Annual Lecture Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2023
In the past few years, Hungary has been portrayed as a negative example of memory politics, charged with being the “ground zero” for a paradigm change in World War II memory politics. This was echoed in Poland when the right-wing populist PiS government passed its infamous law on criminalizing certain perspectives in historical research. This lecture discusses elements of this paradigm change in Holocaust memorialization: nationalization of a hitherto transnational narrative, de-Judaization, competing victimhood, establishing a new terminology, double speech, delegitimizing secular memory frames, her-story turn, and anti-intellectualism. These elements are present in different contexts but nowhere else are they exhibited so prominently as in Hungary. In this lecture, Prof. Andrea Pető argues that this paradigm shift is taking place without recourse to original ideas and yet is nonetheless successfully reshaping memory discourse and offering strategies for memory activists.
About Andrea Pető
Andrea Pető works at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University in Vienna. She is also affiliated with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
She has written several books, including The Forgotten Massacre: Budapest in 1944.
Register
To attend this lecture, please register by e-mail: communicatie@niod.knaw.nl
Programme
14.30: Doors open
15.00: Lecture 'Illiberal memory politics as a paradigm shift in the memory of the Holocaust'
15.45: Q&A
16.15: Drinks
17.30: End time