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Whether it’s at the gas station or in a café – almost everywhere in Bosnia and Herzegovina one meets people who speak German. Many of them fled to Germany from the civil wars in then Yugoslavia. Some would have liked to stay. By Merle Hilbk

It’s easy for Americans: everywhere they go they can make themselves understood in their native language. English has long become the lingua franca. Even in the transitional countries of Eastern Europe most young people learn English as their first – and often only – foreign language. So, you may hardly believe your ears at first when travelling through an eastern European country where German is spoken at every turn. Everywhere in Bosnia and Herzegovina people address one in German; not only that, but people usually engage in lengthy conversations about Germany.

In the 1990s, 350,000 Bosnians and Herzegovinians – one tenth of the population – lived in Germany as war refugees and took language courses there. The fact that even twenty years later the German language still flourishes in Bosnia and Herzegovina may be due to the close ties that many repatriates still have to Germany today, be it through personal friendships, social initiatives, universities or social media platforms. Perhaps, though, it is also the feeling that many associate with Germany – a feeling of being welcome, concern and sympathy.

It is a feeling that grew not only at the political level, but most of all thanks to the personal commitment of many Germans, as was the case for the Kliko family from Jajce.

A village in Bavaria

The Klikos came to Bavaria with the aid of a smuggler, with no money and no documents, because they had to leave their town from one minute to the next. Their house in Jajce had been hit by a bomb and the father was threatened by co-workers because he did not want to “fight against his own neighbours” in the army, as he says. The three kindergarten age daughters were traumatized by the weeks fleeing through the mountains of Bosnia.

In the Bavarian village where they were allocated a place in a Red Cross dormitory, they were received by a Catholic priest. To welcome them he invited them for coffee in his home. The girls stood in amazement in front of the pictures of saints that hung there in the corridor. “He explained to us why his religion had them, but not ours, but that we all believe in the same God,” recalls Indira, the oldest daughter. She also can remember that the owner of a grocery shop brought them food packages, the local locksmith offered her father a job, the neighbours helped their mother care for the children and the day care teacher practiced German with Indira until she was able to communicate with the other children.

Once back in Jajce no one showed an interest in her; no one asked whether the Cyrillic alphabet was difficult to learn, how her father would rebuild the destroyed home with no money, how they should live with no work and no welfare benefits. They waited in vain for the “building aid” that the president of Bosnia and Herzegovina had promised all repatriates and for which the Federal Republic of Germany had transferred money to the new government. Neither a job nor an apartment could be found without connections.

Young repatriates captured their impressions in photos, audios and short articles: Click on the screenshot to go to the Internet exhibition Look Back to the Future.

Indira has supported the family with her job as a tour guide for four years. As she guides groups of German tourists through the founding city of the “Socialist People’s Republic of Yugoslavia,” she gushes about Germany, although the country expelled her family in 1998 just as she had been slated to attend Gymnasium. “In Germany, the individual is important,” says Indira Kliko. “Society gives you the opportunity to find out who you want to be.” Ever since she left Germany she has known that she wants to become an interpreter.

Germany is admired worldwide for its prosperity, its economic aptitude, an unruffled style of politics – in a nutshell, for its performance and success. Yet, this is admiration that produces distance, a teacher student relationship, in the worst case even envy.

What is unusual in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the reason for the admiration: the citizens’ involvement, the commitment of many Germans to their communities, to their neighbourhoods, their acceptance of different lifestyles – all those things that generally fall under the heading of civil society. It is a reason that seems to create closeness, personal interest, an emotional bond. “How one is perceived in a country is not only influenced by politics,” explains Elverim Sukovic, who studied German in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Personal connections play a far greater role, “and the closer and warmer they are, the more feelings one develops for the country.”

The political level is a mystery to many Bosnians and Herzegovinians. “Why were hundreds of thousands put in language courses to learn German? Why did the government pay for their schools, education and housing and then send them back?” wonders Fuad Tunovic, who fled to the Netherlands. He was granted citizenship there a few years later and built a house. His son works as an engineer, his daughter at the Dutch Embassy in Berlin. Every year in August he meets friends from his youth in Sarajevo, not a few of which were in Germany during the war. “They say, ‘You’re lucky, Fuad! You were allowed to decide whether you wanted to stay or return home. And now you’re a genuine Dutchman!’” he relates.

“The German language opened up a new world to me”

“Personally, no one made us feel that we didn’t belong,” says Fatima Kliko, 53, the mother of Indira. “In Catholic Bavaria, the people helped us in any way they could, even though we are Muslims. ‘We know what war and flight mean,’ they told us.” Home is mainly a feeling and that feeling has still not returned to them in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

There is a Serbian Orthodox monastery that was renovated after the war with aid from the international community twenty kilometres northwest of Prijedor. In the devotionals shop, Darko, a 28-year-old novice, talks in German about his life in the monastic community. “I have gotten the feeling here that I am once again the boy I was before the war,” he says. The community taught him that he could finally let go of the war and the feelings of guilt and shame passed on by his parents that had made him see the world as if through a veil. “I consciously tell Germans about the war,” says Darko. “I have the feeling that we share something that they have forgotten how to talk about: grief.”

In the western Bosnian town of Bihac, Armin Amidzic, aged 25, worked towards declaring the region surrounding the Una Canyon a national park. During the Second World War hundreds of Bosnian partisans were thrown into the canyon by German soldiers. Now, with his company Una Aqua Centar he paddles with tourists through the canyons in rubber dinghies and hikes the mountains with them.

He learned how a national park is managed from the web sites of German ecotourism initiatives, he learned the German language and, as he puts it, “ecological thinking” as a teenager in Baden-Württemberg. His web site advertises the tours in German, Bosnian and English. His father inexpensively bought property on a number of islands on the river from emigrants. Initially he did not know what to do with them. “The German language opened up a new world to me,” says Armin Amidzic. “Now I have to find a way to make this world a reality in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

This article – slightly abridged – is from the Goethe-Institut magazine. You can find even more exciting reportages, background information and interviews on the subject in the issue Deutsch! (German!).