Boris Previšić and Svjetlan Lacko Vidulić, eds, Traumata der Transition. Erfahrung und Reflexion des jugoslawischen Zerfalls

This volume reflects on how scholars with family ties to the former Yugoslavia (with one exception) have developed their research interests out of the experiences of transition and war during the 1990s. Based on a multidisciplinary conference held in Dubrovnik in 2013, which gathered historians, literary scholars, sociologists, political scientists, and philosophers, the chapters consider the connections between individuals’ biographies and their scholarly preoccupations: most pointedly, they explore how ‘subjectivity’ and personal involvement influence research agendas. In the introduction, the editors helpfully specify what they mean by ‘transition’: they refer to a complex and multilayered process that encompasses contradictory (progressive and regressive) trends which differ in length and intensity and extend beyond the immediate war years. Second, they define their approach to ‘trauma’: as something that, though having a basis in actual experience, is activated or used discursively within academic and political contexts. Hence the academic endeavours of scholars with roots in the region take place at the intersection of the objective and the collective on the one hand, and the subjective, private, and personal on the other.

As the editors point out (7), some contributors, uncomfortable with the book’s premise, resisted the request for self-reflexivity, perceiving it as an imposition and responding instead with evasions and theoretical digressions. Such resistance is palpable in some of the chapters, which is why the volume as a whole comes across as less than fully coherent, although it includes several excellent pieces. Not every author took the task equally seriously, it seems. One might ask how the project’s participants were selected, and why, for example, no anthropologists were invited to contribute. I can think of several anthropologists who, even though they lack family ties to the former Yugoslavia, are quite ‘at home’ there (for personal and professional reasons), and whose experiences of the traumas of transition and war were far more direct and substantial than those of some of this volume’s contributors. Hence I am surprised to find no anthropologists included also because their discipline regards self-reflexivity as a straightforward and uncontested proposition.

The Slovenian sociologist Ivan Bernik, for example, reduces the question of his positionality to a consideration of whether he can legitimately analyse and comment on these transitions from the detached position of a social scientist with only limited experiences of the war. He claims he can. What then follows is an informative but typically academic analysis of economic and political factors responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia, where the author writes himself completely out of the text. In more provocative fashion, the German-literature specialist Mario Grizelj defiantly refuses the ‘command’ to ‘meta-self-reflect’ and correlate personal experiences with scholarly choices. He makes certain valid points, noting that individuality and subjectivity are social constructs and trauma constitutes itself socially and retroactively, but he then loses himself in a cloud of theoretical mannerism. To be sure, his chapter may be read as a surreptitiously personal and self-ironic response to the book’s overarching premise. Stating that the acknowledgment of accountability is rare in humans, he ostentatiously relinquishes any effort to do so himself, launching smokescreens of detachment and evasion and ‘performing’ outright refusal. The defining moment in his biography, he writes riotously, was his reading of the ‘biography-resistant’ and ‘people-indifferent’ systems theory of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann (48).

Boris Previšić, a specialist in German literature and comparativist (and accomplished musician), addresses the issue in a more straightforward manner. He juxtaposes his unique, unsettling, and idiosyncratic experiences of the war with the ubiquitous attempts to sell their (absent) meanings and (propagandistic) narrativizations as ‘reality’. He recounts his experiences of being ethnically labelled—which brought him into conflicts at home, in Zürich, and in Bosnia—and of hiding his ‘true’ identity in the face of some advancing tanks (in an enigmatic vignette, 62-63). He makes the point that objectifying descriptions fail because experiences of war and trauma are contingent: characterized by immediacy, unrepeatability, and irreversibility, they are therefore hard to render discursively. Hence individual encounters with war cannot be meaningfully ‘experienced’ or ‘related’: they are ‘the sting in the flesh’ of any ordering of reality (63). A similar view is adopted by Milka Car, another comparativist and German-literature specialist, who admits that she feels that the experience of the war ultimately resists any attempt to make it conform to reason. This sentiment is expressed in the (literary) diaries that she has made her objects of study, chronicling the war and confirming the helplessness she felt when seeing flows of refugees in the early 1990s. She finds confirmation in these war diaries, samples of which can be found in her text, and writes about her own teenage ‘self’ at the time in the third person, dissociating herself from her own traumatic experiences.

Tanja Zimmermanntraces her work back to a life-defining moment when a Yugoslav People’s Army helicopter was shot down close to her home during the ten-day Slovenian War in 1991. How this event was represented, and how certain aspects of it were erased in the media accounts of the incident, made her suspicious of images. This scepticism became essential to her academic work: she studies the political manipulations of media images, especially iconic or ‘key’ images. In her chapter, Zimmermann gives numerous examples of images that blur the boundary between the fictional and the documentary, a theme that is also explored in literary works, which she welcomes as forms of radical image critique. She deplores what she regards as the lack of ethics in the work of certain war photographers such as Ron Haviv. Like Zimmermann, the philosopher Jeffrey Andrew Barash, in his chapter, deals with iconic images that have the potential to communicate strong and sensory messages detached from their original context. He states that he has ‘no biographical connection to the country’ (117), whatever this means. Also the historian Sabine Rutar, born of Slovenian parents and raised in Germany, writes of having hardly any immediate experience of the war while it was being waged (134). She weaves an interesting and convincing argument from her archive of brief eclectic notes and photographs taken while visiting places affected by the war (like Sarajevo), as well as war cemeteries, monuments, and academic events touching on the topic of war. They show a reality of competing memories, of new interpretations of the past overwriting older ones, and of narratives being changed on the basis of never-ending incremental experiences, creating a memory ‘minefield’ (154). She criticizes the deterministic tendencies in the scholarship on Yugoslavia, as if the breakup was inevitable instead of contingent, path- and context-dependent. She also deplores the still pervasive lack of willingness in the region to confront (sanitized) national master narratives with the historicity of events: she suggests that this task may be particularly difficult in the former Yugoslav countries due to the lingering traumas of war.

Svjetlan Lacko Vidulić, yet another scholar of German literature, addresses the question whether a genuine Yugoslav literature even existed; that is, whether it was a victim of the war (as Yugo-nostalgics argue), a communist ‘lie’ (as nationalists have it), or still something else. His personal reflections focus on his few faded, fragmentary memories of ‘Yugoslav’ literature. Although his conclusion, that one can in fact speak of a literary history of ‘differences and interferences’ (of divisions and connections) in Yugoslavia, is convincing, his chapter has little to offer in terms of the core theme of the book— surprisingly, given that he is one of its two editors. Historian Armina Galijaš compensates for this deficiency. She recounts her experiences of vigorously wanting to resist the label ‘Yugo-nostalgic’ which others often automatically ascribe to her, and she explains why: Yugo-nostalgics and nationalists both employ bipolar schemes, motives, and narrative plots. But more importantly, having left Banja Luka at the start of the war and returning after its end, she has not been helped in understanding her personal experiences through either of these two paradigms. In fact, had she succumbed to the simplistic bipolar ‘messages’ put forth by Yugo-nostalgics, she would never have been able to return to her radically changed hometown, let alone feel at ‘home’ there.

Davor Beganović, also from Banja Luka, provides an intriguing insight into his fascination with the ‘angel’ figure in post-Yugoslav literatures, which to him ambiguously represents innocence and complicity, at once a neutral messenger and a perpetrator who creates discord and divides. His work on this literary figure has been closely linked to his experiences at the beginning of the 1990s, when new ‘angels’, messengers of the wrong heaven of nationalism, tried to entice him to join purportedly anti-nationalist political forces. For him, emigration was the only solution. The ‘angel’ in Dubravka Ugrešić’s work, for example, has made it easier for him to understand his experiences, aspects of which have continued to puzzle him. Finally, political scientist Irena Ristić reflects on the implications of being the child of ethnically ‘mixed’ parents and how this has affected her academic career. What to remember and what to forget, as an individual frequently torn between two collectivities, has created incessant incoherence. Reflecting on historicity and on issues such as victimisation, (collective) responsibility, and guilt, and attempting to overcome the confusion that her ethnically ‘dual’ heritage has caused her, are now among her life’s purposes.

To sum up, this is a volume which contains some outstanding pieces that address the topic of ‘traumas of transition’ head on, my personal favourites being the chapters by Zimmermann, Galijaš, and Beganović. Despite the shortcomings I’ve mentioned, the editors deserve praise for starting this important discussion, and their book aptly testifies to the diversity of possible responses. One final remark, about something that normally goes unnoticed in a review: for the brief authors’ biographies section at the end of the book, certain contributors have been inspired to write miniatures of self-reflexivity that contain crucial bits of information not commented on in their respective chapters. The reader who has just finished reading the book is left asking for more.