Abstract
The article contextualizes the oral life stories of three Hungarian-speaking women and their connections to the national histories of East-Central Europe. Through these three life narratives, I argue that in reconstructing their own life stories, the women articulate historical change. The women – born in the 1920s in the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and coming of age in a socialist Eastern bloc as citizens of different nation-states – make up a generation as well as a mnemonic community with divergent versions of their community’s past. They talk about childhood in the interwar era, their maturation during the Second World War, their married life and work during the early years of socialism and their retirement years after 1989. In so doing, they give shape to starkly different family histories and personal experiences which inform not only their political sensibilities, but also their sense of womanhood, ethnicity, social standing and assessments of the past. While placing themselves into a sequence of events, they maintain their sense of integrity and construct political subjectivities. Their stories are imprints of a deeply divided collective memory of a generation bearing all the complexities that make women’s history different from the mainstream historiographical canon.
Highlights
The article contextualizes the oral life stories of three Hungarian-speaking women and their connections to the national histories of East-Central Europe
Whether belonging to the majority or ethnic minority, for many Hungarian families the disillusionment accompanying the loss of the Second World War, the reestablishment of the Trianon borders, the forced population exchanges and deportations after the 1947 Paris Treaty, incidents of collective punishment in the surrounding reconstructing people’s republics and the Soviet occupation only exacerbated tensions that became frozen into the political unit(y) of the Soviet bloc
Yugoslavia was expelled from the bloc, ethnic tensions were stifled in silence by means of a powerful, state rhetoric of egalitarianism
Summary
Abstract: The article contextualizes the oral life stories of three Hungarian-speaking women and their connections to the national histories of East-Central Europe. Eszter Szabó, a descendant of an artisan Hungarian family in Vojvodina, tells a life story defined by ethnic difference and the unceasing trauma of genocide.
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