Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille Anita Lukic University of Pittsburgh Abstract: Adriana Altaras’ autobiographical novel Titos Brille productively challenges the category of the “Eastern turn,” first introduced and formulated by Brigid Haines. Unlike other writers from the former Yugoslavia, who mostly focus on the civil wars of the 1990s, Altaras engages readers through the strategy of double deixis in contextual anchoring. The figure of the dybbuk , which alternately appears as her deceased mother and father, addresses readers in the second person as interlocutors and thereby implicates them in the preservation of Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist legacy. In the context of Western European debates about post-national memory, she inscribes the Jewish experience into the founding myth of socialist Yugoslavia. The reconstruction of anti-fascist and post-national memory opens up a path for southern Slavs to participate in European integration and post-war reconciliation� Keywords: Yugo-nostalgia, Titos Brille , Adriana Altaras, dybbuk , postnational memory Among the new trends in contemporary German-language literature at the turn of the twenty-first century, Brigid Haines identifies the so-called “Eastern turn,” echoing Leslie Adelson’s earlier “Turkish turn,” but also signaling an expansion of the traditional migrant canon� In this category she includes all literary works published by authors from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia since 2000. In her essay, “The Eastern Turn in Contemporary German, Swiss and Austrian Literature,” from 2008, the same year that the Bosnian Saša Stanišić won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, she names five general traits that characterize these works. The first common feature that they share is their content, which spans the period from World War II to the end of the Cold War and its 12 Anita Lukic aftermath. Second, Haines describes their point of view as autobiographical, although the ‘I’ often speaks in the voice of the ‘we.’ Third, the authors intend to inform Western readers about daily life under communism� Marketability, which depends on the interest of Western readers in the perceived exoticism of Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia, is the fourth commonality among these literary works� Finally, Haines considers their narration as more realistic than postmodern and thus characteristic of the so-called “new readability” mode of narration (Haines, “The Eastern Turn” 138—39). Although such generalizations delineate the “Eastern turn” as a distinct trend within contemporary literature, they also obscure important differences among the authors and their works� Haines is sensitive to this issue when she writes: There are of course exceptions to all these generalisations. Not all prioritise accessibility: Zsuzsanna Gahse, Mora, Müller and Stanišić, for example […] have received critical acclaim for their postmodern, writerly prose […]. Not all write autobiographically inspired fiction or are comfortable with the role of cultural ambassador […]. And even those who do draw on their personal experience tend to find, like all migrant writers, that the urge to do so lessens with time� (139) While Haines allows for deviations in point of view, marketability, and narration (or the second, fourth, and fifth traits, respectively), the content and authorial intent remain more or less constant across the various literary works of the “Eastern turn.” Such claims of uniformity, however, are problematic for writers from the former Yugoslavia� In this article, I will demonstrate that Adriana Altaras’ autofiction Titos Brille productively-challenges Haines’s claims about the content of the works by “Eastern turn” writers. Altaras addresses historical and ideological narratives that have been repressed by the post-Yugoslav states through concrete memories of Yugoslavia. However, what makes- her autobiographical novel especially noteworthy is that it- provides a model of the dialogic production of memory- that could ground a postnational understanding of Europe. I will unfold my argument in four steps� First, I shall discuss Haines’s notion of the “Eastern turn” in more detail and argue that Yugoslavia’s history makes it a difficult fit for her categories. Then,-I will summarize Altaras’ novel, especially the scenes in which her deceased parents appear to her as dybbuks , followed by a narratological discussion of her use of the second-person address. Finally,- I will briefly-relate the content of the parents’ memories to the phenomenon of Yugo-nostalgia and conclude by situating my reading of Titos Brille in current debates about post-national memory in Europe� Yugoslavia is unique among other communist countries of the Cold War era because it was not part of the Eastern Bloc. Stalin expelled the Communist Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille 13 Party of Yugoslavia from the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in 1948, which consequently allowed the country to develop better diplomatic and economic relationships with the United States and Western Europe. 1 More importantly, Yugoslavia could keep its borders open to both foreigners and natives, while other Eastern European countries had to close off theirs to prevent their citizens from leaving� 2 Haines acknowledges Yugoslavia for both its openness and special political status when she excludes the country from her definition of Eastern Europe: I use the Cold-War term “eastern Europe” deliberately to emphasise that for more than forty years these diverse countries, from the semi-Balkan Romania to the east-central-European Hungary to the northern European Poland, shared a common history� Yugoslavia, although geographically in eastern Europe, was not part of the Warsaw Pact but was in the Non-Aligned Movement. (Haines, “The Eastern Turn” 136) Haines calls attention to the political difference between Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia due to the latter’s exclusion from the Warsaw Pact by referring to the geographic region called Eastern Europe as “eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia” (135, 142). Such terminological qualifications and differentiations are not the only factors that make writers from the former Yugoslavia outliers within the “Eastern turn.” The focus on the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s tends to erase, however, the unique political status that Yugoslavia gained during the Cold War and to rewrite its socialist past as an inevitable development towards nationalist dissolution. The danger of such a narrow historical view is evident in Haines’s reading of Saša Stanišić’ novel Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (2006). In an attempt to refute critics who have faulted the novel for recycling old clichés about the Balkan country, 3 Haines argues that they are actually “carefully crafted to show that the hatred of the other that emerged with frightening speed at this period came from tensions that had always been present” (“Saša Stanišić” 108). The explanation that Yugoslavia was an artificial country awaiting to implode is based on both new and old stereotypes� Scholars like Maria Todorova and Milica Bakić-Hayden show that the Slavs in the Western imagination always appear violent and backward looking for their readiness to take revenge for old grievances (Todorova 14; Bakić-Hayden 918). More recently, these images have served nationalists in justifying the wars among the different ethnicities in the 1990s (Woodward 21). While Haines’s reading of Stanišić’s novel is problematic for substituting one set of clichés for another, it also demonstrates how the content of writers from the former Yugoslavia is limited to the wars of the 1990s� This is the second factor that distinguishes them from the Eastern European novelists who may reflect in their works on the different temporalities of their 14 Anita Lukic countries: the everyday life of socialism, the transition after the collapse of communism, and the future of Post-Cold War Europe� These differences in content challenge Haines’s third characterization of the “Eastern turn,” which describes the relationship between the readers and the authors. Haines attributes the surge of publications by writers from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia at the beginning of the twenty-first century to the curiosity of their readers: [T]hese texts tend to have a common mission to enlighten and inform Western readers about their eastern neighbors, whether it be to remember the “perfectly ordinary lives” […] lived under communism, or to bear witness to politically caused suffering. Writing in German, a choice for pragmatic reasons - to reach a wider, wealthier audience - or political - some of these writers are simply more confident in their second language - also shapes content in the direction of information giving, as the German-speaking readership cannot be relied upon to have the same store of cultural knowledge as the diverse political readership in their home countries. These aims mingle also with a pragmatic wish to exploit the interest in the lost time and spaces of the communist east. (Haines, “The Eastern Turn” 138) The assumption that Western readers are curious about the lives of their Eastern neighbors is again problematic in the case of Yugoslavia, whose borders, as noted earlier, remained open to foreign visitors during the Cold War period� In order to profit, nevertheless, from these readers, South Slavic writers might be forced to focus on the wars of the 1990s, which, in the history of socialist Yugoslavia, were the events that needed perhaps the most explaining. However, by playing to the readers’ expectations, writers from the former Yugoslavia not only reintroduce stereotypes through balkanization, but they also perpetuate the divide between Western Europeans and South Slavs. There is “no touching,” to return to Leslie Adelson’s “Turkish turn,” between the readers and the writers, only the consumption of more clichés ( Turkish Turn 20)� Adriana Altaras’ literary debut Titos Brille illustrates the relationship that could emerge between the readers and the writers of the “Eastern turn” when the former are addressed not as cultural consumers but interlocutors� 4 As in the case of other writers from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia, Altaras’ biography significantly affects the thematic content of her work. She was born in 1960 in the former Yugoslavia to German-speaking Jews. During the Second World War, her parents fought against the Nazis and their various collaborators (the Italians, the Croatian Ustaša) alongside the Yugoslav partisans, and became active members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. In 1964, the family left Yugoslavia because of an impending trial against her father that was merely a manifestation of underlying but never officially acknowledged anti-Semitism. Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille 15 Altaras’ novel stands out from other works by writers from the former Yugoslavia, for example Melinda Nadj Abonji’s Tauben fliegen auf and Saša Stanišić’s Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert , for two reasons� First, the wars of the 1990s are not the central focus of her biography� Instead, she traces her ancestors’ and family’s journey from Habsburg Vienna to Zagreb and Split, and finally to Gießen and Berlin, and focuses on the fighting that took place during World War II. The second difference is Altaras’ use of the second-person voice, which occurs whenever her deceased parents address her� However, by employing “ du ” (“you”), Altaras addresses readers directly and thus performs what the narratologist David Herman describes as “contextual anchoring,” which is the readers’ search for analogies between the text and the real world (Herman 331). On this understanding, the readers are not passive but active participants in the reading experience. Altaras’ practice of “contextual anchoring” is symptomatic of a certain strain of Yugo-nostalgia because it takes place when the readers are addressed by the pronoun “you” in passages in which the deceased parents speak of their partisan resistance to fascism� The phenomenon of Yugo-nostalgia is a contentious topic among scholars. Zala Volčič, for example, argues that focusing on Yugoslavia’s resistance to fascism during World War II poses a danger to a politics of reconciliation in the post-Yugoslav states. Those who are looking to the 1940s are not taking responsibility for the war crimes committed in the 1990s (“Yugo-Nostalgia” 34). In contrast, Tanja Petrović, among others, contends that remembering Yugoslavia’s socialist past can have a liberating and empowering effect (and affect) on those who feel disenfranchised in the new arena of European politics: the fight against fascism and the resistance to the pressures from both the Soviet Union and the United States should remind former Yugoslavs of their power to self-determination (Petrović 200). Altaras’ work, I would argue, is Yugo-nostalgic in the second manner: its second-person narrative address reminds the readers of the unfinished task of resisting fascism. Altaras’ autofiction weaves together several life stories into a hodgepodge that transcends space and time� First, there is the author’s own biography� Altaras, who was born in Zagreb, was sent to live with her aunt in Italy when she was four years old. She reunited with her parents three years later in Gießen, but the reunion was short-lived, because she immediately went off to a boarding school in Marburg ( Titos Brille 122—23). While readers follow Altaras as she juggles her work at home and at the theater in Berlin in the present day, they also encounter her parents and their life stories. Her father Jakob and mother Thea met for the first time in 1936 in Zagreb and were first separated during World War II, then when he married another woman (for political reasons), and, finally, when each was in exile, he in Zürich, and she in Konstanz (11—34). 16 Anita Lukic Another prominent figure in Altaras’ life is her aunt Jelka, whose life story follows its own unique trajectory. After the liberation of the concentration camp on the Croatian island of Rab, Jelka fled to Mantua with an Italian soldier who had saved her life (113—35). Jelka’s decision to stay in Italy is both an expression of gratitude towards her husband as well as her critical stance against the communist government in Yugoslavia. There are other relatives, in Israel and the United States, but they remain marginal figures. The primary focus is on Altaras’ life in Berlin and her parents’ lives in Yugoslavia before, during, and after World War II. While Altaras narrates her own life story with the confidence of an omniscient narrator, she lets her parents and aunt speak for themselves� These various voices are not just a reflection of a postmodern narrative mode, but rather, and more importantly, an expression of Altaras’ particular identity. In the prolog to Titos Brille , Altaras confesses to her readers that she is “Jüdin,” before also revealing that she was born in “Titos Jugoslawien,” that she was “Vollwaise,” and that she hates “Geheimnisse” (6—8). Altaras’ first-person account of her daily life in Berlin is often interrupted by the appearance of her deceased parents. Their voices are italicized in the text and often occur at night, either waking Altaras up or preventing her from falling asleep. After one such occurrence - the mother has just described her father’s funeral in Zagreb - Altaras finally identifies these voices as belonging to dybbuks . Quoting a passage from a Jewish lexicon, she declares: “Ich bin stolze Besitzerin mehrerer Dibbuks, ruheloser Toter, die mir Gesellschaft leisten, nicht erst, seitdem mein Vater tot ist, nein, eigentlich schon immer” (47). By identifying her dead parents as dybbuks , Altaras invokes a figure from Jewish folklore that has also recently appeared in Jewish women’s fiction. 5 This reference, however, raises more questions than Altaras’ lexicon definition answers: Why are her deceased parents restless? Why was she always in the company of dybbuks ? The Jewish history scholar J.H. Chajes traces the emergence of the dybbuk figure through various religious and cultural traditions to the sixteenth-century rabbi Hayyim ben Joseph Vital, who explains that, souls of the evil dead [ dybbuks ] impregnate bodies of the living because they are unable to enter Gehinnom. Gehinnom, the Jewish precursor-analogue to the Christian purgatory or the Islamic barzakh , was the refinery for a “polluted” soul. There, after death, it could be purged of the dross accumulated over a lifetime of sin before taking its place in the World to Come. The duration of this cleansing was fixed at twelve months according to the rabbinic tradition� Without access to Gehinnom, the most the tormented soul could accomplish was a temporary respite from the afflictions associated with its endless limbo state, a respite provided by the shelter of another’s body� (Chajes 22) Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille 17 Vital’s explanation for why dybbuks enter the bodies of the living expands Altaras’ definition considerably. While Altaras simply describes her dybbuks as “ruhelose Tote,” Vital in this passage associates them with nostalgia in its original meaning. The word nostalgia first appears in 1688 in a medical thesis by Johannes Hofer, who wanted to finally name the disease that was infecting his contemporaries. Nostalgia is, Hofer writes, “Greek in origin and indeed composed of two sounds, the one of which is Nostos , return to the native land; the other, Algos , signifies suffering or grief; so that thus far it is possible from the force of the sound Nostalgia to define the sad mood originating from the desire for the return to one’s native land” (381). At the root of this new disease called nostalgia is homelessness� Hofer describes in his study men and women who have left their home and now feel nostalgia because they cannot return to it (382—83). Dybbuks in Vital’s account, as quoted above, are also nostalgic because they are thrice displaced: they cannot return to their earthly bodies; they cannot enter purgatory for purification; and they cannot find final rest in heaven� In this state of dislocation, they may only achieve temporary refuge when they enter a living person. While Vital specifies that only evil souls become homeless, Altaras suggests that the cause of her parents’ homelessness is the actual loss of their home. They had to leave Yugoslavia in the 1960s because of institutional anti-Semitism, but their dybbuks, unfettered by space and time, continuously return to the familiar scenes of their former homeland� The opening lines of the first chapter in Titos Brille , “mein vater, der held [sic],” reveal that Adriana’s father still thinks about Yugoslavia even after his death: “Wir haben gesungen! Gelacht! - Split! Das war eine Perle an der Adria! Die Dalmatier? Wie Italiener! Laut, fröhlich und vor allem keine Antisemiten. Man hat uns geholfen auszureisen, hat uns versteckt, und wir sind gemeinsam in die Berge. Als Kämpfer! ” (11). The exclamation marks underline the father’s positive memories of his life on the Croatian coast, due in no small part to the fact that he had not yet experienced anti-Semitism. Mixed into this first memory of home is also pride in fighting, not merely hiding. 6 “Ich war Arzt,” explains the father’s dybbuk , [a]ls Jude durfte ich im Krankenhaus nicht mehr arbeiten. Bei den Partisanen natürlich schon. […] Und ich habe Titos Brille repariert! Marshall Titos Brille. Aber das ist nicht alles! Ich habe gekämpft, im Wald geschlafen, wie ein Bär, und ich habe 40 jüdische Kinder gerettet und nach Nonantola gebracht (12) The father’s heroic actions fighting alongside the partisans and saving forty Jewish children become the most important markers of his identity. Throughout her novel, Altaras refers to her father as a partisan (25, 28, 60) and even identifies herself as a “Partisanentochter” (228). Her mother had also joined the partisans 18 Anita Lukic after she was liberated from the concentration camp on the island of Rab, but her relationship to Yugoslavia is more complicated� In the chapter appropriately titled “heimweh [sic],” Altaras contrasts her parents’ different experiences of nostalgia: “Im Gegensatz zu meinem Vater sprach sie nie von Jugoslawien. Sie sprach von ‘den Kroaten’ und ‘den Serben’ und zwei, drei Freunden� Das war’s� Nie vom Land, den Gerüchen, den Leuten, dem Meer. Den Toten. Sie doch nicht. Sie hatte kein Heimweh ” (107). The mother’s verbal breakdown of Yugoslavia into Croats and Serbs - the addition of Bosnians would have made this list complete - undermines the country’s ideology of brotherhood, unity, and multiethnic foundation� 7 The refusal to acknowledge Yugoslavia often goes hand in hand with the forced forgetting of everyday experiences that were outside the purview of politics� Altaras does not suggest that her mother actually subscribes to this post-war nationalistic trend� On the contrary, appearing as her mother’s psychoanalyst, she interprets her mother’s resistance as a repression of precisely the homesickness that she claims she does not have. “Ich habe mich geirrt,” Altaras admits, “[s]ie hatte schreckliches Heimweh. Sie fuhr durch Hessen, als sei es der Balkan. Und sie suchte nach den verlorenen Menschen, nach dem verlorenen Leben, als sei sie wieder zur Sommerfrische auf dem Land, bei ihrer Tante Alma und ihrem geliebten Onkel Marco” (107). While her mother’s dybbuk does not remember any heroic partisan actions like her father’s dybbuk , her mother still shows readers the lost life - “dem verlorenen Leben” - through narratives about her childhood and adolescence in Zagreb (67—69). The most striking narrative feature of the dybbuks is their use of second-person address, which underscores the dialogic form of Altaras’ work� In many instances, the “you” is directed at Altaras by her parents when they speak to her. For example, when the father’s dybbuk explains his decision to leave Yugoslavia, he addresses Altaras directly by her first name: “Weißt du , Adriana , mit den immergleichen Anklagen - Zionismus und Kosmopolitismus - waren die Juden doch die Ersten, die aus der Partei herausgefiltert wurden. Ich war weiß Gott nicht der Einzige! ” (25; my italics). Similarly, the mother’s dybbuk interrupts Altaras through direct address while the latter is reading, “ Adriana , was liest du da,” before proceeding to describe the family villa in Zagreb (67; my italics). In both examples the deictic reference is contextualized by direct reference to the narrator. Elsewhere, the references to the “you” reach beyond the fictional world to address readers directly, even when they are still framed as conversations between the narrator and her deceased parents. In one such example, Altaras provides the following setup for a conversation with her father’s dybbuk : “Mitten in der Nacht steige ich ins Auto und fahre nach Gießen. Es ist eine merkwürdige Fahrt, die Reise zu einem Toten, zum toten Vater� Ich bin Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille 19 unnatürlich wach, unterhalte mich mit ihm. Und irgendwie antwortet er. Das ist tröstlich” (15). What follows this matter-of-fact description is a joke set in italics: Kennst du den Partisanenwitz mit den Bären? Ein Mann hat einen Bären an der Leine. “30 Dinar für den Bären! 30 Dinar! ”, schreit er auf dem Marktplatz. “Schön”, sagt ein Passant. “Aber wofür? Was kann der Bär? Kann er tanzen? ” “Nein.” “Aha. Kann er auf einem Bein stehen? ” “Nein! ” “Was kann er dann? ” “Nichts, aber er war im Wald! ” (15) Through the setup and typeface readers may infer that the father’s dybbuk tells Altaras this joke, which plays on the metaphor that partisans lived in the woods like bears when they were hiding from the Nazis� Although the meaning of the joke might be lost on readers who are not familiar with this cultural reference, the dialogic form of the joke still positions them as interlocutors� In another instance, Altaras organizes her father’s first visit to Yugoslavia since leaving the country in 1964: “Und so standen wir eines Tages im Juni an der Promenade in Split� Er schnappte sich einen Enkel und lief los� Traumwandlerisch bewegte sich dieser alte Mann durch die Gassen der Altstadt� Keine Abkürzung, kein Versteck hatte er vergessen, er war Kind und Greis in einem” (141)� At this point Altaras’ narration is interrupted by her father’s dybbuk , whose speech is again set in italics: Hier an dem mittleren Fenster haben wir gesessen, auf dem Peristil-Platz haben sie im Sommer alle großen Opern gespielt. Die gesamte Riege italienischer Tenöre hat hier gesungen! Mario del Monaco? Mein Freund! Merkst du, wie es hier stinkt? Drunter ist Schwefel! Das mögen die Fliegen nicht, deshalb ist unsere Fischhalle die einzige auf der Welt ohne Fliegen und Mücken! Sagenhaft! (142) The father’s dybbuk describes the familiar scenes of his childhood in the Croatian coastal town of Split, even calling attention to the smell of sulfur. Through the second-person address in the second paragraph, he directs his interlocutor to a sensory experience that is tied to a particular place in Split. While the “du” is probably directed at Altaras, it must have been initially addressed to one of his grandsons, who was the occasion for this outburst of deictic references (the word “hier” occurs three times). Syntactically, therefore, Altaras is in the same position as her readers, who are only now being asked to pay attention to the smell of sulfur. Here, as in the previous example, the dybbuk ’s second-person address positions both Altaras and her readers simultaneously as listeners� 20 Anita Lukic David Herman fittingly calls this form of double address “double deixis” because the single pronoun “you” may refer to a character in the fictional world or a reader in the actual world (Herman 352). “Doubly deictic you ,” he explains, “ambiguates virtualized and actualized discourse referents, or rather superimposes the deictic roles of non-participants and participants in the discourse, thus reweighing both terms in the text-context relation itself” (352). The destabilization that occurs between the fictional and extra-fictional world (or text and context in Herman’s terms) due to the intercutting of double deixis is part of the process that Herman calls “contextual anchoring,” “whereby a narrative, in more or less explicit and reflexive way, asks its interpreters to search for analogies between the representations contained” both in the story world and the real world (331). Through the doubly deictic “you,” in which the second-person address to a narratee-protagonist overlaps with an address to the actual readers, the text determines in part how it wants to be read. In the case of Altaras’ Titos Brille , the text directs readers to take the position of interlocutors through the dialogic form of her dybbuks ’ address. The particular interpretive framework through which readers are supposed to engage with the text is provided by Altaras’ experience as interviewer for the Shoah-Foundation� As part of her training to conduct interviews with Holocaust survivors, Altaras received the following guidelines, which she cites in quotation marks: Auf dem Weg zu den Interviews schiebt alles beiseite� Nichts ist mehr wichtig, was euch, euren Alltag betrifft, es geht nur noch um die Person, die gefragt und gefilmt wird. Lasst euch Zeit. Lasst sie reden. Überprüft, was sie beim Vorinterview gesagt haben, was jetzt� Sie werden Dinge vergessen, bewusst auslassen� Wenn sie Zeiten, Orte verwechseln oder sie durcheinanderbringen, hakt nach, behutsam, eventuell auch mehrfach. Aber wenn sie nicht wollen oder können, lasst sie in Ruhe. Es sind ihre Erinnerungen, auch wenn sie “ungenau” sind. ( Titos Brille 237) By directly quoting the instructions that the Shoah-Foundation developed for the interviewers, Altaras once again addresses her readers in the second person, only this time in the plural and as a collective, in which she includes herself� Throughout Titos Brille , readers have the occasion to engage with the text in the same way that Altaras engaged with her interviewees� When her dybbuks address themselves through the doubly deictic “you,” they do so in breaks requiring readers to take the time to hear their story. Her father’s dybbuk describes how he saved forty Jewish children over the span of five pages because he speaks at intervals, although the text encompassing the story could fit on two pages (11—16). Altaras also interlaces the text with documents, thus inviting readers to check what her parents’ dybbuks say against a record. For example, the mother’s dyb- Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille 21 buk had already described her childhood and adolescence in Zagreb (67—69), when six chapters later, in the chapter appropriately entitled “aktenberge [sic],” Altaras provides a copy of a letter that a former employee of her maternal grandfather wrote and that redescribes the family’s life in Zagreb (164—66). Even the admonition at the end that interviewers should not dismiss their interviewees’ memories when there are gaps and/ or inconsistencies seems appropriate in the context of reading the dybbuks � Her father’s dybbuk claims, for example, that he had repaired Tito’s glasses when in fact Tito did not wear glasses, as Altaras finds out from a waiter (9). If readers are thus positioned to read the dybbuks with care and respect but also critically, then the relationship between the readers and the authors that Haines outlined and attributed to the “Eastern turn” does not apply here. Haines describes the writers from Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia as cultural ambassadors who aim to enlighten their readers about life under communism and thereby profit from their curiosity about Eastern Otherness (“Eastern Turn” 138). This implicit agreement between the readers and authors only allows an exchange of information and translations of cultural differences. While Altaras’ novel might perform some of the same functions, it also, and more importantly, addresses the readers directly and implicates them in a reconstruction of Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist legacy� This legacy is part and parcel of the phenomenon of Yugo-nostalgia, one of several local variants of the so-called “red nostalgia” wave that has spread across former communist countries� 8 Nostalgia for the former Yugoslavia emerged after the civil wars of the 1990s as a reaction against the national narratives of the newly-formed states which were on a dual mission: first, to refute the Yugoslav ideology of brotherhood and unity, since any traces of it would have made the wars of the 1990s questionable; and, second, to ground their new identities in symbols and narratives that were antithetical to Yugoslav culture and history, so as to make the wars appear inevitable� Against the distortions and falsifications, ex-Yugoslavs have tried through a variety of medial strategies to preserve the memory of their country� 9 Altaras’ novel allows the readers to take part in this project of preservation and to reconstruct Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist legacy in new and productive ways. By inscribing the Jewish experience into the founding myth of socialist Yugoslavia through the figure of the dybbuk , she reintroduces anti-fascist resistance into discussions about post-national memory in the European context. Scholars agree that the founding myth of post-war Europe was the Holocaust� 10 In his essay on memory and nation building, “Postnational Relations to the Past: A ‘European Ethics of Memory’? ,” Benjamin Nienass describes the various institutions and laws that European countries have introduced to assert 22 Anita Lukic a post-national collective memory and community with three central aims: to commemorate the Holocaust, fight racism and anti-Semitism, and criminalize the denial of genocide (45). Although European countries have different national histories, they all share the same procedures for remembering the past. The “ethics of memory,” as Nienass calls this particular memory discourse, might appear to avoid the problems associated with finding a shared content for collective memory, but it has recently been criticized for prescribing how countries must interpret their past. One example that Nienass cites is Turkey’s negotiations for EU membership, which was in part contingent on Turkey’s admission of the Armenian genocide (49)� Against the limits of both post-national memory content and ethics, I suggest in conclusion that Altaras’ literary debut Titos Brille makes the case for a reflective return to the anti-fascist myth that had legitimized much of postwar Europe. Through the dybbuk figure, Altaras integrates the South Slavic countries into the discourse on the collective memory of Europe� If readers listen, they might just reclaim what has been institutionalized for them. “Ich, die Partisanentochter, muss in den Widerstand,” Altaras proclaims after she learns that the current Croatian government still refuses to return her family’s property, which had been confiscated by the Ustaša ( Titos Brille 228)� What follows this internal self-identification is an act of affective defiance when she shouts, “FASCHISTEN! ” (229). Altaras knows - and this is important - that this defiance is not her own: “[ J]ede Pore meiner selbst war Widerstand, doch nicht mein eigener Widerstand, sondern geerbter � Ich war die Partisanin von 1941, die im 21.-Jahrhundert weiterkämpfte” (62; my italics). It is through her parents that Altaras has inherited this anti-fascist resistance and through their dybbuks that her readers can share in this experience. Notes 1 See Lampe 233—65 for a detailed discussion of the Tito-Stalin split. 2 Between January and November 1948, twenty-two percent of all foreign visitors to Yugoslavia came from Western Europe (Tchoukarine 110)� In addition, between 1968, the year that Yugoslavia signed a labor agreement with the West German government, and 1973, 500,000 Yugoslav “guest workers” were employed in the Federal Republic of Germany (Shonick 719—20). 3 See Iris Radisch’s review of Stanišić’s novel. 4 While Titos Brille has received some attention in the German feuillteons (see Mangold; Bazinger), to my knowledge, only one scholarly article (Hitzke and Payne) has discussed the work in the context of post-Yugoslav fiction. 5 See Legutko� Reconstructing the Anti-Fascist Legacy in Adriana Altaras’ Titos Brille 23 6 After Germany invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, it established a fascist puppet state in Croatia in 1941� From its inception the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) tried to systematically annihilate the Jewish populations in both Croatia and Bosnia. “Underlying these persecutions,” the historian John Lampe explains, “was the racist assumption that Croats were Aryans of Goth or Iranian origin who would be contaminated by contact with non-Aryan Jews or Slavs” (212). While South Slavic Jews, like Altaras’ parents, were persecuted in Croatia and Bosnia, they could find refuge among the communists who made up the multiethnic National Liberation Army (also known as the Yugoslav partisans) under the command of Josip Broz Tito, who became Yugoslavia’s long-running president after the Second World War� 7 Yugo-slavia consists of two words, one meaning South and the other Slav in Serbo-Croatian, and thus encompasses a wide variety of ethnicities to be found on the Balkan Peninsula. The National Liberation Army was the only organization that could underwrite the ideology of such a multiethnic state in post-war Europe. As Richard Mills explains: “In a series of conflicts that featured hegemonic nationalist extremists intent upon the acquisition, retention and forcible nationalisation of ethnically diverse territories, one multiethnic programme - that of Tito’s communist partisans - became increasingly attractive to people of all ethnic denominations” (1110). 8 See Velikonja 2008� 9 See Bošković for a more detailed analysis of Yugo-nostalgia, and a description of the famous Lexicon of Yu Mythology , which to this day publishes entries from private individuals about their everyday memories of Yugoslavia� 10 See Leggewie� Works Cited Adelson, Leslie� The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Grammar of Migration � New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005� Altaras, Adriana� Titos Brille: Die Geschichte meiner strapaziösen Familie � Frankfurt a�M�: Fischer, 2012� Bakić-Hayden, Milica. “Nesting Orientalism: The Case of Former Yugoslavia.” Slavic Review 54.4 (1995): 917—31. 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U of Nebraska P, 2002� Hitzke, Diana, and Charlton Payne. “Verbalizing Silence and Sorting Garbage: Archiving Experiences of Displacement in Recent Post-Yugoslav Fictions of Migration by Saša Stanišić and Adriana Altaras.” Edinburgh German Yearbook 9�1 (2015): 195—212. Hofer, Johannes. “Medical Dissertation by Johannes Hofer, 1688.” Trans. Carolyn Kiser Anspach� Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 2.6 (1934): 376—91. Lampe, John R. Yugoslavia as History: Twice There was a Country . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000. Leggewie, Claus. “The Seven Circles of European Memory.” Eurozine.com 20 Dec� 2010� Web� 1 Oct� 2018� Legutko, Agnieszka. “Feminist Dybbuks: Spirit Possession Motif in Post-Second Wave Jewish Women’s Fiction.” Bridges 15.1 (2010): 6—26. Mangold, Ijoma. “Der Rest: In ‘Titos Brille’ erzählt Adriana Altaras ihre Familiengeschichte.” Zeit Online 25 Aug� 2011� Web� 10 Oct� 2018� Mills, Richard. “Velež Mostar Football Club and the Demise of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ in Yugoslavia, 1922-2009.”- Europe-Asia Studies 62.7 (2010): 1107—33. Nienass, Benjamin. “Postnational Relations to the Past: A ‘European Ethics of Memory’? ” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26.1 (2013): 41—55. Petrović, Tanja. Yuropa: Jugoslawisches Erbe und Zukunftsstrategien in postjugoslawischen Gesellschaften � Trans� Aleksandra Bajazetov� Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2015� Radisch, Iris. “Der Krieg träft Kittleschürze.” Zeit Online 5 Oct. 2006. Web. 22 Oct. 2018. Shonick, Kaja. “Politics, Culture, and Economics: Reassessing the West German Guest Worker Agreement with Yugoslavia.”- Journal of Contemporary History 44�4 (2009): 719—36.- Stanišić, Saša. Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert . Munich: Luchterhand, 2006. 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