Youth in truth and fiction

On February 25^th, Emina Haye and Thomas Schad from our blog & book project, Bosnien in Berlin had the occasion to present the project at the annual Scientific Advisory Board meeting of the Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft (SOG) in Berlin. The SOG, based in Munich, is one of the flagships in the field of Southeast European studies, providing political, economic, cultural, and academic counseling in the German-speaking countries. The German Federal Foreign Office institutionally supports it. The public symposium titled 30 Years After the Beginning of the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina: What Does It Mean to Rely on the Young Generation?, which was our stage, was organized by Dr. Heike Karge from the University of Regensburg (program in English).

Before us, three panelists from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia participated and shared their invaluable research projects and activist work with us: Dino Dupanović from Bihać (BiH), who is a PhD student at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Sarajevo, whose topic was Srebrenica: The Paradigm of Bosniak Suffering; Ajna Jusić from Sarajevo, who is a core activist of the NGO Zaboravljena djeca rata (The Forgotten Children of War), who dismantles—in her courageous and impressive work—the taboo of children born out of rape during the Bosnian war; and Nataša Govedarica from Belgrade, who works in the NGO forumZFD (Forum Ziviler Friedensdienst, originating from Germany), presenting her work on socially engaged theatre (and culture, more broadly) as a platform for dealing with the past.

In this contribution, we present one part of our presentation—and we hope to present to you (hopefully soon) a more detailed report and video link. The following presentation, by Thomas Schad, mainly tackles and discusses the trope of youth, as introduced in the following section, which also framed the symposium in the introductory paragraph of its program:

A few days before taking office as the new High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Christian Schmidt appealed to the public at the end of July 2021 to „put the focus on the young generation [in Bosnia and Herzegovina], the EU, the High Representative, and everyone together. Relying solely on the graying gentlemen will not suffice. I bet on the young generation!“

Source: SOG

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Introduction

Before I come back to our project, Bosnien in Berlin, and how I would situate it under the umbrella of the leading question of what it means to place the emphasis on youth, I would first like to challenge, in a somewhat provocative way, the frame of this symposium. This frame is, as I understood it, the trust in the agency of ‚youth‘ as the agents of hope and a better future. I will discuss the frame and ask for the agency of the other agents inside the picture: the not-so-young, the grown-ups, the adults, and even the elders. But since Bosnien in Berlin is a literary project, and since we are trained scholars, I will also approach the truth-seeking mission that is inherent to both science and essayistic literature. I hope to demonstrate why literature and culture deserve all our attention and support—although we have already heard more than convincing arguments, especially in Nataša’s presentation.

Youth serves as a beautiful frame for a complicated picture.

I feel both entitled and compelled to question that frame, as I cannot consider myself a ‚young‘ person since I am 42 years old. However, this allows me to look back to at least 22 years of a perspective on youth empowerment in Bosnia and Germany: Right after school, I went to Bosnia and worked for the German youth association Schüler Helfen Leben (SHL) and the Campaign for Conscientious Objection (Kampanja za Prigovor Savjesti). One of my first tasks, in the year 2000, was to co-organize a youth summit with a very prominent and important guest speaker: Wolfgang Petritsch, then High Representative of the International Community. And guess what he said: his message was nearly the same as that of the present-day High Representative, Christian Schmidt. He highlighted the role of the youth as the future leaders of the country. We all, including myself, were really charmed and delighted about these words—because hey! – the future was ours!

One could say that it is a cliché to depict the youth as the real saviors of their own future. The probably most prominent recent examples of this kind of rhetoric on youth empowerment also resonate in Barack Obama’s and Angela Merkel’s speeches at the International Climate Summit in Glasgow last year. And as we know, Greta Thunberg—as a representative of „the youth“—was not pleased with the whole performance. So it’s time for some critical questions: What about all the empowered youth from back then? What happened to the empowered youth of twenty or thirty years ago? They are now grown-ups, adults, or even elders. So we should evaluate the outcomes of past youth empowerment initiatives.

When I look back and forth, I can, of course, see some impressively fortunate and successful cases of empowered youth. However, I also see a project that has largely failed, particularly when it comes to the current state of statehood in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is constantly under attack. We all understand that emigration poses a significant issue: a significant number of young individuals are actively leaving the country, as evidenced by the nearly 30,000 members of the Facebook group „Odliv Mozgova“ (brain drain).“ And, of course, they all have their reasons.

However, the relationship between youth and the future today is more (de-)pressing than in the early 2000s, when the general mood was characterized by the all-encompassing hope and belief that things would necessarily get better: Today, all kinds of futures confront the meta-catastrophe of climate change—which is why I am, frankly speaking, very concerned whenever the solution to our problems is projected onto youth and into the future. The progressive catastrophe of climate change urges us to act at present—and not (only) in the future.

The mission of science and literature is to seek the truth.

Science is a truth-seeking mission, and science is also what the Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft is after—which is why I shall revisit the question of the relationship between the literary project of Bosnien in Berlin and science—as science is mostly understood as a positivist, non-fictional (non-literary) approach to proven facts.

„The biggest truth,“ as writer Lana Bastašić was quoted a few days ago in the Sarajevan Oslobođenje, “can sometimes be found in the biggest fiction“. And here, I would like to remind us of the constructive role of fiction as utopia that would later—though in a modified way—turn into reality and even science. If we consider Thomas Hobbes‘ Leviathan, we see that Hobbes used a mythological figure (from literature and the Bible) to develop his theory of politics, the state, and the sovereign as the body politic—a theory that was later recognized by political science as a legitimate field of study (Hobbes focused on adults, not the youth). In that way, literature can work as an incubator of science.

Yet, literature is also often needed to tell a truth that is too fresh to be told in a non-narrative, non-fictional, non-literary way. Consider stories where the protagonists are alive and naming them is painful, risky, or dangerous. In the case of Bosnien in Berlin, we have two contributions that were written as theater pieces, while in other cases, real names were replaced by aliases. Consider the iconic film Aida, Quo Vadis? The film, directed by Jasmila Žbanić, is told from the perspective of a fictional character, yet it conveys a very truthful story; also consider Susan Sontag’s staging. The film „Waiting for Godot“ is set against the backdrop of Sarajevo under siege, with a literary Godot who never materializes and a figurative international community that never truly intervenes.

Literature serves as a crucial field for truth-seeking and science because it not only enables us to explore, contextualize, and construct stories, but also to deconstruct, fragment, and potentially reveal hidden truths. Literary stories can be analyzed like historiography or the story in history—as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin have suggested. According to them, fragmentation is the best way to reveal the pathology in the course of history, which sometimes also becomes apparent when we say, „Look, it happened again,“ or „History repeats itself“ (and you can read similar statements these days in the newspapers and on online platforms when you turn your eye to the Russian invasion of Ukraine). And there is a method for fragmentation: trope or metaphor analysis.

A leading trope or metaphor, which, so to speak, repeats itself, comes alongside „youth.“ „Of course, I am not saying that emphasizing youth is a pathology; yet, the metaphors that are often associated with ‚youth’—like the vegetational metaphor of growth, maturity, and sovereignty—are very complex semantic units that can be understood and deciphered in different ways. They deserve, from time to time, critical reevaluation in order not to petrify and become the fixed frame of discourse, which nobody is supposed to touch or challenge. For instance, in some outdated visions of the future, the course of time is envisioned in the metaphor of growth: the youth is understood as the blossom of life, which will ultimately bear ripe fruit. But with climate change, this all is very questionable: what if snow falls on the blossom, on the fruit—to quote from the famous sevdalinka Snijeg pade na behar na voće. And perhaps, as a side thought, a new sevdalinka should be written on heat and drought.

Avoiding other pitfalls when addressing the youth is crucial, and I have already mentioned the issue of time constraints. Secondly, if we suppose that young people will, tomorrow, settle everything much better than the present-day middle-aged or older adults, this may obscure the real share of agency, wealth, power, and responsibility. I shall conclude here, but not in despair or hopelessness, because I honestly believe in the transformative impact of science as a truth-seeking process and science as the systematic language of critique—no matter how poorly academia often treats academics.

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Emina Haye und Thomas Schad sind die Hauptansprechpartner:innen für Projektinteressierte und Mitwirkende und teilen sich die Aufgaben der Redaktion sowie die Verantwortung für die Inhalte. Aldina Čemernica, Nadira Musić und Sabrina Halilović sind Gründungsmitglieder und Autor:innen des Kernteams. MEHR