History-War of Comrades: The Hungarian-Romanian Polemics in the 1960-80s
History-War of Comrades: The Hungarian-Romanian Polemics in the 1960-80s

Summary/Abstract: History-politics constitute a wide research tradition that investigates the presence of history in contemporary society on different levels. It is an awareness of how history emerges in politics or in public discourse in the forms of taboos, myths, interpretations or argumentations referring to the past. The understanding of the past is inevitably influenced by the perceptions of contemporary society; hence, the image of the past is changing constantly with the circumstances and necessities of the present in any period of time. It is a social construction that manifests a deeply political relation between the past and present because the contact of different time-dimensions involves always interpretation, argumentation, manipulation and rhetoric. In this article, we shall concentrate on the aspects of this wide phenomenon including public discussions that aim, at one hand, to come to terms with the traumatic past, and to use the past for present political purposes. The ‘burden’ of the past can be seen indeed very concretely still today in the never-ending dispute over central concepts of the common past of Hungary and Romania.

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