Aid Keranovic:

To whom the doors in Austria should be open

Aid Keranovic was born and raised in Vorarlberg, his parents are from Bihać.

(Bild: Mathis Fotografie)

What drives young people? How do they see the world? In his series "We're not like that!", author Robert Schneider seeks to talk to young people. He recently met Aid Keranovic.

He knows that he looks good, the tall young man sitting opposite me. When I ask him about it, he grins. 17-year-old Aid Keranovic, whose parents come from Bosnia, was born in Vorarlberg and grew up in Höchst. He is, so to speak, a grandchild of the generation of workers who were called "guest workers". His grandfather came to Vorarlberg long before the Balkan War, worked hard here, created a livelihood for himself and later brought his family members to live with him. At the same time, he still owns a house in Bosnia, which he maintains with a great deal of personal effort, as many of his generation do.

His vacations were exclusively for the purpose of creating a safe place to stay for his old age in his old home. But the war turned many of these efforts into ruins. Even today, when Aid drives through his parents' home town, he says, you can still see the bullet holes from the shells in the walls of the houses in certain neighborhoods. He himself has no memories of the war. He only knows it from stories. From hearsay.

Robert Schneider :Where exactly, Aid, do your parents come from?
Aid Keranovic: They both come from Bihać. That's a town in the north-west of Bosnia, on the border with Croatia.

Your parents must have lived through the war in Yugoslavia, right?
My mother didn't, she came to Vorarlberg a year before the war, but my father did. He was fourteen when the war ended in 1995.

And they got to know each other in Bihać?
Yes, because my grandfather went to Bosnia with his family every summer.

What do your parents do for a living?
My father is a car mechanic at Opel-Natter in Hörbranz and my mother works in the office at Alpla. Something to do with logistics.

You attend the BORG-Schoren in Dornbirn and have just finished seventh grade. Everything went well? No detention?
Yop! Everything went well.

Did your parents want you to go to grammar school?
My father always said to me: "You have to make sure you get the best possible general education. You can work on the street later as far as I'm concerned, but education is important. It's the only way to really get ahead.

Although you grew up here, you don't speak Vorarlberg dialect. Why not?
Bosnian was always spoken at home. I also speak Bosnian with my little brother. But I speak both languages very well. My teachers always praised me for supposedly speaking High German so well.

My father always said: "You have to make sure you get the best possible general education. You can work on the street later as far as I'm concerned, but education is important.

Aid Keranovic

Do you often go to Bihać with your parents?
Yes, I'll be down there for a long time again this summer. The nice thing is that I can get by there for a whole evening on 10 euros. I can go out to eat, to the disco. It's still very cheap. A beer costs 50 cents.

And then of course you take your motorcycle with you, because your favorite item that you brought is a motorcycle helmet.
I got my car and A1 driver's license. I have a motocross in Bosnia. I rode motocross there as a child. Not on the road, of course, but off-road. (Aid's cell phone lights up. He politely asks if he can answer it briefly, but then ignores the call. Nothing important. Just the dance class.)

Are you taking a dance class?
Bosnian folk dancing. In Bregenz. We have three groups there: Children, teenagers like me and older people. We recently had a performance in Lustenau at the "Market of Cultures". Unfortunately, I couldn't be there.

What kind of dances are they?
In Bosnia, there are very different folk dances depending on the region. In Krajina, for example, where we come from, there are more rural dances.

Do you already know what you want to do after your A-levels?
I would like to study medicine. That's a childhood dream. My cousin studied medicine and always told me interesting things about it.

Always with me: the strikingly decorated motorcycle helmet

(Bild: Mathis Fotografie)

What kind of medicine?
Cosmetic surgery. That would really appeal to me. I find it incredibly exciting what plastic surgery, for example, can already achieve today. It's really amazing.

Gaming on the console certainly eats up a lot of your free time, doesn't it?
In the past, yes. Not any more. In the corona era, of course, it was excessive. Shooter games. I played Fortnite up and down! But now I have a two-seater Golf GTI 16V that I was able to buy second-hand. I work on it together with my dad. We sit down together on a Friday evening and see what else we can do. It's great fun.

Do you have a girlfriend, you may ask?
Not any more. I'm solo.

But I'm sure the hearts fly to you.
Yes, I don't find that difficult. Of course, it's even easier when you're tall. But I'm pretty relaxed about it. The right girl will come along.

Where would you place yourself politically?
Neither right nor left. I'm a Muslim myself, but I don't think it's right that Muslims who come to Austria want to establish a caliphate or Sharia law here. I think to myself: you come to Austria, you want to have a job and a better life here, and then you try to establish exactly what doesn't work in your country. But for those foreigners who really want to improve Austria, the doors should be open.