David Albahari

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David Albahari (2011)

David Albahari ( Serbian - Cyrillic Давид Албахари ; born March 15, 1948 in Peć , Yugoslavia ) is a Serbian writer who emigrated to Canada .

life and work

David Albahari studied English literature and language at the University of Belgrade . His first volume of short stories was published in 1973. His book Opis smrti (1982; German Description of Death , 1993) was awarded the Ivo Andrić Prize in 1982, the Roman Mamac (1996; German motherland , 2002) received the 1997 NIN- Prize, in 1998 the Balkanica Prize and in 2006 (with his translators Mirjana and Klaus Wittmann) the Brücke Berlin Literature and Translation Prize . The novel Životinjsko carstvo (German 2017 as The Animal Kingdom ) received the Isidora Sekulić Prize in 2014 . His work has been translated into fourteen languages. Albahari, in turn, translated Nabokov , Updike and Shepard into Serbian , among others .

Albahari describes the I Ching as an important influence on his life and writing that focuses on the personal and the family. “When you understand what's going on in a family, you also understand what's going on in the world. Patterns repeat themselves, only the scale changes. ”The historical events are outlined in the multi-layered levels of memory and experience of his characters. Subjective images allow us to get closer to what is happening. The short stories in his volume of short stories, Description of Death, are kept in a condensed, experimental form. He often uses grotesque images: a father walks across the water and camp inmates go on hunger strike to be allowed to wear "bodices".

Despite efforts to the contrary, Albahari, as a Jewish Serb (or Serbian Jew), could not escape the politicization of his life and work in the war in Yugoslavia. In 1991 he took over the office of chairman of the Association of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia. In this role he played a key role in the evacuation of Sarajevo's Jews. Two years later, he voluntarily chose to “uproot” his Canadian exile in order to escape the “forced politicization” by which he saw his life at the time determined by others. In 1994 he and his family moved to Canada. There he lives as a writer and translator in Calgary . Albahari does not consider himself a refugee or exile and for some time now he has been spending part of the year in Zemun , where he grew up.

From a distance, however, the history of his homeland increasingly comes to the fore in his work. Based on his own autobiographical situation as an emigrant, he tells the life story of his mother in motherland . The first-person narrator not only deals with her biography against the background of Yugoslav history, but also addresses his ambivalences with regard to dealing with memory, identity and history in his new home. The novel Gec i Majer (1998; Eng . Götz and Meyer , 2003) describes the search for Jews who disappeared during World War II. It leads the narrator on the trail of two SS officers who are responsible for their murder. Albahari prevents the reader from identifying with the protagonists through alienating elements in his language. For the first-person narrator, however, these become so real that he breaks up with the past.

"In the end, all of my heroes go crazy in some way, even though I never intended to write that."

- David Albahari

In the novel Die Ohrfeige (2007), the Belgrade district of Zemun becomes the setting for a world full of symbolism. In Ludwig (2009) the author writes a novel about the ambivalent affection and the stealing of ideas between writers.

"Writing is a kind of beautiful madness."

- David Albahari

The writer was a participant in the International Literature Festival Berlin 2004. At the Leipzig Book Fair 2012 he was again in Germany. Albahari has Parkinson's disease. Albahari addresses the disease in his latest novel Today is Wednesday .

Works (selection in German translation)

  • Description of death. From the Serb. by Ivan Ivanji . Wieser, Klagenfurt 1993
  • Snowfall for days. From the Serb. by Mirjana, Klaus Wittmann. Zsolnay, Vienna 1997
  • Wind outside the window. Erker, St. Gallen 1998
  • Motherland. From the Serb. by Mirjana and Klaus Wittmann . Eichborn, Frankfurt 2002; revised Transl .: Schöffling, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-89561-427-9
  • Götz and Meyer. From the Serb. by Mirjana, Klaus Wittmann. Eichborn, Frankfurt 2003
  • Five words. From the Serb. by Mirjana, Klaus Wittmann. Eichborn, Frankfurt 2005
  • The slap. From the Serb. by Mirjana, Klaus Wittmann. Eichborn, Frankfurt 2007
  • Ludwig. From the Serb. by Mirjana, Klaus Wittmann. Eichborn, Frankfurt 2009
  • The cow is a lonely animal. From the Serb. by Mirjana, Klaus Wittmann; Eichborn, Frankfurt 2011, ISBN 978-3-8218-6153-1
  • The brother. From the Serb. by Mirjana, Klaus Wittmann. Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt 2012, ISBN 978-3-89561-425-5
  • Checkpoint. From the Serb. by Mirjana, Klaus Wittmann. Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt 2013, ISBN 978-3-89561-426-2
  • The animal kingdom. From the Serb. by Mirjana, Klaus Wittmann. Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt 2017, ISBN 978-3-89561-428-6
  • Today is Wednesday . From the Serb. by Mirjana and Klaus Wittmann, Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt 2020, ISBN 978-3-89561-429-3

literature

  • Diana Hitzke: Spacetime mapping practices. Maps and mapping in theoretical discourse and in the texts by David Albahari , in: Historical Social Research 38, 2013, 2, Special Issue Space / Time Practices and the Production of Space and Time. Ed. Sebastian Dorsch, Susanne Rau , pp. 246–263
  • Eva Kowollik: History and Narration. Fictionalization strategies with Radoslav Petković, David Albahari and Dragan Velikić . Lit, Münster 2013. Zugl .: Halle (Saale), Univ., Diss. 2012
  • Miranda Jakisa, Sylvia Sasse: Contingent Enmity? The Yugoslav Wars with David Albahari and Miljenko Jergović , in Between Apocalypse and Everyday Life. War narratives of the 20th and 21st centuries. Ed. Natalia Borissova, Susi K. Frank, Andreas Kraft. Transkript, Bielefeld 2009, ISBN 3-8376-1045-4 pp. 221-236
  • Vesna Lopičić, Milena Kaličanin: Unexpected Dialogical Space in David Albahari's Immigrant Writing, in Beyond "Understanding Canada". Transnational Perspectives on Canadian Literature. Ed. Melissa Tanti, Jeremy Haynes, Daniel Coleman, Lorraine York. University of Alberta Press, Edmonton 2017, pp. 175–192

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Sonja Vogel: On the other side of the earth , in: TAZ , May 14, 2014, p. 17
  2. ↑ Interview in concrete, May 2014, no. 5, p. 58, see web links
  3. ↑ a b c "A kind of beautiful madness." David Albahari's letter between Calgary and Belgrade
personal data
SURNAME Albahari, David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Serbian writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 15, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Peć , Serbia