Издаваштво, библиотеке, цензура и књижевни живот Београда за време немачке окупације у Другом светском рату (1941–1944)
Publishing, Libraries, Censorship and Literary Life of Belgrade during German Occupation in the Second World War (1941–1944)

Summary/Abstract: During the German occupation in the Second World War, the cultural and literary scene of Belgrade and Serbia went through a major transformation. The main goal of the enforced transformation was to curb the creative forces of one very vibrant and fruitful environment and to force them to align with Nazi and collaborationist propaganda machinery, which preached the values fundamentally opposite to the intellectual spirit of Serbian and Yugoslav capital in the years prior to the outbreak of war. With a goal to establish control, the occupational and collaborative regimes formulated cultural policy which leaned on ideological postulates of Nazism and reactionary nationalism, xenophobia and anti-modernism. The effective control of literary life of Belgrade was enforced by censorship of all printed material and by prohibition of printing and distributing of all unfit books and magazines, by taking control over important bookstores and publishers and by deterrence, raids, denunciations and searches of personal libraries. The action of establishing control over literary life had double effect – at the same time the literary scene faded as most of the writers and intellectuals decided to withdraw from public life and refused to work in an enforced system, while the quality of the printed material drastically deteriorated; On the other hand, according to many testimonies, the people of Belgrade read a lot during the occupation, maybe more than ever before, friends and acquaintances exchanged books from their personal libraries, people talked about literature and works which had universal artistic value, but also about works which were politically and socially actual.

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