We lived for half a century in a happy marriage.

Our marriage was ideal. If that could be turned into an advertisement, I would say: "Live your marriage the way Cvijeta and I did!" She was the happiness of my life. Please do not take that as a banal thing to say.

Boredom has always been a foreign and unknown word in our life.

Besides sightseeing in cities, we were drawn to places of silence.

Two days ago, at the age of 94, academician Viktor Žmegač died – a special man: gentle, calm, reliable, precise. Like a Renaissance man, he knew a great deal, and too much, about facts, events, people, countries, art, life. He is kind. Strict, even with himself. A Germanist and Croatist, professor emeritus at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, a writer, historian, musicologist, theorist of literature and art, and travel writer.

In the last fifteen years or so, Professor Žmegač wrote about a dozen phenomenal books on the civilisation, culture and art of Europe. Above all, he loves the culture and art of Europe, which he considers the centre of our planet. He is erudite. Top-class. That is him: someone who has a deep knowledge of whatever he engages with or studies.

He was married to Cvijeta, the author of German-language textbooks and an outstanding teacher in language schools: "I loved her immeasurably, from the very first day until her death. We lived for half a century in a happy marriage. The years that followed, right to the end, were the only tragedy of my life. She had to live in a care home, in an ever-worsening state. She was struck by an incurable, slow-progressing illness. There is no treatment. Even today, not a single day goes by without my remembering episodes from our marriage. She was not only beautiful, dear, and devoted to the family; she was also tremendously witty, full of jokes and quips. Our marriage was ideal. If that could be turned into an advertisement, I would say: "Live your marriage the way Cvijeta and I did!" She was the happiness of my life. Please do not take that as a banal thing to say.

We would still be living happily had she not been struck by a severe illness, Alzheimer’s. That illness is especially insidious; it leads to a loss of orientation and of the ability to recognise people, even those closest to one. I will go back to the happy years, which were happy if only because we raised wonderful children, a daughter and a son. Though perhaps there would have been less harmony had our natures not complemented one another".

"Boredom has always been a foreign and unknown word in our life. When someone says they are bored, I have no idea what that means. Cvijeta looked after the family, was an exemplary teacher of German, wrote textbooks – there they are, on the shelf. She studied in Zagreb and Hamburg. Outside of work she found time to entertain us with skilful impersonations of our acquaintances or public figures. She had refined literary taste."

Right up until she fell ill, Cvijeta was unusually hard-working: "The German language bound us together too. She was the daughter of an Austrian. In 1950 we both enrolled to study German studies in Zagreb. That is where we met. Her illness was a tragedy for me, the only one in my life." While she was ill he waited on her, because she could not get out of bed: ‘I have cried more than once beside her bed. I am not ashamed of it, because I want nothing to do with those who cling to the primitive male myth that a man must not cry. Madmen, or fools, or both. As if callousness were a human virtue. I write a great deal, because one cannot live on grief alone. The typewriter – literature and great music, Bach above all – are my comfort. I am not afraid to cry, even though there are some conceited people who say, ‘Tears are not for men.’ Well, that isn’t so….’. At this point he expressed himself somewhat bluntly, disagreeing with that claim: "It is human to weep! It is human to love!" And all of this Žmegač showed towards his beloved Cvijeta. In this context, Viktor is a living example of how one can remain good even when such love is put to the test. 

Already as a student, Cvijeta wrote her graduation thesis on the concept of time in ‘The Magic Mountain’ by Thomas Mann: "I cannot fail to mention the article ‘Journeys’ in Vijenac of 12 March this year, devoted to our travels. On our many journeys with my wife Cvijeta, we used two cars: "for a very long time a Volkswagen 1300, and later a Fiat Uno 45. They carried us faithfully, more than 40,000 kilometres, the length of the equator, even though we travelled only around Europe. Both of us were always fond of verbal jokes and retelling anecdotes. That was, in a way, our essence. We used to amuse ourselves during the drive with word games.

We passed through Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden. In Austria and Germany we peeked into almost every corner, from the Tyrol to the Baltic Sea“. In big cities they had a magic formula: "when entering Paris, always drive straight ahead, don’t let yourself be confused by crossroads, and you will find yourself in front of the hotel. The formula was reliable. We might still have got tangled up, though, if Cvijeta had not had a city map on her knees, so large that it spanned from the steering wheel to the right-hand window. Whenever necessary, we did the same in other countries too. On the back seats lay maps of cities and countries. Cvijeta was very skilled at reading city plans. She could very quickly tell what was essential from what was not for our routes: the types of roads, the shortest connections, the underpasses for leaving the motorway at service stations.

Besides enjoying sightseeing in cities, they especially enjoyed excursions into nature: "But even more than cities, we were drawn to places of silence. One of the strongest early impressions was a rest of several hours on the shore of Lake Walen in the eastern part of Switzerland. Coming from the small principality of Liechtenstein (whose southern part we had walked across in a single day, like a stroll) we found ourselves, on a so-called regional road, in front of a lake I already knew indirectly from my musicology studies in Germany. Liszt, after all, devoted an episode in his cycle of piano pieces on travelling through Switzerland to the mood of that clear, still lake. Sandwiches bought in Liechtenstein suited the genuine idyll (not one dressed up for tourists) far better. We settled on the grass and gave ourselves entirely to the mood, though without sentimentality: the ham rolls mattered no less. "Unforgettable" is not just a phrase. Right up until Cvijeta’s serious illness, we often mentioned Lake Walen: it became, for the two of us, a symbol of beauty".

On their excursions Cvijeta always had a small camera to hand: "I keep all those photographs of landscapes, of the open sea, of ships, of islands. The amateur cameras of that time were descendants of the famous Kodak camera, which had already established itself by the end of the 19th century. In the villa there was an excellent piano, so we used to put on evening concerts. Cvijeta was the organiser, and I played four-handed pieces with a colleague from the Netherlands — Mozart and Schubert. Cvijeta loved long night walks after dinner. We had the keys to the villa. And we walked for a long time… It is unfortunate that, when we cross borders, we find ourselves in a different communicative situation. If we do not know the other language, we suddenly become, in effect, illiterate. That is why we are obliged to learn foreign languages, which is, on the other hand, a great richness. It is a linguistic insight that you get to know your mother tongue best if you also know some other language, because that way you can compare them, and everything stops being simply taken for granted. A person of narrow horizons thinks that four cases are, everywhere in the world, the normal number, not knowing that in some places there are six, seven, or even fourteen, as in Finnish. So nothing in life, or in culture, is simply self-evident, and awareness of that other possibility is awakened through comparison. One might say that comparison is the foundation of every science, in the sense of systematic thinking, observation and experimentation".

He was born in Slatina and lived in Zagreb: "Croatia is my real homeland; Germany and Austria are, in part, my spiritual ones. During the war there was neither benefit nor harm. What was decisive was the fact that my father was a doctor, so everyone needed him. Someone once joked that in wartime the best thing to be is a doctor or a civil servant. There was always illness, and people also have a fondness for marching tunes. Since I grew up bilingual, during my studies in Germany no one noticed that I was not German".

An unusually happy childhood in his native Slatina was shattered by the war: "It was horror. That is collective history, not just my own, individual one. Fortunately I was too young for the army; I had a severe case of jaundice and some signs of diabetes, which soon proved to be a false alarm. I travelled to the Virovitica grammar school as a so-called commuter by train. Every day from Slatina to Virovitica and back. Very taxing, especially in winter. I went through a great deal. I owe a great deal, a very great deal, to my maternal grandfather, an Evangelical, that is, a Lutheran pastor. He despised the Nazis, because they banned Heine’s works and tore down the monument to the great composer Mendelssohn, who was likewise of Jewish origin, though a devoted Protestant.

My grandfather used to take me on outings; we went to the Drava, to the Papuk forests, to Voćin, and from Orahovica we set off for the ruins of the medieval fortress of Ružica. We often stayed at our vineyard. On clear days you could see the outlines of the towers of Pécs. For my inclination towards music and art, he, my grandmother and my mother deserve the most credit. The same is true of my literary upbringing. My mother gave me my basic piano instruction, and I used to listen to my maternal grandmother playing Bach chorales in church. My grandfather had a large library, from the Bible in Luther’s translation to Thomas Mann. My mother took care of buying new children’s books, for instance those by Erich Kästner. As a boy I mostly read German works, or German translations of English and French writers, and I only discovered Croatian literature as a grammar-school pupil, but straight away through top-class works. I dedicated my previous book, a history of German culture, "From Bach to the Bauhaus", to my maternal grandfather.

I never managed to finish the fourth year of the lower grammar-school grades, because the partisans were laying mines under the train tracks. One day I too was on a mined train. The roar and the wreckage of the carriages I shall never forget. Since I could no longer travel, there was, at my parents’ home, a great deal of time left over for reading. I read Kästner’s children’s novel ‘Emil and the Detectives’ and similar works, for instance Mark Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn’ in German translation.

Then, all of a sudden, I found Krleža’s ‘The Glembays’ in the family library. I knew very little about the author; up to 1945 he was not mentioned in school. Old comic strips, Mark Twain and The Glembays — a hodgepodge, but a useful one. The dramatic cycle, in Minerva’s edition, captivated me completely, perhaps also because my mother tongue is German. You only need to read the first pages of the dialogue. I sensed what concentrated dramatic action was, and I was able to follow the family conflicts.

The most beautiful time was childhood, free of politics; the hardest years were those from twelve to eighteen. Afterwards came marriage and happy days with wonderful children – my daughter Aleksandra and my son Andrej – although for a long time I still felt the trauma of childhood: the desperate looks of the Jewish children, my schoolmates, who in 1941 were crammed into cattle wagons and sent away, never to return. In the book "From Bach to the Bauhaus" I highlighted the great role of German Jews in cultural life. That is a modest expression of remembrance for the sufferings of those years".

He wrote on a typewriter: "Although I am technologically behind the times, when it comes to mobile phones I man the barricades. I defend them. Mobile phones are absolutely necessary; they have saved many lives. The only stupid thing is those infantile games on computer and phone screens. They are a finishing school for producing idiots. The more perfect they become, the greater the danger if they fall into the hands of some metaphorical monkey. A monkey on a plane, that is Krleža’s image from ‘Long Ago Days’. I never switched to a computer, because I am afraid the internet might turn me into an addict, just as, every now and then, I cannot resist leafing through encyclopedias. I write directly, mostly without notes, on an electric typewriter. You do not have to be paranoid to have the feeling, like so many people today, that someone is constantly listening to you through your mobile phone, tracking you and downloading all your data. That is why I switch my mobile off, and suddenly there is no more “Big Brother““.

He played the piano almost every day. He played the classics, naturally: “ He loved playing with others: „ In the past I would often perform four-handed piano repertoire with the pianist Srebrenka Poljak. And with Milko Pravdić, a professor at the Academy of Music, I played pieces for clarinet and piano. Schumann, Hindemith, Finzi. With my colleague Poljak, the emphasis was on Bach, Mozart and Reger. It all depends on how things develop”.

Speaking generally about our age, he says: "Our era is neither better nor worse than any other epoch of humanity. It is, of course, different. Historically documented reality begins – with wars. China, Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome offer veritable catalogues of violence. It is no accident that the oldest work of European literature known to us begins with Homer’s ‘Iliad’, an epic about a bloody war between the Greek states and Troy. Neither the Greek king nor the kin of the Trojan king are, according to the poet’s descriptions, the kind of people to whom we would entrust the upbringing of children in our kindergartens. In that whole society, the most intelligent was Cassandra, the Trojan king’s daughter. Her prophecies were perfectly accurate, and precisely for that reason the lords refused to believe her. Some time ago someone coined the expression "in a banana" (a Croatian phrase for being in a mess). That is an exact description of the state of the world — and, if one likes, one can swap a single letter in the Croatian word for "state" (stanje) and get the word for "filth" (sranje) instead; the pun itself does not survive translation, but the point does. In Napoleon’s day it was said that war was too serious a matter to be entrusted to generals. Today money is too serious a matter to be entrusted to the hands of certain bankers. That could be extended all the way to the claim that cakes are too serious a matter to be entrusted to pastry chefs. But joking aside.

I believe the moment has truly come to establish that the Earth is too precious to be entrusted to today’s people. "You must change your life" is the closing line of one of Rilke’s great poems. I think that is a global message”. For the reasons mentioned, there has always been fear. The faces of fear change. As a cultural historian I know that in the ages before the Enlightenment, the stratum of so-called ordinary people lived in dread of evil spirits, werewolves and that whole foolish repertoire. I wrote about this recently in Vijenac, in an article called ‘The Transformations of Night’. In any case, here too we can appeal to a literary work. Alongside Eliot, the greatest Anglo-American poet of the century, Auden, published in 1947 a poem with the telling title: ‘The Age of Anxiety’. In it he alludes also to the atomic bomb, which is one of the sources of that dull, latent fear. One mistaken press of the red button, and in an instant we would be thrown back into a reality compared to which even the Stone Age home would have seemed comfortable enough.”

And during the isolation caused by the coronavirus, with more than ninety years behind him, he lived actively: “ I used to be an active sportsman – I played table tennis, and today I go for a brisk walk every day, mostly towards evening. I cannot claim to take any particular care of myself; I eat little, though I love chocolate, especially when I am writing. I work a great deal and I read a great deal. You might say I am calm. Whenever I am able to work, I am content. Today, too, my children and grandchildren can cheer me up. Today millions of people all over the world live like this, not only the elderly. It is precisely the young who are threatened by quarantine, if they happen to be in the right – or rather the wrong – place at the wrong coronavirus moment. In my childhood I first heard the word "quarantine" because my father was a doctor. Travelling by ship is especially dangerous today. Suddenly you find yourself on a cruise ship flying the yellow flag. Exercise? Yes. I recommend special exercises to strengthen the feet, a kind of kneeling push-up, and imaginary cycling on the sofa. If circumstances were normal, in my old age I might well have made a health technician. We can build up our strength and cope with stress if we do not do ten things at once. Stress and confusion are related phenomena.

I have wonderful, extremely devoted children. Aleksandra and Andrej, we call them Tala and Andi. They look after me perfectly. Tala cooks abundantly and with care. Andi takes care of shopping at the shop and the bakery. There used to be a book in circulation called ‘How Our Grandmothers Cooked’. A new one could now be called ‘How Our Daughters Cook’. Tala cooks perfectly. She has her own recipes. For example: bulgur with chopped meat and carrot. My advice: write it down and remember it. When you live the way I do, you have plenty of time left over for work. I do not know which of them I love more, and I admire their talents. They are certainly both very successful in their careers. There is also my grandson Radovan, a civil engineer who moved into programming, and my granddaughter Jana, an architect, both with professional recognition.

 On politics he says: “There is an old saying that you do not need to take an interest in politics, because politics takes an interest in you. I regularly follow political news, domestic and foreign, but I am not exactly enthralled by it. It is good to be a sceptic; in some foreign countries, on television, something is often being fudged. Only what suits someone in particular is presented as good. That is why, when the schedules coincide, football matters more to me. If top teams are playing, I become an addict. I do not miss a single match. I have never gone to a stadium. Television broadcasts, with their close-up camera work and commentary, are more rewarding.

 On culture: „Culture must be fascinating and refined, otherwise it is nothing. That was said by Baudelaire. Was he a revolutionary? No. My advice: bury your nose in specialist literature. “ Erudition is a broad concept. I wash my own underwear and socks. That, too, is erudition“.

 On God: „That is a riddle without a solution. Everyone must find their own answer. A supreme being is a matter of belief, of religion. Some believe, others do not, and for many it makes no difference. It has rightly been said of atheists that they are, in fact, negatively religious. If you deny something, you thereby indirectly confirm that the object of that denial exists. Everyone ought to ask themselves why we exist. The problem is therefore ancient. It has been said that the purpose of life is life itself. That is only apparently a tautology. Life is not a mechanical process. Meaning has to be added to it through one’s own effort, each person in his own way. In the 20th century, this thought was most clearly expressed by the French classic Camus. Incidentally, Camus is often compared with his compatriot Sartre. Yet Sartre did not come close to Camus, in the ethical sense“.

 The writer Julijana Matanović bears witness about Žmegač: „As a girl, I would often stop by Žmegač’s villa. I would be delighted whenever I caught sight, in the courtyard, of a lady with neatly done grey hair, in a flowered dress. In our small provincial town, women of her age dressed in dark clothes. The wife of the late Dr Žmegač spoke German and was the mother of two sons. The elder was a teacher at our primary school, and the younger, named Viktor, a great scholar in Zagreb. Even those who did not know him personally admired him. The older generation passed the story of his success on to the younger. And we, too, grew up, widening our own paths as we went, because we knew that someone great had walked them before us.

To me he was a support in the corridors of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. He recognised fears, opened his arms, and assured me that what I was doing made a great deal of sense. He knew, when inviting me as a speaker at the launches of his books, that I needed that. And he thanked me, even though he had no need to. I am fully aware that in me he saw not only a person who interprets written sentences, but also someone who knows what shade the Đurđenovac park offers on hot July days.  I am grateful to you, Viktor, for every second, for every word addressed to me. In your presence, all of us grew taller. And you were taller than all of us, and than all of them. For the gifted are not afraid when those weaker than them grow alongside them. There is a Time of Viktor Žmegač, and a time after him.

 Pavao Pavličić says that: „as a man he was simple and modest, responsible and disciplined, in his personal needs almost an ascetic. But when it came to the scholarly and professional goals he set himself, he knew no limits. The bar, already set high, he would regularly clear with room to spare. The space he occupied in Croatian culture, in literary scholarship and in public life is so great that an enormous void remains after him. We shall try to fill it with the memory of his brilliant works, his brilliant lectures and his public appearances. On the one hand, he was a superb university teacher, and on the other, he brought the wider community countless insights and areas of knowledge. What has struck me as particularly impressive of late is that even in his mature years he wrote a great deal, and wrote well. In that respect he can serve as an example to all young scholars and writers. He had been productive in this field before too, but in the last ten years he found some new subjects. I find his books on cities especially interesting, as well as the fact that, latterly, he also introduced a memoir dimension into his texts. He wrote about his childhood and youth in Đurđenovac, Slatina, Osijek… That is excellent prose, but also a valuable document of its time. All in all, we have learned a great deal from the professor, and we shall go on learning still. His books should be read more than once, and understood well. In that sense, we can at least partly make up for his passing."

Svjetlan Lacko Vidulić, writer and professor of German studies: „He was always ready to talk; his stories had an incredible breadth. Every exchange of words with him would turn into a panorama of European, but also of human, knowledge. When I heard that he had died, I threw myself into reading some of his articles. I am fascinated by how a man with a single head and a single brain could have such an extraordinary memory, and also such a remarkable ability to synthesise vividly what he knew. He connected knowledge from different fields in a way that was entirely his own. Perhaps I am wrong, but I do not think there is anyone left in Croatia who can connect facts the way he did, and here I am thinking in particular of his work in the field of German studies. He was one in a million".

He published his last text, ‘Symbolic Figures of European Literature‘, six days before his death, in Matica’s fortnightly journal Vijenac.