Description

It is often taken for granted that Dubravka Ugresic, Croatia’s most famous political exile, is a writer of fiction. Throughout the 1990s, with the country at war, Ugresic penned vitriolic critiques of both Croatian and Serbian governments and their respective policies of nationalist homogenization. The social impact of these essays has eclipsed much of her other work – such as The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, first published in 1997. Described by critics as a ‘postmodern scrapbook’, this novel offers a reprieve from the polemical nature of Ugresic’s essays and establishes a platform for an aesthetic treatment of the world of exile at the end of the twentieth century. Ugresic’s chosen idiom for this novel is the city of Berlin as a horizon of imagery shared by a broad public. Two particular sites are foregrounded, both in form and content: the museum and the archive. This talk investigates the formal properties of these spaces foregrounding the novel’s aims – and ethical tensions – through the art of (obsessive) collecting.