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PARTISAN REVIEW
wanted Gennan goods and Gennan living standards.
A year after the Wall went down, at a similar conference on Ger–
many, I might have still been able to give "A View from Yugoslavia," a
single view of Gennany from Yugoslavia. But one year later, the Yu–
goslav image of Gennany fractured into as many pieces as Yugoslavia it–
self did. The most popular tune in the northwestern parts of fonner Yu–
goslavia in 1991 was "Danke, Deutschland," composed in recognition of
Gennany's pivotal role in the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia. One
of the prettiest islands on the Adriatic Coast, Brac, boasted a monument
erected in gratitude to Hans Dietrich Genscher, the ubiquitous Gennan
Foreign Minister credited with mastenninding this recognition in the
face of strong opposition from most of Gennany's partners in the Euro–
pean Community. Taverns all across Croatia were renamed "Genscher"
in the Foreign Minister's honor.
In the meantime, a radically different perception of the new Ger–
many prevailed in the so-called rump Yugoslavia. In the summer of 1992,
as war raged in Bosnia, the Belgrade evening paper
Vecernje Novosti
ran a
story in which the tenants of the Belgrade municipality Zvezdara ex–
pressed relief and satisfaction at the news that dog-catchers had finally
captured and put to sleep a dangerous and ugly stray dog nicknamed
"Genscher" by neighborhood kids. This was reported in the city section
of the paper. For over a year, other sections of this paper and other
government-controlled media had been filled with news stories, political
serials, and commentaries about reunited Gennany's latest Balkan on–
slaught, visions of the Fourth Reich,
Drang nach Osten,
and evil conspir–
acies of world domination. By that time, Genscher had already resigned
as Foreign Minister, but there was no love lost between the Serbs and
his successor Kinkel, either. A few weeks after he was sworn into office,
Kinkel made the following public pronouncement, "We have to bring
Serbia to its knees." A high-ranking Gennan diplomat in Belgrade re–
fused to believe Yugoslav newspaper reports about Kinkel's statement,
reprinted from the
Siiddeutsche Zeitung.
He sent a letter to Bonn to ver–
ify the newspaper reports. He did not have to wait for the official For–
eign Ministry response. Kinkel repeated himself promptly, over and over
again, in his first few weeks in office. To this day, Croatia swears by
Gennany and Serbia curses it. In the country that now calls itself Yu–
goslavia, the only Gennan thing people still swear by is the deutschmark.
In 1991-1992, I was stationed in Brussels as European correspondent
for a Sarajevo daily newspaper and had the opportunity to observe
closely Gennany's role in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Gennany had
pushed assiduously for recognition of the break-away republics of Slove-
