Negotiating Genocide in a Microcosmos of Fascism: Nazis, Ustasha and the Arrow Cross in the City of Osijek, 1941-1942 (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Microcosmos of Fascism in the Age of Genocide
SIMON, 2022
By combining microhistorical and regional approaches with theoretical findings from fascism, Holocaust, and genocide studies, this chapter examines the interaction between the Nazi, Ustaša and Arrow Cross movements in the city of Osijek. By analyzing the ideologies and praxis of the three fascist movements, this paper demonstrates that the future they wanted to build remained vague, contested, and contradictory despite many shared goals and enemies. Instead of bringing the three fascist movements together, antisemitism became a tool of competitive nation-building which contributed to the failure to create a genuinely transnational fascist front in a single city. Determining the pace of genocidal destruction became an instrument in the competitive fascist-elite-building. By relying on the concept of "genocidal consolidation", this chapter argues that the Holocaust in Osijek became one of the primary means in the attempted consolidation of power by one fascist group at the expense of the other. Attempts to neutralize rival fascist elites in the struggle for political dominance on the regional level brought unintended consequences of significantly delaying the deportations of Jews of Osijek compared to the cities in the Independent State of Croatia.
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.
Tracing Their Steps. Symbolic Topography and Anti-Jewish Politics in Budapest
Yad Vashem Studies, 2018
By focusing on Budapest as an imagined space, this article attempts to contribute to the application of spatial theories to Holocaust research. The article places the outlines of the Budapest ghettos on the “historical maps” of local anti-Jewish urban imaginations. By doing so, it argues that anti-Jewish spatial policies in 1944 relied, in part, on a symbolic topography created by a long tradition of cultural representations. At the same time, it presents examples that confirm Michel de Certeau’s statement that city spaces, imagined or real, are produced on “ground level”—namely, by footsteps. Antisemites, too, were walkers in the city and created racialized images of the city “from the bottom up.”
The Hungarian version of this study was published in Mozgó Világ, February 2015. Originally it was asked by the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, but its editors refused the publication of the manuscript.
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.
The Jewish Genocide in Hungary: A survey of Hungarian collective memories and history
This study explores the currents that have shaped the historical narrative of the Hungarian Holocaust. It examines scholarly perspectives about the history, as well as the underpinning myths and memories that encouraged a nation to pursue an alliance with Nazi Germany and sacrifice their Jewish citizens for Christian national interests. This case study demonstrates the way Hungarian populous movements usurped national and Christian ideals and manipulated society's collective memories. It also explores the subsequent forces of national identity that often whitewash society’s responsibility and skew collective remembrances. Additionally, the examination analyzes three films about the Hungarian Holocaust; Mr. Wallenberg (1990), Sunshine (1999), and Fateless (2005) as contemporary representations of collective memory. This study argues that collective memories shaped by Christian Nationalism construct barriers that impede Hungarians from thoroughly confronting the history and meanings of the Hungarian Holocaust. Since the post war period, Hungarians have failed to accept that Christian Nationalism contributed to Hungary’s devastating national history and equally important the Hungarian Holocaust.