UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

moje detinjstvo, sloboda, mir [my childhood, freedom, peace]
bratstvo, jedinstvo [brotherhood, unity]
preda mnom on, nasmejan, večan [there he was, smiling, eternal]
Al' ja sam video visoke peći [and I saw tall chimneys]
fabrike dim, široke njive [factory‘s smoke, wide fields]
gradove što slobodni žive [cities living in freedome]
decu i mir i jato ptica [children and peace and a flock of birds]
I opet sam video Tita Maršala[and I saw him again, Marshal Tito]
legendu tu, slobodotvorca[the legend, the maker of freedom]
čoveka tog, druga i borca[the Man, comrade and fighter]
opet sam svud video Tita[and again, I saw Tito everywhere]
The response directly related to the lyrics is a telling one. 123kg refers to the song and extends the
Balašević‘s story into the present. In doing so she establishes a connection between failing to live
up to the Yugoslav dream and the self-inflicted consequences.
@peromakata now we have demolished buildings, mines, not to mention health service,
education system and other ministries, I‘m fed up with profiteers and stealers...but the
wors of all is that we‘ve lost those we loved the best, our memories are burnt destroyed
are our memories that no one can ever bring back and now we only have hatred between
one another...whatever people say and wrote they are all sorry for yugoslavia...and so we
should be for having followed tudman and milosevic (may they burn in hell)
123kg9 269
Moreover, through this post protrudes an affective take on the present which is significantly
informed by an image of the past firmly embedded in Balašević‘s nostalgic (or made so after the
collapse), now entirely personalised, internalised narrative.
The song recapitulates several of the pillars of Yugoslav mythology: the industrialisation and postwar
prosperity, peace, brotherhood and unity, indeed an autarchic political, social and cultural
world that easily becomes both the topos of further, post-Yugoslav, mythologisation and
nostalgicisation, while at the same time also an indication of the delusion in which Yugoslavs
lived, according to the 1941—1991 period‘s most ferocious critics. The life of this song after 1991
and its uses in such and similar vernacular interventions at the same time also exposes the social
and cultural perturbations the post-socialist societies have been confronting after the installation of
new political and economic systems. The demontage of socialism in many respects, along the
269 See mejerchold, ―Tri put sam video Tita,‖ comments, http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=E2N-WUeHwRo,
accessed 2 September 2011.
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