Wahrscheinliche Herkünfte

How do we tell about a past that we have not experienced ourselves? How and in what language do we tell of and about stories that we cannot relate to? Because when we speak, we speak the present, in which the past also speaks: whoever wants to understand what they are speaking must also understand the language of the dead.

In her autofictional reflection, Ivna Žic opens up access to the completely different worlds of her two grandmothers and the silent grandfather, in whose lives European history and a vanished world are reflected, which still lives on in us and determines our actions.

In tender prose and with precise descriptions, Ivna Žic traces her ancestors and opens up a place of recognition in the other and of the other. Diversity is horizontal and vertical, diachronic and synchronic. Žic's text opens up in a passage from the past into a European future in which a new, radical multilingualism has long since created space for itself, thereby allowing the political to emerge from the private and new narratives to emerge from the new circumstances.