As the narrator Romanian Sebald's fever (Raštan izdavaštvo, 2025) love for his wounded city forced him to be with him, with him, in him, so writer Predrag Đurić, after a ten-year sojourn in Europe, returned to his hometown, which just marked one year since the death of sixteen people under the canopy of the railway station. Đurić writes about that event, as well as student and civil protests, among other things, in this book, which is his seventh novel. Last year it was for a novel Five fat poets received the "Stevan Pešić" award, and was also shortlisted for the Nino award. In addition to literature and journalism, he published three books about comics, two books of interviews with prominent comic authors, 15 comic albums and graphic novels as a screenwriter, and one collection of comic stories. According to his scripts, which have won several international awards, comics have been drawn by artists all over the world.
WEATHER"A writer who has a conscience has no homeland", written by Laszlo Vegel. The narrator in your new novel is an eternal emigrant, who feels exiled from his city of Novi Sad. He sees in Sebald's novels and stories "history of the bey". Do you agree with Vegel??
PREDRAG ĐURIĆ: That's right. One of the main themes of the novel is longing for a non-existent homeland. Or the absence of a homeland that would correspond to our conscience. This is one of the parallels with Sebald, a problem that Sebald also faced throughout his life, starting from his formative years, when he could not accept Germany as his homeland. Of course not in the administrative sense, but the homeland as a place where our conscience finds peace, where we as individuals find refuge. Given that he could not find it in his native region, in his surroundings, his wanderings began. He leaves for England, and with the distance inevitably comes longing. Many outlines of the physical and metaphysical homeland fade, change, and longing turns into another kind of longing, and the physical homeland transforms into some kind of metaphysical homeland. You physically return to it, but you do not find what you expect, just as Sebald did not find what he expected when he returned to Germany and then leaves it forever. However, in his work he cannot escape from his homeland and finds a way to talk about it through the speech of direct or indirect victims of his unwanted homeland. This is how a literary work is created. If you would Sebald's fever could be understood as a tribute to Sebald as a writer, but also as a person, and in a broader sense also as a tribute to all people who are searching in vain for their desired, unreached homeland, then this novel in some way really tries to convey that feeling of permanent non-belonging, because our conscience does not allow us to belong to something we do not agree with. Ancient writers also wrote about the search for the world according to our conscience, the Bible also talks about exiles, it is Hyperborea by Crnjanski, or Tula, which is searched for by the famous comic hero Torgal.
The reader is confronted with numerous testimonies of prisoners of the Buchenwald camp in the Second World War, but also from several camps where Germans from Vojvodina were imprisoned after the war. Is it necessary for a writer to, for an intellectual to be critical of what is happening in society?
An ideal example is probably Thomas Bernhard. However, this is a difficult question. On the one hand, we are taught, almost forced to idealize what surrounds us and to which we belong due to circumstances. In any case, it is the line of least resistance, surrendering to Tagore's "anarchy of fate" against which we do not defend ourselves. On the other hand, we have the more difficult path, the path of the apostate, the exile. Hermann Hesse has a good allegory that in Demian called the "Mark of Cain". It is the path followed by the one who is driven by conscience and who is not satisfied with compromise solutions, the one who sees better, longer paths. In a young individual, for example, you can see all the possibilities that he can achieve if he is given the opportunity to realize them, but this does not always happen, and we can only imagine what this world would be like if every individual were given the chance to achieve their maximum. Today, people have to give up themselves in order to get a ticket to belong to the collective. What would be the alternative to that? That is certainly Sebald's fate.
But also the fate of Shlomo, one of the two heroes of your novel. He is, also, forced to eternal wanderings, although he manages to recognize every possibility for personal change, isn't it?
That is an important part of the novel, the fact that Shlomo changes. He is a repulsive personality at the beginning, but what you noticed is very important to me, that he is slowly and painfully changing and breaking free. This is why we as a society cannot break free. Shlomo admits to himself that he was wrong, and we as a society persistently do not admit wrongdoing (I use the verb noun on purpose). What, in my opinion, characterizes societies that remain trapped in one historical moment is precisely the failure to recognize the mistakes it made in the past. I fear that without a collective willingness to admit mistakes, the shackles will continue to press and suffocate us.
Da, few in our literature spoke about Srebrenica, Vukovar, Sarajevo... You have been in your prose works before, but also in comics scripts, talked about crimes.
The theme of crime always dominates my works in different ways, both through comics and graphic novels. Few people today communicate with the younger audience in that way. Of course, I always need to talk about topics that are crucial for me, but it is not only my deep, personal need, but I think that it is a topic that is one of the most important for all of us in this climate, and more broadly. Some weights, some shackles that we were chained with 30, 40 years ago, are still holding us down and no matter what we try to do, we keep coming back, like a dog that is tied to a chain, so the moment he thinks he is free, that he will be able to walk further, the chain jerks him and he realizes that he is still tied, that he can't go any further, that in a moment he is even further from freedom than he was. It tightens less when the chain is loose - fitting to looseness, and much more when it is tightened to the point of breaking.
Deprived of the freedom we constantly strive for, those chains with which we are chained, which prevent us from enjoying that freedom, Dušan Vasiljev spoke about this beautifully poetically.
The narrator investigates the fate of Whitman, a young illegal immigrant in Novi Sad, under twenty years old, at the very beginning of World War II. He was first imprisoned in Hungary and then ended up in Buchenwald, from which there is no return. In the novel, you also mention the young generation before the First World War, but also the current generation of that age, students fighting for justice. Here it seems that every generation had to fight for freedom...
It was inevitable that I should also write about it. We could also talk about generations from the 19th century, but here we are talking about generations from the last century. I have always been interested in the generation born in the 20s, which World War II caught at an early age. Then, the generation to which I belong and which was in its early youth at the beginning of the nineties and, finally, this young generation which today is fighting for its homeland, which should correspond to our conscience. And here you can recognize Zebald because he is in the book Expats it also speaks to people who survived the war but could not survive the collective silence, which sometimes seemed more terrible to them than what they experienced during the pre-war or war years. There are examples of that in Aleksandar Tishma, d Use a man., when Vera Kroner returns to Novi Sad and has her famous monologue when she remembers her tormentors.
From that flood of words, we understand that she survived the camp more easily than the silence that greeted her after the war.
In your novel, you also wrote about the fact that in some places in Vojvodina they did not welcome the inmates with open arms.
Indeed there are testimonies of this and I have given authentic quotes from their testimonies. It is devastating that a kind of fanaticism reigned then, and it seems to me that even today this fanaticism, although related to other topics, is more and more present. If you go to the camp, you are expected to die, so you become suspicious just by surviving. You cannot return from any captivity, especially from a camp. Returnees from the camps were a daily reminder to such people that they were silent and silently watched how to survive the war in their homes. Not infrequently, returnees from the war passed by as well. They also witnessed the silence, powerlessness, hiding, opportunism of those who were not in the war. They were also undesirable because they constantly reminded people of their conscience.
This novel is also a great tribute to poetry. "A society deprived of poetry turns into a mob", Shlomo speaks, for whom poetry was in some way the initial capsule for transformation, for the question of what he could have done in the circumstances in which he found himself?
I wanted the novel to Sebald's fever poetry has a multifaceted role. On the one hand, it represents something we could call deus ex machina. When Shlomo finds himself in a situation from which there is no way out, when he feels that he cannot deal with the moral side of his personality, with his conscience, he finds poetry and finds meaning in it. Both Dušan Vasiljev and Crnjanski and Andrić found a way out in poetry after the war, in that way they fought against what Crnjanski in Diary about Čarnojević described as "Autumn, and life without meaning". Thus Shlomo finds the only way out of that conflict situation in poetry. Not a solution, but a refuge that allows a person to continue living. Thus poetry becomes the essence of life. Throughout the novel, we also see that Shlomo, as an anti-hero, becomes the narrator's teacher and critic. There are also parallels that are very significant for the story itself, such as the mention of Georg Trakl and his fate, and Izet Sarajlić and his poem "Born twenty-three, shot forty-two". I also used Larkin and the example of his fate, which shows that poetry requires sacrifice. Another dimension of poetry was important to me, and this, I think, is also a key question of literature: how the author himself changes while creating his work. What he learned from his work and from the process of creation itself. For me, the process of creating a piece is always a learning process. And the narrator in the novel wondered what we can learn from the poetry that surrounded us in life, that we chose or that found us and pressed us. Through the narrator, I examined how much his character was influenced by the poetry that accompanied him throughout his life, as opposed to the poetry that Shlomo brings to him. Therefore, it is not only Shlomo who changes in the novel, the writer also changes, creating, but the narrator also changes, although less visibly.
photo: Milan Stojanović...
You just gave a very serious criticism of Novi Sad today through the narrator"There is nothing in that city for a temporary returnee, for another forced alien". But prompted precisely by student and civil protests, he returns feeling changed.
Novi Sad, like every city - not only as a social community, but also in a physical sense - becomes a reflection of society. Just as our face is a reflection of our character, the physical appearance of a city is also a reflection of the society and community that create it. Despite all the ugly things that have happened throughout history, Novi Sad has managed to preserve its special spirit, it has preserved its individuality and its combativeness. It was not by chance that he was declared a City Hero. I often call it that in my novels, and sometimes, when I'm angry, I write "The hero city that surrendered". My criticism of the city goes in the other direction because only those people who genuinely love it can criticize the city. It takes love to feel the need to criticize someone or something. It's hard for you when you see how his characteristics, the best he had, characteristics built on the experiences of generations - multiculturalism, Central European identity, tameness - disappear. Criticism comes in those moments when the city and its inhabitants do not notice in time the disappearance and loss of essential elements of their character and their identity. Or, in case they even notice it in time, there is not enough readiness to defend those values. In recent months, that has been changing. And I would call that "Sebaldism" because every loss of homeland or loss of a city is something that marks an individual. And just as there is always hope for an individual to return, there is also hope for the return of the values that characterized a city. Because Novi Sad has never lost its identity, that identity has only been suppressed from time to time and here it is, in recent months, emerging on the surface. The narrator's undoubted love for Novi Sad forces him to be with his wounded city. He also feels it as his duty.
