Aleksandar Tišma (16 Jan 1924 – 15 Feb 2003) on his 100th birthday

Tanja Dückers, Gernot Krämer and Achim Engelberg recall the Jewish-Serbian author and his work in a reading and discussion.

In the shadow of Yugoslavia’s wars of disintegration and partition, numerous books by the Jewish-Serbian writer were published in the 1990s, not only in Germany. He filled halls and was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Many of his themes are highly relevant for today and his aesthetic positions await rediscovery, as are the questions he posed: What are the consequences of war and expulsion? When does anti-Semitism begin and how does it function? How and why do some cosmopolitan cities suddenly disappear from the map?

Together with his friend Danilo Kiš, Aleksandar Tišma elevated Novi Sad, the capital of the Serbian Vojvodina, into the realm of world literature. He called the five books The Use of Man, The Book of Blam, The School of Godlessness, Loyalty and Betrayal and Kapo his personal Pentateuch, and they actually form his main work. In German they are available in the translation by Barbara Antkowiak. Tišma’s last German publication was his autobiography Erinnere Dich ewig, translated by Mirjana and Klaus Wittmann in 2021.

Tanja Dückers is a writer and publicist. She writes prose, poetry, essays and children’s books. In 2018, she lived in Belgrade on a scholarship from the Goethe-Institut.

Gernot Krämer is an editor of SINN UND FORM. Issue 1/2024 features a conversation between Achim Engelberg and Aleksandar Tišma shortly before his death.

Achim Engelberg is a publicist and curator, editor and co-author of the writings of his father, the historian Ernst Engelberg. He most recently published the literary non-fiction book An den Rändern Europas in 2021, which is also dedicated to Aleksandar Tišma.

In co-operation with SINN UND FORM