Author(s): Ranka Gašić / Language(s): Serbian
Issue: 1/2003
The cultural relations between German and Serbia (Yugoslavia) in the 1930s make a short section in a long history of Serbian-German relations - between the break in the 1920s, caused by the War, and a whole new context in which they developed during the occupation in the Second World War. Renewal and maintenance of cultural relations between the Germans and the Serbs was left mainly to the private initiative in the first half of the decade. In the years before the Second Worm War, the organization of cultural exchange was taken over by the countries. Cultural manifestations did not have, except on rare occasions, great publicity in the Belgrade public. The exception was a German film, as modem medium, that was a significant carrier of the German culture to the Belgrade audience. However, cultural exchange through education and specialization of the Belgrade intellectuals on the territories where German was a spoken language, as well as the German experts’ activities in Belgrade, marked permanently the development of some scientific and art disciplines. As far as natural sciences were concerned, these were medicine, veterinary medicine, zoology, botany and chemistry. The development of the engineering sciences in Serbia and Yugoslavia was entirely conditioned by taking over German achievements in this field. As for the humanities, the German legal science, economics, archaeology and art history contributed at the most to the development of the same disciplines in Belgrade in the 1930s. The most frequent and intensive form of cooperation was expert specialization of the employees in Belgrade scientific and cultural institutions. Even though students’ education at German Universities was not as mass as before the First World War, the number of professors at Belgrade University in the 1930s, who had been educated in Germany or Austria and who passed their knowledge to the generations of students, was considerable.
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