Péter Apor
Senior Fellow (03/2022-08/2022)
Antisemitism and Collective Violence in Post-1945 Hungary
I will explore the genesis and consequences of collective violence committed by workers and peasants in post-WWII Hungary. I will address four sub-themes: 1, the idea of “legitimate violence” in postwar popular cultures; 2, the public image of Jews and the Holocaust after 1945; 3, the popular memory of the war and; 4, the political uses and abuses of the pogroms. This research will help better understand, first, the social and political history of the post-1945 transformation of Eastern Europe and, second, the causes of collective violence, which will render this project relevant for broader social science research, as well.
Péter Apor is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 2003 and 2011, Apor was a research fellow at the Central European University (Budapest), and an associate researcher at the University of Exeter. In 2015-2018, he coordinated a comparative research addressing antisemitic pogroms in post-WWII Eastern Europe funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. His main research interest includes the politics of memory and history in post-1945 East-Central Europe, the mechanism of collective violence and ethnic hatred and the history of empires and colonialism in the Cold War. Apor is the co-editor of The Handbook of COURAGE: Cultural Opposition and its Heritage in Eastern Europe, Budapest, 2018. He is the author of Fabricating Authenticity in Soviet Hungary: The Afterlife of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic in the Age of State Socialism, Anthem Press, London, 2014.
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