I fear a collective rear-view mirror obsession
Interviewed by: Ivana Golijanin
In anticipation of the eighth Bookstan International Literature Festival, Croatian writer, columnist and musician Zoran Žmirić talks about his latest novel, Hotel Wartburg, which will be presented as part of the festival program. The novel is divided into three parts: The Sultan Sits on the Throne , The Wall ( happiest days of our lives ) and Papa Was a Rollin' Stone . The titles, we recognize, are taken from well-known songs, and the novel quite consistently follows the narrator's childhood, teenage years and later youth. The cinnabar-red Wartburg station wagon 438 centimeters long connects those periods through the story of his father's attachment to him, which largely determined the (dys)functionality of a family.
How does understanding what the Wartburg car meant to the family help us understand the time in which the action takes place?
The titles of the units emphasize the situation in the family in a certain period. Otherwise, I was sure how I was writing my personal story, and in the end that text turned out to be a generational code. A lot of people told me that while reading it, they felt like they were looking at their life again, only that they had another car in their family. On the other hand, when I visit secondary schools, students ask me why we went to Trieste to get martensia and leather jackets, the context is completely unclear to them, so I believe that today's teenagers would give a more accurate answer to the question about the understanding of that time.
Does the Wartburg, as an example of longevity that was cheap to maintain, represent some sort of fatherly nostalgia for the old days? What else did that car mean to him?
The Wartburg is the only thing that the father managed to acquire from his work during his life and that is the reason why it is important to him, so much so that he even attributes human qualities to it and sees it as a member of the family. However, the fact that the Wartburg is not only a means of transport also shows that the father is not entirely wrong; in it the family goes on summer vacations, in it the children are taken to the doctor, important conversations are held, polemics take place between father and mother where their cultural differences come to light, so in the car the son notices for the first time how different his parents are from each other, but also how different his whole family is from other families in the neighborhood. The car is a mechanical hearth around which the family gathers and, in an allegorical sense, a place where all differences are seen and broken.
What did the car mean to the son? Why was his relationship with his father not close as a parent and why did he resent him for everything?
In the beginning, the Wartburg is a purely family identity marker for the son because every family is defined by the car they own; "These are the ones who drive the Fica, here are the ones who drive the Škoda...". During that period, the son does not understand that his family is dysfunctional. He thinks that every family is like his and that everyone solves their conflicts through violence and fear. But over the years, he notices that this is not the case, and that his father shows more inclination towards the car than towards him, and this leads him to anxiety, which grows into anger, and eventually into hatred. The turning point occurs at the moment when he realizes that he is not to blame for the bad relationship with his father, he realizes that it is not up to the child to define the relationship with the parent, but the other way around. This turns him in a completely different direction, first he becomes indifferent to his father and his obsession with cars, and towards the end this conflict grows and as an adult he tries to correct the things that his father did wrong. But the father is no longer there, and the car is expiring, the son remains, who has a choice; to choose anger towards his dead father and stay in that emotion or to turn to the future and build his family better than his father did.
What do you think in general about our tendency to look at the past with nostalgia? Was it really better before? Speaking of literature: did the disintegration of the cultural space shared by the Yugoslav states also lead to a step back when it comes to the individual literatures of those countries?
I fear looking back, that collective rear-view mirror obsession that makes it seem like people are not ready to accept transience, at least their own, let alone the one that is visible in the disintegration of a system that, in its downfall, drags with it all the good things that were once established. Was it better before? If we take into account the fact that before, for the operation of sick children, parents did not have to appeal to the public to help them, that investments were made in education, health, culture, sports, that schools, libraries, hospitals, kindergartens, theaters, sports halls were built, one could conclude that things were better before. On the other hand, when we look at the past where you could end up in prison because of a joke, then that is questionable. I think each of us looks at it for purely selfish reasons, weighing whether it was better for him then or today, and not how it was for society as a whole. I think our biggest defeat is that, moving forward, we didn't take over the things from the former system that were set up correctly and thus build the future, but we burned everything that had a sign of the past as if it was never worth it, and moved forward burdened with anger. I believe that everything has its place on the timeline, I don't think it was better or worse before, the only thing I can say with certainty is that it was different, and how different we readily welcomed it, especially if we didn't choose it ourselves, today clearly shows everyone for themselves. Speaking about the artistic space of the Balkans, I cannot separate the geographical from the time frame, I look at the location of the area after the collapse of the SFRY with the same eyes as before the war. For me, every space is geographical and spiritual at the same time, and in the spiritual there are no clear boundaries, except for those that we set ourselves. Speaking purely in the context of space, I do not assign sides to art. I can't be a stranger to someone who loves Bata Stojković, Ljubo Tadić, Paja Vujisić, Žigona, Milena Dravić, Mika, Kiš, Šovagović, Lepetić, Ujević, Vesna Parun, Vesna Krmpotić, Ugrešić, Fehmiu, Meša, Džumhur, Matvejević, Dizdar, SCH, EKV, Paraf, Miladojka Youneed, Mizar, and if you want, Jodorowsky, Hugo Pratt, Joy Division, Blade Runner... and many others. Art is the only thing that connects people, it doesn't separate them, which is why, especially geographically speaking, it is terribly complicated for me to look at any artistic production in a before/after format.
The first part of the novel is preceded by a short prologue that is almost identical to the final part, entitled Return to the Source. The structure of "The Wartburg Hotel", I admit, often resembles a collection of stories. What genre did you have in mind when you were writing?
When I write, I have neither genre nor reader in mind, I write what is important to me, and I challenge myself within the text. For example, with "Patient from Room 19", my challenge was to offer the reader to feel that he is an active character in the novel, to imagine how the protagonist addresses him, the reader, and not the psychiatrist. With the "Hotel Wartburg" the themes wrote themselves, I just peeked into my childhood and the environment in which I grew up; an urban melting pot, a working-class neighborhood dominated by four skyscrapers with 150 apartments each. The prologue of the novel was written last, before that I was not satisfied with the structure and asked "Fraktura" to postpone the publication until I became friends with the finished text. However, no matter how I turned and recut, it bothered me that I set the time in a straight line in the novel. It finally dawned on me that it would be good to start with the end, so I put together a cyclical structure and the text finally breathed.
At one point, it says that the father is waiting for the right to a new apartment, and instead Bruno from the union tells him that the right has gone to someone else, and says - And I told you to join the party. I would say that here you are very well foreshadowing the consequences that will come with the war (although you do not mention it), which are more pronounced in the Balkans than ever...
Yes, because the war in the Balkans did not happen by someone flipping a switch, it grew over the years, and as always when it comes to war, it first ignited in the foundations of society, where blisters break and sweat bites the collar. A worker who until yesterday was satisfied with class equality, and who has a permanent job, an apartment, the right to health care and annual leave, realizes that his boss has all that, plus two cars, a house and a cottage, suddenly feels that because of this he can swear loudly and that he can change some things to his advantage. But the change, if we continue to the question about the past, is such that now with hindsight we can conclude that things have not changed significantly since then and that the team that was the first to smoke war marketing is in a worse situation today than it was before the war. Still belonging to the political current brings benefits, with the difference that today, instead of one cottage and two cars, individuals have several companies and their only concern is whether their next yacht will be 18 or 24 meters, and others don't even have apartments where, without asking the landlord, they can drive a nail into the wall and hang a picture of some of their own or someone else's better times on it.
You published your first collection of stories in 2002. How much have your writing preoccupations changed to date and how much has the literary scene changed since the moment you published your first book?
I have changed as a person, therefore also as an author, so have the topics that interest me. Everything has changed and it's not so bad. What's the point if we don't have a chance to change for the better? When I start to stagnate, it will mean that I have done everything I had and that it is time to move on, until the next incarnation.
To what extent has your involvement in the cultural field – you write columns, do music and photography – contributed to the literature you write? How much of "Hotel Wartburg" is laden with intertextuality and references to parts of pop culture?
Before writing, I was involved in music, naturally, I'm from Rijeka, where in '80 every neighborhood had one good band. Like most of my generation, when I wanted to express myself as a young man, I started with music. Along the way, I also tried my hand at other media, and to this day I have retained a great love for visual art. Not only in "Wartburg", in each of my books there are numerous references to pop culture.
What drives your writing urge? Do you think of yourself as an engaged writer and, in general, does literature have to be engaged in order to be of high quality?
I write what worries me, and these are mostly topics in which I think about which decisions led me to certain situations and whether I came out of it as a better person. Although my books are imbued with a social charge, I do not see myself as an engaged writer, but if the reader can think about himself after my book and if it can move him forward, then I gladly accept that kind of responsibility.