This book is dedicated to Petar Tomić (1949-2024), a Yugoslav journalist and unique chronicler of European and global crises at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. The book presents Petar Tomić from different perspectives: both as an outstanding journalist and representative of a time of social, political and economic transformation in Europe as well as a private person and family man.
Conceived as a biographical-bibliographical compilation, the book begins with an article about Petar Tomić’s life, and particularly his career. The most important stages he passed through as a journalist are each described in a historical context: from radio and television to the newly emerging multilingual youth press in Vojvodina in the 1970s, to agency journalism and the unique school of the Yugoslav press agency Tanjug, and finally his time as foreign policy editor of the largest regional daily newspaper in Vojvodina, Dnevnik.
While this first introductory biographical section deliberately cites the few self-portrayals of Tomić in the form of relatively detailed quotations, thus giving him an own voice, the second section contains memories of his family and friends. The contributions of his wife Nada Tomić and his sons Đorđe and Nikola, as well as the brief notes by some of his close friends, sharpen our view of Petar Tomić as a family man.
Petar Tomić was an outstanding journalist in many respects. We delve into this aspect in the third part of the anthology, which describes him as a representative figure of Yugoslav journalism and focuses on his work since the end of the 1980s: as a correspondent for the Yugoslav press agency Tanjug in Bucharest, he was the first to report on the 1989 revolution in Romania and the end of the Ceaușescu regime. Two articles are dedicated to this time of upheaval. The first is the interview Tomić gave to his colleague Mihal Ramač immediately after the events of December 1989, which was originally published in the Novi Sad magazine Stav. The second contribution by Vojislav Lalić, Tomić’s former colleague from Tanjug, describes the revolution in Romania almost 15 years later and is enriched accordingly with more recent interpretations of this period. Tomić’s time in Bucharest is also recalled in the article by his colleague János Kokes, who worked as a correspondent for the Czechoslovak press agency ČTK in Bucharest during the same period, was his first neighbor and became one of his closest friends. The section is supplemented by two articles by Petar Tomić himself. The first, previously unpublished article is Tomić’s only account of his time as a Tanjug reporter during the Croatian war in the early 1990s. In the text, which he wrote more than 20 years later, he not only describes the special challenges of working as a journalist in war zones, but also takes a critical look at the Yugoslav wars and condemns the political developments that made them possible in the first place. Finally, his short report on the events around May 1, 2009, across Europe, which we republish in this section, even years later, appears equally critical and downright rebellious and at the same time optimistic.
The fourth part of the book is dedicated to the results of Petar Tomić’s journalistic, publishing and academic work and contains an annotated bibliography of his works. Regarding Tomić’s outstanding journalistic productivity – which is almost impossible to quantify, especially in the context of agency journalism, and very difficult to record given the author’s usual anonymity – the mere attempt to compile all articles by a journalist is an almost impossible undertaking, especially as Tomić published in two languages: Serbo-Croatian and Romanian. This experiment was undertaken by the editor of the book, Đorđe Tomić, who was responsible for collecting, editing and organizing the works and writing the commentaries, thus leaving behind a unique documentation of Petar Tomić’s intellectual production.
Petar Tomić – journalist, foreign correspondent, editor, publicist, literary critic, but also husband, father, colleague, good friend and one of the last representatives of all-Yugoslav journalism – has been given a unique historical synthesis of his life and work in this book, the value of which goes far beyond the mere memory of Tomić as a person. This comprehensive documentation is also a valuable contribution to the Yugoslav and European history of journalism, social and political history and history of everyday life.