German Literature and the Yugoslav Wars: Reorientation, Legitimation and Support

Interview with Dr. Steffen Hendel

29 February 2020

Dr. Steffen Hendel completed degrees in German studies (including a teaching qualification) at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg and art education at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art & Design and the Universidad de Granada in Spain. He works as a research assistant in the area of modern and contemporary German literature at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

Your monograph* engages with the reception and representation of the wars in the former Republic of Yugoslavia in German literature. What motivated your interest in this subject and how did you approach it?

Steffen Hendel: Actually, my interest was initially focused on the increase in partially auto-fictional novels about the Second World War, especially from a German family perspective and the simultaneous boom in cultural studies memory research. Each fertilised the other throughout the 1990s and 2000s and participated in the same discourse. According to this discourse, German history and politics no longer offered any objection to a new German national sentiment, which was now regarded as based in socio-psychology and quasi-natural. That was my detour. The same became even more evident in the debate and the literature about the wars which were taking place with Germany’s diplomatic and military participation at the time: the wars in Yugoslavia. The omnipresence of a German literature about the distant Second World War was conversely met with a relative absence of literature about the wars taking place with German participation at the time – an initial, surprising finding. It was possible to find some statements from authors on the subject but there were not many, they were scattered and only rarely literary. I was able to confront these texts directly with the following question: How does the contemporary German public relate to the most prominent objection to an unbroken national sentiment? What happened to the anti-war consensus, which was undisputed at least in the literature of the GDR and the FRG, in light of the unified Germany and its new wars? How are positions justified? Do any specific aesthetic positions and processes emerge?

The political and public engagement with the wars in Yugoslavia in Germany had its very own particular characteristics, was always conducted in the modus of a debate, which since then has been covered by a lot of research: the wars “in the Balkans” were (and still are) considered as opaque, as “Balkan”, devoid of any rationale or as deeply historically entangled and dominated by ethnic essentialisations. My study had to get away from this, if it didn't want to reproduce the topos. To critically work through what happened in Yugoslavia and Germany was a challenge, at least for me as a literary scholar, but it was an indispensable prerequisite for the analysis. Consequently, there was a lot of reading beyond my field at the beginning: international law, political science specialist publications, thirty-year-old newspapers, magazines, parliamentary transcripts ...

*Steffen Hendel, Den Krieg Erzählen: Positionen und Poetiken der Darstellung des Jugoslawienkrieges in der deutschen Literatur (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2018).

Your study focuses on the period after the unification of the GDR and the FRG, what impact did “violence elsewhere’ have on Germany and German literature during this period?

Steffen Hendel: The perspective of the study was exactly the opposite: its aim was to investigate why the military violence, which took place elsewhere, came into view for German politics and the public. Violence existed and still exists in various places and for different reasons around the globe. By itself, this was never a reason for Germany to intervene abroad. The case of the evolving domestic policy conflicts in Yugoslavia demonstrated that, after 1990, this “violence elsewhere” was used by Germany to engage with itself (!). After unification in 1990, the “economic giant” Germany had to overcome its status as a “political dwarf”. In this respect, “violence elsewhere” was officially the purpose of an engagement, but first and foremost it was a welcome means to raise Germany’s foreign policy profile. German policy remained true to this for the entire ten-year duration of the war.

An analysis of more than 80 texts has shown that it was this political self-interest in the wars in Yugoslavia that German literary figures processed and worked through throughout the 1990s. They struggled with the political reorientation of their unified nation. Eventually, they adapted to the new agenda. Their discursive contributions and literary texts no longer objected to war being a suitable instrument of German politics once again, instead they offered sympathetic and legitimating perspectives.

During a podcast interview you said that no great novels were written about the conflicts in the former Republic of Yugoslavia, none of the German literary giants, including the ‘consciences of the nation’ have engaged with this topic in one of their novels. Why do you think that is?

Steffen Hendel: One definitely has to differentiate: In the first half of the 1990s, GDR authors struggled with their (literary) survival. The, in part, extensive devaluation of their works and themselves, in particular through the West German feuilleton, had to be processed. Some of them did not publish anything substantial for ten years, if at all. Christa Wolf, for example – her critical statements about the Gulf War 1990/91 and about the early conflicts in Yugoslavia 1991/92 are well known – was exposed to the harshest criticism during the so-called German-German Literary Debate, periodically she even went abroad. She only returned to literary activity years later, focusing on the Western “victor’s justice’ and her private life; the war never played a role. To what extent this was also the reason why other East German authors did not write about this war is open to speculation; at any rate, the old ‘moral conscience’ of the former GDR remained silent.

Among the West German authors, Günter Grass, for example, had protested against Germany’s military ambitions in the wake of unification, but it has to be noted that the political Left, including the formerly strong peace movement, imploded precisely in the context of the new national question and the new wars. A number of Left thinkers turned to self-criticism and performed to some extent a rigorous political turnaround. In a way, they ideally affirmed the power of the politically factual.

Novels really only appeared after the end of the wars in Yugoslavia (with two exceptions written by journalists). Although many authors had spoken out for the legitimacy of a German intervention during the wars, the wars themselves only became literary material after they had ended, and a single political explanation had prevailed; only this seemed to enable an open literary interpretation. However, the authors who dedicated themselves to the subject generally belonged to a much younger generation.

To what extent do the existing texts reflect a particular attitude of authors and intellectuals to “violence elsewhere”? What recurring themes and tropes did you find?

Steffen Hendel: All of these texts provide insight into the attitude of their authors and in the process almost all communicate a remarkable understanding: That “violence elsewhere”, i.e. the wars in Yugoslavia represent a mandate for Germany to demonstrate responsibility and become active. Intellectuals and authors reinforced the political perspective to some extent with traditional friend/foe constructions. These were by no means the authors’ artistic constructs, rather they were long established in the media, the political debate and the public discourse. The authors merely equipped this perspective with its own artistic reality. Actually, Peter Handke was the only one disconcerted by this. It was his aim in 1996, through his reportage “A Journey to the Rivers”* and his methodology of “eye witnessing”, to destroy the image of “the Serb” as the enemy, which failed in several ways and is something that Handke is to this day critically confronted with by the public and politicians, for instance on the occasion of him being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019.

(Based on your research), do you think there is a typically German perspective on “violence elsewhere”?

Steffen Hendel: I am happy to open up my generalisation to a discussion: I would say yes. But it is not typically German, I can also detect it in other literatures. To stick to the German realm: What is surprising is the politically interested perspective, which appears to nestle up to official politics and its ideals. Such as for instance in the context of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s but also in the literature about those fleeing violence etc. after 2015. Those who criticised the German or European border and asylum policy did not consider it the reason for the refugees’ precarious existence, instead there was a certain assumption that the reason lay in a politics, which simply did not follow its own ideals. Literature credited the political decision makers (and the “patriotic, concerned, outraged” fellow citizens) with a good, merely not implemented, intention, and took it as a matter of course. I found this prejudice remarkable. A literary engagement, which distances itself objectively from “violence elsewhere” is, in my opinion, rare. On my bookshelf, I had to go all the way back to the 1970s, to Uwe Timm’s Morenga.