International Acclaimed Slovene Author Drago Jancar About Soul of Europe, Dreams: Interview and Selected writings - 2/2

DRAGO JANCAR is one of the most prominent contemporary Slovene author. In 1986 Fulbright scholar, Drago Jancar has been active in the process of democratization in his native country. Jancar’s international significance stems from the fact that he sees himself as an author who, in his own language, is critical of society and the contemporary world.

A novelist, short story writer, essayist and playwright. Jancar’s work have been translated into several European languages, and his plays have enjoyed a number of foreign production.

Q: There is an African proverb "only when lions write history will the hunters cease to be heroes". In the foreword to the book "Slovenia 1945" (John Corsellis and Marcus Ferrar, Slovenia 1945, memories of Death and Survival after WW2) documenting some of the worst atrocities committed against Slovenes after WW2, a genocide, that the necessary settlement, a forgiveness, the Slovenes will have to bring about themselves. What are you proposing?

Drago Jancar: I no longer suggest a settlement or forgiveness. It turned out that this may lead into new political and ideological fights, which are as hatred, as those half of century ago. What am saying now is that we ought to reach an understanding of historical, and above all human position, in which many, in particular, young people found themselves.

A world, divided, full of hatred, in opposing political systems. Once we will understand, we will be able to forgive – I say, we "will". Although personally have little to do with it, I was born after WW2. This is the issue of previous generation. At the same time this is also "our" issue. History after all is not only our past. We are the link between past and the future.

SELECTED WRITINGS BY DRAGO JANCAR (All rights reserved)

DRAGO JANCAR – CENTRAL EUROPE – UTOPIA OR REALITY?
How long has it been since we read Kundera’s essay on the tragedy of Central Europe in America’s (!) journal The New York Review of Books and we had the feeling that something was said which had been on the tip of our tongue for a long time. Then, in the middle of the eighties, it suddenly seemed that the truth of our lives were no longer ideologies and the closed claustrophobic spaces of national states but something wider, deeper and older.

Comic because it contained a nostalgia for something which was outlived and which existed at the beginning of the century, which had an elusive and undetermined identity which has been searched for throughout from the Baroque to the Fin de Siècle. Comic, because the truth about Central Europe has always been something vague, a strange utopia which looked back and forth at the same time. But it was a utopia. We felt that we were reaching beyond the unreasonable ideological schisms, beyond national borders and state jurisdictions, and things were discussed freely in this comic club, ignoring people with their eyes bloodstained by ideological and national hatred. Diversity, pluralism of ideologies, fragmentation, small nations, several languages spoken; all this cultural Babylon, which in half a century experienced bloody turmoil, break up of states, changes of borders, the rise of ideological eschatology, majestic visions and tremendous disappointments, was the origin of a utopia without which, as then written by Konrad, a man becomes stupid and loathsome.

Many years ago, Peter Handke, tired of our daydreaming and debates, informed us that for him Central Europe was a question of weather; a simple meteorological notion. In an essay I agreed with this important statement, but I allowed myself to add that it was nice to look at the sky and the clouds floating in the sky, and that it was also good to look under your feet, at least for as long as this Central Europe was strewn with mine fields, fenced in by wires and Berlin walls. It is also good to look around oneself, since exactly in those days the border guards of the Yugoslav People’s Army shot down a Czech family on the Mura river, when swimming across from one country to another.

From the "meteorological" point of view we would say: God knows why? Why did they have to swim where there was shooting? I proposed that we, who like looking at the clouds, if no one else, would invent something which would be equal to meteorological science. Perhaps a language spoken up there such as altocumulus lenticularis, cirrus filozus radiatus, altostradus translucidus and other celestial travelers; in short, a language which would create a possibility for the ideas, people and goods in Central Europe to circulate in the same way as the air, wind and clouds above it.

Utopias, I wrote then, have this strange characteristic that they like to come true. And this one has come true earlier than anyone among us expected. The walls have fallen, the wires have disappeared, a piece of the Berlin Wall brought to me by my daughter stands on my shelf, a piece of wire remains from the Hungarian-Austrian border given to me by my Hungarian translator. The people who died under the shots on these borders are no longer remembered by anyone, life goes on; dust covered that Berlin stone and that piece of Hungarian wire in the Ljubljana apartment of a writer, until he stored them in a carton box.

But the European idea is not something which would float to the surface today. In the thirties, the pan European idea was very strong. How the idea worked in literature one can read in the book by Ödön von Horvath The Eternal Philistine. This idea, of course modernized, is today awakened with all its force and is on its triumphant journey. Nothing can stop it now. We do not know what will come of all this. We shall see. It is at least clear to eastern pan Europeans that Europe will not solve all their problems in such a way as promised in communism. Each country will have to make its own effort to help itself. This is a bitter but useful experience. Here, people are inclined to solve problems which are beyond them, we can therefore expect that people will further refer to "all solutions" brought by "Europe".

These sentences should not be understood as opposition to European integration. I would like to see our country as part of European integration also in order to overcome the totalitarian past at least in the field of the media and political life, and to start living normally. But now that the daydreaming is over and we face practical challenges, some new questions have been raised.

For example: Does the emergence of a new and united Europe mean the birth of the spirit of philosophy or of the spirit of the economy. Aristotle and Plato or Schröder (or better Kohl) and Van den Broek? If the new Europe is only a product of the economy and the Brussels administration, won’t its labyrinths at the end of the century be the realization of Kafka’s ones at the beginning of the century?

Or: If the new Europe is born as the answer to the United States, does this mean that its ties – except the economy, except a common area of free trade – will only be a popular culture with the lowest possible common denominator? Is the populism of pragmatic European policy at all ready to listen to the voice of a creative and intellectual elite?

And last but not least: What happened to the margins of Europe, small nations and their cultures, which originated from common European spiritual roots and also had a specific cultural development? Should we integrate it and let it be absorbed by the flows directed towards the centre? Isn’t babbling about the identity of small nations, their languages and cultures merely an "ecological" question, while the meaning, however, will be lost sooner or later?

Central Europe has a two-fold experience: co-existence of different cultures and individuals, potent creativeness and tolerance, as well as national and social hatred, harmful intolerance and violence. To live with such an experience, with a two-fold experience, to really be part of it, means to understand many things, means to be prepared for many good and bad surprises awaiting us in pan European integration.

"My Central Europe" means understanding the world and life and its contradictions. The utopia, therefore, with which we lived in the eighties was not something about which we could today say:

Once upon a time it used to be.

It is still here.... at least as long as we are alive.

DRAGO JANCAR - TO WRITE IN THE LANGUAGE OF A SMALL NATION
In Slovenia too, I have heard not just anybody, but a Slovene author say: what is the point of writing in Slovene, since these works might only survive in some library or other, to be studied by eccentric scholars, similarly as dinosaurs are studied today? Somewhat irritated, I replied to my fellow writer that all my books have been translated into so-called "big" languages, so he need not worry about me. But that is of course no answer. Everything goes the way of all flesh, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, people and books. But what do we know about that, how can we see into the future of a global world

In Austria there lives a Slovene speaking minority whose numbers have fallen drastically in the last century on account of Germanisation. Despite this, there are a few authors there who write wonderful literature in Slovene. The following true anecdote also comes from those parts: An expert on linguistic studies attended a meeting of an organization for the protection of minorities, and he told the representative of the Slovene minority, an island amidst the German-speaking majority, that he had a piece of bad news for him. In the next hundred years, he said, a lot of languages will disappear, and Slovene among them. The Slovene representative was saddened by this. But I also have a piece of good news, said the expert. Among the languages to disappear will be also German.

My readers who speak the language of a large nation and benevolently ask me how I feel as an author who writes in the language of a small nation. I realize that they look upon me — even if with admiration — as a member of an endangered species: He writes such beautiful things in such a small language. Strange: I have never felt like a member of an endangered species.

The real answer is shrouded in the mystery of earthly variety and diversity which makes life interesting, beautiful and exciting.

DRAGO JANCAR - AUGUSBURG
Augsburg is a long way from here. I have never seen it. They say it has sixty thousand inhabitants and is very prosperous. Augsburg is the biggest city in Germany and people like living there.

August. For three days I have been pacing my darkened flat. Outside, the August sun is shining. The radio is making great efforts to convince foreign tourists that Slovenia is a peaceful country. The war is somewhere else. The war is in that television set in the corner. In that hole in the world that keeps bringing me new corpses. In that box where the idiocies of propaganda alternate with pictures from a degenerate imagination. The speakers are mostly idiots. When the speakers are intelligent they speak in square sentences. Everything is flat and lifeless. From political upheaval to change. Upheaval? Change? Upheaval, yes, but what kind? Change, yes, but what kind?

The time is coming when I won't know how to rejoice.

DRAGO JANCAR - NORTHERN LIGHTS is a fine book about Central Europe on the eve of the Second World War, well worth reading. Set largely in 1938, in the small Slovenian city of Maribor, in the author’s native town. Jancar paints a rich portrait of Central Europe on the verge of war. Told in the first person, by the central character, Josef Erdman, though significant parts are also related in the third person.

Erdman is an Austrian businessman, originally from Linz and now affiliated with a Viennese firm. He gets off the train in Maribor, one of the many "Central European K. & K. cities, all of them alike". The K. & K. cities (the imperial and royal cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) now resound only with an echo of the Empire that was dissolved some twenty years earlier, each a reminder of the world that was but has now been rent asunder. Arriving in Maribor he is faced with the "shuddering silence that hovered over Central Europe". That a storm threatens in the distance isn't completely clear yet, but even peripheral Maribor grows more unsettled day by day.

Erdman seems lost in the city, his purpose is unclear. He is a suspicious figure -- and he is unsure even of himself. Being interviewed by the police chief he realizes he is: "Suspicious to myself, not just to him." He is, generally, a lost soul -- and that in a city itself unsure of its place and of the future. He finds himself unable to move on, overwhelmed by events around him, powerless, losing himself in lethargy:

It's spinning, this world is spinning faster and faster and there's nothing I can do about it. It' spinning, sinking me into a deep sleep as it spins.

Although the Balkans frequently provides the starting-point in Jancar’s writings it is not his only theme.

POSMEHLJIVO POZELENJE (MOCKING DESIRE) is a melancholy autobiographical account of a central European encounter with American culture. Jancar describes in precise images and with great density. Gregor Gadnik’s failure to integrate, a situation which in the author’s view can be transferred to the world in general: history has passed on after the East-West conflict but forgotten to take the people with it. "I am an observer, he tells himself", when arrives in this strange new world. "I observe what happens to me here on the other side of the world".

The novel 'Headnoise" shows a man who is completely crushed by the course of world events. This is the life story of a man who makes "adventure trips" to various scenes of warfare and whose path leads from Vietnam to the Dominican Republic.

REVIEWS: Was hier erzählt wird, scheint weder als Spiegel zu dienen, aus dem uns das Fremde unheimlich vertraut anblickt.« (What is here narrated, seems like a mirror, the foreign to us becomes very familiar).
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Drago Jancar, der bedeutendste slowenische Erzähler der Gegenwart.« Der Stoff, aus dem die Melancholie ist. Ihre Anatomie - offengelegt in einem Meisterwerk der Prosakunst. Scherz, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung

(Drago Jancar is the most important contemporary Slovene author. The substance from which melancholy is made. Its composition - coming into open in a master piece of narrating. Humor, irony and deep meaning).