Volume 8 Number 3

Summer 1999

Feature: Two Hungarian writers debate the war

Eastern Europe After Kosovo
     Excerpts from an Address Given at the Berlin Arts Academy, May 7, 1999
     Gyorgy Konrad

There are bombs in the air, and the most powerful man in the world promises, in his radio address, that these bombs will be dropped, ever more ruthlessly, on towns where my friends live who are no more sinful than we are. All I would like to say is that I have not authorized him to do this. Have you? Although originally I did not intend to bother you with these images of war, all I ask is that you consider this: Are we allowed to retaliate for killings by killing others, by killing people who did not kill?

It is only natural if an artist does not approve of bloody and hasty deeds. Mechanized killing is done quickly, and art is done slowly, like child rearing. Punishment can wait; rescue operations cannot.

We could suggest that these humanitarian warriors, these governments protecting human rights, give a sum equivalent to the costs of one single day of these bombings, $500 million, to help the refugees.

What should we do with our questions? What shall I do if I cannot understand this pathetic talk intended to explain the bad news? Where can we sail in this flood of rhetoric? Where do lucid arguments hide? Why is it that, suddenly, nice and intelligent people began speaking wild nonsense? Is this the epidemic that raged in the former Yugoslavia ten years ago?

At that time, Danilo Kis said that people were suddenly transformed into rhinoceroses. Let me remind you of Eugne Ionesco's play, of the mysterious malady that turns people into herds of rhinos, rampaging in groups, thinking in unison. Actual rhinos would perhaps find this simile offensive. In any case, the play and its story about the transformation are excellent. We should look in the mirror during our morning shave to see if rhino features are surfacing from under our skin. If people-not the intelligent but the noisy ones-in Yugoslavia ten years ago turned into ethnic nationalists, are we now turning into NATO nationalists? We are a hundred times larger and still we cannot beat them? Even some radical humanists have begun speaking this way: the Serbs ran amok, they are incorrigible, a criminal nation, they do not understand that we only wish to save them, there is no other alternative left, we have to make mincemeat of them in the name of European solidarity. And then we pick them up from the ground and remake them. Ladies and Gentlemen! Please reread Ionesco's play, The Rhinoceros.

Zweispaltig [ambivalent], says a Czech writer about the reactions of her friends to this war. Well, this is the very least that we can expect from a writer: to be twofold, to be paradoxical. This is our job. For who is happy about ferocious Serb fighters expelling helpless Albanians, occasionally even killing them? Who is happy when town dwellers like us are being bombed, even if those bombs were meant for a neighboring building? Who likes ethnic cleansing? And who likes bombings? Naive people say they don't like either.

The confident NATO elite say they approve of the latter as punishment for the former. It is not surprising that people, whose job is to follow the orders of their superiors, think this way. It is also not surprising for people who do not think to think this way. But when people whose job it is to think approve of the bombs, that makes us wonder. Or does it?

If we look back on our intellectual trajectory, we can see that many of us approved of the reeducation of Chinese intellectuals, reeducation being a euphemism here for concentration camps. Shall we now reeducate (perhaps in some reeducation camp) the whole of Yugoslav society? It would be difficult to set up such a big camp. It is better to turn the whole country into a camp through the terror of air strikes. I have the impression that these radical pedagogues have never endured bombings in bunkers or basements.

I think it is a fair guess to say that violence took its toll equally both by Serb fighters in Kosovo and by the air strikes. The first required a lot of vodka, the second a cool and clear mind. Naive morality recoils from the former as well as the latter. It is ashamed of itself. Where did our words go streetwalking? Our bombs came back to roost: they have destroyed the luminous edifice of concepts and values.

Politicians are elected-fine. But their being elected does not prevent stupid talk and stupid decisions on their part. They are in need of intellectual guardians.

***

Gyorgy Konrad is a widely acclaimed Hungarian intellectual, writer, and essayist. He is also one of the founders of the Alliance of Free Democrats, a Hungarian political party, and was the president of the International Pen Club (1990-92). He is presently the president of the Berlin Arts Academy. Among his most well-known books in English are The Visitor (a novel) and Antipolitics (political essays). This speech appeared in Elet es Irodalom, on June 4, 1999.

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