UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

Preface
In November 2009 I had the chance to take part in a weReurope conference in Stockholm where
each participant was asked to bring along an object that reminded him or her of another European
country. An object that triggered a memory of another place and another time. I brought a
computer joystick, an essential part of my Commodore 64 relic which was smuggled, to avoid
paying custom tax, in 1984 from Western Germany to Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. At the time I used it
to play computer games, but now, a good quarter of a century later, when I was looking for an
object to bring to that conference, I realised it was one of the first things in my life to have
‗connected‘ me to the world outside of what was then Yugoslavia.
The joystick bears no explicit reference to Western Germany neither it reminds me of that country.
Rather, it reminds me of my childhood in Yugoslavia, a country of the ‗socialism with a human
face,‘ which in 1991 ingloriously dismembered in a bloody war. Today it only exists in official
records, archives, monuments, music, films, literature, personal memories and, importantly, on the
internet. The post-Yugoslav affairs, nevertheless, feature prominently in regional news and
represent a recurrent topic in cultural, media and political landscapes, often eliciting ambivalent
reactions.
Playing computer games in the 1980s Yugoslavia somehow made a part of a world beyond the
Cold War divide. In that view the Iron Curtain never really existed for me, as even the trips across
the border to Italy or Austria to buy a pair of Levi‘s or a tin of Coke felt more like an adventure
than a quest for otherwise unobtainable commodity. And the divide certainly had not existed for
me in 1986 when the Challenger had exploded and when the news of the Chernobyl disaster
radiated throughout the world. These two epochal events transcended all borders, national,
regional, ideological. Seeing news reports then I felt that as much as these were, respectively, an
eastern and a western disaster, they affected people beyond any ideological or geographical divide.
On a very intimate level, we were affected globally: by the collapse of the post-war dream of a
super-flashy-techno-future and by the realisation of the fragility of man in the face of
uncontrollable technological challengers and chernobyls.
And when the Berlin wall fell in 1989, as crucial an event as this has proved to be for east and
west alike, and also for the future developments in Europe and beyond, for a 1980s Yugoslav kid
living in Slovenia the borders have long since fell. To the west, that is. Towards the former
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