Karl-Marcus Gauss is one of the most famous and most awarded Austrian and German-speaking writers in general, travel writer, essayist and editor-in-chief of the literary magazine "Literatura i Kritika". He is a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry and the jury for the awarding of the "Aleksandar Tishma" international award. A collection of his short prose was recently published in the Academic Book Stone ship, and he is known to the domestic readership for his books In the museum of the discarded future i An adventurous journey through my room, but also because he opened the Belgrade Book Fair in 2017. Although he lives in Salzburg, Gaus is also focused on our area, especially Vojvodina. He is a descendant of the Danube Swabians - his father was born in Bačka Palanka, and his mother in Futog, from where they moved after the Second World War.
He writes about his first encounter with his homeland in Museum of the Rejected Future, while Stone ship a collection of travel miniatures of a pedestrian and an observer, in which he mentions David Albahari, Laszlo Vegel and Novi Sad, the Viennese sculptor Andreas Urtajlo originally from Sombor, but also Šibenik, the war-killed Sarajevo writer and radio journalist Karim Zaimović, and the Nobel laureate Vislava Šimborska and the beauty of ugly cities...
"WEATHER" Stone ship, as you said yourself, occupies a special place in your creativity. Why?
Precisely because they are miniatures, and not extensive stories that reach deep into the past, or reportages in which I pay tribute to an entire region or a certain European cultural landscape. These are impressionistic and sometimes philosophical observations, views of the European world. In addition, in most of these miniatures I evoke intense moments of happiness or moments from which in miniature a great history unfolds.
The title of the book is symbolic and has to do with the trip to Albania. What does it actually mean??
The stone ship is a hotel in the middle of the Albanian hinterland, not on the coast. It was built by a family in memory of their sons who drowned on the way to Italy. However, the hotel never received guests. In other words, it is a monument to destruction, but also a metaphor for hope
a better life, often trampled on, never abandoned. In the middle is a concrete object that, in my eyes, has almost become a symbol of our life.
One of the miniatures is dedicated to the meeting with Laszlo Wegel. Why is this writer important to you??
For me, Wegel is a writer of European importance, who from a peripheral position paints a portrait of a region that is not given special attention on a global scale, while dealing with universal issues. It shows not only how Novi Sad was created and how it developed, not only how Vojvodina developed from the Habsburg Empire to Tito's Yugoslavia: it first of all shows that Vojvodina is a laboratory where it is examined how the coexistence of different ethnic groups, language communities, religions can develop, how it can succeed and how it can be destroyed.
Does Novi Sad and Vojvodina in general change with each new visit you make??
In Novi Sad, I discover something new every time I visit, in my case it is often very small things in which I have high hopes. For example, last time I was invited to a restaurant ("Veliki") where you can not only eat well, but with food and drink, you can even become smarter. Namely, the menu lists and presents a total of 26 nationalities, which incorporated their DNA into the genetic code of Vojvodina, and you can try their typical dishes. For me, the real magical moment was when I sat with the publisher Bora Babić, my translator Emina Peruničić, Lasl Vegel, the philosopher Dragan Prole and many other people who previously attended the presentation of my previous book in "Velik", a place where what Europe could be was magically present. Or what it should be.
In the book, you mention David Albahari, then your grandfather sitting on a chair in his apartment in Salzburg and looking nostalgically in the direction of Backa, and finally Sombor and the sculptor Andreas Urtajlo. What do those dashes mean and what connects them?
These are all moments of longing. David Albahari who was a great artist and lived in distant Canada. Dad, who in Germany looked sadly out the window without stopping to dream of Fruška Gora. Andreas Urtajl, who came to Vienna as a very young refugee from the Danube Swabians, joined the most modern trend in sculpture and died so young...
You knew and Aleksandra Tisma, and now you are a member of the jury for the award that bears his name. How do you remember him?? What is its significance for Serbia?, and what about Europe??
I barely knew Tishma. On one occasion he was a guest at the "Literaturhaus" in Salzburg, he did not feel well, we had to call a doctor. But when his novels and diaries were published in German more than twenty years ago, I spoke about almost all of them for major newspapers. Of course he is an outstanding writer. It would have been right and appropriate if he had received the Nobel Prize, but the Nobel Committee, equally known for good and bad surprises, conspicuously bypasses the Balkans. It is a great shame that Ivo Andrić is still the only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature from Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia.
In books, so i A ship made of stone, you mostly record stories about lesser-known historical details, often from small places. Why?
Because I don't want to get in over my head by writing like the 1432 author about Paris or the first moon landing. And also because I am convinced that the periphery is the place where the secrets of the center come to light, and that in the destinies of seemingly insignificant people and in things that are not so luxurious that they end up in a museum.
Many of those cities you visit and write about were formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The European Union has replaced the great empire that was that dual monarchy. Are we witnessing the collapse of the EU today or just a transformation?
The Habsburg Monarchy, the Yugoslav kingdom with numerous peoples and nationalities, once an attempt to bring people of different origins together peacefully under one roof will surely succeed! But it is not easy to get so many countries with so many different traditions to work together. I am a supporter of diversity and I love that in Europe there are so many languages, peculiarities, differences - but we must not just pass over the fact that they are based on something they have in common, which connects them! In other words, it is not a daring attempt, nor a sensation that the European Union was created; moreover, it is strange that she has been gone for so long!
How do you see Europe today??
The basic difficulties in building Europe today stem from the huge material differences between different countries (as well as within them); then from the attempt of "business-Europeans" to consider additional economic value as the only European value; and from the stupid and crude resistance of nationalists in all countries, who actually do not believe so much in the dignity of the nation, as in the fact that the easiest way to win people over is by means of nationalist pathos. And, by the way, nationalists are almost without exception the people who least know the cultural wealth of their countries. Without any exaggeration, but also without any arrogance, I claim for Austria: politicians from the ranks of the FPÖ (Freedom Party of Austria) have the least idea of what spiritual values Austria has created over the centuries; they are terribly uneducated and therefore so sure of themselves.
Your last year's book Guilty of ignorance (culpable ignorance) it caused different reactions after its publication. How do you view the situation in Gaza today?, Israel and, generally speaking, in the Middle East? How the whole situation reflects on the world?
Israel's understandable war goal of ending the rule of Hamas has not been achieved, and Gaza has become almost unlivable after heavy bombardment. In the West Bank, the Israeli army has become the protector of far-right settlers. It's all terrible. But it is also terrible that immediately after the massacre committed by Hamas, the cheering of united anti-Semites who today like to call themselves something else and who have appropriated such important and correct terms as anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, in order to wrap their anti-Semitic propaganda in the cloak of progress, was heard all over the world. The world has turned upside down: feminists wholeheartedly support ultra-conservative Islamic terrorists who oppress their own women in the worst possible ways, queer-activists take to the streets because of Hamas, who would judge them on the spot in Gaza, and in Germany there are large demonstrations of angry idiots who really demand solidarity with the mullahs in Iran. Of course, wherever Donald Trump appears, the situation immediately escalates, that man harms everyone, not just his enemies.
Translation from the German of Đorđe Trišović
