Looking back cooly to the Paleolithic, ancient Illyrian, medieval, Ottoman, or Austro-Hungarian period, Lovrenovic understands that the accumulated experience of a place can be possessed by a people and contained in its buildings, books, music, and language. She didn't offer them her academies, galleries, theaters, her temples and the glitter of her millennial culture or the wisdom of her sciences, but just her bloody drills, barracks, military hospitals, her brothels and diseases, the mud of the front and senseless death on it, in the nameless mass graves of the Carpathians, Galicia, Piave, and other battlefields. Monolingual America rarely gets a chance to peek beyond the most superficial layers of other cultures. We are close but not close enough to grasping the implications of the war for our own home front, which reach to the core of representation and legitimacy, and which test the limits of exactly what we're willing to tolerate or learn. For Americans to fully participate in the world, the emotional, political, and historical experiences of others must become part of our very consciousness.
Local knowledge can only remain artifact or curiosity until it is brought home.
Ammiel Alcalay is the author of Memories of Our Future . Tell us what you think. E-mail this story to a friend.