A Flower for the Dead

Yugoslavian artist, urbanist, writer, and politician Bogdan Bogdanovic (1922–2010) created some of the most distinctive memorials in Europe. His two best-known works are in Croatia—Flower of Stone (1966), a memorial for the victims of the concentration camp in Jasenovac, and the Dudik Memorial Park for the Victims of Fascism, in Vukovar—but there are nearly twenty other monuments, memorials, and necropolises built by Bogdanovic scattered throughout the territories of the former Yugoslavia, a testament to the region’s tragic history.
           
Friedrich Achleitner, a poet and architectural critic, was a close friend of Bogdanovic in his late years, when he was living in exile in Vienna. Achleitner visited all of Bogdanovic’s memorials, first with his friend, then again after the artist’s death, and this book presents his impressions of the sites through a striking combination of essays and images that bring home the theme of Bogdanovic’s work, a desire to include rather than exclude, to unite rather than separate.