Das verrückte Herz

Thirty years after the publication of his collection of stories Sarajevo Marlboro, which made Miljenko Jergović suddenly famous in 1994, he returns in his new work to the city where so much history, religion, war experience, and everyday life converge.

With compassion, full of sadness and humor, he recounts the daily struggle for survival during the siege and the horrors of war, including hunger, fear, and the small gestures of solidarity. The atmosphere of the war years comes across as vividly as the fragile yet indestructible life within it—masterful tales of humanity that assert themselves at the zero point.

For example, there is Pero Magacioner, the crazy heart. He paints people's apartments in Sarajevo, more poorly than well. With the outbreak of war, soon no one wants to have their apartment painted anymore, but the demand for roofers rises. The craftsmen no longer want to climb onto the shot-up roofs, yet Pero Magacioner climbs up anyway, fixing them as well as he can, it is said, better than he has ever done anything else. Just before the end of the war, he falls from the roof, just like that, an undeservedly inappropriate death amidst all the undeserved deaths in the besieged city, to which Jergović pays a touching tribute. The crazy heart is the successor and twin volume to Sarajevo Marlboro, featuring 29 new stories from besieged Sarajevo—translated into German for the first time.