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Spectral Present. Perpetrator Memory and the Hungarian Fascist Exile in postwar Munich

Seminar
Fortepan archive
Wednesday, January 15, 2020, 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Speaker

Up until the 1970s, Fascist discourses on the Second World War and the genocide were dominated by defending, rather than denying racial policies and practices. While there is solid research on how Holocaust denial emerged in the last decades, we know little about how Fascist memory developed in the postwar period. What and how did perpetrators remember and how did it relate to early efforts to condemn Nazi persecution and commemorate its victims? This talk combines memory studies and perpetrator studies and discusses Hungarian Fascist émigrés in Munich, West-Germany, as a case study, to examine how they remembered war, collaboration, and genocide. Although my talk explores transnational patterns, it focuses on memories that emerged from and materialized in particular spatial contexts—Budapest and Munich.