In 1993, Ugresic conceded that were she to write Fording the Stream of Consciousness again, it would be different, less cheerful.¹ Near the end of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender the narrator states that "no one is the same any more, I myself have changed. I am quieter, sadder, more preoccupied, less resistant".² Perhaps more than any other, this admission captures the novel's sadness. In the shadow of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Yugoslav wars, and Ugresic's own exile, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and its later companion piece The Ministry of Pain form a kind of fin de siècle diptych on memory, displacement, melancholia and nostalgia — an exploration of the symbolic and physical ruins of the European twentieth century.