‘To compose a sentence was to take a moral stance’

Slavenka was… irrepressible.

I had been reading her for many years before we met. Her writing belonged among my first encounters with eastern Europe. At that time, as a student of East European history in the 1990s, I was so often told, ‘you, a young American, privileged and superficial and lacking in history and profound experiences, you will never understand’. And I was grateful to Slavenka Drakulić, who rather than saying ‘you’ll never understand’, instead set about explaining – through telling stories, choosing the illuminating anecdote, casting the political in human terms.

She was not making the polemical point ‘we’re just like you, don’t exoticize us!’, but rather: ‘I know this part of the world is very different from yours, but there are real people there living real lives and I can tell you about those lives in a way that will make you understand – if not everything, then quite a bit.’ She related to her readers with generosity.

Now, when I talk with my graduate students about writing, Slavenka’s attitude is my model. I tell them: be generous towards your readers. Reach out your hand. You’re not writing to make yourself sound superior, you’re writing to help other someone else understand a time and a place where they themselves were not.

*

The first time I saw Slavenka in person I never would have dared to introduce myself. It was 1994 in Prague; she was giving a lecture at Central European University, where I was taking a summer course in creative writing with the Czech novelist Arnošt Lustig. The moderator (a man) introduced her by saying that she had recently married the Swedish writer Richard Swartz. When she took the microphone, Slavenka pointed out that one would hardly introduce a man this way. ‘And by the way,’ she added, ‘this is my third marriage.’

I kind of loved that.

It was another fifteen years of reading Slavenka before I spoke to her. When I did it was in Vilnius in 2009, at a Eurozine conference. I was no longer a twenty-two-year-old student but a thirty-seven-year-old professor, and even so I was a bit star-struck. I wanted to ask her about S: A Novel about the Balkans, which I had assigned in a course. The novel’s heroine, a young Bosnian schoolteacher imprisoned in a Serbian camp, becomes pregnant as a result of repeated rape by Serbian soldiers. S. survives the war, is evacuated from Bosnia as a refugee, and gives birth in a hospital in Stockholm. She has no intention of keeping, or even seeing, the baby, but then, unexpectedly to herself, decides that she wants to be that child’s mother.

Slavenka Drakulić 1949–2026

A moral compass: Slavenka Drakulić (1949–2026)

‘To compose a sentence was to take a moral stance’

‘Life exists to be described’

Slavenka Drakulić was a member of the Eurozine Advisory Board and frequent contributor to Eurozine.

Slavenka told me that S. was inspired by the rape victims she had spoken to during and after the Yugoslav wars. She listened to their stories – stories of displacement and terror, of motherhood and loss. She told me about the women who explained to her that in the end, despite everything, the children they carried and bore felt like their own.

This made sense to her. ‘After all,’ Slavenka told me in Vilnius, ‘I gave birth to my daughter and then I divorced her father. And I forgot about him completely. But my daughter is my daughter!’

That was our first conversation, appropriately unforgettable – and as if a continuation of ‘And by the way, this is my third marriage.’

*

Later, when we all became friends, I found her quite wonderfully matched with this third husband. If I’m not mistaken, it was Martin Pollack, the Austrian writer whose voice is so terribly missed, who introduced them. All three shared an intense commitment to the responsibility of the writer to tell the truth, even when readers preferred not to be told.

S. is not an easy novel to read. Once I showed Slavenka a Facebook post from my former graduate student Colleen, by then a history professor herself, who had read S. with her students.

I knew that I was taking a risk by assigning Slavenka Drakulić’s novel S. on war and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia to my History of Modern Europe class. I worried that the students would be uncomfortable talking about women’s bodies, rape, torture, infanticide, and suicide. Or worse, I feared they’d be indifferent to the suffering of Muslim refugees or the dangers of nationalism. I didn’t expect the nearly unanimous gratitude that the class expressed toward Drakulić for telling this story and toward me for making them read it. S. reached them, and, through S., I reached them.

Slavenka wrote back to me that the appreciation of these anonymous students meant more to her than the praise of any literary critic. She cared about reaching people, and she cared about those women who had told her their stories.

Slavenka was unafraid to write about sex, and about violence, and unafraid to declare herself a feminist in contexts where that label was pejorative. She wrote forthrightly about how eastern European women had been conditioned to stand abuse. She characterized a dominant attitude of toleration: ‘It was senseless to report a man for his habitual behaviour.’

She was also unafraid to place responsibility on women for a lack of solidarity. ‘The idea that women should support other women to achieve common objectives does not exist in Eastern Europe and never did,’ she wrote in Café Europa Revisited. This struck me, painfully, in the 1990s: the lack of solidarity among women, the competition over men – as if a legacy from the wartime generation when there had been a scarcity, and the absence even of a language to talk about sexual harassment. For many years I was a single woman wandering alone, the object of that harassment lacking an adequate language.

Later, when I was in my thirties, I became someone’s wife. In 2018, an interview I gave to a Slovak newspaper about the historical significance of the murders of the Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová, was published under the headline, ‘Manželka Timothyho Snydera pre týždeň: “Už len novinári nás môžu zachráni”’ – ‘Timothy Snyder’s Wife for The Weekly: “Only the journalists can save us now”.’ (The allusion was to Martin Heidegger’s [in]famous Der Spiegel interview: ‘Nur ein Gott kann uns noch retten.’)

‘This headline is so ridiculous,’ Slavenka said when she saw it, ‘that it makes you wonder what we accomplished in the last 25 years in eastern Europe.’

Slavenka herself lived women’s solidarity. She read drafts of my work and sent me comments. She pushed me to keep writing after the birth of my children, when being able to compose a single poignant sentence at times seemed impossible.

For Slavenka, to compose a sentence was to take a moral stance. I remember a dinner with friends at their Vienna apartment; we were talking about writing. And Slavenka said that what novelists understood and scholars sometimes failed to appreciate was that human empathy came into being only at the level of the individual person. Thousands of lives – or deaths – were an abstraction; only a single one was real. Evoking that single life in a way that made empathy possible was an implicitly moral question for her – for all of us around the table, for that matter.

Slavenka was at once Yugoslav, Croatian, European and cosmopolitan; she and Richard moved between Stockholm, Zagreb, Vienna and the Croatian peninsula of Istria on the Adriatic Sea. She was a prolific writer with capacious interests who wrote both fiction and non-fiction, in a frankly astonishing variety of genres from journalism and essays to novels and short stories. In 1987, still during communism, she interviewed Abbie Hoffman, the American civil rights and anti-war activist. Abbie was the hero of my youth. Slavenka’s interview appeared in a Croatian newspaper two years before his suicide – when most Americans had forgotten him. In her fiction she conjured up characters as disparate as the Polish poet consumed by her love for a Brazilian anthropologist and Bohumil the mouse, who was told by the woman selling souvenirs at the Prague museum of communism that people do not come visit because they do not want to confront the fact that they went along with it.

She was funny, sarcastic, sharp, warm, open, self-critical, and demanding – above all of herself. She wrote about what she knew; she was interested in the world; and she posed questions to which there were no comfortable answers. Why is it meaningful that there is a coffee shop called ‘Café Europa’ in the centre of the Albanian capital of Tirana? What do the wild dogs roaming the streets of Bucharest have to tell us? What is revealed by ‘European food apartheid’– the fact that the ingredients in Nutella vary between Vienna and Bratislava? Why did Slobodan Milošević’s wife, Mira Marković, whose fashion style was otherwise quite ‘comradely’, wear a ribbon or bow or plastic flower in her hair, like a small child? How did Radko Mladić, the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, feel after his twenty-three-year-old daughter committed suicide with his pistol? Can a butcher experience the same feelings as his victims?

Because of butchers like Mladić, Slavenka’s friends became refugees. One of them was Dražena, a Bosnian journalist who fled with her small daughter after the bloodied body of a middle-aged woman struck by a grenade landed right beside them on a Sarajevo street. In Balkan Express, Slavenka tells the story of when Dražena is at Slavenka’s apartment in Zagreb, and Slavenka’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Rujana, is packing clothes for her. Rujana gives her a pair of black patent leather high-heeled shoes; Dražena puts them on and looks as if she is headed to a party. Slavenka finds this ridiculous – Dražena is a refugee now, about to leave for places and conditions unknown, she needs practical things, jeans and sneakers. Rujana berates her mother: ‘How could you be so insensitive? She needs precisely that fancy stuff, as you call it. Because even if she has lost everything, she needs to feel like a normal person, even more so now.’

What matters in this story is not only that Rujana is right to give Dražena the high-heeled shoes. What matters is also Slavenka’s self-examination. ‘What I am starting to do,’ Slavenka reflects in that exchange with her daughter,

is reduce a real, physical individual to an abstract ‘they’ – that is, to a common denominator of refugees … From there to second-class citizen – or rather, non-citizen – who owns nothing and has no rights, is only a thin blue line. I can also see how easy it is to slip into this prejudice as into a familiar pair of warm slippers, ready and waiting for me at home … The moment I thought Dražena ought not wear make-up or patent high-heeled shoes was the very moment when I myself pushed her into the group ‘refugee’, because it was easier for me. But the fact that she didn’t fit the cliché, that she disappointed me by trying to keep her face together with her make-up and her life together with a pair of shoes, made me aware of my own collaboration with this war.

*

Slavenka had no illusions about the human condition; she shared the observation of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor that, by and large, people would choose security over freedom. During the winter of 2013–2014, watching the revolution in Ukraine from Vienna, Slavenka grasped what was so special: it was the moment of choosing freedom. Both of us became fellow-travellers of the Maidan. In May 2014, we flew together from Vienna to Kyiv. My children were almost-two and four at the time, and I was very nervous about being away from them. After we’d landed and passed through customs, Slavenka texted Rujana to tell her she’d arrived safely. Rujana was in her mid-forties by then. ‘You’re never too old to check in with your child’, she told me.

We were both very happy to be in Kyiv. There was something ecstatic about the Maidan; it was a masterwork of self-organization and solidarity, and a reminder of the miracle of revolution. Even so, there was a feeling of enormous tension, even dread, when we were there. Putin’s ‘little green men’ had already invaded Crimea and Russian-sponsored separatist rebellions had begun in the Donbas – a conflict that felt eerily like the ‘quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing’ that was – and could be again – the beginning of a world war. Yet even in my catastrophism, I did not foresee 24 February 2022. This was a failure of imagination.

In the time since, the book by Slavenka I’ve returned to most often is one she wrote after witnessing the Yugoslav war crimes trials in The Hague. Like Hannah Arendt listening to Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Slavenka was listening to the defendants speak her native language. There is an intimacy implicit in that situation, something the foreign press cannot capture. The book she wrote after those trials, They Would Never Hurt a Fly, consists of inquisitive portraits of war criminals, each one very different. Her prose intersperses first person with third person – sometimes verging on omniscient – narration; at moments she writes as if from her protagonists’ perspectives. She draws upon her own life in Yugoslavia, inflected by three generations: her parents’ generation, formed by the Second World War; her own generation, formed by Tito; and her daughter’s generation, seemingly free of both.

In one chapter she writes about Zoran Vuković, a Bosnian Serb tried for mass rape of Bosnian Muslim women in the town of Foča. Slavenka listens as he testifies that after raping a fifteen-year-old girl, he told her that he chose not to be as brutal with her as he might have been, having taken into consideration that his own daughter was the same age. This was in essence his defence: I could, after all, have been still more cruel.

Slavenka, whose writing played such a large role in conveying the savagery of Serbian war crimes, was the object of a hate campaign by Croatian nationalists. They called her a witch – for being a feminist, an anti-nationalist, a humanist who aspired to universal categories of understanding. In this way, too, her position and sensibility were reminiscent of Hannah Arendt. She saw the source of evil not in a genetic predisposition of Serbs, but in vulnerabilities lying at the heart of the human condition. She believed that ‘the dehumanization of perpetrators only contributes to a misunderstanding of the core problem: we all carry within ourselves the potential of both good and evil. In critical situations, there can be no assurance which side we will take.’ She adds, in her inimitable tone, that this is ‘a very unpleasant feature of human beings’.

Why – Slavenka asked – do we need to turn the perpetrators into monsters? To assure ourselves that the predisposition to commit those crimes somehow exists outside of human nature. She refused the self-protection offered by that reasoning. ‘Ordinary people could not do what these monsters did. We are ordinary people, therefore we cannot commit such crimes,’ she wrote. ‘But once you get closer to the real people who committed those crimes, you see that the syllogism doesn’t really work.’

She wanted her readers to see how people could slip into mass atrocity step by step. She rejected palliative comfort in favour of responsibility: ‘it is essential that we understand that it is we ordinary people and not some madmen who made it possible. We were the ones who one day stopped greeting those neighbours of a different nationality – an act that the next day made possible the opening of concentration camps. We did it to each other.’

*

In the months after Trump’s first inauguration, she planned a trip to the American East Coast to visit – in a classic Slavenka combination – her kidney surgeon, her second ex-husband, and Gloria Steinem. By then I had been teaching at Yale for a decade; I took the train from New Haven, Connecticut to Manhattan; we met at a French café in the West Village. I was in a state of despair about my country’s descent into fascism. My husband and I had job offers in Geneva. I was torn: I felt like our students at Yale needed us to help them process what was happening. But I also had a strong impulse that we should take our small children and flee. The lesson, after all, of 1933 was that it was better to leave sooner rather than later.

Slavenka tried to calm me down: ‘It took Milošević some time to convince us that we wanted to kill one another. We didn’t know in the beginning, we thought we got along. You have to prepare people for killing, it doesn’t happen overnight. So you can relax, you have time to get your kids out. Today we should order a glass of wine, enjoy a nice lunch…’

This was Slavenka: free of any illusions about our mutilated world – yet always ready to go on fighting and writing and loving and laughing.

Our last exchange was in early June. I had just returned to Toronto from a literary festival in Kyiv, where I’d taken a photo with our Ukrainian friend Oksana and her young daughter to send to Slavenka. She wrote back right saying she was so happy to wake up and see the three of us, adding ‘and, of course, I wished I was there’.

We wished she were there as well.

I arrived in Vienna less than three weeks later, a few days after Slavenka’s death. I opened the closet in our apartment and saw a dress she had passed down to me several years ago, a glimmering silvery lilac, by an Italian designer. It’s the kind of dress meant to be worn with black patent leather high-heels to a party.