A woman walks into a shop to buy a notebook. She means to keep a diary, a small private ledger of a life that has not gone the way she hoped, and she fills it with her thoughts between 1935 and 1940. She dies before the worst arrives. Her diary does not. It passes from hand to hand across the years and the ruins, read by people she taught and people she never met, and it survives nearly everything the century can throw at it, until two of its last readers, themselves barely survivors, decide at the end to burn it. That notebook is the quiet engine of Aleksandar Tišma’s The Use of Man, and the fact that a diary outlasts the human beings around it tells you what kind of book this is.

The Use of Man is a novel about the machinery of atrocity, and its terrible subject is not death but use. War, in Tišma’s understanding, is not chaos. It is a system, an organism with an appetite, and its purpose is to take human beings and spend them: as soldiers, as labor, as bodies for other bodies, as fuel. The people who walk out of it alive are not spared so much as emptied. This is one of the great books to come out of the former Yugoslavia, and one of the most unsparing novels of the Second World War written anywhere.

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A Diary in Novi Sad

The novel opens not with an army but with Anna Drentvenšek, a German teacher whose private pupils call her simply Miss. She has come to Novi Sad after a failed marriage, hoping the move will let her begin again, and instead she finds isolation, money trouble, and a slow narrowing of her world until the only hour she feels whole is the hour she spends teaching. When she falls ill and knows she is dying, she asks her pupil Vera to burn the diary. Vera reads it first and cannot bring herself to obey; she keeps it, shelves it, and by that small act of disobedience sets the whole book in motion. Four years later a young Partisan named Sredoje Lazukić finds the diary in that same library and is disappointed by it, because the confident woman he remembered turns out on the page to have been frightened, fragile, and alone.

Beginning here, with a private grief rather than a public catastrophe, is Tišma’s first deep decision. Novi Sad in these years is a city of layered peoples, Serbs and Hungarians, Jews and Germans, merchants and teachers and drifters, and the diary is the thread he uses to draw them all into view before history comes to sort them. Readers who know the great Yugoslav novels of conscience, the moral claustrophobia of Meša Selimović’s Death and the Dervish or the patient civic tragedy of Ivo Andrić, will recognize the ambition: to hold an entire community in a single frame and then watch what pressure does to it.

Tišma tells all of this out of order. The novel refuses the forward march of chronology and instead circles its material, moving by flashback and return, so that we often know a character’s ruin before we are shown the life that preceded it. The form is not a trick. It enacts the way trauma actually holds a mind, which is not as a sequence running cleanly from cause to consequence but as a set of fixed and terrible images the survivor keeps arriving back at. Once you accept that the book circles rather than advances, its structure becomes not difficult but inevitable.

The Families and the Fracture

Around the diary Tišma arranges two families whose fates the war will braid together. The Kroners are a prosperous Jewish merchant household: old Sara at her prayers, disappointed that her son married outside the faith; Robert, who studied in Vienna and meant to stay there, dragged home to run the family business; his German wife Tereza, who withdraws into their son; and their daughter Vera, who senses early what is coming for the Jews and is not believed. The Lazukićs are Serbs of a different temper, headed by Nemanja, a would-be politician far more devoted to nationalist causes than to his own children, and his son Sredoje, an idle young man who wants nothing from life but its pleasures.

What Tišma shows, with a patience that is almost unbearable, is how a family meets catastrophe as a unit and then comes apart into solitary sufferers, each condemned to endure alone. Robert Kroner joins a resistance group, is captured, and is killed on the way to a camp; Sara is murdered in a gas chamber; Vera is sent to a camp and kept alive, with the younger women, to be used by soldiers. The Lazukićs scatter under occupation. Sredoje’s mother is killed defending the house, his brother dies in an air raid, his father turns to war profiteering and billets a German officer whose attempt to abuse Sredoje ends with the officer dead and Nemanja shot in reprisal. Milinko, the earnest boy who loved Vera and volunteered for service against his own convictions, is maimed past recognition at Dravograd, loses his sight, hearing, arms, and legs, and is finally killed by a lethal injection administered by the very army he was mistaken for. No one is granted a clean death or a clean survival. The war divides the labor of ruin among them and lets each carry a different portion.

What “Use” Really Means

The title is the argument. Tišma’s controlling insight is that war does not merely kill; it converts people into instruments, and the conversion outlasts the shooting. A person who has been used long enough learns, in the end, only one skill, which is how to use others. Sredoje is the clearest case. He begins as a young man accustomed to exploiting everyone around him, women especially, and the war teaches him what it is to be on the other side of that arrangement, to become a tool himself, a wreck struggling out of total submission. When peace comes he returns to his old appetites, but the meaning has curdled: what was once a hunger for excitement is now a search for a peace he cannot find, not in a wife he abandons while she is pregnant, not in fatherhood, not in Vera.

This is where Tišma parts company with the ordinary war novel and edges toward a colder truth. He is not interested in absolving anyone by making them heroic, nor in condemning the damaged for the damage done to them. He writes, as one of his early admirers put it, in a tone of austere detachment, and yet the book leaves the reader flooded with pity. His real project is to lift the stigma from the victims by showing how completely they were stripped of the power to resist, and how the behavior we are tempted to judge, the coldness, the promiscuity, the cruelty, is the residue of what was done to them. War fills people with fear, numbs their feeling so that some fragment of sanity can survive, and empties them of worth in their own eyes. To understand that is not to excuse; it is to see clearly, which Tišma considered the harder and more necessary act.

Vera and Sredoje After the War

If the novel has a center of gravity, it is Vera Kroner, who suffers the most and survives anyway. In the camp she holds herself together by force of will, refusing to let horror dissolve her reason, and she keeps the single vow that matters: she will live. And she does. The cruelty Tišma reserves for her is not the camp but the aftermath. The life that waits on the far side of survival is not worth the desperation with which she fought for it. She cannot hold a job, cannot settle in Munich in her mother’s tavern, cannot make a home inside her wounds. She tries to deaden them through detachment and promiscuity and later through genuine tenderness, and neither the cold way nor the warm way brings her rest. The war’s cruelest theft, Tišma writes in effect, is not her life but her capacity to live it.

Sredoje and Vera find each other again after the war, two people whose histories rhyme, and try to build something together. They cannot. Neither can heal the other because neither can heal himself, and Sredoje, forever searching in other people for a salvation that lies only within him, never grasps that the source of his torment and the only possible source of his rescue are the same. In the last pages Vera resolves to return to her mother in Germany, and before they part she and Sredoje burn Miss Anna’s diary, the one object that had linked them across their whole lives. The book that began with a woman buying a notebook ends with that notebook in the fire. The record is destroyed, but the reader has already read it, which is Tišma’s last quiet insistence: that the witness has been passed on, whether the survivors can bear to keep it or not.

The Man Behind the Machine

Tišma knew this material from close range. Born in 1924 near the Serbian-Hungarian border to a Serbian father and a Hungarian-speaking Jewish mother, he grew up in Novi Sad and came of age exactly as the catastrophe arrived. In January 1942 the occupying Hungarian regime carried out the Novi Sad raid, a series of massacres that killed roughly three thousand people, mostly Serbs and Jews; Tišma’s own grandmother survived by chance, and the scar of that winter runs through everything he wrote. The Use of Man belongs to what is often called his Novi Sad cycle, alongside The Book of Blam and Kapo, a body of work that returns again and again to the same wounded city and the same question of how the used go on living.

He wore his erudition lightly and distrusted reverence. Of his boyhood love of Proust and Thomas Mann he once said, “I read them because they were interesting, not because they were great literature,” a remark that tells you something about the plainness of his own art, which never reaches for grandeur and arrives at it anyway. Bernard Johnson’s English translation, which introduced the novel to a wide readership through New York Review Books, has been praised as a classic in its own right, and the book has drawn the admiration of writers and critics who call it, without much argument, one of the great novels of the twentieth century, a work of stark poetry and illimitable sadness.

Why the Book Endures

Return, at the end, to that notebook. A diary is the most private thing a person makes, and Tišma builds his whole novel on the paradox that this fragile private object survives the war that destroys nearly everyone connected to it. The diary is durable; the human being is not. That is the bitter proposition at the heart of The Use of Man, and it is also, read the other way, the reason the book exists. Tišma could not save Anna, or Vera, or the three thousand of Novi Sad. He could set down the record and hand it to us, knowing that we, unlike Vera, are not too wounded to keep it.

Whether the honest reader finishes this novel in despair or in a strange grim consolation is not a question the book decides for you. It shows the machine, names its appetite, and refuses the comfort of a lesson. What it asks is only that we look, and having looked, that we do not forget what we have seen. For readers drawn to the literature that stares hardest at the century’s violence, from the bureaucratic nightmares of European fiction to the enduring war novels that outlast their wars, The Use of Man is essential, and once read, permanent.

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