Irena Vrkljan's Autobiographical Prose between Zagreb and Berlin: (A Critique of a Monolingual Germanistik)

"Nirgends sein o Nirgends du mein Land"

(František Halas, qtd. in Vrkljan, Marina 63)

Irena Vrkljan cites František Halas, the twentieth-century Czech poet (1901-1949), to head one of the chapters in Marina, im Gegenlicht, a semi-autobiographical novel that combines reflections on her own life story with that of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva (1982-1941). Like Tsvetayeva, with whose itinerant life she expresses an affinity, Vrkljan has lived between cultures, in her case between Croatia and Germany, in a liminal space she associates with a kind of "Nowhere." Born in Belgrade in 1930, she moved with her family to Zagreb in 1941 when the Germans occupied the city. Raised bilingual (her parents had ties to Austria), she refers to "das Blut zwischen zwei Sprachen" (Tochter 6), evoking the fraught political ties between Germany and Croatia during the Second World War (when the latter was a Nazi puppet state) and in the years immediately following, when Tito and the partisans came to power and her father forbade the family to speak German in the home, although the child could hardly comprehend why. Vrkljan went on to study archaeology and Germanistik in Zagreb, and in 1966 she chose to move to Berlin, where she studied at the Film and Television Academy, graduating in 1969. Since that time she has lived half the year in Berlin and the other half in Zagreb. Her earlier writings include several German radio plays, co-authored with her husband, Benno Meyer-Wehlack.¹ She has also composed both poetry and prose in German, although the bulk of her work, especially the poetry and, more recently, the detective fiction, has appeared solely in Croatian. Of her autobiographical novels, two were originally written in German and the others in Croatian, although she herself is the sole author of the translations (or, more correctly, reworkings). This autobiographical series is comprised of Tochter zwischen Süd und West (1982, rewritten in Croatian in 1984), Marina, im Gegenlicht (1985, rewritten in German in 1988), Schattenberlin: Aufzeichnungnen einer Fremden (1988, rewritten in German in 1990), Buch über Dora (1991, rewritten in German in 1992), Vor roter Wand: 1991-1993 (1994, rewritten in German in 1994), and Briefe an eine junge Frau (written in German but published only in Croatian, in 2002, since she could not find a publisher in Germany or Austria).²

Despite Vrkljan's bilingual upbringing and dual residency, there is a vast difference in the reception of her work between Croatia and Germany. In her homeland she was from the start lauded as a major author. As Gordana Crnković has put it, "When Vrkljan's novel Silk, Scissors appeared in 1984, the public and the critics received it as the event of the year" ("That Other Place" 134). Ironically, although Vrkljan wrote the novel that launched her career in Croatia in German, this work along with the rest of her writings has received little notice in Germany. If her feuilleton reception there has been scant, usually seeing her as a Croatian, not a German writer,³ Germanistik has completely ignored her. This contrast in reception is puzzling to say the least, especially given that it is not a question of access to the major works of this Berlin author.

Can the reason for this discrepancy actually lie in how the two receptions are related? Vrkljan has had a profound influence on generations of Croatian women authors, including Slavenka Drakulić, in part because she witheringly described the norms to which women were expected to adhere as she was growing up and in part because, writing about disaffected urban experiences, she broke the stereotype of the rural, uneducated Balkan woman. Yet although she paved the way for other Croatian women writers, she did not participate, as the younger Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić did, in public criticism of Croatian nationalism during the early 1990s and therefore did not gain recognition abroad as a feminist voice for peace. Conceivably, then, the reason for her negligible reception in Germany could lie in the fact that Vrkljan fits the popular...