“As I entered, the first journalist ever allowed to report from inside, I had butterflies in my stomach. For I am a prisoner of my past. Some of the people detained here were accused of crimes against members of my family. We lived through the siege of Sarajevo.”
Photographer’s blog (c) REUTERS by Damir Sagolj who took pictures in the war crimes unit of the prison in The Hague.
On Anna Kim’s novel Frozen Time (2010)
“Written by the South Korean-born author, who moved to Austria from Germany aged seven and regards German as her mother tongue, the narrative follows a young researcher in Vienna’s Red Cross Tracing Service as she attempts to help a Kosovan man discover what happened to his wife during the war in former Yugoslavia.” > article (c) A Year of Reading in the World, 2012 (reblogged)
> homepage Anna Kim (c) photo.
The Story of Dragoljub Milanović: a true Handke indeed.
“This is not a sermon, but (…) a story. A story to tell, if necessary, to a woodpile or an empty snail shell or even to myself alone, by the way not for the first time –”*
Peter Handke’s narrator, the self-appointed chronicler of Dragoljub Milanović’ Story, suffers from a strangely missionary pessimism that leads him to formulate unbearably beautiful sentences like the one quoted. And if no one listens to him, he is just going to talk to his “shoelace”, the “nutcracker”, or even a “worn-out doormat.”
‘Talk to the hand,” evil tongues of Americanized origin probably would tell him, but in Continue reading
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Dead
There are many crime scenes where the idea of Europe was murdered in the “short” 20th century. One of them certainly is Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia, the place where the largest massacre after the Second World War executed by military personnel took its course.
BBC documentary (1995)
delirium clemens 