This paper examines the role of nationalism and propaganda in the development of tourism in inter... more This paper examines the role of nationalism and propaganda in the development of tourism in interwar Hungary through a case study of Hotel Palota, a luxury hotel established in 1930 in Northern Hungary. Historical legitimation played an important role in the development of the hotel, as the goal was to construct a resort that represented the glorious national past of Hungary as well as revisionist aspirations in the form of symbolic elements scattered throughout the hotel and its immediate environs. Contemporary discourses interpreted the prestige investment of the new Hungarian state in a variety of ways, from being a replacement of the Tatra Mountains that had been annexed to Czechoslovakia following World War I, to constituting a sacred space and national pilgrimage site, to being a subject of antisemitic and classist contention.
This paper discusses the interrelationship between discourse about the natural environment and na... more This paper discusses the interrelationship between discourse about the natural environment and nationalist ideologies in interwar Hungary through a case study on the politicisation of bath culture. As a result of the peace treaty that ended World War One, in the 1930s and 1940s, a previously neglected thermal bath town in North-east Hungary became a target for national scale real estate development as well as virulent antisemitism. In order to legitimate antisemitic policy barring Jews from public baths, Hungarian Christian nationalists evoked myths about Jewish bodies being unclean and infectious and used the term ‘Galician Jew’ in reference to Galicia in Eastern Europe, a region historically associated with dirtiness and backwardness. The present study explores the discourse developing around access to thermal resources and argues that the discriminatory bath decrees pushed by the far right were the first step towards the disenfranchisement and eventual extermination of the Hungarian Jewish community.
This is the second of a pair of studies analysing the diary of a Roman Catholic high school boy, ... more This is the second of a pair of studies analysing the diary of a Roman Catholic high school boy, Károly, from 1925-1926. The pair analyses two important sites of his adolescent socialisation - the school and family milieu - through the diary. The present paper outlines the family environment in which Károly grew up, while the other piece of the pair focuses on everyday life at school. This text focuses on the first decades of his life, because it is mainly his adolescence and young adulthood that interest me, as well as the influence of his family socialisation environment on his perceptions of society.
Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien, 2019
In this paper, I analyse diaries from 1944 to explore the extent to which ordinary Hungarian civi... more In this paper, I analyse diaries from 1944 to explore the extent to which ordinary Hungarian civilians were informed of the genocide of the Jewish population. The diaries indicate that information was sparse among the Hungarian population, and mainly obtained, directly or indirectly, from BBC radio broadcasts. The reactions of individual Christian and Jewish dia rists varied according to the amount of credit they gave to the broadcasts or the rumours circulating within their social circles. However, both Jews and Christians tried not to give credit to the rumours as the idea of gas chambers and mass gassings was simply inconceiv able to the majority of the examined diarists. Even Jewish diarists who had received news of the ongoing genocide and feared for their lives thought it more likely that they would be executed by volley fire. For them, this method of mass murder posed a more realistic danger. The issue of how much information contemporary citizens possessed about the Holocaust is still debated today, and it is especially important to examine this ques tion with regard to Hungary, for several reasons. Within the context of Holocaust history, the Hungarian Holocaust was a unique episode inasmuch as the Germans only occupied Hungary in March 1944, which meant that the deportations took place near the end of the war, by which time even ordinary civilians should have been able to access information about the genocide. Moreover, similarly to other Central Eastern European countries, Hungary has yet to confront its historical past, with postwar nonJewish generations still collectively exempting themselves from responsibility by claiming that they and their ancestors had not known about the death camps and were therefore in no way responsible for the genocide of the Jewish population. In order to debunk this myth of nonJewish ignorance, it is worth exam ining how much information ordinary citizens actually possessed of the death camps in the course of 1944. Due to a lack of available sources, contemporary horizons of knowledge, espe cially those of ordinary civilians, are rather difficult to trace, because diaries appear to be the only suitable sources on the subject. In terms of genre, diaries are non retrospective egodocuments that record what information was available to the dia rist at the time of a given event, which makes them especially useful for mapping the dissemination of information among contemporary civilians. However, Holocaust publishing continues to focus on victims, which is why I supplemented published or publically available diaries with privately owned and unpublished diary manuscripts written by bystanders and currently unknown in scholarly literature. In accordance with applicable Hungarian law on the protection of personal information, I com pletely anonymised the authors of the unpublished diary manuscripts. For my research, I examined eleven manuscripts written by ordinary civilians, meaning that these diarists did not belong to Hungary's political, military, or eco
The book Multi-Faceted Reflections: The Diaries of Jewish and Non-Jewish Adolescents in Wartime H... more The book Multi-Faceted Reflections: The Diaries of Jewish and Non-Jewish Adolescents in Wartime Hungary by Hungarian historian Gergely Kunt takes a comparative approach to everyday life in Hungary during the troublesome years between 1938 and the 1950s through analyses of teenagers’ diaries. The methodological approach of the book draws on Charles Taylor’s concept of modern social imaginaries. Kunt uses egodocuments to present the different strategies with which young Jewish and non-Jewish adolescents identified themselves in Hungary during the Horthy period and the era of German occupation, which came to an end with the liberation of the country by the Soviet army. In the case of personal narratives by Holocaust survivors, for instance, there is certainly a vast literature of published memoirs and recorded testimonies available to those interested in the subject. However, Kunt’s research is not based on retrospective recollections recounted under circumstances in which interviewees...
In this paper, Gergely Kunt analyzes the collaborative diary writing of two preadolescent boys fr... more In this paper, Gergely Kunt analyzes the collaborative diary writing of two preadolescent boys from the period of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, during which they decided to act as reporters and writers to create their own chronicles of the events transpiring between October 1956 and March 1957. Twelve-year-old Gyula Csics and thirteen-year-old János Kovács were close friends and neighbors in a tenement house in Budapest, which resulted in their collaborate project of writing and illustrating their own diaries in an attempt to record the events of the Hungarian Revolution. During this collaborative project, they would read and copy each other’s diaries, which primarily focused on public events, rather than the preadolescents’ private lives. In addition to their handwritten entries, the two boys illustrated their diaries with drawings that depicted street fights or damaged buildings, as well as newspaper clippings and pamphlets, which they had collected during and after the Revolu...
Studie se zabývá obrozením budapešťského židovské čtvrti. Část města, kterou dnes takto označujem... more Studie se zabývá obrozením budapešťského židovské čtvrti. Část města, kterou dnes takto označujeme, leží v centru Budapešti, konkrétně ve čtvrtích Erzsébet a Teréz, na hranici šestého a sedmého městského obvodu. Ve studii jsou na příkladech několika restaurací, knihkupectví, prohlídkových okruhů a tzv. barů na staveništi popsány nové tendence, ke kterým v židovském městě dochází. Svou typickou architektonickou podobu získalo židovské město během 19. století a před první světovou válkou. V roce 1944 bylo na jeho území „velké ghetto“. Na zničení architektonicky cenné zástavby se nepodepsala ani tak válka, jako spíše období socializmu, které následovalo po ní. Budovy chátraly, různým vlnám modernizace a přestaveb však čtvrť nepodlehla. Po změně režimu dávalo město stále větší prostor investorům, kteří staré budovy demolovali. Proti těmto necitlivým zásahům se vzedmula vlna občanských iniciativ. Hospodářská krize, která vypukla v roce 2008, pomohla snahám aktivistů o záchranu čtvrti. Mn...
V tomto článku analyzujeme vizuální narativy vztahující se na znesvěcení dvou veřejných památníků... more V tomto článku analyzujeme vizuální narativy vztahující se na znesvěcení dvou veřejných památníků v Budapešti. Zasazujeme tyto narativy do rámce změny v užití a interpretaci veřejného prostoru a jeho památníků, jež vyplývá z demokratické tranzice a moderních technologií a jež je doprovázena novými formami posilování a problematizování legitimních narativů paměti. Analyzujeme dvě sady videonahrávek, které byly pořízeny během dvou demonstrací u odlišných památníků, přičemž oba se nacházejí blízko Kossuthova náměstí. Na tomto náměstí sídlí parlament a skrze proměny soch a památníků na něm sehrálo v maďarských dějinách klíčovou roli při vytváření, udržování a nahrazování narativů paměti. Oba památníky, stejně jako demonstrace a proti-demonstrace v ohnisku našeho zájmu, jsou součástí politické hry o tyto narativy. Videonahrávky při analýze pojímáme jako vyprávěné příběhy, pozorujeme odlišné vrstvy jako třeba interpretaci tvůrců, demonstrantů i jejich publika (které tato videa online inte...
In this paper, Gergely Kunt analyzes the collaborative diary writing of two preadolescent boys fr... more In this paper, Gergely Kunt analyzes the collaborative diary writing of two preadolescent boys from the period of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, during which they decided to act as reporters and writers to create their own chronicles of the events transpiring between October 1956 and March 1957. Twelve-year-old Gyula Csics and thirteen-year-old János Kovács were close friends and neighbors in a tenement house in Budapest, which resulted in their collaborate project of writing and illustrating their own diaries in an attempt to record the events of the Hungarian Revolution. During this collaborative project, they would read and copy each other’s diaries, which primarily focused on public events, rather than the preadolescents’ private lives. In addition to their handwritten entries, the two boys illustrated their diaries with drawings that depicted street fights or damaged buildings, as well as newspaper clippings and pamphlets, which they had collected during and after the Revolu...
In this study, Kunt examines the intergenerational memory of the Holocaust in Hungarian bystander... more In this study, Kunt examines the intergenerational memory of the Holocaust in Hungarian bystander families. Communicative memory plays a key role in intergenerational relationships, as it allows the transmission of the family’s own interpretation of the past to younger generations, thereby becoming an important pillar of individual and family identity. Kunt’s analysis finds that in the memory of bystander families he has studied in Hungary, the persecution of the Jewish population is only marginally present, for several reasons. One is that the intergenerational communication of such memories has been scarce, as these memories in particular are seldom passed down to the third and fourth generations. Another reason is that the majority of Hungarian society is characterized by a sense of competitive victimhood, where many families impress upon their descendants the severity of their own historical losses while simultaneously dismissing or trivializing the losses of other social groups...
This paper analyzes the rhetoric of a manuscript written in Budapest immediately after the Holoca... more This paper analyzes the rhetoric of a manuscript written in Budapest immediately after the Holocaust to record the personal experiences of the author, Margit K. I examine the text in terms of the role of writing and narration in processing trauma and how these appear in the narrative. In her memoirs, Margit K. had imbued her personal history of persecution with meanings that facilitated their integration into her life history and her self-definition. She chose to narrate her tragic past using euphemistic, mitigating, or ironic language and constructed her stories to have positive outcomes while attempting to write as little of the pain and tragedy of her persecution as possible. The euphemizing narrative methods used in the memoirs disappear entirely in the diary and the themes discussed in the diary are also different, which shows the advantages of constructing a desired past within the genre of the memoirs in contrast to the more strictly defined genre of diary-writing.
This paper examines the narrative tropes of Hungarian adolescent diaries written during and after... more This paper examines the narrative tropes of Hungarian adolescent diaries written during and after World War II, primarily focusing on the rhetorical forms of beginning a diary that fall into two categories characteristic of adolescent diary-writing – beginning with an introduction describing the author and their environment, or beginning with a memoir in which the author summarizes the most important events of the period between their birth and the start of the diary. The paper also discusses how adolescents personified their diary books and intended those for their adult selves in the course of diary-writing as dialogue.
This paper examines the role of nationalism and propaganda in the development of tourism in inter... more This paper examines the role of nationalism and propaganda in the development of tourism in interwar Hungary through a case study of Hotel Palota, a luxury hotel established in 1930 in Northern Hungary. Historical legitimation played an important role in the development of the hotel, as the goal was to construct a resort that represented the glorious national past of Hungary as well as revisionist aspirations in the form of symbolic elements scattered throughout the hotel and its immediate environs. Contemporary discourses interpreted the prestige investment of the new Hungarian state in a variety of ways, from being a replacement of the Tatra Mountains that had been annexed to Czechoslovakia following World War I, to constituting a sacred space and national pilgrimage site, to being a subject of antisemitic and classist contention.
This paper discusses the interrelationship between discourse about the natural environment and na... more This paper discusses the interrelationship between discourse about the natural environment and nationalist ideologies in interwar Hungary through a case study on the politicisation of bath culture. As a result of the peace treaty that ended World War One, in the 1930s and 1940s, a previously neglected thermal bath town in North-east Hungary became a target for national scale real estate development as well as virulent antisemitism. In order to legitimate antisemitic policy barring Jews from public baths, Hungarian Christian nationalists evoked myths about Jewish bodies being unclean and infectious and used the term ‘Galician Jew’ in reference to Galicia in Eastern Europe, a region historically associated with dirtiness and backwardness. The present study explores the discourse developing around access to thermal resources and argues that the discriminatory bath decrees pushed by the far right were the first step towards the disenfranchisement and eventual extermination of the Hungarian Jewish community.
This is the second of a pair of studies analysing the diary of a Roman Catholic high school boy, ... more This is the second of a pair of studies analysing the diary of a Roman Catholic high school boy, Károly, from 1925-1926. The pair analyses two important sites of his adolescent socialisation - the school and family milieu - through the diary. The present paper outlines the family environment in which Károly grew up, while the other piece of the pair focuses on everyday life at school. This text focuses on the first decades of his life, because it is mainly his adolescence and young adulthood that interest me, as well as the influence of his family socialisation environment on his perceptions of society.
Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien, 2019
In this paper, I analyse diaries from 1944 to explore the extent to which ordinary Hungarian civi... more In this paper, I analyse diaries from 1944 to explore the extent to which ordinary Hungarian civilians were informed of the genocide of the Jewish population. The diaries indicate that information was sparse among the Hungarian population, and mainly obtained, directly or indirectly, from BBC radio broadcasts. The reactions of individual Christian and Jewish dia rists varied according to the amount of credit they gave to the broadcasts or the rumours circulating within their social circles. However, both Jews and Christians tried not to give credit to the rumours as the idea of gas chambers and mass gassings was simply inconceiv able to the majority of the examined diarists. Even Jewish diarists who had received news of the ongoing genocide and feared for their lives thought it more likely that they would be executed by volley fire. For them, this method of mass murder posed a more realistic danger. The issue of how much information contemporary citizens possessed about the Holocaust is still debated today, and it is especially important to examine this ques tion with regard to Hungary, for several reasons. Within the context of Holocaust history, the Hungarian Holocaust was a unique episode inasmuch as the Germans only occupied Hungary in March 1944, which meant that the deportations took place near the end of the war, by which time even ordinary civilians should have been able to access information about the genocide. Moreover, similarly to other Central Eastern European countries, Hungary has yet to confront its historical past, with postwar nonJewish generations still collectively exempting themselves from responsibility by claiming that they and their ancestors had not known about the death camps and were therefore in no way responsible for the genocide of the Jewish population. In order to debunk this myth of nonJewish ignorance, it is worth exam ining how much information ordinary citizens actually possessed of the death camps in the course of 1944. Due to a lack of available sources, contemporary horizons of knowledge, espe cially those of ordinary civilians, are rather difficult to trace, because diaries appear to be the only suitable sources on the subject. In terms of genre, diaries are non retrospective egodocuments that record what information was available to the dia rist at the time of a given event, which makes them especially useful for mapping the dissemination of information among contemporary civilians. However, Holocaust publishing continues to focus on victims, which is why I supplemented published or publically available diaries with privately owned and unpublished diary manuscripts written by bystanders and currently unknown in scholarly literature. In accordance with applicable Hungarian law on the protection of personal information, I com pletely anonymised the authors of the unpublished diary manuscripts. For my research, I examined eleven manuscripts written by ordinary civilians, meaning that these diarists did not belong to Hungary's political, military, or eco
The book Multi-Faceted Reflections: The Diaries of Jewish and Non-Jewish Adolescents in Wartime H... more The book Multi-Faceted Reflections: The Diaries of Jewish and Non-Jewish Adolescents in Wartime Hungary by Hungarian historian Gergely Kunt takes a comparative approach to everyday life in Hungary during the troublesome years between 1938 and the 1950s through analyses of teenagers’ diaries. The methodological approach of the book draws on Charles Taylor’s concept of modern social imaginaries. Kunt uses egodocuments to present the different strategies with which young Jewish and non-Jewish adolescents identified themselves in Hungary during the Horthy period and the era of German occupation, which came to an end with the liberation of the country by the Soviet army. In the case of personal narratives by Holocaust survivors, for instance, there is certainly a vast literature of published memoirs and recorded testimonies available to those interested in the subject. However, Kunt’s research is not based on retrospective recollections recounted under circumstances in which interviewees...
In this paper, Gergely Kunt analyzes the collaborative diary writing of two preadolescent boys fr... more In this paper, Gergely Kunt analyzes the collaborative diary writing of two preadolescent boys from the period of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, during which they decided to act as reporters and writers to create their own chronicles of the events transpiring between October 1956 and March 1957. Twelve-year-old Gyula Csics and thirteen-year-old János Kovács were close friends and neighbors in a tenement house in Budapest, which resulted in their collaborate project of writing and illustrating their own diaries in an attempt to record the events of the Hungarian Revolution. During this collaborative project, they would read and copy each other’s diaries, which primarily focused on public events, rather than the preadolescents’ private lives. In addition to their handwritten entries, the two boys illustrated their diaries with drawings that depicted street fights or damaged buildings, as well as newspaper clippings and pamphlets, which they had collected during and after the Revolu...
Studie se zabývá obrozením budapešťského židovské čtvrti. Část města, kterou dnes takto označujem... more Studie se zabývá obrozením budapešťského židovské čtvrti. Část města, kterou dnes takto označujeme, leží v centru Budapešti, konkrétně ve čtvrtích Erzsébet a Teréz, na hranici šestého a sedmého městského obvodu. Ve studii jsou na příkladech několika restaurací, knihkupectví, prohlídkových okruhů a tzv. barů na staveništi popsány nové tendence, ke kterým v židovském městě dochází. Svou typickou architektonickou podobu získalo židovské město během 19. století a před první světovou válkou. V roce 1944 bylo na jeho území „velké ghetto“. Na zničení architektonicky cenné zástavby se nepodepsala ani tak válka, jako spíše období socializmu, které následovalo po ní. Budovy chátraly, různým vlnám modernizace a přestaveb však čtvrť nepodlehla. Po změně režimu dávalo město stále větší prostor investorům, kteří staré budovy demolovali. Proti těmto necitlivým zásahům se vzedmula vlna občanských iniciativ. Hospodářská krize, která vypukla v roce 2008, pomohla snahám aktivistů o záchranu čtvrti. Mn...
V tomto článku analyzujeme vizuální narativy vztahující se na znesvěcení dvou veřejných památníků... more V tomto článku analyzujeme vizuální narativy vztahující se na znesvěcení dvou veřejných památníků v Budapešti. Zasazujeme tyto narativy do rámce změny v užití a interpretaci veřejného prostoru a jeho památníků, jež vyplývá z demokratické tranzice a moderních technologií a jež je doprovázena novými formami posilování a problematizování legitimních narativů paměti. Analyzujeme dvě sady videonahrávek, které byly pořízeny během dvou demonstrací u odlišných památníků, přičemž oba se nacházejí blízko Kossuthova náměstí. Na tomto náměstí sídlí parlament a skrze proměny soch a památníků na něm sehrálo v maďarských dějinách klíčovou roli při vytváření, udržování a nahrazování narativů paměti. Oba památníky, stejně jako demonstrace a proti-demonstrace v ohnisku našeho zájmu, jsou součástí politické hry o tyto narativy. Videonahrávky při analýze pojímáme jako vyprávěné příběhy, pozorujeme odlišné vrstvy jako třeba interpretaci tvůrců, demonstrantů i jejich publika (které tato videa online inte...
In this paper, Gergely Kunt analyzes the collaborative diary writing of two preadolescent boys fr... more In this paper, Gergely Kunt analyzes the collaborative diary writing of two preadolescent boys from the period of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, during which they decided to act as reporters and writers to create their own chronicles of the events transpiring between October 1956 and March 1957. Twelve-year-old Gyula Csics and thirteen-year-old János Kovács were close friends and neighbors in a tenement house in Budapest, which resulted in their collaborate project of writing and illustrating their own diaries in an attempt to record the events of the Hungarian Revolution. During this collaborative project, they would read and copy each other’s diaries, which primarily focused on public events, rather than the preadolescents’ private lives. In addition to their handwritten entries, the two boys illustrated their diaries with drawings that depicted street fights or damaged buildings, as well as newspaper clippings and pamphlets, which they had collected during and after the Revolu...
In this study, Kunt examines the intergenerational memory of the Holocaust in Hungarian bystander... more In this study, Kunt examines the intergenerational memory of the Holocaust in Hungarian bystander families. Communicative memory plays a key role in intergenerational relationships, as it allows the transmission of the family’s own interpretation of the past to younger generations, thereby becoming an important pillar of individual and family identity. Kunt’s analysis finds that in the memory of bystander families he has studied in Hungary, the persecution of the Jewish population is only marginally present, for several reasons. One is that the intergenerational communication of such memories has been scarce, as these memories in particular are seldom passed down to the third and fourth generations. Another reason is that the majority of Hungarian society is characterized by a sense of competitive victimhood, where many families impress upon their descendants the severity of their own historical losses while simultaneously dismissing or trivializing the losses of other social groups...
This paper analyzes the rhetoric of a manuscript written in Budapest immediately after the Holoca... more This paper analyzes the rhetoric of a manuscript written in Budapest immediately after the Holocaust to record the personal experiences of the author, Margit K. I examine the text in terms of the role of writing and narration in processing trauma and how these appear in the narrative. In her memoirs, Margit K. had imbued her personal history of persecution with meanings that facilitated their integration into her life history and her self-definition. She chose to narrate her tragic past using euphemistic, mitigating, or ironic language and constructed her stories to have positive outcomes while attempting to write as little of the pain and tragedy of her persecution as possible. The euphemizing narrative methods used in the memoirs disappear entirely in the diary and the themes discussed in the diary are also different, which shows the advantages of constructing a desired past within the genre of the memoirs in contrast to the more strictly defined genre of diary-writing.
This paper examines the narrative tropes of Hungarian adolescent diaries written during and after... more This paper examines the narrative tropes of Hungarian adolescent diaries written during and after World War II, primarily focusing on the rhetorical forms of beginning a diary that fall into two categories characteristic of adolescent diary-writing – beginning with an introduction describing the author and their environment, or beginning with a memoir in which the author summarizes the most important events of the period between their birth and the start of the diary. The paper also discusses how adolescents personified their diary books and intended those for their adult selves in the course of diary-writing as dialogue.
Gaudiopolis (The City of Joy) was a pedagogical experiment that operated in a post–World War II o... more Gaudiopolis (The City of Joy) was a pedagogical experiment that operated in a post–World War II orphanage in Budapest. This book tells the story of this children’s republic that sought to heal the wounds of wartime trauma, address prejudice and expose the children to a firsthand experience of democracy. The children were educated in freely voicing their opinions, questioning authority, and debating ideas. The account begins with the saving of hundreds of Jewish children during the Siege of Budapest by the Lutheran minister Gábor Sztehlo together with the International Red Cross. After describing the everyday life and practices of self-rule in the orphanage that emerged from this rescue operation, the book tells how the operation of the independent children’s home was stifled after the communist takeover and how Gaudiopolis was disbanded in 1950. The book then discusses how this attempt of democratization was erased from collective memory. The erasure began with the banning of a film inspired by Gaudiopolis. The Communist Party financed Somewhere in Europe in 1947 as propaganda about the construction of a new society, but the film’s director conveyed a message of democracy and tolerance instead of adhering to the tenets of socialist realism. The book breaks the subsequent silence on “The City of Joy,” which lasted until the fall of the Iron Curtain and beyond.
Ez a könyv a nők szexuális kizsákmányolásának második világháború alatti történetét mutatja be, h... more Ez a könyv a nők szexuális kizsákmányolásának második világháború alatti történetét mutatja be, hiszen ez az áldozati csoport, amelynek a hangja legkevésbé hallható, ugyanakkor felvillantja az elkövető férfiak perspektíváját és motivációját is. A nemi erőszakot elszenvedett nők nézőpontját és tapasztalatait három napló összehasonlító elemzésén keresztül tárgyalja a kötet. Az unitárius Bodó Róza 36 évesen, a római katolikus, de az antiszemita törvények által zsidónak minősülő Gyarmati Fanni 33 évesen, az ugyancsak római katolikus Bicskey Erzsébet 22 esztendősen számolt be 1944-45-ben a nemi erőszak borzasztó tapasztalatáról és emlékéről. Privát feljegyzéseik elemzésén keresztül azt mutatja be a könyv, hogy milyen eltérő stratégiákkal próbáltak a nemi erőszak többszörösen elbeszélhetetlen traumájával megküzdeni és életüket a sorsesemény után tovább folytatni.
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Papers by Gergely Kunt
The account begins with the saving of hundreds of Jewish children during the Siege of Budapest by the Lutheran minister Gábor Sztehlo together with the International Red Cross. After describing the everyday life and practices of self-rule in the orphanage that emerged from this rescue operation, the book tells how the operation of the independent children’s home was stifled after the communist takeover and how Gaudiopolis was disbanded in 1950.
The book then discusses how this attempt of democratization was erased from collective memory. The erasure began with the banning of a film inspired by Gaudiopolis. The Communist Party financed Somewhere in Europe in 1947 as propaganda about the construction of a new society, but the film’s director conveyed a message of democracy and tolerance instead of adhering to the tenets of socialist realism. The book breaks the subsequent silence on “The City of Joy,” which lasted until the fall of the Iron Curtain and beyond.