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On the South Slavic territories, the end of the World War II came with the victory of communism. As a result, post-war decades in Yugoslavia were subordinated to the partisan ethos founded on the myth of the struggle with fascism. Directly after the war, this struggle assumed disposing of the so-called domestic enemies amongst whom there were also the Germans living in the Serbian Vojvodina from the 18th century. In the post-war Serbia, diversified repressions (displacements, forcible work, camp experience, confiscation of things) were aimed at the German people, predominantly civilians. These repressions constituted the taboo in the Yugoslavian national discourse, with this situation lasting for a number of decades. In his book Majčina ruka, Igor Marojević, the Serbian prose-writer of the middle generation (born 1968), undertakes the issue of the Vojvodina Germans’ post-war fortunes. Consequently, he inscribes his literary activity into the current discussions on the ignored, erased and dissembled events from the history of Yugoslavia. Recovering the memory about them, he questions the black-and-white picture of the world built on the partisans vs. the fascists opposition, which was created after the war.

The Battle of Civitate in 1053 was the clash of two worlds. On the one hand, the people of Italy, who defended the old status quo, led by Pope Leo IX. These descendants of the Lombards and the ancient Romans, stand in front of the descendants of the Danes and Norwegians, who earlier created state later called Normandy. The Normans were the new factor, which disrupted the fragile balance of forces in the Mezzogiorno, between the world of Latin, the Greeks, and Islam. The nwecomers from the north of France, only nominally resembled their pedecessors from Scandinavia, representing a new school of warfare, in which they in a kind of synthesis combined the world of the Vikings and the Carolingian military heritage. Civitate, however, was a lesson foe them from the prehistory, because on the battlefield they met an opponent that was warring on the way of their ancestors. This refers to the 700 Swabians, whose fury and the will to fight, honor, and awarenessof of their own values persisted that the manifestation of the Scandinavians. In the chronicle of William of Apulia, we find a quite intriguing description of this battle, which will become the basis of our analysis of the adoption by non-Scandinavians in XI Century, methods of warfare which had its roots in two peninsulas: Jutland and the Scandinavian.