Architektur der Erinnerung

THE MONUMENTS OF BOGDAN BOGDANOVIĆ

Bogdan Bogdanović - born in 1922, architect, writer, university professor and former mayor of Belgrade - created 20 large-scale surrealist monuments against war and annihilation between the 1950s and 1980s, spread throughout Yugoslavia. Already hostile to nationalist zealots during the communist regime, Bogdanović - a figurehead of intellectual resistance against the regime of Slobodan Milošević - was threatened with death with the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars in 1991 and his conciliatory work became the target of wanton destruction.

This film by urban planner and specialist journalist Reinhard Seiß is the first to portray the art-historically unique memorial sites of the ‘condemned master builder’ who died in exile in Vienna in 2010 - and places his architecture in relation to his literature and the history and present of his Yugoslavian homeland. To this day, the humanist message of Bogdan Bogdanović's works as an antithesis to war and revanchism has lost none of its relevance.