First, they started publishing books by people who under normal circumstances stay in their academic and journalistic niches - translators, correspondents from that somewhat remote corner of Europe, Slavists, historians and rare connoisseurs of the situation. After the war, books came that explained it more or less coherently in the rearview mirror.
The Balkans in a niche
Since the spotlights of the world media in the new millennium turned to new battlefields and focused on new blood - from Kabul to Baghdad - then the authors of books about "hate in the Balkans" retreated to their social niches. They begged from them as needed, on anniversaries (the media loves round numbers) to re-explain what they failed to explain the first time. Or after spectacular events, such as the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, the divorce of Belgrade and Podgorica or the declaration of independence in Pristina.
To these books, I added professional literature - legal, economic, military-strategic, which I needed in 1999 to write my master's thesis in Aachen. Because my work related to the parallelism of the process of abolishing Western European borders and the creation of a common currency in the early nineties and the bloody establishment of new borders in the Balkans and the creation of new national currencies.
Two and a half meters of war
Even some authors, such as managers of aristocratic origin such as Hans von der Gorlitz, felt the need to write books about hatred in the Balkans. I remember how in the novel "The Girl Behind the Hedge", published in 1995, I was angered by obvious factual nonsense such as the sitting of a veiled Muslim girl in Tito's school or the Chetniks singing partisan songs somewhere in Bosnia. And that book is now on my shelf in Belgrade, on the cover is Generalić's rooster on a cross.
Over time, I also found old West German tourist guides through Yugoslavia at flea markets and antique shops, in which there was no mention of hatred between nations, but about the rarely beautiful coast and rarely ugly toilets in Tito's state.
I kept all those books "about us" and transferred them when moving from apartment to apartment, from country to country. Now on my shelf in Belgrade I have two and a half meters of "our" wars in German.
Wars do not "break out", they are planned
Rare books were truly precious for the intellectual analysis of the phenomenon of war. But they existed. In them, I found confirmation of my empirical findings - wars do not "break out". Wars are the consequence of political decisions based on power projection. I am flipping through a book from 1992: "War - a cultural phenomenon". In it, I come across the thought of the German political scientist Eckenhart Krippendorff, that the science of society has not yet shaped a language with an analytical-conceptual apparatus that would be able to encompass war as a type of human "interaction". "Precisely because they know what war means for peoples, even when they are victorious, because they too had to make sacrifices, there is a political-psychological necessity for all political classes to attribute to war the quality of a natural occurrence - so that at least they do not have to replace the metaphor of to the 'outbreak' of war with clarifying precision - about one's own decision". Since in Germany there is a scientific field of peace research, as well as conflict research, there is accumulated knowledge in that field, which would be useful in today's situation. Thus, Ulrike Vasmut mentions the popular and journalistic equating of the word conflict with the word war. She reminds us that war is a violent, armed form of conflict resolution, thus only one of the possible responses to conflict, and that equating these expressions suggests that war is immanent in human nature, which would challenge man's ability to resolve conflicts peacefully.
Waking up to a nightmare
I am flipping through those old books, from which I learned a language, on which I honed my ability to understand what was happening to my unfortunate country. It seems to me that this wisdom from the analog era has been somewhat forgotten, because the wars that kept me awake at the time did not really concern either the pockets or the hearts of most of the people with whom I traveled to work.
The fact that at the beginning of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the public in the west of the European continent wakes up in horror from its peacetime slumber, is to a much greater extent the result of decades of self-satisfied self-referentiality, than the "sudden" outbreak of war. At the latest in 2014, after "Euromaidan" and the war in Donbass, this outcome of the Ukrainian-Russian tension was possible. And there were indications that this would be the case in Putin's February 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference.
"We didn't live to see 75 years"
I was not surprised by German Chancellor Scholz's formulation immediately after the beginning of Putin's invasion: "We were just experiencing the beginning of a war, the likes of which we in Europe have not experienced for 75 years." Some German media commentators followed suit, parroting the wording.
Maybe Scholz is right. Not because it would be true, the facts say otherwise. First of all, because many Germans, as well as many residents of the western part of the continent, really do not perceive the Balkans, Cyprus, Georgia, Armenia and Russia as Europe. In 2008, commentator and publicist Alan Pozener formulated this as follows: "We always think of Europe as Occident, as the heir to the empire of Charlemagne"
From this "reflection" in 2022, the media and politicians draw an almost routine habit of "forgetting" the post-Yugoslav wars of the nineties, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, the war in Georgia in 2008 or the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan that has been going on since 1994, two Russian wars against Chechen separatists. In doing so, they also forget the hundreds of thousands of dead on the European continent.
There is no monopoly on barbarism
Marija Todorova stated in "Imaginary Balkans" a long time ago: "Whether the Balkans are Europeans or not is mostly a question for academic and political discussions, but they in no way have a monopoly on barbarism." So, a Balkan man in the nineties, a Muslim after September 11, 2021, and currently a Russian is a barbarian that we fear because he is somewhere in us. Todorova would formulate it like this: "The Balkans are sufficiently exotic, foreign, wild. He is everything that we Westerners are not. The Balkans is that animal impulse and urge restrained in us, tamed by the results of civilization and acceptable norms of behavior. The Balkans is a place where we could give vent to the savage in us".
That is why the invasion of Ukraine is a war that some Europeans have never experienced until now, even though wars were taking place even where they went to the sea by car in about six hours. In their imagination, Europe remained "anti-Balkan", "anti-Oriental", "anti-Russian-Asian".
My war in the German language, in its two-and-a-half meter length of book spines, moved with me across the European continent, I lived with it and its consequences, like millions of other people.
That's why my solidarity goes to all Ukrainian civilians who found themselves on Putin's geopolitical chessboard, to all Russian recruits who went to a "military exercise" and shaved their beards in front of Kiev in the role of occupiers, to all deserters and refugees, because they follow the most humane instinct - the instinct to survive without killing.
Europe and the despair of those left behind
I look again at that library of mine. One of the books is from 1992, it is called "Europe at War". Then Đerđ Konrad and Peter Handke from one side, and Svetlana Slapšak, Herta Miller and Dunja Melčić stood among the same covers. Dunja Melčić had two texts in the book: "Bankruptcy of a critical intellectual" and "Europe leaves Croats and Bosnians alone with their despair".
Exactly thirty years later, someone may already be writing the text: "Europe leaves Ukrainians alone with their despair".
This is the Europe that has no idea that before this war, at least five other wars were fought in it in the last half century. "He who does not remember lives again" sang Johnny.
I browse through my Balkan library of the dead in German and wonder: will the dead of Ukraine be forgotten one day, when what remains of Charlemagne's empire and what remains of the Russian Empire agree on a mutual border?
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