neighborhood Kova č i. I had a full-time job and lived on my own—a major, adult accomplishment in a sadly socialist society where people grew old living with their parents, perpetually underemployed.
My previous and limited working experience had been in radio, where, apart from very short and baffling fiction, I wrote opinionated pieces on film, literature, and general stupidity. Hence I became the culture editor of Na š i dani , and I somehow managed to negotiate thirteen pages for culture (whatever that was) out of the magazine’s forty-eight. Convinced that the previous generation of journalists was tainted by the idiocy of comfortable communism, I refused to publish in my pages any writing by anyone older than twenty-seven, which required frequently fighting off the rest of the editorial team, still forgiving to some press veterans. I also wrote short, acerbic pieces for the satiric two-page spread and a column called “Sarajevo Republika,” which I conceived of as “militantly urban.” I was constantly high with being young and radical, reveling in the space of fuck-you-ness I carved out for myself.
The rest of the editorial team also came from radio, where we had shared contempt for the old socialist regime as well as for the politics of rabid nationalism, which was busy at the time dismantling the sorry remnants of Communist Yugoslavia. Our employer was the Liberal Party, which came out of what in the previous system was called the Association of Socialist Youth. (I wrote, for a fee, the culture part of the Liberal Party’s platform.) We were hired, after the previous editorial team was fired in its entirety, for reasons I cannot really remember; I’d like to think that it was because our employer wanted a radical break— Na š i dani had a forty-year history of publishing, largely marked by obedience to whatever was supposed to define socialist youth.
We had to learn quickly how to produce a biweekly magazine with a punch of immediacy. Alas, we soon had a chance: one of our first issues was largely devoted to (and supportive of) anti-Milo š evi ć demonstrations taking place in Belgrade, which he eventually crushed with the help of the Yugoslav People’s Army’s tanks. The blood of two young students was the first spilled by the army; we knew the flow would not stop there. By the spring, war was in full swing in Croatia. Reports of atrocities started coming in; we published photos of decapitated corpses and an interview with Vojislav Š e š elj, a Serbian militia leader (now on trial in The Hague), who had famously promised to gouge Croatian eyes with rusty spoons. Somehow regular spoons were not bad enough.
At the onset of war, however, such things could still be treated as horrifying exceptions. One could indulge in thinking that a few bad apples had gone nuts, particularly since the Yugoslav/Serbian and Croatian authorities kept promising that everything would soon return to normal. But we soon broke a story on the army trucks transporting weapons (the cargo listed as “bananas”) to the parts of Bosnia where Serbs constituted the majority. We covered the increasingly belligerent Bosnian parliament sessions and attended press conferences at which Radovan Karad ž i ć (now on trial in The Hague), flanked by my former professor, pounded the table with his shovel-like fist, while making barely veiled threats of violence and war.
The more we knew about it, the less we wanted to know. The structure of our lives relied on the routine continuation of what we stubbornly perceived as normalcy. Hence, convinced that we were merely trying to live a normal life, we embarked upon a passionate pursuit of hedonistic oblivion. There was partying and drinking every night, often into the wee hours. We also danced a lot; indeed, I published an editorial in the cultural section, written by Gu š a, arguing that it was everybody’s urgent duty to dance more if we wanted to stop the oncoming catastrophe.
Much
My previous and limited working experience had been in radio, where, apart from very short and baffling fiction, I wrote opinionated pieces on film, literature, and general stupidity. Hence I became the culture editor of Na š i dani , and I somehow managed to negotiate thirteen pages for culture (whatever that was) out of the magazine’s forty-eight. Convinced that the previous generation of journalists was tainted by the idiocy of comfortable communism, I refused to publish in my pages any writing by anyone older than twenty-seven, which required frequently fighting off the rest of the editorial team, still forgiving to some press veterans. I also wrote short, acerbic pieces for the satiric two-page spread and a column called “Sarajevo Republika,” which I conceived of as “militantly urban.” I was constantly high with being young and radical, reveling in the space of fuck-you-ness I carved out for myself.
The rest of the editorial team also came from radio, where we had shared contempt for the old socialist regime as well as for the politics of rabid nationalism, which was busy at the time dismantling the sorry remnants of Communist Yugoslavia. Our employer was the Liberal Party, which came out of what in the previous system was called the Association of Socialist Youth. (I wrote, for a fee, the culture part of the Liberal Party’s platform.) We were hired, after the previous editorial team was fired in its entirety, for reasons I cannot really remember; I’d like to think that it was because our employer wanted a radical break— Na š i dani had a forty-year history of publishing, largely marked by obedience to whatever was supposed to define socialist youth.
We had to learn quickly how to produce a biweekly magazine with a punch of immediacy. Alas, we soon had a chance: one of our first issues was largely devoted to (and supportive of) anti-Milo š evi ć demonstrations taking place in Belgrade, which he eventually crushed with the help of the Yugoslav People’s Army’s tanks. The blood of two young students was the first spilled by the army; we knew the flow would not stop there. By the spring, war was in full swing in Croatia. Reports of atrocities started coming in; we published photos of decapitated corpses and an interview with Vojislav Š e š elj, a Serbian militia leader (now on trial in The Hague), who had famously promised to gouge Croatian eyes with rusty spoons. Somehow regular spoons were not bad enough.
At the onset of war, however, such things could still be treated as horrifying exceptions. One could indulge in thinking that a few bad apples had gone nuts, particularly since the Yugoslav/Serbian and Croatian authorities kept promising that everything would soon return to normal. But we soon broke a story on the army trucks transporting weapons (the cargo listed as “bananas”) to the parts of Bosnia where Serbs constituted the majority. We covered the increasingly belligerent Bosnian parliament sessions and attended press conferences at which Radovan Karad ž i ć (now on trial in The Hague), flanked by my former professor, pounded the table with his shovel-like fist, while making barely veiled threats of violence and war.
The more we knew about it, the less we wanted to know. The structure of our lives relied on the routine continuation of what we stubbornly perceived as normalcy. Hence, convinced that we were merely trying to live a normal life, we embarked upon a passionate pursuit of hedonistic oblivion. There was partying and drinking every night, often into the wee hours. We also danced a lot; indeed, I published an editorial in the cultural section, written by Gu š a, arguing that it was everybody’s urgent duty to dance more if we wanted to stop the oncoming catastrophe.
Much
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