Slavenka Drakulić’s ethos and Beside, Not Between, read as one pair: on generosity, the courage to be vulnerable, and how a volatile culture gets them back
Paul Tan · Good Protocols, SPC · October 2026
1. What her world actually lost
It is easy to say the Eastern bloc lost freedom, and true, and almost useless for our purposes. Drakulić’s testimony is more precise, and the precision is what makes her this pair’s teacher. What her world lost was the set of conditions under which a person can afford to be open: to give where giving shows what you have, to receive where receiving admits what you lack, to say what you think in your own voice, and to trust a third party with something tender. Each of those is a form of vulnerability, and her world priced every one out of public life. A free society can lose the same four things without losing a single election, and ours is partway there. This essay is about the losing, and about the way back.
Name the mechanism exactly, because the Beside pages answer it exactly. Her world was, among everything else it was, the largest campaign of coming between ever administered. The party stood between neighbor and neighbor, since any colleague might be the one who reports. The state stood between parent and child; the Soviet half of that world even canonized the pattern, teaching generations of schoolchildren to honor the story of a boy who reported his own father to the authorities, the between raised to sainthood. The compulsory public we stood between a person and her own sentence, so that people wore what she called “the terrible hypocrisy with which we learned to live in order to survive,” and the I became a flight risk in grammar: “Those who used ’I’ instead of ’we’ in their language had to escape.” What a world like that destroys first is the third party, the person a confidence can safely pass through. When every teacher, counselor, and friend is a possible file, nothing tender can travel, and so everything tender went indoors and stayed there. Kindness did not die; her books are full of it. It was privatized.
What survived, survived at the table. One of the chapters in How We Survived takes its title from the plainest rule of that survival, that you cannot drink your coffee alone. The coffee was never about coffee. It was the last unguarded room: the one place a person could be seen wanting, seen lacking, seen laughing, without the seeing becoming a file. Her corpus is a map of where the unguarded rooms were, and a record of what it cost a society to have so few.
2. Her ethos: the courage she practiced anyway
Against that architecture she practiced, in public, exactly the openness her world had priced out, and the practice had three movements.
She wrote in the first person singular, about trivial things, under her own name. We are so used to the personal essay that the courage of this is invisible; in her world the I was the dangerous pronoun and the trivial was the unserious subject, and she staked her witness on both. The washing machine, the doll, the lipstick, the queue: she bet that the truth about a system lived in what it did to a Tuesday, and she signed the bet.
She said I when a brand-new we demanded assent. When the war came and Croat became the whole of what she was permitted to be, she kept writing as a person rather than as an exhibit of the Nation, and in 1992 her country’s largest weekly answered by naming her a witch. Say it that plainly, because it happened that plainly: Slavenka Drakulić was named a witch, in print, in an unsigned article that listed her beside four other women writers and said they were raping Croatia, a verb the war had already made literal in the camps she would later enter through testimony. The threats came by phone, her property was vandalized, longtime colleagues went quiet, and she left for Sweden. She had committed no act. She had kept the first person. The courage to be vulnerable is mostly discussed as a private virtue; hers was civic, and she absorbed the cost of the pronoun so it stayed available to others.
And she spent her vulnerability as generosity toward the least deserving recipients imaginable. They Would Never Hurt a Fly gives war criminals the one thing a monster never has to receive, which is full personhood, and the price of writing it that way is the question the writer can no longer refuse herself: if ordinary people did this, what do I share with them? That is attention paid at the extreme edge, generosity of the costliest kind, because the giver’s own innocence is what gets handed over. The whole ethos is there in miniature: see the particular person, pay for the seeing yourself, and refuse the comfortable category even when your own side is handing it to you.
3. The volatile culture, read through her kitchen window
Say the guard rail first, because the razor requires it: nothing in our public life is the Securitate, and a pile-on is not a police file. The magnitudes are different worlds. The mechanisms rhyme, and she taught us to hear the rhyme.
Our public square has rebuilt, by market rather than mandate, several of the conditions she survived, and the plainest one deserves plain words. Social media has given every person a permanent file. The worst sentence you wrote at nineteen, the photograph from the party, the opinion that aged badly, the joke that landed wrong: all of it keeps, and when it surfaces it arrives shorn of its year, its circumstances, and everything its author has become since. We have made everyone aware of everyone’s historical flaws, often without context and usually without grace. A life re-reads itself, and the file never does. There is no statute of limitations in it and no one whose job is to ask what the person learned, only the old row replayed as if it had been beaten in this morning, judged by strangers who know nothing else about the person and by the standards of a different decade. She faced one Globus. We have handed everyone a small one, and the unsigned attack now assembles itself in an afternoon.
The result is the condition she documented, reached by the opposite road, and it should be said as plainly as the mechanism: we are closing off the way people closed off on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Her neighbors guarded themselves because the state kept the file; we guard ourselves because the crowd does. So people of every politics speak in approved sentences worn like coats, confess nothing, sand their histories smooth, and keep the real self for the kitchen, a posture her world needed police to produce and ours has produced without a single policeman. Compulsory sentiment runs the old forced assent at lower stakes and higher frequency, join the display or be accused, and the status economy completes the enclosure, because where worth is ranked, vulnerability becomes a performance genre and generosity becomes a display, and both stop being what they were. A person in this weather makes the calculation her neighbors made. Keep the real self indoors. Trust only the proven. Say we.
There is a second, quieter mechanism that is ours and not hers, and the house’s other essays were written to name it: her world privatized generosity by making it dangerous, and ours has professionalized it by making it unnecessary, help routed through systems that cannot receive, anonymity offered as the last available dignity, the mother in the Buttress paper turning her car around at a food locker because the machine gave her thanks nowhere to land. Those essays carry that half of the diagnosis, and section 5 returns to them. The half that belongs to this pair is the first one: a culture where coming between is ordinary, where confidences leak and files replay and the third party cannot be trusted, is a culture already living by her world’s arithmetic, however free its elections. Which is why the recovery this essay proposes is not a program and not a floor. It is a stance.
4. The covenant: Beside, Not Between as the recovery
The Beside, Not Between pages were written for the parents of middle schoolers and the adults around them, and read beside her testimony they turn out to be something larger: the counter-architecture to the world she survived, built at the only scale where it can actually be rebuilt. Six of the pages’ moves carry the weight.
The kindness that makes it invisible. The pages’ sharpest observation is that coming between “rarely looks like hostility. Most of the time it looks like care”: the counselor who tells the thirteen-year-old the rule is unreasonable, the coach who becomes the adult a child can really talk to and lets the child know it, the neighbor who would never raise a child that way. Her world knew the same face. The recruiters of children and colleagues mostly believed they were helping too; the system did not run on villains, it ran on sincere adults certain they stood on the child’s side, the worker’s side, history’s side. The magnitude guard holds, and the structure is the same structure: between always presents as rescue, which is why it works, there and here.
The two promises. The covenant at the center of the pages has two halves. Nothing a child tells the adult is carried home behind the child’s back, unless the child is in danger. And nothing is promised to stay hidden forever; the adult’s work is to help the hard sentence come home at a safe pace. Read through her window, these are the exact two failure modes the informer world ran on. The adult who carries what they hear is the informer. The adult who promises forever-secrecy is the recruiter, building a loyalty that cuts the child out of their own family. Her world perfected both at once, which is how it destroyed the third party. The covenant rebuilds the third party by rule: an adult who keeps both promises is once again a person a confidence can pass through, and a child ringed by such adults lives in the opposite of a surveilled world, whatever the weather outside the house.
The double message. The pages ask one adult to carry two sentences at once, grace toward the parent and encouragement toward the child: “I am here, and I am not going anywhere. I am not going to take sides against your dad, and I will not disappear either.” Set that against the double bind her world assigned, which was its inversion: perform loyalty in public, practice suspicion at home. The beside adult reverses both clauses. Honesty runs between the adults, in the open, where the child is not asked to carry it, and loyalty is spoken in the child’s hearing. One adult, both messages, no file.
The physics at the saw. The pages’ image for the stance is the helper at the far end of a table saw, who holds the long board level and does not pull, because pulling twists the cut and can throw the board back at the person feeding it. That is the physics of coming between, stated as shop safety. The pages count the thrown boards at family scale: the young person who learns at thirteen to go around a parent and arrives at eighteen with no one to call. Her Café Europa counts them at the scale of a civilization: whole societies of adults who had learned that going around, saying we, and trusting no one was how a person survived, now being asked to build civic life out of exactly the capacities the going-around had destroyed.
The line that does not drift. The pages hold one hard floor, the line below which every adult acts, and one discipline above it: “Every adult feels the pull to move it down to wherever their own disagreement sits, so that the thing they dislike becomes the reason to step in. The line stays where it is.” Totalitarianism, seen from the kitchen where she saw it, is the line moved all the way down: the state’s own tastes made into the reason to step between every parent and child, every neighbor and neighbor. A free society does not lose that line all at once. It loses it one sincere adult at a time, each moving it down to wherever their disagreement sits, and the pages’ refusal of the drift is the anti-totalitarian muscle practiced at kitchen scale, which is the only scale at which it has ever been practiced successfully.
The mend. Vulnerability is rational only where breaks can be mended, and the pages end in kintsugi: the break looked at slowly before any gold goes on, no one allowed to treat the break as proof they were right, repair begun with one plain imperfect sentence. Her world had verdicts and no mends; the colleagues who went quiet in 1992 stayed quiet, because the architecture had no repair protocol. A family that mends in the open is teaching the one capacity that makes every other risk on this page affordable, and a child who has watched a break get mended will risk the next hard sentence sooner.
That is the pair, stated once: she documented the world where the third party died, and the Beside pages are the third party’s rebuilding, promise by promise, at the scale of one child and the adults around her.
5. The rooms behind the pair
A stance needs rooms to be practiced in, and the house’s other essays build them; they stand behind this pair the way framing stands behind a doorway. The Dignity of Owing supplies the economics of the recovery: help that carries a face carries somewhere for gratitude to land, a giver who chose, and the dignity of owing, which are precisely the vulnerabilities the apparatus was built to remove, and its hardest sentence is the admission test for every room the house keeps: a community that will not receive from you has not fully admitted you. The Buttress and the Table supplies the warning from the supply side, a sector fitting the person alone so well that no one asks why she is alone, and the table doctrine answers both essays at once: the door is dinner, the dinner is never leverage, and no one pays for food with their story, because mandatory disclosure is the old forced assent wearing a lanyard. The face, the table, and the stance are one recovery seen from three sides, and this pair names the stance as the load-bearing side, because faces and tables appear wherever adults have already learned to stand beside.
6. The hull under all of it
The condition beneath the stance is the one her world could not supply and ours keeps forgetting: worth settled before performance. Courage cannot be assigned and vulnerability must never be demanded; the moment of real openness cannot be engineered, only housed. What a family, a house, or a neighborhood can do is make the risk affordable, and belovedness is the affordability. A person whose worth is already settled can say I without the I being a gamble of everything, and can enter a we without dissolving into it, which is the task Café Europa set the whole post-communist world and which no constitution ever completed. The hull comes before the sail here as everywhere: safety, connection, and a settled sense of worth first, and only then does openness become something a person chooses rather than something a form extracts.
7. What this asks of us, in an ordinary month
The practices are small on purpose, because her evidence was small on purpose, and the first five are the pair’s own. Keep both promises with every young person in your reach: nothing carried behind their back, nothing promised hidden forever. Disagree adult to adult, in the open, and never hand a disagreement to a child or a subordinate to carry. Say the beside sentences out loud, to the parent and to the child, and let both hear that you are not going anywhere. Help one hard sentence come home at a safe pace this season. Mend one break where the household can watch the mending.
Then the rooms’ practices, behind them. Thank a face, by hand, within days. Receive visibly, and let it count. Owe somebody something and do not rush to settle it. Host before the house is ready, because the imperfect table is the vulnerable one, and the vulnerable one is the one that teaches. Say I in the rooms that demand we, kindly, with your name on it. And keep one unguarded room, in the building or in the week, where nothing said becomes a file.
She watched a whole civilization learn to live indoors, and she spent her life carrying what she saw out into the open, in the first person, at her own expense. The debt the house owes her is not a monument; her books are allergic to monuments. It is adults who stand beside, confidences that can travel safely, breaks mended in gold, tables with faces at them, and a public room where saying what you mean, giving what you have, and needing what you need are ordinary again. That is the inheritance, and it is the thing we were for.
Notes and Sources
Slavenka Drakulić was born in Rijeka in 1949 and died at her home in Istria on June 20, 2026. A Croatian journalist, novelist, and essayist, she wrote about life under communism and after it in the first person and from the kitchen, and about the wars that followed from inside the country they tore apart. Few readers in our neighborhood will have met her, and the books below are the place to start; each has a card on the Lineage Shelf. A personal note: in the summer of 1986 I traveled through Yugoslavia beside a Serbian history professor, learning how singular that country was and how fragile, and behind closed doors it was as she would later write it. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed struck me deeply when it reached me, and it is the book I would hand a neighbor first.
How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (W. W. Norton, 1992): the essays on the washing machine, the doll, the lipstick, and the queue, and the chapter on the coffee you cannot drink alone.
Café Europa: Life After Communism (Abacus, 1996; W. W. Norton, 1997): the source of the two quotations in section 1, on the hypocrisy people learned in order to survive and on the I that had to escape.
The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War (W. W. Norton, 1993), chapter 8, Overcome by Nationhood: the years when Croat became the whole of what she was permitted to be, checked against the author’s copy.
They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague (Viking, 2004): the portraits section 2 reads as generosity of the costliest kind. S.: A Novel About the Balkans (Viking, 2000) is the hardest of her books and the boundary of what the others describe.
The attack in section 2: on December 11, 1992 the Zagreb weekly Globus printed an unsigned article accusing five women writers and journalists, Drakulić among them, of betraying the country; the affair is remembered in Croatia as the witches of Rio. The boy in section 1 is Pavlik Morozov, held up to Soviet schoolchildren for decades as a model for reporting his father.
The settled worth beneath section 6 is the ground of Transcend by Scott Barry Kaufman, and the soil tended for everyone, including those who disagree, is Makoto Fujimura’s Culture Care (InterVarsity Press, 2017).
This essay is the other half of Beside, Not Between, the page for parents. Behind the pair stand The Dignity of Owing and The Buttress and the Table, which is not yet on this site. Rooms or Files and Where to Stand carry this essay’s argument about the file into the neighborhood. The magnitude guard of section 3 travels with every use of this essay: the mechanisms rhyme and the worlds do not.
The works in these notes open their cards on the Lineage Shelf, with doors to borrow them or buy them.