The two men both became members of the Communist League and remained loyal to the membership right up until the fall of Yugoslavia. So did my mother, who at the time of her brother’s death was just a year old. She too would be reminded, on occasion, that Mladen had been on the wrong side during the war. She felt a little guilty about it. So did Dragan. Just as her future husband, my father, felt guilty about his mother and aunts. This guilt marked their lives and remained an important part of their identities.
When, in the summer of 1993, I was leaving Sarajevo, which was under siege by the tanks and artillery of the war criminals Mladić and Karadžić (I was on an American military transport on loan to the UN that had flown in humanitarian aid and journalists from Split). I thought that this could be goodbye forever. I was saving my own skin, that was all. My mother and father were both staying in the city. It occurred to me I might never see them again. All the same, after seventeen months of war and siege, I was saving myself. I was doing what my elder uncle had been unable to do. I was escaping from my war.
I knew I was going to Zagreb, to Croatia. But even though it is the land of my language, even though I am a Croat, I was leaving as Opapa Karlo would have left for Germany – I didn’t know that then. In saving my neck I didn’t consider that “other people” lived in Croatia, and I would be a foreigner, as Opapa had been. His Germanness was defined by his daily encounters, by the bizarre ceremonies of the weekly family meals, by his arrogant attitude toward the Croatian fascists when they wanted to search his house. My Croatianness was Bosnian, and more than that it was kuferaš Bosnian. This was what they had called the people who moved to Bosnia from various parts of the empire under Franz Joseph. With their cultures and languages in tow, they had created their own extra-national identity whose cultural bedrock was stronger than their ethnic affiliation. In my case, or rather, in the case of my family, this meant we were Bosnian Croats whose identities were marked by the Slovene, German, Italian, and rare other nations of the former monarchy. If there had been no Austro-Hungarian empire, I would never have been born, the parents of my grandparents would have never met…In this sense my birth was, from before the beginning, a political project.
Finding myself in Croatia, in the land of “other people,” I understood that I could live my entire life there, that I could be happy, but I would never be one of them. When I pronounced the word we, it would usually be a false we, the sort of we a person might feel a little ashamed of. And so I would more often use the pronouns I and they. I would mostly say things about myself that people didn’t want to hear, or that they themselves would never say, lest they stand out. The moment you begin to separate yourself from the crowd, difference gives rise to antipathy.
When I arrived in Croatia, it was a very ethnically homogeneous country, where 90 percent of the people were ethnic Croats and Catholic, the majority of whom were uncommonly hostile to those who belonged to any sort of minority. This hostility was at the basis of the state’s ideology, but it was also defined by the fact that the country was experiencing a prolonged war and a third of its territory was occupied. The former Yugoslav National Army played the role of occupier, while that of the domestic traitors was played by the country’s Serb minority. At the same time, the small number of Croatian Muslims had also ended up as enemies, and it was then, in the summer of 1993, that Croatian forces launched their attack on Muslim territories in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Beyond national affiliations, atheists were also considered enemies of society, because they reminded the citizens of the preceding forty years of communist rule and probably of their own hypocrisy when it came to faith in God. When it was considered the social norm, the vast majority of people didn’t believe, but now that times had changed the same majority was all of a sudden flocking to church.
In fact, it seemed people took pleasure in all these animosities and antagonisms. This too was nothing new: there is no sensation as overwhelming and fulfilling as hatred, and nothing other than hatred can go so quickly from being a private to a public emotion, one shared across a society. In the 1990s, during the presidency of Franjo Tuđman, Croatia truly became a land of hatred. This hatred was for the most part directed inward, toward aspects of the country’s own society and, in turn, its own culture, history, identities, languages…In Croatia even words were hated if they did not sound Croatian enough. But sound could sometimes be deceptive, and objects of hatred could fall into short supply, so people also took pleasure in directing hate toward things that had nothing to do with minorities.
A person can find countless excuses at such moments to be a part of the crowd. Especially if he’s just come from a besieged city, on his own, without material assistance, as a boarder, an intellectual proletarian. Sarajevo was after all under siege by the very people who were then most vehemently hated in Croatia. So what was there to prevent a person from taking part in this hatred, from becoming socialized and moving from refugee to accepted member of the community? If we forget that hatred presupposes considerable intellectual and spiritual effort, then it becomes very hard to find a reason why someone arriving from Sarajevo in 1993 would oppose the prevailing mood of the city he had just stepped into.
My great-grandfather, as a Swabian German from the Banat residing in Sarajevo, spoke a variety of Croatian filled with words derived from Turkish, which was characteristic of the speech of Bosnian Muslims. He concealed his Serbian neighbors from the Ustaše not primarily because he was a good and unselfish man, but because they were an important part of his own world. He probably didn’t even understand what it would have meant to be a German in a place where there weren’t any Serbs, or Croats, Bosnians, Muslims, Jews…From his perspective, and mine, in multi-ethnic countries every form of hatred is just another form of hatred. This was why my Croatianness was so substantially different from that of the people I found myself surrounded by upon my arrival in Zagreb, and even from that of my friends and acquaintances. For while those people rejected hatred for intellectual and moral reasons, or simply as a fact of good breeding, I rejected it because it was a threat to who I was. Though I was a Croat, it threatened the Serb and the Bosniak inside me.
My younger uncle, Dragan, the one who’d later become a famous metallurgist and Bosnia’s heavy industry representative in the USSR, was born in Kakanj, another of the towns where my grandfather Franjo had served as a stationmaster. Kakanj was inhabited by a majority Muslim population, and when Dragan started school he was the only Christian in his class. Religious instruction was mandatory in all schools of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the 1930s, and so my uncle too, from his first steps and in unusual circumstances, was required to study faith in God. During the early class period all the other children would receive instruction in Islam at a nearby mosque, but Dragan stayed in the classroom by himself because there was no one there to instruct him on the tenets of Catholicism, and the local parish priest, who should have stepped in to replace the absent instructor, did not know that a solitary christened lamb was waiting for him alone in the school. So there within the four white walls, beneath the blackboards and the photographs of King Alexander Karađorđević, my uncle felt that confusing, pernicious loneliness from which grown-ups flee, moving from towns and lands where they are a minority to towns and lands where they will be the majority.
But instead of moving his entire family, or consenting to have the parish priest teach his son about faith in God while all the boy’s classmates were instructed by the local mullah, my grandfather Franjo told the teacher that he didn’t want his child separated from the other children, and that the boy should go together with his friends for instruction in Islam. It was an unusual parental request but it wasn’t against the law, nor did anyone protest. Thus did Dragan complete all four years of the maktab, the Muslim primary school, and though he was christened in the Catholic faith, he came to know the rules of Muslim prayer.
The important distinction is not in the difference between a multiethnic society and an
ethnically homogeneous society but in the very orientation to multiplicity itself. We can take pleasure in hatred and build our identities upon it, or we can live in a different way. When we do not hate, we see ourselves reflected in others. Opapa Karlo knew this when he chose not to go to Germany. How would he even begin to communicate or come to an understanding with them? How would a German like him – except through resistance and conflict – be able to live in Germany?
I have written, in my novels and stories, about my great-grandfather, the Swabian German from the Banat, and his family, about the uncle who suffered as an enemy combatant, about the grandparents who sent their son into the enemy’s army, and about the other major and minor characters whose destinies shaped my own. Mixing reality with fiction, I’ve resurrected these people and extended their lives. I cannot detach myself from their stories, nor can I allow my uncle, whose grave long ago disappeared among the uncut grass of a village cemetery somewhere in Slavonia, to lie alongside millions of Hitler’s soldiers. He’s part of my identity, of a remorse that passes from generation to generation, that which we carry. This is who I am, the Croat I am, the person.
I had assumed that after Franjo Tuđman’s death and the dismantling of the nationalist oligarchy in Croatia, the differences between us would fade and my ill repute among the ethnic elite would sink into the past and become diluted along with all the other forms of hatred that had died away once the war had ended. Ultimately, this turned out to be the moment when Croatia began allowing the dissidents of the 1990s back to its maternal bosom, decorating them with ribbons of ethnic belonging and confirmations of exemplary patriotic conduct. The ethos of nationalism thus turned into an ethos of collective Europeanization, which, while perhaps equally irritating, is at least easier to live with. Now beside the flag of Croatia flies that of the European Union. This may indicate something of a colonial allegiance, a fragmented and schizophrenic identity, or perhaps simply the fact that in front of each public institution there are three poles, and it would be silly to fly just one flag.
It’s not flags, however, that determine our lives. What yesterday was a banner of hatred can today fly as a flag of freedom, and vice versa. Simply look at how Bush’s rule so thoroughly changed the significance of the American flag. My elder uncle once wrote on a postcard to his aunt in Sarajevo, “It’s Sunday. This is a free day. The encampment is deserted. The German flag is flying. We have sold ours.” While it’s not completely coherent, this was perhaps his only political pronouncement. The surviving members of his family could console themselves with such words, however little they amounted to at heart. We’re people who don’t even know which flag to call our own. Those who do know also know that hatred tastes sweetest beneath a banner. Why else would flags be so prominently displayed during soccer championships and the Olympics? Our flags are there more to humiliate the losers than to celebrate the victors. Everyone knows this is the way it works. The best-known fan song in Croatia goes, “Let them suffer those it bothers, Croatia’s champion of the world!” Why would someone else suffer because Croatia is champion? The sort of person who would ask himself such a question is probably not a Croat through and through.
A year after the fall of the nationalist government during the formation of the coalition led by the Social Democrats under Ivica Račan, I was at a film festival in Istria. It was held in an ancient walled city at the top of a hill that was once inhabited exclusively by Italians, who, after Istria became part of Yugoslavia, were given the opportunity to vote by the communists either to leave as Italians or to stay behind as Yugoslavs – and these people chose to set off on their way, bags in hand, to spend years in Italian refugee camps, leaving their Istrian homes behind forever. Of course the new minister of culture showed up, whose supporters and adjutants had taken to calling the “Croatian Malraux,” an appellation he was prepared to accept, since in the Balkans it is common practice to name leaders and dignitaries after magnificent foreigners, Franz Beckenbauer, Emperor Selassie, Shakespeare – in short, who cares. Anyway, this minister of ours, this Croatian Malraux, was previously a lexicographer, which meant he mostly took it easy or had intellectual debates at the pub after inspecting the two or three lexical items that had turned up on his desk that day. I was not fond of the way he ran the ministry and wrote an article about it in the newspaper, though I was far gentler than I’d been in similar critiques against Tuđman’s nationalists.
I wasn’t thinking of my article that afternoon as I approached a café table around which, in the shade of an immense Slavic tree sat a group of directors, producers, and intellectuals, with Minister Malraux at the head. I knew these people, the minister too, and I merely wanted to convey an everyday hello in passing.
“Beat it, you Bosnian piece of shit! Go back where you came from so we don’t have to send you ourselves!” shouted Malraux. I didn’t get too upset, since I knew that the previous night had been filled with such hard work that the ministerial hangover could well have extended into the afternoon. But still I stopped long enough to look carefully at a director who’d been blacklisted during the Tuđman years and whose films had been banned from television. He was a tough dissident, as tough as Kundera if not tougher. He looked down and did not say anything. He needed to be watchful of this ministerial hangover because he wanted to make movies again, and that does not happen without government money. A promising young producer, an apologist for interethnic affection and fighter against nationalism in every form, also looked down, and everyone else one after another looked down, dissidents one and all from the time of Tuđman, until, eventually, I turned and made my way down that Istrian knoll, the Croatian Malraux shouting behind me.
I left and am still going, a happy man, because unlike Opapa Karlo I’m not being led away by two men with a third prodding me in the kidneys with a rifle. This is an important nuance of our identities – why we live where we don’t belong to a majority. Happiness keeps us in this place, and happiness – I really believe this – has often cost us our lives. Reconciled to being who we are, while carrying inside us the idea of who we are not, we represent identities that cannot be defined by a single word, passport, identity card, entry pass. The masses know who they are from a coat of arms, a flag, a name, and then they chant it out, but we are left with winding, uncertain explanations, novels and films, true stories and invented ones; left with the need to visit a village in the Romanian Banat where – although now without Germans – the horizon is the same as when Opapa Karlo was a boy; left with empty villages in Bulgaria, Ukraine, Poland – where people went away in a puff of smoke – and with vague memories, the feeling that today we are one thing, tomorrow another, that our hymns and state borders constantly elude us. We feel remorse because perhaps a relative of ours lived and died as an enemy, because we ourselves are something of an enemy, and we are left with the faith in what we bury beneath our tongue, the truth that our homeland is no more, maybe never was, because for us every step and stretch of the world is foreign country.
The Stublers
A Family Novel
Have You Seen Regina Dragnev?
There in Bosowicz, in the Romanian Banat, on his departure for Bosnia, my great-grandfather Karlo Stubler left behind an elder brother. His name has been lost to family memory, but his daughter’s survives. Karlo too would give the name Regina to one of his daughters. This is what his great-granddaughter would also be called. In the end, my mother too would come to carry the name when, on her birth in May 1942, they refused to inscribe her as Javorka in either the civic birth registry or the church registry. Thus she became Regina Javorka, and she would continue to be called by these two first names until, twenty years later, in the very same registry office, she was forced to choose between them, due to the fact that in our socialist society nothing could have two meanings or two names, and so neither could she. She decided on the second of her names superstitiously to avoid exchanging fates with any of the numerous other Reginas in the family.
> The fate of the first Regina was by then well known. She was the mother of Opapa Karlo. And while we don’t know precisely what made her great or important, our ignorance, along with familial and historical oblivion, have probably in some way served to make her greater.
My great-grandfather’s niece was older than all her Bosnian cousins. In a certain sense she served them as a distant paragon because they never met her, though her name would come to leave its trace. Though from a peasant’s home, albeit a Swabian and well-off one, Regina regularly attended high school in Timisoara, and then during the Balkan wars – while the burgeoning Yugoslavism was spilling its Serbian blood and dying of beauty in its Croatian schemes and tubercular fevers – she went to Sofia to study medicine. It was not terribly common then at the beginning of the twentieth century, not even among the Swabians of the Banat, or in Romania, which at the time was called the France of the Balkans, for a village girl to travel to a distant town to study medicine.
But perhaps Sofia was not all that far from Bosowicz back then. In Bulgaria there were lots of Germans, and maybe the Stublers had relatives or friends in the capital who would have been able to look after Regina.
She became a doctor by the end of the First World War.
She found work and married a Bulgarian about whom we know almost nothing, except his family name: Dragnev.
My great-grandfather, together with his family, was expelled in 1920 from Dubrovnik, where he had taken part in a strike as a high-ranking railroad official. He lost his job and ended up in his “place of domicile,” Sarajevo, along with his wife and three of his four children. In the years after, his livelihood was mostly taken care of by the labor union. Two or three union members, who worked for the railroad as stokers or engineers, used their paychecks to help Karlo and his family, and this was how Karlo’s children were able to finish their schooling. Karlo’s daughter Regina fell in love and later married Vilko Novak, a son of one of the railroad union leaders.
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