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Cultural Critique 54 (2003) 1-25



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Playstation Cordoba, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Etc.
A War Model, Part 1

Klaus Theweleit

Translated by Thomas Pepper

—Is something not quite right, Mademoiselle?
—Just what do you call that thing, when you put the innocent ones on one side and the guilty ones over on the other?
—I don't know, Mademoiselle.
—Figure it out, moron! When everyone has fucked up, when everything is lost and the day begins and despite everything you're still breathing.
—That's called daybreak, Mademoiselle.

Ed.: This is the first part of an essay published in Klaus Theweleit's Der Knall (Stroemfeld/Roter Stern Verlag, 2002). The second part will appear in Cultural Critique, no. 55.

The "Theory of Coerced Loyalty"

The expression "theory of coerced, or blackmailed loyalty" grabbed my eyes from a flyer from the working group Culture and Strategy/Art and War, Bazon Brock's planning group for a multipart symposium about the new wars and their signification for our so-called culture. This theorem states:

The politics of cultural identity consists in the following, namely, the setting up of cultural minorities within a majoritarian society and asserting the cultural autonomy of such minorities, by violence if necessary.... The invention of the concept of cultural identity has no correlate in reality. It is counterfactual, a construction for the blackmailing and coercion of those who belong to that identity for the purposes of the exploitative fencing off and exclusion of all of those who don't.

With the greatest economy, this theorem describes pretty much [End Page 1] precisely what has taken place in the individual states of the Balkans in the last ten years to the extent that they have become ethnicized and, if you will, nationalized; and, in so doing, have re-religionified themselves. For most parts of Yugoslavia, something like religiosity existed only on the surface; for many groups in that population, religion was no longer a central element of their daily life and did not determine their form of life.

This can be seen perfectly in the case of the Muslims of Mostar as they are depicted in Pepe Danquart and Miriam Quinte's film Nachsaison(Afterseason). The filmmakers themselves accompanied the Koschnik Mission—Hans Koschnik's attempt, during his one year in Mostar, as coordinator of the European Union post, to forge an accord between the Croats on the one side of the Neretva River, which divides the city, and the Muslims, Serbs, and Sinti gypsies on the other. This attempt eventually failed because of the resistance of the Croats, who laid claim to the entire city and torpedoed all possible agreements for any mutual or common administration that they would not dominate. Koschnik also failed due to lack of support from the countries of the European Union, a fact he himself laments in the film.

In this film there is a whole series of interviews with Muslims, each one of whom pretty much says:

we had all long since forgotten ... to look toward Mecca each morning ... prayer ... religion as the primary directive for everyday life ... all that had become unimportant here, we were people from Mostar among and just like everyone else. After the forced division [of the city], we were compelled to learn that all over again under the pressure of what we experienced. Now we live and move around in, are confined within a Muslim ghetto and are surveilled, so to speak, as to whether we observe the fundamental religious rules ... we had to learn the songs, the rituals, everything, all over again and to put it all into practice here, where all that had long since died.

Similarly, a Croatian woman bemoans her forced conversion back into the role of a Croatian woman: "My husband was a Serb and now he is dead. I had to leave my dwelling behind; and now I have to live among Croats, with whom, in fact, I have nothing in common, and whose nationalist goals I don't share."

The especially "funny" thing—as it were—the cruel joke about...

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