Abstract
This article describes how two novels with a strong European presence from the 1990s onward, Aleksandar Tišma’s The Book of Blam and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, offer an understanding of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s through the prism of the Holocaust. First, a reading of Austerlitz reveals an intriguing lacuna in Sebald’s melancholic map of Europe. I read this lacuna, using Judith Butler’s notion of ‘the recognizable human’, as Sebald’s predominantly Western-European perspective. I then place this next to Aleksandar Tišma’s conception of Srednja Evropa. This European middle space offers more suggestive and ambivalent East–West imagery for post-1989 Europe, and also, as I contend, a more complex framing of the Yugoslav wars with reference to the Holocaust. The essay will then try to assess literary fiction’s renewed claim on the real, particularly with respect to the distribution of ‘the recognizable human’ within the various zones of Europe.
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Notes
I am referring to the distinction between non-fictional and fictional narrative as referential resp. non-referential, as summarized by Cohn (1999) in her excellent discussion of the borders between fictional and non-fictional discourse. While a fictional narrative can (but does not have to) refer to events in the real world, non-fictional narrative has to relate to events in the real world. Cohn also evokes Hayden White’s well-known distinction between plotment (the arrangement of events in an fictional narrative) and emplotment (not just the arrangement but also the selection of real events in a non-fictional narrative).
See for instance Jachym Topol’s recent novella Chladnouzemí (Cold Land, 2009) which is situated in Terezín before and after the transition from Communism to democracy.
First translations of the work of Tišma occurred in the cultural and linguistic commonwealth of the former Yugoslavia (Slovenian, Macedonian, Hungarian and Albanian). The legendary L’Age d’Homme Publishing House in Geneva published the first French translations of Tišma’s work in the early 1980s but, as Tišma himself complained in his memoir Sečaj se večkrat na Vali, to no avail. As of 1988, his work has appeared in English, Italian, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Spanish.
The concept of ‘foreshadowing’, an understanding of the past solely on the basis of its later course, is elaborated in Bernstein (1994).
Rigney (2009) makes a case for the ‘distinctiveness of artistic writing as a mediator of historical understanding’ (p. 6). She argues that ‘literary works themselves can also play a variety of roles in the ongoing production of collective remembrance: as relayers of knowledge established by others, as catalysts that provoke interest in particular topics hitherto left out of the picture, as canonical objects of remembrance that are themselves recalled as cultural icons, and, finally, as benchmarks whose critical rewriting may subsequently be used to express a new interpretation of a particular period or discussion’ (p. 22).
Several critics have tried to contextualize Sebald’s fiction with regard to the political context of post-WWII German history. Davies (2006, p. 299) characterizes Sebald’s mature fiction as an ‘uncanny return […] of an unresolved psychological, cultural and symbolic complex that haunted the 1960s generation. This complex may have been all the more disturbing because of its re-emergence at a time when, in the wake of German reunification, the legacy of the 1930s and 1940s and the traumatic 1960s and 1970s might have been thought to have been laid to rest.’
A few examples from literary fiction: Drndić’s ‘documentary novel’ Sonnenschein (2007, published in English as Trieste), Štiks’(2006) novel Elijahova Stolica (Elijah’s Chair). Playwright Stoppard (1999) wrote non-fiction about discovering his Jewish roots in his fifties, while Wilkomirski (1995; whose real name is Bruno Dössekker) wrote a factual memoir about early repressed childhood memories of Nazi concentration camps (Bruchstücke) which was later debunked as fake. See for a discussion of that case Suleiman (2006). A slightly different case is Çetin’s Anneannem (2005, English translation 2008 as My Grandmother: A Memoir) which reconstructs several lives of children of Armenians who died during the 1915 genocide in the Ottoman Empire and who were raised as Turks, unaware of their origins.
See for instance Denham and McCulloh (2006) as well as the special issue of Journal of European Studies (2011, pp. 41, 3–4) devoted to the memory and work of Sebald.
While texture and narrative devices qualify Austerlitz as a work of fiction, readers and critics alike seem aware of the novel’s ambiguous relationship with historical reality, intensified by its use of photography. See Snel (2011) for my discussion of Austerlitz in comparison to Drndić’s ‘documentary novel’ Sonnenschein.
References are to the English edition.
In Snel (2011, p. 130) I have tried to analyze the generic ambiguity caused by this picture of young Austerlitz: ‘Sebald’s photograph ís historical—it displays an actual face of someone who has existed, somewhere, some time. But as we never find out whether Austerlitz actually existed, as we also never find out the name of the first-person narrator who meets Austerlitz and presents his narrative to us, there is the very disturbing possibility that this picture represents someone whose identity is covered under that of Austerlitz. Can it be that the melancholic framing of this picture into the novel hides the identity of someone whose name we will never discover?’
One could extend the essentially Western European perspective of Austerlitz into its intertextual references. In his dream Austerlitz visits Duchcov, count Wallenstein’s castle where Casanova spent the last phase of his life as a librarian. Austerlitz’s rendering of Bohemia thus seems to go back to an era in which Wolff (1994) has reconstructed the invention of Eastern Europe, in contrast with Europe as such.
See Snel (2003, p. 14) for my discussion of the concept of Central Europe of among others, Czesław Miłosz and Danilo Kiš.
The wartime lover of Blam’s wife, Petar Poparić, a journalist who collaborated with the occupying forces during the war, is brutally executed by communist partisans. The scene is displayed to the reader in great detail, urging us to consider the partisans’ violent revenge next to that of the fascist Hungarian fascist arrow-crosses.
The term Central Europe is Miłosz’s and very much reflects the discourse of the last decade of the Cold War. It is important to note that there is no direct connection to Tišma’s use of the same toponym in 1961. During the 1950s and 1960s Miłosz referred to the region mostly as ‘Eastern Europe’ (see Snel 2003).
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Acknowledgments
My sincerest gratitude is due to Andrej Tišma who provided me with a concise list of the translations of his father’s fiction, and other data.
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This article is dedicated to the memory of Michael Henry Heim, gifted and prolific translator who died on 29 September 2012. Among the many authors whose work he translated was Tišma (1998). Heim’s English translation of Knjiga o Blamu helped me in many ways while I was working on the Dutch translation.
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Snel, G. The recognizable European. Sebald’s and Tišma’s human geographies of stitches and scars. Neohelicon 41, 459–476 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-013-0228-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-013-0228-3