And me, what do I stand for? Is there such a thing as engagement along national lines or is it a chimaera?
In Slovenia, the Communist Party is dissolved and with it the myth on which the Party based its right to single party rule – the myth of the partisans and the liberation front. New light is shed on the historical account of the Communists’ seizure of power within the liberation moment and this new illumination reveals ever more dead, those purged during the partisans’ battle, post-war massacres of military and political opponents, along with innocent civilians when the partisans returned from the forests and joined the Yugoslav People’s Army.
After a public event, a historian asks me how the Slovenian Communists in Carinthia would respond to these revelations. I explain to him that, unlike in Slovenia, the Communists in Austria are not in power. Yes, he says, he knows that but the equation partisan equals Communist must exist in Carinthia, too. That’s what those who are against the partisans claim, I answer, the equation is wrong.
I cannot help but think of the partisans in our valleys, who look like scattered forest rebels from the perspective of centralized power in Slovenia. They have nothing in common with the partisan iconography, the oversized imagery of steely warriors storming forward that determined the partisans’ image for decades in Yugoslavian and Slovenian public opinion. Our partisans, in contrast, look like erratic boulders left behind by revolutionary history. Since only the Communists’ merits could be praised in Yugoslavian and Slovenian post-War historiography, it is obvious that the other partisans – the believers and non-believers, the apolitical and the half-hearted, the disappointed, the skeptics, and the disillusioned – are absent from the general awareness.
I tell the historian that I come from the Carinthian side, where those involved aren’t blinded by hero worship. They probably would have liked to indulge in it, so they could forget their war wounds and finally experience some recognition. As soon as the partisans come out of the valleys and enter Carinthian public opinion, they are immediately transformed into tragically distorted figures. The moment they leave the safety of their four walls, they find themselves in enemy territory. They have to fight for their historical victory as if it had never been their due.
At a family gathering, I ask Tonči, who was three years older than my father when he fled to the partisans, how Grandfather, a devout Catholic, dealt with the Communists. Tonči says the partisans never challenged Grandfather’s religious faith, all that mattered to them was that they could rely on him as commander of a unit of couriers. It would never have worked otherwise in Carinthia, the majority of the Slovenian speaking community was Catholic. When Grandfather would go with Žavcer to recruit for the partisans at some carefully chosen farms this and that side of the Peca, the farmers said they were glad to see the Slovenian army, finally someone who was on their side! They liked the partisans’ uniform, but the red star on the cap, not so much. Many of them would have been willing to fight for the emperor because there were fewer problems in the time of the monarchy, they said. But in late 1943, when a victory over the Nazis appeared ever more likely, many of the farmers and laborers said they would be willing to help. Later, when you could feel it would be only a matter of months until the Third Reich had to surrender and the partisans were considered part of the Allied Forces, the partisans no longer asked for support, they demanded it.
We had to keep lists of how many pigs or cows we took from which farms so that people could be compensated after the war, Tonči says. Some of the smallholders themselves didn’t even have enough to survive. Their provisions had run out. He knows of families who were starving because a large unit of famished partisans was camped not far from their remote holding. How could we have managed without the local population? No partisan group could have survived in Carinthia without their help. Where would they have gotten their supplies or their information, Tonči asks. There was no supply line following the partisans with provisions, no one setting up camp stoves in the bunkers. The food came from the local population, there was no other source. In the so-called “beggar-patrols,” you had to be very careful not to take more than was sustainable, Tonči says. How often he had hoped that the packages dropped in by the Allies would contain food as well as weapons and medical supplies, especially food. That’s what they needed most urgently. Most often we held in our hands new automatic weapons we didn’t know how to use. In the courier base Grandfather led, rosaries were said regularly, even in front of the political commissars, Tonči says. The politicals knew we couldn’t go home and that those who prayed presented no danger. The commander of the First Carinthian Unit, Franz Pasterk-Lenart from the Lobnik Valley, went to Father Zechner to ask his counsel before he deserted from the Wehrmacht. He couldn’t go back, he said, he could no longer reconcile this war with his views. They prayed through the night in the church and, the following morning, Lenart joined the partisans. When his mortal remains were brought to Eisenkappel from Mežica, the priest said at his graveside that with Lenart, one of the most exemplary Catholics in the area had fallen. For the partisans, undecided young men were a much greater threat than the faithful, Tonči explains. Men who wanted to try out the partisan life but left because they couldn’t take the miserable conditions of living on the run, because they had to put up with injustices, harsh punishment, because they found it too dangerous, too arduous, too hard to bear. They often betrayed everything, were tricked by the Gestapo or even were sent by the Gestapo to infiltrate partisan ranks. It cost many lives, brought on disasters, and spread mistrust among the fighters. A good partisan was a partisan out of necessity, Tonči says, someone who had no way out but to hide in the forest, someone under the threat of arrest or the KZ, for whom there was no choice but flight because he had been betrayed as an activist, because he had given aid to the partisans, or had deserted from the Wehrmacht. Deserters from the German army were the best fighters, accustomed to military discipline, they were fighting for their own survival, for their families’ survival, and they always had their last bullet in reserve, in case they fell into the Germans’ hands. As for the politicals, those who were educated, they were partisans out of conviction and so had political roles, but overall they were a minority, Tonči says.
Father recalls that Tine, whom they called the General, once told him at Kovač’s place in Ebriach how Gašper, Županc, and Žavcer had been searching for Communists in Carinthia, but in vain. At one of the partisans’ general meetings, they concluded that if there weren’t enough Communists, well then, they’d have to create some, so they admitted a few activists and fighters into the Communist Party. There were training courses, a few women activists and fighters even passed the entrance exam, a few others remained candidates. The General remained a candidate until the end of the war. A good fighter, but not suited to the class struggle is what a colonel wrote in his report. After the war, he went back to Carinthia, to his farm, Father says. In Ljubljana, they wanted to make him a functionary. They gave him new clothes and a lot to eat, but he gave it all up, as did a few others he knew well. Jurči, a fellow hunter and partisan from Lepena, described how things went at an illegal political gathering after the war. The partisan functionaries demanded the annexation of southern Carinthia to Yugolavia and called on the masses to vote for revolution. Jurči thought that was a bit much. Did we thrash the Nazis so we could now embrace the Communists, he wondered, that he would never get, no, he couldn’t get his head around this all or nothing, Mother of God, it only brings misfortune, Jurči would say.
THE IMAGE of the unknown partisan from the valleys could be redrawn and freed from the armor that hides his many faces.
A partisan must ally himself to the landscape in which he fights. He has to take on the region’s colors and forms, he must become invisible, he must be a mountain and a stream, a spruce tree, a house, a hill, a forest, an owl, a snake. He must camouflage himself with the meadows and wrap himself in a coat of foliage. He melts into the paths, into the air, he can appear now here,
now there, he can be everywhere at once. He was spotted in this village yesterday and today his shadow is flitting over a distant mountain he is circling. He must defend his house, his land, his own little homeland. A partisan must move like a fish in water. In the water of men, in the human water the enemy is trying to dry up, because the civilian population, unlike the partisans, remains visible, recognizable. A partisan can engage in civilian activities during the day, but under cover of night he has to run and strike. A partisan does not sleep, he has made night his day, he fights to break the enemy’s morale, he flees because flight is his triumph and his success. Fear is his brother, his sister, his name, because fear of death can make him endure anything – hunger, disgust, loneliness. The fiercest despair can save him, false wisdom can destroy him. The water in which he swims can carry him and feed him, with mouthfuls small and large, with fatty and lean meat. Without this water, the partisan would perish, he would be left high and dry, he would choke in the mud. It is the air he breathes, it is his vulnerable body. This body will be caressed and beaten, loved and hated, used and abused, felt and dreaded, cherished and broken. It is his extended arm and his stiff leg, his strong heart and his weak flesh. It is his dearest friend and his best enemy. The partisan will give his body a new form, a new face, he will pull it out of oblivion for all to see. Its determination will give him strength. His body’s wounds will spur him on, his injuries will drive him, his despair will embolden him. He will be the shout that escapes his body, he will embody the voice that speaks for him.
As soon as the war is over, the unknown partisan will give back to the landscape all that belongs to it. He will take off his camouflage and will move about amongst humans who have become human once again, who will have regained their former appearances, he will be unrecognizable in his resemblance to them. At night, he will weep for the dead, during the day he will do his work and will glorify peace. He will place peace above all else and will leave triumph to the victorious armies. His sense of honor will grow from the certainty of having repulsed humiliation, of having said no, of having drawn a line between himself and injustice. His fragile hope will lend him a face, a monument will be built in honor of his desire to live.
Or will the partisan push revolution to its bloody end, will he continue the fight after the triumphal procession, will he celebrate victory with a slaughter of revenge, will he turn peace into a perpetual war of suspicion and wipe away the bloodbath with murder a thousandfold? His victor’s statue stands abandoned in the field, the safety catch on his weapon released, surrounded by ghosts.
IN SLOVENIA, I stop asking myself if anyone around me is annoyed when I speak in Slovenian as I used to do in Carinthia. If it were not for the anxiety in the air caused by the threat of a possible war, I could get used to the delightful, leisurely pace of the Slovenian language, to its ambling, nimble, playful movement.
After a year, I move back to Carinthia. I am drawn by feelings of belonging and troubled by the political contradictions. I still dream of reviving the moribund conversation between Slovenians on either side of the border and begin to work in Carinthia on founding a cross-border literary and cultural magazine, but the project falls through.
While I’m in Klagenfurt working in theater, the Slovenian language begins to withdraw from my writing. One day I will realize that it has disappeared completely from my notes and sketches, it has moved out of my desk drawers, has packed up its most beautiful clothes and left. Offended and tired of my dallying, the beauty has stormed off, I think to myself the day I notice the change. I will wonder if my thinking has changed with this language’s departure, if, along with this language that grew on my lips there wasn’t also a chain that grew in my hand with which I could pull the world towards me, and so in losing this language, have I lost my grip on the world? Should I have abandoned that indeterminate, insecure land between languages sooner, that land through which I wandered for a long time, a land that required no absolute decisions like choosing to write solely in one language or another?
Outwardly, everything will remain the same, just as it had been. The Slovenian books will remain on my shelves. I will not forget the language nor will I discard or disown it. Nothing will be displaced in the silence. But something permeable and impalpable will have broken. Only the verses of my poems will have slipped into new attire, will have gone to look around elsewhere, because they wanted to escape the no-man’s land behind the border.
My desire to write will slacken. My enthusiastic plans will falter. Words will lie scattered around me, as if I had flung them on the ground in a fit of despair and couldn’t bring myself to gather them up again. I will feel like I am sitting on a pile of rubble.
But before things reach that point, I find myself standing on Republic Square in Ljubljana on the evening of June 26th, 1991, watching the new Slovenian flag being raised for the first time in honor of the independent republic. I keep repeating a sentence in my mind, trying to engrave it within me: this is a historic day. But what is it I see in this moment laden with symbols? The historical dimension as an excess of imagination? My joy is muted with worry that the Yugoslav People’s Army might occupy the border posts that very night. I return to Austria before midnight. In the morning, the Slovenian border is, in fact, occupied by the military. I feel like I have escaped. After paralyzing days in which Slovenia stands on the brink of war, the Yugoslav People’s Army retreats unexpectedly from the new republic.
THE THREAT of war in Slovenia almost makes Father lose his mind. From the early afternoon on, he sits, slightly tipsy, at the kitchen table, grumbling that those people over there in Slovenia have obviously forgotten what war is. He wants me to do him the favor of keeping my distance from all this! Indistinct and long repressed fears take hold of him. For days on end he is overcome with agitation and convinced that everyone has abandoned him.
In a book I learn about post-traumatic stress disorder and am almost relieved to apply the unwieldy medical term to Father. That must be it, I think, this will help me cut through the thicket of personal and political intricacies. On the other hand, can a word change anything about an illness? Is it at all possible to disentangle Father’s anxieties, to divide them into nerve cords, cell nuclei, and synapses?
What a strange concept, that the memory of a state of anxiety can span gaps in time and synaptic clefts and reach into the present, causing it to be experienced as alien and unreal, as if the only true reality occurred back then, a long, long time ago and everything happening now is simply a distraction from the essential.
I read about the dwindling of empathy in the now, about the sense of being imprisoned in one’s body in whose metabolism the past has become trapped like a germ of memory, a living microbe that takes possession of the individual in certain situations, invades him and cuts him off from the present.
Father is reborn through the recollection of past suffering, if it is, in fact, suffering and not just a drunken dance of shadows. He compulsively reinvents then rejects himself. His state of extreme tension relaxes only when he drinks, when his body descends into a state of stupor and disinhibition, where borders dissolve, when he becomes a soft mass drifting aimlessly in his consciousness. Only then can he breathe and eject all that is tangled, piled up, frozen within him. A human volcano.
Anxiety is the fundamental difference, the divide between him and us. It forms the internal core of his survival and admits no feelings for us. As soon as he feels such emotions, he pushes us away. His life seems to be concentrated and intensified in those moments when alcohol takes away his reserve.
In Father’s landscape of branching and deformed anxiety that sometimes appears from the outside as much more vast than it could possible be in reality, in this countryside a word from me cannot venture alone. I cannot assume that the solitary word I send on a journey will reach the core of his anxiety, that his anxiety will approach the word and identify itself. Father’s anxiety will not want to call out, this way, word, this is where you must aim. It won’
t let itself be subjugated to that extent and submit to some designation or other. Father’s feelings will destroy any language or words that approach him, just as his rages render me mute, his bellowing always conquers my speech.
Sometimes, when his depression stretches out over several days, I begin to suspect that his native landscape might be provoking these disturbances. He acts as if he does not want to see the familiar meadows and mountainsides, as if he would rather retreat to his house and not set foot outdoors, avoid contact with the proliferating vegetation. Is it the landscape that reminds him of the former battleground now threatening to crush him?
Yet how remarkable it is, too, to fight behind the stable, to fall on the potato field or under the cherry tree, to be discovered in the cellar, how strange to be buried under an elderberry bush or under the old fir tree. How strange it is when war enslaves a landscape.
THE WAR breaks out in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and in Croatia. I hear Father, I hear many neighbors and acquaintances complaining in the first months of the war that they can’t bear to watch the news on television, that they aren’t able to watch war movies either, that they simply cannot bear such films. The horrifying din of war, the grenades, artillery fire drills into them, they lie sleepless in bed for hours and hours, they toss and turn, they can’t help thinking of those poor people, running from their burning houses, it’s all too much, do the politicians not understand what it means to be in a war?
Angel of Oblivion Page 17