In 1993, I thought that an evening class in Cambridge could be an easy way to work out the brain and a great excuse to eat at Casablanca every Wednesday. Bob Maginn, my so-kind VP, offset the insane work schedule and crummy cubicle at Bain by giving me cushy office space at our client site (the late Digital Equipment Corp) in Maynard and by signing off on “Nationalism in Eastern-Central Europe” at Harvard as being “work-related.”Last night, we watched Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land (as distinguished from the porn film of the same name) — a simultaneously comical and bleakly hopeless parable and microcosm of the Bosnian - Serb (- United Nations) conflict set in 1993. That same year our professor tried to communicate the desperation, the imminent and ongoing destruction of the region to a bunch of eager, yet thoroughly clueless students previously unfamiliar with the location of Hungary on a map of Europe. We formed study groups and memorized capitals, rivers, leaders and learned to spell Bosnia-Herzegovina while hundreds of thousands were killed in battle or executed (or about to be) and 2 million people displaced. Our professor became a spitting, angry, sarcastic backdrop to our cool debates about the role of external factors and forces in the face of nationalism and comparisons to other religion-based conflicts throughout history. But like UNPROFOR, my resources were needed elsewhere (Wed. nights — like all others — were sacrificed to analysis of DEC’s swift decline, with only CEO Orit Gadiesh to relieve the pain with a nightly drop off of Morale and McDonalds), and so, I dropped the class and left off my studies of the conflict to focus on the really important things in life, my little world.This film is a pretty effective Cliff’s Notes (Spark’s Notes?) version of the conflict. And sadly, the most comprehensive analysis that I’ve seen around these parts outside that rarified, brief classroom experience. I’ve asked friends what they recall reading/hearing about Srebrenica and Kosovo in the 90’s, and generally get blank stares all around. Except for Joel, of course, who is a refreshing fount of knowledge and recounted the context of this film for us.One of my favorite moments in No Man’s Land is when one Bosnian soldier in a trench, reading a paper exclaims in horror at the atrocities occurring in Rwanda, with his hunting rifle on his knee.I remember the shock of encountering a huge swastica mosaic on a neighbor’s barn wall in Bavaria as a child and being told to hush and that “some older people hold onto the past.” But I think we don’t hold onto the past enough — we suffer from some global memento mori and are then baffled by world events. Gosh, who would have thought Iraq would be such a mess?
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