Photo: S.Fischer Verlag/ Radmila Vankoska
“Strike Germany” is the name of the new boycott movement against German cultural institutions, which was formed because the Germans are allegedly behaving too Israel-friendly. The 37-year-old Bosnian writer Lana Bastašic also followed this line. Last week she announced on the online platform Instagram that she was ending her collaboration with S. Fischer-Verlag – a small media storm followed. What did the publisher that published Bastašic’s debut novel and a volume of short stories do? Above all, as the author accuses him, he has something not done, namely to speak out against the “ongoing genocide” in Gaza. He also kept quiet about the “censorship” that was being applied in Germany in this regard.
S. Fischer had previously stated on his website that, due to its history – the publishing house was driven into exile by the Nazis in 1936, founder Samuel Fischer and his son-in-law Bermann Fischer, the later owner, were persecuted as Jews – he wanted to shed light on the continuities of anti-Semitism and “to counteract the new anti-Semitic and racist thinking and actions”. This is particularly true after the Hamas massacres on October 7, 2023. Bastašic now complains that the publication house is not fulfilling this intention by ignoring the suffering of the Palestinians in the Israel War. She also interprets the statement quite imaginatively: the publisher equates Jewish people with Israel and locates anti-Semitism only in the Middle East instead of in their own country. Bastašic, whose books also deal with trauma from the Yugoslav wars, is now being celebrated by anti-Zionists.
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