Figure 1.--Here we see an unidentified Serbian family, stair step portrait although one of the boys is out of place. They look to be about 3-13 years old. The boys and girls wear identical outfits. The girls wear plain dresses and the boys Lederhosen. We do not know if the boys were ethnic Germans. We believe that the postcard-back portrait was taken in a Belgrade studio. It is not dated, but looks like it was taken in the 1930s.

After the terrible tragedy of World War I we see most Serbian boys not wearing traditinal clothing wearing short pants. We see some boys wearing German-style Lederhosen. Serbia until after World War II had a German ethnic minority. We are not sure if this was primarily a style worn by the German ethnic community or also a Serbian style. We do not yet have enough information on Serbia to assess this. The examples we have found are mostly from he inter-War era (1920s-30s). This is also when Lederhosen became a style in Germany and not just Alpine areas. Here we see an unidentified Serbian family, stair step portrait although one of the boys is out of place (figure 1). They look to be about 3-13 years old. The boys and girls wear identical outfits. The girls wear plain dresses and the boys Lederhosen. We do not know if the boys were ethnic Germans. We believe that the postcard-back portrait was taken in a Belgrade studio. It is not dated, but looks like it was taken in the 1930s. There was an area northwest of Belgrade called the Barbant where many Germans in Serbia lived. There is at least one small area in the East, next to the Romanian border, around a town called Vrsac/Werschatz were German and Hungarian is/was spoken alongside with Serbian. One HBC reader reports, "A patient of mine, a speaker of Hungarian, and now deceased, once told me that "the boys at the German Gymnasium started wearing lederhosen when she was a girl there in the 1930s, suggesting that it was a new phenomenon and possibly related to the political situation of that time. Much more common were H-bar shorts. We see many Serbian boys wearing them with nor real association with Germany although the style probably reflected a German fashion influence. This seems to have been a German influence or Serbian and general Yugoslav patterns.

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Created: 9:29 AM 12/19/2016
Last updated: 9:29 AM 12/19/2016