Selman Selmanagić: The Architect from Srebrenica

By Muharem Bazdulj

Translated by John K. Cox

In 1974 the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobođenje published an article entitled “From Carpenter in Srebrenica to a Deanship in Berlin.” The article was a summary of the life thus far of one Selman Selmanagić, an architect born in the city of Srebrenica who got his degree at the Bauhaus art school, under the watchful eye of Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. In the 1930s he worked in Istanbul and Jerusalem; he spent the years of the Second World War in Berlin, as a member of the Communist Party; and after the war, he designed the largest stadium in East Berlin, which was eventually named for Walter Ulbricht. He died in 1986 and was buried in Srebrenica, the city in which, ten years later, twenty-five of his namesakes were killed in just a few days.

TEN YEARS

On the back side of the old Turkish banknote for 10,000 lira, which was in circulation during the 1980s, was a representation of Mimar Sinan, or Sinan the Architect. Behind him stands one of his best known of his works, the Selimiye Mosque. On the bill, the years of his birth and death are given as 1490 and 1588. There is, however, controversy about both of these dates. The issue with his date of birth is less serious. In addition to 1490, there are references also to 1489. When it comes to the date of his death, though, the controversies are more serious. Even the most banal of internet searches will call up two different years—1578 and 1588. Serious reference works such as, for instance, A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture by James Stevens Curl (from Oxford University Press) list the date of Sinan's death as “1578 or 1588.” In all likelihood, the confusion arises from an unusual error on Sinan's tombstone. Although the majority of contemporary documents note his death in the year 986 A.H., the number on his traditional Muslim headstone (nišan) is larger. Here's what the aforementioned biographer wrote on this issue:  “At the age of almost 90, the 'Ottoman Michelangelo' has died in Istanbul; even in his longevity he was like the Italian. He is buried behind his masterpiece, the Sulemaniye Mosque, close to the building occupied by the Shaikh-ul-Islam at the time, next to a small mosque, or mesjid, which was also one of his works, a school and fountain. The tarih (verse serving as a chronogram) admittedly displays clearly the number 986 (in the Islamic calendar) as the date of his death, but Ahmet Refik-bey recognized that the vowel “i” in the tarih, which carries a numerical value of 10, was missing, so that 996 A.H./1588 C.E. is shown as the year of death, which would also be written in numbers. Since the tarih proceeded in 1595 from the hand of Mustafa Sai, the most famous stonecarver of his era, this flaw in the all-important verse is, to say the least, “odd.” In terms of overall history, ten years isn't an exceptionally long period, but this is not the case when we’re talking about a human life. And yet, when I think of Selman Selmanagić, living in Istanbul at the beginning of the 1980s, gazing at a banknote worth ten thousand Turkish lira, I cannot help but think that the difference between 986 and 996 AH is not as great as the difference between 1987 and 1996 as calculated by the Julians and Gregorians. Selmanagić died in 1986. He was buried that same year in the city of his birth, Srebrenica, a place known to almost no one on this earth around which he himself had traveled far and wide. Ten years later all of that would change.

THE SPEAR

If, in Istanbul at the beginning of the 1980s, Selmanagić had thought about Mimar Sinan, he would probably have thought first about the latter man's masterpiece some seventy kilometers upriver from his home district, about that “bridge on the Drina” and, perhaps, as a connoisseur of languages, Selmanagić would have taken pleasure in a bizarre coincidence. The etymology of the name Sinan, it turns out, begins with the word that means “spear” in both Aramaic and ancient Arabic. Therefore, the name of the most renowned architect of the Ottoman Empire meant “spear.” Meanwhile, Selman was, technically, born into that same Empire. The most famous architect of the Third Reich was Albert Speer. His last name in German also means “spear,” and our Selman spent a significant period of his life living under that second empire. 

Let us return, however, to the beginning, to the time of Selmanagić's birth. The date was April 25, and the year was 1905. Place: Srebrenica. Country: Bosnia and Hercegovina, occupied by Austria-Hungary for the past twenty-seven years, but officially still under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. Selmanagić's father was Alija, a highly educated man who had studied Islamic law in Cairo and taken a university degree in Istanbul. He nonetheless spent most of his time hunting and farming. 

Selman himself, it is said, reveled in drawing even as a young boy. Paper before him and pencil in hand, he would make sketches of the modest old Bosnian houses with shingles on their pavilion roofs; large bridges of stone and little ones of wood; mosques and churches; fountains and brick and stone enclosures; tombs and graves; tables and chairs; oil lamps and candelabras; copper platters and water jugs; tablecloths and headscarves in arabesque patterns; cabinets, dressers, and chests; plows and carts and rakes and shovels; Turkish coffee pots and cups, jewelry, and pottery; and flowers, bushes, and trees. What he most liked, however, were the details: the way a curtain curls in the bottom corner of a window, a stain on an oak table left behind by festivities, the broken-off tip of a stone on a bridge railing, moss on a wall, the yellowing top of an old tombstone half sunken into the earth, the bottom leaves on a rose bush's stalk.

EIGHT OFFICERS FROM PETROVARADIN

At age 18, Selman Selmanagić went off to Sarajevo to learn the carpenter's trade in the City Vocational School. The Great War had just ended; the abbreviation “k. und k.” was being replaced by SHS. A conversation between Selman and his father Alija had preceded his departure. His father spoke to him of the importance of education. After his finishing exam, he was again in Srebrenica for a short while. That's when his father mentioned the school of arts and crafts in Ljubljana. The Miljacka and the Ljubljanica; Tivoli and the Atmejdan; the dual in the language of Slovene professors and muezzin; the anachronistically patriarchal reticence and unapproachability of girls in Sarajevo and the beauty à

la Ivo Andrić of young women in Slovenia Sarajevo-Ljubljana language disorientation (water and two-digit numbers) and foreign languages (German, French); the Babel-like variety of names of his schoolmates (Rade, Franc, Omer, Oskar, Dominik, Vojislav, Moše, Miran, Ljudevit, Primož) and the elemental loneliness when he was away from the school bench.  His education in Ljubljana was interrupted by obligatory military service. He served in the army of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes at Petrovaradin across the Danube from  Novi Sad in 1926. The following year, he earned certification in Ljubljana as a master of carpentry. Once more he returned to Srebrenica. Demanding physical labor was an everyday experience for him there. One of his biographers noted in an article that this is what made him decide that he wanted to do something more with his life, and perhaps this is the case. His colleagues from Ljubljana told him all kinds of fairy tales about the furniture factories in Germany. In order, however, to go to Germany, he had to save up money. When he had finally scraped together a hundred marks, he headed north-northwest.

A STRANGER IN THE TRAIN

Selman did not set out for Germany looking to improve his material conditions, and so he was unprepared for what awaited him. His desire to find employment in a furniture plant was a pretty vague aspiration: he did not, for instance, have in mind a single specific place or any kind of plan for finding work. He did believe, however, that by dint of his diploma and and his knowledge he would be able to secure a decent living. To get to Germany, Selman first went to Ljubljana in order to catch the train to Berlin. This trip by rail was pivotal in Selman's life—decisive, in the positive sense. In Klagenfurt, a stranger boarded the train and came into Selman's compartment. He spoke Serbo-Croatian, while Selman, at that point in his life, knew not a word of German. Indeed in his luggage he was carrying a new dictionary that he was planning to use to study the language. 

For Selman, the stranger from the train was an angel of good tidings. The two men chatted a bit, and when the unknown man learned of Selman's interests he gave him the address of the Bauhaus school and advised him to go there. Before they reached the German border, the stranger disembarked. Selman never did find out his name. This encounter really was fateful, for at that time, Selman had never heard of Bauhaus. The Yugoslav consul in Berlin at that time was, by fortunate coincidence, an acquaintance of his father Alija, and with no further ado he wrote Selman a letter of recommendation. In 1929, then Selmanagić arrived in Dessau, where at first he got a job in a woodworking workshop and then enrolled in Bauhaus.

THE HUNDREDTH DIPLOMA

Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe were teaching at the Bauhaus. Selman would become friends with Gropius; Klee liked his drawings (and Selmanagić would graduate in 1932.) The diploma he earned bore the signature of van der Rohe and the serial number 100. The paradigmatically cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Bauhaus, then, left its stamp on him when he was in his late 20s. 

At that time Bauhaus was a school that had departments for architecture; urban planning; industrial, graphic, and textile design; ceramics and glass; photography; scenography; interior design; and artwork and design in wood and metal. The school also had its own avant-garde student theater and jazz ensemble; it was a place in which the official documents and correspondence did not use capital letters and where the flower of European youth studied. While at the Bauhaus, Selman became a member of the Communist Party of Germany in 1930.

EARLY WORKS

While he was still a student, Selmanagić built a house for his father on their family's property near Zvornik. When he returned to Yugoslavia after taking his diploma, he looked for work in Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Belgrade, but without success. Nonetheless, in the competition to design the new building for the State Printing Office of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, he won fourth place. The Ministry of Education ended up buying his design, and with the money he earned from that he headed to Istanbul to seek work. Aida Abadžić-Hodžić and Antonija Mlikota continue the story: “In that period he traveled quite a bit. After visiting Turkey, he went to Syria, Greece, Jordan, Bulgaria, Palestine, and Egypt. It was his search for employment that took him to Palestine, where he worked in the cities of Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem, and for a brief period he was a collaborator in the studio of the acclaimed architect and urban planner Richard Kauffman.” Years later, Selmanagaic recalled that Kauffman fired him “when he found out that he was a Muslim, something that was against the prevailing immigration policy there, which favored the hiring of young, educated Jewish intellectuals, who were relocating in those years to Palestine in ever greater numbers.” Nonetheless, Selmanagić remained in Jerusalem doing freelance work until, in 1938, he returned to Berlin by way of Italy.

WORK IN FILM PRODUCTION

From April of 1939, all the way through to the end of the Second World War, Selmanagić worked in the UFA Studios as a stage designer. How did someone who had been a member of the German Communist Party since 1930 manage to pass the entire war in Berlin?

Ivan Ivanji has put forward what Sinan Gudžević calls a “daring proposition”: the assertion that, at least at that time, Selmanagić was some sort of double agent. “Although there is no documentary evidence of this,” he writes, “it is unimaginable that he would have been able to go to a place like that without the Gestapo checking up on him in great detail, by means of the questionnaires that all co-workers, even auxiliary or associate ones, had to fill out. There were direct questions about racial background and previous party affiliations. Only Goebbels could, in exceptional circumstances, permit someone to be employed through irregular channels. It would've been impossible for Selmanagić to conceal the fact that he'd not only been a member of the Communist Party, but also the Party secretary in an important institution. Nevertheless, for the period of the war, he created designs for new cinemas, and later he worked as a scenographer. During the war, movies comprised an important propaganda tool in Hitler's empire. 

At the end of the conflict, Berlin was liberated---or rather, from the German point of view, conquered—by the Red Army. What was going to happen to Selmanagić, the former Communist functionary who worked in Goebbel's outfit? Would he be condemned as a traitor? Far from it. Instead, he ended up being praised as a great anti-fascist fighter. One after the next, he received all the medals and decorations that the German Democratic Republic could bestow upon its very best citizens.”

MARRIAGE 

In Berlin after the war, or to be more precise, in the year 1949, Selmanagić married a female architect named Emira Hadžibaučaušević, who was from a Sarajevo family. Selman Selmanagić also made a name for himself with his committed work to prevent the razing of individual buildings damaged in the war, especially in the Russian zone of occupation. These were buildings such as Schinkel's Neue Wache and the Berlin Cathedral, for which Selmanagić succeeded in convincing the Russian general Berzarin that they represented significant architectural achievements. In those years, Selmanagić also played a part in the renovation of buildings at Humboldt University. According to certain eyewitness accounts, he socialized with some of the leading lights in East German society. On one occasion he spent an evening with Bertolt Brecht, and observers recount that they discussed the ups and downs of the role of cities in human history. Selman Selmanagić is said to have delivered a nuanced and convincing oral essay, and Brecht responded with verses of his poem “On Cities.” From 1950 on, Selmanagić was a professor at the Berlin School of Architecture, and for a time he also served as the dean of the College of Applied Arts.

THE WALL

After the war ended, Selman would not be able to travel to his homeland for fifteen years. The wall was not exactly physical; the wall in question was a political one. At the start of the 1960s, however, things were changing somewhat and, after twenty years away, Selman traveled to Yugoslavia. He went to Bosnia, to his Srebrenica. After that trip, he returned frequently. Berlin was his home, and Srebrenica was his birthplace, but he inhabited the entire world. The chain of cities in which Selman worked as a professor of architecture makes an extensive and impressive network: Athens, Moscow, Sarajevo, Cairo, Hamburg, Belgrade, Graz, Zagreb, Munich, Leningrad, Ljubljana, Budapest, and Peking. It would be pointless even to try to enumerate the cities in which he gave guest lectures. Selman's day-to-day life was teeming with airports, postcards, offices, amphitheaters, meetings,  examinations, supervisions, consultations, commissions, ceremonies, seminars, and projects. For that reason, he enjoyed going in the summers back to Srebrenica, which meant sitting for long stretches beneath the clear blue skies with his friends, talking over drinks. Then on one of his visits to Bosnia in the early 1970s, he met the journalist Džavid Husić. The upshot of their conversations was a set of two articles published in Oslobođenje in 1974. The titles are instructive: “From Carpenter in Srebrenica to a Deanship in Berlin” and “I Built Castles in the Air.”

THE STADIUM

Selmanagić's masterpiece was the Walter Ulbricht Stadium in Berlin. It was also known as the Stadium of World Youth and had a seating capacity of seventy thousand. It was dedicated and formally opened on May 20, 1950. This stadium was the traditional site of the finale of East Germany's soccer championship, and the GDR's national team also played fourteen matches there. The facility was best known, however, as the home field of Berlin Dynamo, the country's leading team that won the GDR title on ten different occasions. Indications are that Selmanagić visited this stadium for the final time on October 19, 1983, when Belgrade's Partizan team played an away match there as part of the Champion's Cup in East Berlin. Dynamo prevailed by a score of 2:0, with the first goal going to Falko Götz. Partizan got its revenge in the second game in a rematch, 1:0, on the unforgettable goal by Dževad Prekazi—a free kick from over thirty meters out. The double-header with Partizan, though, is remembered because Falko Götz used the second match in Belgrade as an opportunity to defect to the West. In 1992, two years after the reunification of Germany, Berlin had hopes of being selected as the site for the Summer Olympics in 2000. They were so convinced of their chances for success that, even before the public announcement was made regarding who was to be that year's host, the Walter Ulbricht Stadium was torn down, with the intention of erecting in its place a gorgeous new arena. When Berlin's bid was rejected, construction was halted and the construction site remained vacant for almost a decade and a half. In 2006, work began on the headquarters of the BND, the main German intelligence agency. At that point though, Selman Selmanagić had already been dead for twenty long years.

DEATH

He died in East Berlin on the seventh of May, 1986. In accordance with his own wishes, he was buried in Srebrenica, at the Bojna cemetery. Many people from his hometown participated in his funeral procession, and at the time it was common to refer to him as “our architect.”  On the grave-marker of this architect named Selman there were two numbers, giving the dates of his birth and death, 1905 and 1986.  The Srebrenica stonemason Mustafa, although not as famous as his far-removed Turkish namesake, was not prone to mistakes. 

In ten years, though, the span from 1986 to 1996, Selmanagić's world was completely erased. It happened first of all in 1989, when the wall that split his city into two parts was torn down, and this was followed by the disappearance of the German Democratic Republic, of which he was a citizen. In 1992, then, the Walter Ulbricht Stadium was razed, and his birthplace and homeland began its descent into a bloodbath that same year. In July of 1995, all Muslim men in Srebrenica who were older than he had been when he made his way to Sarajevo to study carpentry were murdered. The list of those condemned to death included a variety of Muslim first names. For example, with the first name Selman there were: Selman Ademović (b. 1934), Selman Begić, Selman Delić (b. 1952), Selman Delić (b. 1935), Selman Delić (b. 1940), Selman Delić (1941), Selman Gabeljić (1930), Selman Hasanović (b. 1940), Selman Jusupović (b. 1945), Selman Jusupović (b. 1949), Selman Mujanović (1962), Selman Mujanović (1958), Selman Mustafić (1960), Selman Mustafić (1963), Selman Osmanović (1976), Selman Osmanović (1970), Selman Osmanović (1978), Selman Osmanović (1974), Selman Ramić (1978), Selman Salihović (1977), Selman Sulejmanović (1976), Selman Sulejmanović (1968).

NAMES

The first name Selman, from which the last name Selmanagić is derived, comes from Arabic, and it signifies both peace and blessing. In the Islamic world it has long been a favorite name, since one of Muhammad's earliest followers was named Selman Al-Farsi, which means Selman the Persian. This Selman had first been a Zoroastrian, and then his search for truth had drawn him to Christianity, before he embraced Islam. Selman was the first Persian to accept Islam, and the only person close to Muhammad who knew Judaism and Christianity well. In addition, he was the first translator of the Koran into another language besides Arabic language, producing a partial translation into Farsi. It was he who suggested the digging of the deep trench in front of the entrance to Medina, when the idolaters attacked the city in the year 5 A.H. with the intention of exterminating Muslims. Once, when Abu Darda invited him to come live in the Holy Land, Selman answered: It is never a land that makes someone holy—only one's works.

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Muharem Bazdulj (1977) is one of the leading writers emerged from the Balkans after the disintegration of Yugoslavia. He published 15 books, mostly novels and collections of short stories. His essays and short stories appeared in 20 languages. Three of his books were published in English: The Second Book, Byron and the Beauty and Transit, Comet, Eclipse. Upon original publication, The Second Book won a leading literary prize for best book of short stories in Bosnia. Byron and the Beauty was selected by Eileen Battersby in Irish Times among 40 best books published in English in 2016. Also, two of his  novels were published in German by Seifert Verlag from Wien: Unglaubige und Zuleika and Transit.Komet.Eklipse. He was resident and visiting author in, among other places, Santa Maddalena (Italy), Boston College (USA), Museum Quartier and KulturKontakt (Vienna). His work was featured in anthologies Best European Fiction 2012,The Wall in My Head and Belgrade Noir. Bazdulj is also a winner of 3 most prestigious journalistic awards in Bosnia and Serbia. After 15 years in Sarajevo, he is currently living in Belgrade. 

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