Filip David's noble battle against moral zeros

By Enver Robelli

In memory of the great Serbian-Hebrew writer Filip David, who died at the age of 84.

1.

There are many proud moments in Filip David's life. One of them was marked - by him personally, it could not have been otherwise - in 2016, when this Serbo-Jewish writer received the award for the best book in the network of public libraries of Serbia (for 2015). Filip David was honored for his novel "The House of Memory and Forgetting". The leitmotif of this work is the incessant sound of the train that circulates on the railways across Europe, the train that established order in time, but which at the same time became an instrument that enabled the efficiency of evil - from the delivery of troops to the fronts of the First World War to the terribly perfect organization of the arrival of the wagons to the extermination camps in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibór.

After accepting the award, David said that he wanted to say something first since the then President of Serbia, Tomislav Nikolić, was present at the ceremony. “However,” Filip David underlined, “I must distance myself from the presence of Mr. Toma Nikolić. Respecting the institution of the President of the Republic, I feel obliged to say that since the beginning of the 90s I have not agreed with the political positions and political activity of Mr. Nikolić and I feel obliged to say this here in front of him.” This is how intellectuals with dignity speak.

2.

There, around 10:00 (or maybe a little later), Filip Davidi would appear in the “Galerija” café in the center of Belgrade. Around him stood journalists (the most regular at these meetings must have been Fahri Musliu), writers, playwrights, opponents of nationalism, and explorers of memory archives. The owner of the café was Dragan Kapićić, once a famous basketball player of Yugoslavia. Sometimes - even often - his father, Jovo Kapićić, a partisan, general, Yugoslav ambassador to Sweden and Hungary, who organized the arrest of the Chetnik leader Draža Mihajlović immediately after World War II, would also appear there as a shadow from history. (Serbian nationalists would never forgive him for this, just as they would hate him for supporting the independence of Kosovo and Montenegro). In 2010, Kapićić, a proud Montenegrin and tall as an oak, gave an interview to B92 television, where he announced that he would never reveal the place where Draža Mihajlović was buried. This was demanded by nationalist circles. “They are not asking to know where he is buried, but they are asking for his remains so that they can build a monument.” In 2011, Jovo Kapićić was brutally beaten by unknown persons in Belgrade.

3.

What was said in the “Galerija” cafeteria was not without risk. Because what the participants in the debates said there, they also defended in public. For example, Filip Davidi. He was a strict opponent of the policies of Slobodan Milošević, Vojislav Šešelj, the Writers’ Association of Serbia, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He was, at the same time, a supporter of the peoples of the former Yugoslavia who were targeted by the Belgrade regime in the 1990s (and later). He was on the side of the victims. And he courageously supported their aspirations for freedom and independence. He called the independence of Kosovo an irreversible process. With words and deeds, he built bridges between peoples. In 1989, he was one of the founders of the association of independent writers in Sarajevo. A year later, he would found the Belgrade Circle, a group of intellectuals who took a principled stance against the war.

It was only a matter of time before he would be punished by the regime. This happened in 1992: Filip David was fired from his job at the Radio and Television of Serbia (RTS) for founding an independent trade union. He worked there in the Drama Program. In 1999, he became a member of Group 99, founded at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which also included cultural figures from Kosovo such as Ali Podrimja and Shkëlzen Maliqi. Falip David was a professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, where he formed a decades-long friendship with Petrit Imani, an equally well-known professor and playwright, who passed away in 2019.

4.

“History,” according to the famous Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic, “is like a big washing machine for us. It throws in the dust of ideology, and out comes a purified history.” Filip David did not want a purified national history. Because such a history hides the dark sides. Filip David was on the side of the light. And his family experience pushed him towards the light. He was born in 1940 in Kragujevac to a Jewish family, which had to live between life and death every day. Many of its members were killed in the Staro Sajmište camp near Belgrade and in Jasenovac in Croatia, both run by Nazi collaborators. As a child, Filip David had to remember his new name well: Fiča Kalinić. With this name he could escape, because Filip David sounded very Hebrew. “Fičo” was sometimes called by his friends in the “Galerija” cafeteria in Belgrade. During World War II, the David family took refuge in a village in Fruška Gora in Vojvodina. "The villagers knew who we were and what we were, and according to the racial laws of the time, it was strictly forbidden to shelter, hide and protect Jews. If they were discovered, the village could be destroyed and all its inhabitants would be killed. Even today I admire those who accepted us, despite everything. This is just proof that even in the darkest periods there are people who deserve worship," Filip David emphasized in an interview for the Bosnian portal "Polis".

Once, while we were drinking coffee at “Galerija”, in the courtyard of the bar we witnessed a fight between two groups. Afraid that they might be caught by the police, the perpetrators fled. A gun was left behind on the asphalt. “This is the result of the long-standing criminalization of society,” said Filip David and continued to talk about his daughter, who worked in Zurich and, like hundreds of thousands of young people from the Balkans, had turned her back on her country because of the darkness following the great political storms.

5.

A liberal in the purest sense, Philip David did not hesitate to challenge any authority, not just political. When the Austrian writer Peter Handke, an apologist for Slobodan Milosevic, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Philip David protested: “Handke is a moral zero. It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate his general work from his political activities. The Nobel Prize will further deepen the misunderstandings in our region and reopen the wounds of the 1990s.”

Philip David, novelist, screenwriter, essayist, playwright and human rights activist, passed away on Monday after a noble battle against moral zeros and for a more just, peaceful and culturally enlightened world. (A2 Televizion)