Drago Jančar
161
Drago Jančar
»How could you think I could possibly forget my old friends because of a lit-
tle book which people have been talking about for a few weeks and which will 
be forgotten just as quickly, just as everything becomes forgotten in Paris?« 
The Jewish-born French author, Irène Némirovsky, wrote the above to a
friend before the Second World War, apropos of the surprising success of her 
novel David Golder. Surprising not only because this was the first novel of a
young émigré who had fled the Bolshevik revolution in Russia with her par-
ents, but also because French was not her mother tongue. She had graduated 
in France with a degree in literature and, soon after, became one of the best-
known French women authors. Not that this helped when the Germans oc-
cupied France; the French police arrested her and handed her over to the oc-
cupiers. Neither did the fact that she had converted to Catholicism with her 
husband, also a Russian émigré, and their two daughters, a few years prior to 
the war. After her arrest, she disappeared without trace. Her husband, who des-
perately sought succor from French publishers, and through them, politicians, 
soon ended up in an assembly camp himself. While he had still been trying 
to intervene on her behalf by all possible means, or at least to find out where
she was, the famed author was traveling amidst a multitude of Jews in boxcars 
toward Germany, clear across Germany, and eastward, to occupied Poland. 
After the war it came to light that her life had ended shortly afterwards, in a 
gas chamber at Auschwitz. Not much later, her husband also perished there. 
Both their daughters, also sought by the police, were saved by good people. In 
the first postwar year, Russian émigré writers continued to raise aid for the two
»JUST AS EVERYTHING BECOMES 
FORGOTTEN IN PARIS«
ON THE TOPIC OF LITERATURE  
AND EUROPEAN DIALOGUE
Phainomena xviii/68-69 Drago Jančar
162
girls, then the joy of victory erased memory of them, as well as of the disap-
peared Irène Némirovsky, and her name sank into oblivion. No one remem-
bered her books anymore, or her life, her flight from St Petersburg by way of
Finland, her retreat from Paris as the Germans advanced, her disappearance 
and death. She was forgotten. Just as, in her words, everything is eventually 
forgotten in Paris.
Not only in Paris and not only in 1945. Europe generally tends to forget. If 
some of us feel as if the fall of the Berlin Wall happened yesterday, we are badly 
mistaken. 1989, just like 1945, is ancient history. And so are the years spent 
by so-called Eastern Europe prior to this occurrence, which changed the old 
continent yet again.
However, it is exactly these years that should not be forgotten or ignored 
if we are to discuss »Literature and European Dialogue,«  a topic I was in-
vited to consider by the philosopher Dean Komel. Just as in the case of Irène 
Némirovsky, the ideological twentieth century left its stamp on many other
writers, whose only desire may have been the freedom to create at will and to 
reach with their writings beyond the confines of ideological walls and national
languages, to have an open European dialogue. Instead, they were forced to 
struggle for the survival of their texts, to accept endless chains of trifling com-
promises to be published at all, or to grapple with the most basic matters of 
securing a livelihood in narrow-minded milieus, among petty people, even in 
the great old cities of Eastern Europe, such as Budapest, Krakow, Prague, War-
saw, Vilnius, or Riga. Those who transgressed the boundaries of censorship or
overstepped the invisible line drawn by the closed, closely supervised societies, 
ended up incarcerated or jobless, often cursed by ostracism, which is especially
devastating for an author, in a type of limbo, with no possibility of publishing 
or any dialogue at all, European or otherwise.
Of those who escaped to the West with great hopes, or made their way there 
in some other fashion, many languished in the nameless, echoless condition of 
the emigrant, writing for political papers of no importance and, at times, for 
literary journals of quality, which nonetheless had hardly any readership. Few 
managed to make a breakthrough with their writings in their new environments, 
and even they were too often unjustly and insensitively attributed political rather
than literary contexts. Kundera, Škvorecký, Brodski. The vast majority lacked the
ability or the good fortune to establish themselves in the cultures of the countries 
in which they had found refuge; at least from the point of view of literature, their 
fate was tragic. From the Slovenian literary scene, small but ebullient prior to the 
Second World War, a pleiad of brilliant writers disappeared in 1945, to reemerge 
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as a lively creative circle in Buenos Aires. At a time when their books would 
have been widely read in Slovenia, this was impossible because they were simply 
banned. And in the 1990s, when these same books saw their first reprints in
Slovenia, no one was interested in them anymore. Grim as the word may seem, 
this is tragic for a writer’s work and life. Of the numerous authors who had emi-
grated from communist countries, one persistently kept writing, leaving behind 
a testimony that should never be forgotten in any European dialogue, present or 
future: Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind.
And yet: how is it that today we nostalgically remember the many texts that 
gripped and shook us in the era when we lacked liberty, also works published 
or staged at theaters in Yugoslavia, Poland, or Hungary. We remember authors 
who lived under dictatorships, with literature their only refuge; they fought 
for it, for belle-lettres, in a »war without battle,«  as Heiner Müller entitled his 
book: Krieg ohne Schlacht: Leben in zwei Diktaturen [War without Battle: Life 
under Two Dictatorships]. What was it that Danilo Kiš wrote, what were the 
sentences spoken by the protagonists of Heiner Müller’s dramas such that not 
only their aesthetic impact, but also the shock waves they sent through society 
should survive in our recollections to this day? The shock waves that stirred in
us joy over the power and the penetrating aesthetic force of a work of art, and 
instigated discussion, sometimes a whispered, publicly unspoken, yet ubiqui-
tous dialogue about the issues of human liberty and the essential right to indi-
vidualism, to being one’s own person and having the right to voice that.
There is no need to go into the differences in circumstances in the individual
countries of this part of the world – undoubtedly the greatest degree of freedom 
was enjoyed in Yugoslavia, but then we should remember also the Czech poets 
and Hungarian cinema, Polish theater and some Russian dramatists such as 
Vampilov – they all had something in common: everywhere art sought its way 
with symbols, rich metaphors, multilayered language, overt irony and covert 
ethical, even political messages. To this day, Western Europe has not grasped 
what an incessant electrifying buzz centered around literature and art in gen-
eral, what extraordinary power literature had to give people courage, or at least 
to raise questions in their minds and make them think. While a work of Shake-
speare was staged in London as a drama from English history, albeit one that 
transcended its time, it was performed in Warsaw as a modern-day drama; in 
their struggles for power Shakespeare’s bloody kings were the bloody rulers of 
20th century Eastern Europe. To stage King Lear in Yugoslavia meant to tell the 
tale of the clash over Tito’s heritage. Dominik Smole’s Antigone is considered 
the most consequential drama of that period in Slovenia. And although it, too, 
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is set in ancient Thebes, whoever read it or watched it performed understood
that Smole’s Antigone was burying the unacknowledged victims of the com-
munist regime alongside her brother and speaking about modern man’s ethical 
dilemmas, about rebellion and freedom.
In that European, Eastern European time there existed an invisible and 
strong tension between literature and readers, between art and society, tension 
with a magical, releasing effect.
More than that: only in this part of the world did literary journals, tradi-
tionally intended for a select circle of readers, remain important intellectual 
and social focal points, retaining the central role that they had had throughout 
Europe prior to the Second World War, preserved afterwards only as vestigial
islands, such as Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes in France or Enzensberger’s Trans-
Atlantik in Germany. They were focal points, drawing artists and intellectuals
of the most diverse profiles to contribute their work and participate in discus-
sions, weaving a variegated fabric of aesthetic trends and engaged views about 
society and politics. This European model of elite intellectual groups affecting
the social climate and effectuating political change from France and Germany
to Poland and Bohemia, influential also in Slovenia both between the world
wars and during the time of communism, is evidently withdrawing to the far 
margins of our current media and internet-centered society, while its influence
is becoming immaterial. Let us think back to the social nuclear reactions set 
off by magazines with such innocuous names as Literarny noviny or Plamen in 
Prague or, at a later date, Nova revija in Ljubljana; photocopied by the thou-
sands, the philosophically complicated texts in their limited editions provoked 
heated debate and triggered political reactions. The photograph of the Czech
and Slovak Writers’ Association building in Prague, with the guns of Soviet 
tanks trained on it in August 1968, documents a historical paradox that is to-
day virtually beyond comprehension.
Soon after the fall of the communist regimes, this world started changing at
lightning speed.
In the early 1990s, I was invited to Warsaw to take part in a discussion 
about democracy and literature. I found myself in the eminent company of 
the above-mentioned Czesław Miłosz and the celebrated thinker and literary 
theoretician, George Steiner. After appearing at the Polish Academy of Arts
and Sciences, before an auditorium packed with a predominantly young audi-
ence, we were taken by our hosts from the Warsaw journal Res publicae to dine 
at a Jewish restaurant. Steiner recounted the time he had wandered around 
the outskirts of Katowice in communist Poland, looking for the factory hall in 
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which a theater group was staging a performance that was stupendous, the best 
thing he had ever seen in European theater. And now, he said, as I look around 
the theaters in Warsaw, there is nothing but entertainment, in fact, everything 
seems to be drifting toward the goal of entertainment, Broadway. How could
such a profound, far from boring, very communicative yet demanding aes-
thetics, which was accepted by masses of people, have originated under those 
conditions, he wondered. The answer might have simply been: because there
was nothing as entertaining as Broadway musicals. Nevertheless: What does 
this mean? Czesław Miłosz smiled, he did not look worried; his world and his 
Poland had changed so much in such a short time that he may have found this 
trend less perturbing than George Steiner.
For my talk in Warsaw I had chosen a thought by Witold Gombrowicz: 
Art loves grandeur, hierarchy, feudalism, absolutism, while democracy favors 
equality, tolerance, openness, and brotherhood. I saw from the discussions 
that I had had with the circle of Res publicae associates that they embraced 
Gombrowicz’s paradoxical thought. Talking about art only partly relates to is-
sues raised by social orders, usually when such orders curtail the freedom of 
artistic expression. And the glorified and so anxiously awaited democracy is, at
the end of the day, almost always a matter of pragmatism and mediocrities; the 
people who rise through elections to the political establishment are, as a rule, 
of average intellectual ability, only rarely exceptional. There is nothing wrong
with that. But art, the art of literature, has its own inner rules, hierarchy, feu-
dalism. As far as I could judge, also Miłosz and Steiner found thinking along 
those lines self-evident.
When I read an excerpt from the same essay a few years later at the Frank-
furt book fair, in a discussion with a few European authors, my musings made 
a well-known Dutch author lose his temper, and I had cold water thrown on 
my ideas. Peremptorily, the renowned author lectured, or rather, scolded me: 
Where do these people from Eastern Europe get off talking about democracy,
they lived under dictatorships only yesterday and now they are calling democ-
racy a matter of mediocrities. Words were on the tip of my tongue, words like: 
Some of us have gone to prison for the cause of democracy, dear sir, while 
you … But I retorted nothing. I acted like the protagonist of some play by 
Havel, like his Vanek. I spoke but did not answer. I may have possibly failed 
adequately to explain something quite plainly understandable to an author and 
a newcomer to democracy. The misunderstanding was complete. To this day,
I sometimes think about what I should actually have said in that European 
dialogue. So, instead of saying while you … I should have patiently elucidat-
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ed. First, I should have quoted the Slovenian philosopher and dissident, Jože 
Pučnik, who puts forth in one of his challenging theoretical books that society 
is part of culture and not vice versa. So democracy is also part of some cultural 
experience, while culture is not something that should submit to any one social 
model, not even the best of them, let alone make literature its altar. Describing 
a decade of life with literature and dictatorship would have worked even better. 
The experiences of the emigrant Gombrowicz and Milan Kundera, who never
accepted a hierarchy that subordinated literature to any social model; if it had 
not done so to a dictatorship, why should it bow to democracy? I should have 
told him of that starry night on a rural road near Bautzen (Budyšina), when, 
far from the ears of the Stasi, the East German poet Benedikt Dyrlich and I 
discussed poetry and its power to rise above ideology and outlive the time in 
which we lived. I should have described and explained many things. And even 
then I should have demanded, or at least expected, to be listened to and heard 
by the person I was addressing. The times in which we live are disinclined to
listening attentively, the way an East German poet and I listened to each other 
on a country road under the stars.
That is a precondition for any dialogue, also European dialogue.
Another condition for understanding in dialogue, including European dia-
logue, is familiarity with the subject discussed; and the dialogue runs most 
smoothly if the interlocutors know one another. They do not have to be friends,
but having some knowledge of each other’s past experiences, of what they have 
gone through, of the kind of environments in which they have lived, will make 
it much easier to talk about what they want, what they hope for, and where they 
are going. In present-day Europe, people speak mainly from their separate and 
mutual interests. In present-day Europe, people coming from its eastern part 
generally know what they want: prosperity and certain standards of public life. 
People coming from its western part know what they want: the eastern Euro-
pean markets, a Europe without borders, a landscape free of political conflict
from the Adriatic to the Baltic Sea. Although people with separate interests 
often reach the best understandings, they are not necessarily the best at engag-
ing in dialogue. And this is what we are after: dialogue, a European dialogue
that will be more than merely an arrangement or understanding. An under-
standing should not only be a sum of interests, or their common denominator, 
but an attempt for the interlocutors to understand each other in their, so to say, 
human and historical contexts.
For European dialogue, in particular if literature is to assist in it, mutual cu-
riosity is necessary; as well as a joint struggle against oblivion. Ignorance and 
Drago Jančar
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oblivion make people overconfident and arrogant. Literature can contribute
much more to European dialogue than can interests. It can contribute a sensi-
tivity to weakness, to being different, and it can contribute memory.
Memory is the operative word here. Only those who think they are building 
the world anew try to avoid it; or to fake it; or simply to forget about it. It would 
not bode well for a common future European life if what Irène Némirovsky 
wrote apropos of Paris were to come true: »Everything becomes forgotten in 
Europe.« 
Trying to save the disappeared Irène Némirovsky from the hands of the 
Nazis, her champions employed all the arguments that came to mind: from her 
being categorically anti-Bolshevist in her world view, which was true, to her 
having written very negatively about Jews in her books, which consequently 
made her, although herself a Jew, anti-Semitic; this was not true. Anyone who 
knows the first thing about literature also knows that we most often write scath-
ingly, angrily, or grotesquely about the people, characters, and events from our 
own cultures. The Nazis were unimpressed by the lot. They were building the
world anew; they had forgotten all the essentials from their own culture, too. 
So it didn’t matter what she had written or what her views of the world were: 
although already a Catholic, she had been born a Jew, so she was one of those 
who no longer had no place in Europe. She had to disappear.
It is much worse that she has disappeared from French, European and liter-
ary memories after the birth of the new Europe. Her unpublished texts – and
her memory – were salvaged by her daughters, who had miraculously sur-
vived. One of them typed up the manuscripts. The novel French Suite, which 
Némirovsky had been writing in the final days before her arrest, was published
and it met with triumphal acclaim. More than half a century after her physical
and literary disappearance, Irène Némirovsky came back to life with her witty 
impressions, lyrical fragments and epic strokes, depicting the dangerous era in 
which she had lived. A happy ending for her literature, at least.
Translated by Tamara Soban
Proof-reading by Dean DeVos
Phainomena xviii/68-69 Drago Jančar
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169
Europe can undoubtedly be proud today that in the decades since the Sec-
ond World War it has achieved enviable political, economic and social stability 
but, at the same time, it must also recognize that it is confronted with numer-
ous factors of destabilization, even with the threat of dehumanization. It is not 
enough that Europe appears strong enough from the point of view of assuring 
its own position and interests in the world; if it wishes to remain faithful to its 
own humanist tradition, it must also open the possibility of understanding the 
world and understanding within it.
Establishing intercultural dialogue must be accepted as the basis for guaran-
teeing the future of Europe, which should also ensure a perspective, grounded 
on human rights for the world within globalization processes.
In order to ensure that establishing dialogue between cultures does not fail 
in a superficial recognition of diversity and difference, dialogue must also be
constantly developed within individual cultures. The various cultural tradi-
tions, namely, have only been able to meet and fertilize each other in Euro-
pean history insofar as they have themselves opened their centers to such 
meeting.
The highest intellectual and creative achievements of individual European
nations have also thus contributed most to the development of a common Eu-
ropean consciousness.
Insofar as the historical aspect of shaping the European consciousness also 
seems to us full of conflict relations, today’s efforts to overcome them have
no other basis than encouraging intellectual and creative dialogue in culture, 
REPORT FROM PARTICIPANTS AT THE
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
»EUROPE, THE WORLD AND HUMANITY  
IN THE 21ST CENTURY:
DIALOGUE BETWEEN CULTURES – DIALOGUE 
IN CULTURE«,
who gathered in Ljubljana from 10 to 12 April 2008 during the Presidency 
of the Republic of Slovenia of the Council of the European Union, under the 
auspices of the Ministry of Culture and with the support of the European 
Commission.
Phainomena xviii/68-69
170
which also gives space to dialogue between cultures. The latter of course is not
restricted only to Europe but also has universal humanization significance.
This also gives Europe a special responsibility to represent on its own ter-
ritory values that guarantee the dignity of man and are open to contemporary 
human challenges, not only from a cultural but also from a political point of 
view.
In the 20th century, when Europe finds itself in the whirlpool of social cata-
clysms, awareness has also matured that freedom which does not accept that 
the freedom of the other diminishes the understanding of humanity. In con-
ditions of economic globalization, this awareness is worth further deepening 
and broadening through educational, research, cultural and media projects 
that connect efforts at understanding the complex situation of humanity in the
world today.
Intellectual and artistic creativity appears in this perspective to be a key 
factor of opening intercultural dialogue, especially where this affects, together
with its political, also its economic, social and other boundaries and limita-
tions. Without familiarity with artistic and humanist works and ethical values, 
which bring us together, it is not possible to recognize contents that often go
beyond the empty institutionalized framework of intercultural dialogue and 
fill it with the sense of the living present.
 We the participants hope that the international conference “Europe, the world 
and humanity in the 21st century: dialogue between cultures – dialogue in cul-
ture”, also as a central event to mark this year’s European Year of Intercultural 
Dialogue 2008 (on the basis of Decision of the European Parliament and of the 
Council EU – decision no. 1983/2006/ES of 18 December 2006) will contribute 
to developing genuine understanding in Europe and the world. 
Rémi Brague, György Dalos, Umberto Galimberti, Karl-Markus Gauß, 
Bronislaw Geremek, Tine Hribar, Drago Jančar, Adel Theodor Khoury, Dean 
Komel, Ioanna Kuçuradi, Andrei Marga, Adam Michnik, Vidosav Stevanović, 
Alenka Puhar, Bernhard Waldenfels 
Translated by Martin Cregeen