Mirroring Europe

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 Balkan Studies Library

Editor-in-Chief

Zoran Milutinovic (University College London)

Editorial Board

Gordon N. Bardos, Columbia University

Alex Drace-Francis, University of Amsterdam
Jasna Dragovic-Soso, Goldsmiths, University of London
Christian Voss, Humboldt University, Berlin
Marie-Janine Calic, University of Munich
Lenard J. Cohen, Simon Fraser University
Radmila Gorup, Columbia University
Robert M. Hayden, University of Pittsburgh
Robert Hodel, Hamburg University
Anna Krasteva, New Bulgarian University
Galin Tihanov, Queen Mary, University of London
Maria Todorova, University of Illinois
Andrew Wachtel, Northwestern University

VOLUME 13

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bsl

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 chapter 5

Mourning the Lost Modernity: Industrial Labor,

Europe, and (post)Yugoslav Post-socialism

Tanja Petrović

Introduction: Looking for “Europe” in the Past

In contemporary European political discourses, and particularly in discourses

related to the accession of the “Western Balkan”1 countries to the EU, Europe
as a notion is intrinsically connected with the future. The linear image of
time flowing from the past towards the future, supported by accompanying
metaphorical processes, calls to mind the idea of progress: whatever belongs
to the past is reactionary, backward and undeveloped, while the notions of
development and progress are associated with the future. Such a perception
made possible statements within political and media discourses in which the
“Western Balkan” countries’ accession to the EU is portrayed as their opting
for the future (and as the final break with the reactionary past); this type of
discourse is supported by the spatial metaphor of progress along the road to
Europe. EU officials and politicians continually repeat that the Western Balkan
countries should be offered the European perspective or the European future, and
talk about these countries taking the European course, choosing the European
course, and the like. Accession to the EU is here presented as the only option
for the Western Balkan countries to rid themselves of the burden of the past and
destructive nationalisms, and turn to the future. To provide an example of such
discourse: the editor of the Slovenian daily Dnevnik’s special edition entitled
“Evropska unija in države jugovzhodne Evrope” [The European Union and the
Countries of Southeastern Europe] stated in the editorial that “the countries

1 In political discourse, especially discourse referring to the EU enlargement processes,

the Western Balkans most often includes Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia (and Kosovo),
Montenegro, Albania and (not so frequently due to its accession on July 1, 2013) Croatia—i.e.
the countries that are still not members of the European Union and are at different stages
of accession to the EU. I accept this term only technically and thus use it within quotation
marks to indicate that it is problematic from a historical and anthropological point of view.
As such, it does not seem to be the right category for positive self-identification and imagin-
ing the future in the region (Petrović 2009).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004275089_��6

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 92 petrović

of Southeastern Europe are missing an extraordinary opportunity to rid them-

selves quickly of the burden of the past and take better advantage of the stra-
tegically and geopolitically important placement in Europe” (EU in države JV
Evrope, January 17, 2009, 5).
A similar connection between Europe and the future may also be found in
scholarly texts: for example, political scientists Joakim Ekman and Jonas Linde
see “belief in the future” among members of the “Western Balkan” societies
as “as support for membership of the European Union” (Ekman and Linde
2005, 358).
In these discourses, Europe, closely related to the future, is semantically not
only opposed to the past, but also to all kinds of nostalgia: as illustrated in the
statements quoted above, the “Western Balkan” societies should leave the past
behind and rid themselves of any kind of nostalgia for the past times. In these
future-oriented and triumphalist discourses, nostalgia is a sign of moral weak-
ness, irrationality and inability to find one’s way around in the ongoing social
and economic transformations. These negative attitudes towards post-socialist
nostalgia fit into larger dominant views of nostalgia most critically articulated
by David Lowenthal (1985) and Christopher Lasch (1991). They understand nos-
talgia as a passive, paralyzing and unproductive feeling, “a term that posits a
veil of distorting sentiment, a longing that can never be transformed into active
motive or critical insight” (Sontag 1977, 69). In the specific post-socialist con-
text of the “Western Balkan” societies, nostalgia is also regarded as a “result of
a feeling of having lost out in the transition from communism to demo­cracy”
(Ekman and Linde 2005, 357), or rejected with a moralistic argument that it
is unacceptable to refer positively to an oppressive and totalitarian system.
The normative, moralizing and patronizing attitude employed in discourses in
which “the comparative notions are communism and fascism, or communism
and Nazism, not capitalism and communism, or liberalism (including neoli­
beralism) and communism” (Todorova 2010, 3) obtains specific height in regard
with post-socialist societies’ relation to Europe. These discourses describe
post-socialist nostalgia as a feature that (still) keeps Eastern Europe away from
Europe and its values. Maria Todorova provides some illustrative examples
for this: she quotes a statement of Tzvetan Todorov from an interview given
in 2005, in which he said that in Russia communism was still alive, and that
“nationalism can keep an illusionary hope, a nostalgia for communism.” He
added that in Europe “ ‘we don’t have this problem’ since there is not the con-
flation of imperial or the state grandeur with communism” (Todorova 2010, 3).
The Hungarian writer Péter Eszterházy emphasized in his acceptance speech
for the 2004 peace prize of the Frankfurt book fair that “ ‘it is no ­wonder that

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 mourning the lost modernity 93

there is no corresponding word for Vergangensheitbewältigung2 in Hungarian,’

the reason being that the corresponding activity, which he calls ‘work, a
European duty,’ is absent” (Todorova 2010, 4).
In opposition to the discourses described above, in which the notion of
Europe is intrinsically connected to the future, the notion of Europe may in
the post-socialist societies in the Balkans also be a metaphor used in nos-
talgic discourses about the glorious past(s). For example, blogger Alexandar
Lambros posted on the Serbian Internet portal b92.net a blog with the title
“When Serbia was Europe” (Lambros 2009). It is a historiographical text about
the flourishing art in Byzantium and King Milutin’s Serbia in the 14th century.
Serbia is depicted as a state that was an important actor taking part in broader
cultural processes. The metaphor of Europe is historically ungrounded in this
historiographical text: as Peter Burke emphasized, until the 15th century the
name Europe had been used only sporadically; the word had not had any
special weight and “for many people it had not meant a lot” (Burke 1980, 23,
quoted from Mastnak 1997). Tomaž Mastnak (op. cit., 15) explains this by the
fact that “Europe is an exclusivist notion: it has always included only by means
of excluding,” and that during the period mentioned “Europe” did not play any
part in the inclusion/exclusion mechanisms. However, in the mid-15th cen-
tury, with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, “ ‘Europe’ began
to acquire increasingly explicit emotional tones and mobilizing power, becom-
ing a notion that began to function as a ‘bearer of the common conscience
of the West’ ” (op. cit., 16). Despite its anachronism, it is easy to understand
the use of the metaphor of Europe in this blog: it is motivated by the sharp
contrast established between the present, when Serbia is symbolically not
part of Europe, and medieval times, when it was perceived as belonging to the
“European culture” (although this culture is yet to be formed as such). Europe
is used here as a metaphor of belonging, being part of the broader world, and
of cosmopolitanism, as opposed to the present-day reality, in which feelings of
isolation and exclusion dominate in Serbia.
In this chapter, I will deal with another type of nostalgic recollection of the
past in which people in the (“Western”) Balkans, more precisely in the Yugoslav
successor states, see Europe rather than in the future. Similarly to Ildiko Erdei
in this volume, I want to point to an emerging “strand of thought [. . .] which,
albeit still somewhat lacking in coherence on the discourse level, represents

2 It is, in Todorova’s words, a “German term—meaning reassessment, coming to terms with the
past, coping, dealing with it, but also including redress, even retribution”—which is untrans-
latable to other languages (Todorova 2010, 3–4).

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 94 petrović

an increasingly salient way of thinking about the Yugoslav socialist past and
which addressed the questions of Yugoslavia’s modernity and its belonging to
Europe long before the ongoing EU-oriented processes began.” In this light,
I am particularly interested in discourses and practices through which the
memory of industrial labor in socialist Yugoslavia is maintained and negoti-
ated, and specifically in their aspect which stresses belonging to Europe at that
time (in respect to work and life in socialism, working standards, quality and
status of the products, etc.).3 What makes this recollection of the past worthy of
attention is the fact that it concerns memories of the “20th century command-
ing vision of the future” (Blackmar 2001, 325, emphasis added). What is even
more important for linking socialist industrialization to belonging to Europe is
the fact that the modernist vision underlying it was shared by both Eastern and
Western parts of Europe: as Zygmunt Bauman reminds us, it is modernity with
its Enlightenment message where capitalism and socialism are “married for-
ever” (Bauman 1992, 222). Moreover, there is the fact that nostalgia for socialist
factory work and solidarity on the factory floors was characteristic of Western
novelists’ writings in the 1970s and 1980s. These works “eulogize not only the
last hopes for a socialist alternative and a singular prospect for international
solidarity, but also a particular vision of collective and collaborative work”
(Scribner 2002, 237). Charity Scribner discusses novels of John Berger and
Leslie Kaplan in which “parallels are constantly drawn between working life in
France and Central Europe, particularly Poland during the years of Solidarity.”
According to her, “a critique of their works discloses the depth of the Western
intellectual investment in an idealized ‘Other Europe’ in the nineteen seven-
ties and eighties” (Scribner 2002, 239). This example shows that nostalgia for
socialist industrial work is not limited only to post-socialist Europe, and also
that there are multiple temporalities in which this nostalgia appears.
Despite all this, attempts to negotiate belonging to Europe by looking at one’s
own socialist past are manifoldly contested in post-Yugoslav and postsocialist

3 The issue of industrialization is particularly relevant in the area of the former Yugoslavia,
for at least two reasons. Firstly, because industrialization and modernization in Yugoslavia
were almost exclusively socialist projects. Modernization of Yugoslav society was achieved
through deagrarization and industrialization (cf. Marković 2002) and in this sense Yugoslavia
differed from socialist countries with an already established working class culture (for the
case of Poland, see Kenney 1994). Secondly, because the role of the worker in Yugoslavia was
central for construing cosmopolitan, internationalist, modern, and supranational identity
of Yugoslavs in the socialist period—the identity that was strongly neglected by nationalist
elites in post-Yugoslav societies. Ruins of the industrial era strongly connected with socialism
evoke ruined possibilities for negotiation of identities alternative to divisions along ethnic
and religious lines that currently dominate the post-Yugoslav spaces.

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 mourning the lost modernity 95

societies. In European political and public discourses, socialism is seen as an

essentially non-European historical legacy. The “otherness” of socialist Eastern
Europe, which did not disappear with the end of socialism, was bitterly
described by Slovenian philosophers Jelica Šumić Riha and Tomaž Mastnak as
early as 1993:

Up until three years ago, we were ‘outside’ because we lived in a commu-

nist country. In Slovenia, as in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and the
Baltic States, asserting that we were Europeans meant criticizing com-
munism and the imperial structures imposed on us. We accepted the
European identity game only to realise that, in the end, we could only
lose. When communism collapsed, we continued to be excluded from the
Europe in which we live culturally, politically, economically, historically.
Europe had needed communism more than we did; and when we freed
ourselves from it Europe kept us in the position of the Other, only the
reasons for that have changed: ideological and political considerations
are being succeeded by racial ones (Mastnak and Šumič-Riha 1993, 7–8).

The feeling of not belonging to Europe was additionally strengthened in the

post-socialist societies by the process of the EU accession, in which the former
socialist countries had to “prove” their Europeanness. Political and national
elites in the post-socialist states themselves often treat socialism as something
essentially non-European that originated in Asia and was enforced upon them,
threatening their otherwise profoundly European identity. As a result, acce­
ssion to the EU is almost always depicted as returning home (for more about
this metaphor, see Mastnak 1998, 11 and Velikonja 2007, 45).
Socialist industrial workers as a social group closely related to socialism are
doubly marginalized—they are doubly subaltern in the already existing subal-
ternity of the former socialist societies, and perceived as a burden and a group
that parasitizes on the broader society. Their memory practices that stress pos-
itive aspects of socialism are derogatively marked as post-socialist nostalgia
and almost entirely interpreted as a strategy related to the present situation of
workers and difficulties they have “getting by in post-socialism.” For example,
David Kideckel stresses that “nostalgia for socialism focuses on security—of
one’s job, of the community, of physical life.” For him, “such selective use of
the socialist model is ultimately futile and frustrating for effective agency,
as it elevates relations and conditions that are thoroughly discredited today.
Collectivist practices make little sense in post-socialist institutional contexts
and have little support among either globalizing elites or the hard-pressed, but
energetic, middle classes” (Kideckel 2008, 13).

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 96 petrović

Post-socialist studies have dedicated significant attention to workers, and

changes in ideology and values of work that took place after socialism have
ceased to exist. Important research has been done on issues of contempo-
rary living conditions of workers and their bodily/existential experiences of
post-socialism; these studies stress deteriorating conditions that frame work-
ers’ experience, economic uncertainty, demographic decline, and social mar-
ginalization. Workers are depicted as a group that has been denigrated and
disadvantaged in post-socialism. This is also a dominant image of workers in
post-socialism that we receive through mass media: they are alienated from
the society at large and forced to strive for basic existential rights.4 Workers’
alienation and critical circumstances in which they have found themselves are
presented as a consequence of their inability to cope with the changing world
and with capitalism, which requires individual’s initiative and responsibility.

Nostalgia for Industrial Labor and European Cultural Memory

Without the intention to diminish the seriousness of existential problems and

immediate, bodily experience of the alienation felt by workers in the present-
day reality, I want to offer another interpretation of their memories of indus-
trial labor in socialism and legacies of socialist industrialization—the one that
suggests understanding of socialist workers as social subjects and actors. As
shown by Jessica Greenberg in the case of Serbia (2011, 89), the inability of indi-
viduals to perceive themselves as “capable of agentive action or moral interior-
ity” significantly influences their attitude towards societies in which they live.
The prevalent feeling of loss of normalcy in Serbian society “points to a loss
of a particular understanding of agency, in which there is a correspondence
between one’s desires, the effects one’s actions have in the world, and the abi­
lity to manage the reception of those actions by others (Ahearn 2001, quoted
from Greenberg 2011, 89).

4 Hunger strikes became the dominant form of this struggle. Deprived of all other tools in their
attempts to secure a bare existence for themselves and their families, workers often reach
for existential means and radical bodily interventions: a powerless working mother burned
herself in presence of her children, while a worker from Novi Pazar in Serbia cut and ate his
finger (Gregorčič 2010). Marta Gregorčič reports on many other similar cases: “180 workers of
the privatized construction enterprise ‘1 May’ in Lapovo (Serbia) who had not received their
salaries for 8 months, decided to commit collective suicide on June 10, 2009. They lied down
on the tracks at a local train station, on the Belgrade—Niš railroad, the same which they built
many years ago. 250 dismissed workers joined them. They also received support from more
than 200 workers of the company Electro in Rača, who were in their 15th day of the hunger
strike” (Ibid.).

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 mourning the lost modernity 97

To take the need of individuals to act and perceive themselves as social

agents into serious consideration, we need an understanding of workers’
stra­tegies of remembering and their negotiations of social identities that go
beyond the familiar interpretation where they are seen as a “misconstruction
of the socialist past” which workers make “when defining goals for the pres-
ent and strategies for the future” (Kideckel 2008, 13). I will argue that workers’
insistence on values, relations and conditions that existed in socialism is for
them more than a way to negotiate better individual treatment and broader
society’s assistance and more than mere “pining for a social safety net that
never really existed” (Scribner 2003, 11). These narratives and practices (usu-
ally discredited as nostalgia for socialism) transcend individual and purely
existential expectations and should be observed in a broader societal context:
memories of work in socialism also provide a narrative of modernization that
includes former socialist societies in the cultural and historical map of Europe.
In this light, these memory practices should be understood as an attempt to
resume a socially relevant and legitimate voice and as a demand to include
own experience and memory into common European cultural memory of the
20th century. Nostalgia for socialist modernization thus indicates a desire for
inclusion of socialist workers’ narratives into a common European cultural
memory rather than additionally stressing their exclusion.
In the remainder of this chapter I will first analyze personal narratives of
modernization and industrial labor in socialist Yugoslavia told by (former)
workers—those who regard themselves as agents of this modernization.
I will then trace attempts to interpret achievements of socialist moderniza-
tion as part of institutionalized cultural memory or, more precisely, attempts
to turn it into cultural heritage. Such attempts are rare and mainly undertaken
by museum workers in the former Yugoslav societies. These two complemen-
tary approaches should elucidate some important questions such as nature
and potential of post-socialist nostalgia, relationship between postindustrial,
post-socialist, and postmodern, the place of socialist industrialization in the
common European cultural imagery, and, finally, the place of Yugoslavia in the
newly articulated narratives of the 20th century modernity in the p ­ ost-Yugoslav
societies.

Stories of Modernity: Memories of Industrial Labor in Socialism

The sharp contrast between then and now, ubiquitous in workers’ narratives
about the past, stresses a dramatically difficult position in which they find
themselves dealing with present and omnipresent feelings of humiliation and
insecurity. However, most of these overtly nostalgic narratives contain another

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 98 petrović

important aspect: these are also stories of modernization, progress and dig-
nity, and as such they transcend personal feelings, desires and self-perceptions.
Nostalgia which they emanate may most adequately be defined by words of
Dejan Kršić, who sees nostalgia as an enraptured gaze, stressing that the “real
object of nostalgia is not a fascinating image of a lost past, but the very gaze
enraptured with that image” (Kršić 2004, 31). Fascination of this kind may
be observed in numerous narratives of former socialist workers with whom
I talked during several years:5

When I came here I was impressed. The factory had everything: buses
from Jagodina to the factory, the train . . . At the train station there was a
roof over the railroad tracks. Before that, one could see covered railroad
tracks only in Belgrade (Cable factory worker in Jagodina, Serbia).

The factory was impressing with its size. When approaching the factory,
one could hear the noise already while crossing the bridge. The noise was
so loud (Cable factory worker in Jagodina, Serbia).

The fascination expressed here should be observed in a broader social frame-

work of self-esteem, closely connected with the narrative of belonging to a
broader world (“Europe”), and participation in a shared project of moderniza-
tion and progress:

We used to have ideal working conditions and equipment—we had over-

alls that assured protection at work. Each six months we used to get new
overalls and other equipment. Also, workers had richer meals than those
who worked in administration. Everything was well-organized and pre-
cisely defined. I believe that the same kind of organization existed in the
West (Cable factory worker in Jagodina, Serbia).

The feeling of pride in the high standards of the production process and per-
sonal attachment to the products maybe best express the desire of workers
to speak not from the social margin as humiliated individuals, but as social
actors capable of articulating historically and socially relevant and legitimate
narratives:

5 Interviews with workers were conducted during my visits to the Jagodina Cable Factory
(Serbia) in 2004–2006 and during fieldwork in Niš (Serbia) in 2007, and Breza and Vareš
(Bosnia and Herzegovina) in 2010 and 2011. I sincerely thank my interviewees for their time
and readiness to share their thoughts and memories with me.

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 mourning the lost modernity 99

We were selling cables to Americans. The Gorenje industry from Slovenia

also used to buy micro-cables from us. We used to export large amounts
of cables to American, Russian, French, German, and Belgian markets
(Cable factory worker in Jagodina, Serbia).

We used to make rockets for Russians. And when they would come to our
factory, they would only watch—they had no clue about what we were
doing. Because we used Western European technology that was unavail-
able to them (engineer, Electronic Industry Niš, Serbia).

My son is studying in Boston. When I visited him he showed me the

laboratory and he could not believe that I was familiar with all those
machines. I said to him: My son, we used to produce them (engineer,
Electronic Industry Niš, Serbia).

The pride in mastering the production process and high-quality products that
enabled belonging of the former Yugoslavs to the world (or to Europe) dur-
ing socialism has another important aspect that goes beyond post-socialist
anxieties and longings: the nature of the relationship between producers,
production and products has dramatically changed in the postindustrial era,
and overwhelming changes have also affected the ways labor is understood,
performed and valued in the last few decades. These changes have triggered
nostalgia for “our products” and for the self-perception of being the agent of
own modernization. In this respect, Charity Scribner points to “the transition
from industrial manufacture to digital technologies,” which “has left its mark
on European culture” (Scribner 2003, 17). This transition, followed by fragmen-
tation and globalization of production processes, affected not only the ways
people work and understand their labor, but also their emotions, affects and
yearnings.6 The philosopher Alexandre Kojève thus describes the importance
of the vanished attachment between workers and their products:

The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has
actually been transformed by his work: he recognizes himself in it, he
sees it as his own human reality, in it he discovers and reveals to others
the objective reality of his humanity, of the originally abstract and purely
subjective idea he has on himself (Kojève 1989, 27).

6 Mathew Crawford (2009) provides an insightful reflection upon these changes and their
consequences.

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 100 petrović

This generally postindustrial and postmodern condition of contemporary

world, in which attachment to the product of one’s labor has been lost, is crucial
to understand the universal aspects of nostalgic narratives of workers in post-
socialism, which sheds important light on the fact that “the socialist project,
particularly its investment in heavy industry, was not restricted to the ‘other’
Europe, nor did its lifeline terminate abruptly in 1989” (Scribner 2003, 15).

(Im)Possibilities of Turning the Legacy of the 20th Century

Industrialization into Heritage in the Former Yugoslav Societies

The industrial past of the 20th century was, at least partially, turned into heri-
tage in parts of Europe and the world where it was related to and considered
as Western capitalism’s natural evolutionary step or, in the words of Elisabeth
Blackmar, where it was possible to naturalize industrial ruins “as an unexcep-
tional consequence of the end of history” (Blackmar 2001, 338) and where
one can contemplate “of the absolute pastness of the past” (Janowitz 1990, 1,
quoted from Edensor 2005, 13). In the nomination document of Blaenavon, an
industrial town in Wales, for inclusion in the World heritage list (Nomination
document 1999) there is an argumentation that illustrates such conception
of the industrial heritage: referring to the Operational Guidelines for the
Implementation of the World Heritage Convention, the document states that
“Blaenavon falls into category (ii) of cultural landscapes: organically evolved
landscape which result from an initial social and economic imperative and have
developed their present form by association with and in response to the natu-
ral environment. It combines elements from both a relict or fossil landscape
in which the evolutionary process of industrialisation came to an end leaving
significant distinguishing features visible in material form, and a continuing
landscape with significant evidence of its evolution over time” (Nomination
document 1999, 19, emphases in original). The quoted passage stresses not
only the aspect of “natural evolution,” but also the importance of incorporat-
ing industrial remnants into natural landscape. This reveals a tension between
industrial objects and natural landscape that should generally be considered
when one thinks of transforming industrial legacy into cultural heritage: the
said process is met with resistance because of the perception that industriali­
zation is an (unwanted) intervention into natural, rural landscape which is, on
the other hand, in the basis of national narratives on cultural heritage, together
with the idealized conception of “traditional life and culture” (Edensor 2005,
13; Janowitz 1990, 2; a classical study of the conflict between industrialization
and pastoral conception of national identity is Leo Marx’s The Machine in the
Garden (Marx 1964)).

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 mourning the lost modernity 101

In many European states, remnants of large industrial projects are pre-

served, conserved and displayed as a representative part of society’s history
and development, advertised as tourist attractions and integrated into the
landscape of collective memory. Quite often, aspects of industrialization that
contained promises and visions of modern living, solidarity and communality
are particularly stressed in the process of turning industrial past into heritage
(see, for example, Roeckner’s (2009) guide through Berlin’s industrial cul-
ture established in the late 1800s and early 1900s, or Siemens’ lexicon of
Siemensstadt in Berlin at https://w4.siemens.de/siemens-stadt/, accessed
May 4, 2014). In spite of that, “culturalization” of industrial remnants in the
post-Fordist West actually means their naturalization—by being reduced to
a “fossilized” archaeological site, an aestheticized tourist attraction or a recre-
ation area, they are brought back to the natural landscape and “embedded in
natural cycles of birth and death, growth and decay” (Barndt 2010, 270). Kerstin
Barndt further warns that practices of “integrating structures of postindustrial
decay into a landscape of renewal is similar to claims about the logic of capital”
(Ibid., 272) and that “the idea of working class as a source of collective identity”
is lost in this process of integration (Ibid., 277).
The remnants of socialist industrialization seem inadequate to be included
in cultural heritage, despite the fact that such industrialization was based on
the same vision of the future as big western industrial projects. It is difficult to
present them as a “natural evolutionary step,” among other reasons, because of
the rupture that emerged with the end of socialism that coincided with the end
of the industrial era. Spaces of the 20th-century industrialization in Eastern
Europe mainly remained outside the scope of thinking about European cul-
tural heritage. For example, the map of the ERIH network (European Route of
Industrial Heritage) does not include any of the former Yugoslav republics and
most of Eastern Europe (http://www.erih.net/anchor-points.html). Poland and
the Czech Republic are included in the map, but are represented by older, pre-
socialist industrial heritage sites. In the former Yugoslav societies, where there
is generally lack of interest for industrial legacy,7 only older industrial legacy
attracts experts’ attention.
How to understand this absence of the industrial past of the post-
socialist part of Europe—both from the map of the European memory of

7 Cf. “Deutshe Welle: Propadanje industrijske baštine—slučajnost ili namjera?,” Nacional,

February 16, 2010; “Industrijska baština na operacijskom stolu,” Deutsche Welle World, Sep­
tember 25, 2010, http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,6044433,00.html (accessed May 4,
2014); “Pozabljena dediščina,” Mladina 25, June 26, 2005; “Istorija nauke i tehnike,” Vreme 1024,
August 19, 2010.

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 102 petrović

i­ ndustrialization and modernization, and from institutionalized national nar-

ratives on cultural heritage?
The explanation is partly to be found in the perception of the socialist leg-
acy as essentially non-European, as well as in the very process of production
of cultural heritage. It is located in institutionalized and authoritative centers
of power and is usually a top-down process. As such, this process is selective,
exclusive and ethnocentric. Socialist legacy inevitably evokes supranational
Yugoslav context; for this reason, it is difficult to include it in nationally framed
discourses of cultural heritage in the Yugoslav successor states. In addition, as
a legal term, cultural heritage implies property, which, in a strict sense, means
that “cultural elements cannot be inherited as long as generations who created
them are still alive” (Gavrilović 2011, 119). According to Serbian jurisdiction,
objects belong to cultural heritage if they are more than fifty years old (Ibid.,
18). Although experts working on protection of cultural heritage are aware that
the modern world is changing too rapidly and too much will be lost if this
time limit is accepted as a criterion, the fact that deindustrialization of the
former Yugoslav societies is a recent process certainly causes difficulties for
the conceptualization of industrial remnants as cultural heritage. These dif-
ficulties also relate to the particularities of what is usually called “post-socialist
transition.” On the one hand, one needs to bear in mind that many big proj-
ects of socialist industrialization are spaces where “transition/transformation”
never actually began and where people still “wait for capitalism to come.”8
Industrial ruins in former large industrial centers are in many cases not aban-
doned as elsewhere in the world, but still inhabited by workers who have con-
tinued to come to work every day, repeatedly confronting gradual decay and
impoverishment, since many giant factories were too large and with too many
employees to be easily or completely privatized (for the case of Jagodina Cable
Factory in Serbia, see Petrović 2010).9 Industrial ruins cannot be transformed
into memory, since for many people they are still part of reality and everyday
struggles. They stress “the experience of loss as ongoing, touching the present”

8 The Belgrade sociologist Mladen Lazić recently published a book under the title “Waiting
for Capitalism: The Role of Working Class in Democratization of the Serbian Society”
(Lazić 2011). He stresses the fact that real capitalist relations are still to come to Serbia—
capitalism is associated there mainly with tycoons, and the working class is strongly margin-
alized, although it is an essential part of capitalist relations as well.
9 Serbian media recently reported on the government program to support foreign investments
in Serbian towns which were former industrial centers by subsidizing newly opened work-
ing positions. According to Nebojša Ćirić, the then minister of regional development, the
government hopes this way to “revive big industrial centers inhabited by 20% of population
of Serbia” (“Vlada oživljava industrijske centre,” B92.net, June 9, 2011, accessed May 4, 2014).

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 mourning the lost modernity 103

(Barndt 2010, 287). Also in those cases when big socialist industrial companies
were destroyed and their objects abandoned, these abandoned ruins do not
completely belong to the past, since no new reality with new possibilities has
replaced the world of socialist industrial work. For example, in a small indus-
trial town of Breza in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the old spinning factory is aban-
doned along with other factories, and the mine operates at reduced capacity,
but for most of the population no new possibilities appeared with transfor-
mation and industrial decline. All these former industrial areas still live in
the present which is, in fact, an extended past, with no possibility to make an
essential step forward that would enable distancing from the industrial past,
reflecting upon it and eventually turning it into legacy/heritage.
On the other hand, “post-socialist transition” creates conditions which
are not particularly “friendly” for the preservation of former industrial sites,
simultaneously imposing a new hierarchy of values and interests: attempts
to preserve old industrial complexes are often perceived as a problem and an
obstacle, especially if they are located in urbanized areas, on the ground which
members of neoliberal elites want to appropriate and profit from.
Apart from these “external” reasons which make the transformation of
spaces of socialist industrial labor into cultural heritage difficult, if not impos-
sible, there is an important “internal” reason that these spaces escape such
transformation. A nostalgic sentiment and strong presence of affect are inhe­
rent to such spaces—also echoing in workers’ memories and fascination with
the production process and their own participation in it. “Museumization” of
these spaces would first require their “pacifying” and emotional discharge. As
the aforementioned case of the Welsh industrial town Blaenavon suggests,
they should speak about us, but not about us here and now;10 however, ruins of
collective industrial work in socialism speak precisely about that.
Is it at all possible to transform an affective narrative of industrial labor
into a museum narrative without losing affect or, in the words of Andrea
Muehlebach (2011), is museum of solidarity possible?
In 2009 the Architecture Museum of Ljubljana organized an exhibition
“Iskra: Non-Aligned Design 1946–1990” dedicated to the products of Iskra,
the biggest electronics company in the former Yugoslavia, and in particular
to their design and the design process used in the company. The catalogue
that accompanied the exhibition contains a series of texts in which one can
recognize most of thematic nuclei articulated also by individuals—(former)
workers who speak about their memories of work in socialism and their (self)

10 The name of the discipline Industrial Archaeology, which promotes study, preservation
and presentation of industrial heritage, also suggests such perception.

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 104 petrović

perception in that period. Authors of these texts stress the fact that industrial
design in Slovenia during socialism had very high standards, comparable to
the most developed Western countries. The introductory article begins with a
reference to the Biennial of Industrial Design in Stuttgart in 1971, where Iskra
presented its achievements in design with an exhibition “Yugoslav Industrial
Design—Iskra Points the Way.” According to the author of the article, “socialist
states of the predominantly Eastern Bloc, with their technologically backward
products of unexceptional design, would not have dared to imagine anything
like this. But Yugoslavia through Slovenia—and Slovenia through Iskra—did”
(Krečič 2009, 7). The sense of pride that back then in socialism Slovenia “was
part of the world” with its top-level industrial design is also expressed in other
articles: “We began exploring this enormous part of Slovene design history and
were delighted to discover that Slovene design had already once enjoyed an
international reputation” (Šubic 2009, 11). It is also stressed many times that
Iskra closely cooperated and exchanged knowledge with the most renowned
Western European companies, such as Bosch, AEG and Siemens, and that it was
a serious competitor to Braun. “With regard to Iskra design, [however] we have
to speak about something more than merely an alternative to the design that
was being created abroad, for Iskra was one of the rare Yugoslav companies
that realized its forward-thinking outlook through a Department of Design.
It was, in fact, in the socialist period that excellence in technology and design
provided the main fuel for Iskra’s success, while today we see only a modest
shadow of this once multi-branched entity” (Predan 2009, 45).
However, the sense of pride and enrapture felt by the creators of the exhibi-
tion about Iskra’s socialist design received little support from those to whom
this story is directly related and who currently occupy positions of authority.
They are, in particular, managers of Iskra’s successor companies and young
Slovenian designers. Most authors of the catalogue, and especially those who
were personally involved in the creation of the exhibition, bitterly mention
their lack of interest and appreciation: “We are very sorry to say that the major-
ity of the companies that today are the ‘descendants of Iskra’ took little interest
in our exhibition. Is this a loss of pride, a lack of feeling for their own history?
The overwhelming burden of the past?” (Šubic 2009, 11). “[Indeed,] what do we
know in Slovenia about our own Iskraši? After making a short inquiry among
younger Slovene designers, I decided that I would rather not record the results.
If we once knew only how to appreciate foreign things and undervalued the
creativity and achievements of our own country, we now have the opportunity
to reverse this and to realize that there was once a time when Slovene design
stood head to head with the world’s best as an equal in this very demanding

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 mourning the lost modernity 105

field” (Ibid., 14–15). “Few today remember the events of those times or the gen-
uine successes Iskra enjoyed on the world stage. But in Slovenia we should
remember them” (Krečič 2009, 7).
On the other hand, the authors of the catalogue mention the delight with
which owners of old Iskra products (many of them former workers of Iskra)
contributed to the exhibition, and a look at these products (telephones, TV and
radio sets, kitchen accessories) emanates a fair amount of personal and collec-
tive nostalgia; there are also clear references to the importance of attachment
to “our products,” which are seen as a source of pride and sign of belonging to
a broader world.
The exhibition of “Iskra” design is a rare attempt to thematize socialist
industrial labor through the narrative of “being part of the world,” of the value
of labor, and of the ability to master the production process and the process
of modernization of society. The indifference of part of society to the exhibi-
tion, particularly of those most directly addressed by it, shows that a narrative
which is not “settled,” naturalized, discharged from affect and any form of criti-
cal potential and distanced from current social anxieties cannot be included in
the dominant social discourses.11

11 In 2010 the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum prepared an exhibition of “Slovenian brands”

entitled “Cockta—the beverage of your and our youth.” The exhibition was an attempt
to present Slovenian brands and to incorporate them into “the national identity held in
museums” (Škafar 2010, 7), and to stress the “importance that improving our knowledge
about brands has for the national culture” (Ibid.). The central part of the exhibition and
catalogue was dedicated to Cockta, a non-alcoholic beverage produced in the 1950s as an
alternative to Coca Cola, which almost disappeared from the Yugoslav market when it
opened for the foreign products, but experienced two major “revivals”: in the 1970s and
in the 2000s. The fact that it is a successful product, one of the rare ones that managed to
survive post-socialist transformations and market globalization, significantly shapes the
ways in which it is presented. Although the history of Cockta is essentially determined
by the Yugoslav socialist period, it is here approached from a purely profit- and market-
oriented perspective, in which the rest of the former Yugoslavia is referred to as “new
southern markets” and nostalgia is used as an effective marketing tool. With marketing
slogans “The beverage of your and our youth” and “You never forget the first one,” Cockta
overtly counted on nostalgic feelings not only among Slovenes, but also among the people
across the entire former Yugoslavia for whom Cockta is still one of “our products.” Through
commercialization (and consumerization) of nostalgia, affective relationship towards the
socialist product is devoid of any mobilizatory potential, so it can unproblematically fit in
“museumized” narrative.

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 106 petrović

Museums of Solidarity on Socialist Industrial Ruins

Anthropology and related disciplines have recently pointed to the problematic

aspects of “traditional” concepts of cultural heritage, in which it is understood
as a set of unidirectional activities, practices and policies coming “from above”
and moving from the elitist/authoritarian/national levels towards the local
and vernacular ones. These disciplines stress the need for a new concept in
which cultural heritage is approached as an ongoing process involving many
voices and protagonists who co-create its meaning (Parekh 2000, 152–153).
“Authorized heritage discourse” (Smith 2006, 29) insists on the institutional,
canonical and ideological nature of heritage and leaves no room either for
meanings that emerge from local and everyday practices, or for affect which is
linked through such practices to those elements of the past that are considered
worthy of remembering and preservation.
“Museumization” of memories of industrial labor in socialist Yugoslavia
may include emotions and can have a mobilizatory potential only if it is per-
formed outside the “authorized heritage discourse”—in local and semi-public
contexts—and if the agents of “museumization” are members of local or work-
ing communities who consider themselves agents of socialist modernization
or bearers of that modernization’s legacy. The hall of central administrative
building of the Cable Factory in Jagodina (Serbia) houses a small exhibition
which was set up in socialist times, and is still carefully maintained, even
though the factory has already been in a state of decay and disintegration for
twenty years. The exhibition displays the factory’s products, photographs of
workers in the production process, and of Tito and his guests from world poli-
tics visiting the factory.
While this small factory exhibition today “communicates” with the still-
employed factory workers and provides legitimacy for their largely questioned
social role, a memorial room arranged at the public swimming pool in a small
industrial and mining town of Breza in Bosnia and Herzegovina has a slightly
broader audience that encompasses the whole local community. It exhibits
miners’ “accessories” such as lamps and helmets and a series of photographs,
most of which show Breza’s most famous miner—Alija Sirotanović, the “hero
of socialist work.”
Activities of amateur photographers of the photo club Hrastnik in Zasavje,
Slovenia constitute an even broader, but still locally anchored practice of nego-
tiation of industrial cultural heritage. Zasavje was a traditionally industrial
and mining area that was devastated by deindustrialization and is now one
of the poorest and prospectless regions in Slovenia. The photo club Hrastnik

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 mourning the lost modernity 107

Figures 5.1 and 5.2 A small exhibition in the Jagodina Cable Factory.
Photos by author

89-113_Petrovic_F6.indd 107 6/16/2014 10:26:11 AM

 108 petrović

Figure 5.3 A memorial room in Breza, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Photo by author

89-113_Petrovic_F6.indd 108 6/16/2014 10:26:12 AM

 mourning the lost modernity 109

organized four exhibitions entitled “Industrial Heritage of Zasavje 2006–2010.”

At the opening of the last exhibition in November 2010 was a performance of
reading the “Official Statement of the Office for the Protection of Proletarians
and Comradeship,” which said that the “proletariat and comradeship are on the
verge of extinction.” The fictitious office of the Slovenian government believed
that it “has the responsibility to draw public attention to Zasavje’s cultural heri-
tage of global importance” and stressed that “the state is obliged to take care
of its cultural heritage, and in this case the industrial heritage of Zasavje, the
proletariat and its comradeship.”12 The above statement placed the memory
of industrial work in the context of universal values such as solidarity, com-
radeship and social responsibility, thus lending legitimacy to the local history
of industrialization. Appropriation and subversion of the dominant discourse
of national cultural heritage is a tool for effective articulation of a critique of
the hegemonic and authoritative concept of cultural heritage. The political
message intertwines with strong emotions evoked by photographs of ruined
industrial sites of Zasavje. In addition, the exhibition was organized in a space
directly linked to the local industrial past: the Workers’ Cultural Center (Slov.
Delavski dom; Serb.–Cro. Radnički dom), in the presence of former workers
and miners and with the sounds of traditional miners’ songs performed by a
local group of singers. With its contents and actors, the exhibition may be taken
as a paradigmatic narrative of valorization of the industrial past: this narra-
tive transmits a universal message simultaneously speaking about us, here and
now. It emanates nostalgia which is not only a consequence of the agents of
modernization being personally involved in its “museumization,” but also an
impulse which gives mobilizatory power to such museum representations.
Finally, when considering practices of “museumization” of the industrial
past that are characterized by affect, one should not forget activities that
remain in the realm of personal and private, such as collecting practices, pri-
vate collections and personal archives. Many individuals devotedly collect,
keep, preserve and exchange objects from destroyed factories and former
industrial sites. The interest in such objects does not reflect the “usual” col-
lectors’ passion for the old. The affect that accompanies these collecting prac-
tices is of a different kind: it is related to personal engagement with objects
from one’s own past. In Jesenice, an industrial town in northern Slovenia,
where the remnants of socialist industrialization are largely excluded from the
“official” narrative of industrial heritage, there are individuals who collect

12 The exhibition opening was recorded and is available at http://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=7fSzvrq58Pc (accessed May 4, 2014).

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 110 petrović

objects related to the Jesenice ironworks.13 This way, collectors—many of

them former employees—attach cultural value to the individual and collec-
tive past that authoritative institutions have not acknowledged as worthy of
remembering.
“Museums of solidarity” and narratives with the capacity to transmit
socially engaged and politically relevant messages are intrinsically connected
to industrial ruins: they emerge in the middle or on the edges of ruins and
their meaning is created in dialogue with ruins. Coexistence of nostalgia as
a constitutive part of the gaze on industrial ruins and “alternative” museum
practices and narratives is not only possible but also necessary for the articu-
lation of engaged, political messages. Just as memories of industrial labor in
socialism on which workers insist contain a demand for “democratization”/
de-provincialization of (Western) European cultural memory,14 these “alterna-
tive,” private and semi-public museum practices and narratives warn that the
concept of cultural heritage should be “democratized” as well.

Instead of a Conclusion: A New Reading of Nostalgia for Socialism?

Through the analysis of memory practices related to industrial labor in social-

ism and narratives of industrialization/modernization in socialist Yugoslavia,
I tried to propose an alternative interpretation of nostalgia for socialism.
Differently from dominant views on post-socialist nostalgia as a sentiment
that paralyzes and prevents autonomous reflection upon the past, thus addi-
tionally marginalizing already marginalized post-socialist subjects, I proposed
an understanding of nostalgia as “related to a deeper knowledge of social life”
(Blackmar 2001, 328), as a narrative tool that insists on including former social-
ist societies in the cultural and historical map of Europe. Articulating such a
demand, post-socialist subjects also require autonomy for themselves, which
makes nostalgia a practice with a mobilizing, legitimizing, and even an eman-
cipatory character.
To fully understand the nature and implications of memories and legacies
of industrial labor in socialism, one has to take into account that many senti-
ments related to them transcend a specific post-socialist context and reflect

13 I thank Tanja Radež for this information.

14 A need to “de-provincialize Western Europe” (related to Dipesh Chakabarty’s call for
decentering and ‘provincializing’ Europe in postcolonial historiography) was articulated
by scholars working on post-socialist Europe (cf. Yurchak 2006, Todorova 2010; Chakabarty
2000).

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 mourning the lost modernity 111

broader, postindustrial (and postmodern) longings and anxieties. The above

suggests not only that these memories and legacies should indeed be observed
as part of European narratives of the 20th century—it also calls for a closer
attention to the affective potential of social and cultural narratives and prac-
tices. Affection is inseparable from workers’ memories of labor in socialism,
which are usually shaped as narratives of fascination and enthrallment with
the process in which they were actively participating. Although in dominant
discourses on post-socialism, the sentimental character of post-socialist nos-
talgia is the main argument to dismiss its relevance for political and social
acting, it is precisely the affect that makes references to work in socialism
legitimate political arguments, since (the possibility of) emotional attach-
ment and engagement suggest that workers in socialism perceived themselves
as subjects with autonomy and agency. This engaged and affectionate nostal-
gia simultaneously maintains tension and restlessness, preventing socialist
industrial ruins of modernist utopia from being peacefully naturalized and
sent to history or just ignored and forgotten as signs of ‘inappropriate social-
ist past.’ It is nostalgia that makes them “unsettled and unsettling” (Blackmar
2001, 333). Enlivened by nostalgia, these ruins become a reminder of not only
the past but also of the values necessary for imagining the future, such as both
intergenerational and universal solidarity, responsibility, communality, value
of work as such, and maybe the most important—personal and collective
autonomy.

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