Alter Ego: Twenty Confronting Views on the European Experience

European Cultural Foundation | General Editor: Guido Snel

Alter Ego Twenty Confronting Views on the European Experience

SALOMÉ

ALTER EGO

ALTER EGO Twenty Confronting Views on the European Experience

European Cultural Foundation General Editor: Guido Snel

Alter Ego has been realised within the ‘Enlargement of Minds’ action-line of the European Cultural Foundation (www.eurocult.org) that analyzed through art and media work, research and seminars the cultural implications of EU Enlargement. Alter Ego was made possible thanks to the support of the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (www.rj.se), The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.

Cover design: Sabine Mannel/NAP, Amsterdam Lay-out: Het Steen Typografie, Maarssen Cover illustration: ©Péter Zilahy and Tamás Fuchs isbn 90 5356 688 0 nur 658/754 © Salomé – Amsterdam University Press, 2004 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

Table of Contents

Preface – the European Cultural Foundation 7

Foreword – Robert Maclennan 9

A Guide to Alter Ego – Guido Snel 13

1. Beauty and the East 19 A Tale from the Wild East – Goran Stefanovski 21 Luxurious Madness – Jachym Topol 28 Ego with Alter Ego – Emil Tode 35 Me, the Mirror and I – Yuri Andrukhovych 42 An Interview with Myself – David Albahari 48

2. Heimat and its (Dis)contents 53 Dreaming of Friends, Living with Foes – Alesˇ Debeljak 55 The Right to Feel at Home – an interview with Jaak Aaviksoo 61 Heimat – Marlene Streeruwitz 67 The Enlargement Takes Place in the Centre of Europe – an interview with Erhard Busek 69 The Corpse under the Table – an interview with István Eörsi 73

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3. Intimate Geographies 79 A Past Retrieved – an interview with Eva Hoffman 81 In the Reflected Light of the Alter Ego or: The Splendour and Misery of My Identity – Nelly Bekus Goncharova 87 Eurotic I – Saviana Stanescu 95 We Are the Past of Europe – an interview with Andrei Ples¸u 103 Alter (the) Ego – Ademir Arapovic´ 108

4. The Uses of Diversity 115 Nevin Aladag˘’s Alter Egos – Nevin Aladag˘ interviews herself 117 Mother Tongue, Stepmother Tongue – an interview with Abdelkader Benali 123 How European – Péter Zilahy 129 The Point of the Commonality of Cultures – an interview with Sami Zubaida 140 The Saga of the Feel-good Strudel (A Family Apocrypha) – Damir Sˇodan 145

Contributors 153

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Preface

On the verge of the EU’s challenging enlargement by ten new countries, the question of its raison d’être, identity and cohesion has become even more topical, also with respect to its new borders and new neighbours. Europe is more than a single market, a single currency, a set of legal and technical rules. Europe is about memories, mental maps, personal experiences and emotional interpretations. Where does Europe start? Where does it end? Are our commonalities more forceful than our differences? How far does ‘Europeanness’ transcend local and regional feelings of belonging? Alter Ego is a collection of essays and (self-) interviews on the European culture of dissent. It offers to share personal trajectories and reflections on ‘the otherness’, ‘the un-known’. Colourful contributions by free thinkers and artists present a kaleidoscope of self-confrontations on the notion of Europe, a different taste and feeling of Europe. Guido Snel completed a thrilling exercise: He made the contributors enter into dialogue with their Alter Egos, look behind well-defined ideas about identity, interlace real and imaginary borders of Europe. The result is a non-academic but intellectually stimulating exploration of European mind-sets and features. We wish to thank Guido Snel and all contributors to Alter Ego. We also wish to express our gratitude to The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation for its support to the realization of the project.

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Our thanks include the OC&W for its general support to the activities of the European Cultural Foundation that tackle the cultural implications of EU enlargement. Isabelle Schwarz Amsterdam, March 2004 Cultural Policy Development Manager European Cultural Foundation

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Foreword by Robert Maclennan

Two episodes in my own life – although they were separated by half a century – helped me to recognise that Europe is not the mere representation of a geographical or historical reality. Europe is better understood as the emanation of the will of those who sense that they belong to it. (I am not a philosopher but a politician, so any echoes of Schopenhauer in that observation are unintended.) The varied offerings by the contributors to the Alter Ego project, which make up this book, might be read as an emphasis on the diversity of the circumstances from which that will is emergent. Nonetheless, from the book’s method of self-examination by the authors, and from their consequential self-identification, the honest conclusion can be drawn that such a singular will does exist. Readers from within the existing European Union might have assumed that the will is not a cause but a consequence: the consequence of the habit of belonging to the Union. But the reflections contained in this book are not the result of that habit; the contributors are mostly from outside that conditioning political framework. The self-analyses which they present emerge from very different political cultures, but nevertheless they appear to sustain the same conclusion: Europe results from the will of those who recognise that they are part of it. Some of us who are already citizens of the European Union may feel challenged by their reflections to re-examine the springs of our own sense of belonging. Since we do not face an obvious climacteric in the life of the Union which might turn upon the answers we give, such vigorous honesty with ourselves might prove difficult. We human beings find it easier to grumble about others than to admit our own ambivalence. But surely this book will prompt many west Europeans to make the effort. That, too, could be an enriching consequence of the project. Some caveats are required. For a few of the contributors that will which gives Europe its reality is attenuated by a personal sense of alienation such as 9

they might experience in any society. It may be alienation from the crowd, from a generation, even from a current fashion. Some react to encountered social attitudes with disaffection; others anticipate the economic prospects with disappointment. Most of the contributors are unsure whether the easternisation of Europe will weaken or strengthen the will, particularly in the West. And those who have experienced oppression in many governmental guises and lived through revolutions are cautious about prospective political changes. These are aware and reflective people and they are decidedly wary of Utopia, or any idealism. Nor do they make the mistake, properly condemned by the Indian thinker Amartya Sen, of attributing as virtues exclusive to Europe the values of tolerance, democracy, the rule of law and human rights. Europe’s history will be remembered by people from countries contemplating joining the Union. Faced with so many qualifications, how can I continue to assert my initial hypothesis: Europe is the emanation of the will of those who sense that they belong to it? I can do no better than to resort to the method of the book and tell the two tales from my own life to which I alluded at the beginning. In the summer of 2002, I was in Moscow with a small committee of British Parliamentarians to ask questions about the conduct of European Union policy towards Russia. A young member of the Russian Parliament from the Altai province, far to the east and south of Moscow, volunteered an observation which caused me to blink with surprise. ‘We are part of Europe and should be part of the Union,’ he said quite simply. ‘Why?’ I asked innocently. ‘Your aspirations are our aspirations and the boundaries between us cannot stand in the way of that,’ he replied. That affirmation raised more questions than there was opportunity to have them answered, but this book, Alter Ego, has opened my eyes to some of the perceptions which probably lay behind this young man’s remark. The earlier formative experience from my childhood followed a day in the pinewoods of southern Scotland in the company of two keen Polish mushroom hunters. As we crawled through the small plantations in search of delicious saffron milk caps, mindful of their past experience in deep, Silesian forests, and anxious to avoid being helplessly separated, from time to time the exiles called out to each other by name: ‘Inka!’ and the other answering ‘Ivo!’ There was in their sport a ritualistic solemnity about which I questioned them upon our return to Glasgow. Pulling down from a bookcase their treas10

ured copy of the Polish national epic, Pan Tadeusz, by Adam Mickiewicz, my friends took it in turn to translate for me the famous passage describing the mushroom pickers, who ‘with a dance-like motion seemed to range like ghosts in the moonlight.’ That was not quite how it had been in the brushwood that afternoon, but yet it spoke to me. When they had finished, with child-like persistence, I begged for more and asked them at least to begin at the beginning. And so they did. Great was my surprise to hear those opening words of yearning for the lost country of Lithuania. How could this be Poland’s epic, I asked? Perhaps I did not wait for an answer, or maybe my friends had had enough for one day, for I do not remember their explanation. But it was not long afterwards that I pieced together my own understanding that the homeland is not always defined by transient national boundaries. There had been other possible perceptions for me. After all, as a Scottish boy in wartime Britain, cut off from an occupied continent, I had been literally insulated. Even when the hostilities had ended, foreign travel was limited by exiguous monetary allowances, and the family’s exultant dash to Rome was ignominiously ended when the British Embassy angrily paid out for the unaffordable expense of replacing our two blown-out motor car tyres. However, it seems to me that the awareness that the homeland may extend across national frontiers is not learned. It happens. The recognition may be awakened by an image or by an utterance so immediate, so striking in its effect, that all sense of the otherness of the place dissolves. But that seems to be far less common than the retrospective realisation that the barriers of otherness have fallen. What was at first strange becomes a ‘dear green place’, as my home city of Glasgow was called by its original settlers. What we Europeans do need to learn, however, is to be less bashful about admitting to each other that we share these feelings of inhabiting in Europe ‘a dear green place’. If the multiplicity of our languages is seen by some as an insurmountable obstacle to communication, to breaking down the bashfulness, the likelihood of multi-lingualism increasing under the impetus of eastern Europe’s example is an exciting challenge, a potential enrichment of our common European heritage. Each new language acquired deepens our understanding of the space wherein it is used. Furthermore, what can we know of the incomparable Gothic limewood sculptor Veit Stoss of Nurnberg if we do not know his alter ego Wit Stocz of Krakow? ‘United in diversity’ is the motto which the Convention on the Future of Europe has proposed for inclusion in its draft constitution for the enlarged Union. Those who regard the motto as a paradox would do well to read this 11

book. The contributors by their vivid self-characterisation help to reify the idea that in diversity is Europe’s unity to be found. Robert Maclennan London, February 2004

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A Guide to ALTER EGO Guido Snel, general editor

Why Alter Ego? ‘Europe never knew more about the stars, about illnesses, about the agonies and mysteries of life than today; and while Europe today knows more than it ever knew before and questions all it knows, it hasn’t got a clue what it wants.’ Thus spoke the Croatian writer Miroslav Krlezˇa in Zagreb in the year 1935, introducing his essay Europe Today. Krlezˇa, an internationalist and European, wanted to analyse in his essay nothing less than the state of Europe. The great political turmoil of his time urged him to do so. Ideologies were preoccupied with progress and enlightenment of the masses, but also with racial purity and atavistic nationalism. As a humanist Krlezˇa looked in his essay for European similarities in the culture of politics, culture and the arts of his time, but when he added up his impressions, he failed to see a synthesis in European history. On the contrary. At the end of his book, Europe appears in the image of a train adrift, full of passengers quarrelling in countless languages, that rides off into the dark. On the eve of the present enlargement of the European Union, feelings and sentiments are perhaps less gloomy than in Krlezˇa’s age. Today, we tend to see the continent’s astounding diversity as an asset, and know that European culture (if such a thing exists) is something entirely different from the European Union as an administrative entity. Hardly anyone challenges the conviction that the European realm is far bigger and more dimensional than the EU. So, enlargement toward the east? Yes! To the south? Perhaps. But where does Europe end? It must end somewhere, though we are suspicious of clear-cut cultural boundaries: isn’t the Mediterranean the cradle of western civilisation, as the cliché goes? And whom do we actually address when we speak of our fellow Europeans? So, is Europe different from 1935 when it had ‘no clue about what it wanted’? Do we know what the Europe of the new EU citizens looks like? And the Europe of the new EU neighbours? And what about all those EU citizens with one leg inside and one leg outside Europe, 13

guest workers and their children, with dual citizenship, dual lives? In a time when multi-lingualism and plural identities are the rule, the debate on European culture still hovers between national and supranational identity. If there is a debate at all. Political themes such as immigration, or the war in Iraq, recently triggered lively, even heated debates, but European culture seems to stir our interest to a far lesser degree. One almost gets the impression that the need to reflect and debate about our European identity is limited to those countries that are not (yet) EU members. When in 2004 and in 2007 the EU does enlarge its community, it is going to abandon old borders and create new ones, with new exclusions. This again means zones with gates to the waiting rooms, velvet curtains, and iron-like walls. In the future as in the past, the individual experience of being a European may be contradicted by the actual borders of the European Union. This book, Alter Ego, although far less ambitious in scope than Krlezˇa’s Europe Today, wants to scan the current transnational European culture. It brings together twenty perspectives, from both inside and outside the EU, from the acceding states and from the new neighbour countries. Writers, poets, scientists, artists, and politicians who all have considerable cross-cultural competence; whose life and work are indistinguishable from Europe and yet often offer the vantage point of an outsider; people who by virtue of their vocation, craft or profession are used to mediating between various milieus, backgrounds, ideologies and languages, and whose stories make Europe palpable on the individual level. The Alter Ego Method It is commonly assumed today that no such thing as a single identity exists, that we have multiple identities. But what does this look like? How does it work? Our invitation for Alter Ego confronted the contributors with two ‘awkward questions’ that the Swiss author Max Frisch formulated in his diaries from the 1960s. ‘Your native realm is irreplaceable as far as it constitutes the landscape and the social area where you were born. Are you grateful for that?’ And: ‘To whom are you grateful?’ We hoped that this would provoke the contributors to confront themselves – literally, in the plural; that they would search for their multiple selves beyond national, political and ideological borders. ‘Look for the alien in yourself!’ we told them and asked them to reveal their personal Europe to us, their dreams and fears, their utopias and dystopias. And so they did. In six cases, we carried out actual interviews. In the other 14

cases, the contributors interviewed themselves. Some adhered strictly to this form, others interpreted it more freely. The tone and spirit of dialogue – contradiction, conflicting voices, irony and sentiment, is obvious in all of the contributions. Master of the Alter Egos So, all of the texts are in some way or another dialogic, presenting two or more voices. Alter Ego as a book contains a great diversity of memories, reflections, and analyses that cannot possible be lumped together. Not even the interviewer and editor (the present writer) was able to do so, though István Eörsi gave him the (I presume) honorary title of ‘master of the alter egos’. The reader should learn more about the editor’s perspective, as he had a considerable part in the making and final shaping of Alter Ego. Let me shed some light on my European ego and alter ego. Where does Europe lie? David Albahari in his contribution writes that his mental map of Europe used to be different before the Yugoslav wars, when his Yugoslavia was located right below Central Europe, whereas since it has moved to the Southeast – you could say his map of Europe was ‘balkanised’. Well, my first childish map of Europe was also meant to shift in the future. I looked at Europe from my native town near Amsterdam and thought that the Benelux countries were the nucleus of Europe. The ground floor was the Dutch nation, the first floor was called Benelux; Europe was some kind of skyscraper, invisible, and high up in the clouds. That’s what I concluded from the stuff we were told in the history lesson early in secondary school. I hardly looked to the south, where France was, nor to the east, where vast Germany loomed. But I did have a clear vision of Eastern Europe. It was shaped while reading Hergé’s famous comic Tintin in Syldavia. When I went to school in the 1970s and ’80s, the real Eastern Europe was part of the communist block. Hergé’s imaginary Syldavia and its neighbour, the villain state Borduria, had no parallels in reality. They were phantasmagorical places that allowed Tintin to display his whole repertoire of Western European (as I can now read between the lines) humanist virtues and peace-keeping skills. My view of Europe as an adult, I suspect, was decisively shaped by my extensive travels in post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe, especially in the former Yugoslavia. I got to know these countries in the 1990s when they were miraculously reshaping themselves into Hergé’s dystopia. And I was often reminded of Krlezˇa’s amazement and irritation at the countless borders he had to cross while travelling in post-WWI Central and Eastern Europe. I can’t 15

agree with him more when he writes that there is nothing more artificial in one’s life than a border, nothing more offensive than having to identify oneself there, to prove that you have the right to cross this artificial line of demarcation. Observing the EU proper from the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s meant first and foremost political failure, passivity, broken promises. But observing Europe from this perspective (as a translator, as a reader, as a social person) laid bare for me a realm beyond the ‘Judeo-Christian’ essentialist view of our continent. In the Balkans, in Turkey, and, I came to realise, also in my own city of Amsterdam, intermingledness and diversity is a reality, even more, it is the reality of current and historical Europe. ‘Europe shall be multicultural, or it shall not be,’ wrote Susan Sontag. As a Dutch translator of the post-Yugoslav (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian) literatures I mediate daily between two European languages, but also between modes of expression, feeling, and perception. And of course, I am convinced that translation is possible, and that the particulars of one place can be rendered in the language of another place – in spite of the considerable loss of details, of colours, scents… How to Read Alter Ego? The book is divided into four thematic parts. The first part, ‘Beauty and the East’, deals with the ambivalence of being an ‘Eastern European’, the second part, ‘Heimat and its (Dis)contents’ addresses the ambiguous feelings evoked by national identity, the third part, ‘Intimate Geographies’ sketches five countries of the mind, while the fourth and last part, ‘The Uses of Diversity’ is in praise of diversity. The parts can be read in random order. This to emphasise that none of the four themes has priority over the others. And also, because Alter Ego, unlike Krlezˇa’s train riding off into darkness, would like the reader to follow his own European trajectory. The reader will find along the trajectory fourteen very unusual visiting cards by Ademir Arapovic´, one of the contributors to this book, interspersed between the texts. The European parliament provides for a simultaneous translation into all of the languages of the EU. However admirable and ideal a form this would be for a book like Alter Ego, we opted for English as the working language of the project. After 1989, English emerged as the new lingua franca of Eastern Europe. English has been for Alter Ego both a blessing and a curse. 16

A blessing because it enabled communication – discussing, disagreeing, quarrelling, opposing, appeasing, and agreeing. Realising what a thrill this gave me, I thought of what Latin must once have meant to, say, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Marko Marulic´ of Split, contemporaries who were able to read each others’ works on two opposite sides of the continent. Likewise, Alter Ego engages individuals from the Baltic to the Balkans in dialogue. But English has also been a curse because it meant in almost all cases a compromise. Most protagonists had to speak or write in a language different from their mother tongue. Common belief holds that one can only truly express himself in the mother tongue. If this is so, then a certain degree of inauthenticity has to be reckoned with. On the other hand, as the Estonian poet Emil Tode writes in his contribution, to express oneself in a foreign tongue raises unexpected opportunities for authenticity – as standard English wouldn’t match his real voice, thus hiding the fact that he is a stranger in that language. If Tode is right – and I believe he is – then a European Babel no longer necessarily means a confusion of tongues; then we certainly have made progress in dealing with our European alter ego.

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Part I. Beauty and the East

Canterbury, UK, is the starting point of the Alter Ego pilgrimage. Goran Stefanovski, playwright born in Skopje, Macedonia, has been living here since the 1990s. His is the first of five tales about the ambivalence of being an ‘Eastern European’. Stefanovski, who grew up and came of age as an artist in the former Yugoslavia, observes that after 1989, he, ex-Yugoslavs, and Eastern Europeans in general, lost their sex appeal in the eyes of the West. But more is at stake than just an image problem. We, Stefanovski writes, have lost our story. The story went to the dogs, because of nationalists, because of the arrival of

Photo: Péter Zilahy

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wild capitalism, because of the enticements of westernisation. Easterners need to regain their stories, their self-confidence, but how? Jachym Topol, Czech novelist, belongs to the last generation that shared the collective experience of communism. So here too is someone, perhaps a whole generation, who is about to lose his story. Should we regret the end of communism? Certainly not, says Topol. But there clearly was something about clandestine life: a romantic mood, a sense that what he did mattered greatly. And he misses that now. As a writer, Topol is somewhat uncertain about his new status as a European author, which requires discipline, soberness, and yes, uniformity. Emil Tode, an Estonian poet, who divides his time between Paris, Tallinn, and the isle of Hiiumaa, asks why easterners are constantly reflecting about themselves, trying to define themselves, almost as if they are nobodies. And why apparently westerners don’t feel this urge. He has a point, it is even one of the dangers of an approach like Alter Ego’s. But then, Tode writes, while the west rests, it may very well be that we, Easterners, are already contaminating the west with our unrealness. Yuri Andrukhovych, a Ukrainian writer, feels insulted by the cordon sanitaire, the new velvet curtain that will soon separate him from his beloved Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Its as if someone is refusing to let him into his own home. It seems that once again the Eastern European artist or intellectual is left with the bitter fruits of adversity: in the east, he will have to always identify himself at visible and invisible, real and imaginary borders. One comfort: the Easterner – like in the pre-1989 era – will once again be considered more clever than the Westerner. And who knows, maybe in the end, this will make him or her sexy again? David Albahari, a Serbian writer living in Canada, rephrases all the above mentioned issues in an uncanny self-interview where both protagonists are obviously Europeans. But who exactly stands where in this dialogue? And when there is both a real and an imaginary geography, does this then mean that we should take the latter less seriously than the former?

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A Tale from the Wild East by Goran Stefanovski

When Were We Sexy? Once I discussed a topic for a speech with my friends from the Hamburg International Summer Festival. They suggested a provocative title: ‘Why the East is Not Sexy Any More’. I instinctively felt attacked. What? Me, not sexy? What could they possibly mean by that? Sexy how? Sexy by what criteria? ‘Sexy’ – What a cheap word! I looked at the question again. ‘Not sexy any more?’ This implied that we had been sexy before. Before when? When exactly were we sexy? Could this mean that the East was sexy when it wasn’t sexy? When it was struggling under the Stalinist yoke? And that it isn’t sexy now that it’s trying to become sexy in the Western sense of the word? Was it sexy when it pretended that it was innocent and naive, and stopped being sexy now that it pretends to be sophisticated and experienced? Was it sexy when it was passé and folkloristic, and stopped being sexy now that it wants to emulate the West and catch up with the latest ‘isms’? My Festival friends are clever. Maybe their thesis was ironic, maybe deadly serious, maybe both. But they got me hooked. I started itching to say something on the matter. Something cynical, or something deadly serious, or both. How I lost My Story My name is Goran Stefanovski. This is the story of my life in a few short sentences. I was born in the Republic of Macedonia, which, at that time, was part of the Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. My father was a theatre director and my mother was an actress. I spent my first forty years in Skopje as a playwright and a teacher of drama. I married Pat, who’s English. We had two children and we were happy. We had a good story. Then, in 1991, the Yugoslav civil wars started. Our lives took a sharp Uturn. Pat decided that the future of the Balkans wasn’t going to be the future 21

of our children. They moved to England. I started commuting between Skopje in Macedonia, where my secure past and my greater family were, and Canterbury in England, where my uncertain future and my nuclear family were. I started living between two stories. ‘We’ve lost our story’, I told Pat. ‘No’, she said, ‘the story has lost us’. When I first arrived in England, as Sarajevo was burning, I met a wellmeaning producer who wanted to cash in on my story, and made no secret about it. She told me: ‘Goran, you’re an asset now. But it’ll only last six months. You must hurry up’. The six months passed. I didn’t make my producer rich. Now I spend my days trying to work out the continuity between my two narratives and the artistic role of someone on the borderline. I patiently try to explain to my friends and relatives in Skopje that I haven’t forsaken them forever and that I’m not living in the lap of luxury in the promised land of the West. I patiently try to explain to people in Britain that I am not a refugee bleeding-heart playwright with a post-traumatic stress disorder. I have little success in convincing either side. They all seem to have strong ideas about who I must be. They have their clichés and stereotypes. How My Friends Lost Their Story So now I live in Canterbury, an olde worlde, touristy little town with a cathedral. On the main street there is a comics shop selling Americana novelties. In the shop window there is a life-size colour cut-out of a character from the popular television science fiction series Babylon 5. It is a picture of a creature with a big halo of flesh around her head. I know the actress behind this character. She is a friend of mine. Her name is Mira Furlan. She used to be one of the best actresses in the former-Yugoslav world of theatre, film, and TV. She was the protagonist of our drama and the hero of our story. Now she is an alien. She has become one with the stereotype about Eastern Europeans. Recently a friend came to see me in Canterbury. His name is Rade ˇerbedzˇija. He was a legendary actor in former-Yugoslavia. He was Hamlet. S He was in countless films and new plays. He was the protagonist of our drama and the hero of our story. Rade is now an international star who gets parts in Hollywood films. As what? As a suspicious, Eastern European mafioso, an unreliable type, verging on the psychopathic. Hamlet has become a subsidiary character. The protagonist has turned into an antagonist. Rade has become an illustration of the cliché about Eastern Europeans. We had a barbecue, on a rainy English Sunday afternoon, under an um22

brella. We drank wine and talked about old times. Then I took him to see the photograph of his alien compatriot Mira Furlan. I looked at them next to each other. The two ex-heroes in virtual reality. Out of their history and out of their geography and out of their story. I told Rade: ‘We’ve lost our story’. ‘Maybe we never had it’ said he. I can hear the yawns from the post-modernist gallery. ‘Story. Continuity. Fate. Life. Death. Why are you Eastern Europeans so gloomy and pathetic and paranoid? Why can’t you cheer up a little. Wake up! The world is a post-modern game!’ Well, possibly it is. Or, possibly it can be. When it isn’t a pre-modern mass grave. Western Stories vs. Eastern Stories Let me make a few personal observations about how I see the differences between the Eastern and Western European basic stories, between the two master narratives. I hope that might throw some light on where my East is, and how it came to be there. Some time ago I saw a BBC documentary about Kosovo. A teacher in a classroom in a Serbian school was telling his pupils that five hundred years ago, a battle was lost against the Turks, and that now it was their task to take revenge for it. This teacher was offering these children a narrative, a template for their identity. It was full of warriors, historical revenge, unsettled scores, sacred national ideals on the horizon. There was too much of my history in it. My daughter Jana, who was six when we arrived in Great Britain, had stories in her first text book about a group of children who lost their dog on the London Underground. A funny story with a hint of magic in it. No history, no wars, no fixed identities. A global, open, decentralised, civic concept of the world. There was none of my history in it. I kept asking myself which of these narratives was better for my daughter. And why should these narratives be mutually exclusive? And could there be a healthy balance between them? I needed urgent answers to these questions not only as a parent, but also as a citizen. Let alone as an artist. Who is in charge of these narratives, anyway? They are written by civil servants in various ministries of education. (Apparently it took the German and French Ministries of Education ten years to finally standardise the school history books and decide how the subject was to be taught to children.) These master narratives create the social context and intellectual discourse in which an artist operates. They are the centrifugal forces of society and culture. The artist can take it or leave it, but the context is there. Like gravity. 23

Eating Salt During our civil wars, CNN showed us as tribes with complicated names and strange political habits. Against this backdrop were the groomed and coherent CNN reporters, in pristine shirts, putting order into the chaos, explaining the mess in plain English. Did it work? Western intellectuals would often catch me at international conferences and ask me in hushed voices: ‘What exactly is going on down there?’ So CNN did manage to make one thing clear: that we are incomprehensible. ‘Don’t bother to understand them.’ This is unfair and it hurts me. And I know how my mind works when I am hurt. I am ready, as the saying goes, to eat a kilo of salt. Let me shift gears here and stray into a dramatic soliloquy in my atavistic voice: ‘You think I’m incomprehensible? You ain’t seen nothing yet. I’ll show you incomprehensible! Yes, I know I’m making a fool of myself and eating salt in front of you while you shake your heads. And I do it just to spite you. Just to damage myself. Because I have learnt in all of Dostoevsky that the only way I can prove I am free is to work against my better self-interest. My Protestant wife will never understand this. She refuses to accept this as reasonable human behaviour. And I agree with her. But I only behave like this in unreasonable situations, under unreasonable pressure. Only when you step on my foot. So now you’re telling me I’m an irrational monster. You, who’ve seen me before and who know I’m not usually this way. You, who’ve told me yourself how generous and hospitable and warm and big-hearted and soulful I am. You say you’re not happy with my story! You tell me I should change it? And unless I do, you would? You know what? Fuck you! How will you change my story? With a bombing campaign? With the Hague Tribunal? With UN Resolutions? With bribes and blackmail? With theatre festivals? I don’t think so. I will change my story when I want to and if I want to. You think I’m not sexy? So what. As the poet said: “We’re ugly but we have the music”. Now you have me on the barricades! And this battle will go well into the next millennium. And the one beyond it!’ My Map of the World The West nurtured a granite conviction that ‘no good could come from the East’. That the story of the countries behind the Iron Curtain was one of a drab life, bleak aesthetics and secret police. This was a political projection, created for the purposes of the Cold War. In Yugoslavia, we always cried for exemption, always wanted to prove we had ‘our own way’. Perhaps we were an 24

exception to the rule, but it was the exception which proved the rule. The cliché applied to us too. (Of course I have these clichés myself. I have always been suspicious of anyone who plays rock and roll and is not white Anglo-Saxon, or plays jazz and is not black. So I should not complain when I meet people who are suspicious of Eastern Europeans dabbling in the performing arts.) So how was our story different from the cliché? What, if any, was our differentia specifica? Well, we grew up in the sixties on our folk stories as much as we grew up on Kafka and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. We enjoyed unrestricted travel abroad. We grew up on the Belgrade International Theatre Festival – BITEF. The Living Theatre came to Yugoslavia in 1968, when hardly anyone knew about them outside New York City. Grotowski, Brook, Bob Wilson were household names in Yugoslavia. We brushed shoulders with them. We believed that we sent them to the West. That they came to show us what they had first, and only then, after our approval, would they go and show it elsewhere. We were very pompous and arrogant. Almost sexy! But, so what? Perhaps it’s because the Yugoslav experience was this sophisticated that it met such a shameful and violent end. Belgrade never really appropriated the novelties of its BITEF festival. It watched and observed, but it took little in. Under the veneer of Europeanism, it kept its Byzantine narrative intact. The Deadly Pull of the Master Narrative So our identity oscillates between deep inferiority and a lofty superiority. The inferiority is based on a sense of economic worthlessness. The superiority is based on a sense that we are the exclusive owners of Soul. (This is what even the two-bit Slav mafiosos believe. I personally can’t see any differences between them and the two-bit mafiosos anywhere else.) The luxury of artists in the West is that they can stay away from politics and still have ample space for discourse. In the East, because of the centralisation of society, there are no avenues for alternative discourse and no parallel spaces. Staying away from politics looks like retreating into autism. You can see productions, made smack in the middle of a historical earthquake, which bear no resemblance to that reality. They witness something else – a certain escapist solipsism of ‘this is not happening, this is not here, this is not us’. It does take a lot of courage to stay alive and make ends meet under the everyday pressure of that ‘historical soap opera’. This courage can’t be appreciated from the outside. The Western observer pretends to know exactly what 25

could be done in the situation, how these wrongs could be made right, and how this drama could be powerfully dramatised. (It’s like watching football on TV and knowing how to score every time.) A western novelist once said to me: ‘I so wish I could live in your part of the world, then I would have a story’. That may be so, but she forgets that the chances are that she would be so sucked into that story that she would not have the time or the energy to even comprehend it, let alone articulate it in a novel form. An Unwanted Story So the story went to the dogs. Together with the storytellers. Some of them became ideologists of political regimes, some ministers of culture. They were all sucked in by the centrifugal forces of their respective master narratives. Perhaps the Western producers (and here I mean not only theatrical, but also political) could have tried to create a context, to adjust the horizon of expectation to the story, and not vice versa. Perhaps, just perhaps, if that story had been recognised and supported, there would not have been the war which demolished it. And now, after the rivers of blood, the question arises again: ‘Wo ist Osten’? Well, there was a time when the East (at least my corner of the East) was screaming ‘Here we are’! and the West replied: ‘We can’t see you. You’re not where we expect you to be. Be somewhere else, so we can see you’. But that is all history now. And there’s no use crying over spilt milk. I know it was nothing personal, amigos! It was strictly business! What To Do? It is street wisdom in the Balkans that it is impossible to be born and die in the same country. Within one’s lifetime, the house will fall on your head, and you’ll have to start building again. ‘The constant repetition of the same’. It is a given, like a natural disaster. The Eastern European arts are stewing in the pressure cooker of political turmoil, and are undergoing a tectonic shift of identity. It is consoling in itself that real artistic birth is only possible in the crucible of historical pain. (And, to be fair, there is the towering Western success of the films of Kusturica and and the music of Bregovic´ which the Eastern European performing artists can strive to emulate.) The Eastern European artists will have to 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, Nijin26

sky, Harms, Vvedenski, and Bulgakov. The same names which the ever-soflexible West appropriated as its own. And so it happened that the East which came up with these names became known as the Wild East. And the Wild West, which came up with Wyatt Earp and Calamity Jane, became the suave and cool proprietor and guardian of modernism. The Eastern performing artists have some old-fashioned and lonely homework ahead of them – to find their voices, remember their names, regain their self-assurance, reclaim their space and recognise their continuity. They have to earn their stories and make them their own. For whatever these stories are worth. And however sexy they may, or may not, be.

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Luxurious Madness by Jachym Topol

Where are you from? From Bohemia? Wasn’t that part of two connected countries, not long ago? Isn’t that in Eastern Europe? Or is it some kind of new Balkan republic? And wasn’t Bohemia once part of the Soviet Union? Yes, the Czech Republic, together with Slovakia, formed Czechoslovakia. But it isn’t in the Balkans and that might be easy to forget, mainly because Czechs and Slovaks were able to separate from each other without a shot being fired, completely peacefully. We have sufficiently similar languages, and even after the separation we like each other and befriend each other! Slovaks are close to the Hungarians, even though they hated each other in the past. Czechs are western Slavs and, despite the tradition of a common state, the Slovaks and Czechs were quite different from one another in details such as table manners. Slovaks drink wine; Czechs drink beer, like the Bavarians. Throughout history, Czech culture has been significantly influenced by German culture. You can see this, for example, in architecture or the number of German names in the phonebooks. Slovaks are Southerners, Catholics, lovers of their great mountains. Personally, I am bothered by the separation into two countries. This is simply because Slovaks are altogether wilder and more exotic than the Czechs. That is also consistent with a literary stereotype: Where a Czech is described as prudent, a Slovak would I SAY 'YES' be more of an emotional type who AND I GROW might pick a fight at the weekend mixer, steal a bride, or become a bandit. I have hiked most of the Slovak 28

mountains with my friend, the writer Petr Placak, with whom I established what we called ‘hero-hiking’ during the socialist era. During the Second World War, Petr’s dad, Bedrich Placak, was in those same Slovak mountains. I’d meet elders who had fought against the Nazis, and during the socialist era were persecuted, as non-communist combatants. In the best cases they were forgotten. I visited them, as they were fascinating narrators. They lived in their mountain solitude, often isolated, individualistic. Some even fought against the communists, and for us young oppositionists in the muddy Seventies that was something absolutely wonderful! They’re all dead now. We interviewed them, but our notes were not preserved. Bohemia was never part of the Soviet Union, instead it was part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Just to make it very clear, I say three times: Shame! Shame! Shame! Bohemia endured the Stalinist terror in the 1950s, and until 1989, the country was surrounded by barbed wire and dogs, accompanied by police who’d shoot at anyone who’d try to cross over to Western Europe. With that kind of heritage, I now assert that yes, we became Eastern European, even if that’s a rather sensitive subject and many people have differing opinions. What is Your Opinion? I say that Bohemia is Eastern Europe with a Western European democratic tradition. It is truly a coincidence, but today is the 28th of October, which is the anniversary of the founding of the modern Czechoslovak state, in 1918. It hasn’t been that long since then. Before that, Czechs and Slovaks lived in the Habsburg monarchy and that ancient group has romantic admirers even today, but I don’t know much about it, and I can imagine that I would have protested against Germanisation, or that perhaps I would have been a Czech nationalist. Eastern Europe has the hallmarks of backwardness for many people, and for the average person who follows the press, it could evoke those immense Siberian plains and the cloudy smoke spewing from indefinable industrial towns, and urban hovels run by prostitutes, the Mafia and greedy cab drivers. For me, and I’d say for many of my friends, Eastern Europe has in itself the nostalgia of something faded. I remember back around 1990, I was hanging out in Moscow, and at a Czech party, an American girl came up to me and said she didn’t like it there, that it is too ‘Westernised!’ I didn’t understand her then. After 1989, I’d understood that to Westernise mainly meant to un-Sovietise. 29

I could not imagine then, that in a few years time I’d come to detest those idiotic ubiquitous billboards and advertisements, and that I’d witness tiny Bohemia becoming a cheap vulgar imitation of the most hideous that EuroAmerican globalisation could offer. Watch Out! You’re Exaggerating! You’re right. But what about Prague? It always carried the hallmark of the central mystical city. Yeah, yeah. Magical Prague: The city of Golem and Franz Kafka, a city where the decadents – that mix of Germans, Slavs, and Jews – scattered their dark spiritual fruits? That is still a nice ‘Trade Mark’ for a certain element among European and American Intellectuals, as if the Jews hadn’t been wiped out, the Germans driven off and the Czechs Sovietised, and I can laugh at that, but also marvel: thanks to the decades of communist supervision, we can always discover cultural treasures… It is true that perhaps everywhere in Central Europe you can successfully study cultural anthropology and archaeology. Here, in the 20th century, there has been upheaval, resettling, killing, and the torture of entire groups of inhabitants, for reasons such as class war, nationalism, religion, ethnicity, and so forth. Just about everyone attempted to leave his treasure somewhere hidden for the future, and we are in that future – a land without war and oppression. So, it is no accident that an award for the most significant publication of the year was received by someone like Jürgen Serke, for an anthology of work by, and a portrait of, German writers working in Czech surroundings, whose names had been basically erased during the Nazi and Communist eras. It is as if this land was always seeking its roots, its past that was severed so violently. And that searching has no end, but it all winds up with the total victory of pop culture. Perhaps, then, this is the end of history, not in the sense of the end of history per se, but somehow an end culturally speaking. That in the near future we will basically be rendered within the same pop culture and our own history will be nothing more than polished family silver and hidden family skeletons, not even having the power to serve as symbols. But I don’t believe in that power! That would only be exterior. There will al30

ways be interested people quarrying through the strata and searching around in underground waters. And apparently, all types of offshoots and species of nationalism and various visionaries are continuing to improve history for their objectives. So that danger – pop culture’s destruction of culture – is something you laugh at? I am no longer laughing, but if you consider that until a few years ago, Soviet soldiers were still camped here, and today just because we all squeeze inside the doors of McDonalds and they no longer point their Kalashnikovs at us, is it still funny? But what really makes me angry is the change of Prague’s centre into a miserable, vulgar tourist business zone. That is so idiotic! Prague isn’t as large as Berlin and Paris, not to speak of New York, and those bands of tourists really are destructive. They also bring money to the city. But No! They wreck it. I am happy to run into those young British guys in their football shirts – that type that British literature, to its own detriment, is so rich in – but to have to struggle through those hordes because beer is cheap in Prague? Yuck! Tourism – but this is the 21st century! If there is suddenly cheap beer in Madrid, or in the Yucatan, all those hordes will fly there. Wouldn’t you just like to return to the past? A trip to the Socialist past? Absolutely not! That would be like reading some strange science fiction, or Orwellian novel, when you realise that until fifteen years ago, this land was surrounded by barbed wire. That is completely unbelievable. I can’t imagine it! Now I have the feeling that I would not be able to survive even one day in such a place. Psychically. Yet, it was also a time of unbelievable humour and delight. One would live with friends in the kitchen and country houses somewhere in the forgotten countryside! Even though a lot of time would be taken up by discussions about who was locked up and which one of us was an agent, there was something unbelievably interesting and valuable, something for which there is simply no time or place in a modern society organised by business. 31

What’s more, that society of people living in the opposition, was transgenerational. It just occurred to me that that life was very similar to living in bands, where one get to know the members of families, clans, and groups who all despised the communist government. That doesn’t exist today, people are closed off within their respective generations and their workday cocoons. In addition to all this about what we called the ‘Merry Ghetto’, people came from all walks of society, all religions, and all political hues. For the inquisitive young person, there was nothing better than to be able to talk freely with communists who’d been expelled from the party and still believed in the Marxist religion, as well as obstinate oppositionists who had already been in jail for years, priests thrown out of the church, decadent poets who had been forbidden from publishing, and so on. That was simply wonderful. You were always in that barb-wired mini-state, somewhere in Prague in a kitchen, knowing there were some hidden eavesdropping devices. Yeah, okay, maybe it sounds wretched!? But it wasn’t only Prague that was part of that territory. I did business with friends on long wandering trips through Poland, where I established relations with the opposition. I carried dozens of kilograms of literature and also publishing machines along the Czech-Polish border. Is that medieval or what? It was freezing, and you were wrapped up to your ears while you descended steep icy cliff trails, wary of armed guards, like a smuggler from days gone by. You didn’t smuggle tobacco or alcohol, just literature, volumes of poetry, novels, and fliers calling for confrontations against the government. I even spent time in Hungary, where I finally found myself in jail. They also locked me up in Poland, and even in military jail. With that kind of record, one couldn’t travel any more, but it was important to strengthen one’s contacts with the opposition. My nostalgic feeling stems from the confidence that everything was vital back then! Imagine that I was smuggling forbidden poetry and that I could go to jail because of the verse of a classic Polish national poet such as Milosz, or Bohemia’s Seifert; that is absolutely unbelievable now!!! It’s as if it wasn’t just a few years that have passed, but several centuries. 32

Now with my books, I have adapted by restricting myself to sojourns to book fairs, and I have to stop drinking and smoking, because my new book, Night Work, has been published. It was published in Germany and France and Holland and of course in Bohemia, and that requires travelling and going to so-called readings. That’s a non-stop party and I’m no longer busting my brain about whether they’ll lock me up, because books are no longer that interesting, but that I shouldn’t drink or smoke! And sometimes I go to Paris or New York, and it gets to me how unbelievable the changes are that I’ve lived through. Of course, I am accustomed and have adapted. But there are moments when I’m at some reading, I’ll run into, say, a Polish poet or a writer from the former GDR, and we crack up giggling like crazy people before we can say anything – that is how our amazement is translated for our Western colleagues. I’ll probably be part of the last generation that shares this collective experience of Eastern Europe. And note how adaptable I am: It occurred to me just now that I could use this as a marketing label. The last generation of something that may always seem so tragically romantic, really nice! I’m not so sure that the socialist regime was really rotting, you have something to boast about, you’ve actually survived it! It was wonderful that a person in his youth didn’t have to endure some really wayward regime, where death threatened you every step of the way, but only those final years where, even though there was some degree of danger, it was like participating in a carnival-like atmosphere while we were tearing down the Iron Curtain. I realise only now that those final years of the dismantling of the East European colossus were amazing for many people because they became the centre of history without even trying. Laying a burning log on the bonfire where a horrible tyrant is already blazing, that is an awesomely positive and meritorious goal, isn’t it? Today, history just passes us by again, and yet also drags the people along with it somewhere. To the Supermarket! They’re dragged along to the supermarket where they are happy!

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To which, as a critical intellectual, you of course condescend? Like with those tourists. Yes, I condescend, but it is even worse. Sometimes; in one of those supermarkets, I also freak out and go shopping and what’s more, I’m also sometimes a very active tourist! Even when I already so despise travelling! I’m always travelling with those books. You said it! Then you go to a reading. That is pretty normal for a writer. But I’m going nuts from it! Writing is my path that requires absolutely being alone, introverted. And travelling and public appearances, selling books, demands an extrovert! From having to adjust my speed, I have to admit that I am going slightly crazy. But isn’t that, in the context of the history of your favourite middle Europe, a truly luxurious craziness, finally with no censorship, exile, banishment, or criminality? It is a completely luxurious madness! I propose to continue! I gaze into the mirror and say: You are truly the first completely free generation of writers! Take it seriously, exercise, don’t drink and don’t smoke. Fine. In the end, could you tell me something normal. For example, do you have a family? Yes! I’ve got a wife and two young daughters. That’s great! Congratulations. Thank you!

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Ego with Alter Ego by Emil Tode (Tõnu Õnnepalu)

You turned 41 recently… Yes, like you. But this is not reason enough to conduct an interview. No. The day after your birthday, two-thirds of the Estonians voted to join the EU. You had already written a couple of articles supporting the ‘Yes’ vote. Why? I’m really sorry. It happened. The No-arguments were just so stupid. I got irritated. But I feel pretty bad every time I think about what I wrote for the newspaper. I mean, after the article was published. There is always a lie that wants to sound like an ultimate truth, an ignorance that pretends to feel like wisdom. That’s what the newspapers are about. Doesn’t the eleventh commandment warn: ‘Thou shalt not commit journalism?’ I have sinned in so many ways. That is what my entire life is about. But you look so innocent. And if you feel you have committed a sin, you can just do your penance. Statistics give you at least another thirty years to live, genetics even more. I’m afraid so, yes. My grandmother, who once taught me to read, and who also gave me the opportunity to appreciate ‘The Ugly Duckling,’ died at the age of 94, and my father, her son, is now exactly twice my age.

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You see. You have a whole other life before you to go to Santiago de Compostela. Or to make your pilgrimage to India, to kiss the hand of some Rinpoche. But before you start, maybe we can do this interview. You can include it as part of your penance: you can add the sin of vanity. And the sin of using bad English in the vain hope of promoting yourself. Or even without that hope, just prostituting yourself for ‘approximately threehundred Euros.’ First, English is very good for both lying and sincerity. It is like being abroad. Second, are you hinting that you are worth more than threehundred Euros? No. But tell me, who really reads these EU grant project anthologies, where Eastern and Central European writers explain their politico-psycho-geographical doubts? Why are we even doing it? Hey, this time, it’s me who’s asking the questions. This is not your bloody fiction, and I’m not one of your damned semi-fictional personages. This time, I’m more real than you are. Questions are in bold. Remember that. And now tell me: aren’t you ashamed of your books? Yes I am. Even more so than about the newspaper articles. The after-journalism shame lasts a week, the after-novel depression may last two or even three years. Le travail de deuil ( The Mourning Process, I guess, in English)? Perhaps. I haven’t seen it this way, but you may be right. Mourning about something that didn’t happen. Again. Kind of crying for your stillborn child. Stillborn child!? Abusive Pessoa-reading. Do you like him still? I have even loved him, I mean, his poetry. There is a big difference: to love somebody, or to love somebody’s lines. Normally, I very rarely get any mail from my readers. I hardly believe they exist. Yesterday was a great day. I got an e-mail from a boy or a man (but my fantasy made him immediately to be a young attractive boy, kind of 25-years old, sensitive, dreamy), who told me he likes my novels, and also his boyfriend and his boyfriend’s sister love them. I 36

got angry and jealous of my books. Suddenly I saw them living there with the one who wrote to me, his boyfriend, the boyfriend’s sister, her pals, their parents. Like in a family. It appeared to me that my books have more life than I have, more fun, more love. They are more real than I am. That means, happier. Do you believe happiness exists? No… I think Michel Houellebecq is right: happiness does not exist. Don’t lie. I’m not lying. I’m trying to comfort myself. So you have written in order to become happier, to find love. To find somebody, to have somebody in your life. And you have failed. Apparently. Perhaps that goal is all together too egotistical. I’m still thinking that Michel Houellebecq is right in the sense that individual happiness does not exist. The further we move toward individualisation (or privatisation) of everything, the more improbable happiness becomes for us. And then we begin seeking it even more desperately, and drift even further away from it. Happiness and ‘I’ don’t fit together. But still we cannot help ourselves; we cannot help but go further on this path that leads to nowhere. Who is we? We the Westerners, the Europeans, our civilisation, the entire world, I don’t know. Are Estonians now considered Westerners? In this sense, of course. We are even worse. More atomic than the real Westerners. By the way, it is less and less difficult to see the difference. Ten years ago, you could tell from the people’s appearances who was who – from the West or from the East. The difference seemed to be almost anthropological. But we have very quickly learned to ape Western ways. I mean, it is seemingly not so hard to become the individualistic (and the so called socialist regime was laid on an even more individualistic basis), atomic consumer who seeks 37

the best goods for his or her individual consumption and to produce the waste that society ends up having to take care of. It is so primitive, you cannot even call it civilisation. Are you worried about that? Not really. I’m talking about it because I don’t know what to do with myself. Every time I get depressed about my own life, which is always the same, I become very ‘global’, I start to think and to speak about the pathetic fate of Humanity. In fact, that’s me, Humanity. Wait. But the social, political dimension of your novels? For instance, your first novel The Border State was what we can call a success… A semi-success. Whatever. Western critics, in particular, seemed to emphasise the socio-critical pathos of the novel, the clash-of-civilisations (East-West) side of it. If there is a clash, it is the clash of hopes and reality. You wrote it in Paris. So what did you hope? Haven’t I told you already? All my writing has been nothing but the search for love. And isn’t Paris the city of love, freedom, light? Is it? I don’t know. I know it is the city of loneliness, stagnation, and decay. I know that it is more a city of autumn (all this smell of feuilles mortes) than the city of spring. But it is true that it also has its comforting side. A kind of wind of eternity, which is pushing the clouds over the river. When it touched me, it always made me feel sad, but strangely free. Are you nostalgic about Paris? Not really. If I am nostalgic, it is about the person I was ten years ago.

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A pathetic young man, going to gay bars in the Marais, with a reawakened hope every night… Yes, it took a time before I really understood that love is also a good of consumption. And I’m not very highly quoted on this market. So, for you Paris was the city of disillusion? Better say, initiation. Like for so many people before me. It’s very strange that it still even works. It may be something inherent to the place, also something literal. We read Paris before we visit it. So it is like a trip into our own dreams. It helped me a lot to learn what I am and what I am not. I was thirty years old then. Then you should be at least grateful for that historic opportunity. Imagine what your life would have been like, if there had been no breakdown of the Soviet Union, no opportunity to cross the borders before, say, today when you are 41 years old! I try, but I cannot. It was all so logical how it happened, wasn’t it? You mean you foresaw the end of the Soviet regime, like many pretend now? No, I didn’t foresee anything, but at the same time I knew somehow that one day I would go to Paris, all legally, and stay there and write a novel. It seemed, by the way, the only possibility of writing a novel. Where else? And when the political changes happened, I felt they happened, in a way, only for my sake. In order to enable me to realise my life. Yes, it was very personal. Don’t privatise history! Why not? Isn’t this all in the air, to privatise everything? I act like a good postsoviet neo-liberal subject. And I am not kidding. By the way, I don’t believe we can avoid ideas that are in the air. We cannot be independent of ‘all the vanity of our time’. There is no gas mask to protect us from that. We inhale it, it becomes a part of our body. And how can one feel the history, if not personally? History is nothing but a means to realise your specific fate. I was born in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Last night on the Arte channel I saw a 39

Russian writer who said that the Soviet Union ended in 1962. She said that the time after 1962 was already post-Soviet, post-two-bloc time. The world after the end of the world that didn’t happen. Or was postponed. I agree with her very much. Because it fits so well into your biography and gives it some sense? That doesn’t matter. And I would add: instead of the end of the world via some atomic war, we got globalisation. Perhaps it is just another kind of end of the world. What’s important is that after 1962, we lived in a phantom state. I was born into a phantom state. It didn’t really exist anymore, and you could feel it. Everything in that Soviet Union of the ’70s, and especially of the ’80s, was so unreal. I longed so much for reality, and thought naively that that reality could be found on the other side. But if one side of two disappears, everything becomes one side. So there was no place for reality any more. I mean, it was like a contamination. It was like the ultimate revenge of the ‘East,’ of the losers – to contaminate the West, the winners, with its unreality. I don’t understand. I’m not sure if I understand it myself, but this idea seems to work. Look. We always support our sense of reality, our sense of existing, by thinking that there is another side, another world, another reality. Somebody else. The mirror and something beyond it. A place for our fears and our hopes. The land of Plenty and the land of Void. Elysion, Atlantis, India, America. Fabulous China at the end of the Route of Silk. The land of wonders and the land of Barbarians. The East. The West. Something else other than the world we are living in. We need it badly. And we haven’t got it any more. Why? We now have the Islamic World, the Terrorism, the Third World, so many Others… Yes, we have the Third World, but we have lost the Second and the First. All those others you mentioned are purely negative, threatening. The Barbarians are at our gates, and we know – we, the Former First plus the Former Second World – that we are losing. We are becoming more and more illusory, and they are becoming more and more real.

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Isn’t this apocalyptic vision just a projection of your own loneliness and lovelessness? And of yours, my friend. We are alone together.

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Me, the Mirror, and I by Yuri Andrukhovych (translated by Vitaly Chernetsky)

. . . I didn’t take part in this division of the world. But you know, the world must somehow be divided – possibly for the very reason that we love it in its diversity. Perhaps this is what borders are for: they protect the differences and stave off the final levelling. Their guards have no idea what riches they actually protect. And the complete disappearance of borders or of dividing lines more generally, would first and foremost mean the loss of identities. Only that under the current division my identity may be torn into pieces and cut off from itself. You see, a large part of me was left there, on the other side of this newly painted curtain; now I can only fiercely scratch against it with my nails which–against my will–sometimes turn into claws. I am cut off from Prague, Budapest, Krakow, soon I will be cut off from the Danube, the Balkans and Transylvania. This division does not satisfy me in the least, for under its conditions I have been, as it were, kicked out of my own home. More precisely, I am not allowed to enter certain rooms of my own home without prior permission. So you consider yourself a European? I consider myself a resident of East Central Europe, that is a European, but a different one, with the experience quite distinct from what is usually regarded as a European experience. Mine is that of an ‘occupied European’; I mean here not only the tanks in Prague in 1968, although them too.

CHAOS = SYSTEM SYSTEM = POLITICS POLITICS = CHAOS

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But what is it, this East Central Europe of yours? I understand that this all had some meaning some twenty or more years ago: Milosz, Kundera, Havel, Konrád. Why do you need all this now? This is one of my last territories. More often than not, I base my geo(cultural? political? poetical?) constructs on several phantoms. Perhaps this is exactly why all my constructs are so unsteady and uncertain. One of these phantoms is East Central Europe. Lately I seem to be doing nothing else other than trying to fend off the persistent question: ‘what is it exactly?’ I consciously erode its contours, mystify it, and fog it over. ‘It’s New York,’ I say. ‘It is a pole on the outskirts of the town of Rakhiv in the Carpathians, a geographical fiction discovered back in the days of the Austro-Hungarian geometricians, one of whom, it seems, was called Josef K. This is the territory of postmodernism endowed with memory and hope. It is a territory with many ruins. It is a moveable territory that drifts eastward. It is my last territory.’ But just recently I came to the conclusion that for me it is nothing at all like the fragments of a Viennese Habsburg idyll (as one could have concluded somewhat nearsightedly from my earlier writings) . . . So, this is not the territory of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, not the cinnamon-flavoured coffeehouses, not the Viennese postcards, not the old Galician jokes, not Sacher, not Masoch, not Kafka, not Musil, not Schulz, not Roth, not all the others? No, actually all of that is still present there, it is, but somewhere deep at the bottom – that which is on the inside. But what is not on the inside is the historically much closer arena of totalitarian communist rule. That is, fragments indeed, and indeed of an empire, but different – the Western ones of the Russian/Soviet empire, in its broadest understanding (not only within the borders of the former USSR, but in all of its limitations, the outer ones included, with all of its colonies, dominions, protectorates, and satellites). Here Austria is basically absent (thus the Habsburg understanding of East Central Europe falls away completely), but the former GDR is present, and not only in connection with the 1953 workers’ uprising. Have you ever travelled through eastern Brandenburg? One could go even further along your path and add to this East Central Europe of yours Mongolia, Cuba, Angola . . . 43

Tracing the boundaries of this, my East Central Europe creates problems that are more substantial than this. For instance, I am not completely sure what to do with the ‘disloyal’ Yugoslavia of Tito, or Ceausescu’s Romania, or Enver Hoxha’s Albania. But still I suppose they did not get lost anywhere: having broken through the boundaries of Russia’s direct Diktat, all these regimes remained under the strong influence of that Russian paradigm of authority, which was its flesh and blood, so to speak. From this it follows that my East Central Europe is the former ‘socialist camp,’ the Ostblock. Dragan Velikic´ has called it Europe B. This is the land where the overwhelming majority of the population found itself dissatisfied with and insulted by the results of the previous division of the world, the one that took place after World War II. As a consequence, their descendants gladly supported the next division as a more just one in their opinion. In other words, this is the land where, over the course of about half a century, the population accumulated grudges against the world order. My friend and colleague Taras Prokhasko in passing, but very acutely, defined this East Central Europe as a ‘territory maximally propitious for conducting guerrilla warfare.’ And indeed, this is where we find the Baltic ‘forest brothers,’ the Polish Home Army, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army; this is the Budapest of 1956, the Prague of 1968, the Gdansk of 1980. So in other words, it is the ‘communised’ Europe? It would be better to say that this is the Europe which was subject to an attempt to turn it into Russia. That they tried to ‘communise’ it is not that essential after all. For an entity like Russia it is generally of no importance whether it is communist, monarchist, or, say, a police/oligarchic state. Its essential quality is something else, namely, the desire to be an empire, to be great, and even bigger, and bigger still. Doesn’t it seem to you that you are demonising it? Could this be your problem, and not Russia’s? I would have thought the same if I didn’t know what took place and continues to take place in Chechnya, for example. By the way, wouldn’t you like to ask me whether Chechnya is part of East Central Europe?

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No, I wouldn’t, because I think I know your answer already. But I have a more awkward question for you. Your vision, you must agree, is almost entirely projected into the past. Perhaps not into a very distant one, not into an ‘Austro-Hungarian’ one, but into the past nonetheless. What about the present, what about the future? Indeed, what comes next? The crucial question for a forty-year-old. Since this ‘near past’ is first and foremost the experience of forty-year-olds. My Europe is the land somewhere between Estonia and Albania where people in their forties back in those days had to study Lenin’s biography in middle school and dialectical materialism at the university, went to absurd excursions to Moscow, Leningrad, and Volgograd, bringing jeans and chewing gum to sell, and bringing back alcohol, TV sets and jewellery. It is hardly surprising that they can still speak Russian and read Cyrillic. But they don’t always like to admit that. That’s fine, but still it’s the past. The past is such an active part of our ‘right now’ that even this would have been enough. There would have been no me, the one I am, if one of my greatgrandfathers one day hadn’t wandered over to Galicia from the Romanian Bukovina, if my other great-grandfather hadn’t travelled there from the Bohemian Sudetes, if his daughter hadn’t been a German teacher in Masurian villages in Poland, if her husband hadn’t perished at the end of the war, felled by gunfire from a Russian plane, if his son wasn’t forcibly repatriated by the Allies from somewhere deep inside Austria, if later, when he was drafted into the Red Army, he hadn’t started writing poetry, in Russian for some reason, if his wife wasn’t exactly ten years younger than him . . . All of this is so unbreakable, such a mutually conditioned chain that it would be enough to alter it in one tiny spot –and I would not have emerged out of this complex and delicate, and sometimes brutal mix, and all this chemistry. But it isn’t only the past that’s at stake here. The fact is, I am simply sick and tired of being in ‘the Russian zone of the world.’ I use the word ‘zone’ here consciously – I don’t need to explain to you what it means in prison slang. This ‘zone’ is simply not mine, with all of its music and movies, its special human warmth and other standards of existence.

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And as a consequence of this you resort to a utopia like your East Central Europe? Perhaps so. But one shouldn’t invariably look down on utopias. Each of us is somehow involved in them. Writing generally is an example of a utopian project. Sometimes this has rather far-reaching consequences. But there is also the daily reality devoid of any features of a utopian ideal, its harsh counterweight, so to speak. And in it, they don’t admit you without a visa even to your beloved Poland. Let me reiterate: I did not take part in this division of the world. I even resisted it, in the way I could and for as long as I could. But the date of my defeat, 1 October 2003, was decided long in advance, apparently even before I was born. Quite possibly, in Yalta in 1944. Or in Riga in 1920. Or in some other, more ancient, memorable (or perhaps completely unremarkable) year of European history. Or in the year when, according to Huntington, unified Christian civilisation experienced the first crack of what was to become a future split. No matter when or how it happened, now its consequence is the fact that on the western borders of my country there rises – no, not even an iron curtain! – but (much more insultingly) a cordon sanitaire. I understand that all of us in this Country of U. are extremely dangerously infected. We are infected with a disastrous political technology, implemented by our leadership with a suicidal stubbornness. We are infected with poverty, stupidity, passivity, and disillusionment. I also understand that there are generally two approaches to infected organisms: they can be either cured or isolated as securely as possible from the others – from those who are considered healthy. The first approach is immeasurably more expensive and frighteningly laborious, especially if the infection has been neglected for too long. Besides it requires countless conscious efforts on the part of the infected. The second is much more practical and simpler, like an amputation. It seems to me that a decision has been made to apply the second approach to us. The consequence of this, in my case, is what I have already mentioned: someone seems to refuse to let me into my own home. Someone who has an extremely vague idea of what is really happening here. By here, I mean my part of the world, this, forgive me, East Central Europe, this Europe B.

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Perhaps it would be better for you to simply emigrate? To cross this boundary once and for all? To break what you call ‘the mutually conditioned chain’? And thus manage to win this liberty, this free movement for yourself ? Movement is indeed worth it. Especially if one means by it the saturation of life with at least several lives, that is, lived experiences, that is, when one is speaking of the slowing down and lengthening of time. But I do not only like leaving; I also like coming back. It is strange – I’m about to contradict myself – but somehow I like things the way they are. I like this emphatically focused passport control, when passports are thoroughly examined and put to light. I like the unchanging questions from the customs officers about icons and drugs. I like pretending that I am smuggling them. I like being a guerrilla warrior. Or when special services tap my telephone. I don’t like it when my friends die in so-called ‘car accidents,’ but I like it that they, my friends, were valued so highly. After all, you’d agree that freedom is genuine not when you have it but when you want it very much. And I think when there’s so much freedom you simply don’t notice it . . .

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An Interview with Myself by David Albahari

The first thing David Albahari told me when I entered his hotel room was that he was afraid. ‘I am afraid of Europe,’ he said, shaking my hand and gently pulling me towards an armchair, ‘but I am still willing to answer your questions.’ I sat down and began fiddling with my tape recorder. I was actually trying to hide my confusion. Why would anyone be afraid of Europe, I wondered. I looked at him and smiled. He smiled back. I pressed the button, turned the microphone in his direction, and raised my eyebrows. ‘No,’ said David Albahari, ‘I should rephrase that. I should say that I am in fact afraid of what might happen to my own self.’ ‘Aren’t we all?’ I said. ‘Isn’t each one of us afraid of what his own self might turn into?’ Albahari waved his hand. ‘I mean something else. Let me explain it. When you called me the other day and said that you would like to interview me for your newspaper, and that our main topic would be the expansion of the EU, I quickly said yes. Too quickly, it seems, for when I later began thinking about what I should tell you, I realised that each of my thoughts – instead of bringing me to a nice sunny clearing in the middle of a dark forest – actually leads me deeper and deeper into that same forest; that instead of reaching an understanding, I got stuck in the mud of misunderstanding.’ ‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘I did not mean to make your life difficult or unpleasant’. TO IMPERSONAL RECEIVER: OPPOSITE OF Albahari laughed. ‘No, it was not COMMUNICATION you who made my life miserable at that point. It was I. I realised that, by inviting me, and probably others, to talk about that expansion, you were 48

in fact confirming your own prejudices – that we who have not yet become a part of the European Union are really different from you, and that we need time to conform to your standards, to become more like you. You are cautious, your invitation told me, because you are aware of the fact that, historically speaking, we have always been on the other side. We are not who you are, so we should be tamed, quarantined for a certain period of time, tested and retested until all results show that we can be granted the same status as the socalled ‘true’ Europeans. But then I also realised that by thinking that way, by referring to you as ‘somebody from Europe’, I was falling into the same trap, that I was as much under the influence of prejudices as you are, and that I was blaming you for something that I should really blame on my own self’. ‘But I have no prejudices,’ I tried to defend myself. ‘In my vision, Europe is an open space where everybody is free to come and go as they wish’. ‘We definitely share that vision,’ David Albahari noted, ‘but we don’t know whether we imagine the same space’. ‘There’s only one Europe’. ‘No, there are hundreds of Europes, and that’s the real problem. Divisions, both old and new, have created innumerable versions of Europe, imaginary maps that differ in substantial ways. I don’t know, for example, where you see my country when you imagine Europe in your mind. I do know, however, that for decades the map of Europe in my mind was terribly distorted – the socalled East European countries were pushed more to the right, while the West European countries were in the centre of the continent, directly above my country. This map was, of course, the reflection of the then-dominant East vs. West kind of thinking, involving various political and cultural prejudices. It took me some time to realise that Europe does not look that way. In the nineties, civil war broke out in my country, and I, after the initial hesitation, decided to go far away, to another continent, to North America. One day, while visiting a friend in Calgary, I saw a map on the wall. It took me quite a long time to recognise that it was a map of Europe, that’s how wrong it looked to me. Former East European countries were now almost in the middle of Europe; Western Europe had moved to the left; the Baltic countries were not so far east after all; the Balkan peninsula was not in the central southern area; instead, it had been pulled down towards Turkey and Asia. I stood there looking at that map and thinking that I’ve spent a large part of my life living in an illusion, that despite all my efforts to avoid any virus of ideological thinking, I was in fact a part of that ideology, and that I saw the world the way the guardians of ideology wanted me to see it. I was devastated by that 49

insight, and I still am, because I cannot be sure that I am free of other viruses. There might be others inside me, affecting my thinking and the way I perceive reality around me’. ‘But if ideology is not the most important driving force in Europe now, wouldn’t you agree that all ideology-based viruses, as you called them, are not important at all’? ‘On the contrary,’ Albahari said, ‘I think they are more important than ever, more capable of inflicting harm and destroying seemingly healthy layers of the population’. ‘But that’s a paradox,’ I said, not even trying to hide my irritation. ‘One moment you celebrate the defeat of ideological divisions, and the next one you mourn their absence’. ‘It is because of the fact that, unless there is a strong centre, things fall apart’. ‘And you believe that ideology is one of the strong centres? I find it a bit disappointing’. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I do not advocate the return of a one-party system or any form of totalitarian society. I am only saying that a moderately strong ideology is needed as a sort of protection against the viruses of extreme ideologies, both left and right. What is the ideology of a united Europe? Is there one, or is economy the only reason why we, my country and all those other European non-European countries, dream of becoming part of a united Europe? Originally, the assumption was that economic integration would lead to political unification, wasn’t it, and even though Europe – the Europe of our prejudices, of course – has been united for a number of decades, the differences remain. Some are rich and some are poor, just like before, and every so often we witness the surge of political conflicts. Since most of the new and future members of the united Europe are much poorer than the so-called Western European countries, aren’t you afraid of the destructive political forces that might be unleashed once the new members realise that it’s going to take much longer for their economies to recover than they had originally thought’? I said that such an idea had never crossed my mind. Besides, I told him that there were many special financial programmes for new members and undeveloped regions, and that these programmes would definitely help us maintain social order and avoid any disturbances. He was silent. I looked at him, and I could sense that he did not believe me. ‘No,’ he said as if he were a mind reader, ‘it’s not that I don’t believe you. I simply do not believe in the idea that money is the cure for everything. You 50

know, I belong to the generation of people who trusted the Beatles when they sang that “money can’t buy love”’. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I agree with you that we should be cautious with the economic aspect of unification, but that’s not the only thing. Wouldn’t you agree that the Europe without borders is a beautiful dream come true’? ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘it is a beautiful dream, but it’s one we’re still dreaming. It is easy to get rid of a border – to tear down a fence or demolish a wall – but what do you do with memory, with the borders that are reflected and entrenched in our minds? The whole of human history is one long dispute about borders: the borders of body, the borders of mind, the borders of nations, and so on. Without visible borders we are lost, we stumble, and we quickly create new ones, invisible ones. So if you ask me, I’d rather have a visible border, the one which clearly tells me what its purpose is, than an invisible one, the one you are not aware of at all, because it can hurt you as much, or even more, than a visible one’. ‘Do you mean that we should, in fact, strengthen our borders and make them more difficult to cross’? ‘I do not know what to do myself, so how can I tell you what you should do,’ he said in a soft voice. ‘I only know that I can understand the caution and distrust felt by many people in my country. It is not easy to be a person from Serbia today, constantly imagining what others are thinking about you when they hear you are from down there. You tell them where you come from, and you can see suspicion rising in their eyes’. ‘But once they know you better,’ I said, ‘they will stop regarding you with suspicion. They will accept you as you are’. ‘And if they don’t’? There was nothing I could say. This was, I felt, one of those circular conversations, which always come to back to the beginning without really solving or even elucidating anything. Later, when I put my tape recorder away, Albahari asked me what gave us the right to call ourselves Europeans and to decide who is a part of Europe and who isn’t. ‘Don’t you think,’ he continued, ‘that it only reflects the old divisions that should be forgotten?’ I nodded, not saying anything. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘silence speaks better than any word we can think of’. We shook hands. He closed the door of his hotel room behind me and, almost at the same instant, opened it again. ‘I hope you’ve got it right,’ he said. ‘It is not that I am afraid of Europe and what it might bring us. I am afraid of what I might bring to Europe. I am afraid of myself’. 51

Part II. Heimat and its (Dis)contents

For various (good) reasons we look upon the nation-state with a frown, and secretly or openly cherish the wish that it might become obsolete in the near future. Wasn’t this what initially inspired the concept of the EU, the fear that the ferocious monster of nationalism would again rise from its ashes? And yet, the Slovene poet Alesˇ Debeljak writes, that perhaps we should not do away completely with national identity. People cannot live without a sense of the collective. Global citizenship, in spite of its many advocates, seems too intangible to Debeljak, who, through his reflections about Slovene-ness, is drawn to the old cosmopolitan port of Trieste. There he undergoes what seems to be a sense of home: a slight colouring of history, of art, literature, and the experiences shared with his neighbours.

Photo: Péter Zilahy

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Jaak Aaviksoo, a physicist from Tartu, Estonia, and rector of the local university, shares Debeljak’s scepticism about global citizenship. Aaviksoo was already a converted European back in the days of the Soviet empire. And although he claims that national identity is not an issue for a physicist, he has confidence in the Estonian project. We revisit Trieste with the Austrian and European politician Erhard Busek, currently special co-ordinator of the stability pact for Southeastern Europe. His picture is gloomier. Busek visited Trieste as a child when it was a divided city. I spoke to Busek in the administrative heart of Europe, in Brussels, where, he admitted, he doesn’t feel very at home. For Busek, home after 1989 means conflicting national perspectives. He is very concerned about the return of the notion of Heimat after 1989. The Austrian writer Marlene Streeruwitz plunges deeper into the notion of Heimat. For her, it evokes the dangers of collective nostalgia, behind which looms atavistic nationalism. Drop Heimat! she says, forget about it! Busek’s political experience in Southeastern Europe seems to confirm her adamant rejection. He has seen the drawing up of many new national borders since 1989 with often devastating effects on individual lives. István Eörsi, Hungarian poet, playwright, translator, and seasoned troublemaker, has seen it all: the Budapest ghetto in WWII, the Russian invasion in 1956, Kádár-style communism and the resurrection of nationalism after 1989. We spoke in his apartment overlooking the Elisabeth Bridge on the Danube in Budapest, and almost got into an argument about the question of whether political poetry can be good poetry. No one was as angry as he was with all the nationalists and chauvinists, no one as happy as he was to live in his native Budapest.

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Dreaming of Friends, Living with Foes by Alesˇ Debeljak

Driving from Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, to Trieste takes an easy hour. Why bother going there? In Slovenia, no border is far away. True, Trieste is a short drive away, but its image is replete with disturbing meanings. Once the principal port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Trieste used to be a diverse place where Slovenians have lived for centuries. After World War II, when the border between Italy and Yugoslavia was finally settled, the ethnic Slovene territory and, at the same time, the city’s hinterland became part of Yugoslavia. The city itself was given to Italy. No longer an important port, Trieste fell into state-pampered obscurity. Still, upon descending from the Karst Plateau on my way to the port, my nostrils widen slightly to catch the scent of the breeze over the cliffs above the Adriatic Sea. For a brief moment, the white tower of the Thurnund-Taxis castle flashes in the distance, and I imagine the slender figure of Rainer Maria Rilke, who in 1912 wrote the first two of his immortal Duino Elegies here. And then Trieste itself comes into view, the city where steamships once blew their horns for the girls on the shore, so lovingly described by the Triestine Slovene novelist Boris Pahor. Just before I lose my patience over the lack of a parking, I recall the gently nostalgic chiusa tristezza sung by the Triestine Italian poet, Umberto Saba, in his poem ‘Tre vie’. Around the old Slovenian Harbor Workers House, I eavesdrop in my mind on the provocative debates among Triestine Slovene social democrats who, in the years before World War I, unsuccessfully argued for the establishment of the first-ever Slovene university in this cosmopolitan port rather than in provincial, land-locked Ljubljana. I pretend to hear the hushed chatter of the Slovene women who every week used to come down the Istrian slopes to the harbour marketplace where they peddled their fresh produce – today you find them only in the contemporary fiction of the Slovene writer Marjan Tomsˇicˇ. In the Santa Anna 55

Cemetery, the epigraph on the grave of the Italian Triestine modernist, Italo Svevo, tells me that the writer ‘smiles at the passing of life and glory which belatedly crowned his work,’ while the Austrian Triestine publisher extraordinaire Roberto Bazlen whispers, from a desk in the Biblioteca Civica, that the only possible way to write is in a series of footnotes. Footnotes, indeed. They are more often than not easy cop-outs. And, more important, why dream of Trieste if you are a Slovenian? But it makes perfect sense for a Slovenian to dream of Trieste. For ‘my tribe’, for the Slovenes, whose Socialist Republic as a part of Yugoslavia shared a border with Italy, post-World War II Trieste assumed a new importance. In the minds of several generations, the city appeared as a seductive place, burgeoning with shops that offered treasures unavailable at home. Trieste was the glitzy and kitschy embodiment of the West. A special kind of hunger was sated in Trieste, a hunger for Fiat spare parts, nifty deodorant sticks, fragrant espresso coffee, trendy Levi’s jeans, and other necessities of hard consumerism that could not be purchased in the Ljubljana of soft communism. But Trieste also has another significance for Slovenes. I remember how, on our first visit to Trieste, I explained this added significance to Erica, my American wife, who in the early 1990s came to post-communist Slovenia to start a family with me. Trieste was the place where, in the period between the two world wars, Italian Fascists burned down the Slovene Cultural Centre and summarily executed a number of Slovenian nationalists in the effort to purge the area of its Slav element. Even today the Slovene minority in Italy, like its counterpart in the Carinthian region of neighbouring Austria, lacks certain constitutional rights as an ethnic group. Erica listened, and then wryly observed, ‘You Slovenes see Trieste only in extremes: it’s either a hotbed of Fascism or a great big shopping mall.’ And that’s as good a metaphor as any for the Slovenes’ view of the Western world. It is either something threatening, or something purely pleasurable. Come on, this is too close to being a stereotype. Try again. Here we go. Having lived through the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-reformation, the Enlightenment and the totalitarianism of both Fascist and Communist varieties, Slovenians nonetheless suf56

fered more under the weight of some marginality that makes every Slovenian very aware of the smallness of their collective population of two million people. How lucky we were, compared, for example, to the Catalans, who number around six million and have a distinct cultural tradition, yet no fullfledged representation in the European Union. Unlike Catalans and many other European nations closer to home, that is, in Central Europe, the Slovenian historic experience was embedded in the unrelenting desire of outsiders to subjugate this southern Slavic people. Slovenians have basically never had a nation-state of their own. Charlemagne, the Franks, Napoleon, the Habsburgs, Mussolini, and Hitler have all historically claimed Slovenian lands as their possession. No wonder, then, that this subtle difference, which was lost to most Western observers, in the post-World War II convulsions, retains a special meaning for Slovenian collective self-perception. Oh, pleeease! Every little nation, every tiny group of humanity takes pains to claim some ‘special’ condition and ‘unique’ character. István Bibo was quite correct when he dismissively spoke of ‘misery’ as the main lot of such Central European national narcissism. What is, then, this miserable little difference? Does it matter? It does. Unlike Central Europe, Slovenia was not liberated by the Russian Red Army. It had its own guerrilla forces that managed to maintain a considerable degree of autonomy in the realm of Marshal Tito’s partisan troupes. Slovenian anti-fascist partisans for several years preferred to carry a Slovenian flag on their hats, rather than the communist red star. Confess I will: I drag my kids to the Museum of Contemporary History (formerly the Museum of Revolution) to see these hats. They were called ‘triglavka’, after Triglav, the highest mountain in the country. The pin has the shape of three heads (as its literal meaning indicates) as inspired by a myth about the three ancient gods, three heads, which forever lodged Triglav into the popular subconscious some time in the 19th century, when its vertical northern face was where the nationalist competition between Slovenian and hitherto dominant German alpinists took place. Thus, Slovenian partisans wore ‘triglavka’ hats until the uniform use of a different hat, the ‘titovka’, was forced upon the resistance fighters. It was of course named after Tito. This is important, as it symbolically captures a primary drive behind the popular Slovenian resistance to the Fascist and Nazi armies, that is, a national liberation. It was only in 1943 that the communist revolution won the upper hand. Both hats, however, have 57

shaped Slovenian life, and both fit the mythical paradigm. Consider the following: the pre-eminent Romantic poet, France Presˇeren, in his The Baptism at the Savica (1836), created an epic narrative in verse., which mythologises the lost battle of pagan Slovenian ancestors, and their subsequent conversion to Christianity in the 8th century BC. Savica, the actual waterfall in the Julian Alps, has served as a near-pilgrimage site for Slovenian people. I took my kids there, too, in the hopes that they would eventually grasp the model for Slovenian life that Presˇeren laid out in his epic: resisted conversion and uneasy adaptation. Pathetic, I must say: except for a few Slavic scholars, who in Europe really knows anything about Presˇeren? Sure, Europeans probably know precious little about Presˇeren, but their ears may have become familiar with popular Slovenian composition, a polka by the Avseniki band, which won a global audience, albeit under the more marketable name of Oberkrainers. But it is probably better to listen to a modern rendition of the folk song All the Wreaths are White, as performed by popular ethno-revivalist Vlado Kreslin. The song’s melancholy melody carries whiffs of the country’s northeastern flatlands. The lyrics describe the sorrows of a young woman whose wedding wreath is still green, that is to say, not yet ready. It is this kind of perverse comfort of longing for the unattainable, that makes Slovenes so incapable of dealing with momentous decisions. Yet, in late March 2003, when my country had a referendum on whether to join the European Union, it made precisely that, a momentous decision of an historical relevance that rivals the referendum that legitimised the independent nation-state in June 1991. Slovenians won that Ten Day War, giving them their first-ever legitimate national status. All this talk about independence and ethnic specificity sends shudders up my politically correct spine. I mean, you’ve travelled widely, you lived and studied in Western and Eastern Europe and in the United States, you even have an American wife and your kids are presumably bilingual, yet you go on and on with this nationalist drone. Has nothing of a cosmopolitan spirit brushed off on you? Look, precisely because I consistently reflect my concentric circles of belonging to a Slovenian ethnic heritage, to the former Yugoslav mosaic of lan58

guages and cultures, and, increasingly, to an European identity in statu nascendi, to say nothing of my ambiguous trans-Atlantic liaison, I can confidently say that it was not a writer of my tribe, but of my lost ‘larger home’ of Yugoslavia, that was most relevant for my moral and aesthetic formation. Danilo Kisˇ, a fiction writer, charismatic bon vivant, and anti-communist dissident who died a few years before the country of his and my birth fell apart, was my Balkan master, even though Slovenians generally shy away from affiliations with the ‘dark continent within a continent’, the Balkans.Kisˇ’s cultural background was animated by Jewish, Serbian, and Hungarian traditions, and he accepted the designation as the ‘the last Yugoslav’, which implied his ceaseless resistance to nationalist exclusivity. I was, however, guided by his no-less relevant observation that a writer whose home lies in his mother tongue is aware that the language is more than just an instrument of communication; it’s also a metaphysical worldview. If ‘free-floating’ internationalism assumes that a person may be at home in a transnational social class which demands the renunciation of immediate ethnic and cultural ties in the name of communist loyalty, I wanted to also believe that it is possible to remain faithful to the primordial realms of intimate geography, history, and community even as I foster links to global cultural movements. Defying both the rigidity of nationalist navel-gazing and the blithe nonsense of ‘global citizenship,’ I have attempted to trace the concentric circles of identity that emanate from images of the self embedded in communal experience that ripple through the currents of local, national, and regional identities. This attitude allows for a commitment to a chosen community that differs from one’s ethnic or linguistic group. This kind of cosmopolitan perspective means using individual choice, as it transcends an organically grounded membership. But where exactly, in this meandering meditation, is Europe? After the tragic collapse of the Slovenians’ ‘larger home’ of Yugoslavia, I suggest that the majority of Slovenians began to realise that it is impossible to live sensibly without some anchorage in the collective, although it is clearly possible to die senselessly in its name. The prospect of entering a new ‘larger home’ – the European Union – is a prospect that does not instil much fear in Slovenians. Equipped with historical experience, they pin their hopes on the federal arrangement of the common European house, that is likely to ensure 59

both a democratic life for its individual citizens and viable conditions for a collective specificity. Insofar as collective life is dependent on at least a shared language, Slovenian historical experience contains a valuable instruction for the European integration, an instruction that Karl Markus Gauss elegantly developed in his book of essays, European Abecedarium. Europe will flourish if it is a Europe of mother tongues and specific cultures, not a Europe of political states only. Having lived without a political state for so long, Slovenians and their minorities in neighbouring Italy, Austria, and Hungary understand very well that constitutional arrangements and state formations come and go: what remains to bear witness to a specific collective life is the language, and its maddening and wonderful idiosyncrasies. If we as European citizens are really looking forward to living together, we should first make a serious attempt to familiarise ourselves precisely with the cultural idiosyncrasies of the many European peoples. The art of learning, I admit, is long, and life is short and filled with prejudice, but it is worth trying to pursue the old-fashioned desire that ‘neighbours friends, not foes shall be’, as France Presˇeren sang.

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The Right to Feel at Home an interview with Jaak Aaviksoo

A Dual life ‘I was born on 11 January 1954 in Tartu, Estonia. Today, a little less than one hundred thousand people live there. There is a university, a theatre with an opera and ballet, the national newspaper. In my youth, despite the fact that it was a closed city, Tartu was also an Estonian cultural centre, because of the huge military airport. My family was what you would now call a middle-class family. My father was an engineer, my mother a university employee. A one-bedroom apartment, sixty square metres. What was important was that my parents grew up before WWII and the Soviet annexation of Estonia. They were young enough to avoid problems during the war. They did not suffer, at least not personally. They still had a memory of a different society. I grew up with this, knowing that what was told to us indoors was not meant to be heard outside our home. I went to school in 1961, just as the Soviets were beginning an experiment that emphasised the teaching of languages. So at the age of seven, I started learning Estonian and Russian, which was of course not a foreign language, but a ‘second mother tongue’, whatever that means. And at age eight I began taking English, four to six hours a week. It certainly opened up a world beyond the Soviet Union, especially later, through the news and books. The libraries of my grandparents also contained lots of books and periodicals from the pre-war period. In a sense, I was living a dual existence. One of the important events of my youth occurred in the mid-sixties. The West had not yet recognised the annexation of the Baltic states and so no foreign visitors ever passed through. With one excep61

tion, the Finnish president Kekkonen. This inaugurated an era of relative openness between Estonia and Finland. There were ferry lines, and the Finns started coming to Estonia. In Northwest Estonia you could receive Finnish television. And there were contacts between students. I went to Finland when I was fourteen years old. This was the first time I had been outside the Soviet Union. A great event. I had very little pocket money, but I did buy a nylon shirt, some chewing gum, and a bottle of Coca Cola. Back home, I shared it with my classmates, giving everybody a spoon full. It now seems pretty funny. But it was a symbol of the outside world. The other link to a totally different world came through music: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin. LPs were smuggled through various channels to the Soviet Union. Taping, retaping and then taping again became a routine. Later, in the 1970s, I played basketball which gave me the chance to travel to Finland. In 1981, as a young physicist, I went to New Orleans. Afterwards, I learned the background of the visit. It was funded by an NGO, but indirectly backed by the Pentagon, to find out what kind of laser research the USSR was doing at the time. Star Wars: I wasn’t aware of this programme back then. Not really. Memories from the Soviet Commonwealth I travelled a lot in the former USSR. I stayed for a year in Novosibirsk. With the exception of the closed cities, I had no travel restrictions as a scientist. I was part of the Academy of Sciences and that was an open institution – with some restrictions. You needed a special permit to enter research institutions, for instance. Estonians had a little more difficulty getting into conferences than members of the communist bloc like the Poles and Czechs. I still have a large scientific network of former-USSR colleagues. Almost half of them now live in Western countries, consequence no doubt of 1989 and the new travel opportunities it afforded. Initially after 1989, my links with the former USSR weakened. Now we are in the process of re-establishing them. Political sentiments of course continue to play a role. But in the academic community, the main problem remains that we are equally poor, both in former-Soviet Europe and in Russia, especially when it comes to financing co-operative efforts. So we have a common financial interest. I felt more or less at home in Latvia and Lithuania. Although the mentalities there are still quite different, a little bit like in the Nordic countries and Germany. I neither felt at home in France and the Mediterranean, nor in East62

ern Europe, especially in the south. It is psychologically a different place. Latvia and Lithuania are different from Estonia first because they have their own languages. But that is not that important. Latvia remains very close; in the 17th century, our countries shared the Lutheran reformed church and the Thirty Years’ War. By that time, a number of public institutions had already been established, like Tartu university and a school system. In Lithuania, a catholic country, things were different. The architecture and mentality were both different. The reforms in the academic world after 1989 show that we have very different approaches. I have no personal feeling regarding any of these religions, but they have clearly influenced the respective nations’ mentalities. Living in Russia proper for more than a year, I experienced a state where private space was compressed, and being alone was almost unheard of. The wish to be alone was considered impolite, or even threatening. Our responses to communism were also quite different. In Lithuania, the communist elite came mostly from the ranks of the Lithuanians themselves. In Estonia and Latvia, the elite were mostly either Russians or Estonians who had lived in Russia for generations, in Siberia, for instance. Estonians maintained their individualism in which they hid themselves. This was both good and bad. The result was many more non-Estonians travelled to Estonia and Latvia than to Lithuania. Lithuanians, to a certain extent, accepted communist ideology, actually took the initiative, but ultimately it got in the way of their sense of community. The Estonians locked themselves into small groups – families, friends, etc. But the society as a whole – the nation – did not go so far as to build a wall against communist ideology. A Mixed Tradition Tartu University has a very mixed history: Estonian, but also German, Russian, and Swedish. It was part of the Latin commonwealth, in spite of its protestant background. In 1802, the university was refounded, together with Charkov and Kazan, as a Russian university. It attracted Russian students who were no longer allowed to study in the west. But it was a German-speaking university – Kaiserliche Universität zu Dorpat – with mostly Germanspeaking professors from Central Europe. Its objective was to provide Russian academia with a Humboldtian model. Even during the Soviet era, this core concept never changed very much. Its basic ideology remained very German. In 1919, it became an Estonian University. It became an internationally 63

recognised institution of higher learning. In spite of the heavy losses during WWII, the national Estonian tradition was kept alive through fifty years of communism. Even in the Soviet years, the lingua franca was mostly Estonian. The result was that it helped establish a national identity that emerged in 1989, which was not exclusively rural, but could boast a national elite educated in the mother tongue. Now, when I travel around as a representative of my university, I discover that the Kaiserliche Universität zu Dorpat remains a Begriff, a concept, in Central Europe. I am convinced that the strength of not only my university, but of Estonia as a nation is that it has, as a very small nation – 1 million Estonianspeakers globally and 1.4 million inhabitants – the ability to integrate a variety of influences. The Estonian intelligentsia was established at the end of the 19th century, as were the first industrialists. This relatively fast and rather remarkable development created a certain positive mood and sense of understanding. The Stalinist repression was brutal but only effective on the surface. The nationalist sentiment was important, but other political issues were more urgent. I remember from my school days that the issue of private property was a common topic of discussion. I could see with my own eyes that the Soviet economic system was, in many respects, irrational. Especially in the 1970s, when the economy began to collapse. This was a matter of debate at university long before perestroika. Clearly censorship played a role. But the fear that had ruled the country under Stalinism was disappearing. In the university libraries, I found books by Western thinkers like Marcuse. They were semi-tolerated, as were Reformist ideas. How far you went with this was another issue. Tartu was a provincial university city with more tolerance despite Soviet power. Of the books I read, 70% were Western, including modern writers, while 20% were Estonian and 10% Russian. So for me, the western Soviet border was always an artificial one. Never a cultural border. Now with a new Europe emerging, I feel as European as I ever have before. The Limits of Global Citizenship National identity plays no role whatsoever in physics. One of the reasons why I studied physics was that it was an ideology-free discipline. Nowadays I would perhaps choose something very different. But we received a very good education, in Tartu and also pretty much everywhere in the former USSR. For a physicist, nationality was not an issue. 64

After perestroika, I spent two years in Germany on a Humboldt scholarship. I also went to Paris and Japan. I observed the differences in the various research cultures. I realised that in the humanities and social sciences, national traditions do, in fact, exist. I am inclined to believe that here, real translation is impossible. Translation transfers you to a different realm. In physics an atom is an atom. We don’t know what is going to happen in the next thousand years, not even in the next threehundred years. But in the foreseeable future, our cultural space will still be very much determined by our mother tongue, by family, by the people we meet until we are eighteen years old. Later on, contacts become more superficial. Globalisation certainly means more travelling, but does this really penetrate the larger self? Perhaps a stay of twenty years abroad would have an eventual effect. I can manage in a few languages, but my core language remains Estonian. By the end of a day of speaking a lot of English, I am tired. It requires a lot of effort. So for me, home means having no tension, no pressure, and knowing how people are going to react. When I travel to a different environment I have to respect the manners, the cultures of my colleagues. I have to remind myself, to be permanently on alert. I really experienced this in Japan. And I don’t think globalisation will change this. Even in the US, the mobility of the population is only 10%. Fly around the world and feel at home everywhere? Maybe in threehundred years – or thousand years. As for the possible Westernisation of the universities in the former communist countries: that certainly remains a threat. But history shows that we survived Stalinism and its attempt to erase our culture and our ancient structures. It did not succeed, because consciously or subconsciously, society developed a defence mechanism. Many Estonians would now claim they had a protection mechanism against russification and the Russian language. We don’t have that mechanism in place against the English language. That remains a possible danger. Our acceptance of English has meant throwing out a lot of our own culture only to replace it with a mess, with turbulence. Take the aggressive billboards. This is really American. You don’t see that in Germany for instance. The society we are building now is much more bottom-up than most traditional western democracies, which are usually more top-down. It will be interesting to see what kind of blend we will have in, say, twenty years. The EU enlargement will introduce more competitive, aggressive features into European culture. Our habits shall be challenged. I am well aware of the brain 65

drain that threatens my university. But we should not resist this. We just have to remain aware of it. Compare it to the 1960s or 1970s in Finland. Many Finnish academics went to the US or the UK. When the Finnish technology boom happened, the next generation turned out to be part of a reservoir of human resources. Something similar may happen to the Baltic states. And why not expect this from the rest of Eastern or Southeastern Europe, as well? Their students too may return one day. The best days for my part of the world were when we were open to both East and West, North and South through trade routes from Hamburg and Lübeck to Novgorod and Jaroslav. The Baltic states and Estonia have a large interest in maintaining its close ties with northern Russia. But St Petersburg is clearly a European city. I can really see an open future there. The border here exists as a historical and military one, but it should be transparent and not hinder the mobility of people and ideas. An absolute must. Otherwise we are heading down a dead end street. This is not just a job for the politicians. In a democracy, it is also the task of intellectuals and scientists. You see, people have a right to feel at home somewhere. No borders should be built on mistrust, or on hatred.’

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Heimat by Marlene Streeruwitz

In German you find the word ‘Heimat’. It means ‘home’, but the semantics reach much deeper. ‘Heimat’ means not only the description of the place where you come from, but also forges a religious connection between person and birthplace. ‘Heimat’ is a sacred landscape usually involving childhood memories, good childhood memories. Of well-lit memories of meadows in the morning. Of murmuring water running between mossy islands. And how the bread tasted. And of course, the bread of childhood tasted so much better. The bread of childhood always tastes better than anything else. The word ‘Heimat’ includes everything good and nice, and that which will never be the same again. All the other sides of childhood: the insecurity, the anger, the fears, and ennui, all these darker sides stay hidden behind the nostalgic beauty. The darker sides have to be suppressed so that the beauty remains unsullied. This beauty defines the self. The dark sides are turned inside out to help define the other. Who is a friend and who is an enemy? This question asks where someone belongs. Where someone comes from. And if you do not share the same nostalgic images of this childhood landscape, then you do not belong. If you do not look like the people in this childhood landscape, then you do not belong. If you do not talk like the people there, you surely do not belong. A nationalist censorship is at work here. One find allusions to this nostalgic construction particularly in popular texts. After the coalition of the Austrian Peoples’ Party with the far-right FPÖ, the Austrian government defended itself with all the phrases that are, and were, used to defend the nostalgia of the quaint Heimat feeling. In the end, all of 67

this was about the question of who our friends are and who our enemies are. In true nationalist fashion, the opposition inside Austria was labelled an antiAustrian movement. It seems that in the end, one should just simply decide to belong. For better or worse. No rational questioning or probing. No democratic privacy. It seems that the word ‘Heimat’ still has an antirational aspect to it. A subliminal force that belongs to the 19th century. A force beyond rationality. It was quite eerie to see this force rearing its head once again so effortlessly. I myself eliminated the word ‘Heimat’ from my vocabulary because this word encircles those who belong, those who are allowed to belong. Its history is just too dark and its historical implications are just too clear. Too often in my life have I had bread that tasted different, but nonetheless as good as any bread at home. The word ‘Heimat’ can only rightfully belong to those who were forced out. All the others should abolish the word ‘Heimat’ and form their own personal memories, and not fall back on the seductive images of a nationalist concoction.

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The Enlargement Takes Place in the Centre of Europe an interview with Erhard Busek

Shifting Perspectives on Home ‘I was born in Vienna in 1941. My sense of home was always connected to the existing historical conditions. The worst place I have ever been to was Prague in 1968. I arrived just as the troops of the Warsaw Pact were moving in. I never felt at home in Berlin while the wall was still there. Now there are parts of Berlin I can call home, but the new Berlin is somehow strange to me as well. I think it is too monumental for our current Europe. Compare what Robert Musil once said about Vienna: he noted that it is unclear whether it is the fairest Western city in the East, or Eastern city in the West. The position of one’s home changes according to circumstances. I wrote a small book called Heimat that dealt with the issue of roots. At the time, there was a danger that new/old nationalists would take possession of the expression ‘Heimat’. I wanted to show that to feel at home can be a very diverse experience and that it not only implied fancy costumes, or Alpine behaviour, or folk songs. That we are exposed to various Heimats, different layers of a sense of home. First in childhood, then as we come of age. In rural surroundings or in an urban environment. Home in one’s business, or being rooted in leisure time. Many Viennese, for instance, live in the city during the week, and then on weekends they go to their second homes, dress in folklore costumes and feel at home there. When it comes to homesickness, I am too eager to look elsewhere. A failure of my generation, our sense of home was never endangered. I would probably know homesickness if I were to lose my home. One can only imagine how emigrants must feel, political emigrants especially. Strangely, when I take Austrian Airlines back to Vienna and I begin reading the Austrian newspapers, I suddenly get the impulse to just turn around and flee. But that too is part of a sense of home. Always ambivalent: I miss it when I am away, but when I return I want to leave again.

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Crossing Borders In my youth, the Iron Curtain was very nearby and felt like a very well-defined border. Part of our family history takes place behind the Iron Curtain. My grandfather was in the construction industry and was involved in building theatres and opera houses from Hamburg to Odessa. My father spoke a little Hungarian. This stimulated my interest. The part of my family in the East had stories that reminded me of how unfortunate my generation was that we were unable to travel to the Eastern bloc. I was deeply impressed by events that happened in our neighbourhood. In 1956, during the Hungarian uprising in Budapest, my father and I went to Györ. The border was open. I was fifteen years old and it left a lasting impression on me. And then, what happened in Prague in 1968 was something that should have offended all of Europe. It inspired me to remind people that we were all Europeans and that the Iron Curtain was not something that would last forever. One of the first borders I ever crossed was in 1952; the Italian border, and then the border that divided Italy from Yugoslavia. We also visited Trieste, which was divided into zones A (controlled the Americans and British) and B (under Yugoslav authority). Everybody bought cheap merchandise there: shoes and silk shawls, etc. The Yugoslav border was always very convenient as it was not really an Iron Curtain border. Austria was divided by the four victorious Allies as well. We had close friends living nearby and to visit them we had to pass through the Soviet zone. This was my real first border experience. I was six or seven years old and we had to carry identity cards, with their eleven stamps. The Soviets would always count them. The border between the zones consisted of a railway bridge. The train would stop and they checked everybody. Once the soldiers had passed and picked out the people they wanted to interrogate, there was an enormous sigh of relief – we had survived once again. But then came the second border: the train would move some twenty meters or so and then it was the American GIs turn to pass through the train. They had pumps and spread TTT on us. I guess they thought we had lice. The fear of being picked out of the crowd and then relief, freedom, and then came the anger that the Americans were convinced that we were living on such an almost subhuman level. Extremely strong impressions. I grew up in this atmosphere. We were lucky to live in the American part. We lived some fivehundred metres from the Soviet zone. The Soviet side had the cheaper 70

shops. This was how they were going to destroy capitalism. This part of the city took a long time to recover from the war. This further emphasised the whole notion of a border, as did the huge Soviet billboards with their huge portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Later on in around 1955-’56 I travelled to neighbouring communist countries like Hungary, which was slightly easier, and Czechoslovakia, a border notorious for the interminable waiting. To say that they were not very friendly is an understatement. The attitude of the GDR Germans and the Czechs was quite different. Coming from East Germany, you were happy to meet the Czechs, who seemed tolerant, which in fact they were not. They were the toughest of Austria’s communist neighbours. But coming from East Germany, into Czechoslovakia was cosy. I was travelling with my parents, through Prague, toward Dresden. Once, when a particularly horrible East German border control appeared, my mother started shouting at him: ‘You could be my son! You’re behaving horribly!’ I was convinced we were going to be sent to prison. But my parents told me that they had learned from their experience with the Nazis, that if you shout at them, all goes well. In general, crossing borders in Europe has become easier over the past few years. But now there is a new shape to the European map. I now cross borders where there used to be no borders like between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and of course in the former Yugoslavia, where I am shocked how strictly citizens from neighbouring countries are controlled. The feeling of being distanced from one’s neighbours is probably the most tangible post-war reality for people in the former Yugoslavia. Europe From a Global Perspective I started to making close contacts with East European intellectuals, especially writers and artists, in 1968. I thus ultimately regained a home that had been familiar to my parents and grandparents. One reason for me to travel eastwards was to hear the family stories about life behind the Iron Curtain before I was born. In the close personal contacts I established, I found a lot of common roots, a strong sense of home. I sometimes feel closer to the intellectuals from the East than those from Western Europe. But this is a personal thing, and certainly not valid for everybody. What Kundera, Konrád, Milosz, Magris did for Central and Eastern Europe was very important. We are very indebted to them. It was of vital importance to keep the spiritual and cultural aspects of Europe under communism 71

together. The expression ‘Eastern enlargement’ is wrong, because the enlargement takes place in the centre of Europe although the centre of Europe cannot be fixed geographically. It involves a system of moving worlds, that depends on one’s perspective. Economically, globalisation is already a fact. Culturally, we don’t have a clue about how to deal with multiculturalism. When I listen to the voices in the tram in Vienna I can hear the mixture of languages, and I respond as a politician. I count the number of people who obviously were not born in this city. And then I observes in what ways they have integrated into Vienna by watching their behaviour. Are there tensions? I am a political animal in this regard. The Austrians living in the workers’ district are mainly elderly people, and here I can feel the tension. Not necessarily peace, but at least an armistice. In some parts of Vienna, the west for instance, there are no problems if someone is from Central or Eastern Europe. The problem is when immigrants reveal that they are Muslims or Arabs. Things like the chador, here I begin to notice the remarks. It seems that one alien and another alien can be two different things. There seems to be a general if not strong feeling that the new EU member nations are from the rim of Europe. That is because people are only looking at the current situation, at the Soviet past, at their poor economic situation. I am not sure that after May 2004, the majority of Europeans will welcome our new/old neighbours in the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and those in Southeastern Europe. The countries about to join the EU are still far from the centre of Europe.’

72

The Corpse under the Table an interview with István Eörsi

Looking For an Eastern European Dialogue Partner ‘If, in our circumstances, you want to express your individuality – to say ‘I’ – with full rights, you have to conquer a whole word. As François Villon observes in one of his poems, he knows all about money, about women, but he doesn’t know himself, his I. Villon’s sense of I led to a development in Europe where the I came more and more to the forefront. This development requires a certain degree of independence. Freedom of movement, of thinking, and of feeling. Only then can this space gradually widen. In Eastern Europe, the arrival of individuality came late for a number of reasons. Gombrowicz, the great Polish writer once asked what the difference was between a French and a Polish painter. The Frenchman is a French painter while the Pole is a Polish man who paints. That means that there are French painters like there are French waiters and French workers and so on, who are part of the labour process and who ultimately have to face problems unique to their own craft. But in Eastern Europe, democratic institutions have only existed for short periods of time. Artists and intellectuals somehow had to replace these institutions. Hungary had no democratic institutions in 1910, but what we did have was Endre Ady the poet. Bad for Hungary, good for the poetry. As a person, Ady was indispensable, as a great individual he bore the responsibility for Hungary’s fate. For Ady this was an obstacle, it made it impossible for him to be just a poet. ‘I wanted the entirety, and so I have a right to nothing.’ But I won’t continue to translate Ady into English, that would be ridiculous: my English, his Hungarian... In Eastern Europe, the structure based on subordination did not 73

favour individuality. Then came Gombrowicz who stated that he didn’t want to suppress his individuality. I, although under different circumstances, had that same desire. I am I. I am who I am. I wrote so extensively about myself through the Polish writer, Gombrowicz, during the days of great upheaval in 1989. I was in trouble back then. I couldn’t write anything except poetry and short articles. In Hungary, as elsewhere, political freedom came with social uncertainty. This was a great disappointment. Freedom brought unemployment, homelessness and an uncertainty among families. Secondly, as a student of Gyo´´rgy Lukács, and as someone who had lived in West Berlin between 1983 and 1986, I had no illusions about capitalism. Everything Lukács said about the Soviet Union was bullshit, but everything he said about capitalism was true, and even worse. Today, if the world doesn’t find an alternative to the market economy, mankind will have little chance of surviving. I am not a socialist, because I don’t have an alternative for the market economy and I don’t know what kind of system would be more social and more just. So I didn’t expect much from capitalism. But what I didn’t expect was that after 1990, the extreme right wing would re-appear, even in similar uniforms I remembered from my childhood. Two generations have passed since WWII. How do these people still know these things? It has all returned: the old dream of Great Hungary, of conquering neighbouring countries, and out with the Jews and the Roma. So all this made it very urgent for me to find a partner in dialogue – an alter ego if you like. But who? It had to be someone very clever, if possible an Eastern European, albeit neither Hungarian nor Jewish. Because I not only wanted the similarities, but also the differences. Gombrowicz was a Catholic, but never a communist. He was an aristocrat. Most important of all, he suffered from this small nation complex, just like me. He was unable to remain in the frame of the ideology, the social conditions in which he was brought up, just like me. He had his adoration of the ego. His ideas about unripeness. I am even now unripe. He was a Catholic atheist, I was an atheistic atheist. A Catholic atheist like him does not believe in God, but does believe in the devil. I never believed in either. He had to revolt to be an atheist, I didn’t. Already as a youngster, I was so radical that it was scandalous. Gombrowicz was someone I could really talk with. Memories From Hell and From Paradise Prison has not been the worst place I have ever been in my life. That distinc74

tion is held by the ghetto in Budapest in 1944. There you never knew whether you would survive the next day. I remember the lice, which spread typhus. Men sitting in the doors of cellars. I spent only two weeks there. I was also in Budapest prior to that. The Crossed Arrows would shoot Jews and toss them in the Danube. Prison life between 1956 and 1960, were pretty terrible times as well. But luckily I was not in the so-called little prison, where prisoners were executed. I really couldn’t pick the best place I have ever been to in my life. I have been to so many wonderful places. Kotor in Montenegro, which Danilo Kisˇ loved so much, and Ireland. But this room overlooking the Danube as well. Well, perhaps the best place in my life was the Schaubühne in Berlin, the day when my play was staged. Both for Danilo Kisˇ and for me, the worst places in life remain related to Nazism. To have a Jewish origin in the past century meant hell. The first time I crossed the Hungarian border was in 1952. As a young communist, I went with a delegation to Auschwitz. An impressive experience. We met a group of East Germans there. They were weeping like children. Not fake tears but real tears. While walking in the woods there, I spotted some small white stones. I was surprised by how light they were. Not at all like stones. Then somebody pointed out to me that these were bones that had been spewed out of the chimneys. Later I wrote about this in one of my plays: the terrible thought that I should collect 80 kilos of this and recreate my grandmother. That was my first excursion abroad. Later, I could go abroad again. To Poland and the CSSR to go skiing. In 1968, I was in France for the first time. I came as a result of the the mediation of Karolyi’s widow (the Hungarian prime minister between the two World Wars). There was a memorial museum for him in Vence, the same village where Gombrowicz was living then. But I didn’t know that back then. Anyway, I lost all my money in a casino in Monte Carlo and then left for Paris. The whole atmosphere there influenced me greatly. Prior to 1989, whenever I arrived at the border, they would pick me out, and they would call the Hungarian ministry of the interior to ask if I had permission to leave and then they would search my car and ultimately they would let me go. They sometimes confiscated my manuscripts. This entailed hours of waiting. Even now, when I approach the border and I know that nothing can happen, I still have this tension in me. It was always very humiliating. ‘Eörsi? Ah, step out, please wait,’ Then they made their phone calls, etc. My apartment was bugged, there were a lot of spies. Not because of 1956 but 75

because I belonged to the – very small – Hungarian opposition. When I lived in West Berlin, I travelled to West Germany through the corridor. But I had a Hungarian car, which meant that I could leave the corridor and enter East Germany at any time. There they also picked me out, suspecting that I was smuggling books. You can’t possibly compare the current controls at the Schengen border with the old communist border. Here at this border, I am no longer an exception. I get the same treatment as the rest. Now they’re only interested in whether you have cocaine, not manuscripts. I do have problems with the brandy I bring with me. Always too many bottles. Techniques for Forgetting The weakest faculty among Hungarian intellectuals is memory. Why? Because they accepted Kádár. It was certainly not the case that they served him with tortured hearts and minds. Kádár came in with Russian help, followed by six years of terror, killing, and imprisonment. Afterwards Kádár told the Hungarian intellectuals, who now felt pretty hopeless and paralysed by fear, that if they accepted his authority, he would give them more freedom and more meat. The intellectuals thought they had no choice. They told themselves that Kádár was not so bad after all. They even came to think that their situation was relatively fine. Kádár kept his word and the Hungarians could read Kafka, Ginsberg – with some exceptions of course; no Koestler, no Orwell. Every second or third year, you could travel to the West. People began feeling they had something to lose. They came to love Kádár. Later Kádár had to pay back the loans on which he had based his policies and prices started rising. People queued up in front of the butchers would suddenly remember that it was Kádár who had killed Imre Nagy. There is a secret connection between meat prices and national memory. After 1989, intellectuals faced a new task: to forget that they once loved Kádár. There are many techniques of forgetting. A rightist intellectual would now say that good Hungarians have to take care of their families. They needed work, to provide for their families. And they would say that those leftists, who are mostly Jews, have no sense of responsibility for their families and therefore they resisted the regime. They are not good Hungarians. I am not inventing this, I read this, and not just once. Recently, the situation has worsened. Kádár has had the greatest influence on Hungary of all the politicians of the twentieth century. Not only on the left, but even on the right. What made him, of all Eastern European politicians, so 76

skilful? After 1956 – before he was a Stalinist, and acted according to his convictions – he was always prepared to suppress the ideological consequences for tactical reasons. Now both the left and the right share this trait. They put all their ideals between quotation marks. Kádár’s government after 1956 was called the ‘revolutionary government of workers and peasants.’ Their task was to suppress the revolution, whereas the revolution was started by workers and intellectuals and supported by the peasants. You can lie to yourself for one or two years. But not for forty years. You start to believe your own lies. This is the fate of Hungarian intellectuals. So they made themselves believe that they loved Kádár. And now it is the reverse again. In a recent poll, the Hungarian population was asked who the greatest Hungarian of the last thousand years was. Number one was King István. Széchényi was second. Kádár was third. Imre Nagy followed far behind them. Every Human Passion Contains the Seed of Great Poetry You said that ‘political poetry is less true to the self than personal?’ That’s the stupidest opinion I have ever heard. But it is not the first time I hear it. From every sentiment or Leidenschaft that is subjectively true, great poetry can be made. Even if this passion concerns a cow. You just have to be talented enough. What does the word ‘political’ mean? Passion for social justice! A passion as great as the fear of death, or love. Prometheus’ passion is no less than Medea’s passion. If the passion is true and stems from your inner self, and you have the power to have a subjective vision strong and personal enough, than you can write great poetry. Every human passion contains the seed of great poetry. In this respect there is no difference between a political poem and a love poem. When I now reread my poems from the early fifties dedicated to Rákoczi, I feel shame. I wrote a book about that: A Poet’s document with explanation. In this book I tried to explain my poetic development, from my Stalinist poems to the present day. I found an organic development that made me very happy. Even this short Stalinist period played an important role in my later development. Because I took part in the revolution I did not have to rehabilitate myself. I am sincere in this book. Poetry was good to me under Stalinism. I got to travel, to Poland, I got awards. In my book I show what role self-deception can play. But the poems in question aren’t even political poems. They are bad poems. The passion behind them is very superficial. I didn’t know this back then. My real political poetry began after my disappointment with Stalinism. In prison I wrote twelve poems included in this book. I wrote a love poem for 77

my wife there. But if you write a love poem in a political prison, it becomes a political poem as well. Under Rákoczi, poets had to praise the leaders. Kádár’s proposed something different: he did not expect praise, but you could not scold him either. Our poets, some of the greatest among them, decided that to write political poetry is not the task of a poet. Politics were excluded from the realm of literature. When I came out of prison in 1960 with the political poems I had written there, my friends said to me that I shouldn’t write political poetry, since we were poets. Alright, I said, but my friend was hanged in prison. And if I have a passionate admiration for his work and his attitude, I shouldn’t write about him? Is this a taboo? I continued to write my things, which simply meant that I was not considered a poet by many other poets. They wanted to forget. I did not. Not because I am a better person but because I had different experiences. I had been subjected to daily humiliations for four years. Later, in my book about my prison years, I write about the silence of the Hungarian writers and poets: I discover a corpse under the table and I shout ‘A corpse, a corpse.’ And nobody responds. Unpleasant offenbarungen, because of which I am not very much liked. But I enjoy that. Ha ha. It makes me even more obstinate’.

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Part III. Intimate Geographies

Czeslaw Milosz once wrote that Eastern Europeans have less time than Westerners to occupy themselves ‘with a three-year-old’s love for his aunt or jealousy toward his father.’ Is inner life in the East really that different from the West? The London based writer Eva Hoffman was born in Poland and she lived and continues to live in both realms. She left Krakow when she was a school girl, in a time when Western and Eastern Europe were as different as the light and dark shades on a claire obscure painting. Later, she relearned Polish and perhaps even her Eastern-Europeanness. Whatever that may be. Yes, she seems to answer, there seem to be distinctions between East and West. But where, exactly, are East and West? Where is here and where is there? Could it be that the unconscious is geographical? And more importantly: when was here, and when was there? Nelly Bekus Goncharova, writer and essayist from Belarus, encountered her alter ego when she came across a diary she had kept as a young girl while in a Soviet pioneer summer camp. She is struck by the strangeness of the voice speaking in the diary. It seemed that in the territory of her past, someone had operated on her behalf. A peculiar experience, yet to be confronted with one’s self who had spent her entire childhood or perhaps her entire life under communism, may be familiar for many of those from the former communist countries. Saviana Stanescu is a Romanian playwright, dramaturg, and poet, who for us draws the landscape of her life. She does this through poetry and so proves István Eörsi right: poetry addresses all aspects of human life, and as politics are an integral, if often unpleasant part of life, poetry can deal with politics. She also proves another statement by Czeslaw Milosz, that poetry, like no other genre, can surprise the self and jump in front of us ‘like a tiger’. Andrei Ples¸u, rector of the New Europe College in Bucharest and former Rumanian minister of culture and foreign affairs, warns that we are dealing 79

with demagogy once the feeling of home begin to resemble the generalities. He himself experienced paradise in very particular, if not peculiar places: the place of his father’s exile, when he himself was a child, and his own place of exile in the late 1980s. He gives us more reasons for conflicting thoughts: both before and after 1989 he experienced his own sense of isolation, of endangered privacy. He furthermore brings to mind an alternative cultural model from inter-war Rumania, a time when the mind was more elastic and political opposites confronted each other and they discussed issues in a salon-like atmosphere. It seems that the EU as a bureaucratic institution is threatening this elasticity of the mind. Ademir Arapovic´, born in Sarajevo and currently living in Amsterdam, would vehemently object to being called an artist. And yet he is one, although he considers the old (European?) concept of artist to be worn-out. Perhaps he is a new kind of artist, who poses questions that are as relevant to an Amsterdam resident as to one of Sarajevo, to a European or to a citizen of the world. It seems that global citizenship is becoming a reality after all.

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A Past Retrieved an interview with Eva Hoffman

Two Senses of Time ‘I grew up in a quiet and very poor part of Krakow. The Krakow of my youth was a beautiful city which was not destroyed during WWII. It was a quiet and very grey city. This was the post-war period. Poland was quite impoverished. There was something about the city’s quietness: next to the actual urban appearance, there was a different sense of time. I loved the courtyards of Krakow which to a child conveyed a sense of mystery. There was the old Jewish quarter where we went to the synagogue once a year, during holy days. My parents weren’t very religious. The old synagogue conveyed a different sense of mystery in a particularly empty and poor part of Krakow. I remember walking along the quiet empty streets, the sound of our footsteps echoing. I keep on repeating the word mystery, but to children it also evoked a wonderful sense of discovery of these very rich and enigmatic spaces. There are several layers of memories, returns, and new actualities about my place of birth. Krakow became very deeply embedded in my psyche. It was as if the unconscious was geographical, formed by my first city. Time in Krakow differed from the kind of time I later encountered in the United States and Canada. I was struck by the startling difference in the pace and of life itself. I suppose this was partly because I was a child, and this was childish time, time expanding. But there really was a difference. Partly because this was not a period in Eastern Europe when people were hustling to pursue careers. Perhaps this was a side-effect of what had been a very difficult time. But it was also simply a quieter period. I now visit Krakow quite regularly. This is very pleasurable, and has added new layers to my memories. But there was a long interval when I couldn’t go back. It took seventeen years until my first return. My first return in 1977 was deeply emotional. Krakow had been obliged to remain very static during the communist period. So it seemed quite unchanged. People still lived in the same apartments. Insofar as they had telephones, they still had the same 81

numbers. So I could really revisit the city that I remembered, partly by dreaming about it. People had changed of course. Childhood friends had grown up and led adult lives very different from mine. After 1989, I could still recognise Krakow as my place of birth although the city has undergone a transition that has been fairly positive. The serious problem of pollution, for instance, is now being taken care of. Crumbling buildings are being restored although its improvements are not all courtesy of mere galloping capitalism. It is now definitely a European city as opposed to an Eastern European city. I take pleasure in seeing the city come alive with cafés opening all over town. The excitement of revival. Of a new life. The clairobscure kind of contrast between Eastern Europe and the West is blurring. Home is no longer restricted to a place because my life has been very peripatetic. London is the perfect middle ground between Manhattan and Krakow. My home nowadays is more specific milieus, specific spaces such as my neighbourhood, London, the Upper West Side of New York, my friends in Boston and certainly my friends in Warsaw, where my affinities have somehow shifted to. I feel a sense of deep familiarity when I return to Poland. And yet I do not live there. Exit Into an Antipodal World A traumatic experience confronting borders upon leaving Poland was averted because we left by ship, so there was no border with barbed wire. Of course my parents were searched, you know. I could feel my parents’ tension. They underwent a body search. That caused great anxiety and tension. I remained quite cool and I wasn’t searched, which was just as well, because we were wearing contraband silver. We were taught to be defiant of the law. So I wasn’t awfully terrified; for me it was just a game. In retrospect it was only fair, it was our own cutlery after all. Our arrival in Canada is a blurrier memory. We arrived by ship, went to Montreal, seemed to be met by somebody who was meant to assist us, to put us on the train. And that is all I remember. As for homesickness, here too there are several layers of memories, returns and new actualities, which in a sense masks it. But yes, I was extremely homesick for quite a long time. I wrote about this extensively in Lost in Translation. It did not surprise me when I later found out that nostalgia was once considered a clinical illness. When I pined it was because leaving Poland was my parents’ decision, not mine. As far as I was concerned I was having a happy childhood. 82

The world we came into was antipodal. I don’t think such contrasts exists in the world anymore, at least not between Eastern Europe and the West. The differences were everywhere in evidence. I never wanted to leave Poland, and I didn’t have any romantic notions of Canada like my father. I just sort of dug my heels in and reacted against this new environment. If we had left even five years later and I had been more conscious of the reasons for leaving I probably would have been less nostalgic. I was talking to a psychoanalyst recently who is interested in questions of migrations and how they affect the relationship between children and parents. It is his notion that children become the carriers of the migration experience. In a sense, I think I carried the full weight of my family’s nostalgia. My parents absolutely refused to acknowledge it. I just don’t believe they didn’t miss Poland. Of course they did, but they refused to acknowledge it because it had been their decision. They were absolutely determined to make their lives work in the new world. To them it was a better place. I consider my migration above all a Cold War experience. I think there are different forms of transcultural movements. Ours was a particular kind of migration, something between migration and exile. Ours was almost like exile in the sense that we could not return. At least we assumed that we could never return. The rift between the two worlds was so great. We lived in a technologically different world, with no emails, no faxes and no long-distance telephone calls. Now that I think about it, there is an Eastern European literature of exile, of Cold War exile in particular. Milosz, Brodsky, Kundera are all Cold War writers. Their sense of extreme contrast is determined by that. Having lived in Eastern Europe gave me a sense of proportion about human experience. If you don’t have that – this is very difficult to talk about – well, it can certainly give you a false sense of your own importance, for instance, that yours is the best generation ever, that you, are discovering the world, and that nobody has ever been as clever as you that instils in you a false sense of control over your fate. And perhaps false expectations of how much you should be in control and of how much we can expect of progress. This was once, more than it is now, an aspect of American culture. All of which I did feel in America very much when I got there. I felt that there was this kind of flattening of the personality, a two-dimensionality, which I think is not disconnected from the absence of a sense of the length and the death of human experience. America has changed a lot however since I arrived there. As for the Eastern European historical imagination: if one holds on to 83

memories too tightly and insistently, you get Yugoslavia. Although what made there for the revival of those memories was propaganda. But there are various kinds of collective and historical memory. In Eastern Europe and in Poland it was terribly important to have this kind of unofficial memory as a repository for something like historical truthfulness. As an emigrant or exile one must ponder the dangers of this wonderfully lyrical feeling called nostalgia. The main danger is getting stuck in the past. One needs the past to inform the present.

A Pre-Political Consciousness I had extremely different influences during my Krakow childhood: Jewish family in a Catholic environment, with communist rituals. As a child you don’t need to separate the various rituals and isms. When I walk into a beautiful Krakow church today, I feel a sense of familiarity. The church offered aesthetics, a sense of familiarity and odd comfort. I was also formed by Polish culture and Jewish culture. People sometimes ask me whether I feel Polish or Jewish. Aleksander Watt, the Polish-Jewish poet, used to say that he was Polish-Polish and Jewish-Jewish. This was initially true for me. We grow up as hybrids in very culturally intermingled worlds. Ever more so. But even before it became more so. There is ever more commingling of cultures and individual destinies every day. While at the same time, we see a resurgence of small nation nationalism. Not to mention a rise in very dogmatic belief systems. I feel that antiSemitism is once again on the rise, although it remains very difficult to diagnose this new version, except, of course, in the Islamic world, where there is simply horrible levels of anti-Semitism. It makes me feel asserting my Jewishness as a declaration of my solidarity. When our identities come under attack, we begin to assert them. What will happen politically is difficult to tell. My observations are on a pre-political level. This is a luxury, this living in a pre-political consciousness, but I do believe it is a true consciousness, and I wish we could maintain this level. But this seems pretty unlikely. The world along with Europe is changing so fast through intermingling and travelling. Meanwhile, younger people have a generational identity that rivals national identity. I am speaking of course of a certain level of education. We will have a sense of Europeanness. Certainly for a long time combined with a particular cultural nationality. These cultural formations have been so interesting as well. We should not overthrow them too easily. 84

As Europe expands eastward, we talk about what ‘they’ can learn from us. But there is a lot to learn – historically, politically, and otherwise – from them and their experience, especially their experience of two totalitarian systems. Politically I am a Central or Eastern European liberal. To convey the lesson the East can teach the West should be part of the European project. Differences That Can Be Bridged In Lost in Translation, I use the Polish word tesknota, which is untranslatable ‘ but means something like pining, that which stems from nostalgia, Polish nostalgia. On one level, the experience of loss was created by migration. On another level, I thought that this emotional difference between Poland and Canada, was that Canada did not experience the war first hand. And I realised how important those rich tonalities of loss, grief and communal mourning that I felt as a child were. In Canada, I missed this variety of emotional strata. So in a way, one could say that it was loss that created this strong sense of home. On the other hand, we should not forget the experience of fullness and plenitude, which I think is very much a part of childhood experience. I lost this notion of plenitude and this is what I so desperately wanted to convey to my new friends in Canada. But they could not imagine plenitude in a communist country. I speak Polish, or rather, I speak Polish again. After emigrating to Canada, Polish was readily replaced by English. I made the decision to accept English because I lived in North America with few other Polish speakers and with not much hope of returning to Poland. So I pushed Polish out of the way. I owe my renewed interest in Polish to Jaruzelski. In 1981, many Poles managed to emigrate to flee the political situation exacerbated by Jaruzelski. Many came to New York and I began to speak Polish again with my new Polish friends. Speaking Polish has, like returning to Krakow, been a very pleasurable experience. When we left Poland I insisted on bringing over many of my books. They were heavy and very expensive to ship over no doubt. This allowed me to keep reading Polish writers even though I did put Polish literature aside for a while. This was because I needed to immerse myself in the English language, to inhabit the language, and make it inhabit me. Once that happened, I could safely return to Polish. It ultimately connected me to the larger conditions of the world. I talked to a Russian-born Israeli poet some time ago. He emigrated to Ger85

many as a child, where he stayed until he was nine, and then on to Israel. He said that he maintained his German but completely forgot his Russian. He said: ‘I killed my Russian’. Because it endangered his Hebrew and his emergence as a Hebrew poet. I went through something quite similar. I am now truly bilingual. The languages coexist and that is quite pleasurable. Fantasies about the turns my life might take were very vivid after I arrived in North America. That is less the case now. But when I go to Warsaw and I hear about friends and what they think is valuable and I think that, yes, maybe I could have been a part of all that. And sometimes there is a hint of regret in all of this. But I don’t dwell on it. I have, after all, done something with my life. I felt it again four years ago when I went with my sister to my parents’ birthplace, a Ukrainian village. It was a very intense and important experience. Suddenly I realised I might have grown up there, or in Lviv. Who knows, I might have become the local school teacher.’

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In the Reflected Light of the Alter Ego or: The Splendour and Misery of My Identity by Nelly Bekus Goncharova

The Dream of the Alter Ego The dream was not mine, but Chuang Tzu’s. Anyway, what difference does it make if it echoes through the lives of all people without exception, including mine. Once that Taoist wise man dreamed he was a butterfly… Upon awakening, he could not make out what he was: a butterfly that thought it had turned into Chuang Tzu, or Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly… This wise man’s story points out surprisingly accurately the fine truth of how we are never completely sure about ourselves, about our ‘Ego’. What if everything that happens to us is not our fate, but that of someone totally different? After all, we can think of ‘I’ as being that very butterfly that once dreamed it was Chuang Tzu … A Lesson from Chuang Tzu: the Matter of Self-Awareness The dream of Chuang Tzu communicates the deep incomprehensibility and fragility inherent in the issue of human self-awareness. Where this matter grows thin, the mysterious world of the alter ego starts to show through. I have no doubts that my alter ego is always beside me, that it participates in my life, and is one of the permanent co-authors of my ‘selfmodel’, secretly present during all the peripeteias of my, or rather our, common life. However, people seldom notice this presence, which happens only when the matter of self-awareness for some reason loses its impenetrability. Like, for example, in the gap between dream and reality in which we find ourselves on the edge of awakening, when the ‘Ego’, as if taken by surprise, at last no87

tices itself in another dimension, sees itself as someone else – as, essentially, its own double. The Topography of the Alter Ego It is conventionally believed that alter egos exist on the margins of our lives: in dreams, unexpressed feelings, and events unlived. I somehow feel that in fact they take part in real events along with us, if not sometimes in our stead. Although nobody, including ourselves, is aware of this substitution. It’s only when you look very carefully that we may discover traces of our doubles left in our personal biographies. Nevertheless, we know surprisingly little about them, and very rarely, if ever, meet them face to face. Actually, we hide behind each other’s backs, unwilling to really look into ourselves, and only special occasions can make us do so. A Biography Lesson: My Someone Else’s Diary In my life, this type of situation arose with one discovery: an old child’s exercise book – my own diary, written while I was at the Artek pioneer camp. It placed me face-to-face with the fact that in the territory of my past, there existed someone who had been operating reality on my behalf, had been me, and yet remained unknown to me, as if living in the shadow of my current selfconsciousness. I had never reread this diary since I had written it, and the very fact of its existence had been erased from my memory. That’s why, while reading it upon rediscovery, I was not recalling – I was actually rediscovering that childhood sensation of writing-and-experiencing; of my stay at Artek (a Soviet childhood myth and an international children’s camp on the Crimean coast) levelled down to an even line of narration by a child’s uneven handwriting. That camp was said to hold ‘the heart of Soviet childhood’. All across the USSR, children knew about it and dreamt of going there, the way kids dream of being in a fairytale, especially if it exists here on earth. Identification Parade Reading that text cover to cover was a strange experience of self-cognition involving a confrontation with my alter ego. I couldn’t believe I had participated in this text, nor did I see in the author anything of myself, my childhood, or my attitude toward the world. It was difficult to accept that this detailed, verbatim report of each day’s life was my true reaction to the wonderful journey it represented for a kid of nine. Separation from the parents, travelling a thou88

sand kilometres, a whirl of encounters with new people – all of this represented an unprecedented stimulation of ‘the social side’ for a child like me. It was, no doubt, a strong emotional experience, an outstanding and eventful burst amid the untroubled placidity of a child’s life… However, the diary did not elaborate a child’s experiences. Each day was recorded in chronological order, according to the tough timetable of life in the camp: ‘7:00 – wake-up, 10 minutes for exercise, 15 for breakfast, 30 for singing classes, the same for dancing, 20 minutes for politinformation, rarely – a walk to the beach and swimming, an excursion, an afternoon nap…’ Meticulously and consistently, without excessive detail and, most importantly, without any emotions, even dispassionately (as much as this word can reflect a child’s attitude to anything), an ‘I’ unknown to me was documenting each day of camp life. And even though I clearly remember that the idea to write a diary was my own and nobody forced me to do so, it leaves me with the strong impression that whatever was happening was not a personal event, but a mere act of abiding by the accepted rules of the territory. And that, of course, was not just the territory of that particular camp. It was the territory of a childhood that, for the millions inhabiting it, was known as ‘Soviet.’ Two Memories, Two of My ‘Ego’s’ The diary’s narrative tone is unusual for a child. It bears no traces of discontent – or joy. It very rarely shows my own personal impressions. The entire text is written in one mode of reporting about things experienced, seen, heard, and done. The report presents a sort of ‘process of objective cognition of reality’. For instance: ‘During the excursion to the Vorontsovs’ Palace in Alupka, we saw how rich people used to live before the revolution’. And although my memory – my other memory – still retains bright images of that excursion, like a winter garden, wall paintings, funny lions on marble staircases, and many other things, the text does not accord them a single word. For some reason such emotions and impressions were marked in the author’s mind – in that someone else’s mind of mine – as being irrelevant. As if all traces of my inner perceptive work, fragments of which still keep surfacing in my memory (but this is some other memory), were erased on purpose from the diary’s account. As for the text, it is impossible to ascertain whether I liked the excursions, whether the films were interesting or the water in the sea warm, and whether those sweets at parties were tasty.

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Boundaries of the Self The details of anyone’s childhood provide one’s first feeling of the boundaries of the self and one’s own. Opening the exercise book, I was hoping to find evidence of those experiences; to discover, perhaps, the origins of my current perception of the world. Instead, in the territory of diary notes written by my own hand, I ran into somebody living another, strange life, subject to a sense of logic foreign to me. The diary proved to be a kind of textual mould of an unfamiliar – my(!) – mind, and maybe it was there that I for the first time came face to face with my Other. I learnt that it possesses a history of its own, which is also part of my biography, and that sectional slices of our common memory reveal stunningly different versions of our life (i.e., its and mine). The child who wrote the diary might have been my first double, an alter ego that appeared on the margin between the inner and outer worlds. That special, historically conditioned configuration of the social world around me, which influenced the image of a kid who was living a double life inside me. Those notes of a little girl disclosed the utterly unchildlike status of a ‘Soviet childhood’ as a particular phenomenon within that ideological space. In fact, the diary, in some childlike way, exposed, ingeniously and clearly, the mechanics of relations between a little person’s Other and her ‘I’ in that particular society. The Optical Gear of Eyesight The diary did not reveal the actual matter of a child’s eyesight, however it did convey its ‘optical gear’. During childhood, this gear is implanted into us by others, our elders. In fact, it was really these various others who were the true authors of all the events described in the diary: i.e., the parents, schoolteachers, educators, and camp authorities. It was they who determined the meaning of what was happening, while the children served as mere parts of a machine for the fulfilment of the plan, parts that ‘worked’ to bring someone else’s ideas into reality. We were taken on an excursion to the botanical gardens; we rehearsed a song about a teddy bear; we were taken to a medical centre to have our heights and weights measured (my data are also recorded in the diary in that same statistical, dispassionate manner); I took part in a contest; and even victories in competitions and sports events were reported with a surprising lack of emotion. Grown-ups might have spoken about it to one other in this way, and it was essentially their ‘optical gear’ that had replaced the ‘textual’ self-aware90

ness of a child. I was surprised that my other Ego, one I still remember something about, never arouse out of any of those diary pages. On the Usefulness of Surprise To be surprised by somebody means to encounter something unexpected, as yet unknown, in that person. To be surprised by oneself means to discover the unexpected and unknown in oneself. In this life, how often we surprise ourselves is far from being some idle question. It is a question of how often our life experience brings us into marginal territories where the ‘Ego’ comes in touch with an unknown alter ego, or how often we look behind the horizon usually maintained by our self-identity. It is as if surprise triggers some mechanism which lifts the curtain of consciousness above a stage on which the play of a human life, by now much more complicated, is being performed. In the spot where a single actor once stood (the one identical to self-consciousness), suddenly appears several of my Ego’s that coexist when projected onto different planes: those of the past, future, family, society, country, and its ideology… A Lesson in Culture: Someone Else’s Experience of the Alter Ego The film director Nikita Mikhalkov once made a film entitled Anna, From 6 to 18, which is striking because of the candid way it tells the story of his daughter Anna, and how she experienced her Soviet childhood. It is told by an adult, through the voice of Anna. The plot is basically how Anna grows up, which was similar to how millions of other Soviet people grew up. The film combines short interviews and conversations with the girl, recorded when she was young. Mikhalkov simply saved Anna’s responses to questions about things that excited, fascinated, and troubled her, as well as her dreams, at the ages of 6, 10, 12, etc. Her responses clearly show how the actual ‘childishness’ in the child gradually is smothered by words that belong to others. Anna’s replies hardly represent the events in her own life; instead they talk about the details in the outside world. ‘What worries you at the moment?’ – ‘Brezhnev’s death. I fear for our great country’, Anna comments, wiping away her tears. ‘What do you dream of?’ – ‘I wish there was no war, and there was peace everywhere in the world’, echoes Anna in the standard ideological clichés of propaganda. We literally see the inner life of a girl absorbing a world of meanings around her; while her thoughts and ambitions are shaped by the outside world; events within the social dimension increasingly replace inner experi91

ences, become their source and determine their value. We see a child emerging as a functioning machine, while other people begin to take their places in Anna’s inner space. It is those Others who conditioned the machine-like nature of my writing in the Artek diary, so astonishingly inappropriate for a child author, which ultimately makes one question the truth of this kind of documentation of childhood. The Formula The child’s diary that I read some twenty years later became a valuable source of experience about the interaction of my ‘Ego’ with its unknown Other. Behind the dispassionate chronicles, one could clearly see how our identity’s elementary particles flow from the outside world to one’s inner life. I learnt that the alter ego occurs at the intersection of my ‘self-consciousness’ with the surrounding world and the people that inhabit it. The alter ego is an effect of refined interaction that occurs at that border, and the answer to the riddle of my inner double (or doubles) can probably be found not in the depths and undercurrents of my existence, but on the surface, in my neighbourhood, in those closest to me. A Chinese proverb by Guang Yin-Tzu observes that our consciousness is born out of the impact of the ‘Ego’ with other things, the way fire is made by rubbing two sticks together. The ‘Ego’ is born and reborn over and over again during the course of a lifetime as it communicates with and encounters new people. Meanwhile, our inner space becomes increasingly inhabited by ever more alter egos. And therefore, the trajectory of my life is not merely the result of books and towns, countries and events, but also people who, willingly or not, have become the co-authors of my self-consciousness. The Road – Practising Identification This truth is still new to me as it is only recently that I found it confirmed by events in my life. It happened during the course of a quite normal trip where I crossed the whole of Eastern Europe in a few days. Belarus, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria – these countries became interchangeable like the shapes inside a child’s kaleidoscope. I rarely had time to stop and stops occurred mainly on the borders, those strips of no-man’s land where one set of human conventions is replaced with another. Various cultural props framing the flow of foreign daily chores flew by outside my window, and only the regularity with which our passports were checked created a sort of monotonous rhythm. 92

To every border guard’s routine question of ‘Where are you from?’, I naturally echoed what was written in my passport: ‘Belarus’. This repeated response had an unexpected effect: halfway through my journey, I discovered that the tone of my responses began changing as I started to add new inner(!) conviction to my responses. Thus, my mechanical responses to stock questions (outward rhetorical identification with a territory) suddenly changed the quality of this connection. It was as if my responses had a purpose beyond their outward representation (to an abstract Other, ephemerally and randomly personified by the border guards) – I was being handed my new reflected face, but now further enriched by someone else’s vision. A Lesson From Lacane In this new face, I caught a brief glimpse of the shadow of my alter ego at the convergence of my self-consciousness and the Other’s perception. The latter kept industriously attaching the idea of Belarus to my ‘I’, which made me start relating to my country in a new way… The more the train moved away from Belarus’s borders, the more attached my self-consciousness became to the country I had just left. Unexpectedly, this journey turned out to be a test drive for my new identity. Meeting others required that the connection with the land-left-behind be constantly renewed, or reinitiated. This reference became an element in my new alter ego’s current image; it provided a system of axes in which the formula of my presence in the eyes of the other people was being worked out. Thus Others once again became co-authors of my self-identification, and gave birth to an alter ego that might (who knows?) be destined to become my new ‘Ego’ in a new phase of my life in another territory. Apparently, Lacane’s image of others being a mirror in which we initially see our own reflection, and from which we then begin to break away in search for ourselves, is more than a primary model of the emergence of the ‘Ego’ during childhood. This journey that leads us to ourselves through the territory of the Others is one we will take many times during the course of our lives. The Destination of My ‘Identity’ My train arrived at its terminus, I stepped out onto the platform, and the first thing I noticed were the people around me. They seemed to bear the reflections of my future alter egos; in every person I saw an attentive look revealing a hint of another face yet to come. And there is nothing unjust about this observation. All things considered, 93

it is the look of the Other that actually determines the distinguishing characteristics of our faces. We probably wouldn’t have any need for ‘self-models’ or identities, were we not surrounded by a diverse field of other people from whom we need to isolate ourselves by means of various cultural, social, and personal identification processes.

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EUROTIC I (a Curriculum Vitae) Saviana Stanescu

Who the hell do you think you are? EU means I in Romanian. RO is an abbreviation of Romania. EURO might be read as ‘I – an abbreviation of Romania’. I am a breathing abbreviation of Romania. Question mark. You like to play smart, huh? Who the hell do you think you are? I is ONE, isn’t it? I am someone. I am a name/number inscribed on a brain. A name/number written in a passport. I am the title of a virtual game for extra-terrestrials. I am eccentric. I am a list of titles. Making love on the barbed wire, Advice for housewives and muses, The Inflatable Apocalypse, Black Milk, The Outcast, Compte au rebours, Diary of a Clone. I am my books.

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You’re a show-off. Where the hell do you think you are? I’ve been living in New York for the last two years. I came on a Fulbright scholarship (imagine: the Fulbright grant as a plane, a boat, a helicopter, a broom, a door, a submarine, a magic carpet). My grandparents are Aromanian, (They are called Vlachs in Greece, Aromani in Romania, Tsintsari in Macedonia) a Balkan population with no country, but a Latin language and an anthem: ‘The Blessing of our Parents’. I’ve known it since my childhood and it still gives me goose bumps all over my body, it’s about the burning to death of anyone who forgets her language. That’s scary. Who the hell do you think you are? I am an abbreviation of the Balkans. I am being poetic. I have the right to be, don’t I? FLASH BACK. FLASH FORWARD. FLESH BACK. FLESH FORWARD. I am a name, a number, a list. A native, a woman, a foreigner, a New Yorker, a European, a Balkan-girl, a GO-GO EAST, a GO-GO WEST, a poet, a playwright, a critic, a teacher, a scholar, a hi/story told by an idiot or by a Nobel prize winner, a human cannonball in a scary and funny circus.

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Gimme a break with all these metaphors… Stories are a means of travel, metaphorai in Greek, vehicles for transporting people into the realm of fiction, means of performing I-dentity. Ken Plummer’s sociological interpretation on intimate tales. His reflection of people as ‘socially constructed biographical objects’ created by producing-receiving public stories. A story-constructed identity. Mine. Yours. We are all defined by the stories we have been told and the stories we tell. Tell me a real story! A good one. All stories are real. My grandmother, Dada, was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Lots of Aromanians still live there. But my Dada’s family left for Romania 75 years ago. So I happen to be Romanian not American. I arrived in New York a few days before September 11. I’ve never seen the Two Towers a/live. I didn’t notice them. I was overwhelmed by the City as a whole, an abbreviation of the big old new world. The World Trade Centre grew to be present for me only AFTER it became absent. The present absent. FLESH FORWARD Days after. Weeks after. Months after. I begin to see. The American flag. Everywhere. Flagshrine. Flagshop. Flagshock. ‘Memory matters.’ Conference at NYU. My Flagstory is a buzz. I’ve taken 101 photos of the American flag. I show them. 97

Flag-mannequins, flag-belts, flag-jumpers, flag-T-shirts, flag-skirts, flaghats, flag-umbrellas, flag-costumes, flag-scarves, flag,7rings, flag-hamburgers, flag-dogs, flag-windows, flag-doors, flag-stockings, flag-underwear, flagpillows, flag-people… A solidarity-on-display fashion show. A community based performance. A roller-coaster of e-motions. A power-point presentation. Playing smart again, huh?! Who the hell do you think you are? I invent words. I travel with my mind. I am a VISARTIST VISA means TO DREAM in Romanian. I cannot travel without a visa. I am afraid to go home to Romania. What if I don’t get my visa for America renewed? It’s my dad’s funeral. It’s my brother’s wedding. It’s my mother waiting. I cannot go to Romania. I’ll have to wait in line for hours. To wake up very early in the morning. To be among the first in line for a visa. And what if I don’t get my visa for America renewed? I am afraid. FLESH BACK My mother waiting for bread and milk at 6 a.m. Waiting. At 7 a.m. Waiting. At 8 a.m. The plastic bag with our family name hand-written on it. In line. Waiting… Waiting. For Life to start. You’re pathetic! FLESH FORWARD I am in America. I wear a black evening dress on which I’ve stuck over 100 colored labels. People love labels. You have to fit under a label or you don’t exist. 98

Hello my name is: ‘poor East European’, ‘poor Romanian’, ‘poor Gypsy’, ‘poor student’, ‘poor single woman’, ‘poor married woman’, ‘poor divorced woman’, ‘poor Balkan woman’, FRAGILE Handle With Care… sale labels: 25c, 50c, 75c, 1$, 2$, 3$, make an offer… and transparent printer labels on my arms, my face, my neck, my ears… I rush among people giving them distorted applications for an imaginary fellowship: Please, would you consider my application Sir/Lady… I hope the deadline hasn’t passed … My performance DEADLINE. In New York. I was invited to perform it in Vienna. I couldn’t go. I was invited for my book launch in Paris. I couldn’t go. I was invited by the man I love to go to London. I couldn’t go. If I leave the US, I have to first go to Romania and ask for a new entry visa, otherwise I cannot come back. I want to come back to New York. I want to go back to Europe. I must apply for a Saviana Stanescu fellowship. Whadda hell is that? It’s a fellowship that allows you to travel wherever you want. There are no money or visa problems. There are no economic or censorship issues. No racial/ethnic/gender inequities. There is no war. There are no superpowers. There is everything you need. There’s nothing to worry about. We are all free to do whatever… It sounds like the ‘golden dream of communism’! Who the hell do you think you are? Ceausescu?! Lenin? Stalin? I fought against communism! Against Ceausescu. I was there in the University Square in 1989… in the Revolution! I saw blood in that square! Okay, okay. Don’t get angry. Who the hell do you think you are! So: did your life actually start AFTER the ‘revolution’? Did you manage to make any money? 99

No, but I published books. I wrote articles against corruption. I got awards for my plays! Who cares about books published in Romania?! I published a book of poetry here in America! I hold an MA in Performance Studies from NYU, the Tisch School of the Arts. I’m getting my MFA in Dramatic Writing. I teach a course called EUROTICS in the Drama Department. I teach Contemporary European Drama. I worked with Richard Schechner! I had a show at La MaMa! Two in the Fringe Festival! Did you manage to make any money to send home, to Romania? I will make money. I’m working on that. I will help my family, my friends… HA, HA! I’ve got all these self-help books from Barnes & Noble. ‘Choose your Tomorrow: BEFORE – perfectionist, misunderstood, love junkie, over-reactive, self-effacing. AFTER – flexible, good communicator, self-accepting, in control, assertive’. I read them all: ‘It’s Not as bad as It Seems’, ‘Master Your Panic and Take Back Your Life’, ‘Twenty-One Ways to Stop Worrying’, ‘How to Control Your Anxiety Before It Controls You’, ‘What Do I Do with My Anger: Hold It or Let It Out’, ‘How to Make Yourself Happy’, ‘Head Over Heart in Love’, ‘How To Stop Destroying Your Relationships’, ‘Making Intimate Connections’, ‘Men Are From Earth, Women Are From Earth’, ‘Briefer and Better Ways of Helping Yourself Emotionally’, ‘What To Do When He Has a Headache’, ‘How to be a Non-Perfectionist’, ‘Can Your Relationship Be Saved’, ‘Fun as Psychotherapy’, ‘Let’s Get Rational Game’, ‘Three-Minute Therapy: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life’, ‘The 6-Second Shrink’, ‘Dating, Mating and Relating’, ‘Unconditionally Accepting Yourself and Others’, ‘Resolving Your Past’… Read them all… But I’m afraid I’m still in the BEFORE stage. I still have emotions, feelings, confusion, anger. I envy all these AFTER people. They must be so happy. So peaceful. So empty…

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This is a quote from a play! Yes, keep your fingers and your toes crossed for me, please! ‘Waxing West’ is gonna open at the Lark Theatre, here in New York, next week, this is all I can think about right now… What the hell does ‘Waxing West’ mean? Are you able to explain it in an articulate way, without all that poetic garbage? It is the story – the hairy-tale! – of a mail-order bride from Romania (haunted by the ghosts of Ceausescu and his wife Elena, now hairy vampires) and an American computer engineer who works at the WTC. They eventually discover that there are some things that ‘speak’ all languages, beyond ethnic, political, historical, geographical and familial differences such as: loneliness, fear, pain, failure, love, hope, trauma… I don’t get it. Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? Listen to this: ‘Stanescu’s drama traverses back and forth between Romania and New York, back and forth between “the American Dream” and all those horrible details that don’t work out quite as planned, back and forth between fantasy and reality. You will laugh your eyes out onto the floor, then reel at the gutsy seriousness of what Stanescu’s young protagonist deals with in her new, American life. And if you don’t like ‘reality’ then there are some fantastically campy vampires (ghosts of the Ceausescu regime) to transport you to another dimension of this protagonist’s secret life.’ A critic wrote this! You must tip me generously for hosting this self-promoting shit… What the hell do you think you are? Who the hell do you think you are? Where the hell do you think you are? This interview is over. Leave your CV and just go! FLESH BACK 2003 – I am at NYU 2002 – I am in New York 2001 – I am shocked 2000 – I am discovering London 1999 – I am awarded in Bucharest 101

1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980 1979 1978 1977 1976 1975 1974 1973 1972 1971 1970 1969 1968 1967

– I am a winner – I am a loser – I am pregnant – I am a wife – I am published – I am in love – I am disappointed – I am enthusiastic – I am revolutionary – I am alive – I am insane – I am stuck – I am a student – I am graduating – I am talented – I am in high school – I am stuck – I am a ‘young communist’ – I am 13 – I am a ‘pioneer’ – I am stuck – I am the best – I am the worst – I am declaiming poems with Ceausescu – I am reading poems with Ceausescu – I am taught poems with Ceausescu – I am happy – I am laughing – I am playing – I am talking – I am walking – I am born

FLESH FORWARD

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We Are the Past of Europe an interview with Andrei Ples¸u

A Very Precise Spatial Feeling ‘I was born in Bucharest in 1948. Our family lived on the edge of the city. I remember it as a rather patriarchal place – very old trams and a peaceful atmosphere. Nothing like a metropola. After some time away, we returned to Bucharest when I was nine years old. What struck me now was how charming the capital was. I was older and had experienced the provinces. Bucharest was a very big city, an important place, with a lot of cinemas, boulevards, and institutions. I think the sense of home is a very precise spatial feeling. To speak about loving a country is rather vague. What we really mean when we say we miss our country while abroad, is mostly not about missing one’s country, but missing a special place, a town, a street in that town, a house on that street, a room in that house, and so on. Feeling at home has nothing to do with abstract feelings. It is very concrete, very specific, very palpable, very material. It doesn’t resemble the generalities and if it does, it is demagogy. When I was young, borders were pretty brutal for those living in Eastern Europe. It was utopian to just think about crossing borders. So the moment I first crossed a border I experienced euphoria, novelty, freedom, surprise, a sense of normal breathing which was absolutely indescribable. I first felt this when I saw Vienna from a plane at night. Vienna was such a massive and complicated texture of lights that I was struck by a feeling of luxury, of science fiction almost. What a huge difference between a Western and Eastern city seen from a plane at night! So many lights and the pattern of the lights was so special. It reminded me of the work of 103

a very good tailor: A very well-tailored town. That was in 1975. Travelling from Bucharest to the countryside, on the other hand, meant crossing a border as well. But returning to Bucharest was a more gradual change, nothing too dramatic. My father had to live in a village for two years. I accompanied him during my holidays. This village had no electricity and there were still skirmishes between the Securitate and peasants who didn’t want to join collective farms. The general atmosphere was grim. But for a child it was paradise. Primitive, full of charms and surprises. I also liked the place of my exile in 1989, a village in the north of Moldavia. Everybody pitied me, but I thought it was nice and I was free to do what I wanted – no telephone, no obligations. The landscape was great, and this comforted me. Going abroad not only meant finding a better place, but finding a place that gave me another kind of liberty. Abroad, I realised I was finally living a normal life. During my childhood in Romania, I always knew that there was no state of normalcy. An unpleasant atmosphere pervaded family life in the fifties. A lot of people had been arrested. I watched my grandfather, my uncle, and my parents listening to Radio Free Europe, very careful not to be seen or heard by others. I understood that it was somehow clandestine to live here. To get over this is perhaps the major inner sensation I had to overcome when I first arrived in the West. Europe’s Past is in the East Say ‘Europe’ today and everybody rejoices and hears Beethoven. Let’s remember that the Day of Europe, the 9th of March, celebrates the end of the war between one part of Europe and another. Europe is not just a place where wonderful things happen. So let’s calm down a bit when we talk about Europe. My experience is that any idea that becomes ideological comes to a bad end. There is already a European ideology, with a wooden, standard language. This makes things boring and artificial. When an idea produces an ideology, it becomes bureaucracy. There is also a trend toward Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which is good. But – and this is something Eastern Europe might offer – we also need some Vergangenheits-bewertung (revaluation of the past). Not everything connected to the past is bad. The slogan of the EU is: Look forward! Build a better future. Yes, but let’s do it the way Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus does: he flies toward the future, but with his face toward the past. In Eastern Europe our image of Europe is the past. For us, Europe is something that happened in the 1920s and 1930s and which we left involuntarily in 1944. We want to return but it doesn’t exist anymore. Everyone here in the 104

country would tell you: Europe is la belle époque, the Pullman wagons, the Orient Express. This is long gone, but the West should remember these kinds of details because it was a nice time. Our feeling for traditions, for the positive aspect of Europe’s history is stronger than is the case now for the Beämter [bureaucrats] in Brussels, who, not unlike their socialist counterparts, are very future-oriented. Europe at the time was a triumph of individualism and a concern for the values of individual life. Not of egotism, but of liberal Europe. Under communism the group ideology of the Party annihilated private destiny. As a reaction we withdrew from communal life, we had a very intense reflective experience of individual destiny. But with this talk about the common house of Europe, the integration of the big family, I am reminded of the rhetoric of collectivism. The ideology of Europe neglects individual values. Now that I can finally think freely about myself, I have to immediately register on a huge list of common goals. I am obliged to reflect about Europe so much, that I forget to reflect about myself. In all these debates about Europe it is clear that Europe does not mean what we think it means. Nowadays, Europe seems to mean administrative homogeneity. It is all about the financial, agricultural, legal, and political processes that together make up the EU. The EU should not be confused with Europe, which is something different, in that it also includes North Africa. Europe was born in the Mediterranean. The founder of Western spirituality, Saint Augustine, was born in North Africa. This Europe is a very rich and varie concept. But many confuse the concept of Europe with the technical term EU, which is only a contract. We discuss whether or not we should sign this contract. But it is immensely ridiculous to think that this is a discussion about Europe. It creates a false territory of debate. True, people in the West know far less about their fellow Europeans in the East than vice versa. But this is understandable. We Easterners have been dreaming about the Western world for a long time. The West had no reason to dream about us. We felt abandoned, cut off from our traditions, as if we were living on the periphery. We had to recuperate our time. News from the West was a very intense and dramatic experience for us. No we are too close to the everyday life of the Westerners. One speaks as if EU enlargement has something to do with westernising Europe. But adding twohundred million Eastern Europeans means we are easternising Europe. People will suddenly have to encounter – as one Eastern European writer noted – their fictions in flesh and bones. Meaning that Eu105

rope will not resemble anything even close to the already standard image Emir Kusturica is presenting of Eastern Europe. An Elastic Mind I was already thinking about angels before I became a politician, even before 1989. Back then it was a utopian project; I knew there would be no chance to actually write about it, let alone publish it. In 1992, while at the Wissenschaftskollege in Berlin, I started thinking about my project again. As a minister I created an artificial connection between politics and angel-ology; after all the Greek word angelos, angel, means ambassador, messenger, one who brings messages from God to men and from men back to God. This movement in the intermediary spaces is typical of angels, and, as I told myself, it should be typical for ambassadors. But that was just a way of comforting myself. In the most uncomfortable moments as a politician, I had the possibility of withdrawing and engaging my angels, which helped me to survive. A signal of lost normality and of the territory I should recover after leaving my political function. And so you see, even after 1989 we notice a split between inner life and public life. There are many more similarities to the pre-1989 era. During communism, there was no such thing as an innocent reading. In order to be accepted as an author, you had to be careful not to say nasty things about the regime. In order to have Eliade published, or Kant, you had to write a foreword explaining precisely how bad they were. When Hamlet said: ‘something is rotten in Denmark’, audiences would applaud. After 1989, I hoped that the possibility of innocent reading would return. To enjoy reading for reading’s sake, without political agendas. But then a different discussion emerged. Now we are reminded that people like Eliade had been fascists. But to truly understand people like Eliade, or Cioran, one has to think less geometrically. I am not trying to find excuses for them, but explanations for the fact that we are now for instance translating the work of Eliade and Cioran, forbidden authors under communism, from the French. Not because they were fascists in their youth, but because they were writing and living abroad. Eliade dealt with religion, Cioran was very pessimistic, and both were prohibited. After forty years of censorship, it is just natural to have them back. And again, not because they were fascists, but because at last we can simply hold their books in our hands. The tendency in Romania since 1989, has not been to return to fascism, but to try to enjoy an innocent reading. And there is something else. I keep asking people from the period about 106

what the atmosphere was like in the 1930s. The Iron Guard certainly had its very bloody and primitive sides. At the same time, intellectuals were playing with ideas, debated, and were engaged in ironically analysing facts. And all this existed at the same time. Left and right would debate with one another. The world back then was ambiguous enough to tolerate opposites in a salonlike atmosphere. Even in the most dramatic contexts, the mind can still be immensely free. A Rewarding Misfortune I feel a few degrees more stupid in a foreign language and am much cleverer in Romanian. So when I speak abroad, I always have the feeling that people get a distorted image of me. But I have come to terms with my vanity... Something that Eastern Europe might bring to Europe is the openness toward multi-lingualism. It is a necessity for us to know more than one language. Romanian or Bulgarian is not enough in today’s world. We are being forced out of our linguistic habits in our attempts to speak to others. This could be considered bad luck, but in the end it turns out to be an important experience, because it is about more than language. In order to speak French, German, or English, I had to read the literatures and was thus able to encounter different mentalities and cultures. This is the origin of ‘multi-culti’ and has nothing to do with some directive imposing political correctness. Inner richness. We adopted it and we might bring it into the big family. Being a small country with a minor culture can be a very rewarding misfortune.

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Alter (the) Ego by Ademir Arapovic´

What’s in a Name? My name is Ademir Arapovic´, but it could have been any other name. But right now ‘Ademir Arapovic´’ unmistakeably represents me. Ademir is not a name one comes across often in Yugoslavia, where I was born. In fact, ‘Yugoslavia’ itself is a relative name as well. For some time now, my place of birth has been called ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina’. If things had gone a little differently, Bosnia and Herzegovina would have been called something else. But let’s stick to myself: ‘Ademir’, I learned, is a Portuguese and Brazilian name. ‘Arapovic´’ came from an ancestor who had a boat and traded with Arabs. Later, when family names became an administrative necessity and he needed one himself, the Arabs were remembered. ‘Arap’ in our language (which I do not even know what to call anymore) means ‘Arab’. My main ancestor was a Catholic who formally swapped Catholicism for Islam when the Ottoman Empire occupied our land, and was promising beneficial tax policies for those who converted. This ‘formal’ change lasted some five hundred years, as long as the Turks remained. Different family branches took different directions and accepted different faiths. Now, looking back at it from a distance, I see that names and religions in my family had a formal meaning and were no more than a means of survival. Before I studied fine arts, I went to elementary school and gymnasium. Both elementary school and gymnasium are now called something different. In school I was either the first or the BE ME second alphabetically, but hardly ever the first to tell the story. That was because most of our tutors preferred a ‘random’ method, in order to keep the pupils alert. ‘Random’ 108

meant opening one’s textbook to a random page. Being the first or the second meant your page was right under the hard back cover, which is usually three to five millimetres thicker than the inside pages, and so protected my page from the reach of the teacher’s fingers. Some other tutors assumed that their colleagues all respected alphabetical order, and therefore did it backwards, starting at ‘z’. So, my story was almost always told toward the end. I hope this time, in Alter Ego, it will be different. What’s in the Art? At an early age, I realised how boring adult life could be. I had some drawing skills and decided to study fine arts. I was not rebellious, the only thing I expected was less hierarchy and certainly no ‘9 to 5’ schedule. During my studies I opened an art-space, a kind of gallery where young artists were exhibited. This was in the mid-eighties. All went really well, until I came across a young graphic designer who produced provocative political artwork. I booked an exhibition of his work. At the opening a man approached me and presented himself as Miro Arapovic´. ‘A relative’ I thought, but he immediately denounced the exhibit as a provocation and that the gallery board (a few politically warped people in charge of the place) had decided to dismiss me ‘ad hoc.’ I hardly knew who these people were and how ‘heavy’ they could be, but I went to a radio station and told my story and they made an item out of it. During the broadcast, many people phoned, expressing their support for my case. In the end, I got the gallery back. I continued with the same exhibit, and when it finished I dismissed myself. I finished my studies, and soon achieved a solid place within the ‘coming artists’ category. Later, I got an invitation by the cultural city fund to start another art-space with all the accompanying promises for support. Fantastic! The space was located in a theatre. I shared the office with the theatre director whom I considered a very nice guy. Soon I had a schedule for eighteen international exhibitions, steady appointments with the same number of artists, only to find out after the first show that there was no money. I thought don’t give up, though, and not just because I felt an obligation to the artists I had invited. If I surrendered, the existence of the alternative world, which I thought art represented, would be threatened. And as an artist myself I did not want to see this happen. All for art’s sake. So I started a little business where I spent all my earnings investing in culture, and so I basically had no income. No, I certainly didn’t work 9 to 5! I was working from 9 to 9. 109

Of the eighteen scheduled exhibitions, sixteen took place. Making art, which usually meant for me being alone in my studio, gave me a lot of pleasure. I believed my work was good only if it somehow ‘extended’ the world – for myself or for somebody else. I did not limit myself to any particular medium. After I read Rupert Sheldrake’s marvellous work, which I easily managed to connect with some of my own conclusions that I had reached instinctively, I made a number of works that treated the human morphogenic field as a regular art medium (thanks again Rupert!). At the time I believed that people who are spiritually dedicated to their work, even when isolated, are in the centre of the world. Their ideas, if they reach outside their own context, can be instantly shared and even ‘established’ without ever having been published or distributed in any way. This also explains to me why so many different people made scientific discoveries at the same time under different circumstances, with no knowledge of each other. The sense of sharing is a graceful state. Many artists know it. It expands the artist in many ways, opens many doors, but if you have to stick to the system you are likely to face drawbacks. Which I did. I realised that the bureaucratic approach has no means of dealing with matters concerning a spiritually ‘open source’. Obvious analogies exist in the contradictions that have arisen around file-sharing, copyright issues and, for instance, the Linux operating system which is an ‘Open Source’ itself. Nowadays, artists fill in more forms than most other people do. It’s not a lot of work, but it points to a contractual quality of the art system. The art world tunes itself towards a business model rather than towards a real understanding of its own content. That’s why art – which should be pouring out with all sorts of alternative ‘languages’ – in the end, relates exclusively to the most pragmatic linguistic fashion. As a result, it is often banally conceptualised. In this context, only a few important works survive. Especially those things that the system, this big ‘certainty factory’, is less familiar with: intuition and the unconscious. I sneaked out of the system once I understood that the art world is even more artificial than the ‘real world’. Maybe I was foolish to expect the opposite. Anyway, I changed approaches and venues. For better or for worse... What’s in the Ethics? Once I stole a piece of cultural heritage from a city in Croatia. In those days Yugoslavia still existed. I took a stone carved into a ball-like shape. I like sim110

ple forms. It was probably from the 14th century. I like old things. The monument had UNESCO status. A local cultural institution guarded it, and so it was guarded by the police. It was a catapult ball, in the old days the equivalent of a bomb. I am crazy about cultural paradoxes! But I had serious doubts. I knew I would use the ball to create a work of art but at that moment I didn’t know how. As a work of art, I would take it back to the city. I swear I meant to. And so I did, not without fear. I brought it to Sarajevo. Soon afterwards I left for Amsterdam. A few months later, the war started spreading across Yugoslavia. It lasted several years. Then it stopped and I visited Sarajevo again. In among what was left of my garage, I started searching for my stuff and found this ball, which I had almost forgotten about. I had dropped it there out of my car, and never moved it again because of its weight. Now for the ethics... My first thought, when I found that ball again, was to take it back immediately, it was only a 3.5 hour drive. My car was, however, completely demolished, but I could borrow my father’s car. Only there was a border now between Bosnia and Croatia. Every car that crossed the border was searched for about twenty minutes on average. No way. My second thought gave me an even greater sense of guilt, even though it was less real: ‘Had I really been the one who had moved this martial symbol? Wasn’t it really the ball’s younger sister that had played the game, and destroyed my garage and my car?’ Out of these thoughts I created my artwork: I made a little inscription on the ball and left it on the street as my contribution to an international exhibition in Sarajevo. A rolling object. Nobody knew what it was, and nobody cared. I desperately wanted the thing to be taken away. Anyone who would take it, would partly rinse away my sense of guilt. The best happened: an artist from Croatia stumbled upon my stone with the inscription ‘I STEAL’, a street over from where I had left it. Thus the ball disappeared, and I was saved. At least I could share my guilt. Not only because the catapult ball was back in Croatia, but Lala, the artist who took the ball, moved to Amsterdam. Lala has been living in my neighbourhood for a year now. Now, when I see the ball again, I have to admit I still feel guilty. All this perpetuating of situations is too conceptual. I am ashamed of it. Not ashamed of having stolen it, but ashamed of having stolen it for that purpose. The act of stealing, as a highrisk means of exposure, should have been backed up by a more purposeful concept. Stealing for the sake of survival would seem more reasonable, but stealing for the sake of art? Hardly. Yet, my theft had not only been tolerated but was elevated to the level of a so-called ‘cultural discussion’. A thief with 111

any other motivation or background would have received very different treatment. I feel good for having told this story because it represents one of my turning points. Looking for things more ‘real’ within the art world never moved me closer to reality. It only perpetuated the problem in order to justify the various solutions. And that’s what we humans do anyway; no need to call it art. One could also call it politics. The fact is that it gets less and less real all the time. What’s in a Machine? The fact that we now can talk to our machines isn’t in itself very fascinating. But when I ask myself what it really is we have to convey to them, I am stunned. No more than before, but this moment of history just yells at us: ‘It is not enough!’ It’s the same with the human genome: if we recreated man, this would not mean we know any more about the meaning of life than others. And the man we made deserves an answer to his question: why? Only, we act as if the man we created is the answer itself. I think we are in need of a spiritual update before we become misfits in surroundings we ourselves created. This update should relate to ethics. Our own origins and purposes are still a mystery because we never got the opportunity to meet our creator. But the forms we consciously produce have the right to answers from us. Do we know why we have created self-conscious machines, or men? Some answers come to mind immediately: we were in need of a high-performance tool, or simply wanted to show how skilfully we can put bones, muscles, and nerves together. Or we wanted the ultimate warrior. Although these answers may be true and logical, we should admit how much discrimination they contain, face to face with conscious beings. Swapping democracy for slavery, are we ready for that? What’s in a Profession? Our grandfathers were going for a job, and expected to stay in that profession until their retirement. And they mostly did: one of them was a barber, who shaved chins in the 1930s, and when the communists took power, he shaved partisan chins. Our generation, on the contrary, carries CVs full of different jobs and positions, never knowing how many more will be added before we retire. If there is going to be any retirement for us. Just a few years ago the internet bubble created an enormous demand for people with adequate skills. 112

When job centres started paying for additional education of the unemployed, there was suddenly no work left. Before, one could afford to get into the shape the profession imposed upon you. And even to harden when the shape fit the function. In our case, the tasks just continue to double. Not only do you have to perform as a professional, but you also need to keep a distance, in order to track the trends and be ready to make a shift if necessary. We are not allowed to harden. Under these circumstances, settling down and entering a stable state is the ultimate luxury. Which is not bad. The borders between leisure and work have also been wiped out. So what is a profession? Do we respect the word because we know we are only pretending? Perhaps. But we do definitely lack stability. This has put the stress on another important issue: vocation. Taking vocation more seriously could enlarge our chances for happiness. A promise of a new randomness out of the worn out corporate order? I hope so... What’s in a Border? To understand what a border really is, one should spend some time on both sides. I am afraid that in our world, most borders are drawn without that prerequisite knowledge. That makes them shift so quickly. Shifting is their only reason for being. My place of birth gave me some close examples to scrutinise. The most sensational realisation of a border happened to me in ’93, watching CNN. A prominent British politician went to Bosnia to negotiate the release of prisoners from Serbian concentration camps. The footage showed him in conversation with two camp commanders. One of them was the theatre director I used to share the office with, in the time I was running the gallery. As I was watching, the border stretched out from me through the cables, guided by the satellite, right to that place in Bosnia. And I still don’t understand what a border really is. What’s in a Memory? I remember there was a lot of snow in the Sarajevan winters during the 1960s. Clear sounds of church bells every quarter of an hour. There were two markets in the neighbourhood, with all kinds of people. Usually hot summers... The truth is that I have forgotten a great deal about the city as it used to be. This forgetting took place spontaneously. I didn’t opt for it. There was probably a reason for it – at least it made the destruction of the city less painful for me. From 1992 to 1996, the media bombed us with horrible images of the war in Sarajevo. When the first bombs were dropped, one of them exploded 113

in front of my parents’ house. I recognised a bleeding woman on the news. During subsequent years, I saw this kind of news almost every day. These images were striking enough to erase many of my earlier memories. Later they got erased themselves by other things. I happen to be one of those who forgets very easily. Not everything of course, but I forgot most of the things that took place around me but that did not improve either me or my surroundings. On the other hand, I am aware of the fact that alienation plays a role in this capacity of mine, and that is something one should also learn to deal with carefully. French existentialism has described that model of non-attachment very clearly. Now we all carry this alienation in part within ourselves. One cannot expect a reliable set of memories from anyone. My memories for sure have been filtered too much. But so has a history as a ‘common memory’: it is also being turned over and over all the time. The past has become as uncertain as the future ever was.

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Part IV. The Uses of Diversity

In the 1980s, Timothy Garton Ash dubbed his famous book about the pearls and perils of communist dissident life ‘The Uses of Adversity’. It was a book that was published when the end of the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe seemed only a matter of time. It was this adversity that gave the Eastern Europeans, in the words of Goran Stefanovski, their attractiveness, their sex appeal. Is diversity the key to a new, or renewed, sex appeal? Diversity has undoubtedly been the great cultural challenge since 1989. For many, it was a bone of contention – witness those who destroyed Yugoslavia and the multi-ethnic, highly intermixed Bosnian society. For others, diversity is a visitation card to the transnational world of the arts. It is a fact, however, that diversity has proven extremely vulnerable and most often still on the defensive. From this perspective, artists working in Eastern and Western Europe have had similar experiences. Nevin Aladag˘, a German-Turkish-Kurdish video artist living in Berlin, once made a video that portrayed the family of a Turkish breakdance instructor in Berlin. He performed his talents, after him his wife sang a traditional song, followed by their daughter who sang her favourite Britney Spears song. Interviewing herself, she tells how much difficulty people have when they encounter diverse origins in one and the same person. She insists that having to mediate between cultures from an early age intensified her artistic talent. Abdelkader Benali, a Dutch writer and son of Moroccan Berber immigrants, is very much aware of the differences between his backgrounds, but refuses to choose. Both environments, the Netherlands and Morocco, have their fixed ideas of what a writer should do, look like, how he should behave. Like Aladag˘, he refuses to be pigeonholed. Péter Zilahy, a Hungarian writer, made a European name for himself with his alphabet-novel The Window-Giraffe, which among other things, describes a journey through Eastern Europe. The book is also available on CD-Rom. 115

Zilahy, artistic jack-of-all-trades, won’t be pigeonholed, not even as a European. A seasoned world traveller lands on Europe’s shores. Sami Zubaida, a London historian, offers memories from the Jewish community in Baghdad, his place of birth, from the 1940s and ’50s. He received most of his education in England, but his sensibility might have been decisively influenced by his memories of the mixed social life of Jews with the other communities in Baghdad. An expert on the history of food, he offers a recipe to counter nationalism’s obsession with single origins: focus on the ingredients rather than on the dish. Damir Sˇodan, a Dalmatian, Croatian, post-Yugoslav poet and playwright from the town of Split, closes Alter Ego by offering a recipe for his grandmother’s feel-good strudel. Read it, and taste European history! It tastes of Dalmatia, of Croatia, of the Balkans. Or rather of Mitteleuropa, or of Pannonia. Or of the Mediterranean? Try and see for yourself.

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Nevin Aladag˘’s Alter Egos Nevin Aladag˘ interviews herself

Your name is Nevin Aladag˘. You were born in Turkey. You now live in Germany. What nationality do you have? Nevin: I am a German citizen. So are you German? Nevin: No. I can’t say that. My life in Germany has moulded me. But an immigrant doesn’t so easily become a German in this country. Not even when you are born here. It depends on a variety of things. First, I don’t look German; moreover, I have a name that is obviously not German. In time, I got used to this ‘privileged position’. Also, others won’t let me fully participate. And somehow, I also don’t want to belong here 100% of the time: I want to be a striking, outstanding person, and sometimes also the contrary. So who or what are you? Are you Turkish of Kurdish origin, with a German passport? What languages do you speak, and in what cultures do you live? Nevin: My parents are Kurds. They brought me up with the Turkish language, and assimilated me. I grew up in Germany. The language in which I think, write, and dream is German. The Kurdish part has, linguistically speaking, declined. But my Kurdish soul is very much alive. I can tell this from my considerable 117

self-irony, and from my ability to immerse myself in melancholic Kurdish folk songs. According to Goethe, the German language was extremely well suited to opening up the otherness of non-Western cultures to the European ear. What is your life in the German language like? Nevin: I can only answer this question as a German, as someone whose native tongue is German. I suspect, though, that it is not the easiest language for the non-European, if only because of the composed words and sentences and the not-so charming sound of the language... Not belonging to the society of the majority, is that a burden to you? Nevin 1: I am quite happy with my biography and my origin. My biography is my capital. I don’t feel torn by the various cultures. They have enriched me, they have given me experiences from which I profit. Growing up between two cultures and two languages, I was from an early age challenged to act as a mediator. Perhaps this intensified my artistic talent, it also made me search for a third language. For a universal artistic language. By universal I mean the quest for authentic expression in art. To bring things back to their essence, to that which regards all of us. A language that blows cultural barriers to smithereens. But I would have to subdivide myself into a number of Nevins to answer your question properly. Nevin 2: To be constantly confronted by my otherness gets on my nerves. There exists a sincere, authentic racism among the ‘tolerant’ people of the majority. They mean so well by our ‘foreigners’, they believe identity is ethnically determined, and fail to notice that facing them is someone who went to the same school, who read the same books, sang the same songs, speaks the same dialect... They fail to see that their well-meant tolerance excludes me. But my identity is a continuing process, and I have every right to select what is best from the cultures that I have experienced and that I am getting to know. I consider this a fundamental human right. Just as I have a right to bring home, rework, and transform travel impressions, I can filter my experiences and compose my own potpourri (in a manner of speaking). I am an inquisitive being, eager to learn and consider it a great advantage to have the German language and culture next to the Turkish-Kurdish culture of my parents. These 118

have moulded me, as have European and American culture. This has made me a basically open person. I should not go against the nature of a culture that has made me into who I am. I have done that before, and learned at an early age to stretch the limits, to conquer my territory. I did not inherit a territory, the German blood right kept me from becoming German, and so my sense of a home is of course different. Its nature is spiritual and virtual, it embodies itself in my work. But this does not mean that I am not looking for a home. Nevin 3: It gave me great sense of relief to visit a city like New York. The first time I came there I experienced well-being, something one associates with arrival, with homecoming. ‘I’ was someone else here, and yet the same. In a city like New York I lost the stigma of ‘otherness’, because there, everybody is the other. There, the difference between minority and majority has almost disappeared. Everybody is an immigrant. The city receives these cultural influences and sees them as an enrichment, not as a threat. I think that this is not yet possible in Germany, where many still fail to understand the advantages of cultural diversity. Nevin 4: I naturally profit from my exotic status. I am different from the others. There is also positive curiosity. Sometimes I benefit from things like positive discrimination. This has good and bad sides. The rights and the participation of minorities clearly need to be improved. Yet as an artist I want to be judged on the basis of my work, not my origins. Nevin 5: Let me quote Pier Paulo Pasolini on the relation between minority and majority. ‘I am like a negro in a racist society which proudly adorns itself with the cloak of tolerance. Put differently: they “tolerate” me. But tolerance is just a word. I don’t know any example, any case of real tolerance. For the simple reason that tolerance is a contradiction in terms. To tolerate someone means basically as much as to damn someone. Tolerance is just another, more sophisticated word for damnation. One can safely say to a negro – let’s stick with the example of the blacks: Do as you please, you have every right to live as you like and according to your nature. The fact that you belong to a minority has nothing to do whatsoever with inferiority. But this does not affect your otherness, or to be more precise, your guilt of being different, regardless of the fact whether they tolerate or damn you. No majority will ever overcome its consciousness about the alleged otherness of minorities. Its fate is to be determined by this consciousness...’ 119

My experiences are those of a minority, also partly of assimilation into the majority. The sum of my experiences and my decisions makes me into who I am and who I am becoming. I am Turkish, Kurdish, German. But most of all I am a human being who refuses to be pigeonholed. What does Heimat, or home, mean to you? Nevin 1: My home is where I feel good, where my friends and relatives are, where I can devote myself to my work. My home can be several places at the same time. Which places do you have in mind? I would call several places my home at the moment. Among these are Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Istanbul. Do you present yourself as Turkish or as Kurdish in Germany? In Germany, as everywhere else, I am all those things simultaneously. Turkish, Kurdish, German. What is your relation to Turkey? I really can’t call it ‘home’. For that, I only know it from afar. I am a stranger there myself. I couldn’t imagine living there for a longer period of time. I was one year old when we came to Germany. Naturally, a distance came between us and the family there, their traditions and religion. The Aladag˘s had the opportunity to broaden their horizon in Germany, to emancipate themselves socially without national ties. This is a great freedom to me. I can be at home anywhere in the world. Perhaps migration and the experiences that go with it have made me into a nomad. Now, as an adult, I rediscover Turkey. I look at it with different eyes. I recently took part in exhibitions in Istanbul. This context limited me of course to the art scene, whose structure isn’t really that different from the German art scene. But my sense of humour and my cynicism, integral parts of my work, are understood more quickly and better in Turkey. Does this mean that some of my works are in Turkish rather than in German...?

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And to your realm of birth? My relation to Southeast Turkey, where I was born, is determined by the few memories I have of our few visits there. Memories of the vastness of the sea, the mountainous landscape, scents, tastes, melodies... They make my cultural origin palpable. They express my longing for cultural wholeness. Melodies, sounds, images and tastes are branded in my cultural memory. They express warmth and safety, closeness to the soil. Wherever I come across a landscape similar to the Kurdish one, it appeals to my emotions. I experience a deep sense of home, something I don’t know in Germany. So are your biography and your origins relevant to your work? Biography and origin are always relevant. But to reduce the motives in my work, the contents and the forms to my biography or my origin, or to use them as an explanation, would be too one-dimensional. What I strive for in my work is to crystallise the universal out of the specific. Let me briefly talk about a recent work of mine. I see it as a response to the demand of the outer world to reveal your identity. It seems there exists a fundamental need to pigeonhole people in a category, after which we can safely close the drawer. So when I had to explain once again that I won’t put the stress on one of my identities, and also don’t want to deny any of them, this created a misunderstanding. I decided to make a T-shirt edition of the three identities that I can boast of, printed in Braille. So on the first was written German (in German Braille), on the second Turk (in Turkish Braille) and on the third Kurd (in Turkish-Kurdish Braille). It is very modern to express your opinion about all kinds of things on a T-shirt. I joined this mode of expression, but with encoded, enciphered information and thus I made the whole thing absurd. As a manner of speaking, one can only grope what the T-shirt says. Besides, I can choose freely every day, depending on my moods, whether I feel Turkish, German, or Kurdish. Do people ask about your origins in relation to your work? Yes, too often. But mostly people who are just getting to know me. When we become better acquainted, the quality of the exchange improves, fortunately.

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What traces of your biography are there in your work? I have to admit that my biography has lately become more prominent in my work. Not in the least because I want to alleviate society’s curiosity, their constant questions and pigeonholing with which they confront me. But I try to do this in a way that secures me the freedom to define myself, and to find playful ways to deal with my nationality shifts. What would have become of you had your parents not emigrated to Germany? I asked myself this question for the first time when I was a teenager. I was convinced that I would have gotten married at age seventeen, and would have had a lot of children. Later, when I got to know Kurdish artists and saw that they were dressed in the same way as I was, that we share the same interests and have similar ambitions and ideas about our lives, I realised that this was a prejudice.

Thank you, all of you. You’re most welcome.

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Mother Tongue, Stepmother Tongue

an interview with Abdelkader Benali ‘I was born in Ighazzazzen. A very small place, not even a village. It doesn’t have a centre. A cluster of farmhouses, small farmers by the Mediterranean, in the Northeast of Morocco. Near the city of Melilla, there is a small bulge into the sea, almost a peninsula, a little spot. You have to leave the road and walk towards the sea to reach the village. It is a rural culture, rather than a maritime one. People do some fishing, but the coast is too fickle. The people there live from agriculture. Potatoes, sweet corn, grapes. I left for the Netherlands when I was three. I remember that I used to crawl around in the village, and I was circumcised there at age two. Those kind of memories. A chicken was slaughtered in a courtyard. That memory is accurate. The yard corresponds to my memory. My very earliest memories are isolated. Because the visits to the village were always connected to returning, and because they were preceded by a journey, a long journey by car, always with a long period of time between arrival and departure. Memories without much narrative; fragments. My sense of home is connected to a place in the future, not so much in the past. You have to make your home, it is something you put together yourself. You’ve got an entire lifetime to do it. You have the house of your parents, the place where you grew up, the place where you feel comfortable. But referring to a real house, that is something I project into the future. After I left home to study, I lived in a student apartment. A little house of sorts. But the serious business is yet to come. Since I always accepted things as they were, I took my house for granted, for the time being. Later I realised that I was striving for something that would be my own. In fact, owning a house of my own means a lot to me. It’s impor123

tant, also in a material sense. That you can live anywhere you want and all that, it’s romantic nonsense. It’s something you can only believe in if you have a fixed point that you can always come back to. For example, the place where I sleep is important to me. Intellectually, I feel at home in literature that is fresh, that sparkles. Almost purely aesthetic. It must tempt me, charm me – where the author might come from, and what might be the story he wants to tell, becomes secondary. Rushdie, Nabokov, Meijsing – people who I admire very much, and there’s always a story to be found there. But that comes later; first, there is the literary enchantment. The first real border in my experience was the Iron Curtain. The idea that there were people who were being prevented from coming here by an ideology. As a boy in elementary school, I wanted to go to the Soviet Union. I also visualised the border: the Iron Curtain as an iron curtain. Morocco-Holland was not a real border. Travelling and migration are perfectly commonplace for Moroccans. If you have a passport, you must also use it. As a child, I used to be homesick for my mother, and in a sentimental way for Morocco. But actually, I was very glad that I didn’t have to live there. This realisation came during puberty. As a child, I thought the holidays were terrific, and always found it very hard to leave, because leaving also meant the time for relaxing was over. In Holland, I had to go back to school, while there it was always the ultimate holiday: freedom, the sea, friends, relatives that made me feel welcome. Going back was like a cold shower. But I could also sense that the reason Morocco was so special, was because I was on vacation. It was a place for holidays. The special thing about the village was that everybody there was family. Everybody knew each other. For a child, there is something charming about this. I could go everywhere. Books made me develop a sense of private space. Through reading, I was by myself. In these things, Holland and Morocco are no different from each other. Children in Holland are also rarely on their own. They go to school, and at home you play, you don’t want any anonymity or privacy. You want friends, things to do. It’s only as a teenager that the moment comes when you realise you want to be alone. The first bite of loneliness is very sweet. But to digest the whole mountain is unbearable. A Room of Your Own In Morocco, there is no such thing as privacy, or even the idea of a ‘room of your own’. This can be suffocating, and then again, it can also be cosy. But that 124

I am able to excel by being alone, is something people there don’t understand. That you just want half an hour without anybody babbling at you. Even in timid families, there is still this idea that everybody is always busy with each other. To a certain extent, privacy is a European invention. In countries like Morocco, there should be grants given to people so that they can be by themselves for one year. A room with a library. The writing will come by itself, there’s plenty to write about. But society does not give it any room. It’s a lot more difficult to be an intellectual in Morocco than here. People always have to make an effort financially. It’s a luxury. And it’s got to be written all over your face. Representing a particular camp. To be grumpy and individualistic is very difficult there, because it doesn’t get you anywhere in society. The idea of individualism is nonsense there. It means that you’ll be dead within fifteen minutes, after you have been abandoned. You cannot survive on your own. You always need someone, people who can do something for you. To be alone there, is egotistical and meaningless. To be alone is maybe also the final phase of a human being. If we want a society where people can excel, then we must make room for the individual. You cannot formulate the theory of relativity, or write In Search of Lost Time as a group. To sit down with twenty other people and write the Koran? Forget it, that is not group work. One person. Islam is very individualistic. One man, one prophet, and that’s who the groups will follow. Of course, individualism also causes a lot of misery, but who cares. And loneliness. In Morocco and in the East, it is often said that people in Europe are all lonely, and because of that, they commit suicide. They can say that there, but we know it already. That pact was already made a couple of centuries ago. There’s no use in talking about it any more, it has already been left behind. Had I stayed in Morocco, I would have become a different writer. Already from the very necessity of making a living in some other way. Maybe I would have become one of these crafty characters who manages to hustle something here and there. Or the Moroccan Italo Svevo. Businessman and writer. Descent and origins also represent certain feelings. I sympathise with the emancipation of the Berbers. I think it is very important that people emancipate themselves. Everybody within their own group. It enriches people, and makes them more resistant to other persons or groups who want to change you into somebody else, and want to decide for you who you are. Everybody must have the right to determine who he is. It can go beyond the matter of origins. That is natural. It doesn’t necessarily have to result in something militant. It’s a part of what you are, and this personal, specific quality must cer125

tainly not be put into the service of some goal. I really do love Morocco very much. I was there again recently, after a long absence. The recognition; the alienation. Origin is something you constantly reinvent. I don’t have a family tree, no pictures of my ancestors. My first photos date from when I was for years old, going to kindergarten. I know little about myself, too little in fact to be lighthearted about it. I have had to make up everything, everything I know about my ancestors I have asked, asked again, and made up. I cannot trace anything back to the last century. When I fill in the blanks in the narrative, I am following reality: so I don’t suppose that my ancestors were Martians. Most likely, they had to adapt to the circumstances of their lives. If I use this as a basis for my imagination, I get nice stories. They were surely poor, moved around, and maybe came to such and such a place, and experienced this and that political situation. It’s nice, these kind of ‘what if’ questions. Plenty of humour, too. The Smallest Possible Form of Recklessness The languages in my life are Dutch and Berber, which is my mother tongue and that I very much want to cultivate – by speaking, and occasionally by reading it. There is a budding written literature in Berber. It has not been completely decided yet, whether to use the Arabic, Latin, or Berber script for writing it. There is no literary canon, and therefore no frame of reference. There is history, but that was all written in French, or Arabic. Then, for me, there’s English as a major intellectual language, French for colonial issues, Italian because my girlfriend is Italian. And Arabic, because like English, it’s a cultural language. I learned Arabic by studying it. As a boy, I was taught Koran Arabic at the mosque, but really, I was just learning formulas there. Later, I began studying it. I read the newspapers on the internet. When I decided to become a writer, Dutch seemed like the obvious choice. After all, who reads Berber? Who would I want to communicate with? A small circle, or did I want to reach a larger audience? Dutch is my strongest language, I can’t deny it. It didn’t take a long time for me to decide. I would maybe write about other things in Berber, than I do in Dutch. When I write in Dutch about protagonists who speak Berber, I include a translation. But at some point, I got over this. First, it seemed strange for them to be speaking Dutch. But I understood that the readers would accept this liberty. For me, there is actually no difference between Berber and Dutch parlando. But there is a tension and it is interesting and has great potential. The thoughts of somebody from a Berber environment, or an Arabic or Moroccan 126

one, are not really that different from those of someone with a Dutch background. Circumstances make a difference. But the strength or the intention are equally powerful. The Berber language that concerns me is spoken in Holland, and deals with life in Holland. The thought patterns are recognisable. Berber doesn’t have a standard language, so there’s a lot of freedom. The vocabulary is more or less fixed, but there are enormous differences in the way speakers use it. Between men and women, for example. Berber makes a speaker’s character come out so sharply. The use of words, the intonation show you who someone is. Of course, I have a certain distance from Berber, therefore I can hear such things more clearly. But it also trained my ear to detect such nuances in any language. Dutch is much more formal. People often have access to the same sources of information, in a small country with few irregularities. The state determines to a large extent who we are. It results in a lot of uniformity. Moody people are very quickly seen as eccentric in Holland. It’s such a small country. My mother tongue is Berber, no doubt about it. I often have to switch back to it in order to keep my Dutch in shape, it holds my Dutch together, so to speak. Dutch is actually my foster mother tongue. I have a much more adult relationship with it, which also clearly shapes me. A more distant relationship, too. Distance is necessary, emotional attachment by itself doesn’t get you anywhere. Many Berber poets lean towards the sentimental, because there is so little tradition in that language. In Dutch, I would never write an ode to the language. That should be obvious from your use of it. When I went to secondary school in Holland, I had already read a lot more than the average pupil there. My hunger for reading was enormous. Reading was a fantastic experience to me; words in your head that evoke something. Roald Dahl, Beckman’s Crusade in Bluejeans, Astrid Lindgren. I read whatever I could get my hands on. My parents didn’t read at all, but having a quiet child didn’t bother them either. My mother did warn me though, that it was bad for my eyes. The reading lists at school were all rubbish to me; imposed by the state, forced down our throats. Just liked those imposed interpretations, which I was constantly in conflict with. Beckman’s Crusade in Bluejeans gave me the inspiration to start writing a book myself. It was about a youngster who takes part in a Children’s Crusade, and goes to the Holy Land to put Saracens to the sword. I was already writing little stories at the time. After reading two pages, I thought: ‘I can write this too.’ Plagiarism is a good teacher, letting yourself be inspired by other authors. In Dutch, you have to make do with whatever you’ve got. French already 127

has a history with my kind of subjects. In Dutch, however, I am entering a Terra Nova. Fouad Laroui said to me once: ‘I couldn’t write about Morocco in French, because then I would end up within the tradition of this and that author.’ It had already been done in French. At the end of the day, I think he writes about Morocco in a very un-Moroccan way, very modernistic. Personally, I was writing much more naïvely, as if that tradition didn’t exist. I have no power over what people think about my books, or if they want to read political or ideological messages into them. Holland is a country where a lot is imposed upon the individual. I am opposed to that, I am anti-patronising. Other people telling you what to do. Especially in Europe. In Morocco it’s the family, and in Europe the state who’s constantly telling you how to live your life. In the end, it leaves little room for movement. I practice my resistance through language, through the way I write. When I feel good, then it’s good, and this has something to do with my search for autonomy. As long as I have the dynamics, there will be good phrases coming out. In this country, there is such a high level of consciousness with regard to language, that you constantly have to come up with tricks and ruses that help create room for movement through the use of language. Then you will get obstinacy, originality. My polyphonics, my books without head or tail, but with context nonetheless, are something I can only achieve when I feel that way – the feeling that I could have written that. Because when I am asked why I write books, I must be able to answer: ‘Because nobody else can do that so well.’ Then, I can still mess it up, but I am still the only one who can do it that way. The smallest possible form of recklessness.

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How European Péter Zilahy translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson

Before You start thinking I’m nuts, I would like to mention that the people at a European foundation of high repute have asked me to talk to myself – a request that in itself is pretty European, inasmuch as it predicates that I shall gain a better insight if I subject myself to an in-depth interview, not sparing myself a confrontation with myself, should it come to that, with particular reference to the subject of Europe. An author’s spontaneous self-confession that cursorily traces his own plunge – as if an absent-minded surgeon were to hack himself up, or a planet to try and stay in orbit through self-reflection instead of gravity. Which of my attributes, I wonder, will be of greatest use to me

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in this schizoid monologue: the fact that I am a writer, or that I am a European? Still, there’s no doubt they’ve found their man, because who is better placed than me to speak with me about us and me. I have been asked to create a situation of open conflict, to give expression to my hopes and fears, give voice to the many tiny European bells within me, so they might toll as they did of old in the draughty monasteries of the Dark Ages, when our forefathers first rained their arrows on Europe. How should we contemplate Europe’s nth unification? What image befits it, at first blush? Sisyphus rolling his rock up the mountain or a baby buggy bumping down a flight of steps? The first time I saw Europe I was still a child. When I was ten, Mother handed me a book of Greek mythology, rather than folk tales, so I might assimilate a bit of Classical culture. Exciting reading it was, too, full of banquets, drinking bouts, betrayals, murders, fabulous creatures, and jealous gods. One of the stories was about Europe – a name that sounded vaguely familiar in connection with a couple of world wars. Let us assume that every story has a meaning. Let us even go so far as to venture that there may be a touch of truth in a story that possibly does not stand in the narrator’s favour. Europé, to put it delicately, was struck by a bolt of lightning. Zeus, transformed into a white bull, seduced her, then, as an eagle, had his way with her. The Phoenician! Europe lost her virginity in Crete,1 at the intersection of three continents, which is funny, if only because it was only much later that the Europeans invented the continents. Could it be Europe was no more than a word?2 If one tries to look at it with fresh eyes, it is striking that Europe is a peninsula at the western tip of Asia, a subcontinent like India, except it has fewer inhabitants, is less ancient, and not as colourful. Nevertheless, for the aforementioned reasons, we still call it a continent. Europeans do not claim that everything had its beginning here, but something continually tells them that this is where it all ends. As if words uttered far, far away were gaining their true sense only here. ————————————

1 Cretans, to this day, are happy to show tourists the plane trees under which the liaison came off. 2 Particularly in light of the fact that it was around the same time that the alphabet swam across from Phoenicia.

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To keep the words to a minimum, Mummy was carried off – by Daddy, fortunately. Our mother arrived on a bull’s back and her progeny was a bird of prey, which pointed to a disturbed family background, to put it mildly. Was it love? That anyway, is supposed to be the first European love story. As to how European it may be, let it merely be noted that according to the Magyar myth of origin3 a bird of prey is also picked out for a one-night stand, so it too weaves out of a girl’s abduction a story about the conquest of the new homeland. So, there is no dilemma over what came first, the chicken or the egg, Europe or the European. Ever since then, Mummy is regularly abducted, and it is only once in a blue moon that she has to go to The Hague for it. Daddy, never. Europe is spoiled. She has forgotten where she came from. She believes she is a continent, that she’s the bee’s knees. Or else she becomes seized with self-doubt and goes to pieces, zips off to the seaside and runs around headless. It seems she needs to be abducted. Where is Europe? Is Europe in Europe? Where in Europe? How many Europes are there? Is there a Europe outside Europe? Europe was abducted by Europeans first of all, which sounds contradictory, but that didn’t bother anyone back then. They didn’t even think of themselves as Europeans until someone attacked them. They called them Barbarians. Europe was regularly reborn at the hands of ‘Barbarians’ who hammered the walls down: Vandals, Vikings, Magyars, Lithuanians, Bulgars, all once feared enemies, turned European. It took a thousand years. Europe was always conquering her conquerors. Then strolling down to the sea to have a look around. Europe is at her most beautiful when she is abducted. If someone is willing to abduct and love her. It would be going too far to say one knows her, as her most typical characteristic is that she is constantly changing, like Proteus. In the lap of her latest lover she is reborn and can still look stunning, though this is not the first millennium she is pushing. Europe will be over and done with only when no one wants her; if the ‘Barbarians’ no longer come. She will sit solitarily on the seashore, the wind blowing through her wrinkles… It has yet to be settled who the Barbarians are, and who plays Europe. East————————————

3 Around that time the Magyars were galloping around on the endless pampas of a nameless part of the world, without the slightest inkling that they would be gaining entry into Europe sooner or later.

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ern Europe is not a suitor, that’s for sure. It did not take the initiative in the ‘transition process’. It is more a declassé member of the family who comes round to the back door to beg. The inhabitants of the old Eastern bloc are puzzled to read in the papers that they can hardly wait for accession.4 The lolly would be handy, but ideals are in short supply. They don’t believe they can direct their own fates, nor that the West has the foggiest notion about the whole thing, all they want is to stretch out on the beach and have a good look around. In case the Barbarians come – or the lolly at least. It’s not that being Hungarian is pure Hollywood, as the poet says. We are run down, our hospitals are falling apart, the elderly are starving, education is antiquated, public life teeming with demagogues. We don’t speak English, not even to ask for help, let alone fill in the grant application forms.5 Our selfimage is more than a touch unrealistic, and we still lead the world in self-destruction. Only the old humour remains the same – black as night. Given that, what else could I be but hopeful? Do you see yourself as European? Does that mean anything? Central? Eastern? Middle Europe? The Carpathian Basin? What does it mean to you, indeed, dear homeland? First and foremost, I’m a resident of Buda, then Hungarian, then European, but by and large I’m at home anywhere on the planet, though of course some continents are more favoured than others. I suppose I might represent humanity, though I’m not a woman, not coloured, my parents haven’t divorced, I wasn’t molested as a child by the nice man next door, and so far, no extremist group has tried to stick a red-hot iron up my backside on some trumped-up pretext. Wherever I travel outside Europe, I am told I am European. I can’t deny that. Wherever I travel within Europe, I am told I am Hungarian. Only in Europe is it hard to be European, and in Hungary, Hungarian. I know I have left Europe when I suddenly become European. How European!, they say. My clothes, my look, my language, my style, my gestures. I am self-explanatory. Hungarian – vide: The name ‘Hungarian’ was erroneously applied to those horsemen who staged raids all over Europe during the ninth century in ————————————

4 The notion of accession would be much more popular if it were forbidden; once something is permitted, it does not seem anything like as attractive. 5 Wittgenstein’s well-known dictum – ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) – resonates a bit differently in Hungarian.

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search of plunder, because contemporary sources mixed them up with an army of marauders from several centuries earlier. The Europeans must have looked upon the Magyars the same way as the indigenous populations of Asia, Africa, America, and the Pacific looked upon the repeated raids of Europeans sevenhundred years later. Seven hundred years later, the Kingdom of Hungary fought a life-and-death struggle with the Ottoman Turks, who regularly raided the shores of Lake Balaton, and there was a time when Hungarian slaves were the cheapest commodity in Istanbul. Which cheek shall I turn to thee? He who is more European than me is a cheat. My identities harmoniously complement one another. I could not be merely Hungarian, or merely European. If I have to choose, then I shall be against those who force me to choose. I shall be against anyone, Hungarian, European, or extraterrestrial, who wishes to usurp the inheritance and pilfers grandma’s silver between two sermons. I shall be against those who don’t like Europe but bow pantingly over her. To be European is not the least bit difficult; all I have to do, for example, is write, write this text, since I couldn’t help being European, or Hungarian. In the same way, I cannot emigrate to Europe either, nor can I accede to her, nor can I expand. I am a whole Europe unto myself. I cannot be more European any more than I can be less European. L’Europe c’est moi. Europe will not be more and it will not be less after unification, nor will it be better or worse. If anything is going to happen, it will not be now, nor will it start now. It is not possible to miss the bus for Europe, because Europe is not a country nor a customs union, nor is it a currency. Europe is a word that is raped at every street corner. What do you think about the frontiers? A nice set of new Iron Curtains? Where would you draw the boundaries of Europe? My god, you ask a Hungarian that! Drawing borders has not been a roaring success in this part of the world. Hungary’s own borderlines have Hungarians on both sides who are again going to be shut out, and yet they are expected to be forbearing because at the end of some war someone who was pig-ignorant about the region drew a line on the map. We ask them to be good Europeans and not kick up a fuss. I feel unbounded love for Europe, which is located roughly between New York, Buenos Aires and Moscow. Its edges are not seas and rivers, not mountains, countries or languages. It cannot be 133

pinned down on a map, nor can it be expropriated – at most it can be hired out on occasions. Europe never was, and never will be, a single country. It will always have bits that stick out from under the blanket, bits that metamorphose, like Constantinople or Cordoba.6 There will be also bits that stick out from under themselves, and there will be bits that move away from Europe. So, has Europe’s time come? Or has it run out? How would you summarise European unification in one minute? How are we to yank off our dormant Europeanness, the veil that covers it? With the proviso that a quick analysis cannot forgo speculative elements, one could say that Europe has already been unified several times, on a larger or smaller scale, within empires and states. Its original building blocks were units the size of a Provence or Tuscany or maritime city-states from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Spans that could be traversed by a day’s horse ride or running a marathon. The empires of the Carolingians and the Salic Franks and the Holy Roman Empire of the Germans attempted to resuscitate the disintegrated Roman empire within narrower confines. Christian and imperial aspirations overrode languages and nations. That’s true, but that Europe was on the defensive, continually subject to external attack. Is it permissible to draw parallels with the European integration of today? Are we seeking the restoration of something? Is it a matter of rehabilitation or creative innovation? There is no way of knowing, since Europe is clearly not a mistress of herself. Whenever a European power felt itself sufficiently strong, each and every one tried, with more or less success, to unite Europe under its own wings – to cite just the examples of the English, French, Germans, Russians, Austrians, Poles, Hungarians, and Swedes. The end of the Middle Ages was marked by the emergence, in alternately conglomerating and fragmenting Europe, of such centralised super states as France, Great Britain, and Spain,7 which as————————————

6 Both of which, incidentally, were flattened by Catholic Europe (cf. the Reconquista and the Crusades). 7 It is an intriguing parallel in the history of the East-West axis that as Moorish power and influence on the Iberian peninsula was ending the Ottoman empire was occupying the Balkans.

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similated and homogenised larger geographical territories – a process in which dozens of languages and European traditions vanished off the face of the earth. Geopolitical factors, such as the distance from Rome or Asia, the location of rivers, seas, peninsulas and islands, played a part too. Western countries did not have to face military superpowers like that Mongol tribal alliance, the Golden Horde, or the Ottoman Empire – at worst the stormy Atlantic Ocean, which later turned out to be an unexpected source of wealth. There could be no question of a similar unification in Europe’s eastern half in view of the multiple fronts that had to be contested. The personal unions of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth and the Habsburg Empire or Austro-Hungarian Monarchy were multinational states and closer in concept to the currently developing model than the Atlantic countries ever were. Not everyone was as lucky as the Portuguese or Dutch; most of the small states of Europe disappeared in the integration of those times. Should we be apprehensive about European integration? Will the new Europe become homogeneous? Will the old Europe become new? Why do we have no faith in ourselves? Why do we have no faith in the West? Not so long ago, there was an expression that we used to use in reference to the far side of the Iron Curtain: ‘The Europe that works.’ As opposed to the constant breakdowns of eastern European machines, cars, nuclear power stations, and the entire host of little practical contrivances of everyday life. Many in Eastern Europe cherished the hope that machines would now work and cars not break down, that the market would generate quality, and if that was the essence of it, then accession would be worth it down to the last speck of grit in the works. Others bewailed the disappearance of old brand names in the maelstrom of globalisation, that the West would colonise us lock, stock and barrel; and if that was the essence of it, then maybe accession would still be worth it. But what if that’s not the essence? What would a Byzantine make of unification? Or a pagan Prussian?8 Would the Languedoc be happy to see a united Europe? ————————————

8 A Baltic ethnic group, speaking a Sanskrit-derived language, who were exterminated by the Order of Teutonic Knights.

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Europe’s abduction was not always an unclouded joy; even the first time she gave birth to monsters, amongst them a bull-headed grandson who dined on virgins. Europe grew westwards from the east, but the eastern parts were laid to waste on repeated occasions. Europeans call all Europeans whom they look down on as Asian or Balkan; the Balkan states are particularly fond of calling one another Balkan. Unlike Europe. Europe only looks so European in the light of the chaos enveloping the world. The chaos enveloping the world, however, is in no small measure the handiwork of Europeans. Compared with European co-operation in its bad moments, the Dark Ages look like a bloody good idea. Which Europe is more European? The Europe of the Hagia Sofia, the Sistine Chapel or Cologne Cathedral? Or the Europe of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust? Is it not more a case of saving the world from Europe than fearing what the world will do to Europe? A European who throughout the twentieth century had watched his neighbours being carted off, most of them not to return, would ask himself whether he had been cowardly or wise. He would maybe generously consider that if every survivor is guilty, then sin would become public property; culture and innocence, a matter for the other world. Maybe he considered it is better to live; better than dying as a European. Europe then died just a fraction. Those ghosts are still flitting about. Every now and then a grave opens. It would be more to the point to fear ourselves than any horde pouring in from outside. Don’t let our limitations be the basis of our identity. If we allow eastern fundamentalism to inflame the European, we’ll never be rid of our ghosts. Europe must remain open, otherwise it can close up the shop for good. Our Europeanness cannot be an object of fear. We can only lose Europe if we have already done so. Where would Africa be without Europe? Where would Australia be without Europe? Where would Europe be without Europe? When the first raiding hordes of Europeans started to colonise the southern shores of West India, they encountered Christians who had been living peacefully in Christianity for more than a thousand years, longer than most European states, without ever seeking to overrun Jerusalem or Constantino136

ple, or to send thousands to the stake. It so happens that India’s first mosque and first synagogue were both built at Kerala, where the religions co-existed peacefully alongside one another until the arrival of the Portuguese. What is there that is non-European? What is there that you are not? What is there that you cannot be? I am not Indo-European, despite having travelled the length and breadth of India and having something of crush on its immeasurable wealth and incomprehensible poverty. I am not American, even though New York is my favourite city and I have now lived in virtually every area of Manhattan. I am not a Buddhist, even though I feel a greater affinity to Buddhism, aesthetically and morally, than to the Christian church. I am not Eurasian, even though two transcontinental Great Powers have had a major influence on the history of my homeland. One of them floored Hungary at the end of the Middle Ages, the other put paid to my parents’ younger years at the end of the Modern Age. In that sense, Hungary is more European than, say, Belgium, because it always stood closer to the fire. Still, it is different to cross the frontier to the Occident. Did it not annoy you that you were looked on mistrustfully? That they looked long and hard at your passport? Or maybe searched you for hours on end? In the West, the average man on the street generally knows less about us than we do about him. Since we didn’t have much money, we didn’t look like tourists. The border guards would see a smuggler, secret agent or refugee in everyone who arrived out of the mists of the East. If they treated us well, that was at most out of a sense of duty or pity. We might have been Chinese, after all. Their ignorance made one arrogant; I would try to miff the guards by asking why would I want to stay in their bloody country when, no offence, they don’t know how to cook and their wines are undrinkable. On one occasion, a Norwegian border guard, almost a child even in comparison with me, made me strip off at the railway station in Oslo. I was gobsmacked. After I had recovered my wits, I put on such a song and dance that he almost ended up in tears – not that it gave me any pleasure. I didn’t feel I was at a disadvantage, or at most only when window shopping, but I wasn’t willing to play mums and dads either. Maybe if I had lived for a longer time in the East and got to be properly humiliated, I would keep my head well down, but 137

as far as I am concerned Eastern Europe provided a lesson about people, time, and space that made me stronger, not more vulnerable. Repression liberated rather than subjugated me, which is why I felt freer than people who didn’t know the difference. Shall we be wiser together? That reminds me of that crack from my childhood, according to which the sum of intelligence in the universe is constant but the population is continually increasing. After the 1989 change in régime, the states of Eastern Europe started up a ludicrous contest as to which of them was the more Western; yet if union makes any sense, it would be that the neighbouring countries come closer to one another. Maybe that will work in a fashion, as we shall certainly have common interests. I am a wee bit sceptical about the enlargement of minds; one thing for absolutely certain is that many brilliant European spirits will continue to be stranded outside the fence. But then, maybe they can turn that to their advantage. To return to the original hypothesis, though, Europe will not be wiser for knowing more; and even if it were wiser, it would not do things differently, because its hands are tied. Is any sort of European identity not excessively burdensome? Would it not be simpler just to be cosmopolitan? As far as that is concerned, pretty well the entire planet has been compromised. We would not be allowed into a pub in one of the better-run galaxies. For one thing, the past must be faced up to. Second, we would do better without the perennial chewing over the sins of ancestors. Third, I personally don’t have any sense of collective guilt. Could it be that I am not susceptible? The fact is that Hungary did not have any colonies, and my forefathers did not collaborate with the post-war régime after either of the world wars. They weren’t in the resistance, since for generations they have not believed history was malleable; but neither did they keep their mouths shut, as a result of which they forfeited their privileged position and all but lost their lives. Nevertheless that did not make them victims or heroes, at least not in their own eyes, for which I am deeply thankful. If the question relates to whether I have a vision of the future, then I would say that one could construct a cool Europe from the available material, but I would not be surprised if that did not come to pass; maybe a wonderful flop looks more tempting. 138

Europé’s name apparently means broad-faced. The question is how broad the bride’s smile will be when brought face-to-face with her new suitors. The East-West dichotomy was more of a joke if one spoke about cultural rather than geographical values. As a teenager, I was amazed to see that in Ireland there were no motorways, many living in poverty and even more were practising Catholics, and that their peasants had no better a life than those in ‘communist’ Hungary. And yet there was neither dictatorship nor revolution nor war. It transpired that Portugal, Ireland and southern Italy were not a whit ‘further to the West’ than us. The system of political co-ordinates is accidental, and astounding observations arise for both parties if one compares, say, Marseilles with Zagreb, or Naples with Lemberg, or Prague with Berlin. Then again, if Europe is the sum total of what Europeans make and do, you have Sweden, which abstained from both world wars. Are the Swedes any less European for that? The heart of Europe is not at its centre. Anyone can see that on a map. In place of the heart of Europe there is a bank. And in that bank, between you and me, they are not guarding Europe’s cultural heritage. What sorts of stories will there be in the new European book of fairy tales? What will Europe’s new hair extension be like? Where is a prince going to come from? What words will swim towards your shores? To begin with, she will be a gawky adolescent, full of fine aspirations, then a strong and desirable maiden soon to become a gorgeous and awesome beauty, before finally decaying into a tedious, hated creature. Then, one fine day, she will run down to the sea screeching uncontrollably and will be abducted again. And reinvented. Whatever will be, Europe will persist and swim. Not the way the West would like, nor the way the East would like. The union will not be peaceful, nor even loving, but it will flourish, even if it kills us. It won’t last forever, of course. That wouldn’t be European.

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The Point of the Commonality of Cultures an interview with Sami Zubaida

‘I was born to a Jewish family in Baghdad, Iraq, where I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. Baghdad was a completely different place back then, with not even 1 million inhabitants. There lived no more than 5 million people in Iraq. Now there are 25 million and more than one third of the Iraqi population lives in Baghdad. The city of my youth was much more intimate somehow. Especially the educated middle classes led an almost small-town life. Everybody knew each other. I also clearly remember that history was punctuated by violent eruptions, by conflicts and demonstrations. But on the whole it was a reasonably harmonious and happy childhood. Our social life wasn’t restricted to the Jewish community. Much of it revolved around the family, around uncles and aunts. There was a lot of Jewish life around. But my father always had Muslim business partners. That meant social interaction: parties and dinners with their families. My father was a building contractor. He built roads and public housing. This involved a lot of travel and contacts with engineers and municipal authorities. As a boy I would sometimes join him. For some Jews social life may have been restricted to the Jewish community, but for me and my family it was quite open to the other communities. And to foreigners of course. Beyond my grandfather, I am very hazy about the history of my family. That’s about the beginning of the 20th century. But there have been Jews in Iraq for more than one thousand years. In the 19th century, many Jews migrated to British India and many Iraqi Jewish families had branches in India. I heard vaguely from my father that our family had Indian connections. A friend of mine, a sociologist, searched medical archives in India and came across my family name. But I don’t know anybody there. As a Jew, I was of course not allowed into the mosques and into other Islamic religious spaces in Iraq. Socially there were people who had strong feelings against Jews. And who would express these feelings. When you needed a passport for instance, government officials would openly say abusive things to Jews. 140

Going outside Baghdad with my father was very pleasant. I had uncles who lived in the provinces. One of them was a merchant in a city between Baghdad and Basra. I loved going there, and to other places where I was also greeted warmly because I belonged to a family whom they knew. So I liked travelling outside Baghdad. The encounter with provincial life was never a shock to me. It was rather like a holiday. Arabic is my native tongue. As a boy I learned Hebrew for religious purposes. Before Israel, Jews of course never spoke Hebrew. In Europe, they spoke Yiddish and the local languages. In the Middle East, depending where, but certainly in Iraq and in Egypt, Jews spoke Arabic. In the 15th century there was the influx of Sephardic Jews from Spain to Turkey and other Ottoman lands, and they spoke Ladino. There were some Sephardic surnames in Iraq, like Perez. But no one spoke Ladino. We didn’t even know about Ladino. Later I discovered that some of the Jews in Turkey and Egypt knew Ladino. What happened is that with modernity they switched to French. So many of the Mediterranean Jews of the Middle East spoke what was then called Levantine French. Today hardly anything is left of this community in Iraq. A few old people. Recently a Jewish agency wanted to take them to Israel. They didn’t want to. Too old. Not an Exile, But a Londoner I came to London when I was sixteen years old. It was quite usual back then for a well-off Iraqi Jew to study abroad. There wasn’t much of a future in Iraq. Soon after the state of Israel was founded, Jews couldn’t go to university in Iraq any more. This changed later. My younger sister went to medical school in Baghdad and graduated as a doctor in the early 1960s. Sons of prosperous families usually went to England to study. For me, going to the UK was my first time abroad and it was a great experience. I went together with two classmates. During the first year we relied on one another. The homesickness was terrible. Later I developed friendships, connections, I had girlfriends and so on. This social network gave me an anchor. I learned English in my Jewish secondary school in Iraq, where they also taught French, Arabic and the official government curriculum. I learned a reasonable amount of English there. Baghdad literary and intellectual life was vibrant. The press endured some censorship but not as much as it encountered later under Saddam, and there was still some opposition. Politically it was the time of the Cold War. The Iraqi communist party was very strong, not just in terms of organisation – it was banned, however. The communist 141

party also had a literary and intellectual presence, which consisted of a great deal of popular poetry and essays which tackled the political and social issues of the time. At school I had an Arabic language teacher who was a Marxist sympathiser. He was from a religious education background. In Iraq, the seminaries in the Shiite holy cities trained students in religious studies, but also in the Arabic language and literature. Many of the graduates of these religious schools from that generation became Marxists and became teachers of literature. All the educated people at that time still naively believed in progress, evolution, in economic growth and national development, in unity and in equality. Within this ideology of progress, the traditional forces of religions, of tribes and of communities were considered obstacles to progress. So the enlightened rejected the traditional, but did not agree on how to move forward. One branch developed a pan-Arab nationalism. They were very much influenced in the earlier decades by fascism and Nazism. The other branch was Marxist. Or rather leftist: they believed in class struggle, liberation, and social justice. As for the religious minorities: they were for the most part non-political, or very sceptical about the politics of the country. But those who did become political tended to be on the left, and some were communist. Most of my intellectual development took place in England, but because of this teacher I had, and other teachers as well, and because of the general atmosphere, I was well aware of the issues of the day in Iraq. As a student, in my younger days, I was much more political than I am now. I was active in student politics on the left. My political ideas were a kind of mixture of cultural nationalism, authenticity mixed with a leftist notion of colonialism. But in the end I suppose I was too cosmopolitan. In England I did not feel the urge to distinguish myself from the Arabic Iraqis. On the contrary. I was always emphasising our history of intermixing. The Middle East, and certainly Iraq, has always been a mixture of various communities. Our communities shared common social values and culture. I never thought about settling in England. It eventually just happened, as it became more difficult to return to Iraq. At one point it became impossible, and then the rest of my family had to leave as well. Some of them, my mother amongst them, came to England, while others went to Canada. I didn’t and still don’t consider myself an exile. I was fortunate to get out of Iraq. Other members of my family, as well as many Iraqis, not all of them Jewish, had terrible times there under the horrible governments and rulers. They had to leave the country under very difficult conditions. They were exiled. I 142

left as a student and settled as a student. When it became clear that I wouldn’t be returning to Baghdad, I simply assumed that London was my home. The Logic of Cultural Nationalism The history of the 20th century has been the history of ethnic cleansing. European history is no exception. One can continue this history of ethnic cleansing into the 1990s, with the Yugoslav wars. On the other side, Canada, Australia and the cities in the US and Northwestern Europe are becoming much more diverse, both ethnically and culturally. I don’t foresee an end to this, because I can’t imagine ethnic cleansing in Paris. However, how this will all develop remains a complex issue. A lot of it depends on class. The more prosperous and educated Turks and Indians become, the more likely they will integrate and be accepted in the UK, for instance. This is a crucial factor. Then there is the question of generations. The paradox is that, whereas subsequent generations become acculturated, know the language and customs, they also cherish the idea of difference, and try to remain authentic. This is a universal characteristic of immigrant communities. In the beginning of the 20th century, the second generation of immigrants in America just wanted to be American. The third generation, however, beside being just American, also wanted to be different and emphasised their origins. Something like that is going on now. Speaking of authenticity: Turkish coffee, as it is generally known, is prevalent throughout the Middle East and the Balkans. Only now Greeks, Arabs and other national groups have begun to reject the ‘Turkish’ designation and claim it as their own. This is of course a way for people to say that they are not Turkish. I used to teach at the Dubrovnik International University in the former Yugoslavia. I attended a concert of Croatian (or Yugoslav) music. The instruments were very similar to Middle Eastern instruments. While discussing some technical points about the instruments with one of the musicians, I suggested the instruments probably came from Turkey. This offended him extremely. I encountered this kind of cultural nationalism perhaps most often in relation to food. There is a common Middle Eastern culinary repertoire, as you know. All variations on a theme. Take baklava: the Turks, Arabs, Greeks, everybody claims it as their own invention. The Greeks and the Arabs say: what are the Turks? Nomads in tents. They can’t possibly have something as sophisticated as baklava! If one were to draw a culinary map of Europe, the Mediterranean and the 143

Middle East there would be so many mutual influences. For instance, in Spanish food so many of the terms are of Arabic origin. This map would also show a great deal of diversity as well. The food is quite different between Spain and even its nearest neighbour, Morocco. You can’t get anything like gazpacho anywhere in the Arab world, while much Spanish food revolves around ham. A cultural history of food should be preceded by a history of ingredients, which would deal with questions of origin, and of the effect they had. There are many ingredients we take for granted today, ingredients that are widely available and cheap. Sugar used to be a very scarce commodity. The trade in sugar became a very important political issue. People find it difficult to believe that the tomato only came to the Middle East in the 19th century. Now everything in the Middle East has tomatoes in it. The history of ingredients would be a good way of starting a cultural history: it avoids the obsession with origin based on a nationalist approach.

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The Saga of the Feel-good Strudel (A Family Apocrypha) Damir Sˇodan (translated from the Croatian by Majda Bakocˇ evic´ )

How did the idea for the ‘Saga of the Feel-good Strudel (a Family Apocrypha)’ come about? It was a story instigated by historical and geo-political musings. Meaning what, exactly? Well, it just happened that as I was getting ready to sit down and write a ‘serious’ text on Croatia’s accession into the European Union, I ended up remembering the tale of a family recipe that went on to become a literary footnote instead. Pondering this yet-unwritten text on Croatia’s possible integration into the EU, I knew that I would have to touch upon the standard – even somewhat exclusive and politically correct – meta-narrative on multiculturalism and its overall benefits, the harmful effects of xenophobia in all its latent and manifest forms, the advantages of tolerance, the inevitability of an active co-existence, and so on and so forth. However, as an introduction to all this, the words of my late grandmother Ruzˇa Sˇodan, née Kvasina (1912-1994) sprang to mind: ‘I lived in five states, and I still haven’t mastered my mother’s apple strudel recipe.’ It was 9 November 1989, and the two of us were watching the Berlin Wall come down on television. Even though Grandma was chronically dissatisfied with the taste of her strudel – for reasons unbeknownst to the rest of the family – we nevertheless happily toasted the forthcoming historical changes with our mouths full of her flaky strudel and Dalmatian prosecco. So grandma lived in five states, then? Strictly speaking, she lived in eight. Let me explain: a few years down the road, when I managed to somehow get my university degree in English and History while the war in Croatia raged on (1992), Grandma and I found our145

selves once again in our apartment in Split. While eating the requisite strudel, we decided to compose a list of all the states she had lived in. Somehow though, the strudel didn’t sit right this time, as bloody footage of the war in Croatia and Bosnia flashed before us on the TV. We were witnessing the creation of a new history for the European Southeast while a surreally beautiful and crystal-clean Adriatic Sea glittered below our 12th-storey apartment. We took advantage of this uncertain repose and came up with the following: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8)

Austro-Hungarian Empire (1912-1918) The State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (1918-1918) Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1918-1929) Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929-1941) Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945) Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (1945-1963) Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1963-1991) Republic of Croatia (1991-?).

After finishing the list, we stared at it in disbelief, and then quickly came to the conclusion that there wasn’t a single social system that Grandma hadn’t lived under: enlightened Absolutism, parliamentary democracy, Fascism, Communism, self-managing Socialism... In her lifetime, which spanned almost the entire 20th century, Grandma witnessed everything, from concentration camps and genocide to the ‘caravans’ of brotherhood and unity, and spectacular celebrations of Tito’s birthdays. At the end, she even managed to see the birth of an independent Croatian state and the unification of Europe, both of whose futures hung in the air. Above all, the fact that in this entire historical turmoil, Grandma never set foot outside the fifty square kilometres she resided in is a paradox in itself. She had spent her entire life in Split and its surrounding areas, while state after state came and went at the speed of express trains. There was a strange contradiction between Grandma’s ‘static’ life and the ‘dynamics’ of history. However, Grandma never commented on the new Croatian state (but I think she was pretty much benevolent towards it) because, in her own words, she hadn’t ‘lived through it long enough.’ But she did live through a lot, and most importantly survived it all, as did the famous recipe for apple strudel that she inherited from her mother. Grandma often used to say: ‘Everything changes except the strudel!’, to which my brother and I would 146

readily retort along with Heraclitus: ‘Sure Grandma, but you can never bite into the same strudel twice!’ She’d simply sigh and shake her head, oblivious to our philosophical reference – a sneaky way of getting her to bake another tray. In some of her beliefs, Grandma was a fierce local patriot. She believed – as did many Dalmatians – that the strudel was actually an invention that came about when the Croats experimented with Turkish delicacies. Her claim was that none other than the Croats – a tribe confined to the so-called Antemurale Christianitatis, a bulwark between the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the Turkish Empire – had baked the first strudel for the purely pragmatic reason of currying favour with the Emperor in Vienna. It was in this way that they ensured their status as an intermediary between the incompatible cultures of the Orient and the Occident. Nevertheless, this remains historical speculation – at least for now. Hmm, I wonder what etymology would have to say about this? In J.R. Entwistle’s study The Food Name Origins (Oyster Press, London, 1959) we come across the following statement: ‘Centuries ago, a German sailor would wake up with his heart in his throat if he would hear someone on the deck yelling ‘Mein Gott! Mein Gott! Der Strudel! Der Strudel!’ The cold shivers down his spine wouldn’t be caused by any sticky sheets of dough, but rather by the knowledge that he had come across a whirlpool. ‘Strudel’ in German, of course, means ‘whirlpool’. Therefore, one can deduce that the strudel is a perfectly suitable metaphor for the turbulent historical events in the midst of which my family heartily devoured it. Interesting. One can say that in your family the strudel is a kind of ‘edible historical fact’? The strudel in our family is first and foremost an omnipresent fact, and only then an edible one. It is eaten indiscriminately alongside both epochal and trivial historical events. This strudel was eaten in 1945, when the Allies conquered Hitler, in 1969, when the Americans landed on the Moon, in 1980 after Tito’s funeral, and in 1992, when Croatia was internationally recognised. My late grandfather, Lovre Sˇodan (1896-1968) ate it in the First World War when he served in the Austro-Hungarian Army at the Isonzo front. My uncle also ate it, first as a partisan, then while in captivity in a German camp (19431945), and lastly after the Second World War, as the head of the State Security 147

branch for Southern Dalmatia. Later on, his son, a Croatian Army volunteer, ate it in the Homeland War (1991-1995). Even our late cousin Petar, a Cominform supporter, managed to get a taste of it at the labour camp on the island of Goli Otok in the ’50s. It was eaten in 1960 at my parents’ wedding, in 1964 when I was born, and in 1970 when my brother was born. It was eaten by our relatives in San Pedro, Buenos Aires, Frankfurt, and Sydney. It was eaten by babysitters, handymen and even a one-time famous rock star at a New Year’s party in the ’80s. My sailor friend ate it in Abidjan when captured by pirates, and claimed the strudel saved his life, while another friend passed it around at a heroin-withdrawal commune near Seville. Atheists, priests, men and women, Partisans and Ustasha, friends and foes, the old and the young, statesmen and washerwomen, the sick and the healthy – all of them ate it. It seems that our family’s entire history revolves around this strudel, which in the end somehow tastes like the very passage of time. OK. I can see you’ve gotten slightly carried away here, but what about European integration? Well, there’s nothing like a sweet and sticky strudel to bind us all together. Only kidding! The best is yet to come. Even the long-time president of Yugoslavia and the Supreme Commander himself, Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980) tried it! Now you’re really taking it too far! No, no, it’s the truth! A good friend of my father’s, Mr. Dorde K. from Belgrade, was one of Tito’s personal drivers during the ’60s and ’70s, and the man in charge of his vehicle pool. This was the man who had clocked the most hours in Tito’s famous black Mercedes. As many before him, Mr. Dorde wasn’t immune to the charms of our strudel, which he would scarf down on a daily basis every summer on the terrace of our family house near Makarska. He always claimed that the taste of this strudel relaxed and filled him, above all else, with the desire to be somewhere alone with his wife, away from his duty and the world. He phoned us one autumn night, having just returned from his summer vacation and excitedly yelled into the receiver: ‘He tried it! Tito tried it!’ According to Dorde , Tito wanted to have close relations with his drivers, gardeners, maids, and doormen, and would often urge them to let him taste their lunches, so that through their simple food he would at least 148

have some kind of contact with the regular world he had floated away from like a giant balloon, having become a statesman and a legend. Tito had complained to Dorde several times that the food prepared for him was strictly controlled and low calorie, while he loved sweets. That day, according to Dorde e, before they set off for a visit to a newly-opened factory, Tito ‘snatched three entire pieces’ of Ruzˇa’s strudel, which is how much Dorde had brought back with him from his vacation in Dalmatia the previous night. Fifteen minutes into the trip, Tito allegedly announced to him that suddenly he didn’t feel like going to the opening and that he was sick of being ‘the people’s icon’ (a quote!). Thus, they returned to his residence, where he retreated into his room with his wife Jovanka. The two of them didn’t come out for that whole night and right up to the following evening. Tito had strictly ordered they not be disturbed ‘even if there’s a coup!’ Are you insinuating that the strudel had an aphrodisiacal effect on Tito? No, I’m only stating that according to Mr. Dorde’s tale, it had some kind of effect. This is very likely, since that strudel was said to have had a particularly beneficial effect by many close and distant family members, dating back to Great-grandma Filomena Kvasina (1883-1960), who had introduced it. As Grandma Ruzˇa would say, the strudel would lead you to self-introspection, force you to focus on yourself and abandon futile thoughts on the ‘Great Big World’, which is so vast that you could never fully grasp it, much less influence it. People who tried the strudel would mainly feel a strong urge to relinquish all great ideas and illusions and would become, if for a moment, open to all forms of ‘grounding’. Philosophically speaking, once you tried Filomena’s strudel, you could easily distinguish between the ontological and the ontic. Give us a few words now on this great-grandmother who introduced it, but keep it short please! Even though she had an illiterate father, our great-grandmother Filomena managed at that time (end of the 19th century) to complete six grades of elementary school and move out of her parent’s home at an early age. She possessed a free and adventurous spirit, and in the years leading up to her marriage (the first decade of the 20th century), she had made her way through the Austro-Hungarian Empire – from Prague and imperial Vienna to Pula and Opatija – where she worked as a governess, a barmaid, a servant, and a maid. 149

However, above all she was known for her strudel, which she successfully passed around wherever she was. It was whispered that in the earlier versions of the strudel, Filomena would enhance the crust with secret ingredients that once consumed, would instigate a variety of reactions, from sexual frenzy to a complete unravelling of one’s perception. You’re straying into fiction here. I admit I may be stepping into the realm of family myths here, but I can’t help but mention that there were those who claimed that Filomena crammed her strudels with minced mandrake root, or that she would buy Moroccan majoun – a marmalade-like mix of honey, spices and hashish – from a certain Abdelouahaid in Trieste for the same purpose. But as I said, all this remains in the domain of family legends. While we’re on the subject of special ingredients and effects, I have to mention the case of Uncle Jordan Svacˇic´ (18751955), one of the local leaders of the Croatian Party of Rights, and a fierce enemy of Austria. He originally planned to dedicate his life to the building of a Croatian state until 1912, when at my grandmother’s christening he polished off a rather large portion of Filomena’s strudel, subsequently transforming him into an impatient wife-seeker who in three months time got married and went on to have six children. When asked years later to explain his sudden decision, he answered that he had realised that for our national cause, it was ‘better to make six Croats than to kill six enemies!’ You once mentioned that the strudel was allegedly responsible for the development of psychoanalysis? It’s a well-known fact that psychoanalysis gained momentum in 1902 when Freud, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler began meeting in the waiting room of Freud’s practice to discuss psychoanalysis and enjoy a slice of strudel. Wilhelm Stekel, who later became an expert on auto-eroticism, was apparently fanatical about that strudel, even to the point that once, during a heated debate on hysteria, Freud snapped at him, asking if he was there for the scientific discussions or the strudel! Incidentally, precisely at that time (1902-1903), Great-grandma Filomena was in Vienna working as a governess at the home of a noble family, but I wouldn’t want to make any far-fetched conclusions here. What is certain however, is that towards the end of 1904 and beginning of 1905, James Joyce also had a taste of it… 150

This is too much. …during his stay in Pula where he lectured at the Berlitz school of languages. It’s well-known that Nora Barnacle and he frequently went to the ‘Miramare’ café where Great-grandma worked as a barmaid and served her strudel as a house specialty. Supposedly, Joyce would have left Pula a lot earlier – which he referred to as a ‘Seaside Siberia’ because it was too depressing and cold for him, if he hadn’t been so enamoured with the taste of Great-grandma’s strudel and its effects. It was said he could be heard making lascivious comments to his mistress after every bite. Hold on a minute now, it looks like you’re trying to move this strudel from your family history into the history of literature. But it’s already there! According to Great-grandma, no one ever enjoyed her strudel as much as a little Russian kid from an aristocratic family during the summer of 1905 in Opatija. His aunt Nathalie could hardly keep up with his demands for more strudel while Great-grandmother beamed behind her seaside stand, amazed at how much he was eating. ‘Look at that! Look at that!’ She exclaimed while the little one, his mouth sticky and greasy, repeated ‘Lo-li-ta! Lo-li-ta!’ Now you’ve gone completely into the absurd. That was of course Vladimir Nabokov, who as a child visited Croatia. I think it is high time now that we said something about European integration and Croatia’s role in it. What do you think I’ve been doing so far? Let me just say that the strudel was also tasted by Agatha Christie, who spent her second honeymoon in Split and Dubrovnik, Gabriele D’Annunzio, while opening his bordello in Rijeka... Enough already! …and William Burroughs, who got married for the first time in Dubrovnik in 1937.

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Speaking of Burroughs, didn’t he say ‘Language is a virus’, which is clearly evident in your case, with or without the strudel. Better with the strudel! Nulla dies sine strudel! I’d rather we end this tirade now and get on to publishing this ‘Saga of the Feel-good Strudel (a Family Apocrypha)’ as part of the Alter Ego-book. I’m afraid that’s impossible. Why? Because it hasn’t been written yet. REALITY IS EXAGGERATED!

Unbelievable! What, if anything, can you offer us instead? Great-grandma’s original recipe:

‘Recipe for Apple Strudel’ Dough: 250 grams flour, 3 teaspoons oil, pinch of salt, 1/8 litre of tepid water Filling: 1 kilo sour apples, a few sprinkles of breadcrumbs, 40 grams ground almonds, 60 grams butter, 80 grams slivered almonds, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 150 grams sugar, rind of one lemon, 100 grams raisins, powdered sugar Mix the dough ingredients together and once it’s formed, put on a plate, cover and leave to rise for an hour. Peel the apples and cut them into thin slices. Place them in a pan along with the breadcrumbs and ground almonds and fry them in oil until golden. Mix in the slivered almonds, cinnamon, sugar, lemon rind and raisins. On a flat surface, or a wooden plank, spread the dough into a rectangular shape and transfer it onto a clean dishcloth also sprinkled with flour. Knead the dough until the dishcloth begins showing through. Scoop the filling onto the dough, leaving a 5 cm margin on the sides. Roll the dough with the help of the dishcloth and then brush it all over with melted butter. Place the strudel onto a greased tin and bake at 200° C for about 50 minutes. While it’s baking, brush the strudel with the butter a couple more times. Once ready, dust the strudel with powdered sugar and serve either warm or cold. Bon appétit! 152

Contributors

Jaak Aaviksoo was born January 11, 1954 in Tartu, Estonia. He is the Rector of the University of Tartu, Estonia for the second electoral period (1998–2003 and 2003–). He was elected an Academician in the Estonian Academy of Sciences (since 1994). He is a Member of the Board of the European University Association. He received his MS cum laude in physics from University of Tartu in 1976 and a Ph.D. in Physics 1981 (Thesis: On Resonant Secondary Emission in NaNO2 and Anthracene) from the Institute of Physics, Estonian Academy of Sciences. He has served as a visiting scholar in the University of Paris (1991, 1994, 2001), University of Osaka (1991), Max Planck Institute Stuttgart (1987-1988, 1989) and Novosibirsk Thermophysical Institute (1981). His main areas of research include photo-excitations in Solids, Laser Spectroscopy, Ultrafast Energy Transfer in Semiconductors and Molecular Crystals and Higher Education Management and Policy. He has published more than 150 scientific articles. Since 1992, he has been Professor of Optics and Spectroscopy in University of Tartu. He has also served as the Minister of (Culture) and Education of Estonia (19951996). Honours/Awards received by Aaviksoo include the 4th Class Order of the National Coat of Arms (Estonia 1999), Merit Cross of the Federal Republic (Germany 2000), Merite National (France 2001), White Rose of Finland (2001), and Honorary Doctor of the University of Turku (Finland 2003). Nevin Aladag˘ was born in Van, Turkey in 1972. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1993 to 1999. She was co-founder of the projects ‘Cafe Helga’ and ‘Galerie Goldankauf’. She graduated in 2000. Her shows include: care of, Milano, Liste, FriArt in Basel (2000); German Leitkultur, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel; Count Down, Kunstverein, Munich; Aspekte Galerie, Gasteig, Munich; Fluxus und die Folgen, Wiesbaden, Proje4L, Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul (2002); Mursollaici, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Blut und Honig, Sammlung Essl, Vienna; Proje4L, Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2003). 153

David Albahari (1948) is a writer and translator from the former Yugoslavia. He has published eight collections of short stories and eight novels in Serbian, including The Globetrotter (novel, 2001) and The Second Language (short stories, 2003). His book Opis smrti (Description of Death) won the Ivo Andric Award for the best collection of short stories in Yugoslavia in 1982, and his novel Mamac (Bait), won the NIN Award for the best novel in Yugoslavia in 1996. This novel was also the first winner of the Balkanika Award, given annually to the best book published by Balkans publishers. His books have been translated into fourteen languages. The novel Bait has also been translated into Dutch, as Moederland, and published by Cossee in 2003; they will also publish the translation of his novel Gotz and Meyer, which deals with the Holocaust of Jews in Serbia, in 2004. He has translated into Serbian many books by contemporary British, American, Australian, and Canadian authors, including stories and novels by Saul Bellow, Isaac B. Singer, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, V.S. Naipaul and Vladimir Nabokov. He has also translated plays by Sam Shepard, Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill and Jason Sherman. He has lived in Calgary, Canada, with his wife and their two children since 1994. Yuri Andrukhovych was born in 1960 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. In 1985, together with Viktor Neborak and Oleksandr Irvanets, he founded the popular literary performance group ‘Bu-Ba-Bu’ (Burlesque-Bluster-Buffoonery). He spent 1989 to 1991 in Moscow where he studied Advanced Literary Courses at the Gorky Institute of Literature. At that time he published two poetry books – Downtown (1989) and Exotic Birds and Plants (1991, new editions 1997 and 2002). Andrukhovych`s prose works, the novels Recreations (1992, new edition 1997, English translation 1998), Moscoviad (1993, new editions 1997 and 2000), PerverZion (1996, new editions 1997, 1999, 2002) and 12 Rings (2003) have had a great impact on readers in the Ukraine. Andrukhovych is also the co-editor of an ‘Encyclopedia of contemporary Ukrainian writing’ Pleroma (1998). He also writes literary essays (a collection of them entitled Disorientation in Locality was published in 1999). Together with Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk he published My Europe (2000 and 2001). Ademir Arapovic´ (aka superb.surface, aka mr.a) comes from the field of visual culture. Media cameleon. Does not expect you to be interested in his CV. When asked about it, he said the following: ‘CV is a boring thing to write and boring thing to read. It improves nothing you do, it just declares you’re either collecting your bits of fame or chasing a subsidy. I rather listen to some music than think 154

about my CV... A contact link is more than enough.’ Contact email: . Nelly Bekus Goncharova was born in 1970 in Minsk Belarus. She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the Graduate School for Social Research in the Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw, Poland. She graduated Philosophical Faculty at Belarusian State University. She studied at the Summer Graduate Institute ‘Democracy and Diversity’ organised by Transregional Center for Democratic Studies New York, Summer University Plovdiv ‘Balcan Societies, Europeanisation, Globalisation’, Plovdiv State University, Bulgaria. Since 1994 she has worked as a lecturer at the Institute of Modern Knowledge, and as a researcher in the Education Development Center at Belarusian State University. In 1999, she was invited for a residency at The Center for Metamedia – Hermit Foundation – Society of Friends of Art-Plasy, Czech Republic. In 2002, she was a writer-in-residence at KulturKontakt, Vienna, Austria; in 2003, Milena Jesenska Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria. In 2003, she participated in the EGE University 8th Annual International Cultural Studies Symposium ‘Inside Outside In: Emotions, Body, and Society’, Izmir, Turkey. Some publications: ‘The Invisible Wall’: The Hidden Factor of Belarusian Reality, International net-magazine www.eurozine.com, May, 2003; ‘Stadt in der Zeit: Stadt ohne Zeit’, Buchkultur, Heft 85 Februar/Marz 2003, Vienna Austria; ‘Emigration: Another Paradigm of Existence’, Novagrodskaya Ziamlia (Novogrudak Land) , N1 2002; Navagrudak, Belarus, ‘Soviet Childhood: the Land of Golems’, Kwartalnik Filmowy 2000, (Quarterly Film Magazine, Warsaw, Poland) ; ‘Aspects of Illusions’, The Art Magazine N2, Minsk, 2001; ‘Belarus’ Sliding Scales of Reality’, Topos, N2, Minsk, 2000; ‘The Somatic Identity: The Photographic Search’, The Art Magazine N4, Minsk, 1998. Contact email: . Abdekader Benali was born in Morocco in 1975. His family migrated to the Netherlands when he was four years old. He studied history at Leiden University and published the novels Weddings by the Sea and The Longawaited. He also writes for the stage including The Miserable, Yasser and Impure. Benali is a regular contributor to the NRC Handelsblad. Dr. Erhard Busek, the former Vice Chancellor of Austria, began his professional career as a legal advisor to the association of parliamentarians of the Austrian People’s Party. He then served in a number of administrative positions including Secretary-General of the Austrian Federation for Trade and Commerce, Secre155

tary-General of the Austrian People’s Party, Deputy-Mayor of Vienna, Minister of Science and Research, Minister of Education, and, most recently, Vice-Chancellor. He is currently the editor of a monthly newspaper Wiener Journal, chairman of the Institute for the Danube and Central Europe, member of the Committee on Education in the European Union, and co-ordinator of the Southeast European Co-operative Initiative (SECI), a project created in 1996 to enhance stability in Southeastern Europe through the development of economic and environmental co-operation. Since January 2002, he has been serving as Special Co-ordinator of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe. Dr. Busek is a Visiting Professor of the Practice of Public Policy Studies at Duke University, and CoChair of the Commission on Radio and Television Policy: Central and Eastern Europe. Alesˇ Debeljak was born in 1961 in Ljubljana. He graduated in comparative literature from the University of Ljubljana and received his Ph.D. in Social Thought from Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, New York. He was a Senior Fulbright fellow at the University of California-Berkeley and a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study-Collegium Budapest. Debeljak, one of the leading Central European poets, published eight books of essays and six books of poems in his native Slovenian. His books of poems in English translation include Anxious Moments (1994), Dictionary of Silence (1999) and The City and the Child (1999). His non-fiction books include Twilight of the Idols: Recollections of a Lost Yugoslavia (1994) and Reluctant Modernity: The Institution of Art and its Historical Forms (1998) and a comprehensive anthology The Imagination of Terra Incognita: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (1997) which he edited. He was the translator of a book of selected poems by John Ashbery and of a book on the sociology of knowledge, he also edited an anthology of American meta-fiction and published a book of essays on American literature. He won the Presˇeren Foundation Prize (Slovenian National Book Award) and Miriam Lindberg Israel Poetry for Peace Prize, Tel Aviv and the Chiqyu Poetry Prize, Tokyo. His books have appeared in English, Japanese, German, Croatian, Serbian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Spanish, Slovak, and Italian translation. Debeljak edited Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian sections for Shifting Borders: East European Poetries in the Eighties (1993) and Prisoners of Freedom: Contemporary Slovenian Poetry (1993). He is also a contributing editor of Trafika: An International Literary Review (Prague) and a member of the advisory board at the Davies Publishing Group (Colorado), Debeljak is also a general editor of ‘Terra Incognita: Writings from Central Europe’, a book series published by White Pine Press, Buffalo, New York. 156

Debeljak teaches at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Ljubljana and directs the Center for Religious and Cultural Studies. In the spring 2002 semester, he was a visiting professor at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. He and his American wife, Erica Johnson, live in Ljubljana and have three small children. István Eörsi was born in 1931 in Budapest. He is a poet, writer, dramaturge, and freelance journalist. He wrote, among many other things, the play The Interrogation (1965, premiere in 1984 at the Berlin Schaubühne), the books: Georg Lukács: Record of a Life, Verso Edition, London 1983, Prison Memoirs: Recollections on the Good Old Times, in Hungarian 1988 (Samizdat-Edition), and since then in German, French and Serbian Editions, My Time with Gombrowicz, Budapest 1994. His work has been translated into English, German and Serbian. He is also a prolific translator. He has translated works by Shakespeare, Shelley, Brecht, Dürrenmatt, McLeish, Jandl, Handke, Bernhard, Heiner Müller, Tabori, Goethe, Schiller, Platen, Heine, and Ginsberg. Eva Hoffman grew up in Cracow, Poland, where she began her musical studies. After emigrating to Canada in her teens, she went on to study in the United States and received her Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Harvard University. Subsequently, she worked as a senior editor and writer on several sections of The New York Times, serving for a while as one of its regular literary critics. She has also taught literature and creative writing at various universities in the U.S. and Britain. She is the author of Lost and Translation: A Life in a New Language, Exit Into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe, Shtetl:The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World. Her first novel, The Secret, was published in 2001 by Secker & Warburg. Her work has been translated into several languages and she has received numerous grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Whiting Award for Writing. She has appeared on radio and television programmes, and has written and lectured widely in North America, Britain, and other European countries on cultural and social issues. She holds a bi-annual appointment as Visiting Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT. Andrei Ples¸u was born in Bucharest in 1948. Since 1994, he has been the rector of the New Europe College, the first Romanian institute for advanced studies. From 1989 until 1991, he was Romanian minister of culture, and from 1997 until 157

2000 minister of foreign affairs. By training an art historian, he has published on a wide variety of subjects. His books are available in German, French, and Swedish. Guido Snel was born in Amstelveen, near Amsterdam, in 1972. He studied Slavic languages, holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature and teaches at Amsterdam University. He writes novels (Afloat, Meulenhoff 1999) and The Poet and the Thief (Cossee, 2004) and translates fiction by Miroslav Krlezˇa. Contact email: . Damir Sˇodan was born in 1964 in Split, Croatia, poet, playwright and translator, graduate of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, Croatia (BA in English Language and Literature, and History). He has published two collections of poetry: Glasovne promjene (Sound Changes) 1996, Naklada MD, Zagreb, and Srednji svijet (The Middle World), 2001, Naklada MD, Zagreb, to critical acclaim. He is one of the editors of the Feral Tribune Publishing House in Split, Croatia. Over the past decade he has translated numerous American poets and prose writers into Croatian (Donald Revel, Charles Simic, Raymond Carver, Allen Ginsberg, Thomas Lux, David Gates, Denis Johnson, Thom Jones, Margaret Atwood, etc.) In 1999, he edited and translated an anthology of New York poets under the title Broad-way for the Zagreb based Quorum literary magazine. His play Zasˇ tic´ena zona (Safe Area) won first prize at the Playwriting Competition for playwrights from the former Yugoslavia, organised by the ‘m.b.h.’ theater in Vienna and the Austrian cultural foundation Kultur Kontakt. The play premiered in Zagreb, Croatia, in March 2002. A book of plays, Zasˇ tic´ena zona/Kain ili njegov brat (Safe Area/Cain or his brother), was published by Feral Tribune Editions, in Split, 2002. Schutzzone, the German translation of Zasˇ tic´ena zona was published by Folio Verlag, Vienna, 2002. His poetry has been frequently anthologised and translated into several languages. Since 1995, he has worked as a translator for the UN ICTY (United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) in The Hague, the Netherlands, where he currently resides. Saviana Stanescu was born in Bucharest, Romania. She has published four books of poetry (in Romanian: Making Love on The Barbed Wire, Advice for Housewives and Muses, Outcast, in English: Diary of a Clone) and three books of drama (The Inflatable Apocalypse, Best Romanian Play in 1999, Black Milk, 4 plays in Romanian and English, Final Countdown / Compte a Rebours, which won the Antoine Vitez Center Award, Paris). Her texts have been presented/published in the 158

US (New York, Philadelphia, Penn State University, Smith College, Idaho University), UK (London, Bath Literature Festival, Cambridge, Salisbury, Swansea), France (Paris), Austria (Vienna – she was writer in residence of KulturKontakt in 2001), Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, and of course Romania. Productions in New York include ‘Waxing West’ at The Lark Theatre and ‘YokastaS’ (co-authored with Richard Schechner) at La MaMa ETC Theater. She has worked as interdisciplinary projects co-ordinator for the Museum of Romanian Literature, Bucharest, and as theatre/arts critic for various Romanian journals. She holds an MA in Performance Studies from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts (as a Fulbright fellow in 2001-2002, George Leigh Odom Memorial Award for distinguished Masters Student) and is currently completing her MFA program in Dramatic Writing at NYU. She teaches Contemporary European Drama at NYU (Drama Department). Goran Stefanovski is a Macedonian playwright and screenwriter. He was one of the leading playwrights in the former-Yugoslavia. Stefanovski is also a teacher of scriptwriting. In 1986, he founded the playwriting course at the Faculty of Dramatic Ars in Skopje, Macedonia where he was a full professor until 1998. Between 1998 and 2000 he was a visiting professor at the Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm. He is now a freelance writer, living in Canterbury, U.K. He teaches at Christ Church University College and the University of Kent at Canterbury. Marlene Streeruwitz was born in Baden, near Vienna, in 1950. She studied Slavic languages and art history. She has published radio and theatre plays and novels. She lives in Vienna. Her books are published by Suhrkamp Verlag. Emil Tode (Tõnu Õnnepalu) was born in 1962 in Tallinn. He graduated from Tartu University in biology (ecology). Has published four poetry books and five novels since 1985. His first novel, Border State, has been published in fourteen languages, including German (Zsolnay, Vienna), English (Northwestern University Press, Chicago), Dutch (Meulenhoff), and French (Gallimard). Under the pseudonym Emil Tode. His last novel Radio was published in 2002. He has also translated some French authors into Estonian. Also worked in diplomacy and in cultural diplomacy (in 2002 founded Estonian Institute in Paris). Since 1985, he has lived mostly on Hiiumaa Island (but also in Tallinn and Paris). He currently lectures on writing in Tartu University and was elected professor of liberal arts.

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Jáchym Topol Jáchym Topol, born in 1962 in Prague, is the son of the dramatist Josef Topol, and became the star of the literary and musical underground before 1989. Still in his youth he signed the ‘Charta 77’. He was the editor of the Revolver Revue and also worked as a stoker and storekeeper. He studied ethnography in the 90s, travelled throughout Eastern Europe as a journalist and script writer. He published, among others, the novels City, sisters, silver and A trip to the train station. He lives in Prague. Péter Zilahy was born in 1970 in Budapest. He is a many-sided author, whose prose and poetry are widely translated and who has often used photography, interactive media, and performance art in his work. He was editor-in-chief of Link Budapest, an Internet magazine for contemporary literature in English and Hungarian between 1997-1999. He has been the editor-in-chief of ‘The World Literature Series’ since 1998, first at Jak Books and later at Gondolat Publishers, where, among others, he published Victor Pelevin, Ian McEwan, Ingo Schulze, and Arnon Grunberg. His book of poems Statue Under a White Sheet Ready to Jump was published in 1993. His dictionary novel The Last Window Giraffe was published in 1998 and has since been translated into fourteen languages. The CD-ROM version of this book has been performed in over twenty countries. He was a visiting scholar at New York University in 2001. In 2002, Ludwig Museum Budapest presented an exhibition of his selected works. He is presently working at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany. Sami Zubaida was born and schooled in Baghdad, Iraq. He obtained his university education in England and embarked on an academic career there. He is now Professor Emeritus of Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck College, University of London. His research and writing are on religion, ethnicity, and nationalism in Middle Eastern culture and politics, as well as on food and culture. The main areas of research interest include Egypt, Iran, and Turkey, but he has maintained a close interest in Iraq. He has held visiting and honorary posts in different institutions, including the American University in Cairo, Boganzici University, Istanbul, University of California, Berkeley and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is currently the Research Associate of the London Middle East Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Publications include: Islam, the People and the State (London 1993), Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East (co-edited with Richard Tapper, London 2001), and Law and Power in the Islamic World (London 2003).

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