[In the following review, Kisslinger compares and contrasts The Balkan Express to Robert D. Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts.]

“Violence was, indeed, all I knew of the Balkans,” Rebecca West wrote in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, describing the stereotypes she held before ever visiting Yugoslavia. A half century later not much has changed. Western images of blood feuds, bombs and pistols in the waist find new confirmation in Croatia and Bosnia. We connect besieged Sarajevo with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, not the Olympics of 1984; hearing the name “Macedonia,” we jump decades to the Balkan Wars or millennia to the conquests of Alexander. It is not hard to understand why, since except for a few folklorists and tourists, we have generally ignored this spectacularly complex region when it was at peace: The powder keg of Europe has only mattered when it exploded.

A small number of books have come out in response to the current tragedy in the Balkans. Misha Glenny's The Fall of Yugoslavia and Alex N. Dragnich's Serbs and Croats dealt with the political and historical background to the conflict. Now two journalists have published personal accounts of events in the region, one as an observer, the other as an insider.

In Balkan Ghosts Robert D. Kaplan, an American who has also written on the Middle East and Afghanistan, shares experiences gathered over a decade of reporting for the Atlantic and the New Republic. On its most ingenuous level, this is a Balkan travel book warmed by plum brandy and the author's self-described obsession with his subject. He moves us south from one end of the Balkans to the other, from Austria to the Asian aridity of Thrace. We stop at a rioting soccer stadium in Kosovo, on the flats of the Danube delta, in the smoke-coated intimacy of a Bulgarian journalists' club, and in the heady darkness of a Serbian monastery. We meet nuns, prostitutes, painters, priests, martyrs, opportunists, and alcoholics.

Kaplan vividly conveys both the unfamiliar landscape—the polluted Romanian countryside looks “as though someone had taken a billowing, yellow-green Oriental carpet and poured tar all over it”—and subtle ironies he encounters. In Transylvania, for instance, he finds a “coffee-house culture, even though there had been no coffee for many years.” He reports as well on the forgotten back alleys of culture—on Saxons in Transylvania, Greeks in Albania, Turks in Bulgaria—giving voice to ethnic minorities deposited, like glacial moraine, by the retreat of empires.

But Kaplan's more ambitious subject is his impressionistic take on Balkan history. “The Balkans are a region of pure memory,” he has written elsewhere, “a Bosch-like tapestry of interlocking ethnic rivalries where medieval and modern history thread into each other.” Here he unweaves the basic strands of that tapestry: the trauma of Ottoman rule, the memories of medieval greatness that inspire revanchist ambitions in so many countries, the open wounds of World War II, and Communism's role in deep-freezing development. Above all, however, he presents an anecdotal cavalcade of larger-than-life characters, including Romania's Queen Marie and King Carol II, Serbia's St. Sava, the Macedonian rebel Gotse Delchev, Count Dracula, the Croatian Cardinal Stepinac, the Fascist Ion Antonescu, and Nicolae Ceausescu. These apparitions are the ghosts of the title, more foreground than background.

In sketching Balkan history, Kaplan goes heavy on Bosch strokes. “What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities?” he asks, as if any place on earth were truly innocent. Mixed throughout his account are stories from the particularly brutal Balkan past—the excesses of the Ottomans, the violence of the Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, and the horrors of World War II from the genocidal Croatian Ustashe state to the demise of Jewish Salonika to the rabidity of Romanian anti-Semitism in Bessarabia. The nadir of inhumanity is probably the 1941 pogrom of the abator, the slaughter-house where hundreds of Bucharest Jews were put through the stages of animal slaughter by Romanian Fascists.

As he extrapolates from these tales, Kaplan paints with a broad brush. For all his insightful interpretations along the way (such as his debunking the various myths about Greece, promoted by travel agents and classicists alike), he is too ready to portray the Balkans as a historical cauldron awash in gore, illicit sex and Eastern Orthodox incense—the haunted house of a violently dysfunctional family. One wishes for a less idiosyncratic sampling of Balkan figures. The author would similarly have been wise to avoid statements on “national character” and other sweeping generalizations about what he unblushingly calls “a time-capsule world: a dim stage upon which people raged, spilled blood, experienced vision and ecstasies.”

When Kaplan refers to “the East” as a realm of “darkness, mystery, sadness, and irrationality,” his orientalizing provokes us to ask whether the “enlightened” West—the home of Wounded Knee, the Hundred Years' War, the Spanish Inquisition, and Nazism—doesn't have abators of its own. The unusual cruelty of Balkan history may indeed help explain the current violence, but do these nations, however tangled their past at the border zone of continents and empires, really inhabit a different moral and historical universe? Kaplan is so anxious to prove they do that he even blames Nazism on Balkan thinking: It was in Vienna, “a breeding ground of ethnic resentments close to the Slavic World, that Hitler learned how to hate so infectiously.”

An uncritical acceptance of other voices is equally distorting. Kaplan quotes without comment this characterization of the Balkans by the late New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger: “It is, or was, a gay peninsula filled with sprightly people who ate peppered foods, drank strong liquors, wore flamboyant clothes, loved and murdered easily, and had a splendid talent for starting wars.” Even Rebecca West, whose 1,200-page masterpiece on Yugoslavia is Kaplan's greatest inspiration, may have encouraged him to shoot from the hip on matters of national character. Almost every page of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon contains the kind of cultural generalizations that we can indulge in a British novelist of the 1930s but must read as absurdly patronizing in a reporter of the 1990s. Its overreliance on earlier Western images of the Balkans, from Bram Stoker's Dracula to the film Never on Sunday, renders Balkan Ghosts unnecessarily derivative.

Dazzled by the nationalist and religious passions he has come upon, Kaplan embraces a view of politics in which ethnicity is all. This severely limits his treatment of the current conflicts. We get only the fuzziest sense of other factors, such as the manipulation of nationalism by leaders in both Belgrade and Zagreb, or the economic and political malaise that fueled ethnic tensions in the former Yugoslavia. Absent completely are the roles played by the West's early recognition of Croatia and Slovenia, the inequitable arms embargo, and the world community's failure to face down aggression. Kaplan takes pains to “heartily condemn” the present violence, yet his lurid account makes it seem normal, if not inevitable. From Belgrade to Zagreb to Washington, those with an interest in fatalistically ascribing the war to “ancient hatreds” can read this book, nod their heads and pretend it simply had to happen.

Anyone comforted by that kind of demonization will have a harder time with The Balkan Express by the Croatian Slavenka Drakulić, who writes in an undeniably human first-person voice. She reminds us that “War is not a single act,” it is “a head-spinning spiral of events and a gradual process of realization.” The 18 beautiful and painful narratives in this slim collection trace her personal descent into the fighting in Croatia.

Drakulić's journey begins in April 1991, here in our world, where she has long been known as a contributor to the Nation and author of several books. Over Waldorf salad at the Harvard Club, she tries to explain the gathering storm to well-meaning friends. Her vain attempt to lay out alliances and territories on a napkin is a poignant symbol of the difficulty of clueing in Westerners.

Through the book's understated accounts, we watch her return to Zagreb and pass milestones of realization and denial, from her first glimpse of death in a newspaper photo, to her mother's advice, remembered across 50 years, on shopping in wartime (“Get salt!”), to her 20-year-old daughter's flight from the country. She learns the ache and shame of the refugee as she herself flees to Ljubljana, Vienna and Paris. And we see her draw close to the combat, visiting the front and meeting an adolescent who has learned to kill like a machine.

War erupts suddenly in these stories, forcing us to confront the normalcy of the life it destroys. When Drakulić's fork hangs in midair during the first air raids in Zagreb, some readers will be more surprised by the Cabernet and pasta al bianco on the table than by the bombs falling from above. Even in describing war photos she fixes on the recognizable remnants: the package of yeast next to a bloodied corpse, the clean wash still hanging next to an annihilated house. For this successful member of a post war generation raised on Titoist slogans of “Brotherhood and Unity,” atrocities are anything but commonplace; again and again she articulates a shuddering horror at “the deep crimson hue of gore” imbuing her homeland, at the nationalistic furies that have been unleashed.

The war soon brings more complex troubles. “Death becomes a simple, acceptable fact,” she writes, “but life turns to hell.” In what may be her most touching essay, “A Letter to My Daughter,” Drakulić blames her own generation for failing to protect its sons and daughters from today's agony. In another, she discusses how the nationalism of the war creates ethical quandaries and intolerable demands for conformity; despite her skepticism, internal and external pressures move Drakulić reluctantly toward the kind of ethnically defined politics Kaplan takes for granted. She writes sympathetically of a Croatian actress whose insistence on performing in the Serbian capital leads to exile, and of a cosmopolitan professor whose protests against the “narrowing of human horizons that the war and nationalism have brought” makes her a pariah.

Above all, these essays convey a sense of violation. Drakulić describes a photo of a house that had its roof blown off. “The picture of this bedroom with two neat beds, helpless and exposed,” she tells us, “looked like a picture of my own life: the perversity of war stripping away all intimacy.” Thus bared, she probes the meaning of war in the minutiae of her personal life, in her own behavior as a daughter, friend, mother, and citizen.

In the title essay, she and two other passengers share a compartment on a train returning from Vienna to Zagreb. No one speaks because, she explains later, “speech implies categories, assumptions, meanings, understandings and misunderstandings,” and may reveal them to be enemies. In Balkan Express she bravely breaks that silence. “In spite of everything,” she writes in the Preface to this sad book, “I still believe in the power of words, in the necessity of communication.” That faith alone is enough to challenge our assumptions, and to stir our compassion.