War, Gender and Memory – Interdisciplinary Approaches to WWII in Hungarian History

Abstract

Andrea Pető has been working cross-disciplinarily between the fields of gender studies, Holocaust studies and memory studies for a long time. Thus, while the main topic of both her books is violence in Hungary during WWII, they concentrate on very different aspects of it and present a multitude of methodological and theoretical perspectives. Das Unsagbare erzählen (“Telling the Unspeakable”) focuses on sexual violence committed by Red Army soldiers after Hungary’s “liberation,” while The Forgotten Massacre deals with a case of an “intimate murder,” that is, violence committed by Hungarians (allegedly led by a woman) against Hungarian Jews in an apartment building in the heart of Budapest in 1944. While the former presents an overview of the main theoretical approaches to, and the comparative historiography and memory of sexual violence, the latter is a microhistorical analysis of a local murderous crime.