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

‘Let’s Laugh About It’. Trauma or Party?

Surprisingly to me when I read the special issue of the journal, the word ‘trauma’ actually never appears in the e-mails of those who were in Serbia during the air raids, although it often arose during the interviews. In fact, people who did not experience it directly were more willing to use the word about the situation of those in Serbia than were those who had actually been in the country. In their e-mails, those who had been following the events from Hungary used such words as ‘fear’, ‘stress’, ‘suffering’, ‘defencelessness’, ‘traumatizing’, ‘imprisonment,’ ‘constant fear of death’, ‘horror’, ‘terror’, ‘brutality’, ‘hopelessness’. In general, those words are much stronger than the words used by individuals who did experience the bombing, only one of whom used the phrase ‘blunt resigned fear’^[13] to describe the general atmosphere during the first days of the bombing. In the interviews I was told by almost everyone from Serbia that they were more afraid of being called up for military service than of the bombing itself. The other cause of worry was that ‘minorities would be used as human shields in the crisis’.^[14] People who wrote from Hungary especially expressed concern that the Serbs would take revenge on local Hungarians for NATO’s ‘aggression’.^[15]

One of the e-mails reads: ‘I don’t like the bombs but the bombs like us.’^[16]Ironic statements like that are very common in the e-mails, and can be found in almost all letters written by people in Serbia. If the bombing is mentioned at all, it is almost always in some humorous way. As Antonijević notes in her study of a chat-room during the bombing, humour was ‘one of the basic elements that eased tensions in these difficult moments’ and ‘a way to express anxiety and fear‘.^[17] It was also a means of maintaining the illusion of normality and distancing oneself from the situation. In the first days of the bombing one author of an e-mail tells of watching the people’s reactions, and concludes that ‘this nation is strange’^[18], as if they did not belong to that community: ‘I was trying to keep my distance’.^[19] However, some are also aware of the fact that ‘one is deceived by irony. Although one knows that behind the unidentifiable (masked) face there is a fucking big heart beating’,^[20] acknowledging the function of irony to be a way of concealing one’s emotions and fear. ‘The horror could be sensed in the form of irony, literature, not as complaints—they didn’t even write about the situation’,^[21] explains a Hungarian writer who was exchanging e-mails with his friends from Serbia at the time.

Entertainment is a frequent topic in the e-mails from Serbia. When referring to the time of the bombing, people most often use the word ‘party’, as well as ‘sexbombing’ or ‘festival’ for the air raids. Partying, drinking, smoking marijuana and illegal clubbing make up a substantial part of the activities of the authors of the e-mails. Several of the interlocutors from Serbia mention that those were great times, and I was assured during one of the interviews that this was a general atmosphere: ‘everyone from Serbia will tell you so’,^[22] that can be read as, ‘I’m not going to let the Americans ruin my Saturday night’.^[23] The only interlocutor from Hungary who actually visited Serbia during the bombing remembers meeting friends and extensive partying, and the memories of those who spent the whole two and a half months of the bombing in Serbia are almost always connected with entertainment, which that interlocutor sees as a compensatory activity, and a way to pass the time. He also mentioned his impression that during the bombing there was a ‘party atmosphere of despair’^[24] in Serbia, while yet another interlocutor sees it in a more positive light: ‘War changes everything; positive processes are started too, that have an activating effect.’^[25]

‘I Am Trying to Continue My Life Without Disruption.’ Everyday Practices

‘All miracles last for three days, we slowly get accustomed to it’,^[26] someone writes, and ‘life is normal here’.^[27] The phrase ‘we get used to it all’ becomes the trope of the entire correspondence. ‘As we don’t have a basement, I am trying to continue my life without disruption’,^[28] and the authors of the e-mails keep describing how they spend their days, rarely referring to the war going on around them. Many who went through the experience of the bombing claim that after the first few days a routine was established, which can be seen not only as normalising their experience but also investing symbolic creativity in order to give meaning to what was going on around them. An interlocutor from Hungary noticed that his friends from Serbia did not write about the situation but about everyday activities that ‘create an illusion of normality’^[29] of a potentially traumatic event. Towards the end of the seventy-eight day bombing campaign the messages about the daily activities of those in Serbia began to seem like ‘weird e-mails from there; they couldn’t see themselves with an outsider’s eye’.^[30]

A considerable amount of the time of those in Serbia was consumed by watching television news and surfing the internet for information. Increasing use of the web in terms of time, frequency, and number of users during the bombing was characteristic of Serbian society in general^[31] as it proved to be the only channel of communication providing full freedom to its users^[32] and satisfying the needs for information, action, and interpersonal contact. At the beginning of the bombing many e-mails report constantly following the events on various television channels and different news portals. However, towards the end, there are many accounts of an ‘overdose of news’ and apathy. It was not uncommon for people to write that they no longer cared about what had already been bombed, nor were they speculating any more about potential targets.

The perspective then on current events was generally ambivalent. The political affiliation and ethnicity of these young intellectuals and the general ideology of Symposion predisposed them to be supporters of the NATO airstrikes, whose aim was to bring down the ruling regime of the country they were living in. Indeed, most members of the Hungarian community were not supporters of the Serb government at that time not only because of the prevalent nationalistic and often xenophobic discourse of the Milošević era, but because many of their collective rights were actually being infringed. Furthermore, the circle of young intellectuals of Symposion can in fact be seen as a ‘minority within a minority’, a group of people with an ideology alternative to the one offered by the state but also critical of the answers suggested by the leaders of their own ethnic community.^[33] Yet, wanting one’s own country—and thus of course one’s own loved ones to be bombed was a position scarcely to be taken lightly. For those from Serbia, whether they were in the country or abroad during the bombing, it was difficult to take sides in what many referred to as a schizophrenic situation. Of those who were in Hungary, only two said they were on the side of NATO, seeing the bombing as the only possible solution; the others, even if not explicitly, ‘asked for explanations of the bombing from their Hungarian acquaintances’.^[34] Almost all the interlocutors reported their enthusiasm for the bombing in the first few days, and it is clearly visible in their e-mails too. However, after the first instances of ‘collateral damage’, many of them turned against the NATO forces, even if they did not thereupon support the politics of the Serbian state nor believe its propaganda. One interlocutor claimed that even those who had not been patriotic before the bombing became increasingly so after it began, and he included himself among those. In one of the interviews, the reason for that is given that there was no reliable source of information: ‘the NATO propaganda had no validity either; its strategy was as absurd as that of the Serbian police and military’.^[35]

‘As if Time Stopped’. Community and Time

Apart from meeting friends in pubs, the frequency of social interaction increased on the streets too, which created a feeling ‘as if we are locked in a broken lift for a very long time’.^[36] Many interlocutors expressed their belief that there was an enhanced need for communication, one of them reiterating that ‘everyone wanted to talk, ‘everyone was waiting for visitors’.^[37] Some e-mails report talking to strangers in the street, singing along with them, discussing news, exchanging information about whether there was electricity and water, but also talking about matters unrelated to the situation. One interlocutor claimed that his friends from Serbia had told him that if there was any animosity between Hungarians and Serbs, it stopped, as ‘neighbours of different nationalities invited each other in for drinks, knowing that they might be drinking their last pálinka’.^[38] This was in contrast to the expectations of a number of the interlocutors, especially those writing from Hungary that national conflicts would increase in Serbia as a consequence of the bombing.

The bombing introduced new ways of measuring time. People in targeted cities organized their daily activities according to when the air raid warnings would blare, when there was electricity and water. Even in smaller towns that were not potential targets, hours became unimportant. ‘Tomorrow is Augusta day. But only according to our calendar. E. invented a new calendar: it couldn’t have been easy for Pope Gregory’,^[39] writes an author of the journal. A shared sense of reality involves a specific perception of time influenced not only by objective events but also by ‘perceptions, intentions, and actions of individuals’.^[40] In other words, events depend not only on the number of days they last but also according to the perception of their duration by those affected. The usual time to do certain things became irrelevant: ‘the world turned upside down, and it became unimportant when something was said or done’.^[41] The new daily schedule rather followed the patterns of the distinction between days that were long and without much to do, and nights when illegal pubs opened, friends gathered, watched the lights of the bombing and had more interaction with each other that during daytime. One interlocutor said for instance that he did not really remember days; ‘nights were much more memorable’.^[42]

Together with a new way of measuring time, a ‘new value system’ came into being, as the ‘things of life and death got considerably reinterpreted, the structure of their value system changed’.^[43] The reason why it is seen by many as a great period is that ‘the coordinates of time changed’.^[44] An interlocutor from Hungary retold his impressions from his visit to Serbia during the bombing as ‘they knew the dangers, and they wanted to live life in its totality’.^[45]

The new time and value system was much more focused on the present and past than on the future. Social actions are embodied in both the remembering and the anticipation of actors.^[46] Making plans is an ambiguous matter in the e-mails. There are almost no long-term plans mentioned and many wonder about life after the bombing: ‘How to behave? Look in the eyes and be silent? Smile? […] What to wear?’^[47] There are all the more plans about getting together in the immediate future after the bombing. One author writes about his friend calling him from Hungary: ‘It was as if he called from the neighbourhood, and our conversation was like that as well. What’s up, when we were going to have a beer together.’^[48] The author of another e-mail thinks that awful as it seemed, the bombing was a good excuse for not having plans, motivations or ambitions for the future: ‘It’s terrible that everything will be normal again.’^[49] Almost all the people who experienced the bombing claimed to be unable to think about the future. It was a period when they had the time to focus on the present and enjoy activities that they could not before, such as biking, fishing, or just ‘hanging out’ and watching the lights of the bombings from a railway viaduct—‘it was like a fireworks show’.^[50]

‘ I Am Numb’. Speechlessness Inside and Outside

While the e-mails written by people from Serbia revolved around entertainment and everyday matters, those written from Hungary were loaded with worries and expressions of solidarity. E-mails from both Serbia and Hungary, and later interviews, reported an inability to speak, to write, to express feelings and translate thoughts into words. The reasons for such speechlessness were different on the two sides of the border. The e-mails from Hungary were full of questions about how their friends were, what they needed, and ought anything to be done for them? ‘I’m worried for the whole company’; ‘I am trembling with worry because I don’t know anything’.^[51] These writers distanced themselves from those Hungarian citizens who supported the NATO bombings. They also condemned those Hungarian public figures who commented on what was happening in Serbia, for the writers of these e-mails believed that ‘normal Hungarian people […] should talk to people from Serbia and write what they say without commentary’.^[52] A common feeling was guilt that their country was participating in the bombing of the country of their friends. A typical sentence in which this can be read is ‘We are going, we are bombing. You’.^[53] Generally, a feeling haunts the e-mails from Hungary that words were useless but all that could be offered as signs of friendship and solidarity. The e-mails written from Hungary seemed more cautious in their wording because, as one of the authors remarked, ‘what to write to be neither pathetic […] nor insensitive?’;^[54] ‘I just keep writing what’s going on with me, but now I am ending that too, because, as I wrote, there is no need for form. Kisses’.^[55] Those in Hungary felt that in spite of all the goodwill they could do nothing to help, nor could they really understand the feelings and thoughts of their friends across the border. ‘I often feel that these e-mails are efforts in vain, too’,^[56] wrote someone from Hungary, because ‘you see the despair, but you can’t help’.^[57] Some of the examples for the nonexistence of expressions or the difficulty of communicating with people in Serbia are sentences such as ‘you know it better’;^[58] ‘I don’t know how I would behave in such a situation, I would be afraid for sure’;^[59] ‘I am asking naïve, numb, stupid questions’;^[60] ‘my stomach trembles when I watch the news, but I should shut up, because they will shit on your house, if. But I hope not!’;^[61] ‘to love, to be afraid, these are only your rights’.^[62]

On the other hand, people who were in Serbia at the time expressed their own inability to express themselves because they felt that what was going on could not be described with words. The only one of the interlocutors from Hungary who visited Serbia in May 1999 felt that it was a major disappointment that he could not write a good report on what he experienced in Serbia, because it could not be verbalized. The authors from Serbia often oscillated between writing circular e-mails every day followed by complete silence for days, while ‘some became mute for that period’.^[63] Others reported that they and their friends had spoken less and less. Generally, talking about oneself seemed to be more difficult than talking about others. In many e-mails the authors wrote about their friends in a seemingly objective tone, rather than reporting about what had been happening to them. Together with the objective description of news, the detached voice available to write an account of oneself and others was a substitute for revealing personal thoughts and feelings.

‘This Is Fiction, Too’. Literary Templates and Imagination

Given that many of the authors of the e-mails were writers, journalists, or other people educated in the humanities and social sciences, they had a specific relationship with both reading and writing. Reading was often done out of boredom, ‘because there is nothing else one can do’,^[64] but also because it was the only meaningful activity. The work of many of the authors mentioned, such as Gabriel García Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Jenő Rejtő (P. Howard) among others, was related to the experience of the situation around the readers. Marquez and Borges’s magical realism forms a good analogy with the genre of the e-mails and fragments of the writings of some of the authors of Symposion. Likewise, the e-mails seem to have originated in an imagined community^[65] where the border between fiction and reality was bracketed. A number of the e-mails start with objective facts but end with fictitious situations, without referring to the difference between the two. The humour of P. Howard is also related to the kind of irony and sarcasm the Symposion group members used in their writings.

Expressions referring to literature are often used to describe the atmosphere of the bombing. Those who experienced the air raids and those who imagined them from the other side of the border alike referred to them as ‘surreal’, ‘dream-like’, ‘unreal’, ‘utopian’. One of the interlocutors said that everything he read at that time ‘seemed to be about the bombing’, while others referred to specific literary works to compare their memories about it: Camus’s The Plague illustrating the isolation they were in, Boccaccio’s Decameron conveying the aspect of a closed community and story-telling, Dezső Kosztolányi’s short story ‘The End of the World’^[66] to describe the atmosphere of freedom a dream-like situation like that might offer, or a Hungarian adventure novel, Tüskevár^[67] by István Fekete, because it is ‘about adventure, nature, jokes, with a dictatorship going on in the background, but that’s not the most important thing’.^[68] One of the e-mails reads:

‘A moment ago, for no reason, my favourite lamp broke. It was sitting here on my table, I was looking through the window, and it simply just broke. It’s quiet outside, only the birds are prattling. Yesterday my father started to show first level symptoms of paranoia. Between Maria-Theresiopolis and Popplarshire the bed is impassable, he told me over the phone. So they closed the road between Subotica and Bačka Topola?, I asked. Uh, he said, be careful what you say.’^[69]

Another e-mail contains the following sentences:

‘Spring breeze is whispering into people’s ears, society kills, back to nature. Marquez totally got me, yes, this is typical of my generation. My words are too cold, I will end here.’^[70]

In many e-mail messages there are references to partisan films and the experience of the Second World War, demonstrating the oscillation between real experience and fiction. The participants of the community felt that ‘maybe it’s not important for a poet how thin the line between reality and imagination is’.^[71]‘The border between reality and imagination was blurred.’^[72]

Imagination played a key role for those abroad too, as they tried to map the virtual reality of their acquaintances through their e-mails, creating an almost mythical picture of the region. As an e-mail reads: ‘This is like a short story, one of those that you write. Or a fairy tale. It’s authentic only because I have been there, in the enchanted village.’^[73] The ‘outsiders“ view—meaning those who were not in Serbia but in Hungary—was based on their visits, their friends’ messages, their readings of local authors, such as Géza Csáth and Ottó Tolnai, and the dance theatre of József Nagy, whose performances were just like the period experienced in Serbia during the bombing: ‘about life, death, and frenzy’.^[74]

Imagining a Mnemonic Community

The five thematic cores, a subchapter each, I have identified and explored above I have called narrative patterns which, together with the everyday practices of the time serve to create a mnemonic community. I define narrative patterns as written or oral discursive elements more or less coherently organized around a common theme. The notion of narrative itself rests on the practice of meaning-making. The term and concept of narrative is understood to be ‘one method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which (it is inferred) actually occurred’.^[75] In discourse analysis, narratives are seen as

‘autonomous textual units whose internal parts stand in systematic relationships with one another […] Although narratives are thus units that can be studied apartfrom the immediate textual or interactional contexts in which they are told, they are not independent of personal meanings and significance.’^[76]

The concept of a story exists universally in the human mind because ‘telling stories is one of the significant ways individuals construct and express meaning’.^[77]The main function of narratives is therefore to provide unity and coherence to human experience.

Moreover, because of its inherent linguistic structure, memory is deeply related to the notion of narratives. ‘What it [language, K.R.] expresses is the manner in which society as a whole represents the facts of experience.’^[78] It is through language that the ‘reality of the past’^[79] is articulated and maintained. Similarly, Halbwachs argues that collective memory is not reconstructed but constructed on the bases of the present through verbal instances: ‘verbal conventions constitute what is at the same time the most elementary and the most stable framework of collective memory’.^[80] His theory gives us a means of approaching social memory, something abstract and intangible, from the direction of narratives, written and spoken, because not only do experiences naturally influence narration about them, but equally narratives influence experience.^[81] What we actually do is give narrative structure to our memories, imposing chronological order on events and a causal relationship between them to provide unity of experience.^[82] Thus written narratives, such as e-mails, not only heighten the consciousness of the writer but also enhance the processing of experiences by embedding them in time. Common narratives generate a strong sense of a group, and in their electronic form create a specific style that is both similar and different from other written genres: it is fixed and stable as all writing is, but it is also characterized by an enhanced and self-conscious spontaneity.^[83]

The interlocutors wrote and talked about things they did regularly, such as spending time with friends, exchanging e-mail messages, drinking, reading, and so on. Such repetitive, sometimes even ritualistic activities had a two-fold function: on the one hand they normalised the experience of the bombing both at the time and when remembering it, and on the other hand by reporting them in an objective, detached or fictional literary tone the authors of the e-mails distanced themselves from the same experience. Also, by reporting their everyday routines, the interlocutors acquired the power to shape their own experience, to intervene actively in the situation, and to document their position.

Being exposed to a traumatic event involves the shattering of the sense that everyday life may be taken for granted. Instead it plunges the witness into a feeling of individuality and loneliness, so that the striving for community is heightened.^[84] The basic definition of a mnemonic community is a group of individuals who have shared the same experience of an event and remember it in a related manner,^[85] who all identify themselves with the memories of the community.^[86] On the one hand, the specifics of the narratives of ‘outsiders’ set them apart from the ‘insiders’, while on the other hand the ‘outsiders” solidarity with those in Serbia, their susceptibility to their discourses, their interpretation of them on their own terms and adopting of them makes them part of the mnemonic community. It is the common ‘cultural grammar’^[87] often manifested in a dream-like or fiction-like writing style and the daily activities, similar for those in and out of Serbia (watching the news, worrying, speculating about potential targets, engaging in online communication) that define them as a community, regardless of the fact that some of the members did not share direct experience of the bombing.

The mnemonic community around Symposion is, however, not defined only by their narratives. Their shared narratives are the product of their common experience but also of the social position they occupied at the junction of ethnic belonging, class and gender. Their

‘stories reflect processes of psychological coping or adaptation—creating order, coherence, and value from chaos, meaninglessness, and suffering—but they are also an act of social positioning, locating the person in a specific role, status, or stance vis-à-vis the interviewer and others not present.’^[88]

Existing work on remembering in Serbia in the 1990s is altogether very often Belgrade-centric and approaches the nation as a unified category without considering the non-Serbian population.^[89] Individuals of different ethnicity and those whose towns and dwellings were not directly targeted struggled to find their own ways of articulating their positions both within and outside mainstream discourses of remembering and ‘coming to terms with the past’—as alternative narratives, subaltern discourses, voices of excluded communities, challenges to the elite (in this case the majority nation’s elite) understanding of the past.^[90] As already mentioned, being Hungarians in Serbia and the editors of a Hungarian-language journal of literature and social sciences to a certain extent placed this community in opposition to mainstream Serbian society and at times like that of the airstrikes made state institutions suspicious of them. Tales of being repeatedly checked by police and other authorities rather confirm that, even if inter-ethnic relations among the ‘common people’ seem to have been less problematic than expected.

The specificity of their narratives is connected to the fact that they were a well-educated segment of a minority society which saw itself so, and which at the time of the bombing felt the need to document their position, to take an active part in creating history. They wished in fact to be the spokespeople of their community. Thus even though the majority of e-mails are private, they were written for a greater, even if imagined, audience. That is something which often becomes clear from the tone of the messages and of the interviews. For instance:

‘The Association of Symposion Citizens and the editorial board of the Symposion journal strongly oppose NATO aggression against Yugoslavia. We believe that the NATO intervention could have been prevented had money not been spent on bombs. Yes, it was a festival: new weapons could be tried out. We also strongly condemn the decisions of the Hungarian Parliament to put its airspace at the disposal of NATO forces which left some 300,000 fellow “nationals” on their own.’^[91]

The fact that even though presented as private, the e-mails written during the bombing were actually public or ‘semi-private’^[92] is reflected in the relative scarcity of deeply personal accounts and references to private matters such as emotions, sexuality or trauma.

Looking at the gender distribution of the Symposion members who participated in the e-mail circulation and with whom interviews have been conducted, approximately one in ten of the e-mail writers was female, and all but one of the group who were willing to be interviewed were men. Men seemed more willing to talk about the topic, at least its public context and themes like war and military matters, traditionally associated with masculinity. One of the e-mails makes an ironically sexist statement about the experience of the first evening of the bombing:

‘I’ve seen a NATO AIRPLANE! I was seeing P. home when it flew over us. P. said that it wasn’t even sure that it was a NATO airplane because it was tu-whooing, but I told her that women don’t know the first thing about science, because that wasn’t tu-whooing but turbulence. I’ve seen it in JAG and since then I know it’s that.’^[93]

Even though in terms of numbers, the narratives and practices dealt with in this article can be seen as defined mainly by men, the gender aspect of the correspondence is more complex than if the memories of the community are seen as being shaped by experiences considered as typically male. Men, unable to leave the country, feared conscription, but other than that the content and how it is expressed does not substantially differ between men and women. The discourses of the only female interlocutor, and of women in general I have heard and read in relation to the bombing, subvert the classical dichotomies of male/ female, public/private, and official/everyday.^[94]

In Place of Trauma

Considering trauma to be ‘events that shatter an individual or collective actor’s sense of well-being‘,^[95] it seems obvious that the community of Symposion shared the experience of the bombing and that trauma can be seen as the element that binds the group together now, and that creates a shared discourse.^[96]However, they themselves do not define their experiences as traumatic, which is a striking contrast to other cases discussed in the literature on war trauma and memory.^[97] In the following section I shall point out some possible reasons for the limited evidence of trauma in the e-mails and interviews and I shall attempt to place the concept within the context of my own research in particular and with reference to the general literature on collective memory.

People interpret their experiences according to cultural patterns that are meaningful for them. In turn, patterns are meaningful if they can incorporate experiences that do not disturb the internal order of past experiences.^[98] A trauma is a ‘confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge’^[99] and that is difficult to articulate.^[100] Experiencing a trauma causes defensive dissociation^[101] and therefore articulating it is something individuals avoid. However, taking into account the context of the Symposion group, which consisted mainly of conscription-aged men, it is difficult to claim that they had no experience of war whatsoever. After spending the 1990s in Serbia, whereas some of them had already been conscripted before, definitely sensitised them to emotions like fear, worry and anxiety.

Work on trauma, memory and their relationship with identity formation^[102]suggests that when individuals are faced with traumatic events, they can suffer various psychological disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which is frequently diagnosed among people exposed to the trauma of war.^[103]While examples suggest masses of soldiers and civilians were diagnosed as suffering from PTSD in the USA after the Vietnam War^[104] and in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina^[105] and Croatia^[106], this medical terminology is absent from Serbia not only in relation to the bombing but to Serbian veterans generally (of all wars) who were left undiagnosed and untreated.^[107] Moreover, according to the official discourse of the time propagated by the state, Serbia came out of the NATO bombing a winner. ‘Although the will to bear witness may be strong, and perhaps universal, […] its enactment and realization can take place only when political conditions allow it’.^[108] In the Serbian public sphere, regardless of ideological affiliation or ethnic belonging, there has been no room for the articulation of traumatization. However, ‘trauma is always more than a biological state’^[109] and therefore it is false to assume that its non-acknowledgement equals its non-existence. As Obradović-Wochnik^[110] points out in her study of how the memories of the 1990s were dealt with by the ‘ordinary citizens’ of Belgrade, the fact that something is not articulated does not imply that it is not dealt with. The reason for the absence of discourses of traumatization might be traceable to ‘scarce cultural frames of remembering’^[111]—the lack of suitable cognitive schemata to verbalize the trauma.

Also, something specific to the members of the group around Symposion is that practically none of them was directly exposed to the air raids. Apart from spending a few days in Novi Sad that was heavily bombed, most of them spent the time of the bombing in relatively safe spaces in the towns and villages of Vojvodina, or in Hungary. Thus to compare the bombing to war situations such as that in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia or what was taking place in Kosovo at the time would, as some said in the interviews, seems to be an exaggeration that would only upset those who were abroad and worried for their family and friends in Serbia. However, as it is the ‘personal relevance to the traumatic memory, and not personal witness to the trauma’^[112] that gives meaning to it, the question of trauma still needs to be considered when exploring the narratives of the memory of the bombing.

Considering distress in relation to the NATO bombing, Spasić^[113] makes the provocative point, that when discussing war and memory we are too ready to assume that there has been a trauma. Whether we see trauma as something articulated or not, as something that was ‘actual’ or not, we implicitly assume that there was a trauma in the case of the Symposion correspondence. According to Alexander Hinton, traumatization is not a passive state but ‘suffering is mediated by social, moral, and political understandings’.^[114] What if it was already subsumed in the narratives of entertainment and in everyday activities at the time of the experience, and it has never surfaced, never even become ‘real’?^[115]The problem posed by Spasić might be a problem of terminology: replacing ‘the metaphor of trauma with more precise language that captures the specificity of each predicament and points us toward the […] response’^[116] to a situation triggering what we, in lack of a more specific term, call ‘trauma’ may lead us to more adequate explanations of its meaning.

The normality of the bombing has thus been created by common narrative strategies of avoiding the acknowledgement of the trauma, and filling in the silences with irony, humour, narratives about everyday activities, literary experiences, social events, political attitudes, and the like. Therefore it is not trauma that creates the mnemonic community, but the transformation of it into narratives. The narrative patterns and everyday activities that give coherence and order to an experience^[117] that does not fit into the existing cultural schemas^[118]have thus been explored as substitutes for the non-existent discourse about danger, fear, and trauma.

When social groups are unable to cope with loss they do not always feel victimized but sometimes transform their loss ‘into powerful cultural narratives which become an integral part of the social identity’.^[119] Emphasizing the collective level of trauma and remembering, Hinton defines cultural trauma as an instance when members of a collective feel they have experienced an event that leaves permanent traces on their group consciousness.^[120] Importantly though, due to the language, history, and the specific modes in which cultural narratives have been created, the collective memory of this group lacks what is most prominent in the Serbian official memory of the NATO bombings, that is to say the discourses of victimhood and of Kosovo. To quote one interlocutor: there were fears that Hungarians in Serbia would find themselves in between the two opposing sides, Serbia and NATO, ‘in a conflict that you have nothing to do with…but still—you do’.^[121] This well reflects the position of the members of the community but also the customary way Hungarians in Vojvodina have been looked upon and have seen themselves in the Yugoslav wars. On the one hand they insist on not having anything to do with a war they claimed had not been fought in their name, nevertheless on the other hand in many ways being part of the system that was involved in it. After all, they had certain rights, participated in certain structures and mobilized for their ethno-national interests within that socio-political framework. Similarly to trauma, victimization can take various forms of articulation and expression or not surface at all. Even if group members feel victimized, that might be victimization based on narratives different from those claimed by the majority nation. In the case of Symposion, and probably the Hungarian minority in general, the specificities of the group seem to overwrite the master-narrative of the country’s suffering and loss. All the same, the feeling of muteness, the absence of an articulated trauma, the narratives of entertainment, the enhanced sense of community, and the generally surreal nature of the experience, are fragments of the collective remembering and the cultural trauma of the bombings. They are embedded in the memory of the 1990s in general,^[122] and are characteristic of Serbian society at large.