A novel centered on a father still suffering from the traumas of World War II, a grandmother who survived concentration camps, recounts the war and its consequences through the eyes of a child who lives between two grandmothers, and two cultures, the Slovenian and the German. Writer Maja Haderlap was in Tirana as part of the European Literature Festival and spoke about those intermediate spaces, the complexity of life in minority areas, the ideological clashes that lead to wars, which do not end when the war officially ends, but continue through destroyed lives, fear and shame and those images through memory, bring back the strong feelings of loss, anxiety, death, pain, poverty and that constant mental and sensory control that possess a person until the end of life, often bringing that end closer.
In an interview for News24, the Slovenian-Austrian writer said that "literature is a good opportunity to approach great traumas. This personal access to such topics avoids politically poisoned discourses. Kärnten is in the south of Austria, where I was born and raised. History cannot be told in simple ways and I thought of bringing what I was at that time, a child who listened to these stories from my father and grandmother. My family was complicated and with some major conflicts. It is not only my personal history, but also that of my neighbors. The fact that the story is told by a child makes it more naive, because the child has no prejudices and ideological education. I do not want to impose the story, I wanted the reader to enter this story slowly and successfully", she said.
In the novel, the partisans are seen as heroes by the Slovenes in the minority region of Kertne, as traitors by the Austrians, and as communists in Slovenia, which became part of the former Yugoslavia. "I could not have written this book when I was young, I started writing it when I was 50 years old. The topic that the book deals with, politically, is bold, but also emotionally challenging. I knew that I was writing from the position of an outsider. I thought long and hard about how to approach this topic, I found the child who took me back to the past, but the child could be used up to a point, I wrote the second part as an adult, who returns to the past and processes that past. It was a great personal challenge, because it required not only memory but also a properly shaped text," said Maja Haderlap, who came to the Festival organized by the European Union. She also spoke about her relationship with the German language, which was the language of the occupier, but which became her language of literature, a language through which she returns to Germany and the German-speaking space as a writer. She focuses on the conflict of living between two languages, a historical and political conflict, wanting to overcome the conflict through the book, understanding being different.
