Eastern European Voices

Abstract

Two female public intellectuals, born in the former Yugoslavia and since the early 1990s living in the North of Europe, respectively in Stockholm and Amsterdam, have built oeuvres combining fiction and essays, semi-autobiographical imagination and culture critique, testimony and journalism. Both authors are regularly invited by various national newspapers to write commentaries on what happened after the split up of Yugoslavia, and they have provided poignant analyses of the East-West dichotomy in contemporary Europe. By reading parts of their work, the European dissemination is brought to the fore, and issues of trans-nationalism and cultural identity are reflected upon. In this chapter, the focus will in particular be on the concept of the public private voice, in which various experiences are conveyed as exemplary for individuals in particular circumstances. Different perspectives are encapsulated in the public private voice: the perspective of the citizen from a country not existing anymore, the perspectives of the exile, the victim and the perpetrator, of a woman from a specific generation and that of the European East-West migrant. This multiperspectiveness makes up the specific performance of these public intellectuals using their own history to stimulate others to think about their responsibility.