Another bloody loveletter.

"You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets, but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of torture and war." - Don DeLillo

"I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood."  - Rebecca West


"Was that a bomb?" choruses around the room in English accented from Britain, Sweden, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands. My brain whispers the same in my American inflection, but I already know it's untrue. The explosion is too small to be a bomb of any significance, and the human commotion that followed was shouting rather than screams. But the sound also lacked the treble to be a gunshot and so the dozen of us backpackers race to the windows overlooking the bar in the alley below. We hear glasses shattering and see packs of people fleeing the standing tables they inhabited seconds before, and I start heading for the stairwell to make it to the street, to whatever phrase is Bosnian for "crime scene." All of this happens before the tear gas hits Matt's eyes and questions are replaced by a percussion of coughing. And then "tear gas" choruses around the room in English crippled by choking. And as the chemicals find my throat, my tear ducts as I'm shuttering the windows on that floor and up in my dorm room on the one above, I already know with bloodshooting eyes that this is exactly what I've always wanted.

xxxxxxx

I learned about war from Professors Talley and Slayton. From two-hour lectures at 7am three times a week from Killer Miller. From the would'be fathers drowning in mud in The First Day on the Somme and the baskets of severed heads filmed in "Night and Fog." I studied it as a concept in college, in poetic treatises like War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning or immediately before this trip, in My War Gone By, I Miss It So, a memoir dedicated to its intoxicating proximity. But before all this, back when I was nine years old, it was Sarajevo that was my first introduction to war as reality.

Two years earlier I'd seen the night'glow green pulsing across a Baghdad sky. The initial images of the nascent First Gulf War. But that was warfare as abstract. A removed modernity sanitized for primetime audiences. We saw not the cities blooming with bone and meal of the bombs' aftermath on the ground, but the video game visuals of their launch from a desert nothingness. In Eighty'Eight the Wall was breached, then floodgated in Berlin and tanks crawled through Tiananmen the following year, and I watched them both from a brown carpet in the Rust Belt, years before coming to California. They were groundbreaking, flashbulb memories of history, even for a kindergartner, but not war. War came in Ninety'Two, with the fleeing residents of Sarajevo running through Sniper Alley. My first time seeing its true face without relent. Removed by layers of journalism and censorship, but still the images of people sprinting haplessly, chased by trails of their own blood and blossoming bulletholes. Mortars exploding, chunking off concrete and flesh. The idea that cities, and all the implied advancement they stood for, could plunge into total chaos. Could fail so completely its residents need revert back to the terrifyingly basic task of trying to remain alive. This was the first time I had seen this. My first time trying to digest conflict beyond its existence as a theoretical or the was of history. Blood and pavement, a contrast meaning war still existed, and not as tanks in the desert, but assault rifles laying waste to the urban, to the urbane. Shredding all that noble subtlety of the soft j. 

At eight, or even at twelve when the Siege of Sarajevo ended, I didn't understand the complexities involved in what was happening. I grasped it only as a fairy tale for the apocalyptic. Milošević as evil, Bosnia as victim, the grandiose scale of murder as the way to remind the world the barbaric will never leave us. It will just get faster and easier to obtain. Additionally, I was grasping then at the idea that there was no longer any such thing as Yugoslavia. That countries could simply cease to exist. This comprehension would also come later, that nations are constructs of the mind that we buy into without probing. That borders, while often mapped via massacre, are ultimately ethereal, arbitrary if not for the faith we put into them. And that they can fail when enough people cease to play along. When the thousand years of religious and cultural differences anchor heavier than a sixty year old banner. Fractures bandaged in flags are still fractures.

This is how deeply Sarajevo and the exotic poetry of its very syllables has been embedded within me for twenty-one years. A city I was drawn to for all the wrong reasons, even at so young an age. A moving-picture show of the grotesque that indirectly wove me through other points first. To Treblinka and Tuol Sleng. A map's journey traced and sewn through with vein and sinew, finally leading me here. When I felt I was finally ready. 

Most all of its buildings are still besieged, like I witnessed them then. The bullet hole constellations are usually brightest on the south sides of the buildings, the ones facing the former strongholds of Serbian gunmen in the surrounding hills. In decline are the Sarajevo Roses, the sidewalk indentations made from mortar shells and their fragmented blast debris, later filled with red resin as dotted memorials throughout the city center. How little chance those on the ground stood is articulated in the expansive spread of their death petals. That spin'art pattern of violence draped all along the city's main street, Zmaja od Bosne, the Sniper Alley I'd watched people die in nineteen years before. A pair of Roses fade outside the new glass Parliament Building, which replaced the one ignited and gutted by tank'fire during the Siege. Above the dead red petals, a cluster of crisp blue and yellow Bosnian flags snap in the breeze. Maybe not enough to heal fractures, but seeming to work on amputees. On an adolescent country relieved to be separated from the older one it knew. Just down and across from Parliament is the Holiday Inn, the historic headquarters for the journalists covering the Siege on the city. Every news report I watched then, and most of the words I've read on it more recently, were relayed by people camped inside. Its conditions more hovel than hotel as the blockade and the fighting drew on. They stayed doubled, tripled up in rooms on the north side of the building, empty ones to the south shielding them from the brunt of the Serbian onslaught. As it stands today, the distinctive outside was repaired but never remodeled, still trapped in a timewarp to the more optimistic Seventies. A banana yellow topped by an uneven brown the color of carpets in the Rust Belt fading from memory.

That optimism of the late Seventies, of the early Eighties, was seemingly well'placed, as is most optimism without the benefit of hindsight. Eight years before the Siege started and Sarajevo was the capital of the fracturing world, it was center of something more hopeful. The Winter Olympic Games of 1984. The first Olympics of my life, even if at six months I was totally unaware of their existence. Which is what makes Sarajevo more than unfortunate, but impressively tragic. Its fall Shakespearean. In order to drown it, one first had to reach above to grasp it from a pedestal. Our abstractions and exaltations are just as mortal as were are too.

Twenty-nine years after Olympians sped down the bobsled track on Trebević Mountain on their way to various medals, I walked down it with six other backpackers, pushing thin branches of heavy overgrowth aside. Most of the track is bombed out, in both the graffiti and warfare senses of the phrase. On the turns, where the track clamshells over to keep the riders from flying off course, the largest works are displayed. The traditional term is masterpieces, but they're aesthetically not, just chunky letters in backgrounds of six or seven colors. They're usually sprayed in the hope for some sort of immortality, but if that's the intent this isn't a very promising venue for it. In the time between the bobsleds and the spray cans was of course the guns. Because those clamshell turns have a better use than canvas, at least to snipers. Facing north, back towards Sarajevo, back towards Sniper Alley and the too many other vulnerable areas of that Bosnian valley, the assassins here could focus and fire through holes in the track with total protection. That's what became of the first Olympics of my lifetime.

And back down in the east of the city, near the Baščaršija, the old bazaar echoing the Mediterranean markets of centuries more Ottoman, is a stone undamaged by fighting. It was masoned there after the Siege, replacing an older one inscribed solely in ruby Cyrillic. That initial plaque was cemented above another one indented with the assassin's footprints, mock-ups of where Gavrilo Princip stood facing the procession along the Miljacka River that marched the Archduke closer. The red'writ one then, and the bilingual greyscale one now, state the rudimentary basics of that June night in 1914. A simple pronouncement of the deaths of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, while omitting the editorial that they certainly had it coming. The diminutive assassin was nineteen, the Miljacka and the Latin Bridge spanning it both equally tiny. In front of the stone, on that bank, the reflective visitor is awed by history, not only its gravitas but its cruelty, in allowing such negligible components to catalyze a World War that would kill over sixteen million people. Because eighty years before Sarajevo would introduce me to warfare, it would do the same to the once-optimistic modern world.

xxxxxxx

The tear gas canister was the second to hit the same bar that summer, according to the girl from Colorado who'd been staying at our hostel for two months. Some personal dispute with the owner was the rumor going around. The effects on me were minimal past the first ten or twenty seconds, briefer even than the communal confusion of those first instants. Shorter still was the surprise, which here in the Sarajevo I remembered and the one I was finally coming to know, was never really there at all. 

Sarajevo, in photos

Rathaus.

"NO NAZIS" is sprayed in a black tag that anchors the already enveloping grey of the Dresden afternoon. The blue abstraction the words tramp upon has the four curving legs of what could be a swastika unmoored in zero gravity, but without the seven letters to force adjacency I can't imagine anyone making that connection, nor that that was the intent, given that the spore is simply part of a larger modern piece. The words themselves are not street art, just a quickly'scrawled reminder, or apology, or threat, depending on who's reading it.

r.

It's a reminder to the casual visitor. The ones that think any mention of Germany is a welcome segue to the cringe-inducing attempts at jokes. The raised straight arm, a brusque "Heil!" Maybe fingers just beneath the nose to feign that silly little mustache. The people unfamiliar with Germany, or history, or good taste enough to not understand that German is not a synonym for Nazi. It actually never was a synonym for Nazi, in the same way American isn't a synonym for Obama supporter or Tea Party conservative. There's a dangerous laziness to paint history in generalities, assume everything was homogenous in societies far more complex than can possibly be captured in surviving writings or photographs. Far too many Germans then, but certainly not all and in some cities less than half, were members of the Nazi political party for anyone's liking and there still exist some today. Not because the country or its citizens haven't learned anything or want to continue the horrendous actions of the past, but because a small fraction of people in life are just festering, abhorrent creatures. The same reason the Westboro Baptist Church exists, or Al Qaeda, or Rush Limbaugh, or that some people's focus immediately after Sandy Hook wasn't on the victims and their families but on how twenty murdered children could potentially affect their lifestyle. Some people exist simply to be pieces of shit. The more people begin to understand that, the more their grotesque aberrant opinions can be ostracized, and the less we'll need reminders of our own distance from them.

a.

It's an apology to those affected and offended, which is to say essentially everyone. But it's a catharsis I've already had at many stops and studies along the way. To read this message, to hear this apology, isn't why I came to Dresden. The guilt of the Nazi party or of any of the mid-Twentieth Century German people isn't what I think of when I think of this rebuilt city. Rather my mind is on one of the rare but disgusting sins of the Allies. The guilt of our American grandfathers... their peers or their commanders. I came to Dresden to reconcile my American heritage with the fact that in February 1945 we firebombed a city into nothingness for no strategic advantage. That we did it out of spite. Killed twenty-three thousand non-combatants and leveled one of the most gorgeous cities in the world just as an elaborate Fuck You.

Leveled is a euphemism. The scrawled possible apology I'm looking at is in the Neustadt, which translates to "new town" despite it now being the older part of the city. The part that was relatively untouched as British and American bombs turned the more storied cultural center into shards. It wasn't on fire. It was fire. While it raged, the firebombing changed the temperature of the town to up to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. That's eight times hotter than the closest planet to the sun. From the photos I've seen, there wasn't a lot of blood, because there wasn't much moisture left of any kind. Just the hungry vacuum of incineration. 

The Allies would win the war, as they had to, but not because they destroyed Dresden. They'd left the few industrial complexes near the town untouched. It was the buildings like churches, the Semperoper opera house, the traditional royal mansions, that would need to be jigsawed together again from what remained. They went on to win the last Good War assuming it was the Perfect War, ignorant to lessons from Dresden that they should have learned. Which means they were repeated in Royan and My Lai. And so it was their grandchildren who would return on their behalf to the rebuilt Frauenkirche, to the lawns and fountains at Zwinger, to witness the pathetic danse macabre come to an end, and join their German counterparts in carrying the sobering weight of inherited apologies.

t.

The smallest group it speaks to is the most disturbing. The threat to the subject named within. Neo-Nazis do persist in modern Germany, as they do in Orange County, California, the American South, far too many other corners of the world. But Dresden is a notable center for their contemporary movement, and among the many other spray-paint stencils on walls throughout the Neustadt I saw one of theirs. An advertisement to a rally protesting police that would have occurred back in June. For decades they've chosen Dresden as their focal point because of the firebombing. Their flagship rallies, including the largest since the height of World War Two, are typically held on its anniversary, hoping the mourning may be galvanized into anger. Which is the exact problem with unwarranted destruction, lapses in morality on such a grandiose scale. When you kill, you create. And a phoenix is a hateful fucking creature.

They'd exist nonetheless, without Dresdens or Abu Ghraibs to fuel recruitment. But we still shouldn't help buttress their propaganda with obvious transgressions. We should never create more destinations for the more somber of our American grandchildren to have to visit in the future.

The wall in Dresden says NO NAZIS. But the ones in Richmond, Virginia could easily say NO SLAVEHOLDERS. NO KLANSMEN in Montgomery and Sumner. NO MANIFEST DESTINY throughout the nation entire. They should be read as reminders, speak self-aware apologies as long as the buildings stand to serve as canvas. And if they're read as threats let them be strong ones, until those seeing them are too afraid to come around these streets anymore.