At the end of the summer of 1985, when I started working as a kind of secretary for Otto Bihalji, I was twenty years old. After four years of high school education by the educational reformer Stipe Šuvar, Frazer's teaching of Marxism and pathetic glorification of socialist self-management and communism, I was convinced that all ideology was superfluous and stupid. That opinion was supported by the one-year socialist-realist torture in the Yugoslav People's Army.
When I said something on that topic to Bihalji, who is over sixty years older, he just looked at me thoughtfully and did not engage in any discussion. He never imposed his views. I spoke German and enrolled in German studies, Bihalji wrote in German and he needed someone to put order in the endless pile of manuscripts, notes, illegible drawings and notes written illegally, on trains and in hotel rooms, which were to be the basis of his autobiographies. Mine better life u hell it should have been called the book, which he did not get to write. Biography of Oto Bihalji, i.e. Peter Tene, i.e. Pierre Merin, is the history of twentieth-century art and the history of communism, not as a social order, but as a struggle against exploitation, injustice and fascism. I didn't know that then.
From Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, through Malraux, Sartre and Gorky to Hemingway and Faulkner, Bihalyi knew, collaborated and corresponded with countless famous figures who influenced the art and philosophy of the last century. And whatever he did, it was subordinated to the fight against the coming fascism in Italy and Hitler's National Socialism in Germany. Arthur Koestler characterized Bihalji as a "legendary figure" in Paris and Berlin in the 1930s. If such a man is a communist, Koestler wrote, then communism may not be so bad after all. Bihalji's invitation to various anti-fascist gatherings would be regularly responded to by all intellectuals, whether they were communists or not.
The Bihaljis' apartment in Nemanja Street, near the railway station, was a labyrinth filled with thousands of books, drawings, paintings, and various posters from the twenties and thirties of the last century hung on the walls. One three-meter-wide wall was filled from floor to ceiling with only his books translated into all the world's languages. Despite his weak heart, Otto was typical workaholic. He would work until he was exhausted, then lie down on the couch and doze off. His wife Lisa worked in another room, and every few minutes Otto would ask her about some people, dates and events from half a century ago. She answered readily.
In Bihalji's study, in front of a rattling air conditioner that sounded like a tractor, there was a canvas screen, faded pigeons on the canvas, a mass of smudged signatures. I asked him what it was. At some kind of gathering of European intellectuals, he answered, Brecht, Sartre and Stefan Zweig were among others. They all signed on that canvas, and Picasso drew something. Then the housekeeper put the dusty, stained linen in the washing machine. That is why it is so pale and illegible. A typical anecdote from the life of the Bihaljis. The historical events they witnessed and the historical figures they knew would be mentioned carelessly, just as a Picasso drawing hung inconspicuously above a lamp.
Otto Bihalji-Merin with his wife
The boy from the then Austro-Hungarian Zemun grew up between two cultures and two languages. He studied painting and art history in Belgrade, at the age of twenty he continued his studies in Berlin and started publishing literary and philosophical texts in German. Bihalji is one of the best stylists of the German language, Thomas Mann once said. Together with Djordje Lukacs, he worked in the famous German magazine of left-wing intellectuals "Die Linkskurve" (left curve).
In 1928, he returned to Belgrade. He was a pilot of the Air Force of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In that period, together with his brother Pavlo Bihalji, he founded the magazine "Nova literatura" and the publishing house Nolit. They published books by Jack London, Maxim Gorky, Remarque, Heinrich Mann, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, Isaac Babel... They tried to somehow publish everything that defied the censorship of the time, Otto said, left-wing and socially critical literature was undesirable and often prohibited. Due to a heart defect, he had to give up flying and returned to Berlin.
As a member of the Communist Party of Germany, he saw the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, how the Nazis burned books in the streets, how they destroyed Jewish shops, and witnessed Hitler's rise to power. He continued to publish in Germany under various pseudonyms. He lived illegally, sometimes in France, sometimes in Switzerland. He was going to Spain to fight against Franco.
When the war began, Bihalji received permission to emigrate to America through Thomas Mann. Instead, he returned to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1941 and was taken prisoner of war as an officer. His life was saved by the fact that he published in Nazi Germany under various pseudonyms, so the Nazis did not recognize a known communist in the soldier Bihalji. His brother was shot already in the first days of the occupation. After the war, Bihalji returned to Belgrade and lived in a modest apartment in Nemanjina until his death in 1993, even though his books were published in large editions and were brilliantly furnished all over the world, mostly in Germany. In Austria, in the XNUMXs, he received the Herder Prize for "understanding the people through art", and in Germany, as the first Yugoslav, the Cross of Merit for "defending German art from Nazism".
Oto Bihalji - Merin wrote dozens of books, mostly about art. Immediately after the Second World War, when the art of Yugoslavia was under the influence of the socialist realism of the USSR, Bihalji popularized modern and naive fine art. The relatively quick separation from the Soviet model of populist, politically engaged art and painting is largely thanks to Bihalji. He wrote about how the theory of relativity and psychoanalysis, photography and the technical possibilities of mapping the micro and macro cosmos expand the concept of reality, change the artist's consciousness and the role of art.
He was obsessed with books Art naive u Yugoslavia, Ivan Generalic Yugoslav pastoral or Bogosav Zivkovic substances i trauma u the tree brought Yugoslav naives out into the world. He popularized art from this area and wrote Frescoes i u Yugoslavia, Stećci Bogomila itd. Mala Beads Earth between worlds contemplative travels published in 1954, it is one of the first books in Western Europe that presents Yugoslavia as a country that is outside the "Eastern Bloc".
His books, which are almost unknown in our country, such as Mask sveta, Bridges sveta, Naive artists sveta, reflections on the interweaving of art history with philosophy and modern sociology, for many world experts are the guideposts for understanding art in the second half of the twentieth century. His four-volume book on Goya and in Madrid is the standard literature for studying the works of the famous Spanish painter.
Bihalji was one of the last intellectual dinosaurs and a witness to the birth of the communist idea of the twentieth century. His appearance had a confusing effect on young people, at least on me. He insisted that I address him as "you". He addressed me, a kid in his eighties, as "you" out of spite, until I finally managed to break it through my tongue. An old custom from the Communist Party, he said, German social democrats still address each other as "you".
After various manipulations with the concept of communism, battered due to idolatry, under the influence of kitsch, melodramatic, intrusive partisan films and schools, youth relays and other nonsense, I managed to understand, along with Bihalji, that the idea of communism is essentially simply the idea of fighting for a more just society, that there is no connections with borders and state order. Due to his critical views, Bihalji was not popularized in Tito's Yugoslavia, and due to the fact that the man was a communist, he will certainly not be celebrated in today's Serbia. I don't think he would care. Otto Bihalji was the only real idealist I met in my life.
