Bosnia’s Magical Realism

Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert
(How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone)
By Sasa Stanisic
320 pages, Munich: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2006 (in German)

When he was a young boy, Aleksandar became a sorcerer. His grandfather made him a magic wand and promised, "You will become the most powerful wizard." Aleksandar had no trust in magic, but he did trust his grandfather. And so Aleksandar kept the wand and the hat with yellow and blue stars and faith in his duty to create the world with his imagination. And when his grandfather Slavko died that same day in 1992, Aleksandar’s freshly acquired magical capabilities became indispensable for his survival in the war that would soon envelop his native Yugoslavia.

The magic of storytelling lies at the heart of Sasa Stanisic’s sensational debut novel, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone), the first novel by a Bosnian German to describe the Balkan war and its atrocities. It was immediately praised as one of last year’s most important literary discoveries when it was published in Germany, and Stanisic was the only newcomer among the nominees for the prestigious Deutscher Buchpreis award. What stunned literary critics and political commentators alike was that, amid a heated debate on immigration in Germany, a young migrant, a refugee with no permanent resident status, could overcome all the legal and linguistic obstacles and offer a book that will dominate the discourse on how children experience war for a long time to come.

Stanisic was just 14 in 1992, when war broke out in Visegrad. Through his alter ego, the young Aleksandar, Stanisic’s eccentric characters and bizarre situations evoke a mythical richness of a world long lost. He not only presents the Bosnian war from a child’s perspective but also reveals his own childhood secret for survival in Visegrad and as a refugee in Germany: imagining a different world through storytelling.

And Sasa Stanisic is a true sorcerer of narrative. It’s a skill that he fully realizes as his literary stand-in, Aleksandar, playfully recreates the world of his Bosnian hometown. It is a cheerful, mysterious, absurd, and timeless glimpse into a Visegrad still unaware of its ethnic heterogeneity. It is a whimsical life of a town still unconscious of the dangers waiting to explode. As when he describes his old neighborhood’s festivities to inaugurate its first operating toilet and the music and endless gluttony with which it was celebrated, the narrator’s fantasy keeps the horrors of the war at bay. Or at least it does for a time. It is seemingly innocent violence at the start — brief eruptions, quietly shifting the tectonic plates of the community along the Drina River. To the young Aleksandar, war announces itself, slowly, almost passively, in small details. It appears in the brutal revenge of a man "who returns home early to find his wife with the newsstand owner," in an argument about militaristic music on the bus, a fight in the schoolyard, a soccer match. War, as Aleksandar experiences it, is never monolithic, never penetrating all segments of life. It is a creeping, multifaceted animal, entering one’s world from the fringes and the center alike.

For centuries, Visegrad’s majority Muslim residents peacefully coexisted with their Serbian neighbors. And for centuries, its inhabitants lived ignorant of their cultural or religious roots, many of whom, including Stanisic, were of mixed ethnic heritage. But in 1992, when Bosnian Serbs attacked their neighbors, all that changed. Hundreds of civilians were slaughtered night after night on the banks of the Drina — a massacre for which the Bosnian Serb Milan Lukic must now stand trial at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. Having witnessed the ravages of Visegrad as a child, it’s no coincidence that Stanisic portrays the Drina as its own character in the novel. It was on the banks of this historic river where hundreds of Muslims met their death. It is on the Drina that Aleksandar’s initiation into the arbitrary brutality of war takes place, where he witnesses the sadistic killing of a dog, the senseless abuse of a horse. It is on the Drina that war enters and transforms Aleksandar’s life and imagination.

"I am half Serb, half Muslim. I am Yugoslavia — and so I fall apart," says Aleksandar when his family flees Bosnia, first to Belgrade and then to Germany. The language of the storyteller has disappeared with his destroyed country. The confidence of a child traveling in his own imaginative world is gone. And it is here, in the gray, joyless cold of a refugee’s life that the wizard must perform his most powerful magic trick: to create himself in a new language in a new world without losing his old world.

The way in which Stanisic describes this transformation is what made this novel a literary and political sensation in Germany. It seemed an elegant response to the scandal that erupted when one of Germany’s most important literary awards, the Heinrich-Heine Prize, was awarded to Peter Handke, the Austrian poet and writer whose appearance at the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic had triggered angry controversy just prior to the publication of How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. Whereas Handke’s attempts to rewrite the history of the Balkan wars only produced revisionist fiction, Stanisic’s penchant for storytelling and his over-the-top imagination masterfully creates an account of the war that is more realistic and truthful than any documentary. Aleksandar’s grandfather would surely be proud.