Scientific Accounts on the Memory of Communism for Minority Hungarians in Romania
Scientific Accounts on the Memory of Communism for Minority Hungarians in Romania

Author(s): Zsuzsa Plainer
Subject(s): History of Communism, Ethnic Minorities Studies, Identity of Collectives
Published by: ISPMN Institutul pentru Studierea Problemelor Minorităţilor Naţionale
Keywords: remembering Communism; Hungarian Minority in Romania;
Summary/Abstract: The aim of this paper is to present and categorize the scholarly publications on the Hungarian remembering of the communist past in Romania. By stock-taking and categorizing the existing publication I intend to find out possible similarities and differences of such works in comparison with their Romanian „counterparts”. In doing so, the following paradigms are presented. The first category contains approaches coined by ethnographers, and anthropologists (including the memory of places, oral history accounts and anthropology of communism). The second paradigm covers those historical approaches which reached a greater public and had a visibility outside the minority Hungarian scientific community. Similar to the Romanian studies and books, minority approaches stress on discourses of the victims. Both accounts have in their core a common denomination, namely that that communism was an unpleasant detour in the Romanian history, something to get rid of, something to be condemned. Thus, communism in this perspective relates drama and sufferings of victims: those „true” or „clean” people, who were not involved and corrupted by the system. Sometimes (unlike Romanians’) the Hungarians’ memories overethnicize communism, which makes possible to create the perception of staying apart from it. But a new generation of historians and social scientists seriously questions this statement, and pleads for a more nuanced framework, claiming to show, the ethnic Hungarians were “part of this system”, too.

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