This morning I finished Dubravka Ugresic’s book The Ministry of Pain. Dubravka’s book has been patiently waiting first on my desk and then on my bedside table for over a year until the right moment came to read it: This early, rainy July in Dublin is ideal because her tale speaks so eloquently of issues I grapple with at this particular point in time. Of course I cannot relate with more than ordinary compassion to the pain and trauma of Yugoslavia’s victims. (God, I don’t even know what to call the affected region – Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania – for fear of a misnomer! So why not just take a shortcut to the misnomer straight away? “Yugoslavia’s victims” it is!) No, I cannot fathom what it is like to lose your home to war and deal with the savagery inside and outside. But I do know what it means to leave your country and I have an inkling of what it means when you don’t recognize it on a contemporary political map as the one you grew up in. The difference is, of course, that Germany reunified, while Yugoslavia fell apart like the oft mentioned china-cups in Dubravka’s book.
While reading I wondered whether the piercing nostalgia in The Ministry of Pain is comparable to the “Ostalgia” that perks up in Germany. I am thinking of films, mainly. Goodbye Lenin is an obvious example, as is The Lives of the Others. Anything really that approaches the oppressive communist past with a touch of sweetness. Of course, the premise is different in Deutschland, because no blood stained German soil when the era ended. The wall came down without death, rape and mutilation, whereas the Balkans drowned in misery, mass graves and bombs. It must be this lack of blood that makes it less bitter for German writers and even to approach the issue with humor, provided that the evil and horror of the regime is never really questioned. What remains, however, is an occasional yearning for a time when the world was clearly split between “us” and “them” (to borrow Dubravka’s distinction) and change happened imperceptibly. I am increasibgly convinced that the nostalgic malaise is not only confined to places in the “East”; this is also known to “us” in the “West”, a Westalgia, if you like. Perhaps we are simply overwhelmed by the Tsunami of changes that relentlessly reshaped the world as we know it over the last two decades. Hence we yearn for the hindsight security of an earlier age, when things were as they had always been, because now they certainly aren’t anymore. My generation will remember, for example, the grey of the concrete bridges with their green railings that cross the Autobahn everywhere in the former FRG; the political other that you could identify and oppose when you watched politicians on one of the five available TV channels; your Haribo and Kinderschokolade which seemed unfathomable without German print on their package. And so on.
There is one passage that particularly struck me in The Ministry of Pain: It states that after years in a host culture the futile urge to return takes over the emigrant. S/he then gives up all they accomplished to go back to their country of origin only to utterly fail to reintegrate. Eventually s/he returns to the host country, broken, ruined, and homeless. Any emigrant can read this as a stark generalization, for sure, but also as a strong warning. It depends what you left behind in the first instance as well as the second. And why you left your country of origin. If you are a war refugee your motivation to return will be very different from that of an economic or even cultural émigré or refugee.
I finished the book before I got out of bed. Once upstairs I felt that my reading urge had not yet subsided and continued with Thom Jones’ The Pugilist at Rest. It turned out that Dubravka’s painful tale is well complemented by this short story. Jones tells of the hard male, the warrior, the broken man of force. He relates the fate of a brutal marine, a boxer and sadistic fighter. On the surface this is a world apart from Dubravka’s female literature teacher in Amsterdam, but both stories with their uncanny insights into their character’s shortcomings achieve a comparable profundity: In a powerful scene between main character Tanja, a temporary lecturer of Yugoslav Literature at the University of Amsterdam, and her slighted student Ivan, Dubravka confronts us not only with a hint of physical perversion, but much more importantly with emotional perversion stirring together sexual tension, love, pain, hate and denial into a potent delivery of a pathetic human being. Jones’ horrendous battle scene is not the actual culmination of this Vietnam vet’s tale – rather it is his timid admitting to his swindling to get decorations that reaches the same effect as Dubravka's scene: the baring of an emotional perversion resulting in the delivery of a pathetic human being.
When I finished the story, I sat down at my machine to check my mail and read the news. On BBC’s home page today’s top story begins like this: “Islamic rebels kill 14 Philippine marines, beheading 10 of them, in a fierce clash in the south, the army says.” It seems that no matter how deep some of us peer into the abyss of the human soul, and how many times we deliver it on paper, reality will always find a way of proving that true perversion cannot be invented, no matter how skilled and gifted we are as writers.
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