So it was a surprise to many of the Belgrade Praxists’ admirers when three key members of the group — Markovic, Tadic, and Zagorka Golubovic — signed a 1986 petition in support of the Kosovo Serbs. Cosic also signed. It was not just that the petition painted a florid picture of Serbian suffering in the southern province. It was also that the signatories obliquely urged the government to revoke Kosovo’s autonomous status — something Serbian nationalists had been pushing the parliament to do. After all, the petitioners reasoned, with its “unselfish” aid to the impoverished province, Serbia had amply demonstrated that it took the Albanians’ interests to heart. Ominously, the petition’s authors intoned: “Genocide [against Kosovo’s Serbs] cannot be prevented by … [the] politics of gradual surrender of Kosovo … to Albania: the unsigned capitulation which leads to a politics of national treason.” for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality." Anything that violates the autonomy of art. To what extent Kosovo's Serbs were persecuted remains debatable. To be sure, they were outnumbered, and there is no reason to doubt that they faced threats, vandalism, harassment, and even the occasional act of criminal violence from an Albanian majority that deeply resented Slavic rule. But to Yugoslavs outside Serbia, complaints of anti-Serb discrimination in Kosovo were incomprehensible. After all, Serbs were hardly an oppressed group in the nation as a whole, whereas the Albanians formed something of an underclass. What on earth had made him think such a thing? But he was not alone. By 1992, the terms of political debate in Yugoslavia had undergone a dramatic shift. No longer was it a question of exactly how tightly the six republics and two autonomous provinces should be yoked to Belgrade’s central authority. As Communism crumbled across the former Eastern bloc, the Yugoslavs began to revive their own pre-Communist paradigms. But in Yugoslavia, these paradigms were extreme and unworkable, drawing on the country’s ugliest memories and worst fears: a Serb-dominated unitary state, which non-Serbs remembered bitterly from the first Yugoslavia; and the fratricidal killing fields of World War II, in which Serbs were overwhelmingly victimized. It seemed increasingly impossible for the country either to stay together in multinational form or to break apart without apocalyptic destruction.

Praxis International's American editors were not particularly perturbed that, with the exception of Supek, they had lost the Zagreb contingent. Says Seyla Benhabib, "The question of ethnicity was irrelevant. They were all Yugoslavs. To us outsiders, it wasn't even like asking, 'Are you Italian American or Irish American?' It was more like asking, 'Are you Bavarian or from Berlin?'" Much has changed since Gerson Sher traveled to Yugoslavia to research his dissertation amid the political and intellectual ferment of the late 1960s. For one thing, the idiosyncratic country that captured his imagination no longer exists. Nor does Praxis, the group of Marxist humanist philosophers Sher studied. But this is not the only reason he responds warily to a request for an interview: “I am appalled,” he says, “that you should be interested in Praxis at this time.”in the final essay, the title of this book refers specifically to Max Brod's betrayal of Kafka's reputed request that his writing be destroyed after his death, although in fact, as Mr. Kundera points out, Kafka's testament Not all of the Praxists followed their leaders down the dark road of Serbian nationalism. The Croatian members cleaved to their humanist principles through the bloodiest years of the Yugoslav wars. And in Serbia, some of the most courageous and lonely expressions of dissent have come from former Praxists and their students. Of the Belgrade 8, none disgraced himself as thoroughly as Markovic, but there can be no question that nationalism captured the hearts and minds of many other Praxists. Consider the case of Svetozar Stojanovic and his ally, Dobrica Cosic. In 1989, Seyla Benhabib took over the American editorship of Praxis International. At the time, she knew that conflict was brewing over Kosovo, but she did not yet understand its history or its dimensions. Her Praxis colleagues were little help. It was curious, she thought, that Svetozar Stojanovic, her Yugoslav co-editor, never wrote about recent developments in his own country. Norman Birnbaum, now a law professor at Georgetown University, explains, "When we went to Yugoslavia at that time, we did think the nationality question had been solved. It was the Titoist truce, or illusion, or parenthesis." Croatian-born historian Branka Magas puts it differently. The Western leftists who took up with Praxis as late as the 1980s and early 1990s, she says, "never really saw Yugoslavia. They saw self-management. They only saw the country through the lens of what interested them."

Many people have read Markovic as being a cynic and a betrayer of Praxis,” says Bernstein. But in Markovic’s distorted vision, Bernstein suspects, “Serbia represented the progressive element of Yugoslav society” — the element bent on keeping Yugoslavia united and on preserving its socialist structure. Over time, he lost all perspective. “That’s the tragedy of Mihailo Markovic,” says Bernstein. “Instead of seeing the dark and ugly side of Serbian nationalism, he committed himself to it.”I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality. Until Stravinsky, music was never able to give barbaric rites a grand form. We could not imagine them musically. Which means: we could not imagine the beauty of the barbaric. Without its beauty, the barbaric would remain incomprehensible. (I stress this: to know any phenomenon deeply requires understanding its beauty, actual or potential.) Saying that a bloody rite does possess some beauty—there's the scandal, unbearable, unacceptable. And yet, unless we understand this scandal, unless we get to the very bottom of it, we cannot understand much about man. Stravinsky gives the barbaric rite a musical form that is powerful and convincing but does not lie: listen to the last section of the Sacre, the "Danse sacrale" ("Sacrificial Dance"): it does not dodge the horror. It is there. Merely shown? Not denounced? But if Why? After all, according to the Harvard political theorist Seyla Benhabib, "the name Praxis has a distinguished history. It was used by dissidents against Stalinism and identified with the project of democratic socialism." Sher's dissertation, later published as Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia(Indiana, 1977), explored what seemed a promising strain of humanist thought emerging from the University of Zagreb and the University of Belgrade. In the 1960s and 1970s, a glittering roster of Western intellectuals attended the Praxis group's yearly retreats on the Adriatic island of Korcula: Jürgen Habermas, A.J. Ayer, Norman Birnbaum, Lucien Goldmann, and Herbert Marcuse were just a few of those who gathered around the Yugoslav group and served on the editorial board of its eponymous journal. Strange, then, that today the term "Praxis" and the names of some of its leaders are just as often associated with the notoriously antihumanist rhetoric of Serbian nationalism and the murderous politics of Slobodan Milosevic. But the most incredible piece of Markovic’s argument was yet to come. It might seem, Markovic mused, that the Albanians are just a small, poor, oppressed minority. But the truth is that throughout history the Albanians have had great powers on their side, while Serbia limped along on her own two feet. And just who were the Kosovo Albanians’ powerful protectors? The Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Italy, the Vatican, Great Britain, the Comintern, the United States, Pan-Islamic fundamentalism, Albania, and a cabal of bureaucrats in the Yugoslav government.

great artists of the century" who became what he calls defendants: Celine, Marinetti, Pound, Brecht, among many others. He asks, "How is it possible that the Soviet Russian chauvinist, the maker of versified propaganda, In subsequent years, Serbian nationalists would bitterly complain that Tito’s policy had been “A weak Serbia is a strong Yugoslavia.” But why shouldn’t it have been? Of the country’s six official nations, the Serbs were far and away the most populous, outnumbering the Croats two to one. If multinational Yugoslavia’s culture and politics were to be governed by majority rule, the country would not survive: The non-Serb populations had strongly developed national identities and long, distinct histories of their own. Not only that, but they occupied more compact territories than did the Serbs. If they felt overly dominated, they could be tempted to secede. So Tito restrained the potentially overweening influence of the Serbs by dividing Yugoslavia into territorial units and constantly readjusting the internal balance of power. Much has changed since Gerson Sher traveled to Yugoslavia to research his dissertation amid the political and intellectual ferment of the late 1960s. For one thing, the idiosyncratic country that captured his imagination no longer exists. Nor does Praxis, the group of Marxist humanist philosophers Sher studied. But this is not the only reason he responds warily to a request for an interview: "I am appalled," he says, "that you should be interested in Praxis at this time." As the 1973 issue of Praxis neared press time, Puhovski was on his own: the editorial board split seven to one in Cosic’s favor.That summer was particularly memorable at Korcula. Richard Bernstein, now a political philosopher at the New School for Social Research, recalls, “Everybody who was a significant leftist, in the East or in the West, came to the 1968 meeting. All the leaders of the student movements in Germany, Eastern Europe, and the United States were there.” But even as the editorial boards of Praxis and the New Left Review sunned themselves on the beaches of Korcula, the Belgrade 8 held on to their jobs by a slender thread. The allegiance of Praxis to a united Yugoslavia seemed clear enough. But given the ever present threat of government censorship, there was little that Yugoslav intellectuals published in those years that was completely transparent. The Zagreb philosopher Zarko Puhovski, the youngest Praxist by about twenty years, says that the group’s disputes over politics and ideology were often disguised as conversations about less controversial questions of aesthetics or ontology. “One kind of debate functioned as a replacement for other kinds of debate,” he recalls. For more than a decade, the Belgrade 8--Mihailo Markovic, Svetozar Stojanovic, Ljubomir Tadic, Zagorka Golubovic, Dragoljub Micunovic, Miladin Zivotic, Nebojsa Popov, and Trivo Indjic--wandered the globe, accepting visiting professorships abroad and meeting secretly in Belgrade. Only Indjic accepted the government's offer of a low-profile post at an institute. The others insisted on nothing less than a full return to the University of Belgrade, which was not forthcoming. Markovic, the group's best-known member abroad, took a part-time philosophy post at the University of Pennsylvania. Stojanovic taught at Berkeley and at the University of Kansas. Meanwhile, in Zagreb, the situation was slightly less dire. "There were pressures," remembers Zarko Puhovski. "I couldn't publish for two years. But it was nothing remotely like the situation in Belgrade." Norman Birnbaum, now a law professor at Georgetown University, explains, “When we went to Yugoslavia at that time, we did think the nationality question had been solved. It was the Titoist truce, or illusion, or parenthesis.” Croatian-born historian Branka Magas puts it differently. The Western leftists who took up with Praxis as late as the 1980s and early 1990s, she says, “never really saw Yugoslavia. They saw self-management. They only saw the country through the lens of what interested them.” Watching the growing nationalist militancy of their fellow Croatian academics, the Zagreb Praxists were horrified. And for this very reason, Tito suddenly found these Praxists indispensable: After all, nationalism was a greater threat to the fragile nation than Marxist critique would ever be, and the members of the Zagreb group were outspoken and eloquent against the greater evil. So even while the Belgrade Praxists, who were associated with student unrest, appealed to the international community for protection, their Zagreb counterparts, who were associated with the fight against Croatian nationalism, continued their work in peace.