Ivo Andrić Quotations in the Speeches of German and Austrian Politicians

Abstract

In the period from 1999 until 2014, German and Austrian politicians several times used selections from the novels and stories by Ivo Andrić to illustrate their speeches. Germany’s federal president Herzog cited a passage from the novel The Bridge over Drina which describes the transformation of the people in Višegrad in June 1914 (a few hours after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand) from normal into beasts. His speech was dedicated to the polemic between the writer Martin Walser and the representative of the German Jews Ignatz Bubis. But Herzog misquoted Andrić by leaving out the first sentence, the mob consisting of Moslems and Croats destroyed the shops of the Serbs, trying in their eagerness to lynch them. In the same way Germany´s defense minister Scharping mentioned the story The Letter from 1920 claiming that it was a letter written by Andrić in 1920. Actually it is a story and the letter is written by Max Löwenfeld, a descendant of baptized Vienna Jews, who had come to Sarajevo, but who cannot live there anymore because of Bosnia being a "country of hate". The defense minister used this description of the situation of different Bosnian ethnic groups to explain at both the SPD-Party-Congress and the Bundestag the necessity of the Bundeswehr taking part in the bombing of Serbia during the NATO aggression against Serbia in 1999.
Gert Weisskirchen, a member of the Bundestag, confused Andrić with Da Vinci. The former Austrian vice-chancellor Erhard Busek, Birgit Diezel, vice-PM of Thuringia, and Peter Krah, a local politician in Dresden, all cited from the world famous novel about the bridge over the Drina in order to show how people can better understand each other by building bridges. Julia Bartz and Frank-Walter Steinmeier have also mentioned Andrić’s novel The Bridge over Drina.