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Former Yugoslav essayist and novelist traced the costs of communism, war and nationalism in Europe

Slavenka Drakulić, the Croatian writer and journalist whose essays illuminated women’s lives under communism, the banality of war criminals in the former Yugoslavia and the resurgence of nationalism in Europe, has died aged 76.

An astute observer of life behind the Iron Curtain, Drakulić made her name with work that joined political analysis to the intimate texture of daily existence. She wrote about ideology not as abstraction but as something felt in kitchens, wardrobes and courtrooms.

Born on July 4 1949 in Rijeka, Croatia, then part of socialist Yugoslavia, Drakulić became one of central and eastern Europe’s most widely read essayists. Her work moved between journalism, fiction and memoir, but was united by a persistent interest in the ways large systems — communism, nationalism, patriarchy, war — entered private life.

Her dispatches from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Guardian and Süddeutsche Zeitung. They were later collected in her 2004 book They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague.

The book examined not only figures such as former Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević, Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić and Biljana Plavšić, the only high-ranking female politician to stand trial there, but also lower-ranking soldiers who relied on the defence that they had been “just obeying orders”.

Drakulić was interested in the horror as well as the banality of political violence: the bureaucratic language, the small men who became instruments of atrocity, and the effect of long legal proceedings on victims and witnesses.

But it was How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, first published in 1991, that brought many readers to appreciate Drakulić’s particular gift: the ability to see an entire political order through the supposedly trivial details. Often described as a landmark book on feminism behind the Iron Curtain, it was also a study of scarcity, conformity and survival as an individual.

“Growing up in eastern Europe you learn very young that politics is not an abstract concept, but a powerful force influencing people’s everyday lives. It was this relationship between political authority and the trivia of daily living, this view from below, that interested me most. And who should I find down there, more removed from the seats of political power, but women,” she wrote.

For readers from the region, Drakulić’s essays offered a forensic examination of the dilemmas they could recognise from their own experience. Her writing helped explain, for instance, the fascination with western fashion and brands among women who had been denied access to them in countries such as Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu. What might have looked from the outside like consumer longing was, in her account, also a politics of the body and of self-presentation.

“To avoid uniformity, you have to work very hard: you have to bribe a salesgirl, wait in line for some imported product, buy blue jeans on the black market and pay your whole month’s salary for them; you have to hoard cloth and sew it, imitating the pictures in glamorous foreign magazines. What makes these enormous efforts touching is the way women wear it all, so you can tell they went to the trouble. Nothing is casual about them.

“To be yourself, to cultivate individualism, to perceive yourself as an individual in a mass society is dangerous. You might become living proof that the system is failing. Make-up and fashion are crucial because they are political.”

More than 15 years ago, the author of this obituary met Drakulić at her summer home in Istria, where she hosted a dinner with journalist and writer friends. Her laughter was contagious, but it was accompanied by a sharp and understanding eye. A conversation that moved from life under communism to feminism, journalism and what it meant to be a writer in a reunited Europe has stayed with me ever since. It also revealed the lived experience behind the essays: the precision, humour and empathy that marked her work.

Drakulić returned to the unfinished business of Europe in Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism, published in 2021. The book offered a bittersweet account of central and eastern Europe after EU and Nato accession. Living standards had risen; the old coffee houses had been renovated and gentrified; flat whites had arrived. Yet nationalism and xenophobia, particularly after the migration wave of 2015-16, had also returned with force.

“Many differences between western and eastern Europe that had existed before, but were not spoken about in the interests of unity, resurfaced to play a decisive role. Citizens of the former communist countries, who felt that they had been treated as second-class citizens ever since 1989, finally took the opportunity to oppose what they called the “dictatorship” of the EU,” she wrote.

Her warning was not confined to the east. Drakulić understood nationalism as a European, not a merely Balkan phenomenon.

“Xenophobia is changing the European social and political landscape. Once-timid discussions about national identity are now becoming full-fledged nationalism. These sorts of ideas used to travel from west to east; now they are moving in the opposite direction, as if nationalism and Balkanisation were no longer the property of eastern Europe alone.”

In that insistence — that the private was political, and that the east’s experience was not an exception but a warning — lay much of Drakulić’s enduring force. She wrote without nostalgia about communism, without innocence about liberal Europe, and without sparing the societies that had emerged from both.