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Overcoming History through Trauma. The Hungarian Historikerstreit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2016

Éva Kovács
Éva Kovács*
Affiliation:
MTA TK SZI, H-1014 Budapest, Országház u. 50. E-mail: kovacs.eva@tk.mta.hu
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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.

Type
Regimes of Memory II
Information
European Review , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , October 2016 , pp. 523 - 534
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2016 

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References

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