Erehwon - published in English by the PEN Centre of Former Yugoslavia in Amsterdam - is produced by people who have not made a choice. The title is borrowed from the novel Erewhon by Samuel Butler. Some texts appear in "that language", in Macedonian, and in Slovenian. (These languages have never been part of "that language", but did form part of the Yugoslavian cultural region). The language of the host country - Dutch - is also represented, by a guest author. The third issue features a poem in German and in English by a German poet of Spanish origin.
The present review concerns the third issue, comprising mostly Serbian topics, presented mostly by Serbs. Yet the spirit of the periodical suggests that exclusivity, ethnic separatism, and conspiracy-mania are not particular to Serbs. Neither is the scope of this issue limited to Yugoslavia. It just happens to be a more palpable, because swollen, artery at present. The leitmotif of the third number is the spirit of conspiracy and conspiracy-mania, which explains everything and without which the war could not have begun.
Milos Vasic, a reporter with the Belgrade Vreme, takes as his point of departure a quotation from Karadzic: "We are not against the whole world, the whole world is against us." Quoting from and analysing examples of anti-Serb conspiracy theory in the statements of Serb politicians and newspapers loyal to them, Vasic draws up a list of the ringleaders of the alleged conspiracy: 1) the Vatican, 2) World Jewry, 3) the Comintern, 4) Islamic fundamentalism, 5) USA-led imperialism, 6) Freemasons, 7) Coca-Cola and jeans culture, 8) plutocracy, 9) decadent and soulless Western civilisation, and 10) so-called "democracy". Why are they all against the Serbs? Vasic summarises as follows: because the Serbs (a) love freedom, (b) have dignity, (c) want to live together, (d) are defending hearth and home, (e) want only what is theirs, and (f) stand in the way of a crusade being waged by the ten conspirators listed above. Vasic quotes the famous Milosevic speech addressed to the mayors of Serbia on 16 March 1991 at a closed session at the Serbian Parliament, in which he explained that after its reunification, Germny wants to create a new European order with the support of US capital."We have information, reliable information, that a desire has arisen for the restoration of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; that they are counting on all of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herczegovina, Vojvodina and a part of the Sanjak (Sandzak). It is also part of their strategy to annex Kosovo to Albania."
Analysis of Croatian, Slovenian and other conspiracy theories would also be possible - but this is not Vasic's aim, and it is not his job.
Conspiracy theories can explain everything. In their The Theology of Conspiracy, Vladimir Pistalo and Charles Simic quote Thomas Aquinas: "Without a conspiracy theory the world would be pointless. Nothing can explain evil and human misery as well as conspiracy." Conspiracy responds to an ancient need. According to Simic and Pistalo (Simic is an American poet of Serbian origin - Pistalo was driven to the USA by the war): "If you cannot think of anything logical, say something that sounds familiar." A real need exists for prefabricated expressions that can be reheated in anyone's mouth, like deep-frozen food in a microwave oven.
Conspiracy is a refuge both the miserable and the downcast as well. Imagine yourself as you are now: with the same convictions, the same smile, the same troubles - but living in Gorazde. How else could you explain your fate?
Vesna Pesic, a Belgrade sociologist (and opposition politician) describes how embarrassed she feels when journalists ask her what is behind the delay in the parliamentary debate on the government report. There is nothing behind it. It has simply been delayed. But this is blasphemy. In the absence of conspiracy, when things can simply happen and there is nothing behind them, what do we have left?
Filip David in his contribution entitled "The Power of Prejudice", quotes a music teacher from Belgrade telling television viewers that already in 1880 Western politicians and musicologists met in Vienna to contrive the ruin of Serbian music. This was necessary because "it is common knowledge" that a nation without its own music is deprived of an identity.
Several other writings published in the third issue are worthy of mention, particularly the article by Belgrade architect - now living in Vienna - Bogdan Bogdanovic, "The Four-Cornered Circle", the piece by Belgrade anthropologist Ivan Cùolovic on Mythical Serbia, and the Noam Chomsky interview.
In this issue the column entitled Dictionary for Slow Learners is also devoted to conspiracies. Here are the words of Kurt Tucholsky: "The man who is able to look on war without feeling disgust is not a human being, but a patriot."
Erehwon is a response; it may be the response of those who refuse to accept history. But things have not yet been resolved. The events (history) are still brewing and taking shape. What shapes will finally emerge in the (former) Yugoslavia is not indifferent for the rest of the world either.
Köszeg warned at the launch of Beszélõ as a weekly that the market would be a greater threat to the magazine than the political police did. During the early part of the transition, the first free elections and the first year of the new parliament when the Hungarian public turned its gaze towards politics with increasing interest, Beszélõ was very popular. When political apathy set in, however, the magazine was badly hit. Circulation dropped and its financial situation deteriorated, yet with support from its two regular sponsors - the Hungarian Soros Foundation and Postabank - it continued to appear with only a few minor setbacks.
In the summer of 1995, however, it became clear that the slow decline was almost irreversible. The editorial board had run out of steam and the sponsors expressed the view that, as things stood, they did not think Beszélõ could survive in the long run. Members of the editorial board had three alternatives to choose from. First, to continue with the weekly paper on the basis of the remaining resources and to attempt a second rebirth, on the failing of which Beszélõ would come to an end. Second, to terminate Beszélõ without further ado. The third alternative was to transform the weekly into a monthly.
The strongest argument against the last alternative was that as a monthly Beszélõ would be deprived of one of its main virtues, its ability to influence liberal political public opinion by responding quickly to political events. On the other hand the monthly format offered possibilities beyond the scope of a weekly; for example, more thorough examination of crucial economic, political and social issues free of the straightjacket of day-to-day politics. In this sense, a monthly can play an important role in shaping political public opinion, but at a different level; and by publishing consistent analyses of particular issues with a clear point of departure and argument it can also contribute to purifying political culture and learned public debate and, in a broader sense, raising it onto an altogether higher level. The supporters of the monthly option also pointed out that the genres characteristic of a monthly - the essay and the in-depth analysis - ideally suit the talents and style of some of the authors who write for Beszélõ regularly or who are otherwise connected with the journal.
The owners of the Beszélõ title, the founding editors, and the editors of the weekly finally consented to commence preparations for launching the monthly, an idea, that was also welcomed by former sponsors. In October 1995 the founding editors and the editorial board of the weekly appointed Ilona Kiss, formerly the weekly's foreign editor, to be editor-in-chief. The new editorial staft was formed from the younger members of the weekly's editorial staff.
The new editors set itself the task of presenting well-grounded and relevant views (even political standpoints) on particular issues underwritten by the authors' particular expertise in essay-type articles. By way of international comparison, what we had in mind was the style and genre attempted by the New York Review of Books, Dissent and Daedalus. Another important aim was to give the fullest possible picture of issues of public interest wherever possible by offering several authors' viewpoints on the subject. In the Culture column in-depth analyses alternate with a series of lighter, shorter essays and reviews. There is a separate column for expressly light-hearted, humorous sketches and commentaries. A new column to be launched in the fall will be a historical series entitled "Beszélõ Évek" (a pun on "Talking Years" and the "Years of Beszélõ"), each subsequent monthly being dedicated to a particular year from 1957 to 1989.
Members of the editorial staft: Ilona Kiss (editor-in-chief), Eszter Babarczy, András Zoltán Bán, Éva Fekete, András Mink, László Neményi.
Beszélõ: Akadémia
u. 1, Ap. 48-50, ground floor,
H-1051 Budapest, Hungary
Tel/fax: (36-1) 153-4444
Ext. 292, 294
Email:
beszelo@.c3.hu
Given this, in July 1996, the Department of Medieval Studies of the Central European University organized a Summer University dealing with "Computing in Medieval Studies. CD-Roms, Internet, Digital Libraries, Source-Oriented Data Processing of Texts and Images". Its programs were designed for researchers, junior university teachers, museologists, organizers of exhibitions, postgraduate students etc. The idea was to present the most recent international developments in computing in medieval studies and to provide possibilities for the participants to apply and test them in practice.
Part of the course covered the presentation, application and methodological discussion of various commercially available CD-Roms such as the "International Medieval Bibliography", the "Cetedoc Library of Christian Latin Texts", "In Principio: Incipit Index of Latin Texts", different image collections etc., a description of the advantages for historians of Internet and the World Wide Web, and a discussion about digital libraries. Another part showed the results of specific projects, like the "Orbis"-Central European image database of the Department of Medieval Studies of CEU, or REAL, the image database of medieval Central European daily life, created by the Institut für Realienkunde at Krems (Austria). A third part of the course dealt with the most relevant means of source-oriented data processing of texts and digitalized images, particularly with the help of "kleio", a database management system for historians that has been developed at the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte at Göttingen (Germany). Methodological discussions and the practical applications proposed by the participants concentrated especially on the analysis of medieval source material in a context-sensitive way.
The participants gained the necessary knowledge to create databases of texts and images, and learned how to structure them in an economical and efficient way, how to treat them in database management systems, how to link hypertexts and images, etc. Tamás Sajó (CEU, Budapest) acquainted them with the basic conventions and tools of iconographic decoding and the description of images: description systems and methods, and available encyclopaedias and handbooks.
Seamus Ross from the British Academy (London) gave an introduction to "Developing and Managing an Electronic Journal, Data Services, Intelligent Agents, and Knowledge Representation". He also presented "The ELECTRONIC BEOWULF Project" of the British Library and the University of Kentucky. Beowulf, the first great Early English literary masterpiece, is known only from a single eleventh century manuscript, which was badly damaged by fire in 1731. Transcriptions made in the late eighteenth century show that hundreds of words and letters then visible along the charred edges subsequently crumbled away. To halt this process each page was mounted in a paper frame in 1845. Taking Beowulf out of its display case for study not only raises conservation issues, however, it also makes it unavailable to the many visitors who come to the British Library expecting to see this most fundamental of literary treasures. Digitalisation of the whole manuscript offered a solution to these problems, as well as providing new insights. "The Electronic Beowulf Project" has assembled a huge database of digital images of the Beowulf manuscript and related manuscripts and printed texts. The archive already includes fiber-optic readings of hidden letters and ultraviolet readings of erased text in the early 11th-century manuscript, as well as full electronic facsimiles of indispensable 18th-century collations, editions, and translations.
The Hungarian project "Monastic Sites in Space and Time. A Multimedia Program of Monastic Culture" (Beatrix Romhányi, ELTE) exemplifies the state-of-the-art of digital image research in the historical disciplines at ELTE Budapest. Milena Dobreva (Sofia) reported on Bulgarian findings concerning the "Encoding of Slavic Manuscripts".
In recent years, it has become increasingly easy to reproduce pictorial sources and manuscripts on computer screens with a quality rivalling professional photography. This also made it possible to distribute such collections easily and cheaply via CD-ROM sets as well as over computer networks. Using both techniques, it is currently possible to create digital editions or digital archives of up to 50,000 or 100,000 digital objects (pages of manuscript, photographs etc.) without too much effort, even within the framework of a relatively small project. An introduction to these resources was given by Manfred Thaller (Göttingen) in his "Images and Manuscripts as Objects of Digital Systems."
Gerhard Jaritz (CEU, Budapest and Krems, Austria) presented "Digital Image Analysis and the History of Medieval Everyday Life". He showed how to obtain direct access to every described detail of digitalised images, the possibilities of creating and administering digital image "archives", collecting and comparing larger numbers of individual image segment information on different levels in the course of comparative analysis, the integration of background knowledge, and the combination of partial or whole images during the research process.
Axel Bolvig (Copenhagen) also concentrated on "Visualizing History" with the presentation of a digitalised collection of Danish medieval murals.
"Image Processing and the World Wide Web" was the topic of Michael Greenhalgh (Canberra, Australia). He surveyed the techniques involved in imaging, from the various ways of converting images into digital format, to their storage and display on computers, and their provision from various media over the Internet. An important theme throughout these classes was the costs and benefits of distributing images across the Web, both of which were illustrated by the set up of Greenhalgh's operation at the Australian National University, where over 8,000 images are currently available only to local students, and a further 16,000 are available world-wide, together with a variety of important texts and illustrated on-line tutorials.
The thirty participants at CEU's Summer University mainly came from institutions in Central and Eastern European countries, where the readiness to implement computer-supported methods in historical research at universities, libraries, museums and cultural institutions is certainly keeping up with international trends. The course offered a chance for the establishment of professional connections, discussion, and testing of various new methods and possibilities. Medieval studies in Hungary, as in several other countries, have shown themselves as pioneers in the application of the most recent technologies.
C3 incorporates the programs of the SCCA (Soros Center for Contemporary Art-Budapest), leaving the building of the Mûcsarnok (Exhibition Hall), and located now in the Országház utca 9 premises.
C3 functions as a thought-provoking, public center that encourages debate and allows for the free exchange of information on a range of issues insufficiently explored in the public and commercial realm, promoting connections and cooperation nationally and internationally.
C3 intends to act essentially as an interdisciplinary interface for the expanded exploration and creative development of digital media technology, and to operate as a think-tank, uniting Hungarian and international practitioners and theoreticians in new forms of collaboration. As a Center investigating both media archaeology and the potentialities of new technology, C3 provides access to intellectual material as well as to various high-powered computers through which the general public and specialists are introduced to an exploration of the future.
C3 is envisioned as a quality content provider - an experimental laboratory utilizing the latest developments in computer and communications technologies to expand the notions of their functionability and usage, with an emphasis on critical and social discourse from within and without the media. The Eastern European context especially must be highlighted: Eastern Europe, with its totalitarian legacy, is characterized by a critical approach to the media within the media itself, in contrast to the Western tradition, which is more formal and less self-reflectively disposed.
The results of our research and creative experimentation are presented in the Exploration Lab, abroad and on the www server. A primary objective of the Center is to promote the results of C3 projects within Hungary, the region and internationally - the global village - in an attempt to communicate with the broadest public.
Center
for Culture and communication
Országház utca 9.
Budapest 1014, Hungary
Tel: 36-1-214-6856
email:
info@C3.hu