ABSTRACT
Within the frame sketched above, numerous ethnographies of transitional time/ space reconfiguration emerge in Serbia, but a few years ago one of them received special attention. The British pop band Kosheen scheduled a concert in Belgrade for 3 November 2007. The concert venue was the Poseydon club in the city’s Staro Sajmište area (Staro Sajmište meaning Old Fairgrounds in Serbian, as to be distinguishable from the modern fairground venues built in the 1950s). The concert eventually never took place: there was a combined domestic and foreign red alert, since the internationally acclaimed musical group was to hold a gig in a building which, although now occupied by the Poseydon club, had in the 1940s been mostly frequented by Nazi guards and concentration camp inmates. The first major concert by an international band planned at this site triggered public acknowledgment of a more or less acknowledged fact, namely that the particular venue used to be a pavilion of the German-run Second World War concentration camp locally known as Staro Sajmište or Sajmište, internationally known as Sajmiste, Sajmiste (Semlin) or Semlin Lager (Semlin being the German name for the once separate town of Zemun, now a major Belgrade borough). After several years during which the public had ignored the fact that the former house of terror was being used as an entertainment facility, the story was out, and there was no going back. It should be noted that the cancelled concert represented the culmination of long-lasting inadequate concepts of (mis)use of this particular site. How this specific public location with historical importance (the so-called Spasić pavilion which functioned as the camp’s hospital during the occupation) ended up in the hands of private owners is unclear to this day (there is an ongoing legal dispute between several municipal agencies and alleged owners). In any event, the lack of scruples when commercial interests are involved was more than evident from the public statement made by the agents organizing the ill-fated concert, who
tried to calm public fury by saying that ‘during Nazism the Spasić pavilion was merely a hospital where the deaths of camp inmates were officially declared’.2
