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And I just think that's neat.

The audience were startled at first; they hadn’t expected this, not at a scholarly conference where one could expect theories, analyses, conclusions - words, words, words. Then people started applauding. For me, the sight of a sanitary napkin and a Tampax was a necessary precondition for understanding what we are talking about: not the generally known fact that women wait in long lines for food or that they don’t have washing machines - one could read about that in Time or Newsweek - but that besides all the hardship of living in Eastern Europe, if they can’t find gauze or absorbent cotton, they have to wash bloody cloth pads every month, again and again, as their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers did hundreds of years ago. For them, communism has changed nothing in that regard.

Slavenka Drakulić, Croatian writer, journalist and Index contributor, whose work covered topics from war in the former Yugoslavia to a novel on Frida Kahlo, has died aged 76. Born in Rijeka in 1949, she began her career as a journalist in the 1970s, going on to contribute to publications such as Index, The Nation, The Guardian and Dagens Nyhete, alongside publishing a number of fiction and non-fiction books.

When Index first published an essay by Drakulić in 1993 she had left Croatia for Sweden following a hit piece that described her and four other prominent female Croatian writers as “witches” and “traitors”. In her response entitled Close-up of death, she wrote angrily about what she called the “book keeping” of death since 1945 which had changed nothing for the tens of thousands of people under siege in Sarajevo during the Balkans war.

“Generations have learned about concentration camps at school, about factories of death; generations whose parents swear that it could never happen again – at least not in Europe – precisely because of the living memory of the recent past. They are fighting this war. What, then, has all that documentation changed? And what is being changed now, by the conscious, precise bookkeeping of death that is happening in our lives, in our living rooms, while we watch transmissions of the dying in Sarajevo?”

In a speech called Who’s afraid of Europe?, reprinted in Index in 2001, she warned of rising nationalism across the continent, asking “what exactly constitutes Europe? Where does it begin and end?”. Twenty years later she wrote again for Index. Emotional baggage explores the few items a refugee decides to pack before fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Drakulić’s 2003 novel They Would Never Hurt a Fly explored the personalities of accused war criminals as they went on trial for their actions during the breaking up of Yugoslavia.  Commenting on the trial of former president Slobodan Milošević, the novel asks yet again how seemingly ordinary people become perpetrators of atrocities.

Drakulić’s final book Zašto nisam naučila kuhati (Why I Never Learned to Cook) released shortly before her death, is a collection of essays discussing her relationship with food through a series of personal vignettes.

Eurozine is deeply saddened by the news of the death of Slavenka Drakulić, a member of the Eurozine Advisory Board and regular contributor. We have lost a European intellectual in the true sense.

By the time Drakulić first entered Eurozine’s orbit in 2000 with her keynote speech at the 14th European Meeting of Cultural Journals in Vienna, she had already published the series of books for which she was well-known througout Europe and the USA: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Café Europa, and Balkan Express.

A prominent writer and feminist intellectual in Croatia, Drakulić had been forced to leave the country in 1992 after being denounced as an enemy of the state by supporters of the Tuđman regime. From then on she divided her time between Stockholm and Vienna, taking it upon herself to explain to a western audience what had become of the former Yugoslavia.

Her speech, which was read out by Swedish publisher Arne Ruth after health problems prevented her from attending, was titled ‘Who’s afraid of Europe’. Occasioned by the new coalition between Wolfgang Schüssel’s Austrian People Party and Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party, Drakulić asked why the far right was gaining ground across the continent.

Her answer: ‘Europe is afraid of itself!’ The far-right was successfully exploiting people’s fear of identity loss, she argued, and liberal Europeans needed to offer something positive. That something was the chance of multiple identities and at the same time belonging.

In 2004 she published They Would Never Hurt a Fly, about war criminals on trial in The Hague. In it, she returned to Arendt’s famous point about the ‘banality of evil’.

‘Ordinary people could not do what these monsters did. We are ordinary people, therefore we cannot commit such crimes. But once you get closer to the real people who committed those crimes, you see that the syllogism doesn’t really work.’

An excerpt from the book was published in Eurozine and Transit magazine. Titled ‘Triumph of evil’, it described the trial of Radislav Krstić the first war criminal sentenced for genocide by the ICTY.

But it was testimony to Drakulić’s sanity as a writer that that she was capable of more lighthearted topics too. In 2007 she returned to a Eurozine conference to give a speech on … toilet paper. During communism, the scarcity of this basic commodity stood for the regime’s failure to meet citizens’ essential needs. Now, however, she wasn’t so sure whether she and her fellow eastern Europeans had not been longing for just another false paradise.

The Croatian writer, who died on 20 June, chronicled communism, war, feminism and everyday life with rare moral clarity. She leaves behind a body of work that helped Europe understand itself, writes her close friend Carl Henrik Fredriksson.

Slavenka Drakulić’s integrity was unshakeable. When she described a conflict, a society or a human predicament, she was not simply an authoritative observer, but a moral compass.

The Croatian writer’s influence on generations of readers, writers, journalists, feminists – on women and men across the world – can scarcely be overestimated. Communism and post-communism, war and post-war, crime and justice, altruistic goodness and banal evil, feminism and backlash, love and sexual violence, health and illness: she helped us to understand all of this.

Not through some grand narrative or all-encompassing analysis, but through a meticulous and empathetic focus on the details: on tampons or toilet paper, a designer bracelet or the hard, cold floor beside a bed in the Covid ward. And on people.

In Kyiv in 2014, just after the Euromaidan had forced the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Moscow, but before a new president had been elected, Slavenka Drakulić was there to take part in a meeting between leading international and Ukrainian intellectuals. At one of the city’s universities, she spoke about the bridge in Mostar, about Srebrenica and about the victims of nationalism in her old Yugoslavia, where a European war had raged not so long ago. The hall was packed to bursting with young Ukrainians, mainly women. They hung on her every word.

“When you can no longer remember the names of the dead,” she said, “that is when you know that the war has begun.”

And it felt as though all of us who were there at that very moment understood precisely that. That the war had begun. The names of those who had died on the streets around Maidan – “the Heavenly Hundred” – were still on everyone’s lips. But the “little green men” were already in Crimea, and in the Donbas people were dying – people whose names hardly anyone knew.

For Slavenka, however, the situation in Ukraine proved to be a difficult test. Her solidarity with the victims of Russia’s war of aggression was strong and unwavering. She stressed the need to document Russian war crimes and pointed to how the international tribunal in The Hague contributed not only to establishing justice but also the truth about the crimes committed in the lands of the former Yugoslavia. Yet she also struggled to fully grasp a situation in which the line between crude nationalism and nation-building was not always clear-cut. For her, nationalism was the greatest enemy; it was this – together with patriarchy – that she had fought throughout her life as a writer.

She herself became one of chauvinism’s foremost targets. In 1992, towards the end of the fiercest part of the war in Croatia, she and four other writers and journalists were branded as enemies of the state and literally denounced as “witches”. As a result of this attack, Slavenka Drakulić could no longer live or work in her homeland and sought refuge in Sweden. There, under Arne Ruth’s editorship, she became one of Dagens Nyheter’s most important writers. Several of her articles on the wars in the Balkans and the break-up of Yugoslavia were first published in the Swedish newspaper.

During these years, she also wrote the books that established her international reputation: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Café Europa and Balkan Express. This was later followed by the revealing and courageous They Would Never Hurt a Fly, about war criminals on trial in The Hague. In 2005, that book earned her one of the continent’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding.

The 2026 recipient of the same prize, the Bosnian-Croatian author Miljenko Jergović, once compared Slavenka Drakulić’s attempt in her work to explain her home region to uninterested westerners to translating the works of the classics of German idealism into the language of a Croatian farmer, only the other way round. In other words, effectively impossible. Yet Slavenka Drakulić succeeded in her task, because she wrote without bitterness, sentimentality or stereotypes.

What was to be her final book, however, was not a work of non-fiction, but one in a long line of novels and short-story collections (of which the two about Frida Kahlo and Mileva Einstein are among the most widely read). It is titled Zašto nisam naučila kuhati (Why I never learnt to cook) and was published in Croatia a couple of weeks ago.

It is a tragicomic collection of stories, all of which take their cue from the traditional embroideries hung in Balkan kitchens, which, for example, urge Croatian housewives to be thrifty and stay close to the hob, for then they might even be treated to an occasional trip to the cinema. Classic Slavenka Drakulić: hard-hitting feminism, with a keen eye for the details of everyday life. (And as everyone who had the privilege of sitting in Slavenka’s kitchen knows: she was a god-gifted cook…)

I'm a cow milk fan but this ad is baffling. "Don't drink oat milk it's made of oats!!!" We know that's why it's called oat milk. Are they against porridge too.