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.
Zentrum für Historische Forschung Berlin der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
Majakowskiring 47
13156 Berlin
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