Impulse of a Wild Imagination

It is as if this new nationalism has sucked up all the limited arrogance of the Marxists, all the dogmatism and hypocrisy of the Bolshevik character and mixed them with the most morbid type of pseudo-romanticism. In Serbia, and I believe in the other parts of the former Yugoslavia, the most bitter, most anti-cosmopolitan, religious converts, as well as racist fanatics, come from the dogmatic communist ranks.

Bogdan Bogdanovic lives in a kind of personal isolation, without losing heart in his determination to outlast the vivisection of Serbian nationalists and in opposition to the senseless war being waged under Yugoslav skies. In around ten interviews this year he has spoken against the war and this has been followed by disqualification and satanization.

You're looking well, Professor...

I never wanted to emigrate. I planned, that is discussed with some people, moving to Sarajevo and relocating the New School of Architecture in an old house there. That was a year before the catastrophe. We thought Bosnia would be neutral, that it would be demilitarized, that it would maybe be a protectorate. Maybe it will be a protectorate, but it is no longer Bosnia, it is a corpse...

You have expressed your resistance to this nameless (ethnic) war through your opposition to the destroyers of cities...

Twenty years ago I wrote that in the modern world cities were becoming more important than the nations that appeared in the course of the industrial revolution and which still bear down so heavily on the intellect of every intelligent person, and the sense of belonging to a city has always, from the time real cities and citizens have existed, been far more important that the sense of ethnic identity.

Vukovar has been destroyed, the Croats promise that if they get it they will leave it in ruins. I haven't been able to summon up the strength to visit it. I still can't talk of Mostar because I still haven't come to the point of being able to accept it. Sarajevo reminds me of someone on the ground, vainly trying to get up. In the entire madness there is an awful method - the destruction of cities is the simplest way of changing regional ethnic structure. It seems absolutely crazy to simply destroy any city you wish to take over. Nothing will ever redeem us from this.

Do you think that what has happened to us is the result of some conception, or chaos, or stupidity?

If people are infected by stupidity, it is somebody's fault. There were schools there, ministries of culture, there were teachers.

In one of your books you wrote that Serbia was in the East, that Serbia was on the margins of civilization, tired of a civilization it had never touched....

I am afraid that something worse is growing, that there is a model of darkness growing, a darkness darker than any other.

One day when the time comes, and it will, when we talk of the Serbian national catastrophe, when we ask ourselves who is responsible and how it came about that we have become one of the last nations in Europe to be surrounded by so many enemies and to be so hated, then many of the big brains from the Academy (of Sciences and Arts) will find themselves on trial, if they live long enough.

Who killed those children of ours? Who is the demon that brought us to this?

President Cosic says: "a terrible accident..."

A gourmet of Serbian gall, a relisher of evil times, it's as if he holds inside him a resident wailer. I saw it at Plevlje, he was tired and somehow bent... I don't like to see a friend looking so limp.

You were friends, you and Cosic?

Of all of them I spent the most time with Dobrica. I tried to teach him something, but it was no good... We liked him, he came like a small peasant boy, wearing "opanci" (soft leather footwear). He only started to rebel later on.

How does he look to you now as head of state?

At one moment I thought that the esteemed head of my country, which is no longer mine, had come through a moral rebirth. After his first antediluvian pestering, I saw that he had no moral obstacles. He truly believes that he had nothing to do with concocting something so ugly.

Afterwards I was afraid he'd become a war president.

You finally broke off with the Academy in 1981.

I have very unpleasant memories of that crowd. I thought we'd be able to talk about serious matters. I came to understand that, particularly in the arts department, they were untouched by philosophy, architecture, cities, history, but that they noted down absence from meetings....

It was easy to break off from them. I just didn't belong there anymore, but they still considered me an associate member, they kept hold of me so that no-one should leave the Academy. They even sent me some money, but I sent it back regularly. I wanted to seek assistance from the Committee for Human Rights. I assume its possible to leave a monastery, with any luck I could probably escape, even, if I were a woman, from a whore house in the Near East, but not from the Academy, because no-one had ever left before.

What, in fact, is the Academy?

Its time has passed. They wanted it to be an important social factor, but it quickly grew into a desire for power. They had an elaborate story about their mission. Some even say that they had a plan, and it seems very possible to me, that they had some demographic committee and that they even calculated how many Serbs could die to liberate the western "krajina" without harming the biological existence Serbs. I don't know if this figure has been reached, but I see, with regard to the Serbs in Croatia, they have succeeded in that which Ante Pavelic did not...

Was it possible to have foreseen such a tragic end?

I had a horrible feeling that things would not be good, but that they would be so awful, never. I had a kind of prophetic intuition. For the monument in Cacak I came up with the idea of animals that bite. I concluded that the beast was inside us. When I made the monument in Vukovar, I drew a falling city. What's worse, I am afraid even I do not see just how awful it all is.

What is the "history of the disease"?

It turns out that the present uncontrollable virus of nationalism was nurtured in vitro in the time of communism. It is as if this new nationalism has sucked up all the limited arrogance of the Marxists, all the dogmatism and hypocrisy of the Bolshevik character and mixed them with the most morbid type of pseudo-romanticism. In Serbia, and I believe in the other parts of the former Yugoslavia, the most bitter, most anti-cosmopolitan, religious converts, as well as racist fanatics, come from the dogmatic communist ranks.

In any case, the Memorandum was written exclusively by ex-communist academics.

Milosevic didn't dare to publicly accept the Memorandum, but he quickly, like an eager schoolboy, began to put it into action... Who is the more monstrous - Frankenstein or his maker?

We are talking today about how the finale began.

It was precipitated by the arrival of Milosevic. The measuring of spiritual guilt is harder, but more important. Because the deviation of thought which brought about one Milosevic, in a generation or two can bring about another Milosevic.

On examining the deepest causes, the surest way is to begin with the notorious fact that nationalist paranoia, at least on the Balkans, is based primarily on the impulses of wild imagination. The biased and ignorant manipulation of history encourages pseudo-history directed towards the search for historical injustices and world conspiracies.

The war novels of Dobrica Cosic have for years been preparing the state of mind which gave rise to the Memorandum, and consequently, to the present conquering exploits, and, I'm afraid, to the bloodshed that follows them.

To round off this literary, political scherzo, I would like to say that the designers of the Bosnian horror are two or three poets of undoubted talent and one incomplete literary historian, while Karadzic himself is a psychiatrist by profession, a strategist by office, and in his free time, a poet.

The Memorandum mentions Yugoslavhood, and is considered to be the inspiration of the present nationalism in Serbia.

That Yugoslavhood is of the type that sees Yugoslavia as an extended Serbia. The idea of all Serbs in one nation, or almost all, like all Croats, or all Albanians, could have been a rational solution in the framework of a multinational confederation, with a complex internal system of dependency. But, as we are far, further than ever before, from thinking about some Balkan or Danube community, it is a good idea to lean on what now exists: the present borders and, unfortunately, small nation states.

All Utopias have been on islands, some in eternal mist so that travellers don't find them.

Unlike you younger people who have the time to be critical, my position is more difficult, I am a man without a country. I am afraid of the building of new walls from both the Croat and Serb sides.

Is the present process of ruination irreversible?

This new nationalism has no stabilizing factor: it has no real national culture, not a trace of middle class taste which knows where to begin and where to end, even in moments of greatest exultation.

Our nationalism is entirely without style.

Is it a miracle to you as well that in spite of everything a generation of students such as we have seen this summer has appeared?

That they are something opposite to the evil that surrounds us is true. But they have already practically told us that they will be leaving in the columns of the elite. They said this to us almost directly. They have nothing to look for here. There was a little melancholy in their gesture, a little sad humor: "We're getting out of here!". And they will let them go.