Mara gets to Germany and does well. She earns, she buys herself a BMW, and what she boasts about is the legroom: now she can spread her legs as far as she likes. Then the car dies on the Autobahn outside Munich. The crisis has eaten her savings, the job has gone and the visa with it, and she is sat in a car she can’t afford to move. “Mara” is the first single from Gastarbeiter, the third album by GORDAN, out on Glitterbeat on 20 November.
Singer Svetlana Spajić found the whole story in two lines. A bećarac, ten syllables to a line, the rhyming couplets people trade at weddings and drinking sessions in the Posavina, the farming country along the river Sava in northern Bosnia, one singer calling and another answering back, usually to make a joke or land an insult. Hers was about a woman stuck on the Autobahn in a new car with no money, sending home for someone to come and get her. Spajić wrote the rest.
She keeps that couplet running through the whole lyric. Each verse says its line, then says it again with the words swapped round, Mara sliding from the end of the line into the middle. It’s a story being retold, and it gets worse every time. Halfway through, the verb shifts under the repetition and Mara stops whining that she’s been robbed and starts screaming it. By the last verse she’s home in Bosnia with none of the Deutschmarks left, back to the convertible mark, the currency Bosnia brought in after the war and fixed to the German one at one to one.
Mara is a gastarbeiter, a guest worker, and there’s a whole tradition of songs about people like her. West Germany coined the word in the 1960s, after Yugoslavia broke with the rest of the socialist bloc and signed a deal to send its workers north, and it stuck in the Balkans as something said behind a man’s back. Those workers sang about missing home, about the shift, about families split by a border and parents left in the village, and that’s the body of song Gastarbeiter takes its name from. On the album sleeve is Gvozden Leaves for Temporary Residence, Mića Popović‘s painting of an ordinary Yugoslav man. Temporary residence was the state’s phrase for going to work in Germany, and Popović, a dissident, put it in the title to mock it.