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The focus of all kinds of manipulation, instrumentalised by the government, parties and the media,“ it is memory that alienates and history that liberates”.
This controversy over the words and the realities they denote, here too briefly recreated, is significant. In fact, the authors both argue for history as knowledge of the past and acknowledge continuities between history and memory. However, when Yuri Afanasiev underlines what Paul Ricœur would later call the“ memory’ s truth-seeking goal”, Pierre Nora holds onto this for the role of history as a critique of memory, bearer of illusions, myths, errors and falsifications. This debate reveals that the binary opposition between history and memory does little to enlighten us. Memory can be both instrumentalisation of the past and resistance to such instrumentalisation; it can be both a political resource( among others or failing others) and a shared memory of a lived experience. As for the
3 | 4. House of Terror at Andrássy út 60 in Budapest, Hungary. It contains exhibits related to the fascist and communist regimes in 20th-century Hungary and is also a memorial to the victims of these regimes, including those detained, interrogated, tortured or killed in the building | EUROM
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