Books I Read In March

Non-Fiction

‘When Swan Lake Comes to Sarajevo’ by Ruth Waterman

My parents were evacuated from Croatia where they had been holidaying when the war in Yugoslavia broke out in 1992.  In that decade, living in London, I met quite a few young people who had fled from the conflict.  In the 2000s I would write a short story set in Bosnia.  These aspects led to me discussing with an author I had met, a proper one who has produced paper books, not just e-books like the stuff that I write and people simply condemn.  She lent me this book which is a memoir by a orchestral violinist and conductor who helped assemble and train various classical ensembles in Bosnia in the period 2004-6.  In my teenage years, I used to read travel memoirs of people in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century and this took me back to those books.  Whilst I have heard about, sometimes at first hand, what happened in the former Yugoslavia, I suppose I have always felt it as far removed from me as someone writing about travelling in the region when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  To some degree this book did not change my perspective though I do feel I have a slightly more up-to-date impression.  Waterman’s story shows simply how long it takes for a country to put itself back together and that no-one should be expecting a restoration of Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya in the next few years.

The book is like two books combined into one.  The passages of the challenges Waterman faced in rehearsing the ensembles and having them perform have quite a light tone and at the end are pretty life affirming, though perhaps less so than Waterman initially thought.  They are cut with testimonials from many of the people she met outlining what they and the people they knew experienced during the war.  What alarmed me was that I could process these testimonials without difficulty.  Some small snippets, such as blame put by a Bosnian on the war being caused by the Americans rang true when you have heard about the agents provocateur in the region at the time.  Similarly finding out the post-war Bosnian currency was the Deutschmark also answered another question I had had about the political situation behind the war.  Perhaps it is because I remember news from the locations at the time; maybe as a historian, dealing in the deaths of millions I am now immune even to hearing the experiences of individuals.  I felt surprisingly numb reading this material.  This made it hard for me to accept why I was unsettled by the books.

The aspect that I felt unease with was when Waterman outlined how orchestras work.  Each member does not simply play the music on the sheets in front of them; they are in a constant dialogue through gestures and expressions and can deliver very different output from the music they read as a result of this.  Perhaps everyone already knew this and I am just a fool not to have realised.  I have always felt inadequate in the face of people who can play music, speak a foreign language or do a martial art, three activities that I have utterly failed at.  This book simply made it worse.  I now realise that musicians, certainly working at the level of playing public performances are a species apart from me with alien capabilities.  I came away from this book wishing I had not read the elements about how an orchestra works and had stuck simply to the material about the war.  I came away from reading this book unpleasantly unsettled and embarrassed at my own failings.

 

‘Brest-Litovsk.  The Forgotten Peace.  March 1918’ by John W. Wheeler-Bennett

I have noted in recent months how history books fall down once they try too hard to draw parallels from the past to the time when the book is being written.  This book was written in April 1938, though my copy was published in 1963.  Thus the author tried to draw parallels between the reshaping of Eastern Europe by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the developments in the region at the time he was writing.  He failed to see the persistence of appeasement, the absorption of Austria into Germany and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia let alone the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the subsequent division and re-division of Poland.  Thus the points he makes seem strained and now erroneous.  It would have been better if he had dropped the Introduction and got on with the history. 

The story of the negotiations between the Socialist Federal Republic of Russia and the German Empire and its allies Austria Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire are rarely told.  This book certainly gives a good impression not only of the negotiations but of the motives of those involved in them and the directions they were receiving from their leaders back home.  What is interesting is how weak the Bolsheviks were even after they had closed down the Constituent Assembly and within the party how weak Lenin was.  Wheeler-Bennett seems rather in awe of Lenin and very dismissive of the liberal government which had followed the February Russian Revolution.  It becomes clear in this book, more than in other general histories of the October Russian Revolution, how Lenin may have been excluded from developments or even once the peace talks had begun, have had his policy ignored and dismissed.  His almost unique early recognition that Russia could not fight the Germans any longer and that to oppose them would simply provoke harsher terms and that there was not going to be an outbreak of revolution across Europe, meant that he was proven to be right and gained immense credibility.  Wheeler-Bennett reproduces one of Lenin’s speeches and you can see that he gained nothing through his rhetoric unless it was to bludgeon his audience with his constant repetition of bare bones ideas.  You wonder how much worse those he faced down were at public speaking. 

Opposing the first German offer led to the loss of all the Baltic States and the Ukraine, though Germany was too weak to enjoy these gains for long.  In fact if the Soviets had accepted the first offer it would have been better for Germany as so many troops would not have been tied up occupying vast areas that had formerly been Russian.  The book is also good in showing how dependent Germany and especially Austria-Hungary were on the grain and other resources that they could insist on delivery from Russia and the Ukraine.  Again, an earlier peace may have led to their economic situation being aided sooner, though given the difficulties the occupying forces faced in securing the grain they had been promised the benefits may have been minimal. 

Another interesting element often overlooked in general histories is how the extreme demands of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk altered the attitudes of the Americans away from the conciliatory Fourteen Points to the far more aggressive peace treaty sought by the British, French and Italians.  This was despite the Western Allies unease with the new Soviet regime.  The Treaty made claims of the barbarity of the Germans appear to have been true all along.  In part this was an accurate assessment as Wheeler-Bennett shows how the expansionist fantasies of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, effective dictators of Germany from 1916 onwards, were allow to run free with the treaty and the Soviets’ vacillating attitude while they still had to learn that Lenin had been right all along.  If the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had not been so harsh, then it seems likely that elements of the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany the following year, would have been milder, though the Allies were committed to the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine and Poland, no matter what, so in German eyes the treaty, even if more moderate than the one our world saw, would have been deemed to be harsh.

 

Overall, in large part this is an astute book which still provides aspects that I find too often missing from general histories of the period and benefited from the author being able to interview participants in the story that he outlines.  It would have been better still shorn of the very rapidly anachronistic introduction and the unnecessary and rather tedious appendices of documents.

Stari Most - Short Story

As I have mentioned already, when I got to Milton Keynes, I found it was well-endowed with book, writing and poetry groups. I joined one of these and with such clubs, we were set various tasks to do and this and the next few stories stemmed from the tasks we were set to write about. This one was to write a short story or poem based on an old photograph. I had been interested in Yugoslavia and its wartime experiences; I had known both Serbs and Croats in London and I also knew British people who had been in Yugoslavia when it collapsed and were evacuated. So this seemed like a good venue for a story. I had been disappointed when I had read Alastair MacLean's 'Partisans' (1982) set in the fragmented Yugoslavia of the Second World War. I liked the fact that he included references to the different factions in the country at the time, but it was too twisty in the narrative, there was so much double-crossing that you utterly lose track and after a while you cannot be bothered, it seemed a wasted opportunity and apparently was unpopular with even his established fans. Anyway, the news about rebuilding the bridge at Mostar was current in the mid-2000s when I wrote this story. However, looking back on it now, I feel very uneasy about this story, feeling that I should have stayed away from this subject area and certainly not produced a story for my own benefit out of it. That is despite my view that everyone should be free to write on any topic, but perhaps it was just too recent for me to be comfortable with.


Stari Most

The view through the grimy lorry window was of an old landscape, unchanged. It was just the buildings lying derelict amongst it that showed me how much trauma this land had experienced. I glanced at my watch, it was two-thirty. We could not be that far from the town now. I glanced over at Milan, but his eyes were fixed on the road. It was a shame that the weather was not better, the plateau we were driving across could be glorious in sunshine but maybe it was suitable, maybe it was a time to be sombre. From the lorry everything still seemed second-hand, just as when I had seen the events on ZDF. I worried what I would feel when I stepped down from the cab and faced it for real. Would I feel the ghosts around me? Would I just feel empty? Would I just become swept up in the introductions, the welcomes, the business? We passed another charred skeleton of a house. I stopped my thoughts running from wondering if its occupants were now in some mass grave and switched my focus to a repaired house, one with a girl by the door toying with a cat.

For the thousandth time my fingers reached into my jacket to touch the old photo. It was like a scab I could not leave. I wondered if I had been right to bring it, my sole tangible connection to this place. This time I took it out. The back side appeared first with its faded writing ‘September ’39’. Already the continent had been at war, but it had impacted little on us down here. It took another couple of years and a coup before Hitler became interested in us. I flipped the photo over. I knew the image well, though I doubt I had looked at five times in the past five decades. It shows two teenage boys, myself and Abid, grasping hands as they stand on top of Mostar bridge. They were hesitating whilst Zdenk, my eldest brother, took three shots with his brown box camera. Seconds later we were proving our courage, plunging into the cool water of the River Neretva below. The dream of that summer did not die for almost another three years until we dragged Zdenk’s body farther down the same river, sodden and with three dark circles of German bullets staining his shirt.

I shook myself. I had begun to think how many other corpses had ended up in the same waters, both then and through more recent murders. Each one has to be pulled out by someone, each one has to be missed by someone. Burying Zdenk was the end of the adventure for us. The next years were serious and they have remained like that. Though we saw little action, the war set Abid and myself up for good positions in Tito’s Yugoslavia. We were the proudest of the victors, the only country in Eastern Europe to kick out the Germans without needing the Red Army, but we were radical too and Communism was the only creed. United by conflict, Abid and me worked closely in our years at Mostar’s technical school, but our objectives were different. He was the keen one in the marches through May the First Square; I just came to be seen. I wanted to build on my skills; he looked for a post in the administration. Ultimately, we both got what we wanted.

I know how my life went, a ‘gastarbeiter’ in the West Germany of the economic miracle. Despite my qualifications I started as a building labourer: long hours spent in soulless German cities, rebuilding their industrial might. At least I was part of a community, other Yugoslavs, Italians and Turks, we kept to ourselves but all knew we were in the same position: living in scummy rooms, a population that despised and exploited you. The only way out was hard work: during the day on the site and studying at night. It took me years, but I got far enough to become a West German engineer. Now my work directs the new cheap labour: Ostis and Poles, the odd Lithuanian and Russian.

By the late Sixties I had become part of the system, with a flat of my own, a lovely Italian wife, Carina and our twins. As for Abid I could only guess, I pictured a trajectory through the local party and maybe on to national celebrity. I did not know. I did not know if he lived or died a peaceful death. I prayed he was not rounded into a barbed-wired camp and had a Kalashnikov bullet put through his head.

Mostar. Our journey was almost at an end. There was a cluster of people around the shattered bridge. I saw Hungarians from the NATO engineering team that had pulled many of the bridge’s 427 stones from the river below. Milan parked the lorry and I had the door open and was out on the street. The language, the accent around me was familiar, welcoming. I shook a dozen hands without thinking. It was the bridge that drew me. Once the link between East and West, it was now the dividing line between Bosnians, Bosnians of the Muslim and Croat variety. I shook off other well-wishers and strode past the Halebija Tower to the ragged edge. People clustered around me, but I was blind to them. My eyes strained to see the other side. We were mirrored by a group of people over there. I recognise Izetbegovic from the press photos, but my gaze continued to hunt, until I saw the slender old man among them. I tugged the small photo from my wallet and wave it above my head. He stepped forward, the press of people seeming to part before him. He smiled and fumbled in his pockets. He too waved a browned photograph. Yet, the bridge between us remained smashed and the Neretva continued relentlessly flowing in the divide.