Back to Left Curve no. 22 table of contents
BALKAN AUTOPSY
Ed. Note: In the following section, we are presenting work from a book project
for which Bálint Szombathy and Csaba Polony received a grant from Artslink
of N.Y. The project, Balkan Autopsy, was completed in the summer of 1997 and
is a collection of works from the former Yugoslavia translated into English
of essays, prose, lyrics and images relating to the Balkan's War of 1991-95.
We had previously published two articles that became part of this anthology
("there's War today!" and "After Auschwitz, after Sarajevo: Three
Sarajevan Poets" by Bálint Szombathy) in Left Curve no.20. To give
readers an idea about the collection, we are printing below the introduction
and the prose work by Jovica Acin by which the anthology concludes. Copies of
the limited edition of the complete work are available for $20 by special order
from Left Curve, PO Box 472. Oakland, CA 94604. Or order by email:
editor@leftcurve.com
Speaking generally, there is something peculiar in national hatred. We always find it strongest and most vehement on the lowest stage of culture. But there is a stage where it totally disappears and where one stands, so to say, above the nations and feels the good fortune or distress of his neighbor as if it happened to his own - Goethe
If (the subject) were liquidated rather than sublated into a higher form, the effect would be regression - not just of consciousness, but a regression to real barbarism. - Adorno
Goethe's words quoted above introduce the 1929 book, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, by the Hungarian liberal intellectual and politician, Oscar Jászi.* Mr. Jászi had been an active politician in the final decades of the monarchy and tried unsuccessfully to convince the politicians of his day of the need for deep structural reform and reoganization of the Habsburg lands into a confederation of equal states within a federal structure. He was a true follower of the Enlightenment - as shown by his quote of Goethe - and believed that progress would eventually eliminate the national hatreds that tore his homeland apart.
Another telling quote is in his preface to the book, which refers to the general climate of opinion of the policy makers after WWI: "Not only will men not understand social realities which are for them disagreeable or disadvantageous when they face them, but also, a posteriori, they try to get rid of the painful past experiences. There is a tendency to falsify history in order to absolve the crimes of the past and to obtain transitory gains among the difficulties of an adverse situation. Both the victorious and and the vanquished nations show this marked tendency. It is an almost intolerable spectacle to see how the four or five great lessons of the terrible catastrophe are obscured and distorted by the leaders of a world which continues along the vicious road of the past. And a falsified history always means envenomed actions and new opportunitites for armed conflicts." These words written in the 1920's are pretty prophetic, given what transpired in the coming decades.
The quote of Adorno's above was written some forty years later, in the years after WWII, and in the midst of the Cold War. We can read in these words a disenchantment with the ideals of the Enlightenment, which was,
of course, already forcefully presented in his 1944 book, co-authored with Max Horkheimer, The Dialectics of Enlightenment. The words can be taken to refer not only to the "regression to real barabarism" most obviously exemplified in the horrors of Nazism, but also to the failures of the communist revolution and the transmutation of the liberal democratic ideal into the vacuous spectacle society of the West. The "subject," as a solid, centered, lived experience of self (regardless of what level in society), had been "liquidated" in all three societal forms that the 20th century had brought into being.
Fascism had tried to resolve the conflicts of modern industrial society - the social and psychological uprootedness, displacements, alienation, meaningless work, inequality, absence of personal and economic stability, etc. - by a mythic appeal to a regressive "pure race" needing to rid itself of its "impurities," which, of course, culminated in genocide. Communism tried to deal with the problem by the construction of a myth of progress into an ideal future, based on an ideology of the "progressive class." This "mythic" part of "really existing socialism" accounts perhaps, for the formal similarities in its art with that of National Socialism. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" also tried to remove its "impurities" (e.g., Stalinist purges, Gulags, Maoist cultural revolution, Pol Pot genocide), but based on "class" rather than "race." Socialism also resorted to bureaucratic, instrumental means to enforce its vision of reality. It tried to "change the world" according to the dictates of preconceived, centrally drawn-up plans, with the intention of creating a more just, egalitarian society. This "social engineering" aspect of socialism is shared by liberal democracy. But the latter, rather than constructing a myth of a "classless society" for which the present must be sacrificed for the future, devolved the mythic into heaven on earth now, in the form of a cornicopia of instant consumer gratification. All that is needed is the free play of market forces, which will insure "economic development," while the state functions as a bureaucratic machine granting formal "equality" to all through various feel-good programs of building self-esteem among groups labeled by liberal guilt as disenfranchised.
In any case, to return to Adorno's quote, the "subject" is "liquidated". The actual experiences of people are repressed, hidden, turned-inward without the development of a higher, more universal sense of self. Since the current socio-psychic state is negated, the repressed longings revert to myths of harmony from the past, a consequence of which is the opening of the door to a "regression to barbarism."
The senseless violence and brutality that broke out in the former Yugoslavia, now at the end of the 20th century, is a recent example of such a process. The dictatorial, administrative, instrumental veneer constructed by Titoist socialism to mask over the particular histories of the various peoples, proved to be inadequate to counterbalance the "dead weight of the past." It is true, of course, that it was the political leaders who fanned these flames and cynically manipulated people in order to maintain their power. However, it is also true that there was something that could be manipulated.
As an aside, it is a peculiar irony that the 20th century (at least in Europe) is ending where it began. The world powers at the end of the 20th century have been forced to deal with the same region of the world as was the case in the beginning of the 20th century, namely the Balkans. Before WWI, the Balkans had been called the "powder-keg of Europe." We need only to recall that it was the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo, by a Bosnian Serb on August 14, 1914 that was the event that sparked the conflagration of WWI. The after-effects of WWI were, among other things, the Bolshevik Revolution and the break-up of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires by the Allies. The inequities of the Treaties of Versailles, St. Germaine and Trianon then led to the creation of Hitler and National Socialism, which led to World War II, which led to the Cold War.
It is also ironic that the aim of the world powers in the Balkans now is focused on a policy of thwarting ethnic separatism by championing "diversity" and "multinationalism," whereas the policy after WWI was to dismantle and carve-up the then existing multinational states into supposedly purer ethnic nation-states under the slogan of "self-determination of peoples." The similarity in both historical contexts, however, is that the dominant powers resort to bureaucratic, rationalistic instruments backed by military and economic power, to implement their views, while the people of the affected regions are but pawns pushed around the chess board in order to maintain the current balance of power.
All this makes the conflict in the former Yugoslavia unique and significant as an historical marker ending the 20th century, and not just some marginal demented event. It crystalizes the contradiction between the imposed artificial boundaries of the bureaucratic nation-state and narrow ethnocentrism. When a situation exists, such as in Bosnia, in Rwanda, or in the Sudan - where there is no dominant ethnic group within the boundaries of a nation-state that can successfully dominatate other minorities - violent conflict is the result.
A deep sense of tragedy runs through these events. This is so not only because of all the obvious destruction and suffering, but because the problems which precipitate the conflict are left unresolved, as far as the affected peoples are concerned. "Solutions" are imposed from the outside, real self-determination is foreclosed. In order to maintain the status quo, the dominant global powers are impelled to forcefully bring such conflicts to an administrative halt by a coercive imposition of rationalistic measures which create only a formal modus vivendi, which do not resolve but merely patch-over, cover-up the failure of modern civilization (modernism); and that failure results from the fact that the only way to organize and administer the modern world is through the logic of techno-rationalization.
The problem is that people cannot idenitfy (form identities) with technocratic, bureaucratic principles but need a sense of subjective, organic connection to other people and to their environment. Concrete, individual experience cannot locate a ground which can heal, bridge, the split between the lack of subjective-belongingness and the necessities of modern, objective life-organization. As such, people continue to revert to (or try to invent) "organic identities" which necessarily become exclusive, different, apart from others, leaving always open the possibility for conflict.
It seems to me that only through the real, uncoerced development of a genuine human communality - from below, from the people themselves, in which each people's historical/cultural specifities is fully acknowledged - and not from forms of association that are forcefully imposed from above - can this dangerous process be eventually overcome. What needs to develop is a sense of our human communality - issuing from the depths of our species-being - that may create a genuine sense of global communality that goes beyond the artificial bureaucratic structures of the nation-state or the raw dictates of economic organization.
The essays, prose, poetry and art of this anthology are roughly organized into three parts (though many individual works overlap). The first three selections are presented as examples of the seeds of destructive conflict that were present in the social psyche in Yugoslavia prior to the outbreak of violence. The second group of works was created during the war, and the last three selections are offered as reflections about the conflict.
Noz [Knife], written by Vuk Draskovic in the years 1979-82, exemplifies the historically deep-seated war-rior tradition among Serbs and just how much Serbian psychology had been formed with the belief that, as a people, they have had to constantly do battle with other peoples in order to survive. These battles have been going on since the 7th century: against Greeks (Byzantine Empire), Avars, Bulgarians, Turks, Hungarians, Austrians, Germans, and most recently Croatians. Much of this warrior traditon was firmly implanted by the Habsburgs, who gave the Serbs special status as frontier guards in the southern "military frontier' of the Habsburg Empire after the OttomanTurks were driven out of Hungary in the late 17th century and early 18th century.
During the Titoist period there was a policy of suppressing ethnic conflicts. However, as texts like Noû demonstrate, such administative censorship had no effect in eliminating ethnic grievances and building the "unity of the South Slavs."
Four-Fingered Man by Miodrag Bulatovic is a blood-curdling account of Croatian Ustashe and Nazi atrocities during WWII. Whether or not events such as this hyper-horror-drama chronicles actually occurred is not really the point here. What is important is that unspeakable violence in the Serbian conflict with Croats during WWII left such deep-seated impressions among Serbs that a literary work of this nature would be written at all. (Croat accounts, naturally, differ. When a Croat scholar saw that this story would be included in this collection, his response was that the story was pubished as an action of a "police-provocator" meant to stir up animosity against Croats).
The section on the music group, Laibach, a Slovenian Industrial Rock band that was formed in 1982, shifts us into a different dimension than ancient historical grievances. An aspect of the whole Industrial and Punk phenomena internationally was a fetishistic pastiche on violence/death/ destruction - not infrequently with fascist paraphernalia - as a form of "rebellion." Laibach no doubt can be taken as an expression of this passing rock fad. So it's possible that Bálint Szombathy, in his presentation of their song lyrics, makes too much of their "prophetic" nature. Still, given the time and place, Laibach's lyrics are only too disturbing, in light of what was to unfold in Yugoslavia in the 1990's.
Why? by Janja Bec was written between 1991-93. Our selection consists of four sections of the longer original work. The style utilized by the author is one of recording the stories told to him by ordinary people. As such, he conveys lived experience and not political polemics. Stories are told to us about ordinary people duped during the Nazi period: rape victims of war, children's hopes for peace and the injurious effects of forced relocations of whole peoples after WWII. An important overall sense is the suffering of common people at the behest of their "leaders." Unfortunately, it's an only too common theme that seems to repeat itself ad nauseum. In any case, one does come away with a better awareness of the socio-psychic complexities in the region of the former Yugoslavia. It is not a simple question of black or white, right or wrong. People remain victims of the circumstances that whirl out of control all around them and have so little choice in what happens to them. What does it really mean to be "free," or is there even such a thing? Maybe that's the real "why?" that begs for an answer.
The material in the middle of the collection are all examples of work produced during the conflict by authors who lived through this tragedy. Of all the brutalities in this war, the siege of Sarajevo will probably be recorded as the most memorable, as the distance of time crystalizes out of innumerable chaotic details into a few symbols as historical markers. The Massacre of Sarajevo by Zeljko Vukovic is a painful record of that seige, as are the poems by the Goran Simic, Izet Sarajlic and Miljenko Jergovic. The difference between direct people-to-people communication and that with political leaders is well illustrat-ed by the article, Telephone Bridge by Marina Mustovic. It points to the very real need of people to be allowed to make connections on their own. The main problem, of course, is the very real difficulty in doing so in such a complex mass society, what with the sense of powerlessness that most people feel.
The book concludes with selections from the work of four authors that take a more reflective approach after the guns have fallen silent. Epilogue by Sasa Rakezic, using the pen name of Aleksandar Zograf, provides some not so funny "comic" relief. Milo Dor's semi-autobiographic account, Habsburg or the Echo of the Radetsky March, gives us a perspective of a man who has no "ethnic" loyalities, yet has a strong attachment to the people of the region as a whole. He mourns the passing of the old Habsburg state and its missed opportunity to create a state form which could have resolved the conflicts within the poly-glot region of the "Kaiser und König Monarchy." I do think that the potential for some kind of more stable resolution must eventually return to this, now often nostalgically recalled, comic-tragic old form: a confederation of peoples where there would no longer be the need for national-ethnic borders. Perhaps some kind of sub-division within the framework of the European Union might become possible. The selections from Ash Oracles by Jovica Acin, with which the volume concludes, is a moving and in-depth meditation on the general theme of the horrors of the 20th century, a world seen as a gigantic garbage dump in a universal concentration camp. Acin is currently one of the best writers in the region, as certainly evidenced by this text.