Karolina Lendák-Kabók (ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences): Revelations of Untold Trauma from the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s

The paper presents how millennials, who become the shocked generation in Yugoslavia due to an experience from which they still cannot recover, and which is embedded in their identity, coped with the dissolution of Yugoslavia on the micro and macro levels. In the group of millennials, I specifically focused on ethnic minority millennials who endured adversities both from the nationalistic uprise and hatred and because their families were torn apart. The research was built on semi-structured interviews, which were analyzed both on micro and macro levels. On the micro level, fathers were conscripted, and families lived in a state of anxiety, often leading to alcoholism, divorce, and post-traumatic disorder. On the macro level, my respondents faced open nationalism, alienation, and the prospect of being side-lined, with emigration (mainly to Hungary) seeming the only logical choice. The paper adds to the memory politics literature as it sheds light on untold trauma from a neglected but deeply affected group of ethnic minority millennials brought up in Yugoslavia during the 1990s.