The premise of this present study is the idea that documentaries attempting to reconstruct the ‘original settings’ significantly influence our understanding of the Holocaust, by way of creating secondary memory. How do we imagine the ghettos and the lagers? Where do we place the series of humiliations and destruction? And what are the methods of documentary films as the means of collective memory? What narrative and visual solutions are deployed to reconstruct the past? These questions are important not only because they are connected to one of the cornerstones of Holocaust discourse, the paradox of the necessity and impossibility of representation, but also because the spatial imaging of past events is indispensable both for our personal and collective memory. Analysing Hungarian documentaries along with Lanzmann’s 1985 Shoah, a milestone in Holocaust representation on film, the study highlights four different techniques for the reconstruction of Holocaust sites: returning to the site, the absence of traces of the past, reconstructing the place from narratives, and the use of archive footage. Place, both in the sense of revisiting it, and being confronted with or finding no traces of the past at the original site, is shown to have an exceptionally important role in the films discussed in the study, some of which were made during the socialist era when this subject was taboo. The road leading to the original site and the passing of time gained symbolic power in these documentaries. The most vivid images were achieved by showing the lack of people and the loss of original sites, by the visual representation of absence.

This study focuses on the responses to the 2004 exposure of ‘Dalos’, an agent of the secret police in the Hungarian pop scene, through his person, his reports and interviews with the subjects of his reports. The media has presented the person and his reports in various interpretive frameworks, with attitudes ranging from moral denunciations, objective explanations, and forgiving/accepting. The thematic interviews with the subject of ‘Dalos’s reports presents a diversified palette too: upon confronting these individuals with the reports on their person, some chose to understate the responsibility of the agent, some attempted to interpret his motivations and some condemned him on a normative basis. The accounts of contemporaneous events in ‘Dalos’s reports provide insight into the centralised popular music scene of the socialist state. They reveal the tactics and strategies employed by those active in the field of popular music, for example, to loosen censorship by being able to perform while expressing their opinions, even if it is through lyrics of a symbolic language.

This paper examines course of life interviews conducted with members of an unskilled woman labourer brigade (and their families) that received the State Prize in 1970. The focus is on how interviewees as young girls experienced leaving their homes for Budapest. After taking a look at the relevant international literature on the subject, the paper presents the motivations behind migration. Reasons were not only of financial nature, since interviews reveal individual and group-oriented strategies behind migrational processes as well. Furthermore, the paper presents the interviewees’ ways of keeping contact with their homes and the representation of these relationships. One can conclude that in spite of the great attraction the metropolis radiates, migrants appropriate their local identities not only to their new environments but also to their birthplaces. Finally, the study examines a relatively neglected area of migration, namely the question of remigration. As the basis for this serve course of life interviews conducted with those brothers and sisters of labourer brigade members, who had periodic jobs in Budapest but re-migrated to their homes and continued to live there. The study shows that in their course of life stories, remigrants present themselves as persons who, when back home, can profit from their knowledge gained in Budapest.

Nincs absztrakt.