Being a Trainee Historian in Belgrade, 1989

Abstract The author reflects on the year 1989 when she was a newly hired trainee historian at the Institute for the History of the Serbian Labor Movement in Belgrade. The topic she was assigned in the Institute was the relationship of the Serbian Social Democratic Party to the war goals of Serbia 1912–1918. As her reading and writing progressed, by 1991 what the Serbian social democrats wrote about the Balkan Wars of 1912/13 began approaching her own political views. However, their antiwar positions at the beginning of the twentieth century sounded like a real feat compared to the virtually monolithic support for the war of 1991. This is how the author’s first research left her with the bitter impression that history, the seeming magistra vitae, had really taught nobody anything given that Serbian society was falling into the same trap as some 70 years before.