Hungarians in 1945

The material of this volume is built around the year 1945, presenting it through diverse narratives and forms of personal experience. Its main focus is on the collective perception of specific groups within the Hungarian society of the historical turning point of 70 years ago, and their way of remembering it in light of the later events. Consequently, almost half of the book’s content is made up by interviews from the Oral History Archives of the 1956 Institute at National Széchényi Library with 63 respondents telling about their memories organized in ten thematic units. In the second part there are three studies on the particular perceptions of 1945 of three political or societal groups: Christian Democrats, Jews surviving the Holocaust, and military officials. The closing essays tell about the consequences of the 1945 turning point: what effects it had on the revolutionary leaders in 1956, and how it led to the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Hungary in 1946–47.

The authors are: Zsuzsanna Kőrösi, Katalin Somlai, Gábor Tabajdi, András Lénárt, János Rainer M., István Eörsi, Iván Miklós Szegő and Krisztián Ungváry.