Sami Tischler
'Sarajevo’s Elusive Spring'Autobiographical base spiced up and painted over with creative fiction layers. Stories of turbulent growing up and transition to adulthood in 1970’s Sarajevo: urban violence, coming to age, personal experiences of love, sex and penniless travel while completely immersed into Avant guard subculture of Sarajevo’s freaks. Love and hate relationship with the revolutionary rhetoric, results in rebellion against the rigidity of the Socialist system, its bureaucracy and its cronies. Experiences in the West, first black-market trade trips to Trieste, penniless travel follow. Expulsion from the Benelux and consecutive 'EU' exposes the hypocrisy of the Western ideologies and rhetoric: misery and degradation of human integrity, consequences of overindulgence and individualism, monsters of regulation eroding civil rights and free movement, all confronting phenomena of a 'free society'.National Military Service shapes stronger defiance of the romantically translated heroics deriving from a bloody, hard-won proletarian revolution. Personal stories are woven within the context and reflections of the family and personal history. Bosnian war and the roots of the ethnic tensions leading to it are juxta positioned against the personal experiences and humanized through humor, cynicism, erotic play, alcohol and drug abuse. Sexual awakening weave a colorful tapestry of liberating intimate encounters and temptations on the road and at home. Raw steamy episodes are staged against contrasting grayness, existential dilemma, political restrictions and inevitable historic tragedies . They are series of escapees, levitating - out of body experiences, meditative cigarette and alcohol highs, means of survival, small human triumph in the World on its way to self-destruction.Lifestyle restrictions typical of an oppressive regime became unbearable. Maintaining human development as a free-thinking citizen faced the official and social judgment and scrutiny. The story teller had assumed a fake sense of safety, acquired a range of habits, developed an independent philosophy and unhinged set of political views in the society frozen in time, struggling within its own rigidity and intolerances. Powerless against imbedded aggressive governance methods combined with the rigid socio-political structures in a society on the verge of losing Tito’s charismatic vision the exile feels like a defeat. Story-teller’s gut feeling that things were going to deteriorate before they got better was the only guiding light before the inevitable disintegration of the country. Capacity of a humanitarian socialist ideology to turn its coat and execute revengeful mindless aggression against civilians, their heritage, cultural identity and their morals was unimaginably brutal and hurtful. Sarajevo’s Elusive Spring, a cultural and political awakening and revival from late 70’s and into the late 80’s had the disaster looming over it throughout its most dynamic period like an invisible net ready to be cast.
