Participants
Sanjin Kodrić, University of Sarajevo
Sites of Remembering Historical Trauma: ‘Austro-Hungarian Theme’ in the 19th and 20th Century Bosniak / Bosnian-Herzegovinian Literature
Initiated by the crucial historical event of the end of the centuries long Ottoman rule in Bosnia (1878) and extremely complex subsequent processes of ‘emancipation’, ‘modernisation’ and ‘europeisation’ of post-Ottoman Bosnia, the ‘Austro-Hungarian theme’ is a common, or even obsessive, literary topic of Bosniak / Bosnian-Herzegovinian literature from the 19th century onwards, mostly realized as ‘an account of Austro-Hungarian occupation, in a range of images of disintegration of Muslim ethnic and social environment’ ‘to which the end of the Turkish Empire [...] is the end of what they were’ (M. Rizvić). As such, the ‘Austro-Hungarian theme’ is a particular mnemonic phenomenon – a theme of a specific historical trauma, as well as a theme of a radical and comprehensive cultural transition or a theme of a complex and dramatic cultural transcoding, crucially important in the construction of identity and alterity policies of modern Bosniak / Bosnian-Herzegovinian literature and culture. It is not surprising, then, that in the scope of the ‘Austro-Hungarian theme’ – along with other literary pieces – there appears the first Bosniak novel, Zeleno busenje [‘The Green Sods’] (1898) by Edhem Mulabdić (1862–1954), after whom the theme will later be addressed, especially in Bosniak literature, by a whole range of different authors, including Skender Kulenović (1910–1978) in his novel Ponornica [‘The Lost River’] (1977), which is one of the last Bosniak / Bosnian-Herzegovinian novels that in its whole capacity, although retroactively, deals with the trauma implied in the ‘Austro-Hungarian theme’.
