In our research, we examined the discursive framing of Trianon and the Holocaust in today’s Hungarian online media. Our corpus contained 26,519 articles connected to these two historical events published between September 2017 and September 2020. We used a mixed-method approach by combining computational text analysis, namely, LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) topic models and qualitative methods. Our aim was not only to map the latent thematic structure and the discourses about Trianon and the Holocaust but also to identify the main differences in the rhetoric of the different sides of the political spectrum. Using Bull and Hansen’s categories, we found that the far-right and government media use the antagonistic, while the left-liberal media use the cosmopolitan mode of remembering. We identified many discursive differences between the rhetoric of the different political sides. Yet, the different relationship to emotions has the most far-reaching consequences. On the one hand, in antagonistic remembering, thus in the far-right and progovernment media, emotions play an essential role. On the other hand, cosmopolitan remembering, thus the rhetoric featured in the nongovernment media, detaches itself from emotions. This difference contributes significantly to the success of antagonistic remembering in Hungary. At the same time, the left-liberal side loses the opportunity to shape memory and identity politics.

After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the sanctioning of new national borders in 1920, the successor states faced the controversial task of reconceptualizing the idea of national territory. Images of historically significant landscapes played a crucial role in this process. Employing the concept of mental maps, this article explores how such images shaped the connections between place, memory, and landscape in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Hungarian revisionist publications demonstrate how Hungarian nationalists visualized the organic integrity of “Greater Hungary,” while also implicitly adapting historical memory to the new geopolitical situation. As a counterpoint, images of the Váh region produced in interwar Czechoslovakia reveal how an opposing political agenda gave rise to a different imagery, while drawing on shared cultural traditions from the imperial past. Finally, the case study of Dévény/Devín/Theben shows how the idea of being positioned “between East and West” lived on in overlapping but politically opposed mental maps in the interwar period. By examining the cracks and continuities in the picturesque landscape tradition after 1918, the article offers new insight into the similarities and differences of nation-building processes from the perspective of visual culture.