Hungary, Romania, the Holocaust and Historical Culture

The Holocaust takes on different significance whether is it perceived as belonging to Jewish historical culture, to Hungarian historical culture or to Romanian historical culture – or whether these historical cultures are thought of, in ethnic terms, as bivalent. Thus, using the same concepts as the ones concerning certain individuals’ orientation in a bicultural environment, one can argue that the historical culture in any bi- or multinational state ideally should be bivalent or polyvalent. In this perspective, historical culture is assumed to function as a means to bring cohesion to a bi- or multinational state, to be a vehicle for integration. Are the Hungarian and Romanian societies prepared to integrate in their historical cultures not only different ethnic groups but also terrible events and figures that are heroes for one ethnic group and villains for another, both central actors in the nationalist discourse and Holocaust perpetrators, such as Admiral Horthy and Marshal Antonescu? The ethnification of civic society, if one can use such an expression, was reinforced with the Hungarian and Romanian anti-Jewish laws in 1941, which followed the pattern of the German Nuremberg laws of 1935. Although the laws of course were abolished at the end of the war, in practice the notion of the pure ethnic state remained during the communist period. It influenced both the writing and teaching of history and the historical culture in general in terms of monuments and commemorations