What is it about?
Which kind of World War II memorial museums have the Polish PiS party and the Hungarian Fidesz party installed during their first governments when they opened the House of Terror in Budapest and the Warsaw Rising Museum? How have they dealt with museums they "inherited" from their predecessors when they came to power again: the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk? Which new museums have they installed during the current authoritarian backlash in the two countries? How is national politics influenced by international debates and critique?
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Photo by Aaina Sharma on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Memory politics and the quality of a democratic system are closely linked. The Polish and Hungarian cases show that official historical revisionism and growing cuts in democratic checks and balances go well together. It is crucial to keep track of this rewriting of history.
Perspectives
There are so many parallels between the two countries, but comparative works are still lacking to a large degree, so I hope to help close this void.
Dr. Ljiljana Radonić
Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ‘Our’ vs. ‘Inherited’ Museums. PiS and Fidesz as Mnemonic Warriors, Südosteuropa, May 2020, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/soeu-2020-0003.
You can read the full text:
Resources
ERC project "Globalized Memorial Museums. Exhibiting Atrocities in the Era of Claims for Moral Universals"
The ‘universalization of the Holocaust’ has established the Shoah as a historical reference point legitimizing a global moral imperative to respect human rights. Much has been written about the ostensible ‘globalization of memory’, but as yet no genuinely global comparative study systematically confronting this hypothesis with the actual representations of atrocities exists. We examine memorial museums on four continents, arguing that what is called ‘globalization’ in fact comprises three to some degree contradictory trends...
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