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    WHEN POLITICS STRATEGISED AESTHETICS: Wall texts

    For ease of access, we have compiled texts accompanying the exhibition When Politics Strategised Aesthetics – Works from the National Museum of Modern Art Zagreb 1945–1960, on view at Kunsthaus Dahlem from 20 March to 21 June 2026, in digital form.

    The texts provide a brief overview of the historical and social context of Yugoslavia after the Second World War, as well as the role of art and culture in the socialist state.

    YUGOSLAVIA UNDER GERMAN OCCUPATION

    On the morning of 6 April 1941, Hitler’s Germany attacked Yugoslavia. The trigger was a coup staged by Serbian generals who, in protest against Yugoslavia’s forced entry into the Tripartite Pact, had overthrown the Yugoslav government. The army capitulated after only a few days, and the king and government fled into exile. Yugoslavia was partitioned into various occupation zones.

    In the territory of Croatia, as well as parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the so-called “Independent State of Croatia” was established – independent in name only. Hitler handed over the government of the country, occupied by German and Italian troops, to the fascist Ustaša movement. Following the Nazi model, the Ustaša built a “Führer” state and, at Germany’s command, persecuted and murdered Jews, Roma, Serbs and political opponents, including Croatian antifascists. The economy everywhere was geared toward German war objectives. Tens of thousands were deported to the Reich as forced laborers.

    By the summer of 1941, two groups had emerged: the communist Partisans and the nationalist Serbian Chetniks. Although they initially fought together against the occupiers, civil war-like conditions soon developed between the ideological opponents. The Chetniks, under Colonel Dragoljub-Draža Mihailović, fought for a monarchical and ethnically homogeneous Greater Serbia. In contrast, Josip Broz Tito and his multinational Partisans propagated the principle of “Brotherhood and Unity”, aiming to build a socialist federal state. The Wehrmacht and SS task forces responded with brutal repression against both groups and the civilian population.

    After Chetnik leader Mihailović had given up resistance and, in some places, even resorted to collaborating with the occupiers, Marshal Tito rose to become the sole political and military leader of the resistance. The Croatian machinist and trade unionist had spent years in Yugoslav prisons for his communist activities. He later received training in the Soviet Union as a functionary of the Communist Party. In 1937, he took over the leadership of the CPY as its General Secretary. His multinational People’s Liberation Army gradually succeeded in reconquering increasing parts of the country.

    LIBERATION OF YUGOSLAVIA AND ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC

    Although the Allies officially recognized the communist leader Josip Broz Tito as an ally in 1943, neither Joseph Stalin nor the Western powers provided any significant military assistance. The Partisans, who had grown to 800,000 men and women of all nationalities by May 1945, were nevertheless able to liberate Yugoslavia despite suffering extremely heavy losses.

    Tito viewed the “People’s Liberation Struggle” from the very beginning as a driving force for advancing the socialist revolution. In November 1943, the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia – a kind of partisan parliament – resolved to rebuild Yugoslavia after the war as a socialist federal republic of equal peoples.

    On the way to this goal, the Partisans systematically settled accounts in the final months of the war with the troops of collaborators and anti-communist “bands”. When the first elections were held in November 1945 – hardly to be described as free and fair – Tito’s “People’s Front” won an overwhelming majority. On 29 November 1945, parliament proclaimed the republic. Yugoslavia now became a federation consisting of six republics and two autonomous regions (later: provinces).

    Josip Broz Tito was the personification of the new Yugoslavia. His political talent and charismatic presence – praised by many foreign observers as well – established a legitimacy recognised by broad segments of society, the political class, and the international community. He allowed himself to be staged, in keeping with all the rules of the modern cult of personality, as a courageous, wise, just, and infallible head of state, and was later proclaimed president for life.

    To pacify the war-torn country, the multinational partisan struggle was staged as the founding myth of a new, peaceful Yugoslavia. Domestically, Tito’s position was considered nearly unassailable also because he had wrested Yugoslavia from the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc.

    More precisely, in 1948 Stalin had Yugoslavia expelled from the Communist Information Bureau. In early 1949, it was also not included in the founding of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Stalin, who saw his influence in South-Eastern Europe endangered, denounced the Yugoslav communists as “deviationists”.

    Josip Broz Tito responded in turn with purges against communists loyal to Moscow. Thousands of alleged Stalin supporters were expelled from the party or interned for “re-education” on the notorious island of Goli Otok.

    CULTURE AND SOCIETY UNDER TITO

    Expulsion from the Eastern Bloc opened up new room for maneuver for the Yugoslav regime. The United States offered military and economic aid in order to keep Tito in power. He established new trade relations with the West, but after the death of Stalin in 1953, he was also able to normalise relations with Moscow. Tito did not want to join either of the two antagonistic alliance systems. Together with his Egyptian and Indian counterparts, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru, Tito committed himself in the 1950s to a policy of “active peaceful coexistence”. In 1961, the Non-Aligned Movement was formally founded in Belgrade. From then on, under Yugoslavia’s leadership, it advocated decolonisation, disarmament, and a more just global economic and communications order. It became a central pillar of identity and stability in the multiethnic state.

    Domestically, after 1948 the Yugoslav communists created a distinct form of socialism with the introduction of socialist workers’ self-management. Instead of anonymous state organs as in the Eastern Bloc, democratic workers’ councils were intended to direct enterprises and all social organisations. In the course of numerous reforms, elements of a market economy and private businesses were permitted. Many Western leftists praised Yugoslav socialism “with a human face” as their model.

    Supported by a highly favourable global economic climate, the Yugoslavs experienced an “economic miracle” after 1945. The leadership pushed forward socialist modernisation, investing heavily in industrialisation, tourism, and education. By the mid-1960s, the former agrarian country had transformed into an industrial state: more people worked in the secondary and tertiary sectors than in agriculture, cities expanded, levels of education and mobility rose, and women emancipated themselves from patriarchal gender roles.

    Growing prosperity enabled greater consumption and leisure time, fundamentally changing lifestyles and values. In contrast to the Eastern Bloc, the Yugoslav system eventually tolerated a certain degree of pluralism in literature, the sciences, and the arts. Although the regime ruled with a secret police, press censorship, and professional bans, it allowed dissenting opinions in certain niches, such as universities, academies, and religious communities.

    PAVILIONS AT WORLD EXHIBITION AS A SPECIAL CULTURAL MISSION

    Unlike the other states of the Eastern Bloc, the government under Josip Broz Tito promoted a modernist formal language not only in the visual arts but also in architecture. Particularly notable in this regard were the pavilions at international trade fairs and World Exhibitions. These international showcases were understood not merely as forums for presenting economic achievements; they were also intended to demonstrate independence from the Soviet Union. After 1948, the pavilions thus became an architectural expression of Yugoslavia’s political positioning between East and West.

    The first architectural monument of this kind can be considered the pavilion for the 1947 World Trade Fair in Trieste, designed by Vjenceslav Richter in cooperation with Zvonimir Faist. This development became even more evident in 1949/50, when Richter, together with Zvonimir Radić as architects and Ivan Picelj and Aleksandar Srnec as artists and designers, received commissions from the Yugoslav Chamber of Commerce to design a whole series of pavilions – including for Stockholm and Vienna in 1949 as well as Stockholm, Hanover, and Paris in 1950.

    This collaboration brought together a young generation of artists for whom architecture, art, and design were inseparably linked and at the same time expressed a new aesthetic far removed from the representational demands of socialist realism. A central aim was also to counter the alleged “backwardness of the Balkans” and to promote a new, cosmopolitan form of socialism.

    These aspirations culminated in the Yugoslav pavilion at the 1958 World Exhibition in Brussels, which was given a Special Award by the Expo committee. Constructed of glass and steel, the structure was intended to appear open and transparent. Here, too, significant space was devoted to contemporary abstract art.

    EXHIBITIONS AS A MEDIUM OF MODERN ART DEVELOPMENT

    The growing public recognition of abstract art was already evident in exhibitions in the early 1950s. For example, the group EXAT 51, founded in Zagreb in 1951 as a collective of artists, architects, and designers whose name stood for “Experimental Studio” and the founding year – presented the first exhibition of abstract art in the socialist countries of the Eastern Bloc at the Croatian Chamber of Architects in February 1953.

    In the same year, Edo Murtić’s successful exhibition, Experience of America, further fueled the artistic movement‘s shift towards abstraction. And the following year, with exhibition Salon 54 at the Moderna Galerija in Rijeka, a museum opened its first exhibition of abstract works, thus finally giving the art form institutional recognition and legitimacy.