Translation
Radovan Karadžic¹ : Books on a Bonfire
Andrej Nikolaidis
Translated by Faruk Pašic
One needs to realize: Belgrade produces more war criminals than can be sent to The Hague! Courts are pointless. As sports commentators used to describe provincial soccer clubs, when it comes to war criminals, Belgrade is a “disseminator of talent.” They cultivate the youth starting at a young age. The selection process is strict and timely, the training fierce. When he runs onto the field, their Balkan war criminal is creative, playful, and a brilliant technician, exhibiting a German degree of devotion to his craft.
Back in the early ‘80s, in a suburb of Sarajevo, my neighbor Meho explained to me that the perfect soccer player would be the one who dribbled like ours, but who hustled and heeded the coach like a German one. In Belgrade, they have drawn closer to this ideal, but in a different kind of game. Imagine a war criminal who is as dumb as Mladic², as immoral as Karadžic, and as brutal as Miloševic; imagine, in addition, that he lies like Goebbels, has the diligence of Speer, and the insane devotion of Hitler!
The author of the best-selling book at this year’s³ Belgrade book expo: Radovan Karadžic. This is what it has come to. At the same time, the most widely read book in America is the autobiography of blue-eyed porn star Jenna Jameson. What does this tell us? In America people want to read about sex secrets, while in Serbia they wish to find out even more about ethnic cleansing. Of course, Karadžic is selling his books based on his old glory. The man is a Serbian icon. Even if he wrote about his personal sexual adventures, the book would still be a bestseller—keeping in mind that sex with a war criminal undoubtedly also qualifies as a war crime.
Who says book-burning must necessarily be an act of evil? If you burned Radovan Karadžic’s book, would this truly be a barbaric act? Would this expose you as an intolerant human being, as an enemy of the arts? For, even war criminals express themselves artistically; even their spirits transcend. It is one thing, after all, if it is a poet who kills, but a completely different one if it is a peasant. With Radovan, even a war crime was like modern poetry—without rhyme but with a profound message. But above all, its attention was focused on experimentation. For example: what would Bosnia look like without Bosniaks4? Experiments employing the poetic for—here a concentration camp, there a concentration camp, a burning village here, a burning city there—were a function of the modernist’s suffering at the world’s imperfection. Think globally, act locally: Before rearranging the world, the poet intended to bestow perfection upon Bosnia. Although one famous 20th century tale of evil tells about book burning, we can easily find examples that tell of the opposite. We do not have to travel far through time and space—to the besieged Stalingrad, for example. Travel back only a decade, only to Sarajevo…
When I finally met up with a friend from Sarajevo in Montenegro, after having feared for his and the lives of his family for years, he told me about how happy he was to have had the heat of the books from his father’s personal library, which he had set on fire in the middle of his living room in the winter of 1994. Until then, I believe, the inhabitants of Sarajevo had cut down all the trees under which they had met their future wives, they had burned all the benches where they used to kiss them, and they had sacrificed to the flames all the furniture for which they had been saving up in the first days of marriage.
In time, the entire history of love was burned down—every monument to the human capacity for this emotion. In the end, only books remained; there was nothing else that could have warmed those tortured people who had survived the sniper fire and sadistic shelling by those three-fingered beasts from the mountains.5 After the monuments of human emotion had been incinerated, it was clear that the testaments to human reason would burn as well. We gathered around the flame and laughed like children while throwing page after page of human wisdom into the fire, he told me. At that time, books were the only proof of sanity. The world was hostile, irrational and lethal—unpredictable, like the mortar shell the passerby hears whistling above his head, while clenching his eyes shut and anticipating the next moment, the moment which reveals whether it lands near him or brings death to another. This until he learns that the ones he can hear do not bring death. They would read, he told me, a few lines from each page they burned. There was nothing truly important in those books, he said to me; for us the warmth of the burning books was much more impressive than any of the elevated retorts, contemplations and puns that we call literature.
Book burning has been transformed into a symbol of barbarism. The vision of the Nazis burning undesirable books has been etched into humanity’s consciousness. Yet it is clear: in Sarajevo, barbarians were not the ones burning books to survive. The barbarians were the ones forcing them to do so by torturing them with hunger, frost and thirst, thereby driving them to burn books to survive. Here Karadžic’s army went a step farther than the Nazis, a step closer to the sadistic ideal. The Nazis were burning their victims’ books, while Karadžic’s murderers coerced their victims into burning their own books. In the end, was this not the goal of the siege on the city? To deprive people of all achievements of civilization, to tear them away from the world, to reduce them to beings guided only by basic instincts, until their own existence would become so unbearable that they would give up their city to the conqueror, to the hordes of barbarians who were determined to wait in their native forests, on their native mountains6 for as long as was necessary—until the city beneath them disappeared and ruins covered the trees and the meadows.
These people are like a damaged record: the record player’s needle has encountered a scratch and the few remaining sounds are playing without rhyme or reason. Until somebody turns off the player and throws away the record. Many such people have told me that they do not regret having left anything behind, not one object, not any sum of money, no matter how large. They only lament the books they have lost. I tell them the same thing— because I projected everything I knew about my own life onto those books.
The books from my house ended up in the basement of a church in the village of Kasindol.7 The local priest had given orders to the Serb combatants to hand over to him any books they might find in the abandoned apartments that they broke into and looted. When my father and I asked one of our prewar Sarajevo friends to take a trip to that church and to try to find any of our books, the priest informed him that all the books he had collected during the war had been destroyed because water had seeped into the basement. They were transported to a landfill in a truck, where they would finally rest in peace, among truck tires, plastic bottles, potato chips bags, and broken cassette tapes of busty Serbian pop singers.
It is not the worst thing, I tell you, when books are burned—but when lowlifes write them and gutter trash reads them. Yet no one burns them.
¹ Radovan Karadžic was the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs before and during the Bosnian War; he was one of the main actors responsible for the establishment of the so-called Republika Srpska, an autonomous region of Bosnia and Herzegovina with a large Serbian population. Karadžic is accused of crimes against humanity by the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague and was arrested on July 21, 2008, after a 13-year manhunt.
² Chief of Staff of the Bosnian Serb Army. Under his command, that army killed thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the region of Srebrenica – an event that became one of the most infamous acts of genocide during the war (For more information see: Žanic, Ivo. Flag on the Mountain: A Political Anthropology of the War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina 1990-1995, trans. Graham McMaster and Celia Hawkesworth. London: The Bosnian Institute, 2007.)
³ This article was originally published in 2005.
4 The term ‘Bosniak’ (Bošnjak) has reentered the Bosnian language after an absence of about a century, and it is often being used to refer to ethnic Muslims in Bosnia. Nikolaidis uses both the terms Musliman (with a capital “M” to designate ethnicity, as opposed to the religious denomination) and Bošnjak as national designations for non-Serbs and non-Croats in Bosnia. For more information on questions of ethnicity in Bosnia-Herzegovina, see: Velikonja, Mitja. Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Trans. Rang’ichi Ng’inja. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003.
5 The commonly recognized three-finger salute among Serb nationalists (first popularized during demonstrations before the civil war) is a raised fist with the thumb, index finger and middle finger sticking out. The Serbs conducted the siege of Sarajevo from the mountains surrounding the city.
6 The population of the mountains surrounding Sarajevo was traditionally composed of ethnic Serbs.
7 Village near Sarajevo; part of Republika Srpska.
Faruk PaŠiC
Faruk Pašic is a graduate student of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests include German literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, with a focus on texts published after 1871 and around the turn of the century.