Nadkarni, M.: Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary

Abstract

I argue for conceptualizing remains as produced by a modern historical optics that anxiously scans the present for threatening signs of an unwanted past and thus undesired future. ... The battles to define what constitutes a remain of socialism, and how best to banish or master it, thus represent an active, contested, and shifting process through which people in Hungary— from politicians and activists to artists and entrepreneurs—struggled both to distance the recent past and to express fantasies and fears about the future yet to come (5).