“Cafe Europa Revisited” (2025)

Cafe Europa Revisited (2025)

a review by Bruce Sterling

Dutifully, I have just read the latest Slavenka Drakulic essay collection.

Once upon a time, Slavenka Drakulic was quite a far-out and exotic personage to me. I tended to think of her as “Madame Drakulic.” A cafe-society, Balkan literary figure with a strange name from a 1960s Hammer horror-film.

However, I have read many of Slavenka’s books, and sometimes her articles, too, for decades on end, and nowadays, I pretty much get where Slavenka is coming from. We have never met — (I saw her read aloud in a bookstore once, since authors do that) — but I have to think and talk about her as “Slavenka.”

This most recent English-language book of hers is a direct sequel to a book of hers I read decades ago, titled “Cafe Europa.” The new “Cafe” book has a subtitle which also connects it to her most famous, and highly readable book, “How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.”

So clearly this new book has been packaged as a retread. It’s literary nostalgia-ware, like some greatest-hits retrospective from a touring 80s rock-band. So I had to wonder who this book was meant for — who is the natural target audience?

And I realized it was probably me. Yes: I seem to be almost the ideal guy to be reading this English-language translation of a rather calm and graceful set of essays by a little old Croatian lady who is also more-or-less Swedish. That’s why I’m reviewing it here and now.

Back in the past, I read Slavenka books which felt very 1968, very 1989. Electrifying, innovative and exotic years, redolent with 20th-century popular upheavals, revolution, bombings, wars, massacres, flows of refugees, sex, drugs, music and so on.

In her Yugoslav youth, Slavenka was the citizen of a peculiar Communist fortress-state. Slavenka used to mostly write about her own scenes — Zagreb, Adriatic coastal towns — and sometimes she would fetch her roll-aboard and go raid some European capitals. Since she had a big consumer-appetite for doing this, Slavenka was second-to-none at taking careful note of European material culture. Whenever she sat in some European cafe (and indeed she did), she became the alert sidewalk-witness of the colors of clothes, chairs, cars… What things smelled like, the emotional affect of some local European guy’s strange idea of a proper meal….

This Slavenka design-centricity — her naturalistic ex-commie regard for what gives over at the fancy Euro-mall — is the most Slavenka-like aspect of Slavenka’s writerly calling. If — like me — you’re a guy entranced by the arcane details of European door-knobs and manhole covers, then Slavenka is the maestra of this “frog’s-eye” perspective. She truly excels at it.

I wouldn’t even call her observations “sharp.” They’re orthogonal to what any European design-critic would likely say about Europe’s everyday objects. It’s different, yet illuminating, like the material poetry of a woman on an Adriatic ferry on the high seas of Transition. You’re from one place, you’re inexorably headed for some other place. Hour by hour, things change. There are distinct gradients in the quality of the bread-loaves and the toilet-paper. You’re the mariner, and you’re marinating in that. That’s the Slavenka sensibility.

The core lesson of “Cafe Europa Revisited” is that Slavenka has become European. I wouldn’t say that she owns the Cafe Europa — clearly, she wouldn’t want that private-propertarian real-estate paperwork hassle — but she’s no longer “visiting” there. Now she lives there. She’s one of them. She just is. She possesses the proper plastic: the European health insurance cards, and European ID-cards. Her somewhat newfangled country, Hrvatska aka “Croatia,” has become a European Union country much like those other, older nation-states. Croatia is a NATO nuclear-umbrella country. She’s even been married to some Swedish guy for many years.

The upshot of all her “visiting” and “revisiting” is that Europa came and appropriated her. She wasn’t magically kidnapped like Europa by the Bull of Jove. Instead, it happened at the elephantine native pace of Brussels. Everything inspected, re-inspected and in triplicate. It took its historic time about it, with the stealthy tiptoe of infrastructural infiltration, but it happened.

This book is about what that situation looks and feels like. Europe, after the Transition transitioned. It’s become nostalgic to still call it “post-Communism.” It’s post-911, post-2008, post-Pandemic. It’s oligarchic trade-war. It’s pre-whatever’s next.

The Twenty-First has been a rather squalid century so far, where people stay alive but take a lot of body-blows. The trend, whenever it’s allowed, is to pick up and leave. The overt ethnic massacres are out of style, but a lot of the cafes of Europa are boarded-up. The Europe of the 2020s has a great many locales where nobody’s home.

“Cafe Europa Revisited” is mostly about the discontents of the polities which became European Union most recently. There’s a universality to this, though, because everybody in the European Union feels much the same. They all vaguely resent being corraled and being made so rationalized, safety-conscious and peaceable. Every polity has some local Brexit-ish faction keen to leave that tedious, demeaning status quo. They’re always allied to some smaller throat-cutting faction who are tenderly eager for those lost pogroms, camps and mass invasions.

The European Union project, as a persistent historical effort, is about taking an eccentric, dangerous place like Croatia, with its population of four million people, and turning it into the functional equivalent of Louisiana (also four million people). This imperial plan is mostly performed with infrastructure schemes, consumer goods and critically-important plastic cards. The plastic cards feel the most painful because they’re the most personal. They have your face on them.

European Croatia in 2025 is no longer exciting, turbulent and war-torn. Instead, it’s Ukraine that is exciting and turbulent and war-torn, because Ukraine wanted to become European Union and then guns started blazing.

The earlier books of Slavenka Drakulic do rather well in contemporary Ukraine (as books go in the Ukrainian regional book market, anyhow). In the meantime, European Croatia gives Slavenka well-deserved literary awards. She’s become a grande dame of Croatian letters, even though she was a bete noire in their worst time of turmoil. She was profoundly out-of-favor with the state and the populace, due to her tactless habit of telling the truth about what was going on.

I read every essay in this book with grave attention and unfeigned enjoyment. They’re about societies being stifled into normalization instead of suffering a radical bloody crisis, and they’re worthy, but they’re not dull. There were a few of them I found especially useful and relevant. “When Aunt Angela Met Donald Trump” turns out to be mostly about Viktor Orban, eastern Europe’s thought-leader of modern ethnonationalism everywhere. I get it better about Orban’s appeal now; it’s about phony blood-and-soil traditions in which everybody nods patriotically and then votes with their feet and tries to find a better life somewhere else. Other people will arrive to fill that vacuum, but alas, they’re from deepest darkest Syria, or rural China, or Left Elbow, Kazakhstan. These are the last people you want taking up pavement-space in your make-believe empire. They’re handy anyway, because they do the necessary work for euro-pennies, while you can also demonize them, make them into an emergency permacrisis, and then use that immigrant-panic to eliminate all the civil rights. That’s what it’s about with Orban power-politics; that’s the game plan for him, and for all his disciples anywhere.

The Slavenka essay on “The Republic of North Macedonia,” aptly subtitled “How to Construct a Better Past,” is an excellent architectural study about what it looks and feels like to live among brand-new pseudohistorical make-believe megabuildings. These pastiche non-monument urban towers — (they’re not about actual memory or history, but they head-fake it for the sake of national expediency) — are the contemporary cousins of 1990s “postmodern” skyscrapers. However, instead of being shiny, groovy, globalized, postmodern pastiche towers, they’re grumpy, funky, ethnonational pastiche towers that no other country would ever want. Having read Slavenka’s hands-on essay about that situation, I’m now better equipped to recognize it. I’m grateful for these insights. I even suspect that there might be some way to “construct a better past” that is elegant, widely influential and actually works. I’ve never seen that done, but it’s a genuine cultural problem of mine. Culture-critic Slavenka is leading me by the hand here, and not for the first time, either.

This “Better Past” essay is also remarkable for her profound observation that nobody anywhere has any objective, honest, factual and fully-detailed Museum of Communism. Real-deal, no-kidding 20th-C Communism been gone for quite a while now, but the heritage industry and the museum economy have serious issues getting any grip there. I can’t think of any fully-qualified curators who would be up for that task. Slavenka herself, maybe. At least she writes about it.

The essay “My Favorite Card” is mostly about the functional-bureaucratic aspects of being old, sick and near death. Old people like myself tend to quite enjoy a narrative of this kind, because it seems so cutting-edge to us, so with-it and topical. Slavenka has never hidden from her fans that she’s lastingly sick and she undergoes kidney dialysis. It comforts me to think that European Union Slavenka is gamely hammering out another novel, while a Yugoslavian Slavenka, who would have lacked all this beeping and blinking Eurohealth machinery, would likely be buried by now.

It’s frankly pretty boring to grow old; the alternative, which is death, is clearly a lot more dynamic socially-speaking, but people don’t stand in line for that opportunity. Kid books written by old people are quite common. Old books directly written for old people by old people, that seems like a potential literary genre, given our century’s demographics. Books of that future kind would look like this book, I suspect.

“Cafe Europa Revisited” is less wacky, antic and peculiar than its prequel “Cafe Europa.” The immediate post-1989 period abounded in surreal, dynamic, mind-boggling daily weirdness, while every chapter in “Revisited” about some harmless personage stuck within grave, lasting trouble. Troubles about moral regrets, demeaning inconveniences, shabby self-incriminalizations, and similar quotidian aspects of day-to-day life. It may sound like some tough sledding for the reader, but I nevertheless find Slavenka’s books quite vivifying. She writes a lot, at length and fluidly. Her books are not all to my taste, but the passage of time has proved her staying-power. Time has also shown me that I’m quite her loyal, long-term fan. Maybe — probably — I was once some Yankee dilettante perusing her texts for the novelty thrills or for the local-color exoticism. That was back in our youth, though. It’s just not like that any more. That’s not the actual world that we laughingly survived to see.

Slavenka Drakulic writes world-class journalism. Whenever she mentions something I’ve never heard of, I promptly look that up. It’s never some mere personal in-joke. It’s always something of newsworthy relevance that it would behoove me to know about. It also fits properly into the well-considered structure of what she’s discussing. These are writerly virtues I feel obliged to praise.

As a journalist, she is no mere diarist or casual blogger, but a genuine, edifying participant in public affairs. They’re giving her awards in Croatia now, although they used to be afraid of her. Clearly they no longer much worry about sharp-tongued, charismatic, dissident Slavenka, but it’s probably because they’re no longer afraid of “journalism.” Journalism as a form of belles-lettres has become something that old people do.

“How We Survived Communism And Even Laughed.” That title is ironic Balkan black humor, and it’s by no means a slapstick belly-laugh. But the “even laughed” part turns out to be the humane, and the good, and even the long-lasting part. It’s a kind of expressive feminine stoicism which is the healthy opposite of glum, tight-lipped, traumatized silence. It’s about the moral courage to notice small-seeming, but vital quotidian aspects of life that are laughable, but also propulsive and restorative. Whenever those are put down on paper, then they can survive a good long time.

I’m happy to own this Slavenka Drakulic book, and I’ll be holding on to it for the long haul, in just the way I held on to all the others.