Between three and four thousand civilians, primarily Serbian and Jewish, were murdered in the Novi Sad massacre of 1942. Hungarian soldiers and gendarmes carried out the crime in the city and ...surrounding areas, in territory Hungary occupied after the German attack on Yugoslavia. The perpetrators believed their acts to be a contribution to a new order in Europe, and as a means to ethnically cleanse the occupied lands.In marked contrast to other massacres, the Horthy regime investigated the incident and tried and convicted the commanding officers in 1943-44. Other trials would follow. During the 1960s, a novel and film telling the story of the massacre sparked the first public open debate about the Hungarian Holocaust.This book examines public contentions over the Novi Sad massacre from its inception in 1942 until the final trial in 2011. It demonstrates how attitudes changed over time toward this war crime and the Holocaust through different political regimes and in Hungarian society. The book also views how the larger European context influenced Hungarian debates, and how Yugoslavia dealt with memories of the massacre.
Emerging in 1917 amidst the anxieties of World War I, the Cult of Our Lady of Fátima began with a vision witnessed by three shepherd children in rural Portugal. News of the apparition quickly spread, ...drawing hundreds, then thousands of pilgrims to the Cova da Iria. This potent symbol of faith soon transcended its origin, migrating in the form of venerated statues and dedicated shrines that sprouted across the globe. Particularly intertwined with Portuguese emigration, the cult’s reach extended to former colonies in Africa and Asia (“Ultramar”) and distant communities like Brazil. Statues of Our Lady became beacons of familiarity and solace, offering “homes away from home” for displaced populations. This essay focuses on the discourses surrounding the cult between the early 1930s and 1950s, exploring how Fátima served as a focal point for navigating the social, political, and cultural conflicts inherent in the emigration experience.
In 1917, in the context of extreme anxiety of a rural Catholic population during a period of war, revolutionary upheaval, and anticlerical politics, the apparition of St Mary to three children near ...the Portuguese village of Fátima stirred up emotions that have created a cult that is still attracting hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year and that has found followers all over the world. How did this happen? One has to look at the history of changing meanings related to the cult of Our Lady of Fátima, its integrative energy, and the global spread of the cult. The fact that, most recently, immigrants with Hindu and Muslim background are also among the pilgrims to Fátima speaks of the unpredictable cross-cultural and cross-religious possibilities of this cult, in which gender aspects of a female deity play an important role. This paper will analyze the various periods of the cult from its beginning in 1917 and the roles of secularism, the Salazar regime, Colonialism, the Cold War, and migration from and (later) to Portugal, in order to find insights into a fascinating global cult and how it has changed and adapted to a society that has developed a new attitude towards traditional Catholicism. While the history of the Cult of Fátima has been studied before, this article seeks to introduce a global and, at the same time, long-term historical perspective.
When Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, since 1945 head of the Catholic Church of Hungary, returned for a visit to the United States in 1973, the world had changed dramatically since his first visit in ...1947. After his arrest and show trial in Stalinist Hungary, he had become a symbol of heroic anti-Communist resistance during the Cold War. Through negotiations with the U.S. administration and the Vatican in the wider context of Detente and "Vatican Ostpolitik, the negative image of Communist Hungary had changed while Cardinal Mindszenty now seemed to have become a person of the past. These changes had a major impact on how the US government, the Vatican, and American-Hungarians interpreted Mindszenty's visits in 1973 and 1974.
Two acts of mass violence that occurred during World War II have strained relations between Hungarians and Serbs for decades: the murder of several thousand civilians in Novi Sad (Újvidék) and the ...surrounding villages in January 1942, committed by the Hungarian army and gendarmerie, and Tito’s partisan army’s mass killings and incarceration of tens of thousands civilians, most of them Hungarians, at the end of the war. Remembering these atrocities has always been difficult and strongly politicized, but this was particularly the case when the Communist regimes in Hungary and Yugoslavia based the legitimation of their authority on anti-Fascist narratives and interpretations of the war. The conflict between Stalin and Tito, and the anti-Stalinist revolution of 1956 made it even more difficult to propagate the original Stalinist narrative about the war, which stood in ever starker contrast to everyday realities. When Kádár began to revise the political justification of his regime with a narrative that was both anti-Fascist and (moderately) critical of Stalinism in the 1960s, the remembrance of the 1942 massacre changed. In Yugoslavia, the weakening of the central government in the 1960s contributed to a local re-appropriation of the memory of 1942, while the 1944 killings remained a strict taboo until 1989.
Remembering Cold Days Klimó, Árpád von
DÍKÉ,
08/2023, Letnik:
7, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
“Remembering Cold Days” is a book on the changing meanings of the 1942 massacre of Novi Sad. It answers questions about what we know and do not know about this specific war crime today and, most of ...all, how different individuals and communities have been remembering and interpreting the events since 1942. It also focuses on the changing international context – the massacre was one of hundreds of similar war crimes that marked World War II as one of the worst conflicts for civilians – and the various political regimes which altered the framework for these memories and interpretations. It further looks at a series of trials related to the massacre and the public debates in Hungary, Yugoslavia and elsewhere instigated by a popular novel and film since the mid-1960s. Finally, it analyzes how the end of communism in 1989 and the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s changed the perspectives on the perpetrators and victims of 1942.
