Memory conflicts and memory grey zones: War memory in Bosnia–Herzegovina between public memory disputes,literary narratives and personal experience

Abstract

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, memories of the 1990s war remain hugely divided on political and institutional levels, constituting what we may think of as a mnemonic war. Interview-based qualitative research shows that people in Bosnia on the individual level tend to follow the dominant narrative of their own group, yet, when challenged on these viewpoints, may also admit that other narratives and different truths may exist. Indeed, this research seems to propose the existence of a memorial grey zone where more open understanding and recognition of other positions is possible. Thus, while memory politics and memory institutionalization are rigidly opposed, other types of memory mediation may challenge the ethnic divisions of the memory landscape, opening up a memorial grey zone. In this article, we study the individual reception of literary works written by Bosnian émigré writers, asking how readers interact with established yet fluid memory discourses in Bosnia. Using focus groups as an interviewing method, we explore how the texts are perceived and discussed by lay readers in the two political entities, the Bosniak–Croat Federation and Republika Srpska. We are particularly interested in how readers make sense of the memory accounts in the texts, and how this relates to personal experiences and official memory narratives within each of the two entities. We argue that the reading and discussions of literary war memories allow for complex negotiations between personal and official ‘group’ narratives, opening a memorial grey zone that transcends the sharp divisions dominating memory politics in Bosnia and creates space for alternative memory positions.

Keywords

Bosnia and Herzegovina grey zone individual memory literature memory conflict memory politics public memory reception war

The 1992–1995 war in Bosnia–Herzegovina cost more than 100,000 lives, forced more than a million people to leave their homes, and caused several hundreds of thousands of Bosnians to seek refuge elsewhere in Europe or North America. After the war, the state of Bosnia–Herzegovina (referred to as BiH in the following) was divided into two ethnically defined political entities. One of these, the Serbian-dominated Republika Srpska, does not recognize the genocide in Srebrenica for which Bosnian Serb military leaders were convicted at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). While the Bosniak and Croat parts of BiH commemorate victims of Bosnian Serb aggression, Republika Srpska’s political leaders have honoured convicted Bosnian Serb wartime military leaders, as well as Bosnian Serb soldiers and civilians. Consequently, interpretations of the 1990s war remain hugely divided on political and institutional levels, constituting a memory political conflict – or indeed, a mnemonic war – between political actors, drawing a sharp line between what is seen as non-negotiable/true and illegitimate/false versions of the past (Kubik and Bernhard, 2014: 13). Interview-based qualitative research has shown that people in BiH on an individual level tend to follow the dominant narrative of their own group. Nevertheless, when challenged on these viewpoints, some also admit that these are somehow official group narratives and recognize that other narratives and different truths may exist (Jeftić, 2019). Indeed, this research seems to propose the existence of a memorial grey zone where more open understanding and recognition of other positions is possible.

While memory politics and memory institutionalization in the two entities are rigidly opposed, other types of memory mediation may challenge these ethnic divisions of the memory landscape. Since the war, émigré authors with roots in BiH have published literary representations of the war, contributing their insightful views on the Bosnian War from a partially outside perspective. We suggest that these literary narratives have the capacity to open discussions of wartime memories among readers in today’s BiH.

In this article, we study the individual reception of literary works written by Bosnian émigré writers, asking how readers interact with established memory discourses about the war in BiH. Using focus groups as an interviewing method, we explore how the texts are perceived and discussed by lay readers in the two main cities of the political entities: Sarajevo in the Bosniak–Croat Federation, and Banja Luka in Republika Srpska. We are particularly interested in exploring how readers relate the memory accounts in the texts to personal experiences and to official memory narratives within each of the two entities.

While individual positions in the focus group discussions often mirror the public and political memory narratives, we argue that discussions of the literary representations sometimes open what we think of as a ‘memory grey zone’, an ambiguous space where memory discourses are less sharply defined, allowing for partial recognition of the other groups’ suffering as part of a somehow shared experience. Yet, this only works as long as the representation is non-specific and universal; once causality and accountability are addressed, the discussions tend to return to the framework of the politically defined memory conflict.

In the following pages, we introduce the main elements of the history of the Bosnian War, how these elements constitute crucial parts of the political memory conflict in post-war BiH, how they are represented in two literary texts by the Bosnian émigré authors Saša Stanišić and Aleksandar Hemon, and how these texts are discussed by lay readers in the different parts of BiH. We take as our point of departure the concepts of public memory and memory politics, the idea of fictional literature as an emotionally engaging medium of memory representation, and the insistence that acts of remembering are essentially carried out by individuals, albeit within social frameworks.

Memory politics, literary representations and individual reception

The conflict about war memory in BiH dominates the country’s public memory, a term understood as the types of cultural memory that are applied by states and their institutions to create legitimacy. Public memory is official and political, anchored in public space and played out at commemorations, monuments, museums and other societal institutions (Tosh, 2018: 30). Public memory is one of the main battlefields of memory politics, which may be seen, very broadly, as ‘the political mechanisms implicated in the formation, transmission, and reception of collective memory’ (Kubik and Bernhard, 2014: 10). The main analytical objects are the political agents involved in the struggle for hegemony over public memory. According to Zoltan Dujisin (2020: 25), the study of memory politics is about exploring attempts to capture the processes of memory negotiation and memory institutionalization by ‘a political constellation bent on legitimating specific identities, interests and agendas’. The aim of memory politics as such is a politically established and institutionalized ‘memory regime’ (Kubik and Bernhard, 2014: 15–17) that defines the framework for remembering. As we will show, political actors on the state and entity levels in BiH promote very different, even mutually exclusive memory regimes, resulting in a mnemonic war at the top political levels.

While public memory provides the structural framework for collective remembering and literary mediations may constitute powerful, emotionally engaging, complex and challenging transmissions of memory, we also need to understand how memory transmissions are reproduced and received, and consequently also how mediated memories remain relevant to societies (Törnquist-Plewa et al., 2018). Indeed, as Hirst et al. (2018: 439) remind us, we need to recognize that ‘it is individuals remembering the past, even if they are remembering as members of communities’ and therefore we need to combine studies of how the past is represented in publicly available symbols such as monuments and public discourse with studies of how it is understood and represented by individuals. Following this approach, we aim to study not only public memory conflicts and how they are explored in literature, but also the ways in which they may be reproduced or challenged by groups and individuals. In other words, the literary text is not only a formalized memory account that stabilizes existing societal controversies, but – and here we follow Dromi and Illouz (2010) – it is also the material for the readers’ mnemonic positioning and moral evaluation, which can say something about how the readers navigate the grey zone between individual and political memory. The fictional text addresses the reader on two levels, as it both ‘requires the simultaneous exercise of compassion for the suffering of imaginary characters and the consideration of the moral implications of that suffering’ (Dromi and Illouz, 2010: 353). We will argue that most of the readers we interviewed expressed compassion on the individual level, but that some of them become suspicious of the text when the moral implications, which necessarily tie into questions of memory and responsibility, were actualized.

Methods

In this article, we aim to compare negotiations of Bosnian war memory on political, literary, cultural and individual levels to uncover possible frictions and grey zones between them. In our survey of the political memory conflict in BiH, we draw on existing research and reports referenced in the section below. For the study of literary memory transmissions, we conduct a brief stylistic and narrative analysis, drawing on Astrid Erll’s (2003, 2009) theory of the rhetoric of cultural memory in literature.

To investigate how individuals respond to literary representations of Bosnian war memory, and how personal experiences, group belonging and the memory conflict on the political level play into this, we organized a series of focus group discussions with lay readers in Banja Luka and Sarajevo who had been given one of our chosen literary texts to read in advance. This allowed us to study how individuals made sense of the texts as influenced by the group’s social dynamics; participants responding to interview questions, but also querying each other, opens the discussion more for the participants’ points of view (Morgan, 1996: 139). Thus, focus group discussions help to ‘illuminate the fluid space between the individual, the social and the cultural’ (Coupland, 2015: 281). The interviews were semi-structured, combining a small set of fixed questions with the flexibility of ad hoc follow-ups. The questions were open-ended so as to inspire generative narratives grounded in the participants’ own experiences (Galletta, 2013: 48).¹

The focus group sessions, eight in all (four in Sarajevo and four in Banja Luka), were conducted after working hours over 4 consecutive days (14–17 September 2020), each lasting approximately 90 minutes. In total, 53 respondents participated: 27 in Sarajevo and 25 in Banja Luka. One month in advance, respondents received one of the two texts – either Stanišić’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone or Hemon’s ‘A Coin’ – in physical copies and with no further instructions.² Each group consisted of five to eight respondents, and we aimed for an equal number of men and women with varying education level and of varying age (25–64), which would represent the reception of those with and without firsthand experiences of the war, respectively. All readers were locals of the city in which the discussions took place, and are thus exposed to the same memory regime, which is key for their positioning in regard to the memory accounts presented in the literary texts. Since travel was restricted by the COVID-19 pandemic, we hired a local research agency, Ipsos, to organize and conduct our focus groups. A local moderator facilitated the discussions, which meant that we had no control over the developments of the interactions, and we had to rely completely on the instructions we had given the agency. However, the discussions were not influenced by our presence as outsiders, and this may have allowed our interviewees to act more naturally within the framework of the local community, which they were all part of. The discussions were video recorded and transcribed. These materials served as the base for our content analysis, which was conducted following the Grounded Theory Method – which allows for the data to be broken down into manageable units that are subsequently coded, by way of constant comparison, into themes and conceptual categories (see Corbin and Strauss, 2015) – on which we have based our arguments.

Bosnia–Herzegovina and the Bosnian War

Bosnia–Herzegovina was part of the Yugoslav state first established in 1918 as a unification of the independent kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro with South-Slav regions of the collapsed Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. In 1945, when the communist-led National Liberation Army emerged victorious from the war against Nazi and Fascist occupiers and from a civil war against other Yugoslav forces, Yugoslavia was re-established as a socialist one-party state, headed by the general secretary of the Yugoslav Communist Party, Josip Broz Tito. The new Yugoslavia was a federation consisting of six federal republics, one of which was Bosnia–Herzegovina (BiH). Unlike the other federal republics, BiH did not belong to one titular nation; home to Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, ethnically undeclared Bosnian Muslims and numerous minorities, it was the most ethnically mixed of the Yugoslav republics. During the early 1970s, Muslims were recognized as one of BiH’s national groups, later called Bosniaks (Ramet, 1984: 147). In 1991, the Bosnian population was made up of approximately 43.7% Muslims, 31.4% Serbs and 17.3% Croats along with Jewish, Roma, Sinti and many other minorities, including ethnically undeclared Yugoslavs (Burg and Shoup, 1999: 27, 32).

When war broke out in BiH in the spring of 1992, Bosnian Serb forces launched an offensive with the support of conventional and paramilitary units from Serbia. This offensive was combined with campaigns of ethnic cleansing against the Muslim population in Eastern Bosnia and other areas under Serb control (Burg and Shoup, 1999: 129, 133). Terrorized women and children were deported, while men and young boys were captured. Many were killed immediately or later during their incarceration in detention camps (Bećirević, 2017: 81–143; Cigar, 1995: 54–61). Similar campaigns of ethnic cleansing took place in other regions of BiH. Serbs, Croats and Muslims were all victims of ethnic cleansing, and forces connected to all three national camps were perpetrators. However, Serb ethnic cleansing was particularly devastating in its impact, and Muslims constituted the largest victim group (Burg and Shoup, 1999: 171–181; Lampe, 2000: 373).

Rape and sexual violence happened on a large scale and in a systematic manner (Allen, 1996). Incarcerated Muslim women were repeatedly raped by Serb forces. Serb and Croat women were targeted as well, though not to the same extent, as were captured men on all sides (Clark, 2017: 39–49; Helms, 2013: 54–58). Exact numbers will never be known, but estimates suggest at least 20,000 victims (Clark, 2017: 39).

BiH’s largest city, Sarajevo, though multi-ethnic, had a Muslim majority and became part of the Bosniak side. Throughout the war, it was shelled by Serb forces and harassed by snipers shooting at civilians in the streets. Fierce fighting between Bosniak and Serb forces took place just outside Sarajevo on several of the surrounding mountains and hills, for instance, on Mount Igman (Burg and Shoup, 1999: 142–144).

In July 1995, more than 8000 Muslim men and boys were murdered by members of the Bosnian Serb army, supported by units from Serbia, after they took over the town of Srebrenica from the UN soldiers meant to protect the 50,000 refugees seeking shelter there (Honig and Both, 1997; Nettelfield and Wagner, 2014: 8–14). For this, Bosnian Serb military and political leaders were convicted for genocide at the ICTY (2004, 2016, 2017). Ultimately, more than 100,000 persons were killed in the war in BiH; more than a third of these were civilians (Zwierzchowski and Tabeau, 2010).

The war in BiH ended in 1995 with the Dayton Peace Agreement that reorganized the country into a complex structure reflecting the results of war and ethnic cleansing of territories and institutionalized nationalist divisions in politics (Bieber, 2006; Keil and Perry, 2016). BiH became one state, but divided into a Bosnian Serb entity, Republika Srpska and another entity, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, consisting of 10 cantons dominated by Bosniaks and Croats.

Inevitably, the Bosnian War has long-lasting and devastating consequences for the people and societies involved – consequences that continue to be revealed among those directly affected by war, but also among subsequent generations. Younger generations growing up in BiH are faced with the legacies of war and also encounter the psychological impacts of the events through shared memory and intergenerationally transmitted trauma stemming from warfare, ethnic cleansing, rape and experiences in detention camps (Al-Sabah et al., 2015; Clark, 2017; Helms, 2013; Močnik, 2020). It does not make it any easier that public memory of the war in BiH is strictly divided and disputed along political divisions.

The memory conflict in Bosnian politics

In BiH, at least three different ‘memory regimes’ exist, one for each of the largest national groups: the Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats (Duijzings, 2007; Jansen, 2007; Moll, 2013). With the Dayton Peace Agreement that settled the status quo, and through the involvement of the political representatives of the three warring parties, the US-led international community contributed to legitimizing the nationalist political leaderships and consequently also the memory politics of these leaderships (Kostić, 2012: 653–654). The fossilized state structure of Dayton BiH affirms the nationalist division of Bosnian politics (David, 2020: 96–97) and, thus, also preserves the divided memory regimes. There is some variation to this pattern, for example, in the early 2000s, when Bosniak political leaders expressed a more universalist perspective on war memory in response to expectations from the international community. Yet, these rhetorical changes were not really reflected in media discourses and, despite international pressure, the nationalists in BiH have never really lost their monopoly over memory political discourses (Rawski, 2021: 7–8, 18). Indeed, according to Lea David (2020: 114), whenever the US or EU-led international community has pushed for moralizing victim-centred memorialization practices, this has led to counter-effects and the strengthening of historical revisionism from the nationalist governments in the region.

Though precise interpretations may vary at local and grassroots levels, political discourse on state and entity levels is framed along national lines and focuses on the victimization of one nation relative to the others. To give a very simplified overview, political discourse in the Bosnian Serb entity Republika Srpska presents the destruction of Yugoslavia as a civil war and Republika Srpska as a legitimate outcome of a Serbian fight for self-defence. Bosniak politicians in the federation focus on the defensive fight against Serbian and Croatian aggression and the genocide committed against Bosniaks. Croat politicians in the federation tend to replicate Croatia’s national narrative of the ‘Homeland War’, focusing on Croat self-defence against Serb and Muslim aggression (Božić, 2019). While these contrasts are obviously about different conceptualizations of the past, recent research argues that memory politics, specifically the public denials by Republika Srpska’s political leadership, are also about populist mobilization aimed at holding on to political control (Hronešova, 2022).

Whereas these rival memory narratives certainly serve to underpin political divisions in BiH, people’s engagement with memory on private and local levels is more complex and may not mirror the politically framed memory war. Hajdarpašić (2010) reminds us of the diversification of memory through diaspora networks and new media, and the existence both in political and individual discourse of an alternative memory narrative foregrounding the socialist past. Indeed, BiH’s main museums, which would supposedly mirror dominant memory discourses in the country, have continued to promote the legacy of socialist Yugoslavia and a Yugoslav culture of memory (von Puttkamer, 2016), which emphasizes the existence of more diverse memory patterns.

In this divided memory landscape, questions of whether and how to commemorate atrocities like Srebrenica are particularly contentious. Political representatives of Republika Srpska do not recognize the genocide in Srebrenica, despite convictions against Bosnian Serb leaders at ICTY (Delauney, 2021). Whereas Bosniak survivors and relatives travel to the Srebrenica memorial to commemorate the Muslim men and boys murdered by the Bosnian Serb armies, Bosnian Serbs gather in nearby towns to memorialize a different history of Serb victims killed by Muslim militias (Wagner, 2010). Elsewhere across the region, memories of war crimes are equally contested and survivors and relatives of victims of detention camps have found it impossible to establish memorials in former killing sites (Brenner, 2011). International attempts to hold war perpetrators legally accountable for their acts have not settled the matter; surveys from the 2000s showed very little public regard for the ICTY among the Serbs of BiH (Vukušić, 2016: 160).

The disputed and divisive approaches to the shared past are also visible in approaches to history education. Analyses show that history textbooks used in the different parts of BiH are prone to emphasize victimization of the students’ own nations, while promoting fear and enemy images of the other Yugoslav nations (see Torsti, 2007). Though BiH is officially one state, schools are divided and segregated according to ethnicity, meaning that Bosniak, Croat and Serb students are taught separately and follow different curricula and teaching materials (Hadžiristić, 2017; Perry and Becker, 2016). Recent reports confirm that war history is taught very differently in the two political entities of BiH (Lakic, 2019; Obrenovic, 2020).

Even at the individual level, war memories in BiH appear divided across ethnic groups and generations. According to Alma Jeftić (2019: 101), young Bosnians display ‘learnt emotional responses’ – based on a ‘collective factuality’ – that embrace the public narratives of their ethnic group and is often acquired through Internet and news media. Interestingly, Jeftić’s research also seems to demonstrate that young Bosnians are aware that other groups have different stories of the war, but for patriotic reasons they will consciously choose their own group’s version (Jeftić, 2019: 119–120). Thus, while public memory of the war in BiH seems firmly established in the divisions along ethno-national lines, and these are apparently accepted also on individual levels, there is apparently some recognition of the existence of alternative versions as well as an understanding of the role of political divisions in this. In the following, we explore this idea by analysing how readers responded to and discussed two fictional accounts of war memory.

Bosnian war memory in literature: Stanišić and Hemon

The two authors in focus in this article, Saša Stanišić and Aleksandar Hemon, are both widely read in the post-Yugoslav region and highly appreciated not only for their literary work, but also for being representatives or ambassadors for Bosnian literature and culture abroad. On an international stage, they have engaged in public debates on topics related to BiH and have appeared as defenders of an anti-nationalist and cosmopolitical understanding of recent Bosnian history. Most notable are their impactful public objections to Peter Handke, the renowned Austrian writer and proponent of pro-Serbian nationalist sentiments, being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019 despite his support for war criminals such as Slobodan Milošević and the dissemination of genocide denialist narratives (see Hemon, 2019).

The texts that our focus groups were assigned to read were Stanišić’s (2008) award-winning novel How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone and Hemon’s (2000) short story ‘A Coin’ from the collection The Question of Bruno. How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone received very positive reviews when it was first published in Germany and was awarded several prestigious prizes. It quickly became a bestseller, and when it was translated and published in BiH (2009), Croatia (2013) and Serbia (2014) it was met with the same univocal appreciation among critics and readers, becoming a canonical text in Bosnian post-war literature. With Hemon’s The Question of Bruno, too, the critical success was immediate when it was published in English by Picador, and the book propelled Hemon into stardom on the global literary stage. Six of the eight stories in The Question of Bruno had already been published in Bosnian, in a collection entitled Život i djelo Alphonsea Kaudersa (The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders, 1997), by the publisher Bosanska knjiga (Tanović and Tanović, 2021: 234). Later, in 2004, The Question of Bruno was translated into Bosnian with the title Pitanje Bruna.

The impact that Stanišić’s and Hemon’s texts have had internationally and locally is one reason for selecting them as material in the focus group interviews. Another reason is that they address some of the most devastating and painful events of the Bosnian War and are thus intensely engaged in Bosnian memory discourse. Stanišić describes the Serbian offensive in Eastern Bosnia – including terrorization of civilians, sexual violence and ethnic cleansing of Muslims – through the eyes of a naïve, uncomprehending child. The chaotic extensive fighting on Mount Igman is retold as a rambling football match between a Serb and mainly Bosniak team. Hemon’s story is a close-up description of life in Sarajevo under siege, with the very present threat of sniper bullets and the more distant danger of rape and other atrocities.

A third reason for their selection is that the two texts are dissimilar in many regards and thus mediate the war in different ways, potentially producing different kinds of responses in readers. The differences are seen not least in style, scope and topic. Stanišić’s text is an eclectic, fragmented and frantic description of war suddenly tumbling down on Višegrad in Eastern Bosnia. The first part of the novel is told from the first-person perspective of a young boy; a perspective that is used to estrange typical macro accounts about the war and instead provide a depiction of the bare and immediate experience of war as it is unfolding, a mode of writing Erll (2009: 220) has called the ‘experiential mode’ of memory-making in fiction. Later in the book, the style turns into a more reflective account by the now adult narrator, who returns to Višegrad after the war and is confronted with both the past and the present, as he finds his childhood home destroyed and the people he once knew changed. ‘A Coin’ by Hemon, in turn, is part of the tradition of ‘siege texts’ in Bosnian war literature that portray Sarajevo under siege, ‘modelling an urban space in which an emergency situation turned into everyday reality creates its own (unreal) reality’ (Nicolosi, 2012: 65). The story follows the postal correspondence between the young woman Aida, who is trapped in the city and is working as an editor for foreign TV stations, and a nameless refugee in Chicago. Focusing on the theme of foreign media images of the war, the text is a precise naturalistic depiction of the siege that does not shy away from the most gruesome and graphic details of war, zooming in on the grotesque and the morbid (Beganović, 2005: 43).

Reading and discussing memory in the grey zone

Only a handful of readers in our focus groups in Sarajevo and Banja Luka stated that they would normally pick up a book dealing with the Bosnian War. While a few of them expressed an active interest in researching stories and historical details surrounding the war, many expressed an unwillingness to engage with fictional war literature, either because of war discourse fatigue or because of the fear of stirring up painful memories from the past. Indeed, in one of the groups, one reader explained how a particular cellar scene in Stanišić’s book brought back olfactory memories of her own situation as a child in the war (SAR 2). While the theme of war is more or less a constant in private and public discourse in BiH, and something that citizens have grown accustomed to, it seems that the literary texts the respondents were given to read have the ability to enact events and stories in a way that still resonates on a personal and emotional level. In all focus group sessions, readers conveyed a great deal of interest in the narratives and a strong sense of immersion, clearly empathizing with the characters and their fates and trying to put themselves in their positions. Regardless of the differences in opinion about representation, authenticity and perceived agendas of the texts, which we will address below, readers in all groups shared a sympathy for depictions of experiences that could be called ‘fundamentally human’, such as those related to childhood, family relations, survival and death.

We would like to argue that common understanding and sympathy on the part of readers in both cities existed in regard to particular events and experiences. Isolated episodes that describe childhood in war (Stanišić) or the sense of loss of home in the migrant (Hemon) are acknowledged, respected and felt by nearly all respondents. However, it is when readers direct their attention to the representing of these episodes – and the narratives as wholes – that disagreement between readers in the two cities about how the war is remembered comes to the surface. Representing is a question of how the narrative is selected, framed and structured by the author (see Prendergast, 2000: 9). It is also on this level that collective memory narratives are brought into play and the differences in reader responses between Sarajevo and Banja Luka can be seen.

Discussions in Sarajevo – affirmation

In Sarajevo, readers focused predominantly on the authenticity of what was represented, that is, to what extent the episodes described in the texts seemed credible and plausible against the backdrop of existing memories of the war. To a high degree, authenticity was judged according to the readers’ own memories (first- or secondhand) and their personal conceptions of what war was like. Referring to the suddenness with which the war appeared in Višegrad in How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, one reader – in a fashion typical of the discussions – confirms the author’s representation by referencing an account by a family member: ‘In Višegrad they fell asleep in peace and woke up to war. That’s literally the way it was. My Mum told me’ (SAR 1). Notwithstanding Stanišić’s highly stylized way of writing, with many hyperbolic traits and fictional markers, the book was deemed ‘real’ in Sarajevo, even ‘100 percent real’ (SAR 2). ‘We all know that this was how it happened’, one older woman suggested in a comment on a scene in which dead bodies were being thrown from the bridge over the Drina (SAR 1). In Banja Luka, too, events represented were acknowledged, for instance, by a woman who felt Stanišić described the chaos of war well: ‘what he described in the book – the war was like that’ (BAN 1).

Just like with Stanišić, Hemon’s description of Sarajevo under siege was received with affirmation by readers in Sarajevo and ‘approved’ as authentic. The text pretty much confirmed the readers’ memories of the siege, without necessarily adding anything new to it: ‘I wasn’t that affected emotionally, because I witnessed many of those situations myself. However, I was surprised how normal I thought those unnormal situations to be’ (SAR 4).

Discussions in Banja Luka – contestation

While the issue of representing – the author’s way of selecting, framing and structuring their descriptions – was largely absent in the Sarajevo groups, it had a central role in the Banja Luka sessions. Significantly, Banja Luka readers reacted differently to the two texts in this regard. Hemon’s story was met with more contestation and disassociation than Stanišić’s novel. The scene in which the family is forced to throw their dead aunt out of the window was especially off-putting to many readers, and Hemon’s writing was in general perceived as ‘disgusting’ rather than emotionally engaging. ‘It makes you want to vomit rather than causing any type of emotional response’, as one reader put it (BAN 3). Another reader associated the ‘morbidity’ of the story with something that could happen ‘down in Africa’ (BAN 3). A central theme in the Banja Luka sessions was that the story was unnecessarily ‘brutal’, and the way the episodes were described were thought to be overly ‘exaggerated’ (BAN 4). The story clearly clashed with narratives about the siege of Sarajevo in Republika Srpska, as the readers were genuinely surprised by the extent and nature of the violence.

The authenticity of specific episodes in the story was certainly questioned by readers in Banja Luka – as the episodes did not match their conceptions about the siege – but what readers took most issue with was Hemon’s position as an author and the choices he made in representing the war. Here is one reader’s stylistic criticism:

Generally, the story would be much stronger if it were less gory [. . .] There is too much listing [of graphic details], and there are too many dead bodies for you to be able to connect to any of these people and for you to have a strong emotional experience. (BAN 3)

In addition, the reliability of the author as a witness was questioned: ‘From whom did he hear about this? That bothered me a little. Don’t think I’m biased because it’s about people in Sarajevo; I just don’t have the impression that it was such horror’ (BAN 4). This way of alluding to the act of representing is, in a way, to point out the subject in what is sometimes called ‘the triangle of representation’ – that is, the subject which controls and delimits what is seen/described (Prendergast, 2000: 10) – which necessarily places what is represented within the sphere of ideology and the contesting memory narratives in BiH. The fact that this does not happen to the same extent – or at all – in the Sarajevo sessions has the same ideological dimension, only it is obscured by the readers’ agreement with the ideological position of the implicit author. In any case, it is at this point that the antagonistic logic of the contesting narratives is activated, something that is clearly shown in the Banja Luka readers’ fear of what ‘A Coin’, as a text that uses a documentary type of style, can do:

I fear that, precisely because it is exaggerated, people abroad, for instance in the US, will think that the opposite side [the Serbian] was overly brutal. I fear such things. Because you write as if it happened exactly that way, but you have that artistic freedom. And with your particular emphasis you’ll be able to create the impression, for people not from here, that the opposite side was scarier than it really was. (BAN 4)

Interestingly, this point about the text as a medium of memory had its counterpart in Sarajevo, where many insisted that the story is important as a witness account and that it should be read by younger generations, not only because it documents the war in Sarajevo well, but also, as one reader put it: ‘I believe [young people] should know about all that happened and what human beings are capable of and to what extremes they can go’. The expressed implication was that new generations need to be prepared for a new potential war (SAR 4).

The critical attention paid to Hemon and his way of representing war events is also found among the Banja Luka readers discussing Stanišić’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, but their reactions were less antagonistic and dismissive. Several readers did indeed see the novel as ‘quite tendentious’ and one-sided in its portrayal of the occupation of Višegrad by Serb forces, who are not called Serbs in the book, but are described as brutish bearded men, alluding to the Chetniks during the Second World War, who prided themselves on having big beards (BAN 1–2). Generally, the sentiment among the readers was that Serbs are portrayed as the ‘bad guys’, exoticized as primitive war-loving cavemen (BAN 1). One reader expressed a wish for more objectivity (BAN 2), while several readers thought that the book neglected talking about atrocities committed against Serbs: ‘Let’s read about what happened to the boys Petar and Pavel in Konjic and the atrocities committed there and see what writer wouldn’t be able to make their reader weep’ (BAN 2). However, in contrast to the focus groups reading Hemon’s story, the Stanišić sessions in Banja Luka were characterized by a high degree of understanding for the perceived lack of objectivity, or anti-Serb bias, which was seen as a normal aspect of a war account and something that does not necessarily prevent readers from connecting with or getting something out of the book, even if they are at the wrong end of the bias. Within the broader Bosnian experience, the existence of multiple perspectives was seen as natural, tolerable and fully logical:

All of us from this region have our own war stories. Never mind if you fled or stayed. We all look at these things from our own angle. He [Stanišić] wrote from his angle. This is what he saw. In his mind, the war, the killings, the people whom he knew are all associated with men with beards. (BAN 2)

In Banja Luka, readers established a view of the novel as a ‘narrative of ours’ (naša priča) that was quite broad in scope and was able to include people from all ethnic groups, despite their strong divisions in terms of how they remember the war. It’s with all Bosnians in mind that one reader interprets Stanišić’s message to be ‘that we’ve lost parts ourselves, in a way, and that we will have to live with the same sense of incompleteness as he’s done all his life’ (BAN 1). Generally, readers felt that Stanišić presented the regional context well – ‘it’s a book from here’ (BAN 2). Interestingly, the ‘narrative of ours’ was much narrower in Sarajevo, where respondents questioned whether the description of the persecution of Bosniaks in Višegrad would be understood at all (SAR 2), implying that other ethnic groups would not be able to accept or relate to the account.

Shared experience versus ethnonational memory

Stanišić’s and Hemon’s texts both allow for two concurrent ways of reading. The first is characterized by immersion and primarily makes use of prior personal experience and individual memory to make sense of characters and events. The second, in turn, focuses upon aspects typically regulated by collective memory discourse, such as the way the war is represented, how the ethnic groups involved are portrayed and who are victims or perpetrators. Our results show that the two texts offer different affordances for how readers relate to memory as well as the degree to which viewpoints are polarized. Stanišić’s style, which is characterized by irony, humour and a child’s perspective (all aspects that create distance to what is depicted) triggers less ideological resistance than Hemon’s style, which relies upon a high-definition naturalism that presents close-ups of the gruesomeness of war, which are clearly more acute. While the vagueness of Stanišić’s account makes it more including, or, shall we say, less excluding, Hemon’s account demands that the reader takes a stance on what is represented, which necessarily raises issues of responsibility and guilt.

The difference is important, because the multiperspectivity afforded by How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone allows for contesting memory narratives to exist concurrently in the minds of the readers (rival narratives are legitimate), while Hemon’s text, however, produces an antagonistic response (where different versions of the past cannot co-exist) in the Banja Luka readers. In Banja Luka, Hemon’s story poses a threat and possibly triggers a fear of collective guilt for some of the readers, in the sense that they would potentially need to revise their image of how the Serbian side acted in the war and thus recognize in-group wrongdoings and guilt. It seems that Stanišić’s novel, to a larger extent, allows for more of a grey zone in which otherwise clear memory divisions become more contingent and negotiable. It certainly produces, at least in Banja Luka, a broad type of ‘we’, a common experience of the past, which implies a space for at least some degree of recognition of the other.

Conclusion

The literary representations of Bosnian war memory by Saša Stanišić and Aleksandar Hemon address some of the most devastating and painful parts of the war history from the perspective of first-person narrators, creating highly immersive reading experiences although in quite different ways. The focus group discussions showed that readers on both sides empathized with the universal human aspects of the texts: the suffering of the child in war, the loss of one’s homeland or families torn apart. Yet, on the levels of narrative logic, causality and accountability, the reactions from the reader groups were clearly divided between the two cities where the interviews were conducted. Readers in Sarajevo saw their own experiences and the official Bosniak war memory affirmed in both texts. For readers in Banja Luka, the two texts worked differently: whereas Hemon’s brutal and detailed description of the siege of Sarajevo was sharply contested, it seems that the naivety and vagueness of the child perspective in Stanišić’s novel allowed for more acceptance. Readers felt included in the narrative as their story as well, reflecting a shared all-Bosnian experience, despite what they saw as a bias against Serbs. This may be seen as a partial recognition of the Bosniak perspective, perhaps even venturing into it and, thus, entering the memorial grey zone, where positions may be opened and warily challenged. However, the idea of multiperspectivity, with all sides in BiH having their own versions, is also a way of insisting on not recognizing the most painful parts of war history, including the genocide against Bosniaks and Serb responsibility for that.

Nevertheless, the focus group material clearly shows that reading and discussing fictional representations of the war created some space for thinking about the war as a shared experience and for encountering the other group’s version, even without quite recognizing it. Thus, despite the mnemonic war that characterizes the political frameworks of memory surrounding them, some of our readers seemed to navigate within a less polarized memorial grey zone with some recognition of otherwise mutually exclusive positions. Rather than mirroring the dominant political memory narratives, the grey zone positions drew on individual and personal experiences and memories, often brought forward by vivid descriptions in Staniśić’s narrative.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article is a result of collective work within our collaborative research project Mnemonic Migration Transnational Circulation and Reception of Wartime Memories in post-Yugoslav Migrant Literature funded by the Danish Research Council for Independent Research and headed by associate professor Jessica Ortner, University of Copenhagen. For more information, see

Notes

Author biographies

Tea Sindbæk Andersen is associate professor of East European history and culture at the University of Copenhagen. Tea’s research focuses on cultural memory, uses of history, identity politics and popular culture in the Yugoslav region.

Fedja Wierød Borčak holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and is currently a Postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. Since his PhD thesis, A Children’s Literature? Subversive Infantilisation in Contemporary Bosnian–Herzegovinian Fiction, which dealt with the child character as a political instrument in post-war Bosnian–Herzegovinian literature, he has mainly worked on Bosnian literature in Scandinavia.

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