After a characterization of contemporaneity (dominance of the financial
sector and high technology, politicization of economy, ideological use of
culture and thought control) and a brief analysis of expansionism (political,
economic, cultural) on the eve of the Great War, the author gives a more
detailed description of the spiritual situation in the wake of the Great War:
in philosophy, literature, and art, as well as the national political
programmatic texts and war propaganda publications of German intellectuals of
the time. The continuity of the Austro-Hungarian colonial policy towards the
Balkans and Serbia culminated in instigation of a preventive war against
Serbia by the elites in Berlin and Vienna, which is important for the
question of responsibility for the war, with concrete war aims which
reflected in the causes of the war. These war elites wanted to declare the
assassination in Sarajevo as the cause of war, which in fact was a political
assassination and tyrannicide. The liberation movement of democratic youth
Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia) needs to be viewed both in the European context
and inspired by the Serbian tradition of Kosovo cult and the ethics of
Vidovdan (St Vitus Day) speaking about the sacrifice as sublimation of
history and about honorable suffering as element of identity. Historical
memory suggests that historical responsibility is transgenerational. The epic
proportions of Serbian suffering in the Great War have additionally incited
the idea of the Temple of St Vitus Day (Vidovdanski Hram) conceived by Ivan
Mestrovic. The bases of this idea were shaken by Milos Crnjanski in his
Lyrics of Ithaca where he succeeded to bring back to Vidovdan (St Vitus Day)
its inexhaustible national power of validity. Because of enormous Serbian
military and civilian casualties in recent history, the establishing of a
Victims of War Memorial today would have identity, existential, ethical and
ontological significance for the Serbian people.
The Great War, ethics of Vidovdan, memory