I am delighted to see the Adriatic again, and at the same time Split is absolutely dominated by the passengers from these behemoths. The streets are all full of tourists. Businesses exist for the tourists. Restaurants and bars charge several times what they do in Zagreb. I hear Scandinavian, American, Australian, German, Italian, Spanish voices in the streets.
This is not my Europe, I think. Mine is the Europe that imprisoned Omar in Italy but then provided him sanctuary in Sweden and Germany. Mine is the Europe of the German historian at the RAF film festival in Potsdam, Oskar Lafontaine at Ramstein, Sahra Wagenknecht, Joschka Fischer, the SPD, my VHS instructors and fellow students, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the historians protesting Orbán’s occupation memorial in Budapest, the historians working for the Croatian History Museum in Zagreb. I guess it would be fair to say mine is the Europe of academics, social democrats and historians in all lands.
This business of tourists out to consume and to be entertained is just weird. Watching them is kind of fun, like going to the zoo, but then you remember the animals are in cages and that makes me feel kind of sad. Obese Americans really stand out. They really do waddle, with rolls of baggy cellulite fat. They look uncomfortable in the heat, women straightening skin-tight jeans shorts already dark with sweat at 10 in the morning. Why are they in Split? What do they expect here? What do they receive? What do they say about Split after they’ve left?
For me, I am thinking of Jasenovac. The area I’d walked through had been de-mined. I’d never knowingly walked through what had been a minefield before. Those mines might very well have been laid by my Zagreb waiter’s father. I am thinking of Jadovno, and the memorial markers which get removed (by no means unique, of course, they also were at Sisak. I drove about there and saw only a Kaufland, no remnants of Europe’s only concentration camp for children). Ninety percent of the dead at Jadovno were Serbs. In Croatian camps Jews and Roma were an afterthought.
But Americans, you see, Americans hear „Bill Clinton“ and they think of Monica Lewinsky, not NATO bombing. „Milošević“ is synonymous with „war criminal“. A Serbian-American I know is bitter, intelligently and rightfully, about a number of things. I’m not sure how to make sense of all this.