Abstract: Raoul Wallenberg is widely remembered for his humanitarian activity on behalf of the Hungarian Jews in Budapest at the end of World War II, and is known as the Swedish diplomat who disappeared into the Soviet Gulag in 1945. While he successfully combated Nazi racial extermination politics, he fell victim to Stalinist communism – yet another barbaric, totalitarian regime of the 20th century.
Given Wallenberg’s biography, his mission and his unresolved fate it is no wonder that Wallenberg became a figure of mythic dimensions. It is the mixture of heroics and victimhood, as well as the seemingly endless potential of possible adaptations that secures this historic figure and his mythic after-narratives its longevity. While it is without doubt the man behind the myth who deserves credit – first the man’s realness gives the myth credibility – it is the myth that secures the man’s popularity. The man and his myth depend on each other.
In this article, I will give an overview of how Wallenberg was perceived and described by survivors, in popular scholarly literature, how he has been researched by historians, and how he has been presented in different media. It will become apparent that the narrators have sought to satisfy different needs, e.g. psychological, political, and commercial ones. The narrators’ intention and attitude towards the historic person and the myth which surrounds him is of primary importance. I will show how different approaches to, and uses of, the myth exist side by side and nourish one another. And yet they can all simultaneously claim existence in their own right. By providing examples from different times and places, I like to illustrate that the popular images of Wallenberg are far less one-sided, stereotypical and homogeneous than they are often portrayed and hope to draw attention to the great potential that the Wallenberg narrative has today, as his 100th anniversary approaches in 2012.
Abstract: Even though the self-critical dealing with the past has not been an official criteria for joining the European union, the founding of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research and the Holocaust-conference in Stockholm at the beginning of 2000 seem to have generatedinformal standards of confronting and exhibiting the Holocaust during the process called “Europeanization of the Holocaust”. This is indicated by the fact that the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest opened almost empty only weeks before Hungary joined the European Union although the permanent exhibition had not been ready yet. The Croatian case, especially the new exhibition that opened at the KZ-memorial Jasenovac in 2006, will serve in order to examine how the “Europeanization of the Holocaust” impacts on a candidate state. The memorial museum resembles Holocaust Memorial Museums in Washington, Budapest etc., but, although it is in situ, at the site of the former KZ, the focus clearly lies on individual victim stories and their belongings, while the perpetrators and the daily “routine” at the KZ are hardly mentioned. Another problem influenced by the international trend to focus on (Jewish) individuals and moral lessons rather than on the historical circumstances is that the focus on the Shoa blanks the fact that Serbs had been the foremost largest victim group. The third field, where the influence of “European standards” on the Croatian politics of the past will be examined, is the equalization of “red and black totalitarianism” at the annual commemorations in Jasenovac. While this was already done during the revisions era of President Franjo Tudman during the 1990, today it perfectly matches EU-politics, as the introduction of the 23rd of August, the anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin-pact, as a Memorial day for both victims of Nazism and Stalinism shows.
