Alem Grabovac and his car fiction "The eighth child"

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The young Alem often does not see his mother Smilja.

But regularly.

This was agreed with Marianne and Robert Behrens, Alem's “German” parents - foster parents, in whose large family the son of a Croatian mother and a Bosnian father grew so firmly that they became his home.

There are reasons that are painful.

There is the father, emir, a pickpocket, gambler and drunkard, who picks Smilja the last money in the hospital after Alem's birth, so that she has to walk home with the baby in her arms.

Soon after, he has to leave because he owes a lot of money to dark figures.

Emir brings it to the notorious Yugoslav prison island Goli Otok, that original sin of socialism with a not-so-human face.

He insulted Tito.

And dies young.

But not in the way his mother told little Alem.

Not in an accident at work.

Alem's mother, who comes from a poor village in the Karst Mountains, has a job in a factory in Würzburg, where she packs sweets day in, day out.

Without a husband, there is nothing left but to give the newborn to the foster family.

Later she will meet Dušan, a Serb who, like Emir, drinks too much and beats the boy.

Dušan alienates the boy more and more from his mother.

That welds him closer to the Behrens'.

A humble happy ending could follow.

If the new parents weren't eternal who associate 1945 with less liberation than defeat.

At some point it pops

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Quite early in Alem Grabovac's “The Eighth Child” there is an indication of what is looming in the minds and hearts of the new, intact family of the guest worker child: Smilja speaks to the war-disabled Robert about a picture, “that Mr. Behrens as a boy Soldiers in front of a tank showed… 'My father was at war too' ”.

Your origin arouses immediate interest: "Then your father fought on our side?"

The question causes brief confusion: “When my mother did not answer immediately, Mrs. Behrens nervously pulled Smilja's arm.

'So, we've been bothering you for far too long.

Now we'd better let my husband keep working. '

Smilja immediately forgot Mr. Behrens' question when she stepped out into the garden with Ms. Behrens. “The reader does not forget this question.

Slowly, for example when he has learned that Alem's favorite hobby is to paint tanks and that when visiting the “hinterland” the Croatian grandfather does not like the fact that these are always German tanks, he will realize what function it had .

A Chekhov shotgun is that question.

At some point she has to shoot.

The publisher calls this book a novel in which Alem Grabovac tells of the life of his protagonist Alem Grabovac.

“Roman” promises excitement.

The life told is not just a novel because of the unanswered question.

It is located in times that go far beyond the life of Alem, Emir, Smiljas, Dušan and the Behrens.

While all signs point to tension, the reader is left with the question of why the great historical brands, the fight between Ustaša and Tito partisans and Germany's role in it, or the prison island Goli Otok, remain so flat.

Too much is presupposed here, too little explained.

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After Smilja learns that her husband is indeed dead and she confesses to Alem that she lied to him about the true fate of Emir, the son, now an adult and a father himself, travels to Belgrade.

Grabovac describes how Alem tries to find out where his father's grave is at an authority: “The clerk put on his glasses, scanned the lines and looked at me curiously: 'You speak our language and have a Bosnian name.

Where are you from? '”The information that Alem is German is not satisfactory:“ So, so, you are Croatian, Bosniak and German.

Brave of you to just walk in here. ”The meaning of the exercise: It is a“ foreign request ”for a“ foreigner ”.

So bribery is required.

Experience, not background

The episode is well observed and clearly described.

If it weren't for Alem's inner monologue when he left the office: “You stupid nationalistic asshole.” What really motivates this reaction is left out.

The disintegration of the multiethnic state in the nationalistic furor remains an accessory.

“The eighth child”, written by Alem Grabovac, born 1974 in Würzburg, Bosnian father, Croatian mother, as the blurb reveals, could have been a book that redeems what has recently been frequently requested.

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It is hidden in the term “migration experience”, a concept that many rightly prefer to the German authorities “migration background”.

It's about storytelling, about communicating who we are in a society in which backgrounds and experiences are more diverse.

And how we became who we are.

For Walter Benjamin, storytelling was a prerequisite for exchanging experiences.

And also for the experience of a community.

Benjamin sharply contrasted storytelling with the novel: there it is always about the lonely individual.

For several years now, autofiction has been a form of writing that makes lived experience its subject.

In the form in which it reaches us readers, namely as a book with an author's name emblazoned on it, it is closer to the novel than to the story.

Telling stories, as Walter Benjamin understood it, is not really suitable for the type of book and the type of author favored by today's literary scene.

For Benjamin, telling a story means taking what is worth going from mouth to mouth from personal and foreign experience.

The narrator, it can be pointed out, is one of many and not at all an author in our modern or postmodern sense.

And so it should also be considered whether the migration experience, as it is increasingly shaping our country, would actually be best expressed in a flood of novels.

Alem Grabovac's book “Das eightchte Kind” is sold as a “novel”, like many other, in the broader sense, autofictional texts before him, such as Deborah Feldman's memory book “Unorthodox” about the liberation of a young woman from the constraints of a religious community or Édouard Louis 'Report of a childhood in extreme poverty, "The End of Eddy".

Because although auto fiction is booming - books from Annie Ernaux to Deniz Ohde to Christian Baron prove it - some publishers want to be on the safe side: in the fiction sector, mainly novels are bought and read.

Exciting novels.

Regardless of whether it says “novel” on the cover or not: the genre of autofiction has its dangers - if you really want to call it a genre.

Because in addition to some special stylistic devices, such as the often tiresome detail of the description of everyday things, as perfected by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård ad nauseam, characteristics typical of the genre have hardly been established.

Challenges for publishers and critics

What remains is the certification of what is written as self-experienced or something that has gone into one's own biography: with auto-fiction, the "whole person" with his experiences of happiness and unprocessed defeats, with the admission of mistakes and weaknesses, goes into the crosshairs of a literary criticism that only lurks relentlessly dissecting narrative weaknesses and evaluating an author's talent in comparison with others.

But what is the criticism of auto-fiction if not a life and its suitability for literature?

How close is the verdict that a book is boring or has narrative flaws to the statement that there is nothing worth reading about this or that life?

In view of this, it is obvious that the work of the literary critic after the publication of an autofictional text is just as difficult as that of the editor who accompanies such a text until it is published.

And not in spite of this, but because the book market craves such stories.

God doesn't know Alem's story is boring.

And yet it becomes lengthy where Grabovac, for example, borrows Knausgård's technique of describing the trivial in detail: for example, when the Behrens' breakfast ritual or the shopping at an Italian campsite are described for pages.

Especially since adjectives all too often have to suffice in other places where narration is required.

“Show, don't tell!” You want to call out to the author: “Your story deserves it.” And he wishes Grabovac had had someone at his side while writing, who despite all the joy of a story we urgently need today need, not have lost sight of the fact that strictness towards writing is not strictness towards lived experience.

Alem's story would have been worth it.

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Alem Grabovac:

The eighth child

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Hanserblau, 256 pages, € 22.

A shorter version of this review was published in the Literary World on February 13, 2021. The author's date of birth was incorrectly stated in the print version as 1976, for which we apologize.

In this online version it is correctly reproduced with 1974.