German in the UK

Translated by Anna Paterson
Vagabond Voices

The next issue of New Books in German, out in September, includes an article about the extraordinary life of Emily Ruete. Born in Zanzibar in 1844, she married a German colonial settler and emigrated with him to Hamburg, only to be caught up in Bismarck's scramble for Africa after her husband's premature death. Her memoirs, published in 1886, made a huge splash at the time, and continue to be reprinted and re-imagined in both German and English.

Thus, cultural diversity is nothing new in German-language literature but it has intensified over recent years as first, second and third generation immigrants have begun to write in German. The unrest in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s increased migration from the Balkans to Germany, and products of that exchange include the Bosnian-German author Saša Stanišić, whose How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone was published in English, translated by Anthea Bell, in 2008.

The author Nicol Ljubić made a similar move to Stanišić. Born in Zagreb in 1971, he grew up in Sweden, Greece and Russia before finally settling in Germany, where he now lives. His novel Stillness of the Sea, newly published by Vagabond Voices in an excellent translation by Anna Paterson, charts the story of a young Croation-German man who falls in love with a young Serbian woman in Berlin. Those of us lucky enough to attend his appearance at Edinburgh Book Festival later this month may be able to find out more about the biographical roots of the novel. But the strength of Ljubić's story is not in any voyeuristic exploration of past traumas, but in its portrayal of how such past events are and should be treated in the present.

Robert is a student of History in Berlin. The son of a Croatian immigrant to Germany who barely talks about his heritage, Robert felt as distant from the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s as his all-German classmates. When he meets Ana, taking literature courses on a study year in Berlin, he falls head over heels in love. And Ljubić writes particularly well about that experience, managing to convey those strong feelings without resorting to cliché or falling into sentimentality. Indeed, the novel is in part about the experience of discovering and exploring another, and the question of how to deal with discoveries that do not match your expectations.

One strand of Stillness of the Sea charts the development of Robert's and Ana's relationship against a backdrop of early 21st-century Berlin and its über-trendy student culture. There is much hanging out in bars, intense reading of Shakespeare (Ana's - and her father's - passion) and long evenings around dinner tables, with wine, friends and highbrow conversation. It is during one of these evenings that the subject of the Balkan conflicts and the ongoing war crimes tribunals comes up, and Ana'a defensive reaction leads Robert to wonder what relationship she and her family have to the war and tribunals. Through a series of small revelations - some freely disclosed, some perhaps intentionally slipped by Ana - Robert discovers that Ana's father, a university professor, has been indicted for war crimes in Bosnia. When he leaves Ana, without really understanding his own motivations for doing so, he travels first to The Hague to observe her father in the dock, and then to Sarajevo because - as Ana said - "you have to go there to understand it".

The action flashes between these different times and discoveries, and there is a gentle onward progression as the reader gradually pieces the whole story together; along with all the unanswered - perhaps unanswerable - questions that it raises about guilt, victimhood and inherited responsibility. The story is well told and compelling, refusing an easy resolution, and will surely generate much debate when Ljubić takes to the stage in Edinburgh later this month.

Ljubić's novel was reviewed in New Books in German in 2010. For this and other reviews of the best new German-language novels, see www.new-books-in-german.com.