From Hard Slavic Endings to Making Things Possible: The Political in Saša Stanišić's Prose

The opening scene in Saša Stanišić's latest work, Where You Come From, places the reader back in Višegrad, a storied town in today's Bosnia and Herzegovina and the site where his first semi-autobiographical novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, ended. We see the narrator's grandmother Kristina as an elderly lady, shouting from the balcony down to her younger self on the street: ‘I'll come get you. Don’t move!’1 Living up to her promise, Kristina drags herself down three flights of stairs, without shoes, her feet covered by thin black stockings only. Cars hit the brakes. Traffic comes to an abrupt halt. In her effort to rescue her adolescent self, Kristina succeeds at stopping the steady flow of the world for a moment. The evocative opening places Kristina front and centre in the text while introducing a split in time: we are simultaneously in the years 2018 and 1943, as well as in some Yugoslav moment in-between, when the street on which the impossible encounter was to play out still bore the name of Josip Broz Tito.2 The formidable storyteller Stanišić tempts his audience in this vignette-like opening with a reassurance of sorts: where you come from – Herkunft (‘origin’) – can, indeed, be found at some mythic confluence of time and place. Origins are not only localisable; they can also be projected back in time, with kinship serving as a well-established narrative and ideological ploy for staking out historical claims to belonging. The very first scene thus appears to preempt the text that follows by giving a rather firm answer to the question that the book's title vividly raises. The answer – the Romantic idea of origins – seems to be reinforced when Stanišić takes his readers from Višegrad to the village of Oskoruša, and with that, deeper into the past. At Oskoruša's cemetery, many of the tombstones bear the narrator's last name: Stanišić. What could possibly be more affirming in a tale of origins than a mountain village, where even the ground is inscribed with proof of one's ancestry?3 Stanišić proves to be a formidable storyteller because he involves his readership in something like a theatre of origins, presenting us with the essential trappings of a ‘filiative’ form of belonging – a term we borrow from Edward Said and Timothy Brennan to designate communities predicated on inheritance, descent, and circumstances of birth – only to then reject the premise and ontological primacy ascribed to these ‘natural’ social bonds.4 Expressed in the well-known terms of National Socialist ideology, Blut (‘blood’) and Boden (‘soil’) not only merge here but become inseparable, with their union counteracting – that is, stabilising – the purportedly modern volatility of origins.5 From the perspective that this special issue of Critical Quarterly adopts, a striking moment comes to the fore: Stanišić's spectacle of origins plays out in what is commonly considered part of Europe's periphery, a tiny village ‘in the Bosnian mountains, in the farthest eastern regions of this perpetually tragic land’ (Where 27; 31). The opening is, of course, an ideological trap expertly set to ensnare the reader committed to the Romantic idea of unmediated belonging and unable to recognise the idea's kinship with the age-old stereotype of bellicose Balkan tribes. For both the yearning for pristine origins and the attribution of irreconcilable feuds to peripheral spaces share the presumption of filiative bonds and also of backwardness – a mode of existence caught outside of historical time and thus seemingly beyond the reach of the historical subject. But who exactly is the audience for Stanišić's demonstration of origins, one that is deeply informed by and that appears to reinforce West European stereotypes of the Balkans as Europe's backward periphery? For whom does this spectacle, in fact, take place? And just as importantly, what happens to the notion of origins over the course of the narrative? We begin with these questions because in the works of German-Bosnian author Saša Stanišić we find a particularly dynamic expression of the core-periphery mapping. We take Stanišić's oeuvre as exemplary for the writer whose critical and political affinities generate an aesthetic intervention that goes beyond the work of demystification (of categories such as core and periphery), summoning at the same time an active historical subject capable of changing the laws of history that are often mistaken for second nature. More specifically, examining Stanišić's latest novel, Where You Come From, we argue that Stanišić's intervention lies in subverting centre and periphery as stable entities and revealing how these categories are produced, employed, and exploited – in writing. His earlier work How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone extends this critical work to the seemingly unalterable laws of history, reintroducing a force that could halt the process of peripheralisation and the endless proliferation of crises. The first critical move points to an alternative in a world in which we are told there are none. The second shows what it takes to actually change the world. Thus, while the first intervention targets discursive conventions, the terrain on which the second intervention plays out is not discursive. Born in Višegrad, Stanišić fled to Germany as a teenager during the Bosnian war. His first novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (2008) (Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert, 2006), turned him into one of Germany's most celebrated authors overnight. And while this semi-autobiographical tale of migration from war-stricken Yugoslavia did not make it past the short list for the 2006 German Book Prize, it paved the way for Stanišić's success in the German literary markets, leading Boris Previšić to wonder if a “Yugoslavian Turn” was on the horizon of German-language literature and its largely orientalising depiction of the Balkans.6 In his second novel, Before the Feast (2016) (Vor dem Fest, 2014), Stanišić turned to a peripheral place within Germany. His peculiar spin on the German genre of the Heimatroman – most frequently translated as ‘regional novel’ – is set in the imaginary village of Fürstenfelde, in the former East German province of the Uckermark.7 Stanišić tells the story of a single night in Fürstenfelde, but what comes to life is the village's history in an assemblage of legends, family stories, and tales. The book continued Stanišić's critical acclaim, winning both the Alfred Döblin Prize in 2013 and the 2014 Leipzig Book Fair Prize. In Where You Come From (2021) (Herkunft, 2019), Stanišić revisits the Balkans to scrutinise this mythical place of the European imagination through the themes of origins, memory, and their disappearance. Where You Come From draws on a long Western European tradition of ‘inventing’, ‘imagining’, or ‘constructing’ Eastern Europe and the Balkans.8 In her now-classic monograph, Imagining the Balkans (1997), Maria Todorova traced the emergence of ‘Balkan’ and ‘balkanization’ as derogatory terms around the turn of the twentieth century and then drew attention to their resurgence in this denigratory capacity at the time the former Yugoslav state fell apart. ‘The persistent use of “Balkan” for the Yugoslav war has by now rekindled old stereotypes and licensed indiscriminate generalizations about the region’, Todorova writes.9 Even a cursory glance at the clichés that Todorova foregrounds reveals intriguing parallels with the inaugural moments in Where You Come From. Mountainous regions, extended clans and tribes, age-old feuds over land – these are common ahistorical staples in explaining the fall of Yugoslavia.10 If the similarities are not immediately visible, it might be due to the fact that Stanišić modifies the war scenario and appears to offer at first a reversal of established valorisations. While the location remains unchanged, what plays out against the background of Bosnian mountains is not violence but the alleged recovery of origins. No syllable you can cling to, zero rhythm, a bizarre sequence of sounds. From the very beginning: Osko – what's that supposed to be? who talks like that? – and then the plummet to the hissed end, -rusha. Hard and Slavic, the way things end in the Balkans. I could leave that in, people would probably accept it from me, seeing as I'm from the Balkans myself. Hard Slavic endings? (26; 30; italics in original) At first, he appears to marvel at his appropriation (marked by italics) of the negatively valorised description of phonetic particularities, only to create an instant shortcut from bad linguistics to even worse politics: ‘Right, of course, those Yugos with their wars and their ways’ (Where 26; 30). How exactly do we get from morphophonology to history in such rapid succession? Is it that language explains national character, and national character explains language? Are words, lives, and political forms determined to end the same way? Reductive reasoning turns on itself here in the exact medium – language – in which it is supposed to go unnoticed. The sardonic exaggeration dismantles the utterance by exposing its flawed logic, at once circular and totalising, while also flaunting the narrator's mastery of the cultural conventions of his target audience. But for whom does this masterful juggling of firmly established clichés take place? Often a question that allows only for speculative answers regarding intended readership finds an explicit one in Where You Come From: the title of its second section and the phrase repeated throughout make it clear that the text is addressed ‘To the [German] Alien Registration Office’ (2; 6). Stanišić builds the authority responsible for granting German citizenship into the narrative world of Where You Come From as the text's intended reader: ‘Thirty years later, in March 2008, I was applying for German citizenship and had to submit at the Alien Registration Office a handwritten chronology of my life [Lebenslauf], among other things’, the narrator declares (2–3; 6–7).11 The entire section reads like the narrator's demonstrative attempt to find a form for his story – or, even a story itself – that proves adequate for his readership and the stated purpose of obtaining German citizenship. The text thus stages itself not solely as a work of literature belonging to the realm of aesthetics, but rather as one whose particular purpose (also) lies in achieving naturalisation. While the humorous tone that frequently tips over into irony unmistakably pokes fun at the text's bureaucratic setting, the narrative set-up puts the question of belonging at the heart of Where You Come From.12 What does a text have to perform in order to become (and be considered) German? What are the narrative requirements of citizenship? Leaving grandmother Kristina amidst the cars on the former Josip Broz Tito Street in Višegrad, the subsequent section of Stanišić's genre-bending work begins in the classic mode of autobiographical storytelling: ‘I was born on March 7, 1978, in Višegrad, on the Drina River’ (Where 2; 6).13 The sentence also marks the moment in which narratives of different order begin to intermingle, as the ‘chronology’ required of the petitioner opens with the same sentence a page later: ‘On my first try’, the petitioner writes, ‘all I managed to put down on paper was that I was born on March 7, 1978’ (3; 7). A series of textual devices, some of which are quite conspicuous, eventually makes the boundary between the narrator's official petition and Where You Come From even more permeable. For instance, the narrator notes that he ‘wrote [to the Alien Registration Office]: There's no such thing as a biographical narrative without childhood leisure activities. I wrote in the middle of the page, in capital letters: SLEDDING’, after which Where You Come From simply continues, not with an account of childhood leisure but with the story of the tobogganing outcast Huso and his execution in 1992 (5–6; 9–10). Another instance foreshadows the story of Dr. Heimat: ‘I wrote out a story beginning: When anyone asks what Heimat means to me – home, homeland, native country – I tell them the story of Dr. Heimat, DDS, the father of my first amalgam filling’, which is, indeed, the beginning of ‘Dr. Heimat’, a section that comes later in Where You Come From and to which we will return below (6, 173–5; 10, 175–7; italics in original). What we witness in addition to the narrator's ‘chronology’ converging with the text of Where You Come From is also an intermittent discourse on the process of writing, a third or metanarrative layer that reminds the reader that the two commingling narratives belong to distinct levels of Stanišić's text. The running commentary on omissions, variants, and phrasing leads to a series of emendations the narrator must undertake to ensure – in a manner as demonstrative as it is ironic – that his German text is not only legible to the intended reader but also appropriate in the context of ‘naturalization’. Both the commingling of the narrator's ‘chronology’ with Where You Come From and the commentary that pulls them apart are significant. That these texts become indistinguishable at times ensures that the Alien Registration Office as the addressee of the former also becomes the intended reader of the latter. That is to say, Stanišić's ploy of blurring textual boundaries effectuates that Where You Come From, too, addresses itself to the German reader. This is not to suggest, of course, that the book's actual readers are either restricted to German-speaking countries or are otherwise determined by nationality. Instead, the narrative comprises the intended (German) reader so as to pose the question of belonging not in existential terms, but with an eye to the particular historical and political exigencies. At the same time, the commentary that separates the text that the narrator Saša composes from Where You Come From, despite varying degrees of overlap between them, reveals that the narrator is involved in the very production of his tale of origins. The discourse on the process of fabulation demonstrates not only that this origin story is written and revised into being, but that its construction takes place in response to its target audiences. The Alien Registration Office is not the only authority that insists on the importance of origins in adjudicating questions of belonging. The relatives whom the narrator meets in Bosnia pose the exact same question – ‘Where do you come from, boy?’ – and expect the same concession to the primacy of filiation (Where 30; 34). ‘You come from here’, one relative exclaims at the Oskoruša cemetery, motioning with his hand towards what remains of their ancestral lands (29; 33). ‘Here’ in this formulation is supposed to point to the possibility of experiencing origins among the tombstones and ruins on one's native soil. Even if ‘here’ refers to a place of heightened symbolism, one is meant to belong ‘here’ in some less contrived way, unencumbered by historical, ideological, and discursive mediations. The assumption soon gets put to a test. Having lost the ostensibly natural ability to recognise his place of origin in the landscape, the narrator is at first unmoved by the empty panorama he is shown from the privileged vantage point of the family cemetery.14 As if in a fairy tale, a stronger potion is needed to awaken his senses. He is then taken to a family well – ‘in fact, to the prototype of all wells’ – and offered a sip of water that springs from his ancestral ground (Where 29; 33). If the cemetery is a symbolic place where blood seeps into the soil, then the water that originates in the native soil injects the same essence from this blood-infused earth back into the body: the ethnic imaginary of nationalism comes full circle here – on the molecular level. And for a moment, having drunk from his great-grandfather's well and declared the water ‘the best’ of his life, the narrator seems ready to believe that he can finally experience what he could neither see nor taste earlier: his place of origin (30; 34). However, resisting the Romantic transfiguration of physical replenishment, he laconically admits that ‘[t]he water was cold and tasted like water’, shrugging off the impulse to locate origins in the ritual performed at the water's source (31; 35). And while he refrains from the wholesale dismissal of ‘[a]ll “belonging” as kitsch’, he declares not to ‘let [his] guard down over a little water’ (30; 34). Neither does Stanišić allow his readers to let their guard down. ‘A little water’ turns out to be a grand gesture that withstands the tainting of sense perception by nationalist sentiment (and nostalgia along with it). Yet, if Where You Come From is firmly stacked against the idea of the Balkans as a place for recuperating origins in the form of filiative bonds, it equally resists locating Heimat in Germany. Although often claimed to be an untranslatable concept – a conceit that replicates the mythology of what the word designates in German – Heimat is best rendered as ‘home, homeland, native country’, just as the translator Damion Searls adds to the text for Stanišić's English language readers (173; 175).15 Oskoruša's water tastes like water and, in a parallel fashion, Heimat is not some metaphysical place that compensates for the modern individual's ‘transcendental homelessness’, to echo Georg Lukács, but a dentist called Dr. Heimat. The discourse on Heimat clearly reverberates in the doctor's name and comes to the fore in his characterisation: ‘He treated all our cavities, the Bosnian cavities, the Somalian cavities, the German cavities. An ideal Heimat cares about the cavities and not about what language the mouth speaks or how well’ (174; 176; italics in original). Dr. Heimat takes shape in contradistinction to what Stanišić understands Heimat to designate. In an interview, he described the concept as follows: ‘Heimat is a structurally regressive, mostly repressive, and anti-emancipatory concept, because it is defined by distinguishing an external you from an internal us’.16 Instantiated as Dr. Heimat, Heimat ceases to be an abstract expression for an inexplicable and unreproducible feeling meant to bind individuals to their ‘native lands’ and exclude others from all belonging. As a personal and thus utterly contingent name, Dr. Heimat represents the remedy of sheer chance against the malady of Heimat's overbearing determinism. With the water of Oskoruša and Dr. Heimat, Stanišić's text revisits two conceptions of belonging that are commonly attributed to the migrant author whose ‘Germanness’ tends to appear in hyphenated form in the German literary public. Designations such as ‘Bosnian-German’ often demand of their bearers both emphatic reflections on belonging itself and the circumscription thereof to those places that the hyphen ties together (and also separates). The author with Migrationshintergrund (‘migration background’), as the official German designation has it, frequently occupies a position that calls for the account of ‘origins’ and, by way of that, the inadvertent negotiation of Germany's position vis-à-vis these places. Stanišić, however, dismisses thinking in these terms altogether. He neither allows for the idealisation of the periphery as a place of ‘authentic origins’, nor does he present his (German) readers with a migration tale that affirms the centre as a place of adopted Heimat. Hence, we can observe two strategies that go hand in hand in Stanišić's text. First, by laying bare the narrative construction of the narrator's story for the Alien Registration Office, Stanišić targets the purported ‘naturalness’ of origins. In fact, the production aspect is rendered in concrete terms: the origins constitute a story that is formulated with a specific audience and purposiveness in mind, both of which determine how they are invented, narrated, and retold.17 Second, flaunting how tales of belonging are made and the role that the fantasy of the periphery plays in their construction, Stanišić also targets different concrete manifestations of origins, shattering the fantasy of the periphery and its link to filiation. If Where You Come From spotlights the discursive construction of origins and the production of the periphery that goes hand in hand with it, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone interrogates the core-periphery dynamic from the perspective of the historical subject. In other words, Stanišić's debut novel attempts to go beyond demystifying the seemingly stable categories of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in order to pose a question of even greater import: under what conditions – and by whom – might the historical processes of peripheralisation be altered? At first glance, this claim may appear peculiar, given that the fall of Yugoslavia and the horrors of war, genocide, and exile are shown through the seemingly naïve perspective of its child narrator, Aleksandar Krsmanović, another prodigious storyteller from Višegrad. Animated by what Boris Previšić calls a ‘childlike baroque lust for fabulation’, Aleksandar propels his readers into a world of childhood mischief, talking rivers, and fantastic stories, in which one can easily detect a depiction of the periphery as a place where enchantment still abounds, not yet giving way to the full sway of adult rationality.18 Seeing the war through Aleksandar's eyes can certainly estrange conventional wisdom; it may even awaken deadened sensibilities in the reader accustomed to a tired war narrative. But beyond the new knowledge and experiences it may generate, can the child narrator – particularly one so focused on the inner workings of magic – also bring to life a historical subject capable of intervening in its own affairs? How can puerile belief in magic and an emphatic historical subject be reconciled? The novel's structural complexity stands in stark contrast with the supposedly childish magic, already foreshadowing the latter's intricate role within Stanišić's novelistic edifice. The Gramophone begins in a seemingly straightforward fashion. Right before the young narrator's beloved grandfather Slavko passes away, he bequeaths a magic hat and wand to his grandson. The historical-political genealogy of the magic power matters greatly: Aleksandar is told that with this wand he will become ‘the most powerful magician in the non-aligned states’, able to ‘revolutionize all sorts of things just as long as they are in line with Tito's ideas and the Statutes of the Communist League of Yugoslavia’.19 As we argue below, the novel seeks to preserve the memory of the ostensibly ‘magical’ power of the former historical subject who was once able to change the immutable laws of history and who passes away at the outset of the novel. Yet the child learns quickly that the magic he is promised has its limits.20 In fact, the waning power of grandfather's magic wand becomes a running motif that connects much of what is told in the vivacious and whimsical stories that once again play confidently with Balkan clichés, while rendering the novel episodic and fragmentary at the same time. With Aleksandar and his family's flight to Germany, the novel first shifts into the epistolary mode, only to shift again into a novel within the novel written by yet another Aleksandar Krsmanović. And while the catastrophe appears to have destroyed any semblance of linear progression – and thus the possibility of the Bildungsroman – a mature narrator nonetheless materialises, resolved to return to the ‘source’ of his stories in Bosnia and ready to give up on the childish belief in the power of magic.21 The last third of the novel shows the grown-up Aleksandar Krsmanović rummaging through the narrative landscape of ruins. He appears to be looking for the remnants of his old life, for some material traces of experience his younger self was attempting to reconstitute earlier in the text. Something or someone had to have survived the deluge, and this unlikely feat of survival would establish a link between the before and after of the catastrophe, providing a foundation for the narrative reconstruction of the world lost to the war. Moreover, it would also lend an ending to the disjointed novel Stanišić's self-styled narrator is writing, an ending that does not affirm the ultimate triumph of discontinuity. The trope, narrative function, and even the infernal setting of this journey home are, of course, familiar from a long list of exiled authors who have plotted in fiction what has remained elusive in (historical) reality.22 The presence of the familiar narrative structure and numerous intertextual signposts only accentuates the futility of Aleksandar's quest. The magic wand that once was able to ‘revolutionize all sorts of things’ reverts to the stick that it has always been, discarded in the mud at the exact site where the war began for the Krsmanović family. The adult pilgrim finds nothing at the point of origin – no object, person, or story that is not fundamentally altered by the catastrophe. To claim otherwise – to claim that fiction could restore the world that has fallen apart in reality, that one can reside in some ‘Republic of Letters’ while the actual homes are destroyed – would be disingenuous at best. And yet, in spite of this sober recognition of the dangers involved in hypostatising the power of literature, Stanišić is not quite ready to give up on its political potential. An understanding of magic's status in the novel that attributes both its existence and potency simply to the perspective of its child narrator falls short of explaining the aesthetic and political complexities that are at play in The Gramophone. In fact, we argue that magic – or what invariably appears as a miraculous transformation of things – constitutes the central locus of the novel's aesthetic and political work. The Gramophone's aesthetic intervention lies in breaking with the customary entanglement of magic and the child narrator's perspective so as to situate in magic the political agency and potency of the historical subject eliminated by the war. And thus, as a political intervention, magic becomes an index of the radically secular power of this (erstwhile) historical subject to affect the seemingly inevitable course of history and to change its outcome. In other words, far from causing the children of communism to mature, the war in fact robs the former historical subject of its agency, condemning it to a life of servitude to the forces over which it ostensibly has no control. The Gramophone lays bare this process of reification by which history regresses into a mythical state of nature. It is the catastrophe that enchants and peripheralises the world of Aleksandar's childhood, not the other way around. Yet the new spell cast by the war does not lead the narrator to abandon hope expressed in the grandfather's promise. On the contrary, he catches a glimpse of a different future in a story of unusual defiance.23 A rather peculiar turn of phrase that Stanišić introduces in the penultimate chapter of his novel provides a preliminary answer to this recasting of magic and its role in so-called peripheral spaces. One of the key events in the novel – an impromptu football match played between the trenches of two warring sides in the Bosnian conflict – takes place at a location Stanišić repeatedly describes as lying ‘behind God's feet’. The expression sounds as strange in the German text – ‘hinter Gottes Füßen’ – as it does in Anthea Bell's English translation. This is so because the phrase, in both languages, is simply a word-for-word translation of bogu iza nogu, an idiomatic expression in Stanišić's first language, the language known today as Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian (BCS). This rhyming idiom is often used in the BCS vernacular to describe a location so remote and inaccessible that even an omnipresent deity cannot make it there. In English, one could describe such a desolate place as ‘far-flung’, ‘in the middle of nowhere’, or, simply and most accurately for our purposes, as a ‘god-forsaken place’ – a peripheral site if there ever was one. The common meaning of the BCS idiom is obviously figurative; no one describing a geographical location lying ‘behind God's feet’ intends to comment on God's power and agility. Instead, bogu iza nogu refers to a place that is the same as vukojebina, a vulgar BCS compound noun that also appears in Stanišić's novel but, unlike ‘behind God's feet’, is left untranslated.24 These multilingual strategies warrant close attention because they reveal how The Gramophone reconceptualises the periphery and entangles this peripheral space with the possibility of a different kind of ‘magic’, one that speaks to a revolutionary potential ‘behind God's feet’, rather than conferring either its belatedness or backwardness. The untranslated vukojebina is both a viable synonym for ‘behind God's feet’ and an example of refusing to literalise idioms. Its presence in the novel – in the exact chapters in which the narrator is told about the football game – leaves little doubt about Stanišić's deliberate literalisation of bogu iza nogu.25 Translating the idiomatic BCS expression into unidiomatic German, Stanišić invokes precisely what the idiomatic quiddity of the expression conceals in BCS: a place outside of God's purview. The football match is to be played to its harrowing end on the pitch that lies entirely behind the back of God, who is no longer able to affect the outcome of the game. It is thus in this awkward, unidiomatic German form, and in the equally clumsy English translation, that the phrase gains the referent and critical import it never had in BCS: the conditions under which the football match is played – and, more broadly, the conditions under which Višegrad is taken, lives interrupted, and stories made impossible to complete – are marked by the absence of God.26 This is a world in which it is no