How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

Drakulić opens with a meditation on her book’s title. In 1991, with civil war looming in her native Yugoslavia, she considers, “the title of my book feels wrong […] we have not yet survived communism and there is nothing to laugh about” (xi). Once, it seemed that the revolutions of 1989 would mark a turning point. Daily life suggests otherwise: Where she once imagined that all fruit would be ripe in a democratic state, “the peaches were just as green, small, bullet-hard, somehow pre-revolutionary” (xii). She notes that the statue of Croatian nationalist general Josip Jelacic has been restored, but that he now points “forward to the past,” as national authorities have erased Communist monuments just as readily as Tito’s government took down Jelacic’s original statue in 1945 (xiii). Thinking back to the revolutions of 1989, Drakulić argues that this was not entirely a joyful time, even though she did not support the system: “the world I had thought of as permanent, stable, and secure was suddenly falling apart around me. It was not a pleasant experience” (xiii).

Drakulić comments that the media images of the Berlin Wall falling are powerful, even cinematic, but also incomplete.