TELLING STORIES TO SURVIVE: THE WRITINGS OF SAŠA STANIŠIĆ. AN APPROACH TO DECOLONIZING DISCOURSES IN GERMAN STUDIES by JOSCHA KLUEPPEL A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of German and Scandinavian and the Division of Graduate Studies of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2023 Dissertation Approval Page Student: Joscha Klueppel Title: Telling Stories to Survive: The Writings of Saša Stanišić. An Approach to Decolonizing Discourses in German Studies This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of German and Scandinavian by: Michael Stern Chair Susan Anderson Core Member Martin Klebes Core Member Michael Allan Institutional Representative and Krista Chronister Vice Provost of Division of Graduate Studies Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Division of Graduate Studies. Degree awarded June 2023. 2 © 2023 Joscha Klueppel 3 Dissertation Abstract Joscha Klueppel Doctor of Philosophy Department of German and Scandinavian June 2023 Title: Telling Stories to Survive: The Writings of Saša Stanišić. An Approach to Decolonizing Discourses in German Studies. This dissertation project is the first comprehensive analysis of Saša Stanišić. It transcends the valid, but restricting focus on migration in his works by tracing a common narrative strategy that spans all his writing. Analyzing his novels as well as two short stories of Fallensteller (2016), I argue that characters and narrators use storytelling as a means of survival. A detailed literary analysis, based on close readings of the engagement with death both as a narrative trigger and a constant negotiation, discusses a multitude of diegetic examples in which storytelling is used as survival strategy, for example in the mediation through bodies of water. Importantly, the focus of my analysis remains on the diegetic level to avoid conflating literary analysis with author biography. Detailed discussions of racism, colonial remnants in Germany as well as the power of naming and language are paired with examples from Stanišić’s texts to illustrate hierarchical and racializing mechanisms in German society. Utilizing the concept of borderscaping, the next chapter highlights how Stanišic’s texts provide solutions to the problem of exclusionary borderscapes. I argue that Stanišić’s texts rewrite and expand notions of Germanness to more adequately inform belonging to Germany and create more representative and less violent borderscapes. For this purpose, I discuss Stanišić’s idiosyncratic idea of Heimaten and themes that I term ‘transeuropean inscriptions.’ Furthermore, I understand the analysis of Stanišić’s novels as a paradigmatic example for the application of decolonizing conversations in German Studies. I do not claim Stanišić as a decolonial writer nor his texts as decolonial texts. Instead, my research places several lineages of knowledge production into conversation with Western thought to critique, decenter, and, at times, deconstruct, the mechanisms that the analysis of Stanišić’s writing unearthed. Centering non-hierarchical conversations is essential. To that end, I employ what I call decolonial couplets to engage with thinkers like Édouard Glissant and Achille Mbembe and the particularities of their approaches to similar themes and topics, such as lineage, memory, violence, and knowledge. 4 Acknowledgments Any project, let alone one of this magnitude and intensity, is only ever possible because of a great support system and my dissertation is no exception. First and foremost, there are no words strong enough to encapsulate my gratitude to my advisor, mentor, and friend, Professor Michael Stern, who has introduced me to new worlds of thinking about and perceiving the world and has challenged me to be my best. Without your unwavering support and guidance throughout the whole dissertation process and your mentorship I would not be where I am, and I would not be who I am. I also must thank Professors Susan Anderson, Martin Klebes, and Michael Allan for their support, feedback, and patience throughout the process. I want to thank every one of my peers who has given feedback, both in the colloquium and on other, less formal occasions, especially Lisa Höller, Jeremiah Young, Daniel Quintero Plata, and Alex Colombo. I thank every person who has helped me refine my arguments and my thinking, particularly those who have given me opportunities to present and publish parts of my dissertation over the last years. I am grateful to my parents for supporting the choices I have made that led me to this point, even when I decided to move continents. Thank you for having my back and for your encouraging optimism throughout the dissertation process. Bobbie, none of this would matter without you at my side. I cannot thank you enough for your unconditional love, support, and your patience, even after I asked you to read over a paragraph for the thousandth time. Your feedback, your input, and your confidence have been invaluable. You have shaped the way I think and the way I am. Your love, intelligence, and sacrifice are the backbone of this dissertation. G, this dissertation is for you. It is going to be a while before you can read these words, but your laughter and playfulness have been a steady motivation. For the rest of my life, I am dedicating every day to you. 5 Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................ 10 1.1 Getting to know the author: Saša Stanišić .................................................................................... 11 1.2 On Stanišić’s novels ......................................................................................................................... 15 1.3 On the Balkans and the Bosnian War ........................................................................................... 18 1.4 Postmigrant Society ......................................................................................................................... 20 1.5 On Using Decolonial Theory .......................................................................................................... 27 1.6 Chapter Outlines ............................................................................................................................. 33 Chapter 2: Initial Conceptual Considerations ............................................................................ 36 2.1 Narratives of Migration .................................................................................................................. 40 2.2 Problematizing Heimat ................................................................................................................... 52 2.3 Narratological Considerations ....................................................................................................... 67 2.3.1 Storytelling and Narration ......................................................................................................................... 69 2.3.1 Autofiction and Unreliability ..................................................................................................................... 72 2.4 Anxiety, Death, and Survival ......................................................................................................... 81 2.5 Decolonization and Decoloniality ................................................................................................... 88 Chapter 3: Telling Stories to Survive ............................................... 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Bookmark not defined. 3.1: Anxiety ............................................................................................................................................ 97 3.2: The Topos of ‘Death’ ................................................................................................................... 110 3.2.1 Of Grandfathers ....................................................................................................................................... 111 3.2.2 Of Rivers and Lakes ................................................................................................................................ 122 3.2.3 Storytelling as Survival Strategy – Dying Villages ................................................................................. 135 3.2.4 Storytelling as Survival Strategy – Grandmother .................................................................................... 144 Chapter 4: Borderscaping: Cartography of Cultural Climate .................................................. 155 4.1 Borderscaping ................................................................................................................................ 158 4.1.1 Borders ..................................................................................................................................................... 159 4.1.2 Violence and Violent Borders ................................................................................................................. 162 4.1.3 Borderscape & Borderscaping ................................................................................................................. 169 4.2 Unsettling Racializing Hierarchies and Hegemonies: Racism and Colonial Remnants ......... 172 4.2.1 Structural and Institutional Racism ......................................................................................................... 175 4.2.2 “Kanacke”: From Human to Dehumanizing / Racism in Germany ........................................................ 182 4.2.3 Stanišič and Nanoracism .......................................................................................................................... 191 4.3 The Power of Language and Names ............................................................................................ 200 4.3.1 “Sprache und Sein”: Racializing Language ............................................................................................. 203 4.3.2 Nietzsche & African Philosophy: The Gravitas of Naming .................................................................... 206 4.3.3 The “Cultural Bomb” ............................................................................................................................... 209 4.3.4 Desirable and Undesirable Bilingualism ................................................................................................. 214 4.3.5 Language and Lineage ............................................................................................................................. 216 4.3.6 Globalectics and Relation ........................................................................................................................ 218 6 4.4 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 222 Chapter 5: Borderscaping: Cartography of Expanded Heimaten? .......................................... 224 5.1 Returning to Heimaten ................................................................................................................. 228 5.2 Transcending National Borders: Transeuropean Inscriptions ................................................. 236 5.2.1 Geography ............................................................................................................................................... 246 5.2.2 Joseph von Eichendorff – a Romantic Poet and a Snake in a Tree ......................................................... 248 5.2.3 Herkunft and Language ........................................................................................................................... 254 5.2.4 Lineage: Of Legs and Of Cherries ........................................................................................................... 258 Chapter 6: Decolonial Couplets ................................................................................................. 264 6.1 Relation and Memory in the Middle Passage ............................................................................. 267 6.2 Aquatic Mediation – Aquatic Remembering - Aquatic Multiplicities ..................................... 278 6.3 Knowledges Submerged in the Ocean ......................................................................................... 289 6.4 Stanišić & Glissant – Ruptured Lineages & Articulated Memory ........................................... 296 In Lieu of a Conclusion: Death in the Mediterranean ............................................................. 323 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 338 7 List of Figures Figure Page 1. Vicissitudes by Jason deCaires Taylor…………………………………………………. 264 2. Vicissitudes by Jason deCaires Taylor…………………………………………………. 264 3. Ocean Atlas by Jason deCaires Taylor…………………………………………………. 289 4. Palimpsest by Doris Salcedo……………………………………………….................... 323 5. Palimpsest by Doris Salcedo……………………………………………….................... 323 8 “Through writing, I cultivate my being to bring forth forests that replenish our depleted humanity.” (Dangarembga 2022, 29) “Many times, trauma in a person, decontextualized over time, can look like personality. Trauma in a family, decontextualized over time, can look like family traits. Trauma decontextualized in a people, over time, can look like culture.” (Menakem 2020, 31:55-21:16) 9 Chapter 1: Introduction Nestled in between two mountains and a limestone plateau, two headwater streams – the Tara and the Piva – meet at the border between Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina and, crossing northbound into the latter, a river named Drina originates. Glimpsing the two hamlets of Hum and Šćepan Polje on either side of the border, the Drina makes its way north, gaining in volume. After some time, the river’s flow bends eastward where it approaches the Serbian border. Before encircling the Northeast of the Serbian Tara National Park (Nacionalni Park Tara) and crossing the Peruća Reservoir (Perućačko jezero), the Drina welcomes its largest tributary, the Lim. Growing in volume, the river continues to wind its way northwards and, for roughly 200 kilometers, takes on the liquid mantle of Bosnian-Serbian border. Passing by countless villages on either side of the border, the Drina both divides and connects as its course is marked by countless bends on its way north. Passing by the Bosnian city of Zvornik on its left, the Drina prepares for the final leg of its perpetual journey. Having reached its full length of 346 kilometers, the Drina greets its big sibling, the river Sava, and, just below the small Serbian village of Sremska Rača, flows into the Sava as one of its tributaries. The Sava, in turn, happily takes on the Drina’s water and carries it alongside its liquid mass to Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, where the Sava, too, takes on the role of tributary as it feeds Europe’s second-longest river, the Danube (Donau).1 At this point, however, the Drina has long passed its perhaps best-known landmark, the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge. Completed in 1577, the bridge, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, allowed for a more direct connection between Istanbul and Sarajevo and was eternalized in Ivo Andrić’s novel The Bridge 1 The Danube, from its origin – the connection of the rivers Brigach and Breg – in the South of Germany (Donaueschingen in Baden-Württemberg), passes through ten countries and flows into the Black Sea, taking with it the water of its largest tributary (the Sava) and, in turn, the water of the river Drina. The Black Sea, in turn, is connected to the Mediterranean Sea and, through it, to the Atlantic Ocean. 10 on the Drina (Na Drini ćuprija, 1945). The Nobel prize laureate was intimately familiar with the bridge, having grown up with aunt and uncle in the city of Višegrad after his father’s death (Foteva 2014, 116). Višegrad is a well-known city, in part because of the bridge, but also because it was one of the many locations of genocide during the Bosnian War (1992-1995). The Drina, its waters reaching Višegrad after around one third of its course northwards, knows the city well: Višegrad touches the river’s water on its right shore as the Drina absorbs its tributary, the river Rzav. The Drina flowed past the city as the bridge was built and finished in the 16th century, as the city was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th century, as the bridge was heavily damaged in both world wars and restored afterwards, and as innumerable living and dead bodies were forced into it in the 1990s. The waters of the Drina also flowed past the city on March 7, 1978, as a boy was born in the city and his parents named him Saša Stanišić. He is the author whose writing is at the center of my dissertation project titled Telling Stories to Survive: The Writings of Saša Stanišić. An Approach to Decolonizing Discourses in German Studies. 1.1 Getting to know the author: Saša Stanišić After growing up in Višegrad, a 14-year-old Saša Stanišić was forced to flee the city with his parents – Serbian father and Bosniak2 mother – to Germany when the Bosnian War reached the city in late spring of 1992. They arrived in Heidelberg where Stanišić visited the Internationale Gesamtschule Heidelberg, and after his Abitur, he studied German as a Foreign Language and Slavic Studies at Heidelberg University. After graduating with a Master's Degree,3 Stanišić enrolled at the Deutsche Literaturinstitut in Leipzig (German Institute for Literature). Writing short 2 Bosniak is the ethnic term used for Bosnian Muslims. 3 His 2004 Master’s Thesis on Austrian author Wolf Haas was awarded the “Jürgen-Fritzenschaft-Preis für herausragende wissenschaftliche Leistungen.” (Schwarz 2004) 11 texts throughout his late school years and especially during his university studies, he was able to publish in smaller magazines and anthologies4 before competing at the renowned Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2005 with the short story “Was wir im Keller spielten…” which won the audience prize (“Kelag-Publikumspreis”). The short story subsequently became part of his successful debut novel, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (2006).5 The novel was shortlisted for the German Book Prize in 2006. In 2008, Stanišić was awarded (among several awards) the Adelbert Chamisso Prize, a literary award given to a work by an author whose mother tongue is not German; the award was discontinued in 2017.6 The next years would see growing recognition in the form of a stage adaptation of his novel in 2008 as well as several awards and grants. In 2014, Stanišić published his second novel, Vor dem Fest for which he received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize; the novel was also longlisted for the German Book Prize. Two years later, he followed it up with a collection of twelve short stories, titled Fallensteller (2016). One of the stories returns to the fictional village and characters of Vor dem Fest. After giving three lectures in Zürich in November 2017 as part of the Zürcher Poetikvorlesung series, he was awarded a lectureship at the Hochschule RheinMain (RheinMain University of Applied Sciences) in 2019. More importantly, his novel Vor dem Fest was one the texts used for the Abitur in Hamburg and Stanišić, using a female pseudonym, took the Abitur exam himself, scoring 13 out of 15 points (see Stanišić 2022). But 2019 remained an eventful year, as it saw the publication of his latest book, the autofictional Herkunft. After a shortlist (Grammofon) and a longlist nomination (Vor dem Fest), the third time was the charm and Stanišić received the German Book Prize in 2019 for 4 For example, two shorter texts in 2002 in the fantasy genre that were part of the series Das schwarze Auge – Fluch vergangener Zeiten: Aus den Quellen des Harotrud and Der Reigen der fünf Schwestern. Das schwarze Auge is a German pen & paper role-playing game. 5 Subsequently, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert is abbreviated as Grammofon. 6 For discussions and critique of the Albert-Chamisso Prize, see for example Brent O. Peterson (2018) and Christine Meyer (2021, especially page 3). 12 Herkunft. He subsequently made headlines when he strongly criticized Peter Handke in his acceptance speech. Handke, “der wiederholt für seine pro-serbische Haltung in Bezug auf die Jugoslawienkriege auffiel,” (Kühl 2022) had been awarded the Literature Nobel Prize a few weeks prior. Stanišić stated his criticism auch deswegen, weil ich das Glück hatte, dem zu entkommen, was Peter Handke in seinen Texten nicht beschreibt. […] In seinem Text, der über meine Heimatstadt Višegrad verfasst worden ist, beschreibt Handke unter anderem Milizen, die barfuß nicht die Verbrechen begangen haben können, die sie begangen haben. Er erwähnt die Opfer nicht. Mich erschüttert […], dass sowas prämiert wird. (Wuttke 2019) In 2021, Stanišić published for a new audience: children. His two children’s books Hey, hey, hey Taxi (created together with his son) and Panda-Pand. Wie die Pandas mal Musik zum Frühstück hatten, a story about a band of pandas who struggle with eating their instruments because they are made out of bamboo, were well received.7 In late April 2023, he published his most recent book, Wolf, aimed primarily at children and young adults. Stanišić lives in Hamburg-Altona with his wife and eight-year-old son, Nikolai. In 2013, he became a German citizen. Since the first two academic publications on Saša Stanišić in 2007, there have been 96 publications (as of April 2023) on his works, with the vast majority focusing on his debut novel.8 7 Stanišić had, in fact, asked for a premise involving pandas on the Social Media platform Twitter where he was given the prompt that led to Panda-Pand (see Zeit Online 2021). His children’s books will not be part of the analysis in this dissertation. 8 An overview of the growing scholarship on Stanišić, starting with scholarship on Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert: Jochen Kelter (2007, 21-31), Monika Straňáková (2007, 196-199), Daniela Finzi (2008, 237-246; 2013), Matteo Galli (2008, 53-63), Boris Previšić (2008, 95-106; 2009, 189-203; 2010, 101-120), Arno Schneider (2008, 87- 116), Špela Virant (2008, 286-296), Ulrike Frenkel (2009, 11-14), Goran Lovrić (2009, 369-378), Amalija Maček (2009, 347-354), Goranka Rocco (2009, 81-93), Brigid Haines (2010, 153-164; 2011, 105-118) Andrea Schütte (2010, 221-235; 2012, 275-293), Françoise Barthélemy-Toraille (2011, 93-101), Clément Lévy (2011, 47-57), Annette Bühler-Dietrich (2012, 35-46), Eva Gregová (2012, 70-83), Alexandra Millner (2012, 309-323), Lene Rock (2012, 47-62), Norbert Wichard (2012, 159-175), Wiebke von Bernstorff (2013, 194-227), Frauke Matthes and David Williams (2013, 27-45), Charlton Payne (2014, 321-339), Svetlana Arnaudova (2015, 209-216; 2017, 157-175; 2019, 39-54; 2020, 107-120), Diana Hitzke and Charlton Payne (2015, 195-212), Alexandra Ludewig (2015, 57-71), Sara Michel (2015, 139-157), Raffaella Mare (2015), Ivana Pajić (2015, 31-40), Vladimir Biti (2016, 45-63), Wiebke Dannecker and Eva Maus (2016, 45-59), Silvana Simoska (2016, 107-114), Wiebke Dannecker (2017, 49-73), Esther Delp (2018, 135-151), Christian Rink (2018, 106-115; 2020, 195-205), Lena Wetenkamp (2018, 249-266), Milica Grujičić (2019), Didem Uca (2019, 185-201), Andrea Meixner (2020, 271-282; 2022, 587-594), Laura Beck (2021, 147-165), Ivana Pajić and Nikolina Zobenica (2021, 91-107), Jessica Ortner and Tea Sindbæk Andersen (2022, 918- 934); scholarship on Vor dem Fest: Mario Huber (2017, 157-173), Michael Ostheimer (2017, 127-137), Paula Wojcik 13 At the same time, 60 of the 96 publications were published since 2015 with an impressive 37 since 2020 – the scholarship on Stanišić is exponentially growing. Because of his biography, Stanišić’s texts are usually read through the lens of migration. Without a doubt: Migration is a theme that is important in Stanišić’s writing, especially in Grammofon and Herkunft.9 Both my peer-reviewed article (2020) and a published book chapter (2023) discuss Stanišić with migration as a central analytical element. And to be clear, the topic of migration is certainly present throughout the dissertation – to omit it would be malpractice. At the same time, centering migration as the focus for a large, all-encompassing project such as this is restricting in three ways. First, it forces the shadow of the author’s biography to loom large over the project – a situation I intend to avoid. My analysis throughout draws its conclusions from the diegesis of each of Stanišić’s texts, not from the figure of the author (see chapter two). What Nursan Celik writes about German-Kurdish author Ronya Othmann’s novel Die Sommer (2020) is also applicable to Stanišić’s texts: “The fact that the author has a biographical connection to the themes explored […] should not obscure the independence and autonomy of her novel, as its textual strategies and conflicts are able to generate coherence without any biographical input or points of reference.” (2023, 143) More importantly, however, I argue (2017, 203-216), Dominik Zink (2017), Anna Sandberg (2018, 91-105), Olivia Albiero (2019, 135-160), Dora Osborne (2019, 469-483), Evi Zemanek (2019, 343-356), Philipp Böttcher (2020, 306-325), Francesca Bravi (2020, 93-108), Christoph Bräuer (2020, 31-35), Frauke Matthes (2020, 91-108), Silvan Moosmüller (2020, 165-180), Myrto Aspioti (2021, 97-121), Martin Schierbaum (2021, 166-189), Katrina L. Nousek (2022, 233-253), Barbara Wahlster (2022, 369-383), Hannelore Roth (2023, 131-151); scholarship on Fallensteller: Maike Schmidt (2018, 116-127), Jan Gerstner (2021, 127-146), Helen Lehndorf and Irene Pieper (2021, 91-107); scholarship on Herkunft: Maha El Hissy (2020, 143-154), Joscha Klueppel (2020, 1-22), Florian Gassner (2021, 223-239), Aleksandra Starcevic (2021), Claudia Breger (2022, 191-215), Norma Jenei-Forray (2022, 67-109), Heidi Rösch (2022, 53-75), Manuel Aragón Ruiz Roso (2022), Anna Rutka (2022, 554-573), Michael Szurawitzki (2022, 104-121), Maria Stehle (2023, 87-105); scholarship that discusses more than one book: Arno Schneider (2017, 129-147), Maria Cossi (2022), Friederike Eigler (2022, 229-247), Andrada Savin and Réka Kovács (2022, 181-195), Joscha Klueppel (2023, 109-140; 2023, forthcoming); scholarship on Stanišić that does not directly discuss one of Stanišić’s books: Michael Stavarič (2014, 4-7), Helga Arend (2016, 149-173), Ruth Steinberg (2019, 181-206), Steffen Hendel (2020, 1-21). 9 Migration is also relevant role in Vor dem Fest (see, for example, Hannelore Roth’s 2022 article), but it is not the primary or even secondary theme of the novel. 14 that, for all its relevance and intrigue, migration restricts the analysis because it is a superficial topic in the sense that it impacts the plot as a framework without being the central focus of the diegetic engagement with characters, relationships, and questions of survival. In other words, migration as a topic is a sufficient element of Stanišić’s writing – to appropriate terminology from the fields of logic and mathematics –, but it is not a necessary element. This brings me to the third and most important point. My dissertation project sets out to detect, trace, and subsequently analyze a common narrative strategy that spans all Stanišić’s writing. In so doing, my dissertation distinguishes itself from previous research not only in its scope (all of Stanišić’s publications), but also in its focus on a narrative strategy that connects all his publications as well as the paradigmatic use of Stanišić’s texts in decolonial conversations. While an argument could likely be made for considering Stanišić’s own writing process as a survival mechanism,10 this is ultimately not the argument proposed here. I argue that characters and auto-, homo-, and heterodiegetic narrators use storytelling as a means of survival. Hence, the focus of my analysis is on storytelling on the diegetic level. Later in this introduction, I am going to expand on my thesis, my goals, and my methodology in more detail. But first, I briefly introduce and summarize the primary texts chosen for analysis. 1.2 On Stanišić’s novels The protagonist of Grammofon, Aleksandar Krsmanović, is a young boy in Višegrad who experiences the start of the Bosnian War during a time where his mind is mainly focused on magic, telling stories, and coping with the death of his grandfather. Towards the end of the first part of 10 In a 2014 interview, Stanišić stated: “Das Ende [von Grammofon] kann als eine Art Versöhnung interpretiert werden, auch für mich selbst und nicht nur für den Protagonisten. Es ist mir schwer gefallen, einige Traumata meiner Kindheit zu überwinden und mit einigen kämpfe ich noch jetzt, […] aber sowieso war das Buch in diesem Sinne sehr wichtig für mich.” (Mare 2014, 302) 15 the novel, Aleksandar and his family flee to Germany. The second part of the novel, only consisting of a handful of letters, deals with the family’s integration (or impossibility thereof) into German society. The third part of the novel is a story within the narrative (“Als alles gut war”) and is written “von Aleksandar Krasmanović” in which he tells of embellished memories and thinks up fictional stories. The novel’s final part sees an older Aleksandar, ten years after his flight, return to Višegrad for the first time, in part to look for an orphan girl he met in the last days in the city, and in part to reconcile his memories and traumata with the present. Vor dem Fest is set in the provincial village Fürstenfelde in Brandenburg’s Uckermark region. Though fictional, the village is modelled on several smaller villages (Fürstenwerder, Fürstenwalde, Prenzlau, and Kraatz, Magenau 2014) that Stanišić visited in research for his book. The plot is as follows: Fürstenfelde, a rural community where everybody knows one another, is coping with the recent deaths of several inhabitants, most importantly the village’s ferryman as well as rural exodus. From the perspective of several townspeople, the novel recounts the last day before their Annenfest – an annual festivity whose origin and original occasion is not known anymore. Throughout the novel, readers encounter numerous characters, a vixen prowling on the edges of town, and several short chapters of (fictionalized) historical reports that span from the 16th to the 20th century. The autofictional Herkunft achronologically tells the story of protagonist Saša. Setting out to write a hand-written résumé as part of his German citizenship application, Saša recalls scenes throughout his childhood, his youth, and his present to determine what ‘Heimat’ (home) and especially ‘Herkunft’ (origin) mean to him. All of the narrative is overshadowed by the recurrent theme of his grandmother’s dementia and, the readers realize, that Saša navigates his way through countless memories as a way to counteract the loss of his grandmother’s memory and the 16 impending loss of her. The final part of Herkunft is a roughly 60 page long choose-your-own- adventure where readers can patch together the narrative chronology themselves. In this choose- your-own-adventure, readers also learn that the grandmother has died. I will not go into detail talking about Fallensteller and will, in fact, only summarize two of the short stories. The other ten are not part of my analysis. The two short stories of relevance for this dissertation are the final two in Fallensteller, the eponymous “Fallensteller,” and “In diesem Gewässer versinkt alles.”11 “Fallensteller” returns the readers to Fürstenfelde, the fictional village that came to life in Vor dem Fest. Some time has passed and rural life continues on. But Fürstenfelde is shaken up a little bit when a mysterious man only named “der Fallensteller” comes to town. It is unclear what his motif his and the narrative locates him somewhere between scam artist, mythological creature, and animal whisperer. Simultaneously, the increasing population of wolves (and refugees) keeps the village and surrounding region busy while the narrative puts a stronger focus on one of the minor characters of the novel. In the second story, “Gewässer,” the readers meet an unnamed protagonist who travels around the world with two young women, Marie and Anna, after they successfully founded a start-up. While the group drives through France, we learn that the protagonist once was a refugee. We soon learn that the trio’s trip is, in fact, only the frame narrative that is complemented throughout by episodic stories of a young boy’s childhood in a town by a river with his grandfather and his mother. The boy’s father had committed suicide in the river. Throughout the short story, it becomes clear that the episodes are, somewhat unsurprisingly, childhood memories of the unnamed protagonist. Towards the end, both narrative planes coalesce, as mother and grandfather appear in the frame narrative. The unnamed protagonist 11 Subsequently, “In diesem Gewässer versinkt alles” is abbreviated as “Gewässer.” 17 hasn’t visited his hometown since leaving and is feeling guilty – an emotion that increases with his grandfather’s impending death. The plot summaries naturally offer a basis for the analyses to come and the detailed formulation of the objective of this dissertation. But to provide a well-rounded frame for what is to come, I will briefly address and discuss two further aspects: the Bosnian War, and the concept of the postmigrant society. 1.3 On the Balkans and the Bosnian War The Balkans are a geographical area in southeastern Europe that encompasses, among others, the countries that were part of the former Yugoslavia (though the inclusion of Slovenia seems to be fluctuating). Ana Foteva states that the Balkans have “always been considered Europe’s border between the Orient and the Occident, Christian Europe and Moslem East, that is, between European and various non-European populations.” (2014, 1) Shifting the focus to literature, Boris Previšić argues that the “Balkanraum […] figuriert in der deutschen Literature größtenteils als Projektionsraum, der sich durchwegs auch auf eine historisch begründete Folie bezieht.” (2008, 96) According to Previšić, the literary engagement in Germany with this “Projektionsraum” has only recently started to change to represent thorough and complex ideas (instead of stereotypes) thanks to a new, younger generation of writers of which Previšić specifically stresses Stanišić.12 Ever since the death of Josip Broz Tito, the man behind the project that was Yugoslavia, in 1980, tensions in the Balkans and especially its Yugoslavian area had been rising and expressed themselves in growing nationalist sentiments that led to the elections of Slobodan Milošević in Serbia and Franjo Tudman in Croatia in 1987 and 1990, respectively. After several Yugoslavian 12 See also Andrea Meixner (2020). 18 countries – Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Slovenia – declared themselves independent of Yugoslavia in 1991, escalation ensued.13 The extreme turmoil, aggressions, and death that followed are known as the Yugoslav Wars: The Slovenian War of Independence (also known as Ten-Day War) in 1991, the Croatian War of Independence (1991- 1995), the Bosnian War (1992-1995), and the insurgency (1995-1998) and subsequent war (1998- 1999) in Kosovo. In the first three years of the Yugoslav Wars, from 1991 to 1993, almost 300,000 refugees from the affected countries applied for asylum in Germany (Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung n.d.). Until 1995, around 350,000 people fleeing the Bosnian War arrived in Germany (Oltmer 2023) – among them were Stanišić and his family. Germany was a reasonable destination for Bosnians as several hundreds of thousands of “Gastarbeiter” came to Germany after the country had signed a recruitment agreement (Anwerbeabkommen) with Yugoslavia on October 12, 1968 (Arbutina 2013). Many had family in Germany at the point of the flight during the Yugoslav Wars. The Bosnian War, in particular, is relevant for my literary analysis as it is a context that Grammofon, Herkunft, and “Gewässer” refer to and build on. Between 1992 and 1995, this ethnic war claimed the lives of approximately 100,000 people, and more than 2 million people were displaced and became refugees. Višegrad, Stanišić’s native city, was one of the hotspots of the war and “saw the second biggest change in population, after Srebrenica.” (Bećirević 2014, 129) 13 According to Milica Grujičić, this is best mirrored an event in January 1990: “de[r] 14. Kongress des Bundes der Kommunisten Jugoslawiens. Nachdem alle Vorschläge der slowenischen Delegation abgelehnt worden waren, verließ die Delegation den Kongress aus Protest. Die serbische Delegation schlug vor, dass der Kongress seine Arbeit fortsetzt. Die Delegation aus Kroatien äußerte Zweifel an der Legitimität der fortgesetzten Arbeit. Sie beschloss, sich der slowenischen Delegation anzuschließen. Ihnen folgten die mazedonische und bosnische Delegation. Die Arbeit des Kongresses wurde unterbrochen. Das Ereignis markierte das Ende der 45 Jahre langen Herrschaft der Kommunistischen Partei Jugoslawiens und den Zerfall des jugoslawischen Staates.” (Grujičić 2017, 205) 19 1.4 Postmigrant Society The analyses to follow are only truly effective if we understand the sociopolitical contexts in which chapters four and five, in particular, attempt to intervene: the sociopolitical realities of Germany in the 21st century. To talk in an informed fashion about the current situation, we need to very briefly look back at Germany’s (ongoing) struggle with realizing itself to be an ‘Einwanderungsland,’ a country that actively encourages and accepts itself to be a nation into which people migrate. Oftentimes, this debate ignores both the “Tradition von Migration, die Jahrhunderte vor den ersten ‘Gastarbeiter’-Abkommen in den 1950ern begann” and “dass im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert kaum ein Volk so viele ‘Zuwanderer’ produzierte wie die Deutschen.” (El- Tayeb 2016, 155) But especially the period of treaties with other countries to incentivize more than a million so-called ‘Gastarbeiter,’ guest workers (an oxymoron in itself), to come to Germany has remained extremely important for the development of the country in the 20th century, economically, socially, and culturally.14 However, as both Fatima El-Tayeb and Aladin El- Mafaalani lament, “die deutsche Migrationsgeschichte [ist] kaum im nationalen Bewusstsein verankert.” (El-Mafaalani 2018, 226) If anything, large parts of the 20th century, especially after reunification, were focused on emphasizing that Germany was not an ‘Einwanderungsland.’ El- Tayeb argues that it was “ein solch dominanter Bestandteil von Diskussionen um Staatsbürgerschaft, Migration und rechtsradikale Gewalt, dass es nahe liegt anzunehmen, es sei von zentraler Bedeutung für das nationale Selbstverständnis.” (2016, 155) Especially the long-standing citizenship law on the books in the 20th century created impactful and long-standing hierarchies that are still difficult to dismantle. Until the year 2000, 14 See, among many, Manuela Bojadžijev’s Die windage Internationale. Rassismus und Kämpfe der Migration (2008) and especially Karen Schönwälder’s Einwanderung und ethnische Pluralität (2001). 20 Germany’s citizenship law was one of jus sanguinis, meaning one was only able to receive citizenship through descent, i.e., if a parent was German: “Es entstand eine wachsende Gruppe ‘Migrantisierter,’ das heißt in Deutschland geborener und aufgewachsener Menschen, denen der Status des Deutschseins verweigert wurde.” (El-Tayeb 2016, 146) But this impacted not only the legal status of many, but also their perception in society. If the idea of ‘Germanness’ was closely connected to a notion of ‘ethnic Germans,’ then those that did not fit this image “wurde[n] trotz deutschem Pass als undeutsch wahrgenommen,” (El-Tayeb 2016, 146) a problem that persists to this day: “So erklärt sich, warum in der Bundesrepublik Fremdheit nahezu ungebrochen auf die Kinder und Kindeskinder der ‘rassenfremden’ Arbeitsmigrant_innen übertragen wurde. Sie galten bis zum Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts legal, kulturell und sozial trotz Geburt und Sozialisation in Deutschland als Ausländer_innen.” (El-Tayeb 2016, 152) Even after the change in law from jus sanguinis to jus soli – birthright citizenship – it has been difficult to dissolve this mindset; and terms like “Person mit Migrationshintergrund” do not make things easier. At the core of Aladin El-Mafaalani’s 2018 book Das Integrationsparadox is the claim that the “Integration von Teilen in ein Ganzes verändert dieses Ganze,” (83-84) a process that is necessarily one of conflict: “Der Konflikt ist Ausdruck des Zusammenwachsens.” (El-Mafaalani 2018, 81) This is one of the factors why, throughout the 2010s and early 2020s, migration has continued to be a core topic. It has developed into a “Metanarrativ,” used to explain prevalent inequalities in education, gender relations, the housing market and, in general, “viele sozialstrukturelle und -kulturelle Probleme.” (Foroutan 2019, 13) In her important 2019 book Die postmigrantische Gesellschaft. Ein Versprechen der pluralen Demokratie, political and social scientist Naika Foroutan argues that the primary concern at the heart of these discussions is 21 migration, after all. Migration functions both as a catalyst of peoples’ fears and, most importantly, as a simulacrum: Es geht in Wahrheit […] gar nicht primär um Migration – die große Gereiztheit liegt vielmehr daran, am eigenen Anspruch einer weltoffenen, aufgeklärten Demokratie zu scheitern.Die Migration ist dabei der Spiegel, in dem wir diese Gewissheit erkennen […]. Der Kernkonflikt in postmigrantischen Gesellschaften dreht sich nur an der Oberfläche um Migration – tatsächlich ist der Konflikt jedoch angetrieben von der Aushandlung und Anerkennung von Gleichheit als zentralem Versprechen der modernen Demokratien, die sich auf Pluralität und Parität als Grundsatz berufen. Die Omnipräsenz des Migrationsdiskurses verdeckt diesen zentralen Aushandlungskonflikt. Um die Probleme zu erkennen, die derzeit Gesellschaften polarisieren, müssen wir hinter die Migrationsfrage schauen, also postmigrantisch denken. […] Die Ausgangsthese ist also, dass Migration sich regelrecht zu einer Chiffre für Pluralität herauskristallisiert hat, in deren Ablehnung sich gleichermaßen die Abwehr weiterer pluraler Lebensentwürfe bündelt. (Foroutan 2019, 13-14, emphasis in original) “Postmigrantische Gesellschaft,” postmigrant society is the necessary and adequate descriptor and sociopolitical context needed for the realities that Stanišić’s narratives scrutinize. In the (mostly German) academic discourse, there are two connected notions of postmigrancy. On the one hand, there is the sociopolitical idea of postmigrancy as a regulating structure of society – the postmigrant society – as discussed prominently by Regina Römhild (2017, 2018, 2021), Erol Yıldız (2017, 2018 with Marc Hill, 2019, 2021, 2022), and Naika Foroutan (2016, 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2020) and researched intensively by two organizations of which Foroutan is director: the Berliner Institut für empirische Integrations- und Migrationsforschung and the Deutsche Zentrum für Integrations- und Migrationsforschung (DeZIM). On the other hand, there is an ongoing negotiation of the cultural and aesthetic representation of postmigrancy.15 As such, the notion of postmigration and a postmigrant society is, in part, descriptive, but also functions as an analytical 15 To name a few: Roger Bromley (2017, 2021), Moritz Schramm (2018), Markus Hallensleben (2021a, 2021b), Anja Tröger (2021). A good starting point are the two following anthologies: Marc Hill and Erol Yıldız (eds.), Postmigrantische Visionen. Erfahrungen – Ideen – Reflexionen (2018) and Anna Meera Gaonkar et. al. (eds.), Postmigration. Art, Culture, and Politics in Contemporary Europe (2021). 22 category (e.g., Schramm 2018, Hallensleben 2021a, 2021b), allowing for “an analytical view of the negotiations about migration and its consequences, which appear in the literary texts and cultural products themselves.” (Schramm 2018, 89) It is seen as a “discursive approach against the ‘migrantization’ and marginalization of people who see themselves as an integral part of society.” (Yildiz, Hill 2017, 277) I will discuss both to build the foundation for the sociopolitical reality in which Stanišić writes and where the diegetic points of interrogation and critique take place to show the aesthetic forms that the cultural engagement with postmigrancy can take (which include literature). At the core of the postmigrant society, argues Foroutan, is not migration, but instead “gesellschaftspolitische Aushandlungen, die nach der Migration erfolgen, die hinter der Migrationsfrage verdeckt werden und die über die Migration hinaus weisen. Konkreter: es geht hier nicht mehr darum, ob Deutschland ein Einwanderungsland ist, sondern wie dieses Einwanderungsland gestaltet wird.” (2019, 19)16 For this to be achieved, it is necessary to acknowledge and accept that the status quo has changed, from hegemonial division of ‘Germans’ and ‘Others’ to a true ‘plurale Demokratie,’ as the subtitle of Foroutan’s book points to. Only in acknowledging and accepting the reality of a postmigrant society is it possible to dissolve the ”establierte Codierung in Einheimische und Eingewanderte […], da Migration sich bei aller ‘Gereiztheit’ zunehmend in die Komposition und Selbstbeschreibung der Gesellschaft einwebt.” (Foroutan 2019, 19; see also Bromley 2021, 133) Doing so not only changes the understanding of 16 “Vor allem in westdeutschen Großstädten ist die Geschichte und Gegenwart von Migration allgegenwärtig. In Hamburg hat knapp jeder dritte Einwohner einen Migrationshintergrund, 46% der unter 18-jährigen – also fast jedes zweite Kind. In Frankfurt a.M. hat bereits jeder zweite Einwohner eine Migrationsgeschichte, bei schulpflichtigen Kindern sind es fast 70% (67%). Auch in den anderen Großstädten wie Köln, München und Stuttgart beträgt der Anteil der unter Sechsjährigen, die über einen Migrationshintergrund verfügen, mehr als die Hälfte.” (Foroutan 2019, 36-37) 23 society in its current composition, but also for future generations, as a postmigrant society fundamentally changes how integration functions: Da sie die Anerkennung der einwanderungsgesellschaftlichen Realität als Ausgangspunkt nimmt und das Versprechen der Gleichheit – in diesem Sinne also auch in Bezug auf Zugänge zu gesellschaftlichen Ressourcen, definiert als Chancengleichheit für alle – in den Mittelpunkt rückt, entfernt sie sich vom Assimilationsdruck und von der Vorstellung einer Bringschuld der Migrant*innen. Es geht bei der postmigrantischen Integration also nicht mehr um einen einseitigen Prozess, der von Einwanderern und ihren Nachkommen erbracht werden muss und auch nicht um die Plattitüde, dass Integration keine Einbahnstraße sei und demnach auch von Seiten der ‘aufnehmenden Gesellschaft’ erbracht werden müsse. (Foroutan 2019, 40) Acknowledging a postmigrant condition also acknowledges a continuous hybridization and pluralization of society which are negotiated “an [Migration] entlang.” (Foroutan 2019, 49) Thus, “Migration wirkt als zentraler diskursiver Treiber in dieser Gesellschaft und ordnet kulturelle Erzählungen, nationale Narrative und Prämissen der Zugehörigkeit neu.” (Foroutan 2019, 49) In its most utopian conceptualization, a postmigrant society then could be built “by manifold cultural identities that coexist without hierarchies” (Hallensleben 2021a, 205) – certainly something worth striving for. A changing, hybrid, and plural society – whether already acknowledged as such or in the process of (hopefully) becoming acknowledged soon – impacts every facet of a society. As such, the concept of postmigrancy is an incredibly versatile and productive approach for cultural production as well as the analysis of said production. It is no surprise that the concept of the postmigrant fits comfortably into the cultural-aesthetic space of the arts. After all, the term ‘postmigrant’ was first coined by “Shermin Langhoff within the world of theatre,” specifically Berlin’s Ballhaus Naunynstraße and the Maxim Gorki Theatre since 2008 (Römhild 2021, 45; Hallensleben 2021, 201; Foroutan 2019, 46-47). Postmigrancy, in the sense of postmigrant narratives, can be a “complex mix of filiation (proximity to migrant experience through family, 24 neighbourhood and, perhaps, language) and affiliation articulated through fiction, drama, film, music and cultural exchanges;” (Bromley 2017, 39) it can center the forms in which we recognize ourselves and others; it can be an “act of appropriation, of owning and changing the political culture of narrative, speaking back to the stereotypes of coloniality;” (39) “an active storying, a bringing into narrative a specific set of new belongings and affinities, projected towards the future and woven, eclectically, from different, and contradictory, voices in an art of contestation.” (39) In his analysis of narratives of postmigrant belonging, Roger Bromley provides a multifarious conceptualization of postmigrancy in an aesthetic, cultural context, understanding postmigrant cultural production as a form of “resistance to the manipulations of power which are exercised in order to confine, define, and limit to the boundaries of ‘otherness’ those who are outside the dominant ethnicity.” (2017, 41) He also offers a definition of the figure of the postmigrant, whether as cultural producer or diegetic focal point, asserting that they are not “a foreigner but someone whose narratives present a new angle of vision, undo certainties, and re-draw the map of places and paths through another way of looking.” (2017, 41) Personally, I believe this to be a description which fits Saša Stanišić considerably better than ‘migrant author.’ This idea solidifies even more strongly when we add Bromley’s conceptualization of how narratives work in postmigrant cultural production: Relationality, reciprocity, and the associational are key terms and these help us to think of postmigrant narratives, for example, as starting out from a ‘minority’ position but as a progressively stripping themselves of provenance, particularity or fixed belongings, and configuring a new set of emergent spaces of plurality. (Bromley 2017, 39) A crucial component of postmigrant narratives is that they are not merely a diasporic “anchorage in an ‘originary’ culture,” but instead “emphasize a present and future trajectory,” (2017, 37) or, as Markus Hallensleben (2021a) puts it: “a transformative aesthetics of multiplicity, heterochrony, heterotopy and super-diversity that allows for a barrier-free plural belonging.” (214) 25 And yet another description of postmigrant narratives, this one by Markus Hallensleben (2021a), overlaps with Stanišić’s narrative approach. Hallensleben asserts that postmigrant narratives reflect on narrative strategies of alienation; Stanišić offers an insecure narrator in the first person plural (“wir”) in Vor dem Fest that, at times, turns on itself, for example when the “we”-narrator isolates and criticizes individual villagers. Furthermore, Hallensleben mentions how postmigrant narratives engage with “paradigms of origin, originality, authorship and any kind of homogenic cultural belonging.” (2021, 202) Stanišić scrutinizes the notion of origin in detail (Herkunft), questions authorship throughout his narratives (Grammofon, Vor dem Fest, Herkunft), and unnerves cultural binaries of belonging. It looks like we have found a fitting descriptor for Saša Stanišić’s narratives, after all. Does that make him a postmigrant author? I am not convinced there is relevance to this question; it is sufficient that his narratives are postmigrant. The final noteworthy aspect of postmigration for this dissertation project is what it shares with postcoloniality and, to a degree, decoloniality. Foroutan explains that postmigrancy’s proximity to postcoloniality emphasizes the “kontextbezogene rassimuskritische Analyse von Gesellschaftsordnungen, die das Wissen und eine historische Informiertheit über das Nachwirken kolonialer Strukturen voraussetzt und stets mitdenkt.” (2019, 53) Similarly, postmigration and postmigrant narratives urge analysts, whether cultural, literary, social, or political, “to find ways to leave the argumentative system of Eurocentric rhetoric and become ‘trained in defamiliarization’ techniques,” (Hallensleben 2021a, 213) as it intends to “avoid the implicit dangers of reiterating Eurocentric territorial relations and modes of marginalisation.” (Hallensleben 2021a, 201) I understand the decolonial conversation about the power of languages and naming (4.3) and the decolonial couplet of chapter six as an approach to transcend the reliance on Eurocentric rationalities with the goal of avoiding (epistemic) marginalization and emphasizing 26 non-hierarchical multiplicities. 1.5 On Using Decolonial Theory April 2020 saw the start of an embittered debate in German-speaking feuilletons. Its cause was the invitation and, shortly after, removal of Cameroonian historian and philosopher Achille Mbembe as opening speaker of the Ruhrtriennale in Bochum, a music and arts festival focused on contemporary social and global issues. A local politician, Lorenz Deutsch of the FDP, was one of the first to publicly criticize the invitation of Mbembe as Deutsch claimed that Mbembe was antisemitic. His case in point was a petition in 2010 of which Mbembe was one of roughly 300 signees. The petition, directed at the University of Johannesburg, demanded to stop any relations with the Ben-Gurion University in Israel. The discussion surrounding Mbembe was quickly picked up in politics and especially in the media. Particularly the months of April and May were dominated by the debate that quickly expanded to include general discussions of the merits of postcolonialism and how to best negotiate the Holocaust’s singularity in public and academic debates. Even the German government got involved in the figure of Felix Klein, the commissary for the fight against antisemitism. While the feuilleton debate was a continuous back and forth between those condemning Mbembe (and postcolonialism) and those defending him (and postcolonialism), the academic world was mostly united in solidarity with the Cameroonian: the “Vereinigung für Afrikawissenschaften in Deutschland” published a supportive statement; a first letter penned by “Jewish scholars and artists from Israel and elsewhere” on April 30, 2020 called on then-Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer, to replace Felix Klein; a second letter of support was signed on May 1, 2020, by countless academics in Germany, Israel, the US, and Australia (including Aleida and Jan Assmann); and an open letter was penned on May 18, 2020, by African 27 intellectuals, authors, and artists, directed at then-chancellor Angela Merkel and president Frank Walter Steinmeier. Even prior to that, Mbembe himself had felt the need to take a stand in an interview on April 22, 2020, with journalist René Aguigah, stating “Diese Unterstellung trifft mich in meiner Seele.” (Aguigah 2020) The heat of the debate lasted through most of the summer of 2020, slowly turning into a simmer in July before a few retaliating pieces against Mbembe turned the heat up again for a short time. Even 2021 saw a total of nine articles published on the issue as well as two detailed chronologies of what he calls “Historikerstreit 2.0” by Thierry Chervel.17 In total, the heated and, at times, outright hostile Mbembe-debate saw the publication of 192 articles, almost all of them in the German feuilleton.18 The debate not only exemplified the difficulty that is particularly apparent in Germany of distinguishing between critique of the State of Israel and critique of Judaism, the Jewish belief, and the Jewish people. This is, in part, a result of a long tradition of conflating the two that has led to a defensive reflex. In the Mbembe-debate, however, this reflex was stubbornly upheld without an actual engagement with Mbembe’s writing and, furthermore, a condemnation of postcolonialism that was demonstrative of the lack of structural engagement with the colonial past and the question of race in public debates in Germany. I start the explanation of my use of decolonial theory by reference to the Mbembe-debate for two reasons. First, the broad strokes with which postcolonialism was demonized throughout the debate, to me, is representative of a general reluctance and defensive attitude towards introducing new impulses into wider sociocultural and political conversations in the German 17 The first of the two chronologies can be found here: https://www.perlentaucher.de/essay/historikerstreit-2-von- achille-mbembe-zu-a-dirk-moses-eine-chronologie.html. I discuss the related “Catechism Debate” in chapter six. 18 An archived listing as well as the links to all the articles can be found here: https://serdargunes.wordpress.com/2020/05/18/wer-zuerst-x-sagt-hat-gewonnen-die-achille-mbembe-debatte-eine- artikelliste/. 28 public. And while this dissertation is, naturally, first and foremost located in academia, it nonetheless engages with and scrutinizes important concepts at the heart of those public discussions and is thus concerned with them. The second and more important reason is that my dissertation project understands itself as an affirmation of the validity of postcolonial – or rather decolonial19 – thought, both for the discussion of academic discourses but also for concrete public debates. With the subtitle of my dissertation, An Approach to Decolonizing Discourses in German Studies, I want to emphasize that this is, indeed, not an attempt at decolonizing the field of German Studies. As far as that is possible at all, it certainly could not be achieved in a single moment and with a single text. The aim of my scrutiny are sociocultural structures, political language, and exclusionary concepts that play prominent roles both in Germany and, to a lesser degree, in the discipline of German Studies. Similarly, I want to clarify that my dissertation does not understand Saša Stanišić to be a decolonial author nor his texts as decolonial texts. Instead, my project understands the analysis of Stanišić’s novels as a paradigmatic example for the application of decolonizing conversations in German Studies. My analysis demonstrates how the narrative voices in Stanišić’s texts, through their use of storytelling, covertly and, at times, overtly point out hierarchical and racializing mechanisms in German society, for example in the violence of concepts like racism, like borders, like the concept of Heimat. This necessitates the telling of stories as a means of surviving physical and social death. I am convinced that the effectiveness of scrutinizing and deconstructing concepts like Heimat and exclusionary structures merely through the theories and rationalities that led to their establishment and, oftentimes, to their upholding yields diminishing results and cannot truly account for the multiplicities within Germany. It also cannot truly allow for decolonial action in the context of German Studies. Instead, my research 19 I discuss the distinction between the two in chapter two (2.5). From here on, I use the word decolonial. 29 places several lineages of knowledge, especially those stemming from the African continent and the Caribbean into conversation with Western thought to critique, decenter, and, at times, deconstruct, the mechanisms that the analysis of Stanišić’s writing unearthed. Centering non- hierarchical conversations is essential. Concretely, this means that Stanišić is at the core of this dissertation. Chapter three is solely focused on a close reading and analysis of his texts; his narratives provide the backdrop and literary examples for the discussion of racist and colonial structures as well as the power of naming and language in chapter four. Chapter five explicates concrete solutions that can be drawn from Stanišić’s own narratives and his poetics. Starting in chapter four, decolonial theory first finds entry into the debate at hand, but it primarily makes its presence known in the sixth and final chapter. While Stanišić remains at the center of the dissertation, his voice having been the primary voice throughout most of it, the field of vision now expands, and several other voices prominently enter the discussion. In that sense, Stanišić’s impact on the dissertation does not dimmish in the final chapter, but instead the impact is fractured and divided up on several shoulders. Let me paint the following picture: imagine a cake at a bakery. You are leaning close to the display window to get the best possible impression of this cake. It has multiple layers and appears to be exquisite craftsmanship. Now you take a step back from the display window and, in your field of vision, the cake is still there, in the same totality as before, but on either side of it you now see two other cakes. The first cake is not lessened by the existence of the other two cakes, but instead there is now a diversity and multiplicity of cakes that you see – or, dispensing with the metaphorical image, two other lineages of thought, of experience, and of understanding the world. This is how I understand the consolidation of the two main objectives of my dissertation: 1) to analyze Stanišić’s texts with regard to their diegetic usage of storytelling as a means of survival; and 2) to scrutinize 30 the social and cultural structures of exclusion and hierarchies excavated by the analysis of Stanišić’s texts through the engagement with decolonial theory. To that end, I introduce and employ the methodology called decolonial couplets in chapter six. Throughout the dissertation, I am indebted, in spirit, to the words that Etritrean-born Awet Tesfaiesus, one of the three elected Black members of German parliament (and the only Black woman), told the New York Times after her election: “The country is changing as we all change. That is normal and isn’t possible to stop. I want us to actively choose this change and not just let it happen.” (Bateson 2021) But what is it specifically about decolonial thinking spearheaded by African and Caribbean thinkers that makes it such a productive, relevant, and important conversational partner (i.e., methodological framework)? Achille Mbembe argues that from now on, “the world will be conjugated in the plural. It will be lived in the plural, and absolutely nothing can be done to reverse this new condition, which is as irreversible as it is irrevocable.” (2019, 63) As such, it is crucial to account for this global plurality in our thinking and our action. And because of this plurality and a concomitant “denationalization of the humanities and academic discussions,” Mbembe insists “that the world can be studied from everywhere and anywhere.” (2021, 13) Mbembe describes this change of focus as a “river with many tributaries” of which “Europe is no longer the center of gravity of the world.” (2017, 1) And Mbembe is not the only one to argue for a focus on Africa in their academic endeavors. Jean and John Comaroff argued in their Theory From the South (2012): “it is the global south that affords privileged insight into the workings of the world at large.” (1) This notion is not “anti-European” (Mbembe 2021, 76), but instead “calls on Europe to constantly open and restart this future, in a singular manner, responsible for itself, for the Other, and before the Other.” (Mbembe 2021, 76) When considering the inclusion of African and Caribbean philosophies, we might follow the example of Robert Bernasconi, who stated that “if it is foolhardy 31 on my part to engage with African philosophy, it would be even more indefensible to ignore it.” (Bernasconi 1997, 183) Or we could simply refer to German Studies scholar Peggy Piesche who stated in an interview with Gabi Kathöfer and Beverly Weber: “[W]e have so much to decolonize.“ (2018a, 422) In my mind, there is no doubt that leading conversations with other rationalities, other epistemologies, other ways of perceiving and understanding the world, such as African or Caribbean philosophy, has immense potentiality, if done correctly. By correctly, I mean more than anything a conversation that is non-hierarchical; a conversation that does not subordinate one rationality under the other but considers the conversation an equal exchange. Each conversation partner in a decolonial conversation (and, in chapter six, a decolonial couplet) is part of lineages in relation as they illuminate and scrutinize a concept or an issue from the varying viewpoints that multiple rationalities invite.20 These varying viewpoints also hold the potential of allowing a different set of questions to emerge. In this way, they can function as a methodology that has the potential to frame anew a whole discipline and, more importantly, to expand its boundaries through a multiplicity of interdisciplinary opportunities. For any attempt at a decolonial conversation (or couplet), the unwavering focus must always be on this guiding principle: both the goal and the modus operandi of the conversation/couplet is not grounded in equivalency, but in discourses of different experiences and conversations that open up already prioritized paradigms of rationality. The impulse my dissertation intends to give is one of expanding and not replacing the way German Studies perceives itself in a globalized world, of how we understand and locate our 20 For example, Glissant’s writing would not be possible in the way that it was written without the combination of the mediation of a European language (French) and his education (Franco-centric) and intellectual environment (Euro- centric), on the one hand, and his experience from the other side of the European horizon in the Caribbean, on the other hand. In the context of the former, Glissant was an “other” of (and in) European discourses. His writings are in relation to that othering and that cultural dominance. 32 discipline in a moment in which humanities are deemed to be in crisis. It is an impulse toward conversations that I believe are worth paying attention to, that speak to the need for German studies to be representative of the kaleidoscopic nature of experiences in German society.21 1.6 Chapter Outlines Why do we tell stories? We tell stories to make sense of a world that can be terrifying and enormous. And what is it that survives when we tell a story? Telling stories allows the storyteller control, be it over memory and what is remembered, be it over that which has not (yet) had a voice, or be it over life and death, as Scheherazade has shown us. The role of fictional storyteller has been profoundly important for centuries, from Scheherazade and similar storytellers like Mother Goose and Aesop, but also in many contemporary texts. Telling stories also carries with it the possibility of bringing forth trauma, the possibility of trauma’s return, not even necessarily trauma experienced by an individual person directly but the trauma that is part of a lineage. Storytelling can also bring forth the trauma of losing one’s language, one’s worth, one’s lineage. Storytelling enables the storyteller to put the amount of value and relevance to their stories that they deserve; it can illustrate the consequences that they experience, whether other people recognize them as 21 In her 2014 monograph Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna? The Geopolitical and Imaginary Borders Between the Balkans and Europe, Ana Foteva explores to which degree postcolonial and decolonial discourses are also applicable to the context of the Balkans. She argues that “the dissolution of Yugoslavia was at the same time the final stage in the breakdown of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empire,” (2014, 12) and thus the dissolution was followed by processes that, in Foteva’s words, are “typical for postcolonial states, e.g., enforcement of national identity and state building through violent exclusion of those who did not belong to the own group.” (2014, 12) Later in her book, Foteva indeed claims that the history of Bosnia-Herzegovina “is indeed a postcolonial situation,” (Foteva 2014, 103) even going so far as to state that it has “similarities to the former colonies of the overseas empires.” (Foteva 2014, 103) On the one hand, this is an argument that gives me discomfort and one that I cannot agree with. For one, the context described by Foteva lacks the violence of the ontological emptying and denial of the colonized by the colonizers (as, for example, described in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth). Also, Foteva’s engagement with Paul Gilroy and, to a lesser degree, Homi Bhaba simply omits the extremely relevant aspect of race; racial hierarchies were at the heart of colonial reason. This is not the case in the context of the Balkans. At the same time, I have to concede that I am simply not knowledgeable enough about life in the Balkans during the Habsburg and Ottoman Empire to make a definite argument. At the same time, I did not want to fully ignore Foteva’s argument which is the reason I discuss this point in a footnote. 33 such or not. Saša Stanišić says: “Wenn Menschen Situationen als verdammt nochmal wirklich definieren, dann sind sie in ihren Konsequenzen wirklich.” (2017c, 48:22-48:28) Édouard Glissant, poet, philosopher, and author from Martinique, writes: “To declare one’s own identity is to write the world into existence.” (1989, 169) This is the essential hypothesis from which my dissertation sets off. That is why it is titled Telling Stories To Survive. The next five chapters set out to concretize this hypothesis through the analysis of Stanišić’s writing and through decolonical conversations. To do so, the second chapter sets the stage by laying the theoretical groundwork. Titled “Initial Conceptual Considerations,” the chapter discusses the idea of literature of migration and the violence of this inscription (2.1); the concept of Heimat, its violence, and its reconceptualization through Stanišić’s texts and his poetics (2.2); the notion of storytelling (2.3), including the ideas of autofiction and unreliable narration; the idea of death and survival (2.4); and lastly what I understand decolonization and decolonial theory to mean (2.5.) The third chapter consists of the primary literary analysis which traces how diegetic storytelling in Stanišić’s texts is used to negotiate anxiety and, more importantly, death. Chapters four and five are part one and two of the engagement with the concept of borderscapes (see discussion in 4.1). Whereas chapter three asks the question “How is storytelling used as a means of surviving?,” chapter four asks “Why is this usage necessary to begin with?” The chapter then uses the analysis of Stanišić’s texts to highlight racist and colonial structures of exclusion in German society and politics (4.2) and to scrutinize the power of naming and language (4.3). Chapter five picks up the argumentative thread that chapter four started to spin. Chapter four maps out a cartography of a cultural climate in Germany that is built on hegemonical borderscapes that exclude. Chapter five, in turn, analyzes Stanišić’s narratives with regards to their potential for solutions or improvements to the status quo. 34 In other words, this chapter asks the question: how can Germany and especially the foundational notion of ‘Heimat’ be expanded to more adequately and equally inform belonging to Germany and create borderscapes that are more representative and less violent? In so doing, it operationalizes Stanišić’s notion of a plural ‘Heimaten’ (5.1) and subsequently traces several narrative inscriptions that I characterize as transeuropean. Stanišić pens his texts into a contemporary, transnational conversation that transcends political and social borders of the nation. In so doing, his narratives inscribe Germany into Bosnia and Bosnia into Germany, thus dissolving national hegemonies and pointing to future possibilities of pan-European conversations. While chapter four already made use of decolonial conversations, chapter six introduces the methodology of the decolonial couplet and reads Stanišić’s texts alongside Solomon Rivers’ novel The Deep (2019) and especially the writings of Édouard Glissant and Achille Mbembe to discuss concepts of memory, lineage, multiplicities, and the ways in which narratives can function as a way to save what has been lost, to anticipate the knowledge-yet-to-come. The dissertation’s final text is less a conclusion and more a concrete application of a decolonial couplet, using Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to discuss the ongoing refugee situation on the Mediterranean Sea. After all, as Evelyn Araluen warns us: “We run the risk of foreclosing decolonisation to an academic elite by coding it purely within poetics and academic practice.” (2017) Therefore, it is important to base it in lived experience and in concrete social, cultural, and political critiques to make sure that we do not, as Matthew P. Fitzpatrick puts it, “defang its material orientation toward the colonized in the interests of making it suit the needs of the academy and existing theoretical traditions.” (2018, 89) 35 Chapter 2: Initial Conceptual Considerations In the early months of 2014, a brief but intense debate stirred German feuilleton; its subject: German contemporary literature. The debate was kicked off by a somewhat innocuous, though clumsy op-ed by Florian Kessler, published in Die Zeit in January of 2014. The text, titled “Lassen Sie mich durch, ich bin Arztsohn!,” draws on Kessler’s own experiences at one of Germany’s prominent writing schools. Kessler argued that the homogeneity and the upper-class milieu of most attendees at these writing schools – a “sich selbst reproduzierende[s] Großbürgertum” (Schröder 2014) – is, in large part, to blame for the, in his opinion, uninspired, boring state of contemporary German literature. Olga Grjasnowa, a German author born in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku, promptly responded to Kessler in Die Welt, in part because Kessler mentioned her by name in his text. Grjasnowa critized Kessler, both for what she believes is a narrow and superficial view of the problem as well as a paternalistic side note mentioning her (and Stanišić).22 Similarly, Christoph Schröder quickly disarmed Kessler’s argument, pointing to a long history of prominent writers with familiar background in the “Großbürgertum.”23 More importantly, he pointed out that there is no singular “literature,” and that Kessler’s actual criticism is rather that of a specific social 22 Kessler wrote that Germany’s writing schools produced “auch einige Olga Grjasnowas, Saša Stanišićs und Clemens Meyers da draußen, wobei übrigens auch jemand mit Häkchen über dem Nachnamen humanistische Bildung genossen haben kann.” (2014) Grjasnowa condemns that Keller feels the need to point out that someone with a “Häkchen über dem Nachnamen” is able to enjoy a humanistic education. The phrase “Häkchen über dem Nachnamen,” she states, is somewhat problematic as Stanišić is the only one in Kessler’s list that even has this visual marker. Her biggest criticism of Kessler’s paternalistic attitude, however, is not that he names her, Stanišić, and Meyer in this poorly phrased side note, but the broader context of the mention. Kessler builds his overall argument on the example of students’ parents, stating that most of the pupils at the writing schools are children of doctors, professors, and other occupations that position them in an upper social class. But while Kessler situates most students in the lineage of their educated and privileged families, he can only attribute the “humanistische Bildung” to Grjasnowa, Stanišić, and Meyer, but not their parents: “Leider schaffte es mein Nachname nicht in Kesslers Auflistung meiner ehemaligen Kommilitonen und der Berufe ihrer Eltern, genauso wenig wie der von Saša Stanišić. Ich vermute, dass es am für Florian Kessler exotisch anmutenden Klang unserer Namen liegt. […] Gönnerhaft gesteht Kessler uns humanistische Bildung zu, aber nicht unseren Eltern. Dass jemand gleichzeitig Migrant und Intellektueller sein könnte, kommt ihm nicht in den Sinn.” (Grjasnowa 2014) Grjasnowa points to a long lineage of doctors in her family’s history. 23 Schröder names “den Juristensohn Goethe, den Arztsohn Büchner, den Direktorensohn Brecht, den Chemikersohn Jünger, den Aufsichtsratsvorsitzendensohn Kracht.” (2014) 36 problem (access to education and publishing) than a problem of contemporary German literature – a point that Grjasnowa would echo five days later. In less than a month, then, what needed to be said was said and the discussion was thus laid to rest. Or so it seemed for twelve days – entrance: Maxim Biller. Starting in the 1990s, Biller, a German-Jewish writer born in Prague in August 1960, had made a name as a columnist with an inclination for provocation. On February 20, Biller picked up on the discussion in “Gegenwartsliteratur: Letzte Ausfahrt Uckermark,” echoing Kessler’s claim of an ineffective, feeble, and provincial contemporary literature. Unsurprisingly, Biller’s words were straightforward and blatantly provocative: “Die deutsche Literatur ist wie der todkranke Patient, der aufgehört hat, zum Arzt zu gehen, aber allen erzählt, dass es ihm gut geht.” (2014) However, Biller’s subsequent angle on the issue fiercely rekindled the debate. Biller argued that German literature has been afflicted by its current condition ever since the postwar period, conceding only two exceptions. The first, he claims, was the Gruppe 47 (1947-1967), though Biller is convinced that they never actually achieved their potential: “Aber wer will heute auch nur einen ihrer früher so berühmten Romane lesen?” Biller locates the second (potentially) reviving element to a “’deutsch-jüdische Symbiose,’” with a strong group of Jewish-German novelists and literary critics (Peter Weiss, Elias Canetti, Marcel Reich-Ranicki). But in Biller’s mind, Reich-Ranicki’s death in 2013 put an end to that. Claiming that the “Abwesenheit der jüdischen Ruhestörer” is hurting German literature, he looks to another group of authors to disrupt the tired, regurgitating work of the German literary landscape and finds it in “Migranten und Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund.” Biller criticizes the lack of a literary movement by them, arguing that the majority of them adapts to the “herrschende[…] Ästhetik und Themenwahl.” In so doing, they fail to supplement and revive a literature on life-support by focusing their experiences of migration, 37 arrival, multiculturalism, and exclusion. And even when they put the spotlight on “ihre Immigrantenbiografie,” they are always only “Folklore oder szenische Beilage” or “süße, naïve Gastarbeitergeschichten.” Biller calls the contribution of migrants to German literature “Onkel- Tom-Literatur,” and finds particular joy in criticizing Saša Stanišić’s Vor dem Fest as exemplary of the sheepishness, conformity, and self-deception that characterizes contemporary German literature written by migrants and Germans with a ‘migrant background.’ For Biller, Stanišić’s debut, Grammofon, had been a prime example of how ‘migrant literature’ should be in that the novel concretely thematized migration, derived from the author’s personal experience. He was aghast, however, that Vor dem Fest is set in a village in the Uckermark, unter ehemaligen Ossis, von denen Stanišić so viel versteht wie seine Kritiker vom jugoslawischen Bürgerkrieg, vor dem er mit 14 Jahren nach Deutschland fliehen musste. Ist dieser radikale, antibiografische Themenwechsel nur Zufall? Hat den ehemaligen Leipziger Literaturstudenten Saša Stanišić der Mut verlassen? Ist es ihm wichtiger, als Neudeutscher über Urdeutsche zu schreiben als über Leute wie sich selbst? (Biller 2014) I will leave behind the descriptive mode of this introduction shortly, particularly to comment on Biller’s assertions at the end of the quoted paragraph. But first, allow me to retrace the final points of the Feuilleton debate. Naturally, Biller’s op-ed drew quick and fierce responses. Author Dietmar Dath countered Biller’s text only one day later in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, criticizing that Biller’s analysis lacked any broader socio-cultural context.24 The strongest rebuttal of Biller came one week later in the form of Ijoma Mangold’s op-ed “Fremdling, erlöse uns!,” published once more in Die Zeit. First, Mangold criticizes Biller’s repetitiveness, pointing to a debate in 1992 where Biller had previously lamented the state of German literature: “Man darf sich aber schon fragen, welche Tiefenschärfe eine Beobachtung hat, 24 “Aber die Zustände, die er ablehnt, reimen sich zu gut auf die Zustände in den Städten, an den Schulen, in den Parlamenten, als dass sie sich auf die Formate der Bewusstseinsindustrie werden stutzen lassen.” (Dath 2014) 38 die über 25 Jahre so selbstidentisch geblieben ist, als wäre die Zeit stillgestanden.” (2014) Primarily, Mangold condemns Biller’s problematic prescription of who should write about certain topics, calling it a “verteufelte positive Diskriminierung.” Biller’s proposition turns a writer’s origin into their “literarisches Schicksal.” (Mangold 2014) Even though Mangold easily hit the mark and directly pointed to the enormous flaw in Biller’s argumentation, I still felt it relevant and productive to start my second chapter with this debate. This has two reasons. First, this debate, albeit short-lived, continues to occupy the minds of German scholars, as the number of recent scholarly discussions attests to.25 More importantly, however, this debate, conducted in the public venue of the German feuilleton, speaks to a broader, more general socio-cultural stereotypical thinking inherent in the concept of Heimat and exemplified by the idea of “literature of migration.” The first part of this chapter, then, is focused on scrutinizing what I would more broadly frame as mechanisms of belonging and exclusion. What are they and how do they function? Why, in particular, do they have the potential to be extraordinarily damaging? And what might be approaches and means to counter or even undo these mechanisms? In answering these questions, I am going to elaborate and map out two important theoretical ideas that reconfigure “literature of migration,” on the one hand, and Heimat, on the other hand, hence rendering them useful for critical assessment in the context of the postmigrant society and the goal of a decolonial German studies. Speaking more generally, the scope and goal of this chapter is to function as a theoretical prelude in which I discuss and concepts that inform my dissertation throughout: Narratives of migration (2.1); Heimaten (2.2); storytelling and questions of narration (autofiction, unreliability) 25 See, for example, Aspioti 2019, 2021; Ruth Steinberg 2019; Jan Gerstner 2021; Tina Hartmann 2021; Martin Scherbaum 2021; Brigitte Schwens-Harrant 2021. Tina Hartmann, for one, argues that “Biller verwendet mit der Festlegung ‘migrantischer’ Autoren auf ‘migrantische’ Themen eine kolonialistische Denkstruktur, die von exotischen Geschöpfen mit exotischen Geschichten delektiert werden will, und er trachtet überdies paternalistisch, einen jungen Autor anhand seiner Biographie auf einen bestimmten Stoffkreis festzulegen.” (2021, 357) 39 (2.3); death (2.4); and decolonization (2.5). As such, this chapter lays the foundation on which the subsequent chapters are built and from which they draw (most of) their theoretical substance. 2.1 Narratives of Migration “Selten ist mir etwas so Engstirniges, Bevormundendes, Überholtes, Klischeehaftes, Falsches begegnet in den zahlreichen ‘Debatten’ der letzten Jahre.” Saša Stanišić did not hold back when asked about Biller’s op-ed in an interview with Andreas Platter in early March 2014 (quoted in Steinberg 2019, 191). In his mind, Biller’s words were most contradictory to his own understanding of his authorship and its position within in Germany. Despite Ijoma Mangold’s convincing rebuttal and Stanišić’s annoyance, however, Biller’s vision of authors confined to a particular set of topics solely based on their origins aligns with an impactful assumption by critics and average readers alike: certain names entail non-German origins which, in turn, entail a specific topic. In other words: Biller’s prescription mirrors a broader perception: migrants, whether first or subsequent generation, should only ever write about what Biller calls “Immigrantenbiografie.” It is a damnatory pars pro toto because an author’s single arbitrary characteristic, one’s origin, is enhanced to the point where it is perceived to be all that they are. This presumptuous perception, so often imposed on authors by society and, at times, publishers, can easily turn into a vicious cycle because it presumes content and, if the content confirms the presumption, in turn confirms the primary presumption about the author. In a sense, this is a capitalist embodiment of the idiom ‘cobbler, stick to your last.’ Undoubtedly, there are many authors that want to creatively engage with biographical experiences shaped by the event of migration and its aftermath. And the issue here is not that these authors cannot freely choose their themes and topics. The issue, however, is best illustrated via the example of Saša Stanišić. Stanišić’s debut 40 novel engages with (forced) migration, as it is a topic that is near and important to him and his family. Stanišić’s second novel, however, barely engages with topics of migration, arrival, or flight, but instead the history and present of a struggling village in Northeast Germany. Not only does the second novel bring about criticism like Biller’s, it also does not turn Stanišić from a “migrant author” to a “Brandenburg author.” Stanišić himself, aside from his clear rebuttal of Biller in the interview quoted above, always makes it a clear point to satirize the idea of literature of migration, of a biographical predetermination on a diegetic level. In Vor dem Fest, we are presented with the interview of a local journalist with the village’s painter, Ana Kranz who has no interest to spare for the journalist’s questions regarding her ‘Herkunft’ (Frau Kranz is a Donauschwäbin). Those, like Biller, that did not understand this fairly broad hint may then turn to the short story “Fallensteller” where Lada, a rather recalcitrant young man, has been inspired to write stories by the visit of the “Jugo-Schriftsteller” in the village. Towards the end of the short story, we learn that Lada has won a literature prize. The narrative “wir” recites an excerpt of the committee’s rationale which oozes sarcasm: Robert Lada Zieschke komponiert in seinem rasanten Milieustück eine Sinfonie der Provinz jenseits der großen Themen und abseits des Mainstreams. Die originelle Musikalität seiner Sprache sucht ihresgleichen in seiner Generation, was sicherlich damit zu tun hat, dass Zieschke ein Autor mit Provinzhintergrund ist.’ Ja, da mussten wir dann mit dem Lesen auch schon aufhören, wir hätten keinen weiteren Genitiv ausgehalten. (2016a, 250, my emphasis) Emphasizing the originality of his written language, something that Stanišić knows all too well from many a review, and connecting it to the biographical and geographical aspect of Lada’s provinciality highlights the arbitrary nature of seemingly creating causal connections and predeterminations between author biography and literary production.26 Ruth Steinberg writes: 26 There is, of course, nothing wrong in praising the irony, the humor, the creativity, the wordplays, and ambiguities of Stanišić’s writing style – a style that he once humorously described as “schreibt mit Synonym-Funktion von 41 “Stanišić dekonstruiert die mit seiner auktorialen Verortung durch verschiedene Feldakteurinnen und Feldakteure in der Sparte der ‘Migrationsliteratur’ verbundenen Zuschreibungen und deckt sie als Formen einer ‘positiven Diskriminierung’ auf.” (2019, 194) But Stanišić did not simply wait the eight years until 2014 after the publication of his debut novel in 2006 to make his thoughts known about the notion of ‘literature of migration.’ During his time as invited resident at the University of Iowa and participant at its International Writing Program in Fall 2007, he presented a short text during a panel discussion on October 5, 2007, that would be published in English in the same month and, in 2018, translated and published in German in the anthropology Eingezogen in die Sprache, angekommen in der Literatur. In “How You See Us: on Three Myths about Migrant Writing,” Stanišić explains that there is exceedingly little that “my ‘migrant colleagues’ and I” (2007, 1) have in common: “I would argue the color of the novel’s cover has stronger literary quality than our biographical backgrounds.” (2007, 1) He argues that to speak “of a single ‘migrant literature’ is simply wrong, because it is wrongly simple. The nature of migration and the level of foreign writers’ integration vary too much to be unified in one category, not to mention their unique biographical backgrounds and differing cultural, religious or social habits.” (2007, 2) Clearly stated, the attempt to reconcile any writer not born in Germany (and, at times, wrongly including authors that were born in Germany) is violent because it attempts to subsume an enormous multiplicity of cultures and experiences into a singular but generalizing category. Whenever Stanišić discusses this topic, he shows a proclivity for unconventional imagery. In “How You See Us,” he exclaims: “In order for an author’s work of literary fiction to Microsoft Word” (2017a, 65:44-65:46). What is problematic, however, is the seeming reflex of many to simultaneously praise his “Sprache” while emphasizing his Bosnian origins. Though (likely) never intended, it nonetheless implies a conditional relationship between the two: ‘you write really beautifully in this language that is not yours and even though you are not from here.’ In Stanišić’s own words: “an odd urge exists to simplify disturbingly the exoticism of style and technique migrant authors are ‘brave enough’ to ‘experiment with,’ as if this quality is a talent one brings from his homeland.” (2007, 1) 42 be significant, being a migrant is as essential as it is to be a guy named Jeff living in a 3000-person town in South Carolina with a 1967 Ford Mustang Coupe parked in your garage.” (2007, 3) He follows this up a decade later, in his first Zürcher Poetikvorlesung, stating: “Die Ergebnisse sind stilistich und inhaltlich so mannigfaltig wie die Biografien, denen sie entspringen. […] Und trotzdem spricht man flächendeckend von Migrationsliteratur. Das ist in etwa so, als würde man die Bücher von Michael Lenz, Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre und Thomas Glavinic als Glatzkopf- Literatur bezeichnen.” (2017a, 65:47-66:55) Stanišić’s rejection of the term ‘literature of migration’ is insightful and straightforward. And yet, the Maxim Biller-debate but also recent academic scholarship show that the question of terminology and categorization is by no means over. Matthias Aumüller (2020), for example, acknowledges the “Tücken” of the term, but nonetheless considers it to be neutral (5): “Denn ein Werk oder einen Autor einer Gruppe von Werken oder Autoren zuzuordnen, die einander in bestimmter Hinsicht ähnlich sind, heißt ja nicht, ihn oder es auf dieses Merkmal zu reduzieren bzw. ihm sonstige Merkmale abzusprechen.” (2020, 10) As the examples of Stanišić and the subsequent discussion show, Aumüller’s stance is, at best, optimistic. To his credit, there has been a growing number of publications on Stanišić that focus on a specific topic. However, his next argument cannot be given this same benefit: “Bei genauerem Hinsehen jedoch gibt es keinerlei Regel, die besagt, dass in einem Fall wie “Gastarbeiterliteratur” die Komponente “Gastarbeiter” sich auf die Verfasser dieser Literatur bezieht.” (Aumüller 2020, 13) Take, as just one counter to Aumüller’s argument, this paragraph by Olga Grjasnowa of her essay “Privilegien” (2019), published in Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum: 2014 veröffentlichte ich den Roman Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe, ein Jahr später wurde Verena Mermers Roman die stimme über den dächern publiziert. Ein Roman spielt in Deutschland und in Aserbaidschan. Der andere handelt von politischen Umbrüchen im zeitgenössischen Aserbaidschan. Das eine Buch ist von mir, das andere von Verena 43 Mermer. Wir wurden im selben Jahr geboren. Sie in St. Egyden Steinfeld, ich wurde in Baku geboren. Verena Mermer lebte und arbeitete in Delhi und Baku. Sie wohnt heute in Wien, ich lebe in Berlin. Eines der Bücher wurde im Hanser Verlag publiziert, das andere im Residenz Verlag. Das eine Buch zählt zur ‘Migrationsliteratur’, das andere zu deutscher bzw. österreichischer Literatur. (Grjasnowa 2019, 135-136) Aumüller does remark that most people still understand “vornehmlich die Autoren” (2020, 14) when saying ‘Migrationsliteratur’ because the term is very broad. And while I felt the need to point to his claim about “keinerlei Regel,” theoretically true, but practically simply inaccurate, the two core claims of his essay are commendable. He argues that we do not conflate and perceive previously used terms such as ‘Gastarbeiterliteratur,’ ‘Chamisso-Literatur,’ or ‘Ausländerliteratur’ as just a progression and evolution (from ‘Gastarbeiterliteratur’ to ‘Migrationsliteratur’) but instead to understand each term within their own scope.27 Aumüller also proposes that we should focus on another connotation of ‘Migrationsliteratur,’ “einen gegenstandsbezogenen Begriff,” (Aumüller 2020, 14) and derive a notion of “interkulturelle Literatur” as a more adequate term – a term that we will return to throughout this discussion. What Aumüller’s essay does not do, however, is provide us with (some of) the manifold reasons for the problematic nature of the term ‘Migrationsliteratur’ or ‘literature of migration.’ Stanišić, both diegetically and in his essay, has already given us some important pointers, but there is more to the discussion. The term “migrant” often carries negative connotations, mainly of the “Other.” In Writing Outside the Nation, Azade Seyhan writes: “Like the term Gastarbeiter, [migrant] diminishes the impact and distorts the parameters of this body of writing” (2001, 105–06). The author’s biography is irrelevant for the purposes of classifying what we read. The genre ascription can be more harmful than Stanišić’s humorous similes about baldheaded literature and imaginary Jeffs and their cars 27 For a chronological look at the terminologies used, see Sandra Vlasta (2016), Milica Grujičić (2017, especially pages 21-22), Hamid Tafazoli (2021, 114), Gabriele Meyer (2021, 4), and Aumüller’s essay. 44 might let on. The term (especially the German terms Migrationsliteratur and Migrantenliteratur) can be exclusionary and racist. As Olga Grjasnowa writes in “Privileges”: In Germany, that means literature that is always different, that does not belong, that is not ‘organically’ German [biodeutsch]. Incidentally, the alleged commonality between ‘(im)migrant authors’ is not aesthetic or thematic, but hereditary: they may come from anywhere in the world, except for Germany. Everyone – really, without exception – everyone who has a strange-sounding name or whose parents were not born in Germany is lumped together under this ineffable term. A term that remains highly questionable, racist, and paternalistic. (Grjasnowa 2019, 135) For Grjasnowa, Migrantenliteratur (and “literature of migration,” I would argue) is a perpetual othering based solely on the name or the origin of the author. As she points out, this is not only racist but, as our analysis of Stanišić’s novels will show, too parochial and narrow. After all, there is currently a “ubiquity of exophoric and intercultural writers among the highest ranks of German- language authors” (Uca 2019, 188). Similarly, Hamid Tafazoli strongly criticizes the idea for several reasons. He argues that the concept reduces the literary discourse to the “foreignness of the migrant-figure” (2019, 82), thus dichotomizing cultural foreignness (2019, 83); it furthermore implies an immutable, homogeneous, and authentic condition of culture that excludes those deemed migrants and, in so doing, constitutes the “privilege of being German.” (2019, 87) A robust critic of the idea of ‘literature of migration,’ Hamid Tafazoli particularly scrutinizes the concept in his 2019 monograph Narrative kultureller Transformationen and his 2021 essay “Entgrenzte Figuren – bewegte Erinnerungen. Migration im Spannungsfeld von Literatur und Begriff.” Like Stanišić, Tafazoli states that ‘literature of migration’ “vereinfacht und vereindeutigt diffuse und vielfältig interferierende Wechselwirkungen.” (2019, 71; see also 2021, 111) But Tafazoli takes it further, stating that this categorization functions as a “Machtinstrument der Exklusion” (2019, 72) as it fixates an author to their place of origin and “bei der Projektion dieser Fixierung auf die ausgestattete Erzählwelt kulturelle Homogenisierung und Reduktion 45 produziert.” (2019, 71) Perhaps most egregiously, the concept of ‘literature of migration’ leads to a conflation of the figure of the migrant with the figure “des Fremden, mit dem Letzteren jedoch keinen interkulturellen Gesprächspartner, sondern eine ontologische Größe assoziiert.” (Tafazoli 2019, 119) This blocks any chance of an engagement or conversation with the particularities of the figure of the migrant and instead only presents the rigid notion of foreignness. Tafazoli is convinced that any interaction needs a plurality of perspectives, not the reductive effect that ‘literature of migration’ engenders. That ‘literature of migration’ functions this way “impliziert also die Annahme eines unveränderbaren, homogenen und authentischen Zustandes der Kultur; in diesem Zustand wird das Privileg des Deutsch-Seins begründet.” (Tafazoli 2019, 87) In that sense, the discussion about the concept of ‘literature of migration’ is not merely a discussion about a genre or even an exclusionary categorization of a group of authors, but really a symptom of a wider sociocultural discourse that asks: who is German? Who is not perceived to be German? Over the last decades, however, this is a discourse that, on the one hand, is still rigidly anchored in on-going debates, for example, about the concept of ‘literature of migration.’ On the other hand, however, it is a discourse that, particularly with regards to ‘literature of migration,’ is built on a falsehood. As Eszter Pabis (2021) argues, “German language literature of authors whose mother tongue is not German advanced from an exception (Sonderfall) to the rule (Modellfall), illustrating the aesthetically constitutive function of strangeness and alienation as well as the untenability of any distinction between a German national literature and ‘migration literature.’” (185-186) The “false differentiation between German literature (as a norm) and migrant writing (as an exception)” (Pabis 2021, 184) is hence no longer valid. Tina Hartmann (2021) agrees with that assessment, arguing that the essential themes attributed to many works that are often categorized as ‘literature of migration’ “wie Alterität, Fremdheit und der Abarbeitung an der 46 Sprache” are “genuin im Zentrum dessen, was sich als Kontinuität der deutschen Literatur erweist.” (2021, 360) Considering the misguided idea of ‘literature of migration’ from an aesthetic standpoint, as demanded by, among many, Stanišić (2007, 2) and Tafazoli 2021, 114) shows us, then, that the idea of ‘literature of migration’ can simply not be maintained. The perhaps final death blow to the concept is dealt in one additional but extraordinarily important and oftentimes neglected reality. German author Marica Bodrožić writes about “[…] wie ich im einstigen Jugoslawien, lediglich neun Jahre ihres Lebens verbracht ha[be]. Mittlerweile stehen bei mir sechsundzwanzig Jahre auf der anderen Seite – und die andere Seite ist gar nicht mehr die andere Seite, sie ist die Lebensseite, einfach nur die Lebensseite.” (2008, 72) Bodrožić points to an important reality. Having spent only nine years of her life in Croatia (then part of Yugoslavia), she has since lived twenty-six (in 2008; now fourty-one years) in Germany. Too often still, the emphasis is on an author’s time spent in their country of birth instead of what Bodrožić calls “die Lebensseite.” Undoubtedly, the years growing up in another country are an important experience. But they must be considered in conjunction with the time lived in Germany; and more than anything, they cannot override that time. I believe this point to be very important because it is often missed. Though it might seem repetitive, I want to continue with a list of important German authors who are often seen as exemplary of ‘literature of migration,’ many of whom have also won the Albert Chamisso Prize. Highlighting the prominence and number of influential and well-known authors, I argue, stresses the arbitrariness of the category ‘literature of migration;’ it truly deconstructs any argument that authors often categorized as ‘migrant authors’ and are thus, to speak with Tafazoli, considered foreign are not German. I include both authors that have started publishing in the 20th century and those that started within the last twenty years: 47 • Aras Ören, currently 83 years old, moved to Germany in 1969 and has since lived in Berlin for more than half a century. • Ilma Rakusa, currently 77 years old, spent the first five years of her life in Hungary, Slovenia, and Italy. She has lived in Switzerland ever since. • Emine Sevgi Özadamar, currently 76 years old, first came to Germany aged 19 and has lived in Germany since 1976 where she has lived for almost half a century. • Rafik Schami, currently 76 years old, first came to Germany in 1971. He has lived in Germany for more than half a century. • Yoko Tawada, currently 63 years old, has spent most of her life in Germany since 1982. • Zafer Şenocak, currently 62 years old, moved to Germany before his tenth birthday. He has lived in Germany for more than half a century. • Feridun Zaimoğlu, currently 58 years old, moved to Germany in the first year of his life. • Ilja Trojanow, currently 57 years old, has left Bulgaria, the country of his birth, at the age of six and received political asylum in Germany. Except for roughly 15 years in which he lived in Nairobi, Cape Town, and Mumbai, he has lived his life in Germany and Austria. • Terézia Mora, currently 52 years old, has lived in Berlin for the last 32 years. • Abbas Khider, currently 50 years old, fled torture in Saddam Hussein’s prisons in 1996 and came to Germany in 2000 where he has lived since. • Saša Stanišić, currently 45 years old, arrived in Germany as a 14-year-old. He has lived in Germany more than twice as long as he did in Bosnia. • Olga Grjasnowa, currently 38 years old, came to Germany as an 11-year-old. She has lived in Germany more than twice as long as she did in Aserbaidschan. 48 • Senthuran Varatharajah, currently 38 years old, fled Sri Lanka with his family within the first five years of his life. • Slata Roschal, whose debut novel 153 Formen des Nichtseins (2022) was nominated for the German Book Prize in 2022, spent 26 of the 32 years of her life in Germany after moving with her parents from Russia. Every single one of these award-winning authors is an important contributor to contemporary German literature; indeed, the last half century of German literary history would be incomplete without them. To frame the analysis of Stanišić’s writing, I would like to trace an idea presented by Brent O. Peterson in a 2018 article who argues for the use of “migration narratives” instead of ‘literature of migration’: “[R]ather than continuing to make choices based on authors’ biographies, we could abandon the twin categories of ‘migrant author’ and ‘migrant literature’ and replace them with the text-based alternative of ‘migration narratives.’” (Peterson 2018, 85) While Peterson is concerned that the term “could be interpreted so broadly as to end up signifying nothing,” (2018, 97) he emphasizes that it not only shifts the focus away from the author, but also enables the inclusion of other forms of media in the discourse, such as film (Peterson 2018, 82). Though it is only a small change, I believe it to be an effective one. The emphasis on narrative puts the focus exclusively on the content of the writing, thus deemphasizing the author’s biography even more. After all, anyone can write a narrative of migration in fiction, so there is no need to refer back to the author for authenticity or validation. It would be impossible to classify an author’s oeuvre broadly and simplistically as ‘literature of migration.’ Shifting the emphasis to narrative instead allows for more flexibility and precision. Stanišić’s debut novel, then, is a narrative of migration, while Vor dem Fest is not (at least not primarily). Stanišić himself says that “migrant literature can only be 49 effectively discussed by [topic] and in relation to the literary premise of genre, style, tradition, etc.” (2007, 2) I believe that the term “narrative of migration” provides more specificity with a stronger focus on content than on the author.28 The concept of narratives of migration accounts for the complexities that (almost) all novels have, for example Stanišić’s Grammofon. It is a narrative of migration, but much more as well: it is “part family novel, part migration story, part war memoir, with shades of magic realism.” (Haines 2011, 105) Such a reconfiguration could return the analytic attention to aesthetic, poetic, and stylistic questions only. As such, we could group certain texts as ‘narratives of migration’ while keeping their authors free from any such categorizations. There is, of course, also another potential successor in form of the previously mentioned ‘interkulturelle Literatur.’ It is far from a new concept. Already in 1999, Aglaia Blioumi discussed the term ‘Migrationsliteratur’ as well as ‘interkulturelle Literatur,’ rejecting the latter as it “betrifft meines Erachtens nur die letzten Entwicklungstendenzen innerhalb der Migrationsliteratur und schließt die Anfangsphase aus. Infolgedessen ist es für mein Dafürhalten literarhistorisch unangemessen, den Begriff für die Benennung des ganzen Genres zu verwenden.” (Blioumi 1999, 358) In the two decades since, the concept has significantly opened, however. In 2006, Dirk Göttsche analyzed Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Der Hof im Spiegel and argued that the current “interkulturellen Problemstellungen und entsprechenden literarischen Darstellungsverfahren […] sich sinnvoll im Horizont des postkolonialen Diskurses analysieren lassen” (518) and understands Özdamar’s short story as a contributor “zur Refiguration des interkulturellen Bewusstseins in der postkolonialen Welt globaler Migration.” (524) It is, undoubtedly, desirable to further intercultural 28 In the same vein, we could describe aspects of the popular novel Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015; Go, Went, Gone, 2017) by Jenny Erpenbeck as a narrative of migration when the reader learns of the experiences of characters like Osarobo, Tristan, or Ithemba without forgetting that our point of focalization is that of an educated white retiree and that the novel is constructed as a Bildungsroman. 50 dialogue: “Interculturalism is more fluid and dynamic, more of a dialogue, as it suggests narratives in motion, mobile and changeable belongings, with identities which are always under construction, incomplete.” (Bromley 2017, 37) But the concept of ‘interkulturelle Literatur’ has also received its fair share of criticism. For one, ‘interkulturell’ is often used in conjunction with the adjective ‘transnational,’ though the relationship of these two terms does not appear to be wholly negotiated. While Hamid Tafazoli, for example, emphasizes migration as a “Phänomen inter- und transnationaler Erinnerungskultur,” (2021, 128) Brigid Haines argues for a shift away from “national or linguistic identifications and the concept of distinct cultures inherent in the term ‘interkulturelle Germanistik,’ and to talk instead of the transnational and porous nature of writing.” (2015, 147) In his monograph Transnationalism and German-Language Literature in the Twenty- First Century (2017), Stuart Taberner focuses solely on transnationalism, declaring Germany “an exemplary transnational nation,” (19) without mention of interculturality. Not only would a term that includes both ‘intercultural’ and ‘transnational’ be unwieldy for actual use, but it is currently still unclear whether and how these two concepts even belong together. Secondly, Christine Meyer recently criticized both terms in Questioning the Canon (2021), writing: the concepts of ‘intercultural’ [and] then ‘transcultural’ literature that are still in vogue today appeared, both responding to the desire to place the ‘cultures’ involved on the same plane. Despite this worthy intention rooted in the recognition that German society has slowly but surely become a ‘globalized, poly-cultural culture’ (Schmitz 2009: 7), the resource to the prefixes ‘inter’ and ‘trans’ cannot but fail to reinforce, sometimes in spite of the authors’ intentions, the problematic hypothesis according to which the different cultures at play in the processes described are a priori homogenous and independent. (4-5) An ’interkulturelle’ and even ‘transnationale’ literature, if used without caution, runs the risk of reinforcing binaries and reading authors with other countries of birth mainly through the lens of ‘other cultures’ or ‘other countries,’ thus inadvertently marking them as potentially foreign once more. And finally, Brent O. Peterson’s concern about the broadness of ‘migrant narratives’ is certainly also in play for both ‘interkulturelle’ and ‘transnationale’ literature. We are left, then, 51 with three points at the end of this discussion. First, it has become thoroughly clear that the concept of ‘Migrationsliteratur,’ ‘literature of migration,’ or any other categorization focused on author origin and biography is not suitable and productive, but instead can be dangerous, violent, and damaging. Second, it has also become clear that the search for a functioning replacement is anything but easy; it is a search that is currently incomplete and one that would be beyond the scope of this dissertation to complete (though there is one promising suggestion waiting at the end of chapter six). And lastly, though not perfect by any means, ‘narratives of migration’ could be a functional temporary solution. 2.2 Problematizing Heimat29 I continue with a discussion of a closely connected concept, Heimat, its problems and downfalls, but also its potential as a pluralized concept (Heimaten). I argue that the notion of Heimaten is a means of mediating the world and experiences of (post)migrancy, heterogeneity, participation;30 making Heimaten tangible, pliable, and, ultimately, something that we can approach and inhabit allows us to expand the social and physical borders of what it means to be German in the globalized 21st century. I will point to the role the concept plays in my analysis. While it is an important discussion to contextualize the concrete moment in which Stanišić lives and writes, it will be relevant for the discussion and analysis in the fourth chapter, as well. My discussion of Heimat will start with a brief literature review,31 followed by a discussion of a pluralized Heimaten that 29 Most of the discussion in this subchapter has already been published in “Saša Stanišić’s novels: Making sense of Migration and Heimat?” Migration and Heimat, edited by Len Cagle, Thomas Herold, and Gabriele Maier. DeGruyter, 2023, 109-140. 30 For a detailed discussion of postmigrancy (and the postmigrant society), see the introductory chapter. 31 Although I only discuss a snapshot of the scholarship on the concept of ‘Heimat,’ the discussions about it in the last half century have been extensive and, as the following list shows, has increased in quantity in the last decade. After 52 draws heavily on a threefold and highly individualized understanding of Heimaten proposed by Stanišić himself. Saša Stanišić makes visible a multitude of Heimaten in his novels and in a three-part lecture series, the Zürcher Poetikvorlesung, which he held in November 2017.32 The second of his lectures, for example, is titled “Das Biographische, das Unwahrscheinliche, das Grausame und der Witz: meine Heimaten.” In this list, the biographical is the only common aspect of usual notions of Heimat. As is evident in the title of the second lecture, Stanišić’s vision of Heimat(en) is very idiosyncratic. For the purposes of this chapter, then, we will have to problematize notions of Heimat if we are to arrive at the plurality of Heimaten that Stanišić inhabits. I adhere to the argument posed by a multitude of scholars that a singular notion of Heimat is unable to account decades of postwar silence, academic (and social) debates about ‘Heimat’ started in the 1970s and took off in the 1980s: Alexander Mitscherlich and Gerd Kalow (1971); Ina-Maria Greverus (1972, 1979); Karlheinz Rossbacher (1975); Hermann Bausinger and Konrad Köstlin (eds., 1980); Wilfried von Bredow and Hans-Friedrich Foltin (1981); Hermann Bausinger (1983); Horst Bienek (ed., 1985); Eduard Führ (1985); Jochen Kelter (ed., 1986); Christian Graf von Krockow (1989); Karl Konrad Polheim (ed., 1989). Discussions continued in the 1990s and 2000s, bringing with them influential discussions in the English language, especially Celia Applegate’s A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (1990), Alon Confino’s essay “The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Heimat, National Memory and the German Empire, 1871-1918,” (1993) and Peter Blickle’s Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland (2002). Further scholarship in the 1990s and 2000s: Ludger Klein (1990); Will Cremer and Ansgar Klein (1990); Michael Neumeyer (1992); Andrea Bastian (1995); W.G. Sebald (1995); Katharina Wiegand (ed., 1997); Gisela Ecker (1997); Thomas E. Schmidt (1999); Bernhard Schlink (2000); Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman (2000); Martin Hecht (2000); Karen Joisten (2003); Johannes von Moltke (2005); Fabienne Liptay, Susanne Marschall, and Andreas Solbach (eds., 2005); Jens Korfkamp (2006); Christoph Türcke (2006); Gimter Gebhard, Oliver Geisler, and Steffen Schröter (2007); Herta Müller (2009). As mentioned, scholarship has grown drastically in the last two decades: Andrea Lobensommer (2010); Miriam Kanne (2011); Friederike Eigler (2012, 2014); Friederike Eigler and Jens Kugele (eds., 2012); Halina Hackert (2012); Gabriele Eichmanns and Yvonne Franke (eds., 2013); Robert Manesse (2014); Werner Nell and Marc Weiland (eds., 2014); Sylvia Fischer (2015); Vanessa Plumly (2015; 2019); Anja Barr (2016); Dimitrij Kapitelman (2017); Verena Feistauer (2017); Christian Schüle (2017); Garbiñe Iztueta et. al. (eds., 2017); Reinhard Müller (FAZ, 14. Feb 2018); Nazli Nikjamal (2018); Jürgen Hasse and Karl Alber (eds., 2018); Peter Zudeick (2018); Susanne Scharnowski (2019); Thomas Ebermann (2019); Martina Hülz, Olaf Kühne, and Florian Weber (2019); Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah (eds., 2019); Eduardo Costadura, Klaus Ries, and Christiane Wiesenfeldt (eds., 2019); Ayata Bilgin (2019; 2020); special volume (vol. 54.4) of Seminar in 2019 (edited by Gabi Kathöfer and Beverly Weber); Dana Bönisch, Jil Runia, and Hanna Zehschnetzler (eds., 2020); Hanna Zehschnetzler (2021); Svenja Kück (2021); Anja Oesterhelt (2021); Wilhelm Schmid (2021); Thorsten Carstensen and Oliver Kohns (eds., 2022); Len Cagle, Thomas Herold, and Gabriele Maier (2023). 32 The Zürcher Poetikvorlesungen are an annual lecture series that has been organized by the German department at the University of Zurich since 1997. Prominent speakers over the years have included W.G. Sebald (1997/1998), Volker Braun (1998/1999), Durs Grünbein (2006/2007), Herta Müller (2007), Marcel Beyer (2009), Melinda Nadj Abonji (2018), and, of course, Saša Stanišić in 2017. 53 for the heterogeneous, diverse German society of the twenty-first century. In fact, it is precisely the singular idea of Heimat that performatively perpetuates the outdated notion of a German homogeneous cultural monolith. The relationship between Heimat and migration is an ambiguous one: it is not necessarily the experience of migration itself that complicates access to Heimat; more often, it is how migrating individuals are received by others that makes it difficult to inhabit a shared idea of Heimat. However, the movement that is essential to migration allows and even necessitates an understanding of Heimat as something plural that can be independent of geographical locations and is instead constituted by aspects of individual importance. This is where the relationship between migration and Heimat can be productive, as individualized aspects have the potential to inscribe themselves into a parochial, ossified, and stagnant Heimat discourse that is dominated by a group that perceives itself to be homogeneous. Though egregiously burdened by its use to justify colonial exploitation and fascist genocide, Heimat remains an influential idea to this day. What are the various understandings of Heimat? Werner Nell (2023) explains that “first discourses on Heimat appeared around 1800, influenced by German Romanticism and in response to events such as the defeat of the ‘Old Empire’ in 1806 by the Napoleonic forces.” (23) Early on then, we can see a tendency of viewing Heimat in connection to the creation of a unity in demarcation to challenges and threats (see Nell 2023, 31). As Johannes Strohschänk argues, “Heimat is the product of alienation,” (2019, 52) which certainly aligns with the increase in Heimat-debates over the last two decades in Germany. In light of this, Maha El Hissy points to the absurdity of this response, particularly in the context of migration: Auf eigenartige Weise sind es Deutsche, die in Anbetracht der Deterritorialisierung und des Verlusts von Heimat und Eigentum, wie sie geflüchtete Personen erlitten haben, nach einer ortsgebundenen Zugehörigkeit und definierenden Kategorie verlangen. Sie verspricht Ein-und Ausgrenzung und bietet einer Gemeinschaft von vermeintlich Dazugehörigen eine 54 Möglichkeit zur Grenzschließung. Im aktuellen politischen Kontext wird Heimat mithin zur Chiffre für eine geschlossene Welt, für Ausgrenzung und Diskriminierung aufgrund von Andersheit und damit zum Albtraum für Menschen mit anderen, nicht-linearen Biographien. (2020, 148-149)33 After the Second World War, Nell argues that Heimat soon became one of the most popular concepts, at least “in the sense of referring to loss and generally bypassing critical reflection” (2023, 24) It was, in particular, the success of Edgar Reitz’s film trilogy Heimat (1984-2012) that “sparked a broad discussion that went even beyond Germany and helped to liberate the concept of Heimat and its references from the Romantic, nationalist German traditions that had prevailed at least until the middle of the 1960s.” (Nell 2023, 25) However, Nell contextualizes this shift in mindset, stating that, to this day, Heimat “still appears to be one of the keywords for establishing and promoting the idea of German unity and a German Volk in the sense of a nation,” (2023, 29) and continues to be “as much a narrative of desire and need as it is the construction of a phantasma built over a gap.” (2023, 31) Johannes Strohschänk (2019) pointed to a delayed picking up of the Heimat-discourse in academia, claiming that “only after German unification in 1990 […] was [it] gingerly rekindled among anthropologists and migration scholars who explored the original meaning of an apparently important concept.” (41) However, as Peggy Piesche stated in an interview with Gabi Kathöfer and Beverly Weber in 2018, the archive of the concept Heimat is still toxic (2018b, 424). This might lead people to abandon the idea fully. Senthuran Varatharajah, for example, wrote in a guest column for the Süddeutsche Zeitung: „Das Wort Heimat gehört nicht zu meinem aktiven Wortschatz. Dieses Wort hat keine Bedeutung für mich.“ (2018) Sociologist Bilgin Ayata emphatically argued against the renewed conceptualization and use of Heimat, even 33 See also: “The term Heimat is as old as the German language, but its use became pervasive only in the nineteenth century, and it seems highly plausible that the rise of the modern concept of Heimat was directly associated with the experience of mass migration.” (Althammer, Oesterhelt 2021, 226) 55 in the plural, in her essay “’Deheimatize It!’” (2020). At the same time, Piesche emphasizes that the answer to this toxic archive is not a refusal to engage with it: “Claiming Heimatlosigkeit in order to get rid of the toxic archive of Heimat actually still leaves us with a toxic archive of Heimat. At least some of us. […] It means somebody else has to clean it up. […] The other [side] is that this move easily avoids reflection on privilege.” (Kathöfer and Weber 2018b, 424) It is thus important to engage with Heimat and, as the title of the subchapter indicates, to problematize it. But first, I must answer the question: what exactly is Heimat? Anja Barr, for one, emphasizes Heimat’s fluidity: “Heimat is understood not as a static attribution, but rather as a flexible and configurable world of experience/world of lived experience” (2016, 139). While Barr characterizes Heimat specifically within the context of the German film Gegen die Wand, (2004; in English as Head-On), her understanding of Heimat implies a negotiation that takes place on both individual and societal levels that is more generally applicable, allowing for the emphasis on what one person or (a large part of) society sees as Heimat to shift continuously. This, then, makes the concept somewhat volatile in nature. More importantly, it stresses the fact that Heimat is always something constructed. In his influential volume Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland, Peter Blickle writes that Heimat is “the imaginary space where a reconciliation with an alienated, moving world occurs” (2002, 40–41), describing it as an “imaginary real world.” Building on the constructed and volatile nature of Heimat, Blickle presents it as a return to something imagined, a protective mental hideaway, a contrast to reality, and, as such, a means to recoup or compensate for a feeling or for one’s idea of the self slipping away. The concept of Heimat, Blickle argues, works “through an imagistic and, thus, regressive representation of an ideal life, or at least of a lost ideal stage in life.” (2002, 139) In a similar vein, Halina Hackert locates Heimat in the awareness of a spatial loss (2012, 135). We 56 may add to the loss of place the loss of a particular, romanticized “stage in life.” Even decades prior, German philosopher Ernst Bloch expresses the latter feeling when he writes: “there will arise in the world something that shines into everyone’s childhood, but where no one has yet been: homeland.” (1986, 1376). Heimat, as Beate Althammer and Anja Oesterhelt write in their co-edited special issue of The Germanic Review (2021) “has an emphatic sound that rouses feelings – be they hostile or affectionate.” (223) This leaves us with a volatile, constructed concept that reacts to both spatial loss (of place) and temporal loss (of a particular phase of life), thus implying the loss of an emotional sense of protection as well. It is for this reason that Heimat is often evoked in a dichotomy with something that disturbs either that place or stage in life: foreignness. Jürgen Hasse describes Heimat as “a relationship between ownness [Eigenem] and foreignness [Fremdem] that continuously sheds its skin.” (2018, 17) While we can see this relationship in individuals moving to a new place or even a new country, we encounter it more strongly when “foreignness” supposedly unsettles the status quo. It is no coincidence that the notion of Heimat, neatly packaged into repurposed slogans like “We are the people,” is undergoing a resurgence at a time when large numbers of refugees are coming to Germany looking for safety and a future. Instead of tackling the intricate and complex societal issues that are at the root of growing feelings of unrest and a loss of control – economic discrepancies between the federal states of the former GDR and the former FRG, the political disillusionment of broad swaths of the German public, the denial of the existence of structural racism in Germany, the long-term and lasting failure of both political and societal institutions to take into account the inevitable and necessary shifts in the make-up of society34 – a return to an imagined space of control and nostalgia is subsumed within the concept of Heimat. Often, this 34 Mark Terkessidis highlights this last point excellently in the first chapter of his 2010 book Interkultur, referring to this phenomenon in bigger cities as “Parapolis.” 57 return presents itself as the emotional recuperation of a lost status quo that operates via exclusion. Unsurprisingly, then, the concept has received its fair and merited share of criticism, most recently in a collection of essays titled Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (Your Homeland is Our Nightmare, 2019), edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah.35 Published in part as a reaction to the addition of Heimat to the title of the Federal Ministry of the Interior in March 2018, often colloquially referred to as the Heimatministerium,36 the collection critically addresses the term Heimat. In charge of renaming the ministry was its new head, conservative politician Horst Seehofer, one of the leaders of the CSU (Christian Social Union). The addition of the two words Bau (building) and Heimat (officially translated as community) was thus a conservative reframing of the importance of specific discourses. Political sociologist Bilgin Ayata describes this change as the institutional reintroduction of Heimat, an attempt to revise history that is emblematic of a shift in contemporary political discourses (2020, 43). Aydemir and Yaghoobifarah harshly criticize the notion of Heimat in the foreword to Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum on the basis that “the concept of Heimat has never described a real place in Germany, but always the yearning for a particular ideal instead: a homogeneous, white, Christian society in which men have the final say and women worry about childbirth – where other realities of life simply do not find a place.” (2019, 9) They emphasize their rejection of the term by placing it in single quotation marks – the written equivalent of touching something with gloves, in this case because of the inapplicability of the word to their lived experience, their reality, the reality of many. In her essay in the same volume, Mithu M. Sanyal states succinctly: “Simply put: if ‘the nation’ functions as an outer border, then 35 Translations of the essays of Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum have recently been published by UC Berkeley’s Transit journal in a 2021 issue titled “Homeland.” 36 The “Bundesministerium des Innern, für Bau und Heimat,” officially translated as the Federal Ministry of the Interior, of Building, and Community, although Heimat and community are certainly two different things with perhaps some overlap. After the elections in 2021, new chancellor Olaf Scholz ordered the ministry be renamed again in early December of 2021, this time dropping the word “Bau.” The word Heimat, however, remained. This speaks to the normalization of the concept, introduced by conservatives, and retained by Social Democrat Scholz. 58 ‘Heimat’ creates an inner border.” (2019, 104)37 Aydemir, Yaghoobifarah, and Sanyal are only a few of the voices giving expression to the exclusion inherent in the concept of Heimat that has been rearing its ugly head again with particular force since the 1990s. It is already problematic when the notion of Heimat is used to exclude refugees and migrants, but it becomes unbearable when it is used to exclude German citizens simply because they are not perceived as “German” due to their name, skin color, or religion. What too many consider “German” is not representative of today’s society. It is, however, representative of the exclusion and racism many face, and this is linked to the idea of Heimat. Luckily, many of those excluded provide their own epistemological concepts, claiming their stake in the discourse. Mark Terkessidis, for one, argues for a political and societal program of “Interkultur” in which everyone is granted accessibility (“Barrierefreiheit”) and given the same opportunities in a manner that accounts for multiplicity within society: interculture as a rule of action (“Handlungsregel”; 2010, 10) for everyone. Terkessidis understands this rule of action as an organizing principle – but one that emphasizes communication and the creation of new connections. There is no such thing as harmony, Terkessidis argues, and it does not always have to be the goal. Instead, German society should strive for a flexible form of communication and interaction that can account for “life in an ambiguous state and the creation of a future that is still vague” (2010, 10). “Interkultur” means that we should not stop at respecting each other’s differences. Respect is necessary but living together successfully and productively requires more than that. Terkessidis proposes that the goal needs to be a diverse public space “in which accessibility prevails and everyone can maximize their potential.” (2010, 126) While not 37 Similarly, Nazli Nikjamal writes in her dissertation on Die Konzeption von Heimat im Werk deutscher Schrifsteller iranischer Herkunft that “Heimat provides a feeling of ontological security at the expense of those who are not allowed access.” (2018, 121) 59 specifically formulated as an alternative to Heimat, this could lessen its necessity in political and societal discourses, and deconstruct the idea of a default, a norm set in stone of what is considered “German.” Mithu Sanyal also argues for a productive and reformative approach that formulates Heimat “in the plural, thus accounting for the lived realities of an increasing number of Germans by acknowledging how (im)migration enriches the Heimat.” (2019, 120) However, Sanyal emphasizes the importance of creating such a notion in the “process of consensus building.” (2019, 121) This process thus requires a diverse and complex assortment of experiences and voices, including those currently excluded (such as disabled people, LGBTQIA+, migrants, Germans who do not conform to the ideal of Heimat criticized by Aydemir and Yaghoobifarah), resulting in an understanding and acceptance of plurality that is reflected in a concept of Heimaten. Althammer and Oesterhelt emphasize that “Heimat could become pluralized” (2021, 225) in the context of migration and, we might add, in the context of postmigration. The idea of pluralizing Heimat is, in and of itself, nothing new. Celia Applegate and especially Alon Confino think of Heimat as something that does not merely exist in the singular. Confino understands Heimat as a combination of collective memory and imagined community (1993, 47), connecting “the local, the regional and the national community.” (1993, 50) It is in this sense of the local, regional, and national that he argues for the existence of a plural Heimat – what he calls “Heimats.” (1993, 62)38 If one’s Heimaten are simultaneously a city or village, a federal state, and a nation, then an individual should be able to inhabit a multitude of Heimaten. There are, however, two problems with Confino’s understanding of Heimat (and Heimaten) in the context of twenty-first century postmigrant Germany. The first is the essential role that Heimat plays in 38 Throughout, I will refer to the plural of ‘Heimat’ as ‘Heimaten’ as it is the grammatically correct German plural form. 60 collective memory. Confino traces this collective memory from the nineteenth century and the German empire into the twentieth century. He focuses on a notion of collective memory that inevitably excludes refugees and the descendants of guest workers, for example, from the collective memory of what is supposedly German, thus making Heimat inaccessible on a temporal level to millions of people living in Germany. Secondly, Confino’s idea of Heimat in the plural is not the same as, for example, Sanyal’s (or Stanišić’s, for that matter). For Confino, each instantiation of Heimat (e.g., a local Heimat, a regional Heimat, a national Heimat, etc.) is still based on the singular and exclusive idea of Heimat that Aydemir, Yaghoobifarah, Sanyal, Terkessidis, and many others criticize for not being representative or timely. Confino himself says as much when he writes: “A thousand Heimats dotted Germany, each claiming uniqueness and particularity. And yet, together, these Heimats have informed the ideal of a single, transcendent nationality,” which he calls the “generic Heimat.” (1993, 62) Confino’s pluralities are simply branches that sprout from the tree that is this “generic Heimat.” The idea of Heimaten that this chapter proposes, however, is fundamentally plural; there is no hierarchy in which a categorical Heimat trumps and subordinates all other notions of Heimat. Instead of reviving an exclusionary dichotomy between Heimat and not Heimat, Sanyal’s “process of consensus building” steps outside of this dichotomy, thus entering a new discursive playing field. Heimaten is a multitude of open public spaces that invite every single person in a society to participate in creating a panoply of characteristics that constitute a representative and fair society. But Heimaten is also a multitude of private spaces that do not prescribe a certain set of religious, behavioral, or societal norms, instead allowing Heimaten to be understood individually, not merely geographically, but kaleidoscopically, in every shape and form: the biographical, the improbable, the cruel, and the joke for Stanišić, for example, if we think back to the title of his second Zürcher 61 Poetikvorlesung. According to Stanišić, each Heimat needs ambivalence (Stanišić 2017a, 75:56– 75:58). This is unattainable when Heimat refers to a specific point in time and a specific group of people as necessary attributes. Coming back to Stanišić, we encounter an author whose conceptualization of Heimaten is creative, playful, and ambivalent. It emphasizes language, writing, and storytelling. For him, there is, first of all, his childhood in Višegrad and all his associations with the river Drina, his grandparents, and his parents. While this is no longer attainable in reality, it still is in his narratives, making it “the most palpable Heimat that I will ever be able to ever describe.” (Stanišić 2017a, 75:40–75:44) The emphasis is on the creative act of describing and storytelling, allowing Stanišić to maintain agency while inscribing this particular Heimat into discourses of (post)migrancy and lived experience instead of it being subject to external determination. Similarly, Stanišić describes inhabiting a second Heimat, one that is imagined, a “Heimat of literary imagination.” (Stanišić 2017a, 75:48–75:50) The emphasis on self-creation is even more evident here. His third Heimat reiterates creation and agency, now clearly connected to writing and storytelling. He calls it a “‘hier’ während ich erzähle.” (Stanišić 2017a, 76:24–76:27) In the lecture, it is important for Stanišić to immediately clarify that he is talking about a very specific, “creative” Heimat, anchored in the process of storytelling (Stanišić 2017a, 76:29–76:46). Interestingly, Stanišić connects a local adverb with a temporal component. More precisely, he connects a place of absence (dort vs. hier) with a lingering in the moment (während). This makes Heimat difficult to understand: Heimat is created in the moment and keeps recreating itself at each moment, resulting in a conglomeration of moments (während). In this multitude of Heimaten – a list that is not exhaustive – the creative act of writing, storytelling, and thus generating agency stands out. In describing his Heimaten, Stanišić avoids, even undercuts any prescriptive attribution to (or exclusion from) a dominant 62 notion of Heimat. But even more than that, with the emphasis on the creative act, the idea of Heimat moves from being predominantly geographical to being a medium. More precisely, it acts as a medium in which to make sense of the world and Stanišić’s position in it. It critically mediates his creative output. Vor dem Fest is set in the fictional town of Fürstenfelde in Brandenburg’s Uckermark. The story confronts the reader with the past, present, and future of this small village. Most of the narrative takes place on the eve of Annenfest, an annual celebration, the reason for which the villagers can no longer remember. Nonetheless, preparations for the feast are made while the heterodiegetic narrator follows several villagers (and a vixen) to explore how they engage with the village’s past, its present, and its fear of dying out. In the novel, the narrator gives voice to a community, a “we” that has lived through the end of the GDR and reunification, and is struggling with the rural flight of its young people and trying to find its purpose. For this exploration, Stanišić uses the template of the village novel (Dorfroman), a genre that has seen a recent rise in popularity. Unsurprisingly, this rise has coincided with the reemergence of public Heimat discourses. As Werner Nell and Marc Weiland write in the introduction to Imaginäre Dörfer: Zur Wiederkehr des Dörflichen in Literatur, Film und Lebenswelt, “’Bilder vom ‘Dorf’ stehen auch gegenwärtig wieder im Mittelpunkt gesellschaftlicher Diskurse; und zwar sowohl als Orte der Affirmation, Lebensreform und Zukunftsgestaltung als auch als Orte der Ambivalenz, Irritation und Vergangenheiterkundung.” (2014, 21) In all its ambiguity, the village has traditionally been and still is the place that is best encapsulated by Heimat more than any other term. Certainly, both Vor dem Fest and the concept of Heimat are indebted to this idea of the “village” – the representation of a quaint, traditional, and secure Germanness that is close to nature. The village novel thus holds an eminent position for literary negotiations of Heimat. Nell and Weiland argue that we should 63 understand literary and cinematic constructions “des Dörflichen” as “Laboratorien, in und mit denen gesellschaftliche Aushandlungsprozesse unter erkenntnistheoretischen und lebenspraktischen Perspektiven vollzogen werden.” (2014, 20) This applies to Stanišić’s novel(s) and allows us to see the double function that the village inhabits, both in Vor dem Fest and more generally: on the one hand, it is a place of retreat, (seeming) tranquility, and romanticized tradition and, as such, a strong proponent of a politicized, conservative notion of Heimat. On the other hand, it provides a strong base from which to scrutinize this notion and examine how it can materialize – as a metonymy for Heimat, so to speak. Such a dissection may offer the building blocks necessary to create an inclusive (or “interkulturell,” according to Terkessidis) notion of Heimaten. In Herkunft, Stanišić questions the ideas of origin (one German word for which is Herkunft) and Heimat by retelling the story of his arrival and first years in Germany, as well as the story of his grandmother in Višegrad who suffered from dementia. The homodiegetic narrator Saša himself – different, but not always easily distinguishable from the author Saša Stanišić – in the novel describes the novel as “a portrait of my not being able to meet the demands of a self-portrait.” (Stanišić 2021, 46; 2019, 49) Throughout the narrative, we jump from Stanišić’s adolescence in Heidelberg to a narrative strand in Višegrad during his childhood, to another narrative strand in Oskaruša, the little village in which Stanišić’s grandfather grew up and that Stanišić visits with his grandmother. Interspersed throughout the narrative are little paragraphs that pull the reader back into the author’s present at the time of writing.39 Discussing the concept of Heimat(en) by reading a book named Herkunft begs the question as to the relationship between these two terms, Heimat (home) and Herkunft (origin). Stanišić, in 39 For example: “Today is August 29, 2018. In the past few days, thousands in Chemnitz, Germany, have demonstrated against open borders. Immigrants are being demonized and the Hitler salute hangs over the present.” (Stanišić 2021, 96; 2019, 97) 64 fact, often highlights the overlap between the two concepts, e.g., when grandmother is his answer to both the question of Heimat and that of Herkunft (see Stanišić 2019, 63, 65). Friedrike Eigler argues in her 2023 analysis of Stanišić’s “Heimatbegriff’ that the two terms ‘Heimat’ and ‘Herkunft’ are used “zuweilen als Synonyme und zuweilen auf unterschiedliche, aber nicht klar voneinander abgegrenzte Weise.” (235) At times, she continues, Heimat appears as the superordinate category, but at other times the two conflate. While this is not necessarily incorrect, it is also not a complete assessment. Generally, the term Herkunft refers directly to the place one was born as well as the community and history of family, culture, and community. While the word Herkunft can be layered and varied, it is usually more static than Heimat, especially geographically, but also temporally: it refers to one’s place of birth, one’s family history, community, and culture, denoting a specific past. Stanišić’s novel provides an excellent example: on his first visit to the little mountain village of Oskoruša, where his grandfather grew up, the narrator Saša visits the graveyard. On each headstone, he reads his last name, Stanišić. As he learns throughout his visit, Oskoruša, too, is part of his origin. When the narrator first ruminates on his Herkunft after arriving in the small village, he sounds almost presumptuous: “Also doch, Herkunft, wie immer, dachte ich und legte los: Komplexe Frage! Zuerst müsse geklärt werden, worauf das Woher ziele. Auf die geografische Lage des Hügels, auf dem der Kreißsaal sich befand? Auf die Landesgrenzen des Staates zum Zeitpunkt der letzten Wehe? Provenienz der Eltern? Gene, Ahnen, Dialekt? Wie man es dreht, Herkunft bleibt doch ein Konstrukt!” (Stanišić 2019, 32) For him, it is clear that Herkunft is always a construct. His monologue emphasizes its arbitrariness. Gavrilo, the family friend his grandmother and he are meeting, simply responds: “Von hier. Du kommst von hier.” (Stanišić 2019, 32) For Gavrilo, there is no doubt. 65 Furthermore, Saša’s brief monologue emphasizes a few characteristics. Most importantly, the word Herkunft is something constructed by the multitude of ingredients the narrator mentions in his speech and thus highly individual. Throughout the novel, the narrator presents his reader with assorted notions of what Herkunft is: his grandmother, something disparate due to the distance from most of his family, Gavrilo gifting him a pig to take home to Germany, his son in Hamburg, his mother (Stanišić 2019, 65), bitter-sweet accidents, war (see Stanišić 2019, 66), to mention just a few examples. But what the narrator says in Oskoruša’s graveyard highlights more than this: it situates the temporality of Herkunft in the past. Each of the items named in his speech refer to a specific and prior point in time – his birth, his parent’s birth, his ancestors, the evolution of language. And Gavrilo’s answer reveals an important aspect of Herkunft that Heimat can hardly account for. By locating the narrator’s origin in Oskoruša (“Du bist von hier”), the individual does not need to have lived or have been born in a place for it to be Herkunft. 40 As Paul Gilroy argues in Black Atlantic (1993), British African-Caribbean people who were born in the UK often feel that they belong to a shared African culture and history.41 Similarly, the connection that many Germans born to guestworkers have to their parents’ native countries speaks to this. Many of the characteristics named here are, indeed, attributes of the conceptualization of Heimaten for many 40 Consider in this context also works by Afro-German writers, e.g., Olumide Popoola’s Also By Mail (2013) or the poems of May Ayim (e.g., “Grenzenlos und unverschämt”). 41 Both in the examples from the novel Herkunft and the reference to The Black Atlantic, we encounter the implied notion of diaspora as something that intersects with migration and Heimat. While “diaspora” as a concept is not part of the analysis of this chapter, the relationship between diaspora and migration as well as between diaspora and Heimat needs to be addressed – at least briefly. Unsurprisingly, migration and diaspora are closely related. Both are spatial and temporal. Looking at the examples provided in Stanišić’s novels, Aleksandar’s migration occurs from Bosnia to Germany (spatial) and, until Aleksandar arrives in an apartment in Germany, takes a certain amount of time (temporal). Similarly, diaspora is characterized by the rift between being in one place and not being able to return to another. But one significant difference is a diasporic spatiality and temporality that is characterized less by geographical movement and more by a shared past. After all, diaspora is usually a communal experience, e.g., the Yugoslavian diaspora in a certain city or federal state. Herkunft provides a poignant example of this in the chapter “Rechtschaffen, Loyal, Unermüdlich,” (2019, 87-91) where the narrator recounts the annual Yugoslavian Republic Day celebrations on November 29 after the fall of the Yugoslavian Republic. He describes men and women nostalgically singing songs and sharing stories about the “good old days,” coming from all over the world to cities that once were Yugoslavian. 66 people, mainly family, community, and specific locations. Furthermore, Heimaten are something that, like the term ‘Herkunft’, are innately individual. But this brief look into Herkunft also clearly distinguishes of its essential features from those of Heimaten, in particular Herkunft’s location in the past as well as its static nature. Heimaten, on the contrary, are often fluid and in flux. Migration, of course, adds another variable to both concepts. Herkunft, however, is weaponized too often in the context of migration and used as a signifier of exclusion from a Heimat. As Maria Stehle (2023) shows, in the context of migration and postmigration in particular, “[w]hen Heimat is considered together with migration it evokes the term Herkunft: some people can claim a (German) Heimat while others have a Herkunft. In this dichotomy, the racialized and essentialist meanings of both terms become apparent.” (2023, 87) The novel’s narrator acknowledges as much when he admits that he avoided admitting that he was engaging with his Herkunft for a long time, writing that it seemed backward and destructive to write “über meine oder unsere Herkunft zu sprechen in einer Zeit, in der Abstammung und Geburtsort wieder als Unterscheidungsmerkmale dienten, Grenzen neu befestigt wurden und sogenannte nationale Interessen auftauchten aus dem trockengelegten Sumpf der Kleinstaaterei.” (Stanišić 2019, 62, emphasis in original) But he then reiterates that, to avoid this pitfall, he explicitly focuses on people and what it means for those people to be born in a specific place. 2.3 Narratological Considerations As I briefly indicated in the introductory chapter, it is a critical intent of this dissertation project to focus on Telling Stories to Survive, on storytelling and narration on the diegetic level: narrators and characters that tell stories within the stories. It is not interested in the role of the author Saša Stanišić, nor does it argue for a reading of Stanišić’s novels as a means of authorial survival. But 67 this resolve demands for some conceptual thoughts. After all, the biographical similarities between Grammofon’s Aleksandar, the unnamed protagonist of “Gewässer,” and Saša Stanišić are plain. Furthermore, as will be discussed in 2.3.1, Herkunft is an autofictional book, its protagonist is Saša. And Stanišić wrote himself both in Fallensteller’s eponymous short story and, concealed to the point that any critic has yet to point to it, also into Vor dem Fest. In “Fallensteller,” there is a diegetic remark about Stanišić within the first five pages: “So einer war Lada geworden. Nachdem der Schriftsteller hier gewesen ist, der mit dem Buch über uns. Lada hat ihm ja damals alles gezeigt, so und so läuft es dort. Alleine hat der Typ sich höchstens mal zum Bäcker getraut, um nicht zu verhungern. Ein Jugo war das.” (2016a, 173) Towards the end of the short story, he is mentioned once more: “Wir wussten nicht mal, dass man für Literatur noch andere Preise gewinnen kann als den Nobelpreis und den einen, den der Jugo gewonnen hat.” (2016a, 250) For a quick investigative work in Vor dem Fest, it is relevant to keep in mind Lada’s statement that “der Typ sich höchstens mal zum Bäcker getraut [hat].” In the first literary visit to Fürstenfelde, there is mention of a run- down young man who is only ever seen in an Adidas tracksuit and is thus given the name “Adidas- Mann”: “Sobald Frau oder Herr Zieschke aufmachen, huscht er in die Bäckerei und bestellt O-Saft und Puddingbrezel.” (2016a, 179) He is mentioned once more, toward the end of the novel. Again, he is waiting for the bakery to open to order his “morgendliche Bestellung,” (2014, 252), a recurring order of orange juice and “Puddingbrezel.” Curiously, in both scenes, he appears injured as if attacked by an animal. In his second appearance, Adidas-Mann is also accosted by Lada in what is the perhaps most glaring example of the violence towards foreigners that lurks just below the surface of the “wir”-identity of the village (see Myrto Aspioti’s 2021 analysis of the novel). But it is not only the admittedly superficial bakery-clue that connects the “Jugo-Schriftsteller” of “Fallensteller” and Adidas-Mann of Vor dem Fest. The connection is solidified when we consider 68 a remark by Stanišić in his third Zürcher Poetikvorlesung. He recalls that the first time he ever visited Fürstenwerder, the village after which Fürstenfelde is primarily modelled, he went into a bakery and ordered a “Puddingbrezel.” (2017c, 42:50-43:00) Considering autofictional narrators, diegetic author inclusions, and Stanišić’s own statements in essays and lectures, how then does this dissertation project understand and utilize the notion of storytelling, particularly in service of surviving and in opposition to death? And how does it reconcile the exclusion of the author Saša Stanišić while simultaneously including his poetological remarks? 2.3.1 is going to answer these questions. 2.3.1 Storytelling and Narration Author Ivo Andrić (1892-1975) is to this day one of the most famous Bosnians and Yugoslavians. The former Yugoslavian ambassador to Germany (1939-1941) might also be one of the more prominent prisoners of the Germans, as he was arrested in 1941 after the invasion of Yugoslavia. Andrić’s novel The Bridge on the Drina (1945; Na Drini ćuprija), in particular, made him the country’s only writer to win the Nobel Prize as he was awarded the accolade in 1961 (over writers like Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, and J.R.R. Tolkien). The committee praised Andrić’s “epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country.” It is noteworthy that the use of “epic” stresses not only how deeply Andrić’s narratives are steeped in his country’s history, but specifically points to the importance and impact of telling stories. In his speech at the Nobel Banquet on December 10, 1961, Andrić unsurprisingly emphasized the significance of storytelling: The manner of telling and the form of the story vary according to periods and circumstances, but the taste for telling and retelling a story remains the same: the narrative flows endlessly and never runs dry. Thus, at times, one might almost believe that from the first dawn of consciousness throughout the ages, mankind has constantly been telling itself the same story, though with infinite variations, to the rhythm of its breath and pulse. […] 69 Or should the storyteller by his work help man to know and to recognize himself? Perhaps it is his calling to speak in the name of all those who did not have the ability or who, crushed by life, did not have the power to express themselves. Or could it be that the storyteller tells his own story to himself, like the child who sings in the dark in order to assuage his own fear? Or finally, could the aim of these stories be to throw some light on the dark paths into which life hurls us at times and to tell us about this life, which we live blindly and unconsciously, something more than we can apprehend and comprehend in our weakness? And thus the words of a good storyteller often shed light on our acts and on our omissions, on what we should do and on what we should not have done. Hence one might wonder whether the true history of mankind is not to be found in these stories, oral or written, and whether we might not at least dimly catch the meaning of that history. (1961) Andrić points to an essential desire in people, specifically that of telling stories, and outlines the ways in which storytelling may contribute to humankind and how it is inextricably connected to human histories. In the context of a project titled Telling Stories to Survive, I would be remiss to omit the perhaps most crucial statement Andrić makes on the character of storytelling: “And one might say that after the fashion of the legendary and eloquent Scheherazade, this story attempts to stave off the executioner, to suspend the ineluctable decree of the fate that threatens us, and to prolong the illusion of life and of time.“ Scheherazade, storyteller par excellence, is a well-known character in One Thousand and One Nights. In the frame narrative of One Thousand and One Nights, the monarch Shahryar vows to marry a new virgin every day and behead her the next morning after discovering his first wife’s unfaithfulness. Scheherazade, daughter of Shahryar’s chief vizier, volunteers to marry the vengeful monarch after her father is incapable of finding any more virgins of nobility. Once married and in Shahryar’s chambers, Scheherazade starts to tell her sister Dunyazad a story that captivates Shahryar. At the break of dawn, Scheherazade pauses her story, unfinished, which leads Shahryar to postpone her beheading to the next morning. Scheherazade, well-read and learned in histories, legends, and myths, continues to tell stories which she purposefully interrupts and pauses each dawn. Thus, every night Shahryar is excitedly waiting for the conclusion of the story of the previous night. Scheherazade continued to tell her 70 stories, 1000 stories in total, for 1001 nights at which point Shahryar had fallen in love with her, spared her life, and she remained at his side as his queen. Perhaps no other story encapsulates the enchanting qualities of storytelling and the close connection between narrating stories and surviving than Scheherazade, a narrator who is both homodiegetic in the frame narrative of One Thousand and One Nights and heterodiegetic in the stories she tells. What makes Scheherazade such a crucial, almost mythical character is that her essence transcends being a mere character. Instead, the notion of diegetically telling stories, independent of whoever the author may be, takes center stage, both in how people think of stories, but also for the purpose of this dissertation: Telling Stories to Survive. Keeping Scheherazade’s spirit in the back of our minds, I will follow what Adriana Cavarero writes in Relating Narratives. Storytelling and Selfhood (1997): “At the center of the ancient art of telling stories lies the figure of the narrator, not that of the author.” (141) In principle, we may understand a narrator “as the agent that utters the (linguistic, visual, or other) signs that constitute the text.” (Bal 2021, 28) According to Mieke Bal, this understanding of the narrator “avoid[s] confusions that ultimately lead to an appropriation of authority” and “a blurring of textual nuances.” (Bal 2021, 28) The turn towards the narrator and away from the author is, in large part, indebted to Roland Barthes’ seminal essay “The Death of the Author” (1967). Barthes admonished that the “explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it.” (1977, 143) This imposition of an author, argues Barthes, limits a text as it “furnish[es] it with a final signified, to close the writing,” (1977, 147) thus the text is explained by reference to the author, their perceived intention, and their biography. Instead, he concludes, “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination,” (Barthes 1977, 148) which he understands to be the reader of any given text. Shifting the focus to the narrator, as both Cavarero 71 and Bal propose, however, allows us “to emancipate both author and reader from the stronghold of a misconceived authorial or interpretative authority.” (Bal 2021, 26) As Cavarero writes about Scheherazade, she “lives in order to tell stories,” and death “is challenged by an explicit choice.” (1997, 123) We can easily flip the first statement on its head: she tells stories in order to live. The challenge to death, the explicit choice, is thus the decision to tell stories. In this sense, it is possible to comprehend storytelling not only as a narratological, but also as an existentialist action. Lost lineages, fractured histories, and silenced voices, for example, can be articulated in storytelling. In an interview with German journalist Karin Janker, Stanišić stated: “Manchmal kann Fiktion die Realität erträglicher machen.” (n.d.) This is important for the diegetic narrators and characters in Stanišić’s texts. But storytelling is also able to challenge universal categorizations, in that each story has the power to highlight individual emotions, histories, and achievements. In so doing, it emphasizes the particulars that make up a universal without falling into the trap of generalizing; it is a way to multiple a discourse (or discourses). This, too, is an aspect of surviving. 2.3.1 Autofiction and Unreliability In 2017, Saša Stanišić wrote a review of Bosnian writer Miljenko Jergović’s novel Rod (2013) on the occasion of the publication of its German translation (Die unerhörte Geschichte meiner Familie). In the review, published on July 27 on Zeit Online, Stanišić describes Jergović’s writing style which, without direct acknowledgment by Stanišić, appears to have overlap with his own: “Das ist ein Buch über das Vielleicht, […] die Mutmaßung methodisch, auch die Mutmaßung über das, was verloren gegangen ist, was mit in den Tod genommen wurde.” (2017d) He identifies himself with much that Jergović discusses, from the “permanenten Identitätsstress, der uns heute, 72 damals und immer umtreibt und klein und groß macht und umbringt und rettet,” the difficult “Abschied des Erzählers von seiner Mutter,” languages, and the honest engagement with a country’s, but also a family’s, history. For Stanišić, the novel is “das monumentalste Buch.” Of particular interest, however, is the following paragraph that could have been written exactly like this two years later about Stanišić’s own Herkunft and, to a lesser extent, is also applicable to Vor dem Fest: Jergović ist ein listenreicher Autor, wenn es um die Verquickung von Erfindung und Dokument geht, seine Position als letzter Nachfahre nutzt er gekonnt – niemand kann ihm mehr widersprechen, nur er selbst, er korrigiert, bezichtigt sich der Lüge und des Verschweigens, um dann mit einer anderen vorgeblichen Wahrheit anzukommen und lautem Geschrei, weil die erfundene Wahrheit ihm beschönigend erscheint. (2017d) The importance of negotiating fictionality and truth is exacerbated in the context of Stanišić’s book Herkunft because of its clear biographical elements. But Herkunft is not an autobiography nor is it a novel. In a (virtual) reading and Q&A as part of UC Berkeley’s Fictions of Origins series in October 2021, Stanišić stated that he refrained from titling Herkunft a novel, preferring to forego any kind of categorizing.42 Not a novel nor an autobiography, Herkunft’s narrative style nonetheless demands a closer inspection because one aspect is evident: the book combines both biography and fiction. One may argue that every autobiography is, likewise, not without fictionality; after all, this is a sentiment already expressed by Goethe as he wrote in a letter to König Ludwig von Bayern in December 1829 “dass es nicht möglich sei, dass eigene Leben zu schildern ‘ohne die Rückerinerung und also die Einbildungskraft wirken zu lassen’ und der Autobiograph nicht umhin komme, ‘das dichterische Vermögen auszuüben.’” (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2013, 8)43 But just as Stanišić does not see Herkunft as a novel, he also inserts a narratological 42 Because of its autofictional nature and the impossibility of clear-cut categorization, I refer to Herkunft as a ‘book’ and not a ‘novel’ throughout my dissertation. 43 The title of Goethe’s autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (four volumes between 1811-1833), speaks to this idea as well. 73 statement into his review of Die unerhörte Geschichte meiner Familie when reading Jergović’s novel as an example for “die Unmöglichkeit autobiografischen Erzählens” and, hence, an example of “die Möglichkeiten und Notwendigkeiten biografischer Fiktion.” (2017d) Stanišić thus simultaneously rejects the idea of autobiography while stressing the necessity of interweaving biographical and fictional aspects. Grammofon, Herkunft, and the short story “Gewässer” all are characterized by this interweaving. And even in Vor dem Fest, we see this strategy, as Stanišić turned the existing villages of Fürstenwerder, Fürstenwalde, Prenzlau, and Kraatz into the fictionalized Fürstenfelde (Magenau 2014), drew heavily on conversations with inhabitants of the Uckermark, and fictionalized actual historical texts that he found during his research in the Uckermark in the novel.44 But it is, to a lesser degree, Grammofon and, mainly, Herkunft that demand a closer engagement with the notion of interweaving biography and fiction. Coined by French writer Julien Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 (Gratton 2001, 86; Vilain 2010, 5; Wagner-Egelhaaf 2013; Gronemann 2019, 241), the term ‘autofiction’ can be understood as a fiction that consists for the most part of real events and facts, but it contains elements that are clearly fictional. In Herkunft, for example, we have author Saša Stanišić and the narrator and protagonist, Saša. They overlap in many points but are not the same or, as Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf writes about autofiction, “brings one or the other dimension into the foreground while still allowing the other to permanently resonate.” (2022, 33) This is also why, following Maria Stehle (2023), I refer to Herkunft’s narrator as Saša 44 The story of the “Wunderferkel,” a piglet with a human head (2014, 70-72), at the same extremely funny but also very intriguing (see the analysis by Dominik Zink [2017], especially pages 71-80), for example, Stanišić found in the archive of another Uckermark city, the city Prenzlau, written by a priest in the 16th century. Stanišić stated that the note merely consisted of three lines (see Steiner 2014, 8:55-9:55): “Nehmen wir mal an, das ist wahr. Was war denn dann? Was ist denn danach passiert, mit dem Schwein? Wie haben die Männer des Dorfs auf dieses Schwein reagiert? […] Ich nehme also diese drei Zeilen und erweitere sie durch die eigene Geschichte, indem ich die Männer des Dorfes da hinführe und mache dadurch vielleicht eine Art von kommunikativer Auseinandersetzung mit diesem Pfarrer. Wir sind dann gemeinsam ein Team und erzählen diese Geschichte. Er gibt den Anfang vor und ich erzähl das Ende davon.” 74 throughout the dissertation and use Stanišić when talking about the author. Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor (2022) remark that most debates on autofiction “usually mention one or more of the following characteristics, all of which can characterize autofictional texts, but none of which is unique or defining: a combination of real and invented elements; onomastic correspondence between author and character or narrator; and stylistic and linguistic experimentation.” (1) While autofiction seems to lack a definition that goes beyond the combination of biographical and fictional, Claudia Gronemann (2019) argues for autofictional writing as “existential,” in that it “becomes an integral part of existence, a never-ending process of producing subjectivity through language. The referential self conceives of itself […] as a part of a fiction.” (245) The existential nature of autofictional writing will become clearer throughout my dissertation (particularly in chapter three). Gronemann reads autofiction as an acceptance that truth and meaning cannot fully be legible and thus both narrator and author inherently know that they are within the realm of fiction. But is precisely the inclusion and, at times, juxtaposition of fictionality and biography that allow autofiction a “polyphonic” character (Egendal 2022, 148). This polyphony allows autofictional texts to both scrutinize the narrative voice(s), but also the intersections of biography and fiction which allow for the diegetic negotiation of multiple forms of belonging and, as Lydia Wever (2019) argues, can become “a key mode with which to complicate and contest [a] version of the nation, which excluded or minimalised other versions of belonging.” (230) Similarly, both Hywel Dix and Helle Egendal understand autofiction as a political, destabilizing, and dialogical mode of writing. Egendal, for one, argues that autofiction’s “flexibility and variety […] affords authors multiple ways in which to express and negotiate their multilingual identities” and “operates with […] an open mind toward plural cultural and lingual relations.” (2022, 143) Dix, who emphasizes 75 the “dialogue between text and pretext” in his understanding of autofiction, stresses autofiction’s use and usefulness in combination with what he calls “post-conflict narratives,” claiming autofictional mode’s “capacity to mediate between individual and collective forms of memory, on the one hand, and, at the same time, to radically destabilize notions of absolute truth and authenticity.” (2022, 185)45 If a narrator or narrative voice openly weaves fiction into the story, does that make the narrator unreliable? If the narrator, as Stanišić claimed for Herkunft in his lecture at UC Berkeley, oftentimes “give[s] clear signals that I am inventing something,” if the narrator considers fiction a necessity for their story, can we still consider them as unreliable? In his discussion of unreliable narration, Bruno Zerweck (2001) states that unreliable narration is dependent on a “narrator’s unintentional self-incrimination.” (156) But Saša, the narrative voice in Herkunft, openly acknowledges his reliance of divergence and fictions, negating any unintentional self- incrimination. In fact, the narrative voices in Stanišić’s texts appear to undermine and satirize the idea of the unreliable narrator. In Herkunft, Saša takes a paragraph to describe his father’s first job in Germany, and him working in a different area of the country with industrial pipes: “Am Ende des Tages hatte er manchmal mit den Kollegen mehrere Rohrkilometer zurückgelegt. Und wenn sie keine Lust hatten, zurückzulaufen, legten sie sich dort zum Schlafen hin, und am Morgen brachte die Frühschicht ihnen Brötchen und Aufschnitt mit.” (2019, 139) In the very next paragraph, Saša continues: “Vater sagt heute: Unsinn. Das war ganz anders gewesen mit den 45 He explains: “This is because, as a mode of writing that involves a dialogic interplay between text and pretext, autofiction has the capacity to recall to public consciousness brutal episodes from the colonial past which have been left to drop out of public memory, giving rise to a collective silence and forgetting which certain authors feel a direct personal responsibility for re-presenting. In the process, they challenge that cultural amnesia at simultaneously an individual and a collective level of discourse, so that autofiction has the capacity to enact an integration of subjective narratives with concerns that are social and historical, or of ‘I’ with ‘we,’ and so re-inscribe expressions of collective experience.” (Dix 2022, 187) 76 Röhren in Schwarzheide. Die waren weder so groß, noch hat man darin je übernachtet, und überhaupt: ‘Frag doch einfach, dann musst du dir nicht so ein Zeug ausdenken.’” (2019, 139). This shows that the narrator is fully aware of making up a story – he is not ashamed of doing so or tries to hide it, but instead justifies it by saying: “Ich wusste tatsächlich wenig über Vaters Zeit in der Lausitz.” (2019, 139) The direct juxtaposition of the two paragraphs, both narrated by Saša, highlights that the narrator fills the lack of memories and knowledge through fiction. Simultaneously, Saša is not concerned about being transparent; he does not shy away from clearly showing what is fictional in this passage.46 A second, less straightforward but also more intricate example can be found in Vor dem Fest. Anna Geher, one of the protagonists of the novel, tries to tear of a rose twig from a bush in at the corner of a field next to her house. The field is described rather uncannily and, throughout the novel, is repeatedly associated with death. In this particular scene, it appears as if the rose twig is fighting back, not allowing Anna to take it: “Der Zweig wehrt sich zäh. Anna ruckelt dran, zieht. Das Feld wehrt sich. Das Feld wehrt sich nicht. Erst im Menschen schlägt die Natur die Augen auf und nimmt von sich Notiz. Das Feld ist der Mensch im Dornenfell; so einem glaub kein Wort.” (2014, 80) In his 2017 analysis of the novel, Dominik Zink explores this passage in detail, pointing first to intertextual references: “Goethes Heideröslein […], ebenso Schellings Diktum, dass die Natur im Menschen die Augen aufschlägt und merkt, dass sie da ist.” (58) Reading Anna’s struggle with the rose twig through Goethe’s poem and Schelling’s dictum, Zink asks “ob nicht die Metaphorizität ein Verständnis derart verstellt, dass die Erzählerinstanz den Rat gibt, kein Wort zu glauben.” (Zink 2017, 58-59) “[S]o einem glaub kein Wort,” then, the narrator’s implicit warning of his own narrative voice, toys with the notion of unreliability. In a sense, the narrator 46 We might, perhaps, speak of a paradoxical narrator instead of an unreliable one, though this idea needs further thought and consideration, perhaps in a future project or when turning the dissertation into a monograph. 77 instigates a ‘chicken-egg’ conundrum: if the narrator is unreliable, can the reader believe the narrator if they say that they are unreliable? And if they are not unreliable, then the reader would have to accept to “glaub kein Wort” which would contradict the assumed reliability. What the narrators in Stanišić’s texts exhibit is a disregard for the idea of unreliability in the narration. The narrators are aware that there are gaps in memory and gaps in the story that need to be filled to continue; moments where the imagination and associative reactions take over. But even at the points where these gaps and moments are not clearly distinguishable – and they exist – it does not change the overall comportment towards unreliability as something that is overstated. In satirizing and undermining the idea of the unreliable narrator, the narrative voices highlight that, whether fictional, biographical, or a mix of both, the essential core themes – family, belonging, memory, grief, lineage – are wholly unfazed by unreliability: “Fiktion, wie ich sie mir denke, ist ein offenes System aus Erfindung, Wahrnehmung und Erinnerung, das sich am wirklich Geschehenen reibt.” (2019, 20) Recent trends in the discourse on unreliable narration see the unreliable narrator not as authorial intent, but instead, in a reader-centered approach, as a projection by readers trying to resolve ambiguities and textual inconsistencies (see Zerweck 2001, 151). But even conceptualizing unreliability from this standpoint leads us to the same outcome: ambiguities and inconsistencies are, within the diegeses of Stanišić’s texts, crucial. Memory is often ambiguous and inconsistent; lineages are marred by ambiguities and inconsistencies, just as grief and trauma are. Recalling a childhood memory in Višegrad, Saša reminisces about the “Tag der Jugend,” an important Yugoslavian holiday celebrated on May 25th of every year. One aspect of the annual celebrations was a relay race where selected “junge Frauen und Männer […] das Stück Holz durch alle Landesteile [trugen] und […] es auf den letzten Metern Tito in die Hand [drückten].” (2019, 232) 78 One year, Saša was one of the children picked to pass the “Stafette” from one runner to the next. Amid his recall, he realizes that he cannot pinpoint the year as the information he finds online clashes with his memory (in particular, with the woodenness of the “Stafette” as he remembers it): “In meiner Erinnerung ist die Stafette ein Holzknüppel mit fünfzackigem Stern. Vielleicht also doch nicht 1987? Die 1986 war ebenfalls nicht aus Holz.” (2019, 234) This uncertainty, however, does not impact him, as he happily continues his recall: “Wie auch immer, ob 1986 oder 1987: Ich trug die Pioniermütze,…” (2019, 234) The memory continues for another page before it is immediately tested at the start of the next chapter (“Wir sind nie zuhaus”) where the reader is met with excerpts of a WhatsApp-conversation between Saša and his mother about the memory in question. Saša learns that it was, indeed, 1986. But he also learns that the ‘Stafette’ he carried was a local one, made out of wood. “Die Stafette der Jugend, die nach Belgrad ist, die echte, die hab ich nie gehalten?,” he asks. His mother replies: “Nie.” (2019, 237) The WhatsApp-conversation, too, is mediated as the readers are left to guess how Saša might have reacted to this news. Shortly after, however, he rejects this new information: “Ich richte mich in der Vergangenheit ein, nicht einmal Tatsache muss sie sein.” (2019, 237) His memory is both ambiguous and inconsistent. The hint of unreliability that one might locate in the juxtaposition between memory and his mother’s correction is immediately undermined by Saša’s statement regarding his past. After all, throughout Herkunft in particular (though not exclusively), his memories are, more than anything, “Variablen der Sehnsucht.” (2019, 108) Stanišić’s texts assert autofictional modi that undermine any unreliability, that emphasize, even celebrate the fictional (“In meinem Zuhause wohnen die Fiktionen,” 2019, 170) and in all his novels/books Stanišić is not afraid to even incorporate elements of the magical (and of magical realism). More importantly, the focus on the autofictionality of Herkunft and, more broadly, the 79 important interconnections of reality and fictionality in his other writings is necessary because of two crucial characteristics relevant to Stanišić’s texts: the incorporation of both the real and the fictional into the narratives – at times autofictional narratives – is used continuously to engage with fractured lineages, with gaps in memories, both personal and communal memories, and to engage with them in a way that mirrors the thought of Zimbabwean novelist, playwright, and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga: “The best writing opens the lesion again and again and cleanses.” (2022, 22) But it is also used to dialogically and polyphonically destabilize what is viewed as the truth in dominant sociocultural structures and discourses, to be able to juxtapose but also combine fictional and real to enrich the narratives, to provide more opportunities to engage with the stories’ themes: “Fiction is not the opposite of reality. It is a special inflection of reality, the latter enriched by the imagination. In this way, art is able to provide visions, including knowledge, that other forms of knowledge production have difficulty achieving.” (Bal 2021, 35) Or in the words of American novelist Toni Morrison: “That way I can explore two worlds – the actual and the possible.” (1995, 97) Secondly, emphasizing the fictionality invites us to move our focus to the stories the narrative voices (Saša, Aleksandar, the “wir” of Fürstenfelde) tell and, conversely, to deemphasize the author Saša Stanišić. Drawing on this second aspect, I want to strongly highlight that my approach throughout this dissertation emphasizes that I do not conflate the author’s biography with content, an interpretative guide, or – and this is most important – authorial reflection: “If I speak of the artist, it is to present her not as the narrator but as the creator of a work that offers a narration and, consequently, a narrator for our consideration.” (Bal 2021, 35) I am advocating not for the disavowal of the author, the Barthesian death of the author, but merely the disavowal of the author’s biography. Stanišić’s ruminations on his writing process, his essays and lectures, provide 80 us with a layer for understanding his narratives, but one that is not dependent on his lived migration experiences, but instead are informed by his narratological and storytelling strategies. Perhaps the experiences of migration influenced how he understood his writing process. Perhaps they did not. It is irrelevant. What is relevant is the contributions that Stanišić’s engagements with narratological questions can make to the discourses of his narratives, of the stories told diegetically. In this regard, he is primarily someone who has written and told stories, not someone who was forced to flee. 2.4 Anxiety, Death, and Survival Titling my dissertation project Telling Stories to Survive and engaging with death throughout most, if not all of the chapters naturally demands a discussion of these two concepts. How exactly can we understand them? Is there a difference in comportment towards death if it is your own versus the death of another person? What is the relationship of an existential notion like death and a narratological category like storytelling? Is there a difference in thinking about death if it occurs in the contexts of war (Grammofon) or if it looms because of illness and old age (Herkunft, “Gewässer”)? There are numerous questions that surround these two ideas and their reciprocal relationship. This subchapter attempts to answer them in a concise manner. To do so, it will be productive to begin with the concept of anxiety, as it helps us approximate death and, inevitably, also life. In Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard retells the story of Abraham in some detail. His focus, however, is God’s command that Abraham sacrifice Isaac. Kierkegaard bemoans that the readings of the story, both in history and in his time, misunderstand the story, representing it in clichés (cf. 1983, 28). To begin with, Kierkegaard argues for a teleological suspension of the ethical (for a purpose, i.e., here God’s command) that is taking place in the story. While we usually 81 find a telos in ethics (e.g., I want to buy a present for person X, because I want person X to be happy), Abraham’s telos cannot be located in the ethical realm. After all, it is a norm that you should not kill. Abraham, however, finds his telos in a higher realm – that of the religious. To get there, however, a suspension of the telos is needed. This suspension is highly individual, as any generalization would return it back to the plane of the ethical. But the question arising is ‘how is Abraham able to suspend the ethical telos?’. Kierkegaard argues that it can be found in something that is lacking, or rather, omitted from the story and most readings of it: “anxiety.” (1983, 28) This anxiety is twofold: on the one hand, Abraham, at least for a brief moment, must have felt anxious. After all, he was about to break an ethical norm (do not kill). Only in confronting this anxiety and in overcoming it, is Abraham able to find a new telos in faith, in the religious. In this realm, Abraham is serene and unwavering. But this, according to Kierkegaard, manifests a contradiction for the reader: “The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac – but precisely in this contradiction is the anxiety that can make a person sleepless, and yet without this anxiety Abraham is not who he is.” (1983, 30) Without anxiety, Abraham cannot unwaveringly sacrifice Isaac, because he is not in faith. At the same time, the reader cannot identify with Abraham, says Kierkegaard. But the paradox, more clearly formulated on page 35 (“During all this time he had faith, he had faith that God would not demand Isaac of him, and yet he was willing to sacrifice him if it was demanded”), is supposed to startle the reader, make them feel uncomfortable, ill at ease. How can Abraham be convinced that he will not have to sacrifice Isaac, but at the same time can be just as convinced that he would kill Isaac if needed? Kierkegaard proposes that this is where anxiety sets in for the reader – an anxiety, he argues, that will demand of the reader to confront themselves. And more 82 yet, by being ill at ease (Heidegger’s unheimlich), the reader, in their anxiety, becomes unsettled about their place in the world (Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-sein) and even their self (Heidegger’s Dasein). But how can that anxiety manage to move us from being unsettled about Abraham’s story to being unsettled about our Dasein? For Kierkegaard, it is obvious: were anxiety an emotion and thus focused or threatened solely by an external object, it could not force us to make this qualitative leap. But anxiety is a Stimmung, and, thus, can attune (stimmen) us in such a way that our overall being is affected.47 In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard expands in detail on anxiety, distinguishing, among other things, between objective and subjective anxiety.48 Importantly, Kierkegaard brings anxiety in connection with freedom. Kierkegaard thus defines anxiety as “freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.” (1980, 42) Anxiety is the actualization of freedom for the individual which means the possibility of having an almost innumerable number of possibilities to choose from: what am I going to eat? Which of the hundreds of TV series on Netflix do I watch? Of course, that also extends to more important questions, such as: What am I going to study? Do I ask out a girl that I like? Adding to the freedom of all these possibilities are two further realizations: (i) each possibility that I decide for will lead again to new possibilities; and (ii) I have to make a decision at some point. All of this, Kierkegaard writes, makes anxiety the “dizziness of freedom.” (1980, 61) He writes: “Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but in itself.” (1980, 49) In other words: one encounters possibilities entangled in possibilities He compares this 47 Kierkegaard’s original Danish word, sometimes translated as attunement, is ‘Stemning.’ 48 “In the strictest sense, subjective anxiety is the anxiety that is posited in the individual and is the consequence of his sin. […] If the term ‘anxiety’ is to be understood in this sense, the contrast of an objective anxiety is removed, and anxiety appears precisely as what it is, namely as the subjective. The distinction between objective and subjective anxiety belongs in the contemplation of the world and the subsequent individual’s state of innocence.” (Kierkegaard 1980, 56) 83 “dizziness of freedom” with the feeling that one has when standing at the edge of a cliff, looking into the abyss. Here, too, anxiety sets in: I could slip and fall into the abyss; I have the freedom to turn around and walk away (but perhaps I am going to miss something incredible); I have the freedom to jump into the abyss. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), in Sein und Zeit (1927), understands anxiety as a fundamental Stimmung of being: “Das Wovor der Angst ist das In-der-Welt-sein als solches;” (186) “[d]aß das Bedrohende nirgends ist, charakterisiert das Wovor der Angst. […] ‘Nirgends’ aber bedeutet nicht nichts, sondern darin liegt Gegend überhaupt, Erschlossenheit von Welt überhaupt für das wesentlich räumliche In-Sein.” (2006, 186) Anxiety is essential for existing in the world. And even more, the mere existence itself is what creates anxiety, due to the number of possibilities and their implications: “Was beengt, ist nicht dieses oder jenes, aber auch nicht alles Vorhandene zusammen als Summe, sondern die Möglichkeit überhaupt, das heißt die Welt selbst.” (2006, 187, italics in the original) The core of anxiety is being-in-the-world as such because once one perceives das Nichts, one also perceives the potentiality and the possibilities. Through this perception, Stimmung, and more particularly anxiety, is necessary for Dasein to see its own potentiality. This potentiality is essential, or existenzial, for Dasein which, in turn, makes both Stimmung and the Stimmung of anxiety existenzial. In anxiety, life sees its potentialities as well as its finitude. It is especially the engagement with finitude that becomes increasingly relevant. For Heidegger, in fact, it is essential: “Der Tod ist eine Weise zu sein, die das Dasein übernimmt, sobald es ist.” (2006, 245) Heidegger argues that existence can only be understood through the inevitability of death. In a sense, the mood of anxiety functions as a mediator because it highlights the all-encompassing certainty of death, though in death it is felt “ursprünglicher und eindringlicher.” (2006, 251) Christian Bermes speaks of the “Inversion des Todes” which he describes as follows: “Unter der Inversion des Todes ist die These zu verstehen, dass dem Tod 84 gegenüber dem Leben in dem Sinne eine Priorität eingeräumt wird, indem erst der Tod das Leben verständlich mache und das Leben selbst ein Leben-zum-Tode sei.” (2017, 174) Focusing on life, Friedrich Nietzsche understands it to mean “fortwährend etwas von sich abstoßen, das sterben will.” It is a simultaneous falling towards death and pushing away that signals a struggle against any particular moment in death. This struggle against death as one facet of life is something that marks Stanišić’s narratives. Both the awareness of being towards death and the narrated experience conveys a grappling with death. One tells stories not to die: “Das Erzählen ist immer auch nur Ablenkung - Ablenkung von dem Grauen. In Augenblicken existenzieller Krise kann es aber auch eine Überlebensstrategie sein, eine Selbstvergewisserung einer Welt, der man misstraut.” (Stanišić 2017a, 47:34 - 47:52) Storytelling takes on the negotiations of death and that which threatens and represents death: violence, exclusion, and the ontological annihilation that Frantz Fanon describes as the “zone of non-being.” (Fanon 2008, xii) When Saša, the autofictional narrator of Herkunft, keeps his grandmother alive in the narrative, he does not do so to triumph over death or even in the hopes of negating it in the long run. Instead of denying death, Saša’s storytelling engenders agency as it enables him to provide a death he deems more fitting. In the (virtual) reading and Q&A at UC Berkeley, Stanišić stated that one of his goals with the final choose-your-own-adventure part of Herkunft was to (narratively and diegetically) lead his grandmother to her last wish, the reunion with her husband. One of the possible endings thus reads: “Ich öffne die Augen. Großmutter und Großvater sitzen da und sehen einander an.” (Stanišić 2019, 349) Following Elias Canetti, Saša knows he cannot escape his grandmother’s death, but he can change his comportment towards it.49 This change in comportment, storytelling’s agency, can engender different outcomes; it can 49 “Entkommen könntest du nur in eine andere Haltung zum Tod. Du kannst nie entkommen.” (Canetti 2014, 164) 85 articulate memories and lineages, as Aleksandar does in Grammofon; it can force a narrator to distinguish between what is important and what it is not important, as the ferryman’s death in Vor dem Fest slowly does; and it can test a narrator’s different narratological approaches (humor50, irony, associations, chronology, lists). In this context, surviving takes on the form of an agency that creates opportunities to articulate and retain, that carries lineages and memories, and that denies the inevitable loss to extend beyond the biological life of a person. I use the verb “surviving” instead of survival to not only indicate the active part of storytelling, the agency, but also to stress that surviving is a continuing process and not a concluded event. In the sense articulated here, surviving means acknowledging “death as a sort of literary limit, the horizon of the possible testimonial, and the experiential limit of what can be narrated” (Allan 2020, 284) and transcending it through storytelling, specifically by accentuating that death can never fully erase the many multiplicities that make up a person: as long as someone tells your story, certain aspects of you keep on surviving. But there is a second form of death that storytellers, in particular those that are marginalized, minoritized, and silenced have to grapple with. It is a death that does not end one’s biological life, but one that dispels one to the “zone of non-being.” I am speaking of social death. Orlando Patterson provides a detailed analysis in his 1982 Slavery and Social Death, though the focus on slavery makes Patterson’s analysis one of the most extreme forms of social death. But according to the characteristics of social death highlighted by Patterson, it certainly has applicability in other contexts as well.51 One of the markers of social death is a violent enforcement 50 “Humor ist aber in beiden Romanen am Anfang trotz des Todes ein erzählstrategisches Verfahren.” (Stanišić 2017b, 28:13-28:18) 51 See for example Lisa Marie Cacho’s Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (2012). 86 of assimilation where people are “not allowed freely to integrate the experiences of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory.” (1982, 5) Many of these aspects are, indeed, applicable to the treatment that many marginalized groups experience, for example the distrust and resentment shown to Muslims in Germany or the reactions to people speaking Turkish in public (see chapter four). Social death also occurs in the liminal state of “[i]nstitutionalized marginality,” (Patterson 1982, 46) which is another lived reality for marginalized and minoritized peoples in Germany and elsewhere, as chapter four discusses in detail. Though Patterson applies the following understanding of social death to the context of slavery, the implications of the two modes discussed carry through to the 21st century: We may summarize the two modes of representing the social death that was slavery by saying that in the intrusive mode the slave was conceived of as someone who did not belong because he was an outsider, while in the extrusive mode the slave became an outsider because he did not (or no longer) belonged. (Patterson 1982, 44) As Monish Bhatia explains in the context of refugees in the 21st century, for example, the “socially dead live in a state of liminality and limbo, subjected to violences, and rendered disposable.” (2018, 199) Although there is no biological finitude, no death in the strict sense, that must be survived, surviving social death is nonetheless as difficult as it is important. How can storytelling aid in surviving and, unlike biological death, even work towards overcoming social death? This is, in large part, the question that chapters four and five address. But briefly stated, storytelling can foster surviving because it allows narrators to clearly formulate the consequences of social death. Storytelling allows us, as Stanišić says, to understand that “[w]enn Menschen Situationen als verdammt nochmal wirklich definieren, dann sind sie in ihren Konsequenzen wirklich.” (2017c, 48:22 - 48:28) Storytelling enables descriptions of the impact and violence of social death that cannot be denied; in that sense, storytelling literally gives a narrator (or a character) a voice. 87 Storytelling thus empowers. It promotes the articulation of memories, lineages, experiences, and lived realities that are present in a culture or society, but are ignored, suppressed, or not valued. More importantly, storytelling can show the ways and forms in which these memories, lineages, experiences, and lived realities shape society without being acknowledged or perceived as such. Storytelling can show both the sociocultural multiplicity and the singularities from which we emerge into multiplicities. It shows how human imagination and artistic expression have the power to bring up what was thought lost, but also imagine what is possible. In that sense, storytelling can educate, create empathy, and can start conversations. Through stories, it can capture another’s attention where they otherwise would have looked away. Thus, storytelling can connect and hence has the possibility to actively work towards belonging and, more importantly, a non-hierarchical co-belonging that works against the idea of outsiders. Stories survive and with them, so can their narrators, their characters, but most importantly, their themes and ideas. 2.5 Decolonization and Decoloniality Approaching the term as generally as possible, ‘decolonization’ speaks for itself. The prefix ‘de’ indicates reversing or removing something, hence decolonization is the reversal or removal of colonialism. But decolonization cannot be approached by merely looking at generalities; decolonization is a precise and particular response to concrete historical periods and events, such as the colonial empires in Africa, America, and the Caribbean, and their structural and metaphysical remnants. Although scholars like Táíwò Olúfẹ́mi argue that decolonization ended after the political independence of colonized countries,52 the “mere persistence of racism and 52 See Táíwò Olúfẹ́mi, Against Decolonization. Taking African Agency Seriously (2022). 88 civilizational rankings53 tells us that the process of decolonization is not complete when one gains a flag and perhaps a parliament.” (Stern Forthcoming, 115) What exactly, then, is decolonization? A brief clarification is needed before discussing the concept of decolonization: is there a difference between postcolonial and decolonial? Both terms are often presented and used side-by-side or even interchangeably. However, in my dissertation project I will distinguish between the two. As the prefix “post” indicates, postcolonial refers to a temporal term that is often focused on the sins of the past, working through the historical colonial periods, and philosophically critiquing Western thought. The term ‘decolonial’ looks at bringing together different discourses, often through an emphasis on literature, to create conversations to highlight the positive possibilities of merging ways of thinking. Decolonial thinking, thus, is looking at various particulars to help articulate a universal where all voices are heard. In that sense, decolonial thinking is anticipatory (and perhaps utopian) of the future. Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe argues that both the postcolonial and decolonial ideas “began with an experience of decentering.” (2021, 4) For centuries, argue Jean and John Comaroff in Theory From the South (2012), Europe has treated other parts of the world, like Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Asia “less as sources of refined knowledge than as reservoirs of raw fact: of the historical, natural, and ethnographic minutiae from which Euromodernity might fashion its testable theories and transcendent truths, its axioms and certitudes, its premises, postulates, and principles.” (1) Mbembe argues that “throughout its history, European thought has tended to conceive of identity […] in terms of a relation between similar beings – of being itself emerging and manifesting itself in its own state, or its own mirror.” (Mbembe 2017, 1) This relation of similar beings has always been a relation of hierarchies. Instead, 53 “[T]he ancient world, the orient, the primitive world, the third world, the underdeveloped world, the developing world, and now the global south.” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 1) 89 Mbembe proposes the idea of “mutual belonging (cobelonging) to a common world” (2017, 1) that is derived from a decentered world, a world that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o describes as shifting from a single universality to a pluriversality which counters hegemonical and hierarchical claims of supremacy and leads to “the plurality of centres.” (1993, 25) This idea wa Thiong’o later termed “Globalectics” which “is derived from the shape of the globe. On its surface, there is no center; any point is equally a center.” (2014, 8) Instead of a dialectic that follows a centered paradigm, he paints a beautiful picture of what could be: The wealth of a common global culture will then be expressed in the particularities of our different languages and cultures very much like a universal garden of many-coloured flowers. The 'flowerness' of the different flowers is expressed in their very diversity. But there is cross-fertilisation between them. And what is more they all contain in themselves the seeds of a new tomorrow. (1993, 24) This decentering is the decentering of Europe; it is an idea that is not based on value judgments, but instead derived from independence movements and global opportunities. A decentered Europe, for the first time in centuries, allows other areas of the world and, thus, other cultures, languages, experiences, epistemologies, and peoples to share the stage. For example, Mbembe opens his Critique of Black Reason with the following image: “I envision this book as a river with many tributaries, since history and all things flow toward us now. Europe is no longer the center of gravity of the world.” (Mbembe 2017, 1) Because Europe has lost its (imposed) gravitational pull, lineages, discourses, and ideas now flow away from Europe and towards Africa. It is an unbridled affirmation of African agency and value. Jean and John Comaroff argue that in the 21st century, “it is the global south that affords privileged insight into the workings of the world at large” (2012, 1) because “it is the south that often is the first to feel the effects of world-historical forces, the south in which radically new assemblages of capital and labor are taking shape, thus to prefigure the future of the global north.” (Comaroff & Comaroff 2012, 12) They also point to the 90 transformation of “Euromodern nation-states” through the migration of formerly colonized populations which is one of the ways “in which the global north is becoming more like the south.” (2012, 13) In general, there has been a trend over the last decades where the global north can be located in the south and the south in the north, but also where global north and global south come together within the confines of an individual country, for example in the form of ever-widening divides in wealth, access to housing and healthcare, and education levels. In his collections of essays titled Out of the Dark Night (2021), Mbembe formulates the trajectory of the world and the philosophical aim of decolonization “in one phrase: the disenclosure of the world [la déclosion du monde].” (61) Following French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, Mbembe understands disenclosure as “synonymous with opening, a surging up, the advent of something new, a blossoming”: “The question of the disenclosure of the world – of belonging to the world, inhabitance of the world, creation of the world, or the conditions in which we make a world and constitute ourselves as inheritors of the world – is at the heart of anticolonial thought and the notion of decolonization.” (Mbembe 2021, 61) Through disenclosure, we can engage with the tabula rasa that Fanon demanded as the starting point of decolonization (see Mbembe 2021, 55). We can test the boundaries, advantages and gaps of our perspectives and open conversations with other perspectives towards an improved future. Michael Stern speaks of “a new humanity in a new world,” though achieving it “involves a confrontation with a colonial world that unworlded your own.” (Forthcoming, 192) Decolonization and decolonial thinking is, therefore, by no means naïve, fully utopian, or misty-eyed. It demands tireless work, a “going forward to meet the world, […] to embrace the inextricable web of affiliations that form our identities and interlacing of networks.” (Mbembe 2021, 64) It entails a demand for everyone to reflect and reorient, but most importantly, to be willing to engage in a dialogue, to be open to other ideas, to disenclose the 91 barriers in your mind and thinking. It is a negotiation to work out the different ways we can interact with others without denying their self-determination. Walter Mignolo argues, “it is not a project that aims at imposing itself as a new abstract universal,” but instead “a third force” that delinks existing structures and rationalities from a notion of the universal that does not consider certain particularities, and that “claims its existence in building futures.” (Mignolo 2011a, 282) Following Fanon, the goal of decolonization entails “a new rhythm, specific to new generations of men, with a new language and a new humanity,” (Fanon 2004, 3), a “radical sharing and universal inclusion” (Mbembe 2021, 41); in short “the possibility of being” (Stern Forthcoming 76), especially for those that Mbembe describes as “the new ‘wretched of the earth’”: “those to whom the right to have rights is refused, those who are told not to move, those who are condemned to live within structures of confinement“ (2017, 177) and those still under attack of a “master-desire”, “Islam, the Muslim, the Arab, the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee, the intruder, to mention only a few.” (2019, 43) This goal continues to be fought for in the struggle of the legacies of slavery and colonization (see Mbembe 2017, 177), of structural exclusion and violent borders, of racism and epistemicide. The idea of decolonization, both in its dialogical approach to bring together different perspectives as well as in its trajectory towards a better future, I believe if done carefully, can equip us with ways of approaching racialized and minorized ‘others’ without fetishizing or continually ‘othering’ them. Thus, a decolonizing approach to German studies, inviting African and Caribbean thinkers into the conversation, and moving the center (even within the country or a specific discourse) can prove enormously productive. When Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o describes how for “a colonial child, the harmony existing between the three aspects of language as communication was irrevocably broken” by the colonial education system which “resulted in the disassociation of the 92 sensibility of that child from his natural and social environment”, something he calls “colonial alienation,” (1986 17) then I see young children who are told not to speak Turkish in kindergarten; I see a country whose biggest minority (Turkish-German) are continuously alienated and whose language appalls the majority so much that the mere idea of offering Turkish as a language in German schools is not even up for debate; I think of a novel like Senthuran Varatharajah’s Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen (2016) where the children are being alienated from their parents because they are forced to choose between German and Tamil and are continuously ostracized for how they look and sound; I think of political scientist Kien Nghi Ha who describes German integration policies as “koloniale Praxis” (2009).54 In short, I see both the remains of a failed colonial empire that never grappled with its colonial past, and, more importantly, so much potential for compassion, understanding, and inclusion – which is something, that I think, German studies has the opportunity to be a forerunner at articulating, emphasizing, and carrying into the future. In chapter six, I will detail and utilize the idea of the decolonial couplet as a methodology to achieve these productive conversations – conversations that also have the aim of surviving by not merely changing their content, but also “the terms of the conversation.” (Mignolo 2011a, 275) Chapters three, four and five will lay the necessary groundwork, starting with a detailed literary analysis of Stanišić’s texts in the context of engaging with death and (diegetically) telling stories to survive. 54 All these points are discussed in detail in chapter four. 93 Chapter 3: Telling Stories to Survive Višegrad, Stanišić’s native city, is perhaps best known for being the scene of Ivo Andrić’s world famous The Bridge on the Drina. There is no doubt that Stanišić read Andrić’s classic, in part because it was a required school text in the former Yugoslavia (Boose 2002, 82), but also because (inter)textual references to Andrić can be found in the two Stanišić texts that play out, at least partly, in Višegrad (Grammofon, Herkunft; see footnote 172). Andrić, who passed away before Stanišić was born, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961, in large part because of that novel. In his Banquet speech at the ceremony, Andrić spoke about storytelling, painting a grandiose picture of a storytelling mankind, and, in so doing, sounded oddly similar to Stanišić about half a century later: The manner of telling and the form of the story vary according to periods and circumstances, but the taste for telling and retelling a story remains the same: the narrative flows endlessly and never runs dry. Thus, at times, one might almost believe that from the first dawn of consciousness throughout the ages, mankind has constantly been telling itself the same story, though with infinite variations, to the rhythm of its breath and pulse. And one might say that after the fashion of the legendary and eloquent Scheherazade, this story attempts to stave off the executioner, to suspend the ineluctable decree of the fate that threatens us, and to prolong the illusion of life and of time. (Ivo Andrić 1961, my emphasis) Andrić, undoubtedly, saw his stories as part of this larger lineage. But more importantly, his words speak to the power inherent in stories, of being in the lineage of Scheherazade, telling stories for 1001 nights to survive. Starting with his debut novel in 2006, Stanišić inscribes himself into this lineage, but not only from the perspective of the author, but also within the narrative, from the perspective of intradiegetic narrators and characters. The narrator aims at survival, not just in its common notion, as ‘not dying,’ but also more broadly conceived as an affirmation of life, of one’s lineage, a universal sense of overcoming, of continuing in the face of gravest adversities. This third 94 chapter sets out to prove this claim, arguing that within the narratives of Stanišić’s novels, narrators and characters deploy strategies to engage with and negotiate anxiety, trauma, and, most of all, death. Building on this first thesis, this chapter maintains that the engagement (“Auseinandersetzung”) with death necessitates storytelling as a survival strategy within the narratives. In so doing, I show storytelling’s performative power in (not) coming to terms with death, but also how it operates as a potent countermotion. As discussed in the introductory chapter, ‘telling stories to survive’ is focused on different levels of diegesis, not on author biography or intervention. At the same time, Saša Stanišić is a very self-aware author who publicly and academically reflects on his own poetics of writing (e.g., Stanišić 2005; 2017a; 2017b; 2017c), who publishes an autofictional novel (Herkunft, 2019), who writes himself into another novel (Vor dem Fest, 2014),55 and who participated in the ‘Abiturprüfung’ in Hamburg in 2019 under the pseudonym “Elisabeth von Bruck” because one of the prompts asked examinees to write a new chapter for his novel Vor dem Fest (Keßler 2019) in which Theodor Fontaine’s eponymous Cécile visits Fürstenfelde, Vor dem Fest’s fictional village.56 As the editors of the Zeitschrift für Germanistik attest, Stanišić’s participation in the ‘Abitur,’ but, I would argue, his general public demeanor (including a very interesting Twitter presence before he deleted his account) are “ein besonderer Ausnahmefall von Selbstkommentierung.” (Stanišić 2021, 199) All this inhibits an outright exclusion of the author persona in my analysis and necessitates the engagement with him. One important purpose of this chapter is, then, to provide a balanced analysis that avoids being overdetermined by author 55 See discussion in chapter two. 56 Stanišić received 13 points (out of a possible 15) for his new chapter which equates roughly to a 90% grade in the US. His Abituressay has been published and is accessible online (Stanišić 2022). Interestingly, Stanišić continues the idea of storytelling as a means of intradiegetic survival when he writes: “[S]o lange wir Cécile erzählen, so lange lebt Cécile. Und wenn wir einmal aufhören, so wird die stille Schöne aufstehen, sich bedanken für Campari-Spritz, und sie wird in ihre Geschichte zurückkehren, ‘herb, trotzig und eigenwillig’ sich stürzen in kein gutes Ende für sich.” (2022, 205) 95 biography, but also does not wholly omit the author while staying focused on the main argument: the autodiegetic, intradiegetic, and even extradiegetic narrators in Stanišić’s writings use storytelling and narrating as tools of survival. In conjunction with the analysis of experiences of migration (especially Grammofon and Herkunft) and the systemic denial of one’s particularity inherent to racism (see discussion in chapter four), the notion of survival allows for a varied and layered examination of the autodiegetic, intradiegetic narrators in Stanišić’s writings. To that purpose, this chapter analyzes how intradiegetic narrators as well as other characters in Stanišić’s oeuvre engage with and negotiate (i) the concept of anxiety as an essential aspect of migration, and (ii) death as both a narrative trigger and a consistent and crucial encounter with, and challenge of, the limits of narration – “ein Symbol, aber auch ganz konkret ein Verlust,” as Stanišić put it in the final Zürcher Poetikvorlesung (2017c, 21:11-21:15). Informed by anxiety and in an attempt to escape from and delay death, the second, more extensive discussion includes a look at Stanišić’s compelling intersecting use of the devices of Magical Realism and the Fantastic in his novels. The most important part of this analysis is taken on by the engagement of Stanišić’s writing with the topos of death. Until now, Stanišić scholarship has hardly paid any attention to this topos even though it spans all his work (excluding, perhaps, his two children’s books).57 But a closer look engenders a comprehensive (‘werkübergreifende’) analysis of Stanišić’s writing and, in so doing, transcends the topics of flight and migration, thus decentering them. Because even though Stanišić inscribes himself individually into migratory discourses, his writing cannot be narrowed down to issues of migration. To do so would be a diminution of his writing and falls short of the complexity of his narratives (see also the discussion in chapter two). Analyzing a topos that is 57 The topos of death and the function of storytelling is discussed, at least in part, by Svetlana Arnaudova (2019), Der Topos Tod und die Funktion des Geschichtenerzählens wird, zumindest ansatzweise, diskutiert von Svetlana Arnaudova (2019), Maha El Hissy (2020), and Joscha Klüppel (2020). However, in the continuously growing research work on Stanišić's works, these two important topics are hardly considered. 96 central to every story allows for a more nuanced understanding that does justice to the diversity of topics, moods, and narrative voices that is found in the pages of Stanišić’s texts. A first discussion of anxiety, trauma, guilt, and shame is followed by the centerpiece of the literary analysis, the engagement with the topos of death. 3.1: Anxiety As argued in chapter two, I do not conceive of survival merely as an outliving and escape from death, but as an overcoming, a continuation more generally. Understanding survival in this manner allows for a broader ontological engagement (‘Auseinandersetzung’) of my thesis with a concept that discloses both an overwhelming number of future possibilities (Kierkegaard) as well as one’s own very existence (Heidegger). Having discussed the theoretical presumptions in chapter 2.4., this subchapter will focus on the experience and negotiation of anxiety in Stanišić’s novel. In so doing, I am putting forth that anxiety is one essential condition of migration: it precedes the actual event, it is an unwelcome companion during the migratory process, and, perhaps most importantly, it remains one after the move from country x to country y. Furthermore, understanding anxiety as a constituent aspect of the modern makes migration a quintessential moment to analyze, as migration (and movement, more broadly) is paradigmatic of modernity. However, my analysis will show that Stanišić’s novels intradiegetically engage with anxiety not only in the context of migration, but also more broadly in the exploration of survival strategies. As the discussions in chapter 2.4 show, I conceive of anxiety in the context of the 97 subsequent discussion not as a question of mental health (there are many studies on that already58), but as an ontological and, in the narrative engagement, as an aesthetic category – as a Stimmung (mood). Furthermore, as the analysis of anxiety will show, it often takes on particular forms of embodiment in Stanišić’s novel, especially those of shame and guilt. The final component stressed in this analysis (and throughout the whole chapter) is trauma, interdependently connected to anxiety, as one can engender the other and vice versa. In the second chapter of Herkunft, the autofictional, homodiegetic narrator Saša recalls his attempts to put together a “handgeschriebenen Lebenslauf” (Stanišić 2019, 6) for the German immigration office (‘Ausländerbehörde’) as part of his application for citizenship. Summarizing thirty years into a handful of pages proves to be extraordinarily difficult: “Beim ersten Versuch brachte ich nichts zu Papier, außer dass ich am 7. März 1978 geboren worden war.” (6-7) Thirty years, Saša remarks, seem to have been wiped out of his mind, “weggespült [von der Drina],” (7) the river of his native Višegrad. Attempt after attempt is discarded as none of them seem to be able to capture who he is. A tabular approach, for example, “kam mir jedoch vor, als hätte das nichts mit mir zu tun.” (7) Over a span of four pages (7-10), readers encounter a variation of the sentence “Ich schrieb” eleven times, each one representing a new angle from which Saša tries to approach the task in front of him. The anaphoric emphasis illustrates the seemingly endless possibilities of representing himself – too many for Saša to find a way to be faithful to himself and his memories, but also abide by the expectancy of an official form. All in all, the immigration office’s request causes “Riesenstress.” (6) The chapter highlights Kierkegaard’s notion of the dizziness of freedom, an “entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but in 58 See, for example, Derrick Silove et al. (1997), Claudia M. Roebers and Wolfang Schneider (1999), Dinesh Bhugra (2004), Jutta Lindert et al. (2009), Stephanie R. Potochnick and Krista M. Perreira (2011), Itziar Familiar et al. (2011), and Helke Drothbohm and Ines Hasselberg (2014). 98 itself.” (Kierkegaard 1980, 49) The freedom to present the thirty years of his life so far overwhelms Saša, he starts to put an emphasis on trivialities, like recalling a childhood afternoon of sledding. At the same time, the chapter also illustrates the anxiety engendered by a bureaucratic demand for absolute transparency from potential citizens-to-be, regardless of the violence and trauma that may have characterized an applicant’s past – especially in the context of forced migration (something that Saša’s reference to his biography being washed away by the Drina hints at). The attempts to contain his life to a few pages fail, both for the résumé requested by the immigration office and in the confines of the chapter. But that illustrates the problem only on the surface. One may consider the following stanza in Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, 51: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.).” (Whitman n.d.) The repeated stops and starts, the dissatisfaction with both the task and his answers speak to a problem in language itself which is incapable of unifying the blunt transparency requested and the difficult, multifaceted experiences and origins that define him. The multitudes that he contains within himself clash with the language available for the official document.59 From that failure results the novel Herkunft, a negotiation of who the person Saša is and the role that his origins played: “ein Porträt meiner Überforderung mit dem Selbstporträt.” (49) These origins, he remarks, are bittersweet coincidences, “Zugehörigkeit, zu der man nichts beigesteuert hat.” (66) But in the very next paragraph, he adds to his definition of ‘Herkunft’ (origin): “Herkunft ist Krieg.” The question of ‘Herkunft,’ the question the immigration office is asking him, is thus closely connected to memories of war and, inevitably, of anxiety, trauma, and death (for the latter, see the discussion in chapter 3.2.). It is impossible for Saša to tell his life’s story without talking about war, nor is it possible to define himself early without reference to what 59 One of the potential solutions, discussed in 3.2.4, is to borrow strategies used in magical realist writing. 99 was left behind. War necessitated movement across borders and borders (and one’s reception at them) are determined by origins, by ‘Herkunft.’ At the same time, he is trying specifically to define himself not through the experience of war and forced migration, as can be seen by him not directly mentioning it once until late in the third chapter. And his attempted biographical sketch fails, at least at first, at the institutional border between citizen and foreigner – in part because Saša tries very hard to not be defined by war. A more subdued, but nonetheless pervading anxiety is the progression of and engagement with the dementia of Grandmother Kristina. It is at the core of the novel, both as a Stimmung, a mood, and as a reminder of the frailty and fickleness of memory. The former is exemplified by the start of the novel where the first chapter (less than a full page) hints at the illness. The grandmother is sure that she is seeing a young girl outside on the street and goes down to help her. Calling her name, the chapter tells us of cars having to stop, and drive around her. It tells us how she is calling her own name and ends with: “Großmutter ist siebenundachtzig Jahre alt und elf Jahre alt.” (2019, 5) Throughout the novel, there are brief reminders of the illness. But the Stimmung fully unfolds hermeneutically, on rereading(s). With the awareness of her succumbing to the illness, the grandmother is both alive and not alive throughout the whole novel. At the same time, as narrator Saša emphasizes, it is not only the anxiety of seeing a loved one deteriorate that causes anxiety, but also the inevitable reflection on the nature of memories: “Als meine Großmutter Erinnerungen zu verlieren begann, begann ich, Erinnerungen zu sammeln.” (2019, 63) The collecting of memories, the recording of them on the page, and the digressions and ornamentations when telling stories (see 3.2.4.) are thus, in part, direct responses to a feeling of anxiety. This is also highlighted by the repetition of the phrases “zu verlieren begann” and “begann ich,” indicating that Saša is 100 now taking on a task that parallels his grandmother’s fate, thus perhaps hoping to keep things balanced. Negotiating anxiety in Stanišić’s novels only (partly) succeeds for the intradiegetic narrators and characters by engaging with embodiments of anxiety, namely guilt and shame. In the (forced) migration process, guilt, in particular, has an enormous presence. Loretta Baldassar (2015) illustrates the power of guilt with the words of a girl who came to Italy: “Guilt, guilt, guilt is what all migrants face!” (81) Guilt, according to Baldassar, “is primarily theorized as largely or entirely linked to private self-consciousness.” (2015, 81) Although guilt is primarily an “intrapsychic process,” (2015, 81) external events can produce the feeling, as well. Guilt is perceived primarily as a reaction to personal failure, such as not keeping a promise. At the same time, guilt also works like that which Keltner et al. describe as adjustment methodology, according to which future events are to be controlled in a targeted manner. The feeling of guilt should help me to act differently at the next opportunity. While Paolo Boccagni and Loretta Baldassar (2015) locate guilt as a relevant emotion in the migration process, the emotion of shame is neglected. In Stanišić’s novels, especially in Herkunft, both are inextricably connected. While guilt is mostly theorized as a reaction to a moral failing, shame is often understood as a reaction to an external failing: “Shame […] is likely to arise also from non-moral situations, such as when one shows incompetence, fails in a performance, or behaves in a socially inappropriate way.” (Pivetti 2015, 3) In her book From Guilt to Shame (2007), Ruth Leys points out that shame is now the emotion “that for many investigators most defines the condition of posttraumatic stress.” (13-14) There are numerous studies that suggest that post-traumatic disorders occur disproportionately among migrants and 101 refugees which in turn reinforces the importance of including shame in an analysis of migration.60 According to recent research, the difference between guilt and shame is not as clear as was assumed a few decades ago. “[C]ontemporary emotion research shows there to be small quantitative differences between shame and guilt, rather than the dramatic qualitative differences suggested by conceptualizing them as opposites,” writes Colin Wayne Leach (2017, 5). “In fact, shame and guilt are more alike than different.” (2017, 5) Nevertheless, in the following analysis, shame and guilt should not be understood as synonyms, but rather as two strong emotional reactions to experiences during, after, and because of migration. Narrator Saša tells us in Herkunft: Die Welt ist voller Jugoslawen-Fragmente wie sie oder ich es sind. Die Kinder der Geflüchteten haben längst eigene Kinder, die Schweden sind oder Neuseeländer oder Türken. Ich bin ein egoistisches Fragment. Ich habe mich mehr um mich selbst gekümmert als um Familie und ihren Zusammenhalt. (Stanišić 2019, 212) In doing so, he holds himself accountable, burdening himself with responsibility that young people rarely have to experience without the uprooting experience of forced flight. Survival becomes a selfish act – both surviving the war and flight and surviving the adjustments to the new country. Because of the confrontation with her dementia and what she can convey to him, the grandmother is the leading figure of the second half of the book. But here, borders and implied distance, both geographical and emotional, complicate interpersonal cohesion: „All die kurzen Besuche nach dem Krieg bei ihr. Mit jedem Mal waren wir uns ein Stück fremder, das Vertraute war das Vergangene. Ich immer auf dem Sprung, sie immer da.” (2019, 323) The flight itself is a source of shame for Stanišić, as it deprived him of any decision-making ability – in itself a condition of anxiety (Kierkegaard’s entangled freedom). In his essay “Doppelpunktnomade” (2005), Stanišić 60 Eine umfassende Untersuchung einiger Studien bietet Bustamante, Lineth H.U., Raphael O. Cerquiera, Emilie Leclerc, Elisa Brietzke. “Stress, trauma, and post traumatic stress disorder in migrants: a comprehensive review”. Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry 40.2 (2018): 220-225. 102 writes: “Ich schäme mich für die Flucht. Weil sie über mich und nicht ich über sie entschied. Weil sie keine Varianten offen ließ, so wie sonst nur der Tod.” As shown in Herkunft, Stanišić’s autofictional narrator Saša reflects on the feeling of shame in a similar fashion. Saša even identifies shame as one of the motivations for telling stories: Ich brauche niemandem zu erklären, warum ich dort, wo ich herkomme, nicht mehr bin. Es kommt mir vor, als würde ich genau das aber immerfort tun. Fast entschuldigend auch. Auch mir selbst gegenüber. Es kommt mir vor, als stünde ich wegen der Geschichte dieser Stadt, Višegrad, und wegen des Glücks meiner Kindheit in einer Schuld, die ich mit Geschichten begleichen muss. Es kommt mir vor, als meinten meine Geschichten diese Stadt sogar dann, wenn ich nicht über sie schreiben will. (2019, 193) At the same time he writes about the feeling of not being able to understand his parents' lives: “Anders als mich die Schule führte die Arbeit meine Eltern an die Ränder des sozialen und körperlich ertragbaren Lebens. […] Mutter starb tausend heiße Tode in der Wäscherei. Als nicht- deutsche Frau, vom Balkan gar, stand sie auf der untersten Stufe der Beschäftigungstrittleiter, und das ließ man sie auch spüren.” (2019, 150) Both in his debut (Grammofon) and in Herkunft, we learn of crying parents – a vulnerability that parents in children's eyes usually do not (perhaps should not) have. Acknowledgement, however, is only possible in retrospect. Stanišić expresses this very clearly: “Ich kann nicht sagen, ob es gut gewesen ist, nicht zu wissen, was die beiden damals umtrieb und quälte. Oder, anders gesagt, ob es gut gewesen ist, davon auszugehen, dass es um sie besser stand, als es wirklich der Fall war.” (2019, 181) Saša describes his childhood and the experiences of his parents as dissonant: “Meine Kindheit lässt sich nicht anders als dissonant erzählen. […] Meine Mutter erlebt und verarbeitet die Dissonanz noch eine Spur intensiver. In Višegrad ist sie eine andere Person. Schreckhafter und launischer, und albern nie.” (2019, 193) Between two harsh realities, there is the possibility of retelling and embellishing positive memories, at least for Saša himself. But this means is not available to the mother either: “Das, was ihr fehlt, ergänzt sie heute nicht mit Erinnerungen wie ich.” (2019, 117) According to Saša, these 103 internal borders lead to “Disparatheit, die über Jahre mitbestimmt hat, wo ich bin: so gut wie niemals dort, wo Familie ist.” (2019, 65) He has family in Bosnia, in the USA, in France and lives in Germany. It is also in Herkunft that Saša finds the perhaps most intriguing metaphor for the shame he feels. While visiting Oskoruša, the small village in which his grandfather was born and where many generations of Stanišić’s have lived, guilt and shame are his travel companions because he struggles, at first, to understand himself in the context of the village. Visiting the village’s graveyard with his grandmother and another relative, he notices a snake in a tree. Up to this point, snakes have played an important role in his memories about family.61 The snake in the graveyard, then, fascinates him: “Das Nebensächliche bekommt Gewicht, bald scheint es unverzichtbar, die Schlange sieht von ihrem Baum auf mich herab und aus meiner Kindheit in mich hinein: das erinnerte Wort, die semantische Angst.” (2019, 37) Shame is symbolically encoded as the animal signifying the fall of man; Stanišić speaks of “einer leibhaftigen Schlange oder einem symbolischen Tier.” (2019, 49) Shame is always present, for Stanišić in the semantic snake ('Poskok'), representing the things he has lost.62 61 “Poskok bedeutet: ein Kind – ich? – und eine Schlange im Hühnerstall. Poskok bedeutet: Sonnenstrahlen, die zwischen den Brettern durch die staubige Luft schneiden.” (26) “Poskok” is the Serbocroatian word for long-nosed viper (Hornotter). But for Stanišić, “Hornotter” and “Poskok” is not the same: “Das übersetzte Wort – Hornotter – lässt mich kalt.” (2019, 27) 62 There is no doubt that the image of the serpent (as well as other passages and images) refers to religious dimensions in both Stanišić and Varatharajah. There are almost no sources or texts in German or English that talk about Poskok. However, the snake seems to have some familiarity in Eastern European countries. If that were the case, it would stand for a lost home doubly: on the one hand through the language (Poskok has more associations for Stanišić) and also through associations with nature and culture. At the same time, the image of the snake also points to betrayal, temptation and the loss of (childlike) paradise (“die Schlange sieht […] aus meiner Kindheit in mich hinein”). The biblical connotation of the snake in general is obvious, but the horned viper is also mentioned in the Bible. Genesis chapter 49, verse 16 says, "Dann wird eine Schlange sein am Wege, eine Hornotter am Pfade, die da beißt in die Fersen des Rosses, und rücklings fällt sein Reiter." However, it must be noted that this is the Elberfeld translation. Luther's translation merely speaks of an “Otter” (viper). At the same time, the snake is of course closely linked to shame in the biblical story: only when Adam and Eve eat the apple from the tree of knowledge, do they realize that both are naked and both feel shame for the first time: “Da gingen den beiden die Augen auf, und sie erkannten, dass sie nackt waren” (Genesis 3:7). It is only through the work of the snake that shame is consciously perceived. For discussions of other religious symbols, particularly in Vor dem Fest, see Dominik Zink (2017, 50; 72-85). 104 Stories that have experiences of forced migration at their core (Grammofon),63 the anxiety of a village fading from relevance and memory (Vor dem Fest), or an engagement with origins and coming to terms with the loss of a loved one (Herkunft) grapple with varying degrees and dimensions of trauma. Stanišić’s debut novel, Grammofon, links trauma to the loss of language and memory, and continuously wrestles with the question of whether writing through and about trauma is productive or beneficial. The novel is set a few weeks before the start of the Bosnian War in 1992. The focal point of the novel and, at times, its narrator is Aleksandar Krsmanović, a boy living in the Bosnian city of Višegrad. The novel does not always follow a chronological narrative and jumps between experiences and memories from Aleksandar’s boyhood, with a particular focus on his grandfather Slavko. Soon, however, the plot homes in on a central event: Slavko’s death. Alert readers will pick up on small clues throughout the first chapters that hint at the war looming in the background of the story. In the aftermath of Slavko’s death, brutal reality intrudes into the narrative. As Boris Previšić argues: Je mehr sich das kriegerische Geschehen dem kindlichen Erzähler nähert, desto mehr fiktionalisiert er es. Am deutlichsten kommt das zum Ausdruck in der im zweiten Teil des Romans eingelagerten Fußballspiel-Parabel, welche in überwältigender Präzision die (Spiel-)Regeln und den (Spiel-) Verlauf der Belagerung Sarajevos nachzeichnet. Gleichzeitig erweist sich das Quid pro quo wiederum als detaillierteste Reportage eines während der Belagerung Gewohnheit gewordenen Fußballspiels zwischen Verteidigern und Belagerern Sarajevos. Die Parabel wird so auf eine doppelte Faktualität, auf diejenige des Kriegs wie auf die andere des Spiels im Krieg lesbar, womit wiederum das Verhältnis der Fiktion zum kriegerischen Ereignis in den Fokus rückt. (2010, 110) This fictionalization, however, stops for a while after Aleksandar’s escape to Germany. The previous, breezy style of narration reaches its limits and a large portion of the second half of the novel is told in seven letters as well as in a collection of short stories that are attributed to 63 Both the migration experience itself and the reason for migrating (e.g., civil war, natural catastrophes, etc.) can cause trauma, as many studies have shown (e.g., Silove et.al. 1997, 351-357; Ingleby 2004; Neuner et.al. 2004; Hamburger et.al. 2018; Hynie 2018, 297–303; Sangalang et.al. 2019, 909-919). 105 Aleksandar.64 While the short stories try to recapture the tone of the novel’s beginning, the letters engage with the struggles of living in a new country, the acquisition and loss of language, and of Aleksandar’s parents, and the (im)possibility of arrival. Brigid Haines summarizes the novel’s narrative fluidity as the evolution of a narrative voice, which goes from being “a naïve storyteller confident of his own powers” to becoming “a postmodern writer who accepts the limitations of fiction, the incompleteness and instability of memory, the possibilities of fluid identities, and the strategic necessity of silence.” (2011, 110) Looking closely at the novel, Haines’s description not only accurately represents the changes in the narrative voice but also mirrors the different ways in which the narrator tries to approach the trauma of war, escape, and arrival. The intradiegetic attempts to cope with traumatic experiences follow what Cathy Caruth describes as two characteristics at the forefront of experiencing trauma. The first, she writes, is the inaccessibility of trauma (Caruth 1995, 11). For Caruth, this means that the actual traumatic event can only be experienced at a later point, “as a temporal delay that carries the individual beyond the shock of the first moment.” (Caruth 1995, 10) In this vein, the reader is presented with seven letters in the second half of the novel that Aleksandar writes to Asija, a Muslim orphan he met while hiding in a basement in Višegrad. The first letter is sent shortly after his arrival in April 1992 (the month the Bosnian war started), and the next three follow in intervals of roughly six months. However, the time between the subsequent letters grows drastically, with the last three letters spanning more than six years (December 16, 1995–February 11, 2002). In these letters, the reader learns of Aleksandar’s process of learning the German language. After a year, Aleksandar starts to lose his native language: “Gestern ist mir auch zum ersten Mal ein Wort auf Bosnisch nicht 64 While the narrative voice is mostly Aleksandar’s, there are changes of perspective within the narrative, for example three chapters in which Aleksandar’s boyhood friend Zoran narrates, and one in which is Grandma Fatima is narrating (for a discussion, see, for example, Arnaudova 2019, 42). 106 eingefallen, ‘Birke,’ ich musste es nachschlagen: ‘breza.’” (Stanišić 2006, 142) This directly coincides with the loss of both his identity and memory, as Aleksandar writes: Asija, ich erinnere mich nicht an die Birken. Es kommt mir vor, als wäre ein Aleksandar in Višegrad und in Veletovo und an der Drina geblieben, und ein anderer Aleksandar lebt in Essen und überlegt sich, doch mal an die Ruhr angeln zu gehen. In Višegrad, bei seinen unfertigen Bildern, gibt es einen angefangenen und nicht zu Ende gebrachten Aleksandar. Nicht ich bin mehr Chefgenosse des Unfertigen, das Unfertige ist mein Chefgenosse. (Stanišić 2006, 142) As Didem Uca argues, the German language throughout the novel and in his letters “serves as a means for Aleksandar to reframe his engagement with a traumatic past.” (2019, 191) It is made clear that during all this time, Aleksandar never receives an answer. He is not even sure if Asija and all that she stands for (his youth, his memories, Višegrad, Bosnia) even exists: “Do you ever get my letters? Are you even there?” (Stanišić 2008, 164; 2006, 153) Three years later, he begins his final letter by wondering whether he had imagined Asija. This letter is the shortest one that he writes, and he ends it asking whether Asija ever really existed at all (see Stanišić 2006, 213). Aleksandar’s loss of language and his uncertainty about his memories are also shown through the break in the narrative, and, to use Haines’ words, in the impossibility of keeping up the “naïve” narrative of the “Aleksandar who began and never finished” in Višegrad. It shows that writing against his trauma, searching for a lost identity must fail – or so it seems. Stanišić ends his novel with a glimmer of hope. Around one hundred pages earlier, Aleksandar tries to call every person in Bosnia with the name Asija that he can find – to no avail. In the last two pages, however, he gets a call and a woman’s voice says his name. Aleksandar says, “ich bin ja hier.” (Stanišić 2006, 315) The final words of the novel are thus an affirmation – an affirmation of the individual in the present, surviving, living. And yet, two things remain: the novel leaves it open whether Aleksandar (a) has actually found his Asija, and (b) whether that is going 107 to help him work through his traumatic experiences. According to Caruth, the inaccessibility of trauma is closely linked to a second characteristic: the impossibility of immediate understanding. “The trauma is the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge.” (Caruth 1995, 153) It took Aleksandar ten years to get to this point. And yet, the act of storytelling itself allowed him to get there: “the transformation of trauma into a narrative memory that allows the story to be verbalized and communicated, to be integrated into one’s own.” (Caruth, 1995, 153) And lastly, the narrative uses the character of Asija not only as a way of negotiating Aleksandar’s trauma. Her absence is also a reminder of the gap in the memory of a society who had to mourn the death of thousands and the disappearance of many more. Diana Hitzke and Charlton Payne (2015) argue for a metonymic understanding of Asija as a pars pro toto for this loss as her “disembodied voice and her absent body, as figured in and by Aleksandar’s narrative, bear the traces of a displaced body and voice.” (199) They argue that Asija and her story represent the account of a “refugee who cannot give an account of herself,” as she is displaced, unaccounted for, and “her physical whereabouts are unknown.” (200) Asija’s fate, mirroring that of thousands of others, is illustrated in Aleksandar’s letters that start to question whether she ever reads them and if she even exited to begin with; and they are mirrored in his seemingly unsuccessful attempts to locate and phone her. To round up this first analysis, I will briefly turn to Vor dem Fest. The novel starts with the death of the ferryman. His death is the alarming culmination of a steady decline in both people (rural exodus) and tradition, as the ferryman was part of the village for centuries. The death of the ferryman reveals a structural trauma that the village is struggling with. This is the loss of a shared past, a shared village and local myth, both embodied by the ferryman. On the one hand, the ferryman was part of the village for a long time, he appears again and again in historical reports as 108 well as memories from the past. As a storyteller, he was the narrative voice that was lost at the beginning of the novel, but also someone who brought stories into the village from outside. In addition, as a “mythical being” in the spirit of Charon, he was a central component of maintaining a unifying myth. The breaking away of the shared past and the shared myth unsettles and destabilizes the present and threatens the future and consequently the continued existence of the village. Following Dominick LaCapra, trauma can be understood as “an anxiety-producing condition of possibility.” (82) This “condition of possibility” is the absence of a shared history, of a narrative that the ferryman had embodied. At the same time, Myrto Aspioti (2021) argues that the novel suggests “that collective identities, especially those anchored in something as arbitrary as geography, are forced and fragile.” (109) At the beginning, the readers encounter a village that is urgently looking for such a narrative: “Jetzt ist der Fährmann tot, und wer uns erzählen soll, was die Ufer treiben, wissen wir nicht.” (Stanišić 2014, 11) In the course of the novel, it is made clear several times that an existence without a village story, without a village narrative would be terrible: “Dass etwas existiert und funktioniert, aber für niemanden einen Nutzen hat. Gegenstände, Geräte, ein ganzer Ort. Die Glocken. Dass die einfach nur noch sind.” (Stanišić 2014, 74) The fact that the residents no longer know why the annual Annenfest is celebrated, which will soon be celebrated again, only increases the threat. Looking at the word ‘Annenfest’ simply on a level of sound, an easy association could be ‘Ahnenfest,’ thus creating a connection between the Annenfest and ancestry, at least tonally for readers. This association emphasizes the village’s problem, as not remembering the reason for the Annenfest equates to not remembering one’s ancestry. This points to a communal anxiety, as forgetting one’s past would severely impact both one’s present and future. 109 3.2: The Topos of ‘Death’ Grandfathers, the ferryman, grandmother, almost one village or perhaps even several: the topos of ‘death’ is continuously present in Saša Stanišić’s writing. Stanišić combines a multiplicity of voices in his literary work – voices that are often telling stories creatively and with a joy for language. The auto-, homo-, and heterodiegetic narrators and intradiegetic characters spice up the mostly somber narratives about migration, trauma, memory, and belonging with a pinch of humor. It makes the seriousness more palpable for readers if there is a joke or punchline waiting around the corner, explained Stanišić in a lecture, held virtually at UC Berkeley in October 2021 (Stanišić 2021b). At the same time, and in the spirit of American writer and literature professor Joseph Campbell, (elements of) comedy complete the realization that the dramatic or, in Stanišić’s case, the prosaic begins. Thus, nuances of humor throughout the novels allow death to take on a central role in Stanišić’s writing.65 In the first chapter of his debut, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert, two dead grandfathers take center stage: Opa Rafik and especially Opa Slavko. Furthermore, the story line of the novel is clouded throughout by the Bosnian war (1992-1995). Vor dem Fest tells of the death of the ferryman on its very first page. The novel is set in the fictitious Fürstenfelde, a small village in the Uckermark (northeastern Brandenburg) that is in danger of disappearing. In Stanišić’s volume of short stories, Fallensteller, readers return not only to Fürstenfelde in the eponymous chapter but also encounter an engagement with the deaths of father figures (“Gewässer”). The inevitable death of the grandmother, in turn, is at the core of Stanišić’s most recent novel and winner of the German Book Prize, Herkunft (2019). This subchapter – simultaneously also the main component of chapter three – consequently argues that death functions as a narrative trigger, on the one hand, but also represents an essential 65 For a more detailed discussion of humor in Saša Stanišić’s Grammofon, see Didem Uca (2019). 110 and ceaseless encounter with, and challenge for, the characters in the novels. Building on this first thesis, this chapter maintains that the engagement (“Auseinandersetzung”) with death necessitates storytelling as a survival strategy within the narratives. In so doing, I show storytelling’s performative power in (not) coming to terms with death, but also how it operates as a potent response. Analyzing the impacts of death and its consequences for the narrative representation of and engagement with the topos also entails a set of further questions. What is the role of the bodies of water that are so prominent in Stanišić’s writing in relation to death? How do auto-, homo-, and heterodiegetic narrators appropriate storytelling? What about intradiegetic characters that do not occupy a narrator’s position? These questions, too, will be answered in the analysis. 3.2.1 Of Grandfathers In all three of Stanišić’s novels, death plays an immediate role as catalyst for each respective narrative. Subsequently, I will illustrate this catalytic function by discussing Grammofon and the short story “Gewässer” with a particular focus on the roles inhabited by grandfather figures. Discussing overarching links between the characters further allows me to highlight the versatility of his characters. On the very first page of Stanišić’s debut, Grammofon, death sneaks into the game played by its protagonist, Aleksandar Kršmanović, and his dearly beloved grandfather, Opa Slavko: “Am Morgen des Tages, an dessen Abend er starb, schnitzte mir Opa Slavko aus einem Ast den Zauberstab.” (Stanišić 2006, 11) Slavko’s death is heralded within the first few sentences of the novel, giving it an immediate presence. For a short time, it is kept in check by Aleksandar’s imaginative and childlike retrospection – after all, Slavko had taught him that invention is the most precious gift and imagination the greatest fortune. Aleksandar puts this maxim to use as he does 111 not accept the death of his grandfather. In the form of memories, he keeps him alive, though only briefly, speaking of a “vorläufig[en] Tod,” “bis ich meinen Zauberstab und Hut wiederfinde.” (12) An innocent child trying to make sense of loss: if only he were to find his magical objects, everything could be fixed. The realization that the homodiegetic narrator of this scene is not Aleksandar, the child in his early teens, but Aleksandar, the young adult, refurbishing and rewriting memories to add the sense of invention and imagination his grandfather instilled in him, gives a first sense of an unreliable narrator whose memories operate as mediated focalization points for the engagement with death; the homodiegetic narrator helps young Aleksandar to put emotions and incomprehensibility into words. However, neither the narrator’s unreliability nor its position in relation to the recalled memories is accessible early on, but instead necessitates a hermeneutic reading, a reader’s return armed with knowledge of the full novel. Nonetheless, it is important to point to the operationalization of memories and their mediation because they, first of all, give a sense of the significance of the foci of these memories, and, secondly, are the favored approach of the homodiegetic narrator for the first half of the book. But let me return to the young Aleksandar, searching for a way to bring Slavko back to life, be it by magic or other means. In this situation, Aleksandar’s perspective is clouded by this death to the point where he can only comprehend the rest of his family in relation to it – as “noch nicht gestorben”: “Noch nicht gestorben in meiner Familie sind Mutter, Vater und Vaters Brüder – Onkel Bora und Onkel Miki. […] Tante Gordana ist auch noch nicht gestorben.” (Stanišić 2006, 12) The description of the first family gathering after Slavko’s death illustrates what Aleksandar has started to realize: death can only be made comprehensible in contrast to life. Onkel Bora, for instance, whispers that his unborn child will be called Slavko if it is a boy. The female family members discuss the “neue Leben in Tante Taifuns Bauch” while eating cake. This natural, self- 112 evident dyad is continuously negotiated in Grammofon (and Stanišić’s other novels). In the first chapter of Grammofon, however, the exposure to death is too much for the protagonist; he cannot fully apprehend it: “Aleksandar, du hast jetzt einen unendlichen Opa.” (31) This is reinforced in the second chapter: the picking of plums and the subsequent family celebration is brimming with life: they are harvesting, cooking, eating, singing, and dancing. Nonetheless, the dyad life-death briefly comes to the fore: “Opas Tod ist das Gegenteiligste von Sommer.” (2006, 33) While Aleksandar is struggling to process Slavko’s death, the next chapters subtly proliferate allusions to the rising ethnic and political tensions that will explode into the Bosnian War. Coping with the grandfather’s death in August 1991 functions as a protective barrier for young Aleksandar who can subordinate the power of politics to his personal grief. At the same time, the novel implies an understanding of the grandfather as a pars pro toto: Slavko’s death is a representation of countless people dying. Even more, Slavko is portrayed as a born-and-bred communist loyal to the party from the very beginning. He has dedicated his life to Yugoslavia, deeply believing in its ideals and values. His death, then, is also a representation of the dissolution (death) of the federation. Milica Grujičić argues: “Hier ist der Name des Großvaters – Slavko – interessant, welcher in Verbindung mit dem bosnischen Wort ‘Slava’ (deutsch: Ruhm) steht. Der Tod eines ruhmreichen Jugoslawien korreliert mit dem Tod Slavkos, der letzten Säule des Jugoslawentums.” (2017, 192) Stanišić described death in the final of his three Zürcher Poetikvorlesungen in November 2017 as “ein Symbol, aber auch ganz konkret ein Verlust.” (Stanišić 2017c, 21:11-21:15) Slavko’s death is a concrete loss. It is also a symbol. But Slavko is not the only grandfather whose death occupies the first chapters. Opa Rafik, Aleksandar’s maternal grandfather, died when Aleksandar was very young: “Nur warst du zu klein, um dich an seine Dummheit zu erinnern.” (Stanišić 2006, 21) His stupidity, says Aleksandar’s 113 mother, was Rafik’s affection for the railway (his job), the river Drina, and, after losing his job, alcohol. There are old pictures of Rafik in the house, but they lack any affiliation to the family. Hence, Aleksandar searches “Opa Rafiks Fotogesicht” (18) in his mother’s face, asking her if she resembled him. Rafik is part of the novel for merely seven pages (17-22; 280; 292).66 It is only after some urging that his mother, over three pages, tells of her father – a man on whose existence lies a veil of silence: “Weniger am Leben kann kein Toter sein.” (18) This simple sentence reveals the modus operandi of the novel’s homodiegetic narrator – and, to foreshadow, the narrators of all Stanišić’s novels. Svetlana Arnaudova aptly remarks: “Er ist fest davon überzeugt, dass Sprechen und Erzählen für das Leben stehen und dass Schweigen über Personen diese gewissermaßen zum Tode verurteilt.” (2019, 41) Aleksandar’s mother begins her dirge, as Aleksandar calls it. Aleksandar, his mother complains, did not have a grandfather. Instead, she names him “Traurige[r]” four times, “Dumme[r]” twice as well as “Verbitterter” and “dein Gehetzter.” She recalls continual insobriety. She tells Aleksandar how she and her husband found Rafik on the bank of the Drina, drunk; how they carried him home and how she scrubbed him clean in the bathtub. Throughout, her disgust is palpable, but so is her pain and her disappointment. Rafik’s final promise to her on this evening – clean clothes, no alcohol, affirmation of life – is only kept for a few hours before they find a bottle of cognac on the bank of the Drina and downstream, shortly after, Rafik: “seine geliebte Drina küsste ihn in den Tod.” (2006, 21) Rafik’s only joy had been the Drina which he could describe in the “malerischsten Farben” as well as his reflection in the river. The Drina, Rafik’s “grausame[r] Fluss,” (2006, 21) takes on the role of temptress, charming yet deadly. In this short, intensive, and angry monologue – without any quotation marks, further 66 However, he is also mentioned in Nena Fatima's lyrical confrontation with her muteness (Stanišić 2016, 151-152), where she does not paint a good picture of her former husband. 114 blurring who is actually speaking – are several subtle pointers which, in their ambiguity and multidimensionality, are paradigmatic for the complexity of the novel and its treatment of grief, death, and war. On the one hand, there is the mother, whose dirge and the corresponding emotions appear to have been suppressed for many years. That is not surprising, considering that the family does not talk about him and has not done so for many years, all throughout Aleksandar’s childhood. This is mirrored by Rafik’s former wife, (Nena) Fatima. Nena Fatima suffered greatly in her marriage with Rafik because he did not allow her to wear her hair openly, forcing her to hide it under a hijab. At his grave, she read a long list of grudges that she wanted to let go and, after coming to the end of the list, stopped speaking altogether. Unlike her, the family (including Aleksandar’s mother) does not seem to have let go of their grudges but opted to pretend that he never existed in the first place. But this gap functions allegorically, as well. Is Rafik only hushed up because he was a suicidal drunkard who drowned (perhaps himself) in the Drina? Those killed in Višegrad during the war were almost exclusively Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks). In Genocide on the Drina River (2014), Edina Bećirević points out that in 1991, 66 percent of Višegrad’s inhabitants were Muslim.67 She states that Višegrad was second only to Srebrenica in how drastically its population changed during the war (Bećirević 2014, 125).68 Ewa Tabeau writes in a 2008 report for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in their case against Milan Lukić and his cousin, Sredoje Lukić, that Muslims disappeared entirely from the city during the war (2018, 1, 12). Nowadays, roughly 90 percent of its inhabitants are Serbs. The Serbian violence during the war is also highlighted in the singular, rather short scene that gives Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert its name: “Ein Soldat repariert das 67 See also Tabeau (2008), who lists 63.5 percent of Višegrad’s population in 1991 as Muslims. 68 For a discussion with specific focus on violence towards women during the Bosnian war, see Lynda E. Boose (2002). 115 Grammofon, indem er an dessen Knöpfen reißt und gegen den Grammofonkasten schlägt und tritt (s. Soldat: 120). Dies kann dahingehend interpretiert werden, dass hier ein Versuch der serbischen Seite literarisiert wird, das zerbröckelnde Jugoslawien mit Gewalt zusammenzuhalten.” (Grujičić 2017, 210) Even several decades later, Bećirević argues, there has been almost no effort to come to terms with the atrocities committed during the war. The family’s veil of silence surrounding Rafik and his absence in the family’s collective memory can thus also be read as a symbol for the impenitent silence that surrounds those murdered in Višegrad and elsewhere.69 This is a continuation of the war’s violence: “Furthermore, because Serbs have done nothing to mitigate the results of that genocide over the past two decades, and because there are no longer Bosniaks in Višegrad, the process of genocide is still at work in the town.” (Bećirević 2014, 131)70 This emphasizes how important, both on the individual, but also on the collective level, the engagement with the war’s victims is. When Aleksandar returns to visit Višegrad for the first time in ten years, he runs into Pokor who went “vom gemütlichen Polizisten” to “Anführer gewalttätiger Freischärler” and was given the nicknames “Herr Pokolj” (Pokolj means massacre) and “Herr Gemetzel.” (Stanišić 2006, 282) Pokor is now once again working as a policeman. Aleksandar 69 Milica Grujičić also proposes an interesting and coherent reading of Rafik’s death as a harbinger of the Bosnian War: “Opa Rafik ist die erste Figur im Roman, die den Krieg ankündigt: Er personifiziert den labilen Zustand im Land und dessen Zufall, er trinkt und vernachlässigt sich. […] ‘Züge’ stehen für Tito, dem Bindeglied aller Völker und Volksgruppen im jugoslawischen Raum, der stirbt und den Zerfall des Landes initiiert. Das ‘graue Assoziationsspiel,’ das Opa Rafik mit Aleksandar spielt und in dem alles mit grauer Farbe und Lok assoziert wird, suggeriert Diktatur, Perspektivlosigkeit und Depression. Rafiks Leben dreht sich um zwei raumbezogene Aspekte: die Eisenbahn und den Fluss Drina. Rafik, in dessen Leben das Graue vorherrscht, erlebt die Drina als ultimative Schönheit mit unterschiedlichsten Farben. Die Drina als pars-pro-toto symbolisiert das unterjochte Bosnien: ‘Drina, welch vernachlässigter Fluss, welch vergessenes Schön!’ Rafik beobachtet das gedemütigte Land und trinkt aus Kummer. Er streichelt das Gras und kratzt in der Erde. […] Die Erde unter seinen Nägeln und der angedeutete Akt des Grabens assoziieren an die Bemühungen, das Land vor dem Zerstören zu beschützen. […] Jede Nacht geht Rafik von der Kneipe ans Ufer, geht ins Wasser, sitzt im Schlamm und schreit: ‘[…] wie soll ich allein etwas so Großes retten?‘ (Soldat: 20). […] Rafik stirbt in einer Nacht, nachdem er einen langen Abschiedsbrief an die Drina geschrieben und den Text mit einer zerbrochenen Flasche in den Ufersand geritzt hat. […] Rafiks Tod ist ein freiwilliger Akt, denn er sieht sich in Bezug auf die Rettung Bosniens hilflos.” (Grujičić 2017, 196-197) 70 Though the latest census lists roughly ten percent of Višegrad’s population as Bosniaks, that does not change the core truth of Bećirević’s statement. 116 himself even becomes complicit in the predominant silence when Pokor asks him about his parents. Even though Aleksandar is burning with the desire to affirm his Muslim mother and the rage “Pokor ins Gesicht [zu] sagen, es sei eine Ungeheuerlichkeit, dass Mörder in diesem Land nicht nur frei herumlaufen dürfen, sondern auch noch eine Polizeiuniform tragen,” (2006, 283) he remains quiet, full of “Scham.”71 The discrepancy between the homodiegetic narrator’s emotional acknowledgement of the importance of speaking up clashes with Aleksandar’s reluctance to do so. This is emphasized in “Gewässer,” the short story to which I will turn in the next paragraph, where we can read: “An dem Fluss wurde doch schweigen gelernt, nicht schwimmen.” (Stanišić 2016, 262) And yet, at the very same time, there is symbolism in silence. Diana Hitzke and Charlton Payne argue that it is a literary strategy of “bearing witness to something which cannot be said, which is unsayable, but which must be attested.” (2015, 197) Silence can be a performative emphasis. As I turn to “Gewässer,” we can see that bodies of water, for example the Drina, mediate silence, allowing for the detour of the water to engender comprehension. In the short story “In diesem Gewässer versinkt alles,” the final of twelve short stories in Fallensteller (2016), the readers meet an unnamed protagonist who travels around the world with two young women, Marie and Anna, after they successfully founded a start-up. While the group drives through France, we learn that the protagonist once was a refugee. We soon learn that the trio’s trip is, in fact, only the frame narrative that is complemented throughout by episodic stories of a young boy’s childhood in a town by a river with his grandfather and his mother. While the frame narrative is characterized by a homodiegetic narrator, the “ich” vanishes in the childhood 71 For two interesting discussions on silence in Stanišić's novel, see Arnaudova (2019) and Hitzke and Payne (2015). For a more detailed discussion of shame (and guilt), see 3.1. Consider also that the table of contents of the ‘book in the book,’ the parenthetic list of stories (“Als alles gut war”) promises a chapter with the same title as the novel’s very first one. But the chapter in question is merely an empty page (see Previšić 210, 106-107). 117 episodes and gives way to a heterodiegetic narrator – or so it seems. Throughout the short story, it becomes clear that the episodes are, somewhat unsurprisingly, childhood memories of the unnamed protagonist. Towards the end, both narrative planes coalesce, as mother and grandfather appear in the frame narrative. The latter of the two is at the core of the engagement with death and efforts made to stall and avoid. But this engagement is firmly mediated by bodies of water. The very first sentence of the first childhood memory mentions a river.72 Though never given a name, it suggests itself to be the Drina.73 The first characteristic of the river is that “normalerweise alles [in ihm] versinkt”74: Steine sowieso, aber auch Bälle, Bäume, Kühlschränke, einmal ein Ochse mitsamt dem Karren, der blöde Fluss, Kanarienvögel flogen hinein und versanken, ein Fahrrad, das dem Jungen versprochen worden war, im Sommer die Wolken, Schnee im Winter und zur Schneeschmelze einmal eine Brücke und im Frühling einmal ein Vater (Stanišić 2016, 261) Two listed items catch the eye. The first is the description of the river as stupid which personifies the natural (the river) with a negative adjective. The personification of the river is not only repeated throughout the short story (see especially 263, 272), but is a shared characteristic of the Drina in Stanišić’s novels.75 The end of the quoted list, in turn, justifies the feeling towards the river because one item differs drastically from the rest: the father that sank into the river one spring. The next sentence reveals that this was the young boy’s father (2016, 261) who committed suicide (264, 272). Although the father drowned himself, the boy’s relationship with the river is not purely 72 An interesting, though likely unintentional connection is happening here lexically: in German, the opposite to the frame narrative is a “Binnennarrativ.” Similarly, the word for rivers, lakes, and any form of inland waters is “Binnengewässer.” Inadvertently, the river justifies its existence in the “Binnennarrativ” on the lexical level. 73 Although it could also be any other river that flows next to a village or small town and serves as a grave for war dead. But due to the short story's proximity to Grammofon and, in some parts, Herkunft, reading the river as the Drina suggests itself. 74 The assumption is that the body of water in the title is the important river. However, as the eponymous poem within the short story indicates, "Gewässer" actually refers to the tears of the grieving mother – at least according to the narrator. The short story gives no reason why it cannot refer to both – which is the most likely scenario. 75 In Grammofon, see, among others, pages 21,23, 95, 206, 209-211, and 260; in Herkunft, see pages 6-8, 76, 166- 167, and 254. 118 negative, but extremely ambivalent. On the one hand, the river is his father’s grave (and a mass grave in war), but on the other hand, it saved him from the war in his city: “Der Fluss trug den Jungen über vier Grenzen zu einem Gastarbeiteronkel.” (2016, 272; see also 271) In a second list, mirrored after the first quoted above, the river is again described as stupid, but the list ends with “der schöne Fluss.” (272) Before focusing in more detail on this second list, I have to return to the first once more. The list is sandwiched between two paragraphs in which the boy plays with his grandfather on the bank of the river. This grandfather combines characteristics of both Opa Slavko and Opa Rafik without turning into a poor copy of either. The overlaps are too subtle, and the shared characteristics are not solely indicative of who he is. Opa Rafik is characterized by his work costume, a blue signalman uniform that he wore his whole adult life and even in death. The “alte Mann” – the name given to the grandfather in “Gewässer” – wears a “blaue[s], feste[s] Eisenbahnerhemd, ohne das ihn der Junge kaum je sah.” (Stanišić 2016, 262)76 The grandfather, a paternal figure through and through, gifts this shirt to the boy and it plays an important role in the short story as a mnemonic object. The short story’s ending offers another parallel between Rafik and the old man. In “Gewässer,” the grandfather is at death’s door, ailed by poor health. He receives a newly tailored blue shirt which his grandson had commissioned in France. He puts on the shirt by himself, gets up, washes his face, and combs his hair after which the story’s final sentence follows: “’Zum Fluss’, murmelt er und lässt Wasser in die Wanne ein.” (277). Does the shirt help? Is the grandfather suddenly improving? Or is this his final moment before the water takes him? “Gewässer” gives no definite answer. However, the subtle intertextual reference to Rafik, who had been scrubbed and washed in the bathtub by Aleksandar’s mother before and after 76 In Herkunft, there, too, is a grandfather named Muhamed, who owned a “blaue Eisenbahner-Uniform.” (Stanišić 2019, 72) 119 drowning in the river and who was wearing his blue signalman uniform, amplifies the ambiguity of the ending and implies suicide or death of the grandfather. At the same time, there are traces of Opa Slavko in the old man. Opa Slavko, for example, is immediately linked to magic (Stanišić 2006, 11), and the old man “konnte allerhand Zauberstücke” (Stanišić 2016, 261). Furthermore, the old man functions as a paternal figure for the protagonist after the suicide of his father and the paralyzing grief of his mother and thus takes on a central role in the boy’s childhood, just like Slavko did for Aleksandar. The protagonist’s father, too, is an intertextual remnant of both Rafik (drowning in the river) and Slavko (being dead at the start of the story) and a point of connection between “Gewässer” and Grammofon. Ultimately, both father and grandfather in “Gewässer” and Slavko and Rafik in Grammofon are connected in a large chain of associations, linked by the topos of death. But even with these connections and references, the grandfather in “Gewässer” is more than merely a counterpart to Grammofon’s grandfathers. Whereas the incomprehensibility of Slavko’s death and Aleksandar’s resistance to it spans, at most, the first two chapters of Stanišić’s debut novel, the grandfather is at the core of negotiating and engaging with the inevitability of death in “Gewässer.” Throughout, the short story’s frame narrative is pervaded by a sense of restlessness and shallowness. The three young “Existenzgründer ohne Existenzsorgen” (270) share a fast lifestyle and superficial relationships which try to cover a feeling of discontent. While passing a handful of puppies on the road, they ponder how nice it would be to take some with them. But the homodiegetic narrator concedes: “Was wir natürlich nicht tun würden, weil wir wissen, dass in unserem Leben kein Platz für das Glück von Welpen ist.” (2016, 261) Similarly, intimacy and triviality go hand in hand: “Anna, zum Beispiel, mag es nicht, wenn sie sich beim Sex aufs Küssen konzentrieren soll. Auf unseren Reisen möchte sie nur an Orten mit Dachterasse unterkommen.“ 120 (2016, 260) But anything that is uncomfortable is strictly avoided: “Wir sprechen aus, was uns gefällt, und meiden, was wir nicht ertragen. Bevor wir uns im Weg stehen, gehen wir uns aus dem Weg.” (2016, 260) It becomes clear that the protagonist’s restlessness is symptom and expression of avoidance and distancing. Though he has traveled much, his grandfather and he have not seen each other since he had to flee his native city because he does not want to return to “das Land des Hasses” (273) and the “Leben meiner Mutter und meines Großvaters ließ sich gut wegtelefonieren.” (2016, 272-273) “Gewässer” strongly implies that the shallowness between the protagonist and the two young women mirrors the protagonist’s relationship with his mother and grandfather by overlaying one set of relationships with the other: “Anna ruft meinen Namen. ‘Er ruft deinen Namen’, sagt die Mutter. […] ‘Mein Junge?’ Seine Stimme bricht. Marie und der Automechaniker lachen.” (265-266) The distance, both geographically and emotionally, between the protagonist and his family is also illustrated by the blue “Eisenbahnerhemd” which belonged to his grandfather who gave it to him as a child. He is not wearing it anymore and it is stashed “irgendwo [in Frankfurt] auf dem Dachboden.” (2016, 273) The homodiegetic narrator illustrates that the protagonist is aware that his distant behavior is on purpose, trying to avoid the unavoidable. He knows that his grandfather is dying (“Mein Großvater liegt im Sterben,” 273). And more importantly, he knows that he avoids facing the truth: “Ich will nicht fragen, wie es ihm geht. Solange er mir nicht sagt, dass es ihm schlecht geht, geht es ihm nicht schlecht. […] Ich bin genauso. Ganz genauso, hier sprechen zwei, die nicht über das sprechen wollen, was auf der Hand liegt, dass ein Mensch stirbt.” (2016, 266) The choice to flip between narrative voices, now, reveals an interesting strategy because it artificially and deliberately conceals the connection between frame narrative and episodes (at least, at first) and, in so doing, creates the pretense that the homodiegetic narrator does narrate the childhood memories. This mirrors the protagonist’s state 121 of mind as his relationship with Maria and Anna is superficial, and his relationship to his mother and grandfather is distant. The choice of narrative voice, then, is a narrative strategy of creating distance between the memories and the present. Visiting a tailor in Paris to commission a blue button-down shirt is a concerted effort to restore the shirt that he is not wearing anymore and, in so doing, symbolically repaying his grandfather for his youth and trying to save him from dying. At the same time, visiting the tailor is also a clear sign of a need to communicate, of opening up in a way that he has been unable to do with anyone close to him: “’Ich möchte, dass Sie für meinen Großvater ein Hemd schneidern, aber hören Sie erst zu, was mein Großvater für ein Mann war.’ Meine heisere Stimme versinkt dramatisch in meinem Anliegen, alles versinkt in meinem Anliegen.” (2016, 274) Not only does this pleading moment forge a connection between the figure of the tailor and the readers, but also between the “Anliegen” – telling stories about the grandfather to keep him alive – and the river (and the mother’s tears) into which everything sinks (261, 271-272). I will discuss this central issue of storytelling as a means of keeping alive in more depth in 3.3 and 3.4. But first, I will return to the topic of bodies of water and analyze how rivers (and lakes) are connected to the topos of death. 3.2.2 Of Rivers and Lakes The memories in “Gewässer” are set in the early 1990s. Although the short story itself never provides information about the time or place in which these episodes take place, a temporal placement is made possible by a reference to the music video of the Scorpions’ song “Wind of Change” which was published in 199177: 77 Compare to Herkunft, page 93: „Mit meinen Pioniergenossen säuberte ich die Ufer der Drina und pfiff ‘Wind of Change,‘ mein Lieblingslied zu der Zeit.“ (Stanišić 2019, 93). 122 An dem Abend sah der Junge ein Musikvideo, das ihm sehr gefiel: Wunderkerzen bei einem Riesenkonzert, Soldaten an einer Mauer und marschierend und Menschenmassen, und ein Mann im weißen Hemd klettert auf einen Panzer. Der Sänger trug eine kleine Mütze und eine Lederjacke, er pfiff und sang und pfiff (Stanišić 2016, 268) But this intertextual reference also places the episodes geopolitically: it is a time of drastic transformation, and a shift of the borders between West and East. But it is also the time of Yugoslavia’s looming collapse, and the murderous tensions that struck out during the Bosnian War. This is illustrated by the figure of the communist who, in the boy’s memories, is literally thrown out of the town (266-267) and later returns as a “frisch geschlüpfter Nationalist.” (2016, 271) Considering that I assumed that the unnamed river is the Drina, it suggests itself that the unnamed town is Višegrad – or at least a town that lived through similar historical events. Stanišić is an author who has taken a clear stance against stereotyping based on biography, most notably in his critique of the idea of literature of migration (see, for example, Stanišić 2007, 2017a; see also the discussion in chapter two). But Stanišić also remarked that two of his short stories in Fallensteller are ”konkret in Bosnien angesiedelt.” (Stanišić 2017a, 65:35-65:40)78 He states that the experience of migration, whether traumatic or not, stays with him as an individual – “und das ist auch gut so.” (Stanišić 2017a, 65:44-65:52) However, migration itself is only a marginally relevant topic in “Gewässer” because the short story remains focused throughout on negotiating the process of a loved one dying. However, it not only focuses on the individual negotiation with the inevitable, but also on the murder of many during war. In “Gewässer” as well as in Grammofon, the violent killing of groups of people is almost always negotiated and mediated in relation to the Drina. In general, bodies of water take on a mediating role throughout all of Stanišić’s writing, be 78 He refers to “Gewässer,” and “Die Fabrik,” a short story set in the province Romanija in the east of Bosnia. 123 it rivers (Grammofon, Herkunft, “Gewässer”) or lakes (Vor dem Fest). They mediate the experiences of death (and war) as well as the intradiegetic negotiations of death. Therefore, the subsequent analysis sets out to highlight this connection and, in so doing, concretizes how characters and narrators negotiate death in Stanišić’s works. The episodic memories in “Gewässer” do not only deal with the dramatic effects of the father’s suicide on an individual level, but on a secondary level also narratively process war crimes for which the river was exploited and used. At the heart of this storyline is the communist-turned- nationalist. After the grandfather threw him out of the town, the grownups come together in the marketplace to discuss what just happened. A professor asks what the communist wanted and “was […] er dem alten Mann, oder der alte Mann ihm getan [habe].” (2016, 267) No one answers, and everyone remains silent – except the grandfather. He climbs the town’s steeple and preaches a sermon: “Genau das ist das Problem! Wir fressen zu viel Fettiges und Süßes und wundern uns später, dass wir am Fettigen und Süßen gestorben sind!“ (267) The protagonist, our point of focalization, can only remember this excerpt of the speech and, like the rest of the town, is unable to comprehend the grandfather’s words. They still appeal to him, but only “wegen Sterben [sic],” (267), because death is mentioned. Grandfather’s allegory, however, is both knowing and prescient. Although readers are not given a reason for the fight between grandfather and communist, the latter’s return as a nationalist allows for an educated guess. The communist-turned- nationalist orders townsfolk to be brought to the marketplace where he “ließ Namen ausrufen und aufreihen.” (2016, 271) Grandfather’s name is among them, but he hid himself with his grandson and daughter-in-law. In so doing, he saves their lives because the people were brought “in einer langen Kolonne zum Fluss […], und der Junge durfte nicht hinsehen, aber was macht man gegen hinhören?” (2016, 271) The homodiegetic narrator, masked as heterodiegetic, leaves it at this, but 124 the implication is evident: at the river, the people are being killed by the nationalist; the boy hears the screams of the people, and the corpses hitting the water. A historical contextualization substantiates this reading. Edina Bećirević reports, among many other incidents, of July 7, 1992, a day on which five Bosniaks were murdered on the bank of the Drina by Milan Lukić and Mitar Vasiljević, or June 19, 1992, where 147 Bosniaks were murdered and thrown into the Drina (2014, 126-127). Considering this historical and narrative context, it stands to reason that the dispute between grandfather and communist can be traced back to ethnicity. Even though the grandfather is never characterized as Muslim, the overall context makes this implication reasonable.79 Applying this insight to the grandfather’s sermon allows us to understand his words as both criticism and warning: he decried the townsfolk’s ignorance, pointing to the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing; there are people like the communist-turned-nationalist that constantly stoke the fires of nationalism and propagate islamophobia, but it is brushed aside as the aberration of the few. But the grandfather knew that without fighting back, this passivity equals indifference and acceptance. He was sure that the effects of it, of too much “Fettiges und Süßes,” would close in on them soon. The framing of his sermon points to the truth of his words even before the communist returns as murderous nationalist. The people on the marketplace are indifferent: “Die Leute schlugen sich gegenseitig die Mücken von der Haut. Eine Antwort schien keiner zu haben.” (2016, 267) At the same, war already seems to be on people’s mind, all the way down to the youngest whose playtime has turned martial: “Die Kinder spielten Irak gegen Kuwait.” (2016, 267) And 79 Such an interpretation could also shed new light on the father's suicide: rising ethnic tensions and a simmering Islamophobic mood may have led the father to commit suicide. However, this is never implied in the short story and would be speculation at best. 125 even the boy, our protagonist, does not understand what his grandfather said but was fascinated by the mere mention of death. The river is, on the one hand, a grave for the people killed by the nationalist. But in the same scene, it is also savior for the protagonist (wearing the blue shirt) and his mother who were led to a quiet hiding place on the river’s bank by the grandfather. Once they hear the barking of dogs in the forest, implying that a search is ongoing, the grandfather tells the boy to follow the river. Its current, then, carries them to safety. The narrator, however, is unable to let go of what he has witnessed. In a list mirroring the first one quoted above, the narrator uses the image of the river to mediate the horrors he has witnessed, seemingly unable to do so without the distance provided by an intermediary whose flowing waters bring with them constant renewal and change. But neither renewal nor change is able to bring the victims back to life or unmake atrocities, adding an element of futility which moves the focus away from any thought of cleansing, rebirth, or renewal, and emphasizes the river as a way of creating distance between what occurred and the person having to come to terms with it – the river as intermediary to negotiate the cruelty of death, to slowly grinding down its incomprehensibility like water working on a rugged stone, and allow for an engagement with something the protagonist is otherwise unable to face. Instead of stones, balls, trees, birds, snow, or the protagonist’s father, in this list “selbst der Krieg” sinks into the river: “Handgranaten, Lebende und Tote, gesprengte Brücken, Geschichte und das daraus Gelernte, der blöde Fluss, ganze humanitäre Hilfsladungen, blubb-blubb, Kindheiten, noch mehr Väter, die aber unfreiwillig, der schöne Fluss.“ (2016, 271-72) The surprising straightforwardness of this list clashes with the previous unwillingness of the homodiegetic narrator to transcend implications and hints. The mediation via the river allows him to speak the unspeakable. In a way, the river is a conduit that allows him to find language and, in so doing, supplies a narrative. But this list also 126 shows that the mediation is only possible by operationalizing the image of something sinking, of letting death, war, and of historical lessons (especially those of the Second World War, where more than five thousand Bosniaks in Višegrad were killed on the Drina, see Bećirevič 2014, 124) vanish under the surface of the water, palpable and yet unseizable as it is carried away by the water in an instant. This inconceivability (consider the German “Unbegreiflichkeit”) is negotiated with the help of the Drina, not only in “Gewässer,” but also in Grammofon where the ambivalent and lively Drina forces childhood memories and crimes of war to clash. In his debut novel, the Drina not only embraces the willing body of Opa Rafik, but is also forced, for the first time in Stanišić’s writing, to serve as a mass grave. The homodiegetic narrator Aleksandar’s approach to reflect on the atrocities that took place in Višegrad with the help of the Drina is subtle and usually contrasted with positive memories of “meine Drina,” (Stanišić 2006, 95, see also 206), the “launische Drina” (142) that he misses in Essen where he lives in Germany – at least at first, until he warms up to the Ruhr (though some longing always remains). But ten years later, when he returns to Višegrad for the first time, the Drina is back on his mind prominently and immediately. Taking the bus from Sarajevo to Višegrad, the first thing the narrator stresses once Aleksandar gets close to his native city: “Die Drina weckt mich.” (2006, 260) The river is also part of one of the many long lists of things he wants to revisit, remember, and test against his memories and that he created before and during his visit: “Soldaten: Eisen und Schnaps. Drina: Drina.” (2006, 265) Two things catch the eye: there is the matter-of-course-nature with which the Drina is needs no explanation, is enclosed, almost self-sufficient in its own existence; it is not possible to capture what constitutes the Drina for Aleksandar. At the same time, it is hard not to notice that the Drina, almost resembling a chain of association, directly follows the item “Soldaten: Eisen und Schnaps.” It seems that, whether subconsciously or not, Aleksandar’s mind has created a connection between soldiers and the Drina. 127 It is especially upon returning to Višegrad that the memories of the river, so far usually positively connotated, become more ambivalent. He recalls a swimming lesson with Opa Slavko in the Drina and remarks: “Das Licht, das durch die Wasseroberfläche bricht, von unten gesehen, ist das unheimlichste Licht, wenn es dazu hinter der Nase im Kopf zu brennen beginnt.“ (2006, 281) This is a conceivable description of someone who, while diving in the river, witnesses the sunlight hitting the surface of the water and sees the light breaking. At the same time, the description is ambiguously ominous. The light is perceived from below (“von unten gesehen”), it is the uncanniest light, and it is connected to the image of something burning. Considering the historical context, it is easy to read this description and think of people falling into the water after being shot on the bridge or the bank of the river; dying, the last thing they see, is the sunlight breaking on the river’s surface while they sink, a burning sensation in their heads. It is not Aleksandar, however, who is the most explicit about contextualizing the Drina in relationship to death. Instead, it is Aleksandar’s boyhood friend, Zoran Pavlović. Unlike Aleksandar, Zoran remained in Višegrad during and after the war, and contact with his old friend has been sparse. Zoran takes on the role of homodiegetic narrator a few times in the novel, most notably perhaps in chapters three and four. His narrative voice is most impactful, however, at a later point. Sandwiched between Aleksandar’s letters to Asija, Zoran describes his emotional state in a three-page chapter (“Hallo. Wer? Aleksandar! So was, woher rufst du an? Nicht schlecht? Beschissen, und selbst?,“ 146-148), emphasizing how much he hates living in Višegrad: Ich hasse die Schüsse in der Nacht und die Leichen im Fluss, und ich hasse es, dass man das Wasser nicht hört, wenn der Körper aufschlägt, ich hasse es, dass ich so weit weg bin von allem, von der Macht und von dem Mut; ich hasse mich, weil ich mich oben am alten Gymnasium verstecke, und ich hasse meine Augen, weil sie nicht genau erkennen können, wer die Leute sind, die in die Tiefe gestoßen werden und im Wasser erschossen werden, vielleicht sogar schon im Flug. Andere werden gleich auf der Brücke getötet […]. Ich hasse 128 den Typen vom Staudamm in Bajina Bašta80, der sich beschwert, man solle nicht so viele Leute auf einmal in den Fluss werfen, weil die Abflüsse verstopften. […] Weil der scheiß Schnee nichts, nichts, nichts verdeckt, wir aber unsere Augen so gekonnt verdecken, als hätten wir nur das gelernt in den Jahren der Nachbarschaft und der Brüderlichkeit und der Einheit. (2016, 147) The multitude of anaphoras illustrates and intensifies the forcefulness and poignancy of Zoran’s feelings. Unlike Aleksandar, Zoran is blunt and direct in his descriptions. Instead of using the river as mediatory, Zoran’s description more resembles an irate witness report disclosing the murders on the bridge and the bank of the Drina. His strong anger mixed with feelings of powerlessness, shame, and survivor’s guilt point to trauma that is too strong to try and deal with it through the mediation that Aleksandar chooses: “Mein Hass ist endlos, Aleksandar. Auch wenn ich die Augen schließe, ist alles da.” (2006, 148) Instead, it must be laid bare. At the same time, Zoran does not have the same connection to the Drina: “Du hast mir einmal erzählt, dass du mit der Drina gesprochen hast. Spinner. Ich frage mich, was sie jetzt erzählen würde, wenn sie es wirklich könnte.” (2006, 148) This last sentence, however, implies that there is some part of Zoran that wishes he was able to negotiate his trauma in the same way as Aleksandar. One further thing that stands out in Zoran’s description of his emotional state is an echo of the grandfather’s sermon.81 The covered eyes find a parallel in the fatty and the sweet through which one perishes: covering one’s eyes equals an ignorance, a passivity, putting up with even the worst atrocities. Zoran’s reference to snow shows that it is impossible to not be affected whether one believes themselves innocent or not. It is also Zoran who confronts Aleksandar with death more directly than anybody else. When the two meet for the first time in a decade, they sit in a bar and drink beer. Aleksandar tells 80 As Edina Bećirević reveals in The Genocide on the Drina River (2014), the story of the “Typen am Staudamm in Bajina Bašta“ really happened (127). 81 Or, chronologically speaking, rather an anticipation of the sermon in “Gewässer.” 129 his boyhood friend of “Krieg […], von der Zeit danach, von Frauen oder Studium oder Fußball.” (2006, 279) Zoran barely interacts, just shaking his head from time to time. Though the homodiegetic narrator notes that it has always been hard to get much reaction from Zoran in conversations, there is a storm brewing inside Zoran this time around. At one point, he lets Aleksandar know that he is nothing but “ein Fremder” (279) here in Višegrad as he does not know him or anything else in Višegrad anymore. Aleksandar’s objection that he only wants to compare his memories to the present enrage Zoran further. Before Zoran can lash out, however, the homodiegetic narrator inserts a different story into the narrative, but only for two pages; in the end, Aleksandar, who has always only approached the subject of war and death through an intermediary, cannot avoid Zoran’s blunt words: Erinnerst du dich an Čika Sead? Man sagt, sie haben ihn aufgespießt und wie ein Lamm gegrillt, irgendwo neben der Straße nach Sarajevo. Und wenn du dich an Čika Sead erinnerst, dann erinnerst du dich auch an Čika Hasan. Zweiundachtzig Liter Blut hat er vor dem Krieg gespendet, damit hat er immer geprahlt. Čika Hasan haben sie Tag für Tag auf die Brücke gebracht, damit er die Leichen der Hingerichteten in die Drina wirft. Hasan hat dem Toten die Arme ausgebreitet, er hat ihre Körper an seinen gelehnt, er hat sie auf sich ausruhen lassen, bevor er sie losließ. Zweiundachtzig Tote hat er so in der Drina bestattet. Und als sie ihm den dreiundachtzigsten befohlen haben, ist er auf das Geländer geklettert und hat selbst die Arme ausgebreitet. Das ist alles, soll er gesagt haben, ich will nicht mehr. (2006, 282) Zoran exacerbates the notion of the Drina as a mass grave, not only by recounting the death of 84 people, but especially through the use of the word “bestattet,” buried. Moreover, the difference between Aleksandar and Zoran really comes to the fore in Zoran’s words. While Aleksandar slept on the bus from Sarajevo to Višegrad, only to be woken up by the Drina, Zoran can perceive this street only as a mnemotopia, a “Gedächtnisort” in the sense of Jan Assmann, for him and those who lived through the horrors in Višegrad. While Aleksandar engages with the fate of the victims almost exclusively through the image of sinking into the Drina – for him both childhood friend 130 and a place of shelter –, Zoran has to cope with the fate of Čika Hasan who gives a name and a face to the victims who, up to this point, have been nameless and faceless. It is likely that Zoran witnessed Čika Hasan’s torture and agony firsthand and over several days – an immediacy that Aleksandar can hardly fathom, much less stomach. Aleksandar is working through his own experiences, memories, and traumas, and he does so of his own accord. In Zoran, he is confronted with someone who is forced to encounter mnemonic spaces (like the street to Sarajevo or the bridge over the Drina) or even perpetrators like Pokor every day, thus having to live through his traumas continuously. This unending cycle of traumata precludes the experiences from becoming the past, the present to separate itself from the past, and the process of healing. Aleksandar, only visiting and about to return to his life in Germany, is unable to share Zoran’s forlornness. Zoran’s shame for having survived is unlike any shame Aleksandar experiences. The novel itself assigns neither blame nor value judgements to either character and even the two homodiegetic narrators (Aleksandar and Zoran), though not frugal with emotionality, do not fault the other for what happened. Instead, each narrator and each character find their own approach to negotiating the topos of death. Aleksandar is reliant on the Drina to soften the blow, to mediate the engagement with the topos to be able to approach what to Aleksandar is still incomprehensible; Zoran is straightforward and blunt, too jaded to think of death as incomprehensible, instead understanding it as a significant reality of human life and, more woefully, something that humans intentionally inflict upon others. Zoran is left with rage, hate, and resignation which contrast drastically with Aleksandar’s urge to comprehend and the wish to visualize his memories. But perhaps the confrontation with Zoran enabled the homodiegetic narrator Aleksandar to productively and, at least for Aleksandar, bluntly engage with the mass death in Višegrad. Unsurprisingly, he does so once again in relation to the Drina. In a mix of fantasized childhood 131 memory and fantastic story, Aleksandar talks to the Drina while fishing – and the Drina answers. In their conversation, the river apologizes for the death of Opa Rafik, although she cannot remember him (Stanišić 2006, 209). After a brief silence, the Drina starts to monologize. Even in a scene with an unmistakable magical realist tinge, this monologue abides between the spoken and the invented because it is cited by the homodiegetic narrator in the subjunctive after saying: “Vielleicht erzählt sie von alleine weiter, wenn ich nichts sage, von alleine weiter.” (210) Thus, it is likely that it is the narrator that is speaking through her which surely fits the narrative strategy of mediating Aleksandar’s experiences and thoughts. The monologue reads: Der Winterkälte trotze sie und die Herbstregen wühlen sie nicht auf, aber sie habe Angst davor, dass die Schüsse auch uns mit Krieg anstecken. Gegen den Felsen klagt sie, unzählige Kriege habe sie durchgemacht, einer scheußlicher als der andere. So viele Leichen habe sie tragen müssen, so viele gesprengte Brücken ruhen für immer auf ihrem Grund. […] Auch habe sie sich nie verstecken können und vor keinem Verbrechen die Augen verschließen, schäumt sie vor Wut, ich habe nicht mal Augenlider! Ich kenne keinen Schlaf, kann niemanden retten und nichts verhindern. (2006, 211) The rendering of speech in the subjunctive makes it clear how the narrator uses the Drina as a mediator, as a mouthpiece to put what happened into words. In no other scene is the Drina so humanized, her emotions so emphasized. In addition, none of the Drina scenes conveyed by Aleksandar deal with the dead and the war so directly. Aleksandar's account of Drina's monologue also functions as a defense for the Drina, who has to carry the corpses, who wants to help, forget, but not see, yet is unable to do so. Instead, she is at the mercy of human actions. In an interview with Raffaella Mare, Stanišić described the Drina für mich wie eine Person, die alles vertragen muss. Sie ist eine geschichtliche, immer anwesende Instanz, in der unsere eigene Fehler und Ängste und Aggressionen versammelt sind. Und sie kann nichts dafür. Für die Menschen, die neben der Drina wohnen, ist sie auch eine symbolische Größe, ein symbolisches Grab, aufgeladen mit Geschichte. (Mare 2014, 301) 132 What is also interesting about this monologue is that it repeats many elements of Zoran's monologue (147): the anger, the impossibility to look away, to forget, to help, to prevent. In this monologue, the homodiegetic Aleksandar narrator shows most clearly his strategy of using only the Drina to narratively reflect on the atrocities of war and to engage with the memories. From running water and a river doomed to be a mass grave, we turn to a still body of water that plays an important role in Vor dem Fest. However, the connection between death and the lake(s) is not as pronounced as in “Gewässer” and Grammofon and the relationship between positive and negative associations of the Lakes of the Uckermark is more ambivalent and less clear-cut. Therefore, a brief analysis will round off this discussion. There are a total of four scenes in which the two lakes (the “Deep Lake” and the “Great Lake”) around Fürstenfelde are brought into a narrative connection with death. One of the many historical reports in the novel tells of a “Schultzin” (mayoress) who in 1589 strangled the child begotten by the son and the maid and instigated the son to murder the maid, whereupon she was "drowned in the deep lake for punishment.” (Stanišić 2014, 104)82 It is the deep lake, in particular, that has been viewed with suspicion for a long time and since the area was first settled due to its depth and the associated dark black color of the water, which is why it was given the name “Düvelsbad,” (95) Devil’s Lake. According to the heterodiegetic narrator of the relevant chapter (95-98), there is a local legend that goes along with the name. As the ferryman once drove a small, shady figure across the lake, rowing became increasingly difficult for him. The figure tore off his leg and threw it into the lake. It asked the ferryman to wait while it jumped into the lake and eventually emerged with its leg bent into a goat's hoof. Since the ferryman dutifully complied with this wish, the devil spared him, as the figure unsurprisingly revealed himself to be, but he cursed the remaining residents of Fürstenfelde 82 Besonders auffällig ist, dass […] die Seen Orte des Todes, des Vergehens und des Vergessens zu sein scheinen.” (Zink 2017, 57) 133 with the plague because they had dared to settle on his lake. Undoubtedly, this is a local legend meant to explain the onset of a disease. But it also contributes to local history and, therefore, to a local identity. In a radio interview with SRF (Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen; Swiss Radio and Television), Stanišić explained: “Wir kennen alle diese lokalen Sagen und Legenden. Manche lieben sie, manche verfluchen sie, die meisten kennen sie gar nicht mehr. Und auch das galt es also zu schaffen für dieses Dorf.” (Steiner 2014, 7:15-7:23) Considering that Stanišić himself refers to the invented nature of both the legend and the village itself, it is important to understand the proximity of death and storytelling in his novels, and especially so in Vor dem Fest. This will be discussed in detail in the upcoming 3.3 shortly. Another instance of the connection between lake(s) and death is the memory of Ana Kranz, the town’s painter. Having found a new home in Fürstenfelde after fleeing the Banat, Frau Kranz was still unable to escape the violence of war. While painting on and in the lake, she remembers a Russian invasion of the Uckermark and the fear she felt while hiding in the water under the ferryman's punt. Although it is the lake that helps Ms. Kranz to survive – “sie trank den See” (Stanišić 2014, 100; this sentence is even found twice on the page) – it is also implied that rape and death (in the image of the soldier strangling a pig) happen at the lake. Ana Kranz is rescued by the ferryman, and her survival is a good example of the ambivalence of the narrative connection between lake and death. The most obvious and decisive example in the novel is the death of the ferryman, with which Vor dem Fest opens. The ferryman is naturally part of the “lake” ecosystem: “Zwei Seen, kein Fährmann.” (Stanišić 2014, 11) In addition, the ferryman drowned in the Great Lake (12), a likely suicide.83 The death of the ferryman, who was a gifted narrator at the time and who also connects Fürstenfelde with the outside world, forces the village itself to take over the gap 83 “Vor allem die eigene Unsterblichkeit ha[t] ihn mürbe gemacht und resigniert.” (Stanišic 2017c, 23:19-23:22) 134 in the narrative position, as Stanišić himself confirmed in the aforementioned interview with the SRF (Steiner 2014, 17:30-18:22). Consequently, the death of the ferryman in the lake changes the entire village structure, opening the door for the 'we' narrative voice that defines the novel, bringing with it uncertainty but also opportunity. The following discussion engages with this narrative figure and narration in general. Because on the narrative level, death is often dealt with in connection with bodies of water, but dealing with it in the narrative is essential, especially when it is used as a survival strategy. 3.2.3 Storytelling as Survival Strategy – Dying Villages The fictional village of Fürstenfelde in Vor dem Fest has been shrinking for years, either due to rural exodus, as is now looming in the person of Anna Geher, or due to deaths. The first paragraph of the novel makes this clear: “Wir sind traurig. Wir haben keinen Fährmann mehr. Der Fährmann ist tot.” (Stanišić 2014, 11) The death of the ferryman is not only the catalyst of the story. In the novel, one learns again how respected the ferryman was in the village; after all he had lived there for many decades. Borrowings from Charon, the ferryman of the dead across the rivers Styx and Acheron in Greek mythology, can undoubtedly be found in Fürstenfelde's ferryman. The ferryman is old, because of the naming as “the ferryman” throughout the novel, it seems as if he had been part of Fürstenfelde for centuries. He shares this mythical age with Charon. However, the novel itself gives the clearest indication. One chapter describes archaeological finds around and in Fürstenfelde, which not only refer to a long history, but also to the advance of Slavs into the area (Stanišić confirms that these were real archaeological finds, see Steiner 2014, 16:53-18:22). Among other things, the narrator tells us: “Und in einem slawischen Grab fand man eine Meerschaumspinnwirtel und im Mund der Toten eine Münze, dem Fährmann zum Lohn, der sie 135 ins Jenseits bringen würde.” (Stanišić 2014, 260) On the other hand, the ferryman occupies a position that is “reverse […] from that known as a mythological figure,” (Steiner 2014, 16:53- 18:22) as the protector of the village. This can be seen, for example, in the two scenes already mentioned. It is the ferryman who saves Frau Kranz from under the punt, hides her in his ferry house, survives imprisonment and ordeal to ultimately return to her with food. It is also the ferryman who, in the mythologized local legend, runs through the whole village after the devil threatens its residents, and tries to warn them of the devil's curse. But the ferryman also protected the village – this is made clear at the beginning of the novel – through his position as narrator, as narrative authority, which is now vacant due to his death and, thus, the village has to take over as a seemingly homogeneous ‘we.’ Most importantly, then, the ferryman told stories: "Der Fährmann war ein guter Erzähler." (Stanišić 2014, 12; see also 233). Without him, this element, which turns out to be essential for survival, is suddenly missing. Without stories about the history of the village there is no sense of community. And due to the missing constitution of the village's past through storytelling, the present and the future is in danger because Fürstenfelde is defined by its own tradition. The central importance of the “Haus der Heimat” makes this clear. And the ferryman's death is only the alarming culmination of a steady decline in people, but even more in tradition. Because not only the ferryman is dead, but also the carpenter and the electrician in the village have died - a replacement for them is not in sight. It is also striking here that the ferryman, carpenter, electrician and also the bell ringer, who will soon be retiring, are all named solely by their job titles; none of them have proper names. This emphasizes that the role of the individual in the overall fabric of the village is more important to the conception of “we” than the individual himself. It is thus not so much the loss of an individual that hurts, but the loss of a part of the village’s self-conception. 136 Except for the electrician, these are professions that have a long tradition and are part of the composition of the village's history. Their disappearance is therefore a further sign that the history of the village is being lost and that the present and the future are in danger. The fact that Johann, Frau Schwermuth's son, takes over the position of bell ringer - albeit unpaid - and thus a change from a job title to a proper name is completed, is possibly a first, albeit fickle, sign of hope. Nonetheless, the actual death of the ferryman is symbolic of the seemingly unstoppable death of the village. Because “es gehen mehr tot, als geboren werden,” and “natürlich werden viele trotz der Bilder bald vergessen sein.” (2014, 85) Even if the narrator's voice - the ‘we’ of the village - tries to remain optimistic, it quickly has to admit that this optimism is only an illusion: “Bloß ist jetzt der Fährmann tot,“ and “[n]iemand sagt, ich bin der neue Fährmann.“ (2014, 13) Since no individual can be found to fill the role left behind by the ferryman – narrator, protector, village fixture –, the village as a whole has to take up the mantle: Er führt nicht die Menschen in den Tod, sondern er rettet sie eher. Und bei mir ist er in dieser Nacht nicht mehr da und deswegen ist alles unsicher jetzt. Also niemand darf sich sicher wähnen in dieser Nacht, in der ihr Fährmann selbst nicht vorhanden ist. Das ist eine Warnung an all die Personen, die in dieser Nacht vor dem Fest unterwegs sind: euch könnte etwas passieren, euch beschützt heute Nacht niemand; ihr müsst euch dem Dorf als Erzähler ergeben. Er ist derjenige, der euch durch diese Nacht führt. (Steiner 2014, 17:55-18:22) Consequently, the death of the ferryman not only sets the narrative in motion. As Stanišić explained in the last of his three Zürcher Poetikvorlesung in November 2017: “Mit ihm stirbt nicht nur ein Fährmann. Mit ihm stirbt ein mythisches Wesen. […]. Und auch er war, also der Fährmann, wie Aleksandars Großvater jemand, der mit dem Erzählen gehandelt hat. Über Jahrhunderte hinweg brachte dieser Mann mit seinen Passagieren Geschichten ins Dorf und ließ die Dorfgeschichten über die Passagiere wieder in die Welt hinaustragen.” (2017c, 22:32 - 23:10) 137 Even if the readers never get to know the ferryman, it quickly becomes clear that his death leaves deep scars. In this situation, it is creating and telling stories that ensures the survival of the village. Johanna Schwermuth, archivist at the “Haus der Heimat,” not only acts as a curator for the objects in the archive. As is implied throughout the novel, Frau Schwermuth rewrites or even creates many of the texts in the archive. She designs and thereby writes the story of the village, creating a (in her eyes) meaningful narrative. The best example of this is the semi-historical account of “Ring des Kesselflickers” (Stanišić 2014, 187-190), where the layout of the novel itself exemplifies Schwermuth's interpolation. Parts of the printed text are crossed out, individual words, phrases or entire paragraphs are inserted by her in handwriting. Frau Schwermuth, according to Stanišić, does not like “wie das Dorf in der Geschichte dargestellt wird. Ihr fehlt zum Beispiel die Psychologie in den alten Geschichten oder sie findet die Einträge der Vergangenheit zu knapp; dann erzählt sie ihre eigenen Märchen und Geschichten und so weiter.” (Steiner 2014, 7:55-8:16) She perceives it to be necessary because without the past, she knows, there can be neither the present nor the future. The death of a unifying myth (the ferryman and his stories) that binds the community to keep their past alive through stories, the village’s future sense of continuity is endangered – and Frau Schwermuth writes and invents to prevent that. She embodies what Alon Confino writes on the subject of ‘Heimatfolklore’: it “linked generations by emphasizing the longevity of traditions, real or invented, thus connecting the past and present.” (1993, 59) By creating the history of the village, Frau Schwermuth tries to legitimize its presence. In this context, it is noteworthy that this creation of a narrative takes place close to the annual Annenfest - a festival in which past and present overlap, thus impacting the future: “Die Nacht trägt heute drei Livreen: Was War, Was Ist, Was Wird Geschehen.” (Stanišić 2014, 64) 138 On the one hand, this superimposition is due to the long tradition of the festival, which is enriched by the renewed execution. But there is also a collapse on the narrative level: the two thieves from historical accounts suddenly appear in the present and try to steal the church bells (see Stanišić 2014, 178, 307). The vixen, which roams around the village in several chapters in the present, also finds its place in some historical reports (117, 146; see also the reference on 205). Several female figures appear in semi-historical reports. They are mostly nameless. But then: “Nennen wir sie Anna.” (222). This is fascinating in the context of the Annenfest because the narrative intertwines the experiences of one of the protagonists of the novel, Anna Geher, with characters from the past. Altogether, there are six generations of Annas from the 16th century to the present: one Anna in 1636 (221), one Anna in 1722 (181) as well as Anna Geher, Ana Kranz and JohANNA Schwermuth in the present.84 All six can be found in the sketch – later transferred to canvas – by Frau Kranz (100). The name ‘Anna’ itself is complex and interesting. Not only is Anna the mother of Mary (and grandmother of Jesus). The name itself is also a palindrome. In the chiastic character of the palindrome itself is a reference to the collapse of past and present. To comprehend this, we briefly follow an argument that Sarah Colvin (2022) masterfully pursues in her analysis of Sharon Dodua Otoo's Ada's Raum (2021), and which is also fruitful for Anna in Vor dem Fest.85 In Ada's Raum, the readers meet four Adas in different times and places. The timelines are intertwined. Colvin argues that this intertwining does not occur chronologically but anachronistically - namely in “a chiastic loop,” (2021, 155) a chiastic loop which, in turn, mirrors 84 The sixth Anna, in the 16th century, is unnamed but is confirmed by Stanišić as a woman condemned as a witch (Steiner 2014, 43:43-45:29; see also Zink 2017, 95, footnote 153). It is likely that this was the year 1599, when the fire got out of control during an Annen festival and set four houses on fire (28). The chapter describing the fire of 1599 begins with the words: “Wir sind froh, Anna wird verbrannt. Morgen Abend beim Fest wird das Urteil vollstreckt.” (28) Even if a description of the present follows shortly afterwards, the context of these first two sentences is that of the past, as children are spoken of immediately afterwards who are put “zu den Kälbern ins Heu.” 85 In Vor dem Fest, Anna, of course, lacks any reference to the experiences, obstacles and traumata of Black and Afro- German women. However, the part of the argument that is presented here deals fundamentally with the palindrome of the protagonist Ada and an anachronistic understanding of time. 139 the “chiastic palindrome of Ada's name”: The four Adas, “rather than being arranged into one section per lifetime according to a linear chronology, […] intertwine as the stories move forward.” (Colvin 2021, 155) Something similar happens with the six Annas, whose return is only anchored in the annual Annenfest, and who appear together in Frau Kranz's sketch, regardless of their historical time. In the last third of the novel in particular, it becomes apparent how past and present become blurred – a kind of chiastic loop, which is reflected in the palindrome “Anna.” In the last third of the novel, Anna meets Wilfried Schramm, a pensioner in the village. As she quickly finds out, Mr. Schramm is planning his suicide. In addition to the symbolic parallel of Anna rescuing Mr. Schramm as a pars pro toto for the entire, aging, and meaning-seeking village, the situation quickly becomes opaque at the narrative level. Suddenly Frau Schwermuth appears with a gun drawn and threatens Anna. The rewriting and creation of the village history triggered a psychotic episode in her,86 in which she can no longer distinguish between the different times and constructed stories: “Den Kesselflicker habe sie erwischt und die Glocken gesichert, jetzt sei sie dran.“ (Stanišić 2014, 218) Anna, in turn, draws a gun and points it at Frau Schwermuth. Parallel to this event, some chapters tell the story of an old man named Lutz and a young woman who stand by on the outskirts of the village to fend off a gang of marauders. Lutz and the young woman are in the same place as Anna, Herr Schramm, and Frau Schwermuth - but in the 17th century. The young woman in the 17th century, also Anna, has a crossbow. Caught in an intersection of time strands, in the present, Frau Schwermuth tells Anna to lower the crossbow. She talks to Herr Schramm, calling him Lutz several times. She tries to convince him that Anna is a traitor. Just a few pages later, the narrating voice of the village, the ‘we,’ reveals its own intervention in the storytelling and rewriting: 86 Stanišić described it as “einen schweren Schub von Wörtlich-nehmen-der-Geschichte.” (Steiner 2014, 46:27-46:33) 140 David gegen Goliath. Naja. Gefällt uns nicht. … Es wäre viel spannender, wenn die wirklich in Gefahr wären. … Was, wenn einer dazukommt? Zum Beispiel einer aus dem Dorf, der glaubt, Anna sei eine Verräterin. … Sagen wir, der Bürgermeister. Der Schulze. Ja, der. Er verlangt, dass Anna die Armbrust ablegt und runterkommt. … Noch eine Wendung muss jetzt rein. Gut, es ist so, dass der Lutz ihr vertraut. Er stellt sich dem Schulzen in den Weg. Der richtet die Pistole auf Lutz. Das kennen wir ja schon! Richtig. (2014, 223-24)87 The first interjection of the village voice emphasizes that an interesting story is more important than a factual one by shortly afterwards referring to an issue of the GEO epoch magazine in the middle of a story set in the 17th century. The use of the village voice, the pronouns ‘us’ and ‘we,’ make it clear that the homodiegetic narrator see themselves as the voice of Fürstenfelde. Consequently, it stands to reason that the rewriting should create something for Fürstenfelde. The subsequent, seamless transition in the new chapter, which picks up where the two previous chapters (one in the present, one in the past) left off, completes the effect: the past has completely broken into the present. Present Anna and the historical Annas coincide. Picking up on the brief discussion of trauma in Vor dem Fest (see 3.1), Dora Osborne (2019) argues that the character of Anna Geher is essential for any analysis of the novel. Osborne advocates an understanding of the various Annas as a form of “cultural memory, figures of trauma and its recurrence throughout history.” (2019, 4) And indeed, the irruption of the past into the present through these various Annas and the underlying trauma associated with their stories, brought to light by the archivist Schwermuth, comes together in the Annenfest. The festival functions as an instance of order, of community, and, as Osborne writes, as “a means of reinstating order following loss or violence.” (4) That is why the novel begins with the death of the ferryman and the resulting chaos and ends with the ordering celebration of the Annenfest. 87 A page earlier, this is made clear, as well: “Wer verrät uns, was wir wissen sollten? Wer verrät uns, was wir wissen? Wer verrät uns was? Wir. Wer verrät uns? Wer verrät? Wer?” (2014, 222) 141 During the Annenfest, there is an auction where attendees can bid on a painting of the village, painted by Frau Kranz. Anna Geher makes the first offer. But with the last sentence of the novel, she is outbid by the village, the ‘we’: “Sie steht beim Scheiterhaufen und hebt ein brennendes Scheit in die Luft und wird überboten von uns, wir bieten zwölf.“ (Stanišić 2014, 315) Consequently, the village triumphs over the representation and recurrence of the trauma. Even more, it has written this triumph for itself. In this regard, Philipp Böttcher speaks of an “Erzählen, in dem und mit dem das Dorf seinen zukünftigen Bestand sicherstellt.“ (2020, 311) This also makes it perfectly clear what has been suggested throughout the novel: the identity of the village is not rigidly defined, but is created in the narrative process. Osborne understands this ending as an overcoming of the trauma, which in turn signals the survival of the village. The return to Fürstenfelde in the eponymous short story in Fallensteller also suggests this. As Aspioti argues, this is not so much a historical continuity per se, but rather a “genealogical continuity that, coupled with the villagers' geographical situation, cements their self-perception as a homogeneous collective.” (2021, 114) It is a genealogy that can also be extremely exclusionary and even discriminatory, for example, towards Dietmar “Ditzsche” Dietz, Frau Reiff, or the nameless stranger wearing Adidas tracksuits and eating pudding pretzels, baptized by the town as the “Adidas-Mann.”88 (Stanišić 2014, 179, see also Aspioti 2021, 120-121) Aspioti argues that the subtle examples of exclusion and discrimination, for example against Mrs. Reiff, who has moved here, or the “Adidas man,” ironically undermine the novel and the apparently successful 88 In his third Zürcher Poetikvorlesung, Stanišić actually hints that this unnamed “Adidas man might, indeed, be him. He recounts that he ordered a pudding pretzel the first time he went to Fürstenwerder (Stanišić 2017c, 42:50-43:10), the village Fürstenfelde is most inspired by. In the SRF radio interview with Nicola Steiner in 2014, he also mentioned seeing himself in Frau Schwermuth, while Steiner argued convincingly that he might share characteristics with Frau Kranz. 142 continuation of the village community, since they criticize supposed homogeneity and thus question the apparently successful continued existence of the village community. In Stanišić's Herkunft, both the oppositional pairing death-life and the understanding of death as a symbol, but also as a concrete loss are most tangible. The entire story is overshadowed by dementia and the inevitable and eventual death of the grandmother. This shadow is multiplied for the readers, since the grandmother has already died when the book opens, and it is diegetic from the beginning with every further reading. The temporal proximity between the real death of the grandmother on October 29, 2018 (Stanišić 2019, 312) and the publication of the novel on March 18, 2019, is reflected at the end of the novel when Stanišić narratively keeps the deceased grandmother alive. But more about the grandmother shortly. The best textual example of the opposition of life and death is actually the autofictional Saša’s visit to Oskaruša, the small village where both Saša and Stanišić's grandfathers were born and grew up. Together with his grandmother, Stanišić first visited the village in 2009, recorded and fictionally enriched in the fourth chapter “Oskoruša, 2009.” 100 people lived in Oskoruša in the 1980s. In the present of the novel, 13 still live there: “Die dreizehn gehen nirgendwo mehr hin. Sie werden die Letzten sein.“ (2019, 18) Oskoruša is dying out – a fact that is so immediately present to the homodiegetic narrator Saša on his first visit that he is reprimanded for it by Gavrilo, his relative and one of the elders in the village: “Was ist los mit dir? Kaum angekommen, sprichst du schon vom Sterben. Ich sag dir was. Wir haben das Leben hier überlebt, der Tod ist das kleinere Problem.“ (2019, 18-19) On his first visit, Saša is taken to the village cemetery. Hardly anywhere do death and life coincide as strongly as there: “Ich wandte mich ab. Ging von Grabstein zu Grabstein und las. Ich las Stanišić. Las Stanišić. Las Stanišić. Auf fast jedem Grabstein, auf fast jedem Grabholz stand mein eigener Nachname.“ (2019, 27-28) The clash and collapse of death and life is reinforced by references to 143 religious symbolism: a horned viper, a snake, squirming on a tree near the characters, the “Grabplatte war die Tafel“ (2019, 27) for food and drink, shared between the living and the dead. The grandmother lights candles. Saša sums it up shortly afterwards: “Der bitter-süße Tag mit den Lebenden und den Toten, einer leibhaftigen Schlange oder einem symbolischen Tier. Das Picknick am Grab meiner Urgroßeltern. Das alles ist eine Art Urszenerie geworden für mein Selbstporträt mit Ahnen.“ (2019, 49) Concrete and symbolic, life and death are united in Oskoruša's cemetery. Death penetrates the narrative, gaining equal access alongside life. Stanišić himself commented on this narrative strategy, saying: “In der Nähe vom Tod handelten alle Erzählungen in Oskoruša immer ausschließlich vom Leben.“ (Stanišić 2017c, 30:54-31:01) But that's not all: the book (and Stanišić's works in general) doesn't just juxtapose life and death. Rather, the narrative voices and the characters make productive use of the tension between the two. Stanišić himself describes it as follows: “Gräber schaffen Geschichten, konstruieren Herkünfte. Da wo sie sich mit Informationen über die Toten zurückhalten, lassen sie Grabräubern wie mir den Platz für literarische Grabbeigaben.“ (Stanišić 2017a, 61:15-61:25) Up to this point I have already spoken about two concrete examples that show the role played by the topos of death and the ways that storytelling is used to engage with it. With the last example, I would like to solidify my second thesis, according to which the auto-, homo- and heterodiegetic narrators in the novels are prompted by the presence of death to use storytelling as a survival strategy. 3.2.4 Storytelling as Survival Strategy – Grandmother In Herkunft, Saša's grandmother Kristina, who is suffering from dementia, moves more and more obviously into the center of the story before she finally becomes the central part of the storyline. 144 Then, she is part of a story titled “Der Drachenhort” that constitutes a clear rupture in the narrative. At the end of each chapter, the reader can interactively decide between several options, and, depending on the decision, is asked to continue reading on a certain page – a true choose-your- own adventure. Readers can thus experience different processes and endings. But abruptly, the increasingly imaginative storyline (including dragons) is interrupted by a short, italicized text at the end of a chapter: “Heute ist der 29. Oktober 2018. Ich habe geschrieben: ‘Schmetterlinge sind es nicht, du Esel‘. Mein Telefon hat geklingelt. Meine Großmutter ist im Alter von achtundsiebzig Jahren in Rogatica gestorben.“ (2019, 312) As a result, the entire epilogue and - especially in repeated readings - the entire text becomes a cover letter against death. While death was audible in the background throughout the novel, it now breaks into the text and interrupts it. The epilogue itself becomes more and more imaginative, the grandmother and the grandfather, who has been dead for about thirty years, are reunited. Stanišić does not want to give death the upper hand over the text. The first part of Stanišić's debut novel, already, wrote against death, particularly the death of Opa Slavko – the imagination of young Alexander as protection against the onset of war. Frau Schwermuth used her imagination to do the same in Vor dem Fest and so did the voice of the village, as well as the narrative voices in “Gewässer,” trying to avoid, perhaps even prevent, the death of the grandfather. While it remains ambiguous whether the grandfather in “Gewässer” is saved, whether Aleksandar finds the closure he is longing for in his search for Asija and what she stands for (see 3.1), the village in Vor dem Fest is saved. Even Oskoruša, the village in Herkunft, remains optimistic in the person of Gavrilo. But in the end, with his grandmother dying, realistic storytelling enriched with a dose of inventiveness as a survival strategy reaches its limits. The narrative therefore steps it up and, amplifying its inventiveness, invites fantastical elements of magical realism into the story. 145 The choose-your-own-adventure, titled “Der Drachenhort,” that make up the last 62 pages of Herkunft is a bold choice to make, in part because it functions as a surprising incision into the narrative. But it is also remarkable for an autofictional, homodiegetic narrator who is prone to digressing, inventing, and embellishing his stories to hand over the reins to a “du,” a second-person narrator, and let the readers choose their own narrative flow and composition.89 Stanišić made the choice for two reasons, as he explained during his (virtual) lecture at UC Berkeley as part of the “Archives of Migration” series in October 2021. First, he wanted to grant readers more freedom and autonomy in reaching one of twelve possible endings (or, in re-readings, all twelve). By doing so, he wanted to acknowledge that “there were always people in my life during crisis moments that helped us,” referring, among others, to a bus driver that took him and his mother across the Hungarian border on their flight to Germany. He wanted to imitate this reliance on others – at time, he said, beautiful and simple – by giving the power of decision making to somebody else: “It becomes your fiction. I just offer you choices.” But secondly, it was both homage to his memories with his grandmother, and an approach to the rapid decline of her health. He explained that she was very sick towards the end of him writing the book and, as the note on page 312 reveals, died before he finished it. The choose-your-own-adventure allowed Stanišić to really lean into the fantastical properties that is often part of the format and, hence, keep not only her alive in the fiction, but also “all the beautiful moments, all the archived memories, all the aphoristic things that she was saying throughout the years.” It especially allowed him to “lead her to her last wish,” getting back with her husband. The narrative context of the choose-your-own-adventure opened the door for a magical realist-esque tinge of fantasy that in its scope would likely have derailed the main story: one chapter has the reader engage with sirens and make the decision whether to accept 89 Stanišić foreshadowed the choose-your-own adventure if we consider that it is already possible to read the chapters of the main story in a random order without much of a problem. 146 the drink they offer you (Stanišić 2019, 294); the gardener that tries to prevent you from taking grandmother from the retirement home turns into a demon (306); the mountain Vijarac, close to Oskoruša, starts talking to the travelers (330); the existence of dragons (298, 339); grandmother wants to go hunt the dragons (319); you and your grandmother mount a dragon (346) and let him fly you to a three-headed dragon that guards a crossing into the realm of shadows (339); the three- headed dragon is apologetic (“’Ich bin aus einer russischen Drachenlegende, ich dürfte gar nicht hier sein,’” 346) and goes through a long list of names to look for your grandfather Pero; Pero comes walking out of the shadows, embracing his wife (347); grandfather is given a 48-hour leave from the realm of the dead to spend time with grandmother and you. This is, in fact, a strategy that Stanišić’s narratives have used before, for example with the monologuing Drina (see analysis in 3.2.2), a detailed, 22-page description of a football (soccer) match between Serbian and Bosnian soldiers during a truce (both in Grammofon), or the two thieves from the 16th century that come back to live in the present time of Vor dem Fest to try and steal the village’s bells (while listening to German rap music in their BMW). But none of the other novels take these elements of magical realism as far as Herkunft. I want to briefly point to my own wording: magical realist-esque tinge. The monologuing Drina River, a vixen roaming Fürstenfelde and its surrounding forest, two 16th-century thieves coming back to haunt the village, or elements of the choose-your-own-adventure – Stanišić’s novels offer several moments that dip their toes into magical realist territory and bring about brief instances of the fantastical. But at no point are Stanišić’s novels wholly magical realist or fantastic writing. Discussing the ’why’ of this narrative choice also paves the way for the discussion in chapter four as it unearths what Wendy Faris calls magical realism’s potential to challenge “the dominant mode of realism in the West,” and thus the dominant narrative mode of the West, thereby 147 challenging “its basis of representation from within.” (Faris 2004, 1) Returning to the question of storytelling as a tool for (intradiegetic) survival, I argue that Stanišić uses magical realism as a further means of engaging with the topos of death. In Herkunft, especially, the narrative turns to magical realism as a last resort. This particular choice, the inclusion of magical realist episodes in his novel, is one of the effective tools that Stanišić provides his narrative voices and characters in their struggles, engagements, and negotiations with death. Allowing magical realism to seep into the narratives is part of the broader strategy of telling stories to survive. But throughout his novels and especially in Herkunft, Stanišić lays the foundation from which he is able to introduce magical realism and elements that are wholly fantastic. For most of the novel, Stanišić provides us with a prelude to magical realism. He understands fiction as “ein offenes System aus Erfindung, Wahrnehmung und Erinnerung, die sich am wirklich Geschehenen reibt,” (Stanišić 2019, 20) and makes ample use of deviations from the story, short bouts of word play and chains of association: “Ohne Abschweifung wären meine Geschichten überhaupt nicht meine. Die Abschweifung ist Modus meines Schreibens.” (Stanišić 2019, 36; see also Stanišić 2017a, 26:05-26:27) Maha El Hissy understands this digressive writing strategy as a “poetologisches Programm” which allows the “autodiegetische[…] Erzähler, ‘Fragmente,’ so der Titel eines Kapitels, zusammenzufügen oder fixe Standpunkte zu transzendieren.” (2020, 143) While it is useful in making sense of lived experiences fragmented by war and geographical and emotional distances, it helps to transcend and, at least temporarily, unsettle that which seems fixed – like the inevitable death of a loved one. As El Hissy points out, this happens on the level of the narrative: digression allows for deviation from chronological and linear narration. This, in turn, argues El Hissy, is a literary strategy “mit der der Autor Grenzen aufhebt und überschreitet: zwischen Ländern sowie essayistischem, autofiktionalem und 148 phantastischen Erzählen.” (2020, 144) Suspending borders is a narrative goal – one that approaches the inventive, making use of aspects of magical realism. After all, Stanišić describes his biographical writing – which Herkunft certainly is – as “ein unheimlicher, absurder Versuch zu erhalten und erfindend zu erhalten, was einmal jemandem, auch mir, wichtig war.” (Stanišić 2017a, 67:57–68:07) Stanišić continually enriches his story with ornamentation, on the levels of both language and content, but does not yet cross the line to magical realism. In fact, the reader is simply presented with a homodiegetic narrator (Saša) freely admitting the role that imagination plays in his writing: “Diese Geschichte beginnt mit dem Befeuern der Welt durch das Addieren von Geschichten.” (Stanišić 2019, 36) This layering of stories within the narrative is, in fact, continuous throughout all three novels, as much a defining characteristic as the digression that Stanišić acknowledges. Importantly, the narrative voice is not alone in admitting that the story begins with the “Befeuern der Welt durch das Addieren von Geschichten” (Stanišić 2019, 36); other characters make this clear as well. In the chapter “Schwarzheide, 1993,” for example, Saša recalls how hard his father worked after joining him and his mother in Germany. He comments on his recollection by quoting his father who calls his story “Unsinn” and tells him to ask next time, “dann musst du dir nicht so ein Zeug ausdenken.” (Stanišić 2019, 139, emphasis mine) We encounter several such situations throughout the novel – and potentially there are more that we as readers do not recognize as such, because we do not know what actually happened and what is poetic license. Thus, the reader encounters Saša as an unreliable narrator – something he does not try to hide. In a short chapter toward the end (“Alle Tage”), he repeats the sentence, “Ich bin nicht unzufrieden” (Stanišić 2021, 283-284; 2019, 277-278) a few times, yet every other sentence in the chapter screams exactly 149 that.90 This style of writing adds several layers to even simple sentences. When we read, “[i]n meinem Zuhause wohnen die Fiktionen, denke ich,” (Stanišić 2019, 170), we may question whether he indeed had this exact thought in this exact moment or whether we are encountering even more fictionalized ornamentation of actual experience. Interestingly, this openness, almost transparency, on the part of the narrative voice prevents said narrative voice from alienating its readers. After all, when we expect creative and imaginative stories, we are not surprised by them. Indeed, this transparency allows for the simple suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader while maintaining a sense of realism. In so doing, Stanišić playfully prepares the reader for the narrative to emphasize more and more the ‘magical’ in favor of the ‘realism’, allowing it to cross into the fantastic at the end of the novel. Magical realist texts, loosely defined, contain an “irreducible element” (Faris 2002, 102) of magic without relying on the suspension of disbelief, instead remaining grounded in a narrative world that conforms to the conventions of literary realism.91 Nonetheless, magical realism disrupts accepted beliefs about time, space, and identity by presenting different conceptualizations in the disguise of realism. Within the context of Stanišić’s novels, the fantastic and magical realism are clearly not interchangeable, but the narratives use the fantastic qualities inherent in magical realism extensively, to the point of suspending any realism. When the narrator and grandmother Kristina fly on a dragon to then talk to another, three-headed dragon, it certainly strains any suspension of disbelief or pretension of a real event taking place. This excess of the fantastic, expelling the magical realism from the novel, is a narrative representation of the narrator’s desperation, regret, 90 “Dass sie so wenig trinkt, gefällt mir nicht”; “Ihre Bewegungen sind ungestüm und verlangsamt wie bei einem Kind, das lernt”; “Dass die Nachbarin, wenn sie fortgeht, Großmutter einsperrt, stört mich”; “Dass wir als Familie immer noch keine Lösung haben, nervt mich.” (Stanišić 2019, 283) 91 Wendy Faris suggests a total of five characteristics of magical realism, including the three mentioned in the text; see also her 2004 volume Ordinary Enchantments (8). 150 and grief. By handing over the narrative reins from the homodiegetic first person to the homodiegetic second person, the novel invites us to empathize strongly with this loss, but also to empathize with the attempts to keep the grandmother alive even if they transcend the possibilities of the realistic. In so doing, neither narrator nor format try to hide from readers what they are doing: “Die Geschichte hat als einzige Pointe das Überleben.” (2019, 349) Instead, they invite readers to join them, a sort of narrative complicity. But even accessing this last resort of magical realism, even pure fantastic storytelling is not sufficient in this case. In his first Zürcher Poetikvorlesung, Stanišić says: “Der Mantel der Fantasie liegt über dem Körper der Gewalt, dünn und durchlässig. Jede Idylle ist nur temporär.“ (Stanišić 2017a, 47:20-47:28) In Herkunft, the narrator tries to cover the death of a loved one with the cloak of fantasy, but he does not succeed – each attempt can merely temporarily keep up the illusion. During their fantastic journey into a cave in which they hope to find dragons and also Grandfather Pero, the description reads: “Still ist es. In der Höhle. In Rogatica. Am Grab meiner Großmutter in Višegrad am Morgen des 2. November 2018.” (Stanišić 2019, 331) Here, too, the illusion is only temporary, and reality is breaking in. By listing three places side by side, the fantastical element (the cave) is placed directly next to the memory of the grandmother in the retirement home (Rogatica), and her funeral – invention, memory, and reality of the present are juxtaposed. Recognizing the failure of its strategy, the narrative voice lets the already deceased grandmother speak: “Das Erzählen erhält mich nicht am Leben, Saša! Du verwandelst Funken in Feuerodem. Du übertreibst! Herkunft als Wimmelbild mit Drachen? Und einer bewacht den Steg über den Fluss in die jenseitige Welt?“ (Stanišić 2019, 345) The grandmother, who died of dementia, becomes a fictional character, a wise old woman who gives the hero important advice. Despite the death, the homodiegetic narrator cannot stop writing about the person. This is also stylistically indicated by 151 the few passages that are written in italics: “Dabei sind die Bezüge zum realen Tod der Großmutter typografisch abgesetzt […], d.h. ihr Tod ist nicht in diese Erzählungen integrierbar, allenfalls ist die Todesnachricht von diesen imaginären Welten umrahmt und lediglich vorübergehend im Erzählen aufgehoben.” (Eigler 2023, 244) Svetlana Arnaudova’s previously quoted statement about Aleksandar in Grammofon is also extraordinarily applicable in Herkunft: “Er ist fest davon überzeugt, dass Sprechen und Erzählen für das Leben stehen und dass Schweigen über Personen diese gewissermaßen zum Tode verurteilt.“ (Arnaudova 2019, 41) To compensate and cope with this death, Stanišić overcorrects by allowing the fantastical to fully take over the story arc. One of the potential endings reads: “Ich öffne die Augen. Großvater und Großmutter sitzen da und sehen einander an.” (Stanišić 2019, 349) However, this overcompensation only lasts for or a moment, as the narrator acknowledges: “Jetzt weiß ich nicht, wie es weitergeht,” (349) and “[e]s gibt keine Gegenerzählung zu ihrem Kinn auf der Brust.” (2019, 278) In another chapter, he follows it up with what really happened, how the funeral liturgy took too long, and how the coffin was too big for the grave, thus demystifying what he had just built up. The novel does not assign more value to one event than the other, thereby allowing both scenarios to exist simultaneously, allowing the reader to decide – mirroring the segment’s form of the scavenger hunt in this section of the novel. In Herkunft, the narrative even goes as far as intertextually mirroring, even directly quoting Grammofon: ’Eine gute Geschichte,’ sagt [Großmutter], ‘ist wie früher unsere Drina war: nie stilles Rinnsal, sondern ungestüm und breit. Zuflüsse reichern sie an, sie brodelt und braust, tritt über die Ufer. Eines können weder die Drina noch die Geschichten: Für beide gibt es kein Zurück. (Stanišić 2019, 330) In Grammofon, Aleksandar reminisces about his grandfather Slavko (who, biographically speaking, appears to be Pero), saying: 152 Eine gute Geschichte, hättest du gesagt, ist wie unsere Drina: nie stilles Rinnsal, sie sickert nicht, sie ist ungestüm und breit, Zuflüsse kommen hinzu, reichern sie an, sie tritt über die Ufer, brodelt und braust, wird hier und da seichter […]. Aber eines können weder die Drina noch Geschichten: für beide gibt es kein Zurück. (Stanišić 2006, 313) There is a triplet of reasons for this. First, the narrative tries to break down the borders between Stanišić’s novels, hoping that perhaps in this way the narrative can continue and keep the grandmother alive. Secondly, the scene in Grammofon, though said by the homodiegetic narrator Aleksandar, contextualizes this statement as a recalling of words by the grandfather or, at least, as something the grandfather could easily have said during his life. Giving grandmother Kristina (in Grammofon, she is named Katarina) words to speak that have been, or could have been, said by Slavko/Pero enables her to be reunited with him more intensely, across novels. Yet, at the same time, quoting Grammofon also emphasizes that there is a need for closure, for an ending, a need to accept what is inevitable by recalling that there is no going back, both for the Drina and also for stories. But the homodiegetic narrator’s realization that storytelling itself – even enhanced with the fantastic – is not enough to engage the topos of death in the particular case of the grandmother leads to a modified approach. He tells us: Heute ist der 30. Oktober 2018. In unserer Wohnung in Hamburg brennen Kerzen im Fenster zum Gedenken. Ich sehe mir Fotos meiner Großmutter an. Auf einem sitze ich auf ihrem Schoß. Ich bin sechs Jahre alt und vierzig Jahre alt. Es fällt mir schwer, mich an sie als gesunde Frau zu erinnern. Es fällt mir schwer, meine Großmutter hier am Leben zu halten. (2019, 317) In the novel, these seven sentences are in italics. The only exception is the word “hier” in the last sentence. What exactly does Stanišić mean when he emphasizes this adverb: here in the book? here in Hamburg? Probably both, but even more: here in the present - especially that of the grandmother before dementia, because “[e]s fällt mir schwer, mich an sie als gesunde Frau zu 153 erinnern.” The readers feel the same, as they only get to know the grandmother in the book as suffering from dementia, right from the first chapter. It is precisely the adverb “hier” that acts as an anchor in the present tense for Stanišić at this critical point. A similar play with the adverb “hier” can also be found in Grammofon on more than one occasion, for example: “Hier, ich. Spielregel: Treppenaufgang – Waffenruhe. Hier auf der Treppe neben mir saß Asija und weinte. Hier, ich, der heute Abend die Erinnerung nicht mehr vorhatte.“ (Stanišić 2006, 287)92 Perhaps then, anchoring oneself in the present is enough to substantiate storytelling to help it succeed as a narrative strategy that negotiates the topos of death: “Solange ich erzähle, gibt es mich da.“ (Stanišić 2017a, 47:46-48:00) Using the narrative strategy of storytelling against the topos of death is something that both Stanišić’s writing and he himself clearly communicate: “Das Erzählen ist immer auch nur Ablenkung - Ablenkung von dem Grauen. In Augenblicken existenzieller Krise kann es aber auch eine Überlebensstrategie sein, eine Selbstvergewisserung einer Welt, der man misstraut.“ (Stanišić 2017a 47:34-47:52) Stanišić even breaks it down to a simple formula: “Solange ich erzähle, gibt es mich da.“ This crucial understanding of the function of storytelling is mirrored in the first of the Zürcher Poetikvorlesung where Stanišić conceptualizes his idea of Heimat as “dort, während ich erzähle.” (2017b, 76:29-76:46) In chapter two, I argued that Stanišić understands his individual concept of Heimaten as a medium in which to make sense of the world and his own position in it. Unsurprisingly, the same can be said about Stanišić’s intradiegetic strategy of storytelling. I would go so far as to argue that while his notion of Heimaten critically mediates his creative output, his 92 See also instances on pages 284 and 297-298, as well as an instance on page 223. In this latter instance, the possessive pronoun “mein” is also used in a similar fashion: ““Das sind meine Hände in den Taschen. Das sind meine Schritte. Das ist mein Schlüssel. Hier schließe ich die Tür auf. Hier gehe ich auf Zehenspitzen die trotzig knarrende Treppe hinauf. Das ist mein Leisesein. Das ist mein Zimmer. Hier liegt mein Koffer. Hier stapeln sich die Listen. Hier stapeln sich die Straßen. Hier stapeln sich die Namen. Hier knie ich vor dem Koffer. Hier lese ich: ‘Damir Kičić’. Hier steht: ‘Damir Kičić – Kiko.’” (Stanišić 2006, 223) 154 storytelling strategy creatively mediates trauma and death. In moments where that it is not sufficient anymore and death seems to gain the upper hand, the storytelling turns to elements of magical realism and, if necessary, even plain fantasy. Throughout the analysis of Stanišić’s writing, there have been ample examples that illustrate the success of the narrative strategy and value of intradiegetic storytelling, of telling stories to survive. But the strategy has its limitations, as seen in the death of Grandmother Kristina in Herkunft. After some time, the narrator has no choice but to accept the inevitable, and to admit the grief. Even in this vulnerable moment, the narrative finds a suitable approach: embedding itself in the present moment, both spatially and consciously, may give the strength and endurance needed. Chapter 4: Borderscaping: Cartography of Cultural Climate “Without the destruction of prejudice, equality can only be imaginary” (Mbembe 2019, 83) Chapter four functions as somewhat of an in-between, an interlude between the literary analysis of chapter three and the decolonial analysis to follow. In so doing, it draws on aspects of both, functioning as a socio-political analysis, but also as a bridge towards the decolonial analysis. Importantly, chapter four needs to be understood in conjunction with chapter five, as they operate as a pair: they share the analysis and critique of racializing and hierarchizing mechanisms in German society and take the concept of the borderscape as their starting points. Chapter four, in a sense, operationalizes Stanišić’s narratives to take stock of the sociopolitical problem(s), making them legible and enabling their critique. Chapter five, the second part of the borderscaping duet, is concerned with proposing solutions, particularly by way of Stanišić’s narratives. In this sense, both chapters are more than just a transition between literary and decolonial analysis, as they built 155 on the former to substantiate the need for the latter. More importantly, however, they stand on their own since they continue to break down the notion of ‘telling stories to survive.’ Chapter three asked and answered the question of how storytelling in Stanišić’s writing functions as a survival strategy. Chapter four, “Borderscaping: Cartography of Cultural Climate,” then, primarily asks the questions that the analysis of storytelling as survival strategy implies: what necessitates this strategy? And what necessitates this survival, in the first place? In other words: where chapter three asked the question how, chapter four asks the question why. Chapter five “Borderscaping: Cartography of Expanded Heimaten?” builds on this discussion by illustrating narrative approaches to overcome both how and why, by moving from the territory of questions (how does writing function? Why does it need to function this way?) to a quest for answers and, perhaps even, solutions. For now, the focus lies on chapter four and the question: why is it necessary to employ a narrative strategy in which storytelling is used as a means of survival? Naturally, the first impulse is to answer this question with the notion that was also the focal point in the literary analysis of chapter three: death. But I do not want to understand survival only in its relation to death (as death’s antagonist), but, importantly, also in relation to life – survival as affirmation of life. From this standpoint, the answer to the question posed is not quite as straightforward. In fact, I believe it necessitates one further question: what is it that hinders (or even threatens) the affirmation of life, both in the sense of “ausleben” (to live out one’s life) and “überleben” (to survive)? My literary analysis in chapter three showed the narratological strategy of survival as a direct negotiation of death. After analyzing narrative survival strategies from this perspective, I want to turn the tables and scrutinize survival with life in mind, not with death. Framing the analysis of Stanišić’s writing with this set of questions in mind, I argue, brings together literary texts and social realities. This, 156 in turn, foregrounds the socio-political critique inherent in Stanišić’s writing. If narrative survival strategies are still necessary when life, not death, is the focal point and take the form of overt and covert sociopolitical and cultural critique, then Stanišić’s writing points to socio-cultural-political and hence institutional elements that severely impede personal growth, happiness, and belonging; in short, a life unobstructed, in which the amount of joy or misery experienced should depend on individual factors and circumstances alone. Accordingly, this chapter argues that the necessity of narrative survival strategies in Stanišić’s texts unearths and highlights socio-cultural-political issues which I mainly locate in hegemonial structures that create hierarchies, such as racism, colonial structures, and the power of language and naming. Throughout my analysis, Stanišić’s narratives loom in the background and provide examples that enable and substantiate the discussion and critique of German society. Functioning as its theoretical cornerstone, this chapter discusses the concept of borderscapes and operationalizes the related action of borderscaping (4.1). To do so effectively, the chapter first contextualizes borderscapes by outlining the notions of borders, violence, and, subsequently, violent borders. Drawing on borderscapes’ understanding of borders as “dynamic social processes and practices of spatial differentiation” (Brambilla 2015, 15) allows the discussions of racism, colonialism, and the power of language and naming to be understood as a cartography of interior borderscaping, a stock-taking and mapping of mentalities, restrictions, and exclusions that show that Germany (and Europe) is divided in ways that do not show on the map. In this chapter, borderscaping is both backdrop and analytical tool in that it frames and contextualizes the discussions of racism and colonial structures (4.2.1) and the power of language and naming (4.2.2) as substructures that were first put into place through a form of hegemonial borderscaping. While the potential for borderscaping lies in its anti-hegemonial usage, a counter 157 to predominant conceptions and constructions that permeate society, representations, performative, narrative, visual, and imaginative acts can, of course, also be used hegemonically. In that sense, borderscaping first and foremost creates borderscapes, such as the ones discussed below, solidified into society’s substructure by racism and colonial structures (4.2 and 4.3). I use the notion of the borderscape to analyze how acts of borderscaping function in the contemporary German context, specifically in the narratives of Stanišić, and how their usage can counter, undermine, or scrutinize the violence of borders and the racializing and hierarchizing substructures within society. But I argue Stanišić’s narratives overtly and covertly use borderscaping counter-hegemonically to illustrate and scrutinize physical, internal, and invisible borders in German society. What these narratives and the discussions of existing racializing hierarchies and hegemonies show is that deep roots of various forms of exclusions in Germany are cultural practice. This means that these forms of exclusions that mark interior borderscapes are not aimed at anyone in particular, but instead reify what and who is German. Therefore, existing borderscapes do not just affect certain sections of the population, but everyone. 4.1 Borderscaping In Herkunft, the narrator Saša comments on Europe and its borders: “Müssten wir jetzt fliehen, wären also die Zustände an den Grenzen 1992 so restriktiv gewesen wie an den EU-Außengrenzen heute, würden wir Heidelberg nie erreichen. Die Reise wäre vor einem ungarischen Stacheldrahtzaun am Ende.” (2019, 119) In this statement and throughout Herkunft, the narrator points to a social and political climate of exclusion, exemplified by an increasing presence of borders, both external and internal. For a comprehensive and representative understanding of the 158 lived experiences of racialized and minoritized people in Germany, there is a need to understand physical borders, but also, perhaps even more urgently, social borders (i.e., structural and invisible borders).93 The theoretical backbone of this chapter, but also its first analytical dimension is the concept of borderscapes and the corresponding action of borderscaping. I will approach my engagement with them by building up to the discussion, by way of scaffolding. A brief and, with an eye to the variety of fields and the enormity of the scholarship involved in their discussion, selective overview of the concept of borders (i) is followed by a discussion of the notion of violence and, subsequently, violent borders (ii). From the foundation of (i) and (ii), I then define borderscapes and the applicability of borderscaping for my reading of Stanišić’s narrative forms of survival as a sociopolitical critique. 4.1.1 Borders “We live in a world of borders. Territorial, political, juridical, and economic borders of all kinds quite literally define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century.” (2016, 1) In the first two sentences of his 2016 book Theory of the Border, Thomas Nail straightforwardly categorizes our contemporary and global existence as defined and ordered, but also divided and endangered by borders. From their role in creating nation states across the globe starting in the 17th century, borders have continually played important roles on the world stage,94 both physically (e.g., the 93 Geopolitics expert Manlio Graziano writes: “Migrants must deal with two types of boundaries: the visible, official borders that separate states from each other and the invisible, albeit no less effective, borders that internally segment states, regions, cities, and neighborhoods. Invisible boundaries are by far more numerous than visible ones.” (2018, 34) 94 More specifically, the year 1648 (Congress of Westphalia; see, for example, Graziano 2018). Of course, borders, mostly in the form of walls (e.g., Hadrian’s Wall, the Limes, the Great Wall of China), have played important geopolitical and thus also sociocultural roles prior to the 17th century. 159 Berlin Wall), geopolitically (e.g., the Iron Curtain), and metaphorically (e.g., class systems, segregation, etc.). Since the start of the millennium, however, it seems that “the world is becoming ever more bordered,” (Nail 2020, 152) showing an “excessive passion for borders.” (Graziano 2018, 81) Nail explains that we are confronted with more types and higher number of borders than ever before (2016, 1). Manlio Graziano states that for every mile of dismantled border of the Berlin Wall, 107 new miles have been built in Europe up until 2007; “the European continent and its Eurasian margins added about 16,600 miles of political borders” since (2018, 28-29). Unsurprisingly, then, Europe is the continent “with the highest ratio of internal borders to total surface” and “the one producing the most recent borders.” (Graziano 2018, 58) Borders are everywhere. Borders are powerful. “Borders are not the same for everyone.” (Graziano 2018, 58) And for most, borders are inevitable. But how can we conceptualize the term border to make sense of the large number of different types, from “territorial, political, juridical, and economic” to social and invisible? Borders are always multiple, as they operate with multiple purposes simultaneously (keeping in/keeping out; barrier/protection; national, social, and geopolitical relevance) and take on different meanings depending on the person that encounters them. A border between two states is going to act differently on a citizen with a passport and an undocumented migrant, to name just one example. As such, borders act predominantly as a process of “social division” (Nail 2016, 2) and of spatial differentiation. Borders, argues Nail, “introduce a division or bifurcation of some sort into the world.” (2016, 2) The creation of this bifurcation is, in his mind, one of the two primary characteristics of the border; the other one is circulation (Nail 2016, 2). By circulation, he understands not only the continuous movement of people across a border, but also a border’s inherent potential to change its permeability from one day to the next, as was the case during the 160 COVID-19 pandemic or would be the case for me in a hypothetical scenario in which international students with an F-1 visa would suddenly be no longer allowed to stay in the United States. As such, borders are inherently dichotomous as they enable movement but also restrict it. Importantly, then, borders are active and continuously moving: “The common mental image many people have of borders as static walls is neither conceptually nor practically accurate. If anything, borders are more like motors: the mobile cutting blades of society.” (Nail 2016, 7) As Reece Jones (2016) argues, the borders and lines on a map are “not a representation of preexisting differences between peoples and places; they create those differences.” (166) Borders hence are also active in categorizing people into groups and, in so doing, for example constitute “the stranger/foreigner as a social type,” as Etienne Balibar argues (2009, 204; see also Honig 2001). This continual operation of categorization also makes borders a space, an interaction, or an obstacle where representation happens. Arriving at an airport in the US on a flight from Germany, for example, it is demanded of me to show my passport and other necessary documentation. In so doing, I represent myself as a German citizen, as an international student, as a man with a certain date and place of birth, a certain height, weight, and a certain eye and hair color. There are, unfortunately, also (too) many instances where representation is negotiated, questioned, or denied. This, in turn, happens because each person carries borders in their thinking and their comportment to the world and to other people, many of which have been trained (see the discussions of subchapter 4.2). Recall, for example, my retracing of the debate in German feuilleton in 2014 at the start of chapter two. Maxim Biller’s insistence that Stanišić, as a migrant, should rather stick to writing about migration is a denial of how Stanišić represents himself as author and his narratives. Denying someone the opportunity of representing themselves accurately and without fear of repression or exclusion is a form of violence. A comportment towards other people that is 161 informed by invisible borders is a form of violence. The next point of this discussion draws on this insight, as I examine violence and violent borders. 4.1.2 Violence and Violent Borders Like borders, violence comes in many shapes and forms and is discussed by a great number of theorists.95 One of the earliest attempts to systematically define various forms of violence was done in 1969 by Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung. His essay “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research” (1969) has been very influential and is, half a century later, still debated96 but also highly regarded. Galtung defines violence as “the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual” and “when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations.” (1969, 168)97 In other words: when there is either an acting subject that prevents a person from reaching their potential (e.g. by killing them) – what Galtung sees as personal or direct violence- or when there is a system that doesn’t allow for full realization (e.g. a systemically racist system that does not afford the same opportunities to all citizens, or the striking difference in academic access in Germany between 95 There are, undoubtedly, many works written on violence – too many to look at most of them here. A short overview (certainly not exhaustive): George Sorel, Reflections on Violence (1908); Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” (1921); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961); Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1961); Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research” (1969); Hannah Arendt, “On Violence” (1970); Wolfgang Sofksy, Traktat über die Gewalt (1996); Judith Butler, Kritik der ethischen Gewalt (2007); Slavoj Žižek, Violence (2008); Richard J. Bernstein, Violence: Thinking without Banisters (2013); Étienne Balibar, Violence and Civility (2015). 96 See, for example, C.A.J. Coady’s criticism in Morality and Poltical Violence (2007) and Mark Vorobej’s rebuttal in “Structural Violence” (2008). 97 Galtung offers the following example: “if a person died from tuberculosis in the eighteenth century it would be hard to conceive of this as violence since it might have been quite unavoidable, but if he dies from it today, despite all the medical resources in the world, then violence is present according to our definition.” (1969, 168) One striking, but also horribly maddening example is the murder of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky in March of 2020. Without knocking or announcing that they were with the police, three Louisville Metro Police Department officers entered the apartment of Taylor and her boyfriend in search of two people who were, at that moment, already in custody. Both Taylor and her boyfriend were shot and killed, thus stopping both from “their potential realizations.” 162 “Nichtakademikerkinder” and children whose parents went to university98) – what Galtung considers systemic violence. In 1990, he added a third form of violence into the mix: cultural violence. “By ‘cultural violence’ we mean those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence – exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic, mathematics) – that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence.” (1990, 291) In his seminal work The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon offers a striking example of cultural violence. In the final chapter of his book, “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders”, he shows the scientific discourse on Africans in France and Europe during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). He quotes from The African Mind in Health and Disease: A Study in Ethnopsychiatry, written in 1954 by Dr. J.C. Carothers. Carothers, argues Fanon, “puts forward the idea that the normal African is a lobotomized European.” (1961, 227). At the time of publication, Carothers was an expert from the World Health Organization (WHO). Such a discourse in the sciences functions as cultural violence because it creates a hierarchy that “justif[ies] or legitimize[s]” personal and systemic violence against Algerians (and Africans, in general). Finally, Galtung also considers the relation that these three forms of violence have to each other, writing that “a causal flow from cultural via structural to direct violence can be identified” (1990, 295) as well as the other way around. The relation is thus more that of a triangle with movement in both directions than a circle or a linear sequence.99 Hannah Arendt formulates her well-known, often-cited and often-criticized essay “On Violence” (1970) in response to many (oftentimes violent) demonstration and riots in Europe and 98 See Winde and Schröder (2020). 99 “Direct violence is an event; structural violence is a process with ups and downs; cultural violence is an invariant, a ‘permanence.’” (Galtung 1990, 294) 163 the US, in particular on university campuses. She particularly criticizes what she perceives as a perverted Marxism that calls for violence (Arendt 1972, 124). For Arendt, the distinction between violence and power is very important. Violence is antithetical to power, and it is instrumental (Arendt 1972, 145, 150), always functioning as a means to an end. However, Arendt is strictly against the idea that violence can create something new (proposed by, for example, Sorel and Fanon, whom she argues against). Furthermore, violence can often have unintended consequences (“violence harbors within itself an additional element of arbitrariness”, 1972, 106). Thus, violence is dangerous as it cannot lead to anything new. Instead, it is usually a catalyst to more violence and is therefore uncontrollable.100 Power, on the other hand, is for her the more productive category. She writes: “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.” (Arendt 1972, 143) She does concede that in praxis, power and violence are usually found together and rarely on their own (that would be, according to her, an extreme state, see pages 145-146). At the same time, when violence and power are opposed to each other, she makes it clear that she thinks that violence usually wins – it just cannot generate anything productive and positive from that. One example of power would be the momentum created by the demonstrations during the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. An example of violence, then, would be the crushing of the uprising by the Soviets with tanks. Arendt thus presents us with a notion of violence that is powerless, that is destructive, always instrumental (means for an end) but then cannot realize that end. 100 Arendt critiques intellectuals who believe that they can have control over violence. 164 Before returning to borders, I want to discuss a final notion of violence; a notion that I believe to have much potential to describe both the 20th and 21st century without being as broad and general as Galtung’s or Arendt’s. In 1996, French Philosopher Étienne Balibar was invited to give a series of three lecture at the University of California, Irvine (Wellek Library Lectures). After some delay, the lectures were eventually published in 2010 in French and then in 2015 in English under the title Violence and Civility. In it, Balibar argues for what I perceive as a very thought- provoking notion of violence, especially of extreme violence. Throughout the three lectures- turned-book chapters, Balibar leaves the reader with many discussions of relevant terminology. For the moment, I want to focus on the following: nonviolence, counterviolence, antiviolence, ultrasubjective violence, ultraobjective violence. Both nonviolence and counterviolence are part of the functions of society; Balibar sees them dialectically with antiviolence as the synthesis. Ultrasubjective and ultraobjective violence are forms of extreme violence. But let us dive a bit deeper into what Balibar proposes. Nonviolence is understood as the reduction or elimination of violence. As such, it is an essential part of society (going back all the way to Hobbes’s social contract). However, to regulate this nonviolence, there is the need for counterviolence (e.g., the police), a violence that punishes outbreaks of violence. This, of course, is nothing that Balibar came up with – Hegel already pondered this element of society. But Balibar now proposes antiviolence as a way to break out of this cycle. This antiviolence, argues Alexander Livingston in his review of Balibar’s book, “is the disruption of the circuit of extreme violence that opens up the possibility for politics as a collective project of emancipation.” (2017, 305) Both ultrasubjective and ultraobjective violence are forms of extreme violence. Balibar understands extreme violence as violence “at the limit of the intelligible and the bearable.” (2015a, 21) One thing that makes Balibar’s philosophy of violence so remarkable and potentially very fruitful is 165 the perception that nowadays, societies are in a constant condition of violence – a condition that is structural, underlying, and opaque. Balibar certainly thinks so: Is there any reason to wonder at the general retreat of the political, the widespread feeling that it is useless and helpless, when violence no longer appears to be either the antithesis of the institution or the symptom of its capture and the perversion of its function by a ‘caste’ or a ‘ruling class’ but rather, in some sort, the general condition of the functioning of institutions, the ‘universal naturalness’ of institutions? (2015, 15-16) The threshold to extreme violence can be crossed in two ways: either through the intensification of the intentionality of violence (e.g., the identification of a group of people as essential enemies in genocides) [ultrasubjective] (I) or through “a completely impersonal anonymous process of unintended or unreflected consequences” (Harvard University, 14:59- 15:02) [ultraobjective]. His example for the latter is the living and working conditions of women in Bangladesh or children in Pakistan due to capitalist consumerism. Balibar does not offer simple definitions for either ultrasubjective or for ultraobjective violence. But he does give us more characteristics. Ultrasubjective violence “proceeds by installing in place of the subject’s will the fetishized figure of an ‘us’ reduced to absolute homogeneity,” (Balibar 2015a, 61) “an obsession with identity or introducing this obsession ‘into the real.’” (74) Ultraobjective violence, on the other hand, “proceeds by way of an inversion of the utility principle and the transformation of human beings into not useful commodities but disposable waste,” (Balibar 2015a, 61) and results “from the reduction of human beings to the status of useless and, therefore, superfluous or redundant objects.” (74) While they cannot be conflated with each other (Balibar 2015a, 70), “the manifestations or phenomena of ‘ultrasubjective’ violence […] can at any moment turn into those of ‘ultraobjective’ violence […] and the other way around, although the ‘ultrasubjective’ and ‘ultraobjective’ nevertheless remain fundamentally heterogenous.” (74) Following Balibar’s 166 descriptions, the two forms of extreme violence coalesce in atrocities that mark both history and present, slavery and, in altered form, white supremacy. Balibar is not alone in his conceptualization of violence as a permanent and opaque living condition of modern societies. It is an assessment shared, among others, by Slavoj Žižek and Édouard Glissant. Žižek, for example, argues that objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.” (2008, 2) Glissant said in an interview with Manthia Diawara that while violence used to be a rupture (most notably in the form of slavery), he finds it “extraordinary today […] that violence is permanent.” (Diawara, 17) Balibar’s analysis of extreme violence can thus help to make visible this permanence as will examples of Stanišić’s writing throughout 4.2 and 4.3. Borders do not become violent through specific operations, laws, or mechanisms. Borders are violent; they are, in Balibar’s words, part of a “violent process of exclusion.” (2009, 202, emphasis in original) I am going to discuss, in detail, forms of border violence in the upcoming subchapter, particularly when we emphasize social and invisible borders. But physical borders, too, can be violent. In his 2016 book Violent Borders. Refugees and the Right to Move, Reece Jones points early on to the most drastic example of violent borders in the 21st century, refugee death: “Globally, according to the International Organization for Migration, an estimated 40,000 people died attempting to cross a border between 2005 and 2014. These are not military deaths, but civilians losing their lives as they attempt to move from one place to another.” (4) Considering that roughly 24,000 migrants have gone missing in the Mediterranean Sea since 2014, the number today is likely approaching the 100,000-mark. Understanding this violence is important for anyone working in fields that have to do with Europe, in particular, as “more than half the deaths at borders 167 in the past decade occurred at the edges of the EU, making it by far the most dangerous border crossing in the world.” (Jones 2016, 16) Whether acknowledged politically or spoken about by the media, this amount of human suffering – more than 23,000 migrant deaths from 2005 to 2015 (Jones 2016, 10) – is inevitably going to impact discourses in Europe. In this context, it is unavoidable to scrutinize the violence of borders – a violence, as Jones argues, produced by the very existence of a border itself (2016, 5). We can see this clearly, both in the European and the US context. Creating strongly regulated and selective border crossings around San Diego in California has forced many Latin American migrants to cross the border from Mexico to the US in Arizona. “On a map, the southwestern Arizona desert is an empty stretch, the size of Connecticut, a sea of nothing. On a map of deaths, it is a sea of red.” (Gonzalez 2018) This desert, the Sonoran Desert, has claimed the lives of almost 3000 people since 2001, according to a Pulitzer Prize-winning report by Journalist Daniel Gonzalez (2018). On the violence of borders in the European context, Reece Jones writes: “If there was a humane and orderly way for migrants to enter the European Union, they would not choose the dangerous, violent option provided by the smugglers.” (2016, 26) According to estimates by Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, “one out of every four people who attempt to enter Europe by boat dies en route.” (Jones 2016, 26) I do not want to belabor this point for too long, but I want to transition into the discussion of borderscapes and borderscaping with one final, but crucial characteristic of the violence of borders. Jones argues that the violence of borders is independent of any single person (e.g., a border guard), but instead, is “built into the structure,” where it impacts countless lives by creating hierarchies and dynamics of “unequal power and consequently unequal life chance.” (2016, 8) Borders are thus an embodiment of systemic violence – subtle and dangerous. 168 4.1.3 Borderscape & Borderscaping The concept of borderscapes first entered academia in 2007 with an edited volume by Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr titled Borderscapes. Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge. Since then, the term has been debated and, more importantly, has yet to receive a succinct definition. This decisive definition is not mine to give, as the discussion of the borderscapes concept for my dissertation has at its goal to be explorative as well as to utilize the idea of borderscaping for the subsequent analyses. The reconfiguration of the notion of borders into the concept of borderscapes “allows borders to be viewed as dynamic social processes and practices of spatial differentiation.” (Brambilla 2015, 15) It highlights the “constitutive role that borders in modernity have played,” functioning as a conceptual tool “to question the complexity of the dynamics through which border landscapes are produced,” thus emphasizing borders as “a mobile and relational space.” (Brambilla 2015, 18; 20; 22) In a sense, the concept of borderscapes is at the core of the notion of ‘landscapes of migration,’ the focal point of two volumes of UC-Berkeley’s journal TRANSIT (Vol. 12.1/Vol. 12.2). In the foreword to Volume 12.1, editors Michael Sandberg and Molly Krueger describe landscapes of migration as a category that investigates “how demographic and political shifts reflect changing mediascapes, memoryscapes,” but most importantly they investigate the “increasingly tenuous notion of geographic boundaries.” (2020) In my contribution to TRANSIT’s Volume 12.2, I expanded the notion of ‘landscapes of migration’ to include an internal and emotive aspect, arguing that every “emotionale Migrationslandschaft [ist] immer eine fragmentierte Landschaft.” (2020, 19) This fragmented landscape is both geographical and physical, as the disorientation of Stanišić’s narrators with regards to the non-existence (or rather not-anymore-existence) of Yugoslavia shows, but also internal, in a society and in a person, 169 highlighted through the “Aspekte von Scham, Sprache, Tod und Ausgrenzung und letztendlich auch aufgrund der internen Grenzen, die das Individuum erlebt.” (Klueppel 2020, 19) This conceptualization approaches what the idea of borderscapes comprises and how I understand it to be valuable for the discussion in this and the next chapter. The concept of borderscapes does not only center the geographical location and physical impact of a border, but also asks for the “alternative epistemologies, and equally ontologies and methodologies [that] are called for by the changing nature of the border.” (Brambilla 2015, 16) In so doing, it has the potential to liberate political imagination “from the burden of the territorialist imperative while opening up spaces within which the organisations of new forms of the political and the social become possible.” (Brambilla 2015, 18) Dina Krichker (2021) connects borderscape “to conceptions of belonging that stretch across (and into) territorial divisions.” (1228) Benjamin Tallis picks up on the spatial relevance but adds two important notions to the idea of borderscape when he argues that borderscapes “occur at the intersection of (in)security and (im)mobility.” (2021, 411) This approach allows for an analysis of borders that “critically interroga[tes] the relationship” (Brambilla and Reece 2019, 292) between borders and violence and, most importantly, highlights “the urgency of building on the awareness to construct alternative border imaginaries.” (293) Furthermore, Krichker points out that most scholarship on borderscapes emphasizes three aspects: space, experience, and imagination (2021, 1226). This realization leads her to conclude that a borderscape “needs to be experienced and/or imagined as such” for it to be constituted. (2021, 1238) While this understanding of borderscapes is, on the one hand, somewhat volatile and arbitrary, it also has the potential to be productive, as it encompasses multiplicities and is, as it is based on an individual’s experience and/or imagination, difficult to deny. 170 Brambilla, in turn, presents the related notion of borderscaping: “the construction of borders ‘takes place’ through representations, through performative acts, through acts of narration, visualization, and imagination including their interpretations.” (2015, 28) Borderscaping is, first of all, a verb and hence a something that can be actively utilized and turns the concept of borderscape into something that can be embodied and, more importantly, mediated in cultural production and art. Because of its mediating property, borderscaping, i.e., the negotiation or engagement with, or creation of, a border, empowers producers of cultural artifacts to illustrate and highlight the operation and impact of borders. It also enables them to scrutinize borderscapes effectively. Borderscaping also mediates the comportments individuals but also societies exhibit to shape belonging; in Germany, for example, this is, perhaps more than anything, built on the concept of ‘Heimat’ (as discussed in detail in chapter two and in chapter five). While the potential for borderscaping lies in its anti-hegemonial usage, a counter to predominant conceptions and constructions that permeate society, representations, performative, narrative, visual, and imaginative acts can, of course, also be used hegemonically. In that sense, borderscaping first and foremost creates borderscapes, such as the ones discussed below (4.2 and 4.3), solidified into society’s substructure by racism and colonial structures. I use the notion of the borderscape to analyze how acts of borderscaping function in the contemporary German context, specifically in the narratives of Stanišić, and how their usage can counter, undermine, or scrutinize the violence of borders and the racializing and hierarchizing substructures within society. In this chapter, borderscaping is both backdrop and analytical tool in that it frames and contextualizes the discussions of racism and colonial structures (4.2) and the power of language and naming (4.3) as substructures that were first put into place through a form of hegemonial borderscaping. But I argue Stanišić’s narratives overtly and covertly use borderscaping counter-hegemonically to 171 illustrate and scrutinize physical, internal, and invisible borders in German society, hence making them available to be experienced and legible. What these narratives and the discussions of existing racializing hierarchies and hegemonies show is that deep roots of various forms of exclusions in Germany are cultural practice. This means that these forms of exclusions that mark interior borderscapes are not aimed at anyone in particular, but instead reify what and who is German. Therefore, existing borderscapes do not just affect certain sections of the population, but everyone. 4.2 Unsettling Racializing Hierarchies and Hegemonies: Racism and Colonial Remnants Racism has a long and bloody history. It is one that is, undoubtedly, essential in understanding our global world in the 21st century. Although an understanding of racism as a general concept – prejudice towards or discrimination of a person based on their race or ethnicity – is mostly common knowledge, racism impacts peoples’ lives in a plethora of forms, some of which intersect. While the racist actions of individuals are more public and hence visible, racism in social embodiments and institutional structures (structural racism, institutional racism) are more pervasive and, oftentimes, more (negatively) impactful. A discussion of structural and institutional racism will be followed by the more specific concept of nanoracism, as explicated by Achille Mbembe. Additionally, while racism’s impact is harmful around the globe, there are distinct varieties in the way racism in a culture operates and is embodied. The German context requires a context-specific discussion of racism. In Nature, Human Nature, & Human Difference. Race in Early Modern Philosophy (2015), Justin E.H. Smith traces in detail the formation of the concept of race, both in science and philosophy, from the 16th to the 18th century. Smith as well as Denise Ferreira da Silva (Toward a Global Idea of Race, 2007) highlight the fundamental role race (and racism) has played in shaping 172 Western thought and Western modernity. By “deploying racial difference as a constitutive human attribute” (Ferreira da Silva 2007, xiii), racial hierarchies shaped the constellation of the world, both scientifically and philosophically over centuries. Two monumental figures that shaped not only German (and European) philosophy and anthropology but, through their impact, also Germans’ (and Europeans’) understanding of the world in (at least) the 18th and 19th century are Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Both Kant and Hegel also pop up frequently in discussions of the history of race and racism: Ferreira da Silva (2007) and Smith (2015) grapple with the two thinkers in this context, as do Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1997), Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), David Theo Goldberg (2002), Robbie Shilliam (2011), Walter D. Mignolo (2011), Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014), Fabien Eboussi Boulaga (2014), Achille Mbembe (2017, 2019, 2021; Mbembe speaks of “Hegelian Mythology”), and, perhaps most extensively, Robert Bernasconi (2003, 2011, 2012, 2020). Political scientist Kien Nghi Ha writes: Die Beiträge deutscher Philosophen und Naturwissenschaftler waren von Anfang an für die Entwicklung kolonialer Diskurse und Praktiken konstitutiv. So trugen die Rassenzuschreibungen und einseitigen Abwertungen etwa in den einflussreichen Schriften der Professoren Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Christoph Meiner (1747-1810) und Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring (1755-1830) erheblich zur Entstehung und internationalen Verwissenschaftlichung von Rassentheorien bei. (2009, 57) Throughout centuries that included colonial exploitation and hierarchy, the notion of race and, with it, racism has remained “a violent reality” (Kilomba 2010, 40) – a reality that continues in the 21st century.101 In Plantation Memories (2010), Grada Kilomba defines racism as a combination of prejudice (the construction of difference that is inseparably linked by hierarchical values) and power (42). As such, racism is 101 “But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.” (Ta-Nehisi Coates 2015, 7) 173 ein gesellschaftliches Verhältnis, das Menschen anhand verschiedener möglicher Merkmale als Gruppen konstruiert, denen in homogenisierter und essenzialisierender Weise (zumeist negativ konnotierte) Verhaltensweisen, Werte oder Eigenschaften zugeschrieben werden und denen aufgrund dieser Zuschreibungen der Zugang zu materiellen, sozialen und symbolischen Ressourcen behindert, limitiert oder vorenthalten wird. (Juliane Karakayalı 2022, 18) Juliane Karakayalı explains that there is a strong variability concerning which feature(s) racism draws on, from visual markers like skin color to ethnic/religious markers like a hijab, or auditive (potentially also visual) markers like accents or names, an aspect to (often falsely) interpret “als Hinweis auf eine nicht-deutsche Herkunft.” (2022, 18) This variability, Stuart Hall’s “sliding signifier, (2017, 45) indicates that racism often concludes “von einem fast beliebigen Merkmal auf eine unveränderliche Andersartigkeit des Gegenübers.” (2022, 18) And racism is particularly threatening and harmful due to its pervasiveness, appearing “in Symbolen, in behördlichen Verfahrensweisen, in der Sprache, in Interaktionen etc.” (2022, 18) The use of “etc.” by Karakayalı is certainly appropriate, as such a list could run on extensively. Important in this discussion of racism, however, is not merely the contexts in which one encounters racism, but its effect: othering, i.e., an intended exclusion, “eine unveränderliche Andersartigkeit des Gegenübers.” Fatima El-Tayeb emphasizes this point, arguing that racializing a person has the purpose of engendering “die Wahrnehmung bestimmter Gruppen als nicht-zugehörig […], auch wenn sie bereits Teile der Gesellschaft sind.” (2016, 34) Sociologist Aladin El-Mafaalani echoes this sentiment, stating that not (perceived) foreignness, but its interpretation and judgment create hierarchical difference (2018, 92). In so doing, racism suppresses any possibility of curiosity or interest, as it always immediately marks the perceived foreigner as “defizitär, schlecht oder gar schuldig.” (2018, 92) This is particularly harmful when it occurs not only on an individual level, but in the structures that surround and shape a person, thus impeding their daily life, their daily 174 interactions, their sense of belonging, and their future opportunities. Simultaneously, it gives one person or group power to categorize another, as racism is “a central means of power.” (Ohnmacht and Yıldız 2021, 153) Racism affects people in myriad ways and, in so doing, maps out social hierarchies and social exclusions. In the context of the borderscapes framework, racism functions as an essential component of the borderscape of the German nation. Importantly, it is not (merely and mainly) about the optics of racist and sexist exclusion, but also about a tradition of epistemic violence. The following part of this discussion will show how deeply rooted racism is in society, politics, and culture, thus drawing the next lines in this cartography of Germany’s cultural climate. 4.2.1 Structural and Institutional Racism In a report from February 1999 titled The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, William Macpherson offers a succinct and clear definition of institutional racism. According to Macpherson, institutional racism is the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people. (48) Similarly, Grada Kilomba understands institutional racism as “official structures [that] operate in a way” that disadvantages members of racialized groups, thus placing them “outside dominant structures.” (2010, 43)102 As both Fatima El-Tayeb and Kien Nghi Ha argue, it is important to discuss how the institutionalization and the structuring of society through racism came to pass: “Ohne eine ehrliche 102 See also Floris Biskamp and Karin Scherschel (2022, 91-94). 175 Auseinandersetzung mit den europäischen Wurzeln von Rassismus kann seine anhaltende gesellschaftliche Funktion nicht adäquat analysiert werden.”103 (El-Tayeb 2016, 36) These roots started their spread in the creation of a scientific racism and its philosophical and anthropological justification in the 17th and 18th century, as mentioned before.104 However, the “europäischen Wurzeln von Rassismus” truly took hold of German society during its colonial empire. Not only did this period establish visual markers of othering in the subconsciousness of German society,105 many of the colonial power relations and hierarchies were solidified into lineages and structures that exist to this day.106 Many of them are hierarchies that claim permanence and appear to be naturalized (instead of natural). As such, they are not only inseparable from, but rather vital to, the borderscapes that run through German society, leaving a bold trace on the imaginary and ideological cartography of the German nation. These “very deep, permanent roots and foundations” of racism in Europe (Balibar 1990, 12) are particularly apparent (though rarely realized or acknowledged) in what Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez titled “coloniality of migration.” (2018, 18) In a 2018 article, Gutiérrez Rodríguez argues that many of the migration policies in existence throughout the 20th century and even still today “were coded through a racist nomenclature in former European colonies in North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean in the late nineteenth century and in Oceania and South Africa in the twentieth century.” (20) Hence, regulations surrounding migration ensure a 103 “Eine ehrliche Auseinandersetzung mit Rassismus setzt das Eingeständnis voraus, dass das, was heute gemeinhin als deutsche Kultur und Geschichte bezeichnet wird, nicht ohne deren Verbundenheit mit der kolonialen Moderne und der damit zusammenhängenden Machtform des Weißseins gedacht werden kann” (Kien Nghi Ha 2009, 57) 104 See also Henning Melber’s essay, “Colonialism, genocide and mass violence – integral parts of modernity” (2007). 105 For a detailed analysis, see David Ciarlo’s Advertising Empire (2011). See also Volker Langbehn’s essay, “The Visual Representation of Blackness During German Colonialism Around 1900,” (2010) and Ming-Bao Yue’s essay, “On Not Looking German” (2000). 106 “Colonial power during the nineteenth century was founded on a politics of difference. Colonial encounters had always required that explicit hierarchies be established.” (Sebastian Conrad 2014, 105) This has not changed in the 21st century. 176 “reconfigur[ation]” of migrants “in racial terms.” (2018, 24) In conjunction with this racialization, administrative categories such as ‘refugee’ “construct[…] and produce[…] objects to be governed.” We could certainly extend this idea to include the foul administrative category of ‘Migrationshintergrund’ (see also El-Mafaalani 2018, 52). This categorization creates a two-class society by administratively dividing German citizens into two groups; German citizens share one of these groups with non-citizens, thus deeming them less ‘German,’ because of an arbitrary bureaucratic ascription. Furthermore, it is an ascription that is oftentimes highly selective, both in bureaucracy, but more egregiously in social interactions, marking those that are deemed ‘others’: Black people, Turkish people, Muslims, Eastern Europeans, Asians. While it is a quick social reflex to designate, for example, authors like Stanišić, Grjasnowa, Aydemir, Yaghoobifarah, Özdamar, Zaimoğlu, Şenocak, and many others as authors with “Migrationshintergrund,” and as part of that rationale as migrant authors, an author like German American Paul-Henri Campbell, born in Boston, MA, is never part of such a grouping.107 Hence, the addendum “Migrationshintergrund” is a marker that is operating within structures of a racializing hegemony; it is not all-encompassing for those with experience or biography of migration, but instead selectively categorizes those that a broader national consensus has deemed as less than German. Naika Foroutan states aptly: “Kaum jemals wird mit dem Begriff ein eingewanderter Schwede adressiert, wohingegen selbst Kinder der dritten Generation, wenn sie türkischstämmig sind, als Migrant*innenkinder klassifiziert werden und [S]chwarze Deutsche, selbst wenn sie nie migriert sind, ebenfalls unter der Kategorie Migrant*in angesprochen werden.” (Foroutan 2019, 56) Categorizing a person as having a “Migrationshintergrund” is a state-sanctioned marker of otherness (see Ohnmacht and Yıldız 2021, 251-252) that, subliminally at least, evokes memories 107 This is, of course, not a criticism of Campbell. His name could be replaced with that of others. The criticism is not toward him, but toward the society that inherently differentiates between him and other experiences of migration. 177 of an Aryan ‘purity of blood,’ at worst, or creates a category of German that is always asterisked,108 at best. Gutiérrez Rodríguez asserts that social classifications, such as ‘refugee,’ ‘foreigner,’ or ‘Person mit Migrationshintergrund’ thus operate within the matrix of the coloniality of migration, creating “colonial racial hierarchies.” (2018, 24) The categorization of ‘Migrationshintergrund,’ in particular, does not and must not have a future. Naika Foroutan (2019) writes: “Wenn knapp 40% der schulpflichtigen Kinder in diesem Land einen Migrationshintergrund haben, dann wird die etablierte defizitäre Kategorisierung des migrantischen Anderen in absehbarer Zeit nicht mehr hinreichend sein und auch nicht mehr hingenommen werden.” (18-19) Similarly, Kien Nghi Ha provides a good example for the continuation of colonial structures in German institutions in his 2009 essay, “The White German’s Burden. Multikulturalismus und Migrationspolitik aus postkolonialer Perspektive.” He explains that starting in 1912, the so-called “Legitimationskarte” (59) was first introduced to signify “Aufenthalts- und Arbeitserlaubnis.” (59-60) Early on, “mit der Einführung der deutschen Migrationspolitik in der Kolonialzeit,” (60) the ‘Legitimationskarte’ was connected to concerns of national security and henceforth used “die migrantische Bevölkerung gesondert zu überwachen. Daraus entstand unter anderem die institutionelle Praxis, Einwanderinnen und Einwanderer zentral zu erfassen.” (60) Over several decades, this practice continued on and, as Kien Nghi Ha explains, erschien so selbstverständlich, dass das Ausländerzentralregister 1953 ohne gesetzliche Grundlage eingerichtet wurde. Erst 1994 wurde, nach Kritik der Datenschutzbeauftragten, nachträglich eine Rechtsgrundlage eingeführt. Eine solche Arbeitsweise verdeutlicht, wie stark derartige Techniken sich institutionalisiert und verselbstständigt haben. (60) 108 German* – read as: ‘German, but…’. Though certainly not the most reputable of newspapers, the headline by the DailyMail in 2017 is a great example for this perception. A report in 2017 showing that more than half of Frankfurt’s residents were either non-Germans, German citizen born abroad or Germans whose parents or grandparents migrated to Germany led the tabloid to title: “Germans now the MINORITY in Frankfurt.” (Paterson 2017) 178 He also points to the “Gastarbeiterpolitik” of the BRD, arguing that its political core had its origin in the “wilhelminischen Kolonialzeit.” (59) In her detailed analysis of the BRD as an “Einwanderungsland,” Karen Schönwälder (2001) points to the colonial mindset that was part of daily politics, even in the 1960s. As Schönwälder shows, the government tried very hard to refuse entry to guestworkers from non-European countries – at times with absurd reasoning. In 1965, then-Secretary of Labor Theodor Blank of the CDU responded to an offer of Tunesian workers “’daß die Beschäftigung von Staatsangehörigen aus dem außereuropäischen Ausland wegen deren völlig andersartiger Mentalität und der oft gänzlich unterschiedlichen Lebensgewohnheiten und Bräuche besondere Anpassungs- und Eingewöhnungsschwierigkeiten aufwirft.’” (2001, 262, emphasis in original) According to Schönwälder, this argumentation had been developed “seit Ende der fünfziger Jahre in den Bonner Ministerien […] und nun ungeachtet der Eigenheiten des jeweils diskutierten Falls zur Anwendung brachte.” (2001, 262)109 In a 2004 article, Schönwälder also mentions how the members of “an inter-ministerial working party on foreign employment agreed that it was unacceptable to recruit dark-skinned Portuguese for work in Germany. As they could not openly be excluded, it was decided to inform Portuguese authorities that German employers were not interested in dark-skinned workers.” (250) In both her monograph and the essay, Schönwälder depicts the enormous obstacles and discriminations African and Asian guestworkers, in particular, faced in West Germany which points to a colonial mindset. In the early 1970s, this became even clearer as it was publicly debated whether the “guestworker question is our race problem.” (Schönwälder 2004, 258) 109 In her recommendable monograph, Schönwälder provides a plethora of further examples and traces this mentality and its very slow shift through the decades of the second half of the 20th century. See also the 2006 article by Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos and Karen Schönwälder. 179 Hierarchical exploitation has continued into the 21st century, as Gutiérrez Rodríguez points to a measure that passed German parliament in June 2016, the so-called “’1-euro jobs for refugees.’” (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018, 25) Intended to create jobs for 100,000 people who had only recently arrived in Germany and framed as an offer to keep them busy, “these people received only eight cents per hour, because the cost for travel and work clothes were deducted.” Racializing and othering people simplifies their exploitation. In Herkunft, Saša recalls his mother working in a washhouse where she suffered greatly from the heat: “Als nicht-deutsche Frau, vom Balkan gar, stand sie auf der untersten Stufe der Beschäftigungstrittleiter, und das ließ man sie auch spüren.” (2019, 150) But it is not only an exploitative nature that is inherent in the coloniality of migration, but, as Kien Nghi Ha illustrates in a 2010 essay, the imposed institutional integration – an endeavor that he describes as “colonial pedagogy.” One aspect of this institutional integration is the selectivity of accepting prior qualifications. As Saša explains about his parents: Beide hatten sie Berufe aufgeben müssen, in denen sie sich auskannten und gerne arbeiteten. In Deutschland hätten sie so ziemlich jeden Job angenommen, um nicht unterzugehen. In unserem jugoslawischen Freundeskreis war es überall so. Von der Not wussten die Arbeitgeber zu profitieren. Die Löhne waren niedrig, die Überstunden meist unfreiwillig und unbezahlt. War das diskriminierend? Meine Eltern könnten es nicht sagen. War es erbärmlich? Auf jeden Fall. (2019, 180) In addition to a lack of legal protection and hence uncontrolled exploitation is an enforcement of attending language classes that is required to stay in the country. Kien Nghi Ha describes it as “the obligation to take part in a rigorously controlled language and orientation course” and asserts that at “the end of 2006 more than 250,000 new and already settled immigrants have participated in 16,850 integration courses.” (2010, 163) Ha argues that these courses are used to convey a national-hegemonic idea of Germany, thus functioning “as a national-pedagogical instrument” for “political re-education of immigrants with non-EU backgrounds.” (2010, 163) What is particularly striking about these courses is that they are ”only obligatory for migrants from non-Western 180 countries.” (Kien Nghi Ha 2010, 164) Furthermore, they are expected without any consideration of the lived experiences, traumata, or circumstances of the individual people. Saša recalls Das Einkommen reichte selten, um sich nebenbei aus- oder weiterzubilden. Für Sprachkurse, die Basis also, blieben wenig Zeit und Kraft. Es gab dennoch nicht wenige, die sich nach der Arbeit noch zwei Stunden Flexion deutscher Verben mit Blasen an den Füßen reinzogen. Ein Ausweg aus der Abhängigkeit gelang aber oft nicht, oder es war zu spät – die Abschiebung kam zu früh. (2019, 180) Kien Nghi Ha does not argue that this colonial pedagogy is an exact reproduction of “old colonial practices,” but instead “institutions of power imposed on People of Colour” that “rely on colonial paradigms” (2010, 162). In a sense, integration courses evoke the schooling that was essential to the maintenance of colonial hierarchies in African countries as the people that are to-be integrated in society are “subjected to [a] knowledge transfer process” (Kien Nghi Ha 2010, 162) that presents Western rational knowledge as superior.110 The example of Saša’s parents also fall in line with Gutiérrez Rodríguez’s argument that “by coupling nationality and the right to asylum, [EU migration and asylum policies] construct hierarchies in the recognition of rejection of asylum in terms of nationalities. This places people in zones of recognition or rejection of the human right to livability.” (2018, 24) In so doing, they not explicitly operate within a framework of racial or ethnic difference (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018, 24), but still manage to create exclusionary zones, not unlike Frantz Fanon’s zones of nonbeing. 110 “The teaching of only European literature, or even the very fact of making it the primary study, means that our children are daily confronted with the Europe's reflection of itself in history. They are forced to look, analyze and evaluate the world as seen by Europe. Worse still, the images of themselves that they encounter in this literature reflect the European view of Africa. […] This is cultural imperialism, a very powerful instrument of oppression since it distorts a people's vision of their place in history and of the reality of the world around them.” (wa Thiong’o 1997, 30) 181 4.2.2 “Kanacke”: From Human to Dehumanizing / Racism in Germany It is not only racializing colonial structures that impact people, but also the pervasive mindsets that these structures have molded through centuries. I had mentioned previously how one colonial legacy had been the anchoring of specific visual markers of otherness in the mind of German society. But there are also certain linguistic markers with the same ramification. Let us look at the following memory that Saša narrates in Herkunft: Beim Einkaufen mit Großvater an der Edeka-Kasse, ein Gespräch in der Schlange: Es ging darum, dass die Salami in Folie eingepackt war, das fand er immens komisch. ‘Eine Salami muss frei sein!’, rief Großvater und reckte die Salami über den Kopf wie Dejan Savićević den Landesmeisterpokal. Wir lachten und verpassten den Augenblick, da die Schlange sich weiterbewegte. ‘Ey, Kanacken, wird’s heut noch?’ Ich habe meinem Großvater nicht gedolmetscht. Ich habe mich umgedreht und mich entschuldigt. (2019, 150) Saša’s shame and avoidance of conflict stand out at first. But there is also the very common insult that is used to degrade Saša and his grandfather: “Kanacke.” In one of her two “Koloniale Nachbeben” in her book Undeutsch (2016), Fatima El-Tayeb writes that the term has been used as an insult to degrade those “die ‘nicht hierher gehören’” for decades. (2016, 65) She argues that the term reflects an intersection of “Rassifizierung und Migrantisierung […]: Die Zuschreibung referiert ein als inakzeptabel wahrgenommenes ‘Nicht-(richtiges)-Deutschsein.’” (2016, 65) Although the term is so well known (“jede_r Deutsche kennt und versteht dieses Wort”), its colonial origin is not. According to El-Tayeb, the word “Kanaka” is the Polynesian term for “human” and was used as self-descriptor “verschiedener polynesischer Völker.” (2016, 66) Though most of Germany’s colonial and imperial endeavor was focused on the African continent, it also controlled Samoa and Papua New Guinea: In seinen 1899 veröffentlichten ‘Studien und Beobachtungen aus der Südsee’ bot [Joachim Friedrich] von Pfeil eine umfassende und autoritative Analyse der von ihm studierten Einwohner_innen der Inseln […]. Zu ihrer Benennung verwendete er deren Selbstbezeichnung, ‘Kanaken’. Zur besseren Orientierung der Leser_in stellte der adelige 182 Kolonisator schon einleitend mit Bestimmtheit fest, ‘dass der Kanake wirklich tief unter anderen farbigen Völkern steht.’ (2016, 67) Though its origin was forgotten, the term with its negative, racist connotation continued on; it is a slippage between a specific term and a generalized pejorative. What remains, however, “ist die implizite Hierarchie der Wertigkeit und die Verortung der Nicht-Zugehörigkeit.” (2016, 68)111 The violence of the insult “Kanacken” towards Saša and his grandfather hence is an example of the colonial lineage of racism in the German context and impacts both everyday instances of racial violence as well as institutional and structural racism. Institutional racism pervades everyday structures and operations, from the education system to labor markets to criminal justice and policing.112 Consider, for example, the following study conducted and published by a group of pedagogical psychology researchers at the University of Mannheim in 2018 and reported on by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The researchers divided 204 students of a ‘Pädagogische Hochschule’ into two groups; each group was given a writing assignment (“Diktat”) from a high school student to grade. Group A graded the assignment of “Max” and Group B graded the assignment of “Murat.” Both assignments were identical, with the same number of mistakes. In total, 102 students graded the assignment of fictional Max, and the other 102 the fictional assignment of Murat. The research study found that, on average, Murat was given a worse grade than Max, nonetheless.113 A study conducted a year prior by the same research group showed similar tendencies for the subjects of mathematics. 111 El-Tayeb also shows that the term “Hottentotten” has a similar history (2016, 68). 112 On education, see, for example, Naika Foroutan Die postmigrantische Gesellschaft (2019, pages 85ff); on policing in Germany, see, for example, Mohamed Wa Baile et.al. (eds.), Racial Profiling. Struktureller Rassismus und antirassistischer Widerstand (2019), and Daniela Hunold and Tobias Singelnstein (eds.), Rassimus in der Polizei. Eine wissenschaftliche Bestandsaufnahme (2022). On the topic of structural racism more generally, see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists (2003), and, in the German context, Natasha A. Kelly, Rassismus. Strukturelle Probleme brauchen strukturelle Lösungen! (2021) 113 See also Karakayalı 2022, 19 and Foroutan 2019, 87-88). 183 Importantly, I understand structural racism to impact not only the structures of institutions and systems of a society, but, equally important, its “social forces,” “ideologies,” and “[social] processes” (Gee and Ford 2011, 116). In other words, the underlying racist structures in a society impact the perception and situatedness of each individual in the society. More importantly, aspects that structure a society, such as language, shape the way they view and understand the world.114 Following this thought, I will now briefly move the focus from general discussions of racism to the specific German context. According to a press release by the German government in May 2022, a representative poll conducted by the Deutsches Zentrum für Integrations- und Migrationsforschung (DeZim) shows that 22 percent of people in the country have been victim to racist attacks (physical or otherwise).115 Of respondents that identified as part of a “rassifizierte[…] Gruppe,” 58% indicated that they experienced racism at least once. (DeZim, 2022, 5) The government also states in the press release on their website that 90 percent of Germans acknowledge that racism exists in Germany on a daily basis.116 Positively publicizing the acknowledgment of the existence of racism in 2022: what appears to be the bare minimum is, indeed, the bare minimum. If one continues to read the press release, one quickly notices one crucial aspect that is representative for the engagement with racism in Germany. Although 90 percent of those polled acknowledge the existence of racism on a daily basis (“Rassismus ist Alltag in Deutschland”), almost half (49%) of the respondents “glauben an die Existenz menschlicher Rassen,” and more than a quarter (25%) believes “dass eine Gesellschaft Gruppen braucht, die 114 Language, in particular, will be discussed in more detail in the next subchapter, 4.3.2. 115 The poll was conducted by the Deutsche Zentrum für Integrations- und Migrationsforschung (DeZIM) under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Naika Foroutan, Dr. Noa Ha, Prof. Dr. Frank Kalter, Dr. Yasemin Shooman, and Dr. Cihan Sinanoğlu. In July 2020, the German Bundestag provided financial means for the creation of a Nationaler Diskriminierungs- und Rassismusmonitor (NaDiRa). Roughly 5.000 were polled via phone. As the report mentions, the poll is “die erste repräsentative Studie in Deutschland, die die Auseinandersetzung mit Rassismus in seinen unterschiedlichen Facetten umfangreich beleuchtet.” (DeZim 2022, 1) 116 Die Bundesregierung 2022. 184 oben stehen, und andere, die unten stehen.” Further, more than half of the respondents (52%) said that they “finden es übertrieben, dass manche Menschen Angst davor haben, ständig und überall Opfer von Rassismus zu werden.” Indicating a very common reflex, almost half of the respondents (44.8%) stated that criticizing racist behavior “sei eine Einschränkung der Meinungsfreiheit, bei jeder Kleinigkeit würde man als Rassist abgestempelt (53,4%) und es sei unsinnig, dass normale Wörter jetzt rassistisch sein sollen (54,4 Prozent).” (Die Bundesregierung 2022) Though certainly not the intention of the government (after all, the press release leads with the headline “Viele Menschen sind zum Engagement gegen Rassismus bereit”), the reported results of the poll plainly indicate an enormous problem in engaging with racism in Germany117: most people still believe that “Rassismus ist entweder ein historisches Problem, unter Hitler und Mussolini, oder topografisch weit weg, zum Beispiel in den USA, wo es scheiße läuft mit den People of Color” or “dass es nur eine Form von Rassismus gäbe.” (Ippolito 2019, 88) Enrico Ippolito’s essay “Beleidigung,” published as part of the anthology Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum, perfectly outlines the discrepancy between the perception of racism in Germany and its reality. In this rather personal essay, Ippolito argues that most Germans only understand racism to be an ideology of Neo-Nazis, “glatzköpfige, gewaltbereite Menschen oder wahlweise auch ganz generell Ossis.” (Ippolito 2019, 93). In turn, most are blind for “strukturellen, institutionellen oder alltäglichen Rassismus.” (Ippolito 2019, 92) The poll results named in the Bundesregierung’s press release seem to indicate exactly that. Florian Ohnmacht and Erol Yıldız describe this misconception of the forms that racism takes as a tension “between the state’s recognition of being a country of immigration and a heterogeneous migration society coupled with its liberal, anti-racist basic 117 To be clear: my critique aims in no way at the poll nor its finding. Instead, my critique is directed at the framing of the information in the Bundesregierung’s press release. 185 attitude, accompanied at the same time by a continuation of racist and colonial discourses, structures, practices and subjectivations.” (2021, 152-153) However, looking more closely at the report by DeZim that the press release refers to muddies the water somewhat. The report, 103 pages long (excluding the bibliography), summarizes the main findings early on. Among these findings is the following: Racism’s “strukturelle und institutionelle Dimension scheint einem Großteil der Bevölkerung intuitive bewusst zu sein.” (DeZim 2022, 3) Similarly, a 2023 report by Reem Alabali-Radovan, minister of state and commissary of the Bundesregierung for migration, refugees, and integration as well as commissary for antiracism,118 states that “Rassismus durchzieht […] die gesamtgesellschaftlichen Strukturen.” (2023, 15) On the occasion of the third anniversary of the deadly racist attack in Hanau in 2020, Cihan Sinanoğlu, director of DeZim’s ‘Rassismusmonitor,’ said: “Ein Anschlag wie der von Hanau findet niemals isoliert statt. Vielmehr ist er eingebettet in rassistische Diskurse. Wenn wir Rassimus bekämpfen wollen, müssen wir ihn als strukturelles Problem begreifen.” (DeZim-Institut 2023) Undoubtedly, it is beneficial and important that both academics with federal support and a ministry of the state focused on migration, refugees, integration, and anti-racism acknowledge the existence and relevance of structural and institutional racism in such clear terms. Awareness is necessary and seems to exist – at least in these positions. But are the academics of the DeZim, experts in theories of racism and incredibly well attuned to racism in Germany, and Alabali- Radovan, ministry of state for this exact issue, representative for society at large? It is likely that they, too, would deny that. While it is encouraging to see prominent engagement on the federal level, that does not necessarily lead to a mirroring or adaption of this knowledge in society. DeZim 118 Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Migration, Flüchtlinge und Integration, die Bundesbeauftragte der Bundesregierung für Antirassismus. 186 wrote that a majority of the population is intuitively aware of structural and institutional racism. But I think it is important to bear in mind the following: being aware that a concept or structure exists does not equate to an awareness of its impact. The previously discussed numbers highlighted in the Bundesregierung’s press release speak to that. Also, I purport that there is a difference in affirming the existence of structural and institutional racism on the phone, on the one hand, and detecting it when it impacts people in concrete instances or realizing when one perpetuates it (intentionally or unintentionally), on the other hand. More importantly, the concept of structural and institutional racism entails that while an individual might not act in a racist manner or subscribe to a racist ideology, they are nonetheless implicated in the system. After all, it is not just the articulation of racism and racist actions, but also indifference and complacency towards it that hurts society and, especially, its racialized peoples. Consider in this context also the definition of “racist” by Ibram X. Kendi, author and director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University”: “One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.” (2019, 13, my emphasis) In so doing, most of German society are what Michael Rothberg (2019) understands as “implicated subjects.” Rothberg writes: “Implicated subjects occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes. An implicated subject is neither a victim nor a perpetrator. […] Less ‘actively’ involved than perpetrators, implicated subjects do not fit the mold of the ‘passive’ bystander, either. Although indirect or belated, their actions and inactions help produce and reproduce the positions of victims and perpetrators. In other words, implicated subjects help propagate the legacies of historical violence and prop up the structures of inequality that mar the present” (2019, 1) As encouraging and necessary as the findings of both DeZim’s and Alabali-Radovan’s reports are, both countless examples of lived experiences by racialized people in Germany (Afro- 187 Germans, German Asians, Sinti*zze and Rom*nja, Jews, migrants, Muslims),119 the rhetoric of major political figures in Germany, the AfD continuing to be in the Bundestag, and concrete data and historical structures120 speak to a continuing prevalence.121 119 Though far from exhaustive, some prevalent examples are the poetry and essays of May Ayim; see also Mark Terkessidis, Die Banalität des Rassismus. Migranten zweiter Generation entwickeln eine neue Perspektive (2004); Manuela Bojadžijev, Die windage Internationale: Rassismus und Kämpfe der Migration (2008); Grada Kilomba, Plantation Memories (2010); Armin Nassehi, “Namenlos glücklick” (2014); Wiebke Scharathow, Risiken des Widerstandes. Jugendliche und ihre Rassismuserfahrungen (2014); Mariá do Mar Castro Varela and Paul Mecheril (eds.), Die Dämonisierung der Anderen. Rassismuskritik der. Gegenwart (2016); Senthuran Varatharajah, Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen (2017); Senthuran Varatharajah, “Wir hießen Dahergeschleifte, Asylantenschweine, Affen, Neger” (2018); Sulaiman Masomi’s edited anthology Wir sind gekommen, um zu schreiben (2019); Enrico Ippolito, “Beleidigung,” (2019); Ferda Ataman, Ich bin von hier. Hört auf zu fragen! (2019); Alice Hasters, Was weiße Menschen nicht über Rassismus hören wollen, aber Wissen sollten (2019); Olivia Wenzel, 1000 Serpentinen Angst (2020); Olivette Otele, African Europeans (2021, especially 159-184); Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, Ministerium der Träume (2021); Fatma Aydemir, Dschinns (2022). I further want to point, in particular, to a recently published anthology titled People of Deutschland (2023, edited by Martina Rink and Simon Usifo) which contains the story of 45 Germans and their experiences with racism. Two recent journal volumes in the field of German studies also speak to problems and experiences of racism: The German Quarterly’s Volume 95, Number 4 (Fall 2022) and German Studies Review’s Volume 46, Number 1 (February 2023). Another example is the viral “#SchauHin”-campaign in September 2013 that Kübra Gümüsay presents in Sprache und Sein (2020, pages 50-52); consider also the recent public backlash after the decision by German publisher Ravensburg Verlag to pull two books about the Native American Winnetou, the fictional character that made Karl May famous (Roxborough 2022); for further discussion on the topic of Germany’s racialization of Native Americans, see, among others, Schumacher 2020 and, especially, D.S. Red Haircrow’s award-winning 2018 documentary Forget Winnetou! Loving in the Wrong Way. There are a number of musicians that thematize their experiences, for example Samy Deluxe, Nenda, and OG Keemo. 120 See, for example, Naika Foroutan (2019, especially pages 73-109); see also the Afrozensus (2020). An accessible, chronological approach to racism in a historical German context is Wulf D. Hund’s Wie die Deutschen weiß wurden: Kleine (Heimat)Geschichte des Rassismus (2017). 121 Looking specifically at People of African descent (PoAD) in Germany, there are two valuable statistical resources that add numbers to the multitude of lived experiences, the “Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its mission to Germany” (2017) of the United Nation’s Human Rights Council, and the first ever Afrozensus (2020). Visiting Germany in February of 2017, UN’s Working Group noted that “[a]wareness of the issue of structural racial discrimination targeting PoAD has grown, thanks to a vocal civil society.” (2017, 12) In other words: PoAD, other racialized groups, and allies have been able to increase visibility and awareness. However, the working group acknowledges that this has mostly been a one-way street, as PoAD and other racialized groups have been put into a position where they must do so or remain invisible: “People of African descent remain structurally invisible.” (2017, 12) The Working Group clearly states that as long as “a person is discriminated against, whatever the reason, the State is not free from structural racism.” (2017, 12) More alarmingly, one of the group’s main conclusions reads: “the Working Group is deeply concerned about the human rights situation of people of African descent in Germany,” (2017, 12) stating that their lives are “marked by racism, negative stereotypes and structural racism” which “remain commonplace.” The current laws on the book, specifically the General Equal Treatment Act (Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz), are “too narrow” and do “not cover structural racism or racial discrimination by the State.” (2017, 6) The Afrozensus was published in 2020 and conducted primarily by the Berlin-based education and empowerment project Each One Teach One, the Afrozensus collected the voices of 5.793 responses, 73.2% of which were Afro-Germans (i.e., born in Germany), with an average age of 31.7 years (2020, 65-66). Functioning both as a (first) statistical resource for experiences of Anti-Black racism and an educational resource, the Afrozensus is a highly interesting read, providing relevant information, individual quotes and experiences, and an important insight into the obstacles imposed by structural racism. Asked about the relative frequency of experiences of racial discrimination in different areas of their lives, the respondents’ answers point to a pervasive climate of racial exclusion (2020, 92). For each of the following areas, at least 41.5 percent of respondents indicated racial discrimination at times 188 In their report, DeZim is, of course, merely reporting the answers of respondents; by no means do lived experiences devalue the findings of DeZim’s poll and at no point do they argue that a solution to racism is close by. There are, undoubtedly, positive signs in the reports.122 It is comforting to read that almost 70% of respondents are willing to get involved against racism and to confront racist actions when they see them (the reports names demonstrations, financial donations, linguistic interventions, and signature collections as examples). That is recommendable and a productive starting point. Unfortunately, the last decades have shown that, for many, this starting point is also the finish line. There is an aspect of performativity to demonstrations, linguistic interventions, signature collections, and even financial donations; I am making this statement without value judgement. These are productive measures to start and increase awareness, but participating in them oftentimes leads people to feel that they have done their part. Fatima El- Tayeb writes: “Solange die übergeordnete Ideologie intakt bleibt, werden punktuelle Interventionen (Lichterketten, ‘Wir schaffen das!’-Rhetorik) keine strukturellen Änderungen hervorbringen.” (El-Tayeb 2016, 40) Demonstrations, linguistic interventions, signature collections, and financial donations are not changing the “übergeordnete Ideologie,” because they (“manchmal”) if not more often (“oft” or “sehr häufig”): justice system (41.5%), agencies and public authorities (44.7%), private life (51.7%), education system (56.4%), housing market (57.1%), police (60.5%), businesses and service (61.6%), professional life (62%), media and internet (71.6%), and in public and spare time (72.7%). Though the number of respondents fluctuated for each category, it still severely affects a large, and, more importantly, representative number of people. Similar results are reported for other structural issues: respondents were asked to answer a set of statements with either ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ depending on whether they are accurate. 66.7% of respondents agreed that doctors are not taking their ailments or discomfort serious (2020, 142); 62% said that psychotherapists questioned their experiences of racism (2020, 141); 67.6% state they received worse grades in school or university for the same output and performance (2020, 179); more than half of respondents said they had been insulted by a teacher (2020, 179) and almost a third said they had been insulted by a peer (2020, 178). I believe it is important to highlight these numbers because they provide an accurate representation of the lived experiences of People of African Descent in Germany and speak to the pervasiveness and ubiquity of everyday, structural, and institutional racism. 122 61% stimmt zu, dass Rassismus “Alltag in Deutschland” ist; 81% stimmen zu, dass Menschen “sich auch ohne Absicht rassistisch verhalten’ können (7) 189 are not changing the way institutions are run, court cases are decided, or policing impacts racialized people.123 In the Afrozensus (2020), the first ever representative data acquisition on Black life in Germany, 93 percent (of more than 4700 respondents) agreed with the statement: “Wenn ich Rassismus anspreche, wird mir nicht geglaubt.” (2020, 221) In “‘The Forces of Creolization.’ Colorblindness and Visible Minorities in the New Europe,” (2011) Fatima El-Tayeb understands this denial of racism, an “enforced silence,” (232) as a (somewhat conscious) counterstrategy to the “growing presence of minority populations challenging the European narrative of purity” and perceived “creolizing taking place in contemporary Europe, creolizing not (only) in the sense of a mixture of cultures and groups but an active reworking of essentializing ethnic ascriptions.” (2011, 230) El-Tayeb calls this the idea of “racelessness,” a specifically European response to racism. Of course, the stipulation of racelessness (oftentimes also called colorblindness) denies the experiential reality of racist exclusions within the borders of the new Europe, ensuring its own continued dominance by defending the continent’s putative identity against groups who are European but are perpetually assigned the position of other, kept outside the borders of Europe, if not literally then culturally and socially. (2011, 230) This mindset allows society to continually understand racism, and the “race question” as “externally (and by implication temporarily) imposed from the outside. The result is an image of Europe as self-contained and homogeneous in which racialized minorities permanently remain 123 Consider the following prominent example: after the horrific murder of George Floyd in May 2020, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to demonstrate, both in the US and globally – an important response to the event. But what has changed, almost three years later? In November 2021, voters in Minneapolis, the city in which Floyd had been murdered, rejected a ballot measure to overhaul policing in the city. In 2022, the number of people who died during interactions with the police in the US hit a 10-year high with 1,186 deaths. Consider also the debates in the aftermath of the murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, TN by five Black police officers. CNN columnist Van Jones received strong backlash for publishing a column titled “The police who killed Tyre Nichols were Black. But they might still have been driven by racism.” (Jones 2023) That is the reality of structural and institutional racism. It is not without reason that Natasha A. Kelly titled her 2021 book Rassismus. Strukturelle Probleme brauchen strukturelle Lösungen! 190 outsiders.” (El-Tayeb 2011, 233) Racialization in European countries is thus often subsumed in discussions of “terms like migration, integration, culture, and xenophobia” (201, 235) which continually places any racialized minority in the context of the outsider, hence precluding the normalization of perceiving someone without stereotypical visual markers of Germanness (and Europeanness) as German (and European).124 The term migrant in particular, argues El-Tayeb, describes both a person “who has migrated from one nation (usually outside western Europe) to another (within Europe,” (2011, 235) but also (wrongly) to any “European of color.” 4.2.3 Stanišič and Nanoracism I must address a question that I have seemingly avoided for a while now: what exactly does this discussion of racism have to do with Saša Stanišić? He is, after all, not a European of color (anti- Black racism), a practicing Muslim (anti-Muslim racism) or several other categories listed in the report of DeZim. But we have noticed that racialization, in the German context specifically, occurs whenever people read a feature or aspect of another person “als Hinweis auf eine nicht-deutsche Herkunft,” (Karakayalı 2022, 18) and discriminate based on this feature. Stanišić himself explained in an interview with Thomas Andre of the Hamburger Abendblatt: Hätte ich eine dunklere Hautfarbe oder starken Akzent, würde man mich mehr daran erinnern, nicht ‚von hier‘ zu sein. Oder mir selbst würde es mehr auffallen aufgrund dessen, wie ich behandelt würde, welche Privilegien mir nicht selbstverständlich in den Schoß fallen, so wie mir das früher aufgefallen war, als meine Familie und ich noch als Flüchtlinge frisch in Deutschland waren und ständig in unterschiedlichen Kontexten auf dieses Flüchtlingssein begrenzt wurden. 124 El-Tayeb speaks of “the peculiar coexistence of a regime of continent-wide, recognized visual markers that construct nonwhiteness as non-Europeanness with a discourse of colorblindness that claims to not see racialized difference.” (2011, 227) See also Étienne Balibar, “Es gibt keinen Staat in Europa: Racism and Politics in Europe Today” (1990) who speaks of a unique “European racism” (6) that is “sustained by an ideal image of Europe itself.” 191 One example mentioned by Karakayalı is a marker like an accent or a name. In the chapter “Die Häkchen im Namen,” Saša, the autofictional narrator of Herkunft, discusses the “Häkchen” in his name (č and ć), stating: “Ich empfand sie in Deutschland oft eher als Hindernis. Sie stimmten Beamte und Vermieter skeptisch, und an den Grenzen dauerte die Passkontrolle länger als bei Petra vor und Ingo hinter dir.” (2019, 60) In a later chapter, he recalls a memory from his teenage years, on the subway with his cousin: Wir wurden auch oft daran erinnert, dass man sich in Deutschland an »die Regeln« zu halten habe. Als seien Regeln anderswo völlig unbekannt. »Do reddä märr Daidsch« an meinen Cousin und mich in der Straßenbahn gerichtet, war keine ernst zu nehmende Regel natürlich, der Spruch allerdings durchaus ernst gemeint. […] Und mit jeder Regel, an die man uns erinnerte, erinnerte man uns auch daran: ihr seid fremd hier. (151) This memory is an example of what Achille Mbembe describes as nanoracism. Nanoracism, explains Mbembe, is prejudice based on skin color that gets expressed in seemingly anodyne everyday gestures, often apropos of nothing, apparently unconscious remarks, a little banter, some allusion or insinuation, a slip of the tongue, a joke, an innuendo, but also, it must be added, consciously spiteful remarks, like a malicious intention, a deliberate stamping underfoot or tackle, a dark desire to stigmatize and, in particular, to inflict violence, to injure and humiliate, to sully those not considered to be one of us. (2019, 58) In so doing, nanoracism “plac[es] the greatest number of those that we regard as undesirable in intolerable conditions” (2019, 58) and does so daily. Mbembe emphasizes that racism, in general, and nanoracism, in particular, is “painful and hard to forget because they attack the body and its materiality, but also, above all, they attack the intangible (dignity, self-esteem). Their traces are mostly invisible and their scars difficult to heal.” (2019, 58) In short, nanoracism is daily reminders that one does not belong or is less than a ‘real’ member of a society, at best a German with an asterisk. To the one inflicting nanoracist violence, it seems innocuous. However, the mostly unprompted reflex to often claim nanoracist inflictions as a joke or banter shows an awareness of 192 their violence, at least on a subconscious level. For the person forced, often also coerced125, to endure nanoracist violence, it is a performative reinforcement of separation that is normalized and institutionalized. In his 2017 Nach der Flucht, Ilja Trojanow provides a fitting example: “Man hört ja gar nicht, dass Sie nicht von hier sind. Auch unschuldige Fragen können zersetzen.” (15) Nanoracism which Mbembe also describes as “racism turned culture,” (2019, 59) goes hand in hand with structural racism, or as he calls it “hydraulic racism.” (2019, 59) Nanoracism is a valuable concept because it emphasizes that intent, whether good or bad, is always secondary to the impact one’s actions (or inactions!) have. While the nanoracist violence is inflicted deliberately in the memory with his cousin, to me, the most striking example of this racialization occurs in the following scene, a memory of an experience which Saša recalls in a story told to his grandmother: “Ich erzähle, wie wir ein Lamm am Spieß grillen im Wald und eine Spaziergängerin mit Dackel sich erkundigt, ob das ein Hund sei, den wir braten.” (Stanišić 2019, 345) The “Dackel,” I would argue, symbolizes the Germanness of the woman. Did this German woman, then, simply assume a different, perhaps more primitive culture, based on perhaps a few snippets of language? A specific visual? Is her walking her dog but also suspecting a dog on the spit a subconscious expression of feeling threatened? If these ‘others’ barbecue a dog, would they stop at my dog – or at me? Or is there a different reason for the woman’s comment? It is hard to imagine that she just wanted to chitchat and thought this 125 Statements like ‘You just don’t get the joke,’ or ‘You are too sensitive,’ for example, are mechanisms that pressure others into accepting nanoracist violence without complaint by subtly threatening their exclusion from the social situation/the social hierarchy. Simultaneously, it imposes the subjectivity of one person (the one ‘telling a joke,’ i.e., inflicting nanoracist violence) to the level of objective truth: i.e., ‘my statement was not nanoracist violence, but a joke, and if you don’t understand it as a joke, you are simply incorrect.’ Achille Mbembe describes this as a “kind of merry and frenzied nanoracism that is utterly moronic, that takes pleasure in wallowing in ignorance and that claims a right to stupidity and to the violence that it institutes – herein lies the spirit of our times.” (2019, 62) He continues: “Racism is practiced without one’s being conscious of it. Then one expresses one’s amazement when someone else draws attention to it or takes one to task.” (Mbembe 2019, 62) See also Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst (especially pages 195-197) and the recent book by Raúl Pérez, The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy (2022). 193 question was a good icebreaker. Throughout Herkunft, there are two moments in a previous chapter (“Lämmer”, 192-195) that amplify the effect of this moment. The chapter starts with Saša referencing a May 1st celebration in 1990 in Višegrad where his family grilled a lamb on a spit on a forest clearing (192).126 There is already a direct connection between the family outing in 1990 and the one quoted above. Interestingly, most of the chapter, in fact, recalls how the family grilled a lamb at the “Grillhütte” in Emmertsgrund and how Saša had invited his friend Martek to join them. As such, the description of the chapter “Lämmer” might very well be the same memory that Saša later tells his grandmother about. What particularly foregrounds – and, to a degree, foreshadows – the (intended or unintended) exoticization and discrimination is a comment Saša makes to Martek: “Gerade die Deutschen erwarteten doch genau das von uns, dass wir Lämmer grillten und im Basketball fies faulten und mit Schlagring unter dem Kissen schliefen.” (194, my emphasis) Hence, even though the family does something that is at the same time culturally Bosnian but also not at all foreign for Germans (see footnote 127), and even though they play into the stereotypical expectations of Germans by doing so (“Gerade die Deutschen erwarteten doch genau das von uns”), the German woman violates them by transgressing both their cultural embodiment and the German stereotype. Her comportment towards them reinforces an invisible border and communicates that, in her perception, Germanness remains unavailable to them either way. This one sentence, then, emphasizes that violence does not have to be malicious or, as discussed previously, physical; indeed, a violence borne out of the naivety and ignorance of and (unfounded) fear induced by stereotypes is, in a sense, involuntarily malicious. As author Ilja Trojanow writes in Nach der Flucht: “Den Anderen nur als ‘Anderen’ wahrzunehmen ist der 126 It is worth noting that this, indeed, is also a popular way of celebrating May 1st in Germany. 194 Beginn von Gewalt.” (2017, 55) Mbembe states that racism “will continue to proliferate not only as a part of mass culture but also (we would do well not forget it) within polite society.” (2019, 57) Stanišić providing examples of the prevalence of racism “within polite society,” perhaps one of the more painful forms racism takes, is one of the reasons that speak to the relevance of analyzing Stanišić’s work in this context. There are two further reasons that speak to this discussion’s relevance in my dissertation’s broader context. First, there are examples of racism in the diegesis of Stanišić’s works, two of which I will explicate below; consider also the two memories I just quoted. Furthermore, Enrico Ippolito, writing from the lived context of a German-Italian person, points to an important aspect to consider about racism: though there are prevalent racist structures, each racial discrimination occurs to an individual and is relevant in the context of their lives. Ippolito writes: “Er erfuhr im Gegensatz zu anderen keine körperliche Gewalt. Erst viel später erkannte er: Rassismus ist kein Wettbewerb, der sich in Kategorien aufteilen lässt wie Auf-die- Fresse-Kriegen und Nicht-so-schlimm.” (2019, 85) Racism is not a competition and a racial discrimination is not made less hurtful or the experience less valid because other people experience worse racial discrimination: “Das sind Kleinigkeiten, bemessen an dem, was andere durchmachen. Aber sind es deswegen auch nebensächliche Erfahrungen, die schnell weggewischt werden konnten?” (Ippolito 2019, 87) For Stanišić’s autofictional narrator of Herkunft, Saša, the discrepancy between his own privileged position as someone who was mostly spared racial discrimination and those more strongly racialized than him is, in fact, a point of emphasis: “Ich sehe am eigenen glücklichen Beispiel, wie breitflächig die strukturelle Benachteiligung der Geflüchteten damals war und heute noch ist.” (2019, 180-181) Saša perceives himself to be lucky, though he, too, had to navigate the structurally racist housing market (2019, 61) and his stay in 195 Germany was, until his citizenship, inextricably linked to his occupation as a writer (2019, 213- 214).127 But his good fortunes do not close him off to the many realities worse than his (“allen Hürden des Migrantischen zum Trotz,” 2019, 181). Simultaneously, the necessity to emphasize that he was lucky because he only had to experience fewer, less violent instances of racism is itself a sign that many understand and accept a certain amount of racial discrimination as a natural default. This is the first reason a discussion of Stanišić’s writing is valuable in the context of discussing racism in Germany. Secondly, discussing Stanišić’s writing in this context speaks to the “überlappende[n] Geschichten von Migration, Kolonialismus und Rassismus” in the German context. (El-Tayeb 2016, 42) I have shown the impact colonial structures have on racialized and minoritized peoples in Germany and how they are closely connected with both understanding of race (and racism) as well as migration. Étienne Balibar states that “the category of the immigrant [is] a new name for race in postcolonial society.” (2014, 268) Similarly, Achille Mbembe argues for the necessity of understanding the situation of those he terms the “new ‘wretched of the earth,’” (2017, 177), those “who are turned away, deported, expelled,” and racialized groups today marked by names such as “Islam, the Muslim, the Arab, the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee, the intruder, to mention only a few.” (2019, 43) Importantly, this applies to Stanišić because even though he is a German citizen, the discussion of racism – specifically in the German context – has shown how non- Germanness and non-Europeanness is constructed. This construct disregards citizenship in favor of perception, stereotypes, and the “ideal image of Europe” and Germany (Balibar 1990, 6), projecting “undesirable information onto the ‘Other.’” (Kilomba 2010, 67) In a society structured by racism (colonial, institutional, Alltagsrassismus), aimed at excluding those marked as non- 127 This, of course, adds yet one more layer to the notion of “writing to survive” (see also the discussion by Eigler 2023, pages 243-244). 196 German, many are included in its sphere of action (‘Wirkungsbereich’). As such, the diegetic examples in Stanišić’s writing point to this ‘Wirkungsbereich,’ to both the structures themselves and their effect on individuals and allows them to be legible. The diegetic narrators pointing to examples of racial discrimination does not necessarily mean that they affect them most. These are obstacles, hurdles, and structural inequalities that affect many, to varying degrees, and the diegetic examples point to the problems they pose. At times, Stanišić’s narrators openly point to experiences of racial discrimination and explicate why the behavior is problematic (see the experience quoted above with his cousin in the subway). More often than not, Stanišić’s narrators instead depict a scene without too much commentary, in their highly descriptive style, leaving the reader to fill in the gaps themselves – an approach to which Stanišić spoke in an interview Karin Janker, stating: “Ich vertraue den Lesern, dass sie diese Leerstellen schließen.” While there are several (diegetic) moments in the narratives in which instances of social exclusion or outright racism are more blatant (as discussed in this chapter), the following example from the short story “Fallensteller” (2016a) shows just that, though more sarcastically than in other examples; the narrative voice’s use of irony highlights the “Leerstellen” explicitly. But I also put forth this example to wrap up the subchapter because, unlike the other examples taken from Stanišić’s texts, this one takes on the character of a storyline. In “Fallensteller,” the narrative engages with the debates around refugees that had so viciously resurfaced around 2014. In this case, this engagement occurs in form of a storyline, though not a primary one; it is a sarcastic, almost snarky critique of those denying refugees dignity and human rights. “Fallensteller” takes up a seemingly random story thread that Vor dem Fest had placed in its narrative, but never actually picked up. In the novel, the character Lada and his friend Suzi smuggled a few wolves into the Uckermark. A few years later, in “Fallensteller,” the wolf 197 population in the region has drastically increased: “Inzwischen kamen Wölfe längst in der Zeitung. Überregional. Wenn von uns was überregional kommt, dann kannst du einen drauf lassen, dass es Opfer gegeben hat. Wegen Nazis, die sich wie Nazis verhalten, oder eben wegen Raubtieren, die sich wie Raubtiere verhalten.” (Stanišić 2016a, 203) Right of the bat, the connection of the animalistic predator (wolf) and the human predator (Nazi) is evident and the juxtaposition of wolf and its victims and Nazis and their victims is established. Previously, we had learned that five Syrian families had moved to Fürstenfelde (2016a, 175). Only a few pages later, the juxtaposition is made even clearer. The narrative “we” describes a scene at a local butcher where “ortsfremde Straßenbauarbeiter” discuss both refugees and wolves during their breakfast: “Erst wurde die Mettstulle bestellt, dann die ‘Flüchtlingskrise’ kritisch diskutiert – gerade war in Bad Belzig eine schwangere Somalierin zusammengeschlagen worden, und da stellte sich die Frage, auf welche Weise sie die Schläge provoziert haben könnte –, dann wurde das Frühstück serviert und die Raubtierkrise besprochen.” (2016a, 206) The sarcastic tone of the narrator, combining “kritisch diskutiert” with blatant victim blaming, infuses a value judgment into the scene that is barely even under the surface.128 The increased number and a rise in stories of wolf attacks frightens some of the people in Fürstenfelde and the neighboring villages.129 Once Olaf Götze, one of the biggest farmers and owner of one of the largest slaughterhouses of the region, loses a piglet to what is presumed to be 128 See also the example later in the short story: “Nachdem Frau Würzel aus Arendsee nach Wolf und Wildschwein nun auch noch Besuch von einem ‘Nordafrikaner’ bekommen hatte, […].” (Stanišić 2016a, 249) This “’Nordafrikaner,’” it turns out, is only the “Rewe-Lieferdienst.” 129 As a reference point: According to the Statisches Bundesamt, as of December 31, 2021, 5,057 foreigners live in the Uckermark. The Uckermark has a population of more than 117,000 people. The state of Brandenburg released a report in June 2020 on the numbers of “Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund,” “Ausländische Bevölkerung” and “Flüchtlinge/Asylsuchende” in the state. In the Uckermark, 1.3% of the population were categorized as refugees or “geduldete Personen” (persons who have received a ‘Duldung,’ an exceptional and temporary leave to remain). Going off the roughly 117,000 inhabitants of the Uckermark leaves us with roughly 1,500 refugees and “geduldete Personen” in a district of 30 cities and a total area of 3,058 square kilometers. 198 a wolf attack, a large group of people comes together in the evening. It is easy to miss that they are described as “besorgte Bürger,” (Stanišić 2016a, 208) a term that has become a self-descriptor and thus closely associated with many conservative and right-wing people that demonstrated against the refugees coming to Germany. The emergency meeting in the evening is led by Herr Kessel who is not only part of the Nationale Kameradschaft Uckermark (Stanišić 2016a, 213), but also a member of the NPD, the successor party of the NSDAP (2016a, 248). As such, “war er ja quasi Experte in Sachen Ängste.” (Stanišić 2016a, 213) In this meeting, the juxtaposition between wolf and refugee is conflated, creating a continual and ambiguous double layer. A first speaker claims that the wolves must go, even going so far as to advocate for “Wolfsmord.” (2016a, 210) Farmer Gölow, too, gives a speech and even though he lost an animal to the wolves, he quickly detects the underlying ideology that resonates in the discussion. He takes a stance: Der Wolf an sich, rief Gölow und zerstörte die Hoffnung, sei gar nicht das Problem. Menschen gebe es, die seien schlimmer als Wölfe. ‘Die hetzen erst und schießen dann und denken nicht erst danach, sondern gar nicht.’ Gölow klopfte mit dem Zeigefinger gegen den Tresen, als wollte er andeuten, wo sich solche gerade aufhielten, das aber nur als Vermutung unsererseits. (Stanišić 2016a, 211) However, this assumption proves true, as Gölow ends his speech and leaves the meeting with an ironic “’Schönen Abend noch.’ […] Dem Letzten wurde nun klar, dass hier einer Kritik geäußert hatte. (2016a, 211) After he leaves, the meeting continues, Gölow is disavowed and a letter to the regional government authority is brainstormed in which phrases like “angesichts der hemmungslos anwachsenden Wolfspopulation,” “[a]uch der beste Zaun hält die Eindringlinge nicht immer fern,” and “wolfverseuchten Wälder” are reminiscent of common right-wing, anti-refugee talking points. The narrative “we” picks up the leftovers of Gölow’s irony and continues sarcastically: “Man hätte wetten können, Gölow wäre als Schweinezüchter automatisch auf der Seite der Schweine. […] Klar, es gibt unter den Wölfen auch welche, die wahrscheinlich nie auffällig werden. Aber wer 199 will das garantieren? Ein Wolf ist ein Wolf, der kann sich doch schon rein von seiner Kultur her nicht an unsere Sitten halten, da kann der Naturschutz noch so viele Broschüren drucken, die liest der Wolf nicht.” (211-212) Interestingly, it is the figure of the eponymous Fallensteller who appears in their midst and, seemingly, spurs the “besorgte Bürger” on130 by recommending the phrasing “’Den Wolf zur Not aus der Natur entfernen,’” which, he asserts, is more open-ended and can, among other things, imply a large enclosure “oder dass man den Wolf an einen Ort bewege, wo er anderen nicht auf der Tasche läge.” (Stanišić 2016a, 214) The veiled reference to refugee camps or segregated housing and the very common talking point of undeserved financial benefit once more accentuates the conflation of wolf and refugee. It is unclear to both attendees and the narrative voice whether the Fallensteller is, indeed, on their side or just making fun of them. Myrto Aspioti (2021) argues convincingly that the wolf/refugee-storyline is not merely a clear critique of the refugee discourse and a wonderful use of irony, but the “threat of the wolves in the village and the contemporaneous arrival of the Europe-wide refugee crisis in the region put new pressures on the community of Fürstenfelde, allowing the villagers’ age-old conflicts, secrets, and grievances to surface.” (116) The narrative thus cleverly allows the critique to shine through while integrating it into the broader plot of the short story.131 130 On the juxtaposition of Fallensteller and wolf, see Myrto Aspioti (2021, 116). 131 In a footnote, Aspioti also references that at an event in 2017, Stanišić himself “suggested that the wolves in ‘Fallensteller’ can be read both literally (given that farmers in northeast Germany are reportedly often threatened by wild predators), and metaphorically, as ersatz figures for migrants, who are viewed with ambivalence by the locals in the German provinces.” (2021, 116, footnote 43) 200 4.3 The Power of Language and Names To this day, one can find a small village and a mountain in the Mpumalanga province in South Africa named Mauchsberg. In September 2001, I started elementary school in a small village in the southwest of Germany. The school was named after Karl Mauch, a German explorer and geographer of Africa in the 19th century. At that time, I knew only that he must have done something noteworthy to have a school named after him. It was almost two decades later that I understood two things about my elementary school: i) through its name, it kept up and alive the legacy of one of the few somewhat famous sons of a small village of, nowadays, roughly 6000 inhabitants; ii) though most likely unknown to all the young pupils as well as teachers, it is a symbol of Germany’s colonial history. The few mentions of Mauch in a simple online search show him as a young man, unhappy with his position in life, who, following his childhood dream, went to South Africa to be an explorer.132 That he went there as part of the colonial enterprise is ignored if even realized – in part because colonial history is neglected and ignored in Germany’s educational curricula. Though it might not be the best example of Germany’s colonial history, I have decided to start this brief treatise on the power of language and naming with this anecdote on the hardly remembered explorer Mauch because of its proximity and connection to my own history, my own identity, and my own education and knowledge (which is lineage). Realizing this colonial tradition, inevitably and unconsciously linked to both the historic person, but even more the name Karl Mauch, illustrated to me the lack of reflection in Germany (and myself) about the country’s colonial past as well as the lack of comprehension of and care about the power of naming. Understanding colonial history and its effects are, I would argue, immensely relevant to understanding migration 132 Clauß (2018); Mauch is also often (incorrectly) credited with finding the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. 201 in the late 20th and early 21st century because there is a direct lineage and even causal relation between both (historical) moments. As such, this subchapter is not meant to explore Karl Mauch, but instead more generally the power that is inherent to language, to names, and the process of naming. To do so, I initiate a decolonial conversation between German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), on the one hand, and thinkers that write from African (Achille Mbembe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o) and Caribbean (George Lamming, Édouard Glissant) contexts, with examples of Stanišić’s writing incorporated along the way. This decolonial conversation is not yet a fully formed decolonial couplet, the methodological end stage that is going to structure and characterize the sixth chapter, but a looser, (slightly!) less tightly concentrated approach in conversational form. Nonetheless, this discussion highlights one productive possibility to start a conversation that counters German studies’ (and German society’s) lack of engagement with its colonial tradition – a tradition that still influences social interactions, politics, and, broadly put, life in the present, for example through language and through naming. This discussion also points to ways in which Stanišić’s texts speak to this issue. Oftentimes, diegetic examples for this topic are not a text’s core message or a narrative’s focus, but instead overt and, at times, covert remarks that subtly expose and disclose. This allows them to substantiate a conversation on language and naming as they open windows into a precise moment, a snapshot of Germany’s grappling with its societal changes, and enables the conversation’s core arguments on language and naming to connect with the temporal and spatial particularity of Germany in the 21st century. Lastly, the example of Karl Mauch points to a very concrete example of a colonial cartography, a borderscape upheld through names. This discussion shows that language and naming strongly impact and uphold borderscapes, though more often on the level of social markings and inscriptions, i.e., a cultural landscape, rather than a 202 geographical landscape. 4.3.1 “Sprache und Sein”: Racializing Language “Sprache ist mächtig. Und Macht bedeutet Verantwortung,” writes Kübra Gümüşay in her 2020 bestseller Sprache und Sein (23). If a desire for power gets the upper hand over a feeling of responsibility, then language can quickly turn into a tool of domination: “Kurt Tucholsky schrieb, dass Sprache eine Waffe sei. Ja, das kann sie sein, und das ist sie viel zu häufig, ohne dass sich die Sprechenden dessen bewusst wären.” (Gümüşay 2020, 25) Language is also at the core of many crucial issues in German society. Case in point: Gümüşay starts Sprache und Sein by discussing the German language and her own multilingualism. From this starting point, she seamlessly addresses and connects a variety of forms of (racializing) exclusions, from everyday racism and racial stereotypes to right-wing extremism and anti-Muslim racism, to forced silence, categorical generalizations, and loss of individuality, to the normalization of hate online. Thilo Sarazzin’s racist book Deutschland schafft sich ab (2010) had changed public discourse a decade prior to Gümüşay’s publication, normalizing racializing and exclusionary language and topics as part of everyday conversations. In so doing, it had moved “die Grenzen des Sagbaren unumkehrbar.” (Hatice Akyün, quoted by Gümüşay 2020, 10) According to Gümüşay, this is a mistake by journalists, talkshows, and the ‘Mitte der Gesellschaft’ that has since been egregiously repeated because terms “aus der Sprache der Rechten [werden] in den allgemeinen politischen Diskurs übernommen.” (Gümüşay 2020, 124-125) As a result, Nazi rhetoric has found its way back into the political discourse. Wir haben die AfD so groß gemacht, wie sie es heute ist. Indem wir ihre Provokationen durch unsere Diskussionen legitimierten. Indem wir ihren Hass zur Meinung erkoren haben. Indem wir ihre Menschenfeindlichkeit, ihren Rassismus, ihren Antisemitismus, ihren Sexismus zu legitimen Perspektiven geadelt haben. (Gümüsay 2020, 128) 203 Throughout Herkunft, narrator Saša points to this with a couple of comparisons between historical events, descriptions of his search for ‘Herkunft,’ and narrative interruptions in which he points to specific events in the present. These events are mostly connected to instances where the “Sprache der Rechten” was used in the “allgemeinen politischen Diskurs,” for example “Heute ist der 28. August 2018. Sebastian Czaja (FDP) twitter: ‘Antifaschisten sind auch Faschisten.’” (2019, 138; see also pages 97 and 98) Similarly, Gümüşay argues (as does Fatima El-Tayeb) that the definition in use for a variety of linguistic delicts and, oftentimes inspired by them, physical offenses is not precise enough. The perhaps most egregious instance is the excessive use of the word xenophobia, ‘Fremdenfeindlichkeit.’133 Every attack on people that are marked by journalists, police, or politicians as non-German based on their appearance or names is immediately categorized and talked about as an instance of xenophobia. Shortly after the horrific and deadly right-wing terror attack in Hanau in 2020, Hesse’s Secretary of the Interior, Peter Beuth, ascribed the racist murderer a “fremdenfeindliches Motiv.” (Klein 2020) In so doing, he associated one of the locations of the attack (a shisha bar) with non-Germanness; he deprived German-born Gökhan Gültekin, Sedat Gürbuz, Said Nesar Hashemi, Mercedes Kierpacz, Hamza Kurtović, Fatih Saraçoğlu, and Ferhat Unvar of their German citizenship, of their identity; he deprived Kaloyan Velkov and Vili Viorel Păun of the lives they had built up in Germany.134 In the public broadcasting news station 133 According to a report by Deutschlandfunk, the conflation of ‘Rassimus’ and ‘Fremdenfeindlichkeit’ is something that has been publicly criticized by activists for more than a decade (Klein 2020). See also the discussion by Manuela Bojadžijev (2008, 26-29) and Meltem Kulaçatan’s essay “Die verkannte Angst des Fremden. Rassismus und Sexismus im Kontext medialer Öffentlichkeit” (2016; see especially the discussion of the NSU murders that were for many years publicly discussed as “Dönermorde,” pages 106-117). 134 In the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Hanau, activists indicated their positive surprise “dass in Talkshows und Beiträgen zum Anschlag von Hanau inzwischen so behutsam mit den Worten umgegangen wird.” (Armbrüster 2020) The direct response by several media outlets and political figures nonetheless pointed to the problematic conflation. A year after the right-wing terrorist attack in Halle during Jom Kippur, then-foreign minister Heiko Maas (SPD) named right-wing terror “die größte Gefahr für unser Land,” stating that, on average, “gibt es alle 24 Minuten in 204 Deutschlandfunk, journalist Sheila Mysorekar, part of the activist organization “Neue Deutsche Medienmacher*innen,” explained after the Hanau terror attacks: “Wenn man Fremdenfeindlichkeit sagt, übernimmt man die Perspektive des Täters.“ (Klein 2020) Similarly, Gümüşay explains: “Ein Wort, mit dem Deutsch sprechende auch andere Deutsch sprechende bezeichnen, die sie als Fremde empfinden, obwohl sie keine sind. Obwohl sie womöglich in keiner anderen Sprache zu Hause sind als der deutschen.” (2020, 42)135 This almost subconscious, exclusionary reflex of marking those deemed non-German as foreign (regardless of their place of birth, citizenship, or lived experiences) is a hierarchical tool and remnant of Germany’s colonial empire. Achille Mbembe writes: “For the moment, too great a mass of citizens, obscure and invisible, is literally akin to foreigners in the public imagination – in an era where the figure of the foreigner is dangerously confused with the figure of the enemy.” (Mbembe 2021, 108) Deutschland eine rechtsextrem motivierte Straftat. Das sind keine Einzelfälle, sondern das ist die bittere rechtsradikale Realität in Deutschland.” (Zeit Online 2020) For a good discussion of the rise of right-wing extremism and terrorism in Germany, see (among others) the New York Times’ 2021 five-part podcast series titled Day X. 135 Gümüşay’s quote, in particular, but also the discussion of language and naming, in general, brings up the question of deportations (like the one of both Aleksandar’s and Saša’s parents in Grammofon and Herkunft, respectively) and, in the German political context, of the policy of ‘safe countries of origin’ (SOC). The sichere Herkunftsländer, as SOC are called in Germany, are a constant issue of debate in the German public. The list of the countries that Germany deems secure reads as follows: All member states of the EU, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia, Ghana, Senegal, Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro. Germany regularly deports refugees back to what it considers a ‘sicheres Herkunftsland.’ Especially deportations to Afghanistan have been debated strongly. From December 2017 to early 2019, Germany deported more than 430 people to Afghanistan (Iskandar 2019) – a country where reports of deaths are a daily occurrence and 2018 was the year with highest recorded numbers of civilian deaths (3804 with 907 being children). Recently, journalist Nilab Langar criticized deportations to Afghanistan as a violation of human rights (Langar 2019). On August 12, 2021, the German government decided to halt deportations to Afghanistan. Regardless, deportations are an almost weekly occurrence in German newspapers that often run a similar course: a well-integrated family receives a deportation note that is to either send the whole family back to a country they fled from or, if the children are born in Germany, tear them apart. This is often followed by outrage and small protests in the community as well as a District Office that knows of nothing. It usually ends with police coming for the deportees in the early morning (see, for example, the very public deportation of Tina in Austria in January 2021; see also the 2023 documentary Zahnschmerzen which is available on YouTube). With a deportation order, the state names a refugee, a person living and often working in Germany, as undesirable. Jona Zyfi and Idil Atak, criminology scholars from Toronto, criticize the policy harshly: “this policy is inherently a discriminatory political tool that is predicated on a narrow, stereotypical conception of asylum seekers from certain countries as undeserving of international protection. Hence, it delegitimizes the protection needs of individual refugees from designated countries.” (2018, 359) Delegitimizing the protection needs of an individual refugee likewise delegitimizes them and their identity. 205 4.3.2 Nietzsche & African Philosophy: The Gravitas of Naming As mentioned above, understanding Germany's situatedness within colonial history and its remnants are important for contemporary German studies, whether they are focused on literature, society, or history.136 African and Caribbean philosophies are useful conversation partners in this exchange because they are, as Lucius Outlaw argues, both deconstructive and reconstructive: Philosophy, both as practice and accomplishment, had been reserved for the […] peoples who had realized – in fact, were the embodiment of – the Greco-European paradigmatic forms of rational contemplation and understanding as the highest, most definitive, and most divine activities of which true humans are capable. Thus, each instance of African philosophy… is at the outset, a deconstructive challenge: it decenters the concept of ‘Philosophy’ and its discursive practices into the history of their construction and maintenance, into the historicity of the philosophical anthropology that forms the fabric of their textuality and thus of the race/ethnicity, the gender, and the cultural agenda of the voices in which they became embodied and the practices through which they were constituted and institutionalized (quoted after Gratton 74) In this vein of being both deconstructive and reconstructive, leading conversations with other rationalities, other epistemologies, other ways of perceiving and understanding the world, such as African or Caribbean philosophy, has immense potential, if done correctly. As I discussed in the introductory chapter, a correct decolonial conversation that is non-hierarchical is a conversation that does not subordinate one rationality under the other but considers the conversation on eye level. Nietzsche is not a contributor to the conversation to contextualize or, worse, explain what Mbembe, wa Thiong’o, Lamming or Glissant contribute (or vice versa). Each conversation partner 136 There are several academics in German studies and in German academia doing great work in the field of decolonial studies (e.g., the collective Diversity, Decolonization, & the German Curriculum; works by Kien Nghi Ha, George Steinmetz, Robert Heinze, Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Jürgen Zimmerer, Robbie Aitken, Kristyna Comer, Noa K. Ha to name only some, and exemplified by an issue of Postcolonial studies focused on German Theory in 2006 (Vol. 9, No. 1). For a longer bibliography and a literature review, see Fitzpatrick (2018). Nonetheless, thinking decolonization still often seems to be an academic side note, often spurred on by academics who experience the lack of decolonization themselves. Instead of understanding such an approach as another field of interest, however, it needs to be understood as a redefining movement of the field as a whole. On a positive note, a recent book on the topic might change how decolonization is thought about both in German curricula in Germany and the US: Criser, Regine, Ervin Malakaj [eds.] Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 206 in a decolonial conversation (and, in chapter six, a decolonial couplet) is part of lineages in relation as they frame, illuminate, and scrutinize a concept or an issue from the varying viewpoints that multiple rationalities invite. These varying viewpoints also hold the potential of allowing a different set of questions to emerge. In this way, they can function as a methodology that has the potential to frame anew a whole discipline and, more importantly, to expand its boundaries through a multiplicity of interdisciplinary opportunities. The starting point of the decolonial conversation is an analysis of Friedrich Nietzsche’s understanding of the power that both naming and, more generally, language have. One of the longer passages in Nietzsche’s writing that refer to the process of naming and the power of names can be found in the Fröhliche Wissenschaft. Aphorism 58 reads: Diese hat mir die grösste Mühe gemacht und macht mir noch immerfort die grösste Mühe: einzusehen, dass unsäglich mehr daran liegt, wie die Dinge heissen, als was sie sind. Der Ruf, Name und Anschein, die Geltung, das übliche Maass und Gewicht eines Dinges - im Ursprung zuallermeist ein Irrtum und eine Willkürlichkeit, den Dingen übergeworfen wie ein Kleid und seinem Wesen und selbst seiner Haut ganz fremd - ist durch den Glauben daran und sein Fortmachen von Geschlecht zu Geschlecht dem Dinge allmählich gleichsam an- und eingewachsen und zu seinem Leibe selber geworden: der Schein von Anbeginn wird zuletzt fast immer zum Wesen und wirkt als Wesen! (422, my emphasis) In this aphorism, Nietzsche comments on both the importance of naming as well as its weight. While people, things or events may have a specific truth or core to them, within the shared world, they, in fact, are dominated by the name or description that the world or a society agrees on. We can see that in simple everyday things like agreeing on calling a wooden, four-legged object a chair or a table. This is perhaps less evident but more impactful when considering the maxim that the victors write history (i.e., history not being a series of objective facts, but a subjective description). This is exactly what is realized when Nietzsche writes “dass unsäglich mehr daran liegt, wie Dinge heissen, als was sie sind.” And he provides a reason as to why: once a name or description of something is agreed upon and accepted, it will transcend mere sound and action and 207 will impact both that person, thing or event and the perception of it radically: “der Schein von Anbeginn wird zuletzt fast immer zum Wesen und wirkt als Wesen.” While we must not forget to understand Nietzsche as a product of, and situated in, 19th-century Europe, we already find ample ground for discussion with African and Caribbean Philosophy as well as the realization that this notion is, in fact, still very relevant, as shown by current debates on how to make languages more equitable (and the backlash to it). Apart from the philosophical-ontological argument, there is also a very palpable and historical argument to be made that links our society nowadays to the colonial past, especially with an eye on migration: “European global expansionism can, to a large extent, be held responsible for the ‘push and pull’ factors behind contemporary movements of migration.” (März 2020, 381) After all, the former colonies remain beholden to an economic system that not only puts them at an economic disadvantage but also exacerbates climate change, forcing the movement of people to where the jobs are and forcing the movement of people who cannot work the land anymore because of climate crisis.137 This, in turn, forces the movement of people. In 2018, Time Magazine, for example, reported that by 2050 143 million people could be displaced due to climate change, 86 million from Sub-Saharan Africa (Barron 2018). Of course, we have already seen migration on account of it – and it’s certainly not the only aftershock of colonial empires, many of which are, in one form or another, ongoing: “This crisis is often framed as one of refugees fleeing internal economic stress and internal conflicts, but subtending this crisis is the crisis of capital and the wreckage from the continuation of military and other colonial projects of US/European wealth extraction and immiseration.” (Sharpe 2016, 59) In other words: colonial histories and colonial 137 The connection between colonialism and climate change has been analyzed for quite some time. More recent discussions include Richard Grove (2002), Eyal Weizman and Fazal Sheikh (2015, Martin Mahony and Georgina Endfield (2018), and Alex A. Moulton and Mario R. Machado (2019). 208 relations remain an inseparable and crucial factor in global issues like migration, poverty, and climate change. Lastly, radicalized ideas about migrants can often be traced back to colonial ideologies, the notion of the ‘savage,’ the ‘brute,’ or ‘the other’ (not to forget the notion that migrants may only be considered acceptable if they provide labor, i.e., can be valuable as a capitalist commodity).This also plays out in the way media, politicians, and the public speaks about those deemed ‘other,’ especially migrants.138 4.3.3 The “Cultural Bomb” During the colonial empire, it was common practice to either strip the enslaved natives of their names,139 or to give them Christian names. A prominent example of this is Kenyan writer and thinker Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. As he explains in an interview in 2003 with Harish Trivedi (and on many other occasions), his name at birth was changed to James Ngugi140 after being baptized in primary school: So the person who was once Ngũgĩ is now James Ngugi, the one who was once owned by his people is now owned by the English, the one who was owned by an African naming system is now owned by an English naming system. So when I realized that, I began to reject the name James and to reconnect myself to my African name which was given at birth, and that’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, meaning Ngũgĩ, son of Thiong. (6) This is and was so important for him because “[t]o interact with the world freely and creatively, a people have to have the power and the means of naming that world. To name the world is to possess 138 For more voices on this particular aspect, see (among many others) El-Tayeb (2011), Daniela Dahn (2015), Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2018), Thomas Nail (2020), and Jeffrey Jurgens (2020). 139 Edouard Glissant: “The only written word on slave ships was the account book listing the exchange values of slaves” (1997, footnote on page 5); Achille Mbembe: “In order to exercise a durable project on the native people they had subjugated, and from whom they wanted to differentiate themselves at all costs, the colonists had to somehow constitute them into various kinds of physical objects. In this sense, the whole game of representation under colonialism consisted in turning the natives into a variety of typical or type-images.” (2016, 25) 140 Notice also the change in spelling/the vanishing of the indigenous letters “ũ” and “ĩ”. 209 the world. To name self is to possess the self.” (1997, 140)141 And wa Thiong’o is not alone with this position. Similarly, Barbadian novelist and poet George Lamming (1927-2022) wrote extensively about the role that both language (and thus naming) and education play in the imperial project that the Antilles fell victim to. Unlike Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who had the possibility of returning to his language, Lamming is caged in the English language just as Caliban was caged in a rock in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Lamming is in a situation that wa Thiong’o poses as a hypothetical: if the African languages had all died, African people would have had to define themselves in a language that had such a negative conception of Africa as its legacy (1993, 35). In a set of interviews between 2006 and 2009 between Lamming and Anthony Bogues, Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University and editor of The George Lamming Reader (2011) in which the interview was published, Lamming states: “language itself became the major instrument of imperial expansion and of the consolidation of empire wherever it reached.” (197) Similarly, he described schooling as “a kind of external prescription for erasure.” (217) Language (and naming) became the epitome of what wa Thiong’o describes as “the cultural bomb”, “the biggest weapon wielded and actually unleashed by imperialism.” (1986, 3) He summarizes: “The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.” (1986, 3) This, he continues, ultimately, leads to a vicious circle in which they want “to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples’ languages rather than their own”. Naming, and as its tool also language, allows to erase and disrupt, but more damaging even is the realization that taking away naming and superseding language takes 141 On that note, one could argue that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wikipedia page reading “originally James Thiong’o Ngugi” is not just factually incorrect but also a continuous act of colonialization (the Wikipedia page did, at least, have this sentence until July 27, 2020, when it was removed from the page by an unnamed user). 210 away freedom better than any prison cell. Whether in Africa or the Caribbean, the colonial ‘cultural bomb’ had this effect. We can see an embodied effect of a ‘cultural bomb’ in connection with racializing language in the German context in the previously discussed memory of Saša and his grandfather in the supermarket. While waiting in the checkout queue, they joke, laugh, and talk (whether in German or Serbo-Croatian is not stated, though the latter is likely). After they are insulted (“’Ey, Kanacken, wird’s heut noch?’, 2019, 150), Saša’s demeanor, his physical comportment in the moment and to the space surrounding him changes drastically: he does not translate the insult to his grandfather, turns around, and apologizes. The reader can imagine a young boy, likely with a subdued demeanor, shocked into silence and forced into an apology which makes him the culprit (instead of the person insulting them), which forces him to justify or, in this case, apologize for his existence in this very moment. The unprovoked hostility does not acknowledge the humanity of the other person; it others them. Thus, this insult challenges his existence – it unworlds or in wa Thiong’o’s term “annihilates” – and, instantaneously, rewrites the space surrounding Saša and his grandfather. The pervasive effect of cultural bombs, specifically focused on language and naming, speaks both to the impact on how the oppressed experience the world as well as the enormous but natural(ized) lack of recognition on the side of the oppressors – natural insofar as they considered it a natural aspect of colonial annexation.142 This strategy made use of the power that is inherent to names. Achille Mbembe writes on that power: Black is the name that was given to me by someone else. I did not choose it. I inherited the name because of the position I occupy in the space of the world. Those clothed in the name ‘Black’ are well aware of its external provenance. They are also well aware that they have no choice but to experience the name’s power of falsification. (2017, 151, my emphasis) 142 Though I certainly don’t want to argue that they were unaware of the effect that this strategy of naming had. 211 In his essay “Literature & Society: The Politics of the Canon,” (1997) wa Thiong’o makes it very clear how effective this “power of falsification” is: “and after a while – sape cadendo – they begin to seem the proper things to say about his race, and he accepts what, at first, his first and unbiased feelings naturally and indignantly repelled. Such is the effect of repetition.” (17) This power of falsification, then, through repetition is exactly what Nietzsche describes as “der Schein von Anbeginn wird zuletzt fast immer zum Wesen und wirkt als Wesen” (1999, 422) and what Mbembe in his Critique of Black Reason (2017) bluntly and correctly analyses as a racist strategy: “Racism consists, most of all, in substituting what is with something else, with another reality.” (32) This continual negative reinforcement is also at the core of institutionalized racism, for example in the field of education or even in the German language. For the latter, Noah Sow, for one, highlights the deeply cemented problems of the German language in her book Deutschland Schwarz Weiß (2018). Words and phrases like ‘Schwarzarbeit,’ ‘schwarzfahren,’ ‘schwarzes Schaf,’ ‘Wer hat Angst vorm schwarzem Mann,’ and ‘Schwarzmarkt’ are only a handful of her examples. She writes: Das ist unsere Sprache und wie wir sie benutzen. Denken Sie, dass Kinder diese Zusammenhänge nicht verinnerlichen, wenn sie doch andauernd verwendet werden? Vor allem wenn dies nie besprochen oder erläutert oder relativiert wird, müssen Kinder natürlich annehmen, ‘weiß = gut, schwarz = böse’ seien naturgemäß richtig und nicht etwa erfunden oder auf Menschen bezogen ganz falsch. Unsere Sprache ist aber keine natürliche Gegebenheit, sondern steht in einer Tradition und spricht gesellschaftliche Werte aus. Kultur und Machtverhältnisse werden durch Sprache weitergegeben und verfestigt, und so führen wir den Status quo als Erwachsene munter fort. (2018, 117-118) Consider also Senthuran Varatharajah’s novel Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen where one of the two protagonists, Senthil, recalls his time in kindergarten. While drawing, a teacher replaces the brown pencil in his hand with a light pink one: „und sie sagten, […] diese farbe nenne man hautfarbe, sie 212 wiederholten es, diese farbe nennen wir hier hautfarbe, und wir sprachen es ihnen nach.” (2017, 94-95) Associating the color of a particular pencil with the default color of skin and implementing that through language signals strongly to the child that his appareance and, thus, him, are not normal.143 In Stanišić’s debut novel, protagonist Aleksandar is also confronted with this particular aspect of language, specifically the word ‘Schwarzarbeit’: “Vater arbeitet im selben Betrieb wie Onkel Bora. Die beiden sind tagelang unterwegs. Sie arbeiten schwarz. Schwarz heißt: die Arbeit macht dir den Rücken kaputt und dich gleichzeitig zum Verbrecher, obwohl du nicht wirklich klaust.” (2006, 140) In The Pleasures of Exile (1992), George Lamming reflects on his own situation most critically through the story of Prospero and Caliban, told in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. For him, it is not just a story: “Caliban is a condition.” (1992, 111) Caliban is the Caribbean people. Or better: The Caribbean people are Caliban; the Caliban that was enslaved on his own island by Prospero and subjugated by Prospero’s language; but also the Caliban that made us of that language to curse Prospero, the Caliban that claimed that language for himself, appropriated it as a form of struggle. Lamming argues that by repurposing language to write not for but against a strictly English consciousness, Caliban can reclaim himself: “The old blackmail of Language simply won’t work any longer. For the language of modern politics is no longer Prospero’s exclusive vocabulary. It is Caliban’s as well; and since there is no absolute from which a moral prescription may come, Caliban is at liberty to choose the meaning of this moment.” (1992, 158)144 143 Varatharajah’s debut novel discusses more instances of racist language use. I discuss them in my published article “Emotionale Landschaften der Migration.” (2020) 144 While visiting Ghana, Lamming noticed the changes in name that have followed the country’s independence in 1966: “And the names, not a day older than the present Government, were still fresh with the echo of an historic moment: Nkrumah Circle, Independence Avenue.” (163) If the names are not a day older than the present Government, then the present Government is not a day older than the names – names, after all, that are still reverberating with “the echo of an historic moment.” Both the act of renaming streets and the continuous repetition of those names in the daily life are forms of living independence. Lamming, thus, provides the reader with an example of how reclaiming and/or renaming can function as form(s) of resistance. 213 For Lamming and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, reclaiming names and using language is essential in approaching decolonization. However, due to their different situations (African / Caribbean), this plays out differently. For Lamming, it must come from within the English language, a reencountering, finding, and redefining one’s people through the only language available. As Sandra Pouchet Paquet writes in her Foreword to The Pleasures of Exile: Lamming must deconstruct the two icons [Shakespeare and English] to reveal the way they have been used as an enslaving aesthetic in order to construct the foundation of a liberating aesthetic reflecting a sovereign people whose capacity to imagine a new world, whole, unfragmented, is set free. This would be a people who have overcome a state of alienation imposed on others. (1992, xvi) In the interview with Anthony Bogues, Lamming is asked whether the question of language is “the final act of decolonisation.” (2011, 233) Lamming answers: “It is. It would be. And that is the sense in which the language becomes a liberating power because the day you found a language that was minted by you it would render all the concepts that you used irrelevant.” 4.3.4 Desirable and Undesirable Bilingualism Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o describes how for “a colonial child, the harmony existing [in] language as communication was irrevocably broken” by the colonial education system which “resulted in the disassociation of the sensibility of that child from his natural and social environment”, something he calls “colonial alienation.” (1986, 17) Though not with the same intensity, there are parallels in the way German society treats those who are bilingual, but their second language is not one of the languages that Kübra Gümüşay coins “Prestigesprachen,” like Italian, French, Spanish, or – nowadays – Chinese. (2020, 37) Instead, young children are told not to speak Turkish in kindergarten. Germany is a country whose biggest minority (Turkish-German) is continuously alienated and whose language appalls the majority so much that the mere idea of offering Turkish, 214 a language spoken by millions in Germany, in German schools is not even up for debate: “Türkisch lernt man nicht, Türkisch verlernt man.” (2020, 37).145 In Sprache und Sein (2020), Gümüşay points out that prohibiting and devaluing a language also has the implicit effect of devaluing the person speaking it. Talking about her relationship to the German language, she writes: “In dieser Sprache wurde mir verboten, meine Muttersprache zu sprechen, die anderen fremd erschien. So wie ich.” (Gümüsay 2020, 29) She asks why undesirable languages, such as Turkish, but also a language like Bosnian,146 are widely viewed as a disadvantage instead of “Zukunftspotenzial.” (37)147 She suggests that it could lead to “einer neuen Art von deutschem Selbstverständnis.” (2020, 38) Will we ever get the chance to find out? It does not seem likely. Instead, the undesirability of a specific bilingualism marks millions of people in Germany: “Wir […] wachsen auf in einer Sprache, in der wir als Sprechende nicht vorgesehen sind. In einer Sprache, in der unsere Perspektiven nicht vorkommen, sondern nur die Perspektiven derer, die über uns sprechen. In deren Macht es steht, uns zu kategorisieren, zu markieren, auszusortieren.” (Gümüsay 2020, 42) In Herkunft, Saša touches on this power relationship a few times, stating: “Ich weiß noch, wie es sich anfühlt, für etwas keine Sprache zu haben. Wie ich manche Unterhaltungen am liebsten einfach abgebrochen hätte, wenn meine Gesprächspartner ihre Ungeduld kaum verbergen konnten, weil ich so lange brauchte, um mich mitzuteilen.” (2019, 134) He describes his desire to keep practicing and improving his German. His reason: “damit die Deutschen in meiner Gegenwart sich nicht so viel Mühe geben mussten, zu verbergen, dass sie 145 Similarly, in Senthuran Varatharajah’s novel Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen (2016), children are being alienated from their parents because they are forced to choose between German and Tamil and are continuously ostracized for how they sound (and look). 146 Saša recalls: “Einmal fluchte ich während eines Basketballspiels auf Serbokroatisch, beim nächsten Angriff haute mich einer brutal um, brutal mit blödem Spruch.” (2019, 150) 147 The strong disavowal of certain languages, the prohibition of them in kindergartens and schools can be situated in an imperial, colonial lineage in which the languages of the colonizers supplanted the native languages of the colonized, both in educational settings and in laws. 215 mich für dumm hielten.” (2019, 147) These sentences also portray an aspect of language (and naming) that is physical – a physical embodiment of what language, naming and, in the case of these two quotes, the comportment towards a broken language inscribes onto a physical body.148 4.3.5 Language and Lineage Reflecting on his name, Saša ruminates: “Es hätte mir egal sein können, dieses namentliche Exotentum.” (2019, 61) That is how the sentence ends – the subjunctive mode does the heavy lifting for the reader. It could have not mattered to him, but it did. Naming and language are, naturally, closely linked to the idea of lineage. In Oskoruša, Saša sees his last name on numerous tombstones on the graveyard (2019, 27-28) after which he states: “Dann las ich aber auf dem Friedhof von Oskoruša meinen Nachnamen auf jedem zweiten Grabstein. Und habe mir aus dem, was mit Herkunft zu tun hatte, aus meiner unbekannten Verwandtschaft und meinen bekannten Orten, gleich mal mehr gemacht.” (2019, 62) Shortly after, he asserts: “Herkunft ist in Hamburg der Junge mit meinem Nachnamen.” (2019, 65) Just like Saša’s last name on the tombstones, a sense of origin is encapsulated in the lineage represented by his son which, in turn, is represented by their shared last name. We see this throughout the world today where many Arabic names have patronyms or a series of patronyms, thus carrying with them the family history. They also often carry demonyms that show lineage to a specific tribe, city, or region. Another example is Icelandic culture where sons carry their father’s name as their last name with the suffix -son, and daughters carry their mother’s name as their last name with the suffix -dóttir. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, too, speaks about it: 148 The question of physical embodiments, particularly of language and naming, and the closely connected concept of rhythm (see Stern, Working Draft, especially pages 82-99) will be object of analysis in my upcoming book project. The physical embodiment of language can be seen, perhaps most literally, in Franz Kafka’s In der Strafkolonie (1919). 216 “Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, meaning Ngũgĩ, son of Thiong.” (Trivedi 2003, 6) But a name is, as Orlando Patterson argues, “more than simply a way of calling [someone]. It is the verbal signal of [their] whole identity, [their] being-in-the-world as a distinct person.” (1982, 54-55) Simphiwe Sesanti highlights how this practice was used as a means of establishing power and erasing lineage when he writes: "Not only did the names imposed on Africans by Europeans succeed in denying African achievement and attributing it to Europeans, but the act of naming by Europeans also ensured that wherever Europeans went they displaced the colonized’s memories and replaced it with colonizers.” (2018, 509)149 To return for a brief moment to Nietzschean concepts, it raises the question of how a person can go through the eternal return and leave behind the ressentiment to something in the past, change one's comportment in the present to the future and accept one's past when this past was never one's own to begin with, but dominated and prescribed by a dominating force? We can see a glimpse of it at the end of wa Thiong’o’s memoir. Having just received his admission papers to Makere University College, he is stopped on a bus and, after being unable to produce tax papers, gets taken into custody and must spend several days in prison. The police officers make use of their position of power to fabricate his attempts at justifying himself into charges of resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer on duty. Before the trial starts, they keep telling him to simply plead guilty, which he does not do.150 Such forms of metaphysical violence (more often than not connected with physical violence151) align with what Nietzsche says in aphorism 83 of Fröhliche Wissenschaft: “In der That, man eroberte damals, wenn man übersetzte.” (1999, 439, my emphasis) While translating 149 We don’t just see that in the colonial empire in Africa but also in the names of many cities in the US where hundreds of them are named after cities all around the world (particularly names of European cities). 150 Ironically, he uses his skills learned at debating society at Alliance, the English school he attends in Kenya, to prove his innocence, thus using colonial education to best colonial hierarchy and justice. 151 See, for example, the all-encompassing, pervasive fear that comes with bodies regulated by violence described by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015, 14-21). 217 sounds almost euphemistic in a colonial context, Nietzsche is correct. Language, as wa Thiong’o reminds us, is “a naming system.” (Trivedi 2003, 6) And by bringing everything colonizers encountered into a system of naming that was their dominion already (the English, French, German,… language), they ensured their domination on a linguistic and cultural level, as well. What they do is, as Michael Stern calls it, “to assume sovereignty over something with a sound.” (Fortcoming, 200) wa Thiong’o writes on that note: “It is in the naming of the landscape that we can so clearly see the layering of one memory over another, a previous native memory buried under another, a foreign alluvium becoming the new visible identity of a place.” (2005, 157) We can see that in the example provided in the introduction about a small South African village and a mountain both called Mauchsberg; or in the more prominent example of Lake Nyanza in East Africa that most people will not know by its Bantu name but instead by the more common name of Lake Victoria, renamed by the English explorer John Hanning Specke in 1858; or the erasure of the land and history of the Kalapuya tribe by naming the city I am currently residing in after Eugene Franklin Skinner. As Stern notes: “Names are not only born of lineages, they participate in relationships of power, inflect the articulation of spaces.” (Fortcoming, 199) Seldom do these relationships of power play out on equal footing. It is thus essential to make inequalities visible.152 4.3.6 Globalectics and Relation Chinua Achebe’s words offer themselves perfectly to briefly summarize the argument so far: “Oppression renames its victims.” (2011, 56) It was my concern to show how similar notions with 152 Though it does not fit the flow of the argumentation, I nonetheless do not want to omit that Grammofon also offers a positive form of naming, one that enables survival (though one should keep in mind that the context where this action of naming is made necessary is a violent one): While hiding in the basement with the orphan Asija, they are found by soldiers who ask them for their names. Aleksandar understands “(obwohl noch ein Kind), welcher Name ‘richtig’ ist und rettet auf diese Weise seine Freundin Asija vor der Entführung, indem er sie den Soldaten als seine ‘Schwester Katarina’ vorstellt.” (Grujičić 2017, 209) The name Katarina does not imply a Muslim lineage while ‘Asija’ does. 218 continual relevance and importance can be brought into contact and conversation with each other to broaden one’s view and, through that, to sharpen the tools of analysis by opening them to another set of lived experiences and ways of thinking. To be clear: this is by no means exhaustive. There is much to be said on the lived experience of those who were carried onto ships, objectified, and sold as part of the Atlantic Slave Trade (which, to some degree, I do in chapter six). There are many more examples provided by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o that could be talked about, for example his experiences told in his memoir In the House of the Interpreter (2012) about learning in a colonial setting and with a colonial syllabus, showing that English is set as the new default through which to learn about history, language, literature, and culture, to new words, titles, facts, and names (25); not to mention the information that knowledge is always a lineage in itself. But I want to briefly focus on the following notion because it emphasizes once more the relevance of a decolonial approach through conversation with African philosophy: The “tendency to make Europe the reference point for human experience” (2012, 66) was and still is a colonial practice and a decolonial approach is always hindered while working from this reference point – not that any academic stemming from this reference point (like myself) can ever free themselves fully from it (see my previous discussion of Kien Nghi Ha in 4.2). But I am not proposing or arguing for already existing ideas of a (somewhat) radical exclusionism (e.g., Tuck and Yang 2012). I am arguing for reflection, self-awareness, and the liberation of the discourse from a Eurocentric point of view by bridging the conversation to meet African philosophy face to face, accounting for the multiple centers that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o proposes in his books Moving the Centre (1993) and Globalectics (2014): “It is therefore not really a question of studying that which is removed from ourselves wherever we are located […] but rather one of understanding all the voices coming from what is essentially a plurality of centres all over the world.” (1993, 10-11) 219 This shift from a single universal way of seeing the world to a plural understanding can counter hegemonical and hierarchical claims of supremacy and lead to the “plurality of centres”. My argument here is guided by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s idea of Globalectics and, in a similar vein, Édouard Glissant’s theory of Relation. Like Globalectics, Glissant’s notion of Relation is a call against singularities and for multiplicities and, as such, certainly something to strive toward. Relation is opposed to the idea of the universal. Instead, it is in consecution of totality; importantly though, not in the realization of totality as a universality that remains static, but as a movement in which everything is multiple because “Relation is movement.” (Glissant 1997, 171) It is “the moment where we realize that there is a definite quantity of all the differences in the world. […] I say that Relation is made up of all the differences in the world and that we shouldn’t forget a single one of them, even the smallest.” (Diawara 2011, 9) While Glissant understands that literally (and so should we), I also want to read it metaphorically, in the vein of Mbembe who writes in Critique of Black Reason: “European thought has tended to conceive of identity less in terms of mutual belonging (cobelonging) to a common world than in terms of a relation between similar beings – of being itself emerging and manifesting itself in its own state, or its own mirror.” (2017, 1) This means that our approach is one of an understanding of the cobelonging between two philosophical systems and should strive towards Relation as any “monolingual” (read: singular) approach is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, to create a “diplomacy of unequal exchange” to speak with wa Thiong’o (2012, 11). Naming, however, was (and often still is) a tool of just that diplomacy.153 We can incorporate this into a Nietzschean understanding: renaming (in the sense encountered here) is an unworlding of the world encountered by the individual. One thinks that 153 I am going to continue my discussion of Glissant’s idea of Relation in more detail in chapter 6. 220 they know how the world works, but an instance of nanoracism disrupts it, leading to a process of unworlding in which the world is destroyed and replaced (worlded) by a new world. In a society that has not come to terms with its colonial past or its institutionalized racism in the present, this happens exactly on the societal level. These “racist wounds,” as Mbembe calls them, are very much inflicted through words and names: “they are painful blows that are difficult to forget because [they are] inflicted on the body and its materiality, but also, above all, on intangible elements such as dignity and self-esteem.” (2016, 31) We start to see the vicious circle that is opening: nanoracism unworlds the individual’s world, damaging dignity, self-esteem, sense of place in the world, which leads either to a complete exclusion (othering) or in trying to assimilate (Fanon’s white mask). In “Society of Enmity” (2016), an essay that was later expanded and published as one of the chapters of his book Necropolitics (2016, English translation 2019), Mbembe builds on this notion and shows how the “name’s power of falsification,” by robbing you of your freedom and your individuality, and therefore essentially of your humanity, turns the oppressed “into various kinds of physical objects.” (25) Physical violence or the threat of it may subdue a people. But it is only through language that they are dehumanized.154 Language changes our perception,155 prohibiting language and imposing names can challenge our humanity, as they participate in relationships of power. Considering Stanišić and his work from the position of language points to ways in which he expands the German language. 154 That this is not only fruitful in a German context should not come as a surprise. For context in the United States, we might, for example, look at Te-Nehisi Coates’ brilliant Between the World and Me (2015) in which he writes: “I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” (120) 155 See the discussion of Noah Sow above. See also: “Sprache verändert unsere Wahrnehmung” (Gümüşay 2020, 11); “Sprache repräsentiert und schafft Wirklichkeit. Eine veränderte Sprache kann entsprechend auch die Wirklichkeit verändern” (El-Mafaalani 2018, 54); “What I began to see […] is that it is experience which shapes a language; and it is language which controls an experience.” (Baldwin 2011, 67-68) 221 Crucially, this is not meant as an appraisal of his use of the language, as many reviews of his books are wont to do. Instead, Stanišić’s works expand the German language by speaking to a question that is at the core of Kübra Gümüşay’s Sprache und Sein: “Woran aber liegt es, dass die Erfahrungen und Perspektiven bestimmter Gruppen in unserer Gesellschaft nicht oder erst nach langen Kämpfen ihren Weg in die Sprache aller finden?” (2020, 53) His diegetic narratives inscribe these experiences and perspectives into the German canon and, considering his prestige and sales numbers, into German society. One of the numerous ways to understand Stanišić’s writing, then, is as an emphasis and explication of how “anders klingende Namen mittlerweile auch deutsche Namen und europäische oder bosnische Geschichten über Vergangenheitsbewältigung auch Teil der deutschen Erinnerungskultur geworden sind.” (El Hissy 2020, 148) 4.4 Conclusion This chapter operationalized the concept of the borderscapes and the notion of borderscaping to create a cartography of interior borderscaping, mapping the cultural climate in Germany and the forms and structures that racialize, create hierarchies, and uphold hegemonical ideologies, specifically in the forms of racism, colonial structures, and the power that language and names can exert. The discussion of racism pointed to a discrepancy between the perception and the reality of racist structures in Germany which appear to stem to a large degree from a singular and limited definition of racism which only understands it in its extreme form (i.e., physical violence by Neonazis). Instead, my discussion traces the work done by a number of scholars (Fatima El-Tayeb, Kien Nghi Ha, Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Juliane Karakayalı, Grada Kilomba, and Achille Mbembe) to show racist and colonial structures that pervade sociocultural and political borderscapes in Germany; borderscapes to which examples from Stanišić’s texts speak, as well. 222 The discussion of the power inherent in language and naming substantiated the pervasiveness of hegemonical ideologies by showing how imposing a language or using it without being reflective and aware of its impact is used to exert power and uphold hierarchies. The giving of names does the same. Both also unworld a person in that an insult, a categorization, or a denial challenge that person’s sense of belonging and their sense of humanity. The discussion of the power of language and naming also served as the first detailed example of a decolonial conversation, providing a first approximation of the decolonial couplet of chapter six. The discussion in chapter four, in its theoretical discussion, and in examples of Stanišić’s narratives show that immigration and racialization submit many people in Germany to a colonial mentality. Though instead of the colonial mentality coming to them, they have seemingly moved into the colonial mentality, but are nonetheless under attack. This cartography of the cultural climate at the core of chapter four, in short, maps and thus highlights severe inequalities in German society. As my discussions of the reports by the Deutsche Zentrum für Integrations- und Migrationsforschung and Reem Alabali-Radovan as well as the existence of both the center and Alabali-Radovan’s position in the Bundesregierung themselves show, Germany is making steps in the right direction. Nonetheless, my discussion also emphasizes that there is great need for visions and ideas for improvement – a desire towards non-hegemonical co-belonging. The interior borderscape presented in chapter four alerts us to the need to expand an understanding of what and who is Geman. Seeing that much of the hegemonical borderscapes in Germany are constructed on the notion of ‘Heimat,’ the cartography of the cultural climate also alerts us to the need to expand the idea of ‘Heimat.’ Stanišić’s narratives provide possibilities to do so, as his writing is one example of the expansion of particularities and their subsequent voices in the German context; and these particularities demand more. This is what chapter five tackles by 223 analyzing, first, how a pluralized notion of Heimaten, particularly Stanišić’s individualized conception displayed in chapter two, has the potential to unsettle hegemonies and lay bare mechanisms of social exclusion and “social death” (Orlando Patterson 1982; see discussion in chapter two), and secondly, various forms of transeuropean inscriptions in Stanišić’s narratives. Chapter 5: Borderscaping: Cartography of Expanded Heimaten? Chapter five picks up the argumentative thread that chapter four started to spin. Chapter four mapped out a cartography of a cultural climate in Germany that is built on hegemonical borderscapes that exclude. It is not this dissertation’s intention to only turn the spotlight on excluding, racializing, and hierarchizing structures via the reading of Stanišić’s narratives, but also to analyze these narratives with regards to their potential for solutions or improvements to the status quo. In other words, this chapter asks the question: how can Germany and the foundational notion of ‘Heimat’ be expanded to more adequately and equally inform belonging to Germany and create borderscapes that are more representative and less violent? As German studies scholar Peggy Piesche emphasized in an interview with Gabi Kathöfer and Beverly Weber in Seminar’s special volume on “Heimat,” (54.4, 2018): „I think that challenging the idea of Heimat or, for that matter, citizenship – still a very exclusionary club – is more productive, has more potential.“ (424) The purpose of chapter five is hence to analyze Stanišić’s writings to tap into this potential. Austrian author and journalist Vina Yun remarks, postmigrants in today’s societies are not connected by a shared identity, but by a shared perspective – a perspective “auf die Dominanzgesellschaft und auf hegemoniale Verhältnisse.” (2020, 7) A productive adjacent theoretical note is the concept of funds of knowledge, i.e., “historically accumulated and culturally 224 developed bodies of knowledge and skills” (Moll et. al. 1992, 133). Building on this, Lew Zipin (2009) coins the idea of dark funds of knowledge. Though primarily conceptualized in a pedagogical context, it is applicable in other contexts of social and cultural interaction. Dark funds of knowledge are funds of knowledge that center racism, abuse, othering, and similar negative experiences. As shown in chapter four, these negative experiences, i.e., inflictions of nanoracist violences, are an everyday occurrence. However, the understanding of a world that excludes, accumulated through a lifetime of experiences and nanoracist violence, not only engenders a clear view of the obstacles and barriers in society; it also enlivens one’s mind with ideas of how things could be different, more just and equal. In the pedagogical context of Zipin’s essay, he argues that “dark knowledges and deep ways of knowing offer fuller and stronger possibilities to transform the norms of schooling.” (2009, 325) I believe this possibility for transformation extends to sociocultural structures and norms, as well. Yun argues that postmigrants’ knowledge of racism and exclusion “befähigt uns […] jenseits nationaler Kategorien zu denken, ethnisch- rassialisierende Zuschreibungen zu hinterfragen und das ‘Migrantische’ nicht an Personen und Bevölkerungsgruppen festzumachen.” (2020, 8) It is important to note that one’s comportment towards something needs to change before one can meaningfully change that thing. While these dark funds of knowledge are not at the forefront of Stanišič’s diegetic engagement with a potential expansion or rewriting of the cultural map of Germany (and Europe) – after all, he understands himself to be one of the ‘lucky ones’ (“am eigenen glücklichen Beispiel,” 2019, 180) – these dark funds of knowledge still loom and implicitly inform the diegetic narratives and, hence, implicitly inform the analysis in this chapter. In her analysis of Herkunft, Maha El Hissy (2020) attests to Stanišić a mode of writing that is in line with contemporary “Deutschland-Analysen, die sich nur aus multiplen Heimaten und nicht-deutscher Geschichte zusammensetzen können.” (150) If 225 Stanišić characterizes his (diegetic) comportment toward the world and his hope for the world (“Befeuern der Welt”) in Herkunft as occurring by adding “Geschichten,” (2019, 36) we might speak of a comportment toward the world that is ‘befeuert’ by contemplating improvements and solutions. Tina Hartmann (2021) argues this expansion occurs, to a degree, “im gezielten Sich- Einschreiben in den Kanon der deutschen Literatur.” (367) Stanišić has won several prestigious literature prizes, most notably the German Book Prize, and his novel Vor dem Fest was one of the reading materials for the German ‘Abiturprüfung’ in the city state of Hamburg in 2019 and 2020 (alongside Friedrich Hebbel’s Maria Magdalena and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Emilia Galotti). For 2024, Herkunft is also listed as one of the reading materials in the city state of Bremen. But it cannot be ignored that a literary canon is always part of the status quo; indeed, it often upholds it (consider, for example, the texts read by thousands of students each year for ‘Abiturprüfungen’ across the country156): “canonization stands in for naturalization.” (Meyer 2021, 33) As such, the inscription into a German canon is valuable, but is also primarily an embodiment of an existing ‘Heimat’ rather than an expansion of the current ‘Heimat’-borderscape. Simply ascribing a change in the notion of ‘Heimat’ to an addition to the German canon is simplistic, particularly because it is often a reverse move: instead of allowing the canonical addition to expand the notion of ‘Heimat,’ it is often simply subsumed into the predominant notion.157 Thus, the search for improvement, for a solution, for an expansion of the sociocultural borderscapes of Germany cannot 156 In the years 2022-2024, for example, reading materials in some German states include Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, Goethe’s Faust I, Faust II, and Iphigenie auf Tauris, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der goldne Krug and Der Sandmann, Thomas Mann’s Mario und der Zauberer, Heinrich Heine’s Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen, Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, Schiller’s Maria Stuart, Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Der Besuch der alten Dame, and Sophokles’ Antigone and König Ödipus. This list is not meant to negate or question the importance or literary value of these works, but instead to point to the uphill battle a work of literature would have to face to significantly galvanize the current focal points in the school (and university) education of Germany’s youth. 157 See also Christine Meyer’s 2021 book Questioning the Canon. Counter-Discourse and the Minority Perspective in Contemporary German Literature. 226 merely rely on changes to the German literary canon. At the forefront of the focus to the potential for solutions or improvements to the status quo in Stanišić’s narratives, in this chapter, I instead locate two concrete diegetic approaches: (i) Stanišić’s individualized notion of a pluralized ‘Heimaten,’ and (ii) inscribing his narratives into transeuropean discourses and lineages (what I call ’transeuropean inscriptions’). For (i), I briefly retrace how Stanišić’s conceptualizes his own notion of pluralized ‘Heimaten,’ and how this is reflected diegetically. I then illustrate how this pluralized idea of ‘Heimaten’ can function as an expansion of hegemonical borderscapes. For (ii), I argue that Stanišić pens his texts into a contemporary, transnational conversation that transcends political and social borders of the nation. In so doing, his narratives inscribes Germany into Bosnia and Bosnia into Germany, thus dissolving national hegemonies and pointing to future possibilities of pan- European conversations. Ana Foteva writes: “If the Balkans are going to be treated as part of Europe, the cultural paradigm of Europe will have to be extended, too. […] Only then will the Balkans be treated not only as a geographical, but also as a cultural part of Europe.” (2014, 104) There are several textual examples that support this argument one of which also ties back into the main thesis of my dissertation. Both transeuropean inscriptions and Stanišić’s concept of ‘Heimaten,’ I argue in this chapter, are forms of borderscaping to remap what I call the opportunity of a cartography of expanded Heimaten. If fictions of space, otherness, and identity are important parts of the hegemonical idea of ‘Heimat,’ then we might need need fictions for a new idea of ‘Heimaten.’ Stanišić’s narratives, I propose, are a good starting point. Or as Saša, the autofictional narrator of Herkunft, states: “In meinem Zuhause wohnen die Fiktionen.” (2019, 170) 227 5.1 Returning to Heimaten158 In this subchapter, I show how a pluralized notion of Heimaten, particularly Stanišić’s individualized conception, has the potential to unsettle hegemonies and the racializing and hierarchizing mechanisms of social exclusion and “social death” (Orlando Patterson 1982) that I have analyzed in the fourth chapter. More importantly, I argue that Stanišić’s notion of Heimaten holds the potential of borderscaping in that it can redefine and expand who is considered German, hence engendering a non-hierarchical co-belonging. As a first step in this analysis, I will briefly discuss what, for Stanišić, encapsulates Heimaten to show how his notion may function in expanding, renewing, or dissolving (i.e., borderscaping) current borderscapes. As I have argued in my 2023 book chapter “Saša Stanišić’s Novels: Making Sense of Heimat and Migration?” and retraced in chapter two of this project, Stanišić has a threefold understanding of Heimaten, explicated especially in his second Zürcher Poetikvorlesung titled “Das Biografische, das Unwahrscheinliche, das Grausame und der Witz: meine Heimaten.” In this list, the biographical is the only common aspect of usual notions of Heimat. As is evident in the title of the second lecture, Stanišić’s vision of Heimat(en) is very idiosyncratic. There is, first, the memories of his childhood in Višegrad, the childhood associations with the river Drina, his grandparents, and parents; roughly summarized as childhood and family. The second is an “imaginierte Heimat,” it is the “Heimat der literarischen Vorstellung.” (Stanišić 2017a, 75:45- 75:50) The third and, for the purpose of this chapter, most relevant aspect of Heimaten is “ein ‘dort’ während ich erzähle.” (Stanišić 2017a, 76:24-76:27) This, Stanišić emphasizes, is not Schreiben an sich,” but instead “eine ganz bestimmte, gestaltende, eine Arbeit als Schreiben, das 158 Much of my argument and text in 5.1 is taken – in a sense of self-quotation – from Joscha Klüppel, “Saša Stanišić’s Novels: Making Sense of Heimat and Migration?” Eds. Len Cagle, Thomas Herold, and Gabriele Maier. Boston, MA: de Gruyter. 2023, 109-139. 228 im Erzählen verankert ist. Ich meine das Erschaffen von etwas in einem ganz bestimmten Augenblick und dieser Augenblick ist nicht immer da.” (Stanišić 2017a, 76:29-76:46) Interestingly, Stanišić connects a spatial adverb with a temporal component. More precisely, he connects a place of absence (dort vs. hier) with a lingering in the moment (während). This makes Heimat difficult to understand: Heimat is created in the moment and keeps recreating itself at each moment, resulting in a conglomeration of moments (während). In this multitude of Heimaten – a list that is not exhaustive – the creative act of writing, storytelling, and thus generating agency stands out. Though most apparent in the final aspect, all three Heimaten are, indeed, anchored (“verankert”) in the process of storytelling: telling of his childhood, of Višegrad and the Drina, of his grandparents, of his parents; storytelling is the embodiment of the “Heimat der literarischen Vorstellung;” and storytelling is essential for the idea of “ein ‘dort’ während ich erzähle,” as the verb “erzählen” (to tell a story) indicates. In describing his Heimaten, Stanišić avoids, even undercuts any prescriptive attribution to (or exclusion from) a dominant notion of Heimat (such as the ones primarily discussed in chapter two). But even more than that, with the emphasis on the creative act, the idea of Heimat (or, for Stanišić, Heimaten) moves from being predominantly geographical to being a medium. More precisely, it acts as a medium in which to make sense of the world and Stanišić’s position in it. It critically mediates his creative output. Let me return once more to Stanišić’s novel Vor dem Fest. As discussed previously, Vor dem Fest is set in the fictional town of Fürstenfelde in Brandenburg’s Uckermark. The story confronts the reader with the past, present, and future of this small village. Most of the narrative takes place on the eve of Annenfest, an annual celebration, the reason for which the villagers can no longer remember. Nonetheless, preparations for the feast are made while the heterodiegetic narrator follows several villagers (and a vixen) to explore how they 229 engage with the village’s past, its present, and its fear of dying out. In the novel, the narrator gives voice to a community, a “we” that has lived through the end of the GDR and reunification and is struggling with the rural flight of its young people and trying to find its purpose. For this exploration, Stanišić uses the template of the village novel (Dorfroman), a genre that has seen a recent rise in popularity. Unsurprisingly, this rise has coincided with the reemergence of public Heimat discourses. As Werner Nell and Marc Weiland write in the introduction to Imaginäre Dörfer: Zur Wiederkehr des Dörflichen in Literatur, Film und Lebenswelt (2014): “’Bilder vom ‘Dorf’ stehen auch gegenwärtig wieder im Mittelpunkt gesellschaftlicher Diskurse; und zwar sowohl als Orte der Affirmation, Lebensreform und Zukunftsgestaltung als auch als Orte der Ambivalenz, Irritation und Vergangenheiterkundung.” (21) In all its ambiguity, the village has traditionally been and still is the place that is best encapsulated by Heimat more than any other term. Certainly, both Vor dem Fest and the concept of Heimat are indebted to this idea of the “village” – the representation of a quaint, traditional, and secure Germanness that is close to nature. The village novel thus holds an eminent position for literary negotiations of Heimat. Nell and Weiland argue that we should understand literary and cinematic constructions of “the rural” as “Laboratorien, in und mit denen gesellschaftliche Aushandlungsprozesse unter erkenntnistheoretischen und lebenspraktischen Perspektiven vollzogen werden.” (2014, 20) This applies to Stanišić’s novel(s) and allows us to see the double function that the village inhabits, both in Vor dem Fest and more generally: on the one hand, it is a place of retreat, (seeming) tranquility, and romanticized tradition and, as such, a strong proponent of a politicized, conservative notion of Heimat. On the other hand, it provides a strong base from which to scrutinize this notion and examine how it can materialize – as a metonymy for Heimat, so to speak. Such a dissection may 230 offer the building blocks necessary to create an inclusive (or “intercultural,” according to Terkessidis) notion of Heimaten. The village defines itself through its inhabitants and their traditions: the ferryman is deceased, the bellringer is about to retire, both the carpenter and the electrician have died without any replacement. In Vor dem Fest, we read, “Das ist das eigentliche Nichts …: Dass etwas existiert und funktioniert, aber für niemanden einen Nutzen hat. Gegenstände, Geräte, ein ganzer Ort. Die Glocken. Dass die einfach nur noch sind.” (Stanišić 2014, 74) Re-narrating the village’s past creates purpose. The inherent plurality of Heimaten can be filled with multiple purposes and does not merely fade. By creating a past, the village is realized in the present which, in turn, solidifies Heimaten. The novel implies this by highlighting the renewed interest in the Haus der Heimat during the Annenfest celebration. We can also see this in Frau Schwermuth’s own lineage: her son, Johann, is taking over the outdated and unpaid occupation of the bellringer, thus injecting it with youth and ensuring its continuity. Most importantly, purpose is created through writing, particularly in Frau Schwermuth’s re-writing of the past. Philipp Böttcher correctly points out that the village’s identity is not fixed, but created in the narrative process (2020, 316). It is almost as if Frau Schwermuth takes on Stanišić’s premise of Heimaten as a “‘dort’ während ich erzähle”: the importance of storytelling is highlighted repeatedly in the novel. This is where Heimaten can be found. Along these lines, Böttcher states that the centrality of storytelling that Stanišić inscribes into his novel and characters reflects Stanišić own understanding of origin and Heimaten as something “open, fluid, and bound to memories and narratives.” (2020, 316) This does, indeed, apply to Stanišić’s understanding of how Heimaten are created: through self-narration, and without fetishization or external interpretation (Fremddeutung). 231 Another example for this brief negotiation of Heimaten is a brief chapter titled “Dr. Heimat” (171-173). Dr. Heimat is a dentist that Saša meets in his first months in Germany; or as Saša describes it, he is the “Vater meiner ersten Amalgam-Füllung.” (Stanišić 2019, 171) The dentist’s name stands out immediately and could speak to a first experience of being made to feel like he belonged. After months of small talk across a garden fence, Dr. Heimat offers Saša a treatment of his cavities, ignoring the lack of health insurance or, as Saša emphasizes, his origin: “Er hat unser aller Karies behandelt: bosnischen Karies, somalischen Karies, deutschen Karies.” (2019, 172) He extrapolates from this experience, pointing to Dr. Heimat as an embodiment of what ‘Heimat’ should be like: “Einer ideellen Heimat geht es um den Karies und nicht darum, welche Sprache der Mund gut spricht.” (2019, 172) In other words: an ideal, welcoming society focuses on your individual contribution instead of your origin. This, then, might result in many more idyllic scenes, such as the following when Dr. Heimat invites Saša and his grandfather to go fishing with him at the river Neckar: “Wie wir Stunden nebeneinander am Neckar standen, ein Zahnarzt aus Schlesien, ein alter Bremser aus Jugoslawien und ein fünfzehnjähriger Schüler.” (172-173) In the end, what connects them is their interest in fishing, or to stick with the previous simile, the cavity, and not their origin (“welche Sprache der Mund gut spricht”). This example even has a transeuropean character, connecting it to 5.2, as well. In a sense, it is a somewhat uncharacteristic and small glimpse of what transcending the notion of a transeuropean connection might look like: by focusing on individual people. In a sit-down interview with the Hamburger Abendblatt in 2022, Stanišić stated: “Ich denke, wir alle sind mehrfach kulturelle Menschen – meine Auffassung dessen, was uns als Individuen ausmacht, ist viel vielschichtiger als die bloße Reduktion auf Herkunft.” (Andre 2022) This is one of the rare times that Herkunft offers such a straightforward positive, even somewhat utopian example of successful co-belonging. 232 Moving from this look at Stanišić’s Heimaten to its potential for borderscaping, I argue that two main characteristics of his conceptualization are capable of expanding what is considered to be German, and to rewrite the cartography of Germany’s cultural climate: first, an inherent plurality of Heimaten, and second, the emphasis on the creative act and, in turn, on creative mediation. Though not solely proposed by Stanišić, the inherent plural nature of Heimaten destabilizes the idea that there is a single, socially constructed concept of Heimat with clearly defined properties and clearly demarcated groups of belonging and exclusion that is often mirrored in debates about, for example, dual citizenship or, in the context of Germany’s ‘Volkssport’ football, the singing of the national anthem. Emphasizing the indispensable plurality of Heimaten encourages a shift in mindset that accommodates the countless multiplicities of a hetereogeneous make-up of society without crowning one singularity as an all-encompassing default. In that sense, Heimaten encourage a non-hierarchical co-belonging which is based on an expanded notion of Heimat. The highly individual nature of Stanišić’s Heimaten furthermore engenders a comportment towards one another focused on each person’s particularity instead of a generalization built on stereotypes (for the latter, see for example, Kübra Gümüşay’s Sprache und Sein, 2020, especially pages 63-78). In an interview with Martin Ebel, journalist of the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, around the time of his Zürcher Poetikvorlesungen in November 2017, Stanišić was asked to elaborate on how he understands the term Heimat. He stated that every person would answer this question differently and goes on to say: “Jede persönliche Annahme, die Konstruktion einer Heimat ist für mich okay, solange man die nicht als einen Finger mit sich schleppt, um damit auf andere zu zeigen und zu sagen: ‘Ätsch, guckt mal, was ihr nicht habt/könnt/machen dürft.” (Ebel 2017) Maha El Hissy (2020) locates this idea in the narrative structure of Herkunft, arguing that 233 “anhand der rhizomatischen Erzählstruktur [werden] multiple Zentren und Heimaten aufgefächert und miteinander in Verbindung gebracht.” (El Hissy 2020, 144) She argues that Stanišić’s narrator makes use of “ein antihierarisches Prinzip des Erzählens,” (2020 148) most notably visible in the choose-your-own-adventure section of the book. This antihierarchical narrative principle, she continues, expands and is transferable to constructed categories, such as Herkunft or Heimaten. (El-Hissy 2020, 148) Though Stanišić is likely unaware, a sociopolitical system following this notion is reminiscent of Édouard Glissant’s ‘Poetics of Relation’ as it “allows individuals to relate to one another.” (März 2020, 73) Moses März explains concisely how the notion of Relation could function in this context: “On a collective level, it allows political communities, cultures and civilisations to conceive themselves as being constituted by diverse forces and not as homogenous entities, as well as being constituted through the interactions with those communities surrounding it.” (73) Furthermore, it is Relation, he argues, that allows “poets to trace connections between different ideas and landscapes beyond the confines of geography and biological filiation.”159 As such, the notion of ‘Heimaten,’ functioning relationally, has the potential to rewrite the cartography of Germany’s society, culture, and politics; it has the potential of borderscaping a truly inclusive and just borderscape. The second property of Stanišić’s Heimaten is the emphasis on the creative act. As exemplified in the sentence-turned-motto “dort, während ich erzähle,” Stanišić’s Heimaten is inextricably connected to an artistic creation. This becomes even clearer when we consider the following answer Stanišić in the interview with Martin Ebel. Ebel’s first question (asked via email) prompts Stanišić what Heimat means for him. Stanišić is quick to operationalize the term, writing: Es ist schade, dass der Begriff keine Verbform besitzt. Wir machen mal eine: ‘zu heimaten’: “1. etwas zu tun für andere an einem Ort, und 2. etwas tun für einen Ort, 159 Like in chapter four, I am going to put off a detailed discussion of the ‘Poetics of Relation’ one last time and instead refer readers to chapter six. 234 künstlerisch, sozial, archivarisch, immer mit dem Ziel einer möglichen Lebensverbesserung für alle an diesem Ort sich Aufhaltenden. Heimat real bedeutet für mich genau das: die Beschäfitgung und Arbeit an Orten, mit anderen gemeinsam. In meinem Fall ist es literarisches Schreiben, könnte aber auch Schnitzen von Kochlöffeln sein. (Ebel 2017) It is almost ironic that, in his answer, Stanišić innovatively performs his own definition by creating a possibility for expanding the notion of Heimat with the “Ziel einer möglichen Lebensverbesserung” through the definition. More importantly, the emphasis for Stanišić is evident: to engage with others, to do something for others, preferably in a creative or artistic engagement to improve the life of others. The focus is on communication, collaboration, finding ways to create progress in a shared process. The nature of his definition, ‘zu heimaten’ as a verb essentializes the active role each individual has to play in creating Heimaten that is productively improved for “alle an diesem Ort sich Aufhaltenden”; recall, for example, the chapter about Dr. Heimat that Friederike Eigler describes as an example of “eine bestimmte Form von Nachbarschaft, d.h. an den Umgang der dort lebenden Menschen miteinander.” (2023, 245) The emphasis on “alle an disem Ort sich Aufhaltenden” once more mirrors the idea of Relation, as it is applicable from a small community (e.g., friends) to an excluded group (e.g., racialized people) to a society (Germans) to a (at least currently) utopian community (European). The crux is that this idea is not conceived as a harmonious and trouble-free ‘being together,’ but merely as a coming together at a specific point in time with a specific goal in mind. Friederike Eigler comments on Stanišić’s makeshift definition: “[N]immt man Stanišićs pragmatische Neuformulierung des Heimatbegriffs ernst, dann liegt in dem Verb ‘heimaten’ eine so radikale wie utopische Dimension, die alle diejenigen betrifft, die zu einer bestimmten Zeit an einem konkreten Ort miteinander leben.” (2023, 247) The focus on the “Ziel einer möglichen Lebensverbesserung” does not ask for one’s citizenship, lineage, or origin, but for one’s open-minded collaboration or, in the postmigrant context (see the extensive discussion in the introduction chapter), a shared perspective on a 235 particular issue (“auf die Dominanzgesellschaft und auf hegemoniale Verhältnisse”, Yun 2020, 7), but also a particular solution: improving the lives of the people around you. Similarly, Dominik Zink points to Stanišić’s texts as a productive form of engaging with this aspiration, arguing that Vor dem Fest – to which I would also add Stanišić’s other texts – illustrates dass die naïve Vorstellung, es könnte eine Gemeinschaft ohne Gewalt geben oder es könnte eine Gemeinschaft geben, deren Integrität nicht aufgrund der Marginalisierung, dem Auschluss und der Vernichtung von Erinnerungen aufrechterhalten bleibt, zurückgewiesen werden muss. Stanišić stellt damit einen Begriff von Gemeinschaft vor, der einsichtig macht, weswegen die folgenden Texte überhaupt geschrieben werden mussten – weswegen eine interkulturelle Erinnerung notwendig ist. (Zink 2017, 106) 5.2 Transcending National Borders: Transeuropean Inscriptions Before I can adequately discuss Stanišić’s transeuropean inscriptions, I must first clarify what I mean when I write ‘transeuropean.’ It is a term that has received surprisingly little academic debate nor any detailed definitions beyond something that extends across Europe, i.e., across more than one European country. Interestingly, transeuropean is at the core of how the European Union understands itself, at least politically (Zappettini 2017). Aline Sierp (2014) points out, however, this “development of a Europe-wide public sphere that allows citizens to communicate, interact and participate and as a result ‘feel more European,’ has, so far, proven ineffective.” (132) Though written in 2014, her words still ring true. As such, the current self-conception of the EU and thus the political notion of the transeuropean is, for the most part, an idea “floating within a vacuum,” because a transeuropean identity “cannot be solely imposed from above.” Germany, for one, is not necessarily doing the most to change that: as part of the EU’s 2022 transeuropean youth campaign “Democracy here. Democracy now,” not one of the 34 pilot activities took place in Germany or was even proposed by the German government or a German organization. 236 Sierp further shows how the European Union’s approach to create a common, transeuropean identity relies strongly on memory (e.g., the Musée de l’Europe and the House of European History in Brussels). While this could, to a degree, show success, I would argue creating identity solely (or almost exclusively) through memory creates an identity that is not adequately capable of adapting to changes in social, cultural, and political makeup, but instate solidifies and reinforces a static monocultural default. As Andreas Huyssen argues in his 2003 essay “Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts,” public memory discourses are often still “fundamentally and persistently national,” (163) particularly in the German context. Furthermore, the question, for example, of how migrants can relate to the remembrance of the Holocaust has been debated for some time, especially as “millions of migrants now live in dozens of diasporas within European nation states, but they remain structurally excluded from such national historiography of memory.” (Huyssen 2003, 152)160 Lastly, we would have to ask: who creates these public memories and discourses surrounding them? But it is not my goal to answer this question here. What this paragraph points to is the insufficiency of the EU’s public and political understanding of transeuropean. Instead of relying on detailed, mostly political definitions, I am going to operationalize the term transeuropean for this chapter as follows: (a) it speaks to the reality of shared (family) histories, shared borders, and shared negotiations of the hurdles of and backlashes to postmigrant societies, but (b) it also speaks to a Europe that is still compartmentalized into its countries – a compartmentalization that is both geographical and conceptual – and thus speaks to the differences and multiplicities inherent in the notion of the transeuropean. Stanišić understands 160 See also Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz’s 2011 essay “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany.” 237 himself as a European citizen,161 but is aware of this continual compartmentalization. With this understanding in mind, we can read Stanišić’s transeuropean inscriptions as an illustration and emphasis of (a) in the hopes of overcoming, perhaps even dissolving (b).162 In Herkunft, the narrator Saša comments on Europe and its borders: “Müssten wir jetzt fliehen, wären also die Zustände an den Grenzen 1992 so restriktiv gewesen wie an den EU- Außengrenzen heute, würden wir Heidelberg nie erreichen. Die Reise wäre vor einem ungarischen Stacheldrahtzaun am Ende.” (2019, 119) In this statement and throughout Herkunft, the narrator points to a social and political climate of exclusion, exemplified by an increasing presence of borders, both external and internal. I have touched on the nature of borders and their inherent violence and Stanišić, in Herkunft as well as in previous novels, shows that he knows them all too well. Racist exclusion and particularly nanoracist violence rear their head numerous times, often maliciously (see 4.2.2). Voluntary malice might be hard to counter, much less resolve or overcome. But what about its involuntary, but not necessarily less harmful counterpart? There is room and potential for growth, for realization, for progress. My argumentation sets in in the context of such social, cultural, and political embodiments of a climate of exclusion, fortified as much by voluntary as by involuntary malice. I locate the transeuropean conversation which Stanišić’s various inscriptions advance inside this climate where it scrutinizes and acts on gaps of knowledges, willful ignorance, and involuntary malice and naivety. In so doing, it works to counter and overcome. More 161 Asked in an interview in 2017 about his thoughts on the “deutsche ‘Flüchtlingsjahr’” 2015, Stanišić stated: “Ich spreche nicht wirklich als Flüchtling das ist ja kein Talent. Ich habe einfach als europäischer Bürger mit grosser Anteilnahme die Entwicklungen verfolgt und mich engagiert.” (Ebel 2017) 162 In this sense, my understanding of Stanišić’s transeuropean inscriptions perhaps shares similarities with Étienne Balibar’s notion of “borderland Europe,” a hopeful and perhaps utopian idea in which Balibar imagines Europe as “overlapping open regions” which may lead to “the democratization border controls,” “the generalization of multiple- citizenship status and the inclusion of ‘migrant languages’ in the linguistic map and the educational landscape of Europe,” and “where the opposites flow into one another.” (2009, 210) 238 importantly and primarily, Stanišić illustrates a means of expanding the notion of what Germany (and German) is, both geographically and conceptually, thus countering the monocultural default of a “allgemeingültige Heimat,” to use Trojanow’s words (2017, 94) and emphasizing that Germany today is and, for some time, has been more than its external borders can geographically contain and more than its internal and invisible borders can hierarchize. Reading Stanišić’s Herkunft as transeuropean, then, means to focus on the existence of transeuropean connections that transcend national borders and speak to a globalized understanding of Germany and, perhaps somewhat utopian, to the potential of a future as citizens of Europe. In my chapter, I will discuss a total of four examples of transeuropean inscriptions in varying depth, starting with what I term, first, “Lineages of war,” and, second, “geographical contact.” I will, then, discuss Stanišić’s fascinating engagement with German Romantic poet and novelist, Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff,163 before ending it with some examples for inscriptions in the context of “language & origin.” Let me briefly return to the quotation with which I started this section: “Müssten wir jetzt fliehen, wären also die Zustände an den Grenzen 1992 so restriktiv gewesen wie an den EU- Außengrenzen heute, würden wir Heidelberg nie erreichen. Die Reise wäre vor einem ungarischen Stacheldrahtzaun am Ende.” (2019, 119) The narrator scrutinizes a social and political atmosphere of historical repetition and, in certain aspects, aggravation. Throughout Herkunft, Stanišić creates historical and geographical relationships between Germany and other parts of Europe, particularly Bosnia. They show the interconnectedness of European countries and histories, but, simultaneously, function as a warning to heed the words of Ilja Trojanow: “Amnesie ist der 163 Though not enough to warrant its own discussion, there are interesting connections, in particular in Grammofon, between schooling in Bosnia and Germany, especially assignments about the topic of ‘Heimat.’ (2006, 87, 130, 141, 173-175; see also Wichard 2012, 165-166) 239 Totengräber der Zukunft.” (2017, 84) It is not by accident that the jury of the German Book Prize justified its decision to award the prestigious prize to Herkunft by writing: “’Herkunft’ zeichnet das Bild einer Gegenwart, die sich immer wieder neu erzählt. Ein ‘Selbstporträt mit Ahnen’ wird so zum Roman eines Europas der Lebenswege.” (2019) In a 2021 article on Stanišić’s Herkunft, Christian Rink, German Lecturer at the University of Helsinki, argues that Stanišić inscribes himself into a European literary tradition. Besides vague references to intertextual connections to Günter Grass and the genre of the “Schelmenroman,” and without providing closer information or a comparative reading, Rink’s argument falls somewhat flat throughout. He argues that Herkunft joins a “weites Panorama einer europäischen Geschichte der Flucht und Verfolgung,” (202), though his text fails to substantiate that claim. He could have, for example, referred to a three-page chapter in Herkunft titled “Piero aus Lucera in Apulien,” (205-207) where the narrator recalls his youth friend Piero. They went to school together and, for some time, spent many afternoons playing video games. Piero, like many Germans with the heritage of Italian guestworkers, spent each summer in Italy: “Nach Hause, sagt sein Vater. Nach Apulien, sagt Piero.” (Stanišić 2019, 206) This brief exchange not only shows the disparity of generational loci as well as the connection between Germany and Apulia in the person of Piero, the end of the chapter also creates a larger, historical connection between Apulia, Bosnia, and Germany. Its last few paragraphs recall the coronation of Friedrich II. in the year 1220: Friedrich II. wurde 1220 zum Kaiser des römisch-deutschen Reiches gekrönt. Während seiner Amtszeit kümmerte er sich auch um die aufständischen sizilianischen Muslime auf Sizilien, die Sarazenen, die er irgendwann in das Gebiet von Lucera in Apulien umsiedelte. […] Kurze Zeit lebten Christen und Muslime in Lucera friedlich nebeneinander. Dass das alles aber nicht im Einklang mit den Sehnsüchten des Papstes stehen konnte, lag auf der Hand. Er entzog dem Staufer das Vertrauen. […] Lucera wurde 1300 auf päpstliches Drängen hin von König Karl II. von Anjou zerstört. Ein Großteil der dort heimischen Sarazenen kam nicht mit dem Leben davon. (206-207) 240 The emphasis on the demise of the Saracens speaks to a lineage of ethnic conflicts between Christians and Muslims that parallels not only the ethnic genocide in Stanišić’s hometown of Višegrad during the Bosnian war, but also the ongoing political and social hostility towards Muslims in Germany and in Europe. The histories of Piero’s family who has lived in Lucera for centuries, of Stanišić’s family who has lived close to Višegrad for centuries, and their shared presence and lives in Germany connect across temporal and geographical borders. Moreover, they simultaneously act as a pars pro toto; after all, their particular lineages is one shared by many in Germany. Later on, Herkunft doubles down on this point, emphasizing it: Meine Urgroßeltern aus Oskoruša waren keine Migranten gewesen. Anders als Wojteks Eltern, die aus Schlesien gekommen waren, Pieros Eltern aus Apulien, Rike und ihre Eltern aus der DDR, Kadriye und Fatih aus der Türkei, Emils Großvater aus Danzig, Dedo aus dem Albtraum einer Minenfalle. (216) In his article, Christian Rink continues his argumentation, situating Herkunft and its engagement with the Bosnian war in “eine[r] gesamt-europäischen Geschichte,” (205) and as much as Rink is correct in this assessment, the lack of substance in his argumentation demands rectification; Herkunft is, after all, not lacking in examples. One striking inscription into a transeuropean history of war and violence is a juxtaposition found in the chapters “Heidelberg” and “Hängt Sie!” The former recalls Saša’s arrival in Heidelberg after fleeing Bosnia; the first sentences read: In Bosnien hat es geschossen am 24. August 1992, in Heidelberg hat es geregnet. Es hätte ebenso gut Osloer Regen sein können. Jedes Zuhause ist ein zufälliges: Dort wirst du geboren, hierhin vertrieben, da drüben vermachst du deine Niere der Wissenschaft. (119, my emphasis) 17 pages later, August 24, 1992, prominently appears once more: “Am 24. August 1992 werfen Neonazis Molotow-Cocktails in ein Wohnheim für vietnamesische Vertragsarbeiter in Rostock. Es gibt Zuschauer. Rostocker Bürger. Zugereiste Hasstouristen. Polizei.” (136, my emphasis) Each 241 quote, on its own, conveys important messages: the former emphasizes the randomness of Heimat, thus scrutinizing the claim to belonging and to hierarchies derived from one’s home, while the latter recalls a horrendous period of at least five deadly right-wing attacks in the 1990s that is oftentimes painted over by a discourse of unity – a discourse that usually ignores those not perceived to fit this unity. Both in her essay “Das Jahr 1990” as well as her poem “grenzenlos und unverschämt,” May Ayim speaks of the “deutsche sch-einheit,” stating that after reunification, “[z]um ersten Mal, seit ich in Berlin lebte, musste ich mich nun beinahe täglich gegen unverblümte Beleidigungen, feindliche Blicke und/oder offen rassistische Diffamierungen zur Wehr setzen.” (Ayim 2021, 91) The unification of BRD and DDR was, at least in part, built at the expense of those deemed ‘others’ (not to mention the exploitation of East Germany).164 Stanišić embeds the reference to the arson attack in Rostock in the context of snapshots of the years 2017 and 2018 throughout the book, pointing to renewed aggressions: “Heute ist der 29. August 2018. In den letzten Tagen haben tausende in Chemnitz gegen die offene Gesellschaft in Deutschland demonstriert. Migranten wurden angefeindet, der Hitler-Gruß hing über der Gegenwart.” (2019, 97) This quote follows a whole chapter in which the narrator recalled the radicalization of individual Yugoslavian nations and ethnicities after the death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980, creating an immediate connection between the last decades of the 20th century and Germany’s present. Sarah Colvin calls this effect “transtemporality – a poetic strategy where meaning emerges out of temporal dissensus.” (2022, 143) But let me return to the previous two quotes centered around August 24, 1992. As I’ve briefly shown, each individual quote conveys an important message. Considering that the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks by Serbs in Višegrad rose in intensity in late May of 1992, it stands to 164 See also Fatima El-Tayeb (2016, 120-124). 242 question whether the date of August 24 is, in fact, the arrival date of a young refugee boy and his mother in Heidelberg or a specific choice by the autofictional narrator for the contrast with the Rostock arson attack. As Maha El Hissy (2020) argues: Mit dieser lapidar formulierten Nebeinanderstellung will der Erzähler die Paralellwelten, aus denen seine Biographie besteht, zusammenfügen. Eine Geschichte über den Krieg in Bosien ist mittlerweile auch eine über das Leben in Deutschland. Solche dissonanten Erlebnisberichte, in denen Geschichten über Kriegsverbrechen auf Situationen im gewöhnlichen, vielleicht sogar banalen, Alltag in Deutschland treffen und das abschweifende Erzählen motivieren, zeigen sich hier als Modus des derzeitigen Schreibens von Deutschland-Analysen, die sich nur aus multiplen Heimaten und nicht-deutscher Geschichte zusammensetzen können. (150) The first sentence in the chapter “Heidelberg” (“In Bosnien hat es geschossen am 24. August 1992, in Heidelberg hat es geregnet”) already transcends national borders by bringing the conflict in Bosnia into Heidelberg, both in embodied form – child and mother –, but also in narrative form. The juxtaposition with the quote in the chapter “Hängt Sie!” speaks to a shared lineage of ethnic violence. It also shows that the response of some Germans to those fleeing violence was more violence. This, in turn, mirrors the hundreds of attacks on refugee houses in the late 2010s, at the time of the writing of Herkunft. But Herkunft also inscribes itself into a shared European history by creating concrete connections between the Second World War and Saša’s hometown of Višegrad. In 2010, journalist Miran Jelenek reported for Reuters that the remnants of “at least three German Wehrmacht soldiers bearing Iron Cross decorations from World War Two” were found in the river Drina. In the chapter “Großmutter und der Soldat,” we learn that “Wehrmachtssoldaten” came to Višegrad in 1944. This information is immediately paired with the personal connection to the narrator Saša as the next sentence reads: “1944 war Großmutter zwölf Jahre alt.” (2019, 54) The chapter narrates the soldiers’ time in Višegrad, at first a tense respective gauging, then somewhat of a life side-by-side 243 for a few months. “Großmutter erzählte, dass ein Offizier bei ihrer Familie untergekommen war. […] Er bedankte sich, wünschte Gute Nacht, ein paar Tage lang auf Deutsch, dann hatte ihm jemand laku noć beigebracht und auch mlijeko, molim – Milch, bitte.” (2019, 55)165 The convergence of German military history and Stanišić’s family history is extended twofold: diegetically, it is brought into the present because this story is told to the narrator by the grandmother in the 2000s and because, as the end of the chapter states, “[a]uch er besucht Großmutter heute gelegentlich.” (56) The latter, of course, only occurs in the dementia-afflicted mind of the grandmother, but as her dementia is a crucial part of the book, the connection remains relevant. On a more general note, the extension also occurs through the medium of the book itself: readers learn about the connection between the history of the Wehrmachtsoldaten, on the one hand, and individuals in Bosnia. This, in turn, connects an individual like Stanišić through his family history with Germany before he ever arrived.166 Herkunft, however, does not stop there, but keeps on spinning new connections to adequately illustrate the knot of transeuropean interconnections. In a later chapter, titled “Herkunft an der Mündung,” Saša tells the story of his school history teacher, Herr Gebhard. The two met up in 2016, after Herr Gebhard learned that his father was stationed in Višegrad in 1943 and 1944 for several months. The narrator situates his grandparents at the same places as Herr Gebhard’s father and then cleverly uses the subjunctive mode to indicate “[die] Möglichkeit, dass sich unsere Vorfahren damals begegnet sein könnten,” (2019, 166) when he writes: Und wenn meine Urgroßmutter Rumša abends an einer ganz ordentlichen Stube in einem noch unversehrten Haus vorbeigegangen wäre, so hätte sie den Radio hören können […]. 165 See also Maha El Hissy (2020, 152-153). 166 Talking about Rogatica, the town where Saša’s grandmother lives her last few months in a retirement home, Saša mentions how the town is even “trister als Višegrad” (2019, 279), only to mention right after: “In den Kriegsjahren wurde am Stadtrand ein Bauernhof zum Konzentrationslager für die nicht-serbische Bevölkerung.” The “Konzentrationslager” speaks a lineage that even connects to the colonial empire in Africa, but most clearly to Europe in the Second World War. 244 Und wenn der Vater meines Geschichtslehrers an dem, was von Rumšas Haus damals noch übrig war, vorbeigegangen wäre, so hätte er Gefallen finden können an ihrem Gesang. (2019, 165) But the narrator quickly realizes that the potentiality of this subjunctive voice is irrelevant because in pictures that Herr Gebhard shows Saša, “hält [sich] der junge Soldat […] in Višegrad an Orten auf, an denen auch ich irgendwann gewesen bin.” (2019, 167) Most importantly, they are connected by the river Drina, which “hat uns alle gesehen” (166) and is “immer da, unerschüttert selbstverständlich.” (167) The fate of the soldiers during World War Two, be it the milk-drinking housemate of Saša’s grandmother or Herr Gebhard’s father, “verschränkt […] in dieser Erzählung auf subtile Art die Geschichte des Kriegs in Jugoslawien mit der Deutschlands” (El Hissy 2020, 152-153) on both a historical and an individual level: World War Two and the Bosnian War for the former; the stories of grandmother, the meeting of Saša and Herr Gebhard for the latter.167 On a secondary level, this transeuropean inscription is a “sprachliche und inhaltliche Polyphonie” which “bricht die nationalistische Erinnerungskultur auf und markiert ein wesentliches Merkmal von aktuellen Deutschland-Analysen, die auch Geschichten über Bosnien einschließen.” (El Hissy 2020, 147) In so doing, the diegetic narrators in Stanišić’s texts approach (though not fully 167 The topic of football could warrant some interest in the context of ‘lineages of war’ which I will consider for my book project. From the overlay of a Champions League game between Red Star Belgrade and FC Bayern München in 1992 with the beginning of the Bosnian War in Herkunft to a long chapter describing a fictional, very tense football game during a truce between Bosnian and Serbian soldiers in Grammofon (see, for example, Milica Grujičiç’s discussion of the scene; 2017, 211-212), football is used in interesting ways in Stanišić’s writing. Saša growing up in Heidelberg where he became a fan of the Hamburg football club HSV Hamburg might be worth a closer look, too. Stanišić’s fandom of HSV Hamburg has, in fact, been part of his public life over the last few years: He spoke for over an hour on HSV, wir müssen reden, the official HSV Hamburg podcast of the Hamburger Abendblatt in November 2020. During same time, he wrote a game report of a loss of the HSV for the Abendblatt, sitting in the journalist section of the Volksparkstadion. He describes the game with his usual, acute sense for embroidering important details with ancillary insights (Stanišić 2020). In a sit-down article with the Hamburger Abendblatt, he did say, with a smirk of course, that he would have to disinherit his son if he were to become a fan of FC St. Pauli, the city rival and nemesis of his football club, HSV Hamburg (Andre 2022). For some time now, Stanišić has also been the coach of a football youth team in Hamburg (Teutonia Ottensen; see Andre 2023). At a workshop on Saša Stanišić on November 26-27, 2021 at the University of Mannheim, Amelie Meister presented on the topic of “Der Fußball in Stanišićs Literatur.” In an upcoming volume on Stanišić (edited by Amelie Meister and Katja Holweck), derived from the Mannheim workshop, the topic is also discussed. See also Brigid Haines (2010, 161). 245 embody) a concept coined by Michael Stern (2023; Forthcoming) – that of “Mnemotopia.” Stern describes mnemotopia as “a relationship between a body and an absent place, what the body carries of that place, and what is passed on of that place in a diasporic or colonized lineage.” (56) Importantly, mnemotopia is less about one’s identification and more about one’s comportment in the world. For Stanišić and his narrators, the absent place is both Yugoslavia (“Das Land, in dem ich geboren wurde, gibt es heute nicht mehr,” 2019, 13) and Višegrad.168 They carry diasporic lineages with them at all times, in their bodies and their physical comportments to the spaces they move in.169 One perhaps simple example is inscribed on the body of Saša’s father in Herkunft. The father followed his wife and son to Germany six months after them: “Er kam ein halbes Jahr später nach und brachte mit: einen braunen Koffer, eine Schlaflosigkeit und eine Narbe am Oberschenkel.” (2019, 66) The insomnia is both a psychologically and physically embodied connection to Višegrad and, more broadly, Yugoslavia; the scar on his thigh, which to Saša looks like a gunshot wound, is a remnant of Višegrad that he carries with him. That Saša never asked him about it and the father does not talk about it represents a comportment to his surroundings that is inflected by a diasporic lineage of trauma. 5.2.1 Geography To this point, geography has been a mostly silent passenger in my discussion of Stanišić’s transeuropean inscription. For at least a brief time, I am going to put the aspect of “geography” in the driver’s seat. I will remain with Herkunft briefly, before moving to Stanišić’s second novel, Vor dem Fest. Saša, the autofictional narrator, starts one of the earliest chapters with the following 168 It could even be argued that the narrators of the ‘Ostalgie’-filled village Fürstenfelde in Vor dem Feld fall into that; their absent place is the DDR before reunification. 169 See, for example, my discussion of grandfather, Saša, and Saša’s son having the same legs on page 252-253. 246 statement: “Ich lebe in Hamburg. Ich habe einen deutschen Pass. Mein Geburtsort liegt hinter fremden Bergen.” (2019, 35) On first glance, these two sentences illustrate that a place of birth outside the bordered boundaries of Germany does not make German citizenship impossible – and, more importantly even, vice versa! It puts emphasis on the impact movement has on the composition of our globalized world. But it also connects “Hamburg,” his current place of residence, with “fremden Bergen,” referring to Višegrad and the small mountain town of Oskoruša. This connection is relevant and impactful at this early point already because we, the readers, have just spent 17 pages in Oskoruša in the previous chapter; incidentally also the book’s longest chapter. The position of the quoted statement at the start of the very next chapter emphasizes this connection between Hamburg and the “fremden Berge[…]” even on the level of the book’s layout. Oskoruša, Stanišić tells us, had been on his mind since his first visit in 2009 and, in subsequent years, colored his writing, for example of his second novel Vor dem Fest: “Ich schrieb […] über Brandenburg, über Bosnien, die geographische Verortung war gar nicht so entscheidend. Identitätsstress schert sich nicht um Breitengrade.” (2019, 63) In the case of Vor dem Fest, this mindset is laid bare. When he composed the novel, Stanišić did not at first have a rural area in Eastern Germany’s Uckermark in mind, but rather the East European landscape of the Banat, “etwas mit zwei Seen, Wäldern.” (Bartels 2021) Based on this image, a friend took him to the Uckermark where Stanišić found his German equivalent to the Banat, thus overlaying the German and Eastern European landscapes. This is supported in the novel itself: the character of Ana Kranz fled the Banat, only to end up in the Uckermark. Ana Kranz is a so-called “Donauschwäbin” or “Banatschwäbin.”170 In the novel, she is interviewed by a local journalist who makes reference to 170 Ana Kranz’s origin adds an interesting layer to the question of migrancy. After the dissolutions of the Yugoslavia and the UdSSR, Donauschwaben were one of the groups that profited from a two-class distinction in German asylum law which gave preferred treatment and easier access to citizenship to Donauschwaben compared to other refugees (see, for example, Dietz 2000, 635-652; Merih Anil 2005, 453-470). As Dominik Zink remarks in a footnote, Stanišić 247 her origins: “’Wir können über das Banat sprechen. Ich habe mir Fotos angeschaut. Flach und ländlich wie die Uckermark. Hilft die Ähnlichkeit der Landschaft bei der Eingewöhnung?’” (2014, 55) Thus, the connection between the two landscapes is diegetically emphasized.171 Frauke Matthes writes: “It is, namely, through the painter Ana Kranz that Stanišić shows how stories and memory relate not only to the German but also the European, a transnational past.” (2020, 99, my emphasis) Furthermore, the narrative voice of Vor dem Fest tells the readers that archeologists found a “slawische[s] Grab” in the Uckermark (2014, 260), thus connecting histories and lineages strongly; in part so strongly because these archeological findings did, in fact, occur. Geographically, we can read this overlay of Brandenburg landscape and Banat as a writing of a shared European space – one that not only shares geographical features, but also historical lineages. This overlaying of space, the hybridization of Fürstenfelde as something that is more than one place at once, can also be read as a device to emphasize the multiplicities of Heimat (Heimaten; see discussion in chapter two and in 5.1). 5.2.2 Joseph von Eichendorff – a Romantic Poet and a Snake in a Tree I now move to the field of intertextuality;172 in particular, the narrative engagement with the Romantic German poet Joseph von Eichendorff.173 There are three aspects to this discussion, published a handful of shorter Vor dem Fest-related narratives on the specially created website fürstenfelde.de where one can also find an alternative spelling of Frau Kranz’s name: Frau Kranž (see Zink 2017, 101, foonote 159). I have to rely on Zink’s information for this claim as the website no longer exists. 171 Ana Kranz’s answer to the journalist’s question, however, is an emphatic “Nein.” 172 There are many intertextual references that can be identified in Stanišić’s texts. Dominik Zink, for example, points to references in in Vor dem Fest to Goethe, Schelling (Zink 2017, 58-60), and Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff (Zink 2017, 88). Boris Previšić (2009, 201-202) identifies references in Grammofon to the Bosnian movie Papa ist auf Dienstreise (Otac na službenom putu, by Emir Kusturica). And Milica Grujičić locates a whole host of intertextual references to Bosnian texts, from a novel by Bora Ćosić (2017, 187-188) to references to several works by Ivo Andrić (2017, 212-213) to multiple movies (2017, 204-205): “Hier ist ebenso Stanišićs Auseinandersetzung mit der jugoslawischen Kinematographie, insbesondere mit den Regisseuren Emir Kusturica und Slobodan Sijan sowie dem Drehbuchautor Dušan Kovačević zu erwähnen, die an mehreren Stellen zu finden ist.” (Grujičić 2017, 228) This list is by no means exhaustive. 173 In an interview with Karin Janker, Stanišić explained: “Eichendorff habe ich an der Uni kennengelernt: Eigentlich staubtrockener Beamter, aber dann steckt in seinen Gedichten so viel Wehmut und Zuneigung zu den Dingen. Die 248 including a nose-horned viper, a shirtless Saša loudly reading poetry on his Hamburg balcony, and a Bosnian mountain. Eichendorff first enters Herkunft briefly when Saša recalls a fight during a party at a “Grillhütte” in Heidelberg and, in retrospect, states: “die Anmerkung, ‘Das ist deutscher Wald, ihr Pisser,’ würde ich heute als Versuch werten, Eichendorff in die Gegenwart zu holen.” (2019, 203) But the poet truly takes center stage on page 223, in a chapter titled “Es ist, als hörtest du über dir einen frischen Flügelschlag.” The poet is brought into focus before his name is mentioned in the narrative, as the chapter title is a well-known line from the 1841 poem “Wechsel.” The most interesting and most glaring intertextual overlay of Germany and Bosnia happens in this chapter but needs contextualization. In one of the earliest chapters, Saša is at the graveyard in Oskoruša, having a picknick with some family members. He notices a snake in a tree nearby, a “Hornotter,” a nose-horned viper. This scene quickly takes on mythical characteristics and becomes a core symbol, returning several times throughout the book, particularly with its Bosnian name of poskok. Amongst these appearances is the Eichendorff chapter. Early on, the image of the “Hornotter” in a fruit tree is challenged as Saša must admit: “Das Naturhistorische Museum in Wien sagt, Hornottern seien immens schlechte Kletterer.” (2019, 223) He concludes: “Sie muss sich also wandeln. Sich häuten, als zöge sie eine Maske ab. Auch nicht mehr poskok sein. Dafür braucht sie einen Namen. Josip Karlo Benedikt von Ajhendorf.” (223) The transformation of a snake in Oskoruša’s graveyard into a “bosnified” form of Eichendorff’s name creates a transcending connection. As the readers have learned throughout the book, Saša only experiences a physical and linguistic reaction to the snake when given its Bosnian name, poskok. This, especially, emphasizes this transcending connection. Enge seiner Amtsstube stand in totalem Kontrast zu der Weite in seinen Gedichten. Er sehnte sich nach einem Ort, an den er gehört. Das entsprach mir damals, mit Anfang 20, sehr. Beim Schreiben von "Herkunft", kam er mir wieder in den Sinn, ich habe eine Woche lang Eichendorff gelesen.” 249 Even though Saša adds somewhat meekly that Josip Karlo Benedikt von Ajhendorf is “[n]icht zu verwechseln mit dem romantischen Dichter,” (223) even he cannot dismiss the transference. Florian Gassner, in a 2021 article on Herkunft, describes this as: “Ein erzählerischer Kurzschluss ersetzt also das biblische Bild mit einer Brücke zur Romantik.” (229) The artificial distinction between Ahjendorf and Eichendorff is unsurprisingly short-lived, “hat nicht lange Bestand,” as Gassner phrases it (229). Within half a page, the Ahjendorf turns into the poet: “Herrenrock. Stehkragen, breites Revers. Schnurrbart,” (224) and Saša continues: “Der Lyriker im Baum gefällt mir besser als das Reptil im Baum.” Joseph Karl Benedikt Freiherr von Eichendorff has cemented himself as the essence of the chapter; though for now, he is still stuck in a fruit tree. Having accepted the implausibility of the “Hornotter” in the tree and having replaced it with Eichendorff, the narrator wants to engage more profoundly with the poet. Thus, Saša, graduate of Heidelberg university, decides to read nothing but Eichendorff, fellow graduate of Heidelberg university, for one whole week: [Ich] lese auf dem Balkon zwei Stunden lang Eichendorff-Gedichte, halb-laut und mit nacktem Oberkörper oder – sofern mir eines gut gefällt – sehr laut, sodass es die Rentnernachbarn hören und von ihrem Balkon einen vom Balkan sehen, der ihnen Eichendorff vorliest mit nackten Oberkörper. (2019, 225) Throughout the chapter, stanzas of seven Eichendorff poems174 are quoted, in italics and indented. Their relevance in the context of Herkunft, argues Florian Gassner, is reliant on the themes of Eichendorff’s poetry as he treats “diejenigen Themen, die auch in Herkunft im Mittelpunkt stehen, Heimweh und Heimatverlust” (Gassner 2019, 229) – Gassner calls this “Eichendorffs Sehnsuchts- Poetik.” (230) 174 “Der Unverbesserliche,” “Wechsel,” “Das zerbrochene Ringlein,” “Erinnerung, “Nachts,” “Heimweh,” and “Mandelkerngesicht.” 250 I want to briefly address the narrator’s quotation of the poem “Heimweh,” or more precisely: what the narrator omits. One of the stanzas Saša performs with “nacktem Oberkörper,” are the following: “Der Morgen, das ist meine Freude! / Da steig ich in stiller Stund / Auf den höchsten Berg in die Weite, / Grüß dich, Deutschland, aus Herzensgrund!” (2019, 228) The climbing “[a]uf den höchsten Berg in die Weite” foreshadows what is to come in the final part of the book, the choose-your-own-adventure “Der Drachenhort.” More intriguing, however, is the omission of the following, rather pertinent lines: “Was wisset Ihr, dunkele Wipfeln, / Von der alten schönen Zeit? / Ach, die Heimath hinter den Gipfeln, / Wie liegt sie von hier so weit.” (Eichendorff 1993, 48) At first glance, these lines seem to perfectly fit Saša’s situation as they could refer to both Višegrad and Oskorusša “hinter den Gipfeln,” in Bosnia, so far away “von hier,” with “hier” being Heidelberg or Hamburg. Remember Saša’s previous statement: “Ich lebe in Hamburg. Ich habe einen deutschen Pass. Mein Geburtsort liegt hinter fremden Bergen.” (2019, 35) But throughout the book, Saša has emphasized that there is significance to Oskoruša for the purpose of thinking through the idea of “Herkunft,” of origin. But it has also become clear that while Oskoruša has helped him distill what for him is origin, the village itself is not one aspect of it. In fact, both “Heimat” and “Herkunft” is, at no point, truly a physical, geographical place, but instead always people and memories. The omission of lines of the poem “Heimweh,” then, in fact substantiate that. This engagement with Eichendorff has earned Stanišić praise. In his review of Herkunft in March 2019, noted literary critic Ijoma Mangold wrote: “Stanišić [entdeckt] die deutsche Romantik und überholt die Deutschen gewissermaßen, indem er das Heidelberger Schloss, Hölderlin und Eichendorff umarmt und besser zum Singen bringt als jede Kartoffel.” (2019) On the one hand, Mangold’s compliment speaks to Stanišić’s successful appropriation of 251 the romantic poet and his transference into his family history as well as a Bosnian and thus transeuropean context, crossing the borders of Germany, placing him on a fruit tree in Oskoruša’s graveyard. On the other hand, however, Mangold’s statement runs the risk of a generalizing binary: “die Deutschen” on the one side and “Stanišić” on the other which implicitly locates him outside of “die Deutschen.” Furthermore, Mangold’s praise, though thoroughly deserved, falls short of implicating the book’s engagement with Eichendorff in Stanišić’s grand programmatic endeavor of using storytelling as a survival strategy. Florian Gassner argues for an understanding of the book as a continuation of romantic traditions: Das Unbegreifliche der Identität mit Worten fassbar zu machen – in dieser Aporie spiegelt sich idealtypisch die Tradition der romantischen Ironie wider. Gleichzeitig ist es eine programmatische Ansage über das unvermeintliche Scheitern konventioneller Erzählformen. (2021, 228) In the Eichendorff-chapter, this becomes clear insofar as the narrator’s thoughts keep returning to his grandmother. The grandmother, slowly dying of dementia, is both trigger for the scrutinization of “Herkunft,” and central theme of the book. Saša himself makes it perfectly clear that his interest and engagement with Eichendorff has, more than anything, one specific purpose: “Ich gehe nach Hause und beginne noch in der Nacht, das zu formulieren, was mir an Eichendorff gefällt. Ich nenne das Projekt ‘RIESENABLENKUNGSMANÖVER, BEVOR GROSSMUTTER VERSCHWINDET.’” (2019, 227) Thinking about Eichendorff and the secondary goal, even just side effect, of a transeuropean inscription is undoubtedly productive. Primarily, however, it attempts exactly what the choose-your-own-adventure “Der Drachenhort,” the last 57 pages of Herkunft attempts: “den Erzähltod der Großmutter hinauszuzögern.” (2021, 231)175 175 The “Ablenkungsmanöver” is, unsurprisingly, not successful at all: every single chapter that follows “Es ist, als hörtest du über dir einen frischen Flügelschlag” focuses on the grandmother. 252 It is unsurprising that Eichendorff returns one final time, in a crucial moment of both loss and acceptance. The choose-your-own-adventure, naturally, allows readers to experience a number of endings or even bypass some. As its title “Der Drachenhort” insinuates, it also opens the narrative gates to the fantastic: the grandmother, narratively in a limbo between life and death, and Saša climb the mountain Vijarac in search of the grandfather who died decades prior. Their search leads them into a mountain cave where they bump into countless dragons, one of which guards the crossing into the world of the dead. The grandfather is allowed to join them for 48 hours. There is only one noteworthy detail of their descend of the mountain, as the narrator remarks: “Über den Abstieg vom Vijarac gibt es nur noch ein Detail zu erzählen: Unterwegs begegen wir einer Hornotter, nur dass es Ahjendorf ist, will ich nicht behaupten.” (2019, 348) It might not be Ahjendorf, but it surely is Eichendorff, as this sentence is directly followed by one final stanza of an Eichendorff poem: “Ich habe treu gelesen / Die Worte, schlicht und wahr, / Und durch mein ganzes Wesen, / Ward’s unaussprechlich klar.” (2019, 348) The corresponding poem is titled “Abschied.” This farewell guides the final two pages of the book, as several things become “unaussprechlich klar” for Saša. There is, first, the acceptance that his being, his “Herkunft” is inextricably linked to the people in his life, with a particular emphasis on his grandparents: “Wenn ich die Augen schließe, am 2. November 2018, ist hier, hinter meinen Lidern, eine Reihe von Dingen, die ich habe: Großmutter Kristina und Großvater Pero.” (2019, 349) There is, secondly, a loss of childhood inherent in the loss of his last grandparent: “Ich öffne die Augen. Großmutter und Großvater sitzen da und sehen einander an. Jetzt weiß ich nicht, wie es weitergeht. Ich sage: ‘Bis später.’ Und laufe raus, spielen.” (2019, 349) The child in him remains with the image of his grandparents, alive and side by side; it runs outside to play. But Saša, the narrator, knows not how to continue: “Jetzt weiß ich nicht, wie es weitergeht.” Florian Gassner comments: “Wie in den 253 Eichendorff-Gedichten bestimmt bis zuletzt die Spannung zwischen poetischer Vergangenheit und prosaischer Gegenwart die Dynamik des Werkes.” (2019, 231) Even though the sentence “Und laufe raus, spielen,” is followed by an “ENDE” – all capitalized – and even though the book offers the reader the opportunity to remain alongside the child in this poetic fantasy by accepting this “ENDE” as the desired ending, flipping over to the very next and final page of the book, page 350, the reader is immediately confronted with the following question: “Oder möchtest du ein Ende, wie es wirklich war?” (2019, 350, emphasis in original) And as the narrator recalls the somber, unglamorous funeral of the grandmother, the reader realizes the third and, perhaps, most painful realization inherent in the lines of the poem “Abschied”: it is time to truly say farewell to the grandmother. There remains, of course, one narrative asterisk inherent to the chosen genre of the choose-your-own-adventure, as readers can always return, pick a different path, and if they so choose, a different ending. Regardless of the readers’ choice, the engagement with Eichendorff throughout Herkunft and especially the inclusion of a stanza of the poem “Abschied,” point to an intriguing relationship between Eichendorff and the programmatic goal of Stanišić’s writing; between an acclamation of elements of a romantic tradition and letting go, accepting the inevitable; but also a central inscription of Eichendorff and with him essential nuances, relations, and contexts of German literary history in Saša’s family history, in an overlaying of Germany and Bosnia, and thus in a transeuropean conversation. 5.2.3 Herkunft and Language Herkunft and Language are closely intertwined, and I discuss examples for the analysis of the fourth and final transeuropean inscription in Stanišić’s writing under one heading. As I have 254 examined both concepts at previous points of the dissertation, I will move straight to the analysis, starting with Herkunft. In Herkunft, there are moments where the notion of Herkunft is closely intertwined with the experience of arrival. I have discussed the structural and social barriers and obstacles that are in place to hinder arrival in chapter four, in particular. But that, of course, does not negate the desire to arrive; if anything, it might intensify it. One form the desire takes is found in the social settings of ‘being a guest’ and ‘hosting.’ There is, undoubtedly, a metaphorical, if not psychological character to the desire of hosting guests at one’s own place. After all, being in the position to invite someone over for dinner not only insinuates stability, but also, especially in the context of migration, a reversal of roles: from (oftentimes undesired) guest in the ‘host country’ to host. In Nach der Flucht, Ilja Trojanow writes: “Jeder Geflüchtete kommt auf seine Weise an. […] Bei seiner Mutter geschieht es an jenem Tag, an dem sie zum ersten Mal im Neuland jemanden empfangen und bewirten kann.” (2017, 18) This sentiment is mirrored in Herkunft, yet again in a couplet of consecutive chapters, aptly titled “Gäste” (179-186) and “Sind nur Worte (Gäste, 1987)” (187-189). The parenthesis of the second chapter title, “Gäste, 1987,” immediately emphasizes a connection that the chapters’ contents affirms; it also frames the setting for both chapters: One in the 1990s in Heidelberg, the other in 1987 in Višegrad. Most of the first chapter, set in Heidelberg, discusses the sacrifices Saša’s parents had to make, their living conditions, and hardships. But Saša also tells of his first girlfriend, Rike – the first person to regularly visit him at home in the Heidelberger Emmertsgrund – and his best friend, Rahim, at whose house Saša spent a lot of time. Saša desperately wants to invite Rahim and his parents to his home to give his mother and father the opportunity to host and hence experience some sense of normalcy, something that might provide a feeling of having arrived. He explains: 255 “Ein guter Gastgeber ist auch ein guter Gast, besagt ein bosnisches Sprichwort.” (2019, 184) Saša hopes, in particular, that inviting Rahim and his parents would be a positive experience for his mother: “Ich wünschte es mir speziell für meine Mutter, die in Jugoslawien so gern Gastgeberin gewesen war, viel lieber als selbst Gast zu sein.” For close to half a page, Saša images how a dinner with Rahim and his parents, hosted by Saša’s family might look like. That this remains an unfulfilled dream is immediately emphasized by the narrator’s use of the subjunctive mode but is also confirmed roughly a page later: “Die Familie meines besten Freundes war nie bei uns zu Hause und meine Familie niemals zu Gast bei ihm. Unsere Eltern haben einander nicht kennengelernt.” (2019, 186) In conjunction with the other chapter, which recounts his mother hosting a group of his father’s friends, the narrative once more juxtaposes two memories that span countries. More importantly, it highlights the similarities between the German family (Rahim’s) and the Bosnian family (Saša’s) which both regularly hosted guests – Rahim’s family in Germany, Saša’s family in Bosnia. In turn, the impossibility of being host in Germany for Saša’s family indicates the arbitrariness of marking human beings as ‘guests’ and ‘others,’ when the only thing essentially dividing them is forced migration. In a perhaps metaphorical sense, the activity of hosting offers the ‘guest’ the opportunity to move their status from ‘guest’ to ‘host,’ thus embodying and, ultimately, inhabiting ’host’ qualities of the ‘host’ country, thus simply making it ‘their country.’ Throughout Herkunft, there are also a number of short sentences that speak to a ‘Herkunft’ that is anything but bound but national borders. In later years, Saša rarely sees his parents. They were deported in 1998 (212), six months after he graduated from the Gymnasium (211) and, since then, have been spending most of their time in the USA and, since their retirement, in Croatia (66) and, according to a 2023 article by the Hamburger Abendblatt on Stanišić, now in Sarajevo (Andre 256 2023). He also hardly sees his grandmother in Višegrad, feeling strong reservations to return to his childhood town. Reflecting on his personal story and alienation from his family, Saša laments: “Die Welt ist voller Jugoslawen-Fragmente wie sie oder ich es sind.” (212) Throughout the book, there are brief references to family members all over the world: his parents in the US; a cousin in Montpellier, married to a Frenchman whose parents came from Tunisia (65); an uncle in Salzburg (69); family in Višegrad and Oskoruša. In short: “Meine Familie lebt über die ganze Welt verstreut.” (65)176 Outside of the book’s diegesis, this sentiment has been echoed by other “Jugoslawen-Fragmente.” In her review of the book for the Austrian newspaper Der Standard on March 26, 2019, Olivera Stajić claims: “Und während Saša Stanišić über deutsche Aral- Tankstellen schreibt und über bosnische Berge, in denen Drachen wohnen, weine ich also viel und erkenne vieles wieder. Aus dem gleichen Grund muss ich aber auch oft lachen.” Stajić even enriches her review with anecdotal experiences by some of her friends, writing: “Es ist nicht so, als habe man mich nicht vorgewarnt. Eine Freundin sagte, sie habe ein ganzes Wochenende in Gedanken verbracht, eine andere hat schon auf Seite acht geweint. Ich habe fast auf jeder Seite geweint und denke noch immer nach.” In her 2020 article on Herkunft, Maha El Hissy comments that the narrator interconnects “die Vergangenheit und Gegenwart sowie Angehörige von vier Generationen einer Familie in verschiedenen Kontinenten.” (143) In so doing, this narrative strategy is able to create a collage of “Szenen aus dem deutschen Alltag mit Themen aus der bosnischen Ferne;” (2020, 146) to which I would add that it is not only the “bosnische[…] Ferne,” but really a European remoteness. 176 More broadly, Saša states: “Die Kinder der Geflüchteten haben längst eigene Kinder, die Schweden sind oder Neuseeländer oder Türken.” (212) 257 A similar, though not quite as straightforward example are the following two sentences that conclude the chapter “Heidelberg”: “Heidelberg ist ein Junge aus Bosnien, der sich in den Weinbergen am Emmertsgrund von einem Mädchen Deutsch beibringen lässt. Der sich erst viel später des Zufalls bewusst werden wird, ausgerechnet ein Heidelberger Junge geworden zu sein.” (127) Particularly relevant is the emphasis on chance, “Zufall.” After all, no person can ever influence their place of birth and, even throughout their lives, chance always plays a role – a role only increased by migration.177 Even more relevant is the start of the quotation: “Heidelberg ist ein Junge aus Bosnien.” The story of Saša could not have been told in this way without Heidelberg. Hence, Heidelberg is an essential part of who he is. At the same time, this statement is true in reverse: ‘Ein Junge aus Bosnien ist Heidelberg’ – or at least one part of it, of its history, its story, its past and present.178 This formulation, of course, opens up the (imaginary) door to fully understand Heidelberg and seeing it as a pars pro toto for Germany as a whole, as made up by individuals with a wide variety of origins, languages, and cultures. 5.2.4 Lineage: Of Legs and Of Cherries What the examples to this point have shown is that the idea of Herkunft in Germany is almost inevitably almost transeuropean, though this inevitability clashes with a practical adherence to stubborn nationalism. For one final emphasis on this argument, consider the following, almost poetic creation of a personal lineage from Oskoruša to Hamburg, from Saša’s grandfather Pero to 177 In Vor dem Fest, Ana Kranz states: “Geburt ist unser erstes Glückslos.” (2014, 92) 178 In the context of a book reading by Stanišić in January 2020, Stanišić was given the honor of writing his name into the “Goldene Buch der Stadt” – an honor reserved to honorary guests or remarkable citizens of a city or town (Heidelberg24.de 2020; Wiele 2020). At this event, Heidelberg’s major, Prof. Dr. Eckart Würzner, said of Stanišić and his book Herkunft: “Saša Stanišić gelingt es mit seinem preisgekrönten Roman ‘Herkunft’, Heidelberg in die Landkarte der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur einzuschreiben.” (Heidelberg24.de, 2020) In a commentary on the book reading, published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung four days after the event, Jan Wiele writes that Stanišić was waited on “von 700 Menschen wie ein Popstar.” (2020) 258 his son. In the chapter “Großmutter und der Reigen,” Saša is on a phone call with his grandmother. She tells Saša once again (“Zwei oder drei Mal diese Woche allein,” 83) of how she and Pero met. They first met during a dance (“Reigen”) in Oskoruša where Pero stepped on her toes several times. After she tells Saša about the dance, she is lost in thought for a second, but then adds: “Du hast Peros lange Beine.” (83) The chapter goes on for another three pages, tracing aspects of the relationship between Pero and Grandmother Kristina.179 Important for the quote with which I am going transition to the discussion of language is the following information of their relationship: even years after Pero’s death, his name remained on the “Klingel zur Wohnung meiner Großmutter.” (85) The chapter ends with a short paragraph of four sentences: “Mein Name steht an einer Klingel in Hamburg. Ich habe als Kind ein paar Mal den Reigen getanzt. Ich weiß die Schritte heute nicht mehr. Mein Sohn hat meine langen Beine.” (86) Both the name on the bell and the dancing of the “Reigen” connects Saša to his grandfather before Saša himself creates a connection that has transcended national borders and is a (perhaps genetical) part of Saša’s lineage: the long legs of Pero, the long legs of Saša (“Du hast Peros lange Beine”) and the long legs of Saša’s son (“Mein Sohn hat lange Beine”).180 In an allegorical sense, this shared lineage also connects across European borders, from Oskoruša and Višegrad to Heidelberg and Hamburg. 179 The chapter also mentions a small Bosnian village close to Višegrad named “Staniševac” (86), hinting at another deep family connection to the area. 180 It is curious that this connection seems to skip a generation as Saša’s father (Pero’s son) is not mentioned. On the one hand, this is not surprising as the grandfather is, for the most part, a very idolized figure while his father is not.On the other hand, there is nonetheless an interesting scene that brings together the two components ‘father’ and ‘leg’ and even has mythological connotation, though most likely unintended. Saša’s father joins him and his mother in Heidelberg roughly six months later, as he stayed back to take care of his mother. As the father is not Muslim, he is not in immediate danger in Višegrad. He nonetheless returns to his family scarred: “Er kam ein halbes Jahr später nach und brachte mit: einen braunen Koffer, eine Schlaflosigkeit und eine Narbe am Oberschenkel. Ich habe nach der Herkunft der Narbe bis heute nicht gefragt.” (Stanišić 2019, 66) Saša assumes the scar on his father’s leg to stem from a gunshot. In Greek mythology, it is Odysseus who, having received a scar on his leg as a child, returns home after many years and is recognized precisely because of the scar. Unlike Odysseus, the father’s scar, a physical representation of war, is actively avoided and not talked about. 259 I have briefly discussed the reference to Saša’s son. Regarding the facet of language, there is another, rather brief scene involving the son. In a sense, the following three scenes even point to important stages of language negotiation in the context of migratory experiences. Recounting aspects of his life in Germany and in Hamburg, where he lives, Saša briefly tells of a garden with a cherry tree close to his apartment: “Die Kirschen sind reif. Wir pflücken sie gemeinsam. Mein Sohn ist in Hamburg geboren. Er weiß, dass Kirschen einen Kern haben und Kern auch Košpica heißt und Kirsche auch Trešnja.” (36) In itself, the quote itself already points to an interesting relationship to language: for Saša’s son, German is the default from which he also (“auch”) learns the Bosnian words. This relationship is reflected and mirrored at specific points in both Grammofon and Herkunft, speaking to a profound link between languages and, more specifically, to a profound link between German and Bosnian – a link that goes beyond language and further characterizes social and cultural relationships. In Grammofon, for example, we see protagonist Aleksandar write a letter to Asija after several months in Germany in which he states: “Gestern ist mir zum ersten Mal ein Wort auf Bosnisch nicht eingefallen, ‘Birke’, ich musste es nachschlagen: ‘breza.’” (2006, 142) Here, we see the same hierarchy in language, with German functioning as the default to which the Bosnian word needs to be looked up (“nachschlagen”). The reason, of course, is different compared to the language acquisition of Saša’s son in Herkunft. Returning to the autofictional Herkunft, Saša provides us with an example that reverses this hierarchy. It is a longer scene, early in Herkunft, in Oskoruša where Saša first encounters the pivotal horn-nosed viper, even before seeing it later in the graveyard. This encounter triggers both memories and a discussion of language: Eine Schlange kreuzte unseren Weg. ‘Poskok’, zischte Gavrilo. Ich trat einen Schritt zurück, und es war, als schritte ich auch zurück in der Zeit, zu einem ähnlich heißen Tag in Višegrad vor vielen Jahren. Poskok bedeutet: ein Kind – ich? – und eine Schlange im Hühnerstall. Poskok bedeutet: Sonnenstrahlen, die zwischen den Brettern durch die 260 staubige Luft schneiden. Poskok: ein Stein, den Vater über den Kopf hebt, um die Schlange zu erschlagen. In poskok steckt skok – Sprung, und das Kind malt sich die Schlange aus: an deinen Hals springt sie, spritzt dir Gift in die Augen. Vater spricht das Wort aus, und ich fürchte das Wort mehr als das Reptil im Hühnerstall. […] Poskok enthielt für das Kind alles, was es brauchte für eine gute Angst. Gift und Vater, der töten will. […] Ich habe Angst vor dem Wort und um das Tier und mit dem Vater. […] Vater trifft nicht, und das Wort wird zum skok ansetzen. […] Das übersetzte Wort – Hornotter – lässt mich kalt. (26- 27) The name of the venomous snake, spoken in his native tongue by Gavrilo, brings him back in time – “es war, als schritte ich auch zurück in der Zeit” – and floods him with memories of his father once killing a poskok in their garden shed (indicated by the use of the italics). It is a memory Saša seems to be so enchanted by that he dedicates the whole next chapter (“Ein Fest!”) to recounting it.181 This also representative of the structure of the book, as the narrator latches on to associations to progress the story. Later, however, when the idea of the poskok starts to lose its power over the narrative due to the worsening condition of the grandmother, just before Eichendorff takes over as the new diversion, Saša problematizes this memory in the chapter “Vater und die Schlange” (218- 220): ’Wenn du das nicht warst, mit der Schlange, wo hab ich das dann her?’ Vater weiß es nicht. Ich fürchte, er könnte sagen: Vielleicht hast du es dir bloß ausgedacht. Ich sehe aber doch die Bilder: Erst tanzen zwei, dann tanzt einer mit der Schlange (2019, 220) This instability or ambiguity of memory necessitates more fantastic engagements in the latter part of the book, starting with Eichendorff. But there is one more layer to the intense intrusion of memory via the word poskok: the linguistic word itself. Unlike the example of Saša’s son and the line from Aleksandar’s letter, readers encounter the Bosnian word first and are only later let in on the translation (“Hornotter”). This is emphasized by the overlay of animal and word by personifying the noun “das Wort” (“das Wort wird zum skok ansetzen”) as well as Saša using 181 A more detailed discussion of memory is going to take place in chapter 6. A truly substantial discussion of the topic, however, is not possible within the confines of this dissertation, but will be necessarily part of my book project. 261 components of the snake’s name (“zum skok ansetzen”). Most importantly, Saša tells us: “das übersetzte Wort – Hornotter – lässt mich kalt.” Unlike the Bosnian word, the German translation causes no emotional or physical reaction in Saša, specifically because he has no memories or personal connections with the snake in its German, “Hornotter” context. Nonetheless, the juxtaposition of language hierarchies (German à Bosnian / Bosnian à German), on the one hand, emphasize the close connection between memory and language, but, on the other hand, also highlight an intrinsic desire to transfer memories expressed in one language into the other. This even spans the diegesis of a single book, though it is particularly apparent in Herkunft where the German-Bosnian couple of ‘Kirsche/Trešnja’ and the Bosnian-German couple of ‘Poskok/Hornotter’ speak to this (as well as to generational differences).182 With this as well as his other transeuropean inscriptions, Stanišić follows in his literature what Brigid Haines proposed in 2015 for the field of German studies, namely that “[p]erhaps it is time […] to retreat from national or linguistic identifications and the concept of distinct cultures inherent in the term ‘interkulturelle Germanistik’, and to talk instead of the transnational and porous nature of writing.” (147) And if we understand Stanišić’s narratives in all their multiplicity also as postmigrant narratives, then we see in these transeuropean inscrioptions a glimpse of what Markus Hallensleben describes as the social function of postmigrant narratives: their aesthetic power to transform society by retelling its history as a history of migration that goes across cultures. This retelling of history not only entails multidirectional memories but also the potential of changing monocultural core narratives of society to polyphonic ones in terms of a cultural belonging to multiple places. (2021a, 208) 182 For my future book project, it could be of interest to have a closer look at instances of what Brian Lennon (2010) calls “weak plurilingualism,” that is the use of two or more languages in a narration in a way in which the reader can still understand every aspect of the narrative by following the monolingual string of narration (see also Yasemin Yildiz 2012). In Herkunft and in Grammofon, there are several instances of stanzas of songs or simply a sentence or two written in Bosnian, but no translation is given (e.g., 2006, 51-52, 121; 2019, 87, 89). Though no translation is given, they are marked as different by their difference in layout (indented, italics). In conjunction with the engagement and quoting of Eichendorff, Stanišić follows what Dirk Göttsche (2006) described as “extensive Intertextualität” which he understands as “eine weitere Form der Grenzüberschreitung.” (523) 262 Stanišić’s narratives provide two concrete examples of an expanded notion of ‘Heimaten’ and multiple ways of inscribing himself not only in a German canon, but also expanding the border of what is ‘German’ through his transeuropean inscriptions. Drawing on this discussion, then, I see ample opportunity for literary cartographers like Stanišić to propose a change in mindset, to provide examples of, and tools for, active borderscaping. Whether we as a society engage with that opportunity accordingly, whether enough individuals in our society take on the active role of cartographers, of those that are willing to live relationally, willing “etwas zu tun für andere an einem Ort” is something the future will have to show. Let us hope this future is near. Concluding the borderscaping-duet of chapters four and five and considering the main thesis of my dissertation – writing to survive –, I argue that Stanišić’s diegetic storytelling provides numerous diegetic examples that, at times unobtrusively, point to sociopolitical hierarchies, obstacles, and discriminations but simultaneously also offers intriguing approaches to expand notions of Germanness, transcend borders, and address inequalities. The sixth and final chapter is going to pick up where the fifth chapter ended, putting the focus on the notion of lineage which, given the centrality of family in Stanišić’s writing, deserves closer attention. This is also going to provide opportunity to bring the decolonial conversation started in the last two chapters into a more structured analysis: the poetics of the decolonial couplets. Writing to survive overshadowed the last two chapters, just as it will be the frame of the sixth chapter. After all: in writing and in telling stories, words take on the mantle of empowerment, enabling lineages and memories to be preserved and, thus, to survive. We will let the words of Zimbabwean auhor Tsitsi Dangarembga build the bridge between the two chapters and lead us into the final part of the analysis, the decolonial couplets: 263 Watching the adults around me I developed an intuitive idea that words were power. After adults spoke to each other, things happened: little children were left. My brother spoke to my foster brother and did things. The things they did together made them laugh and looked like fun. I realised I was powerless which I meant I needed power, which in turn meant I needed words. With words I could do things. I could make good what was no more. Then perhaps I could bind the things that mattered to me with words and not experience their loss. I could beat the nameless things that sharpened the guillotine and came for me after I was tucked into bed. I learnt that writing begins much earlier than I was later taught to believe: that writing is no more than telling, beginning with that which you tell yourself; that the word is one method of shaping experience. (2022, 34-35) Chapter 6: Decolonial Couplets Figure 1 Vicissitudes by Jason deCaires Taylor Figure 2 Vicissitudes by Jason deCaires Taylor What you see in the images above is an art installation by British-Guyanese sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor titled “Vicissitudes.” The installation depicts the cement sculptures of 26 children in a circle, holding hands and facing outwards. The cement casts of fourteen identical girls and twelve identical boys had been lowered to the bottom of the sea in 2006, just off the coast of Grenada. The girls stand a little taller than the boys. They wear a tank top, and their hair is in a bun, held back by a hairband. The boys have short, curly hair; the sleeves of their shirt are tucked up, and their heads are turned slightly to the left. Each sculpted child is barefoot; their feet solidly anchored to the ocean floor by the cement platform on which they were placed. Each sculpture: 264 immovable, timeless, but also lithic, defying the flow of water and fish around them; and yet, as Figure 2 clearly shows, each sculpture is also part of the marine ecosystem that it was introduced to. Countless colorful algae, sponges, and polyps have annexed the sculptures, and, in the process, have mutated colors and forms. As such, “[t]hey are stone, they may be read as history, but are alive on the ocean floor,” argues Inez Blanca van der Scheer (2021, 380). This multiplicity extends to readings and interpretations of the project. According to Taylor, the project’s goal is to convey the importance of nurturing a sustainable space for children to grow. But it is a simple associative connection to read and understand the sculptures also as a monument to the countless lives lost during the shipment of enslaved Africans to the Americas, the so-called Middle Passage.183 In that sense, Vicissitudes “is not a work about the Middle Passage. Except, of course, that it is.” (Carozza 2014) Davide Carozza argues that the geographical context as well the imagery and associations with the rupture and genocide of slaves are, ultimately, imbued in the sculptures, whether intended or not: The supports that connect the hands of the figures must be there to reinforce the sculpture at its weakest points, where hands grasp, against the currents of the water. These structural supports look, however, very much like manacles. Coupled with the fact that this underwater sculpture resides off the coast of Grenada, a country in which the vast majority of the population descends from African slaves, the image of seemingly manacled figures at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea produces unavoidable associations. (Carozza 2014) At the same time, Vicissitudes manages to go beyond merely depicting the traumatic violence of the Middle Passage and a continual victimization of those perished by “taking figures that in one sense represent death and turning them into the medium for new life.” (Carozza 2014) Instead of claiming what followed this rupture to be an origin out of death, Vicissitudes instead allows a reading of the sculpture and, thus, its sprouting lineages of associations and, with it, memory as 183 Though never his intention, Taylor expressed his encouragement for a variety of interpretations (see Blanca van der Scheer 2021, 378). 265 “change[d] into something different, into a new set of possibilities,” to quote Martiniquan poet, philosopher, and novelist Édouard Glissant (1989, 14). Metonymically, Vicissitudes can be read as an “underwater signpost[…], mark[ing] the course [across the Atlantic].” (1997, 6) We will now allow the flow of the water to take us from the singular example of deCaires Taylor’s art installation to a view overlooking the broader implications of engaging with lineages of violence, genocide, and death, but also of memory and knowledge. From the starting point of sculptures off the coast of Grenada, this chapter discerns, follows, and discusses said lineages, particularly in how they are negotiated in the mediation of bodies of water. I do so in an effort to exemplify and explicate a decolonial couplet – a methodology that houses enormous potential in scrutinizing and decentering unjust hierarchies, racializing and excluding discourses, and in enriching and diversifying one’s breadth of thought. This, in turn, can function as an actionable building block for the decolonization of the field of German studies. As all knowing is perspectival,184 the crux of a decolonial conversation is to bring one thinker or writer from a specific lineage of rationality and mode of knowledge production into conversation with a thinker or writer from a different lineage or mode, for example the Eurocentric context of Stanišić’s experiences, education, and writing and, in this chapter, especially (but not exclusively) the context of the Caribbean in Édouard Glissant. Importantly, this conversation has as its goal not the analysis of Stanišić’s writing via Glissant or other thinkers like Achille Mbembe, i.e., the usage of their theories to explain Stanišić. Instead, the goal is to read their writing alongside one another, explicating each one in their singular context and within their lineages of relation, to then be able to productively frame a question from multiple perspectives, and to engage with the 184 Friedrich Nietzsche writes in Zur Genealogie der Moral: “Es giebt nur ein perspektivisches Sehen, nur ein perspektivisches ‘Erkennen’; und je mehr Affekte wir über eine Sache zu Worte kommen lassen, je mehr Augen, verschiedne Augen wir uns für dieselbe Sache einzusetzen Wissen, um so vollständiger wird unser ‘Begriff’ dieser Sache, unsre ‘Objektivität’ sein.” (1988, 365) 266 particularity of their approach to similar themes and topics. Even within these particular contexts, it is important to remember that the perspectives in conversation are not depicted ex nihilio but are part of lineages already in relation. Glissant’s writing, for example, is deeply indebted to the (colonial) French language and his Franco-centric education. At the same time, his experience stems from the other side of the coin, as an ‘other’ in the European discourse. His writings are, therefore, in relation to that othering. If the point of discussion, the discursive theme or concept were the horizon, then Glissant would see this horizon from his particular point and context in the world while Stanišić would look at the same horizon, but from a different point and context. Neither are wholly foreign to another, but their particularities hold enormous potential when brought into conversation. Cameroonian philosopher Fabien Eboussi Boulaga describes it aptly: “The individual I am is an empirical segment of the world, a momentary figure of relations, a provisional knot of attributes and roles in a determinate context, in a location.” (2014, 234) As the previous three chapters have looked in detail at Stanišić’s perspective of the horizon, the emphasis in this chapter is slightly tilted toward the couplet-partners though that does not alter Stanišić’s relevance to the task at hand. 6.1 Relation and Memory in the Middle Passage The Middle Passage is the name for the shipment of enslaved Africans from the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. An inextricable aspect of the Middle Passage is ubiquitous death. There is death on board of crowded slave ships, from hunger and thirst, or from sickness. In his poem “Middle Passage,” (1945) Robert Hayden viscerally describes the inhumanity of the conditions: A charnel stench, effluvium of living death spreads outward from the hold, where the living and the dead, the horribly dying, lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement 267 In this situation of “living death,” some preferred the decision to jump from the ships. In situations where slave ships were pursued by raiders, the enslaved, nothing more than freight in their capturer’s eyes, were thrown into the ocean as a way of lessening the ship’s weight. The total number of deaths directly attributable to the Middle Passage is estimated to be around two million people, forced into an oceanic grave in the Atlantic. In the words of Hayden’s poem, the Middle Passage was a ”Voyage through death, / voyage whose chartings are unlove.” Love can be understood here as the acceptance of one’s humanity. The negation of love (“unlove”) and thus the deprivation of one’s humanity and, with it, the unmaking of one’s world attests to the Middle Passage as a set of colossal ruptures: of lives, but also of lineages. Families were torn apart, histories, knowledges, cultures, and names lost in the sea. Édouard Glissant notes: “The only written thing on slave ships was the account book listing the exchange value of slaves.” No names, nothing else. This loss of lineage and knowledge is continuously felt in the Caribbean context and the island archipelago of the Antilles from which Glissant and many other important thinkers like Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, and George Lamming write. In his analysis of Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990), Lance Callahan (2003) writes: Emerging from over three hundred years of brutal oppression, the Caribbean people find themselves custodians of a culture inextricably tied to an imperial history which they themselves had no part in writing, inheritors of a civilization crated as a result of a plan they themselves had no part in formulating, and chroniclers of that world in a language coded by slave traders and overseers (1) While Glissant’s philosophical poetics are productive and informative in the context of the manifold ruptures and, thus, essential for my discussion, I am going to briefly insert an example of the effect of these ruptures – in part because it is less opaque and, in turn, more easily accessible than Glissant, but in part also because I believe it to be important to note not only the philosophical 268 engagement with these ruptures, but also the concrete impact on lived realities; in the following example, the particular lived reality of George Lamming. George Lamming was born in Barbados in 1927. Barbados, as most other islands in the Antilles, has lived through a history of colonization since the late 15th century, changing hands once in the 1620s, from Spanish to English control. Barbados lived through centuries of English colonization, gaining sovereignty in 1966; only in December 2021 did Barbados establish itself as a Republic, removing Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. English is and remains Barbados’s official language and is the language with which Lamming grew up. Lamming described schooling as “a kind of external prescription for erasure.” (Bogues 2011, 217) In “The African presence,” an essay of his 1960 collection The Pleasures of Exile, Lamming describes a visit to Africa. Though he had lived in Barbados, Trinidad, and England and visited the US at that point, his arrival in Ghana’s capital, Accra, shortly after the country’s independence in 1966, was the first time he had ever set foot on the African continent. He describes this journey as “more personal and more problematic” than that of a European or American tourist: “It is more personal because the conditions of his life today, his status as a man, are a clear indication of the reasons which led to the departure of his ancestors from that continent.” (1992, 160) After all, his very being was directly connected to the “commercial deportation.” Arriving in Accra, he and his travel group are welcomed by a group of boy scouts – in English. After the official greeting, the boy scouts are excused and start running around, talking in their language (presumably Akan). Lamming writes: They were talking all the same. The voices clashed like steel; and their hands were like batons conducting the wild cacophony of their argument. It was impossible to understand how so harmless a ritual as meeting that English Scoutmaster could now lead to such a terrifying chorus of discord. What were they quarreling about? Or what were they rejoicing about? For it was difficult to distinguish which noise was war and which was peace. […] Neither of us could understand a word of what those boys were saying. Nor could the English Scoutmaster (1992, 162) 269 Two things are striking. The description of both language and behavior is remarkably negative. Their movements are seemingly uncontrolled, a “wild cacophony;” the sound of the language is uncomely, clashing in Lamming’s ears “like steel.” This “terrifying chorus of discord” is contrasted with the “harmless ritual” of meeting the English Scoutmaster. The Scoutmaster is himself a stand-in for the English language, its customs, and order, but also for colonial arrogance and ignorance as he does not understand the boys’ native language. Lamming thus provides us with an internalization of colonial subjectivity: the ritualized ceremony (and the concept of boy scouts to begin with) is part of English culture and, more importantly, the normative mindset with which Lamming judges the scene. The difference manifests itself in the difference of rhythm: both in the movement of their hands as well as their overall behavior: “their passions were poured through another rhythm of speed.” Rhythm is not only bodily, however, but also generally manifests as a different comportment to the world, juxtaposed by the orderly ritual, on the one hand, and the playfulness of the boys, on the other hand.185 Furthermore, it is a clear indication of the erasure of African history, language, names, and culture in the Carribean as “[n]either of us could understand a word the boys were saying.” Lamming realizes this, reflecting: “It was at this point that the difference between my childhood and theirs broke wide open. They owed Prospero no debt of vocabulary. English was a way of thinking which they would achieve when the situation required it.” (1992, 162) This is not an option that Lamming is capable of embodying: he is stuck within an English (cultural) frame of reference and language.186 More precisely, Lamming’s world is one remade in an English frame of reference and language, one that violently attached itself to the ruptured lineages of the Middle Passage, like leeches attaching themselves to an open wound. 185 Rhythm is an immensely interesting category. Its analysis is beyond the scope of my dissertation project but will be considered in more detail for my monograph. A detailed and intriguing discussion of rhythm can be found in Michael Stern’s forthcoming book, Alluvia: Towards a Poetics of Reworlding. 186 See also the discussion of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and George Lamming in chapter four. 270 For Lamming, this led to dissonance, distance, and incomprehensibility with the continent of his ancestors. Whether through the collision of lived realities (Lamming) or, in the case of Édouard Glissant, the omnipresence of the ocean surrounding him, the Middle Passage reverberates through history and thought. About Glissant’s works, Aaron Pinnix remarks that he “describes a culture saturated with the invisible presence of Africans thrown into the sea, a sort of original and continuous connection that challenges distinction between life and death, while also interconnecting Africa and the Caribbean, as well as communities of the African diaspora and the ocean.” (2018, 428) As such, the Middle Passage as a monumental and horrific historical event, and, with it, the Atlantic Ocean, inflects much of African and especially Caribbean and, in Glissant’s case, Antillean thought. In her 2019 The Black Shoals, Tiffany Lethabo King points out that the ocean has “functioned as a complex seascape and ecology within Black diaspora studies that ruptures normative thought and European discourse.” (2019, 5)187 Glissant calls this “abyssal knowledge,” situating his own work as a specifically Caribbean response to an abyssal experience wrought by colonialism that is threefold. The first is the “belly of the [open] boat” because it “precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out.” (Glissant 1997, 6). This boat, he writes, is a “womb abyss” because it births the enslaved into the space of the unknown, it unworlds them. It also contains both an uncertain future as well as death: “This boat: pregnant with as many dead as living under sentence of death.” (Glissant 1997, 6) The second abyss is the depths of the sea; the third abyss is yet another form of the unknown, the arrival of those enslaved in new countries. For the people enslaved, open water had been something with one riverbank always in sight. But 187 Other influential works that combine the ocean especially with studies of indigenous thought are Epeli Hau’ofa’s 1993 A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, his 1994 essay “Our Sea of Islands,” and Karin Amimoto Ingersoll’s 2016 Waves of Knowing. A Seascape Epistemology. 271 now, “[t]he banks of the river have vanished on both sides of the boat. What kind of river, then, has no middle?” (Glissant 1997, 7) In this, the abyss does not only have a vertical depth but also a horizontal, leading to “the edges of a nonworld that no ancestor will haunt.” (Glissant 1997, 7) And even today, “the abyss is also a projection of and a perspective into the unknown.” (Glissant 1997, 8) Finally, it is “something shared and made us, the descendants, one people among others” (8) which, as Michael Stern argues, makes “the abyss […] a space of relation” (Forthcoming, 204): “Glissant’s notion of the abyss as that coming knowledge yet to be known, knowledge of a re- worlded world yet to arrive.” (Stern Forthcoming, 207) This knowledge-to-come, something in the process of being known has the dimension of multiplicity: “The Africans in the New World – African Americans, but also the Antilleans, Brazilians, etc. – escaped the abyss and carry within them the abyss’s dimension. And I think the abyss’s dimension is not, contrary to what one might believe, the dimension of Unity, but rather the dimension of Multiplicity.” (Diawara 2011, 5) South African Researcher Aragorn Eloff explains The past is drowned and all that remains are fragments; with no possible return across the endless sea a thinking from the shoreline, at the place of arrival, thus becomes necessary. However, deep roots cannot take hold in the loose sand and so the thought that emerges is fragmented, a bricolage of different elements that does not form any fixed system or linear continuity. (2019) Glissant argues that thinking in the particular context of the Antilles only happens in Relation, across decentred networks of connection that relate other to other, without reducing them to the same. Brought to its very core, Relation is and “Relation exists.” (Glissant 1997, 142) And there are those who live in Relation and those who do not live in it yet, according to Glissant. In conversation with Manthia Diawara, filmmaker and writer from Mali, Glissant explained Relation as “the moment where we realize that there is a definite quantity of all the differences in the world. 272 […] I say that Relation is made up of all the differences in the world and that we shouldn’t forget a single one of them, even the smallest.” (2011, 9) In praxis, this might not be attainable. But Glissant’s Relation is a call against singularities and for multiplicities.188 Relation does not stop there, however. Glissant offers further characteristics. Relation is opposed to the idea of the universal, calls it into question (Diawara 2011, 10). Relation is in consecution of totality; importantly though, not in the realization of totality as a universality that remains static, but as a movement in which everything is multiple because “Relation is movement” (Glissant 1997, 171) and can never be passive (137). Important for Glissant’s conception is also the notion of rhizomatic thought which he understands as “the principle behind […] the Poetics of Relation.” (Glissant 1997, 11) Glissant proposes rhizomatic thought in opposition to the idea of the root: “The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around.” (Glissant 1997, 11) A root moves vertically and is thus rooted in a single space and doesn’t allow for movement nor for multiplicity. Rhizomatic thought, which Glissant takes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, is “an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently.” (Glissant 1997, 11) Therefore, it allows for horizontal movement and, because “no predatory roostock [is] taking over permanently,” for multiplicity.189 Relation is born out of a coming together of multiple origins and, in that sense, is a composite that does not become a fixed identity but remains open to new beginnings and new knowledges. In the theoretical and lived struggle against what Glissant calls the monolingual intent of dominant cultures (1997, 19), this new knowledge and, derived from it, new universals are necessitated by histories of 188 In the interview with Diawara, Glissant offers the following example: “For example, we understand that a desert in Peru and a desert in Africa have things in common and differences as well through which it’s exciting to establish a Relation between these commonalities and differences. That’s the poetics of Relation.” (2011, 15) 189 “Relation is a direction which is not the direction toward unity but which remains a direction in any case.” (Diawara 2011, 10) 273 marginalization, erasure, and violence of a presumed and often imposed self-conception “to arrogate to himself the right of thinking and judging for the entire world and of dictating to all the truth and the norms of conduct,” to quote Cameroonian philosopher Marcien Towa (2012, 56). Instead of a conceptual singularity, Relation is polyphonous. From the basis of ruptured lineages, the reverberation of the Middle Passages in the lives of hundreds of thousands, and the centering of multiplicities, I am going to discuss more closely the mediating role that oceans and rivers take on in the explication of my first decolonial couplet. Before that, I must briefly discuss one invaluable concept: memory. Simply put, “memory is the past made present.” (Rothberg 2009, 3) Without wanting to dig too deep into the detailed and longstanding discourses in the field of memory studies, I focus on a concept that I believe to be most productive for my discussion: the concept of multidirectional memory, as coined by Michael Rothberg in his 2009 Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. At the core of Rothberg’s idea is the question of “how to think about the relationship between different social groups’ histories of victimization.” (2009, 2) Perhaps the most debated relationship, especially in the German-speaking context, is that of German colonialism and the Holocaust. Only recently, in 2021, this particular debate resurfaced furiously. On March 30, 2021, and in the context of the German translation of Rothberg’s book Multidirectional Memory, Rothberg and German historian Jürgen Zimmerer published an essay titled “Erinnerungskultur: Enttabuisiert den Vergleich!” in Die Zeit. The article prompted vehement reactions that expanded to include both Rothberg’s book and Jürgen Zimmerer’s Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz (2012; translated into English in 2019) as well as references to the short, but intense “Mbembe Affair” (Rothberg) in 2020. The reactions to the Die Zeit-article proved so fierce that Australian historian Dirk Moses, a specialist in the studies of genocide, described them 274 as “reminiscent of heresy trials” as “indicated by the denunciation, sarcasm, and indignation.” (2021) Moses felt it necessary to respond to the debate, publishing his article “The German Catechism” on May 25, 2021. This article in defense of Zimmerer and Rothberg initiated an intense interdisciplinary academic debate in Germany, the US, and Australia that is now known as “The Catechism Debate.” Within less than a month, up until June 18, 2021, twenty-one further essays had been written, debating Moses’ contribution as well as the overarching question: can the Holocaust be thought of in relation to another historical events (particularly the German colonial empire) or is it unique?190 Michael Rothberg is a proponent of the first option as the idea of multidirectional memory indicates because Rothberg understands memory to work “productively through negotiation, cross- referencing, and borrowing,” and “collective memories of seemingly distinct histories […] emerge dialogically.” (2014b, 176, emphasis in original) Rothberg proposes his idea of memory as multidirectional against what he sees as the predominant perspective: collective memory as competitive memory, “a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources.” (2009, 3) Rothberg contends that the focus on dialogue, on negotiating through transnational references creates a productive and intercultural “shared terrain of multidirectional memory” that, in turn, “creates possibilities for unexpected forms of solidarity” without offering guarantees (2014b, 176). Concretely, Rothberg argues that the emergence of a global Holocaust memory has paved the way for the “articulation of other histories,” both predating the Holocaust and following it. He names slavery, the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) and the genocide during the Bosnian War as 190 The project The New Fascism Syllabus, a crowd-sourced collection of writings on the history of fascist, authoritarian, and populist movements and governments during the 20th and 21st centuries curated by an Editorial Board consisting of eighteen scholars specializing in the histories of Fascism, authoritarianism, and right-wing populism, put together all twenty-two essays on their website and made them available to download, listing both a PDF including the entire debate as well as each contribution individually: https://newfascismsyllabus.com/news-and- announcements/the-catechism-debate/. 275 examples (Rothberg 2009, 6). Rothberg’s claim is perhaps best comprehensible by looking at a concrete example. In both his 2009 book and a 2011 article titled “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory,” Rothberg discusses W.E.B. Du Bois’ visit to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1949 and his subsequent 1952 article “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto.” Rothberg argues that the visual impact of the Warsaw Ghetto led Du Bois to reflect “on the significance of the Jewish experience during World War II for the global problem of race” and to draw “on the material traces of the Nazi genocide in order to rethink his understanding of the African American past and present.” (2011, 526-527) He cites Du Bois as stating, “I have seen something of human upheaval in this world: the scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta; the marching of the Ku Klux Klan; the threat of courts and police; the neglect and destruction of human habitation; but nothing in my wildest imagination was equal to what I saw in Warsaw in 1949.” (Quoted after Rothberg 2011, 527) Rothberg reads this quote as Du Bois bringing Black and Jewish histories into relation “without erasing their differences or fetishizing their uniqueness.” (2011, 527) Du Bois avoids any binary opposition as “varieties of racial terror that have marked and marred the twentieth century – in everyday as well as extreme forms – leave their tracks on all forms of knowledge.” (Rothberg 2009, 115) This negotiation of two historical memories – that of slavery and the subsequent treatment of Black people in the US even centuries later, and of the Holocaust – enabled Du Bois to formulate a “vision of solidarity constructed through differentiated similitude.” (Rothberg 2011, 528) This, then, is the workings of multidirectional memory. Throughout Multidirectional Memory, Rothberg continually emphasizes that his approach is one of juxtaposition which “can serve more to bring difference into relief than to melt them into banal equation.” (2009, 171) The potency of multidirectional memory is not only in its dialogical approach, but also in that it sets memory always in relation to other histories and memories without 276 demanding one to subordinate, without diminishing either. In a sense, Rothberg’s multidirectional memory approaches its dialogical negotiations with the same mindset as the decolonial couplets in this chapter and the decolonial conversations throughout this dissertation. Rothberg is, indeed, formulating decolonial conversations throughout his book when he dialectically places Aimé Césaire next to Hannah Arendt in part one, W.E.B. Du Bois next to Caryl Phillips and André Schwartz-Bart in part two, and Austrian film director Michael Haneke next to French-Algerian writer Leïla Sebbar in part four. It is undoubtedly one of the concept’s strengths that dialogues of multidirectional memory are always negotiated in “multicultural and transnational contexts,” (Rothberg 2009, 21) emphasizing their multilayered nature. Its second strength lies in its comportment towards the future. As multidirectional memory highlights how multiple our relationship to the past is in “determin[ing] who we are in the present,” it always does so with “unexpected or even unwanted consequences that bind us to those whom we consider other.” (Rothberg 2009, 5)191 In negotiation one’s past in relation to the other and with a comportment to the future, multidirectional memory “has the potential to create new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice,” as well as the “ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older worlds,” (2009, 5) for example a more just, non-hierarchical society. After all, Rothberg is convinced that “without changing the way we think about the past it will be difficult to imagine an alternative future.” (Rothberg 20211, 541) And as multidirectional memory emphasizes the sharedness of its terrain while also highlighting transnational and transcultural connections to give vocabulary for the articulation of memories, the “public articulation of collective memory by marginalized and oppositional social groups provides resources for other groups to articulate their own claims for recognition and justice.” (Rothberg 2011, 524) 191 For a particular analysis expanding on this point, see Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz’s 2011 essay “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany.” 277 6.2 Aquatic Mediation – Aquatic Remembering - Aquatic Multiplicities “She let the multiple truths exist inside […]. It was something that she’d learned to do when dealing with remembering, to try to find a modicum of quiet and accept the multitudes inside herself” (Solomon Rivers, The Deep 142) “Es kommt mir vor, als wäre ein Aleksandar in Višegrad und in Veletovo und an der Drina geblieben, und ein anderer Aleksandar lebt in Essen und überlegt sich, doch mal an die Ruhr angeln zu gehen” (Saša Stanišic, Grammofon 142) Solomon Rivers’ 2019 novel The Deep is an afrofuturistic take on the engagement with the Middle Passage and the questions of memory and remembering of the people that followed its abyssal rupture. At the center of the novel is a population of deep-sea descendants from pregnant African women who were thrown overboard by their enslavers, the wajinru. As the novel’s afterword explains, the idea of the wajinru was born out of a thought experiment by electronic music duo Drexciya: if a fetus is able to live and breathe in the aquatic environment of its mother’s womb, might humans be able to do so after birth? Thinking specifically of the fate of pregnant African women during the Middle Passage, they asked: “Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air? Are Drexciyans water-breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed?” (quoted after Rivers 2019, 158)192 This idea, almost mythological in nature, appealed to Californian hip hop group clipping.193 They released an album titled The Deep (2017) as well as an eponymous song which, in turn, strongly influenced Solomon Rivers. In a sense, the mythos of the wajinru (or Drexciyans) is in itself a form of lineage-making, a way of taking agency in the process of recollection and of trying to fill the abyssal gap: “The murder of enslaved women was reimagined as an escape from murderous 192 In the novel, we read of the wajinru: “We were born breathing water as we did in the womb.” (2019, 28) 193 clipping. wrote the afterword of the novel. They consist of Tony Award-winning rapper Daveed Diggs, best known for his roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the musical Hamilton (2015), and producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes. 278 oppression, and the founding of a utopian civilization.” (Rivers 2019, 158) This attempt is centered on remembering, In their song “The Deep,” clipping. makes use of the anaphora “Y’all remember,” repeating the line 23 times throughout; it also functions as a short chorus. Rivers’ novel The Deep takes up this chorus on remembering. The wajinru have learned how to forget, remembering close to nothing of their past and origin – except for one individual each generation, taking on the mantle of historian: “Only the historian was allowed to remember.” (2019, 5) The historian’s task is to traverse the ocean, and, through a mix of a particularly strong development of electroreceptors and a somewhat mythical attunement to the currents of the ocean, locate all wajinru to collect their memories. At the end of a historian’s life, another wajinru is chosen as historian and absorbs or, as the novel calls it, “harvests” the memories of its people. What brings gravitas to the role of the historian and, thereby, to the act of remembering is a cyclical event called the remembrance. Once a year, all wajinru come together and, for a single day, take on and, more importantly, physically and spiritually live all the memories of their people in a ritualized and communal experience: “They didn’t remember in pictures nor did they recall exact events, but they knew things in their bodies, bits of the past absorbed into them and transformed into instincts.” (Rivers 2019, 11) Afterwards, each memory, or “remembering,” is returned to the historian: “A historian’s role was to carry the memories so other wajinru wouldn’t have to. Then, when the time came, she’d share them freely until they got their fill of knowing.” (Rivers 2019, 8) The novel thus sets up an interesting dichotomy between remembering and living. On the one hand, the wajinru are comfortable living their daily lives without traumatic and abyssal memory. On the other hand, they cannot do so indefinitely, instead needing an annual fix: We grow anxious and restless without you, my child. One can only go for so long without asking who am I? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? What is being? What 279 came before me, and what might come after? Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. (Rivers 2019, 8) Yetu, the protagonist of the novel, knows that her people would be lost without their shared memories (see 5, 19, 32), but, more importantly, without the act of remembering, centering agency and physical embodiment194 in the engagement with the past and its traumata. The naming of a memory as a “remembering” emphasizes its active nature just as much as the physical pain that the protagonist Yetu feels throughout the novel. Her hypersensitivity to the electroreceptors with which the wajinru communicate, with which she perceives the ocean, and with which she lives through the rememberings cause her excruciating pain: “Her peoples’ survival was reliant upon her suffering.” (Rivers 2019, 15) Fittingly, Yetu’s name translate to “our” or “ours” in Swahili, marking her lexically as the communal vessel of her peoples’ history and memory. But her name, intrinsically embodying a more-than-one, a multiplicity, is also representative for the multiplicities that are the core of The Deep’s engagement with Glissant’s abyssal knowledge. During a remembrance, while she watches her brethren and sisters agonize when they remember their ancestors drowning, she remarks: “It was too strange to carry both truths at once: the aliveness of their own bodies, and the deadness of the two-legs corpses. The conflict split their minds in half, threatened by their own bodies.” (Rivers 2019, 37) The particular lineage of the wajinru, the lineage of the Middle Passage’s rupture, shared with hundreds of thousands of “two legs” in the Caribbean and globally, is one that holds the multiplicity of said rupture and with it the multiplicity of “aliveness” and “deadness.” And at the same time, it marks a form of worlding. As Cameroonian philosopher Fabien Eboussi Boulaga writes: To constitute a world is to insert oneself, to situate its members through a network of references, a system of relations which distinguish them from any other human group while 194 On the wajinru’s trauma, the novel states: “It lived in their cartilage and their organs, as coded into them.” (Rivers 2019, 27) 280 allowing them to recognize each other, to assert each other as humans and bestow meaning and ground on what they are and do. (2014, 154-155) This constituting of a world happens towards the end of the novel. Yetu is close to perishing, unable to solely carry the weight of her peoples’ history. Yetu flees the remembrance, leaving the others in a state of perpetual remembering, a painful trance. In the end, however, she yearns to return – not necessarily to the memories, but to the connection they made her feel with her people. Upon her return, the wajinru collectively decide to break with the old tradition, instead of an individual carrying the “burden of remembering” (Rivers 2019, 98), they all share that burden. It is a simultaneous emphasis of individual and community as Yetu and, with her, the wajinru come to realize that “[w]ho each of them was mattered as much as who all of them were together.” (Rivers 2019, 145) But the crucial point of the novel consists of a reversal of roles, in the emphasis on survival: “Our survival honors ancestors more than any tradition.” (Rivers 2019, 147) It is not a reversal of Yetu free of pain or a symbiotic mnemonic revelation for the whole population. Instead, the novel puts forth a reversal in the hierarchy that, up to this point, had defined Yetu’s life and the life of the wajinru: it is not the death of the ancestors that defines the wajinru, but the survival of the wajinru that harbors ancestry. Up to this point, the wajinru and, in particular, Yetu were marked by their ancestry, by their physical embodiment of remembering, but also by their mere existence as descendants of pregnant women thrown overboard of slave ships. But now, “[t]he living put their own mark on the dead.” (Rivers 2019, 150) Where panic reigned in Yetu’s mind at the start of the novel and every lost memory was considered a tragedy, now there is a realization that “[g]aps could be survived and made full again, but only if you were still living.” (Rivers 2019, 149) 281 And yet, next to a new form of remembering and an emphasis of living and survival, there is a third dimension to the novel’s ending – one that is engendered by the first two. With her escape from the ritualistic remembrance, Yetu takes the first step in her own version of the hero’s journey. Close to death, Yetu drifts through the ocean for days until she is caught in a fisherman’s net. Coming in and out of consciousness, a weak Yetu finds herself in a small cove, the exit covered with rocks. Over the coming days, she’s brought food by Suka, a human. After a few days, Yetu, feeling stronger, recognizes similarities between the speech of the wajinru and the tongue of Suka. Slowly, she starts communicating with Suka, who, after a first shock, is a willing respondent. From Suka, Yetu learns that she was caught by a fisherwoman named Oori, the withdrawn and seclusive last survivor of the Oshuben people, a fictional African people. Unlike Yetu, Oori knows hardly anything of her family or her ancestry. At first, their conversations are limited to what they both know well: the ocean. Oori, in particular, rarely shares anything about herself, but Yetu grows fond of her – in part due to the woman’s opacity: “Suka didn’t understsand Oori. Yetu did. And what she didn’t understsand, she wanted to. Suka had written Oori off. But Yetu was happy to simply exist alongside her whenever Oori made herself available for such things.” (Rivers 2019, 84) In a sense, the combination of opacity and “simply exist[ing] alongside her” are traits of Glissant’s idea of relation. More importantly, it is only through the presence of and dialogue with Oori that Yetu realizes that, though the pain never subsides, it is better to have memory and remembering and find a way to accommodate them than to not have any. It is through Oori that Yetu realizes the best form of accommodation is in sharing. And only because of Oori is Yetu receptive to the idea of sharing the wajinru’s memories in a community of individuals.195 For the 195 Whether intended by Rivers or not, a brief Google search reveals that Oori is a Korean word that expresses the idea of “communal dining,” and thus community. In a character that mostly eschews any community, bereft of hers, the lexical notion first takes on an ironic character, only to later resolve into a sense of agency. 282 first time, the wajinru embody a sense of Relation – no longer a hierarchy between historian and the rest – but a co-belonging; every embodiment of history, of memory, and of remembering is multiple. Building on this, the end of the novel takes on a particular form of Relation, that of creolization.196 Glissant explained creolization in a conversation with Malian writer and filmmaker Manthia Diawara in 2010 as “the very sign of [perpetual] change. In creolization, you can change, you can be with the other, you can change with the other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself. You are not lost, because you are multiple. You are not broken apart, because you are multiple.” (2011, 7)197 Yetu, being finally able to share the burden of remembrance, goes to search for Oori who she fears has died in a storm.198 She manages to find Oori. At this point, the two have developed a deep and intimate relationship, a mutual love. They embrace and, through her electroreceptors, Yetu is able to share many rememberings with Oori. Understanding both her own history and that of the wajinru, Oori is transformed: But when Oori jolted from the remembering, she was breathing underwater, just as she’d breathed in the womb. She did not transform in the way wajinru pups transformed in the two-legs’ bellies. She didn’t grow gills or fins, but like Yetu, she could breathe both on land and in the sea. She was a completely new thing. (Rivers 2019, 155) In this scene, we see two important characteristics of creolization embodied: creolization adds something new to the components that participate in it, and creolization is a “permanent process” (Diawara 2011, 7) that is never fully essentialized and never static (“producing the process of 196 Glissant calls creolization a very close approximation of what he understands Relation to be: “What took place in the Caribbean, which could be summed up in the word creolization approximates the idea of Relation for us as nearly as possible.” (1997, 34) 197 Most of the interview that was published in 2011 in the Journal of Contemporary African Art can also be seen in the Diawara’s documentary One World in Relation which was released in 2010 and can be found on YouTube. 198 The storm was caused by the symbiotic relationship between wajinru and the ocean as well as the electromagnetic waves erupting from the wajinru’s electroreceptors. In their trans-like state, the other wajinru made the ocean emulate their feelings of pain, sorrow, and grief. 283 being”). Oori and, with her, Yetu is – to return to my earlier explanation of Relation – part of a composite that does not become a fixed identity but remains open to new beginnings and new knowledges. Solomon Rivers’ afrofuturistic novel The Deep highlights in its engagement with the abyssal rupture of the Middle Passage three crucial aspects in the question of remembering and memory. Undoubtedly mediated via a particular embodiment of the ocean, the novel calls for a new way of remembering, one that is simultaneously individual and communal; it calls for an emphasis of survival over death; and it calls for a life in Relation, creolized and multiple. At the start of part two, I accompanied the epigraph by Solomon Rivers’ novel with an epigraph taken from Saša Stanišić’s debut novel, Grammofon. Naturally, the question emerges: how does Stanišić fit this narrative call for creolization and multiplicity? To answer, let’s have a closer look at the quote from Grammofon: Es kommt mir vor, als wäre ein Aleksandar in Višegrad und in Veletovo und an der Drina geblieben, und ein anderer Aleksandar lebt in Essen und überlegt sich, doch mal an die Ruhr angeln zu gehen. (2006, 142) Aleksandar writes this sentence in the latter half of the novel; more specifically, he writes it in his third letter to Asija. At this point, Aleksandar and his family have lived in Germany for roughly 15 months. The experiences in and the flight from Višegrad are still present, but so is the awareness of the toll that life in Germany has taken on his family: “Mutter hat die Fähigkeit verloren, Dinge schön zu sehen. […] Vater ist im selben Betrieb wie Onkel Bora. Die beiden sind tagelang unterwegs. Sie arbeiten schwarz.” (2006, 140) It is both a sign of the completely new living situation as well as a mechanism of survival that Aleksandar compartmentalizes this situation into two Aleksandars, one in Bosnia and one in Germany. In other words, Aleksandar – diegetically only in his early teens after all – is not able to bring together the multiplicities within him. It seems, at first, that he is incapable of reconciling these two. But the quoted sentence and its context already 284 hint that the separation is perhaps no separation at all, but instead a difficult engagement with multiplicities. One of his meetings back in Višegrad is with Marija, who was one of the girls Aleksandar used to like when he was younger though she was “zu sehr Mächen für so ziemlich alles, das wir anstellen wollten.” (2006, 284) Marija’s mother greets him in German when he comes to visit her, saying: “[G]ut schaust aus, ruft sie, d’Oma hat di angekündigt.” (2016, 284) It appears that she and Marija had also left Višegrad and lived in München, as is indicated by the use of a dialect (“d’Oma hat di angekündigt”) and confirmed on the next page: “Marija und ihre Mutter beschreiben mir München. […] Die beiden haben acht Jahre in der Nähe von München gelebt.” (2016, 285) On the one hand, Marija has thus similar experiences as Aleksandar, of growing up in another country, in another language (unlike, for example, Zoran). But Marija and her mother returned to Višegrad when Marija’s grandfather died and her grandmother got ill, and Marija is now a student at the university in Belgrade. Although she tells Aleksandar that she plans to return to Germany, she is not opposed to life in Višegrad, at least for a while, unlike Aleksandar. They sit in the basement and talk about the present, but also about the past in which he sat next to Asija in this basement. Though Aleksandar does not want to remember, remembering is inevitable and the memories come flooding back. Aleksandar thinks: “Hier, ich, der heute Abend die Erinnerung nicht mehr vorhatte.” (2006, 287) Following this sentence, the next eleven pages are memories of the days in the basement during the attack on Višegrad. It shows both the unease of Aleksandar to fully embrace and embody the memories, but also the futility of resisting the memories. Aleksandar’s negotiation of present and past mirrors the idea of multidirectional memory, though Aleksandar is doing so only reluctantly. In a sense, Aleksandar’s negotiation of his self in 285 Germany after the flight, and his self in Bosnia is in itself conflicted upon his return to Višegrad and his attempts to reconcile the two parts is increasingly difficult. Carrying the past into the present needs its own mediation and finds that mediation in the form of the two girls, Marija and Asija. Marija, though, in part a remnant of the past, is also an orientation in the present, an example of the seeming reconciliation between a life in Germany and a life in Bosnia. Asija, on the other hand, is consistently on Aleksandar’s mind. She is a mnemonic benchmark, but also a continuously felt loss. Throughout the second half of the novel, after asking in a letter whether she actually existed or was only a figment of his imagination (2006, 213), Aleksandar tries to find Asija, first by calling a total of 330 random numbers with Sarajevo’s area code and leaving countless voicemails (2006, 219-226), then by returning to Višegrad where she is part of his many lists (see 2006, 284). Aleksandar struggles to unify the multiplicities within and around him: childhood memories collide with a Višegrad that feels mostly alien and uncomfortable; the Aleksandar in Germany collides with the young Aleksandar in Bosnia but is also unsettled by his current self in Višegrad; the yearning for Asija collides with Marija. Throughout, remembering is both something Aleksandar knows he needs to do and confront, but it is also something that remains painful and difficult. If we were to consider the idea of creolization proposed by Françoise Lionnet and Shu- mei Shih, a notion “used to describe many forms of cultural contact, including both reciprocal and asymmetrical exchanges across a wide range of cultural formations” (2011, 1), we could understand Aleksandar’s negotiation as one of creolized identity. However, I believe that the theory of creolization has a particular context – African and especially Caribbean – to which Stanišić does not have access (nor does he try to access it), and I do not intend to appropriate the context for the analysis of Grammofon. 286 Instead, I focus on multiplicities: During his visit to Višegrad, Aleksandar attempts to engage with the multiplicities within him. Towards the end of his time in Višegrad and right before his first visit to his grandfather’s grave, this struggle comes to a head: “Ich habe von einer Mischfrau aus Asija und Marija geträumt, mit hellen Locken. Ich habe Asijamarija ein Omelette- Frühstück ans Bett gebracht.” (Stanišić 2006, 305) It appears that Aleksandar’s only means of containing the multiplicities is through a hybridity, a hybrid form that combines past (Asija) and present (Marija), loss (Asija) and chance of reconciliation (Marija) and, as the second sentence implies, perhaps Aleksandar’s romantic feelings: Asijamarija. Importantly, these multiplicities are not neatly resolved towards the end of the novel because they cannot be resolved. After a fight with his uncle Miki at his grandfather’s grave, a heartfelt eulogy by Aleksandar at the grave, and a moment filled with heavy rain, nausea, tipsiness, and disorientation, Aleksandar receives a phone call. The connection is bad, at first, but Aleksandar thinks it might be Asija: “Das Rauschen wird zu einem Regenguss an Stimmen, es ist, als lausche ich zwei Millionen Telefonaten auf einmal. […] Asija?, rufe ich erst leise, dann lauter: Asija?” (2006, 314) The only two words said by the voice on the phone that the readers are privy to is Aleksandar’s name, said repeatedly. The novel ends with the following image: “Der Regen füllt mir den Mund, Stimmen wie Fliegen im Ohr. Ja, sage ich, ich bin jetzt hier. Aleksandar?, sagt die Frauenstimme, und es ist ein Fluss, in dem ich liege, meine eigene Regen-Drina habe ich bekommen, und ich sage: ich bin ja hier.” (2006, 315) It is remarkable that the Drina returns at this point, at the climactic ending. Even more than that, it is a form of the Drina that Aleksandar can call his own. However, the readers never learn whether the person on the phone is Asija. The narrative pushes the idea of Asija onto the reader. But it does so because Aleksandar – the narrator – wants it to be the case. Though Asija is seemingly omnipresent in this moment, it is more likely that the voice on the phone is, in fact, Marija (see 287 Grujičić 2017, 218). During their first meeting earlier in the week, Aleksandar had given her his phone number. And hours earlier, when he awoke from his dream, Marija was present on his mind, in the hybrid form of Asijamarija. By leaving the decision to the reader and by leaving the novel open-ended, the narrative maintains and embraces the multiplicities that Aleksandar struggled with throughout the second half of the novel. Just as Asija had been a stand-in for loss, for Višegrad, and for Bosnia throughout most of Grammofon, Asijamarija has become a stand-in for the multiplicities. While the quotes from The Deep and Grammofon are naturally snapshots of their respective novels, it is important to point to the differences in the moments these snapshots were taken as well as the overall character progression by Yetu and Aleksandar, respectively. Yetu’s embodiment of multiplicities is representative of the multiplicities inherent in every person (their lineages, their relationships,…), but her character, simultaneously, takes the notion to its extreme, particularly in its physical aspect, as it nearly rendered her asunder in the early parts of the novel. Crucially, however, she learns to accept and live with the multiplicities. Aleksandar, on the other hand, is never fully capable of bringing together his multiplicities, the Aleksandar in Germany and the Aleksandar in Bosnia. He becomes more aware of what they have in-common and works to bridge what separates them, but his visit in Višegrad (e.g., the interactions with Miki and Zoran) hinder the smooth resolution that Yetu experiences. As Yetu’s character and character arc feels more metonymical than Aleksandar’s, this is perhaps more realistic. 288 6.3 Knowledges Submerged in the Ocean Ocean Atlas is the largest single sculpture ever to be deployed underwater. In a sense a successor to Vicissitudes (2006), Ocean Atlas was designed by sculpturer Jason deCaires Taylor and installed by him in 2014 on the Western coastline of New Providence in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas. With a size of five meters, Ocean Atlas connects sea floor and surface and, as deCaires Taylor writes on his homepage, “reflects a mirror image on the underside of the sea’s surface” at Figure 3 Ocean Atlas by Jason deCaires Taylor low tide (deCaires Taylor n.d.). In a continuation of Vicissitudes, the context and goal of Ocean Atlas is, once more, to increase awareness for the need to preserve the oceans. According to deCaires Taylor, it additionally “creates an artificial reef for marine life to colonise and inhabit, whilst drawing tourists away from overstressed natural reef areas.”199 Like the mythological Greek Titan Atlas holding up the sky for all eternity, Ocean Atlas holds up the surface of the ocean (in which, of course, the sky is mirrored). The statue depicts a young Bahamian girl; her stance heavily draws on depictions of Atlas (see, for example, the sculpture called Farnese Atlas). Her right knee rests on the sea floor. The left knee is bent, allowing her foot to rest on the sea floor and her head on her knee. She looks to her left while her right arm is holding the top of her head. The connection to Atlas is further mirrored in the geographical location of the statue in the Atlantic Ocean: according to the Ocean Conservancy, the term 199 According to deCaires Taylor, it has also managed to draw attention to “a long-standing oil leak from a power station refinery a few miles up the coastline which had been polluting the marine environment for many years.” 289 “Atlantic” was first used in the sixth century BC by a Greek poet as ‘Sea of Atlas’ (Atlantikôi pelágei; see Montemurno 2022). The conscious coupling of the statue to the myth of Atlas emphasizes the ocean’s importance in relation to our life on solid ground. But it also opens several further readings. Just like holding up something abstract as the sky, there is a futility to holding something liquid, ever-changing. It indicates a lack of control that is applicable to the relationship of humans and the ocean, both in the sense of immeasurability as well as uncontrollability of the ocean’s power (think of storms, floods, or tsunamis), but also in the fact that humanity has long lost control over the pollution levels of the ocean – if we ever had that to begin with. In that sense, humanity, just like the statue, is exposed to the ocean. Metaphorically speaking, we are (and we have been) living our lives on the back of ocean for a long time, just as the statue carries the ocean on her back. But the statue depicting a Bahaman girl also points to the effect humanity’s current treatment already has on specific groups of people (e.g., Caribbeans) of which many have also been impacted by colonialism for centuries. Like Vicissitudes, Ocean Atlas thus allows for a connection to colonial lineages and subsequently a critique of them. The final reading is somewhat more straightforward: the image of the Bahaman girl, the stance of the statue, its geographical location, and the implied weight of the ocean speak to the important, very close connections between many people – here particularly Caribbeans – and an interconnected lineage between the ocean(s) and them. In this reading, we can understand deCaires Taylor’s installations as “one way [of] situating histories in/of the ocean’s immersive materiality” that “can engender our appreciation of the lives that persist in the wake of past and future oceanic passages. This immersion allows new stories to be told, or old stories to be told in new ways.” (Steinberg 2022, 9) Histories, lineages, passages, stories – all these aspects are essential in the literary and philosophical engagement with the ocean in Black diaspora studies as well as Caribbean and 290 African philosophy. Returning to a previously quoted statement, Tiffany Lethabo King argues in The Black Shoals (2019) that the ocean has “functioned as a complex seascape and ecology within Black diaspora studies that ruptures normative thought and European discourse.” (5) As discussed above in this chapter, the ocean permeates and informs Édouard Glissant’s philosophy and poetry (as they are closely linked). This “labour of the Antillean imagination,” to use Derek Walcott’s words (2014, 82), will be the focus of the subsequent analysis, as I center Glissant before bringing Stanišić back into the conversation at a later point. A good starting point is the aptly named Glissant poem “Ocean”: The ancestor speaks, it is the ocean, it is a race that washed the continents with its veil of suffering; it says this race which is song, dew of song and the muffled perfume and the blue of the song, and its mouth is the song of all the mouths of foam; ocean! you permit, you are accomplice, maker of stars; how is it you do not open your wings into a voracious lung? And see! there remains only the sum of the song and the eternity of voice and childhood already of those who will inherit it. Because as far as suffering is concerned it belongs to all: everyone has its vigorous sand between their teeth. The ocean is patience, its wisdom is the tare of time. (2005, 50) While the poem is intensely descriptive of its subject, the ocean, it is remarkable that readers hardly find any descriptors one would usually associate with the ocean. On first glance, only “blue” and “foam” might fit this criterion. But they, too, are woven into the web of associations, images, and metaphors with which the poem expresses itself in relation to the ocean. This complex and intriguing web, once disentangled, yields three core characteristics that define the relationship between the ocean and the lyrical voice (‘lyrisches Ich’): physical sensation/embodiment, temporality, and lineage. Let us disentangle then. The first line of the poem immediately offers an intriguing ambiguity. “The ancestor speaks, it is the ocean” – either this line establishes the ancestor as the orator of the poem (i.e., “The ancestor speaks: ‘It is the ocean’) or the ocean is 291 identified as the ancestor (‘The ancestor, i.e., the ocean, speaks). Crucially, the poem is not dependent on a resolution, but functions within this ambiguity because both readings emphasize the crucial theme of lineage. If the ancestor is the orator, the poem takes the role of a direct ancestral message, thus relaying cultural and historical information to the present and the future – a continuing lineage. Poetry has long functioned in such way, after all. If we understand ancestor and ocean to be one, the lineage is found in the ocean’s song and its “eternity of voice.” This lineage is primarily the lineage of the Middle Passage, as indicated by “the veil of suffering” which the ocean brought with it, making it an “accomplice” to genocide.200 Though this lineage is inextricably linked to the threefold abyss of the Middle Passage (see discussion on pages 265-266), it also contains “the sum of the song,” i.e., the multiple pasts of Africa, of the Caribbean, of slave revolts (e.g., Haiti) and marronage, of individuals as well as shared community, shared experience, and shared knowledge. The connection between ocean and lineage is present throughout the poem, especially through the image of the song, but the emphasis of the ocean’s (involuntary) complicity in bringing suffering turns the middle part into a lament. Also note the formulation “you are accomplice” which forgoes the use of an article; it is unlikely that this is merely to punctuate the alliteration. Instead, “you are accomplice” makes the complicity an inherent characteristic of the ocean, underscored on the layout by increasing the proximity of “you” and “accomplice.” Stylistically, too, the change of the poem into a lament is indicated by the shift in focus onto a direct addressee, the ocean itself: “ocean!” Perhaps the most crucial question this poem poses is hidden in one of its more important lines: “And see! there remains only the sum of the song and the eternity of voice and childhood already of those who will inherit it.” What exactly is “it”? This short pronoun, these two letters, is 200 Consider in this context the discussion in chapter three of the river Drina as an (involuntary) accomplice. 292 enormously potent in the context of the poem, as its point of reference is multiple and thus ambiguous. Moreover, in its multiplicity, it connects the three core themes of the poem, physical embodiment, time, and lineage. Repeating the mode of address of the previous line (“ocean!” / “And see!”), the narrative voice moves from the temporal embeddedness (past and present) of the previous line to another (present and future). This temporal shift is constructed around the image of orality – song and voice – which emphasizes the importance of the medium ‘poetry’ itself. In “cry[ing] our cry of poetry” (Glissant 1997, 9), the poem “imparts form to a knowledge that could never be stricken by obsolescence” (Glissant 1997, 81) as emphasized by the word “eternity.” But it is not quite as simple as merely declaring “it” the poem or even poetry itself. Perhaps it proves helpful to look closely at the phrase “sum of the song.” In the second line, we first encounter “song” which is immediately set into relation to “this race.” As we learn in the first line, this race is used metaphorically to describe the ocean; or more precisely, the impact and complicity of the ocean’s “veil of suffering.” There is a throughline connecting the triplet ‘ocean – race – song,’ as the ocean is depicted with the image of the race which, in turn, is characterized by song. Throughout the poem, we encounter the components that make up the “sum of the song”: “dew of song,” “blue of the song,” “mouths of foam.” Returning to the previous assumption that the “sum of the song” indicates and transports foremost the lineage of the Middle Passage, we understand that this poem is, from its very start, contextualized by this lineage. We thus need to put the determination of “it” into the context of this lineage, too. This first reading is underscored by the next line, specifically the connecting conjunction “because” which links “it” with suffering. But a lineage is never only the past, as the start of the poem (“washed”) indicates, but the past comported into the present, and its continuation is a projection into the future. This understanding highlights the second context of the pronoun “it” as it “will inherit.” “It” is not facing the past, but the future. 293 “It” is thus lineage projected into the future – but to what end? For Glissant, the answer to this is immensely important. In the brief, epigraphical text “Imaginary” at the beginning of Poetics of Relation, he writes: “Thought draws the imaginary of the past: a knowledge becoming.” (1997, 3) It is this knowledge-yet-to-be, derived from the lineage of the ocean, the lineage of the Middle Passage, the “sum of the song and the eternity of voice” that is inherited and, as the suffering that is historically so present “belongs to all,” it hopes to be a shared knowledge-yet-to-be. This, for Glissant, is only possible in Relation, as it “is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge.” (1997, 8) “It,” this knowledge becoming, is characterized in the image of the ocean as “thought in reality spaces itself out into the world,” (1997, 3) just like the ocean. This knowledge becoming intends to be a more complete and thorough notion of the universal because it includes particulars that had been erased in previous conceptions. Michael Stern reads the core impetus of the poem similarly: “despite the intonation of the waves incessantly forming, this is not what is now called knowledge, it is the rhythm of enduring time, the rhythm of knowing as it begins and becomes.” (Forthcoming, 162) The means through which this heritage (i.e., lineage) can truly turn from “vigorous sand between their teeth” to knowledge becoming is found in Relation. What makes the ocean such an intriguing conduit for Glissant in this discussion? Naturally, there is the historical and, in Glissant’s writing, abyssal connection to the Middle Passage. But in his poem, Glissant also highlights the dichotomy of finitude/infinitude through the image of the ocean. In a context of abyssal experiences such as slavery, of the Middle Passage, but also of war and genocide, finitude of memory and of lineage is tantamount to death: even if possibilities are lost forever, the memory of them is potentially available though they may be “bitter memories.” (Glissant 1989, 172) After all, what survives exile, flight, and historical events such as the Middle Passage if not memory and, through it, lineage? But this lineage is not straightforward, it must find 294 its way and thus cannot endure easily within the bounds of finitude, i.e., the chronological notion of time. In the poem, the narrative voice points to this: “how is it you do not open your wings into a voracious lung?” How can a lung be voracious? With unending hunger and desire for air. Next to the subdued, but implied image of countless Africans drowning in the Atlantic, having been thrown from or jumped from slave ships, a voracious lung also indicates an ocean that is waiting to be filled with air. In the context of this analysis, air can be thought of as a metonym for knowledge – a metonym that is perhaps only rivaled in its peculiarity in the image of the ocean’s voracious lung. Substituting ‘air’ for ‘knowledge’ points to the notion of the ocean desiring knowledge: the ocean as the conduit for the knowledge-yet-to-be. There is, indeed, a second peculiarly intriguing image the poem evokes to speak to the temporal relationship between past, present, and future. The last line of “Ocean” reads: “The ocean is patience, its wisdom is the tare of time.” In its imagery, the line itself is in remarkable discrepancy to the previous markers of the ocean, especially the metaphor of the “race.” The ocean is both patient and wise, though the latter is qualified by “tare of time.” It is this “tare of time” that gives the ocean its wisdom. This image is, at first, difficult to grasp. Combining the image of the ocean with the notion of a scale, of weighing, of measurements seems dysfunctional. Specifically, the tare is the weight of an empty container, a null set allowing for the precise measurement of whatever is added. How can time be without weight; or rather: what gives time its weight? The weight of time is finitude, the inevitability of an endpoint. A finite amount of time is structured by a beginning and an end. The wisdom of the ocean, the poem argues, is that of a tare weight which is not restricted to a finite notion of time – just as the voracious lung knows no end, neither does the ocean’s time. Both images can thus be understood as an emphasis of that which does not have finitude; in other words: the poem tries to break through the limitations 295 of finitude by disrupting a chronological flow of time, emphasizing that the past is not over in the sense that every memory, experience, and lineage is set to make its return in the knowledge-yet- to-be. It is an understanding of the ocean as something that is not controlled by humans, but something that is limitless and, because of this, the perfect conduit of knowledge becoming. Édouard Glissant’s poem “Ocean” is a first, but strong indicator for the mediative role the ocean and, considering Stanišić, bodies of water (‘Gewässer’) take up in the philosophical, literary, and relational engagement with lineage and memory as well as Relation. The following couplet will deepen this understanding. 6.4 Stanišić & Glissant – Ruptured Lineages & Articulated Memory “Absent who are every presence!” (“A Field of Islands,” Glissant 2005, 34) “Unbeschwert ist an Višegrad für mich kaum ein Ort mehr. Kaum eine Erinnerung nur persönlich.” (Stanišić 2019, 193) Lineages connect the past and the present. They can inform the future. But there is also always the potential for lineages to be disrupted. Each of Stanišić’s novels, for example, engage with a scenario like this. In Grammofon, the Bosnian War rips Aleksandar and his family from Višegrad and from Bosnia. It also marks the end of Yugoslavia, leaving behind what Saša in Herkunft calls “Jugoslawen-Fragmente.” (2019, 212) In Vor dem Fest, the village community of Fürstenfelde is hard-pressed to recall its own history and thus lineage as both are tangled in a web of traumata, social and cultural shifts, and the fading of memory as people die or move away. And in Herkunft, Saša is frantically trying to piece together his lineage in the face of his grandmother’s dementia and her impending death as well as his efforts to gain German citizenship. Understanding his lineage is thus closely connected to efforts of belonging, but also about engaging with absences left behind by the war and the looming absence of the grandmother’s fading memory. 296 In each of these examples of Stanišić’s works, lineage is disrupted, but not fully lost. These disruptions are on a level that is, at times, individual, familial, or perhaps communal. In the Caribbean context from which Glissant writes and, in Poetics of Relation, names the Middle Passage as the threefold abyss, the disruption of lineage has to be understood as an annihilation. Achille Mbembe argues that race was (and still often is) considered a matter of a genealogical deficit. Within this mindset, the enslavers did not even consider Africans as inherently possessive of any lineage – after all, they did not consider them human. The loss of lineage leads to absence. Absence must be accounted for. Hence, much of African and Caribbean philosophy is strongly informed by an approximation of the lineages lost – especially the thought of Édouard Glissant. In Glissant’s poem “A Field of Islands,” we learn about this understanding of absence. Locating and discussing “absence” is much less about lamenting the past and the formation of a gap or an absence. Instead, it is a comportment that focuses on how the absence informs the present and the future: “Absent who are every presence!” (Glissant 2005, 34) As Glissant writes in Poetics of Relation, the experience of the abyss is not only inside the abyss (the concrete experiences of the Middle Passage, of slavery, and genocide), but also “outside the abyss,” (1997, 7) which, to me, points to their impact beyond and after the abyss had formed, i.e., the impact on lineages. In the Antilles and the Caribbean, the absence is continually present, be it in the language that is predominantly spoken (French or English) which points to a colonial imposition, the shorelines, waves, and horizon of the ocean and its (unwilling) participation in the threefold abyss, or, as Michael Stern writes about George Lamming, a “geographical education […] restricted to a lesson in calabanic cartography, his language lessons to the magic books of Prospero, and the official narrative of even his own history is contained therein.” (Stern Forthcoming, 127) “Absent who are every presence!” This line of Glissant’s poem speaks strongly to an ‘in-between,’ both available 297 and yet not quite, as the contrasts of ‘absence’ and ‘presence’ play of one another. The line in Glissant’s poem is not stopped by the seeming dichotomy between absence and presence but instead invites it, locating one within the other. An absence continually present in every aspect of life is, on the one hand, an expression of a pervasive trauma underlying one’s calcified lineage. On the other hand, it is a positive affirmation: perhaps one’s lineage is not available in the form or extent one wishes, but the acknowledgment of absence, being aware of it turns it from a loss and an insurmountable trauma only into a space to be experienced and filled by Relation and by knowledge becoming. Though absence is painfully felt, it is not a deficit but an opportunity to put forth affirmations of one’s lineage into the future. In Poetics of Relation, Glissant locates this potential for the future twofold: first, in the lingering of absence’s presence in stories and poetry where the “voice comes from beyond the seas, charged with the movement of those African countries present in their absence.” (1997, 39) The second is the notion of Relation. Those that inhabit and embody the notion of Relation, those that accept and understand each other’s differences in their opacity while emphasizing that the relationality of the lives on the planet is not totalitarian and thus non-hierarchical, “[t]hey live in Relation and clear the way for it, to the extent that the oblivion of the abyss comes to them and that, consequently, their memory intensifies.” (1997, 8) For Glissant, this is the “freeing knowledge of Relation within the Whole,” (1997, 8) which engenders both a more just and equal cohabitation and paves the way for knowledge becoming. Already in his collection of essays, Caribbean Discourse, first published in 1989, Glissant ponders the question of the future of the Caribbean. In a subsection titled “Cultural Identity,” he resorts to the form of the litany to adequately “summarize […] the facts of our quest for identity.” A total of 22 couplets makes up this litany; the struggle is always the same. The first line is a 298 diagnosis of the Caribbean identity after the “rupture with our matrix” of the slave trade (1989, 231). Each line is followed by a second line in parenthesis which functions as a brief analysis or explication of the diagnosis. Though the whole litany traces a path from the abyss of slavery to the formation of a “politicized people” that actively partake in a shared identity, the following few, in particular, lay out how the three interconnected notions of lineage, absence, and presence interact and evolve: “Slavery as a struggle with no witness; […] The loss of collective memory; […] Oblivion (neither doing nor creating) […] The past recognized (absences overcome) […] A people finding self-expression (the country coming together).” (Glissant 1989, 231-232) Glissant admits that this progression is an ideal, something to strive for. And yet, there are at least three stages or movements in this litany that I believe are adequate descriptions of how lineage, absence, and presence impact the experiences of many people, those that Glissant describes as transplanted and those he describes as transferred:201 “The loss of collective memory; […] Oblivion (neither doing nor creating) […] The past recognized (absences overcome).” Importantly, this is not an equation of one set of experiences with another set of experiences. Instead, Glissant describes disruptions of lineages and the striving for remembering in his singular way. Think of it like this: if the notions of lineage, absence, and presence made up the horizon, then Glissant’s particularity is someone looking at this horizon from one specific point on earth. Bringing Stanišić and his engagement with lineage, absence, and presence into this conversation, then, occupies another point on earth that looks at the horizon. While there surely is overlap in what they see, their particular perspective on the horizon is singular. When Saša, the autofictional narrator in Herkunft states: “Unbeschwert ist an Višegrad für mich kaum ein Ort mehr. Kaum eine Erinnerung nur persönlich,” (2019, 193) 201 Glissant describes transplanted people in his collected essays as dispersed or exiled people “who continue to survive elsewhere,” while transferred people refer to those that fell victim to the slave trade; it is a transfer “of a population to another place where they change into something different.” (Glissant 1989, 14) 299 then the analysis continues the discussion of lineage, absence, and presence, but contextualizes these notions by looking at the singularity of their experiences to make observations that avoid generalizing one experience while providing a fuller picture of the horizon which, in this specific analysis, are the notions of lineage, absence, and presence and how they interact. After all, engaging in decolonial conversations holds the “ever-present danger of appropriating and displacing”, as Jason Groves has fittingly put it (2022). The aim of my research and of these conversations is never to appropriate a particular context of lived experience, nor intends to speak for how Black and Native people experience violence in the world. The position from which Glissant, Solomon Rivers, or Tiffany Lethabo King write, feel, and suffer, their emotions and their context are not Stanišić’s and, clearly, are not mine.202 To reiterate, the aim of these decolonial conversations is instead to open up new multiplicitous and polyphonic spaces, to strive for the possibility of a meeting of perspective, an opening of what lies beyond any particular horizon to other horizons. This dialogical comportment engenders the means of carrying to the surface and articulating lineages, to better appreciate, scrutinize, and think about elements that shape, disrupt, enrich, or cost lives, and thus of writing to survive. “Unbeschwert ist an Višegrad für mich kaum ein Ort mehr. Kaum eine Erinnerung nur persönlich.” This quote, taken from Stanišić’s latest book Herkunft, points most clearly to the troika of lineage – absence – presence which is noticeable throughout his writing. Višegrad embodies the struggle of lineage and both absence and the presence of absence. Višegrad is closely connected to his grandfather Slavko and his grandmother Katarina, though the first one has long been gone (both in Grammofon and in Herkunft) and the latter is in the grip of dementia and at 202 Any appropriation would be yet another form of violence that I truly hope and strive to avoid. For me, it is essential to follow this guideline, and subject myself to a constant process of self-reflection, of reassessment, and of keeping myself accountable to avoid forms of epistemological violence, to not speak for others. 300 death’s door (in Herkunft). It is the place both Aleksandar and Saša were born and where their parents started their family. But it is also the place where they had to fear for their lives and where they had to flee. Višegrad has thus become a symbol of lineage disrupted. But the city is not only place of personal trauma, but also a pars pro toto for the dissolution of Yugoslavia (see also the discussion of Opa Slavko in chapter three), the Bosnian War, its ethnic genocide, and the reported lack of remorse.203 Višegrad is hence a symbol of lineage disrupted which is shown in the unease that Aleksandar feels upon his first return to Višegrad and that Saša formulates in the quoted sentences. In Grammofon, the uneasiness of lineage is personified in the figure of Miki. Miki is Aleksandar’s uncle, the brother of his father. Unlike his brother, Miki does not flee Višegrad when the attack on the city starts. Miki is part of the attacking force, having joined the Serbian army. Miki’s turn to nationalism is foreshadowed early in the novel, during a family fest before the start of the war where Miki’s best friend, Kamenko204, disrupts the merriment when a song is played and sung that, for him, is not Serbian: So eine Musik in meinem Dorf! Sind wir hier in Veletovo oder in Istanbul? Sind wir Menschen oder Zigeuner? Unsere Könige und Helden sollt ihr besingen, unsere Schlachten und den serbischen Großstaat! Miki geht morgen in die Waffen und ihr stopft ihm am letzten Abend mit diesem türkischen Zigeunerdreck die Ohren? (Stanišić 2006, 46) Not only is it concretely mentioned that Miki is joining the Serbian army (“Miki geht morgen in die Waffen,” see also the statement one page later by Aleksandar’s father: “Der wird ja auch 203 “In total, three people have returned to the town of Višegrad, a young couple and an old lady. People are not returning both because of the trauma they went through and the absence of regret among Serbs for their atrocities.” (131-132, Bećirević, quoting Bakira Hasečić, a women’s rights activist the author interviewed; my emphasis) Similarly, Bećirević interviewed a Serbian doctor who reportedly refused to treat Bosniaks during the war. The doctor merely responded to the accusations by saying: “I honestly knew nothing about that. I never heard about crimes against Bosniaks. Believe me, I did not hear anything until after the war.” (2014, 130) Bečirević contextualizes and comments on the doctor’s quote, stating: “The Mehmed-paša Sokolović Bridge and the Drina River were painted in Bosniak blood, and houses were burning in and around Višegrad with the cries of people inside. Bearing this in mind – the magnitude of the genocide – it simply seems impossible that the doctor was unaware of what was occurring.” (2014, 130) 204 According to Milica Grujičić, Kamenko is the Serbian name of Barney Rubble/Barney Geröllheimer from The Flintstones (1960-1966). Like in the famous TV series, Kamenko in the novel “denkt wie ein Mensch aus der Steinzeit.” (Grujičić 2019, 201). 301 Soldat, das merkt man ihm an”), but his best friend is a clear-cut ethnonationalist (see also the discussion by Milica Grujičić [2019, 201-204]). Throughout the war, Miki remains a Serbian soldier, shooting and killing people that, like his sister-in-law, are Bosniaks. After the war, Miki continues his life in Višegrad and once Aleksandar returns to the city, he also has to face his uncle: “Als Aleksandar von Person zu Person geht, steht hinter alldem Unausgesprochen [sic] der Name des Onkels als eine allgegenwärtige, gefährliche Präsenz, von der man nicht reden solle.” (Grujičić 2019, 224-225) Grujičić appears to be the only analyst to recognize the importance of Miki during Aleksandar’s return to Višegrad. Her analysis is worth retracing, at least briefly. She notes that throughout town Miki is only known by his first name, “das Aussprechen von Mikis vollem Namen [erweist sich] als völlig überflüssig” (2019, 225) as the name plate on his door indicates. Subsequently, the homodiegetic narration adopts this: “Miki startet den Wagen […]. Miki fährt mit mir zu einem Haus […]. Miki schließt die größte Zelle auf […]. Miki hat Listen gemacht. Miki fährt mit mir zur Feuerwehrstation […]. Miki faltet die Hände im Schoß […].” (Stanišić 2006, 306-307) Grujičić asserts that the repeated use of his name “steht dabei im krassen Kontrast zu seiner Person als unerwünschtem Gesprächsthema.” (2019, 225) It seems that Aleksandar simultaneously attempts to keep any emotion out of the encounter with his uncle while also forcing himself to engage with Miki and the disrupted family lineage that he represents. Miki takes Aleksandar on a ride through town and though the two barely talk, it appears as if Miki takes him to the places in Višegrad where atrocities took place. The first stop is the bridge over the river Drina, followed by Hotel Bikavac where “Muslim men and women were […] tortured and killed” (Bećirević 2014, 128; see also Grujičić 2017, 186), and shortly after Hotel Vilina Vlas which was used as a camp for torture and rape. That the visit to the latter is preceded by Miki asking 302 Aleksandar “wann hast du vor, Kinder zu zeugen?” might indicate that Miki was involved in the camp at Vilina Vlas or that he, at least, still thinks of national purity.205 Particularly the use of the verb “zeugen” indicates that, as it is a rather clinical term (‘to sire,’ to beget’) that strongly emphasizes the aspect of procreation, of expanding the lineage. Their tour of Višegrad hits the police station before ending at the fire station. Whether Miki takes Aleksandar to places that are mnemonically connected to death and torture as a sign of repentance or of pride remains ambiguous. Just once does their interaction leave the field of unanswered small talk or insinuations created by the places they visit: as they end their trip at the fire station – a spot that was used as a place for torture and murder during the war, rather than help save people (see Grujičić 2019, 205) –, Miki decries to Aleksandar that Miki’s brothers do not visit their mother in Višegrad. “Dein Vater und Bora haben mit mir ein Problem. Das ist eine Sache unter uns, das hat mit unserer Mutter nichts zu tun. Sag ihnen das.” (Stanišić 2006, 307) Miki tells him that Aleksandar’s father has not talked to him in seven years: “Für deinen Vater bin ich weniger wert als ein ausgespuckter Kaugummi.” (2006, 307) To this point, Miki has remained calm. But then he explodes: “Aber das geht so nicht!, schreit er plötzlich, das geht so nicht!, schreit er, das geht nicht, so nicht!, schreit er, schreit er, schreit er, das geht so nicht, nicht so!” (2006, 307) Aleksandar actively restrains himself from giving any response, verbally or with his body language. The repetitiveness of Miki’s cry and the diegetic recounting point to an unloading of emotions that have long been suppressed, but, at the same time, also a futility in a denial that potentially refers both to the treatment of Miki and his mother by his brothers and an understanding of the insoluble rupture in the family that he 205 According to reports that Edina Bećirević discusses in Genocide on the Drina River, the goal of camps such as Vilina Vlas was for as many women as possible to be “inseminated by the Serb seed.” (2014, 122) See also Lynda E. Boose’s article “Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory” (2002). 303 caused. This futility is emphasized in Aleksandar’s lack of response – instead of engaging with his emotions, Miki’s outburst, or the reason for the family strife, the homodiegetic narrator focuses merely on describing Miki’s gestures: “Ich bin überragend im Beschreiben von Gesten.” (Stanišić 2006, 308) Taking into consideration that Miki seems to primarily blame his brothers instead of acknowledging his part in their fractured relationship tilts the interpretation of the city tour that he takes Aleksandar on towards pride rather than repentance. This is, after all, also in line with the lack of remorse and repentance that Edina Bećirević describes in her subchapter on Višegrad in Genocide on the Drina River (2014). It is noteworthy that Miki, just like Aleksandar, has created lists: ”Miki hat Listen gemacht.” (Stanišić 2006, 307) At the same time, Miki is not on any of Aleksandar’s lists. Grujičić argues that “Miki fungiert als Aleksandars Gegenpol.” (2019, 226) At the end of the novel, it has become clear that the strain on the family is irreversible. In the context of family lineage – Aleksandar, his grandmother, great-grandmother, and Miki visit Opa Slavko’s grave –, the tension unloads and it comes to blows between Aleksandar and Miki: “Miki grinst mich an, ich trete zu ihm, unsere Brustkörbe berühren sich, […] ich nehmen den Hut ab und will ihn Miki aufsetzen, er schlägt meine Hand weg, jemand schubst ihn, der Hut und der Stab landen im Matsch.” (Stanišić 2006, 313) The irreparable damage within the family construct, embedded in the fractured lineage represented by Višegrad, at the absence’s presence of Opa Slavko (his grave) comes to full fruition in the two items that fall into the mud: “der Hut und der [Zauber]stab.” Both sorcerer’s hat, made out of cardboard and decorated with yellow and blue stars, and the wand, carved out of a stick, were made by Slavko who gave them to Aleksandar on the “Morgen des Tages, an dessen Abend er starb.” (Stanišić 2006, 11) For young Aleksandar, these two items were magical, as was the advice he received with them: “Die wertvollste Gabe ist die Erfindung, der größte Reichtum die 304 Fantasie.” Hat and wand falling into the mud while Aleksandar and Miki brawl symbolizes that no magic, no fantasy, and no narrative inventions are capable of changing this rupture; reality cannot be overcome, and, just like the hat and the wand, family and communal lineages are muddy, at best. Višegrad’s symbolic function as a disrupted lineage, an absence’s presence and simply an absence is also represented in the figure of Asija, the girl Aleksandar meets while hiding in the basement of their building and whom he tries to contact with letters and phone calls in the second half of the novel. As an orphan girl, Asija is severed from her lineage. As I have discussed in chapter three, Asija can also be read as a pars pro toto for the countless people that were displaced and lost during the Bosnian war. And Milica Grujičić shows that Asija is simultaneously also a stand-in for the country of Bosnia as a whole: “Asija personifiziert Bosnien und ferner all das, was das Land ausmacht: den launischen Fluss Drina, die pittoreske Stadt Višegrad und dessen Bewohner.” (2019, 218)206 And finally, Višegrad also represents the notion of absence’s presence in form of the river Drina as unwilling accomplice, washing away hundreds of dead bodies; in chapter three, in particular, I have shown the great lengths the narrative voices and diegetic characters go to highlight the mediative role the river Drina plays in all of this. Similarly, many buildings in the city had been used for cruel purposes for which they were not intended, such as the fire station (see Grujičić 2019, 205). Višegrad is a geographical place and a mnemonic space, but more than anything it is an idea(l): “Wenn ich zurückgeh in diese intakte Kindheit in Višegrad, in einer Kleinstadt am Vorabend des Krieges, dann immer in dem Bewusstsein, dass ich einen Ort erschaffen habe, den es so nicht mehr gibt. Wenn es ihn überhaupt jemals gegeben hat.” (Stanišić 206 See also Grujičić’s discussion on pages 215-220, especially Asija’s association with the Bosnian poem ‘Inschrift über das Land’ (‘Zapis o zemlji’) on pages 219-220. 305 2017a, 49:36-49:54)207 This nostalgia takes diegetic form which, in turn, is used as an approach to recognize the past and to overcome absences, to use Glissant’s formulation “The past recognized (absences overcome).” Additionally, the second sentence of the quote of Grammofon shows there is an aspect of engaging with this disrupted lineage that transcends the individual and, instead, is communally shared by everyone who had to flee Višegrad, but also, more generally, anyone who has tried to come to terms with the trauma of flight, exile, war, and genocide: “Kaum eine Erinnerung nur persönlich.” Naturally, this context is not as radical or pervasive nor all-encompassing as it is in Glissant’s context. That is not a claim Stanišić’s writings (or, for that matter, I) make. It is nonetheless a pressing theme in all his writing. Lineage, absence, and presence inform Grammofon through the figures of Opa Slavko, Miki, Asija, Zoran, and the role of Višegrad; they inform the narrative voice in Vor dem Fest as well as the multiple Annas; they inform the relationship of the unnamed protagonist and the grandfather in the short story “Gewässer”; and they inform Saša’s relationship to his origins and his negotiation of his grandmother’s illness and her subsequent memory loss and death in Herkunft. It is also Herkunft that provides us with a striking example of the interaction of lineage, absence, and presence. Let us return one final time to Oskoruša and its graveyard. It is the encounter of Saša’s last name on these gravestones that leads to a first attempt at defining ‘Herkunft’ (2019, 32), specifically because this encounter is an impulse that catapults the idea of lineage squarely into his mind and turns into “eine Art Urszenerie […] für mein Selbstporträt mit Ahnen,” (2019, 49) something he finds enormously taxing. The lineage on the 207 See also in Herkunft: “Es kommt mir vor, als stünde ich wegen der Geschichte dieser Stadt, Višegrad, und wegen des Glücks meiner Kindheit in einer Schuld, die ich mit Geschichten begleichen muss. Es kommt mir vor, als meinten meine Geschichten diese Stadt sogar dann, wenn ich nicht über sie schreiben will.” (Stanišić 2019, 193) 306 graveyard, however, is starting to fade twofold. Within the broader context of the novel, Oskoruša is described as a hamlet whose thirteen inhabitants are likely to be its last inhabitants; it is a hamlet that is likely to be soon empty, with no one left to care for the graveyard. This is amplified by the grandmother’s illness. She is, after all, Saša’s introduction and access to Oskoruša. But even in the moment on the graveyard, the disruption of lineage is felt. Even though the name Stanišić is omnipresent, the individual strands of the lineage diegetically remain anonymous as no Stanišić in their grave is given a first name: “Der da ist auch einer, und die auch. Stanišić. Stanišić.” (2019, 28) Saša’s relative, Gavrilo, assures him that no one is forgotten, but both the description of the scene and he himself contradict that: “Moos hatte einige Namen überwachsen, die Zeit einige verwittern lassen. ‘Keiner ist vergessen’, versicherte Gavrilo mir später am Grab meiner Urgroßeltern. Er deutete auf die unleserlichen und sagte: ‘Der da ist auch einer, und die auch. Stanišić, Stanišić.’ Und nach kurzer Pause: ‘Die weiß ich nicht mehr.’” (2019, 28) Although the disruption of the lineage seems to have only just started, it looms large in Oskoruša’s graveyard. Moreover, few spaces embody the dichotomy of absence and absence’s presence as strongly as a graveyard. What is a graveyard if not inherently a place (and institution) to keep those absent present? Graveyards are never for the dead, but those left behind. And unlike the countless dead in the river Drina or the hundreds of thousands in the Atlantic Ocean, Oskoruša’s graveyard is, at the very least, able to keep the memory of those absent visually alive. In so doing, it perhaps manages to close the gap between absence and presence slightly. Although I have discussed memory at the very beginning of this chapter, it has been largely absent from this discussion. But to adequately continue the conversation of lineage, absence, and presence, it is necessary to briefly recall important aspects of multidirectional memory as to then analytically turn the spotlight to this elephant in the room (or rather, in the pages). Michael 307 Rothberg suggests an understanding of memory as multidirectional and thus, “as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative.” (2009, 3) For Rothberg, this engenders afflicted groups to “come into being through their dialogical interaction with others” (5) while highlighting the “inevitable displacements and contingencies that mark all remembrance.” Importantly, multidirectional memory is always negotiated in “multicultural and transnational contexts,” where its dialogical approach has the “ability to build new worlds out of the materials of older worlds,” (2009, 5) and to provide “resources for other groups to articulate their own claims for recognition and justice.” (Rothberg 2011, 524) All these aspects are undoubtedly present in the analysis of Glissant and Stanišić, from highlighting displacements to multicultural and transnational contexts and a focus on “build[ing] new worlds out of the materials of older worlds.” To return this discussion from the realm of theory to the particularities of Glissant and Stanišić, I will return one last time to the poetry of the former. In his epic poem “A Field of Island,” (1995, 33-46) memory (as well as lineage, absence, and presence) plays a central role and, as the subsequent analysis of two stanzas (1995, 37) shows, is negotiated and mediated through the ocean: To know what within your eyes cradles A bay of sky a bird The sea, a devolved caress The sun returned here Beauty of space or hostage Of tentacular future Every word is lost there In the silence of Waters These two rhymeless quatrains are spoken from the point of view of one of the many islands of the Antilles, such as Glissant’s native Martinique – “what within your eyes cradles,” particularly 308 the sea. The first and the second quatrain contrast one another which is expressed by the juxtaposition of “here” in the first and “there” in the second stanza. The context of “here” consists of palpable and concrete elements – sun, sky, bird, and sea. These are elements that the narrative voice has familiarity and certainty with, as it “knows” what is within eyesight, that can be perceived and experienced; there is also an element of intimacy in the use of the verb “cradle” and the description of the sea as a “caress.” The break in these two stanzas is especially visible in the first line of the second quatrain. The juxtaposition of “beauty of space or hostage” is emblematic for the two stanzas in general. While the “here” of the first stanza, the view from the island onto the sea, is a “beauty of space,” this particular point of view also holds the experience of loss and potential futures. The sea is not a hostage per se, but a hostage of a “tentacular future.” The adjective “tentacular” entails notions of the multidirectional, of movement, something that is winding instead of being static; “tentacular,” of course, evokes images of creatures of the sea, a kraken, for example, and thus creates the association with water and something that is below the ocean’s surface. A tentacular future is hence one that is hard to grasp, it is not linear and, in that sense, unpredictable yet charged with numerous, even endless possibilities. “Tentacular” also informs the reader about a specific notion of time; specifically, a notion of time that is contrary to the unidirectional flow of time that European cultures have for centuries simply assumed as a template, particularly as the template of historical development. In other words, the idea of a tentacular future decenters the idea of the unidirectional flow of time and with it, the flow of progress, but also of memory. The last two lines speak to an impossibility of language, a loss of lineage experienced in the Middle Passage, and the fractured nature of recoverable memory as the waters are silent – a silence that might be temporary. Perhaps the future with its tentacles can fill that gap, account for 309 the space left open for those missing or perhaps the loss will continue and will continually be felt. Notice also that for the first time in these two stanzas a noun is not only pluralized – not water, but waters – but also capitalized. In my reading, this speaks to two things: first, no water is the same as it was only a few seconds ago as the currents enforce continual movement, as each drop consists of countless particles which are, in themselves, filled with remnants of life. Secondly, it allows the idea of a concrete engagement with water to be shared in other contexts, such as Stanišić’s mediation of the river Drina. In the context of the Caribbean, Glissant argues that “all that had been left behind” in the Middle Passage, may not be regained for generations to come – except “in the blue savannas of memory or imagination.” The image of the blue savannas clearly links the ocean to the effort of recalling memory. It also emphasizes that any return is only ever possible in memory. Similarly, Stanišić writes in his latest book how the Drina had washed away his memories of thirty years but, as his debut novel has shown, is also substantial in the process of recall. Remember also the lists created by the protagonist of the short story. I understand Glissant and Stanišić to be conversing in a multidirectional dialogue, particularly of memory, of a remembrance that is ruptured and hindered. Regarding his notion of multidirectional memory and “the interlacing of memories,” Michael Rothberg proposes a comportment towards the future: “The only way forward is through their entanglement.” (2009, 313) Though lineages and memories discussed in this chapter are ruptured and hindered, I still believe that the notion of entanglement can be a productive form of engagement, particularly in two natural materials turned metaphors found in Africana and Caribbean theory: alluvium and sargassum.208 208 One could also consider Tiffany Lethabo King’s notion of the shoal as a metaphor that is used with a similar purpose. 310 But what exactly is the relevance of sediment material (alluvium) and macro-algae (sargassum) for discussions of lineage, memory, and emerging knowledge? And what makes them good metaphors to engage with the disruptions and fractures of lineages and memories? Alluvium (pluralized: alluvia) is the term used to describe the accumulated sediments of organic matter like sand, silt, rock, or clay that is deposited by rivers, usually “where rivers empty into lakes and overflow riverbanks, forming floodplains and deltas,” (Pariona 2017) at the meeting point of river and land.209 The metaphorical utility of this sedimentation lies, first, in its hybridity and, second, in it connecting water and land. The hybridity of the coming together of organic materials, for example, finds mirroring in the idea of “the layering of one memory over another.” (wa Thiong’o 2005, 157) Moreover, it is an apt image for the imposition of a colonial identity, as the already existing memory is suppressed by the colonizing prescriptions that lay themselves over that which already exists, “a previous native memory buried under another, a foreign alluvium becoming the new visible identity of a place.” (wa Thiong’o 2005, 157) We might say that the expected and, at times, coerced demand for assimilation in an immigration country like Germany flips this notion on its head and instead requires newcomers (as well as those that are perceived to be ‘Undeutsch,’ to use Fatima El-Tayeb’s term) to bury their memories and their identity below that which already exists, thus creating a nationalizing and engrossing alluvium. In a sense, this inverse process where the existing sediments of the alluvium push down the fresh sediments brought by rivers (of people) is unnatural as usually the newer is layered on top of the old. Metaphorically perceiving the social structure of a country in this way, then, perhaps engenders the following impulse: clinging to the old and closing oneself off to the new is unhealthy as renewal is a natural process; clinging to the old and closing oneself off to the new lessens the fertility of the alluvium which, after all, is not 209 According to Amber Pariona (2017), “Alluvium deposits have also been known to fill in small lakes over time.” 311 only known for its fertile soil, but throughout history “has been of significant importance to the development of humans throughout history.” (Pariona 2017) But thinking with the alluvium also holds positive possibilities. Glissant argues that “there is opacity now at the bottom of the mirror [in which Western humanity reflected the world in its own image], a whole alluvium deposited by populations, silt that is fertile but, in actual fact, indistinct and unexplored even today.” (1997, 111) In other words, while Western humanity has buried experiences, knowledges, and identities of countless populations under its layer, foreignizing the existing alluvia, there is a “fertile” and “unexplored” alluvium that holds said experiences, knowledges, and identities. In fact, Glissant is convinced that this is a reality that “we are incapable of not experiencing.” (1997, 111) We have to open our minds and our horizons to it. More importantly, we have to articulate the experiences and knowledges, as alluvia represent “the fertile ground of unarticulated memory [and] a fertile crescent for the emerging knowledge to come.” (Stern 2022, 2) Michael Stern argues that, therefore, the inherent hybridity and multiplicity of alluvia make them the “site of a dynamic epistemology as the silt in the alluvia around the globe keeps building, becoming even richer and more complex.” (2022, 2) In his forthcoming book, Alluvia: Towards a Poetics of Reworlding, Stern takes the idea of the alluvium further than even wa Thiong’o or Glissant, aiming at a “poetics of the alluvium, where silt built up through time carries the possibility both of unworlding and reworlding.” (Forthcoming 148) This deconstruction and renewal is applicable both to the individual and to communities of peoples as they unearth the mingling multiplicities that have come together in alluvia of (cultural) memory. Glissant, for example, understands the alluvium in the context of the notion of the abyss “as a site of transition” (Stern Forthcoming, 205) where “memory of the abyss served as an alluvium for these metamorphoses.” (Glissant 1997, 7) Though the alluvium builds up both on land and in water, 312 Glissant’s connection of abyss and alluvium locates the latter in the watery depths of the ocean – which is where the image of the alluvium flows into the metaphor of sargassum. Like alluvium, sargassum, too, is biotic matter. More specifically, sargassum is the name given to a species of seaweed, a “migrating holopelagic macro-algae” (Pinnix 2018, 425) that can entangle more sargassum as well as plastics and other materials swimming in the ocean to form large mats. It can be found primarily in the so-called Sargasso Sea of the coast of the Eastern US and Northern Caribbean, but “large mats of sargassum have also been discovered in new areas, such as off the coast of Africa and in the South Atlantic” (Pinnix 2018, 431) as well as in the Mediterranean Sea. In his article “Sargassum in the Black Atlantic,” (2019) Aaron Pinnix suggests sargassum as a modification of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, arguing that the “terrestrial figure [of] the rhizome” “falters as a model for transoceanic connection.” (2019, 425) Though Pinnix does not consider alluvium in his discussion, his usage of sargassum shares alluvium’s double layer of organic physicality and figurative metaphor. More prominently than the sedimented layers of the alluvium, “sargassum entangles. It entangles other pieces of sargassum to create mats, but it also entangles other materials that come into contact with it.” (Pinnix 2019, 431) In so doing, it physically entangles, but it also “figuratively entangle[es] diverse narratives,” (Pinnix 2019, 427) as the mats become both a molecular, living archive of the oceans “through its utilization of matter drawn from the dead” (434; see also Sharpe 2016, especially 40- 41) and a “literal moving archive of human produced waste.” (Pinnix 2019, 432) Furthermore, the image of the entangled sargassum is a figurative, micro-scale image of our global world shaped by colonization as “the world [colonization] created, and what came after are entangled, [as] are near and far entangled.” (Mbembe 2021, 91) This notion is supported by Pinnix who argues that “sargassum can be understood as symbolically interconnecting various Atlantic cultures and 313 histories, including Africa, the Mediterranean, Europe and the Americas, while also allowing for gaps in knowledge and interconnection.” (2019, 425-426) Pinnix locates a particular engagement with this entanglement in Glissant’s thought, noting “a form of interrelation present in the Caribbean” articulated by Glissant. This entanglement “crosses oceans but is also marked by violences and lacunae […], abyssal and submerged, troubling the undisturbed functionality of transoceanic connections, since death remains an important presence throughout.” (Pinnix 2019, 429) The idea of sargassum unsurprisingly also closely aligns with Glissant’s notion of “[s]ubmarine roots: that is floating free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches.” (1989, 67) But sargassum, ultimately, not only remains a reminder of death’s presence (i.e., absence’s presence), but is also “able to figuratively surface abyssal histories connected to atrocities such as the Middle Passage” (Pinnix 2019, 425-426) through its organic circulation and its drawing “of sustenance from the depths” of oceans: “Thus, as a figure of relation sargassum makes the ocean as material critically present, while also refusing to ever be attached to one location.” (Pinnix 2019, 426) In a sense, then, the idea of the alluvium makes the point of connection between land and water critically present,210 both materially and metaphorically, while sargassum does so for the oceans. From this base, unarticulated memory may be articulated and suppressed or lost knowledge may become realized. To recall Michael Rothberg’s statement on multidirectional memory: “The only way forward is through their entanglement.” (2009, 313, my emphasis) Sargassum’s (metaphorical) entanglement, but also the entangled layers of alluvia’s sediments of cultural 210 Consider also Édouard Glissant’s novel The Ripening (1985; French original La Lezarde, 1958). Its political plot, first implicitly, later actively revolves around the river Lézarde in Martinique (though a tributary river of the Seine in France and a river in Guadeloupe also carry this name). In the novel, the truth of the characters and the plot “can neither be explicitly nor simply stated, nor can it appear in a flash of insight, but rather emerges slowly like the accretions of experience that accumulate in the Lézarde River,” as Michael Dash, the English translator writes (1985, 10). 314 memory “entail[…] a continual process of becoming through interrelation.” (Pinnix 2019, 427) The notion of entanglement is powerful because it necessitates hybridity and multiplicity that is, at least in the organic reality of sargassum and its metaphorical image, non-hierarchical and, as Pinnix argues, acentered (2019, 433). On a broader perspective, our contemporary world is a web of entanglements. Not only are local decisions very capable of having global ripple effects, but we see the entanglement most notably in the fact that global north and global south are not mere geographical delineations anymore: today, the global north is in the global south and vice versa. Achille Mbeme (2021) speaks of planetary entanglement. Like Stanišić’s writing, though with a far more global purview in mind, Mbembe emphasizes the necessity of understanding and productively engaging in the different strands of global entanglement: To reopen the future of our planet to all who inhabit it, we will have to earn how to share it again among humans, but also between humans and non-humans, between the multiple species that populate our planet. It is only under these conditions that, becoming aware of our precariousness as a species in the face of ecological threats, we will be able to overcome the possibility of outright human extinction. (2021, 41) Considering, for example, the manifold concurrent prognoses that largely inhabited parts of the earth will become unlivable in this century, it should be clear that current hegemonic and hierarchical mindsets will not have us equipped for this upcoming reality. Stanišić’s writing, of course, does not draw such grandiose and overarching conclusions. But its narrative focus on survival is nonetheless dictated by instances of entanglement, most clearly in the transeuropean inscriptions discussed in chapter five.211 And while Stanišić’s writing does not share Mbembe’s global perspective, both Stanišić and Mbembe emphasize the local, the particular which for 211 Considering the fifth chapter, also think about the alluvial notion of layering and the layering of the idea of ‘Herkunft’ throughout Herkunft, the layering of different Heimaten in both Stanišić’s conception and generally in the diasporic experience. 315 Mbembe is needed to inform the global.212 In that sense, the engagement in Stanišić’s texts with and negotiation of survival is nonetheless representative of the challenges millions of people face daily. But more than that, I want to productively use the paradigms of the conversation started by the decolonial couplet(s) and weave Stanišić’s writing more profoundly into the images of alluvium and sargassum. We may consider the river Drina, its rich history (in stories and in history), and the countless memories, lineages, names, and possibilities of uncounted people that died in both World Wars, the Bosnian War, and even in centuries prior to that. Recall the river’s mediated monologue towards the end of Grammofon: “Der Winterkälte trotze sie und die Herbstregen wühlen sie nicht auf, aber sie habe Angst davor, dass die Schüsse auch uns mit Krieg anstecken. Gegen den Felsen klagt sie, unzählige Kriege habe sie durchgemacht, einer scheußlicher als der andere. So viele Leichen habe sie tragen müssen, so viele gesprengte Brücken ruhen für immer auf ihrem Grund.“ (2006, 211)213 And recall also Stanišić’s talking about the Drina as a “geschichtliche, immer anwesende Instanz, […] aufgeladen mit Geschichte. Seit Generationen werden dort Verbrechen verübt.” (Mare 2014, 301) Though the first point of contact may be found in the shared reliance on the mediation of their essence via water, this is shallow and superficial. Considering the Drina and the alluvium created by the numerous dead people that passed through her, we may consider an alluvium built throughout all of Stanišić’s writing, an alluvium layered by the histories and memories of all the people that die in and around the Drina throughout Grammofon, “Gewässer,” and Herkunft. But I do not think such a reading would be all 212 “[T]he sharing of singularities is indeed a precondition to a politics of relation and of the in-common.” (Mbembe 2021, 109, emphasis in original) 213 Further north along the river, where the river flows into Serbia close to the town Mali Zvornik, recent archeological discoveries show that the area used to be a large Byzantine city. The history of the Drina and the many lineages that make up her alluvia are not only on her riverbed, but also on her shores. 316 too productive. Instead, I want to read one of Stanišić’s most common diegetic tactic as a form of a narrativizing alluvium, a narrativizing entanglement: “Die Abschweifung ist Modus meines Schreibens.” (Stanišić 2019, 36; see also Stanišić 2017a, 26:05-26:27) I have touched on the narrative use of digressions, the meandering form of storytelling acutely present in Stanišić’s writing briefly in chapter three. I will show how the weaving together of the metaphors of alluvium and sargassum with the narrative digressions in Stanišić’s writing are not a pastime, a means of forcing Stanišić back into the conversation, but instead a productive reframing of the narrative engagements with memory, lineage, and survival that allows us to read the digressions as forms of narrative entanglements that, like alluvium’s fertile soil, enrich the narratives. Digressions are central to Stanišić’s stories: “Ohne Abschweifung wären meine Geschichten überhaupt nicht meine. Die Abschweifung ist Modus meines Schreibens.” There are three concrete purposes engendered by narrativizing alluvia. Like sediments of alluvia, digressions narratively layer the stories, sediment upon sediment, to bury the truth one does not wish to face. Each meandering sediment becomes a retarding moment in which the narrator barely keeps the breaking out of the Bosnian War under the surface (Grammofon); in which the trauma of the village is only slowly unearthed under sediments of history, memory, and vanities (Vor dem Fest); in which travels through France and superficial relationships long cloud the fear of the grandfather’s death (“Gewässer”); in which digressions are a shield used to cope with the grandmother’s illness and death (Herkunft). In so doing, digressions both create and navigate alluvia, as they narratively contribute to sedimentation while simultaneously contextualizing the main themes of the stories; in that rich narrative soil, they follow an associate method where the narrators follow one association to the next without thought for chronology or urgency – several chapters, for example, associatively spring from the sight of a snake in a memory in Herkunft – and, hence, unearth 317 memories and amplify their richness. It is a simultaneous pushing away and unearthing through which digressions create alluvia rich in memory and narrative storytelling. Similarly, we can read the image of the alluvium as an emphasis of the importance of storytelling. Glissant understands the layers of the alluvium as opaque and not transparent. This opaqueness allows readings of the surface layer, but not the depth which may go unrecognized. Through this image, Glissant adequately describes the (post)colonial situation in Africa and the Caribbean. The foreign alluvium that wa Thiong’o described creates the layer that is visible, that is read and perceived as the knowledge of a place, of a people, of a culture. The layers beneath are not acknowledged as they are not transparent. But it is important to transcend or accept the opaqueness of the lower layers to be able to perceive and read them. Just like the memories and lineages waiting to be articulated in the lower layers of the alluvium, the raw (in the sense of the raw essence) material of any narrative is hidden underneath layers, pointing to aspect of that which cannot be articulated easily. How then can we – or rather an artist – carry these materials to the surface? It is through the telling of stories, specifically stories that engage with memories and lineages that demand articulation. These narrativizing alluvia engage with the question of surviving and enrich the diegesis through its protective meanderings in that they both deepen the stories and increase the number and intensity of memories unearthed. Importantly, these narrativizing alluvia are engendered by a web of entanglements. These entanglements go beyond general plot causalities and connections in that they, as Maha El Hissy argues about the literary strategy of digression, “Grenzen aufheb[en] und überschreite[n].” (2020, 144) They are transcultural and transnational entanglements that, in the spirit of multidirectional memory, negotiate and articulate memory. They are entangled lineages that scrutinize hierarchies of remembering and of belonging. The story of the Bosnian 318 War in Grammofon is inextricably entangled with the life of Aleksandar in Germany, but also the attempt at recovering memory a decade later. Even the digressions themselves are entangled in the presence of the war where the attempts to keep him in the realm of absence are futile, as countless insinuations and implications swell up under the surface of the narrative. The “Selbstporträt” of Saša in Herkunft, at first an attempt at defining himself in the face of German bureaucracy and citizenship forms, becomes inextricably entangled with the dwindling memories of his grandmother. In a sense, the grandmother’s memories are one strand that slowly drifts away from the web (or sargassum mat) of entanglement and Saša’s narration, particularly his digressions, attempt to wrap his diegetic strands of memory around the grandmother’s, archiving and, at times, embellishing them, thus keeping them entangled and connected. We once again may recall Rothberg’s quote: The only way forward in the negotiation of memory is “through their entanglement.” Entanglement is perhaps most essential in Vor dem Fest. In it, the historical reports have, at first, the character of digressions that disrupt the narrative. The layers (of alluvia) built up by those digressions, however, are later revealed to be essential as the historical reports – archived memories – come to influence and entangle the present. Crucially, the present also becomes entangled in the past; most notably in Frau Schwermuth’s work of fictionalizing, inventing, or rewriting historical reports. To illustrate this, let us briefly return to a scene of the novel that was analyzed in the third chapter. The scene in question is really a short episode, as it spans six (mostly short) chapters that connect the second and third part of the novel (pages 207-224). In these chapters, the characters Anna Geher, Wilfried Schramm, and Johanna Schwermuth come together and different pasts entangle the present: while Anna and Wilfried are in the present, Frau Schwermuth perceives herself to be in 1636. Two of the chapters in question are located in 1722 319 in which Anna in the present and Anna from 1722 become blurred. This is followed by a third chapter in 1636 and a subsequent blurring of a third Anna (from 1636) into the entanglement of Annas, the entanglement of past and present. The final chapter of the episode plays out this entangled conglomeration and, as my analysis in chapter three has shown, takes an important step within the diegesis to articulate the traumatic memories that are so relevant for the village in Vor dem Fest.214 Reading Stanišić’s digressions alongside the metaphors of alluvium and the non- hierarchical entanglement of sargassum allows us to truly emphasize the necessity and importance of Stanišić’s “Abschweifungen.” Their role in deepening and articulating memories, but more importantly their role in bringing different (multidirectional) memories into dialogue and lineages into question is essential for diegetic storytelling in Stanišić’s writing and, thus, also for the negotiation of how stories are told as means of surviving. (Narrativizing) alluvia and entangled sargassum, metaphorically applied, illuminate, enhance, and amplify the effect of the diegetic digressions. In lieu of concluding words for this part, I want to emphasize that the decolonial conversation I engage in between Glissant and Stanišić is not an exercise in equivalence: Stanišić’s engagement with death, with war, with violence, and loss of lineage is particular, just as Glissant’s context is particular. And yet, there is a commonality in experiencing suffering. By this, I don’t mean the concrete forms, violences, and severities of suffering – they are impossible to compare – but instead the common capacity for and response to suffering. Michael Rothberg ascribes just this notion of suffering to W.E.B. Du Bois, writing: “Du Bois’s precept [is] that no suffering should be considered ‘separate and unique’ […] [with] the important corollary specifying that different legacies of suffering are not therefore ‘equal’.” (2011, 533) In the case of Stanišić and Glissant, 214 For a detailed analysis of this short episode, see also Dominik Zink (2017, 66-71). 320 this entails a mediation that, in both singular instances, “becomes the voice of a poly-temporal lineage of a place, almost inaudible but always present for the poet who knows how to attune herself, who knows how to listen,” to quote Michael Stern (Forthcoming, 150). We see a lineage from intertextual references to, among others, Ivo Andrić, to three different protagonists engaging with the war in Višegrad in Stanišić’s writing. We also see the entanglement of digressions enrich the narratives and open poly-temporal, transnational, and transcultural negotiations. In Glissant, we see the engagement with the poly-temporal lineage of the Middle Passage and the difficulty of comprehending the memory, trauma, and loss of its rupture. But, looking back at my analysis to this point, there are also two lineages of genocide: the Middle Passage in the context of the Atlantic Ocean, and the Bosnian War in the context of the Drina. Tiffany Lethabo King writes: “Each form of violence has its own way of contaminating, haunting, touching, caressing, and whispering to the other. Their force is particular yet like liquid, as they can spill and seep into the spaces that we carve out as bound off and untouched by the other.” (2019, x) Instead of an equation or equivalence between these genealogies, my analysis points to a shared human experience that informs us about the commonality of suffering, though the particular suffering is always singular. More than that, my analysis points to a shared impossibility of return, be it a return of the countless bodies in their marine graves or the lost lineages and memories. Just like Glissant’s context, King’s discussion centers the singularity of genocidal violence experienced by Black and Native people. Yet certain elements of genocidal violence transcend or, to use King’s words, contaminate, haunt, touch, and caress. Returning to Stanišić and Glissant, I propose that there is value in the narrativity of these representations and experiences, as put into prose and lyrical forms. This creative engagement and mediation is in itself a form of surviving: of that which is no longer present, which cannot be present and, in this particular context of loss of words and silent waters, cannot be named. It is also 321 a narrative and artistic engagement with transcultural and transnational movement and with hybridity. In that sense, we might speak of alluvial poetry and alluvial literature: literature, storytelling, poetry that travels and settles where it is not native, but then becomes native in its hybridity. Its relevance and essence may not be immediately visible at the surface, but there is so much potential for things to grow out of it (to stay with the image of the alluvium); the soil for art and artistic engagement of any kind is enormously fertile. Drawing on the previous discussion, we might call Stanišić’s writing alluvial. The idea of alluvial literature is, at this moment, merely the glimpse of an idea that, I believe, holds a lot of potential. It is an idea that I will continue to work on and expand to see what ultimately comes of it. Perhaps it can function as a satisfactory solution to my discontent with the notion of ‘literature of migration’ and, to a lesser extent, even the preferred ‘narratives of migration’ that I discussed in chapter two. To round off this dissertation, I will now bring concrete sociopolitical critique to the realm of humanistic inquiry to round out this foray into decolonial couplets to show how they can not only engender unique analytic readings and help approach transnational issues from several perspectives by bringing thinkers from different epistemologies into conversation but can also lay the groundwork for and decisively inform tangible forms of criticism. After all, the metaphor of the water has a real-life equivalency in the precarious aspect of the migrant traveling by sea. 322 In Lieu of a Conclusion: Death in the Mediterranean Figure 4 Palimpsest by Doris Salcedo Figure 5 Palimpsest by Doris Salcedo In these two images, you can see an art installation by Columbian visual artist Doris Salcedo titled “Palimpsest.” Textured slabs of stone display the name of 300 refugees who lost their lives on the perilous Mediterranean passage from Africa to Europe. It looks as though the letters are etched into the surface of the stone. But, in fact, it is water that is holding the shape of names, seeping up slowly through tiny holes in the stone. After some time, the water and thus, the names disappear, and other names start to emerge with water seeping up through holes in other stone slabs. In this way, “Palimpsest” mirrors ebb and flow. The installation explores how easy it is for lives to vanish and be forgotten. The scenery evokes lines in the sand: their names fade, but more names replace them. In that sense, it is a constant tide of people, mirroring the people washed up on to European shores on a regular basis. In this final text, in lieu of a conclusion, I will show how decolonial couplets can be used for concrete sociopolitical critique of the current refugee crisis in the Mediterranean Sea. Placing those (people, memories, lineages) lost in the Middle Passage into conversation with those (people, memories, lineages) lost in Bosnia, showing ways in which Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe can come together, and discussing examples of and ways in which writing and storytelling aims at 323 surviving physical and social death now culminate in this analysis of people that did not survive and that are currently experiencing social death. Throughout the dissertation, I have shown how human imagination and artistic expression have the power to bring up, articulate, and carry forth lost memory, negotiate death and structural exclusion, and formulating visions for the present and the future. Instead of simply regurgitating what has been said in the previous chapters, I want to use this conclusion as a concrete example to show the continuing relevance of imagination and artistic expression in enabling us to perceive the world. I want to show why decolonial couplets are important as a methodology. I also want to stress the following: my dissertation has engaged with issues that I believe to be very important. Tackling them and analyzing the literary texts, primarily Stanišić’s publications, is an endeavor that, for all its worth, is diminished if it remains general and theoretical instead of applying it directly to concrete moments of concern and crisis. This is why I now turn to the myriad instances of physical and social death that continue to happen on and around the Mediterranean Sea. To put it bluntly: Any writing, any teaching about German colonialism, about the remnants of Germany’s colonial empire, of the country’s heterogeneous and multicultural reality ultimately needs to question and scrutinize Europe and its acceptance of and complicity in refugee camps within and at its borders. For that purpose, I first focus on Achille Mbembe’s concept of Necropower or Necropolitics, an idea that he originally discussed in an essay in 2003 and followed up with a book of essays that was published in French in 2016 and translated into English in 2019. The starting point of Mbembe’s discussion is Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower. Mbembe understands biopower as the sovereign power over mortality, “that domain of life over which power has asserted its control.” (2019, 66) While Foucault traces a long genealogy of biopower, I will focus on one brief example. Mbembe asserts that biopower in its contemporary form and force acts 324 mainly through discipline (e.g., laws, systems of justice) and regulation (e.g., supply and distribution of medicine). As such, biopower is often traceable in the social and political control that many governments today enact on populations. One very recent example is the current shortage of four prominent cancer medications in the United States. In providing its citizens with the medication, the US government asserts its power over their lives and extends them. This power, however, only becomes truly visible in a situation as the current one. As there is not enough medication available, the hold over people’s lives becomes tragically clear as they are dependent on the medication and thus dependent on the government. An article on the shortage, published by CNBC, quotes the 76-year-old Robert Landfair who is suffering from Stage 4 prostate cancer. In the article, he is quoted as saying: “I definitely need that drug. […] It’s the only way I see my life.” (Lovelace Jr., and Kopf 2023) Access, dependency, and regulation are one of the more pervasive means of biopower in our current age. While Foucault’s notion of biopower accounts for death, Mbembe argues that it does so insufficiently “to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death.” (2019, 92) Mbembe considers a variety of examples to make his point, from colonial legacies to numerous wars fought all over the world. He argues that death appears to be a very private matter, but, in fact, must be considered as one of the most public matters as death and the political and social power over it can be found in every manifestation of government. One example that is both temporally and geographically close to our location today is police brutality, as in 2021, close to 1000 people have been shot and killed by the police. The racial implications of this topic are well- documented, one of which is the all-encompassing, pervasive fear that comes with such hierarchies, with bodies regulated by violence (see Ta-Nehisi Coates 2015, pages 14-21). But Mbembe does not dismiss biopower, but instead reads it as the inextricably intertwined 325 sibling of necropower or, as I will refer to it subsequently, necropolitics. In short, necropolitics is the way social and political power direct who may live and who must die, enabling Mbembe to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds, that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead. (Mbembe 2019, 92) There is likely no example for the creation of a death world as singular and haunting as the concentration camp. But there are many necropolitical realities that stare at us in the 21st century. Two-plus years of a state of exception during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated quite clearly the biopolitical and necropolitical realities that subject “vast populations […] to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead,” which make clear the populations governments thought expendable, “bodies with minimal resistance” to use Mbembe’s phrase.215 Data by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for one, shows the enormous disparity of hospitalization and death rates between White, Non-Hispanic persons and historically and structurally repressed and discriminated peoples (CDC 2023). Consider also the proposals by several governments, for example in the United Kingdom and Sweden, of achieving “herd immunity” – who would have been harmed the most by such action? This question is, of course, rhetorical. Part of necropolitical violence is inactivity of those in power. Allow me to briefly point to one more contemporary necropolitical reality that appears to turn more precarious and outright hostile by the week: the treatment of LGBTQUIA+ people, in particular of the transgender community and the continuing flood of newly passed laws with which many bodies of government deny them their human rights and their human dignity. 215 For further discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of necropolitics, see Christopher J. Lee’s “The necropolitics of COVID-19” (2020), Tony Sandset, “The necropolitics of COVID-19: Race, class and slow death in an ongoing pandemic,” (2021), and as analysis focusing on the Mediterranean context, Maurice Stierl and Deanna Dadusc’s “The ‘Covid excuse’: EUropean border violence in the Mediterranean Sea.” (2022) 326 There is one ongoing necropolitical reality, however, that encapsulates watery deaths, their mediation through bodies of water, and, in short, appears as a sad contemporary companion to my decolonial couplet of river Drina and the Atlantic Ocean: the migration routes on the Mediterranean Sea. According to the Missing Migrants Project, since 2014, close to 27,000 people have gone missing on their way from the African to the European continent, many of them dead (2023). And those numbers only speak to what has been visible enough to record. Achille Mbembe writes in the fourth chapter of Necropolitics: “In an increasingly Balkanized and isolated world, where are the most deadly migrant routes? It is Europe! Who claims the largest number of skeletons and the largest marine cemetery in this century? Again, it is Europe!” (2019, 102) The deadliest known migrant route in the world is a continuous deathtrap for human beings fleeing war, hoping for a better life. Those that survive the passage and arrive on shore mostly find themselves in one of numerous refugee camps, like the infamous Camp Moria in Greece or, in the years 2015 and 2016, Camp Calais in northern France. These camps are veritable death-worlds, at Europe’s border and inside of it. Mbembe describes them accurately as “places of internment” and “spaces of relegation,” rendering human beings “illegal and ultimately undeserving of dignity.” (2019, 102-103) One need only to see images of these camps, let alone listen to its inhabitants, to perceive the forced deprivation of dignity. Mbembe rightly speaks of a “Europe of camps. Samos, Chios, Lesbos, Idomeni, Lampedusa, Vintimille, Sicily, Subotica – the list goes on.” (2019, 102) In the early 2000s, Mbembe writes, anthropologist Michael Agier located roughly four hundred refugee camps within the borders of the European Union. Since 2015, “new camps and new sorting infrastructures have been created both in Europe and on its borders and, at its insistence, in third world countries. In 2011, this array of detention spaces contained up to thirty-two thousand people. In 2016, the total had grown to forty-seven thousand.” (Mbembe 2019, 103) The UN’s Refugee 327 Agency called the situation a “widespread, longstanding, and largely overlooked tragedy” in June 2022 (United Nations 2022). In the context of the camp but also in the context of the open sea, inactivity and indifference are powerful necropolitical tools. Davies and Isakjee (2019) recall the conditions in Calais, at one point Europe’s largest refugee camp, within the borders of the European Union. Insufficient food provisions, enforced water shortages, lack of heating and shelter indicative of human dignity led to a range of illnesses: “The violence of the camp crept under the skin in the form of scabies, which affected a fifth of its 10,000 residents.” (Davies and Isakjee 2019, 215) These “repressed topographies of cruelty” (Mbembe 2003, 40) are one example of the structural, necropolitical violence to which refugees coming to Europe are subjected as they show the way in which “power can be administered through the deliberate withholding of care.” (Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017, 1269) This use of necropolitical violence calls to my mind a statement by Aimé Césaire: “A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.” (2000, 31) Moving from one ‘death world’ to another, the necropolitical violence that engenders the harrowing numbers of people of all ages drowning in the Mediterranean Sea is one of abyssal ruptures, unarticulated grief, and lost knowledge and memories. Each year since 2014, at least 1500 people died or went missing at sea, with numbers currently rising once more (United Nations 2022). In 2022, in Italy alone, almost 64,000 people arrived by sea, 6,590 of which were unaccompanied and separated children (UNICEF 2023). How many exactly did not arrive on shore is unclear, but what is clear: there certainly were some that did not arrive on shore. The marine graveyard named Mediterranean continues to grow drastically. As was the case with Stanišić’s Drina and Glissant’s Atlantic, the Mediterranean is currently an “abyssal womb,” a rupture of 328 lineages, knowledges, and lives. This abyss in the Mediterranean context is echoing history: Jennifer Leetsch argues that the deadly “space for black bodies during the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in the twenty-first century evokes the spectres of another violent passage and of other black bodies that have died in the waters. It constitutes, it may be argued, an echo of the horrors of the Middle Passage.” (Leetsch 2019, 82)216 It is undeniable that, in this historical echo that contextualizes the fractured lineages in the Mediterranean with those in the Middle Passage, there is also a historical echo, or rather a continuation of racism that is responsible for much of the tragedy. After all, Mbembe argues that “racism is the driver of the necropolitical principle insofar as it stands for organized destruction, for a sacrificial economy, the functioning of which requires, on the one hand, a generalized cheapening of the price of life and, on the other, a habituation to loss.” (2019, 38) Throughout the decolonial couplets in this chapter, we have seen the impact that attempting to articulate memory and engaging with violent ruptures and death has, but also the necessity of these engagements in the context of multidirectional memories and remembering. In the Mediterranean Sea, “[s]edimented in this sea, sustained, as though in solution, are histories, interwined narrations.” (Chambers 2010, 679) The abyss of the Mediterranean shows that, after centuries, we are still incapable of avoiding these ruptures, of truly valuing memories and knowledges that we could learn and grow from (‘erschließen’) but instead we close ourselves to it (‘verschließen’) without any consideration to listen to articulations of grief, to make an effort to live in relation to those that come to Europe in search of a better life. Instead, we let them fall into the abyss, indifferent to the lives, the memories, the knowledges lost. Much of it is fueled by the continuing 216 When turning my dissertation into a monograph, I intend to include a closer discussion of the notion of hauntology in the context of decolonial conversations. The idea is that decolonial thought, in creating transnational and transcultural archives of memory, can recover traces of ghosts, spectres, memories that are present but not accessible. After all, it is always there; Tiffany Lethabo King argues that the haunting quality “lies precisely in its refusal to stop.” (2019, x) See also Iain Chambers (2010) who writes: “the repressed always return to haunt the present in one way or another.” (679) Maria Stehle writes, in the context of the notion of ‘Heimat’: “the past supplies the ghosts and the hauntings that make Heimat un-heimlich.” (Stehle 2023, 102) 329 vortex of racism, the remnants of European colonialism. Perhaps nothing shows this more clearly than the recent juxtaposition between refugees in camps and on boats in the Mediterranean, and Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion. The perhaps most telling example comes from journalist Daniel Hannan. In a column published by the British The Telegraph on February 26, 2022, shortly after Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, Hannan wrote: “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections and read uncensored newspapers. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone.” With a lot of good will, one might say that Hannan is referring mainly to the geographical proximity. But Hannan is not only a seasoned journalist, but also a conservative politician, current advisor to the UK Board of Trade, and was a Member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2020. I give this additional information to show that Hannan is anything but an inexperienced, blue-eyed commentator. Without the good will that one might concede to an inexperienced writer who picked his words incautiously, this first paragraph of Hannan’s column speaks to a Eurocentrism that is wholly informed by an image of Africa that, Mbembe argues, is all too common: it is a hegemonial construction of Africa “as a pathological case, as a figure of lack. It is a set of statements that tell us what Africa is not. It never tells us what it actually is.” (2021, 26) And Hannan was not the only journalist who said the quiet part out loud. In the US, CBS News foreign correspondent Chris D’Agata claimed on air that the invasion of the Ukraine is not comparable to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as Ukraine’s capitol is “a relatively civilised, relatively European […] city.” (Nugent 2022)217 217 Similarly, Ukraine’s deputy chief prosecutor David Sakvarelidze was strongly criticized after he said in an interview with the BBC in late February 2022 that the events are “very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed.” 330 There were enough instances of (perhaps unconscious) Eurocentric biases that were articulated in the first days of the invasion that the Los Angeles Times even reported on it, stating that “In Ukraine reporting, Western press reveals grim bias.” (Ali 2022) But as the report pointed to, it was not only journalists who laid bare their perception of the world: “As Ukrainians fled the country, crossing the border into neighboring Poland, Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Kiril Petkov said, ‘These are not the refugees we are used to. They are Europeans, intelligent, educated people, some are IT programmers…this is not the usual refugee wave of people with an unknown past. No European country is afraid of them.’” (Ali 2022) It is a bias that, already 1950, Aimé Césaire pointed to with urgency when he claimed that Western civilization had no issues with the brutality and barbarity that would later mark Nazism when it appeared in the guise of colonialism (Césaire 2000, 36-38). In Germany, too, the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), usually the loudest anti-refugee voice, advocated for accepting Ukrainian refugees. The reasoning for it, given by the party’s chair Tino Chrupalla, makes it clear that its usual anti-refugee stance is built on racism alone. Chrupalla said about the Ukrainian refugees: “Für die Kriegshandlungen sind die Ukrainer nicht verantwortlich. Sie erfahren Leid und Schmerz durch den Tod von Angehörigen und und Freunden sowie Zerstörungen ihrer Heimat. […] Deshalb sollten ukrainische Kriegsflüchtliche in Deutschland und ganz Europa Beistand finden.” (Zeit Online 2022) Since 2016, most refugees coming to Germany are from Syria and Afghanistan, two war-torn countries (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung 2023). Just like the Ukrainian citizens, these people are not responsible for the war in their countries. They, too, have experienced years of grief and pain, losing family members, friends, and their homes. More likely than not, they have had to make these experiences and have had to make the perilous journey, at least in part, because of Europe: 331 “no one could dare to claim Europe is guilt-free, in the long term as well as in its more recent policies, be it through cynical alliances, incautious interventions, or a continuous flux of arm sales.” (Balibar 2015) Following Chrupalla’s argumentation then, the only difference one can find between Ukrainian and African refugees is the color of their skin. This, in itself, is, of course, factually incorrect as countless Black people, both native Ukrainians and foreigners – more than 20 percent of foreign students in the Ukraine are from African countries –, have also been fleeing the country.218 But this difference in perception showed itself also more subtly. In the early days of Russia’s invasion in the Ukraine, news outlets reported that the EU expected seven million Ukrainians to be displaced. Many German magazines and newspapers took this news from the German press agency (dpa) as several outlets reported the same headline. What is remarkable about the headline used is the use of the word “Vertriebene” (the displaced) instead of “Flüchtlinge” (refugees) which was and continuous to be always present in contexts of migration from Africa. In the story reported by Der Spiegel and others, the use of the word “Vertriebene” was, in fact, attributed to EU-commissioner Janez Lenarčič. The difference in valuation between “Vertriebene” and “Flüchtlinge” is noticeable even on a linguistic level where “Vertriebene” indicates a passivity and thus victimhood while “Flüchtlinge” is understood to be active, implying a choice on behalf of those fleeing. The (most likely) subconscious decision to use the term “Vertriebene” instead of “Flüchtlinge” indicates a different valuation of (white) Ukrainian bodies compared to (mostly Black) African bodies on the level of the EU government. The Los Angeles Times report aptly 218 As Rashawn Ray (2022) highlighted in a blog entry for the Washington, DC-based non-profit Brookings, the experience of Black people fleeing Ukraine were obstructed and hindered by racism: “Videos show Black people being pushed off trains and Black drivers being reprimanded and stalled by Ukrainians as they try to flee. There are even reports of animals being allowed on trains before Africans.” (Ray 2022) 332 states: “The limits of empathy in wartime are still too often measured by race.” (Ali 2022) However, I would go so far as to say that empathy, in general, is still too often dependent on race. We see this especially clear in the crisis on the Mediterranean – after all, the indifference of many Europeans gives the impression that the wars in Afghanistan and Syria are nonexistent. And there is no empathy for the people coming, particularly because of their race.219 Khalil P. Saucier and Tryon P. Woods illustrate this with urgency in her 2014 article “Ex Aqua. The Mediterranean Basis, Africans on the Move and the Politics of Policing.” Although their article was written and published before the increase of death on the Mediterranean, their analysis is still accurate – if anything perhaps predictive. In the same vein as Mbembe’s idea of the ‘death world,’ Saucier and Woods assess the Mediterranean as “a deathscape, a zone of disposability” for those bodies that are policed, i.e., scrutinized and denied: black bodies (2014, 69). The policing of black bodies ranges from bombarding them with advertisements and information about staying home while they are still in their home countries, to forcing them into illegal, excruciatingly dangerous and life-threatening crossing routes, to denying help on the ocean when help is needed, to turning them away on the water or at the borders, to treating them like less-than-human (to use Mbembe’s phrase). In an article from September 2022, Human Rights Watch’s Judith Sunderland provides an overview of the many inactions and failures that lead to countless tragedies and suffering, from unlawful and dangerous boat pushbacks, failure to respond to rescue calls, horrific detention conditions and abuse by the Libyan forces with which the EU has made a pact to keep refugees from reaching European shores. More than 1200 people died in the Mediterranean Sea in 2022 alone (Sunderland 2022). 219 It seems that short spouts of empathy, within this cynical context of indifference, can now only be sparked by making visual the most extreme atrocities imaginable, such as the brief moment of grief and outcry when the image of two-year old Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy with Kurdish ethnic background who drowned and was found lying face- down on a beach in Turkey, went around the world. 333 Importantly, Saucier and Woods emphasize that these forms of policing are much less about exclusion, but rather preclusion (2014, 59). After all, to be excluded from something you must have belonged to it at some point. Instead, the people are not even given the chance to belong to something, but preemptively barred from ever joining. In so doing, the preclusive response to those arriving via the Mediterranean Sea (as well as those that are lost on the way) assigns them into a Fanonian zone of nonbeing, what Saucier and Woods describe as “an infinite reproduction and refraction of subjection, a mise-en-abyme.” (2014, 59) They emphasize the term “black Mediterranean” (2014, 64) to emphasize the lineages that connect death on the Mediterranean transculturally and, more importantly, historically, but also because the Mediterranean oceanic grave must be considered “in the historical context of slavery and colonialism,” a dialogue of multidirectional memory, to effectively “deal[…] with the world as it is.” (2014, 60) 25,000 and more dead in the Mediterranean Sea is a human catastrophe. But it is also “a new declination of an old and repressed issue that haunts and composes the European project and modernity itself.” (Saucier and Woods 2014, 64) Christina Sharpe, in In the Wake (2016), equally argues for a direct lineage from colonialism in Africa and the Middle Passage to necropolitical death in the Mediterranean: “African migrants are exposed ‘to inhuman levels of violence,’ stabbed and thrown overboard, shot and thrown overboard, migrants shut in the ‘dark and suffocating hold,’ while others are packed on deck […].” (2016, 55) Her description of the suffering of African migrants on the Mediterranean Sea purposefully mirrors descriptions of the death of the Middle Passage. And Sharpe not only juxtaposes Atlantic and Mediterranean to argue for the continuation of this colonial lineage, she also clearly states that the Mediterranean crisis “is often framed as one of refugees fleeing internal economic stress and internal conflicts, but subtending this crisis is the crisis of capital and wreckage from the continuation of military and other colonial projects of 334 US/European wealth extraction and immiseration.” (2016, 59) This lineage is one of the reasons as to why it is imperative to engage in decolonial conversations that emphasize lineage, memory, remembering, but also do not shy away from engaging with death and ruptures. If a person is lost (at sea), if they are dead, but they are not spoken about, whether it is because of an active choice (as seen in the case of Rafik in Aleksandar’s family in Grammofon), a lack of knowledge (caused by lack of information), a rupture of lineage in the maritime graves of Atlantic and Mediterranean (caused by the unlocatable and oftentimes unnoticed character of death at sea) or the indifference of a population (such as Europeans in the face of continual suffering on the Mediterranean), they are as Aleksandar says of his grandfather Rafik: “Weniger am Leben kann kein Toter sein.” (Stanišić 2006, 18)220 How then can their fates, their lineages, be archived? By drawing on related archives and, more importantly, related approaches of creating knowledge, of poly-temporal lineages to engage with death, engage with ruptures, and engage with lineages marred by necropolitics. Contextualizing the current human rights-crisis in Europe and at its borders with the decolonial conversation emphasizes that both the violence on the Mediterranean and in the refugee camps are not singular atrocities, but part of a lineage of suffering, of abyssal ruptures in the water where silence and suffering are omnipresent and memories and knowledges are lost. This not only emphasizes the urgency of action, but also speaks to the availability of lived experiences, of resources, and, hopefully, of existing connections of empathy. Simultaneously, political responses from Europe are lackluster. It is a necropolitical rationale that categorizes those arriving as less-than-desirable, as living dead which is, per se, at the heart of a necropolitical lineage that spans centuries. 220 Grujićić’s analysis of Rafik’s death as a symbol of Yugoslavia breaking apart also add a transcultural character to this statement (see the discussion in chapter three). 335 Analyzing Stanišić’s narratives via a close reading for its mediation of death through bodies of water demonstrated an engagement with the ruptures of genocidal violence and death in the East of Europe in the 1990s. Placing this into conversation with Solomon River’s The Deep spoke to both the pain and the necessity of articulating memory actively (remembering) and the struggles an importance of sharing memories relationally. Glissant’s creative engagement with the ruptured lineage of the Middle Passage and its effects in the Antillean context spoke to a commonality of suffering, a multidirectionality of memory, and a shared impossibility of return. The decolonial couplets enabled me to not only speak on a current European crisis, but to contextualize and situate it in a global necropolitical lineage of violence, genocide, and death while simultaneously emphasizing the particularities of each rupture. In so doing, I highlighted the relevance of analyzing cultural artifacts in the grander project of critiquing the systems and structures of a Europe whose decolonization has only just started: “The struggles fought out in the Mediterranean Sea both expose a Europe of violent borders and call upon all of us to work collectively toward a different Europe to come.” (Mezzadra and Stierl, 2019) Looking ahead, I will continue working with, expanding, and refining the methodology of the decolonial couplet. I will examine the plausibility and the prospect of alluvial literature – a concept that I have only mentioned in passing, but one that I believe to have intrigue and potential. In form of an outlook, my second research project, tentatively titled Mediating Migration, Mediating Form continues decolonial conversations that engage with migration, with structures of exclusion, and notions of belonging. The focus of this project is on migration experiences on the Mediterranean as well as in broader structures and experiences of migration and postmigrancy. It aims to combine German Studies, Migration Studies, and New Media studies to analyze how artistic expressions of migration experiences are represented in forms of or intersections with New 336 Media and how belonging and exclusion are negotiated in the engagement with New Media. Subsequently, I question how structural racism, co-belonging, and participation are negotiated in relation to the processes and systemic structures that define New Media, and countless discursive and artistic possibilities they provide. In so doing, this second project draws on and continues the core negotiations started in my dissertation; it continues to put forth the methodology of decolonial couplets; and it continues to highlight and scrutinize exclusionary structures and hegemonical hierarchies. In a time where systemic, necropolitical, and epistemological violence pierce many areas of life, decolonial action is necessary. Returning to the perspective that framed the dissertation, I will once more quote Etritrean-born Awet Tesfaiesus, one of the three elected Black members of German parliament: “The country is changing as we all change. That is normal and isn’t possible to stop. 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