MILOVAN DJILAS.  Wartime.  New York:  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1977.  Pp. x, 470.


Milovan Djilas' Wartime is a sensitive, perhaps even agonized,
account of the author's experiences as a young communist and
thinker involved intimately with the political struggles in
Yugoslavia from the Italian Occupation until the end of World War
II.  His autobiography of this period provides us with sharp,
personal insight into infra- and international politics, but also
dissects his own self with the same sharp instruments.  His
internal struggles and self-observation are very similar to that
of postwar existentialist writers.
      Djilas gives away some of his philosophical cards early in
his text.  Rather than the neurotic machismo and after-the-fact
posturing that breeds like a virus in some militarily-experienced
autobiographers, Djilas lays bare the pain and confusion that
wartime visits on its participants.  He is not unaware of the
absurdity that is the amoral flipside of the carnage of war.  In
the internal nihilism of war, only the earth itself stays calm: 
all else is jumbled and juxtaposed ("Death had suddenly become .
. . as ubiquitous as the air and the soil (12)."
      On a more personal level, Djilas relates how his decision to
not escalate peasant involvement in the expulsion of the Italians
from Montenegro led to criticism from the more vocal peasants: 
he is reprimanded that some action must be maintained, "now that
you've started the bloody dance (24)!"  This is the Heideggerian
dilemma of 'thrown-ness,' of being thrust into a situation one
must control, without having the slightest means of doing so.  He
laments that he is "alone in the vortex of the deadly vortex into
which I had led my own people (42)."  
      In war this fear and aloneness sublimates into aggression
and interpersonal ferocity.  Djilas walks past a grieving new
widow but does not stop to console her because it "seemed
senseless" to comfort her (33).  Then, in a delicious bit of life
mirroring art, and vice versa, Djilas has an absurd, hostile
exchange with a peasant (almost peasant/object) on a hill top. 
The young Djilas confronts this Sisyphus, who has lugged a wheel
"up a mountain (34)." When Djilas challenges his motivation the
peasant cannot justify his labor.  Djilas, godlike and terrible
in relation to the base peasant, rolls the wheel back down the
hill -- Camus would be proud.
      This underlying existential infrastructure is probably not
intended by Djilas.  It is the result of being in a leadership
position where he must defend communist ideology, although he is
perceptive enough to see that there are indefensible aspects of
it.  The lower Partisans are never faced with this dilemma: they
only have to obey orders and spout out the appropriate phrasings. 
It is the leadership (and, then, only the intellectual subset of
leadership) that must struggle with the ethical and philosophical
absurdities.  The politics of word choice and terminology takes
on an Through the Looking-Glass resonance.  
      At Djilas' eventual high-level position with Tito, personal
behaviors have such repercussions that the result is dreamlike,
unreal.  The image of Tito vacillating wildly, giving
contradictory commands under pressure is odd and disturbing
(222).  Americans are used to their leadership portrayed as
certain, heavily-armed, white-hatted men but Djilas is not
socialized into portraying Tito that way.<1>  To see an
important leader as an imperfect person goes a long way towards
accomplishing Djilas' goal of convincing others that war may be
necessary at times, but unthinking murder in defense of an
allegedly perfect leader or ideology is fraudulent.  It is, of
all things, to kill in bad faith.<2>  
      The awareness of acting in bad faith, and of the absurdity
of acting unthinkingly under the protection of a "monolithic"
ideology (450) forcefully startles Djilas in his last chapter: 
during the recitation of party slogans he has a sort of
existential epiphany.  He is divorced from all meaning, even from
language as long as he falls in line with the other herdtiere. 
It is this slide into formless slave-mentality that provokes him
to make a stand against the personal and national betrayal that
comes from blindly following utopian "ideological revolutions
(450)."

      Jason Carr
      University of Texas at Arlington
      Arlington
      
                                   NOTES



<1>Consider Stalin's bizarre behavior towards Djilas and Djilas'
wife at a Kremlin delegation party (428).

<2>Note that Djilas praises the German troops he encounters for
being more German than Nazi, for having some other centripetal
force besides an externally applied political schema (234).  Is
Djilas here rebelling subconsciously against the radically
international position of the Party?
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