Aggressively Anti-War
Yugoslavia’s Collapse as Reflected in Literature
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Post-Yugoslav fiction marginalises the real acts of war that occurred in the 1990s and nonetheless takes a position on war. The stories by Dalibor Šimpraga and Miljenko Jergović do not deal with victims or perpetrators, they arouse no pity. Šimpraga and Jergović expose instead the everyday, state-ordered language of violence, into which ethnic cleansing and mass murder are subtly embedded. Their cycles of stories can be read as allegorical forms of criticism of the war but also as doubts about what is essentially human in human beings.
(Osteuropa 3/2008, pp. 85–94)