Freedom of Culture in and after Yugoslavia. An Interview with Branka Prpa

Abstract The historian Branka Prpa was the director of the Historical Archives of Belgrade after Slobodan Milošević’s regime ended in 2000. Jacqueline Nießer spoke to Prpa about how she set about reforming Belgrade’s Historical Archives during Serbia’s democratic opening-up under Zoran Djindjić. Prpa has fostered preservation of the cultural history of socialist Yugoslavia, so the focus of the interview was cultural freedom in and after Yugoslavia. The historian elaborates on how culture both then and now has been in conflict with politics, her remarks leading on to a discussion about how a future may be imagined in the 21st century. The interview was conducted during the COURAGE project, which between 2016 and 2019 has researched the cultural heritage of dissent in the former state socialist countries of Eastern Europe.