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[ 105 ] The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief. A man who saw clearly and with open eyes and was then living could see how this miracle took place and how the whole of society could, in a single day, be transformed. —Ivo Andrić, Bridge on the Drina Nations, and the people who form them, differ in the degree to which their memory of history—and the violence that punctuates it—remains active, generative of their collective identity. In the quotation from Ivo Andrić’s Bridge on the Drina, no mention is given of a specific historical moment, yet it is hard to imagine a citizen of the former Yugoslavia who would not recognize the passage instantly, and also know that it refers to the horrendous outbreak of the violence during the Second World War. Today, of course, the passage also carries a more contemporary resonance , and it is not surprising that chroniclers of the destruction of Yugoslavia have singled out these lines, implying that Andrić’s eloquent words were not simply descriptive but also prophetic. By stripping his prose of historical referents, and by envisioning violence as a “beast within,” Andric´ created a text that would itself become a territory of struggle, his Nobel Prize a crown that opposing forces would read in ominously different ways. Aggressors The Beast Is Back 5 [ 106 ] CHAPTER FIVE During the recent Yugoslav wars, World War II was only rarely an abstract metaphor. A poster created by the Ministry of Information of the short-lived Republic of Serbian Krajina, for example, portrays the clinking glasses of a toast, one in the hand of a man with a Croatian nationalist cuf- flink, the other in that of a demon. Behind the bubbly, revealed by parted curtains, is a Nazi flag. Framing this image are the words “The Beast Is Out Again” (the substantive written, for good measure, in German Gothic script). Not a work of particular subtlety, but then the poster was done in English. In the 1990s, it was apparently felt that an Anglophone audience needed to be reminded that Croats were Nazis, and in league with the devil. On a different front, early in The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell reminds his readers of how unprepared in 1914 the average Englishman was for the cataclysm about to unfold, or for any war, actually. His subtitle cites Philip Larkin’s MCMXIV—“Never such innocence again.” Fussell adds, “That was a different world. The certainties were intact. Britain had not known a major war for over a century and on the Continent , as A. J. P. Taylor points out, ‘there had been no war between the Great Powers since 1871. No man in the prime of his life knew what war was like. All imagined that it would be an affair of great marches and great battles, quickly decided’” (21). As Gertrude Stein famously quipped, the United States had lost its youthful innocence some years earlier; we entered the brutal twentieth century at the beginning of our Civil War. The picnic baskets and lawn chairs that the Washington elite brought to watch Bull Run would be packed up and stowed long before Franz Ferdinand took his one-way trip through the streets of Sarajevo. When I taught my first War Stories course in the spring of 2003, frankly, U.S. college students didn’t seem all that different from the average Briton in the spring of 1914. September 11, the Afghanistan invasion, build-up to the war in Iraq . . . certainly the presence of war was everywhere, but this was definitely not the Vietnam generation. The wars they remembered— vaguely—were distant wars; war itself was a distant, nebulous idea. And apparently the parents had been taught by their children. How else to explain the response to 9/11? Those flags sprouting up like mushrooms made my foreign students—particularly the Germans—uneasy. Me...

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