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report: December 2008 |
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Reading Histories and Telling Stories, Time and Time Again …“Each of us can tell so many fateful stories that the only thing that makes sense is to tell and to continue telling”
At 6 p.m. on 2 May 1992, the photographer Milomir Kovačević took a photograph of a couple fleeing from the outbreak of war on Sarajevo’s main street, Maröala Tita. This photograph went around the world and was shown on the front pages of many international newspapers. For Miroslav Prstojević and his wife, who can be seen on the photo fleeing from the grenades, the collapsing facades, dodging between injured persons, pools of blood and wrecks, this is not a snapshot for the family album that one looks at fondly. And yet Prstojević used it himself again in his book “Sarajewo. Die verwundene Stadt” (Sarajevo. The Wounded City), as a part of a history that documents the fate of a city and its inhabitants. Change of scene. We are sitting in the rear of his bookshop MI on Burggasse in Vienna’s seventh district, drinking schnapps and coffee. Since 1995 Miroslav Prstojević has been selling books written in Croatian, Serb, Bosnian, Slovene and, of course, German. A treasure trove that, as he proudly explains, is “unique in Europe”. Between cookery books, children’s books and romance novels there are also hardly known literary treasures that tell the history of the Balkans in different ways. Novels, histories of cities, documentations of pop culture in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Particularly amusing is the “Lexicon of YU mythology” a kind of collection of everyday myths from Yugoslavia or a kind of fictive travel guide (original title: “SFRJ za ponavljace”), that declares that the “Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia has ‘failed the test’” and that became a best-seller. Between the books are catalogues with academic paintings and, within range of vision, a bust of Tito at the door. Prstojević smirks behind his big moustache: “ I’m Yugo-nostalgic. Why not? That was the best time of my life.” As the son of an officer who fought in the Second World War, while still a child Prstojević travelled and moved house a lot. Every two to three years his father was stationed somewhere new. This meant for Prstojević a regular change of schools and languages within Yugoslavia. It was only when he began to study law that he moved to Sarajevo. Today, he again travels a great deal to search for new books, to buy and to order. Books in all languages, also in Cyrillic script. “Almost 300,000 former Yugoslavs live here in Vienna,” the book dealer asserts. And to the question why, given the large stock of potential customers, his shop has remained so small, Prstojević answers: “Most of them flee from their own language and want their children to read only books in German.” Almost nobody can read Cyrillic script any more. For Prstojević this is a misunderstanding of integration, for “diversity of language ought to be cultivated and also one’s native language, no matter what country one lives in!” People from all over Europe order books from him through the Internet. “Our people are scattered throughout the world. From Alaska to New Zealand, I can always find a ‘hotel bed’ with friends or relatives.” He is certainly never short of a literary gift for his hosts. More schnapps is poured into the small, stylish glasses. A sip of the Balkans and you sink somewhat deeper into the sofa, into the past. However: “I only talk about the war with friends who experienced it,” Prstojević states clearly. He doesn’t have to, he already has. While still a student, Prstojević wrote his first novellas and worked as a journalist. After this, from 1982 to the outbreak of the war in 1992, he was an editor in the publishing house “Oslobodenje”. In 1992 his first book, “Forgotten Sarajevo”, was published that, after twenty months of war, indirectly made it possible for him to escape from Sarajevo. Austrian helpers, who were interested in the book, got him on board one of the few planes leaving the city. But he did not remain idle during the period of the war. In 1993 his guide to the war and the city, “Survival Guide – Sarajevo” (FAMA 1933), was released in English. The idea of this ironical guide occurred to him because at the time he began to grow very irritated with journalists who flew to Sarajevo from all over the world in order to subsequently present their “experience of the war”. So, in this survival lexicon under “D” for “Drinking” there are not the usual tips about cocktail bars or beer pubs, but the following: “The water of Sarajevo was always famed. Today it is boiled and cleansed by using tablets. We have a white one for two litres and a green one for five litres. The problems start when you have a green tablet but no pot that is large enough…” At the end of 1993 his last book about his personal experiences during his twenty months in war-torn Sarajevo was published. Entries in his diary are placed next to official reports of newspapers and magazines from 1992 to 1993. And therefore Prstojević does not have to talk about this war anymore; he has ‘got it off his chest’ by writing about it as a kind of therapy, so to speak. As an artist and member of the Austrian PEN-Club, Miroslav Prstojević is allowed to have two passports, a Bosnian one and an Austrian one. He did not have to decide between the two. He does not want to go back – he travels a great deal anyway and he stays in contact with his friends mostly by e-mail. But his younger daughter, who attended the Sozialakademie in Vienna, wants to help in her former homeland and often travels to Bosnia. While we drink our fourth schnapps and chat about our families, a friend of his son (born in 1972) comes into the bookshop. He proudly shows us his residency permit. His is a typical European biography. He is newly married to an Austrian-Iranian. They met in Rotterdam where he moved after his childhood in Sarajevo and eleven years in Jerusalem. He has come to buy a greeting card. He and his friends are flying to London tomorrow, to a Bosnian-English wedding. Prstojević recommends two books, pours another schnapps “for the road” and just says: “The next time we’ll talk about my children’s generation that is scattered throughout the world.” |
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