Veranstaltung der Vortragsreihe
Identitätsfabriken? Museen & historische Bildung in Polen
im Rahmen des Klaus Zernack Colloquiums
Prof. Dr. Yvonne Kleinmann (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle/ Wittenberg), Prof. Dr. Michael G. Müller (Aleksander-Brückner-Zentrum)
& Prof. Dr. Igor Kąkolewski (ZHF Berlin) laden Sie herzlich ein zum Vortrag von
DR. LJILJANA RADONIĆ (Wien)
Der Umgang von PiS und Fidesz mit "geerbten" Gedenkmuseen
mit einem Kommentar von Dr. Florian Peters (Berlin/München)
Der Vortrag findet am Donnerstag, den 7. November 2019 um 19.00 Uhr in der Bibliothek des Zentrums für Historische Forschung Berlin statt.
The Warsaw Rising Museum (opened 2004-2006) and the House of Terror (2002) in Budapest are the flagships of PiS’ and Fidesz’ politics of history as I will show at the beginning of my lecture. But how do the current Polish and Hungarian governments deal with the museums designed while they were not in power, like the Museum of the Second World War (2017) in Gdańsk and the Holocaust Memorial Center (2004/2006) in Budapest in the course of their to some degree similar authoritarian backlash? Both governments initiate new museum projects like the Markowa Ulma Family Museum in the Polish case and the second Holocaust museum in Budapest, the “House of Fates”. Yet while PiS keeps changing content in Gdańsk, the Hungarian Holocaust museum and the content of its exhibition are protected by law so far. I will show that Fidesz has applied different strategies for marginalizing the Holocaust Memorial Center like not paying wages for several months. The international context will be considered in the course of analysis as well – to close or change a Holocaust museum has different implications than insisting that a museum of the Second World War is too much about “shame” and too little about “Polish truth” as Jarosław Kaczyński did in the Gdańsk case. I argue that due to the “Universalization” and “Europeanization of the Holocaust” PiS and Fidesz, Kaczyński and Orbán, favor opening new museums which fit their “polityka historyczna” rather that debating closing the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest or even the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, although both deal with complicity, with Jedwabne and Hungarian antisemitic laws and the role of Hungarians in the Holocaust.
DR. LJILJANA RADONIĆ is finishing her postdoctoral thesis on the “World War II in Post-Communist Memorial Museums” at the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History, Austrian Academy of Sciences, funded by the Elise-Richter-Program of the Austrian Science Fund – FWF. She was just awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for her project on “Globalized Memorial Museums. Exhibiting Atrocities in the Era of Claims for Moral Universals” (2019-2024). She teaches on antisemitism and antigypsyism theory and “(Central Eastern) European memory conflicts after 1989” at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna. In 2017 she was visiting professor at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Graz, in 2015 visiting professor for critical theory of the society at Gießen University in Germany. She studied political science, philosophy and translation and wrote her doctoral thesis on “The War on Memory – Croatian Politics of the Past between Revisionism and European Standards” (Campus: Frankfurt 2010) at the University of Vienna.