Ivan Ivanji, writer and translator, was chosen as Person of the Year by the majority of the members of the editorial board of the weekly "Vreme". The criterion for the award is, as in previous years, a contribution to the improvement of social institutions in the public interest.
The editorial staff of "Vremena" believes that Ivan Ivanji, with his tireless work, both on the pages of our weekly and in other public appearances during 2016, as well as many times before, made an immeasurable contribution to the affirmation of anti-fascist and civilizational values. He did all this courageously and uncompromisingly in an environment where collective amnesia is declared the greatest national achievement, and obscure revisionism grossly replaces historical facts. Ivan Ivanji's life experience and work, as well as his deep truthfulness and humanity, were in this year one of the few beacons of intellectual honesty and refusal to agree to lies and everything else that follows as a consequence of them.
When someone is known to have 153 bibliographic units behind him (novels, short stories, fairy tales, essays, lyrics, theater pieces, radio dramas...), that he was a friend or knew most of the most famous writers from this area and the German-speaking area in the previous decades , that he has three mother tongues and writes in two, and that he was a German translator for the most important politicians of Yugoslavia after the Second World War, that he also worked in diplomacy, was a journalist and editor, a dramatist and an artist theater director, technical high school teacher, that sounds like an impressive resume. Ivan Ivanji, in addition to all that, is also a witness of history who went through the horrors of concentration camps as a child, witnessed the Hungarian revolution in 1956, watched the collapse and rise of the states and worlds in which he lived.
And although many difficult and painful topics are inevitably touched upon in the conversation with him, the basic impression after that conversation is that even after bitter residue of experience can celebrate life, and that history did not kill man, and that is a precious message.
WANDERING IN LANGUAGES: Father was born in Veliko Bečkerek, after Petrovgrad, today Zrenjanin, and mother was born in Vršac, Banat combination. Both were doctors, studied in Germany and received their doctorates in Germany. Father knew, however, that his German was not too good, and the language our Swabians spoke was particularly ugly. Since he wanted me to speak German well, he found me an Austrian governess, admittedly from Slovenia, she even claimed to be a noblewoman, Ilse von Schludermann, and she was with me since I was four or five years old.
That's why I once said - I don't have a mother tongue, I have a governess's language. In our family, my parents spoke German with my sister, me and the governess; Dad and Mom spoke Hungarian to each other, Serbian to the whole world; during the occupation, I went to Hungarian high school for three grades. Of those three languages, I don't know which one I would say first, with the fact that I have neglected Hungarian a little, I have no one to talk to. When I have to follow the Hungarian press, nothing bothers me, I speak normally, even with a Budapest accent, not with a provincial accent, but if I were to write, then I would search for words.
It seemed to me that we were living in an idyll in Bečkerek, because I didn't feel any differences between Serbs, Hungarians, Germans, Romanians, Slovaks, Jews... It was all mixed up, at least I wasn't aware that there were any differences, we were all mixing languages.
The first neighbor in the one-story house was the prota, the oldest priest in Bečkerek. He is a very important person from my childhood because he had three daughters, and doctors have more time than gynecologists, so I played chess and sat at his place more than at home. It was funny to me when, from the 1990s onwards, people became orthodox here, and I knew all that from childhood, firsthand. That priest's last name was Popov and he never led me to his ways, but I experienced those customs in the original, when a Christmas tree is brought into the house, straw is spread and he drinks from that straw, etc. He was an interesting man. In his room hung a picture of him with the naked upper part of his body in the form of a, today we would say... strongman. He was pelivan, as it was said then, his eldest daughter was Miss Yugoslavia.
My parents were not religious to the extent that I was, I guess, the only Jew in my generation who was not circumcised and who did not attend religious studies, because my father had the attitude that when I was mature I should decide about it myself. But right before the crowd in 1940, he hastily had me baptized, so it turned out that he himself converted to the Protestant faith in Leipzig, because he thought he would be able to make a career in Germany. Dad took me to the Reformed, Calvinist priest Zoltan Szabo in the office and there he did what I guess is the minimum, then he baptized me. Then he made a "mistake" in the baptismal certificate - he wrote the date of baptism next to the date of birth - and that helped me to later survive three years in Novi Sad as a Hungarian, because many did not have documents in that crowd.
Interestingly, I then went through a short period of deep religiosity of the Reformed type, with the fact that perhaps the Calvinist, in addition to the Serbian variant of Orthodoxy, is, how to say politely, the most rigorous Christian variant. Calvin must have been an awful guy. I was trying to, as they say, prayerfully establish some kind of connection with the Lord, but either I wasn't skilled enough, or he wasn't interested in contact with me, so I wised up in the camp.
THE END OF CHILDHOOD: Even when everything started to change, I still didn't really feel it and take it seriously. Anti-Jewish laws were passed in '40. in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia under the regency of Pavle, who was indeed an Anglophile, but he was an unhappy type. Jews were forbidden to attend high schools and universities in a higher percentage than the population, they were forbidden to engage in any kind of trade or food production, so my dad warned me then: "You have to be an excellent student to pass" , and I said, "Never mind, I want to be the captain of the ship anyway." Nothing came of it, so my grandson is the skipper - that's how it got to him, although we never talked about it before started sailing.
School 1940/41. I enrolled in the second grade of high school, high school started after the fourth grade of elementary school. I didn't notice at the time, my friends from Zrenjanin pointed it out to me much later, that many Jewish children could not enroll in that second grade of high school, I don't remember that at all. Well, when the Germans entered, suddenly everything was there.
I was confused. We had March 27 when I went to school where we got some tricolors and badges with King Per and we went out into the streets to shout: 'Better war than a pact' etc., military music passed by on horses and there was a celebration around Bečkerek . I didn't know, I realized later, that in the meantime the taverns in Bečkerek where the Germans went and their shop windows were smashed Kulturbunda with Hitler's picture; and I was late for lunch at home for the first time in my life because I was celebrating. It was absolutely unthinkable to be late for lunch. Instead of scolding me, Dad said, "I've always told you - war is the worst thing in the world, but this has to be done," and he was for "Better war than a pact." Dad was a reserve medical lieutenant colonel, he even wore a uniform on public holidays. He had this big gray military trunk that he packed into and went to war.
Now comes a big one blackout, and it is inexcusable that it has not been examined. Namely, the grandparents on the father's side committed suicide. My grandfather was also a doctor, he gave himself ten cubic meters of morphine, and he probably didn't tell his wife what he was giving her, he wrote on the prescription: "I lived so well, that I wouldn't let them spoil me." They lived across the street from us, I often visited them. They reported that his father had died, he was the commander of the so-called The fifth field hospital in Macedonia, and someone had appeared with his wristwatch, said that he had taken it off the corpse and brought it to his mother. As it would turn out later, a bullet ricocheted off his helmet so that he passed out and someone took off his watch, and he thought it was stolen. He arrived on time for the funeral of his father and mother.
Well, now - what's weird? My maternal grandmother, who was there the whole time, survived it all. She also survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and after the war she was in quite good mental and physical condition, she lived a very long time. We saw each other, I spent two summers with my uncle in Pancevo, where she was also, and we never talked about it, it was a taboo topic. I was then able to question her in detail: "Well, how did my mother react to the fact that my grandparents killed themselves?" My grandmother lived through it all, she saw how my sister and I were shipped off, she saw how my parents were closed, we didn't say a single word about it, but: "What do you want me to cook?" "Does something need to be ironed?"
It was the same with my uncle, an engineer, who wisely hid in the forest, but not with the Partisans or Chetniks, but with his masons from Crna Trava, I talked with him about bridges, civil engineering and I worked for him during the summer as a technician, because he was the director of a provincial construction company. Neither he asked me about the camp, nor I asked him about his forests. Strange... Nor did I want to see my governess after the war, who was the lover of a Gestapo man during the occupation. Later, on his initiative, I established excellent relations with her cousin, I was also at her grave, but I didn't want to see her after the war.
HIDING IN NOVI SAD: When my father returned, my sister and I, for reasons I don't know, lived with my grandmother for a few days. Then my aunt came to pick us up, my uncle was in Novi Sad and married Švabica, before the war I was with them several times. Thanks to old connections, we got permission to go to Bačka, my mother could have gone with us, but she didn't want to, she wanted to stay with her father. It's just that his Swabian acquaintances didn't say to my father: "And you're running away, doctor, again", that's at least a family legend, I don't know if it's all true. Strina took us across Titel, across the Tisa, the ferry was going, I stayed with my uncle, my sister was transferred to Subotica to live with my aunt and my mother's sister. I don't remember what they told us, why we were going, blackout.
My sister lived with her aunt in Subotica, I even went two or three times during the holidays. We didn't know anything about our parents, neither did my uncle. In the beginning, I went to the quay to watch the ships coming from Belgrade, from the Danube, to see if I could meet them. But we didn't know what happened for a long time.
I was quite independent, my uncle was not at all interested in what I was doing, whether he was a traitor to that extent, I leave that open, now I wouldn't bother him too much. Summer has passed on the Danube Strand, the school year has begun. I set out alone to enroll in a Hungarian high school, with my wonderful baptismal certificate as the only document. I meet the professor who is working on it, I tell him: "I'm from Petrovgrad and I don't have any documents, can I enroll?" "We'll enroll you. What were your grades in the midterm?" "Well now, excuse me, I got all A's..." "Good. We will write that you were in Novi Sad High School and that you got all A's."
After the war, I established that this professor was Bogdan Čiplić, a writer. That's how Zoltan Sabo gave me my baptismal certificate, Bogdan Čiplić enrolled me as a Hungarian in the Gymnasium. At least I could thank Čiplić after the war, he says he didn't remember it at all, so he did countless such things and it was quite brave, especially since his brother was a well-known communist. I wrote later in the "Novosadski dnevnik" about it, I also spoke to him at the funeral.
We weren't afraid then, we weren't aware of everything, it all comes back later. I don't know if it was like that in the war, many war heroes say that they were afraid only afterwards, after the fact. At the time of the raid in Novi Sad in 1942, my uncle's brother and I go to school in the morning, we see a closed school, a wild one, a terrible winter, 21-22. January. So - home, and we didn't know anything, if the uncle knew something more than us, and he probably knew because the phones were working, he hid it well. We didn't know what was happening until it was over, until we went to the gymnasium and saw that some of our Serbian comrades were no longer there. By the way, Jews did not go to Hungarian high school.
Later, when the Germans in '44. invaded Horthy's Hungary because they didn't trust him anymore, everything changed, then they started to check harder, so one fine day in April they came for me, a civilian and two policemen, and took me away. They came to the apartment, and the whole thing is a bit mysterious, because it wasn't a general raid, they just came for me. I wrote my assumptions about this in the novel My beautiful life in hell, that my uncle out of fear for himself and his family reported me, betrayed me, I don't know the truth, sometimes it's better not to know the truth. What is the truth anyway? What remains based on uncertain documents? I don't have any documents about that, I only have the precise documents that the Germans gave after the war when I arrived in the camp.
THE WAY TO THE CAMPS: While they were taking me from Banovina to the Synagogue in Futoška Street, I was just looking to see if anyone would see how two policemen were taking me with a rifle on their shoulders, I was terribly proud, it was a real experience. From the Synagogue, they took us to the train station, and transferred us to Subotica in relatively normal wagons. In Subotica there was a camp for Jews in an abandoned mill, where my aunt visited me one more time, we talked over the wire, all of that was still under Hungarian command. Then they took us to another camp in Baja, a village on the Hungarian side, and then we were taken over by the SS.
I know those dates, because the documents from the arrest are kept by the Germans. In Arolsen, Germany, there was some international institution that collected all the data from the German concentration camps and made it available only to former camp inmates, not to science. I have accurate information from them until liberation, although there are errors, e.g. my date of birth is wrong - it says I was born on December 31, 1927, but I was born on January 24, 1929. It's possible that I lied about being older, which was important. But why my father's birthday instead of mine? Did I dictate my father's birthday, did I say something, or did they mess up in their office... I don't know.
There were whole families in Baja, I was alone. And now I think that in such a situation it is better to be alone. Families suffered terribly in those camps. We were together on that transport to Auschwitz for three days, without toilets and almost without food, and when you're alone, at least you don't suffer because of your loved ones.
However, it is a strange thing again. We have watched countless films about these transports. And in my memory, if it's a memory at all, the images from the movies overshadowed my personal memory to such an extent that I remember situations from the movies that were mostly poorly presented. When you watch American films about it, you should pay attention to who the producer is - if it's Branko Lustig, then it's good, everything else is something. Because Branko Lustig, who made several of those films, who himself was in Auschwitz, made sure that everything was accurate. Lustig also worked for Spielberg.
As far as I remember, when I saw that they were separating at the entrance to Auschwitz, it was logical to me that they were separating into able-bodied and unfit for work. It was logical to me that those able to work would be better fed, I had no idea that they would immediately kill those unable to work. When I got to the SS doctor who decided who was healthy and who was not, I just said: "Ich bin arbeitsfähig!" (I am fit for work!); he didn't care. And at the age of 15 and a few months, I was there, on the edge of a knife, whether I was fit to work or not, although there were children my age who were declared fit, like a certain Georges Fenier, who later lived in Paris, then killed himself , like many former inmates.
There was talk about concentration camps and what was happening to Jews all over Europe, but we didn't believe it was true. Back in Auschwitz, when a camp inmate answered the question: "What's that smell?", "It's your parents," I believed they were exaggerating. Why do they say such disgusting things, that people are immediately burned? I realized that it was true a little later. Until then, everything was an interesting adventure, and then the struggle to survive the next five minutes or the next day was more important than anything else.
Although, there were also important differences - by chance my group of Hungarian Jews who came from Baja were transferred after a few days from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, so I Buchenwaldian, although I did pass Auschwitz. I was leaving Buchenwald, that is. they sent people to the so-called working commandos, I was first in Magdeburg, then returned to Buchenwald, then to Niederorschel, that's a small place in Thuringia, and finally in Langenstein, again in Thuringia.
This Niederorschel was a sanatorium in camp terms. It was a wing factory for "Junkers" planes, they made it in a former textile factory, then they joined them together, the wires were around them. The camp was inside those factories, the SS stood around, they rarely entered the camp. There were German masters in the camp, and war invalids who came there with the inmates, real masters.
Since I had some ulcers on my leg, I dared to report to the doctor, which was otherwise dangerous in the camps. There I ran into the head doctor who was French, Charles Odick, a Breton, a socialist. He took me under his wing so that I was constantly spared and sat mostly at his office, played chess with his assistant, read Nietzsche and Pirandello, which the camp capo, who was a communist, had. That winter of '44-45. I, for camp terms, lived strangely, and then a few of us, i.e. one transport, sent to Langenstein Zwiberge.
It was a deadly camp where tunnels were built, and the camp commander used to say: "Every 100 meters I need one dead." But, even there, in a strange way, some people stay alive. The SS weren't perfect either - someone slipped through the cracks, and I was always lucky there. Back in Niederorschel, I met Dr. Hans Adler, who signed himself in literature as HG Adler. Czech Jew, sociologist, who wrote major sociological studies on the camp after the war.
They produced him as a camp scribe, he was placed in that tunnel in a ready-made section with a typewriter, table and paper. He didn't have any work - and he started typing songs. Suddenly, a capo appeared behind him: "What, you write songs?", and ordered him to write a love song for a girl. Adler thus began to write commissioned love poems, then biographies in verse for SS men and criminals. For that, he received extra food, he could get me a tape that I was a courier, for our friend Ladislav Blažek, a Czech, that he was a foreman, and that's how we got by until the spring of '45.
LIBERATION: It was felt by the nervousness of the SS that something was happening, and then a few days before the end, it seems to me on April 7, it was decided that those fit for work should go on transport. The deliberation began, Adler, Blazek and I discussed which half they were going to kill. If the Germans are crazy, they will kill those who remain and use the others to dig more trenches. If they know it's over, they'll kill those able to work. Basically, the three of us, who could have been both, stood in line to go on the transport. When the counting started, Blazek remembered - Well, I won't - and ran away from the machine, it was unimaginable. Adler and I followed him, the machine fell apart, the shooting began, and now - how uncertain the memory is.
Adler and I, who were present, analyzed it years later, not decades later, at his place in London. His version is that he hid me in a small room, so he saved me. My version is that I threw myself next to one of the affected inmates and pretended to be dead. Totally different stories. I'm in my novel Shadow jumping wrote: "If I were some third person, I would trust myself more", but this way I have to leave it without knowing what happened.
So, here we are in the camp, with people who are still literally dying of hunger. It continues to die, and then on that April 11, there are no more searchlights and no more SS men, somewhere far away you can hear some thunder, if I didn't make that up. Then the Russians go out on the first evening and come back with some rabbits, they ransacked some German barns, and that's the first roast. The three of us are leaving on April 13, with the idea that when the Americans reach the camp, since they are still dying, they will put us in quarantine, so we will be late home, we better go somewhere.
So we walked to the nearby town of Halberstadt, where we ran into an American patrol on the road. The Americans are coming, and we are in those camp, zebra uniforms, and the first gesture of the Americans: "Don't hug us, you have yours!" That was an encounter with liberation. They started digging in their pockets, they had nothing but gum, which they gave us, so I, the idiot, bit into the gum, which was disgusting, I never liked gum in my life. Then we tell them: "There is a camp here where people are still dying," and they tell us that they are a patrol and that we should go to their command to report it.
One important thing - in his first book after the war They did not kill the man I claimed that there were cherry blossoms on that road. Afterwards, like many things I've written, I worried whether it was a poetic trick, whether it was possible for cherries to bloom in April, whether there could even be cherries... When I was there for the first time after the war, on that road , I was relieved that there really were cherries, so I didn't make it up.
We walked six kilometers to Halberstadt, American trucks passed by, throwing us their nice little packages, breakfast, Dinner i soups, in waxed paper, then inside this can, that can, toilet paper, cigarettes, matches... Because of those packets, I never smoked in my life because we got them in bulk, cigarettes were currency, you could get anything for them. Why should I burn the dollar?
RETURN HOME: We were sitting in Magdeburg, about 2000 Yugoslavs, prisoners of war, some civilian workers and families, very few inmates. There is a pontoon bridge across the Elbe, there are Americans and Englishmen, on the other side Russians, Poles and other people from the east. The French go home over that bridge to the west, the Yugoslavs don't go anywhere because the royal generals decided not to go to that communist Yugoslavia. There is no one to transport us, so we occupied an entire quarter that remained intact after the various bombings of Magdeburg. Some of our clever comrades connected us to American electricity there, the town normally had no electricity, we received American signals and waited, waited, waited.
It's funny that the commander of that part of town, Captain First Class Weitzenhofer, was a man who had a bicycle shop in Bechkerek, that is, an acquaintance of mine from childhood, I didn't want to write that in the novel, there would be too many Jews for my taste. In the novel, he is Captain Vasić who, one fine day, drove off with the car that the Americans gave him, leaving us stranded. Then we met once in Frankfurt am Main, by chance. He went to Israel - that's for sure.
Then, according to the American-Russian agreement, that part of the city was taken over by the Russians. I was sixteen and something, and it is clear that I fell in love with a German girl my age. It was heard that the Russians are coming. Hers lived in that part of town, they: "Oh, the Russians are coming," and I say: "The Russians aren't scary, that's the stories." I had a beautiful uniform - dark brown trousers, like SA members wore, English lambertjack and a five-pointed hawk. I consoled her and one of her friends that Russians are not terrible. We are walking like that one night in the moonlight, and a Russian patrol is coming. The girls' hearts were in their heels, and by God, mine too, not that I was afraid of the Russians, but I was still afraid for them. The Russian says: "What you?", "Yugoslav", he says: "Tito!", I: "Stalin!", as if they were passwords. "Your whore?" "That's right." We even filmed that scene for a film for German television, that and other stories were often repeated.
Somehow the Russians finally agreed to assemble a transport for Yugoslavia, but it was only in September, they also had more work to do. We spent the summer with them in Magdeburg, on Russian supplies, it was modest, but enough. They put us in transport, freight cars again, but we got furniture from German apartments, so they were freight cars, but with couches, armchairs; with us and two senior Russian officers to train the locomotive at major stations because, of course, there was no timetable. To go with it, since they didn't have enough cans, we got eight live cows. Ours managed to exchange it for salami only in Prague. I arrived in Kikinda on September 3, 1945, with military music. Kikinda was already used to transportation.
When I arrived in Kikinda, we all went past our officers to get our documents. One was a teacher from Zrenjanin and he knew my parents, he said to me: "I haven't heard anything about your parents, and if there was something, I probably would have heard, and don't despair, you're just now coming back."
There is no official information about my mother and father. About the father of none, he was probably, according to all the stories, at the Cannon sheds. For mom, it is certain that she was at the Fair, because there is a postcard addressed to her aunt, a Red Cross postcard with twenty-five letters, that she is there, where she says: "I am alone." What did that mean - was it only that dad was not in to that camp, or that he knew that he had already been executed, because it was somewhere, February, March '42, it is unclear. There are some family stories told by my aunt Budimka, a Serb from Vršac, which have not been verified. But it's a nice story, so let it be true... That dad from Topovske šupa, as a doctor who completed gynecology in Germany, went out with a single guard to visit German mistresses, or the wives of German officers, and that there was a connection to join the partisans, and that he did not want to leave without his mother, who previously did not want to leave without him from Petrovgrad (today's Zrenjanin), so he asked that they also try to free her from Sajmište, which was impossible.
The awareness of their absence gradually prevailed, until the aunt, who was the most energetic, in '47-'48. she did not ask to be declared dead, although there was nothing to inherit.
A NEW LIFE: What I found after returning from Germany seemed strange to me compared to what I had experienced. A man asked me then in Kikinda, which I want to know, where I should go, so I asked for Petrovgrad and further to Novi Sad, which he gave me, and some small money in dinars of the time. Arriving in my hometown, I went straight to my former apartment - our former apartment - when I saw "Doctor Aleksić" written on the door. I'm calling, of course I knew Dr. Aleksić, his sons from school, one a year older than me, the other a year younger. He was surprised, apologized for being in our apartment, says: "They took our apartment for other purposes, so they moved me here." Do you want to see if there is anything of yours?” There was nothing of ours, except for one chandelier in the hall, which I was not interested in. And he counted the 20 ducats that my father left with him, a certain amount of money, with a list, which is an important piece of information for my uncle, because he always replaced it as the currencies changed. He says: "Your uncle appeared and asked around if there was anything left of yours, and I knew him and I didn't trust him at all, I kept hoping that one of you would come back." That doubt about the uncle was obviously spread throughout Zrenjanin.
Then I went to some acquaintances, the Borals, the woman was Švabica, her son Ivan Boral was my so-called best friend, a month younger than me. She divorced her husband, a Jew, Tibor Varadi has that, he writes a lot about divorces in mixed marriages in his book Writings and people stories from the lawyer's boxlariats, because his father and grandfather followed those divorces as lawyers. If she hadn't divorced, then the son would have gone with him to the camp, and he didn't come back, he went with my father.
They had a woodshop. A significant thing before the war - old Boral drove mercedes, my father drove a small Styria, the director of the sugar factory was driving packard. The rank was known exactly, and most did not drive anything at that time. I spent the night twice with the Borals and got civilian clothes from them, and went on. My namesake didn't want to hang out with me after the war, he was terribly embarrassed that he survived at the expense of his father.
Then I went to Novi Sad and found my uncle in his electrician's shop, he almost fainted because I was considered dead, someone said that I died in his arms in Magdeburg, from where I had disappeared because I was transferred back to Buchenwald. I had a successful argument with my uncle right away, so that since the fall of '45. lived independently, paid for rooms, worked at Kumdruđozli, as we called it then - the Đorđe Zličić Cultural and Artistic Society - and the SKOJ committee, I don't know when I even managed to sleep during those three years. Technical high school, bachelor's degree in construction technician in architecture, the only degree I got in my life, apart from a few books...
My sister lived in Subotica with her aunt, finished secondary music school, then studied piano at the Academy of Music in Belgrade under the famous professor Emil Hayek. She thought she played well enough to be a concert pianist, got a job as music editor of RTS, was a musical collaborator in many series of Lola Đukić until her retirement. She also wrote a novel Bet gate with a camp theme.
Although my family belonged to the "bourgeoisie" before the war, it is logical and normal that I became part of the new, communist society in Yugoslavia. I came from the camp, the Russians were nicer to me than the Americans for countless reasons. I met both of them, the Americans were very arrogant, they had everything and gave everything. The Russians were friends from the first, from those who said "Your whores?", to the point that we were absolutely equal in that Magdeburg. As a former inmate, I don't think it could have been any other way than to be who I was.
I had only one sin - I wore ties. When there was admission at SKOJ, they wouldn't admit me. I say: "When did you see Comrade Lenin without a tie?", they: "When did you see Comrade Stalin or Comrade Tito with a tie?" But I was in the "apparatus" of the city leadership of the youth organization, that's what we called it. The political president of SKOJ, Rajko, it's a shame, but I forgot his last name, at one point he sends me to some meeting in SKOJ, I tell him: "I can't, I'm not a member of SKOJ." "How come you're not?" I explain to him, he says: "According to the Statute, I can accept you, go as an instructor."
The concerned Rajko committed suicide when the Informburo Resolution came, because he could not make up his mind. For me, interestingly, everything was clear. One of my older comrades at that time was Vlada Rothbart, a man of strange destiny. During the war, he was saved by the fact that he was a communist. He did not go to the camp with the Hungarians, he did not die in the Raid, but he went to prison as a communist. In the end, he was the president of the Constitutional Court of Vojvodina.
He was then a correspondent for Tanjug, he had something that was very rare - a "Kosmaj" brand radio - our first radios. That day, it happened to be Vidovdan, we listened to Radio Moscow at his place and heard about the Resolution; and we conclude, he's a communist, I'm a young man from Skoje, that Comrade Stalin must have been misinformed. We went to the train station in the early morning, we discussed the problem all night, to see our press, because we were sure that we would find out what our views were in "Borba" and "Politica". With Rothbart, I was on Tito's side, logically, without much thought.
One of my classmates, a certain Heršković, spoke in favor of the Informburo Resolution. They are to him indicate said, or it was already UDBA: "Don't be fooled, you were in a camp, go to Israel, so if you are a Stalinist, you better be there." wanted to opt for Israel. Much later I heard that he became a construction contractor and a millionaire in Israel, so he did well. But, well, I was mostly on the Tito line out of conviction.
ON REAL AND INTERNAL CENSORSHIP: Tito's generation was later reproached for why those who knew about Stalin's horrors did not say anything, so someone said: "We did not want to harm the first country of socialism, and we knew, of course, what was happening." Of course we did too. knew everything that happened after Resolution IB. I thought that we could defend ourselves against the Stalinists in no other way than with Stalinist methods, and little by little it would get better, and it was getting better. But I was always in the role of the court madman, I said and did all sorts of things and no one ever blamed me.
I was in the editorial office of "Youth" in the fifties, when I was put on the committee for organizing the May Day celebration in the City Committee. Then I said that the whole celebration seems inconvenient to me, because I don't like the workers getting up at five to parade in front of the tribune with the managers and that it should be abolished. And the army, if it has to parade, let it parade on May 9. They just didn't call me to the next meeting, but no one gave me a problem because of that.
Later, when I worked in the daily newspaper "Mladost", I deliberately exaggerated because I knew what the editor-in-chief would delete, so that there would be something I wanted to say, and it worked out great. I only "died" once. I started printing half-naked girls, and to justify it, I placed one girl in a bikini sitting on a pint of beer and signed: "With such pictures the West poisons its youth." It happened that someone killed one of our border guards, it arrived quickly, printed just below the naked girl, so it turned out that the girl was sitting on the murdered border guard with her beautiful ass, and then they took 20 percent of my salary.
Then Đilas started publishing his articles in "Borba", which, of course, we young people really liked, especially Mladen Oljača, a first-time fighter from Lens, one of our editors in "Omladina", and he wrote a big article in support of Đilas. Then Milijan Neoričić, then the president of the National Youth of Yugoslavia, called us to the Central Committee and said: "Come on, calm down the ball, I would wait a little longer in your place" (Užićan, refers to "waited") "Do you know something that I don't we know?" "I don't know anything, you wait a bit with that Djilas." Well, that's where we "waited".
But, in any case, there was much more internal censorship. Peđa Marković, historian, vice-president of SPS, once wrote in his book that I wrote against jazz in "Omladina", which is absolutely untrue, and I proved it to him later. Namely, Saša Marković and Duško Savković wrote against jazz, as good citizens. I wrote in support of jazz (Tito himself spoke against jazz). Duško Vidak played our first jazz then, I wrote about him positively, and that it is the music of enslaved blacks and that is why we should support it - one needs to have the right argumentation, then anything is possible. And that passed, and jazz passed, however, a little later I was very overbearing and had a public discussion with Bubiš Simić about his concert, where he, from my current point of view, was 56% right. Well, that's what Peđa read, but I wasn't against jazz, I was making a fool of myself against Bubiša Simić, which is a different matter after all. I was sinful, but not to that extent. And from Hungary in 'XNUMX, during the revolution that I was present at the time, I already wrote what I wanted in "Mladosta".
TRANSLATOR WITHOUT OATH: I graduated from the Technical High School, and since I was a good student and a good student, I got the best that could be obtained at that time, because at that time the state allocated personnel. They switched in '48. me and my first wife, who was from the same class, as a teacher at the Secondary Technical School in Belgrade.
Then we all did everything we knew, and I knew German. The first contacts between the people's youth and the West German socialists began, we were already at odds with the East, thank God. I started to translate, translated Herb Ivan Goran Kovačić in German, took it to Otto Bihalji Merin, he liked it. One day in 1965, Voja Lopičić, who worked with me in the "Youth" editorial office, called me on the phone and said: "Do you dare to translate for Comrade Petr Stambolić?" "Why shouldn't I dare?" "Well, then you will report". Someone told me to come to the train station then and there, someone introduced me to Pera Stambolic. "I know your poems, I read them." Pera Stambolić really read them, we talked a lot about it later.
The Prime Minister of Austria Klaus, his Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno Krajski came, they took us to SIV to translate. I am sitting to the left of Pera, to his right is Koča Popović, then our Minister of Foreign Affairs. I translate, the Austrian translator translates, wrong in my opinion, I inadvertently fall into a word and correct him, and I get scared. Nobody explained anything to me, nobody told me anything. And behind Pera's back, who I know knows nothing, I look at Koča, who knows all the languages of the world, to see if I made a mistake, he nodded to me: Continue. I also understood, and I started correcting the German, so Klaus cut in at one point and said: "Let's not complicate things, I'm interested in what's really being said here, translate in both directions." When it was over, the Germans left, and Koča he says to me: "You were good, come on, I'm taking you to Titus."
Günther Grass asked me once: "Did you take an oath?". I didn't. Oaths are something. Whoever would break it, will break it, even if he signed the Bible or swore something else. Whoever knows what the order is, he will not, even though he has not formally taken the oath. If they checked me, they certainly did, but I didn't feel it, they were good.
I worked as a translator for the German language for Tito and for all our state and party leaders at the time, but I was not officially a translator, but I also worked in all kinds of other things - in the theater, then as a freelance writer, then in the Union of Writers.
The foreign statesmen I met as a translator were only from the German language area. Germans, Austrians, Swiss... The Swiss don't have "personalities", someone gets elected for a year, then they forget about him, that's the real democracy.
From Germany, the strongest impression on me was, of course, Willy Brandt. He is the most honest and purest soul who has entered into that awful trade of politics, in which he has done moderately well. He without discussion, the others more or less, like Schmidt; it was interesting then to fraternize with Erich Mielke, the Minister of the Interior of East Germany. At his insistence, one night in Tito's blue train.
STATELESS AND SERBIAN WRITER: At school I already started writing and I wrote a notebook by hand, like poetry in prose in green ink, in technical letters, it went to the Buchenwald Memorial Center, which took my prelegate and all my manuscripts, pictures, books will go to them , 34 crates are already gone. I published my first songs in Subotica, probably on January 1, '48. In the April issue of the literary magazine "Mladost" I published in '48. a few poems and an essay about the Hungarian revolution, because it was the centenary. It is an extremely important issue of that magazine, because Oskar Davičo wrote the essay "Poetry and resistance" in that issue, which was the first sign of farewell to socialist realism in our country. My first three books of poems were published in '51, '52, and '53, my first novel in '54... From then until today, I have been doing this sport, I have 153 bibliographic units behind me - novels written in Serbian and German, short stories, fairy tales, essays , lyrics, plays, radio dramas, translations of my books or stories into Hungarian, Slovenian, Czech, Slovak, Italian and English, many of my translations from German and Hungarian and German.
I started writing in Serbian. Then, after the first book of poems, I received a letter from Matica Srpska, polite: "Comrade Ivanji, what is your nationality?" I answered, impolitely: "I don't understand the question. If you ask along the lines of Hitler, then I am a Jew. If you ask by the sound of my last name, then I am Hungarian. If you ask in which language we spoke with our parents, then I am German. If you ask what language I speak with my family now, then I am Serbian. If you ask me by heart, then I am from Banac." I immediately received a polite, confused letter back: "Please, excuse me, we didn't mean it that way, we wanted to ask if you consider yourself a Serbian writer?", I answered: "Of course." I I write in Serbian Cyrillic when I write for myself, although I think that Cyrillic has no future. Hitler personally abolished Gothic in Germany, there is simply no one who knows it anymore. But I write in Cyrillic, I love that script.
Only today I can't define myself nationally... I used to be able to say Yugoslav, now I could say nostalgic, I was ideologically Yugoslav in Tito's time, very consciously and very deliberately, and now I wouldn't be able to define myself. I don't belong to anyone, although I have two passports, Serbian and Austrian. I would get Israeli immediately if I asked for it, and I would get Hungarian.
At first, my wife Dragana did not want an Austrian passport at all. Then I explained to her that Nyreyev had an Austrian passport, that Brecht had an Austrian passport, that great artists, when they needed a foreign passport, took an Austrian one, that is true to this day. For example, the great singer Ana Netrepkova has an Austrian passport, it's still fashionable. Austria has a special law, that when it comes to the interest of the Republic of Austria, citizenship can be granted without someone renouncing their citizenship, that is an exception. They gather athletes, opera singers, writers - they can also pass, business people if they invest at least half a million euros in Austria. We lived in Austria for 22 years. I think I speak German like the Austrians, but I feel at home here. So, I'm definitely a citizen of Belgrade, but otherwise I'm stateless.
AGAIN IN GERMANY: We left when Budimir Lončar, whom I knew, whom we also knew privately because of his ballet and other loves, got the position of ambassador in Germany and asked me. We left in '74, so that my son could learn German, which he learned, and we spent four years pretending to be diplomats... I was a press and culture advisor for the SFRY embassy in Bonn. I always say - after the camp and service in the JNA, it's the worst thing I've done in my life. I am disciplined, but I absolutely did not like that job. What's worse, after that I sat in the ministry for three more years.
By the way, I went to Germany for the first time after the war in '52, the editorial office of "Omladina" was able to get visas. I then went to Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt and Hamburg, wrote reports. Then I went again in '53, somehow at that time the Veterans Association offered me to go to Auschwitz as a member of the delegation, I didn't want that. I still had resistance... Not from Germans and German literati, although they wanted to introduce me to Thomas Mann, I didn't dare to go before Zeus; but I met Erich Kästner on my wish, he was a writer of children's novels, that was easier.
However, then Marko Nikezić called me as a translator to East Germany and then we visited the "Elephant" hotel in Weimar for the first time, my "third house". Goethe was there, and Bach was there, all the nice people were there, and so were we... Hitler liked to stay there, he had his own apartment. Then I was still quite uneasy there, Buchenwald is located on a hill just above Weimar.
Later, in 1994, the German radio station WDR asked me to write a one-hour feature about my camps. Then I went more consciously to all my camps, including Buchenwald, which was taken over by the newly minted director of Folkhard Knigge. Since then, I have been to Weimar, to Goethe, and up there, to Buchenwald, almost every year, because Knigge called me. I was there twice last year, so yes, it might be a little strange, but I feel that Weimar and Buchenwald, somehow, like some kind of strange homeland. It's like I ended up being sentenced there for life.
Strange, strange camps... I think they did a very good job of leaving an entrance in Buchenwald, with that famous inscription "To each his own" (To each his own), the SS didn't understand what they wrote. It stands, the entrance stands, the SS barracks stand, the crematorium stands, the former multi-storey magazine stands, where there is a permanent exhibition, and in the place of numerous other barracks only the floor plan is exposed; and it is a slope, according to Weimar, usually cold, deliberately facing the northwest, always windy…
I keep saying - the first prisoners of those concentration camps were Germans. So German communists, German social democrats, German Jehovah's Witnesses, German homosexuals. Jews, if only they were any of that. Only since '38. Jews as Jews go to the camps. If we are not nationalists, it means that we are not talking about the Germans, but about the Nazis, or the fighters against them and the vast majority who kept silent and watched and then pretended that they knew nothing. Well, we here in Serbia have learned it now, if we didn't before...
YUGOSLAVIA AND PHANTASMAGORIES: Of the politicians I met in Yugoslavia, Tito radiated, anyone who saw him could state that. I don't know if he would accept it, but I had the impression that his attitude towards me was sometimes a little paternal. The few times I had the opportunity to have private contacts with him, I once questioned him about Ferdinand Lassalle. It happened to me, when someone introduced me to Tita, I was on a diet and he said: "I know Comrade Ivanji, only he was fatter before." Phenomenal memory. Both he and Jovanka, I have to say, had a very nice relationship with me, for them I was "Ivanji's friend who is so kind to translate".
I was not in a situation like those who are permanently employed there, it seems to me. Because Tito rarely, but he knew how to get angry and swear, and Jovanka didn't swear, but she kept them under control terribly, everyone hated her from that part of the court, so to speak. People changed, consciously and intentionally, the only man who lasted several decades, i.e. who they were holding was Blažo Mandić, who had Tito's authority to change his written sentences. The others changed every four years. And he kept Ljubičić for an infinite amount of time, I don't know why. I knew Ljubičić, and I didn't really like him. In contrast to the Chief of the General Staff, Viktor Bubnja, who was great. The translator has all sorts of thoughts about those he is translating for.
Of other personalities, now he will be gone again, because I highly appreciate Kardel's works, which will be revealed yet, his Socialism and war, his theoretical writings, with which he was always ahead; he was perhaps too strict, he rejected his own ideas, he was a theoretician of self-management. Despite what is being written now, he was a great Yugoslav, and he was at silent war with the Slovenian leaders about it.
Not everyone understands that the main guy on behalf of Slovenia when Leskošek retired was France Popit, whom no one mentions anymore, and not Stane Dolanc. When Dolantz became Minister of the Interior, I asked him: "What do you want?" "Popit and Kreiger decided and said You're a scumbag you have to listen.” And Dolanz was a narcissist, it was comical. He was terribly unhappy about his appearance. Once we bumped into each other in the CC building, I startled, I said: "Oh, you scared me", and he said: "Am I that ugly?" , they were pulling him by the nose. He did not hold it in his hands, he did not hold it in his hands even as party secretary; because he was constantly present, then strangers thought he was the one, he was never the one…
That is Tito's biggest mistake, that he did not know who should be at the top, he hoped that it would work with the presidency in the Swiss way, which I also hoped. When Sinan Hasani was the president of the Presidency, who remembers that, an Albanian, I told him: "Finally, the president of the country is someone with whom I am on your side", and he answered me: "Yes, now that it is no longer worth anything." "Then I said: "Who is the president of the Swiss Confederation? Did anyone ever know who the president of the Swiss confederation was?” Well, that was my hope – that we could be something like that, and we're not. Very early on, I hoped for Switzerland, and fantasized about Yugoslavia, a union of free communes without republics, I had some of my own phantasmagorias, obviously unrealized, and probably unrealizable...
For the last year or two of his life, Tito was in a bad mood. Whenever the interlocutor left, he took off his mask and made a painful grimace, which I interpreted as an illness and pains that he could not deal with, and now I often think that he knew that idea was falling apart - an idea related to him. Says Nušić u On the way around the world: "I am not alone, but with other brothers."
THE END OF YUGOSLAVIA: I knew Sloba Milosevic privately through his brother Bora. When there was that famous session when Sloba took power, I wrote a letter to my basic organization in Voždovac that I would no longer come to meetings and pay the membership fee, but that I did not have the impression that I was leaving the party, but that it had left itself. So everything was clear to me with Slobo...
Bora no, Bora was a more complicated personality, he spoke ironically for a long time about his younger brother, when he suddenly became his ambassador in Moscow, when he became his translator, he said ironically: "When I translated for so many, I guess I can and my brother to translate." That wasn't clear to me, and somehow I didn't manage to catch him when he came to Belgrade - I'm talking about Bora Milošević - but when my book came out Tito's translator, he texted me that he read the book and loved that I was so straight.
Since my son left when he was called up for the army in 1991, we also went to Austria. I was much more depressed than my family noticed. When I was packing my bags, eerily, it was like '41 was repeating itself. To appear smarter, to escape in time...
Then it turned out that I could write books in German, that I was in high demand then both for literary evenings and for non-fiction. We survived well in that Austria. But we kept coming to Belgrade. I never said that I emigrated, which many people used at the time to get extra money.
REVISIONISM AND CHANGING HISTORY: Let's take Hungary, since I know it a little better. Who mentions Horti in a positive sense? Franc in Spain? There are groups in Germany that deny that this country exists, but they are unimportant groups. It seems to me that these types of revisions are our specialty, which cannot last. It's already funny to what extent Vučić is starting to compare himself to Tito, if he can at all, in connection with highways, construction, and what not... He's already catching on to anti-fascists.
It will pass, that revision. Our, Tito's, "brutal" government condemned Draža Mihajlović, who could have done it cheaper. And now they say that they threw Nedić out of the window. It was easy to convict Nedić, why would the government kill him when he was on the plate to make a clean trial? And it's so comical, his grandson wants to inherit something, it's humanly understandable, but how can a judgment that doesn't exist be annulled?
Historically, it will have to be overcome when people remember to study the documents, which is not the fashion here among historians. The connection with Draž Mihajlović on behalf of the German Abwehr was maintained by a certain Matl, captain of the Abwehr. The Abwehr and the SD (SS secret service) have always been in conflict, as all military intelligence services are with civilian intelligence services. Matl in question wrote about that topic, the Austrian history professor Walter Manošek, who was translated by us, quotes him - so we have a clue in Serbian as well. Mattel left his records to the University of Graz, because he was a professor of Slavic studies in Graz after the war, with the order that, if someone came who wanted to do serious historical work, the University of Graz would make those papers available to him. That is now waiting for someone from here to remember to check the details of Draža's connection with the German command. Manošek wrote it, it was translated into Serbian, why don't Peđa Marković and company quote it. I'm not a historian, I'm a fiction writer. I write about Roman emperors with pleasure.
Is this a new era, is evil awakening again? Life under Constantine and Diocletian, under Julian, was even similar to today in Serbia. In Diocletian's time, when the last great persecution of Christians began, people were, of course, against Christians. Then Constantine came, so it was supposed to be a Christian, so they were Christians; then Julian came, who once again wanted to turn back, so they were against the Christians, for the Hellenistic gods; so Julian died in the war against the Persians, so the Christians came to power again... So, the same generation was against-for, against-for, until death, the same man. Isn't that the same? If you're into history, then it's nothing particularly new. We, unfortunately, live now - everyone said that unfortunately they live now, that someone was the emperor at the moment, and someone was not at the moment... Nothing new - phlegmatic, cynical, interesting.
Of the German writers, I met Heinrich Bell even earlier than Grass, but we were not on such intimate terms, and I knew Enzensberger well. I would have to mention Milutin Doroslovac, Milo Dora, he was a very close, intimate friend of mine, especially since it turned out that our fathers also knew each other, there were few doctors in Banat. His father was also a doctor, and later he was the first beautician in Belgrade, generations grew up on Doroslovč's ointment for children and Doroslovč's lotion.
Although he spoke Serbian perfectly, he did not want to translate himself, my son and I translated some of his books. He had, to some extent, the rights, because he said that all that had to be written anew. And that's true - since I sometimes write in German, sometimes in Serbian, and then I don't translate, but I write again a little differently, they are different versions to that extent. An Italian woman, one Christina Puel, who studied Italian and Slavic studies at the University of Turin, wrote her doctoral dissertation on the differences between the German and Serbian originals of my novel, which in German is called Das Kinderfrculein, while we call it in Serbian The governess.
I had a very good relationship with Günther Grass, that was an exception, he was at odds with most German writers, especially the younger ones, who envied him. I was for Grass, often politically, when everyone screamed at him that a former SS man could speak badly about Jews. And he didn't speak badly about the Jews, but about Israel, which I also do, but I can...
He didn't keep silent about being in the SS units, that's not true! We all knew, in one of his books, which is not very well known even in Germany, it is called Diary of a Snail, he says it, it's just that people haven't noticed. He never hid that as a boy he was enthusiastic about Hitlerism. First, like all seventeen-year-old kids, he worked in the anti-aircraft artillery, after that, when he had to join the army, he signed up for the submarines, they put him in the SS. I know that back then they put the SS in the army, and it was not a secret at all. When he pointed it out in his book Peeling onions, I shrugged, it was to sell his book. It was always important to him that books were sold. He was not interested in money, except what he could get for money, and he was interested in fame as well, and that should have moved the readership again.
It is more interesting that I chased some serious SS men, that I interviewed, without him knowing who I was, Wilhelm Hetl. He was one of the heads of the SS in Belgrade during the occupation, then he left Belgrade for Budapest, he is a well-known figure in the literature on Nazism because he was the first to say that six million Jews were killed. He was the first to say it publicly, because his friend Eichmann told him. I hunted down Hettl in Austria to speak with him in the place of Altausze in his beautiful villa (see "Time" 1353, Bookkeeper of Death).
I was interested in those guys. That's the tallest SS man I've seen, he was a colonel. I had other encounters, with slightly smaller ones. Mephisto is a better character than Faust, although Faust is not uninteresting either, but it wouldn't be Faust without Mephisto...
I never had a need for revenge. It's foreign to me. It turns out that I am a better Christian than these believers, although everything can be found in Jesus, if you believe the Gospels, and that is not really love. It's not love - I don't love people, I love certain people, or I loved certain women, but... Simply, someone is gifted for this, someone for that, I was not gifted for revenge.
As for dealing with the past, later generations in Germany dealt with it, but the first generation did not. They kept quiet about it for a long time, in Adenauer's time it was politely hushed up. The East Germans emphasized it, but as a fight against fascism, but not as victims, and only the generation of grandchildren of the guilty and those who watched and remained silent began to take a more serious interest. It was almost only with the unification of Germany that it changed completely, so now it is a law that a student by the age of fourteen must visit at least one memorial center, they didn't have that in classes before.
With Vasko Pop
I was the secretary of Čedomir Minderović, the general secretary of the Union of Writers, whose president at the time was Ivo Andrić, and Miroslav Krleža one of the vice-presidents. Of course, these were not friendly relations, but relations with due respect.
Andrić was a gentleman. He was endlessly witty, when we once asked him: "Comrade Andrić, what do you think about socialist realism?", he, as always, slowly and thoughtfully: "Well, you know, comrades... What socialism, such realism." When he came out to me first novel, he called me aside to praise me and gave me some of his story books, I was burning with enjoyment. Then Oljača's first novel came out, he then told me that Andrić told him the same thing. So, he supported the youth, but we don't know if he read it. But it was Andrić...
Krleža was conceited in his own way, but since I was already spinning a little, and hitting my heels and bowing a little in the Austrian-military way, Old Fritz, as we called him, accepted it, and I was at his mercy, especially because of the Hungarian language. Okay, I didn't mention them as writers, that's Olympus, and I'm mortal.
Of the older writers, Otto Bihalji Merin played a crucial role for me, several times in his life. He wrote one play and two novels, he was better known as an art historian, much better known on the world literary market than in our country. His tetralogy on Goya is the basic book on Goya that has been written in the world, and there are also books on bridges, masks, aviation, the Spanish Civil War, our naives... Together with his brother Pavlo, he is also the founder of NOLIT. He put me in the Union of Writers to be the secretary, he assigned me to write about Diocletian, and my serious writing career, in my current opinion, actually begins with Diocletian. I think the most important thing I wrote, I can already say - definitely, the emperors Diocletian, Constantine and Julian, and he gave me that first idea. That's how he followed and supported me, until death.
Oketa - meaning Davičo, was the editor of "New Generation". I took my first collection of poems to him, he invited me to lunch, to tell me that it was no good, but that it would come out anyway and that one day I would regret it. So it would. I don't think it's any good, I will always live in spring it is called a book; well, there are two or three verses that can still be submitted. We were friends with due respect for the rest of our lives.
When my book came out One Hungarian autumn about the Hungarian revolution in '56, where I also describe Dobrica Ćosić, he calls me on the phone: "Why do you describe me as a coward?" I answer: "Excuse me, when did you last read your brochure 13 days in Budapest?" "Since I wrote it, I haven't read it again." "Look, I'm quoting you verbatim." I was very grateful to him, he transferred me from the Technical Faculty to German Studies, we've known each other for a long time. His nickname was Gedža, it was not hostile, just as Broz was Tito, or Vukmanović was Tempo, so he was also Gedža, I did not feel anything condescending about it, neither did he then. Much later, in Knez Mihailova, he is already the father of the nation, I shout: "Gedzo!", he turns away, as if he is uncomfortable, so I apologized. In Germany, in the 70s, I wrote a review of his trilogy, from Roots do Division, and I wrote that Dobrica Ćosić is the greatest Serbian novelist of the 19th century. He didn't get angry.
Vasko Popa was very close to me. We had a party cell, an organization in the Union of Writers. We are sitting at a party meeting, and it is on the agenda Heretical story Branko Ćopić. If I speak up, Vasko kicks me in the shin to keep quiet. I open my mouth, he kicks me again. And I fell silent, we fell silent. It was a strange grassroots organization where pre-war party members led the way, a la Koš, Davičo and so on. Wartime communists like Ćopić had to be kush, we post-war ones who joined, it's better not to speak...
We have been friends since then, for a while we lived in the same house at Revolucije Boulevard 26. We were friends, as we were with Mija Pavlović, although the two of them did not speak. I did an experiment once - literary evenings were in vogue, where we read our poems, and usually even paid for it. I found that if a man fixated on someone in the audience, which was usually a pretty girl, that someone would approach you later. Once at Dedinje Gymnasium, I fixed what I thought was the most beautiful girl, and when she actually approached me afterwards, some friends teased me: "Oh, you're shooting high..." Jovanka's sister, as it turned out later. But, to continue the experiment, I once fixed a bald guy, and he also approached me...
I was a member of the jury of the Union of Jewish Municipalities for Literature and the editor of the almanac, when one year something arrived that was so above everything else that we just looked at each other. That was a passage Attic Danila Kiša, as it turned out later, was a student at the time. Then we met, I was also translating some of his books into German. We have been friends all our lives.
And the creepiest was one year in Dubrovnik. Daniluška and one of ours, who is a video director in Paris, are sitting in front of the City Tavern, already heavily drunk. Both Dragana and I come and sit with them, Danilo says: "Order a bottle of wine." I judge that he has had enough, I say: "You are more famous, if anyone orders wine, it is you." "No, I have cancer, you order a bottle of wine." I thought everything was spinning.
Later he came here, we edited one of his books that I did in German, then he was already seriously ill. In one of his stories in Encyclopedia of the Dead describes a man who gets a stain in the bathroom, then he covers it, and the stain always comes out again, stronger and stronger. Since he got sick, a biopsy shows that this is the form of his cancer. And Danilo says: "I was not allowed to describe that death, it was a death sentence for my cancer as well..."
Who left the strongest impression on me, both as a writer and as a person, and in whom was I most disappointed? The same person - Ivan V. Lalić. We really were, he to me for sure, I to him, I'm not sure anymore, the most intimate friends, we talked until eternity. I think he is by far the greatest poet of his generation. And we talked for hours and hours, we played poker all night, of course, not alone, and then he went crazy with nationalism - which is totally unclear to me. For many people, nationalism is a refuge in the larger society, and I don't justify that, but I understand, but Ivan Lalić, who spoke impeccable English, French, German, Russian, I don't know what he didn't speak, and who read all the time languages, when he became a 100 percent Milosevic supporter and a nationalist... We once had an argument in his house to such an extent and started yelling at each other that the women barely separated us, and that was the end of it. I don't understand, and I still don't understand.
