Bosnien in Berlin: German Postmigrant Memory Culture

On February 25th, Emina Haye and Thomas Schad had the occasion to present our project at the annual Scientific Advisory Board Meeting of the Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft (SOG) in Berlin. In this contribution, we post the first part of our joint presentation, by Emina Haye.

In late 2020, 25 years after the end of the Bosnian war and the Srebrenica genocide, the initiators of our book project—Nadira Musić, Aldina Čemernica, Sabrina Halilović, Snežana Stanković, Thomas Schad, and Emina Haye—participated in a panel discussion at the Berlin Science Week @ Humboldt University that focused on how, even 25 years after the war, these events can shape and determine personal lives, one’s personal choices, and even academic careers. Prof. Christian Voß from Humboldt University Berlin organized the event, while Thomas Schad moderated it.

We, the participants, women from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Germany, and Serbia, discussed our perspectives and experiences. We found that all of us, despite our different ages, heritages, and backgrounds, had a very personal story to tell and share. Our story encompasses the pre-war period, the war itself, our life in the diaspora, and our personal engagement and processing with this issue. Our perspectives are firsthand and authentic: Perspectives of women who were young children or youngsters when the Bosnian and Yugoslav wars started; women who have experienced the war directly or indirectly through their families and relatives and who know very well what trauma and traumatic experiences mean. This trauma is of a transgenerational nature.

After this initial discussion, we received consistently positive feedback that encouraged us to continue and to share our stories. The idea to gather and begin writing a book emerged at that moment. At the first glance, writing a book sounds exciting, of course. However, we still need to discuss our central question and the overall structure of the book-writing process. We wanted to present this idea and this possibility to a broader audience, and in the first step, we looked for potential contributors for our anthology. A call in the form of an exposé followed, where the idea and the background of the book project were described. A wide variety of professional profiles came forward: linguists, artists, writers, and academics. We can proudly say that all the people we have contacted and asked to contribute have responded positively to our project and agreed to participate.

We are taking this opportunity to stress that our book project is not exclusively about Srebrenica—although the initial event and getting together had precisely that topic in focus. We, Bosnien in Berlin are concerned with a broader reading of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the question of how personal migration history can become part of a larger migration history. The title of our book is Bosnien in Berlin—but it goes beyond that. We are open to other perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds, and our entire framework is quite open. For instance, our geographical focus extends to the entire German-speaking region and even beyond that. We have authors coming from Austria, Italy, Germany, or Serbia. In the summer of 2021, Thomas finally developed our homepage, which had not been planned from the very beginning but grew significantly over time. Right now, everything is kept bilingually, in German and Jezik*, but it is planned to translate the whole content into English as well. We firmly believe that the multi-perspective analysis of the war holds significant relevance for today’s societies.

We regularly post abstracts from our contributors and use this way to introduce them to our followers and readers. In addition, we have created an Instagram profile and a Facebook page, where we keep our followers up-to-date and inform them about new content on our homepage. It is important to say that all our work on this book project is absolutely voluntary, and that so far, we haven’t received any funds yet.

It is planned to publish our anthology by the end of this year in Germany for the German-speaking public, Peter Lang publishing house, and in 2023 in Bosnia-Herzegovina, too. We want to take this opportunity and publicly thank Prof. Christian Voß once again. He has always supported us and will continue to do so throughout the publication process. Thank you.