Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development. Vanessa Pupavac
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Falls, and claimed to be the second constructed in the world based on Tesla’s alternating current system.
The association of Faust’s literary children and its related Miltonic tradition with claims for freedom and self-determination has persisted through the centuries. Writers engaged with the Faust tales to address foreign oppression, political censorship, and cultural taboos. Krleža was immersed in German literature, especially Goethe’s Faust (Šnajder 2019). His work addresses the themes of striving to be subjects, not just objects of modernity, and establishing a home in the world (Berman 1988 [1982]: 5). His 1938 novel The Banquet in Blitva parodied the Faust puppet play to depict the peoples of the Balkans as stunted puppets allowing themselves to be manipulated by invisible external powers (Krleža 2002 [1938]: 319–34). His puppet Dr Faust declared despairingly, ‘Fortunato Yorick is right! Our performances go on being repeated forever and our humanity as puppets on a string plays the same performance from the very beginning of its civic existence!’ (Krleža 2002 [1938]: 328). Krleža’s novel was a satire on the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia, set in a fictional Blitva (chard cabbage land) and its rival neighbour Blatvia (mud land), and its historic struggle for its independence against the Aragon empire. Krleža’s novel opens with ‘A Form of Prologue of Sentimental Variations on the Blitvinian Question through the Ages’, declaring how ‘Thirty European nations slaughtered one another for four years, and out of this bloodletting emerged Blitva, like a child’s tin rattle with the inscription Blithuania Restituta’ (Krleža 2002 [1938]: 3). The new state of Blitva was soon caught up in state coups, civilian killings and rival nationalist conflict with its neighbour Blatvia, bringing in Hunnia and other regional powers. Would the High Contracting Powers support the revival of Blitva and the humiliation of Blatvia, or the reverse? For centuries Blitvians and Blatvians had been warring with each other, or found themselves to be imperial cannon fodder in foreign wars, repeatedly menaced by invasion and irredentism, dictatorship and revolution, political corruption and social ignorance. Krleža’s novel addressed the problems of small nations establishing free peaceful societies, while squeezed between rival great powers. He set The Banquet in Blitva in the northern Baltic, making his fictional countries colder and bleaker than his southern homeland he was satirising (Krleža 2002 [1938]). Even after gaining formal national independence, they struggled to escape from being puppets of external forces or their own self-destructive tendencies and their political polarisation between intolerant nationalism and liberal internationalism with its own complicity in violence and intolerance (ibid.: 3–13). War remained the experience of most generations and his country fated to be in the third class carriage as Krleža’s fictional works The Banners and The Croatian God Mars also explored.
Krleža has been described as a Faustian figure with two or more competing souls within him, aspiring, like Faust, to a ‘higher degree of harmony’ against an external and inner ‘world in conflict with itself’ (Goethe 1808 ‘Outside the City Gate’ in Wayne 1949: 67; Šnajder 2019: 118). As an atheist there was no God to redeem his soul from the diabolic, nor an interceding Greta to forgive his sins and overcome his conflicted nature. Earlier in his life, Krleža had addressed his inner Faustian demons by throwing himself into social political commitment. He believed in material transformation and recognised the need for collective action, but his individual freedom as a writer was paramount. Like his fictional protagonists he reacted against the echelons of society, and recoiled from political terror and social oppression. Krleža remained a conflicted self and, like Tesla, became an isolated recluse. Dead texts were more alive to him than his contemporaries (Šnajder 2019: 116–8). Yet the disillusioned modernist, in withdrawing from society, lost the comfort of community he craved.
Earlier Fausts, in league with the devil, enjoyed supra-human powers and all the excesses of European civilisation before their damnation. Conversely Krleža’s puppet Dr Faust revealed people stunted and confined in a puppet play and manipulated by invisible fingers. The stage might be on ‘the so-called European level’, but his Fortunato Yorick was condemned to be ‘a thinking puppet who is aware of his puppet tragedy’ (Krleža 2002 [1938]: 320–6). Yorick was ‘in revolt against the establishment of puppet theaters as such’ and wanted them to cut the strings controlling them. His puppet-staged revolt, parodying Goethe’s Faust, did not get beyond the prologue (Krleža 2002 [1938]: 320–9). Even in their independence, the states of Blitva and Blatvia had to suffer external interference in their internal affairs from Western European statesmen, who dispensed advice from their plush theatre boxes, while having little comprehension of the local conditions: ‘You call yourself Europe and so we have to pay for everything at 143 percent interest, if not more, because you’re Europe’ (Krleža 2002 [1938]: 31). Krleža was a leading figure in the post-war socialist Yugoslavia, a state which broke with the Soviet bloc in 1948 and pursued modern industrialisation under its particular socialist model of workers’ self-management. Socialist Yugoslavia followed Goethe’s solution of material progress as the key means to ensure political legitimacy and a peaceful stable society. Yugoslavia enjoyed relative independence during the Cold War and was a leading member of the Non-Aligned Movement.
The fate of Tesla and Krleža’s homeland has remained intertwined with the wider European and international context. Its internal weaknesses became exposed under the less favourable international climate and external structural adjustment requirements of the 1980s, and the country did not survive the end of the Cold War. Four decades on from Krleža’s novel, Slobodan Šnajder’s play The Croatian Faust was written in the renewed political fears of the 1980s following President Tito’s death. The play was set in wartime Croatia about a theatre company staging Goethe’s Faust, and explored the Faustian pact of the Croatian wartime state with the Nazi regime (Šnajder 1983, 1986; Baković 2011; Marjanović 1985; Radosavljević 2009). The Croatian Faust depicted Goethe’s Faust legitimising a genocidal regime. Šnajder recognised different interpretations of the Faust story, including its emancipatory potential against its fascist use, and the importance of political freedom against censorship and intolerance (Marjanović 1985: 224; Radosavljević 2009: 441). His invocation of the Faust story to pursue taboo topics echoed how in the 1960s the former political leader and writer Milovan Djilas translated Milton’s Paradise Lost into Serbo-Croat while in prison for dissident political views (Djilas 1958: 402–3). Šnajder’s father was an ethnic German writer, whose family had lived in Croatia for centuries, while his mother was a Yugoslav Communist also from Croatia. During the Second World War his father was mobilised as an ‘involuntary volunteer’ to the Prince Eugene unit, the most notorious German SS forces in the area, and managed to desert when the unit was sent to the Eastern Front and return after being with Polish partisans (Šnajder 2019: 43–105). His father was one of the few ethnic Germans to remain in post-war socialist Yugoslavia when most ethnic Germans were collectively expelled from the country. In creating a one-party state and ruling out political doubt, the new regime, with its utopian socialist ideals and secular doctrine and inquisition, pathed a road to hell with good intentions (Šnajder 2019: 118). The conflicted Krleža was reluctant to play the public role of devil’s advocate, a role when properly understood concerned strengthening faith and conviction. If there was a devil’s advocate, Šnajder suggests, it was Djilas, the former ideologue-turned-dissident (Šnajder 2019: 118).
Goethe’s humanist legacy was dismissed by many in the earlier post-war generation as too complacent over his treatment of evil. Others argued that his ‘complex and contradictory’ idea of the demonic fruitfully questioned our misanthropic complacencies (Brown 1992: 475–6). The original accounts of the Faust legend recognised humanity as flawed and the human condition as tragic. They expressed humanist possibilities of advancing human self-determination and cultural and spiritual realisation beyond tragic fatalism. Goethe’s Part I accepted the traditional tragedy. His Part II offered a hopeful progressive vision of national development in Faust the Developer. Two centuries later, a degraded view of humanity prevails in European intellectual and policy circles. Today’s views are closer to Mephistopheles’ anti-humanism, rather than Faust’s ambitious hopes for humanity. The loss of trust in our humanity is a fundamental obstacle for human freedom and progressive development humanising the world. Consequently we are witnessing the erosion of states being or becoming countries where citizens prosper protected from disaster. This cultural pessimism is encroaching upon the freedom and security of European countries,