A Paper House
A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia by Mark Thompson (1992)
Written just after the Slovenian spring, while the Yugoslav republics were on the verge of full-blown war, A Paper House is Mark Thompson’s journey throughout the region, using the people he meets and the cities he visits as a springboard to discuss its history
Though structured like a travellogue, and presented as an account of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, this book is mostly a cultural and political history of those peoples living in its final days. It constantly jumps back and forth between past and present, between politics, travel stories, geography, and art. The scope is ambitious and dizzying. It is also uneven, with almost nothing on Macedonia (for instance) and heaps on Slovenia (the country Thompson is most familiar with). Normally, I’d say this couldn’t work, but in Yugoslavia’s case, the format captures the patchwork of peoples and their confusing, overlapping, shifting boundaries of identity and disavowal, war and peace, oppressor and oppressed.
Thompson has both a journalistic and a literary background. He worked for Mladina magazine in Slovenia, and was also a translator and historian of Slavic and Italian literature (including a noteworthy biography of Danilo Kiš). His way of telling history therefore has a very distinct emphasis on the art and literature of each place.
This was a fascinating way to compare national outlooks. The forlorn Slovenes, long Habsburg subjects, internalised their deference to western, German, enlightenment ideals. They developed an intellectual culture that saw itself as insufficient, and therefore in need of development.
By contrast, the Serbs raised their own folklore—particularly that surrounding the 1389 Battle of Kosovo—to the level of mythology. Their poets were the nation’s slumbering heartbeat during centuries of Ottoman rule. They mystified the promise that Serbia would one day reclaim the glory of its medieval empire, connecting this eventual recrudescence to the very existence of the nation-state.
My favourite chapter in this book was about the Istran peninsula (called Istria in Italian). For centuries, Istra was divided between an urban Italian coastline and a rural Slavic hinterland. The emergence of nationalism and borders changed the situation. After the World Wars, many of the region’s Italians were expelled—by force or otherwise.
Thompson shines a light on this period of history through his discussions with Ligio Zanini, fisherman and writer. Zanini’s mother-tongue was Rovignese, a tiny Romance language distantly related to Italian, with only a few hundred speakers. His magnum opus, Martin Muma, written in both Italian and Rovignese, paints the uncertainties of those Italians living in the Istran peninsula at the end of World War II:
We Italian comrades were fighting for a socialist Italy on one side and a socialist Yugoslavia on the other. Then it wouldn’t matter where they put the border around Istria. (68)
After its expulsion from the Cominform in 1948, Yugoslavia embarked on a new wave of purges against its political enemies, real or imagined. Italians—even those who, like Zanini, had willingly submitted to the new Yugoslav state—came under suspicion.
For renouncing his party membership, Zanini spent several years toiling on Yugoslavia’s worst gulag, the barren island of Goli Otok. But on his release, unlike the thousands of other Italians who fled the peninsula, including the titular Martin Muma, Zanini chose to stay in the only place he had ever called home:
The illusion that anyone possesses territory is so damaging. What matters is to walk lightly on this earth. Bickering about whose culture is better than whose: what nonsense! . . . Culture belongs to everyone. From slave songs came spirituals and the blues, which are played now in the same theatres where Verdi is performed. Think of it! Even those wretched and despairing people brought their little flower to the house of culture. . . (70)
Mark Thompson has a brilliant eye for the poetry in Zanini’s tale: the powerful sense of place and home (oikophilia); the fragility of belonging to a marginal culture in uncertain times; and the animating zeal of political ideals, the belief that the world can be changed for the better, even as corruption and failure corrode its reality. All of this constitutes the tragic history of Yugoslavia.
A lot has happened since 1992, when A Paper House was first published. As a primer on the region’s political situation, it is somewhat dated. But as a cultural history, it is still extremely valuable. And as literature—as pure delight—it is a product of obvious care for and attention to the lands and peoples of Yugoslavia.