Slavenka Drakulić 1949–2026

Eurozine is deeply saddened by the news of the death of Slavenka Drakulić, a member of the Eurozine Advisory Board and regular contributor. We have lost a European intellectual in the true sense.

By the time Drakulić first entered Eurozine’s orbit in 2000 with her keynote speech at the 14th European Meeting of Cultural Journals in Vienna, she had already published the series of books for which she was well-known througout Europe and the USA: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Café Europa, and Balkan Express.

Slavenka Drakulić, Sibiu, 2007. Copyright Eurozine

A prominent writer and feminist intellectual in Croatia, Drakulić had been forced to leave the country in 1992 after being denounced as an enemy of the state by supporters of the Tuđman regime. From then on she divided her time between Stockholm and Vienna, taking it upon herself to explain to a western audience what had become of the former Yugoslavia.

Her speech, which was read out by Swedish publisher Arne Ruth after health problems prevented her from attending, was titled ‘Who’s afraid of Europe’. Occasioned by the new coalition between Wolfgang Schüssel’s Austrian People Party and Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party, Drakulić asked why the far right was gaining ground across the continent.

Her answer: ‘Europe is afraid of itself!’ The far-right was successfully exploiting people’s fear of identity loss, she argued, and liberal Europeans needed to offer something positive. That something was the chance of multiple identities and at the same time belonging.

In 2004 she published They Would Never Hurt a Fly, about war criminals on trial in The Hague. In it, she returned to Arendt’s famous point about the ‘banality of evil’.

‘Ordinary people could not what these monsters did. We are ordinary people, therefore we cannot commit such crimes. But once you get closer to the real people who committed those crimes, you see that the syllogism doesn’t really work.’

An excerpt from the book was published in Eurozine and Transit magazine. Titled ‘Triumph of evil’, it described the trial of Radislav Krstić the first war criminal sentenced for genocide by the ICTY.

But it was testimony to her sanity as a writer that that she was capable of more lighthearted topics too. In 2007 she returned to a Eurozine conference to give a speech on … toilet paper. During communism, the scarcity of this basic resource stood for the regime’s failure to meet citizens’ basic needs. Now, however, she wasn’t so sure whether she and her fellow eastern Europeans had not been longing for just another false paradise.

Slavenka’s subsequent articles for Eurozine circled around her key themes of war and war crimes, nationalism, gender and sexuality. We were proud to count her among Eurozine’s regular contributors. Editing her work was always a pleasure. We are deeply grateful to her contribution to Eurozine over the years and will miss her greatly.

Simon Garnett

Read former Eurozine Editor-in-Chief Carl Henrik Fredriksson’s obituary of Slavenka Drakulić here.