Versöhnung auf dem Balkan: Der Opferrolle zum Opfer fallen

In diesem Artikel, der von Transitions Online veröffentlicht wurde, schreibt Paul B. Miller über die Reaktionen bosnisch-muslimischer Studenten auf Unterricht zum Thema Völkermord. In vielen Fällen beherrsche das starke Bewusstsein ihrer eigenen uneingelösten Opferrolle ihre Einstellung zu dem Leid anderer.

How do you tell Bosnians that you’ve come to their country to teach a course on genocide? The first time I encountered this awkward situation was in the gym, while trying to make small talk with the woman next to me on the exercise bike. “So what are you teaching here?” she asked, innocently enough, in response to my boastfulness about being a Fulbright professor at the University of Sarajevo. “Well, you see, it’s a course about genocide in the 20th century. I mean, some of the faculty felt it would be good to look at this, eh, ‘scientifically’ since, you know, it’s not taught here as an academic subject like it is in the States. And I … because I teach the Holocaust at my university in America … they thought it would be a good way to begin confronting the recent history here. But I’m not touching what happened in Bosnia directly … no way! You know far more about that than I do. And in any case, Bosnia keeps coming up during our discussions.”

Phew. For once my discomfiture had less to do with her looks than with my own anxiety about how she might respond to what I did, to what memories the deceptively simple word “genocide” might evoke. Indeed, what do I have to teach Bosnians about genocide?

It was my sabbatical, and, to be honest, I didn’t really want to teach anything. I had taught three courses a semester the previous six years, responding dutifully to my colleagues’ requests to broaden course offerings. “I know nothing about women,” I joked to the mostly female students in my first class on women in modern Europe. But learn I did.

So when it came time to apply for a Fulbright in Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to begin a new book, I would have preferred one of the purely research grants. Yet not quite able to market myself as a criminologist or economist – in other words, something Bosnia might actually need – I had to go for the catch-all lecture/research award in “all disciplines.” That meant that I would have to teach, and since European history was well-covered at the university, I brazenly, if perhaps naively, suggested that my Holocaust course might provide a means for Bosnians to begin facing their own recent past.

The idea did not fill me with confidence, so I broached it with someone who had spent time in Bosnia during the war, whereas I had never been there. “You want to teach the Holocaust at the University of Sarajevo?” he replied. “That has got to be the most ridiculous idea I have ever heard! I mean, do you really think that people who live amid neighbors who murdered their families and burned down their homes want to hear about what the Jews suffered 60 years ago?” He insisted that no one in the country was ready to reopen such fresh wounds. 

The Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo had no interest in my course and was happy to let me spend the year doing research. But a new dean at the Faculty of Islamic Studies wanted to start a genocide studies curriculum, and when my CV crossed his desk he proposed a series of 15 lectures on genocide in the 20th century. Now I not only found myself teaching during my coveted sabbatical, but once again teaching something I had never taught before. Moreover, for someone who had breezily spent the Bosnian conflict in New Haven, Connecticut, reading books about French peasants in the 19th century, lecturing in Sarajevo on genocide seemed an intimidating prospect.

To read the article in full, visit the Transitions Online website.