Between the Holocaust and Trianon — Historical Culture in Hungary

Abstract

Historical culture is about public memory, that is, representations of the past in the public sphere. It ranges from scholarly works to monuments, novels and movies, to ‘sites of memory’ in Pierre Nora’s sense.2 An important part of historical culture is public debate and political discussion. Certainly it is impossible to record all instances of public attention to or commemoration of historical events and personalities in a certain country in a certain period. However, what can be gauged and discussed is the prominence or absence of, in our case, Jewish history in general and the Holocaust in particular in the public sphere in Hungary. The Jewish dimension was absolutely central in the modernisation of Hungary between 1867 and 1914, that is, the historical period that preceded the epoch of the Holocaust.3 The Polish scholar Antonina Kloskowska has suggested the concept of ‘bivalence’ to denote ‘non-conflicting interlinking of elements selected from two cultures, possessed, approximately, in the same degree and accepted as close to one’s value system’.4 Kloskowska refers to two ethnic — confessional or linguistic — categories in a state and an (any) individual’s ability to identify with both. Is it possible for a political culture in a state to be bivalent in the sense that it incorporates narrations and sites of memory of two ethnic categories?