The Changing Memories of Jewish Budapest: Pre- and Post-Holocaust Representations of a City

Abstract

Budapest was the home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the central European region before the Holocaust, and the history of the city becoming a metropolis at the turn of the twentieth century cannot be told without its Jewish inhabitants. This paper examines the scholarly established notion of the Jewish Budapest by including its modern history, literature, and the city's cultural heritage of architecture. The intersection of the several aspects establishes a conceptual framework that shows how the Jewish Budapest is considered a lively home before the Shoah, and remembered after the Shoah in a new light. The perception of Jewish Budapest presents itself as visible and invisible, and my line of investigation regards both as long as they are conveyed in the writings of Ernő Szép, Tamás Kóbor, Ferenc Molnár, Imre Kertész, and Susan Robin Suleiman. The memory of Budapest might be a colorful image turned into gray, yet eventually the artistic utterances after 1945 present the mnemonic device of a dual image of Budapest, resulting in a more complex vision.