![]() ![]() And now I, having had nothing to do with anything of the kind, was to be Director of something! I said: ‘My dear good man, I shouldn’t even know how to organize an office party, let alone run a major institution with a staff of sixty people! I don’t know a thing about it! I don’t even know what a Director does. Historians don’t tend to have any experience of working together. We tend to get together only at conferences, or other occasions when we want to exchange bits of ideas with colleagues, you know? So, as a historian you grow apart from the others. I said, ‘What on Earth gave you that idea? I couldn’t do that! I shouldn’t know how to be the Director of anything!’ I told him I’d worked on my own all my life. And then Djindjić asked me to lead an institution that was part of-well, what was it?-part of my wider professional domain, really. P: I was at the Institute for Modern History of Serbia. N: Where were you working before you became Archive Director? I was fully active as an academic I had my projects on the go and to me at the time, dealing with an archive was, well … ![]() Zoran and I knew each other personally, but it never struck me that he might think of me as anything like the Director of an archive. So ended that awful agony which Serbia had lived through for ten years, during which it experienced the most horrific things. The choice of democracy had just won the elections, in the sense that it was democracy that defeated Milošević and removed him from power. P: Do you know what? Well, how can I put this? Well, Zoran Djindjić was prime minister when I took the job. N: Did you face resistance? What were the circumstances when you took over leadership of the Archives? So the Archives weren’t only somewhere researchers would come to, but became a venue for active cultural life in Belgrade. And then, of course, something absolutely unbelievable happened! The Historical Archives of Belgrade became one of the most important cultural spaces in the city, with exhibitions, book promotions, all that sort of thing. And that’s been my approach all along it’s part of my thinking as a historian. ![]() To me it’s a shame if individuals who were extremely important to the cultural history of this space are forgotten. But-they didn’t! I just thought it would be a pity if things like that just disappeared from view. At the Belgrade Archives I’d had to take over the role of the institution that should actually have done that. So you see? It wasn’t the National Theatre that published the monograph, it was the Belgrade Archives. For example, we published a monograph about Milorad Mišković, the greatest ballet dancer the Serbs ever produced and whose papers are in the municipal Archives. Culture has always been extremely important to me and that’s why I did what I did when I was Director of the Archives. I’ve always identified with the social approach to history, or rather, with the total-history approach of the Annales School. But right from the beginning I’ve been a different kind of historian. You know, historians somehow always tend to avoid the question of culture. Prpa: My entire approach is all about returning culture to history. Nießer: As Director of the Belgrade Archives you were a particularly strong supporter of the preservation of Yugoslavia’s cultural history. A crucial source for the COURAGE research was a series of interviews with nonconformist intellectuals. COURAGE is a cooperative effort by twelve research institutions from throughout Europe which have described collections highlighting cultural opposition during socialism and created an online database for them. The COURAGE project formed the framework of the interview. Nießer wished to focus on the main arguments covered and so took the decision to edit the material for clarity’s sake. ![]() Nießer conducted the interview in the Serbian language on 24 October 2017 in Belgrade the translation into English is her own. Jacqueline Nießer asked Prpa what she had done to reform Belgrade’s Historical Archives during the early years after Milošević and the beginnings of democracy, and about what freedom of culture meant both in those days and before that, in socialist Yugoslavia. When Slobodan Milošević’s regime was brought to its end in 2000, the new prime minister of Serbia, Zoran Djindjić, asked Prpa to take over as director of the Historical Archives of Belgrade ( Istorijski Arhiv Beograda, IAB). Her area of expertise is 20th century history, and she studied the intellectual history of Serbia particularly closely, as well as the history of ideas about Yugoslav statehood. Branka Prpa is a historian at the Institute for Modern History in Belgrade, Serbia. ![]()
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