Abstract: The analysis of survivors’ testimonies was unable to enter history-writing for many decades after the shoah. If nevertheless it was, the testimonies served only as illustrations of the personal experience of victims in the Grand Narrative of historians. However, in the past 20 years, parallel to the opening of digital oral history archives, these testimonies became regular sources of mainstream historical research. Moreover, the memory culture of the Shoah has fundamentally changed in the Western world after 1989. From the perspective of paper, the most relevant changes were a widespread appearance of the concept (cultural, social, historical) of trauma in public history, and the digital turn in testimony collections.It is a commonplace in psychological and sociological research on Holocaust testimonies and other ego-documents that in the case of large digital collections specific analytical methods need to be used. However, Holocaust historians dealing with these sources have hardly applied such methods. My paper proposes specific sociological techniques of using personal accounts in history-writing (such as the intuitive analysis of testimonies by accumulating and testing data; qualitative approaches and quantifying the data of big qualitative collections). It also discusses the historical usage of large testimony collections with the help of current case studies of the Holocaust in Hungary
Abstract: Emma was born in 1956. Her parents survived the Holocaust with the help of false documents and their Slavic appearance – goes the family legend. Emma was brought up by her parents, according to communist principles. She is already 17 when she first learns from her aunt that she is Jewish. She meets her husband, Ben, a Nigerian, in 1976, and they leave for Nigeria. A year later Emma returns alone, pregnant, and from then on, her relationship with Ben is almost completely cut off. In 1990, Emma sends her child to a Jewish school. The analysis of the narrative interview reveals that for Emma, the meaning of choosing a stranger from a different culture was to get rid of a stigma. The presence of the colored child born from the relationship comforts her – if she manages to hide the Jewishness of the child, this covers her Jewishness as well. Along with this, she seems to be trying to protect her son from her identity problem: the color of his skin gives clear evidence of who he is and where he comes from. A decade later, she changes her strategy: now she wants the hidden stigma to be revealed and seen. And once more she uses her son to achieve this: if her son attends a Jewish school, he becomes Jewish. And if he is Jewish, that means that she too is Jewish.
Abstract: 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.
Abstract: Mindennapi életünk milliárdnyi eseménye alussza Csipkerózsika álmát lelkünk mélyrétegeiben, mindaddig, amíg valamilyen 'sorsesemény' felszínre nem hozza azokat, és ezzel mintegy átstrukturálja életünk megszokott szerkezetét. Ezek az események a maguk idejében nem alkottak jelent vagy jövőt meghatározó élményt. Ahogy a szerzők ezt megfogalmazzák: 'Ez a múlt tehát olyan múlt, amely soha nem volt jelen'. A rendszerváltozás olyan 'sorseseménynek' számít, amely képes volt átstrukturálni a múltat, az egykor jelentésnélküliként megélt események a megváltozott jelenben új struktúrába szerveződtek, ettől jelentésük megváltozott, jelent formáló, jövőt meghatározó jelentést kaptak, ahogy a szerzők ezt - talán túl tömören fogalmazva - írják: 'a sorsesemény olyan jelenre utal, amely soha nem volt jövő. Értelmezésünkben e soha-nem-volt-jövő jelenből tekintünk vissza e soha-nem-volt-jelen múltra, s előre a soha-nem-lesz-jelen, illetve soha-nem-lesz-múlt jövőre'. A magyarországi zsidó identitást, illetve annak a rendszerváltozás utáni változását, 'átstrukturálódását' vizsgálta Kovács Éva és Vajda Júlia. Két csoport körében végezték - az erre a célra kidolgozott interjú-készítési módszerrel, a 'narratív interjús technika' alkalmazásával - vizsgálataikat a kilencvenes évek elején alakult zsidó iskolákba beíratott gyermekekkel és szüleikkel - akik részben vallásos, részben vallásukat már elhagyott zsidók, de ugyanúgy van közöttük katolikus, vagy éppen vegyes felekezetű család is. A lefolytatott beszélgetések szociológiai, szociálpszichológiai elemzése a választások indítékait, az identitás hátterét tárják fel.
Abstract: Jewish identity in the diaspora has always had its problematic sides, particularly in the last 100 years. As a consequence of factors such as secularization, the erosion or dissolution of traditional communities, and rapid assimilation processes, Jewish identity became more problematic, and its borders and definitions more vague, doubtful, or flexible. Definitions of “being a Jew” were relativized; they became various points on a scale that may range from belonging to a ritual community, to a distinct ethnic, religious and/or linguistic group, through belonging to more or less well-defined subcultures and/or traditions, to the point where no Jewish identity exists at all.
