Аннотация
This paper analyses the written testimony of the Macedonian writer Aleksandar Aleksiev, which recounts his internment on Goli Otok, the Yugoslav political labour camp established in the aftermath of the Tito-Stalin split. It focuses on Aleksiev’s subjective experience of the mechanisms of political repression, and ideological re-education.
The conceptual framework is grounded in Theodor Adorno’s notion of working through trauma and its subsequent elaboration by Dominick LaCapra, who distinguishes between acting out and working through trauma in both individual and collective contexts. Within this theoretical paradigm, Aleksiev’s testimony is understood not merely as a personal reckoning with past violence, but as a site of collective working through of trauma in post-Yugoslav societies. His account represents the experiences of Goli Otok inmates and could thus become part of a more inclusive and critical public memory.
By bringing Aleksiev’s narrative into a dialogue with trauma theory and historiography, this paper argues that literary and testimonial texts are crucial to the process of collectively working through trauma. They enable the articulation of suppressed experiences, foster empathetic identification, and open a discursive space for re-evaluating the legacy of state violence. Aleksiev’s testimony, in this sense, becomes not only a record of individual suffering but also a medium through which society might begin to confront and integrate traumatic pasts into a shared historical consciousness.
