Absztrakt

A nation, as Ernest Renan acknowledges, cannot exist without forgetting. Forgetting and selective memory as primary factors in the creation of community do not occur spontaneously: they are the result of a nation’s memory politics implemented by force. The instrumentalisation of history is the alliance of power and forgetting. The history of the twentieth century, especially the European memory of the Second World War, is replete with examples for this. Firstly, the case of France is especially illuminating. After the war, the history of the French collaboration and the existence of the Vichy-regime were shrouded in silence and oblivion for a decade and a half. Instead, the French resistance was selected to be remembered with a special emphasis on the French as victims. It was not until the 1980s that the French began to come to terms with the past, but even this development failed to bring an honest acknowledgement of collaboration. The memory of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in the Kádár Era is an example for replacing the image of a violent past with screen memory (Deckerinnerung). The Kádár propaganda brought the atrocities perpetrated by “counter-revolutionaries” to the forefront, but remained decidedly silent about the significantly more grievous violence carried out by the Hungarian Secret Service and the Soviet troops. Finally, the wilful forgetting of the entire Jewish past in line with the Nazi racial ideology went hand in hand with replacing the historical significance of a Biblical people with the concept of the Germans’ historical vocation. One of the means to achieve this was the physical destruction of the Torah and synagogues, as well as the creation of the concept of the Jewish Museum in Prague.