ABSTRACT
In the past few years, Hungary has been portrayed as a negative example of memory politics in both mainstream and academic press, charged with being the “ground zero” for a paradigm change in World War II memory politics that was echoed in Poland when the right-wing populist PiS government passed its infamous law on criminalizing certain perspectives in historical research. The reshaping of historical discourse was also manifested in four institutional changes in Hungarian academic life within a short period of time. In this chapter, the author claims that there are three plausible frameworks of interpretation of Orban’s memory politics: distortion, revisionism, or paradigm change. He explains recent developments in Hungarian memory politics in terms of a paradigm change. The historiography of the Holocaust could move forward substantially if it analyzed the causes, institutional forms, and main actors of oblivion.
