Sarajevo Under Siege. Ivana Macek
people feel powerless in the face of hostile forces; their survival or death is random; and the conditions of life are no longer morally recognizable as humane. Chaos and paranoia are the order of the day. In this situation, paranoia is not irrational but is founded on the experience that nothing can be trusted. In this “gray zone” (another term coined by Primo Levi [1989]), nothing is fixed and known; any action and view is potentially acceptable. Norms and normativity itself are eradicated. The debates that arose after the Holocaust about whether God still existed and whether poetry still was possible express this void of meaning.
This type of destruction surpasses anything that can easily be documented or communicated. While material destruction and mass killing can be caught on film or summarized in statistics, the destruction of cultural meanings is hard to express, as the very creation of meaning becomes difficult. The visible destruction caused by war has much deeper effects on us than meet the eye. It reminds us daily of our mortality, and by destroying our cultural artifacts it reminds us that there is no way in which we can achieve permanence. At the same time, the omnipresence of destruction that makes death a constant companion of people living in a war zone drives them to respond with startling creativity. They need not only to re-create culture through reshaping knowledge and forms of expression but also to deal with profound existential issues when death becomes possible, not in an unknown future some decades away, but any moment—as people are killed randomly, here and now, just a minute or a meter away from where one is standing.
The process of coming to terms with such fundamental existential changes centers on taking control over your life in spite of mounting evidence of your powerlessness.
Figure 3. Vilsonovo šetaliste (Wilson’s Promenade) in central Sarajevo, seen from Grbavica. March 1996. Photo by author.
During the first days of war people lived in a state of shock. Frightened, they hid in cellars without understanding what was going on. The awareness that the war would not be over in a few days came only gradually. An extraordinary situation had to be normalized under completely new circumstances. The first forays from shelters were short, in order to provide food, but over time became longer and freer. We started to stroll around the town searching for food or fuel. People went on with their lives and started increasingly to see themselves as the only reliable source of energy. Life began renewing itself, the culture livened up, and the hunt for survival started to take on meaning, but this was a completely different meaning from what the world is familiar with. One started to live a peculiar and dreadful life, which in its preposterousness seemed consummate. One lived with death as much as one lived with arts. No cultural activities stopped, but neither did the dying.
We lived a Spartan life and were more hungry than full. Almost all our strength went to the struggle for physical survival. Immeasurable time and energy were needed to provide water, food, wood. Under such circumstances the needs of an exhausted body lessen, and the soul seeks its peace wandering through the past. In a completely new way thought got nourishment and imagination wings…. As if a new inner need emerges, in a situation in which life is threatened and has lost its value, to establish an island of quiet understanding during a concert, theater performance, exhibition, or in the intercourse with thoughts and feelings of the characters in a book….
An actor and theater manager in Sarajevo [said]: “It seemed as if we by performing in the moist cellar moved the walls and the entrance to that dark room. We scared away the fear from children’s faces; they forgot what was happening out there.” (F. Trtak 1996:28–30, my translation)
Figure 4. A residential area on the front line between Serb-held Grbavica and the government-controlled part of Sarajevo. March 1996. Photo by author.
The same impulse that moved Sarajevans under siege to create art animated their daily struggles against death-dealing circumstances.
Comprehending this sort of destruction requires a description of the war “from within,” as Michael Taussig (1992) has put it, rather than from the comparatively safe world outside. Photographs do not speak for themselves. Stig Dagerman, the Swedish writer and the first reporter to be sent to postwar Germany, wrote in a letter to a colleague and friend, dated November 8, 1946, about the state of mind and soul that comes from observing mass destruction:
In Hamburg one can get off the train at Landwehr and walk for an hour in any direction without seeing anything but inner walls and floors hanging like flags in their holds and frozen radiators clinging tightly as blowflies to their walls. It is nearly in the middle of the town and one does not see a human being for approximately an hour. I walked for three quarters of an hour toward the east, then I walked back. When I came home to the hotel I switched on the lamp over the mirror, thinking: If I do not look different there is something wrong, sir. Perhaps I should have gone west first.
Yes, in the beginning the mirrors were the worst, but afterward it takes no talent to understand that one can cope with seeing everything without going blind. It is not even gruesome to be here any more. It only makes one tired and one sleeps well at nights. (Dagerman 1996:115, my translation)
Everyone staying for some time in a war zone has similar experiences. The overwhelming destruction numbs one’s sensitivity, the sight of death becomes an everyday fact, and exhaustion takes over after the initial rush of adrenaline in one’s body. Most of the people I met in Sarajevo had experienced this shift. One woman said: “Before the war I thought how war is so awful, and if I was in the war I could not sleep for days, or something. But you are so tired from the grenades that you … [laughingly] you just fall down and sleep. That’s … that was surprising, really.” I was amazed at how quickly I got used to the devastation, first of the Croatian frontiers and later of Sarajevo. While I was there, I never took a step back and looked at the town through the lens of peacetime standards. I suppose that, like many a Sarajevan, my senses of mortality were sufficiently engaged with avoiding sniper fire and occasional shelling. My creative forces were concentrated on the task of documenting life during the war. I lost this state of mind and emotion only a few times, when I experienced what other people in Sarajevo experienced throughout the war: the awareness of having no power whatsoever over your own life, the feeling of meaninglessness that resulted, and the omnipresent emptiness. Although we are aware of our mortality, we seem to have a limit as to how much of this knowledge we can take in at a time. This human quality was expressed many times by Sarajevans as a somewhat shameful amazement over their “getting used to it.” They often wondered whether they would look and act normal to people outside Sarajevo, because they were aware that in the outside world the material destruction and deaths caused strong emotional, social, and political reactions. They themselves no longer felt this way, as a young woman described:
Figure 5. Although all of Sarajevo was subject to shelling and sniper fire, some parts of town were directly exposed to shooting from the mountains. Signs were posted in these places saying, “watch out, sniper” (pazi snajper) or “dangerous zone” (opasna zona). Sarajevo, spring 1996. Photo by author.
In the very beginning, every person killed was reported in all of the mass media. As time passed—it may sound a bit cruel, but it really is so—we started getting used to all those victims, and people began to turn into mere numbers. It was reported only: so and so many killed, so and so many hurt…. And then we came to a stage when they would for example report: ten hurt, and you would say: well, it isn’t so many. Two or three killed—oh, then it is not so many today. You know. But that is terrible.
This numbness registered the war’s excessive violence.
A play with this theme was put on in Sarajevo; it was based on the life and work of Mula Mustafa Bašeskija, a Sarajevan chronicler who lived in the eighteenth century (Lukić 1991). His “Chronicle” included a time of plague in Sarajevo. At the beginning of the plague people who died were named and their lives were briefly described: who they were, what they did, and their characters. Toward the end of the play, the narrator only reported