Reading the Cultural Trauma: Újvidék Raid

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.