중동부유럽

In contemporary Eastern Europe, after the policy of forced forgetting under communism, a memory bomb exploded in 1989. Society was said to have broken out from under the red carpet under which everything had been swept. Suddenly, everything was rendered visible. In the village described in Aftermath, even the red carpet was not really needed: the crimes committed had already been covered up, and in the absence of any real contact with the outside world, the villagers had been able to use communist laws to bury their secret even deeper. Evidently, the situation in Hungary, home to Central Europe’s largest Jewish survivor community, is even more complicated. While silence and forgetting meant, for many, abandoning one’s Jewish identity, among some families and groups of friends the discussion of past events was a means of establishing identity. In informal salon-style gatherings, people told family stories, and this became an important way of establishing group cohesion. Personal narration gave credibility to the historical events: by telling the stories, people made them true. Linked with this were efforts to improve the emotional and intellectual well-being of the surviving mourners, combining the commandment of nichumaveilim with memory policy. This commandment connects the story of the brothers in Aftermath with the battles over the politics of memory in Hungary.