Mária Schmidt (historian)

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Mária Schmidt

Mária Schmidt (born October 10, 1953 ) is a Hungarian historian, museum director and university lecturer. She is considered a confidante of Prime Minister Viktor Orban .

life and work

She graduated from Eötvös Loránd University as a teacher of history and German. She then did her doctorate in 1985 and in 1999 she also received her Ph.D. from. Since 1996 she has worked as a professor at the Catholic Peter Pázmány University , her habilitation followed in 2005. In 2010 she became a full professor. Schmidt taught as a guest at the Universities of Vienna and Innsbruck, Oxford, Paris, the Technical University of Berlin , Tel-Aviv , also at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Authority in Jerusalem, and at the Universities of New York and Bloomington and at the Hoover Institute in Stanford . It was 1989, the first fellow of the Open Society Foundation of George Soros .

She was chief advisor to the Hungarian Prime Minister Orban from 1998 to 2002. Since 2002 she has been on the board of the Ettersberg Foundation . In 2016 she held the post of government commissioner for the commemorative year of the 1956 revolution . She is General Director of the 20th Century Institute and the 21st Century Institute, as well as the House of Terror in Budapest, dedicated to dictatorships in the 20th century.

She researches the history of Hungarian Jews after 1918 and the history of Hungary under dictatorships in the 20th century. "In Hungary nobody doubts that these totalitarian regimes are comparable, we have the living experience of both dictatorships and we know what we are talking about."

She was married to the Hungarian billionaire András Ungár († 2006), with whom she has two children.

Positions

The Hungarian historian Laszlo Karsai called Schmidt a Holocaust revisionist because she ignored the anti-Semitic measures of the Horthy regime before the German occupation in 1944 and did not give the Hungarian part any space in her museum concepts. Thereupon he received no more influence on the planned Budapest Holocaust Museum (the future House of Fates ). The museum has not yet opened until 2019.

With Sándor Szakály from the Veritas Historical Research Institute , Schmidt represents a historical revisionism of Hungary's 1944 attitude towards the German occupiers. After that, the Germans were solely responsible for the anti-Semitic measures. Schmidt linked this politically in 2017 with attacks on the current refugee policy of the Federal Republic: "The Germans have already decided who we are not allowed to live with, and now they want to decide who we have to live with."

Fonts

  • A minority who always felt part of the majority. The Fate of the Jews in Hungary (1867–1987) . In: Österreichische Osthefte, journal for research on Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, 33rd volume, issue 2, Vienna, 1991.
  • Hungary twelve years after 1918, after 1945 and after 1989 . In: After the dictatorship. Democratic upheavals in Europe - twelve years later . Ettersberg Foundation, Böhlau Verlag, Weimar 2003. pp. 89–99.
  • The Budapest Museum "House of Terror". Museum of modern contemporary history and living memorial. In: Communism in the Museum, Forms of Confrontation in Germany and East Central Europe . Edited by Volkhard Knigge and Ulrich Mählert , on behalf of the Ettersberg Foundation and the Foundation to Process the SED dictatorship Böhlau, Cologne, Weimar, 2005, pp. 161–171, pp
  • Communism in the German culture of remembrance. Comment from a Hungarian point of view. In: Remember what? Communism in the German culture of remembrance. Böhlau Verlag Cologne Weimar Vienna, 2006. pp. 201–204.
  • Communism, a crime without consequences? (Communism: crime without consequences?) In: Renato Cristin: Memento Gulag - In memory of the victims of totalitarian regimes . Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 2006. pp. 91-97.
  • "Now they will do everything as they did with the Russians!" The expansion of communism in Hungary. In: The New Beginning in Europe 1945–1949 - Determinants and Spaces, Munich, Bavarian State Center for Political Education, 2010. pp. 119–128.
  • Hungarian past and present. The problematic relics of the communist dictatorship in Hungary continue to this day. In .: The political opinion , Ways out of the dictatorship - European perspectives , pp. 25-30. Konrad Adenauer Foundation , 01–02 / 2011.
  • On the way to a European memory? A Hungarian view of the planned House of European History. In: Volkhard Knigge / Hans-Joachim Veen / Ulrich Mählert / Franz-Josef Schlichting (eds.): Work on European Memory , Writings of the Ettersberg Foundation, Volume 16, Boehlau: Koeln / Weimar / Vienna 2011, pp. 165–167.
  • Monument landscape - symbolic forms of expression of political will in Hungary. In: Monuments of Democratic Changes after 1945 . Cologne - Weimar - Vienna, Böhlau Verlag, 2014, pp. 131–144.

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ^ The Institute of the Twentieth Century. Retrieved October 15, 2019 .
  2. ↑ XXI. Század Intézet. Retrieved October 15, 2019 (hu-HU).
  3. ↑ Johanna Kissis: Hungary's House of Fates is not opened yet. NPR, February 8, 2019, accessed October 15, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Sandor Szakaly: Portrait of a historian
  5. Jump up ↑ history in Hungary. taz, December 6, 2017, accessed October 15, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Schmidt, Mária
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1953