Das Übernatürliche im Roman Herkunft von Saša Stanišić

Abstract The article discusses the supernatural in the autobiographical novel as reported by Stanišić ( Herkunft , Luchterhand, Munich, 2019), the outstanding representative of contemporary post-Yugoslav migrant literature in German. The article focuses on the formal and narrative aspects of the representation of the supernatural, which is ultimately connected to magical realism. It analyses its diverse semantics and historical foundations and finally sheds light on its inherent social dimension. The article elucidates Stanišić’s aesthetic goal in using magical realism, represented by the relatives of the protagonist figure Saša, and closely interwoven with diverse metafictional narrative techniques, to place the present and past — with special reference to the post-Yugoslav situation of the 1990s — into a subversive and thus differentiated perspective. In this way, the novel provides future projections of a subtle humanity, marked by traumatisation and fragility. The author lends additional poignancy to the differentiation of the image(s) of society through critique that visualises the Bosnian homeland as a space of toxic‚ bundle of ideologies’ provoking transgenerational traumas, and at the same time reveals the culture of the West in its rationalist delusions and frenetic search for orientation. On the other hand, the author elevates the experience of migration in Germany to the status of a personal pluralistic myth, that, in comparison to the monistic religious and national myths, opens up the historical and memorial space of representation and communication, which is painstakingly making its way in historiography of the war-torn Balkan regions.