This final punch line would have been too intrusive for a novel, but as a conclusion to a real life it is unsurpassable: the Serbian writer Ivan Ivanji, born in 1929, survivor of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, who repeatedly returned to this camp experience in his novels and his prose often moved to Weimar, where he had one of his protagonists gain his first political experiences in a back room of the legendary Hotel Elephant, died – in Germany, in Weimar, as a guest in the Hotel Elephant. He died on May 9th. The day before, he had taken part as a guest of honor at the opening of the “Museum of Forced Labor in National Socialism” and had also read from his work in the theater. A life couldn’t end more memorable.
Ivan Ivanji comes from a Jewish medical family in Banat, a historic region in Serbia. He grew up multilingual; German is of course one of the languages he speaks and writes. His parents were killed soon after the German occupation of Yugoslavia began in 1941. The son survived and made a career as a journalist, writer and diplomat in Titoist Yugoslavia after 1945.
Tito’s translator
In the immediate post-war period he also created enemies. Vojislav Simić, a legend of Yugoslavian jazz who recently celebrated his 100th birthday in Belgrade, is one of them. Simić describes in his memoirs that Ivanji was one of the communist party’s main agitators against jazz as a supposed capitalist-American scourge of the young generation until 1953. Other jazz musicians of those years also mention that Ivanji’s agitprop cultural criticism was notorious in the scene and brought with it many an unpleasant summons.
But over the years, not only Yugoslavia became more liberal, but also Ivanji, who always remained a loyal supporter of the system. A letter to the editor in this newspaper from August 1978, in which the then embassy councilor for press and culture at the Yugoslavian embassy in Bonn defended his country against criticism and tried to demonstrate how liberal the penal system was in socialist Yugoslavia, also speaks of this. He later became Tito’s translator for German and was present at his meetings with Willy Brandt, Herbert Wehner, Helmut Schmidt, Walter Ulbricht, Erich Honecker, Bruno Kreisky and Kurt Waldheim. He also wrote a book about it.
As a writer, Ivanji was admirably productive, even if the quality of his novels did not always keep pace with their quantity and his literary treatment of the camp period did not come close to that of Imre Kertész or Jorge Semprún. Ivanji achieved a great achievement as a mediator between cultures. He translated Günter Grass and Bertolt Brecht into Serbian as well as Danilo Kiš and David Albahari into German. Until the end he was a wide-awake observer of current events, which was always worth listening to.