Title: Kosova, Kosova Author: Beqe Cufaj Creation Date: 2000 Location: Munich, Germany Collection: One Book Per Country
Brief
Beqe Cufaj published Kosova, Kosova in German in 2000 — the title rendered as Kosovo, Kosovo in that language — a memoir-novel written from exile that stands as one of the most direct literary witnesses to the decade that made Kosovar independence both inevitable and catastrophic in human terms. Alongside Ismail Kadare's Three Elegies for Kosovo and the poetry of Ali Podrimja, Cufaj's book belongs to the small body of Albanian-language writing that has carried the experience of the 1990s into literature. Cufaj was born in 1970 in Decan, Kosovo, studied literature at the University of Pristina before the institution was closed to Albanians, and later emigrated to Germany, where he has continued to write in both Albanian and German.
The book navigates between the autobiographical and the novelistic, between the personal narrative of a young Albanian man coming of age under occupation and the collective experience of a people whose national aspirations were being answered with mass graves. It traces the arc from the revocation of Kosovo's autonomy in 1989, through the decade of apartheid-like conditions under Milosevic's regime, the emergence of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the 1998-1999 war, and the NATO intervention that ended Serbian control.
Publication in German placed Cufaj in the tradition of exilic literature central to Albanian literary production — the condition of writing from outside about a place that exists most intensely in its absence. The novel's lyrical intensity comes from the particular pressure of needing to say something that has not been said, in a situation where not saying it had become the condition of survival. Kosovo declared independence in 2008, and Kosova, Kosova has acquired retrospective status as the literary document of the generation that lived through the 1990s — the title itself a love song and an elegy, the name doubled the way you say the name of someone you love or the name of someone you have lost.
The National Voice
Kosova, Kosova captures the experience of being Albanian in Kosovo during the decade when being Albanian in Kosovo was systematically made impossible. Cufaj renders this not through panoramic political history but through the intimate, accumulating detail of a young man's daily life — ordinary existence incrementally degraded, rights removed not as a single dramatic event but as small losses compounding into catastrophe.
Pristina in the early 1990s is a city of divided reality: the same streets carry two populations in two political systems. The Serbian state apparatus functions officially; the Albanian parallel society functions through improvisation and stubborn refusal. Cufaj captures the surreal quality — attending school in a private apartment because the university is closed to you, paying taxes to a government that does not recognise your existence, maintaining civic life in the absence of the institutions that normally house it. The public sphere has been confiscated, and what remains is the extraordinary improvisation of a people who refuse to accept that confiscation is permanent.
What makes the book distinctively Kosovar is its attention to the particular Albanian identity that developed under Yugoslav socialist modernisation. These were not Albanians isolated under Hoxha's regime but a population with a university, a literary culture, a professional class — people who experienced Milosevic's programme as the sudden destruction of a functioning modern society. The emotional register is compressed grief, and the love story embedded within it is essential: the insistence that people continue to want intimacy and future in the middle of political catastrophe is itself a form of resistance requiring no ideology, only humanity. The title — the name said twice — carries the longing of a generation addressing a place that was simultaneously homeland and battleground, the thing most worth preserving and the thing most thoroughly destroyed.
The Historical Ground
Kosovo's Albanian population, part of the Ottoman Empire for five centuries, was incorporated into the Serbian kingdom after the First World War. Serbia regarded Kosovo as its historical heartland — the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389 was the foundational myth of Serbian national identity, and the Orthodox monasteries of Gracanica and Decani were among the church's holiest sites. Under Tito's Yugoslavia, the 1974 constitution granted Kosovo nearly the same rights as the six republics, producing the Albanian institutional infrastructure Cufaj's generation inherited: the University of Pristina, Albanian-language newspapers and publishing houses, the Kosovo Academy of Sciences and Arts, and a growing professional class.
Milosevic's revocation of this autonomy in 1989 precipitated everything that followed. Albanian institutions were closed or Serbianised; employees dismissed from state enterprises, schools, and hospitals; Albanian-language broadcasting shut down. Ibrahim Rugova's Democratic League responded with nonviolent resistance and parallel institution-building — underground schools in private houses, a shadow health system, a government collecting taxes and maintaining rudimentary administration. This extraordinary experiment maintained Albanian cohesion for nearly a decade but failed to attract the international intervention Rugova sought.
The Kosovo Liberation Army emerged as an armed alternative in the mid-1990s. The Serbian forces' disproportionate response — the Drenica massacres of 1998, the systematic expulsion of approximately 850,000 Albanians during the 1999 war — provoked NATO's seventy-eight-day bombing campaign. Kosovo was placed under UN administration after the Serbian withdrawal and declared independence on 17 February 2008, recognised by over one hundred countries but not by Serbia, Russia, or China.
The Literary Landscape
Albanian literature in Kosovo developed within Yugoslav cultural policy supporting national-language production. Esad Mekuli founded the journal Jeta e Re in 1949, serving as the institutional centre of Kosovo Albanian literary culture for decades. Martin Camaj, a poet and linguist who spent most of his career in Munich, produced modernist poetry considered among the finest in Albanian, though exile limited his influence within Pristina. Anton Pashku pushed Albanian fiction toward modernist and postmodernist forms, and the novelist Hivzi Sulejmani and poet Din Mehmeti developed the tradition further through the Yugoslav period.
The 1990s produced a distinctive Kosovo Albanian literature shaped by conditions of apartheid and resistance. Writers worked without institutional support — publishing houses closed, journals suspended, the university shuttered — and those who continued to write did so under extreme constraint. Some emigrated; others remained and worked underground. The decade's literary production includes poetry of witness, short fiction circulated informally, and the memoir-novels emerging after 1999 as writers processed what they had survived.
Cufaj's publication in German places him in the tradition of exilic literature central to Albanian letters — a lineage running from Camaj through the diaspora writers of the 1990s. Alternative candidates include Ali Podrimja's spare, politically charged verse, Ismail Kadare's novels addressing the broader Albanian experience from Tirana rather than Pristina, and younger writers like Jeton Neziraj and Pajtim Statovci who have achieved international recognition. Kadare's Three Elegies for Kosovo and Ali Podrimja's spare, politically charged verse remain the more canonical Albanian-language treatments of the territory's history and the 1990s. Cufaj's novel earns its place here because it captures the specific texture of the decade from inside the generation that lived it — written in exile but from the lived experience of the catastrophe rather than from across the border or across time.
The Reading
The Streets That Changed Their Meaning
The first thing you lose is not the big things. The first thing you lose is the assumption that the world you live in is yours. You walk through Pristina and the streets are the same streets, the buildings are the same buildings, the light falls on the same facades in the same way it has always fallen. But the meaning of the streets has changed. They are now streets in someone else's city, and you are present in them on terms you did not negotiate and cannot renegotiate, and the people who set the terms have no interest in hearing your objections.
This is the specific psychic condition: living in a place that is still your home and has already become your prison, walking through a city whose surfaces are familiar and whose substance has been replaced.
You are young. You are Albanian. You are growing up in a Kosovo that is visibly becoming a place where Albanians have no place. This is not a sudden change but a gradual one — the accumulation of laws, policies, and practices that strip a population of its standing incrementally, that change the meaning of ordinary life by changing its legal and social context. Your school changes language. Your teachers are dismissed. The university in Pristina, which had been a centre of Albanian cultural life — the place where your parents' generation built something that resembled a future — becomes inaccessible. The public sphere — the jobs, the institutions, the newspapers, the theatres — is no longer a place where you can exist in your own name.
You watch your family navigate this. Your parents are people of the generation that built the Yugoslav Albanian middle class — educated, invested in institutions, carrying the particular dignity of people who constructed something from nothing and expected it to last. Your father has opinions about politics that he shares carefully, measuring his words even at the dinner table, because the walls of the apartment are thin and the neighbours include people who might report what they hear. Your mother maintains the household with a fierce normality that is itself a statement: the meals will be prepared, the floors will be clean, the children will be dressed properly, because to let these things slip is to concede that the dismantlement has reached the inside of the house, and the house is the last perimeter.
Watching the dismantlement of what your parents built is a grief different from any other: the grief of watching your parents' investment proved worthless, of seeing that the world did not keep the promises it seemed to make when they enrolled you in school and told you to study hard. You carry this grief alongside your own, and the weight is compound — the personal humiliation of being excluded from the university where your intelligence should have been welcome, layered over the generational humiliation of watching the entire institutional framework of Albanian cultural life dismantled by people who regarded it as a threat.
The Parallel City
Pristina in the early 1990s is a city of parallel systems. The Serb state functions; the Albanian parallel state — the shadow government, the underground schools, the informal economy — functions alongside it with a surreal completeness. You pay taxes to the shadow state and are taxed by the Serb state. You attend schools run in private houses and basements while the official schools are closed to you. You maintain a civic life outside the official framework — newspapers printed on borrowed presses, cultural associations meeting in living rooms, medical clinics operating without official sanction — which is simultaneously a remarkable act of collective self-organisation and an acknowledgment of how completely you have been expelled from the official world.
You move through this dual city with the alertness of someone who has learned that the rules change depending on which system you are currently in. A conversation in Albanian on the main boulevard carries a different weight than the same conversation in a private house. The police are Serbian police; they do not speak your language and they do not need to, because the language of their authority is not verbal. You have friends from the Serbian community — not many, but some, and these friendships carry the particular strain of relationships across a line that is becoming a wall. You do not hate Serbian people; you hate the system that is using Serbian people as its instrument. This distinction — necessary, difficult, often impossible to maintain when a Serbian policeman is beating your neighbour — is one of your moral preoccupations. You insist on making it because the alternative — hatred of an entire people — is the logic that produced this situation, and you will not replicate it.
Every interaction with the official world is a negotiation conducted from a position of total weakness. The daily requirement to be smaller than you are, to accept what should not be accepted, to smile at people who have the power to hurt you — the psychological cost of this is what accumulates with the most precision and the most anger.
There is also the cost of patience itself. The collective strategy requires that you absorb the daily accumulation of insult and prohibition without visible response — that you register the humiliation and not act on it, that you contain what functions as provocation because the political calculus demands your restraint. Year after year this becomes an extraordinary practice of self-management: you learn to read situations quickly, to measure the safest response, to modulate your presence according to who is watching. You do not become less angry; you become skilled at not showing the anger. The skill is a kind of discipline, and it is also a kind of damage. Something accumulates in the space between what you feel and what you permit yourself to express, and it has no outlet except inward.
Love in a Country Without Future
There is love. A woman whose name you hold with the same care you hold everything precious — gently, with the knowledge that it might be taken. She is Albanian, she is young, she has the intelligence and the beauty that in a different country would constitute a promising future. In this country they constitute a vulnerability.
The relationship invents its own daily routines — small rituals of normalcy that substitute for the larger ones the situation has denied you. You meet in the early afternoon because the evenings are less predictable. You find places where conversation does not need to be measured: a café whose owner knows you, a park whose sightlines you have memorised, a friend's apartment where for a few hours the vigilance can be set down. These arrangements are not romantic in the conventional sense — they are practical. But in their practicality lives a form of tenderness: the care you take with each other shaped by the care the situation requires. You are learning to love in a reduced space, and the reduction is itself a record of what has been taken.
Love in Kosovo in the 1990s is an act of defiance by the fact of its ordinariness: the desire to have a future with someone implies that there is a future, and the assertion of a future is, under these conditions, political. You love her. The love is real. You talk about the future as though it exists, and the talking is itself an act of construction — building the future out of words because the material for building it out of anything more substantial has been confiscated.
What is also real is that the world is not arranged to protect this love, or any love. The world — the specific world of Kosovo in the 1990s — is arranged to make Albanian life impossible in increments small enough to avoid international intervention and large enough to destroy everything worth living for. The jobs are gone. The schools are underground. The police belong to someone else. The courts do not recognise your claims. The hospitals may or may not treat you, depending on who is on duty and what mood they are in.
The nonviolent resistance that Rugova championed — the parallel state, the underground schools, the patient waiting for international attention — has not produced the result it promised. The world has noticed Bosnia. The world has intervened in Bosnia. The world has not noticed Kosovo, and the lesson many young Albanians draw from this is that nonviolence does not work, that the international community responds to violence and ignores patience, that the only way to make the world care about your suffering is to create a situation dramatic enough to appear on television screens in Washington and Brussels.
The Turning
The KLA emerges as an armed response. Your relationship to it is complicated: you understand what drives it, you share the aspiration it serves, you do not recognise yourself in its methods. You are a man of books, not a man of weapons, and the pressure to become a man of weapons — the pressure that war places on every young man, the requirement to choose, to be for or against, to participate or be seen as passive — is one of the specific cruelties of political violence. You cannot resolve this complication. You inhabit it, which is the only honest response to a situation that offers no honest resolutions.
The 1998 offensive by Serb forces against Albanian villages breaks something. The Drenica massacres — the killing of the Jashari family and dozens of others — break something in you that cannot be repaired by any subsequent event. Until this point life has been about endurance, about the daily management of an intolerable situation, about the specific arts of survival under occupation. After Drenica it is about something else: the moment when endurance is no longer possible, when the situation moves from intolerable to lethal, when the refugee columns begin.
The hundreds of thousands of Albanians driven from their homes by a military campaign — they are not abstractions. They are faces you recognise, people whose names you know, families you have eaten with. Each person in the column has a name and a house and a set of belongings they chose to carry and a set they left behind, and the decisions about what to carry and what to leave are the decisions you make when you have thirty minutes to choose what matters and what can be lost.
The Bombs, the Columns, the Return
The NATO intervention — the bombing campaign of spring 1999 — is experienced from inside Kosovo as a sound first, a distant rumbling that could be thunder or could be the end of the world, then as a change in the behaviour of the Serb forces, then as the beginning of something that might be survival. The bombs fall on Serbian military positions and on Belgrade, and you hear the explosions and do not know whether to be afraid or relieved, because the bombs are falling in your name but not under your control.
The seventy-eight days of the campaign are lived in basements and in forests and on roads leading to the borders, because the Serb forces — in the chaos of the intervention, in what may be their last opportunity — are intensifying the expulsions rather than halting them. The logic is clear: if NATO wins, there should be no Albanians left in Kosovo to celebrate. It is the logic of ethnic cleansing compressed into its final, most concentrated form.
The woman you love is somewhere in the refugee columns, or she is not — you do not always know, and the not-knowing is a specific quality of wartime existence. You cannot find the people you love. The telephone lines are cut. The roads are controlled by men with weapons whose instructions may or may not include letting you pass. Information travels through networks that are informal and therefore unreliable: someone saw her, someone heard that her family left, someone thinks they are in Macedonia but is not sure. The uncertainty is the lived condition of a population scattered by military force across several countries, and your experience of it — the daily management of not knowing whether the person you love is alive — is the grey territory of sustained dread.
You watch the Serb police and military withdraw under the NATO ultimatum and experience a feeling that is not quite joy — it is too complicated for joy, too contaminated by the dead, too uncertain of what will follow, too saturated with a decade of accumulated damage that no withdrawal can reverse — but is the particular, irreducible feeling of not being killed when you expected to be killed, of the future resuming when it had seemed to stop permanently.
The streets of Pristina are suddenly your streets again. The suddenness is itself disorienting, because you do not simply resume a life that has been suspended for a decade, a life whose institutions were dismantled and whose daily rhythms were reorganised around the management of fear. You resume a life that has been damaged in specific, irreversible ways, and the damage does not disappear because its cause has withdrawn.
The Name, Twice
The return is not the homecoming of liberation narratives. The houses have been looted. Some have been burned. The neighbours who remained — the few Serb families who did not leave — are now afraid, and their fear is the mirror image of the fear you have lived with for a decade, and the symmetry is not justice but tragedy. The graves are being discovered — in fields, in wells, in the forests outside the villages — and the process of counting the dead will take years. Each identification is a resolution and a reopening: the uncertainty ends and the grief begins, and the grief is in some ways worse than the uncertainty because it is permanent.
There is no ending with flags. There are the ruins and the work of surviving them, the slow process of learning to live in a place that has been both your home and the site of your near-destruction. What does it mean to rebuild a life in a country whose meaning has been permanently changed by what happened in it — whether the streets of Pristina can ever be simply streets again, or whether they will always carry the doubled meaning of before and after, the city you grew up in and the city you almost died in?
Kosovo, Kosovo. The name said twice the way you say the name of someone you love or the name of someone you have lost. It is a love song and an elegy simultaneously, addressed to a place that has been both homeland and battleground, both the thing most worth preserving and the thing most thoroughly destroyed. This is what Kosovo means to the generation that lived through the 1990s: not just a political unit or a national aspiration but the specific earth where your specific life happened, the streets you walked, the houses you grew up in, the light falling on facades you knew by heart.
The graves are still being counted. The understanding is still in process. The name is still being said, twice, into the silence that follows, waiting for the echo that will tell it the world is listening.
This post is part of the One Book Per Country series — 195 countries, one defining book each, working through the literary map of the world.
Cufaj's memoir-novel was first published in German in 2000. No standard English translation is currently in print.
Kosova, Kosova (Albanian edition) The Albanian-language edition, published in Pristina after Kosovo's independence. The text closest to the author's native voice.
Kosovo, Kosovo (German original, Wieser Verlag)
The first edition, published in German — the language in which Cufaj composed the work during his years in Munich. Out of print but available secondhand.
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