Der Tabubrecher aus Liliput
The Taboo Breaker from Lilliput

Experiences of Violence in the Novels by Drago Jančar

Summary/Abstract: The novels by Slovenian writer Drago Jančar tell us the history of Yugoslavia in the 20th century from the perspective of the periphery, focusing particularly on the Central European experience of violence. Three of the novels under review tell the story of Jančar’s hometown of Maribor in the 1930s to 1950s, focusing on the violent excesses of the 1940sbetween the Nazis and the immediately following Tito-Yugoslav Stalinist terror against the local population. Yugonostalgia faces a tough trial, as the unpunished war crimes of Tito’s partisans are repeatedly addressed.The Slovenian demand for pluralism (including the banning of the youth magazine Mladina 1988 from Belgrade) and the secessionist movement during the 1980s are relatively minor factors in the process of Yugoslav disintegration. Nevertheless, the failed politics of memory that Jančar illustrates in his novels contributed significantly to the collapse of the common state and favored the ethnic violence of the 1990s. The references to Kosovo or North Macedonia show that Jančar is not an isolated phenomenon, but that in the literatures of the former Yugoslav periphery similar and not quite euphoric memories of the Yugoslav period are articulated. In literary and political terms, Jančar stands alongside Milan Kundera or Václav Havel as impressive artistic and moral instances of the democratization movement in Central Europe.

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