Handke, Peter - Journey To The Rivers, A (Viking, 1997)

;'It was principally because of the war that I
wanted to go to Serbia, into the country of
the so-called aggressors . . . I felt the need to
travel into the Serbia that had become, with
every article, every commentary, every analy sis,
less recognizable and more worthy of study,
more worthy, simply, of being seen. And who
ever is thinking now: Aha! pro-Serbia! or Aha!
Yugophile - need read no further. "
-from A Journey tu the Rirers
Published m Germany in 1996. A Journey to
the Rivers created a firestorm of controversy,
being likened, by some, to revisionist writings
mitigating Nazi guilt for World War II. But
that is a grave misreading of the book, for
Peter Handke proffers no justification or
explanations for Serbian atrocities in the
Balkan conflict. A Journey to the Rivers is,
rather, both a scathing criticism of Western
war reporting, which Peter Handke describes
as lazy and mendacious, and a wonderfully
sensitive and nuanced travelogue through
Serbia. The moving observations, the acerbic
reflections deepen even as Handke continu-
l(untin/ll'd on h(/(·kjl11p1 0 It)-;-

I Cun tin 11 I'd jio111 frun 1 jlae J
ally, insistently asks, "W hat does a stranger
know'?" The result is rich, rewarding, and
provocative.
Pt-:TEH H \NDKE, one of the most popular post-
war German language writers, is the author
of numerous novels and memoirs including
Repetition, Slow Homecoming, and The Weight
of the World. He lives in Paris.
Jacket design by Merideth Harte

Author photograph by IsolJe Ohlbaum
A division of Penguin USA

375 Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. 10014
VI Kl NG http://www.penguin.com
A JOURN EY
TO THE RIVERS
Peter Handke
A
JOURNEY
TO THE
RIVERS
justicefor
Serbia
T R A N S LA T E D BY
S CO T T A BBO T T
VIKING
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U .S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, V ictoria, Australia
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Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in 1997 by V iking Penguin,

a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
I 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Translation copyright © Penguin Books USA Inc., 1997

All rights reserved
Published in Germany under the tide Eine winterliche reise

zu denflussen donau, save, morawa und drina: oder gerechtigkeitfor Serbien
by Suhrkamp Verlag. © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1996.
German-language text previously appeared in Suddentschen Zeitung,

January 5-6 and January 13-14, 1996.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Handke, Peter.
[Winterliche Reise zu den Flilssen Donau, Save,
Morawa und Drina. English]
A journey to the rivers: Justice for Serbia I Peter Handke.
p. em.
ISBN o-670-87341-1
1. Handke, Peter-Journeys-Yugoslavia-Serbia.
2. Authors, Austrian-2oth century-Biography.
3· Yugoslav War, 1991- I. T ide.
P T 2668.ASW 5613 1997
838 '.91409-dC2o 96-31031
T his book is primed on acid-free paper.

e
Primed in the United States of America

Set in Adobe Garamond
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part

of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
Ah, I remember: Back then I signed letters Poor Yorick,
and my mother went around the neighborhood all day
long and asked who this Yorick was. Well, that was life
before the war. ...
What diffirence does it make to us to kill three mil
lion people. The sky is the same everywhere and blue, so
blue. Death has returned, but peace will follow. We will
be free and strange.. . .
When the first snow fell, we got better acquainted.
"
MILOS CRNJANSKI,
v
Diary About Carnojevic, I92I

PREFACE TO THE
AMERICAN EDITION
DEAR READER,
This text, appearing on two weekends at the onset
of 1996 in the Suddeutsche Zeitung, caused some com
motion in the European press.
Immediately after publication of the first part, I
was designated a terrorist in the Corrz"ere della Sera,
and Liberation revealed that I was, first of all, amused
that there were so few victims in the Slovenian war of
1991, and that I was exhibiting, second, "doubtful
taste" in discussing the various ways of presenting this
or that victim of the Yugoslavian wars in the western
media. In Le Monde I was then called a "pro-Serbian
advocate, " and in the Journal du Dimanche there was
talk of "pro-Serbian agitation." And so it continued
until El Pais even read in to my text a sanction of the
Srebrenica massacre.
Now the text is translated, and I trust that you will
read it as it is; I need not de(end or take back a single
word. I wrote about my journey through the country
of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books,
my literature: a slow, inquiring narration; every para
graph dealing with and narrating a problem, of repre-
. .
vu
P R E FA C E T O T H E A M E R I CA N E D I T I O N
sentation, of form, of grammar-of aesthetic veracity;

that has always been the case in what I have written,
from the beginning to the final period. Dear reader:
that, and that alone, I offer here for your perusal.
-Peter Handke, April I99 6
Vtlt
CON TEN TS
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION

. .
Vll
BEFORE THE TRIP
PART ONE OF THE TRIP
27
3
PART TWO OF THE TRIP
SI
EPILOGUE
JI
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I
BEFORE
THE TRIP
FoR A L ONG TIM E , for almost four years-after the

end of the war in East Slavonia, after the destruction
of Vukovar, after the outbreak of the war in Bosnia
Herzegovina-! had planned to travel to Serbia. I
knew only Belgrade, to which I had been invited al
most three decades earlier as the author of a silent
play, for a theater festival. I recall, of those perhaps
one and a half days, only my youthful or authorial in
dignation at the response to the wordless perfor
mance, an incessant unrest among the Serbian
audience, which, as I thought at the time, being
southern European or Balkan, naturally could not be
mature enough for such a long silence on the stage. Of
Belgrade itself, nothing from that time remains in my
memory except a rather gentle slope on both sides
down to where the Save and Danube rivers flowed to
gether on the plain. There is no image in my mind,
however, of the two bodies of water, as the horizons
were blocked off by the "typically Communist" apart
ment complexes. Only r�cendy, during my second
stay in the Serbian, formerly Yugoslavian, capital, did
I recall, on a side street lined by linden trees strewing
fall leaves, during an accidental walk past a House of
I
P E T E R H A N D K E
Writers, that I was once there, hosted and at the same

time gently ridiculed for my j uvenile authorial airs by
Miodrag Bulatovic, who \vrote "The Red Cock Flies
to Heaven . " He was not that much older than I and
was famous at that time throughout Europe, and I too
had read him with some enthusiasm. (He died a cou
ple of years ago, during the Yugoslavian war, and re
mained until the end, as I was told in Belgrade, full of
mockery toward everyone and at the same time un
remittingly charitable. Were there, outside his coun
try, reports of his death?)
It was principally because of the war that I wanted
to go to Serbia, into the country of the so-called ag
gressors. But I was also drawn simply to see the coun
try that of all the countries of Yugoslavia was least
known to me and, perhaps because of the news re
ports and opinions about it, had come to attract me
most strongly (not least because of the alienating ru
mors) . Nearly all the photographs and reports of the
last four years came from one side of the fronts or bor
ders. When they occasionally came from the other side
they seemed to me increasingly to be simple mirror
ings of the usual coordinated perspectives-distorted
reflections in the very cells of our eyes and not eyewit
ness accounts. I felt the need to go behind the mirror;
I felt the need to travel into the Serbia that became,
with every article, every commentary, every anal
ysis, less recognizable and more worthy of study,
more worthy, simply, of being seen. And whoever is
2
A J O U R N E Y T O T H E R I V E R S
thinking now: Aha, pro-Serbian! or Aha, Yugophile!

the latter a Spiegel [the German newsmagazine;
Spiegel=mirror] word-need read no further.
In recent years there had in fact been the occa
sional invitation into the shrunken Yugoslavia, to Ser
bia or Crna Gora, Montenegro. But I wanted to avoid
being a public person there, or even a semipublic one.
I wished to travel as a normal passerby, unrecognizable
as a foreigner or a traveler, not only in the metropo
lises of Belgrade and Titograd (now Podgorica) but
above all in the small cities and villages and even,
where possible, far from any settlement. But of course
I needed someone, a knowledgeable pilot, companion,
and perhaps translator; my rough Slovenian and the
few Serbo-Croatian memory traces from a summer on
the Adriatic island of Krk, more than thirty years ago,
were insufficient if it was to be more than an ordinary
trip. (No problem, on the other hand, the strange
Cyrillic alphabet: that I would have to decipher it
haltingly seemed exactly right for the endeavor.)
Conveniently, I have two longtime friends from
Serbia, both of whom left their country when rather
young and now, even during the war, return home at
more or less lengthy i ntervals: visiting parents, or the
widowed mother, and/or � the legitimate or illegitimate
children, along with the former Serbian lover. There is
v
Zarko Radakovic, translator of several of my things

into Serbian and a ses he ures, as it is put so well in
French, "in his hours," himself a writer; though pro-
3
fessionally, after studying in Belgrade and then for a

long time in Ttibingen, he became a translator and
reader of German-language newspaper articles for the
Balkan-directed division of Deutsche Welle radio
where, in a not infrequent conflict between being Ser
bian and having to speak against Serbia (as in the
tendentious, never even faintly "pro-Serbian" fusil
lades of the FAZ [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung]), he
is a faithful translator, although he reads sometimes
with a faltering voice. It may be that such an existence
contributed to the silence that had overcome my
friend since the war's beginning, vis-a-vis not only the
world of enemies but even that of friends, and thus
also toward me. He did continue to translate the odd
piece, which appeared then as a book, in spite of the
war, in Belgrade, Nis, or Novi Sad; but I no longer
y
heard about it from him-Zarko R. lived, translated,

and wrote as if in voluntary obscurity. To track him
down, I had to turn to his last remaining confidant, a
Mormon, far away in the American state of Utah.
And, befitting such a Mormon detour, the Serb and I,
the Austrian, found each other immediately. A phone
call from Cologne: Yes, meet in Belgrade the be
ginning of November-"I 'll be visiting my mother
anyway"-and the following week a joint trip to
the Bosnian border, where, again "anyway," he had
arranged to meet his onetime girlfriend and their now
almost eighteen-year-old daughter in a border town
on the river Drina.
4
A J O U RN E Y T O T H E R I V E R S
The other Serbian friend who I hoped would bring

me closer to his country and his people I knew from
the near decade of my life in Salzburg. Zlatko B. was a
regular in a tavern on the Schallmooser Hauptstrasse,
which led out of the city, a place I frequented over the
years, in part because of the old-fashioned and always
loud j ukebox with its ever reliable Creedence Clearwa
ter Revival songs-"Have You Ever Seen the Rain?"
and "Lookin' Out My Back Door" and "Lodi." Zlatko
used to play cards there, always for high stakes. After a
rustic childhood in the east, a business machine ap
prenticeship in Belgrade, and extended army service in
several corners of Yugoslavia, he had left Serbia for
Austria to get rich, as he claimed. He did not achieve
that as a laundry employee in a Salzburg suburb. And
so, between stints as a messenger-assistant for a travel
agency, he tried his luck as a professional gambler in
Mirjam's Pub; working alone, however, he had no
chance in the long run against the European-class
gambling syndicates that replaced one another there.
(What I chiefly remember of him from that time is his
appeal to an invisible heaven after every lost game.) M
terward he became, so to speak, resolutely honest, an
occasional employee, alwa�s prompt, competent, and
incidental, and sometimes, almost exclusively by com
mission, also a painter of curious genre scenes, only re
motely related to the colorful and somewhat derivative
fantasies of the once highly prized Serbian naive
painters-recalling, for example, nineteenth-century
5
Slovenian beehive paintings (on display in the sweet

little museum in Radovlj ica, on Bled Lake) or the inn
signs of the Georgian muralist Pirosmani. Since the out-
v
break of the Yugoslavian wars, Zlatko B., like Zarko R. ,

had withdrawn from the city of Salzburg into the
country, and then he had officially dropped his Serbian
name in favor of a German-sounding one-a faith
ful evocation of the seventeenth-century Netherland
ish miniaturist he valued so highly, Adrian Brouwer.
And Zlatko B . , alias Adrian Br. , likewise agreed on
the spot to my proposal for a joint trip through his
Serbia. We would visit his parents, vintners in the
village of Porodin, near the central Serbian river
Morava-if possible before late November, so as not
to miss the last of the beautiful autumn and the grapes
in the vineyards. He hesi tared, however, to drive his
own car, because he had heard it would be stolen in
no time in his Serbian homeland.
At the end of October 1995, from our three various
locations, we made our way to Belgrade: one from
near Salzburg, straight through Austria and Hungary
(finally, in fact, with his car) , another in a Lufthansa
plane from Cologne, the third, after an automobile
j ourney from a Parisian suburb, by way of Lorraine to
Switzerland, with Swissair from Zurich, accompanied
by S . It thus became one of the few trips in my life
that I didn't take alone and the first during which I re
mained almost exclusively in the company of others.
6
A J O U R N E Y T O T H E RI V E R S
I had not otherwise especially prepared myself for Ser

bia. S. and I had almost neglected to acquire visas, my
memory dominated by an image of the vast Yugoslavia
I had known from 1970 to 1990, everywhere accessible
and without war. And now, at the appropriate place in
Paris, no longer an ambassade but simply an emer
gency office, I had to give a reason for the trip.
"Tourist, " which applied, was considered unbelievable
(was I the first since the war began?) and insufficient.
Fortunately, in a back room, a cosmopolitan represen
tative of Serbia appeared who required no more expla
nation; and she assured us that we need not fear,
anywhere in her country, even a moment of publicity.
(But "'hat was her country? She came from the Kra
jina, which has since, apparently, permanently fallen
to the state of Croatia.)
On the evening before departing, I saw Emir Kus
turica's film Underground in a theater in Versailles.
I had, on the one hand, admired the earlier films of
the Bosnian from Saraj evo , like Time of the Gypsies
and Arizona Dream, for their more than merely free
floating-their free-flying fantasy, with images and se
quences so densely and evenly intertwined that they
frequently metamorphosed into Oriental ornaments
(what could be the antithesis of constriction); on the
other hand, I had missed anything like a connection
to earth or country or even world in these image
flights, so that in each case the entire fantasy soon ex
ploded into an eye-stuffing fantastification; and rather
7
than being forced to admire, I have always preferred

being moved, or being almost moved, an effect that
works in me most strongly, persists, lasts.
With Underground, I was, for the first time, (al
most) moved by one of Kusturica's films. The narra
tive facility had finally become a narrative force, as a
talent for dreaming, a powerful one, had joined with a
concrete piece of world and history-the forrner Yu
goslavia, the home of the young Kusturica. For wasn't
it a force-a Shakespearean force, repeatedly shot
through with the power of the Marx Brothers-when
in a major scene near the end, deep in the civil war,
one of the film's heroes, searching desperately, inter
minably for his son, who had disappeared in the B el
grade Danube, runs on and on through the battle
smoke and switches repeatedly between screaming for
the lost child and bellowing the order: " Fire! " ? In that
moment, so much of what had been written against
Underground seemed foolish or malicious. Not only
did Alain Finkielkraut, one of the new French
philosophers and, since the beginning of the war, an
incomprehensible chatterer for a Croatian state, ac
cuse Kusturica's film in Le Monde, after the showing in
Cannes, without having seen it, of terrorism, pro
Serbian propaganda, etc. , but j ust a few days ago,
in Liberation, Andre Glucksmann, another new phi
losopher, grotesquely reversed the point when he con
gratulated Kusturica on his film-which he had
seen-as a coming to terms with a terroristic Serbian
8
Communism that, as opposed to the Germans, had

learned nothing from its historical misdeeds: a person
who reads that into Underground, what has he seen?
What does he see at all ? And a critic of the film in the
German Zeit, otherwise insightful, found Kusturica
full of rage, resentment, even "vindictiveness. " Not at
all. Underground comes, is made, consists, and has an
effect-! saw it-solely out of sorrow and pain and a
powerful love; and even its brutalities and noise are
part of that . . . all of which together finally produces
the clear-sightedness, sometimes almost clairvoyance,
of this other Yugoslavian history, or the naturalness of
a fairy tale: see the festive ending on the island that
drifts away from the continent, in which the idiot of
the film, suddenly not at all so disturbed, let alone idi
otic, turns to the audience, and clearly and with the
gentle authority only the narrator of a fairy tale can as
sume, says: " Once there was a country . . . " (For me,
there in the theater, his fairy tale was unfortunately all
too short.)
But the very worst that has yet been written
against Kusturica's film was again in Le Monde, once
one of my favorite newspapers. Disguised in its famil
iar solemn and distinguished form-scarcely a photo,
densely set text, quasi-official columns-it now has
become, aside from its often still hyperconscientious
main section, a demagogic snoop sheet, and not only
in cases like the illness of President Mitterrand, which
was spread over the pages a year ago under the pretext
9
of providing information, with a lust for death that is

perhaps in keeping with the times but certainly is not
contemporary. The newspaper does not describe its
s ujets any longer; still less does it evoke them, which
would be better, nobler; but instead it gropes them
makes them into objects. Typical of the new perspec
tive is the way that-once unthinkable in Le
Monde-persons are initially characterized in terms of
their exteriors, as was, j ust recently in a front-page col
umn, an American art photographer: "a scheming,
disinviting forty-year-old" (or something like that) , as
if the seeming image abstinence of the newspaper
were producing other images altogether, word images,
and certainly none to be taken seriously.
Since the editorial corps of Le Monde had agreed
(see Finkielkraut's infamy) that Emir Kusturica and
his pro-Serbian or Yugophile craziness should be
swept aside, on the same culture pages as the thread
bare, seemingly remote-controlled review by the main
film critic-an occasionally intelligent and finely dif
ferentiating writer-who reproached the film for its
baroque or self-referential forms, meaning that they
only play with themselves, an article appeared about
Undergro und from the hand of a woman formerly fa
miliar to me, as a newspaper reader, only as the Yu
goslavian war correspondent for Le Monde, and in fact
as one who not only was biased-and why not, in this
case?-but over and above that, in report after report,
let loose a sturdy and even enviably self-conscious hate
10
A J O U R N E Y T O TH E RI V E R S
for everything Serbian. She wanted to prove that Kus

turica's film, filmed on Serbian soil (and waters) , was
undoubtedly produced with the support of local firms
and was thus in violation of the trade prohibition or
embargo imposed by the United Nations on Serbia
and Montenegro. With a laborious and simultane
ously highly j udgmental thoroughness that only ap
peared to be objective, she cited against Underground,
for approximately a quarter column, all of the even
vaguely applicable UN resolutions, numbered para
graph after numbered paragraph, subregulation after
subregulation, all of it pedantically ordered, totaled
up, interlinked in a litany of guilt, comparable only to
an indisputable, final , irrevocable j ustification of a le
gal opinion-and thereby suggesting that Kusturica's
fil m, even simply as a product or ware, was in its
essence something unlawful, its non-Serbian (French
and German) "coproducers" were breakers of the law,
the film, at leas t in the countries obliged to uphold
the embargo, should be withdrawn from the screen,
pulled from circulation (I'm translating the recom
mendation of the war correspondent rather mildly) ;
Underground had no right to exist, and the producers
and the filmmaker Emir� Kusturica were war profi
teers, at least. (In fairness, it should be mentioned that
in the meantime, approximately a month after this ar
ticle appeared, the newspaper printed a short letter
from a reader in which Le Monde was politely re
quested finally to bring an end to the "unsavory inci-
II
P E TE R H A N D K E
dent"; but in the next issue there was a report written

by another woman at the front, this time about the
circumstances of the Red Star Belgrade soccer club, in
truth, at least for a close reader, a closed chain of de
nunciations, with this stinger at the end: the club,
long allied-according to the international press
with the "notorious bandit and war killer Arkan, " had
not i n fact distanced itself from Arkan, although the
club leaders claimed to have done so; why otherwise
would there still be in the Red Star souvenir shop,
next to the uniforms, ashtrays, and the like, a video
cassette of the "sulfurous" wedding of the war criminal
with the "chauvinist Serbian rock singer Ceca"?)
I have had to spend so much time with these (per
haps) peripheral scenes and rotten language games,
less worthy of Philip Marlowe than of the vice squad,
because the above-cited strain of rhetoric, dictated al
most purely by a suspicious, predetermined, inquisito
rial agenda, seems to exemplify a predominant strand
of publications about the Yugoslavian wars since they
began. "What, are you trying to help minimize the
Serbian crimes in Bosnia, in the Krajina, in Slavonia,
by means of a media critique that sidesteps the basic
facts?" "Steady. Patience. Justice. " The problem-only
mine?-is more complicated, complicated by several
levels or stages of reality; and I am aiming, in my de
sire to clarify it, at something thoroughly real through
which something like a meaningful whole can be sur
mised in all the mixed-up kinds of reality. For what
I2
does one know when participation is almost always

only a ( tele)visual participation? What does one know
when overwhelming on-line networking produces
only information and not the knowledge that can
come into being solely through learning, observing
and learning? What does one know who, in place of
the thing, sees only its picture, or, as in TV news, an
abbreviation of a picture, or, as in the on-line world,
an abbreviation of an abbreviation?
There are two things, worse than puzzles, that I
have not been able to rid myself of for four and a half
years, since June 1991, the beginning of the so-called
ten-day war in Slovenia, the starter's gun for the
breaking apart of Yugoslavia. Two things-a number
and an image, a photograph. The number: approxi
mately seventy people died during that initial war,
relatively few in comparison to the many tens of thou
sands in the subsequent wars. Still, how did it happen
that almost all of the seventy victims were from the
Yugoslavian People's Army, which even then was con
sidered the great aggressor? Much more powerful in
every sense, that army should have toyed (toy?) with
the few Slovenian freedom fighters. (The relative
numbers are known, curiously without having pene
trated into world consciousness .) Who banged away at
whom? And wasn't there perhaps even an explicit or
der from the army not to strike back, for one imag
ined that one was still, in spite of everything, among
southern Slav brothers and wanted to act on that be-
I3
lief or illusion, at least on the one side? And the ac

companying photograph, which I then saw in Time
magazine: a rather sparse group of Slovenes in slightly
romantic battle dress, with a banner and a flag, repre
senting the newly created republic. And if memory
serves me, there were not really any young people
among them, or in any case the crowd or troop exhib
ited no youthfulness: foremost in my memory are pot
bellied freedom fighters in their mid-thirties, a bunch
of lady-killers, the flags as the scenery of an outdoor
theater; and even now my first thought on seeing
that picture won't leave my head: it was those semi
cheerful outdoor types, not freedom fighters, who
cold-bloodedly shot down the seventy young soldiers,
who, despite their weapons superiority, were between
a rock and a hard place. Naturally, that may be non
sense-which shows, nonetheless, how such broadcast
reports and pictures transform or misform themselves
in the receptor.
Increasingly, the war reports affected me in a simi
lar way. Where was the parasite that was displacing the
realities or moving them like backdrops: in the news
itself or in the consciousness of the addressee? How
was it possible, for example, that I could immediately
empathize, at the end of November 1991, on the
evening of the day of the report of the fall of the city
of Vukovar, when the sign of the Parisian Metro sta
tion Stalingrad was altered to Vukovar by the hand of a
passerby, both indignant and moved. I viewed that as
an appropriate as well as a biblical deed, or as the ideal

combination of artistic and political action-and that
still, as early as the next morning, like a film that is
momentarily gripping but that immediately following
the words "The End" seems less plausible and later,
when thought through, even less so (as a rule, these
are from HollY'vood) , my doubts arose about how
"Stalingrad" and "Vukovar" could be said in the same
breath. How, for example, was I ever supposed to sep
arate the statement of a hatemongering hack in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from what had just
happened in East Slavonia? The Serbs living in Croa
tia (thus also in and around Vukovar) , heretofore Yu
goslavian citizens on equal footing with their Croatian
fellow citizens, were suddenly designated a second
class ethnic group in the constitution of the new state
of Croatia, adopted over their heads . And now these
approximately six hundred thousand Serbian people,
no longer simply answerable to Croatian management
but annexed, unasked, into a Croatian state, were, ac
cording to the decree of the German journalist, most
properly, most obligingly, most obediently "to con
sider themselves"-so therel-"a minority"!? "Good,
yes sir! As of today, we agree to consider ourselves a
minority in our own country and are accordingly also
willing to be classifi e d by your Croatian constitution
as such": that is supposed to have been the alternative
to the war in the Kraj ina and for the city of Vukovar?
Who was the first aggressor? What does it mean to
IS
P ETE R H AN D K E
found a state that ranks its peoples relative to one an

other in a region where, since history began, an im
mense number of people have lived for whom such a
state would be as welcome as a slap in the face, or
in other words would be an atrocity comparable to
the unforgettable persecutions at the hands of the
Hiderian-Croatian Ustacha regime. Who, then, was
the aggressor? Was the one who provoked a war the
same as the one who began it? And what does " begin"
mean? Could such a provoking also be a beginning?
("You started it!" "No, you started it! ") And how
would I, as a Serb in Croatia, have related to such a
state, established as an enemy to me and my people?
Would I have emigrated "home" over the Danube to
Serbia, although perhaps deeply bound to the place,
in part by generations of ancestors? Perhaps. Would I ,
even if suddenly a second-class citizen, even i f a co
erced citizen of Croatia, have remained in the country,
reluctantly to be sure, sad, full of gallows humor, but
in the service of precious peace? Perhaps. Or, had it
been in my power, would I have taken up arms-nat
urally, only with many others of my peers and, in an
emergency, even with the help of a disintegrating,
aimless Yugoslavian army? Probably, or, if I were, as
such a Serb, halfway young and without a family of
my own, almost certainly. And wasn't that how the
war began, as is well known, with the marching of the
first Croatian state militia into the Serbian villages
around Vukovar? About the war itself, however, some-
A JO U R N E Y T O T H E R I V E R S
one like myself may say nothing; for that horrible

"War is war" is still in force, and the even more horri
ble "Civil war is civil war. " And whoever understands
that not as retching, but as indifference, likewise need
read no further. (Isn't the almost ostentatious "heart
lessness" of the Serbian Jewish author Aleksandar
Tisma, with his ((War is war, " exposed so often in
German newspapers, more, much more thought
provoking than all the indignant, extortionate lip
service, extortionate and far from a primal scream?)
Later, from the spring of 1992 on, when the first pho
tographs, soon photo sequences or serial photos, were
shown from the Bosnian war, there was a part of my
self (repeatedly standing for ((my whole") which felt
that the armed Bosnian Serbs, whether the army or
individual killers, especially those on the hills and
mountains around Sarajevo, were ((enemies of human
ity," to slightly vary Hans Magnus Enzensberger's
phrase in reference to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hus
sein; and as things continued, in response to the re
ports and photographs from the Serbian-Bosnian
internment camps, I could have, to some extent, ap
proved of the statement of a Serbian patriot, the poet
and opposition leader Vuk CWolf") Draskovic, ac
cording to whom now, with the massacre in Bosnia
Herzegovina, the Serbian people too, throughout
history hardly ever the perpetrators, or first perpetra
tors, had become a kind of people of Cain. And not
IJ
P ET E R H AN D K E
j ust once, not only momentarily, when confronted by

another murdered child in a Saraj evo morgue, alone
in an empty universe-photographs, by the way, that
Spanish newspapers like El Pais are world champions
in enlarging and publishing, in their own minds per
haps following in the footsteps of Francisco Goya-l
asked myself, Why doesn't one of us here, or, even bet
ter, someone from there, one of the Serbian people
personally, take the life of the one responsible for such
a thing, the Bosnian Serb chieftain Radovan Karadzic,
reportedly the author of children's poems before the
war! Another Stauffenberg or Georg Elsner! ?
And in spite of that, almost coincidentally with
the impotent impulses to violence of someone visually
involved from afar, another part of me (\vhich in fact
never stood for my whole) did not want to trust this
war and this war reporting. Didn't want to? No,
couldn't. Because the roles of attacker and attacked, of
the pure victims and the naked scoundrels, were all
too rapidly determined and set down for the so-called
world public. How, my immediate thought had been,
is that ever supposed to end well, the high-handed
establishment of a state by a single people-if
the Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslim descendants of
Serbs in Bosnia are in fact a people-in a region to
which two other peoples have a right, and the same
right!, and further, all three peoples are mixed up
among one another, not only in the multicultural cap
ital city but from village to village and from house to
I8
house In the villages themselves? And again, how

would I have acted as a Serb there in Bosnia in re
sponse, to put it mildly, to the aggressive founding of
a state not suitable to me in my, our, own territory?
Who now was the aggressor? (See above.)
And in the course of events, weren't, for a time,
many of the distant observers so disposed that if occa
sionally, as a single exception, one of the pictures of
the war victims bore the caption "Serb," we saw that
as a mistake, a typographical error, in any case as the
exception to be ignored? For if there were in fact such
innocent Serbian victims, then they were in a ratio of
one to a thousand-one Serbian corpse to a thousand
Muslim ones, corresponding to their rare appearance
in world consciousness. Which side of the war was, in
terms of the dead and martyred, the most attractive
for reporting and photography? And why, for the first
time, were these sides changed somewhat in the sum
mer of 1995, with the expulsion of the Serbs from the
Kraj ina?-although still it was not the faces of the
murdered people that were seen but "only" those of
the homeless, with the accompanying suggestion that
"these same people" had earlier driven out another
people. And doesn't the number j ust published by the
International Court of Justice of those suspected of
war crimes in the Yugoslavian war fit that pattern?
Forty-seven (47) Serbs, eight (8) Croats, and one ( 1)
Muslim are said to be sought, perhaps, by those in
The Hague-as if for this side too, for form's sake,
I9
P E T E R H AN D K E
one is needed, a token war crin1inal, as otherwise a to

ken good person .
But didn't the odd observer, even before the pic
tures of the refugee trek out of the Kraj ina, notice how
the Serbian victims, almost invisible up to that point,
as a rule appeared radically different in picture, sound,
and print than the hecatombs of the others? Yes, in
the photos, etc., of the couple of exceptionally news
worthy Serbs, they seemed to me in fact to be "vanish
ing" and thus stood in the most conspicuous contrast
to their comrades in grief and sorrow from the other
remaining peoples of the war. The latter, it was not
uncommon to see, didn't exactly "pose, " but they
dearly had been shifted into a pose as a result of the
visual or reported perspective: doubtlessly really suf
fering, they were shown in a pose of suffering. And
during the years of war reporting, while continuously
and really suffering, and no doubt more and more,
they compliantly and visibly adopted the requested
martyr faces and postures for the lenses and mi
crophones of the international photographers and
reporters, as instructed, directed, signaled ("Hey,
partner! ") . Who can tell me I am mistaken or even
malicious when, looking at the picture of the unre
strainedly crying face of a woman in dose-up behind
the bars of a prison camp, I see also the obedient fol
lowing of directions given by the photographer of the
international press agency outside the camp fence; and
even in the way the woman clings to the wire I see
20
something suggested by the picture merchant? Yes, it

may be that I am mistaken , the parasite is in my eye
(the child, large in one photo, screaming in the arms
of a woman , its mother?, and in the subsequent photo
far away in a group, very peaceful in the arms of an
other woman, its real mother?) , but why haven't I ever
seen such meticulously framed, cleverly devised, and
seemingly set-up photographs-at least not here, in
the "West"-of a Serbian war victim? Why were Serbs
hardly ever shown in close-ups, and hardly ever alone,
but almost always only as groups, and almost always
only in the middle distance or background, j ust van
ishing, and also, as opposed to their Croatian or Mus
lim cosufferers, hardly ever with their gaze directly
and passionately into the camera, but rather in profile
or gazing at the ground as if conscious of their guilt?
Like a foreign tribe? Or as if too proud to pose? Or as
if too sad for that?
Thus a part of me could not take sides, much less

j udge. And that led, and not only me, to such
grotesque and at the same time perhaps not entirely
incomprehensible mechanisms (?) as those described a
couple of months ago by the ,still young French writer
(with a Croatian mother) Patrick Besson, in a defense
of or, rather, a lampoon for the Serbs (a lampoon
for?). The lampoon, insightful throughout, ranging
from sense to nonsense, begins with Besson's assertion
that initially he had seen the beasts of war on the same
2I
side as all the other Western observers , but then one

day-cunningly he plays the news consumer, the
moody, chic Parisian-he was sick of such monotony.
What follows, to be sure, has to do not at all with
moods but solely with the author's sensitivity to lan
guage and images. First, he very explicitly reminds us
of Yugoslavia's history of suffering and resistance dur
ing the Second World War-what the rest of us hardly
remember and that we now require those affected, and
their children and children's children, finally to forget.
Then, in a furious sweep, Besson strings together all
the worn-out media cliches about contemporary Yu
goslavian events , a kind of continuation of Flaubert's
Dictionary ofAccepted Ideas, now, to be sure, less for
laughter than for crying and screaming at once. As an
example here, his citation of the usual sketch of
Radovan Karadzic: how it has happened that his pro!.
fession as psychiatrist is automatically mentioned, for
obviously, vide Flaubert, all of those who care for the
mentally ill cast a shadow themselves; and how, in ad
dition, in publications from Vienna to Paris, he regu
larly is given the tide "Doctor, " an obvious parallel to
that "Dr. Strangelove" who, in the film by Stanley
Kubrick, wants to blow up our world, etc. , etc. And,
as it happened, while reading Besson's lampoon, I
came across a kind of portrait of the Serb leader in Le
Monde, which featured popular image after popular
image, cliche after cliche, exactly that linguistic prac
tice j ust mentioned. This was a quasi-serious account
22
of a reality that included additional accepted ideas: for

example, the poems that psychiatrist Dr. K. writes
naturally, " in his spare time"-were read by nobody
and were, naturally, "mediocre, " etc. And in one of
those grotesque response mechanisms to such things,
at least in my case, I wanted to read a poem of
KaradziC's-just as the phrases about the murderer's
bride and chauvinist singer Ceca awakened a desire to
hear her songs. And in a perhaps similar mechanism
in Patrick Besson: how, after all the prefabricated re
ports, he actually sees Radovan Karadzic once in Pale
and describes him as an aging, tired, almost absent,
rather sad woman-an almost loving description: -
an inadmissible countermechanism?
In any case, such mechanisms or, better, defenses
or, better, countermotions seem worth mentioning in
part because they run the risk of falling out of balance
and losing a sense of justice-like the perhaps only
popular image to slip from B esson's hand in his de
fense of Serbs, a turbid stereotype not unlike the ones
he aims at in his pamphlet: he tells of a meeting of
warriors in that same Pale, and the B osnian Serb sol
diers appear quite different from our usual concep
tions of them, which would perhaps be a good thing if
the young men didn't rise so delicately out of the short
depiction, sentence after sentence, approaching the
motto "Lively, Cheerful, Free" [Frisch, Frohlich, Frei,
the motto of the physical education movement
around r8oo]. And I thought then the danger of such
23
countermotions could be that something might ex

press itself in them comparable to the glorifications of
the Soviet system by some travelers in the West during
the thirties. Still, is it a misdirected mechanism when,
in response to every new journalistic report of yet an
other horde of Sl ivov ica-drinking Serbian nationalists,
rural illuminati, and paranoiacs, one sees a not so dis
similar horde of foreign reporters every evening at a
hotel bar, holding, instead of the plum brandy, one
distilled from grapes or something else? Or when one
desires for many a journalist, on the occasion of his
hundredth identical Yugoslavia article, not exactly a
glowing coal on the lips, as in the prophet Isaiah, but
certainly a small poultice of stinging nettle around his
writing hand?
What follows here, however, does not stem entirely

from my perhaps mechanistic mistrust of those (often
seemingly practiced) heraldic reports but consists of
questions about the thing itself: Has it been proved
that the two attacks on Markale, the market of Sara
jevo, were really Bosnian Serb atrocities, as claimed,
for example, by Bernard Henri-Levy-he too a new
philosopher, one of the increasing number of contem
porary philosophers who are everywhere and no
where-who trumpeted immediately after the attack,
in an absurd grammar: "It will doubtless be the Serbs
who prove the guilty ones!"? And another parasite
question: What really happened in Dubrovnik? Was
the small, old, wonderflJl city bowl or bowl city on the

Dalmatian coast actually bombed and shot up early in
the winter of 1991? Or only-bad enough-episodi
cally shelled? Or did the targets lie outside the thick
city walls and there were stray shells, ricochets? Mali
cious or accidental, shells that were put up with (that,
too, bad enough) ?
And finally, I have even come so far that I ask, and
not only myself: What is the truth about that violent
dream of "Greater Serbia" ? Didn't the powers that be
in Serbia, if they in fact dreamed it, have it in their
power-child's play-to bring it to pass? Or isn't it
also possible that a few of the innumerable sand grains
of legend that fly around wildly in disintegrating
kingdoms, not only those in the Balkans, have been
magnified in our foreign darkrooms into stumbling
blocks? (Not long ago, a purported chronicle of the
four war years in Yugoslavia in the Frankforter Allge
meine began as early as the subtitle to assign guilt for
the disintegration of the country to the anonymous
memorandum writers of the Serbian Academy of
1986: "The war in the former Yugoslavia began in the
study I Scientists provide the ideological j ustification
for the great conflict. ") Q idn't, finally, a "Greater
Croatia" prove to be something incomparably more
real, or more effective, or more massive, more deter
mined and resolved, than the legend-nourished Ser
bian dream seed, which never and nowhere gathered
into a unified sense of power and power politics? And
25
P E T E R HA N D K E
won't the history of the wars of disintegration now be

written differently perhaps than in the contemporary
assignments of guilt in advance? But hasn't this his
tory, as a result, already been written in stone for all
the future? Written in stone? Not rather rigidified, as
after 1914, as after 1941-rigidified and consolidated in
the consciousness of Yugoslavia's neighboring peoples
as well, of Austria above all, and of Germany, and thus
ready for the next explosion, for the next 19 91? Who
will someday write this history differently, even if only
the nuances-which could do much to liberate the
peoples from their mutual inflexible images?
2
PART ONE
OF THE TRIP
T H E T H I N G S I H AV E T O R E LAT E about our tnp

through Serbia are not intentional counterimages to
the multiple prepunched peepholes into the country.
For what impressed me, without intent and without
effort on my part, were almost exclusively third
things-that third that according to the German epic
writer Hermann Lenz is to be seen or caught sight of
"alongside outside" and that for the old philosopher
(nothing against new philosophers; now and then I
would need one) Edmund Husserl is called "the life
world. " And naturally I was always conscious while
traveling that I was in the state of Serbia, constituent
state of the shrunken Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
This third, this life-world, did not lie inside or away
from the signs of reality or of the times.
Before departing from Zurich, I bought a small
Langenscheidt's dictionary (1992 edition) . Where it
once said "Serbo-Croatian" on the familiar yellow
cover, only "Croatian" now stood. I asked myself,
while thumbing through, whether I would have found
"D IN, Deutsche Industrienorm" in the back under
"Common Abbreviations" even during the time when
Serbian too played a role. It was newly revised by
27
"Pro£ Dr. Reinhard Lauer," who, more or less that

same year, hired by the F.AZ there repeatedly accused
the entire Serbian people, along with its poets (by
passed by the Enlightenment from, shall we say, the
Romantic Nj egos to Vasko Popa-see identification
with the wolf!; see Popa's wolf poems!) , of the most
dangerous myth complexes .
In contrast to the other gates at the Zurich airport,
hardly any of the passengers to B elgrade opened their
mouths, and even during the flight we remained quite
silent, as if the Serbs, even as a large majority in the
belly of the plane (foreign workers? visiting parents?) ,
felt they were on the way to an uncertain destination.
While landing in the flat, long since harvested
countryside, nothing visible far or near of the city of
Belgrade, with over a million inhabitants the "only
cosmopolitan city in the Balkans" (Dragan Velikic;
more about him later) , S. made me aware of a group
of people, or silhouettes, next to the runway, roasting
a piglet there at the edge of a field. Other late-autumn
smoke plumes rose up, simultaneously, everywhere.
Previously, in a book by the contemporary Serbian
novelist Milorad Pavic, I had read of a woman who,
kissing her lover, counted his teeth one by one with
her tongue; and that the meat of fish from rivers
which, like the Morava, flow from south to north is
no good; and that it is barbaric, while mixing wine, to
pour in the water, rather than the other way around.
v
And then my friend and translator Zarko was

standing at the airport exit, having flown ahead of us

from Cologne. I hadn't seen him for several years, and
yet I was now almost disappointed to be picked up. I
would rather have negotiated this first threshold to the
foreign country, found my way in, alone. As if I had
spoken it aloud, he said that he too had become some
thing of a stranger in Belgrade and Serbia (as was
borne out by the awkwardness of his movements, in
cluding his opening of the hotel door).
On the drive through the new parts of town,
"Novi Beograd, " intermittently, in the almost steppe
like emptiness, there occurred at regular intervals
something like mass gatherings close to the edges of
the broad access roads, and at the same time widely
separated from one another: the entire population in
the middle of what seemed an otherwise leisurely af
ternoon-all the buildings under construction as if
long since abandoned-waiting ostensibly for buses
and streetcars, interminably, though no longer with
the appearance of waiting people. And again it was S .
who made me aware o f the even more frequent groups
of black market gasoline sellers with their plastic con
tainers. In the first moments, as so often, and not only
particularly there, I had a clear view of all the antici
pated emblems of reality.
In the Moskwa Hotel-an elegant and, as time
passed, even noble-seeming street-corner structure
from the turn of the century, in the center of the city
on the terrace above the Save and the Danube (Dunav
in Serbian)-almost all the rooms were empty, while

downstairs at the reception desk an entire brigade of
employees (including their friends ?) lazed around, and
initially it seemed to us in our room that we were
the first guests in a long time and the last for even
longer. From S . 's view, from the high balcony door
down to the leaf-blown boulevard-no, bulevar; no,
EYflEBAP-1 felt her French depaysement come over
me, her alienation, her being foreign here, or, trans
lated literally, her "having fallen out, being out of the
country" (like being out of oneself) , and I wished
then and there to conj ure up my other Serbian friend
for us, the former laundry employee and gambler,
who would have been immediately and contagiously
at home everywhere, whether in Salzburg or here in
his capital city, or who at least would have conta
giously scorned all need for being home. (He was two
days late on his drive through Eastern Europe.)
For my part, the "repaysement," the "repatriation,"
took place immediately afterward, on that very boule
vard, while buying something in a shop, in fact while de
pressing the ancient iron door handle and pushing open
the shop door almost laboriously, and it became final,
valid for all the subsequent days, with the speaking of the
name of the article, learned out on the street and under
stood immediately by the saleswoman. And S. too
seemed to become somewhat secure during the evening
walk through the unexpectedly bright center of Belgrade
in the direction of the Kalemegdan, the old Turkish
30
fortress high above the confluence of the Save and the

v
Danube. Only Zarko, the native, our pilot, stumbled, got

mixed up, lost his way, confused directions, and could
not cease talking about his having become a stranger in
his own capital, where he had in fact been living again for
several days, cared for by his mother, which made me
think he had probably always been a stranger in Bel
grade-and then his answer again: actually he was at
home only out in the suburb of Zemun, on the Danube,
where it begins to flow into the Pannonian plain, his
birthplace, childhood locale, and lookout.
The first Belgrade evening was mild, and the half
moon shone not only over the Turkish fortress. There
were many people out, as is customary in a large
southern European center. But they impressed me as
not only more silent than, let's say, in Naples or
Athens but also more conscious of themselves and of
the other passersby, more alert as well, in the sense of a
very special courteousness that did not display itself
but simply suggested itself through a manner of walk
ing that excluded jostling, even when hurried, or
through a similarly harmonious way of speaking,
which seemed to leave room for others , without
the yelling out, whistling; and showing off common
in comparable pedestrian zones. And the numerous
street vendors were quietly ready for their customers,
addressing no one (there was one who contradicted
my image) . I caught sight of no Serbian slivovitz
drinkers but rather, around a street fountain, people
JI
who drank water from their hands; and nowhere was

there any sign of or reference to the war, and hardly a
policeman, at least perceptibly fewer than elsewhere in
urban areas. S . thought later that these citizens of
Belgrade were serious and depressed. The inhabitants
seemed to me, however, at least at first sight, singu
larly animated (as opposed to the theater audience
thirty years earlier) and at the same time, yes, civilized.
Out of a general consciousness of guilt? No, stemming
from something like a great thoughtfulness, an over
developed consciousness, and-I felt there and now
think here-an almost dignified collective isolation;
and perhaps also out of pride: one, to be sure, that did
not boast. "The Serbs have become modest," I read
later in Die Zeit. Have become? Who knows? Or, in
my favorite saying (Austrian) , along with "For that
you would have had to get up earlier! " : "What does a
stranger know? "
Who were the many old men the next day on the
grounds of the Kalemegdan ruins, most of them
alone, whiling away time so silently in the prewinter
fog rising from both rivers? Often in tie and hat, com
paratively smooth-shaven for the Balkans, they did
not exhibit characteristics of retired workers, nor
could masses of that size be former officials or free
lance workers; they did exude, all of them, a class con
sciousness, but one that was, even in the case of the
possible doctor, lawyer, or former merchant among
32
them, visibly different from, say, the German and es

pecially the Austrian bourgeois consciousness I was ac
quainted with. And further, these old but never aged
men did not give the impression of Europeans or even
Orientals; they most closely resembled strollers on a
misty promenade in Basque country, though lacking
the appropriate caps. Powerful appearances, they were
under way there among the fortress ruins, clear forms
in the fog, their faces almost grim, though over time
they came to express for me a kind of presence, or de
termination. Nor were they confirmed bachelors; they
had rather something about them of long and even
somewhat happily married and now recently widowed
men : widowed and, peculiar in the case of such old
men, at the same time orphaned. No, in my eyes they
could not be Serbian patriots or chauvinists, ultra
orthodox churchgoers, royalists, or old Chetniks, and
surely not former Nazi collaborators, but it was also
difficult to imagine them as partisans with Tiro and
then Yugoslavian functionaries, politicians, and indus
trialists; it was clear only that they had all suffered ap
proximately the same loss and that it was still quite
fresh in their clouded minds as they strolled about.
What was the loss? Loss ? Wasn't it more like they had
�
been brutally defrauded of something?
Among the few questions I actually asked during the

Serbian trip, the most common-so common that it
irritated those traveling with me-was whether the
33
person I questioned believed that Yugoslavia could ever

reconstitute itself Almost none responded positively,
"Not even in a hundred years." At best was the one an
swer "We, at least, will not experience it. " Mil orad
Pavic, the writer, thought that if the former parts of the
republic were ever to draw together, it would happen
solely through trade, and he explained how treasured,
for example, products from Slovenia once were in Ser
bia. Which? "Cosmetics. Slovenian skin creams, oh!"
Only Zlatko's almost eighty-year-old father said, in his
village, Porodin, on the Morava plain: "Not perhaps
with the Croatians, but certainly with the Slovenes,
and that quite soon. We Serbs have always produced
the big things and the Slovenes the small, delicate parts
for them, and that was a good trade-off And I have
never been so hospitably entertained as in Slovenia!"
(That was the only time his wife nodded, vigorously, in
response to one of his remarks.)
After the fog, there followed a couple of days that
were still sunny and again warm. Once, still before
Zlatko ("the golden one") arrived, we traveled with
v
Zarko ("the fiery one") out to his Belgrade suburb, Ze-

mun, his childhood locale and now perhaps his dream
home-out of the city over the Save Bridge, which the
residents of the capital city call "Gazelle. " Difficult, at
first, to participate emotionally as he showed us the
two windows of the family's former apartment (his fa
ther was a minor local politician, who died early on) ,
up in a not especially high apartment building in need
34
of plaster work, the ubiquitous poplars around the

corner; and his route to school, which, I thought or
said, was much too short for anything noteworthy to
have happened-to which his answer was: "But on
the way home, detours!" The Zemun fruit and veg
etable market, neatly separated into two large sections,
spacious for a suburb, with an atmosphere that evoked
the river, gave the first indication of something special
(I bought a couple of apples because I didn't want to
roam through a foreign market like a curiosity seeker) .
And then, for once well guided by our friend, who
had us go ahead at the end, we came out, unsuspect
ing, between small, stretched-out bourgeois houses to
the Danube, so powerfully broad here, in contrast to
the river of the same name I knew in Austria, that an
additional zone stretched back behind on the water,
still far from the other shore, which made this Dunav a
real Strom {flowing river] -a word from the Austrian
national anthern that, measured by my experience, had
always seemed exaggerated to me. A river world
opened for us in this Belgrade or Zemun Danube, an
inland watenvay, not only on the restaurant-lined
promenade, which led back into the city, but also in
the hundreds of boats dr9-wn up in deep, vanishing
rows, anchored and only recently covered for the win
ter, and skiffs like dugouts. Now and then, one of the
things eased free-the soft puttering of its motor, with
sporadic human voices, the only sound far and near
slanting over to the seemingly transcontinental oppo-
35
site shore, where, on the edge of the woods, stilt houses

stood. But most of the watercraft simply rocked in the
current or swung back and forth; here and there,
smoke from a cooking fire; and otherwise the river's
center remained empty for the entire afternoon: the
embargo. This river world was perhaps a sunken one,
decaying, old, but it represented also a world landscape
the likes of which have never emerged for me from the
Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century: a primeval
world that appeared as an undiscovered civilization, a
very appealing one. And then we dined on carp in a
v
river inn of the same name, Saran. In the dusk we

climbed to the Zemun Castle, asked, on the way, for
directions to the castle by an older woman, speaking in
unaccented English, who then apologized that al
though a Serb, she didn't know the language. Up in the
cemetery, the faces of the dead were graven in the
monuments, probably from photos, only much en
larged, many of them married couples, as a rule repre
sented as very young couples, however old they had
become together-perhaps because no subsequent pic
ture had been taken of them?
Back in Belgrade ("White City") , under a nearly full
moon, we finally met Zlatko, who had had to spend a
night in Hungary for driving too fast (his car was al
ready safely parked in a garage near the hotel) , and the
four of us listened to music from various regions of Yu
goslavia until long after midnight in a pub called !rna
Dana ("There Are Days," the title of a Serbian song) ,
while at the same time in Tel Aviv, Yitzhak Rabin was

being murdered-the following morning, his blurred
image appeared on the low-tech front page of the oppo
sition newspaper Nasa Borba. During the late-night
walk home, the fog had returned, so thick that the bod
ies of the passersby seemed cropped and lessened by it.
And, unexpectedly, there were masses of passersby on
all the streets of Belgrade, appearing out of the gray and
whitish clouds that barked up into the city as if from
below, from the two rivers, running and then again mo
tionlessly pressed together in certain places: passengers
for the last streetcars. And then from the hotel window
nothing outside discernible anymore in the now total
fog other than a single bright piece of paper fluttering
back and forth far down the boulevard, joined momen
tarily by the outline of a broom and by the hand of
the post-midnight Belgrade street sweeper. And on Ser
bian state television that farewell scene of President
Milosevic, in1mediately prior to his departure for the
peace talks in Dayton, Ohio: walking down a long line
of military and civilian people on the runway and hug
ging each one long and hard, the whole time visible
only from the back-the departing man for long min
utes only as a picture from the back.
While listening to the Ima Dana music, Zlatko had

told about a legendary section of the Danube near the
city of Smederevo , where-he hadn't experienced it
himself, knew it only secondhand from a teacher at
37
his village school-the great river was supposed to

flow by silently, absolutely without sound. The next
day, we set off for there in his car (neither stolen nor
scratched) and for the first time entered deeper into
the Serbian countryside. And here, toward the south
east, we found what Zlatko said was typical for Serbia:
broad horizons with a gentle, even hilliness (Avala
Mountain, an hour in the car from Belgrade, a bit
much for a local mountain, rose up there like an
event, although it was not at all high-as if every ordi
nary landscape had its Sainte-Victoire massif) . Closely
dovetailed villages were each made up of farmsteads
that themselves consisted of multiple parts, small vil
lages, as it were, within the large village. The cemeter
ies too, out among the fields, seemed to be not cities
of the dead but villages of the dead, animated ones, to
be sure, especially now at the time of All Souls' Day,
celebrated in Serbia a few days after "us," when nour
ishment was brought for the dead, and people ate and
drank with them at their graves. And topsoil that
seemed rich even at a glance stretched to the farthest
folds of the land, where everything grew that was
needed for daily life: corn, sunflowers, and grain, long
since harvested, of course; here and there the remain
ing darkly shining bunches of grapes up on the hill
sides. And again everywhere the gasoline and diesel
sellers with their containers or even j ust bottles and
flasks-Romania was a close supplier-and the seem
ingly infinite if thin stream of those walking the
length and breadth of the country, not only the

refugees from Bosnia and the Krajina, but above all
the natives, common not so long ago among "us" in
Central Europe, village people on the way to the dis
tant hospital or to the weekly market, walking beyond
the secondary streets out even to the scarcely used
freeway (a high toll, especially for foreigners) .
In Smederevo, by foot to the Danube, behind the
n1edieval river fortress partially blown up by the occu
pying Germans in the Second World War: and in
truth, no sound came from the entire open and broad
and yet obviously fast-flowing body of water, the whole
hour there, on the bank, not the least splashing, bub
bling, gurgling, no sound and no stirring. Back in the
city, then, an old passerby was asked for directions: he
didn't know the way, was a refugee from Knin.
T'hat was the day on which, for the first time in
Serbia, it became rather cold even before dusk, with a
hint of snow. But the next day, for a last time, the
warmth of late autumn, sun without wind. Before we
left a Belgrade deeply preoccupied by the peace talks
to visit Zlatko's village, his parents supposedly having
been preparing a feast for us for days, we took a de
tour via the main city market, there on the terraced
embankment that slopes gently down from the city
center to the Save.
Not a few reports have made fun, more or less mildly,

of the indeed ridiculous things with which the Serbian
39
people, if they don't belong to the local mafia, try to

make a profit, from badly bent nails to painfully thin
plastic sacks and, let's say, empty matchboxes. But
there was also, it now turned out, much to buy that
was beautiful, pleasing, and-why not?-charming. It
is difficult for someone who doesn't smoke to tell
whether, for example, the heaps of thin-cut tobacco,
airy and grassy, changing from market table to market
table, taste as good in hand-rolled cigarettes as they
look. I do know the taste of the Yugoslavian breads,
uniform or monotonous only at first glance, of the
massive forest-dark honey pots, of the soup chick
ens as big as turkeys, of the oddly yellow noodle nests
or crowns of the often predator-mouthed, often story
book-fat river fish. But what I remember most vividly
of such market life, noticeably affected by a time of
shortage-and this applied not only to delicacies but
equally to all the perhaps really almost useless stuff
(who knows?)-was a liveliness, something happy,
light, vivacious about the process of buying and sell
ing (that elsewhere has become pompous and grave,
mistrustful and half scornful)-a graceful finger dance
back and forth over the market grounds, a dance of
alternating hands. From the messiness, mold, and
forced nature of mere business deals there arose there,
in miniature, but in myriad variety, something like an
original and, yes, traditional pleasure in commerce.
Pari passu business dealings: the meaning of such a
term was renewed here in this isolated country, as was,
for example, the word "notions. " Business be praised:

would you ever have expected something like that
from yourself (and it wasn't even commissioned) ? And
I caught myself then even wishing that the country's
isolation-no, not the war-might continue; that the
Western (or whatever other) world of goods and mo
nopoly might continue to be inaccessible.
On the drive to the village of Porodin, we finally
crossed the much, probably too much, sung Morava
River, pressed into a symbolic role and forced into a
symbolic bed by the Turkish and Balkan wars. It was
now, simply, autumnally dry and stone-pocked; next
to the automobile bridge, the earlier foot and cart
bridge, half collapsed. Porodin then stretched out
along the road, perhaps one of the longest villages in
Europe, with its several small centers constituting a
kind of village state, as were said to exist in the area, at
a considerable distance from one another. We stopped
for a short time at a general store in one of the village
centers. In front of it, for lunch, a couple of villagers
were drinking beer; during the years of restrictions,
the cafes had become too expensive for most of the
population, and so the business had been converted
into a tavern. On the hou,se across the way a black
doth was stretched out; the little child from there had
recently been run over and killed by a car driving fast,
as usual, in the village built along the road. When a
young man dressed in a farmer's work clothes, with
red eyes and lips that seemed to be swollen, came into
the store, each of us knew immediately that he must

be the child's father.
The house, the farmstead, the estate of Zlatko's
parents-in actuality long since signed over to their
only child, the Serb abroad-lay at the farthest end of
..
Porodin, not beyond seven fabled mountains, but be-

yond seven long curves . It is flanked first by the still
partly blooming flower garden of the mother and im
mediately thereafter, without transition, by the pow
erful muddy yard in front of the barns and stalls;
the accompanying fields and vineyards were scattered
about, generally far apart. The rooms of the house
were in different structural sections, their coherence
difficult to grasp, everywhere new rooms built on or
over or even in the old structure, little of it finished,
however, as is customary, perhaps, for workers abroad
who acquire money and return home by fits and
starts. One of these additions, with a score of shiny
new chairs of a Salzburgian elegance around an
equally bright long oval table, presented itself as
an otherwise empty, totally unprovincial conference
room, and on that same floor, around three corners, a
bathroom tiled in Baroque blue awaited the guest, ob
viously never entered by the timid mother or father;
and perhaps most astonishing of all was to come upon
a small kitchen couch here and there in this new-old
interconnected living section-meant for whom?
but nowhere anything like a master bedroom or a
double bed. "Where do your parents sleep, Zlatko?"
42
"Wherever they end up, here, there; my father some

times down in the basement, my mother usually up
stairs with the television. "
To eat there was the chicken soup, a roast pig, and
the "Serbian" cabbage salad, along with an extremely
cloudy and yet dear-tasting homegrown wine from
the hillsides across the road, where the last visible ob
jects in the dusk were the sheep grazing up the hill.
The conversation between the returned son and
his father and mother had ceased to make sense to
me-was it even still Serbian? No, the family had un
consciously slipped into Romanian, the conversational
or intimate language of most of the village inhabi
tants; Porodin was well known as a linguistic island.
But did they identify themselves as Serbs ? Naturally
what else? On the way back to Belgrade, we carried
with us a basket of fruit, overflowing with grapes, on
each one of which, as we entered the city, there flashed
a point of light.
The single somewhat official day in Serbia began dur

ing the drive into the southern mountains, to the me
dieval church and monastery complex of Studenica, a
national shrine; a trip within-or external to?-the
trip. We traveled in the company of the famous writer
Milorad Pavic, a gently dignifi e d older man who had
always written, he told us , but until his first successes,
past the age of fifty, was known rather as a professor of
literature, a specialist in the Serbian Baroque, with vis-
43
tnng professorships at the Sorbonne a nd I � th i n k .

Princeton.
It was also the day of the first snow, s t art i n g that
morning during our departure fron1 Belgrade. a No
vember snow that brought down from the trees nu
merous leaves, whipped by gusts of wind th a t s p r u ng
the not exactly stable Yugoslavian umbrellas . The d r iv
ing snow increased, and at the instigation of l\1 ilorad
Pavic we stopped at a freeway rest area to drink . . . .
thinned, to be sure, by hot water and served by a sol i
tary rest-stop attendant, who, like n1ost of the popu la
tion along the five-hour journey that follo\\'ed . knew
Gospodin Pavic (and not only from televis ion : t h e
Serbs are said to be a people of readers) .
Kragujevac, Kraljevo-quite large n1 i d-Serb i a n
cities, after which we turned southwest into a no t h e r
Serbia, mountainous, full of canyons, nearly deserted .
with here and there a castle ruin round about a treeless
mountain, similar to a deserted castillo in the S p a n i sh
meseta. And gradually, in advance of every even recog
nizable locality or landscape form, I figured o u t that
my neighbor in the backseat of the car had al ready
written something about it, whether it \vas prose
about this village church or a poem about that rnoun-
.
tatn nver.
.
Up the mountain to the monastery, a lo n g the \Yild

brook named Studenica (in effect, "ice-cold \Vater" ) .
the weather became deep, bitter-cold \vi n te r ,,·e�uh e r.
which stayed with us for all the ren1a1 n 1 ng davs .
44
A bo ve th e o l d Byzan ti n e ch urch settlement on the

H o o r o f a h igh val l ey, n earl y a th ousand meters above
t h e sea t h a t i n Serb i a is so perceptibly distant, the
H a k e s swi rl ed as th ey have fo r eternities. In the fres
coc.:s I re co g n izc.: d th e ro undish table of the Last Sup
p c.: r fro m th e B yz a n t i n e ch urches in Ohrid, in Skopje,
i n ' f 'h c.:ssal o n i ca, Jesus an d th e apostles gathered
a r o u n d i t as i f aro u n d th e Ptolemaic earth disk, and
o n e.: Jo h n th e B a p t i st resem bled Che Guevara in a

way, h i s n i p p l e , s urro und e d by sparse hair, like a
t i n y b u l l c.: t wo und. And in the guest room of the
m o n as tc.:ry, across th e frosty courtyard, in front of an
open h re that sc.:em ed rather to be burning in a white
ovc.:n , t h e a b bo t , of course orthodoxly bearded, after
t h e.: h os p i tabl e.: co n fc.:ct i o n offered by the spoonful,
served wa t c.: r - th i n n e d p l u m bran dy (again!) and him
sel f d i d a m p le.: j ustice to the ruffians' rotgut . And then
s n o w cl o u d aftc.:r sn ow cl oud brush ing the windows of
.
the.: h o tel res tau ran t b e l ow th e m onastery, the cliffs

beh i n d al rc.:ady i n vi s i bl e i n the early-win ter darkness,
the.: o th c.: rw i se u n h e at e d d i n i ng room weakly fanned
.
by a s h oebox-s i ze h eater. Clam m iness, exposure,

fo rced m argi n al i ty. And at the same time I wanted to
.s p c.: n d a p i tch -d ark n i gh t i n th is unworldly place and
#
t h e n was al m os t di sap p o i n ted that the snow did not
preven t o ur return tn p .
iv1 u ch l ater, wh e n I asked S . for an extremely ordi
n ary an d pe r i p heral detail of that day-a day that
co n t i n ue d to have, i n s p i t e of everyth ing, a slightly of-
45
ficial tint-she offered the moment of the crepes, or

palacinke, there in the cold inn : they were served cold
and thick as a thumb, and Monsieur Pavic said it was
hopeless, the Serbs would never learn to make crepes .
Yes, and then I remembered how the poet, breaking
the rule in his book, poured water into the wine
(rather than the other way around) and explained that
it was mineral water and didn't count for him as water.
And how, during the long drive, he had mentioned
the Serbian king in exile, who had become much
more conversant in the language of his forebears since
the disintegration of Yugoslavia and that he, a mem
ber of the Privy Council, was invited to London by
the king with increasing frequency, and they also met
in Greece. And then it was I who told the story of my
Slovenian grandfather in Carinthia, how he voted, in
the plebiscite of 1920, for unification with the newly
established Yugoslavia and had always considered it
his affirmation of the Slavic and a vote against the
Austria that had shrunk, kleindeutsch, in 1918-and
how I had since asked myself whether his decision, af
ter the end of the Hapsburg Empire, with the declara
tion of the republic, hadn't perhaps arisen more out of
a longing or a need, not for a Kaiser, to be sure, but at
least for a king like the one at the head of the young
southern Slavic nation!?
On that same semi-official day, I still had an
evening appointment in Belgrade with the forty-two
year-old writer Dragan Velikic (two writers in one
day) , whom I had met once, in the years before the

wars, in Lipica in the Slovenian karst. I know two of
his short novels, Via Pula, in which the childhood of a
Serb in Croatian Pula is described quite freely, with re
peated crossings or views into possible second or third
lives, and then Zeichner des Meridian (Draftsman of
the Meridian) , read after my return (both published
by Wieser Verlag) . The latter is a grotesquely mir
rored, shattered, shardlike story about a decimated Yu
goslavia-the narrative and the told events work
together and produce, finally, alongside "book" and
"country, " a third thing. Velikic writes against the
grain, a contrary writer born of the collision of the
geographic-historical with t� corresponding frag
mented self that is, at the same time, no less "I!": this
is the substance of the book or the minor premise that
holds together the splintered things and passages. And
of course examples are in order. " Life as a grave. It
cannot, perhaps, be otherwise in a land where, at the
turning point of the winds over centuries, the cunning
eunuch with the silk cording, the snake-eyed wearer of
a habit, and the bearded schismatic faced one another.
They can be forged together only through deception."
Or: "In European cities (1995) enclaves of Belgrade
�
youths vegetate, fled in the early nineties, during the
war in Croatia and Bosnia. It was their fate to be for
gotten. For the fighting parties, the war dogs, are from
the same tribe, whatever their names and with how
ever many fingers they cross themselves. If they cross
47
themselves . " And: "Just like a hibernating scorpion

that spends its years in a green wall, he (the hero)
dreams the life that hasn't been realized. It is impossi
ble to still the vein that pulses. "
On that late evening in Belgrade, Dragan Velikic,
whom I remembered as strong and passionate, as at
tentive and full of trust, seemed to me at first glance
rather depressed and disheartened, almost despon
dent. The place of our meeting was not a good one,
perhaps : the supposedly private address turned out to
be a small publishing house, where a couple of other
"literary" people were already waiting with Velikic,
emanating the surely unintended air of conspirators .
And because at that late hour there was no longer a
way to escape into one of the neighborhood pubs, the
official character of this day, as if preestablished, con
tinued, curiously, deep into the night. A kind of panel
discussion was now supposed to take place about gen
eral conditions, about the Bosnian war, about the ,
Bosnian Serb, Serbian Serb role in the war. For a long
time we sat in near silence, edgy, at a loss, with a huge
bottle of Frascati, and an ancient one at that, although
the young domestic white wine was so much more
palatable; Dragan had a bottle of the famous Riesling
from Palic, but in the general silence it didn't last
long, and it was, in any case, past its prime; strange to
see the vintage 1990 on the label, after the small
Slovenian war and before the other, big ones .
The worst or most awkward moment came when
someone passed around a memento from the war in

Bosnia, said to be the guidance capsule of a Toma
hawk rocket fi r ed from there at the Serb Republic j ust
this past autumn. The approximate size of a rugby
ball, it was an extremely heavy steel thing, between
hemisphere, rounded cone, and miniature pyramid,
which supposedly, shortly before reaching the target,
detached itself from the missile, and the souvenir (in
fact, with an obviously genuine plaque declaring it to
be the property of the U.S. Air Force) was p urportedly
acquired in Banja Luka, the center for Bosnian Serbs.
Still, instead of feeling closer to the events as a result, I
sensed that we were all suddenly nowhere, and felt
there was now nothing more to say; and I think I was
not the only one to respond that way. Fortunately, I
then thought to ask Velikic about his Pula and about
!stria, and j ust as relieved as the others, he said that his
rented house there was occupied by the Croatian mili
tary; an officer lived in it, while he, from Belgrade,
continued to pay the rent-powerful short laughter
and why not? And then things livened up, with gen
eral conversation about small and large places, about
Feldafing in Bavaria, for example, or about Vienna,
where his young son, during a stay the previous sum
mer, had memorized the transfer possibilities of all the
subway stations.
And then gradually, as a matter of course, the sub
j ect changed to contemporary Yugoslavia. One man in
the room finally literally screamed at how guilty the
49
Serb leaders were for the present suffering of their

people, from the oppression of the Albanians in
Kosovo to the thoughtless recognition of the Kraj ina
Republic. It was an outcry, not an expression of opin
ion, not simply an oppositional voice from a cultural
gathering in a back room. And this Serb spoke only
about his own leaders; the war dogs elsewhere were
spared, as if their deeds themselves screamed to
heaven, or to somewhere else.
Strange, however: although in this man's presence
I finally lost my sense that anything was official or
calculated about the situation-rather than m aking
statements, he suffered, angrily and transparently-!
did not want to hear his damnation of his leaders; not
here, in this space, nor in the city or the country; and
not now, when a peace was perhaps in the works, after
a war that had been started and finally probably de
cided with the help of fo reign, utterly different pow
ers. (That he then hugged me as we parted was, f
thought there, because he felt understood, and I ask
myself now whether his motivation wasn't rather that
in fact he hadn't.)
so
3
PART TW O
OF THE TRIP
THEN BEGAN THE LAST PART of our trip, and in

stretches (no, throughout) it became adventurous.
We departed from Belgrade during a late-Novem
ber snowfall shot through with leaves. Leaving the city
and the Moskwa Hotel, we headed for the border, to
Bosnia. S. had set out that morning for France, be
cause the children had to return to school after the All
v
Souls holiday, and now we-Zlatko, Zarko, and l-in

Zlatko's car, sought the way to Baj ina Basta, on the
v
Drina, where Zarko's former wife lived with their

daughter. "Sought" because although the father had
traveled the route repeatedly in the course of the eigh
teen years of his child's life, this time none of the
roads were familiar to him, for he had always taken
the bus (and there were, at the moment, no road maps
of Serbia available) .
Before leaving the city, however, we gassed up for
the first time in what was commonly said to be the
"land with the most gas stations in the world"-which
meant the people crowding the edges of the streets
leading out of the city, canisters and bottles in hand.
Each subsequent refueling did nothing to change my
first impression, that the thick greenredgreen fluid,
5I
poured openly into the tank each time in a slow, broad

stream by exceedingly careful hands, let itself be seen as
never before as what it in fact was: something quite
rare, precious, a treasure ofthe earth--a nd again I could
not argue against my wishful thought that this kind of
refueling might long continue, and perhaps even catch
on in other countries of the world. (After filling up we
were, it's true, examined by a police patrol, as if they
had smelled something; and because "Zlatko Bo."
according to his Serbian driver's license-was driving
the car of someone else, '�drian Br. "-according to
the Austrian registration-there was a not too exorbi
tant fine to pay; if the police had figured out that the
two names stood for one and the same person, the
whole thing would have ended less leniently.)
Our trip to the Drina led approximately south
west, through a broad, fielded plain, hill-less for a long
v
time, "finally typically Serbian, " according to Zarko.

In the open countryside, it was soon snowing harder,
and after we had taken a wrong turn for, say, the third
time-the few Sunday-afternoon people on the coun
try road, when asked for directions, proved to be, and
properly so, drunk out of their minds-it was already
starting to get dark in an uncertain, nameless transi
tional area far from what our guide, otherwise ever
more silent, called the "great, wild mountains, " which
we would have to cross before reaching our goal. Re
signed to not arriving there, we turned in at a solitary
rural roadside pub, where, in place of the former 'fito
52
portrait, now hung the picture of a Serbian hero and

general from the First World War, on the table was a
newspaper from the day before, Vecerni Novosti, whose
front page a good week later would be dominated by
the giant word MMP -Mir, Peace (I wondered in
which German newspaper that could have appeared so
monumentally in 1945) .
As is always said in stories about getting lost,
"somehow" we reached the city of Valjevo, where the
road over the mountain begins. The mountain was
called Debelo Brdo, the Fat Mountain; and the pass
for Baj ina Basta, which our guide translated for me in
the increasing snowstorm-it was long since night
as " Garden of Baja" (Baj a was a Serbian hero against
the Turks) , was supposed to be well over a thousand
meters high. The road up the mountain rapidly grew
white, the wheels skidded at the least braking, and the
sky grew j ust as rapidly black. Very soon there were no
more lights, neither from a house nor from another
car, and the next day we learned that the evening bus
from Belgrade had turned in at Valj evo and the pas
sengers had spent the night there in the city at the
foot of the mountain.
On a long unpaved stretch, our driver slalomed
like a rally driver between crater-size potholes and we
immediately felt better, for the snow had hardly stuck
to the bare earth. Our pilot remarked then that on the
television weather map that morning there had been
no more snowstorms indicated beyond Valj evo. And
53
now, with each of the long curves, it snowed more

heavily, and approximately halfway up, the wind
joined in, and soon a mountain storm quickly blew
the flakes into dunes, low ones, marching along, halt
ing, solidifying, back and forth across the narrow road.
The cardplayer and painter of inn signs steered up
through it with the equanimity of a European cham
pion, even when he had to change gears on the steeper
sections; no more question of turning back (wasn't
that too an expression from adventure stories?) .
Now and then, someone, while continuing to stare
straight ahead, made a diverting comment, receiving,
however, no response. And for perhaps an hour none
of the three of us spoke another word as we crossed
the Fat Mountain; and even Ceca quit singing, as did
the Serbian folksinger Tozovac. When anything at all
besides the snowdrifts, hurdle after hurdle, shone iQ
the slowly curving headlights, it was the cliffs, which
grew increasingly bare. And my mental game was:
Suppose the car got stuck now . . . or now. I n which
direction should I walk? And how far would I get
without a hat and good shoes? Tense! And too bad, al
most, that lightning didn't finally shoot through the
billowing flakes; such a blizzard would have perfected
the stormy night high in the Balkan mountains and
transformed, as well, my unease into something else.
I nto panic? Or perhaps exactly into its opposite?
Somehow, almost at a walking pace, we found our
way over the pass and then down to levels where it
54
snowed more gently; after everything we had experi

enced we were as if in a peaceful field, and the snow
even left the road surface bare in places-whereupon
our guide pointed somewhere into the dark valley
and, excitedly, spoke the first sentence within what
seemed like human memory: " Down there is the
Drina, down there must be Baj ina Basta, and then,
j ust beyond, Bosnia."
Then the strange sound of a bell at the door of an
apartment house on the brightly lit main street of
what seemed to be a quiet Sunday-evening provincial
Yugoslavian city, which, in all its strangeness, still
seemed somehow familiar (and I now remember that
similarly, well over thirty years before, deep in Croatia,
I had arrived at the door of a childhood girlfriend) .
Then three well-lit and even-a rarity in all of Ser
bia-warm rooms. The welcoming sweets again, with
the water glasses into which the teaspoons were then
placed; the woman of the house, once an archaeology
student in Belgrade, now a secretary at the nearby
Drina power plant; the daughter's walls covered with
posters of the eternally young James Dean; sarma (a
kind of stuffed cabbage) , kajmak (cream cheese) ,
bread and wine from Smederevo (where the Danube
flows without a sound) . Now and then, I glanced out
of the tightly drawn curtai ns into a Balkan courtyard
bordered by similar multiple-dwelling buildings:
snow, snow, and continued snow.
And Olga, the native, the woman from Baj ina
55
Basta who, even so, knew almost every film ever made,
explained that the people had experienced little of the
war taking place a kilometer away. Corpses in great
numbers had supposedly floated repeatedly down the
Drina, but she knew no one who had witnessed that.
Still, there was no more swimming in the river, which
had been full of swimmers in the summers before the
war, on the Serbian and the Bosnian banks, back and
forth, back and forth, and naturally the boat excur
sions had been canceled. She and her daughter missed
greatly their trips through Bosnia to Split and above all
to Dubrovnik, on the Adriatic, and she herself bitterly
missed seeing her Muslim friends, whether from Viseg
rad, her favorite Bosnian city (Ivo AndriC's Bridge on
the Drina takes place there) , or from Srebrenica, which
was even a little closer. And she was convinced it was
true that near Srebrenica in the summer of this year,.
199 5, thousands were murdered. In smaller ways, much
smaller, that was how the whole Bosnian war had
gone: one night a Muslim village was destroyed, the
following night a Serbian one, etc. But here in the bor
der city, the Serbs were among Serbs, and there was
nothing to say to one another. The brand-new, semi
elegant businesses and bars on the main street be
longed to Bosnian Serb war profiteers, and she would
never set foot inside. She made it through the month,
modestly, only with the support in German marks
from her former husband. And the others? They were
dependent on neighbors like her, who were halfway
s6
able to share-and in spite of the material deprivation,

the distress was primarily an inner one: cut off from
the previously wide world, among people who were
like herself, she often supposed she was dead. Did love
affairs still take place, were children still conceived?
"Only, if at all, among the refugees. " (And here, for
once, even the still young and youthful woman
laughed.) Journalists had shown up now and then
from the West-which meant, in this case, Bosnia
too-but they had known everything in advance and
had asked questions accordingly; none of them had
proved to be even slightly open to or even j ust curious
about the life of the people here in the border city; and
the UN observers had soon moved out of their hotel,
because they themselves had felt observed there.
Zlatko, alias Adrian, and I then slept in the Drina
Hotel, in unheated rooms . There were no real cur
tains, and every time I opened my eyes during that
first night, in the window, in the bright-yellow illumi
nation from outside, the snow was still falling, and it
continued in the morning and during all the days and
nights in Baj ina Basta. The city became snowbound.
The return route over the Fat Mountain was long
since closed; there remained only the road to the
north through the Drina VaHey, so Zlatko learned, his
face and hands swollen with cold, from a couple of
militia soldiers who sat next to us at breakfast, their
machine guns within reach; but was there a snowplow
working?
57
And almost cheerfully we decided to remain as

long as necessary. We bought shoes and caps for the
snow, and confronted with the salespersons' diffidence
each time we entered, obviously foreigners, I imagined
that the "customers" during the war years had all
turned out to be foreign reporters who, rather than
buying something, asked about prices as part of their
research.
Then weatherproofed, half-uniformed figures of
men appeared everywhere on the border roads, in the
v
border pubs, and we, including Zarko-who had

joined us again after the night with his episodic fam
ily-naturally (?) and involuntarily saw in them para
military killers: notice the telltale eyes, "experienced in
killing" ; were then enlightened by the local librarian,
who had come with us, a reader (of Nathalie Sarraute
and Fernando Pessoa, for example) : they were the tim
ber workers and forest rangers of the Fat Mountain,
which was something like a national park or at least a
kind of recreational area, with a spruce tree found
nowhere else in the world, a survivor from the last in
terglacial period; and nonetheless suspected these peo
ple again of being members of a troop of soldiers, in
disguise as forest rangers and game wardens.
We walked out of the city to the Drina, to the bor
der bridge. Perhaps, unexpectedly, we would be al
lowed to go over to Bosnia, which, behind the snow
clouds, its hills and meadows clearly silhouetted at
times, at others absent, seemed far and near. Quite a
s8
few people were out in the deep snow, mainly old peo
ple and children-the latter, probably after having
crossed the bridge, on their way to school-wearing a
wide variety of head coverings from around the world,
among them an old man, his head wrapped in a
frayed handkerchief. From their groups the children
invariably said, in English, "How do you do?" and
then laughed themselves silly. Most of those coming
in our direction, whether young or old, were missing
several teeth, as was the border guard on the Serbian
side of the bridge, who finally let us continue, of
course at our own risk; it was well known that the
Bosnian Serbs on the other side were long since sensi
tive about the subject of their homeland.
And now the Drina, broad, wintry black-green,
steadily flowing mountain water that appeared still
darker, even somber through the snow haze over both
banks. A slow walk over the bridge, the librarian, the
native, ready, it seemed, to turn back with each step,
with an anxiety in his eyes dose to naked fear. At the
center, benveen the two countries, then, a kind of
lantern was fastened to the rail, improvised and yet like
a shrine at a Buddhist river, in my imagination a recep
tacle for candles, to hold a watch candle for the night.
But when opened, the supposed lantern contained
nothing but ashes, was prickly with cigarette butts.
Finally, the opposite border house, where we took
a couple of steps, memorial steps, into Bosnia. The
broken window in the hut, and behind the hut two
59
turnoffs from the path, more or less straight up the

mountain. The border guard with the eyes of a
sniper-or wasn't it rather a kind of incurable, inac
cessible sadness? Only a god could have relieved him
of it, and in my eyes the empty, dark Drina flowed
past as such a god, if a completely powerless one. No,
we could not enter his country. Still, he let us stand,
look, listen for a while on its threshold-not curious,
any of us, only shy. Above this Bosnian cliff stretched
a scattered farm settlement, the farmsteads at some
distance from one another, each one flanked by or
chards and the Balkan hay cones or pyramids, high as
a house. Even, here and there, a chimney that gave off
smoke. (I thought at first they were smoking ruins, or
were they in fact smoking ruins?) From most of the
farms, however, there was no smoke, and often not
only the chimney was missing but the entire roof and
the doors and windows below. But curiously, few signs·
of arson, so that these farms too resembled the typi
cal guest-worker houses eternally under construction
throughout Yugoslavia, and that not only at the sec
ond glance but also at the third. Were they under con
struction or destroyed? And if destroyed, then, more
exactly, carefully dismantled, carried off, the parts
dragged away.
And unexpectedly the border-city librarian said:
" In this marsh, where once every bird sang its song,
European spirits have moved. I don't know how to ex
plain that increasingly I am becoming a Yugoslav. For
6o
them these are now the most difficult times. And

when I think about it, it has always been most diffi
cult for such people. I cannot be a Serb, a Croat, a
Hungarian, a German, because I no longer feel at
home anywhere."
"
And then too, from my friend Zarko, the Serbian

eater of German bread, a song that contradicted his
own situation: "Is life in Germany, for me, a Serb,
now murderous? The fact is that Germany has made
of itself a beautiful, rich, paradisaical country. It is
the world as a machine. The houses too are machines.
The barking of the dogs in the streets resembles the
screeching of the machines in the factory halls. In the
self-service stores, it feels as if you were buying screws
and not milk. In the butcher shops, as if you were
buying nails and not ham. In the drugstores, as if you
were buying hammers and not aspirin. "
For my part, I can now say that I have hardly
ever in my life found myself so constantly and per
manently drawn?-inserted?-incorporated? into the
world or world events as during what followed in the
eventful snow and fog days there in the Baj ina Basta
region on the Bosnian-Serbian border river. That
nothing bad happened to me in this in fact distressed
location-not the least bad �thing-n1eant only good.
And the events?
Instead of visiting, for example, an old monastery
in the neighborhood, inaccessible anyway because of
the incessant snowstorm, we drove up the Drina,
along the border, to visit Olga's mother, a nurse with

Tiro's partisans during the Second World War. A diffi
cult illness and, even more, heartache at the end of his
Yugoslavia, caused her husband, a few years earlier, to
shoot himself with his partisan rifle, and she lived
alone now in a tiny house (something like a tollhouse)
at the base of the Fat Mountain, between precipices
that allowed j ust room for her garden and a strip of
land for potatoes. Although the old woman kept her
kerchief on all afternoon, in her room she shared some
of the traits of an officer, or of the only female among
a hundred soldiers, equal in rank with them, grace
fully proud in her bearing and simultaneously ready to
spring to action. Until the end of her life she would be
an enthusiastic Communist-not a Serbian but a Yu
goslavian Communist, and not only in the years after
the Second World War: today too it was for her the
only reasonable possibility for the south Slavic peo
ples. Before the German invasion in 1941, there were
in the kingdom a very few who owned almost every
thing; otherwise nothing but wretched poverty; and
now, in this special Serbian state-whose rulers, as in
the other new states, were "traitors"-it was repeating
itself with the few war profiteers, who were snatching
up everything, and the freezing paupers. (And that at
least v;as correct, for what Zlatko, the foreign Serb
from Austria, used to other circumstances, once ex
pressed was obvious: "The whole people is freezing. ")
All afternoon we sat in the border hut, and then,
as the village lights went on on one side of the Drina,

on the other side it remained completely dark-or
darkened. Before the war, light had streamed from the
windows there, the one side of the river a mirror of
the other; and she missed, the old woman said, the
Bosnians, whether Serbs or Muslims, primarily be
cause of the fruit the Muslims, whose orchards were
favored by the less steep slopes, brought every autumn
over the Drina. (On the return trip from that village
on the river road, the headlights sliced figures out of
the darkness, refugees quartered here in masses, wait
ing for hours for a ride into the city, with hardly a car
on the street.)
Or we simply crouched, wrapped in coats and
parkas, the two of us, as the only regular guests, until
far past midnight in the long-since-lightless lobby of
the Drina Hotel, and recovered from the singing and
blaring of a guslar, one of the singers of Serbian heroic
legends, supposedly in the traditio n of Homer, who
had filled our ears the entire evening in a narrow pri
vate apartment, his blaring heightened by the accom
paniment of his gusla, a stringed instrument with a
single, cunningly braided string-recovered there in
the dark by telling each other less heroic, even non
sensical stories, or simply by looking out on the un
ending play of flakes far up the main street (and was
the car still there?) .
Departure then one early afternoon in snow that
was finally letting up, again only two of us, because
Zarko (supposedly the "fiery" or "glowing" one) wanted

to stay longer with his daughter and in Frau Olga's
heated room (the Deutsche Welle gave him an addi
tional week) . And so we drove downriver, to the north,
through the darkening and soon and for long pitch
dark Serbia, past more and more slushy piles of snow,
which ra ised thernselves one last time to icy drifts dur
ing the cro�· _ l : ' g of Fruska Cora, the long-backed
mounta in ot:•-_ , ; de Novi Sad (after th e First World War,
more J {u rci gn than a local mountain for the great Ser
bian poet Milos Crnjanski) . And after yet another cold
night, in the Turist I-Iotel in the capital of Vojvodina,
early-morning shopping for a couple of packs of ciga
rettes, Morava and Drina brands, in the Novi Sad mar
ket, and for a Serbian-Cyrillic mushroom guide in a
Novi Sad bookstore, both meant for the Paris suburb.
And there too the only meeting of my entire time in
Serbia with other travelers, two young men from New
York State, who asked if I knew of a cheap hotel and
said they were going to make a film in Novi Sad, "only
a short one. " And then on the way to the Hungarian
border, outside Subotica, still in the bitter cold, the al
most puszta-like plain sporadically hammered by hail
stones; dogs straying as always through the countryside,
or already dead and stretched stone cold on the street
(Zlatko: "In Romania there are even more!") ; the spar
row that crashed into the windshield; and the occa
sional hordes of ravens on the mostly empty asphalt,
about which my driving companion then once said
how strange that a magpie, always a single one, was

among each flock of ravens-j ust as I meant to point
out the same thing to him.
In the years of the wars of Yugoslavian secession, I had

traveled repeatedly through the newly founded Re
public of Slovenia, once ((my hiking home . " That con
sciousness of connection, however, was impossible to
re-create, even for a moment (which would not have
been fleeting) . Maybe it was my fault, a consequence
of my childish disappointment while looking, for ex
ample, at the glorious Triglav Mountain (once the
highest in all of Yugoslavia) , there north of Wochein
Lake in the Julian Alps, and knowing its triple head
was newly profiled on the Slovenian license plates and
the national flag; and perhaps I took the wrong hikes,
should have, on my own, taken new routes and not
the same old ones.
And in spite of that, such a precipitous turning
away, such a sudden isolation and inaccessibility of a
country, wasn't simply imaginary. Scarcely a month
before our Serbian trip, alone as usual, I hiked
through the Wochein Valley and from there to the
south down the Isonzo Valley and up to the karst
above Trieste. The Wochein area, with its lake, so ani
mated yet so still, at the extreme end, from which the
only way further into the mountains is on foot, was
once a mythical place, for the Serbs as well: at least,
there have been not a few initiation texts (or testimo-
nials, calls to a less pedestrian, more poetic life) ,

called forth in their poets by this region of "Slovenian
brothers."
Now, however, back at the valley's end, I found the
familiar Hotel Zlatorog (named for a fabulous rock
goat) , a huge Alpine hut, completely oriented to
speakers of German, and in the en trance the framed
photos of Tito's onetime visit had been removed-not
a big loss-and replaced by the Willy Brandt equiva
lents, which made me wonder whether Brandt's visit
hadn't been made in the company of the Marshal .
And on state television-otherwise predominantly Ger
man and Austrian channels-a trade or business dele
gation from abroad is feted at length with strictly
native folklore, and finally the Sloven ian president
joins in, a once able and proud functionary?, who
now, however, with the gestures of a waiter, almost of
a lackey, tenders his country for sale to the foreigners,
as if trying to conform precisely to that assertion of a
German entrepreneur and buyer: the Slovenes are not
this or that but are rather "an industrious and work
loving Alpine people. " And then, early in the morn
ing, the not otherwise unpleasant supermarket, set
back in the mountain woods behind the hotel, has
the German Bild ready, even before the native Delo,
the daily newspaper from Lj ubljana, right next to the
stacks of Nivea tubes and cans, their bits of Sloven ian
text pasted in a narrow strip over the predominant
German text. (Sentence of the first customer: "Is Bild
66
here yet?") And in the still beautifully rustic train sta

tion of Bohinjska Bistrica, the almost painterly depic
tions of Serbian monasteries, of the Montenegrin Bay
of Kotor, and of the Macedonian-Albanian Lake of
Ohrid, true to nature or history, have been replaced
not even by p urely Slovenian landscapes, but by prints
of children's drawings.
A childish state, then? I j ust can't get it out of my
mind how, as on all the previous trips through the
new state, the approaches to similar train stations on
the reliably gentle broad karst plateau, even if they lay
far out in the wilderness, were posted with a plethora
of government exhortations to cleanliness in the land
scape (worthy of Europe) and to a common watchful
ness over it-and each time, fittingly, the radio music
heard-and impossible to miss-throughout the
country, when not trivial-folksy, blared forth ex
clusively as refined European classical, a behavior
through which even the brightest pieces of a Mozart
or Haydn darkened the mind of the traveler.
Once, I had been thus under way to the grayish
white limestone train station far outside the karst vil
lage of Dutovlje. And turning off there from the
highway, I missed the screeching, howling, and teeth
gnashing of the inmates in the asylum and hospital for
incurable illnesses on the otherwise empty corner,
sounds I was used to hearing from the windows in all
my years hiking through. There was instead a discreet
silence behind one window, muffled piano concerts
from a radio behind another; and I walked on to

the station, where every picture from the former
Yugoslavia had been removed from the old, black
waxed waiting room, in their place in the station en
trance another public proclamation against dirt; and
saw then, at the end of the path, against the karst sa
vanna, a truck parked, with a license plate from
Skopje/Macedonia, no rarity on Slovenian roads in
the past but now absolutely unique, and the driver
resting out in the steppe grass, vastly deserted, as if left
over from the years before the war; and he was listen
ing to a cassette in his transistor, the volume turned
down, an Oriental, almost Arabic music that had once
played here with a thousand other tunes and was since
banned, so to speak, from the air. The man's gaze and
mine met for a moment, long enough so that what
happened between us was more than merely a com
mon thought but something deeper: a common recol
lection . Although the sound made the surrounding
land seem to open and to stretch anew now, as far as
the farthest, nearly Greek south, that continental feel
ing (as opposed to the "oceanic," hearty feeling) fiz
zled out almost immediately, and only a phantom
pain quivered through the air, a powerful one, and
surely not exclusively mine.
Later, in contrast, traveling through Serbia, I had
no homeland to lose. Not that the country was for
eign to me in the way that the Basque city of Bilbao
once felt so alienating, primarily because of its written
68
language, so that once on entering a public pissoir I

expected that even the urinals there would exhibit un
heard-of, never seen forms, or would be fixed high up
on the walls rather than down on the ground. No, I
neither was at home in Serbia nor experienced myself
as a foreigner in the sense of one who didn't belong or
\vho had even been offended. I remained constantly a
traveler, yes, a tourist, if of that new type recently rec
ommended to the "vacationer" as "durable travel" by
travel researchers or scientists. For travel ought-see
the travel section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung of 23 November 199 5-"finally to be under
stood as valuable property, " which is difficult "as long
as the choice of a destination is dependent on its pres
tige"; travel "oriented not to services offered but to
those requested"-only thus will the vacationer expe
rience "what effect his trip has on him" : in short,
"durable tourism. "
In the case o f Serbia, durable i n what sense? For
example, there remains with me from there the image,
in contrast to our own, of a sharpened and almost
crystalline everyday reality. As a result of the war? No,
much more the consequence of an entire, great peo
ple, Volk, that knows itself to be scorned apparently
throughout Europe, and experiences that as insanely
unj ust, and now wants to show the world, even if the
world doesn't want to hear anything about it, that it is
quite different, not only on the streets but also away
from them.
There remains for me, precisely 1n the crystal

sharp isolation of almost everyone there, for the first
time a sense of something like a Volk, otherwise
rightly long since declared dead: conceivable because
this people so visibly dwells in the diaspora in its own
country, each in an intensely personal disj unction (as,
when I returned, the birds in their sleeping tree near
the suburban train station, ruffled up in the night
against the cold, were each at a distance from the oth
ers, and between their bodies the snow fell) . And there
remains, durable, to put it most plainly, simply the
traveling in a pure inland, almost without natural
lakes, with only rivers, but what rivers!-for an experi
ence of such a proper inland, exclusively rivers, no sea
far or near: off to Serbia.
And finally, most important, this durable impres
sion: No one knows Serbia-freely adapted from the
story by Thomas Wolfe, "Only the Dead Know
Brooklyn. "
And while I often imagined or wished, on other
durable trips, under way alone, to repeat them in se
lect company, I wished this time, almost constantly in
such company, to move around in the country by my
self, not by car, but in a bus and, most of all, on foot.
70
E PIL O G U E
B uT WAS N ' T I, in fact, alone once in Serbia? It was

on one of the snowy days in the border city Baj ina
Basta. In the early-morning darkness, I set out with
two goals (remembering my favorite saying, "For that
you would have had to get up earlier! ") : bus station
and Drina, not near the bridge crossing over to Bosnia
but somewhere outside, as far beyond the houses and
gardens as possible, where it might flow between the
fields and pastures on this side and on the other.
It was and remained a dark day, with the moun
tains on all sides in snow clouds. I had to look hard to
find the bus station; there were no signs, and I didn't
want to ask. It lay then-as expected, a low build
ing-in a valley created by a tributary of the Drina,
across from the first house I had seen in Baj ina Basta
with a cross on top, which was otherwise not at all
churchlike.
In the main hall of the bus station, the destination
board, as large as a mon u.'mental painting. Here the
Cyrillic letters I had grown accustomed to felt like cal
ligraphy: EEO rPA,Il, (Beograd) , and under it, at the
end, CPEEPEHI1U A and TY3JI A , Srebrenica and
Tuzla. This tremendous and seemingly ancient board,
71
however, was no longer valid. The current timetable

had been pasted over a corner, a tiny, formlessly let
tered piece of paper, and there were, for the two last
named places as well as others, no more departures.
The adjoining coffeehouse, a kind of barracks hall,
was empty-except for an old woman at a very large
table, who then acted as innkeeper or waitress, two
chess players, who played approximately twenty games
of lightning chess in the following half hour, and the
solitary local elder, far back in a corner, from which he
spoke loudly into the room the whole time, not to
himself but searching urgently for a listener (who
didn't appear) .
The hike, straight through the fields, far from the
last houses on the city's edge, I soon wanted to aban
don: high, wet snow that slid into my shoes, and no
footprints ahead of me, as if in warning. And hadn't I
already seen enough of the Drina? Nonetheless I con
tinued, my legs continued-and not, by the way, for
the first time in such a situation-steadily on, in the
direction of the dark strips of pasture that marked
border and river. (In that purely Croatian dictionary,
there was listed for luka, pasture, only the meaning
corresponding to the Croatian seascape, "harbor,"
while in another, a prewar dictionary, I also found
"prairie. ") Was I being observed from the opposite
bank? Nothing moved there in the ruins, or was it an
unfinished building? No, ruins, and on both sides
again the blackish, seemingly ancient hay cones, high
72
as a house. And finally, after negotiating a hollow in

which there seemed to be gathered all the songbirds I
had so missed earlier on the trip through Serbia-the
sparrows, the titmice, the robins, the wrens, the
hoopoes, the hummingbirds (no, none of these)-fi
nally, now viewed from the top of a bare dike, again
the Drina, flowing swiftly, broad, shining deep green,
and I almost felt more secure then, sliding down the
embankment, past unharvested acres of corn flapping
in the wind, than I just had up on the dike.
"But no farther! "-and farther I went, my legs
taking me out of the bushes and straight to the bank,
past a still fresh excavation in the earth in which
masses of shell casings lay (no, not true) . And I squat
ted down there, which made the river stretch a little
wider, nothing now from the tips of my Serbian win
ter shoes to the Bosnian bank except the water of the
Drina, smoky cold, into which the big wet flakes fell. I
caught myself wondering whether I could have squat
ted next to such a border river during a German
German war. Downriver, perhaps fewer than thirty
kilometers, began, apparently, the region of the Sre
brenica enclave. A child's sandal broke the surface at
my feet. "You aren't going t? question the massacre at
Srebrenica too, are you?" S. commented, in response,
after my return . "No," I said. "But I want to ask how
such a massacre is to be explained, carried out, it
seems, under the eyes of the world, after more than
three years of war during which, people say, all parties,
73
even the dogs of this war, had become tired of killing,

and further, it is supposed to have been an organized,
systematic, long-planned execution. " Why such a
thousandfold slaughtering? What was the motivation?
For what purpose? And why, instead of an investigation
into the causes ("psychopaths" doesn't suffice) , again
nothing but the sale of the naked, lascivious, market
driven facts and supposed facts?
And I continued to squat that way next to the
Drina and thought, or it thought in me, about the
Visegrad of Ivo Andric, perhaps fifty kilometers
downriver-and specifically about the figure of the
city chronicler so incisively delineated in The Bridge
on the Drina (actually "On the Drina a Bridge") , writ
ten during the Second World War in German
occupied Belgrade, a man who records almost none of
the local events over the years, not out of laziness or
carelessness, but rather out of vanity and, above all,
pride: the events, whatever they are, are simply not, in
his opinion, worth recording.
And I thought further (or it thought) there, and I
think it expressly, formally, literally here, that all too
many of the reporters on Bosnia and on the war there
are similar people, as I see it, and are not only proud
chroniclers but false ones.
Nothing against those-more than uncovering
discovering reporters on the scene (or better yet: in
volved in the scene and with the people there) , praise
for these other researchers in the field! But something
14
against the packs of long-distance dispatchers who

confuse their profession as writers with that of a j udge
or even with the role of a demagogue and, working
year after year in the same word and picture ruts, are,
from their foreign thrones, in their way just as terrible
dogs of war as those on the battleground.
What kind of journalism was that, for example,
practiced interminably in the German Spiegel, in
which Karadzic "first roared" and then "gave in, " and
in which, during a dinner at the ongoing peace talks
at the military base in Dayton-the negotiators from
the Federal Republic of Germany are there, the omni
scient weekly whispers, naturally with the final say
one of the participants is described (?) as follows :
"More than any o f the others, Serb President Slo
bodan Milosevic seemed to relish the surrounding
bombers and a dummy of the Nagasaki atom bomb" ?
(If Croat President Tudj man is a known, all too well
known, or, as one might have said earlier, "sufficiently
known" evil, Milosevic appears, in contrast, if he is an
evil, as a largely unrecognized one up to now, which
ought to be researched by a journalist, in lieu of curs
ing and denouncing.) And what kind of journalism is
it in which, a week later, the Serbs of Sarajevo, whom
the treaty had brought under the control of the Mus
lim state (and here the Spiegel rhetoric suddenly
switches from its customary baseness to a biblical
phrase) , saw themselves "cheated of their thirty pieces
of silver" ? (To which the inevitable (( Balkan expert" in
75
Le Monde inimitably opined that down there, "nowa

days, very few wanted to live in regions where the law
givers are not the representatives of their own people. "
Only nowadays? And only there in the Balkans?) Der
Spiegel is a very special mirror of Germans.
Note well: This is absolutely not a case of "I accuse. " I

feel compelled only to j ustice. Or perhaps even only
to questioning?, to raising doubts .
So I can, for example, understand very well that
the regular special correspondent for Bosnia from
Liberatio n--anything but a Yugoslavia expert before
the war, rather a lively, sporadically amusing sports
writer (most brilliant at the Tour de France)-focuses
on such and such a hero and then on the formless, un
interesting, hard-up pack of losers or also-rans; but
why must he then make public fun of the "absurdity"
and the "paranoia" there in the Serbian districts of
Saraj evo when he sees banners with the question: " Do
we need a new Gavrilo Princip ?" And I can also
understand-to be sure, less well-that so many in
ternational magazines, from Tirne to the Nouvel Ob
servateur, in order to bring the war to their customers,
set up "the Serbs, " far and ncar, large and small, as the
evildoers, and "the Muslims" in general as the good
ones.
And in the n1ean time, it even interests me how in
the Central European Serb-swallowing rag, the Frank
furter Allgemeine Zeitung, whose primary hatemonger,
their taproot of hate, an editorialist writing almost

daily against everything Yugoslavian and Serbian in
the style (?) of an executioner ("to be eradicated, " "to
be cut off, " "to be removed") , a Reisswolf and Geifer
muller [slashing wolf and vicious-tongued miller-a
play on the last name of Johann Georg Reissmi.iller, an
editor of the FAZ ] -it interests me how this journal
ist might have arrived, from his German throne, at his
word-slinging tenacity. I was never able to understand
this man and his rabidity, but lately I feel some com
pulsion to do so: can it be that he, that his family,
comes from Yugoslavia? Like the German-speaking
people from Gottschee [a Slovenian city, now
Kocevje] , for example, was he, or his family, perhaps,
hunted out of the totalitarian Communist Tiro state,
innocent, suffering, a victim, dispossessed, only be
cause he or his family was German? Instead of draw
ing his hatchet articles from the same worn-out
holster, will this hack finally tell the world what is the
cause of his untiri ng destructive rage at Yugoslavia and
Serbia? But naturally he is not acting (yes, acting)
alone; the entire newspaper knows what it is doing
in contrast, it seems to me, to this and that politician
of the Federal Republic du�r ing the deci mation of Yu
goslavia: characterized now and then on the surface by
bright and pleasing rationality, the newspaper is at
heart the organ of a pitch-black sect, a sect of power,
and a German one at that. And it excretes the poison
that is never, ever beneficial : word poison.
17
And I continued to think there next to the No

vember Drina, and now think here next to a similarly
wintry, but quiet, forest pond over which at the mo
ment dozens of helicopters thunder past with diplo
mats from all over the globe, on their way from the
Villacoublay military airport to the signing of the
peace treaty in Paris, on 14 December 199 5 : Is such a
mechanical word-slinging between peoples, even if
then unspoken between generations, perhaps herita
ble, as I have experienced among my fellow Austrians
concerning the Serbs-the old "Serbien muss sterbien"
[Serbia must die] , aimed on the one hand at the anni
hilators of the empire, on the other hand aimed with
friendly condescension at the Alpine Slovenes, in the
form of that ostensibly new "Join us!"? Would a peace
ever be created and maintained from generation to
generation by such reactionary people, blind with
rage? No, peace has happened only in this way: let the
dead bury the dead. Let the Yugoslavian dead bury
their dead, and the living thus find their way back to
their living.
And I thought and think: Where then was that
"paranoia, " the most common of all rebukes against
the Serbian people? And, in contrast, how conscious
was the German (and· Austrian) people of what it did
and caused to be done repeatedly in the Balkans dur
ing the Second World War? Was it simply "known, "
o r also really present, i n the common memory, as was
what happened with the Jews, or even only half so
present, as it still is, from generation to generation, for

the affected Yugoslavs? The latter, however, must con
sequently see palmed off on them by global media
syndicates a persecution complex, an "artificial cold
remembering, " an " infantile unwillingness to for
get"-unless the suddenly hot, blazingly topical,
media-expedient Balkan entanglements of an Austrian
presidential candidate occasionally become an issue.
Wasn't this German-Austrian knowing what happened
I
but having nothing whatsoever present a spiritual or

psychological illness very different from the so-called
paranoia? A complex peculiar to itself?
And on my trip I, at least, hadn't seen Serbia as a
land of paranoiacs : rather it seemed the huge room of
an orphaned, yes, of an orphaned, abandoned child,
something that I never saw in Slovenia over the years
(but perhaps-see above-I j ust walked the wrong
paths: didn't someone else from the organ of the
power sect recently yap again against the small coun
try that it was making eyes "with tradition" and hold
ing fast "to the insecure Balkans"?) and was not able to
imagine of Croatia, although the great Yugoslavian
idea once proceeded from there. But who knows?
What does a stranger know?�
And I put my hands into the wintry water of the
Drina and thought, and think it now: Is it perhaps my
illness not to be able to have as somber a view as Ivo
Andric in his continuously instructive Drina epic, to
be unable to match his absolute image of necessary
79
catastrophic war that breaks out every century be

tween the Bosnian peoples? Wasn't Andric such an
incisive j udge of people that sometimes, as a result,
human images paled for him? Will hopelessness flow
with the Drina here till the end of time? And now one
of the rafts from before swept by in front of me, on it
the famous figure of a splavar, a Drina rafter-but no,
nothing there. And on the Bosnian bank the Gypsy
trumpets, from Kusturica's film?, now blared the fa
mous " Drina March"-but no, nothing at all.
And in the Drina's presence I thought, and I think
it now here at my desk: Didn't my generation fail to
grow up during the wars in Yugoslavia? Not grow up
like the innumerable self-satisfied, complete, boxlike,
opinion-forging, somehow worldly, and yet so small
minded members of the generation of our fathers and
uncles, but grow up. In what way? Perhaps thus : firm
and yet open, or permeable, or with that one word
of Goethe's: Bildsam [educable] , and as a motto per
haps the rhymed couplet by the same world cham
pion from Germany: (Xindlich I Unuberwindlich"
[childlike I invincible] , with the variant Kindlich
Uberwindlich [childlike I vincible] . And with this kind
of maturity, I thought-as the son of a German-pull
out of this history that repeats every century, out of
this disastrous chain, p ull out into another story.
But what was my generation's response to Yugoslavia,

in the case that was for us-and here the new philoso-
8o
pher Glucksmann was right-of earth-shattering im

portance but also essentially different from the earlier
Spanish civil war: a case of the real Europe, parallel to
which the other Europe might have been constructed?
In that context, from those of my approximate ag�, I
know only the uncharitable, cold vilification of the
Serbs by Joseph Brodsky in the New York Times, lack
ing both insight and nuance, written with a rusty
knife; and a j ust as mechanical scribbling, infatuated
with images of enemies and war, collaborating instead
of wall j umping, by the author Peter Schneider, argu
ing for the intervention of NATO against the criminal
Bosno-Serbs, available before its German publication,
moreover, in French in Liberation and also in Italian
and Spanish. To grow up, to do j ustice to, to not only
embody a reaction to the century's night and thus add
to the darkening, but to break out of this night. A
missed opportunity? Those who follow us?
But isn't it, finally, irresponsible, I thought there at
the Drina and continue to think here, to offer the
small sufferings in Serbia-the bit of freezing there,
the bit of loneliness, the trivialities like snowfl a kes,
caps, cream cheese-while over the border a great
suffering prevails, that of S� raj evo, of Tuzla, of Sre
brenica, of Bihac, compared to which the Serbian
boo-boos are nothing? Yes, with each sentence I too
have asked myself whether such a writing isn't ob
scene, ought even to be tabooed, forbidden-which
made the writing journey adventurous in a different
8J
way, dangerous, often very depressing (believe me) ,

and I learned what "between Scylla and Charybdis"
means. Didn't the one who described the small depri
vations ( gaps between teeth) help to water down, to
suppress, to conceal the great ones?
Finally, I thought each time: But that's not the
point. My work is of a different sort. To record the
evil facts , that's good. But something else is needed for
a peace, something not less important than the facts .
So now it's time for the poetic? Yes, if it is under
stood as exactly the opposite of the nebulous. Or say,
rather than "the poetic, " that which binds, that en
compasses-the impulse to a common remembering,
as the possibility for reconciliation of individuals, for
the second, the common childhood.
How, then? What I have written here was meant
for various German-speaking readers, and j ust as
much for various readers in Slovenia, Croatia, and
Serbia, for experience tells me that that common re
calling, that second, common childhood, will arise
exactly through the detour of recording certain trivial
ities, at least far more lastingly than by hammering in
the main facts. ''At one place on the bridge there was,
for years , a loose board . " ''Yes, did you notice that
too? " "At one place under the church choir the steps
began to echo." "Yes, did you notice that too?" Or
simply to divert from the shared-shared by us all
captivity in the rhetoric of history and topicality into
a much more productive present: "Look, now it is
snowing. Look, children are playing there" (the art of

diversion; art as the essential diversion) . And thus I
felt, there on the Drina, the need to dance a rock
across the water toward the Bosnian shore (but then
couldn't find one) .
The only thing I wrote down during the Serbian trip,

along with 'Jebi ga!"-Fuck him! the common
curse-was a section from the farewell letter of that
man, a former partisan, as was his wife, who took his
life after the outbreak of the Bosnian war. And here I
v
put it down again, in the joint translation of Zarko

Radakovic and Zlatko Bocokic, alias Adrian Brouwer:
"The betrayal, the disintegration, and the chaos of
our country, the difficult situation into which our
people is thrown, the war [Serbo-Croatian rat] in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, the extermination of the Serbian
people, and my own illness have made my further life
meaningl ess, and therefore I have decided to free my
self from the illness, and especially from the suffering
induced by the decline of the country, to allow my ex
hausted organism, unable to bear it any longer, to re
cuperate. " (Slobodan Nikolic, from the village of
Perucac near Baj ina Basta 'on the Drina, 8 October
1992.)
27 November-I9 December I995

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;'It was principally because of the war that I

wanted to go to Serbia, into the country of

the so-called aggressors . . . I felt the need to

travel into the Serbia that had become, with

every article, every commentary, every analy sis,

less recognizable and more worthy of study,

more worthy, simply, of being seen. And who­

ever is thinking now: Aha! pro-Serbia! or Aha!

Yugophile - need read no further. "

-from A Journey tu the Rirers

Published m Germany in 1996. A Journey to

the Rivers created a firestorm of controversy,

being likened, by some, to revisionist writings

mitigating Nazi guilt for World War II. But

that is a grave misreading of the book, for

Peter Handke proffers no justification or

explanations for Serbian atrocities in the

Balkan conflict. A Journey to the Rivers is,

rather, both a scathing criticism of Western

war reporting, which Peter Handke describes

as lazy and mendacious, and a wonderfully

sensitive and nuanced travelogue through

Serbia. The moving observations, the acerbic

reflections deepen even as Handke continu-

l(untin/ll'd on h(/(·kjl11p1 0 It)-;-

ally, insistently asks, "W hat does a stranger

know'?" The result is rich, rewarding, and

Pt-:TEH H \NDKE, one of the most popular post-

war German language writers, is the author

of numerous novels and memoirs including

Repetition, Slow Homecoming, and The Weight

of the World. He lives in Paris.

Jacket design by Merideth Harte

A division of Penguin USA

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

First published in 1997 by V iking Penguin,

Translation copyright © Penguin Books USA Inc., 1997

Published in Germany under the tide Eine winterliche reise

German-language text previously appeared in Suddentschen Zeitung,

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

T his book is primed on acid-free paper.

Primed in the United States of America

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part

Diary About Carnojevic, I92I

sentation, of form, of grammar-of aesthetic veracity;

-Peter Handke, April I99 6

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION

BEFORE THE TRIP

PART ONE OF THE TRIP

A map appears on pages

FoR A L ONG TIM E , for almost four years-after the

Writers, that I was once there, hosted and at the same

thinking now: Aha, pro-Serbian! or Aha, Yugophile!­

Zarko Radakovic, translator of several of my things

fessionally, after studying in Belgrade and then for a

heard about it from him-Zarko R. lived, translated,

The other Serbian friend who I hoped would bring

Slovenian beehive paintings (on display in the sweet

break of the Yugoslavian wars, Zlatko B., like Zarko R. ,

more worthy, simply, of being seen. And who

thinking now: Aha, pro-Serbian! or Aha, Yugophile!

I had not otherwise especially prepared myself for Ser

for everything Serbian. She wanted to prove that Kus

lief or illusion, at least on the one side? And the ac

found a state that ranks its peoples relative to one an

one is needed, a token war crin1inal, as otherwise a to

countermotions could be that something might ex

them, visibly different from, say, the German and es

"Wherever they end up, here, there; my father some

The single somewhat official day in Serbia began dur

snowed more gently; after everything we had experi