Blood and Belonging Read Online Free PDF Page A

his finger, he resembled nothing so much, my father said, as a prosperous south German refrigerator salesman.

    Obviously, he was more imaginative and sinister than that. I remember how, on a cruise in the Adriatic, my parents kept hiding a book from the crew, stowing it under their bunk, locking it in their luggage. The book turned out to be Milovan Djilas’s The New Class . Djilas, Tito’s companion in arms, was still in Tito’s jail for denouncing his dictatorial tendencies.
    We traveled everywhere in the Yugoslavia of the late 1950s—through Bosnian hill villages, where children swarmed up to the car, barefoot and in rags; to the great mosque of Sarajevo, where I removed my shoes and knelt and watched old men pressing their foreheads on the carpets and whispering their prayers; to the Dalmatian islands andbeaches, then unvisited by Western tourists; to Lake Bled in Slovenia. Parts of southern Serbia, central Bosnia, and western Hercegovina were so poor that it was not clear how ordinary people survived at all. Ljubljana and Zagreb, by contrast, were neat, prosperous Austro-Hungarian towns that seemed to have nothing in common with the bony, bare hinterlands of central Yugoslavia.
    At the time, all expression of economic resentment, together with nationalist consciousness itself, came under Tito’s ban. The society marched forward, willingly or unwillingly, under the banner of “brotherhood and unity.” To call yourself a Croat or Serb first and a Yugoslav second was to risk arrest as a nationalist and chauvinist.
    I had no idea how complicated and ambiguous the division between national and Yugoslav identity actually was. I knew, for example, that Metod, my tennis coach in Bled, always called himself, first and foremost, a Slovenian. I remember him saying bitterly that he hated serving in the Yugoslav National Army, because both he and his brother were ragged by the Serbs for being Slovene.
    Was that the only time I saw the cracks that were to become fissures? I think so. For everywhere else I remember people who told me, happily, that they were Yugoslavs. In retrospect, I see that was there at the most hopeful moment. Tito was still lionized for having kept the country out of Stalin’s empire; there were the first signs of the economic boom of the 1960s; soon to come was the liberalization of travel, which allowed millions of Yugoslavs to work abroad and for a time made Yugoslavia the freest of all the Eastern European Communist countries.
    I hold on to my ancien régime memories. Everyone now says the descent into hell was inevitable. Nothing seemed lesslikely at the time. My childhood tells me that nothing is inevitable: that is what makes what did happen tragic.
    THE NARCISSISM OF MINOR DIFFERENCE
    As Balkan nationalists tell it, their history is their fate. Croats will explain, for example, that the root cause of the bloodshed in the Balkans is that they are “essentially” Catholic, European, and Austro-Hungarian in origin, while Serbs are “essentially” Orthodox, Byzantine, and Slav, with an added tinge of Turkish cruelty and indolence. The Sava and Danube Rivers, which serve as borders between Croatia and Serbia, once demarcated the boundary between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires.
    If this historical fault line is emphasized often enough, the conflict between Serbs and Croats can be read off as inevitable. Yet it is not how the past dictates to the present but how the present manipulates the past that is decisive in the Balkans.
    Freud once argued that the smaller the real difference between two peoples, the larger it was bound to loom in their imagination. He called this effect the narcissism of minor difference. Its corollary must be that enemies need each other to remind themselves of who they really are. A Croat, thus, is someone who is not a Serb. A Serb is someone who is not a Croat. Without hatred of the other, there would be no clearly defined