Silence, Cultivation, Cultural Heritage: strategies of identification in discourses on the “German past” in Hungary

From the perspective of historical sociology, this essay discusses the social conditions of German identification in Hungary after the Second World War. It focuses on the discursive logic of collective guilt and justice that was institutionalised in 1944-1948 through the empirical analysis of Hungarian nationality politics and public utterances in the context of international (European) discourses on the past that have influenced Hungary since the 1980s. The essay proposes a historical periodisation according to typical configurations of discursive constraints and strategic identifications and thus explains the reasons why the problem arises today as the “memory of expulsions”