[...]

As I watched helplessly from my home on one of Novi Sad’s main boulevards while the Serbian tanks sent against Croatia were paraded in 1991 I realised that Yugoslavia was bound to disintegrate. A decade before I still harboured certain illusions, not surprisingly, as for very many of us across Yugoslavia the conjuncture of Mediterranean, Central European and Balkan cultures with their wonderful diversity was an exciting intellectual challenge, a European venture. It promised to be an exhilarating European experiment that, culturally speaking, was full of potential. Politically, though, it was untenable. When it came to implementing multiculturalism, Yugoslavia was ahead of the West: what we were born into has only been emerging in the West starting with the past two decades. Thanks to a scholarship from DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service, I spent a year in Berlin, from May 2007 to May 2008, in the course of which those old memories of Yugoslavia all of a sudden reawakened. Berlin, that multicultural megalopolis, the receiving party, brought to my mind a Novi Sad that is now in the process of disappearing. Not that the symptom is specific to Novi Sad; it is East- Central European and Balkan too. While the western megalopolises of London, Berlin and Paris become ethnically ever more diverse, the formerly nationally motley small cities of the East are turning ethnically homogeneous. And that is being done in full view of the EU. The West has entered the post-national age whereas the East has tumbled into a nationalist euphoria.
During the nineteenth century, and right up to the end of the First World War, Hungary also enjoyed the same sort of ethnically variegated life as Yugoslavia did in the latter half of the twentieth century. It was an ethnically mixed and culturally rich country right up to the end of the First World War, but the Peace Treaty of Trianon led to the loss of two thirds of its territory, and with that the flavour of the “foreign”, the “Other”, almost vanished from Hungarian literature. And that goes not only for Hungarian literature, because the ethnic make-up of Eastern European fiction is everywhere becoming monochrome. By contrast, the “foreign”, the “Other”, is finding itself increasingly more at home in western literatures—English, German, French and Austrian—and, little by little, primarily thanks to the great western megalopolises, a new literary Babylon is taking shape.
The old Yugoslavia used to be an exciting cultural Babylon.
In point of fact, it is only since its disintegration that I really started to understand the writer Joseph Roth’s sense of homelessness and statelessness following the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And Robert Musil’s, too, who called himself the sort of Austro-Hungarian from whom the Hungarian would have to be subtracted.
In Vojvodina that subtraction and addition was not just politics or culture but a way of life. In the eighteenth century, after the Ottoman power was driven out, the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria swung into a massive colonisation drive to create what was, in effect, a mini America in the middle of Europe. It was Serbs, Germans and Hungarians, first and foremost, who settled, but there were also substantial numbers of Jews, Slovaks, Romanians and Ruthenians, and in the Banat a few small Spanish colonies also came into existence. Austria-Hungary was an empire and not a nation-state, and the various ethnic groups that settled in the vacuum that was Vojvodina preserved their national distinctions. The inhabitants of Vojvodina were caught up in a particularly absurd process of addition and subtraction, and even more complex mathematical operations were in play. Nobody now mourns the loss of the old Yugoslavia because of the brutality and bloodiness of its break-up. There are many who are willing to say that it was brought into this world as a result of French foreign policy; others suspect that it was a fictional entity dreamed up by the Communist Tito, who had spent his early years growing up in a thoroughly Austro- Hungarian milieu. Whatever may have been the case, the concoction resulted in valuable experiences all the same. Now that Yugoslavia has collapsed I read The Man Without Qualities differently from the way I read it in the Sixties. Then I considered it a great ground-breaking novel; only now do I see that its grand formal experiment was a better expression of the times than were literary works that it is customary to call realist. Realism may be true to perfection but it is insensitive to cataclysms.

[...]

László Végel
is a novelist, essayist and playwright who lives in Novi Sad, the largest city in the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia, with many ethnic Hungarian inhabitants.
His books include a fictional diary on the war in Serbia (Exterritórium, 2000) and a volume of essays on life as a member of a national minority (Hontalan esszék, 2003)