Photo: Emilio Morenatti / Associated Press When Nicolas Sarkozy claims that Europe will explode if the euro explodes, adding that defending the euro means defending Europe, well, his claims can be taken with a pinch of salt: the French politician’s rhetoric can withstand quite a bit and so can our European ears in our increasingly baffled European heads that have lately become accustomed to quite a lot. If, however, the pragmatic and rational Angela Merkel makes an even more dramatic statement, namely: If the euro breaks up Europe will break up, it gives cause for concern even to those of […]

When Andrzej Wajda’’s film Katyń was shown in Slovenia this spring, first in cinemas and then on public television, it aroused enormous audience interest but was met with almost complete silence in the media. Slovenian public opinion is tired of the issue of post-war mass murder and the seemingly endless discoveries of mass graves. The film advertisements talked of exposing Europe’’s greatest lie of the century and of the Polish nation’’s profound trauma.  After the screening a number of film critics analyzed the film’’s aesthetic values and discussed its narrative techniques yet nobody took notice of the universal message of this horrific […]

Recently a Swedish journalist came to Ljubljana to interview me and I took him to lunch in a Ljubljana restaurant. After a few minutes we realized that our interview would come to nothing unless we started shouting at each other as if we were standing on two opposite hills or banks of a wide river, for the music blasting from the speakers was so loud it was impossible to order our food, let alone conduct an interview. So I politely asked the waiter (i.e. I shouted at him) if he could be so kind as to slightly turn down the […]