Matthew Battles

Library

An excerpt, from Chapter 6, "Knowledge on Fire"

Sarajevo's town hall, an astonishing example of Moorish Revival architecture known as the Vijec'nica, opened on the banks of the Miljacka River in 1896. "Its mix of imposing masonry and architectural frivolity," Kurt Schork wrote in the New York Times, "captured the city's postwar personality." In 1914, Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Sophia, began their fateful car ride at the Vijec'nica; a few minutes later, Gavrilo Princip emerged from the crowd to fire the shot that started World War I. But the building's importance throughout the Yugoslav era rested on its postwar task: housing the 1.5 million books of the Bosnian National and University Library.

At about ten-thirty on the night of August 25, 1992, the Serb nationalist general Ratko Mladic's guns north of the Sarajevo-Pale Road on the high ground of Mount Trebevic opened fire on the Bosnian National and University Library on the river's opposite bank. Residents of the neighborhood of the Vijec'nica reported that the evening's blanket bombardment of the city suddenly gave way to shelling focused on the library. A series of explosions rocked the city as incendiary shells slammed into the roof of the library and fell inside, setting the book stacks on fire.

Many Sarajevans made their way to the library, where they began a furious effort to rescue books from the advancing flames and guide survivors out of the building. One staff member, Aida Buturovic, died in the conflagration. Film taken inside the burning library during the fire shows an inferno raging in the spacious main hall, the air filled with smoke and a snow of drifting, charred pages. As firefighters arrived, they came under attack; soldiers in the hills loosed antiaircraft shells and machine-gun fire that did little damage to the building itself, but cut hoses and firefighters to ribbons. Overnight, Bosnian soldiers pulled books from the library under withering fire from Serb nationalist positions. Rescue efforts continued over the next several days; a fire brigade commander later remembered watching books fly through the air above the library. Onlookers described ash and paper from the library fire filling their courtyard. One Sarajevan told the reporter Kurt Schork that "even on fire the building is very beautiful." The Bosnian poet Goran Simic gathered bits of burned paper as they fluttered down; he later wrote a poem, "Lament for Vijec'nica," which expresses the tragic absurdity of the library's destruction. "Set free from the stacks," he wrote, "characters wandered the streets / mingling with passers-by and the souls of dead soldiers."

The story of Nikola Koljevic, a onetime scholar who rose through the ranks of the nationalist Serb government, tells much about the interwoven motives and resentments that drove the library's destroyers. Before the war, Koljevic had been a noted authority on Shakespeare. Along with his scholarship, he wrote poetry and criticism, and he thrived in the cosmopolitan milieu of Sarajevo. In a story written for the Manchester Guardian in March 1997, the reporter Janine Di Giovanni described how Koljevic turned away from scholarship to embrace Serbian nationalism, rising to become vice-president of the Bosnian Serbs and "Iago to Othello, whispering in [Radovan] Karadzic's ear."

Nikola was not the only notable Koljevic in Sarajevo. His brother Svetozar, an authority on American literature, was beloved by his students and better known than Nikola. In addition, Svetozar, whose wife was a Bosnian of Muslim origin, was more at home in the multicultural lifestyle of a Yugoslav intellectual. When Nikola's son died in a skiing accident in the late seventies, Koljevic descended into a depression that led him to turn to Serbian nationalism and orthodox mysticism. He became an early disciple of the Nationalist Serb leader Radovan Karadzic (who had poetic pretensions himself); with his refined manners and his fluent English, he became an important spokesperson for the cause and quickly gained power. Fleeing with Karadzic to the nearby resort town of Pale in 1992 to set up a Bosnian Serb capital, Nikola Koljevic directed the siege of Sarajevo. To him, it was the Vijec'nica that represented everything he hated about the city: it contained its diverse history and embodied its Ottoman legacy; within its walls the scholarly life, which ultimately had attracted Svetozar but alienated Nikola, thrived. According to Di Giovanni's account, in the end it was Nikola—a former scholar who over many years had made extensive use of the Bosnian National and University Library—who signed the directive ordering Ratko Mladic to shell the Vijec'nica and destroy the library.

Di Giovanni filed her story some six weeks after Nikola Koljevic shot himself. The former vice-president had his reasons: definitely excluded from political power, humiliated by the Dayton accords that ended both the war and the nationalist aspirations of the Bosnian Serbs, he was biding his time, awaiting indictment for war crimes. To acquaintances and colleagues interviewed by Di Giovanni, people whose lives were torn apart by his policies, Koljevic's destruction of the library must have counted among the reasons for his suicide as well. One acquaintance, a scholar who was forced to use his own books for fuel during Sarajevo's long siege, told Di Giovanni about an essay Koljevic had written about Macbeth. "In an attempt to become more than he is, Macbeth virtually destroys himself," Nikola had observed. The scholar paused to reflect. "That sentence," he continued, "can beautifully serve as an epitaph on Nikola's grave."

The Vijec'nica was not the only library the Serbs attacked; its destruction was just one instance in a campaign carried out against Bosnian lettered culture. Three months earlier, Serb nationalists had attacked the Oriental Institute with incendiary grenades; the losses, described by the librarian, scholar, and activist András Riedlmayer, included 5,263 bound manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and adzamijski (Bosnian Slavic written in Arabic script); 7,000 Ottoman documents, primary source material for five centuries of Bosnia's history; a collection of nineteenth-century cadastral registers; and 200,000 other documents of the Ottoman era. The Bosnian National Museum and National Archives of Herzegovina were also shelled, as were the library of the University of Mostar, the Museum of Herzegovina, the Roman Catholic diocesan library of Mostar (50,000 books lost), and, as Riedlmayer has documented, hundreds of other libraries, museums, and architectural treasures throughout Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and, more recently, Kosovo. In this record of destruction, however, the National and University Library of Bosnia represents perhaps the greatest loss; most of its 1.5 million volumes, including over 150,000 rare books, were destroyed. Jeffrey Spurr, Riedlmayer's colleague and the coordinator of a multinational effort to rebuild Bosnia's irreplaceable collections, calls it "arguably the worst single case of deliberate book burning in history in absolute terms." Spurr notes that the library "enshrined the strivings of generations," that the works it contained showed that despite the arguments of Serb nationalists and Western critics alike, "multi-confessional Bosnia had thrived under centuries of Ottoman rule and then decades of Austrian and Yugoslav rule, its inhabitants of whatever background able not simply to live next to but also with each other." And for that very reason it became a target for the guns of the nationalists.

To Riedlmayer, too, the nationalists' motive is all too apparent. "Throughout Bosnia," he has written, "libraries, archives, museums and cultural institutions have been targeted for destruction, in an attempt to eliminate the material evidence—books, documents and works of art—that could remind future generations that people of different ethnic and religious traditions once shared a common heritage. . . ." Riedlmayer has written eloquently about Convivencia, the animating notion of the culture of Moorish Spain, in which the traditions of Muslims, Jews, and Christians were understood to contribute to a civilization greater than the sum of its parts. Similar notions, Riedlmayer argues, once animated the intellectual and cultural life of the Balkans in the Ottoman era. But the Serb nationalists who besieged Sarajevo in August 1992 could not abide so direct a contradiction of the cherished ideals of ethnic purity. "What's odd in all this," Riedlmayer has written, "is the reversal of perspectives—the 'ethnic cleansers' show a keen understanding of cultural and religious factors: these are the main criteria on which they select their targets." Their attempted destruction of Bosnian libraries is cruelly ironic, because it confirms Western prejudices about the intractable mutual hatreds prevalent in the Balkans, even as it erases the very evidence of its contradiction: the rich and varied products of a millennium of cultural and intellectual conviviality in the region. Western peacekeepers, aid workers, and bureaucrats, meanwhile, fail to acknowledge cultural destruction for the harbinger of genocide that it is.

When András Riedlmayer was a child, his family fled the communist takeover of Hungary. Now he is a librarian and a historian whose specialty is Islamic southern Europe. His office in Harvard's Fine Arts Library is a quiet, brightly lit space stuffed with books, binders, and overflowing file boxes. In this office, Riedlmayer and Jeffrey Spurr run the library's Islamic art program and direct a host of projects dedicated to the preservation of Balkan civilization and efforts to bring those who would destroy it to justice. His files hold evidence of war crimes: photographs, witness statements, field notes, and reports documenting the destruction of cultural monuments from Bosnia to Kosovo. Atop a cabinet lie a few covered petri dishes, which also hold evidence: charred remains of the burned books of which András has made himself custodian. The first time I visited him in his office, it occurred to me that András is a librarian of burned books.

Like fragments from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, these cinders bear fragmentary evidence of their origin: on some, the ghosts of letters are visible, blacker than the ashen paper. Larger chunks often consist of fused pages, the edges of which fan in the delicate, telltale manner of a book's fore edge. "It turns out that it's actually very hard to burn books," András tells me with a smile, echoing the bitter lessons frightened German book owners learned when the Nazis came to power. He shows me pictures taken inside shattered mosques in Kosovo: charred books piled waist-high in corners, where they had been doused with gasoline and torched. "The pages of a book are pressed tightly together, which makes it hard for oxygen to feed the fire," András reminds me. "The attackers did not realize this." Many of the books in these photos are beyond repair, and yet retain their shape, and blocks of text are plainly visible in the jumble. Still more, though damaged, could be cleaned and read once again.

The Bosnian Manuscript Ingathering Project searches libraries around the world to locate copies of materials lost during the war in Bosnia, while the Bosniaca Bibliographic Database, built by a broad consortium of university libraries, compiles a bibliography of lost Bosnian materials as the first step in rebuilding a national collection. At the same time, Riedlmayer is also building a database to document the destruction of libraries and cultural monuments in the Balkans for evidentiary use in future war crimes trials. Most recently, he traveled to The Hague to testify in the war crimes trial of the former Serb president Slobodan Milosevic.

Over coffee one afternoon in the summer of 2001, András reminded me of another way to burn books, explained to him by a colleague who survived the siege of Sarajevo. In the winter, the scholar and his wife ran out of firewood, and so began to burn their books for heat and cooking. "This forces one to think critically," András remembered his friend saying. "One must prioritize. First, you burn old college textbooks, which you haven't read in thirty years. Then there are the duplicates. But eventually, you're forced to make tougher choices. Who burns today: Dostoevsky or Proust?" I asked András if his friend had any books left when the war was over. "Oh yes," he replied, his face lit by a flickering smile. "He still had many books. Sometimes, he told me, you look at the books and just choose to go hungry."

Copyright © 2003 Matthew Battles. All rights reserved.