Rebranding the footnotes
Dubravka Ugrešić
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.