80 years ago, a man was killed during the liberation of Sarajevo from Fascism, who would become the embodiment of the city and its inhabitants – and Tito’s most famous partisan who would inspire rock albums and one of the most watched movies of all time.

When the inhabitants of Sarajevo woke up on April 6th 1945, they did so in a liberated city. The last German soldiers had left it, and its critical infrastructure was intact.

And they did so without Sarajevo’s most important liberator.

The man who led local resistance against the Nazis for the past two years, and who had protected the main post office and the electricity plant against German sabotage the night before lay dead in the city morgue.

When he learned that a fire had broken out in the tobacco factory, he rushed there after organizing an impromptu fire brigade. Around midnight, a hand grenade exploded. According to most accounts, a German soldier had thrown it at the partisan. Some others assume that the tobacco factory had been booby trapped.

Thanks to this act of heroism, the city was spared a large fire during liberation.

Most Saralije had no clue about this. They had never heard of the local secretary of the communist party who had been organizing armed and non-armed resistance against fascism. They had never heard his nom de guerre.

Fewer even knew his real name, which had been a successfully kept secret: Vladimir Perić, known to other resistance fighters and the Germans as Walter, or Valter in local orthography.

Three days later, thousands of Sarajlije paid their respect to the fallen hero and lined the streets to the cemetery where he was put in a mass grave.

Valter had been one of the last of the city’s inhabitants to be killed in World War Two. Overall, around 10.000 inhabitants found their deaths between 1941 and 1945, roughly a fifth of the population.

They are honored in a memorial park in the outskirts of Sarajevo.

Many were Sarajevo’s Jews, whose large and blossoming community had almost been wiped out by the Nazis, and many Serbs were murdered by Ustaša, Croat fascists who were allied with the Nazis.

During the war, Bosnia and its capital had been part of the Ustaša puppet state NDH.

The Historical Valter

Already a member of the Communist Party, Valter had joined the restistance movement against Yugoslavia’s fascist occupiers as soon as Tito had organized it.

He participated in several battles against the Germans, such as in Zenica, and then went back to Sarajevo where he worked as a bank clerk.

In 1943, Valter took over the local party, and organized an effective resistance network: His agents gathered critical intelligence, spread antifascist propaganda, organized donations for the persecuted Jews of the city, and engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Germans and their Croat allies.

While acts of sabotage and ambushes were often no more than pinpricks, they sometimes severely hindered or delayed larger military actions against the Partisans elsewhere, kept German troops tied down in the region, and were a constant reminder to the occupiers that they were not welcome in Sarajevo.

Valter’s activities saved a lot of lives and was an important contribution to the overall struggle of Tito’s Partisans, who liberated Yugoslavia largely on their own – the only other countries who liberated themselves were Albania and Greece, albeit both with Yugoslav help.

This makes him a freedom fighter to be remembered an honored.

Yet, how Valter is being remembered and honored far exceeds anything that happened to any other antifascist resistance fighter of WW II, save Tito himself. Valter has become an icon of pop culture, far beyond former Yugoslavia itself, and an allegory to Sarajevo itself, and the inat of its inhabitants.

And whenever larger protest movements emerge in former Yugoslavia against the corruption of the Powers That Be or against nationalist hate mongering, be sure that someone references the fallen hero.

The Movie That Created A Legend

The little tower of Sarajevo’s former train station up on the hill in the district of Bistrik hosts a small museum that documents just how that came to be.

It is dedicated to one of the most watched movies of all time: Valter brani Sarajevo. Walter defends Sarajevo in English, and, more importantly, 瓦尔特保卫萨拉热窝 in Chinese.

„Some 30 Chinese tourists just came yesterday“, museum guide Eldin Hodžić. „Whenever Chinese are in town, they visit“.

They have to be a dedicated bunch.

The museum’s entrance on the backside of the building isn’t marked, and it shares the access stairs and the entrance door with the storage of a branch of a Turkish restaurant chain, that is just bulding an extra room on the frontside, destroying the historical train station’s freshly renovated and protected facade.

The restaurant occupies all of the building’s ground floor.

As one enters the lower staircase of the small tower with the museum inside, one has to watch out in order not to collide with one of the restaurant’s waiters.

Only a small sign inside the building indicates that you have found what you are looking for.

Today it’s a but quieter up here in Bistrik.

Other than me, just a dijaspora Bosnian from Switzerland and his girlfriend are visiting the museum.

That there are no Chinese to be seen, is remarkable.

The movie Valter brani Sarajevo is one of the most popular movies in China of all times. Some sources claim that up to three billion people there have watched it in the half century since it has been released in the People’s Republic. The number can not be verified, but does not seem entirely implausible.

Why Chinese Love Valter

This is not just owed to the great work of director Hajrudin Krvavac, the solid performance of lead actor Velimir “Bata” Živojinović, who played Valter, and the action movie’s special effects that were quite en par with what Hollywood had to offer in the early 1970‘s, when the movie was made.

And it isn’t just due to the fact that the film’s plot, loosely based on Valter’s resistance, offers something a lot of people in China at the time could relate to: Armed resistance against foreign occupiers.

The history of the movie’s reception in China also is a history of the Cold War, and of Tito’s foreign policy.

The Sino-Soviet war had just ended a few years before the movie was made in 1972. Mao Zedong’s China was opening up to other countries. There was the US, largely for economic reasons, and there were those socialist countries who were decisively non-Soviet: Albania, which was to become a close ally for a few years, and Yugoslavia, which had defied the USSR since 1948.

China’s Communist Party started importing books and other works of art and culture from Yugoslavia – including partisan movies, a genre that was just really coming into its own in Yugoslavia itself. Valter Brani Sarajevo redefined the genre with its complex characters and its action sequences.

That made it insanely popular in Yugoslavia, and it hit a nerv with the Chinese audience. They had never seen an action movie in their lives, and there was one that told a story they could empathize with, and into which they could project their own experiences in China’s long and bloody struggle against the Japanese.

Valter brani Sarajevo had a huge impact on Chinese cinema, says film researcher Wang Yao in an interview with the online portal Sixth Tone: „Walter’s’ major set-piece battles were the first time many in China had seen pyrotechnics up on the big screen,” says Wang. “Certain tropes from the film — the use of code words, the swapping of uniforms and identities to infiltrate the enemy camp, and gun battles on moving trains — have been adapted by Chinese filmmakers time and time again.“

The movie also gave a Chinese beer brand its name. Its bottles feature a portrait of Bata Živojinović with a machine pistol in his hands, that had been used for movie posters.

It isn’t easy to experience this in the small museum that overlooks Sarajevo from a hill across the Miljacka.

Due to its location in the tower, it spreads out over several floors, and is divided into many small rooms.

The museum’s curators have put a lot of love and care into making the movie come alive, nevertheless.

They carefully reconstructed key scenes and locations. Sead Kapetanović’s watchmaker shop. Director Hajrudin Krvavac on the set. German headquarters, and of course Valter himself.

Props such as machine pistols, helmets, first aid kits and the like are on display.

„They are not from the movie“, curator Eldin says. „They are on loan from the Historical Museum.“

The movie with English subtitles is running on a flatscreen in one of the few relatively larger rooms.

Interestingly, there are no inscriptions in Chinese to be found.

You can watch the movie here.

Thesis And Antithesis Alike

Following the movie, Valter’s larger than life image became somewhat more nuanced and was interpreted in somewhat contradictory ways in Yugoslavia and its successor states.

Valter was pop culture as well as a symbol for how the socialist country had become complacent and conservative.

This can be found in the first album of the legendary rock band Zabranjeno Pušenje from Sarajevo. It’s called Das ist Walter and was released in 1984.

This isn’t just affirmative. Like in most of its songs from the period, Zabranjeno Pušenje takes apart the superficiality and hollowness of official rituals – such as the constant invocation of the Partisans’ struggle against the Fascists, while recognizing the historical and cultural importance of the achievements the rituals are supposed to honor.

(See here for a reportage about the concert the band gave in Sarajevo for the album’s 40th anniversary.)

Dubioza Kolektiv, another and younger Bosnian band, also invokes Valter for one of the ironic protest songs it became famous for. Its Valter song dismisses heroic myths and appeals to people to take responsibility for themselves – and at the same time to organize.

This is how author Azra Šehović interprets the song for the Bosnian portal Tačno.

Here, the larger than life image of the fallen hero is contrasted with his historical achievements, Valter as a historical figure and Valter as an object of reverence and projection.

Valter is his thesis and his antithesis at the same time.

Invoking Valter On Both Sides of the Front

This could also be seen in a more tragic way in the early 1990‘s.

When Yugoslavia started breaking apart, Bata Živojinović, who had played Valter in the movie, backed (Rump-)Yugoslavia’s dictator Slobodan Milošević. He was a member of Milošević’s Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), the successor to the League of Communists of Serbia.

As a member of parliament, he voted for war measures throughout.

Like many pro-Yugoslav Serbs, and some others, he interpreted the war as an attempt to keep socialist Yugoslavia together, and conveniently ignored how from 1991 on, open and brutal Serb nationalism had become an important and violent tool in the war efforts.

That his support for Milošević and what Valter had stood for, contradict each other, did not dawn on Živojinović when the army of Republika Srpska, backed by (Rump-)Yugoslavia started laying siege to the city Valter had given his life for on April 5 1992.

During the siege, which lasted 1.425 days, people on both sides of the front invoked Valter.

Later on, Serbia all but attempted to ursurp the partisan’s myth and memory. The latest documentary about the movie Valter brani Sarajevo was produced in Serbia 13 years ago.

Actor Živojinović went on a promotion tour in China, and was received warmly.

Today, a Serbian restaurant chain calls itself Walter Ćewapi, adopting more Western spelling for the purpose. (There is no W in the alphabet of the language formerly known as Serbocroatian.) One can hardly commercialize Valter’s myth any more than that. Yet, even critics acknowledge that Walter restaurants serve what can be described as authentic Sarajevski ćevapi.

Looking Beyond The Myth

On a serious scholarly and cultural level, Valter and his legend have entered a new level – one that transcends uncritical heroification and commercialization.

„Wer ist Walter“ („Who Is Walter“) was started by the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Hercegovina in Sarajevo, and has been made possible with international financial, academic and cultural contributions.

With a new permanent exhibition of the same name in the Historical Museum’s garden at its core, it tells a nuanced and analytical story of antifascist resistance in Europe during WW II. While honoring each of them, the project also questions their instrumentalization in later years.

Much of which can be applied to Sarajevo itself.

While Valter’s legend certainly has its roots in the fact that Yugoslavia became socialist in 1945, and that the Communists needed heros for their new state, it is also true that it was convenient for many Sarajlije to remember German occupation and the war through Valter’s lens.

Like in all of occupied Europa, Sarajevo had not just been a hotbed of resistance. The city’s elites eagerly cooperated with the Nazis. Many Catholics and Muslims joined the Ustaša, and participated in their genocide against Jews, Serbs and Roma.

Quite a few of the Muslim landed gentry, wealthy Muslim merchants, and leading Muslim clergy openly cast in their lot with the Nazis. Their own fascist project was intended to bypass the overall very Catholic Ustaša and gain them more autonomy within or even nominal independence from the Ustaša puppet state NDH.

This culminated in the formation of the SS division Handschar, comprising mainly Bosnian Muslims.

Like anywhere else, it was the city’s working class, supported by parts of the middle class, who resisted, Muslim, Orthodox, Croats, Jews and Roma alike protected each other from Nazi or Ustaša persecution, passed on information to the Partisans, collected money and food for them, passively resisted by dragging their feet at their workplaces, or secretly spread subversive information.

Many went on to join the Partisans.

Even so, the vast majority of people went on to live their lives and did not get active either way.

Glorifying Valter is a convenient way of pretending this was not so.

This is not different from what happened in many other places.

„Wer ist Walter” does not fall into this trap – in fact, it does what is didactically possible to dispel such instrumentalization.

Its focus clearly is resistance in Yugoslavia, which is largely unknown or even actively ignored in the West. That Yugoslavia’s Partisans liberated the country largely on their own – even considering arms deliveries and training by the Western Allies and the Red Army’s liberation of Beograd in late 1944 – just didn’t fit into Cold War narratives.

Yugoslavia’s violent and bloody breakup did little to revive the memory of Europe’s largest antifascist resistance movement in the West.

„Wer ist Walter“ is in more than one sense a critical contribution towards reviving that memory, and comparing it to other resistance movements in Europe, honoring them while avoiding any glorification.

Nothing seems more fit on the 80th anniversary of the death of the man who gave the project its name.

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