Miljenko Jergović – ‚Rod‘: Between Individual and Collective Identity

The novel tells the family story of the writer’s mother and goes back to her grandfather Karlo Stubler, who came to Bosnia as a „Swabian German“ railway employee. This extremely personal narrative reflects the history of the whole area lying between East and West, between Orient and Occident. It begins with Omar Pasha Latas’ campaign in the middle of the nineteenth century and ends with the aftermath of the Bosnian War in present-day Sarajevo. The article is devoted to three thematic lines in the novel: the narrator’s basic mental state, anchored in the family; the continuity of his identity as a stateless person; and the discontinuity of the history of his area. These three strands unfold in a narrative that transforms postmodern features (fragmentariness, intertextuality, metalepses) into elements of hard-boiled fiction (‚stvarnosna proza‘).