Platens from the Past: Yugonostalgia and the UNIS-tbm Typewriter

This article explores the lost history of the Olympia Traveller and Traveller de Luxe typewriters. Designed in Germany but manufactured in a once multiethnic town called Bugojno in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of a thriving Yugoslav typewriter industry, these machines were once exported to all corners of the globe with more than ninety different keyboards. Sold throughout Yugoslavia under the brand name UNIS-tbm and UNIS-tbm de Luxe, these typewriters were also common objects in many former Yugoslav homes and have recently become ubiquitous props in a thriving culture of “Yugonostalgia.” Using Roland Barthes’s key 1957 insight about the “mythologies” that inhere in quotidian objects, this article views the typewriters as a concrete embodiment of the memory of Yugoslavia as an imagined community of “brotherhood and unity.” Using historical accounts in the Yugoslav, Bosnian, and international press, as well as expert interviews with journalists, curators, and historians, this article pieces together the backstory of a fascinating piece of Yugoslav material culture and its legacies and meanings in an ethnically homogeneous but corrupt and disappointing neoliberal present.