Saša Stanišić as a “Migrant” Author

SAŠA STANIŠIĆ's PERSONAL EXPERIENCE as a migrant from former Yugoslavia in Germany continues to play an important role in how critics map his work onto the German literary landscape. From his debut Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (2006; How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, 2009) to his most recent autobiographical work Herkunft (Origins, 2019), for which he was awarded the German Book Prize in October 2019, his work is often read by reviewers as Migrationsliteratur, “migrant” literature. Most reviewers admittedly only mention his Serbo-Bosnian roots in passing, as an interesting, “exotic” fact about him, or to praise how quickly and seamlessly he became a “selbstverstandlicher Teil der deutschsprachigen Literatur” (a natural part of German-language literature). Yet even such well-intentioned praise is often counterproductive: pointing out how well he has integrated into the contemporary literary landscape only reiterates and implicitly reinforces his status as a familiar “other,” a “good” migrant, and by extension the status of his work as Migrationsliteratur.

It is worth noting that the term Migrationsliteratur is rarely used anymore in scholarship, which favors the much broader and more nuanced term “transnational literature.” As Elisabeth Herrmann, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Stuart Taberner note in their introduction to the 2015 volume Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature, the notion of the “transnational” “prompts us to move our focus away from the movement of some—migrants, refugees, exiles, or trafficked people—across borders towards the implication of all.” It implies, they continue, that “all are impacted by the flows of people, products, and ideas across borders, including those who do not themselves move.” Yet this broader scholarly view, through the lens of the “transnational,” of how mobility and border crossings shape individual and collective lives, identities, and experiences in the twenty-first century has by no means eclipsed the narrower focus on migrants and migration in public discourse. The term Migrationsliteratur still seems to be widely used in public discourse surrounding literature, especially in Feuilleton (German-language newspapers’ arts section) writing. Whether we talk about “migrant” or “transnational” literature, however, we are implicitly thinking in categories of identity defined by reference to political and geographical borders.