Overcoming History through Trauma. The Hungarian Historikerstreit
Author(s)
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Abstract
In the mid-summer of 2012, a sort of Historikerstreit broke out in Hungary. The main topics of the controversy were the language of and the attitude to the history of the Holocaust. In what follows I will argue that the Hungarian Historikerstreit is closely related to both the renaissance of the Horthy era (1920–1944) in current Hungarian politics and the ambivalent attitude towards the Holocaust in public memory. Since 2010, Hungary has celebrated ‘Trianon commemoration day’, remembering on the peace treaty of Trianon after the First World War. In today’s Hungary, Trianon seems to be a permanent trauma of the nation not only in the public memory but also in history writing. In spite of the fact that many respected scholars argue that currently the construction of the trauma of Trianon has a hegemonic position in Hungarian social memory and that the Holocaust cannot compete with it, I will show that the Trianon trauma is a construction of the current politics of history, which overshadows the tragic experiences of the First World War. Moreover, Trianon and the Holocaust are strongly interconnected historical events, which cannot be understood separately.
Topics
Holocaust Holocaust Commemoration History Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial Memory Memorial National Identity Nationalism
Genre
Geographic Coverage
Original Language
Volume/Issue
24(4)
Page Number / Article Number
523 - 534
DOI
Link
Link to article (paywalled), Overcoming History through Trauma. The Hungarian Historikerstreit
Bibliographic Information
Overcoming History through Trauma. The Hungarian Historikerstreit. 2016: 523 - 534. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1017/S1062798716000065
