History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  What is to be done? Some nongovernmental talks between local Serbs and Albanians have started, and are to be continued in New York. The Albanians look to the so-called international community. Like Drašković, they parrot the latest political buzzwords of the West: “full minority rights,” “regional cooperation.” But “parroting” is the wrong word. “Magpieing” would be more like it. For these Western terms are all adapted to their own local purposes, like a pen or pencil sharpener in the magpie’s nest.

  From Belgrade, from no less a figure than the novelist Dobrica Čosič, has come the suggestion of peaceful partition. Serbia should take the main areas of Serb settlement, the mineral resources, and the holy places—the patriarchate at Peć, the beautiful monasteries of Gračanica and Dečani. The Albanians should have the rest. Albanian intellectuals have heard of this, of course. They even joke about it, when we talk in a cheerful basement restaurant hidden away beneath the dim, potholed streets of Priština. “Maximum fifteen percent for the Serbs!” “No, I’d go to twenty percent!” For a moment, I feel like the Edwardian British East Europeanist R. W Seton-Watson, dividing up the Balkans on the back of an envelope. But seriously: The Serb holy places and main settlements are not contiguous to Serbia proper, there are large areas of Albanian settlement along the Serb frontier, and no one knows how it could be done without large movements of people and almost certain bloodshed.

  David Owen has suggested an international conference on the Kosovo issue, under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). A Vance-Owen plan for Kosovo? But neither the Serb nor the Albanian side is ready for that. For the so-called international community, Kosovo is mainly an issue of “regional stability.” The NATO generals’ cauchemar de Kosovo is that violent conflict breaks out there and spreads to the large Albanian minority in Macedonia, thus also tearing the fragile former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia apart, involving Bulgaria and our NATO ally Greece. Then—hey nonny no!—we have the long-forecast “third Balkan war.” Assuming, that is, we have not had it already.

  For Serb democrats, by contrast, Kosovo is about the future of Serb democracy. One of them puts the case drastically: Serbia can have Kosovo, or it can have democracy. But which Serb politician would dare to suggest surrendering the mythical heartland of Serbianness? The leaders of Zajedno all feel it would be political suicide to open themselves to the charge of “losing Kosovo.” Yet deep down everyone knows that somehow, some day, Serbia must address this issue if it is ever to become a normal, democratic nation-state.

  Back in Belgrade, I have an extraordinary conversation with Dobrica Ćosić, perhaps the most important intellectual father figure of Serb nationalism in the 1980s and for a time president of the rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, until Milošević cast him aside, as he has so many others when they have served their turns. Ćosić receives me in his large villa in the famous suburb of Dedinje—where Tito used to live—amid ornate wooden furniture and towering bookshelves. A heavy, white-haired man, he speaks a heavy language of portentous national pathos. Yet his message is a surprising one.

  It is this. He doesn’t like the modern world, with its “technological civilization” and its dreadful, rootless Americanization. No, he abhors it. But that is the direction History is going. And if Serbia—now a small nation in the Balkans, on the outer edge of Europe—does not want to be left behind, to lose out completely in the great struggle of peoples for survival, then it must go with History. Specifically, then, Serbia should have a democratic and preferably a parliamentary rather than a presidential government (although keeping a federal presidency), a market economy, the rule of law, and a cooperative foreign policy. It must start to rebuild from the ruins. And then he—he of all people—speaks the memorable line “We cannot live from the myth of Kosovo.”

  4

  For my last day, I go back to the students. I already have my “Walker’s Passport,” with, on the cover, the outline of Serbia filled with a photograph of protesters. (The outline shape includes Kosovo but not Montenegro.) Now they give me a badge: “Room 559: Epicenter of the Resistance.” But Room 559 will soon be returning to its original use, as the departmental lending library for ancient history.

  This has been a long moment of practicing democracy; of the new kind of peaceful, self-limiting popular protest that is one of the treasures of late-twentieth-century Europe; of excitement and hope. “Canada, don’t give me a visa,” said one of their placards, “the victory is near!” (It rhymes—in the language they now call simply “Serbian.”) But privately, their assessments are sober. Biljana wants to go and study in America. Čeda fears a country populated largely by “old people and refugees” and sees the specter of fascism in its current politics.

  True victory is still a long way off, and the past is such a heavy burden. “You know, there has been so much blood,” says Aleksa Djilas, sitting in the apartment of his father, the great dissident Milovan Djilas. When I walked with the students a few days earlier, heading up toward Milošević’s villa in Dedinje, we were stopped by a line of police just next to a large, new, monstrously vulgar, blue-and-white wedding cake of a building, thrusting out of the hillside. This is the house and headquarters of Arkan, one of the worst Serbian gangster-warlords in Bosnia, who still operates freely here, even appearing on television with his wife and baby child, all dressed up to the nines. Grotesque, utterly grotesque.

  One day, in a new Serbian democracy, these young historians will have to address this heavy burden. But, looking at Kosovo, I feel the poisoned cup has still not been drained to the dregs. The tragedy that began on the field of Kosovo may yet end on the field of Kosovo.

  Peering deeper into my crystal ball, I can dimly see the shape of a new Serbia. This shape is slightly smaller even than that on the cover of my Walker’s Passport. It is the outline of a truncated imperial nation, which overreached itself and then lost, perhaps even more than it deserved to, in the cruel game of international politics. A suggestive comparison is with Russia: the other Orthodox postimperial nation, now also looking back before the First World War in search of a new-old identity. But a better comparison may be with a closer country of more equal size: modern Hungary, truncated since the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which gave formerly Hungarian territory to neighboring states, including Yugoslavia. Like Hungary, this Serbia will be metaphysically depressed, much given to national self-pity, but eventually, slowly, painfully trundling back toward a place in Europe as a more or less liberal, democratic nation-state.

  Then Momčilo may finally live his “normal life.” Then Biljana may return from her university in America. Then Čeda may write the true history of a modern Serbia of which he can at last be proud. But how old will they be when that day comes?

  For more of Biljana, Čeda, Kosovo, and Serbia, see below, pp. 318–39.

  CHRONOLOGY

  1997

  2 APRIL Russia and Belarus sign a treaty providing for even closer ties.

  20 APRIL. Fighting between Armenian and Azerbaijani troops in Nagorno-Karabakh.

  1 MAY The British Labour Party wins a landslide victory at a general election, ending eighteen years of Conservative rule. Tony Blair becomes prime minister.

  7 MAY. The War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia finds Dušan Tadić, a Bosnian Serb, guilty of crimes against humanity. He is subsequently sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment.

  25 MAY. In a referendum, Poles vote for a new constitution.

  1 JUNE Socialists win parliamentary elections in France.

  16-18 JUNE. An EU summit in Amsterdam agrees on the Amsterdam Treaty, which results from the intergovernmental conference to review Maastricht. It provides for complex but relatively modest steps of further integration.

  18-20 JUNE. Amsterdam. Just after the European summit, and the whole city is complaining about the disruption to traffic and everyday life. There is no single hint of pride in the “Amsterdam Treaty.” In fact, I don’t think it’s ever mentioned.


  20-22 JUNE. A Denver summit of the group of seven leading industrial nations (“G7”) is joined by Russia, making it a group of eight.

  25 JUNE. Italy is admitted to the Schengen group.

  8 JULY At a summit in Madrid, NATO agrees to admit the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland by April 1999.

  9 JULY. NATO signs a security pact with Ukraine.

  16 JULY. The European Commission announces proposals for the EU to open membership negotiations with Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, and Cyprus.

  20 JULY. Warsaw. Lunch with my old friend Adam Michnik, ecstatic about the NATO and EU decisions to admit Poland. He takes me to an extravagant lunch at the Belweder restaurant—proud of being able to pay by credit card—and tells me, “I feel my life’s work is done.” The historic mission of his generation, he now thinks, was to guide Poland safely and peacefully from East to West, from communism to democracy. Poland could have blown it, like Slovakia under Mečiar. There were many dangers on the way. He still thinks that his dramatic Jeremiah-like warnings about the danger of a clerical nationalist authoritarianism (see above, pp. 76—77) were needed to prevent it becoming a reality. I still disagree. But no matter. The ship is nosing into harbor. Mission accomplished. And even a right-wing prime minister will not throw it off course now.

  “Do you know the name of the prime minister of Switzerland?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly! You see, it doesn’t matter.”

  25 AUGUST. Egon Krenz, the last communist leader of East Germany, is sentenced to six-and-a-half years’ imprisonment for his responsibility for shootings of would-be escapers at the Berlin Wall.

  31 AUGUST. Diana, Princess of Wales, dies in a car crash in Paris.

  21 SEPTEMBER The Solidarity Electoral Alliance wins Polish parliamentary elections.

  21 SEPTEMBER. Warsaw. The by now traditional election-evening party at the offices of the newspaper Rzeczpospolita. Canapés, exit polls, and media hullabaloo, just like any election in a Western country. It’s as if Poland has been holding free elections for decades. While the Solidarity Electoral Alliance, a coalition of right-wing parties, is the winner, the more centrist, liberal Freedom Union does well, too. In spite of everything, there is pleasure at the prospect that two parties emerging from the post-Solidarity tradition can now form the government, albeit under a postcommunist president. This will be what the French call “cohabitation,” but à la polonaise.

  25-26 SEPTEMBER. Sibiu, Transylvania, Romania. Sibiu is now a Romanian town in Romania, but it used to be a German town in Hungary. The Germans had been settled here since the Middle Ages, and they called it Hermannstadt. Even today, it looks like a woodcut illustration to a book of Grimm’s fairy tales: Gothic churches, houses with steep-pitched gables, cobbled streets. Yet virtually all the Germans have left. They started leaving under the communist regime. Nicolae Ceausescu sold them to West Germany for about DM 8,000 a head. The rest left after the end of communism.

  On the door of the large, handsome German church, I find a notice. It says something like this: “The member of our congregation Gertrud X died on 7 September. Our church bells will ring at the time of the funeral in Munich. The member of our congregation Hans Y died on 18 September. Our church bells will ring at the time of the funeral in Düsseldorf. The member of our congregation Hilde Z died on 24 September. Our church bells will ring at the time of the funeral in Frankfurt.”

  For whom the bell tolls? It tolls not just for the Germans of Transylvania. It tolls for that old Europe where people of different and of multiple nationalities lived mixed up together for generations, in a tense but creative coexistence. Now, having destroyed that world, we set about recreating it. We call it “multiculturalism” and artificially nurture it with laws, subsidies, and government programs. The folly of it, Europe, the folly of it!

  BAD MEMORIES

  THE SENTENCE “WE ALL HAVE BAD MEMORIES” CAN BE READ IN TWO ways: “We all have memories of things that we found horrible, embarrassing, regrettable” or “Our faculty of memory is intrinsically weak, leading us to forget or misremember.” The two may be connected, of course. We have a bad memory for bad memories.

  In our post-Freudian English, this is usually called “repression,” thus encouraging further wordplay: “After suffering under a repressive dictatorship, people repress the memory of repression.” To say “repression,” in the psychological sense, implies that the bad memory is the mind’s way of handling bad memories. But that is just a theory. Before Freud, there was Nietzsche: “‘I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I can’t have done that,’ says my pride and remains adamant. In the end—memory gives way.” And, before Nietzsche, there was Schopenhauer: “We do not like ruminating on what is unpleasant, at least when it wounds our vanity as indeed is often the case … therefore much that is unpleasant is also forgotten.”

  Comfort? Repression? Pride? Vanity? The explanations differ, but on the existence of this phenomenon, at least, the sages all agree. As Robert Louis Stevenson put it, we have “a grand memory for forgetting.” But is “forgetting” an adequate word? In everyday life, we tend to operate with the binary distinction: remember/forget. And there is an awful lot that we do quite simply forget. Yet there are also many variations in between. There is, for example, the jumbling of memory. And there is the involuntary embroidering of memory. (When you recount an argument you had with somebody, it always sounds as if you won the argument.) Thomas Hobbes drew the most radical conclusion in his Leviathan. Discussing memory in a chapter entitled “Of Imagination,” he concluded that “imagination and Memory are but one thing.”

  CLEARLY, this is a rich field. You may almost feel another little academic specialization coming on. There she goes, the bright young doctoral student heading straight for the Jonathan Aitken Chair of Memory Studies at the University of Westminster, after studying with the fearsome founder of the discipline, Professor Erich Teufelsdonck, Distinguished Professor of Gedächtnisforschung at the University of Braunau.

  Let the joke die on your lips: The discipline is already here. French historians have been dwelling on this subject for more than a decade. The multivolume Les Lieux de mémoire, edited by Pierre Nora, is a centerpiece of recent French intellectual life. There is even—sure sign of the arrival of another academic subsubdiscipline—a learned journal, entitled History and Memory. Not accidentally, this is based at Tel Aviv University and centrally concerned with some very bad memories indeed: those of war, occupation, and the Holocaust.

  By and large, the studies of the French school have been concerned with the history of collective memories. Often this involves a leap from a body of evidence about attitudes to the past—politicians’ speeches, films, opinion polls—to a generalization about national memory. Thus, in his very interesting book The Vichy Syndrome, Henry Rousso uses the psychological notion of “repression” to describe the French collective memory of collaboration in Vichy. He even has a “temperature curve” charting the ups and downs of the syndrome, as if it were a fever. Stimulating though the argument is, these generalizations about some sort of national psyche are as hard to test as old-fashioned generalizations about “national character.”

  AS A PLODDING Anglo-Saxon empiricist, I find it better to start with individual memory. My interest in this subject began—if I remember rightly—with the German memory (or forgetting) of Nazism, as I found it while living in Berlin at the end of the 1970s. The great change of 1989 was another stimulus. Trying to write the history of divided Europe in the cold war, I found that the end of communism had a remarkable transformative effect on individual memories. As after 1945, everyone suddenly discovered that they had been opposed to the fallen dictatorship. (In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt notes that Dr. Otto Bradfisch, head of a Nazi Einsatzkommando that shot some fifteen thousand people, told a German court he was always “inwardly opposed” to what he was doing.) Meanwhile, politicians in the West suddenly remembered how they had “always” supported the di
ssidents and “said all along” that the division of Europe could not last.

  Egon Bahr, the intellectual architect of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, now explained that he had always intended this policy to be subversive of communist regimes. Why was there no single record of his ever saying this over the previous quarter century? Ah, because he could never say this in public, for fear that the communists would wake up to what was going on. Not for nothing was he called “tricky Egon.” Politicians’ memories are, of course, made of especially flexible material. But we all do it.

  The retrospective rationalization may be half conscious or even fully unconscious. A fine example is contained in the conversations between members of the German team who had been working on an atom bomb for Hitler, secretly recorded at Farm Hall, the British country house where they were being held. After they heard the news of Hiroshima, the German scientists were trying to work out why the Americans had succeeded where they had failed. “I believe the reason we didn’t do it,” ventured Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker, “was because the [German] physicists didn’t want to do it on principle. If we had all wanted Germany to win the war we would have succeeded.”

  MORE RECENTLY, I have been plunged still deeper into the labyrinth of memory by working on a book about the strange experience of reading my own Stasi file. To read a secret-police file on yourself is a Proustian experience. It brings back to you with incredible vividness many things that you had quite forgotten or remembered in a different way. There is a day in your life twenty years ago, described minute by minute with the cold, clinical eye of the secret policeman. There are conversations, recorded word for word. There are photographs taken with a concealed camera.