grasp the civilian, soldier, and deserter perspectives on war, and let the necessity of their contradictions enter our own world, we come to comprehend the war as Sarajevans experienced it. The Epilogue looks back at Sarajevo on the twelfth anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords, asking, as its residents and exiles do, what has become of Sarajevanness today.
Chapter 2
Death and Creativity in Wartime
Culture is after that permanence and durability which life, by itself, so sorely misses.
—Zygmunt Bauman, 1992
The fundamental difference between peacetime and wartime is that in war death and destruction are massive and unremitting. War acquires an all-encompassing quality that makes peace inconceivable. During our lives, we go through periods of confusion in which our understanding of the world does not help us to organize our experiences in a meaningful way. In peacetime we describe this unstable state as a life crisis. We wonder whether life has meaning when its predestination is death. Culture is central to the ways people create meaning in the face of death. In Western culture many have found death meaningful because it marks the limit of our existence and in that way makes it possible to grasp.1 A life without limits is formless, an endless continuum or even a vacuum. Death enables us to define ourselves, and our mortality is an essential dimension of our identity. We deal with life crises and with death though our capacity to create new meanings in our profoundly altered situation.
When our civilian expectations of life are shattered by war, we search for ways to organize our shocking encounters with violence. However, even the most convincing explanations of “whose fault it is” and “which side is mine” are seldom long-lived in a war zone, as none of the warring sides provide protection and justice. When social institutions dissolve and meanings disappear, we use the full array of our cultural resources and inventiveness in order to make sense of our wartime existence.
Wartime conditions do not facilitate creativity, as Carolyn Nordstrom has pointed out (1997:15). Our capacity for making meaning often proves useless when we are confronted with the sudden terror of violent death and destruction. Mass murder is incomprehensible. While in peacetime we gradually reassess our situation in order to come to terms with death and loss, in wartime we must balance between acknowledging and ignoring the life-threatening circumstances in which we exist. Being too aware of the very real dangers we face inhibits our capacities not only to make sense of our situation and respond to it creatively but even to cope with it from one moment to the next. When meanings evaporate as soon as we have imagined them, when whatever map of the new world we construct is shattered as soon as we construct it, we find ourselves in a “limit situation.”
The experience of chaos that was characteristic of Sarajevans’ struggle to recreate normality during the siege, as well as their constant oscillation between knowing and not-knowing, was a typical limit situation, resembling the Holocaust and other instances of massive political violence. In limit situations the scale of destruction makes life conditions unrecognizable and incomprehensible: people feel powerless in the face of hostile forces; their survival or death is random; and the conditions of life are no longer morally recognizable as humane. Chaos and paranoia are the order of the day. In this situation, paranoia is not irrational but is founded on the experience that nothing can be trusted. In this “gray zone” (another term coined by Primo Levi [1989]), nothing is fixed and known; any action and view is potentially acceptable. Norms and normativity itself are eradicated. The debates that arose after the Holocaust about whether God still existed and whether poetry still was possible express this void of meaning.
This type of destruction surpasses anything that can easily be documented or communicated. While material destruction and mass killing can be caught on film or summarized in statistics, the destruction of cultural meanings is hard to express, as the very creation of meaning becomes difficult. The visible destruction caused by war has much deeper effects on us than meet the eye. It reminds us daily of our mortality, and by destroying our cultural artifacts it reminds us that there is no way in which we can achieve permanence. At the same time, the omnipresence of destruction that makes death a constant companion of people living in a war zone drives them to respond with startling creativity. They need not only to re-create culture through reshaping knowledge and forms of expression but also to deal with profound existential issues when death becomes possible, not in an unknown future some decades away, but any moment—as people are killed randomly, here and now, just a minute or a meter away from where one is standing.
The process of coming to terms with such fundamental existential changes centers on taking control over your life in spite of mounting evidence of your powerlessness.
Figure 3. Vilsonovo šetaliste (Wilson’s Promenade) in central Sarajevo, seen from Grbavica. March 1996. Photo by author.
During the first days of war people lived in a state of shock. Frightened, they hid in cellars without understanding what was going on. The awareness that the war would not be over in a few days came only gradually. An extraordinary situation had to be normalized under completely new circumstances. The first forays from shelters were short, in order to provide food, but over time became longer and freer. We started to stroll around the town searching for food or fuel. People went on with their lives and started increasingly to see themselves as the only reliable source of energy. Life began renewing itself, the culture livened up, and the hunt for survival started to take on meaning, but this was a completely different meaning from what the world is familiar with. One started to live a peculiar and dreadful life, which in its preposterousness seemed consummate. One lived with death as much as one lived with arts. No cultural activities stopped, but neither did the dying.
We lived a Spartan life and were more hungry than full. Almost all our strength went to the struggle for physical survival. Immeasurable time and energy were needed to provide water, food, wood. Under such circumstances the needs of an exhausted body lessen, and the soul seeks its peace wandering through the past. In a completely new way thought got nourishment and imagination wings…. As if a new inner need emerges, in a situation in which life is threatened and has lost its value, to establish an island of quiet understanding during a concert, theater performance, exhibition, or in the intercourse with thoughts and feelings of the characters in a book….
An actor and theater manager in Sarajevo [said]: “It seemed as if we by performing in the moist cellar moved the walls and the entrance to that dark room. We scared away the fear from children’s faces; they forgot what was happening out there.” (F. Trtak 1996:28–30, my translation)
Figure 4. A residential area on the front line between Serb-held Grbavica and the government-controlled part of Sarajevo. March 1996. Photo by author.
The same impulse that moved Sarajevans under siege to create art animated their daily struggles against death-dealing circumstances.
Comprehending this sort of destruction requires a description of the war “from within,” as Michael Taussig (1992) has put it, rather than from the comparatively safe world outside. Photographs do not speak for themselves. Stig Dagerman, the Swedish writer and the first reporter to be sent to postwar Germany, wrote in a letter to a colleague and friend, dated November 8, 1946, about the state of mind and soul that comes from observing mass destruction:
In Hamburg one can get off the train at Landwehr and walk for an hour in any direction without seeing anything but inner walls and floors hanging like flags in their holds and frozen radiators clinging tightly as blowflies to their walls. It is nearly in the middle of the town and one does not see a human being for approximately an hour.
