I have gone back and forth into things Albanian. I haven’t been at it consistently, but I started studying Albania in the 1980s, when I was an undergraduate and wanted to do something different. I developed a fascination with Albania because of its exotic aspects—its isolation, going at it alone, the strange alliance with China—all of which would have been attractive to an undergraduate like me.
I stuck with it and ended up being a journalist there. I made so many great friends that Albania became the key to my professional life. I was giving a talk not long ago to a group of young Canadian-Albanian and Albanian-Canadian lawyers in Toronto, and I told them that at the end of the day, 'I’ve had my ups and downs with the Republic of Albania, and with the Republic of Kosovo for that matter, but it was Albania that gave me my professional life'.
I’m always very grateful to Albania and Albanians for making that possible, but I also always wanted to tell Albania’s story—with sensitivity to what Albanians have had to endure, taken out of high politics. I wanted to get a sense of what the twentieth century was like for Albanians, and it wasn’t a particularly good century. I became kind of obsessed with that: telling the political story while also trying to get the mindset of a person in Albania.
I often think of someone born in the same year as Enver Hoxha, in 1908, and then viewing the world as it evolved for them—from the Ottoman Empire, to the brief German kingdom, the First World War, a fraught republic, a self-imposed king, an Italian king, the Germans, the communists, and then collapse. There is so much change, but so little actually happening in their personal lives. How that would have impacted people is what has drawn me to this work, and it’s something I continue to do. My next project is to take some of these stories and turn them into narrative nonfiction—to tell another story: how the communism in Albania in the late 1980s created the conditions for their survival. That’s not just an Albanian story; it’s a Central European story and an East European story. I’m completely fascinated by what was happening in the 1980s, because that’s when things in Albania got really weird. Edi Rama made a point once that got everyone mad. He said, 'my father was on the right side of history in 1944', and everyone goes up in arms. If you understand what Albanians had lived through in the interwar period, the question is 'not, why are you a communist, it's why aren't you?'
This is the challenge for historians, especially when you're teaching. It is to explain to students why an idea that obviously ended so badly was so attractive. It’s a shortcoming in Albanian transitional justice, a shortcoming in everything I’ve written about before, and a shortcoming in the education system. You see these strange surveys where Albanians are oddly ambivalent about Hoxha. They seem to dislike his wife more than him. Albania cannot be a normal country if people do not understand the depth of what happened for the sake of this massive modernization project. Albanians don't understand the past. Full stop.
The character I’m working with for this historical nonfiction book is born in 1920—actually, a little later, because he has to be younger. I’m thinking he’s born in 1925 so he can join the war around 1943. He’s born in Gjirokastër, which is the Nuremberg of the movement. He moves his way up, works through the system, and ends up as the editor of New Albania. That’s the character.
Ongoing thread. More from Robert C. Austin to follow.
