Going Out

The heir to Thomas Bernhard’s legacy comes from Belgrade. It’s there that Barbara Marković – a writer with a degree in German studies, a penchant for nightclubs, and a love of Bernhard’s literature – made a surprising discovery. By translating individual sentences from Thomas Bernhard’s classic narrative Walking into Serbian, and at the same time translating the dire landscape of Bernhard’s Vienna into the dire nightlife of postwar Belgrade, she found that she could fit them together – playfully and mercilessly – into a completely new and yet utterly Bernhardesque remix.

Sentence for sentence, with the cascading force of the original, Walking (in German Gehen, which also translates as “going”), becomes Going Out, the disaster in Rustenschacher’s trouser shop becomes a social suicide at a Plastikman concert, and the Steinhof mental asylum becomes the ultimate retreat in front of the idiot box. Though formally this is a strictly structured work of conceptual and appropriative art, Going Out reads so realistically that you can easily feel that you are reading about Vienna, Berlin or New York just as much as the Belgrade party scene. A brilliant and inventive new work from an exciting new voice from Serbia.

»Barbi Markovic, an author originally from Belgrade but now based in Vienna, remixes a text by the classic Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. … As in the original, the result is an artistic and philosophical text, which in this version takes on a Warholesque slant. Barbi Markovic’s Going Out is as much about thinking as it is about atmosphere, fashion, and style.« Christopher Strunz, taz. die tageszeitung