Terrorism, Trauma, and the Search for Redemption

To Silke Maier-Witt, the two words are antithetical: She refuses to equate revolutionary with hero.

For her, there is nothing romantic or idealistic about management books that borrow from the language of revolution. There is nothing edgy, hip, or cool to her about books that offer to teach U.S. managers how to "lead the revolution." Maier-Witt, 51, is one member of the baby-boom generation with no appetite for phony romantic revolutionary sentiments. Talk of revolution is cheap, and the rhetoric of radical change and organizational chaos is just that -- rhetoric. But when you grow up in a family where your father was a member of Adolf Hitler's elite secret police -- a fact that your father hid from you, and which you discover only after his death -- and you become a member of Germany's most wanted gang, a terrorist and an accessory to murder in your own right, then talk of revolution is more than rhetoric. It is reality.

It makes your life a lesson in the pain of killing in the name of lofty ideals and national principles. It pries the romance off of revolution. It makes you fully appreciate the power of listening and of healing -- one person at a time. It makes you want to change the way you think about change.

And if you are Silke Maier-Witt, it brings you to Prizren, Kosovo, where you're trying to help rebuild a nation -- not to change it or to revolutionize it, but to heal it. It is work that is your own personal form of repentance for years spent -- wasted, really -- reacting to and practicing revolutionary politics. Everywhere Maier-Witt goes in Prizren, her reputation precedes her. People know her as the radical, the girl Gandhi, the woman who stood up to the German power structure.

And she hates it. As she maneuvers a white, mud-coated Mitsubishi van between bathtub-sized craters left by the peacekeepers' heavy tanks, she is fuming over the high cost of lofty ideals. Ideals are bunk, she knows now. She just wishes that she'd learned it sooner. Just thinking about it makes her angry: She has absently lit two cigarettes -- one is in her mouth, one is burning on the dashboard. She is as quiet as a live grenade.

Her anger focuses on Milena, an 18-year-old Serbian girl. A year ago, Milena was an office assistant and a university student living in Babin Most. As she was going about her errands one Saturday afternoon, she was grabbed on the street by two men. She knew what they wanted: The Balkans boast a booming business in women kidnapped and forced into prostitution. Milena fought her way free and fled the city the next day.

She took refuge in her Serbian enclave, a 10-cow town where trash piles up in the gutters. The loose red dirt of the town gets into everything: food, clothes, even the concrete, turning the buildings a blood red. Centuries of bloodshed have colored the dust, colored the land, colored the memories which hold even the youngest captive. Gesturing at the gravestones that bear the names of the dead, most of them fighters for the cause of Serbian freedom, Milena had proudly said to Maier-Witt, "Everyone I love is here." She gives the impression that she wouldn't mind joining them if the cause demanded it.

You want to weep for Milena just as you admire her courage to go on fighting for her ideals at any cost. Not Maier-Witt. To her, Milena's suffering is a bum trick. "When Milena talks about all the dead people here," she says, her rage barely contained, "I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear about all of these heroes who died for some cause. What good does it do? The Serbs are so connected to stories from 1389. To them, it's as if it happened yesterday. That is trauma."

Maier-Witt is in Kosovo to try to alleviate trauma, to heal. Others come to Kosovo for different reasons. But regardless of why you come, you will leave with only one lesson: Never again will you take the notion of revolution lightly. Revolutionary change is not cool. This place is not a destination in a romantic war novel; it is not a clever word game or an edgy call to arms. Silke Maier-Witt's world is a stage on which you can see what happens to someone who lives for her ideals only to find that ideals can easily produce the opposite of the glories intended.