The Latest at Goethe

Marica Bodrozic loves to travel. The writer from Berlin has been to the most remote places – often together with the Goethe-Institut. In the interview, she talks about wanderlust, the rhythm of foreign cities and what writing means to her.

You’ve travelled quite a lot with the Goethe-Institut – to such different places as Marrakesh and Chicago. What did these places say to you?

Bodrozic: Before you arrive anywhere, you always think you will get to know the place as such, but the interesting thing about travelling is that you always take yourself along, and your own life and experiences. And then you notice that and especially in a strange place. For example, if you don’t speak the language, it’s a matter of what kind of orientation you find for yourself. In most cases, you have no other choice than to get a feel for the rhythm.

Can you give us an example?

One time in Marrakesh I got lost in the market district two hours before a reading. And it taught me mostly something about myself: namely that I become very calm when a situation gets a bit hairy. And also that everything falls back into place. That time, I happened to meet up with a couple I had met a few days before, who then helped me find my way. I met them a number of times then – stories like that really bond you.

Travelling means getting to know new, unfamiliar things. It takes time to assimilate them. Marrakesh, Novosibirsk, Minsk and Chicago: you travelled all four cities within one year.

That year I was really only at home in Berlin for a few weeks and overseas far more often. But, it also led to a great deal. Especially in Novosibirsk. I was there for a number of weeks as part of the Goethe-Institut’s writer-in-residence programme. There were a few writers who, in a manner of speaking, took cultural soundings in the field before the Goethe-Institut was opened there later. We were, in a way, cultural observers.

How do you do it? Isn’t it hard to always be travelling?

Foreign places are interesting and inspiring, but you do need to possess a certain mental disposition to throw yourself into the unknown and deal with various everyday problems. It sounds banal, but not every restaurant in Novosibirsk has spaghetti on the menu. Even such little details are essential for travel experiences. And it doesn’t end there. What’s really striking is the quite literal speechlessness you experience in a country where you don’t even know the alphabet.

What interests you most on your journeys?

I am mostly interested in the personal: how the people there live, how they deal with their personal freedoms and limitations. I was born in former Yugoslavia and came to Germany when I was ten years old. That’s why dealing with the theme of freedom has always been familiar for me.

You were once a sponsor for a library in Uzbekistan as part of the library initiative “People and Books” – the theme of freedom surely plays a special role there.

That was a really great project in which a number of German writers took up sponsorships for libraries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. I was in Uzbekistan and very touched to get to know the librarian there, who really did everything possible with the books to give the people there, who live under a dictatorship, a free space and to open a window for intellectual space. The Goethe-Institut delivered a lot of books back then – I considered it really a very important task. The library was the place where people could create a way to think freely through the books and reading.

How do your experiences find their way into your writing?

On the one hand, very directly when I write journalism reports. On the other hand, there are the very personal experiences like those low moments when you’re feeling at everyone’s mercy, the loneliness or encounters with strangers who nonetheless all deal with the same things like: what is love, what is life, why do I do this or that? All of that finds its way rather indirectly into my writing, particularly in my poetry. But in the novel I’m about to finish, Siberia also suddenly turns up in a subordinate clause. This is where writing and experience take one another’s places and something very autonomous – sometimes very associative – happens in my writing.

Did sharing with other international writers play an important role for you?

Naturally, you always meet other writers, but I particularly remember one experience. At the Goethe-Institut in Chicago, a poet of Asian origin from Indiana spoke to me. He wrote in English. And we realized that he has exactly the same experiences in the States that I do in Germany: from the surprise that someone writes literature in a foreign language, to the questions people ask us about our origins. I noticed one thing in particular: people who come to a foreign culture all have to deal with the same structures and challenges, regardless of what country they go to. I’d go even further and say that in my journeys I have learned that all people everywhere and always ultimately deal with the same problems. The most important questions in life are the same for all; the only things that are different are the respective cultural codes – the attendant circumstances.

“I suffer from wanderlust no matter where I happen to be.” You said that. Is that where your literary creativity begins?

In a way, yes. You always have a goal, but when you travel you’re able to pause for a moment. For me, the being-able-to-look is very important; in normal life at home, you have fixed routines and no longer take in much that goes on around you, but when you go abroad, it’s to look. In Marrakesh I sat for hours in the Café de France and watched the goings on at the famous square Djemaa el Fna. I also re-read Canetti’s wonderful book there about Marrakesh and looked for the connections between what I was reading and what I was seeing. This results in many important points of contact for your own writing.

What is writing to you?

Language is not just the spoken word, but also the human body that belongs to every person’s biography. This is where the circle meets with writing. The questions that I deal with when writing are: What is it that makes people speak the way they do? Or what does their personal language tell us about their very unique way of encountering life? Why do people make certain decisions and not others? This is always linked to stories but also with the very real language in which they are expressed by a certain person. Perhaps through writing I wish to understand life as such: love, the abysses, the diversity of human and personal pathways.

The interview was held by Sabine Erlenwein at the Leipzig Book Fair (Edited by Viola Noll)