Milan Kundera writes about the bombing of Serbian cities in 1999.
Milan Kundera briefly addressed the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia in the closing sections of his book Ignorance. He controversially interpreted the weeks of bombings not merely as a response to the Kosovo crisis, but as a deliberate European effort to retroactively impose a “vanquished” status on Serbia.
Milan Kundera; photo: Wikipedia/Elisa Cabot
No country in Europe liberated itself with its own forces. (None? One did. Yugoslavia. With its own partisan army. That is why in 1999 it was necessary to bomb Serbian cities for weeks and weeks: in order to impose, a posteriori, the status of the defeated on that part of Europe as well.)
“
in order to impose, a posteriori, the status of the vanquished on that part of Europe)”
The new Europe was born out of a huge defeat,
which has no equal in its history;
first time, Europe was beaten,
Europe as such, all of Europe.
Battered first by the madness of its own evil
embodied in Nazi Germany
and then freed from one end by America,
as the other, by Russia.
Freed and occupied.
I say that without irony.
Both of those words are correct.
In their combination lies the unique nature of the situation.
The existence of members of the Resistance Movement (partisans),
who fought the Germans everywhere,
nothing important has changed: no European country
(Europe from the Atlantic to the Baltic countries)
she did not free herself by her own strengthsystem.
(None? One is, after all. Yugoslavia.
With his own partisan army.
That’s why it’s 1999. it was necessary
to bombard Serbian cities for weeks and weeks:
in order to, a posteriori, and imposed the status
of the vanquished on that part of Europe.)
Milan Kundera (Brno, April 1, 1929 – Paris, July 11, 2023) was a Czech-French writer. His best-known works are the novels A Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Although he also published essays, collections of poems, and plays, Kundera is best known for his novels and considered himself primarily a novelist. Kundera was widely read in Yugoslavia, and the Sarajevo publisher Veselin Masleša published his collected works in 1984.
In 1985, Kundera received the Jerusalem Prize, and his acceptance speech was published in the collection of essays The Art of the Novel. He was also the winner of the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987; in 2000, he received the international Herder Prize; and in 2007 the Czech State Prize for Literature. He is also considered to have been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Prepared by: Dalibor Drekić
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