Report_Issue 1/2009 - Jubiläum/ 20 Jahre Mauerfall

Slovenia: Instructions
for a Visitor
— Drago Jančar —
Once upon a time, when he created the world,
so it is recorded in a famous legend, once upon
a time God had carefully distributed beauty
equally all over the world, very economically
and carefully, but in the end he still had a
handful of beauty left over, so he scattered it
across the country that today is called Slovenia.
A literary journey by Drago Jančar, Slovenia’s
best-known contemporary
author, essayist and dramatist.
If, someday, your path should lead you to the Istrian
coast, or more exactly to the little old town
of Piran, or still more exactly, to the stony tip of
the town that reaches far out into the sea, then
be careful, in the evening, not to become lost
in the illusion of the colours that are sprayed
out by the sun sinking into the sea beneath the
clouds.
Strain your eyes, and perhaps you will perceive,
in the narrow crack between water and clouds,
the shadows flitting about to and fro, flying
towards you from the glowing sky across the
bright surface of the sea, flying past way above
your head and into the interior of the country,
into its Alpine valleys and on to the other side,
down towards the Pannonian plain. These are
the melancholic daemons. You do not need to
know them, you can be satisfied with tourist
brochures that try to make you believe that you
are “on the sunny side of the Alps”, in an old
European country, in a country full of European
prosperity, of the Baroque, good wines, and
friendly and cheerful people.
Should you, however, see the shadows that
fly cross the sky, cleverly avoiding the densely
planted church towers on the hills, the mountains
and the plains, then you should know that
the actual home of the melancholy daemons
is there. They live in the Alpine basin: in the
morning they fly down to the sea, and at evening
return to the highlands, they live in the
crowns of the trees and on the mountain ranges,
in village inns and on the Sunday streets in
empty towns.
So empty on Sundays that the poet Tomaž
Šalamun writes about them that there and in
the countryside there is nothing, that was what
his grandmother told him, when the poet was
still a child and was boarding the train in Vienna.
His grandmother had said: there is nothing
in between, sleep until you get to Trieste, children,
because there is nothing between Vienna
and Trieste. Or only very minor things, as Milan
Kundera says, Slovenia is so small, he writes
that all the rivers only have one bank.
Who should be interested in such an area
anyway, where the people like to put up with
things, where they put up with their melancholy
daemons and themselves, where they put up
with everything from their earliest childhood
to their very last day; and, to wit, quietly, and
with a malicious Schadenfreude towards their
own and others’ tolerance, where glasses are
not smashed and jazz is not played, since acquiescence
is not particularly joyful, yet nor is
it particularly sorrowful, but rather something
that one has to live with, because it is pre-determined.
Even though the landscape is beautiful,
the mountains are high, the hills are green, the
wine is sweet and the sea is blue.
Yet anyone who has eyes to see knows only too
well that this is also simply the illusion of the
melancholy daemons. It is true that people
here have always prayed to God for help, and
as faithful sons and daughters of the Catholic
Church they have built a little Baroque chapel
on every hill and prayed to him there, that he
might liberate them from the Turks, the Germans
and the Italians, or even from the Protestants,
whom they drove away to Germany, even
though it was the Slovene preachers who gave
them the first written texts in their own language,
the Bible, which was published shortly
after Luther’s Bible, printing presses, numerous
books, they drove them away and publicly
burned their books. They expelled them and
then celebrated them, just as they have always
celebrated their deceased poets, always only
once they were dead, they never liked the living
ones.
They praised God and celebrated their dead,
God above all because he had given them the
beautiful landscape. Once upon a time, when
he created the world, so it is recorded in a famous
legend, once upon a time God had carefully
distributed beauty equally all over the
world, very economically and carefully, but
in the end he still had a handful of beauty left
over, so he scattered it across the country that
today is called Slovenia.
People there have always liked to tell this tale.
They like such legends, but one legend they do
not like so much that was recorded for them by
the writer Ivan Cankar at the start of the twentieth
century, is the story of a visit of the Saviour:
Our Saviour is wandering along the country
road when he sees a man sitting on a stone
at the side of the road and weeping inconsolably.
Whatever is the matter with you, asks our
Saviour, who pities the man to the depths of his
heart, why are you weeping? I am the Saviour, I
can help you. The man raises his eyes, still wet
with tears, and says: I am Slovene.
People who write, and all
kinds of artists, utter the
word ‘desire’ with particular
piety and explain to each
other, full of pride, that noone
understands this word
in all its profundity, and that
this word cannot be translated
into any other language,
that this word is magic and
that its ineffable nature can
be understood only by the inhabitants
of this countryside.
The Saviour looks at him, and then sits down
beside him and begins to weep bitterly too. If
that is the case, says our Saviour, then not even
I can help you. Not even your beautiful country
can help you, because its beauty is an illusion
for travellers. The more the inhabitants of this
countryside stare at this illusion, the more they
climb its high mountains and behold its yellow
fields, the more they find themselves and others
ugly and evil, themselves even more so than the
others, and if they are not ugly and evil enough,
then they do harm to themselves and others,
so that they become so. People who write, and
all kinds of artists, utter the word ‘desire’ with
particular piety and explain to each other, full
of pride, that no-one understands this word in
all its profundity, and that this word cannot be
translated into any other language, that this
word is magic and that its ineffable nature can
be understood only by the inhabitants of this
countryside.
Naturally, people here have done mischief and
harm to others for ages, they have also chosen
forms of society that best corresponded to their
basic attitude to life, to mutual relations based
on a deep melancholic maliciousness. Here oppressive
systems have developed to great effect,
here the wily and perfidious violence of clericalism
was able to flourish, and at the first opportunity
grew into the brutal criminality of a
Communism that was particularly bestial from
the outset. Here the political police achieved
bafflingly good results, since they were able to
hide behind the typical nature of the people,
who only feel themselves to be in their most
natural condition, deeply rooted in history and
in their own nature, when they are able to do
mischief to or slowly torment themselves and
others, others and themselves.
Why would anyone be interested in such a
country, even if, in passing through it, travellers
praise the fact that in none of the town squares
are horsemen with raised sabres to be found,
but only poets, grammarians and librarians,
why would anyone want to read the literature of
this country, which tries to describe all this evil
melancholy, at the same time also mocking it,
because it believes that in this way it can tear it
out, why would anyone at all want to read about
the restlessness, about the blind restlessness of
history, which the mad twentieth century, with
its ideas of salvation, its armies and police,
proclamations and ovations, sowed among the
Slovenian people?
Anyone who writes from all this blind restlessness,
who relates with joyful scorn for himself
and for others about the people and daemons of
this country, who provokes with his sentences
and stories, both the people and the daemons,
does not ask why he should explain to anyone
else the secrets of this country, where the inhabitants
would, after all, most like to dispose
of their secrets, their memories, the dark melancholy
concealed beneath their exultation, and
even their language as quickly as possible. In
order to be able, as fast as possible, to practise
free trade and to barter, in order to be just the
same as the others, any others, whoever they
may be, anything other than the way they actually
are, with so many shadows flying around
the village church towers and through the alleys
of the empty Sunday towns, shadows that
chase out over the surface of the sea, almost
like buffoons and which you too, traveller, may
be able to perceive on some evenings, in that
bright crack on the horizon, in that red glow between
the surface of the water and the clouds,
if by chance, at that moment, you happen to be
standing on the prow of the stone town, which
looks like a ship made of stone that has long
been waiting to sail off to somewhere else.
A novelist, playwright and essayist, the Slovene Drago
Jančar, born in 1948 in Maribor (SLO), is one of the most
prominent figures of Central European literature. He has
received a number of literary and arts awards in Slovenia
and abroad. He lives and works in Ljubljana. 2007
he received the Jean Améry Award for Essay Writing.
Published in “Report” in February 2008 (online)
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