NPR does Nihilism

Two fun (fun?) podcasts about nihilism from On the Media and RadioLab. A bit of overlap because it's a collaborative effort, but both pieces are distinct enough to make it worth your while.

Ernst Jünger’s Shot-up Stahlhelm

Shot in the head during the battle of Cambrai (1917).
On display at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

Is it wrong that seeing Ernst Jünger's damaged helmet was a high point in my trip to Europe? Is it wrong that my favorite piece of Great War literature is still Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel? Probably. Jünger was a darling of fascists everywhere, but his Wikipedia biographer takes great pains to distance Jünger from the Nazis. Actually, based on everything I've read, it seems he had little patience for Nazi anti-intellectualism. Jünger himself was a serious intellectual and his work reflects an active, creative imagination (as in The Glass Bees, a bizarre novella I read many years ago).

That said, I recently learned about Ernest Hemingway's claims that he killed as many as 122 German soldiers in WWII. He appears to have murdered at least one unarmed prisoner outright, but biographers won't take him at his word. I think his actions don't correspond to his myth, and so we choose to dismiss them. The same may be true about Jünger. Nobody wants to believe that such a prolific, creative author would throw his lot in with a mob of cretins.

A few of Jünger's Diaries

I've read a wide selection of veteran fiction/memoir (many seem to be a combination of both) over the past few years. I probably average one each year. This summer I picked up Gabriel Chevallier's Fear, which NYRB Classics just published. It was fantastic. Far more readable than Barbusse's Under Fire (although lacking his powerful, nightmarish imagery). I attribute much of Fear's power to the excellent work of translators Malcolm Imrie and John Berger. The language is fluid and accessible--it feels modern. One of my great complaints about Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front has been the archaic translation into British English. When I added some passages to the West Civ Reader I prepare for my students, I actually pulled out my German edition and polished up the language a bit. I won't pretend I could ever compete with A.W. Wheen's original translation, but the dialogue often feels like it was lifted directly from an episode of Downton Abbey.

My next Great War memoir will have to be Siegfried Sassoon's The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. Translation won't be an issue.

Sacco's "Fixer"

Neven: Sarajevan Man of Mystery

Upon returning home, I pulled Joe Sacco’s illustrated reportage from my bookshelf. The war in Bosnia was Sacco’s Spanish Civil War, and Safe Area: Gorazde his Homage to Catalonia. He didn’t fight, of course, but his stories still resonate. His own experiences during the siege and the contacts he made in the 90s provided enough material for two additional books: War’s End and The Fixer. They’re both excellent.

Re-reading The Fixer following our journey was instructive. I could better appreciate how Sacco worked the story out on multiple levels. One story is Sacco’s, as he negotiates the wartime city. Another is the story of the city itself and the many underworld figures who organized its defense.

But the real story is about “the fixer” himself. Neven is Sacco’s unreliable narrator and guide through the shrapnel-scared streets of Sarajevo. Outside of Sacco’s own self-deprecating voice, it is Neven’s that we hear most clearly. A Serb defender of Sarajevo, Neven lurks in dark hotel lobbies, perpetually in debt, ever on the make, looking for western journalists who want to get close to the trenches in the hills above the city. The story of Sarajevo’s paramilitary antiheroes—Caco and Celo—remind us that this was a dirty, confused and morally ambiguous war. We wanted simple answers, and there are none to be had. The strongmen of Sarajevo press-ganged civilians into digging trenches, enriched themselves on the black market, and even ‘disappeared’ local Serbs who remained in the city. Sacco is at his most journalistic when he recounts their histories. However, those panels are also the least interesting in the book. The real story concerns Neven himself. He remains a mystery throughout the book. We don’t know if we can believe his stories about the Sarajevan underworld, much less his tales of his own battlefield heroics. At one point, a fellow soldier dismisses Neven’s account of a desperate battle against “43 tanks”, suggesting that Neven actually ducked front-line service. Later, another Sarajevan asserts that Neven was brave to the point of recklessness. Sacco lets us decide what we want to believe.

I want to believe in the romantic warrior who risked his life for a multi-ethnic city that no longer exists. I want to believe that the balding, paunchy, perpetually-broke Neven fiercely fought for the cause of Serbo-Bosniak co-existence, or at least Sarajevo. The war in the 90s left us to wallow in the mud and slaughter of Srebrenica. I turned off my television rather than watch more footage of useless UN “Smurfs” and meaningless talk from our politicians. But Neven seems different, and one Neven can remind us that war can evoke love as well as hatred. 

Sarajevo: Scarred and Divided

Sarajevo is still a divided city, and I can imagine that many Sarajevans still feel that their security is tenuous. A quick Google search reveals that Sarajevo as well as the entire Bosniak “heart” of Bosnia-Herzegovina is landlocked, surrounded on three sides by the Republska Serbska and on the fourth by Croat-dominated territory. The region around Sarajevo itself is also divided. During the siege of 92-95, a large section of the southern bank of the rust-colored Miljacka River was occupied by Serb forces, and even today the boarder of Republika Srpska lies just over the wooded line of hills south of the city. Just this week, the gulf between Serbs and Bosniaks was once again apparent as the two communities held separate commemorative events. Bosniaks invited the Vienna Philharmonic to play in the Vijecnica National Library. I day earlier, in a Serb neighborhood to the east, residents unveiled a monument to the assassin/freedom fighter Gavrilo Princip. Reuters covered the story (and interviewed our group) HERE.

Even small things appear to reflect the continuing ethnic mistrust in this country. As he drove us from the airport along narrow, winding roads to a centuries-old Jewish cemetery overlooking Sarajevo from the south bank of the Miljacka, D______, our tour guide pulled a pack of Marlboro cigarettes out of his pants pocket. “You see,” he said, “the warning labels must be printed three times. Once in Cyrillic for the Serbs, of course. Then the same warning is printed for the Croats and Bosnians, even though it’s spelled the same. Word for word.” The street signs were now posted in Cyrillic as well.

This is a story we heard from other short-term residents as well. Barhana is a popular rakjia bar in the Baščaršija old town. American graduate students and other young tourists dominate the space. There is still a joint European military mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and EUFOR soldiers stationed near the airport were eating lunch at Barhana at the table next to ours. “Where is the new statue of Princip?” we asked. They didn’t know, and they advised us that we would never find out unless we asked in Serbian neighborhoods. Bosnians will simply ignore you or gently apologize and shrug, offering you a Sarajevsko Pivo. You can’t even get Novi Sad Serbian beer unless you leave Sarajevo. Serbs won’t sell Bosniak beer, and Bosniaks return the favor.

The Sarajevsko brewery itself, just across the river from the Latin Bridge, is evidence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s lasting impact.  Krakow and Prague play up their Habsburg roots, trading on a romantic narrative of a degenerating, doomed central European aristocracy—Think of the tragic stories of the beautiful and neurasthenic Empress Sisi or the murder-suicide of her son, the crown prince Rudolf. In contrast, it’s difficult to determine whether there’s any serious Habsburg nostalgia here. Clearly, the Austrians (or “Schwabes”, as Ivo Andrich’s Visegrad Turks refer to them in Bridge on the Drina) shaped this city as much as the Ottomans. One sees it in the architecture—solid facades reminiscent of similarly formidable Secession-style Belle Epoch buildings in Paris, Berlin, Budapest and Vienna. But Turkish Islam, Titoism, and the siege have had a far greater impact on look and feel of the city.

Even though the mythic tragedy of the murdered Archduke—a man who hoped to provide national minorities within the empire more autonomy, whose greatest joy was playing with his children, whose last words were “Sopherl! Don’t die! Live for our children!”—would seem to provide an obvious source of tourist revenue, the city is too divided about the character and status of the assassin. For many years, Sarajevans marked the spot where Princip stood with the imprint of his shoes in concrete. During the civil war in the 90s, however, the monument was removed (now it stands just inside the door to the museum). Many Serbs view him as one of their greatest heroes and they are quick to accuse those who refer to Princip as a “nationalist” or “terrorist” of anti-Serb prejudice.

Personally, I find this kind of knee-jerk response to the realities of the historical record baffling. It is a fact that Princip acted in concert with certain officials from Serbia who hoped to use terror and assassination to eject the Austrians from Bosnia. It is a fact that Princip’s actions that day triggered a cascade of events culminating in the outbreak of war a month later. However, those facts don’t damn the Serbians as a people or Serbia as a nation. It does not make them uniquely responsible for the catastrophe of the Great War. Most historians point at the other great powers: Germany and Austria for the most part (Fischer, Hastings), occasionally Great Britain (Ferguson) or even Russia. This is clearly a case where the violent breakup of Yugoslavia has made the sober assessment of history impossible. Serbs feel that the West continues to unfairly victimize them for their role in the war; that they suffered as much if not more than the Croats and Bosniaks, and that they must defend their own myths or risk losing face. 

Sassoon's Journals Online!

Siegfried Sassoon's wartime diaries are now available online in their entirety. You can read them at the Cambridge Digital Library. HERE

Sassoon attacks a German position on the Somme

In the Trenches Around "Wipers"

Today we finally piled into our rental car and began our tour of the battlefields of Flanders. Joe drove us all the way to the Vladslo German Military Cemetery northeast of Ypres and Diksmuide. Our goal was to finally see Kaethe Kollwitz's "Grieving Parents"--the monument she cast in honor of her son Peter, who died in October, 1914. We arrived early enough to beat the tour bus crowd. 

Kollwitz: the Grieving Mother

Kollwitz spent over a decade mourning her son before she finally settled on a design that suited her. She and her husband finally installed the memorial in 1932.

Kollwitz's Husband

The cemetery contains the remains of over 25,000 German soldiers, many of them transferred in 1956. In 1918, there were 678 German military cemeteries in Belgium; in 1925 and once again in 1956, they were consolidated. At that time, Peter Kollwitz and his comrades were moved from Roogeveld to Vladslo--Kollwitz's statues went with them.







AND THEN...

We made our way to Ypres (Ipres to the Belgians, "Wipers" to the British). We visited the In Flanders' Fields Museum, and it was terrific. The museum is interactive and the displays fascinating. I'll add some more later. Finally, we drove to Hill 62. It's a site that includes the remnants of a British trench system from 1918. All of us wandered through it.

Yes. Overjoyed to finally be in a trench. 

The cratered landscape on Hill 62