Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 5. (Budapest, 2010)
Recenziók
522 Abstracts pregnant she did not, as the reporter wrote, take advantage of the assistance for mothers offered by the state. She had got pregnant from her lover, 13 years older, after having forgotten to take her contraceptive pill. She carried the child in secret, and bought nothing in preparation for the baby. Despite being “no maid led astray by a lord,” she gave birth to the child in the toilet and buried it in her parents’ garden in the Nyírség region, under an apple tree. So the infanticide mothers served the official discourse in setting the “modem” city life against “backward” village life. The paper briefly looks at possible approaches to the subject (legal, criminological, constitutional), and analyses two specific trials of infanticide mothers in Budapest in the 1970s, Ilona and Agnes, to establish the social background of women that committed infanticide in the socialist period, whether attitudes to infanticide were different, and if so why, and how those involved in the trials put their cases. ÉVAARGE JÓ Secret hideouts of the city State security spaces and places - secret-service topography 1945-1953 The spatial structures of Budapest merit a special chapter of the city’s sociopolitical biography. The spaces and buildings where the political police plied their trade for several decades now cany symbolic meanings and have their own place in individual and collective memory. The paper attempts to place public spaces, public places and secret spaces and buildings in the visible and invisible, public and hidden official matrix which is closely allied to the dimension of acceptance and prohibition. It traces how the political police force led by Gábor Péter staked out territory after its beginnings in early 1945. The organisation’s headquarters at no. 60, Andrássy út, is still burnt into the public mind as the venue of uncontrolled terror. The prisons it used - in Fő utca, Conti utca, Margit körút and Kozma utca - were also places of contemporary notoriety. The political police also had their own favourite venues for collective relaxation, like the Fészek Klub. As time went on, the great state occasions also became fixed in location and choreography. The paper maps out the political and spontaneous occasions of the state security elite, and venues of “mixing
