that followed the dissolution of SFRJ did not have the effect of freeing national identity from constraints imposed by a guilty past. Instead they burdened these identities further with a consciousness of a guilty present. This is clearly visible in an examination of diaries and autobiographical works produced in Serbia during the war period. A number of writers produced “war diaries” examining events they had experienced or witnessed, and exploring their own responses to them. There is no way of knowing how many people shared the impressions offered in these works, most of which were consciously presented as an alternative to official “patriotic” propaganda, but enough of them were produced that they might be considered a meaningful subgenre of contemporary Balkan literature.21
First, writers displayed a keen consciousness of the way that Serbs were perceived in the world as the primary perpetrators of atrocities. Mileta Prodanović tells of meeting an old and prominent East European writer at a conference. “I shook hands with the old man (who was the only Nobel laureate I had ever met personally), told him where I was from, and at once noticed a change in his blue Slavic eyes.”22 Discomfited by the writer’s gaze:
I understood. The old man was disappointed. The questions which he really, undoubtedly, wanted to ask me could be, for example: “And how many unfortunate Bosnian children did you slaughter with your own hands? Did you participate in mass rapes? Are you a relative of one of the leaders of the paramilitary formations, or maybe just one of the ‘weekend warriors’?” I ran to my hotel room, ripped off the top of the plastic container of red ink for my “Rotring” pen with my teeth, spread the ink over my shirt, and rubbed it on my hands. When I returned to the lecture room, I could see the relief on the face of the old poet. It seemed to me that he even nodded his head a little bit.23
Other writers tried responding directly to the negative global reputation of Serbs, rather than taking refuge in bitter humor. Vladimir Arsenijević quotes an e-mail message he wrote to an Albanian friend:
My compassion really and naturally belongs only to people, regardless of their nationality and/or religion. I know that everything we have been going through in this country for the past decade or so is simply a long chain of consequences of our President’s irresponsible and highly destructive behavior. You say that people are suffering here just for the fact that “they are Albanians” and I totally agree with you—they do—but you should also know that what you are concerned with is just one part of the big problem. Because many more people than just those of Albanian nationality have been going through enormous problems here, for a very long time now. It is a kind of inverted nationalism to think that only those citizens who are of non-Serbian nationality suffer here. There is no favouritism in this society, you can be sure of that. Everybody is Albanian here, and this is not just an apt, if shabby, analogy….
And as for us, Bashkim, people like you and me, Serbs as well as Albanians, those who suffered a lot although they never caused any of this to happen, well—we are just flesh, valueless bodies for both parties to play with. That seems to be our most common ground. I’m sorry to say that. Because this is what Our region has given us, such a hideous legacy. We are Nothings. We can easily be killed, and hardly anyone would blink, but many would cheer, because—we are Those Who Are Easily Killed. And, even if we manage to escape the borders of our misguided, stupid, sad countries, we are still not in a position to shake off that negative identity. Our countries, small and miserable as they are, nevertheless remain stronger than us.24
Regardless how they approached the problem, all these writers needed some reply to what they recognized as the international perception of collective guilt about Serbs. Sometimes this took the form of satirizing the imposition of an unwelcome identity, sometimes it took the form of attempting to find a specific social location for blame, and sometimes it took the form of skepticism toward Serbian identity itself.
However, other people’s stereotypes about Serbs were not the only burden that faced Serbian writers. They also had to develop an approach toward inflated patriotic models of identity that were offered up constantly in state-sponsored media. At the same time that media in other parts of the world generated the image of Serbs-as-war-criminals, another mythology was developing in state-sponsored nationalist media of Serbs-as-Ubermenschen, the oldest,25 most virtuous, and altogether finest people. Goran Marković offers an account of one Dr. Jovan I. Deretić,26 a self-declared “historian” promoted on television:
He was speaking about some Serbon Makeridov, a conqueror who lived long before Alexander the Great and conquered much more territory than him…. That Serbon, the father of all nations, was a Serb. That is to say, all his descendants, or rather all known peoples, have a Serbian origin. Contemporary Serbs, in fact, are just some of the many Serbs who, over time, became Greeks and Celts and so on. Serbs, according to this lively old fellow, are not a nation but a race. In fact, why hide it, all Indo-European peoples have Serbian origins.
Even that lesser conqueror than Serbon, Alexander, was named Aleksandar Karanović and he was of Serbian origin too. He conquered the world with an army that was recruited from areas settled by Serbs, our ancestors were so brave. And the most beautiful girls, who can be seen on ancient Greek vases, were also Serbs, there is indisputable evidence for that….
About this doctor. Of course, Deretić has the right to assert whatever he likes, just like the audience has the right to believe it or, like me, simply to ignore it. But something else is in question: the context of the story. It was disgusting, and at the same time typical. The host of the program, a Serb primitive who is delighted by every Serbian heraldic symbol, even completely nebulous ones, in archaeological digs, and who triumphally grins over every bit of “evidence,” even the most suspicious, of the Serbian origin of everyone and everything, and his interlocutor … were perfect partners in this pig’s race of nationalism. It was a real orgy of stupidity in the service of deceiving exhausted people, a last effort to inject hungry and scared people with the feeling that they still have a reason to live. I am not against nationalism a priori. I do not think that love for one’s people is negative by definition. What makes me angry is not even the falsehood or artificiality of what those two people were claiming. I am ashamed because my feeling of belonging to a nation has been made into something crude, used for dirty purposes, because my personal feelings are being sold publicly by TV Palma, like prostitutes in Gavrilo Princip street.27
Similar themes are apparent in other diaries of the period, in which a falsified collective pride, widely publicized, is perceived by the writers as an attack on individual pride, and massively promoted nationalist feeling makes national identity impossible.
A similar response is offered to the discourse of victimization. Arsenijević responds to the efforts of state television to promote a feeling of victimization with what seems to be insensitive rationality. Describing a television clip from a bomb shelter, he tries to place the rhetoric and its motivation in perspective:
“He is completely hysterical!” a young mother said in a shaky voice into the microphones of the state television news, squinting from the bright lights which were pointed right into her eyes as if she were at a police interrogation. In her arms she was holding a baby who did not seem the least bit hysterical.
“How does he behave?” asked the invisible interviewer, with pathos.
“Sometimes he laughs. Sometimes he cries,” the young mother answered.
But isn’t that what babies generally do? Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes they cry. All the time, even in the shelters when you are bombing them.
But I don’t think the problem is with the baby.
What is worse, it’s not with the mother either.28
Here the writers face an unusual rhetorical challenge. Faced with genuine danger associated with the bombing campaign, they simultaneously
