NEW BOOK

German historian combed through archives and wrote Tito's biography: 'Time has run out' What he cared about most, Yugoslavia, outlived him by only ten years Writes: Jutarnji.hrPosted: October 7, 2020 9:35 pm Josip Broz Tito Josip Broz Tito Satellite Facebook Twitter Messenger E-mail When Josip Broz Tito , the lifelong president of Yugoslavia, died on May 4, 1980, at the University Clinic in Ljubljana at the age of 88, the whole country stopped. People were affected, stunned, sad. The father of the socialist multinational Yugoslavia died. And with him, the whole era is over, writes Deutsche Welle . From a distance of 40 years, the German historian Marie-Janine Calic wrote an interesting biography of this unusual ruler - "Tito. Eternal Partisan". In about 400 pages, she describes a very complex and very flexible political figure. Tito was "a typical product of a time ruled by extremes, which he personally experienced and in whose shaping he participated." A hero in war Even in his "most liberal" phases, Tito was not a democrat in the Western sense. After the end of World War II, he allowed his partisans to take cruel revenge on tens of thousands of innocents. It is an indisputable credit to Tito that after Hitler's attack on Yugoslavia in April 1941 he built a partisan army which he eventually led to victory in the war with an opponent who seemed almost invincible. image Josip Broz Tito plays chess (October 1944) - Several times the partisans were almost defeated, Tito himself was wounded, he narrowly escaped death on the battlefield. "Tito was the only supreme commander of the anti-Hitler coalition who was in the war zone throughout the war," Calic said. His “unwavering belief in the power of his own actions,” as well as his organizational abilities, influenced and motivated the partisans. Even in the middle of the national liberation struggle, Tito and his associates formulated the principles of the new Yugoslavia: as a federation of equal peoples, Deutsche Welle writes . image Wladyslaw Gomulka, Secretary General of the Communist Party of Poland and Josip Broz Tito (September 10, 1957) Vanity, vain, far-sighted Tito was charming, writes Calic, "with his immediacy he won over people of completely different social backgrounds and social status." RELATED NEWS . 50 YEARS AGO Nixon in Zagreb: Did the US President Really Support Savka, Tripal and the Croatian Spring in 1970 THE MOST FUN EXHIBITION They wholeheartedly celebrated Tito and Yugoslavia ... and now they are not happy to talk about it As a communist, he parted ways with Soviet dictator Stalin, whom he did not want to obey. He founded the Non-Aligned Movement, which during the Cold War sought a "third way" between the atomic superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. And the western Federal Republic of Germany (BRD) was closer to it than the eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR). image Josip Broz Tito and Nikita Khrushchev, Secretary General of the Central Committee of the USSR Lebedev German Chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt gained trust in him - they saw Tito as an important partner for their new policy of easing tensions with the East. In order to clarify these relations in more detail, the author researched the documents in the political archives of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs in great detail. The book also devotes a lot of space to Tito's personal vanity, the bombastic stagings he loved, his penchant for luxury and glamor, and the cult of personality he built. image US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Josip Broz Tito (September 1960) - Time has run out on him When Tito died both the embarrassment and grief of the people after his death were real and sincere. But what he cared about most, Yugoslavia, outlived him by only ten years. Here, however, Calic remains on the surface when he briefly concludes: "When Slovenia and Croatia unilaterally declared independence on June 25, 1991, Yugoslavia sank into a bloody civil war. Thus, Tito's life's work failed." image Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie and Josip Broz Tito (September 1961) - Because the declaration of independence of the Yugoslav northern republics was not to blame for the end of Yugoslavia after Tito. As the author states in another place, Tito was an enlightened, fatherly good, so-called monarchist communist, and as such he was obsolete during his lifetime, he was no longer in the spirit of the times. Democratization that would go beyond a system of federalized one-party repressive tolerance was simply unthinkable to him. image Josip Broz Tito and General Secretary of the Central Committee of the USSR Leonid Brezhnev Satellite The national communist Slobodan Milosevic came to power in Serbia in the second half of the 1980s , and began working on the "Greater Serbia" project - the annexation of those parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to Serbia where the majority of the population lived. In response, nationalists in other republics have strengthened. In the first free elections in 1989/90. nationalists took over everywhere. Tito's legacy has failed.