Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 08:51:37 -0500 (EST)
From: Stephanie Niketic <[log in to unmask]>

The Washington Post
BOOK REVIEW

Lest We Forget
By John Balaban
Sunday, November 7, 1999; Page X06 

THE MUSEUM OF 
UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER
By Dubravka Ugresic

Translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth

New Directions. 238 pp. $24.95

Reviewed by John Balaban 

A Croatian historian of the last century referred to his country as reliquiae
reliquarium, a remnant of remnants, a reliquary for fragments of past
empires: Roman and Holy Roman, Tsarist, Turkish and Austro-Hungarian.
Included in the remnants, of course, are the many ethnic groups left in the
wake of early migrations and imperial collapse: Serbs, Croats, Bosnians,
Albanians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Hungarians,
Romanians, Gypsies, Slovaks, Slovenians, Ruthenians and even Swabian
Germans sent forth long ago by the Empress Maria Theresa.

Today, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent wars in the
former Yugoslavia, that notion is still alive, although its applications have
shifted. This is a book about remnants, including the marvelous and many
fragments that shine forth with human significance in the post-Soviet world
of Eastern Europe. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender -- the title
refers to a strange Soviet museum in East Berlin that once memorialized the
Nazi defeat -- is a novel written close to the bone of reality, and includes
real people, including the author, an exile from the devastation of
Yugoslavia.

The novel, Dubravka Ugresic's fifth, is set in Berlin, and is beautifully
translated by Celia Hawkesworth. English readers will have encountered a
similar world of exile and remembrance in Vladimir Nabokov's Speak,
Memory and in his wonderful short stories, such as "First Love." Like
Nabokov, Ugresic affirms our ability to remember as a source for saving
our moral and compassionate identity. The book begins with a walrus -- or
rather the stomach contents, displayed in a glass case, of Roland, a walrus
who died in August 1961 in the Berlin Zoo, where he had swallowed,
among many other things, "four nails (large), a green plastic car, a metal
comb, a plastic badge, a small doll, a beer can (Pilsner, half-pint), a box of
matches, a baby's shoe, a compass, a small car key, four coins, a knife
with a wooden handle, a baby's dummy, a bunch of keys (5), a padlock, a
little plastic bag containing needles and thread." "The visitor stands in front
of the unusual display, more enchanted than horrified, as before
archaeological exhibits."

Similarly, we are more enchanted than horrified with the details of this
novel. Nothing much happens in it. There is no movement of rising action,
climax and denouement. In a sense, everything has happened already and
is happening again in the narrator's reconsiderations. Ugresic gives us
things to study, remnants of human struggle: little stories of ordinary lives
before and after social calamity, photos examined and re-examined for
what they seem to tell, an old woman's diary jottings set against parallel
words of Eastern writers like Danilo Kis, Georgy Konrad, Joseph
Brodsky and Peter Handke.

Events in the novel seem guided by the invisible hand of the angel of
nostalgia as a spiritual world of memory, of loss and of moral reckoning is
opened up in these arrays of remnants, variously viewed. Perhaps the most
powerful elements looked at are photographs and photo albums. (Among
its many surprising elements, the book contains a brilliant disquisition on the
function of photographs.) The value of photographs is set early on in a
story about the war criminal Ratko Mladic, who, while shelling Sarajevo,
noticed an acquaintance's house in the next target. "The general telephoned
his acquaintance and informed him that he was giving him five minutes to
collect his 'albums,' because he had decided to blow the house up. When
he said 'albums,' the murderer meant the albums of family photographs.
The general, who had been destroying the city for months, knew precisely
how to annihilate memory. That is why he 'generously' bestowed on his
acquaintance life with the right to remembrance."

The difficult work of human preservation is something that Eastern
European writers know firsthand and can share with us, as Vaclav Havel
seemed to suggest in a recent speech in Poland, published in the New
York Review of Books. "What could we and should we possibly have
given to the wealthy, developed Western democracies?" Havel asked.
"The benefit, both in intellectual and pragmatic terms, of the unique
experience given to us by life under totalitarian conditions, and by our
resistance to those conditions." He went on to say that such a gift should
be accepted "for reasons that concern the general standards of civilization."

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is part of that civilizing gift. n

John Balaban is working on a novel set in Romania. He teaches at the
University of Miami. 

        © Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

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