The phrase cancel culture, which at first was literally transliterated into “kansel kultura” in our country, and after some time the variant “culture of cancellation” became established, began to appear in the public in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, that is, eight or nine years ago. Today, it seems to us that it has existed much longer, and we often do not understand how there was a world in which there was no name for such a practice. However, the phrase itself did not catch on overnight. It gained wider popularity only in 2019.
For four or five years, therefore, there is hardly a day or a week that some variant of the “cancel culture” does not become a media topic. Its targets are mostly well-known persons, mostly from the artistic and academic world. And the whole practice does not calm down or mitigate, but actually shows elements of escalation. From the ex-Yugoslav or Bosnia-Herzegovina perspective, it is interesting to observe how some global phenomena know that they have their origin here.
One of the first authors certain circles tried to “cancel” was the Austrian author Peter Handke. Although he has always had a conflicting nature, he has been globally perceived as a classic since the beginning of the seventies of the twentieth century, that is, since his early thirties. Because back then, all those “scandals” seemed to help his popularity to some extent. Things changed when, in early 1996, he published a travelogue from Serbia in which he criticized the black-and-white media coverage of the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. There he made at least two risky moves: he opposed the pseudo-moral consensus of practically the entire German public and personally resented many influential media figures whom he directly “called out”. Even though he experiences numerous attacks, his powerful publisher and practically all the theatres he cooperates with stood firmly behind him.
As the years passed, not everything remained the same. Continuing to write on the “Serbian theme”, Handke raised the stakes more and more, as they say, the highlight of which was probably the attendance at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević. What Handke experienced then already belongs to the classic “cancel culture”, even if the term was not used then. The theatres that have already commissioned his texts are giving up on premieres, literary prizes are being taken away from him, for political reasons. It could have seemed that, in his later years, Handke would be denied a well-deserved place in the history of culture and literature, and then the Nobel Prize happened. That news caused “noise and fury” of a large camaraderie of self-styled “moral judges”, but in vain. It has been shown that the “cancel culture” can also be defeated.
As of the last few months, however, we could say that Handke was lucky because his dissenting opinion was about a war that, as we see it today, was not as polarizing an issue among Western publics as some other world conflicts. The latest escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which began in October 2023, has revitalized the “cancel culture” like never before.
A few weeks before the start of the Frankfurt Book Fair, it was announced that the prestigious “LiBeraturpreis”, which is traditionally awarded in Germany to female authors from developing countries, was this year won by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli. The award ceremony was scheduled for mid-October, but the organizer cancelled the event. The theme of the novel, no matter how well-documented it was, about Israeli crimes against Palestinian civilians in the middle of the twentieth century, was suddenly no longer politically correct.
After that, a whole series of related situations followed, one of which again concerned the so-called our area, since the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek was at its centre, that is, his speech at the aforementioned Frankfurt Book Fair.
Finally, at the very end of the year, everything reached the level of caricature. Namely, Masha Gessen was awarded the “Hana Arendt” award. I’m talking about Masha Gessen in the feminine gender, which is perhaps a bit politically incorrect in itself, because she declares herself to be a non-binary person. A person who is Jewish, whose grandfather was killed in the Holocaust, known as one of the biggest critics of Putin and Russian politics, compared the refugee camps in Gaza with the Nazi concentration camps in one of her journalistic articles. That was enough to ban the award ceremony. In barely two months, the German obsession with the defence of Israel went from the “cancellation” of a Palestinian to the “cancellation” of a Jewish author. That’s it.
Author: Muharem Bazdulj
The Srpska Times
