An der schönen blauen Donau… Obraz rzezi nowosadzkiej we współczesnej literaturze serbskiej
An der schönen blauen Donau… Depictions of the Novi Sad Massacre in Contemporary Serbian Literature

Summary/Abstract: The tragic events in Novi Sad in January 1942 constitute an important subject in the prose of Aleksandar Tišma (Knjiga o Blamu [The Book of Blam]), Erih Koš (Novosadski pokolj [Novi Sad Massacre]), and Danilo Kiš (Psalm 44 and Peščanik [Hourglass]). Jewish-Serbian writers were not left disinterested by the fact of the Shoah of fellow Jews or by the violent deaths of their Slavic neighbors. The above-mentioned, formally very diverse works belong to the corpus of Serbian novels about the Holocaust, which are a testament to the crime and which render individual deaths meaningful. Novels about the Novi Sad massacre reveal the psychological motivation of the instigators and direct perpetrators of the crime, shed light upon the logistics and the mechanics of death, and constitute a record of the victims’ reactions in the situation of a direct threat to their lives, and also the world of mental nightmares tormenting the survivors. Finally, and most importantly, they are an artistic tribute to all the identified and anonymous victims of the Hungarian repressive and exterminatory operation. The above-outlined issues were examined using the notions and research tools of psycho pathology, individual psychology, humanistic psychiatry, thanatology, suicidology, victimology, and cultural anthropology.

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