Trauma or Entertainment? Collective Memories of the NATO Bombing of Serbia

Abstract

This article addresses trauma, its absence, and the creation of a collective memory among the contributors to the journal Symposion following the 1999 bombing of Serbia. By examining the group’s e-mails and conducting interviews with some of its members, it explores how their shared narrative patt erns constitute a mnemonic community, and asks what are the shared cultural frameworks that create a space for collective remembering within that community. The article argues that past and current politics of memory in Serbia have been built on discourses of a victimized nation and therefore do not recognize the specifi c ethnic, class or gender positions of individuals as they were during the bombing. Conversely, the national discourse on memorializing the bombing fails to articulate individual experiences and commemorative practices. This article therefore aims to present and analyse some of them. Krisztina Rácz is a PhD candidate at the Balkan Studies program of the University of Ljubljana and works at the Regional Science Center of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Novi Sad, Serbia. The Context of the Bombing Like quite a large number of other Serbian citizens, especially those of Hungarian ethnicity, I spent the days of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia mainly in Hungary. However, as a woman I was allowed to travel across the border, so I made a number of visits to my home in Zrenjanin during that time. Zrenjanin was not bombed, so neither I nor most of my friends had any direct experience of being bombed, for most of my friends too lived in Vojvodina in smaller towns and villages that were not targeted by air raids. Yet, I felt, their experience, even though their lives were not in immediate danger, was profoundly diff erent from mine, if for no other reason than that they were all potential targets. Yet, my curiosity about their experience was not satisfi ed. I did not really learn from my friends how it felt to expect a ‘siege from the sky’ night after night. Instead of stories of trauma and fear, I heard about parties in the shelters and in illegal pubs, alcohol and drug use, and social gatherings I was unfortunate to have missed. Surprisingly, at least on the face of it, the e-mails published in Südosteuropa 64 (2016), no. 4, pp. 520-543 MEMORIES AND NARRATIVES OF THE 1999 NATO BOMBING 521 Trauma or Entertainment? Collective Memories the journal Symposion and which I read shortly after were not much diff erent from the stories I had heard from my friends. I was curious about the traces the experience of the bombing had left in those who had witnessed it and how it had diff erentiated them from those like me who had not had the same experience. Was the bombing a traumatic event or rather a period of fun, as I have often heard it described? Were those who experienced it victims, even if their lives were not directly endangered? Could we, who were not in the country but who cared for many people who were there, understand? In 2008 I analysed the 104 anonymous e-mails published in Symposion writt en and sent from Vojvodina, from places like Novi Sad, Subotica, Bačka Topola, Mali Iđoš, Tornjoš, Senta, Stara Moravica, Čantavir and other towns and villages in the province, and from Szeged and Budapest in Hungary.1 I also conducted semi-structured interviews with fi fteen of their authors (twelve in person and three via e-mail) who spent the days of the bombing in Serbia as well as those who were corresponding with them from Hungary. The interviews raised topics such as everyday activities, people to keep in touch with, and ways of communication; and they also threw up broad questions about the authors’ memories of the period. In 2013 I revisited the topic and conducted follow-up interviews with two of the original interlocutors, this time fi lming them. The conclusions drawn from the discourse analysis of the e-mails served as the basis for the interviews. The general aim of the interviews was to provide a wider context for my research; while returning to the topic off ered the possibility of reconsidering some of my initial ideas about the creation of the mnemonic community, its collective memory, and the place of trauma in it. The considerable amount of interest and feedback I have received from people who are aware that I deal with this topic caused me to realize that remembering the bombing has been a vexed question in Serbia ever since it occurred.2 However, only recently has it begun to enter mainstream public discourse. A monu1 All e-mails were sent between 25 March and 10 June 1999 and are published in the issue no. 24-25, volume 6 of the journal Symposion as columns in the middle of a double page. They have been anonymised with the indication ‘from: somebody@word.com to: somebody@word. com’, so that the sender and receiver are unidentifi able and the only thing that makes the emails distinguishable is the date and time they were sent (in Hungarian, personal pronouns are gender-neutral, thus in most cases even the gender of their author remains undisclosed). For this reason the references include the date and time the e-mails were sent and the pages of the journal where they can be found. 2 I am grateful for the comments and feedback I received from my colleagues at my presentation of this research at the ‘Faces of Eastern Europe’ seminar of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna in 2013 and at ‘The 1999 NATO Bombing. Memories, Narratives and Histories’ workshop in Belgrade in 2015. I am especially thankful to Natalie Smolenski, Orli Fridman, János Mátyás Kovács and the late Aleš Debeljak for their valuable insights.