Drakulic quoted by Der Speigel

Ullrich Fichtner, writing in Speigel online on the horrible event of fire in Notre Dame in Paris, quotes and old essay by Slavenka Drakulic:

The collapse of the Stari Most, Drakulic wrote, made her aware of her own mortality in a way that the dead woman did not. “We expect people to die. We count on our own lives to end. The destruction of a monument to civilization is something else. The bridge, in all its beauty and grace, was built to outlive us; it was an attempt to grasp eternity. Because it was the product of both individual creativity and collective experience, it transcended our individual destiny. A dead woman is one of us — but the bridge is all of us, forever.”

The whole article was originally published in Der Spiegel on April 17th in a paper copy. It can be read here or on this link