By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Precisely five years ago, in March 2019, Radovan Karadzic was sentenced to life imprisonment. This text is an attempt to create an alternative biography of him.
In the essay On Heidegger’s Nazism, the American philosopher Richard Rorty writes about how little was needed for Heidegger’s biography to be very, very different. Rorty treats Heidegger as a “toolbox”.
“As far as I am concerned, I would like to keep Heidegger a pragmatist and ignore Heidegger the Nazi, to keep his delineation of the history of metaphysics and reject the pessimistic conclusions, to keep selected parts of Heidegger’s imagery and jargon, and get rid of his world-historical pretensions”, says Rorty.
He writes an imagined biography of a different Heidegger.
In the summer of 1930, the philosopher fell in love with the beautiful student Sarah Mandelbaum, a Jew. In order to be with her, he dares to divorce Elfrida, which will cost him his friendship with the Husserl family. In January 1933, the two of them will have a son – Abraham. Growing Nazism is a threat to their happiness. The Heideggers leave Freiburg. He briefly teaches as a visiting professor in Bremen, and then accepts Princeton’s invitation and leaves for America. At the University of Chicago, he meets Thomas Mann.
“They see that they share things in common with Adorno and Horkheimer; they agree that America is a reductio ad absurdum of Enlightenment hopes, a land without culture”, writes Rorty.
After he divorced Sara and she and her son left for Palestine, Heidegger returned triumphantly to Freiburg in 1948.
What follows is Rorty’s final, ingenious intervention:
“Heidegger marries for the third time, this time to a war widow who reminds all his friends of Elfride. When he died in 1976, his wife placed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Order of Pour le Merite and the gold medal of the Nobel Prize for Literature on his casket. This last recognition was awarded to him a year after the publication of his short but moving elegy for Abraham, who died on the Golan Heights in 1967”.
Let’s apply this Rorty construction to, say, Radovan Karadzic and see where it takes us. And then: We’re on the Road to Nowhere… First of all, because there is a certain difference between Heidegger and Rasa, so significant that it makes any analogy impossible. Even where they appear to be similar, there is a chasm between them that separates the genius who embraced a monstrous idea from the desperate poet and the “great” criminal.
Heidegger was mockingly called a peasant philosopher by his opponents, a man who used agrarian metaphors. Heidegger himself with his pumps and suspenders (allegedly, even before he met Heidegger, Husserl noticed this peasant boy in the first rows of his lectures), with his forest roads (“In the forest there are roads which, overgrown with moss, suddenly break where no human has yet set foot… Lumberjacks and foresters know those roads.
They know what it means to be on a forest road”), showed considerable openness to such criticism.
But Heidegger’s forests are metaphysical, while Radovan’s are cadastral and Serbian; Hölderlin lives in Heidegger’s forests and searches for the source of the work of art in them; he and Mladic live in Radovan’s woods, and they are looking for the best place for a mortar from which a grenade will be fired, which, down in the valley, if the Orthodox God and heroic luck wills, will kill as many “Turkish” children as possible.
The analogy is also impossible because Heidegger came to his worldview by, to put it simply, thinking and reading. Karadzic’s worldview, on the other hand, is only possible for people who don’t think and don’t read. Only evil fools can wipe entire cities and nations from the face of the earth, as if they were God from the Old Testament (evil always makes a man stupid, because evil is stupid), like those who led the Serbs through the Bosnian forest paths in 1992.
And yet, let’s say it was like this…
Radovan Karadzic gets off the bus that brought him to Sarajevo. He watches the city around him in fear. He remembers the words with which his parents sent him off to study: beware of the city and keep your wits about you, alone among all those Turks. His knees are shaking as the 1979 earthquake shook the Montenegrin coast. Thank you and all the best, says Radovan to the driver and disappears into the forest of buildings.
Every day of the siege of Sarajevo in this reality, the driver will remember that moment and curse himself for not driving the bus down a cliff and saving so many good people from misery. The one who is shooting at us, I drove him here, fuck it – the old man tells the passers-by who threw themselves on the asphalt when a shell exploded near the Sarajka department store. Crazy old man, they think. Good and crazy, it’s the same for you, thinks the old man.
It’s a nice spring day. Passing by the Town Hall, Radovan sees a girl with whom he instantly falls in love. It will take years to win her heart. But in the end, the dreamlike Indira Hadzic becomes Mrs. Karadzic. The times are hard and their rnted room in Bjelava is cramped. And yet, they are happy. Radovan cuts off contacts with his native land – forced to choose between Indira and the Karadzics, who refuse to accept her, he chooses her.
Their daughter Sara suffers from severe chronic bronchitis. Radovan’s career as a psychiatrist is in its infancy, Indira is at home, taking care of her child. With their income, the month is too long. They are saved from starvation by the neighborhood, which mobilized to help the likable Montenegrin, good Indira and poor little Sara. Sometimes, when Radovan is not at home, someone brings some money to Indira. She doesn’t tell him about it, knowing that it would hurt his highland pride, but he still knows.
The love with which he is surrounded begets love – everything he was taught about those people was a lie, which Radovan is ashamed of.
But all the love in the world is not enough to heal Sara. They take her to Belgrade, to the Military Medical Academy. While staying in Belgrade, Radovan, who has already published two books of poetry, goes to France 7. A society of Serbian literary greats pleases him at first, but when Beckovic and Cosic take the floor, who talk about Serbian lands and national unity, Radovan demonstratively leaves. What fools, he thinks, resolved never to write a single poem again.
What would happen next, would such a different biography of Radovan be enough to avoid war in Bosnia and save hundreds of thousands of people from death and exile? Of course not.
Because, staying in Sarajevo, Radovan certainly had the opportunity to feel the human kindness that had to distract him from ruining the city that welcomed him as his own. His wife could have been Indira, as Ljiljana was, it doesn’t matter, because the cause of what he did does not lie in the woman, nor in any man he met. All that evil lay in him. Let evil out of just one man – it will be enough to destroy the entire world as we know it.
In a world where he has not become a criminal, Radovan finds war in an apartment in Breka. In such a world, Radovan remains in Sarajevo, under the bombs dropped on him by Ratko Mladic and the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Momcilo Krajisnik, Aleksa Buha or some other Lord of the Flies.
In such a world, in September 1992, Radovan gets killed by a Serbian shell in an old neighborhood in Bjelava, while carrying water to the infirm Ismet, who did him good at the time when Sara almost suffocated from bronchitis.
What does this tell us, except that every world is the worst of all possible worlds? In such a world, would Radovan Karadzic manage to save at least one Sarajevo citizen? Actually, he would. Because if it had been as it hadn’t been, if, instead of surrounding and bombarding the city that embraced him as his own, he had stayed in that city and got killed by those who committed the crimes he committed with his own hands, Radovan Karadzic would have saved himself.
(The opinions and views of the authors of the columns are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)