Antifascist memory revisited: Hungarian historical exhibitions in Oświęcim and Paris, 1965

Abstract

The article challenges the widely shared thesis in memory studies that the antifascist memory of the Second World War suppressed the Holocaust. Instead of exploring exceptions to this rule by looking for single cases of antifascist memory that represent some aspects of the Holocaust, we argue that antifascist memory presented a distinct cultural regime for remembering the past. Our claim is that antifascist memory, understood as a particular historical phenomenon on a transnational scale, opened up specific ways to commemorate the Jewish genocide. Our article relies on two pillars: first, on recent memory studies scholarship that challenged “the myth of silence” in relation to the postwar decades; second, on recent studies revisiting antifascism itself, demonstrating its transnational and ideologically diverse nature. We argue that a contested but at least until the 1970s still commonly held pan-European antifascist legacy fostered not only intra-Eastern bloc but also cross–Cold War mnemonic cooperation. We present an empirical comparative study that discusses the 1965 Hungarian exhibition at the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Hungarian section at the permanent exhibition at the Museum of the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr in Paris that opened in the same year. Based on archival documents in Budapest, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Paris, we prove that both exhibitions displayed a coherent, historically accurate, and comprehensive account of the genocide that articulated unambiguously the Jewish identity of those perished and persecuted. At the same time, they both operated under discursive conditions informed by antifascist legacies in Poland, Hungary, and France.

Beyond multidirectional memory: Opening pathways to politics and solidarity

“…The Spanish Civil War was not a Holocaust referent, but it did loom large in the imaginary of the anti-Fascist Left" (Nord 2020: 115). Marceline's testimony is yet another evidence that anti-fascist imaginary did not exclude the Jewish genocide (Kékesi and Zombory 2022). This imaginary is conjured up via Loridan's references to Alain Resnais: from 1950 to 1960, Resnais elaborated an antifascist aesthetics, as the topology of his work clearly demonstrates: Guernica -Auschwitz -Hiroshima (Barker 2013: 131-156).…”

“…Unlike our contemporary regime of memory, antifascism remembered fascism, not the Holocaust. Yet, it regarded the genocide as central to fascism and commemorated its Jewish subjects as Jewish (see Kékesi and Zombory 2022). While the latter were not unnamed nor marginalized, the Jewish genocide constituted no separate past to be remembered.…”