Memory of Shoah in Hungary

1
Memory of Shoah in Hungary

• Andrea Peto
• CEU, Budapest

2
Social Composition

• Budapest centered, in few provincial cities
• In 1945 150 - 260 000 decrease due to migration
• (in 2000 64 000- 118 000)
• 33 younger than 20 years, 23,2 older than 60,
  for 1000 men 1370 women
• Assimilated, educated
• Nationalization and Communist take over

3
Aliya and migration

• internationalisms
• Loss of symbolic spaces
• Jewish identity becomes victimized identity
  antifascism
• Zionism increasing popularity managed as
  religion
• Migration outside the Soviet Block

4
Transitional justice

• Ethics, moral and law mixed
• Individualized corrective justice
• Bifurcation of memory
• Institutionalised amnesia

5
New anti-semitism

• Increase of new anti-semitism 1946 Pogroms eg.
  Kunmadaras
• Critics of transitional justice
• Change in elite (collaborationists were out from
  power, migrations plus economic boom 1945-1947)

6
Why lawyers?

• After 1945 normalisational discourse was legal
  discourse (peoples tribunals)
• Legal professionals mediating, invisibly between
  state and individuals (communicative memory)

• Liberal profession, social composition
• Legal profession
• Conflicting identities both victims of Shoah and
  members of the legal profession

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Social composition of lawyers

• MÜNE (National Association of Hungarian Lawyers)
  1927-1945 numerus nullus 6 of all lawyers in
  1939, in Budapest 3384 registered lawyers 2040 of
  Jewish origin
• Lustration 1945-1946
• Communist lustration 1947-1948---

9
Characteristics of the lawyers

• Age composition (62)
• 50 1896-1913
• 31 1871-1895
• 19 young with generational luck
• One third of the lawyers were of Jewish origin

• 5 Debrecen lobby
• 8 postal service lobby
• 3 active in professional organizations
• 53 party affiliation (18 leftist, 5 member of
  Christian religious institutions)
• 12 published in professional journals, 10 link
  to agrarian party, 1 MP

10
Result of lustration

• 71 approved
• 21 reprimanded
• 3 excluded
• 5 lawyers were suspended

11
Conclusions
12
Bibliography

• Photos are from Jewish Museum and Archive and
  Museum of Criminology, Budapest
• Peto, Andrea, Problems of Transitional Justice
  in Hungary An Analysis of the Peoples Tribunals
  in Post-War Hungary and the Treatment of Female
  Perpetrators in Zeitgeschichte Vol. 34.
  November-December 2007. pp. 335-349.
• Peto, Andrea, Gendered Memory of Military
  Violence in Eastern Europe in the 20th century
  in The Gender of Memory. Cultures of Remembrance
  in Nineteenth- and Twentieth- Century Europe Eds.
  Sylvia Palatschek, Sylvia Schraut. Frankfurt, New
  York Campus Verlag, 2008, pp. 237-253.