Ferenc Laczo
Biographic Data
| ID | 522907 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ferenc Laczo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ferenc |
| FAMILY NAME | Laczo |
| SIGNATURE | LACZO F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Maastricht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0543-7653 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 27 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Trap of Wish Fulfillment
How entrenched has Viktor Orbán’s rule become in Hungary after a decade and a half? How might domestic and international political shifts, especially Donald Trump’s second administration, impact the country’s trajectory? To answer those questions, this essay outlines the foreign policy strategy the Orbán regime has pursued and assesses its chances of success; discusses the recent emergence of a charismatic opposition leader and what that unexpect…
The Bear in the Room and the Civilizing Process
The History of an Idea and Anthony Pagden's The Pursuit of Europe: A History, arrive amidst significant polemics and much uncertainty.Flattering self-images and sanitized historical narratives of "Europe" and "the West" have come under sustained scrutiny and repeated criticism also "from within" in recent years, yielding sharp contestation of their meanings.How will these two key concepts be understood in a world often described as "multipolar, "…
The History of Ideas
György Konrád as a Post-Dissident Public Intellectual Biography, Interventions, Reception
The paper offers a case study of György Konrád, a leading intellectual from post-Communist eastern Europe, who was arguably the most internationally visible and influential former dissident—or post-dissident—from Hungary after 1989. The paper introduces the biography and intellectual activities of Konrád, which stretched from the periphery of interwar Hungary to post–Cold War international fame, and it focuses on his post-1989 public intervention…
Introduction to the Special Issue “Canonizing and Contesting Communist-Era Dissent in Eastern Europe
This special issue in historical and memory studies analyzes two interrelated processes. It explores how the dissident past has been negotiated, contested, or reclaimed since 1989 and how key post-dissident actors have employed their own pasts as a moral and political resource after 1989, with what consequences. The issue approaches post-dissident history and the memory of dissent after 1989 in a regional-comparative frame while paying ample atte…
Creeping Right-Wing Hegemony and Its Contestations
Approaching the case study of Hungary as one in historical revisionism, this article focuses on new museums, revamped public squares, and popular historical walks which either reinforce or contest the contemporary project of right-wing hegemony. The author compares two major historical museums which both aim to address the recent past and opened in the early years of the twenty-first century; zooms in on two post-2010 initiatives to reshape major…
The Legacy of Division
This volume examines the legacy of the East–West divide since the implosion of the communist regimes in Europe. The ideals of 1989 have largely been frustrated by the crises and turmoil of the past decade. The liberal consensus was first challenged as early as the mid-2000s. In Eastern Europe, grievances were directed against the prevailing narratives of transition and ever sharper ethnic-racial antipathies surfaced in opposition to a supposedly …
From Collaboration to Cooperation
This article provides an overview of German research on the Holocaust in Hungary.Its first part sketches four larger contexts of the professional study of the Holocaust in Germany to show why, though it was one of the major chapters of the genocide against European Jews, the Holocaust in Hungary has not emerged as a preoccupation among German historians.The second and longer part examines the premises, conclusions, and reception of the three most…
The Tragedy of Central European University
The splendid new campus in downtown Budapest will in all likelihood feel eerily quiet in the coming years—a forcibly abandoned cathedral that was devoted to our precarious belief in an open and argumentative future
Raul Hilberg und die Holocaust-HistoriographieRené Schlott
Raul Hilberg und die Holocaust-HistoriographieRené Schlott René Schlott(ed.), Raul Hilberg und die Holocaust-Historiographie (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein, 2019), 288 pp., paperback €20.00, electronic version available. Ferenc Laczó Ferenc Laczó Maastricht University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 34, Issue 3, Winter 2020, Pages 508–510, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/…
A Mortuary of Books
A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the HolocaustElisabeth Gallas Elisabeth Gallas, A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 416 pp., hardcover $35.00, electronic version available. Ferenc Laczó Ferenc Laczó Maastricht University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 34, Issue 2, F…
New Versailles or a Velvet Revolution? Brexit and the Exits of Central and Eastern European History, 1916–2016
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Beyond Helpless Victims and Survivor Trauma
This review essay explores recent scholarship on the history of Jews in the post-Habsburg territories, before and after the Second World War. The impressive wave of scholarship that has emerged in recent decades on European Jewish history shortly before, during and, increasingly, after the Holocaust, has only made historians more aware of how much they have left to do to reconstruct, at least in text, the lives of European Jews – a multilingual a…
Catastrophe and Utopia
Catastrophe and Utopia studies the biographical trajectories, intellectual agendas, and major accomplishments of select Jewish intellectuals during the age of Nazism, and the partly simultaneous, partly subsequent period of incipient Stalinization. By focusing on the relatively underexplored region of Central and Eastern Europe – which was the primary centre of Jewish life prior to the Holocaust, served as the main setting of the Nazi genocide, b…
Memories of 1989 in Europe between Hope, Dismay, and Neglect
This article is part of the special section titled The Genealogies of Memory, guest edited by Ferenc Laczó and Joanna Wawrzyniak This introduction to the special section on memories of 1989 calls for a closer analysis of various ways in which narratives of the democratic breakthrough in East Central Europe develop at the transnational, national, and vernacular levels. The four case studies in this section show that the liberal view of 1989 has be…
Black Earth
Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide
Hungarian Jews, the last major Jewish community in the Nazi sphere of influence by 1944, constituted the single largest group of victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide Ferenc Laczó draws on hundreds of scholarly articles, historical monographs, witness accounts as well as published memoirs to offer a pioneering exploration of how this prolific Jewish community responded to its exceptional drama and unprecedented t…
Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain. Routledge Studies in Cultural History 27. London
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Integrating victims, externalising guilt? commemorating the Holocaust in Hungary
Since its rightward political shift, questions concerning how Hungarian society has reflected on the role the country played during the Second World War and how it has confronted its co-responsibility for the Holocaust in particular have been raised with new urgency. After introducing some of the central divisive issues in the interpretation and commemoration of the Holocaust in Hungary, the author analyses current trends based on a case study of…
A world without Jews
In A World without Jews, Alon Confino explores the emergence, solidification, and functioning of the Nazi redemptive imagination; the gradual making of a culture in which a Germany, and later a wor
The foundational dilemmas of Jenő Lévai
This article studies the beginnings of Holocaust historiography (avant la lettre) in Hungary during the second half of the 1940s by focusing on the oeuvre of Jenő Lévai, a crucial pioneer of the field. The article provides brief overviews of the contents of Lévai's major works, analyzing his stances on key interpretative questions as well as his use of sources. It argues that Lévai's impressive series of journalistic-scholarly works from the imme…
Twenty Years After Communism. The Politics of Memory and Commemoration
Twenty Years After Communism. The Politics of Memory and Commemoration." Europe-Asia Studies, 67(8), pp. 1331–1332
Jewish Questions and the Contested Nation
In the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Hungary was a multidenominational society without a clear ethnic majority that had one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. The Kingdom was a constituent part of the Habsburg Empire with significant levels of autonomy that emerged as a nationalizing state upon the Compromise of 1867. How did the public contest over the legal standing and societal role of the Jews develop in such a special environm…
From "Liberal Minimum" to the "Complete Catalog of Human Rights
This article analyzes how five leading Hungarian postdissident liberal thinkers conceptually constructed their view of liberalism in the early years of postcommunism. Studying Beszélő, the most signi cant liberal journal during the early years of representative democracy, it shows how they did so through references to political “threats” and the idea of a “liberal minimum” (János Kis), local liberal and democratic traditions and “progressive patr…
Between Transnational Embeddedness and Relative Isolation
Memories of 1989 in Europe between Hope, Dismay, and Neglect
This article is part of the special section titled The Genealogies of Memory, guest edited by Ferenc Laczó and Joanna Wawrzyniak This introduction to the special section on memories of 1989 calls for a closer analysis of various ways in which narratives of the democratic breakthrough in East Central Europe develop at the transnational, national, and vernacular levels. The four case studies in this section show that the liberal view of 1989 has be…
Between Transnational Embeddedness and Relative Isolation
Twenty Years After Communism. The Politics of Memory and Commemoration
Twenty Years After Communism. The Politics of Memory and Commemoration." Europe-Asia Studies, 67(8), pp. 1331–1332
Mapping the Landscape of Hungarian Urban Historiography
This review essay discusses four recent urban historical publications that all relate to Hungarian history and scholarship. The first two works are studies of Budapest by individual authors, namely Gábor Gyáni and Robert Nemes, and are now available in English. The second two are Hungarian-language volumes of conference proceedings that consciously aim to cross disciplinary and national borders, specifically the Slovak-Hungarian one. Taking diffe…
A Brief History of the Masses
Jews and Other Germans
German City, Jewish Memory
Between Transnational Embeddedness and Relative Isolation
From "Liberal Minimum" to the "Complete Catalog of Human Rights
This article analyzes how five leading Hungarian postdissident liberal thinkers conceptually constructed their view of liberalism in the early years of postcommunism. Studying Beszélő, the most signi cant liberal journal during the early years of representative democracy, it shows how they did so through references to political “threats” and the idea of a “liberal minimum” (János Kis), local liberal and democratic traditions and “progressive patr…
Jewish Questions and the Contested Nation
In the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Hungary was a multidenominational society without a clear ethnic majority that had one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. The Kingdom was a constituent part of the Habsburg Empire with significant levels of autonomy that emerged as a nationalizing state upon the Compromise of 1867. How did the public contest over the legal standing and societal role of the Jews develop in such a special environm…
A world without Jews
In A World without Jews, Alon Confino explores the emergence, solidification, and functioning of the Nazi redemptive imagination; the gradual making of a culture in which a Germany, and later a wor
The foundational dilemmas of Jenő Lévai
This article studies the beginnings of Holocaust historiography (avant la lettre) in Hungary during the second half of the 1940s by focusing on the oeuvre of Jenő Lévai, a crucial pioneer of the field. The article provides brief overviews of the contents of Lévai's major works, analyzing his stances on key interpretative questions as well as his use of sources. It argues that Lévai's impressive series of journalistic-scholarly works from the imme…
Twenty Years After Communism. The Politics of Memory and Commemoration
Twenty Years After Communism. The Politics of Memory and Commemoration." Europe-Asia Studies, 67(8), pp. 1331–1332
Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide
Hungarian Jews, the last major Jewish community in the Nazi sphere of influence by 1944, constituted the single largest group of victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide Ferenc Laczó draws on hundreds of scholarly articles, historical monographs, witness accounts as well as published memoirs to offer a pioneering exploration of how this prolific Jewish community responded to its exceptional drama and unprecedented t…
Andy Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain. Routledge Studies in Cultural History 27. London
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Integrating victims, externalising guilt? commemorating the Holocaust in Hungary
Since its rightward political shift, questions concerning how Hungarian society has reflected on the role the country played during the Second World War and how it has confronted its co-responsibility for the Holocaust in particular have been raised with new urgency. After introducing some of the central divisive issues in the interpretation and commemoration of the Holocaust in Hungary, the author analyses current trends based on a case study of…
Catastrophe and Utopia
Catastrophe and Utopia studies the biographical trajectories, intellectual agendas, and major accomplishments of select Jewish intellectuals during the age of Nazism, and the partly simultaneous, partly subsequent period of incipient Stalinization. By focusing on the relatively underexplored region of Central and Eastern Europe – which was the primary centre of Jewish life prior to the Holocaust, served as the main setting of the Nazi genocide, b…
Memories of 1989 in Europe between Hope, Dismay, and Neglect
This article is part of the special section titled The Genealogies of Memory, guest edited by Ferenc Laczó and Joanna Wawrzyniak This introduction to the special section on memories of 1989 calls for a closer analysis of various ways in which narratives of the democratic breakthrough in East Central Europe develop at the transnational, national, and vernacular levels. The four case studies in this section show that the liberal view of 1989 has be…
Black Earth
Beyond Helpless Victims and Survivor Trauma
This review essay explores recent scholarship on the history of Jews in the post-Habsburg territories, before and after the Second World War. The impressive wave of scholarship that has emerged in recent decades on European Jewish history shortly before, during and, increasingly, after the Holocaust, has only made historians more aware of how much they have left to do to reconstruct, at least in text, the lives of European Jews – a multilingual a…
New Versailles or a Velvet Revolution? Brexit and the Exits of Central and Eastern European History, 1916–2016
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The Legacy of Division
This volume examines the legacy of the East–West divide since the implosion of the communist regimes in Europe. The ideals of 1989 have largely been frustrated by the crises and turmoil of the past decade. The liberal consensus was first challenged as early as the mid-2000s. In Eastern Europe, grievances were directed against the prevailing narratives of transition and ever sharper ethnic-racial antipathies surfaced in opposition to a supposedly …
From Collaboration to Cooperation
This article provides an overview of German research on the Holocaust in Hungary.Its first part sketches four larger contexts of the professional study of the Holocaust in Germany to show why, though it was one of the major chapters of the genocide against European Jews, the Holocaust in Hungary has not emerged as a preoccupation among German historians.The second and longer part examines the premises, conclusions, and reception of the three most…
The Tragedy of Central European University
The splendid new campus in downtown Budapest will in all likelihood feel eerily quiet in the coming years—a forcibly abandoned cathedral that was devoted to our precarious belief in an open and argumentative future
Raul Hilberg und die Holocaust-HistoriographieRené Schlott
Raul Hilberg und die Holocaust-HistoriographieRené Schlott René Schlott(ed.), Raul Hilberg und die Holocaust-Historiographie (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein, 2019), 288 pp., paperback €20.00, electronic version available. Ferenc Laczó Ferenc Laczó Maastricht University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 34, Issue 3, Winter 2020, Pages 508–510, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/…
A Mortuary of Books
A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the HolocaustElisabeth Gallas Elisabeth Gallas, A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 416 pp., hardcover $35.00, electronic version available. Ferenc Laczó Ferenc Laczó Maastricht University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 34, Issue 2, F…
Creeping Right-Wing Hegemony and Its Contestations
Approaching the case study of Hungary as one in historical revisionism, this article focuses on new museums, revamped public squares, and popular historical walks which either reinforce or contest the contemporary project of right-wing hegemony. The author compares two major historical museums which both aim to address the recent past and opened in the early years of the twenty-first century; zooms in on two post-2010 initiatives to reshape major…
The History of Ideas
Political science (21 works) · History (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics (10 works) · History (10 works) · Archaeology (9 works)