Dubravka Ugresic, Nausicaa Marbe and Lea Ypi wrote about it in three beautiful books ★★★★☆

In Museum of Unconditional Surrender Dubravka Ugresic recalls a former compatriot who carried out ethnic cleansing, Ratko Mladic. Before this general started shelling the house of an old Bosnian acquaintance, he made a phone call: ‘Quickly grab some photo albums and walk out!’

Hardly a more cruel fate than being separated from your photo albums for good, Ugresic knows. Who ever Wim Kayzers series Of the beauty and the comfort may remember that this author scoured Berlin flea markets where photo albums of complete strangers were for sale. Dubravka Ugresic lost her country, home, job and many friends in 1991 because she refused to undergo the metamorphosis from Yugoslavian to Croatian author and to use the slogans that came with it. She wouldn’t let her photos be taken away. Take those few photos she owns of her grandmother: along with a little knit pullover, they’re the only tangible evidence that that woman ever existed. The photos went with them in exile.

Museum of Unconditional Surrender first appeared in 1997, six years after Yugoslavia violently fell apart. It is one of Ugresic’s most important books and has now been reissued. It is difficult to categorize: there are essays, there are magic-realistic pieces, there are aphorisms, there are childhood memories, there are contemplations about exile, but many chapters are about photographs.

The title was also the name of a Soviet museum about the exploits of the Red Army in former East Berlin. Ugresic’s unconditional surrender is to an exile from a land that no longer exists. In her museum are photos from Yugoslavia. In the quarter of a century that she has lived abroad (alternately in Amsterdam and Berlin), she has continued to abhor the label ‘Croatian writer’. Yugoslavia was a country that ended up as a photo album on the flea market of history and in Museum of Unconditional Surrender Ugresic saves people from that album from oblivion for a while.

lost land

Leaving your country is a profound experience – that experience is even more profound if your country disappears afterwards. If you want, you can call Nausicaa Marbe and Lea Ypi fellow sufferers of Ugresic. The countries they left, Romania and Albania respectively, still exist politically, but have nothing in common with the countries of their youth. Dubravka Ugresic is from 1949, Nausicaa Marbe from 1963, Lea Ypi from 1979. Three different authors from three different countries of three different generations. Still have Waiting for the West from Marbe and Free from Ypi with Museum of Unconditional Surrender to make.

If you could make topographical maps of memories, the ones from these books cover almost all of southeastern Europe. The Socialist Republic of Romania and the People’s Republic of Albania, like the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, disappeared down the drain of history, but they still exist in the memories of three women who once lived there.

Those who only know Nausicaa Marbe as a columnist, nowadays from The Telegraphlearns in Waiting for the West know a very different kind of literary author. Marbe left Romania at the age of 19, in 1982, in the grim late Ceausescu years, when this European country began to resemble North Korea more and more. Almost forty years later, in the Netherlands, she was catapulted back to her Romanian childhood by the pandemic.

Suddenly she saw a void in the street that she hadn’t seen since she left, suddenly she had nowhere to go at night – as if the 38 years since her one-way trip to the free world had been some kind of interlude. Marbe doesn’t equate a lockdown with totalitarianism, but that lockdown gave her the opportunity and the time to return to her childhood in a totalitarian state. Therein was a perfect contrast between the world outside and inside. Outside the lie reigned, inside you heard the truth, and that truth was subversive.

Marbe’s mother was a composer, her father a writer. Both parents had roots in the pre-Communist bourgeoisie, in families that the regime had labeled class-hostile. For such class enemies, even preserving old photographs was a subversive activity. And that’s why those photos were cherished extra, in a special drawer where everything that had really been was hidden.

As a little girl, Marbe heard writers and artists talk about their experiences in the Romanian Gulag in her home. Such gatherings were never dejected. What was typical of the repression in the outside world was that it made the bonds between people you could trust unprecedentedly close, it was a kind of conspiracy of the non-perverted.

This world also produced very special people. One of the illustrious characters that readers of Waiting for the West Remembered is a poet who was officially charged with terrible communist architectural education. One day this teacher walked through the school with a wheelbarrow that contained no building materials, but copies of his first collection of poems.

Isolated Albania

Lea Ypi, professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, is the youngest of these three ‘Women of the Balkans’ returning to their youth. Ypi wrote Free – Growing up at the end of history† Just like with Marbe, corona was the direct reason for this: suddenly there was that emptiness on the street and that emptiness in the agenda. Ypi was born in 1979 in Europe’s most isolated communist country, the only one with statues of Stalin. Primary school teacher Nora said that Stalin had been a great friend to children. And that is why Ypi was shocked when the bronze Stalin in Durrës on the Adriatic Sea lost his head one day in 1990.

Albania was not a client state of the Soviet Union. The regime was more repressive than in any Warsaw Pact country. Indoors, too, there was no free conversation: code language existed for delicate subjects. As a little girl, Ypi heard her parents talk about people who had graduated from University B and University M.

The Albanian regime only collapsed two years after 1989, when Ypi was 12, and only then did she find out that the initials B, M and K stood not for universities but for penal camps, and that ‘graduates’ were political prisoners. It was only after the fall of the regime that she learned that her grandmother had a bourgeois past, that she had visited Paris in pre-Communist times, that grandmother even had photos of it that she had had to keep hidden for almost half a century.

Strange things happened in Europe’s most isolated communist country when ‘capitalist stuff’ started arriving after 1991. There were people who felt their scalps sting because they mistook fancy bottles of dishwashing liquid for shampoo. There were people who walked the streets in nice new western clothes and didn’t know they were wearing pyjamas and bathrobes.

When Ypi took the boat to Italy to study philosophy in the late 1990s, Europe’s most highly regulated country had fallen into chaos and anarchy. Today she teaches her students in London the political theory that Miss Nora from Durrës explained to her in Albanian way as a 6-year-old girl, Marxism. One of her cousins ​​said: Our grandfather spent fifteen years in a penal camp and Lea is teaching the joys of Marxism in London! That cousin never attended any of his cousin’s lectures. It teaches its students that behind all the economic categories that Marxism distinguishes are people of flesh and blood. Even class enemies were humans. Ypi wears Free even to a class enemy: her grandmother. That grandmother only existed in pictures, but now also exists in words.