Barbi Marković's career began with a theft

It's a day for being outdoors, a rare occurrence in Hamburg. The sun is shining. The pensioners happily place their cushions on the chairs of the "Barca" bar. A cooling breeze blows from the Alster, and electric boats named "Oscar," "Lotti," "Anja," and "Charlie" are moored at the dock. The writer Marković's first name is Barbi. She fits in well here.

Marković wears round sunglasses and drinks an Americano. You could go boating with her, her wavy hair blowing in the wind, and talk about how it all began: with a theft.

In 2006, Barbi Marković stole an entire book from Thomas Bernhard. "Going" became "Going Out." Thomas Bernhard begins like this: "While, before Karrer went crazy, I only went out with Oehler on Wednesdays, now, after Karrer went crazy, I also go out with Oehler on Mondays." Barbi Marković writes: "While, before Bojana had enough of clubbing, I only went out with Milica on Saturdays, now, after Bojana has had enough of clubbing, I also go out with Milica on Sundays."

Someone took off the Austrian author's lederhosen and gave him a playful make-up for Belgrade's nightlife. For discos and clubs like "Basement" or "Idiot." Belgrade's Bernhard is very funny. And so that the book, written in Serbian, wouldn't end tragically, the young author asked Suhrkamp if she could remix the Austrian. They weren't amused, but they gave permission anyway and advised: "The author should stay away from such projects in the future." The punchline: The German version of "Ausgehen" was, of course, published by Suhrkamp and was a success.

Now Barbi Marković has written a book that's a kind of poetry lecture called "Stealing, Swearing, Playing." It tells this story and "how stealing was normal in my family." Marković's grandmother once stole a necklace from her and then gave it back to her for her birthday.

Born in Belgrade in 1980, the author's approach to writing was a kind of Robin Hood approach. You take from those who have and give to those who need it. "Because literature is a blanket act of revenge by small, cornered souls."

That's what it says in the poetry lecture. It speaks of the hope of sowing, with Thomas Bernhard, "the seeds of bitterness" toward one's own society. Take this, homeland! Save your Serbian nationalism! This brings us to the second part of the poetry lecture: the ranting. Barbi Marković borrowed a bit from Marcel Proust for the title of her autobiographical novel "Die schissene Zeit," which was already published in German in 2021.

The time between the 1980s and 1999 in Belgrade was a mess. A few Belgrade teenagers relive it with a time machine that repeatedly tosses them back and forth between childhood and its final stage: the NATO bombing of Belgrade. Banovo Brdo is a neighborhood you wouldn't want to be born in. But if you were, the only thing that helps is cursing. "'Be careful not to break your neck, not to freeze your toes, not to get raped,' your mother yells at you before you leave the apartment."

Barbi Marković has captured the authentic sound of Serbian kindness in her books, emphasizing that her childhood back then wasn't a pleasant one. On the Hamburg jetty, she says: "When I started kindergarten, I was surprised. The others all knew some songs. I wasn't well informed about that."

No, she didn't know any songs. She skipped ballet school and instead spent hours traveling around the city on the bus. "Even as a child, I was more interested in the unpleasant things. I trained my perspective on reality with bad books. With Charles Dickens' 'Oliver Twist,' for example, the story of the orphan boy."

The beauty of Barbi Marković, who has switched to the major German publisher Rowohlt with her new book, is that melancholy and reflection create a dialectical third element that one would not have expected from these ingredients: fun. Or "play," as it is called in the poetry lecture. In 2005, Marković moved to Vienna, where she survived as a "poor worker in bad jobs," and wanted to improve the German she had learned during her German studies in Belgrade. With sometimes tragic results.

Her German was that of Thomas Mann. But at the operetta wine tavern where she worked, owned by a former operetta singer, they spoke Viennese dialect, as if all the peoples of the former monarchy were still officially obligated to understand it.

Marković had to wear Austrian costume and can now at least turn the meanness of her new homeland into stories. She's a Serbian-Austrian Proust, a "sentence freak," and likes the original "the crazy comparisons and perceptual problems. The lyrical, shaky quality."

Perhaps, says Barbi Marković, she had such perception issues with her father, which is why she elevated him to a character, a figure. Under his full name, Slobodan Marković, he haunts the books—and is said to be even stranger in reality. He has filled his car with shells so he can always remember the sea. He keeps dozens of toothbrushes in his pockets and pushes them on people to remind them of the importance of oral hygiene. He goes barefoot through life and, naturally, also through his daughter's books.

His world is absurd, but so are the comic-like, exaggerated worlds of Barbi Marković's works, which bear titles like "Superheroines," "Piksi Book," and "Mini Horror." For the latter, the author received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize last year.

A bit was copied from Disney for "Mini Horror." Writing as a vintage shop: "I'm the Marie Kondo of literature. If it doesn't spark joy – throw it in the trash." In the book, the characters Miki and Mini experience a horror in which the real and the surreal are not always distinguishable. Just like right now in Hamburg: A sailboat thunders against the planks of the "Barca" bar, the pensioners at the next table jump up from their cushions, and then a text message arrives saying that Elfriede Jelinek has died. Later, the news arrives that she hasn't died after all. That's how you can imagine death: If it isn't revoked on X, you are really dead.

The sun is setting over the Inner Alster Lake, guests are streaming from the Hotel Atlantic to the restaurant boats, the seagulls are preoccupied with themselves, and 1,300 kilometers away, a state of emergency is perpetuating itself. Millions of people have been protesting against Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić since November.

The trigger was the collapse of a train station canopy in the city of Novi Sad. Fifteen people died because the president had exerted pressure to reopen the station after construction work. Chances are good that the people will demonstrate to oust the government. Next week, Barbi Marković is scheduled to give a reading in Belgrade, on June 28, of all days, the national holiday commemorating the Battle of Kosovo. "It's possible that the largest protests will take place on that day," says the writer.

"There will be more counter-protests. Vučić is having people brought from the countryside to the city by bus. He pays them with sandwiches, so the rumor goes." Vučić probably already has a helicopter waiting somewhere to take him to Russia.

"Whitewashing one's homeland" isn't for her, says Marković. This also applies to her new, long-standing habitual homeland of Austria. She likes to complain, says the writer, and if someone complains, she's happy to join in. That's her blues.

Never have you heard a blues that elicits so much laughter. "Stehlen, Schären, Spielen" is a brilliantly funny book about an author on the verge of failure. Poetry lecture? Me? Doubt echoes from all sides, but doubt is the father of good. Barbi Marković writes with a serenity that comes from not actually wanting anything. A stylistic exercise turned into a career. A new play is currently being written, and this evening there will be a reading from "Stehlen, Schären, Spielen" at the Hamburg Literaturhaus. Nothing worse should happen to this author than the classic work-related accident described in the book: "scene-writing inflammation."

Barbi Marković: Stealing, Swearing, Playing. Rowohlt-Verlag, Hamburg 2025. 144 pp., Fr. 30.90.