Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture 9783110431575, 9783110439434, 9783110764598

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Post-Yugoslav Constellations

Media and Cultural Memory/ Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung

Edited by Astrid Erll ‧ Ansgar Nünning Editorial Board Aleida Assmann ‧ Mieke Bal ‧ Vita Fortunati ‧ Richard Grusin ‧ Udo Hebel Andrew Hoskins ‧ Wulf Kansteiner ‧ Alison Landsberg ‧ Claus Leggewie Jeffrey Olick ‧ Susannah Radstone ‧ Ann Rigney ‧ Michael Rothberg Werner Sollors ‧ Frederik Tygstrup ‧ Harald Welzer

Volume 22

Post-Yugoslav Constellations Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture Edited by Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet

DE GRUYTER

ISBN 978-3-11-043943-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-043157-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-043178-0 ISSN 1613-8961 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Boris Kralj, from the series www.mybelgrade.de Typesetting: Konrad Triltsch, Print und digitale Medien GmbH, Ochsenfurt Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the series editors Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning for their enthusiastic endorsement of this project from the very beginning. We are grateful to both of them for the opportunity to publish this collection in the Media and Cultural Memory Series. We would also like to express our gratitude to Stella Diedrich, Manuela Gerlof, Angelika Hermann, Johannes Parche, and the technical team at De Gruyter for their support throughout the publication process. Always ready to answer our queries and generously understanding of the frequent detours of academic work, they are a true editorial dream team. We are happy to acknowledge the financial support of the Flemish Research Council (FWO-Vlaanderen) and of the European Commission Marie-Curie Action FP7PEOPLE-2013-IEF (626248), which made the proofreading of this volume possible. A special word of thanks is owed to Carol Richards, whose meticulous and comprehensive editorial work on the volume was invaluable. We would also like to thank the contributors to the collection for believing in this project and for their flexibility and willingness to work with shifting deadlines. Finally, we would like to thank all the artists who gave us their permission to reproduce their work: Boris Kralj for the cover photograph, and Mirza Ibrahimpašić, Ozren Kebo, Milica Konstantinović, Siniša Labrović, Vladimir Miladinović, Dušan Milovanović, Predrag Nešković, Teodora Jelena Stošić, Sandra Vitaljić, and Aleksandar Zograf for illustrations in the respective chapters in the volume. Vlad Beronja & Stijn Vervaet

Table of Contents Acknowledgements

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Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet Introduction 1

Part 1: Entangled Legacies of Extreme Violence: Traumatic Memories in the Aftermath of the Yugoslav Successor Wars Antje Postema “Read and Remember”: Ozren Kebo’s Sarajevo for Beginners as Ironic 23 Guidebook and Narrative Memorial Vladimir Biti Remembering Nowhere: The Homeland-on-the-Move in the Exile Writing of Saša Stanišić and Ismet Prcic 45 Sanja Potkonjak and Tomislav Pletenac The Art and Craft of Memory: Re-Memorialization Practices in Post-Socialist Croatia 65 Miranda Jakiša The Evidence of Srebrenica: Oliver Frljić’s Theater Court in Cowardice

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Stijn Vervaet Intersecting Memories in Post-Yugoslav Fiction: The Yugoslav Wars of the 99 1990s through the Lens of the Holocaust

Part 2: Reclaiming the Past: Artistic and Literary Representations of Socialist Yugoslavia Ajla Demiragić What Remains of Mostar?: Archive and Witness in Marsela Sunjić’s Goodnight, City 129

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Tatjana Jukić Post-Socialism Remembers the Revolution: The Comedy of It Nikola Dedić Yugoslavia in Post-Yugoslav Artistic Practices: Or, Art as …

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Part 3: Reconfiguring the Post-Yugoslav Present: Towards New Forms of Community and Identity Guido Snel Garbage Heap, Storehouse, Encyclopedia: Metaphors for a Post-Yugoslav 193 Cultural Memory Vladimir Zorić Small Town as the Scene of a Memory Encounter: Portraits and 209 Commemorations of Radomir Konstantinović Vlad Beronja Recollecting an Alternative Modernity: Aleksandar Zograf’s Flea Market 237 Archaeologies Damir Arsenijević, Jasmina Husanović, and Sari Wastell A Public Language of Grief: Art, Poetry, and Transitional Justice in Post-Conflict Bosnia 259 Martin Pogačar Digital Afterlife: Ex-Yugoslav Pop Culture Icons and Social Media Notes on Contributors

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List of Illustrations Index of Names

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Introduction

After Yugoslavia – memory on the ruins of history During the last twenty years, the Yugoslav successor states have been undergoing substantial political, social, and economic changes that have inevitably left their impact on the cultural life of the region. In contrast to the rest of Eastern Europe, where non-violent revolutions following the fall of the Berlin Wall secured a largely peaceful transition from state socialism to liberal democracy, Yugoslavia experienced a rise of violent nationalism in its respective republics, eventually culminating in a series of brutal and drawn-out wars, the worst Europe has seen since the Second World War. The Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), a largely secular, multicultural welfare state with a “soft” socialist system that incorporated elements of capitalism, quickly splintered into seven different, mutually antagonistic nation-states, which after a period of wartime nationalism in the 1990s have gradually accepted the Western model of democracy and free market economy. However, the fact that three different “regimes of truth,” namely, “the types of discourse [society] harbors and causes to function as true,” (Foucault 1977, 14), have radically altered in the period of two decades – from self-management socialism to nationalism to Western-style democracy – points to a dominant historical trend in the twentieth-century Balkans, a region that has been a crucial strategic and ideological battleground in both the First and the Second World War. Crucially, these three different regimes of truth went hand in glove with specific use(s) of history, that is, different ways of performing collective memory for the sake of a specific identity politics and the construction of usable pasts (Sindbæk 2012). This volatile, complex, and often traumatic experience of twentieth-century history and memory has subsequently been recorded in contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, keeping pace with and even anticipating worldwide experiments in form, genre, medium, and style. Evidence of this avant-garde attitude can be found in the mixed-media novels of Daša Drndić, Dubravka Ugrešić, Saša Ilić and Aleksandar Hemon; in the experimental theater of Oliver Frljić, web-based projects such as Cyber Yugoslavia and The Lexicon of Yu Mythology; the performances, photographic, and multimedial projects by Milica Tomić, Marijan Crtalić, Igor Grubić, Sandra Vitaljić, Siniša Labrović, and Vladimir Miladinović; as well as in the activities of radical artistic col-

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lectives such as The Monument Group; and in the graphic narratives of Aleksandar Zograf, among many others. Combining textual, material, and visual elements into new totalities, these cross-genre and multimedia works explicitly question the boundaries between site-specific “hard memory,” such as monuments and museums, and deterritorialized “soft memory,” such as novels and memoirs (Etkind 2004). Moreover, literary, performative, and visual works of this type have been frequently produced in opposition to the “official,” ideologically approved historiography – a dominant source of political legitimacy for both communism and atavistic nationalism (Bell 2008) – creating politically charged counter-memories and marginalized archives. Due to the socially embedded albeit frequently agonistic nature of these critical memorial practices, the essays in this collection inevitably traverse disciplinary boundaries, moving from formal readings to sociological, anthropological, political, and activist frameworks that bring to the fore the progressive and transformative power of memory. Thus, while memory in the Balkans has often been described as binding, authoritative, and non-negotiable (Bet-El 2002), functioning as a banner of war, we want to challenge this one-dimensional representation and offer a more nuanced analysis that accommodates frequently ignored instances of international solidarity, shared dialogue, communal mourning, and working through a difficult past. Moving beyond the methodological nationalism of studies that focus solely on Serbian, Bosniak, or Croatian literature, film, and visual art, this volume complements recent studies that from a supra-national angle examine post-Yugoslav literature and film (Gorup 2013, Crnković 2012), visual culture (Šuber and Karamanić 2012), and politicized artistic practices (Šuvaković 2012). At the same time, the present collection takes a more specific approach by focusing on a broad range of memorial practices, especially on the ways in which cultural memory is mediated, performed, and critically reworked by literature and arts in the region of the former Yugoslavia. As recent studies have shown, cultural memory is not bound to specific sites or merely “contained” and “transported” by media – cultural memory circulates from one medium to another (from fictional and non-fictional stories to photos, to monuments, to commemorative ceremonies, to souvenirs), between social groups, and through plurimedial networks outside as well as below the level of the state (Erll and Rigney 2009). The present volume illustrates and underscores this dynamic nature of cultural memory in that it brings together essays examining a wide range of critical cultural practices, ranging from literature, theater, film, comics, over painting, visual art and photography, to websites and social media such as Facebook and YouTube. By focusing on the former Yugoslavia as a supranational case, the present volume joins memory scholars who

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have argued for the need of a transnational turn in memory studies (De Cesari and Rigney 2014). Finally, because the volume focuses on a region of Europe that has been going through turbulent changes from wartime nationalism, with strong authoritarian and populist tendencies, to liberal democracies that are at least nominally, if not substantially, invested in securing a pluralist and open society, the volume also could make an interesting and meaningful contribution to debates on a shared European memory and supranational identity. Indeed, as Ann Rigney has argued, “the historical importance of national thought on the ‘old’ continent means that the current state of Europe is making visible in particularly urgent ways the need for new intellectual and imaginative tools with which to articulate postnational identities” (2012, 609). In similar manner, intellectuals such as Dubravka Ugrešić and Boris Buden have shown the limits of identity politics and multiculturalism in the West, which, akin to nationalism, often work to erect fixed boundaries between cultures, thereby fragmenting potential supranational solidarities based on class (Ugrešić 2008, 2014; Buden 2004). Certain authors in this collection echo these insights, pointing to the stigmatized legacy of socialism as a starting point for introducing class struggle, worker’s rights, and publicly owned space into the vocabulary of collective memory. No less important is the search for new, reparative, and transformative spaces of mourning, especially if we consider the historical and recent instances of slaughter and ethnic cleansing not only in the former Yugoslavia but also in Europe as a whole. The danger here seems to be a traumatic foreclosure of national identity, a politics of affect, which in Wendy Brown’s words, “enunciates itself, makes claim for itself, only by entrenching, dramatizing, and inscribing pain in politics and can hold out no future – for itself or others – that triumphs over this pain” (1993, 406). By not only focusing on traumatic memories but also exploring the ways in which post-Yugoslav cultural practices mobilize memory for a politics of hope, this volume moves beyond the trauma paradigm that still to a large extent dominates the field of memory studies. Specifically, the present collection points at ways of dealing with a shared supranational past that show the relevance of the cultural memory of “Eastern European” citizens and the contribution they can offer to the building of Europe’s shared cultural memory and transnational identity.

Three regimes of memory Following Tito’s break with Stalin and the Cominform in 1948, Yugoslavia developed its own socialist politics based on the ideology of non-alignment with a dis-

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tinct teleological historical narrative centering on Tito’s communist Partisan movement and its accompanying rhetoric. Specifically, the construction of collective memory in socialist Yugoslavia revolved around the traumas of the Second World War and followed the communist dictum of “brotherhood and unity” [“bratstvo i jedinstvo”]. Monuments to the fallen heroes of the partisan revolution and to the victims of fascism were erected across the country, and in addition to novels, partisan films became the most popular medium to disseminate this historical narrative, which, like two sides of the same coin, had both a heroic and a martyrological face.¹ While the “official” Yugoslav historical narrative of the Second World War centered on heroic acts of communist partisan resistance against the Nazi occupiers, it simultaneously aimed to smooth over the (memory of the) ethnic tensions that had so violently disrupted this multinational country during the war.² Certainly, the way in which Yugoslav society dealt with the traumatic legacy of the Second World War, including the interethnic massacres that happened during the war, evolved over time and was far from homogenous in both form and content.³ The early 1980s saw the breakdown of the communist master-narrative about the Second World War, and from the mid-1980s onwards, the rise of different national (Serbian, Croatian, Slovene, for example) revisionist historiographies took the shape of aggressive nationalist and mutually competing victimcentered narratives that introduced the theme of genocide (of the own national group) to the larger public (Sindbaek 2012, 139 – 188). The obsession with genocide led, to borrow an expression from Dirk Moses, to a real “terror of history” (2011): a war about history that was played out on the pages of newspapers, on the radio and television and that, because of its strategic dissemination in mass media, paved the road to the wars of the 1990s and even further entrenched

 For a good overview of the state-sponsored remembrance of the Second World War in socialist Yugoslavia in general and for the role of monuments in particular, see Karge (). For the hero/martyr dichotomy in Yugoslav socialist prose and poetry about the Second World War, see Kazaz (). For a nuanced view of the role of popular culture and mass media in the socialist memory politics of the Second World War, see Jambrešić-Kirin ().  In essence, this state-supported collective narrative refused to acknowledge the victims of the Second World War in ethnic terms: all victims of the war, regardless of whether they had died as political opponents fighting the Nazis or whether they were killed because of their ethnicity (that is, as victims of the Holocaust, or as victims of the genocide against Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies perpetrated by the Ustashe in the Independent State of Croatia), were subsumed under the larger category of “victims of fascism” (žrtve fašizma) (Kerenji ,  – ).  See Sindbæk () for a helpful periodization and careful discursive analysis of the evolution of the way in which Yugoslav historiography, media, and (popular) literature and culture thematized the inter-Yugoslav massacres that happened during the Second World War.

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antagonistic ethnic identities (Gagnon 2004; Žarkov 2007). As Katherine Verdery (1999) has shown, the fall of communism in Eastern Europe thus resulted in not only a dramatic transformation of the economic system but also in a wholesale reorganization of time and space, which was symbolically reenacted through the entrance of dead bodies into politics. In Yugoslavia specifically, the reburial of key historical figures and nameless dead was tied to territorial pretensions of individual republics and a re-establishment of uninterrupted continuity with precommunist national histories, which entailed an active suppression of the socialist past and hence of an extensive period of interethnic coexistence (Verdery 1999, 95 – 127). Due to their excessive violence and strategic targeting of civilian populations through ethnic cleansing, the Wars of Yugoslav Secession only created new ethnically marked dead bodies and collective traumas, usable pasts around which the successor states organized their new grammars of national memory. The post-Yugoslav present, however, is also seeing signs of disappointment with the nationalist euphoria that characterized the decade of the 1990s, with rising unemployment, political corruption, and undelivered promises of a better future that indicate a prolonged transition without an end in sight (Pupovac 2010). It is in this context of uncertainty and lack of future prospects that Yugonostalgia – the various forms of nostalgia that the memory of the socialist era evokes in the inhabitants of former Yugoslavia and the role of popular culture in these processes – has attracted, over the past few years, considerable scholarly attention (Volčič 2007, Velikonja 2008, Luthar and Pušnik 2010, Bošković 2013). However, it is only recently that anthropologists and sociologists have argued that nostalgia can be oriented towards the future and recognized the political potential of Yugonostalgia to produce hopeful visions of a better one (Palmberger 2008; Petrović 2012). Similarly, philosophers have emphasized the political relevance of Yugoslavia’s socialist and antifascist legacy for post-Yugoslav societies today (Kirn 2012) and suggested that (post‐)Yugoslav culture can play an emancipatory role in mediating this legacy (Buden 2009).

Why post-Yugoslav constellations? Our usage of the “post-” in post-Yugoslav should be understood to mirror both the (violent) break between socialist Yugoslavia and what came after it, as well as a certain continuity of its cultural, political, and social legacy. Here, we follow Marianne Hirsch’s explanation of the prefix “post-” in “postmemory” – as a prefix that, not unlike the post- in postmodernism, not only indicates a mere temporal sequel, a discontinuity or gap between the modern and the post-

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modern, but also stresses at the same time the ongoing influence of the former on the latter and the profound relationship between the two (Hirsch 2012, 5). This continuity is often unwillingly acknowledged or fiercely negated by the ruling nationalist political and cultural elites, who continue to engage in nation-building processes based on ethnopolitics because this is the only way they can stay in power. The political boundaries notwithstanding, we perceive this continuity as embodied both in the existing shared cultural and linguistic space as well as in the enduring inspiration artists and critics find in socialist Yugoslavia as a failed albeit not fully exhausted revolutionary project. This volume presents a critical account of the diverse and dissonant voices that make up the contemporary cultural landscape of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s “constructive principle” in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” we imagine these cultural practices as forming critical constellations that “blast open the continuum of history,” thereby recovering the memory of struggle, oppression, and utopian horizons from what Benjamin calls the “homogenous, empty time” of progress (Benjamin 1968, 261). In other words, critical cultural practices such as literature, film, and performance art integrate a dynamic and open-ended experience with and of history, which traditional historiography all too frequently chooses to ignore or, even worse, deliberately silences and suppresses. On the one hand, these works of art and literature acknowledge the mediated character of memory, which they foreground through experimentation with formal devices and the use of new media. Conversely, experimental forms and new media technologies enable precisely the critical interaction of different times, spaces, memories, and histories to (e)merge within a single cultural text. The present volume explores this interaction between different media and the coexistence of temporalities in the unstable and ever-changing present. Furthermore, it focuses on histories and memories that have not been acknowledged or sufficiently “worked through,” as well as the presence of marginalized voices – those of women, ethnic minorities, transnational and exilic subjects – within dominant national(ist) frameworks. Understanding cultural memory as a performative engagement with the past, the volume draws attention to works of art that function as alternative archives, which do not merely contest the dominant (ethno-nationalist or neo-liberal) narratives of the past and the present but help to imagine new forms of community and identity for the future. Thus, the volume contributes to recent developments in memory studies, which have seen a shift in focus from static to dynamic models of cultural memory: from storage (Pierre Nora’s “lieux de mémoire”) to circulation; from the view of “media as passive conveyors of information” to an understanding of the necessarily mediated character of practices of remembering (Erll and Rigney 2009).

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Moreover, by focusing on works that move away from a “zero-sum” conception that perceives memory as necessarily linked to or even owned and inherited by a specific national, ethnic, or religious group, the essays in this volume foreground the potential of post-Yugoslav works of art to transcend national and ethnic boundaries and to imagine new forms of transnational solidarity and cosmopolitan citizenship (in line with Rothberg’s multidirectional memory, 2009).

Entangled legacies of extreme violence The first section gathers essays that analyze post-Yugoslav works of literature and art dealing with difficult historical legacies, most prominently the memory of the wars of the 1990s. Internationally renowned novels by Ozren Kebo (see Postema), Saša Stanišić and Ismet Prcic (see Biti), Saša Ilić, Daša Drndić, and Irfan Horozović (see Vervaet), to name a few, mobilize precisely constellations of traumatic history and memory in a way that enables mourning and working through a difficult past. Visual art, photography, sculpture, performance (see Potkonjak and Pletenac), and theater (see Jakiša) also prove to be productive ways of bringing sensitive issues into the public sphere, urging audiences to confront the difficult legacies of the violence of the 1990s. As the essays in this section show, these memory works emerge in opposition to what Aleida Assmann has called the ethnocentric “grammars of individual and national memory” (2006, 62), practices of remembering which project an exclusively narcissistic image of the nation, refusing to acknowledge popular consent to criminal regimes and legacies of extreme violence towards the nation’s historical others. The opening chapter by Antje Postema examines the complex relations between narrative documentation and memorialization in Ozren Kebo’s Sarajevo for Beginners, a well-known collection of short stories about the siege of Sarajevo written and published during the Bosnian war. She shows that although the book’s title addresses a novice reader, the seemingly straightforward “relationship between narrator and reader, between literature and traumatic experience, is meaningfully complicated by the tone, the fragmentary nature, and the lived experience to which the work refers.” Postema shows how “the textual features employed in Sarajevo for Beginners allow it to fit into a number of overlapping genres”: the book for beginners, the field guide, and the survival guide. She argues that, while these genres are all “characterized by an eminently practical relationship between text and experience,” in Kebo’s Sarajevo for Beginners these textual practices function ironically. Her analysis reveals a double bind between traumatic experience and textual practice: “just as traumatic circumstance interacts with textual practice in the type of Bosnian witness literature to which

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Sarajevo for Beginners belongs, so too are textual features implicated in conceptions of memory and commemorative practices.” It is precisely in this gap between genre-specific reader expectations and textual execution, she claims, that “the book enacts its particular type of commemorative practice.” Sarajevo for Beginners’ enactment or performance of memory results from a “near temporal coincidence of witnessed event and its narration,” and hence significantly complicates theories of (the literary representation of) trauma such as Cathy Caruth’s, which foreground belatedness as the crucial temporal structure of trauma and focus on literary representations that by way of gaps and lacunae bring this aspect of trauma to the fore in a modernist key. Whereas Postema looks at literature written during the Bosnian war, in the essay following hers, Vladimir Biti explores two novels dealing with the Bosnian war but composed in a linguistically, culturally, and geographically remote environment and at a temporal distance of more than fifteen years. Specifically, Biti examines the multiple entanglements of trauma and exile, homeland and “hostland,” history and memory in the work of two Bosnian-born novelists: Saša Stanišić’s How the Soldier Repaired the Grammophone and Ismet Prcic’s Shards. Drawing on insights by Azade Seyhan and Ottmar Ette, Biti argues that exilic writing performs a double therapeutic and creative maneuver that “systematically links, deregulates and alters both the home and host territory, and parallel to that both the past and the present.” On the one hand, exile literature works through “the trauma of domestic contestation and oppression,” that is, “the refuge in the hostland enables it to rescue familiar memory archives” that are forgotten, ignored, contested, distorted, or erased by the politics of memory in the writer’s former homeland. On the other hand, exile writers work through “the trauma of enforced assimilation”; they “challenge, dislocate and estrange the language and culture” of their hostlands by importing the language and culture of their homeland, a process which is particularly effective if the writer adopts the language of his host country, as is the case with both Stanišić, who writes in German, and Prcic, who choose English as his literary language. Taking his cue from the Lacanian concepts of après-coup and déjà-vu, Biti shows how both novels enact “a subversive mixing of diverse spatial and temporal registers as well as two distant languages”. By doing so, Biti argues, both novels rewrite the teleological pattern of the Bildungsroman: instead of enlightened progression towards a mature, unified identity, Stanišić’s and Prcic’s narrators can only re-assemble fragments, or the shards of their traumatic past into a new “fractal” narrative and create “occasional and revocable homelands-on-themove,” thus turning literature into a loiterature. Of course, working through historical traumas and losses is not limited to works of literature. As symbolic expressions of state power, monuments and me-

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morial sites in particular have been placed at the center of memory studies, although their alleged permanence and monumentality have been challenged in recent decades by new approaches to commemoration, which stress the processual, dialogic, and transient nature of collective mourning (Young 1993; Sturken 1997). This approach is also visible in recent interventions by a new generation of visual and performance artists into the post-Yugoslav memorial landscapes, in which the heroic, internationalist, and monumental syntax of socialist memory has been replaced and rewritten by the new politics of national trauma and victimhood. Through the concept of “the unmemorable,” the essay by Tomislav Pletenac and Sanja Potkonjak examines the way in which Sandra Vitaljić and Siniša Labrović, two artists belonging to the “post-memory generation,” paradoxically represent and perform the “impossibility of mediating trauma, the failure of speech and image to represent a traumatic inheritance.” These artists engage with “the afterlife” of antifascist memorials and Second World War’s sites of trauma that have been obscured and rendered unintelligible during the re-memorialization process in post-socialist Croatia, thus dropping out of collective memory. Pletenac and Potkonjak first focus on Siniša Labrović’s performance in the town of Sinj, Bandaging the Wounded, where Labrović mobilizes activist memory against collectively enforced historical amnesia, performing a public ritual of “healing” an antifascist memorial that has been first actively damaged during the Croatian War of Independence (1991– 1995) and subsequently neglected by the local community. They then move on to Sandra Vitaljić’s Unfertile Grounds, a photographic series of national landscapes marked by historical traumas. These photographs, Pletenac and Potkonjak argue, resist being read within the dominant political and symbolic codes of national memory and aim instead to produce an affective and individualized response in the viewer. In both cases, the artists powerfully foreground commemorative deficits and absences in Croatian collective memory, calling for empathetic reception rather than collective transference of historical trauma that only “produces new topographies of pain.” The participatory, open-ended and performative dimension of working through a difficult historical inheritance is also present in the next essay by Miranda Jakiša, which analyzes Oliver Frljić’s play Cowardice as a controversial instance of contemporary post-Yugoslav vanguard theater. Pointing to the parallel emergence and mutual implication of the court of law and theater, a historical connection that also underlines the “theatrical” nature of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Jakiša explores how Frljić’s participatory and site-specific play adjudicates, through artistic and “extralegal” means, the Serbian collective responsibility for the Srebrenica massacre while placing the theatrical form itself on trial. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s work, Jakiša sees Cowardice as a play that breaks the consensus of silence around

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war crimes committed by the Serbian side in the war of the 1990s, thereby shifting “the boundary between those who have a place in the [social] order and those excluded from it.” By ending the play with a recitation of names of Srebrenica victims, a gesture that reverses the order of the trial by reading the charge at the end, Cowardice transforms from participatory theater to “documenting investigative theater, which as a pure and simple ‘bringing before the eyes,’ is accorded a particular potential for yielding the truth” about war crimes and disrupting the reigning consensus of silence in Serbia. The question of collective guilt, or rather the collective oblivion of the war crimes committed in the name of one’s own nation, also resonates with post-Yugoslav prose writers in search of new aesthetic forms capable of rewriting exclusionary forms of memory and identity after the catastrophe of the 1990s. In the closing essay of this section, Stijn Vervaet looks at the intersection of memories of the Yugoslav wars and Holocaust memory in a Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian novel: Irfan Horozović’s The Unknown Passerby in Berlin, Saša Ilić’s The Berlin Window, and Daša Drndić’s April in Berlin. After a brief discussion of the ways in which since the 1980s onwards the memory of the Holocaust has been appropriated for political purposes in the former Yugoslavia, he explores how the novels, instead of making easy Holocaust analogies, make reference to Holocaust memory as a memory trigger, model, or unsuccessful template respectively. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s notion of noeud de mémoire, Vervaet demonstrates how each of the novels creates unexpected constellations of memory through different aesthetics, specific tropes, and intertextual and intermedial links. He shows that whereas Horozović’s postmodernist novel, The Unknown Passerby in Berlin, proposes a politics of mourning and cosmopolitan openness to (the suffering of) the other through the figure of the doppelgänger, Ilić’s and Drndić’s novels focus on processes of collective remembering and forgetting. Ilić’s Berlin Window, he demonstrates, can be read as a traumatic realist novel that points to the need for a more active working upon the past as the only possible remedy against a politics of self-victimization and collective amnesia in Serbia. Drndić’s April in Berlin, however, deploys a neo avant-garde model and an aesthetics of shock to bring to the fore multiple webs of implication in post-war and contemporary (Central) Europe and Croatia. Vervaet argues that all three novels intervene into local, state-sponsored politics of memory, which tend to conceive of collective memory as inextricably linked to national identity, and foster instead forms of transnational solidarity.

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Reclaiming the socialist past To avoid reproducing the dangerous stereotype of Balkan history as exclusively violent and traumatic, the present volume also includes essays that recover the legacy of social struggle, utopian investments, and the cosmopolitan outlook specific to the more progressive cultural trends in the former Yugoslavia. The second cluster of essays explores those artistic and literary representations of Socialist Yugoslavia that aim to remedy the ideologically driven historical revisionism of the 1990s whose goal was to irreparably throw Yugoslavia into the “dustbin of history,” labeling the fifty-year experience of peace, modernization, and relative prosperity as a “totalitarian prison house of nations.” Indeed, the novels and essays of Dubravka Ugrešić and Marsela Šunjić, among others, have recorded the complexities and paradoxes, successes and failures of the Yugoslav experiment to the domestic and international reading public, often in a way that subverts nationalist or neoliberal accounts of the socialist past (see Demiragić). In addition to novels and film (see Jukić), protest against the erasure of socialist Yugoslavia’s heritage from the public sphere is particularly visible in the field of visual and performance art, for example in the work of artisticactivist collectives such as Grupa Spomenik, Abart, Kontekst kolektiv, Prelom kolektiv, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster and his Committees (see Dedić). The members of many of these collectives have not had a direct experience of Yugoslavia, which means that the memory of the past has been additionally mediated by the previous generation and the experience of artistically and politically maturing in the so-called successor states. Such “post-memory” accounts (Hirsch 2012) are especially valuable because they show how new generations gain access to the past within the altered demands of the present, while at the same time they tell us what is specifically new in the post-Yugoslav experience. The essays in this section analyze how the artistic imagination shapes the cultural memory of Yugoslavia and makes it politically productive by critically reflecting on present conditions and triggering new discussions about the future of postYugoslav societies. Pointing out the dominant trend of collective amnesia regarding the socialist past in post-Yugoslav societies, Ajla Demiragić explores how and to what extent literary representations of the socialist period can help not only to re-discover the socialist past but also to recuperate some positive aspects of the (forgotten) socialist experience. Assuming that the marginalized archive of women’s writing might be a good starting point to look for counter-memory, she turned to novels by contemporary Bosnian women authors dealing with socialist Yugoslavia. She points out that, unfortunately, most novels to a large extent resemble and echo

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dominant and revisionist narratives of Yugoslav socialism. In her discussion of novels and short stories by Jasmina Šamić, Nura Bazdulj Hubijar, and Cecilia Toskić, she demonstrates that these novels present the socialist period in a one-dimensional way, as a period characterized by the coercive nature and arbitrariness of government, as well as shortages and the violation of intellectual and artistic freedoms. Contrary to these mainstream novels, Demiragić shows that Marsela Šunjić’s novel Goodnight, City can be read as an attempt to rescue the memory of Mostar as a Yugoslav city par excellence that was violently destroyed during the war and is now an ethnically divided city. The novel does this by using Mostar not merely as the setting or background of the novel but by zooming in on the life of Mostar’s citizens as active actors and agents, as people with great and small hopes and political ideas, and pointing at the places in Mostar that continue to function as places of memory, acting as witnesses to the shared experience of a better past. Balkan nationalisms forming on the ruins of socialist Yugoslavia have inspired numerous psychoanalytical readings, in the first place, Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian critiques of ideology, based on the notion of excessive enjoyment in the “National Thing,” which “noxious” Others are trying to steal and contaminate (1993, 200 – 239). In particular, Žižek has used film not only to dissect those phantasmatic structures that underlie eruptive instances of national identification but also to recover popular cinema’s subversive and revolutionary potential. Along similar lines Tatjana Jukić draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis to unearth the often-unexpected ways in which traces of Yugoslav socialism persist in the post-socialist imaginary in terms of symptoms and counter-archives in contemporary Croatian film. Starting from the claim that socialism in Yugoslavia, unlike most forms of central European socialism but very much like that found in the Soviet Union, had been constituted within the revolution rather than installed bureaucratically, Jukić first points out that in Yugoslavia socialism evolved with and into a raison d’État that “could not sustain the libidinal configurations and the assemblages of affect formative to the revolutionary communities.” As an effect of this, she argues, the revolution kept “depleting its symbolic resources.” Moreover, precisely to the extent to which the revolution “deregulated the symbolic economy of socialism,” it “keeps regulating the rationale of postsocialism.” From this position, she moves on to analyze Hrvoje Hribar’s What Is a Man Without a Moustache?, a film paradigmatic of contemporary Croatian cinematic production. She shows how the film, despite its remoteness from the political history of Yugoslavia and its allegedly ethnographic character, is organized around a memory of the revolution and the assemblages – such as melancholia, masochism, and anti-Oedipal brotherhood – that are decisive for a revolutionary community.

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In contrast to Jukić’s contribution, where the revolutionary heritage is recovered unconsciously, through metonymical slips and veiled cinematic allusions, Nikola Dedić’s essay looks at the various ways in which contemporary politicized artistic practices overtly and critically counter the erasure of Yugoslavia from public awareness in the post-Yugoslav nation-states. He identifies three ways of understanding art that serve as starting points from which artistic-activist collectives read and re-examine the legacy of socialist Yugoslavia. The first concept sees art as a form of archive, aimed at countering both the depoliticizing practices of Yugonostalgia and at (re)constructing “bodies of knowledge that might be relevant in the present social reality,” as in the case of platforms such as The Ignorant Schoolmaster and His Committees, Media Archaeology, and the Abart collective in Mostar. The second conceptualization of art considers art as a way to create a counter-public sphere and include the activity of marginalized groups, for example by “re-actualizing the Yugoslav project’s class and emancipatory potentials,” as in the case of The Break Collective, The Monument Group, and The Four Faces of Omarska, which all aim to disrupt the neoliberal and nationalist consensus. The third model starts from an understanding of art as a class-motivated and ideological critique of the neoliberal concept of transition: artistic collectives such as The Four Faces of Omarska, The Context Collective, and artist Dubravka Sekulić interrogate the link between the commercialization and commodification of culture and the depoliticization of cultural production, as well as between the logic of the liberal market and the privatization of public space. Dedić concludes on an Adornian note that it is precisely post-Yugoslav art’s antagonistic relationship with society that forms the basis of its emancipatory potential.

Reconfiguring the post-Yugoslav present The essays in the final section address more explicitly the role of various media of memory in post-Yugoslav culture and the ways in which intermediality and the re-mediation of memory help engender new forms of visibility, plurality, and solidarity in emergent civil societies. This section is the most diverse in terms of various media and cross-media interaction, with essays covering media ranging from postmodern novels, portraiture (in painting, sculpture, and photography) and comics, to public poetry readings and discussions open to the public, and social media such as Youtube and Facebook. What these memorial practices have in common is that they open up new spaces of memorial entanglement beyond state control. They do so by either reconstructing and recuperating transnational Yugoslav cultural genealogies (see Snel, Zorić) that transcend national

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canons (Snel) or institutionalizing forms of cultural memory (see Zorić, Beronja) or opening up vistas toward new forms of commonality that move beyond established ethno-national communities (see Beronja, Arsenijević, Pogačar). By creatively re-assembling the Yugoslav past, all these cultural practices in one way or another re-claim a part of the public sphere and subvert the ethnonational and or neo-liberal logic of the transitional present. In the opening essay of this section, Guido Snel takes Dubravka Ugrešić’s exile novel, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1998), as both a starting point and a dominant framework for tracing a Yugoslav artistic and literary genealogy that stretches from Ivo Andrić, Miroslav Krleža, Danilo Kiš, and Leonid Šejka all the way to Miloš Bobić, Daša Drndić, and Ugrešić herself, thereby establishing a line of continuity around the use of mnemonic tropes intended to counter forgetting in the wake of wars and other historical ruptures. In particular, Snel focuses on those tropes that oscillate between order and chaos, form and formlessness, totality and fragmentation, such as catalogues, photo albums, encyclopedic lists, and garbage heaps, connecting these to the experience of exile and literary homelessness, namely, to “those who are excluded by their national communities” and “otherwise condemned to oblivion.” Ugrešić’s Museum of Unconditional Surrender is paradigmatic in this respect; but it is also exceptional owing largely to the historical moment in which it was written. On the one hand, the novel assimilates a spectacular overabundance of modernist literary tropes into its heterogeneous structure in an effort to construct a total memory “in competition with God.” On the other hand, it fails to keep up with the impulse of history to scatter existing totalities and continually produce new disasters, which, as Snel argues, yields melancholia. The essay concludes by reflecting on the differences between memory in literature and on the web, contending that even in our digital age serious literature can still communicate historical experience and forge intellectual and affective solidarities in ways that challenge reigning clichés and political dogmas. In the essay following, Vladimir Zorić makes a similar move to Snel, arguing that “the rethinking of the Yugoslav past as an emancipative rather than traumatic locus will not be driven by the generational remembrance of the halcyon days of social equality and national parity. Rather, the process will hinge upon the possibility of constructing a sufficient number of cohesive figures of moral authority and supranational relevance.” Apart from Danilo Kiš, Zorić contends, such a supranational icon relevant to intellectuals in the whole region of the former Yugoslavia would be the Serbian philosopher, critic, and writer Radomir Konstantinović. However, because of his radical criticism of the provincial worldview (expressed most notably in his The Philosophy of the Small Town), which is incompatible with the conservative nation-state model that has prevailed in Ser-

Introduction

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bia, and because of the country’s unresolved debates about the past and unstable state institutions, Konstantinović has not (yet) obtained a place in the Serbian cultural canon. Zorić focuses specifically on portraiture (painting, photography, and sculpture) as a cross-media genre and medium of memory that complements the textual aspect of Konstantinović’s commemoration. The memory of the recently deceased Konstantinović, Zorić shows, is subject to a tension between group-based generational memory (the memory upheld by a close circle of friends and family members) and a canonical cultural memory in the making. Portraiture, Zorić argues, plays the vital role of negotiating between these two forms of memory, between living memory and cultural artifact. Importantly, Zorić’s essay for the first time brings together a selection of various portraits of Konstantinović, which creates a public archive on its own. Indeed, in recent decades, visual and mixed media forms are arguably replacing strictly textual channels of cultural memory, re-mediating and rearranging texts of the past without sacrificing complexity and critical vigor. In this vein, Ann Rigney has suggested that our image of the past is no longer formed by popular historical novels, such as Walter Scott’s Waverly Novels, but “by graphic novels like Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1973, 1986) or Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde (2000) and by virtual memorials using the new digital media” (2008, 345). Drawing on complimenting insights by comic book scholars and theorists of cultural memory, Vlad Beronja reads two albums by Aleksandar Zograf, one of the most accomplished comic book creators in Serbia, as an ongoing project to archive and re-mediate the forgotten and marginalized artifacts of mass culture related specifically to Balkan modernity. Through Zograf’s practice of flea market archaeology, Beronja argues, forgotten and non-canonical artifacts of mass culture are once again brought into cultural circulation where they acquire new values, meanings, and frames of interpretation, frequently forming surreal historical rhymes with the present epoch. Beronja opposes Zograf’s inclusive albeit transient archive of everyday life, placed “into visual boxes and narrative dioramas,” to the epic and monumental history paradigmatic of Balkan political memory. Focusing on Zograf’s representation of Balkan towns, which take the from of “ghostly palimpsests,” on the one hand, and his re-mediation of lowbrow science fiction novels on the other, which recapture the elapsed utopian images for the post-utopian present, Beronja shows how these comics can accommodate a fragile and self-reflective politics of hope while marking a difference between the past and any new present as a potential moment of progressive transformation. The transformative potential of art to intervene into the public sphere and create new forms of commonality and supranational solidarity is also at the heart of the next essay. In their contribution, Damir Arsenijević, Jasmina Husa-

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nović, and Sari Wastell examine the emergent memorial and artistic practices in the context of a new future-oriented paradigm of transitional justice in post-Dayton Bosnia, where the present serves as “a moment of linkage, of transition” demanding “that all members of a society engage with the traumatic memory, not simply the political elite who benefitted from the war.” Traversing multiple disciplinary boundaries, such as law, politics, and forensic science, the authors argue that these politicized memorial practices involved in the management of post-conflict societies work to construct “a shared and share-able public language of grief […], a particular sort of affect that engages with the losses and remnants of the catastrophe besetting forms of sociality and politicality in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its regional, as well as global contexts.” In their first case study, they discuss public poetry readings by contemporary Bosnian poets organized by the artistic platform Mathemes of Re-Association. Conceived as “distributive monuments,” these performances and discussions inevitably generated “open scripts” in which individual affects and political positions were assembled and re-assembled into free associations guaranteeing no definite outcome. Their second case study concerns another project by Mathemes of Re-Association, which in the form of public forums (held in Belgrade, Banja Luka, and Zagreb) interrogates the ethnonationalist foreclosure of identity and memory in the process of identifying the nameless victims buried in mass graves. By insisting on “the uncomfortable surplus” in the bodily remains that cannot be identified by modern science, the Mathemes of Re-Association platform “opens up the space of politics, of a specific type of subjectivization that is not based on identity or counting.” These open-ended and politicized memorial languages, the authors argue, can serve as a basis for “a new politics of hope beyond both ethnic and multicultural discourses of nation and religion, law and science.” The locus of grassroots agonistic politics has been increasingly shifting from the agora to the virtual space, where new imaginary communities are being formed on a daily basis, which by their very virtuality transcend the territorial and administrative boundaries of the nation-state. Given the substantial role that the constructions of the common past play in legitimizing political agendas, it is hardly surprising that the web has also become a major forum for negotiating popular history and making new collective memories, often in opposition to the structurally similar discourses of the existing states. In the closing essay of the selection, Martin Pogačar looks at the afterlife of Yugoslavia on the Internet and social media. Drawing on the concepts of media archaeology and micro-archiving, Pogačar explores how the (co‐)creation of individual, affective, and grassroots digital memorials dedicated to the deceased country and individual pop culture icons serve not only as a “cyberspace of memory” for the individual author(s) but also as “a space of memorial entanglement for and with other

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users.” In the context of the former Yugoslavia, in which dead bodies over the past decades have gained political currency (see Verdery 1999) and in which the rise of digital technologies occurred more or less at the same time as the collapse of the country, the digital resurfacing of the country and its pop culture icons, Pogačar contends, appears as a significant (and at times even amusing) way of dealing with the phenomenon of death and transience. Performing a multimodal discourse analysis of a sample of digital memorials on Facebook and YouTube, Pogačar demonstrates that the “deceased” country and its pop culture personae are used not only as affective intermediaries to renegotiate the Yugoslav socialist past and contest narrowing and nationalizing historical narratives but also as vehicles to make sense of an ambiguous present and to articulate an affective claim to the validity of individual, intimate memories.

References Assmann, Aleida. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. München: Beck, 2006. Bell, Duncan. “Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Memory.” Constellations 15.1 (2008): 148 – 166. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. and with introduction by Hannah Arendt; transl. by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World 1968, 253 – 265. Bet-El, Ilana R. “Unimagined Communities: The Power of Memory and the Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia.” Memory and Power in Post-War Europe. Ed. Jan-Werner Müller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002: 206 – 222. Bošković, Aleksandar. “Yugonostalgia and Yugoslav Cultural Memory: Lexicon of Yu Mythology.” Slavic Review 72.1 (2013): 54 – 78. Brown, Wendy. “Affective Attachments.” Political Theory 21.3 (1993): 390 – 410. Buden, Boris. Der Schacht von Babel: Ist Kultur übersetzbar? Berlin: Kadmos, 2004. Buden, Boris. Zone des Übergangs: Vom Ende des Postkommunismus. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2009. Crnković, Gordana. Post-Yugoslav Literature and Film. London: Continuum, 2012. De Cesari, Chiara and Ann Rigney, eds. Transnational Memory. Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014. Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning, eds. Media and Cultural Memory/Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney. “Introduction: The Dynamics of Cultural Memory.” Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney. Berlin, De Gruyter, 2009. 1 – 11. Etkind, Aleksandr. “Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia and Germany.” Grey Room 16 (2004): 36 – 59. Foucault, Michel. “The Political Function of the Intellectual.” Trans. C. Gordon. Radical Philosophy 17 (1977): 12 – 14.

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Gagnon, Valère Philip. The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. Gorup, Rajka, ed. After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory. Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata. “The Politics of Memory in Croatian Socialist Culture: Some Remarks.” Narodna umjetnost, 41.1 (2004): 125 – 143. Karamanić, Slobodan and Daniel Šuber, eds. Retracing Images: Visual Culture after Yugoslavia. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. Karge, Heike. Steinerne Erinnerung – versteinerte Erinnerung? Kriegsgedenken in Jugoslawien 1947 – 1970. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2010. Kazaz, Enver. “Heroj i žrtva u funkciji pamćenja rata. Književni kanon i ideološki rituali kao temelj nacionalnog pamćenja.” Kultura sjećanja: 1945. Povijesni lomovi i savladavanje prošlosti. Ed. Sulejman Bosto and Tihomir Cipek. Zagreb: Disput, 2009. 141 – 154. Kerenji, Emil. “Jewish Citizens of Socialist Yugoslavia: Politics of Jewish Identity in a Socialist State, 1944 – 1974.” Diss. Michigan U, 2008. Kirn, Gal. “Transformation of Memorial Sites in the Post-Yugoslav Context.” Karamanić and Šuber 2012. 251 – 282. Luthar, Breda, and Marusa Pusnik, eds. Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia. Washington: New Academia Publishing, LLC, 2010. Moses, Dirk. “Genocide and the Terror of History.” Parallax 17.4 (2011): 90 – 108. Palmberger, Monika. “Nostalgia Matters: Nostalgia for Yugoslavia as Potential Vision for a Better Future.” Sociologija 50.4 (2008): 355 – 370. Petrović, Tanja. Yuropa. Jugoslovensko nasleđe i politike budućnosti u postjugoslovenskim društvima. Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2012. Pupovac, Ozren. “Present Perfect, or the Time of Post-Socialism.” 2010. Eurozine. http://www. eurozine.com/articles/2010-05-12-pupovac-en.html (9 August 2014). Rigney, Ann. “Transforming Memory and the European Project.” New Literary History 43 (2012): 607 – 628. Rigney, Ann. “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts between Monumentality and Morphing.” Erll and Nünning 2008. 345 – 356. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Sindbæk, Tea. Usable History? Representations of Yugoslavia’s Difficult Past from 1945 to 2002. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 2012. Šuvaković, Miško. Umetnost i politika. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2012. Sturken, Marita. Tangled memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Ugrešić, Dubravka. Nobody’s Home. Rochester: Open Letter, 2008. Ugrešić, Dubravka. Europe in Sepia. Rochester: Open Letter, 2014. Velikonja, Mitja. Titostalgija. Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek, 2008. Verdery, Katherine. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Volčič, Zala. “Yugo-nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.1 (2007): 21 – 38.

Introduction

Young, James Edward. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. Žarkov, Dubravka. The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-Up of Yugoslavia. Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 2007. Žižek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

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Part 1: Entangled Legacies of Extreme Violence: Traumatic Memories in the Aftermath of the Yugoslav Successor Wars

Antje Postema

“Read and Remember”: Ozren Kebo’s Sarajevo for Beginners as Ironic Guidebook and Narrative Memorial Introduction This essay examines Ozren Kebo’s Sarajevo for Beginners [Sarajevo za početnike], a collection of short prose written and published during the war in Bosnia. Kebo’s text fits with other works of Bosnian literature that serve as witnesses to the trauma of Sarajevo’s three-and-a-half-year besiegement; it also shares features with contemporary acts of memorialization, and in particular the literary memorialization, that took place both during and following the war. Kebo’s title highlights the work’s particular take on the relationship between narrative documentation and memorialization. It overtly addresses the novice reader as a “beginner” or “dummy” in need of a guide to the city during its wartime perils. However, the seeming straightforwardness of the project’s paratextual framing – its relationship between narrator and reader, and between literature and traumatic experience – is meaningfully complicated by the tone, the fragmentary nature, and the lived experience to which the work refers. In the following pages, I demonstrate, first of all, that the textual features employed in Sarajevo for Beginners allow it to fit into a number of overlapping genres: in addition to being a book for beginners, it can also be read as a field and survival guide. These heavily stylized genres are all characterized by an eminently practical relationship between text and experience; moreover, they are fundamentally fragmentary rather than exhaustive. While delineating the varied generic contours of the work, I argue that the kinds of textual practice that Kebo employs in Sarajevo for Beginners function ironically; they allow the narrative to address critically the experiential traumas the prose incorporates and to reflexively evaluate the dialectical relationship between textual structures and the acts of memorialization in which they participate. Kebo is a Bosnian journalist and author who spent most of his adult life living and working in Sarajevo.¹ As a journalist and editor, he has been heavily in-

 Sarajevo for Beginners’s characteristically ironic biographical note reads: “And now a little about the author, his person, background, and character, related to different cities: Ozren Kebo, , no criminal record; sign: Gemini, Ascendant sign: unspecified. Born in Mostar, fell in love

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volved in Sarajevo’s dynamic and celebrated cultural scene that defined the urban landscape and made the city rightfully famous from the early 1980s onward.² During the war, this cultural activity was marshaled for anti-war movements and channeled into a huge number and variety of “cultural resistance” projects.³ The proximal impetus behind and constant referential focus of Kebo’s collection is the traumatic experience of the war, which he personally witnessed. Sarajevo for Beginners belongs among the numerous contemporary artistic projects that both protested the bitter violence raging in Bosnia and viewed artistic media as crucial to both intellectual engagement with the circumstances of war and as a way to preserve highly valued aspects of prewar life in Sarajevo.⁴ These works of wartime Bosnian literary witness are, by and large, marked by a sense of immediacy towards unfolding events. They are frequently gritty, sometimes crude. They were published amid wartime shortages and distributed with great difficulty and often with authorial sacrifice. They are politically and ethically engaged. Many are difficult to fit into strict genres and often push at the boundary separating fiction from non-fiction. They are intertextually rich and employ a wide variety of media (often within a single work). They are compact and their elements are often short and fragmentary.⁵

in Dubrovnik, spent the largest part of his life in Sarajevo. It seems that there is a hidden curse in his path: whatever city his steps took him to was later destroyed” (Kebo , ). Translations from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian are my own.  For more on the lively and unique Sarajevo artistic and cultural milieu, see Levi () and Markowitz ().  In his analysis of “engaged” literature in wartime Bosnia, Enver Kazaz links such literature and criticism to a specific, largely anti-nationalist type of political outlook and critical stance. For this reason, Kazaz () claims that the semantic basis for so-called war literature is anti-war even if its theme or setting is war.  These projects include but are obviously not limited to: the Sarajevo Film Festival, FAMA’s Survival Art Museums (, , and ) and Sarajevo Survival Guide, Alma Suljević’s “Kentaur” tram installation, Radio Zid’s programming, TRIO’s postcard-sized pop-art posters, the “Miss Sarajevo” beauty pageant, and the approximately ninety literary and scholarly texts published during the war years.  For example, I have in mind the following works: Zlatko Dizdarević’s columns in Oslobođenje [Liberation], Nedžad Ibrišimović’s Knjiga Adema Kahrimana napisana Nedžadom Ibrišimovićem Bosancem [The Book of Adem Kahriman, Written by Nedžad Ibrišimović the Bosnian], Miljenko Jergović’s Sarajevski Marlboro [Sarajevo Marlboro], Dževad Karahasan’s Dnevnik selidbe [Diary of Exodus], Alma Lazarevska’s Sarajevski pasijans [Sarajevo Solitaire] and Smrt u muzeju moderne umjetnosti [Death in the Museum of Modern Art], Semezdin Mehmedinović’s Sarajevo Blues, Abdulah Sidran’s Sarajevski tabut [Sarajevo Coffin], Nenad Veličković’s Đavo u Sarajevu [The Devil in Sarajevo] and Konačari [Lodgers], Marko Vešović’s Smrt je majstor iz Srbije [Death is a Handyman from Serbia], and Karim Zaimović’s Tajna džema od malina [The Secret of Raspberry Jam].

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Indeed, it is this fragmentariness that I wish to focus on as a way of introducing Sarajevo for Beginners. During the war, many of the most influential literary works were published serially in journals and magazines, often in several different versions.⁶ Their components – often short stories, essays, or poems – were characterized by brevity, urgency, aphorism, and a narrow subjective rather than totalizing perspective. We can read such literary productions as directly emerging out of circumstance; wartime privations often complicated and inhibited the physical act of writing, and, as Judith Herman maintains, “people who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner” (Herman 1992, 1). Instead of foregrounding such an interpretation, I focus here on how the fragmentary qualities of Sarajevo for Beginners exist in a dialectical relationship with traumatic experience; the work’s textuality is influenced by atrocity, violence, and death, but it also pointedly responds to circumstance. Here I employ a notion of fragments similar to that of Camelia Elias, who views the fragment as a performative textual act that is “habitually defined, not as an object in itself, but in relation to notions of either the period or aesthetics/genre in which it appears” (Elias 2004, 4). In this, the choice of the fragment form becomes both a generic as well as a critical – even polemical – gesture. Wartime narratives like Sarajevo for Beginners often took the form of fragments in scope and organization. By focusing on the physical city, which is broken into pieces, authors find a narrative correlation in the fragmentary form: notions of “part” and “whole” link the experience of destruction and its narration. Beyond merely using the fragment as a form, however, these wartime works self-reflexively argue for the fragment as a truthful or adequate way to express the experience of war. This move towards the fragment in its ethical as well as aesthetic dimensions can be seen as an explicit rejection of postmodernist textual practices, which were often avoided by wartime Bosnian authors who critiqued postmodernism largely for what they saw as its lack of ethical concern.  Sarajevo for Beginners, for example, was published in several different versions, and with each new publication its elements were revised (in both superficial and significant ways). During , many of the pieces from Sarajevo for Beginners were prominently showcased on the inside of the back cover of the cultural and political magazine, BH Dani [Bosnian and Herzegovinian Days] (called, during the war, Ratni Dani [War Days]). The pieces were collected in book form by Biblioteka Dani in Sarajevo in , just after the end of the war. Two further versions were put out, one by Feral Tribune in Croatia () and one by Zoro in Sarajevo (). It would be beyond the scope of this essay to further and more substantively detail the type and importance of these variations. I work primarily with the Feral Tribune version here, using material published earlier in BH Dani when the textual variation is critical for my argument.

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Instead, these authors seemed to hold to the inverse of Adorno’s famous maxim, that “Das Ganze ist das Unwahre [the whole is the untrue]” (Adorno 2005, 50), employing the fragment in ways that metatextually allied it with a truth value. In addition to its fragmentary quality, Sarajevo for Beginners shares with a number of wartime volumes a highly developed and effectively deployed sense of irony. In approaching and delineating the function and import of irony in Kebo’s volume, I rely on Linda Hutcheon’s seminal study on the discursive contexts, political entanglement, and ethical stakes of irony. As she maintains, “irony is a ‘weighted’ mode of discourse in the sense that it is asymmetrical, unbalanced in favor of the silent and the unsaid […]. [It] involves the attribution of an evaluative, even judgmental attitude” (Hutcheon 1995, 35). For this reason, and because it relies on relationality, inclusivity, and differentiality (Hutcheon 1995, 56 – 57), an ironic text can be dexterously employed to bring textuality and social reality into the same critical sphere. As Hutcheon notes, “[u]nlike metaphor or allegory, which demand similar supplementing of meaning, irony has an evaluative edge and manages to provoke emotional responses in those who ‘get’ it and those who don’t, as well as in its targets and in what some people call its ‘victims’” (Hutcheon 1995, 2). The omnipresence of irony in Sarajevo for Beginners gives it its characteristic and, moreover, generative “edginess.” My major argument rests on the fact that just as traumatic circumstance interacts with textual practice in Sarajevo for Beginners as a work of witness literature, so too are its textual features implicated in conceptions of memory and, more specifically, commemorative practices. As Geoffrey Hartman argues, “memory, and especially the memory that goes into storytelling, is not simply an afterbirth of experience, a secondary formation: it enables experiencing” (Hartman 1996, 158). Here, it is crucial to keep in mind Astrid Erll’s explication of how literature functions as a medium of cultural memory (Erll 2011). Beyond the intertextual mechanisms by which literary texts recall and memorialize (Lachmann 1997), I am here particularly concerned with the notion of memory’s mediation through specific generic or rhetorical practices. Such mediation is indicative of the way in which memory is “stabilized” through narrative symbolization (Assmann 2003). Literary texts take particular genres and styles; they might represent the past in experiential, monumental, antagonistic, historicizing, or reflexive modes (Erll 2011, 158). The medial frameworks used in recounting or engaging with the past constitute not only modes of narration but also, equally and inseparably, “modes of remembering” (Erll 2008a, 7; 2008b). Mnemonic and commemorative practices in culture influence the possibilities for literary representations and vice versa. On the one hand, a work can be, in Erll’s terms, “memory-reflexive” insofar as it uses the concepts of memory as a narrative theme or trope, metatextually contemplates the structure and function of memory, and

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demonstrates the mediation involved in representing memory. On the other hand, a work can be “memory-productive” to the extent that it employs powerful images and tropes about the past. Memory-productive works do not necessarily address the concept of memory but can shape and disseminate representations of the past that are incorporated into and shape collective memories (Erll 2011, 137– 151). Sarajevo for Beginners is both memory-reflexive and memory-productive because it both explicitly comments on the work of memory in wartime and employs powerful images that resonate with wider commemorative activity in Bosnia during and after the war. The interwoven expectations developed by both literary genre and memorial culture motivate my investigation of Kebo’s collection. Moreover, the particular contours of genre and memorialization found in Sarajevo for Beginners support my argument that the book exists in a dynamic relationship with larger strategies that commemorate the siege of Sarajevo.

A beginner’s guide to besieged Sarajevo As is immediately apparent, Kebo’s title highlights a particular approach to the relationship between narrative documentation and memorialization. Printed on its first page or above the column (depending on the version), the title strongly influences the way readers encounter it, the presuppositions they entertain, and the web of associations (both textual and supra-textual) into which they immediately fit the work. The words “Sarajevo for beginners” thus function as a paratext (Genette 1997).⁷ In this case, a seemingly clear and delimited title presents the work to its reading public, fitting the reader, the narrator, and the body of the text into a set of interacting relationships. The implied naive reader is thus someone unfamiliar with Sarajevo during wartime, to whom Kebo’s expert narrator addresses Sarajevo for Beginners in the form of a guide. Despite a title that paratextually circumscribes how the reader approaches the text, Sarajevo for Beginners does not neatly fit into a genre category. The book productively exploits the resulting mismatch between genre expectations and textual execution. Indeed, it is primarily in this gap between what is promised and what is deliver-

 Genette includes in the general category of “paratext” all those elements that accompany, surround, and present a text while existing outside (temporally or spatially) the text itself, for example: titles, subtitles, illustrations, tables of contents, indications of genre, etc. It might be argued that, in Genette’s definition, hardly anything can be excluded from the category of paratext. The concept, primarily as it relates to title and genre markers, is nonetheless useful for my argument.

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ed, what is expected and what can be achieved, that the book enacts its particular type of commemorative practice. Sarajevo for Beginners was first published serially in the well-known monthly cultural-political journal, BH Dani, its two columns of text separated on the page by a striking collage.⁸ The bottom of this composite image depicts the young sleepwalker, Malik, from Emir Kusturica’s hugely popular film, When Father was Away on Business [Otac na službenom putu] (1985). The image’s top section features a horizontally compressed version of the poster, “Sarajevo 1992: Summer,” by the graphic arts group, TRIO; the TRIO poster is itself a photographic collage of buildings in Sarajevo’s war-torn skyline (Fig.1). The choice of images is intertextually and critically evocative – either image, by itself, would have been immediately recognizable to readers of BH Dani in 1994 and would have elicited a number of associations and highly-charged emotions. The image of Malik functions as a metonym for Kusturica’s film, which thematizes the turbulent socio-political climate in Yugoslavia following Tito’s 1948 break with Stalin. The film is focalized through the young Malik, who remains largely unaware of the political causes and ramifications of his father’s imprisonment. The magical realism of Malik’s sleepwalking becomes a metaphor for a naive, and slightly victimized, perspective on reality. Kusturica’s film was known, loved, and celebrated at home and abroad.⁹ However, at the time Sarajevo for Beginners appeared in BH Dani, controversy raged about Kusturica himself, who had moved abroad during the war (to the United States, France, and more problematically, Serbia).¹⁰ Through statements he made in the local and international press, Kusturica had distanced himself from Sarajevo society and openly critiqued former colleagues. In the opinion of many in Bosnia and abroad, including many actors and artists who had contributed to When Father was Away on Business and who continued to live and work in besieged Sarajevo, Kusturica had turned his back on his native city.¹¹ An image of Malik, therefore, metonymically recalls the figure of Kusturica him-

 BH Dani has been published throughout its history with variable frequency. Before the war, it came out monthly. During the war years, it was published less frequently and usually sporadically. Nonetheless, its front matter continued to claim that it came out monthly.  It won a Palme d’Or and FIPRESCI prize at Cannes, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in . When the film won the Palme d’Or, Yugoslavia declared a national holiday (see Turan ,  – ).  For example, see: Finkielkraut (), Žižek (), and Iordanova ().  For example: Abdulah Sidran (scenarist), Mustafa Nadarević (actor), and Emir Hadžihafizbegović (actor).

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Fig. : Collage accompanying Sarajevo for Beginners columns in BH Dani (). Top: TRIO “Sarajevo : Summer” (poster). Bottom: Malik sleepwalking (film poster for Emir Kusturica’s When Father Was Away on Business []). Used with permission.

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self, functioning as an antagonistic mnemonic device that both criticizes the film director and sets the stage for Kebo’s text as a whole. The Sarajevo skyline at the top of the collage, meanwhile, refers to the entire oeuvre of postcard-sized prints produced by the TRIO graphic design group. TRIO, a collaboration of the artists Delila Hadžihalilović, Bojan Hadžihalilović, and Lela Mulabegović, were active since the 1980s but rose to particular prominence during the war. Building on its pre-war pop-art aesthetic, Trio’s wartime works pointedly critiqued society and politics with wry black humor. TRIO relied on the appropriation of well-known international images and slogans, altering the meaning of these by situating them in the new context of wartime Sarajevo – and thereby commenting on the war. TRIO’s use of pop-art as an aesthetic medium can be seen in their use of advertising (which integrates “low-cultural” elements into the typically “elite” medium of fine art), mass production (which provides a commentary on the singularity of the artistic object), and defamiliarization to a sense of detachment from everyday objects. The most famous of their wartime posters, to which the skyline series belongs, commented on many aspects of the city’s dire situation: the lack of UN/NATO intervention, the spectacle of violence in global media, and the contrast between Sarajevo’s prewar cosmopolitan sophistication and its wartime deprivation. Each of these small prints bore the inscription: “This document has been printed in war circumstances: no paper, no ink, no electricity, no water. Just good will.” The TRIO image of Sarajevo’s skyline printed alongside the Sarajevo for Beginners column thus both paratextually and intertextually links Kebo’s texts with a specific type of ironic critique. Further, it helps to situate Sarajevo for Beginners in both a place (the city of Sarajevo, albeit viewed as a site of memory and myth rather than as geographical location) and in a defined “present moment” (one that, like the figure of Malik, is irrevocably linked with a sense of the past). In this way, the accompanying graphic establishes a clear cultural and generic field in which the text functions as a multi-layered commemoration. As a genre, the introductory book designated “for beginners” is intended for someone with little or no knowledge about a topic in which the narrator (often the author) is a presumed expert. These books may vary in their degree of abstractness or specificity but are organized according to a careful taxonomic or procedural structure and are more often than not accompanied by a detailed table of contents and index. The book for beginners can easily be used as a reference guide when a reader is no longer a true novice. The tone of its prose is journalistic and direct, but it pointedly avoids confrontation or intimidation; its reading is, after all, motivated by the reader’s curiosity – which may well be a passive or passing one – rather than out of an urgent desire to master a skill as quickly as possible. A book designated for beginners builds up powerful

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and immediate readerly expectations. Therefore, designating Sarajevo for Beginners as an introduction to the city “for beginners” creates, from the book’s first page, a relationship between narrator and reader that involves the former educating or passing on selected useful information to the latter. Sarajevo for Beginners ultimately ironizes this relationship – and indeed the genre of the beginner’s guide itself – in order to comment on the war in Sarajevo, its literary witness, and the ethics of commemoration. The book’s ironic gesture, however, is grounded in the careful mimicry of salient stylistic features and narrative stances commonly associated with the beginner’s guide. For a start, Sarajevo for Beginners sets clear parameters for what a beginner might learn from such a volume, for example, the city itself. Which is to say: Sarajevo as it was, as it was thought and written about, and as it is now under siege. The text offers a coherent portrait of Sarajevo to an uninitiated reader. This portrait, however, is not laid out for the reader in a way that is consistent with or expected from introductory guides: the scope moves haphazardly between the general and the particular, and uses irony to subvert apparent claims to comprehensive knowledge. For instance, several general (and generalizing) areas appear with identically structured titles at intervals throughout the book. The work opens with “something about war in general” (Kebo 2000, 11), moves to “something about illusions in general” (Kebo 2000, 27), “hell in general” (Kebo 2000, 95), “something about memory in general” (Kebo 2000, 132), and “something about the meaning of life” (Kebo 2000, 139). These individual pieces, however, fail to provide the reader with a systematic understanding of their ostensible topic. “Something about war in general” identifies the first day of war as the “beginning of suffering” for Sarajevans, who passed from “a period of unbearable uncertainty to a period of blessed unhappiness” (Kebo 2000, 11). When outlining the topic of illusion, the reader is met with the injunction to “never believe in reality […]. This world rests on an illusion and nothing is how it seems in our absurdity” (Kebo 2000, 27). The section “hell in general” focuses on Henri Barbusse’s L’Enfer although the discussion does not completely rule out Dante’s Inferno, at least as an intertext, in the context of Sarajevo’s burning libraries. “Something about the meaning of life” is an ironic commentary on the way life is reduced to securing and eating three meals per day, and then, also daily, eliminating this food. War brings oxymoronically blessed unhappiness, reality is unbelievable, and “the biggest whore of all is human memory” (132). The rhetorical thrust of each of these otherwise different statements about an aspect of lived experience in besieged Sarajevo involves linking general maxims with specific circumstance in a way that deflates, overturns, or otherwise complicates the general rule.

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A field guide to the destroyed city In this regard, many of the component pieces in Sarajevo for Beginners establish the work as a field guide rather than – or in addition to – a book for beginners. A field guide pertains to an extensive yet strictly delimited category of objects or phenomena. It is portable and useful in particular situations and primarily helps readers identify something by its (predominantly visual) characteristics. Part of the work of a field guide is to present a relatively coherent analytical image of a range of related things so that particular examples of this range can be picked out and identified in situ. A field guide portrays totality through individual features. A field guide to Sarajevo attempts to represent its characteristic elements and, in doing so, present Sarajevo as a particular, defined ecosystem. Therefore, to answer the large question, “What is Sarajevo?” Kebo’s text describes it as “a city that flows out. There’s a little hole at the edge of the city, where there is a constant crowd [of people leaving]” (Kebo 2000, 110). This is the language of taxonomy and identification; seeing a stream of people, always leaving and never returning, means that the reader is looking at Sarajevo. The import of the passage vis-à-vis the field guide hinges on paradox: the city is characterized by those who are, in fact, leaving it. However, Sarajevo can also be identified by its inhabitants: those who choose to wash their clothes in the river, exposing themselves to shelling, preferring to be clean and dead than dirty and alive (Kebo 2000, 86); those who assiduously clean their hands, lest they require amputation and the surgeon sees the dirt under their nails (Kebo 2000, 44). We see Kebo relying on a similar mechanism of describing Sarajevo in an article published in BH Dani with the subtitle, “everything you always wanted to know about Sarajevo but were afraid to ask” (Kebo 1993, 38). In spirited prose, the piece identifies a number of statements about Sarajevo as either true or false. “Sarajevo is where East meets West. False! It is where urban meets rural” (Kebo 1993, 38). “Water is the most valuable liquid in the world. False! Beer is. Water is the heaviest liquid in the world” (Kebo 1993, 39), thereby alluding to the daily struggle to collect and carry potable water in besieged Sarajevo. Sarajevo for Beginners presents a qualified list of commonly found objects in the demonstrative manner of a field guide: 1. Water from a canister is sweetest. 2. Plain rice is tastiest. Rice without anything on the side. 3. The wood that burns the best is the kind brought down from Trebević [mountain] on one’s back. Best, therefore fastest. 4. There’s nothing better to smoke than tea but only if it’s rolled well.

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5. Electricity is unnecessary. You sit at four o’clock and wait in the dark until eight. At eight, it’s time for bed. 6. The best spinach pie is made from nettles. (Kebo 2000, 24)

This list not only catalogues items found in wartime Sarajevo but also indicates how to pick out the best example in a given category. Meanwhile, the specific items pointed to are deeply and bitterly ironic. On one hand, everything outlined here is obviously untrue; indeed, every superlative could be turned into its opposite, resulting in a more “accurate” summing up of wartime circumstances. On the other hand, the effect of such a passage rests precisely on a consistent and unrelenting ironic distance between its recognizably confident and didactic form and the implication of stating such tragic details in a brisk, almost cheerful tone. Furthermore, the prominent use of lists in Sarajevo for Beginners serves both a descriptive and a mnemonic function. Because the prose addresses events that are outside the range of usual experience, lists become a way of detailing a subject while it still exists and preserving it narratively. Thus, when we find the following description of Sarajevo, which consists solely of a list of features, it seems both to capture a basic description of the city and fix it in memory. Sarajevo is: abandoned, left alone, naked, barefoot, besieged, haggard, inexperienced, drenched, frozen through, moldy, wretched, stunted, spent, starved, abject, despised, uncertain, ill-tempered, melancholy, doleful, unstable, weepy, pathetic, kitschy, written-off, silly, paranoid, anemic, blasphemous, god-fearing, dignified, condescending, tolerant, intolerant, lost, and wrecked. (Kebo 2000, 106)

This rhetorically vivid and pathos-infused list of adjectives highlights the way a desperate list of qualities might arise out of traumatic, destructive experience and serve as a method of reckoning with this trauma. Indeed, the related genres of the list and the catalogue are well documented as mnemonic strategies from antiquity to the present. Here Kebo’s use of lists as literary mnemonic devices to witness the traumatic lived experience recalls the poetic textures of the novels of the Yugoslav authors, Danilo Kiš and Daša Drndić, both of whose work strongly thematizes twentieth-century historical traumas and their integration into individual and social memory. At the same time, it is striking that Kebo’s extensive list of Sarajevo’s qualities does not give the reader a visually specific picture of the city. Moreover, the fact that those listed are analytical qualities rather than straightforwardly perceptible features immediately raises the question about the adequacy of the text to orient the reader, as one would expect a field guide to do. Indeed, the fragment from which the list above is drawn thematizes and, in doing so,

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problematizes the adequacy of a guide that relies on visually observable characteristics, maintaining that “Sarajevo can best be taken stock of by night, in total darkness, when illusions recede into the shadows” (Kebo 2000, 106). Such a description and method for encountering Sarajevo under siege belongs in a peculiar field guide, one that requires an unusual type of effort and awareness on the part of the reader. In the traumatic conditions of the destroyed city, visual clues might not be of assistance. The text thus calls for a mnemonic witness rather than a visual description and, indeed, in the last sentence of this description, the narrative voice shifts. After the catalogue of adjectives, the author commands: “Write also: destroyed” (106). He may be addressing himself, reminding himself to include this last description however difficult it may be to get down on paper – or how similar it might be to the others already listed. However, the narrator might also be ordering the reader to write, thereby implicating the latter as one who contributes to – or ought to contribute to – the guide.¹²

A survival guide for impossible conditions Beyond providing the specificity and taxonomy of a field guide or the accessible wide-ranging overview of a beginner’s text, Sarajevo for Beginners invites readers to approach it as a survival guide. Such a text contains specific knowledge, as in a field guide. However, in striking contrast, a survival guide is specifically focused on describing the processes by which essential tasks ought to be carried out (often in difficult or extreme circumstances) and helping the reader develop a set of precise skills. Rather than containing a field guide’s thorough description, a survival guide provides background information only when such background would be immediately germane to the survival task in question. If Sarajevo for Beginners is read as a field guide, it gives the reader a sense of how the destroyed city looks and behaves; read as a survival guide, meanwhile, it shows the reader how to survive in and practically navigate the besieged city. Bosnian readers of Sarajevo for Beginners during and after the war would have seen a clear intertext between its own use of the conventions of a survival guide and the famous Sarajevo Survival Guide issued by the FAMA independent media company in 1993. Many aspects of tone, theme, and purview are shared between the two works. In bitterly ironic detail, the Sarajevo Survival Guide de Kebo’s injunction echoes the conclusion to Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “One Art,” which reads: “the art of losing’s not too hard to master/though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster” (Bishop , ). Even more evocatively, the power of both passages fundamentally derives from their treatment of the relationship between writing, memory, trauma and, moreover, irony.

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scribes daily activities and difficulties: how to collect water, the importance of having a staircase under which to hide, the imbalanced supply and demand of common medications during war, what to give as a gift (a bar of soap, a bottle of clean water, an onion), a price list with reasonable prices for common items, sports and recreation (running, tree-cutting, rock-climbing on the faces of burning buildings, exchanging recipes with no ingredients), an overview of transportation in the city, advice about where to get film developed and make photocopies, and important aspects of cultural survival in Sarajevo. It includes a recipe book that details how to make common Bosnian dishes from nettles, rice, flour, and humanitarian aid lunches. The final pages of the Sarajevo Survival Guide are an entreaty to an implied foreign visitor to Sarajevo: When you come to Sarajevo, be prepared and be mature. It might prove to be the most important decision you have ever made in your life. Bring: good shoes which let you walk long distances and run fast, pants with many pockets, pills for water, Deutsche Marks (small denominations), batteries, matches, a jar with vitamins, canned food, drinks, and cigarettes. Everything you bring will be consumed or exchanged for useful information. (Kapić, et al. 1993, 95)

In many ways, the Sarajevo Survival Guide and Sarajevo for Beginners work in tandem within particular didactic textual practices to establish and then destabilize the reader’s expectations, document experiential reality, and provide a critique of the war through irony. In addition to providing detailed instructions, survival guides urge readers and users to creatively employ common objects to make the best of the circumstances in which they find themselves. Therefore, their tone is often optimistic and motivational. We see this clearly in the Sarajevo Survival Guide’s continued advice to the foreign visitor: You should know when to skip a meal, how to turn trouble into a joke and how to be relaxed in impossible circumstances. Learn not to reveal your emotions, and don’t be fussy about anything. Be ready to sleep in basements, eager to walk and work surrounded by danger. Give up all your former habits. Use the telephone when it works, laugh when it doesn’t. You’ll laugh a lot. (Kapić, et al. 1993, 95)

We also see this synthesis of practical skills, encouraging tone, and irony at several points in Sarajevo for Beginners. We read that “one can work miracles” with five liters of water (Kebo 2000, 87). The text goes on to instruct the reader in the art of showering using a hanging PET bottle, a process that the author labels

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with the neologism “bottling.”¹³ Here we are reminded, in a slightly different way, of the kind of war recipes for nettle pie and tea cigarettes depicted in both Sarajevo for Beginners and the Sarajevo Survival Guide. Another piece in Kebo’s work urges readers to follow a series of rules when walking or running in the city. This piece is entitled “In the [rifle] scope,” a phrase that recurs again and again in the text.¹⁴ The fragment gives instructions in several different categories: how to walk (don’t walk, run; or walk “like a Serb”¹⁵), what to carry with you at all times (your ID), what to wear (never anything flashy, nothing green,¹⁶ and certainly not a headscarf ¹⁷). All of these pieces of practical advice are, meanwhile, layered with irony. Kebo selects pieces of advice that particularly highlight both the absurdity and the seriousness of living in besieged Sarajevo. In a war that was often interpreted as an ethnic or religious conflict between Orthodox Serbs, Muslim Bosniaks, and Catholic Croats, connections were made between observable features (like name or dress) and ethno-religious or national identity. By alluding to the visible signs of ethno-religious identity with a heavy dose of irony, Kebo provides a trenchant critique of identity politics during (and after) the war in Bosnia. However, what fundamentally lies behind these varied bits of practical wisdom is an unspoken, but nonetheless potent, realization that neither axioms nor jerry-rigged devices can absolutely protect or aid the user. As though cognizant of its own inability to give perfect advice, the text implores the impossible: “you must know every crossroad by heart” (Kebo 2000, 74– 75).¹⁸ Thus, in passages that could be read as elements in a survival guide, readers also find allusions to a specific relationship between experience and knowledge. The dire and trying circumstances under which Sarajevans are living are connected at times with a superior practical insight. For example, “anyone who has lived through a detonation even once should be regarded as a wise person […]. Perhaps these people know the secret to life. A sound is one of the great se-

 A play on words that works better in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: “tuširanje” (showering) becomes “flaširanje” (derived from the word for bottle, “flaša,” plus a gerundial suffix).  Indeed, many elements of the text could thematically and stylistically be characterized by the title of another piece, “I Am Not a Man, I Am Just a Target in the Sniper’s Scope” (Kebo , ).  This phrase ironically comments on the absurdity of discerning someone’s ethno-religious identity based on their gait.  Green is considered the traditional color of Islam.  A headscarf stereotypically identifies its female wearer as a Muslim.  Crossroads were one of the most hazardous areas to walk in besieged Sarajevo, and certain crossroads were infamous for being particularly dangerous. Knowledge of the relative safety of crossroads circulated among Sarajevans, becoming a mixture of truth, urban rumor, and superstition.

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crets. The sense of hearing is the superior sense” (Kebo 2000, 59). This is followed by a dissection of the sounds that follow a grenade launch: first the launch sound, then the whistle, then the detonation, then the “plop” sound of someone being hit. Added to this are additional sounds: screams, sounds of crying, and a hum of voices from the cemetery (Kebo 2000, 60 – 61). We can see in this privileging of the sense of hearing a vivid narrative representation of the experience of trauma, in which the sensory input is distorted and normality is defamiliarized. Moreover, a tone of practicality becomes an ironic gesture in passages like this. The text’s instructions are aimed at someone learning for the first time how to avoid grenades, undercut by the extra-textual knowledge that Bosnian readers were already skilled in listening to and dodging grenades. A further layer is added to this irony: the fact that “skill” in a besieged city is no guarantee against a chance encounter with death, particularly with the type of odds stacked against those who remained in Sarajevo. In this respect, a section that instructs readers in the best way to dive to the ground during an attack is illustrative. They can either follow the “Sarajevo” model, which involves immediately, inelegantly, but efficiently lying down without taking any time to contemplate the action; the “London” model, wherein one removes one’s coat, carefully lays it down, and only then lies on top of it; or the “Sokolac” method, which has not been used often enough for it to have developed its own characteristics (since most Sarajevans who practiced it have moved to Pale and have no need to dive to the ground).¹⁹ In reality, however, because grenades are falling in rapid succession, there is no time to do either the “London” or the “Sokolac,” leaving the “Sarajevo” as the only viable option (Kebo 2000, 64). Furthermore, through absurdist allegorical framing, the technique of falling on the ground is correlated with a choice to abandon Sarajevo (either to Western Europe or to Serb-held territory) or to remain in the city. Those who remain are the only ones required to cultivate these skills, while having these skills is characteristic of being a Sarajevan. It is as a survival guide that Sarajevo for Beginners vividly documents the way practical and ethical codes have been updated by the harsh reality of war. Objects, habits, and ethical attitudes have been deemed essential, whereas other things have been rendered unnecessary in the circumstances of war:

 Sokolac is a village northeast of Sarajevo that was ethnically cleansed during the war and incorporated into the larger Republika Srpska municipality of “East Sarajevo.” Pale was the wartime capital of Republika Srpska.

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tablecloths (absolutely non-functional and unnecessary), tapestries (ugly concoctions that serve only to take away the sight of those who make them and sour the appetite of those who look at them), books (read and pass them along), paintings (anyone who wants art should go to a gallery), figurines (their primary purpose is to prettify a room; laughable), electric orange juicer (a person must truly be a degenerate to do this juicing with electricity that can otherwise be done by hand; and why juice oranges anyway, they aren’t lemons), juicers (fruit is best consumed in its natural state), wallpaper (it looks ugly and prevents the walls from breathing; the paste evaporates; it is altogether unnecessary and superfluous), drapes (blinds are sufficient), table service for eight, twelve, or twenty-five people (most often housed in apartments that can hold a maximum of four guests; more than this should be invited to a bar, not one’s home). (Kebo 2000, 92)

The passage not only calls attention to the grave state of affairs in Sarajevo but also rhetorically strips down the setting – a narrative correlate to the systematic way in which Sarajevo, as a modern European capital, is stripped of superfluous (and not-so-superfluous) objects. The book engages with an environment that has been razed and made dangerous by using narrative techniques to describe, understand, navigate, remember, and retell the circumstances and consequences of this destruction. By using the familiar form and rhetoric of a survival guide, while defamiliarizing the subjects and objects treated in this guide, Sarajevo for Beginners establishes a degree of irony that seems to bring devastation and death almost unbearably close to the reader while fundamentally sustaining an uncomfortable ironic distance.

Sarajevo for Beginners as memorial text The fragment that opens the Feral Tribune version of Sarajevo for Beginners, “Something About War in General,” begins by stating simply that “the war began in Sarajevo on the sixth of April, 1992. A landmark day” (Kebo 2000, 11). An earlier version of the piece enjoins its readers to “remember that date” instead of using the phrase “a landmark day” (BH Dani 5/23/1994, 54). Here we can clearly see textual practice intersect with memorial practice. The didactic rhetorical stances of the beginner’s text, field guide, and survival guide are intertwined with the injunction to remember in such a way that they cannot be separated from each other. In order to understand Sarajevo for Beginners, it is crucial to view its generic structure as a mnemonic one. The collection highlights the way in which literature can be both memory-productive and memory-reflexive, and how literary witnessing can prefigure, configure, and refigure – or premediate, mediate, and remediate – memorial practice, and vice versa (Erll 2011, 152– 156; Ricoeur 1984, 1985, 1988).

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In Sarajevo for Beginners, the focus on memory, and in particular memory as a discipline or practice, emerges through the practical genres discussed at length and also helps to explicate the choice of such genres. The text vividly and provocatively claims, the biggest whore of all is human memory. My memories vanish. This is the deceptive process by which our tragedy will be reduced to the limit of what is bearable although we all know that it wasn’t […]. The whole war, everything that we went through, has been condensed into a couple of images: a few grenades, a little hunger, a few art exhibits, some water queues, a handful of massacres, and that’s all. (Kebo 2000, 132)

Memory not only is faulty and deceiving but also generalizes where one might crave specificity. In addition, it threatens to become a passive process in which “we don’t decide what is for forgetting and what is for remembering. The scenes choose us, not we them. Just like the snipers” (Kebo 2000, 72). For this reason, I maintain that textual practice becomes of primary importance for Kebo: not only does writing down serve a basic mnemonic function but also the stylistic and thematic strictures of genre become a way to “choose scenes” in an active sense. The issue of memory is intimately connected with that of time. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of Kebo’s text, and of all texts written during the war, is the near temporal coincidence of witnessed event and its narration.²⁰ The question of literary memorialization becomes equally one of attending to traumas of the recent past, their narrative symbolization in the present, and an awareness of the future in which both the “present” of the textual artifact and the “past” of trauma will be integrated into commemorative practice. The way in which temporality can be imagined, and perspectives on time can be adopted at will, is elucidated well in the following passage. “Every year,” the narrator maintains, “we excused ourselves from one delusion, only to pass into a new one. Our desires became ever more meager, more humble, and more real: 1992: How we’ll get drunk as soon as this is over. 1993: When this passes, how we’ll eat until we’re stuffed. 1994: If this ever lets up, then at least we’ll get a good sleep. 1995: If I get shot, then at least this will stop. (Kebo 2000, 202)

 This tendency complicates theories of traumatic experience and literary representation in which belatedness is foregrounded. Influenced by Sigmund Freud’s conception of Nachträglichkeit, we see this conviction advanced in both Jacques Lacan’s and Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic understandings of trauma, as well as in Cathy Caruth’s work in the field of literary trauma theory.

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On one level, this complicated temporal structuring partakes of the generic demands of the field guide and the beginner’s guide, which often open with brief chronologies. It identifies a characteristic pattern of ordering and positioning oneself in time that is, presumably, shared widely among Sarajevans. It also establishes a strategy for readers to optimally calibrate expectations about the future using the real conditions in wartime Sarajevo. In addition to a chronology of years, Sarajevo for Beginners includes a timeline of a “normal day.” This attempt to present a routine event certainly fits within the genre conventions of both the field guide and survival guide; it serves either to prepare readers for what they might encounter on any given day in Sarajevo or to retroactively view the events they encounter as habitual, normal, and expected. At the same time, it provides some elements of practical advice for someone who finds him or herself in a similar situation. I argue, however, that it also serves a commemorative function because of the particular juxtaposition of these generic conventions. 8:17 – a girl on the bridge, right in the head. 9:00 – the sniper doesn’t stop. The body of the girl is still over there; no one can get to it. 9:30 – grenades all around the Velepekara [bakery]. Anyway, there’s no bread. 10:00 – grenades around the tram stop. Anyway, the trams aren’t running. 10:22 – a boy runs up to the body, the one up above shoots at him twice. The boy ducks behind a container and doesn’t appear again. 10:45 – journalist for the Sunday Telegraph, Con Coughlin, on BBC: “Anyone who went to Sarajevo and saw how the Serbs behave was in favor of military intervention. Such haughtiness can’t be conceived of by anyone who didn’t live through it.” 10:53 – the boy emerges from behind the container, crawls towards the girl, grabs her with his left hand and then, still crawling, pulls her back. A difficult sight: the bloody head hanging, the cries of people watching the scene from their windows as the boy once again disappears behind the container. 11:00 – grenades, grenades, grenades. (Kebo 2000, 43)

The ironic framing of this piece as an “ordinary day” occurs on several levels and influences the particular commemorative work it does. First, the series of events listed are outside the range of “ordinary” prewar experience and, more importantly, recognized as such in Kebo’s prose. This is a portrait of a potentially traumatizing three hours for the wounded (or likely dead) girl, the boy, and the onlookers. However, on another level, the piece’s irony rests in the fact that this scenario is all too “ordinary.” The lack of unique details (names, places, dates) makes the timeline sufficiently abstract that it might apply to any day at all. Moreover, the violence which bitter understatement describes as a “difficult

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sight” has indeed become over months and years of repetition a new kind of “normal.”²¹ A similar “everyday conversation” between the narrator and a young boy, Dino, later in the book, highlights the process of re-normalization. Responding to a question about whether his family is healthy and well, Dino answers, “yes, but my mom died, grandma was killed, dad was wounded in the leg yesterday, and my sister’s in the hospital with jaundice” (Kebo 2000, 161). The documentary stylistics of these pieces illuminate the way in which fragments that are vital to remember must be condensed, selected, and organized in memorial practice. The primary mechanism of such stabilization of experience into memory in Kebo’s text is narrative. However, we also see glimpses where other forms of symbolization are employed. For example, returning to the extensive list of objects that have been rendered unnecessary in the new circumstances of war, we find the following additional items: photos (a hyperproduction of photos; throughout our lives, a thousand of them are produced; roughly a hundred is enough. Actually, fifty. Actually, ten of each family member), souvenirs (what purpose do these have? To prettify the room? They’re usually kitsch. To remind you fondly of some trip you took? This associative dimension is very quickly lost and they take on a new dimension: the non-associative collection of dust. (Kebo 2000, 92)

As has been widely theorized, photography has been instrumental in and fruitful for conceptualizing memory; as a representational medium, photographic conventions and practices exist in a mutually constitutive relationship with acts of memorialization that employ photographs (see Hirsch 1997; Liss 1998; Sutton 2009). Here, however, we see an almost Benjaminian dismissal and distrust of the photograph, at least in large, mass-produced numbers. Photographs can be meaningfully incorporated into memorial practice, the passage asserts, only in small numbers of highly individual photographs. Similarly, souvenirs that might otherwise serve a mnemonic function have lost both their necessity and their capacity to organize memories (see Stewart 2003). Narratively included here in the form of a list that overtly focuses on their (lack of) practical function,

 Countless diaries written during the war attest again and again to the fact that the atrocities suffered on a daily basis in Sarajevo during the war did, in fact, become “normalized.” See, for example, Filipović (), Marjanović (), Softić (). Similarly, literary, autobiographical, and scholarly accounts testified to the importance of actively maintaining a degree of “normalcy” through habit: “Sarajevans survived under siege by adhering to their normal routine and rhythms of everyday life to the greatest possible extent. Social scientists and psychologists have noted that preserving a sense of normalcy is a common response to violence. […] The city in wartime was filled with stories of people taking extraordinary measures to preserve ordinary habits” (Donia , ). See also, Maček (), Rosner, et al. (), and Weine ().

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the surplus photograph and the kitschy souvenir are fitted into a new mnemonic framework: their ekphrastic treatment allows them to participate in an alternative memorial or anti-memorial. Whereas they formerly mediated meaningfully between past and present, in conditions of war their primary use is to collect dust. Neglected photographs and souvenirs serve as indices of how memorial practice has itself been reworked in relation not only to traumatic lived experience but also to its textual emplotment. Thus, the act of specific narrative witness becomes not only one of cultural resistance but also an assertion of literature’s multi-faceted capacity to function mnemonically. In this way, we can view the epigraph at the beginning of Sarajevo for Beginners as doing more than simply establishing expectations for the reader. A chronicle about Sarajevo that encompasses and praises its marvelous history, bitter fate, and bright future, all of which was carefully examined, considered, and set down by one Ozren Kebo from Mostar. Very pleasant reading, in fact, and useful for everyone; read and remember. (Kebo 2000, 7)

While echoing the ironized notion of practicality that I have discussed, we see in this passage a striking intertextual reference to the chronicle written by Mula Mustafa Bašeskija, a famous eighteenth-century Ottoman Bosnian chronicler. The opening statement of Bašeskija’s own chronicle, begun in 1756, reads, “here I will take down and record the dates of events that happened in the city of Sarajevo and in Bosnia’s vilayet because of the following maxim: that what is written down remains, while what is memorized disappears!” (Bašeskija 1997, 68). Kebo not only alludes to an ancient relationship between writing and memory but also develops Bašeskija’s oft-quoted conclusion further. As a chronicle, the mnemonic potential of Sarajevo for Beginners explicitly includes the social and the ethical: a community of readers must read and must remember. Moreover, its mnemonics perpetually and ironically undercuts itself, asserting and doubting in the same breath the utility of writing and reading for that “whore” of human memory, with its caprice and limitations. As a bookend to its evocative epigraph, a “warning to the reader” concludes Sarajevo for Beginners. This warning explicitly links narrative witness, pragmatic genres of literature, and the possibilities and mechanisms for commemoration. The book’s final fragment cautions that “the story about Sarajevo before you

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is at an end. Just a little more […] the fact that we are all injured and there is no cure except in one thing. Everyone has to decide for himself what that thing is, and whether it can help him” (Kebo 2000, 205). The warning forcefully recapitulates the collection’s central hypothesis about the structural similarities and mutual reinforcement of reading, memorialization, and narration while offering a faint hope that these practices might someday heal. Neither Kebo nor his readers know exactly what this fragmentary but potentially restorative “thing” might be, but it certainly is the final and essential object in the survival guide’s list, and Kebo provides his postwar “beginners” ironic directions about how to use it.

References Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. London: Verso, 2005. Originally published as Minima Moralia. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag, 1951. Assmann, Aleida. “Three Stabilizers of Memory: Affect–Symbol–Trauma.” Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures. Ed. Udo Hebel. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. 15 – 30. Bašeskija, Mula Mustafa. Ljetopis: 1746 – 1804. Sarajevo: Sarajevo Publishing, 1997. Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems, 1927 – 1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Elias, Camelia. The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre. Bern: Peter Lang, 2004. Erll, Astrid. “Cultural Memory Studies: an Introduction.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. 1 – 15. Erll, Astrid. “Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory.” Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Erll and Nünning 2008. 389 – 398. Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Originally published as Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2005. Filipović, Zlata. Zlatin dnevnik. Zagreb: Znanje, 1994. Finkielkraut, Alain. “L’imposture Kusturica.” Le Monde (2 June 1995). Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Originally published as Seuils. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987. Hartman, Geoffrey. The Longest Shadow: in the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge: the Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge, 1995. Iordanova, Dina. “Kusturica’s Underground (1995): Historical Allegory or Propaganda?” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19.1 (1999): 69 – 86.

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Kapić, Suada, Miroslav Prstojević, Željko Puljić, Nenad Dogan, Maja Razović, Aleksandra Wagner. Sarajevo Survival Guide. Zagreb: FAMA, 1993. Kazaz, Enver. “Prizori uhodanog užasa.” Sarajevske sveske 5. (1 January 2004): 137 – 165. Kebo, Ozren. “Najebac´emo im se majke kadli tadli.” BH Dani. 16 (10 September 1993): 38 – 39. Kebo, Ozren. Sarajevo za početnike. Split: Feral Tribune, 2000. Kebo, Ozren. “Sarajevo za početnike.” BH Dani. 1994. Lachmann, Renate. Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Originally published as Gedächtnis und Literatur: Intertextualität in der russischen Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990. Levi, Pavle. Disintegration in Frames. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. Liss, Andrea. Trespassing Through the Shadows. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Maček, Ivana. Anthropology in Wartime: Sarajevo Under Siege. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2009. Marjanović, Mirko. Živjeti smrt: sarajevski ratni dnevnik. Zagreb: Hrvatsko slovo, 1996. Markowitz, Fran. Sarajevo: a Bosnian Kaleidoscope. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2010. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Chicago, London: U of Chicago P, 1984, 1985, 1988. Originally published as Temps et récit. Paris: Seuil, 1983, 1984, 1985. Rosner, Rita, Steve Powell, and Willi Butollo. “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Three Years After the Siege of Sarajevo.” Journal of Clinical Psychology 59:1 (2003): 41 – 55. Softić, Elma. Sarajevski dani, sarajevske noći. Zagreb: VBZ, 1994. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Sutton, Damian. The Crystal Image of Time. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Turan, Kenneth. Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Weine, Stevan. When History is a Nightmare: Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Hercegovina. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999. Žižek, Slavoj. “The Poetry of Ethnic Cleansing.” Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997. 60 – 64.

Vladimir Biti

Remembering Nowhere: The Homeland-on-the-Move in the Exile Writing of Saša Stanišić and Ismet Prcic Contrapuntal affiliations Deprived of their homeland and unable to assimilate into their host-land, writers in exile live a doubly estranged life. Two socially, linguistically, and culturally remote environments, equally strange and all but smoothly translatable into one another act in their consciousness in an incessantly contrapuntal fashion (Said 2000, 149). By way of such mutual expropriation, displacement, and disfiguring, two environments force each other into alternative scripts of themselves, which is at once both a traumatic and creative requirement. Exile writing inhabits this borderland of a continuous non-isomorphic translation of the one environment into the other, both as the contested terrain and as a reservoir of inspiration. Inasmuch as exile narratives elude the usual identification procedures of the established literary institutions, they are permanently contested, exposed to mechanisms of exclusion, and bereft of belonging by both environments (Ette 2005, 40). In the face of such exclusion, the only possibility for survival enjoyed by exile writing is ceaseless mobility, as epitomized in the Western tradition in the wandering figure of Ulysses (Ette 2005, 34). He was the first to transform the traumatic transit-space of his escape, by way of various appropriation, translation, and transference operations, into the new homeland-on-the-move. Using their contested terrain as a reservoir of inspiration, exile writers take up and elaborate upon Ulysses’ hard-won survival abilities. The refuge in the host-land enables them to rescue familiar memory archives – endangered back in the homeland by political repression, erasure, or distortion – by smuggling them across borders and transplanting them in foreign soil. Thanks to this maneuver, the traumatic loss that would be ignored and forgotten in the political management of their homeland’s public memory not only survives but is also brought to a subtle expression through the work of meticulous personal recollection (Seyhan 2000, 12), which is how the trauma of domestic contestation and oppression undergoes the therapeutic operation of working through in exile writing. The salvation of confiscated memories from the homeland turns exile writing into a work of commemoration directed against the politically engineered

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naturalizing mechanisms of domestic national history as well as the restrictive collective memory of its writers’ primary communities. However, there is even more at stake in exile writing because writers also mobilize another creative operation to deal with the trauma of enforced assimilation. By importing their native language and culture into the new territory, they challenge, dislocate, and estrange the new language and culture by drawing them into new trans-local solidarities and transnational alliances (Seyhan 2000, 30). This maneuver proves to be especially efficient when the exilic work is composed in the host language, as is the case with authors we will examine below.¹ By unhinging the age-old loyalties and traditions of the host language, writers in exile multiply its sources, re-accentuate its grammar, and expand its meanings as well as refashion and pluralize its experiences and practices. As Ottmar Ette (2005, 193) has inventively put it, they extend, that is, both continue and update the (site of) writing (f:ortschreiben) of the language they deploy. In the final account, in the delineated “double” therapeutic maneuvering of exile literature that systematically links, deregulates, and alters both the home and the host territory – and parallel to that both the past and the present – all its instances present themselves as redoubled and echoed rather than original and singular. That is to say, they come to be unknowingly but inextricably involved with their forerunners: unknowingly because they can discover their forerunners only with a constitutive delay; inextricably because they cannot withdraw the impression that their present has been experienced in the past. Exile writing forces the après coup knowledge and the déjà vu experience to penetrate each other disquietingly.² This is why its instances elude identification

 At the outbreak of the war, Saša Stanišić (), the author of the novel How the Soldier Repairs the Grammophone (; German original ) was in his native Višegrad – the little provincial town at the border of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia made famous in the work of the Yugoslav Nobel Laureate Ivo Andrić. Stanišić was forced to leave his hometown with his family when he was fourteen years old (). His quasi-autobiographic novel reconstructs these traumatic developments in German fourteen years after he settled in his new German homeland. Ismet Prcic (Prcić) (), the author of the novel Shards (), immigrated to America in , flying from the war atmosphere in his North Eastern Bosnian hometown Tuzla at the age of . His quasi-autobiographic reconstruction of these traumatic developments in the novelistic form was composed after fifteen years in his new homeland, the United States, in American English.  By translating the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit [belatedness, posteriority, retroaction] with après coup [after-effect], Lacan points out that the encounter of the present representation with the past reality cannot but be missed. This unavoidable falsification of the past forces the latter’s “real” [le réel] into unrepresentability. Coming from “abroad,” this castrated spectral

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in Euclidian territorial and historical-temporal terms, introducing a fractal spatio-temporal configuration through the consistent mutual infiltration of distinct spaces and times (Ette 2005, 31). From the spatial perspective, the home and the host territory become inextricably interwoven, and in the temporal perspective, the present developments uncover the past and anticipate those of the future (Ette 2005, 196). Because both the space and time of exile writing are captured by such a consistent “vectorization” – every instance of its “de-territorialized territory” and “de-historized time” is driven apart by its contrapuntal affiliations – Ette suggests calling its plural and diverse products “literatures without a fixed abode” (2000, 10; 2005). Indeed, the basic feature of exile is that it makes, for one reason or another, the return to a fixed abode impossible; the departure is “for an unforeseeable time irreversible” (Neubauer 2009, 8). Therefore, it is not only the figures represented by exile writing that are bereft of a fixed abode but also its writers and readers. Because it was only with the Renaissance that exile began to take on massive proportions, the emergence of exile writing is a clearly modern phenomenon (Neubauer 2009, 7). Disowned by the irresistible global processes inherent to “modernity at large” (Appadurai 1996), given the rapid development of media and the growing number of mass migrations (Ette 2005, 34), exile writers and their readers were forced into not only transcendental or intellectual homelessness but also existential homelessness, characterized by political, social, and economic vulnerability. While the gradual establishment of the “state of exception” as the basic political condition of Western modernity fostered mobility on the one hand, it induced huge political, social, and economic asymmetries on the other. The condition of homelessness, traumatizing for writers’ and readers’ lives but at the same time stimulating for the emergence of their new alliances, is thus an outcome of the two parallel processes of homogenization and differentiation of the world population. Along with the traumatic deracination of minds and bodies, this condition induced the creative mobility of the imagination by relegating its operations beyond the restricted local, national, and areal spaces (Appadurai 1996, 33 – 37). In establishing transnational and trans-territorial convergences, solidarities, and public spheres across huge ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences, imagination became the staging ground for the therapeutic activities of both everyday exiles and, in a more critical and elaborated fashion, exile writers. In the twentieth century, it was mobilized more intensely than ever by exiles whose compul-

“real” haunts the present in the form of déjà vu by subverting in such a way its uniqueness and sovereignty.

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sory mass migrations transformed “transcendental homelessness” from the intellectual into the harsh material destiny (Lukács 1963, 35). If Georg Lukács invented the term transcendental homelessness to designate the spiritual condition of the modern novelistic hero in the extraordinary reality of the “age of extremes” (Hobsbawm 1994), then it became the physical condition of many writers and readers as well. Their déjà vu task consisted in transforming their enforced situation of escape, withdrawn from habitual human affairs, into an intensified “prolonged participation” in the world, as Hannah Arendt famously defined the mission of the Weltflucht in all dark times, beginning with antiquity (2001, 18, 38). This spawned a number of far-reaching consequences for the structure of exile literature. The coerced crossing of the political-spatial borders induced the strategic blurring of the historical-temporal ones, too. Concomitantly, the teleological pattern of the historical narrative underwent a rewriting into complex constellations. If the geographical transgression came to be epitomized by Ulysses, its historical counterpart appears to be exemplified by the figure of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, torn apart between the wish to memorize the traumatically unresolved past, on the one hand, and the historical powers pushing him toward the new future, on the other (Ette 2005, 34– 35). According to Nietzsche’s argument in Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben [On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life] (1988, 281– 283), memory comes into play to counteract history and offer an antidote to its doctrinaire rigidity. Unlike history, memory uses the past selectively and creatively, that is, not for the sake of dead eternity but for the ongoing needs of life. Rather than taming the past with the allegedly superior wisdom of the present, memory acts in reverse by releasing the liberating potential of the past to transform that which the present has regrettably come to be. By saving numerous local and personal histories from the present distortion, silence, and oblivion, remembrance opens the vista of their preservation for humankind to come. In advocating a plural as opposed to a monological history, exile writing does not hide memory’s treacherous fictional mechanisms, such as the alliance with willful invention, mistranslation, madness, and daydreaming, but as we will soon see, exile writing openly exposes and challenges memory’s fabulations. By multiplying its voices and subversively trafficking between them, exile writing aims to rewrite the officially instituted cultural heritage and collective memory. This may be why history in Nietzsche’s argument is interpreted as science and memory as art (Seyhan 2000, 34). If the science of history takes possession of the past from the cognitively privileged après coup position, then the art of memory, by using imagination, fantasy, and fiction to interweave the apparently distinct temporalities of the past, present, and future, has “an aptitude

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for always being in the other’s place without possessing it” (De Certeau 1984, 77). The art of memory delves into the polyvocal déjà vu experience of the self that is populated by the voices of the past, thereby providing a counterweight to a monological national history. In its unbounded mobility and combined research activities, the art of memory represents the favorite technique of exile writing that in its “vectorized” imagination consistently inquires into “elsewhere versus the origin, and even nowhere versus the roots” (Kristeva 1991, 29, original emphasis). Such an insistent undermining of the triumphant historical après coup by the commemorating déjà vu makes the homeland of exile writing a displaced, invented landscape situated within a “pathography of contested geographies and genealogies” (Seyhan 2000, 70).

Clashing frames, memories, and hi/stories As Maurice Halbwachs argued as early as 1925, memory operations are bound to family frames. If historical reconstruction is an instrument of institutions of differentiated society, then personal recollection works within the frame of family community. With regard to the shaping of personal memories, no other community can beat the power of the family environment. The community of religious beliefs, increased spatial mobility, and similar social representations are not enough to create the common spirit of a family. […] It is a fact that familial feelings have their own distinct nature, and that external forces can influence them only to the extent that the family consents to such influences. (Halbwachs 1992, 68 [1925, 219 – 220])

However, history does not ask family frames for permission to influence them. Significantly, the narrators of both novels that I will analyze in the following sections, Saša Stanišić’s Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (2006) and Ismet Prcić’s Shards (2011), open their childhood recollection precisely at the moment their families’ internal fabric comes under pressure from external historical forces. Soldat begins on 24 August 1991, just a day before Grandpa Slavko passes away, an event that will profoundly change the life of the fourteen-year-old teenager who acts as the novel’s narrator. Grandpa Slavko, an enthusiastic provincial Communist party official, epitomizes the state ideology of a country that was drawn into an accelerated disintegration upon Tito’s death in 1980. Upon the departure of his adored grandfather – a figure that strategically links the state’s political history with the narrator’s personal memory – the teenager discovers, in an almost daily rhythm of the approaching collapse, the long repressed secrets, tensions, and fissures within both his family and his local community. Starting

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from this traumatic event, political history increasingly challenges his personal memory, invoking a defensive response on the part of that memory. This defensive response comes in the form of the novel’s “screwy” narrative. As a young German author with a bitter experience of exile, Stanišić retroactively takes the point of view of a teenager in the little provincial town at the border of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. Stanišić introduces the world of a naive and playful commuter between diverse personal, social, economic, and political histories. In his peculiar “inferential walks,” staged by the author for the entertainment and consternation of his more experienced reader, the narrator unconcernedly jumps from one level to another. As an outsider, he sees both more and less than insiders, ponders upon social rituals that are habitual and self-evident in the world of adults; he participates where adults prefer to take their distance and observes where they participate. By thus putting on stage, après coup, the child as an unconscious exile in the world of adults, the author seems to be indicating that his subsequent exile was already anticipated, a déjà vu. The judgments the child passes, not exactly fitting well and suitable because of his “exile position,” accordingly acquire a double de-familiarizing function. They not only estrange the way the readers perceive these phenomena but also distance the child from the members of his Orthodox-Muslim family. Hence, even before history cracked the family frame, there was a rift operating in it; the future was actually inscribed in the past in the same way the past is now in the present. Die Toten sind einsamer als wir Lebenden es je sein können. […] Wenn ich sterbe, möchte ich ein Massengrab. (Stanišić 2008a, 25)³ The dead are lonelier than the living ever can be. […] When I die, I’d like to be buried in a mass grave. (2008b, 14) Gastarbeiter sieht man nur in der eigenen Familie gern. (36) Guest workers aren’t welcome anywhere except in their own families. (2008b, 24) Ich bin ein Gemisch. Ich bin ein Halbhalb. Ich bin Jugoslawe – ich zerfalle also. (53) I’m a mixture. I’m half and half (2008b, 41). I’m a Yugoslav – and I am therefore falling apart.⁴ Mach, sehr geehrte Moschee, mach, dass Roter Stern Meister wird. (166) Dear Mosque, let Red Star win the championship. (2008b, 144) [Red Star is the famous soccer team from Belgrade.]

The fascinating history of the global media-scape (Appadurai 1996, 35) that connects personal biographies across the world here runs parallel to the political

 In the following, only the page numbers of the quoted German edition will be parenthesized.  This sentence is missing from Anthea Bell’s translation.

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history of the narrator’s dismembering, multiethnic country, the troubled personal history of his divided Bosniak-Serbian family, and the histories of the equally ethnically mixed school and local communities. Indeed, these histories are closely intertwined and subversively blended into one another. Thus, before the narrator is coerced as a migrant to break into the foreign world, the latter has already coercively broken into his province via aggressive media networks that penetrate every corner of the world. Even if it leaves the impression of the tragic outcome of his life history, exile thus seems to have been inscribed into its very beginning. Media catapulted his youth from its geopolitical locality. As for migrations that connected that world of yesterday in addition to media networks, tourists invaded Višegrad with their motorcycles (176), and an Italian engineer arrived to help construct the dam on the river Drina (188 – 196). Global communities thus penetrated the teenager’s local communities, preparing him for the forthcoming clash between history and the family frame. In the infantile, freely meandering and media-impregnated imagination, for example, the grandfather dies in the tempo of Carl Lewis’s globally broadcasted world record in Tokyo (13) and Great Grandma Mileva’s way of acting and behaving is compared with the famous sheriff played by John Wayne (36). The fall of the Berlin Wall causes the power cut and AIDS in Yugoslavia (174– 175). The discovery of the meteorite in the village of the great-grandparents occurs one hour after the first broadcast of Superman on TV (37); Bruce Lee’s kung fu movies or Muhammed Ali’s fights are ordinary topics of adolescent conversation (58, 89), and the songs of The Doors or Pink Floyd are ordinary topics of their imagination (198); the adults distract themselves, to avert their thought from everyday horrors, by playing computer games or watching soap operas (63, 106, 265). On the one hand, the bands, sporting events, movies, and TV celebrities as well as global historical events populate the teenager’s abundant imagination; on the other hand, we have tragically departed relatives such as the loony Grandpa Rafik (17– 21, 207), local Jews treated horribly because of their “wrong faith” (100 – 102), and tortured animals. Ominous scenes of animal abuse such as the bloody slaughtering of a pig (45 – 47), setting fire to a frog (70), the shooting of a dog (122) and a horse (127), the dismembering of the river fish by the shell explosion (121), or putting pigeons and cats in a neighbor’s apartment (213) anticipate the forthcoming war crimes and violations. Even the river, plagued by the successive war atrocities and for its part in taking many innocent human lives, complains (207– 208). The unbridled operations of adolescent fantasy, extended by numerous invented scenes, dialogues, and scenarios, thus produce a very complex nesting of imaginative appropriations of the commonly available reality, either to de-territorialize the local or to re-territorialize the global one, either to make the past present or the present past.

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This rich imaginative maneuvering, such as the creative response of exiled memory to the traumatic blow of history, justifies the inauguration of the young narrator as “a magician who could make things possible” [Fähigkeitenzauberer] undertaken by his beloved grandpa in the testimonial gesture at the very beginning of the novel. By consistently meeting this testimony, the youngster engages his fantasy to resist the irrevocability of human historical destiny and to compensate for innumerable traumas inflicted by its dictated course. Following the model of other exile writers, such as Ana Castillo in The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), Aysel Özakin in Die blaue Maske (1989) or Emine Sevgi Özdamar in Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei (1992), Stanišić inverts the teleological narrative pattern of the classic Bildungsroman. Instead of taking the reader from the hero’s naive and utopian youth to his reflexive and sober adulthood, he recasts this enlightening progression, reorienting it toward the disjunctive histories of the narrator’s maturation as well as the lives of his fellow beings. As history catches them up by pushing them to give up the traumatically unresolved past, it disables them to put together its scattered parts in a rational fashion. These dissipated shards can only be picked up, juxtaposed, assembled, and reassembled. The Bildungsroman hero and narrator thus becomes a desperate loiterer moving not only between the divergent histories of his maturation, the stories of one or the other grandpa and grandma, his mother and father, various relatives, comrades and neighbors stories, but also between the different narrative perspectives such as those of his schoolmate Zoran (61– 66; 144– 146) and his father Walross (93 – 99), Rabbi Avram (100 – 102), Grandma Katarina (155 – 156; 163 – 164), and the Serbian occupiers (129 – 30). He even gives voice to the mute Grandma Fatima (278 – 279), and the war criminal from his family, Uncle Miki (305), and inserts into the novel the numerous alleged letters and phone messages to the neighborhood Moslem girl, Asija, who ominously disappeared during wartime, the letter of the Italian engineer Franscesco addressed to him (196), as well as his supposed schoolwork for the teacher Fazlagić (171– 173). The story of his Bildung [education, development, formation] thus gradually falls apart in the multiple, disjunctive, and contradictory truths until the sovereign narrative promised to Grandpa Slavko is ultimately replaced by a sheer enumerative composing of lists, the most rudimentary art of memorizing the devastated past. Listing is, after all, a well-established technique of commemorating the traumatically lost past and belongs to the standard repertory of exile writing. As such, catalogues, also available in the earlier parts of the novel, begin to agglomerate: the grandpa’s hat and wand, ceremonially handed over to the “wizard of abilities” at the beginning of the novel, end up in the mud at its end. In the face of the irrecoverable deficits of the undertaken narrative of self-recuper-

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ation that have been discovered in the meantime, nothing can stop the concluding dismemberment of the narrator’s identity constituents: Die Idee habe ich von Nena Fatima, die Stimme von Opa Rafik, das Buch, aus dem ich lese, von Oma, die Adern an den Unterarmen von deinem Sohn, der jetzt Kokosnüsse malt, die Schwermut von meiner Mutter. Mir fehlt alles, um meine Geschichte als einer von uns zu erzählen: Drina’s Mut fehlt mir, die Stimme des Falken, das felsenharte Rückgrat unserer Berge, Walross‘ Unbeirrbarkeit und der Enthusiasmus des ehrlich Vermissenden. […] Du fehlst. Und die Wahrheiten, sie fehlen mir am meisten, solche Wahrheiten, in denen wir nicht mehr Zuhörer oder Erzähler sind, sondern Zugeber und Vergeber. Unser Versprechen, immer weiterzuerzählen, breche ich jetzt. (311) I got the idea from Nena Fatima, the voice from Grandpa Rafik, the book I’m reading from Granny, the veins on my under arms from your son’s upper arms, who is painting coconuts right now, the melancholy from my mother. I don’t have all the things I’d need to tell my story as one of us: I don’t have the courage of the river Drina, the voice of the hawk, the rock-hard backbone of our mountains, the infallibility of Walrus and the enthusiasm of the man who misses, but honorably. […] I miss you. And most of all I miss the truth, the truth in which we are no longer listeners or storytellers, but we give and forgive. Now I’m breaking my promise to you to go on telling stories. (2008b, 275 – 276; translation slightly modified)

The unresolved silence of the past – the speechless River Drina, Grandma Fatima forced into muteness, the desperately missed Asija forever withdrawn into silence, the notoriously taciturn father, the consistently melancholic mother, and the profound silence of the teenager’s exile years – puts the narrative promise of the grandchild to invent untiringly the histories under such pressure that the backward-oriented memory eventually takes the upper hand over the forward-oriented history. The narrative transmission breaks up. If the teenager, raising himself to the Chefgenosse für das Immerweitergehen [comrade in chief of going on and on], still resolutely countered death and other types of interruption and closure of human life by advocating its endless narrative continuation (22– 23), then the adult narrator already calls himself der Chefgenosse des Unfertigen [comrade in chief of the unfinished] who proves incapable of uniting the scattered heritage of his past (298). Nothing of that which had once been done can now be undone; no imagination can repair the damage and atrocities committed (312). This is how the narrator’s maturation concludes. This inverted Bildungsroman-pattern ultimately authorizes Stanišić’s placing of the “fairytale” section “When It Was All Good,” which recalls the early childhood days, at the novel’s middle instead of at its beginning; it also accounts for attributing the authorship of the section to the child Aleksandar Krsmanović instead of to the teenage narrator. The alleged child’s story, its truthfulness already questioned by such retroactive positioning and attribution, is additionally framed by Grandma Katarina’s preface that, from the distance of bitter life ex-

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perience, translates its fairytale title “When It Was All Good” as the retroactive ironic insight “When no one thought nothing was right” (2008b, 142 translation modified; [“als niemand dachte, dass nichts in Ordnung war”] 2008a, 164). The uncanny déjà vu thus haunts and catches up with the triumphant après coup along the Bildungs-axis of not only one human life but also intergenerational transmission. Various generational frames (of the great grandparents, grandparents, parents, and children’), although closely interwoven with one another, are not mutually reinforced or continuous but highly disjunctive. With regard to the successive ontogenetic perspectives that structure the novel, the child’s, the teenager’s, and the adult’s commemorations of the past are equally intermingled yet anything but unanimous. On the contrary, like the other exile writers – and like his former compatriot Aleksandar Hemon – Stanišić is caught in an ambiguous discourse of doubt, conflicting loyalties, and unstoppable guilt; with multiple and discontinuous mediations, his remembrance is polyvocal and split, interlaced with mistranslation and self-invention; his genealogies are displaced and contested. On the one hand, his autobiographical reports renounce the underlying “autobiographical pact” systematically refusing to be taken at their word; on the other hand, his invented stories reject the underlying “fictional contract” and cannot be simply discarded as sheer phantasms. In addition, both emerge in the transit-space of a late-acquired, frequently misinterpreted and mistranslated German language that is strategically made queer and “spoiled” by the mother tongue’s phrases, expressions, and idioms.⁵ In summary, by triggering enriching, confusing, and disfiguring mutual exchanges, this subversive mixing of diverse spatial and temporal registers combined with the two distant languages creates a sort of hybrid Niemands- and Nirgendland (Ette 2005, 241), a nowhere which is the only homeland this novel is capable of inhabiting. In the final scene, strongly reminiscent of Benjamin’s angel of history, who is prevented in his attempt to save the traumatically devastated past by the powerful wind of historical progress that spans his wings, the great-grandpa is unable to stop the rising wind that lifts even a wet sheet and forcefully blows it away. The scrambled past ─ Benjamin’s “heap of ruins” ─ suddenly summons the narrator. It rings inside his cell phone, filling his ear with “two million” departed voices. A terrible Geräuschlandschaft [noise-landscape] thus emerges in the communication between the past and present in which Asija’s phantom voice some-

 See, for example, the schoolboy confusing the town name Essen with the nominal word Essen meaning food in the school essay on the topic “Essen, I like you” (a, ); see also, “jooj, lauter, zacka-zacka-zacka-za! […] zwei Schritte rechts, einer links, jooj!” (a, ).

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how seems to be enmeshed, as if urging Aleksandar to provide an appropriate narrative redemption for her inconsolable disappearance (312– 313). Now grown up, he is indeed back home – a German exile on a research trip to Višegrad designed to aid the completion of his novel-in-progress – and he gladly expresses his readiness to take up the mission. However, in an irresistible redoubling of the traumatic past, lying in the river Drina like his loony grandpa Rafik or numerous other corpses thrown into it during the wartime, he appears to be violently and unwillingly taken away by its stream. Aleksandar?, sagt die Frauenstimme, und es ist ein Fluss, in dem ich liege, meine eigene Regen-Drina habe ich bekommen, und ich sage: ich bin ja hier. (2008a, 313) Aleksandar? says the woman’s voice, and it’s a river I am lying in, I have my own rainy river Drina now, and I say: yes, I’m here. (2008b, 345)

This is certainly a response, but by acting out the traumatic past and being drawn into its unstoppable erasure, would the narrator prove capable of properly meeting the therapeutic promise given to it?

Intersected fissures and bifurcations Ismet Prcić’s Shards is also a novel that commemorates an adolescence ruined by loss. Like Stanišić’s Soldat, Shards deconstructs the traditional Bildungsroman pattern; it collects, selects, and combines its fragments by repackaging them into a new “fractal” narrative. By tightly interweaving the trajectories of the figures represented with those of the narrator and author, though never identifying them with one another, the autobiographically rewritten novelistic fiction preserves the memory of a life ruptured in multiple ways and allows its polyphony to be articulated. Prcić’s novel demonstrates a consistent parallel appropriation of the strange and the estrangement of the familiar well beyond its pure linguistic level. The heterogeneous voices located inside, at the margins, and outside the text’s world merge their different times and spaces into one another, establishing connections and alliances by introducing a kind of friction located between diction and fiction (Ette 2005, 189). Two languages and cultures, one the major Occidental and one the minor Oriental, permanently infiltrate each other in inducing, as they notoriously did in Stanišić’s Soldat, permanent misunderstandings, hybrid constructions, displacements, and violations. In a kind of countermove to this overlapping of agencies, times, spaces, languages, and cultures, Shards mobilizes their continuous fissuring, doubling, diffusion, and multiplications.

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The novel opens with two quotations, which primarily reflect the OccidentalOriental poles of the author’s identity as well as introduce other important aspects of the novel. The first quotation is Hamlet’s famous directions to a group of actors enlisted to stage The Murder of Gonzago for the Danish king, Claudius. Hamlet expects them to confront the king, through their performance, with the public reflection of his secretly committed crime. This revealing mission of the performance underlies his advice to the actors “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image […].” The task of art, therefore, does not consist in reflecting nature’s generally available face but her hidden one, which counters her deceitful self-presentation. However, because the essence of acting is deception, how can one fiction dismantle the other? This is the central paradox of a novel that never tires of denouncing the deceptive character of its techniques. The novelistic hero himself is significantly an actor; moreover, as its narrator confesses, “I’d been an actor since I was six because I knew how to play parts and keep the illusion going, how to get into different characters” (Prcic 2011, 146 – 147).⁶ Hence, he is a cheat and performer beyond the stage as well (35 – 36). In knowing that the novel’s author has worked in theater for a long time, his reader will be close to assuming that developing “many roles to pacify the people around me” (147), as the narrator describes the hero’s deceitful behavior in everyday reality, pertains to the author’s writing as well. In short, Prcic, in his autobiographical rewriting of the Bildungsroman pattern, extends the strong predilection of its hero for the theater, as established in Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, to the agencies of the narrator and author, too. This maneuver challenges the narrator’s and author’s cognitively privileged après coup attitude toward the hero by drawing them into the latter’s delusions in lieu of letting them comfortably dismantle them. The narrator’s and author’s conclusions are likewise ceaselessly uncovered as delusions, which is how in this novel the uncanny déjà vu experience frames the sovereignty of the après coup attitude. Nobody can escape being captured by the past. To prevent such an erosion of the author’s claim to truth that would endanger the commemorating mission of his novel, Prcic counteracts the first quotation, a vision of the verisimilitude of art representative of the triumphant Occidental culture, with the second quotation, an alternative vision of art’s mission as a representative of the subordinated Oriental culture. The much less wellknown Arab poet Saadi Youssef (his obscurity aptly reflects the power asym-

 In the following only the page numbers of the quoted novel edition will be parenthesized.

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metry between the occidental United States and the oriental Bosnia and Herzegovina) instructs in his verses the poet, who is obviously living in the postapocalypse world devastated by faceless forces (“Who broke these mirrors […]”), to pick up the tossed shards and fit them together “any way he likes.” The objective is “preserving the memory of the branch,” which on given circumstances served as the refuge for scattered shards and not the memory of nature as a whole as in Shakespeare. On the first impression, this advice is reminiscent of Benjamin’s advice to the translator, namely to treat both the source and the target language as shards of the one and the same but lost original tongue (1977, 59). The translator’s task consists not in likening one language to the other but in matching them together in order to recall the lost whole of which they were once constituent parts. Youssef seems to confirm Benjamin’s principal thesis that the mirror has definitely exploded in sentencing us to our native tongues as its disfigured shards. However, for Youssef the task of the poet’s patchwork consists not in commemorating the exploded mirror’s whole – in this regard Benjamin is still indebted to Hamlet’s presumption of the common homeland for all people – but the branch that offered a refuge to the scattered shards. From the outset, the world consists of many interconnected but irreconcilable mirrors (or civilizations) and shards (or languages). It does not offer one homeland for all people but various, more or less hospitable environments or refuges. Once the poet is catapulted out of the environment he was accidentally born into, and this happens all the time due to the forces that transcend individual lives, Youssef advises him to assemble the shards of his inherited “identity package” available in the environment in which he arrived. As the poet thus fights for survival in the foreign language and culture instead of conquering them, his task appears to be selftherapy rather than domination. Hamlet’s taking into possession the one common homeland for all people is thus replaced by the establishment of the remedial homelands-on-the-move in the foreign territory. In engaging this subordinate Oriental understanding of art against its sovereign Occidental understanding, Prcic enables the Oriental plural homelands to deploy the shards of the Occidental unitary homeland. However, if shards are to be matched together on such an experimental basis, the representative identity “mirrors” of the Bildungsroman, such as the hero’s formation, the teleological plot, the author’s educational sovereignty or the genre’s all-uniting capacity, must first be completely broken up. After undergoing such a consistent decomposition, they turn into the scattered shards, allowing the author to collect and assemble them “any way he likes” or finds appropriate under given circumstances: “There is no one solution. Everything is up for interpretation” (36). Therefore, only the collapse of Hamlet’s vision of art makes it possible for Youssef’s

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poetics to come into being. By sharing the same divided world, the master’s and the slave’s idea of art cannot be but dependent on each other. Radical dismemberment and perturbation of both the novelistic plot and hero commence with the very first page. The first “chapter” is an “excerpt from notebook one: the escape by Ismet Prcić,” a shard that appears almost two hundred pages into the novel even though it is implicitly present within the whole story (195 – 196). The notebook itself, which hosts this story, comes into being as the hero’s memoir therapy ordered by his American shrink (22, 145, 333); the Bosnian patient cannot stop drinking, takes sedatives, and suffers from the fear of going insane (76). It is in this seriously disordered “American” condition that the hero composes his notebook and diary entries that gradually transform him into the narrator of this novel. No wonder the shards the narrator leaves behind must be matched together by the reader’s tentative back-and-forth routes. As if this enforced miming of the author’s loitering identity patchwork is not baffling enough, Prcic decides to confuse his reader further. The excerpt addressed above, introduced by the redoubled author’s name “Ismet Prcić,” deals with the first war training of Mustafa, the hero’s principal doppelgänger. Unlike the hero, who speaks about himself in the first person, Mustafa is, in the subsequent scattered chapters, rotationally presented mostly from the third-person perspective. Why is this alter ego so important that this quasi-autobiographical novel, obsessively focused on the author’s systematically fissuring self, opens with him of all people? Is it because he is destined to stay in his endangered country while the hero abandons it? The hero certainly has more than enough undesired doubles to cope with, even without Mustafa. First of all, his exile life trajectory turns out to be redoubling the enforced route of his ancestors: Two other Prcićs made this journey before me. There was my granduncle Bego, who fled the Nazi invasion via Paris, settled in an apartment in Flushing Meadows, and died there, alone. And there was my uncle Irfan, who fled the Communists in 1969, ended up in California, and twenty-six years later invited me to live with him. (17)

Then, his unpleasant experience with the dogs proves to be iterative, too (153). The Serbian siege of his native town Tuzla during the Bosnian war repeats the former serpent-like wall around Tuzla as well as the following grip of Omar Paša Latas’ invading army (161). Not only personal but also collective history is involuntarily caught up by the past. Then, in the countermovement of breaking with the past, the narrator represents the hero from a spatial, temporal, and cultural distance and refers to the author “Ismet Prcić” as if this is somebody else (1, 40, 76, 112,

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115, 144, 235, 262, 270, 313, etc.). In such a way, the novelistic hyphenation substitutes for the autobiographic identity between the author, narrator, and hero. Along the family line, the hero’s acting and poetic predilections (21), as well as insanity, redouble his mother’s inclinations (44, 72, 77, 120, 341– 342, 348), and his inappropriate sense of humor redouble those of his father (49 – 50, 116). Even his father’s figure is multiplicitous: “I look at Father. Who the fuck is this guy (94)?” This estrangement is not without good reason – at age six, he receives an anonymous telephone call: “Little boy, Dr. Stefan Tadić is your daddy” (29). Because of the father’s terrible indecisiveness (45), he finds a substitute father, the determined Asmir, the leader of his theater group in Tuzla (96 – 111). Furthermore, because his brother Mehmed is a pale and insignificant figure in his life, he finds the substitute brother Mustafa. As for the love affairs, the youngster is continuously split between his mother, who wants him back, and his American girlfriend, Melissa. Even Melissa is split into Asja, his first Bosnian girlfriend, and Allison, his second Scottish girlfriend, resulting in three overlapping temporal levels he proves unable to keep clearly apart (245, 270). As for the central axis of the Bildungsroman, his identity formation is irrecoverably fissured into the Bosnian (Ismet) and American part (Izzy), driven apart between Tuzla and California, war and peace (112– 113, 239), in the same way as he is constantly divided between his childhood and adulthood (27, 118, 146 – 147), apparent opposites that incessantly interfere with and infiltrate each other but nonetheless allow for no remedial reconciliation. I have two minds of everything. Side A(merican), and side B(osnian). (41) Back in the USA, mati. Exit Ismet, enter Izzy. You have no idea how good it feels to be another. (132) I had that werewolf feeling again, all day today, like I wasn’t the only one in my body or my mind. (287)

Last but not least, his language persistently oscillates between Bosnian SerboCroatian and American-Scottish English, which causes numerous misunderstandings and distortions between his present and the past, the one and the other culture. I’m sorre, but’ could you say yer name again, please?” she asked. “Ismet.” “Izz-matt,” she said. Boro scoffed. “Ssss,” I said. “Izmet with the zed means, uh… shit of cow in my country.” (243)

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In the final account, as in the case of Benjamin’s angel of history, the strong fascination with the past self gives way to the compulsion of moving this self toward the future, whatever the price: Something was missing. I slowed down and turned around, and there I saw myself standing in front of the bank, unable to move, unable to catch up to me, as though there were an invisible barrier separating two possible futures that only a certain percentage of me could pass through. I wanted to stop and go back, but my own feet kept moving. (191)

Unable to bridge up the cleavage between his compulsions, the narrator addresses his self in jumping back-and-forth from the first to the third person: I was looking down. At another Ismet. […] My passport was in the front left pocket of his Levi’s jacket. […] My name was Ismet. He reached inside. (259)

The pushing of the doppelgänger Mustafa to the forefront of this novel, “a random fucking guy who begged to be in the special forces” (169), is the peak of the delineated systematic undoing of the Bildungsroman’s identity formation. No recuperation of the self is possible. In lieu of inhabiting one and the same homeland, our dispersed selves establish occasional and revocable homelands-onthe-move. Immediately after the chapter with the anonymous phone call telling the sixyear-old Ismet that his father is actually a physician – and in the concluding chapter his mother announces she will tell him in person the truth she was unable of confessing in the letter (390) – a short chapter is inserted. It depicts the small Mustafa conversing with a physician, his mother’s friend from work (Ismet’s mother was likewise a nurse), though he was told not to disturb his mother and her guest who were, as he noticed, delicately touching each other under the table. The guest speaks with his mother about the children of physicians and addresses him as “son.” We do not learn his name. Is it possible that Mustafa and Ismet have different mothers but the same father with whom both mothers have “sinned?” Whatever the case, and the reader never really finds out, the mother raises Mustafa strictly adhering to his father’s family’s extremely rigorous code (93). Haunted by numerous traumatic experiences, this family is full of lunatics. “Nalićs are crazy (169)!” Mustafa’s first girlfriend is likewise a lunatic who almost kills him for no reason; he accidentally saves his life with the aid of “the total absence of him from himself” (134). This consciousness of not belonging to the present (136), very reminiscent of Ismet’s, follows him via the draft (136 – 143) into the war in which he happens to escape death again by pure chance (200). Like Ismet, he is perpetually outside himself “like he was watching himself doing things on tape” (215), like “he was not there” (216).

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Beyond these intersections, there are confusing role exchanges between the two. At the recruitment, Mustafa, whose body is described as pale and tubercular, meets a frightened broad-shouldered giant with a full beard and dupes him, by farting and jesting with the nurse and commissioners until he is punished for that with an assignment to the special forces; he lies that he is brilliant at mathematics (142). Ismet repeats the same lie at his own draft (148) when he meets the same big man who behaves like Mustafa: he “kept ridiculing them, pushing their buttons, farting, and finally he pissed one of the brass, who assigned him to the unit with an average life expectancy of about a week” (164). Encountered for the second time as the killer of the dog Archibald (164), this full-bearded mountain of a man turns out to indeed be Mustafa, since Ismet sees his picture reproduced on the grave that reads “Mustafa Nalić, 1977– 1995 (168)” and cannot stop dreaming about him from that point on. Even the host of the Nalić brothers, refugees from the country, confirms Mustafa is a big guy with a beard (180). Now, is Mustafa tubercular or broad-shouldered, a frightened country boy or a relaxed jester and killer, did he meet the giant at his draft or is he the giant himself met at the draft by Ismet? Both drafts, interestingly enough, turn out to have taken place on the same day (181). Furthermore, the question is whether or not Mustafa is dead at all because the landlord of the Nalićs claims Mustafa’s brother is dead, not Mustafa (181), and thereafter Ismet runs into him in Edinburgh (255). However, it is also possible, of course, that Mustafa is Ismet’s growingly obsessive projection – “I saw him everywhere” (168) – and his shards “pieced together like a puzzle” (169). This phantom figure might have been derived from an accidental meeting with the seriously injured Bosnian soldier in 1997 in Thousand Oaks that powerfully sets in motion Ismet’s guilty consciousness (349). Emerging from a deep remorse, his destiny’s shape follows the inventor’s wishful thinking: Why did Mustafa put his own picture on his brother’s grave? I think I wanted him to be alive. The picture was Mustafa’s scam to not have to fight anymore, to run away, pull off a disappearing act, start anew, live some of my life. (337)

Not only does Mustafa live Ismet’s life (271, 368 – 369) but also vice versa. Ismet sees himself crawling through a sticky minefield (323) or experiencing a cataclysmic night on the frontline (329) with the Claw, who was Mustafa’s war commander. The substitution of two identities becomes inextricable when the narrator remarks that Mustafa “kept seeing scenes from someone else’s life intermixed with his own, confusing him: two mothers, two fathers,” although this obviously holds true for himself (205). As a repeatedly displaced substitute, Mustafa escapes historical verification, turning into an epitome of cheating memory.

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Doomed to the après coup, memory disfigures, fictionalizes, and redoubles the past. The memoir cannot be anything but fake (133) because memory, by blending events, times, and spaces into one another (119) and “marinating” the “perished moments” in “brain chemicals” (127), is an unreliable witness indeed. One of the inserted metafictional commentaries reads: Tapes record reality. Minds record fiction. My mind was never one for remembering things right. Too much fantasy. Too much muggy past. Too many daydreams. (119)

Therefore, it is not only by moving from history to memory that the après coup insights are undermined by the déjà vu experiences but also the other way around. The failure of the resumption of the public by the private and vice versa, exemplified throughout the novel, peaks in the doppelgänger figure of Mustafa. Jean Paul invented this concept in 1796, after all, precisely to dismantle the idealistic Bildungsroman of human life by introducing instead a decentered subject (Vardoulakis 2010). After the completion of decentering, scattered shards of the novel’s Bildungsroman agency are handed over to the recipient’s piecingtogether activity (375). Urged to continue with the narrator’s assembling of shards, the reader is ironically allowed to proceed “as he likes.” “There is no more narrative to conjure up and make it make sense and hide behind. Now there’s just the mess of life” (339). No other authority than the risky imagination is capable of commanding the dismembered homeland(s) of today’s world. 1. Fill in the blank: The third presence is

? (378)

Remembering nowhere Both Stanišić’s and Prcić’s novel thus leave their readers with the impression that the disquieting nowhere is not only the birthplace but also the destination of their operations of remembering. There is no-thing waiting at the end of the journey, no terra firma that would soothe the restlessness. In both spatial and temporal terms homeland turns out to be something missing, displaced into elsewhere. It is beyond the reach of recollection put in narrative terms. The homeland, in other words, remains open to remembering only if the narrative abandons its ambition to reestablish the (self‐)possession of its author, narrator, figures, and readers at the end of its trajectory. Rather than aiming at a (re)possession, the exile writing’s remembering of the homeland-as-nowhere enables its authors, narrators, figures, and readers to continuously dispossess their

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selves, to come to terms with their injuries by getting rid of the devastating illusion of sovereignty. Exile writing renders homeland not as something to be possessed but as something that one is always dispossessed of anew. Homeland-onthe-move does not close up but reopens our self toward its exiled others.

References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Arendt, Hannah. “Gedanken zu Lessing.” Menschen in finsteren Zeiten. Ed. Ursula Ludz. München-Zürich: Piper, 2001. 17 – 48. Benjamin, Walter. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.” Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1977. 50 – 62. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Ette, Ottmar. Literatur in Bewegung: Raum und Dynamik grenzüberschreitenden Schreibens in Europa und Amerika. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2000. Ette, Ottmar. ZwischenWeltenSchreiben: Literaturen ohne festen Wohnsitz. Berlin: Kadmos, 2005. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Trans. Lewis E. Coser. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Halbwachs, Maurice. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1925. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914 – 1991. London and New York: Vintage, 1994. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Lukács, Georg. Die Theorie des Romans. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963. Neubauer, John. “Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century.” The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium. Ed. John Neubauer and Borbála Zsuzsana Török. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. 4 – 103. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben.” Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen II. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden. Vol. 1. Ed. Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari. München: dtv, 1988. 243 – 334. Prcic, Ismet. Shards. New York: Black Cat, 2011. Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile.” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 2000. 137 – 149. Seyhan, Azade. Writing outside the Nation. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2000. Stanišić, Saša. Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert. München: btb, 2008a. Stanišić, Saša. How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. Trans. Anthea Bell. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2008b. Vardoulakis, Dimitris. The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy. New York: Fordham UP, 2010.

Sanja Potkonjak and Tomislav Pletenac

The Art and Craft of Memory: Re-Memorialization Practices in Post-Socialist Croatia Crafting the un-memorable and the invisible It is more arduous to honor the memory of anonymous beings than that of the renowned. The construction of history is consecrated to the memory of the nameless. (Walter Benjamin, Memorial)

We preface our analysis of intense re-memorialization in a “non-academic” context in present day Croatia with the epitaph taken from Walter Benjamin’s memorial (see Rigney 2004, 363). This thought can be found at the beginning of resistance to the heroic conception of memorial practices. It also evokes memories and calls upon persons, places, and events that did not survive transitional rememorialization in Croatia while pointing to the construction of new sites of remembrance. The transitional period in Croatia is marked both by a revaluation of the heroic personalities of Yugoslav socialism and by a new victorious commemorative undertaking to consolidate the national community around new (memorial) values and “fundamental myths” (see Habermas 2006). In his account of memorial reconstruction that followed the demise of Yugoslavia, Holm Sundhaussen underscores this change in political and memorial dynamics in post-socialist Croatia. Sundhaussen discerns that by “the end of the 1980s, not only was Yugoslavia dead, but also the ‘collective’ memory of WWII. Yugoslav ‘memory’ was broken into a series of national ‘memories’” (Sundhaussen 2006, 259). Moreover, he shows that the creation of new national memories was preceded by a “post-Yugoslav fall of heroes” (Sundhaussen 2006, 259). This “fall” of socialism’s heroic figures has in turn created a space for the workings of what we term “the un-memorable.” By “the un-memorable,” we refer to the tangled web of forgetting and denial that has engulfed what was left of socialist memorial structures to fog their recognition and intelligibility. Following the loss of the socialist heroic habitus, we address the ways in which socialist heroes and certain sites of mass atrocities disappeared during the revaluation of collective memory in Croatia. Specifically, we focus on the efforts of two Croatian contemporary artists to evoke the lost “shared memory” of not only “anti-fascist heroes,” formerly

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shared traumas of the Second World War, but also of contemporary sites of collective trauma related to the War of Croatian Independence (Rigney 2004, 366).¹ We are interested in the potential of new media artists to access collective practices of remembering as socially engaged acts of repairing and repatriating cultural memory. As individual interpolations into the collective imaginary, two art projects, a performative project by the Croatian artist Siniša Labrović, Bandaging the Wounded [Zavijanje ranjenika], from 2000, and Sandra Vitaljić’s photographic series Infertile Grounds [Neplodna tla] from 2009, attempt to answer the same questions: How can one remember in the collective? What is the place of the personal within the collective? How is contemporary art connected to political activism? And can the art of memory be understood as a civic action of a non-academic historian? Marianne Hirsch (2008, 107) posits that these types of artistic projects represent a form of work on inherited memories. They simultaneously represent the rebellion against the violent emptying of collective imagery and against the memorial vacuum into which we are drawn as indirect inheritors of the shared assumptions about our own history. These projects began with the same sense of wonder and with a similar question as the one that Orwell’s character Winston Smith asks in 1984: “For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn” (Orwell 2013, 9). Thus, these projects not only address the past but also turn to the present and future. This is why the memorial turn is not a process directed towards the narration of trauma for trauma’s sake but a complicated process of parallactic viewing of one’s own community in the present, on the one hand, and a commentary on the future of a community that is not ready to work through its traumatic wounds, on the other. We begin with Labrović’s performance in Sinj, which we have already written about in the context of spatial memory (Potkonjak and Pletenac 2011). In this paper, we will expand on this thesis and contextualize it along with Vitaljić’s newer art project Infertile Grounds, which also focuses on the remembering and working through historical traumas, the widespread forgetting of antifascism as well as the traumatic sources of collective memory in general. In our analysis of Vitaljić’s photographic series, we focus on the mediation of memory, the struggle against forgetting the Second World War’s sites of mass atrocities as well as more recent traumatic sites marked by the repercussions of the 1990s war  By shared memories, Rigney understands those memorial practices that are publicly conducted and communicated within the same or across different generations (Rigney , ). Basically, shared memories link members of a community through memorial practice, which bridges the past and the present.

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in the former Yugoslavia. We will focus on the impossibility of mediating trauma, the failure of speech and image to represent a traumatic inheritance, an ongoing process that we describe using the concept of un-memorable, which tries to capture what is not easy to remember. It also brings to the forefront the problems in engaging with memory that arise with the passing of time. By drawing attention to how historical figures and events tend to become lost and forgotten, the unmemorable describes a process as well as a product of collective failure to sustain a common ground for memory without substantial aid from a supportive community. In both art projects discussed here, collectively and generationally “received memory” represents the effects of postmemory although it is “distinct from [the] recall of contemporary witnesses and participants” (Hirsch 2008, 106). It “describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before” (Hirsch 2008, 106). By working through and evoking the afterlife of historical trauma in the present, Labrović’s and Vitaljić’s art projects show that “[hi]story is an object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by here-and-now [Jetztzeit]” (Benjamin [1940] 2001). This is why the crafting of memory and the art of recollecting the un-memorable, which are the focus of this text, denote “an activity, a performance taking place in the here and now of those doing the recalling” (Rigney 2005, 17).

Postmemory and the afterlife of memorials Communities of those who remember, just like memory itself, are bound by time. Memory comes alive through group communication and through commemorative solidarity formed around traumatic experiences and historically memorable events (Rigney 2005, 12). It persists in various ways: through transgenerational transmission, in traces, in texts (Rigney 2005, 12), in “postmemory” practices by way of inherited narratives (Hirsch 2008) or through public art. Evoked memory resists the complimentary and inherent process of forgetting described by the binary paradigm of “plenitude and loss” (Rigney 2005, 13). This paradigm refers to the processual nature of memory, implying that memory advances from former fullness to subsequent fading. In this view, memory is a process that starts with commemoration and ends in absolute forgetting. Memory studies scholars point out that the work of memory is permeated by the work of forgetting (Connerton 2008). Whereas we can observe the work of forgetting purely in its negative aspects that deprive the agents of collective memory of a cultural framework in their everyday life, according to Paul Connerton, for-

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getting must not always be necessarily destructive. Asserting that forgetting has often been induced by political strategies and repressive acts of memory erasure, Connerton aims to show that the work of forgetting traumatic events is sometimes crucial for the rehabilitation of a community (2008, 60 – 63). Connerton’s taxonomy of forgetting, however, is not one of therapeutic models of living with trauma in conflict and post-conflict societies. In such communities, memory in both its collective and individual manifestations seeks expression in the public sphere even when it does not conform to the dominant frameworks of cultural memory. The projects of the two Croatian artists presented in this paper show that public memory policies in Croatia have induced forgetting, that is, that they have failed to integrate certain historical traumas and to establish a historically sensitive hierarchy of traumatic inheritances; they show that public policies have failed to do anything more than to reconstitute a particular politics of remembrance. In this paper, we discuss the need to rehabilitate memory as a tool for the universal understanding of human suffering and not as a particular act, the goal of which is to politically unify a community around the most recent instance of historical suffering. Such a politics of memory precludes other historical traumas and projects the exclusivity of a specific community’s trauma into the present and future. The concept of the un-memorable that we employ here to describe the process of forgetting, using the example of recent artistic interventions into anti-fascist memorials or sites of recent historical trauma, encompasses two aspects of memorial practices. On the one hand, this concept presupposes that memory situates the individual within the collective, and on the other hand, it presupposes that the proscription of certain memories and the erasure of others is part of a political process through which communities are constituted anew. Such a process is particularly visible after violent conflicts and during great political upheavals, for example during and after the fall of communist and socialist political projects in Eastern Europe and the subsequent creation of new and “more democratic” national spaces. The concept of the un-memorable, therefore, describes the dynamics of the politics of forgetting. It looks at how two individual artists claim their right to remember and challenge invisibility and forgetting in the collective memory arena. Maurice Halbwachs (1992) has already highlighted that the group that remembers determines the content of collective memory. Halbwachs’s classic work on collective memory claims that in the process of remembering it is important to attach the individual to the group and to the social framework in which remembering takes place:

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To be sure, everyone has a capacity for memory [mémoire] that is unlike that of anyone else, given the variety of temperaments and life circumstances. But individual memory is nevertheless a part or an aspect of group memory, since each impression and each fact, even if it apparently concerns a particular person exclusively, leaves a lasting memory only to the extent it is connected with the thoughts that come to us from the social milieu. (1992, 53)

Following this argument, it seems that the erasure of certain collective practices of remembering endangers an individual’s memorial capacity and puts him or her into an antagonistic and subordinate position vis-à-vis the dominant community. The art practices presented here address those dominant communities that were highly traumatized by the experiences of the recent war and human losses. These newly “created” communities were formed around new national projects, through the processes of selective remembering and the political manipulation of collective memory; they no longer address but repress and negatively revaluate cultural memory of anti-fascism while valorizing and privileging the traumas of the War for Croatian Independence. The story of memorialization that Connerton pejoratively calls an “orgy of monumentalization” (2008, 69) can therefore be interpreted also as an orgy of forgetting, which takes place due to the lack of solidarity and empathy for the trauma of others. Rigney has shown that “monuments retain their value as agents of ‘working’ memory only as long as their significance is kept alive by the recycling of stories and commemorative events” (2005, 21). Therefore, memorialization does not automatically ensure the continuity of collective memory because collective memory is not a linear and continuous process in which eternity is guaranteed by a single event of memorial consolidation. Collective memory is, in fact, produced anew by a “desire to remember” (Rigney 2005, 21). The desire to remember, however, seeks out protagonists, media of transmission, and memorial consensus around the significance of the person or the event that is being memorialized. It represents a willingness to recognize the significant kernel of the traumatic in the historical site, event or person. “The afterlife of a memorial” is in this way connected to its ability to communicate with and unify an intergenerational public through its universal or particular values. In other words, “the afterlife of a memorial” consists of practices that the second generation uses to work through – within a different temporality of the aftermath – traumatic events or a historical period in which the memorialization process had already been completed. Although completed, re-memorialization and the related phenomenon of postmemory explain why the “powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (Hirsch 2008, 103). Removed from the generation of immediate witnesses, the memorials and memorial sites pre-

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sented here try to access the “acts of violence in the past” as starting points of working through the individual’s relation towards traumatic sites of specific communities (Rigney 2012, 255).

The un-memorable: Siniša Labrović’s Bandaging the Wounded In 1999, when I came back [to Sinj] […]. It was as if there never was […]. There never was anything … (Siniša Labrović, 2010).

When Labrović’s project was performed over a decade ago, its purpose was to mark the collective deficit of historical memory at a specific point in time. A statement from his interview, which we quoted above, in fact shows that Labrović situates himself within the dynamics of collective forgetting.² With these words, Labrović related that his project originated with a feeling that something is wrong with collective memory, that it is going through a process of revaluation in which a large portion of memorial content is being forgotten. His aim was to show the “troubling” present in which the capacity for recollection has been lost and in which the “social framework for memory” appears to be broken under the altered group dynamics of recollection (see Halbwachs 1992, 38). The social framework for memory helps “to situate the recollections of some in relation to those of others” (Halbwachs 1992, 39). Precisely in the loss of this “collective framework of memory,” Labrović finds a reason to intervene personally and engage artistically in the undoing of forgetting. This is particularly important in the context of the collective memorial imagination, which is a starting point for any social practice of memorialization. Labrović’s project can be contextualized through other attempts to valorize socialist memorial heritage and to record the destruction of antifascist memorials in Croatia. The first significant attempt to showcase the monuments and memorials dedicated to the workers’ movement and the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle (NOB) was undertaken by the Association of Croatian Antifascist fighters in a 2002 book, The Demolition of Antifascist Monuments in Croatia, 1990 – 2000. As a register of memorials and acts of memorial destruction, this book records the effect of violent de-memorialization during and after the War for Croatian Inde-

 The interview was conducted in Zagreb on  April . The topic of the interview was the art project Bandaging the Wounded that took place in Sinj on  June in the area of Đardin, the location of the WWII ossuary and a monument sculpted by Ivan Mirković.

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pendence. Along similar lines, newer studies, like the one by Gal Kirn (2012), also try to deepen the understanding of post-Yugoslav politics of memory. Kirn (2012, 253) speaks of the “management of monuments” and points to the process of “revisionist aestheticizing” as a dominant paradigm of nationalistic memorialization projects in post-socialist Yugoslav countries. Lana Lovrenčić, Tihana Pupovac, and Rebecca MacKay, concurrently with Kirn, recently curated an archivalart project “Monuments in Transition: The Destruction of NOB Partisan Monuments in Croatia,” which was exhibited in Galerija Nova in Zagreb in 2012.³ Using archival data and “before and after” visuals, the project asks the viewers to confront the images and effects of destruction directed at the monuments and sites commemorating Peoples’ Liberation Struggle (1940 – 1945) in Yugoslavia. With his socially engaged performance that predates most of these projects, Labrović was one of the first to “challenge dominant regimes of memory by creating spaces that revisit social relations and imagine new possibilities” (Till 2008, 104). Labrović starts the process of re-memorialization by highlighting the danger of not only aggressive and destructive but also tacit forms of forgetting through which communities enter into collaboration with the dominant regimes, in which humanistic messages contained in the memorials that thematize the trauma of the Second World War are negatively revaluated. His performance represents a new form of communication with cultural memory that consists of resistance to collective forgetting. His art is a “moral agent,” and he himself a “pseudo-historian” who “redeems the past and many of its characters” through a new memorial medium (Thomas 2005, 184). As the concept of postmemory suggests, Labrović in fact activates “events [that] happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present” (Hirsch 2008, 107). This type of insistence on the endurance of memory and on the obligation derived from the memorial undertaking is typical of the postmemory generation. Postmemory, as noted by Hirsch, does not signify mere recollection, but a memory “mediated […] by imaginative investment, projection and creation” (Hirsch 2008, 107). In this way, postmemory is marked by a type of memory work that does not tie the subject of recollection directly to the traumatic event, but obliges him or her to carry on the work of recollecting through a type of crossgenerational understanding. The memorial structure of the monument around which Labrović’s performance is built consists of a sculptural composition placed on a two-level

 The project was coorganized with WHW – an association for visual culture from Zagreb, and with the Serbian National Council from Zagreb (see http://www.whw.hr/download/izvjestaj_whw_.pdf; http://www.whw.hr/galerija-nova/izlozba-spomenici-u-tranziciji.html)

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stone mount depicting an open interpretation of the Pietà, as he stated (although the author of the monument said that it is of a woman and a wounded man), and a figure of a victor in the higher part of the sculptural composition. The mini-memorial also includes an ossuary. Both parts of the memorial are dedicated to the memory of antifascist fighters from the city of Sinj and surrounding villages who were killed during the Second World War. The monument was erected in the city of Sinj and subsequently damaged by explosives planted during the 1990s war in the former Yugoslavia. The monument is part of a larger sculptural opus of Ivan Mirković, a sculptor and a painter from Split, who devoted almost an entire decade, between 1950 and 1960, to the production of war-themed public memorials (Slade 2005). The specific piece that was the object of Labrović’s intervention is called the “Memorial to the Fallen Soldiers of Cetinjska Krajina.” The author dedicated the series of ten similarly themed memorials to the “fallen soldiers,” that is, to the “fallen partisans” (Šerić and Mirković 1968). Mirković’s memorial, therefore, can be seen as a “place-based memory” (see Till 2008, 101) that subsequently became the object of Labrović’s “socially engaged, site-specific art” (Till 2008, 102). Labrović’s anamnesis of the condition of social amnesia was publicly performed on the main square of the city of Sinj. (Fig. 1) Labrović encountered the strategically desecrated and neglected “Memorial to the Fallen Soldiers of Cetinjska Krajina.” On 22 June 2000 (the Day of Antifascist Struggle), he enacted his performance, the “healing of wounds.” In describing his performance, Labrović says: The monument shows, you know, virtually the classic Pietà, mother, fellow fighter… And I treated it as if it were a wounded, living being. There were syringes, bottles, and other garbage scattered around the base. It was damaged by explosives. I cleaned it. And then I treated the edges of wounds, the edges that have been blown up, I cleaned them with water used to clean the wounds and […] I put ointment on everything. Then I bandaged everything and let it stand there like that. (Labrović 2010)

Labrović “humanizes” the memorial – the statue and the ossuary – with an arttherapeutic procedure that consists of a traditional approach to treat a wounded person that could be witnessed in any modern emergency room. He removed the leftover shrapnel from the memorial, which was “wounded” during the war of the 1990s, and then he treated the sites of wounds, from the planted explosives, with a medicinal solution used to disinfect wounds. He bandaged the memorial and then allowed it to rest with its dressed wounds. According to Labrović, the project’s aim was to illuminate the “conceptual gift” of humanism situated in the antifascist memorials in a city that “silently” approves of the destruction of antifascist memorial heritage. Labrović’s art per-

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Fig. 1. Bandaging the Wounded, documentation of Siniša Labrović’s performance. Used with permission.

formance, Bandaging the Wounded, in other words, began with concern for the memory of the wounded hero represented by the memorial. For Labrović, the collective and public forgetting is also a marker of a “post-utopian time” in which antifascism no longer has a place among the community’s basic values. Labrović is more concerned with the individual’s reluctance to take a stand against the process of forgetting that is representative of a generation that has once shared the experience of antifascism and the humanist values that this historical experience fostered. Therefore, it is not surprising that Labrović’s work proposes a definition of the individual as a bearer of specific values, someone who refuses to be guided by collective pragmatism. Post-socialist Sinj for Labrović is not only his birthplace but also a place where he can stage his own individual rebellion by demanding his right to remember.

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He started working on this project by considering the shift in values that marked Croatian politics during the 1990s – best described by the exclusion and forgetting of antifascism – interpreting the destruction of an antifascist memorial as both a collective blindness to trauma and an individual indifference in the face of powerful and dominant practices of forgetting. Thus, it is not surprising that Labrović explained his performance as a critique of the collective and a longing for individualization: [In Sinj] nobody is an individual, [and it is not possible to see] that somebody could exist as an individual human being. [Everyone] feels the pressure of eternity […] you know, the oppression of eternity in which you cannot live, do wrong, be happy, sad. And everybody ignores this […]. Perhaps a rebellion [should be staged], an understanding of the situation, perhaps forgiveness and hope… (Labrović 2010).

The collective culture of forgetting and the loss of individual dissenting voices that Labrović describes question the memorial capacity of cultural memory, but also of reality as such. For Labrović, Sinj is a city in name only. Through participation in and silence about the demolition of the antifascist memorial, and through the persisting “public opinion” that does not tolerate difference, Sinj becomes a place of commemorative deficit. Labrović thus turns to the city’s fleeting reality of socialism which he witnesses by observing, listening, and being in the city. The altered memorial landscape causes him to feel lost and disoriented. He occupies a space between the new naturalized façade of the city that has been emptied of history and memory on the one hand, and the more humane forms of inhabiting the city in its recent history on the other. Labrović therefore considers the new memorial reality as a specific kind of “lie” in which inhabitants of Sinj are implicated, and which renders the whole of Sinj a city of “lies.” The memorial lie, or the instant amnesia, is for Labrović communicated through the inability to embrace the compassionate side in us and in others and to respect the humanist remnants of former times. In that moment of forgetting, antifascism and its “heroes” become anonymous subjects of history, distant and unknown, while the collective and individual trauma, memorialized by the ideological apparatus of socialism, transforms into an empty space of non-remembrance of (non)existent victims. Devoid of living memories, antifascist memorials thereby become arbitrary reminders of unsuitable and conflicting narrations of history. The loss of dialogue and memorial legibility – the inability to communicate the ideas of antifascism – is related to the strained relationship between the collective memory constructed by the state on one hand and individual memory on the other. The historian of commemoration and museologist Paul Williams notes that “memorial conventions” have changed over time, showing that the discourse of the state and “official historical narratives” have been replaced by soft-

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er memorial conventions – that is, by “subjective memory” (2008, 2– 3). Furthermore, Williams shows that these two discourses, that of the “populace” and that of the “state” are heavily entangled but rarely in harmony. Like Williams, Labrović recognizes the complex relationship between public and everyday life of memory. His performance was conducted to addresses the collective usage of public space and its relationship towards historical memory. The official forms of memorialization in Sinj, Labrović reveals, hegemonize the space of memory and the right of individuals to remember past suffering, casting the rituals of remembrance as exclusively “collective” and “under the patronage of the state.” The individual valorization of the humanistic potential of the memorial offered by Labrović represents a seemingly private disturbance, a memorial quip that is not necessarily a “moral-historical lesson” (Williams 2007, 162). Indeed, Labrović shows that engaged art, despite the changes in collective memory conditioned by the crises and shifts in political ideology, can offer an answer to the universal need for forgiveness and hope through individualized remembrance.

The invisible: Sandra Vitaljić’s Infertile Grounds There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. (Michel de Certeau 1988, 108)

Sandra Vitaljić’s photographic series Infertile Grounds from 2009 represents another sophisticated attempt at re-memorialization. In this project, she addressed the traumatizing capacity of the sites of suffering from the Second World War, as well as the sites created during the 1990s war in Croatia (see Vitaljić 2012). Infertile Grounds is conceived as a photographic pilgrimage not only to the commemorative and the non-commemorative sites of mass atrocities during the Second World War, but also to the contemporary places of suffering which were constitutive in the formation of the new national identity (see Connerton 2008, 62). The aim of the series is, as Barthes puts it, to “grant a vision” (Barthes 1981, 6) by means of photography to that which is invisible. Infertile Grounds represents a photographic molding of the “traumatic turn” in the poetic of visual remembering; it is an homage to trauma perceived as horror that emerges from the inability to visualize the subsequent effects of re-memorialization and collective forgetting. By photographing non-commemorative sites, where traumatic events are “in absentia” and traces of violence are non-existent – through landscape sequences that were sites of terrifying instances of mindless violence incompre-

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hensible to the new generation – Vitaljić foreshadows the indexing power of the photographic medium in the art and craft of memory. In other words, Vitaljić creates the horrific equivalent to the family album of photographs. Her album consists of “national landscapes” that are not populated with recognizable and iconic heroes. She includes a wide range of traumatic points of origin that create national memory and chronologically exhibits them through the most recognizable sites of collective trauma. Vitaljić’s series Infertile Grounds, therefore, does not show classic photographs from the private family album; conceptually, the photographs in this series are taken out of the context of private photographs and made public by addressing the collective imagination of trauma. However, by focusing on the individual understanding of national memorial sites, their emptiness or devastation, they activate an affective response in the viewer or visitor. Infertile Grounds contains twenty-four photographs. The first photograph in the series is an image of a landscape in the town of Stubica and commemorates the suffering of the indentured peasants in the mythical fight with a hegemonic master during their first great rebellion in the sixteenth century – a moment that represents the beginnings of anti-feudal revolt in the national history. The main part of the photographic series depicts fascist concentration camps and sites of execution during the Second World War, and it is followed by a series of “infertile grounds” tainted by traumatic events after 1945 and the victory of Yugoslav anti-fascists, whose triumph proved deadly to many on the defeated side. In the final section of her assemblage of collective trauma inscribed on the landscape as its infertility, Vitaljić reaches to the era of the 1990s and photographically communicates with the sites of killing and trauma from the recent conflicts in Yugoslavia. Again, Vitaljić does not differentiate between the sites of execution by segregating the “perpetrator” and the “victim,” but she consistently records and marks in the collective imagination the haunted sites she visits, ones that can be associated with all human victims of war. Vitaljić says that the “title of the series Infertile Grounds refers to our inability to face the debts of the past and move on, instead we just spin in the same circle of mutual hate and blame” (Vitaljić 2012, 55; original emphasis). By disallowing the viewer to appropriate the collective sites of suffering completely and by avoiding the placement of people in the traumatic landscapes, Vitaljić challenges those who are faced with her photographic series both to summon their own (family and group) memory and to become aware of the collective attitude to the past and to the recent traumas and losses experienced by various communities. As a medium of memory art, they are “occasions for performances of memory” (Kuhn 2007, 284) and a way to look at the history of trauma as a con-

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tinuum in the ongoing dialogue with the dead, which refuses to establish a hierarchy of historical trauma in the collective memorial practices. Because viewing images of extreme violence undisputedly produces an affective response and causes both physical and cognitive reactions (Stewart 2007), Vitaljić illustrates the invisible pain of remembering in her depiction of the sites of trauma, devoid of any visible signs of violence. Although it can never fully capture the traumatic content, the invisible pain of remembering nonetheless survives as unspoken horror, a feeling connected to the unintelligibility of violence that is present in the traumatic topographies that have remained uncommemorated. In a way, Vitaljić shows that several generations occupy the space of inherited memory, which is a topography of pain that they constantly re-visit in everyday family narratives and political discourses. This transference of traumatic spaces through collective imagery, this mastering of national topography and territorialization of trauma only produces new topographies of pain. In her project, however, Vitaljić shifts away from such narrative reproduction. Instead, she makes an individual appeal to the society that has “experienced feelings of loss, grief, guilt and anger” (Till 2008, 108), a society that has produced new topographies of remembering while simultaneously forgetting about other sites of historical trauma that are crucial for understanding political and cultural memory in Croatia today. As a site-specific project that rehabilitates the dialogical character of memory and forgetting – of the memorable and un-memorable – Infertile Grounds not only activates the traumatic sites but also thematizes the inability of these sites to carry memory as long as they remain incomprehensible or forbidden to those who want to remember. This is why the selected “infertile grounds” rarely contain a memorial or a monument, an indication or a fragment of formal commemoration. For the most part, they are characterized by abandonment, their inability to transfer traumatic memory and to produce a bodily and visual experience of trauma retrospectively (Fig. 2). This is why the chosen frames are predominantly emptied of people, events, memorials, and memorial practices; they depict empty fields, meadows, groves, river banks, and lakes covered with overgrown vegetation, which in turn become “environmental witnesses” to the most horrific suffering, murders, and executions in this part of the world. In other words, the memory of trauma is invisible in these photographs. There is nothing that would make a random passer by, or even a community, stop and remember. Nonetheless, the titles of photographs indicate that these are horrific locations of mass death during the Second World War and the 1990s war (Fig. 3). Vitaljić compensates for the “emptiness” of the infertile ground that does not encourage remembrance by conceptually and visually insisting on an empty, invisible revocation. The landscape of personal trauma is impossible to grasp in its

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historical continuum and in the physical landscape. It is not that photographing the “invisible” negates the historical view and understanding of trauma. Instead, Vitaljić insists that although trauma is invisible to both the “eye of the camera” and to the observer, it is still frighteningly present in the collective imagination. The blankness of the landscape and the thorough insensitivity of forgetting in sites that cannot bear memory – and therefore produce the invisibility of the traumatic fracture in the collective memory – is a form of “a […] critical aesthetic that palpably conveys absence and loss; the determination to know about the past and the acknowledgement of its elusiveness” (Hirsch 2008, 119). They show that trauma does not have to be commemorated only through the conventional means, by traditional memorials offering a guarantee of the permanence of memory.

Fig. 2. “Dotršćina” memorial site. Vandalized monument and forest. Used with permission.

In Vitaljić’s work, the un-memorable and the invisible present a pitfall for a community torn between working through and negating past traumas. The sites of memory that she photographs in their natural settings do not reproduce immediate recollections, and they do not correspond to the collective practices of

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Fig. 3. The Sava river bank close to Sisak, un-memorialized site of killings during the Homeland War in the 1990s. Used with permission.

remembering and forgetting. Their weakened capacity and their naturalization is almost as horrific as a landscape filled with trauma. The absorption of trauma into the natural state of the landscape is a consequence of the un-memorable and the invisible – produced by the trauma’s annulling emptiness of meaning in the (un-commemorated and un-memorialized) space. The naturalized landscape of trauma is simultaneously a memorial of entropies and a physical site of the inscription of the intimate into the landscape of cultural memory. It is simultaneously fleeting and empty, timeless and full.

Conclusion The idea that underlines Labrović’s and Vitaljić’s works is the inability to remember. These artists address both the un-memorable and the collective inability of a community to see its own history as the origin of contemporary traumas. If we go back to the beginning and attempt to collect memories in Labrović’s and Vitalj-

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ić’s works, it appears that every moment, including the one that just ended, instantly becomes a memory; so we can say that there is nothing outside of memory. Every experience goes through re-collection, and events and experiences themselves are structured through language as much as they are structured through the artistic commemorative practices that we have shown here. Douglas Hollan asserts that the relationship among experience, memory, and language is constitutive for the practices of memory. He concludes that “much experience is lost and forgotten not because it is actively repressed […] or dissociated (as a result of trauma or socialization experiences), but because it never finds its way into culturally and familialy mediated schemas and ‘clichés’ that give form, structure, and persistence to self-related memory” (Hollan 2000, 540 – 541). Using the new “language” of memory both Labrović and Vitaljić have found a way to re-craft both their own and the collective memory. If we follow the assertion of Hollan, for whom forgetting is a necessary consequence of the inability to reach the elusive past, one can say that memory is something that needs to be acquired, that is out of reach, and that still “screams” for conceptualization. The kind of re-memorialization that the artists call for in their works is an appeal to conceptualize the un-memorable and invisible memory. Despite the fact that in almost all post-conflict communities, including the post-Yugoslav community, there is a disagreement between “the carriers of cultural legacies and traditions that clash with new cultural imperatives imposed by traumatogenic change” (Sztompka 2004, 169) and those that follow in their wake, these art projects activate the universal dimension of the cultural remembrance of trauma. This is why the tactical demonstration of individual reactions to the collective state of memory or forgetting is not meant to collapse the space of remembering but to authorize its alternative usage in which the aforementioned places of memory would be universally readable.

References Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. On the Concept of History. [1940] (Trans. Dennis Redmond, 2001) http:// www.efn.org/~dredmond/Theses_on_History.html (23 July 2014). Benjamin, Walter. Walter Benjamin Memorial. http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/walterbenjamin-memorial (18 February 2014). Connerton, Paul. “Seven types of forgetting.” Memory Studies 1 (2008): 59 – 71. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. (Trans. Steven Rendall). Berkeley, Los Angeles: U of California P, 1988. Habermas, Jürgen. Time of Transitions. Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press, 2006.

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Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. (Trans. Lewis E. Coser). Chicago, London: The U of Chicago P, 1992. Hirsch, Mariane. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29 (2008): 103 – 128. Hollan, Douglas. “Constructivist Models of Mind: Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Development of Culture Theory.” American Anthropologist 102 (2000): 538 – 550. Hrženjak, Juraj, ed. Rušenje antifašističkih spomenika u Hrvatskoj 1990 – 2000. Zagreb: SABA RH, 2002. Labrović, Siniša. Interview conducted by Sanja Potkonjak and Tomislav Pletenac. Zagreb, 14 April 2010. Kirn, Gal. “Transformation of Memorial Sites in Post-Yugoslav Context.” Retracing Images. Visual Culture after Yugoslavia. Ed. Daniel Šuber and Slobodan Karamanic. Leiden: Brill Publishing 2012: 251 – 281. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books. [1949] 2013. Potkonjak, Sanja and Tomislav Pletenac. “Kad spomenici ožive – ‘umjetnost sjećanja’ u javnom prostoru.” Studia Ethnologica Croatica 23 (2011): 7 – 24. Rigney, Ann. “Reconciliation and Remembering: (How) Does It Work?” Memory Studies, 5 (2012): 251 – 258. Rigney, Ann. “Plenitude, Scarcity, and the Production of Cultural Memory.” Journal of European Studies 35 (2005): 209 – 226. Rigney, Ann. “Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans.” Poetics Today 25.1 (2004): 261 – 396. Slade, Iris. Ivan Mirković. 1893 – 1988. Split: Galerija umjetnina, 2005. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Sundhaussen, Holm. “Jugoslavija i njezine države sljednice. Konstrukcija, destrukcija i nova konstrukcija ‘sjećanja’ i mitova.” Kultura pamćenja i historija. Ed. Maja Brkljačić and Sandra Prlenda. Zagreb: Golden marketing, Tehnička knjiga, 2006: 241 – 284. Sztompka, Piotr. “The Trauma of Social Change: A Case of Postcomunist Societies.” Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Ed. Jeffry C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 2004: 155 – 196. Šerić, D. “Između dijetla i kista. Susret s kiparom i slikarom Ivanom Mirkovićem.” Slobodna Dalmacija. 12 October 1968. Till, Karen. “Artistic and Activist Memory-Work: Approaching Place-Based Practice.” Memory Studies, 1 (2008): 99 – 113. Vitaljić, Sandra. Neplodna tla/Infertile Grounds. Pula: EikonBooks, 2012. Williams, Paul. Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007.

Miranda Jakiša

The Evidence of Srebrenica: Oliver Frljić’s Theater Court in Cowardice In recent years, the common origins of theater and the court of law have occupied cultural studies as well as post-dramatic theory and practice. In his paradigmatic study, Postdramatic Theater, the Frankfurt theater scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann describes the theatron of Greek antiquity as both the reference and vanishing point of contemporary re-politicized theatrical practice. As a productive place of encounter and public negotiation, the antique theater and court of law shared one and the same locale that offered all those present the opportunity to participate. Post-dramatic theater has set itself the goal to democratize the theatrical action in the spirit of this antique model as well as to re-engage the spectator, who has been condemned to passivity by the picture-frame principle of the (bourgeois) dramatic theater, and to involve him once again in its “negotiations.” Post-dramatic theater that has currently been shaping the postYugoslav stages in a decisive way has marked this shift in the relationship between theater and public space (Primavesi 2004, 9), and it has done so by directly involving the spectator in the “adjudication” of communal issues (Lehmann 2002, 19). Cornelia Vismann in her study Medien der Rechtsprechung impressively describes the close interrelation between acting and judging in the context of the court as the “theatrical apparatus” of adjudication. “The judiciary is perfectly adapted to the conditions of the theater,” Vismann notes (2011, 17). The origin of the court as convening around something, that is, an object of contention, has imprinted “performative traits onto the act of adjudication” (Vismann 2011, 17). Before a ruling can be pronounced, the contentious issue must first be displayed on the court’s stage to all those present, that is, to be “brought before the eyes” of the participants. This paper will focus on the post-dramatic work of the director Oliver Frljić in Cowardice [Kukavičluk]: a staging that “brings before the eyes” the contentious issues of Serbia’s political and social reality and directly involves its audience by using various forms of court theater. Frljić’s play can be seen as emblematic of the work of the new “post-pessimistic” generation of theater directors advocating a committed theater with a neo-avant-garde verve (Munjin 2012, 35).

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Serbia “on trial” Frljić’s Cowardice premiered in December 2010 in Subotica in the Vojvodina province on the Serbian-Hungarian border, and in 2011 it received the award for best performance and the prize for best director at the renowned theater festival Sterijino Pozorje in Novi Sad. The provocative play not only contains a court also but stages a veritable tribunal in the theatron, the extended auditorium. The roles of the various protagonists in a court proceeding (judge, prosecutor, defendant, witness, public) assigned in this play (to the actors, the director, the public, and the community of all those present in the theater) rotate continuously, so that the performance is never reduced to a mere shifting from one stage to another, to a reduction of the theater to a court room. Instead, the theater of adjudication remains continuously interwoven with the adjudication of the theater – the theatrical form is itself placed on trial. Therefore, in the performance, collective guilt and trauma, denial of responsibility and precarious remembering of Serbia’s role in the Yugoslav wars, the main themes of Cowardice, can never be disconnected from the accusation against theater itself. Cowardice opens with a tearful prologue recited by a solitary actress stating that everything that will be said in the course of the performance is neither the truth nor a reflection of the opinions of the participants. She claims that she and the other actors were forced by the director Frljić to utter these statements. The performance is, therefore, framed by a meta-theatrical statement, alluding to the post-dramatic theater’s renunciation of the sovereign status of the text (“König Text”; Lehmann 2004), which rejects the notion of actors as uninvolved performers and agents acting out a predetermined text. However, the emotional lament also points in another direction, that of enforced testimonials before a public court. The a priori problematization of the actor’s role in the theater that occurs here already anticipates the problematization of various roles in a court, especially because the actors in Cowardice will later appear as witnesses of the events in 1990s Serbia. The solitary voice in the prologue goes on to say that everyone present is standing in the dock, but after all there can be no such thing as collective guilt “of an entire people.” This statement introduces the issue of “Serbia’s guilt,” which includes the audience (Cowardice has so far been performed only in two cities in Vojvodina: Subotica and Novi Sad), and the first scene clearly establishes guilt as the central theme of the performance. Subsequently, seven actors come on stage and repeat verbatim (shouting in chorus) Slobodan Milošević’s notorious Gazimestan speech while holding a poster of him in their hands.

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Here, Milošević’s speech, which the International Court ICTY used as evidence in the charges leveled against the defendant, functions in the court theater as a document of the evidentiary hearing and also as a site for the re-presentation of unsettling shared memories in the performance space of the theater. In a translatio temporum, the past is transported to the stage as something unfolding in the present moment, and Milošević’s person is brought before the eyes of the audience in a mixture of prosopopeia and fictio personae (is it the posters speaking or a reanimated Milošević?). As a “catachresis of the face,” Milošević here gives a face to something as yet unnamed, to the guilt and responsibility for what has happened (Menke 1997, 229). Peter Handke also sets his sights on the problematic nature of witnessing and the “guilty verdict theater run wild” (2006, 18), taking as an example Serbia’s former president, whose trial in The Hague ended without a verdict when he died in 2006 in captivity. Handke, unlike Frljić, works most of all to discredit the ICTY. According to Handke, the court around Milošević “played world tribunal” and as a “grand world theater” would have produced “like any theater […] this or that truth” (2006, 19). Handke’s polemical observation on the tribunal, which he documented in Rund um das Große Tribunal (2003) and Die Tablas von Daimiel (2006), expressly contradicts Madeleine Albright’s much quoted statement on the occasion of the tribunal’s establishment: “[t]his will be no victor’s tribunal. The only victor that will prevail in this endeavor is the truth.”¹ In his writings on the Hague tribunal, Handke, who in later interviews qualified his choice of words, squarely denies the ICTY any legitimacy as a court because as such, it is “wrong and remains wrong” (2005, 30). Handke’s texts, therefore, reveal the ambivalent structure of the tribunal that oscillates between legal court, “world tribunal,” and “world theater.” In principle, Handke mobilizes a dual notion of the tribunal. On the one hand, Handke rejects the tribunal, expanded by an extrajudicial public, “as the wrong court” (2005, 30). On the other hand, because he claims that his texts are dedicated, as the tribunal itself is, to the struggle for truth, Handke elevates himself as an “advocate of tribunalization” (Brokoff 2013). The differentiation between court and tribunal, which Handke makes at the divide between legitimacy and self-empowerment for Serbia, is also important for Frljić’s theater court. The tribunal as an ad hoc court will always retain the blemish of a certain partiality, which stems from the fact that the tribunal is “extra-legal,” that it does not apply existing law but institutes law a posteriori (Vismann 2011, 160 – 163). The tribunal, which by its very nature requires a pub-

 See the press release of the ICTY from  October  (http://www.icty.org/sid/).

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lic, aims to disempower. It knows what the outcome should be even before any kind of hearing has been instituted. A tribunal – only think of the Nuremberg trials – also “brings to trial a discredited regime” and declares the latter’s justice a subject of the proceedings (Vismann 2011, 161). This is precisely where two essential intersections of tribunal organization and post-dramatic theater become manifest and what Cowardice brings to the central focus in its court theater: the intrinsic role of the community of spectators and the condemnation of a criminal regime. Historically, the original tribunal, performed in the open by a tribune in front of interested attendees, a potentially always growing public, evolved into the orderly court that takes place indoors, whereas twentieth-century theater took the opposite path. However, before that happened, theater modeled itself on the court and ended up as a closed picture-frame stage, an aspect that was prominently criticized by Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator. The court, which regiments participation in its proceedings and admits spectators only as uninvolved parties (whoever speaks is expelled from the courtroom), displays similarities with the drama of the bourgeois theater, which separates the spectator from the theatrical action via the curtain, the lighting, and the closed-system of its processes. Post-dramatic theater on the other hand re-tribunalizes; it attempts to create a large, participatory public through performative means, for example, through open-air venues or through activation strategies directed at the audience that can go as far as making threats against it. Upon closer inspection, Frljić’s theater court indeed turns out to be a court with a tribunal structure, celebrating, on the one hand, “tribunalization” as a necessary and welcome extension of the decision-making process to the theater audience and questioning, on the other hand, the presumptuous world tribunal as a collective (traumatic) experience of the (whole) ex-Yugoslav region.² The theatricality of the ICTY, the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia, is displayed in such a way that it alludes to the performative act of judgment in the framework of theater. The court within theater thus serves to re-present both the court’s theatricality and theater as a place of adjudication and passing of a guilty verdict. While Heinrich von Kleist, in Broken Jug, for example, discusses theater through references to the court, Frljić in Cowardice uses the form of the tribunal to demonstrate not only the post-dramatic obligation to involve the audience but also the limits of this post-dramatic theatron mantra. Frljić shows that a theater court that illegitimately and self-righteously takes objectionable liberties can “deteriorate” into a tribunal.

 For the inclusion of the spectator in the theater, see Erika Fischer-Lichte .

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Eyewitnesses and forced testimonials If there is a director in post-Yugoslav theater who has demonstrated how unpleasant theater can be for the spectator, the actors, and the social context in which it is performed, that director is Frljić. The provocation of the audience, like social and political intervention, is calculated and foreseeable from afar in his performances. Spectators regularly leave Frljić’s performances, scandalized because of gay kisses, antinationalist statements, pedophile priest characters, and props fashioned from raw meat, among other things. In Split the house director Milan Štrljić (albeit for merely a few hours) prohibited Frljić’s production of Euripides’ The Bacchae. Frljić received threatening phone calls (that were later made public) from the Bosnian actor and minister for culture of the canton of Sarajevo, Emir Hadžihafizbegović, because he used the latter’s voice recordings from the 1990s in a theater project. While this kind of strategic protest builds more on the display of “inadmissible,” taboo political and social contents and positions, Cowardice is also concerned with the question of the operational and admissible form in which the spectator is turned into a witness of the “truths” expressed in the theater. ³ Like many contemporary performances, Cowardice correlates secondary eyewitnessing (of the theater) with primary eyewitnessing (of historical events). At the same time, Cowardice does not shy away from showing the limitations of theatrical witnessing that has in recent years gained great currency both on the stage and in theater studies. “Theater creates witnesses,” writes Sybille Krämer (2005, 19), referring to the claim of post-dramatic theater to reinstate theater as an “eventful encounter between actors and spectators” (Primavesi 2011, 47). Turned into participating witnesses, the spectators carry responsibility for what they physically experience, that is to say, what they register with their own eyes and ears. This holds true in equal measure for the experience of theater as well as of history. Frljić’s point of departure is this accepted notion that theater, in becoming aware of itself through audience participation, has moved into the limelight as a venue. This also means that theater brought into focus can no longer be perceived outside a social context. The present, made palpable via participation, must “break apart” in the course of the performance so as not to remain a mere unmasking, a mere public outrage at what is shown (Lehmann

 In interviews Frljić has repeatedly commented on the backwardness of the Croatian audience in particular and of post-Yugoslav audiences in general, which, compared internationally, according to Frljić, cannot stand much provocation, which is precisely why it needs to be provoked.

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2002, 21). According to Lehmann, it is only by “interrupting” itself that the postdramatic theater can find its true political dimension by not only enacting political issues but also disrupting the “deceptive innocence of the spectator” and letting the spectator “experience the shaky premises of his own judgment” (2002, 19). It is, Lehman argues, through the “how” of the presentation and not the attack on social injustices that the “core of sociality itself” (Lehmann 2002, 21) is critically revealed. This idealized view of the theater’s political potential, clearly indebted to the Brechtian tradition, has taken on an even more extreme form in post-Yugoslav drama through the ubiquitous claim that the arts should offer “heterotopias of resistance” to the precarious present.⁴ Jacques Rancière, whose work has become a dominant reference in performance studies, has also theorized the issue of dissent in art. Following Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2000), theater directors expect their plays to “make injustice visible” (Bandi et al. 2012, 174). In Le Partage du sensible, Rancière differentiates between “politics” proper as dissent made visible and “police,” which orders the space of everything sayable and doable and assigns to everyone a place in this order. In other words, somewhere along the road, consensus always demands exclusion and injustice. Therefore, what is commonly understood as politics is in Rancière’s terminology designated as the “police,” which limits equality in the enforced maintenance of consensus. Rancière demands that art outline and shift the boundary between those who have a place in the order and those excluded from it, and it should do so not in a single artistic event but as an ongoing process. For Rancière, it is the task of art – which, defined in this way, cannot be dissociated from politics – not to be political in the sense of a committed art but to make the potential of its infinite demand for equality tangible for a brief moment. Only insofar as art has an emancipatory, truly political character does it constantly re-emphasize the fundamental equality of all and everyone, which, according to Rancière, is not the goal, but the precondition of all politics. For Frljić, Rancière’s “responsibility of art” represents a central point of reference in his post-dramatic stage work.⁵ Cowardice asks how the representation of social precariousness, war crimes, and traumatic transformations go hand in hand with an aesthetic interruption, a state of exception to be achieved by theatrical means. A more general issue is whether or not theater really can give a fleeting glimpse of that utopian moment  See for this the statements of one of the best known theater and literary critics, Bojan Munjin (, ).  In lectures and articles published in theater studies journals Frljić discusses the issues of political theater beyond the stage. See Frljić a.

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of promise of equality without assuming the role of “police.” In line with the aspirations of post-dramatic theater, spectators can be turned into an emancipated and responsible participant of a performance, which we see in Cowardice. In The Transformative Power of Performance, Erika Fischer-Lichte paraphrases the manner in which similar ethical categories have found their way into theater through forms of established, permitted, or enforced participation of spectators since the 1960s. By constantly shifting their roles, the audience also contributes, through the “autopoietic feedback loop” (Fischer-Lichte 2004, 63), to making the subject-object relationship in the theater more dynamic. For this to take place, the audience must become aware of itself as actually participating in the performance. Therefore, participation is not merely demonstrated but made tangible in the present time and place. The performative act makes the present come alive as an “extended moment” that can be witnessed by the spectator as a singular, unrepeatable event. Frljić’s theater in Cowardice interrogates well-known post-dramatic (participation) strategies while also reflecting on the limits of his previous work. Cowardice, which no longer wants to limit itself to an emphatic call for audience participation, questions the post-dramatic premises of uncritical spectator involvement. Frljić’s court theater reverses the court’s normal judicial process. The guilty verdicts are pronounced at the beginning, whereas the presentation of the case and the hearing of witnesses take place afterwards, only to come to a halt at the end of the Srebrenica scene, when the reading-out of the charge takes place. Cowardice stages repeated hearings of witnesses who present collective and locally specific experiences familiar to the present spectator community. For example, all actors provide partly biographical statements about their experiences of the NATO air raids on Serbia. Also, all of them comment in personal testimonials on situations in which they had witnessed discrimination of Hungarians in Vojvodina or had themselves actively carried out racist attacks against them. The testimonials evoke experiences that almost any spectator from Vojvodina can readily identify with and recognize. The central message here is that it is “we,” the local audience attending the performance, who are given a stage, who are not only portrayed but also encouraged to participate. The play further “enforces” participation by extracting a public, political statement from spectators who are singled out in the course of the performance. The communal effect of the theatron here reveals its negative side by using public pressure to force the audience into participation. Frljić lets one of the actors equipped with a microphone jump around the auditorium and ask randomly picked members of the audience their opinions about homosexuality, ethnicized minorities, or approval of the International Court in The Hague. The following

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questions are put to the audience: “Would you accept the independence of Kosovo for a salary of 3000 Euros?”; “Is the Kosovo scenario also conceivable in Vojvodina?”; “Would you accept a high-ranking position if you had to sit between a homosexual and an Albanian?”; “Do you think that the Serbian orthodox church is the main source of power in Serbia?”; “The Hague Tribunal – for or against?”; “Vojislav Šešelj or Madeleine Albright?”; “Would you vote for a presidential candidate with whose views you completely agree but who is of Roma nationality?”; “Should Ceca Ražnatović [Turbofolk singer and widow of the war criminal Arkan] be behind bars?” The choice of questions makes it clear that the director is aiming at a broad re-presentation of the social and political problems facing contemporary Serbian society. The statements are extracted under pressure, a procedure that recalls the International Tribunal in The Hague, which in the opinion of the majority of Serbs represents an international and unwelcome imposition, a fact mentioned repeatedly in the performance. In these interviews, not only the questioned spectators are exposed to the gaze of other spectators, placed under pressure to say the “right” thing, but also those who have not been questioned so far need to constantly worry that they might be picked next. Instead of creating a community of spectators that mutually acknowledge and empower each other, the performance at this point produces a spectatorship in which everyone is at each other’s mercy. The question of what might constitute a correct answer, one that is accepted by the community, is left very visibly hanging in the air, and once again the status of truth is up for renegotiation. Does one express a view shared by the majority of Serbs, which might also be shared by the person sitting in the neighboring seat, but which might not be “politically correct?” The majority of those interviewed did in fact give revealing answers in this regard. For example, they support Vojislav Šešelj (the Serbian ultranationalist, standing trial in The Hague since 2006) and are against the ICTY; they purportedly have nothing against Kosovo Albanians and are divided over the question of acceptance of gays as equal members of society. The interview situation makes the audience aware of its own duplicitous identity; they represent the “average Serbian views” but are at the same time an adept, educated public, which as a theater-going audience is also under the pressure of the cultivated “world tribunal.” Those who gave homophobic or nationalistic views either had to bring themselves (or actively decide) to voice a politically incorrect opinion or express an opinion that (as announced at the beginning of the performance) did not represent their own view but that of a statistical majority, which became noticeable during the performance. The gulf between the globally recognized, the “backward Serbian” stance, the

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personal opinion, and the one given under pressure of the group could not be more evident to those present. Individual spectators attempted to extricate themselves from these embarrassing questions by replying with the explicit statement: “I’m not participating in this performance.” Those unwilling to answer thus produced a performative contradiction decisive for Cowardice. It is precisely their refusal that ultimately accomplishes what they were refusing (Fischer-Lichte 2004, 66), making them true co-actors in the theater. Their refusal to participate reveals the performative enforcement of spectator participation and role-changing in post-dramatic theater. It is primarily the non-participators who truly participate in the negotiation of the relationships between those present, spectators and actors, and with their answers they also expose the participation strategy as what it was all along: a presumptuous tribunal. Cowardice thus shows that the involvement of the spectator is in fact informed by a pedagogical and educational impetus that is diametrically opposed to the democratization of the event called “theater” and presupposes the superior knowledge of a guiding force, the director and “theater judge.” The latter forcibly extracts statements that turn the spectator into a performing witness but at the same time also into a witness who lacks the freedom of opinion. Very much in contrast to the post-dramatic theatron mantra, what is conceived as a stage for empowerment also stands for a scenario of powerlessness. As a self-empowered theater court, the performance of Cowardice extracts testimonials from not only the spectators but also the actors. Using personal recollections, the actors appear as eyewitnesses of the 1999 NATO bombings of Serbia. These experiences, shared by most of the audience and thus functioning as sites of collective identification, represent the most recent Serbian past on the stage. The actors report how the outbreak of the war, when they were teenagers, had provided them with the long yearned-for dramatic event in their lives; how their parents had sent them to relatives in Bosnia (of all places!) to keep them safe from the NATO air raids; how the German teacher interrupted the class because she was too horrified by the events; how, thanks to the air raids, they found the time for playing games with their parents; how their friends who were exposed to the attacks in Novi Sad came to Belgrade to catch up on sleep; or how the aunt from Denmark called to announce the bombardment of Belgrade. The actors’ personal memories are accompanied by a running TV set showing news programs from the 1990s, so that their memory of the events remains inextricably interwoven with the representation in the media. Moreover, the reliability of the actors’ testimonials and their authentication of recollections are destabilized by the fact that the actors have previously appeared as characters. The

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opening sequence with the Gazimestan speech, in which Milošević is quoted in unison, is immediately followed by a trial scene in which all actors are captured, dragged before the judge’s bench, and after being read the charges brought against them, are sentenced to play themselves. “The theater court charges you for not being [name of the character] and sentences you to play yourself in this performance!” the verdict states. Therefore, the characters are sentenced before a theatrical court and on a theater stage for something that has not always been a crime in the theater: being a character. The actors carry nametags of real historical theater people whom they should have played had the sentencing not interfered. These are KPGT members and participants in the production Šiptar, which was staged in 1985 in Subotica under the direction of Ljubiša Ristić in precisely the same theater where now, twenty-five years later, Cowardice is being performed.⁶ (Cowardice even contains direct quotes from Šiptar.) All of the participants are then put on trial for their life work on the basis of their artistic and personal biography presented in the form of a charge. The negative sign preceding the biographical summaries of the KPGT members – “You are not Dušan Jovanović. You were not born in Belgrade on the first of October 1939. You did not graduate from […]. You did not establish […]” [Ti nisi Dušan Jovanović. Ti se nisi rodio u Beogradu prvog oktobra tridesetdevete. Ti nisi diplomirao […]. Ti nisi osnovao […]]” – marks the rupture in their lives that occurred with the collapse of Yugoslavia and with which each one of them is charged in the performance. The negative biography also elucidates the concept of the stage role and with it the fact that actors are not congruent with the characters they portray. For instance, the actor Vladimir Grbić plays the Slovenian director Dušan Jovanović,  Šiptar is a pejorative term for Kosovo Albanians in the south Slavic languages, derived from the Albanian word shqiptar [Albanian]. For Cowardice as well as other theater projects by Frljić, the question arises of whether they are at all performable beyond the cultural context to which they refer. This performance, for example, which contains passages in Hungarian, is specifically addressed to the audience in Serbian Vojvodina, Preklet naj bo izdajalec is tailored to a Slovenian audience, while Pismo iz  can only expect a Bosnian audience to have the necessary knowledge of local politics to appreciate the performance. What is interesting about the local embeddedness of Frljić’s work is that with his individual plays he covers the entire territory of post-Yugoslavia and in doing so follows the pan-Yugoslav tradition of the KPGT within his post-Yugoslav possibilities. The Yugoslav theater group KPGT (abbreviation of Kazalište, Pozorište, Gledališče, Teatar – the combination of the first letters of the words for “theater” in Croatian, Serbian, Slovene, and Macedonian, respectively) was founded in  in Zagreb and developed from an isolated project to a veritable theater movement. In line with Yugoslavia’s cultural policy, it pursued the aim to reinforce the cohesion of a decidedly Yugoslav audience, transcending ethnic affiliations with a collective cultural production. The group comprised members from all former Yugoslav constituent republics. In , Ristić (controversially) reestablished the KPGT in Belgrade. Cowardice makes several direct references to the KPGT and its history.

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who in 1986 was a guest in Subotica with Titus Andronicus, and the actor Srđan Sekulić impersonates the theater director and founder of the pan-Yugoslav theater company KPGT, Ristić, whose ideological turnaround after his time at KPGT occasions the charge against him. In the guilty verdict and the sentence “to play himself,” the actor Grbić, like all the others, is refused a retreat into the played part, while the character of Ristić is condemned for his Janus-faced behavior (the retraction of his opinion on theater from socialist times). However, Frljić’s actors are not allowed to rid themselves of their characters: they carry the nameplates of their respective aliases right up to the last scene! For Cowardice, assuming political and aesthetic responsibility in the theater means deconstructing the very premises of illusionistic theater. In this way, the spectators and the actors are made equally responsible for what transpires and are synchronized with the historical and theatrical context of the play in which they participate. In the course of the performance, they are pronounced guilty, subsequently heard as witnesses, and finally confronted with a reinterpreted event, temporarily freed from a concrete guilt that may no longer be concealed due to “cowardice.”

The (plain) evidence of Srebrenica Through his stage work, Frljić – who in Croatian theater criticism enjoys the reputation of being “a pamphlet director” [redatelj pamfleta] (Ružić 2012), someone who creates controversy for the sake of controversy – has a clear mission of searching for the truth. Referencing Dubravka Ugrešić’s well-known volume of essays, Frljić sees post-Yugoslav society as continuing to live in a “culture of lies” [kultura laži], in which defeats are regarded as victories and war criminals as heroes (Frljić 2011b and 2012). All those that are beyond this “consensus of lies” have no voice in the post-Yugoslav world. Accordingly, theater that spectators agree with is for Frljić – referring to Rancière’s concept of dissent – nothing but a consensus theater that is based on lies. The public criticism and political intervention to which his performances are subjected are therefore understood by Frljić as a vehicle to create a theater of dissent. His theater projects, among which Cowardice, Zoran Đinđić (2012) and Pismo iz 1920 (2011) caused a particular stir in Serbia and Bosnia, see themselves as resolute acts of a publicized search for truth, in which a shifting of the boundaries between the consensus community and the group of those excluded takes place, while at the same time rendering victims’ rights visible. In the end, all of Frljić’s theater projects revolve around unresolved legal and political issues stemming from the Yugoslav wars.

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The truth about the war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, demanded by Albright’s tribunal and questioned by Handke’s occasional moments of unquestioning Serbophilia, is qualified by Cowardice in a renewed act of truth-finding without refuting the tribunal itself. The performance, which in a greatly differentiated way levels accusations against a great many things and in so doing also acts as a tribunal, in the end finds its way back to a clear point of departure liberated from all subsequent interpretations: the simple evidence of Srebrenica. Cowardice opposes the erasure of the all-Yugoslav (theater) tradition; the chauvinistic attitudes circulating in Serbian society; the collective condemnation of the Serbs as well as the denial of individual and political responsibility in Serbia; the post-dramatic credulity with regard to audience participation; and self-pity in the aftermath of the Serbian NATO trauma. Cowardice ends after this veritable roundelay of accusations with the eight participating actors reciting by heart the names of all 505 victims of Srebrenica identified up to that point. The oral reproduction of the list of names leaves the beaten track and strikes a new chord with regard to the visibility of Srebrenica in Serbia. It evokes the orchestrated pathos familiar from 9/11 memorial days or Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and at the same time alludes to the Yugoslav socialist practice of holding pioneer recitations on national holidays (recalling not only the laborious memorizing on stage but also the uniformed dress of the performers: white shirt, dark skirt, trousers and the youthful Chucks sneakers that are similar to the Borovo startasice of socialist times). But the names list also evokes, with its “enumerating as documenting and vice versa” (Lachmann 2011), the poetical practice of the Subotica born writer Danilo Kiš. Just as in Kiš’s literary catalogues, the list represents the dead and (re)creates a reality that had been obscured by numerous debates. The Srebrenica scene begins with the explicit statement that the simple reciting of the names will take twelve or thirteen minutes and that beyond that nothing spectacular will happen. “Everything that will happen, if at all, will happen inside you,” the announcing actor adds. The repeatedly disrupted division between stage and auditorium, which had served up to this point to equalize the stage and the audience, is now entirely suspended by floodlighting the spectator seats. The actors, still carrying the names of real people/historical characters they have been playing, recite from the edge of the stage, disrupting their fictionalization as characters in more ways than one. On the stage there is also the play’s last prop: Kosovo as the trampled “heart of Serbia” laid out in balls of crunched-up paper with small flags stuck on stands with the names of Kosovar cities. At this point the performers, who previously danced the “kolo” [traditional circle dance] on Kosovo, are no more concerned with this abandoned “Kosovo scene” than the community of spectators.

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The meta-theatrical challenging of the boundaries of belonging and nonbelonging that occurs here, of voice and voicelessness in the theater, draws attention to the question to what extent is the spectator also part of the performance and, at the same time, to what extent are all those participating in the theater responsible for the presented event. Are actors speaking here or real people? To whom is this reciting of names actually addressed? The Srebrenica subject therefore spawns a far more precarious issue of belonging than that of participation in the theater action: On whose side is this performance? Whose business is Srebrenica actually? And: What do the people sitting here with me in the theater think beyond the theater space? In the span of barely quarter of an hour, the audience undergoes a visible process of polarization and development. While a number of spectators leave the theater (partly under indignant protest) or pick up their cell phones and lean back disapprovingly with folded arms, others begin exchanging perplexed looks, some lower their heads steeped in thought or mourning, and a few begin to weep during the recitation. It takes some time until the monotonous reciting of names to which no concrete faces can be assigned shows its effect on the audience. It is only by degrees that the lack of consensus in the audience becomes perceivable and the dissent among the spectators visible. The Srebrenica issue is palpably present, even though the singularity of the action, the pure enumeration, cannot be easily translated into the “logic and terminology of political discourse” (Lehmann 2002, 17). In Cowardice’s final scene, Srebrenica acquires the status of an exception, acting like the grant of pardon in relation to the law, or the miracle in relation to the course of nature (see Lehmann 2002, 17). It remains unclear whom exactly does the mnemonic act of reciting names accuse and of what? At the end of the performance, Srebrenica leads the post-dramatic theater away from the “committed” mise en scène achieved primarily through spectator participation, towards a documenting investigative theater, which, as a pure and simple “bringing before the eyes,” is accorded a particular potential for yielding the truth. Through the post-dramatic visualization of all parts of the theater – with breaking of the fourth wall – theater reverts to a more primal purpose, namely to provide contentious issues with a stage for negotiation. The “theater court” and “court theater” of Cowardice not only demonstrate the cowardice of silence but also bring the failure of both the theatrical and judicial language onto the stage. In the course of a trial, the proceedings of the verbally organized court increasingly convert the events into language and fix them first into a verdict and finally into a written form. In Cowardice, however, these proceedings are reversed until that which has already been understood as established and decided reverts into the re-presented event until language dissolves into pure evi-

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dence. Therefore, as a theatrical tribunal, Cowardice is concerned with the reinstitution of a lost equilibrium and with the balancing of the upset scales of justice, bringing the political present into dialogue with the voiceless dead and calling for decisions.

References Bandi, Nina, Michael Kraft, and Sebastian Lasinger. “Kunst, Politik und Polizei im Denken Jacques Rancières.” Kunst, Krise, Subversion. Zur Politik der Ästhetik. Ed. Nina Bandi, Michael Kraft, and Sebastian Lasinger. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012. 167 – 181. Brokoff, Jürgen. “Übergänge. Literarisch-juridische Interferenzen bei Peter Handke.” Tribunale. Literarische Darstellung und juridische Aufarbeitung von Kriegsverbrechen im globalen Kontext. Ed. Werner Gephart, Jürgen Brokoff, Andrea Schütte, and Jan Christoph Suntrup. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2013. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Die Entdeckung des Zuschauers. Tübingen: Francke, 1997. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans. Saskya Iris Jain. London and New York, 2008. Frljić, Oliver. “Govorim o onom što svi znaju, a o čemu šute”. www.novilist.hr (16 June 2012). Frljić, Oliver. “Političko i postdramsko.” Teatron 154/155. Časopis za pozorišnu umetnost. (2011a): 53 – 56. Frljić, Oliver. Should Be Art and Politics at the Same Time. http://nova.maska.si/en/pub lications/special_issues/bcc_balcan_can_contemporary/512/oliver_frljic.html. Weblog 2011 (21 February 2014). Frljić, Oliver. “Živimo u kulturi laži”. www.novilist.hr (16 October 2011b). Handke, Peter. Rund um das Große Tribunal. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. Handke, Peter. Die Tablas von Daimiel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006. ICTY. Press Release 14 October 2003. http://www.icty.org/sid/8186 (14 August 2014). Krämer, Sybille. “Zuschauer zu Zeugen machen. Überlegungen zum Zusammenhang zwischen Performanz, Medien und Performance-Künstlern.” Europäisches Performance Institut. Die Kunst der Handlung 3. Berlin: Europäisches Performance Institut, 2005. 16 – 19. Lachmann, Renate. “Zur Poetik der Kataloge bei Danilo Kiš.” Wortkunst. Erzählkunst. Bildkunst. Festschrift für Aage A. Hansen-Löve. Ed. Rainer Grübel and Wolf Schmid. München: Otto Sagner, 2008. 296 – 309. Lachmann, Renate. “Zwischen Fakt und Artefakt.” Theorie der Literatur. Vol. 5 Helden als Heilige. Ed. Günther Butzer and Hubert Zapf. Basel: Francke, 2011. 93 – 116. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. “Just a Word on a Page and There is the Drama. Anmerkungen zum Text im postdramatischen Theater.” Theater fürs 21. Jahrhundert. Ed. Heinz L. Arnold. Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 2004. 26 – 33. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Das Politische Schreiben. Essays zu Theatertexten. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2002. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

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Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatisches Theater. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1999. Menke, Bettine. “Prosopopoiia: Die Stimme des Textes – die Figur des ‘sprechenden Gesichts.’” Poststrukturalismus. Herausforderung an die Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Gerhard Neumann. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1997. 226 – 251. Munjin, Bojan. “Političko kazalište danas. U ime svih nas.” Kazalište 49/50 (2012): 34 – 37. Munjin, Bojan. “Tri autora nove teatralne realnosti.” Kazalište 47/48 (2011): 152 – 157. Primavesi, Patrick. “Orte und Strategien postdramatischer Theaterformen.” Theater fürs 21. Jahrhunderts. Ed. Heinz L. Arnold. Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 2004. 8 – 25. Primavesi, Patrick. “Theater/Politik – Kontexte und Beziehungen.” Politisch Theater machen. Neue Artikulationsformen des Politischen in den darstellenden Künsten. Ed. Jan Deck and Angelika Sieburg. Bielefeld: transcript, 2011. 41 – 71. Rancière, Jacques. Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique. Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2000. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2004. Ružić, Igor. “Predstava predodređena za uspjeh.” Kultura. http://www.tportal.hr/kultura/kaza liste/216291/Predstava-predodredena-za-uspjeh.html#.UPZwfELEcb0 (24 September 2012). Vismann, Cornelia. Medien der Rechtsprechung. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2011.

Stijn Vervaet

Intersecting Memories in Post-Yugoslav Fiction: The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s through the Lens of the Holocaust* Introduction Berlin occupies a pivotal position in the post-Yugoslav literary imagination. This is certainly due to the presence of a vibrant ex-Yugoslav migrant community in Berlin, which in the wake of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s rapidly increased and made the city a recurrent and obvious topos in post-Yugoslav exilic literature.¹ However, in several contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian novels, of which the most frequently discussed would be Dubravka Ugrešić’s Museum of Unconditional Surrender [Muzej bezuvjetne predaje] (1997), the German capital not only serves as the setting of a story about exile but also emerges as a paradigmatic reference point from where to approach the traumatic past of the Yugoslav 1990s.² In this essay, I will look at three post-Yugoslav novels that stage Berlin not as a (collection of) lieu(x) de mémoire but as what Michael Rothberg (2011) has called a noeud de mémoire, a “memory knot” in which different stories of extreme violence come together, thus in often unpredictable ways shedding light on the palimpsestic and dynamic nature of cultural memory and, most importantly, unsettling traditional models of collective memory that perceive the nation-state as the natural container of collective memory.

*

The research for this essay was made possible by a research grant of the Flemish Research Council (FWO-Vlaanderen).  Apart from the novels discussed in this essay, examples would include novels by Bora Ćosić and Irena Vrkljan.  This is not accidental; in contrast to Yugoslavia’s violent breakdown and painful economic “transition,” post- Germany in many respects looks like a political and economic success-story. Since its unification, Germany has become one of the leading countries of the European Union and thus an important partner and interlocutor for all post-Yugoslav states aspiring to EU-membership. In liberal democratic circles in the former Yugoslavia, Germany is additionally perceived as a country that has successfully coped with traumatic aspects of its past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), specifically with the legacy of Nazism and the practices of the Stasi secret service in the GDR, and can as such serve as a role model for most post-Yugoslav states.

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I will investigate how and to what effect post-Yugoslav fiction connects the memory of the Holocaust with memories of extreme violence during the Yugoslav wars and inquire into the aesthetic and ethical aspects of the these intersections. Specifically, I will look at a Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian novel: Irfan Horozović’s The Unknown Passerby in Berlin [Berlinski nepoznati prolaznik] (Sarajevo; 1998), Saša Ilić’s The Berlin Window [Berlinsko okno] (Belgrade; 2005), and Daša Drndić’s April in Berlin [April u Berlinu] (Zagreb; 2009). After a brief discussion of the ways in which since the 1980s onwards the memory of the Holocaust has been appropriated for political purposes in the former Yugoslavia, I will explore how each of the novels “performs” memory.³ I will read the novels as agents of memory that contest Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian political discourse(s) that establish and exploit simplified equations between the suffering of the “own”’ national group and the suffering of the European Jews in the Holocaust for the sake of local identity politics. Instead of easy Holocaust analogies, the novels propose other, more productive models of memory and forms of dealing with the traumatic past. In my close readings, I will demonstrate how each of them creates unexpected constellations of memory through different aesthetics, specific tropes, and intertextual and intermedial links. While Horozović’s postmodernist novel The Unknown Passerby in Berlin through the figure of the doppelgänger proposes a politics of mourning and cosmopolitan openness to (the suffering of) the other, Ilić’s and Drndić’s novels focus on processes of collective remembering and forgetting. Ilić’s Berlin Window can be read as a traumatic realist novel that points to the need for a more active working upon the past as the only possible remedy against a politics of self-victimization and collective amnesia in Serbia.⁴ Drndić’s April in Berlin, however, deploys a neo avant-garde model and an aesthetics of shock to bring to the fore multiple webs of implication in post-war and contemporary (Central) Europe and Croatia. I will argue that, through the way in which they connect (hi)stories of suffering from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s with the memory of the Holocaust, all three novels intervene into local, state-sponsored politics of memory, which tend to conceive of collective memory as inextricably linked to national identity and as “a zero-sum game” of “competing” national memory communities (that

 For a performative understanding of cultural memory, see Erll and Rigney (, ), Rigney (, ), Plate and Smelik (). Rothberg helpfully specifies that a performative model of memory assumes that “we need to attend not only to what the novel says – its enigmatic tale of a frustrated quest for the past – but also to what it does, for what it does […] involves the creation of new forms of memory via intertextuality and a metonymical narrative technique, even at sites of emptiness and forgetting” (,  – ; original emphasis).  For the notion of traumatic realism, see Rothberg ().

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is, that public attention to one group’s trauma goes necessarily at the expense of another; see Rothberg 2009). By doing so, they invite the reader to reflect upon the ways in which memory, even in the wake of the catastrophe of the Yugoslav 1990s and ongoing disastrous identity politics, can not only become un-bound and transcend national boundaries and identities but also foster a politics of transnational solidarity.

Instrumentalizing the Holocaust in (the former) Yugoslavia since the 1980s Already during the 1980s, before the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars, Serbian and Croatian nationalist politicians frequently invoked the Holocaust, each side supported by revisionist historians whose new versions of the Second World War inflated the numbers of victims of their own ethnic groups. To put it succinctly, “both groups used claims of victimisation and persecution to legitimate their own state-building or state-expanding projects, with often violent consequences” (MacDonald 2002, 6). On the one hand, Serbian nationalists compared the suffering of Serbs during the Second World War to the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust, especially with reference to the Jasenovac concentration camp on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia, in which the Ustashe had interned and systematically murdered Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. Croat nationalists, on the other hand, referred to the Holocaust in the case of Bleiburg – a place next to the Austrian border where Tito’s partisans had massacred thousands of Ustasha militia and civilians who had fled with them – at the same time trying to downplay the number of (Serbian) victims of the Jasenovac camp. Moreover, as Bruce MacDonald put it, the instrumentalization of the Holocaust in Serbia and Croatia in the late 1980s functioned as “performing, or acting out a genocide” (2002, 6). During the 1990s, these trends almost became the official national version of the history of the Second World War, meaning that in the time of Slobodan Milošević, a specific Serbian philo-Semitic discourse that equated Serbs and Jews as eternal victims of history became dominant (see Pickus 2008), while under Franjo Tuđman, a Croatian nationalism with clear anti-Semitic characteristics was revamped (Goldstein and Goldstein 2002; Radonić 2010, 135 – 265). Since the 1990s, the Holocaust has become a recurrent trope in discussions about the extremity of war crimes committed in the countries of the former Yugoslavia as well as in an international context. During the wars, Western intellectuals, journalists, activists, and governments invoked the Holocaust to justify military

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intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo by the international community (Cushman and Meštrović 1996; for France, see Golsan 1997; for the US, see Steinweis 2005). Since the end of the wars, local politicians, journalists, historians, and nongovernmental organizations representing victims of war crimes have frequently invoked the Holocaust analogy to stake their claims for the recognition of the suffering of their own (ethnic) group. This is particularly the case in contemporary Bosnia. In a text published in 2009 under the title “A School of Memory Culture [Škola kulture pamćenja],” the Bosniak journalist Fatmir Alispahić called upon the Bosniaks to learn from the Jews how to establish “a proper memory culture” and develop “a national strategy” of commemorating their victims. According to Alispahić, the Bosniaks should commemorate not only the victims of Srebrenica but also all Bosniak victims of the Bosnian war, and they should do so not only on the annual commemoration held in Srebrenica on 11 July but throughout the whole year, very much like the Jews: “If the Jews are not disgusted [sic] with starting each day by remembering the victims of the Holocaust, why would the Bosniaks be so upset by the presence of Bosniak victims in Bosnian everyday life?” (2009). Apart from the fact that Alispahić’s views epitomize a dubious philo-Semitism, he clearly invokes the Nazi genocide of the Jews in order to foreground the suffering of his own ethnic group.⁵ As this brief overview shows, the Holocaust analogies that have been invoked in (the former) Yugoslavia since the 1980s point at more or less explicit forms of instrumentalization of the Holocaust, which reveal a clear link between historical revisionism, collective memory, and nation-building. The ways in which the Holocaust is used (often in a philo-Semitic discourse with unmistakable anti-Semitic undertones) to foreground the suffering of the “own” national group reveal a competitive logic and display a belief in an inextricable link between identity, memory, and nation-state/territory. In what follows, I will explore how contemporary novels from the former Yugoslavia try to undo these devastating political performances of victimhood and propose more productive forms of working through the past instead of this veritable acting out of the past.

 For a critical analysis of Alispahić’s views, see Beganović .

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Horozović’s Unknown Passerby in Berlin – The double as vicarious witness: Towards a politics of mourning Irfan Horozović’s short novel The Unknown Passerby in Berlin (1998) features a first-person narrator-protagonist who, as a Bosniak refugee in temporary exile in Berlin, wanders through the streets, parks, and museums of Berlin.⁶ His strolls through Berlin not only lead him to discover the city and its scars of the past but also evoke in him memories of his hometown Banja Luka and of the genocide committed on the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) by the forces of the Bosnian Serb Republic in that part of Bosnia. The narrator perceives Berlin as the city that was once divided but which is now re-uniting, as “a man torn to pieces who is rising again” (Horozović 1998, 202), or as “the city which feeds on memories of itself and ashamedly sees itself in the rainbow that joins its two halves” (202).⁷ As such, Berlin emerges as the counterpart of the once multi-ethnic and now ethnically cleansed Banja Luka, which, very much like the exiled protagonist himself (“izgnanik” [exile]; 187), is called “the exiled and lost city” [izgnani i izgubljeni grad] (187). Contrary to “the small place” (188) from where he had fled, Berlin is the metropolis where the narrator feels comfortably at home: “In this enormous city, and in all other big cities which I have visited, I took pleasure in the unknown crowd, myself an unknown passerby in it […]. I wish I could always be only an unknown passerby, I thought. That’s happiness. Invisible and unknown, to feel the pulsation of the crowd, to recognize in it like-minded and different people” (188 – 189). This recognizing of similar people and, by  Born in  in Banja Luka, Irfan Horozović studied comparative and South-Slav literature in Zagreb. Before the war, he served as editor of the student journal Pitanja i putevi [Questions and Ways] as well as of the publishing house Novi glas [The New Voice] in Banja Luka. He has written radio dramas, poetry, children’s books but is best known for his lucid and complex postmodernist prose. His major works include Talhe or the Shadervan Garden, Kalfa, Rea, William Shakespeare in Dar-es-Salaam, A Similar Man, The Filmophile, and The Qadi from Imotski, for which he received the Meša Selimović Award in . Currently, he lives in Sarajevo at the margins of cultural and literary life. While his prose belongs to the finest in contemporary Bosnian literature, he seems to occupy a rather peripheral position in the Bosnian (and Bosniak) canon today; apart from one chapter in Kazaz’s study of the Bosniak novel (,  – ) and a special issue of the literary journal Odjek (), his work seems to be almost forgotten by Bosnian literary critics – with the exception of the literary scholars Davor Beganović (Konstanz) and Šeherzada Džafić (Zagreb).  All translations from BCS are mine with the help of Vlad Beronja. Further in the text, I will give only the page numbers of the quoted edition.

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extension, similar fates, is crucial for a correct understanding of the work of mourning the novel performs.⁸ Most importantly, the memories and musings of this Berlin flâneur come to us from the perspective of a split or doubled narrator: at the very beginning of the novel, the protagonist looks in the mirror, but instead of his own image, he sees someone else. He calls this person the “Unknown Berlin Passerby”: “You’re the unknown passerby in Berlin, I say to the mirror. And that other looks at me, smiles, not without a sneer, pulls up his collar and leaves without looking back. […] Even before he left I had the impression that that face, which I was convinced that I knew, has an entirely strange expression” (189).⁹ The result of this combination of the figures of flâneur and doppelgänger is an extremely fragmented narrative which, however, seems to do more than just hinting at the shattered nature of traumatic memories or evoking the turmoil of the metropolis. As Dimitris Vardoulakis reminds us, “The doppelgänger undoes mere presence; it resists a reduction to a determinate locus as well as to a determinate temporal arrangement. The effective presence of the figure of the doppelgänger creates the condition of the possibility of topicality as well as temporality” (2010, 135). In what follows, I will show that, through the figure of the double, Horozović arranges a chiasmic configuration of time and place that enables him to address issues of trauma and testimony, mourning, identity, and community in a way that allows him not only to escape but also to deconstruct the dominant triad: (collective) victimhood – traumatic memory – nation state/ territory. The protagonist’s memories of the Bosnian war emerge as a traumatic past, a past that haunts the present in the form of dreams and flashbacks and urge him compulsively to revisit his hometown in his thoughts. The narrator’s walks through Berlin at day are mirrored by walks in Banja Luka in his dreams at night: “Who knows where I have been walking last night in my sleep?” (201), “and so my tired legs […] continued to walk in my sleep. And where would they go but to places where they were forbidden to step, there from where they were banished” (211). One of the triggers for the protagonist’s traumatic memories and dreams is a rowboat without paddles on the river Spree, which re-

 For an analysis of “the structures of recognition” (anagnorisis) in Horozović’s The Qadi from Imotski, William Shakespeare in Dar-es-Salaam and Talhe or the Shadervan Garden, see Beganović .  This “alter ego” joins him at the most unexpected moments on his walks through Berlin and keeps lengthy conversations with him. This male alter ego seems to have its female counterpart in Berolina Brandenburg, the female unknown passerby into whom the narrator frequently runs – a reference to Baudelaire perhaps?

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minds him of the paddles that the army of the Bosnian Serb Republic used to tie together selected Bosnian Muslims (men belonging to the intellectual and political elite of Banja Luka), after which they were taken to a place from where no one returned: Paddles. I see people at a stadium and try to discern [razabrati] their faces. About ten thousand unwanted [nepoćudnih] because of their origin and faith, because of their name. It is but a moment before their final expulsion. Their exodus from the city lasted the whole day. But not everyone managed to get out. The chetnik guards tied together a few chosen men with paddles. They tied their upraised hands and took them like that in an unknown direction, toward their destiny. It was never discovered what happened to them. I looked at them in my dream and tried to recognize their faces. (191– 192)

The missing paddles in the rowboat on the river Spree also trigger memories of Banja Luka as it was before the war; specifically, the paddles remind him of “the paddles of the kayak rowers that made the city and that frontier river famous” (192). In this sense, Horozović’s doppelgänger is indeed “the product of a broken home […], exposing the home [in this case, Banja Luka] as the original site of the ‘unheimlich’” that keeps haunting him in Berlin (Webber 1996, 5). One of his trips takes the protagonist outside Berlin,¹⁰ to the House of the Wannsee Conference – which is described as “a spectral city on the water” (227) and “the house from which the Holocaust started” (228). However, the Wannsee Lake is also the place where “one day at the end of the twentieth century, a middle-aged man from the country where a bloody war had just come to an end, shot himself in his temple and tumbled into the Wannsee Lake. It was only a few meters away from the tomb of Heinrich von Kleist” (202). Later in the novel, we learn that the “unlucky Bosniak, a survived fugitive from Potkozarje, was of the same age as Kleist” (212). Thus, the narrator establishes a link between the place where the Holocaust was planned and the place where a survivor of ethnic cleansing could no longer bear the memories of what he had gone through during the war. The fact that there is no monument or commemoration plaque for this unnamed Bosniak survivor leads the narrator to link the unknown Bosniak’s fate to that of Henriette Vogel, the lover of the poet Heinrich von Kleist.¹¹ Kleist committed suicide at the

 The protagonist also visits the reconstructed medieval museum village Düppel, which was the place where the biggest camp for displaced Jewish persons in the Berlin district was established in the wake of the Second World War; see http://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/displacedpersons/camp.htm#.  Not accidentally, the double is a frequently occurring figure in Kleist’s oeuvre; see Webber (,  – ).

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Wannsee Lake after killing his lover, the deadly ill Henriette Vogel (who was the first of Kleist’s lovers to accept his proposal to die together with him). However, on the gravestone, which the narrator finds at the Lake, only Kleist’s name is mentioned – there is no trace left of Henriette Vogel: “Her name is absent. It is only in books, together with his [Kleist’s] laughter and sadness” (212).¹² The narrator immediately adds “and neither is there the name of the Bosniak who in the vicinity shot himself desperately in the head” (212). To be sure, Henrietta Vogel is not a victim of history in the same sense as the unknown Bosnian who committed suicide, and the narrator does not equate their fates; instead, he establishes associative links between them based on the fact that both are forgotten. The narrator seems to imply that literature could be a possible place to safeguard the memory of the forgotten other. Moreover, by foregrounding the fate of unnamed, forgotten victims, Horozović’s novel seems to ask whose suffering can become visible as “human” suffering and is worth being remembered as such, or as Judith Butler puts it: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, what makes for a grievable life?” (Butler 2004, 20; see also Butler 2009). Who is in the novel a victim and who is framed as a victim? And how does the novel account for their suffering? Once again, recognition of similarities and similar fates seems to be the way in which the novel establishes relations to others and draws attention to the precariousness of the other’s life. After his visit to the Wannsee museum, the narrator keeps seeing the pictures of Holocaust victims in the windows of the Berlin underground: “Through the darkened glass of the underground railway, images from the House on the Wannsee Lake glide by […] I watch pictures of camp detainees, unfortunates, exiles from various parts of the world, and it seems as if in each of them I recognize someone from my street, someone from my close or distant family” (228). Different from much fantastic literature, the figure of the doppelgänger in The Unknown Passerby in Berlin does not account for the uncanny other of the narrating self or protagonist (Webber 1996, 4; 8); instead, it productively codifies the relations between victim and witness, narrator and listener. The double narrative voice allows the narrator to become at the same time speaker and listener, the one who observes and is being observed simultaneously, someone who remembers only things he himself has survived, and someone who tells memories from times and places where the narrating “I” had never been – or could never  Interestingly, this situation has changed since Horozović’s stay in Berlin: in , on the th anniversary of Kleist’s and Vogel’s death, the original tombstone, on which there was an inscription devoted to Henriette Vogel but which had been removed in the s under national socialism, was reinstalled. See http://www.berlin.de/orte/sehenswuerdigkeiten/kleist grab-am-kleinen-wannsee.

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have been, for example, at the stadium during the Berlin Olympics of 1936 (225). As Primo Levi put it in The Drowned and the Saved (1989), the main paradox of testimony is that those who are the real witnesses, the Muselmänner, cannot speak for themselves because they did not survive (or because they saw such horrible things that they can no longer enunciate the experience they went through in understandable language), whereas those who did survive will never be able to grasp what the real witness of the camp, the Muselmann who was reduced to bare life, experienced.¹³ Horozović’s novel, however, tries to find ways to account for the suffering of others without usurping their voices, thus emphasizing that the narrator-protagonist can only act as a vicarious witness. An example of Levi’s “true witness” in the novel would be Fariz Čavka – the narrator’s childhood friend who was one of the first to be killed in 1992 in Banja Luka but whose specter seems to haunt the narrator in Berlin. The narrator believes he recognizes Fariz in the Berlin underground (229) and engages with him in imagined conversations, in which he learns that the Bosniak who killed himself at the Wannsee lake was “disgusted […] and most of all because of his helplessness” (264). A final aspect that The Unknown Passerby in Berlin addresses and deconstructs is the national(ist) myth of organic community existing in continuous historical time. As Vardoulakis has pointed out, the relationships structured by the doppelgänger are “without a single origin and without a determinable telos” (2010, 134). A first way in which the novel approaches the myth of organic community is by contrasting the preferred locus of (Balkan) nationalisms, the “small place” [malo mjesto] to the (Berlin) metropolis (188 – 189). Horozović’s metaphor of “small place” reminds us of Radomir Konstantinović’s philosophical understanding of the “small town” [palanka],¹⁴ in that it emerges as a panopticon, a place where there are no borders between public and private, where what its members do is always visible and to everyone: “The small place that you remember is dangerous for a man who thinks a lot and wants a lot. Each of his movements is visible, each thought met with aversion. By becoming different, he becomes someone around whom a circle is made, a circle resembling a bird trap. […] I tried to be invisible in that small place, because that was a way of surviving” (188; original emphasis). Contrary to the small place, which the narrator compares to a “bird trap” (188), the metropolis is “the collection of such [i. e. di This paradox leads Giorgio Agamben in The Remnants of Auschwitz () to conclude that ultimately, testimony is bearing witness to the impossibility of witnessing.  Konstantinović’s small town implies also a specific form of memory, or rather, collective oblivion (see Zorić, this volume) that tyrannically ties together the presumed natural community that inhabits it.

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verse] birds in an enormous bird cage” (190), in which people look at each other, wondering “is it possible that such color of eyes exists? Is it possible that in such a faraway land people are really woven out of different tissue?” (190). The world, then, appears to the narrator as “a pandemonium” (199), a chaos in which Benjaminian correspondences and flashes of recognition occur.¹⁵ In one of his dreams, the narrator engages in a discussion with one of the guardians of the (memory) community that inhabits the small place, more specifically, with a Serbian orthodox monk – who clearly emerges as a representative of the Serbian Orthodox Church and its discourse about the Serbs as “the heavenly people” (and, consequently, the Muslims as treacherous converts¹⁶), which actually fuelled ethnic cleansing and the erasure of monuments from the Ottoman era: “Why did you ruin Ferhad-Pasha’s Mosque? Why the Tefterdarija Mosque? Why the Old Clock Tower? He looks at me as if I were an imbecile. I don’t know who ruined it, but it was not us. We are a righteous, heavenly people. Injustice was done to us. Besides, everyone suffers in the war, right?” (232). This enrages the narrator, who answers that, if he were to choose, he would always prefer “to be among the persecuted and never a perpetrator” (232) – a clear reference to the postscript of Eduard Sam’s letter that closes Danilo Kiš’s novel Hourglass: “It is better to be among the persecuted than among the persecutors” (Kiš 1997, 274). Taking her cue from Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall, Alma Denić-Grabić (2008) has interpreted the novel as a postmodern celebration of hybridity and multiculturalism, and stressed the “liminal” position of the narrator as an exile in Berlin. While she has rightfully pointed out the ways in which the novel deconstructs essentialist conceptions of (Bosniak) ethnic identity, her otherwise careful close reading overlooks that the novel establishes relations with the suffering of the other, which point to processes of mourning that imply a possibility of transformation rather than states or degrees of hybridity. It is in this sense that I would read the narrator’s remark that “the Vietnamese

 Horozović uses a whole web of intertextual references to complicate the binary small place/ metropolis. Thus, the sentence “those who climb out of the crowd don’t climb to see better but to be seen better” (“oni koji se uspinju iz gomile, ne uspinju se da bi bolje vidjeli, nego da bi bili viđeni”; ), could be read as an ironic reference to Njegoš’s “he who stands on a hill, even if only for a while / sees better that he who stands below” (“ko na brdo, ak’ i malo, stoji / više vidi no onaj pod brdom”). Berlin is closely connected to Voltaire (Arouet in the castle Sanssouci in Potsdam); while at the same time a dialogue with the statue of the Captain of Köpenick ( – ) reminds the reader of Zuckermayer’s parody of Prussian militarism. The many intertextual references and allusions to Western European literature, from Voltaire to Rimbaud and Benjamin to Zuckermayer could be read as an attempt to inscribe the Bosniak trauma and Bosniak literature into a wider European tradition.  For variants of this discourse in Serbian historiography, see Aleksov ().

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woman selling cigarettes and crying is at once closer to me than she was yesterday, when I really went past her knowing that I could not help her” (196; original emphasis). And when (the specter of) Fariz tells the narrator that the Bosnian refugee who killed himself at the Wannsee Lake was a close relative of his, the narrator reacts: “A relative of yours? – I say, unsurprised. I know since a long time that we are all relatives. All exiles are actually related” (264). Rather than foregrounding a competitive memory of Bosniak collective suffering, the narrator proposes a cosmopolitan web of relationality, a model of grief which, in Butler’s understanding, furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility. If my fate is not originally or finally separable from yours, then the “we” is traversed by a relationality that we cannot easily argue against; or rather, we can argue against it, but we would be denying something fundamental about the social conditions of our very formation. (Butler 2004, 22– 23)

The result of this relationality is an “unworked community” (Jean-Luc Nancy’s “communauté désoeuvrée”) of unknown, forgotten victims, of unknown passersby, a community based on “inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence” (Agamben 2009, 18 – 19). However, is it enough to acknowledge and foreground this relationality to challenge the triad collective memoryvictimhood-nation and “find a basis for community” in social mourning, as Butler suggests?¹⁷ As my following examples show, some authors from the former Yugoslavia require a more proactive “working upon the past,” in the sense of Adorno’s Aufarbeitung (see Adorno 2003).

 Seth Moglen has argued for the need of “a fuller conception of social mourning” and proposed a revision of Freud’s dyadic model of mourning and melancholia “in order to bring fully into view a third term – the variable social forces that are responsible for most forms of collective loss” and to arrive at a form of mourning which would give way to a politics of hope (, ).

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Ilić’s Berlin Window – Giving a voice and a face to the other¹⁸ While Horozović’s novel, which was written in 1996 – 1998, in the immediate wake of the Bosnian war, staged a Bosniak protagonist who is haunted by memories of ethnic cleansing, Ilić’s Berlin Window was published almost a decade later (2005) and is more concerned with the ethics of memory, specifically with the politics of collective remembering and forgetting in contemporary Serbia.¹⁹ Most importantly, the novel opens with a quotation from Emmanuel Levinas saying that “the past of the other, and, in a sense, the past of mankind in which I have never participated, in which I have never been present, is my past” (Ilić 2005, 5).²⁰ This epigraph not only introduces the theme of remembering, the leitmotif of the novel, but also emphasizes the ethical dimension inherent in any act of memory work: our responsibility to remember the past of the Other and the problems such remembering generates. The Berlin Window narrates the story of a young man from Belgrade, who is hired by a Belgradebased non-governmental organization to interview refugees from the former Yugoslavia now residing in Berlin. During his stay in Berlin, he additionally hopes to find out what happened to his friend Janko Baltić,²¹ a former officer in the Yugoslav navy of whom every trace has been lost since he deserted the military in

 This section is a condensed and on several points elaborated version of “Facing the Legacy of the s: Saša Ilić’s Berlinsko okno” (Vervaet ). I am grateful to the editor of SEEJ for allowing me to reuse parts of this article for the present publication.  Born in , Saša Ilić debuted in  in the Belgrade-based literary journal Reč. He has published a book of short stories, A Presentment of the Civil War [Predosećanje građanskog rata] (), and two novels: The Berlin Window [Berlinsko okno] (), and The Fall of Columbia [Pad Kolumbije] (). The Berlin Window was translated into French () and Macedonian (), The Fall of Columbia into Macedonian () and Albanian (). Together with Jeton Neziraj, he edited three anthologies: one of contemporary Serbian prose and poetry, published in Prishtina in Albanian translation, From Belgrade with Love [Nga Beogradi, me dashuri] (); one of contemporary Kosovar prose and poetry published in Belgrade in Serbian translation, From Prishtina with Love [Iz Prištine, s ljubavlju] (); and one of contemporary Kosovar theater plays in Serbian translation, A Flight over Kosovo’s Theater [Let iznad kosovskog pozorišta] ().  Further in the text, I will give only the page numbers of the quoted edition.  The name of the main missing person could be read as a reference to the historical figure Milutin Baltić, a prominent Croatian Serb politician and Second World War partisan. As a member of the Central Committee of the Croatian Alliance of Communists, Baltić sharply criticized the emerging Serbian nationalism of the early s. See http://www.vuksfrj.se/istorija/her oji/B/baltic_nikole_milutin.htm.

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1992. Revolving around the search for a missing person, around a blank space, the novel raises the question as to how societies, as Damir Arsenijević put it, “acknowledge and remember those who are only present by being absent” (2010, 218). Reading The Berlin Window as a monument to those who fell victim to the ethno-nationalist violence of the 1990s in Yugoslavia, I will argue that the novel does not merely try to give a voice to them but strives additionally to bear witness to “the horror of their having been silenced” (Readings 1991, 62). In doing so, The Berlin Window directs the reader towards what Jean-François Lyotard called “the immemorial” – “that which cannot be either remembered (represented), or forgotten (obliterated)” (Readings 1991, 62). Very much like Horozović’s Berlin, the Berlin of Ilić’s novel is a modern Western metropolis, but a metropolis in which refugees and immigrants from (South‐)Eastern Europe clearly live at the margins. While in Horozović’s novel, the Berlin underground is the place where the narrator-protagonist is haunted by images and specters of the past and occasionally recognizes a similar face/ fate, in Ilić’s novel it is the favorite means of transportation for immigrants, who find themselves at the margins of society and whom the local citizens avoid at all costs: “as if pushed by fate into the invisible zones of the city, the emigrant population usually prefers this type of transportation, as if due to their status they do not have the right to anything better” (135). The protagonist’s trips on the Berlin underground serve as a narrative device that connects the stories of different characters, and some of the stories, such as the first part of Isa Vermehren’s life, are even told in the subway. In addition, the metro can be read as a trope for plunging beneath the surface of official history: the U-Bahn not only acts as a site for the subculture of street musicians and ironic video clips by East European artists (136), but it also alludes to other underground spaces associated with counter-hegemonic practices, such as Werner Finck’s cabaret The Catacombs [Die Katakombe]. Apart from its almost literal reference to the Berlin underground’s passenger TV,²² the “window” [okno] in the title of the novel seems to imply a double meaning: the first, general meaning of okno is window (synonym for the in Serbian more commonly used prozor), but it can also refer to an underground passage, such as a mining shaft. Thus, the title seems to imply both meanings: “okno” as a window onto Serbia’s recent past and as a shaft providing access to hidden layers of history that the dominant politics of memory would rather leave untouched. At the same time, it is not acci-

 “Berliner Fenster” is the soundless passenger TV in Berlin’s subway that broadcasts a mixture of current world news, sports, culture, weather, today’s events, and advertisements. See .

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dentally a Berlin window: it is only by looking at the Serbian past through the German prism of Vergangenheitsbewältigung that the protagonist gains insights about his country’s unwillingness to deal with its violent role in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.²³ Berlin emerges not only as a palimpsest in which traces of the past (of the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust, communism, and post-1989 unification and neo-liberal capitalism) are layered one upon the other, but also as a true noeud de mémoire where different stories of state-sponsored violence, specifically of the 1930s in Germany and the 1990s in Yugoslavia, intersect and shed light on each other. The anonymous protagonist stays with a certain professor Greber, a retired scholar who grew up in Nazi Germany and lived in the GDR after the Second World War. The stories he hears from Yugoslav refugees about the nationalist violence in 1990s Serbia and those parts of Bosnia controlled by Serbian paramilitary troops alternate with Greber’s memories and the protagonist’s search for Baltić. These various narratives are linked thematically by the (historical) figure of Isa Vermehren, whose life story is told to the protagonist by Greber. During the rise of Nazism in Germany, Vermehren was “a fifteen-year old girl with an accordion” who, “after having refused to salute the Nazi flag, was forced to leave her high school in Lübeck and take off for Berlin in search of a job” (10). In Berlin, she starts performing satirical songs in Werner Finck’s cabaret Die Katakombe. Through the figure of Isa Vermehren, the first person narrator establishes an analogy between the German 1930s and the Serbian 1990s: this story about the young girl from The Catacombs is not only a German story from the thirties; it is also a story from the nineties, a decade that had left behind a lump in my throat and an unstoppable rhythm in my fingers, tapping to the beat of her song: Eine Seefahrt, die ist lustig, eine Seefahrt, die ist schön … (11)

Importantly, the figure of Isa Vermehren is also very much a figure of protest that stimulates the young protagonist (and, with him, the reader) to reflect upon the possibilities of resistance against patterns of collective forgetting, and the narrator suggests that “these verses were more combative than Brecht’s plays or  The idea of representing the absence of missing persons as a void that society tends or tries to forget and with which a national memory community cannot deal is also central to Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin (see Huyssen ,  – ). Although the Jewish Museum does not figure in The Berlin Window, in my interview with him, Ilić confirmed that he visited the museum while he was writing the novel and that he found the way in which Libeskind’s building deals with collective forgetting and remembering very inspiring, in particular the Holocaust Tower in which visitors can hear voices from outside but cannot see the faces of the people talking – which brings us to another possible interpretation of the “shaft” in the title.

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Mann’s critique of the Reich and only for one reason: the young Isa Vermehren performed her cabaret numbers in Berlin” (10). Due to her political activism, Vermehren was interned in different concentration camps. According to the narrator, this is what links her to the people who suffered from extreme state violence during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s: “because she passed through the machinery of Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, and Dachau, that thing has also left its mark on Isa Vermehren” (11). With “that thing,” the narrator indicates the indefinable trace left by the dehumanizing experience of the concentration camps. We could describe these people, whose communication with other people is thwarted and whose gaze has been altered by the traumatic experience of extreme violence, in Shoshana Felman’s words, as the expressionless, as those whom violence has deprived of expression; those who, on the one hand, have been historically reduced to silence…[who] have been historically made faceless, deprived of their human face – deprived, that is, not only of a language and a voice but even of the mute expression always present in a living human face. (2002, 13; original emphasis)

The most telling contemporary story in this respect, which is told to the protagonist in Berlin by the sisters Hodžić, is that of their father, Arif Hodžić. A high communist official in Tito’s Yugoslavia, at the end of the 1980s, Arif was forced to retire, and he and his family are increasingly pushed to the margins of Serbian society. Facing growing anti-Muslim sentiment and overt violence in the public sphere, he fears that he is no longer safe in Belgrade and decides to return to his native town of Prijepolje, close to the Montenegrin and Bosnian border. However, the train from Belgrade to Bar is stopped, and Arif is, together with other Muslims, taken off the train by Bosnian Serb paramilitary troops, put in a truck, and locked up in a school gym, where they are submitted to a humiliating baptism ritual and required to renounce Allah (188). Under the pretext of an exchange of prisoners of war the captives are then taken to the bridge in Višegrad, where they are shot and thrown in the river Drina, only Arif escapes by chance. On the one hand, Arif’s story can be read as the account of the expelling and liquidation of the Other of Serbian nationalism. The story is certainly a fictional restaging that directly alludes to what is known as “the abduction at Štrpci” [Otmica u Štrpcima].²⁴ However, more is at stake than just recalling this horrible event. Lyotard stresses that literature is more than just retrieval work, and that

 On  February , most probably with the support of the Serbian police and army,  Muslims/Bosniaks were taken off train  from Belgrade to Bar by the paramilitary forces of Milan Lukić, which took them to Višegrad, where they killed them.

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the real objective of literature […] has always been to reveal, represent in words, what every representation misses, what is forgotten there: this “presence,” whatever name it is given by one author or another, which persists not so much at the limits but at the heart of representation […] a forgotten that is not the result of the forgetting of a reality – nothing having been stored in memory – and which one can only remember a forgotten “before” memory and forgetting, and by repeating it. (1990, 5)

On the other hand, rather than merely referring to the extra-textual referent (Štrpci), Arif’s story urges the reader to “think the immemorial” (Lyotard 1990, 5). In doing so, the novel points out the politics of forgetting in Serbia, especially concerning the war crimes in which Serbia (its army, police) was involved – a collective amnesia that, as a form violence of the second degree, once more erases the other from the national (memory) community. Seen in the context of the entire novel, which revolves around a blank space, the novel reveals “the intensively selective memory of the memorial,” which “requires the forgetting of that which may question the community and its legitimacy” (Lyotard 1990, 7). Crucial to Lyotard, then, is the question of representation: “One must, certainly, inscribe in words, in images. One cannot escape the necessity of representing. […] But it is one thing to do it in view of saving the memory, and quite another to try to preserve the remainder, the unforgettable forgotten, in writing” (1990, 26; original emphasis). The question of the representation of the expressionless is present on different levels in the novel. At a certain point in the novel, the protagonist hears an unpleasant, screeching voice from the yard in front of Greber’s building. The voice belongs to the unknown person whose face the protagonist tries to see, and while he never succeeds in doing so, he understands that he will “one day have to confront this person” (259). It is not accidental that the novel approaches Levinas’s request to attend to the face of the Other through the motif of the voice; as Butler reminds us, “for the face to operate as a face, it must vocalize or be understood as the workings of a voice” (2004, 161). The voice of the other in the novel is echoed by the trope of theater and the underlying idea of pretending to be someone else. Ana Dajdić, one of the main characters who acts in Frosch’s Immigrant Theater, tells the protagonist the story of Janko Baltić (which is actually the only trace he ever finds of his lost friend) using a puppet and transforming her voice. This act of ventriloquism foregrounds the difference between the position of the victim, the storyteller, and the listener, thus implying the impossibility of full identification with the other. The narrative situation of the novel as a whole, then, is reminiscent of Brechtian theater. Each chapter is preceded by a comment, a kind of appellative statement by a narrative voice that directly addresses the reader, informing him or her about the place of action and whereabouts of the main character and giving a summary

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of what is going to happen in the next chapter. At the same time, this voice teases the reader about his or her supposed disinterest in the story, laziness, and bad memory. Given the importance of the motif of theater and cabaret, these interpellations can be read as aiming at a certain Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, seeking to break the illusion of fiction in which the reader would like to indulge or be compared to a Brechtian narrator addressing the audience. The last page of the novel shows a photograph of Isa Vermehren performing with Ursula Herking in Die Katakombe, accompanied by a comment of Greber saying “It was taken from below, so the camera lens did not really capture a lot from that time. The only thing we see against the dark background is the whiteness of the fingers and buttons [of the accordion], Ursula’s white collar and the girl’s open mouths, out of which comes a voice” (305). Thus, the novel ends with the word “voice” – specifically with the voice of Isa Vermehren, a voice of protest against the hegemonic discourse of silence. The Brechtian intertextual connection, of course, also evokes the question of the social and political role of art and its relationship to the dominant political discourse. In this context, the Berlin Window’s reference to the bridge in Višegrad is not accidental. As Guido Snel has pointed out, the bridge has long been “the outstanding ideological image of Yugoslavia’s post-WWII imagined community” (2014, 199), a metaphor which also determined the dominant interpretations of the novel that made the bridge famous, Ivo Andrić’s novel The Bridge on the Drina. Since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, this metaphor of course has “lost credibility” (Snel 2014, 199). This is also what The Berlin Window seems to suggest: instead of a symbol of Yugoslav unity and the transnational link between the South-Slav peoples, the bridge over the Drina in Višegrad has now become a symbol of “the conflagration of community.”²⁵ Therefore, The Berlin Window can also be read as an attempt to write “after the ‘destruction’ of the bridge as metaphor” (Snel 2014, 200). In the wake of the Yugoslav catastrophe, the novel seems to imply that not only a new kind of literature is needed but also a new kind of critical reflection on the cultural and mnemonic capital of literature, that is, on the role literature can play in the performing of collective identities as well as in processes of collective forgetting and remembering. However, as my following example shows, the entanglement of different memories of suffering and play with intertextuality do not necessarily amount to a self-reflexive form of writing about the suffering of others.

 For the concept “the conflagration of community,” see Hillis-Miller ().

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Drndić’s April in Berlin: The reader as implicated subject Not unlike Horozović’s, Daša Drndić’s semi-autobiographical novel April in Berlin takes the reader to the Wannsee Lake, where the narrator-protagonist participates (during the month April) in a writer in residence program.²⁶ April in Berlin reads as a real patchwork-novel: it contains detailed diary-like descriptions of the protagonist’s stay at the writers’ villa, of her encounters with friends and acquaintances in Berlin and her discussions with other writers at the Wannsee villa and excerpts of their poems, which are interlaced with imagined dialogues with and lengthy quotes from the work of other writers (most notably, Witold Gombrowicz, Thomas Bernhard, Victor Klemperer, and Danilo Kiš) that alternate with long narratorial monologues, reports of short stays in Vienna, Graz, and Budapest, as well as the narrator’s memories of Istria (where she spent much of her childhood summer holidays at her grandparents’ place), and Belgrade (where she grew up and lived until the outburst of nationalism in the 1990s). Conceived as a montage, the novel also includes photographs and non-fictional historical materials such as excerpts from court transcripts of trials against Holocaust economic profiteers and scientific collaborators, as well as short (partly ficionalized) biographies of some of the victims of medical experiments conducted by Nazi doctors and of KGB prisons. As we read on one of the first pages, “The Wannsee district was a Nazi quarter, which it has partly remained to this day, says Hanno, and Hanno knows” (22). This sentence actually sets the tone of the novel: the narrator is firmly decided to bring to the light what is left of Nazism today. Not accidentally, Hanno is someone who fled Eastern Germany (176 ff.): his victim status is a guarantee that he knows and tells the truth. The Wannsee Lake – and Berlin, for that matter – is clearly a place where traumatic history surfaces at every step: “always and everywhere behind me, from the beginning to the end of my stay in Berlin, ran His-

 Daša Drndić (born in ) is one of Croatia’s leading novelists. She studied English literature at the University of Belgrade and theater at Southern Illinois University, and holds a PhD from the University of Rijeka, where she has been an associate professor at the Department of English. She has published an impressive number of novels, short stories, and radio dramas. Many of her novels (e. g. Doppelgänger, Leica format, Sonnenschein) deal with the Holocaust. For her novel Sonnenschein (), which has been translated into Slovene, Dutch, Polish, English, and French she was awarded the Croatian Fran Galović and the Kiklop awards, while the English edition (translated as Trieste, ) won her the  Independent Foreign Fiction Readers’ Prize.

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tory, gone out of her mind, screaming: Listen! Look!” (109). Berlin and the Wannsee Lake figure not only as an important lieu de mémoire (as the place where the final solution was conceived) but also as a metaphorical station of departure for other trips through (Central) Europe, in particular to those countries and places where the narrator uncovers the legacy of Nazism as something very vivid: Germany, Austria, Hungary, and, not in the least, Croatia.²⁷ Reading April in Berlin as a work engaged in the “post-traumatic archaeology” of the Central European city, Vlad Beronja has argued that although a large part of the novel is spent on describing Germany’s relation to its difficult past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) as well as the unfinished process of de-nazification in postwar Europe, the novel’s polemical thrust […] is primarily aimed against nationalism as an ideology that survived the 1990s in Croatia and Serbia. By unearthing those memories that would rather be left buried – in individual speech acts, literature, urban textures […] Drndić […] destabilizes current constructions of the symbolical national space in the postYugoslav context. (2014, 154)

Already a first visit to the Wannsee museum triggers the narrator’s associations with Croatia. When the narrator sees the Wannsee Protocol, she feels overwhelmed with strong emotions, which she finds hard to classify: “Shame? […] Nausea because of the atrocities committed in my name as well” (24). She quotes from the Protocol that “in Slovakia and in Croatia the execution of this task no longer poses any difficulties, because in these countries a final solution regarding the most important questions of this problem is already emerging” (24; original emphasis). However, Croatia not only was among the best pupils of the Nazi class in 1941 but also continues to be a kind of ideological heir of Nazism. Croatia emerges as “the country of hearths and hearth-mongering, of ossified tradition, empty seriousness, whose self-appointed guards are Ustashoid priests and half-literate singers” (24), something that the narrator illustrates using the 2008 public burial in Zagreb of Jasenovac commander Dinko Šakić, which “today in Germany would be unthinkable” (26).²⁸ The legacy of Nazi Germany in contem-

 By way of allusions and associations, the novel also establishes links between the Holocaust and the Bosnian war (specifically to recipes of dishes prepared by women in Teresienstadt and in Sarajevo during the siege of the city), thus laying bare a whole palimpsest of state-sponsored violence.  Dinko Šakić was the commander of the Jasenovac concentration camp. He was tried in  for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Croatia. He was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment but died in  of heart problems and was cremated in his Ustasha uniform. At Šakić’s public burial, Dominican friar Vjekoslav Lasić claimed that the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was the foundation of contemporary Croatia and that every honorable Croat should

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porary Croatia seems not only to survive through extreme right-wing ideological groups but is also deeply imbedded into everyday practices, specifically on the level of language usage. The narrator draws a clear analogy between Franjo Tudjman’s language politics and the language politics of the Third Reich, which she illustrates with lengthy quotes from Victor Klemperer’s Lingua Tertii Imperii on the one hand, and with references, on the other hand, to situations in which people in Croatia “corrected” the “Serbianisms” her language allegedly contains even seventeen years after she moved from Belgrade to Rijeka (11). It is indeed in this context that it becomes clear why the title of the novel, April u Berlinu, uses the Serbian word for April (april) rather than the Croatian (travanj) – it functions as a protest against Croatian language purism that is framed as an example of “a historical constellation between Croatian nationalism of the 1990s and German fascism” (Beronja 2014, 167). By way of abundant intertextual references to Klemperer, Gombrowicz, Bernhard, Kiš, and others, Drndić evokes and anchors herself in a Central-European literary tradition of Nestbeschmutzer [lit. a bird fouling its own nest]; she is both a victim of and actor against the narrow-minded nationalism of her country.²⁹ In the novel, the map of (Central) Europe emerges as a devastated landscape haunted by the ghosts of an insufficiently de-Nazified Third Reich and its allies (the only alternative to which would be the literature of anti-nationalist writers), torn by scars that are covered (and highlighted at the same time) by Stolpersteine. In fact, the cover of the book shows an illustration of Stolpersteine that are merged together with a computer keyboard (Fig. 1). Very much like these cobble-stone sized, personalized memorials to the victims of the Holocaust, the novel clearly aspires to be both a monument to the victims and a stumbling block for those who want to assign the Holocaust and the legacy of Nazism to a comfortable zone of collective oblivion. In addition, the novel seems to be at least a partial attempt to call at least some of the many nameless victims by their names. Having seen the table from the Wannsee Protocol displaying the numbers of Jews to be killed per country, the narrator hysterically cries out:

be proud of Šakić (Lučin ). For the  trial against Šakić and the way it was presented in Croatian media, see Radonić (,  – ).  Beronja looks more in detail at Drndić’s use of intertextuality in April in Berlin as a way of “point[ing] to a [Central-European] underlying historical continuity that overcomes the history of rupture and violence,” which at the same time “foregrounds the process of writing as rewriting” and “allows for different notions of community to emerge based on a dialogue that aims to transcend space and time” (, ).

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“Where are the names, where are the names!” (26; original emphasis).³⁰ Such a form of critical memory, April in Berlin seems to imply, is only possible through a kind of shock therapy, something that the exhibition at the Wannsee villa, to the narrator’s obvious regret, fails to achieve: Similar to the exhibit at the memorial center in Jasenovac, the exhibition in the Wannsee villa wants to instruct and inform its visitors, not to disturb them at any cost, in no way to wake up the merry company of devils, those fallen angels of light, so that one leaves the villa without the need to pose questions, indifferently, without memories, because the memory which the exhibition offers is a faded memory, its rhythm is monotonous and its colors dull. The exhibition in the Wannsee villa is a completed exhibition, and every completed memorial closes off a story, offers a final solution. The curators of memorial exhibitions take care of their guests. They don’t want to upset their guests too much. (23; original emphasis)³¹

Upsetting the reader seems exactly what the novel attempts to achieve. In what follows, I will read the novel through Rothberg’s concept of “implicated subjects” (2012, 2013, 2014), a notion that refers to “beneficiaries of a system that generates dispersed and uneven experiences of trauma and wellbeing simultaneously” (Rothberg 2014, xv). I will argue that, while the novel aims to uncover, in Rothberg’s terms, “an archive of implication” (2013, 40), rather than raising the reader’s critical awareness of different grades and forms of implication in the Nazi genocide of the Jews or other forms of extreme state-sponsored violence, the aesthetics of shock employed by the novel paradoxically seem to prevent any productive dealing with the issue of implication. Specifically, Drndić’s appropriation of victim’s stories seems to aim at the reader’s identification with the victims rather than at establishing a relationship of empathy, which would involve critical distance and an awareness of the difference between the reader/writer/historian on the one hand, and the victim on the other hand – what LaCapra calls “empathic unsettlement” (2001, 78 – 79). The narrator’s anger and the straightforwardness with which she confronts the reader with unsettling evidence do not work as a productive force but block off any positive action, leaving instead the reader overwhelmed by feelings of horror and guilt.³² The novel explores several cases which, almost seventy years after the end of the Second World War, show how certain elites, by way of a complex network  Such an attempt is foregrounded even more explicitly in Drndić’s previous Holocaust novel Trieste (originally published as Sonnenschein; ), in which a seventy-page long list of around , names of Jews killed or deported in Italy and countries occupied by Italy from  to  is inserted in the midst of the novelistic narration.  Translated by Beronja.  Beronja notes a similar tendency in Drndić’s novel Sonnenschein, in which “Drndić addresses her readers directly as potential bystanders” (, ).

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Fig. 1. Book cover April in Berlin. Used with permission.

of familial and collegial ties continue(d) to benefit from the victims of the Holocaust. This “perpetuation of the Holocaust” is facilitated by a combination of hidden scientific and economic interests, bureaucracy and uninterested governments, conspiracy-like protection, and a well-orchestrated politics of silencing of the victims. The novel presents the reader with a whole series of examples, ranging from Topf & Söhne (99 ff.), the firm that made the crematoria for Auschwitz and even applied for a patent, to examples closer to contemporary consumer culture, such as fashion creator Hugo Boss (314 ff.), the chocolatier Fassbender & Rausch (340 ff.), or science, such as the Pernkopf atlas which is still sold and in use at universities all over the world (133 ff.), to name a few. The most unsettling, example, however, is that of the Nazi’s Children Euthanasia Program, which involved the systematic killing of ill, handicapped, mentally ill, or “socially deviant” children. In Vienna, in the children’s ward Spiegelgrund at the psychiatric hospital Am Steinhof (today renamed into Otto Wagner Hospital), these systematic killings were conducted by Ernst Illing, Marianne Türk, and the notorious Heinrich Gross who established himself as one of the most requested and best-paid court psychiatrists in post-war Austria; Gross had conserved the brains of his, Illing’s, and Türk’s victims and used them for medical research until the

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1970s.³³ After giving the reader a short description of Gross, “who picked through the preserved brains of his murdered underage patients” (114), the narrator recalls how she came to know about this on a modest exhibition, where she saw images of the killed children, and where “I spotted ‘my’ Friedl whose story in Leica format I half-invented and whose brain floated in formaldehyde for sixty years to be eventually buried together with the other 789 children’s brains, and he looked at me [a picture of Friedel is inserted here] and I froze” (114– 115). Arguably, we could read this photomontage with Sontag, who reflects on the haunting effect of photographs (of atrocity), as a well-calculated shock-effect. At the same time, however, Sontag reminds us: “Shock can wear off. […] As one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images” (Sontag 2003, 65). While Friedel’s photograph is not a photograph of a tortured or killed child, the way in which Drndić embeds it into the narrative makes the reader feel outrage, but at the same time, the novel “fail[s] to show how to transform that affect into effective political action” (Butler 2009, 95). Drndić’s straightforward use of Friedel’s photograph and her unashamed appropriation of him as “my Friedel” points to a similar problem on the level of narrative, namely the author’s and narrator’s appropriation of victims’ and survivors’ stories and their unproblematic fictionalization. Specifically, Drndić’s aesthetics of shock pushes the reader towards a direct identification with the victim.³⁴ Most importantly, a form of self-reflexivity is both for LaCapra and for Rothberg a prerequisite to think, write, and narrate stories of implication. In Rothberg’s understanding, artistic representations of multidirectionality and implication, or of the implicated subject position, for that matter, are “not an abstract cosmopolitanism that disregards its own situatedness” (2013, 46), nor is it “simply a matter of represented content”: more than “an explicit analogy between different forms of violence […] [it] involves a new level of self-reflexivity” (2013, 55). Drndić’s novel, however, does not show even the slightest indication of any form of meta-literary self-reflexivity about the re-use or appropriation of non-fictional stories of suffering in the novel, which, due to the lack of distance between the narrator and the Holocaust victims, not only leads to problematic identification with the victims but also to a certain objectification of the victims. What is more, the narrator turns both herself and the reader into a victim: “and  For the Nazi Euthanasia program in Austria, see Czech ; for the crimes committed in the Am Spiegelgrund clinic, see the website of the Steinhof memorial: http://gedenkstaettesteinhof.at/de/aus-stellung/wien-steinhof.  Drndić’s aesthetics of shock is thus fundamentally different from Horozović’s Benjaminian flashes of recognition.

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so, not only do I harass possible readers with stories about the Holocaust […] I also torment myself” (313). In the end, if the narrator at the beginning of the novel said “But the audience loves evil. The audience loves to watch horror and suffering, especially if it’s someone else’s and if it’s dosed carefully” (23); didn’t she then push it a bit too far, having the novel result in the opposite, namely an overdose, an overexposure to hideous facts and figures with which the reader cannot cope?

Conclusion By way of conclusion, all three novels in different ways draw analogies between the memory of the Holocaust and stories of extreme, state-sponsored violence that happened during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the destructive effect of this violence on (forms of transnational) community. They make reference to Holocaust memory as memory trigger, model, or unsuccessful template respectively. All three novels (1) create a transnational topography of memory, (2) insert the text in a specific, transnational literary and aesthetic tradition, and (3) intervene into the local dominant politics of memory. In the case of Serbia and Croatia, such an intervention means undercutting the nation-state’s performance of self-victimization, which during the 1990s had to “legitimat[e] the violence necessary to create expanded homelands” (McDonald 2002, 39), and which over the last decade, under the guise of approaching European standards of Holocaust remembrance, has taken on more sophisticated forms (for Croatia, see Radonić 2010, 318 – 383; Radonić 2012; for Serbia, see David 2013). In the case of Bosnia, this implies breaking through the polarized self-victimization discourses of the Bosnian Serb, Croat, and Bosniak political elites that prevent any form of interethnic reconciliation within post-Dayton Bosnia. As the novels discussed in this essay show, post-Yugoslav writers look for new aesthetic forms to re-write memory and identity after the catastrophe of the 1990s. Horozović’s novel only tangentially touches upon the Holocaust, as a way to connect different stories of suffering and to arrive at a cosmopolitan politics of mourning, which in essence moves from recognizing the other’s suffering to acknowledging the relationality and interdependency of disparate human fates, of people of different nationalities, historical times, and geographical locations in order to break through the self-victimization of post-1990s Bosniak and Serbian mnemonic communities. Ilić’s novel, however, interrogates the “own” national community’s collective amnesia related to its role as perpetrator in the wars of the 1990s and implicitly seems to posit the German Vergangenheitsbewältigung and the way in which Germany deals which the memory of the Holocaust and its Nazi past as a possible

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model of remembrance from which Serbia should learn and could benefit. Drndić’s novel, then, is the only one that is really focused on the Holocaust (especially in Germany and Austria) and the dealing with the Holocaust and the Nazi past (in Germany, Austria, Croatia). However, the need for Croatia to confront its nationalist legacy of the 1990s only periodically comes to the surface as an uncanny echo of the country’s past as a Nazi puppet state. Moreover, Drndić’s novel is so obsessed with pointing out instances of unsuccessful de-Nazification in the German, Austrian, and Croatian twentieth and twenty-first century to the point that it seems to discard the “German” model of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, leaving the reader with the extreme pessimistic feeling that Nazism is still very much all over the place in Europe and that during the 1990s in Yugoslavia, specific subspecies of Nazism were bred. While it clearly foregrounds remembering as a duty, the novel’s juxtaposition of different stories of suffering combined with its aesthetics of shock results in an identification of the secondary witness with the victim and in an overexposure of the reader to horrible stories, thus undercutting or preventing even the slightest possibility of a politics of hope. The instrumentalization of Holocaust memory for local identity politics in the former Yugoslavia shows how easily a global memory can be re-territorialized. At the same time, these forms of appropriation of the Holocaust also show how collective memory – as a re-interpretation of the past seen from the perspective of the current needs of a group or community – is in essence performed in a complex interplay between local embeddedness and a global vocabulary. It is precisely at the interstices of local and global, past and present, that literature, and the literary imagination in particular, can play an important, transformative role.

References Adorno, Theodor. “The Meaning of Working through the Past.” Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. 3 – 18. Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. 1990. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, [1993] 2009. Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 2002. Aleksov, Bojan. “Adamant and Treacherous: Serbian Historians on Religious Conversions.” Myths and Boundaries in South-Eastern Europe. Ed. Pål Kolstø. London: Hurst, 2005. 158 – 191. Alispahić, Fatmir. “Škola kulture pamćenja”, Bošnjaci.net, 15 July 2009. http://www.bosnja-ci. net/prilog.php?pid=34803 (9 July 2014).

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Arsenijević, Damir. “A Politics of Memory and Knowledge Production in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Case for Studije Jugoslavije.” Conflict and Memory: Bridging Past and Future in (South East) Europe. Ed. Wolfgang Petritsch and Vedran Džihić. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010. 215 – 222. Beganović, Davor. “Rovovske bitke poslijeratnog vremena. Kulturkritik u masovnim medijima.” Beton, 23 March 2010. http://www.elektrobeton.net/wpcontent/uploads/ 2013/05/BetonBr92.pdf (9 July 2014). Beganović, Davor. “Strukture prepoznavanja u prozi Irfana Horozovića.” Novi izraz 26 (2004): 21 – 47. Beronja, Vladislav. “History and Remembrance in Three Post-Yugoslav Authors: Dubravka Ugrešić, Daša Drndić, and Aleksandar Zograf.” Diss. Michigan U, 2014. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York-London: Verso, 2004. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Cushman, Thomas, and Stjepan Meštrović, eds. This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia. New York: New York UP, 1996. Czech, Herwig. “Abusive Medical Practices on ‘Euthanasia’ Victims in Austria during and after World War II.” Human Subjects Research after the Holocaust. Ed. Sheldon Rubenfeld and Susan Benedict. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2014. 109 – 125. David, Lea. “Holocaust as Screen Memory: The Serbian Case.” History and Politics in the Balkans. Ed. Srđan Jovanović and Veran Stančetić. Belgrade: Center for Good Governance Studies, 2013. 64 – 88. Denić-Grabić, Alma. “Berlinski nepoznati prolaznik: Liminalnost imaginarnih zajednica ili naracija o nacionalnom identitetu.” Odjek 2 (2008): 121 – 124. Drndić, Daša. April u Berlinu. Zagreb: Fraktura, 2009. Džafić, Šeherzada. “Prostori fakcije, fikcije i fantastike u djelu Irfana Horozovića.” Diss. U of Zagreb, 2012. Erll, Astrid, and Ann Rigney. “Introduction: Cultural Memory and Its Dynamics.” Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2009. 1 – 11. Felman, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 2002. Goldstein, Ivo & Slavko Goldstein. “Revisionism in Croatia: The Case of Franjo Tudjman.” East European Jewish Affairs, 32.1 (2002): 52 – 64. Golsan, Richard L. “From Sarajevo to Vichy: French Intellectuals and the Wages of Commitment in the Balkans.” L’Esprit Créateur, 37.2 (1997): 79 – 89. Hillis-Miller, J. The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. Horozović, Irfan. Filmofil & Berlinski nepoznati prolaznik. Sarajevo: Šahinpašić, 2008. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Ilić, Saša. Berlinsko okno. Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2005 Kazaz, Enver. Bošnjački roman. Sarajevo: Zoro, 2004. Kiš, Danilo. Peščanik. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1995. Kiš, Danilo. Hourglass. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1997.

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LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Lučin, Ana. “Pater Lasić: svaki pošteni Hrvat treba se ponositi Dinkom Šakićem.” Jutarnji list, 24 July 2008. http://www.jutarnji.hr/pater-lasic–svaki-posteni-hrvat-treba-se-ponositi-din kom-sakicem/189303 (14 August 2014). Lyotard, Jean-François. Heidegger and “the jews.” Trans. Andreas Michel and Marc S. Roberts. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. MacDonald, Bruce. Balkan Holocausts? Serbian and Croatian Victim-Centred Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. Moglen, Seth. “On Mourning Social Injury.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 10 (2005): 151 – 167. Pickus, David. “Philo-Semitism in Serbia 1940 and after.” Sociologija, 50.4 (2008): 433 – 448. Plate, Liedeke, and Anneke Smelik, eds. Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 2013. Plate, Liedeke, and Anneke Smelik. “Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture: An Introduction.” Plate and Smelik. 1 – 22. Radonić, Ljiljana. Krieg um die Erinnerung. Kroatische Vergangenheitspolitik zwischen Revisionismus und europäischen Standards. Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2010. Radonić, Ljiljana. “Standards of Evasion: Croatia and the ‘Europeanization of Memory.’” Eurozine, 6 June 2012. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012 – 04 – 06-radonic-en.html (7 August 2014). Readings, Bill. Introducing Lyotard. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Rigney, Ann. “Transforming Memory and the European Project.” New Literary History 43 (2012): 607 – 628. Rothberg, Michael. “Preface: Beyond Tancred and Clorinda – Trauma Studies for Implicated Subjects.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. London: Routledge, 2014. xi– xviii. Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Rothberg, Michael. “Introduction: Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire.” Yale French Studies (2010): 3 – 12. Rothberg, Michael. “Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice.” Narrative 20.1 (2012): 1 – 24. Rothberg, Michael. “Multidirectional Memory and the Implicated Subject: On Sebald and Kentridge.” Plate and Smelik 2013. 39 – 58. Snel, Guido. “After the Bridge. The Bosnian War as a European Trauma in the Work of Emir Šuljagić and Aleksandar Hemon.” Reexamining the National-Philological Legacy. Quest for a New Paradigm? Ed. Vladimir Biti. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. 191 – 211. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Steinweis, Alan E. “The Auschwitz Analogy: Holocaust Memory and American Debates over Intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 19.2 (2005): 276 – 289.

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Vardoulakis, Dimitris. The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy. New York: Fordham UP, 2010. Vervaet, Stijn. “Facing the Legacy of the 1990s: Saša Ilić’s Berlinsko okno.” Slavic and Eastern European Journal 57.1 (2013): 13 – 27. Webber, Andrew. The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Part 2: Reclaiming the Past: Artistic and Literary Representations of Socialist Yugoslavia

Ajla Demiragić

What Remains of Mostar?: Archive and Witness in Marsela Sunjić’s Goodnight, City Introduction In the past ten years, there have been a number of works that discuss the loss of public awareness about the socialist past and the practice of the coerced oblivion of the socialist legacy in the period of post-socialist transition in the former Yugoslavia.¹ As Ozren Pupovac asserts, since the fall of the Berlin wall onwards, post-socialism, being the period of capitalistic restoration, presents itself as “a time suspended between negation and anticipation”: Not anymore, not yet […]. On the one hand: “the escape from communism,” the collapse of authoritarian apparatuses, the end of stagnating economies. On the other, that irresistible desire for “liberalization,” for “privatization,” for “democracy,” the teleology of economic growth and social stability under the auspices of the laissez faire market model – but also the promises of “Europe” and of the inclusion in the global circuits of the capitalist economy. (Pupovac 2010)

However, the collapse of Yugoslav socialism coincided with the territorial disintegration of Yugoslavia and with armed conflicts between and within its former republics. Thus, the period of transition in Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia), as well as in other war-affected republics, was qualified and thought of primarily from the perspective of war as the founding event that shapes and forms the whole post-war reality (Vlaisavljević 2007, 2012). In several inspiring texts, cultural theorist Jasmina Husanović (2006, 2010) has written about the problem of social forgetfulness and collective amnesia of the socialist past in the social context of post-war Bosnia. Husanović has pointed at the different ways in which references to Yugoslav socialism are systematically prevented in post-war Bosnia during the process of articulating demands for a better and fairer present. In her opinion, in the so-called post-war period, the break with the socialist past “represents a key strategy for inducing the kind of historical amnesia that the political elites rely upon to distract ordinary people from their misuse of  See Arsenijević (), Buden (), Buden and Žilnik (), Ugrešić (, ), Gilbert (), Kurtović (), Petrović (), Žitko ().

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power” (Husanović 2006, 271). Historical amnesia regarding the period of socialism in “post-Dayton” Bosnia is created primarily through the depoliticization of memory. Referring to the strategies of the depoliticization of memory that Kali Tal (1996) identified as mythologization, medicalization, and disappearance, Husanović (2010, 175) emphasizes that all three are operational in the public sphere of Bosnia. This overwhelming historical amnesia is also a consequence of the reconstruction of the past in line with consumerist-marketing strategies. As Tanja Petrović warns, new generations usually learn about the period of socialism through non-reflexive practices, interpretations, and conceptions that are part of marketing strategies which “transform the objects related to socialist past into objects of consumerism” (Petrović 2012, 12). In addition, amnesia is encouraged by ethnonational political programs implemented through cultural and educational projects of national heritage.² Finally, the collective forgetting of socialism is constructed through manifold obstructions in terms of access to archival materials, the renaming of streets and towns, and changes in the basic functions of institutions that are supposed to store and process the documentation and artifacts related to the period of socialism.³ Furthermore, even intimate forms of memory and nostalgia for the lost homeland were until recently declared to be inappropriate, treacherous practices because they were officially interpreted as “a way to easily and superficially move past the responsibility for the crimes of the 1990s, and as a lack of empathy for the victims” (Petrović 2012, 125 – 126).⁴ Nonetheless, the official politics of memory, designed by institutionalized actors of memory (cf. Kuljić 2006, 10), can be successfully countered by creating an oppositional memory, especially in the field of artistic engagement. Because art is able to articulate the concealed or ignored past, artistic works, especially works of literature, become, as Ann Rigney suggested, “a privileged medium of oppositional memory, […] a ‘counter-memorial’ and critical force that undermines hegemonic views of the past” (2008, 348). Indeed, in her critical essays on cultural production and emancipatory politics, Husanović convincingly demonstrates that an important segment of the war-related and post-war cultural and literary production in Bosnia continues to create new knowledge and embrace

 For the issue of nationalist educational projects, particularly literature textbooks, see Veličković ().  On the transformation of public spaces, renaming of streets and towns, and destruction of monuments from the socialist period in BiH, see Karačić, (). For details on the renaming of museums and the changing of their function, see Arsenijević ().  For post-socialist nostalgia, see Velikonja (, ) and Petrović () who pointed out the emancipatory potential of Yugonostalgia and its political function.

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practices of memorialization and testimonies that “can result in resistance to the routinization and codification of memory within the public sphere through the language of art” (2010, 175).⁵ These emancipatory, progressive forms of action and production are linked with the engagement of certain women artists and cultural workers of a new or younger generation, who, as Husanović explains, were forced to seek “new forms of cultural and political relevance, acknowledgement, and voice that will have a stronger echo in society precisely in the sphere of art or civic engagement” (2010, 205). Such new forms of engagement for women were necessary because of the depoliticization of women during the war and in the post-war period and the accompanying reduction of women’s engagement to the alternative scene and to non-institutional initiatives. One of the literary voices that openly and courageously thematizes the ruptures and injuries caused by the war and quite boldly points to the violent and uncritical disconnection with the Yugoslav socialist past is certainly that of prematurely deceased author Marsela Šunjić. With her first novel, Goodnight, City [Laku noć, grade] (1995), Šunjić bore witness to the period of socialism as well as personal and collective losses, creating “a memory on the history of anarchy and crimes for which we ourselves are responsible or are accomplices at least” (Kuljić 2006b).⁶ In this paper, I will demonstrate that her novel, which focuses on the example of violent destruction of the city of Mostar and of Yugoslav socialist unity, undermines the hegemonic depiction of the socialist past through the “act of memory or speaking the truth to the face of power” (Husanović 2010, 165). I will treat this narrative not only as an archive of the socialist past but also as what Aleksandar Hemon (2000) referred to as “a space where people get together to talk about things that matter to them”.

The depiction of socialism in prose texts of women authors from Bosnia I started my analysis by adopting the feminist assumption that women, like all other marginalized groups, create counter-memory, and that women are “‘op-

 In her critical essays, Husanović mentions and interprets, among other things, the works of authors Aleksandar Hemon, Karim Zaimović, and Šejla Šehabović, as well as the multimedia public interventions of artist Šejla Kamerić and the movie Grbavica by Jasmila Žbanić.  Besides this novel, Šunjić published one more novel entitled Puno pozdrava s Mjeseca [Lots of Greetings from the Moon] (), in which she portrayed the lives of displaced and relocated persons from the former Yugoslavia in America.

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ponents’ of the official past, bearers of an abhorrent excess of memory that cannot be incorporated into the authorized systems of knowledge” (Jambrešić-Kirin 2006, 157). Against such a background, I presumed that the narratives by Bosnian women authors would offer notions and depictions of Yugoslav socialism that could enable us “to recuperate some positive aspects of the (forgotten) socialist experience” (Kurtović 2010).⁷ However, in the following pages, I will show that the depictions of socialism in most of the discussed novels by Bosnian women authors are largely similar to the depictions offered in institutionally authorized and canonized narratives. I will illustrate my thesis with examples from fictional narratives written by Bosnian women authors during and after the war, which discuss the experience of Yugoslav socialism from the new perspective (re)shaped by war and post-war experience. Specifically, I will look at the following novels: Nura Bazdulj Hubijar’s Baš mi je žao [I am So Sorry] ([1998] 1999), Jasna Šamić’s novel Mraz i pepeo [Frost and Ashes] (1997), and Cecilia Toskić’s collection of stories Pa, da krenem ispočetka [Well, Let Me Start from Scratch] (2004). Under the influence of strong resentment and in line with the overall post-war political and cultural atmosphere, a strong tendency towards revisionist interpretation of the socialist past is present in these narratives. This is not surprising in itself since, as Raphael Samuel (1994, x) reminded, “memory is inherently revisionist and never more chameleon than when it appears to stay the same”. Even works of narratology that discuss temporal perspective, which is defined as the distance between the original perception of an event and the way it is subsequently understood and presented in prose text (Schmid 2010), emphasize that delayed representation often leads to a shift in knowledge and opinion, as well as to a modification of ideological standpoints. What is arguable in the above-mentioned novels, however, is the insistence to present the period of socialism in a one-dimensional way, as a period characterized by the coercive nature and arbitrariness of government, as well as shortages and the violation of intellectual and artistic freedoms. The above narratives are mostly presented in the form of an autobiographical, sentimental testimonial prose, which establishes a critical-ironic or infantilehumorous distance towards the period of socialism. We can find in a number of narratives a mildly humoristic presentation of socialism through ostensibly un-

 Fortunati and Lamberti suggest that counter memory – as a different memory belonging to marginalized groups in relation to the dominant culture – is an “‘act of survival’ of consciousness and creativity, fundamental to the formation and rewriting of identity as both an individual and a political act. In such a perspective, memory and recollection have a critical impact, as Benjamin states, because they bring out unresolved difficulties of history and represent the most efficient protest against suffering and injustice” (Fortunati and Lamberti ,  – ).

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troubled, even benevolent, recollections of the “socialist” childhood. For example, Hubijar’s novel I am So Sorry (1999) presents a description of summer holidays in socialism from the perspective of the main character, a teenage girl who keeps a diary during the war: Every year, up until the war, on 1 July precisely, we used to go to the seaside. We were so cool. Waiters almost bowed down to my old folks. Why wouldn’t they? Two doctors and their underage children make their way into the workers’ resort, amongst the poor blue collars. To make the joke even funnier, these very toilers, instead of protesting because the gentlemen (like a mouse under the table) usurped the room of some other workers’ family, they too smiled benevolently and died of joy if they found some way to please my mom. (Hubijar 1999, 15)

Right after, nonetheless, the teenage girl, who was eight or nine in the period of socialism that she describes, points out the “usual” practice of abusing sick leaves: “What else could they do? [The doctor] worked at their company, and it was up to her good will whether they would be approved sick leave during the season of plowing, mowing, or harvesting crops. And she, by God, was as generous as if she was giving away stuff from her own pocket. You want a sick leave even though there’s nothing wrong with you? Here you go!” (Hubijar 1999, 15). The comment about fraudulent and too easily approved sick leave that follows right after the description of summer vacation in socialism is a clear signal that it is just a case of forging innocent teenage memory about the careless days of growing up in socialism. In this case, a child’s “innocent” perspective should serve to certify the authenticity and truthfulness of the presented description. Thus, this reminiscence of summer vacation in socialism too easily ignores the fact that the workers at that company had their own holiday resort (which was almost free of charge).⁸ Instead of reminding of that fact, the novel accentuates, in an ironic voice, the condescension of workers towards the instance of power, in this case the doctor who approves their sick leave requests. In Toskić’s collection of stories Let me Start from Scratch (2004), in the story “Petokraka [The Five-Pointed Star],” an unnamed narrator uses a light, funny tone to reminiscence how she lived in fear that “someone from the top would hold her accountable” because she failed to notice that the five-pointed star was missing from her hat on the day when she took her oath to become Tito’s pioneer (Toskić 2004). In most of the narratives, it is possible to single out a congruent and even uniform cluster of motives and themes, such as the depiction of day-to-day

 For an eloquent discussion of summer vacations in socialism, see Grandits and Taylor ().

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life in socialism through scenes involving smuggling of clothing, trading in foreign currencies, awakening of national consciousness as consciousness about unbridgeable and fundamental differences between the nations, and the timeframe that includes almost only the 1980s, the period of “decadent socialism” (Duda 2010; Kolanović 2011). The novel entitled Frost and Ashes (1997) by Šamić, a versatile artist and scientist,⁹ is a representative example of how the Yugoslav past is depicted in line with simplified, one-dimensional interpretations of socialism as a form of totalitarianism. Unlike the other narratives discussed in this paper, it cannot be said that literary critics ignored Šamić’s first novel: it was discussed and noted with appreciation by Asmir Kujović (1997), Enver Kazaz (2004), and Alma Denić-Grabić (2005, 2010), among others. According to Kazaz, the novel is “structured as a daily chronicle of the ethical and ideological sides of the former Yugoslav community and as the chronicle of a spiritual biography” (2004, 153). Direct autobiographic links can be established between the author and the main character, Višnja, a university professor from Sarajevo on a study visit in Paris and the daughter of a renowned scientist on his deathbed. The novelistic structure is designed in the form of three diaries. The first diary – the one kept by Višnja’s cousin – presents a framework for the inclusion of Višnja’s records from 1989 and diary records kept by her father from the period between 1939 to 1944. Besides the father’s depiction of his experiences from the Second World War, the story also offers a critical commentary on “totalitarian patterns of communist ideology” through fragmented recording of impressions and observations about political and cultural tendencies in leading intellectual and literary circles and through a depiction of the general situation in socialist society (Kazaz 2004, 154). This depiction of socialism as totalitarianism does not differ from the dominant forms of thinking and public debates about the socialist past from the 1990s. As Mislav Žitko (2012) has demonstrated, during the 1990s different forms of restrictions and censorship of research and debates about the socialist Yugoslav legacy were imposed on the public and intellectual

 Up until , Šamić worked as an associate professor at the Department for Oriental Philology at the University of Sarajevo. Besides her first novel, Frost and Ashes, Šamić also published the following works in Bosnian language: Soba s pogledom na okean [Room with a View of the Ocean], Portret Balthazara Castiglionea [The Portrait of Balthazar Castiglione], Carstvo sjenki [The Kingdom of Shadows], MIstika i mistika [MYsticism and Mysticism], and Mozart. She also authored a political essay entitled Pariski ratni dnevnik [Paris War Diary] and a number of recognized scientific studies as well as translated works from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, English, and French language. In addition, she produced three short documentary films about Bosnian dervishes and the city of Sarajevo.

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field, while “public speech about socialism was structured by the conceptual opposition of totalitarianism and democracy” (2012).¹⁰ Višnja’s diary entries describe the situation in Sarajevo during the milestone year of 1989: corruption and nepotism (Šamić 1997, 125), consumer habits, (39), collapse of healthcare and economy, and general shortages in supplies (31).¹¹ Housing issues are also discussed (Šamić 1997, 124 and 130), as well as inequality in society, which is presented through a binary opposition between politically suitable people (“peasants and primitives”) and the few “real Sarajevo citizens” who survived, failed academic workers and artists, incapable of coping with the brutal social order ruled by primitives: In the neighborhood where Robert got his apartment lives the second generation of peasants. They turn on their expensive music devices at early dawn and enjoy the song: “Those three drops of blood on the sheet, they are a sign that you were my first, my dear.” I fantasize about trading those two apartments for one apartment in an Austro-Hungarian building with a view of Trebević, and then throwing a big party, where I would invite all my friends from Sarajevo and Paris as well, and have all the doors inside opened wide so we can dance Vienna waltzes through every room. (Šamić 1997, 37, emphasis mine)

The following passage offers another illustration of the two allegedly opposing sides in society: There are Sule and Mladen there as well, both of them idols of our poetry, living myths, with distinction that one of them never looks you in the eye when he speaks (Durrell says that is a characteristic of homosexuals, and Alisa says that is a characteristic of peasants) while the other one looks, not only in your eye, but also at your breasts, your behind, legs, hands, cheeks, and comments on all of that. Both of them have been residing in a threebedroom apartment in downtown for a while, while their meadows are today ploughed by Sarajevo citizens, such as uncle Isak, Viennese by origin. (Šamić 1997, 38, emphasis mine)

The depiction of cultural life and the academic community, which is governed by fulltime professors who never published a single academic paper and are inarticulate when they speak (Šamić 1997, 130), for the most part coincides with

 For the use of the notion “totalitarianism” in discussions about communism, see Komelj ().  Zitko wrote about  as “a [time] of demarcation: totalitarianism, scarcity and underdevelopment on one side, democracy, development, and prosperity on the other” (). It was also the year when Ante Marković, as chair of the Federal Executive Council of Yugoslavia, launched an ambitious program of economic reforms that were unlike anything ever seen before in the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. The reforms also included the stabilization of the Yugoslav currency (Dinar), as well as privatization by way of allocating shares to workers.

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assessments of the situation in culture both by prominent ideologists of the Communist Union of Yugoslavia (Savez komunista Jugoslavije) and artists and critical voices of the time (Senjković 2006; Čale-Feldman 2006).¹² After the intellectual and artistic community had learned about the White book, the secret report about the situation in culture, open debates about the status of artists and the role of the culture and art in society followed (Čale-Feldman 2006). For example, commenting in 1984 on the emergence of a new and popular movement in Yugoslav film, director Veljko Bulajić pointed out the problem of lowering the taste and pandering to the preferences of the masses: “We are allowing the taste of people to decline, instead of becoming elevated. In this respect, I also have in mind the newly emerged wave in cinema with naked female bellies, parties, knives. On every line of sex comes a line of politics, that is, of political allusions” (qtd. in Senjković 2006, 43). The literary critic and writer Igor Mandić, who in 1984 characterized the ruling system of that time as porno-bureaucratic, also had a similar opinion (qtd. in Čale-Feldman 2006, 50). However, Šamić reduced this very tumultuous and dynamic debate about the cultural politics of the 1980s to a clichéd motive of joining of the Party ranks under coercion and the denial of intellectual freedoms in socialism: I thought that it was enough to engage in research and teaching activities. Then I learned that I was “a bourgeois who plays the piano and writes poetry,” as my Professor used to say. […]. “The Party needs such workers”; workers such as myself, after all. I was literally pushed into the Party as well […] I no longer knew how to resist the persuasions from my close friends who claimed that “I should join because it cannot be allowed that scum takes all the positions, as if joining the Party could improve anything. They only dragged you in to control you better.” (Šamić 1997, 128)

Furthermore, the narrator adds: I somehow managed to recover from the Party but not from the self-government meetings, especially the ones taking place at the Department, where I could not stand the Komsomol rhetoric, the pathetic tone, the constant warnings about the gravity of situation, the need to close ranks in these difficult times, and sentences such as “self-governance requires permanent attention, and not only when someone personally needs it.” No one ever spoke about work. We even discussed my participation at congresses! […] It was definitely those meetings that drove me to Paris. If it weren’t for self-government, maybe I would have never got a kid either. (Šamić 1997, 130)

By reducing the lived experience of socialism to a trivialized memory about humiliating “survival” in the socialist dungeon called Yugoslavia, this narrative of Regarding the Communist Union of Yugoslavia, see, for example, Šuvar ().

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fers a highly irresponsible and unilateral representation of the socialist past.¹³ This particular representation is irresponsible because, as Petrović warned, such uniform and two-dimensional depictions of socialism, “besides making it impossible [for us] to review the positive aspects of socialism, also discourages [us] from responsibly observing the events that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia” (2012, 132). In Frost and Ashes, the characters are either unfortunate hostages and helpless victims of a corrupt regime or unscrupulous profiteers and unimaginative, primitive party “cadres.” As lifeless puppets in the hands of an almighty retrograde party system, the characters are not responsible for their actions and decisions. That is why, while the madness of war surrounds Višnja’s city and country, she can throw herself without hesitation into the passionate embrace of her cousin, the Parisian, at the seacoast. Her diary entries are framed by his notes, which open and close the novel, and thus suggest that the (socialist) past can be told only indirectly, through someone who actually knows nothing about it except for what they heard from their mother and what they remembered from their brief visits during childhood – in other words, it could only be told by a stranger from the West.¹⁴ Šamić shaped her protagonist as a helpless victim who simply endures various adventures in life. Šamić also allowed the foreign, Parisian cousin to write about Višnja and turn her into a symbol (Šamić 1997, 200) and put an end to Višnja’s past and to (socialist) ideology, about which “every pen will remain silent” (Šamić 1997, 199). In the way she presents her protagonist, Šamić participates in the post-socialist transition practice of depicting, moreover, producing the people from the countries of the Eastern bloc as “children of communism” (Buden 2010, 126), as children who have no past, or, more accurately, who do not have anything positive they should remember and keep in their allegedly better and freer life after the end of communism.¹⁵

 Slavenka Drakulić is one of the first women authors from the former Yugoslavia who wrote about the experience of “surviving” socialism in her book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed ().  In the diary entries at the beginning of the novel, the cousin wonders whether he, who stayed in Yugoslavia very briefly as a child, can even write about the country because he relies on his memories of what his mother, who believed that all her hardship and trouble “came from communism,” referred to as “the plague” and “the work of Lucifer” (Šamić , ).  Buden uses the term “children of communism” as a metaphor that signifies the practices of “subordination to the new form of so-called historical necessity, which is introduced and controlled by the post-communist transition process” (Buden , ). According to Buden, who builds on Jean-Luc Nancy’s critical thinking about the discourse of the end of communism, “children of communism” are not expected to have a mature consciousness about the communist past. It is precisely for this reason that they are transformed into children: to prevent them from remembering the past. As children, they do not have a past. Paradoxically, it is only in the

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In search for a better past Šunjić’s novel Goodnight, City [Laku noć grade], written as a criticism of the war’s destruction, is a precious testimony not only to the barbaric annihilation of the city and the meaningless killings of its citizens, but also to the end of the era and of the social order in which these people lived for nearly fifty years. According to the author’s confession, Goodnight, City was written out of a need to preserve, if only in the form of a novel, the past and the memory of the city “that is no longer there” (Šunjić 2005). Many authors from the former Yugoslavia whose hometowns were destroyed during the war tried to mitigate the terrible sense of loss of their own towns and memories by reconstructing them in an imaginary world of fiction and through a depiction of places that are symbolic manifestations of individual memory (see also Neumann 2008, 340). Dubravka OraićTolić pointed out Pavle Pavličić’s autobiographic prose titled Šapudl (1995), written during the siege and destruction of Vukovar, the author’s hometown, as an interesting example of literature about the wartime destruction of cities. In Oraić-Tolić’s words, Pavličić develops three nostalgic techniques that would inspire other authors as well. The first one is cataloguing. The author separates items, occurrences, and events that had an impact on his childhood but are no longer there […]. The second procedure is that of an eidetic imagery – vividly remembered perceptions. The author remembers the smells, shapes, and colors with such intensity that it seems as if he is resurrecting a lost world in his sensory reality […]. The third procedure of Pavličić’s nostalgia is the revival of the local, non-standard language that was used in his family and town. (Oraić-Tolić 2005, 199)

Nonetheless, Šunjić is not trying to keep the city that disappears in the war turmoil from oblivion through localized memory and intimate accounts. Even though the novel relies on personal memory and memories of the city and the people, as a hybrid between faction and fiction it tries to establish itself as a reliable and credible representation of the horrors of war.¹⁶ This is because the author primarily aims to tackle the practices of “the confiscation of memory” era of post-Communism that one gets the suspicious impression that Communism never existed in the first place” (Buden , ). For a discussion of the representation of people from the former socialist block as incapable of critically reflecting on their past, see Yurchak () and Boyer ().  In , after the war broke out, Šunjić first published a newspaper article under the title “Mostar, the city which no longer exists” in the Belgrade magazine Vreme and the Ljubljana magazine Jana. In an interview with the magazine Dijaspora, the author told that this news article later served as the basis for the novel (see Šunjić ).

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(Ugrešić 1999), which were particularly aggressive during and right after the war.¹⁷ The novel, which consists of three parts, “Okupacija [Occupation],” “Oslobođenje [Liberation],” and “Skidanje maski [Removing the Masks],” describes the brutal destruction of the city of Mostar. The first part presents Mostar in the early 1990s, right before the war broke out, through three significant historic events: the mass deployment of military reserve forces, the referendum on the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the peaceful protests organized by citizens at the Partisan memorial cemetery right before the start of armed conflicts in the city. At the very moment when Vukovar in Croatia is being destroyed, Šunjić introduces us to the main characters of the story, a group of Mostar citizens, friends, and neighbors, gathered at a New Year’s Eve party in Boss Mugdim’s café-restaurant. The party includes such diverse characters as the politician Jadran Zovko, who transformed overnight from a “consistent Marxist and a fighter for the implementation of the Communist Party’s policy – the strengthening and development of socialist self-government relations, brotherhood and unity and equality of all nations and nationalities, and an unfaltering follower of Tito’s revolutionary course” (Šunjić 1995, 38) into a prominent member of the newly-formed nationalist party. Indeed, the gallery of characters is rich and diverse: a smuggler; failed footballers; those unable to adapt to and incapable of reconciling with the loss of their homeland and the emerging set of new customs and values; and a newlywed bride and groom, whose wedding was aired on television because they were one of the sixteen couples to wed in a mixed marriage on that day (Šunjić 1995, 34).¹⁸ The scene at Boss Mugdim’s café-restaurant is particularly significant and telling because it portrays the characters of the story as people who had lives filled with great and small concerns, hopes, fears, political stances and ideals even before the war. This is especially visible in the discussion about whether to leave or stay in the newly-formed

 In her essay, Dubravka Ugrešić points out that in exchange for their confiscated individual memory of the lived experience in socialism, the citizens of the former Yugoslavia were offered “a construct of national memory, which many accepted with enthusiasm, thinking that that was a firm foundation for a better future” (Ugrešić , ). In order to tackle such practices, Ugrešić points out the need to take over, articulate, and musealize “someone else’s” rejected junk, a fifty-year-long Yugoslav cultural memory (Ugrešić , ).  Besides this “happy” couple, there is another “mixed couple” present at the celebration: the pregnant girl Sanja who cannot marry her boyfriend Dragan because his mother does not support marriages between persons of different nations or religions (Šunjić , ). By way of such contrasts, Šunjić avoids falling into a trap of idealization of mixed marriages in Yugoslavia by pointing out that the issue of “mixed marriages” was indeed present and at the same time very much politicized well before the war broke out.

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country that takes place during the celebration between one of the main characters Silvija and her neighbor Miro: “I am going to run away, because the country I would fight for is not there anymore, and I can’t have every fool as my president. I had my own president.” “You are wrong there” calmly, cajolingly responded Miro – “I am going to take up a gun.” “I have nothing to fight for,” honestly responded Silvija, who was terribly annoyed by Miro. “I was born in Yugoslavia, in a country I loved more than I loved myself, more than I loved the whole world. That country fell apart because of an agreement made by corrupt and sleazy politicians; I lost my homeland, and I don’t see my place and my future in Bosnia and Herzegovina as mono-ethnic country because I am Yugoslav by nationality.” “Come on, stop being ridiculous. Can’t you see that there are no more Yugoslavs. You have traveled across the world and you still have that stupid idea stuck.” “Precisely because I traveled the whole world, my idea is not at all stupid. I remained Yugoslav, because Yugoslavs of all religions in the world were internationalists, and not tribes” […]. “You’re done Yugoslavs. Your times are over.” (Šunjić 1995, 48).

The continuity between the lives of characters under socialism and their horrible suffering during the war, as well as the agony of survivors, is a very important narrative strategy because, as Petrović has emphasized, “insisting on continuity is not an attempt to ‘normalize’ the past by ignoring its bad and problematic aspects but a form of resistance to another generalization – to the description of socialist subjects as incapable of reflection and legitimate political action” (Petrović 2012, 132). While the hero of the novel Frost and Ashes sees an “escape to Paris” as the only way out, all the characters in the novel Goodnight, City are active, capable of taking a (political) stance and making decisions, even if they prove to be wrong or fatally affect their lives. After a brief presentation of the referendum and increasingly frequent incidents between the local population and military reserve forces, and repeated acts of vandalism at the Partisan memorial cemetery, the novel zooms in a group of citizens, who gather at that memorial site to publicly express their dissatisfaction with the war and violence and attempts to tear down the memorial cemetery. Šunjić recreates these peaceful protests organized at the Partisan cemetery as a crucial scene of the plot and a cue to the denouement of the story. While blowing up of the memorial site, on one hand, symbolically signifies the start of the war, on the other hand, it also signifies a chaotic end to a social, moral, political, ethical, and ideological system as well as the end of a city that systematically fought all forms of fascism for fifty years and always supported the construction of a Yugoslav community in which workers’ self-governance would play a key role. In that scene at the cemetery, in front of the burnt

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down tombs of “those who gave their lives for freedom” (52), Šunjić gathers partisans from the People’s Liberation War and their descendants, underlining the antagonistic generation gap. Standing on one side are Generals Sveto and Hamdija, representing those who created the SFRY. Standing on the other side are their children and grandchildren, Boro and Igor, the youth of Yugoslavia, those who betrayed the achievements of the revolution and the idea of brotherhood and unity because they were so lulled by their life in prosperity and peace that they, completely indifferent and uninterested, allowed the spread and the subsequent victory of nationalism and dismemberment of their homeland (Šunjić 1995, 53). General Sveto’s poignant lament over the loss of homeland is interrupted by sniper shots and an appeal by the crazed mob for the military to cease fire and prove that they still loyal to Yugoslavia (Šunjić 1995, 54). The scene ends with a depiction of miners from Zenica, who came on foot to Mostar wearing banners with Tito’s picture and green miners’ flags, claiming that “only Tito’s miners are still left of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Loyal to the end to the man who made it possible for the working class to rule” (Šunjić 1995, 56). After the arrest of Darko Šotra and his deportation into an infamous detainment camp begins the depiction of the “manhunt” (Šunjić 1995, 62) and the merciless murder of the “city of light” of which nothing will remain by the end of the novel except for the darkness by which, as the author stated, the city will be remembered and because of which she will wish it goodnight forever.¹⁹ When reading Šunjić’s novel, a gloomy and tragic story about a lost city, homeland, and people, today, nearly twenty years after the destruction of Mostar, Vukovar or any other war-destroyed city, each of us is invited to wonder if this city, as well as any other city that suffered a similar fate, will only remain a “symbol” of suffering for our nations in our present (Dežulović 2013). Today, these are not living cities but places “on hold,” and perhaps there is a way to revive them, setting ourselves up for the “impossible” task of creating a better and fairer world for us. Aleida Assmann has pointed to the significance of “place” for the construction of collective memory while at the same time pointing out that sites of memory (Gedächtnisorte) help bring the past into the present: “certain locations form contact zones between past and present and [function as] a mysterious gate to a past world opens up at these locations” (2011, 281). The goal of the urbicides  Darko Šotra was “the kid from downtown, part of the gang, part of the neighborhood. The legendary Daba – as they used to call him, was the legend of basketball in Mostar, athlete of the year, head coach of the Lokomotiva basketball club, basketball referee, engineer, and director of airplane constructions in the civil aviation section at Soko airplane factory” (Šunjić , ).

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committed during the Yugoslav wars was, among other things, to ensure that the gate to the past (socialist) world would never open up again. The very title of Šunjić’s novel clearly suggests that the city as the space in this narrative does not exclusively have the function of background, war scenery, a stage on which the characters are placed as the main carriers of another shocking story about the suffering in war. The author primarily wants to save the city of Mostar by telling a story about the city and its citizens, aware that she herself, due to the war trauma she had suffered, has started to forget important details about it. The story about the destruction of the city in three acts opens with a brief reminiscence of the funeral of the (author’s) beloved grandfather, Ilija Dabić, which takes place at the Orthodox cemetery, located at the foothills of the Velež Mountain in 1987. The selfless man is accompanied to his final resting place by many of his fellow citizens, who truly loved and respected him. Unfortunately, the eternal resting place of Ilija Dabić will turn out to be a very brief resting place for him because right at the start of the war, this cemetery, together with the biggest, and perhaps the most beautiful Orthodox church in Bosnia, built within the cemetery, will be bombed and completely destroyed. The destruction of the monument meant the launch of a vicious, four-year, systematic killing of the city. Not one structure that made this town recognizable would survive, and in November 1993, the bridge from which the city emerged some four hundred years earlier would be destroyed as well. It is precisely the destruction of the Old Bridge that would become the “case” forming the key example for many inspirational and convincing papers written about urbicide and the importance of constructions and monuments for the memory and viability of a community. Mostar will become a city and symbol of suffering where, allegedly, an entire community was permanently destroyed because the bridge that represented, to borrow a phrase from Andras Riedlmayer, “the collective memory of co-existence” was destroyed (qtd. in Coward 2009, 6). At first glance, there is nothing wrong with the claim that “The bridge itself had united the town, enabling it to develop. All citizens had used the bridge in their daily lives and shared in rituals based around it. As such, the bridge held a rich symbolic position in all of their lives. To destroy the bridge is to deny this shared history” (Coward 2009, 6). However, if we look more closely at the examples of shared rituals that Coward presented, it is indicative that besides referring strictly to tourist rituals, “most famously that of the young men of the town jumping from the top of the parapet into the river below” (Coward 2009, 4), Coward does not give any example of a vital practice of everyday life. The examples of how the bridge functioned and what its significance for the community was are, in fact, examples from the city’s older history, and most cer-

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tainly not from the city’s development during the modern socialist period. Against such a background, it is very important to ask for which community exactly was the Old Bridge a symbol of coexistence. For the one that was destroyed with its destruction or for the one that was created from that destruction? Did the citizens of Mostar, a city officially liberated from fascism on 14 February 1945, actually fix their shared memory of the Old Bridge as a symbol of coexistence? Perhaps to them, the Old Bridge was more of a symbol of (artistic) timeless beauty and a tourist symbol. In other words, perhaps the people of Mostar had lived in a form of communality that for nearly fifty years no longer needed symbols of coexistence. And finally, what happened to those monuments, to those sites that were, for the community that allegedly disappeared in 1993, in fact vital places of social rituals, everyday life, and the creation of shared memory, places such as the devastated and neglected Partisan Memorial Cemetery or Football Club Velež’s stadium at the foot of Bijeli Brijeg, which was ‘privatized’ into the mono-ethnic property of Football Club Zrinski during the bloody war and the post-war transfers? These true places of shared memory have survived despite everything. Not giving up on these memorial sites of the shared memory of “all of us” (Slavenka Drakulić’s words, qtd. in Coward 2009, 11) is a way to bring the city back to life and return to the citizens the “future” that was taken away in 1993. Šunjić’s novel Goodnight, City reminds us that Mostar was primarily a city of workers, with many poor but honest families. It was also the city of Crveni [The Reds] and their fans Rođeni [Our Boys], and Mostarske kiše [The Mostar Rains],²⁰ as well as artists such as Skender Kulenović, Predrag Matvejević, and Bogdan Bogdanović. Mostar was the city of Tito’s pioneers and youth, of famous footballers and handball players, and judging by the census results in 1981 and 1991, it was also the city with a large number of Yugoslavs living in it.²¹ All these forms of unity and social actors that actively participated in building socialist Mostar were not a large fabrication, and they did not disappear into nothing. During the war and the pillaging of the city, many of those people, as Šunjić writes, “hid in their basements,” which the author refers to as a dissident gathering space. In the basements, she wrote, “lived the past hidden away from present” (Šunjić 1995, 183). People “buried alive” in those basements “continued to love

 Crveni was FC Velež’s nickname, Rodjeni was the name for FC Velež’s football fans. The female choir Mostarske kiše was one of the most famous choirs from the former Yugoslavia, performing songs dedicated to comrade Tito and the People’s Liberation War and its heroes.  The results of the  census showed that , citizens declared themselves as Yugoslavs, and the results of the  showed this number to be ,. (Information about the census results is available at http//www.fzs.ba/popis.)

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that past of theirs and their past lives. To refuse to bury the past and to keep on living, that was the fate of those who lost their homeland and who did not belong anywhere anymore. Just in the basement. Long live the basement. Long live the homeland” (Šunjić 1995, 195). Today, “the people in the basement” at least exist in what Dragan Markovina called “the shared dreams for a fairer and better living of all of us together in the unfortunate space of the former state” (qtd. in Petrović 2012, 193).

Conclusion In the late 1980s, according to Dubravka Oraić-Tolić, a great world, built for half a century, started collapsing – on its own [sic!], like in most countries, or violently, like in the former Yugoslavia. It was not just the disappearance of an ideology, or its institutions […] but also of all forms of life. In the end, it was a loss of identity of all who lived in that world, regardless whether that world was someone’s home or prison. (2005, 197)

For a long time, there were no attempts to replace the loss of that world with anything. Instead, for more than a decade, the dominant ideological discourses have been trying to convince us, as Maria Todorova lucidly noted, “that it was all one package, that one cannot have full employment without shortages, inter-ethnic peace without forced homogenisation, or free healthcare without totalitarianism. And since allegedly you cannot wish for a part without wishing for the whole, any positive mention of the socialist past is seen as ideologically suspect” (Todorova, 2009). Much like the other Bosnian writers mentioned in this paper, Šunjić focuses on similar topics and uses similar motives to describe the period of socialism in her novel Goodnight, City. Also, Šunjić places most of her descriptions related to the period of socialism in the era of “decadent socialism,” a period when the city started taking the shape of a great “fair market” (Šunjić 1995, 23) where smuggling of clothes imported from Turkey and Italy and trade in foreign currencies flourished and religious customs began to be “celebrated publicly, proudly, and defiantly, as if just to spite the others” (Šunjić 1995, 24). This novel does not present Yugoslav socialism as the period when everything was possible (full employment and free healthcare and inter-ethnic peace). On the contrary, through a story about the final breakdown of the city of Mostar as a Yugoslav city par excellence, the novel testifies to the infamous collapse of all Yugoslav socialist ideals and values. However, besides testifying to the breakdown, this narrative also asks how this better past, which truly existed, collapsed. Šunjić does not ac-

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cept that the collapse of a prosperous community was necessary, or, as it is often said today, “natural” because it was allegedly an artificial and impossible community located in a space where freedom and justice were lacking. Although she wished her beloved town goodnight with her novel, Šunjić actually never gave up on the city and its current and future residents. The author framed the horrifying story about the destruction of the city and the darkness that came after the collapse of socialism with a commemorative remembrance of her grandfather Dabić. Who was Dabić? A child from the poor but honest neighborhood of Carina. He was a locksmith, a communist, and a partisan. He was the post-war director of successful companies and wore two suits all his life. He was was a good uncle (Dajo) to all the children of Carina, one of the founders of the red, workers’ football club Velež, a little big man who died and who “was a man of honor” (Šunjić 1995, 22). Dabić, who was arrested and convicted several times as a member of the communist party before the Second World War, lost a brother, an underage nephew, and two sisters during the war, and after the war, despite successfully managing a local BOAL, he was dismissed from his job under charge of being “nothing but a locksmith” (Šunjić 1995, 13), but he never gave up on the “impossible” demand for radical abolition of the current state of oppression and lies.²² As pointed out by the group of authors of AKTIV²³: To think and practice a politics of the impossible, a politics of overcoming existing conditions, in a situation in which, like in the case of Yugoslav partisans, the enemy is incomparably more numerous and stronger – that is precisely what represents a direct continuity with the emancipatory project of Yugoslavia. The actions of the Yugoslav partisans should serve today as an inspiration in our situation, a situation that is equally post-Yugoslav and “post-socialist” because it is the situation of the new global structure of relations between capital and legal-political-militaristic formations, as an inspiration to think and practice its impossibility, namely the possibility of emancipation for all. (Collective of authors, 2012)

By evoking the memories of Dabić, Šunjić suggests to us that, despite the downfall into war and the attempt to erase the socialist past, that man remains part of our better past on which we can base the creation a better present.  Acronym for Basic Organisation of Associated Labour (Osnovna organizacija udruženog rada).  AKTIV is a special segment about the theory of practice published in the weekly magazine Novosti, and edited by Srećko Pulig. Several topics dedicated to critical thinking of the Yugoslav legacy were realized within AKTIV; Misliti partizanstvo [To think Partisanship], Marxism-marxisms, as well as topics dedicated to the initiative to launch Yugoslav studies and attempt to explore within that framework the issue of the meaning of Yugoslav project and the thinking of Yugoslavia as a revolutionary idea (see Pulig, ).

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Hartman, Geoffrey H. “Public Memory and Its Discontents.” Literature of the Holocaust. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004. Hemon, Aleksandar. Interview with Jenifer Berman. Bomb Magazine. 72 (2000). http://bomb magazine.org/article/2328/aleksandar-hemon (13 August 2014). Husanović, Jasmina. “At the Interstices of Past, Present, and Future: Cultural and Artistic Practices of Traversal in the Work of Šejla Kamerić, Jasmila Žbanić, and Amra Bakšić-Čamo.” Leap Into the City: Chisinau, Pristina, Sarajevo, Warsaw, Zagreb, Ljubljana: Cultural Positions, Political Conditions. Seven Scenes from Europe. Ed. Katrin Klingan and Ines Kappert. Cologne: DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, 2006. 270 – 283. Husanović, Jasmina. Između traume, imaginacije i nade: kritički ogledi o kulturnoj produkciji i emancipativnoj politici. Belgrade: Fabrika Knjiga, 2010. Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata. “Politike sjećanja na Drugi svjetski rat u doba medijske reprodukcije socijalističke kulture” Devijacije i promašaji. Etnografija domaćeg socijalizma. Ed. Lada Feldman Čale and Ines Prica. Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 2006. 149 – 177. Karačić, Darko. “Od promoviranja zajedništva do kreiranja podjela. Politike sjećanja na partizansku borbu u BiH nakon 1990. godine.” Re:Vizija prošlosti. Politike sjećanja u BiH, Hrvatskoj i Srbiji od 1990. godine. Ed. Darko Karačić, Tamara Banjeglav, and Nataša Govedarica. Sarajevo: ACIPS, Friedrich-Ebert-Stifting, 2012. 17 – 150. Kazaz, Enver. Bošnjački roman XX vijeka. Zagreb, Sarajevo: Zoro, 2004. Kolanović, Maša. Udarnik! Buntovnik? Potrošač…Popularna kultura i hrvatski roman od socijalizma do tranzicije. Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak, 2011. Komelj, Miklavž. “Uloga oznake ‘totalitarizam’ u konstituisanju polja ‘istočne umetnosti.’” Sarajevske sveske 32 – 33 (2011): 185 – 200. Kujović, Asmir. “Tri dnevnika o ljubavi – Jasna Šamić, Mraz i pepeo.” Bosnjaci.rs, 1997. http://www.bosnjaci.rs/tekst/100/tri-dnevnika-o-ljubavi-jasna-Šamić-mraz-i-pepeoroman;-bosanska-knjiga-1997.html (9 August 2014). Kuljić, Todor. Kultura sećanja. Belgrade: Čigoja štampa, 2006a. Kuljić, Todor. “Kritička kultura sjećanja” Pešćanik 30 June 2006b. http://pescanik.net/2006/ 06/kriticka-kultura-secanja/ (9 August 2014). Kurtović, Larisa. “Istorije (bh) budućnosti: Kako misliti postjugoslavenski postsocijalizam u Bosni i Hercegovini.” Puls demokratije. http://arhiva.pulsdemokratije.net/index.php?id= 1979&l=bs (9 August 2014. Neumann, Birgit. “The Literary Representation of Memory.” Erll and Nünning 333 – 344. Nünning, Ansgar. “Editorial: New Directions in the Study of Individual and Cultural Memory and Memorial Cultures.” Fictions of Memory. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. Spec. issue of Journal for the Study of British Cultures 10.1 (2003): 3 – 9. Oraić-Tolić, Dubravka. Muška moderna i ženska postmoderna. Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak, 2005. Petranović, Marina. “Topos krčme u suvremenoj hrvatskoj drami.” Dani hvarskoga kazališta. Građa i rasprave o hrvatskoj književnosti i kazalištu. 32.1 (2006): 375 – 393. Petrović, Tanja. Yuropa. Jugoslavensko nasleđe i politike budućnosti u postjugoslovenskim društvima. Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2012. Pulig, Srećko. “Za ovu Jugoslaviju.” Novosti 639 (2012). http://www.novossti.com/2012/03/ za-ovu-jugoslaviju/#sdfootnote9anc (9 August 2014). Pupovac, Ozren. “Present Perfect, or the Time of Post-Socialism.” 2010. Eurozine. http://www. eurozine.com/articles/2010 – 05 – 12-pupovac-en.html (9 August 2014).

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Rigney, Ann. “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing.” Erll and Nünning 345 – 356. Samuel, Raphael. Theatre of Memory. Vol. 1. London: Verso, 1994. Schmid, Wolf. Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010. Senjković, Reana. “Izgubljeni u prijenosu: O kulturnim studijama u uvjetima vladavine ljevice.” Devijacije i promašaji. Etnografija domaćeg socijalizma. Ed. Lada Feldman Čale and Ines Prica. Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, 2006. 25 – 51. Šamić, Jasna. Mraz i pepeo. Sarajevo: Bosanska knjiga, 1997. Šunjić, Marsela. Laku noć grade. Mostar: Samizdat, 1995. Šunjić, Marsela. “Svijet je moj dom i moja domovina.” Interview with Dijaspora. November 2005. http://www.dijaspora.nu/latinica/susreti_i_vidjenja/index.php?strana=svijet. (7 July 2014) Šuvar, Stipe. Politika i kultura. Zagreb: Globus, 1980. Tal, Kali. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Todorova, Maria. “Daring to Remember Bulgaria, Pre-1989.” The Guardian 9 November 2009 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/nov/09/1989-communism-bulgaria (31 July 2014). Toskić, Cecilija. Pa, da krenemo ispočetka. Zagreb & Sarajevo: Synopsis, 2004. Ugrešić, Dubravka. Kultura laži. Antipolitički eseji. Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2008. Veličković, Nenad. “Školokrečina”–nacionalizam u bošnjačkim, hrvatskim i srpskim čitankama. Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2012. Vlaisavljević, Ugo. Avetinjska stvarnost narativne politike. Sarajevo: Rabic, 2012. Vlaisavljević, Ugo. Rat kao najveći kulturni događaj: ka semiotici etnonacionalizma. Sarajevo: Maunagić, 2007. Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 2006. Žitko, Mislav. “Jugoslavenski modernistički projekt – ekonomski aspekti 1950 – 1970.” Novosti 669 (2012). http://www.novossti.com/2012/10/jugoslavenski-modernisticki-projekt-eko nomski-aspekti-1950-1970/ (9 August 2014).

Tatjana Jukić

Post-Socialism Remembers the Revolution: The Comedy of It Revolution and the state of exception The post-Yugoslav imaginary depends on post-socialism for its constitution: it is mobilized in post-socialism; post-socialism is its rationale, the logic of its coherence. Yugoslavia, before its disintegration in the 1990s, was above all a socialist project and it cannot be properly understood outside its socialist agenda. In addition, the post-Yugoslav imaginary seems most productive where it addresses what was specific to Yugoslav socialism; there are elements to Yugoslav socialism that seem to be surviving as exceptional compared to other post-socialist cultures in Europe. Most importantly perhaps, socialism in Yugoslavia had been constituted from within the revolution, and revolutions operate as crisis and critique of raison d’État. This is why socialist states constituted in revolutions differ structurally from those that are instituted bureaucratically (which was the case with most European state socialisms, instituted as an extension of the international position and influence of the Soviet state, in the wake of the Second World War). In Yugoslavia, revolution was acknowledged as the founding event of its socialism, yet socialism evolved with and into a raison d’État that could not sustain the libidinal configurations and the assemblages of affect formative to the revolutionary communities. Thus melancholia, which best captures the libidinal configuration constituent to the revolutionary collectives, gave way to the masochism of the post-revolutionary state, suggesting that masochism provides the script which couches the revolutionary melancholia within structures and institutions of the post-revolutionary state.¹ It follows from here that Yugoslav socialism labored around a state of exception, also that psychoanalysis is critical to understanding both the logic of revolutions and the constitution of (post-)socialism.² I am deliberately playing with the “state of exception” here, a term put forward by Giorgio Agamben when he maps out the concerns of biopolitics. Agamben uses it to describe the pitfalls of raison d’État. In order to do that, he em Paradoxically perhaps, this is why post-socialism in the former Yugoslav republics compares more functionally to post-Soviet cultures than to post-socialism in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, or Romania.  See Jukić  for a more detailed elaboration of this argument.

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ploys homo sacer, the figure of “archaic Roman law” which designates the man who “may be killed and yet not sacrificed” so that “human life is included in the juridical order […] solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)” (1998, 8). As such, homo sacer has “offered the key by which not only the sacred texts of sovereignty but also the very codes of political power will unveil their mysteries” (Agamben 1998, 8). This is why Agamben associates the state of exception primarily with concentration camps, which is where raison d’État seems to be suspended and, with it, the law as the sphere where human life and rights are secured. Yet Hannah Arendt observes that characteristic of Nazism was “the curious pedantry of legalizing crimes by retrospective and retroactive legislation” (1976, 353). This implies that law and raison d’État were not suspended in concentration camps but reinforced against all odds and at their perverse purest. Revolutions, however, serve to redress Agamben’s argument because they – rather than concentration camps – are enacted from within the state of exception; they, rather than concentration camps, originate in and around the crisis of raison d’État. Instead of deprivileging the issue of human rights, revolutions deprivilege raison d’État where it fails to secure human life and gives way to being renegotiated as an alibi for a political economy or a fully functional fantasy of it. This is why the communist revolution, which was remembered as the founding event of Yugoslav socialism in its various institutions, nonetheless kept depleting the symbolic resources of socialism. For this reason, the revolution was in fact the economic problem of socialism; if analyzed against the revolution, the very statism of socialism appears as a peculiar economy. This then is constituent of post-socialism, which designates a kind of pre-memory for the exYugoslav futures: the legacy of post-socialism is that of the raison d’État which is fully operative where it partakes of fantasies and economies. If this again calls for psychoanalysis, another consideration is as critical: that revolution could persist in post-socialism as logic or a type of rationality, removed equally from the reason of the state and from the madness implicit or imminent in its fantasies and economies. It is in this sense that post-socialism is symptomatic of politics in modernity as such because it indicates that the issue of biopolitics in modernity keeps shifting away from the raison d’État and toward the event of the revolution. Another issue emerges here, again to do with Agamben. When describing homo sacer as the figure of the state of exception, Agamben stresses that he is the man outside the bounds of the Roman law and religion. His murder could, therefore, go unpunished and constitute no religious sacrifice; hence Agamben’s puzzlement over his Roman label, homo sacer, the sacred man. This is where another philosophical example comes to mind, equally from Roman antiquity:

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Alain Badiou turns to Saint Paul to address universalism and communism. Badiou traces his position to that of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the great Italian filmmaker, for whom “the question of Christianity intersected with that of communism” (2003, 36). Badiou explains how this intersection is structured: in Pasolini’s reflection “on communism through [Saint] Paul, the Party is what, little by little, inverts saintliness into priesthood,” which “reveals itself to be an essential corruption, that of the saint by the priest,” says Badiou, and concludes: “It is the almost necessary movement of an internal betrayal” (2003, 38). Revolution, by extension, comes out as saintliness to the priesthood of socialism. Consequently, the revolution continues to regulate the rationale of post-socialism precisely to the extent to which it deregulated the symbolic economy of socialism, just as it keeps intersecting with religious structures of Christianity.

Beyond the ethnography of post-socialism It is from this position that I would like to analyze What Is a Man Without a Moustache? (Što je muškarac bez brkova?), a 2005 comedy directed by Hrvoje Hribar and in many ways the epitome of Croatian post-war cinema.³ True, its focus on religion is steady until the end, but – seemingly – this has little to do with either socialism or the revolution. However, rather than going for a mere ethnographic outline of the issues Hribar raises in his film, I propose to analyze its narrative and visual assemblages, as well as its cinematic rationale, in order to see how revolution and communism are (counter)archived in the ethnography of post-socialism and how this counter-archiving serves to shift the critical positions in Agamben and Badiou. Set in the rural region of mainland Dalmatia at some point after the war of the 1990s, the film focuses on Tatjana (Zrinka Cvitešić), a young widow whose husband, a Gastarbeiter, died in an accident at a construction site in Germany.⁴  After the film’s release, Leon Lučev and Zrinka Cvitešić, the romantic couple of the comedy, began defining the star system of the Croatian cinema. Their roles in Hribar’s film were evidently formative to the iconic overload implicit in star systems: to the kind of visual accumulation in the image of an actor which is likely to reformat the cinema one revisits and preempt the cinematic future one imagines. In  Jurica Pavičić listed Lučev among thirty individuals who defined the outline of the post-Yugoslav cinema. He quotes Lučev’s roles in What is a Man Without a Moustache? and in Jasmila Žbanić’s Grbavica () as decisive to his profile as actor (Pavičić , ).  Gastarbeiter (German for guest-worker or guest-workers) was the label used in Yugoslavia to designate the workforce, most often unskilled and from rural regions, who left the socialist Yugoslavia in the quest for low-level jobs in the West.

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Overwrought with grief, Tatjana ends up bargaining for thrice the sum initially offered as indemnity, only to donate it to Don Stipan (Leon Lučev), the local priest, for a new campanile. After the priest refuses the donation as unreasonably generous, Tatjana strikes a deal to buy a stretch of arid land instead, as a memento of the first time she had sex with the deceased. She learns eventually that her husband had cheated on her; this is followed by the news that a state highway is under construction; Tatjana sells the land to the state for many times the original sum and becomes the richest woman in the village. She is now in love with Don Stipan who keeps rejecting her advances, in an attempt to honor his vows to celibacy although he is attracted to her. The story climaxes when his twin brother Ivica comes on the scene: Ivica (Lučev, again) is the general in the Croatian Army, in charge of the military exercise in the region. Tatjana decides to trade one brother for the other and has a brief affair with the general. The general refuses to marry her; Don Stipan is sent off to an African mission by the Catholic Church, in part to quench the rumors about Tatjana and in part as punishment for failing to raise the funds for the campanile. Tatjana gives birth to a baby boy from her affair with the general. On his return from Africa, Don Stipan baptizes Tatjana’s son – and his nephew – and then defrocks in public, presumably in order to become husband and father. Certainly, there is something of post-Yugoslav ethnography to the fact that the male lead in Hribar’s film is a priest and a general (not to say something of Jesuitism, with its “soldiers of God”). It signals the widespread visibility of the clergy and the military in post-Yugoslav communities as well as the structural connection between the two, especially in the positions where socialism did not allow for a connection. While socialism promoted the army as a social spectacle, it tolerated but did not promote the equivalent visibility of clergy and certainly not together with or alongside the military. It is a departure which suggests that a shift has occurred in the understanding of the state or indeed in raison d’État, which now gives access to religion, even if this access registers (only) as ethnography. There is a joke in the film which is emblematic of the structural communication between the clerical and military orders: the priest-brother observes at one point that it is just as well that his mother had not sent his brother to the seminary and him to the army because his brother would have succeeded in erecting the campanile but the country would have lost the war. There is a Freudian quality to this joke because it gives an insight into the structure of Hribar’s narrative intelligence. What is Freudian about the general is the fact that with all his sexual and political prowess, he is not enough: it takes twinship with Don Stipan for the story to work, even though Don Stipan is the less cunning and resourceful of the two. True, the general performs for the story through a number of blunders and failures: he oversleeps, is sometimes

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reckless with security, or turns out not to have the necessary gear in his jeep. Yet each of these various lapses serves to mobilize his prowess, sexual and political, which in turn reinforces his rank instead of damaging it. He designates in fact what in the war constitutes specific intelligence – a complicated network of violence, power, and knowledge which demands that war be perceived as an exercise in critique. In this capacity, the general promotes the resonance between the war of the Yugoslav disintegration (the only sustained military undoing of socialism in Europe) and that of the Yugoslav revolution, because the Yugoslav revolution, 1941– 1945, was in the socialist era perceived primarily as an exercise in military and political critique. Even so, whatever the general is for the film, he is not as one, but in the assemblage he forms with his twin, the priest. Yet he is not quite two either. His condition is that of plus d’un, more than one and one no more, which his is how Jacques Derrida describes the rupture constituent to the political.⁵ It is a self metonymic rather than metaphorical; the general therefore remains contained within metonymy if he is to work for Hribar’s story. This impairs the symbolic economy of the narrative because the more resourceful of the two brothers is not enough to carry the story through to a satisfying end, suggesting that metonymy serves as a scene of deconstruction of the narrative economy into politics. The deconstruction climaxes in the final frames, those of the defrocking. When Stipan takes off the collar, he is not merely shedding priesthood but the very sign of the uniform, clerical or military, or rather that which in the uniform is the sign of all signs: the sign of the law itself, the law as the sign itself. By this act, he denudes himself into a state of exception, and in the moment when, shedding the priesthood, he recovers his saintliness. It is a phantasmal moment that the cinema cherishes but cannot sustain, a kind of cinematic madness when the film sheds the character in order to bare its actor into a pure image of man or else into man as pure image. In Hribar’s film, this coincides with the recovery of man’s saintliness, the recovery of homo sacer. Of course, the logic of this is preeminently political just as it is preeminently cinematic in its inevitable recourse into phantasm.

Brotherhood and unity The recovery of homo sacer is also the crucial departure away from the novel on which Hribar based his film. In the eponymous novel by Ante Tomić (2000), the

 See Derrida (, ).

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general simply replaces his priest-brother and wins Tatjana in sex and marriage, while the priest never defrocks. It thus turns out that Tomić privileges replacement and metaphor where Hribar privileges metonymy; also, it turns out that Hribar privileges politics where Tomić privileges (narrative and libidinal) economy. Brotherhood at this juncture appears to be working in a kind of Oedipal impasse: if brotherhood in Tomić’s novel serves to espouse the Oedipal model – because the general brings sexuality back into legitimacy, recovers the priest as the vacant sign reducible to the operation of the Holy Father and the Law, and thus effectively replaces the fraternal with the paternal – brotherhood in Hribar’s film persists as a zone of uncertainty right to the end, locked in the figure of homo sacer and his state of exception, so that the paternal remains suspended in the fraternal. Paternity is further displaced and dispersed into a zone of uncertainty through Tatjana’s son. In the end, Stipan is both uncle and father to Tatjana’s son, and because he is both, he is also neither. This position is reinforced by the fact that Stipan assumes paternity of Tatjana’s son after he has defrocked himself and thus relinquished the authority of the Holy Father that he was supposed to represent up to that point. For this reason, Stipan seems to be reinforcing the claim of Lacanian psychoanalysis, that no father can live up to the idea of paternity which resides in the law; the individual father, in other words, is never enough.⁶ Yet the image of defrocking, with which the film ends, suggests that ideal paternity is viable or workable in this world; this undercuts the representation itself that puts its faith in the paternal ideal. As a result, Hribar’s vision of fatherhood is reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze’s critique of the Oedipal. Deleuze contends that paternity “is an emptiness, a nothingness – or, rather, a zone of uncertainty haunted by brothers, by the brother and sister” (1998, 84). Like Hribar, he sees fraternity as marking the position where fatherhood is metonymized away into a spectral zone of uncertainty. Furthermore, this is where Deleuze situates the political and the international, saying that it is not “an individual or particular affair, but a collective one, the affair of a people, or rather, of all peoples. It is not an Oedipal phantasm but a political program” (1998, 85). In Deleuze, the political program outlined in this fashion is also the program of the revolution; he describes the revolutionary community as that of sons without the father. Furthermore, the return of the father, says Deleuze, constitutes the

 See Ellmann (, ) for this point. Interestingly, Julia Kristeva attributes to Lacan an implicit, original Catholicism (, xiii).

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only true danger to the revolutionary community.⁷ This is important because it demonstrates that Hribar’s film is structurally implicated in the memory of the revolution and, consequently, of socialism, even though it seems to operate at a remove from the political history of Yugoslavia. Accordingly, if the film appears to cohere around the ethnography of post-socialism, this ethnography remains productive for the narrative precisely where its assemblages keep spelling revolution, even after the dissolution of socialism.⁸ Brotherhood is one such assemblage, but now also along the lines it keeps tracing towards a specific position of brotherhood in the Yugoslav revolution: when “brotherhood and unity” or simply “brotherhood-unity” [bratstvo-jedinstvo] was the slogan used to describe the revolutionary community. The slogan was meant to explain how the national and ethnic groups in Yugoslavia were to make sense in the revolution. In particular, it was to show how the national question, unresolved in pre-socialist Yugoslavia, was to be resolved in socialism. It implied that the national question in the Yugoslav state could be settled if the various national and ethnic communities were to reconcile their particular interests with those of the socialist state by acknowledging brotherhood as a kind of logical detour that was strategic to deconstructing their differences. Brotherhood was thus to secure what Derrida later describes as plus d’un; in fact, jedinstvo translates as oneness, as if to remind unity of its dangerous etymology. For this reason brotherhood was perceived as Marxist in inspiration, a stepping stone to effecting the international agenda of Marxism; however, as a stepping stone, it remained suspended from the imaginary core of Marxism just as it remained a detour to raison d’État of socialism. In turn, brotherhood became compromised where it used to designate consanguinity and the regulation associated with it. As a result, while the parental and the filial persisted in the socialist imaginary with no remarkable scars to their Oedipal constellations, the fraternal took on the brunt of transfiguring the Freudian Oedipal into the political. In

 See Deleuze (,  – ).  It is to this argument that I would attach another quote from Deleuze – the cinematic author, says Deleuze, must not “make himself into the ethnologist of his people, nor himself invent a fiction which would be one more private story: for every personal fiction, like every impersonal myth, is on the side of the ‘masters’” (Longinović , ). As referenced, this quote has already found its way into the discourse on post-Yugoslav film: Tomislav Longinović uses it to address post-Yugoslav war films as “symptoms of an internalized culture of self-Balkanization articulated by the auteurs as a response both to the exclusion of their native locations from the Western vision of civilization and in implicit critique of the domestic glorifications of righteous uses of violence” (, ). In Hribar, I argue, a different agenda is at work. What seems readily attributable to an ethnography of the Balkans shows as a symptom of Yugoslavia as a socialist project, premised on Marxism and its universalism and internationalism. See also Jukić ().

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doing so, it unleashed the parental for the colonization of the spheres and structures previously held together by brothers and sisters, thus facilitating a rearranged Oedipal model for socialism. Brothers make sense in Hribar’s narrative precisely within this model. Theirs is the relation of brotherhood-unity: they would be one(s) were it not for the fact of their twinship. This is also why they fail to labor inside the Lacanian model, where the mirror-image and the idea of doubling pave the way to the ego as it is finally produced in the symbolic (in the scope of metaphor and around the name of the father). Namely, the brothers resist the relationship of mirroring – they are twins, but Tatjana’s story signals that their being twins is to secure neither replacement nor difference. Instead, one brother is needed in order for the other to defrock and thus deconstruct the very paternal authority that secures the logic of replacement and difference. Hence the moustache. In Hribar, it is not only the uniform which distinguishes the brothers in the story, Leon Lučev donning cassock and military fatigues by turns. It is also the moustache, another removable appendage and the one which features in the title of both the novel and the film. Initially, the general has a moustache and the priest has none; this seems to correspond to their different uniforms because the fatigues appear to connote active manliness where the skirt-like cassock connotes effeminacy through celibacy. Upon his return from Africa, however, Don Stipan is shown with a moustache and a beard, only to shave them both off. Instead of cultivating the moustache (or not), where the alteration itself, like that of the uniform, secures the fantasy of twins, replacement, and difference, Don Stipan unhinges this fantasy when he overgrows the moustache into a beard. The moustache too is thus exposed as metonymy. This is also where a metonymic rearrangement of nationality and ethnicity takes place. When Don Stipan returns to the village after his stay in Africa with a moustache and a beard, Tatjana’s sister (Marija Škaričić) observes that he may have become a Serb Orthodox priest, which is just as well in her opinion because Orthodox priests are not bound by celibacy. An ethnic metonym is thus effected, because Croathood emerges as metonymic to Serbhood, and vice versa, in the position where ethnicity was hitherto presented as paternalist and metaphorical.⁹ What is more, the ethnic metonym couches a sexual intervention be-

 I define Croathood and Croaticity here in analogy with Roland Barthes’s use of terms like Italianicity or Germanicity: as a kind of trademark which secures the circulation of national cultures the way trademarks traditionally secure products (for circulation). See Barthes (,  – ).

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cause within it the celibacy of Catholicism is shown to entertain a kind of supplement, a certain operable sexual agenda.¹⁰ Here too Hribar’s narrative reflects the sexual economy and the sexual politics of the partisan movement in Yugoslavia and, by extension, of the revolution. The partisan movement embraced celibacy as a rule although married couples were admitted to it, occasionally with children. The Oedipal question of incest between brothers and sisters of the revolution was thus suspended. This is why the imaginary of the revolution resembles in many ways the script of masochism as analyzed by Deleuze. In Deleuze, masochism is premised on the abolition of Oedipal fatherhood and the displacement of incest, and the same is true of revolutionary collectives; also, both masochism and revolutionary collectives depend on the mobilization of the future as critical to pleasure. What is more, Deleuze observes that Christology, especially its dream of parthenogenesis, is implicated in the fantasy of masochism, which all but invokes Hribar’s priest-brother.¹¹ It is with this in mind that one could revisit Badiou’s claim about the intersection of communism and Christianity, as well as his comparison of Marx to Christ, and of Lenin to St. Paul (2003, 2). Which raises a question: if Badiou’s analysis resonates with Deleuze’s Christology of masochism, would it be fair to assume that Badiou’s take on universalism is inflected in a masochist fantasy?¹²

Women and voice This is where Tatjana comes to the fore as decisive to this fantasy, both in terms of its eroticism and its politics. She is the lynchpin that holds it together; Deleuze remarks that the “contract of submission, made with the woman… constitutes the essential element of masochism,” only to add that “the manner in which

 This is why the Freudian narcissism of small differences does not apply to the relationship between Croathood and Serbhood in Hribar because the narcissism of small differences resides in the operation of metaphor. For the same reason, Hribar’s film is at odds with the structures of religiosity that Pavle Levi attributes to post-Yugoslav cinema when he says that “in the postsocialist/post-Yugoslav context […] identification with the ‘subject supposed to believe’ is no longer mediated by the communist/revolutionary but rather by the ethnonationalist rhetoric” (, ).  See Deleuze ,  – .  Symptomatically, Badiou casts Deleuze in the following terms: “He said of Spinoza that he was the Christ of philosophy. To do Deleuze full justice, let us say that, of this Christ and his inflexible announcement of salvation by the All […] he was truly a most eminent apostle” (, ).

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the contract is rooted in masochism remains a mystery” (1998, 53). By extension, the manner in which the contract is rooted in the woman remains a mystery as well because if she truly is as decisive to masochism as Deleuze claims, she cannot be so from within but from where she enters masochism through a different libidinal formation. This formation comes out in Hribar’s film as melancholia: the two brothers are drawn into the story only through the relationship they both strike up with Tatjana, and in the wake of that which in her initial mourning remains unresolved and unprocessed – which is how Freud explains melancholia.¹³ Also, Tatjana remains the spectacle of the impoverished ego, exactly as Freud defines the damage to the ego through melancholia (2005, 205 – 206). With her many and furious investments, all of them markedly libidinal, Tatjana is consistently the figure of libidinal economy, yet her investments are detrimental to economic reason, as if they were calculated to impoverish her to the point where her ego would be damaged beyond repair. The comedy of her situation is generated in places where she gains a profit regardless, for example, when she ends up making a staggering amount of money out of a stretch of arid land. The comedy, in other words, resides where the ego is exposed as the playground of economic reason, not as its function. Moreover, the film opens with a kind of preemptive melancholia. Not only are the brothers mobilized with a narrative delay, as functions of that which remains unresolved in Tatjana’s mourning, but her husband’s death is redundant too because melancholia precedes it. The husband’s death is secondary to the loss occasioned by his departure to Germany, where men from the region have been known to stay for most of their lives as Gastarbeiter. It is the ethnographic fact which for decades was changing the structure of masculinity in entire regions in Croatia, shaping masculinity and paternity in terms of a collective displacement. This is more than evident in the narrative tissue of Hribar’s film, where most men are either markedly displaced or facing imminent and lasting displacement: they are in Germany (Tatjana’s husband), returning from Germany (Marinko, Tatjana’s elderly suitor), employed on foreign ships (Tatjana’s brotherin-law), or are to be shipped out to African missions (Don Stipan) and UN military missions (Ivica).¹⁴

 In the opening passages of “Mourning and Melancholia” Freud () argues that mourning and melancholia stem from the same affect; mourning is normal (and consequently the norm?), which evolves into melancholia, as pathology, when the ego is unable to process the affect away from the unconscious and into the conscious.  The only male lead not facing imminent displacement – Stanislav (Bojan Navojec) – is known as Linguz, “Lazy-Ass,” the one doing nothing and therefore worth nothing, which

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This has had a corresponding effect on femininity, resulting in female collectives of the so-called “white widows”; theirs has been the script of melancholia to begin with. Indeed, the film opens with the intersecting frames of Tatjana’s husband’s death and burial, enveloped in the opening song, a lament, strongly suggestive of the rural Dalmatian hinterland, with a female voice pining for the lover who is so far away and consistently displaced that he remains active only as melancholia in the female voice – in turn, the female voice remains reducible to the work of melancholia.¹⁵ Insofar as they are melancholy, the female voices, like the one of the opening song, are never quite their own but are a function of melancholia, where melancholia is also collective. This is how Tatjana functions in Hribar. If Don Stipan works for the story through the relationship he forges with his brother, Tatjana is persistently amplified by and through her sister Ljubica, a white widow. It is certainly telling that the most conspicuous symptom of Tatjana’s melancholia is her inability to speak for thirteen months, after having learned that her late husband cheated on her. As a result, there is a sustained acousmatic quality to her voice in the film, but also to the female voice in general. Drawing on the term proposed by Michel Chion, Slavoj Žižek describes voix acousmatique as “the voice which transgresses the boundary outside/inside, since it belongs neither to diegetic reality nor to the external vocal accompaniment, but lurks in the in-between space, like a mysterious foreign body which disintegrates from within the consistency of ‘reality’” (1992, 120). In Hribar, the acousmatic comes out as feminine, as if femininity is how voix acousmatique is to be imagined, also, as if the acousmatic is how to imagine femininity. Symptomatically, the acousmatique dovetails here with how Deleuze describes the woman of the masochist’s fantasy. For Deleuze, she is reducible to orality, she is the “oral mother”; voice is where her different roles and personae resonate. ¹⁶ This is also how Tatjana is political, because – deconstructed through her various melancholy labors – she comes out in the narrative consistently as plus d’un. After all, when Derrida describes the political as plus d’un, he proposes mourning and haunting as its correlatives. In turn, when commenting on voix

means that masculinity in Hribar’s narrative has worth only insofar as it works, which however is staged as displacement.  Staged around the sketchy scaffold at a construction site, in markedly dark-blue and darkgray hues, high up against the German sky, the death sequence is reminiscent of Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (). With a cruel and grotesque twist: instead of Wenders’s angel becoming a mortal for the love of a melancholic woman, the suggestion in Hribar’s film is that of a mere mortal slipstreaming inside an enveloping feminine melancholia. (The opening song was composed by Tamara Obrovac).  For the oral mother of masochism, see Deleuze (,  – ).

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acousmatique, Mladen Dolar points out that there is “no voice without a body, but yet again this relation is full of pitfalls: it seems that the voice pertains to the wrong body, or doesn’t fit the body at all, or disjoints the body from which it emanates” (2006, 60). He uses a Derridean turn of phrase to explain it: One could use a French pun, and say that the voice is plus-de-corps: both the surplus of the body, a bodily excess, and the no-more-body, the end of the corporeal […]. The voice is the flesh of the soul, its ineradicable materiality, by which the soul can never be rid of the body; […] it is a truncated body, a body cloven by the impossible rift between an interior and an exterior. The voice embodies the very impossibility of this division, and acts as its operator (Dolar 2006, 71).

When Derrida approaches the political on similar terms, it is in his book on Marx. Mourning in Derrida’s work, therefore, remains implicated in the imaginary of the revolution and the subsequent formations of (state) socialism.¹⁷ In Hribar, this assemblage resonates ultimately in the widow’s name. She is Tatjana in the story where the other names resonate with their local Croaticity – Stipan, Ivica, Ljubica, Marinko, Miljenko. “Tatjana”, on the other hand, resounds with an estranging and expansive sense of Russianness, where Russianness is perceived as metonymic to revolution and socialism. True, this Russianness surfaces as undifferentiated, but is for this very reason capillary and pervasive. Her very name entails therefore the scope of the acousmatic; she is interpellated from within the acousmatic, only to expose the terms of interpellation as those of the voix acousmatique. ¹⁸

Masochism and melancholia As a result, there emerges in Tatjana a peculiar constellation, a masochism-cummelancholia. The phantasmatic complex of it sits well with the post-Yugoslav ethnography but also functions as a counter-archive, where the imaginary of the revolution survives for post-socialism, apart from the official memory of socialism

 In Specters of Marx, Derrida aims at separating Marx’s writing from the histories of socialism, in an attempt to locate in Marx the ruptures critical to philosophy proper. As a result, socialist cultures remain underrepresented in Derrida’s work, as a kind of admissible waste. The problem with this is twofold. On the one hand, Derrida fails to appreciate socialist cultures where their very constitution reflects the traumatic configurations that Derrida finds critical to Marx. On the other, thus divorcing Marx from socialist cultures leaves in its wake a phantasmatic residue that eventually weighs down on both philosophy and socialism in Derrida’s work.  “Interpellation” being the concept critical to Althusserian Marxism.

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and its historiography. In addition, the counter-archive thus invoked in Hribar’s film demands that Derrida’s perspective on Marx as mourning be examined against Deleuzian masochism to produce a detailed analysis of how Marx is still operative in post-socialism. On the one hand, Deleuzian masochism depends on the law that is curtailed and suspended in favor of the contractual, which resides in the feminine; after all, Deleuze describes the fantasy of the communal to which this contract is attached as “the dream of agrarian communism” (1991, 95 – 96). On the other hand, Derrida’s Marxism, embedded in mourning, opens itself to critique where Derrida fails to take into account the lesson of Freud’s psychoanalysis: that mourning comes in pair with melancholia and is normal (and, consequently, the norm, the semblance of paternal authority), whereas melancholia as pathology undercuts this norm as conditional. That is why mourning in Freud stabilizes the future in terms of a manageable fantasy, while the future in melancholia is mobilized as critical and precarious; for this reason, Freudian mourning does not support the imagination of the revolution but Freudian melancholia does.¹⁹ Deleuze’s masochism, with its critique of Freud, and Derrida’s Marxist mourning, with its occlusion of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”, should be read together as a critical assemblage, with one shedding light on the other, in order to adequately address post-socialism, especially where it appears to be reducible to ethnography. After all, Deleuze frequently warns about the phantasmatic function of rural Slavic communities and their rituals as constituent to the script of masochism. In Hribar’s rural community, Deleuzian masochism comes out in truly structural terms. It is the world in which brothers (Stipan, Ivica) and sisters (Tatjana, Ljubica) are conspicuously fatherless, even parentless, whereas the only father of any prominence – Marinko (Ivo Gregurević), the elderly returnee from Germany – is exposed as powerless. He fails to attract women and he is unable to control his only daughter (who ends up controlling his life for him). Also, he is father to one and not to many, as if to underline the division essential to Deleuzian masochism: in Hribar’s film, where there are fathers, there are no brothers and sisters, and vice versa. Even the general is the figure not of paternal authority but of authority refracted in masochism. He owes his obedience to the defense minister, an overbearing middle-aged woman (Jelena Miholjević) who is also his mistress and who threatens to send him away to the UN mission in Afghanistan if he

 For this particular argument see also Jukić .

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should stray. Significantly, she is also the figure of sexual abandonment and humiliation, hence indicative of melancholia.²⁰ This is where an insight is generated into the very logic of coherence of Hribar’s film: with its priest and its general who operate from within a fantasy of twins, in a world where authority is consistently displaced onto the script of masochism, Hribar’s film seems to recall the figure of the political commissar. It is as if all of Hribar’s story serves to invoke the agency and the scope of the political commissar now that socialism is being readily archived, which in turn bares what remains counter-archival about the event of the revolution. The political commissar was the figure essential to the communist revolution in Yugoslavia but lost his place and function once the socialist state set about fortifying its various institutions. Like commanders, commissars were attached to military units; unlike commanders, whose function was primarily military, commissars were to secure the revolutionary morality and with it ongoing political education and critique, which also included enforcing celibacy. Hence the complexity of their position – they were to secure morality from within the revolution, which defined itself as a state of exception. The authority which thus resides in the figure of the political commissar bears an uncanny resemblance to how Deleuze perceives the inflection of law in masochism. “A close examination of masochistic fantasies or rites,” says Deleuze, “reveals that while they bring into play the very strictest application of the law, the result […] is the opposite of what might be expected (thus whipping, far from punishing or preventing an erection, provokes and ensures it)” (1991, 88). As a result, “suffering is not the cause of pleasure itself, but the necessary precondition for achieving it” (1991, 89). It is in this inflection that Deleuze situates humor, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, as integral to masochism: “The essence of masochistic humor lies in this, that the very law which forbids the satisfaction of a desire under threat of subsequent punishment is converted into one which demands the punishment first and then orders that the satisfaction of the desire should necessarily follow upon the punishment” (1991, 88 – 89). The humor of Hribar’s film resides in the same juncture. It is the humor of Deleuzian masochism, implying that what one perceives as the humor of postsocialism could be understood in the same Deleuzian terms. Another important implication is that post-socialism as a concept will have ceased to be relevant in

 The same configuration resonates in the priest’s joke about his mother wisely sending his brother to the army and him to the seminary; it is the mother, not the father, who issues the injunction.

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the description of post-Yugoslav communities once the humor which is constituent to them can no longer be unraveled along these lines.

A post-socialist America It is from within this specific constellation of humor that Hribar persistently invokes the international and the cinematic as integral to his story’s community. Firstly, Germany as the place that absorbs the community’s masculinity is supplemented by recurrent references to German-made westerns shot on location in the Dalmatian hinterland in the 1960s.²¹ Marinko brags about having been cast in one of them as Little Beaver, the son of the chief; Linguz watches them on VCR while pointing to one of the Native American women as his grandmother. The man-eating Germany is in this fashion supplemented by an elaborate German fantasy of American culture, in which the local Dalmatian community – a rural Slavic collective of Deleuzian masochism – is recreated into a Native American tribal fiction. It is the fiction of a precarious community, which is in many ways central to the political project of America. (Not least on film, or as film, in the generic rationale of westerns.) Furthermore, this process is associated with the political agenda that is inseparable from the revolution – according to Arendt, America has a stronger claim on revolution than Europe because America, with its Jeffersonian emphasis on the new continent and a new man, renounces the concept of the nation-state (2006, 14– 15). This then is how the Dalmatian hinterland accumulates symbolic value: it stages the European dream of America where the dream is also that of the revolutionary crisis. This dream in Hribar’s film is sustained and elaborate. It surfaces, for example, when the general-brother first appears in the film, which is also when the subject of twins and brotherhood arises. The general enters the region and the film in a military jeep, accompanied by a unit of new recruits who are marching to a song similar to American army drill chants. However, just before the general is shown and exposed as a twin brother, his arrival is adumbrated by a sound-image composition practically edited out of Miloš Forman’s Hair (1979): the scene when Berger (Treat Williams) illicitly enters the military base in Nevada in order to replace Claude (John Savage), as his narrative twin and brother, only to end up in Vietnam, where he is killed. If the war in Vietnam was the crisis through which the American myth of the frontier was reassessed for the twentieth century and the legacy of the American Revolution with it, Hair foregrounds

 The Winnetou series based on the novels by Karl May.

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the terms on which this reassessment was to be accomplished. The terms entail precarious collectives and tribal fictions whose phantasmal script relies on a Native American iconography. Hence the ritualistic excess of feathers and bare skin in Hair and long hair, regardless of gender, as a signature mark. Symptomatically, hair is equally critical to Hribar’s film, with moustache and beard mobilized into the metonymy where ethnicity is deconstructed away into brotherhood.²² If this is how the political logic of the Marxist International shows as refracted through the script of Deleuzian masochism, the phantasmatic aspect of it becomes inseparable from cinematic visuality. The examples cited above provide ample evidence that the political and the cinematic occupy the same position in Hribar’s comedy – that there seems to be a political logic to the cinema’s rationale, just as there is political logic to Deleuzian masochism.

John Ford as a specimen story This logic climaxes in a sustained reference to John Ford. When Don Stipan is sent away to the Catholic mission in Africa (where he ends up growing both a moustache and a beard), its location is identified as Mogambo. In the film, his thirteen months in Mogambo show as an ellipsis, just as Tatjana’s thirteen months of melancholy muteness were shown earlier in the film as an ellipsis; this suggests that the two ellipses are of the same seminal order and significance, or at the very least that Mogambo is of the same order and significance as Tatjana’s melancholia. Of course, Mogambo (1953) is a film by John Ford, shot on location in Africa; Mogambo, in other words, is how Ford imagines Africa for the cinema. It is worth noting that Ford’s Mogambo was not conceived as a geographical location but in terms of libidinal topography – apparently, the production was tuned to the information that mogambo was the Swahili word for passion.²³ Mogambo revolves around an elaborate libidinal phantasm in which the African location, with its tribal ethnography, serves to contain and redistribute a man with a moustache (Clark Gable) between two women (between the dark of Ava Gardner and the light of Grace Kelly). This is how Ford anticipates Hribar’s narrative. Ford’s Gable is a tracker and a hunter, the figure of military-like dress and know-how; he is pursued by a sexy, assertive dark-haired widow (Gardner),  The lines, light, colors, and expanse of Hribar’s Dalmatian hinterland, especially in the shots of roads and the highway, are uncannily reminiscent of Forman’s Nevada in Hair, just as Forman’s Nevada comes close to the generic landscape of westerns.  See McBride (, ).

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who in turn confesses to being controlled by a long and persistent melancholy spell. Although attracted to her, he readily switches to the saintly and unavailable Kelly, only to re-embrace Gardner in the end. If Ford’s Gardner anticipates Hribar’s Tatjana (Cvitešić), with her dark, melancholy, libidinal drift, Kelly in Ford is the figure of law and restriction, who will ultimately succumb to her illicit desires but only to inspire in Gable chivalric restraint. Put differently, Kelly in Ford is what the Catholic Church is to Hribar’s Don Stipan. When Deleuze discusses masochism, he says that the chthonic, uterine, sexual woman and the cold, punishing, Oedipal mother combine in the masochist’s fantasy to resound as its oral mother.²⁴ This is how Gardner and Kelly combine in Ford; it is indicative that Gardner’s character in Mogambo, “Eloise Y. Kelly,” is constantly addressed as “Kelly,” so that the two women resonate in Ford from within a complex of sounds, voices, invocations, and addresses as an acousmatic figure. Or: Ford’s is an acousmatic woman.²⁵ Finally, Ford’s Africa is contaminated with the visual, narrative, and libidinal structures of his westerns. Rather fundamentally, Mogambo is a western in which the tribal communities are freed from the historicist pretence of the American nineteenth century and staged as the present, unrestrained in its phantasmal drift. In turn, Hribar’s reference to Ford underlines Ford’s importance to Croatian film history and to the cultural history of Yugoslavia, because Ford proved formative to an entire generation of Croatian filmmakers and critics during socialism (Zoran Tadić and Ante Peterlić, for example).²⁶ In consequence, when Hribar cites Ford in this manner, he is in fact addressing the imaginary of cinema in socialist Croatia, which in turn implies that Ford’s westerns were integral to how socialism in Croatia managed its phantasmal core. Significantly, Don Stipan needs to occupy the phantasmal core of Mogambo before he is able to defrock; it is only after the exposure to Ford that he can end the story, as if Ford contained a clue to how this is to be done. Ford indeed contains the clue; it is to be found in the religious structure of salvation on which the narrative closure of Mogambo is premised. When Gable re-embraces Gardner/“Kelly” in the end, he is also embracing salvation, perhaps for the first time, because she has absorbed the available constellations of sacrifice and

 See Deleuze (,  – ).  Ford’s woman is in this sense similar to Hitchcock’s women; after all, Grace Kelly is a recurring presence in Hitchcock. Michel Chion describes the mother-figure in Hitchcock as Acousmère (, ); Dolar touches on this problem when he says that in Hitchcock, “we find the mother where one would expect the father-figure,” identifying “Mother as the bearer of the law” (,  – ).  See Gilić (, ) for Ford as the model of filmmaking in Croatia at the time.

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processed them into a legitimate structure: Catholicism. This is how she too is saved. By deflecting onto herself sacrifice and Catholicism, her pursuit of Gable is saved from what is initially unsettling about her melancholy eroticism, and is now transformed into a fantasy of masochism. There is an economy to it, the economy of sacrifice. It is as if masochism designates a process whereby the impoverished ego of melancholia is exposed to an elaborate fantasy of sacrifice until the ego has regained access to a narrative of the functional self: it is the ego now able to say that “there’s ultimately profit in my being undone in this way.” By embracing Tatjana in the end, Don Stipan organizes an altogether different structure. When he defrocks, he exposes the fault in Fordian masochism, in the position where Ford streamlines his woman into the economy of sacrifice and salvation: because the woman of the masochist fantasy cannot be saved if its man is saved. In Hribar’s film, the man’s regeneration, implicit in the fantasy of masochism, depends on the woman not being able to regain access to the same narrative of a functional self: because the cruelty and the eroticism that she contributes liberally to the man’s fantasy, if it is to work, would then be reclaimed and repossessed by her. In other words, if the man is to profit from his being undone that way, the woman cannot profit from the same fantasy; the woman’s masochism does little to provide for a male masochist fantasy, but her melancholia goes a long way. It is for this reason that the closure of Ford’s Mogambo is flawed: Gable and Gardner/“Kelly” cannot be sharing the same fantasy if it is to succeed for either. Hribar’s Tatjana, however, is exempted from the economy of sacrifice, nowhere so distinctly as at the end, when she secures Stipan’s regeneration by occasioning his breach with priesthood. In order to secure this process, she is exacting the sacrifice where she cannot claim it for herself, where there is no self to claim it, so that the sacrifice is left lingering and unattached. It is as such that the sacrifice comes closest to the political. It is as such that Tatjana comes closest to the political too: her melancholia constitutes the state of exception in and for the masochist script. True, Hribar’s film ends with what seems to be the image of a traditional, Oedipal family: a shot of Stipan, Tatjana, and (their) son as they are walking up the road. Nevertheless, with the father disconnected from paternal authority away into a fraternal zone of uncertainty and the child suspended within this zone, the final image undercuts the Oedipal where it appears at its purest. Without understanding this undercutting, there is hardly a chance of understanding what the post-Yugoslav imaginary is all about.

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Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.

Nikola Dedić

Yugoslavia in Post-Yugoslav Artistic Practices: Or, Art as … … remembrance What does it mean now, halfway into the second decade of the twenty-first century, to remember Yugoslavia, not only as a political project that marked the optimistic beginning of the twentieth century, that is, the idea that the name of a European state need not be the same as that of an existing nation, but also as a project often identified with the grim finale of that same twentieth century, which ended amidst extreme nationalist violence and destruction (Stojanović 2003, 48)? In the catalogue of one of many exhibitions that have sought to reexamine the legacy of Yugoslavia over the past ten or more years, the aesthetician and art theorist Miško Šuvaković provides a summary review of the contradictory debates on the phenomenon of Yugoslavia that are still raging on its former territory. He asserts: When you speak about Yugoslavia, you can make certain categories. You have ex-Yugoslavia, post-Yugoslavia, neo-Yugoslavia, and non-Yugoslavia. Ex-Yugoslavia is the commonly used term for the countries which became independent after the end of Yugoslavia. “Non-Yugoslavia” are nationalist ideas and identities which started at that time. It is the belief that Yugoslavia is impossible, that it was finished during the bloody wars and that it has totally ended. Then you have post-Yugoslavia, representing certain ideas that, for example, the PRELOM Collective and other people in the cultural sector stand for, in order to construct some kind of network or relationship between ex-Yugoslav countries as a space for discussion, for presenting the idea of Yugoslavia in a historical sense. Because after the end of Yugoslavia, in each one of the new nation-states, the notion of Yugoslavia is something that has been cancelled. And finally, the concept of neo-Yugoslavia suggests that Yugoslavia is possible. Neo-Yugoslavia means something like a new avant-garde, claiming that such a network is a potential political future. (Henning et al. 2011, 48)

To many of us still living in the territory that the state of Yugoslavia once encompassed, it is more than obvious that the dominant public and political discourse is that of non-Yugoslavia, which rests not simply on reducing our common Yugoslav past down to a mere historical fact, but more than that, seeks to erase any kind of historical memory or cultural continuity with the former state and the values that supported it. This erasure of Yugoslavia from the ideological field of its present successor nation-states occurs in the name of “democratic” European integration as well as nationalist revisionism. The concept of European in-

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tegration rests on the idea of “overcoming” socialism’s supposedly totalitarian past; it is a process of “transition,” meant to transform the former communist Yugoslav societies into liberal, democratic, and capitalist-oriented societies. In that process, Europe is a possibility only if “Yugoslavia’s socialist heritage is discarded, repressed, and erased. It links to the widespread perception that full membership in the European Union means returning home” (Petrović 2012, 15). However, the erasure of Yugoslavia is happening also in the name of a counterrevolutionary restoration of collective ethnic and national identities. These two processes – the capitalist “transition” leading toward the establishment of the neoliberal paradigm and ethnocentric restoration leading toward the renewal of an organicist national state – are not separate; quite to the contrary, capitalism and nationalism, running in parallel, are shaping the “post-socialist condition” of the former Yugoslav nations. The states that emerged from the bloody breakup of the socialist Yugoslavia appear to be national inside and neoliberal outside, that is, each of them is a hybrid form of the state and “the familial-tribal, tycoon, and often secret-police remnants performing the primitive accumulation of capital in the conditions of a controlled and criminalized transformation of public into private property” (Šuvaković 2012, 206 – 207, original emphasis). Thus, it becomes clear why erasing every memory of a political entity that rested on the ideas of antifascism, antinationalism, cosmopolitanism, and class solidarity is so dear to neoliberal and nationalist elites alike. In her book Yuropa: jugoslovensko nasleđe i politike budućnosti u postjugoslovenskim društvima [Yurope: The Yugoslav Heritage and Politics of the Future in Post-Yugoslav Societies], Tanja Petrović analyzed the ideological process of negating Yugoslavia in great detail, within both the liberal and nationalist matrix. She singles out several models of this negation. The first model proceeds by historicizing it – reducing it to a historical fact; by incorporating it into a museum, that is, historiographic narrative, the story of Yugoslavia is “tranquilized” and “suppressed into a finished and unequivocal past, whereby it is disabled to perform any kind of intervention into the present” (Petrović 2012, 185 – 196). Running in parallel with this process of an ostensibly ideologically “neutral” historicization is the process of the nationalist revision of history, which typically suppresses the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle during the Second World War by means of a forced equalization of antifascism and fascism, “the reds” and “the blacks,” for the sake of a supposed national reconciliation.¹ Thus, post-Yugoslav societies  In various ways, this process is present in almost all of the former Yugoslav states and typically involves positing the collaborationist movements of the Second World War as antifascist: in Serbia, for instance, the parliament has extended veterans’ rights to all former members of the Četniks, the Second World War royalist and anti-communist guerrillas; anti-

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have undergone a nationalist restoration, a turn toward clerical fascism, and rightwing radicalization. In Serbia, this process was symbolically marked by two paradigmatic events: 1) the removal of the five-pointed star from the city hall building in Belgrade, initiated in 1997 by Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić who was later assassinated; and 2) the bid to rehabilitate the fascist collaborator Draža Mihailović, initiated in 2006 (Mirčev 2012, 25 – 30). The second model of excluding Yugoslavdom from discussions concerning the present is the process of trivializing, ritualizing, and commodifying it by incorporating it into an “industry of the communist experience.” The founding premise of these procedures is the depoliticization of that experience and practices of memory: they are being constrained to the sphere of the private, personal, and sentimental, or reduced to objects from mass popular culture and consumption. […] Post-socialist subjects who approach their past with a high degree of emotional investment are portrayed as incompetent or uninterested in articulating politically relevant messages or demands, while their attempts to build the Yugoslav experience into a politics of the future are dismissed as a sentimental, obsessive, and unproductive focus on the past. (Petrović 2012, 189 – 190)

Finally, the third model of “disqualifying” Yugoslavia in the present public sphere is treating the memory of Yugoslavia as a kind of utopian and thus unproductive, “naive” political way of thinking: evoking Yugoslavia is interpreted not as lamenting over a lost past, but as evoking an ideal past that never even was, in other words, as a utopia. The experiential, lived relationship with Yugoslavia that its former citizens, who are still very much alive, have is thereby ignored, and they are prevented from invoking those aspects of that experience that might function today as an alternative to the currently prevailing social relations and ruling values (Petrović 2012, 15). Unlike the neoliberal or nationalist concept of “non-Yugoslavia,” described above, the idea of “post-Yugoslavia” is marginal and in the minority. Nevertheless, this idea of a critical establishment of continuity and association with the emancipatory legacy and cosmopolitan values of the Yugoslav project does exist though it is mostly in fragments and within what is only now emerging as a relevant leftwing political platform as well as in cultural and artistic practices. These artistic practices do not pursue nostalgia for the supposedly “con-

fascist symbols are expunged from street names; and  is interpreted not as the year the country was liberated from fascism but was “occupied” by communists; in Croatia, the fascist heritage of the former Independent State of Croatia is negated, that is, the Ustaše (Croatia’s Nazi puppet regime,  – ) and communist regimes are being identified as equally “totalitarian,” and, as in Serbia, the Croatian Home Guard, the regular armed forces of the so-called Independent State of Croatia, have been positively revaluated.

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crete utopia” of the former Yugoslavia, but for a critical and deconstructive view of the causes of the Yugoslav project’s collapse as well as the politics of memory regarding that collapse. The aim of artistic-activist collectives such as Abart, Kultura sećanja [The Culture of Memory], Medijska arheologija [Media Archaeology], Četiri lica Omarske [The Four Faces of Omarska], Kontekst kolektiv, Kuda.org, Grupa Spomenik [The Monument Group], Teorija koja hoda [Walking Theory], Učitelj neznalica [The Ignorant Schoolmaster], and other similar groups emerging in the area of the former state is to “read” Yugoslavia from the present of today’s national-capitalist consensus and to establish “an activist relationship with a reality that must be emancipated at a time of prolonged local crises and the newly arrived new global crises,” as indicated in the catalogue of an exhibition that problematizes the issue (Dedić et al. 2012). The following “theses” may serve as a framework for interpreting various understandings of this interest in the Yugoslav heritage in contemporary post-Yugoslav artistic practices; art can be seen as: 1) a form of archive; 2) a counter-public sphere; and 3) a class-motivated and ideological critique of the neoliberal concept of transition.

… an archive One of the most typical forms of remembering Yugoslavia affirmatively is nostalgia, which is a spontaneous, affective relationship with the lived experience of the relatively high standards of living in former socialist societies. According to Svetlana Boym, nostalgia is a dominant feature in “post-communist memory.” For Boym, nostalgia means “a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history” (Boym 2001, 8). Thus, nostalgia is structurally close to utopia as a narrative genre, especially in terms of constructing ideal but nonexistent spaces and communities; the difference is that utopia operates by combining metaphors and projections of an ideal future, whereas nostalgia is always oriented toward the past. At the same time, nostalgia is associated with the collective, that is, it rests on the link between personal memories and collective memory; nostalgia differs from melancholy, which is likewise oriented toward the past but refers primarily to the field of individual consciousness (Boym 2001). However, even though nostalgia is predicated on at least an affective relationship with a better and more perfect community that perhaps existed in the past, in Boris Buden’s view, nostalgia remains an essentially depoliticized narrative. Buden perceives such a nostalgic, depoliticized narrative as the ideological

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forsaking of emancipatory and class-determined communist policies and their replacement with a kitsch fixation on various forms of (typically popular) culture and items of the defunct socialist everyday. Thus, nostalgia emerges in parallel with culturalization and depoliticization, that is, by replacing concrete political action with culture. Therefore, no concept of cultural memory, above all no cultural notion of its possible subject, may evoke communism the way it was in its essence – notwithstanding the terror that accompanied it: a concept of universal emancipation. From that past, cultural memory may no longer remember precisely that, the exclusively communist experience of political engagement. (Buden 2012, 70)

This apolitical and cultural character of Yugo-nostalgia is likewise recognized by Jelena Vesić and Dušan Grlja in their foreword to the catalogue of an exhibition that addressed the ideological re-actualization of political practices in Yugoslav art. Although post-communist nostalgia represents a realistic and still living memory of a period when most of the population enjoyed a higher standard of living and degree of social security, Yugonostalgia still perfectly fits into today’s dominant, capitalist model of cultural industries, “which present that period as an image of a consumerist paradise, whose imminent realization is promised by the advent of neo-liberalism” (Vesić and Grlja 2009, 8). Therefore, contemporary artistic practices that begin by re-examining the Yugoslav heritage reject a romanticist and nostalgic return to the “good old days” and insist instead on a hardcore politicization of not only art but also all segments of depoliticized everyday life. Contemporary artistic practices achieve that by replacing nostalgia with a form of archive. Unlike nostalgia, the archive represents a concrete political intervention into the field of current ideology; Aneta Stojnić, invoking postulates by Jacques Derrida (Derrida 1995), asserts that the archive is not a passive vessel or an objective or neutral repository of history. Quite on the contrary, the archive governs and controls the way we read and interpret history and thus shapes our current political reality. Michel Foucault and Derrida viewed the archive as a metaphorical construct at the center of the formation of not only human knowledge, memory, and power, but also the demand for justice and a just society. In other words, archivists permanently reshape, reinterpret, that is, actualize memory: The power over memory is the power over identity, the power over fundamental ways in which society seeks evidence of what its core values are in what they used to be, whilst memory space becomes a space in which social power is negotiated, where it is challenged, denied or confirmed. By establishing memories, narratives, which are necessarily ideological in the context of the present time, get established. This is why the space of memory

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must always be critically re-examined, deconstructed, and reconstructed anew. (Stojnić 2012, 39, original emphasis)

Therefore, archiving is intervening in the current social and political field, which means that the archive is not a demand for a retrospective “objectivity” or political, disinterested “neutrality” but a possibility to arrive at bodies of knowledge that might be relevant in the present social reality. This is the backbone of activist-artistic platforms such as Učitelj neznalica, Medijska arheologija, and Abart. Učitelj neznalica i njegovi komiteti [The Ignorant Schoolmaster and His Committees] is a project conceived as a public library – an archive of texts, periodicals, and books in the Yugoslav humanities – and as a self-education platform by studying the heritage of Yugoslav self-managed socialism.² Today, the humanities, both Yugoslav and in general, languish on the margins of the education system³ – the authors of the platform insist on the fact that without the humanities it is impossible to understand the causes of the Yugoslav project’s collapse as well as the entire twentieth-century history of the Yugoslav nations. By rereading the Yugoslav humanities and reexamining the class nature of the Yugoslav project, the authors of the platform seek to articulate social and political alternatives to the existing system in Serbia as well as globally. Thus, the platform’s activities involve a physical and digital archive, reading groups, writing workshops, seminars, and the like, promoting the discourses of history, community, class, gender, and secularism, and seeking to generate a public “that may use them, develop them conceptually and practically, as well as disseminate them on various levels of society” (Učitelj neznalica 2011). Medijska arheologija is a project that bases its method on “recognizing the dominant and group-related media forms, generating a new series of media fragments that will, unlike a decontextualized series of screenings, enable a better insight into the production and communication mechanisms and continuity of an individual media form or media formations” (Medijska arheologija 2009 – 2010). Finally, Abart is a curatorial platform based in Mostar, which problematizes the specific context of that divided city by presenting contemporary artistic practices as well as by archiving the socialist heritage of its past; thus, the

 The name of the project is a paraphrase of a title by Jacques Rancière, who expounded his thesis on “the ignorant schoolmaster” in his eponymous book; see Rancière .  In Croatia, the s even saw a systematic destruction of books printed in the Cyrillic script or published in Serbia during the Yugoslav period, as well as books concerning the People’s Liberation Struggle and socialist Yugoslavia. According to Ante Lešaja, over two million books were destroyed, mostly from school libraries, those of former League of Communists and Socialist Union committees, and former public companies and Army cultural centers. See Lešaja .

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platform rests on socio-political engagement and the re-examining of current political and ideological values, and insists on “reflecting on new forms, functions, and values of public space and art that emerges within and in relation to it” (Abart 2010). A typical example is their project Urbani imaginarij / (Re)collecting Mostar, realized in the form of a mobile, open archive featuring documents and maps as the final processes of “fieldwork” explorations, as well as fragments of artistic interventions and performances installed at various locations around the city of Mostar. The material was assembled by collecting and archiving artifacts and by means of surveys and interviews conducted by the authors with the citizens of Mostar. The archive thereby broaches the question of personal and public memories, which operate proactively in the process of conceiving the past through an auto-reflexive and critical perspective, thus subverting the city’s ethno-national division.

… a counter-public sphere The archive, therefore, is an attempt to conceptualize a new, alternative form of political public: in the neoliberal capitalist social order, public space is a real or symbolic territory that power (private property) allocates to the public under the slogan of the supposed “accessibility for all.” Behind this hides an expert managerial team (including state management) who seek to maximize their own power (Učitelj neznalica 2012, 63). By contrast, the art of the archive articulates areas of resistance that German Marxist theorists Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge labeled the “proletarian” or “counter-public sphere” as early as the 1960s (Negt and Kluge 1993). In part, Negt and Kluge follow Jürgen Habermas’s analysis of the classic liberal (that is, bourgeois) public sphere, whereby the public is interpreted as the “neutral” corrective of state power. Habermas and Kluge recognize an important shortcoming of the bourgeois conception of the public: the democratic character of a society depends not only on the level of (non‐) knowledge and the (non‐)awareness of its citizens, but also on its political-economic system of power, specifically, division of social wealth. This is the moment when information is replaced by the production of commodities (especially those of the so-called “culture industry”) and the process of political decision-making is replaced by the principle of market generation: it is a matter of privileging the reproduction of surplus value of democratic political decision-making, which entails the process of commercializing the media and turning the public sphere into a spectacle in order to reproduce class power relations (Habermas 1991). In that regard, even Marx had recognized that the public sphere and capitalist state manifest in one and the same act. Within the capitalist system of produc-

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tion, politics is integrated into the domain of consumption, whereas the public sphere is transformed into ideology. Negt and Kluge’s conception of the counter-public sphere involves the activity of marginalized groups in the domain of art, that is, a (newly) formed community that leaves the sphere of the permissible and depoliticized and acts in the capitalist public sphere with the intent of highlighting its abuse by the elites. It is thereby suggested that the capitalist public and media space is not a homogeneous, undivided whole, but that the public sphere is permeated by antagonisms, containing groups, communities, and individuals that “fall out” from the domain of the current national-liberal consensus. In the early 2000s in Serbia, Prelom kolektiv (The Break Collective) already made a pioneering attempt at this conceptualization of art as a form of counter-public sphere, along with re-actualizing the Yugoslav project’s class and emancipatory potentials. By rediscovering post-Marxist theory in the magazine Prelom, as well as by revalorizing the People’s Liberation Struggle, the collective insisted on articulating new forms of radical and pluralist politics beyond the then dominant ideological matrix of “the democratic transition.” This actualization of post-Yugoslav politics in the domain of artistic production reached its climax in the exhibition PPYUart, organized at the Museum of Yugoslav History in 2009 (Dojić and Vesić 2009). The exhibition was a political revalorization of: 1) Yugoslav Partisan art, which served as a historical example of uniting art and socio-political engagement in a common gesture, as an example of “the simultaneity of art and resistance, action and thought – the ability to think beyond existing social rationality” (Vesić and Grlja 2009, 9; Komelj 2009, 2) Yugoslav socialist modernism, which served the authors of the exhibition as an example of the link between the public, political sphere and the autonomous language of art⁴; and 3) the phenomenon of the so-called new artistic practice, specifically the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s, which rested on the dialectics of “speaking in the first person” and self-organized collectivist acting, and were thus quite similar to Kluge’s explanation of his concept of “proletarian” public sphere. An important example of art as a counter-public sphere also comprises those artistic practices that begin by working with a trauma, not only that of the wars of the 1990s, but also those of Yugoslavia’s Second World War history and nationalist attempts at revising it. Using the classic psychoanalytical key, we might posit that society and history are constructs that revolve precisely around  The phenomenon of socialist modernism denotes the liberalization of Yugoslav culture and art following Yugoslavia’s break with Stalin and the Cominform in . From the s on, instead of socialist realism as its official doctrine, Yugoslav art accepted the formalist formal procedures of international modernism. See Denegri ().

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the site of a trauma as a fundamental social antagonism, a void that no amount of interpreting may entirely fill. Nevertheless, critical artistic practices work precisely with these sites that are suppressed in the social structure; they problematize the “empty place” in current national-liberal ideology. In that regard, Andrej Mirčev, taking his cue from Theodor Adorno’s earlier dilemma regarding the viability of writing poetry following the horrors of the concentration camps, poses a similar question: “whether and in what way whatsoever could genocide be adequately represented? If it is possible, in what media should it be: photography, film, video, installation, performance/action, debate, plenary, reading group? In what way should and could artists treat archives, especially in relation to what is missing, what is censored, suppressed, marginalized?” (Mirčev 2012, 28). Artistic collectives such as Grupa Spomenik, Četiri lica Omarske, and Kultura sećanja work precisely with the places associated with the traumas of Yugoslavia’s current post-genocidal society and suppressed from the “official” (Kluge would say “bourgeois”) public sphere. The guiding principle of Grupa Spomenik’s activities is working with war and post-war traumas. The group emerged by initiating public debates on the construction of a monument to the victims of the 1990s wars; in line with that, the group works with medical, forensic, political, and moral identifications and presentations of war crimes, that is, against the post-genocidal ideologies of negating and erasing those crimes. In reading groups and public discussions, which are forms of archives working as a participative theoretical-artistic platform, the group seeks to generate a counter-public sphere meant to be articulated as an intervention into the public space of the institutions that shape the dominant discourse of contemporary art and to establish Yugoslav studies as a critical and political reflection of (post‐)Yugoslav sociality. In this regard, Grupa Spomenik is examining the conditions under which art can produce its own discourse on the genocide and the contemporary condition of permanent warfare […]. In the context of the currently global and permanent war, they have also engaged and rendered discursive a set of basic terms which contribute to our understanding of the history of war in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Through their long-term work, Grupa Spomenik is continuing its research into how we can contemplate and produce a space for an open, critical, and engaged discussion about the wars of the 1990s. It also opens up a space for the recognition of new forms of commonality and for the discipline of Yugoslav Studies. (Grupa Spomenik 2011, 172)

Closely related to Grupa Spomenik’s activities are those of Četiri lica Omarske and the project Rendered History by Vladimir Miladinović, an artist and member of the group. In 2012, at the Fifty-third October Salon, Miladinović exhibited a series of Indian ink reproductions of Serbian newspapers’ front pages from the

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war year of 1992, thus problematizing the issue of wartime media propaganda, manipulation, historical responsibility, and intellectual engagement. Miladinović broached the question of ideological mechanisms through which the media create the “bourgeois” public sphere and thus also shape a nationalistoriented collective memory (Fig. 1, 2, and 3). One of the main goals of Miladinović’s project was to dig into the local newspaper archive and examine daily newspapers from the period of 1991– 1992. He paid particular attention to articles related to the war in Yugoslavia. After a first selection of articles, Miladinović made a series of handmade ink wash drawings of entire newspaper pages. So far, he has examined Serbia-based newspapers such as Politika, Politika Ekspres, Večernje Novosti, and Borba. Specifically, Miladinović selects the front pages of regime-sponsored newspapers that deny war crimes on the territory of the former state, such as those pages that deny the existence of concentration camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. By using the medium of newspaper copies in his artworks and by appropriating and displacing these representations from their original media into a new art context, Miladinović points to the ideological mechanisms of power that stand behind actual political structures. In this way, his art becomes cognitive, a form of knowledge that registers the sites of trauma in the transitional, post-Yugoslav societies. Trauma is also the topic of Kultura sećanja, a project initiated in Šabac in 2010 with focus on re-politicizing the memory of the Second World War; the authors distinguish between history, “which is primarily longitudinal,” and memory, which “seeks to stick to the event, to remain inside it, to extend knowledge and come to it from within (Gilles Deleuze)” (Kultura sećanja 2012, 71). Thus, the project re-examines current politics that shape communal memory, maintaining that neither memory nor oblivion are separate from society’s political reality today; memory is politically contingent at its base because it very much depends on models of communal (self‐)representation in the present. Why is it important to work like this with traumas, with these erased places in current politics? It is important not only because these artistic practices create a place where we can face the past and our social responsibilities but also because working with trauma is a way to create new forms of political universality. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek explains this mechanism of establishing universality by means of the traumatic remainder with his theory of “particular universality”; in Žižek’s view, the paradox of ideology is its striving to reach the Whole, an undivided Totality, its aim to construct universality without an inherent exclusion. However, that is precisely the “lie” of ideology – invoking Hegel, Žižek highlights the distinction between abstract and concrete universality and points out that the universal as such is constituted only through the exclusion of a traumatic particularity: fascism depends on anti-Semitism for its own position as the

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Fig. 1. Vladimir Miladinović, Rendered History, series of drawings, ink wash on paper, 2012ongoing. Used with permission.

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Fig. 2. Vladimir Miladinović, Rendered History, series of drawings, ink wash on paper, 2012ongoing. Used with permission.

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Fig. 3. Vladimir Miladinović, Rendered History, series of drawings, ink wash on paper, 2012ongoing. Used with permission.

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“natural,” universal order. In terms of ideology something always “falls out” – what remains is trauma, which is necessary in the construction of the “abstract universality” of ideology (Žižek 1985). Post-Yugoslav artistic practices that problematize current politics of memory precisely create an instance of the suppressed (traumatic, un-symbolized) place breaking into the domain of the current national transitional consensus. As Žižek shows, building current politics from the position of the “suppressed place” means defining the principle of a new politics that would pursue not a national but an emancipatory “particular universality.” A universality grounded in exception does not cover all particulars, [does not mean] that there is a “rest,” a remainder, while radical universality “really includes all and everyone”; the point is, rather, that the singular agent of radical universality is the Remainder itself, that which has no proper place in the “official” universality grounded in exception […] it is those who are excluded, with no proper place within the global order, who directly embody true universality, who represent the Whole in contrast to all others who stand only for their particular interests. (Žižek 2003, 109; original emphasis)

This sentiment perhaps most directly comes up in a sentence from a manifesto by Grupa Spomenik, which says: “where the genocide was, shall the political subject be,” which means – at the site of genocide as the ultimate counterrevolutionary anti-event, a new, revolutionary subject will be established. Buden labeled this revolutionary subject that emerges through its self-exclusion from the concepts of national identity and nation as “the most lethal political weapon of the counterrevolution” and “the coffin in which society is buried” (Buden 2012, 82). In other words, actualizing politics of memory in the current public sphere does not mean establishing a new kind of social harmony or utopia; on the contrary, working with trauma denotes a gesture of rejection, of establishing a difference, of drawing a demarcation line in violation of the neoliberal-national consensus in the current political environment.⁵

 In other words, in the manifesto of Grupa Spomenik: “This embarrassing remainder opens the space of politics, a type of subjectification that is not based on identity or counting and that opens a process of memory, a politics of memory that produces a politics of non-identity and not counting. The unidentified bodily remainder correlates to a political subjectification that we know not how to call but that is meant to put an end to the ‘parallel convergence’ of the contemporary construction of identity and the politics of terror. The politics of memory is a politics that implies a political subject in the present, because according to the basic work hypothesis of Grupa Spomenik, there is no memory without politics” (Grupa Spomenik ).

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… a class critique of neoliberalism Post-Yugoslav artistic practices, therefore, point to the essential link between the nationalist and neoliberal paradigms, as the film theorist Pavle Levi pointed out in his text “Kapo iz Omarske (The Capo from Omarska)” (Levi 13 – 14). In this text, Levi explains why he did not want to see Sveti Georgije ubiva aždahu [Saint George Kills the Dragon], a 2009 film by Srđan Dragojević, a great national spectacle about the ordeal of the Serbian army in the First World War, co-funded by Serbia and the Bosnian Serb Republic (Republika Srpska). The film was partly shot at the former mine and then concentration camp of Omarska. During 1992, thousands of non-Serbs went through the camp, several hundred of whom lost their lives. Omarska is thus one of the locations of the systematic terror that the Bosnian Serb Republic established in the early 1990s. Levi posits his opposition to the film as not only an ethical but also a political act: using a location where mass crimes occurred to shoot a historical ethno-spectacle is a sort of continuation of war by other means – “this is a film, more precisely, an act of film shooting that does not address at all the events that took place at Omarska during the war but, quite to the contrary, obliterates, marginalizes, or, at least, avoids them. Therefore, staying away from the cinema in the case of Aždaha represents a necessary but only the first step toward articulating an engaged cultural-political position” (Levi 13 – 14). With this text, Levi establishes an essential link between the contemporary, neoliberal, “transition” industry of the spectacle, capitalist forms of production and nationalism, and the wars of 1990s: during socialism, Omarska was a mine; in the 1990s, the mine was transformed into a concentration camp; after the war, Omarska was turned back into a place for extracting iron ore but this time owned by a private multinational company, ArcelorMittal; finally, with the film by Dragojević, Omarska is a place of spectacular media production, which further reproduces the logic of national identity. Studying this link became the basis for the activities of the artistic-activist platform Četiri lica Omarske, which specifically uses Levi’s theory as its point of departure: The work Four Faces of Omarska introduces an important aspect, the transition from socialism to capitalism, which began during the course of the war and is still an ongoing process. The process of appropriating public property and public-owned property in the name of the ideology of transition (the ties connecting global capital and the local ruling structures), that is, a form of the extreme terror as a means and a medium of robbing the population, and appropriating socially-owned property. When we speak of social ownership, we refer to a type of ownership specific for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (social ownership as the key locus of producing solidarity and equality within the framework of the Yugoslav brand of self-management socialism).

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It also deals with the role of transition in the wars of the 1990s, as well as the aspect of today’s revision of the crimes committed [during the 1990s] in Bosnia, through the current situation of the Omarska mining complex: the struggles and debates between those who survived the “Omarska” camp, the families of the killed and missing, and the current owner of the mine in Omarska – the Mittal Steel company – which refuses to allow a memorial plaque to be placed on the site for the purpose of commemorating the victims of the camp. (Tomić 2013)

This essentially affects understanding the phenomenon of the capitalist transition; in the usual context, the wars of the 1990s are interpreted as a sort of totalitarian “regression,” a kind of return to “the natural state” of all-out combat, whereas “the transition,” by turning toward market economy and joining the European Union, constitutes the process of a general democratization of the former Yugoslav societies, of their transformation from “backward” Balkan nations into “civilized” nations of Europe. In that regard, the transition is a sort of metaphor of a road with a clear endpoint: states that aspire to become members of the EU through the transition process must “transform and educate themselves and mature so that when they reach that goal, they might turn from non-European into European states” (Petrović 2012, 61, original emphasis). This logic not only hides what Petrović correctly recognizes as remnants of colonial reasoning regarding the difference between “civilized” Europe and the “barbarian” Balkan Other but also negates the fact that the establishment of the neoliberal, capitalist paradigm was enabled by the war of the 1990s; the transformation of public property into state property first and then, through the “transition” process, into private property could proceed only through war and ethnic cleansing. The wars of the 1990s did not establish a fall into “the natural state” but a struggle for a primitive accumulation of capital as the basis for establishing capitalist forms of production; therefore, the wars of the 1990s appear to be class wars that finally brought about the generation of a new, transitional bourgeoisie. Nationalism is not a phenomenon that is separate from the “logic of transition.” On to the contrary, nationalism made room for the establishment of neoliberalism, and genocide is a radical consequence of the privatization that began in the 1990s. Afterwards, with the empowerment of “democratic” transitional governments and privatization laws (which most of the former Yugoslav states adopted in the late 1990s and early 2000s), genocide was finally legalized. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and nationalism, therefore, served as the basis for the accumulation of surplus value, and paved the way for the integration of the former Yugoslav societies into the system of global capitalism. Max Horkheimer’s line from the late 1930s – “Whoever doesn’t want to talk about capitalism shouldn’t talk about fascism” (qtd. in Kuljić 2006) – which is also confirmed by the surge of nationalism, conservatism, various forms of

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neo-fascism in today’s Europe, marked by the economic crisis and neoliberal austerity measures, is re-actualized. In fact, Horkheimer’s statement here means the following: analyzing the causes and conditions of the breakup of Yugoslavia, as well as its local nationalisms today, is inseparable from analyzing the capitalist forms of production and class antagonisms that capitalism produces.⁶ The work of numerous authors and artistic collectives predicates upon this analysis. The project Učitelj neznalica emphazes that there were different forms of public property at different times in Yugoslavia’s history. “In practice, it had various meanings, in most cases it was far from its declared ideals, but the horizon of social property enabled Yugoslav society to have only small socio-economic differences and a relatively clear sense of responsibility. Brotherhood and unity, the party/self-management, emancipatory autonomous groups or moral-political suitability imply that various gaps constituted the basis of society” (Učitelj neznalica 2012, 63). Nevertheless, when the paradigm of social property and socialist self-management changed and transformed into the new paradigm of private property, Yugoslavia fell apart. Kontekst kolektiv has based its work on analyzing the commercialization and commodification of culture, specifically, the de-politicization of cultural production, as well as the concomitant partisan management of the infrastructure

 This idea is increasingly present in progressively oriented economic theory; economist and historian Goran Musić has argued that the capitalist transition in Yugoslavia began as early as the s with the emergence of a managerial elite at the helm of Yugoslavia’s largest companies at the time. The leaders of post-Yugoslav national projects such as Slobodan Milošević and Milan Kučan stemmed precisely from this technocratic-managerial milieu and at first strove for a transition from self-managed “market socialism” to a classically understood market economy with all the trappings of a bourgeois society. Milošević began his nationalist project by trying to recentralize the Yugoslav market and create local institutions that would protect the selfsufficiency of the national markets and the interests of the new economic elite. According to Musić, “‘the awakening of the Serbian nation’ in the late s was only an instrument for trying to overcome the crisis of ‘real socialism’ and get closer to Western Europe. During the late s, the nationalists placed free market at the center of their economic program, whereas the economic liberals often implied an ethnically understood national state as the natural environment for attracting investment and building efficient state institutions. Most of the new parties viewed Yugoslavia as an ‘artificial creation,’ whereas the ethnic moment was important in the imposition of a social consensus based on the assumed organic unity of the nation. The return to the conventional bounds of capitalist modernization had to find its ideological justification, above all due to the social shocks that it inevitably caused. This ideological justification resided in the founding assumption of a national interest of all Serbs, specifically, that the material interests of people corresponded simply because they were members of the same nation. The political elite thus proclaimed its own material interests as universal, labeling them as ‘national’” (Musić a; see also Musić b).

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and funds allocated to culture (the collective cite the example of youth cultural centers that were founded in Yugoslav times and are now subjected to institutional and program transformations within the transitional, capitalist paradigm). The artist Danilo Prnjat works with alternative forms of economic exchange and attempts to establish a model of commodity exchange that could exist within current economic processes in our country that are ever so determined and guided by the principles of liberal economy. The project implied organizing an open workshop with initiative to contemplate on all potentialities, as well as making practical attempts to execute some real self-sustainable systems of exchange which wouldn’t be determined by predominant logic that production or labor always results (or should strive to that) in extra value, thus profit. (Prnjat 2013)

Dubravka Sekulić works by analyzing urban space and the differences between socialist and neoliberal city planning, with the latter showing that the state has finally capitulated “as the regulator and agent of the struggle for the public and equality and transformed into an active collaborator of the market” (Sekulić 2013). A typical example is her project Glotzt nicht so romantisch!, which broaches the question of urban transformation under the impact of the capitalist transition. As a case study, the author takes the informal urban development that has taken place in Karaburma, a part of Belgrade where the owners of flats in collective residential buildings have been spontaneously expanding their living quarters by adding extra floors and adapting the attics. These adaptations are conducted without consulting architects and often without the required building permits; since the early 2000s, construction investors who enter the real-estate market from within the “grey zone” have used this strategy. This results in a sort of “privatization” of the public space, and habitation proceeds in a permanent dialectic between legal and illegal ways of organizing space.

Conclusion The idea of post-Yugoslavia, as conceptualized at the beginning of this text, still remains, as I pointed out above, a minority idea on the margins of the political processes that are currently taking place in the area of the former state. Whether that will ever change and whether post-Yugoslavia will manage to transform into a relevant, leftist political platform remains to be seen; analyzing the (pre)conditions necessary for such a transformation would exceed the scope of this short study. Nevertheless, practices that begin by analyzing Yugoslavia and the causes of its collapse renew one’s trust into the relevance of contemporary art: the prac-

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tices analyzed in this text prove the theory of US historian Martin Jay that the category of art lends legitimacy not only to the cathartic and soothing experience of “the beautiful” but also to experimentation in the domain of cultural transgression and innovation; art thereby “serves a vital future-oriented function that transcends its status as mere capital in the cultural economy of our day” (Jay 1998, 19). The artistic practices described above are consistent and worthy successors of those ideas that the Yugoslav historical avant-gardes articulated in line with the precepts of the leftist movement as early as the first half of the twentieth century. Progressively oriented art history will need to rediscover that radical artistic movements – such as Yugoslav constructivism, dada, surrealism, interwar social art, Partisan art, as well as post-war so-called new artistic practices – emerged on the political left as today’s art did. To ignore the politicalleft origins of these artistic movements would mean to surrender twentieth-century critical art to the international art market, which has turned into yet another form of capitalist spectacle. To say that art is the place that articulates various forms of radical social and political imagination does not mean that art rests on a naive or unfeasible utopia; the utopianism of contemporary art, as well as that of its leftist predecessors – the avant-gardes, is negatively determined. Its utopianism rests on the idea of permanently negating existing social relations and thus evokes Adorno’s old claim that the work of art cannot reach the level of reconciling oppositions and universal harmony but that the basis of work in art is antagonism and a dialectical negation that never leads to a final, metaphysical synthesis. Neither art nor social reality attain any sort of unity – art is necessarily in an antagonistic relationship with society and that is the basis of its emancipatory potential (Adorno 2005). It seems that today, when all political options rest on a self-implied neoliberal, national consensus, there is nothing we need more than negation, or, in Buden’s words, Basically, people must start resisting. Whether at their place of work, or wherever they live. Whether it concerns a high school that can no longer put up with priestly nonsense and is rebelling against it, or the economists who can document the catastrophic consequences of that privatization. So, people must start resisting and on every level they must say “enough.” This is taking us nowhere. It is not a matter of waiting for someone to come up with an alternative. In general, one comes up with alternatives in concrete political struggle, in concrete negation. The alternative is negation because up until now there has been no negation in these parts. Until now, the rulers have done whatever they wanted for over twenty years, and now it is about time they encountered some resistance. The alternative starts with that resistance. (Buden 2013)

In their own day, the Yugoslav communists articulated this idea of a radical, revolutionary negation of the then current social reality through the idea of a social-

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ist Yugoslavia. As Ozren Pupovac argues, the essence of the Partisan movement and then also of Yugoslavdom consisted of the material practice of transformation, which was at the same time a practice of new invention: Built upon a subjectivity of struggle, upon a collective force that is capable of developing itself incessantly, to transform itself without interruption, the Yugoslav project teaches us an important lesson. It teaches us that experiment and experimentation reside at the heart of politics. It teaches us that political practice should necessarily be measured with regard to innovation, if it wants to bear the name of emancipation. (Pupovac 2011, 93)

Therefore, in post-Yugoslav artistic practices, Yugoslavia is neither a nostalgic return to the “good old days” nor an attempt to restore a social project that has definitely become part of the past and historical memory. In post-Yugoslav practices, Yugoslavia is a form of negating the current social status quo, thus a fresh attempt to rethink social alternatives through a critical view of the past. In that regard, a line at the end of W.R. – misterije organizma [WR: Mysteries of the Organism], a 1960s film by Dušan Makavejev, quoted by Buden in his book on the “end of post-communism,” might serve as an illustration of that which connects all of these practices, as well as a perfectly rational maxim that might help articulate some new, emancipatory politics of the future. That famous line goes: “Comrades! Not even now am I ashamed of my communist past.”

References Abart. “O nama.” 2010. http://www.abart.ba/o-nama. (13 December 2013). Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Buden, Boris. Interview. “Prošlo je vrijeme manifesta.” http://www.oslobodjenje.ba/vijesti/in tervju/boris-buden-proslo-je-vrijeme-manifesta (15 December 2013). Buden, Boris. Zona prelaska. O kraju postkomunizma. Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2012. Dedić, Nikola, Aneta Stojnić, Jasmina Večanski, Miroslava Matijević, Nevena Daković, and Radiša Stanišić, eds. De/re/construction: Space/Time/Memories. Pančevo: 15th Biennial of Art, 2012. Denegri, Ješa. “Inside or Outside ‘Socialist Modernism’? Radical Views on the Yugoslav Art Scene, 1950 – 1970.” Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918 – 1991. Ed. Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković. Cambridge: MIT P, 2003. 170 – 208. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Dojić, Zorana and Jelena Vesić, eds. Political Practices of (Post‐) Yugoslav Art: Retrospective 01. Beograd: Prelom kolektiv, 2010.

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Grupa Spomenik (Damir Arsenijević, Ana Bezić, Pavle Levi, Jasmina Husanović, Milica Tomić, and Branimir Stojanović). “Manifest. Kako misliti genocid?” Matemi reasocijacije n.d.: 3. Grupa Spomenik. “Čega je danas ime rat?/What is the Name of War Today.” Henning and Komnenić 172. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991. Henning, Naomi et al. “A Conversation with Miško Šuvaković.” Henning and Komnenić. 48 – 61. Jay, Martin. “The Aesthetic Alibi.” Cultural Semantics: Keywords of the Age. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998. Komelj, Miklavž. Kako misliti partizansko umetnost? Ljubljana: Založba, 2009. Kuljić, Todor. “Anti-antifašizam.” http://pescanik.net/2006/08/anti-%E2 %80 %93-anti fasizam/ (6 January 2014). Kultura sećanja (Marija Ratković i Dejan Vasić). “Sadašnjost prošlosti.” Dedić et al. 71. Lešaja, Ante. Knjigocid: Uništavanje knjiga u Hrvatskoj 1990-ih. Zagreb: Profil, 2013. Levi, Pavle. “Kapo iz Omarske.” Matemi reasocijacije (n.d.): 13 – 14. Medijska arheologija. 2009 – 2010. http://www.medarh.org/ (13 December 2013). Mirčev, Andrej. “Emancipatory Strategies of Memories or on the Performative Dimension of Archives.” Dedić et al. 25 – 30. Musić, Goran. “Gde je nestala radnička klasa?” Interview. Vreme 1167 (2013a). http://www. vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=1114776 (12 August 2014). Musić, Goran. Radnička klasa Srbije u tranziciji 1988 – 2013. Belgrade: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2013b. Negt, Oskar and Alexander Kluge. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Henning, Naomi and Jovana Komnenić. Spaceship Yugoslavia: The Suspension of Time. Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, 2011. Petrović, Tanja. Yuropa. Jugoslovensko nasleđe i politike budućnosti u postjugoslovenskim društvima. Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2012. Prnjat, Danilo. 2013. http://www.openspace-zkp.org/2013/en/artslab.php?a=3&w=8 (17 December 2013). Pupovac, Ozren. “Project Yugoslavia: The Dialectics of the Revolution.” Henning and Komnenić 84 – 94. Rancière, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. Sekulić, Dubravka. “Ka prevazilaženju političke lenjosti.” Interview. 2013 http://www.uzbuna. org/yu/node/123/ka-prevazila%C5 %BEenju-politi%C4 %8Dke-lenjosti (17 December 2013). Stojanović, Branimir. “Politika partizana.” Prelom 5 (2003): 46 – 49. Stojnić, Aneta. “De/Re/Construction of Memories of Yugoslavia: The Draft for the Exhibition.” Dedić et al. 39 – 42. Šuvaković, Miško. Umetnost i politika. Savremena estetika, filozofija, teorija i umetnost u vremenu globalne tranzicije. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2012. Tomić, Milica. “New Projects. Four Faces of Omarska.” http://milicatomic.wordpress.com/newprojects-2/ (13 December 2013) Učitelj neznalica. “O nama.” 2011. http://www.uciteljneznalica.org/ (13 December 2013).

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Učitelj neznalica. “Javni prostor vs. društveni prostor – ekonomska demokratija kao mesto govora.” Dedić et al. 63. Vesić, Jelena, and Dušan Grlja. “Political Practices of (Post‐)Yugoslav Art: Retrospective 01. Introduction to the Exhibition.” Dojić and Vesić 8 – 11. Žižek, Slavoj. “Tri sklepna predavanja o Hegelu in objektu iz Šole Sigmunda Freuda.” Hegel in objekt. Filozofija skozi psihoanalizo III. Ed. Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek. Ljubljana: DDU Univerzum, 1985. Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge: MIT P, 2003.

Part 3: Reconfiguring the Post-Yugoslav Present: Towards New Forms of Community and Identity

Guido Snel

Garbage Heap, Storehouse, Encyclopedia: Metaphors for a Post-Yugoslav Cultural Memory Smoking, and drawing on little boxes In her novel of exile, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender [Muzej bezuvjetne predaje] (1998) Dubravka Ugrešić writes about “the architect Miloš B. [who] for some years now has been unconsciously keeping an unusual diary. On the back of matchboxes Miloš B. draws miniature sketches of faces, objects, things, houses, dreams, encounters, people, scenes from Amsterdam streets, fragments, tiny jottings, names, telephone numbers, designs, ideas, mementos” (Ugrešić 1998, 113 – 114). Miloš Bobić was to exhibit his Vatreni Dnevnik [Burning Diary] in the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum in 1999, and in the catalogue it is again Ugrešić who provides the hundreds of tiny drawings on match boxes with a narrative, albeit this time a slightly different one: Miloš Bobić who knows, of course, the meaning of what we call fine art, refuses to participate in any sort of conversation about a possible “artistic” value for his matchboxes. They are a profoundly personal act, they are an alternative to an “artistic” vision of life, one which is left to “ordinary people.” That is why as he puts the magnificent heap of matchboxes back into a plastic garbage bag, the most natural place to keep them, he remarks […] “Those were years when I was smoking too much […]” (Ugrešić 1999)

I knew Bobić, who left Belgrade in 1991 and who died in 2007 in Amsterdam, his chosen second hometown, well.¹ In 2001, when we were compiling a special issue of the Dutch literary review De Gids about contemporary literature in and about Bosnia, Bobić’s contribution consisted of an essay in which he examined, in the painful framework of “urbicide,” the ritual murder of cities, a term used by Bobić’s former mentor Bogdan Bogdanović, a personal tie which connected his beloved Belgrade with the city of Sarajevo (Bobić 2001). Writing this particular essay was a strenuous effort for Bobić, and it undoubtedly caused him to smoke his tobacco pipe even more than usual. Both of us were, moreover,

 This essay is dedicated to the memory of Miloš Bobić (born in Belgrade, ; died in Amsterdam, ), architect and writer. His inspiring presence was an asset to the cultural life of the city of Amsterdam, one of the main centers of post-Yugoslav exile.

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aware of another correlation, one linking his matchboxes in his Amsterdam exile to the cigarette packages in the siege of Sarajevo. In the same issue of De Gids, there were excerpts from Semezdin Mehmedinović’s Sarajevo Blues (1995), which mentions the paper shortage in the city under siege: […] the tobacco factory uses any leftover materials they can find: the wrapping might be toilet paper or even pages from a book so that in the leisure time tobacco affords you can read fragments of a poem or the ingredients of a bar of soap. Foreigners buy cigarettes here as souvenirs, to bring home as living proof of this new tobacco art. The cigarette I am smoking now was wrapped in a paper confirming someone’s death: the cause of death is written on it, and you can see the signature and the official stamp of the physician. (1998, 89)

Miljenko Jergović mentions the same white, unprinted packages in the story “Grob [The Grave]” in Sarajevski Marlboro [Sarajevo Marlboro] (1994). Intentionally or not, by adding the detail of the garbage bag as “the most natural place to keep [the matchboxes]” into the text for Bobić’s exhibition, Ugrešić has added another layer of references and allusions, this time to older literary and poetic texts and works of art. The theme of reality as a garbage heap goes back to the work of the Belgrade painter Leonid Šejka (1932– 1970), to whom the narrator of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (hereafter referred to as “MOUS”) at a certain point refers as “the great ‘philosopher of the garbage heap’” (1998, 37). Incidentally, as Peter Urban recalls, Šejka also “[…] smoked much, always Sarajevska Morava, the brand which, wrapped in the old manner of Oriental tobacco, had a blank flipside, on which one could write or draw” (Urban 1997, 155, my translation). Danilo Kiš, in his obituary for Šejka, recalls his many tiny drawings on these cigarette packages (1995 h, 499). And Šejka, in turn shared, at least for some time, strong aesthetic affinities with Kiš, who was editor of Vidici, a groundbreaking review which “made first mention of Kafka, Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, and Borges in the People’s Republic” (Urban 156) and which also provided a stage for Šejka’s writings about aesthetics. Central to these writings were a series of metaphors – or for Šejka, as a painter, images – of varying degrees of order and disorder in random objects of reality: first and foremost, đubrište (“garbage heap”) and skladište (“storehouse”). Kiš wrote a short text under the title “Skladište” (1995 g, 167– 187); a section of his posthumous collected works received the same title, and he certainly had an aesthetic fondness of (seemingly) random lists. Therefore, one could maintain that what became his preferred metaphor for ordering in the last stage of his literary career, the encyclopedia, represents a next level, coming from the garbage heap via the storehouse and leading out of chaos. For Šejka, as well as for his wife, the poet Marija Čudina, alternative

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metaphors for a higher level of ordering became zamak (“the castle”) and terasa (“the terrace”). Kiš went into “Joycean exile” in 1979 when he left Belgrade for Paris. His exile was to provide a blueprint for post-1991 Yugoslav exilic culture and literature. Andrew Wachtel (2006) discusses a number of writers (Aleksandar Hemon, Muharem Bazdulj, Svetislav Basara and Drago Jančar, to which one could add not just Ugrešić but also Daša Drndić and Goce Smilevski), who all seem to take Kiš as a prose model for post-Yugoslav literature. Whereas Wachtel goes as far as suggesting that the existence of post-Yugoslav common literary culture furnishes sufficient proof for the existence of a common supranational culture before the breakup of Yugoslavia, I would limit the sense of a literary community here to the narrower, common concern of exile and (literary) homelessness. Thus, Ugrešić opens her Američki Fikcionar (first published in Dutch as Nationaliteit: Geen 1993) with a motto from Kiš’s unfinished story “Apatrid [The Man without Fatherland],” based on the life of writer Ödön von Horváth. Horváth’s life as an exile, among that of many other exiles who passed through Berlin, is the subject of discussion in MOUS. The novel itself rejoices, seemingly, in a lack of form; instead, it offers “anti-form,” one gets disconnected chapters and no central narrative. In a structural sense, MOUS hovers between two metaphors for ordering: the garbage heap and the encyclopedic list. This list appears random, and at the same time it might be compared to the medieval lists of authors (auctores), which Ernst Robert Curtius discusses in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Whereas the Latin auctores gave a sense of continuity to Christianity through the ages, Ugrešić’s catalogue of exiled authors offers, in a different era, when, as she later wrote, we compile our own archives “in competition with God” (Ugrešić 2011, 345), a list of those who are excluded by their national communities, some of whom would be otherwise condemned to oblivion for want of an alternative community. This also explains the abundant use of intertextuality in this novel: to instantly create a cultural memory by quoting the cultural annihilation brought about by the culture of nationalism. In this respect, Ugrešić’s prominent use of intertextuality reminds us of what Renate Lachmann considers to be at the very origin of literature as a mnemonic technique: “At the beginning of memoria as art stands the effort to transform the work of mourning into a technique. The finding of images heals what has been destroyed: The art of memoria restores shape to the mutilated victims and makes them recognizable by establishing their place in life” (Lachmann 2008a, 302). Creating or preserving a cultural memory, Lachmann continues, involves among others “the prevention of forgetting through the retrieval of images” (2008a, 302). In MOUS, the series of recurring images and tropes that structure the novel (suitcases, photo albums, encyclopedic lists, all containing ran-

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dom objects and images) are in themselves also quotations and should be read as such. By borrowing devices from its self-appointed predecessors, the novel points out a literary and artistic tradition that, much as Ugrešić’s own work, shows an obsession for literary form as a means to counter forgetting. This essay will attempt to uncover part of this tradition. It will focus on a number of questions. First, what exactly does the Yugoslav culture that Ugrešić constructs in hindsight in MOUS consist of? Which images and tropes does she revive? How then does Ugrešić rework and revitalize these older models for dealing with cultural annihilation and forgetting? In the end, I will elaborate on what I consider to be the main shift in Ugrešić’s poetics away from her (selfimagined) Yugoslav literary ancestors, toward literary form as a means to cope with ongoing forgetting, literary form as a means to perpetuate mourning or grief as a result of irreconcilable loss.

Ugrešić’s intertextualities: Yugoslav culture in hindsight Let me stress from the outset that Ugrešić’s intertextual affinities not only in MOUS but also in other texts are by no means limited to the realm of SouthSlav culture, to the Serbo-Croatian language, or to Yugoslav culture – all inherently problematic configurations of a cultural tradition that resists being reduced to ideological parameters, whether national, supranational, or socialist. The main focus of this essay is the intertextual tapestry that her Berlin novel is woven from and stretches from the Russian language (Viktor Šklovski, Joseph Brodsky) to German (Von Horváth), to Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov, among many others. Although Kabakov’s French colleague Christian Boltanski’s work is also discussed, stress in MOUS seems to fall on literary and artistic work from Eastern Europe. In this sense, MOUS, as well as most of Ugrešić’s work, is a response to a wider appeal in post-communist Europe, formulated by her colleague, playwright Goran Stefanovski (who writes in both Macedonian and in English): The artists from Eastern Europe should snap out of their amnesia and remember that it was their own convoluted society, which, in a spasm at the turn of the century, spurted out Chekhov, Malevich, Stravinsky, Eisenstein […]. The Eastern performing artists have some oldfashioned and lonely homework ahead of them: to find their voices, remember their names, regain their self-assurance, reclaim their space and recognize their continuity. (2004, 26)

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Apart from regaining an artistic self-consciousness in the culturally bleak years after the end of communism and with the ongoing Yugoslav wars, Stefanovski’s formulation also represented an appeal to remember pre-1989 reality, to embrace what Ugrešić considers a commonwealth of shared experience under communism. Thus, for instance, when probing the impact of Kabakov’s installation Communal Kitchens, Ugrešić’s narrator in MOUS speaks of a “shared ‘East-European trauma’” (42) – a trauma consisting of the loss not only of a shared living experience but also of a common cultural tradition. One of these “East-European” traditions that stands out in particular in MOUS is the literature written in the same language (formerly known as Serbo-Croatian²), which Ugrešić uses but which defies any single labeling these days. Her novel, as well as her other texts from the 1990s, evoke this literary tradition in a manner similar to the way it creates its own (anti‐)structure: the very images that all refer to memory and forgetting are also images that bring an intertextual string of older meanings and uses. And although most of these intertextual borrowings (not only from Kiš but also from Miroslav Krleža and from Ivo Andrić), would qualify as forms of allusion rather than direct quotation (because sources are not always mentioned), it is hard to imagine that such occurrences are accidental in the work of a writer such as Ugrešić, who is well-versed in matters of poetics and literary history. I will discuss two of these images, that of the suitcase and the photo album, below; the remainder of the essay will then be devoted to the trope of the encyclopedic list.

Suitcases First, there is the exhaustive state of exile, the weariness of constantly being on the move, visualized in the image of the suitcase – although Ugrešić denies its metaphorical nature: “I do not use my suitcase as a metaphorical substitute for the word ‘exile.’ The suitcase is in fact my only reality. Even the stamps which have accumulated on the pages of my passport do not convince me sufficiently of the reality of my journeying. Yes, the suitcase is my one fixed point” (1998, 204). One canonical text that possibly resonates in this image is Andrić’s story “Pismo iz 1920. godine [The Letter from 1920],” first published in 1946). The story is of interest here because it was at the center of the vitriolic polemics that

 For a sociolinguistic discussion on the sense and nonsense of the new national standardizations of Serbo-Croat (Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin), see Rašić ().

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raged throughout the 1990s about Andrić’s oeuvre.³ The plot is one of an old friendship under strain as a result of great political changes and shifting allegiances – not unlike the section “Group Photograph” in MOUS, where the narrator discusses the fate and choices of her former colleagues at Zagreb University during the war of the 1990s. But while Ugrešić’s novel deals with the break-up of Yugoslavia, Andrić’s story deals with the making of the first Yugoslavia after World War I. An anonymous narrator speaks of his encounter with Max, an old friend from Sarajevo in March 1920, in Slavonski Brod: “in front of the station by the track, we sat on our suitcases” (Andrić 2000, 107). While the narrator seems to be going home and sees a great historical task ahead, the building of a new (Yugoslav) nation-state, Max, a physician from a multilingual, cosmopolitan Jewish family, confesses that he will leave Bosnia; indeed, he plans to leave behind Europe altogether. His motive is the hatred between the peoples of Bosnia, which he considers endemic. What concerns me here in particular is Max’s apologetic use of the phrase “kuferaši” (“suitcase persons”) in the letter in which he afterwards justifies his decision to leave.⁴ He begs the narrator not to mistake him for an ordinary “Švaba” and “kuferaš,” someone who “lightly leaves the country he was born in, the moment she is beginning a free life and needs every ounce of her strength” (Andrić 2000, 114). It obviously is a derogatory phrase here, and it suggests a national perspective on those who choose not to affiliate themselves with the project of Yugoslav nation building. This is quite unusual from our post 1991-perspective because the tendency has been to stress the multinational nature of the various Yugoslav imagined communities. However, even when the narrator can be said to apply a (national) logic of exclusion to those who decided not to participate in the new Yugoslav imagined community, the story can still be read, albeit subversively, as an inscrip-

 These polemics represented one of the major endeavors to dismantle cultural Yugoslavia. Radical Bosniaks rejected Andrić’s work for its alleged orientalizing views. Serbian nationalists claimed he was inherently Serbian, whereas the author’s adherence to the Yugoslav project now seemed merely of nostalgic value (see Žanić ).  Andrić was not the first to use the term “kuferaš.” It stems from the Austro-Hungarian era and seemed to have been used by the local population to refer to foreign, that is, Austro-Hungarian officials who came with nothing but a suitcase to Bosnia but soon occupied all leading administrative, economic, and political positions, benefitting from Bosnia’s peripheral position within the Habsburg Empire. The term seems to have been more common in the central and eastern areas of the Serbo-Croatian language (the JAZU dictionary, issued in Zagreb, gives no entry), and it is hard to say when the first usage of the word has been attested. The Dictionary of the Serbo-Croatian Literary Language [Rečnik srpskohrvatskoga književnog jezika, Matica srpska,  – ] gives, among others, examples from Jovan Jovanović Zmaj ( – ); while the word also appears in the work of satirist Savo Skarić ( – ).

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tion of a tradition of homelessness in the Yugoslav cultural canon. Ugrešić’s usage of the metaphor of the suitcase adds a historical layer of non-national identity to her intertextual tapestry of homelessness.

Photo albums A second metaphor is related to photos. The above-quoted passage in MOUS about the suitcase as the narrator’s “only reality […] one fixed point,” concludes by saying that the suitcase “contains some completely senseless things. Including one old, yellowed and another blank, reject photograph” (1998, 204). Memories as conveyed through photographs, and especially in photo albums, are a powerful structuring theme in MOUS: A photograph is a reduction of the endless and unmanageable world to a little rectangle. A photograph is our measure of the world. A photograph is also a memory. Remembering means reducing the world to little rectangles. Arranging the little rectangles in an album is autobiography. (1998, 30)

But photographs do not just preserve slices of reality (of the life of the narrator, her mother, and her friends), they also recall Ugrešić’s literary ancestors – by inserting the photo album as structuring device for (her) autobiography, she turns Kiš and Krleža into her literary ancestors. Elsewhere (see Snel 2006) I have written of the specific intertextual ties that connect Kiš’s fictionalized autobiographies to the fiction of Krleža, specifically in the way Kiš’s writing continues Krleža’s imaginary space of homelessness, Pannonia (see Snel 2006). I contended in that essay that the appearance of the “velvet album” as the title of the fragmented closing chapter of Kiš’s Rani jadi [Early Sorrows] (1969) points back to the fictional character Filip Latinovicz in Krleža’s Povratak Filipa Latinovicza [The Return of Filip Latinovicz] (1932), listing through his velvet album trying to guess who his biological father is. This identity quest in Krleža’s work is then extended to a much wider crisis of Croatian cultural identity. Crucial in Kiš’s intertextual borrowing was that he wrote from a post-Holocaust perspective and that the imaginary space of Pannonia filled the lacuna not only in his family memory but also in the post-Second World War Yugoslav consciousness of the pre-war multilingual, cosmopolitan reality of Central Europe. Kiš’s text has a strong sense of writing in the aftermath of catastrophe, and it is precisely this sense of crisis, of cultural annihilation, that is perpetuated through Ugrešić’s intertextual repetition of the photo album. By reviving the photo album as a structural device in her novel of exile, Ugrešić suggests continuity between the chaos and

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the forgetting that followed the cultural annihilation (Holocaust, the Second World War) that is the subject of Kiš’s fiction, and the chaos and forgetting in the wake of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, of which her own personal adversity is a part. While Ugrešić, on the one hand, writes very critically of photo albums as fictions of identity and continuity, the very evocation of the image as a form of intertextuality, on the other hand, remembers previous usages of the image and are therefore part of the novel’s cultural micromemory.

Lists, random or encyclopedic Let me now concentrate on the literary genealogy of the encyclopedic list: the enumeration. MOUS famously opens with a description of the contents of the stomach of Roland, a walrus in the Berlin Zoo. The scene is echoed several times in the course of the narrative. One such instance is when the narrator quotes Krleža, who writes in March 1925 about the corpse of a whale being a popular attraction for Berliners (110). Toward the end of the novel, when discussing the Berlin flea markets, the narrator merges some of her images and metaphors, beginning again with the contents of Roland’s stomach: The Berlin flea markets resemble the slit stomach of Roland the walrus who swallowed too many indigestible objects. The Berlin flea markets resemble the Teufelberg with its longhidden contents spilling out. The Berlin flea markets are open museums of everyday life, past and present. In Berlin flea markets times and ideologies are reconciled, swastikas mix with red stars, everything can be bought for a few marks. In the Berlin flea markets surviving uniforms with different insignia are heaped together harmoniously, their owners long since dead. They rub together, and their only enemies are moths. (1998, 249)

While one could trace the history of the trope of the catalogue or list, through Curtius’s discussion of medieval catalogues of Latin auctores (Curtius 2013, 48 and 260), all the way back to the catalogue of ships in Homer’s Iliad, what is relevant here is the immediate prehistory of this trope for a number of prominent post-Yugoslav texts: not only for Ugrešić’s novel of exile but also for Hemon’s use of the trope when describing, for example, a sniper’s view of a street in besieged Sarajevo in the story “A Coin” in The Question of Bruno (2000), and even Drndić’s more recent Sonnenschein (2007), a novel which contains at its heart a seventypage long list of Italian Jews deported during the Second World War. With specific reference to the list of contents in Roland’s stomach, Stijn Vervaet writes: “We have to accept that writing history […] to a large extent means not only preserving and classifying trivial artefacts (as in a museum), but also making sense of these random relics of the past” (Vervaet 2011, 295). Indeed, the key question

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when discussing the trope of the list or catalogue seems to be: how does it relate to literary form, specifically to narrative form, as narrative is required to make sense of the random list? Because all the above-mentioned writers seem indebted to Kiš’s novelistic poetics, the answer to this question lies not just in a simple analysis of how, for example, MOUS frames such lists in its non-linear narrative. One should also consider how these texts, through their abundant use of intertextuality, provide a meta-commentary, a poetics, on the function and the working of literature, of literary form, as a means to counter forgetting. The literary text is not only a simple act of remembering but also encourages the reader to reflect on the particular kind of remembering that it makes possible.

Kiš’s poetics and the encyclopedic list Thus for Ugrešić as much as for Hemon and Drndić, Kiš’s experimentation with fact and fiction has proven a model to imitate, repeat, and modify. At the heart of Kiš’s poetics, his experimentation with fact and fiction, lies the trope of catalogues, random lists of trivia. Let me uncover here the genesis of the trope of the list or catalogue because it will shed light on how Kiš saw the relationship between literary form and the huge heap of trivia of which historical reality is made. In 1978, Kiš published a lengthy defense of his fiction in Čas Anatomije [The Anatomic Lesson], where he pays tribute to Jorge Luis Borges as the writer who broke the spell of realism in narrative prose. Before Borges, Kiš claims, narrative prose functioned according to the principle of induction, and on the basis of singular observations, it strived toward more general truth (1995a, 39). With Borges, deduction becomes the rule (that is, for any writer who wishes to be modern, or as Kiš says, “neanahroničan” ‘not an anachronism’ [1995a, 41]). Although Kiš himself is opaque about what he exactly means by “deduction,” a central notion in The Anatomic Lesson is the primacy of language, of “logos” set against a naive belief in the unmediated presence (and therefore of the representability) of historical reality. Narrative fiction after Borges, for Kiš, now fully explores language’s self-referential potential. Prose should no longer strive to uphold “l’effet de réel” ‘the effect of the real,’ to paraphrase Barthes; instead, it should acknowledge the definitive divide between language and reality. Every narrative now becomes first and foremost an attempt to reach out to reality, to reconstruct it from chaos, from the random heap of trivia, rather than to just represent it. Kiš also states his difference from Borges: writers should not just avoid becoming “an anachronism” in not only an aesthetic but also an ethical sense, and he dismisses Borges’ preference for mythical narratives, which he deems almost

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entirely devoid of history. He confirms the importance of this ethical dimension by choosing the Holocaust as the subject matter of his family trilogy, and the Soviet Gulag as the theme of Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča [A Tomb for Boris Davidovič] (1976). Writers like Kiš himself, who felt an ethical urge to write about real history, relevant history, face two major themes in the twentieth century: the Holocaust and Stalinism. Any single narrative driven by that ethical urge becomes an attempt to retrieve individual lives from forgetting, from annihilation. Catalogues are central to such poetics (or “po-ethics,” as Kiš, playing with words, called it) because they contain the contents of real life, of history. They signal tension between the principal closure that every narrative strives for and the principally endless number of details and facts that make up a single life. Kiš wrote these reflections about the “po-ethics” of narrative fiction after he wrote his major works, but the trope of the list or catalogue also prominently figures in the genesis of his major works, precisely in the years when Kiš was acquainted with Šejka, “the great philosopher of the garbage heap” as the narrator of MOUS presented him.⁵ James Joyce proved pivotal reading in those years, the second half of the 1950s. Especially the penultimate chapter of Ulysses, “Ithaca” stands out for its long lists and enumerations – a technique that Kiš would apply most extensively in the novel Peščanik [Hourglass] (1973). Ulysses not only represented for Kiš a way out of traditional realism but also revealed, as I will show below, what he considered to be a pitfall of modernism. In 1973, he stated in an interview that “all of us moderns did not come out of Joyce’s cloak but from Joyce’s nightmare, from Joyce’s grandiose defeat! The contemporary European and American novel represents nothing but an attempt to transform Joyce’s grandiose defeat in small individual victories” (1995c, 266). Let me stress here that Kiš was not just seeking to stress his difference (in the sense of, for example, Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence”). On the contrary, Kiš points out the intimate relationship between his family biography and the Central-European origins of Leopold Bloom. Both Eduard Kiš (fictionalized as Eduard Sam, or E.S., the main character in Kiš’ family trilogy) and Rudolph Virag, Bloom’s father, were from recently assimilated Jewish families, and both lived in close vicinity of one another.

 Lachmann discusses Kiš’s preference for enumerations and catalogues as a major characteristic of his novelistic poetics of the late  s and the  s; in A Tomb for Boris Davidovič and Hourglass, it is “die Aufzählung, die das Unsagbare (Holokaust und Gulag) zu Worte kommen lässt” ‘the enumeration, through which the unspeakable (Holocaust and Gulag), can come to words (b, ). The series of short stories with Mr. Mach as protagonist show that the genesis of this preference lies earlier and in a critical dialogue with not only Borges but also Joyce.

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A short series of prose sketches from the late 1950s reflect both in form and content Kiš’s reading of Ulysses. There is a certain “gospodin Mak” ‘Mister Mach,’ who has been reading Joyce (Mach also seems to echo Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste (1895), an abstract character devoid of biography). He has taken a stroll, in Bloomian fashion, along the shore and now wishes to express his impressions of this walk in artistic prose. However, simply imitating Ulysses won’t do: there is a problem with the endless lists in Joyce, the endless catalogues of details: they render modernist prose “neumetnički” ‘nonartistic’ (Kiš 1995 f, 36), and Mr. Mach asks: “What kind of a painter is he who is incapable of deciding, making up his mind, and choosing the best way to position the easel of his eye and his consciousness” (37, my translation.) The task of a writer, therefore, is to find that single list that contains all lists in itself, a concise list that bears and conveys the suggestion of a whole reality. Mr. Mach lists three chapters from Ulysses that he thinks achieve this goal because in those chapters “two worlds merge, that of the subjective and the objective, in a unity that is a symbiosis of the conscious and the unconscious” (Kiš 1995d, 46). Consequently, catalogues were to appear throughout Kiš’s fiction, especially in his family trilogy. They occur mostly in the context of the imaginary-real father Eduard Sam, where they tend to disrupt the narrative that his son seeks to impose on the endless, random details that make up his father’s life. Lists, it seems, insert randomness; they threaten to reduce a narrative to a mere catalogue of random details, which is the fundamental tension in the peculiar combination of life story and catalogue for Kiš. The trope of the catalogue or list is a principally open, unending form, while narrative form principally strives for closure. Because the ethical task of post-Holocaust and post-Kolyma literature is remembrance, or not to forget, closure is to be avoided: there are as many novels to write as there are anonymous victims. However, randomness is also to be avoided. When balanced, the combination of catalogue and narrative may yield a literary construction with the suggestion of a whole universe in it. This much, at least, is suggested by Mr. Mach, and a similar thought is expressed in a story that might be considered to be Kiš’s post scriptum to this particular thematic strand in his oeuvre, “Enciklopedija mrtvih [The Encyclopedia of the Dead]” (1983). A theater scholar is visiting Stockholm and comes across this peculiar encyclopedia that contains, according to the narrator, “the multitude of details that make up a human life” (Kiš 1989, 42). A sense of completeness is achieved through the encyclopedia’s “style, an unlikely amalgam of encyclopedic conciseness and biblical eloquence [that] condenses into a few lines of such intensity that suddenly, as if by magic, the reader’s spirit is overwhelmed by the radiant landscape and swift succession of images” (1989, 44– 45). Too much randomness (details, cataloguing) leads too far astray from aesthetic

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form. Too much narrative form and too much closure leads too far astray from the ethical task to remember reality in its potentially infinite dimension.

Ugrešić on Kiš’s Encyclopedia of the Dead as an archive For Kiš, the essence of an aesthetically “successful” list seems to have been a combination of conciseness and stylistic effectiveness, which would then result in the suspension of time (“I lost all sense of time and place” (1989, 64) as the narrator in “The Encyclopedia of the Dead” says). When the same trope reappears in post-Yugoslav fiction in the 1990s, historical time is being significantly modified. While Kiš stresses on several occasions that any relevant contemporary fiction should show at least some concern with the two major sources of evil in the twentieth century, Nazism and Stalinism, catastrophe was to be perpetuated in the Yugoslav wars. Although I wish to refrain from the suggestion that these wars were a consequence of the earlier unresolved racial and ethnic conflict of the Second World War, it is Ugrešić herself (as well as Drndić and Hemon, to name only the most prominent authors who consider themselves heirs to Kiš’s aesthetics), who suggests a continuity that would then reside in the following: the human catastrophe of the Yugoslav wars was (again) making a moral appeal to literary fiction, to counter forgetting and to remember. The very act of referring to Kiš and his literary imperative against forgetting, represents in itself an act of remembering, of forging a tradition in a decade – the 1990s – when next to countless human lives a whole cultural canon, and with it a cultural memory, is at stake. Let me show in conclusion how this renewed appeal to literary fiction urges Ugrešić to move away from Kiš’s particular use of the trope of the encyclopedic list; how, to paraphrase Kiš, literary fiction no longer strives to become a “small individual victory,” a triumph, however ambiguous, over forgetting (because so many other lives are not being remembered) but instead admits to its defeat, which is lasting. Now that history has shown itself to be an endless series of catastrophes, literature is left with the sole task of mourning, of expressing grief. Let me illustrate this point. In MOUS, the narrator recalls how she gave her mother a notebook to keep a diary (53), and when the mother complains that she finds her own life uninteresting, her daughter urges her to write down “anything […] notes […]” (54). The reader is not surprised to come across reference to Samuel Pepys (55), whose diary is recalled in the novel as arguably the most ambitious attempt to capture daily life in its entirety. But what do the notes of the mother –

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basically a list of the events that make up her own day-to-day life – yield? After carefully editing her mother’s diary, the narrator notes what is left: “the shells of her language, her identity, touchingly misused accent marks, intonations which only I hear, words whose meaning only I know, her handwriting which changes depending on her mood, self-censorship which only I sense […]” (55). The list of her mother’s daily life fails to go beyond the particular. But the narrator’s disappointment seems unjustified. After all, her mother told her in advance that her life is not interesting enough. It is at this point that the mother writes in one of her entries: “I’ve got nothing new to read, so I’m reading The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Kiš again, I like it” (53). Why does she like it? Indeed for the same reason that her daughter, the narrator, likes it: both long for a different kind of life writing, for something, I suggest, that MOUS as a whole refrains from giving – precisely the suspension of time, and hence of death. The novel itself takes as its structure the logic of the flea market, the random heap of events and artifacts that make up a human life, and it is in this respect that the episode with the mother’s diary reflects the novel as a whole. It is precisely at the level of literary form that Ugrešić’s novel gives up the ambition of a “minor victory” in the wake of Joyce’s grandiose defeat. The lasting and repetitive nature of this defeat yields melancholia because it acknowledges that the longing for absolute remembrance cannot be fulfilled.

The end of literature while history continues Ugrešić returned again to Kiš’s story in a recent essay devoted to the changing meaning of the archive in the digital age or the evolving nature of literature as a result of the dynamic conditions under which we categorize the random relics of daily life. It seems that the Internet is now competing with literature and art in their (almost) sole right to remember. This, at least, occurs to Ugrešić when she considers the fate of the Lexicon of Yugoslav Mythology, “a rescue project to save symbols of Yugoslav everyday life and popular culture” and one of the first of her “symptoms of archive fever” (2011, 348) that befell her as early as 1989. While looking back at the project, which is “apparently even in its third edition” with material assembled by Ugrešić and her Amsterdam students that they had put online and was published as an encyclopedia, she notes that “these memory fragments of daily life in the former Yugoslavia […] do not set my heart aflutter” (2011, 349). She even questions the project’s authenticity as “everything the Yugonostalgic heart could ever desire is now on YouTube” (350). In summary, “an authentic need to re-establish a cultural continuity so brutally broken has been transformed into political kitsch and the cultural programme

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of a well-funded NGO” (Ugrešić 2011, 350). Her critique and disillusionment, however, reach beyond this particular case. It seems that the Internet, “since achieving mass penetration,” has dramatically altered the status of our memories. “Would Marcel Proust have written A la Recherche du Temps Perdu if he could have seen a madeleine on the computer screen in front of him?” she asks rhetorically, implying that digitalization has deprived the random objects from our past of their materiality (Ugrešić 2011, 351). I contend that materiality is precisely the quality of the random objects that artists like Šejka and Kabakov and authors like Kiš put at the very center of the encyclopedic list as a trope. The uniqueness of materiality, the fact that it is unrepeatable and unreproducible makes it the extreme opposite of aesthetic form and at the same time its sine qua non, its ultimate object of desire. Now that the Internet has made these random objects widely and perpetually accessible, aesthetic form, in particular the trope of the encyclopedic list, has lost its raison d’être. In the same essay, Ugrešić discusses Kiš’s story “The Encyclopedia of the Dead” in a nostalgic mode, as a token from the pre-Internet era: Kiš’s humanistic and utopian imagination and his painful first-hand knowledge that the majority of human lives end as anonymous dust, has today, thanks to technology, slipped its ethical, moral and metaphysical coordinates and become the dominant cultural obsession of our age. (2011, 344)

At the end of the essay, the real purpose of esthetic or literary form becomes clear: it enforces genuine human communication, which is also under threat: “we do not communicate with each other. None of us has the patience for others’ photograph albums, holiday snaps or videotapes” (Ugrešić 2011, 352); we never had, of course, but literary form showed singular instances of such random snapshots in their full and unique force. Nevertheless, it seems that Ugrešić has not given up on literary form altogether. The biblical image of dust in the passage quoted above is repeated at the end of her essay, when she brings in another metaphor of passage, of transience, of a moveable home: the hotel room. What will happen, she seems to ask, when we end up one day in a hotel room devoid of Internet or television? After an extensive quote from Carolyn Steedman’s Dust (2001), Ugrešić writes, “And, as the pale morning light comes through the window, we will watch the dust falling faintly upon us, like a faintly falling snow” (2011, 353). It would go too far here to uncover the intertextual intricacies of this image – not only Walter Benjamin’s ninth thesis on the philosophy of history with its famous interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus and its explicit mention of “the debris of history” but also Ugrešić’s own reworking of that image in the fifth part of her novel

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about her Berlin exile, with an outspoken role for angel Alfred, which again echoes Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin. The image of the falling dust does show, however, that whereas Ugrešić’s despair about literature’s decreasing significance intensifies – a despair which also figures in two recent books of essays, Zabranjeno Čitanje [Thank you for not Reading] (2003) and Karaoke Kultura [Karaoke Culture] (2011) – so too does her stubborn reliance on tropes. It seems that after the programmatic usage of language in the essay, literary tropes still have the final say.

References Andrić, Ivo. “The Letter from 1920.” The Damned Yard and Other Stories. Trans. Celia Hawkesworth. Belgrade: Dereta, 2000. 105 – 119. Andrić, Ivo . “Pismo iz 1920. godine.” Jevrejske priče [Jewish Stories]. Belgrade: Narodna knjiga, 1991. 57 – 73. Bobić, Miloš. “Transit Belgrado – Sarajevo.” De Gids 164.6 (2001): 492 – 497. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 1983 ed. Drndić, Daša. Sonnenschein. Zagreb: Fraktura, 2007. Hemon, Aleksandar. The Question of Bruno. London: MacMillan, 2000. Jergović, Miljenko. Sarajevski Marlboro. Zagreb: Durieux, 1994. Kiš, Danilo. “Borges.” Homo Poeticus. Essays and Interviews. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995a. 39 – 45. Kiš, Danilo. Čas Anatomije. 1978. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1995b. Kiš, Danilo. “Doba sumnje.” Sabrana dela, Homo poeticus. 1973. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1995c. 258 – 291. Kiš, Danilo. The Encyclopedia of the Dead. 1983. Transl. Michael Henry Heim. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1989. Kiš, Danilo. “Gospodin Mak se zabavlja.” Sabrana dela, Varia. 1959. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1995d. 41 – 46. Kiš, Danilo. Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča: Sedam poglavlja jedne zajedničke povesti. 1976. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1995e. Kiš, Danilo. “Jedna šetnja gospodina Maka.” Sabrana dela, Varia. 1959. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1995 f. 35 – 41. Kiš, Danilo. “Skladište.” Sabrana dela, Skladište. 1979. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1995 g. 167 – 187. Kiš, Danilo. “Smrt Leonida Šejke.” Sabrana dela, Varia. 1970. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1995 h. 499 – 500. Lachmann, Renate. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature.” Cultural Memory Studies. An Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2008a. 301 – 310. Lachmann, Renate. “Zur Poetik der Kataloge bei Danilo Kiš.” Wortkunst. Erzählkunst. Bildkunst. Festschrift für Aage A. Hansen-Löve. Ed. Rainer Grübel and Wolf Schmid. München: Otto Sagner, 2008b. 296 – 309.

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Mehmedinović, Semezdin. Sarajevo Blues. Trans. Ammiel Alcalay. San Francisco: City Light Books, 1998. Rašić, Nikola. “What happened to Serbo-Croat?” Lexicography and Language Policy in South-Slavic Languages After 1989. Ed. Radovan Lučić. München: Otto Sagner, 2002. 164 – 173. Snel, Guido. “The Return of Pannonia: Imaginary Topos and Space of Homelessness.” History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe. Ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2006. 333 – 344. Stefanovski, Goran. “A Tale from the Wild East.” Alter Ego. Twenty Confronting Views on the European Experience. Ed. Guido Snel. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2004. 21 – 28. Ugrešić, Dubravka. Američki fikcionar. Zagreb: Konzor, 2002. Ugrešić, Dubravka. “The Elusive Substance of the Archive.” Comparative Critical Studies 8.2 – 3 (2011): 341 – 353. Ugrešić, Dubravka. “Miloš’ Match Boxes.” http://milanov.home.xs4all.nl/burning_diary.html. 1999. (4 May 2014). Ugrešić, Dubravka. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Trans. Celia Hawkesworth. London: Phoenix House, 1998. Urban, Peter. Leonid Šejka. Alchemie. Hamburg: Material Verlag, 1997. Vervaet, Stijn. “Whose Museum? Whose History? Whose Memories? Remembering in the Work of Dubravka Ugrešić.” Comparative Critical Studies 8.2 – 3 (2011): 295 – 306. Wachtel, Andrew. “The Legacy of Danilo Kiš in Post-Yugoslav Literature.” Slavic and East European Journal 50.1 (2006): 135 – 149. Žanić, Ivo. “Zloupotreba Andrićeve književnosti u ratu u BiH.” Erasmus 18 (1996): 48 – 57.

Vladimir Zorić

Small Town as the Scene of a Memory Encounter: Portraits and Commemorations of Radomir Konstantinović* In a necrology on Radomir Konstantinović’s death in 2011, Serbian historian and publicist Latinka Perović claimed that his polemical treatise The Philosophy of the Small Town [Filosofija palanke] (1969) had become the key “identifier” [“znak raspoznavanja”] in Serbian culture in the 1990s (Perović 2011).¹ It separated those who rejected the atrocities of Yugoslav wars from those who justified them as well as those who endorsed critical thought from those who shunned it. In Perović’s opinion, the opposing positions were served by largely the same agents. If this assessment, echoed by a number of other prominent figures, is correct, then it should be recognized as paradoxical: a monosemous, instrumental value was assigned to a versatile and elusive work. Forty-five years after the publication of The Philosophy of the Small Town, it is still very difficult to claim a neutral perspective on this work and its author. Polemics have periodically flared up and subsided without any sign of détente. Indeed, any comprehensive account of The Philosophy of the Small Town must take into consideration its locutionary ambivalence and a peculiar capacity to elicit dogmatic responses on different sides of the political spectrum. Such an antagonistic context has not only disabled any substantive dialogue on the political aspects of Konstantinović’s treatise but also occluded insight into its supra-political, mythopoeic values. At the same time, however, The Philosophy of the Small Town has served a completely different, connective function at the regional level. It worked as a stimu-

*

All images are published by courtesy of the artists and media houses and I would like to acknowledge their generous help in providing the vital information about the background, creation and circulation of these artworks.  Due to its dauntingly complex phraseology and syntax, Konstantinović’s work has not yet been translated into English. Consequently, various renditions of the book’s title have been in circulation in recent scholarship. The central concept of the palanka stems from Ottoman Turkish, in which it designated a palisaded fortified outpost along a major trade route. In South Slav languages, however, the word was assimilated into a different, decidedly civil semantic field and denotes a small town, usually in Turkey’s Balkan territories and with distinctly Ottoman appearance, often with negative connotations of economic and cultural backwardness. Konstantinović developed these Orientalist cues into a polemical emblem of parochial closure: the palanka is not so much a geographical province as a particular mindset, one marked by oppressive conservatism and is not so much a small town but a small culture driven by collective myths.

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lus for intellectuals from different countries of the former Yugoslavia to denounce the “small town mentality” in their own nation states. This process has important implications for the politics of memory across the region. In the long run, the rethinking of the Yugoslav past as an emancipative rather than traumatic locus will not be driven by the generational remembrance of the halcyon days of social equality and national parity. Instead, the process will hinge upon the possibility of constructing a sufficient number of cohesive figures of moral authority and supranational relevance. Alongside a few other intellectuals, such as the writer Danilo Kiš and the philosopher Milan Kangrga, Konstantinović is undoubtedly a likely candidate for this process. This essay will, therefore, go beyond the dialectics of political alignment and approach Konstantinović’s works as an index to memory resources stored and developed by different media to ensure his symbolic canonization. This enquiry must be based on the notion of media as a dynamic system that not only makes the past appear “immediate” but also “hypermediates” its own technologies and genres (Bolter and Grusin 2000; Erll and Rigney 2009). The focus of the enquiry will be portraiture as a distinctively cross-media genre and one that complements the verbal aspect of Konstantinović’s commemoration.

Between the street and the archive: The public remembrance of Konstantinović In spite of the dominant homogenizing interpretations, Konstantinović’s works exhibit a significant tension between two pragmatic modes of memory. In The Philosophy of the Small Town, he argues that the capsular culture, a characteristic of the small town, arises from oblivion: “it is a spirit which, forgotten by history, strives to transform its doom into a privilege by forgetting history in its turn (like one wedge driving another)” (Konstantinović [1969] 2004, 5). Unlike the temporary therapeutic oblivion of societies marked by trauma, the mnemonic content erased from the memory of the small town is not bound to return as a symptom; it is instead a cheerful, slovenly jettisoning of the unwanted. Nevertheless, there is in Konstantinović’s thought, especially in the postmodernist soliloquy Death of Descartes [Dekartova smrt], a different approach, one that challenges the legitimacy of memory precisely on account of its being normative and discursive: “weak memory, that’s a weak authority” (Konstantinović 1996, 6). Here, it is particularity that is threatened by the hegemony of the universal history. Memory is, therefore, a sword and a double-edged one at that: it can not

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only subvert the collective make-believe of the small town, as in The Philosophy of the Small Town, but also crush individuality, as it does in Death of Descartes. Importantly, these differing modes of memory imply sharply polarized media frameworks: media are either completely overridden by remembrance or completely occlude it. In The Philosophy of the Small Town, the spirit of provincial seclusion is actively a priori, assimilating new generations and outliving them in a “tautology of a closed circle, ‘circulation’ of one-and-the-same in one-andthe-same” (Konstantinović 2004 [1969], 79). Disguised as “style,” the spirit of the small town regularly descends upon certain genres, especially poetry, from which Konstantinović draws most of his examples. However, that does not mean that the elusive spirit is properly mediated. On the contrary, in the parochial optic of the small town, media are deprived of their distinctive opacity and transformed into “pamphlets,” docile tenors of ideological meaning. In Death of Descartes, there is no such sovereign spirit: every act of remembrance is preceded and substantially determined by one or more media technologies. The unnamed narrator gains access to his innermost experiences and recollections only by reminiscing on his reading of Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal as well as a number of other writers and artists. The erudition becomes a source of immense torment as his lived past and deceased family are mediated and transformed into a kaleidoscopic succession of apropos sentences, front pages, and drawings. If Konstantinović himself were remembered in either the autarchy of memory or the vagaries of intertext, then his status would be the focus of a secular cult or an image projected by other texts. However, the actual interaction of memory and media in Konstantinović’s creative career, as well as in his ongoing remembrance, yields a more complex and gradational picture than that suggested by the sharp contrast between his two magisterial works. To begin with, the literary-philosophical work and the public activism of Konstantinović represent an intersection point of different types of memory discourses and with different referents. Firstly, in his philosophical essays, particularly in The Philosophy of the Small Town, Konstantinović acts as a theorist of memory, who on the margins of his critique of nationhood also reflects on collective remembrance and oblivion and their violent excesses in the Balkans. By virtue of his intellectual positioning in the public sphere of Serbia and Yugoslavia, he also engaged in devising and performatively enacting alternative modes of group remembrance with a strong antinationalist hue (Konstantinović 1997). Secondly, Konstantinović is important for remarkably vivid acts of individual remembrance in his literary works, most notably in Death of Descartes (1997) and documentary prose Beckett the Friend [Beket prijatelj] (2000) as well as in his earlier works with experimental narrative techniques. These acts arise in a

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private context and relate to individual people, who are painstakingly remembered rather than spontaneously reflected. However, they also go beyond this intimate sphere to probe the conditions of possibility of subjective remembrance. Thirdly, Konstantinović himself has been actively remembered. In the Yugoslav period, he received numerous state awards, many of which were named after the most important dates in the partisan liberation movement in the Second World War and linked his achievements to the country’s honorific rituals. Following his withdrawal from the public stage in the early 1990s and particularly after his death, he became a subject of remembrance in his own right, as a fighter against nationalism qua neo-Nazism. All these discourses live on in unofficial reminiscences of his friends and adherents and in several initiatives to collect his scattered texts into a publicly available archive, in print and online. Furthermore, a specific interplay of media frameworks and technologies has structured and brought to the public’s attention this variety of commemorative discourses centering on Konstantinović. For one thing, unlike most of his peers on the Yugoslav literary stage, Konstantinović relied with equal levels of competence on multiple media to disseminate his texts. Before appearing in print, the entire text of The Philosophy of the Small Town as well as the bulk of his literary criticism that was later gathered in the eight-volume collection Being and Language [Biće i jezik] (1983), was read in weekly broadcasts of Radio Belgrade’s Third Program where he worked as the co-editor. Occasionally, he read some of his reviews on the Teveteka program of the Belgrade state television. Furthermore, this vocational engagement with different forms of media was complemented by intellectual and creative interest in their discursive bases, expressive potentials, and forms of interaction. Thus, his opus includes not only numerous essays and reviews on contemporary developments in visual arts (Konstantinović 1960, 1962, 1963, 2005) but also occasional experiments in creating media hybrids, such as ekphrases in Death of Descartes (Konstantinović 1996, 56, 108 – 109, 190 – 191) and inclusion of phototypic copies of private letters in Beckett the Friend (Konstantinović 2000). Crucially, Konstantinović’s activities in this area have gained a whole new dimension with the emergence of the commemorative discourse on him in the last years of his life and after his death. Representative formats include collaborative activities such as commemorative events and workshops and newspaper supplements as well as portraiture as a cross-media genre. Much of this multimedia corpus has been digitized and posted on politically engaged websites that have greatly enhanced the outreach, graphic malleability, and hyper-mediacy of these artifacts. Nevertheless, the gaping abyss of oblivion, both as the insidious, sullen forgetfulness of man and as organized suppression within a polity, was always an obsessive concern for Konstantinović. His early novel Ahasuerus [Ahasver] (1984

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[1964]) ends with the narrator, styled as the Wandering Jew, reminding his persecutors (and the reader) that he has not yet been done with and that even if he happens to die it will only take a little cuff to call his specter into being (Konstantinović 1984 [1964], 163). The way in which Serbian institutions dealt with Konstantinović in the 1990s and 2000s is a case in point. The attempts to turn blind eye to the highest cultural awards bestowed on him over the course of three decades preceding the collapse of Yugoslavia sometimes took the form of awkward slips of memory. The initiative to declare Konstantinović an honorary citizen of Subotica foundered in 2005, when the municipal committee claimed to have insufficient information on the candidate, but it failed again in 2013 when a cocandidate was vigorously disputed as a nationalist, leaving the committee in a deadlock (Komarčević 2013). At other times, ambiguous messages were sent out: for example, the central commemorative event after his death was held in the city hall of Belgrade but not one dignitary of the city (or for that matter the state) took the trouble to attend or send a condolence card (M. Konstantinović 2014). As for the artifacts and manuscripts left after Konstantinović’s death, the situation is more complex. Although the key works have been preserved in the printed form parts of his vast output have been irretrievably lost. Chronically undersupplied with recording material, the Third Programme transcribed the audiotapes of Konstantinović’s shows and then proceeded to delete them to record new programs. The publication of these transcripts has recently been hampered by red tape and political antagonisms in the publishing world. Another hit was taken in the early 1990s when Croatian nationalists looted Konstantinović’s summer house in Rovinj, on the Adriatic coast, and consigned all the books and documents held there, including a long correspondence he and his wife had with Samuel Beckett, to the garbage (Ćosić 1998; Konstantinović 2000). Konstantinović’s working diaries, which he kept for each new book project, are preserved in the private collection of his widow Milica Konstantinović, but given that large parts are difficult to decipher, significant expert involvement will be needed to edit and release them (M. Konstantinović 2014). The steady growth of commemorative discourse after Konstantinović’s death is epitomized by the opening sequence of a recent documentary film on his work, Filozof nad palankom [A Philosopher above the Small Town] (Zorić 2012). Shot from a strikingly low angle, this short scene (Fig. 1) shows a busy pedestrian street (soon recognized as Belgrade’s central promenade, Knez Mihailova Street) traversed by sundry legs and torsos, their invisible heads taking them in different directions. Sharply focused and somewhat isolated in the foreground is a copy of The Philosophy of the Small Town, placed on the pavement in an oddly upright position, with a clearly visible front page. The balance is suddenly shattered when an ominous pair of legs appears from the left, knocks over the book

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and continues its way to the right side of the screen paying no heed to the object. Later on, a different scene is shot in an interior setting (Fig. 2): the same volume is put on display on an old-style library cabinet, firstly on its own and then later alongside copies of Konstantinović’s other works. A mysterious hand is seen reshuffling the books without adding any other items from the archive. Despite the protective atmosphere of the institutional setting, the position of the volume is no less precarious than that on the street: the cabinet drawers, left slightly ajar, serve the dual function of pedestal and support for the books. Although the books displayed appear to have magically stepped out of the catalog drawers, it is clear that they also block access to those drawers because any movement would cause them to fall.

Fig. 1. A Philosopher above the Small Town (Film 2012). Used with permission.

This intricate visual arrangement entails several codes that set the book within the symbolic order of Serbian culture. Konstantinović’s work is a concrete site, in an open public space and in an institutional archive, and at the same time a lieu de mémoire (Nora 1986), a central and distinctive part of the spiritual

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Fig. 2. A Philosopher above the Small Town (Film 2012). Used with permission.

itinerary of an entire generation. It appears abandoned on the street, but it also paradoxically has the form of a “textual monument” (Rigney 2008, 249), an enacted metaphor of durability and authority. In this latter form as a memorial, however, it seems to have a rather limited capacity of “morphing” through substantive interaction with its surroundings (Rigney 2008, 249). Instead, it is erected like a sanctum of stability and wholeness amid the haphazard movements of the faceless, fragmented multitude of the small town. The monument is brutally toppled by a member of that same small town, which signifies cultural oblivion and material destruction rather than revision through judicious engagement. As a volume standing out in the archive, it brings together all other books and at the same time provides access to them, which strongly suggests a form of canonical priority on account of comprehensiveness. Here, too, there is very little space for interaction with other works from the archive: the volume is bound to remain where the canonist’s “invisible hand” has placed it (Winko 2002). Importantly, this visual encoding of monumentality and canonicity is born out by the verbal metaphors used by Konstantinović’s friends interviewed in the film. Konstanti-

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nović’s works and political views are variously described as “heroic” (László Végel), “monumental” (Ottó Tolnai), “unique and inimitable” (Gojko Tešić), “the most imposing” (Aleksandra Bosnić Đurić), “European paradigm” (Latinka Perović), “a man for all times” (Filip David), and “cult and capital” (the narrator).² The film’s symbolic overture, therefore, defines the polemic context and the pragmatic agenda for the commemoration of Konstantinović. This can be summarized as follows: the accident of writing in a small language, as well as his uncompromising critical stance, had made Konstantinović hostage to parochial resentments. Consequently, his farsighted thought is exposed to gradual oblivion and his literary remains to dispersal and natural wastage. This trend, it is further argued in the film, should be reversed by his posthumous recognition and institution into the realm of national memory: the book on the street should grow into an actual memorial and the works scattered in catalogs and archives should be instituted into the cultural canon of Serbia. This thrust would also have broader implications for the society at large. A joint anamnesis would not only retrieve the last member of a bygone generation but also lead to a pervasive catharsis and represent a pawn for a more dignified future. Therefore, Konstantinović, like his Ahasuerus, is remembered as someone who is being forgotten and needs to be recalled again and again. But how is this supposed to happen? Aleida Assmann distinguishes between different modes of memory and argues that in opposition to individual (neuronal) and social (generational) memories, which are sustained by human biology and life cycle, any transition to political and cultural memory involves a radical break. In the latter domain, memories must first be “uncoupled” from living tenors and committed to external symbolic media and then “recoupled” with a wider circle of tenors and transmitted in time (A. Assmann 2006, 34). By the similar token, if the remembrance of Konstantinović is to be instituted into the memory politics of the state, there would have to be a circular movement: it would need to go from the street (the flux of living, generational memory) to the archive and canon (consignment to a centralized, merit-driven remembrance), and finally back to the street (the construal of memorial sites in the public space and a set time in the public calendar). Although in the visual code of the documentary

 Above and beyond the figures employed in the documentary film, the two metaphors most frequently encountered in interviews with Konstantinović’s friends frame The Philosophy of the Small Town as a Bible (the Holy Scripture) and as a primer (textbook). While the former assigns the treatise a virtually sacred status the latter calls for its introduction into the national school curriculum at the elementary level.

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film this circular movement appears unproblematic, there are two misunderstandings that need clarification. Firstly, it is not quite correct to say that Konstantinović has been passed over in silence. As a matter of fact, he is one of the most discussed – albeit not necessarily best understood – authors in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literatures. Moreover, the discussions about him have frequently taken the form of a collaborative honorific ritual that centers on his uniqueness as a man and a writer. Several dedicated events brought together artists and scholars to celebrate such jubilees as the twentieth anniversary of The Philosophy of the Small Town and seventy-five years of Konstantinović’s life that have been followed by other commemorative gatherings after his death. The papers delivered at those meetings were disseminated through Festschrifts that featured texts by authors who for various reasons did not attend the original event but wanted post festum to contribute to the undertaking (Daković and Kuzmanović 1998; Bajtal et al. 2003; Daković 2008; Beganović and Jakovljević 2013). This growing corpus of critical work surpasses the attention accorded to most of his fellow writers, especially those who lay claim to immortality in memory through the membership in the academy. Thus, there is a genuine “commemorative vigilance” accorded to his life and works (Nora 1986, 7). However, the pattern of these commemorative efforts is uneven in terms of geographic and institutional distribution. For example, more activities have been initiated in Sarajevo, which Konstantinović held in esteem before the war and supported during the siege in 1992– 1996, than in Belgrade where he lived (Konstantinović 2013). Also, the activities have been organized mainly on the personal initiative of his friends and activist groups and funded by non-governmental organizations; gestures of recognition by major cultural and academic institutions in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina were the exception not the norm. Nevertheless, to argue that Konstantinović’s works are suppressed in a part of the public sphere is different than claiming that the society as a whole is poised to forget him. On the contrary, the conspicuous lack of concern on the part of governmental institutions was met with a clearly articulated memory framework on the part of the liberal segment of civil society (Halbwachs 1992, 38, 52). Secondly, given that most of the honorific rituals of the former Yugoslavia have now been discontinued or discredited as doctrinaire or outdated, Konstantinović would need to be included into the institutionalized memory discourse of the successor countries, in particular of Serbia. In that case, the governmental bodies would need to find or create a niche in the public space (street names, monuments, commemorative plaques, exhibitions), in the annual calendar (awards, anniversaries, commemorative stamps), and in the educational curriculum (excerpts in textbooks, research) to maintain the memory of Konstantinović

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and foster the awareness of his relevance. However, this motion would run up against a very obvious political obstacle: Konstantinović’s radical criticism of the small town is incompatible with the conservative nation-state model that has prevailed in Serbia (Perišić 2011). Regardless of this political hindrance, any effective commemoration of Konstantinović within state institutions remains unlikely for another, merely practical reason. It would require a level of coherence and coordination that is currently unattainable by that sector. Like many countries with unresolved debates about the past and unstable institutions, Serbia has not developed a steady honorific system to commemorate persons deemed to hold merit. Civic, class, national, and religious systems have alternated and displaced each other leaving sometimes vestiges and other times open contradictions between persons included in the commemorative canon (Prodanović 2002; Perica and Velikonja 2012). If and when the institutional canonization of Konstantinović happens, there is a risk that the process would be either too slow to make a difference or too fast to earn credence. The constant friction between generational remembrance and institutional misrecognition, as well as their underlying interdependence, can be illustrated by a recent example. As the first signal that Konstantinović’s work is destined for the public space and regional remembrance, a commemorative plaque was erected on his birth house in Subotica with an elegant relief portrait and parallel inscriptions in Serbian and Hungarian (Fig. 3). Here again, the push was driven by the generational circle rather than the municipal authorities, who opted in only at a late stage, and it was completely ignored by the central government. The portrait on the plaque was made by Konstantinović’s widow, Milica Konstantinović, and the whole project was organized by his friends, gathered in the non-governmental initiative, “Trust for Preservation of the Intellectual Legacy of Radomir Konstantinović.” At the unveiling ceremony held on the 85th anniversary of Konstantinović’s birth, the philosopher was reportedly described as “the great son of Subotica” and “the most significant writer of contemporary Serbian literature,” a rather bold label given the fact that Subotica was also the birthplace of another iconic figure of intellectual dissent, Danilo Kiš (Laloš 2015). Thus, expressed in the visual code of the documentary film, Konstantinović’s itinerary from the street to the archive or canon and back to the street is fraught with various ideological and practical difficulties. Consequently, much of the commemorative effort remains in an unresolved stasis between the group-based generational memory (Halbwachs 1992; A. Assmann 2006) and the canonical cultural memory (J. Assmann 1992, 52; A. Assmann 2006, 51– 58). However, this pending commemoration actually takes advantage of that duality. Foreclosed from the channels of institutional transmission, the commemoration is diverted and expressed in a fundamentally decentered media frame-

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Fig. 3. Commemorative plaque in Subotica. Used with permission.

work: through multiple technologies and random access. In the next section, I will argue that in the digital landscape of new media, it is portraiture that takes on a vital role of negotiating between generational and cultural aspects of Kostantinović’s memory site.

The face as a multimedia locus: Portraiture and remembrance Each portrait is undeniably a performative enactment of the generational memory in its social, interactive aspect. The sitter and the artist are engaged in a dialogue over the scheme and details of the portrait. Implicitly or explicitly, that dialogue requires both parties to reach into their individual memory stores and identify in life’s bewildering variety the most suitable pose and setting, those that will express the subjectivity of the sitter and define his or her future remembrance (A. Assmann 2006; Brilliant 1991, 129 – 140). This search brings together their remembrance of the subject’s past and the catalog of conventional poses

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prevailing in the given period: if the cooperation is successful, the two will fit together. After the portrait has been cast into a definitive form it also acts as a prompt for generational memory in the time to come: it is revisited by the sitter as well as his or her family and friends. Furthermore, it can also act as an extension of that memory after the death of the sitter when it gradually replaces the welter of mental associations and becomes a template for remembrance and dialogue between those who survive him or her. The spectators’ uncanny sense of looking at the sitter looking at them gives this memory a distinctly numinous air in that it seems to impersonate those who died. Nevertheless, portraits are also objects of cultural memory. They are typically committed to one of the recognizable media but can also combine them, be transferred to other media and multiplied. The dispersal at the level of media technologies is paralleled by the cultural heterogeneity of the subject portrayed. The portraitist regularly has to make a selection from the sitter’s cultural capital (Bourdieu) to single out the canonical, culturally encoded version of that personality (A. Assmann 2006; Brilliant 1991, 69 – 76). Dissociated from their “occasionality” (Gadamer, qtd. in Brilliant 1991, 7) and outliving their referents, portraits often take up the role of surrogate memorials. Unlike its conversational function, the cultural aspect of portraiture is defined by random access and restricted possibilities for interaction on the part of the spectator. In this respect, the spectator’s sense of the sitter looking back at him/her has no generational but merely a functional aspect: the sitter appears to posit the viewer of the photo. Last but not least, portraits lend themselves to the dialectics of cultural and political memory. While sometimes they are recuperated as specimens of genre, independently of any living memory, other times they serve as visual illustrations of categories larger than themselves such as the state or the nation. Whatever the role of his repute as a philosopher, there is ample evidence that Konstantinović’s face and appearance attracted attention and invited portrayals. For his fellow writers, that meant primarily the verbal evocation of his face and posture in a mimetic code that emulated painting. The features captured seem to be as different as the observers. For Borka Pavićević, the memory of Konstantinović’s self-composed pace, during occasional encounters in Rovinj and before the break-up of Yugoslavia, was reminiscent of “a definitive form […] a painting” (Pavićević 2003, 42). His life-long friend Bora Ćosić recalls a rather different picture, one of a young Konstantinović whose unsteady, irregular walk reflected a visceral refusal to go by conventions of behavior and thought, in other words a protest against any definitive form (Ćosić 1998, 138). Another friend, Radivoj Cvetićanin, recalls the last period of Konstantinović’s life, which he spent restfully in his Belgrade apartment and respectfully shifts the focus of depiction from his aging face to “his central armchair, freshly ironed

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shirt, and polished shoes” (Cvetićanin 2011). Different and personal though these portrayals are, they illustrate both the dialogic principle of generational remembrance and the framing of cultural memory in different media. Nevertheless, it is the visual portraiture of Konstantinović that epitomizes and energizes this interaction between living memory and cultural artifact to a much greater extent than the verbal medium. There is a growing awareness that Konstantinović was communicating with his contemporaries through his portraits no less than through his philosophical and literary works. If one contemplates the artfully designed front page of Death of Descartes (Fig. 4), featuring a black-and-white photograph of Konstantinović by Dušan Milovanović on a black cover, one gets the impression of a fusion of verbal and visual form. Intensely probing and hermetic, they throw into relief the collapse of the Cartesian attempt to master memory. Konstantinović’s unsettled, syncopating sentence refers the reader to the image on the front page and, vice versa, the image invites the reader to resolve its mystery by plunging back into the text. Although the photo on the front page was actually made some fourteen years before Death of Descartes, one cannot help but relate it to the introductory description of the paternal figure as the latter-day Descartes, frightening in its gentlemanly solitude: “indeed, he was ‘the form of an independent decision’ […] ‘a plastic figure,’ but one that moves, a clear form, an absolute form” (Konstantinović 1996, 8). If anything, this curious anachronism demonstrates a multimedia tendency inherent in the act of interpretation of any given text. As readers, we are portraitists who construct a human form from the verbal material. As spectators, we are readers who seek to decipher the physiognomy and expression of the writer’s face as “a living language without speech” (Martin 1961, 65). Meanwhile, Konstantinović’s portraits are also included into the macro-text of the commemorative discourse on him and thus define the visual template of his remembrance in the indeterminate state between generational and cultural memory, which was poignantly expressed by Pavićević, who claimed: “Anyway, see for yourselves how beautiful and clever he was” (2011). What is important here is not the overt and naive belief in a unity of beauty and truth but an underlying acceptance of the indexical and simultaneously of a discursive value of portraits. Konstantinović’s portrait repertoire includes portrayals from all periods of his life rendered in three different media: photography, painting, and sculpture. The bulk of these artifacts consist of family photographs taken during his childhood and early youth in the late 1920s and 1930s, as well as of those taken in the context of his professional engagement as a writer, critic, and media personality, from the 1950s to the early 1980s. In those photos, Konstantinović is seen in the company of figures of authority and trust, initially his parents and his sister, and then his friends and fellow writers such as Miroslav Krleža and Pavle Ugrinov.

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Fig. 4. Death of Descartes (front page, photo D. Milovanović, 1983). Used with permission.

Alternatively, he is captured alone, surrounded by distinctive signs of his social background and vocation, such as a painting, a writing desk sided by book shelves, or a microphone. This group is complemented by a portrait painted by the pop-art painter Predrag Nešković (“Reflections of Radomir Konstantinović”) as well as by several caricatures including those by Zuko Džumhur and by Dimitrije Živadinović. A wholly different series of portraits emerged between the 1980s and 2000s, a period which brought momentous changes in the political landscape of the country and in Konstantinović’s personal circumstances. Several artists were in a position, through ties of friendship or allegiance, to portray Konstantinović as he was going through a Montaignian stage of his life: an aging recluse who grapples with the burden of his memories no less than with the outrage of a civil war in the immediate proximity. This late harvest includes a series of black-and-white frontal photographs taken by Milovanović, a blackand-white photographic profile of Konstantinović working at his desk (author unknown), two painted portraits by Mirza Ibrahimpašić and one by Teodora Jelena Stošić, as well as three sculptures by the writer’s wife Milica, namely two three-dimensional busts (in wood and in bronze) and a relief (in bronze). While the division between the two periods is by no means clear-cut, it seems fair to stress that there is a marked difference in mood and format between the vocational and the old-age photos. Not only were these portraits made in different periods, they also deployed different communicative and mnemonic strategies to gain access to the sitter’s personality. Given Konstantinović’s dislike of academic sculptures, it is some-

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what ironic that the busts made in the last decade of his life by his wife Milica offered the opportunity for a near-perfect fusion of conversational memory and media articulation. Made in the domestic setting of their apartment, the bronze bust (Fig. 5) was cast on a clay mold that took roughly a month to complete. After the initial measurements were made, the model was encouraged to relax and further sittings hardly differed from the daily routine: “while I was working, we were chatting and listening to music and he was able to move freely” (M. Konstantinović 2014). A close link between Konstantinović and his portraitists was also achieved in photographs taken over several decades. Here again, the settings were familiar – Konstantinović’s home or a studio – and so were most of the photographers, either commissioned by himself or employed as in-house photographers at the radio (Fig. 10, 11). Furthermore, having run prerecorded and live programs on radio and television for years, Konstantinović was at ease with this medium, and the collaboration proceeded on a tacit trust between the two parties. The writer would routinely take a set of poses, and the photographer would adjust the technical parameters of the frame before surrendering the whole scene to the mechanism of the analog camera. On occasion, photographs were retouched in the production to adjust shading and the tonality of the background, and Konstantinović reserved the right to discard those images that he found unsuccessful, a discretion that he only rarely exercised (Milovanović 2014).

Fig. 5. Bust (Bronze, M. Konstantinović, 2008). Used with permission.

The painted portrait by the contemporary artist and Konstantinović’s friend Predrag Nešković (Fig. 6) was made shortly after the first edition of The Philosophy of the Small Town and was significantly influenced by it. It was driven by analytic reflection more than by anatomical likeness. The artist firstly laid down the contour of Konstantinović’s profile (with the indispensable cigarette

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in mouth) and then, guided by its curving line, proceeded to add his own forms (Nešković 2014). A masterful rendition of a life in the spirit, the portrait seeks to translate the convolutions of Konstantinović’s syntax into an entanglement of free forms and colors. On a different level, however, it also articulates and extols the emancipative value of the grotesque hybrid against the smothering uniformity of style imposed by the small town. By a curious symbolic reversal, Konstantinović would re-verbalize Nešković’s visual pattern in the 1990s: in one of his addresses with a telltale title “The Beast of My Humanity [Životinja moje ljudskosti],” he reclaims the human right to individual aberrance against the monstrous normativity and normative monstrousness of the collective: “the scream of […] a big, wonderful, terrible animal which vindicates its right” (Konstantinović 2003, 138).

Fig. 6. Portrait ‘Reflections of Radomir Konstantinović’ (Acrylic on canvas, P. Nešković, 1973). Used with permission.

The portrait by Mirza Ibrahimpašić (Fig. 7) employed a very different strategy of portrayal. On the occasion of Konstantinović’s seventy-fifth birthday in 2003, a group of prominent writers and philosophers from different parts of former Yugoslavia organized a two-day meeting in Sarajevo to honor his life and work. There was a sense of occasion on both sides: the honorary guest, Konstantinović, sat at the roundtable and listened pensively to the speakers without saying a word; Ibrahimpašić was commissioned to make a portrait that would become a gift on behalf of the entire group (Ibrahimpašić 2014). When the portrait, subsequently finished in the tempera technique, appeared on the front-page of the Festschrift from the meeting Konstantinović was said to have been taken by surprise. It is precisely this strategy of mutual concealment and surprise that marks the decisive shift in the group remembrance of Konstantinović. The generational meeting is turned into an event with typical features of commemorative ritual

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that generates further artifacts of cultural memory. Konstantinović is freed of the obligation to contribute to the generational remembrance and placed in a position of a living monument; his friends and associates, for their part, are released of the requirement to have their words verified and proceed to construct an autonomous commemorative discourse which they later present to him.

Fig. 7. Portrait (Tempera, M. Ibrahimpašić, 2003). Used with permission.

Once the vital dialogic bond has been disrupted and portraiture made independent from the sitter, the next stage in the centrifugal thrust towards cultural remembrance is to have a portrait painted by someone who is not part of the generational circle at all but merely inspired by his perceived legacy. Teodora Jelena Stošić’s portrait of Konstantinović (Fig. 8) was not based on personal recollection, let alone a formal sitting, but purely on media memory. A student of graphic design, Stošić accessed several pictures of Konstantinović on the Internet and, based on her “inner experience of Konstantinović,” evolved a template for her own frontal portrait that she submitted to her faculty as a practical assignment and subsequently uploaded on the web (Stošić 2015). By virtue of its media format, the web material is two-dimensional and all images (including images of sculptures) are given a perspective. In processing the web material Stošić thus included both the anatomic and the perspective-related features of

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Konstantinović’s face. Her tempera portrait of Konstantinović has the same shirt and broadly similar facial features as that on the front page of Death of Descartes, but his eyes are semi-closed as on another photo from the same series. The portrait was then graphically processed: it was photographed from an oblique perspective and a calligraphic quote from The Philosophy of the Small Town was pasted upon it. Interestingly, due to a certain shortening of perspective the figure on her portrait has a significantly lower forehead. This effect challenges the age-old tradition to paint persons of genius and spirit with a dome-like skull and forehead (as in the famous portraits of saints and of Shakespeare).

Fig. 8. Portrait (Pastel, T.-J. Stošić). Used with permission.

The last stage in the emancipation of media remembrance from its living tenors consists in the digital processing of Konstantinović’s portraits: analogue images are firstly pixelated and then further manipulated to accentuate desirable features. For instance, the Belgrade daily Danas marked the first anniversary of Konstantinović’s death by publishing a four-page supplement dedicated to him. The front page of the supplement (Fig. 9) reworked an early photograph of Kon-

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stantinović and his father made in a photographic studio in Subotica where they lived at the time. The newspaper had the photograph cropped to frame Konstantinović, a serene child with eyes wide open, in the center of the image. The effects of the cropping were striking: the new frame not only makes the child a solitary figure that he would turn into later but also makes him appear more inscrutably pensive than he probably was at the time (on the ambiguity of the photographic “look” see Barthes 1984, 111– 114). Other examples of digital cropping were limited to manipulating Konstantinović’s own figure, zooming from his bust to his face and from his face to his eyes. Alternatively, the dark background in some of the portraits was extended to both the left and the right side to equally colored patches to emphasize the writer’s social and political isolation. Finally, some portraits were compressed along the horizontal axis to emphasize the vertical, spiritual dimension of his face. Thus, the tendency of the new technologies to hyper-mediacy is tapped to project a horizon of cultural memory: Konstantinović is perceived as a prophetic, solitary, and spiritual figure, and the digital manipulation must emphasize precisely those features.

Konstantinović’s portraits and the dynamics of multimedia remembrance The commemoration of Konstantinović has been articulated in multiple media forms: not only as the conventional verbal homage (delivered orally or through Festschrifts) and meta-commemorative features (documentary film) but also through diversified and dynamic portraiture in different materials and formats. The proliferation and interaction of these forms and levels is due to a conspicuous hold-up in the politics of memory: Konstantinović’s memory site has not yet been transferred from the generational, group-based remembrance to a steady locus of cultural memory. Presently, neither Serbia as a nation-state nor the “Yugosphere” as a nascent regional initiative offer a stable and congruous framework to commemorate Konstantinović. Whereas the former is antagonistically disposed and dysfunctional, the latter is inchoate and underfunded. Instead, Konstantinović’s memory is nourished in the interstitial space between generational and cultural memory and, in metaphorical terms, between the street and the archive. In that space, there is an increased reliance on new media technologies and ample opportunities for their autonomous remediation. The question that still begs an answer is why in the plethora of images only certain representations are on their way to become canonized while others have been pushed aside and surrendered to a form of secondary oblivion. For instance,

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Fig. 9. Danas front page (Special Supplement, 27-28 October 2012). Used with permission.

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in the wake of celebration in 2003, Ibrahimpašić painted two tempera portraits of Konstantinović, a front-and-side and a profile, which were based on several drawings. As a matter of fact, only the first of these portraits appeared in the Festschrift, while the other lingers in relative obscurity, hanging on a wall in a local café, Marijin Dvor in central Sarajevo, and surrounded by Ibrahimpašić’s portraits of other notable persons of the Sarajevan and Yugoslav intellectual elite (Izet Sarajlić, Dario Džamonja, and Kiš); the sketches remain the painter’s possession (Ibrahimpašić 2014). A published resource, a bohemian sanctuary, a personal collection: why do they have different itineraries and appeal to different audiences? The one straightforward response to this question would be to remind oneself of the current informal state of Konstantinović’s memory site. Due to ongoing institutional antagonism and foreclosure there is as yet no central archive of his printed works, manuscripts, and artifacts. Konstantinović himself has approved much of the visual material now associated with him for a particular purpose, usually a review or the front page of a book. After his death, additional material has streamed – or trickled – from various private sources and sources with restricted access, such as the personal collection of his widow or of his friends and associates from the generational circle, and finally, from the Documentation Center of Radio Belgrade. These instances occasionally come into indirect or direct conflict: the Sarajevo committee selected the front-and-side portrait for the front page of the Festschrift against the wish of the painter Ibrahimpašić, who preferred the profile portrait (Ibrahimpašić 2014). We could, thus, argue that the commemorative community has seen what Konstantinović himself and the holders of his literary estate wanted it to see. While it is clear that the barrier separating the private and restricted-access collections from the public sphere has put a limit to the total amount of the publicly available material, it still does not explain the preference given to certain parts of that corpus. For example, all portraits discussed in the previous section have gotten through that barrier and attained some degree of renown and circulation. However, it is clear that they do not lay the same claim to a place in the cultural canon. While each of them illustrates an important aspect of Konstantinović’s encoding some appear more “memorable” than others. The only way of explaining this is to assume that there is still another barrier, that of the medium to which the portraits are committed or relocated. For one thing, some media are ill suited for the informal and interstitial realm in which Konstantinović is currently remembered. By virtue of its three-dimensionality, sculpture seems destined for the public space and the conventional monumental function. Not only is there a net loss involved in its digital reduction to two dimensions and a single perspective but also a misplaced cultural code. It is, therefore, unsurprising to see a sculpture’s commemorative potential overridden by portraits per-

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ceived as more congruous with new media as long as such portraits are extant. Konstantinović’s painted portraits, however, appear more relevant because they develop remarkably personal visions in the two-dimensional format compatible with the digital framework. However, they, too, have certain limitations because they transpose the memory site of Konstantinović into sundry aesthetic and cultural canons rather than making a case for canonization of that site itself. Photography, with its paradoxical enactment and elision of the sitter’s death (Barthes 1984), seems best suited to capture the memory of someone whose essence is to be constantly forgotten. Nevertheless, it is clear that there is a further differentiation in Konstantinović’s photographic portraits. A routine scrutiny of newspaper reports on Konstantinović indicates that in the 1970s and 1980s the textual material on his works was accompanied by a large number of photos taken at different points in time and with different frames. However, in articles published in 2000s and after the writer’s death, this assortment has been supplanted with a limited number of photographs with the absolute predominance of the series made by Milovanović. Although the initial publicity was achieved when one of those photos was selected for the front page of Death of Descartes, neither the subsequent quantitative expansion of this series nor the fallout of a routine suppression of the old and the updating of the press archives with the more recent images was accidental. Actually, if Konstantinović is remembered primarily as the author of The Philosophy of the Small Town (1969) and of Death of Descartes (1997), then one would expect the visual aspect of that commemoration to be anchored in a photo from one of those two periods. Milovanović’s series, consisting of six shots made in Konstantinović’s apartment on a sunny morning in 1983, establishes a significant temporal distance of fourteen years from both works. In the linear temporal order, the author of The Philosophy of the Small Town has gone off the stage; the author of Death of Descartes has not yet come into being. The canonization of a portrait has very little to do with chronological correspondence; the success of that series has been driven by a different factor: the icon which sets forth the type of intellectual Konstantinović is imagined to be. This can be demonstrated by a brief comparison of a well-known photograph from Milovanović’s series with another, made by an unknown photographer during a pre-recording session at the radio station in the late 1960s. The photograph taken in the studio (Fig. 10) represents Konstantinović as an energetic, sharp public persona behind the microphone. Although there is no video camera around, he gesticulates in the oratorical manner as he delivers a talk without notes. In this deferred communication with the audience, he appears to be fully in control of his body, which opens up to the camera and the media conduit at his disposal.

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Fig. 10. Portrait (Unknown author, photo-archive of M. Konstantinović). Used with permission.

In fact, it is his mastery of language that translates into body and imposes a flux so swift that it almost eludes the photographic act. In contrast, Milovanović’s photo (Fig. 11) shows Konstantinović as a reluctant object of media technology rather than its operator. Soberly dressed, with a somber countenance, he is captured in a moment of silence and inscrutable meditation that seems to precede and outlast the photographic act. Emerging from a dark background, he willfully ignores the shaft of daylight falling laterally

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on his face, yet beneath this appearance of monumental, iconic dignity, there is a tension. Although his eyes appear to be closed, as on death masks, a closer inspection of the photo shows that they are actually open and looking intensely downwards. The photo enforces a double trompe-l’oeil: the spectator’s eye is deceived, and it is precisely the sitter’s eye that deceives it. Unlike conventional photos, it exudes darkness rather than providing a deceptive window into a past self. In this manner, the standard photographic capture and mystification of the gaze (Barthes 1984) is evaded and outmaneuvered. Thus, Milovanović’s photo offers a visual model for monumental remembrance of Konstantinović and at the same time a potent metaphor of his deconstruction of language. However, the anti-Cartesian strategy is not the only grounds of the memorability and ongoing remediation of Milovanović’s portrait in recent years. In addition to presenting the opposing models of media awareness, the two photos display the different types of intellectual activity obtained in the Yugoslav and the post-Yugoslav period. The photograph taken in the studio posits an engaged intellectual who, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words, rises above the functionality of his profession “to question both received truths and the accepted behavior inspired by them, in the name of a global conception of man and of society” (Sartre 1976, 230). It is precisely this type of critical acumen that the first generation of readers of The Philosophy of the Small Town held in esteem. Moreover, this form of global humanist challenge to ideology had its place and value in the Yugoslav political system and was even promoted in some media houses. A poster-size photo of Konstantinović at the studio was displayed for years at the show-window of Radio Belgrade alongside other prominent intellectuals who collaborated with this institution before being discarded in the 1990s (M. Konstantinović 2014). In the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars, the intellectual ceases to be a Sartrean meddler and becomes a someone who remembers; it is from that affective stance that the intellectual builds towards an engagement with public remembrance (Burke 1989, 110; A. Assmann 2006, 50 – 51). The striking feature of the later photo is a certain air of ineffable trauma and mourning that goes well with the public perception of Konstantinović’s withdrawal. The Philosophy of the Small Town is now remembered in light of the wars in Yugoslavia, and so is its author, in his posture of universal mourning and painstaking re-collection. To conclude, the remembrance of Radomir Konstantinović in Serbia has been suspended in a precarious balance. Due to a combination of literary, historical, and generational factors, it cannot remain merely an in-group communicative memory; however, for political reasons it has not yet been admitted to the canon of cultural memory. This undecided status has led to a heightened awareness of the fragility of his literary estate and to continued pleas for his institution into the honorific system of the state and public space. These demands for rec-

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Fig. 11. Portrait (photo by D. Milovanović). Used with permission.

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ognition have been channeled through verbal as well as visual forms, and unlike other, uncontested writers, the demands generate a distinctly multimedia locus of remembrance. Konstantinović’s portraits testify to the dispersal of commemoration beyond the immediate generational circle of his friends and followers and to the differing degrees of remediation. They link back and forward to Konstantinović’s texts, to the artistic developments of the time, and to the digital hyper-mediation of the global network. Despite this social and thematic heterogeneity, media dynamics and distribution of those portraits points to an emergent pattern of visual remembrance of Konstantinović. Above and beyond any anatomical or behavioral likeness and chronological correspondence, this emergent pattern throws into relief his ethical agency in a turbulent time when, in the mythopoeic image of the youngest of the portraitists, “thinking still existed and a voice would not simply disappear into the distance” (Stošić 2015).

References Assmann, Aleida. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. München: C. H. Beck, 2006. Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: C. H. Beck, 1992. Bajtal, Esad, et al., eds. Radomir Konstantinović: glas savjesti u nevremenu. Sarajevo: Krug 99, 2003. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections of Photography. London: Flaming, 1984. Beganović, Davor, and Branislav Jakovljević, eds. Sarajevske sveske 41 – 42 (2013). Bolter, Jay David, and Walter Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT P, 2000. Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture, London: Reaktion, 1991. Burke, Peter. “History as Social Memory.” Memory: History, Culture and the Mind. Ed. Thomas Butler. Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1989: 97 – 113. Cvetićanin, Radivoj. “Umreti u cipelama.” Special supplement of Danas 5 – 6 (2011): 8. Ćosić, Bora. “Epilog za povest o Miškinu: razbijena šolja, Descartesova.” Daković and Kuzmanović 135 – 158. Daković, Nenad, and Rade Kuzmanović, eds. O Dekartovoj smrti Radomira Konstantinovića, Belgrade: Radio B92, 1998. Daković, Nenad, ed. Fenomenologija duha palanke. Belgrade: Otkrovenje, 2008. Erll, Astrid, and Ann Rigney. “Introduction: Cultural Memory and Its Dynamics.” Media and Cultural Memory: Mediation, Remediation and Cultural Memory. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009: 1 – 14. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1992. Ibrahimpašić, Mirza. Interview. 28 June 2014. Komarčević, Dušan. “Konstantinović bez priznanja u Subotici: filozof žrtva politikantstva.” http://www.slobodnaevropa.org/content/konstantinovic-bez-priznanja-u-subotici/ 25095307.html. 4 September 2013 (1 April 2014).

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Konstantinović, Milica. Interview. 24 March 2014. Konstantinović, Radomir. Filosofija palanke. 1969. Belgrade: Otkrovenje, 2004. Konstantinović, Radomir. “Povratak materiji.” Nin, No. 520 (25 December 1960): 9. Konstantinović, Radomir. “Igra sa Rembrantom, ili trijumf analitičke svesti.” Nin, No. 613 (7 October 1962): 9. Konstantinović, Radomir. “Sezanova osveta.” Danas 43 (1963): 11. Konstantinović, Radomir. “Ruka Ede Murtića.” Nin, No. 2819 (6 January 2005): 48 – 49. Konstantinović, Radomir. Ahasver/Pentagram. 1964. Belgrade: Nolit, 1984. Konstantinović, Radomir. “Živeti sa čudovištem.” Druga Srbija. Ed. Ivan Čolović and Aljoša Mimica. Belgrade: Plato, Beogradski krug, Borba 1992: 1 – 2. Konstantinović, Radomir. Dekartova smrt. Novi Sad: Agencija “Mir,” 1996. Konstantinović, Radomir. “Divno je i tužno je i strašno je.” Konstantinović’s address to Bora Ćosić. 1997. http://sh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radomir_Konstantinovi%C4 %87. Audio recording 1997 (30 November 2013). Konstantinović, Radomir. “Životinja moje ljudskosti” Bajtal et al. 137 – 138. Konstantinović, Radomir. Beket prijatelj. Belgrade: Otkrovenje, 2000. Konstantinović, Radomir. Na margini. Sarajevo: University Press, 2013. Laloš, Vesela. “Spomen-ploča u znak sećanja na Radomira Konstantinovića” Radio Slobodna Evropa, 27 March 2015, http://www.slobodnaevropa.org/content/spomen-ploa-u-znak-se canja-na-radomira-konstantinovica/26924389.html (28 June 2015) Martin, David. “On Portraiture: Some Distinctions.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20.1 (Autumn 1961): 61 – 72. Milovanović, Dušan. Interview. 24 March 2014. Nešković, Predrag. Interview. 3 April 2014. Nora, Pierre. “General Introduction: Between Memory and History.” Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Vol. 1. Ed. Pierre Nora. New York: Columbia UP, 1986: 1 – 2. Pavićević, Borka. “Crveni otok ili kontinuitet.” Bajtal et al. 41 – 42. Pavićević, Borka. “Srž istorije srpskog naroda.” Danas 29 – 30 October 2011. Perica, Vjekoslav, and Mitja Velikonja. Nebeska Jugoslavija. Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek, 2012. Perišić, Vuk. “Sljepilo ulica.” Peščanik. http://pescanik.net/2011/10/sljepilo-ulica/. 31 October 2011 (30 November 2013). Perović, Latinka. “Knjiga sa tajnom šifrom naše sudbine.” Special Supplement Danas 5 – 6 November 2011: 3. Prodanović, Mileta. Stariji i lepši Beograd. Belgrade: Stubovi kulture, 2002. Rigney, Ann. “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008: 345 – 353. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “A Plea for Intellectuals.” Between Existentialism and Marxism. New York: William Morrow, 1976: 228 – 285. Stošić, Teodora Jelena. Interview. 27 June 2015. Winko, Simone. “Literatur-Kanon als invisible hand-Phänomen.” Literarische Kanonbildung. Ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold. Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 2002: 9 – 24. Zorić, Nada. Filozof nad palankom. RTV Vojvodina. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= BaYM8x9Z_iY. Documentary film 26 October 2012 (13 December 2013).

Vlad Beronja

Recollecting an Alternative Modernity: Aleksandar Zograf’s Flea Market Archaeologies Recollecting the Yugoslav sixties Multitudes and Myriads (2005), a comic album by the Serbian cartoonist Aleksandar Zograf (the pseudonym of Saša Rakezić), features a short strip titled “The Sixties.” The strip skillfully condenses the now iconic decade in what was then Yugoslavia into a dense sequence of textual and visual boxes, transporting the reader for a brief moment into a past that is at once patently remote and eerily close at hand. In many ways, “The Sixties” is representative of Zograf’s unique approach to history, which foregoes major events in favor of marginalia, just as it perfectly reflects the personality of its creator, an eccentric collector of historical and pop-cultural flotsam that has ended up – by an incredible stroke of luck – at a local flea market instead of the trash heap. The major historical players, in particular, Josip Broz Tito and other notable politicians, are curiously absent from the strip, and the effects of their policies are presented indirectly – as an invisible background against which the exhibited cultural fragments become legible as historical players in their own right. Thus, in Zograf’s version of the sixties, we won’t find references to those events that for most academic historians defined Yugoslavia at the time, such as the establishment of diplomatic relations with the West, the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, and the outburst of student protests in Belgrade that marked the end of the globally tumultuous decade. Instead, we learn that “television had reached even the remotest regions” (Zograf 2005, 32) of the country and that in 1963 the illustrated edition of Politika, a major national newspaper, started advertising dolls that were repurposed as TV decorations. The new Yugoslav consumer and avid television watcher, Zograf tells us, could choose between a doll that is either “standing or sitting, in traditional or modern dress” (Zograf 2005, 32). Further on, Zograf quotes the same publication from 1968, now reporting on the influence of the nascent hippy subculture on high fashion. “Flowers,” the magazine reports, “have already covered dresses, and now they can even be found on bathing suits. Fashion designers say that, in the course of summer, flowers will blossom even in navels!” (Zograf 2005, 32). This information is immediately contrasted with an excerpt from a reader’s letter published by

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Bazar, a magazine specializing in “women’s issues” launched by Politika in 1964, in which an elderly woman from a Serbian province complains about her granddaughter’s desire for shorter dresses and, more disturbingly, pants (!). “These days,” the reader grudgingly notes, “the traditional peasant costume [narodnu nošnju] can only be seen in the theater” (Zograf 2005, 32). A similar debate between tradition and modernity takes place on the facing page of the strip, involving the popular youth magazine, Čik, and the military publication, Front (Fig. 1). If the contentious issue in the previous instance revolved around changing gender norms, here the topic shifts to sexuality. Next to a reproduction of a Čik cover page, featuring an iconic image of a young hippy surrounded by “psychedelic” Cyrillic typography, Zograf informs us that the Yugoslav youth in the sixties gained access to sexual education primarily through advice columns in Čik, which the conservative military establishment subsequently accused of spreading “amorality.” Although in this and other strips Zograf mainly refrains from explicit editorializing, his preference for the liberalizing forces in Yugoslav society becomes evident in his inclusion of certain textual fragments, such as the excerpt taken from a passionate letter defending Čik’s advice columns. “In my entire life, I never had the opportunity to talk about love, sex, etc.,” writes Nećmudin Imerije, a high school student from Gnjilane (Zograf 2005, 33). “Čik enabled me to expand my knowledge. Not only about love and sex, but also about movies, astronomy, and poetry” (Zograf 2005, 33). Further on, the cartoonist reveals his distaste for conservative moralizing much more explicitly when he reproaches Čik – previously featured as an agent of modernization – of harboring “paternalistic” attitudes towards “fashionable” [pomodne] young women who “move like Mick Jagger, shake their heads like Ringo Starr, imitate Antonioni’s grimaces, and dangle cigarettes from their mouths like Paul McCartney” (Zograf 2005, 33). The text is accompanied by a colored illustration of one such girl smoking a cigarette and sorting through records, presumably of Beatles and Rolling Stones, her cool and defiant gaze reaching across time to meet the reader’s in desire, identification, or both. Finally, the strip concludes with two panels that juxtapose high and low, urban and rural aspects of Yugoslav culture in the sixties, dichotomies and antagonisms that are in many ways still operative in the (self‐)definitions of contemporary Balkan societies (Fig. 1). The left panel shows a mustachioed man playing an accordion below a makeshift triumphal arch. According to the caption, these inventive and bizarre constructions raised by musicians in front of their houses with the money they earned from playing at weddings were part of the “‘folk’ subculture” (“narodnjačka” supkultura) (Zograf 2005, 33) that blossomed across Serbian villages in the sixties. The opposing panel features Zograf’s drawing of Leonid Šejka’s 1957 performance “Illusionistic Destruction

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Fig. 1. Page from “The Sixties,” Multitudes and Myriads (Zograf 2005, 33). Used with permission.

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of a Hand,” reproduced by the avant-garde magazine Rok in 1969. As Zograf informs us, “[t]he performance consisted of Šejka showing his hand” – covered with illusionistic designs, against a black background – “in the Belgrade Writer’s Club in front of one witness” (2005, 33). At first glance, these two historical fragments, one from a populist rural milieu and the other from an insular and rarified urban art scene, occupy the opposite ends of the cultural hierarchy of tastes. Through juxtaposition and montage, however, Zograf is able to place these artifacts in a dialogical relation, thereby bridging the great divide between elite and popular culture, urban and rural settings, avant-garde and kitsch. Indeed, both cultural expressions stem from the same impulse to bring art – or rather the aesthetic attitude – into the practices of everyday life. Both use unconventional materials and reframe them in a way that destabilizes traditional aesthetic categories in the viewer’s mind, anticipating the broader deconstructive impulse of postmodern culture. Here, moreover, the comic strip form, which has the distinctive capacity to assimilate, remediate, and rearrange different cultural citations within the unifying space of the comic book page, serves as a fitting mediator between high and mass modes, image and caption, the past and the present.¹

Flea markets and comics as sites of cultural memory Zograf’s “Sixties” is just one among many similar strips featured in his comic strip column that has been appearing since 2003 in the Serbian weekly magazine Vreme. Subsequently, a representative selection of his strips has been collected in two separate albums, Multitudes and Myriads [Tušta i tma, 2005], published in Zagreb by the Croatian publisher VBZ, and Second Hand World [Polovni svet, 2009], published in Belgrade by the Serbian press Službeni glasnik.² While the

 Hilary Chute, for example, has made this affinity between postmodernist critical interventions and the medium of comics explicit in her own pioneering work on comics. “The form of comics,” she contends, “is, broadly speaking, obviously relevant to postmodernism in that it is, unlike, say, the novel, itself an approximately twentieth-century form, and an inherently self-reflexive one that mixes high and mass modes” (Chute , ). Whether we perceive it as a critical attitude (Hutcheon) or as a broader cultural condition (Jameson), postmodernism indeed facilitated the new visibility of comics on the cultural landscape and concomitantly its circulation beyond narrowly commercial sites and across legitimizing institutions of culture such as universities and museums.  Zograf became popular with a series of comics collected under the title Regards from Serbia (), first published in the United States. The book was initially conceived as an English-lan-

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title of the first album suggests the eclecticism, bizarreness, and the sheer quantity of collector’s objects that Zograf displays in his comics, the second title describes their marginal position within contemporary Serbian society, both in terms of their economic and symbolic value. Both albums additionally evoke the topos of the flea market as a peripheral and anarchic but ultimately miraculous space in which cultural objects of seemingly minor significance are rescued from oblivion and placed back into wider cultural circulation. Zograf’s character appears here as an archaeologist of the flea market, someone who is willing to dig and sift through layers of “junk” in order to find a minor but illuminating monument of the time past.³ For example, the opening strip of Multitudes and Myriads casts the flea market both as a “junkyard” of mass culture, an unofficial repository of the collective traces of the past, and as a potential “goldmine” of historical insight and rediscovered aesthetic pleasure. In the flea market one encounters abandoned family photographs, tacky holiday postcards, old political leaflets and propaganda materials, fashion magazines and outmoded advertisements, dime-store novels from the 1930s and 50s, fin-de-siècle proto-comics, personal letters and amateur poems, even archaeological fragments of ancient civilizations. These are precisely the sort of detritus that cultural historians, such as Walter Benjamin and Jacob Burkhart, have viewed as involuntary memories of an era, authentic and seemingly unremarkable traces of the past “that can tell a counter-history to the one propagated by the rulers” (Assmann 2008, 99). Zograf’s strategy consists of exhibiting these found objects in graphic frames and narrative dioramas of the comic strip while ultimately leaving it up to the reader to illuminate the larger historical structures, meanings, and events in these discarded fragments of mass culture. He performs this type of historical recollection against the backdrop of present-day Serbian and other post-Yugoslav societies, in which the public history and collective memory have been enlisted in the service of violent nation-building projects,⁴ guage correspondence between Zograf and several authors from the American alternative comics scene, eventually developing into a full-fledged graphic diary depicting the daily life in Serbia during the turbulent s, from the internationally imposed sanctions to the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević following the US-led NATO bombing campaign.  Aleida Assman sees archaeology as a paradigmatic institution “that retrieves lost objects and defunct information from a distant past, forging an important return path from cultural forgetting to cultural memory” (, ).  As Ilana bet-El () has convincingly argued, the temporal structure of political memory in the Balkans draws its roots from the oral epic tradition. Similar to Walter Benjamin’s notion of Messianic time, this form of political remembrance tends to collapse the past and future into a coherent narrative unity that is then activated in the present, thereby “reconfigur[ing] any event, however long past or collective, into a personal memory” (bet-El , ). Politicians and in-

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a process that has pushed certain cultural values and historical artifacts to the edge of oblivion. In contrast to this form of narrowly political memory, which offers an authoritative, highly selective, and collectively binding version of the past, Zograf’s comic strips cannot be detached from their visual-textual medium of transmission on the one hand and highly individualized and flexible mode of reception on the other.⁵ I will analyze not only a selection of Zograf’s comic strips but also the collection as a whole, as a unique project that records, archives, and recollects the traces of Balkan modernity outside the constraining national(ist) frames of history and collective memory. Previously seen as a fringe product of mass culture, comics in recent years are increasingly being viewed as a sophisticated visualtextual form that has both anticipated and in many ways exemplified the central role of new media in shaping the cultural contours of (post)modernity, including the ways in which we represent and access the past.⁶ Arguing for a critical relevance of comics vis-à-vis complex, interactive, and self-reflective representations of history and memory, Hilary Chute sees the comics medium more broadly as a form that fundamentally relies on space to represent time, carving punctual moments out of the space of the page. Comics locates the reader in space and for this reason is able to

tellectual elites, therefore, can invoke a distant historical event, such as the Battle of Kosovo or the Second World War, in the present as if no time had actually passed, enflaming old enmities and reasserting the historical continuity of national identity across an enormous temporal divide. While this form of political memory is certainly not unique to the Balkans, it is the one that was activated before the violent breakup of Yugoslavia and has subsequently remained – more or less unquestioned – as a symbolically available model of national unification, especially in times of social instability and frequent economic crises.  Importantly, Aleida Assmann distinguishes between political and cultural memory in terms of their media of transmission and mode of reception: “Whereas political memory achieves stability by means of radical restriction of content, high symbolic density, collective rituals, and the normative obligation [to remember], cultural memory cannot be separated from its diverse expression in texts, images, and three-dimensional objects. Both rely on symbolic media – either in ‘forms that secure longevity,’ through techniques of storage such as text and image, or in ‘forms that secure repetition,’ through performative media such as rituals […]. While in the case of political memory the modes of reception are primarily collective, reception in the context of cultural memory is an individual act” (, , my translation).  Jared Gardner emphasizes how comics was from its very beginnings involved in what he calls a “transmedia conversation” () between daily newspapers, cinema, and advertising that together comprised the new, highly immersive, and fragmentary language of modernity, suitable for mass reception and consumption. Indeed, the popularity of comics, its association with lowbrow and escapist entertainment, has for a long time obscured both their cultural location as a new, primarily visual medium of storytelling, as well as their critical potential as a form that is highly conscious of its own origins in twentieth-century mass modernity.

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spatialize memory. The cartoonist Chris Ware suggests that comics itself is “a possible metaphor for memory and recollection.” The form is built on an ongoing counterpoint of presence – in frames or panels – and absence, the white space between frames where a reader projects causality and that is called a gutter. (2011, 108)

Precisely because of the architectonic qualities of the comic book page and its linking of text and image, comics shares certain structural features with other more established media of memory, such as museums and dioramas, as well as with newer digital and web-based platforms for archiving the past. Moreover, given the form’s maturity and the currently widespread acceptance of comics by the cultural mainstream, contemporary cartoonists are becoming increasingly self-reflective and retrospective, mining the twentieth-century for aesthetic and narrative precursors, while tracing the history of the comics form itself and situating it alongside other products of mass modernity. Jared Gardner has termed this retrospective and postmodern tendency an “archival turn in the contemporary graphic narratives” (2006, 788), arguing further that “the comic form is ideally suited to carry on the vital work [Walter] Benjamin called for generations earlier: making the present aware of its own ‘archive,’ the past that is always in the process of becoming” (2006, 803). Whereas Gardner and Chute are primarily interested in the way acclaimed American cartoonists – such as Chris Ware, Ben Katchor, Art Spiegelman, and Alison Bechdel – archive and interrogate as well as intervene in public history and memory in the contemporary United States, my focus is on the peripheries of both modernity and of the comics tradition in Zograf’s two albums. Namely, the Balkan experience of modern history exhibited in Zograf’s comics is more visibly marked by periodic wars and attendant regime changes that have frequently promoted active forms of cultural forgetting, such as the destruction of monuments and cultural artifacts tainted by recently ousted power structures and ideologies. Most recently, the nationalist regimes that came to power during the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s activated such processes of cultural forgetting by actively trashing and destroying artifacts and historical structures that were construed as a threat to “pure” national cultures and traditions, replicating the nineteenth-century strategies of European nation-building. Despite the Western European and very modern origins of Balkan nationalisms, the region has also been imbued with negative associations of atavistic violence and images of never-ending ethnic feuds, particularly in the twentieth century (Todorova 1997). This colonial discourse, frequently internalized by the Balkan people themselves, has both overlooked centuries-long cohabitation and mixing of different ethnicities in the region and denied the Balkans a claim to its own modernity, situating it in a primordial anthropological past. However, with

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their liminal and peripheral position within the Western geographical imagination and a long history of colonialism followed by the twentieth-century experiments in hybrid political forms, the Balkans have also produced their own unique albeit highly discontinuous and frequently traumatic modernity. This modernity becomes most discernable not so much in the monumental historical events as in the flux of everyday life, including the changes in the objects people consume and the environments they inhabit. By exhibiting waste products of mass culture and contemporary cityscapes altered by time and history, Zograf tries to make this modernity – its articulations and ambiguities, its myths and cultural forms – visible and legible to the reader of his comics. Therefore, the focus on the cultural and quotidian articulations of Balkan modernity can be situated within a wider perspective of alternative modernities, which “holds that modernity always unfolds within a specific cultural and civilizational context and that different starting points for the transition to modernity lead to different outcomes” (Goankar 1999, 15). While I am aware that modernity remains a widely contested term, I use it here to designate not so much a concrete period or a set of emergent social structures as a certain sensibility, an aesthetic and contemplative attitude inflected by the consciousness of the present moment as historical, mutable, and transient. Following Walter Benjamin, Dilip Parameshwar Goankar outlines this modern sensibility in terms of the dialectic between the old and the new, tradition and innovation, which finds its ultimate expression in fashion: “one cannot find the modern by stepping outside the stream of the stylish and the fashionable. It is not an atemporal transcendent entity. To find ‘the eternal and the immutable’ half of the modern, one must go by the way of the fashionable. But fashion is not innocent of history; it continually scavenges the past for props, masks, and costumes” (Goankar 1999, 7). As I already indicated, Zograf’s interest in fashion as an expression of a particular epoch – its aspirations, tensions, and nascent forms of life – is particularly visible in “The Sixties” strip, where new clothes, postures, and attitudes were a telling sign of changing sexual and gender norms. It can, however, also be found in other strips in the collection, such as “Fashion: 1938 [Moda 1938],” in which Zograf quotes from magazines from the interwar period that covered the influence of war on women’s fashion and forms of emancipation: “in epaulets, widened shoulders, and buttons lined up in two rows as on overcoats, and especially in unusual hats in the shape of helmets, we see the influence of militarism on fashion” (Zograf 2005, 38). Zograf, in other words, shows us not only how larger historical forces left their stamp on forms of everyday life but also how Balkan modernity was negotiated and articulated through “creative adaptation” (Goankar 1999, 16) of wider global trends. As a form of creative adaptation, fashion and other forms of cultural production and

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consumption become “a site where people ‘make’ themselves modern, as opposed to being ‘made’ modern by alien and impersonal forces, and where they give themselves an identity and a destiny” (Goankar 1999, 16). Finally, Second Hand World and Multitudes and Myriads exist in the interstices between a narrative sequence and a dispersed collection, which makes it particularly difficult to read as a coherent totality. On the one hand, each comic strip, appearing initially in a newspaper as an isolated “column,” exists independently in the form of an enclosed fragment, a micro-narrative inspired by a certain object, place, or a person. On the other hand, taken together as an ongoing project, they constitute a heterogeneous and loosely held universe that in its relaxed structure imitates the disordered and potentially unbounded space of the flea market, a warehouse, or an amateur collection. Indeed, Thierry Groensteen situates the comic form itself between a narrative and a collection in which panels communicate both sequentially, as a story, and at a distance by forming non-narrative series (Groensteen 2007, 147). This formal complexity, located between the linearity of the narrative and palimpsestic and irruptive meanings that compliment, impede or undermine it, makes comics especially suitable for innovative representations of history, memory, and temporality, which reiterate and exceed, in a very different medium, the literary experiments of high modernism. Converted into a series of spaces, historical time in comics is thus revealed as the co-presence of the past, present, and future, which is simultaneously strung in a progressive narrative sequence and constellated across multiple temporal registers. The difficulty and pleasure of reading Zograf’s two albums consists then in finding topical series, narrative patterns, and visual correspondences that cross individual strips without sacrificing the open-ended character of the collection, its ultimate disavowal of unity in favor of ever new “myriads and multitudes.” I acknowledge that such an approach carries the danger of endless permutations of meaning or conversion of the semiotic noise of the flea market into a paranoid and completely legible totality. However, Zograf obsessively returns to certain motifs, images, and objects more than once, providing a sufficient basis for a type of distant reading that moves across the panoptical space of the collection. I am especially interested in those structures of historical and collective experience, fossilized by various media of cultural memory such as texts, three-dimensional objects, and images, which Zograf sees as representative of but not necessarily limited to the Balkan modernity. My reading, therefore, will be organized around a provisional and limited series of topical repetitions – namely, urban palimpsests and past utopian visions – within Zograf’s expanding bank of visual narratives.

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Balkan palimpsests One of the most prevailing metaphors for cultural memory today is that of a palimpsest, a parchment on which the original text has been partially erased or modified by subsequent rewritings, creating an effect of a layered coexistence of different moments of time within the same space. While this metaphor has its origin in writing, it has been increasingly used to describe the visual configurations of cityscapes that preserve the traces of different historical periods and cultural memories embedded in them within our collective imagination (Huyssen 2003, 7). As a visual-textual medium that converts time into a series of spatial fragments, comics seems especially well suited for representations of cityscapes, especially if we consider its “historical origin in the mass culture of urban modernity” (Ahrens and Meteling 2010, 14). Zograf’s search for traces of the past and narratives that can potentially be reconstructed from them also leads him to different cities, where he takes on the role of the Benjaminan flâneur – someone who views the city as a bank of collectively created images and reads it as a text written and re-written by different collectives and political regimes. Balkan towns and cities in particular occupy a privileged space in the two collections not only because they are more familiar to the author but also because of their historical and aesthetic specificities: namely, the centuries-long coexistence of different ethnic and religious collectives combined with violent historical ruptures and ideological shifts in the short twentieth century, all of which have left their unique mark on the contemporary urban landscape. In this respect, one of the most representative comics in The Second Hand World is “Postcard from Pančevo [Dopisnica iz Pančeva],” which tells the turbulent history of the author’s hometown from the earliest Neolithic settlement to the present in a highly condensed form of a comic book postcard. The title panel (Fig. 2) features a view of Pančevo depicting a nineteenth-century town center in the Habsburg historicist style, somewhat iconic of certain Balkan and Central European provinces. However, the iconic simplicity of this image is immediately undercut by fragments of other postcards on the left-hand side of the same panel. By evoking the figure of mise en abîme, this detail flaunts the comic strip’s reliance on multiple nesting frames that radically destabilize representation. In this way, Zograf also establishes a structural analogy between comics and another mass cultural form: the postcard. The Pančevo strip integrates the postcard into its form by unrolling its superficial visual synchrony into a denser diachronic narrative while simultaneously pointing to the superior – selfreflective and meta-textual – capacities of the comic book medium. We could additionally read the miniature decorative boxes on the side of this panel as allud-

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ing to the filmstrip. The history of cinema is further echoed in the next to last panel in the comic, where Zograf draws a sepia tinted scene from Živojin Pavlović’s When I am Dead and Gone [Kad budem mrtav i beo] (1967), an overlooked masterpiece of the Serbian Black Wave cinema that was shot on location in Pančevo. The narrative frames of the comic thus also re-mediates and assimilates fragments of media that have fallen into oblivion, making it a palimpsestic depository of “neglected, trashed, and abandoned media technologies” (Erll 2011, 140).

Fig. 2. Detail from “Postcard from Pančevo,” Second Hand World (Zograf 2009, 180). Used with permission.

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The next panel in the comic immediately plunges into the prehistory of Pančevo, which was settled by the Neolithic Starčevo culture; here, we see the narrator imagining a prehistoric human making a “clay idol in the form of a female figure” and pondering whether “their ghosts still wander around [Pančevo]” (Zograf 2009, 180). As in many other comics, the past is here focalized through Zograf’s narration and visually foregrounded as an imaginative, incomplete, and subjectively inflected reconstruction that is possible precisely through contact with material objects and media of the past that are preserved in the present; take, for example, the Neolithic clay idol in the Pančevo comic or, in a similar fashion, the archaeological fragment in an earlier comic about Gamzigrad, by means of which Zograf imagines a “palacemausoleum” of the late Roman emperor Galerius who was born in what is presentday Serbia (Fig. 3). In this latter strip, Zograf additionally establishes a suggestive historical connection between Galerius and Tito because both of them rose to power from lowly and peasant origins, and with their respective deaths, the Roman Empire and Yugoslavia quickly disintegrated. As in Walter Benjamin’s dialectical images, here modernity cites antiquity, whereby the present landscape is estranged and imagined as a future historical ruin (Benjamin 1999, esp. 330 – 338; Buck-Morss 1989, esp. 161– 185). By highlighting these porous temporal boundaries, the present in Zograf’s comics is revealed as “spectral” and “non-contemporaneous with itself” – haunted by the ghosts and contaminated by the traces of the past and future. This comingling of different historical moments in the palimpsest, according to Dillon, “does not elide temporality but evidences the spectrality of any ‘present’ moment which always already contains within it ‘past,’ ‘present,’ and ‘future’ moments” (2007, 37). It is also by evoking the long shadows of the past extending into the present that Zograf bridges the prehistoric period with the next panel in the Pančevo

Fig. 3. Detail from “Gamzigrad,” Multitudes and Myriads (Zograf 2005, 10). Used with permission.

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comic, which condenses several centuries of the town’s modern history into a short narrative fragment: Many shadows of the past hover above this town: in the course of several centuries, Pančevo experienced the succession of Hungarian, Ottoman, and Austrian rule until it became a part of Serbia in 1918. It only developed into a modern city when the two towns, the Serbian and the German, were unified in the eighteenth century. At that time, it seemed that these two culturally and religiously distant entities were heading towards a peaceful coexistence. (Zograf 2009, 180)

The spectral nature of the present seems to intensify as we move towards the traumatic events in twentieth century, when this otherwise peaceful historical course will be disrupted, especially during the Second World War when Pančevo was under the Nazi occupation. Therefore, the next page (Fig. 4) is much more somber, depicting the resisters to the occupation, “made up mostly of Serbs” (Zograf 2009, 181), hanging from a tree. The strip moves in chronological order towards the postwar period, showing a monument that the Yugoslav government built in the 1980s to honor the victims of fascism, “thousands of people (the exact number was never confirmed), including almost the entire Jewish population” (Zograf 2009, 181). The monument is portrayed in its present-day state, merged into a natural setting like a historical ruin and “somewhat forgotten […] as the only reminder of all this horror […]” (Zograf 2009, 181). While this monument seems abandoned to nature in the present political climate, inhospitable to antifascism, the Orthodox monastery from the fifteenth century was exposed to more direct forms of violence. As Zograf tells and then shows us, the communist government built a refinery around it, an unsightly and polluting industrial complex that subsequently became a frequent target during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. Thus, at first glance, Balkan towns flaunt their hybridity and heterogeneity, the utopian simultaneity of different cultural and ideological influences, yet “an attempt at unravelling the palimpsest,” which Zograf’s comics performs, also “reveals its violent and disruptive impulses” (“Palimpsest”). Acting as a medium in the double sense of the word,⁷ Zograf’s comics call up the ghosts of the dead, only to contain and enclose them in visual and narrative

 Evoking Stephen Greenblatt, Aleida Assmann points to this double meaning of “medium,” suggesting that the modern “scientific” study of the past bears traces of necromancy. Greenblatt, in Assman’s words, “reminds us of something all too easily forgotten by salaried middle-class literature professors: that we are all shamans at heart, recreating a continuous conversation with ancestral voices and spirits of the past. We not only work with media in the technical sense, literary texts and theatrical performances, for instance, but we also are media in the oc-

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Fig. 4. Detail from “Postcard from Pančevo,” Second Hand World (Zograf 2009, 181). Used with permission.

boxes, thus depriving them of the power to engulf the present with overwhelmingly traumatic pathos. In this way, the violence that underwrites the palimpsest is temporarily suspended or at least pacified by the ordering, preserving, and inclusive effects of the medium. Indeed, rather than focusing solely on the violence done to the Serbian collective, Zograf also shows how the entire German civilian was expelled from Pančevo during the vengeful military action in 1944, when the new communist government came to power: “While those who committed crimes managed to flee with the Nazi troops, the ordinary people

cult sense of establishing contact with a transcendent world for a collective benefit” (, , original emphasis).

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were those who paid the price” (Zograf 2009, 181). It is only by reading these lines that we come to understand retrospectively the meaning of the panel that closes the previous page, where Zograf imagines the visit of the Buffalo Bill traveling circus in early twentieth-century Pančevo attended by both Serbs and Germans. Besides punctuating the narrative with a bizarre almost Kafkaesque moment in the town’s history, this scene also evokes a utopian moment of playful and lighthearted coexistence that stands in sharp contrast to the images of war, mass murder, and destruction on the opposing page. A similar flash of hope amidst enmity and devastation is also alluded to in Zograf’s comic about Sarajevo, forming a legible constellation across the collection as a whole. Essayistic in its structure, this comic registers the effects of the recent war on the city while considering the future of Bosnia as a multinational community torn by interethnic strife. The comic thus closes with the narrator ruminating at the mouth of Bosnia River (Fig. 5), which “originates from three visible streams, just as three nations live in Bosnia,” an analogy that for the narrator evokes “the vestiges of a Slavic belief in the mystical connection with natural forces” (2005, 93). By citing a pagan belief that was subsequently overwritten by three different religious traditions, Zograf points to the underlying unity of Bosnian culture. In this utopian image, nature seems to unite what history has torn apart. This unity is further highlighted in the opposing and last panel in the comic, where Zograf cites a telling legend from national folklore, “recorded by K[osta] Hörman[n] at the end of the nineteenth century” (Zograf 2005, 93), in which two national heroes – Alija Đerzelez and Prince Marko – belonging respectively to the Bosniak and Serbian epic traditions become sworn brothers after years of mutual enmity: And it was told how Prince Marko became a blood brother [pobratimio] with Alija Đjerzelez, how they both dreamt the same dream and set out to look for one another around the world. They encountered each other in some field and from bitter enemies became sworn blood brothers [pobratimili]. This was recorded in songs that were sung even in our day. (Zograf 2005, 93)

Zograf recuperates this fragment from the Bosnian oral tradition by offering a wishimage of hope and reconciliation, even as the legend is framed precisely as a dream. In this way a marginalized element in the canon of epic poetry, which has been utilized to entrench cultural divisions in Bosnia (Žanić 2007; Husanović 2009),⁸ is again illuminated and mobilized in the present as a powerful counter-memory.

 As Husanović points out: “The folkloric matrix has a deeply depoliticizing effect – it possesses an atemporal structure of myth and a universal Truth. […] [V]arious discourses inside higher institutionalized fields of political representation in the former Yugoslavia and its successor states

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Fig. 5. Detail from “Sarajevo,” Multitudes and Myriads (Zograf 2005, 93). Used with permission.

Futures past While the past in Zograf’s comics often wears a farcical mask of comedy, there are also signs of genuine hope appearing throughout the collection, which despite (or precisely because of) their childlike naiveté can still capture our attention and hold us in thrall. These utopian images are especially visible in comics that re-mediate anonymous and largely forgotten science fiction novels and pamphlets – which Zograf found at a flea market or rescued from some attic – published in Serbia and Yugoslavia during the twentieth century. Judging by the selection offered in the two collections, these are hardly masterpieces of the genre. Their characters are flat, their plots simplistic, driven almost exclusively by didactic if not crudely ideological concerns. One such example is “Travel Notes from the Year 2349 [Putničke beleške iz 2349. godine],” Zograf’s comic strip adaptation of the eponymous science fiction novel written by a high school teacher from Niš in 1906, when, as Zograf tells us, “more people wore traditional exemplify the authentic structure of the folkloric matrix – the fundamental binary opposition ‘We-Good’ – ‘They-Evil,’ which is typical for epic poetry” (,  my translation).

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peasant costumes than they did modern suits” (2009, 66). The novel tells of a merchant who fell into a centuries-long coma when hit by lighting only to be woken up by a new superior race of humans (Serbs) in the year 2349. The future that the novel projects is founded on many turn-of-the-century preconceptions about humanistic progress based on the unlimited advancement of science and technology as well as, more disturbingly, on racial theories that underpinned modern nationalism and ethnocentrism at the time. In this respect, Zograf acknowledges that “it is collective narcissism that is most readily identified in the various xenophobic or racist groups practices, all of which have their Utopian impulse” (Jameson 2005, 8). (From today’s perspective, the seriousness and the prophetic tone of the aforementioned novel are somewhat undermined by the surnames that the author gives to the future humans: Teslić, Keplerović, Galilejević, Sinusović, Kosinović.) However, precisely because of this overly naive almost childlike simplicity, this and others similar artifacts that appear in Zograf’s collections exhibit the “utopian impulse” that Ernst Bloch identified as “governing everything future-oriented in life; and encompassing everything from games to patent medicines, from myths to mass entertainment, from iconography to technology, from architecture to eros, from tourism to jokes and the unconscious” (Jameson 2005, 2). All of these elements are present in Zograf’s comics as well, especially in the tackiest items that truly border on being trash – such as socialist New Years’ postcards and faux “ecological” commodities from airplane catalogues that promise to reconcile man with nature. Despite the frequent occurrence of wars, disasters, and violence that litter the collection, there is an underlying optimism, tinged with non-corrosive irony, which is legible not only in the past artifacts but which also extends into the future. In a different post-utopian temporality, these narratives and “afterimages” are offered anew to the imagination when the social context in which they originally appeared has been depleted. As historical fossils they contain “dialectical images” of history, in which the mass utopia of both the socialist East and the capitalist West alternates between a “dreamworld” and a “catastrophe” (Buck-Morss 2000). Such is the image of a Yugoslav lieutenant from a science-fiction novella published in the mid-1960s (Fig. 6), longingly looking at the moon while saying to himself: “It is so close that one can almost grasp it” (Zograf 2005, 18). Behind him Zograf depicts an unreal cityscape of the future, characterized by the verticality of skyscrapers. In many ways, these images enforce the shared utopian compulsions of both the capitalist West and the socialist East founded on the transcendence of time, space, and corporeality through technological prowess (Jameson 2005, 5 – 7), thereby deconstructing the binary logic that structured the Cold War and enforced a rigid division between the two political systems.

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Fig. 6. Detail from “Future from the Past,” Multitudes and Myriads (Zograf 2005, 18). Used with permission.

Zograf does not, therefore, uncritically embrace every manifestation of the Utopian. Rather, “the principle of hope,” to use Ernst Bloch’s term, is strategically deployed and frequently tempered by showing how the utopian impulse in Yugoslav socialism often degenerated into spectacle of the collective body orchestrated by a charismatic and authoritarian personality in strips such as “Encounters with Tito [Susreti s Titom]” (2009, 184– 185) and “Children Write About Tito [Deca pišu o Titu] (2009, 96 – 97). Especially in the latter strip Zograf presents us with a striking image of such a spectacle organized on the occasion of Tito’s birthday in 1973, where socialist iconography was combined with the images from American popular culture, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. The comic illustrate letters and greetings that children wrote to Tito for his birthday published in a popular children’s magazine Tik-Tak. A particularly suggestive image is of a child kneeling before Tito’s portrait in the supplicating position (Fig. 7) with a quote from one of the letters that reads: “Every day when I enter the classroom I see Tito’s picture. And I have the desire to tell him: ‘I love you Comrade Tito! I love you like I love my father and mother, like I love a first spring flower’” (Zograf 2009, 96). The next few panels cite another letter in which we see how this patriarchal authority is internalized and transformed into a mechanism of discipline, throwing a particularly ominous shadow over the expression “self-management socialism”. Here, Zograf wants to decouple the utopian impulse from sovereign power which speaks for the collective in order to distinguish between the ideological appropriations of “wish images”

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by the state and those genuine moments of revolt in which the present moment is pregnant, as it were, with a new radically different future. These moments, however, are few and far in between. For Zograf, these instances of revolutionary hope are found in youth culture, and especially in those artistic experiments and cultural forms that disrupt the dominant mechanisms of disciplinary society, such as punk music, avant-garde art, and underground “comix.”⁹

Reframing history In his previous album, Regards from Serbia, Zograf’s strategy involved shifting the focus from sensationalized media coverage of the war in Yugoslavia to the micronarratives of resistance performed by ordinary individuals against authoritarian politics and catastrophic historical events in which they were unwillingly caught. The scenes from Regards are somber and full of dark humor, drawn with black ink on whatever scraps of paper Zograf could find during the time of internationally imposed sanctions in Serbia. They testify to a long-lasting political crisis and present us with a picture of a manipulated, fragmented, and traumatized collective that has tended to transform its own complex history into a simplistic myth. In Multitudes and Myriads and Second Hand World, Zograf digs even deeper into the history of this collective, recovering those minor and overlooked monuments of popular culture that throw a more democratic and less dogmatic light onto the past. The past offered to us in these comic strips is not presented as a single, authoritative narrative, but as a series of fragments, scribbles, and citations that resonate in the present as so many echoes of the past. Both in terms of the hybrid and immersive medium employed to bring the past into the present as well as in the shift of perspective from macro to micro-history, Zograf’s comics reflect broader trends in postmodern historiography. Indeed, if a significant part of the vast archive of Balkan modernity has ended up on the flea market or the trash heap, through either neglect or the purposeful destruction of unwanted history, it becomes the task of postmodern historiography to recover, classify, and make sense of those traces of the recent past before they disappear altogether. In the absence of more inclusive exhibition halls, the humble paper architecture of Zograf’s comic seems as good a place as any to house these marginalized treasures.

 “Comix,” refers to the small-press and underground publications that started in the s and s and often featured subversive and tabooed content, as opposed to more mainstream commercial comics.

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Fig. 7. Detail from “Children Write to Tito,” Second Hand World (Zograf 2009, 97). Used with permission.

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References Ahrens, Jörn, and Arno Meteling. “Introduction.” Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture, and Sequence. New York: Continuum, 2010. 1 – 19. Asman, Alaida (Assmann, Aleida). Duga senka prošlosti [Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit]. Serbian Trans. Drinka Gojković. Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek, 2011. Assmann, Aleida. “Canon and Archive.” Media and Cultural Memory. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. 97 – 109. Assmann, Aleida. “Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory.” Representations 56 (2008): 123 – 134. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 1999. Bet-El, Ilana R. “Unimagined Communities: The Power of Memory and the Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia.” Memory and Power in Post-War Europe. Ed. Jan-Werner Müller. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2002. 206 – 222. Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2000. Chute, Hillary. “Comics Form and Narrating Lives.” Profession (2011): 107 – 117. Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Chute, Hillary. and Marianne DeKoven. 2006. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 787 – 806. Dillon, Sarah. The Palimpsest. Literature, Criticism, Theory. London and New York: Continuum, 2007. Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford UP, 2012. Gardner, Jared. “Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 787 – 806. Goankar, Dilip Parameshwar. “On Alternative Modernities.” Public Culture 11.1 (1999): 1 – 18. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Jackson, MI: UP of Mississippi, 2007. Husanović, Jasmina. “Društveni imaginarij i politika metaforizacije kroz BiH-a optike: dominantne kulturne/političke matrice, diskursi i prakse.” Reč 78.24 (2009): 67 – 104. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. “Palimpsest.” http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/palimpsest/ (1 July 2014). Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford, UK, Oxford UP, 1997. Zograf, Aleksandar. Tušta i tma. Belgrade: VBZ, 2005. Zograf, Aleksandar. Polovni svet. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2009. Zograf, Aleksandar. Regards from Serbia. Top Shelf Productions, 2007. Žanić, Ivo. Flag on the Mountain: A Political Anthropology of War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1990 – 1995. London: Saqi, 2007.

Damir Arsenijević, Jasmina Husanović, and Sari Wastell

A Public Language of Grief: Art, Poetry, and Transitional Justice in Post-Conflict Bosnia* Introduction Amongst the myriad of mechanisms that comprise transitional justice practices, art, poetry, and performance seem to be pushed into the background. In the aftermath of mass atrocity, criminal prosecutions, truth and reconciliation commissions, and reparations all seem more exigent components in the effort to create disparate forms of accountability that might underwrite peaceful and just futures. The top-down and legally over-determined nature of transitional justice has long been a point of criticism (McEvoy 2007, 2008). Even memorialization often takes a backseat in processes of transitional justices, and when memorials are eventually completed, they take the shape of monuments and plaques, statues, and buildings. Somehow, we want our memorials to be both durable and timeless even as they reference specific – and passing – moments of history. The more ephemeral nature of much cultural production seems paltry by comparison, gestures simply not grand enough in the face of the abject violence that preceded them. In a recent conference hosted by the ICMP (International Committee for Missing Persons), the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme/Sarajevo), the Embassy of Switzerland in Bosnia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Ministry of Justice, two invited speakers, Louis Bickford and Gabriella Citroni, offered a plethora of examples of innovative and fluid forms of memorials (Bickford 2010; Citroni 2012). Their message was clear. Memorials must be about the living as much as the dead. They must be more about the process of civic engagement, debate, and memory rather than the product of an immutable version of history. For a variety of reasons, this understanding of memorials might be particularly true in the states of the former Yugoslavia. One need not rehearse the longstanding plaint against “ethnic” divisions in Bosnia and how these divisions, whether the cause or the product of the Yugoslav wars, left a country with three sets of politics, three versions of history, and *

Damir Arsenijević wishes to express his gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust, whose support for the project Love after Genocide made possible the research and the publication of this paper.

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three conflicting visions for the country’s future.¹ In such a climate, one can imagine that there might be fewer platforms available for a unified civil society and for social movements that not only bridge divided communities but also offer a regional purview.² The Dayton Peace Accord not only reified Bosnia’s multiethnic character but also ensured that that reification would operate across almost every institutional form of social interaction. All of this leads to an inevitable paradox. In a post-conflict situation where the need for supra-ethnic communal associations and dialogue is paramount, it is difficult to find social spaces in which such interactions could fruitfully be pursued. Paula Pickering notes that even NGO activities, which are mid-level points of supra-ethnic interaction, fail to link ordinary people except in a hierarchical fashion that discourages repeated interactions (2007, 124). The intransigent role of ethnicity (and the presumably volatile relations between different ethnic communities) leads to a further problem. In the name of political correctness and for fear of instigating further ethnic violence, there is an injunction not to say many things. Human rights and the dangers of hate speech are often invoked by the international community to silence debates that might threaten to unleash the affective, ethnic ties they have tried so hard to contain. As a result, civil society in Bosnia remains fractured, controlled, and worryingly stagnant. Therefore, if grass roots or bottom-up movements are inevitably over-determined by a cross-institutional injunction to cooperate only amongst co-ethnics, where is one to go in order to move beyond this impasse? In this paper, the authors want to argue for the central role of cultural production – of art, literature, poetry, and performance – in the realization of a truly emancipatory politics for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Working through two disparate case studies, we aim to show both the potential of as well as the great challenges faced by artistic expression as a mode of peace-building in Bosnia. We contend that there exists a sort of bureaucratic complicity between the international community and the ethnically-differentiated Bosnian state that allows for a wholly unproductive management of memory and affect, and that this collusion confounds efforts towards establishing a supra-ethnic civil society capable of debating its own future. Forever focused on accountability for past events,

 The authors take the view that both the cause and product renderings are unsatisfactory. Of course, the so-called ethnic differences existed prior to the war. Although these differences may not have constituted divisions, they were also not a sui generis invention. However, new meanings clearly became attached to such differences through political mobilization as well as people’s own experiences of conflict (see Bougarel et al. ). Jansen () offers a compelling account of the “ethnic numbers” game.  See Pickering () for the best analysis of this accepted state of affairs.

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Bosnians do not at present have the means to demand accountability from both the international community and their own current leaders. What Bosnia sorely needs, we propose, is a shared and share-able “public language of grief” (Arsenijević 2011b). We refer here to a particular sort of affect that engages with the losses and remnants of the catastrophe besetting forms of sociality and politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its regional as well as global contexts. Our focus is on such engagements and interventions in knowledge and cultural production as a way to generate hopeful solidarities and communalities and to host an emergent subject of the politics of hope, a subject capable of materializing new possibilities of social and political transformation towards equality.

The new paradigm of memorialization and its relationship to cultural production Speaking about these new possibilities in the politics of memorialization, at the above-mentioned conference, the plenary speaker, Bickford, contrasted the classic model of memorialization with what he referred to as the “new paradigm.” Within the classical model, in the aftermath of the conflict and during the nation building that accompanies it, the focus is placed on the actors involved in the war. Heroes and the fallen are commemorated; the glory of the nation is magnified; and common folk are assimilated into the greater body politic. In this rendering, the war is the hinge between a before and an after moment; in other words, the war is imagined as the moment of transition. The new paradigm, by contrast, centers on confronting the past, the moment of conflict, in order to build a better future. The present is the moment of linkage, of transition, and this moment demands that all members of a society, not simply the political elite who benefited from the war, engage with the traumatic memory. It is a moment of civic dialogue, of shared efforts at reconciliation, of the recognition of what everyone has suffered through. As Bickford noted, in this new narrative, “all victims are equal as victims” [emphasis added] (Bickford 2010). Of course, this new paradigm of memorialization is a direct product of the ascendency of transitional justice and its victim-centric disposition. It might also be noted that in this paradigm shift in memorialization, one can most clearly see the tacit acceptance of New War Theory in the appeal to a new approach towards post-conflict peace-building (Duffield 2001; Kaldor 2006). However, the point that we should underscore here is the extent to which the new paradigm is intrinsically about shared engagement. It is also about the contingency that such

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an engagement must necessarily entertain. Histories are not yet fixed and taken for granted and perpetrators not irrevocably differentiated from victims. In the Bosnian example, where there is little agreement on whether there was one war or a plurality of wars and where international intervention ended the conflict in a stalemate, the ground seems to be overly ripe for an internationally-driven new paradigm approach. However, the very ambiguity created by the stalemate is also the greatest source of anxiety about the country’s future. This anxiety paralyzes any attempts at a different memorialization in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. What dominates in such a context is a consistent recourse to look for a definitive history of the war in the transcripts and judgments of legal proceedings.³ And while one might agree that certain incendiary topics, such as labeling an event as genocide, are best adjudicated in legal forums, this does not mean that those determinations should not be open to critical commentary. Furthermore, the law should not maintain an exclusive ownership over language it has itself expropriated, giving once familiar terms new and unrecognizable meanings. Of course, both accusations of genocide and the denial of genocide provoke strong reactions, and that is precisely why the law should serve as a benchmark, a reference point to orient debate. However, it is necessary to recognize both the potential and the limits of law as an arbiter of history and memory in post-conflict societies. In an article discussing the unique characteristics spawned by the phenomenon of collective violence being (legally) managed in terms of individual punishment, Mark Drumbl (2005, 593) cites a lecture given by Justice Albie Sachs at the Columbia University School of Law. In it, Sachs posited a four One might cite the RECOM initiative, a trans-regional coalition that aims to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a significant departure. In its literature, it explains that “The RECOM Initiative does not offer an alternative to war crimes trials conducted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) or by local judiciaries in the Balkans, but it addresses the limitations of a perpetrator-oriented approach to the truth about a conflict-ridden past. The trials have failed to bring about a public debate about war crimes both inside the countries and between the countries in the region. The trials have failed to be perceived as a legitimate mechanism for establishing the full truth about all crimes that happened in the past” (). However, should the initiative prove successful after the current signature-collecting phase, their petition will “be submitted to all respective parliaments in the region, together with a draft Statute of RECOM in order to petition all states in the region to jointly undertake the task of establishing the regional commission” (RECOM ). This suggests that no matter how laudable an initiative, we will still be looking at a highly regulated and top-down endeavor. Furthermore, RECOM is facing difficulties in Bosnia because it failed to gain adequate support from the local civil society movement. Civil society in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been further fragmented by a multitude of vertical cooperation gestures (involving region and Europe) and very few horizontal ones that would connect different parts of Bosnia.

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part typology of truths. Law, he suggested, dealt with “microscopic” and “logical” truths but had little concern for “experiential” and “dialogic” truths. Ultimately, what initially looks like a recuperation of memory through the establishment of facts in a courtroom setting might in actuality serve as “a retraumatizing process of microscopic dissection” for both participants in legal proceedings, and equally importantly, for the stakeholders outside the courtroom with their faces pressed up to the glass of law’s promise of historical truth, still seeing neither a reflection of their experiences nor a clear sign as to how these truths promise a different future (Drumbl 2005, 594). Likewise, Shoshana Felman so cogently asserted: “law’s story focuses on ascertaining the totality of facts and events. Art’s story focuses on what is different from, and more than, that totality” (2002, 278). With the caveat that law’s facts should not be understood as absolute truths but as legal truths, the authors would agree entirely. The point underscores the unique remit of art and, perhaps, of the appropriate division of intent between art and law.⁴ Felman goes on to say: “Law is a language of abbreviation, of limitation and totalization. Art is a language of infinity and of the irreducibility of fragments” (2002, 279). Would we really want engagement to happen solely in an abbreviated and limited form or would it be better to accord with the fait accompli acts of memorialization in the classic paradigm? Cultural production, in a variety of forms, was intrinsic to the making and breaking of the state that was the former Yugoslavia (Arsenijević 2010; Husanović 2010). Literature, poetry, and theater did not simply reflect a mobile political climate; they helped to direct the winds of change that would sweep over it. Certainly, poetry and prose continue to be mobilized for political purposes in the here and now of twenty-first-century Bosnia. Ethno-nationalist leaders, complicit with the international community, endorse work that undergirds the indisputable nature of ethnic division in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a move that “merely pacifies social antagonism into incommensurable differences” (Arsenijević 2010, 67). Alternatively, there is a counter-discourse of what Damir Arsenijević has termed “false universalization”: “The poetry of false universalization […] is a melancholic statement of the trauma of the lost world and the alienation caused by the re-defined meanings in the new one” (2010, 174).

 Feldman makes these observations in the context of her analysis of the Adolf Eichmann trial. She contends that the great difficulty with the trial was that it attempted to engage in both art and law simultaneously: “The Eichmann trial sought […] not only to establish facts but to transmit (transmit truth as event and as the shock of the encounter with events, transmit history as experience)” (, ; original emphasis).

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In contrast to this, there exist voices and practices in cultural production that re-politicize post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina along more inclusive lines. Such re-politicization entails acknowledging the position that the vast majority of citizens in Bosnia and Herzegovina is a “new community of the excluded” (Arsenijević 2010, 194), deserving of shared dialogue – a debate that could rehabilitate inclusion into a new politics based on the fusion of knowledge production, cultural production, and a sensibility of the thread of the everyday as intrinsically political and not merely ideologically over-determined. In terms of its ethical-political stance, this vernacular of “politics must enact a peculiar fidelity towards the looming specter of a very particular ‘face’/‘body’ that universalizes the predicament of being violently excluded from dominant biopolitical orders” (Husanović 2009, 100). This new community will need to universalize its shared predicament in order to enact social transformation; it will need to go beyond the oppositional then articulate and materialize through concrete acts affirmative politics. The two case studies that follow will draw the framework of such affirmative politics and discuss the extent to which concrete cultural practices have enabled the coming together of this new community.

Case study 1: From reading poetry in parliament to a new parliament of poetry In 2008, Arsenijević coordinated the activities of the Department for Civil Society Initiatives at the International Commission of Missing Persons (ICMP) in Sarajevo. He devised a public campaign to commemorate the international day of missing persons, entitled I Have the Right to Know, launched on 30 August 2008. Part of the public campaign was the display and public readings of contemporary Bosnian poetry in the Bosnian parliament, poetry that speaks truth to power in such a way as to demand justice for the whole of Bosnian society to know the whereabouts of clandestine mass graves. However, even before the event was launched, an unanticipated furor was stirred up because the ICMP and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) deemed that some of the poems included in the selection were “not good poetry.” A couple of poems by Marko Vešović and Šejla Šehabović included word chetnik and references to the existence of concentration camps. The inclusion of these words was what the international representatives used to assess that these two poems were of poor quality. Furthermore, the international representatives judged such references – conjured in the name of suffering, remembrance, and the importance of encouraging ongoing discussions – to be too incendiary to appear in

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the Bosnian Parliament. They were, therefore, censored from the program with little conversation about the positive effects their inclusion might have potentially had. The representatives of the ICMP and ICRC eventually censored the public campaign I Have the Right to Know (Vešović 2008, 3). This incident can only be read as an index of the powerful potential of poetry to speak to people about their own pasts and futures. Indeed, if those futures were shared publicly instead of remaining privately imagined, they might have a profound transformative effect. If citizens in Bosnia and Herzegovina were to produce a hopeful future that breaks the bounds of the everyday horror of transition in the country today, the agents striving for emancipatory change in Bosnian society would need to draw on the demotic and artistic idioms that enable us to talk about suffering experienced in war and genocide as a public matter. In doing so, the production of social and cultural capital by using art to create a truly public space of engagement, by reasserting the right, importance, and productivity of creating a civic consciousness through open debate, is a form of capital that can only enhance all efforts at social reconciliation and the building of a durable peace in this country. It is how a truly “unbribable life” is mobilized in quotidian practices – as life “that refuses to be bought off in the face of a politics that aims to de-sensitize it in relation to the workings and effects of the terror of inequality […] [and] enacts its refusal to be bribed in its demand for and its insistence on the politics of equality for all (Arsenijević 2011b). Immediately following the 2008 case of censorship, a group of Belgradebased artists and theorists decided to move the exploration of how poetry may engender a public space for imagining and discussing a future that has a shape to the program of the Monument Group [Grupa Spomenik]. In this manner, the Monument Group, an artistic-theatrical group, intensified its collaboration with the theoretical scene in Bosnia and Herzegovina and commenced work on a novel platform to facilitate public discussions of genocide in Srebrenica. In 2008, the Monument Group’s task was to examine in the fields of art and theory the ideological coordinates of international and local management of denial and amnesia related to war and genocide. The group devised a series of interventions between 2008 and 2010 entitled Mathemes of Reassociation. These interventions comprised various art exhibitions, publications, performances, public readings, and workshops.⁵ The platform has developed and expanded as a result of individual and collaborative work during the last decade carried out by the

 Details of all the Mathemes of Re-association interventions by the Monument Group are from Belgrade October Salon , Zagreb , Novi Sad , and Banja Luka .

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group’s members. The work generated a political space in which it would be possible to discuss the wars of the 1990s and the (post‐)war collectives on territories of the successor states to Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The premise of the Monument Group was that there could be no successful three-dimensional monuments built to the Yugoslav wars; the only possible monument would be a public discussion about the war and its ongoing effects. Poetry has been pivotal in initiating and developing such discussions, so the format of “public reading and analysis of poetry” was devised and realized as installations with a particular duration. Each installation is accompanied by a “distributive monument,” a physical object containing a poem and a short essay written by individual poets discussing their motivations for writing the select poems. Public discussions through poetry were devised not to fetishize the dead but to stand as a call to the living and to engage in the joint creation of memory and a social script by taking a stance in relation to war and genocide with no prior guarantees. The Monument Group’s postulate is that there is a lack of language that could re-politicize the objects of (post)-war everyday life collected after mass killings, rapes, deportations, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, and other mass crimes. Mathemes of Re-Association provided a platform for the articulation and the development of strategies in the fields of theory, art, and culture that focus on the understanding of post-genocide collectivities in the former Yugoslavia, amongst which Srebrenica is only the most well-known. In a series of events during the October Salon 2008 in Belgrade, the Monument Group opened a public discussion around the claim “Where genocide was, there will be a political subject.”⁶ Its method was to draw on psychoanalysis, philosophy, theory, literature, art, anthropology, and forensic archaeology. Through the opening lecture performance, Oroditi kost (Arsenijević 2008), the group set the tone for the language it was proposing for the public discussion. This language would be used to articulate and enact the interruption of governance over both the dead and the living exercised by the triad “the Scientist-the Bureaucrat-the Priest” (Arsenijević 2011a). The decision to use contemporary Bosnian poetry (and the censored poems in particular) as a building block of the framework of Mathemes of Re-Association led to the creation of public space in Serbia, where denial of genocide and war dominates. In such a created public space, the artistic and theoretical scene from Bosnia could posit genocide and its effects as topics to be discussed publically using the concepts of the critique of ideology.

 The October Salon was set up in  in Belgrade as a venue for the exhibition of and investigation into contemporary art.

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In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the urgency to deal with the denial of genocide and its effects guided the decision to convene in October 2010 for the first public reading and analysis of poetry in Banja Luka. This public reading took place within the Spaport Biennial and the exhibition Where Everything Is Yet to Happen Second Chapter: Exposures curated by Ivana Bago and Antonia Majača. To engage in such an exposure was “to take part in a transformative quest” because making the public call for participating in poetry reading and analysis was “to emancipate the actual process of searching, the uncertainty of the outcome and also, through the continued joint commitment, to create the conditions for empowering the existing alliances and to create new mutualities” (Bago and Majača 2011, 35). The format of the public reading and analysis was novel and risky. Questions that led the devising of this format were: how is it possible to hold a setting of a public discussion in which confrontations around war and genocide are possible without them breaking into a conflict? How can anger, which is always already there and needs not necessarily always be destructive, be transformed by making it an integral part of a social script? The relation, based on explicit articulation of mistrust and anger, enables a discussion about loss as properly social rather than hegemonically ethnic or solely private. It also enables something that goes beyond the posited choices articulated in injunctions to remember or to forget. What is enabled is the start of a mourning that creates some new meaning of loss and goes beyond the compulsion to repeat and reenact. Mourning and solidarity are in that sense closely related because both are relational and enable the creation of new meaning and new social ties. With the awareness of relational qualities shared between mourning and solidarity, the title of the public poetry reading event was Vrijeme je da se upoznamo onakvi kakvi stvarno jesmo [It’s Time We Got to Know Each Other as We Really Are], a verse taken from the poem “Bratstvo jedinstvo [Brotherhood unity]” by Damir Avdić Graha. The method of work for these public poetry sessions is always explicitly outlined in the protocol that frames the collection of poems published as distributive monuments [kajdanke]. Kajdanka, in its original meaning of a music sheet, is a direct reference to the performative dimension of public reading of poetry. What does it mean to read from the same sheet in a community that is riven with tensions, dominant injunctions to deny or remember war and genocide in a very specific way? How does this public reading open up a space for the confrontation between posited individual and collective meanings of war and genocide but also a space for non-sense as yet un-created meanings? How does it bring together the given text of poetry and the open discussion in a frame of working through and creating of a new text in a session that has its beginning and end? How do participants read and analyze poetry together? Participants

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jointly discuss two most important themes – past and commonality – with poetry creating a setting for the discussion in such a way that the collective coming together to read and analyze poetry thinks about the future that they desire: that forgotten future that they are forbidden to contemplate in the current political framework, which presents itself as the only possible one. They all engage in free associations based on the content of the poem. This means that they speak whatever thoughts occur to each of them, with as little censorship as possible, when they hear either the lines of a poem or the words of others during the reading and analysis. In the joint creation of memory and social script through poetry, the past and the present are brought into a productive conflict through which participants expose and articulate their own positions in relation to war and genocide, positions that are always political. In these public sessions, poetry reminds us that the social script is open and constructed, with multiple perspectives merging and separating through free associations. There is a reminder that because the social script is inherently constructed and uncertain, it need not inevitably lead to collapse, chaos, and destruction. All the while, there exists a structure – a setting, created through poetry, in which history is brought to justice in such a way as to uphold equality among speaking beings and to strengthen the communal capacity to release us from the emotion of the impossible. Articulating this seeming impossibility, exposing flights into helplessness that accept ready-made images of the shapeless future, dealing with the deep mistrust whilst being surrounded by the prevailing fantasy of salvation – these are the things that a public reading and analysis of poetry has enabled but in such a way that it treats them not as communal losses from the war but as communal gains. Public readings and analysis of poetry enable a shift in perspective from hopelessness to hope by counting the gains of everything that has survived. This communal sharing of our individual and collective articulation treats these gains as something we have to start with if we are to envision and materialize a more just future. In these readings, we are given an insight that “trauma can help in overcoming trauma,” as the poet Ferida Duraković claims (2014). Poems and our public discussion of them short-circuit the prevalent imagery of helplessness, asserting a different possibility and reminding us of the creative tension in, what Dinko Kreho (2010) calls: the “forgotten future tense.”⁷ In the following vignette, the poet Adisa Bašić (2014) reflects on one of the short-circuits that emerged at a public reading of her poetry: “I remember two young men, who reacted to the erotic poem about the former concentration camp inmate by talking about their fathers, who had been imprisoned in concen-

 “Forgotten future tense” enables Kreho to emphasize how social critique actualizes the future.

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tration camps: it was only later that we found out that one of these was a Bosniak, the other a Croat; while talking about the experience of living with a former concentration camp prisoner, ethnicity is completely irrelevant.” There it is – for a moment, albeit a brief one, we are invited to recuperate a life that has survived and a commonality resulting from the experience of survival. In doing so, we discover and learn hitherto unknown ways of speaking, reading, and listening; in creating and rehearsing jointly the social script, we make space for new subject-positions. This social script, jointly composed, is now part of our common shared experience, and the words of others become our own through dialogue. “These readings expose before me the process of reading – the text finalizes itself before your eyes, finds a collocutor, gains sense. The significance this had for me was to be present at and be a part of an entirely intimate act” (Bašić 2014). In the shared intimacy of the setting created and supported by poetry, the commons of the shared social script enable us to espouse the words of others as our own. As the poet Šehabović (2014) claims, “this is the type of solidarity I seek in my poetry”.

Case study 2: Mathemes of Re-Association: Interventions into the public language of “telling the story of a mass grave” and “mapping genocide” The search for this kind of solidarity and commonality in shared collective spaces, whilst engaging with the traumatic contents of everyday life and politics in the post-SFRY region, is also evident in the Monument Group’s series of interventions entitled Mathemes of Re-Association. Indeed, the struggle to find words conducive for affirmative political gesture in a terrain framed by two issues – “telling the story of a mass grave” and “mapping a genocide” (Husanović 2008, 2009, 2011) – has characterized the last three decades of artistic, cultural, and knowledge production in this region. Many interventions and collaborations of artists, scholars, students, and activists in this period have fought the inability to think and talk about the wars and the (post)-war collectivities, struggling to do so within the framework of emancipatory politics. The Monument Group intended the public production of Mathemes of Re-Association to navigate politically through the terrain of post-genocide culture as a culture of lies, a culture of denial, and a culture of amnesia. This culturalized terror of governance, produced and practiced by a range of local, regional,

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and international actors, is understood to mask the ongoing exploitation of governed life (as bare life, or as labor power⁸), turning it into a collection of enclaves. It is also testament to the inability of various forms of authority to find properly political rather than managerial solutions to the crises of transitional societies. In opposition to this, Mathemes of Re-Association’s production and public events in Belgrade, Zagreb, Novi Sad, and Banja Luka critically explored the genocide industry constitutive of Srebrenica today that holds the potential to reveal ethno-nationalist politics in all its bankruptcy and testify to the limits of multiculturalist identity politics. In Srebrenica, we are witnessing the current stalemate in the form of ethnic apartheid involving post-genocide collectives, including not only the relationships existing between refugees, survivors (women, men, children), the international scientific community, the local government, civil society initiatives, and NGOs but also the destroyed houses and newly built ones, identified and non-identified human remains, buried and non-buried individuals, identified and non-identified mass graves, and so on. The ideology of reconciliation has left a political wasteland in Srebrenica today, rendering it a society of the symbiosis of dead and living, perpetrators and victims, functioning through apartheid where traumatic injustices endure. However, the paradigm of reconciliation has its distinct technologies and economies, a coalition of science, administration, and religion encircling the management of remains of those killed in genocide. How is it possible to think and enact new collectivities, communalities, and solidarities in the face of the material abject that permeates the everyday of the post-genocide society? Through lectures, readings, and exhibitions with theorists, artists, and activists, as well as with the staff of ICMP, Mathemes of Re-Association explored how genocide in Srebrenica is construed as an object of science, law, and international administration in the work of ICMP. This process consists of a set of forensic doctrines and bioinformatic technologies (the forensic DNA analysis and database management designed to identify the remains of the genocide victims found in mass graves and other sites, or to “help find the missing through the means of science,” as was repeatedly expressed by the ICMP staff members during many field visits to their facilities), as well as a set of legal-administrative mechanisms that purport to produce a “story of a mass grave” and a “map of genocide” in the service of transitional justice, reconciliation, and civil society development (Husanović 2011, 505 – 512). The “Bosnian technology,” as it is called by Wagner (2009), can be summed up as follows: through the process

 For more on the concept of bare life (Agamben ) as labor power in the Marxian sense and a matter of exploitation and ghettoization, see Sylvester ().

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of re-association of bodily remains of those killed in mass atrocity, it construes a matheme, containing a description of the place and method of killing the victim, and through which, after the DNA analysis, the bodily remains retroactively acquires identity. In other words, through a hyper-expert discourse, the missing become “mathemes” or mere bar-codes before they are re-associated with their identity and a form of ethical and political visibility is restored to them. Through a series of debates, texts, exhibits, and performances, Mathemes of Re-Association transformed into a public classroom on the knowledge-technology complex behind the governance of the missing, where DNA identification technology was politically analyzed in order to shed new insights into the relationship between states and their citizens in moments of crisis and disorder, mass atrocity and its aftermath (Wagner 2009, 249). By fixing identity to nameless remains through a public gift of identification (granted not only to families but also to ethno-nationalist orders that reinsert them back into their projects⁹), sovereign power reasserts itself through “a mechanism for tabulating losses and indexing postdisaster/postconflict political will” (Wagner 2009, 255). The process of identifying nameless remains thus feeds directly into modes of ethno-nationalist commemoration and political mobilization of affect that are still as profitable as ever. This completes the circle as modern science and religion identify their object, thereby repeating the procedures of the politics of atrocity. After Srebrenica, we do not have silence. On the contrary, its name speaks of a mute coalition of science and religion: science that construes identity and religion that gives it “dignity” and meaning at the price of repeating and reiterating the procedures of the politics of terror and atrocity by other means. In contrast to this knowledge-technology complex, Mathemes of Re-Association remained faithful to an uncomfortable surplus, a remainder of the process of identification and culturalization, that is to say, those bodily remains that cannot be identified by modern science. What remains, in other words, are bones without identity, something that has no identity. It is possible neither to construe its identity nor to count it nor to render it dignified and deserving of religious burial and mourning rituals. This abject remainder opens up the space of politics, of a specific type of subjectification that is not based on identity or counting and that opens up the process of remembering, whose task is to break up parallel conver-

 Ethno-nationalist identity politics is the primary logic of violence that produced the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which resulted in ethnic cleansing and genocide. It is also the matrix that has framed post-war politics and everyday life in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the s.

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gences of contemporary construction of identity and the culturalized politics of terror.¹⁰ Mathemes of Re-Association interventions engendered promising public spaces and a new form of solidarity in thinking about genocide, where each participant may position her- or himself politically in relation to it through a new language that critically engages with the ideological mechanisms perpetuating the politics of genocide for two decades. This new public language rejects those dominant public languages of biopolitical statecraft that go hand in hand with administrative demands from a new leviathan – internationalized forms of governance framed as a therapeutic management of affect and yet preoccupied with the politics of security and freedom through internationalized practices of ghettoizing life (Husanović 2011, 502– 503). Instead, Mathemes of Re-Association platform insisted on producing and practicing a new politics of hope beyond both ethnic and multicultural discourses of nation and religion, law, and science. It collaborated outside of the dominant protocols of civil society in the post-SFRY region (involving international organizations, cultural policies, inter-state cooperation program) and against the current paradigm of reducing everyday life in a post-genocidal society to the management of cultural and ethnic differences through hyper-scientific and (extra‐)legal practices of governance. The Monument Group’s interventions gathered people across the divisive terrain induced by the politics of affect concerning genocide in a proclaimed effort to enact emancipatory gestures in the fields of arts and theory and to impact productively on everyday lives against identitarian culture and the politics of terror. Their gesture was that of a resistance to the paradigm of culturalized identity in “transitional justice,” seeking that which stands against the culturalization of politics, which exploits the capital of the living and dead through new and old forms of political authority. The public engagement around the Mathemes of Re-Association project effected various new paths and interventions towards affirmative and universal politics of the new subject through the public language of political humanity and equality whose “poetry does not stem from the past but only from the future” (Marx 1852). When witnessing the legacies of atrocity, ethical and social relationships must be forged anew, based on the critical reflection on the origins and methods of violence where mass atrocity is only the culmination of everyday biopolitical control over life and death. An affirmative politics of witnessing  The psychoanalytic term abject refers to that which has been violently expelled from the symbolic order, social or cultural, inhabiting the liminal space that shatters the division between the object and the subject and the encounter of which represents a traumatic experience. For more on the notion of abject and abjection, see Kristeva ().

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trauma and thinking through genocide does offer a space for a new public language of grief and hope as well as ways of subjectivization, which are an authentic challenge to both the ethnocratic mobilization and aseptic liberal management of affect. The question of how to embody justice in a post-genocidal political community that lives with the realities of mass atrocity poses a challenge, where academic engagement needs to follow non-institutionalized and non-state spaces of publicity (fields of cultural production, art, and activism). Spaces and public voices created by new solidarities and subjectivities beyond the closures of institutional politics are the promising site for social and political transformation. The Mathemes of Re-Association thus operated as an “emancipated community” were the participants acted as “storytellers and translators” engendering a different public language of witnessing trauma, repoliticizing the effects of it, thinking through political violence, and acting upon radical contingencies in the world around us (Rancière 2007). It has been a process of producing radical relationality in a way that strikes back through emancipatory politics, its center being the political subject where genocide was.

Transitional justice after positivism: Some conclusions In the aftermath of what Mark Osiel termed “administrative massacre,” victims, whose silence is finally being broken, want facts (2000). They want to know numbers, names, and locations. The feeling is that the victims will be able to move forward only when a true history of the conflict in question has been established, and with this they will then be able to carry their societies forward with them. Perhaps this is why criminal prosecutions and truth and reconciliation commissions seem to take precedence in transitional justice program. Notwithstanding Osiel’s claim that courts “fragment our settled perception of reality into contending stories and counter-stories” by offering a “narrative multiplicity” (Osiel 2000, 271), they also provide the finality of judgment. Indeed, many scholars expect that an institution like the ICTY can and must offer the official and indisputable history of the conflicts in which the crimes they adjudicate took place (Wilson 2011).¹¹ The sense seems to be that legal and quasi-legal modalities of truth telling are best suited to elucidating “what really happened,” and

 Wastell has argued against this position strenuously, noting that the “facts” that war crimes trials establish are adjudicated facts, open to be contested further, and that the truths arrived at by trials should be understood as legal truths ().

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can memorialization and reconciliation can be realized only when a single, factual history of events has been established. While this sequencing of transitional justice elements seems both commonplace and self-evidently reasonable, one might want to sound a note of caution. It also seems a perfect modus operandi for memory management. Certainly in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, memory management has been shored up by the well-intentioned, but ultimately ill-founded acceptance of the tacit chronology of transitional justice initiatives. At the Memory/Sjećanje conference discussed throughout this article, the participants, while disagreeing about the “facts” themselves, all seemed to agree that the facts needed to be established before issues of memory and memorialization could be broached. Speakers and audience members alike repeatedly asserted that it was perhaps “too early” for memorials. Despite being asked to think about memorialization as a process, a debate, a pedagogical activity, conversation seemed doomed to return to a discussion of where to put up plaques and monuments, and this required knowing the facts insomuch as one would not want to put up a physical index of an incontrovertible historical truth only to discover one had got the “facts” wrong. In her presentation, Saliha Duderija, the Assistant Minister in the Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees of BiH and the leader of the working party that is drafting a transitional justice strategy for the country, repeatedly emphasized the need for a specifically Bosnian concept of transitional justice.¹² A transitional justice strategy that did not start from a uniquely Bosnian conceptual framework, she argued, could never adequately deal with the many particularities intrinsic to the Bosnian situation that might not be evident in other postconflict societies. Her reasoning, which the authors agree with entirely, belied the fact that not only Duderija but also most of the attendees in the hall seemed wholly unreflective about the extent to which a very foreign and under-examined conceptual framework actually over-determined the two days of discussion. Leaders of victims’ associations, government ministers, foreign and “local” NGO workers alike, all seemed to speak in unison in the language of “transitional justice” – not only employing its specific lexicon but also failing to interrogate many of its underlying assumptions. In short, “transitional justice” had become in Bosnia, what Partha Chatterjee elsewhere referred to as a “derivative dis-

 The need for context-specific post-conflict interventions, although largely ignored in the early days of transitional justice’s maturation, is now widely recognized. See, for example, the particularly apt discussion offered by Rama Mani ().

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course” (1993).¹³ Well after transitional justice practitioners have come to query the one-size-fits-all model of transitional justice interventions and to deconstruct some of the movement’s earlier underlying presumptions, the certainties of an older discourse seem to have colonized the imaginations of those looking to effect social reconciliation in Bosnia. A privileging of positivism in the guise of transparency and accountability, the resulting temporality of transitional justice programs, the dyadic rendering of restorative versus retributive models of justice, all seem to be above the level of debate in Bosnia. The sum outcome is that very little substantive debate actually occurs – a situation only exacerbated by the reification of ethnic categories and the concomitant injunction not to say anything that might offend someone who is not a co-ethnic, thereby potentially instigating further violence (as discussed at the start of this paper). Therefore, the voices of the victims, allegedly at last free to be heard, resound across the society as a social movement of silence couched in the language of caution and political correctness, and too often requiring a foreign presence to establish objective and unambiguous facts. Without opening the spaces of cultural production – of art, poetry, and performance – to create platforms for a real discussion of what happened in Bosnia and its neighboring countries, the silence of the murdered dead will be mirrored in the silences crafted by the absence of a “public language of grief” (Arsenijević 2011b).

References Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1998. Arsenijević, Damir. Forgotten Future: Politics of Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010. Arsenijević, Damir. “Gendering the Bone: The Politics of Memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Journal for Cultural Research 15.2 (2011a): 193 – 205. Arsenijević, Damir. “Mobilising Unbribable Life.” Towards a New Literary Humanism. Ed. Andy Mously. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011b. 166 – 180. Arsenijević, Damir. “Love after genocide.” Moments. Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten. [Moments. A History of Performance in 10 Acts]. Ed. Boris Charmatz et al. Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2013. 472 – 479. Arsenijević, Damir. “Oroditi kost,” novine Matemi reasocijacije, Grupa Spomenik (transkript javnog predavanja i diskusije od 27. septembar 2008., Oktobarski salon, Muzej istorije

 In this vein, Chatterjee’s distinction between “civil society” as opposed to “political society” is particularly apt ().

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Jugoslavije, Beograd) [transcript of public lecture and discussion of 27 September 2008 at the Oktobarski salon, Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade]. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995. Bago, Ivana, and Antonia Majača. “Izloženosti/Exposures.” Where Everything Is yet to Happen. Protok-Centar za vizuelne komunikacije & Institut za trajanje, mjesto i varijable (DeLVe), 2011. 20 – 85. Bašić, Adisa. Personal correspondence between Damir Arsenijević and Adisa Bašić. 2014. Bickford, Louis. Memory: Promoting a Holistic Approach to Memorials and Remembrance [Sjećanje: promoviranje univerzalnog pristupa memorijalima i sjećanju]. International Commission n Missing Persons (ICMP), United Nations Development Program in BiH (UNDP), Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees, and Ministry of Justice of Bosnia and Herzegovina. UNITIC, Fra Anđela Zvizdovića 1, Sarajevo, 8 – 10 December 2010. Plenary address. Bougarel, Xavier, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings. The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis: U of Minnesotta P, 1993. Citroni, Gabriella. Memory: Promoting a Holistic Approach to Memorials and Remembrance [Sjećanje: promoviranje univerzalnog pristupa memorijalima i sjećanju]. International Commission n Missing Persons (ICMP), United Nations Development Program in BiH (UNDP), Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees, and Ministry of Justice of Bosnia and Herzegovina. UNITIC, Fra Anđela Zvizdovića 1, Sarajevo, 8 – 10 December 2010. Address. Drumbl, Mark A. “Collective Violence and Individual Punishment: The Criminality of Mass Atrocity.” Northwestern University Law Review 99.2 (2005). Duffield, Mark. 2001. Global Governance and the New Wars. London: Zed Books Ltd, 2001. Duraković, Ferida. Personal correspondence between Damir Arsenijević and Ferida Duraković. 2014. Felman, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. London: Harvard UP, 2002. Husanović, Jasmina. “Recasting Transitions after the Fall: Global Governance of Trauma and the Politics of Life in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” 20 Years after the Collapse of Communism: Expectations, Achievement and Disillusions of 1989. Spec. issue of Interdisciplinary Studies on Central and Eastern Europe 9 (2011). 495 – 520. Husanović, Jasmina. “Ka emancipativnoj politici svjedočenja: politika nestalih kao vladanje traumom kroz kodifikaciju, matematizaciju i depolitizaciju.” novine Matemi reasocijacije, Grupa Spomenik (transcript javnog predavanja i diskusije, septembar 2008.,Oktobarski salon, Kuća legata, Beograd). Husanović, Jasmina. “The Politics of Gender, Witnessing, Postcoloniality and Trauma: Bosnian Feminist Trajectories.” Feminist Theory 10.1 (2009): 99 – 119. Jansen, Stef. Antinacionalizam: etnografija otpora u Zagrebu i Beogradu. Trans. Aleksandra Bajazetov). Beograd: Biblioteka XX vek, 2005. Kaldor, Mary. New & Old Wars. Cambridge: Polity P, 2006.

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Kreho, Dinko. “O jednoj nemogućoj knjizi.” http://www.sic.ba/rubrike/stav-esej/dinko-krehoo-jednoj-nemogucoj-knjizi/ 2010 (14 January 2014) Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Mani, Rama. Beyond Retribution: Seeking Justice in the Shadows of War. Cambridge: Polity P, 2002. Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” 1852. http://www.marxists.org/ar chive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ (26 February 2013). McEvoy, Kieran. “Beyond Legalism: Towards a Thicker Understanding of Transitional Justice.” Journal of Law and Society 34.4 (2007): 411 – 440. McEvoy, Kieran, and Lorna McGregor, eds. Transitional Justice From Below: Grassroots Activism and the Struggle for Change. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2008. Osiel, Mark. Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers,2000. Pickering, Paula M. Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View from the Ground Floor, New York: Cornell UP, 2007. Rancière, Jacques. “The Emancipated Spectator.” Artforum (March 2007): 271 – 281. Rekom Memo: The RECOM Initiative. 2009. http://www.civilrightsdefenders.org/news/a-truthcommission-strengthens-rule-of-law/ (downloaded 14 August 2014). Šehabović, Šejla. Personal correspondence between Damir Arsenijević and Šejla Šehabović. 2014. Sylvester, Christine. “Bare Life as a Development Studies/Postcolonial Problematic.” Geographical Journal 172.1 (2006): 66 – 77. Wagner, Sarah. To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Vešović, Marko. “Hoće da nam oduzmu pravo na sjećanje.” Dani 29 August 2008. Wastell, Sari. “Auditing War.” Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 35.2 (2010): 84 – 89. Wilson, Richard A. Writing History in International Criminal Trials. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.

Martin Pogačar

Digital Afterlife: Ex-Yugoslav Pop Culture Icons and Social Media Introduction

The colonization of everyday life by digital communications technologies is transforming the modes of re-presencing the past (Sobchack 2011). In and through medial externalizations (Erll 2008a; Erll 2008b; Assmann 2008), the past unceasingly resurfaces not as something that has passed but as an escalating present (cf. Huyssen 2003, 11). In post-Yugoslavia – the political and cultural residue of the SFR Yugoslavia cast in permanent “transition” – different modes of engaging with the country’s socialist past are all the more poignant. In fact, the shift of interpretive authority from the institution to the individual, arguably the corollary of the all-out mediatization and the digitally enabled co-creation and circulation of content, makes the past and practices of remembering an increasingly ubiquitous matter. Furthermore, the present is becoming embroiled in the increasingly present culture of the past (Buden 2013, 20). In this view, memory, remembering, and practices of co-creating historical and memorial narratives in digital media environments (DME) often entail the use of pop culture content and artifacts in combination with historical sources, thus creating pop culture from history and history from pop culture.¹ In turn, the dominant historical narratives are increasingly challenged and contested. In the post-Yugoslav situation, where the political and cultural divisions are based on contested understandings of the Second World War, the post-war socialist period, and the aftermath of the dissolution of the state, the practices of re-presencing the past and their uses in the present prove illustrative of the wider uneasiness with memory and transience in DME. In their capacity to externalize loss, discontent, fascination with a past moment, a historical event, or a personality, twenty-first-century social media in post-socialist contexts seem to transpose a very private and intimate understanding of the past into a sphere of decidedly public and often grassroots practices of remembering. This entails the creation and co-creation of individual, intimate, grassroots digital memorials (as found, for example, on YouTube and Facebook), and on-the-fly affective memorial collectivities. Digital memorials serve not only

 The role of television is not to be underestimated; see Hoskins ; Lagerkvist .

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as a “cyberplace of memory” for the creators but, because of the circularity and global accessibility of digital content (Straw 2010), also as spaces of memorial entanglement for and with other users. Typically, grassroots memorials are made to commemorate a relative or friend, a celebrity or an event, and they hardly differ in their function from graves and tombs and “hardcopy” memorials. However, they seem to be radically more alive and “present.” Thus, they raise questions regarding the phenomenon of death in DME. How is one to think about passing away while staying digitally present? How to reconcile individual commemoration with the public intimacy? In this paper, I analyze the digital (and political) lives of deceased Yugoslav pop culture icons.² In post-Yugoslavia, the phenomenon of death, finitude, and afterlife or the post-mortem has a number of dimensions. Primarily, these are related to the dismemberment of the country and the wars of the 1990s, which left in their wake approximately 200,000 dead and 800,000 displaced, and the uneasy socio-political, cultural and economic aftermath of the collapse of not only the country but also socialist regimes in general. Dead bodies recurrently seem to gain political currency and are readily disinterred symbolically and otherwise: the victims of the Second World War and post-Second World War extra-judicial killings, as well as the victims of the recent Yugoslav wars (Verdery 1999). However, there seems to be another and somewhat less macabre aspect that arises from the fact that the mediatized Yugoslav socialist past unceasingly resurfaces in (digital) media discourses. In the resurfacing of pop culture references of the past, an unruly assemblage of music, films, pop culture icons, celebrities, politicians, the country’s technological and industrial achievements, food and textile brands disturbs or allegedly annihilates altogether the much-desired calmness of the present. What makes the resurfacing of pop culture in digital media intriguing for some and painful for others is that in DME the forlorn Yugoslav socialist past is continually getting a new life or, more precisely, a digital afterlife. Popular icons, politicians, even the country’s renowned car factory, music bands and deceased band members, and in some cases the country itself continue to live through the circulation of digital content, in accounts and profiles, blogs and websites, posts and comments. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine all of the pop culture references; therefore, I will investigate a selection of grassroots memorials, or digital ghosts, on Facebook and YouTube as sites of memory (see Lagerkvist 2013) via multimodal discourse analysis (O’Halloran 2004; Chiew 2004).

 I derive the analogy from Katherine Verdery’s The Political Lives of Dead Bodies ().

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I approach the question of Yugoslavia’s digital afterlife as a two-layered phenomenon. First, I analyze it in relation to the deceased country and individual pop culture icons that are continually re-presenced in and through code. Along with the country’s political system, the icons transform into pop culture legacies and collections of individual memories, the fodder of memory debates and wars (Rutten 2013). Second, I examine Yugoslavia’s digital afterlife in relation to the fact that much of online content was created retrospectively. This latter aspect is particularly important because it reveals a certain retroactive refurbishing of dead people’s lives. From this perspective, the central question is how the country and its pop culture icons are resurrected from the dead and used as affective tools to renegotiate the Yugoslav socialist past. I contextualize the discussion of the digital afterlife of a number of Yugoslav pop culture icons within the wider framework of media archaeology and digital (micro‐) archiving and situate their pop culture legacies in the perspective of ambiguous presents. Consequently, this desire to reassemble the Yugoslav past, whose present-day reception is complicated by the narratives of transition and recent wars, emerges as an attempt by users to endow their individual biographies with a sense of normalcy and to recreate the past and present as a particular epoch.

The unforgotten and the undead in social media The beginning of life, of human life in particular, as well as the definition of “life” in general, are still highly open to speculation and broadly contested on scientific, religious, philosophical, and bioethical grounds. What happens after death is subjected to both religious speculation and ideological manipulation and goes hand in hand with the practices of social and cultural reproduction and survival. Death as the final event in a human’s life necessarily disturbs the everyday rhythm of the collectivity. Culture seeks to provide answers to the unbearable realization of the inevitability of dying (Munster 2011, 71). Externalizations of memory range across material artifacts, tombstones, epigraphs, cenotaphs, museums, monuments, art, and media. However, no externalization of memory is solely material or physical. The weight of the immaterial, the symbolic, often tends to surpass that of the material, and symbolic investments in the material are by far more pervasive. In the context of this argument, afterlife is understood not only in religious and biological terms but mainly in terms of an entanglement of commemoration and prolongation of life through media content and in interactions in DME, which features, among other things, the uncanny undead of pop culture and political icons: “Perhaps even more dreams than not simply refuse to die, they hang on like ghosts, or ghouls, zombies or vam-

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pires, or whatever freakish version of the undead suits your fancy” (Searle 2014). If the corrosiveness of time affects the material externalization of memory, giving it a patina or is like chipping an odd nose off a statue, the symbolic evades deterioration through perpetual shifts and changes, thereby masking time’s corrosive effects on the fabric of memory. The interplay of the collapse of socialism and its aftermath, on the one hand, and the rise of digital technologies, on the other, is important for understanding post-socialist cultural transformations and is possibly part of the reason why the past (the socialist past in particular) keeps bubbling up in the present. Digital media and the mediatization of everything (Livingstone 2009) facilitate a cultural dynamic and a communication environment where it is very easy to “unforget” and to “unsee” the past. As Boris Buden points out, in the time of the mediatization of the everyday, the past can be seen as a cultural and no longer a temporal category. Just like culture, the past is everywhere and in everything that surrounds us; it is in front of us just as it is behind us. The past is not something we have left behind to look back to; it is also something that we have not yet set our foot into, something that is just as new as it is alien, unknown, foreign, different, in short, another culture (Buden and Žilnik 2013, 20).

Buden’s argument about the tenacity of culture demands acknowledging the liminality of presences and absences, forgetting and remembering. What is more, in light of the present discussion, this idea proves all the more intriguing in its emphasis on our “not yet [having] set our foot into” the past. Digital afterlife is a life reconstructed, re-narrated, recontextualized and re-mediated, that is, it is the past we have not yet clicked our mind into. The past, therefore, lives on and contributes to our understanding of the present primarily through re-presencing the events, topics, issues, personalities, ideas. The process of re-presencing unravels primarily through the co-creation and circularity of content. Digital content, such as video memorials found on YouTube, further contributes to the unforgettable and unsettling character of the past. However, given its grassroots pedigree and the affectivity entailed in creating and responding to digital content, the past re-presenced through grassroots memorials and commemorative practices also necessarily obscures the historicity of that past. The most immediate victims of such commemorative interventions are historical facts, which are discarded in exchange for a nostalgic, intimate, and affective rendition of the past. The fascination with afterlife or with re-presencing the dead is not a recent phenomenon. Religion and science, ideology and politics, as well as historiography can be seen, each in its own right, as a sort of trans-temporal storage from which culturally and politically important figures and events and their meanings

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are derived and reproduced. The twentieth century and, in particular, the postWorld-War-II pop culture takeover of the quotidian are in this respect most apparent (if only because they are the best documented); namely, famous and important historical figures, leaders, politicians, and generals are increasingly accompanied and sometimes replaced by pop culture icons (see Walter 2011). Take, for example, the musician Jim Morrison, whose Parisian grave has been turned into a site of near-religious pilgrimage or the more recent statue of Bruce Lee in Mostar, which reconfigures the geography and politics of memory in Bosnia. Facing north (neither east or west, to fend off potential assumed allegiance), the statue allegedly serves as a pop culture memorial to which people can relate regardless of their ethnic or religious background (Bolton and Muzurović 2010; Morpho 2014). More recent, and far more ubiquitous, however, are digitally mediated memorials made and used to commemorate deceased pop culture figures. If the grave is a site of gathering and pilgrimage, then digital memorials and other instances of digital afterlife surpass the materiality of the site, thus transforming its locality and temporality. Afterlife is usually considered more “real” if it occurs extra-personally, that is, without our immediate intervention, and if it can be seen as having an agency of its own. Mechanics and electrical technology, for example, have been seen as the prime external facility that may retain or replicate life or at least entice people to believe in the ghostly nature of technology (see Wood 2002); photography and cinema have been dissected in much detail along these lines. Thus, it seems appropriate to think and investigate digital afterlife in terms of its ghostliness. Digital communications technology offers an intriguing fusion of mythic and mystic aspects of technology, electricity, digitality, and ghostliness, not least because the ghostliness of the past is a feature that, in a vivid and lively manner, permeates real life in post-Yugoslavia. Digital ghosts in DME refer to a particular individual’s “digital remains”: photos, a collection of audio materials, and importantly, to his or her post-presence in social media (Steinhart 2014). This understanding stems from the fact that an individual, once deceased, leaves behind one or more social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, for example). These pages may contain personal information, uploaded photos, liked pages, links, and commentaries. In retrospect, they serve as a person’s timeline, a more or less curated post-interactive archive of individual media externalizations. Such digital ghosts, although rudimentary and selective, facilitate a highly mediatized audio-visual representation of a person’s life. However, here I am interested in digital ghosts of a different kind, namely, those mediatized externalizations, micro-archives, accounts, and afterlives that were made “in the name” of a person or a country.

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The phenomenon of memorializing and commemorating famous and influential individuals, particularly musicians, singers, and film actors, as well as politicians and countries, is widespread. Bruce Lee, for example, lives happily ever after on Facebook, along with the likes of Jim Moriarty or Janis Joplin, and “they” continue to post memorable quotes, sayings, and dispense wisdom to the public.³ On 27 August 2012, even Mahatma Gandhi set up a Facebook account (one among many, apparently) under the name “Gandhi.” The profiles themselves vary in type; the latter was set up as a personal profile (People), while another Mahatma Gandhi page was set up as Public Figure (Gandhi (Public Figure)).⁴ It should come as no surprise that Josip Broz Tito is on Facebook too, at least twenty of them; and so is the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, in at least 50 versions. Indeed, the act of commemorating and resurrecting deceased public figures and pop culture icons is also widespread in post-socialist Yugoslavia. In post-Yugoslav and other varieties of post-socialist dealings with the past, social media provides: 1) a useful outlet for media externalizations of (positive or negative) personal experiences of living in socialism; 2) a forum to voice discontent with the present-day state of affairs; and 3) a response to the transition-induced devaluation of post-Yugoslavs’ individual biographies.

Digital memorials as conduits of digital afterlife The two main social media platforms for Yugoslav digital afterlife are YouTube and Facebook. I propose to examine the content and user accounts by looking at how they re-presence and remediate the Yugoslav past through the country’s pop culture icons. In many cases, digital memorials and micro-archives also serve as digital ghosts of Yugoslav socialism or, put in Nietzsche’s terms, they turn into the specters of the past that haunt the present (Nietzsche 1980, 8). These ghosts, however, often have very active lives and produce real effects in DME. So how are these ghosts made and how do they function? To what purposes are they put? What are the contours of Yugoslav digital afterlife? What can we learn about the past and about the present from them? To answer these questions, I will first briefly discuss two principles that can be usefully applied to  The Facebook page also promotes merchandise sales and links to several external social media sites – among others, the brucelee.com site and the related Twitter account and YouTube channel. Twitter mainly serves as a parallel outlet, whereas the YouTube channel hosts an extensive selection of short video clips.  Public Figure type allows for “liking” but not befriending.

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the discussion of individual and affective memory and remembering in DME: media archaeology and micro-archiving. At the time of Yugoslavia’s dissolution in 1991, the change was not only political and economic but also cultural and social; it was part of wider global political and economic changes. The words of the then Slovenian President, “Today we may dream, tomorrow starts a new day” (Kučan 1991), underscore the importance of the event and the severity of the cut. Retrospectively, this statement effectively eradicates the past and projects action into the future. Alas, the future did not turn out to be the expected dream. One could argue that this was not only because the global geopolitical circumstances changed but also because the collapse of Yugoslavia and its aftermath coincided with the invasion of our daily lives by digital media technology and the Internet. With the former homeland gone and new ones only just emerging from its ruins, historical revisionism, part and parcel of any regime change (changing street names, tearing down monuments, rewriting histories), faced an unprecedented challenge: globally mediated and circulated content that eschewed any form of regulation and resisted ideological control and framing by the new states. The collapse of the country and the subsequent massive emigration it produced, as well as the fact that many former Yugoslavs were effectively left without a referential cultural and political framework, coincided with the technological potential of digital communications technologies: communication across borders, across space and time. In post-Yugoslav political discourses, the period from 1941– 1991 was problematized and often eradicated from the newly emerging national edifices, albeit in varying degrees and in different forms depending on the state. On several levels, such attempts faced opposition either in the form of continued maintenance of memorials or through popular culture in a far more widespread and subversive manner. Yugoslav pop culture seems to have survived through mixtapes, “Balkan parties,” and flea markets (Velikonja 2002; Pogačar 2011). These decidedly offline artifacts and conduits of pop culture memory contributed to the blooming phenomenon of Yugonostalgia and also fuelled cultural alternatives as well as the opposition to nationalizing and narrowing discourses. Importantly, the opposition was related to the fact that the regime change cast very individual pasts as undesirable and flawed. On a very intimate level, the reaction formation against ideological and historical engineering thus seems to present a quest to normalize the past and reclaim historicity. The archaeological aspect of browsing and buying stuff at flea markets resembles the more widespread practice of media archaeology that subsequently emerged and developed in DME (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011; Ernst 2011). In this context, media archaeology entails navigating the Internet, browsing and searching for media that originated in or is related to the former Yugoslavia, such as images, sounds, and videos (Se-

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kulić 2009). A random search thus yields countless photos of Marshal Tito, Yugoslav tourist sites, photos of musicians, actors, and politicians. On YouTube, a user can find hours of uploaded audiovisuals spanning digitized TV shows and documentaries, music videos and, crucially for this discussion, user-made videos. On music blogs, a user can probably assemble the entire legacy of Yugoslav popular music (Pogačar 2012). But on Facebook, where accounts of deceased people abound, the situation gets more personal. Social media importantly function as cyberplaces of memory that offer an outlet for publishing, exhibiting, and curating the material found in the fits of archaeological fever. Social media, therefore, provide opportunities for micro-archiving: a YouTube user can select, trim, and edit mediatized audiovisuals into a narrative that often comprises an intimate montage of photos and videos along with a soundtrack. We can think of this audiovisual assemblage as micro-archival or digital memorial. For example, the video “Ladarice – Od Vardara pa do Triglava” [Ladarice – From Vardar River to Mount Triglav] (mejerchold), uses a famous Yugoslav patriotic song, dubbed over scanned photos (postcards, tourist guides, textbooks). The choice of photographs and the song turn this random selection into a narrative, which tells a story through the interplay of images and music. Importantly, however, this fusion resonates with other users who may engage with it through affective investment, outright dismissal, sharing, or textual commentary. This digital memorial is, therefore, a short (approximately three minutes long) audiovisual narration that presents a distillation of a user’s take on the past. Through the activity of other users, a decidedly performative rather than rigid micro-archive is co-created and circulated, which gives the entangled users a place and tools to engage (purposely or not) in commemoration. Heated responses in the digital memorial’s comments section reveal the complexity of remembering and re-presencing the past in post-Yugoslavia (Fig. 1). Responses often illustrate affective investments in the digital memorial and its entanglement with the wider memorial landscape and post-socialist present. These investments include recognizing a familiar location among a selection of other geographic localities, which contributes to building an affective geography of the past and present (Matic Slovenia: “Novo mesto–My town ;D”). Other users, for instance, express enthusiastic Yugoslavism, the affective quality of which is additionally emphasized by use of Slavic denominator “Jugoslaveni” in the otherwise English comment (for example, Marko Raičević’s comment); or mention historically situated trauma, as evident in the reply to Jiri Sebesta’s statement: “Sorry – this song is for me a symbol of united, strong and happy Yugoslavia,” where a user named nemesiscro refers to underlying inter-ethnic tensions that in his or her intimate history feature as an important tenet for understanding the past and its role in the present. But how do such memorials relate

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Fig. 1

to digital afterlife? It could be argued that a certain external agency is attributed to digital memorials that prompts an affective response due to the circularity and virality of digital memorials in, as kasheta says in her comment, the “off-roads of historical realities.”⁵ It is not unusual to see commentaries that are extremely emotional and personal in nature, toward not only other commentators but also the content, and via content, towards the present state of affairs. In many cases, the content itself elicits controversies over a variety of topics (the Second World War, the socialist period, the Yugoslav wars, and present-day realities). It could further be argued that such straightforward affective memorials as, for example, “Generacija 1960., 1970. i 1980” have little to do with afterlife (Indigo5142). Yet, in the perspective of Buden’s culture of the past, the afterlife prop kasheta is objecting to the commentator writing in English instead of his own language, presumably Serbian, while kasheta is apparently Croat. The reader should note the ironic reference by this user to Franjo Tudjman’s controversial book Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti (literal English translation “Wastelands of Historical Reality”). Translated as “off-roads,” this also offers a wider commentary on issues with history and memory in DME.

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osition becomes more feasible: the country is dead and gone, memories are alive, and through medial externalizations and circulation of curated content, the past in such re-narrations becomes a present worthy of consideration. Even more, digital memorials must be considered as specimens of the digital afterlife of the country, if not for their media presence and affective qualities, then for their apparently autonomous existence through circularity. Nevertheless, Facebook profiles offer a clearer link between Yugoslavia and its digital afterlife, not least because Facebook is a social media platform that is by definition more personal, happens in real-time, and is susceptible to personification.

Making friends with the dead on Facebook There is one feature that makes Facebook particularly relevant for this study: apart from personal profiles, the service also enables the creation of profiles dedicated to individuals who are no longer alive – celebrities or war victims (from the Second World War to the most recent military adventures) – and, in the case of Yugoslavia, even countries. As memorial or archival timelines, these profiles feature as an “aesthetic identity gravescape whereupon future members of the community may come to observe traces of that presence” (Church 2013, 188). However, in the cases discussed here, these profiles are not mere traces of presence but are given an active afterlife by being managed by someone else who is creating traces retrospectively. The deceased receive not only an archival timeline but also a retroactively created page and a retroactively constructed timeline, as is the case with the Yugoslav car manufacturer Crvena Zastava (see Zastava Automobili), which additionally blurs the distinction between persons and objects in digital media. In the following, I discuss several Facebook pages and trace the contours of the digital afterlife of these individuals and, through them, the memory of Yugoslavia more broadly. Facebook pages serve as a crossroads of textual comments, descriptions, discussions, (embedded) videos, links to news and websites, and articles more or less directly related to the past, present, and future of Yugoslavia. The memorial type consists of networked externalizations of memory, places where posted content (status updates, video links, news) and user activities (discussions, comments) converge. As a temporally structured audiovisual and textual timeline, the page (usually run by one or more admins) takes on a life of its own, in which its role as a co-created digital memorial intertwines with the re-constructed activity of a deceased person. In the case of Facebook pages, audiovisual and textual content is posted on the timeline and wrought into a fragmented, perpetually evolving narrative. However, as Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt argue,

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the technological structure of Facebook “allows only a few organizing principles such as thematic ‘tagging,’ or other methods for structuring content uploaded to the ‘stream.’ Ordering and indexing, which are central elements for preserving data and for organizing temporality, are not well developed on the platform” since it lacks “fundamental features to systematically archive uploaded materials” (2014, 1160). Nevertheless, as I have argued above, the practice of media archaeology provides the backbone to Facebook archiving: the admin searches for photos, videos, and news, and then curates the content into a living timeline, with updates appearing in followers’ newsfeeds. Extremely ephemeral as a repository of memory (much like real life encounters, it emphasizes an on-thefly and transitory relationship), the fleetingness of content in all its gossipy predisposition renders practices of remembering ever more informal. In the following, I look at the ways the pages are used to keep the dead alive via popular culture audiovisuals, textual interventions, and management practices. Moreover, by tracing the ways these pages function, I demonstrate the influence that the audiovisual and affective mediatization of the past has on the digital afterlife of Yugoslavia and its cultures of the past. One of the most popular Facebook pages dedicated to Yugoslavia seems to be the SFR Jugoslavija – SFR Yugoslavia. Actually, there are six pages with the name of SFR Jugoslavija, while two “Communities” among these (that I discuss further below) bear the exact same name (one was set up in 2008 and the other in 2013). Over the years, the older page has attracted nearly 170,000 and the younger about 25,000 followers (at the time of writing in the summer of 2014); and the older, producing several posts per day, seems to be much more active. Both, however, were set up with a very clear mission. In the “About” section, the younger succinctly declares: “Jugoslavija” (SFR Jugoslavija – SFR Yugoslavia (2)), while the older gives a more programmatic stance: “Niko u nasoj zemlji ne treba da se odrice svoje nacionalne pripadnosti. Ali, svi smo mi, u isto vrijeme, i Jugosloveni […] –Tito. [Nobody in our country has to renounce their national allegiance. Still, all of us are, at the same time, also Yugoslavs … – Tito]” (SFR Jugoslavija – SFR Yugoslavia (1)). The older page was set up on 24 September 2008. Looking in 2014 at the oldest posts reveals that very little is accessible to the everyday user who might want to investigate the past of the page. This demonstrates that despite massive preservation capacity, the algorithms that determine what is to be visible to whom may in the long run provide a distorting filter on the past (page activity and otherwise). Still, the page does offer ample resources to approach the digital afterlife. In the “About” section, in the subsection titled “Company Overview,” the older SFR Jugoslavija page quotes the unofficial Yugoslav anthem (From the river Vardar to the mountain Triglav / From the Đerdap to the Adriatic Sea / As a shiny necklace / Bathing in the bright sunshine / Proudly standing in the midst of the

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Balkans / Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia […]). Reference to this unofficial Yugoslav anthem serves as a territorial and temporal marker to support the symbolic and mythic dimensions of the country. Referring to the furthest northwestern and southeastern ends of the country stretching between the rivers in the east and the Adriatic Sea in the west, the unofficial anthem pins the virtual space of togetherness down to the ground both historically and in the present. In this, the page serves as an interactive memorial that commemorates, re-narrates and reconstructs the past and facilitates the co-creation of a community of post-Yugoslavs. In its memorial capacity, the page also serves as an archive of Yugoslavia and its afterlife. Although it is not organized chronologically, that is, the life of the country is not presented as a timeline from birth to death, the events in the past and present merge together to create a non-linear lifespan extending beyond the official time of death (videos, celebratory notes on various anniversaries, references, and comments related to current affairs). The posts tend to elicit various kinds of responses from followers who, on the one hand, engage (purposely or not) in memorial activity and, on the other hand, also perpetuate Yugoslavia’s digital afterlife. Overall, the page and user responses are frequently nostalgic in that the past is romanticized and affectively remembered, but it is also used to proactively focus on and frame the present. The combination of admin and user activity gives the page its afterlife quality: the circulated Yugoslav iconography, re-presencings of events and (images of) people are vehicles used to externalize user affect. The page and numerous posts feature as a space where various images attain a living quality. In the communicative sequence of posting a photo and in users’ reaction to it, the person long since dead becomes alive in a way a trigger of social and commemorative action. The miscellaneous nature of the posts, their disregard for historical chronicity, and their tendency to emphasize anniversaries endow the page with an aura of process, through which the past becomes enculturated into the present. The present, via user activity, becomes entangled in continual reassessment of what was, what should have been, and what is (not and no more). As one user noted: “Nisam KAFKA ali osjećam proces. [I’m no KAFKA, but I can feel the process]” (SFR Yugoslavija (1)). This post indicates that some users are aware that their experience of the past is framed by a specific medium and are able to reflect on that fact in a witty and creative manner. Some pages offer an even more personalized virtual presentation of their respective personae of interest. A number of Facebook pages dedicated to Marshal Tito, for instance, take a similar approach in terms of managing content. They may differ in scope, but they tend to share enough fascination with the historical figure to engage in media archaeology and archiving, which results in numerous posts containing audiovisual material. What is similar across a number of Tito’s

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profiles is that none seems to be a proper “personal” profile; they seem to be deliberately impersonal because they do not engage in creating profound timeline of Tito’s life. Tito’s Facebook profiles can be contrasted to the Facebook presence of Henio Zytomirski and the Warsaw Uprising, analyzed by Dieter de Bruyn (2010), or an interesting project by the Slovenian Museum of Contemporary History (a state institution that uses social media to promote its activities), which set up a fictional personal page of Elizabeta Juta Kranjec, guided by the question of what would people have written on social media during the Great War (Elizabeta Juta Kranjec). Elizabeta’s Facebook timeline presents a person who lived in Slovenia during World War I and traces her life from birth until 1916. Her life “resumes” in 2014 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Great War, and she shares, one hundred years later, her thoughts, fears, and photos with her “friends” in 2014. In terms of digital afterlife, this offers a particularly interesting case: one is invited to befriend a person from an experientially inaccessible time, a person who should be no longer here.⁶ Tito’s profiles, however, tend to have little educative agenda and tend instead to narrow the divide between nostalgia and the critique of the present. The use of Tito as historical figure is still in many respects based on historical facts, excerpts from his speeches, video material, and photographs. However, the interpretive framework that would give a user the chance to use the profile as a reliable historical resource, such as Elizabeta’s, for example, is missing. What the user encounters most often are photos and excerpts from Tito’s real life (see, for instance, Titomanija, Facebook). The photo itself is always already a decontextualized fragment of time, but when re-contextualized on a Facebook page, the historical burden attains a different quality. The photo no longer serves just as a historical record but as a re-virtualization of the historical figure as part of a particular Facebook page. Tito’s digital afterlife opens up to users a rich selection of partial and decontextualized audiovisuals that, as they pop up on a user’s timeline, come to represent Tito’s activity. Historical partialities, inaccuracies, or fallacies, however, are characteristic of such afterlives and contribute to their overall effectiveness and are often framed in

 In its mission statement, the project makes clear that Elizabeta is a historical construct, but there is more: such fictional profiles serve as excellent examples of the culture of the past. The past becomes viral and personal, we click into it and it pops up on our timelines. In the case of Elizabeta, this is all the more convincing because the strategy behind it involves “Three colleagues [who] develop a script, while a WWI specialist historian checks and chronologically situates it before posting. The data, thus, is credible” (in conversation with Kaja Širok,  July ). Elizabeta’s digital afterlife thus serves as an educational tool with the goal of bringing the topic and the museums closer to the public.

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nostalgic treatment of the past. As such they are imbued with strong affect, leading to the glorification of the Yugoslav socialist past. Both admins and users tends to engage in nostalgic expressionism, in what could be termed “Yugo-schmerz,” not only to idly wax nostalgic about bygones, reminiscing about the good old days and about how everything was better “back then,” but also to express discontent with the present. For example, the recent floods in Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia proved to be a massive mobilizing factor across the former Yugoslavia, substantially supported via social media, also on the Josip Broz Tito profile and a number of other Yugoslavia-related Facebook pages. As Tanja Petrović notes in relation to Yugonostalgia, in a decidedly offline context: The fact that this massive and effective mobilization of citizens is largely framed through references to socialist Yugoslavia signals that Yugonostalgia is not a comforting, consumption-driven mechanism that ideologically freezes post-socialist subjects in an idealized past. On the contrary, the “emergence of Yugoslavia from the floods” reveals citizens’ desire for forms of agency, autonomy, and morality that would provide an alternative to the extremely restricted horizons of possibility, limited by the paralyzing synergy between local ethno-nationalisms and global economic exhaustion (Petrović 2014).

Following Petrović, it can be argued that nostalgia and agency are so closely intertwined that it is impossible to talk about one without another. In the context of social media, this conjunction of agency and nostalgia is made possible thanks to the technological affordances of social media to create a cyberplace of memory. A page dedicated to the memory of Tito or Yugoslavia, for example, is always part of wider sociocultural and political frameworks. This is particularly relevant in the context of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, which left many people with a life’s worth of illegitimate pasts. In the process of transitioning between the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav eras (see Buden 2012), fending off the socialist Yugoslav past rendered numerous biographies irrelevant, but through social media (among other things), the country never really became a thing of the past. In the attempt to reaffirm personal dignity, such activities reveal that digital ghosts in social media do in fact have very real-life consequences. In the realm of digital ghostliness, pages dedicated to pop culture icons, such as musicians and actors, are less politically burdened but similar in their ambitions, strategies, and activities. Overall, the pop culture and frequently consumerist social media activities are far more common and widespread than the political cases described above. However, the situation in post-Yugoslavia is specific because of the corollaries involving the collapse of the country. The nationalization of pop culture productions resulted in the fragmentation of the common market and, importantly, of pop culture preferences. Pop culture, in other words, was highly contaminated by politics. Musical tastes and preferences be-

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came problematic in two ways. Synchronically, popular music functioned as a marker of and outlet for expressing national allegiance so that listening to “wrong” music was seen as a form of political misalignment, and diachronically, exhibiting a preference for Yugoslav popular music after 1991 tended to be understood as part of unproductive Yugonostalgia. In this view, pop culture preferences and choices easily become politically charged. Although the situation has changed considerably since 1991, a certain legacy of national purification through popular music remains intact. To an important extent, it is also the digital ghosts of Yugoslavia in social media that transgress the exclusivist and chauvinist politics and help transform its detrimental effects in relation to the pop culture heritage and individual biographies. As a formative “genre” for many Yugoslavs (see Hofman 2013), Yugoslav pop and rock throughout the 1980s was seen as the last common identity platform to defy the nationalization of republican political elites (Stanković 2001). During the 1990s, resurgent Yugoslav rock became an important marker of the rejection of cultural nationalization, with many, but not all, big names of Yu-rock taking a clear anti-war position in the Yugoslav wars. I remember in 1998 when I first found a website dedicated to Ekatarina Velika (EKV), arguably one of the most influential Yugoslavian rock bands. The site became a source of band information, lyrics, and discography, but it was eventually taken down. A decade or so later, Facebook replaced “classic websites” and hosted several band pages, and although all the EKV band members had long since passed away by the time Facebook became popular, it also became a place where they found their digital afterlife. Today, EKV band members Bojan Pečar, Milan Mladenović, and Margita Stefanović all have more than one Facebook page or a Facebook community dedicated to them. The personal pages operate much like Tito’s, with anonymous users assuming the identity of individual band member. Through these users, who engage in collecting, posting, and sharing vast amounts of band member photos, music videos from YouTube, and details of their lives, the “original” band members continue to live in their fans’ hearts. The lives of these digital ghosts serve as a vehicle for the continued popularization of EKV music, for enhancing and promoting the mythic or even divine dimensions of the band and its members. This aspect is apparent on Margita Magi Stefanović’s Facebook page in the post made by the administrator, who quotes Massimo Savić, another legend of Yugoslav pop rock.⁷

 Partial translation: “I am glad to see that even today his cult is alive. […] Today, I rarely see authors such as Milan, such openness. People who collaborate today are on too many ego trips. […] Cooperation was crucial back then. We took brotherhood and unity literally. We lived it. To

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Fig. 2

Endless streams of images, often shared between different pages, contribute to the visual re-presencing of EKV band members, while music videos continually re-presence their sound and vision. The music and the band thus continue to live among fans and potential fans to an extent previously impossible. The “identity theft” endows the musicians with a ghostly life that surpasses by far the “mere” collecting of music records, posters, photos, and the like that characterized analog fandom. These memorial pages in their living quality provide more than a simple space for the promulgation of pop culture memory, musical heritage, and historical information about the band. The band members’ multiple digital afterlives and the spaces they carve out in DME also open up spaces for users and admins to incorporate affectively the pop culture heritage into their present day lives. One of the Margita Stefanović pages at one point posted a series of excerpts from a biography of the band’s keyboard player. In addition to the

us, this was no slogan. We were making music, socializing, partying in this way […] A truly wonderful time, I’d never exchange it for anything.”

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lively photo stream featuring Stefanović and other band members, this significantly contributes to the timeline of her life with which users can react and interact and thus keep the ghost of Stefanović alive. The post above (Fig. 2) reveals perhaps most clearly the paradox of the digital afterlife of such pages:⁸ The answers to Magi’s question reveal affective responses to the digital postpresence, which comes across in content and, given the rather limited expressiveness of text, in typos, style, the use of capital letters, and punctuation. Perhaps it is most disconcerting to see, despite knowing this is not Stefanović herself responding: “Magi continues to live through your memories, thank you, dear friends” (Margita Magi Stefanovic). Finally, I would like to discuss an event from 2 July 2011, when Olivera Marković, a Yugoslav and Serbian actress and singer (an interpreter of Russian romantic songs), passed away. When I logged onto my Facebook account that same evening, in a routine practice that could be termed “hovering attention,” I started browsing through my newsfeed and came upon a following report posted by “SFR Jugoslavija – SFR Yugoslavia”: ETERNAL GLORY AND MANY THANKS TO THE GREAT DIVA OF YUGOSLAV THEATRE. […] OLIVERA MARKOVIĆ – DOVIĐENJA DRUŽE DOVIĐENJA (1973) IN MEMORIAM […] After a long and difficult illness the diva of Serbian and Yugoslav theatre passed away in Belgrade, 2 July at the age of 87, the National Theatre, Belgrade reported (SFR Jugoslavija – SFR Yugoslavia (1)).

Before I realized it, I was involved in an act of co-creative, on-the-fly commemoration. As I was browsing through the posts and the comments, I was witnessing a digital memorial in the making. Within hours, over 70 people expressed their condolences in short comments, and 245 people “liked” the news.⁹ The post contained a short notice of Mrs. Marković passing away and a link to a music video of her song, “Doviđenja, druže, doviđenja” [Goodbye, Comrade, Goodbye] on YouTube (cumcaki). The posts that followed were largely unrelated. In the end, the memorial became a multi-vocal space of intimate and individualized expressions of grief. The assembly of voices is a key contributor to the for-

 Margita: What is your dearest memory of Magi? / “To see her on stage […] she was one of a kind” / “I believe you, the rest is music.” / “Memory of her smiling while playing just before she died […] and some stuff she left behind […] tears just burst out.” / There is one recording where she reveals she had an ideal ear for music […] that’s what I remember her for, the great talent.”  The issue of users being forced to “like” bad news is apparently part of Facebook’s “no-offence policy” because the absence of the “dislike” button prevents people from expressing disagreement or a negative stance. Paradoxically, this can lead to cases like this one, in which the user just has to “like” the bad news if she wants to participate in the on-the-fly collectivity.

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mation of co-creative and affective memorial and commemorative spaces. Judging from her Facebook page (Olivera Marković),¹⁰ it is possible that it was conceived, unintentionally perhaps, as a memorial when Mrs. Marković was still alive. An “obituary in the making” soon enough became a place of commemoration. Although it is obvious that the actress herself did not manage the profile (at least not at the time of her death), people still tended to respond to it and interact with it in a very personal manner. Some of the users addressed her directly: “Dear Olivera, I’m glad to communicate with you at least this way. I love your songs, especially “Ja o proslosti ne mislim vise” [I no longer think about the past], and you’re also a great artist of theater. With some delay: HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND MAY YOU BE HEALTHY THROUGH WHAT GOD HAS GRANTED YOU” (Olivera Marković). This comment is particularly interesting because the user refers to the medium of communication: since she cannot meet her idol in person, the user finds it adequate to communicate with Mrs. Marković’s digital self. However, on 2 July 2010, “Olivera Marković” edited her “Personal Information” and “Location” to include the date of her death and location, Belgrade, Serbia. Profile activity boomed after Vesna Miletić posted “RIP Olivera! :(“ ((Olivera Marković)). This was followed by a string of posts: “I thank her for wonderful roles and songs. She enriched our lives […] it’s always difficult to say goodbye to a friend. 2 hours ago; in Slo [Slovenia] we also loved you and admired you […] find your peace of mind somewhere there among the stars, where we’ll meet again […] condolences to family and friends 7 hours ago; Olivera Marković ETERNAL GLORY to her!!!” ((Olivera Marković)). What is particularly interesting in terms of digital memories and memorials is the apparent afterlife activity on the part of Mrs. Marković, who posted a link about her passing away. This cast the profile into the postmortem phase. Thereafter, users replied to Olivera but addressed her in third person: “Hvala joj za predivne uloge i pesme. Ona je obogatila nas zivot… uvek je tesko kada se oprastate sa prijateljima 02 July at 21:16”) [“I thank her for her wonderful roles and songs. She has enriched our life […] it’s always difficult to say goodbye to a friend”] ((Olivera Marković)). Administered by another person, the structure of the page (personal photograph, real name, personal, first-person addresses) consequently shifted the understanding of the afterlife presence of a person. It seems all activity ended on 4 July 2011, meaning that the active life of the profile stopped very soon after Marković’s death, with the last post announcing the date of her funeral. Four

 Within hours of establishing the profile, the number of people who “liked” it grew from below , to ,.

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years later the three existing Olivera Marković profiles have very little recorded activity but are still eerily present on Facebook. It seems the end of the profile’s activity adds to the eeriness, while other post-mortem profiles, whose personae have migrated deeper into the imagination of pop culture or political icons, tend to assume a more coherent afterlife.

Conclusion Despite the declining activity of the pages discussed in the last section, they nevertheless remain a double record of a time: both of the past and of the moment or period in which they were active. This applies also to other interventions on Facebook, where the past becomes virtualized in a radically different present both politically and culturally. The interlocking of the socialist pop culture past, which rarely becomes a part of official cultural heritage policies, and the post-socialist present, which in Buden’s argument is denied epochality (Buden 2012, 39, 42), is to an important extent enacted by “digital ghosts.” It also resides in the process of creating digital afterlives of the country, its political leader, and pop culture icons, which are often co-created and circulated as carriers of values and meanings and as triggers of action. From the perspective of co-creation, such collaborative endeavors serve the purpose of creating a joint audio-visualization of the past beyond the constraints of either historiography or fiction. Through interactions and participation in a collaborative practice of bringing the past into the present, people engaged in such activities are effectively weaving together an unsolicited vision of the past. The Yugoslav past as re-presenced in certain Facebook pages radically and in a postmortem manner informs how we can make sense of the present. Such activities enable the re-presencing of completely different (ideas about) values, memories, and realities connected to the socialist Yugoslav past; furthermore, the mere presence of such interventions demystifies the demonized past. Engagement in such commemorative activities on social media, therefore, opens the space to articulate affectively a claim to the validity of individual, intimate memories that were framed after 1991 in an exclusively negative light. Using dead people to deal with the past and present is a widespread way, at least in post-Yugoslav contexts, of tackling the uneasiness with memory and transience in DME. Deceased individuals are no longer present to raise their voice in protest; therefore, their personae – including the historical and pop culture baggage associated with them – can be freely used as symbolic vessels in acts of unpremeditated memory and even co-historicity (Pogačar 2014). However, when ordinary Facebook users use such a persona (whether it is a politician, a

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pop culture icon, or a country), their motives and aspirations become enhanced by and channeled through the assumed and presumed symbolic luggage. Such a fusion of the intimate and the public, of the biographical and the historical, in fact endows passing away and the afterlife with the capacity to articulate a view of the past and the present. In post-Yugoslavia, this becomes particularly relevant with regard to the individual and intimate attempts to make sense of the post-socialist transition and war-torn history and to endow individual biographies with a sense of normalcy. Moreover, such counter-memorial interventions in the digital afterlife can be seen as acts of resistance to denying epochality to the post-socialist condition. Therefore, taking recourse to the personae of politicians and celebrities can be understood as a way to resist self-marginalization within a broader perspective of making individual histories constitutive and consistent parts of each post-Yugoslav’s present.

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Notes on Contributors Damir Arsenijević is a literary theorist and psychoanalyst in training. He is a Leverhulme Fellow at De Montfort University, Leicester (UK), leading the project “Love after Genocide.” At Tuzla University, he is an Associate Professor of Critical and Literary Theory and Gender Studies. He founded the Psychoanalytic Seminar Tuzla and set up the artistic theoretical working group “Jokes, War, and Genocide.” In his work, he examines and intervenes into the unconscious of war and genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His most recent book, Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Fight for the Commons is a collection of essays on the 2014 Bosnian protests and plenums. Vlad Beronja is an independent scholar. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages & Literatures from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where he has taught courses on exile literature, visual culture, and popular music from the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans. His research has been generously funded by the ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in East European Studies, the Rackham Graduate School (University of Michigan), and the IREX IARO Fellowship (Title VIII grant). Vladimir Biti is Professor of South Slav Literatures and Cultures at the Faculty for Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna. Author of eight books, Literatur- und Kulturtheorie: Ein Handbuch gegenwärtiger Begriffe (2001) among others, he has also edited or co-edited six books as well as published over one hundred articles in a wide range of international journals and edited volumes. Co-editor of arcadia: Journal of Literary Culture and member of the editorial board of several international journals, including Journal of Literary Theory, Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, Primerjalna književnost and Advances in Literary Studies among others. Since 2007, he has been a member of Academia Europaea. Nikola Dedić is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade where he teaches history of art. His books include: Utopijski prostori umetnosti i teorije posle 1960. [Utopian Spaces of Art and Theory after 1960] (2009), Ka radikalnoj kritici ideologije: od socijalizma ka postsocijalizmu [Towards A Radical Critique of Ideology: From Socialism to Post-Socialism] (2009), Trijumf savremene umetnosti [The Triumph of Contemporary Art] with Miško Šuvaković and Ješa Denegri (2010), Niže nego ljudski: Srđan Đile Marković i underground figuracija [Less than Human: Srđan Đile Marković and Underground Figuration] (2011), and

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Slika u doba medija: Dragomir Ugren [Painting in the Age of Media: Dragomir Ugren] (2011). Ajla Demiragić earned her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Sarajevo (2015). She currently teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Sarajevo. Her current areas of research include contemporary Bosnian women’s writing, war fiction, narratology, and feminist theory. She has published a number of works on contemporary narrative and feminist theory. Miranda Jakiša is Professor of South and East Slavic Literatures at Humboldt University Berlin. She teaches Slavic literatures of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, post-dramatic theater and (Yugoslav) film. Her current research interests focus on the theater and literature of dissent, partisan strategies in the arts, performative interventions, and the aesthetics of uprising. She is author of Bosnientexte (2009) and recently co-edited (with Nikica Gilić) Partisans in Yugoslavia. Literature, Film and Visual Culture (2015). Tatjana Jukić is Professor of English Literature in the Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. She also teaches in the doctoral programs of Comparative Literature and Croatian Language and Literature. In addition to two books – Revolucija i melankolija. Granice pamćenja hrvatske književnosti [Revolution and Melancholia. Limits of Literary Memory] (2011), and Zazor, nadzor, sviđanje. Dodiri književnog i vizualnog u britanskom devetnaestom stoljeću [Liking, Dislike, Supervision. Literature and the Visual in Victorian Britain] (2002) – she has published articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, psychoanalysis, film and philosophy. Jukić is currently the Principal Investigator on the research project “A Cultural History of Capitalism: Britain, America, Croatia” and is completing a book provisionally titled The Invention of Masochism. Jasmina Husanović is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Tuzla (Bosnia and Herzegovina). She earned her PhD in 2003 at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (UK) with the thesis entitled “Recasting Political Community and Emancipatory Politics: Reflections on Bosnia.” Her interests are in cultural and political theory and praxis dealing with the politics of witnessing, governance of life, culture of trauma and emancipatory politics, with a focus on intersecting public spaces of cultural and knowledge production (art, education, activism). She has published widely on these themes in the post-Yugoslav region and internationally.

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Tomislav Pletenac is Professor of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Zagreb. He teaches Theories in Cultural Anthropology, Ethnographies of Popular Culture, Postcolonialism, and Gender and Cultures of Postsocialism. He is a co-author of two books with Boris Perić: Fantastična bića Istre i Kvarnera [Fantastical Creatures of Istria and Kvarner] (2008) and Zemlja iza šume. Vampirski mit u književnosti i na filmu [Land Beyond the Forest: Vampire Myth in Popular Culture and Literature] (2015). His main interests are postcolonial theory, theoretical psychoanalysis, studies of nationalism, and popular culture. Martin Pogačar is a researcher at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is interested in popular culture and memory, memory and technology, digital memory, and post-socialism. His publications include: “Digital Heritage: Co-historicity and the Multicultural Heritage of Former Yugoslavia” in Dve domovini 39 (2014, 111– 124); “Vernacular Interventions in Post-socialist Digital Media: Historical Re-presences and Diversities from Slovenian Perspective” in Europe and Media: The History on the Web: France, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Slovenia, Spain. (2013, 89 – 132); “Empowering Digital Memorials: Post-Yugoslav Dealings with Socialist Past” in Memory and Meaning: Digital Differences. (2013, 99 – 114). Antje Postema is a Cultural and Area Studies PhD candidate in the Slavic Languages and Literatures Department at the University of Chicago. Her research analyzes how fiction and nonfiction narratives, filmic representations, and memorial rituals address and shape traumatic legacies of war in the former Yugoslavia. In her dissertation, “Claimed Experience: Literature, Film, and the Shaping of Social Memory After Trauma in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” she locates fictional texts that critically intervene in Bosnia’s contemporary memorial landscape. Her archival fieldwork has been funded by Fulbright-Hays and Title VIII ACTR/ACCELS grants. She co-founded the University of Chicago’s Interdisciplinary Memory and Trauma Workshop. At her home institution, she regularly teaches a variety of Russian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language and culture courses. Sanja Potkonjak is Assistant Professor of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Zagreb, where she is also co-chair of the PhD program. She teaches Introduction to Feminist Anthropology, Postcolonialism and Gender, and Methodology of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology. She is editor-in-chief of Etnološka tribina, the journal of Croatian Ethnological Society, co-founder and member of an editorial board of the hed-biblioteka, an online book series of the Croatian Ethnological

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Society as well as a member of the editorial board of Studia ethnologica Croatica, the journal of the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology. She is the author of the recently published book Teren za etnologe početnike [Fieldwork for Apprentice Ethnographers] (2014). Guido Snel is a Lecturer in Modern European Literatures in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He has written extensively on the literatures of contemporary Central and South-Eastern Europe. He is also a prolific translator (Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian into Dutch, work by Krleža, Crnjanski, Drndić, Tišma, Mehmedinović) and a novelist (most recently Naar Istanbul, a literary travelogue about Istanbul as the capital of South-Eastern Europe). Stijn Vervaet is a Marie Curie postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University, where he works on the project “Yugoslavia Revisited: Post-Yugoslav Literature and Art as Curators of the Socialist Past”. He holds a PhD in East European Languages and Cultures from Ghent University (2007). He is the author of a book on the construction of national identities in Bosnia and Herzegovina under AustroHungarian rule, Centar i periferija u Austro-Ugarskoj [Center and Periphery in Austria-Hungary] (2013). Apart from the literature and cultural history of Habsburg Bosnia, he has published on the representation of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s in contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian literature and comics. He is currently writing a monograph on the memory of the Holocaust in (post‐) Yugoslav fiction. Sari Wastell is a Legal Anthropologist and lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, with long-standing interests in “transitional justice,” genocide studies, war crimes trials and cultural production before, during, and after mass atrocity. She was previously trained as an actress and worked extensively in theater and film production before re-training as an international and comparative criminologist and legal anthropologist. Her most recent project, “Bosnian Bones, Spanish Ghosts: Transitional Justice and the Legal Shaping of Memory” included a work package exploring the interlocutions between law and art in post-conflict societies and inspired her participation in this publication. She is hugely indebted to the ERC (European Research Council) for their support of her endeavors over the previous five years. Vladimir Zorić studied at the University of Belgrade and the University of Nottingham (PhD, 2006) where he currently teaches South Slav Cultural History, Literature, and Film. The fulcrum of his research is in literary theory and comparative

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literature with a strong focus on the political and cultural nexus such as exile and empire. He is the author of the book Kiš, legenda i priča [Kiš, Legend and Narrative] (2005) and is presently preparing a monograph about the rhetoric of exile in law, literature, and the humanities. He also published several comparative essays on Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav writers on the cultural memory of Yugoslavia and Central Europe.

List of Illustrations “Read and Remember”: Ozren Kebo’s Sarajevo for Beginners as Ironic Guidebook and Narrative Memorial: Fig. 1 Collage accompanying Sarajevo for Beginners columns in BH Dani (1994); top: TRIO “Sarajevo 1992: Summer” (poster); bottom: Malik sleepwalking (film poster for Emir Kusturica’s When Father Was Away on Business [1985]); reproduced courtesy of Ozren Kebo. Art and Craft of Memory: Rememorialization Practices in Post-Socialist Croatia: Fig. 1 Bandaging the Wounded; documentation of Siniša Labrović’s performance; reproduced courtesy of the artist. Fig. 2 “Dotršćina” memorial site; vandalized monument and forest; photograph by Sandra Vitaljić; reproduced courtesy of the artist. Fig. 3 The Sava river bank close to Sisak; un-memorialized site of killings during the Homeland War in the 1990s; photograph by Sandra Vitaljić; reproduced courtesy of the artist. Intersecting Memories in Post-Yugoslav Fiction: The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s through the Lens of the Holocaust: Fig. 1 Book cover April in Berlin; reproduced courtesy of publisher Fraktura. Yugoslavia in Post-Yugoslav Artistic Practices. Or: Art as …: Fig. 1 Vladimir Miladinović, Rendered History; series of drawings; ink wash on paper; various dimensions; 2012-ongoing; reproduced courtesy of the artist. Fig. 2 Vladimir Miladinović, Rendered History; series of drawings; ink wash on paper; various dimensions; 2012-ongoing; reproduced courtesy of the artist. Fig. 3 Vladimir Miladinović, Rendered History; series of drawings; ink wash on paper; various dimensions; 2012-ongoing; reproduced courtesy of the artist.

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List of Illustrations

Small Town as the Scene of Memory Encounter: Portraits and Commemorations of Radomir Konstantinović: Fig. 1

A Philosopher above the Small Town; screenshot (dir. N. Zorić, 2012); reproduced courtesy of RTV Vojvodina. Fig. 2 A Philosopher above the Small Town; screenshot (dir. N. Zorić, 2012); reproduced courtesy of RTV Vojvodina. Fig. 3 Commemorative plaque in Subotica; photograph Milica Konstantinović; reproduced courtesy of Milica Konstantinović. Fig. 4 Death of Descartes; front page; photograph Dušan Milovanović (1983); reproduced courtesy of Dušan Milovanović. Fig. 5 Bust of Radomir Konstantinović; bronze; Milica Konstantinović (2008); reproduced courtesy of Milica Konstantinović. Fig. 6 Portrait “Reflections of Radomir Konstantinović”; acrylic on canvas; Predrag Nešković (1973); reproduced courtesy of Predrag Nešković. Fig. 7 Portrait; tempera; Mirza Ibrahimpašić (2003); reproduced courtesy of Mirza Ibrahimpašić. Fig. 8 Portrait; pastel and multimedia techniques; Teodora-Jelena Stošić; reproduced courtesy of Teodora-Jelena Stošić. Fig. 9 Danas front page; special supplement (27– 28 October 2012); reproduced courtesy of Danas. Fig. 10 Portrait; Unknown author; photo-archive of Milica Konstantinović. Fig. 11 Portrait; photo Dušan Milovanović; reproduced courtesy of Dušan Milovanović. Recollecting an Alternative Modernity: Aleksandar Zograf’s Flea Market Archaeologies Fig. 1 Page from “The Sixties”; Multitudes and Myriads (2005); reproduced courtesy of Aleksandar Zograf. Fig. 2 Detail from “Postcard from Pančevo”; Second Hand World (2009); reproduced courtesy of Aleksandar Zograf. Fig. 3 Detail from “Gamzigrad”; Multitudes and Myriads (2005); reproduced courtesy of Aleksandar Zograf. Fig. 4 Detail from “Postcard from Pančevo”; Second Hand World (2009); reproduced courtesy of Aleksandar Zograf. Fig. 5 Detail from “Sarajevo”; Multitudes and Myriads (2005); reproduced courtesy of Aleksandar Zograf.

List of Illustrations

309

Fig. 6 Detail from “Future from the Past”; Multitudes and Myriads (2005); reproduced courtesy of Aleksandar Zograf. Fig. 7 Detail from “Children Write to Tito”; Second Hand World (2009); reproduced courtesy of Aleksandar Zograf. Digital Afterlife: Ex-Yugoslav Pop Culture Icons and Social Media: Fig. 1 Responses to video “Ladarice – Od Vardara pa do Triglava” (mejerhold); screenshot; YouTube; public domain. Fig. 2 Responses to Margita Magi Stefanović page; screenshot; Facebook; public domain.

Index of Names Adorno, Theodor 26, 109, 177, 187 Agamben, Giorgio 107 f., 109, 149–151, 270 f. Andrić, Ivo 14, 46 f., 115, 197–198 Arendt, Hannah 48, 150, 163 Arsenijević, Damir 14–15, 111, 129–130 f, 261, 263–266, 275 Assmann, Aleida 7, 26, 141, 216, 218–220, 232, 241–242 f., 249 f., 279 Badiou, Alain 151, 157 Bago, Ivana 267 Barthes, Roland 75, 156 f., 201, 227, 230, 232 Bašeskija, Mula Mustafa 42 Bašić, Adisa 268 Bazdulj Hubijar, Nura 12, 132–133 Bechdel, Alison 243 Benjamin, Walter 6, 41, 48, 54, 57, 60, 65, 67, 108, 121 f., 132 f., 206, 241, 243– 244, 246, 248 bet-El, Ilana 2, 241 f. Bobić, Miloš 14, 193–194 Borges, Jorge Luis 194, 201–202 f. Boym, Svetlana 172, Brecht, Berthold 86, 112, 114–115 Buden, Boris 3, 5, 129 f., 137–138 f., 172– 173, 182, 187–188, 279, 282, 287, 292, 297 Butler, Judith 106, 109, 114, 121 Caruth, Cathy 8, 39 f. Chatterjee, Partha 274–275 f. Chute, Hillary 240 f., 242–243 Connerton, Paul 67–69, 75 Crtalić, Marijan 1 De Certeau, Michel 49, 75 Deleuze, Gilles 154–155 f., 157–159, 161– 162, 165, 178 Derrida, Jacques 153, 155, 159–161, 173 Drndić, Daša 1, 7, 10, 14, 33, 100, 116–121, 123, 195, 200–201, 204 Drumbl, Mark A. 262–263 Duffield, Mark 261 Duraković, Ferida 268

Erll, Astrid 2, 6, 26–27, 38, 100 f., 210, 247, 279 Ette, Ottmar 8, 45–48, 54–55 Felman, Shoshana 113, 263 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 86 f., 89, 91 Ford, John 164–166 Foucault, Michel 1, 173 Freud, Sigmund 39 f., 109 f., 158, 161 Frljić, Oliver 1, 9, 83–89, 92–93 Gardner, Ava 164–166 Gardner, Jared 242–243 Goankar, Dilip Parameshwar Groensteen, Thierry 245 Grubić, Igor 1

244–245

Habermas, Jürgen 65, 175 Halbwachs, Maurice 49, 68, 70, 217–218 Handke, Peter 85, 94 Hemon, Aleksandar 1, 54, 131, 195, 200– 201, 204 Hirsch, Marianne 5–6, 11, 41, 66–67, 69, 71, 78 Horkheimer, Max 184–185 Horozović, Irfan 7, 10, 100, 103–108, 110– 111, 116, 121 –122 Hribar, Hrvoje 12, 151–166 Husanović, Jasmina 129–131, 251 f., 259, 263–264, 269–270, 272 Hutcheon, Linda 26, 240 f. Huyssen, Andreas 112 f., 246, 279 Ibrahimpašić, Mirza 222, 224–225, 229 Ilić, Saša 1, 7, 10, 100, 110–111, 112 f., 122 Jansen, Stef 250 f. Jergović, Miljenko 24 f., 194 Joyce, James 194–195, 202–203, 205 Kaldor, Mary 261 Katchor, Ben 243 Kebo, Ozren 7, 23–24, 26–27, 30–43 Kelly, Grace 164–166

312

Index of Names

Kiš, Danilo 14, 33, 94, 108, 116, 118, 194– 195, 197, 199–206, 210, 218, 229 Kleist, Heinrich von 86, 105–106 Kluge, Alexander 175–177 Konstantinović, Milica 213, 218, 222–223 Konstantinović, Radomir 14–15, 107, 209–234 Kranjec, Elizabeta Juta 291 Kreho, Dinko 268 Kristeva, Julia 49, 154 f., 272 f. Krleža, Miroslav 14, 197, 199, 200, 221 Kusturica, Emir 28–29 Labrović, Siniša 1, 9, 66–67, 70–75, 79–80 Lacan, Jacques 8, 12, 39 f., 46 f., 154, 156 Lachmann, Renate 26, 94, 195, 202 f. Lehmann, Hans-Thies 83–84, 87–88, 95 Levi, Pavle 24 f., 157 f., 183 Levi, Primo 107 Levinas, Emmanuel 110, 114 Lyotard, Jean-François 111, 113–114 Majača, Antonia 267 Mani, Rama 274 f. Marković, Ante 135 f. Marković, Olivera 295–297 Marx, Karl 157, 160–161, 175, 272 McEvoy, Kieran 259 Mehmedinović, Semezdin 24 f., 194 Miladinović, Vladimir 1, 177–181 Milovanović, Dušan 221–223, 230–233 Monument Group 2, 13, 172, 265–266, 269, 272 Negt, Oskar 175–176 Nešković, Predrag 222–224 Nietzsche, Friedrich 48, 284 Nora, Pierre 6, 214, 217 Oraić-Tolić, Dubravka Osiel, Mark 273

Rancière, Jacques 9, 88, 93, 174 f, 273 Rigney, Ann 2–3, 6, 15, 65–67, 69–70, 100 f., 130, 210, 215 Ristić, Ljubiša 92–93 Rothberg, Michael 7, 10, 99–101, 119–121 Šamić, Jasmina 12, 132, 134–137 Sartre, Jean-Paul 232 Šehabović, Šejla 131 f., 264, 269 Šejka, Leonid 14, 194, 202, 206, 238, 240 Sekulić, Dubravka 13, 186 Sekulić, Srđan 93 Seyhan, Azade 8, 43, 46, 48–49 Sontag, Susan 121 Spiegelman, Art 15, 243 Stanišić, Saša 7–8, 46 f., 49–50, 52–55, 62 Stefanović, Margita Magi 293–295 Stefanovski, Goran 196–197 Stošić, Teodora Jelena 222, 225–226, 234 Šunjić, Marsela 11–12, 131, 138–145 Šuvaković, Miško 2, 169–170 Tito, Josip Broz 3–4, 28, 49, 101, 113, 133, 139, 141, 143, 237, 248, 254, 256, 284, 286, 289–293 Tomić, Ante 153–154 Tomić, Milica 1, 184 Toskić, Cecilia 12, 132–133 Ugrešić, Dubravka 1, 3, 11, 14, 93, 99, 129 f., 139, 193–201, 204–207 Verdery, Katherine 5, 17, 280 Vermehren, Isa 111–113, 115 Vismann, Cornelia 83, 85–86 Vitaljić, Sandra 1, 9, 66–67, 75–80 Vogel, Henriette 105–106

138, 144

Pavičić, Jurica 151 f. Petrović, Tanja 5, 129 f., 130, 137, 140, 144, 170–171, 184, 292 Pickering, Paula M. 260 Prcic, Ismet 7–8, 46 f., 49, 55–58, 62

Wagner, Sarah 270–271 Ware, Chris 243 Wastell, Sari 273 f. Wilson, Richard A 273 Žižek, Slavoj 12, 28 f., 159, 178, 182 Zograf, Aleksandar 2, 15, 237–256