Nenad Leibensperger and colleagues were "just doing their job", and that is already a feat in Serbia today. This historian and conservator of the Republic Institute for the Protection of Monuments refused to remove General Staff from the register of cultural property.
That's why he was chosen for personality of the year 2025 of the weekly "Vreme". Now she's on the cover of the first issue of the new year, which is on newsstands from this Friday (January 9).
We asked him if there have always been people "in the system" who do their job properly, we just didn't notice them?
"Previously, it was often thought that only opposition politicians were fighting against the government, while those who opposed the system within the system were mostly not noticed," he says. "They were too small, not loud enough, and that kind of struggle is often much more difficult than public political conflicts, because within the system they can punish you very concretely and in different ways."
Couple of investors and politicians
In the conversation, which we print on seven pages, Leibensperger talks in detail for the first time about the pressure to cancel the protection of the General Staff in order to build a hotel there and the dangers that threaten the area around Knez Miloša Street, whose protection was canceled by lex specialis.
"It's about intertwined political and economic interests," says Leibensperger about the pressures that come to the address of the conservator of the Institute for the Protection of Monuments for other reasons as well.
"Sometimes these are the interests of politicians - someone comes up with an idea, secures money, wants to show what it is." done and he thinks that now he has to do it as he imagined. And then he is stopped on the way by the security service, who says: it can't be done like that, you can't build Disneyland the way you want, but you have to respect certain norms," he says.
"Nevertheless, it is much more often about investors who want to build, to erect a building or to intervene in the space, so they exert pressure - sometimes directly, but first of all by finding politicians who will provide them with everything they want."
Who did not serve in the army?
We talked about the German line of his origin, great interest in the heroes and victims of past wars in this region and their memory, but also how he himself was in the army of the FR Yugoslavia in Pristina during the bombing in 1999.
He says that the attitude towards war veterans was and remains disappointing. "I, as someone with a German surname, someone who enrolled in college and was able to postpone the army, in the end and not serve it, considering that it was later abolished, still went, and people who were much more, much louder proud of their Serbianness postponed it as long as they could. And then they didn't even serve it."
Read the entire interview in the new "Vremen" from Friday. Or it is subscribe now on the printed or digital edition with a discount of up to 25 percent. The action lasts only until the middle of January!
