Abstract (may include machine translation)
In recent years, the analysis of World War II history has once again taken political center stage in the former Eastern Bloc countries. In Hungary, the debate about criminalizing Holocaust denial was resumed, partly in response to the advance of far-right political organizations whose internal group cohesion is confirmed through Holocaust denial. In Hungary, the debate over who was responsible for the losses in World War II and for the murder of 600,000 Hungarian Jews — or rather the absence of such a debate — has caused a split in the nation’s collective memory. After World War II, at the very outset of the democratic transition, the Hungarian People’s Tribunals were to draw a distinction among prewar, wartime, and postwar values. The courts that investigated war crimes in Europe, and later in Japan, served the function of defining, in legal terms, such crimes and of punishing offenders. In Hungary, the courts were only half-successful in this endeavor. An inquiry into why this was so may help us re-evaluate various elements of the nation’s collective memory.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 48-52 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | Baltic Worlds |
Volume | 2 |
Issue number | 3-4 |
State | Published - 2009 |