Historical Knowledge Production Cultures in Late Socialist Hungary and Croatia

This book compares the ecologies of historical knowledge in late socialist Hungary and Croatia. Its integrated analytical framework – academic, party, and popular history – is an innovative attempt to grasp the unique uncertainties surrounding the making of narratives and knowledge about the recent past in state socialist Eastern Europe.

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Historical Knowledge Production Cultures in Late Socialist Hungary and Croatia: Expertise Unsettled offers a comparative study and analysis from the Hungarian case, and integrating academic, party, and popular historiography into a single analytical framework. Narratives concerning the history of the interwar period and the Second World War, and circumstances of their elaboration are at the forefront of this study. Réka Krizmanics argues that even within state socialist Eastern Europe, different enabling and restrictive factors were at play, and investigates the specificities of late socialism while embedding them in the context of their interwar, Stalinist and post-Stalinist legacies. “Expertise Unsettled” refers to the growing peril of historians, who proved to be often divided among themselves, and were increasingly on the defense as a guild, when literature, cinema, and interested non-professionals got involved in making and criticizing narratives of the recent past. Party history and party historians have been often sidelined in intellectual history, but the author argues that their inclusion is crucial both for a more complex understanding of what (late) state socialism meant for historians and to historicize practices of contemporary post-socialist, especially illiberal memory regimes.