Rec Room #1: What to Read About the Artist Formerly Known as Yugoslavia

With some brief asides about an international smuggling caper, "our Spanish Civil War," and a dickhead Bosnian roommate

So, we get emails asking for book recommendations. Oh dear Lord, do we get emails asking for book recommendations. Maybe it’s the historian/author one-on-ones (Sarah Haider, Amy Chua, Jon Ronson, Patrick Radden Keefe, Duncan White, Sean McMeekin, John Thorn); maybe it’s the sporadic dramatic readings from authors of a slightly lesser quality….Whatever the root cause, until our pivot to Substack, the main denouement for such missives was that we’d read maybe one out of every 15 on the ol’ Patreon podcast, then Moynihan would spout some gibberish about Martin Amis or whichever part of his vast commie/Nazi library he was sleeping under that week out in East Egg. The rest would mostly languish.

No more! With the advent of a well-designed website that we’re incentivized to decorate, these queries shall be answered in (sometimes belated) earnest, as often as every week. Good thing, too, since you people are already doing crazy things like holding unsanctioned #Fifdom Book Clubs (of which we will certainly hear more about in the comments), and sending certain oft-discussed titles (The Revolt of the Public, Kindly Inquisitors, Days of Rage, Racecraft) rocketing up the Amazon charts.

I’ll go first on the non-rapid response here, mostly as an act of penance, but also because the tasks required in porting six years’ worth of output over to a brand new home do not, ah, line up well with my particular(ly narrow) set of skills. So let’s start with a play in three acts, the first two written by long-suffering subscriber Jeff:

January 9, 2021 

Gents - long time listener/Patreon subscriber, first time emailer. I'm currently reading a really great fiction book (semi-historical as far as I understand) about Bosnia by Ivo Andric called "The Bridge on the Drina" and realized that I have a Yugoslavia-shaped hole in my knowledge of 20th century world history. I've heard whispers from time to time that Welch may have for a time lived in Eastern Europe so I figured I would check if you guys had any insight as to good histories of Yugoslavia (either WWI or WWII to breakup in the 80s/90s and related wars). Any help would be appreciated.

*

February 15, 2022

I write to you about books with a little bit of trepidation as the last time I attempted this I think I asked you guys about some sort of Yugoslav history book and was laughed off on the Patreon. Who knew Matt could turn down an opportunity to discuss 1990s-era Eastern Europe?

Ouch.

Well, while I have a hazy memory that we once covered some of that ground, let me start this Balkan book tour by heartily seconding the recommendation of The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić, who was a WWII-era Yugoslav ambassador to Germany and later a Nobel Prize-winner for literature largely in recognition of this captivating historical novel, which tells the history of Yugoslavia’s eternally overlapping/warring tribes, religions, and empires through the prism of a contested old stone bridge in Višegrad.

Drina belong in this whole great subcategory of evocative, realistic, and vaguely intoxicating Balkan or Balkan-adjacent novel/travelogue/whatevers, a list that also includes Claudio Magris’s magnificent 1986 Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea, Neal Ascherson’s more-relevant-than-ever 1995 history Black Sea, and the grandaddy of them all, Rebecca West’s 1941 doorstopper Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which was basically The Power Broker for 1990s Balkanologists—everyone had it on the shelf, everyone acknowledged it was the GOAT, no one ever finished it.

The one guy who did finish Black Lamb was the one who popularized it for so many of us—the international affairs writer Robert D. Kaplan, in his deeply influential, 1993 bummer of a book Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History. Ghosts, which is great to read in tandem with the far more enjoyable Danube, is a winningly Hellenophobic travel/literary exploration of what is and is not the Balkans, at times reminiscent of the wonderful BBC World Service series “From Our Own Correspondent,” where you’d get these burned-out stringers from Turkshittystan compiling one last big F-you to the hellhole they were finally swapping out for some London R&R. (Kaplan had been a longtime newspaper correspondent in Athens, and seemed very happy to burn those bridges.)

Balkan Ghosts convinced many Western elites that doing anything to stop the raging bloodshed in disintegrating Yugoslavia was hopeless, due to the aforementioned history of murderously entangled tribes/religions/empires. I think Kaplan felt bad for the book being associated with transatlantic hand-wringing in the face of slaughter, and has spent much of the rest of his career trying to make up for it by agitating for a more robust American/Western response to global awfulness. It could also well be that that interpretation is out of date.

I spent much of 1994 gorging on this literature, in advance of what I hoped would be a life-changing two-year academic/journalistic fellowship in the Macedonian capital of Skopje, a town and people that bewitched me in the fall of 1990, when I was spirited there in an elaborate video-equipment-smuggling operation. (Long story, later date.) My proposed project was to figure out why Macedonia of all cursed places did NOT succumb to the Yugo fratricide, and whether there were any applicable lessons from that avoidance for that or any other region. It was a pretty good pitch! I’d been ready to move on from the newspaper we had started and tackle something more immediately relevant, more close to life-and-death struggles, than the arcana of, you know, NATO enlargement. Anyway, the foundation didn’t pick me, so I ended up in Budapest, and now my daughters have Hungarian names.

But! Nearly three decades after that long cram-session for Skopje, a few other books still jut up above the memory quicksand: Foxy Ferdinand, Tsar of Bulgaria (no really!), by Stephen Constant. Eastern Approaches, by the marvelously named Fitzroy MacLean. Misha Glenny’s The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War, and (later) The Balkans, fundamental texts both. Pretty much anything by Lawrence Durrell before 1965, even if obliquely. And I should also shout out my friendly acquaintance Peter Maass’s Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, though strap in for some serious grim.

As I have mentioned in other fora, Yugoslavia was for journalists of my generation and location (for instance, Samantha Power) “our Spanish Civil War,” which was arguably narcissism-speak for a bloody and portentous event WE knew was horrible and important and pivotal for the future, but the Babbitts back home couldn’t be bothered to learn about. I still do think the West’s initial impotence in the face of Yugoslav carnage had long-lasting effects above and beyond the bloody dismembering of a multi-ethnic/national/religious country, serving as the case lesson that prosperous Western Europe after the end of the Cold War was still not ready to put on its big-boy pants when it came to international security responsibilities.

But back then, after about seven years of the Spanish Civil War conceit, including at the end of my tenure there housing a real Grade-A prick of a Bosnian refugee in my apartment (he has since become an American immigrant success story, so you’re welcome!), I had run out of all patience for both the you-don’t-understand-our-magical-and-endless-history special pleaders from the various tribes, and also the Western interlocutors for whom gleaning an understanding of these complexities was like earning a merit badge, a golden ticket to the special club of refined people.

Balderdash, spat I, at the end of this 1997 piece about the student protestors in Belgrade challenging the rule of Slobodan Milošević:

If the Belgrade ruckus finally nudges Serbia down the long, long road to tentative humanism, one can only hope that the passing of Communist-nationalist warmongering in the Balkans will also put an end to a century's worth of overheated apologia from the flustered West. From John Reed, to Rebecca West, to Robert Kaplan and to a lesser extent a dozen or so friends of mine, Anglo-Saxon writers have spent far too much energy and talent stoking literally dozens of exotic-sounding mythologies in a near-futile attempt to somehow explain the Balkan conundrum (which can be crudely boiled down to: How can these handsome folks be so fluent in Western culture and still cut each other's balls off?). We have, I'm afraid, given these warring tribes an almost exalted status of Otherness, even while creating (especially in the much-noted case of Ms. West) a vibrant and valuable literature that does much to decipher the local code. The unfortunate by-product of this well-intentioned work has been that the subjects themselves truly believe they drink from a different water supply than you and I.

The other week a Bosnian guy staying in my Budapest apartment delivered a long rap about how none of the journalists covering the war down there had any idea what was really going on, because "only Yugoslavs know the truth." Fair enough. Except that he hadn't been there himself since 1989, he doesn't read any of the newspapers he complains about, the only information he gets is from monthly phone conversations with his dad, and he routinely lies more than anyone I know. At a recent party, he tried to toss off some sorry bullshit about how "A Bosnian's word and handshake are as good as gold." Then he asked me what was going on in Belgrade.

"Oh, the students are partying," I said.

"I'm telling you, Milošević is gonna crack down. Believe me, I know," he said.

"I don't think he really can," I said.

"Listen, I know the Serbs, and he's gonna crack down."

End of Discussion, as far as four out of five ex-Yugoslavs I've ever known are concerned. I used to try and argue, but I don't begin to care anymore. It's a Yugo thing, I couldn't possibly understand, and they are all-knowing—especially concerning the personality characteristics of emigres from the other tribes.

That very same evening, a Serb friend of mine went on and on about how my Bosnian roommate's habits of massive self-delusion and predatory sexual behavior were "typically typically typically Bosnian." She hasn't lived in Novi Sad—with its population of Serbs and ethnic Hungarians, and not many Bosnians—since the 1980s.

The day that Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and the rest of the human wreckage on that peninsula stop peddling that tired line of thought, and the day we stop trying to "interpret" such nonsense as anything else than the illiberal gruntings of brains rotted by lazy nationalism, the sooner those infuriatingly obvious seeds of humanity and intelligence down there will grow into something that resembles the best of European values.

I was, um, ready to move back home.

Anyway, sorry for the delay, Jeff! And keep those book-recommendation requests coming!