CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Székely, Júlia |
|---|---|
| Title | The Transfiguration of the Hero: A Memory Politics of the Everyday in Berlin and Budapest |
| Summary | Although after the period of the Second World War the death of the hero was loudly announced (Münkler 2006), in recent years, the academic interest in heroes has been reemerging. Authors not only established a critical understanding of the hero who came to be defined as an end-product of a careful construction (e.g., Todorova 1999, Giesen 2004a), but “new heroes” also made their mass appearance (Jones 2010). Yet, in contrast to the majority of these analyses that either concentrate on one particular hero (e.g, Verdery 1999) or on one specific period (e.g., Lundt 2010), I discuss the conceptual and aesthetic transformation of the hero. Focusing on the genre of public works of art in Berlin and Budapest from 1945 up to the present time, I study various processes of the transfiguration of the hero. Besides the linguistic and cultural connections between Berlin and Budapest beginning from the 19th century, I assumed that the two cities can represent many of the dual arguments of memory studies. On the one hand, the memory politics of the so-called capitalist and socialist system is generally differentiated on the basis of the former’s disconnection and the latter’s connection to heroic traditions. On the other hand, the post-1989 memory politics of Berlin and Budapest seemingly also represent the opposite end of the scale: while in Germany, parallel to the strengthening of a perpetrator discourse, heroes became “cultural taboos”, in Hungary, along with the intensification of self-victimization narratives, the need for historical role models grew. The point of departure of my dissertation is a comprehensive database that I have compiled during my field work and that lists public works of art installed between 1945 and 2012 in Berlin and Budapest. Utilizing these records as a basis of my theses, I apply the multidisciplinary approach of a sociological aesthetics (Simmel 1968a) in order to discuss the abstract and visual transfiguration of the hero. Throughout the dissertation, I not only diminish the sharp opposition between the socialist and capitalist system, but I also show that in Berlin heroes are reemerging, whereas in Budapest heroic narratives are undergoing a crisis. I argue that in both cases there is an unambiguous trend towards reinventing the concept and form of the hero through the notion of everyday man and everydayness. However, currently everyday heroes seem to occupy different registers in the two cities. In Berlin, the memory of the so-called “silent heroes” – who as everyday men helped people persecuted during the Second World War – appeared as an unofficial memory that meanwhile has also been institutionalized. In Budapest, the official memory of 56 revolutionaries – who are primarily represented as everyday men – disintegrated that brought about the emergence of various unofficial projects. Therefore, I argue that while in Berlin everyday heroes overtake the official function of traditional heroes as historical, social and cultural models for future societies, in Budapest they resurface in the field of alternative art projects. |
| Supervisor | Bodnár, Judit; Fabiani, Jean-Louis |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/szekely_julia.pdf |
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