The Future of Europe

Abstract

A well-connected public intellectual who took up the cause of ending the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s, Susan Sontag helped to assemble an international community advocating North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention. The attention that she generated during her staging of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot turned her into the promotional face for what became a cause célèbre, and she continued to participate in many projects for Bosnia-Herzegovina after the play. In her publications, Sontag championed Sarajevo as an exceptionally European cause because of its liberal multicultural pluralism, in contradistinction to the rural, religious and militant periphery. Recovering a biographical narrative of Sontag's Sarajevo work means also turning to less official sources than the published ones, however. The Susan Sontag Papers archived at UCLA provide a less resolved record of her activity in Sarajevo. Whereas Sontag's public statements on Sarajevo represent it in broad strokes as a model ‘European’ city threatened by anti-European elements, the traces of the Sarajevo Theatre and Film Festival preserved in her personal archive better speak to the multi-layered dilemmas of cultural politics that shaped Sarajevo's cultural sphere, during the war and today. Sontag's position is rendered at times excessive and at other times contradictory when juxtaposed with these elements.

• archive
• cultural memory
• Europe
• Godot
• Sarajevo
• Sontag, Susan

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program.