Hungarian Studies Review Fall 2013 on Political Justice in post WWII Budapest, together with Ildiko Barna (original) (raw)
Related papers
The decade of economic and political-social transition in Central Eastern Europe has had modest success in the development of a market economy and in the harmonization of political structures and legal frame-works with those of the European Union (EU). A number of issues, however, remain unaddressed; issues which concern civil society and local cultural traditions as well as individual and collective needs and responsibilities. Hungarian citizens are well informed about the global economy and politics. When it comes to knowledge of such matters as civic participation in political processes, social and cultural discourses about human rights - and their relevance to particular social groups, such as ethnic or religious groups and women or others experiencing poverty - Hungarian society displays definite shortcomings. The causes of this lack of social sensitivity, this paucity of public discourse about the emerging social, political and cultural values of the transition era, are not readily evident and should be investigated. In particular, the peculiarities of the social processes involved in the transition from communist rule to the new pluralism and the market economy should be analyzed, because they seem to gravitate towards the exclusion of women from politics and work opportunities, and the silencing of women by drawing on outdated arguments derived from patriarchal traditions. It seems somewhat ironic that while the values of a consumer society and popular culture are being promoted in Hungary, women's concerns are not being addressed. Besides tracing post-1989 attitudes toward women's roles in society, this paper aims to offer some explanations of why women's concerns are not in the forefront of Hungarian public consciousness, and to throw some light on the factors that contribute to negative attitudes to women's issues in this era of political and social transformation. This paper will also suggest that in order to begin the process of remedying these deficiencies and shortcomings, Hungarian society - instead of looking entirely to Western European and North American models for solutions - should try to reclaim the rich legacy of Hungarian feminism, a feminism that has grown out of national roots and traditions.
Among Hungarian historians the subject-matter of female labour has gradually become a popular topic. The research work can be placed to the borderline of two disciplines: female history and history of journalism in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. With the application of news analysis, discourse analysis and text linguistics, the study intend to prove that women's movements at the beginning of the 20 th century considered the safeguarding of female workers' interests as essential as the fight for women's enfranchisement. The author analyses the views, opinions mediated by the Austro-Hungarian feminist periodical press -The Woman and The Society A Nő és a Társadalom) and New Woman's Life (Neues Frauenleben) -about female labour and the working conditions of working women between 1907 and 1913. 'National Excellence Program'. 2 However these works do not discuss comprehensively the history of female labour during the second half of the 19 th century, they are only short articles and chapters of books. E.g.: NAGY, Mariann: Nők a magyar gazdaságban a dualizmus korában. (Women in the Hungarian Economy during the Dualistic Era.) IN: GYÁNI Gábor-SÉLLEI Nóra (Eds.): Nők a modernizálódó magyar társadalomban. Csokonai Kiadó, Debrecen, 2006. 205-223.; NAGY, Beáta: Nők keresőtevékenysége Budapesten a 20. század első felében. (Wage-earning Activities of Women during the First Half of the 20 th Century.) IN: HADAS Miklós (Ed.): Férfiuralom. Írások nőkről, férfiakról, feminizmusról. Replika Kör, Budapest, 1994. 155-175.; BURUCS, Kornélia: Nők az egyesületekben. (Women in the Associations.), História. XV. (1993):2. 15-19.; KERESZTY, Orsolya: Bédy-Schwimmer Rózsa A Nő és a Társadalom szerkesztője. (Rosika Schwimmer, Editor of The Woman and the Society.) IN: PALASIK Mária és SIPOS Balázs (Eds.): Házastárs? Munkatárs? Vetélytárs? A női szerepek változása a 20. századi Magyarországon. Napvilág Kiadó, Budapest, 2005. 186-194.; KERESZTY, Orsolya: Nők változó társadalmi szerepei a dualizmus kori Magyarországon. (Changing Social Roles of Women in Hungary during the Dualistic Era.) IN: PSENÁKOVÁ Ildikó-MEZŐ Ferenc-VICZAYOVÁ Ildikó (Eds.): Teória a Prax II. Nitra, 2009. 77-88.; KERESZTY, Orsolya: Egy folyóirat a művelődésért: A Nő és 3
Klimo1956_1942_HungarianHistoricalReview2016 (1).pdf
Two acts of mass violence that occurred during World War II have strained relations between Hungarians and Serbs for decades: the murder of several thousand civilians in Novi Sad (Újvidék) and the surrounding villages in January 1942, committed by the Hungarian army and gendarmerie, and Tito’s partisan army’s mass killings and incarceration of tens of thousands civilians, most of them Hungarians, at the end of the War. This was particularly the case when the Communist regimes in Hungary and Yugoslavia based the legitimation of their authority on anti-Fascist narratives and interpretations of the war, which stood in ever starker contrast to everyday realities. When Kádár began to renew the Anti-Fascist narrative and develop a (moderate) critique of Stalinism in the 1960s, the remembrance of the 1942massacre changed. In Yugoslavia, the weakening of the central government in the 1960s contributed to a local re-appropriation of the memory of 1942, while the 1944 killings remained a strict taboo until 1989.