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Kinsfolk Miljenko Jergović; translation by Russell Scott Valentino My father and two uncles went to the same Sarajevo high school that I did. Before the Second World War, when the three of them were enrolled in the school, it was called the Upper Gymnasium or the First Boys Realgymnasium. After the war, when there were no longer separate boys and girls schools, it was called simply First Gymnasium. Before my graduation in 1984, the school’s name was changed for a third time - to Heroes and Revolutionaries of the First Gymnasium. Its name was given back during the war in the 1990s, when it again became First Gymnasium. Despite the nearly fifty years that had passed since my eldest uncle was enrolled in the school - which was in 1934 - the interior had remained the same. The person who noticed this was my grandmother, who came to the parent-teacher conferences for both him and me. My father and younger uncle, who enrolled five or six years later, were taught by the same art history professor who would eventually teach me. When the old professor died at the beginning of my second year, all three of us attended the funeral. From its founding in the 1880s it had been an elite school for the bourgeoisie. The Bosnian author and Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić graduated from it, after considerable torment, about which he would later speak with horror and disgust. This is probably why his name was never mentioned at school functions, when the director would enumerate all the distinguished personages and celebrities who had attended the school. In my own days 2
there the most noteworthy graduates were considered communist revolutionaries, in addition to the assassins of Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Gavrilo Princip himself, who fired the shots that struck Ferdinand and his pregnant wife, did not graduate from the school, because he had moved to Belgrade by then, but several of his close associates did. Our professors often told us that we must model ourselves after these shining examples. We lived in a socialist society, which held especially fast to its shining examples. Among them our fathers and uncles were often held up to us as paragons of sacrifice and heroism. And so my father, for instance, who was an excellent student, one of the best in his generation. Or the younger of my two uncles, who would become a man of the world, the representative of the Yugoslav metal industry to the Soviet Union. The two of them were often commemorated, and I was often reminded of them. On the subject of my elder uncle there was silence. Despite his being a better student than either of them, he was not a shining example. He was among those who existed in most upstanding Yugoslav families but about whom no one spoke. It was like in a fairy tale: at least one of the three sons was not a shining example. My elder uncle never received any grade lower than the very best. He had pen pals in other countries with whom he corresponded in Latin, he solved unsolvable math problems, he played the guitar, and he wrote an essay on Paul Valery. In photographs, tall and fragile, with his blonde hair and blue eyes, he looks like a young aristocrat in a Thomas Mann novel, someone who 3
will die by the end of the book, from meningitis or gaping caverns in his lungs, but his will not be an ordinary death for in it will be gathered the destiny of a family or an entire generation. I should say that while this is how my elder uncle looked, nothing else about him was like in Mann, except that I’d have been happy to reproduce, on a gravestone that’s now perhaps long lost, the words with which the doctor of philosophy Serenus Zeitblom takes leave of his friend, the composer Adrian Leverkühn: “May God have pity on your poor souls, my friend, my homeland.” But it’s not at all clear that I know what my elder uncle’s homeland would have been. Wha’s clearer, at any rate, is that I don’t have one, which means in the end that I wouldn’t really know what such an epitaph on his invisible grave would mean. Here’s one possible conception of his homeland. He was born in Usora, a small town in central Bosnia, where his father, my grandfather, was employed as a railroad stationmaster. He grew up along the tracks built by the Austro-Hungarians, changing homes and friends often. From his father—a Slovene by birth—he learned Slovenian, while his mother tongue was Croatian, but his first language was German. This he learned from his grandfather, my great grandfather, a high ranking railroad official, a Swabian German from the Banat, who was born in a town that’s now in Romania and went to schools in Vršac, Budapest, and Vienna. He too spent all his working life along the tracks of Bosnia. You must understand, then, that my elder uncle - let us call him Mladen because things will get too confused if we keep this up without names - lived 4
in complex surroundings and a complicated language situation. But saying this doesn’t make clear just how complicated it was, nor how language can determine a person’s destiny. For Mladen’s grandfather Karlo was a nationally minded German, and all four of his children spoke only German till they died. Not once did he ever impart to them even a single Croatian word. With his daughters’ husbands - two Croats and a Slovene - he spoke Croatian, despite the fact that all three of them spoke perfect German. With his grandchildren, he spoke both languages, but only after he’d been addressed in German. If anyone greeted him in Croatian, Opapa pretended not to hear. They say the weekly meals when the whole family would gather were quite something. There was a strict language protocol of the sort that today probably only exists at the headquarters of the European Union, though no one seems to have wondered why it had to be this way. Karlo’s Germanness was especially important to him, as were his choices among the various people present, and everyone else had to adapt. In return, no one, least of all him, prevented them from being other than who they were or from speaking languages among themselves according to their own desires. My great grandfather loved his sons-in-law, and it didn’t bother him that they weren’t Germans; rather he was proud, I should note, of their civic calling. Belonging to the railroad workers trade was for him something like being a member of a secret society, a Masonic lodge of sorts, whose members differed from other people by their understanding of the world and their role in it. A German rail man and a Croatian rail man enjoy a brotherhood 5
that allows them greater mutual understanding than any members of a single nation amongst themselves. Opapa was a leftist, and in the early 1920s he ended up in prison and later lost his job because he backed a rail men’s strike. It would not have been a scandal if he hadn’t been a stationmaster and a German among the barbarous Slavs. He was harshly punished by the royal government for the betrayal of his caste and his nation. But at home there were no arguments about ideological questions, beyond the ideology that is part of one’s upbringing, to which all people have the same right, regardless of faith or assets. The poor little country of Bosnia, where nearly ninety percent of the people in the 1920s and 30s were illiterate, where epidemics of typhus and cholera would take over from time to time, and where an endemic syphilis ravaged generation upon generation without respite, like some kind of evil tradition, this Bosnia was - for Opapa Karlo and his ideas - the ideal place to be living. He never had any notion of returning to the Banat or of moving to Vienna or Germany. Despite his being German, those were foreign countries to him. When asked about it, he would quietly answer that he wouldn’t ever be able to live there because that was “where other people live.” As far as I’m concerned, there has never been a more precise definition of the opposite of one’s homeland. Uncle Mladen was closer to his grandfather than the other grandchildren were, even though one wouldn’t have said he resembled him physically. The elderly Karlo was dark-haired, of short stature, and had a long grey beard; judging by his photographs, he looked more like a Romanian Rabbi, or at least a learned Jewish man, than a German. But Mladen, with his Nordic 6
blue eyes, his height, and his bearing took not so much after his maternal German relatives as those on his father’s side, Slovene peasants from the region of Tolmino. When I look at the two of them in the faded black and white photos, I wonder what their lives might have been like if German had not come so easily to Mladen, if he hadn’t so willingly listened to his grandfather play the violin, if he had been seated farther from the old man during the weekly meals. I wonder what might have been if the old man had hated the Slav in his grandson even a little bit. In the courtyard of the building where my people lived from the beginning of the 1930s on stood a new Ashkenazi synagogue. Everyone, not just the Jews, referred to it as “the Temple.” There people prayed to God who would - like Opapa Karlo and my other great-grandfather, the Slovene - by the will of the emperor and king Franz Josef, take their business affairs to Sarajevo, where they would long remain. Earlier, during the time of Turkish rule, there were no Ashkenazis in our town, only Sephardim, Spanish Jews. They were impoverished for the most part, distrustful of the new occupying power, and unwilling to allow the new arrivals to enter their shrine. In a certain sense, they did not even quite believe that the newcomers were Jews, and so they called them, like their imperial and royal patrons, Swabians. In the end it became necessary to build a new, Ashkenazi, or Swabian, synagogue, and this was what everyone referred to as “the Temple.” Right at the beginning of the war, the moment the Germans had entered the town, a few days before the Ustashas would take power, a mob broke into the Temple and destroyed everything. These people were not uniformed but 7
were what you might call regular, everyday, civilized folks. Among those who attacked the Temple were the town’s layabouts and thugs, petty thieves and gentlemen, but there were also Roma, who, together with Jews from Sarajevo, would in a few days’ time find themselves in transports bound for concentration camps. My Slovene grandfather, whose name was Franjo, watched the people destroying the Temple from his window. Nona Olga kept pulling him inside lest someone see him, but he stayed at the window despite the fear. It was a measure of his courage. He watched the people among whom he lived in the hours of their transformation. First, they would become outlaws, then murderers, and in the end martyrs, casualties of war. At the time the Temple was destroyed, their son Mladen was starting the seventh grade. They taught him that what was happening was not okay. They told him that Pavelić was a savage, Hitler was insane, and he would surely lose the war in the end. The two of them explained to him, as did Opapa Karlo, all that what from our perspective today seems important and useful. Of course, they also told him not to say anything anywhere, if he valued his life, about what he thought of Hitler or Pavelić. And he should stay clear of those who revolted against the new Ustasha government. My grandfather and grandmother, just as their parents and our entire family in the broadest sense of the word, were on principle opposed to any resistance to the authorities. A person can accomplish nothing there. It is not up to us to change the government. What you’ll accomplish is to get yourself thrown in prison, nothing more. 8
They also told him to stay as far from possible from the Ustasha Youth, not to attend their meetings and events, and if he were asked about it, to say that he thought of himself more as a German than a Croat. Who knows if by telling anyone at any point that he was a German he would have avoided the consequences of being a Croat, but clearly his knowledge of German and his accomplishments in all the fine skills that characterize the German race, the floret and violin bow let’s say, helped him to begin experiencing things as someone who is not a Croat, and this made it impossible for him to be an Ustasha. When he graduated a year later, Mladen was preparing to begin studying in Zagreb or Vienna. In Vienna we had relatives who were not poor, so he could live with them. In Zagreb it would be a little harder. He wanted to study forestry, and Opapa used to tell him that it was crazy to live in Bosnia and not live alongside the forests. But then suddenly in the summer of 1942 came the conscription letter, written in two languages, according to the conventions of a united Europe, both German and Croatian. The unit in which Mladen was being called to serve was part of Hitler’s army, not the Croatian armed forces, and the call included the best and brightest of Sarajevo’s youth of German or Austrian descent. There were two possibilities at that moment: either Mladen would report for military duty and go off to war, or he could escape to the Partisans. His parents, my grandfather Franjo and grandmother Olga, did not doubt for an instant that Hitler would lose the war and Pavelić would end up on the 9
gallows. I said it already but I have to repeat it ten times: never, not for a single day, not for a single hour in his life did Franjo believe that those who had destroyed the Temple, those who had led away our Jewish neighbours, could be victorious. Although he was not a believer, it was out of the question that evil could win out in the end. He wasn’t a communist, but his father-in-law, Opapa Karlo, was sort of one, and the communists were also the Partisans whom Mladen needed to run away to in order to avoid the German conscription. If he did that, he would be on the side of right in every respect. They both knew this, but still, instead of sending their son, my eldest uncle, to the Partisans, they sent him to the Germans. They thought he had a better chance of survival there. There would be several months of basic training, but by then Hitler would have already lost the war. It was a mistaken calculation, and fourteen months later my elder uncle was killed in battle against the Partisans. It was the first battle for his unit, and he was the first and last person killed. Several days later, the entire unit together with its commander joined the Partisans. After the war, in the summer of 1945, four of Mladen’s war buddies sought out his parents. In that hour they were a liberating army, and Franjo and Olga were the parents of an enemy combatant. After the death of her son, my grandmother never again went to mass, she never again crossed herself, she stopped celebrating Christmas and Easter. When at five years old I asked whether God existed, she answered, “For some he does, for others he doesn’t.”
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“Does he for you?” “No.” “Does he for me?” “You have to see that for yourself.” While his grandson was fighting as a German soldier, Karlo lived in his house in the southern Sarajevo suburb of Ilidža, which at night was often raided by soldiers of various kinds, mostly drunk. When the Ustashas would set off on their nightly rounds to kill and loot in the Serbian homes, he would take in his neighbours. It wasn’t unusual for there to be as many as fifty. And when the Ustashas arrived at his gate to conduct a search, he would wait for them on his threshold, dark and menacing, and call out to them in Croatian: “This is a German house. You can’t come in!” And no matter how drunk they were, they would turn back and go away without a word. He stared at them with hatred and that look that would alter his features completely such that he seemed a different person. A terrifying person. Someone once said that I inherited that look from him. Sarajevo was liberated in April of 1945. A month or two later they came for Opapa to take him to a camp, from which he, like all his compatriots, would later be deported to Germany. He walked the kilometer and a half to the train station in Ilidža, flanked by two Partisans while a third nudged him constantly in the back with his rifle barrel. That man had known him from before the war, and he understood very well who and what Opapa Karlo was, but it made him feel good to mistreat him a little. That’s the way it goes. You 11
never know who will get led off to a concentration camp, when, or why, only that people rarely think it might be them. But when they got to the station, in front of the stock cars that the Partisans used to transport their victims to the camps Opapa’s Serbian neighbours had gathered. They said that for four years he had saved them from the Ustashas and even if he was a German a hundred times over they would not give up comrade Karlo, they would go where he was going. The Partisans tried to disperse them, they flared their rifle butts, some people’s heads got bashed in, but the more they struck at them, the more hard headed the people grew. They returned Karlo to his home that day, and no one ever came again for him, despite the fact that he was a German and was meant to go to Germany with the other Yugoslav Germans. Who knows whether he would have got there alive, and this makes it possible to think that his life was saved by the same people whose lives he had saved. A good deed was repaid with good, like in a children’s fable. Opapa died several years later, before the decade in which I would be born. His daughters were not treated as Germans in Yugoslavia because they were married to Slavs. And his only son Rudolf, whom everyone called Nano, except for his sisters and lovers, who called him Rudi, also was not considered as a German and so was not sent to the camps. What were the criteria that motivated the Yugoslav communists when, after the war, they sent Germans to the camps, and what, from their perspective, was needed for a person to be defined as a German? To this very day I don’t have an 12
answer to the question. For instance, our Nano looked “more German” than his father, whose last name he kept, without ever Croatianizing it or adopting a phonological spelling for it, he had a library full of German books, he went to classical music concerts, spoke German with his friends, took walks through Sarajevo’s old Baščaršija bazaar with cousins from Vienna and their beautiful girlfriends, all of them Austrians, and yet he himself was never seen by the Partisans as a German. Why not? Probably because they understood through some sort of policeman’s sixth sense that the Germanness of our family ended with Opapa, and that Rudolf was indifferent to his heritage. That was enough for them to spare a man from a camp, and in this sense the concentration camps of the communists were incompatible with those of the Germans or the Ustashas. My father and my younger uncle, whose name was Dragan, were mobilized by the Partisans after the liberation of Sarajevo and fought in one of the bloodiest theaters at the end of the war, near Karlovac. They went into the war as high school students who hadn’t yet graduated, and they graduated as demobilized Partisans. After that my uncle studied metallurgy and my father medicine. Both were successful in their specializations and became respected members of society. And both carried family stigmas in their hearts and heads, which went with their names and into their police files. My uncle’s was his kid brother, who had died as a German soldier; my father’s was his mother and her two sisters, who were very active for the Ustasha Youth in Sarajevo—after the war she was sentenced to prison, while her sisters emigrated to Argentina. 13
They 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 her brother was on the wrong side during the war. She felt a little guilty about it. So did her brother. Her future husband, my father, also felt a little guilty, on account of his mother and aunts. This guilt marked their lives and remained an important part of their identities. I am conscious of it as a part of my own identity, too, though I never had direct contact with it, just as I never directly felt the Germanness of Opapa Karlo or the Sloveneness of my grandpa Franjo. My own case, I understand now, is slightly more complicated, for my identity is to a great extent comprised of what I am not. Perhaps more so than from what I am. When in the summer of 1993 I was leaving Sarajevo, which was then under siege by the tanks and artillery of the war criminals Mladić and Karadžić—I was on an American military transport that had flown in humanitarian aid and journalists from Split—I was thinking that this was perhaps goodbye forever. I was saving my own skin, nothing more. My mother and father were staying in the city, each on their own since they had separated long before. It occurred to me that 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.
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