Open Wounds? Trianon, the Holocaust and the Hungarian Trauma

The Trianon treaty has been a prominent site of memory in Hungarian historical culture from the day it was undersigned on 4 June 1920. 564,000 Hungarian Jews became victims of the Holocaust. In the first years after the end of World War II, the Holocaust was not a concept in Hungarian politics and historical culture. In the interwar period, in Hungarian historical culture the Trianon syndrome exhibited the emotional characteristics typical of trauma in an individual. In the communist period, there were only indirect expressions of this trauma in the form of concern for the fate and plight of the Hungarian minorities in the neighbouring states, especially Romania and Czechoslovakia. In the late 1980s, Hungarian politics were increasingly influenced by the perception that the Hungarians in Romania were severely suppressed by the nationalist Romanian Ceausescu regime. After 1989, irredentism came back in politics But when first Hungary in 2004 and then Romaia in 2007 became members of the EU, it lost political significance. Instead, Trianon was firmly established as an element of Hungarian historical culture through a new museum and documentary film. To commemorate the Holocaust did not become an issue in Hungarian historical culture until the 1990s. Although a new Holocaust museum and study centre in Budapest opened in 2004, the Holocaust has not assume any central position in this culture, although of course it is of great concern to Jews in Hungary and abroad.