"Victim of the Past, The present and The possible Future" Belladonna by Dasa Drndic

Abstract

The discussion about the war plays not only a central role in German literature of the 20^th century, but it also holds a very important and indispensable place in Croatian literature, considering the events of the previous war on Croatian territory (i.e. former Yugoslavia) around 1990. Wars are, as Carsten Gansel says: “similar to revolutions, fundamental disturbances of the social system status, a social ‘state of emergency’” (Gansel 2012: 9-12). Literature as a form of ‘self-observation of societies’ (H. Böhme 1998: 476–485) constitutes a medium, in which ‘fault conditions’ (Gansel 2012: 9-12), caused by wars, can be thematized. The “dualism of offender and victim, observer and combatant, army and civil population, rulers and subjects” (also in socio-political everyday life), find expression in literature, by processing it literarily and discussing it.

In her work, Daša Drndić thematizes exceedingly controversial and lively past and current war discourses in socio-cultural context from the perspective of the past, as well as of the present. Her work, i.e. her texts, can be considered as a cultural form of expression, which “in symbolic presentation provides individual, and/or generation-specific reminiscence of the collective memory[1]” (Gansel 2011:11).

Daša Drndić discusses openly and without reservation already controversially conducted discourses about the Second World War, Holocaust, escape, expulsion, camp and destruction, especially after 1945, as well as the roles of the offender and victim not only in the Second World War and the ‘Yugoslavian war’ (civil war, fatherland war) from an – let’s say – own perspective. In her most recent work Belladonna (2012)[2], she even goes one step further, by thematizing and questioning the present everyday life interwoven with experiences, events and stories from the past through illness, suffering, dying, death and being a victim of diverse socio-political and socio-cultural systems until it becomes unbearable.

Daša Drndić, a retired professor of Modern English Literature and author of several award-winning novels, with residence in Rijeka and several study and research periods amongst others in the USA, Canada, Serbia, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, born 1946 in Zagreb, is, besides Slavenka Drakulić, Dubravka Ugrešić and Ivana Sajko, one of the most read and most committed (as well as the most controversial) author of contemporary Croatia.

[1] Collective stories are based on collective memory, which – as opposed to the individual memory - is developed in social interdependency of members of a collective. The individual memory, which is formed by the collective memory of the social-historical environment, builds, however, individual stories. See:Gansel/Kaulen 2011.

[2] All quotations of the novel Belladonna (2012) will be marked/quoted only with ´Belladonna´ and the page number. All quotations have been translated from Croatian into German by the author of this article, as a German Translation of the novel Belladonna is not yet available. The novel Sonnenschein, which is on a paratextual level very important for this study, is currently being translated from Croatian into German (status: 29.9.2014). The German translation will be presented at the book fair in Leipzig in 2015.