Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (14)
- Book (3)
- Other (2)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (20)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (20)
Keywords
- Ungarn (20) (remove)
A new Trianon monument has been inaugurated in August 2020 right opposite the parliament building in Budapest. Installed by government decree without much prior deliberation, the ‘memorial ramp’ reveals the current government’s flirtation with irredentist, 'Greater Hungary'-fantasies. While briefly reviewing public reactions to this new installation, the article's main focus is on the monument’s construction of a historical narrative of Hungary's pre-Trianon 'Golden age' and discussing it in its historical evolution.
Migrationsgeschichten können Erfolgsgeschichten sein. Oftmals ist eine Migration verbunden mit dem Wunsch, die eigene Lebenssituation zu verbessern. Dieser Wunsch geht aber nicht immer in Erfüllung und so sind Migrationsgeschichten vielfach deshalb auch von Enttäuschungen und Misserfolgen geprägt – wie die des Michael Kreutzers.
From Crumbling Walls to the Fortress of Europe: Changing Commemoration of the ‘Pan-European Picnic’
(2020)
Official narratives about the legacy of 1989 and of Hungary’s role in bringing down the Berlin wall have changed significantly over time. The article zooms in on the public commemorations of one particular event, the 'pan-European picnic' at the Austro-Hungarian border, to show how Hungary’s elite is increasingly turning the original story of this event, a Europe without borders, into a story of Hungary as the sole protector of Europe’s borders and values against unwanted outsiders.
A recent Instagramm project called 'eva-stories', in which a young girl (played by an actress) 'experiences' the Holocaust and documents it on her Insta account received much international attention, both positive and negative. Going beyond the existing critique, the article analyses the stories themselves, their uses of aesthetics as well as the accuracy of their historical representations of wartime Hungary. Based on this analysis, it discusses broader issues of Holocaust education in an age of digitalized communication.
The ‘House of Fates’, the future Holocaust memorial museum in Budapest, stands empty. Efforts to realize this project have divided the Hungarian Jewish community and have been widely criticized as an attempt by the Orbán government to re-write the history of the Holocaust in Hungary. The article reconstructs the main trajectories of this highly politicized conflict by focusing on the key actors, their political maneuverings and motives in this ongoing power struggle over the representation of Hungary’s past.
The 'Lex CEU' and the heavy anti-EU and anti-Soros campaigns that accompanied this legislative move against the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest in the spring of 2017 caused a major stir among both academics and European politicians. But what were its reverberations in the region? This special issue (FOCUS) of the state of academic freedom, civil society and liberal values in the countries that came out of communist dictatorships more than 25 years ago and to place the Hungarian ‘Lex CEU’ in a broader regional, historical and conceptual context.
As part of the special issue on 'Lex CEU', the article discusses the developments in Hungary and the issue of "illiberal backsliding" under Viktor Orbáns government against the backdrop of a broader crisis of liberal democracy around the world. Viewed in such a wider context, local specificities of post-socialist transitions do not seem to provide a full explanation for this phenomenon. Indeed, making sense of the present crisis may demand that we wholly revise the post-Cold War narrative of post-socialist democratization itself.