Hungarian_Holocaust_2014.doc (original) (raw)
Introduction to special issue Hungarian Historical Review on the Holocaust. 2020. 3.
There was a significant debate in the Hungarian journal of social sciences and culture Kommentár in 2008 initiated by Gábor Gyáni as to whether Hungarian Holocaust research had or had not been successfully integrated into international discourse after 1989.1 One element missing from the debate was that after 1989, main concepts and the language of the discipline derived from the Western side of the (fallen) Iron Curtain. The histories of the Holocaust survivors had been only descriptive in nature, while the experiences of Jewish communities, the members of which had lived under communism was of predominant focus. There was no theoretical inquiry in Holocaust scholarship as long as the objective fact-finding was taking place, expanding on questions as to when, where, and what had happened to which actors. Historical inquiry, however, needs to extend further to explain the uncovered events and experiences. For instance, a significant element missing from the scholarship in its entirety is gender analysis, and this observation brings to the fore the lack of discussion on methodology and the consequent absence of acknowledging developments. Hungarian scholarship of Holocaust historical inquiry with a central aim evolving around gender analytical perspectives is still nonexistent, yet there are some contributions about women and the Holocaust in the English language, for instance by Andrea Pető.2 This special edition of the Hungarian Historical Review lines up studies which draw on new modes of analyses and frameworks with the aim of achieving knowledge production on a whole new level about the Holocaust in Hungary.
Prelude to assassination. An episode of the Romanian Holocaust
Holocaust. Studii şi cercetări / Holocaust. Study and Research, 2011
The subject of this paper is an episode of the Romanian Holocaust, the Legionary Pogrom in Bucharest, in the winter of 1941, 21-23 of January. My intention in this paper is to bring to the reader a general image of the Jewish victims of those days. I will do this through an empirical research using an S.P.S.S. (statistic program for social sciences) database comprising information from the death files of the victims, files found at the Forensic Institute in Bucharest. Moreover, this paper wants to offer a broader analysis framework of the Pogrom in Bucharest by also focusing on the historic circumstances of the Pogrom, with an accent on the economic, legislative and institutional aspects. I will try to develop this circumstances taking into account the events that preceded and anticipated the Legionary Pogrom, bringing into discussion the economic, legislative and institutional initiatives that were made against the Jewish during the national-legionary state, focusing on the manners in which these initiatives were applied and the consequences.
Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne, 2017
The article examines genocide as a category that has been used and abused in various, especially historical, political, and ideological, discourses. It considers whether the extermination of Jews (the Holocaust) should be studied in the context of other mass crimes. I investigate various sources of twentieth-century organized violence and their literary representations. I also discuss the works of Polish literature (by Nałkowska, Gębarski, Woroszylski, and Margolis), which depict twentieth-century acts of genocide (the extermination of Jews and Armenians, in particular) in the context of other mass crimes.
East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, 2020
The Shoah belongs to one of the most thoroughly investigated aspects of modern european history. Scholars have used the Holocaust methodology to study other genocides, or forms of ethnic or political violence. Nevertheless, our understanding of the extermination of the european Jewry is limited, fragmented, and changes constantly due to new investigation methods, research interests, and public debates. The first studies on the Holocaust were conducted already during the Shoah but because of different reasons historians in some countries such as germany and Ukraine did not pay much attention to them and concentrated rather on the documents left by the perpetrators and their fate during the war. While in Poland the research on the Holocaust never stopped, even if it was subjected to various political and ideological limitations, and the Shoah has been publicly debated since the middle of the 1980s, this was not the case in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Nevertheless, in the last two decades, the importance of the Holocaust was discovered in these countries as well and it is currently conceptualized in the framework of regional, national, and european history.
The Hungarian Holocaust Memorial Year 2014 - Some Remarks
2017
From the perspective of the past two (almost three) years, it seems that the significant anniversary of 2014 went down in the annals of history as a remarkable fiasco of Hungarian memory politics. Controversial Monument, Divided Hungarians, Angered Jewish Community – these newspaper headlines are still fresh in our minds. Over the course of the year, the Hungarian Holocaust Memorial Year turned to become somewhat infamous, and scandal followed upon scandal not only in domestic media but also in foreign newspapers. However, everything had started off well in the beginning. This essay will first briefly introduce the broader context of this fiasco, discussing the main differences between Eastern and Western European memory politics before and after 1989. It will then distinguish some milestones of the Hungarian ambiguity and delay in coping with the European tendencies in Holocaust remembrance. After that, it will turn to its central subject, analysing the main events of the Hungarian Holocaust Memorial Year 2014. Toward the end, the essay will map the different initiatives between the coordinates of memory politics and show some unintended consequences of the unsuccessful governmental intentions.
The massive scale of the Nazi-persecution of Jews in Europe, resulting in the death of almost six million people, makes it easy to forget that the Holocaust was also an intimate history, taking place around the corner, in the street, on the hallway. As much as it is a story of industrial killing in Auschwitz, of Nazi racial mania, of the power of the state apparatus and its repressive institutions of police and military, of the fanaticism of ethnonationalism and of institutional collaboration in the occupied countries of Europe, it is the story of more mundane civilians and their agency during genocide, of "ordinary" Jewish-Gentile relations and how they developed under the immense pressure of Nazi-rule.