Rácz, K: Trauma or Entertainment?

Opposed to what it is to be expected, the bombing of Serbia in 1999 is not present in the public discourse of the country as a traumatic event, if it is present at all. My research deals with the absence of this trauma, and the creation of a collective memory of it among the community of the contributors of the journal Symposion. It explores how the interaction along the lines of the non-acknowledged trauma constitutes a mnemonic community of the mostly Hungarian authors living either in Serbia or in Hungary. By looking at their private e-mails and conducting interviews with some of the members of this community, I argue that the community is linked through emerging shared narrative patterns that have the function of normalizing the experience and creating shared cultural frameworks for remembering it. The research hopes to fit the case of the Symposion correspondence into a both empirically and theoretically analyzable framework of collective memory studies, works on trauma and on narration.