Who we are
Croatian-German author, columnist and playwright Jagoda Marinić talks about how the Goethe-Institut changed the direction of her life at two significant points.
By Jagoda Marinić
The invitations to artists come across as quite harmless: a nice letter in the post, a brief email. But once you start accepting these invitations, it kick-starts a process. It gives rise to moments and encounters that change you, your perspective on the world and therefore the art you create.
I’d like to talk about what the Goethe-Institut means for me as a writer. This piece can’t be anything other than a declaration of love, naturally, because my connections with the Goethe were always a link with that world, an opening up, a journey of learning and becoming. Funnily enough the Goethe-Institut invitations tended to come at points in my life at which I wasn’t quite sure what to do next. Obviously the first encounters were readings. I was 23 years old when my first book “Eigentlich ein Heiratsantrag” (Actually a marriage proposal) was published. I did readings all over Germany of course, at countless tiny places I’d never heard of before. But when the Goethe approached me about readings, suddenly I was off to places like Prague, Genoa and Paris. Sometimes parts of my work were translated. My writing was no longer about isolation all of a sudden, instead it became the start of a dialogue with the world, with other countries and cultures. The reading tours themselves were a source of new material. Without these tours, I don’t know whether I would have understood so early on that thinking and writing poetry is not something that had to take place within such narrow confines.
There were two points at which the Goethe-Institut changed the direction of my life significantly. The first time was when I travelled to Zagreb on behalf of the Heidelberg Theatre as a scout for the Stückemarkt, to learn more about the Croatian theatre scene. My role was to choose the best plays and invite them to the theatre competition, I spoke fluent Croatian, I had worked as an assistant in German theatres, but how the Hell was I supposed to gain an overview of the local theatre scene in only a week – the travel budget wouldn’t stretch to any more than that. Once I arrived in Zagreb I met two fantastic women: the head of the Unesco International Theatre Institute and the director of the local Goethe-Institut. The former was from Croatia, while the latter was German. They both showed me their theatre scene in Zagreb, attended performances with me and discussed what might interest a German audience. It was the first time I had faced my parents’ country through the culture scene, during which I met progressive voices there and noticed how much my parents’ Croatia was a country of the past, the land of their memories. Croatia had developed since then, the free groups were taking many risks in art, they were criticising politics, exploring unfulfilled longing. It was the year in which I took my parents’ homeland, a childhood homeland, and created a Croatia of my own. It was through these dialogues and in that week that the process of fashioning a present-day reality out of this former home began.
When the Stückemarkt event was finally held in Heidelberg, the audience was impressed with the Croatian entries. All the prizes were awarded to the Croatian plays, except one, which was specifically reserved for German drama. During the award ceremony I stood next to the two culture managers who had accompanied and supported me – they had travelled there especially – and for the first time I realised that there was something else I could do as well as write: teach people about culture. Confront people with artistic material that touches and moves them. Years later, when I wanted to develop the Intercultural Centre in Heidelberg, it was precisely this experience that allowed me to believe in it: yes, indeed it is possible to enrich dialogue at both national and international level through intercultural encounters. This is the only way to challenge ourselves, it is only through this questioning that we understand who we are. If the scouting had not been blessed with success, culture management would have remained out of my reach.
However something far important than that was the realisation that we need to create spaces for second and third generation migrant children, so we can enable them to discover their parents’ native countries in new and different ways. Why for instance do many young people of Turkish origin who are residents of Germany support Erdogan in preference to the artists living in exile because of his repressive politics? I understood that part of the remit of cultural work is to make the German-born children of migrants aware of the creative, cultural and progressive protagonists of their countries of heritage. Nothing suffocates the development of children as much as nostalgia. The Goethe-Institut can pave the way for young people with a migrant history to understand democracy through the freedom of art, and learn to value it. It could do that for me, so why not for others too?
The second crucial encounter with the Goethe-Institut was an invitation to Canada. The Goethe-Institut had started up a residence at the renowned Munk Centre of Political Science. The invitation reached me at a point in my life when I was asking myself whether it’s really possible to live as an author, not financial but in emotional terms. After all, writing always involves isolation. At the time I went round to see my friends, waving the invitation letter and saying: “I’m going to Canada! I’ve even got something I can do there”. During these few months I lodged with a university employee, was given my own office in the Munk Centre, and a campus world straight out of a Zadie Smith novel opened up before me.
The Goethe-Institut colleagues had put together a programme for me, my novel “Die Namenlose” (The Nameless) had been partially translated so that I could hold readings. It was the way people there reacted to my literature, to my accounts of theatre work in the European cultural capital of Hermannstadt in Romania, which helped me to believe that it’s a good idea to write, to “do” culture and all that. In those days Germany didn’t have a language for its own diversity. Immigration was characterised by a rhetoric of segregation.
At an event on the very first evening I was privileged to meet director Atom Egoyan, who investigated the Armenian genocide through film; origin played a major role, and yet he seemed free for the present. He was a filmmaker, a Canadian with Armenian roots. I was an author, a German with Croatian roots. So there I stood with this man in the hall, and that alone told me that I would come to understand many things over the next few weeks. I understood that Germany in some respects had progressed further than the political discourse. In Toronto – as a Marinić – I suddenly represented life in Germany as well.
At the Munk Centre I met a professor who had completed her doctorate under Habermas, and she instilled this question in my mind permanently: Who does the country belong to? Why do the people who got there first think they have more rights than people who come later? At this point I could tell stories about many people and how they touched me in those four weeks, and readers could respond with: isn’t that just a cheery account of your trip? Yes and no. What’s so unique about these tours is understanding that there’s a platform for culture as well, that there are structures upon which we can build our work, that a huge number of people need the trains that depart from these platforms, that many of them enjoy boarding the trains and discussing books, theatre or life in their carriages.
Canada is known to be an exemplary country with regard to immigration and dealing with diversity. Whilst there I experienced that the country’s most successful film director of the country also has the opportunity to focus on the origin of his parents, and at the same time everyone is proud of him. I have learned that Polish bakeries sell everything the nostalgics crave, and are nevertheless a living aspect of the present. A completely different approach to diversity, with cultural differences, embraced by the local Goethe-Institut team members as well, which enabled me to access this attitude to life right away. One woman from the theatre said after a meeting: “You feel like you were part of my tribe, like lost and found.” Lost and found – that’s how things often feel on these railway tracks.
The intensity in these encounters, this assimilation of a country and a city in such a short time is thanks to the preparatory work of the people who sent the invitations. But maybe another question is more important as well – what do others take away from encounters with me? What can be given back?
After this time in Canada I had the courage to talk about the promise that immigration can be in Germany too. No, I thought, we do not pose a risk to Germanness, as was claimed by some people for decades. We as immigrants and the children of immigrants can create an openness in Germany similar to what I have seen in Canada. I have now been allowed to establish a house in the city where I live, in which everything I saw in Canada is normality. Coincidentally Heidelberg has a migrant structure like Toronto, and my experiences there had shown me how to provide an agenda that brings people together in an open society. I have now started visiting other towns to tell them how to create spaces in which an openness to cultural dialogue prevails. My next consultation visit will take me to Hanau, the city where people died at the hands of right-wing terrorists.
Of course, even the Goethe-Institut must continue to develop and grow in order to preserve the significance it had in the past. However I am convinced that you can only truly grow if you know what makes you unique. The Goethe-Institut is like having your very own global railway network that allows artists to step out from the confines of “everything revolves around me” – an accusation popularly levelled at German artists in particular. Not unjustly so.
The protagonist of the novel I wrote after Toronto lived and loved in Canada. Confrontation with a new reality is always a driver of the imagination as well. Without this time in Toronto, when everything I had thought up to that point was being thrown into question, I don’t know whether I would have been able to write about my origins in the same way that I subsequently did.
I wish the Goethe-Institut all the best on their 70th birthday. Here’s hoping their global network always invests in dialogue, in encounters – because that’s the only way to bring the unexpected into your life – and therefore also in culture.