Sasa, taken last year´s Leipzig bookfair´s focus on Croatia and numerous programs - Traduki, Robert-Bosch-Stiftung, LCB etc. - funding translations and the exploration of Eastern European literature, it looks like some kind of renaissance of interest in "post-yugoslavian" writers and literature. Somehow that seems to be contradictory to the the 90s, when not many people displayed real interest in understanding what was happening in the region. Would you agree that there seems to be a rising desideratum to have Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian writers explain history, developments and current situation to us, rather then to have (German) political commentators and the media do it?
Sasa Ilic: "I am not sure if I would agree on such an explanation. It has always been a tricky thing to inform on history via literature. We have examples of foreign diplomats and soldiers who in the course of the 90s, before their arrival on the Balkans, would take the books of Andrić in order to understand the nature of the conflict. However, I would say that the role of literature is to be found in something else. That is in deconstruction or destabilization of the hegemonic cultural, historical and political narratives. In that sense, I would like interpret a rising need for books from the ex–Yu region as a desire to have the simplified media representation broadened and in the last stance to have it deconstructed. Literature was always to some point more general than historiography. It is well known ever since Aristotle. The attempt undertaken within communist regimes to drive literature into the ghetto of esthetics or into the ghetto of the market economy within Capitalism is another matter. Literature is vital and alive as long as it is political and subversive. And if you ask me the best pieces from this region really are of that kind."
You´re an editor of the literary supplement "Beton" (www.elektrobeton.net). Since you´re novel "Berlinsko okno" centers around the idea of symbolic windows, how far would you describe the role of elektrobeton.net as a public window reaching an audience beyond Serbian public?
S. I.: "Beton is a resistance movement within the culture that was occupied by nationalists since the 80s. It is a specialized literature supplement that is engaged in open conflict and harsh criticism. In fact, the common critical discourse was drastically distorted in this region in the course of the 90s. Initially, it happened as a result of the glorification of the nationalistic cultural production, but after 2000 it turned itself into a national marketing. And all of a sudden everything was promoted as “so excellent”. Elektrobeton.net is a window that some individuals all over the world and especially Slavists could use to look through and come to terms with relevant facts and streams of culture and literature production in Serbia, and in the region as well. We have contributors from Croatia (journalists and writers from the Feral newspaper that was recently shut down, then from Zarez, and from Booksa.hr), from Bosnia and Hercegovina, and from Montenegro as well. So far we have been resisting pressures to shut down Beton and to dissolve this critical voice coming from the inside. ...weiter
