Reading War, Making Memory: Remembering the Bosnian War Across Europe

In the fields of literary and memory studies, the cultural impact of the Bosnian War of 1992-1995 appears―despite the scale of devastation―somewhat minimal. Reading War, Making Memory focuses on how authors from the diaspora of the former Yugoslavia have transmitted and translated the realities of the war in their fiction, illuminating how these texts interpolate the culture and memory of Bosnia-Herzegovina into an act of “mnemonic migration.” Drawing from close readings, studies of public reception, and focus group interviews, this volume explores the attempt to reshape social frameworks of memory, and the wider reception and impact of memory-making literature across Europe.

Tea Sindbæk Andersen is Associate Professor of East European Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on the contemporary history of southeastern Europe, particularly on issues related to cultural memory, uses of history, identity politics, and popular culture in the Yugoslav area. She is the author of Usable History? Representations of Yugoslavia’s Difficult Past from 1945 to 2002 (Aarhus UP, 2012); co-editor with Barbara Törnquist-Plewa of The Twentieth Century in European Memory: Transcultural Mediation and Reception (Brill, 2018); and, with Jessica Ortner, of the Memory Studies special issue on “Memories of Joy” (2019).

Jessica Ortner is Associate Professor at the Department of Culture and Language, University of Southern Denmark. Her research focus is German and European memory culture in relation to Jewish, postcolonial and migrant literature. Recent publications include Transcultural Memory and European Identity in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant Literature (Camden House, 2022), and with Tea Sindbæk Andersen and Fedja Wierød Borčak “Fiction Keeps Memory about the War Alive. Mnemonic Migration and Literary Representation of the War in Bosnia” (Memory Studies, 2022).

Fedja Wierød Borčak holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and is currently a Research Assistant at the School of Culture and Communication at Aarhus University, Denmark. His main research interests include post-Yugoslav literature, and he has written on the figure of the child in Bosnian-Herzegovinian fiction as well as themes of mobility and diasporic writing.