Albahari David: Gec i Majer

David Albahari: Gec i Majer

Biblioteka Tok

The short novel Gec i Majer by the great storyteller David Albahari appeared in its original edition around twenty years ago and since then, quite justifiably, it has captured the undivided attention of the audience as well as the critics. The work, which is small in scope, without paragraphs and other caesuras, written in one continuous, monolithic block, is at the same time a layered analysis of some of the central problematic foci of contemporary Europe: questions of guilt and responsibility, collective and individual, memory and forgetting, and, finally, abstract good and that quite tangible "banal evil", as well as their successful artistic synthesis.  Albahari's style is surgically precise, imagistically pure - just like the vivisection of malignant tissue long poisoned by history, but still alive. Gec and Majer are thus portrayed as faceless executioners (they are even completely interchangeable with each other!), they write love letters to their wives when it gets dark in Germany and distribute candy to camp children, being at the same time responsible for the paradigmatic modern evil: their characters could have been derived directly from the thoughts of Hannah Arendt. The position of narrator, heir, survivor - the one who can and must testify - is by no means unproblematic: the guilt of witnessing and the inability to fully comprehend the horror bring him to the brink of suicide. This testimony, even as a fictional reconstruction, is nevertheless necessary for him: it is up to him "to spread the seeds of memory among the students (...), to prevent the growth of the weeds of oblivion".

David Albahari was born in 1948 in Peć. Books of stories: Family Time (1973), Ordinary Stories (1978), Description of Death (1982, Andrić's Award), Fras u Šupa (1984), Simplicity (1988) and Pelerina (1993, Stanislav Vinaver Award), Selected Stories (1994), Unusual Stories (1999, 2002) and Second Language (2003). Novels: Judge Dimitrijević (1978), Zinc (1988), Short Book (1993), Snowman (1995), Bait (1996, NIN Award for Novel of the Year, Award of the National Library of Serbia for the most read book), Mrak (1997), Gec i Majer (1998), Svetski putnik (2001), Pijavice (2006), Ludvig (2007) and Brat (2008). Books of essays: Rewriting the World (1997) and Burden (2004). Selected works of David Albahari in ten books were published during 1996 and 1997. David Albahari's books have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Greek, Danish, Albanian, Slovak, Esperanto and Polish. Since 1993, he has been the author of Vremena knjiga, and since October 1996 of Pillars of Culture. He lives in Calgary.

The truck was a Zaurer brand, a five-ton truck with a box body, 1.7 meters high and 5.8 meters long, which was hermetically sealed. In the beginning, the Gestapo used smaller trucks, but the Zaurer from Belgrade belonged to another, more perfected series: namely, according to the statements of witnesses, they could fit up to a hundred people. On the basis of this data, a simple calculation can be made and it can be determined that to transport five thousand souls, it was necessary to make at least fifty trips. In these rides, souls did indeed become souls, but no longer in human form. Goec and Majer undoubtedly knew what was happening in the back, but it is certain that they would never describe it that way. The people they drive have no soul at all, at least that's well known! They are nothing but mold on the face of the world! And so, day after day, they repeat their well-established procedure.