Abstract
The chapter seeks to analyse the Újvidék Raid as cultural trauma construed in and transmitted across a variety of art and media texts, that is literature, cinema, and commemorative practices which are seen as a “performance of the memory narrative.” The 1942 Great Raid in Novi Sad/Újvidék is considered to be one of the cruellest Holocaust episodes in the Hungarian occupied Bačka (and broader in Vojvodina). During three days in January (21–23) 1942, on the bank of the frozen Danube, the Hungarian police (gendarmes) and local security forces brutally executed 1,800 inhabitants of the city (813 Jews, 380 Serbs, and tens of victims of other ethnicities such as Slovaks, Croats, and Russians). This traumatic event with a formative influence on national and ethnic identities resurged as a cultural trauma in the early 1960s, and after 2000 it gained wide public recognition. The list of chosen texts includes the novels of Danilo Kiš (Psalam 44/Psalm 44, 1962; Peščanik/The Hourglass, 1972), Aleksandar Tišma (Knjiga o Blamu/The Book of Blam, 1972), and Tibor Cseres (Hideg napok/Cold Days, 1964); the biographies of Đorđe Lebović (Semper idem, 2008) and Ivan Ivanji (Moj lepi život u paklu/My Beautiful Life in Hell, 2016); the films of Mika Antić (Spomenik/The Monument, 1967), Andras Kovacs (Hideg Napok/Cold Days, 1966), and Szabolcs Tolnai (Peščanik/The Hourglass, 2007); and various commemorations.
Speaking of this is easy and simple at the same time. Simple for us, complicated for foreigners. I was born in Subotica […]. I lived there with my family until 1942, when a massacre of Jews and Serbs took place in a part of Yugoslavia and Hungary called Vojvodina. (Kiš 2012, 93) If not stated otherwise, all translations are by the author. “Govoriti o tome istovremeno je i jednostavno i komplikovano. Jednostavno za nas, komplikovano za strance. Rođen sam u Subotici [...]. Tamo sam živeo sa porodicom do januara 1942. godine, kada se odigrao pokolj Jevreja i Srba u delu Jugoslavije i Mađarske zvanom Vojvodina” (Kiš 2012, 93).
This chapter was partly researched within the scientific research activities of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts funded by the Ministry of Science, Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia.
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Notes
- 1.
The Raid was the mass murder of the civilians, mostly of Serb and Jewish ethnicity, performed by the Hungarian Axis troops, in the period 4–29 January 1942 in southern Bačka. Out of almost 4000 victims—killed in Novi Sad, Bečej, Vilovo, Gardinovci, Gospođinci, Đurđevo, Žabalj, Lok, Mošorin, Srbobran, Temerin, Titel, Čurug, and Šajkaš—the vast majority were Serbs (2578) and Jews (1068) (Đurđev 2017, 143). The Újvidék Raid or the Raid in Novi Sad was its cruelest and deadliest episode.
- 2.
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
- 3.
The intersection of the ethnicised Serbian Holocaust and Hungarian versions accommodates the theory of interethnic violence as a “generative force in the Balkans” (Bergholz 2016) that shapes and determines “identity, nationalism and memory.” Analysing the interethnic pogroms in Bosnia in the region of Kulen Vakuf during World War II, Max Bergholz argues that they reveal a “counterintuitive dynamic in which violence creates antagonistic identities rather than antagonistic identities leading to violence” (Bergholz 2013, 684). Seen through this prism, the Újvidék Raid is, on the one hand, the trigger buried in memory and history of the community that set off the rapid ethnicisation and the escalating nationalism in the post-war period. On the other hand, perennial nationalisms culminated in the Újvidék Raid.
- 4.
The concept of the city as one big family killed in the massacre resonates in the first official monument, Family/Porodica (Jovan Soldatović 1971). The three, skeletal, 4-metre-high, bronze figures of a father, mother, and child—closely following the style of Holocaust monuments—emphasise the fragility and ephemerality of human lives in the implicitly, ever present fog and chill of the river.
- 5.
“U balkanskom svetu kulture ima mnogo istorijske drame i sve je prožeto patosom” (Palavestra 2005, 23).
- 6.
Simultaneously, as the complex post-generational, post-traumatic story Hourglass points to its memory prose layer. The very title of the book refers both to the hourglass and a kind of sandstone—in itself a perfect metaphor for the flow of memory, its fragility, and its cracks and gaps. “The Hourglass is the image of the broken and cracked time, broken people and their broken creator. The Hourglass is a perfect crack” (Kiš 2012, 30).
- 7.
The two novels were published in the same year and were nominated for the prestigious NIN award that went, however, to Hourglass.
- 8.
The fact that he was saved due to fraud and betrayal committed by others does not diminish the tragic guilt he feels.
- 9.
Tišma is the best translator of Kertez's novel into Serbian.
- 10.
For more on other titles concerning the Újvidék Raid, see Daković (2020, 103–104).
- 11.
However, the primacy of Cseres’s novel as the first one dealing with the sensitive past is disputed by the Serbian–Jewish/Yugoslav/Central European novel of Erih Koš, Massacre in Novi Sad (Novosadski pokolj) published in 1961, i.e. three years before the Hungarian one. Nevertheless, both novels follow the same pattern being founded upon historical facts, and historical (Ferenc Fekethalmy-Czeydnar, Jozsef Grassy) and fictional characters. The facets of the hybrid story and modernistic (Cseres) or realistic (Koš) narration are best described in the critical praise of Ivan Ivanji in the novel by Koš:
Beside all fallacies, we have to note one positive fact that is, perhaps, more important than all the other details. The book is easy to read; it is such fluent, likeable and exciting prose that it provides to the new reader – one already saturated by the documentary horrors – the essential images of the Újvidék massacre that are easy to understand. (1962, 419)
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Daković, N. (2024). Reading the Cultural Trauma: Újvidék Raid. In: Beganović, D., Božić, Z., Milanko, A., Perica, I. (eds) Procedures of Resistance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49386-7_9
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