Memories of Camps, Memoirs of War: Personal Experience, Historical Trauma, and Literary Expression in Post-War Hungarian Literature

Abstract

This essay focuses on the testimonial works of two Hungarian writers, Ernő Szép (1884-1953) and Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944). The two Jewish descent authors suffered grievously during the last months of World War II, and they rendered their persecution in different literary genres. The poet Miklós Radnóti kept a diary during his first two mobilizations of forced labor, and during the third, fatal one, he wrote some of his most famous poems found in a mass grave in 1946. Ernő Szép, novelist and playwright of the inter-war period, tells the story of his forced labor in a memoir written and published in 1945. Following some theoretical remarks on aesthetic and moral questions associated with attempts to represent traumatic historic events, the paper analyzes the above-mentioned works with a twofold aim. It shows how the irruption of history influences the two authors’ artistic aims, and vice versa, how their former writing production determines their attempt to grasp their historical reality.