A novel about civil war and flight
Although German is not his mother tongue, he is one of Germany’s best writers. Sasa Stanisic fled to Germany from civil war in Bosnia.
Saša Stanišić
An exceptional writer.
In his hand an ice-cream, in front of him a view of the castle ruin in Heidelberg and in his mouth the taste of chocolate – this is how Saša Stanišić describes his first memory of Germany. “We were walking with ice-cream cones in our hands along a river which, like everything else, was nameless: the streets, the buildings, the colours. We understood nobody.” Stanišić was born in 1978 in Visegrad, a small town in eastern Bosnia, the son of a Bosnian Muslima and a Serb. In 1992, after the occupation of Visegrad during the Bosnian War the family fled to Germany.
Although German is not his mother tongue, Saša Stanišić is considered to be one of the most successful writers in this country. “I wrote my first poems at school,” he says. A teacher corrected them; Saša Stanišić was learning German – and almost became a teacher himself. While studying at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig he found the right ‘sound’ for his stories about Bosnia and flight – the main themes of his books. His debut, How the Soldier repairs the Gramophone, though not an autobiography, is about civil war, flight and the new start in Germany. The book was nominated for the German Book Prize and has been translated into 31 languages. With Before the Feast, Stanisic won the 2014 Leipzig Bok Fair Prize. In it he outlines similarities between Bosnia and the German Uckermark region.
As regards the current debate about refugees, Stanišić would like if there were more openness. He himself has met a lot of people in Germany who are willing to help without making a fuss, he says. ▪
