Krauss in Belgrade

I recently attended the opening night of Karl Krauss's play The Last Days of Mankind in the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, a house which still preserves traces of the memory of Europe. That evening, I wrote down on my copy of the playbill the following: "Karl Krauss on the stage! Voice of apocalypse on the boards! Ironist on the public platform! The Last Days of Mankind in Belgrade! This is not a good sign - it might be a first-class theatrical provocation, a doubtful theatrical gesture, a belated literary-theatrical representation of Krauss's discourse of catastrophe".

I witnessed an undoubtedly brave theatrical gesture, a courageous artistic act which stepped out in protest and publicly said the unspoken truth, known by all, about the local war in Yugoslavia. It was only on the stage, in the symbolic space, that Belgrade faced its drastic role in the Yugoslav drama. For a moment I believed that this symbolic redemption might start off that long-delayed wave of final admission of guilt which could at least partly prevent the peace-making hypocrisy of the authorities who now wish to forget the war they themselves caused. Sadly, the hesitant, reserved and very cold reception of this pacifist play demonstrated that even the best in this milieu are not yet ready to openly admit and take upon themselves part of their own blame. It was precisely to such a milieu that Krauss directed his apocalyptic message from the stage: "This play is the blood of your blood... it can be reached by no waking senses, by no living memories". It is only those who have lived through the tragedy of mankind who know, feel and remember that it is not true that you live only once. On the contrary, you never live at all.

Weekend

We are the only people in Europe who work especially much, who are particularly active, on weekends only. We do not accept the ritual signs of Christian humbleness. I recently met a skilled toolworker who regularly goes to work to a factory which hasn't been operating for years. This worker is the typical figure of the new hero of labour who perpetuates "forced vacations". At his imaginary workplace, he concentrates in silence, gathering strength for his smuggling activities. As soon as the weekend comes, he charges for the border, illegally importing satellite dishes in cooperation with Hungarian and Yugoslav customs officials. The border guards are full of understanding, TV equipment is much sought after and expensive here. Nowadays, you can go from Serbia to Europe, and further on, to the rest of the world, only by way of the blunt, imaginary look.

Arts and Crafts

Recently in Vojvodina I met a nurse of genius. Even though she works in one city and lives in another one, she has never been late for work. She shows up on the dot in the local hospital and makes the rounds of her patients in intensive care with a forced vivacity. As she says herself, her task is very delicate: she flirts almost incestuously with her half-alive patients, in order to prepare them for a dignified death. This caring nurse never forgets her patients; in her spare time she makes plastic wreaths for their funerals. Her profitable merchandise is sold all over Vojvodina. Local cemeteries are full of her increasingly colourful handiwork. Even arts and crafts in this place flourish in league with death.

The Energy of Death

Necrophilia is our favourite subject. It is, therefore, not surprising that the "father of the nation", former president of Yugoslavia, academician, writer, philosopher and politician - namely, Dobrica Cosic - got rich on it. Who can understand the spirit of the "celestial people" better than "The Hick", as his supporters call him affectionately. His peasant wit is boundless. His multi-volume novel Time of Death, a veritable Bible of äumadija, sold in the millions, gives voice to the spirit of a people who jealously nurture and almost narcistically guard their suffering. His books truly live on the obsessive energy of death. This funereal thinker has understood most clearly that the energy of destroyed lives and of social catastrophe can be used in its natural, pure, state, just like the energy of the tides, of the sun, or of earthquakes. He is without peer in this. Our necrophiliac thinker prophetically announced, not long ago: "I hate the sea: no mounds, no graves", making his point later on with "The sun is a punishment!" (Dobrica Cosic: Changes, Novi Sad: Dnevnik, 1992, pp.27-29). And, indeed, life here passes in darkness. Only the moon can still warm us.

An Anonymous Letter

Public discourse in Serbia is now in the phase of epistolary exaltation. Its trademark is the anonymous letter. Platonic love for written communication has become unbounded. The gigantic task of making anonymous phone calls has been relegated to the acoustic graveyard of history. The letter has supressed the voice. It is a trendy symbol of the dead time of forms. The rhetorical messages of these letters herald a new creative wave in Serbian writing. The narrative glow of these anonymous epistles, sent to members of the Belgrade Circle like so many deadly arrows, is eternal. Let us take a look at the warm, humane words that a class-conscious Serb man - or woman - sent to Ms Borka Pavicevic.

"You bitch, you were recently in a TV duel with Milja Vujanovic, a proven patriot, and also a proud Serb woman. I wonder how Milja condescended to let you sit in her company, you scum and traitor.

"Milja is a beautiful woman and has two degrees, and what is most important she is an exceptionally smart woman, and what are you? You are a freak seen from the outside, and you are also a freak inside.

"You freak, how dare you behave so impudently. You good for nothing, when Milja asked you if you were Serb, you hissed like a snake and didn't know what you were, and only later you remembered you were supposedly a Yugoslav. You bastard, you are nothing. Everybody who is a traitor is nothing and nobody, a zero. You are a traitor to this country, which evidently isn't yours, but you were paid lots of foreign money to denigrate it, so you have to do it. You bitch, you worked your way into the Serbian theatre in the middle of Belgrade, the Serbian people is paying you, you good for nothing you are eating Serbian bread produced by hard-working Serbian hands, and you betray this same people, so may you choke on every bite of this Serbian bread that you put into your freakish mouth.

"You, you bitch, you and Vida Ognjenovic and Vesna Pesic should have their heads shaved, because that is what the French did after the war with those who collaborated with the fascists, you should be taken to the border with Croatia and kicked in the ass, and Tudjman can feed you Croatian bread, and you three can kiss his ass.

"Death to fascism - freedom to the people.

"P.S. When all this ends one day, and it will surely end with a Serb victory to spite you, then you freak I will come and make you even more freakish".

( The text of this patriotic letter is published in its original version. )

Thinker on the Stage

Finally we have a philosopher of genius in Serbia, too. For his sake only, the international community should introduce a Nobel Prize for wisdom. Who in the world can resist the Dionysian passion of our thinker, who proudly and independently made his way into the deepest chasms of thought? What to say of the philosopher who showed in his authentic, inimitable way that nationalism was the last stadium of humanism? This caring "shepherd of the Serb being" (whose sheep don't seem to be all there!) was forced in Tito's time to gestures of nearly operetta-like self-restraint: "My basic choice in life is humanist, and has nothing to do with nationalism and chauvinism" (Mihajlo Djuric: Experience of the Different. Belgrade: BIGZ, 1994, p. 30). Somewhat later, during preparations for the patriotic war which was supposed to convert little Serbia into a great one, his humanism took on specifically ethnological overtones: ".. so the return to the place of birth is often experienced as practically the only true human liberation". (Op. cit., p. 49). Finally, in the midst of the war, when a nostalgia for the frontlines overtook nearly all Serb intellectuals, our wise man returns deep-somatically to the stadium of the (Serbian) mirror, and says: "... first we must educate the people itself in the national spirit. We must cultivate the consciousness that the national belongs to the sphere of highest human responsibility, that we owe our allegiance and devotion of a special kind to the nation, that national belonging and national feeling are original, primary human characteristics, and that the national interest and the national good enjoy an uncontested advantage and dominance over all other earthly interests and considerations" (Op. cit., p. 117).

These lines fascinate: has anybody formulated a programme of national self-redemption more adroitly than Herr Djuric? Nobody has succeeded in furnishing our nationalist brutality with such a convincing theoretical background and clear philosophical conscience. It is no wonder then that his address to the Second Congress of Serb Intellectuals (Belgrade, 22 April 1994) was greeted with thunderous applause. On that occasion, like Mao Zedong or Gadaffi, he uttered a sentence which has since taken on cult status. "In order to know what we are to do, we should do that which we would wish to know". This sentence worthy of inclusion in any anthology has since become part of the treasure trove of Serbian, and world, wisdom.

The Spanish Word

In a collection of essays by Miguel de Unamuno published in Serbian under the title of Civil War and Peace (Belgrade, 1993), I rediscovered an old word which I had never suspected of being of Spanish origin - race. The long and meandering history of this not-quite-harmless-and-naive word is yet to be written. In Europe, this naturalist term has practically disappeared from the public stage. It can only be found sulking despondently, tamed and filed away, on the dusty shelfs of eugenicists, characterologists and, perhaps, ethnopsychologists, awaiting its new promotion.

With a certain sarcastic boldness which is in contrast with a bad conscience, it was precisely the "Yugoslavs" who resurrected this word in Europe. They had the honour of lexically reviving the dark gifts of our ancestors, to call up a primitive linguistic scene of which the sombre chronicler of the bourgeoisie, the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno, wrote: ".. This nowadays fatal word race - it is of Spanish origin, and means the same thing as line or stripe. You say raza del sol - a ray of sunlight, and a line in weaving is also called raza. Race is, therefore, is a line, a stem. An analogous word is caste. And as these words were first used in cattle-breeding, they still retain a tinge of animality. Racist concepts are often the zoological, if not the zootechnical, notions of cattle-breeding". Who could have expected that we would enter the 21st century in such a powerful animal passion! Cattle corridors are the highways of our future. Through them, we could express our own disaster.

Conquest of the Void

The Veljkovic Pavillion is more than just the name of a cultural institution. In these words, the names of a city, a country and a people are fatally crossed. This wondrous mixture takes place in the ambiguity of their glory and poverty, their rise and fall. These extremes and evident contrasts demand a mixture of praise and criticism, a simultaneous attitude of admiration and contempt.

It should be said, however, that when the sums are totalled for our culture, when the whole history of this Pavillion is taken into account, we arrive at a result which is zero. Wherever we go, and however far we get, we always seem to be returning to the very beginning. We are the victims of idling energy, cultural hostages of re-runs of discontinuity.

The surrealistic gesture of the re-opening of the Veljkovic Pavillion confirms this in an unambiguous, nearly consensual way. Brutally destroyed and completely abandoned, the Pavillion reveals the terrible nature of extermination, it is a model of the time after the catastrophe. Of the shining past of this cultural monument, when it was a virtual mini-Beaubourg of pre-war Belgrade, nothing is left. Barbarically devastated, the Pavillion seems to be a silent document of the annihilated bourgeois tradition, a ghostly view of destroyed traces of modernity. Annulled by primitive external intervention, the Pavillion vegetated in artificial isolation for decades. This abandoned space, this empty stage which in its heroic period absorbed and radiated all the cultural and spiritual energy of its time, now appears vampiric. Today, the Pavillion resembles a miniature Pompeii. Like a natural cataclysm, this destroyed heritage, this buried legacy lives on the energy of its decay. As a hapless venue of absolute non-happening, the Pavillion offers a nearly autobiographical confession of the spiritual regime of the city, the state and the people who liquidated it. The evil spirit of deterrence is the only gift of civilisation, the only cultural bequest, which this conquered void, this cemetery of dead signs, could offer us.

Continued in Issue Two (1-2/1995)

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