Karaoke (meaning: empty orchestra) is a form of entertainment enjoyed by millions. The karaoke machine was invented in the early 1970s by Japanese musician Daisuke Inoue, but Inoue never patented his invention, leaving others to make the money that has been pouring in ever since. In 2004 Inoue received the ersatz Ig Nobel Peace Prize awarded by an American science humour magazine for “providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other”.

Cultural critics are people who read into the fad of tattooing, for instance, something beyond the fad itself. I too am one of these: I am inclined to see more in karaoke than the untalented warbling of an anonymous person over the “I Will Survive” backing track. Karaoke endorses the democratic notion that anybody can do anything if only they want to, just as everybody will want to because they can. Inoue, an unassuming man, sees his contribution in the fact that he has managed to change the Japanese – people short on expressing emotion – for the better. Now that the Japanese have grabbed hold of the microphone, there is nothing to stop them.

Karaoke can be seen as an offshoot of those old-fashioned fairground portraits where the anonymous person places his face through a hole in the backdrop and purchases the cheap satisfaction of a picture taken in the company of someone famous, in the costume of a historical personality, or in a famous setting. From a visit to Universal Studios in Los Angeles I have a photograph where Clark Gable is holding my sylvan body in his arms. The body belongs to Vivien Leigh, but the head is definitely mine. This sweet memento from thirty years ago cost me no more than an American dollar.

What is the appeal of karaoke? I assume that the attraction is in the simplicity and silliness of the fun, and then the double position the participant holds in the game: singing a famous song, the amateur expresses respect for the original interpreter, but at the same time questions their musical authority because the amateur performance makes them ridiculous. This theft of the star’s aura, the undermining of the hierarchy, remains in the realm of harmless entertainment. And the performer remains anonymous.

Of course we can imagine other forms of karaoke entertainment. It might occur to someone who is very rich, for instance, to engage the entire corps de ballet of the Bolshoi Theatre to perform Swan Lake, while inserting their wife, or mistress, or themselves into the leading role. There are many takes on this. In all of them, it seems the key element is anonymity. Why? Why would our gesture – if we were to sign ourselves to it in full – not have an entirely different function? Then our rendition of Mamma Mia, for instance, would be not so much a slavish imitation of the model, as a subversion, an homage, a parody or something similar. The authorial gesture, unlike anonymity, sends a different message, like the one sent into the world by Marcel Duchamp by drawing a moustache and beard on Mona Lisa, or Andy Warhol cranking out portraits of celebrities. Many works of modern art – which use quotes and a different purpose for the function of a traditional artistic original – could be termed “karaoke-art” – if it weren’t for the artist’s signature. Karaoke is a form of entertainment that belongs to those who leave no signature.

Not entirely. There are examples that work the opposite way, where the famous entertain using karaoke. Romance & Cigarettes (2005) is a karaoke movie of sorts, a musical in which fine actors such as James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet and Steve Buscemi lip-synch songs from the collective unconscious when their characters’ own words fail them. In last year’s Mamma Mia! Julie Waters, Meryl Streep, Colin Firth and others gamely take on ABBA. Both films, just like karaoke, are fuelled exclusively by the viewer recognizing authentic hits. They run on the energy of the evergreen rather than on the new imitation.

When does the innocent fun of the anonymous grow into something larger, into culture? Can these two movies be considered karaoke culture, or simply celebrity culture in which stars are not only given free rein – from mediocre warbling in a film musical to writing mediocre books – but are egged on to do so for powerful commercial effect? Don’t forget that karaoke is the entertainment of anonymous people who, protected by their mask of anonymity, realize their secret longings within given codes (technological, and others). Karaoke people are everything but revolutionaries, creators of something new or people who will change the world. And yet it appears that they are quietly changing it.

“Second Life affair leads to real life divorce”, an article in the Guardian last November, describes the case of English couple Amy Taylor and David Pollard, who met in an internet chatroom, fell in love and married. They both had avatars in the internet computer game Second Life. These avatars were lovers in the game. Then Taylor caught her husband watching his avatar make love to a prostitute. Enraged, Taylor broke off her relationship in virtual life, while she and David (in real life) stayed married. After a time Taylor decided to check David’s faithfulness so she camouflaged herself in Second Life as a detective and discovered that Skye, her avatar, and Barmy, David’s avatar, were still happily married, but she also found out that Barmy was still cheating on Skye. Taylor filed for divorce in real life. David announced that he had had only one online affair, but that there been no cyber consummation, and that he hadn’t done anything to feel guilty about.

The foundation of karaoke culture is the parading of the anonymous ego through a game of simulation. It is as if people are more interested in escaping themselves than in recognizing their authentic self. The self has become boring. The possibility of a transformation into something else or someone else is far more engaging than digging around within oneself. The culture of narcissism has given way to karaoke culture.

The market for parading the ego, whether we are fleeing from it or confirming it, is wide open. Everyone and everything is welcome. The ego, which spent centuries languishing below ground, has now poured out onto the surface and no one can stop it. In metaphorical terms, Andy Warhol, inventor of karaoke in art, died at the right time, because today he would watch on in horror as the anonymous Campbell Soup can lurches toward him to slurp him up. And the good man Daisuke Inoue is working today selling eco-friendly detergents and ego-friendly cockroach repellant to rid karaoke machines of the roaches that nest in them and gnaw at the wires. Without healthy wires there can be no healthy culture.

Translated by Ellen Elias Bursać.

Published in: The Drawbridge, issue 12, Spring 2009.

The name of Upton Sinclair recently cropped up in the media. Sinclair would have remained a half-forgotten classic of American literature if not for the recent film adaptation of his novel Oil!

After I watched the movie, I recalled the bookshelf in my mother’s house and the covers of the first edition of Sinclair’s Oil in Serbo-Croatian. The covers are embellished with scribbles, my first attempts at drawing a line or a circle. In those poor post-war days the book could serve as a note pad. Sinclair, Gorky and Dreiser might not have been my mother’s favorite writers, but their books appeared in half-empty bookstores in the post-war socialist Yugoslavia. With these books my young, newly married parents started to furnish their library.

I don’t remember if I ever read Oil. Even if I did, I would not have boasted of it in my student’s days. I was a promising student of comparative literature and inspired to defend the “autonomy of literature”. I saw myself somewhere on the first defense lines. In my students days the notion of “literary autonomy” had been closely tied to literary evaluation and literary taste. Simply said, good writers were not supposed to deal with politics, ideology, not even with (too much of) real life. “The literariness of literature” was what mattered. Although Yugoslav writers have never been seriously infected by the virus of socialist realism (the break with the brief ascendance of socialist realism was declared in 1953) resistance to any politicizing of literature lasted a long time, even when the “enemy” was long dead. Thanks to that fact many good writers wrote excellent books, while many bad writers were thought to be good only because they didn’t deal with any “political” issues, and the opposite is also true: the great Croatian writer Miroslav Krleza is still stigmatized for his friendship with former Yugoslav president Tito.

Today I know that the infatuation between literature and ideology started with the first human fingertip. The Bible, the cornerstone of European literature, is not only magnificent, but also a magnificently ideological piece of writing. The history of  dangerous liaisons between literature and ideology is too complicated and dramatic to be treated with superficial ease. In the course of that long history many lives were lost because of the written word. The history of relationships between kings and poets, rulers and fools, “commissioners” and writers, patrons and artists is soaked in blood; episodes of book burning and censorship happened too often; the number of lives given for free words, an idea and a dream is too great to be ignored. The autonomy of literature has too often served as an excuse: when they have found it profitable there were writers who become politically engaged, but others chose political engagement even when it was suicidal; some writers when saving their skins have withdrawn into literary autonomy, others choose literary autonomy even when it leads to genuine or symbolic bankruptcy. The dynamic between the two poles — literary autonomy and literary engagement – has been particularly dramatic in the former East European literatures, and, although the political context had changed, it holds its relevance even now. East European literary environments are more rigid: there the writers may lose their careers for the written word or be named to ambassadorial posts. In some East European countries as they move from communism to nationalism, the writer is still expected to be the voice of his people, or his people’s traitor.

The first Serbo-Croatian edition of Sinclair’s Oil slumbers quietly on the bookshelf in my eighty-two-year old mother’s house. This one book tells several histories: the history of American literature, of the East European literatures, the history of the Yugoslav literatures, no longer Yugoslav, and so forth.  My mother’s grandchildren do not  know who Upton Sinclair is. My mother does. That’s why Granny is cool! True, Granny has no clue who Daniel Day-Lewis is.

Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac

 Published in Bookforum, June/July/August 2008.

Dubravka Ugresic

Dubravka Ugrešić the Drawbridge

Tito and the Partisans laid the groundwork for a new Yugoslavia on 29 November 1943 at a clandestine meeting in Jajce, in Bosnia, right in the middle of the most gruelling part of World War II. Thanks to their boldness (at that point they had no idea how the war was going to play out), their courage, and the overall outcome of World War II, the people of Yugoslavia got a new state. For years Yugoslavs celebrated 29 November as Yugoslavia’s birthday. Until it collapsed. Now each of the five (soon to be six, and perhaps, indeed, seven) little states hatched out of the ex-Yugoslavia, celebrates its own birthday.

A few years ago several of us thought we’d get together at an Amsterdam bar to celebrate the birthday of the no longer existing state. Whether as a joke, or out of nostalgia, or out of a need to get together and sniff at each other, the stuff emigration is made of! Yugo-emigrants began drifting into the bar at the agreed time: Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, Slovenes, Albanians, all of whom had turned up in Amsterdam as a result of the war.

There were two Bosnians sitting at one end of the counter. One of them made a pretence of grumbling angrily.

“Screw you, Tito, you creep!”

“Why?”

“Who ever heard of starting a country in November?”

“What’s wrong with November?”

“Well, if it were May, right now we would be sizzling up something tasty on the grill.”

The bartender – who was probably seeing a gathering of these proportions for the first time in his bartending career – asked:

“So what are you people celebrating, anyway?”

“A birthday.”

“Whose?”

“The birthday of ex-Yugoslavia.”

“Tito’s dictatorship?”

“Yes, that’s the one, the ex…”

“Wait a minute, does that mean that all of you are pro-dictatorship?” the bartender squinted, suspicious.

“No, we are pro-democracy,” the Bosnian replied calmly.

“Then why are you celebrating the day a dictator came to power?”

“Because democracy came hand in hand with dictatorship.”

“You must be crazy,” muttered the bartender.

“We sure are,” replied the Bosnian calmly.

How can a person start claiming something different – once sweeping generalizations have gained credence, aided by the media and widely held beliefs? How can a person explain to a bartender that things were not as he imagines, when even we can no longer tell whether things were different from how the bartender thinks they were. Haven’t we – for the sake of life as it moves ever onward – touched up our personal history, bringing it closer to those sweeping generalizations?

Once when I was trying to explain to a western European friend what was happening during the war in Yugoslavia, she interrupted impatiently:

“A thing like that could never happen here!” she said, using the phrase “thing like that” so that she wouldn’t sully her mouth with the word war.

“And why not?”

“Because we have democracy!” she said with conviction. Instead of her pitying me, I found myself pitying her. With such a holier-than-thou attitude she could equally have been saying “Because we have communism.” It wouldn’t have changed the substance of the matter.

In communist dictatorships ordinary people were not as ideologized as my bartender presumably thinks they were. Most of them, like anywhere else in the world, thought of nothing but how to get by. But dictatorships were, if nothing else, a free school for political smarts: even the most illiterate cleaning lady had politics at her fingertips. People did all sorts of things to make ends meet. They lied, cheated (homo duplex, homo sovieticus) and they brown-nosed; they performed their mini political slaloms with remarkable agility. They’d balance on the high wire above the abyss. They were flexible. Yes, they were compromisers, corruptible, scum, you name it, there is just one thing that cannot be said for them: that they were politically unaware. They snatched at political nuance in the blink of an eye. They knew the whole system of signals, they knew how to publish newspapers “between the lines” and to read between the lines with canny insight. They kept their fingers crossed behind their backs, they sported a simpering grin, they learned how to be perfect hypocrites. True, the Yugoslavs were less politically agile than the Czechs, Hungarians and Poles, simply because in “Tito’s dictatorship” people fared better. They got lazy, lost their muscle tone, perhaps that is why they failed to see the signs of their own impending doom.

Back to our bartender. How can I now explain to him that in post-communist democracy, in our new “democritatorships”, I have to fight for the rights I had enjoyed freely in the communist dictatorship? The right to gender equality; the right to reproductive choice; the right not to attend religious instruction classes if I chose not to; the right not to wear a cross around my neck; the right not to declare my nationality; the right not to hate my neighbour; the right to say out loud that though I may not have been living in the glow of democratic fireworks, life was not so gloomy either. (After all, in communism electrification was a big priority, wasn’t it?) How can I now reclaim the rights I had under communism without sustaining big losses? Losing my job, losing my public voice; losing friends who claimed they had been blind but now they see; a plumber who refused to work for “Serbs, gypsies and Yugo-nostalgians”; an editor who became chief of police; a publisher who chose to live off the fifth edition of Mein Kampf…
Two Russian Lolitas, Lena Katina and Yulia Volkova, set the Eurovision Song Contest on fire in 2003 with their sexy on-screen smooching. There were many viewers who were delighted, as if this had been a glimpse of a new sexually uninhibited Russia (sure, during communism there hadn’t been bananas, hence there must have been no lesbians).

The pair recently cropped up on YouTube with a musical number called “Yugoslavia”. Lena Katina hums a sad little ditty, and meanwhile images follow one after another. A black-haired Volkova appears, who has taken it upon herself to personify Yugoslavia. Her cute face fills the screen. It never occurs to her or anyone else that with her shoulder straps she is concealing all those dark, greasy heads of Yugo-murderers and criminals. And why should this occur to her, why should she or anyone else make a connection between things that are entirely separate from one another?

The verses grieve for the demise of Big Brother and invoke the Soviet Army, that army from long ago 1949 when there was genuine danger that the Soviets might occupy Yugoslavia, to save it, just as they had “saved” the other countries of the Eastern bloc. I cannot imagine, nor do I care, how it happened that long-dead Big Brother – having traversed light years – insinuated his way into the song. What does worry me is the ignorance behind their pretty faces. They play with the war as if it is chewing gum. I am even more saddened by the media reach of these mish-mash messages – and the popularity the video spots enjoy among many of the younger ex-Yugoslavs and young Russians (there are even several versions of it, including a cartoon). They, and their pop idols, have no clue about who’s who in the whole story.

My bartender would jump right in to defend them and pull the customary card out of his sleeve: those tasty television shots – which jump from the screen each time when needed like a devil from a jack-in-the-box – of a group of embittered old people waving tattered red flags on Red Square.

“Are you going to tell me the alternative is better?” the bartender asks in an orthodox tone I know so well. Ah, I don’t want to say anything. I agree, they’re old commies, ugly people resembling cabbages that sprouted in some field near Chernobyl…

But there is a thing that seems more dangerous to me than old people who grew up under dictatorships. So many young people, the sated children of democracy – in the East as in the West – are emptied of all ideology except the ideology of success. Comfortably snuggling into democracy, like mice nibbling leisurely at the cheese, they are harmoniously working at some future great hole. Perhaps I am worrying about the hole because the future of the world rests on the young (these last words emanate from the grave of dead communism). Because from there, from that empty hole, an obedient army may one day emerge, an army that will place itself in the service of a future manipulator. And just an ordinary manipulator will suffice. No need for a dictator.

Dubravka Ugrešić the Drawbridge

I cannot recall when I last saw a more pornographic image. The picture is a close-up of Putin holding a fish and kissing it. It was taken during the president’s visit to a fish farm in the village of Ikryanoe, near Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea. He is kissing a sturgeon, the fish that produces the finest caviar. The eye of the fish, visible just below Putin’s nostrils, is, it seems, warmer and more tender than Putin’s own. Several moments later, he put the sturgeon back into the water, to the applause of the assembled locals and employees.

Putin, like the great masters of self-image management, is here killing several semantic birds with one stone. The sturgeon is a long fish with a pointy head. With the gesture of an experienced porn star, fixing the observer with his chill gaze, Putin is sending an indirect kiss to the gay population: the long, slippery sturgeon in his hands could be a penis, and Putin is kissing the organ at its sensitive tip.

But there is another, strictly heterosexual, interpretation. In the slang of many Slavic languages the word “fish” means woman, or, rather, the female sexual organ. This metaphoric sequence starts from the male assumption that the female sexual organ “smells like a fish”. Fearless Putin embraces the smelly fish (though his sensible woollen gloves suggest the fish-kisser prefers safe sex).

The president is also sending the kiss to the subconscious mind of the Russian people, who know their fairy-tales. The main hero of “By the Pike’s Wish” is stupid, ugly, lazy Emelya, a fisherman who amasses wealth, a kingdom and a beautiful princess because he releases a pike he had caught. The pike is his powerful helper. All Emelya has to say is: “By the pike’s wish, at my command…” and things are resolved instantaneously in his favour. Putin, therefore, is suggesting to his people that they should stay where they are and place their trust in a higher order, because they can be pulled out of deep shit only by the will of God – or fish. Putin himself, like Emelya, is a lucky fellow, and the fish’s favourite. One way or the other, the kingdom is his.

Many and varied holy fathers have had their picture taken wearing purple berets, tiaras, turbans and fezzes – more penis symbols – clearly signalling an ancient potent fraternity (God, after all, is male). So why, then, wouldn’t Putin send a similar love message to his most ardent macho fans, the many Russian neo-Nazi gangs? If hundreds of tons of paper and millions of dollars were spent some eight years back when the Clinton-Lewinsky national lottery spun, and if all of America was caught up in measuring the diameter of the stain from Clinton’s sperm on Monica’s dress, then why shouldn’t Putin publicly kiss a slippery, wet fish? If Mikhail Gorbachov can advertise Pizza Hut and Louis Vuitton (photographed by Annie Liebowitz, no less), why shouldn’t Putin have a snap taken with an impressive Caspian sturgeon?

But I am not interested in Putin, or the fish, but in hunger, the hunger for the limelight. What has provoked this massive yearning? Some twenty years ago, expectations called for the opposite behaviour. It was once thought unseemly to speak of yourself, tell the public about your private life, to cosy up to people you don’t know, and show undue interest in the private lives of others – all that was considered vulgar and a sign of bad upbringing. How did it happen that what used to be vulgar has become an essential part of daily life?

When I first went to Moscow many years ago, my Russian friends held to an unwritten rule: the less you said about yourself, the thinner the police files would be. Why is everyone now rushing to fill their files? Why do we treat the former bogeyman of the totalitarian system, Big Brother, like a household pet? Isn’t there anyone left in this world who suffers from healthy paranoia?

Foreigners who live in Holland often repeat a complaint that the Dutch hardly ever invite them over. They say this is due to the Protestant culture of privacy; one of the most fundamental values. This may be so, but all you could care to know about the Dutch is right there on their front doors. All a foreigner has to do is stroll through a suburban neighbourhood, and on the front doors he will see an array of photographs of the residents, displays of their vacations, genre scenes with the kids, children’s drawings, verses penned by the poetically inspired, announcements about newborns or a death in the family…

The media induce the hunger in millions of ordinary mortals. It is all-consuming and on the rise. The gullible millions do not have the kind of access to the main headlines that Paris Hilton and Putin have, but they have found their own media to propel them out of anonymity: mobile phones, blogs, websites, internet forums, television programmes in which they perform as the “gladiators” of our time. Then there’s the street as the medium: in Amsterdam everyone knows about the guy who streaks through the city, buck naked on roller skates from time to time. Outsiders on the outskirts sit on their motor scooters with the muffler stripped and roar around the quiet neighbourhoods through the night just to let it be known they exist.

The paradox is, the more we eat, the hungrier we are. The more opportunities we have to inscribe our name on the map of the world, the greater the fear of disappearing. The more traces we leave behind us, the faster these traces are erased. The more books we publish, the quicker they are forgotten; the more movies we watch, the less able we are to remember what they were called.

An American university started a project of buying up the archives of famous writers who write in English. Some young writers have sold their archives to the university in advance. Whence the panicked fear of disappearing, when not only are we living longer, but our possibilities of leaving proof of our existence are incomparably greater?

All our ancestors left behind were a few photographs, usually family pictures. We record absolutely everything today: our inception, life in the womb, emergence from the womb, games, growth, every minute, every month, every year, the operations, excursions, sexual acts, pulling of teeth, concerts – absolutely everything. Even when we don’t do all the recording ourselves, there are many services at work recording our biographies: somewhere our every purchase of an airplane ticket is on file, our dinners, the shoes we bought, the times we went to the doctor… And when we record and re-record everything, when we write everything down, when our archives are full even before we are born, there is a great risk that we all, along with earth itself, will pop like a vast, bulging plastic bag. After each of us will remain a heap of photographs, cell phones, video recordings, movies, digital recordings, bills… Perhaps, protruding from that rubbish heap, will be a photograph of a stranger with a chill gaze kissing a fish. But until that global blast happens, let us satisfy our hunger, let us seek the limelight, let nothing stop us in this, for we only live inasmuch as others know of us.

On the same day the picture of Putin kissing the fish appeared in the press, The Lancet published alarming findings from a research project conducted by the World Health Organization. It turns out, apparently, that one third of mankind suffers from some form of mental illness. And of that horrifying number, two thirds will have no treatment. What possible connection could there be between Putin and the world’s mental health? The answer lies in the lack of equilibrium. While thirty per cent of mankind is truly maddened by starvation, poverty, war and disease, the rest of us are rapidly losing the plot.

Dubravka Ugrešić the Drawbridge
A ten-year-old nephew of mine recently spent his Easter holidays with me in Amsterdam. I took him to the Anne Frank Museum. He had never heard of Anne Frank. I tried to recall whether I had known of her when I was his age. Then my childhood diary came to mind. I had written to an imaginary friend in my diary and that imaginary friend’s name was – Anne Frank.

Last year I spent two months teaching students of comparative literature at a German university. I was free to speak on whatever I liked. At one point I realized that out of a natural desire to help the students follow me I was turning my lectures into a list of footnotes. My students knew who Lacan, Derrida, and Zizek are, but the number of books they had read was astonishingly small. I would mention a name such as Ceszlaw Milosz. My students did not know of Ceszlaw Milosz. I would give them a word such as samizdat. It meant nothing. This is entirely understandable, I thought, and I did what I could to explain: that in some former communist countries manuscripts were distributed clandestinely, in copies made on a typewriter. Then I realized that it was more than I could do to explain what carbon paper was – let alone a typewriter. Typewriters now dwell in the limbo of oblivion: they haven’t yet surfaced in museums, yet they can no longer be found in stores.

All East European culture that had been created under communism dwells in a similar limbo. This was an intriguing culture and the shared ideological landscape – the landscape of communism – gave it a certain consistency. It was a fact that the finest part of that culture was born of its defiance of communism, split into the “official” and the “underground” sides. Aspects of that cultural landscape are a part of many of us. Among us there are many who remember the brilliant Polish, Czech and Hungarian movies, the stirring theatre, the culture of samizdat, art exhibits and plays held in people’s living rooms, critically oriented thinkers, intellectuals and dissidents, great books, experimental books whose subversive approach was built on the tradition of the avant-garde movements of Eastern Europe. All of this has, regrettably, gone by the board, because all of it has been stymied by the same merciless stigma of “communist” culture. There are not many today in the younger generation who know who Bulgakov was, though his and other books have been translated, the movies have had their audiences, and artists such as Ilya Kabakov have been enshrined in Russian coffee-table picture books.

But is the stigma of communism at fault for the lack of interest, if “fault” is the right word? Of course not. Much of this cultural oblivion can be ascribed to the global marketplace. Global culture means the global marketplace first and foremost, and like any market it is guided by a simple law: survival of the fittest. Add to that the built-in reflex each of us carries, the fear of being left out. The market feeds on precisely that consumer reflex. If all the kids on the block wear Nike sneakers, I too must wear Nike sneakers. Or if I am a rebel, the market will find a way to commodify my rebellion, and I’ll wear my anti-Nike sneakers. The young global consumer devours Michel Houellebecq and considers him the most subversive writer of the moment, completely forgetting the fact that his “subversive” voice is being marketed at all airport bookstores, selling millions. Even the information revolution is in thrall to the global marketplace (so our consumer will wear a T-shirt with Malevich’s signature on it despite being unsure who or what it signifies).

Most of the guilt for cultural oblivion can be laid at the doorstep of those at work on cultural history. The hysteria around that past still goes on, the past is the favourite chewing gum of intellectuals, historians, writers, member of the Academy, the media and politicians. In Croatia, for instance, the word “Yugoslavia” is nearly forbidden, the same way Russia and communism are forbidden in Estonia, Lithuania and many other post-communist countries. Fifteen years ago many libraries in Croatia were purged of “communist”, “Serbian”, “Cyrillic” books, but also other books considered inappropriate.

That is why my ten-year-old nephew may not find the verse of Ivan Goran Kovacic, a fine poet, in his curriculum. Kovacic joined the Partisans and was killed in the Second World War. Vladimir Nazor penned a famous onomatopoetic line of verse which every Croat knows by heart: I cvrci cvrci cvrcak na cvoru crne smrce (meaning: a chirping, chirping cricket on the knot of a black spruce) which teachers of the Croatian language often foist on foreign students studying Croatian. (Try it! Tsvrchi, tsvrchi tsvrchak na chvoru tsrne smrche). Foreign students have no idea as they struggle with this tongue twister that there were attempts to expunge the name of Vladimir Nazor during the anti-Yugoslav and anti-communist hysteria of the early 1990s. Nazor, an elderly poet at the time, joined Tito’s Partisans, like Ivan Goran Kovacic, and wrote a poem celebrating Tito. Both these poets are being rehabilitated by members of the Croatian gay movement, who recently claimed that the two men had been homosexuals and lovers. The anti-communists (everyone today is an anti-communist) are secretly hoping that this rehabilitation with a twist will succeed, because if it does, it will distract from the fact that the purists had tried to expunge all mention of these writers. That they were communist is unacceptable, but if they might have been gay, their work can be read again. This is only one small example of the schizophrenia of transitional, post-communist culture.

During a recent stay in Zagreb I watched my mother’s favourite morning TV show. A brief historical piece gave the story of child actress Lea Deutsch, “Zagreb’s little sweetheart”, “the Croatian Shirley Temple”. The pleasant voice of the speaker accompanied a sequence of photographs appearing on the screen: “And then one day Lea Deutsch was put on a train headed for Auschwitz, but she never made it because she breathed her last while still on board the train. It was only last year, after so very long, that a Zagreb street was named after her…”

Why was that little girl put on the train? Who put her on that train? Does the fact that a street was given her name “after so very long” imply that the communists would not allow it? Does this mean that the street was given her name thanks to the new democratic government?

The Nazi government of the Independent State of Croatia put Lea Deutsch and her family on the train for Auschwitz in 1943 in order to ingratiate themselves with Himmler. And the street was given her name only now because the new government, which has at the very best only half-heartedly distanced itself from the fascism of the Independent State, decided to whitewash its image a little to appear more politically correct.

Back to my ten-year old nephew. Why did I take him to the Anne Frank Museum? Because the museum and the story of Anne Frank are accessible to kids his age. Sure, there is always a long line of tourists at the museum, most of them adults, but then the museum is right in the centre of town. Most visitors take with them from there the story about the valiant Dutch who hid the Frank family. There is another museum in Amsterdam, the Dutch Resistance Museum. It is a little further out from the centre and there are no lines of tourists waiting to get in. Though its name would suggest otherwise, visitors can learn there about how the Dutch were eager to denounce their own fellow citizens, the Dutch Jews. In fact they were more eager to turn Jews in than other Europeans were, and furthermore, they received a small remuneration for every Jew they reported to the authorities.

In their redesign of their own past the Croats are not so different from the Dutch, just as the Dutch are not so different in their redesign of their past from many other people. In other words, we are all human. All of us – the states, state institutions, the media, politicians, historians, teachers, parents and the watchful aunts who have assigned themselves the task of setting things right. We work on remembering and forgetting, on arranging and rearranging history, each of us in our own way, each for our own reasons, each in our own realm. And so it was that I took my nephew to the Anne Frank Museum. Perhaps I’ll take him to the Dutch Resistance Museum the next time he comes to visit. Perhaps not.

Translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac.

09/02/2008 telegraph.co.uk

Along with the typewriter, communist-era art and literature dwells unfairly in oblivion – beside darker episodes in history, says Dubravka Ugrešić

A 10-year-old nephew of mine recently spent his Easter holidays with me in Amsterdam. I took him to the Anne Frank Museum.

He had never heard of Anne Frank. I tried to recall whether I had known of her when I was his age. Then my childhood diary came to mind. I had written to an imaginary friend in my diary and that imaginary friend’s name was Anne Frank.

Last year I spent two months teaching students of comparative literature at a German university. I was free to speak on whatever I liked. I soon realised that out of a natural desire to help the students follow me I was turning my lectures into a list of footnotes.

My students knew who Lacan and Derrida were, but the number of books they had read was astonishingly small. I would mention a name such as Czeslaw Milosz. My students did not know of Czeslaw Milosz. I would give them a word such as samizdat. It meant nothing to them.

This is understandable, I thought, and I tried to explain: in some former communist countries manuscripts were distributed clandestinely, in copies made on a typewriter. Then I realised it was more than I could do to explain what carbon paper was – let alone a typewriter.

Typewriters now dwell in the limbo of oblivion: they haven’t yet surfaced in museums, yet they can no longer be found in shops. All East European culture created under communism dwells in a similar limbo.

This was an intriguing culture and the shared ideological landscape – of communism – gave it a certain consistency. The finest part of that culture was born of its defiance of communism, split into the official and the underground.

Aspects of that cultural landscape are a part of many of us. Many remember the brilliant Polish, Czech and Hungarian movies; the stirring theatre; the culture of samizdat; art exhibitions and plays held in living rooms; critically orientated thinkers, intellectuals and dissidents; great and experimental books whose subversive approach was built on the avant-garde movements of Eastern Europe.

All of this has, regrettably, gone by the board, because it has been stymied by the merciless stigma of “communist” culture. Few in today’s younger generation know of Bulgakov, though his books have been translated and made into movies, and artists such as Ilya Kabakov have been enshrined in Russian coffee-table books.

But is the stigma of communism at fault for the lack of interest, if “fault” is the right word? Of course not. Much of this cultural oblivion can be ascribed to the global marketplace.

Global culture means the global marketplace first and foremost, and it is guided by a simple law: survival of the fittest. Add to that the reflex each of us carries, the fear of being left out. The market feeds on that reflex.

If all the kids wear Nike sneakers, I too must wear Nike. Or if I am a rebel, the market finds a way to commodify my rebellion: I’ll wear my anti-Nike sneakers. The young global consumer devours Michel Houellebecq and considers him the most subversive writer of the moment, forgetting that his “subversive” voice is marketed at airport bookshops.

Even the information revolution is in thrall to the global marketplace (so our consumer wears a T-shirt bearing Malevich’s signature but is unsure what it signifies). Most of the guilt for cultural oblivion can be laid at the doorstep of those at work on cultural history.

The hysteria around that past still goes on; the past is the favourite chewing gum of intellectuals, historians, the media, writers and politicians. In Croatia, for instance, the word Yugoslavia is virtually forbidden, the same way Russia and communism are forbidden in Estonia, Lithuania and many other post-communist countries.

Fifteen years ago many libraries in Croatia were purged of “communist”, “Serbian”, “Cyrillic” or simply “inappropriate” books. That is why my 10-year-old nephew may not find the verse of Ivan Goran Kovacic, a fine poet, in his curriculum.

Kovacic joined the Partisans and was killed in the Second World War. Vladimir Nazor wrote a famous onomatopoetic line of verse that every Croat knows by heart: I cvrcˇi cvrcˇi cvrcˇak na cˇvoru crne smrcˇe (meaning: a chirping, chirping cricket on the knot of a black spruce).

Teachers of Croatian language often foist it on foreign students (try it: Tsvrchi, tsvrchi tscvrchak na chvoru tsrne smrche). As they struggle with this tongue twister, students have no idea that there were attempts to expunge the name of Vladimir Nazor during the anti-Yugoslav and anti-communist hysteria of the early 1990s.

Nazor, an elderly poet at the time, joined Tito’s Partisans, like Ivan Goran Kovacˇic´, and wrote a poem celebrating Tito. Both these poets are being rehabilitated by members of the Croatian gay movement, which recently claimed that the two men had been homosexuals and lovers.

The anti-communists (everyone today is an anti-communist) are secretly hoping that this rehabilitation with a twist will succeed, because if it does, it will distract from the fact that the purists had tried to expunge all mention of these writers. That they were communist is unacceptable, but if they might have been gay, their work can be read again.

This is only one small example of the schizophrenia of transitional, post-communist culture.

During a recent stay in Zagreb I watched my mother’s favourite morning TV show. A brief historical piece gave the story of the child actress Lea Deutsch, “Zagreb’s little sweetheart”; “the Croatian Shirley Temple”.

The pleasant voice of the speaker accompanied a sequence of photographs appearing on the screen: “And then one day Lea Deutsch was put on a train headed for Auschwitz, but she never made it because she breathed her last while still on board the train. It was only last year, after so very long, that a Zagreb street was named after her…”

Why was that little girl put on the train? Who put her on that train? Does the fact that a street was given her name “after so very long” imply that the communists would not allow it? Does this mean that the street was given her name thanks to the new democratic government?

The Nazi government of the Independent State of Croatia put Lea Deutsch and her family on the train for Auschwitz in 1943 to ingratiate themselves with Himmler. And the street was given her name only now because the new government, which has at the very best only half-heartedly distanced itself from the fascism of the Independent State, decided to whitewash its image a little to appear more politically correct.

Back to my 10-year-old nephew. Why did I take him to the Anne Frank Museum? Because the museum and the story of Anne Frank are accessible to children his age. Sure, there is always a long line of tourists at the museum, most of them adults, but then the museum is right in the centre of town.

Most visitors take away with them the story about the valiant Dutch who hid the Frank family. There is another museum in Amsterdam, the Dutch Resistance Museum. It is a little farther out from the centre and there are no queues of tourists waiting to get in.

Though its name would suggest otherwise, visitors can learn there about how the Dutch were eager to denounce their fellow citizens, the Dutch Jews. In fact they were more eager to turn Jews in than other Europeans were, and furthermore, they received a small remuneration for every Jew they reported to the authorities.

In their redesign of their own past the Croats are not so different from the Dutch, just as the Dutch are not so different in their redesign of their past from many other people.

In other words, we are all human. All of us – the states, state institutions, the media, politicians, historians, teachers, parents and the watchful aunts who have assigned themselves the task of setting things right.

We work on remembering and forgetting, on arranging and rearranging history, each of us in our own way, each for our own reasons, each in our own realm. And so it was that I took my nephew to the Anne Frank Museum.

Perhaps I’ll take him to the Dutch Resistance Museum the next time he comes to visit. Perhaps not.

By Dubravka Ugresic

The lips pursed in the shape of the letter “O”. “Pu” – a throat bulging from within, a mouth crammed with mouthfuls. “Lence” – rings like a brass bell. O-pu-lence. The word swells, then pops like a fountain gushing with sprays of gold coins. Rivers flowing with milk and honey, roast chickens tumbling from the sky.

“What image does the word opulence evoke for you?” I ask a friend and fellow countryman who is a little younger than I am.

“An American refrigerator!” he shoots back.

It is an accurate representation for many East Europeans – especially those Yugoslavs who watched American movies from their earliest childhood – of the mythical “horn of plenty”. The image of that immense American refrigerator so full to overflowing that food cascades out of it; the picture of the fridge (what a warm, soothing word!) out of which a sleepy American pulls a plastic half-gallon jug of milk or orange juice and chugalugs it down; or removes a tub of ice cream, brandishes a soup spoon, and sitting, cross-legged on a comfortable sofa, flips on the TV and slurps the ice cream from the tub as if it were soup. This has been etched on the imagination of Easterners for generations as the most direct and appealing image of wealth and comfort.

In an episode of Dynasty, Joan Collins’ Alexis and her lover Dexter are soaking in a jacuzzi, sipping champagne. Dexter scoops something up with a spoon from a serving dish and tastes it.

“Hey, go easy,” says chronically vulgar Alexis, “that is caviar!”

The director probably thought it gauche to zoom in on the salty roe, yet the audience still needed to register the couple’s indulgence, hence Alexis gets her incompatible sentence. The champagne, the caviar, the jacuzzi: the simple symbols of opulence the media have thrust into the brains of poor people in America and all over the world. Yet many Russians during the starvation period of the Red Revolution had so much caviar that they were sick of it; there was absolutely nothing else to eat. Those who were short of a spoon scooped it with their bare fingers.

Opulence resides where the poor and the rich meet. All of us intersect in a place much like an old abandoned railway station where trains never arrive or depart. Apparently we arrived at the station when God expelled us from paradise. After the Fall, it makes no difference whether a pearl is natural or artificial.

Poverty knows affluence best. Peer into the small apartment where the largest wall in the living room is wallpapered with a glowing sunset over a vivid seascape. Or into little city gardens done in plastic grass with a flock of plastic flamingos and plastic frogs swimming in a plastic fountain. Peek into the stores selling gilded nylon brocade, synthetic lace and silk, polyester satin. Check out East European hot springs dating from the communist period, where weary Western retirees purchase accessible pleasures: a swim in the shabby pools, a massage and a pedicure.

Perhaps it is only in this context that we can make sense of why the Vanderbilt family imported, brick by brick, lavish Italian rooms from the 16th century and built them into their “cottages” in Newport; and why today’s rich Russians blast great slices into the Montenegrin cliffs to build villas reminiscent of the Guggenheim, with swimming pools from which the swimmer gets an eagle’s eye view of the majesty of the Adriatic.

There was a popular ad for Franck coffee on Yugoslav television back in the late eighties. A space ship with its crew. Sudden turbulence. Grim expressions on the astronauts’ faces signal that the spaceship will never return to earth. A stewardess wearing a Gagarin costume steps into the captain’s cabin and smiles brightly: “Captain, Sir, we have plenty of coffee!” That was a time of chaos on the Yugoslav market, a time of shortages. Three things symbolized opulence back then: coffee, detergent and cooking oil. The women of Yugoslavia went off over the border by bus on day trips to Trieste or Graz to buy supplies. For no apparent reason one of the items on the must have list was raisins. My mother’s cupboard at one point was nearly bursting with little packets of them, and I nearly burst with pity for my mother.

Opulence is dangerous because death usually lurks just beyond its achievement. (Moths will get to it! Mice will nibble it! Fire will reduce it to ashes! Stains will make it ugly! People will snatch it! Banks will go bust! The money will be eaten by inflation!) Nothing lurks beyond poverty but the necessity of survival.

When I was a child, we lived in a small town near Zagreb, about three kilometres from the motorway to Belgrade. In summer the traffic of Turkish and Greek guest workers on their way home from Western Europe inched along the road. One day the local police knocked at our door and asked my mother to help as an interpreter. That very day the Bulgarian ambassador to Mali was on his way home for a hard-earned summer vacation, and just where the road splits off the highway toward our town, the ambassador had collided with another car. His wife was killed instantly; he and his two little girls were unharmed. There were formalities to attend to, but also the poor man and his children needed to be cared for. They were our guests for several days. When the ambassador departed, he left behind two large sacks of peanuts which had been in the trunk of his car. He probably felt it no longer appropriate to deliver them home along with the news of the death of his wife. Perhaps this was his expression of gratitude; he had nothing else to give us. None of us had ever seen or tasted a peanut before. Our whole neighbourhood roasted peanuts in the oven, shelled the unsightly husks, and nibbled at the unusual oval seeds for months. From the horn of plenty peanuts showered down upon us.

I have disliked peanuts ever since.

Opulence should be left where it can do the least harm – in the realm of the imagination. I make an effort, as much as I can, to steel myself to its siren call. Plenty of coffee is entirely sufficient for my daily dose of happiness.

Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac.