Caught Between Historical Responsibility and the New Politics of History: On Patterns of Hungarian Holocaust Remembrance

Abstract

In the last decade, questions concerning how Hungarian society has reflected on the role the country played during World War II and how it has confronted Hungarian co-responsibility for the Holocaust in particular have been raised with new urgency. This chapter discusses four major interpretative divides, followed by a section which sets this discussion within two broader contexts and a section on recent trends in Hungarian Holocaust remembrance. It shows that the spread of more self-critical Hungarian perspectives on the history of the Holocaust after 1989 has been followed by attempts to weaken their impact and even to counter their influence. The societal unwillingness to recognize Hungarian co-responsibility appears to have grown in recent years. However, this trend cannot be seen as resulting from a lack of emphasis on the history of the Holocaust. Rather, it seems to be the consequence of self-critical interpretations coinciding in time with and being contested by an ever more marked ethno-nationalist political and cultural shift.