Another false dawn
Liliana Brisby
CAFE EUROPA : LIFE AFTER COMMUNISM by Slavenka Drakulic Abacus, £6.99, pp. 213 In How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, a collection of essays pub- lished a decade ago, Slavenka Drakulic had a marvellous title which unfortunately she failed to live up to. The book was rather humourless and survival was irritatingly viewed mainly from a consumerist perspec- tive: there was more about the miseries of not having proper lavatory paper than about the humiliations of being treated like a sheep by the communist rulers. As the daughter of one of Tito's partisan generals in a country reaping the benefits of the 1948 break with Stalin, she used her frequent travels to the West to train her keen journalistic eye on the contrasting experiences of women on both sides of a disintegrating Iron Curtain. Part of a cyni- cal and apolitical post-war generation, she did not believe in Marxism but was ideo- logical in her espousal of militant feminism to the point of denying her small daughter the coveted Barbie doll.
Ten years on, her new batch of short essays focuses on life in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. No longer a struggling single mother, but happily mar- ried to a gentle Swedish journalist, with a well-stocked home in Sweden and a sum- mer house in Croatia, the author finds that the gulf between the two halves of Europe `Swinging through the treetops just isn't the same any more, Taman.' persists. Despite growing privatisation, a free market and the lifting of censorship, she sees a lasting legacy of communism in the inability of East Europeans to grow up and practise democracy — 'they do not know how to be free and are not ready for responsibility'. Instead, they are willingly mobilised behind their rediscovered and often rewritten past, clinging to nationalist ideals and myths which lead to the old mis- takes, back to Balkanisation rather than to the Westernisation they aspire to. Real democracy still eludes them.
While there is little to quarrel with in the author's general observations, the charm of her writing, now as before, is to be found in the arresting details, and revealing para- doxes gleaned as she ranges over the spec- trum of post-1990 change from Albania to Czechoslovakia. Revolution is seen in small everyday things: sounds, looks, smells, images. Would anyone else have spotted that in Budapest, as in no Western capital, you can buy sweets in a shop called Bonbonniere Hemingway? In Zagreb a beautiful cinema, once named 'the Balkan', has been rechristened 'the Europa', encapsulating what people want to be, not what they are. In Sofia, where a smile is at a premium, the Café Wien's meticulous recreation of an elegant Viennese ambience produces 'a Brechtian alienation effect', as do the depleted 'supermarkets' and the humble Café Hollywood in Bucharest.
Drakulic's habit of looking at the state of personal hygiene and public lavatories as a litmus test of the surviving heritage of Communism and the faltering advance of democracy leads to a comic act of symbolic resistance followed by serious reflection. Having relieved herself in the gleaming bowl of the pink and gold kitsch bathroom in the sumptuous villa of Ceausescu's daughter,
I understood that a civilised democratic soci- ety has a very slim chance of taking root in countries where a normal clean bathroom with running hot water, toilet paper and soap was a luxury reserved for dictators.
True, as far as it goes.
Not being political, Drakulic puts her faith for the future in responsible individu- alism. But in confessing that she has remained an incorrigible hoarder of cheap consumer goods and that she expresses her opposition to the appalling shortages and soaring prices under post-communist dis- pensations by becoming 'a "professional" East European smuggler' of foreign goods, she gets entangled in contradictions which her life in the West has not resolved.
Nevertheless, her critique is well worth listening to, especially with regard to her native Croatia. Her merciless lampooning of General Franco Tudjman is just, and her refusal to be swept away by the prevailing nationalist tide is worthy of respect. How- ever, her condemnation of the crimes of the fascist wartime leader Ante Pavelic and the horrors of the extermination camp at Jasenovac ('our own, local, home-made little Auschwitz') would have carried even more weight if paralleled by a more acute political indictment of communism.
In asking rather diffidently whether East- ern Europe, too, has something to con- tribute to the West it longs to join, Drakulic mentions the model of the moral politician represented by Vaclav Havel. This seems to me to hit the nail on the head: for the most heartening thing about communism's collapse was its ultimate fail- ure to win by way of fear and opportunism. In the end, the dissident voices of coura- geous men and women of principle could not be silenced.
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