Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 5. (Budapest, 2010)
Recenziók
512 Abstracts ÁRON NAGY-CSERE Memories of the slum. Myth, cultural memory, lieu de mémoirel The view that leaders and privileged groups of the Horthy system deliberately oppressed the urban working masses and kept them in poverty dominates both the political-ideological and the historical discourses of the Socialist period. The narratives that make up these discourses - the founding stories, to use Assmann’s term - present conditions in slums as valid for workers as a whole. Space allows only one particular narrative from the abundant writing on the Mária Valéria temporary housing estate, Rudolf Szamos’ 1960 journalistic book Barakkváros (Barrack Town). An attempt is made to determine whether this text may be interpreted using the now-fashionable categories of cultural memory (Assmann) or lieux de mémoire (Nora). The paper ends with the conclusion that Communist memory-policy, on ideological grounds, was required by the “expectation horizon” to interpret poverty as something from the past, and so raised monuments to it which could be used to glorify the present. But it also promoted forgetting, encouraged by the contradictory present experience of ideology, the feeling of continuity. KATALIN JUHÁSZ The Mátyás Rákosi House of Culture - citadel of socialist culture The author has had a personal interest in the past of the Angyalföld area as a local resident since 1992, and a professional interest as manager of the District Local History Collection since 1996. She has always taken an ethnographic approach to studying the city, as conveyed in her exhibitions and publications. Surrounded by housing estates built in the 1950s is a distinctive area of detached houses and small blocks of flats dating from the 1940s, generally known as the “OTI Estate” after the body responsible for building it, and sometimes also as the “Horthy Estate”. It was to include a modem “house of culture”, or arts centre, in Magdolnaváros. Construction was interrupted by the
