A Lifetime of Crisis
A Lifetime of Crisis

The Story of a Dalmatian Peasant in the Mid-20th Century

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the traumatic experiences of Stevo, a Serbian-Orthodox peasant, and his coping strategies as revealed in his autobiography. Stevo wrote down his experiences at the young age of thirty in the years after World War II. The critical events in his life had various causes: poverty, family conflicts, migration, political convictions, communal unrest, deportation, and war. In his first 30 years of life, however, Stevo experienced more trauma than most people do in an entire lifetime, and these traumas are additionally closely entangled with the history of Yugoslavia. Carefully contextualised and combined with further written and oral information about his family, Stevo’s life story constitutes an excellent case for an historical-anthropological lifeworld study that demonstrates how macrohistory influences microhistory, and vice versa.

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