Making (Dis)Connections

An Interplay between Material and Virtual Memories of the Holocaust in Budapest

Authors

  • Gergely Kunt
  • Julia Vajda
  • Juli Székely

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14712/12128112.3324

Keywords:

shoah, digital memory, counter-monument, Hungary

Abstract

Following Hoskins’ often-cited notion of “new memories” (Hoskins 2001), which are generated by traditional media in the broadcast-era, now, in a post-broadcast age, we seem to face yet another “memory boom” (Huyssen 2003), also known as a “connective turn” (Hoskins 2011). Instead of focusing on the consequences of this connective turn, however, in this paper, we aim to conceptualize another kind of (dis)connection: we analyse the interrelatedness of various – digital and analogue, virtual and material – memories. Focusing on the diverse practices of memorialising the Hungarian Shoah, and more specifically, on the controversy over the Memorial to the Victims of German Occupation in the urban, as well as digital space, we do not only show how memories (dis)connect an actual and a virtual community, but also how these different kinds of memories (dis)connect with each other in the urban and digital space.

Author Biographies

Gergely Kunt

is a social historian and Assistant Professor at the University of Miskolc, Hungary. Kunt earned his PhD. in history at the University of Budapest (ELTE) in 2013. His dissertation was a comparative analysis of the social ideas and prejudices of Jewish and Christian adolescents during World War II as reflected in their diaries. Currently, he has been granted a Junior Research Core Fellowship (2017–2018) at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Central European University.

Julia Vajda

senior researcher of the Institute of Sociology at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest is a sociologist and psychologist, who also works as a psychotherapist. Aside from the theory and notion of trauma, the effect of the Shoah on the different post-Shoah generations in Hungary is the core of her research interest. Trained also in psycho-analysis, she works in her methodology with narrative interviews, and in their hermeneutic case reconstruction, she combines a psycho-analytic understanding with the analysis of narrative identity (as Paul Ricœur uses the term).

Juli Székely

is an art historian and sociologist, currently working as a research fellow at the Department of Sociology at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest (Hungary). She did her PhD studies in Sociology at the Central European University (Budapest), during which she was also a DAAD research fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research interests lie primarily in the relationship of art and the city, with a special emphasis on public art, (in)tangible heritage, and memory politics in urban space.

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Published

2017-07-01

How to Cite

Kunt, G., Vajda, J., & Székely, J. (2017). Making (Dis)Connections: An Interplay between Material and Virtual Memories of the Holocaust in Budapest. Lidé města, 19(2), 297-321. https://doi.org/10.14712/12128112.3324

Issue

Vol. 19 No. 2 (2017)

Section

Article

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.