ABSTRACT
If one aspect of thinking geographically about the Holocaust is to recognize that territorial “solutions” were applied to the “Jewish Question,” another is to acknowledge that those territorial “solutions” were both time and place specific. What such thinking implies for this study of the territorial decisions made by doctors of space in Budapest in 1944 is the need to investigate Hungarian wartime relations with Nazi Germany. In particular, there is a need to examine the vexed question of collaboration at a variety of scales— the actions of national and local government as well as the role played by ordinary Hungarians during the implementation of the Holocaust. Now to explore those themes is to engage with both a contentious historiography and a contentious public debate over the Holocaust past in the Hungarian present. As I want to suggest in the final chapter of this book, the ways in which the Holocaust is—and is not—remembered and represented in contemporary Hungary are very much live political issues. And this sense of contemporary debate is reflected in a contentious historiography, which I will attempt to navigate in this chapter, before turning to look more specifically at the spatiality of ghettoization in Budapest.
