Testaments Betrayed: Essay in Nine Parts, an

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By this time, Mihailo Markovic was clearly the Yugoslav group's leader, and he came to play a crucial role in the revived journal. A fluent English speaker, he was gregarious, cosmopolitan, and urbane. Both his anti-Stalinist and his antifascist credentials were impeccable: He had fought in Tito's Partisan army during World War II and prided himself on extending aid to Yugoslav Jews. In his philosophical work, Markovic emphasized Marx's commitment to human dignity, freedom, and self-realization. It was in Dubrovnik that Habermas, Bernstein, and German philosopher Albrecht Wellmer hatched a plan to revive the Praxis journal that had so interested them in the 1960s. To provide the disfranchised dissidents with a new, international forum for their work could only do the cause of democratic socialism good, the Western philosophers figured. Together with Markovic and Stojanovic, they launched Praxis Internationalin 1981.

Yugoslavia’s six republics and two autonomous provinces were already on a collision course by the mid-1980s, but even the most astute Western observers did not perceive what lay ahead. The most visible sign of trouble was in Kosovo, where martial law had only stoked the flames of ethnic strife. The Serb minority clamored for Belgrade’s attention: In 1985 Kosovo’s Serbs sent a petition to the central government, claiming that Serbs had been raped, murdered, and driven from their homes by the province’s ethnic Albanians. Couldn’t Belgrade do something?

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that last image, is concentrated the entire novel's fundamental situation. . . . This transformation of a man from subject to object is experienced as shame."

Why? After all, according to the Harvard political theorist Seyla Benhabib, “the name Praxis has a distinguished history. It was used by dissidents against Stalinism and identified with the project of democratic socialism.” Sher’s dissertation, later published as Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia (Indiana, 1977), explored what seemed a promising strain of humanist thought emerging from the University of Zagreb and the University of Belgrade. In the 1960s and 1970s, a glittering roster of Western intellectuals attended the Praxis group’s yearly retreats on the Adriatic island of Korcula: Jürgen Habermas, A.J. Ayer, Norman Birnbaum, Lucien Goldmann, and Herbert Marcuse were just a few of those who gathered around the Yugoslav group and served on the editorial board of its eponymous journal. Strange, then, that today the term “Praxis” and the names of some of its leaders are just as often associated with the notoriously anti-humanist rhetoric of Serbian nationalism and the murderous politics of Slobodan Milosevic. This orientation was hardly a Yugoslav invention. If anything, the Praxists took their cue from neighboring Hungary, where Georg Lukacs had amassed a following of like-minded dissidents. Like Lukacs, the Praxists were captivated by the early Marx's theory of alienation. In an ordinary capitalist or a Stalinist socialist society, man was alienated from himself by the commodification of his labor and by the overweening power of a small, privileged class and its institutions. A utopian Marxist society, the Praxists imagined, would overcome that alienation; it would unleash human creativity--or "praxis"--by doing away with the ruling class through self-management. The workers would directly control not only their workplaces but also social and cultural institutions--even local political parties and governing bodies. The state, given enough time, would of its own accord "wither away," just as Marx had predicted. The last noun in 'The Trial': 'shame.' Its last image: the faces of two strangers, close by his own face, almost touching it, watching K.'s most intimate state, his death throes. In that last noun, in In his book, Stojanovic condemns the Milosevic regime’s criminal activity on nationalist grounds: If one shares in collective pride, he reasons, one must also share in collective shame. And he claims that Cosic protested Milosevic’s deployment of brutal paramilitary formations in Croatia and Bosnia. At the same time, however, Stojanovic and Cosic did support Milosevic’s territorial aims. Yugoslavia could not be dismembered along the frontiers of its onetime republics, Stojanovic and Cosic argued. A “deeper map,” they believed, lay submerged beneath the map of Tito’s Yugoslavia; and this true map would account for the swaths of Croatian and Bosnian land that had been populated by Serbs for hundreds of years.History, the Praxists urged, “is made neither by objective forces nor dialectical laws; it is made instead by people, who act to transform their world within the limits of historical possibilities.” So wrote Sher in 1977. In the precarious decade to follow, the Praxis philosophers would indeed transform their world. But the way they did so was not, at that time, imaginable to academics in the West. Who could have known that one of the Praxis philosophers would later become vice president of Milosevic’s party — and its chief ideologue during the Bosnian war? Or that another member, once a passionate critic of nationalism, would sign a 1996 petition calling for the Hague to drop war-crimes charges against the brutal Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, whom the petition dubbed “the true leader of all Serbs”? But, Benhabib protested, Praxis International did not avoid the Palestinian conflict because some of its editors were Jewish. It did so because the Middle East did not fall within its purview. Questions of nationality in Marxist countries, on the other hand, were obviously germane. Stojanovic relented. However, Benhabib notes, “When the article about Kosovo was written, Sveta, who was a moderate man, did not write it himself. It was Mihailo.” This was particularly evident when Puhovski himself edited a special issue of Praxis in 1973. He received a submission from the well-known Serbian novelist Dobrica Cosic. It was a short piece that argued that true socialism was not possible in an unenlightened society and that faith in the people — of which Cosic claimed to have little — was the “last refuge for our historically defeated hopes.” Which people and what hopes? The article did not specify. But Puhovski detected a disturbing nationalist message all the same. Nor was he impressed with the article’s argument or its rigor: “I had the junior approach of believing that philosophy and sociology were specialized fields,” he recounts with a touch of sarcasm. “I didn’t think Cosic’s piece was up to the level. It was bad nationalist propaganda.” He turned it down.

As the 1973 issue of Praxis neared press time, Puhovski was on his own: the editorial board split seven to one in Cosic’s favor. So it was a surprise to many of the Belgrade Praxists' admirers when three key members of the group--Markovic, Tadic, and Zagorka Golubovic--signed a 1986 petition in support of the Kosovo Serbs. Cosic also signed. It was not just that the petition painted a florid picture of Serbian suffering in the southern province. It was also that the signatories obliquely urged the government to revoke Kosovo's autonomous status--something Serbian nationalists had been pushing the parliament to do. After all, the petitioners reasoned, with its "unselfish" aid to the impoverished province, Serbia had amply demonstrated that it took the Albanians' interests to heart. Ominously, the petition's authors intoned: "Genocide [against Kosovo's Serbs] cannot be prevented by...[the] politics of gradual surrender of Kosovo...to Albania: the unsigned capitulation Yet his concern is not so much with the freedom of artists as with the autonomy of what they create. In considering the threats to freedom in our time, he eventually arrives at the idea of shame. "Shame is one of the key notions of the Modern Era," Liberated from fascism by partisan struggle, after 1945, socialist Yugoslavia claimed to offer an alternative to the bureaucratic Soviet model. Although Communist leader Josip Broz Tito remained firmly in command until his death in 1980, his party promised equality among the nationalities, workers’ self-management in industry, and a degree of cultural freedom unparalleled elsewhere in the socialist world. Yet Mr. Kundera's title also refers to the many diverse things that can betray art as a testament. He includes, for instance, the translators who have failed to respect Kafka's use of word repetition and who insist on showing off their skills

The truth was very simple: In multinational Yugoslavia, Tito had deliberately redistributed power from the strong to the weak. And if his belief really was that a strong Yugoslavia required a weak Serbia, perhaps he was not mistaken. Much later, in 1989, when Milosevic finally did enforce Serbian control of its provinces, Serbia emerged strong--and Yugoslavia fell to pieces. The terrible irony in all of this is that the geographically dispersed Serbs may have benefited more than anyone from the years of Serbia's weakness. For of all the Yugoslav nations, only the Serbs needed a unified Yugoslavia more than it needed them. Norman Birnbaum, now a law professor at Georgetown University, explains, “When we went to Yugoslavia at that time, we did think the nationality question had been solved. It was the Titoist truce, or illusion, or parenthesis.” Croatian-born historian Branka Magas puts it differently. The Western leftists who took up with Praxis as late as the 1980s and early 1990s, she says, “never really saw Yugoslavia. They saw self-management. They only saw the country through the lens of what interested them.” The allegiance of Praxis to a united Yugoslavia seemed clear enough. But given the ever present threat of government censorship, there was little that Yugoslav intellectuals published in those years that was completely transparent. The Zagreb philosopher Zarko Puhovski, the youngest Praxist by about twenty years, says that the group’s disputes over politics and ideology were often disguised as conversations about less controversial questions of aesthetics or ontology. “One kind of debate functioned as a replacement for other kinds of debate,” he recalls.