Faruk Bešić
Born in Berlin in 1994, the author studied German philology and biology at Freie Universität Berlin and graduated with a master’s thesis entitled Tabubruch durch Andeutungen – Fakten und Fiktion in Herta Müller’s ‚Atemschaukel‘ (Breaking Taboos by Hinting – Facts and Fiction in Herta Müller’s ‚Atemschaukel‘) in the Department of Modern German Literature. Following his academic training, the author devotes himself in his literature in particular to the processing of traumatic experience, to remembering as a constructive process, and seeks ways to stage these literarily. Today, the author works in Berlin as a teacher of biology and German.
Aldina Čemernica
Aldina was born in 1984 in the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sarajevo. She fled from the besieged Sarajevo to Germany in 1995 as an eleven-year-old child and has since lived in Berlin, where she grew up. She completed her Bachelor’s degree at the Humboldt University in Berlin with a core subject in Southern Slavic Studies and the second subject in German Linguistics. She then completed her Master’s degree in Central and Eastern European Cultures at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Currently, she is working on her dissertation on the identity constructions of young people of Bosniak origin in Berlin. She was a doctoral fellow of the Konsul Karl and Dr. Gabriele Sandmann Foundation. In 2016, she was an adjunct lecturer at the Institute of Slavic and Hungarian Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin. She is also politically involved as a member of the SPD Berlin and has worked as a research assistant to a member of parliament in the Berlin House of Representatives. In her essay on childhood in besieged Sarajevo, Aldina will report and write about everyday life in besieged Sarajevo from the perspective of a child. In doing so, she will address the following questions, among others: How did my friends and I experience everyday war life? How were school lessons organized? What was my personal view of the adults?
Dr. Armina Galijaš
Armina Galijaš has been a Senior Scientist at the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz since 2011. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Vienna and her MA degree from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. She also worked as a research assistant and lecturer at both universities. Her research interests and teaching activities have Focused on the contemporary history of Southeastern Europe. More about Armina Galijaš on the research portal of the University of Graz.
Sabrina Halilović
Sabrina is a young Bosnian born in Berlin in 2000. Through her Bosnian family, she maintains a strong connection with and to Bosnia. During her Bachelor studies in the core subject Slavic Languages and Literatures (BKMS) and second subject Educational Sciences at the Humboldt University in Berlin, she was able to deepen her knowledge about Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also the region scientifically. With her main focus on multilingualism, interculturality, cultural and language policy, economy as well as tourism, her Bachelor thesis deals with the topic The Arab region and Turkey as soft power in today’s Bosnia-Herzegovina. She also completed her internship at the Embassy of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Berlin, where she gained additional experience regarding German-Bosnian relations.
Ado Hasanović
Ado Hasanović (Srebrenica, 1986) is a Bosnian film director based in Rome. In 2013 he graduated in Directing at the Sarajevo Film Academy with the short film Mama, which enjoyed a positive festival distribution. The same year he finished the Norwegian Nansen Academy, a course focused on inter-ethnic dialogue.
In 2014, after an internship at the Cinema for Peace Foundation and the participation in the Documentary Summer School organised by the US James Madison University in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he received the award as Best Student, he enrolled in the prestigious National Film School Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, where he specialised as a film director. In 2017 he also finished a Master in Dramaturgy at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo as a guest student. His short films The Angel of Srebrenica, Blue Viking in Sarajevo, Mama, Breath of Life Srebrenica, Pink Elephant, Nomophobia and Let There be Colour enjoyed world-wide selections and won many international awards. Since 2015, he is the Art Director of the Mediterranean Short Film Festival The Author’s Passages in Sant’Antioco (Italy). He is also the creator of “Cortovisioni – How To Make A Short Film“, a workshop format in which he teaches how to make a short film from the subject up to the post-production.
In 2019, he co-founded the cultural association Admon Film based in Sarajevo. On August 20th 2019 he was awarded with the Sarajevan Golden Medallion by the Mayor of Sarajevo as a special recognition for his cultural achievements. He is currently working on his first feature documentary.
Emina Haye
Emina was born in the north of Bosnia, the Posavina. At the age of 14.5, she came with her family as a war refugee from Bosnia, via Croatia and Hungary, to Berlin. She studied German language and literature, history, and psychology at the Technical University of Berlin and the Humboldt University of Berlin. During her studies, she worked with various Berlin institutions and associations as a freelance interpreter in the field of psychotherapy for war refugees from the former Yugoslavia. She completed her Master’s degree in Slavic languages (BKMS and Russian) at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her Master’s thesis focused on ethnic, religious, and national identity ascriptions in 20th and 21st century Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her research interests include multilingualism, interculturality, identity, integration, and migration. She is working as a freelance translator, interpreter and lecturer and has been working as an adjunct lecturer in BKMS at the Department of South Slavic Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin and as translator and editor for the Deutsche Welle Academy. Emina will describe her childhood memories from the beginning of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in her semi-fictional personal essay. She will write about themes such as growing up, disappointment, betrayal, and loss of trust, among others.
Azra Hodžić-Kadić
Azra is a lecturer in Bosnian and Croatian at the Language Center of the University of Vienna and works on a project at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in the field of minority languages. She is also a Ph.D. candidate at the Slavic Studies Department in Vienna. Her research areas are minority languages, multilingualism, the study of the Bosnian language in a multilingual society, and the role of native languages in the formation of a polycentric identity. She actively speaks eight languages and is the initiator and chairperson of the project Otkrij bosanski -Discover Bosnian – Discover Bosnian in Vienna, which aims to promote the Bosnian language and multilingualism in the diaspora. Azra is the author of the first multilingual textbook for Bosnian as a second/foreign language, and another textbook and a grammar book are in preparation. She is the chair and founder of the Multilingualism and Interculturalism Initiative, which promotes multilingualism more broadly. For Bosnia in Berlin, Azra will provide poetic contributions. Her poems are characterized by a pronounced emotionality and lyricism, as well as the specific relationship of a woman to political reality. Even those poems that are politically engaged are also strongly emotional.
Dr. Lumnije Jusufi
Lumnije Jusufi is at the end of her habilitation at the Humboldt University of Berlin with a study on a border region between Albania and Northern Macedonia and head of a project on migration and cultural transfer between Germany and the Albanian Western Balkans funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. She is a lecturer at the HU Berlin, at the TU Dortmund, and at several Southeast European universities. She is the author of numerous books and articles. She is an Albanologist specializing in sociolinguistics, with migration studies as an important focus of her research. Her research is at the intersection of linguistics and cultural studies.
She came to Germany in the 1990s at the age of 16 as the child of a guest worker. She attended a secondary and comprehensive school in Dortmund, after which she went to Munich to study in 2000. At LMU Munich she studied, received her Ph.D., and worked as an assistant lecturer until 2012. Since 2013, she has been a lecturer for German as a foreign language at TU Dortmund. She has been employed at HU Berlin since 2014 via third-party-funded projects. She is committed to the interface between science and the public, because the social utilization of scientific results is very close to her heart, especially when she can raise her voice for those who do not have one themselves.
Edina Klopić
Edina Klopić was born in Ulm, Germany in 1974. In her childhood, she lived for several years in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, a time that left a lasting impression on her. In 1987 she returned to Germany but continued to feel connected to her second homeland. During the war years, she volunteered as an interpreter for refugee compatriots, later she tutored Syrian refugees in Germany and was a co-founder of the Cultural Association Bosnia and Herzegovina in Göppingen. In 2019, she launched the Sevdalinka initiative, a project dedicated to the preservation and maintenance of traditional Bosnian songs. Her main job is in the finance department of a software company.
In her essay, she writes about belonging to a homeland and the turmoil that set in after the Srebrenica genocide. She searched for a link that could connect the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina and found it in the Sevdah.
Sanija Kulenović
Sanija Kulenović studied art history and wrote her thesis on art as a way of leaving traces of the Bosnian war. Later, she explored issues of flight, trauma, cultural heritage, identities, and cultures of memory in her performances, workshops, and lectures. She believes in effective art and its potential to support peace-building processes. Her works have been shown at the Month of Performance Art in Berlin and the Musrara Mix Festival in Jerusalem, among others. The protagonist in Sanija’s literary contribution is a guest worker’s daughter who leaves Berlin at the age of five and grows up with foster parents in Bosnia, only to return to Berlin ten years later as unaccompanied minor seeking protection from the turmoil of war there.
Nadira Musić
Nadira was born in Zvornik in eastern Bosnia. With the beginning of the war in Bosnia, her family fled to Germany, where Nadira spent her first years of life. However, her life’s path led her to France, where she partly grew up, and finally completed her Master’s degree in Slavic Studies in Berlin. Nadira is not only truly polyglot because of her migrations: she also knows something about Alhamijado texts. These are written in Bosnian, but in Arabic letters, where Nadira’s profound knowledge of Arabic is certainly of great use. Her main areas of interest and study are sociolinguistics and political developments of the post-Yugoslav Western Balkans. She currently works at Deutsche Welle Akademie and is a member of the editorial staff of Bosnia in Berlin.
Denijen Pauljević
Denijen Pauljević was born in Belgrade and fled to Germany during the Yugoslav wars. He studied intercultural communication, participated in the screenwriting workshop at the University of Television and Film in Munich, and works on various literary, screenplay, and theater projects. From 2013 to 2018 he was responsible for the coordination of the Munich Balkan Days. In 2014, he received the author grant Raniser Debüt, and in 2015 the literary scholarship of the city of Munich. In the summer semester of 2021, Denijen Pauljević taught scenic writing at LMU Munich. His radio play debut Das Schneckengrabhaus was selected as a radio play of the month in January 2022.
Dr. des. Thomas Schad
Thomas was born in 1980 in Lower Franconia (Unterfranken) and grew up there in a German-Bosnian family. After working as a project coordinator in Sarajevo for two years, he studied Eastern European Studies, Political Science, and South Slavic Studies in Berlin and Istanbul. After graduating, he worked as a consultant in the foreign affairs department of Freie Universität Berlin. Subsequently, doctoral studies at the Chair of Southeast European History at the Humboldt University of Berlin and DFG fellow at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. His research interests include the transformation of nation-statehood, neopopulism, new media, public diplomacy, Southeastern Europe, Turkey, and Franconia. Writing, blogging, and long bike rides in nature are his passions. He is the author of the blog Incubator Metamorφ.
Snežana Stanković
Snežana Stanković is a postdoctoral researcher at FSU Jena and Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION (European University Viadrina). Her ethnographic and archival work focuses on the lifeworlds of human and non-human subjects in post-conflict areas. She is particularly interested in (im)tangible landscapes of coexistence. She focuses on atmospheres, cemeteries / monuments / memorials, archives, and narratives to explore possibilities of experiential and emotional transferability in diverse cultural and often politically conflictual environments. In her research, she brings anthropological discussions of aging, forced migration, violence, humanity, policymakers, poverty, and the environment into dialogue. Together with visual anthropologist Linda Paganelli, she has studied the official and personal memories and commemoration of the Holocaust and the Roma genocide in Croatia and Serbia, as well as the dirge and afterlife of the deceased and missing in the Western Balkans and Sardinia.
Tanja Šljivar
Tanja was born in Banja Luka (SFR Yugoslavia) in 1988. She studied dramaturgy in Belgrade and applied theater studies in Giessen. Her plays have been translated into ten languages and performed at theaters such as Deutsches Theater Berlin, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Theater Paderborn, Schauspiel Dortmund, Narodno pozorište Užice (Serbia), Atelje 212 Belgrade, BITEF Theater, and National Theater Belgrade. She has been awarded numerous prizes and scholarships. In 2019 she was acting director at the National Theatre in Belgrade.
[Cover picture: Bookstore in Berlin-Charlottenburg. By Emina Haye, 2018.]
