Balkan Academic News Book Review 2/2000
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Branimir Anzulovic, Heavenly Serbia, From Myth to Genocide
London: Hurst & Company, 1999. £ 14.95, pp. 233, ISBN 1-85065 530 8

Reviewed by Olivera Jokic (University of Texas at Arlington)
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In the middle of recently intensified, if still sporadic and often cursory,
interest in what became of the former Yugoslavia, grappling with the
abundance of material becoming available on the topic, its accessibility
and seeming usefulness, will turn into a task equal to learning effective
web browsing. The media frenzy surrounding NATO intervention in Yugoslavia,
which for many in the 'general public' was the first opportunity to hear
about the area and learn about the complexity of its problems, hasn't done
much to make this task less arduous.

Branimir Anzulovic’s Heavenly Serbia, From Myth to Genocide came out in the
post-Kosovo-liberation world, the one that had already been fed a
relatively steady representation of the Serbian state and Serbian nation,
along with the curiosities about its political and combative history and
present-day hegemonic inclinations. Although its topic alone might have
earned a publisher’s attention, this book deals with a problem that does,
particularly to a western eye, defy explanation, and invites wonder and
disbelief. What by now even the Serbian nation recognizes as one of the
most trying times for its survival does call for analysis, and one that
could require a radical revision of Serbian national identity, and Branimir
Anzulovic attempts to initiate that process.

His success seems to be compromised at the very onset of the project. In a
world that has seen so much talk about the problematic nature of history
and historiography, along with Foucault’s warnings about the “gray,
meticulous, documentary” work that defines genealogy, it seems almost naive
that Anzulovic sets off to rid politics of “lies, delusions, and sheer
inexcusable ignorance” (9). He does warn that the world’s views and
discussions of the ex-Yugoslav wars are fraught with partial ‘information’
about all sides in conflict; yet, the way Anzulovic attempts to alleviate
that serious problem may not turn ‘balkanization’ into‘scandinavization’
very soon.

It is exactly in the turn that Anzulovic tries to take that his work is
most liable to criticism. After verbalizing his aim to do away with
prejudice informing the conflict, his argument takes its conclusion for its
premise, and determines the choice of supporting material that is included
in the book endeavoring to rationalize the creation of war as a
manifestation of "endemic violence" that is inherent to the Serbian nation.

In the best tradition that Slavoj Zizek described as the West’s desperate
effort to project its desire on the East, Anzulovic relegates Serbia to the
realm of the “Byzantine”, the word, even for those English speakers who
don’t know what the Byzantine Empire was, denoting oddity, backwardness,
cunning, mystique beyond repair by the rational world). This is also a part
of author’s quite dubious ethos-building device, himself of Croatian
heritage, knowing fully well the current taste of the audience he’s
addressing in the language of power, frequently comparing “Serbia (or
Montenegro) and Croatia . . . to highlight the differences between Eastern
and Western Christian cultures” (6). He finds these comparisons
“particularly suitable” because the similarities of language and shared
history could obviously be misleading for many who cannot fathom why such
similar nations with similar political traditions would engage in an armed
conflict. Anzulovic comes to the rescue of his reader’s full grasp: “Most
of these comparisons are drawn from a time when most Croats were anchored
in Western cultural political spheres, and the Serbs were an underdeveloped
Eastern Orthodox nation submerged in the Ottoman Empire” (7).

Anzulovic looks at Serbian history and ethnic identity through this lens a
lot--it helps him explain the links of the Serbian Orthodox church with the
ruling regime(s), or the obsession with the loss of the Kosovo battle in
1389, that looks like irrelevant ancient history to a ‘normal’ western
reader. However, this prejudice is a flexible one, it seems, as for
Anzulovic the Turkish rule (its religious tolerance in particular, if that
is what tax breaks in exchange for one’s faith are) is something that Serbs
should have taken more advantage of.
In a book that includes surprisingly little of direct historical research
on the part of the author, Heavenly Serbia brings up several crucial issues
that the completely brainwashed official Serbian historiography makes a
point of forgetting. The effects of a cancerous political structure that
has stifled everything from the state’s legal system to banking, its
citizens’ sanity, and independent higher education in which the study of
history chronically gets done in Room 101, remain lamentably underexplored,
however. Anzulovic spends noticeably more time finding signs of Serbian
aberration from civilized nations in analyses of Serbian literature, in
which he often relies on circulation numbers or other people’s opinions for
judgment about quality. One of the most intriguing cases analyzed is
Njegos’ Mountain Wreath, which is a thorn in the author’s side because it
is “an ode to genocide,” yet has “the highest artistic value.” The same
work, “an encyclopedia of Montenegrin life” according to Anzulovic, also
contains signs of “nihilism and necrophilia.” Other Serbian authors’
genocidal tendencies are judged on a scale of the number of lines from the
Wreath they new by heart, what their “favorite” animals were (hobbyist’s
psychoanalytic session with Radovan Karadzic through his poems), or how
fond they were of knives as leitmotifs or weapons. (Anzulovic deplores the
negativity of Serbian literary mood, forgetting that the current First Lady
of Serbia writes exclusively about ‘nice things in life;’ not that he would
wish her on anyone.)

Aside from the saddening fact that literary analysis and criticism get
treated like something anyone can do (again), there are worrisome
indications in Anzulovic’s text that the force of an authorial voice in a
minority literature could be confined to the voice of a whole group (a
nation, in this case) in a world that is already too busy “othering” the
unfamiliar on so many accounts. There is no doubt in the mind of anyone
willing to look at Serbia through eyes other than the ones of its state
television that the country is in urgent need of radical change, in which
the awakening of its citizens' sensitivity for the acceptable in politics
should be a top priority. Enabling exposure to the degree of isolation from
the world to which Serbia likes to compare itself in terms of political
life and economic progress will constitute a crucial part of that project,
and Heavenly Serbia will hardly do much to help re-structure political
ideology and institutions around concepts other than the ones already
over-abused in the war of the 1990s. Forgetting the idea of a ‘clean start’
might be a useful beginning, where a bare idea of living in peace and
profiting from it would be made more appealing than turning the tables
through academoid work. Re-building a nation's identity not around
contestation with and annihilation of the neighbors, rather around a
transparent political system which is not a fascistoid kleptocracy and
doesn’t promote itself as the best exercise ground for the greatest
military power in history, focusing on the importance of cohabitation with
respect for difference, is a long-term process. It will be initialized only
if the Serbian people get represented differently to themselves and to the
world, by themselves and by the world. In the scarcity of positive
self-images for Serbs, or venues in Serbia to even attempt to live like
anyone else in Europe, the claim that there must be nice people in Serbia
who want to live normally won’t help much to forestall discussions about
Serbs' congenital propensity for genocide. Undoing the work of intricate
political play with language and history, instead of making revolutionary
revelations of secrets that prevented us from seeing the ‘whole truth’
until now, could help find a novel tone to talk about the war, seeing it is
as much a suffering of individual human beings whose lives explode in an
infinitesimally short time, as it is an occasion to cash the old rainchecks.

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