The Library: Yugoslavia, My Fatherland by Goran Vojnović

Read by: Paul Scraton

In the departure lounge of Ljubljana airport, two hours early for our flight back to Germany, I pulled a book out of my bag and start to read. Two flights and about five hours later I read the final page as the plane made the final approach to Berlin’s Tegel Airport. I had crossed the Alps and the heart of Germany, but really I had been in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, as explored through the eyes of a narrator who has discovered, sixteen years after he believed his father was dead, that in fact that this barely remembered man who was an officer in the Yugoslav People’s Army is actually alive and living in hiding, a fugitive of the Hague as a wanted war criminal. Yugoslavia, My Fatherland by Goran Vojnović tells the story of the narrator’s journey to find his father, a journey that causes him to reflect on how the disintegration of his family is tied to the disintegration of the country, and the world, that they used to call home.

I came to this book by coincidence – the man sitting next to me on my flight out to Ljubljana a week earlier was reading (in Slovenian) a book by Goran Vojnović who was then profiled (in English) in a magazine I picked up at the airport, waiting for my bags to appear. I have long been interested in the history of the former Yugoslavia; ever since I was a student in Leeds starting out my degree only two years after the Dayton Peace Accords had brought to an end the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina that had played out on our teatime television screens throughout my teenage years. Reading about Yugoslavia, My Fatherland in the magazine was what led me to a book described by the English publishers as a work that “deals intimately with the tragic fates of the people who managed to avoid the bombs, but were unable to escape the war.”

Goran Vojnović was born in Slovenia in 1980 and is a well-respected director and screenwriter as well as being a bestselling novelist. I would love to speak to him at some point about how much of the background of his protagonist – school experiences in Ljubljana in the 1990s for instance – reflect his own, as the power of this novel is in how Vojnović manages to explore the break-up of Yugoslavia from the multitude of perspectives in the different parts of the former Federal Republic, allowing all voices to have their say without, it seems to me, judgement or bias one way or the other. One of the finest scenes in the book is when his new classmate in Ljubljana, where the teenage narrator has moved with his mother from Pula, Croatia via Belgrade and Novi Sad, explains what is happening in Yugoslavia via the nationalities of the other children in the class.

Throughout the book the narrator remembers the slow collapse of the world of his childhood through remembered scenes in apartments, the tone of the newsreaders on the evening television and the atmosphere in Ljubljana where he lives but never quite feels at home. The other strand of the story is of course the present-day search for his father, and the impact of the knowledge of the crimes he is alleged to have committed in a village in Slavonia. The story is told in a matter-of-fact, sometimes humorous tone, and Vojnović certainly has a flair for set-piece scenes, both in the description and the dialogue, but what is most impressive is how the battle of ideas that reflects battles taking place elsewhere in real life, and the complexity of personal identities both in the time of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and today, are told through the multitude of characters who appear in the book. This is impressive writing, and one of the best tellings of the Yugoslavia story that I have read.

This is a novel about place, about memory, and about how the world of our childhood can be destroyed so that it no longer exists, even if it remains a name on a map. Along the way it deals with a number of signifiers of home and belonging, from the behaviour of guests at a wedding to the differences in language, not only between the Slovene his mother insists on using when they move to Ljubljana and the Serbo-Croatian that has been the family language up to that point, but the differences within the latter, when his Bosnian classmates make fun of the narrator as he speaks the Italian-tinged version of his childhood home on the coast.

Goran Vojnović tells this story in relatively straightforward language, but the more you read the more you realise how complex the novel is as it creates this portrait of a disintegrating country through the personal story of a disintegrating family. It is a reminder of the power of literature, and of fiction, to help us come to the essential truth of history and its impact on people. Much credit must go to the translator Noah Charney and the publishers Istros Books for bringing it to an English-speaking audience as this is an important and powerful book, and one which deserves to be read as widely as possible.

Yugoslavia, My Fatherland by Goran Vojnović, translated by Noah Charney, is available via the publishers, Istros Books.

Postcard from... Koh Kret

By Julia Stone:

As we approach the island by boat, the chimney has the appearance of a ginormous tree, sprouting high above the coconut palms and temple rooftops. Out of the mouth of the chimney a bush of some sort is growing, like a head of curly hair.

Koh Kret became an island in 1722, when a canal was constructed to create a shortcut in the Chaophraya river. To this day there is no bridge connecting the two by two kilometre island from the mainland, and only bicycles and motorbikes travel the path that runs around it. You will find Koh Kret to the north of Bangkok, in the district of Nonthaburi, where I my dad lives. I love coming to Koh Kret for the rural atmosphere and absolute contrast to the bustle and noise of the mainland, just a two Baht ferry ride away, although not on the wekend, when hordes of Bangkokians arrive to eat, buy pottery souvenirs or visit the Mon temples on the island.

Mon immigrants settled Koh Kret after the destruction of Ayutthaya in 1767, during the Siamese-Burmese war. Today the majority of Koh Kret's population is still Mon, with their own distinct version of Buddhism and a traditional style of Mon pottery called kwan aman, for which Nonthaburi and especially the island are famous.

The chimney is the remnant of a pottery village, I can see some of the brick kilns still standing below as I approach it via an elevated path between crops growing in water, but it looks like it hasn't been used in quite a while. As a kid, my mom used to take me to the Koh Kret and sometimes one of the potters would let me have a go at forming the clay on the rotating wheel, but now I wonder about this inactivity. As the visitors pick over the choice of pottery souvenirs in the village shops I have to question whether they are even made here any more. 

The Joy of Old Maps

By Paul Scraton:

A love of maps is something that all of us share here at Elsewhere, and I suspect that goes for a good many of our readers as well. On a personal level, there is nothing I like more than sitting down with a collection of maps to plan a route or a journey. If is a place I have never been to before, it is a moment where imagination takes over as I attempt to picture the lie of the land or the streetscape I will soon be passing through. If it is a place I known well, the map will stimulate memories of previous travels and trips, or the everyday journeys from here to there when it was a different place, the place on the map, which I called home.

Something of a traditionalist, I prefer my maps on paper, although Amy Liptrot’s essay in Elsewhere No.02 that featured Google Maps as a stimulus to memory and imagination persuaded me that there can also be much value in exploration via a glowing screen. If it is a map of the here and now, I think it is the possibility that they represent that most appeals: Is that a footpath along that abandoned railway embankment? Is that a river in my neighbourhood, one that had somehow passed me by? What is in that patch of grey space in the edgelands of the city, between the residential districts and first of the farmed fields in the surrounding countryside? Maybe I should go and find out…

There is another subset of maps that have long fascinated me, and they are maps from the past. Whether found in second hand bookshops or reproduced and reprinted, old maps are a great starting point for anyone interested in understanding the history of a place. In Elsewhere No.04 we highlighted two projects that have old maps at their heart: the reproductions of city maps by Pharus here in Germany, and the London Trails walking tours by Ken Titmuss, using old maps as guiding documents. Inspired, we decided to launch the fourth edition of Elsewhere by taking a walk, following a route from Friedrichstraße station in the centre of Berlin to the Vagabund brewery in the old industrial district of Wedding. Using a Pharus map of the city from 1902, we attempted to bridge the gap between the Berlin on paper and what we could see with our own eyes.

The map offered us clues to the history of the city. The location of synagogues on the map suggested where the centre of the Jewish community in the early 20th century Berlin could be found. The market halls and bathhouses, theatres and factories, all diligently marked down, spoke to the everyday reality of life in the rapidly industrialising city in 1902. The destinations indicated for each of the main-line railway stations hinted at very different borders for the Germany of then and the Germany of now. Where the Vagabund brewery now stands, the streets are marked but not yet named, and in between them only an empty space. The map of 1902, with a good number of these planned but unbuilt neighbourhoods circling the city centre, showed us that the expansion of Berlin, laid out by James Hobrecht in 1861, was still very much a work in progress. 

As we walked a steady rain fell and the water on the ground shimmered under the streetlamps and headlights of the cars as darkness swallowed the city. In the half-light of an autumn evening we searched out the links between 1902 and now. The theatre still standing. The railway station. The market hall (now a supermarket). And we spotted what was missing: some of the synagogues, the bathhouses and a department store, huge factory complexes and a circus tent. As we walked we could also trace other moments in Berlin’s history, things that in 1902 were still to come. We walked by open spaces levelled by bombs that fell over 70 years ago. We crossed the path of the Berlin Wall. We finished up on a street that now had a name and was now lined with houses.

Old maps will only ever tell part of a story, but they offer up clues that help lead us to some of the fascinating tales of the city. They help us understand what was here before and provide us with a guiding document to imagine what has been lost. Indeed, all maps are – to some extent – “old”. From the moment they are finished they are immediately out of date. A new building erected here. An old one gone there. Streets re-routed and renamed. But in their inaccuracy, maps whatever their age are invaluable for those of us interested in the story of a place. 

Elsewhere No.04, with our map special featuring essays and interviews can be found on our online shop here. Elsewhere No.02, featuring Amy Liptrot’s essay ‘A (near future) Google Maps tour of the heart’ can be found here. For the historic map tours in London, offered by Ken Titmuss, visit London Trails website. You can search the archive of reprinted maps from Pharus via their online shop here. 

Memory, Place and Personal Narratives: High Street Stories

The High Street Stories Augmented Reality app. showing the geo-tagged stories. Credit: Heritage New Zealand. Photo: Guy Frederick

By Paul Scraton:

The question of how we tell the stories of a place becomes all the more urgent when the physical reminders of a city, a town or a village have been destroyed. With the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010/2011, the High Street precinct of Christchurch, New Zealand was irrevocably destroyed. Many of the historic buildings of the neighbourhood were reduced to rubble, and the streetscapes altered forever.

With a background in oral history and documentary film and radio, Zoe Roland in her role as public programmes developer at Heritage New Zealand instigated a project designed to capture the stories of the High Street, “from early days as a bustling commercial centre through its decline in the 1970s and ‘80s, and later regeneration.” With both a website and an augmented reality app for android, High Street Stories brings together 90 histories, anecdotes and other stories from the architectural heritage of the neighbourhood to sordid memories of the red light district.

In her essay ‘There’s nothing to See Here’: Rebuilding Memories of Place through Personal Narratives Zoe Roland reflects on how, after the earthquake “the city’s communities were left disconnected and disaffected, and their mental well-being compromised.” But through projects such as High Street Stories, the use of personal narratives - their collection and presentation - “is a powerful tool to creative collective agency, sense of place and to ameliorate historical amnesia.”

Exploring and listening to the stories of Christchurch, I am reminded of other projects in other, very different places, that also attempt to use this “powerful tool.” In Cape Town in 2010 I explored the District Six Museum, located in what was once a mixed community of “freed slaves, merchants, artisans, labourers and immigrants,” that was declared a white area in 1966 by the Apartheid government. Over 60,000 people were forced to leave and their houses destroyed by bulldozers.

In 1994 the District Six Museum was established to bring together memories of the once-vibrant, now-destroyed neighbourhood, not only to preserve the stories of those who once lived there, but also to tell the story of the forced removals in South Africa in general and their impact on communities and the wider society. Exploring the District Six Museum was a moving experience, and as with High Street Stories, it suggested to me the power of individual testimony and personal anecdote in our understanding of the past.

Here in Berlin, in my previous job at the Circus Hotel, I was involved in a series of Eyewitness History Talks (which are still ongoing) organised through the Zeitzeugenbörse; the Centre for Witness to Contemporary History. In those talks we heard all kinds of different people tell us their stories of Berlin, whether it was growing up in the city during the Nazi era, student days in the GDR, or living with the Wall at the end of the street in West Berlin. Some of the stories were dramatic but it was the observations and memories of the everyday that were often the most powerful, as they all help us build a picture in our minds and offer a backdrop and a context when we are trying to understand the past.

Back on the High Street in Christchurch I continue to listen to the stories and flick through the images that stand now, on my screen, as a reminder of what was lost. I learn about a murderous assault in the 1870s at Barretts Hotel and what it was like to be a kid in the city in the 1960s; I hear about butcher’s shops and departments stores, and learn what as china jerry is and how it explodes into a thousand pieces when fired at with an air gun. 

I have never been to New Zealand, and even if I was to visit tomorrow, the High Street of these stories is no longer there as it was. But it exists in memory, both individual and collective, and through projects like High Street Stories it is there for others to discover.

Links:
High Street Stories website and augmented reality app
District Six Museum, Cape Town
Zeitzeugenbörse Berlin (For the next history talk at the Circus, check out the events page on their blog)

Postcard from... the Eternal Sea

By Julia Stone:

It was the name on the map that intrigued us. Scanning through the places and landmarks of Ostfriesland the name jumped up off the page. Ewiges Meer – the Eternal Sea. We knew nothing else but the name was enough. We took a detour and followed a wooden path above the marshy moor for two kilometres, all the while watching the sky warily for the onset of a promised thunder storm.

We found the lake and immediately noticed there was none of the usual reeds and other plantlife growing in the shallower waters along the shore, and from the information boards by the path we learned that this was a result of the nutrient poverty of the moorland waters. The Eternal Sea is a Hochmoorsee (high moor lake), around which peat was long extracted until it was declared a nature reserve in 1939. It may be only three metres deep but it is 1.8 kilometres long and almost a kilometre wide.

Under darkening skies the waters were choppy, and although the information boards promised a variety of birds and other wildlife there was none to be seen. No people either, and standing out there with no chance of shelter from the cloudburst, feeling rather disconnected from civilisation, our surroundings felt strangely timeless... you might even say: Eternal.

Elsewhere No.04, featuring illustrations and artwork from Julia Stone, is out now. You can order your copy directly with us via the online shop.