A Flower for the Dead: The Memorials of Bogdan Bogdanović, Achleitner Friedrich

Abstract

The complex opus of Bogdan Bogdanović (1922–2010), famous architect and builder of one of Europe’s most intriguing memory sites of the twentieth century, can be understood by a variety of different approaches. The interpretation of numerous memorials of this enfant terrible of Serbian and Yugoslav culture and politics, by Friedrich Achleitner, offers an interesting answer to the questions of their poetic, artistic and architectural features, as he ventures on a rather uncertain voyage of formal and poetical commentaries on Bogdanović’s memorials, bot in words and photographs. Nevertheless, whilst describing Bogdanović’s highly metaphorical and ambiguous ways of memorializing war victims by means of gigantic earthworks and sculptural remodelling of the natural landscape, Achleitner offers only a glimpse of the complicated cultural and historical landscape of socialist Yugoslavia.