World Peace And Legacy Of B. Wongar

cience, omnipotence, wisdom… He was Zarathustra of brotherhood
of unity and socialism triumph. What was looking like liberation from
nazism initially appeared very soon as mere ideological disguise of
conquest and usurpation of the country. new laws were made and
the Superman deprived all institutes of legal state. Many important
individuals perished overnight in mass murders that didn’t spare
anyone, wiping out everyone starting from university professors to
mere laborers.
This is the moment when Stevan come out with Kant’s idea of
“World Peace” and death penalty abolition in order to prove, probably
alone against all, the existence of moral perception and vision which no
regime can destroy. But as such, regime can throw him in jail, what in
fact happened not only once but four times because regime considered
his proposition as hostile to its unlimited political self-sufficient will.
Stevan bore this with no grumble, knowing he had done everything
he could. With clean conscience he went to his world of dreams and
conveyed the message to his sons. B. Wongars literature has ramified
from that seed; Wongar became the one “who brings the message”.
Sreten didn’t need anything else to learn about the world, history
or social relations. It was enough he knew his father’s life. also he did
not need to read Kafka, as he said in an interview, because he knew
the faith of his uncle. His conflict with a communistic official, while
he worked in newspapers in Titovo užice, just repeated his family’s
history and contributed to understand it even better. The horror seems
to have been so terrible that Sreten left the country in the early sixties
of the previous century carrying nothing, crossing alps by foot and
coming to france which he had envisioned as a promising land. He
fled from death, evil, and horror wishing to reach happier world where
people are not incited and where respect for life existed, which had
been advocated by his father as well. Indeed in france, the war winner
de gaulle failed to initiate mass killing of Marshal Petain supporters.
Both, de gaulle and Tito were politically sponsored by British (same as
Mussolini and the Croatian fascist leader Pavelić), but the first one had
enough decency and civic culture not to act as the Superman.

Quest for Arcadia
In fact Wongar`s journey as an immigrant is a deeply frightened
child’s pursuit of a country with no evil. an attempt to find a mythical
arcadia in this world where shepherds graze their herds freely having
no fear that someone will come to “liberate” them. So much shudder
he felt in the war and horror he heard from his father prompted him
to leave searching for a happy country that must exist and where evil
does not harm the life. First stop on his road was france; happy coun-
try of rich people and of great culture, but this illusion disappeared
shortly after he saw how this culture uses force on insurgent algerians,
throwing them alive off the bridge into the river, and how racism flour-
ishes on beautiful streets of Paris.
Sreten realized this was not that promised country he had hoped
to find. When he came he was immediately thrown into the hell of the
underground world in the renault car factory. Then he found him-
self in the middle of the state persecution of foreigners. He was scared
stiff that he, as swarthy, could be replaced as the algerian and thrown
back into the dungeon from which he hoped he had fled while leaving
yugoslavia. “france was in chaos. about one half a million algerian
internees lived in Paris. I tried to learn french well to be able to ex-
plain I was not algerian if police arrested me. for two years I mastered
language so well that I even intended to write in french. I mixed up
with advanced people who were against the war and gathered together
in the square near the Museum of Man. Here I met Sartre and Simon
de Beauvoir, and here, in this ethnographic museum I met for the first
time the culture of australian aborigines. In Paris I met Beckett who
helped me also to publish my novel later. However, I dreamed it would
be nice to leave Europe and go somewhere, half a world away, where
there was peace.”
Even though after the St. Bartholomew’s night and the french
revolution, the french did not indeed captured and killed their own
countrymen, they did it to strangers. Maybe this was better than what
Serbs did to themselves under the guise of liberation. It certainly was
not the Promised land arcadia where shepherds and shepherdess
may wander the fields with no fear. This vision of arcadia with its
long disappeared shepherds may seem outdated today since they all
were destroyed by the ideology of a better life. The ideology that did
nothing but endlessly promise better life and future until the life itself
disappeared. It is not difficult to grasp the dialectics of such a method
– ideal life is the one that is gone.
Sreten Božić could only find moments of relief during his conver-
sation with Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir. These moments he felt like
he finally escapes from the grey life routine as foreign worker. The
strength to elevate spiritually and emotionally from the bottom of the
renault basement, no doubt came from Simon de Beauvoir and Sartre.
Sreten drew his inspiration from his world of dreams. This is the same
world where his father’s strength attempting to change the history ori-
ginated from. He was apparently convincing enough for Sartre and de
Beauvoir to later decide to publish his work in Les Temps Modernes.
Herewith, he also points out how aware he was about his life calling.
It was first and foremost a quest for the Promised land and only then
writing. It is maybe surprising that a barely literate worker sees writ-
ing as his vocation, but it is just because we do not grasp that writing is
only a knoll to infinite horizon of the contemplation.
Sreten was banished from france by the same horror that had
exiled him from yugoslavia. He felt that the same slavery was waiting