Hans-Dietrich Genscher

Hans-Dietrich Genscher is presented as a German foreign minister whose support for recognizing Croatian independence made him a focus of Serbian political anger during the breakup of Yugoslavia. He never appears in direct conversation with Eduard in these episodes; instead, others define him as an enemy, and Eduard’s readiness to adopt their language reveals how quickly the war’s political arguments become part of his personal attraction to the conflict.

Policy and the Serbian Dispute

In the narrator’s account of debates over Croatian independence, Genscher figures in the argument against treating national self-determination as a simple principle. Some of the narrator’s friends supported Croatian independence, while others warned that the same reasoning could be claimed by many separatist movements. They also invoked the wartime history of the region: France had traditionally been friendly with the Serbs, who had resisted Nazi Germany, while the wartime Croatian state had collaborated with the Nazis. Against that background, Genscher’s encouragement of his European colleagues to recognize an independent Croatia was presented by his Serbian critics as taking the Croatian side in a conflict shadowed by older atrocities and fears.

An Enemy in Belgrade

When Eduard was invited to Belgrade in November 1991, Serbian officers offered to take him toward the recently fallen city of Vukovar. His French passport initially made the soldiers wary: although he was Russian and presumed Orthodox and pro-Serbian, they associated France with Catholicism and possible support for Croatia. The atmosphere eased after Eduard and the officers exchanged denunciations of Croatian president Franjo Tuđman and Genscher. In Belgrade, the German foreign minister was regarded as a theoretician of a Fourth Reich; the officers’ lurid promise to hang one man with the other’s intestines, followed by a drink, turned political hostility into a display of comradeship. Genscher is thus present not as an interlocutor but as a name around which the men perform their shared opposition.

Genscher in Eduard’s Wartime Imagination

The association recurs at Arkan’s headquarters near Vukovar. Eduard and Arkan found common ground in their hostility toward Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Tuđman, and Genscher, and in their conviction that Russia needed a revolution. This later recollection places Genscher within Eduard’s imagined alignment of political enemies, linking European diplomacy to the conflicts that animated his new wartime friendships. The narrative also complicates the Serbian officers’ framing: the Yugoslav People’s Army, though formally not meant to participate, was in practice majority-Serb and had shelled Vukovar and nearby Croatian positions. That contradiction goes largely unexamined by Eduard, whose attention is captured instead by soldiers, tanks, uniforms, and the experience of war. Genscher’s significance in the episode lies in this contrast between the diplomatic policy attributed to him and the militarized, selective political world through which Eduard encounters it.