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AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER HANDKE Conducted by German TV journalist Martin Lettmayer, JAN 1997. Author of the book A Winter Journey to the Rivers Danube, Sava, Morava, and Drina or Justice for Serbia, Suhrkamp 1996, Your book. My book. Today, several weeks after your book's appearance, how do you feel? How do I feel? Well, I'm glad I wrote it. Naturally I'm grateful to my publisher for publishing the book, after it attracted so much attention in the papers. Was it published because of or in spite of that? No, it was already set that the "History of Serbia" would come out a couple weeks after the piece in the Sddeutsche Zeitung. Was the idea of writing the book born together with your decision to make the journey? I wanted to take the trip anyway. During the trip, as I noted elsewhere, I didn't take a single note of what I saw in Serbia. It was on the return trip, after I left Serbia, driving through Hungary to the West, through Austria and Germany, that I was gradually moved by the contrast of the various lands, that I felt something had to be written about Serbia. That had never happened all these years. So, the idea of the book came to me on the return trip. What was the decisive factor? As I said, all the stories that I read about the war were written, as if in front of a mirror. I wanted to get behind that mirror. Nothing had ever been written about the country of Serbia [during this war]. Once in a while there was something about Belgrade, but it was always just full of cliches: "everything is grey, nobody is willing to speak, the opposition is weak, the war wounded have nothing to come home to", etc. etc. Every report was the same, and it was always Belgrade. I thought I'd like to travel to Serbia, but out in the countryside. I wanted to, I had to, get to war-torn Bosnia, but not as most journalists. They always came via the West. I wanted to get to Bosnia from the other side, from the East, through Serbia and over the Drina, the river border with Bosnia. That was my driving idea. No one had done it in all five years of the war. Did you feel anger ... over this media reporting? Yes. At first I believed the reporting, but felt the balance was wrong. I kept seeing the same turn of phrase, the same twist of grammar and choice of words etc. I felt that just can't be, or if it is so, then everyone, whether journalist or author, at least has the duty to consider the other side, without passing judgment. A journalist once wrote: " when you look at it from the Ivory Tower, it's all the same". Well, for me it's not all the same because I always felt close to Yugoslavia, my life long, through my ancestors, who were Slavs, from Slovenia, or rather from the Slovenian minority in Carinthia, on my mother's side. Second, for me Yugoslavia was Europe. I traveled there, on foot, not just by bus or car or plane. Yugoslavia, however fragmented it might have been, was a model for a future Europe. Not Europe as it is now, our somewhat artificial Europe, with its free trade zones, but a place with different nationalities living among each other, especially as it affected young people in Yugolavia, after Tito's death. That, I thought, is how I would like Europe to be. So, for me the vision of Europe was destroyed with the destruction of Yugoslavia. Is this picture of Europe ... multicultural, multi-ethnic ... [garbled]... ? Certainly, it was that. But I can't stand hearing the word "multi-cultural" any more That was a dishonest excuse to conjure up a Muslim state of Bosnia out of nowhere. I can't take it when the word is applied to Sarajevo. But when you apply it to the old Yugoslavia, where the nationalities lived together, with one another, naturally separately, then I can accept the words "multi-ethnic" and "multi-cultural". Not, however, when it's applied to Bosnia. For me it was a lie to make a state out of a region that was formerly a mere administrative unit. That's what Bosnia was in Yugoslavia. Bosnia had never had been a sovereign state. For me creating sovereign states out of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina was also just concocting historical fakes. In the beginning I too believed all the talk about freedom and freedom fighters battling against "Panzer" communism for multi-ethnicity. In the beginning I believed it. But now I don't believe a word of it. How do you explain that the Slovenes and the Croats suddenly wanted their own nation states? It was the opportune moment. I'm not a political commentator and I never will be. It was the favorable moment, after the death of Tito, for everyone to make a run for it, to grab something for himself. Much too little has been written about what Hitler, together with Catholicism, inflicted on the Balkans. Catholicism, too, was a horribly pernicious force in Croatia, where it was utterly fundamental and destructive, perhaps a bit less so in Slovenia. [Much too little has been written about] the crimes committed in Croatia during the Second World War by Catholicism and Nazism, and nationalism. There was the concentration camp Jasenovac, where between six- and eight hundred thousand Serbs and Jews, were annihilated, and Muslims, too. That led to revenge by Tito's people for the crimes of the Ustasha regime in Croatia and the Domobranci in Slovenia. There were deportations, often unjustified, from Croatia and Slovenia across all Europe, to Argentina, and even America. The breeding ground for the collapse of Yugoslavia was Croatia, with its unchecked Nazi-Catholic history in the Second World war, and even earlier. We Europeans, and the whole world, know far too little about all this. But just as the history of the Jews before and during the Second World War has been examined and clarified, as I have said in my book, it is now necessary to bring to light everything that fascism did during World War II in Yugoslavia, as well as its holocaust of the Jews. Again and again we hear the word "Jasenovac" mentioned. This is a trauma for the Serbs. Is the present war, despite the long interval, in principle a continuation of that war 40 years ago? Yes, it's a metamorphosis, or better said, a metastasis, as we say of cancer. It is a continuation of the Second World War. It is significant that, when the Croats overran the area of Jasenovac [on May 1, 1995: translator], they destroyed every monument to the victims killed there. The Jasenovac camp was destroyed -- as a monument -- again this year by the Croats. This is significant. This is what inspired me to write. Your book is not extremely political, or is it? What is "political"? My book deals with problems. It tells of problems, the newspaper reader's problems in thinking. It tells about the history reader's problems. It talks about the viewing problems of someone looking at a photo, the problems of a television viewer. It speaks continuously about problems of how a distant reader sees, how I, how we almost all, read the war reports. Criticism deals with structures. One criticizes esthetic forms of camera technique, of grammar, of the art of war reporting. My book is criticized for esthetic blindnesses. The political and the poetic blend into each other in my Serbia book. Because you say there is both the political and the poetic in your Serbia story. There is no contradiction. There is a sentence in your book : "Wilhelm, don't let yourself be fooled by your poetic feel for the world". I waited a long time for my feel for the world to be a poetic one, a feel for little things, a feel for the pars pro toto . I think that in the little phenomenon we see the big picture. It's an inductive procedure (pardon the foreign word). I like to go from the small phenomenon and see how far I get. Naturally I'd like to get as far as I can. That's the inductive, or poetic, process. Can Peter Handke also be tricked sometimes by his poetic feel for the world? That's something you've thought about, no? No, I can't be. If that's deception then it is, as they say, "trial and error". You learn from your mistakes.That's my basic attitude in writing on world events. By way of error I find out just what went wrong. I can't say in advance that what I write is true. But by making a mistake I notice how the truth can look. In my story telling, that's everything. Here's another sentence: "If only both the poetic and the political could be one and the same." In this book is it only partial? I believe that we're not far away from the ideal union of the historical, political, and poetic, just as three separate paths come together and form a sort of clearing in the forest, the forest of history. I'm not far from it. Then comes the sentence: "That would be the end of the yearning and the end of the world." And you have said somewhere that when the book is published you wonder if you will ever write anything again. That's nonsense. That was written about me only as a reaction to my Serbia book. Above all they're reacting against my impudence at having written the story at all. ... /skip: there is a lot of literary chit-chat here with no relevance to Handke's book on the Serbs ..: jpm/ You have said you believe that observation is better for writing than imagination. As far as books are concerned, or literature -- in a word, writing -- I am no fan of the fantastic. In this regard a Swiss writer, Ludwig Hohl, said that fantasy is a suscitation of objects in front of you, such as a table, a stone, another person's eye. This suddenly becomes significant, meaningful. For him ... /skip/ I assume your book has provoked such opposition in Germany and Austria particularly because it brings into question two utterly essential dogmas of Western policy. One is the question of the aggressor. Is there an aggressor? Not as it has been represented. We have here again the problem of authority. [Tito's administrative unit] the federal "Republic of Croatia" becomes a [sovereign] state. It was arbitrarily made a sovereign state with constitutional powers, but it was established on a territory inhabited by 600,000 people of another nationality. Before World War II, before Pavelic's Ustasha regime, there were 1 million Serbs there. Even now [at the beginning of this war] about 400,000 Serbs lived in Croatia. At least one fifth of the population were members of another nation. Under the Croatian constitution they were turned into second class citizens, a minority. They were supposed to allow themselves to be treated as second class. That is a question that I raised in my history: how can you establish a state where there is a large minority, a considerable minority, of another nationality? -- Can't one consider this as aggression? Can't one defend one's nation against this? There's no denying that this is aggression [of the newly recognized state] against the other nationality. Isn't all this too black-and-white, like little children's "you started it, you started it!"? That's what I say in my book. I'll defend myself with what I have written. Naturally I have my opinions and convictions, but what I have written has nothing to do with opinions. It has to do exclusively with basic questions. My best expression for this is, it is a question of telling a story, as it is, as I always have done in my literature since I began writing. I never let it be known what my opinion is. That's why it's so amazing that all this hate and aggression has erupted against my little book, especially in Germany. Would you stick your neck out so far and say you don't know just who the aggressors are, but it's not the Serbs? They are not the aggressors. Exactly right. Things can and must be seen differently. That's just what I asked in my book. The second dogma .... You reflect on Srebrenica and wonder about that -- 2nd cassette. I try to tell -- the other problem -- I try to tell -- we all seem to know -- I believe --As for Yugoslavia, no one knows -- no one can present himself as a Balkan expert. All these people give me a pain... We all know or think we know about all the atrocities from 1991 and 1992, and in the last 3 years...We don't know much, almost nothing... We get our news second hand. Even the dogs of war (we needn't name them) were supposedly tired of killing, they say... As for Srebrenica, where the massacre was committed just before the end, in June-July 1995, I ask "why [should it have happened]"? For the sake of argument, let's say I don't for a second doubt the facts. I'm not competent to judge... But it is for others to doubt the facts, since the massacre story has been peddled five times in the whole world press. Yet, it has simply not been proved that 3000 to 8000 were killed. It has not been proved. -- But I ask, if after three years of blood-letting such a thing could happen, why. How could there be a massacre of 3000 to 8000 Muslim men. Why that? And why do we read about it again and again? Since June 1995 the massacre story has been peddled four or five or six times in the world press. In the autumn there were cover stories in Time magazine, in Le Nouvel Observateur, in Der Spiegel etc. Again and again, in spring, in autumn... They show aerial photographs, where, they asssume, there are graves. From a satellite photo, they assume, a bulldozer had mangled the corpses. But, assuming for the sake of argument, that it all happened, why, I ask, after three years, with everyone so tired of the killing, should or could it have happened? I ask myself why General Mladic could have had all these people blown away. That's what I'm asking. It would be good if a historian or a journalist would raise the question --Why? I hear two things here, the "why?" and ... The "why" is given in my book. I ask the "why?". Have you gotten an answer ... I was told by some Serbs from the region -- and I don't know if it's true or not -- I'm only relaying what they told me. They told me that villages around Srebrenica were attacked by the Muslims. Srebrenica is a little, a middle sized small town, inhabited by Muslims. The surrounding farming villages are Serb. Around here the cities are Muslim, from time immemorial, and the country villages are Serb. At the beginning of the war, Serb farmers were chopped to bits by Muslims. The war was a war of the cities against the countryside. The Muslim commander of Srebrenica had a compulsion to destroy. Before the fall of the enclave, this commander of Srebrenica, one of the few Muslim war crimes suspects, [Nasir] Oric, was transferred a week before the fall of the town, by the Bosnian Muslim General Staff to Tuzla. In the meantime, he has opened a discotheque in Tuzla. You have to wonder if this guy isn't a war profiteer. I personally do not have direct first hand information, but my Serb friends tell me that the massacre, if it took place, was in revenge for all the Serb villages around Srebrenica destroyed [by the Muslims] over three years of war. It was revenge for destroying and annihilating, certainly the massacring, of the Serbs around Sarajevo.That's how it was told to me. And it doesn't bother you ....[inaudible]... At least that's an explanation, one that I never saw in the Western press, nowhere. I also heard that many Muslim soldiers escaping from Srebrenica didn't seek refuge to the West, in their Bosnian Muslim land, but in the enemy's land, across the Drina, to the East. They sought their salvation in the Serbian mother land. They crossed the Drina on rafts etc. They crossed the Drina, to the East, and a lot of them were put in internment camps there, where they certainly weren't well treated, but they survived. We have to clarify now how many of the retreating [Muslim] soldiers were promised free passage. It seems clear who crossed over the Drina to Serbia, and who tried to head northwest from Srebrenica, to reach the Bosnian Muslim heart land. I'd like to know how many there were and what really happened to them. And you are disturbed by the marketing of this suffering? It bothers me a lot. And you are bothered by the manipulation... At first I didn't see it that way. Like many people I thought that the Bosnian Serb army was a bunch of naked killers. That's what I thought. Stationed on the strategic heights above Sarajevo, I thought, they were just playing games with the city of Sarajevo. It was was awful. Again and again a kid shot on the street. You saw the photo, and the parallel with the worst crimes in this century seemed justified. In the meantime I've changed my mind. Hans Koschnick, the administrator of the city of Mostar, put it well when he said that by founding a Muslim-dominated Bosnia-Herzegovina that excluded the Serbs, a horrible power vacuum was created. Because Bosnia is such a mountainous land. It consists of isolated village after isolated village. Someone like Karadzic, or even someone like General Mladic, could exercise absolutely no overall authority. Therefore we have created over and over a gang system, just like the old stereotype of the Balkans, and this is not completely false. But this idea of a power vacuum, where the right brute force fills the vacuum, is an explanation. We all want explanations. This one doesn't seem all wrong to me. In your book you say: "Almost everyone says Yugoslavia won't be resurrected in a hundred years." Will it rise again or not? I believe it can't be otherwise. It will resurrect. It is the only sensible thing. Look at the economics, the geography -- the rivers, the mountain ranges. The common history after 1918 was not so bad. There was the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and there was Tito's Partisan communist Yugoslavia. By the 1980s there was no more communism. For me that was a near religious event. Compared to many European states, Yugoslavia was a model for Europe. It cannot remain fragmented, [in spite of] these secret powers, such as Catholicism. Catholicism is an incredile power - - I am myself a Catholic and will remain so my life long. -- But in the Balkans Catholicism practices conversion. This is the essence of Catholicism, to missionize, something the Serbian Orthodox Church has never done. Besides murders of Serbs, in the Second World War, there was again and again forced, violent conversion of Serbs by Catholics. In many epochs of church history the Church can be accused of this. So, as long as there is nationalism and the Church militant, there will be no restoring Yugoslavia. What things did you especially notice? I ask about the legend of the 1986 memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Science, as I told in my book. According to this document, supposedly, wherever in the world there is a Serb, there is a Serb state. This gradually turns into a "back stab" myth [like the Dolchstoss-theory of the German defeat in WW I: translator's note]. But I have found this memo nothing in comparision to the many activities of Croatian desperados and agitators and perhaps even well-intentioned people in the diaspora -- in Germany, America, Argentina, Italy, less in France, but nevertheless in France, too. That is something far more massive and militant. That is a real drive for a Greater Croatia. The 1986 memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences, a few little paragraphs that are not even definite, has been taken up as a rusty knife against the Serbian people. Meanwhile I have totally given up all credence in the myth of "Greater Serbia." But there is much more evidence for the ideology of Greater Croatia than for one of "Greater Serbia". The ideology of Greater Croatia was and is a fact. The average person perceives the world through the media -- television, newspapers ... So do I. So does everyone who doesn't go there. Even if you go there, you go with interpreters, so I don't necessarily believe in the evidentiary value of simply having been there. Many journalists can remedy this when using interpreters, but it's a rarity when they succeed. Most journalists from the West take an interpreter who speaks English or German. Where do they get this interpreter? What does the interpreter tell you? Where does he take you, etc.? First of all, the journalists usually do not understand the language of the country. They can't decipher the Cyrillic alphabet and have no idea, much less any real knowledge, about Yugoslavia before the war broke out. They are always taken to where the victims are, as per arrangement, or according to news reports. They always came to Sarajevo. This was always, as far as history goes, suspicious for me. Do you feel you had been "had", deceived, tricked? Many journalists, whose good will I do not doubt, were netzliche Idioten ['useful idiots", in Lenin's words: jpm] in the hands of the two regimes that claimed to be the chief victims, the Croats and the Muslim Bosniacs. How did you personally get to know the Serbs? Are they an intolerant people, disinterested in other cultures? That is one of the worst and most monstrous lies. Almost worthy of Goebbels. What has been spread about the Serbs is a lie. I believe that is not just my personal story, but everybody's who has dealt with Serb culture and the Serb people. If there is any people in the Balkans open to the East, the West, the South, or simply has any sensitivity to the rest of the world, that is in Serbia, not in Croatia nor Slovenia. Where do you find books of the whole world, today and yesterday, published and read in translation? In Serbia. Far less in Croatia, and even less in Slovenia. Serbia, I can enthusiastically recommend to everyone who thinks about what a country can be. A land of rivers, what can a country be that is far from the sea? Naturally, Serbia is disadvantaged in the media landscape, as compared to Croatia -- [with] Dubrovnik, Split, or Zadar. But apart from these fabulous cities on the Adriatic, Croatia is totally a land of the interior and almost unknown to the traveler or the tourist. ...But Serbia, I would say, is a warm-hearted land... In its history Serbia was always tolerant. In World War II if there was any land that accepted Jews, sheltered Jews, that took Jews into their houses, that was not Croatia, not Slovenia, but Serbia. Serbia was the only philosemitic country in the Balkans, together with Greece -- though Greece, strictly speaking, isn't Balkan. What has been done to the Serbian people and the lands of the Serbs in the last five years is an enormous injustice. It's an injustice that cries to high heaven to compare Serbia with Nazi Germany. But, what was the slogan in the Spanish Civil War? -- "no pasaran"/ they shall not pass." That is, they won't get away with it forever. How did you feel about the speculation over Western military strikes against the Serbs? I found it obscene. Unfortunately, the French government and the British government, after first showing skepticism about the anti-Serb propaganda, caved in under all the arm-twisting and violent anti-Serb propaganda. France and and Great Britain took part in this terrible and sanctimoniously justified NATO business against Pale. So, I would not have been surprised in the end if they had, in order to force a peace, bombed Belgrade, for the third time in this century. First it was the Nazis, then the English and Americans, who destroyed Belgrade again in January 1944. This time, too, Belgrade probably was close to getting it. ...Herr Kinkel said, the Serb aggressors must be brought to their knees. This is for you arrogance and infamy. What have you to say? When someone like Klaus Kinkel says that, I imagine he's someone who has no knees, that he doesn't know what knees are, that he has only stilts, or maybe a bayonette instead of legs. No one should talk that way, but a lot of things are going on in German politics and public opinion. I imagine my book brought in a breath of fresh air. You are Austrian, and Austria also played a significant role in the person of Foreign Minister Alois Mock. He was a prime mover in the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, i.e. in the demolition of the country. At least he was active at the desk.1 I know the former Austrian Foreign Minister a little. I believe I can say that he is a convinced anti-fascist, since he comes from the region, as he once told me, of the Mauthausen concentration camp. He suffered the shock of his childhood, or his youth, there. I don't believe he did what he did out of Nazi, or fascist, revenge seeking. What led to the break up of Yugoslavia was more Austrian revenge seeking. Even more blame-worthy is the Austrian regime that he had running things. Half consciously we still blame the Serbs, collectively, for the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy.The Austrian people, though of course not everyone, still harbor a great hatred for the assassin of Sarajevo, for Gavrilo Princip. Austrians feel he was driven by the Serbian government and the Serbian state. They make Serbia responsible for Austria's reduction to such a little country. This is for me sheer atavism, i.e. a simian regression to hatred. As it seems to me, Alois Mock is not just personally responsible for the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia. This right of national self determination was handed out to all, but I never heard it applied to the Serbs. That is the height of absurdity. The Serb nation in Croatia and the 35% of Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina -- no one recognized any right of self determination for them. Where is the justice in that? That is a lot of sanctimonious talk about the right of national self determination. But these nations, the Croats and Slovenes, I believe, were well off in the Yugoslav state. Especially in the ten years following Tito's death they never once made a complaint that they were mistreated or disadvantaged under the federal government in Belgrade. Their (recent) claims of such are a historical lie. The Croats and Slovenes, on the contrary, were given preferential treatment, economically, in trade on the Mediterranean and in tourism, and much more. Their Catholicism connected them more with Europe than Orthodoxy did. etc. Did you notice that the Serbs, for years, left the bridge in peace, and that the Croats blew it away? Oh, yes, in Mostar. That was sheer madness. Do you have any explanation for this: if the Serbs had bombed the bridge in Mostar to bits, then we would be reading about it every other day in the papers? ...Can one say the Serbs have more respect for cultural treasures like Dubrovnik than the Croats? That could have to do with the power vacuum. I wouldn't consider myself competent to say if the Croatian army bears responsibility for the destruction of the bridge, but apparently there was no power vacuum there. Still, I don't like to speculate. Germany has a great interest in the right of national self determination, especially of Croatia and Slovenia. Do you suspect an ulterior motive? Suspect? What could be clearer? I'm afraid it's a sorry lesson of the logic of history that it always happens that Germany grows bigger. There needn't always be a plan behind this. I believe that such happens through economic magnetism. Political negotiations come through economic power. I don't believe it's the other way around, that policy comes first. What can be Germany's interest in breaking up Yugoslavia? You're asking me too much there. I don't like to talk politics. There are books that you know, too, in which it is said that the German secret intelligence service collaborated with the federal [Yugoslavian] Croatian government and systematically prepared the collapse of Yugoslavia. Even before the war, in the 1980s, there are documents that often venture into such suspicions. But as an author I must keep my mouth shut. You once said Germany had an interest inhaving little lackey states around it... That's true. After the collapse of Yugoslavia I often travelled to Slovenia, which was once one of my favorite regions, partly because of my ancestors, my mother, and my mother's brothers, who were Slovenes. I went there often, and experienced every time ... that the [independent] state of Slovenia was reshaped either as a province of Austria or a a labor pool for Germany. Even the people at the top of the Republic of Slovenia, when it was part of Yugoslavia, had more presence, more power, more statesmanly quality than they have now. The leadership of Slovenia have now become underlings, like stage props, and not even that good, to serve Germany, Austria, and to a certain extent, Italy. This is a fact that everyone who goes there can see for himself. With Tudjman they have miscalculated a bit ... ...Every now and then before the war Sunday supplement articles appeared in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that I really liked a lot. They always presented Slovenia in a way that was very pleasant to me: there were pictures of e. g. a baroque church in a broad grain field, and so on. I liked these pieces.There was no irredentism, just musings on landscape, regions, village scenes. There was no history writing there. But as soon as the war came, that was all over. I failed to notice it, but I wasn't to blame. ... break ... ... Herr Reissmueller is very aggressive... ... For me that man is a war criminal. Someone has to collect very precisely what he has written, examine it grammatically. I would do that respectfully. It's sheer war mongering, as they used to say, a clear case of ethnic hatred. There's nothing more you can say about it. I heard the rape stories. There were poorly researched stories. Then the German Parliament held a special session. I wonder if there was first a policy and then the articles and commentaries. No, strangely enough, that's not what it was. It was not German policy first, then the German press. It was the German press, in the form par excellence of the important right wing, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [Frankfurt General Newspaper], and its journalists, that fundamentally influenced German policy. That's clear. It is a strange phenomenon, this immense power of the media and the press today. I was right in saying, maybe harshly, as far as Germany is concerned, the press, particularly the Frankfurter Allgemeine, is the "Fourth Reich". Just as the Jew Viktor Klemperer has recently investigated the language of the Third Reich, so we can characterize, on the basis of its language, the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper as the language of the Fourth Reich. ... and Reissmueller is the Goebbels of the Fourth Reich. Reissmueller's language is a mixture of a visionary plus Goebbels. But Reissmueller doesn't have Goebbels' sports jargon. He was forever talking as a boxer or a long distance runner. No, it's more a mixture of Utopian and hangman. These people ought to be brought before the court and charged. [They demand] this and this; this had better be done, or else... That's the way it was in the Nazi People's Court [Volksgericht]. We remember [the Nazi lawyer] Mr. Roland Fleischer. Although the comparison may be a bit stretched, every age has its demonology and new forms of malice and contempt for mankind, and always new sorts of camouflage. At the moment, things are well camouflaged. The worst is that the Fourth Reich business will never stop. It'll go on till the end of time. The press, a certain kind of press, will be a power till the Last Judgment. It has civilized forms at its disposition. An eye witness report will always work. It's remarkable. I've researched the grammar and the structure of these ostensibly objective reports. From the grammar and style of the first sentence, you already know what the conclusion will be. A few months ago in the New Yorker Magazine I read a story set in Tuzla. The author's guide is stationed there, speaks English, of course. Went to the American school. He was in Tripoli, in Libya etc. He becomes the hero of the story, this young man who speaks English.The very first sentence goes: "Harun -- or Haris -- got ethnically cleansed playing cards with friends in Sarajevo." That's the first sentence, and I think, first of all, it's bad literature. Secondly, the story line is immediately transparent. Thirdly, it's politically blind to write such a thing. And so it goes, for the whole article. For me the treatment of the Serbs, the whole Serb people, is the clear first big step to the Fourth Reich of media power. ...a brief clarification: in Austria, currently, the idea is circulating of the Fourth Reich as a new edition, or a continuation, of the Third Reich. Is that what you mean, or do you have in mind the Fourth Reich as a fourth power in the state? It's a metastasis of the Third Reich. The Fourth Reich is just as bad in its own way as the Third Reich. Only it hides under a humane surface. It springs to help the victim. But it's just as bad. It's another cancer, that I'm afraid is not curable. It will only spread. Mr. Levy and Mr. Finkielkraut naturally have also attacked you... Right. They aren't writers. They are "new philosophers". I don't know why they're called "new" or "philosophers". There was time at the beginning of the war when they needed me. They needed someone who was not a philosopher, but an author, a recognized author, who, unlike them, had some knowledge of Yugoslavia. After a few meetings with Finkielkraut and Bernard Henri Levy it was clear they just wanted to use me. But after I stood up for Serbia, they didn't want to see me any more. This is a very secretive cartel. It belongs to the Fourth Reich. There's a lot of money involved. And power. In France books and the [electronic] media are totally controlled by a sort of chain of these people. You just can't get through any more. The French press and TV are almost, almost, totally under the control of Bernard Henri Levy -- as well as Finkielkraut. A few people poke a little fun at him, but in spite of all the wretched, awfully bad, cliche-studded diaries that he [Levy] publishes on the Bosnian war no one attacks him. Not one single attack. They take it as good literature. All you have to do is look up a couple phrases in Robert's Dictionary of Commonplaces.3 His work is wrong in its viewpoint, full of incorrect grammar. It's all beyond belief. But no one does a thing. A lot of money is involved, and a lot of power. It all dawned on me after I met a couple times with the "new philosophers". I decided I wouldn't sign anything. I wouldn't go to their meetings anymore. They held it against me, but it's healthy that way. I'm interested in Messrs Finkielkraut and Levy. They could earn money writing other things. The one praises Tudjman's democracy, the other says Sarajevo is where Europe begins. Where does their engagement come from? Intellectuals (nothing negative intended) don't lack money these days. So it's not just money that motivates them. It's power, power more than money. Of course money and power are certainly connected. Bernard Henri Levy, I believe, hasn't a clue about his own demonology. He's dumb -- but sly. Dumb and sly. It's marvelous to speculate how his Bosnia Diary projects a vision in which there is a second power, besides that of governments, Chirac etc., an ethical and moral power. That's what he imagines. But there's the rub, since morally and ethically he's a dead duck. (As we say in Austrian idiom "under the dog"). One I saw a scene that was shot, I think, by German TV, where Levy goes up to the Yugoslav Cultural Center in Paris with a group of his followers. At this moment the woman who directs the center wants to unlock the building. She refuses to hand over the key to the intruders. Levy has his assistant grab the key forcibly from this woman. For two or three minutes she, an older woman, just screams: "No, I won't give you the key; it does not belong to you. You cannot come in here. This is breaking and entering." -- Levy stands there, just like the B-film communist commissar in his black leather coat, and, smiling, watches his friend twisting and wrenching the key out of the old woman's hand. -- This picture should be shown on the evening news, for three whole minutes, on every TV station in the world, how this self-proclaimed moralist for Sarajevo and Bosnia, behaves with everyday people. I wish the whole world would see that. Are you convinced that all these people who do these things today will be reformed? No. That would be too easy. It is tragic, the history of Yugoslavia, the history of this century in Europe. How history happens and how history is written are joined together. This story belongs together with the history of the Jewish people. These are the two great tragic stories. And it will probably not be corrected. To think so would be, I feel, false optimism, that one day things will be seen differently. These people will not change. With their language and their pictures they have committed so many crimes, real crimes, against Yugoslavia. There are some crimes that can only be perpetuated. There's no turning back. What was your worst experience after the publication of four book? And have you received support from anyone outside your family? I haven't had any bad experiences. There have been insults and outbursts of hate against me in the media, especially the German, Austrian, and Swiss, and French and Spanish, too. It affected me, but like a Kafka figure, you accept it, as if it belongs to history. ... What others say about me I can take, without it really getting to me. ...The [right wing] Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes about my "breathing ...the odor of blood, earth, and corpses and war" etc. And the left wing Frankfurter Rundschau says I "walk over corpses" with what I write. That does get me. But when I go back and sift through every sentene that I've written, I find, after all is said and done, I have not written one sentence that overlooks the victims. Every one of my sentences, I believe, is esthetic, moral and just. ... In France my book will appear in two months. And I'm almost certain that the critics will say, just as they did in Germany, that I've besmirched my previous work with what I've written here. My own translator here in France told me "Don't you dare publish that, or you'll make yourself kaputt for them, you'll be your own ruination". But I'm grateful to Gallimard Publishers for publishing my book. Reissmueller categorizes you as a war profiteer. ...I don't believe that I am. For the first time in 24 years I gave public readings with the book, in Germany and Austria. And the small change I made on that I donated to help the victims. The trip through Serbia I paid for out of my own pocket -- air ticket, hotel, food, everything. I'd like to know if journalists also do it this way, if there is one journalist in the whole world who traveled to the war zone at his own expense. The media are the biggest war profiteers. Who supported them? Many, many people that I do not know write me, many readers. They say: "at last we get a breath of fresh air. At last I read something else about the war." No public person has ventured to support you? None. I don't need that, either. It might have happened that someone says "we'll join the movement.You are right." ... In Western Europe is it impossible to hold this opinion? It's impossible. It's even worse than political (in)correctness. It's like a tabu. It's as if you break a tabu, or commit a crime against history. It's something not to be done, not now, anyway. Meanwhile, before my book a few others had appeared, but partly hidden from public view. Some more will appear. The journalist Mira Becher, whom you probably know, has published a history of the history of the media in all the wars of the last 150 years, beginning with the Crimean War and ending with the Bosnian War. The publisher is the house DTV.4 It's a good sign that this could come out with DTV, since that's a big publisher. But it remains to be seen if this problem will really be discussed. Up to now there was one or other case of alternative thinking about the war in Yugoslavia, but nothing got out into the public. Even Bittermann's article, which you published5 -- I don't believe even it attracted a big readership. Mine was the first and may be the last book on the Yugoslav war. It may not even be read, but the word has gotten out to the people, to the German people, the Austrian people -- if there is such a thing as the German people ... What I hear on the street is "You're right". People say: "the Serbs shouldn't be treated like like this". One thing, then, has gotten through: the Serbs cannot be like that. And even if the book is not read, it will be good when people in this place and that think: "No, we just can't take this stuff anymore". Translated by J. Peter Maher.

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