Holocaust In Hungary Research Articles

Immigrant Memories of Healing

Erika Gottlieb’s narrative is a transgenerational family memoir, a search for identity, and also the testimony of the protagonist Eva Steinbach, the thinly disguised authorial self, a child survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary, which provides a larger historical perspective for the personal narrative written in Canada. The satisfactory completion of the tasks involved in these three strands of Gottlieb’s life writing depends on how successfully memories can be preserved without allowing them to paralyze the remembering subject. Since these three themes are inseparable from each other, they can only result in self-understanding and healing for the author/protagonist if they evolve together. At the same time, Gottlieb’s narrative is intricately linked to her artwork, which calls for an intermedial discussion of the book to reveal how the graphic images further enhance the protagonist’s struggle to comprehend herself. While the multi-layered text is constructed in a non-linear structure, the sketches and paintings incorporated in it are employed to fulfill various functions. They serve both as illustrations of characters and locations at times, while on other occasions they are made to serve as structural devices. When describing or representing existing artwork, the text also turns into ekphrastic writing at certain points, thus multiplying the interpretative possibilities opened up and the aesthetic impressions created. (MP)

Politics of memory, urban space and the discourse of counterhegemonic commemoration: a discourse-ethnographic analysis of the ‘Living Memorial’ in Budapest’s ‘Liberty Square’

ABSTRACT This study analyses of the Living Memorial: a counter-monumental installation located since 2014 in the highly contested Szabadság (‘Liberty’) Square in central Budapest, Hungary. The focus on the LM allows showcasing it as a unique type of commemorative installation that not only contests the current Hungarian top-down, hegemonic narrations and practices of memory but also counteracts the country’s politicised and ideologised narrations of the past. The LM is explored as a dialogical ‘nexus’ of, on the one hand, individual, lived experiences of the Holocaust in Hungary in 1944–45 and, on the other, of the wider historical and contemporary socio-historical narratives as well as commemorating practices. Presented in the article – and set against the wider input from memory and commemoration research – the systematic, discourse-ethnographic analysis of the Living Memorial links its discursive and visual as well as spatial aspects with the exploration of various types of spectator engagement. In doing so, the article connects the wider context of memory and commemoration in the national and city spaces – and specifically in the often strongly politicised capital milieus – to the specific, localised contexts of ‘commemorative battlegrounds’ wherein ‘official’ displays of memory clash with, and are opposed by, their bottom-up, counterhegemonic contestations.

Women’s affective transactions and the memory of Hungarian (historical) affairs: Istvan Szabo’s The Door (2012)

ABSTRACT The article highlights the cinematic portrayal of a woman’s exceptional affective agency against the backdrop of historical trauma, more specifically, of the Holocaust in Hungary, in Hungarian director Istvan Szabo’s The Door (Az ajto 2012) based on Hungarian writer Magda Szabo’s eponymous novel The Door (Az ajto 1987). Through a juxtaposition of the cinematic and the literary text, the article discusses central protagonist Emerenc Szeredas’s affective transaction to save the life of a little Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied Budapest. Emerenc’s ‘affective bargain’ through which she sustains the ‘cruel optimism’ (Lauren Berlant) of love and compassion pits her gendered capital against devalued Jewish life. The film conveys the costs of such an affective transaction and Emerenc’s ultimate failure to achieve ‘the good life’ (Sara Ahmed) of societal expectations. What transpires in The Door at the convergence of cinematic discourse and literary text is female agency constrained within the severely limited terrain of patriarchal economy. In terms of Istvan Szabo’s cinematography, The Door instantiates yet another engagement with the Holocaust as Szabo’s lifelong preoccupation, and it stands for a significant intervention into the current post-Holocaust memory discourse in Hungary.

Information About the Holocaust in Hungary Before the German Occupation, Revisited

ABSTRACT The question of what was known in Hungary about the Holocaust has been a mainstay of research on that chapter since the time of the Kasztner libel trial in the mid-1950s. New studies on various aspects of the subject and new sources that have become available make it worthwhile to revisit it. It is now clear that news about the Nazi persecution of Jews reached Hungary soon after it began and continued to arrive in the period preceding the German occupation in spring 1944. This included information about the massacre of Hungarian Jews at Kam'yanets-Podilskyy in 1941 and Jews in Novi Sad in the Hungarian occupation zone in Serbia in 1942. From the second half of 1941 through the occupation, Hungarian soldiers and Hungarian Jewish labor servicemen learned about mass murder of Jews and brought news back to Hungary. The destruction of Jews was discussed in the Hungarian Jewish press. The activists of the Budapest Relief and Rescue Committee, led by Kasztner and Otto Komoly, were also a conduit for information. Very specific information, including about Auschwitz, reached Hungary in January 1944 when the Hashomer Hatsair leader from Będzin, Chajka Klinger, who had escaped to Hungary, gave her testimony. Around that time, Zionist youth movement emissaries were sent from Budapest to the provinces and, after encountering Klinger's message, passed it on. Despite the availability of much information, as Yehuda Bauer explained many years ago in an article, there is a gap between information and knowledge. To a large extent this gap regarding the events of the Holocaust, which a great many Hungarian Jews did not bridge, derived from the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust.

The Memory Discourse of the Holocaust in Hungary: Distortion of Memory

This article studies the memory of the Holocaust in Hungary and its distortion within the official narrative. This research, alternating between past and present, demonstrates the abyss between the “official” memory put forward by the Fidesz’s government, and the familial and personal memories. In line with Memory Studies, this research focuses on the past and historiography to underline the instrumentalization of the memory of the Shoah within the country. To conclude, the example of the monument of the German invasion at the Szabadság Tér (Liberty Square) in Budapest and its counter-memorial, Eleven Emlékmű (Living Memorial), are underlined to contrast “official” memory with personal and familial memories.

Remembering Cold Days: The 1942 Massacre of Novi Sad, Hungarian Politics, and Society, 1942–1989

Remembering Cold Days: The 1942 Massacre of Novi Sad, Hungarian Politics, and Society, 1942–1989

The Holocaust in Hungary: A Critical Analysis

Abstract Randolph L. Braham, the authority on the Holocaust in Hungary, spoke out forcefully against the historical revisionism of the Fidesz government in Hungary. Historians and publicists close to that leadership equate the occupation of Hungary by its World War II German ally with its occupation by the Red Army and subsequent decades of Soviet domination. Implying that the Hungarian people suffered at the hands of the Germans just as did the Jews, these writers set forth a nationalist narrative that casts Hungary as a victimized “Christian” nation. Braham submitted this synthetic article shortly before he died in 2018. An introduction by Paul Hanebrink sets Braham’s work in its biographical, political, and historical contexts.

Memory and politics: "totalitarian" and "revisionist" approaches to the study of the Holocaust in Hungary and Slovakia

Memory and politics: "totalitarian" and "revisionist" approaches to the study of the Holocaust in Hungary and Slovakia

From Collaboration to Cooperation: German Historiography of the Holocaust in Hungary

From Collaboration to Cooperation: German Historiography of the Holocaust in Hungary

‘Non-Remembering’ the Holocaust in Hungary and Poland

‘Non-Remembering’ the Holocaust in Hungary and Poland

Harmful Memories—Present Dynamics: The Heroic Helper’s Effect on Collective and Individual Responsibility and Prejudice

This study was aimed at testing if exposure to a narrative about a heroic helper, can increment responsibility—taking about past ingroup wrongdoings and reduce prejudice and intergroup hostility in the present. We used the narrative of a Hungarian hero in an experiment who acted for targets of the Holocaust in Hungary, and measured if this narrative might increase collective responsibility for the Holocaust, decrease Hungarians’ hostile attitudes towards the Jewish minority, and this effect could be expanded to ongoing conflicts with other minorities. We used an experimental group (N = 99) exposed to the narrative, and a control group (N = 101) that was not. Both groups completed a test-battery measuring national identification, empathy, responsibility-taking, and prejudice. Data were analyzed with SPSS, and open-ended questions were content—analyzed by four independent coders. Results show that learning about a heroic helper increased acceptance of responsibility for the Holocaust and empathic abilities, whereas these effects were not generalized to current intergroup relations.

Local Faces, Human Crimes—New Histories of the Hungarian Holocaust

This essay examines the state of the art in Hungarian Holocaust research by way of three studies that appeared recently: Budapest Building Managers and the Holocaust in Hungary, by István Pál Ádám; The Holocaust in Hungary: Seventy Years Later, edited by Randolph L. Braham and András Kovács; and Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History, 1929–1948, by Ferenc Laczó (all in 2016). It shows how these studies navigate the intentionalist versus functionalist debate in new ways, by zooming in on local, private, and ordinary Jewish Hungarians, as well as non-Jewish Hungarians, and their experiences of and role in the implementation of the Holocaust. Two main questions stand out: how to understand and come to terms with the complicity of non-Jewish Hungarians and the Hungarian state on the level of nationwide history politics, and how to grasp the relationship between the Holocaust and earlier periods in Hungarian Jewish history. In other words, was the catastrophic fate of Hungarian Jewry presaged by a lingering and deep-rooted antisemitism in Hungarian society, or was it an unprecedented and entirely unexpected occurrence that was out of step not just with Jewish life in Hungary, but with Hungarian society as a whole? By approaching the Hungarian Holocaust in the longer durée and from a transnational perspective, these studies succeed in illuminating the ways in which the catastrophe unfolded “on the ground” and how responses to it depended heavily on previous experiences and life stories based on class, gender, and political and emotional socialization.

Budapest Building Managers and the Holocaust in Hungary

Budapest Building Managers and the Holocaust in Hungary

British Narratives of the Holocaust in Hungary

British Narratives of the Holocaust in Hungary

Integrating victims, externalising guilt? commemorating the Holocaust in Hungary

AbstractSince its rightward political shift, questions concerning how Hungarian society has reflected on the role the country played during the Second World War and how it has confronted its co-responsibility for the Holocaust in particular have been raised with new urgency. After introducing some of the central divisive issues in the interpretation and commemoration of the Holocaust in Hungary, the author analyses current trends based on a case study of the Holocaust’s 70

Hungary and the Distortion of Holocaust History: The Hungarian Holocaust Memorial Year 2014

AbstractThis paper deals with the Hungarian Holocaust Memorial Year 2014 and the ongoing debate about how to assess Hungary’s involvement in the Holocaust. By introducing the Holocaust Memorial Year 2014, erecting the Monument on the German Occupation and initiating a Memorial to Child Victims of the Holocaust (the House of Fates), the Hungarian government tried to establish a common narrative about the Holocaust in Hungary. For various reasons, however, this attempt failed. Instead, it turned out that the anniversary year 2014 fostered the emergence of diverse new cultures of commemoration at different levels of society. This study discusses the reasons for these developments and provides an overview of the (public) events surrounding commemorations in the Holocaust Memorial Year, thus exploring Hungary’s process of coming to terms with its past. The events in 2014 were accompanied by disputes at multiple levels that were held in the public domain and involved all types of traditional and modern media. This study highlights the reactions to several statements and explains how they came about. Our aim is to engender interest in further scholarly examination.

The foundational dilemmas of Jenő Lévai: on the birth of Hungarian Holocaust historiography in the 1940s

ABSTRACTThis article studies the beginnings of Holocaust historiography (avant la lettre) in Hungary during the second half of the 1940s by focusing on the oeuvre of Jenő Lévai, a crucial pioneer of the field. The article provides brief overviews of the contents of Lévai's major works, analyzing his stances on key interpretative questions as well as his use of sources. It argues that Lévai's impressive series of journalistic-scholarly works from the immediate postwar years not only addressed a host of themes that have been repeatedly studied since, but several of the interpretative dilemmas he first raised have continued to preoccupy historians of the Holocaust in Hungary until the present day.

Review Article: The Saddest History Ever Written: On Randolph L. Braham’s "The Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary" (2013)

Only in 1989, after forty-five years of Soviet domination, could the Holocaust in Hungary begin to be discussed openly and honestly. One scholar in particular, the author – editor of this mammoth geographical encyclopedia, Randolph L. Braham, has devoted his life and career to uncovering the truth about what happened within the borders of Hungary and the annexed territories. Since 1961 he has written or edited, co-authored or co-edited more than fifty books on the Holocaust. The masterful two-volume Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (1994) appeared to be his definitive statement. But now, with a team of Hungarian Holocaust scholars and journalists, he uncovers, with maps and photos, how the Holocaust was implemented within each and every city, town, and village of every one of the forty-one counties in wartime Hungary.

“Hungary 70”: Non-remembering the Holocaust in Hungary

Analysis of memory studies is usually focusing on processes of remembrance, looking at the actors, sites, processes, institutions of remembering. This article however looks at non-remembering as a conscious strategy of not participating in commemorations of the 70 th Anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary. It claims that lack of common language, the imprisonment of a “true” versus “false” dichotomy is contributing to the further pillarisation of the Hungarian memory culture.

Dokumentując odpowiedzialność. Jenő Lévai i narodziny historiografii Zagłady na Węgrzech w latach czterdziestych XX w.

Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie, analiza i ocena dorobku Jenő Lévai, prekursora badań nad zagładą Żydów węgierskich. Dzisiejsze przekrojowe prace o Żydach węgierskich są oparte w dużym stopniu na dorobku Levai. Jednocześnie renoma jego prac systematycznie maleje i coraz częściej kwestionuje się wartość jego publikacji, co nie współgra z historycznym ujęciem skali jego osiągnięć we wczesnych latach powojennych. Autor analizuje cztery kluczowe publikacje Lévai: Endre László. A háborús bűnösök magyar listavezetője, o głównym węgierskim planiście i wykonawcy Zagłady (1945), Fekete könyv a magyar zsidóság szenvedéseiről (Czarna księga o cierpieniach Żydów węgierskich) będąca pierwszemu omówieniu Zagłady na Węgrzech (1946), A pesti gettó csodálatos megmenekülésének hiteles története (Prawdziwa historia cudownej ucieczki z getta peszteńskiego) o getcie w Peszcie (1947) oraz głównej syntezy Lévai z 1948 r. Zsidósors Magyarországon (Losy Żydów na Węgrzech). Autor konkluduje, że najwięcej kontrowersji opracowań Lévai wynika m.in. z ideologicznie nacechowana interpretacja i wpisywanie się jego w cele polityczne komunistów.