Replika Monologue: Schizo

Replika introduces a woman who was born in 1944 during the siege of Budapest under German occupation. Hardly surviving her birth, she lives a traumatic life determined by her Jewish identity. The monologue reveals how history intrudes into one’s life and leaves the person with unhealable wounds and unresolvable anxieties.
 
 

The Politics of Remembering

The essays in this thematic section focus on theoretical questions regarding history, collective memory, and national symbols, providing Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovakian case studies. The introductory essay by Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins reviews definitional disputes and different approaches to social memory in order to reconstruct a social scientific tradition. Focussing on the example of the Right Hand relic of King Saint Stephan, founder of the Christian Hungarian state in the tenth century, Árpád von Klimo describes the historical processes of national symbol creation and ritual. Klimo emphasizes the relic’s role in the political struggles between the Communist Party and the Catholic Church. Enikõ Magyari-Vincze discusses the history of Babeº-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, and argues that present debates concerning its ethnic character embody the Hungarian and Romanian elites’ conflicting perceptions about the two ethnic groups’ relation in Transylvania. She identifies three strategies of ethnic identity politics: conflictual segregation, consensual separatism, and institutional assimilation. Margit Feischmidt and Rogers Brubaker analyze the recent trends in the politics of commemoration in Eastern Europe from historical and comparative perspectives. The commemorative practices and discourses of 1848’s 150th anniversary in Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia differ both in manner and mood (from a mythic, sacral to a carnevalesque and reflexive one) and in content (from a particularizing to a universalizing discourse).
 
 

School Narrative

Géza Takács tells the story of an alternative high-school of economics from its foundation in the mid-1980’s to the recent past. Rather than an outsider observer or an expert, Takács is a narrator who worries about his heroes and faces his own problems as a teacher. The waning of communism opened the way to the emergence of alternative educational institutions, and the story of a free school’s adventure reflects the everyday changes in a post-communist society. The essay is not only a pedagogical case study, but also a literary sociography with special sensitivity towards social-psychological aspects.
 
 

E-way: Internet Media in Hungary: New Media, Old Problems

László Turi discusses the Hungarian net-media in the context of international trends. "Gift economy" is the keyword that helps to resolve the contradiction between the sociologist’s and the economist’s interpretation of net-media. Portal sites – like aol.com or Yahoo! – are the realizations of gift economy on the Internet. Due to the limited number of Internet-users in Hungary, the market of net-media is small, there are only a few true portal sites in the .hu domain. However, the net-presence of the traditional electronic media is increasing.