The Invisible Anikó Szenes

Abstract: This article discusses the circles of forgetting of the memory of Anikó (Hannah) Szenes (1921–1944) in Hungary, from the end of World War II through the illiberal turn in memory politics that began in the 2010s. This process of forgetting resulted in a canonized history of her life, highlighting different elements of her story in different periods while omitting other parts and condemning her to oblivion in postwar Hungary, her native land, where she spent 19 of her 23 years. These different memory circles are bound up with much-debated elements of twentieth-century Hungarian, European and Israeli history that intersect precisely in the narration of Szenes's tragically short life story. As a leftist, a Jew, a woman, a left-wing Zionist and a writer, Szenes was too much and too complex to digest for the traumatized postwar history of Hungarian Jewry, which rests on silencing and forgetting. I first present the methodological problems of gendered memory and then map the intersecting circles of forgetting of Szenes's life. I conclude by analyzing the memorial events in Hungary around the 100th anniversary of Szenes's birth in 2021 as an example of illiberal memory politics.