- Events
- September 23, 2026
HISTORY ON THE EDGE: LIVING IN THE AFTERMATH: NARRATIVES OF LOSS AND VICTORY IN POSTWAR YUGOSLAVIA
HISTORY ON THE EDGE: LIVING IN THE AFTERMATH: NARRATIVES OF LOSS AND VICTORY IN POSTWAR YUGOSLAVIA
You are kindly invited to a new lecture in the History on the Edge series, which will take place on Wednesday, September 23, 2026, at the INZ premises or via the ZOOM link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84664422400?pwd=b61EIvRBkMcapTCUwbscnA3NtuNS6K.1 . In the new season, lectures will take place at 3 p.m. and if you will be joining us in person, you are welcome to a coffee 20 minutes before the lecture begins.
The lecture will be given by Ana Antić, and the title of the lecture is “Living in the aftermath: Narratives of loss and victory in postwar Yugoslavia”. The lecture will be held in English.
Living in the aftermath: Narratives of loss and victory in postwar Yugoslavia
This talk aims to explore languages of suffering and recovery in post-1945 Yugoslavia. It combines cultural and social history, history of everyday life and psychiatric history in order to explore how vastly traumatic events such as mass violence, genocide, extreme political disruption and social dislocation were experienced, processed and (re)interpreted in this region outside the broader framework of psychological trauma. This framework was arguably significantly less influential in Eastern Europe (and even in Western Europe, it only gained dominance in the final decades of the twentieth century), and it also interacted in complex ways with the broader context of socialist revolution, its public discourses and expectations, and post-socialist transition. Instead of searching for trauma or assuming that its expressions were forcibly suppressed, this research investigates how distressing experiences were narrated, reframed and commemorated in artistic and cultural production, in everyday lives and practices of different social groups, and in psychiatric clinics. The project thus aims to develop a deeper insight into how the most disruptive and lethal events of the twentieth century affected Yugoslavs, their understandings of psychological pain and resilience, and their relationship to broader political projects and collective identities.
If psychological trauma was not the dominant paradigm used to understand and describe psychological suffering in socialist Yugoslavia, how were the effects of extreme wartime violence and loss addressed, discussed and represented in postwar medical language and artistic productions? How did psychiatrists, writers, artists and film-makers understand the concept of a damaged psyche and how did they envision its recovery? Were the psychological experiences of war and violence seen as potentially undermining the efforts at postwar reconstruction? Assuming that ‘trauma’ would not necessarily be the most appropriate framework for understanding and describing the Second World War’s psychological consequences in Yugoslavia (or Eastern Europe), the talk explores whether this kind of analysis, focused on specific political, historical and cultural contexts outside the Western world, can help us diversify interpretive frameworks employed to understand the psychological aftermath of war and violence.