Facing the Legacy of the 1990s: Saša Ilić's "Berlinsko Okno"

Abstract

This article explores how questions of collective memory, more specifically those connected to the traumatic legacy of the 1990s in Yugoslavia, are addressed in Sasa Ilic’s novel Berlinsko okno (The Berlin Window, 2005). At the heart of Berlinsko okno is the idea that, not unlike post-1989 Germany, Serbia should confront its recent past, especially its role in the wars of Yugoslav succession. This article argues that Ilic’s novel not merely attempts to give a voice to the nameless victims of the recent Yugoslav wars, to those who Shoshana Felman calls ‘the expressionless’. Calling attention to the politics of forgetting in Serbia, Berlinsko okno also urges the reader to think what Jean-Francois Lyotard has called ‘the immemorial’, that which can be neither remembered, nor forgotten. An analysis of the Brechtian intertext of the novel, then, reveals how Ilic’s novel connects the ethics of remembering with the politics of representation. Emphasizing the task of not forgetting the victims of the violence of the 1990s, the novel provocatively engages in the current debate among Serbian writers and literary critics about the social role and political relevance of literature today.