The City and the Archive – Historical Interventions in the Public record 2022/23 Winter

INSTRUCTORS

Ioana Macrea-Toma, István Rév

COURSE DESCRIPTION

In the 4.5-week internship the HIPS students will get acquainted with a critical toolkit that will allow them to deal with historical falsifications in the public sphere, from the urban landscape to archival corpora. The city of Budapest will provide the opportunity for a concrete exploration of political strategies of deception, belonging to the dictatorial regimes of the 20th century up to the populist autocracy from the current times. The archive will serve as a “source” documenting sensitive topical issues; in a broader, heuristic sense, it will be the laboratory where analogous issues related to the relationship between documents/ traces, representations and historical phenomena will be analyzed.  

The internship would not be a touristic immersion within the controversial memorial sites of Budapest, nor a panoramic overview inundated with empirical details; it will analyze the city(-ies) in general as a symbolically loaded, yet tangible layered archive whose body can (or NOT) be willfully rearranged to serve ideological aims and the re-writing of accepted consensual narratives. Broader theoretical insights (generalizable to other sites as well) will be derived from such concrete peripatetic explorations, and the students will have the chance to reflect and build projects about the: 

• complicated relationship between the city-text and political discourses, between history re-writing and urban erasures  
• the paradoxical connection between mythization/ falsification and [the need for] evidence,  
• the oddity of mimicking (instead of outright rejection) of reasoned debate and scholarship,  
• the relationship between public reasoning and truthful historical and architectural expertise, 
• the vulnerability of documentary traces to multiple interpretations and moral relativism,  

• The ways of conveying contested historical knowledge to the public 
• the differences and similitudes between documents and monuments. 

The collections from the Open Society Archives will be primarily mined for their historical information, but also for the analogous problems related to either curating and archiving polyphonic records created in the time of an informational, evidentiary Cold War, or with keeping collections in line with certain historically acceptable/ consecrated representations. Other museums and archives in Budapest will also be visited and students can learn about the challenges associated with keeping the integrity of public records, creating new (counter-)records, or dealing with sensitive ones.  

Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) is not a state institution, but a research unit and a private archival laboratory in the service of the public, legally part of the Central European University. Its primary holdings are related to the post World War II divided world order and its contested history and to grave violations of human rights worldwide. OSA thus has an unusually rich collection of documents produced by or reported on clandestine activities, real or imagined figures of political oppositions, activists, politicians, private citizens. Its researchers and professional archivists have topical knowledge on issues related to Communism, Nazism and post-’89 transitions as well as on practical, theoretical, and methodological archival matters.  

Students’ projects 

Students are organized in 6 groups that correspond to 6 urban sites that have been preselected for them as the most representative, symbolically loaded locations within the historical-political landscape of Budapest. The students will work together to produce the final videos/ podcasts by doing archival research and conducting interviews.  

The sites are: 

1. Liberty Square (Szabadság tér) 

2. Kossuth Lajos Square (Kossuth Lajos tér) 

3. Heroes Square (Hősök tere) and City Park (Városliget) 

4. Corvin köz and János Pál Pápa tér 

5. Castle District (Budai Vár és Várnegyed) 

6. Jewish District (Zsidó negyed)  

Consultants/ interviewees:

István Rév (OSA)

Stefano Bottoni (Univ. of Florence)

András Mink (OSA)

Balázs Trencsényi (CEU-Hist.)

Orsolya Sudár (CEU)

Zsuzsanna Toronyi (Jewish Museum and Archive)

Gábor Egry (Institute of Political History, Budapest)

Pieter Lagrou (Free University of Brussels)

András Török (Fortepan)

Gréta Süveges (Jewish district guide)

Barna Szasz (documentary film maker, AV)