Telling Histories of Violence without Borders

2019

laura shannon prize lecture

Telling Histories of Violence without Borders

occasional paper, volume 4

Telling Histories of Violence without Borders Max Bergholz Associate Professor of History, Concordia University 2019 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies Nanovic Institute for European Studies Keough School of Global Affairs University of Notre Dame November 21, 2019

Copyright Š 2020 by Nanovic Institute for European Studies Keough School of Global Affairs University of Notre Dame Printed and bound in the United States of America ISBN: 978-0-9975637-1-9 First Edition, First Printing

Table of Contents

Preface and Introduction

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Mark T. Kettler

Telling Histories of Violence without Borders

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Max Bergholz

Exhibits

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Post-Lecture Discussion

37

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Preface and Introduction Mark T. Kettler Postdoctoral Research Associate Nanovic Institute for European Studies The Laura Shannon Prize is awarded annually to the “best book that transcends a focus on any one country, state, or people to stimulate new ways of thinking about contemporary Europe as a whole.”

Given this description, it may seem curious at first to bestow the 2019 prize on Max Bergholz’s Violence as a Generative Force. After all, it centers on Kulen Vakuf, a small region in the west of the Independent State of Croatia. Indeed it focuses intently on a few months in the autumn of 1941, when neighbors who had generally lived peacefully in multi-ethnic communities suddenly perpetrated a series of horrific massacres and reprisals, claiming the lives of hundreds of men, women, and children.

Readers quickly discover, however, the profound implications of this study for how we understand, even how we talk about, instances of mass violence against civilians, both in Europe and globally. Many accounts of mass violence or “ethnic conflict” default to a basic explanatory shortcut. They assume on some level that the outbreak of mass violence among neighbors can be meaningfully attributed to deeply held ethnic grievances, prejudices, and hatreds between very distinct communities. This is a rather comforting explanation for outside observers. It allows us to imagine that mass violence only occurs—can only occur—among peoples torn by decades of unresolved strife among nationally-atomized communities, or, as we sometimes call them, “Balkanized” societies. Mass violence happens “over there.” We are safe.

By deftly analyzing the escalating cycle of violence in Kulen Vakuf, Bergholz arrives at an unsettling but important conclusion. He demonstrates that ideological indoctrination, deep ethnic cleavages, and long-nurtured hatreds often played little role in motivating those

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who actually perpetrated killing locally. Instead, violence itself recast social relations among neighbors in Kulen Vakuf, shearing multi-ethnic communities and steeling previously malleable ethnic identities.

Bergholz also directs our attention away from staid debates about the intention and premeditation of mass violence. Once unleashed, mass violence in Kulen Vakuf provoked a dynamic of escalation difficult to foresee and impossible to control.

This is already a remarkable achievement in scholarship. But Bergholz goes further, investigating how memories of violence can persist, or even surge, decades after the event, sometimes reinforcing these Manichean ethnic and political categories. In doing so, his work meaningfully contributes to how we understand the collective memory of trauma. This intervention could hardly be more timely, as nationalized narratives of perpetration and victimhood are hotly contested in Poland, Ukraine, and across Eastern Europe.

These achievements distinguished Violence as a Generative Force from a field of highly accomplished books. The final jury’s citation reads, in part: Restrained, humane, and beautifully written, and drawing intelligently on ethnography, psychology, and genocide studies, Violence as a Generative Force deserves to be read not only

by Europeanists but by anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of mass violence.1 Students of mass violence will reflect upon Bergholz’s insights for years to come.

1. “Nanovic Institute Awards Laura Shannon Prize to Max Bergholz,” Nanovic Institute for European Studies, January 17, 2019, https://nanovic.nd.edu/news/nanovic-institute-awards-laura-shannon-prize-tomax-bergholz/.

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Telling Histories of Violence without Borders Max Bergholz Associate Professor of History, Concordia University

I’m a historian of modern European history, and my main research interests are the local dynamics of violence, nationalism, and historical memory. My primary research sites are regions in the South Slavic lands, and, in particular, the areas that today consist of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia. These are parts of Europe that most historians and history departments in North America do not consider to be of central importance to the telling of the continent’s modern history, aside from briefly mentioning their place in explaining the outbreak of the First World War. So, on first glance, it may seem strange that I have been awarded this prize since many people might assume that my work does not concern the areas and subjects that most people would consider as central to the telling of Europe’s modern history.

But my book on the dynamics of violence, identity, and memory in a small Balkan community has won not only the Laura Shannon Prize, but also a number of other prizes, most of which were from organizations with no connection to Balkan or Slavic studies. This success surprised me and my editor at Cornell University Press, who actually remarked to me in an email back in 2015, when he was considering the manuscript for publication: “If we actually manage to publish this 400 plus page book on the history of a small corner of northwestern Bosnia during only a few months of violent history, then you and I will be very lucky to still have our day jobs.”

My sense is that my book has been successful not because of a widespread interest in the history of Bosnia nor because there is some growing imperative in North America to more generally study Balkan history. Rather, the reason would have to be because of the book’s more portable findings, especially its methodological orienta-

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max bergholz tions, which I think can be useful to historians and other scholars who study violence in very different contexts, and not only in Europe.

What follows is less about the specifics of my book and more about what I learned from a methodological standpoint during the decade I spent researching and writing it. Specifically, I want to reflect about three issues that arose during my work, all of which are rooted in the notion of crossing borders: first, the need to surmount disciplinary provincialism when studying violence; second, the importance of establishing a sense of place when writing about violence; and third, the challenge of practicing historical empathy when telling histories of violence.

Before I turn to a discussion of these subjects, I want to tell a story about the origins of my book in order to provide a context for these broader ideas. The moment when the journey of writing my book began was on a warm and sunny afternoon in September 2006, even though I didn’t know it at the time. I was in the Archive of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo conducting research for my doctoral dissertation on local struggles over how to remember the intercommunal violence of the Second World War in Yugoslavia. I was searching for a third local case study to go along with those that I had already researched from 2004 to 2005 in Serbia and Croatia. I thought I was nearing the end of my doctoral research.

On this afternoon I was unexpectedly given access to one of the archive’s basement storage depots. The archivists let me in for about fifteen minutes after they grew tired of dealing with my constant requests for materials they had difficulty locating.

This unusual opportunity arose due to a specific set of conditions.

After all of this research during the previous two years in Serbia and Croatia, I knew which sources I was looking for when I came to Bosnia.

There was a certain set of files generated by a veterans’ organization.

Among other activities, its members were involved in building monu-

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telling histories of violence without borders ments and creating physical manifestations of historical memories of war from 1945 until the early 1990s.

During the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina—from 1992 to 1995— there had been changes in the archive’s staff; some had left the country, while others had retired since the end of the war. Much of the archive’s staff was new by the time I arrived in 2006, and they basically told me that they simply could not locate the files for the veterans’ organization that I was looking for. But I knew from conversations with others in the region that none of the files I wanted to examine had been destroyed during the war.

I kept dropping by the archive every day to inquire whether the archivists had managed to find the files. I was being politely irritating, and soon the archivists became irritated with me. One day I heard the person responsible for the archive’s reading room say: “Just let the Bergholz guy down into the basement to look for the files himself—I’m tired of seeing his face!”

An archivist took me down to the basement and then opened the steel door of one of the many storage depots. I heard a light switch flick, and I expected the room to light up. Instead, just a few light bulbs lit up, some of which were flickering. It was very dim, and I strained to see the many shelves of documents and boxes. The archivist handed me a flashlight and simply said: “I think what you’re looking for might be down there…,” and pointed me toward a set of shelves filled with stacks of uncatalogued documents bound in string.

Then I heard the following words: “You have fifteen minutes.” Still staring into near darkness of the storage depot, and trying to take in the enormity of the amount of materials in there, I asked: “Why only fifteen minutes?” The archivist casually replied: “Because I’m going to coffee with my colleagues in fifteen minutes, so that’s all the time you get.” This unprecedented opportunity to search for files was therefore structured by when the archivists’ morning coffee break was going to take place.1 1. On this experience in the archive’s basement, as well as in another archive’s storage depot in northwest Bosnia, which in crucial ways led to the writing of my book, see Max Bergholz, “Archives in Bosnia in Minutes 3

max bergholz Without further hesitation, and very conscious of the precious minutes ticking by, I began my search for the files. After about ten minutes, while I was sifting through a stack of uncatalogued documents with a flashlight, the hand-written words on a handful of blue folders (fig. 1) stopped me in my tracks.

The words on them were unusual and caught my eye: “Sites of Mass Executions, 1941-1945.” I had stumbled upon a confidential communist government investigation that had been compiled during the first half of the 1980s. According to the law in Bosnia on the use of archival documents, at least thirty years must elapse from the time a document is created until it can be made available to researchers.

I was not supposed to have access to this report. With that in mind, I grabbed it from the shelf and brought it back to the archive’s small reading room. And I began to read.

The papers inside mentioned repeatedly a town and surrounding community that I had never heard of: Kulen Vakuf, a small town and its surrounding villages, all of which straddle the historic border between present-day northwest Bosnia and Croatia.2 At the heart of this region is the Una River, which flows through the town of the Kulen Vakuf. Due to a specific content of sediment, and the pure quality of the river’s water, the Una often appears emerald green, especially when the sun shines down. It generally flows along softly; if you stand on one of the bridges that span its banks, you can hear it quietly gurgling. Here and there, it bursts over spectacular waterfalls. But mostly, the Una flows gently and is visually mesmerizing due to its magnificent colors.3 The documents in the blue folders told that during two days and nights in early September 1941, this stunning natural world had transformed into a site of mass death. The documents indicated that approximately 2,000 people—men, women, and children “of and Hours,” Sage House News: The Cornell University Press Blog, February 16, 2017, https://sagehouse. blog/2017/02/16/archives-in-bosnia-in-minutes-and-hours/.

2. See fig. 2-4.

3. See fig. 5-6.

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telling histories of violence without borders the Muslim population”—were killed by their neighbors, who were described as “insurgents” and “Serbs.”4 The documents offered only a glimpse of this multi-ethnic community’s sudden descent into intercommunal violence. But I immediately had a very strong feeling that I had stumbled upon a story of potentially great significance. And it eventually grew into my book, Violence as a Generative Force.5 The major reorientation that began that afternoon in the archive’s basement ultimately dragged me away from my original interest in the local dynamics of remembering violence and pushed me toward the challenge of explaining the causes, dynamics, and effects of local violence. Slowly, my interest came to focus on a forty-eight-hour period, during which these 2,000 men, women, and children disappeared: some were shot to death; others were butchered with farm tools; some were drowned in the emerald green waters of the Una River; others were thrown into the darkness of deep vertical caves.

I became fixated on reconstructing and explaining those terrifying forty-eight hours when this killing took place.

Yet doing so slowly pulled me further and further into the past.

I soon learned that those forty-eight hours could not be explained without first reconstructing the destruction of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941, and then the subsequent creation of the fascist Independent State of Croatia, and its policies of ethnic discrimination and violence, during the spring and summer of that year. Explaining those transformations led me back to the political struggles of the first Yugoslavia during the 1930s and 1920s. Excavating the dynamics of social conflict and cohesion during the interwar years led me to the period of Austro-Hungarian rule from 1878 to 1918, 4. Arhiv Bosne i Hercegovine, Fond Saveza udruženja boraca Narodnooslobodilačkog rata Bosne i Hercegovine, Osvrt na pregled stratišta i žrtava fašističkog terora i njihove obilježenosti u Bosni i Hercegovini, November 1986, 4; Pregled stratišta i žrtava terora u Bosni i Hercegovini, September 1985, 2, 4-5; Obrazloženje tabele (undated document, most likely from June 1985), 5.

5. See fig. 7. Max Bergholz, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2016); in Bosnian translation: Nasilje kao generativna sila: identitet, nacionalizam i sjećanje u jednoj balkanskoj zajednici. Trans. Senada Kreso (Sarajevo / Zagreb: Buybook, 2018).

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max bergholz and then to the preceding centuries of Ottoman rule, during which the town of Kulen Vakuf was established at the end of the seventeenth century on a small island in the Una River.

I kept turning back in time in pursuit of evidence. Once I felt like I had excavated nearly everything I could find about the history of this Balkan community, I then switched directions and began writing the story of Kulen Vakuf forward in time, towards the summer of 1941, and finally returning to where I began—to those forty-eight hours in early September of that year.

But doing so presented me with a huge challenge: to tell the history of this community, in which shocking levels of intercommunal violence would take place, but without doing so in a deterministic way, as if local residents seemed destined to destroy one another because of nominal cultural differences and something called “nationalism.� The best way forward, it seemed to me, was to use the snapshot in the blue folders of the killings in Kulen Vakuf as a microlens through which to embark on a search for answers to questions of global significance.

The two main questions that frame this book are: What causes intercommunal violence among neighbors in multi-ethnic communities?

How does such violence then affect their identities and relations?

Violence as a Generative Force represents the culmination of my search for answers to these questions.

One of my overarching objectives in writing this book was to tell the story of this largely unknown Balkan community in such a way that it might appeal to readers with interests in the dynamics of violence across time and space. As I conducted my field research, as I read secondary literature, and as I began writing, I increasingly felt that a first potentially fruitful way of realizing that objective would be to try to write in the margins of the scholarly disciplines from which I was drawing inspiration. These included not only the genre of microhistory, or local history, but also various subfields within political science, as well as social psychology, sociology, and anthropology. My main 6

telling histories of violence without borders motivation in trying to open up productive space in the borderlands of these disciplines was the challenge I mentioned earlier of finding a way to tell the story of this Balkan community with an acute sense of historical contingency, rather than determinism.

I came to identify this challenge through my reading of the historiography about mass violence in this part of Europe during 1941.

Until recently, historians have devoted little sustained attention to explaining the intercommunal violence that took place in the fascist Independent State of Croatia (or NDH, as it is known in the region, which stands for Nezavisna Država Hrvatska). This was the new state that the Kulen Vakuf region was incorporated into in April 1941.6 A striking characteristic among works in South Slavic languages is how the description of violence overwhelmingly substitutes for explanation. Many authors decontextualize killings by stringing together acts of violence against a particular “ethnic group” from different locations and times, but without accounting for their temporal and geographical variation. This approach makes it easier to argue for the importance of a single macro factor, such as, in this case, a supposedly deeply rooted, almost timeless nationalist ideology, as the primary cause of violence.7 6. See fig. 8.

7. On violence in the NDH more generally, see, for example, Savo Skoko, Pokolj hecegovačkih Srba ’41.

(Beograd: Stručna knjiga, 1991); Nikola Živković & Petar Kačavenda, Srbi u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj: izabrana dokumenta (Beograd: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1998); Vladimir Dedijer & Antun Miletić (eds), Genocid nad Muslimanima, 1941–1945: zbornik dokumenata i svjedočenja (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1990); idem., Proterivanje Srba sa ognjišta, 1941-1944: svjedočanstva (Beograd: Prosveta, 1989); Smail Čekić, Genocid nad Bošnjacima u Drugom svjetskom ratu: dokumenti (Sarajevo: Udruženje Muslimana za antigenocidne aktivnosti, 1996); Semso Tucaković, Srpski zločini nad Bošnjacima-Muslimanima 1941-1945 (Sarajevo: El-Kalem, 1995); Zdravko Dizdar i Mihael Sobolevski, Prešućivani četnički zločini u Hrvatskoj i Bosni i Hercegovini 1941.-1945. (Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 1999); Slavko Vukčević, ed., Zločini na jugoslovenskim prostorima u Prvom i Drugom svetskom ratu. Zbornik dokumenata (Beograd: Vojno-istorijski institut, 1993); on the violence in the region of the NDH that my book examines, see, for example, Milan Vukmanović, Ustaški zločini na području Bihaća u ljeto 1941. godine (Banja Luka: Institut za istoriju u Banjaluci, 1987); Josip Jurjević, Pogrom u Krnjeuši 9. i 10. kolovoza 1941. godine (Zagreb: Vikarijat Banjalučke biskupije, 1999); Milan Obradović, “Zločini na kotaru Donji Lapac od 1941. do 1945.,” in Kotar Donji Lapac u Narodnooslobodilačkom ratu 1941–1945, ed. Gojko Vezmar & Đuro Zatezalo (Karlovac: Historijski arhiv u Karlovcu, 1985); Josip Pavičić, ed., Dossier Boričevac (Zagreb: Naklada Pavičić, 2012); Milan Štikavav, “Krvavo lapačko ljeto,” in Ratna sjećanja iz NOB, knjiga I, ed. Esad Tihić & Momčilo

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max bergholz Among historians based outside the Balkans, there have been a number of illuminating studies published during the past decade or so on the history of the NDH.8 But when it comes to explaining the causes, dynamics, and effects of intercommunal violence, this literature offers surprisingly few answers. Part of the problem is that while this newer work has much to say about life in urban centers and the actions of political elites, it is striking how little we still know about the countryside of the NDH (i.e., places like Kulen Vakuf) despite a consensus among scholars that the majority of intercommunal violence from 1941 to 1945 actually took place there.

This hole in the literature is perplexing given the shift in research on violence during the past decade and a half in other contexts, such as South Asia and Africa, as well as other parts of Eastern Europe, in which the local level—especially in the countryside—has become a central subject for analysis.9 Regarding the NDH, part of the problem Kalem (Beograd: Vojno-izdavački zavod, 1981), 599-616; Ilija Rašeta, Kazivanje pobjednika smrti (Zagreb: Grafički zavod Hrvatske, 1988).

8. See, for example, Emily Greble, Sarajevo, 1941-1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2011); on the policies and practices of the Ustašas and Chetniks, see Tomislav Dulić, Utopias of Nation. Local Mass Killing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1941-1942 (Upssala: Upssala University, 2005); Alexander Korb, “Understanding Ustaša Violence,” Journal of Genocide Research 12, no. 1-2, (2010): 1-18; a more detailed analysis of Korb’s arguments about violence in the NDH can be found in idem., Im Schatten des Weltkriegs. Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien 1941-1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013); on the Partisans and the Chetniks, see Marko Atilla Hoare, Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); on the cultural politics of the NDH regime, see Rory Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941-1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013).

9. See, for example, Yang Su, Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009); Séverine Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peace Building (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Omar Shahabudin McDoom, “Who killed in Rwanda’s Genocide? Micro-space, social influence and individual participation in intergroup violence,” Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 4 (2013): 453-467; idem., “Antisocial capital: a profile of Rwandan genocide perpetrators’ social networks,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 58, no. 5 (2014): 866-894; Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); on Eastern Galicia, see Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919-1945 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002); Omer Bartov, “Communal Genocide: Personal Accounts of the Destruction of Buczacz, Eastern Galicia, 1941-1944,” in Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, Shatterzone of Empires: Co8

telling histories of violence without borders has to do with the research questions that have retained importance.

Historians tend to focus on subjects that have long dominated this field: how many people were killed in the NDH; whether certain killings constitute “genocide”; the wartime experience of “ethnic groups”; among others.

These subjects have their place, but their continued prominence helps maintain a certain inward focus in this field. This provincial perspective is not particular to the historiography of violence in this part of the Balkans; it is a more general feature, to some extent or another, of many historical literatures on various episodes of violence, such as Holocaust studies, the mass killings or genocides in Indonesia and Rwanda, and the destruction of indigenous peoples in the Americas, among other examples.10 In Balkan historiography, a main consequence of this provincialism has been a surprising lack of engagement with broader scholarly debates, particularly debates in the social science literature on political violence, currently taking place about the dynamics of violence in various contexts throughout the world. A lack of engagement with more general questions about the causes, dynamics, and effects of violence has meant that most histories of violence in the specific time and place of my research have been characterized by a striking poverty of conceptual and analytical clarity.

To surmount these challenges, I chose to employ a dual approach in the research and writing of my book. On one hand, I decided to make a rural community (i.e., Kulen Vakuf) the central lens of analysis.

On the other hand, I wanted to build an analytical bridge between the existence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 399-420.

10. On how a provincial perspective continues to play a significant role in discussions about episodes of mass violence, see, for example, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s 2019 “Statement Regarding the Museum’s Position on Holocaust Analogies,” https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/ press-releases/statement-regarding-the-museums-position-on-holocaust-analogies; for a response to this statement signed by a large number of scholars, which sharply criticizes the Museum’s attempt to wall off the Holocaust from comparison and analogy with other episodes of violence, see “An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum,” https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/07/01/ an-open-letter-to-the-director-of-the-holocaust-memorial-museum/.

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max bergholz specific history of this community and debates about the dynamics of violence. My challenge was to write a rich microhistory that could engage a number of debates in the field of political violence but would also avoid getting bogged down in the provincial in-fighting and historical determinism that is common to many scholars who write about violence in this part of the Balkans.

My rough road map in charting this new path came in large part from the kinds of books and articles I read during and after my fieldwork. As my dissatisfaction grew with the historiography on intercommunal violence in the Balkans, I found myself reading increasingly outside the discipline of history in search of more general insights, as well as new perspectives, about the dynamics of violence.

At first, I think I began moving in this direction almost unconsciously; my intuition told me that I needed to acquire a broader perspective to make sense of, and tell, the microhistory I was excavating. Engaging with work by political scientists of civil war and anthropologists of pogroms and intercommunal violence, whose research focused on time periods and places far afield from my particular topic, provided me with questions and perspectives that had not occurred to me during my years of immersing myself in the specifics of Balkan history.

The studies I read, such as the seminal work, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (2006), by the political scientist Stathis Kalyvas, noted the frequent and puzzling disjuncture between the macro cleavages of violent conflict and the nature of local violence, especially in rural regions.11 That insight led me to seek out works by social scientists who have studied what is often the puzzling temporal and geographical variation in instances of local violence that has been vividly illuminated through micro-comparative research, such as work on

11. Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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telling histories of violence without borders pogroms in Poland, lynching in the United States, and the genocide in Rwanda.12 This work has helped to generate research on how instances of violence shape the prospects for further violence, which I learned more about in recent social science literature on the Spanish Civil War.13 This scholarship has helped focus attention on discerning the extent to which pre-violence macro cleavages, along a political, religious, or economic axis, interact with local dynamics in accounting for whether intercommunal violence happens, where it happens (or does not), and in what ways. And the focus by these political scientists on the often internal dynamics of violent conflict led me to discover the work of anthropologists of violence, particularly those who study South Asia, such as Veena Das, whose careful local research has suggested that violence may, in fact, dramatically transform perceptions of identities and forms of social categorization in ways that differ strikingly from what existed prior to violent conflict.14 The chief payoff for me from engaging with this social science literature was that it began to give my writing a focus on posing fresh and compelling questions, many of which began to resemble puzzles that needed to be solved. Why did violence start when and where it did? Why did it stop? How could I explain the presence and absence of violence in the same regions? What, exactly, transforms a context in which violence seems likely into one in which we see actual violence?

12. See, for example, Diana Dumitru and Carter Johnson, “Constructing Interethnic Conflict and Cooperation: Why Some People Harmed Jews and Others Helped Them During the Holocaust in Romania,” World Politics 63, no. 1 (2011), 1-42; Jeffrey Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg, “Deadly Communities: Local Political Milieus and the Persecution of Jews in Occupied Poland,” Comparative Political Studies 44, no. 3 (2011), 259-283; Su, Collective Killings in Rural China; Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence.

An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

13. See, for example, Laia Balcells, “Rivalry and Revenge: Violence against Civilians in Conventional Civil Wars,” International Studies Quarterly 54, no. 2 (2010), 291-313.

14. See, for example, Veena Das, “Collective Violence and the Shifting Categories of Communal Riots, Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocide,” in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke, England; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 93-127.

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max bergholz By telling my local history of violence as a story that can provide empirically vivid answers to these kinds of questions, I found that my microhistory began to sound like one that had real global significance, which it would not have had without the insights and questions I acquired by reading far outside my discipline. Crossing disciplinary borders and increasing engagement with the social sciences can bring enhanced analytical clarity when telling histories of violence.

Venturing down this path also means that historians need to remain vigilant about how to keep their readers reading. Bombarding them with paragraphs full of social science jargon, statistical methods, mathematical equations, charts, and graphs can be an effective way to compel most people who might be willing to pick up our books to put them down very quickly and perhaps never return.

Another major challenge when telling histories of violence concerns how to create, and especially maintain, a compelling bond between our readers and the often highly disturbing stories we seek to tell.

On first glance, this challenge may not appear to be significant. After all, stories of violence, from distant history to today’s news, tend to immediately attract people’s attention. Think of the execution videos that members of ISIS have produced during the past years and the attention they have drawn, as well as the recent acts of mass violence by adherents of the white power movement, such as the shootings in the synagogue in Pittsburgh and in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

But stories of violence often also immediately create some kind of almost unbridgeable border between those who read, or hear about such stories, and those who are participants in them. Histories of violence, and especially extreme manifestations of cruelty, simultaneously attract attention and alienate our readers, who are drawn to witnessing the horror of violence but often recoil from delving too deeply, or even at all, into understanding its causes and dynamics.

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telling histories of violence without borders One way I tried to remove this border between the story I sought to tell in my book and my potential readers was to make use of what the historian Kate Brown has called “the transformational experience of being there.” Among other books, Kate Brown has written Plutopia, which she published in 2013.15 This is a pathbreaking social history of communities that evolved in the shadow of nuclear power facilities in the United States and Soviet Union. Given the sensitivity of her subject, archival documents were often scarce. But she found that the natural and human landscape, while vast and unstructured for traditional historical research when compared to formal institutions like archives and libraries, could nonetheless serve as very effective “sources” if she was capable of seeing them as such. In this way, the experience of “being there” opened up new vistas and perspectives for historical explanation, which would have been missed had she stayed within the confines of traditional research institutions.

This notion—“the transformational experience of being there”— was something that happened to me in a certain way during my fieldwork, even though I only read Brown’s work on this subject many years later. Due to a number of reasons, such as working in a highly divided, post-war society like Bosnia-Herzegovina, my archival research was sometimes hampered, and I found myself without access to formal research institutions for significant periods of time. This initially highly frustrating situation led me to seek out insights from the landscape where the story I was trying to tell took place, and from the people I encountered there.

During the first week of October 2008, I was in the town of Bihać in northwest Bosnia struggling to gain access to that region’s archive. My written requests for permission to conduct research were languishing in piles of paper in various ministries. I visited the archive regularly to inquire about the progress of my request and each time the director invented new reasons why documents could not be made 15. Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); on Brown’s notion of the “transformational experience of being there,” see idem., Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 96.

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max bergholz available to me. Whenever I would leave his office, I could immediately hear him cursing me, and my relatives, in multiple and extremely colorful ways. During this time, I felt that my research had hit a brick wall.

So one chilly morning, I boarded a local bus to Kulen Vakuf, which took me far from the archive director and his friends in the ministries who seemed to be trying—and succeeding—to block my research.

Once I arrived, I borrowed an old bicycle that belonged to the son of a woman whom I had interviewed during the previous weeks.

I set off through the fog along the Una River valley on my way to a village called Martin Brod, about fifteen kilometers down this road. I can still clearly remember the sounds of the Una as its waters gurgled and bubbled while I pedaled across the bridge spanning its banks in Kulen Vakuf. I turned right and, after a kilometer, the paved road abruptly ended (fig. 9). My tires bounced off of pebbles, which rattled and shook me. The smell of recently burned fields permeated the air.

Halfway to Martin Brod, the sun broke through the mist, lighting up the fall colors of the trees lining the valley and sparkling on the emerald green waters of the Una. Once or twice a car passed me going too fast for the road. This enveloped me in a cloud of fine dust, which seemed to hang in the air without dissipating. Here and there I caught sight of a house from the road. I saw elderly people tending their sheep and goats. I heard the faint noise of bells clanging around their necks as they grazed. This mingled with the sound of their owners using hatchets to split logs, which combined with the popping of stones as I pedaled forward, dodging water-filled craters in the road.

At several points I stopped and took photographs: a still destroyed bridge from the 1992-1995 war; fading graffiti on a house left by warring factions of those years; and the mesmerizing waters of the Una River. I had no phone, and almost no one knew where I was. I remember quietly saying to myself at one point as I scanned the landscape: “There’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be, and nothing else I’d rather be doing.”

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telling histories of violence without borders My excitement at probing this corner of the world as far as my limits as a historian would allow contrasted sharply with my knowledge of the terrifying history of this dusty road. This was the same road along which approximately 400-420 men and boys were marched on the evening of September 7, 1941. Like me, they could see the mesmerizing emerald green waters of the Una (fig. 6) from various junctures as they traveled south, one step at a time, toward Martin Brod.

They were in a long column, lined up two across, as armed insurgents marched them forward. It was in Martin Brod, after a sleepless night, that two groups of insurgents faced off against each other on the morning of September 8th. One smaller group was composed of those who wanted to free most of these prisoners, who also happened to be their neighbors. The other, which was much larger, was made up of those who demanded that all the men and boys be killed.

There was a physical altercation between the two groups, and the latter prevailed. After binding the prisoners’ hands with wire, these insurgents took the men and boys in small groups about three kilometers up a winding road. As the road turned sharply left toward a village, they turned right into a meadow, walked about thirty meters, and brought the prisoners to the edge of a vertical cave. It was there that they cut each prisoner’s throat and then dumped their bodies into the darkness. Only one man managed to get his hands free and escape. The remains of the rest are still at the bottom of this cave today.

It was not until a blisteringly hot summer afternoon in 2014 that I, along with the woman who lent me the bicycle in 2008, and a local police officer, managed to locate this cave just on the other side of where the forest begins (fig. 10, 11). We came to its edge and looked down into it.

I held onto a tree and stared into its darkness. I then dropped a stone, which made a clicking sound as it bounced from side to side for a few seconds before hitting the bottom. I remember I immediately felt very cold even though the air temperature that afternoon was at least ninety-five degrees.

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max bergholz I narrate these moments during my fieldwork to pose several questions that I think all scholars of violence should consider. Can the experience of “being there,” as Kate Brown has called it, help us to restructure the simultaneous magnetic attraction and enormous gulf that usually occur when we confront our readers with histories of violence? Can the effort taken to convey a sensual portrait of a place help dispel, at least to some extent, the flood of preconceived notions that race into readers minds about how and why people have engaged in violence, which creates a gulf, and for many, an almost unbridgeable border, between them and histories we seek to tell? Can incorporating experiences of “being there” help us engage readers with our stories in ways that convey humanity, and thus suggest our collective interconnectedness across space and time, including our common humanity with those caught up in episodes of past violence—and with even those who have committed acts of violence?

A third and final way to try and cross the borders that arise when we seek to tell histories of violence is to reflect about our capacity, and especially our willingness, to practice historical empathy.

I took a photograph of the Una River from a bridge in Kulen Vakuf (fig. 12; note this is not the large bridge visible in fig.4). Here, we are looking down into the Una River from a smaller bridge that spans a gorge, known as the “buk,” which is located about a kilometer north of the center of the town.

This smaller bridge is a place where on September 7, 1941 a sizable group of women and children were trapped. They had been chased here, from both sides of the bridge, by groups of insurgents and peasants who were intent on killing them. Some were armed with rifles, but many more carried axes, sticks, and rocks. The women turned left and saw there was no way out; and they turned right and saw there was no way out. So, they began picking up their children and throwing them over the bridge into the Una’s rushing waters.

And then they threw themselves into the river. Virtually none of them 16

telling histories of violence without borders could swim, and so most quickly drowned. In a few cases, some of the women were washed a few hundred meters down the river where, once they passed through this gorge, they managed to grab hold of tree branches by its bank and pull themselves out of the water. They immediately realized that their children had disappeared in the water.

And so, in several instances, survivors recall that some of these distraught women then ran back toward the river and threw themselves in the water, where they drowned themselves.

I share this photograph and I recount this terrifying story from my book because I think they can help us better appreciate the immense challenge of practicing historical empathy when we seek to tell histories of violence. Most scholars, including myself, would agree about the necessity of extending as much empathy as possible when telling the history of the victims of the violence on this bridge in Kulen Vakuf.

But there is another challenge here, which most scholars of violence, either implicitly or explicitly, would balk at taking on. In my book, after narrating the harrowing experience of what took place on and nearby this bridge, I wrote the following sentence at beginning of the next paragraph: “Although this level of cruelty is shocking, we should resist the urge to see it as incomprehensible, and instead rise to the challenge of discerning its internal logic.”16 Here, I’m signaling my intention to try and travel into the world of those who committed this violence, to see them as human beings like us, and to attempt to explain why they did what they did from their point of view.

I go on to discuss how these killings were fueled by an immense desire for revenge among the insurgents and peasants, many of whose families and villages had been destroyed during the previous weeks by some of the male relatives of those women and children on the bridge. I suggest that this desire for revenge was about more than simply “getting even.” Here, total obliteration of the perceived enemy was the primary objective because it alone held the capacity to coun-

16. Bergholz, Violence as a Generative Force, 238.

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max bergholz teract the pain and sense of powerlessness previously felt by these revenge seekers.17 When I received the anonymous readers’ reports from Cornell University Press about my book manuscript, one of the readers reacted to this paragraph in the following way: “You suggest that this disturbing behavior ‘makes sense’ if we view it as intimately connected to fulfilling this desire for revenge. But it is not spelled out why we should view it from this perspective, which is ultimately the perspective of the perpetrators of this violence.”

Out of all the comments that this reviewer wrote, which totaled nearly 9,000 thoughtful words of feedback, this sentence is among those that remained in the forefront of my mind. It seems to me that my effort to tell part of this history of violence by trying to walk in the shoes of some of the perpetrators struck a nerve with this reviewer— so much so that the reviewer even questioned why we should try to tell this history from the perspective of those who committed such exceptionally cruel acts of violence.

To me, this reaction highlights a challenge that every scholar of violence eventually has to face head-on. In my teaching, I call it the point at which we choose to get off the bus that we are traveling on into the world of violence when we choose to study this phenomenon.

All of us have a point when we no longer wish to travel any further, and so we stand up and ask the driver to pull over and stop so we can disembark. For most scholars, this stop can be found somewhere around the area when we come upon the world where the perpetrators of violence live, and we have to choose how empathetic we wish to be when we encounter their perspectives and the challenge of explaining their behavior. Some scholars have referred to this choice as the central dilemma of researching what could be called “repellant” or “unloved” groups.18 Can we extend to them the same level of empathy and sensitivity that we would offer to their victims? Are we 17. Ibid., 238-239.

18. See, for example, Kathleen Blee, “White Knuckle Research: Emotional Dynamics in Fieldwork with Racist Activists,” Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1998): 381-399.

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telling histories of violence without borders willing to rise to the challenge, to use the words of Viet Thanh Nguyen in his book Nothing Ever Dies (2016), of explaining “how the inhuman inhabits the human?”19 In spite of our responsibility as historians to rigorously explain— rather than judge—human behavior, the answer that many scholars offer to this question, either explicitly or more often implicitly, is “no.”

For many who write about violence, there are humans in the past who deserve our empathy, and in-humans, who do not. Yet in making such a distinction, we place yet another major border between the histories of violence we seek to tell and our readers.

For those of us who believe that transcending this border is a critical challenge that we have to take on, then we may need to consider crossing another border and venture outside the scholarly world in search of inspiration and methods. Here, I’m thinking of what can be learned by closely engaging with what artists have accomplished in recent years with regard to pushing the limits of practicing historical empathy when examining the subject of violence.

This topic could take up an entire lecture, but before I finish I’d like to briefly mention one recent work of artistic creation that has been influential on my thinking as a historian of violence: the 2003 play by Wajdi Mouawad called Incendies, or Scorched as it has been translated into English (fig. 13).20 This play was made into a 2010 film with the same title, which was directed by Denis Villeneuve.

Incendies is a complex story. But what struck me about it the most is its astonishingly radical level of empathy for all characters who have committed and been subjected to acts of extreme violence. In this play and film, these two categories are completely merged. Those who are subjected to extreme violence then go on to commit acts of extreme violence.

19. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies. Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 19.

20. Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies (Montréal: Leméac, 2003); in English translation: Scorched. Trans. Linda Gaboriau (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005).

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max bergholz One of the film’s main characters, Nihad, begins his life in trauma.

His mother, nominally Christian, is forced to give him away immediately after giving birth due the taboo nature in her village of her relationship with Nihad’s father, a nominal Muslim. Nihad is sent to an orphanage, which is then bombed during his country’s civil war.

He and the other boys he lives with are taken by one of the warring factions and raised to become soldiers, the first steps of which can be seen in the film still with his head being shaved (fig. 14). As the civil war unfolds, Nihad searches for his mother. But he is transformed by the ongoing violence and becomes an expert sniper, executing other child soldiers. He is captured by the opposing side, which recognizes his skill as a practitioner of violence. He changes his name to AbouTarek and becomes a terrifying torturer in a prison. In the story of Nihad to Abou-Tarek, we are confronted with the tragic victimization of an infant and child and then the emergence of a frightening perpetrator, yet we never leave the same person.

This play and film confront us with sensitive portrayals of such individuals’ most intimate struggles without harsh judgment or comfortable moralizing. Instead, we are constantly challenged to see all of them as people like us, who are extremely vulnerable to being hurt, and who also have a terrifying capacity to hurt others. This sensibility differs dramatically from the typical way that most scholars approach the telling of histories of violence, in which they generally divide people into exclusive categories of perpetrators and victims, into the evil and innocent, with only the latter really deserving our empathy.

Yet the play Incendies confronts us with a radical challenge: if we really want to understand history, then we must approach all perspectives of those involved in violence with the same level of empathy. As Nihad’s mother writes in a letter to her children when imagining a way forward with regard to engaging with the violent past: “Now, history must be reconstructed.

History is in ruins.

Gently Console every shred Gently 20

telling histories of violence without borders Cure every moment Gently Rock every image.”21 Such words, especially the imperative of approaching the past “gently” and considering “every” shred and image, challenges scholars to make crossing the normally-sealed borders between victims and perpetrators a central intervention of their work. Here, we can look again to the writing of Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose reflections about the responsibility of the artist are highly instructive to scholars of violence. He insists that artists must strive to: “see across all kinds of borders, beginning with those that separate selves from others. For the artist, politics should ultimately be about abolishing sides, venturing into the no man’s land between trenches, borders, and camps. We need an art that celebrates the humanity of all sides and acknowledges the inhumanity of all sides, including that of our own.”22 My argument is that we also need a scholarship of violence in which we seek to “see across borders,” and in which we approach the study of humanity and inhumanity by acknowledging that they are, in fact, two sides of the same coin.

In the end, the notion of “telling histories of violence without borders” challenges us to make a number of moves that ultimately mean we have to consider leaving our comfort zones as scholars of violence. The first is to read far outside our often-provincial disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of new perspectives and questions that can open up fresh vistas for explanatory and analytical clarity. The second is to engage deeply with the physical and human landscapes where the stories we seek to tell took place, and to develop a sensual understanding of those landscapes, which can seep into our writing so as to narrow the border between our readers in the present day and 21. Mouawad, Scorched, 133-134.

22. Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 267.

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max bergholz our stories of violence in the past. The third and final move asks us to extend historical empathy as far as we possibly can, to try and walk in the shoes of all people caught up in episodes of violence.

In so doing, we need to ask ourselves hard questions about what, at the end of the day, we are trying to accomplish in telling histories of violence. Are we content to memorialize the violent past? Do we wish to moralize about it? Is the study of violence to be used primarily as a weapon in never-ending battles of identity politics?

Or do we have our eyes squarely focused on the challenge of explaining violence, while conveying as much humanity as possible of all the people whose stories we have given ourselves the right to tell?

Our answers to these questions will ultimately determine whether we wish to try and travel into the world of violence with an eye on crossing these seemingly uncrossable borders, or instead remain where we are, as scholars of violence who prefer to feel safe on the other side of the many borders that divide us from the subject we claim to know best.

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Exhibits

Figure 1. Blue folders discovered in the basement of the Archive of Bosnia-Herzegovina, September 2006.

Photo: Max Bergholz.

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Figure 2. Map of the Kulen Vakuf region in relation to the western borders of the Ottoman Empire, ca. early seventeenth century until 1878. Kulen Vakuf straddles the border that long divided the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. Drawn by Bill Nelson for Max Bergholz.

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exhibits

Figure 3. Map of the Kulen Vakuf region in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which is often simply called “the First Yugoslavia,� ca. 1920s. Drawn by Bill Nelson for Max Bergholz.

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Figure 4. Kulen Vakuf from a nearby ridge. Photo: Max Bergholz, 2008.

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exhibits

Figure 5. The Una River cascades over waterfalls in the village of Martin Brod on its way north toward Kulen Vakuf. Photo: Max Bergholz, 2013.

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Figure 6. The Una River flows gently between Martin Brod and Kulen Vakuf. Photo: Max Bergholz, 2013.

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exhibits

Figure 7. English and Bosnian editions of Violence as a Generative Force, copies in possession of Max Bergholz. On the left is the cover of the English edition, published by Cornell University Press in November 2016. On the right, the Bosnian edition, Nasilje kao generativna sila: identitet, nacionalizam i sjećanje u jednoj balkanskoj zajednici, which was translated by Senada Kreso and published at the end of 2018 by the Sarajevo and Zagreb publisher Buybook.

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Figure 8. Map of NDH, also known as the Independent State of Croatia, in 1941. Drawn by Bill Nelson for Max Bergholz.

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exhibits

Figure 9. Dirt road between Kulen Vakuf and Martin Brod. Photo: Max Bergholz, 2008.

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Figure 10. Cave that served as massacre and burial site as seen from a distance after crossing the meadow that separates the cave from the road. Photo: Max Bergholz, 2014.

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exhibits

Figure 11. Vertical cave, where insurgents “cut each prisoner’s throat and then dumped their bodies,” from directly above. Photo: Max Bergholz, 2014.

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Figure 12. The Una River from a smaller bridge that spans a gorge, known as the “buk,� located about a kilometer north of Kulen Vakuf. Photo: Max Bergholz, 2008.

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exhibits

Figure 13. Playbook covers for Incendies (LemĂŠac ĂŠd, 2009) and Scorched (Playwrights Canada Press, 2010).

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Figure 14. Still from the 2010 film Incendies of Nihad having his head shaved, one of the first steps in his transformation into a soldier. Printed with permission from micro_scope productions.

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Post-Lecture Discussion Shinjini Chattopadhyay:1 What happens when there are gaps of silences in the archives? Do you employ something such as Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” or do you have your own methodology for that?

Max Bergholz: That’s a great question. When doing this kind of local research, you come up against vast silences. This is one of the ways in which “being there” can be very useful.

I can give an example from the book: I did not have actual sources to talk about the movements of certain groups of people from one place to another, and I wanted to include storytelling dynamics about how people moved through the region. So, one of the things I was able to include was my own sense of what those same paths were like— what they looked like, what they felt like, and what they smelled like. I didn’t attempt to project those images into the past, but I said, “here is what they must have seen,” describing what it would have looked like as they moved, for example, alongside a river and came to a fork in the road with the choice to either go right past the train station that was full of people who had been killed in the previous weeks, or go left and cut across the gorge that I discussed in my lecture.

Elements like that are not fabrications but are in fact a way of trying to use the experience of “being there” to fill gaps in such a way that is true to the historical record without actually speaking on behalf of actors in the past. This is one of the reasons why an ethnographic and anthropological approach by historians is, I think, critical.

And this is why the archive itself cannot be the only destination. It’s a crucial destination in most historical research, but it can’t be the only destination.

I would not have been able to write this book in the way that I did without spending a significant amount of time breathing the air in the region. Without having gone too far in that direction in the book in 1. Shinjini Chattopadhyay is a Nanovic graduate fellow and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame.

certain moments, I could feel that experience helping me to approach the silences in a creative way that I think would still maintain the integrity of historical record, but without simply having to say, “we have no sources and therefore there’s nothing.”

I wanted the text to have some kind of pulse to it, which is why I’m a big believer in this multidisciplinary approach. It really transformed me as a writer, not just as a historian.

Jake Coen: 2 I am also a historian of violence and something that I find myself running into pretty consistently is the struggle to draw the line between historical empathy and trying to read the minds of my historical subjects. I wonder if you could possibly reflect on that.

At what point are we crossing the line into speculation and potentially overstepping our bounds?

Bergholz: I’m not sure I have a definitive answer for you. In terms of how far we can go into the world of perpetrators, I think it all depends on the kind of evidence that is available.

I think deep understanding of the historical context, which comes from reading and chasing down the sources in an all-out effort to acquire every shred of evidence, is the only way to approach reasoned, sensitive speculation about anyone who’s been caught up in acts of violence—whether they’re a perpetrator or victim, or perhaps both, that is, people who might occupy both of those identities, or those who are witnesses. When we run out of evidence, we can begin to pose potential hypotheses—“it” may have been about “this”; “this” factor may have been involved—by constantly acknowledging at the same time that we lack definitive evidence, even when the evidence seems direct, like in cases with much more recent instances of violence, such as the genocide in Rwanda. In Scott Straus’s book Intimate Enemy, he went to prisons and interviewed individuals who had confessed to taking part in mass killings. He literally was able to do what I never could in my book: he was able to ask, “Why did you kill?” In one such exchange, the answer he gets is very unsatisfying.

2. Jake Coen is a Nanovic graduate fellow and Ph.D. candidate in the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

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post-lecture discussion Straus says, “I don’t understand,” and the person answers back “I can’t make you understand.”

These are moments when I think we can try and move toward some kind of reasoned speculation using different kinds of theories, and comparative work can be useful too, as we can note similarities across cases, which allows us to make a sort of reasoned speculation.

But sometimes, beyond that, the power is actually to step back and acknowledge where the limitation is in our knowledge, and to simply acknowledge when we can’t go any further.

Student: 3 Could you please talk a little bit more about the common social or political factors that contributed to this violence discussed in your book?

Bergholz: What was fascinating to me about researching this book is that what I expected to see was not supported by the evidence that I found.

I thought, given the nature of this violence in which people were killed along the lines of their perceived cultural identity, that cultural cleavages must have been very deep in this society, and that nationalist ideologies and political parties organized along such lines must have been strong and must have had large-scale support. I didn’t find that at all.

Instead, what I discovered is that the earthquake of, first, the invasion by outside powers and, second, the destruction of this country, upended the previous social order, which allowed a small group of extremists to come to power. In order for them to mobilize power, they had to offer concrete incentives. And so they allowed people in the regions to plunder and steal from their neighbors and, with violence, to decisively resolve local squabbles that had dragged on for decades, if not longer.

What’s compelling here is that the initial group of perpetrators that started these waves of violence was about 111 individuals.

111 individuals. None of these individuals had been involved in any 3. A student from the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame.

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of the extremist organizations prior to this violence. In other words, their motivation for involving themselves had much more to do with personal squabbles and material incentives, but they found common ground with those who took power in this region who were much more politically motivated.

So, there was an economic component, there was a personal vendetta component, as well as a political ideological component.

The story really shows that we can’t understand how violence takes place to this extent in small regions without looking at both how the macro level matters and how the micro level becomes embedded and interacts with macro level policies. That has to be researched from the ground up, not simply used to illustrate policies from the top.

That’s what was different in this story. The previous histories of this region usually use the localities to illustrate decisions taken in the center. What I found here, by making the locality the central analytical focus from start to finish, is that in the periphery we come up with a completely different story, if we take the time to find the sources and listen to what people have to say.

Alexander Martin:4 In regards to the combination of empathy and “being there,” particularly empathy with the perpetrators, were there any personal experiences or conversations you had with people that got you thinking about that? Is there something of that nature that influenced your thinking?

Bergholz: There was a moment when I became fascinated with this subject and realized how much work I still had to do. The challenge that I laid out at the end of my lecture with regard to practicing historical empathy is a challenge that was enormous and is enormous for me. I don’t invite others to take up that challenge without also acknowledging that it was, and is, a very demanding one for me.

During my research, the moment when I felt the great demand of it was when I went to the village of Martin Brod, located south of Kulen Vakuf. I was speaking with an individual there and it became very clear 4. Alexander Martin serves as a Nanovic Institute faculty fellow and is professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.

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post-lecture discussion to me that in 1992 he had been involved in the ethnic cleansing of Kulen Vakuf.

In 1992 the entire Muslim population in this region was expelled.

So this individual, who had offered me coffee and with whom I was sitting in his kitchen, talking about history and life in the region, was someone who had carried out war crimes fifteen kilometers up the road.

I began to feel all kinds of feelings sitting there: feelings of fear, feelings of fascination, and ethical dilemmas. I realized that if I want to actually tell histories of violence, I have to be able to find a way to listen sensitively to a person’s experience on a side that does not necessarily conform to my moral universe. That was a moment when I felt the gravity of that challenge, because I did not like being there at that moment with that individual. It felt very uncomfortable to me.

Later, I thought to myself, “how will I actually write a history of violence when I can’t engage with that perspective and I can’t approach that perspective with some sort of sensitivity?”

That’s when I think I began to appreciate the great challenge of probing the world of the perpetrator, and trying to walk in that person’s shoes as much as possible.

Martin: Was your feeling at that moment that this guy did what he did because he’s different from you, or did he become different from you because of what he did?

Bergholz: The general feeling I had at that moment was not even that complex. I simply felt extremely uncomfortable being near a person who had engaged in acts of violence. Even though I was writing a history of violence, when I actually came that close to an individual who had admitted to me that he had carried out such acts, without going into great detail, I could feel my level of discomfort. This happened to me multiple times, but this was the first time it happened. There were other times after that. I think it’s something that one has to make a commitment to acknowledging and engaging with. It’s a very complex terrain on which to be. I’ve had people admit things to me that, without being able to verify whether they are true or 41

not, would have made them susceptible to being arrested and taken to the war crimes tribunal at the Hague.

These are real dilemmas that researchers like myself and others face when doing this kind of work. I’m not sure that there’s always a right approach in these moments. What I think gives this book a different quality than other studies of violence is perhaps not a successful effort but, nonetheless, a strenuous effort to tell the story through the eyes of as many people as possible without putting certain groups into one-dimensional categories of evil individuals.

To me, the most important review written of the book is by the Bosnian writer and literary critic Miljenko Jergović, who wrote a long review of the book earlier this year. At the end, he simply said, “it is unbelievable how unacceptable this book is to all of us”—as a compliment. To me, I think that this is some kind of confirmation that I pushed hard in this direction and had some kind of success. I think this is the greatest challenge in engaging with this work, and it needs to be talked about and acknowledged more. By extending the number of perspectives that we engage with in a sensitive way, and as far as possible, I think this is one of the key ways that the field will advance further.

Janne Haaland Matláry: 5 I was a politician working in the Balkans after the war. I remember a French commander telling me that the way the ethnic cleansing really started was that paramilitaries would go into a village and tell one person to kill his neighbor so that there would be a dynamic of violence unleashed. The commander said, “Once you have killed, you have overstepped the border. You cannot return to your old self.” Then there is both in a way a license to kill for many people and also a sort of dehumanization of yourself so you can go on killing.

We said this is a well-known way of instigating this kind of civil war violence and this is what was deliberately used in Bosnia. This in a way 5. Janne Haaland Matláry, professor of international politics at the University of Oslo, is the former State Secretary of Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Professor Matláry is a Director’s Fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study for the 2019-2020 academic year. Additionally, she presented the 2018 Nanovic Forum Lecture at the University of Notre Dame.

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post-lecture discussion tells us that religion and ethnicity were not really causal. It was a more primitive kind of dynamic. It had nothing to do with rational reasons or irrational reasons; there was no reason in a way. It was simply the rules were changed in a gruesome way in local communities and then people would have to take sides. That was the military’s psychological assessment. Is that perhaps what happened in this village?

Bergholz: As a historian and scholar of this region, I certainly have followed and pay close attention to writing and discussions about the most recent conflict in the 1990s, but I’m one who believes that we need to draw a real distinction between comparing the two conflicts too closely. Each conflict has its own historical dynamics, its own context, its own causal mechanisms. In the region, there’s easy talk about how 1992 to 1995 was simply just “finishing” 1941 to 1945, and I don’t subscribe to that view.

In my book I try to illuminate certain dynamics of violence that I think compare and connect across contexts, across space and time.

In that sense—and it’s in the title of the book—violence is in many ways, and not simply in one way, a generative force. Once an individual, for whatever reason, commits an act of violence, whether it’s in a household, or in a village, or in some wider context, that individual and the others who are subjected to that violence are transformed very rapidly.

Appreciating that idea allows us to take more seriously the role of historical contingency and looking at events hour-by-hour, minute-byminute, day-by-day, rather than how these types of conflicts are often written about in the media, or from a more macro analytical standpoint; as many have suggested in one way or another, “it seems as if cultural criteria mattered in this conflict; therefore such cleavages must have somehow mattered in the past, and especially in causing this conflict.”6 Rather than work backwards with such a preconceived 6. The notion that supposedly deep cultural cleavages are crucial to explaining why mass violence occurs is present not only in how the media often portrays conflicts; it has also played a significant role in shaping the study of what many refer to as genocide studies. See, for example, Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944); Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); and Helen Fein, Geno43

understanding toward the past, it’s much more useful to go to a particular historical moment, find the evidence, reconstruct what happened, and then work up to a theory. As I said at the beginning of the lecture, we need to try and tell the story forward in time rather than project our perhaps simplistic understanding backward. But that’s very difficult, especially when conflicts continue to be so politicized and people are so emotionally connected to advocating on behalf of one side or the other. In that sense, the conflicts continue on long after the actual violence stops, and that is the case in this part of the world today.

The conflicts there are still being fought over, not so much through physical violence but rather through works of history, through the media, through commemorations, through street signs, through the way people talk to each other, and through the everyday language that’s used to describe the conflict. It’s still a huge debate for people.

Every single word matters. This context is one of the reasons why I worked so hard to translate the book as fast as possible. I wanted to have a Bosnian edition printed so it can be sitting there waiting for a younger group of historians to come along and perhaps in it find some way forward that might allow them to think differently about the violent past. Whether they like my interpretations or not, that’s okay.

But I hope the book can simply offer a way of approaching the past that’s different from what dominates the world in which they live in now. And my book suggests that we first need to gather the evidence and look at what happened day-by-day, rather than use preconceived notions, which are structured by more recent conflicts, to approach history with our own conclusions ready.

William Collins Donahue:7 I work in the area of Holocaust studies and during your talk, especially during the last third, I was trying to think about how to apply that.

Two points in particular come to mind—one is the importance of place. What do we gain by taking students to places like Majdanek, cide. A Sociological Perspective (London: Sage Publications, 1993).

7. William Collins Donhaue is the Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C., Professor of the Humanities and director of the Initiative for Global Europe, Keough School of Global Affairs. He served as director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies (2018 - 2020).

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post-lecture discussion Sachsenhausen, or Auschwitz? I know it’s not just about camps, it could be other places too.

The second point is the much harder challenge, which I think you really discuss delicately, and that is about bringing humanity to this subject matter, including to the perpetrators. In the area of Holocaust studies that’s a huge problem in part because of the way the field developed in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It was dominated by survivors and considered taboo to have much compassion for perpetrators.

Then when we began to see things a little bit more differentiated and with the discovery and attention to Primo Levi you saw nuance, but it was then Jews who were seen as perpetrators and victims and not so much Germans.

In both areas—the importance of place and the compassion for perpetrators—I would welcome your insights.

Bergholz: As the book won awards that I didn’t expect it to win, I tried to think “Why? What is interesting here to readers who may not have ever thought about Bosnia and don’t really care much about that part of the world?” I think the two subjects you mentioned are major elements in the book that help answer this question. But I’m not sure there’s simply one way to engage with them.

When it comes to the subject of “place,” I’m reminded back to one of my great teachers. I was talking with some global affairs graduate students this morning about a professor of mine from Ukraine. I ran into her on the street once when I was an undergraduate student and she was smoking a cigarette. I had just written a paper for her class on Russian intellectual history, which was about a book by Dostoyevsky, and she complimented me on it. Then she looked at me and said, “When are you going there?” I responded, “What do you mean?”

She replied, “When are you going to Russia? You don’t know anything about that place until you breathe its air. Go.” She took another drag on her cigarette and walked away.

Such encounters drove me toward anthropology, without formally studying anthropology. I really felt that in order to tell the story in my book in a new way, the place had to somehow become an actor and 45

that I had to make this place feel like somewhere that we all could go, or would like to go. If the place appeals to us in some way and the place feels like something we can imagine, feel, smell, and hear, then the experience that I write about—which is terrifying and perplexing—feels less far away.

It’s an approach that I think can be useful. It’s not simply just window dressing, color, or detail added: it’s a real commitment to try and narrow that gap, to cross that border, to allow us not to simply see terrible violence—either in camps or the countryside of Bosnia—as something happening “out there” in some supposedly incomprehensible part of the world. If that behavior is unfathomable, then that world is unfathomable. But if that world is fathomable, then perhaps we can approach the behavior with a greater degree of sensitivity.

This leads us to the second subject, that is, the issue of historical empathy. I tried to meditate on and think about this subject as I prepared this lecture. The extension of historical empathy to multiple historical actors is something that, for the most part, is new in the field of Balkan studies, and especially in research on violence during the Second World War in the part of Europe that I’ve researched. The history that I have written about in this book is usually told as three distinct histories: there is the history of killing of people considered to be Muslims, and that story is told completely divorced from context with any of the other actors; there is a history of people considered to be Serbs, told divorced from any other context; and there is the history of people considered to be Croat Catholics, which is also told divorced from historical context. This is the case because most people are not willing to actually think about human relationships and the ways in which one act is connected to other acts, and the way in which one neighbor is connected to another neighbor. When suffering takes place, somehow the urge to remember in the service of identity politics—in other words, not to remember for peace or to promote historical understanding, but to remember so as to never forget, to make sure those people never do it to us again—is in a sense building a wall in terms of practicing historical empathy.

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post-lecture discussion I think there isn’t necessarily a magic solution. One of the key elements is simply to have a willingness to tell the story of violence differently, to try and devote some space to the other side. To consider that person on the other side not as a black box, or as an evil person, but as a person just like you and me. And to at least attempt to think about that person’s hopes, fears, dreams, and horrific actions—but not just the latter. It’s a great challenge. As you point out in Holocaust studies, as huge as that field is, the inability to extend historical empathy remains a gaping hole in that field, aside from a few key works, Christopher Browning’s for example. We’re waiting for another generation of historians to bring this approach of historical empahty into that field in some serious way.

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