Displacement, Self-(Re)Construction, and Writing the Bosnian War: Aleksandar Hemon and Saša Stanišić

This article offers a comparative reading of Alexandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno (2000) and Nowhere Man (2002) and Saša Stanišić’s Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, 2006), focusing on the effects of the Bosnian War on the external and internal trajectories of their young male protagonists. Finding themselves in the United States and Germany respectively, these protagonists for the most part experience the war as an indirect and mediated event. Tracking their struggle to ‘reconstitute’ themselves as fledgling American and German denizens, it examines the sense of displacement their removal and survival engenders, and the intersections of this displacement with constructions of self and other.