Multidirectional Memory as an “Ongoing Negotiation” of Competing Memories in Saša Stanišić’s Writing [Multidirektionales Gedächtnis als „fortwährende Aushandlung“ konkurrierender Erinnerungen im Schreiben von Saša Stanišić]

Abstract

This article focuses on German-Bosnian author Saša Stanišić’s texts Herkunft (2019), “In diesem Gewässer versinkt alles” (2016), and Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (2006) in the context of the events that constitute Europe’s violent twentieth-century history. In a first step, it reconstructs the transeuropean inscription of these narratives in particular through the establishment of specific “lineages of war.” In a second step, the essay reconstructs the texts’ diegetic engagement with death in the context of the Bosnian war of the mid 1990s. Memory processes in both texts are the product of a continuous negotiation of competing historical memories (Rothberg) and as part of an ongoing dialogue. By establishing a lineage between World War Two, the deadly atrocities taking place during the Bosnian wars, and today’s violence from the Extreme Right in Germany, this article traces the ways in which Stanišić’s narratives question the idea of Germany as a monolithic cultural space, to instead show its functioning within a multiplicity of memory threads. His texts emphasize that Germany today is, and for some time has been, more than its geographical borders can contain and more than its invisible internal borders can hierarchize.