Karoline von Oppen is lecturer in German at the University of Bath. She is currently completing a book on German perceptions of Yugoslavia during the 1990s and after, which explores representations of the conflict in journalistic and literary accounts. She has published in this area and on other aspects of contemporary German literature. Reporting from Bosnia: Reconceptualising the Notion of a 'Journalism of Attachment' Distant countries are like stories. Once such a story has become established it is difficult to break out of, once it has been moulded into a useful truth by being told again and again (Wiedemann 2004). 1 The story of Bosnia remains vivid in the western European imagination. In the early 1990s dreams of peaceful transition, poignantly encapsulated by images of East Germans scaling the Berlin Wall, were rudely interrupted by the outbreak of war in Bosnia. From 1992 onwards pictures of dead civilians on the streets of Sarajevo, or of emaciated Bosnian Muslims held behind barbed wire, reminiscent of the Nazi concentration camps, confirmed that the 'end of history' appeared to be over. The two

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This paper is concerned with the reception of one of the earliest fictional responses to German unification. In the early 1990s Die Birnen von Ribbeck by the West German author Friedrich Christian Delius was widely interpreted as an attempt to give a voice to East German villagers after the fall of the Wall, and was dismissed as another example of West German colonisation. I offer an alternative reading of the text which focuses on Delius's critique of the unification process and his deconstruction of the colonial metaphor so prevalent in this period. Delius himself, however, subsequently accepts the critics' reductive reading of his work, and retrospectively redefines his own text as an ethnographic monograph. In doing so he abdicates responsibility for the criticism contained in his text. The predicament of ‘Wendeliteratur’ is most evident in this study.

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