Geschichte Serbiens

This book is about the two hundred years since the first Serbian uprising against the Ottoman rule 1804 until the beginning of the post Milosevic era. For the first time ever, political and incidental history are combined in a symbiosis with social, cultural and economical history. And for the first time a lot of space is devoted to questions and approaches based on cultural studies in an overall view of the more recent history of Serbia. The expert for Eastern Europe Holm Sundhaussen from Berlin has dedicated a first extensive history to Serbia, which will have a central role in the stabilisation of the Balkan region in the 21st century and which will probably be one of the biggest challenges for the European Union. 200 years of Serbian history are unfurled and the crucial test between tradition and modern spirit in the post Milosevic era is made clear. In modification of the dictum of the Serbian author and temporary (remaining) Yugoslavian president Dobrica Cosic, that Serbians always lose in peace, what they have won in the war, in the 20th century, and especially in the war in the 1990s, they have lost what they could have won in peace. The (Pyrrhic) victories in the Balkan wars of 1912/13 (with the conquest of Kosovo and Vardar-Macedonia) represent the most important break in more recent Serbian history and turns out to be a problem, which the divided political elite of Serbia has still not dealt with. The author discusses the reasons for the breakdown of Yugoslavia and the escalation of violence in the 1990s. He reconstructs the role of the intellectual and political elites, which over the course of time, constructed various concepts for the people, including biological and racist concepts; he underlines the diversity of Serbian society and ends with an outlook on the unsolved problems at the beginning of the 21st century.

The non-fiction book Geschichte Serbiens [History of Serbia] has been published in Serbian translation by Tomislav Bekić and published under the title Istorija Srbije od 19. do 21. veka by Clio, Belgrade.