Wednesday, 23. May 2018, 19:00 - 21:00

Balassi Institute – Collegium Hungaricum Wien, 1020 Wien, Hollandstraße 4

Judith Szapor: Hungarian Women’s Activism in the Wake of the First World War. From Rights to Revanche, London/Oxford/New York/Sydney and Delhi: Bloomsbury 2018

István Pál Ádám: Budapest Building Managers and the Holocaust in Hungary. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2016

Using hitherto unpublished sources, Judith Szapor’s book offers the first gendered history of the aftermath of the First World War in Hungary. Szapor argues that illiberal ideas on family and gender roles, tied to the nation’s regeneration and tightly woven into the fabric of the interwar period’s right-wing, extreme nationalistic ideology, contributed to the success of Miklós Horthy’s regime. Furthermore, the book looks at the long shadow that anti-liberal, nationalist notions of gender and family cast on Hungarian society and provides an explanation for their persistent appeal in the post-Communist era.

Ádám’s book traces the role of Budapest building managers during the Holocaust. It analyses the actions of a group of ordinary citizens in a much longer timeframe than Holocaust scholars usually do: Instead of presenting a snapshot from 1944, it shows that the building managers’ wartime acts were influenced and shaped by their long-term social aspiration for greater recognition and their economic expectations.

Programme

Welcome Notes

Iván Bertényi (CHW, Director of the Institute of Hungarian History) and Béla Rásky (Managing Director, VWI)

Book Presentations and Discussion

Gábor Gyáni – historian, Research Professor at the Institute of History at Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) and full member of HAS. He is specialised in social, urban and mentality history and historical theory.
Judith Szapor – historian, Assistant Professor of Modern European History at McGill University in Montreal, currently Senior Fellow at VWI.
István Pál Ádám – historian, currently Dubnow-Wiesenthal-Fellow at VWI.
Emese Fáy reads Hungarian texts from the rst half of the 20th century.

In cooperation with the Balassi Institute – Collegium Hungaricum Wien