A Nation Divided by History and Memory: Hungary in the Twentieth Century and Beyond [1 ed.] 0367457199, 9780367457198

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A Nation Divided by History and Memory

During the last few decades there has been a growing recognition of the great role that remembering and collective memory play in forming the historical awareness. In addition, the dominant national form of history writing also met some challenges on the side of a transnational approach to the past. In A Nation Divided by History and Memory, a prominent Hungarian historian sheds light on how Hungary’s historical image has become split as a consequence of the differences between the historian’s conceptualisation of national history and its diverse representations in personal and collective memory. The book focuses on the shocking experiences and the intense memorial reactions generated by a few key historical events and the way in which they have been interpreted by the historical scholarship. The argument of A Nation Divided by History and Memory is placed into the context of an international historical discourse. This pioneering work is essential and enlightening reading for all historians, many sociologists, political scientists, social psychologists and university students. Gábor Gyáni is Research Professor at the Institute of History Research Center for Humanities, and Professor at Roland Eötvös University Budapest. His numerous English language books include Parlor and Kitchen: Housing and Domestic Culture in Budapest, 1870–1940 (2002), Identity and the Urban Experience: Finde-Siécle Budapest (2004), Social History of Hungary from the Reform Era to the End of the Twentieth Century (co-authored with György Kövér, Tibor Valuch) (2004).

Routledge Histories of Central and Eastern Europe

Hungary since 1945 Árpád von Klimó, translated by Kevin McAleer Romania under Communism Denis Deletant Bulgaria under Communism Ivaylo Znepolski, Mihail Gruev, Momtchil Metodiev, Martin Ivanov, Daniel Vatchkov, Ivan Elenkov, Plamen Doynow From Revolution to Uncertainty The Year 1990 in Central and Eastern Europe Edited by Joachim von Puttkamer, Włodzimierz Borodziej, Stanislav Holubec Identities In-Between in East-Central Europe Edited by Jan Fellerer, Robert Pyrah, Marius Turda Communism, Science and the University Towards a Theory of Detotalitarianisation Edited by Ivaylo Znepolski A Nation Divided by History and Memory Hungary in the Twentieth Century and Beyond Gábor Gyáni www.routledge.com/Routledge-Histories-of-Central-and-Eastern-Europe/ book-series/CEE

A Nation Divided by History and Memory Hungary in the Twentieth Century and Beyond Gábor Gyáni

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Gábor Gyáni The right of Gábor Gyáni to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gyáni, Gábor, author. Title: A nation divided by history and memory : Hungary in the twentieth century and beyond / Gábor Gyáni. Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge histories of Central and Eastern Europe | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020010800 (print) | LCCN 2020010801 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367457198 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003024934 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Hungary—History—20th century | Hungary—History— 20th century—Historiography. | Collective memory—Hungary— History—20th century. | Memorials—Hungary—History—20th century. Classification: LCC DB947 .G89 2020 (print) | LCC DB947 (ebook) | DDC 943.905—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010800 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010801 ISBN: 978-0-367-45719-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02493-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Prefacevi Acknowledgementsxi

Introduction: Two kinds of history

1

PART I

The past as experience and memory17 1 The experience and remembrance of World War I

19

2 Image and reality of a divided country

39

3 Collective memory as a political instrument

56

4 Jewish experience and the memory of the Holocaust

67

5 Memory and discourse on the 1956 revolution

88

PART II

History as constructed by historians99 6 Culture, nationalism and history

101

7 Cultic and ironic visions of Hungary

115

8 Revolution, uprising, civil war

137

9 Conclusion

155

Bibliography160 Index179

Preface

The book focuses on the creation of Hungary’s historical image, which has become split as a result of the many differences between the historian’s notion of a national history and its many diverse representations in collective memory. The two kinds of history have further been divided within their own confines due to the permanent and changing political struggles and tensions, at least since Hungary became a modern nation-state in the second half of the 19th century. The aim of the present work is to present both of them by discussing a few key historical events and processes of modern-age Hungary as they have been experienced, memorialised and/or narrated by academic history writing. Describing and analysing the parallel and even contrasting understandings of history may even explain Hungary’s present-day political divisions and distinct mentality. Personal remembering and collective (or social memory) have for many years been an acute issue for scholarly discourse. This derives from a new and refashioned need for both individual and group identity, caused in part by the growing erosion of the old, well-established national identity. This development also concerns historical scholarship, which has often been engaged in creating and sustaining the sense of identity as a national one. The process of globalisation underneath all this urges countries, including post-communist ones, to “return to history,” to the true history of the nation as a defensive reaction. This endeavour is further strengthened by the firm belief that lengthy Communist rule suspended, reshaped and even deformed the authentic image of a truly national past, as had been narrated by a historical scholarship informed by the national paradigm. In revealing the intricate relationship between historical scholarship and collective memory, we may identify some of their basic differences, and even some of their common elements. The book thus aims at demonstrating the varied ways of how academic history writing and multifarious personal and collective memory tends to understand history in its own way. By describing and analysing a few decisive turning points, outstanding events of modern-age Hungarian history, we are concerned with seeking and finding the meanings ascribed to them either by contemporaries or posterity, in the form of both collective memory and history writing. The various images of history generated in this way could as much unite as divide the Hungarian national community in its own sense of belonging together. The success and the frequent failure of creating and sustaining the notion

Preface vii of a unified modern Hungarian nation always depended upon the fundamentally split character of both historical scholarship and social memory. The kind of approach pursued in this work is by and large lacking in the available historical discourse in Hungary. The recapitulation and analysis of the narratives produced in the various discursive registers is placed into the context of an international scholarly discourse. This makes it possible for us to connect the particular Hungarian phenomenon to a transnational pattern of development. In the course of reconstructing the historical vision, provided either by history writing or collective memory, one also has to take into account the unambiguously great influence that official and politically motivated memory politics exerts on historical consciousness. The repeated interventions of politics in the life of scholarship occurring frequently (and again) in today’s Hungary seriously threaten the intellectual autonomy of academic history writing. The Introduction traces the changing relationship between professional history writing and the memorial work of the various collectivities, the national one included, as has been formed since the emergence of an academic historical scholarship. The tenet according to which any professional historian is able and even destined to give the true description and explanation of “what really happened in the past” now needs to be revised. The reason is that the challenge both of postmodernism and the current waves of a sub- and transnational historical approach to the past have made this old postulate obsolete. The distinction made by 19thcentury historism between history writing and collective memory on the grounds of their own epistemology, one also adopted by Maurice Halbwachs, who elaborated the scholarly notion of collective memory, has now been harshly criticised by many. The scholarly insights into the problem of memory and memorialising, provided by Y. H. Yerushalmi, Pierre Nora, Patrick Hutton, Jan Assmann or Paul Ricouer – just to mention some of the important theoreticians and historians in the field – questions the near-monopoly position held by historians over the memory of the past. The claim that historians are able to integrate the great number of past narratives (the wide range and the sometimes contrasting historical experiences) in their scholarly works has lost much of its previous plausibility, as it turned out that what “memory” expresses and confirms also belongs to history. Accordingly, the authenticity and validity of memory may justify the increasing claim that “everyone is his or her own historian.” This endeavour is further strengthened by the need to “tell the truth” about the basically unmasterable past represented by a traumatic historical experience caused either by the Holocaust, the Communist dictatorship or some other genocides committed in the not too distant past. One may even add that the paradigm assuming that the nation as such is a fundamentally constructed historical entity also favours the adoption of a reflective cognitive attitude to history. Despite all this, the demand for remembering the past in the right way and not taking very seriously the contingencies that collective memory usually suggests still exists in our own age. Amidst such circumstances the debate continues necessarily and uninterruptedly about how to fix the balance

viii  Preface between the two possible kinds of historical consciousness. The problem of collective memory and its (wished or real) relationship to academic history writing is now among the most relevant issues to be debated. The extent of the scholarly works, studies and monographs dealing with the matter seems to be enormous. The subject has also gained a prominent place in the university curriculum. Thus the book may generate very wide interest, not only in the scholarly community but also in universities. Since the theme of historical and collective memory is extensively researched within the framework of more than one discipline, the kind of the memory historical study represented by this book has some interest for historians, sociologists, political scientists and social psychologists. The book may also be easily integrated into the curriculum of university teaching. In addition, East and Central Europe is a relatively neglected research field, as few studies and much fewer monographic works have been published so far on the theme. No overall study produced by an East and Central European scholar has been available until recently. The book is aimed at graduate and postgraduate students who attend courses held on memory studies and modern European history. As the work is a research monograph, in all probability it will be bought by academic and university libraries. The consciously analytical and comparative way of approaching the issue may also make the book attractive for a broader group of scholars. The main competing books are, with a few exceptions, not monographs but rather collections of essays in which the wide East and Central or the entire European area is discussed through a series of case studies. A monograph in the field has not yet been published in English on East and Central Europe. The works that may be compared to our undertaking are those written by Jeffrey K. Olick, Mary Fulbrook or Aleida Assmann on (East and West) Germany, or the book authored by David Foot on Italy, and the many further works written on Austria (Heidemarie Uhl), France (Pierre Nora et al.), Great Britain (Raphael Samuel), the United States (John R. Gillis, John Bodnar, William M. Johnston), etc. The focus of the chapters in Part One is on the very diverse historical experiences gained by both the historical agents and the many forms of remembering (and recollection) in relation to these personal and collective past experiences. Our aim has been to define the nature and the precise role of all of them in shaping and even determining the actual historical processes. One possible way of approaching (and describing) these entities may involve examining a number of extreme historical situations, which regularly provoke manifest mental and emotional reactions and – not least – produce an abundant corpus of historical evidence. Therefore we are concerned especially with the shocking experiences and the intense memorial work generated by them, such as the Great War, or the acute and sharp social inequalities characterising interwar Hungary. We also study the national(ist) reactions to the drastic change of Hungary’s state borders following World War I, or the special Hungarian Holocaust experience and its (latent) memory, as well as, by no means least, the truly tragic historical experience of the suppression of the 1956 Revolution. Some of the historical experiences generated

Preface ix by these decisive historical events were regularly followed by a vivid remembering and memory work, which, however, had a crucial role in shaping the course of later history. Some other historical experiences, or their memory, however, were suppressed for a long time, mainly for political reasons. The amnesia created and maintained in this way had a definite function in political legitimation. The place that both historical scholarship and collective memory held in the two contradictory processes was not to be mutually reconcilable. Part Two comprises chapters in which the close relationship between the nationalist political discourse and the human sciences is discussed by putting the whole issue into the context of cultural nationalism – how historical scholarship could fulfil the unambiguous ideological function imposed on it within the nationstate building process while also trying to retain its proclaimed disciplinary character. One can reveal here some Hungarian specificities in a comparison with the general (European) pattern. The vision of history constructed by historians on a scholarly basis was as much an articulation of the split of political and ideological realm (deriving from the antagonism between the independence and the imperial political orientation) as it was the expression of a clearly rational (objective) recognition. The case may also be evidenced by citing the example of how the official and the social memory (and the historical evaluation) of the 1956 Revolution has led to deep dissension in Hungary since at least the suppression of the revolution. This derives in part from the very diverse historical experiences gained during the days of the revolution, and can be related to the lack of uninterrupted memorial work in terms of the revolution. In addition, the memory and identity politics pursued by the succeeding Fidesz governments (1998–2012, and since 2010 continuously) has done its best to use, or more precisely misuse, the memory of the revolution for its own political purposes. The kind of instrumentalisation of history represented by the example of the 1956 Revolution has always been an integral element of the historical policy (and the historicised political discourse) practiced in Hungary since at least the 1989 political changes. The scholarly issue on the agenda, however, is rather the following: what sort of an event actually was the Hungarian revolution? Was it simply a revolution in the modern sense of the word, or rather a civil war, or only an attempt to change the sociopolitical relations in the sense of “revolutio.” The last-mentioned term refers to a consciously devised and definitive return to a point of departure by regaining some of the formerly lost social and political liberties. In the Conclusion I summarise briefly the main statements of the book relating to the changing relationship between collective memory and history writing in terms of the chosen fundamental historical issues and turning points. I call attention to their permanent and deep effect on how history was and has always been shaped by the most various historical agents. Hungary is only one among the Central and East European countries whose history was extremely put to decisions and steps taken by outer forces, especially those of the neighbouring empires. All these might easily result in creating a wide-scale belief that the country is wholly defenceless against their overwhelming power. The conspicuous lack of any selfconfidence to act in an autonomous way, however, was sometimes interrupted

x  Preface by several sudden and vehement mass actions, revolutions per se, the memory of which was also to nourish both the public resignation and the tragic historical consciousness just because these upheavals were regularly defeated. This has also been a peculiar feature of the so-called national character as it has usually and repeatedly been constructed with the explicit aim of defining the self-image and the national identity of the Hungarian people.

Acknowledgements

Various parts of the book have been previously published albeit in a different form. The original titles and places of publication are as follows: “Changing Relationship between Collective Memory and History Writing,” Colloquia, Journal of Central European History, XIX (2012) 128–144 [Introduction: Two Kinds of History]; “Az első világháború emlékezete,” in Az első világháború következményei Magyarországon, edited by Béla Tomka (Budapest: Országgyűlés Hivatala, 2015) (we would like to thank the Office of the Hungarian National Assembly Directorate of Cultural Affairs for making possible the re-publishing of the material) 311–332 [chapter 1]; “Image and Reality of a Splitting Country,” in Mastery and Lost Illusions. Space and Time in the Modernization of Eastern and Central Europe, edited by Włodzimierz Borodziej  – Stanislav Holubec – Joachim von Puttkamer (München: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014. Copyright 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH Berlin/Boston) 53–70 [chapter 2]; “The Memory of Trianon as a Political Instrument in Hungary Today,” in The Convolutions of Historical Politics, edited by Alexei Miller – Maria Lipman (Budapest – New York: Central European University Press, 2012) (Central European University Limited Liability Company) 91–115 [chapter 3]; “Image versus Identity: Assimilation and Discrimination of Hungary’s Jewry,” Hungarian Studies, 18, 2 (2004) (Akadémiai Kiadó Zrt.) 153–162 [chapter 4]; “Hungarian Memory of the Holocaust in Hungary,” in The Holocaust in Hungary. Seventy Years Later, edited by Randolph L. Braham – András Kovács (Budapest – New York: Central European University Press, 2016) (Central European University Limited Liability Company) 215–230 [chapter 4]; “Memory and Discourse on the 1956 Revolution,” in Challenging Communism in Eastern Europe: 1956 and its Legacy, edited by Terry Cox (London and New York: Routledge, 2008) 11–20 [chapter 5]; “National Culture, Cultural Nationalism, and History,” in Cultural Nationalism in a Finnish-Hungarian Historical Context, edited by Gábor Gyáni – Anssi Halmesvirta (Budapest: MTA BTK TTI, 2018) (Research Centre for the Humanities) 11–26 [chapter 6]; “Cultic and Ironic Visions of Hungary’s History,” in Geschichtsbuch Mitteleuropa vom Fin de Siècle bis zur Gegenwart (Wien: new academic press, 2016) 229–256 [chapter 7]; “Trends in Contemporary Hungarian Historical Scholarship,” Social History 34, 2 (May 2009) 250–260 [chapter 7]; “Socio-Psychological Roots of Discontent:

xii  Acknowledgements Paradoxes of 1956,” Hungarian Studies, 20, 1 (2006) (Akadémiai Kiadó Zrt.) 65–73 [chapter 8]; “Revolution, Uprising, Civil War: the Conceptual Dilemmas of 1956,” European Review of History – Revue européenne d’histoire, 15, 2 (2008) 519–531 [chapter 8]. Reprinted here with permission. I thank the publishers for kindly allowing me to republish my essays.

Introduction Two kinds of history

Both personal remembering and collective or social memory have become today, and for many years now, an acute question for scholarly discourse.1 The reason for this development is in all probability a new and refashioned need for individual and group identity, flowing in part from the obvious erosion of the old and well-established community identity, the national one.2 As a result both the suband supranational identity constructions gained now a much larger territory as compared to the past. This change seems to be felt everywhere due to the parallel processes of globalisation and regionalisation. The recently emerging sub- and/or supranational community identities resulting therefore also need some historical support through the lively memory of a usable past to legitimate. This development has had its impact on historical scholarship, or at least the discipline of history, which has (as often) been engaged in creating and sustaining identity as national. True, however, that there is some difference between history (writing) and collective memory. Since, “History is the remembered past to which we no longer have an ‘organic’ relation – the past that is no longer an important part of our lives – whereas collective memory is the active past that forms our identities.”3 It is difficult, if not impossible, to decide whether the 19th century, the age of “true” historicism and nation-building, or much rather the present-day has been more surrendered to the enchantments of memory work to secure identity. Pierre Nora holds that the “tidal wave of memory” of our own days has much to do with the “dissolution of any teleology of history – the disappearance of a history whose end is known – that creates an urgent ‘duty to remember,’ a sense more mechanical and heritage-based than moral, and linked not to the idea of ‘debt’ but to ‘loss,’ a very different matter altogether.”4 It seems to be probable that the cult of memory as underpinning identity has always had a larger role in Europe than, for instance, amongst the Asian peoples and cultures.5 The growth of concern about identity, whether individual or group, gained prime importance in the age of “classical capitalism,” when the laissez faire, laissez passer market economy was established against the backdrop of modern European nation-state formation. This led to a much higher appreciation of the so-called heritage categories (legend, language, landscape and history, archaeology and architecture, art and antiquities), which all demanded and caused homogenisation of the codes. Heritage categories, so goes the argument, crowded

2  Introduction out alternative modes of constructing a sense of commitment to “memory work.” This also meant that the erosion of any viable alternative modes of constructing the sense of commitment to a community required a permanent memory work.6 This is the context within which the cult of historical memory and the overall practice of historicising were to provoke Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1870s in his protest against the overabundance of historical consciousness of his age. The extreme obsession with the past on the part of his contemporaries, Nietzsche warned, had reached a point that it was damaging human vitality. He thus insisted on having the right of forgetting instead of an uninterrupted remembering.7 Nietzsche spoke not for absolute oblivion, but only for reaching a healthy compromise or balance between remembering and forgetting. And although Nietzsche’s prophecy remains relevant, still, who can ever fix the optimal proportion between recollection and amnesia? In his analysis of the 1,000-years cult of Jewish memory, Y. H. Yerushalmi resolved this dilemma by recommending rather an “excessive” memory than any facile forgetting, since he found both personal recollection and collective memory (tradition) a vital need for life. At the same time he stressed the great role that the historian may or is expected to play in the struggle against the imminent danger of oblivion.8 Still, it is difficult, maybe impossible, to decide when and to what extent it is advisable to remember instead of forgetting and vice versa. Looking back from the present to the past, it is easier to decide what is worth remembering, how to use the evidence of memory in describing and interpreting our world. It is less clear at the time. One of the best ways of representing and re-enacting a past that has been made available by some form of collective memory is exemplary recalling, as the notion has been elaborated on by Tzvetan Todorov.9 The many difficulties arising from an uncritical use of memory have plainly been shown by the practice of public history,10 and, not least, the various manifestations of how the past is and has been made into a tool for state and political interests.11 How we might have a more critical concept of collective memory and what its interactions might be with “historical memory” or “historical scholarship” remains an unanswered question.

The changing and disputed relationship between memory and history The classic argument that Maurice Halbwachs advanced took as its starting point the distinction between personal (individual) and group recollection on the one hand and historical memory on the other. The dual characteristics of these two entities were assumed by the French sociologist and had increasingly become dogma by the end of the 20th century. The reason in part was that the distinction met the requirement of the historicist’s way of thinking. In stating that history begins only when tradition fades away, Halbwachs did no more than repeat the deep-rooted assumption held by the Prussian (German) historians who wholeheartedly committed themselves to historist convictions, according to which the historical past transmitted by tradition should urgently be replaced by a more rational way of

Introduction 3 recognition. In discussing the temporal pattern of collective memory, Halbwachs emphasised the sense of permanence as against the perpetual disjunctions produced by the historian’s gaze directed towards the evidence of change in the past. For a historian showing an exclusive interest to the chronological sequence of events, the image of the past as an uninterrupted flow of incidents just looks like myth.12 Thus the fundamental difference between collective memory and historical consciousness manifests itself mostly in their special relation to continuity and discontinuity. This was what the Prussian school of modern historical profession, the founders of historicism, had also stressed by arguing that the past is constituted by a great number of individual facts or incidents, which cannot, or even must not, be dissolved in any sort of generalisation. By particularising in this way the recognition of the past, they aimed at creating an objective image of history, one that is worth researching and narrating by trained historians. The latter are held to be convinced that by critically immersing themselves in (archival) sources and handling the past wholly apart from the present, interpreting it within its own context, professional historians will be able to reconstruct the past as history per se (Geschichte) (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, as Leopold von Ranke would have said). This, however, refers only to the history of the political realm of politics (which itself was identified with the notion of statehood). For it was the political realm that was held to properly represent the past and make available a metanarrative of Western social order and civilisation.13 This has led one recent scholar to claim, perhaps overstatedly, an inherent tension in the horizontal contextualism of such writing and the vertical drive toward temporal continuity and succession.14 Halbwachs went even further by stating that the distinctive feature of history, compared to collective memory, is that “history is unitary, and it can be said that there is one history.”15 Collective memory, on the contrary, is defined as a plural entity carrying many signs of a fragmented social existence. “What makes recent memories hang together is not that they are contiguous in time: it is rather that they are part of a totality of thoughts common to a group, the group of people with whom we have a relation at this moment. To recall them it is hence sufficient that we place ourselves in the perspective of this group, that we adopt its interests and follow the slant of its reflections.”16 Memory is thus embedded in diverse group formations (the family, church, estate, social class), giving it the social frameworks needed to its existence. Collective memory comes into existence only “if there is a sufficient unity of outlooks among the individuals and groups comprising it.”17 Now, the notion of collective memory thus distinct from one of history produced by historians was rapidly disseminated, even in the apparent absence of direct influence, such as happened with Walter Benjamin. Benjamin also shared the idea of the duality of community memory (tradition) as he called it, and the so-called social memory, which later he considered the primary agent of contemporary “memory work.”18 Yerushalmi was the first, who after a long time returned to the problem in his effort to describe the special form of Jewish memory. In his book dedicated to it, Yerushalmi has asserted that the surprisingly strong (hot) and permanent Jewish

4  Introduction memory, as successfully performing an identity creating and sustaining function over several centuries, was far from being a modern form of historical consciousness; it looked rather to be an unreflected tradition. His adherence in this case to the view arguing for the rigid distinction between memory and history was obvious. Whence came his insistence on the specific task of historians which he has defined not simply as trying to regain any past remembrances as they reveal them in researching and analysing the texts of the past. Their specific contribution to the construction of the image of the past is therefore more than an act of constituting a “mere” collective memory. What historians actually do is to fill in the spaces of the past left wholly or partly empty; in doing this they tend to question several claims of the live tradition referring to the past. In his effort to describe the unique and traditional Jewish memory, Yerushalmi took over the original Halbwachsian postulate of an unbridgeable gulf between the tradition-bound collective memory and the historical consciousness created on a rational basis. He, however, managed to prove that there could have been a strikingly vital memorialising even in the absence of a plainly secular-grounded historical awareness. The thesis has plausibly been justified by the example of the diaspora Jews of Europe, a people without statehood, held together only by the generally shared firm belief in their common ancestry and religion.19 Pierre Nora has now become an outstanding spokesman of an influential collective memory theory. Initially he also took for granted that memory and history differed from one another. “Memory and history, far from being synonymous, are thus in many respects opposed.” The argument is Halbwachsian. “Memory is life, always embodied in living societies and as such in permanent evolution, subject to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of the distortions to which it is subject. . . . History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is always a phenomenon of the present . . .; history is a representation of the past.”20 The logical conclusion drawn by the French historian is that, “[m]emory is an absolute, while history is always relative.”21 By arguing that the relationship between history (now here that word is being used in the sense of historical consciousness) and tradition shaped for long by the latter, started to be ruled in modern times by historical scholarship, Nora repeats the view held by Halbwachs. “From the chroniclers of the Middle Ages to modern historians of ‘total’ history, France’s entire historical tradition has developed as a disciplined exercise of the mnemonic faculty, an instinctive delving into memory in order to reconstruct the past seamlessly and in its entirety. On the contrary each of . . . [the] historians was convinced that his task was to correct his predecessors by making memory more factual, comprehensive, and useful as an explanation of the past. . . . The scientific arsenal with which history has equipped itself over the past century has done nothing but reinforce this view of history as a critical method whose purpose is to establish true memory. Every major revision of historical method has been intended to broaden the base of collective memory.”22 He continues that historical consciousness crops up as a result of the dissolution of some spontaneous memory, and, furthermore, that the identity that created and sustained “historical consciousness” came increasingly to be

Introduction 5 informed and enriched by professional historical scholarship (which he takes to be a newly emergent phenomenon). This, however, (necessarily, for his argument) led to a state of affairs in which history, memory and the nation started to enjoy an unusual intimate communion, “a symbolic complementarity at every level.” As history was on the road to become “a tradition of memory” transformed in this way into memory-history (Nora), the concept of memory-nation was soon closely linked to memory-history. “History was holy because the nation was holy.”23 With the process of the gradual demise (his argument confidently asserts) both of memory-nation and memory-history beginning in the 1930s at least in France, the concept of history became a kind of social self-understanding. “[t]he nation is no longer the unifying framework that defines the collective consciousness. . . . Once society had supplanted the nation, legitimation by the past, hence by history, gave way to legitimation by the future. . . . Thus the three terms – nation, history, memory – regained their autonomy; the nation ceased to be a cause and became a given; history became a social science; and memory became a purely private phenomenon. The memory-nation was thus the last incarnation of memory-history.”24 This development finally lead to the need of establishing and maintaining lieux de mémoire, places where one may easily find the traces of the past to remember it. “Places, lieux de mémoire become important even as the vast fund of memories among which we used to live on forms of intimacy has been depleted, only to be replaced by a reconstructed history.”25 Accordingly, any belief in the separateness of history and memory cannot be feasible as, “[w]hat we call memory today is . . . not memory, but already history.”26 The transformation demonstrated by Nora has, however, serious consequences in terms of the possible ways and the precise meaning of how to recollect and commemorate in today’s societies. There was, in the past, one national history with a lot of group memories around (under) it, but nowadays, “there is one national memory, but its unity stems from a divided patrimonial demand that is constantly expanding and in search of coherence.”27 Due to the “radical inversion of the ordinary meaning of the terms history and memory,” history comes to be verified by memory not vice versa as has been the case before. “What is today commonly called memory, in the sense in which people speak of working-class memory . . ., in fact marks the advent of historical consciousness of defunct traditions, the reconstitutive recovery of phenomena from which we are separated and which are most directly of interest to those who think of themselves as the descendants and heirs of such traditions. . . . The group’s memory is in fact its history.”28 The consequence is a fundamental instability of the scholarly based knowledge about the national realm of past: “the national memory is not a secure possession or closed inventory [anymore], but, as privare memories become shared memories, a force field whose configuration and structure are subject to continual change.”29 Not just Pierre Nora’s briefly recapitulated argument, but even a whole discourse arising in the 1980s points to the unambiguous intention of breaking away from the Halbwachsian heritage. Let’s now see some remarkable articulations of this new conceptual endeavour. Patrick Hutton, who dedicated an entire book in the 1990s to the issue,30 made an ambitious attempt of proving the supposedly

6  Introduction close tie between history-writing and memory embodied by tradition. In doing this Hutton paid great attention to the frequent alterations of the relationship between memory work and the historical-bound communicative technologies transmitting the material of memory from one generation to the other. As Hutton heavily relied on the idea advanced by Marshall McLuhan and especially by Walter J. Ong, he finally concluded that, “each stage in the history of changing modes of communication might be linked to a different historical perspective on memory: orality with the reiteration of living memory; manuscript literacy [of the European Renaissance] with the recovery of lost wisdom [of Antiquity]; print literacy with the reconstruction of a distinct past; and media literacy with the deconstruction of the forms with which images of the past are composed.”31 Hutton holds the view that memory is a mental construct successfully retaining its permanently central role in the history-writing and the specifically historical way of thinking even after the inauguration of historicism (or historism) as a guiding principle for research and narrative. It is true, however, that the historicist approach provided a new self-consciousness about the historicity of the past, and made available a totally new understanding of historical recognition. The historians started to interpret and judge the past on its own terms, while also taking into consideration its possible present understanding. They thus did their best to re-create imagination of the historical actors for the end of a better understanding of the past incidents. Despite all of their efforts for judging the past within its own specific contexts, “Unacknowledged, however, was the way in which collective memory continued to provide the larger framework for the historical linking of past to present.”32 Although central place was given to the historical context in the process of knowing what had actually happened in the past, still the reality referred to was “assimilated into a conception . . . [which] ultimately derived from the unexamined assumptions of the historiographical tradition in which historians themselves were situated.”33 Every historian, Hutton has assumed, made use of timelines on which images of historical events and outstanding actors served as places of their memory. A set of unreflected political traditions (mental patterns or values) with which scholars identified themselves in the course of their familial and much broader socialisation (schooling), were to replace philosophy, which they looked at with suspicion, to inform the historians in their dealing with the past for the sake of the present. Hutton learnt a lot from the philosophy of hermeneutics, especially from Gadamer in articulating his own thesis. The idea elaborated on by Gadamer on the “fusion of horizons,” those of the past and the present plays the biggest role in his argument. With the aim of verifying his main thesis, Hutton conducts a thoroughgoing analysis of several French historians (Philippe Ariés, Jules Michelet, Alphonse Aulard, Georges Lefebvre and François Furet) to demonstrate the huge importance that memory always had implicitly in terms both of imagination and habit of mind of practising historians. The time has now arrived, Hutton made it explicit, to come to terms with these implicit and unreflected mental or spiritual drives moving the gaze and interpretive work of historians. The task, therefore, is to reveal the true nature of the hidden traditions exercising more or less influence

Introduction 7 on the way the historian tends to think about the past. Mentality history is the method with which one may make much easier the discussion of these objects. “The historians of the nineteenth century were intent on keeping alive a political tradition of progress through the agency of the nation-state. Today’s historians prefer to explore lost cultural worlds. The historians who receive most of the attention today are not the ones that confirm conventional values, but those who investigate forgotten traditions and alien viewpoints.”34 In underlining his statement Hutton refers here as evidences to the works of Carlo Ginzburg, Le Roy Ladurie, Natalie Z. Davis and Robert Darnton.35 It is not wholly an accident that the new currents of history-writing represented by these names and works serve as a reference point for the claim of some convergence between memory and history. The well-known postulate advanced by Maurice Halbwachs on the duality of collective memory and history is thus dissolved with the appearance and growing popularity of microhistory, historical anthropology, Alltagsgeschichte, the New Cultural History and, not least, gender history and New Historicism. The common element found in them has been the demand for self-reflexivity of the historian as something to guarantee a much better understanding of the past. It is no surprise that a historian like Peter Burke, an outstanding representative of historical anthropology, has already noticed in the 1990s that the notion of history identified with social memory opens new roads before the historical scholarship. “This traditional account of the relation between memory and written history, in which memory reflects what actually happened and history reflects memory, now seems much too simple. Both history and memory are coming to appear increasingly problematic. . . . Neither memories, nor histories seem objective any longer.”36 He has finally concluded that: any commitment to the idea of the duality of social memory and history is “a somewhat old-fashioned positivist way” of thinking. “However, Burke continues, many recent studies of the history of historical writing treat it much as Halbwachs treated memory, as the product of social groups such as Roman senators, Chinese mandarins, Benedictine monks, university professors and so on.”37 This is to lead him to identify history-writing with memory as a social understanding of the past, “which sums up the complex processes of selection and interpretation in a simple formula and stresses the homology between the ways in which the past is recorded and remembered.”38 His firm intention to leave behind historicism (historism) is further made clear by his discussion of his own historical relativism. It is, Burke explains, “not that any account of the past is just as good (reliable, plausible, perceptive) as any other. Some investigators can be shown to be better-informed or more judicious than others. The point is that all of us have access to the past (like the present) only via the categories and schemata – or as Durkheim would say, the ‘collective representations’ – of our own culture.”39 The problem of collective memory may be of interest to historians either as simply a theoretical issue or rather as itself a field with which they are concerned in their research. In the latter case, traces of a past collective memory serve as evidence referring to historical facts (albeit a special kind thereof) that are subsumed under the category of a historical “social imaginary.”40 In showing an increased

8  Introduction interest in and sympathy toward testimonies of this social imaginary, and its past, one is concerned with various past collective memories which were used by contemporaries for their own purposes. In doing such research, prime importance is attributed to the diverse “subjective” sources that put the voice of the historical actors on the soundtrack of history. When we are dealing with the not too distant past, oral history methods may be of particular use; although oral testimony has quite frequently been the source even for a wide array of the written documents. The great relevance that any memory is supposed to have as an object of historical inquiry is also attested to by the growing popularity of the genre of mentality history in today’s historical scholarship. That is the kind of history-writing that Aleida Assmann has labelled as mnemohistory, which “is interested in the constructive as well as the distorting effects of memory; it takes into account the ambivalence of the past both as a conscious choice and as an unconscious burden, tracking the voluntary and involuntary paths of memory.” Mnemohistory is responsible, to a large extent (she holds), for the changes occurring in the relationship between memory and history. As Assmann concludes: “[w]hile the task of traditional historical scholarship consists in separating memory (the mythical elements) from history (the factual truth), it is the task of mnemohistory to analyze the mythical elements in tradition and discover their hidden agenda.”41 Looking at the tenets of the philosophy of history based on experience, being informed by the phenomenological approach to experience, one might even say that remembering and recollecting have a strong and unambiguous link to lived experience. Since, as David Carr writes, “I can only remember (recollect) things I have first experienced. It is in this sense that recollection refers back to and conceptually presupposes an original experience. It is this relation that bridges the gap between the present and the remembered.”42 Not going now into the details of the intricate relationship between the historical actors’ primary experiences and the ones gained by any historian in his or her research, we would rather place Aleida and Jan Assmann’s theory of collective memory, one of the most well-known analytical constructs in the field, into the context of contemporary scholarly debates.43 Being faithful to the wellestablished notion of the opposition of collective and historical memory, Jan Assmann assumed the operation of a separate communicative and cultural memory. By postulating their duality, he retains his close commitment to the Halbwachsian way of conceptualisation. “For us the concept of ‘communicative memory’ includes those varieties of collective memory that are based exclusively on everyday communications . . ., which M. Halbwachs gathered and analyzed under the concept of collective memory.”44 As opposed to it, the cultural memory, as it has been understood by Jan Assmann, relates to a sort of mnemonic practice lying at a fixed distance from any everyday activity. Cultural memory defined in this way amounts to various representations and is a vehicle of cultural reification taking several and alternative shapes in the field of intellectual life. The crystallisation of communicated meaning and collectively shared knowledge always needs some measure of institutionalisation and is furthermore a mode of recollection being more conscious than the regular mnemonic techniques of the so-called communicative memory.

Introduction 9 Despite the obvious analytical difference between the two forms of memory, their distinctiveness is not absolute. Jan Assmann does not miss the many and frequent transitions and crossings between the two poles caused by the none too rigid, sometimes porous boundary separating them from each other. The notion of the floating gap taken over from the Italian anthropologist Jan Vansina plays a crucial role in his argumentation. One may easily identify several overlapping elements in the memory constructs, and one even finds that in the case of commemoration, communicative memory is not always (and necessarily) followed after some time by a cultural one. The reason has been that even amidst the circumstances of the rule of an objectified way of memory setting up claims for rational justification, some forceful needs and interests are or may be at work in the interests of close commitment to an unreflective and over-emphatic relation with the past. That is the case when the cultic practice of remembering the past has an upper hand even in the realm of cultural memory. Commemoration usually goes hand in hand with the cultic way of memorialising even when it is practiced through the medium of cultural memory; and accordingly, commemoration always makes great use of and takes the shape of communicative memory.45 Aleida Assmann adds to all this in discussing the similarities and dissimilaries of personal remembering and collective recollection that, “[t]he individual participates in the group’s vision of its past by means of cognitive learning and emotional acts of identification and commemoration. This past cannot be ‘remembered’; it has to be memorized. The collective memory is a crossover between semantic and episodic memory: it has to be acquired via learning, but only through internalization and rites of participation does it create the identity of a ‘we.’ ”46 All what has been said before in terms of the meaning of the changing relationship between collective memory and history (historical scholarship) makes it easy to integrate the one into the other. The topic has richly been explored by recent discourse on the memory industry and its close influence on historywriting. It is widely held now that the development concerned brought far more than merely giving birth to an ephemeral fashion or scholarly excentricity.47 The imminent prospect of a convergence of collective memory and history was and has greatly been facilitated by several developments, including the obvious decrease of the so far dominant national paradigm in historical scholarship, the challenge of identity politics following from the impostures and imperatives of multiculturalism and – not least – the epistemological scepticism propagated by various forms of postmodernism. For Wulf Kansteiner, the memory studies are now getting to a position from which more may be said about the past than what a conventional (historicist) historical approach can provide. Since they lead us to acknowledge “that historical representations are negotiated, selected, present-oriented, and relative, while insisting that the experiences they reflect cannot be manipulated.”48 Furthermore, his argument continues, “scholars of collective memory have successfully unravelled the semantic and narrative parameters of social remembrance that inform and limit the historical imagination of the members of any given collective and that are inscribed in the media of communication as well as our bodies and mind. These cultural formations

10  Introduction might variously be defined as discursive formations, habitus, thought styles, archetypes, paradigms, or simply as traditions.”49 This, however, may not mean the rule of collective memory over rational recognition of the past. It means, perhaps, no more than exploring collective or social memories of the past with the explicit aim of gaining a better understanding of a history of certain forms. The situation comes to threaten history-writing with the fast and successful emergence of public history, lessening the social impact of any academic historical scholarship. The worldwide experience of the persistent survival of the unmastered past (or pasts) prompts some analysts (historians and theoreticians alike) to view the demotion of historical scholarship with growing anxiety. Gavriel Rosenfeld is one of the historians who, with such an anxiety in the background, strongly awaits, if not the crash, at least a soft landing of today’s prospering memory industry. The memory boom, Rosenfeld insists, will be downgraded from a formidable industry to an ordinary subdiscipline within the academic discipline. In his assessment, the memory boom of our own days may even be useful for the future by making it “easier for us to identify the telltale signs of unmastered pasts and to recognize genuine efforts to atone for historical injustices.”50 The very diverse experiences gained now in terms of the memory boom, may or hopefully will help us in the future to understand and resolve the mental and psychological problems caused by such unmastered pasts, or its uninterrupted remembrance. The growing anxiety stirred by an expanding public history movement has also been reflected upon and sometimes conceptualised by some theoreticians. Allan Megill is among the theorists who find this development very dangerous for the historical scholarship. “A common, current question is, Who owns history? It is an astoundingly inadequate question. In many instances, what is really being asked is, Who has the right to control what ‘we’ remember about the past? Or, to put this another way, Whose ‘political, social, and cultural imperatives’ will have predominance at any given moment in the representation of the past? The demand that the past should be remembered in the right way is an insistent one, and historians are expected to do their part, by those who pay them and by those who feel that their own political, social, and cultural ‘imperatives’ are the deserving ones. So conceived, history would be primarily a continuation of memory – in this case, the continuation of memories that, for one or another reason, have been cast aside.”51 His preference is to restore history to its former privileged position by stating, “far from being a continuation of memory, true history stands almost in opposition to memory.”52 In providing a detailed argument Megill refers to the kind of unmasterable past represented by the traumatic historical experiences of the Holocaust, which much contributed during the last couple of years to giving an increased importance to the memories of the victims as against the scholarly accounts provided by the Holocaust history-writing. The great importance of a traumatic experience of the past events is, however, not sufficient in itself for repudiating the rational knowing of history, including the irrational occurrences of the genocide designated as Holocaust being committed and organised by Nazi Germany. Replacing

Introduction 11 history-writing with the testimonies produced by the victims (and even the perpetrators and bystanders) of the Holocaust, Megill holds, “has little if anything to do with establishing a more accurate record of the Holocaust. Rather, the testimonies are collected because they have come to be seen as having something of the character of sacred relics.”53 He, therefore, urges historians to recapture their exclusive right of giving plausible (rationally bounded) accounts of the past, the task which has increasingly been stolen by an increasingly memory-oriented way of memorialisation. If this won’t be done, historical scholarship, based on and sustained by a critical assessment of the past, will necessarily give up its original function and ethos. “To focus on past historical actors’ memories ‘for their own sake’ (that is, to see the memories as valuable in themselves), and to think of historical research and writing as offering a continuation of such memories, is to put in abeyance the kind of critical procedure of which Thukydides was perhaps the first practitioner.”54 He thus concludes that, “The task of the historian ought to be less to preserve memory than to overcome it or at least to keep it confined.”55 With the explicit aim of supporting his claim, Megill even alludes to Michel de Certeau’s standpoint in which the French historian stresses the basic otherness of the past and the present, and that the gap or distance separating them from each other is the reason why the “past is first of all the means of representing a difference.”56 Allan Megill is not alone in his opinion that history is directly endangered by the expansion of a collective memory-oriented approach to the past. Paul Ricoeur in his last and seminal work has also argued for the fundamental distinctiveness of memory and history. Ricoeur talks here about an unambiguous gap between memory and history, plainly an epistemological one “which will never be entirely bridged” just because it has resulted “from the break . . . made by the system of writing imposed on all the historiographical operations.”57 What Ricoeur is getting at is his attempt to locate the source of the distinction in the fact that collective memory is kept alive and transmitted through orality, while historical scholarship always takes the form of writing. That explains why history (in the sense of history-writing) tends to be more complete and is incomparably more plausible than a single testimony or series of testimonies handed down either by tradition or any other mnemonic practices (commemoration, ritual). One albeit paradigmatic aspect of the problem has been that, “[n]umerous reputedly historical events were never anyone’s memories.”58 Ricoeur conveys his main argument in a metaphorical way by assuming that, “[t]he historical operation in its entirety can . . . be considered an act of sepulcher. Not a place, a cemetery, a simple depositary of bones, but an act of repeated entombment. This scriptural sepulcher extends the work of memory and the work of mourning on the plane of history. The work of mourning definitively separates the past from the present and makes way for the future. The work of memory, [however] would have attained its aim if the reconstruction of the past were to succeed in giving rise to a sort of resurrection of the past.”59 Ricoeur, however, does not deny that, though history is vaster than memory and is thus able to correct or transcend it, still “it cannot abolish it. . . . [Memory]. . . . [Since] memory remains the guardian of the ultimate dialectic constitutive of the pastness of the past. . . . That something did actually

12  Introduction happen, this is the pre-predicative – and even pre-narrative – belief upon which rest the recognition of the images of the past and oral testimony.”60 In admitting the relative closeness of memory and history to each other, Ricoeur is thus able to remain faithful to his narrativity theory that he has applied to history-writing in his influential work, Time and Narrative.61

Conclusion The historian’s ability to give a true description and explanation of what happened in the past as history continues, needs reconsideration. Several historians resign involuntarily their exclusive right to narrate the historical truth; the perspective from which the information has been produced by this or that kind of memory work presupposes that none can claim more than to have one possible narrative version of a world that is already lost.62 Yet historians attempting to integrate the great numbers of past narratives generated by memory work are by no means compelled to follow one line of memory work or another. This derives from their responsibility for establishing and maintaining a discursive mode of representing the historical past. Yet not even academic historians are immune from “misjudgement” or even serious “errors” and some biases (rooted in unconscious prejudices) in interpreting the past. However, if that discourse meets scholarly standards, historians may indulge in the perhaps pious hope that they can finally succeed in adequately adapting the dialectic of memory and forgetting on a more rational basis than the transparently politically motivated (and to that extent non-rational) narratives of the nation and other communities that were discussed earlier. They may maintain some distance between themselves and the subjective view entailed in personal and group memory work and their myths. How precisely historians can usually get in touch with the past vis-à-vis collective memory may further be specified. One of the most notable attributes defining the historical endeavour was and remains the fundamentally and consciously less moralising tone applied in approaching that past. Yet the sharp distinction made in that regard does not mean that the historian’s discourse would simply replace, and could completely cancel or repudiate, the alternative historical narratives based either on personal recollections or some other forms of collective memory. “Today everyone is his or her historian,” John Gillis has suggested, and “this democratization of the past causes some anxiety among professionals, most of whom still write in the nationalist tradition, and who still retain a near monopoly over professorships and curatorships, even as they lose touch with the general public.”63 It is, however, worthwhile to consider the history of the notion of national awareness in a modernising world of the past itself nonetheless deeply saturated with national ethos. Outstanding medievalists (Jenő Szűcs and Patrick J. Geary just to mention some of them) have indeed argued against the continuity of this tradition. They claim that history of the nation-state is essentially a fabrication, as it only emerged with the birth of the modern political concept of the nation-state; a development which made it easy for the scholarly community to view the past and learn from it with an approach that corresponds to the idea of the national ethos. Historiography was to this extent

Introduction 13 largely dependent on the power of myth that generates historical knowledge, the one making it possible at all to understand history within a particular kind of structure, which takes mostly or exclusively the shape of a national historical paradigm. The linear continuity of history of the nations that was fashioned in the 19th and in some cases the 20th century has nearly always been based on and deduced from ethnic (and/or statehood) identity constructions. There has been a strong, and sometimes seemingly mutually dependent, relation between nationalism and historiography that cannot be considered a purely rational construction.64 The only (or maybe the best) option for a historian today is to accept that he or she is but one among the story-tellers entitled to talk about the past and that he or she cannot expropriate or monopolise any more the role of telling the truth about history. This is what makes it so important a duty to draw the boundary between the myths (the national historical myth also being implied) and the clearly scholarly “truths,” revealed and narrated by historians who regularly accomplish their work under the aegis of an institutionalised craftsmanship. When discussing the relationship between how history has been reflected upon by historians and how it was interpreted by the agents themselves, one has to take into consideration the basic difference between the two pasts both in epistemology and temporality. One may say, citing Michael Oakeshott’s statement, that certain pasts remembered are not history at all, they are only “practical pasts,” preceding and influencing the present and the future as well. The practical past is thus what is experienced and located in history. The historical past, more closely the historian’s own experience, however, “is categorical and not merely apodeictic”,65 something produced in the process of examining the past in a temporal perspective with hindsight. It conveys the idea that that particular past is seen (interpreted and explained) as history in connection with later events and as parts of temporal wholes.66 Not going into the details, one may argue that the experience of any “lived history,” the practical past per se, cannot be taken to be identical with history, the historical past. Historians are thus expected to hold some distance from the realm of practical past for the sake of objectivity, although the latter is in part “the framework in which the methods, procedures and goals of an academic discipline have been developed,”67 as it is an intellectual ground in the metaphorical sense, the “soil out of which such knowledge grows.”68 The first step taken in revealing the intricate relationship between memory and the scholarly activity demands studying first the historical experience and the memorial work in their close interaction. This will be the topic of the first part of the book in which we focus on the diverse experiential and memorial past realities, the practical pasts which shape the course of historical events themselves.

Notes 1 Just a few more examples. Langenbacher, Eric – Bill Niven – Ruth Wittlinger, Dynamics of Memory. New York: Berghahn, 2012; Pakier, Małgorzata  – Joanna Wawrzyyniak. Memory and Change in Europe. Eastern Perspectives. New York: Berghahn, 2016; Altinay, Ayşe Gül – Andrea Pető, Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories. Feminist

14  Introduction Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence. London: Routledge, 2016; Cornwall, Mark – John Paul Newman. Sacrifice and Rebirth. The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War. New York: Beghahn, 2016; Maerker, Anna – Simon Sleight – Adam Sutcliffe. History, Memory and Public Life: The Past in the Present. London: Routledge, 2018. 2 Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. London: Penguin, 1991. 3 Olick, Jeffrey K. The Politics of Regret. On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. New York: Routledge, 2007. 20. 4 Nora, Pierre. “The Tidal Wave of Memory,” Newsletter. Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, 72 (Spring 2001) 26. 5 Handler, Richard. “Is ‘Identity “ a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept,” in Commemorations. The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. 27–41. 6 Lowenthal, David. “Identity, Heritage, and History,” in Commemorations. The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. 44–45. 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” in Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe. Band 1. München: Walter de Gruyter, 1980. 243–334. 8 Yerushalmi, Y. H. Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976. 9 Todorov, Tzvetan. Les abus de la mémoire. Paris: Arlèa, 1995. 10 Black, Jeremy. Using History. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005. 11 MacMillan, Margaret. The Uses and Abuses History. London: Profile Books, 2010; Miller, Alexei – Maria Lipman. The Convolutions of Historical Politics. Budapest – New York: Central European University Press, 2012. 12 Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter – Vida Yatdi Ditter. New York: Harper Colophon, 1950. 13 Iggers, Georg G. The German Conception of History. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1983; Berger, Stefan – Christoph Conrad. The Past as History. National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 14 Iggers, Georg G. “Comments on F. R. Ankersmit’s Paper, ‘Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis’,” History and Theory, 34, 3 (October 1995) 163. The statement quoted appears as a debate with the view held by Ankersmit on the notion of Historism. 15 Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory, edited, trans., intr. by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 83. 16 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 52. 17 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 182. An analysis of Halbwach’s distinction made between collective memory and history is to be found in Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey – David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 393–397. 18 Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. ed., intr. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 19 Yerushalmi, Zakhor. Jewish History 20 Nora, “General Introduction. Between Memory and History,” in Realms of Memory. Rethinking the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, edited by Pierre Nora, vol. I. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 3. 21 Nora, “General Introduction,” 3. 22 Nora, “General Introduction,” 3–4. I heavily relied on Ricoeur’s analysis in my own attempt to reconstruct Nora’s changing conceptualisation: Ricoeur, Memory, History, 401–411. 23 Nora, “General Introduction,” 5.

Introduction 15 24 Nora, “General Introduction,” 6. 25 Nora, “General Introduction,” 6. 26 Nora, “General Introduction,” 8. 27 Nora, “The Era of Commemoration,” in Realms of Memory. Rethinking the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, edited by Pierre Nora, Vol. III. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 635. 28 Nora, “The Era of Commemoration,” 626. 29 Nora, “The Era of Commemoration,” 636. 30 Hutton, History as an Art of Memory. Hanover – London: University Press of New England, 1993. 31 Hutton, History as an Art, 16. 32 Hutton, History as an Art, 20. 33 Hutton, History as an Art, 21. 34 Hutton, History as an Art, 167. 35 Ginzburg Carlo. The Chees and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980; Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy. Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Random House, 1979; Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Basic Books, 1984. 36 Burke, Peter. “History as Social Memory,” in Varieties of Cultural History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. 43–44. 37 Burke, “History as Social,” 45. 38 Burke, “History as Social,” 45. 39 Burke, “History as Social,” 45–46. 40 On the concept of social imaginary, see Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 3–30. 41 Assmann, Aleida. “Transformations Between History and Memory,” Social Research, 75, 1 (Spring 2008) 62. 42 Carr, David. Experience and History. Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 72. 43 Assmann, Jan. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” trans. John Czaplicka. New German Critique, 65 (Spring – Summer 1995) 125–133; and see his seminal work, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1992. 44 Assmann, “Transformations Between,” 126. 45 Assmann, A kulturális emlékezet. Írás, emlékezet és politikai identitás a korai magaskultúrákban, trans. Zoltán Hidas. Budapest: Atlantisz, 1999. 50–53, 64. 46 Assmann, “Transformations Between,” 52. 47 Confino, Alon. “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” American Historical Review, 102, 5 (December 1997) 1386–1403; Crane, Susan A. “Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory,” American Historical Review, 102, 5 (December 1997) 1372–1385; Klein, Kerwin Lee. “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations, 69 (Winter 2000) 127–150; Fritzsche, Peter. “The Case of Modern Memory,” Journal of Modern History, 73 (March 2001) 87–117; Kansteiner, Wulf. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” History and Theory, 41, 2 (May 2002) 179–197; Rousso, Henry. “History of Memory, Policies of the Past: What For?” in Conflicted Memories. Europeanizing Contemporary Histories, edited by Konrad H. Jarausch – Thomas Lindenberger. New York: Berhahn Books, 2007. 13–26; Rosenfeld, Gavriel D. “A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the Memory ‘Industry’,” Journal of Modern History, 81 (March 2009) 122–158; Eley, Geoff. ‘The

16  Introduction Past under Erasure? History, Memory, and the Contemporary,” Journal of Contemporary History, 3 (July 2011) 555–573; Assmann, Aleida – Linda Shortt (eds.). Memory and Political Change. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 48 Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory,” 195. 49 Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory,” 196. 50 Rosenfeld, “A Looming Crash,” 158. 51 Megill, Allan. Historical Knowledge, Historical Error. A Contemporary Guide to Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 18. 52 Megill, Historical Knowledge, 18. 53 Megill, Historical Knowledge, 20. 54 Megill, Historical Knowledge, 22. 55 Megill, Historical Knowledge, 37. 56 Certeau, Michel de. “The Historiographical Operation,” in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 85. 57 Ricoeur, Memory, History, 497. 58 Ricoeur, Memory, History, 497. 59 Ricoeur, Memory, History, 499. 60 Ricoeur, Memory, History, 498. 61 Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen MacLaughlin – John Costello. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988, 3 vols. 62 The problem of the multiple viewpoints has a crucial significance, see Berkhofer, Robert F. Jr., Beyond the Great Story. History as Text and Discourse. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. 155–201. 63 Gillis, John R. “Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship,” in Commemorations. The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. 17. 64 Berger, Stefan. “On the Role of Myths and History in the Construction of National Identity in Modern Europe,” European History Quarterly, 39, 3 (2009) 490–502; Lorenz, Chris. “Drawing the Line: ‘Scientific’ History between Myth-making and Mythbreaking,” in Narrating the Nation. Representations in History, Media and the Arts, edited by Stefan Berger – Linas Eriksonas – Andrew Mycock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 35–55I. 65 Oakeshott, Michael. Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 102. 66 Danto, Arthur C. Analytical Philosophy of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. 183. 67 Carr, Experience and History, 75. 68 Carr, Experience and History, 76.

Part I

The past as experience and memory

1 The experience and remembrance of World War I

Libraries have been filled with heaps of scholarly literature on the military, economic and diplomatic history of the Great War. Much less attention has been devoted, however, to the question of how Europeans processed the experience of the World War I psychologically. No or few attempts – especially comparative ones – have been made at the analysis of the various sites of remembrance, the places of mourning and collective (official or state) commemoration and the relation of these two to each other. The veracity of Jay Winter’s statement1 is confirmed by the observation of Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker: For eighty years, historians of the Great War overlooked the long, painful scars of grief that followed after the conflict was over. True, the mass deaths were recorded (not without difficulty), but the bereavement, the mourning process went unrecorded. . . . They [historians] put the catastrophe into a demographic context but not into the equally important context of collective grief. Yet little in twentieth-century history can be understood unless close attention is paid to the immense grief experienced during and after 1914–18. This is an issue that transcends the history of the conflict per se.2 It is for this reason that our study will focus on the remembrance of massive death, and we will examine the phenomenon that George L. Mosse defined as the cult of the fallen soldier, also regarded as a civic religion.

Fallen soldiers and mourners According to Mosse, the memory of war has been fixed in the collective mind as a myth that endowed the fallen soldier with symbols and symbolic meanings and which served as the foundation of war remembrance. Mosse only examined the public manifestations of war remembrance, so he tended to remark the heavily politicised character and fundamentally nationalist attitude of the cult.3 In his essay dedicated to war memorials, Reinhart Koselleck also emphasised that the memory of the war highlighted collective political and national identity. According to Koselleck, war memorials transfer the remembrance of the soldiers’ deaths into a profane functional context and thus become an issue affecting the

20  The past as experience and memory future of survivors. “The decline of a Christian interpretation of death thus creates a space for meaning to be purely established in political and social terms.”4 But later he adds: “Admittedly, it cannot be denied – across all national differences and in spite of the distinction between triumphant and non-triumphant war memorials – that no monument is completely absorbed by its political function. No matter how much dying for a cause is thematized in order to derive a particular group identity, dying itself is also always a major additional theme.”5 Nonetheless, he does not examine this aspect of the question even though he admits that the political function that the state assigns to war monuments can be different depending on whether the latter have been erected by a victorious or losing state (country). Today we have a clear understanding of the fact that the meaning attributed to the memorials by the community of mourning is partly, or entirely, different from their official meaning. As revealed by the research of Jay Winter and numerous French historians, the social use of monuments also acts as a meaning-making entity. The tangible manifestations of the latter are the rites of collective commemoration related to the memorials, which bring to light the exceptional importance of the “communities of mourning” inherent to the cult and making it live.6 Mosse also believes that it is only the Great War that created – after certain antecedents – the novel collective cult of the war dead that was also fanned by the state. Mosse talks about the nationalisation of death, which, according to him, was a decisive step that allowed for the creation of the myth of the fallen soldier that also affected private grief.7 The remembrance of the dead (soldiers) is democratised by this new kind of sensitivity and some sort of a modern commemorative culture, but the brutal fact of massive war casualties is simultaneously impersonalised. From that point, the object of the cult is the common soldier and no longer the commanding officers and generals of the armies, as it used to be in the not so distant past. The democratisation of death corresponded to the “democratic spirit” of the Great War: everyone (i.e. men in certain age brackets) had the right and the duty to fight and die on the front. This is why Koselleck labels the commemoration of the fallen soldier as a civic commemorative cult. The other side of the coin is that war memorials and sometimes related commemorative rites as well were assigned a function by being filled with political content. This is how they could fulfil the democratic legitimising role destined for them, communicating to the survivors that each and every citizen of a nation-state had equal rights and was thus entitled to be personally remembered, especially if they died in a war.8 The fact that war death affected such huge masses was another obvious catalyst for this new type of death cult. Ten million soldiers were killed in battle.9 As for the Hungarian loss, it amounted to about 611,000 people.10 And how many actual and potential mourners may there have been? According to the estimates, nearly one third of the soldiers killed left behind a widow, but the number of orphans was even higher; Jay Winter estimates this figure at 6,000,000 only in the European context.11 And with that, we have not yet taken into consideration the rest of the community of mourning composed of the parents, close and distant relatives and other personal relations, the so-called “fictive kinship” of those killed in action. Estimates for France put the number of direct mourners (i.e. the relatives of fallen

Experience and remembrance of World War I 21 soldiers) to 2,500,000. “Virtually an entire society was probably in mourning; an entire society formed a community of mourning.”12 Moreover, wartime grief differs from grief in times of peace, mainly because the former hits only one of the sexes and only young adults. What is more, death tolls were enormous within a short time frame, which also devastated those left behind. Finally, as a result of the demographic shifts of the 19th century, it was relatively rare at the beginning of the 20th century for the offspring to die before their progenitors – a daily and completely ordinary experience during the World War I. This made the death of the soldiers even more shocking for those left behind.13 It was a source of “eternal grief,” meaning that the traumatic experience of loss could never be entirely processed. And there was one more thing: the inconceivably high number of dead bodies that were unidentifiable and not taken care of, the ones that could not be “properly” buried. That was also a serious obstacle to processing the grief. If those tombs existed at all, they were inaccessible for the mourners. Sometimes the community of mourning wanted to take the corpse into its possession (and bury it at home) or at least visit the tombs.14 Every person’s death is the fulfilment of their individual destiny, which necessarily triggers an individual mourning process. One of the conspicuous particularities of the Great War was that – for the first time in history – massive death generated collective commemorative rites besides leaving the individual character of grief intact. It is still a question to be answered how these two related to each other or, to be more precise: did the collective commemorative cult influence individual grief and if yes, how so? Did the former attenuate the latter or not?

Heroisation and/or paying tribute The collective commemorative rites emerging in the wake of the Great War put the heroised figure of the fallen soldier into the focus of the memory work. According to the general conviction of historiographers, heroisation leads to the instrumentalisation of the cult and, as such, it contributes as a tool to the (political) process that (by the way) attenuates the pain of the mourners to some extent. If they go through grief together, then (hopefully) it will reduce the burden of the individual ordeal imposed by the feeling of loss that people usually experience in a terrifying solitude.15 What is more, the war death of the soldier, besides triggering individual grief, (also) receives a general meaning as an event of heroic devotion to the community and the nation. Would that be the sole meaning of the cult of war remembrance exercised all over Europe and the whole world, embodied by the monuments? And if it is so, to what extent was the nationalisation of the death of the soldiers efficient (or could it be) in attenuating the pain of the individual (of the micro-community)? If we take a quick glance at the specific content of collective grief, and examine what corresponded to the public and cult remembrance of the fallen soldier, we may have doubts about the omnipotence of the collective cult of the dead. Although Mosse insists that “Modern war memorials did not so much focus upon one man, as upon figures symbolic of the nation – upon the sacrifice of all of its

22  The past as experience and memory men.”16 However, this observation needs some correction today. It is a fact that the fallen soldier was mostly and almost exclusively depicted in official commemoration as a hero and not as a victim. That was a logical consequence of the democratisation of the cult. In relation to that as well, the soldiers of the hostile army could under no circumstances be the object of commemoration (and the cult of the dead). Typically, the defeated were never represented on the memorials in their own right, and even their tombs (cemeteries) were put at a great disadvantage in the preservation of the post-war military cemetery cult.17 According to our hypothesis, the official meaning attributed to local (and especially central) state war memorials did not necessarily equal the meaning assigned to these objects by the community of mourning when the latter used them for its own commemorative rites. Needless to say, similarly, the “original” meaning of the monuments erected for the purposes of the cult did not survive the generation that had erected them and had used them for the purposes of commemoration.18 Jay Winter distinguishes between three non-contiguous spaces and times of war memorials. The monuments erected before 1918 were usually scattered in the territory of the hinterland, whereas in the decade following the armistice they were, most of the time, erected in churches and in mundane sites (in the centre of each of the settlements). In the third phase, such objects were mainly placed in cemeteries. In the beginning, the practice of monument erection was imbued by exaggerated war patriotism and heroism because they were meant to fan the flames of enthusiasm for the war. The monuments of the second phase were dominated by religious ecumenism coupled with conventional patriotism, which expressed the universality of the loss (individual grief) as well as the national, political and aesthetic approach to remembrance. The universal language of grief as a memory work was formed only in the third phase, drawing on particular (sub-national level) traditions and often surpassing them.19 This is how the issue is put into a more nuanced light, without an exaggerated emphasis on the politicisation of war remembrance anymore. As highlighted by the studies of Antoine Prost, Annette Becker and Jay Winter, besides projecting an image of national heroism, monuments had always comprised a message enabling the personal mourning process if only in a coded form and submitted to the former. This cannot be a pure accident. In most cases, it was the war monument that constituted the only place of commemoration available for the mourners because, during the frontline combats, multitudes of corpses disappeared without a trace and ended up in mass tombs. (In France, even the creation of ossariums came into fashion after the war.) At the same time, mourners could not even visit the tombs of those fallen soldiers who were laid to rest in tombs marked with a tombstone in cemeteries on the front; these cemeteries were situated inconceivably far from the living places of the relatives. (We will come back to this issue later.) That is also part of the reason why war memorials could not have one fixed meaning that would have withstood the test of time. The public sites of war remembrance (military cemeteries, war monuments or the narrative discourse of the Great War for that matter, including dairies, memoirs, novels and even historiographical literature) created a personal

Experience and remembrance of World War I 23 relationship – through the rites of commemoration – between mourners and fallen soldiers who were husbands, fathers, sons and brothers. In this way, they contributed to helping the members of the mourning community get over the pain caused by the loss, a relief mostly found in oblivion. Undoubtedly, the remembrance of the war is a highly complex phenomenon, in which official and private remembrance processes sometimes run parallel to each other while at other times they diverge. “A memorial can be individual or collective, a private act of remembrance or a public commemoration, a material object, a ritual, a monument of solid stone or portable ‘commemomorabilia.’ ”20 The nature of the tensions between the officially propagated cult of commemoration and the identity of mourners may be grasped by posterity if one takes a look at the individual decisions of the committees in charge of the erection of monuments and analyses the speeches delivered on the occasion of the inauguration of the monuments.21 The European (and overseas) remembrance of the World War I seems to be relatively homogeneous, which proves the universality of this new commemorative culture. That alone suggests already that the formal and sometimes content-wise consistency of war memorials that had been conspicuous since the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century cannot be accidental. Nonetheless, Koselleck finds it surprising.22 If that is true, then it can be justly claimed that the spaces dedicated to the memory of war were more or less unanimous on a global level, especially when it comes to the effervescence of the 1920s in setting up monuments.23 Nevertheless, there are also some differences between the individual countries, even if the formal similarity of the monuments is indisputable. The cult of the fallen soldiers of the war, forced from above, was on the agenda, at times even simultaneously with the fights, and there was no exception to that. (Or rather, the only exception was Russia; that is, the Soviet Union.) And what is perhaps even more significant, the obligation to commemorate soldiers individually by their names was widespread. The latter practice had appeared before here and there, but it was the Great War that turned it into a routine to remember the dead soldiers by their names. That was usually accomplished by lists of names placed on the memorials. In line with that, those buried in military cemeteries were all assigned an individual tomb with a tombstone.24 The practice of remembering the dead by name was indisputably an equalising process, but by no means an individualising one. That distinction needs to be made very clear. This practice basically put the immense masses of dead soldiers identified by their names at the disposal of public mourning with the very purpose of wrapping the cult of the dead into the sublime notion of national collective heroism. This actually means that the cult of the dead soldiers virtually reproduced the original logic of the total war reaping masses of soldiers, as a result of which soldiers were dying daily in inconceivably high numbers on the front. During the incessant combats, there was often no chance to bury the corpses of the dead soldiers – many of them were not even identified then, or later. It is quite revelatory that from 1926 to 1935, a further 122,000 corpses of previously unburied French and German soldiers were found on the Western front.25 Reinhart

24  The past as experience and memory Koselleck made a poignant observation on the subject: individuals were swallowed up by mass death.26 Not only was death on the front massive, but it also parted the dead and the mourners once and for all. Barely ever were the corpses of the dead soldiers transported to their homeland (cemeteries at home). Those who were buried on the front, if they went unidentified, were placed into mass tombs, above which or near which monuments would sometimes be eventually erected that would later on become places of pilgrimage or tourist attractions. As a cost-saving solution, former combat sites (as well as cemeteries) were ceded to spontaneous commemoration before they fell into oblivion.27 With that, the cult of memorials attached to and following the World War I became complete. This cult was the linear descendant of 19th-century monuments erected by the winners even if, in the spirit of the commemorative cult, and as a novelty, it eternalised the memory of (nearly) all of the soldiers killed in battle. The apogee of this process of democratisation, albeit not perfect individualisation, of war death was when monuments of the type “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier” were introduced. There was virtually no belligerent country where sooner or later the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier would not be set up in the capital, but there is only one such monument in every country. According to the maxims of the synecdoche, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier satisfied the official cult of the personally unidentified fallen soldier, and it was supposed to stand for all of them: “one for all.”28 It is unknown who rests in the symbolic tomb in reality,29 so the tomb of the Unknown Soldier is – seemingly – different from the symbolic mass tombs decorated with the names of the fallen soldiers and many other municipal (village) war memorials. At the same time, it is by this emphatic singularity that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier refers to the enormous masses of the dead soldiers of the war, so characteristic of the Great War. Commemorating the soldiers killed in the war by their names expresses a new kind of sensitivity, a modern awareness that also satisfies the pressing need to create continuity – at least through remembrance – between the motherland, home and the soldiers killed for their motherland on the faraway fronts who could not go home even in their death. Death on the front was seldom followed by the exhumation and identification of the corpses and their transfer back to their countries, i.e. their repatriation and domestication. The creation of any kind of relation to these bodies and the tangible and massive demand for that could materialise only through some kind of a surrogate. The role of this surrogate was fulfilled by the creation and perpetuation of the material frameworks of the individual worship and reverence due to every single soldier remembered and venerated for his heroic death. The war monuments supplied with the lists of the names of the dead soldiers served as a substitute for cemeteries, thus allowing for the individual mourning process. The mourning process could be carried out by occasionally visiting the monument as a “tomb” and attending the commemorative ceremonies habitually organised at the site.30 In light of Pierre Nora’s concept of “memory places” (lieux de mémoire), we may assign a different meaning to these monuments. According to the French

Experience and remembrance of World War I 25 historian, remembrance is never or seldom created solely on the basis of an experience in the 20th century. Thus “modern” man can no longer draw on his past experiences and those inherited only as it used to be the case in the past. Therefore he needs to create memorials artificially that – as signs representing the past in a way – are able to act as emphatic, special, evocative representations and compel individuals to commemorate the past. Thomas W. Laqueur termed this practice as a special manifestation of commemorative hypernominalism.31 During the cult of the dead of World War I, individual soldiers lost a lot of their individuality despite the fact that they were registered by their names in both private and public remembrance. Military cemeteries are perhaps the most salient examples of that. We cannot discuss here in detail how military cemeteries were distinguished from civilian cemeteries over the time and how; it suffices to note that as a result of a lengthy process, the latter also became independent from the space of church graveyards.32 We will highlight only a few of the specificities of military cemeteries. (1) The dead soldiers buried hastily, then definitively, found their eternal peace in the newly established military cemeteries that were systematically set up on or near the front areas, far from the birth places and places of residence of those killed in action.33 Consequently, most of the soldiers killed on the front were buried in “inimical,” or at least, foreign lands. Only those soldiers could be laid to rest in cemeteries close to their home who died after being injured or after their hospital treatment. The chances of the eventual repatriation of these corpses varied from country to country. After a certain degree of resistance, in September 1920, the French state authorised the operation (terminated in 1923) in the framework of which the corpses of approximately 300,000 soldiers were repatriated to be reburied at home. It should be noted, however, that a little more than 1,000,000 French soldiers lost their lives in the war, but there were only about 700,000 of them whose remains could be identified: 240,000 of them were repatriated at the state’s expense thanks to the previously stated operation.34 Apart from France, it was only the Italian authorities in 1921 that permitted the transportation of the corpses after exhumation and their reburial at home. As Antoine Prost has aptly remarked, the case of the hence “demobilised” corpses of the soldiers was a good illustration of how the public could phase into the private, the collective into the individual and the formal into the intimate.35 (2) In the military cemeteries created during World War I, a new pattern of burial was institutionalised (which had been common only in the United States, but unknown in Europe): the arrangement of uniform tombstones without distinctive features in a geometrical order. Military cemeteries as spatial forms differed radically from traditional, civilian cemeteries. The former were also distinctly set apart from the latter in their location, as a sort of indication that the civil population and the military population represented two different kinds of men even in their death, especially if it was a war that caused the massive death of the soldiers. All in all, the normal mourning process, which is conventionally enabled by visiting the cemetery and taking care of the tomb, was rendered virtually impossible in such circumstances. The military cemeteries created on the fronts were

26  The past as experience and memory usually very far from the places of residence of the relatives, so relatives could barely ever visit them, or not at all. From time to time, state-financed trips to the cemeteries (tourist programmes) were organised to counterbalance the difficulties due to the long distances, for which the United States was the best example. By organising so-called Golden Star pilgrimages for American mourners, the federal government made it possible to visit the tombs at least once.36 On the other hand, mourners from England would quite often make the trip to military cemeteries in Northern French and Belgian territories.37

War memory as a transnational phenomenon However, the various (belligerent) states of Europe are not entirely homogeneous regarding their war memory. All that has been stated previously holds true mostly or exclusively for Western Europe (and the United States and Australia), but it barely, or not at all, applies to Central and Eastern European countries. There is a spectacular difference in terms of style: whereas the majority of the Western monuments were characterised by restraint when it came to the exaltation of the national hero, the Eastern European practice followed a different path. Curiously, Western monuments were (also) erected by the authorities and local communities of the triumphant countries, whereas the latter were partly created in the losing countries. It is quite telling that the French call these memorials the “monuments to the dead” (monuments aux morts), which – unlike the ones in the past – express the need to remember the human lives sacrificed for the nation, instead of celebrating the military victory achieved in the war.38 It should be pointed out that the myriad of local war memorials erected as a result of their nearly serial production (in France, there are 30,000 of them) mostly capture soldiers in a standing position (not in motion), with their weapons resting by their legs, as passive figures even if they seek to achieve a dramatic effect. In other words, they aim at expressing grief instead of cherishing victory.39 The question is: why did this happen? According to the obvious explanation, it was the impact of the “cultural demobilisation” following the war that contributed to the fact that not even the remembrance of military sacrifice took place in the spirit of heroism. As a replacement of the ideological and mental (spiritual and intellectual, rational and emotional) state of war mobilisation, cultural demobilisation exchanged the former hegemony of the image of the enemy with the gestures of pacification and friendliness on both sides of the one-time war enemies. This process of cultural demobilisation was especially advanced in the triumphant Entente countries, though it did not become a majority force even before the 1930s. It is a fact that after the occupation of the Ruhr region (1923), France was overtaken by a sudden desire to make peace, which also attenuated the previously highly triumphant and combatant tone of the cultural representations (military monuments of the poilus). As John Horne also observes, this was the direct consequence of the following: “In the second half of the 1920s France underwent a veritable demobilization of its wartime cultures.”40 This was not the case in those Central and Eastern European countries that happened to gain their nation-state sovereignty as a result of the Paris peace treaties,

Experience and remembrance of World War I 27 e.g. Poland and Czechoslovakia. That is why Jay Winter’s observation regarding British veterans fails (he made it while examining the textual evidence of war memory), if we extend the question to Czech, Slovak and other East European veterans remembering the war. By writing their memoirs, the primary aim of the surviving soldiers of the victorious countries was to commemorate their comrades killed in action and also to relate the horrors of the war in their accounts. Equally importantly, they also expressed their guilty conscience for having stayed alive.41 Czech and Slovak veterans sometimes also recalled their memories related to their fallen comrades, but they barely ever talked about the horrors of the war. In contrast, they spoke at length about the sublime role that they fulfilled in the war for the sake of the creation of the new nation-state and society. The prolonged war caused British and French soldiers to lose their earlier illusions: they no longer thought that bloodshed made any sense. On the other hand, their Czech and Slovak fellow soldiers perceived these four years of war – in retrospect – as the fulfilment of their illusions.42 A similar conclusion has been reached by a scholar studying the Polish memory of the war when he examined the eventual fate of military cemeteries in Poland. With Piłsudski’s coming into power (1926), the state-level cult of the soldiers of the Polish legionary army as national heroes began. From then on, the tombs of “foreign” soldiers (not only Russians, but those of the Austro-Hungarian imperial and royal army as well) who had been killed and buried in Polish lands were neglected, if they were not eliminated at once. Of course, the population took everything of value from the tombs.43 If the soldier killed in the war did not contribute directly to the future glorious ascension of his nation by his death, the cult-like memory of the war did not and could not become a legitimate issue. After the war, Ireland was successful in fighting for its independence from England as a sovereign state, but this great achievement did not come about as a direct result of the Great War. Seen from the Irish national angle in retrospect, those Irish soldiers who had fought in the British army and died on the front were not worthy of the heroes’ rank because they sacrificed their lives for a British (colonial) cause alien to the Irish nation. Thus their death did not and could not have a special value with respect to the Irish national pathos. What is more, such spontaneous manifestations of collective remembrance were officially frowned upon. Naturally, the community of mourning still claimed its right to commemorate the fallen soldiers although it could not count on public support (from the state, the local authorities and public opinion) in this effort; on the contrary, it had to go against them and proceed in secret.44 It was only at the end of the 1990s that this nearly omnipresent amnesia started to ease in Ireland.45 And what about the German war memory? According to a popular contemporary German view, the country did not effectively suffer a military defeat in the Great War: it was in a different domain and in a different way that the country lost the war. This widespread idea was captured by the expression im Felde unbesiegt that served as the principal guarantee of keeping the German national identity safe. But if it was not in the battlefields that German military honour was lost,

28  The past as experience and memory what led to this ignominious end lacking any tragedy? It was the hinterland, especially the extreme left starting the revolution after the armistice and/or the Social Democratic Party forming a government after the war that stabbed the army in the back that had stood its ground on the front. After the war, the stab-in-the-back theory was the most obvious explanation for the defeat, especially on the political right. One more explanation was also offered; namely, that it was the Entente propaganda, more efficient than the German one, that led to Germany losing the war. To put it in a nutshell, contemporaries thought war defeat was not inherently linked with the loss of military honour, so in the eyes of posterity, German soldiers were and remained just as much heroes as the soldiers of the triumphant countries. According to the public opinion, the German army had not suffered a decisive defeat and its soldiers had sacrificed their lives for their homeland.46 Recent historical research has refuted the idea that the German war remembrance was completely homogeneous in the Weimar era. In the broad spectrum of veteran associations, pacifist and certainly non-militarist comrades’ organisations, close to the Social Democratic Party, had a non-negligible role and weight as well. War remembrance that may be called republican and which was, among others, kept alive by Reichsbanner founded in 1924 and other comrades’ associations of the kind, handed out harsh criticism to the army of the Wilhelmine Germany, and even condemned Germany’s role in the war and conducted a purely anti-militarist propaganda. German front soldiers remembering the war in this spirit categorically rejected the stab-in-the-back myth, and refrained from using the typically right-wing rhetoric of German self-pity, either. Thus the popular war memory of the Weimar period (nourished by the front soldiers) also shifted towards cultural demobilisation, and the German war remembrance before the 1930s was a phenomenon incomparably more pluralistic than what the following decade implied.47 The ascension into power of Hitler and the national socialists was accompanied by the euphoria of German rebirth, which was highly reminiscent of the enthusiasm of August 1914.48 From then on, the cult of the fallen German soldier was endowed with a new and vital (mobilising) meaning through the German renaissance and the renewed desire for revenge. Hitler, the former front soldier immediately occupied the place of the figure of the Unknown Soldier, which, by the way, had not even been set up in Germany, and which was now brought into life and personalised by Hitler himself. This soldier, however, was no longer lamenting over the miseries of the past, but looked ahead into a glorious future.49 All of the previously made statements are clearly reflected by German war monuments as well. The German army, which, according to the myth, had not suffered a decisive defeat in the battlefield, is represented idyllically in the soldier figures of the monuments of the 1920s as the embodiment of the purest military ethos (loyalty, obedience, self-sacrifice): the German warrior is shown as a hero, and not as a victim, who thus does merit the memorial of honour. On the other hand, the monuments erected in Nazi Germany are distinctive due their fierceness. Naturally, some monuments were also created in Germany in the spirit of self-restraint (prior to Hitler’s coming into power), of the kind that satisfied the elementary need for individual mourning in order to help the mourning process. The latter lacked

Experience and remembrance of World War I 29 any kind of militarist implication, of course. The best known artistic creation of all was a sculpture by Käthe Kollvitz (The Parents, Vladslo, Belgium, 1932), which was inspired by the death of Kollvitz’s son on the front in 1914.50

War memorials in Hungary Hungarian war remembrance was conditioned by circumstances in many respects similar to the ones in Germany. In Hungary it was also the erection of monuments that served as the most massive solution intertwined with the cult of the fallen soldier. This cult-like memory was also justified by the dimension of the (military) blood loss of the war, which has been discussed previously. It suffices to note here that more than half of the men conscripted during the war were killed, injured or captured (mostly by the Russians). The setting up of monuments began quite early on, in the first year of the war: the statue entitled Wehrmann im Eisen, called simply as the “Iron Soldier” in Hungarian, was inaugurated on 6 March 1915 in Schwarzenberg Square, Vienna. Budapest did not lag behind: the wooden sculpture entitled “National SelfSacrifice” and erected in front of the Anker House in Deák Square in the city centre was unveiled on 12 September of the same year. Pedestrians were allowed and even expected to drive a nail into this sculpture.51 The monument in question, along with many others, did not yet serve the cult of the fallen soldier, but of the fearless warrior: it enthused instead of facilitated the mourning process. However, the increasingly blatant fact of massive death on the fronts inspired quick changes within less than 18 months. As a sign of that, Act VIII of 1917 stated that the soldiers of the belligerent army “honoured their duties faithfully” and as such, they merited “the uniform and grateful recognition of the nation.” Therefore the legislation obliged settlements (towns), in proportion to their financial possibilities, to “eternalise the names of all those who died among the inhabitants of the settlement on a worthy monument (sic!).” The first monument was inaugurated in November 1917 in Hatvan as a result of a series of civil society efforts. In the following 20 years, there were 1100 World War I memorials erected all over the country. With time, the state also embraced the movement, enshrining the obligatory commemoration of the memory of the dead heroes in a law. Several years after the war it also declared the Commemoration of the Heroes a national holiday (Act XIV of 1924).52 According to the data of Ákos Kovács, from the breakout of the war till the middle of the 1980s, “there were more than two thousand statues, commemorative plaques and various occasional constructions set up in the country” in relation to World War I.53 We could also mention the different exhibitions or the foundation of the museum of military history; the latter also emerged as a result of the cult of the war.54

Propaganda and tribute function Up to this day, something is missing from the historical literature dealing with the Hungarian monuments of World War I: the recognition that these public

30  The past as experience and memory representations simultaneously served the grief of the relatives and the political regime of the Horthy era when they expressed some sort of a political message. The historiographical approach still dominant today claims that of individual grief (personal remembrance) and community commemoration, “the dominant element was community commemoration, of course.”55 This view was originally put forward by Miklós Szabó who referred to the Hungarian war monuments en bloc as both evoking and invigorating the nationalist vision of Hungarian history.56 Szabó asserted that the formal (aesthetic) elements belonging to the array of symbols of “national mythology” that were used on the monuments were widespread and that they were recurrent on several hundreds of war memorials. In fact, this suggestion is far from being true. For we know it with certainty that out of 10 Hungarian war memorial types, only two exemplify such powerful nationalisation of war remembrance, i.e. the overt cult of heroism that relies heavily on the allegories of the historical-national mythology. These two types of monuments take us back into the times of the Conquest of the Carpathian Basin: on one of them, the Turul bird takes the central place while the other sculpture represents an imaginary ancient Hungarian warrior reminiscent of Chieftain Árpád. Nonetheless, another type of monument is much more common, i.e. the one that (also) induces the mourning process as its main objective, and in order to do that, it uses the death of the hero, the mourning soldier, the Hungarian family or the religious allegory of motherly grief as its leitmotif.57 It should be noted that the previously described typology applies only to those 500 statues that make up the substantial minority of about 2,000 war memorials established between 1914 and the 1990s. Thus nothing justifies the claim that the dominant motif of Hungarian war monuments is political symbolisation and especially national mythologisation since only a small portion of figurative war monuments erected in public spaces seems to prove that. Let alone those monuments that bear inscriptions, which, besides sculptures, also carry a message, but these monuments have not been the subject of systematic research at all. The function of paying tribute to the dead is just as emphatic an element of this commemorative practice as overt political agitation. To cite art historian Márta Kovalovszky’s observation, “the underlying motivation of the many similar ‘artistic’ conceptions following an identical pattern is the argument that every victim of the war is entitled to have a commemorative mark (because they ‘deserve’ it). From this point, it is a small and logical step to believe that monuments are a sort of tribute allotment, and they are slowly degraded into a service.”58 Moreover, it can be observed in relation to war memorials charged with historical allusions that these two efforts merge and mix with each other, especially in the 1920s. “Ever since its emergence, the entire earlier history of Hungarian monument sculpture was stamped by the idea that ‘the old glory’, ‘ancestors and heroes’ should be set before the nation as role models and as an encouragement for the future. . . . Although the figures of the ancient Hungarian legends made their reappearance on world war monuments created in the 1920s, times had changed, and their role and significance were also different. These statues were erected by a losing country, which now sought to mute its doubts

Experience and remembrance of World War I 31 and bitter experiences, heal its wounds and justify its right to exist as well as its Hungarianness by evoking this history.”59 When these popular aesthetic forms of expression are widely used with the purpose of reconsidering the national past, they can soothe the impact of the recent experiences frustrating the national community. Nevertheless, all of the previously made statements do not exclude the possibility that these monuments (or their majority) could facilitate the experience of personal grief and aid the mourning process. Their aesthetic conservatism (most of all, the overwhelming use of neoclassicism and the other historicising aesthetic forms) also greatly contributed to fulfil this “hidden” function, which also imbued the global practice of the erection of war monuments. For by sticking to the ground of aesthetic conservatism, it is easier to achieve the desired impact on the recipients’ side that may lead to a more profound experience of grief by appealing to personal emotions. In contrast to that, unusual and thus “incomprehensible” artistic creations or other public representations may prove to be a major obstacle to that process. To paraphrase Jay Winter, it was quintessential that traditional and conservative aesthetic forms be maintained unaltered in order to trigger the genuine feeling of grief.60 This also goes to show that the emotions of grief, tribute and gratitude of the individual and the micro-community (family, kins and the neighbourhood) and social expectations pointing in that direction affected the artists (and commissioners) of the monuments just as much as those nationalist political intentions that wished to assign an overtly propagandistic role to war monuments, and for that they often borrowed decorative motifs from the array of symbols of national mythology. It was these two separate efforts of authorities and individuals that created in symbiosis the simultaneously communal and individualistic aura of war monuments. By examining the works of one of the most productive Hungarian monument sculptors of World War I, Zsigmond Strobl Kisfaludi (1884–1975),61 it can be observed that, even within the serially produced war monuments of the same artist, artistic creations expressing a feeling of tribute, facilitating the mourning process and using political symbols with a national propagandistic purpose were in alternation. The reason for that is simple: the artist carved into stone whatever was necessary in the given case, what the commission was about, especially if the given artist conceived of his or her own profession in such a lucrative spirit as Zsigmond Strobl Kisfaludi.62

The written documents of the mourning process Unfortunately, we still know very little about the social (individual, local) use of war monuments and the emotions and attitudes attached to them. What we can learn about the mourning process mostly comes from the corpuses of narrative textual sources (private correspondence, diaries and memoirs). We will now turn to them to offer a factual piece of evidence of the contemporary significance of private grief framing the memory of the fallen soldier. As demonstrated plastically by the following short extract from a peasant’s recollection, the death of a soldier on the front had a traumatising effect on the

32  The past as experience and memory widow: “Poor Etel was struck down by tremendous grief. Not only her husband was killed, but her brother, Józsi also fell victim to an explosion in 1917. She knew that they were no longer alive, but when she saw that others came home while those that she had loved the most were lost, she could not stop weeping for them. On many a sleepless night she would cry into her tear-soaked pillow; her painful tears turned the widow’s bread all salty. Kind words were all in vain; nothing could console her aching heart.”63 A conspicuous feature of death on the front is that it takes place in the complete solitude of the moribund, and no family member or close relative is present. Thus the bereavement of the relatives is not attenuated by having been witness to the dying of the person or by taking part actively in the funeral rituals. This is why the pressing questions of “how did he die” and “how much did he suffer” were always among the main concerns of the relatives, who could only be informed about the details of the death and dying of their beloved ones from second hand sources (comrades). Let us quote one example of the many: “Suddenly he felt an unusually hard blow in his chest on the right – he thought his weapon had sprung back. His right hand was also bleeding. He looked for bandage in his bag before falling unconscious.”64 And when the stretcher-bearers appeared, “they saw that our hero had been shot in the lungs, so they lay him among the dead. His comrades forwarded the news of his death almost immediately, which then arrived in Cegléd.”65 From the perspective of the mourning process, it is important from whom and how the relatives are informed about the death of the beloved person.66 The latter is convincingly illustrated by the following extract from a letter written by a Transylvanian war widow in November 1915, who, more than a year after her husband died on the front, was inquiring from her own brother about the circumstances of her husband’s death. A quote from the letter: “Give me advice what I should do and how I should do it, how I should raise my four orphan children. I have no one left, I am and will be an orphan till I die. Because all my hopes were lost in the battlefield, I beg you, dear brother, to ask János Barta if he had seen him for sure for András Bodor told me that he and János crawled on their stomach for half a kilometre when they found Péter [the husband] dead. . . . But do ask him, I beg you, dear brother, how my good master, this good child and loving father died. Alas, I cannot put into words my tremendous heartache, but do ask him where he had found him, if he had suffered for long. Write all to me as it is, for I know very well that I have no longer a master, but please do not forget to do that, write to me as János recounts it because this is always on my mind if he had been hit by a cannon, or how did he die? At least, inform me where he was found, I pray, dear brother. They said that János Szász from Abásfalva also saw Péter dead, he is there, too, if you should see him, ask him whether he had seen him indeed. It is rumoured that these people had seen him, but no one has written to me about it, but I know very well that he is not alive.”67 The fact of death was not always communicated and confirmed to the relatives in due time. The official communication (confirmation) of front death was the duty of the “correspondence bureau” of the Red Cross: this activity of the

Experience and remembrance of World War I 33 organisation was authorised by ministerial decree n. 61.265/1914. The Red Cross notified those left behind on a postcard created especially for that purpose. After receiving this notification, the relatives could no longer hope that the person was still alive, that he was only captured, or injured and being treated in a hospital somewhere. However, the official confirmation of death usually took place much later than the person actually died: as we have seen previously, the comrades had already informed the parents and/or the wife and family of the fallen soldier. This delay would sometimes take several months. In the meantime, the relatives would often receive contradictory news about the fate of their beloved one. In order to reduce or end this uncertainty, every now and then relatives would initiate this process to retrieve confirmed information. The following story presents such a case, which recounts the story of Benedek Bodor, the dead hero from Esztelnek (now Estelnic in Romania) in Szekler Land, the confirmation of his death and its lengthy procedure. The story begins when a former classmate and friend of Bodor’s writes to the parents that their son died in combat on 5 June 1915. His letter is dated 6 June. However, the parents did not accept the news of their son’s death. Moreover, there was some gossip about his being captured “only” although the letters of two other comrades also confirmed the fact of their son’s death and even described its circumstances in detail. These letters were written in July, and the parents received them in the same month. In one of the letters, Benedek’s comrade designated a place in Galicia as the exact location where the soldier had died. There were, however, other pieces of information, also provided to the parents by soldiers, which contradicted that. Thus there was a total information chaos, and the parents were still hoping for the truthfulness of more favourable news. But they could only count on learning the truth from the official notification. During the summer the Hungarian Red Cross could not provide any confirmed information regarding this case, and it was only at the end of September that it notified the parents of their son’s heroic death in June. It is unknown when the Red Cross’s notification reached the parents because on 10 October, they once again submitted a request to the general headquarters to be informed about the actual fate of their son. Finally, a letter dated 15 October was delivered by post at the address of the municipal council of Esztelnek (the letter was sent by the 24th Infantry Regiment of Brassó [now Braşov, Romania]) and commissioned it to notify the relatives of the news of the son’s death. This final notification was also a reply to the mother’s inquiry. Thus ended the four-month-long waiting period full of despair and hope, spent in complete uncertainty regarding Benedek Bodor’s fate on the front on 5 June 1915.68 The later course of the widows’ life and the constant fragility of the singleparent families’ place and position in society rendered the one-time war death unforgettable for all those concerned. Let us quote some relevant lines from a war widow’s memoirs: “I had no other choice than to stay in my father-in-law’s house and help them run the farm. Now we were joined by our common grief and the little one. We lived together for four years.”69

34  The past as experience and memory It goes without saying that the solidarity and bereavement of comrades was and remained vigorous and vital as well. This phenomenon is demonstrated by the following excerpt from the (unsent) letter of a former soldier who had served on the front. In this letter, the author meditates on the sorrow of widows: “And then those dear postcards stop coming. A month goes by, then another one, and the person who has disappeared still gives no sign of life. How could he, the poor thing? For he had been resting in eternal peace for long. The poor woman weeps no more, it would be all in vain. It is only when she recalls her memories from the past that it hurts; when she thinks back to that blissful spring when the man who is no longer alive was still his.”70 And what happened to the individual memories of the veterans having survived the war? There has been regrettably little research conducted on this subject, and even that pertained mainly to the elite culture, putting the literary self-representation of the “lost generation” at the forefront.71 The known data suggest that this sort of personal remembrance of the war belongs to the domain of traumatic memory. The latter is also confirmed by the fact that the kind of discourse that compels someone to relive incessantly the shocking events of the past is often characterised by a lack of linear presentation and clear-cut stories. Its principal feature is that only certain episodes are recounted by the narrators over and over under the pretext of storytelling, and the original context is never presented. The narrator recalling the events is adamant on repeatedly and continuously sharing the same memories (mostly earlier visual impressions) that were unforgettable (elementarily shocking) for him.72 Nearly every soldier who has fought on the front is permanently haunted by the incessant traumatic memory of the war, which is attested by a host of diaries and memoirs.73 But this would take us into the domain of world war remembrance manifested in a textual form, which we cannot discuss here in detail.

Conclusion Both the experience and the memory of the Great War had a long-lasting and deep influence on Hungary’s history, which took a fundamentally new path as a result of the eclipse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and the Peace Treaty of Paris of 1920. The many consequences of both of them may be detected either in the enhanced importance that the extreme social inequalities and disparities had in the interwar period, or the traumatic experience caused by the drastically reduced territory of the country. The latter manifested itself explicitly in the so-called Trianon discourse and collective memory. Similarly traumatic has been the experience gained by many as a result of the Jewish persecution and discrimination in the interwar period and beyond (in the 1940s), and also the experiences provided for a great part of society by the Communist rule in the post-war decades. They all seem to have been decisive in informing, shaping and even guiding the course of events that happened in Hungary since at least 1920. In trying to have a better understanding of Hungary’s 20th-, and 21st-century history, one has to reveal the main characteristics of all of these “hot histories.” The following chapters are

Experience and remembrance of World War I 35 therefore intended to give some insight both into the experiential base and the memory of the “basic facts” of that particular national history.

Notes 1 Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 1. 2 Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane – Annette Becker, 1914–1918. Understanding the Great War, trans. Catherine Temersion. London: Profile Books, 2002. 174. 3 Mosse, George. Fallen Soldier. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. 46–50, 74, 85, 90, 92. 4 Koselleck, Reinhart. “War Memorials. Identity Formations of the Survivors,” in The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Presner. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. 291. 5 Koselleck, “War Memorials,” 291, 309–310. 6 The notion of the community of mourning was introduced by Winter. Winter, Sites of Memory, 6. 7 Mosse, Fallen Soldier, 36–38, 49. 8 Koselleck, “War Memorials,” 314, 320. 9 This is only an approximate figure. It is virtually impossible to calculate the exact number of the soldiers killed in the war. See Prost, Antoine. “The Dead,” in The Cambridge History of the First World War. Vol III. Civil Society, edited by Jay Winter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 563–567, 587–588. 10 Kiss, Gábor. “Az I. világháború veszteségi adatainak kezelése a világháborútól napjainkig,” Levéltári Szemle, 64, 4 (2014) 52. Moreover, 743,000 injured and 734,000 prisoners of war (many of them dead). 11 Winter, Sites of Memory, 46–47. 12 Audoin-Rouzeau – Becker, 1914–1918, 212. 13 Horne, John. “The Living,” in Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History, 595. 14 Prost, “The Dead,” 567–586. 15 Audoin-Rouzeau – Annette Becker, 1914–1918, 219; Also Winter, Sites of Memory, 95–97. 16 Mosse, Fallen Soldier, 47. 17 Koselleck, “War Memorials,” 302; Scates, Bruce – Rebecca Wheatley, “War Memorials,” in Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History, 553. 18 Koselleck stresses explicitly that the meaning comprised by war memorials is tied to a specific time and a specific age (context). Koselleck, “War Memorials,” 324–325. A similar observation is made by Scates – Wheatley, “War Memorials,” 554–556. 19 Winter, Sites of Memory, 79. 20 Scates – Wheatley, “War Memorials,” 529. 21 Audoin-Rouzeau – Becker, 1914–1918, 185; moreover, Koselleck, “War Memorials,” 311. 22 Koselleck, “War Memorials,” 299. 23 Audoin-Rouzeau – Becker, 1914–1918, 188. 24 The creation of cemeteries wore on: concentration was still going in the 1920s due to the reburial of previously unidentified corpses. Prost, “The Dead,” 576–583. 25 Prost, “The Dead,” 578. 26 Koselleck, “War Memorials,” 319. A similar claim is made by Scates – Wheatley, “War Memorials,” 552. 27 Koselleck, “War Memorials,” 319–320; Prost, “The Dead,” 568–570; Stencinger, Norbert  – Tamás Pintér  – János Rózsafi, “Első világháborús magyar katonatemetők kutatása a Doberdó-fennsíkon,” in Hőseink nyomában. Tanulmánykötet a hadisírok kutatásáról, edited by Zsolt Tóth. Budapest: Zrínyi, 2014. 94, 109.

36  The past as experience and memory 28 Koselleck, “War Memorials,” 317. The first two monuments of the type “The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier” were inaugurated in November 1920 (in Paris and London), then the other European and overseas capitals followed in line (Washington, Rome, Brussels, Prague, Belgrade, Warsaw and Athens). Budapest followed their example with a bit of a delay in 1929. However, no such monument has ever been erected in Berlin. Audoin-Rouzeau – Becker, 1914–1918, 196–200; Mosse, Fallen Soldier, 97–98; Ziemann, Contested Commemorations. Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 165–167, 169–171, 192–197. 29 The Tomb in London is empty. Winter, Sites of Memory, 104. 30 Sherman, Daniel J. “Art, Commerce, and the Production of Memory in France after World War I,” in Commemorations. The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. 189; Kaiser, Stephanie – Jens Lohmeier, “Mourning Aachen’s War Dead: Cultures of Memory during the First World War and the Postwar Period,” in Remembrance and Solidarity. Studies in 20th Century European History, no. 2. First World War Centenary. Warszawa: European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, 2014. 270; Damousi, Joy. “Mourning Practices,” in Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History, 358–384. 31 Laqueur, Thomas W. “Memory and Naming in the Great War,” in Gillis (ed.), Commemorations. 160. The described line of thought owes a lot to Laqueur’s argumentations. For Pierre Nora’s approach, see Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7–24. 32 For more details, see Mosse, Fallen Soldier, 38–44. 33 This topic is discussed in depth by Prost, “The Dead,” 568–586. 34 Winter, Sites of Memory, 26; Prost, “The Dead,” 576. 35 Prost, “The Dead,” 576. 36 Piehler, “The War Dead,” 175–181. 37 Winter, Sites of Memory, 52. 38 Sherman, “Art, Commerce,” 189. 39 Scates – Wheatley, “War Memorials,” 540. 40 Horne, John. “Demobilizing the Mind: France and the Legacy of the Great War, 1919– 1939,” French History and Civilization, 2 (2009) 107. In this important paper of his, Horne offers an elaboration of the notion of cultural demobilisation and presents the limitations of its implementation as well. 41 Note: such a well-known (commemorative) war novel as the fiction entitled All Quiet on the Western Front by the German Erich Maria Remarque also relates the events of the war in a tone characteristic of the former soldiers of the Western (Entente) states. This, of course, has major repercussions in the public (political) discourse of the Weimar left-wing (pacifist) German war remembrance. See Ziemann, Contested Commemorations, especially 246–254. 42 Kapfl, “Sites of Memory, Sites of Rejoicing, the Great War in Czech and Slovak Cultural History,” in Remembrance and Solidarity, 131, 138. 43 Pałosz, Jerzy. “The Military Cemetery as a Form of the Cult of the Fallen Soldier: The History of the Idea and Its Destruction on the Example of Austro-Hungarian Cemeteries in ‘Russian Poland’,” in Remembrance and Solidarity. Studies in 20th Century European History, no. 2. First World War Centenary. Warszawa: European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, 2014. 314–317. A more recent contribution to enriching the historical knowledge in the field. Cornwall – Newman (eds.), Sacrifice and Rebirth. 44 Townsley, Mandy. “Neither for King, Nor Empire: Irish Remembrance of the Great War in the 1920s,” in Remembrance and Solidarity. Studies in 20th Century European History, no 2. First World War Centenary. Warszawa: European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, 2014. 147–168. 45 Horne, John. “Our War, Our Century,” in Our War, Ireland and the Great War, edited by John Horne. Dublin: RTE and Royal Irish Academy, 2008. 3.

Experience and remembrance of World War I 37 46 Koselleck, “War Memorials,” 297–298; Schievelbusch, Wolfgang. The Culture of Defeat. On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, trans. Jefferson Chase. London: Granta Books, 2001. 189–234. 47 This is Ziemann’s principal argument. Ziemann, Contested Commemorations, 246– 254. The author also adopts the notion of the appearance of cultural demobilisation as a process in Germany. Ibid., 154, 268. At the same time, he implicitly refutes Horne’s suggestion that German veteran organisations would have completely refused to join in French pacifist initiatives. It is worth noting that the Italian war memory of the early 1920s was similar to the German one in terms of its deep internal dividedness. In Italy there was almost a struggle over the issue of erecting any war monuments before Mussolini had come to power. Foot. Italy’s Divided, 31–53. 48 See Fritzsche, Peter. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. 38–56. 49 Schievelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, 239–240. 50 Winter, Sites of Memory, 108–114; Kaiser – Lohmeier, “Mourning Aachen’s War Dead,” 257–278; Bremen, Benedict von. “Warriors and Victims: Commemorating War on the Stadtfriedhof Tübingen – A Local-National Perspective,” in Remembrance and Solidarity. Studies in 20th Century European History, no 2. Warszawa: First World War Centenary, European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, 2014. 229–256. 51 Szabó, Dánial.“A nemzeti áldozatkészség szobra (avagy fából vaskarika),” Budapesti Negyed, 3 (Tavasz 1994) 59. 52 Kovács, Ákos. “Emeljünk emlékszobrot hőseinknek!’,” in Monumentumok az első háborúból, edited by Ákos Kovács. Budapest: Corvina, 1991. 109–111, 116–117. 53 Kovács, “Emeljünk emlékszobrot.” 118. 54 Ságvári, György. “Tárgyiasult emlékezet – emlékművek, múzeumok a nagy háborúról (2005),” in Az első világháború, edited by Dániel Szabó. Budapest: Osiris, 2009. esp. 798–814. 55 Ságvári, “Tárgyiasult emlékezet,” 793. Italics not in the original. 56 Szabó, Miklós. “A magyar történeti mitológia az első világháborús emlékműveken,” in Kovács (ed.), Monumentumok az első, 46–63. 57 Nagy, Ildikó. “Első világháborús. Esemény- és ideológiatörténet,” in Kovács (ed.), Monumentumok az első, 126, 128. 58 Kovalovszky, Márta. “Kegyeletszolgáltatás,” in Kovács (ed.), Monumentumok az első, 93. 59 Kovalovszky, “Kegyeletszolgáltatás,” 99. 60 Winter, Sites of Memory, 8. Based on that, Winter disputes the view originating from Fussel, but shared by many for a long time that the commemorative culture of the World War I – also in terms of its formal representations – would have been interpreted as modern or an expression of modern mentality. See Fussell, The Great War. 61 Sixteen or 17 monument sculptures set up in a public space are known from Zsigmond Strobl Kisfaludi. 62 Wehner, “Emlékműsablonok. Kisfaludi Strobl Zsigmond első világháborús monumentumai,” Tiszatáj, LXVIII, 7 (2014). 110–120. 63 Keskeny, Józsefné Kovács Veron. “Életem története,” in Csongrádi szegényasszonyok. Két önéletrajzi írás a 30-as évekből (together with Istvánné Túri (Cseh Viktória). Szeged: Tiszatáj – Magvető, 1967. 378. 64 Kósa, “Az első világháború emlékezete a családi hagyományban,” in Sorsok, frontok, eszmék. Tanulmányok az első világháború 100. évfordulójára, edited by István Majoros. Budapest: ELTE BTK, 2015. 705. 65 Kósa, “Az első világháború,” 706. In fact, our “hero” did not die, but survived and because of his injury, he could leave the front once and for all. 66 See Prost, “The Dead,” 567–568. 67 Oláh, “A Nagy Háború alulnézetből,” Székelyföld, XVIII, 7 (2014) 62–63.

38  The past as experience and memory 68 Dimény-Haszmann, “Írott emlékek az első világháborúból,” in Beavatás. Tanulmányok a zabolai Fiatal Néprajzkutatók Szemináriumainak anyagából (2008–2011), edited by István Kinda. Kolozsvár – Zabola: Kriza János Néprajzi Társaság – Csángó Néprajzi Múzeum, 2011. 217–219, 229–234. 69 Szenti, Tibor. Vér és pezsgő. Harctéri naplók, visszaemlékezések, frontversek, tábori és családi levelek az első világháborúból. Budapest: Magvető, 1988. 349–350. 70 Szenti, Vér és pezsgő, 357. 71 One of the exceptions is Ziemann, Contested Commemorations, passim. 72 Winter, Jay. “Generations of Memory. Grief, Irony, and Trauma in Britain since the Great War,” in Arbeit am Gedächtnis. Für Aleida Assmann, edited by Frank C. Michael – Gabriele Rippl. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007. 171–175. 73 For a case study, see Gyáni, “Az első világháború és a paraszti emlékezet,” in Az elveszíthető múlt. A  tapasztalat mint emlékezet és történelem. Budapest: Nyitott Könyvműhely, 2010. 294–303.

2 Image and reality of a divided country

How were fundamental social differences expressed in both real life and in the contemporary social imaginary from the late nineteenth to the mid-20th century? Here image (historical experience) and “reality” (“historian’s knowledge”) partly coincide and partly diverge. In two steps I show the significant role played by the awareness of a huge contrast between the city and the countryside, between rural peasant and urban bourgeois milieus, in the life of a modernising country. After discussing the conceptual history of the modernisation process in Hungary, I turn to the spread of the one-child system, which was for many an excuse to condemn the modern bourgeois spirit held responsible for this demographic behaviour. In order to demonstrate the profound effect rapid urbanisation had on the real and symbolic processes of social polarisation, I will focus on the metropolitan development of Budapest and some reactions to it.

The discourse on modernisation/embourgeoisement The bourgeois development of Hungary went through several phases, repeating in a short time the development patterns of the West. It entailed firstly a fundamental legal transformation, which amounted to the creation of bourgeois property rights. It also entailed the emergence of a market economy and the declaration of the legal equality of all citizens (including the emancipation of the Jews). This process was complemented by the formation of the liberal constitutional government (in 1867) based on voting rights that were restricted to a small, mainly propertied elite and the more well-to-do strata, the middle and even the lower middle classes of society. It all began in the 1830s with István Széchenyi’s initiation of modernising the country. In the beginning, this necessitated a decidedly cultural (educational) embourgeoisement (polgárosodás), since according to Count Széchenyi, public culture and reason would be the basis for the happiness and welfare of all members of the nation.1 His programme was soon completed by the legal emancipation of the serfs, the so-called urbarial peasants, subordinated to the rule and even the legal authority of the nobility. In addition to personal freedom, they were granted full ownership of the lands they had previously cultivated. In 1833 Lajos Kossuth asked: “may one allege without any partiality in the nineteenth century that there is no need to

40  The past as experience and memory change and improve a constitution that preserves both property rights and ancient traditions, and in which out of ten million people, no more than sixty thousand are considered to belong to the nation?”2 The bourgeois transformation project reached a critical phase in 1848 when the political efforts to establish unrestricted bourgeois property rights and their concomitants finally bore fruit. Following the defeat in the 1848/49 War of Independence some, though not all, of these rights were strengthened amidst the context of Habsburg neo-absolutism. The word embourgeoisement, which was used to describe modernisation, emerged as a neologism at that time. It was first used by the poet János Vajda in the 1860s. In Hungary, Vajda wrote in a pamphlet published in 1862, the term civilisation (civilizálódás) had become fashionable, but it was only Hungarian that had such a definitive and all-encompassing word for it – embourgeoisement (its German equivalent has been Verbürgerlichung). At the same time, Vajda invested the expression with a somewhat broader meaning. In most cases, he argued, civilisation meant education, but education was not always equivalent to embourgeoisement. Thus, he too stressed the sanctity of property rights, the cult of work and, not least, the rule of law and the triumph of individual achievement over birth and hereditary status.3 Around the time of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise (Settlement), in the late 1860s and early 1870s, the basic legal institutions that would later provide the framework for a capitalist transformation already existed. This transformation gained pace in the context of industrialisation, which began in the 1880s. When the Habsburg Monarchy collapsed in the aftermath of World War I, the country was still in the midst of a process of westernisation. The question is, however, whether the process of embourgeoisement in Hungary, that of becoming a capitalist or bourgeois society, was successful or not. Opinions are divided on the matter. Those who claim that the process was incomplete have always been the loudest. They argue that the survival of several “feudal remnants” was integral to Hungarian capitalist development. They thus create the impression of an incomplete bourgeois development by using the feudalisation thesis to explain many aspects of modern Hungary’s historical development. The main representative of this point of view in contemporary Hungarian historiography was Péter Hanák (1921–1997). He painted a picture of a polarised society, with the old Hungarian estate-based class, including the aristocracy and descendants of the bene posessionati (middle-sized nobility), on the one side, and an emergent bourgeois society with an haute-bourgeoisie and an enterpreneurial middle class on the other side. The conversion of the nobility into a middle class in the 19th-century capitalist society was, Hanák argued, characterised by the survival of the modes of behaviour and the value system typical of the landed nobility, the “gentry.” In Hanák’s view, this resulted in the gentrification of elements that should really be regarded as “bürgerlich.” Hanák described how an extensive salaried class emerged as the state bureaucracy absorbed elements of the economically declining nobility. These were soon to form the core of a decidedly gentlemanly middle class that was recognised as such even by contemporaries.

Image and reality of a divided country 41 These deficiences in the formation of the middle class were exacerbated, Hanák maintained, by the fact that large parts of the new entrepreneurial and professional class were not ethnically Hungarian (Magyar), since they had been recruited from a rapidly assimilating Jewish population, the domestic German population, and other immigrants. However, their gradual integration into modernising Hungarian society was not seamless and they continued to occupy an inferior position, both politically and culturally.4 The view has been challenged by several scholars investigating the social history of both state bureaucracy and of the middle classes of a more bourgeois type. In the late 1980s György Ránki (1930–1988) already argued along these lines in his contribution to an edited volume on the 19th-century European bourgeoisie. “Even if all of these non-Jewish bourgeois officials and intellectuals,” Ránki wrote, “lacked the appropriate ‘bourgeois ethos’, they cannot be left out of any structural analysis of the Hungarian Bürgertum.”5 Ránki’s still very tentative claim has since been vindicated by much new empirical evidence. It was revealed that the salaried classes were by no means completely dominated by descendants of the former nobility, the gentry. Both central government bureaucracy (the ministries) and the officer-corps of the army seemed open (to a changing degree) to the sons of truly bourgeois groups. This lends credence to the assumption that these two segments of the middle class, although more or less dependent on the state, were demonstrably closer to bourgeois elements than they were to the once-privileged landed gentry. The statistical analysis of movement into the ranks of various professional groups underlines the significant role played by the Bürgertum in shaping the social profile and the outlook of the urban middle classes.6 If we examine not just the salaried classes employed by the state and the local (county) authorities but also the other half of the middle class, the Bürgertum, we are forced to revise established ideas about the emergence of the middle classes (embourgeoisement) in Hungary. In particular, today’s disputes over Jewish embourgeoisement and assimilation explore the many internal contradictions and the inadaptability of the dual structure concept that underlies these ideas. This concept was first elaborated on by Ferenc Erdei (1910–1971) in the 1940s when he argued for a clear division of Hungarian society into two opposing structures. Erdei called the first of these co-existing structures “historical national” society and the second “modern bourgeois” society. Each of the two parallel and coexisting structures constituted a more or less discrete entity, with an elite, a middle class and a lower class. As Erdei saw it, only the working class (the industrial proletariat), which formed Hungary’s lower classes in the first part of the 20th century, had no counterpart on the “historical national” side. In his scheme, the peasantry constituted a third, feudal-like society below both the historicalnational and modern bourgeois societies. In the modern bourgeois society, the elite and the middle class did not emerge from the traditional Hungarian elite and middle class (the former nobility), but mostly from recent immigrants, including Jews from the western and eastern provinces of the Habsburg Empire, Germans and other ethnic groups. Erdei suggested that business was a way of life for Jews

42  The past as experience and memory and they had made middle-class and professional careers for themselves within the framework of enterprise.7 In the last few decades, however, the feudalisation thesis has been challenged by a new concept, which is informed mostly by social history. Sometimes labelled revisionists, its proponents, György Kövér and Gábor Gyáni, raise serious objections to the historicised image of fin-de-siécle Hungary, where feudal atttributes are alleged to have prevailed. Based on growing empirical evidence, these historians reject the idea that a dual society separated from each other to such an extent existed at that time (or even afterwards) in Hungary, represented on the one hand by a backward, traditional and ethnically Hungarian (Magyar) society dominated by the Christian aristocracy and the salaried middle class – the gentry per se – and a modern, progressive, Jewish-dominated bourgeois society on the other hand.8 The debate, however, is ongoing, as seen in the latest reaction to the “revisionist” view discussed before. Describing the protracted disputes over the feudalisation thesis in relation to Hungary’s road to modernity, Balázs A. Szelényi finally concludes that, “there was . . . a duality to Hungary’s middle class which also had an ethnic base. But this duality between the Gentleman Christian middle class – as it was called – and the liberal Jewish middle class did not represent a struggle between a backward, feudal force on the one hand and a progressive, modernizing one on the other. Both segments of Hungary’s ethnically fragmented bourgeoisie were modern, but they were traveling on very different trajectories.”9 When describing and assessing Hungary’s modernisation process, it is useful to look at the social imaginary and the social history dimensions. Here, however, the retrospective view demands analytical criteria with which to assess and interpret the past. In the case of the social imaginary, both description and analysis should remain close to the primary context of past events. So, what one identifies as understandings of polemics and fantasies about the former social world, reflects the perceptions, rationalisations and experiences that informed the everyday acts of historical actors.10 However, the hierarchy of multiple social positions constituted by wealth, status and power, and the social practices subsumed under the category of social history, cannot always be reconstructed with reference to contemporary (mental) perspectives.

The demographic transition and the urban-rural divide Before discussing the various aspects of the disjunction between social reality and the social imaginary in interwar Hungary, some basic facts should be mentioned. The country suffered huge demographic and territorial losses due to the redrawing of the borders dictated by the Treaty of Trianon. This amounted to a loss of 71% of Hungary’s territory, with a corresponding loss of 64% of her population. This drastic demographic change fuelled great anxiety about the gradual depopulation of the country. From the beginning of the 1920s, the spread of the one-child system, common not only among the urban middle classes and the elites but also among the rural peasantry in particular regions, stirred passionate debates in Hungary. Discussions of the one-child system portrayed the decrease

Image and reality of a divided country 43 in population as the “fate of the nation” and suggested that it signalled the coming death of the nation. More than the birth control practiced by many members of the urban middle and upper classes, it was that practiced by sections of the peasantry that prompted such a bleak view. Populist writers (népi írók) concerned with village life (Lajos Fülep, János Kodolányi, Gyula Illyés) attributed the same social importance as they did to the unfair distribution of land.11 A way of life pursued by some peasant communities was now being approached from a purely nationalist viewpoint. The many facts on the birth control practices of the urban (middle-class) population prompted much less public anxiety, because urban dwellers were not seen to represent the true Hungarian (Magyar) nation. This belief was based on the fact that a large part of the middle-class population in Budapest and many other provincial cities (especially those beyond the Great Plain) comprised recently assimilated Jews, Germans and other nonMagyars. This created the impression that the contemporary urban population was not truly Hungarian. By contrast, the peasantry, which had also begun to practice artificial birth control extensively, represented for many the biological foundation of an ethnically Magyar population. However, public discourse on the one-child system was not a true reflection of Hungary’s contemporary social and demographic development. One may refer here to the overall process of demographic transition, which peaked in Hungary in the late 19th century and early 20th century and came to a standstill in the interwar period.12 This ultimately led to a drastic reduction in fertility rates in the early 1930s, at a moment when the populist writers were paying greater attention to these demographic issues.13 The social imaginary of the time believed that the one-child system adopted by the peasantry was proof of the decay of the nation. This was contradicted by the scholarly view that the changes in Hungarian society were in fact part of a European-wide modernisation process. It is thus not surprising that the negative assessment of the peasants’ “modern” demographic behaviour was linked to an anti-Western, anti-liberal attitude. The change in the image of the West was partly due to Hungary’s disillusionment with Europe and the West in general; they were held responsible for the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the resulting dismemberment of historic Hungary. To quote László Németh (1901– 1975), one of the most influential ideologues among the populist writers, Eastern Europe “is simultaneously our own fate and our own opportunity,” because it was this region of Europe – not the crisis-ridden West – that was best prepared and the most likely to develop a feasible model of economic, social and political reform for itself.14 For Németh, Eastern Europe denoted the area between Germany and the Soviet Union, including the Balkans. Another populist sociologist expressed the same view in his discussion of the one-child system. Imre Kovács (1913–1980) claimed that the “new law” was not due to economic factors, and the issue of inheritance, but rather to the distortion of the whole moral universe in the peasant society, which resulted in one child per family, or not even one.15 With this moralising tone, this social commentary on peasant birth control failed to acknowledge the effect of macroprocesses on declining fertility rates.

44  The past as experience and memory Image and reality thus parted ways, even if the sociologists among the populists were intent on revealing traditional, and sometimes anachronistic, rural social relations. The term populist writers refer to is an intellectual and quasi-political movement emerging in Hungary in the 1930s and 1940s, which held together writers, poets, publicists and scholars.16 Many members of it were born in part into the poor peasantry or the middle classes, but all having deep sympathy with the fate of the then pauperised lower agrarian social strata. The populists negated not just the conservatism of the Horthy regime, but also rejected liberalism, democracy and the bourgeois radicalism. According to their nationalist ideals, the special and authentic national characteristics were retained in the purest form among the rural population and the peasantry per se. They thus were hostile both to the bourgeoisie and the old elite (the aristocracy), and also disliked the urban way of life in its entirety.17 The long-lasting influence of the movement exercised both on the intellectual life and the political culture of Hungary may be felt even today.18 One may even say that despite the many fundamental changes taken place in Hungary’s socioeconomic and political make-up since at least the interwar period, the populist writer’s intellectual heritage is still alive in Hungary in the form of a “practical past” as it is meant by Michael Oakeshott. Therefore, its memory may not simply be relegated to the realm of the true historical past. Returning now to the main argument, there was, in fact, a huge social and mental gap between the city and the village (including the farmstead) in every imaginable sphere of contemporary life. The gulf between the two was further widened by images of the peasantry and the bourgeoisie. As a result, both groups came to be seen as culturally and ideologically exclusive social constructs; bourgeois individualism was considered to be the antithesis of peasant collectivism. This imagery underlies the scholarly concept of the dual social structure, a concept that formed the basis of political programmes and rivalling ideologies. The latter manifested themselves in the constant struggles between the populists (népiek) and the urbanists (urbánusok) in the 1930s and 1940s. The heated debates between the two camps must be seen in the context of the huge socioeconomic disparities and differences in mentality that shaped and defined contemporary Hungary. There was, for example, a disproportionate spatial distribution of the population between the capital city and the countryside. The fact that over 10% of Hungarians lived in Budapest, with less than 20% residing in provincial cities, was thought to explain the hydrocephalic formation that was then considered an apt metaphor to describe the place of the capital in the country. However, one has to admit that the population distribution between Vienna and Austria (after the Paris Peace Treaty) was even more disproportionate. To make matters worse, Budapest’s elite, middle class, petty bourgeoisie and modern industrial proletariat had no true counterpart in Hungary’s countryside population. Moreover, Budapest and the Hungarian provinces (including most of the provincial cities) found themselves at very different developmental stages and were vastly different in terms of their economic, social, political, cultural or intellectual milieus. This had already been the case in the late 19th century and early 20th century, when Budapest set off on a path of modern metropolitan development.

Image and reality of a divided country 45 The situation, however, worsened after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the light of hard (demographic) facts, but also because of the way Budapest started to be viewed officially. As a consequence of the counter-revolutionary hysteria and the virulent anti-Semitism that swept the country after the collapse of the four-month-old Soviet Republic in summer 1919, Budapest was denounced as a “sinful city” by Miklós Horthy (1868–1957), then commander-in-chief of the national army. This label stuck to the capital throughout the ruling period of the Horthy regime (1919–1944). It was a radical re-assessment of what in fact had been an urban development of staggering proportions since the Compromise (Settlement) in 1867, which embraced every conceivable manifestation of being a Budapester, whether in politics, behaviour or even language. The prevailing interwar discourse on Budapest was thus shaped to a large extent by the claim that the “natural” non-Hungarianness of the cosmopolitan metropolis within AustriaHungary had soon been effaced by the Magyarising influence of a country that had now become a sovereign nation as a result of the Trianon decision in 1920. We will return to this problem later on. The sharp contrast between the capital city and the countryside was further underlined by the underdeveloped infrastructure of the provincial cities. The process of urbanisation had always largely been shaped and even dictated by Greater Budapest, the population of which was 1,600,000 at the beginning of World War II (18% of the entire population). Towns and cities in rural regions saw little growth at that time. The largest provincial urban centres of post-Trianon Hungary (Debrecen, Pécs and Szeged) could not develop into real metropolises because they were surrounded by agrarian farmsteads.19 The majority of Hungary’s population (twothirds) lived in villages and farmsteads, accordingly, with almost 30-40% residing in villages.20 Apart from the demographic factors mentioned previously, Budapest and the countryside (including many provincial cities) represented sharply contrasting social and mental domains. This followed in part from the fact that Hungary had not yet evolved into a truly industrialised nation, but remained a largely agricultural economy. Nearly half of the population was still engaged in farming in 1941. The agricultural economy, which was closely tied to the villages, the farmsteads and the provincial cities (the agrarian towns) located on the Great Plain, continued to be characterised by large estates and a myriad of tiny peasant landholdings. After the land reform of 1920 the latter increased even further in number.21 This situation led to an extremely unequal distribution of wealth, which was out of synch with the European norm. According to some contemporary calculations, one-fifth of all incomes were earned by 0.6% of the Hungarian population, with barely more than 44% of income distributed among more than four-fifths of the population. By contrast, in Germany at around the same time the top 0.7% of the population earned 50% less than its counterpart in Hungary, and, as a consequence, the absolute majority (nearly 90%) of the population had access to almost two thirds of all wealth.22 It is true, however, that many neighbouring countries (the Balkan states and even Czechoslovakia) also experienced extreme income disparities at that time.23 In Hungary, the most obvious inequalities manifested

46  The past as experience and memory themselves in agrarian society and placed the city and the village at opposite ends of the social hierarchy. These striking inequalities manifested themselves most obviously within the agrarian society, and placed the city and the village at two extreme poles of the social hierarchy. Given these socioeconomic circumstances, it is no wonder that such a polarised image of the urban and rural worlds emerged. But that’s not the whole story. When ethnic nationalism began to attract growing support in the 1900s, a close link was established between racism and nationalism. This was a key factor decisive in the generation of specific images of the city and the village. Collective identities have always been tied to particular places or spatial entities. The best example of this is the national identity, a construct closely tied to a given territorial unit in the statebuilding process. The great role played by the notion of homeland in defining the nation (or nationhood) in terms of territory testifies to the great symbolic and political weight that geography can have in this development. Modern nationalism strengthens the relationship between man and space by suggesting that individuals belong to specific places. This was also the case in an age when the movement of people and ethnic groups reached massive proportions in Europe and worldwide. At the same time, social integration based on a movement towards national homogeneity also peaked. These parallel (and even contrasting) developments – the propagation and institutionalisation of national identity and increased social and physical mobility – were somewhat paradoxical.24 The modern political and socioeconomic and cultural community represented by the nation-state per se is a territorial bound unit. In building a modern nationstate, the aim was first and foremost to create an ethnically and politically homogeneous modern society, bound together by legal equality and a shared sense of belonging. All this was complemented, however, by the appropriation of the physical environment, which was transformed in the 19th and 20th centuries into a distinctively national territory, ruled and administered by a single sovereign nation-state. The politics of naturalising the territorial claim to the nation amounted to exercising uncontested rule over the area of a nation-state, thereby ascribing a specific (national) meaning to it. This has often been accomplished through cultural activities (including the arts and the sciences). “Who, more than poets, musicians, painters and sculptors, could bring the national ideal to life and disseminate it among the people?”25 We will discuss this problem in a detailed way later on. Thus in the context of constructing the nation-state, large-scale migration, which was seen to have a negative impact on national integration, led to a social imaginary in which the metaphor of rootlessness remained powerful, thanks in part to vibrant nationalist discourse at that time. When the capital city embodied by Budapest was thought to represent an alien, non-native place that was foreign to allegedly authentic Hungarian life and dominated by immigrants and ethnically alien elements (Jews, Germans and other non-Hungarians), the image of a split nation soon developed. The voice of ethnic nationalism can be heard in the decidedly anti-urban statements that began to dominate public discourse as late as the interwar period.26

Image and reality of a divided country 47

Metropolitan development: Budapest Before attempting to assess contemporary public discourse, one should consider the way in which historians have explained the social and mental development of Budapest from the moment it became Hungary’s capital city. In influential books, John Lukacs and Péter Hanák offered two considerably diverging historical narratives of Budapest around 1900. The gist of Lukacs’s book, which first appeared in English and was later translated into many other languages, including Hungarian, is that the city’s lively and occasionally crude provincialism at that time sat well with a metropolitan character that sprang from the capital’s indisputable cosmopolitanism.27 This simultaneously Hungarian and cosmopolitan Budapest was captured best, in Lukacs’s view, through the figure (and writings) of Gyula Krúdy, “the Hungarian Proust,” who conceals a series of dualities as being revolutionary and conservative, erotic and Christian, Bohemian and somebody who admires the Biedermeier provincial Hungary of yore. Hanák, by contrast, in a book which appeared in both English and German (first in Hungarian), places the emphasis elsewhere. The Garden (as fin-de-siècle Vienna was portrayed by Carl E. Schorske) and the Workshop (the metaphor that Hanák applies to fin-de-siècle Budapest) stand for the two mutually distinguishable Central European alternatives of modernity and modernism. Hyperindividualistic and decadent Vienna, retreating into the psychological depths of subjectivism, is confronted by a Budapest that couples modernity with a readiness to act, and reformism with a soon-to-be renewed nationalism.28 Even now that we have these two major and influential narratives on the history of Budapest, we still cannot say that we have received satisfactory answers to all problems that crop up. In both cases, the image that these two authors outline, each in his own way, seeks to ascribe the “essence” of the phenomenon called Budapest to some fundamental duality. It seems to me, though, that it would be more fruitful to tackle the analysis on the concept. In this view, a triad of praising the city, blaming the city and negating the city would offer us a better chance of understanding the dynamic of the variable relationship of modernity and modernism.29 Now I shall focus in what follows on the antiurban social critique both of modernity and the city as it has been articulated by the aforementioned populist discourse of the day. Before dwelling upon this issue, it will be useful to have a short look at the spectacular metropolitan development of the Hungarian capital following the 1867 Compromise (Settlement). Metropolitan development was fuelled by rapid demographic growth which even contemporaries compared to the growth rate in American urban centres. In 1869 the population of the three cities (Pest, Buda and Óbuda) was 280,000. By 1880 it had grown by almost 100,000. Due to immigration, this growth continued over the following two decades, with the result that Budapest’s population exceeded 600,000 by the mid-1890s, climbing to almost 1,000,000 by the late 1910s. Thus, in the course of the quarter of a century after 1870, the population of Budapest almost doubled due to immigration that was unparalleled in contemporary Europe. The major beneficiary of that

48  The past as experience and memory immigration – Pest – was the real engine of metropolitan development in terms of both demographics and economy.30 For several decades Pest had been an important mercantile city. Buda, however, had previously only stood out as an administrative centre. Óbuda was a typical lowlands agricultural town. In the context of unification it was decided that Buda would take on the role of a residential centre, thereby losing its previous importance. Nevertheless, a number of central state administrative bodies continued to be located in the vicinity of Buda Castle. The core of the modern economy was concentrated in Pest, where the majority of the flour-mills were located – the first beacons of modern industry in Hungary.31 Around the turn of the century, heavy industry, in particular mechanical engineering and the iron and steel industry, took the lead. Furthermore, owing to the constant need to service the rapidly growing population, the food industry also remained an important economic sector. So in many ways, the demands arising from swift urbanisation spurred industrial development. The dire need for housing and public construction works was met by the building and building materials industry, while the iron and steel industry and the heavy engineering sector fulfilled the demand for new railways. Budapest was admired by citizens and visitors alike for its spectacular and rapid transformation. The list of structures built within just a few decades in order to meet the requirements of a capital city include the Andrássy Avenue, which was spectacular even by European standards. It became famous for its neoRenaissance palaces designed along the lines of historicism and for some of its public buildings (Műcsarnok [Art Gallery] built in 1877; the old Academic of Music built in 1879; Opera House built in 1884). Still, the most obvious sign of large-scale urbanisation was the extensive building of residential housing. In the 1870s and 1880s two thirds of all new buildings were blocks of flats and tenement houses, and this number later increased even further. Relatively few slum clearances were carried out for the sake of creating space for new buildings, which in most cases were four- or five-storey blocks of flats. Therefore it is no wonder that from the moment Budapest set off on the path of modern development – a process that has been a motor for Hungary over the last century and a half – two distinct social groupings, an enterpreneurial (and managerial) segment of the middle and upper classes, and the industrial working class, determined its character. Around the time of unification (1873), but also in the decades that followed, the emerging economic elite documented in the regularly compiled lists of the 1,200 biggest taxpayers, which included many of the wealthiest landlords. The elite of a society tells us a lot about the entire society. The role of mobile capital proved to be decisive in defining this elite, which was mainly made up of crop and animal merchants, architects, building entrepreneurs, factory owners, the wealthiest landlords and the aristocracy with extensive land property in the countryside.32 This shows how the capital inevitably became the centre of the Hungarian upper middle class. But the middle and the lower middle classes were also represented here in large numbers. They were concentrated especially in the entrepreneurial sphere and the intellectual professions. In addition to intellectuals, they included a large number of clerical workers employed by central government (ministries) and the

Image and reality of a divided country 49 business sector (white-collar workers in private enterprises). The sharp contrast between the capital city and the countryside is illustrated by the fact that at that time one quarter of all Hungarian physicians lived in Budapest.33 This indicates the high level of metropolitan medical services on the one hand and the lack of such services in the provinces on the other. Finally, at the very bottom of the social structure, the proletariat, which constituted the majority of the population, also made its way into the metropolitan and seemingly bourgeois world of Budapest. The almost exclusive concentration of the industrial working class in Budapest was another sign that the capital had been and remained the sole stronghold of capitalism in Hungary. Budapest, the metropolis created by an incessant flow of immigrants, was thus a conglomerate of many diverse traditions and influences. At the time the city was being unified in the 1870s, a long-standing German cultural tradition set the tone.34 Yet within a very short period of time, a massive tide of Hungarian-speaking newcomers arrived. There is no doubt that this linguistic shift was the key to the Magyarisation of Budapest. Until 1840, the country’s official language had been Latin, although German had been the language of local administration in Pest and Buda, because the residents of both cities had been German-speakers.35 This started to change around the middle of the century, as the ability to speak Hungarian had been a central demand of Hungarian nationalism from the 1830s onwards. However, it was only after 1867 that Hungarian became the official language in all parts of the country, including Pest and Buda, later (1873) Budapest. Bilingualism or even multilingualism was thus commonplace in the contemporary urban public sphere. After some initial steps, in 1872 the Metropolitan Board of Public Works (Fővárosi Közmunkák Tanácsa) introduced mandatory street-naming. From that time onwards the streets had to bear Hungarian names.36 This extraordinary linguistic, ethnic and confessional heterogeneity and the brisk homogenisation that followed at the end of the 19th century are widely acknowledged. However, opinions differ on the nature of this process. Furthermore, after 1920, instead of viewing the Magyarisation of Budapest as a positive development, some found it partly or wholly objectionable. The aforementioned “sinful city” slogan, which gained currency at that time, expressed this disgust in no uncertain terms. Turning now to the mass culture of the city, one can see the co-existence of various subcultures in continual interaction and their gradual integration, albeit not entirely free of contradictions.37 In the decades leading up to 1900 the urban bourgeois (Biedermeier) culture of the established ethnically German petty bourgeoisie co-existed with the Hungarian culture of the recently arrived Magyar petty bourgeoisie and a working class rooted in the peasantry in what was, already in the 1870s, a heterogeneous mass culture – and a linguistic hotchpotch as well. This was rounded out by the predominantly Germanic industrial working-class culture of other immigrants (in some cases native Hungarians who had worked abroad) and the separate culture of the Jewish petty bourgeoisie, which had streamed continuously into the country from the 1840s onwards. The growing “Jewishness” of the city was due to the rapid increase in the number and proportion of Israelites

50  The past as experience and memory (as they were identified in the censuses) in the city and their growing presence in the sphere of mass culture. Today, some cultural historian analysts are even tempted to talk about an “invisible Jewish Budapest,” a new kind of public space or culture “that could not openly be acknowledged [by contemporaries] as Jewish but that, nevertheless, functioned as the source of an unmistakably urban Jewish subculture and identity.”38 Mary Gluck, however, admits that the discursive world of humour and popular entertainment created by this public culture “with its playful and transgressive cultural forms, never displaced or seriously threatened official or respectable Jewish Budapest, which was based on the abstract ideals of national liberalism and Enlightenment rationality. . . . Middle-class Budapest Jews . . . continued to live double lives as patriotic citizens and as ironic flâneurs. In fact, the two realities mirrored each other, like parallel universes in a sciencefiction narrative.”39 From about the Millennium (1895)40 onwards, the kaleidoscopic product assembled from these elements was gradually transformed into a modern metropolitan bourgeois (or petty bourgeois) public culture now based fundamentally on “Hungarian” culture. In the meantime, a proletarian class culture was taking shape, also forged in Budapest. In the interwar years, mass culture gained a firm footing in Budapest with the modernisation of the media. Its social reach was spectacularly expanded, with Budapest’s public culture, which catered mainly to petty-bourgeois tastes and expectations, exerting a great hold on newcomers from the provinces, and on the industrial working class and the urbanised petty bourgeoisie. Moreover, this mass culture increasingly undermined the distinctively working-class culture that had emerged in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and has initially constituted a kind of counter-culture. Through the agency of mass culture then there emerged an entity that was held to be “typically Budapestian” and which, in the end, streamrolled any resistance put up by the various sub- and counter-cultures based on ethnicity or class. Admittedly, older traditions and local peculiarities did not completely wither away, but the earlier conspicuous diversity of codes and frames of reference clearly diminished. Everything that has been touched on up to this point is virtually self-evident in the context of prolonged metropolitan development.

Budapest and its discontents I would now like to compare the historian’s perception of this metropolitan development with how it was assessed by contemporaries immersed in the nationalist anti-urban discourse. But before describing that discourse, I should say something about how historians describe the countryside, the true counterpart of the city. The modernisation process in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to the development of an agro-industrial economy. Census data from 1920 in relation to the occupational structure of Hungary shows how far the Hungarian economy had advanced in that direction. The absolute majority of the population (55.7%) was engaged in agriculture, 30% involved in industry and commerce, and slightly less

Image and reality of a divided country 51 than 10% in white collar professions and the civil service. Yet, as testified by the last census taken in 1941, Hungary had not evolved into an industrialised nation by the beginning of World War II, as 49% of the population was still employed in the agricultural sector.41 Given the persistence of a basically agricultural economy, the land-ownership structure did not change substantially. The majority of landowners were landowning peasants and there were huge disparities in the distribution of land. Every third person lived in an independent household, where a farm, a shop, or an artisan workshop formed the basis of the family’s livelihood. The proportion of selfemployed people was even higher (42% of all earners), although many of them were not really independent, since they were also forced to perform wage labour to survive. As a result of the 1920 landreform, the number of peasant landowners with fewer than 100 Hungarian acres (holds) almost doubled, as did the number of those who owned tiny plots (less than three Hungarian acres). The bulk of these new peasant owners formed part of an extensive agrarian semi-proletariat numbering over 1,000,000, which was self-sufficient in name only.42 All this seems to suggest that re-peasantisation was prevalent at that time and contributed more to traditionalism than to social and economic innovation. The widening gap between the city (the bourgeois domain) and the agrarian hinterland was thus a shared social experience for many. Let’s turn now to the discourse that foregrounded the vision of a split country. László Németh, the well-known novelist and essayist, and one of the spokesmen of the populist writers’ movement, who was deeply concerned about the fate of the Hungarian nation, was shocked when he experienced (as the school doctor of a junior secondary school in Buda) the reality of the “flotsam and jetsam” of the Budapest lower classes. In a book about his experience, he wrote that “our school . . . is attended by the children of those who have been tossed this way and that in the course of the modern-day Great Migration.” And concluded “it does not take too much intelligence to find an explanation for the Magyarisation [of schools] in the post-war (and in part, also pre-war) engulfment. The catchment area of our school in the seventies and eighties was still German-speaking, the Magyar nation supplying fifty per cent before the war and now eighty or ninety per cent (for certain).”43 The continuous monitoring of the homogenisation that accompanied Magyarisation between the two world wars was something of a national pastime, particularly among those who were connected in some way with a school and its pupils. Sándor Karácsony (1891–1952), a legendary educationalist and psychologist, also holding close ties to the populist movement, considered it important to write down his views on the hotly disputed question of a “Hungarian Budapest” (the title he gave to his article). “At the start of the last century, Budapest was still a German-speaking city; indeed, even in mid-nineteenth century much German speech was heard in the streets, and any Budapester who attempted to speak Hungarian did so with miserable results. . . . These days, [however] Budapest is Hungarian. It speaks Hungarian and feels Hungarian. It may speak differently from, and not feel quite the same as Debrecen or Dévaványa or the Bugac plain;

52  The past as experience and memory nevertheless, it is Hungarian. Yet, how could this modern miracle have happened, one wonders?”44 Karácsony argues that it happened, first and foremost, because the provincial Hungarian population found a home for itself in Budapest. “The Hungarian peasantry made Budapest Hungarian.” Furthermore, he adds the somewhat curious explanation that as Budapesters these Hungarian newcomers “are all the more Hungarian [because] their souls . . . by a strange but understandable and natural contrariety, to their dying day feel an aching homesickness and pull towards home, to the countryside, the open air, the village, the puszta.”45 Their many obvious aversions from the urban and bourgeois world and lifestyle, represented first of all by Budapest, explains the fact that in spite of their intense sociographic and sociological interest, none of them could venture to deal with the social milieu of the city. Even the sociologist Ferenc Erdei, a key figure in the populist movement, opted for talking more about “Pest countryside” and “Buda countryside,” the neighbouring suburban areas of the capital in his sociographical work dedicated to the description and analysis of the region adjacent to Budapest.46

Conclusion The two contrasting images of Budapest cited previously show the significant role the social imaginary played in placing the city (Budapest in particular) and the countryside at the opposite ends of Hungary’s social and mental hierarchy. The image of a polarised society that became so prevalent in public discourses at the beginning of the 20th century had always been closely correlated with the ethnic make-up of society. It was derived from an identification of the city (and the bourgeoisie) with Jewishness (and sometimes with Germanness) in sharp contrast with the alleged true Hungarianness (Magyar) of the countryside (the village and the peasantry). The metaphoric use of terms, such as Jewishness and Jewification (of the big city, the metropolis) sometimes reflected the genuine experiences of many people in the countryside. The alien bourgeois (metropolitan) world that gave rise to the widespread use and acceptance of the metaphor of rootlesnesss in connection with it was often perceived in the context of the manifold lifestyles, the great diversity and the tremendous material disparities that characterised Hungary at that time. From the external perspective of the provinces and some social substrata, Budapest’s Jewishness was not simply a conviction, but an everyday experience of obvious otherness. It was thus a clear manifestation of how, where and to what extent social otherness could be experienced in a way that contributed to the creation of the image of a fundamentally split country. In a case where the social imaginary, the product of contemporary historical agency, shapes and even determines the scholarly conceptualisation of the past, one should be wary of accepting the feudalisation thesis and the dual society construct at face value, as both tend to exaggerate the split in Hungarian society at that time. Both theories reflect a plainly normative approach. The main problem with this is that not even the pattern of bourgeois development in the West, which is frequently contrasted with the Hungarian (Eastern and Central

Image and reality of a divided country 53 European) modernisation pattern, meets the requirements of the model. Furthermore, the recent emergence of the notion of multiple modernities puts the whole issue – including backwardness and the normal pattern of an ideal modernity (and modernisation) – in a totally new light. In an attempt of assessing the conceptual heritage with which one is always confronted in one’s own research on the social, mental and political history of modern Hungary, the focus should be placed on the unique combination of old and obsolete social structural elements with the modern. The “normal” pattern is thus revealed to be an incessant adaptation and readjustment to the swiftly and incalculable transformation of internal and external conditions. However, the succeeding drastic changes repeatedly occurring in Hungary since the time period of the Great War until at least the end of the 20th century rendered this adaptation more difficult, and sometimes made it even impossible. In addition, the highly contradictory experiences gained in the course of this hectic course of history is and has always been shaped by and used in the public domain often outside of academic history writing. This insight may indeed bring us closer to a much better understanding of the specific trajectory of Hungary’s history during the last 100 years. The question will be discussed in the next chapter in close connection with the vital role that either the so-called Trianon syndrome or the memory of the Communist past has played in the past and plays even in today’s Hungary.

Notes 1 The meaning of the term, embourgeoisement (Verbürgerlichung) referring to the modern capitalist transformation of some Central and East European societies of the day has been clarified in Kocka, Jürgen. “The European Pattern and the German Case,” in Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by Jürgen Kocka – Allan Mitchell. Oxford: Berg, 1993. esp. 11, 17. On Széchenyi’s ideas on the imperative of civilising the nation, see Gergely, András. Széchenyi eszmerendszerének kialakulása. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1972. 151. 2 Pajkossy, Gábor (ed.). Kossuth. Budapest: Új Mandátum, 1998 (1999), 29. 3 Vajda, János [Aristidesz]. Polgárosodás. Pest, 1862. 4 Hanák, Péter. Ungarn in der Donaumonarchie. Probleme der bürgerlichen Ungestaltung eines Vielvölkerstaates. Wien: Böhlau, 1984. 362–374. 5 Ránki, “The Development of the Hungarian Middle Classes: Some East-West Comparisons,” in Kocka (ed.), Bourgeois Society. 451. 6 Mazsu, János. The Social History of the Hungarian Intelligentsia, 1825–1914, trans. Mario D. Fenyo. New York – Boulder: distr. by Columbia University Press, 1997; Hajdú, Tibor. Tisztikar és középosztály 1850–1914. Ferenc József Magyar tisztjei. Budapest: História – MTA TTI, 1999; Benedek, Gábor. “A bürokratizáció történetéhez: az 1853–1854. évi definitív rendezés személyi következményei,” in Zsombékok. Középosztályok és iskoláztatás Magyarországon a 19. század elejétől a 20. század közepéig, edited by György Kövér. Budapest: Századvég, 2006. 7 Erdei, Ferenc. “A magyar társadalom a két háború között,” Valóság, XIX, 4 (1976) 41. 8 Gyáni, Gábor. Történészdiskurzusok. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2002. 78–158; Kövér, György. A felhalmozás íve. Társadalom- és gazdaságtörténeti tanulmányok. Budapest: Új Mandátum, 2002.31–190; Gyáni, Gábor – György Kövér – Tibor Valuch, Social History of Hungary from the Reform Era to the End of the Twentieth Century. New York – Boulder: distr. by Columbia University Press, 2004.

54  The past as experience and memory 9 Szelényi, Balázs A. The Failure of the Central European Bourgeoisie. New Perspectives on Hungarian History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 157. 10 On the notion of the social imaginary, see Taylor, Modern Social, 23–30; Maza, Sarah. The Myth of the French. An Essay on the Social Imaginary 1750–1850. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003; On the significance of historical experience expressed by the notion of social imaginary, Cabrera, Miguel A. Postsocial History. An Introduction Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004; Carr, Experience and History. 11 Vásáry, Ildikó. “The Sin of Transdanubia: The One-Child System in Rural Hungary,” Continuity and Change, 4, 3 (1989) 429–468. 12 Katus, László. “A  demográfiai átmenet kérdései Magyarországon a 19. században,” Történelmi Szemle, 22, 2 (1980) 270–289. 13 Gyáni – Kövér – Valuch, Social History, 272–276. 14 Cited by Lackó, Miklós. Sziget és külvilág. Válogatott tanulmányok. Budapest: MTA TTI, 1996. 177–178. 15 Kovács, Imre. A néma forradalom. A  Néma Forradalom a parlament és a bíróság előtt. Budapest: Cserépfalvi – Gondolat – Tevan, 1989. 89. 16 Borbándi, Gyula. Der ungarische Populismus. München: Ungarisches Institut München, 1976; Papp, István. A magyar népi mozgalom története 1920–1990. Budapest: Jaffa, 2012. 17 Némedi, Dénes. A népi szociográfia 1930–1938. Budapest: Gondolat, 1985; Lackó, Sziget és külvilág, 10–190. On the East-Central European context, see: Trencsényi, The Politics of “National Character”: A Study in Interwar East European Thought. Oxford: Routledge, 2012. 18 Lackó, Sziget és külvilág, 187–189; Papp, A magyar népi mozgalom, 245–273; Agárdi, Péter. “A  népi-nemzeti ellenzék 1956–1989 közötti történetéről,” Múltunk, LVII, 4 (2012) 234–269. 19 Gyáni, Gábor. Az urbanizáció társadalomtörténete. Tanulmányok. Kolozsvár: KompPress, 2012. 19–64. 20 Gyáni, Gábor. “Social History of Hungary in the Horthy Era,” in Gyáni – Kövér – Valuch, Social History, 279. 21 Gyáni – Kövér – Valuch, Social History, 297–302, 405–406. 22 Gyáni, “Social History,” 292. 23 For a general European overview of contemporary income distribution patterns, see Tomka, Béla. Social History of Twentieth-Century Europe. London: Routledge, 2013. 104–105. 24 More about it, see Gyáni, Gábor. “Migration as a Cultural Phenomenon,” The Hungarian Historical Review, 1, 3–4 (2012) 275–293. 25 Smith, National Identity, 92. 26 On the problem of contemporary anti-urban reactions in Europe, see: Gyáni, Gábor. “Metropolitan Development and Modernity: A Phenomenological Approach,” Coactivity: Philosophy, Communication, 25 (2017) 150. 27 Lukacs, John. Budapest 1900. A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988. 28 Hanák, Péter. The Garden and the Workshop. Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. 29 This analysis has already been done from a specific perspective in: Gyáni, Gábor. Identity and the Urban Experience: Fin-de-Siècle Budapest. New York – Boulder: distr. by Columbia University Press, 2004. 207–222. 30 Faragó, Tamás. “Budapest népességfejlődésének vázlata (1840–1941),” Statisztikai Szemle, 73, 4–5 (1995) 375–391. 31 Klement, Judit. Gőzmalmok a Duna partján. A budapesti malomipar a 19–20. században. Budapest: Holnap, 2010. 32 Vörös, Károly. Budapest legnagyobb adófizetői 1873–1917. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1979.

Image and reality of a divided country 55 33 Magyar statisztikai évkönyv 1912. Budapest: Kir. Magyar Statisztikai Hivatal, 1912. 78–81. 34 Faragó, Tamás. “A főváros népe: sokszínűség és beolvadás,” in Az egyesített főváros. Pest, Buda, Óbuda, edited by Gábor Gyáni. Budapest: Városháza, 1998. 75–111. 35 Heiszler, Vilmos. “Soknyelvű ország,” 5–22. 36 Holló, Szilvia Andrea. “Hősök és mondák az utcanévadásban,” in Magyarok Kelet és Nyugat közöt. A  nemzettudat változó jelképei, edited by Tamás Hofer. Budapest: Néprajzi Múzeum – Balassi, 1996. 222. 37 Gyáni, Identity and the Urban, 173–187. 38 Gluck, Mary. “The Budapest Flâneur: Urban Modernity, Popular Culture, and the ‘Jewish Question’ in the Fin-de-Siècle Hungary,” Jewish Social Studies, 10, 3 (Spring – Summer 2004) 18; see further: Gluck, Mary. The Invisible Jewish Budapest. Metropolitan Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. 39 Gluck, “The Budapest Flâneur,” 19. 40 On the event of the Millennium, see Freifeld, Alice. Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848–1914. Washington – Baltimore: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press – Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 266–278; Barenscott, Dorothy. “Articulating Identity through the Technological Rearticulation of Space: The Hungarian Exhibition as World’s Fair and the Disordering of Fin-de-Siècle Budapest,” Slavic Review, 69, 3 (Fall 2010) 571–590; Varga, Bálint. The Monumental Nation: Magyar Nationalism and Symbolic Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hungary. New York: Berhahn Books, 2016. 41 Cf. Gyáni, “Social History,” 291. 42 Cf. Gyáni, “Social History,” 406. 43 Németh, László. A Medve utcai polgári. Budapest: Magyar Élet Kiadása, 1943. 33–35. 44 Karácsony, Sándor. Ocsúdó magyarság. Budapest: Exodus, 312. 45 Karácsony, Ocsúdó magyarság, 316. 46 Erdei, Ferenc. Futóhomok. A Duna-Tiszaköz földje és népe. Budapest: Athenaum, n.d. [1937] 29–65.

3 Collective memory as a political instrument

Following the political change of 1989, history came to attract more and more attention in Hungary and every post-communist country in Central and Eastern Europe. The emerging cult of the national past created by politicians derived not just from the negative, Communist attitude which prevailed during the decades of their rule, as has often been accused. The discourse – called at the time a “return to history” (namely returning to the “true” national narrative of history) – was as much a reaction to the demands of the new democracies established amidst the circumstances of national sovereignty. The revival of historically tried methods, and the emergent discovery or invention of traditions, served in many postCommunist countries to preserve or gain vitally important mass political support or at least an assurance of the passive loyalty of people, the voters, who started then to experience in ever larger numbers the heavy economic price of political change (mass unemployment, drastic decrease either in the wages and the occupational position of many and not the least increase in material inequality among the members of society). The preoccupation with the national past was necessary for creating and strengthening the democratic national community which thus could replace the forces of political loyalty in a situation where the former mechanisms of legitimacy (the fear of terror or of its remembrance, discrimination, and the gentler forms of suppression, political apathy, and, last but not least, the involvement of many in maintaining the old system, which also rewarded this active role) have suddenly ceased to operate. This argument advanced in the first years of the post-Communist transition1 may easily be adapted to succeeding developments. But it is true, however, that the use of history for clearly political purposes, the political instrumentalisation of the national image of the past, was always preferred – at least in Hungary – by conservative or right-wing governments rather than the Socialist and Liberal ones. This was already the case with the first (conservative) government led by József Antall (1932–1993), and was perpetuated and further deepened by the first Fidesz government which came to power first in 1998. The pattern is much the same with the newly elected succeeding Orbán governments after 2010. Let’s see now how the past has been instrumentalised both by politics and society during the last three decades (and previously). In describing the main features

Collective memory as political instrument 57 of the public use of history at that time,2 I am going to point first to some identitymaking processes demanding a kind of usable past, and also to specific political aims sought and found in the various ways of accommodating the past images to the changing political discourses. Two historical issues seem now to provide important reference points: the mental legacy of the former Communist past, and the memorial cult built around Trianon, the Peace Treaty of Paris accomplished after World War I.

Coming to terms with the not too distant past after 1989 János Kádár (1912–1989) and the period named after him have now gained a clear, widespread popularity. It is associated with a stable social existence, the unambiguous mobility perspectives and the sense of social solidarity, “social facts” scantily available amidst the circumstances of the market economy. The memory of the dictatorship, however, fades away. Any evaluation of the Kádár regime is, however, extremely polarised: there are many who show loyalty to the memory of the Kádár era, but some others look back with anger and contempt.3 The many contradictions that characterise the public attitude and memory work toward the Communist (Kádárite) past may be demonstrated by the telling example of the so-called informer’s cases. Tens of thousands – about 40,000 – civilian informers were employed before 1989 by state security to regularly watch over and denounce their fellow citizens.4 Many members of the first democratically elected parliament (in 1990) and other active politicians of the day – on the right and left – were previously employed as informers. The government refused to make available the files of the secret police, and established a practice that has continued more or less through today. When Péter Medgyessy, the Socialist prime minister, was unmasked in 2002 as having worked for the secret police during the Kádár era, changes appeared likely to come. From that time onwards, scholars (and journalists) were allowed to study secret police documents, but did not have a free hand in making public the findings of their own research carried out in the Historical Office, which was renamed in 2003 as the Historical Archive of the State Security (ÁBTL). Informers who are identified threaten defamation suits against the historians and journalists who expose them, creating a significant problem. The courts regularly give special consideration to the unmasked former informers on the principle that negative information should only be published about a public figure. The hardships begin only when the names of the persons concerned are intended to be made accessible to the public, according to which any negative information is allowed to be published only about a public personality. The big question, however, is how to define who is or isn’t a public figure. The view present-day public opinion holds about past wrong-doings by informers can be seen in cases where the exposed is among the country’s most famous and respected politicians, church leaders, sports broadcasters, rock musicians, actors, journalists, artists or other professionals. One of the most notable scandals to erupt concerned István Szabó, the internationally famous, Oscar-winning film director. He worked for State Security as

58  The past as experience and memory a civilian informer between 1957 and 1961, giving 48 reports on 72 “target persons” in which he sometimes (not always) denounced some of his colleagues. The customary public reaction to such cases had always been to engage in hot debates about the unambiguous responsibility (or more rather, the irresponsibility) of the politicians who held back the documents of the secret police. The reactions given to István Szabó’s affair, however, clearly showed a shift in this attitude. The change was already anticipated by how Szabó himself first reacted to the announcement that he had been an informer. The film director said, “to agree to work for State Security was the bravest, the most daring act of my life,” because he could thus save the life of one of his classmates who participated in the armed action in 1956, the one that took place at the Köztársaság square (Republic Sq.). Not much later it turned out, however, that the story was not true. But even this was not enough for Szabó to show repentance. He admitted only that, “I had to act to protect myself.” He would have been expelled from the College of the Film and Theater Arts, Szabó claimed, if he had refused an offer to cooperate with State Security. His changing excuses to explain his past misdeed proved, however, plausible for many. A great number of colleagues who were also informed on by Szabó, and almost the entire film-making profession in Hungary, and even a considerable part of the intelligentsia, declared solidarity with him. Well over a 100 prominent intellectuals published a manifesto claiming that instead of blaming such a great talent for his past misbehaviour (which is indeed worth forgetting), one rather has to endorse him in trying to explain it. It was striking that the manifesto was also signed by several of the “target persons” whom Szabó denounced in his secret reports.5 The events described offer deep insight into Hungarian society’s emotional and intellectual process of coming to terms with its own past. The striking absence of a critical – or self-critical – confrontation with this past on the part not just of the political elite, but even the wider public, most probably derives from the common experience of general collaboration with the Kádár regime. This is what makes the memory of that particular past so uneasy for everybody concerned. The plain moral condemnation of the past implying the misbehaviour of our own cannot be fulfilled amid such conditions without threatening personal identity. The case of civilian police informers, collaborating in this way with the dictatorship, is not an exception, but rather an extreme manifestation of the attitude of every citizen who to some extent was involved in sustaining the imposed tyranny. The moral problem of judging the past has been known more or less in almost every post-Communist country of Eastern and Central Europe. In explaining the positive public attitude towards the Communist past, one may refer to the notion of the “solidarity of the culpable” formulated by Jirina Šiklová, the well-known, once dissident Czech sociologist. She has argued that the fall of socialism “did not mean just the fall of the bearers of communist power . . . but was also the fall of ordinary people who lived under this system and had, to a greater or lesser degree, adapted to it.” Since everyone “who lived here inevitably achieved his secondary acquired social status . . . [demanding] to conform to this system to some degree.”6

Collective memory as political instrument 59 In any discussion of everybody’s own role in the many ways of sustaining the former dictatorship, the sentiment of shame seems hard to avoid. The growing readiness of the public, at least in Hungary, for tolerance and even empathy towards the unmasked informers and collaborators underlines the invisible force of the so-called “solidarity of the culpable,” one shaping or even defining the moral and spiritual remembrance of Communism. The ambivalent assessment of the not too distant past is regularly associated with the extremely diverse meanings, relevance and function attributed to the previous Communist rule. According to those who are ambitious to unmask the former informers with the explicit aim of creating moral purity in the new democracy, the past is only a “practical past” still living with us, something which does not allow for forgetting. Everybody else who would be ready to forgive the unmasked informers for having committed such a shameful act consign that particular past to the “historical past.” The latter is thus the clear manifestation of a difference, created by the so-called “historical operation.” In defining the precise meaning of the term “historical operation,” Certeau says, “it consists in classifying the given according to a present law that is distinguished from its ‘other’ (the past), in assuming a distance in respect to an acquired situation, and thus in marking through a discourse the effective change that precipitated this distancing.”7 The problem of making (and how to make) a distinction or not making any distinction between past and present (and the future) is further aggravated by the revival of the Trianon syndrome in today’s Hungary.

A return to the cult of Trianon Trianon’s psychological shock to 20th- and 21st-century Hungarian historical awareness and national identity was acute during the interwar period, and now seems to have revived.8 Trianon is a metaphor to express the discontinuity of the “natural” trajectory of modern Hungary’s history. By redrawing Hungary’s borders, the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, as has already been mentioned, caused the country to lose 71% of her former territory, with a corresponding loss of 64% of her population. More than 3,000,000 ethnic Hungarians, compared to 8,000,000 remaining within the new state’s borders, became citizens of the successor countries around Hungary.9 This truly traumatic experience and permanent source of collective grievance manifested itself in various ways during the last 100 years. The irredentism dominating the official politics and the public discourse of the Horthy period (1920–1944)10 was followed by a long, deep silence on Trianon imposed by the Communists.11 The latter started to be melted in the 1980s, but fundamental change was brought only by the regime change of 1989 by allowing talk about past grievances, particularly Trianon. However, the generality of such a discourse allows diverse meanings to become attached to a past event, and leads to various ways it can be discerned in the rhetorics of the Trianon discourse as articulated in present-day Hungarian party politics. One could begin by looking at the many ways of mentioning Trianon in Parliamentary speeches delivered between 1990 and 2002 and thereafter. A study

60  The past as experience and memory written on the topic has revealed that no more than 443 Parliamentary speeches out of nearly 12,000 included direct references to Trianon at that time; this looks not to be a great number, indeed.12 The issue of Trianon was brought forward almost exclusively by the right-wing MPs and was mentioned much less by any left-wing politicians. The analyst Gergely Romsics set up various analytical categories into which he tried to classify the various discussions of Trianon. Accordingly, MPs of the right-wing parties tended to apply a so-called “historical,” “plebeian historical” or “historical plebeian” dominant poetics in their speeches delivered at the House in connection with Trianon. By adapting a historical rhetoric, the speaker expressed his unconditional identification with the tragic Hungarian past eloquently symbolised by Trianon. In applying the so-called “historical plebeian” rhetoric, the speaker showed the sign of his conscious identification with the national heritage, and his firm belief that the trauma or shock caused by Trianon might finally be successfully dissolved. Application of the third trope as a dominant one in the talk about Trianon emphasises the speaker’s insistence on his strong commitment to the trauma engendered by the unending memory of Trianon. On the basis of the latter, the injustice caused by that particular historical event did not lose at all its present-day actual political meaning and significance; it is thus a guideline even today for any truly national political strategy. Apart from the terminology constructed and the analytical tools used by the analyst, one may argue that more than one option would have been in currency even within the right-wing political camp of the possible meanings and the ways of instrumentalisation of Trianon. The obvious propensity of right-wing political forces to revive the memory of Trianon is clearly shown by the second (and the subsequent) Fidesz governments, which came first to power in April  2010. The first law that the newly elected Parliament passed concerned the idea of extending Hungarian citizenship to every ethnic Magyar living in neighbouring countries together with granting them the rights of voting in Hungary.13 The second step the Fidesz government took was to release a declaration, the National Cooperation Proclamation (Nemzeti Együttműködés Nyilatkozata) which announced the introduction of the so-called System of National Cooperation (Nemzeti Együttműködés Rendszere, NER as abbreviated in Hungarian). It has been a plan devised to integrate, at least in principle, every Hungarian living either within or outside the state borders of the country. Finally, the new government declared June 4, the day of signing the Peace Treaty in Trianon in 1920, to be a national day of commemoration, one comparable to 15 March or 23 October, the commemorative days of the 1848 and the 1956 revolutions. These new developments within the sphere of state politics were preceded, however, by a great number of civil society endeavours in the same direction. The mass demonstrations, which sometimes became violent in 2006, were usually intertwined with public articulation of a forceful anti-Trianon sentiment. It is no accident that several of the riots organised and managed by an extreme right-wing social association, Sixty-four Counties,14 were at least tacitly supported by the then oppositional Fidesz. The tactic followed by the latter then an oppositional

Collective memory as political instrument 61 and a governing party only in the aftermath has always been to denounce the liberal and especially the socialist forces. This was done by suggesting and even arguing that they do not belong to the authentic national political community of the country. Following 2002, at a time when Fidesz had lost the parliamentary elections and became for eight years an oppositional party, Viktor Orbán, president of the party and the former (and the would-be) Prime Minister, asserted again and again that, “the nation could not be in opposition,” and that “the socialists have always attacked the nation both in the past and the present,” or that “the liberals represent an alien-hearted component of the country’s population,” etc. Trianon politics, however, soon became a double-edged sword in the hands of Fidesz, as it has also been used to counterbalance the overt revisionist ideology of the extreme right-wing forces, represented then by the parliamentary party, Jobbik (Better). The growing nationalism of today’s Hungarian right-wing government was and remains a reaction to the xenophobic and nationalist state politics of some neighbouring countries, where a considerable Hungarian minority is to be found. This caused recurring conflicts during the last couple of years between Hungary and Slovakia, between Hungary and Romania, and especially between Hungary and Ukraine. The latter countries’s anti-Hungarian nationalist line of politics, “playing the Hungarian card,” fed the militant Hungarian nationalism since the Parliamentary elections, held in 2010. The whole problem cannot be reconciled by the guiding ideals and politics of the European Union (EU), of which both Hungary and some of the related neighbouring countries are members. The EU, however, is reluctant to intervene in these international disputes between member countries, and deals much less with internal political issues concerning the measure and form of nationalism. The sort of political populism described before was accompanied and further strengthened by a parallel development in public discourse. With the explicit aim of producing and disseminating a plainly nationalist image of history, focusing on Trianon, the public history getting out of the control practiced by academic history writing started to take institutional form. As a clear sign of this more recent development a Trianon Museum was founded in a provincial city, Várpalota, and a Trianon Research Institute was set up in 2007 led by, among others, Ernő Raffay, a one-time academic historian (who also held a post as under-secretary of state at the Ministry of Military Affairs in the Antall government). Raffay has been a key figure in the whole story by becoming, in the aftermath of 1989, the well-known spokesman of the group of historians declaring themselves to represent “national history writing” as opposed to mainstream (academic) historical scholarship. “National” in this case means mostly a Trianon-focused account of Hungary’s 20th-century history. In order to achieve greater public influence, Raffay and his close colleagues set up in 2009 a short-lived historical journal, Trianoni Szemle (Trianon Review) dedicated solely to the discussion of the Trianon question. The journal focused on criticism of the internal enemy of Hungary, both in the past and the present. These enemies allegedly contributed greatly to the tragedy of Hungary at the end of World War I, and are now engaged in diminishing the great importance of the border changes accomplished at the Peace Treaty of Paris.15

62  The past as experience and memory The way of reasoning pursued by these historians to explain Trianon revolves around identifying scapegoats to bear the primary responsibility for Hungary’s suffering.16 They, alongside the Entent Powers (France in particular) and the new states created as a result of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (the later Little Entente) are Mihály Károlyi (1875–1955), Oszkár Jászi (1875–1957), leaders and representatives of 1918 Revolution and the first Bourgeois Republic afterwards, and, last but not least, the Freemasons. This argument contains a latent anti-Semitism and the whole historical construct is actually a mere replica of the historical image produced and propagated in the interwar period. The approach outlined fully coincides with the historical vision cherished and propagated through public history by the present-day Fidesz government. This may also explain the many ties connecting these historians and their efforts to the historical and memory policy pursued by the present-day government. As a clear sign of it is the increasing number of several newly established non-academic history research institutes, set up by the state since 2014 (the Veritas, the László Gyula Intézet [Institute of Gyula László], Magyarságkutató Intézet [Institute of Researching Hungariannes], Retörki [Institute for Researching the Change of Regime], NEBI [Committee of National Remembrance], etc. whose exclusive task has been to propagate the nationalist image of Hungary’s history beginning with ancient history and ending with several hot issues of the modern-age Hungarian history. It also expresses the firm belief of the illiberal Orbán regime that the historians employed by the state run institutes alone are able to sweep away the historical falsehoods and distortions advanced by the “official history writing.” These matters had already reached the stage by 2018 and 2019 that the government passed a law (in Summer of 2019): the whole set of the research institutes from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, including the Institute of History, too were placed under the control of the state. All this had happened in spite of the public resistance showed both by the leadership of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a great number of scholars employed in these research institutes. And this could also have happened despite the fact that the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was far from neglecting during the last couple of years to carry out ambitious research projects in terms of several of the so-called hot topics of Hungary’s distant and near past, the ancient history, the Trianon issue, or history of the family and the cultural resistance to the Communist dictatorship.17 Some further similar developments are also to be registered within the realm of public history in connection with the growing cult of Trianon. The short-lived journal Nagy Magyarország (Greater Hungary) was established in 2009 by a group of second-rate historians, not holding academic status, with the aim of discussing Trianon and other vital events of the 20th century on the basis of the single national truth. The group, many without any professional qualifications or credentials, have established, by the aid of a then mayor representing the Fidesz, their own institutional base, the Memory-point Museum (Emlékpont Múzeum) located in a provincial city, Hódmezővásárhely. The Museum, maintained by the local municipal authorities, was founded in cooperation with the House of Terror, set up previously, which was and has been even today made to represent the

Collective memory as political instrument 63 officially approved image of history of the Fidesz. The final success of these early, pre-2010 efforts to basically transform the concept of Hungary’s modern history has eloquently been showed by the fact that the once editor-in-chief of the journal Nagy Magyarország had become in the meantime one of the leading publicists of the government, and somebody who set the tone for the Kulturkampf (Cultural Warfare) campaign started in 2018, which was aimed at the so-called “liberal cultural rule.” The House of Terror, already mentioned, was actually founded under the patronage of Fidesz in 2002 for political propaganda purposes, specifically to create and deepen an explicit anti-Communist historical image. The building that houses the museum (without any collection) serves as a commemorative place,18 while the exhibitions feature the telos of representing the national suffering caused by the Communist rule.19 It is also located on one of the most fascinating thoroughfares in Budapest, Andrássy út (Andrássy Avenue), which gives room for diverse commemorative public rituals and ceremonies organised by Fidesz, where sometimes even the Prime Minister delivers a speech. The head of the Museum, Mária Schmidt, supervising and coordinating the Fidesz’s historical (memory) policy, also manages some other Fidesz-founded historical institutes, and the historical propaganda campaigns linked to a few outstanding official commemorations like the one held on World War I, the 1956 revolution, the 30th anniversary of the regime change, and the 100th anniversary of the Trianon Peace Treaty. One can find at the background of the aforementioned institutional forums representing to some degree the scholarly domain a unique historical subculture, existing since at least the 2000s onwards. It is enriched by adopting so-called national pop music (whose lyrics include nationalist messages),20 the film industry,21 and not least by incorporating certain leisure activities such as historical military games and various tourist programs.22 This is supplemented by the reading of alternative historical accounts either on Trianon or of the ancient history of the Hungarians, with their pre-Christian tribal social and political frameworks. The number and the extent of membership in these societies, however, are not known at this moment, but it may safely be argued that there has been a vital and unambiguous social support for the historical and identity politics of the presentday Hungarian government.

Conclusion In summarising, the gradual emergence and the recent triumphant expansion of the Trianon industry was linked initially to the political opposition movements, when Fidesz was in opposition to the Socialist-Liberal government. Still, it was not simply an ingredient element of the political strategy applied by the Fidesz, but something created more or less independently of its political guidance. The historical subculture manifesting itself through the spreading cult of Trianon was thus an autonomous form of public history which, however, could easily be appropriated by any right-wing political propaganda.

64  The past as experience and memory What are the social factors giving birth to this entity? The basic socio-mental preconditions23 that may be held responsible for facilitating these processes are among others the democratisation of the creation (and dissemination) of more than one possible image of a historical past, independent of the history taught at school. A further factor to be mentioned in this context is the sudden return of some of the old corpuses of historical knowledge and conceptual approaches. This closely relates to viewing the national historical cause through the prism of the socalled “fate issues,” which has been an extensive and highly popular sort of discourse in the interwar Hungary represented and practiced especially by the “népi írók,” the populist writers and sociographers we had already discussed in a previous chapter.24 And, lastly, one is tempted to refer here to the urgent need of many young men and women for a newly (re)established community identity to replace the former one invalidated by the political change of 1989. The obvious absence of a feasible group identity due to the subversive forces of a strongly individualist new social order may easily bring back some of the older and apparently (or probably) more or less ambivalent group commitments like the rigorous national one.25 That alone can explain the evolvement of such a unique, but not wholly unprecedented, alternative historical consciousness, which looks to take the form of a public history domain. Everything described previously about how Trianon is viewed and approached now officially in Hungary predicts a future in which the cult of Trianon will finally be nationalised in the same way as it has been appropriated and controlled from above in the Horthy era. The centennial year of the memory of this event in 2020 will no doubt provide ample evidence for this supposition. Although the incalculable geopolitical consequences of the wholehearted embrace of this memorial practice actually restricts the range of options available to the present-day nationalist and populist Hungarian government.

Notes 1 See, for example, the issue of the journal Social Research titled The East Faces West: The West Faces East, Social Research, 60, 4 (Winter 1993). 2 To the notion of the public use of history see, among others, Black, Using History. 3 Vásárhelyi, Mária. Csalóka emlékezet. A  20. század történelme a magyar közgondolkodásban. Pozsony: Kalligram, 2007. 146. 4 Rainer, János M. The Agent: Fragments on State Security and Middle Class Values in Kádárist Hungary. Trondheim: Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2007. 5. See furthermore: Ungváry, Krisztián. A szembenézés hiánya. Felelősségre vonás, iratnyilvánosság és átvilágítás Magyarországon 1990–2017. Budapest: Magánkiadás, 2017. 5 The case was described from an American perspective by Deák, István. “Scandal in Budapest.” New York Review of Books, October 19, 2006. 6 Šiklová, Jiřina. “The Solidarity of the Culpable,” Social Research, 58, 4 (Winter 1991) 767. 7 Certeau, “The Historiographical Operation,” 85. The problem came to be discussed more recently in the various East-European historiographies: Apor, Péter – Sándor Horváth – Mark James (eds.), Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe. London: Anthem Press, 2017. To the notion

Collective memory as political instrument 65 both of the “practical” and “historical” past, see Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes, esp. 102–112. 8 Feischmidt, Margit. “Populáris emlékezetpolitikák,” 51–81. 9 Gyáni, “Social History of Hungary,” 271. 10 Zeidler, Miklós. Ideas on Territorial Revision in Hungary 1920–1945. Budapest, New York: Institute of Habsburg Institute, 2007; Vardy, Stephen Bela. “Trianon in Interwar Hungarian Historiography,” in War and Society in East Central Europe, Vol VI. Essays in World War I: Total War and Peacemaking, A Case Study on Trianon, edited by Béla K. Király – Peter Pastor – Ivan Sanders. New York: distr. by Columbia University Press, 1982. 361–389. 11 Nagy, Zsuzsa L. “Trianon a magyar társadalom tudatában,” Századvég, 3 (1987) 5–25. 12 Romsics, Gergely. “Trianon a Házban. A Trianon-fogalom megjelenése és funkciói a pártok diskurzusaiban az első három parlamenti ciklus idején (1990–2002),” in Az emlékezet konstrukciói. Példák a 19–20. századi magyar és közép-európai történelemből, edited by Gábor Czoch – Csilla Fedinecz. Budapest: Teleki László Alapítvány, 2006. 35–52; Ablonczy, Balázs. Trianon-legendák. Budapest: Jaffa, 2010, 31–32. 13 On the public discourse of the double citizenship, see Krasznár, Veronika Katalin. “Versengő nemzetfogalmak a kettős állampolgárságról szóló 2004–2005-ös publicisztikai vitában,” in Nemzet a mindennapokban. Az újnacionalizmus populáris kultúrája, edited by Feischmidt Margit et al. Budapest: L’Harmattan – MTA TK, 2014. 209–246. 14 The name refers to the territorial subdivision of the Hungarian Kingdom before 1918 (and/or 1920). 15 The border changes fuelling nationalism are extensively discussed in Frank, Tibor – Frank Hadler (eds.). Disputed Territories and Shared Pasts: Overlapping National Histories in Modern Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 16 The great role of scapegoating in conceptualising twentieth-century Hungary’s history is described and analysed in Pók, Attila. The Politics of Hatred in the Middle of Europe. Scapegoating in Twentieth Century Hungary. History and Historiography. Szombathely: Savaria University Press, 2009. 17 The research groups dealing with these topics enumerated all enjoy or have enjoyed domestic, sometimes even foreign, financial support. On the process and events of how the government appropriates the academic institutional system in Hungary during the last few years, see Human Platform, Hungary Turns Its Back on Europe. Dismantling Culture, Education, Science and the Media in Hungary 2010–2019. Budapest: Hungarian Network of Academics, 2020. esp. 45–53. 18 This building served for several years as headquarters for the ÁVH (State Security Office), the Communist Secret Police. True, however, that the same building was previously the headquarters of the Arrow-Cross Movement (the Hungarian Fascists) and also gave room in 1944 to the terror tribunal of the Arrow-Cross Party (Nyilas Számonkérőszék). 19 Pittaway, Mark. “The ‘House of Terror’ and Hungary’s Politics of Memory,” Austrian Studies Newsletter, 15, 1 (Winter 2003) 16–17; Apor, Péter. “An Epistemology of the Spectacle? Arcane Knowledge, Memory and Evidence in the Budapest House of Terror,” Rethinking History, 18, (2014) 328–334. 20 Feischmidt, Margit – Gergő Pulay. “Élmény és ideológia a nacionalista popkultúrában,” in Feischmidt, Nemzet a mindennapokban, 249–289. 21 Sárközy, Réka. Kinek a történelme? Emlékezet, politika, dokumentumfilm. Budapest: Gondolat – OSZK, 2018. 22 Ilyés, Zoltán. “Az emlékezés és a turisztikai élmény nemzetiesítése,” in Feischmidt, Nemzet a mindennapokban, 290–340.

66  The past as experience and memory 23 The sociopsychological context of all of this has masterfully been analysed by the late Ferenc Pataki: Pataki, Ferenc. “Kollektív emlékezet és emlékezetpolitika,” in A varázsát vesztett jövő. Budapest: Noran, 2011. 221–294. 24 Sanders, Ivan. “Post-Trianon Searching: The Early Career of László Németh,” in Béla K. Király et al (eds), War and Society, 347–359; Gyáni, Gábor. Nép, nemzet, zsidó. Pozsony: Kalligram, 2013. 147–172. 25 Cf. Pataki, Ferenc. Nemzet és baloldal. Budapest: Noran, 2015. esp. 207–221; Zombory, Máté. Az emlékezés térképei. Magyarország és a nemzeti azonosság 1989 után. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2011. esp. 85–149.

4 Jewish experience and the memory of the Holocaust

What it means to be a Jew Saul Friedländer in his pathbreaking book argues that, The ‘history of the Holocaust’ cannot be limited only to a recounting of German policies, and measures that led to this most systematic and sustained of genocides; it must include the reactions (and at times the initiatives) of the surrounding world and the attitudes of the victims, for the fundamental reason that the events we call Holocaust represent a totality defined by this very convergence of distinct elements.1 In discussing the peculiar problem of Jewish identity in a country like the interwar and wartime Hungary – which contributed to killing around half a million Hungarian citizens – this call for a fuller vision toward approaching the event of the Holocaust aims to be an important observation worth pursuing. The question arising has been: To what extent and in what sense were those doomed to suffer and die in the hell of Auschwitz-Birkenau really Jews (Jewish) in their own sense of identity? “Well: I  was trained as a Magyar. I  firmly believed that only my confession is Jewish, but I am ethnic Magyar. Since, however, I am not a faithful Israelite, I have no community with the Jewry. Then I became cosmopolitan at the university. All this was a mistake and a lie.”2 This kind of mixed or rather fragmented identity thus expressed by Aladár Komlós (1892–1980), an intellectual (literary historian) in 1921, was to describe the real mental profile of many contemporary Hungarian Jews at around the beginning of the 20th century. Before that, around the mid-19th century, however, the label “Jew” simply meant that someone belonged to the Israelite denomination. In the aftermath of Jewish emancipation, following the 1860s, this, however, changed fundamentally, as the label “Jewish” was applied not just to members of the Israelite denomination – it might have been that an individual was born into a Jewish family, was baptized as an infant or a child, thereby having received Christian (Catholic or Protestant) education, and, thus he or she was not even aware of his/her Jewish origin.3 This is the reason why historians prefer to use the term “Jewish origin” instead of the word, Jew.4

68  The past as experience and memory Following 1869, due to the split of the Israelite Church into Neolog and Orthodox (and even status quo ante) parishes, and not the least owing to the increasing number of neo-orthodox and hasidic local parishes, adherence to the Israelite Church came less and less to express the real self-consciousness of an incessantly growing part of Hungarian Jews. There is hardly any doubt that Jewish religious status, in itself, did not invest Jewry in contemporary Hungary with a “special group identity” and community awareness, which had been, however, ascribed to them by the anti-Jewish laws passed in 1938, 1939 and 1941. As regards ethnicity, if we use the criterion of common culture, primarily the use of mother tongue, a majority of Jews had successfully been adapted to and assimilated into the Hungarian nation. In spite of their rapid and massive cultural assimilation (acculturation), the Jews as a whole still retained some sort of otherness well into the 20th century. The grounds for this quasi-ethnic distinctiveness plainly followed from their confessional attachment, which, however, was in several cases not more than merely a well-accustomed confessional-based community formation. Not only the Jews, but even the Catholics and the Protestants held it important to maintain their confessional links in order to be able to sustain a definite group identity of their own. If the Jews were considered to have an unending separation from the Christians, a fact associated with their alleged racist attributes, it could be justified only by referring to their visible denominational distinctiveness. Even the discriminatory anti-Jewish laws took the confessional status as the sole basis of – or reference point – in identifying the “Jewish race.” This clearly demonstrates that the anti-Semitic politics in Nazi Germany, Hungary and the other contemporary European states relied more on the confession as a classificatory category than anything else. The social attitudes and even the historical experiences laying at the bottom of that kind of a categorical knowledge and social classification are described and analysed by the German sociologist, Georg Simmel. According to Simmel, it is not objectivity but rather the “mental facts” that define and mirror the real identity constructs of the people who are regularly held as strangers, or aliens by members of the in-groups.5 In trying to have a better understanding of the process of successful antiSemitism in Hungary in the course of the first half of the 20th century, one has to be engaged in describing the process of Jewish integration into the Hungarian society. (Integration is meant here as assimilation since along the norms dictating the building of nation-states in the 19th century, integration has not yet gained ground in a full sense of the word.) The main question to be answered is: What could have been the reason for an uninterrupted anti-Semitism in spite of the many apparent signs of the successful integration of the Jews? The evidence for the latter comes from the facts of the massive process of acculturation of large segments of Hungary’s Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many Jews, with the sole exception of some Orthodox Jewish and the Hasidic Jewish communities, gave up Yiddish (and/or German), changed their names and opted for the road of social mobility by becoming professionals, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, company managers etc. It is true, however, that the Magyarisation of names, rather than religious conversion, was the method most generally

Jewish experience & memory of Holocaust 69 chosen for a shift of identity.6 It indicates that the more loosely a given attribute was linked to confessional identity, the easier it was to break away from it in the interests of adaptation. Hence, following only slightly initial resistance, very large numbers of those assimilating gave up Yiddish, and, as a second step, changed their names. One may even add that the successful integration of many urban and especially metropolitan Budapest Jews on the one side was opposed by the increasing mutual alienation among the Jews on the other side. The in-group model was thus always in operation not only between the Christians and the Jews but as much within the Jewish confessional community of the country. The case has aptly been described by Jakov Katz (1904–1998), the great Jewish historian in Jerusalem, who was born into a Hungarian Orthodox family. He argued, that “the Neolog and Orthodox Jews functioned even as two distinct social entities.”7 All the Jews who tended to opt to remain within the closely-knit web of the Jewish Orthodoxy felt themselves to be confined to an increasingly unfavourable social status amidst the conditions of social immobility. Most of them lived in villages, located at a greater distance from the thriving urban centres of modernity; pursued (as usual) lower paid occupations; did not enjoy high prestige; and, consequently, remained more or less strangers in their own local peasant communities.8 The perpetual effort of being integrated in a Hungarian national and modern (urban based) society was to shape and even determine the creation of a new Jewish identity. The process pointing in that direction accelerated the growing divergence between the identity of many, if not all, Jews and the image construct attached to Jewishness by the Christian in-group. This, as a whole, resulted in a highly ambivalent mentality for many Jews, who were on the road to being assimilated. The historian is, thus, induced to make an analytical distinction between identity and image, with the aim of reaching a plausibe answer to the question: What happened in Hungary in the interwar years and during the war? This may help us in interpreting the remarkable change that was occurring in the attitude of the Hungarian state (and political elite) towards the Jews in the interwar period as compared to the previous Dualistic era. The arguments in currency explain the resurgent tide of an extreme anti-Semitism of the state at that time as relating to: (1) the sharpening competition of professionals in the labour market; (2) the large influence exerted by new Galician immigration during World War I; (3) the negative repercussion of the swift emergence of war millionaires (with many Jews among them) and (4) the drastic changes happening to the political elite in 1918 and 1919.9 The latter concerns the significant role that the Jews played in the two revolutions – the memory of which persistently fuelled the anti-Semitic political propaganda throughout the Horthy regime.10 I may cite as evidence the following paradigmatic case. When a delegation of the Alliance (a Jewish organisation) visited the “completely liberal aristocrat” Count Khuen-Héderváry, ambassador of Hungary in Paris, to consult about the first anti-Jewish law passed in 1938, Khuen-Héderváry stated that the enmity Hungarians obviously felt toward the Jews in Hungary was rooted in the permanent “memory of Béla Kun’s and his Jewish comissars.”11

70  The past as experience and memory The vital issue being worth discussing here is the nature of the relationship between identity and the image of the Jewish historical actors, mainly politicians, who were later accused of contributing to the tragedy of Hungary in the aftermath of the Great War. When looking more closely at the actual identity construct of those scapegoated by the Horthy regime propaganda machine that eclipsed the historical Hungarian statehood (Béla Kun or Oszkár Jászi in particular), one may argue that the image-making process was to play, in that case, an important role in shaping the anti-Semitic perception and evaluation – far more than the actual sense of identity of the persons concerned.12 For example, neither Béla Kun (1886–1938), leader of the Republic of Councils in Hungary in 1919, nor his comrades in the leadership of the Republic of Councils gave the least manifest sign of a distinct Jewish consciousness. Kun’s father was a village notary, who later worked as a clerical worker in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca today in Roumania), pursuing such occupations which could not be counted as being typically Jewish. In addition, Béla Kun was a pupil of the well-known Kolozsvár Protestant College and was, in his youth, filled with some sense of national patriotism. Due to his close and continuous commitment to the working class movement thereafter, he also became wholly immunised from any direct influence of Jewishness, an attribute which would have been mediated mainly by the Israelite religion and church.13 Another example is Oszkár Jászi (1875–1957), scholar and Minister in the Károlyi government (1918–1919), who was also branded in the interwar period as representative of a specific Jewish spirit. As opposed to this judgement, György Litván (1929–2006) argues in his Jászi biography, “Like many other assimilated converted Jewish contemporaries [Jászi was baptised even as a child], he grew up and for a long time acted as if he had been born a Calvinist Hungarian. For him Protestantism signified a disposition more than a religion, for he never fully identified with it, despite preserving his belief in God – a period in his freethinking youth aside – right up till his death.”14 And this is justified even by Jászi’s highly critical attitude both towards the assimilationist Jews and such figures like the aforementioned Béla Kun. There was not, as demonstrated before by a few truly paradigmatic examples, any close correspondence between identity and image, although the Jewishness was, and permanently remained, to constitute the main attributes ascribed to many Jews (converted included), who otherwise achieved successful assimilation into the Hungarian nation. The difference between the pre- and post-war era is indeed striking in that regard; a difference which is still awaiting a historical explanation. The pre-1918 Hungarian anti-Semitism, in accordance with the contemporary German one, was based on the mental construction of a cultural code. It is something that signifies that everybody belongs to one particular cultural camp or universe. Hence, the anti-Semitic notion of that kind tended to negate even the mere possibility of Jewish emancipation (and assimilation) as it declared the absolute Jewish cultural alienness, which cannot be eliminated at all. Such a perception, that particular image of the Jew, however, failed, then, to dictate the nationalist discourse in an age when the idea of the co-constitutionality ruled – one which favoured both the emancipation and assimilation process on either side.15

Jewish experience & memory of Holocaust 71 The situation described earlier changed drastically during the late 1910s and especially following 1918 and 1919. Anti-Semitism from that time on started to play a key role in Hungary (as elsewhere in Central Europe) in the nationalist discourse. It derived in part from the general expansion of ethnic nationalism influencing the whole of Europe since the late 19th century and early 20th century.16 The way in which Central Europe contributed to the creation of a new form of anti-Semitism was filling the Jewish image with clear-cut political content. It suddenly “turned out” that the Jew, who up to this point was only viewed as culturally alien, then represented a hostile element that might even mean a political “threat” to the host: the Christian national society.17 At this point, one may quote Ottokár Prohászka (1858–1927), a Roman Catholic bishop and one of the notable ideologues of the initial period of the counter-revolutionary regime, who stated that the Jews and freemasons were the closest allies of destructive communists. “Now we see that they (the freemasons) are an internationalist, defeatist gang that hates the church and opened the gates to Jewish infiltration and tramples upon Christian national traditions.”18 This seems to have been the most important message of 1918 and 1919 in the eyes of those most frightened by the revolutionary events of these years. The language adopted by the interwar state-supported anti-Semitism could even retain some links with the pre-existing forms of hating Jews. However, more radical manifestations and new meanings were then added to the well-accustomed traditional political anti-Semitism. When it took the form of a political code, it was able, in itself, to justify and underline the anti-Jewish discrimination policy committed since the late 1930s in Hungary. The, then, forceful new sense attributed to nationalism and the irony hidden at the depth of the tragic story of Hungary’s Jewry have been demonstrated clearly by the obvious divergence between identity and image. The split occurred at the moment when the most assimilated and the least Jewish Jews lived in Hungary, in the time period after Trianon. The tormenting and almost unsolvable dilemmas of many acculturated Hungarian Jews were fairly expressed by a diary-keeper trader living in a Transdanubian provincial city, Nagykanizsa. János Hoffman gave expression to all this by putting the following entry in his diary on December 1942: “Assimilation for the Jewry – the way we did in Europe – led to catastrophe; it seems that there is no room for remaining Jew and the will to become Magyar. That is the duality which causes enormous sufferings for us; the uprootedness imposed on us which cancels all of our ideals – there is no psychic drive available any more.”19 In summary, I would say that there was more than simply a continuity between the form of anti-Semitism affecting and accompanying Hungary in the age of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (1867–1918) and the one present in the interwar period when it became a state policy. The former was still rooted in the mental construction of a cultural code, as has been elaborated upon by the Israelite historian Schulamit Volkov. The latter, however, was most closely associated with the cognitive construction of political code. This also meant that while the former was mostly held by some middle-class social movements hostile to the issue of Jewish

72  The past as experience and memory assimilation, the latter led to rigid state discrimination policy applied to all those identified with the image of Jewishness. This practice, however, did not have a real connection with the then actual self-awareness and identity constructs of the majority of Hungary’s Jewish population.

The memory of the Hungarian Holocaust Among the topics which have been discussed in dealing with today’s memorialisation practices, one of the most important is the official memory of the past. This is true of Holocaust memory studies internationally as well in Hungary. Regarding the treatment of memory studies in Hungary, one must admit that the most detailed and thoroughgoing descriptions and analyses of the historical policy in terms of the Jewish genocide during World War II were achieved more by foreign than by Hungarian historians. The first to be cited in the field was a Germanlanguage monograph published by an Austrian historian, Regina Fritz.20 In it Fritz described the trajectory of how the Hungarian Communist political elite sustained their image of the past by instrumentalising historical memory. She followed the story starting when the war ended until well into the 1990s, in the aftermath of the 1989 regime change. Fritz claimed that renewed public interest in the Holocaust reappeared as late as the 1970s and especially the 1980s after the deep amnesia imposed on it, a pause beginning in the late 1940s. The collapse of Communist rule brought the story into a totally new phase, giving rise both to a live public discussion and commemoration of the Jewish tragedy. Since that time a kind of state memory politics of the Hungarian Holocaust is on the agenda, as shown by the growing number of monuments dedicated to the memory of the Jewish victims of the war as well as the declaration of the Holocaust Day ceremony to be held in schools. The British Holocaust historian, Tim Cole, who specialises in researching the history of the ghettos in Hungary established for the Jews in the course of 1944,21 has considered the monuments erected in Budapest during the Communist period. He raised the question of how and to what extent the organised memory (that is, the official memory) transformed the sites in the city where the atrocities were actually committed against the Jews in 1944 and 1945 to a kind lieux de memoire. The places concerned were the sites of the ghettos that had been established at different parts of Pest side of the city. Cole found that the initial commemorative efforts made by the authorities erased rather than fixed the “Jewish” specificity of the Holocaust. These monuments memorialised the victims of fascism (defined very broadly) and stressed the great role that the “Soviet liberators” played by freeing the Jewish dwellers of the Pest ghettos. This way of commemorating the Holocaust was then a general practice in all of the countries of the Soviet bloc. Change occurred in Hungary during the late 1980s with the arrival of explicit reference to the Jewish victims of the war events. The shift in memory politics was, however, coupled with a much greater focus placed on the role of the rescuers in the whole story, the paradigmatic case being the memory of Raoul Wallenberg (1912–1947?). There also appeared an endeavour to nationalise the memory of

Jewish experience & memory of Holocaust 73 World War II by Magyarising the notion of victimhood. It amounted to restricting the Hungarian perpetrators who committed the atrocities against the Jews to particular social and political forces (the Hungarian fascists, the Arrow Cross Party/ Nyilaskeresztes Párt). This tendency was further strengthened by commemorating the gentile victims of the war. Academic historical scholarship exhibited little interest in the history of the Holocaust for a long time. Accordingly, research into the memory of the Holocaust is among the most neglected areas in history writing in Hungary even today.22 This situation may derive in part from the difficulty of facing up to the complicity of both the Hungarian state authorities (including the gendarmarie) and ordinary citizens, as perpetrators or bystanders,23 in the genocide (and, of course, the durable discrimination) of the Hungarian Jewry. The case has correctly been characterised by a Western analyst who stated: “The Holocaust became sidelined, distorted or ignored in public discourse and in textbooks, which ignored the Hungarians’ role as collaborators as well.”24 The striking indifference to and the deep silence imposed by the Communist historical policy on the Jewish Holocaust may best be described by the fact that even the first Marxist synthetic master narrative of Hungary’s history, a twovolume work appearing in 1964, did not find the topic worthy of a lengthy discussion; only 21 lines were devoted to it, and within that no more than 12 lines addressed the events of the deportation of around half a million Hungarian Jews of the countryside being sent to the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The strikingly short passage telling the story of the Holocaust events looked like a news item and lacked any interpretation and argumentation of the past referred to.25 About this time, Elek Karsai (1922–1986), an archivist historian, coordinated a project to publish the source material related to the deportation and ghettoisation of the countryside Jews and the policy of discrimination against the Jews in Hungary from the late 1930s. Although it was a non-academic research project, a large amount of archival source material was collected and made available. This work, however, was independent of official (academic bound) historical scholarship and was financed by a Hungarian Jewish committee.26 György Ránki, then a young historian, was the first to break the academic silence by publishing a book in 1968 on the question of how Nazi Germany had occupied Hungary in 1944. Ránki dedicated a whole chapter (36 pages) to telling the history of the atrocities committed against the Hungarian Jewry in 1944. His account was the first scholarly discussion of the theme written by a Hungarian historian in Hungary.27 The Holocaust did not receive any further serious attention at this time from any domestic historian. With the American appearance of Randolph Braham’s (1922–2018) monumental book in the United States in the early 1980s,28 the situation changed substantially. György Ránki’s immediate reaction to Braham’s work was the self-critical observation that this book should have had already been written by a Hungarian historian living in Hungary. Ránki added that Braham’s monograph was a great challenge to Hungarian history writing, one that it had to respond to as quickly as possible. This, however, Ránki admitted, would indeed be difficult because the

74  The past as experience and memory Hungarian historians were expected to navigate between the cliffs of the philoSemitism and anti-Semitism.29 Not too long after that a conference was organised on the topic in Jerusalem with the inclusion of several Hungarian and Israeli historians. This was fast succeeded by another discussion held in New York City where many other historians who specialised in the Holocaust studies were also to present. Ránki’s eminent role in initiating and supporting these international discussions on the history of the Holocaust was enormous. It followed from his own personal experience; he had been deported to Auschwitz (and was later taken to Germany to become a slave labourer). Braham’s narrative was much later translated and published in Hungary, which gave further impetus for the historical research of the Holocaust in Hungary. The emergence of the Holocaust as a distinct and engaging problem both in the public opinion and in scholarly discourse occurred in the West (in West Germany and the United States alongside Israel) at the same time as it did in Hungary. Before then, the silence imposed on the issue, the striking neglect showed towards it, lasted for about a decade and a half after the late 1940s.30 Hungarian memory politics in terms of the Holocaust were thus not wholly a unique phenomenon. Readiness for forgetting rather than remembering the immense sufferings of the Jews in Hungary during World War II was underlined by the almost general amnesia in connection with the war. One may even add: memory of the Great War, together with its close consequence, the Peace Treaty of Trianon, was also devised to be wholly forgotten by the work of the Communist historical policy, at least until the 1980s. Although, the historical fact that Hungary then lost the larger part of her former territory, with a corresponding loss of her population, resulted in a deep psychological shock to both the 20th and 21st century Hungarian historical awareness and national identity, which was especially acute during the interwar period (and now seems to have revived again). All of this has previously been discussed in a detailed way. To be more precise, the issue of the history of World War II was not totally absent from contemporary communicative and cultural memory (a few monuments were even set up to commemorate the event, including the Jewish genocide), but the way this past was approached did not allow any room for keeping in memory the variety of the Hungarian victims of the wartime events. It followed from Hungary’s very special case as a nation that was defeated in the war by the Soviet Union, a situation that prevented its people from vindicating their rights as victims, a status which the people of neighbouring countries, such as the Poles, or the Czechs, were unambiguously entitled to claim. The many sufferings attached to the events of World War II even in this country, including the Jewish genocide, were thus eliminated from the narratives produced about the war, and they were replaced by a master narrative called the Great Patriotic War. Accordingly, deep silence was to become the rule in sensitive matters, such as the victimhood of the Hungarian soldiers who died in great numbers not exclusively at the front, but even at Prisoner of War (POW) camps in the Soviet Union. Similar oblivion was sanctioned in terms of civilian victims of the war, dying due to the bombings both of Budapest and the provincial cities, or as being brought to malenkij robot,

Jewish experience & memory of Holocaust 75 when a great number of the civilian population, mainly males, were deported to the Gulag in 1945. And, finally, not too many words were allowed to be heard in connection with Jewish victimhood. The ruling canon of how to tell the story of World War II led in this way to cancelling the overall memory of the sufferings of the people of a defeated country like Hungary, and this amnesia was extended to some extent to the Jewish victims. Some modest changes occurred at the beginning of the 1970s with the appearance of István Nemeskürty’s (1925–2015) Requiem egy hadseregért (Requiem for an Army). This book described the fate of a great many Hungarian soldiers who served in the war. Nemeskürty’s attempt to open up the topic of Hungarian victimhood during World War II focused on the tragedy of the Hungarian Second Army, which was destroyed at the River Don during the first few months of 1943. Nemeskürty claimed that the long-lasting silence imposed on the victimhood of the soldiers (the number of the dead among them might even reach 100,000, according to his own estimation) began at the moment when the army had to cease to exist. This oblivion, one might add, was an uninterrupted process lasting until the publication of his book in 1972. Nemeskürty insisted that “these people, this hundred thousand males, should be mourned, because they were victims.”31 The dramatic account given by this book was a trumpet call to create a cult of the fallen Hungarian soldiers of World War II. This initiation was immediately furthered by a made-for-TV film shot by the well-known director and cameraman Sándor Sára (1933–2019). This film, which lasted for several hours, was titled Pergőtűz (a 2. magyar hadsereg pusztulása a Donnál) (Drum fire. [Destruction of the Hungarian Second Army at the River Don]). It was based on interviews with a few surviving soldiers of the Hungarian Second Army. When the film appeared on TV, the visual-oral testimonies transmitting the historical experiences that the soldiers gained both as warriors and POWs in the Soviet Union had a significant impact on the public by making available many fresh and surprising historical “facts.” The film broke the silence surrounding the topic of Hungarian victimhood during the war and contributed to the rekindling of a sense of national identity, which had suffered from bearing the burden of the forced awareness of collective sinfulness.32 The importance of all this in view of changing the then prevailing attitude to the memory of the Hungarian Holocaust was evident. The positive public reception of such an insistence on the notion of a true Hungarian victimhood connected to World War II was quickly met and brought further by historians who welcomed the revitalised interest in the collective experience of the past. Gyula Juhász (1930–1993), an authoritative historian at that time and a specialist in the history of the foreign policy and war diplomacy of the Horthy era, argued that “this war has not yet been articulated and so the work ought to begin now.” The task which is waiting for us historians is not to identify the heroes and/ or the villains, but to enable “the ordinary man . . . [who] was afraid, who did his task or the one he thought he had to do” to finally be given a voice so that he could be heard after so many years of total silence. For, Juhász added, he has the right to tell the story of his experiences, traumatic as they may have been.33

76  The past as experience and memory

From remembering to memory Two theoretical questions should be raised before going into the details of how the Hungarian historical memory embraced the Holocaust experience. One of the most basic problems has always been connected to understanding how private memory (remembering per se) is born, and which are the mechanisms making possible its rendering as a public (social, collective) memory. A further, not less important, issue concerns the relationship between the collected and collective memory34 of the Jewish and non-Jewish victims of World War II. No public memory can exist in the (total) absence of personal memory (remembering). It is true that the official kind of public memory, the so-called Geschichtspolitik (historical politics)35 pursued and sustained by the state, may come into existence even without the necessary support of a kind of collective or social memory. Official memory politics, however, may assist, or conversely restrict, the process of establishing collective memory, and indirectly may have some influence even on articulating private memory. The latter is happening now in regards to Holocaust private memory throughout the world, including Hungary. One may add that collective (or social) memory may also facilitate the personal memorialisation process, manifesting itself through biographic remembering. The essence of their reciprocal relationship means that collective memory regularly fulfills the function of generalising the highly scattered, even contradictory and always particular, individual pieces of remembrances.36 The myriad personal remembrances coming to light through the aide of biographic memory constitute the hinterland of any sort of collective memory. Biographic memory is thus the sole medium making it possible to reach back to the once existing primary (authentic) historical experience that has gone away forever. By playing such a role, biographic memory provides us with a secondary experience of history, representing (more closely, replacing) the idea (or spirit) of the original, the authentic historical experience, the sensation of the historical agents (as Wilhelm Dilthey has described it).37 Therefore, biographic memory as holding direct contact with the past realm in this way is necessarily segmented, plural and particular. Collective memory, constructed retrospectively, performs the work of collecting, homogenising and representing diverse individual past experiences (remembrances). This is how the mechanism of the memory works, based first upon personal remembering and then proceeding toward the collective form of memory. This explains why the work of memory, which begins with sensation and ends with a retrospective keeping of the past in mind, should obviously be discontinuous.38 Not even the communicative form of collective memory may be devoid of a conscious act of “preserving memory.”39 Considering all this helps make clear how making personal testimonies on the experience of Jewish suffering available to the public can play a very special role in the process of generating a distinct Holocaust consciousness. Two telling examples may be mentioned regarding the case of how the memory both of Jewish and gentile victims of World War II has been maintained following the tragic historical events of the war. The German (more exactly, the

Jewish experience & memory of Holocaust 77 West-German) memory of the war (and of the Holocaust) was long characterised and even defined not simply by forgetting but rather by selective recollection. This meant that it was not the Jews, the true victims of Nazi Germany, but the German people themselves who occupied the position of the victim, who were thus remembered both publicly and privately. The German POWs and the large masses of the German diaspora population who were persecuted and expelled from East and Central Europe and transplanted to the territory of West-Germany in the aftermath of the war represented the victims of World War II in the West-German mind.40 Only much later, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, did German memory politics turn to the Jews as representing the proper victims of the Nazi terror.41 The “German memory of World War II” was accordingly shaped and dominated until the late 1960s by remembering (and mourning) the German victims only. An alternative way of memorialising the Holocaust occurred in the EastEuropean countries and constituted the Communist pattern of historical politics in terms of the Holocaust. This also involved, more or less, suppressing memories of the war as well as avoiding reference to the victimhood of the people who otherwise committed atrocities against the Jews. This memorialisation (or, more precisely, this “forgetting strategy”) sometimes took the form of declaring the principle of collective culpability of the whole nation which collaborated with Nazi Germany, as in the case of Hungary, which was held to be “the last satellite to Germany.” Within this construct there was, however, an obvious effort to reduce the perpetrator’s responsibility, that of the elites and the average citizens alike, by supposing their innocence, with the exceptions of a few fascists, who were the “true” perpetrators. This method of neutralising the awkward memory of the national engagement with the criminal acts of the past was also strengthened by emphasising the great role that the anti-fascist forces played, a group allegedly led exclusively by the Communists. The latter form of identity politics led, within a short time (even before the 1950s), to dropping the memory of the Jewish victimhood altogether. The partial or total lack of keeping in mind the memory of Jewish suffering and mass death, the Holocaust in its entirety, lasted until the 1960s and, in several areas, well into the 1970s. Similar amnesia affected the memory of many other, non-Jewish victims of the war, including the soldiers who died in large number at the front or who became POWs in some form in the Soviet Union. That was the case especially in a country like Hungary, which was held to be responsible for her own sufferings as she collaborated up to the last moment with Nazi Germany.42 The first signs of creating a public Holocaust discourse in Hungary appeared as late as the 1960s in the form of some artistic representations. For example, Jorge Semprùn’s Le Grand Voyage (1963), a fictionalised retelling of his deportation and incarceration in Buchenwald, was published in Hungary in 1964 (and reprinted in 1973). The book became a cultic text. One of the first and highly influential movies wholly dedicated to depicting the Hungarian (civilian) complicity in the action of sending half a million Jewish fellow citizens to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Utó-­ szezon (Late season), directed by Zoltán Fábri (1917–1994), appeared in Hungarian cinemas in 1967. Fábri’s film reached an even wider audience than Semprùn’s

78  The past as experience and memory novel as 400,000 cinema-goers went to see it.43 This seems to indicate that there has been some change in the prevailing official attitude to the issue of the Jewish persecution (and the overall historical fate of the Jews) in the Hungarian past.44 The following decade brought a real tide of the partly fictional, partly documentary biographic memory literature in Hungary. Due to the publication of a wide range of personal testimonies, Holocaust discourse became a real (and legitimate) public event. All this happened, seen from an analytic viewpoint, under the shade (or maybe the light) of the borderline separating the “communicative” and “cultural” memory from each other, influenced by the floating gap, the meeting point of the orally transmitted tradition (the authentic memory of the past) and the written or at least artistically and scholarly depicted past realm.45 Starting in the 1970s, quite a large number of texts on Holocaust memory started to appear in book form, making available the authentic experiences of the Jewish victims of the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators to a reading audience. The varied manifestations of such a biographic memory provided ample evidence for the Jewish historical experiences linked to the fatal and lethal events of 1944/45, the ghettoisation and its consequence, the deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau. An incomplete list of important works include the following novels, Terelőút (Driving road) by György Gera (1972), A tolmács (The translator) by Ágnes Gergely (1973), Hajtűkanyar (Hairpin bend) a documentary fiction by Mária Ember (1974), Sorstalanság (Fatelesness) a biographic novel written by Imre Kertész (1975), Az első évtized (The first decade) by Pál Bárdos (1975), and the narrative Szemüveg a porban (Spectacle in the dust) produced by Ervin Gyertyán (1975). These and other texts published in the first few years of the 1970s were joined by memoirs such as Vándorló fegyház (Wandering penitentiary) by György Markos (1971), Miskolc – Nyizsnyij-Tagil – Miskolc by György Fazekas (1979), and the narrative Mozgó vesztőhely (Mobile scaffold) written by Elemér Sallai (1979). A few diaries were also made public at that time, like the one published first by a Transylvanian publisher in Hungarian.46 The shocking narratives of individual Jewish life stories did indeed have a great impact, far deeper than any historian’s accounts could do. The reason for it is that while the latter can generate at best a “cognitive learning process” in the audience, a fictional or quasi-fictional narrative is able to capture the total imagination and affective household of the reader. As a result, somebody becoming familiar with these narratives may thus discern the true victimhood of the people from the past referred to in the biographic memorial. It follows from the effective way of ascribing specific meaning rhetorically to history through some individual images.47 In addition, national myths and ideologies represented by the official war memory have been acutely refuted by the historical “facts” presented in the firsthand accounts of the Holocaust, which was a new sensation for those who formerly had no access to the experiences of the “limit event” of the Holocaust. The conflict between the two constructs of the historical past might prompt many to self-revise their view of the awkward past of their own country and the people living there (including their own ancestors). When history comes to be seen not exclusively from the single perspective of the perpetrators, but also from the angle of the

Jewish experience & memory of Holocaust 79 victims, the shift of the viewpoint may lead many to be more aware of the truly tragic sense of that particular past. In this process, it becomes easier to feel empathy for the victims who suffered so much from the misdeeds of the perpetrators, much easier than by merely knowing what really happened in the past. All of this may even lodge a degree of guilt in the consciences of the bystanders and their descendants. The textual testimonies of these biographic memories, and the many other forms of memorial manifestations of the sinful past of the nation, could thus enable the audience to connect with the retraumatised experience of that historical past.48 The question, however, still remains to be answered: What further factors are needed to entail such an identification with past victimhood when consuming the artistic representations of the Holocaust experiences? The generation shift may, in fact, facilitate the evolution of such an attitude, as some scholars suggest. For example, it may have contributed to the success of West Germany to “come to terms with its past” in the last few decades of the 20th century. One may claim that the temporal chain of the generations is or has been a key factor in shaping the changing attitude to the fact of the Holocaust.49 Another possible explanation concerns the ever changing meaning of history, which has a lot to do with the incessantly moving temporal perspective from which the same past is viewed. The changing temporal horizon on the basis of which the past is examined creates and increases the plurality of the meaning of history. As people become more and more familiar with subsequent events and processes which follow the actual past studied by the historian, these additional “facts” of an after-history offer alternative (and plausible) images of the historical past to the one known (and available) to the actors living in and experiencing the primary context of history. Consequently, the historical facts constructed retrospectively by the historians are not necessarily the same ones already available to the historical actors who were personally involved in the past events and processes.50 Regarding the possibility for a radical break with a well-established canon of history, the chances seem to be better when the ruling national(ised) memory falls into disrepute, thereby opening the way before the rise of both of a truly personal and specifically collective memory, which tends to replace the so far dominant role of the former. When this event is coupled with an apparent weakening of rigorous state censorship in terms of the “telling the truth of history,” the prospects for renewing the image of history through accommodating the individual and collective memorialisation practices seem to be favorable.

Emergence of a Holocaust consciousness in Hungary It is hard to say whether by the 1970s the memory of the Holocaust was established as a fully legitimate lieu de mémoire in Hungary. What is clear is that the events of the 1970s prepared the way for such a future development to take place over the subsequent decades. In addition, one has to be careful in not exaggerating the weight of the initial factors pointing in that direction. For example, Sorstalanság (Fatelesness), a fictional Holocaust narrative by Imre Kertész (1929–2016), winner of the 2002 Nobel prize for literature, was published in 1975. Did it have

80  The past as experience and memory an impact on the public’s memory of the Holocaust? As it happens, Sorstalanság did not receive any perceptible recognition and appreciation at the time of its publication, so it would seem not.51 There are some other examples, however, that suggest that something was happening. The documentary fiction, Hajtűkanyar (Hairpin bend) (1974), written by Mária Ember (1931–2001), a publicist, succeeded in breaking the wall of silence built around the Holocaust. Ember’s narrative was a fusion of available historical documents with personal recollections (presumably that of the author), and the plainly fictional narrativisation of ghettoisation and deportation (not to Auschwitz, but to an Austrian work camp, Strasshof, close to Vienna). The novel provoked a swift reaction from a non-Jewish writer and essayist, György Száraz (1930–1987). His essay reacting to Ember’s text was first published in a popular monthly, Valóság, and later in book form in a widely read book series, Gyorsuló idő (Accelerating time), from one of the then leading publishers Magvető.52 Száraz’s essay provoked wide public interest and resulted in a breakthrough in the process of creating public discourse on the Holocaust. This may in part be explained by the raising of the question of Hungarian complicity in committing the Holocaust atrocities. No doubt, some official consent was also needed to publish this self-critical essay, and it shows indirectly the willingness of the Communist leadership to change the accustomed official attitude to the “Jewish question” and the memory of the Holocaust. Száraz’s argument demonstrated the firm intention of the author to face the past as represented by Ember’s narrative. Even the motto that Száraz chose for his own text, taken from Ember’s novel, showed what he aimed to express. “The object of this book is not ‘the’ fate of the Jewish. What this book is about, is the history of Hungary (Mária Ember: Hajtűkanyar).” Száraz commented on the statement the following way, “It is a subtle motto. But there lies a charge and a latent historical claim at the bottom of it. It does not request, and does not demand: on the contrary, it announces. Rightfully.”53 He then puts the question to himself: How is one compelled to write about 1944? The answer to the question is that the story of that notable year has to be told in a way that reveals how it closely concerns every one of us, including the survivors, the bystanders, and the ones who were born later and who would be born in the future. This is because the events that happened in that year have now truly become Hungarian history. When Száraz refers to concrete passages in Ember’s novel, he is interested in the textual manifestations of Jewish self-image (identity), and the image of wartime Hungarian society that contemporary Jews constructed for themselves. His primary aim is to bring them into close connection for the sake of identifying the then relevant Jewish and Hungarian (or, more precisely, Magyar, or gentile) identity constructs. Since Ember relies on a clearly Jewish viewpoint to relate the persecution and suffering of the Jews in Hungary, Száraz complements it with the distinct viewpoint of the perpetrator, or at least that of the bystander. As he is guided and deeply moved by Ember’s Jewish-focused account both of the ghettoisation and deportation of the countryside Hungarian Jewry, Száraz concludes that not even the gentiles exist beyond the constraints of the depressing historical

Jewish experience & memory of Holocaust 81 experiences represented by the Holocaust. He is thus ready to admit the burden of culpability, and adopts a guilty conscience due to complicity in the sins committed against the Jewish citizens of the country. Száraz thus provided the Hungarian Holocaust with a specific meaning by ascribing to it a more general historical significance. He seems to anticipate in this way the later development of American and German (and international) Holocaust memorialisation practices. It is quite another point to note that, not reducing the significance of his intellectual achievement and bravery, only much later did a more permanent public interest in the Hungarian Holocaust emerge in Hungary.

Holocaust memory politics after 1989 Coming to terms with the past has even been today a particularly difficult task in Hungary in connection with the Holocaust. The more or less obliviousness of Hungarian society of their own complicity in committing the Holocaust (beyond the role of state authorities of the Horthy regime) was followed after 1989 by officially initiated, forceful commemorative practices about the Jewish tragedy of 1944 and 1945. Just a few weeks after the new, democratically-elected government led by József Antall (1932–1993) entered office in 1990, the president of the republic and the Prime Minister attended the unveiling of a monument dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust located on the territory of the former Great Pest Ghetto. Also, the Minister of Interior spoke at another commemorative ceremony that year, organised for the inauguration of a monument dedicated to Jewish Hungarian martyrs on the enbankment of the Danube River. The message delivered at these official commemorative events was, however, not to wholly acknowledge the past misdeeds of the “Hungarian nation” with a belated official apology. Antall argued in one of his commemorative speeches that while it is true that “serious tribulations, violations of law occurred, or rather laws [were passed] contrary to the concept of human rights and humanism. . . . But nobody should forget that until March 19, 1944, Europe’s largest Jewish community was still alive.”54 There was no reference to the responsibility of the Hungarian state bureaucracy (including local administrations) as perpetrators and the people as bystanders to the genocide committed in Hungary later in 1944. Still, as a plain indication of the changed attitude to the Holocaust, the Hungarian Parliament passed several laws on restitution concerning the “unfairly” committed damages to Hungarian citizens between 1939 and 1949. This was to replace the official apology offered for the victims of the genocidal anti-Semitism of a former Hungarian political authority (more or less supported by majority of the Hungarian society) which thus expressed the obvious recognition of the Hungarian state’s responsibility for the sinful acts of the past. The next step was taken again by another conservative government, the Fidesz one (in power between 1998 and 2002) by declaring (in 2000) April 16 as the day to commemorate the Holocaust; it also established the House of Terror Museum for commemorating 20th century state horrors (as has already been mentioned). The latter, however, laid more emphasis on displaying the atrocities committed by

82  The past as experience and memory the Communist regime rather than on the Horthy regime for passing discriminating measures against Jewish citizens in the prelude to the Holocaust.55 The establishment of the Budapest Holocaust Museum and Education Center, which opened in 2004 in a former Orthodox Synagogue under the patronage of a Socialist-Liberal coalition government, was devised to counterbalance this one-sidedness. The division of labour between the two memorial sites reproduced and further strengthened the long tradition of a divided memory of the brutalities featured in the 20th-century Hungary. The main issue looming behind all this has been the insecure definition of who may truly be considered to embody the victim and the perpetrator in the past. The obvious lack of a coherent culture of memory in Hungary also follows from the common, but still contradictory, traumatic experiences of the 20th century. Very few attempts have been made after 1989 to transcend this duality of how past experiences are remembered now. One of the positive endeavours was the dialogue proposed by the Abbey of Pannonhalma, a prominent institution of the Hungarian Catholic Church. Using the circular letter of Pope John Paul II, issued in September 1996 on the memory of Shoah (We remember: considerations on Shoah) as a starting point, Asztrik Várszegi, abbot of Pannonhalma, organised a conference in 1998 with the aim of confronting on a scholarly basis the main problems of history of the Jews in Hungary. He stressed: “We did not want only to tear the wounds open by this dialogue and remain only at the rigorous analysis of the various topics. We wanted that everything brought forward should become memory and the ground for dialogue. We would be remedied through remembering only. The scholarly conference and the volume produced as a result thus serve the reconciliation and the social calming down, or a conscious beginning of such as reconciliation.”56 The project, however, was not continued and the effort of drawing closer to each other the two realms of memory, the Jewish and the Gentile one, seems not to have been successful. Apart from the public discourse referred to, actual historical inquiries in the field have increased since 1989. Parallel to and somewhat independently of it, a separate mode of collective memory on the Jewish side has also gained legitimacy during the last few years; these include the ambition of some young people to invent or re-invent the lost traditions of a past Jewishness.57

Conclusion There are many obvious deficiencies of how the coming to terms with the past is achieved. The case of the memory of the Holocaust in Hungary (as well as in neighbouring countries, including, recently Italy) is just one example.58 One may argue that two distinct traumatic experiences perform key functions in Hungary in terms of creating and sustaining the national consciousness. The first is a collective memory manifesting itself in the Trianon syndrome, attached to the territorial and population losses the country sufferred after World War I. Equally important is the second collective memory, manifesting itself in the wake of the trauma of the Holocaust. The Holocaust in Hungary, affecting the Jewish and Roma Gypsy

Jewish experience & memory of Holocaust 83 populations, accounts for most of the casualties caused by the war. The estimates regarding the number of victims due to deportation, the Military Labour Service, the ghettoisation (in Budapest) and the many atrocities committed by the Arrow Cross Party against the Jewish citizens in Budapest in late 1944 and early 1945 range between 465,000 and 560,000. The Jews in the reattached regions – numbering around 300,000 – and in the provinces became victims almost to the last man, woman and child.59 There are competing traumatic events and historical narratives, but the Trianon syndrome alone manages to monopolise and reserve for itself the national claim for the “true” traumatic past, expressed by the widely accepted view that it is “a question of national fate” (nemzeti sorskérdés). The basis of reference has here been the very concept of the nation as an exclusive sacrificial community, which goes hand in hand with the conceptual relativisation, and sometimes the outright negation, of the Jewish sacrificial community, at least in some particular collective memories, if not in the official (commemorative) Holocaust memory. The latter, however, is full of many ambiguities, as has clearly been evidenced by the Memorial for the Victims of the German Occupation, erected in 2015 at Szabadság Square. The inherent message of it has been that not the Hungarians (contemporary state and the people) but the occupying force, the Nazi Germany, bore all of the responsibility for everything that happened in Hungary in 1944 (including the deportation and ghettoisation of the Jews). The monument has thus soon become a symbol of the kind of nationalist politics of memory that are unwilling to fully accommodate the (self-critical) Holocaust consciousness.60 The mutual absolutising of the victim trauma and the absence of recognising the perpetrator trauma61 prevents the Trianon syndrome and the Holocaust trauma from serving simultaneously as instances of equal importance in the national memory in the dominant collective mind. This seems to lie at the bottom of the contradictory developments of the Holocaust memory in today’s Hungary. The many tensions and contradictions found in the public attitude to that particular past seems also to characterise the living memory of the 1956 revolution, which could as much unite as divide the nation following even 1989.

Notes 1 Friedlӓnder, Saul. The Years of Extermination. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939– 1945. New York: Harperc Perennial, 2008. xv. 2 Komlós, Aladár. “Zsidók válaszúton (1921),” in Magyar-zsidó szellemtörténet a reformkortól a holocaustig, 2. Bevezetés a Magyar-zsidó irodalomba, edited by János Kőbányai – József Kiss. Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 1997, 2 vols. 168. 3 A good example in case is Oscar Jászi. See: Litván, György. The Twentieth-Century Prophet: Oscar Jászi 1875–1957, trans. Tim Wilkinson. Budapest – New York: Central European University Press, 2006. 4. 4 Erényi, Tibor. A zsidók története Magyarországtól a honfoglalástól napjainkig. Budapest: Útmutató, n.d. 50–51 5 Simmel, Georg. “Exkurzus az idegenről,” in Az idegen. Variációk Simmeltől Derridáig, edited by Gábor Biczó. Debrecen: Csokonai, 2004. 56–59.

84  The past as experience and memory 6 Karády, Viktor. Zsidóság, polgárosodás, asszimiláció. Tanulmányok. Budapest: Cserépfalvi, 1997. 114–150. 7 Katz, Jakov. Végzetes szakadás. Az ortodoxia kiválása a zsidó hitközsége­ kbőlMagyarországon és Németországban, trans. Judit Stöckl – Gábor Ács. Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 1999. 303. 8 This all has been demonstrated on an empirical basis in Karády, Zsidóság, polgárosodás. 9 Bihari, Péter. Lövészárkok a hátországban. Középosztály, zsidókérdés, antiszemitizmus az első világháború alatti Magyarországon. Budapest: Napvilág, 2008. 10 McCagg, William O. “Jews in the Revolutions: The Hungarian Experience,” Journal of Social History, 28 (1972) 78–105; Borsányi, György. “Zsidók a munkásmozgalomban,” Világosság, XXXIII, 2 (1992) 145–152; Erényi, Tibor. “Zsidók és a magyar baloldaliság,” Világosság, XXXIII, 2 (1992) 152–160. 11 Katzburg, Nathaniel. Zsidópolitika Magyarországon 1919–1943, trans. Piroska Hajnal. Budapest: Bábel, 2002. 245. 12 On scapegoating in Hungarian context, see Pók, The Politics of Hatred, esp. 67–68. 13 Cf. Kun, Béláné. Kun Béla (Emlékezések). Budapest: Magvető, 1969. 7–20; Borsányi, György. The Life of a Communist Revolutionary, Béla Kun, trans. Mario D. Fenyo. New York – Boulder: distr. by Columbia University Press, 1993. 5–8. 14 Litván, A Twentieth-Century Prophet, 4. 15 To the meaning of cultural code, see Volkov, Shulamit. “The Written Matter and the Spoken World. On the Gap between Pre-1914 and Nazi Antisemitism,” in Unanswered Questions. The Nazi Germany and the Genocide of Jews, edited by François Furet. New York: Schocken Books, 1989. 33–55. In terms of the notion, co-constitutionality, see Ascheim, Steven. In Times of Crisis. Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2001. 87. 16 Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 101–130. 17 The shift was termed in this way by Volkov, Shulamit. “Anti-Semitism as a Cultural Code. Reflections on the History and Historiography of Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, XXIII (1978) 25–45. 18 Quoted by Pók, Attila. A haladás hitele. Progresszió, bűnbakok, összeesküvők a huszadik századi Magyarországon. Budapest: Akadémiai, 2010. 168. 19 Hoffman, János. Ködkárpit. Egy zsidó polgár feljegyzései (1940–1944). Szombathely: Szombathely Megyei Jogú Város, n.d. 97. 20 Fritz, Regina. Nach Krieg und Judenmord. Ungarns Geschichtspolitik seit 1944. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012. 21 Cole, Tim. Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto. New York: Routledge, 2003; Cole, Tim. Traces of the Holocaust. Ghettoization and Deportation: Journeying in and out of the Ghettos. London: Continuum, 2011. 22 Among the few exceptions one may mention: Seewann, Gerhard – Éva Kovács, “Juden und Holocaust in der ungarischen Erinnerungskultur seit 1945,” Südosteuropa, 54, 1 (2006) 24–59; Laczó, Ferenc. Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide. An Intellectual History, 1929–1948. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 23 On a specific type of the bystander (or perpetrator), an excellent historical analysis has been published a few years ago: Ádám, István Pál. Budapest Building Managers and the Holocaust in Hungary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 24 Fox, Thomas C. “The Holocaust under Communism,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, edited by Dan Stone. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 431. 25 Molnár, Erik (ed.). Magyarország története, Vol. 2. Budapest: Gondolat, 1964. 456. 26 Beneschofsky, Ilona – Elek Karsai (eds.). Vádirat a nácizmus ellen. Dokumentumok a magyarországi zsidóüldözés történetéhez. 2 volumes. Budapest: A Magyar Izraeliták Országos Képviseletének kiadása, 1958. Two additional volumes were published in the same organisational context.

Jewish experience & memory of Holocaust 85 27 Ránki, György. 1944. március 19. Budapest: Kossuth, 1968. 28 Braham, Randolph. The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, Vol III. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. 29 Ránki, György. “Magyar Holocaust,” Élet és Irodalom, 26, 25 (1982). Republished: Ránki, György. A Harmadik Birodalom árnyékában. Budapest: Magvető, 1988. 195–210. 30 On the short-lived post-war memorialisation practice of the Holocaust on the side of the survivors, see Laczó, Hungarian Jews, 134–160. More recent research shedding some light on the role that the creative arts (literature and film) had in engendering a kind of Holocaust consciousness in Hungary stresses the importance of the 1960s in that regard. See, Esbenshade, “Holokausztemlékezet másképpen”; Jablonczay, Tímea. “Hivatalos amnézia és az emlékezés kényszere. A holokauszt női elbeszélései az 1960as években,” Múltunk, LXIV, 2 (2019) 77–110.; Varga, Balázs. “Vissza a múltból. Cselekvés/képtelenség és emlékezés Fábri Zoltán Nappali sötétség című filmjében,” Múltunk, LXIV, 2 (2019) 111–135. 31 Nemeskürty, István. Requiem egy hadseregért. Budapest: Magvető, 1972. 9 (italics in the original). 32 Sándor, Iván. A történelem gépangyala. Válogatott esszék. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2013. 33. 33 Juhász, Gyula. “Előszó,” in Pergőtűz. A  2. magyar hadsereg pusztulása a Donnál, edited by Sándor Sára. Budapest: Tinódi, 1988. 8. 34 On the notion of them, see Olick, The Politics of Regret, 23–30. 35 The term Geschichtspolitik refers here to the broad use of history for political purposes, see Miller, “Introduction. Historical Politics: Eastern European Convolutions in the 21st Century,” in Miller –Lipman (eds.), The Convolutions of Historical, 1–2. 36 Assmann, “Gedӓchtis ohne Erinnerung,” 3–13; Crane, “Writing the Individual,” 1372– 1385; Confino, “Collective Memory,” 1386–1403; Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning,” 179–197; Cole, Tim. Scales of Memory, Layers of Memory: Recent Works on Memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust,” Journal of Contemporary History, 37, 1 (2002) 129–138. 37 Carr, Experience and History, 19–23. 38 Koselleck, “Die Diskontinuitӓt der,” 213–222. 39 To the notion, see Assmann, “Collective Memory,” 125–133. 40 Moeller, Robert G. “The Search for a Usable in the Federal Republic of Germany,” American Historical Review, 101, 4 (October 1996) 1008–1048. 41 A vast literature discusses the question. For example, Koonz, Claudia. “Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory,” in Gillis (ed.), Commemorations. 258–280; Fulbrook, Mary. German National Identity after the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999; Eley, Geoff. “The Past under Erasure?”555–573. 42 György Ránki was the historian who most explicitly dealt with the problem of collaboration and the problem of the so-called “space for maneuver” given to Hungary at that time. Ránki, A Harmadik Birodalom, 5–178. 43 For a detailed description and analysis of Fábri’s product placed in this context, see: Zombory – Lénárt – Szász, “Elfeledett szembenézés. Holokauszt és emlékezés Fábri Zoltán Utószezon c. filmjében,” Buksz, 25 (Ősz 2013) 245–256. Furthermore, Lénárt, András. “ ‘Perek’. A holokauszt tematizálásának példái a hatvanas évek magyarországi nyilvánosságában,” in A forradalom ígérete? Történelmi és nyelvi események kereszteződései, edited by Tibor Bónus – Csongor Lőrincz – Péter Szirák. Budapest: Ráció, 2014. 511–537. 44 The best historical account on the official “Jewish policy” of the Communist regime in Hungary is, Kovács, András. “Magyar zsidó politika a háború végétől a kommunista rendszer bukásáig,” Múlt és Jövő, XIV, 3 (2003) 5−39.

86  The past as experience and memory 45 The notion of the floating gap was used with such a meaning in Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, chap. 2. 46 Rózsa, Ágnes. Jövőlesők. Nürnbergi lágernapló 1944–45. Bukarest: Kriterion, 1971. It was also translated into German: Rózsa, Ágnes. “Solange ich lebe, hoffe ich”. Die Aufzeichnungen des ungarischen KZ-Häftlings Ágnes Rózsa, 1944/1945 in Nürnberg und Hollesschein. Nürnberg: testimon Verlag, 2006. To its analysis, see, Gyáni, Gábor. “ ‘Jövőlesők’ avagy a trauma genezise,” in Homoklapátolás nemesércért. A 70 éves Standeisky Éva tiszteletére, edited by Eszter Balázs – Gábor Koltai – Róbert Takács. Budapest: Napvilág, 2018. 78–87. 47 Rosenfeld, Alvin K. The End of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. chap. 8. 48 The problem of post-Holocaust trauma has recently been conceptualised in a novel way by the theory of the “cultural trauma.” Alexander, Jeffrey C. Remembering the Holocaust. A Debate. With Commentaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 49 Assmann, Aleida. Rossz közérzet az emlékezetkultúrában. Beavatkozás, trans. Ágnes Huszár. Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 2016. 71–74. 50 The problem sketched here has widely been discussed in theoretical literature. For my own standpoint, see: Gyáni, Gábor. “Historical Event and Structure, and Their Relationship,” in Signaturen des Geschehens. Ereignisse zwischen Öffentlichkeit und Latenz, edited by Zoltán Kulcsár-Szabó – Csongor Lőrincz. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014. 391–411. 51 The way how Kertész’s novel was received at that time has been thoroughly reconstructed and analysed in Vári, György. “A Kertész-életmű recepciótörténete,” Buksz, 5, 1 (Tavasz 1991) 31–41. Similar experiences are addressed by Földes, Anna. “Emlékezés és felejtés,” Élet és Irodalom, August 22, 2014. 11. 52 Száraz, György. “Egy előítélet nyomában,” Valóság, XVIII, 8 (1975) 60–82; Száraz, György. Egy előítélet nyomában. Budapest: Magvető, 1976. 53 Száraz, Egy előítélet nyomában, 5. 54 Cited in Pók, The Politics of Hatred, 148. 55 Pittaway, “The ‘House of Terror’,” 16–17; Apor, “An Epistemology of the Spectacle?” 56 Várszegi, Asztrik. “Magyar megfontolások a Soáról,” in Magyar megfontolások a Soáról, edited by Gábor Hamp – Özséb Horányi – László Rábai. Budapest – Pannonhalma: Balassi – Magyar Pax Romana Fórum – Pannonhalmi Főapátság, 1999. 12–13. 57 The monthly, Szombat (Saturday) plays a great role both in reviving and articulating a modern and not denominationally bound Jewish identity in today’s Hungary. 58 See, e.g. Fox, “The Holocaust under Communism”; Janowski, Maciej. “Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Debating the History of a Single Day,” in Miller – Lipman (ed.), The Convolutions of Historical, 59–89; Kassianov, Georgiy. “The ‘Nationalization’ of History in Ukraine” in Miller – Lipman (ed.), The Convolutions of Historical, 141–174; Dumitru, Diana. “Caught between the History and Politics: The Experience of a Moldovan Historian Studying the Holocaust,” in Miller – Lipman (ed.), The Convolutions of Historical, 239–252; Michlic, Joanna Beata. “The Path of Bringing the Dark to Light. Memory of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe,” in Pakier – Wawrzyniak (eds.), Memory and Change, 115–130; Evans, Richard J. “Kisses for the Duce!” London Review of Books, February 7, 2013; Duggan, Christopher. “Coming to Terms with Italy’s War,” History Today, 57 (December 203) 72. 59 Braham, The Politics of Genocide, 1981; Stark, Tamás. Hungarian Jews During the Holocaust and After, 1939–1949. A Statistical Review. New York – Boulder: distr. by Columbia University Press, 2000. 112. 60 The monument and its institutional, intellectual and ideological background closely linked to the historical and identity policy committed by today’s Orbán government is discussed in Rainer, János M. “Discourses of Contemporary History in Hungary after 1989: A Fragmented Report,” East Central Europe, 44, 2–3 (2017) 226.

Jewish experience & memory of Holocaust 87 61 Cf. Giesen, Bernhard. “The Trauma of Perpetrators. The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 112–154; on the perpetrator problem more generally, see Stone, Dan. Histories of the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 95–111.

5 Memory and discourse on the 1956 revolution

It is worth emphasising in terms of the 1956 revolution that the memory was shaped first and foremost, and even determined, by the harsh terror that came as its aftermath, and not least by the permanent presence of the Soviet army in the country. These related circumstances stood behind both the forced amnesia – the attempt of the Kádárite authorities to contain the still vivid social memory of 1956 – and the ultimate failure of that attempt. Since, all this made it almost impossible to forget 1956, despite the obvious and permanent suppression of its public memory. Therefore the regime had to be careful not to take the public silence at face value, since official policy measures to eradicate the memory of the population could never be completely effective. Awareness of the origins – the original sin – of the regime was not going to be expunged, not even by the compromise that it made with the majority of society in the 1960s, when it relied on systematically depoliticising everyday life and creating a private sphere for economic and cultural activity.1 In particular it was impossible to forget entirely the role played in Hungary by the Soviet Union or, as the eloquent official phrase put it, “the Soviet army temporarily stationed in our country.” This and several other hard facts were always there to remind people of how the Soviet army had moved in to supress the revolution and impose the new Kádárite power system by force. Even the oft-heard boast that Hungary was “the merriest baracks in the block” referred latently to 1956 as the historical event that alone had made that possible at all. So as one tries to assess the real weight and comprehend the precise meaning of 1956, in the past and today’s collective memory in Hungary, he has to be ready to apply the notion of myth, as Jan Assmann and Paul Connerton have advocated. For example, Assmann makes a clear distinction between “cold” and “hot” memory, arguing that only the latter can invest the present with definite meaning.2 Hot memory renders the past worth remembering by suggesting it is still with us. Therefore any account of the past influenced by hot memory immediately becomes a “grounding narrative,” a sort of myth embracing facts and fiction, history and mythology alike; the grounding narrative is a myth that is at once fictious and factual. Let me emphasise at this point that the memory of the 1956 revolution has always been a myth of that kind. It became a grounding narrative as soon as the

Memory & discourse on the 1956 revolution 89 Kádár regime had established itself, and this seems to be confirmed by Kádárite memory politics itself. Propaganda during the so-called consolidation period, not long after the harsh terror of the late 1950s, referred regularly not to the revolution as such but to the canonised interpretation of the revolution. The practice was to cite the main theses of the party resolution passed in December 1956, which had been designed to lay the foundations of the Kádárite political system. Even when the 10th anniversary came around, this party declaration was mainly evoked, along with the achievements that the regime claimed for itself in the decade since 1956.3 The revolution, for the Kádárite political elite, was much more a negative than a positive grounding narrative or myth, and so the memory politics of the day tended more to obscure it than to reconstruct the actual story of a notable event. The commonest method applied was to impose silence about 1956 and rigorously restrict and even distort the knowledge available for any public discussion of it. A good example for the latter may be the official “reconstruction” of and narrative on the atrocities committed at the Köztársaság tér (Republic Square) during the last days of October, in terms of the events connected to the siege of the Budapest Party House.4 Information included in the retaliatory documents, the propaganda material produced and manipulated by the Kádárite political police (the so-called White Books and similar texts) were the only permitted source for school curricula, historical textbooks or the mass media. The legacy of the Kádár era in terms of memory of the revolution came up for reversal with the political shift, the regime change of 1989, which transformed it into a positive grounding narrative. The way was opened for doing so by the ceremony before the reburial of Imre Nagy and his fellow martyrs, held on 16th of June in 1989 in Hősök tere (Heroes’ Square) in Budapest. However, the initial great hopes of the process were not to be fulfilled.5 The reburial ceremony itself revealed the secret that there had not been a consensus on what 1956 was to mean for the present. It emerged again that modern memory too is born from what John R. Gillis calls “an intense awareness of the conflicting representations of the past and the effort of each group to make its version the basis” of commemoration.6 Does this mean that 1956 finally lost all of its mythic importance and meaning? Not at all, but in trying to obtain a nuanced picture, it is important to place it into a conceptual framework that assumes there has always been a big difference between the notions of ritual and myth. The mythic material contains a wide range of possible meanings and interpretations, so that selection among them derives from the function the myth performs in a specific context, as a grounding narrative. As Paul Connerton has pointed out, “by comparison with myths, the structure of rituals has significantly less potential for variance.”7 Because ritual is both performing language and formalised language, it is a series of speech acts that always takes canonical form. Myth, on the other hand, is often subject to continual reshaping until it eventually gains a relatively stable form and meaning. Those given to lamenting the increasing emptiness of the memory of the 1956 revolution often stress the many contradictory meanings attributed to it at recent public commemorations. The memory of 1956 is dead, they declare, because it

90  The past as experience and memory no longer has a fixed, unambiguous sense.8 And one may add that this makes it deficient by comparison with a ritual. Yet several efforts have also been made to establish a canon for assessing the revolution and its main heroes. The point around which this revolved was disagreement on how to establish the canon, the single authentic pattern, for remembering Imre Nagy (1896–1958). One of the most striking attempts was made by the late Erzsébet Nagy (1927–2008), the daughter of Imre Nagy, when she seized the opportunity offered by the double anniversary that occurred in 1996. This was the year of first, the 40th anniversary of the historic events of 1956 itself, and secondly the 100th anniversary of Imre Nagy’s birth. Further special significance of the double anniversary lay in the fact that this was the first commemorative occasion to remember the 1956 revolution as freely as possible. The professional masters of creating such a collective memory thus soon appeared on the scene in 1996 to fulfil this duty. Accordingly, a TV production was ordered, and a film was envisaged and planned with the aid of some specialist historians. Moreover, a scholarly biography was promised – to be written by a then young historian. Looking back now upon these developments, we might say that both of them have finally been accomplished.9 The 1956 revolution, however, was then far from being a distant or closed past, not least because of its live experience, and since many of its active participants, and even sufferers of the harsh repression exercised in the aftermath, were still living. The personal remembrances of these people are always mobilised at an occasion like this; and these live experiences pertaining to the remembered past have a central role in creating their own personal identity. This special image of the 1956 revolution has two important attributes: on the one hand, it regularly deviates from a historian’s account of the past; and on the other hand, it shows a great internal variety. Since members of each of the rival remembering communities10 strive for canonising their own version of the historical account, there is no real chance left for compromise, or even peaceful co-existence among the diverse images of the past. Consequently, an anniversary soon and necessarily results in sharp conflicts among the various memories appearing before the public. The clash of these demands, each struggling for exclusive primacy over the alternative forms of memory, even concerned the problem of how to interpret Imre Nagy’s personality and his role in the course of history. The debate at that point was so acute that the resulting dispute even became the object of a judicial trial. First, the documentary film, ordered by the Hungarian State TV, and secondly a scholarly biography of Nagy, already referred to before, written by János M. Rainer, provided both the opportunity and the proper material for a suit to be filed by Erzsébet Nagy.11 Nagy’s daughter did her best to dictate what the family saw as the most desirable approach to the image-making process. First, she accused the authors of the TV screenplay of improperly selecting the facts and data describing Imre Nagy’s life story; some of the selected material, she said, touched on aspects which she judged not to be permissible for discussion at all. In her suit submitted to the court, she declared that Nagy’s alleged involvement in the killing of the Russian Tsar’s family in the early 1920s had to be considered

Memory & discourse on the 1956 revolution 91 taboo. She also insisted on excluding everybody who had been open enemies or persecutors of Nagy from recalling him in public. The major question emerging at that point was how such a dispute over right way of remembering that past could become the object of a judicial trial? In this instance the legal basis was provided by an adaptation of the legal term, the protection of personal rights to a case that already belonged to the domain of history. According to the argument the claimant formulated in her suit, it was not exclusively the living but also the dead persons who had an inalienable right to protect their good name. She called the latter the right to reverence, which was required to be defended before the court in a case where irreverence had occurred. With the passing of time, however, the judicial procedure lost all of its practical meaning, since the programme had been broadcast even before the court could ban it. This, however, led in turn to a second court trial also launched by Erzsébet Nagy. In this case she made repeated protests against certain passages and arguments in the scholarly biography of Nagy by Rainer, which was not yet published at that time. In particular she complained about the part of the book in which the author dealt with Nagy’s supposed role as an informer of the Soviet political police, that of The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) during the interwar period. Although the biographer did not altogether support or justify the hypothesis that Nagy had been an informer, by simply raising the issue at all he seemed not to satisfy the requirements of historical memory advocated by Erzsébet Nagy. In defining the proper way to remember Imre Nagy, she drew a distinction between the documentary and the memory film as genres, which lay, she explained, in the fact that the latter needed no further explanation, interpretation or comment. The facts, properly selected and utilised, would suffice in themselves to convey the history and display the life path of an outstanding historical personality. Such an account, she proposed, would be wholly dedicated to the reverence of that public figure. Moreover, she argued, it was only right that Imre Nagy, who had inscribed his name forever in the memory of the Hungarian nation, should receive such reverence. In addition, she added, there were many tangible signs of his immortality in the West, too. Thus, in essence, the type of memorial work she advocated might simply be labelled hagiographic, an offshoot of a genre dating back to the Middle Ages. This was not the first, and will probably not be the last, occasion that the law and the cultivation of collective and personal memory come into open collision with each other in contemporary Hungary.12 Today’s legal administration on individual rights issues in Hungary, by rigorously restricting the scope of any public recalling of the recent past, quite frequently lead to conflicts, and usually resulted in the rigorous regulation both of research and the publication of archival sources and data. It, however, seems now to be a spreading international practice. One of the devices adopted for that purpose was in the near past anonymisation of historical documents. Another frequently applied method was and has been denying free access to the documents produced by the Secret Police in the period of Communist rule. The result thus gained is a very specific notion of individual rights, which holds the rights of historical subjects to enjoy primacy over everyone else’s

92  The past as experience and memory rights to remember the past as freely as possible. The 1956 revolution raises a distinct problem in this context as it has been a particular event which carried for long very live and highly diffuse (plural) historical images of its own, filtered through many individual remembrances and personal relics. The reason for the apparent diversity of historical remembrances rooted in the plural historical experiences may further be discussed in a following chapter. And this demands not only recording and presentation of the evidence, but some further comment and interpretation. The endeavours of Erzsébet Nagy described previously ultimately failed, as the memory of 1956 was still connected more closely to a grounding-narrative type of myth rather than to the ritual form, and could not therefore imply or express a fixed and stable meaning. In instances, when “hot” memory was still at work, any allusions to 1956 necessarily had a vital function in perpetuating some present-day political and ideological ends.13 On the day of commemoration of the revolution (23 October) there are usually several separate political meetings (quasi-demonstrations) held, under the auspices of political parties, parliamentary and non-parliamentary, each intent on remembering the historical revolution in its own way and according to its own taste. Changes, however, also occurred in that regard, during the last few years in the aftermath of Fidesz’s coming to power in 2010. In that new “illiberal” political governance, represented by the Orbán’ cabinet, the ritual of commemorating the 1956 revolution has increasingly lost almost all of its previous political connotation and relevance. Before that, however, the commemoration had the function of elaborating a historically based self-image needed for a new and democratic political power. How can one explain the great role of history in the function of providing some political legitimacy for a democratic state? What is worth emphasising here is that the political discourse arising after 1989 was thus soon confronted with the image of the once interrupted past which has been waiting for restoration. Since the past is so various and contradictory an entity, the question of what part of it is worth restoring and how to restore it usually raises the problem of choosing between multiple forms of history. The result achieved depends upon the consciously chosen context into which this or that historical interpretation is placed. Amidst conditions in which a historically based political discourse tends to dictate how the past should be read, the historical vision, constructed in a teleological fashion, has to shape or even determine how the story may be told. That is what cultural psychology calls “the invisible narrative template,” which determines the way an event or sequence of events could be plotted at all, narrowing down our views in ways we do not recognise.14 A case in point has been the mythical vision of 1956 devised in the late 1990s and early 2000s by the political party Fidesz, then being in government. They had an image of a linear development in Hungary, beginning as early as 1956 and moving in the direction of the ostensibly bourgeois government they now embodied. In this view, the specific sense and the real significance of 1956 lay only in its anticipation of the day when the Fidesz would eventually come to power. This view followed logically from their firm belief that they alone could continue

Memory & discourse on the 1956 revolution 93 and restore the legacy of 1956, which had been neglected even after 1989. By assuming the role of the present true mouthpiece of an exclusive historical truth about 1956, the storyteller (in this case a specific political actor) dubbed the 1956 revolution as distinctively bourgeois and turned an image of the past into a mere reflection of the future. Commemoration of this kind can easily be identified as a case of using history instrumentally, for present-day political aims. The importance of discovering a past that can be used for political purposes is shown by the permanent discourse entitled “return to history” pursued since 1989. There are several questions that one must answer in discussing the issue of “return to history”: what is the reason for the increased use of the past, and which kind of past is preferred or chosen to be revived? There is no room here for highlighting the problem in its entirety and only some aspects of it can be mentioned very briefly again (as it has already been discussed in a previous chapter). The return to history is a restoration, if only symbolic, of the interrupted continuity and generally springs from two motives, depending on the analyst. Communist rule was unable to solve several fundamental problems of the Central and East European region, for instance, border disputes, and the lack of national sovereignty. In addition, it did not know how to incorporate itself into the normal historical process of the affected states. One might even dare to say that Communism was never able to forge for itself a credible historical image with which the people were able to identify unconditionally. The disowning of the past in Hungary during the reign of the Communists is directly linked to the Kádár era. As already mentioned, the Kádár system, in sharp contrast to the Rákosi system of the 1950s (before 1956) representing true Stalinism in Hungary, began to forget that history even existed. There were two sources of this behaviour: the desire to stifle the remembrance of the 1956 revolution and the desire to complete the full depoliticisation of society. The substantial political change in 1989 brought history back. The political apathy of the masses quickly gave way to an urge to create a “normal” political culture. This new political culture could be constructed from both imported and domestic material. However, the adoption of the political ideas of Western political structures involves for very different reasons great difficulty. Thus the only or at least a palpable practicable way is to make use of domestic material, the nation’s past, the intellectual material that can be extracted from history and handed down. That is one possible source of the desire to bring back history and place it at the centre of present-day politics which seems to be a ubiquitous phenomenon in the post-communist countries. Perhaps it also relates to the preservation or gain of vitally important mass political support or assurance of the passive loyalty of people, the voters, who are faced with the multiplying economic and social problems caused by the market system. Perhaps it is an emerging social sympathy in a situation where the former mechanisms of legitimacy have suddenly ceased to operate. These mechanisms included the fear of terror or of its remembrance, discrimination and the gentler forms of suppression, political apathy, and, last but not least, the involvement of many in maintaining the old system, which also rewarded this active role. In the midst of such critical conditions, the

94  The past as experience and memory conscious political use of a century-old or older “inventing of traditions” technique is perfectly understandable. This seems to have been a universal East- and Central European phenomenon in the post-1989 period, indicating that “in Central and Eastern Europe the notion of collective memory is not an empty shell but has been and still is the object of intensive and highly politicized debate.”15 Within the matrix of the potential past to be revived and used for legitimating this or that present political authority, a specific “bourgeois” heritage is also on offer. Accordingly, the historical roots of capitalist development, the forces that encouraged it, the phenomenon of “embourgeoisement” are also subjects of this historisation practice, a discourse began by the scholars (sociologists and social historians, in particular) even before 1989, and further pursued by the politicians in the aftermath of 1989. I am far from suggesting that there is a close connection between Iván Szelényi’s concept of the “interrupted embourgeoisement”16 and the notion held then by Fidesz that the 1956 revolution had been a failed bourgeois revolt. Still, the assertion, made by that well-known Hungarian-American sociologist, even as early as the late 1980s, that the only way to link up the authentic past is a reliance on the entrepreneurial tradition, and the demand of the true “bourgeois” political forces of the present (embodied by Fidesz occasionally) to pick up, continue and fulfil the bourgeois heritage of 1956, seem to follow the same inner logic. This way of instrumentalising the memory of the 1956 revolution by Fidesz proved not to be a feasible practice of historical policy, not even on their side. Following their coming to power again in 2010, Fidesz left altogether its previous claim of representing any bourgeois characteristics both in the present and the past, and showed a growing neglect to the whole legacy and the memory of the 1956 revolution. A further remarkable element of the historical policy associated with the 1956 revolution on their side has thus become to rule out the leftist dimension of the event. This clearly was demonstrated in the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution, when the Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “forgot” even to mention Imre Nagy in his speech; and the same happened in any other official commemorations.17 A further step taken in that direction in the end of December of 2018 was to remove the statue of Imre Nagy from its location close to the Parliament, and to replace it half a year later by a monument, erected originally in the same place in the Horthy era with the aim of reminding contemporaries of the victims of the Red Terror committed by the 1919 Republic of Councils, the first Hungarian Bolshevik state.18 However, a similar monument dedicated now to the memory of the victims of the White Terror exercised by the counterrevolutionary regime is still missing in Budapest or elsewhere in the countryside.19 The efforts of cancelling even the memory of the 1956 revolution by every possible and available means has, however, not yet been completed even by these measures. They were crowned by the decree issued by the Orbán government (on 19 May in 2019), precisely at the date of the 30th anniversary of Imre Nagy’s and his martyr fellows’ reburial, with the aim of putting an end to the 1956 Institute; it was dissolved into the state run historical policy institute, the Veritas. This step might be considered to convey a deeply symbolic meaning as the 1956 Institute was in fact founded on the day following the reburial event, with the task

Memory & discourse on the 1956 revolution 95 of researching the Communist past, including the 1956 revolutionary events, on a purely rational basis, independent of any direct political and ideological influence.

Conclusion One question that remains to be answered is the role of historians: how do they contribute to the memory work under the role of hot memory, or how can they so contribute? The question of the authenticity of the various memories, whether they are true or not as historical accounts, seems a less relevant issue now when the basically constructive nature of any type of memory work has been identified. The logic of construction, as we have learned from narrative psychology, is always ensured by textual editing. Accordingly, remembering itself is an act of narration, systematisation and representation.20 Remembering, therefore, means that we tend to accommodate our memories to the framework of a coherent story. The “realistic” nature and the mere credibility of the events recalled are thus provided not by their close reference to the actual events in the past, but rather by their relevance and specific meaning gained from the story itself. Since the act of remembering is plainly retrospective in its character, we actually express not our genuine experience of the past processed in a narrative mode, but the past revealed only from the perspective of the present (in the so-called hermeneutic circle). So the putative responsibility of historians also needs reformulating. One main consequence is that historians resign involuntarily their exclusive right to narrate the historical truth: the perspective from which the information has been produced by memory work presupposes that none can claim more than to have one possible narrative version of a world that is already lost. This is wholly consonant with the substantially hermeneutic nature of every kind of recognition, whether based on personal memory or on clearly scholarly pursuits.21 Yet historians attempting to integrate the millions of past narratives generated by memory work are by no means compelled to follow one line of ordinary memory work or another. This derives from their responsibility for establishing and maintaining a discursive mode of representing the historical past. Yet not even historians are immune to “misjudgement” or even serious “errors” in interpreting the past. However, if this discourse meets scholarly standards, historians may hope they finally can succeed in adequately adapting the dialectic of memory and forgetting on a rational basis, and thereby maintain some distance between themselves and the subjective view entailed in personal memory work and the diverse myths of collective memory. This does not concern the well-established notion of historical objectivity, an idea coming from the 19th century. Due both to the hermeneutics and the theory of narrativity formulated primarily by the late Hayden White and his followers, who advocate the (much disputed) tropology theory of representation, the unambiguous division between absolute objectivity and the arbitrary subjective interpretation of past events looks no longer to be a feasible tenet.22 It is time to look more closely at the post-1989 historiography of 1956 and its possible influence on the collective memory of the Hungarian revolution. It

96  The past as experience and memory might be argued that this has none too high or stable a status in the hierarchy of memory work. Despite every effort by a handful of high-level researchers, their contributions to the common historical knowledge and image of 1956 have gained limited credibility or prestige. This is partly because of the legacy of the revisionist communist interpretation of 1956, which was decisive for so long in shaping the historians’ discourse. Its more or less continual intellectual presence began with the extensive research of the Imre Nagy Institute in Brussels, in the aftermath of the revolution, and continued with many later publications by émigrés of that political persuasion.23 As a reaction to this, there appeared soon after 1989 a rightwing, or at least conservative type of, interpretation of 1956, presented by several previously obscure experts, including historians, jurists, political journalists and even amateur researchers. The tension necessarily arising between the two sides also had political connotations, despite the intentions of some of those involved.24 This was no help to historians who sought earnestly to keep their distance from subjective points of views that resulted from obvious differences in the way the revolutionary events were experienced at the time. There are still rival, irreconcilable images of the 1956 revolution in currency even within the frames of memory work conducted on a scholarly basis under the aegis of institutionalised craftmanship. This is due only in part to the natural divergences that mark discursive practice, and much more to the domination of the plural historical narratives based on personal recollection or other forms of collective memory. The case very briefly sketched here seems to suggest that there is some validity in the postmodern belief that everyone can be his or her own historian, in line with the democratisation of the past, even if such a belief causes anxiety among the professionals who still hold a near-monopoly over the memory of the past.25

Notes 1 Fehér, Ferenc. “Kadarism as the Model State of Krushchevism,” Telos, 40 (1979) 19–31. 2 Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedӓchtnis. 3 Ripp, Zoltán. “1956 emlékezete és az MSZMP,” in Évkönyv 2002. X. Magyarország a jelenkorban, edited by János M. Rainer – Éva Standeisky. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2002. 238. 4 Tulipán, Éva. Szigorúan ellenőrzött emlékezet. A Köztársaság téri ostrom 1956-ban. Budapest: Argumentum, 2012; Tulipán, Éva. Ostrom 1956-ban. A Köztársaság téri ostrom emlékezete. Budapest: Jaffa, 2014. 5 Of the abundant literature on the failure to accord 1956 a true Hungarian lieux de mémoire, see Kende, Péter. “Megmarad-e 1956 nemzeti hagyománynak?” in Évkönyv II, edited by János Bak et al. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 1993. 7–19; Rainer, M. János. Ötvenhat után, Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2003. esp. 223–249. 6 Gillis, “Memory and Identity,” 8. 7 Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 58. 8 This has also been concluded by Kende, Eltékozolt forradalom? Budapest: Új Mandátum, 2006. 9 As far as the historiographical biography is concerned, see Rainer, M. János. Nagy Imre. Politikai életrajz. Első kötet 1896–1953. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 1996;

Memory & discourse on the 1956 revolution 97 Rainer, M. János. Nagy Imre. Politikai életrajz II. 1953–1958. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet,1999. The biography since then was published in several languages. 10 On the notion of remembering collectivity, Fulbrook, Mary. “History-Writing and ‘Collective Memory,” in Writing the History of Memory, edited by Stefan Berger – Bill Niven. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 70. 11 The material relating to the whole matter was made available to me by János M. Rainer, to whom I express my thanks. 12 A similar case happened in 2016 and 2017, when the descendant of a 1956 Budapest freedom fighter (pesti srác) brought suit against the House of Terror, led by Mária Schmidt, one of the leading ideologists (and public historians) of Viktor Orbán’s illiberal government regime. The object of the judicial trial has been that who is to be seen on the gigantic poster prepared by the House of Terror for displaying it on the wall of a Budapest tenement house, whether the claimant’s already dead father or a still living actor, who himself insists that he has been the young boy depicted by the poster. The suit was ended by the victory of the claimant. 13 An abundant historical literature is available on the politically motivated debates on 1956 in the 1990s (sometimes even in the 2000s). Rainer, M. János. “Másnap. Az intézményesült emlék(ezés) – 1989–1992,” in Évkönyv 2002. X. Magyarország a jelenkorban, edited by János M. Rainer – Éva Standeisky. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2002. 251–257; Litván, György. “Politikai beszéd 1956-ról – 1989 után,” in Évkönyv 2002. X. Magyarország a jeklenkorban, edited by János M. Rainer – Éva Standeisky. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2002. 258–263; Kende, Eltékozolt forradalom? 212–232; Fazekas, “Küzdelem az igazi 1956-ért. 1956 eltérő politikai értelmezései a rendszerváltástól az ötvenéves évfordulóig,” Valóság, 60, 11 (2017) 89–104; Rainer, M. János. “Consequences of 1956: Short-term, Long-term, Remembrance,” in European Remembrance. Symposium of European Institutions Dealing with 20th-Century History. Warsaw: European Network, Remembrance and Solidarity, 2016. 230–238. 14 Wertsch, James V. “National Memory and Where to Find It,” in Handbook of Culture and Memory, edited by Brady Wagoner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 259–282. 15 Górny – Kończal, “The (non-)Travelling Concept,” 67. 16 Szelényi, Iván. Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary. Wisconsin: Madison, 1988. 17 Benazzo, Simona. “Not All the Past Needs to Be Used. Features of Fidesz’s Politics of Memory,” Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language, 11, 2 (2017) 207–208. 18 On the Communist memorialisation policy of the first Hungarian Soviet Republic, see Apor, Péter. Fabricating Authenticity in Soviet Hungary. The Afterlife of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic in the Age of State Socialism. London: Anthem Press, 2014. 19 The memory politics of the Fidesz pursued in the form of public history is analysed in Apor, “An Epistemology of the Spectacle?” 328–344. 20 We refer here to the studies of narrative psychologists like those of J. Bruner, D. P. Spence, K. J. Gergen and M. Gergen. And, of course, A. MacIntyre, P. Ricoeur and E. H. Erikson also support that line of argument. 21 Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has directly been applied to history in LaCapra, Dominick. Rethinking Intellectual History. Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. 23–69, and Olafson, F. A. “Hermeneutics: ‘Analytical’ and ‘Dialectical’,” History and Theory, XXV, 4 (1986) – Beiheft, 25. 28–43. 22 White, Hayden. Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973; Ankersmit, F. R. Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. The Hague: Martinus Nijh of Philosophy Library, 1983; Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. Beyond The Great Story. History as Text and Discourse. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. 23 Litván, György. Az 1956-os magyar forradalom hagyománya és irodalma. Budapest: MTA TTI, 1992.

98  The past as experience and memory 24 Litván, “Mítoszok és legendák 1956-ról,” in Évkönyv 2000. VIII. Magyarország a jelenkorban, edited by Zsuzsanna Kőrösi – János M. Rainer – Éva Standeisky. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2000. 205–218; Horváth, Sándor. “1956 történetírása a rendszerváltás óta,” in Évkönyv 2002. X. Magyarország a jelenkorban, edited by János M. Rainer – Éva Standeisky. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2002. 214–224; Rainer, “Discourses of Contemporary,” 227–234. 25 The slogan, first voiced by Carl L. Becker several decades ago (“What Are Historical Facts (1926),” in Detachment and the Writing of History. Essays and Letters of Carl L. Becker, edited by Phil L. Snyder. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1958. 60–61), has been revived by several historians today; see for example Gillis, “Memory and Identity,” 17.

Part II

History as constructed by historians

6 Culture, nationalism and history

Some conceptual considerations It is commonplace that historians have regularly had an eminent role in constructing and propagating the idea of modern European nationalism. This may easily be explained by the fact that the modern European nation has primarily been a cultural construct. “In the Western model of national identity – Anthony D. Smith has claimed – nations were seen as culture communities, whose members were united, if not made homogeneous, by common historical memories, myths, symbols and traditions.”1 Therefore, “More than a style and doctrine of politics, nationalism is a form of culture . . . and the nation is a type of identity whose meaning and priority is presupposed by this form of culture.”2 Accordingly, the main agents in the process have always been the intellectuals. “This goes some way to explaining the role of the arts in nationalism. . . . Who, more than poets, musicians, painters and sculptors, could bring the national ideal to life and disseminate it among the people?”3 All this may account for why nationalism replaces religion in its role of creating and sustaining the community identity constructs.4 The fundamental functional similarity that may be observed between the two explains why nationalism could become a “form of historicist culture, which emerges out of the breakdown of earlier religious forms of culture.”5 Anthony D. Smith did not, however, give plausible answer to the question of the spectacular success of a historicised sense of the “national past” in the process of creating a new group identity. The diverse theorists of the nation and nationalism are all unanimous in emphasising the great role that the concept of history and the historians themselves have played in informing nationalism. One of them links the question to the basic transformation going on in the time consciousness of the European people. “What has come to take place of the medieval conception of simultaneity-along-time is . . . an idea of “homogeneous, empty time’, in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.”6 According to Anderson, a close connection seems to have been between that particular time-consciousness and the emergence of the idea of an “imagined community” of the nation. In examining the internal structure both

102  History as constructed by historians of the novel-writing and the modern press (products of the so-called “printing revolution”), he states that “these forms [or organs, one even may say] provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation.”7 The huge transformation identified in this way was made possible by the fast economic change, the social and scientific discoveries occurring simultaneously and not least by the rapid development of communications, the outcome of the printing revolution. They all anticipated the development of a modern form of the nation and also followed from it.8 Anderson’s notion stands close to the thesis advanced by Reinhart Koselleck on the birth of the concept of Neue Zeit, an event happening in the late 18th century. According to the German theorist, “Time is no longer simply the medium in which all histories take place, it gains a historical quality. Consequently, history no longer occurs in, but through time. Time becomes a dynamic and historical force in its own right. Presupposed by this formulation of experience is a concept of history which is likewise new: the collective singular form of Geschichte which since around 1780 can be conceived as history in and for itself in the absence of an associated subject or object.”9 One may add that the collective singular form of Geschichte is what solely makes possible the creation of various national history narratives satisfying the spiritual needs of the European-wide nationalism. Ernest Gellner also underlines the relevance of the evolution of a state-run education system which greatly contributed to the establishing of the national awareness. It has a lot to do with building-up a cultural universe by transforming elite culture into a vernacular one. The latter was keenly needed by the unlimited economic growth spurred by a fast-rate industrialisation process. Nationalism, either as a precondition or a consequence of the culturally homogeneous modern society is thus becoming to cater “the distinctive structural requirements of industrial society” because it organises human groups into large, centrally educated, culturally homogeneous units.10 Gellner, however, is silent about the historians’ special contribution to facilitating the cultural honogenisation process, but instead claims as against Elie Kedourie’s statement that “it is rather that a homogeneity imposed by objective, inescapable imperative eventually appears on the surface in the form of nationalism.”11 Large emphasis has been placed on the cultural (subjective) factors even by Eric J. Hobsbawm in his theory of inventing the tradition. He takes the realm of traditions (the various nationalised histories) in their newly invented forms as being indispensable sources for creating the historically rooted sense of a national consciousness in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.12 Although the thesis sounds plausible, still it is insufficient in itself for explaining adequately the irresistible emotional power that nationalism could exercise throughout the long 19th century. The explanation given by the teachings of the ethno-symbolic approach of nationalism provides a better clue for understanding the whole process. One may cite here Anthony D. Smith who claims that, “The nation . . . [is] a named human population sharing a myth of common descent, historical memories and a mass culture, and possessing a demarcated territory, common economy and common legal rights and duties.”13 Smith in his polemics with the constructivist theorist

Culture, nationalism and history 103 Gellner seeks a “more general perspective” which would give some explanation for the obvious success of nationalism in its role of conferring group identity to the “national communities” by telling their own national histories.14 Smith’s assumption on the peculiar temporal continuity of some basic “ethnic” attributes, assisting the accommodation of historical references to the nationalist doctrine appears to be a fruitful approach, although the hypothesis is rarely verified on an empirical, historical basis. This seems to be its main weakness. The conceptual development of the notion “nation” may also have some importance here. It demands describing the permanent semantic permutations of the word “nation” over a longer time period.15 This has also been done by Liah Greenfeld who concluded that “The successive changes in meaning combine into a pattern which, for the sake of formality, we shall call ‘the zigzag pattern of semantic change’. At each stage of this development, the meaning of the word, which comes with a certain semantic baggage, evolves out of usage in a particular situation. The available conventional concept is applied within new circumstances, to certain aspects of which it corresponds. However, aspects of the new situation, which were absent in the situation in which the conventional concept evolved, become cognitively associated with it, resulting in a duality of meaning. The meaning of the original concept is gradually obscured, and the new one emerges as conventional. When the word is used again in a new situation, it is likely to be used in this new meaning, and so on and so forth.”16 She also added: “The association between the nationality of a community and its uniqueness represents the next and last transformation in the meaning of the ‘nation’ and may be deduced from the zigzag pattern of semantic (and by implication social) change.”17 In light of the latter argument, it is no wonder why an American medievalist, Patrick J. Geary, harshly criticised the construction of national histories, which he claimed to be the outcome of myth-making activity. A similar view has previously been advanced even by a Hungarian medievalist, Jenő Szűcs (1928–1988), who claimed that the meaning both of “nationality” and “national consciousness” differed in the Middle Ages from the one what was ascribed to them by the modernage nationalism. He went even further by stating that the notion of natio had no such classificatory role in the Middle Ages as it gained under the aegis of a modern nation-building project. “This is not because ‘nationality’ did not exist for the medieval persona as an objective reality or as the object of group sentiments . . ., but because the social and political sphere was thrust into the background objectively and conceptually with respect to primary models. . . . What primarily determined an individual’s social and political status was his fidelis subditus to a higher authority (Church or empire, king or liege lord), or was recognised as a member (membrum universitatis) of a conglomerated entity (feudal/estate societas publica). But these loyalties themselves were not associated with the framework of nationality.”18 The fusion between the concept of nationality (ethnicity) and political loyalty (citizenship) happened much later as a result of the emergence of the modern nation-state. One may thus assume that, “The ‘nation-state’ as we understand it today did not exist before the 19th century, not because nationalities had not yet ‘evolved’ or because nationality and the state did not generally coincide,

104  History as constructed by historians but because the built-in logical precondition of the concept is the modern idea of ‘nation’ and the doctrine of national sovereignty that stems from it. That is, the state is the substratum of nation, and natio is not the modern abstraction of the ‘state,’ which, in turn, postulates a series of institutions which only developed in the early modern era, along with other modern concepts.”19 Consequently, any use of the word “nation” may only be acceptable as a terminus post quem, as an outcome of a forced compromise made for the sake of merely research ends.20 Patrick J. Geary also objects the temporally unlimited uncritical adaptation of the term “national” in history, a well-known historian’s practice which regularly brings back the national story to late antiquity. In attempting to clarify the highly mixed, unstable and obscure ethnic group characteristics of the people living within the boundaries of the late Roman empire, and in the era of the wanderings of the People, Geary concludes that not any true resemblance may be stated between these historical founders of the modern European nations and the peoples who inhabit the present-day European nation-states. He thus assumes that “Congruence between early medieval and contemporary ‘peoples’ is a myth.”21 Not even the language spoken in the distant past and the one spoken in our own days are the same. In addition, language does not correspond in itself to, and does not even determine the cultural universe of, the past, in a sense of ethnicity. Consequently, Geary insists that there is not any ground for assuming an uninterrupted continuity of the “national” in history, a notion grounding the nationalist doctrine. Various national histories produced by the professional academic historical scholarship could enjoy a wide-scale mass support and they became a wellgrounded scientific undertaking.22 It followed as much from its actual discursive achievement as from some other peculiar characteristics of its own. The “configurational comprehension” of how a historicist (historist) historian makes sense of the past is but one element among all these attributes. It relates to using the notion of Universal History, the one that is meant to describe an internally cohesive temporal entity, which provides the ontological base needed for any rational recognition of the past. “[T]o comprehend temporal succession means to think of it in both directions at once, and then time is no longer a river which bears us along but the river in aerial view, upstream and downstream seen in a single survey.”23 At the moment when professional historiography joins the nationalist doctrine of the day, the idea of Universal History is doomed necessarily to disappear. Notwithstanding, it could survive even after that holistic concept of history had been broken into the series of parallel (and sometimes contrasting) national (particular) histories. The idea of Universal History was kept alive mainly by the assistance of the notion of evolution, a new orthodoxy, accepted by many of contemporary practising historians.24 Due to the obvious epistemological advances that the application of such a concept of Universal History may offer, the national histories already being researched on an empirical level could also make great use of it. The reason is, as Hayden White has pointed out that, “Historiography is, by its very nature, the representational practice best suited to the production of the ‘law-abiding’ citizen. This is not because it may deal in patriotism, nationalism, or explicit moralizing but because in its featuring of

Culture, nationalism and history 105 narrativity as a favored representational practice, it is especially well suited to the production of notions of continuity, wholeness, closure, and individuality that every ‘civilized’ society wishes to see itself as incarnating, against the chaos of a merely ‘natural way of life.”25 All this means that the kind and the form of narrativity represented by modern history writing has wholly been adjusted to the “politics” of disciplinisation carried out by “the transformation of historical studies into a discipline that purports to serve as custodian of realism in political and social thinking.”26 National historiography viewed from that perspective has always been deeply integrated in the cultural infrastructure of a nation-building project. A clearcut, albeit purely analytical distinction should, however, be made here between “political nationalism” and “cultural nationalism.” The former closely relates to establishing the independent (sovereign) nation-states; the latter, however, concerns the efforts made by the creative intellectuals (artists and scholars) for creating a true national community, existing alongside and within the sphere of the nation-states. A wide range of intellectual activities working for the interest of cultural nationalism endeavoured to establish a moral community of the nation.27 They, accordingly, tended to promote the ethno-historical “revivals” through establishing (standardising) the national language, the literature, the arts and not the least the linear historical account of the people constituting the modern-age nation-states. The cultural and political nationalisms, Hutchinson argues, have very different sources; still they both are engaged in creating a new type of community, called Nation. Political nationalism adheres to the “voluntarist” notion of the nation by incarnating a politically autonomous community, based either on will or common descent. Cultural nationalism, on the contrary, gains its intellectual impetus more from an “organic” romantic concept of the nation, the spiritual base of a historical community. Cultural nationalists, intellectuals per se, who are always and everywhere ready for establishing a holistic national culture, make their best effort to create a morally grounded national community. They thus act as moral innovators, who “construct new matrices of collective identity and directions for collective action. By education rather than by machine politics, they aspire to redirect these groups [the traditionalist and modernist ones] away from mutual conflict, and instead unite them in the task of creating an integrated, distinctive and sovereign community, capable of competing in the modern world.”28 The academic historical scholarship has also been deeply involved in constructing national identity. This social and political function of contemporary historical scholarship contradicts the genuine ethos and ambition of professional historians which links them to the ideal of a scholarly neutrality (objectivity) in approaching the past reality.29 Therefore, it is far from being an exaggeration to claim that “Historians went into the archives not so much to be guided by the sources as to find support for their arguments which preceded their research.”30 Now I am going to demonstrate the strategic importance that nationalism could have as a political idea in shaping the concept of national history. The case studies are chosen from the Hungarian historiography.

106  History as constructed by historians

Hungarian versus nationality historical narratives Establishing (and maintaining) a modern national consciousness demands cancelling the many “non-identities” found in the past of a modern nation. The historical amnesia required in all these matters, as Ernest Renan has correctly remarked, is indispensable for successfully creating the Nation.31 Consequently, the nonidentities concerned should be replaced by historical arguments which underline the notion of a homogeneous and uninterrupted process of national history. This leads to fabricating a teleological vision of the national past where  – as Szűcs argues – “by virtue of its own inner logic, and specifically a form of a sense of identity in the historical continuity is an important component. Without this there can be no national consciousness, or it is present but disturbed. Historical continuity does not mean an identity of ‘non-identity’ in the Heraclitean sense of not being able to step twice into the same river, even though it is nevertheless the same river. The regulating system that is called on to validate this dialectic is history writing – to the extent that it is science. National consciousness, however, in looking to the past seeks identity even in ‘non-identities’, not necessarily on ideological grounds but in order to intimate the fact of identity in itself.”32 Now, the main issue that arises has been that “what is the existing Hungarian nation that postulates its own identity and seeks historical continuity rather than an identity (even in ‘non-identity’) on precisely that account.”33 Two options are available here: the politically (really) existing Hungarian nation brought into existence by the modern development, which fits well in with the French model of the nation. In Hungary existing within the imperial Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (1867–1918) there appeared the demand of the creation of another kind of nation (nationhood), a cultural one. The cause of national identity in this case was as much attached to the citizenship as to the imagined community of language and culture. All this means that the shared subjective self-concept of the national ingroup based on the cultural belonging to each other had primacy over political loyalty manifesting itself through state citizenship. I would not say, however, that the duality of the “state-nation” and “culture-nation,” elaborated first by Friedrich Meinecke and propagated much later by Hans Kohn, must now be accepted as an arbiter for any description and characterisation of the modern-age Hungarian history. Szűcs is fully right in stating that in the absence of a confederation of states, which perhaps would have more satisfied the (nationalist or only separatist) demands of the national minorities of historical Hungary, these minorities did not reckon themselves at all, or hardly at all, as being “national” in the nationstate formation called Hungarian Kingdom. Everybody who felt that he or she belongs to the nation not just politically but thanks to having the state language and national culture was to constitute the clearly definable modern (Hungarian) nation, an entity as the product of a long-lasting historical evolution. That was the case even after historical Hungary had already been partitioned as a result of the Trianon Peace Treaty (1920). So, for the academic historians engaged in writing the story of Hungary with the aim of producing “law-abiding” citizens, the cultivation of an accentuated national(ist) history meant a political obligation. In

Culture, nationalism and history 107 doing so, they were preoccupied with fixing the origo of the nationalised image of history by giving an account of the scantily known event of the Conquest of the Carpathian Basin, the founding mythical event of Hungary’s national history, occurring in the 9th century. Therefore the professional historians gave preference to the principle of statehood instead of the notion of ethnicity.34 It can be found in the first representative master-narrative of history of the Hungarian nation, in the 10 volume Millennial History.35 The multi-authored undertaking appearing in the second half of the 1890s reached a relatively wide audience as it actually sold more than 20,000 copies.36 The task on the agenda was, however, performed more successfully by displaying the emblematic panorama, The Hungarian Conquest (A magyarok bejövetele), the exhibition of which became an important showcase of the Millennium celebration at the end of the 19th century. How was this popular visual representation of the founding historical event presented, and how was it actually related to historical evidence? All this may be assessed by knowing that Árpád Feszty (1856–1914), the leader of the painters’ group responsible for the whole undertaking, was incessantly looking for primordial Hungarian faces among his compatriots.37 However, Feszty and especially Mór Jókai (1825–1904), the great novelist of the day who gave the main spiritual impetus to the panorama picture, completely neglected the research findings of contemporary anthropology and archaeology. The scholars concerned were firmly convinced that the ancestors of the Hungarians bore physical traits of Asian Mongolian men and women, not to be found at all among the people populating Hungary at their own time. Accordingly, even the subdued Slav people, whom Feszty portrayed, were modelled after the Slovak manual labourers employed in Budapest at the time mainly in the building industry. Or, the painters of this panorama preferred to use the Kalotaszeg embroidery – a Transylvanian artefact of folk art so popular in the late 19th-century Hungary – with the aim to decorate the carriage of the princess. The theme of the Conquest was frequently discussed by the Hungarian historians. One eminence insisted that the Magyars had already constituted a nation while staying in Asia. Consequently, the conquerors arriving in the Carpathian Basin somewhat later might or even should have been considered to constitute a (Hungarian) nation. The fact of their nation-ness, Vilmos Fraknói (1843–1924) maintained, is thus wholly independent of the level of their civilisation (cultural quality), and even of their own political organisation. The whole question has been decided by some unknown criteria, according to which the Magyars brought with them their already existing nationhood. On the contrary, the Vlachs (the Transylvanian Romanians), whom the arriving Magyars found in Transylvania as aboriginals, were allegedly entirely lacking the basic characteristics of a nation at the time.38 The same was true, stated Fraknói, for all the other ethnic groups (including the men and women living under the rule of the great Moravian Empire), whom the conquerors subjected to their rule in the Carpathian Basin. They were, Fraknói claimed, peoples or tribes, but not nations per se. The primordialist concept of the (Hungarian) nation advanced by him was further developed and even refined by the perennialist historical discourse, according to which the nation-ness

108  History as constructed by historians of the Hungarians (Magyars) anticipated rather than followed the establishment of their own statehood. Founding of the state had occurred only with the coronation of Saint Stephen (or a little bit earlier during the rule of Géza prince), about 100 years after the event of the Conquest (around the year 1000). It may safely be argued that the Hungarian (Magyar) nation identified as a historical entity was in all cases the obligatory conceptual framework, which provided the ground needed for telling the whole story.39 Some other historians of the late 19th century and early 20th century, however, broke in part with this conceptual scheme by stressing the priority of the state over the nation in the Hungarian ancient history. They argued that the Magyar people began to form a nation since only they actually were organised into a state formation by Saint Stephen (975–1038).40 This approach also implied that the nation was not at all a primordial, a naturally given, entity but rather a historical phenomenon, brought about by the organising force of the state itself. The Magyars, as Ignác Acsády (1845–1906) has emphasised, were not more than a people at the moment of the Conquest. They were not yet a nation. The way the origo of Hungary’s history was defined has been the conceptual pattern becoming the most feasible historical narrative which survived well into the 20th-century.41 The perennialist way of framing the national in history was something which even after the deconstruction of the notion, carried out by Jenő Szűcs in the 1970s and 1980s, could find its way into the present-day mainstream of Hungarian history writing. The best example of it is the concept, advanced by one of the most influential medievalists of the day, Gyula Kristó (1939–2004) at the end of the 1990s who contended in sharp polemics with Szűcs, that the Hungarian nation had finally and fully been established in the course of the 13th century.42 Seen from that perspective, it is no wonder why the 19th- and 20th-century non-Magyar ethnicities could barely have found any place for themselves in the fully Magyarised account of history. Since their own historical agency was either negated or at least reduced both in terms of the distant and the nearer past, they unanimously refused the kind of interpretation of history suggested by the Hungarian (Magyar) academic historians. “The planned Millennium celebrations – reads the declaration of the executive committee of the second nationality congress, published in 1896 in the daily, Narodnie Noviny – is bound to prove to Europe that one thousand years ago a tribe has conquered this native land, and subdued other nations of our native country, and that the tribe concerned feels itself to have a right even after one thousand years to exclusively embody Hungary’s state idea and that it alone is to invest the Hungarian state with the character of an ethnic unity.”43 By raising their voice against the official demands, the authors of the declaration cited previously claimed their own right to espouse a historical anti-Narrative. Hence they were bound to say that the account of Hungary’s history advanced officially (by Hungarian academic historians) was completely false. “But suppose that the fables of the anonym notary of king Béla include the germ of truth in that Hungarians came here fighting, as knightly conquerors, as heroes, knights and

Culture, nationalism and history 109 lords, against non-Hungarian nations who played the role of the conquered and subjugated, and who due to the Hungarians lost our independence and national existence, and thereby experienced the biggest disaster that might happen to a nation.”44 The conflicting views of the origins of a postulated nation, the Hungarian one, and the very diverse narrative constructions basing “the right of the people” on their own nationhood mirrored the many inherent tensions culminating and manifesting itself in the assimilation policy of the 19th century Hungarian political elite. The nationalist discourse of a historicised past of the Hungarian (Magyar) nation served the end of excluding and silencing any alternative narrative and truth, which would contradict its own dogmas and beliefs. These anti-Narratives could in this case have been those told by the Slavs and other ethnic minorities (the Romanians in particular) – the nationalities as they were called in 19th-century Hungary, which more or less (but not always) showed resistance to the various inducements of contemporary assimilation politics and socioeconomic developments. The real importance of the question discussed before is shown by the fact that more than half of the citizens of the Hungarian Kingdom (1867–1918) were then made up of non-Hungarian, non-Magyar men and women.

A divided Hungarian nationalism The basic characteristics of the development of a Hungarian national consciousness have been the huge dissensions in the matter of what national actually means in Hungary’s history. The issue relates back to at least the beginning of the 18th century, and is becoming hot mainly after the failed mid-19th century revolution and independence struggle. As a consequence, two diametrically opposed concepts of the historically defined nation (and nationhood) came into existence and existed simultaneously almost until now. The alternative historical concepts were in part committed to the confessional separation between Catholicism and Protestantism, the former cherishing of a pro-Habsburg image of history, called by some historians (Gyula Szekfű in particular) as a Great Hungarian concept. The latter, informed by the ideal of the national independence, was, however, designated by Szekfű as a Small Hungarian concept.45 But how has the divide manifested itself in the national narrative of history? In answering the question one may mention the various assessments of the personality of Ferenc Rákóczi II (1676–1735), leader of a failed riot against the Habsburg rule in the late 17th century and early 18th century. Rákóczi became a permanent point of reference in the vision of history linked to the independence ideals. The issue gained new impetus and accentuated ideological function after the 1848/49 War of Independence. Even the party politics during the age of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy were closely adjusted to the logic of this divided historical tradition, meaning that the pro-Habsburg governing liberal party faced the oppositional Independence Party which was wholly obsessed with the cult not only of Ferenc Rákóczi but with many other historical figures, Lajos Kossuth

110  History as constructed by historians (1802–1894) in particular, who distinguished himself as struggling against the Habsburg imperial rule in the mid-19th century. The dual defining character of the Hungarian historical awareness did not mean, however, that the two alternative visions of national history, conveying implicit or even explicit political meaning, showed any substantial difference in their own cultic approach to the past. The cult of Lajos Kossuth, leader of the War of Independence of 1848/49, is a good example.46 The historical idea of a permanent Hungarian state supremacy over the entire area of the Carpathian Basin through many centuries was challenged following the eclipse of historical Hungary in 1918. There emerged an acute need for reframing this notion at the moment when millions of ethnic Hungarians were, due to the Trianon Treaty, subjected to the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. So, the kind of national historical narrative, which had been written in 10 volumes of the Millennium History of the Hungarian Nation in the 1890s, became obsolete and even dysfunctional amidst the new circumstances. In the wake of this, the concept of ethnic nationalism seemed to be a better tool for matching the present-day political ends. This, however, demanded some revision in the ruling historical paradigm, which was then intimately affected by the German Geistesgeschichte. Due to its main focus on the political and diplomatic affairs, shortly on the state (eventful) history, it proved not to be able to create a new historical notion of the nationhood and remained locked within the state-bound historical vision. An alternative path of conceptualising the historical nationhood was chosen in the 1930s in the form of ethnohistory (népiségtörténet). History of politics was to be replaced by ethnohistorians by putting the notion of society into the centre of scholarly discussion. At that time, there were some similarities between the Hungarian version of ethnohistory (social or structural history) and the historian’s practice represented by the French Annales, although the Hungarian ethnohistory was in fact influenced more by the Volkstumskunde (Volksgeschichte), a line of historical argument that emerged sometime before and simultaneously in Nazi Germany. The strong nationalist impulse working in the background was common in the Hungarian ethnohistory and the German Volkstumskunde (Volksgeschichte). Elemér Mályusz (1898–1989), the main proponent of the Hungarian ethnohistory, attempted to elaborate on the new historicised notion of the nation and nationhood, in which the concept of nation as state was dismissed and substituted by the notion of nation as culture (ethnicity). The topical, conceptual revision was meant to respond to the challenge of Trianon, the loss of a great many ethnic Hungarians. Mályusz asserted that Hungary would only be capable of remedying the miserable situation of the country by adopting the historical concept of cultural nationalism with the explicit aim of helping the cause of the territorial revisionism.47 Both cases clearly indicate that any national historiography is indeed very heterogeneous even from the perspective of its “national” contents. This follows from the political function of any history writing, from the great extent to which it is almost always instrumentalised for definite political ends. In this case nationalism in its many explicit cultural manifestations was and has been closely

Culture, nationalism and history 111 linked even today to the scholarly academic historiography. The same holds true of a seemingly not so national, political make-up, like the Communist social and political one. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, at a moment when the canonisation of a truly Marxist scholarship was on the agenda in history writing in Hungary, the old options started partly to dictate the accessible historical canon. In establishing a Marxist-Leninist rule in Hungarian historical scholarship, two alternative roads opened before contemporary historians: the one insisting on the national (independence-centred) conventional historical vision, coupled with an analytical approach to class struggle; and another one stressing the great role of the structural components of the past thereby replacing the topic of political struggles fought either for the national sovereignty or some other national causes. The debate between József Révai (1898–1959) and Erik Molnár (1894–1966) in all these instances culminated in the early 1950s, and ended with the victory of the national-Communist view represented by the group of historians gathered around Révai.48 The endeavours for de-nationalising historiography gained a new impetus following the 1956 Revolution, the “national uprising.” Erik Molnár, a Marxist ideologue and the head of the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, had at the time the ambition of possibly re-orientating the mainstream Hungarian historical scholarship by launching a debate among historians at the beginning of the 1960s. By doing so, he endeavoured to substitute the dominant notion of national history that found manifestation in the struggle for independence for the historical concept of class and class warfare. His effort, however, failed as the first Marxist master narrative of Hungary’s history, published in 1964, conveyed as much a conventional national(ist) as a de-nationalised vision of history which Molnár tended to propose in these years.49

Conclusion The notion of historical writing as a presentation of the history of the nation stretches back to the Middle Ages. Berger and Conrad use the term premodern to denote the “national” historical narratives that were prevalent during the time of the rule of dynasties and kings, and they use the term “protomodern” to describe the national narratives of the Enlightenment.50 In the Age of Enlightenment, the scope of historical inquiry broadened and became European and even global, but the holistic approach did not sever itself completely from the notion of the national past, and for the most part history and historians put the leading nations of Europe in the foreground of their inquiries and narratives. The Göttingen historians (A. L. v. Schlözer, J. C. Gatterer) did a great deal to promote the spread of the English concept of universal history. At the same time, they also favoured the perspectives of national history over the universal history approach.51 The writings of Herder and the Romantic approach to history (which was influenced by Herder) lessened the tension between national and trans- or supranational history simply by making the concept of history more national. Thus, nothing really stood in the way of the triumph of the national paradigm. At the

112  History as constructed by historians prompting of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, national historiography, which was imbued with the ideas and ideals of Romanticism, passionately championed the permanence, authenticity and homogeneity of the national past, and it used the metaphors of growth and development to describe the gradual emergence of characteristics that were allegedly intrinsic to the nation. The people or “Volk” were given a particularly prominent role in this vision, as the “Volk” was seen as the social actor of national history.52 German Historicism gave history the prestige and status of a generally accepted discipline. This took place in the roughly half-century between 1850 and 1914. As most of the nations or peoples of Europe embarked down the path towards the capitalist development and political organisation based on the concept of the nation-state, politics and the academic writing of history entered into an enduring and increasingly close relationship with each other. The canon of methodologically rigorous history writing gained both widespread currency and institutional form all over Europe. Historians began to have some voice on issues concerning contemporary politics, and the canon of a given national history became complexly intertwined with the aspiration for national sovereignty. History acquired a new role and justification as a form of national scholarship, and thus a tradition took root which historians have had to confront ever since.53 However, the constructivist theorists of nation and nationalism firmly declare that the history of the nation is simply a fabrication, as it only emerged with the modern political concept of the nation-state alongside the market-based socioeconomic structures and the spreading legal equality of the individuals. This urges historians to examine and learn from the past by applying an approach that corresponds to the idea of the national ethos. According to the tenets of the modernist or constructivist theory of the nation, history writing is largely dependent on the power of myth, which alone is capable of yielding a holistic vision of any time of the past. The result is the image representing the national historical paradigm which may even be changed with time passing. Being familiar both with succeeding and competing images of history, and the national identities attached to them, provides the clue for a better understanding of Hungary’s past as has been represented in a long series of various historical narratives. This will be the topic of the following chapter.

Notes

1 Smith, National Identity, 11. 2 Smith, National Identity, 91–92. 3 Smith, National Identity. 4 On the relationship between religion and nationalism in the field of artistic representation designed and used for (political) legitimation, see: Balogh, László Levente. “A magyar nemzeti áldozatnarratíva változásai,” Korall, 59 (2015) esp. 38–46. 5 Smith, National Identity, 97. 6 Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. 30. 7 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 30.

Culture, nationalism and history 113 8 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 40. 9 Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 236. 10 Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. 35. 11 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 39. 12 Hobsbawm, Eric J. – Terence Range, The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 13 Smith, Anthony D. “The Myth of the ‘Modern Nation’,” in The Antiquity of Nations. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. 42. 14 Smith, Anthony D. “Nationalism and the Historians,” in Mapping the Nation, edited by Gopal Balakrishnan. London: Verso, 1996. 175–197. 15 An almost classic formulation of it: Koselleck, Reinhart. “Einleitung: Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse,” in Geschichtle Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Vol. 7, edited by Otto Brunner – Werner Conze – Reinhart Koselleck. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992. 141–151. 16 Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism. Five Roads to Nationalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. 5. 17 Greenfeld, Nationalism, 8. 18 Szűcs, Jenő. “ ‘Nemzetiség’ és ‘nemzeti öntudat’ a középkorban. Szempontok egy egységes fogalmi nyelv kialakításához,” in Nemzetiség a feudalizmus korában. Tanulmányok, edited by György Spira – Jenő Szűcs. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1972. 38. 19 Szűcs, “ ‘Nemzetiség’ és ‘nemzeti öntudat’,” 46. 20 Szűcs, “ ‘Nemzetiség’ és ‘nemzeti öntudat’,” 48. 21 Geary, Patrick J. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 37. 22 A European-wide excellent account on the theme is available in: Berger, Stefan – Christophe Conrad. The Past as History. National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. 23 Louis O. Mink is cited by Ankersmit, Frank. Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. 25–65. 24 Mink, Louis O. “Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument,” in Historical Understanding, edited by B. Fay – E. O. Golob – R. T. Vann. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. 182–203. 25 White, Hayden. “Droysen’s Historik: Historical Writing as a Bourgeois Science,” in The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. 87, 88. 26 White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation,” in White. The Content of the Form. 61. 27 Hutchinson, “Cultural Nationalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of History of Nationalism, edited by John Breuilly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 75. 28 Hutchinson, “Is Nationalism Statist? The Nation as a Cultural Project,” in Modern Nationalism. London: Fontana Press, 1994. 51. 29 On the problem of objectivity not being equal with neutrality, see: Haskell, Thomas L. “Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetorics vs. Practice in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream,” History and Theory, 29, 2 (May 1990) 129–157. 30 Iggers, Georg. G. “The Uses and Misuses of History,” Apollon (2000) 4. 31 Renan, Ernest. “What Is a Nation?” in Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhaba. London: Routledge, 1990. 8–22. 32 Szűcs, Jenő. “Történeti ‘eredet’-kérdések és nemzeti tudat (1985),” in A magyar nemzeti tudat kialakulása. Budapest: Balassi – JATE – Osiris, 1997. 346. 33 Szűcs, “Történeti ‘eredet’-kérdések,” 346–347. 34 Their endeavour was thus a close reaction both to the extreme ethnic diversity of the people (led by chieftain Árpád) identified as the Hungarian union of tribes and the not less multiethnic character of a modern-age Hungary.

114  History as constructed by historians 35 Szilágyi, Sándor (ed.). A magyar nemzet története, 10 volumes. Budapest: Athenaum, 1895–1898. 36 Romsics, Ignác. Clio bűvöletében. Magyar történetírás a 19–20. században – nemzetközi kitekintéssel. Budapest: Osiris, 2011. 163. 37 On history of the Feszty’s panorama see: Gyáni, Identity and the Urban, 197–202; Kovács, Ákos. Két körkép. Budapest: Sík, 1997. 27–104. 38 Frankl (Fraknói), Vilmos. A magyar nemzet története I. Pest: Szent István Társulat, 1872–1873. 4, 8, 18. 39 More about it in: Tarafás, Imre. “Nemzetiségek a nemzeti történelemben: Magyarországi nemzetiségi kisebbségek reprezentációja történelmi összefoglalókban, a dualizmus korában,” Korall, 68 (2017) esp. 35–45. 40 Acsády, Ignác. A magyar birodalom története, Vol. I. Budapest: Athenaum, 1904. passim. 41 Lajtai, “ ‘. . . Mi a nemzet . . .?’Nemzetfogalmak és a Magyarország-történeti összefoglalók,” Kommentár, 5 (2016) 47–48. 42 Kristó, Gyula. A magyar nemzet megszületése. Budapest: Kossuth, 1998. 175. 43 Cited by Niederhauser, Emil. “Honfoglalás és Millennium,” 153. 44 Niederhauser, “Honfoglalás és Millennium,” in A pesti polgár. Tanulmányok Vörös Károly emlékére, edited by Gábor Gyáni – Gábor Pajkossy. Debrecen: Csokonai, 1999. 153–154. 45 Szekfű, Gyula. “Politikai történetírás,” in A magyar történetírás új útjai, edited by Bálint Hóman. Budapest: Magyar Szemle Társaság, 1932. 439–440. 46 Gyáni, Gábor. “The Creation of Identity Through Cults,” in Cultic Revelations: Cult Personalities and Phenomena, edited by Anssi Halmesvirta. Tampere: Historietti Oy, 2011. 23. 47 Gyáni, Gábor. Nemzeti vagy transznacionális történelem. Budapest: Kalligram, 2018. 175–187; Oberkrome, Willi. Volksgeschichte, Methodische Innovationen und völkische Ideologisierung in der Deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft 1918–1945. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck – Ruprecht, 1993. 48 Gyurgyák, János. Ezzé lett magyar hazátok. A magyar nemzeteszme és nacionalizmus története. Budapest: Osiris, 2007. 526–534: Romsics, Clio bűvöletében, 377–383; Kövér, “A magyar történettudomány első ötéves terve és a gazdaságtörténet-írás,” in Tudomány és ideológia között. Tanulmányok az 1945 utáni magyar történetírásról, edited by Vilmos Erős – Ádám Takács. Budapest: ELTE Eötvös, 2012. 22–42. 49 Lackó, Miklós. “Molnár Erik és a 60-as évek történész-vitája,” Századok, 142, 6 (2008) 1483–1536; Molnár (ed.), Magyarország története. 50 Berger – Conrad, The Past as History, 29–43. 51 Berger – Conrad, The Past as History, 70–74; Kontler, László. “Győztes kánon – vesztes kánon. Rehabilitált kánon,” in A magyar történetírás kánonjai, edited by Zoltán Iván Dénes. Budapest: Ráció, 2015. 44–50. 52 Koselleck, “Einleitung: Volk,” 141–151. 53 Iggers, The German Conception; Berger – Conrad, The Past as History, 140–225.

7 Cultic and ironic visions of Hungary

Nationalism, antinationalism and transnationalism as guiding principles In order to answer the question of how this divide has manifested itself in the national narrative of history, we mentioned previously the varied assessment of Ferenc Rákóczi II, leader of a failed riot against the Habsburg rule in the late 17th century and early 18th century. Rákóczi became a permanent point of reference in the vision of history closely committed to the independence ideals. The issue gained new impetus and accentuated ideological function after the 1848/49 War of Independence; even party politics in the age of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (1867–1918) were adjusted to the logic of a split historical tradition. Accordingly, the pro-Habsburg governing liberal party was faced with the oppositional Independence Party that was deeply engaged in the cult not only of Ferenc Rákóczi but of many other historical figures, primarily Lajos Kossuth, who distinguished himself as struggling against the Habsburg imperial rule in 1848/49. The fact that the evaluation either of Rákóczi, Kossuth or other similar historical actors sent a rather unambiguous political message was clearly evidenced by the scandal caused by the publication of a book in 1913 on Ferenc Rákóczi, the emigrant politician. Written by a young historian, Gyula Szekfű (1883–1955), the monograph provoked a heated, mostly politically motivated debate in which not only the scholarly critique was to be heard but the leading role was played rather by parliamentary interventions, mass rallies and protests of various social associations against the book, which sometimes coupled with autodafé. Szekfű, who some time later became one of the leading historians of the country, was blamed for discrediting the cult for Rákóczi, whom he depicted as an aging and by then unsuccessful politician.1 Not even the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy put an end to this practice, which thus survived well until today. Yet, the two optional visions of history, each conveying implicit or even explicit political meaning, did not differ from each other in employing a cultic approach to the national past. If we are to demonstrate the way this was done, we may mention the paradigmatic example of the cult of Lajos Kossuth, leader of the War of Independence of 1848/49. From the beginning, his heroic image, embodying and articulating the independence ideal, stood

116  History as constructed by historians in sharp contrast to that of Count István Széchenyi (1791–1860), representing and expressing the negotiation type of political culture. The history writing of the first decades of the 20th century in particular was prone to use both images for personification of the “usable past,” serving highly acute present-day political ends. Today’s historical scholarship has too often been informed by this conceptual framing, especially when coming into close contact with a public history that is engaged in establishing and maintaining an identity-conferring public culture (and political discourse). Lajos Kossuth, an emblematic figure of insurrections or uprisings in the course of Hungary’s modern history, always had a much greater impact on the popular image of history than anything and anybody else, including Széchenyi. Therefore, he could have become the historical personality, with his eternal merits and remembrance even being codified by the Parliament in the interwar period in 1927.2 This is all the more important given the fact that the then ruling Horthy regime was not an enthusiastic supporter of the revolutionary and liberal ideas, the assertion of which Kossuth had strived for in the 1840s. His cult remained unchallenged up to the second half of the 20th century; it was first sustained by the Stalinist communist regime in the 1950s, and later cherished by intellectuals, particularly historians, who persistently adhered to the dream of liberating the country from the Soviet imperial domination like the late György Szabad (1924– 2015).3 The official cult of Kossuth was taken up again in post-Socialist Hungary by declaring 2002 to be a Kossuth commemoration year, not least “because of its significance both in terms of national mythology and in terms of scholarly interest.”4 As a consequence, there is now a broad range of historical literature dealing with Kossuth’s life, ideas and political career. Besides Kossuth’s nationally approved cult, the worship felt towards the ideals incarnated by Széchenyi provided a source for an alternative way of national identification. This was the case with the authoritarian regime of the Horthy era when Széchenyi was first given a prominent and normative role in the past processes of creating a modern Hungary. This image was especially raised by the aforementioned Gyula Szekfű in several of his highly influential essays and monographs.5 This was and has also been the case with the conservative or rather “illiberal” governments being in power following 1989, that, in spite of stressing their own historically-rooted national orientation, obviously preferred Széchenyi’s cult to Kossuth’s. Although Kossuth as a common national historical idol was not disputed either, the cult of him still had more supporters among the liberal than the conservative (illiberal) political and intellectual forces in the post-1989 Hungary. This was clearly evidenced by the fact that although 2002, the commemorative year for Kossuth, was officially designated a cultic event, it lacked any governmental financial support. A reason for this is the highly ambivalent attitude that the governing conservative forces, represented by the Fidesz (Union of Young Democrats) led coalition cabinet, showed towards the national liberal historical heritage. It, however, was opposed by the liberal and then oppositional party, the SZDSZ (Alliance of Free Democrats), which carried further the tradition of a Hungarian liberalism that to a great extent is represented by Lajos Kossuth.6

Cultic and ironic visions of Hungary 117 It is necessary now to discuss the main characteristics and historical trajectory of Hungarian nationalism. The idea of an “imagined community,” attached to the permanency of a Hungarian state supremacy over centuries, was to be reframed when, in the wake of the Great War, millions of ethnic Hungarians were transferred to successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. This kind of national narrative, linked to the notion of a continuous Hungarian statehood, represented by the 10 volume Millennium History of the Hungarian Nation, appearing in the 1890s, had immediately become obsolete. As has already been indicated, an entirely new approach was needed, one in which ethnic nationalism was to play the decisive role. The model had formerly been provided by Ernest Renan who – while reflecting the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in 1870 – also emphasised the importance of a commonly shared spirit and a collective memory (historical awareness) linking the German-speaking local population to France. The concept of the ethnic nation as an effective legitimation for the modern nation-state was mostly worked out by historians (and some others working in the field of humanities), who were willing to contribute to the success of the politics of territorial revisionism. Mainstream historical scholarship, which in the interwar period was closely linked to the German Geistesgeschichte, appeared not to be able to meet the need for establishing an ethnically based new concept of nationhood. Its main focus on the political and diplomatic, or putting it another way, the state history, made for the establishment of a national historical narrative that remained locked within the state-bound historical vision.7 Against the background of this authoritative scholarly standpoint, the alternative way of defining the meaning of historical nationhood on the basis of ethnohistory could thus emerge only in the 1930s. As we have already referred to before, ethnohistory attempted to elaborate on a new historicised notion of nation and nationhood, in which the concept of nation as state was substituted by the notion of nation as culture.8 Throughout the 19th century, the building of the Hungarian nation-state was almost always affected by independence ideals. The development towards the outbreak of the 1956 revolution may also be explained by the same impetus, as it will be discussed later on in a separate chapter. The long-lived Hungarian tradition of resistance took the form of a national uprising but also a social revolution coupled with the former. The succession of the events relating to each occasion shows that these upheavals had two co-equal goals: to regain the nation’s independence and to forcibly change the political and social order. The Rákóczi war of independence (1703–1711) was, perhaps, something of an exception, though even Ferenc Rákóczi II was willing to try social reform in an attempt to broaden the heyduck’s privileges to other segments of society so that they, too, would have a stake in his victory against the Habsburg rule. The implementation of this ordinance, however, was half-hearted, at best.9 In 1848–1849 the cause of national sovereignty in the modern sense was first tied to that of (legislated) economic and social modernisation.10 In 1918, when, in the wake of the lost war, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy disintegrated and Hungary became an independent nation-state, the need for social and political change was again on the agenda. This attempt, however, failed as early as mid-1919.

118  History as constructed by historians The next revolutionary turning-point occurred in 1956; in this case, the issue of national independence unquestionably went hand in hand with the issues of social and political reform. The tradition of revolutions notwithstanding, there is also, as has already been mentioned, an alternative historical tradition: the political culture and collective memory of compromise, the penchant of the Hungarian political elite of whatever time to come to terms with the victors, to incline to opt for some kind of settlement. This not less vital tradition, too, dates back to the Rákóczi War of Independence, if not earlier, and was taken up again following the 1849 catastrophe, when the constitutional settlement was reached in 1867. This “realistic compromise” was then seen by many as the culmination of 1848/49. The compromise of 1867 would later become one of the main reference points of this alternative historical tradition.11 One can hardly miss the analogies between 1848 and 1956 or, more exactly, between the Compromise (Settlement) and the “consolidation” under János Kádár. The analogy, of course, springs from the collective memory of “revolution versus compromise,” which is specific to Hungarian political culture. Seeing that the 1956 revolution was in some sense an eruption of the national sentiments against the tyranny of the Soviet imperial rule, it is not unusual that the regime following the failed revolution did its best to destroy and effectively neutralise any sense of a national identity. The reason was that the Kádárist leadership discovered the threatening potential of a nationalist framing of history, which might have facilitated the occurrence of an upheavel similar to the 1956 revolution. The experience that the Communist elites gained from the revolt led them to adopt and prefer a kind of memory politics, in which less emphasis was put on any efforts of historicising the nationhood. The ideological pragmatism so much characterising the Kádár regime demanded a systematic de-politicisation of everyday life on the one hand and suppression of the national historical memory as a source of political legitimation on the other. The latter originated from the desire to stifle the remembrance of the 1956 revolution.12 All of this was in accordance with certain efforts of some eminent academic historians who were ready to reconceptualise the main trajectory of Hungary’s history pertaining at least to the last two or three centuries. This is the political context within which the Historikerstreit in Hungary, the so-called Erik Molnár-debate, surfaced. The authoritative historian, former Stalinist politician, then director of the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Erik Molnár proposed a new, denationalised vision of Hungary’s past. He strove to offer the Kádár regime the kind of ideological weapon through which the personality cult could have been neutralised. Molnár also advocated a historicised ideological construction of the nation that lent special value to the formula of an “unpatriotic” image of history. The construct, however, was strongly opposed not only by a majority of the dogmatic Marxist nationalist historians but also by all of the supporters of a democratic independence-centered historical tradition. The debate thus expressed and further increased the previously existing divide between the anti-nationalist (sometimes pro-Habsburg) historical vision

Cultic and ironic visions of Hungary 119 and the plainly nationalist narrative of history fed by the virulent independent ideals. The dispute, which lasted in the 1960s for several years and mobilised almost the entire profession as well as several scholars from the neighbouring humanities, did not result in the triumph of one or the other line of thought or paradigm. One of the most important consequences of the debate was that the historical problem especially of the nation and nationalism was subsequently raised as a special field of historian interest.13 Jenő Szűcs, a medievalist, had become the most outstanding representative of the self-reflexive historical discourse engaged in researching the epistemology of the national master narrative and the history of national awareness. In his seminal work published, in part, only after his death, Szűcs dealt extensively with the birth of a pre-national collective consciousness in Hungary, dating back to sometime between the 10th and 11th centuries.14 As has also been discussed by advocating a clear-cut distinction between the proto-nation (and the estate-based protonationalism) and the modern construct of the nation-state generated and fuelled by nationalism, Szűcs, in fact, preceded or even anticipated the emergence of today’s so fashionable constructionist nation theories (E. Gellner, B. Anderson, E. J. Hobsbawm). He assumed that the main defining characteristics of nationalism, the fusion of the ethnic bond with a political loyalty, were exclusively shown towards the nation-state, an entity based on a rigid territorial rule. Szűcs’s anti-nationalist concept of history, however, did not attract too many followers among academic historians, as we also discussed before in the previous chapter, who rather criticised it during the last two and a half decades. This may have a lot to do with the urgent need at that time for a “return to history,” meaning to the true national paradigm of history. The slogan referred to the endeavour of the restoration, if only symbolic, of an interrupted continuity of history. The project of restoring the national canon of history also stemmed from the obvious failure of the former, the Communist political regime to establish itself historically. This prepared the way after its fall before inventing the national “usable past,” a practice so typical not only in post-communist Hungary but in every country of East and Central Europe freshly emancipating itself from a Communist and Soviet rule.15 From the beginning of the 1960s and parallel to the Erik Molnár debate, but more or less independent of it, remarkable steps have been taken towards a fundamental revision of the dominant historical image of the Compromise (Settlement) of 1867 and the entire history of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The potential for such an alteration lies in the fact that even contemporaries held diverse, sometimes contrasting, views on their own world. This plurality survived the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918. The “representative” national narrative, the five volumed Magyar történet (Hungarian History) by Bálint Hóman (1885–1951) and Gyula Szekfű, which had been produced in the interwar period, tended to create a positive image of the dual Monarchy. Szekfű, however, harshly criticised the liberalism for being a guiding spirit of the past age and held it responsible for the final disintegration of the Hungarian Kingdom. Several non-academic intellectuals of the Horthy era, like László Németh, the novelist and essayist, and István Bibó (1911–1979), the political analyst and law scientist, however, held the

120  History as constructed by historians view that the dual Monarchy was in fact a failed attempt to artificially lengthen the duration of a not properly democratic and nationally restrictive state formation, i.e. the Habsburg dynasty rule. Paradoxically, the anti-Habsburg thrust merged some time later, in the 1950s but still before 1956, into the dogmatic Marxist construct of history. According to the latter national(ist) and class theory-based approach following 1867, Hungary was and still remained a colony of the Habsburg empire. An entirely new evaluation started to emerge at the outset of the 1960s, stressing the positive implications of the Compromise (Settlement) of 1867, as it succeeded in securing the quasi-inner-state autonomy of Hungary (and the hegemony of the then ruling classes), and made possible a considerable influence for Hungary with respect to the entire empire. It was also emphasised that the construct of the Dual Monarchy provided comparable socioeconomic advantages through establishing a common customs boundary and market system covering the whole area of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Accordingly, not the dependence on Austria, but quite the reverse, a surprisingly high rate of economic growth, the spread of a market-based economy could thus be reached for Hungary in the late 19th and early 20th century. Several leading economic historians of the day were unanimous in highly appreciating the enormous achievement of the dualistic period in view of its fast economic growth, and thus concluding that there was the “growth process of about half a century that lifted Hungary out from among the backward countries stagnating under traditional economic conditions” – citing one of them.16 The tension already existing and even further increasing between the historians holding a basically positive image of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and those sharing a negative approach towards the dual Monarchy was not settled, not even within mainstream history writing. This finally led to paradoxical developments when the plan of the highly ambitious academic project, the 10 volume History of Hungary, was devised to be implemented. The synthetic historical account was intended to establish the single Marxist canon of a historical vision of the country by uniting the creative efforts of every eminent mainstream historian of those days. The final result, however, was not and could not be satisfying due to the deep and unbridgeable conceptual gaps and differences among the contributors.17 Returning for a moment to the dispute over the merits and the alleged deficiencies of the Compromise (Settlement) and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, some further vital issues have also been added implicitly or even explicitly. One of them is the re-interpretation of the role that the supra-national regional historical entities might have played in the life of the not too distant past of the country. The notion of a European identity as one possible source of a group identity has often emerged at critical periods in the country’s history.18 This was the case with the first half of the 19th century, in the so-called Reform Age, which culminated by and ended in the 1848 Revolution of March 15 and the War of Independence of 1848/49. The notion was again brought forward as a vital issue from the point of view of the future development of the nation in the late 20th century, both before and after the regime change of 1989. Without going into details, it is still worth

Cultic and ironic visions of Hungary 121 mentioning, however, that the place of a European identity in the Hungarian selfconsciousness has always been associated with the vital dilemma of belonging or not belonging to an empire instead of constituting an autonomous nation-state. Firstly, it needs to be emphasised that nationalism has been coupled with classical liberalism and hence has been a vehicle for linking Hungary to Europe throughout the 19th century. Despite the failure of the War of Independence in 1848/49, the notion of European modernity, in close connection with embourgeoisement (Verbürgerlichung), was still widely referred to among Hungarian liberals. This even applied during the Dual Monarchy when Hungary, as an integral part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and on the basis of an institutional framework of liberal constitutionalism, started its economic take-off, a process accelerated by industrialisation from the 1880s onwards. At that time and even before, Eurocentrism of the political elite concealed a clear geopolitical significance as Europe was perceived as the best antidote to the threat of Asian barbarism, then embodied by Czarist Russia (and the Balkan). In the aftermath of World War I, when Hungary had finally acquired independent status, the question of Europe, and the need for some sort of a European identity for Hungary, emerged (again) as a burning and hotly debated issue. The dissolution of the monarchy in 1918, and, in particular, the dismembering of the historic Hungary, dictated by the Western European powers under the leadership of France in 1919/1920, brought some change to the formerly well-established attitude. Championed by its elite, Hungary’s disillusion with Europe, and the West in general, together with specific developments in the interwar period had the effect of softening Hungarian public opinion regarding the German concept of Europe which was dating back to the 1910s (I will return to this topic later), and was increasingly shaped by the Nazi vision of a new Europe from the 1930s onwards. Even amidst such unfavourable conditions, the Europeans still retained some force of attraction to the public opinion. This stemmed from the fact that the country was openly threatened by an imperial expansion especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The then dominant ideology, supported even by the mainstream historical scholarship, held that Hungary – as witnessed in 1,000 years of history – constituted a bastion of western Christianity. The notion taken in part over from the political and historical discourse of the previous century was directly instrumentalised in the course of the war waged against the Soviet Union since 1941 alongside Nazi Germany. The Pan-Europa ideas, then championed internationally by Count CoudenhoveKalergi, and the notion of Central-Europe, propagated in the 1910s by a German liberal, Friedrich Naumann, who covertly legitimised Germany’s Drang nach Osten politics, also enjoyed some popularity in Hungary at that time. It is true, however, that the notion of Central and/or East Europe, to which Hungary was belonging or should belong to at least spiritually, did not coincide with Naumann’s idea; yet it was also differing from the notion, addressed more or less at the same time by several Polish historians (Oscar Halecki and Marceli Handelstam), and the Czech scholar, Jaroslav Bidlo.19 László Németh, the novelist and

122  History as constructed by historians essayist already mentioned before, argued that “the Eastern European peoples are nursed by the same breast.” Furthermore he criticised the Western culture by asserting that Eastern Europe, “is simultaneously our own fate and our opportunity,” because this region of Europe – and not the crisis-ridden West – was most likely to develop a feasible model of economic, social and political reform for itself.20 Following World War II the question was reversed, however, as Hungary fell within the imperial orbit of the Soviet Union. This turn of events made Hungary’s specifically European characteristics, both past and present, almost irrelevant. Accordingly, new historical paradigms appeared on the agenda, being more compatible with the vital ideological interests of the Communist-led country. One of the most important paradigms, concerning the question of Hungary’s place in Europe seen from a historical perspective, was the so-called “deviation theory.” It assumed a historically grounded Hungarian Sonderweg leading to East-Europeans of the country when it finally came to be ruled by the Soviet Union. By stating that there had been societies beyond the Elbe (specifically in Eastern Europe) that were rather characterised by a Prussian-type development in agriculture, chronologically lopsided industries, the prevalence of etatism, and, to crown it all, poorly-developed civil societies etc., the region (including Hungary) was held to be fit for accommodating the rapid success of Sovietisation in the aftermath of World War II.21 The new paradigm was proposed at the beginning of the 1960s by Zsigmond Pál Pach (1919–2001), one of the most authoritative historians of the day, alongside Erik Molnár and mainly after Molnár died in 1966, and it immediately became a canon. Pach assumed that this region of Europe, which had earlier followed the Western-European development model, had begun to deviate after the Turkish conquest, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, thus placing Hungary alongside Eastern rather than Western Europe.22 The concept was further developed in the 1960s and 1970s by György Ránki and Iván T. Berend, disciples of him, who presented what they referred to as East Central Europe as a distinct model of modern development. In doing so, they could also build upon the then fashionable centre-periphery theory. In asserting a distinctive historical evolution of Eastern Europe, Berend and Ránki made, however, some concessions by dividing the region into a Russian (and Balkan) model, and a Central-Eastern one, assuming that Hungary together with Poland and Bohemia belonged to the latter.23 It is notable that these local socioeconomic histories (like Pach’s construct) became known and an accepted interpretation even for the international historical community. This is true especially for the scholarly contribution of Ránki and Berend, who worked in close intellectual contact with Alexander Gerschenkron and the late Immanuel Wallerstein in advancing their sophisticated formulation of the theory of an East European backwardness and of the center-periphery economic interaction.24 In sharp contrast to that line of argument, the aforementioned medievalist Jenő Szűcs produced a major study in the early 1980s, first appearing as samizdat, but subsequently published not only in Hungarian (1983) but in French as well, with

Cultic and ironic visions of Hungary 123 an introduction by Fernand Braudel, and also in several other languages, titled Three Historic Regions of Europe.25 Szűcs defined the region as being part of a transitional area, which, however, constituted a border zone between Western and Eastern Europe. The economic and social structures of that particular area embodied the basic characteristics of both regions, whilst its ambitions and the religious and intellectual life placed it closer to the West. Around the mid-1980s, Szűcs’s theses, which had some implicit connections with the then rising international current of thought on the issue of Central Europe, provoked controversies in Hungary. The historically based argument advanced by Szűcs was in fact a response to the latent need of the subdued Central European peoples to bring about change in the dominant social and political regime, needing a total break with the Bolshevik-inspired system. This was to give a wide-scale popularity to the reinvention of an already non-German Central Europe, which could thus serve the intellectual needs of a historically postulated European identity of the people living in the satellite countries. At that time, Péter Hanák (1921–1997), who was pioneering in the re-evaluation of the history of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, made an attempt to adapt the positive image of the Dual Monarchy to the supra- or transnational approach to Hungary’s modern-age history. He echoed Szűcs’s view by supporting the notion of Central Europe as he advanced evidences that the bourgeois development and modernisation process were inherent to the region, including Hungary. He thus emphasised the importance of the internal forces for modernising the country, who showed striking similarities in the entire Central European area, being equivalent to the territory of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, where several common and universal traits (structures, agency, mentality) were to be found.26 The main problem with the Central-Europe paradigm as formulated by Szűcs and reformulated by Hanák was that, beyond the objective evolution, a key role was (or should have been) played by the region’s own sense of identity. This common and regionally based identity, however, seems not to have been an effective factor, neither in the past nor the present. The historical discourse on the notion of Central Europe was less vital in several other Eastern-European-communist countries than in contemporary Hungary. This also applies to Poland although a few Polish historians pioneered some decades earlier in proposing this idea (Marceli Handelsman, Oscar Halecki). The reason lies in the obscure meaning ascribed to the term Central Europe, as it has been identified with the territory of the once existing Habsburg empire (later the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy), which only a section of today’s Poland, namely Galicia, was part of. Any equation of Central Europe with more or less the former Habsburg monarchy “never found support among Poles ([as] it would mean dividing Poland into two different zones, with most of the country, including Warsaw, out of the Central Europe so understood). Thus, if the concept were to be accepted in Poland, it would have to be reformulated.”27 Polish scholars could thus choose only the historical concept of Central Europe moulded according to the “Habsburg vision,” and in this sense Central Europe is equal with Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, areas showing more or less comparable centuries-old traditions of statehood, and similar socioeconomic and

124  History as constructed by historians mental structures. The other alternative available is that Central Europe embraces the peoples and nations found between Germany and Russia. According to the latter view, as it has been assumed by Jerzy Kłoczowski that the Byzantine traditions may or even should be taken as components of the true Central Europeanness.28 The big question arising in terms of the Central Europe paradigm, which attracted several sympathisers and supporters already before the regime change of 1989, is whether or not it served as a base for transnational historical investigation. It is hard to give an answer to the question considering the obvious plurality of present-day historical discourse in Hungary to which we may return later on. Mainstream history writing, closely committed to the canon of a national paradigm, no longer monopolises the whole profession. The most striking development in the transition process that started with 1989 might have been “that the significance of social history has been increased.”29 The latter development contributed to a weakening of the power of mainstream history writing engaged both in creating and maintaining the construct of a national identity. Social history and the postmodern challenge as a point of departure for any approach to the (national) past has in fact brought substantial changes to the selection of vital historical issues worth researching and discussing, and the way they are being discussed. The growing demands for irony and self-reflection than for providing historical arguments facilitating national identification seem now to be confronted with an emerging and already prospering public history, which fulfills the role of creating a national identity-conferring culture, and is therefore inclined to serve the ends of political instrumentalisation of the historical knowledge.

Personal and collective agency, and the question of public morality Discontinuity is obviously the most decisive attribute of 20th-century Hungarian history. There have been three succeeding territorial changes of the state borders of the country, the first caused by the Treaty of Trianon (1920), the second following from the success of the revisionist policy of the Horthy regime just before and during World War II, and, finally, the post-war Peace Treaty of Paris, which compelled Hungary to restore its state boundaries as they had been established by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. These alterations were accompanied by similar changes both in the number and character (structure by ethnicity, occupation etc.) of the population of the country. The drastic changes, resulting from the two world wars, were worsened by the enormous human losses. World War I accounted for more than 600,000 dead soldiers plus those who died as POWs. World War II alone entailed casualties of over 1,000,000, among others comprising of the victims of the Holocaust, which could or should be a highly sensitive issue for the troubled collective memory and national identity of Hungarians.30 Besides the territorial changes of the country caused by the Peace Treaty following the Great War, the economically motivated mass population turnover also had a great influence in Hungary. In the decades before 1914, a large-scale emigration, heading mostly for the United States, was to mobilise 1,400,000

Cultic and ironic visions of Hungary 125 Hungarian citizens. Although one-third of the emigrants eventually returned to their homeland (even before the end of the Great War), the exodus still reduced the total population number of the country. The outmigrants, a great number of them were Slovak and other non-Magyar nationalities, left Hungary to improve their living conditions. Though for most of them their stay in the United States was planned to not last longer than two or five years only, the majority remained in the United States. While a considerable portion of them were recruited from members of the agricultural wage earners, the geographical distribution of this overseas migration proved to be enormously uneven. “The formation of emigration centers demonstrates that although general economic and social conditions determine the possibilities and limits of human life, the intentions and actions are influenced by the local environment and the information received in that environment.”31 As a result of the chain migration, a few peripheral areas of the country were to become the main regions of outmigration, with the northeastern countries being the most important area; they sent a large number of Slovaks to the United States. The topography of overseas migration was closely linked to the unequal spread both of industrialisation and urbanisation taking place in Hungary around the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The following mass movement occurred between 1918 and 1924, when nearly half a million refugees arrived in Trianon Hungary. The Hungarian refugees, representing primarily the various members of the former economic, social and political (administrative) local elites of the lost territories, fell victim to the nationalist policies of the newly established successor states of Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The refugees, who represented about 5.3% of the reduced number of the total population of Hungary, had a great impact on the political, social and economic life of the country by supporting the conservative Horthy-regime, which pursued a revisionist policy throughout the whole interwar period.32 The massive influx of a great number of refugees was a hard hit both for the labour and housing markets. As a result, not only the number of unemployed (chiefly clerical) workers but even the housing shortage of the post-war period increased, since 43% of the new arrivals had previously been civil servants. In addition, the refugees, who arrived by train, were unable to leave the railway carriages for months; they thus came to be known as “wagon-dwellers.” Only in 1924, with the suspension of immigration movement, were these “homes” finally liquidated by constructing a considerable number of council housing financed by the local governments.33 All this intensified the internal social tensions of contemporary Hungary. The succeeding large-scale wave of a population move took place following World War II. Beyond the war-related human losses also being considerable,34 the population exchange agreement between Czechoslovakia and Hungary signed in 1946 also contributed to the growth of the demographic upheavel in the postwar years. As a result more than 100,000 Hungarians, either legally or illegally, moved to Hungary and half of this number went as Slovakians to Czechoslovakia. Besides all this, nearly 200,000 German ethnic Hungarian citizens were forced to leave the country for Germany between 1946 and 1949. We have no precise data on the probable number of the so-called Hungarian Displaced Persons (DPs), who

126  History as constructed by historians left the country during the last months of World War II and closely thereafter, or a few years later; 800,000 to 1,000,000 refugees might have fled to the West from Hungary at that time. The Hungarian POWs in the West are calculated to have been around 300,000, a major part (200,000) of whom, however, returned to Hungary after some years. The number of refugees living in camps in Austria and Germany was around 400,000 in June 1945, and it changed to tens of thousands by the second half of the 1940s. The Western countries, including the United States, opened their borders to the DPs and refugees as late as 1947, but the immigration of the Hungarian DPs was allowed only in the early 1950s, until that time they held the status of being the former enemy.35 Last, but not least, when the 1956 revolution was mercilessly suppressed by the Soviet Union, 200,000 Hungarian citizens fled, a majority of them to Austria, subsequently heading for the United States. The ’56 refugees, the Freedom Fighters as they were called later on in the United States, represented a young adult population; two-thirds of them were under 30 years old and male. They mirrored the image of an educated society: more than half of them had college degrees or were skilled or semi-skilled workers, and the number of the university students was very high as well.36 The changes mentioned previously all had an impact on societal processes by slowing down or even obstructing the development towards modernity. The many hardships felt in terms of the adaptation to the Western model of bourgeois development were to give birth to the idea that the many remnants of feudalism surviving well into the 20th century had primarily been responsible for the backwardness and the structural anomalies of Hungary. With the time passing, the view preferred and voiced chiefly by leftist (liberal, socialist) and other (e.g. the populist) critics of the current social and political status quo was thus inscribed into the minds of the people, serving as an explanation for the problems of the post-1945 and post-1989 social development. The notion was finally elaborated as a sociological paradigm by Ferenc Erdei in the 1940s, who set up the theory of a dual structure of Hungary’s society, which we have discussed in an earlier chapter. He suggested that a historically developed so-called national society was faced with a modern bourgeois society.37 The two divergent and opposing structures had their own internal hierarchies: the national society was supposed to cover the aristocracy, the traditional middle and lower-middle class, but the lower class or classes were lacking from it. As contrasted to the former, Erdei held that the bourgeois society was made up of the haute bourgeoisie, the middle class of enterpreneurs and managers, the urban petite bourgoisie and the (industrial) working class. The most populous part of Hungary’s society before 1945, the peasantry, embodied a third distinct social structural component in the model, carrying many characteristics of the national society. The social history model outlined previously suggests that Hungary’s social structure has barely or wrongly been integrated internally due to the lack of a closer interaction between the two halves. The weak and ineffective entanglement in the other’s life-worlds followed from and re-strengthened at the same time the unorganic bourgeois transformation specific for Hungary’s embourgeoisement

Cultic and ironic visions of Hungary 127 (modernisation), in which many signs of a colonial type development – also characterising some other Eastern- and Central-European countries at that time – were to be discovered quite easily. The two structurally opposing forces had, however, unequal access to political power and the public culture (the ideology, in particular), which were monopolised by elites of the national society alone. “The Hungarian Bürgertum,” Ránki contended in accordance with this historical discourse, “therefore was at best a part of the state power but never conquered it. Instead of sharing power with the nobility, it was confronted by a state apparatus that was dependent on the landowning nobility and defended the interests of these landowners both institutionally and politically.”38 The social history model was intended to provide an explanation for Hungary’s underdeveloped and distorted socioeconomic, political and ideological stance. The more recent social history writing, however, finds no plausible evidence for justifying this explanatory scheme.39 Based on growing empirical evidence, they thus reject the idea that a dual society existed at that (or a later) time in Hungary, represented on the one hand by a backward, traditional and ethnically Hungarian (Magyar) society dominated by the Christian aristocracy and the salaried middle class – the gentry per se – and a modern, progressive, partly Jewish dominated bourgeois society on the other hand. The concept of the dual society still retains its undisputed relevance for many sociologists, who use it for describing and interpreting the social reality not only of the past, but of the Kádárist era as well, and even more of the “new capitalism” that has surfaced after the political shift of 1989. The feudalisation thesis used in this way conveys a normative approach. The main problem with it is that not even the pattern of the bourgeois development of the West matches the requirement of the model. In addition, the more recent emergence of the notion of multiple modernity puts the whole issue – including backwardness and the general pattern of an ideal modernity (and modernisation) – in a totally new light. No longer insisting on that sort of normative conceptualisation, the focus has to be placed rather on the unique combination of the old and obsolete social structural elements with the modern. The “normal” pattern then amounts to an incessant adaptation and readjustment to the swiftly and incalculably changing inner and outer conditions. This insight may indeed bring us closer to a better understanding of the specific trajectory of Hungary’s modern-age history. Let us discuss now some of the most important historical circumstances and occurrences continuously enforcing a partial or fuller readjustment of the people concerned. There have been at least 10 smaller or bigger political or regime shifts in Hungary in the course of the 20th century. Consequently, an average (and long-lived) Hungarian citizen was supposed to live through and experience four or more such drastic political changes. The abrupt and intense political transformations generated as usual basic alterations both in the economy and the social structure. The physical movement discussed previously was thus supplemented and even complemented by some form of social mobility, both upward and downward; this social move could occur once or more in the life of an individual. The

128  History as constructed by historians regime shifts, in addition, were not preceded by a series of changes anticipating the predictable future. The market-based economy and the bourgeois society prevailing more or less before 1945 were immediately replaced by a command economy and proletarian state authority in the post-war period. Quite the reverse happened in this case, when the Communist socioeconomic (and political) makeup was suddenly substituted by market economy and bourgeois-type social structures, operating within the framework of a welfare-state. The necessity of a permanent readjustment to the frequently changing institutional frameworks of the life-world explains the efforts of many historical actors to possibly cling to some elements of their old behavioural and mental strategies in order to retain their own personal and group identity. The historical agency both on individual and collective levels has thus played a crucial role in shaping and even determining the course of events amidst the drastic changes of the 20th century. One is tempted to place more emphasis on the personal than the collective historical agency just because the individualisation process seems to have been the leading force working in the background of most of the societal processes throughout the whole period.40 Admittedly, the latent, sometimes explicit individualisation process was frequently hidden and even contrasted or counterbalanced by some historical moves reflected by the social imaginaries as clear manifestations of the national, racial or class-like collectivities. But how and to what extent does today’s Hungarian historical scholarship embrace the whole problem discussed before?

Trends of contemporary Hungarian historical scholarship Did the political change of 1989 have any influence on Hungarian history writing? If there was a perceptible impact, in what direction did it help the forward movement of historian’s practice? If the change in the sociopolitical realm did not have any repercussion, what could be the reason? According to a more recent assessment, Hungarian historical writing “has undergone a remarkable transformation after 1989 – even if in personal, ideological, and infrastructural terms the change was far from abrupt. However, the most important marker is probably not the (imaginary or real) end-point of the transition process, but rather the process itself, the spectacular dynamism of different, sometimes mutually reinforcing, sometimes opposed projects of reshaping the public and academic discourses, and the ensuing interplay of different conceptions of the past.”41 The truth of the previous statement that speaks about an increasingly plural Hungarian history writing as compared to the previous state of affairs cannot be, indeed, disputed. However, I am sceptical about the truthfulness of the argument describing the present-day situation as favouring an “ensuring interplay of different conceptions of the past.” The thesis according to which there was a greater continuity of historical scholarship in Hungary than in most post-communist countries in the region looks feasible. The difference registered in that regard originates from the more liberal

Cultic and ironic visions of Hungary 129 political and intellectual atmosphere of the Kádár era which made possible a relative freedom of the scholarly domain, even allowing scholars to travel to the West and accommodate some concepts and findings of the “bourgeois” social sciences and humanities. This also included a less ideological rigour and an absence of the total dominance of nation-centered mainstream history writing. These seem to have been the most important circumstances giving birth to the experiments such as social history, fruit of the endeavour of a group of young historians in the 1980s working in close co-operation with a few marginally positioned older historians. Their concerns manifested themselves in the form of establishing the István Hajnal Circle – Social History Association in 1988 and its annual conferences, the first of which was held in 1987.42 It is true, however, that the 20th-century Hungarian past was always full of forbidden territories (events and arguments) for historians, demanding silence, the use of euphemisms or in extreme cases even lying. These taboos related mainly to the events and development of the communist past, some questions of the Trianon problem (especially the Hungarian minority question in the succeeding countries), several crucial incidents of World War II, and mainly the role that the Soviet Union played in liberating the country from the Nazi rule, the Jewish past (the Holocaust in particular), and of course the problematic 1956 Hungarian Revolution in its entirety. (Several of all these points have already been discussed and will be shown in detail in the following chapter.) But it was not wholly unimaginable, even in these cases, to depict the interwar period in a way that at least matched the requirements of the period following 1989.43 In terms of the 1956 revolution, however, a wholly new chapter began after 1989, and not just because a separate research centre was established then – The Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution – but more significantly as 1956 came to fulfil thereafter the role of the basic narrative. This resulted in a situation all too familiar to historians from the ancient regime, that the historical narrative was expected to satisfy the needs of certain political discourses, filling in the frameworks of public history. That could have been part of the reason why the political and diplomatic aspects of 1956 came to be replaced in the historical vision by a growing interest in the concerns of specialists in social and cultural dimensions,44 or the collective memory of the revolutionary events,45 and not the least the problematic “Sixties,” and that of the so-called Kádárism.46 Returning to the question of continuity and discontinuity, it may be argued that there was still a role for the particular features of previous history writing. Several authors of the national history master narrative, represented mainly by the 10 volume History of Hungary (seven volumes were finally published), a project coordinated by the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, approached the national past on a more or less positivist scholarly basis. It is not wholly accidental, therefore, that the volume devised to deal with history of the post-World War II period was not prepared in the end, as a consequence of the latent “resistance” of those academic historians who refused to canonise the officially approved story of the socialist period. Although the party historians represented by the Institute of Party History, directly supervised by the Central

130  History as constructed by historians Committee of the Communist Party, were ready to produce such an account, the assignment went to the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences which, however, sabotaged the work. As a clear sign of the great extent to which there was continuity in this field, there was the ensuing outstanding comprehensive national history (appearing already in the 1990s) whose authors also retained the same basic conceptual framing of a narrative synthesis.47 Apart from the obvious continuities, there were also a few fundamental changes shaping Hungarian historical scholarship in the 1990s and 2000s. They stemmed from: (1) the generation shift of the historians, (2) the predominant national selfconsciousness surfacing after the 1989 regime change and (3) the impact of globalisation from the late 1990s onwards. These factors had varying influences on any further evolution of Hungarian historiography, but they surely all contributed to an increasing institutional and conceptual pluralisation of historical scholarship. In describing the present-day history writing in Hungary I consciously apply the viewpoint of a social historian: never closely be integrated in the mainstream. I place the whole matter in the context of a spreading transnationalism and internationalisation of historical scholarship which brings about the need both for interdisciplinarity and transcending the spatial boundaries of a nation-state in the narrative of national history.48 The mainstream history writing of the 1990s apparently came very close to the classical 19th-century way of narrating the historical past. The generational shift occurring at that time, coinciding with the eclipse of economic history as the former basis for conceptualising the master narrative of a national history, might also account for this development. Since economic history was closely linked to the Marxist view of society, it “was, after all, more predisposed to produce a longterm and structural approach to history than narratives with a political moral.”49 Accordingly, it was not uncommon in the period between the 1960s and the late 1980s that the (economic) structural aspects were to frame the overall vision of a national past. In addition, this was further supported by the fact that several economic historians of the day occupied key institutional positions in contemporary academia (Pál Zsigmond Pach, György Ránki and Iván T. Berend to name just those most well-known). The economic historians concerned were among the most open-minded scholars in Hungary, showing readiness to apply the currently most fashionable, internationally preferred conceptual approaches (economic growth theory, modernisation theory, centre-periphery theory etc.) and not even refusing quantification taken over from the cliometric historians.50 A notable representative of them, György Ránki, made even a modest attempt in the late 1970s to adopt social history by proclaiming that the German historische Sozialwissenschaft has been the ideal way for conceptualisation to be followed. His efforts to initiate special social history research projects at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (headed by himself and Pach) failed. This followed in part from the embedded weaknesses of the vision advocated by Ránki, not least due to its reductionism; Ránki, in fact, tended to subdue social history to the imperatives of

Cultic and ironic visions of Hungary 131 economic history.51 The failure also followed from the absence of genuine social historians in the realms of academia. When following 1989 the mainstream historians like Ránki and his close companions were increasingly replaced after 1989 by the members of a new generation of historians, the structurally based approach of history was practiced less and less. The reason was that the historians who started to rule were, as usual, more committed than their “Marxist” predecessors to a traditional political or state history. This new (old) approach turned swiftly back to the kind of historicism and naïve epistemology inherited from the 19th-century historical scholarship. The national history modelled on state history was further inspired and legitimised by an abrupt revitalisation of the idea of national sovereignty as a result of the breakup of the Soviet empire. The slogan, “return to history” meant, in most cases, no more than simply regaining and reinventing the national as such by sweeping away every intellectual constraint of the former imperial political and ideological rule. All efforts of re-establishing history have thus necessarily led to re-creating a national identity, a construct that could best be articulated by applying the linear narrative of the political history of the nation. History, on the way to nationalism, was thus to revive the “true” political traditions allegedly dismissed or even cancelled by the formerly dominant communist vision of the past. The purely national image of history which then came to substitute the previous and already outdated principles of political legitimacy fit in with post-1989 mass democracy, demanding new models of identity and citizen loyalty. The present-day mainstream historiography, defined by a preponderant interest in the political and diplomatic aspects of past life, mainly in the form of a synthetic national history, came to dominate both school textbooks and university history teaching. The growing parochialism of Hungarian mainstream historiography appears even more pronounced when it is assessed in the light of the fastly expanding globalisation and internationalisation of historical scholarship. The symbiotic relationship that once existed between Orthodox Marxism and the nationalist historical concept, a short-lived tendency characterising the early 1950s before the 1956 revolution, also contributed in some sense to the later reemergence of the national paradigm. Today’s nation-centered state history, which has thus been preceded or even anticipated by the special mixture of the Marxist and nationalist conceptualisations of history, is and has always been resistant to any modernising efforts of the historical profession. As Apor and Trencsényi have correctly assumed in describing and analysing the more recent developments of Hungarian history writing, the “breakthrough of social history in the early 1990s” was actually one of “the most striking peculiarit[ies] after 1989.”52 The changes registered manifested themselves, on the one hand, through the process of the institutionalisation of social history and, on the other hand, the rising theoretical interest attested to by several young historians. In terms of the former, one can mention the establishment of two university departments both at Roland Eötvös University (ELTE, Budapest) teaching social history per se. The Economic and Social History Department located in the Faculty of Humanities, which was initially headed by the late Vera Bácskai

132  History as constructed by historians (1930–2018), an internationally known urban – social historian, was soon entitled to hold a doctoral school of its own, with urban and social history as its focal point. The Department of Historical Sociology at Social Science Faculty, however, made its name widely known by producing the first social history textbooks on the 19th – and 20th – century Hungarian history, and also releasing the first synthetic monographs on Hungary’s modern-age social history.53 In addition, one of the leading social historians in today’s Hungary, Béla Tomka, has published an overall European social history narrative focusing on the 20th century.54 A new and not less important step was the appearance of a handbook of social history, the achievement of 30 domestic historians. The large number of topics discussed in this volume included the theory of history and historiography; various trends of social history (microhistory, historical anthropology, feminist history, psychohistory); the national social history schools (Annales school, the Anglo-Saxon social history or the German Sozialwissenschaft and Alltagsgeschichte), and last but not least the problems linked to the linguistic turn, interdisciplinarity and so forth.55 Besides the regular and ungoing conferences held by the István Hajnal Circle – Social History Association, several series of books have also been released to present the special expertise of social history to the public. One of the most notable of these was the series entitled Microhistory initiated by Gábor Klaniczay in the late 1980s which, however, came to a halt after publishing seven works. The series was revived a couple of years later by another publisher but after four books it went to a third publisher. Several other historical series of books may also be mentioned as contributing to the dissemination of social history such as the A múlt ösvényén from the publisher L’Harmattan, and some others too. A separate group of then young historians established the quarterly Korall in 2000, with an exclusive and specific focus on social history. In each issue the journal discusses a single and important historical problem. The journal Korall also started to publish a series of books, in which lengthy monographs of mostly young historians are made available. Since 1989 the historical profession has finally acquired an intellectual freedom not previously available during communist rule, while still being expected to provide a usable past serving direct political needs more and more since 2010 when the Fidesz led by Viktor Orbán came to power. The freedom gained was to open the door before its internal accelerated pluralisation. An obvious sign of this has been the increased intellectual and institutional position that social and mentality history finally reached in the 1990s and thereafter. Although the old divide between mainstream and social history writing survived, it has become even more emphatical than before.

Conclusion The historically grounded national ethos, which plays an active role even in our present-day life, is regularly explicated by the national historical narrative. Hungarian past, as it has usually been told by the various histories, comes to be loaded with a peculiarly tragic perspective, following in part from the numerous defeats

Cultic and ironic visions of Hungary 133 that Hungarian people have suffered during the last few centuries. But, as Wolfgang Schievelbusch has pointed out rightly, “Every society experiences defeat in its own way.”56 We have given a short overview both of the decisive occurrences and developments of the 20th century, as well as of how they actually influenced the shape and the content of the national historical narrative and hence the identities of the Hungarian national community. Summing up, we can draw the conclusion that the various traditions of collective self-perception almost always alternate between a recurring lethargy and self-regret and an adaptive pragmatism. When the former prevails, the cultic attitude towards the past tends to mold the heroic historical scenario, which favours the historical consciousness conceived by the notion of monumental history as it has been defined by Friedrich Nietzsche.57 However, when the historical sensibility accommodates the spirit of negotiation and compromise, the ironic perspective comes to dominate the historian’s vision of history.58 It is not surprising, however, that the two modes of historical sensibility or consciousness may sometimes peacefully co-exist with each other in the mind even of the same historian. Gyula Szekfű, who started his professional career by ironically molding the story about the cultic figure of the independence-centred concept of history – Ferenc Rákóczi II – in an ironic mode, continued with establishing and sustaining the cult of Count István Széchenyi, the emblemetic representative of the opposing historical tradition.59 The other option also accessible to the historian as a story-teller is the preference given to the so-called productive eras vis-à-vis the sublime but ephemeral moments of the past. This option – serving as a consolation for the defeated – underlines the well-grounded faith in our own cultural and moral superiority over the victors. The view that the loser’s position also keeps advantages in reserve that may or should be used and exploited for noble ends60 has always played a part in shaping the Hungarian national historical narrative. The competing images of history (and the national identities attached to them) outlined before may further be described and showed on the example of how the 1956 revolution is and has previously been assessed and conceptualised in the historical discourse.

Notes 1 Szekfű, Gyula. A száműzött Rákóczi. Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1913; On the debate and Szekfű himself, see Dénes, Iván Zoltán. A történelmi Magyarország eszménye. Szekfű Gyula a történetíró és ideológus. Pozsony: Kalligram, 2015. esp. 61–140. 2 It is true, however, that the historical merits of Ferenc Rákóczi were already codified by the Parliament as early as 1906 at a time when the same act was not even imagined in terms of Kossuth, the great adversary to Francis Joseph, whom Kossuth had dethroned in 1849. 3 Szabad, György. Kossuth politikai pályája ismert és ismeretlen megnyilatkozásai tükrében. Budapest: Kossuth, 1977. 4 Welker, Árpád. “The Kossuth Commemoration Year and Its Impact on Hungarian Historiography,” in Halmesvirta (ed.) Cultic Revelations, 44.

134  History as constructed by historians 5 Szekfű, Gyula. Három nemzedék és ami utána következik. Budapest: Királyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda, 1940 (6th ed.), esp. 9–57; Szekfű, Gyula. A mai Széchenyi. Eredeti szövegek Széchenyi István munkáiból. Budapest: Révai, 1935; Hóman, Bálint – Gyula Szekfű, Magyar történet, Vol. V. Budapest: Királyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda, 1934. esp. 258–275. 6 Welker, “The Kossuth Commemoration,” 47. 7 Szekfű, “Politikai történetírás,” 439–440. 8 Gyáni, Nemzeti vagy transznacionális, 175–187. 9 Szijártó, István. “The Rákóczi Revolt as a Successful Rebellion,” in Resistance, Rebellion and Revolution in Hungary and Central Europe: Commemorating 1956, edited by László Péter – Martyn Rady. London: Hungarian Cultural Centre – UCL, 2008. 67–76. 10 Deák, István. The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. 99. 11 Gyáni, Gábor. “A kiegyezés nemzeti és birodalmi látószögből,” Buksz, 29, 2 (Ősz – Tél 2017) 151–154. 12 Fehér, “Kadarism as the Model,” 29–30; Rainer, M. János. Bevezetés a kádárizmusba. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet – L’Harmattan, 2011. 13 Lackó, “Molnár Erik,” 1483–1536. 14 Szűcs, Jenő. A magyar nemzeti tudat kialakulása. Budapest: Balassi –JATE – Osiris, 1997; Szűcs, Jenő. Nation und Geschichte. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1981. 15 Miller – Lipman (eds.), The Convolutions of Historical; Pakier – Wawrzyniak (eds.), Memory and Change. 16 Katus, “Economic Growth in Hungary during the Age of Dualism (1867–1913). A Quantitative Analysis,” in Social–Economic Researches on the History of EastCentral Europe, edited by Ervin Pamlényi. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1970. 87. 17 Gergely, András. “Kísérlet mesterelbeszélés megalkotására: a ‘tízkötetes’ Magyarország története,” in Dénes (ed.), A magyar történetírás, 206–213. 18 Gyáni, Gábor. “European Identity, Modernisation and National Self-determinism in Hungary,” in Towards a New Europe: Identity, Economics, Institutions. Different Experiences, edited, by Alberto Tonini. Florence: University of Florence, 2006. 31–42. 19 Wandycz, Piotr S. “East European History and Its Meaning. The Halecki – Bidlo – Handelsman Debate,” in Király Béla emlékkönyv, edited by Pál Jónás – Peter Pastor – Péter Pál Tóth. Budapest: Századvég, 1992. 308–321. 20 Gyáni, “European Identity,” 36. 21 The latter view was represented by Péter, László. “East of the Elbe. The Communist Takeover and the Past,” in The Phoney Peace. Power and Culture in Central Europe 1945–49, edited by Robert B. Pynsent. London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies UCL, 2000. 17–38. 22 Pach, Zsigmond Pál. Nyugat-európai és magyarországi agrárfejlődés a XV–XVII. században. Budapest: Kossuth, 1963. 23 Berend, T. Iván – György Ránki, East Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Tokyo: Chuoh University Press, 1978; Berend, T. Iván – György Ránki, The European Periphery and Industrialization 1780–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 24 Mishkova, Diana  – Bo Strǻth  – Balázs Trencsényi, “Regional History as a ‘Challenge’ to National Frameworks of Historiography: The Case of Central, Southeast, and Northern Europe,” in World, Global and European Histories as Challenges to National Representations of the Past, edited by Mathias Middel – Lluis Rouray y Aulina. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. 257–314. 25 Szűcs, Jenő. Les Trois Europes, préf. Fernand Braudel. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985. 26 Hanák, Péter. Ragaszkodás az utópiához. Budapest: Liget, n.d. [1993] 120–304. 27 Janowski, Maciej – Constantin Iordachi – Balázs Trencsényi, “Why Bother about Historical Regions? Debates over Central Europe in Hungary, Poland and Romania,”

Cultic and ironic visions of Hungary 135 East Central Europe/L’Europe du Centre-Est/Eine wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift, 32, Parts I–II. (2005) 23. 28 Kłoczowski, Jerzy. East Central Europe in the Historiography of the Countries of the Region, trans. by Christopher Garbowski. Lublin: Institute of East Central Europe, 1995. 29 Trencsényi, Balázs – Péter Apor, “Fine-tuning the Polyphonic Past: Hungarian Historical Writing in the 1990s,” in Narratives Unbounded. Historical Studies in PostCommunist Eastern Europe, edited by Sorin Antohi – Balázs Trencsényi – Péter Apor. Budapest – New York: Central European University Press, 2007. 59. 30 Stark, Tamás. Magyarország második világháborús embervesztesége. Budapest: MTA TTI, 1989. 31 Puskás, Julianna. Ties That Bind, Ties That Divide. 100 Years of Hungarian Experience in the United States, trans. Zora Ludwig. New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000. 32–33. 32 Mócsy, István I. Partition of Hungary and the Origins of the Refugee Problem,” in Király (ed.), War and Society, 491–507. 33 Gyáni, Gábor. Parlor and Kitchen. Housing and Domestic Culture in Budapest, 1870– 1940. Budapest – New York: Central European University Press, 2002. 180–186. 34 Stark, Magyarország második, 42–47. 35 Puskás, Ties That Bind, 263–264. 36 Puskás, Ties That Bind, 271. 37 Erdei, “A magyar társadalom.” 38 Ránki, “The Development of the Hungarian,” 449. 39 Gyáni – Kövér – Valuch, Social History of Hungary. 40 A few examples: Mayer, Arno J. The Persistence of the Old Regime. Europe to the Great War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981; Thompson, F. M. L. The Rise of Respectable Society. A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830–1900. London: Fontana Press, 1988; Maza, Sarah. The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie. An Essay on the Social Imaginary 1750–1850. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 41 Kövér, György. “A  társadalomtörténet ‘refigurációja’, avagy eltűnt főszereplők nyomában,” Történelmi Szemle, XLVIII, 3–4 (2006) 235–260; Gyáni, Gábor. “Huszadik századi magyar társadalmak,” in A mi 20. századunk, edited by Gyöngy Kovács Kiss – Ignác Romsics. Kolozsvár: Komp-Press, 2011. 51–99. 42 Trencsényi – Apor, “Fine-Tuning the Polyphonic Past,” 61. 43 Gyáni, Nemzeti vagy transznacionális, 234–256. Thirty-seven social history conferences were held up to 2018, and the material of 30 conferences has already been published in the book series, Rendi társadalom – polgári társadalom (Estate Society – Bourgeois Society). Czoch, Gábor. “Rendi társadalom – polgári társadalom. A Hajnal István Kör könyvsorozata,” Buksz, 29, 2 (Ősz – Tél 2017) 235–237. 44 Romsics, Ignác. “Those Inter-War Years,” Budapest Review of Books, 6, 1 (Spring 1996) 42. 45 The best evidence of this new orientation is shown by Gyáni, Gábor – János M. Rainer (eds.). Ezerkilencszázötvenhat az újabb történeti irodalomban. Tanulmányok. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2007. See further: Standeisky, Éva, Népuralom ötvenhatban. Budapest – Pozsony: 1956-os Intézet – Kalligram, 2010. 46 Kőrösi, Zsuzsanna – Adrienne Molnár, Carrying a Secret in my Heart . . . Children of the Victims of the Reprisals after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. An Oral History, trans. Rachel Hideg – János Hideg. Budapest – New York: Central European University Press, 2003. The original Hungarian edition was published in 2000, the German language version appeared in 2005. See also Molnár, Adrienne – Zsuzsanna Kőrösi – Márkus Keller (eds.). A forradalom emlékezete. Személyes történelem. Az Oral History Archívum interjúi alapján. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2006. 47 Rainer, M. János (ed.). Múlt századi hétköznapok, Tanulmányok a Kádár-rendszer kialakulásának időszakáról. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2003; Rainer (ed.). “Hatvanas

136  History as constructed by historians évek” Magyarországon. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2004; Rainer, M. János – György Péteri (eds.). Muddling Through in the Long 1960s. Ideas and Everyday Life in High Politics and the Lower Classes of Communist Hungary. Budapest – Trondheim: Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution – Program on East European Cultures and Society, 2005; Rainer. M. János (ed.). Búvópatakok. A feltárás (Évkönyv XVIII. 2011–2012). Budapest: OSZK – 1956-os Intézet, 2012; Rainer. M. János (ed.). Búvópatakok. Széttekintés (Évkönyv XIX. 2013.) Budapest: OSZK – 1956-os Intézet, 2013; Rainer. M. János (ed.). Búvópatakok. Mélyfúrások. Magyar jobboldal  – 1945 után (Évkönyv XX. 2014). Budapest: OSZK – 1956-os Intézet, 2014. 48 The volumes of the book series Magyarok Európában were written by Pál Engel, Domokos Kosáry and Ferenc Szakály (the planned fourth volume covering the time period between the late nineteenth and the end of the twentieth century was not written). 49 Bence, György. “On the Defensive: Transition and Conservation in Academia,” Budapest Review of Books, 2, 2 (Summer 1992) 49. 50 Kövér, György. “Crossroads and Turns in Hungarian Economic History,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Economic History, edited by Francesco Boldizzoni – Pat Hudson. London: Routledge, 2016. 242–257. 51 Kövér, György. A felhalmozás íve. Társadalom- és gazdaságtörténeti tanulmányok. Budapest: Új Mandátum, 2002. 379; Gyáni, Gábor. Nemzeti vagy transznacionális, 231–232. 52 Trencsényi – Apor, “Fine-Tuning the Polyphonic Past,” 12. 53 Gyáni – Kövér – Valuch, Social History of Hungary. 54 Tomka, Twentieth-Century Europe. 55 Bódy, Zsombor – József Kovács Ö. (eds.). Bevezetés a társadalomtörténetbe. Hagyományok, irányzatok, módszerek. Budapest: Osiris, 2003. 56 Shievelbusch, Wolfgang. The Culture of Defeat. On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, trans. Jefferson Chase. London: Granta Books, 2003. 10. 57 Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil, 243–334. 58 White, Metahistory, 37–38, 433. 59 Csunderlik, “A ‘kicsapó és megfeneklő hullám’ – A  száműzött Rákóczi poétikája,” Kommentár, 2 (2011) 24–39; Gyáni, “The Creation of Identity.” 60 Koselleck, “Diskontinuität der Erinnerungen,” 213–222.

8 Revolution, uprising, civil war

There were from the very beginning two ways of conceptualising the events of 1956 in Hungary, labelling it as a revolution or a national uprising. There also emerged a third way of conceptual definition when what occurred in 1956 was named an anti-totalitarian movement. From the theoretical perspective of Begriffsgeschichte the Hungarian events of 1956 cannot simply be assumed under the notion of “revolution,” the term first applied to what took place in France in 1789, since it was not the kind of forceful collective effort leading to an unknown future. The notion of “revolutio” works better to describe the analytical meaning of the Hungarian anti-Soviet and anti-Communist disturbance. The reason has been that the main thrust of the Hungarian situation in 1956 was similar to the 17th-century English and the 18th-century American “revolutions,” to return definitively to a point of departure by regaining some of the formerly lost social and political liberties.

The conceptual dilemmas of 1956 Historians and social theorists have, from the start, been divided on the question of how to conceptualise the events of 1956 in Hungary. Shortly after the 1956 events the debate on the issue was already in full swing, publicly as well as privately. In her theoretical work published in 1963, Hannah Arendt came out firmly in favour of ranking 1956 as a revolution. To be able to call it a revolution, one first has to establish the class or social characteristics of the event, because according to the usage requirements, a revolutionary event is the violent manifestation of the awakening of class-consciousness of a given social group. In Arendt’s opinion, 1956 was a workers’ revolution. Since it was also a rebellion against the Bolshevik system that had been brought to power by the revolution of the proletariat, the advocates of revolution theory needed to show the specific social character of 1956 in order to prove that 1956 preserved (was able to preserve) its working-class character despite being directed against the revolution of the proletariat. Arendt solved this problem by linking the working-class character of 1956 to the exceptional role the workers’ councils had played in the Hungarian events; she named the workers’ self-organisation as the revolutionary differentia specifica of the event. She enthusiastically registered the “fact” that

138  History as constructed by historians Hungary’s 1956 revolution had offered a glimmer of hope for the prospect of a selfregulating society: “nothing indeed contradicts more sharply the old adage of the anarchic and lawless ‘natural’ inclination of a people left without the constraint of its government than the emergence of the councils that, wherever they appeared, and most pronouncedly during the Hungarian revolution, were concerned with the reorganization of the political and economic life of the country and the establishment of a new order.”1 Marxist philosophy in the Western countries of the 1960s took a favourable view of such a conceptual development of the 1956 revolution; at that time this was mainly linked to the name of the British historian Bill Lomax. Thanks to his syndicalist views, Lomax, who wrote a comprehensive historical monograph on 1956, treated the October events as a victory for the state of the workers’ councils. “The greatest achievement of the Hungarian revolution should thus be recognized as the creation of this totally new structure of popular power – of a state of workers’ councils directly controlled by the workers. . . . Indeed, their very essence as revolutionary institutions was that they were organs through which the people would directly rule, through which society could exercise its self-mastery. The Hungarian workers, in establishing direct control over their factories through the workers’ councils, had thus in one blow both smashed the former state power ruled over by the Communist Party, and reopened the road to that society which had been the original aim of Marxism and socialism – in which hierarchy would give way to equality, in which political institutions would be replaced by social power. . . .”2 Roughly at the same time (two years later, to be precise), the same British leftwing publishing house that had published Lomax’s book also brought out a neoMarxist analysis by two dissident thinkers, János Kis and György Bence (under the pen name of Marc Rakovski) on Eastern European Marxism and the Communist regimes. However, the co-authors were far from being convinced that 1956 had been a workers’ revolution. “If we leave aside the remnants of the classes that sought the restoration of capitalism, the dramatic events of 1956 had only two protagonists: the political elite, which was disintegrating into antagonistic factions, and ‘the people’. The strata of the ruling class below the political elite were absorbed by ‘the people.’ ”3 Although they failed to define what they meant by the word “people,” this usage undoubtedly revealed the authors’ hesitation to classify 1956 as a revolution. From the very beginning, another tradition also existed in connection with the conceptual definition of 1956, which viewed the events as a purely, or mainly, national uprising. Even the choice of the exact word had a symbolic significance: instead of calling it a “revolution,” the followers of the latter tradition preferred to use the words “revolt,” “uprising” or possibly even “freedom fight” in reference to 1956. This already had a prelude during those fatal weeks in 1956. In his famous radio speech on 3 November, Cardinal József Mindszenty (1892–1975) declared the following: “everyone in this country must know that the recent fighting was not a revolution but a freedom fight” (emphasis in original). By way of an explanation he added: “The regime was wiped out by the entire Hungarian nation.”4

Revolution, uprising, civil war 139 The idea of 1956 not being a revolution soon found enthusiastic supporters even among historians. The title (and especially the subtitle) of a bulky monograph on 1956 written by the 1956 émigré Ferenc Váli (1905–1984) confirms the author’s strong belief in this concept.5 He summed up his views on the nature of the revolution in a separate chapter. According to this, the resentment that sparked off the events originated from local nationalism fuelled (or merely awakened) by Soviet-Russian nationalism and Marxist-Leninist internationalism; at the same time, people’s desire for freedom became a driving force only in reaction to that. “In the fall of 1956 both Hungarian nationalism and Soviet Russian imperialist nationalism hurtled into the open and met in a head-on collision.”6 Due to the 1956 narrative that preferred the term “uprising” (or “national freedom fight”),7 the historiographical tradition of 1956 has to this day been marked by a dualism. This is not a kind of historiographical categorisation recognising four traditions in connection with 1956, two “left-wing” and two “right-wing” ones (reform socialist, national democratic, conservative nationalist and extreme right).8 The distinguishing feature we have chosen is not based on the various assessments of 1956 according to different political value systems (with which we have already dealt with in a previous chapter); rather it focuses on the issue of whether historians prefer to describe 1956 in terms of the trans-historical meaning that expresses the modern-age concept of the revolution or they prefer some other alternative.

An excursion to the Begriffsgeschichte At this point, we should attempt a brief theoretical discussion on the various usages and changing meanings of the term “revolution.” In her previously mentioned book, Hannah Arendt describes the moment when “we hear the word still, and politically for the last time, in the sense of the old metaphor which carries its meaning from the skies down to the earth; but here, for the first time perhaps, the emphasis has entirely shifted from the lawlessness of a rotating, cyclical movement to its irresistibility.” On 14 July 1789, in Paris, “when Louis XVI heard from the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt of the fall of the Bastille, the liberation of a few prisoners, and the defection of the royal troops before a popular attack . . . [the] king, we are told, exclaimed, ’C’est une révolte’, and Liancourt corrected him: ’Non, Sire, c’est une révolution’. . . . The king, when he declared the storming of the Bastille was a revolt, asserted his power and the various means at his disposal to deal with conspiracy and defiance of authority; Liancourt replied that what had happened there was irrevocable and beyond the power of a king.”9 Therefore, it was in 1789 that people first used the word “revolution” to describe a force of nature in the context of the historical events, losing once and for all its original meaning, i.e. “a return, a rotation of movement back to a point departure, as in the original Latin usage. [Since] in keeping with its lexical sense, revolution initially signified circulation.”10 Therefore, Reinhart Koselleck makes the observation that, “Since then, revolution obviously no longer returned to given conditions or possibilities, but has, since

140  History as constructed by historians 1789, led forward into an unknown future. The nature of this future is so obscure that its recognition and mastery have become the constant task of politics.”11 This was how the word “revolution” became (or was condensed into, in Koselleck’s wording) a “collective singular,” a trans- and metahistorical concept, which made it suitable for categorising and describing the historical experiences of various unrests. At the same time, it acquired a temporal dimension, which elevated the expression into a “historicophilosophical perspective,” sharing “with prognoses an implicit and irreversible trend covering all tendencies simultaneously.” And last but not least, the modern concept of revolution was filled with a definite social content, once “it turned out” that “all political unrest involves social elements. But what is new is the idea that the objective of political revolution should be the social emancipation of all men, transforming the social structure.”12 And while we are on the topic of the “aim of revolutions,” we must not forget to mention the fact that it was Marx’s and Lenin’s utopian theory of revolutions that first put the bug in people’s ears about both the desirability of revolutions and the wisdom of making them permanent. Therefore, the noble task of awakening the potential social basis of the revolution (the participants acting as a group) to their authentic social consciousness in order to revolutionise the entire globe fell on the revolutionaries, who are the sole keepers of the “progressive laws” of revolution.13

Class characteristics of 1956 The obvious question is whether the 1956 events can be connected to any particular social class according to the normative concept of modern revolutions. To answer this question, we need to examine 1956 from the aspect of social history. In the following section we shall focus on the social background of the “revolutionaries” in an attempt to identify the social groups that contributed the greatest number of participants to the revolution. It is almost impossible to discuss the social history of 1956 adequately without a clear picture of the social groups that not only supported or sympathised with the revolutionary movements but were committed to them and made up the revolutionary bodies. Without relying on impressionistic images available as revolutionary legends or the post-revolutionary propaganda of the Kádár-regime, one is left only with the data produced and provided by the subsequent processes of judicial retaliation. The lists of those interned, imprisoned or sentenced to death after the revolutionary events provide some knowledge of who was actively involved in them. The main problem, however, is that such empirical evidence was constructed some time later, during the reprisal process. Findings taken from judicial proceedings become the basis for identifying and defining what counts as revolutionary behaviour, what can be placed in the revolutionary category (or counterrevolutionary category as the Kádárite persecutors labelled it). This ignores what their immediate inducements to such behaviour were. So the bias in the accessible data, coupled with the absence of some 200,000 people who fled westward in late 1956 and early 1957, distorts any picture of the social basis on which the

Revolution, uprising, civil war 141 revolution rested. Historians frequently remark that “a fairly wide circle of the participants in the incidents was not brought to trial.”14 And this is strengthened by data revealing the behaviour of the authorities involved in the reprisal. According to an instruction of 4 December 1957, issued by the deputy Minister of the Interior, the more exact definition of the social origins both of the persons under arrest and those being suspected is needed to match the correct “class politics.” The erroneous data provided on them demonstrates that “in many cases the ‘politicals’ and the ordinary criminals are recruited primarily not from the ‘class alien’, the depraved proletariat and the hooligan elements. . . . It occurs that the previously convicted hooligan elements, class alien persons are assessed as manual labourers on the basis of their nominal occupation, recent work-place of origin.” Therefore, to get a “more exact” definition of who could be considered a worker at all, “It is not allowed to register the ones being convicted twice, not even the class alien persons, displaced by the proletarian dictatorship from their [original social] position and doomed to become manual labourers etc. as workers or peasants.” So “both the original and the recent occupation has to be taken as a basis” in determining the class position of the persons concerned.15 Some further invaluable data about the incentives behind revolutionary action can be gathered from oral history, although the difficulties of applying them are no less considerable. Recollections many years or decades later seem to provide decisive evidence about events whose “true story” cannot be learned from official written sources, which are silent on the subject. Oral history sheds light on facts that are personal, unrepeatable and accidental, but the historical evidence it provides is not flawless either. For the record, oral history is an intellectual or rather discursive construct that has more to do with the present than the past.16 In examining earlier a collection of oral history interviews with ‘56 émigrés,’ I found that the “framework-story” type account was shaped primarily by certain time, narrative strategies. Less was revealed about the experienced events of historical value because the account was a subsequent story with a teleological basis.17 Let’s now see the main contours of the social composition of the revolutionaries. As a rough approximation, the vague outlines of three macro-social groups emerge in this respect: the left-wing creative intellectuals, often referred to as the “revisionists” (including a large number of writers, journalists and social scientists); university students; and, finally, the industrial workers, most notably those working for large industrial companies. It would be an over-simplification to single out these three groups alone as the social basis of the 1956 revolution. Outside the capital and the larger provincial towns, the revolutionary role of certain elements within the peasantry becomes apparent. This is hardly surprising in view of the fact that the peasantry faced severe persecution in the last few years before 1956. As a result, their understandable hostility against the regime swiftly rose to the surface following the spectacular collapse of Rákosi’s oppressive system from one day to the next.18 On top of that, the opinion-leaders in villages usually came from the kulaks, in other words the propertied peasant families, and 1956 was no exception in this

142  History as constructed by historians regard. This is faithfully demonstrated by a social history analysis carried out in connection with 1956, according to which in a village named Nógrád nearly one quarter of the population took part in the mass demonstration that broke out on 26 October, either by standing in their gates so as to follow the events of the protest or by publicly voicing an opinion and joining the revolutionary organisations. Of the 797 people who inhabited the village, the kulaks formed 10% (78). We should also add that they were all men.19 Villagers personally concerned in local events (some of whom even held leading positions in revolutionary organisations) came partly from the young workers under 35 years of age (mainly descendants of landholding peasants), and partly from the highest-status smallholders, who belonged to an older generation. With minor exceptions, the workers included were commuters in close touch with the town, so that they could mediate between the revolutionised urban centres and their home villages. Other case studies relating to much less industrialised villages have also revealed feverish activity by first-generation workers of peasant origin.20 This had a lot to do with their upward mobility – they, unlike pre-war traditional peasants, had managed to rise socially by becoming unskilled industrial workers.21 In the interwar period, however, the main channel accessible for the landowning peasantry to rise was either the accumulation of land property or becoming an artisan, merchant and/or clerical worker.22 For the peasantry, traditionally and instinctively, would distance itself from modern collective social protest. The “rational peasant,” as Samuel L. Popkin calls it in his analysis, regularly refuses to act for any common or group interest, preferring individual methods of resistance. Individual peasants frequently leave the task of concerted protest to others.23 In 1956, however, not even the peasantry and the villagers were left out of the revolutionary mobilisation, even if not, they were the ones who lead the revolutionary movements.24 With slight qualifications, this rural pattern of the 1956 revolution has general applicability. But now we should turn our attention to the social groups whose revolutionary spirit was more pronounced. For a brief period, those young, left-wing revisionist intellectuals, who had been loyal to the Stalinist Rákosi regime for a while but then turned against it vehemently, played a crucial part in preparing the stormy event; in addition, they left a deep impression on historical memory after 1957.25 For that reason, their role has been thoroughly discussed. Rather less attention has been paid to the role of the university students, who had already distinguished themselves before the outbreak of the revolution through their political mobilisation and radical demands. It is hardly a coincidence that the largest social group among those leaving the country in late 1956 and early 1957 was that of university students.26 The revolutionary mobilisation of university students requires a little more explanation, because the universities’ strict admission policies before 1956, along with the intense ideological propaganda incorporated into university training, were not the ideal breeding ground for revolutionary activism. Since the admission policies favoured students who came from the lower social classes, university students were counted among the more reliable supporters of the “dictatorship

Revolution, uprising, civil war 143 of the proletariat” and the Communist system. As an evidence for all of this, one may mention that 67% of the students in 1954/5 at the Budapest University of Economics came from poor peasant and worker families.27 Furthermore, a scaleddown szakérettségi (specialised school-leaving certificate) had been established to make it easier for children of socially disadvantaged families to gain university placements. As a result, children from such groups accounted for as many as 21% of all students in 1952–1953, although this had eased to 13% by October 1956.28 The reason for the drop in the percentage may be accounted for by the cessation of those kinds of courses in 1955.29 Finally, let us briefly examine the role that the industrial workers played in the 1956 revolution. The question is especially timely, because prior to 1956 (and after it, also, of course) the Communist regime continuously pointed to the industrial workers as the main social basis of its power. This was not completely without justification, because the workers (or anyone with a working-class background) were indeed the beneficiaries of the social politics of the regime. Even so, the actual circumstances of the workers in general were not really better than the circumstances of any other social group. The concept of industrial workers as a class went through substantial changes during the first decade after the end of World War II. The politics of forced industrialisation inflated their numbers tremendously: almost 500,000 rural people  – one-sixth of the 1949 rural population – streamed into urban industry between 1949 and 1953.30 This in turn brought about further changes, both structural and mental. Industrial workers in the 1950s were nothing like their counterparts in the 1920s and 1930s. First of all, they lacked an elite group of skilled and classconscious workers with the organisational potential in the areas of trade unionism, politics and culture. Their distinguishing mark was social hybridity, as their ranks included a large number of peasants and petit-bourgeois elements, as well as some déclassé members of the middle and upper classes.31 As a result of the comprehensive transformation earlier mentioned, the wages (and social prestige) of young skilled labourers very nearly equaled those technicians and young engineers who were directly responsible for production and who constituted the middle management in the various companies.32 Later on this, and the concomitant drastic deterioration in the status of non-manual employees in industry turned out to be one of the reasons why these two groups within the hierarchy of company employees came to forge a close “alliance” during the revolution, as manifested in the composition and the activities of the workers’ councils.33

Sociopsychological roots of discontent What was the motivating factor of said social and professional groups behind their decision to turn against the dictatorship’s machinery of oppression? On this occasion, we would like to underline the importance of social resentment. The intensive social re-stratification that took place in the last five or 10 years before 1956 affected almost every family and very nearly every individual in some way or another.34 In the course of this process, a widespread feeling of uncertainty and

144  History as constructed by historians transience set in, with many people becoming confused about their identities. The déclassés of the 1945 changes experienced this growing feeling of uncertainty just as much as those who replaced them, and who faced the task of becoming the new intelligentisa, the new elite or the new working class in this cartwheel of social mobility from one day to the next. In the Hungary of the mid-1950s, there was not one compact social group whose identity coincided with their image. It was this general feeling of uncertainty, this strange social experience, that proved the crucial factor in the formation of the revolutionary potential. We have called this phenomenon the mobility trap, because we wanted to demonstrate that the rapid industrialisation forced by the Stalinist political elite, coupled with the determined efforts to keep society in a perpetual state of mobility, dug its own grave. The ruling elite succeeded in implanting (and sustaining) this all-pervading feeling of uncertainty in everyone’s minds, of which the excessive fluidity of social hierarchy was both the cause and the logical consequence. The reason why this “social politics” eventually proved to be a trap was that the mobilisation strategy, which was meant to stabilise the system and legitimise the duplicitous seizure and arbitrary exercise of power, backfired. However, in the due course of events this was precisely what brewed widespread spiritual and intellectual hostility against the hard dictatorship. Therefore, the previously given answer to the question of “How could there have been a revolution in 1956?” does away with the idea of establishing a strong link between the outbreak of the unrest and the split among the ruling elite. As for proponents of the theses that describe 1956 either as a (national) uprising or as a revolutionary act, they invariably make their case by pointing to a split among the ruling elite. In order to prove my point, I would like to mention just two examples. “The present work has grown out of a study on the internal rift within the Communist Party of Hungary. This rift, so long hidden from the outside world but closely interwoven with the popular opposition against a Soviet-dominated regime, provided material for a continued study of conflicts in the body politic of Communist Hungary, conflicts which eventually led to the Revolution of 1956,” Váli claims in the opening passage of his Preface.35 One of the eminent representatives of the revolutionary narrative, Péter Kende, has also put forward a strikingly similar reasoning. In seeking the real causes of the revolution, it is “unnecessary to get bogged down in details about what it was precisely that the Hungarian masses found ‘atrocious’ and ‘unbearable’ before 1956, because the same atrocious conditions also existed in Romania, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria at the time, yet they failed to provoke a revolution there.” Then he goes on to make the claim that: “the prehistory of every revolution originates in part in the elite. When there is no crisis, rift, discord or the likes within the leadership of a society, the mass disturbance will in all probability lead to no more than a few local unrests. By contrast, when the elite is in a crisis, then even a relatively minor disturbance is enough to spark off a revolutionary situation, which can bring about the collapse of the government.”36 Therefore, the dilemma about concerning 1956 being a revolution or an uprising does not directly affect the historical argument, which points to the internal

Revolution, uprising, civil war 145 crisis of the elite as the major cause of such events. Besides the weakness of the empirical evidence, this latter theory has another shortcoming in so far as it makes no attempt at explaining the social historical roots of the split among the elite.37 Also, putting too much emphasis on the conflicts among the elite may cause problems with regard to the presentation of 1956 (or historical events similar to it) as a revolution. This is one of the reasons why Marxist historians and theoreticians, who have most consistently defended the ideological content of the revolution, have been warning about the dangers of reductionism coming from the direction of “bourgeois theories about the elite.” If the conflicts among the elite (or the elites), the Marxist argument says, are held to be the main or exclusive factors working at the background of movements and violent coups portrayed as revolutionary cataclysms, then what possible need can we have for the notion of revolution? Therefore, the concept of revolution becomes “historically and socially denaturalised,” while the theory of conflict among the elite makes assessments that are indifferent to periods, classes and formation possible.38 Finally, let us see what motivated the members of the various social groups, which were vastly different from the aspects of social position, culture and interests in the course of becoming revolutionaries. In the case of the revisionist intellectuals, there is an easy explanation whereby their feelings of being betrayed and their illusions about the utopia of Communism turned them into revolutionaries. On top of that there is a historically given, peculiar, intellectual subculture taking the form of a tradition in collective memory. The over-politicised intelligentsia’s awareness of its mission had lost little, if at all, of its earlier intensity throughout the years following 1945. It was further fuelled by the fact that the politically committed (and the fellow travellers) among the intelligentsia played some, albeit not too great, a role in the oppressive mechanism of the dictatorial system. They were the ones who conveyed the will of the party to the “masses” on the one hand and expressed the approval of the masses in the face of the ruling elite on the other. Therefore, they played the part of the mediator – under dictatorial circumstances that completely shut out public opinion in political matters – so as to legitimise the regime. Their modest autonomy and the slightly greater room for their manoeuvre both originated in this fact, which in turn increased their potentials as revolutionaries. Overall, their initiative role in successfully mobilising society in 1956 had a lot to do with the kind of “moral revulsion,” which “was an unintended consequence of the extraordinary claims of the official propaganda . . . that were designed not only to make these systems acceptable but also to convince the citizen of their unprecedented superiority in a comparative and historical sense.”39 The fact that there actually was or evolved at least with the time passing a deeply felt and perceptible gulf in the people and the intelligentsia between reality and the official ideology became clear in all the cases of the collapse of these systems, occurring either in Hungary in 1956 or at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. The eminent role that university students played in the revolution sheds light on the Hungarian aspect of a context that in fact went beyond the horizon of the country. The rebellion of the younger generation was at the same time the

146  History as constructed by historians manifestation of a generation gap, which had been in the making for some time, and which became especially apparent after the end of World War II. The younger generation’s protest movement, which mobilised the arsenal of mass culture in the United States and in Western Europe (clothing, body culture, music and consumption) began to acquire definite political content in the late 1960s (the student rebellions in 1968). However, in Hungary this came out in the open as early as 1956. How may we explain that? The subculture movement among the younger generations, which flourished in Hungary under the circumstances of a Communist dictatorship,40 found itself on a head-on collision course with the dictatorial regime that was bent on brutally suppressing and eradicating all political and individual freedoms. Therefore, the coming of age of the younger generations could not merely mean the introduction of radical changes in clothing and consumer practices. The painfully obvious lack of freedom relatively quickly and inescapably infused the younger generations’ search for identity with political elements. This was why the strict socialisation and indoctrination practice at schools failed, when it found itself going against the universal process of generational realignment in the postwar world. And finally, as far as the working class was concerned, it was probably sheer frustration, more than anything, which drove it to the revolutionaries’ camp. Besides their dire economic circumstances, their other main grievance may have been the lack of upward social mobility.41 The particular social composition of street fighters (the pesti srácok) offers numerous evidences in this regard. However, the proposal in recent literature, which links the militancy of young urban workers (often adolescents and young adults) to their social condition of anomie (complete lack of integration), appears to be an over-simplification.42 In addition, the labourers, who set up the workers’ councils that gave them visibility, displayed social historical characteristics that were different from those of the street fighters. This also dispels the myth surrounding the workers’ council, which has enjoyed a great run of popularity in recent times. What is it exactly that we know about the social forces constituting the workers’ councils? The most active members and prominent leaders of the workers’ councils came especially from the ranks of skilled workers, technicians and engineers. The majority of them belonged to the younger generations (around 30 years of age) and were often first-generation workers with a peasant family background. What impelled them to revolutionary actions? Our hypothesis in this regard is as follows: an ascending social group (the skilled workers) demonstrated against the appalling living conditions and authoritarian rule. This resentment was met with, and reinforced by, the similarly serious grievances of technicians and engineers, in other words the middle management. The ill feelings of the latter group originated from the demoralising consequences of the levelling of the wages and the loss of their independence at work. In this way, the two groups of industrial employees joined forces, vindicating for themselves the right to organise production and distribute the resulting wealth.43 A brief review of the social history of the 1956 revolution seems to suggest that the most important characteristic of the event was the plurality and fragmentariness

Revolution, uprising, civil war 147 of its social support. Through one or the other of its segments, every major social group was thus represented in the making of the revolution. The diversity of their active participation and their direct revolutionary “interests” appears to be one of its most important features of 1956, which clearly sets this revolution apart from all known (modern) revolutions, or from the historical narratives about these revolutions, to be precise. The social basis of the events in 1956 described previously followed from the denounced and rejected Communist dictatorship and thus had a close association with the fact that the Stalinist dictatorship of the 1950s found itself in confrontation with the entire (civil) society in the fateful days of 1956.

Revolution and anti-totalitarianism If we define 1956 as an anti-totalitarian movement, can we still call it a revolution? What do we mean by describing a movement as anti-totalitarian, a label proposed first by Raymond Aron in terms of the Hungarian 1956? Péter Kende afforded considerable scope for the clarification of this question when he revived and further developed this theoretical tenet. Kende, in his attempt to define 1956 as an anti-totalitarian movement, tried to evade the failure to choose the exclusive conceptual categorisation stating that “also right were those who called it a ‘national revolution’, and so were those who primarily attributed to it a ‘democratic’, or in many respects even a ‘socialist’, conception.” By contrast, the concept of “anti-totalitarian revolution,” in Kende’s opinion, makes it clear that “the Hungarian October as a political revolution had the main and undeniable accomplishment of eradicating the Communist one-party system.”44 The terminology he has proposed also accounts for the fact that “the 1956 Hungarian revolution in a way provided an archetype for the democratic transitions after 1989, the anti-totalitarian character of which needs no further proof [!].”45 The concept of “anti-totalitarian revolution” is further supported by the well-known fact that a considerable proportion of former Communists marched together with the anti-totalitarian masses in the revolution (for example, in the workers’ councils and in the revolutionary council of the intelligentsia); in other words, the formula was not “people against the Communists” but “the elite and the people demanding freedom against the supporters of the Soviet system.”46 The point that the theory of totalitarianism no longer satisfies all the criteria raised in connection with the conceptual definition of the Soviet-type systems may limit the use of the previously mentioned concept.47 Kende still adheres to the concept, because (1) a crushed revolution is still a revolution, regardless of what may follow afterwards and (2) one cannot a priori exclude the possibility of the value-free usage of the expression, when we apply it to an event, which leads to the collapse of the given system of government: “we can talk about a revolution, when the existing political system is replaced by a radically different one” (emphasis in the original).48 However, Kende fails to address the question of whether an event can be called a revolution if it is “merely” a violent, anti-totalitarian mass movement aiming

148  History as constructed by historians at cancelling the dictatorship, although this question is indeed important from the viewpoint of the conceptual development of revolution. The time-honoured meaning of the word “revolution” (after 1789) gets lost in the basically teleological explanation, which suggests that the anti-totalitarianism of 1989 is the best proof for the anti-totalitarian attribute of the 1956 revolution, which served as the prototype for the later shift of the regime. The problem is that nobody has ever suggested that 1989 was also a revolution (a violent movement). Quite the contrary! First we should settle whether the concepts of anti-totalitarian movement (regime change) and revolution are compatible. Kende has no problem with this: “A revolution is (merely) a fact, which needs explanation and has consequences: it is not a cornerstone or a postulate. It is not necessarily ‘progressive’, but that does not mean that it cannot be appropriate and unavoidable.”49 But in this way he robs the term “revolution” of the very meaning that it acquired in 1789, and in which sense it has been used ever since.50 Hannah Arendt sums this up as follows: “Ever since the French Revolution, it has been common to interpret every violent upheaval, be it revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, in terms of a continuation of the movement originally started in 1789, as though the times of quiet and restoration were only the pauses in which the current had gone underground to gather force to break up to the surface again . . . Each time adherents and opponents of . . . [the succeeding] revolutions understood the events as immediate consequences of 1789.”51 According to the “ideological,” post-1789 interpretation of the word “revolution,” a restoration, i.e. a (violent) return to an earlier stage, cannot be called revolutionary; that is clearly an act of counter-revolution. This was the view taken by the political elite of the Horthy period, proudly proclaiming itself a counterrevolutionary regime, even though they had no intention of restoring every aspect of the pre-1918 conditions. In their case, the self-description merely meant the negation of the fact (the legitimacy) of the revolution (revolutions) of 1918/1919 in Hungary. Finally we come around to 1956. If most of the demands that the instigators of the events had in mind merely concerned “restoration” instead of progressive changes, then the propriety of applying the word “revolution,” when meant in the modern sense, is at least doubtful. Restoration in this instance is equal to the elimination of the monopoly of the Communist party rule and its replacement with a multi-party system. It also means the institutional restoration of the established freedoms of bourgeois democracies and the creation of some forms of direct democracy anew (the possible antecedents of the workers’ councils included the revolutionary councils of 1944–1945 and the factory and national councils of later times).52 It is understandable that Kende is attached to the designation of 1956 as a revolution. Everyone apart from the Kádárists thought of 1956 as a revolution; that was perhaps true already at the time, and was definitely true later on, especially when the people who had helped in crushing 1956 disparagingly branded them as a counter-revolution. Therefore, loyalty to the revolution resulted in the enduring

Revolution, uprising, civil war 149 popularity of the term “revolution,” as the opposite of the official designation (counter-revolution). However, the everyday usage is quite another thing, along with the accompanying universe of experiences, and then we have still said nothing of the requirements of scholarly notions. This is where our main problem lies, when we try to return to the pre-1789 meaning of the term (to the original meaning of “revolutio”) through the adaptation of the expression “anti-totalitarian revolution.” There are incalculable risks in the undertaking, which could perhaps be averted, but we must know that from this point onward we are on shaky territory as far as the establishment of scholarly concepts are concerned. If the word “revolution” were to be relegated to its earlier, descriptive role, then what justifications could we have in continuing to use it in the semantic space, where it has up till now been in circulation as a trans-historical (and ideological) concept? For what purpose should we keep it, when the expressions – without transhistorical connotations – “uprising,” “insurgence” or “civil war” can all give a more precise description of the nature of the given historical event? The underlying, and undeclared, purpose could be that we keep using the expression in academic language either for emotional reasons or because in public speech it helped to express the dramatic nature and the uniformly cathartic effect of the event.

Continued, completed or reversed revolution It is, of course, possible that “the internal contradictions of the revolutionary situation back then” can provide some justification for using the revolution in its descriptive sense, in the meaning of “revolutio.” The Kádár regime, which crushed the 1956 revolution with the Soviets’ help, labeled 1956 as a counterrevolution, because it saw in it the act of an uprising against the state of the revolution of the proletariat; from the rather handy conceptual perspective of the permanent revolution, it appeared to Kádár and his followers that the 1956 events prepared the ground for the restoration of the political and social system before the revolution (for example, the capitalist or semi-capitalist system under Horthy’s rule), or would have done, if it had been victorious. It was not the actual events but the “persuasive power” of the theory that prompted the designation “counter-revolution.” The problem it conceals is, of course, hardly a new one: the origin of the idea can be traced back to the late 18th century in a wider European context, and to 1848 in Hungary’s case. The issue brings us back to the French revolution, the paragon of all modern revolutions. This was the first revolutionary event, in which (1) the participants did not want to restore, or return to, an earlier stage (in contrast with anything that the English thought of their own actions in 1688, and the Americans in 1787) – rather, they wanted a completely new beginning and (2) the event could not come to an end by itself. From the moment it erupted, “the revolution has no declared goal, it has no foreseeable conclusion . . . [because] the 1789 revolution already carried in its womb a second one, the revolution of 1792. The latter made two demands: it wanted to straighten out the first one and also wanted to broaden it, so as to make it more radical and more universal; it also wanted to be more faithful

150  History as constructed by historians to its promise of liberation than its predecessor had been. In this way, it launched a movement, which is characterised by a never-ending dualism of self-repudiation and self-advancement.”53 This was the point of no return as far as the older meaning of the word “revolution” was concerned; to be more precise, it is bound to create confusion, if someone suddenly starts to use the word “revolution” not as the metaphor of relentless, progressive innovation but as the synonym of restoration, which is more in line with the traditional meaning of “revolutio.” Or is such a return still possible? Perhaps it is this conceptual dilemma that stands behind the occasional rejection of the modern experiences of revolution, as was the case with the reformist (liberal) Hungarian nobility, who “saw it, theirs had not been a revolution [in 1848], but a peaceful adjustment to the times and the legal reconquest of Hungary’s historical freedom.”54 This sounds strange to all of us who believe that 1848 was a revolution in the most literal sense of the word; nevertheless, in the eyes of a historian like István Deák, 1848 was not the historical pattern of an incomplete, permanent revolution. This was already signified by the title of his book, Lawful Revolution, which stated that 1848 had no intention of being a repetition of 1789 as “it guaranteed the economic and political survival of the landowning class” although “opened the way to spectacular economic and cultural development and provided the Magyar nation with an eternal romantic legacy.”55 Therefore, while they initiated and implemented progressive developments, the reform-minded instigators of the events that later turned violent, interpreted 1848 (and their own intentions) more as a “revolutio” than as a (French-type) revolution. This is, however, merely a hypothesis that would require rigorous proof (if such a hypothesis could be justified by sources at all). This particular case may clearly faithfully demonstrate the wide gap that separates the direct experience of a historical event and posterity’s conceptual judgement on it, as manifested in commemorations always adjusted to the requirements of the present. If revolutions have a permanent character, as has been suggested, then every single stage in the course of the revolutionary process can be surpassed in due time. The question is whether the inherent permanence of revolutions is desirable at all. For the majority of the people, the radicalisation of the 1789 revolution in 1793, along with the historical experiences gained in this respect, serves as a compelling reason for disliking the idea; for modern revolutionaries, it is just the opposite. If the results of the 20th-century revolutionary movements, which consummated 1793, ever run up against the will of the majority wishing to halt the revolution – as happened in Hungary in October 1956, and then all over Eastern Europe after 1989 – the people carrying the burden of the permanence of the revolution will – even at the price of turning violent – return to the principles of 1789, or, to put it another way, they will take the cause of freedom “one step back,” rather than forward. This is quite understandable, in view of the fact that the twentieth-century revolution carried out – or enforced – in the name of the Leninist principles created nothing at all, on which anything could be constructed. . . . By the end of the twentieth century, the whole idea about the

Revolution, uprising, civil war 151 irreversibility of Communism had turned out to be a catastrophic illusion. . . . The Communist states and societies found themselves in the absurd situation, whereby they have to restore at all cost the very things that they thought they had abolished, because their modern history can offer them no other fix points.56 Therefore, Hungary’s 1956 freedom fight  – and also a national uprising, of course – cannot be described as a revolution in the modern (ideological) sense of the word without further qualification; at best, it was a “revolutio.” It was more of a restoration than a further extension of modern revolutions. In this strict conceptual sense, and only in this sense, 1956 was more of a “counter-revolution” than a revolution, since it was a return (according to the dynamics of circular motion) rather than a step in the progressive direction, according to the notion of the permanence of revolutions. Naturally, this “counter-revolution” was not that counter-revolution, which Kádár and his followers envisaged in connection with 1956, as they were the prisoners of modern revolutionary mythology and therefore saw it as a retrograde historical event. The year 1956 as a freedom fight par excellence corresponds, therefore, to the revolutionary ideal that Condorcet defended in June 1793 against the Jacobins (the masters of the Bolsheviks) as follows: “We can apply the word ‘revolutionary’ only to those changes, which are in the service of freedom.”57 That section of the 1956 events, which the metaphor of modern revolution has so far blocked out almost completely, becomes immediately visible as a chain of facts linked by the concept of “revolutio.” This first of all applies to the so-called “civil war line of events” in the history of 1956. When Kende was struck by the slightly civil war character of 1956, it was not because this aspect was so conspicuous that it was impossible to miss. Rather, it was because 1956, as soon as it has been transferred to the category of “revolutio” becomes a synonym for civil war. “In fact, almost every revolution that wants to change the system of government is, by necessity, also a (latent or open) civil war, provided that the system under attack has some social basis,” Kende claims.58 Although one may raise the objection that people associate modern revolutionary events not with a civil war but with a class struggle. This, however, is not the case historically. “Thus for the period to around 1700 we can conclude that the expressions ‘civil war’ and ‘revolution’ were not interchangeable, but were not at the same time mutually exclusive.”59 Therefore, Kende’s heightened sensitivity to the civil-war aspects of the 1956 events derives from the fact that this conceptual apparatus is more in line with the pre-1789 semantics than with modern usage.

Conclusion The competing positions taken up in this “battle of names,” which have mostly been limited to a choice of terminology and only rarely have produced carefully constructed arguments (Kende is an exception to this rule), have no direct effect on the traditions of national and social commemoration of 1956. The debate sparked

152  History as constructed by historians off by the confusion of concepts is focused neither on the true significance of 1956 nor on its overall assessment, whether it was a positive event or a historical tradition to be denounced. These questions had some vitality only before the moment of Hungary’s democratic transition, in the Kádár era. The conceptual dilemmas discussed now merit some interest only in academic discourse, and their discussion appears to be urgent as it is expected to inject new vigour even into the “factual history” of the revolution. Instead of providing answers, we have primarily tried to formulate questions that can foment further debate.

Notes 1 Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Middlesex: Penguin, 1973. 271. The scope of this chapter will not allow a discussion of the changes in Arendt’s theoretical views on the Hungarian revolution. 2 Lomax, Bill. Hungary 1956. London: Allison &Busby, 1976. 203. 3 Rakovski, Marc. Towards an East European Marxism. London: Allison &Busby, 1978. 31. 4 Varga, László. A forradalom hangja. Magyarországi rádióadások 1956. október 2 – november 9, edited by János Kenedi. Budapest: Századvég – Nyilvánosság Klub, 1989. 470. 5 Váli, Ferenc A. Rift and Revolt in Hungary. Nationalism versus Communism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. 6 Váli, Rift and Revolt in Hungary, 494. 7 As an extreme manifestation of this, a British (Holocaust denier) historian depicted 1956 as an anti-Semitic uprising. Irwing, David. Uprising! One Nation’s Nightmare: Hungary 1956. London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1981. 8 Litván, György. Az 1956-os magyar forradalom, 7. 9 Arendt, On Revolution, 47–48. 10 Koselleck, Reinhart. “Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution,” in Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 45. 11 Koselleck, “Historical Criteria of the Modern,” 49. 12 Koselleck, “Historical Criteria of the,” 50, 51, 52. 13 Koselleck, “Historical Criteria of the,” 54–55. For more on the historical development of the term “revolution,” see Ungvári, Tamás. “Revolution: A Textual Analysis,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 19, 1 (Fall 1990) 1–21. 14 Bán, Péter. “A  Pécsi Megyei Bíróság bűntetőperes iratainak néhány társadalomtörténeti tanulsága,” in 56 vidéken, edited by Imre Kapiller. Zalaegerszeg: Zala Megyei Levéltár, 1992. 24. 15 ÁBTL, Az érvényes miniszteri, miniszterhelyettesi parancsok, utasítások, közös utasítások gyűjteménye 1957. 6–21/1957. 16 Thompson, Paul. The Voice of the Past. Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 150–166. 17 Gyáni, Gábor. “56-os menekültek emlékező stratégiái,” in Relatív történelem. Budapest: Typotex, 2007. 136–154. 18 Szakács, Sándor. “Az ötvenes évek agrárpolitikája – különös tekintettel a ‘kulákkérdésre’,” in 1956 és a magyar agrártársadalom, edited by János Estók. Budapest: Magyar Mezőgazdasági Múzeum, 2006. 34–66. 19 Tyekvicska, Árpád. “Helyi forradalom. Önszerveződés Nógrád községben 1956-ban,” in Szociológiai Szemle, 2, 2 (1992). 61–84. 20 Belényi, Gyula. “Párhuzamos falurajzok: Kistelek és Mórahalom 1956-ban,” in Kapiller (ed.), 56 vidéken, 14–15.

Revolution, uprising, civil war 153 21 Valuch, Tibor. “Changes in the Structure and Lifestyle of the Hungarian Society in the Second Half of the XXth Century,” in Gyáni – Kövér – Valuch, Social History of Hungary, 580. 22 Gyáni, “Social History of Hungary,” 416. 23 Popkin, S. L. The Rational Peasant. The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. 24 Cf. Standeisky, Népuralom ötvenhatban, 116–119, 134–156. 25 “It was the Western European émigrés, and most notably the Imre Nagy Institution of Brussels, who represented the reform socialist tradition most forcefully, and even somewhat one-sidedly.” Litván, Az 1956-os magyar forradalom, 7. 26 Puskás, Ties That Bind, 271. 27 Zsidi, Vilmos. “A hallgatóság és a tanári kar átalakítása a közgazdaság-tudományi egyetemen 1945–1956,” in Hatalom és társadalom a XX. századi magyar történelemben, edited by Tibor Valuch. Budapest: Osiris – 1956-os Intézet, 1995. 615. 28 Kovács, Mária M. – Antal Örkény, Káderek. Budapest: ELTE Szociológiai és Szociálpolitikai Intézet és Továbbképző Központ, 1991. 17. 29 Majtényi, György. A tudomány lajtorjája. ‘Társadalmi mobilitás’ és ‘új értelmiség’ Magyarországon a II. világháború után. Budapest: Gondolat – Magyar Országos Levéltár, 2005. 109. 30 Belényi, Gyula. Az állam szorításában. Az ipari munkásság társadalmi átalakulása Magyarországon 1945–1965. Szeged: Belvedere, 2009. 70–71. 31 Belényi, Az állam szorításában, 51–135; on the kind of hybridity discussed, see the case study, Horváth, Sándor. Stalinism Reloaded. Everyday Life in Stalin-City, Hungary, trans. Thomas Cooper. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. 81–111. 32 Belényi, Az állam szorításában, 139–240. 33 To the background of the statement, see Pittaway, Mark. “The Social Limits of State Control: Time, the Industrial Wage Relations and Social Identity in Stalinist Hungary, 1948–1953,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 12, 3 (1999) 271–301; Pittaway, Mark. “The Reproduction of Hierarchy: Skill, Working-Class Culture and the State in Early Socialist Hungary,” The Journal of Modern History, 74, 4 (2002) 737–769. 34 One may find ample evidence on this subject in an important work that reflects the continuous traumatisation of twentieth-century Hungarian society in Losonczi, Ágnes. Sorsba fordult történelem. Budapest: Holnap, 2005. 115–205. 35 Váli, Rift and Revolt in Hungary, ix. 36 Kende, Péter. “Elkerülhetetlen volt-e a forradalom, és mi volt a haszna?” Világosság, XXXVII, 10 (1996) 4. 37 Some aspects of it have been considered in Gyáni, Gábor. “Potentials for Unrest: Some Peculiarities of Hungary’s History,” in Péter – Rady (eds.), Resistance, Rebellion, 209–213. 38 Kossok, “Az újkor összehasonlító,” 69. 39 Hollander, Paul. “Crossing the ‘Moral Threshold’: The Rejection of Communist Systems in Hungary and Eastern Europe,” in Péter – Rady (eds.), Resistance, Rebellion, 206. 40 Horváth, Sándor. Kádár gyermekei. Ifjúsági lázadás a hatvanas években. Budapest: Nyitott Könyvműhely, 2009. 41 A useful study revealing the diverse meanings ascribed to the worker in the fifties: Szabó, Márton. “A dolgozó mint állampolgár. Fogalomtörténeti tanulmány a magyar szocializmus három korszakáról,” Korall, 8 (május 2007) 151–171. And more about this, see the studies in Rainer, M. János – Tibor Valuch (eds.), Munkások ‘56. Budapest: OSZK – 1956-os Intézet Alapítvány, 2017. 42 Kozák, Gyula. “Szent csőcselék,” in Évkönyv 1999. VII. Magyarország a jelenkorban, edited by Éva Standeisky – János M. Rainer. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 1999. 264–269. Here is a quote from the latest criticism of the thesis: “the assumption, whereby the insurgents came from the lowest segment of society, does not necessarily

154  History as constructed by historians bear scrutiny.” Vajda, Zsuzsa – László Eörsi, “ ‘Szent suhancok’ – az 1956-os felkelés résztvevői,” Beszélő, XI, 10 (október 2006) 71. See also Eörsi, László. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Myths and Realities. New York – Boulder: distr. by Columbia University Press, 2006. 43 To all this, see Rainer – Valuch (eds.), Munkások 56; Tóth, “A társadalmi részvétel,” 379–380; Tóth, Eszter Zsófia. “A Csepel Vas- és Fémművek munkástanácsainak története (1956–1975),” Múltunk, XLIV (1999) 163–198; Szakolczai, Attila. “A  győri vagongyár munkástanácsa a győri forradalom élén,” in Politika, gazdaság és társadalom a XX. századi magyar történelemben II, edited by Levente Püski – Lajos Timár – Tibor Valuch. Debrecen: KLTE Történelmi Intézet, 2000. 129; Horváth, Sándor. “A Központi Munkástanács története,” Első Század, I, 1 (1998) 113–209. 44 Kende, Eltékozolt forradalom, 112. And also a reference here to Raymond Aron’s way of conceptualisation. 45 Kende, Eltékozolt forradalom, 113. 46 Kende, Eltékozolt forradalom, 113. Emphasis in the original. 47 Cf. Fitzpatrick, “Introduction,” in Stalinism. New Directions, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick. London: Routledge, 2000. 1–14. 48 Kende, Eltékozolt forradalom, 110. 49 Kende, Eltékozolt forradalom, 109. 50 In this way the term unnoticeably returns to its ordinary meaning, which was described in a mid-nineteenth-century dictionary under the entry “revolution” as follows: “In the stricter sense, an uprising staged by either the entire nation or a multitude in it against either the sovereign ruler or the authority for the purpose of establishing a new system of government or state structure.” Czuczor, Gergely – János Fogarasi, A magyar nyelv szótára, Vol. 2. Pest: Emich Gusztáv, 1864. 914. 51 Arendt, On Revolution, 50. 52 Standeisky, Népuralom ötvenhatban, 356–360. 53 Furet, François. A forradalomról, trans. Zoltán Vargyas. Budapest: Európa, 2006. 91, 93. 54 Deák, The Lawful Revolution, 99. (emphasis added) 55 Deák, The Lawful Revolution, 106. 56 Furet, A forradalomról, 149, 150. 57 Condorcet, “A ’forradalmi’ szó jelentéséről,” Világosság, XXX, 6 (1989) 429. 58 Kende, Eltékozolt forradalom, 115. 59 Koselleck, “Historical Criteria of the Modern,” 47.

9 Conclusion

In discussing the relationship between how history has been created by historians and how it was experienced, sensed and interpreted by the historical actors themselves, one has to be aware of the fundamental difference between them. The problem has already been conceptualised by Maurice Halbwahs by stating the duality of collective memory and history. Michael Oakeshott likewise made distinction between the notion of the “practical” and the “historical” past, thereby suggesting that the lived history gained by the historical actor is not identical with history per se, which is viewed and written from a hindsight position of the historian. It does not mean, however, that historical scholarship has the exclusive right to tell the truth about history despite the fact that any past may become history only as a result of its activity. In an age when the “democratisation of the past” demands or at least allows that everyone can be his or her own historian, the option left for the academic historian is to accept that he or she is not more than one only among the story-tellers, who are entitled to talk about the past. That is the reason why it is an important duty to draw the boundary between the myths, the legends and the clearly scholarly “truths.” This is to make it possible for the historical profession to resist the many temptations both of relying on collective memory and the political usage of the past. The sharp distinction made between the two notions of the past does not mean, however, that the historian’s discourse would simply replace and repudiate the alternative historical narratives based either on personal recollections, the various collective memories, or any other form of public history. The reasons for that lie in the fact that, firstly, the historians cannot usually get in touch directly with the past under review vis-à-vis the personal or collective experiences. Accordingly, the perspective from which the historical information has been produced has a lot to do with the historical experiences of the agents transmitted through their memory work. They thus also have to be taken into consideration when producing a truly plausible historical narrative. Secondly, in light of the tenets both of the philosophical hermeneutics and constructivism (including the theory of narrativity), the popular assumption of an unambiguous division between the absolute objectivity and the arbitrary following from the subjective interpretation of the past looks no longer to be a tenable conceptual basis.

156  History as constructed by historians The fact of a perpetual although more or less latent interaction between memory (referring to and articulating the historical experience, handed down either personally or through the generation chains) and historical scholarship demands to reveal first the contemporary memory work that holds close connections with the not too distant past. That kind of memory (and memorialisation) plays the regular role of a proto-narrative of history as it has been called by David Carr. By using this term he points to how a preliminary framework is created into which the historian’s account may or has to be placed later on. The Great War and its several consequences did indeed make a great impact not only on many contemporaries but also a long-lasting and deep influence has been felt even in today’s Hungary. The traumatic experiences gained in the fronts, and not the less shocking effects of how Hungary’s state borders were radically cut as a result of the Paris Peace Treaty of 1920, the so-called Trianon decision, both were and have been decisive in shaping and even guiding Hungary’s history since at least 1920. A further and similarly serious consequence of all of this has been the enhanced importance that the extreme social inequalities and disparities had in the interwar period. The image of a polarised society was to become a prevalent public discourse sustained especially by the intellectual efforts of the Populist writers and sociographers of the 1930s and 1940s. They definitely argued that Hungarian society was split due to the existence of a separate national and separate bourgeois realm. The former consisted of some barely changed historical social groups (aristocracy, Christian middle class of a noble origin and the peasantry), the latter, however, was represented especially by a Jewish middle and upper class (the bourgeoisie) and the modern proletariats. The two contrasting images of contemporary Hungarian society were coupled with an emphatical anti-urban and anti-Jewish attitude, expressed quite frequently in the harsh critique of Budapest. The sole metropolis of the country, a bourgeois and “Jewish” city was held throughout the whole Horthy era (1920–1944) to cause the social and political upheavals of 1918/1919. It was also seen at that time to be a clear manifestation both of the social and spiritual otherness and aliennes of some part of the Hungarian nation. An other, not less important consequence of World War I and its several implications has been the rise of the Trianon consciousness, and the identity politics closely attached to the memory of the Paris Peace Treaty. The cult of Trianon took the form in the interwar period of the officially supported, state-run irredentism, which, however, was put to an end in the post-World War II period, during the Communist era. The gradual emergence and the recent triumphant expansion of the Trianon industry have customarily been linked to the conservative political forces, the Fidesz in particular. The Trianon syndrome, with a real traumatic event at the background, is one among the most significant national “fate issues,” the discourse of which has already been grounded in the interwar period. Besides the remembrance of Trianon, the memory of the not too distant past, referring to the Communist era is also used quite frequently for purely political ends. Just because the memory of the dictatorship slowly fades away and even the live memory of many of its “negative attributes” (state terror, censorship, the absence of civil rights) becomes obscure, both the image and evaluation of the Kádár regime

Conclusion 157 grows to be polarised. Many seem to be loyal to its heritage, although some others look back with anger and contempt. The unambiguous dividedness of the public attitude (memory work) showed toward the Communist (especially the Kádárite) past is evidenced by the example of the so-called informer’s cases. The customary public reaction to the cases when somebody, especially a celebrity who has been an informer previously, is unmasked, changes with the passing of time. As the scandal concerning István Szabó, the Oscar-winning film director, has clearly demonstrated, even the once secret collaboration with the State Security ceased now to exist as a moral and political problem. The striking absence of a critical or self-critical confrontation with this (personal) past shows that Hungarian society has not been ready since the political change of 1989 to carry out its coming to terms with its own past. The Jewish Holocaust in Hungary also raises the problem of how (in what sense) and to what extent are we able to achieve the coming to terms with the 20th century past in this country. The “historical” and even the “practical” past concerning the Jewish suffering, including the anti-Jewish legal discrimination, the Military Labour Service, the ghettoisation, and last but not least the deportation of a great mass of Hungarian Jewry to the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau were not integral parts either of the communicative or the cultural memory of the 1950s and 1960s. The changes in the field began only in the 1970s with the rising public discourse of the memory of Hungay’s human losses at the fronts of World War II. The latter was presented first of all by a TV film series carrying the title, Pergőtűz (Drum fire). Radical changes ensued in view of the Holocaust memory with the appearance of a great many Jewish memoirs, and fictional accounts during the first half of the 1970s. The shocking narratives of individual Jewish life stories presented in them were able to capture the total imagination and affective household of the reader, who thus could become familiar with the true victimhood of their Jewish fellow citizens. As György Száraz’s reaction to Mária Ember’s quasi-fictional account of a deportation story demonstrated in the mid-1970s, even the question of a Hungarian civilian complicity could have been raised in this public discourse. However, history writing of the day was still far from being engaged in within the Holocaust discourse. In the absence of it only the growing artistic representation of the Holocaust could thus create the embryonic form of the Holocaust consciousness. The 1956 revolution and its afterlife, the harsh terror which followed it, and last but not least the rigorous silence imposed upon the event until the end of the 1980s also seems to have contributed to splitting the Hungarian historical consciousness. Initially the left-wing tradition of the 1956 revolution was to shape the mind; but some time later as a reaction to it, there soon appeared a right-wing or at least conservative interpretation. The historical policy also played here a crucial role by further polarising the contours of the commemorative communities. When the Fidesz came to power again in 2010, memory of the 1956 revolution, which has always been used for political ends, began to lose all of its previous relevance. The Orbán government finally decided to dissolve in 2019 even the 1956 research institute, set up still in the wake of the political change of 1989 in the spirit of a

158  History as constructed by historians wide-scale consensus. This meant an open break with the supposition that the 1956 revolution could become the grounding myth of the new democratic political establishment, something which had been in the air at around 1989. When we turn our attention to the scholarly discourse of the historians, a short overview has to be given about the conceptual basis of a national historiography. Following the proto-modern and the Universal notion of history, in the age of Enlightenment and especially amidst the circumstances of the modern nationstate building, the national paradigm of history was to become the central and exclusive historical discourse. The German Historicism (historism) set the canon prescribing both the method and the topic for such academic scholarship. The relationship between the nationalised vision of a historical past and the political effort of establishing modern nation-states was close from the beginning. The symbiosis of these two entities lasted until at least the end of the 20th century. However, the constructivist theorists of the nation and nationalism, arising in the 1980s, has undermined the solid building of many of the national historiographies by stating that the nation is not a perennial and/or primordial entity, but a historical one. It was born only as late as the 18th and 19th centuries, consequently its linear and uninterrupted story going back to at least the age of the wanderings, or the late antiquity is just a fictitious construction. The historically grounded national ethos and identity strengthened and sustained by the national historical narrative of Hungary comes to be loaded with a peculiarly tragic perspective. It follows in part from the numerous defeats that Hungarian people have suffered indeed during the last few centuries. This does not mean, however, that the concept or the vision of a Hungarian national history constitutes a totally uniform and cohesive story. As Gyula Szekfű, one of the most notable historians who ever lived in Hungary definitely argued, there had always existed since at least the late 17th century and early 18th century a Great and a Small Hungarian concept. The former referred to a country belonging to the Habsburg empire, the latter one, however, expressed the unending wish of having an autonomous (sovereign) Hungarian nation or nation-state. Accordingly, the personal and collective historical agents discussed by historians in their accounts of the past, could as well be the pro-Habsburg politicians, bureaucrats and subjects who were loyal to the empire, or the ones who rebelled against it. When the historian chooses among them whom to place at the forefront of his or her narrative, he or she depicts the history of the country by molding the story either in a Great or a Small Hungarian historical version. Not only the public and collective memory but even the scholarly evaluation of the 1956 revolution split into two or more alternative accounts. The once existing experience of the revolutionaries (and many of their contemporaries) suggested that it actually was a Revolution. For those, however, who suppressed it by the aid of the Soviet Army, the Kádárite leadership, it meant to be a counter-revolution. In the aftermath of the 1989 political change there soon emerged a wide range of competing notions and definitions to describe the meaning of the 1956 upheaval. They each seized one or a few important attributes only of the historical event, designating it either a national uprising, a worker’s council syndicalist revolt, a

Conclusion 159 civil war or an anti-totalitarian revolution. The conceptual propositions arising may easily be supplemented by the term “revolutio,” which describes more adequately the analytical meaning of the Hungarian anti-Soviet and anti-Communist disturbance. The reason being that the main thrust of the Hungarian situation in 1956 was similar to the 17th-century English and the 18th-century American “revolutions,” to return definitively to a point of departure by regaining some of the formerly lost social and political liberties. The aim of writing this book has been to demonstrate that there was not and there is not even today a single national historical consciousness in Hungary. The one that actually has always existed could as much unite as divide the citizens of the country. This was not wholly independent of the identity politics which persistently tried since at least the 19th century on to create an imagined national community by applying the method and technique of inclusion and exclusion. The many divergent, and sometimes even conflicting, notions and interpretations of and practical attitudes toward a few key events and processes of the 20thcentury Hungarian history are obvious manifestations and reflections of the basically splitted Hungarian (Magyar) national identity. Presenting an overview of all of this may help us to have a better understanding of what actually goes on in today’s Hungary.

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Index

Abásfalva 32 Abbey of Pannonhalma 82 Academic of Music 48 Acsády, I. 108 agency: collective 128; historical 127; personal 128 Alsace-Lorraine 117 A múlt ösvényén 132 Anderson, B. 101 – 102, 119; “imagined community” (see nation); “printing revolution” (see revolution) Andrássy Avenue 48, 63 Anker House 29 Antall, J. 56, 61, 81 Apor, P. 131 Arendt, H. 137, 148 Ariés, P. 6 aristocracy see classes Aron, R. 147; anti-totalitarian revolution (see revolution) assimilation 48 – 49, 68, 70 – 72 Assmann, A. viii, 8 – 9; mnemo-history (see history) Assmann, J. vii, 8 – 9, 88; communicative and cultural memory (see memory) Audoin-Rouzeau, S. 19 Aulard, A. 6 Auschwitz-Birkenau 67, 73 – 74, 77 – 78, 80, 157 Austro-Hungarian: army 27; Monarchy 34, 40 – 41, 43, 45, 62, 71, 106, 110, 115, 117, 119 – 121, 123, 125 Austro-Hungarian Compromise 40, 45, 47, 118 – 120; see also Settlement of 1867 Bácskai, V. 131 Balkan 43, 45, 121 – 122 Bárdos, P. 78 Barta, J. 32

Bastille 139 “battle of names” 151 Becker, A. 19, 22 Bence, G. 138 bene possesionati see classes and social groups Benjamin, W. 3; community of memory (see memory); social memory (see memory) Berend, T. I. 122, 130; centre-periphery theory (see theory) Berger, S. 111 Bibó, I. 119 Biedermeir 47, 49 Bidlo, J. 121 biggest taxpayers see classes and social groups birth control 43 Bodnar, J. viii Bodor, A. 32 Bodor, B. 33 Bolshevik 151; system 137 bourgeois midde class (Bürgertum) see classes and social groups Braham, R. 73 – 74 Brassó (Braşov) 33 Braudel F. 123 Buchenwald 77 Buda 47 – 49, 51 – 52 Budapest 43 – 45, 47 – 52, 63, 72, 74, 94, 156; Holocaust Museum and Education Center (see museums); Metropolitan Board of Public Works 49; Party House 89; “sinful city” 45 Bugac 51 Bürgertum see classes and social groups Burke, P. 7; social memory (see memory) bystander 73, 79 Byzantine 124

180 Index Carpathian Basin 107, 110 Carr, D. 8, 156; narrativity theory (see theory) Cegléd 32 Central Committee of Communist Party see Communist Certeau, M. de 11, 59 Chieftain Árpád 30; see also conquest civilisation see embourgeoisement; Verbürgerlichung civil society 146; war (see revolution) classes and social groups: aristocracy 42, 44, 48, 127; bene possessionati 40; biggest taxpayers 48; bourgeois midde class (Bürgertum) 41, 48, 127, 156; clerical workers 48, 125; entrepreneurs 48; gentry 42, 127; industrial management 145 – 146; industrial workers 48 – 49, 141 – 143, 145 – 146; intellectuals 48, 141 – 142, 145; kulaks 141 – 142; landowners 48; peasantry 51, 142; petit bourgeoisie 48 – 49; university students 142; urbarial peasant 39 clerical workers see classes and social groups code: cultural 70; political 70 “cognitive learning process” 78 Cole, T. 72 collective: “culpability” 77; memory (see memory); “singular” 140 commemoration: cults of 24; Day of Commemoration of Heroes 29; Golden Star pilgrimage 26; Holocaust Day 72; hypernominalism 25; Kossuth 116 (see also Kossuth, L.); protection of personal rights 91; public 22, 89, 92; Reichsbanner 28; rites 21, 23 commemorative community 157 Communist: Central Committee of Communist Party 129 – 130, 138; dictatorship vii; historical policy 74, 77; leadership 80, 118, 144; Party 73, 138, 144, 148 (see also parties); regime 81, 93, 138, 146 – 147; rule vi, 34; see also Kádár, J.; Rákosi system community: Anderson 101; imagined (see nation); of memory (see memory); mourning (see mourning) concept: dual society 41 – 42, 126; Great and Small Hungarian 109, 158; “invisible narrative template” 92 Condorcet 151

confessions: Calvinist 70; Catholic 82; Christians 67 – 70; Hasid 68 – 69; Neolog 68 – 69; Orthodox Israelite 68 – 69 Connerton, P. 88 – 89 conquest: of the Carpathian Basin 30; Turkish 122 Conrad, C. 111 Coudenhove-Kalergi, count 121 countries: Austria 44, 126; Belgium 26, 29; Bohemia 122 – 123; Bulgaria 144; Czechoslovakia 27, 45, 125, 144; England 26; France 4 – 5, 20, 22, 25 – 26; Galicia 33, 123; Germany 29, 43, 45, 74, 124 – 126; Ireland 27; Israel 74; Nazi Germany 10, 28, 73, 77, 83, 121; Poland 27, 122 – 123; Romania 61, 70, 109, 144; Slovakia 61; Soviet Union 23, 43, 74 – 75, 77, 88, 121 – 122, 126, 129 (see also Soviet); Ukraine 61; United States of America 25 – 26, 74, 124 – 126, 146; West Germany 74, 77, 79 cult: of fallen soldier (see fallen soldier); Kossuth 115 – 116; personality 118; Rákóczi 115, 133n2; Széchenyi 132; Trianon 64 cultural: code 70 – 71; demobilisation 26,  37n47 Czech 58, 74 Danube River 81 Darnton, R. 7 Davis, N. Z. 7 Day of Commemoration of Heroes see commemoration Deák, I. 150; Lawful Revolution 150 Debrecen 45, 51 demographic transition 42 – 43 Dévaványa 51 Dilthey, W. 76 Drang nach Osten 121 dual society see concept Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt 139 Durkheim, É. 7 Elbe 121 Ember, M. 78, 80, 157; Hajtűkanyar (Hairpin bend) 78, 80 embourgeoisement 40, 121, 126; “interrupted” 94; see also Verbürgerlichung empire: Moravian 107; Roman 104; see also Habsburg entrepreneurs see classes and social groups

Index  181 era: Horthy 30, 59, 64, 75, 94, 156; Kádár 57, 89, 127, 129, 152; Weimar 28; Wilhelmine 28 Erdei, F. 41, 52, 126; dual society model (see concept) Esztelnek (Estelnic) 33 Europe 1, 4, 21, 26, 43, 47, 112, 121; EastCentral vii, ix, 26, 43 47, 53, 56 – 58, 94, 119, 121 – 123, 127; Pan-Europa concept 121; West 121, 123 European: identity 120; Union 61 experience: collective 155; personal 155; traumatic 21, 156 Fábri, Z. 77; Utószezon (Last season) 77 fallen soldier 19 – 20, 22, 24; see also cult fate issues (sorskérdések) 64, 83, 156 Fazekas, G. 78 Feszty, Á. 107; The Hungarian Conquest 107 feudalisation thesis 127 “fictive kinship” 20 Fidesz: government ix, 56, 60, 62, 92, 157; historical and identity policy 60 – 63, 81, 92, 94 – 95, 97n12; Union of Young Democrats 56, 81, 94, 116, 132, 157 Foot, D. viii Fraknói, V. 107 freedom fighter 97n12 French: Annales 110, 132; historian 24 – 25; Revolution 23, 112, 148 – 149 (see also revolution); soldiers 23, 25 Friedländer, S. 67 Fritz, R. 72 Fulbrook, M. viii Furet, F. 6 Fülep, L. 43 Gadamer, H-G. 6 Gara, G. Gatterer, J. C. 111; Göttingen history writing (see history writing) Geary, P. J. 12, 103 – 104 Gellner, E. 102 – 103, 119; constructivist concept of nation (see nationalism) gentry (Christian middle class) see classes and social groups Gera G. 78 Gergely, Á. 78 German 48, 76; army 28; historians 2 – 3; historicism 112, 158; national identity 27; occupation 83; victims 77; see also victimhood

Gerschenkron, A. 122 Geschichtspolitik (historical policy) 73 – 74, 76 – 77, 157; inventing of traditions 94; see also Communist; Fidesz, historical and identity Politics; Kádárite Géza, prince 108 Gillis, J. R. viii, 12, 89 Ginzburg, C. 7 Gluck, M. 50 Golden Star pilgrimage see commemoration government: Socialist-Liberal 63; see also Fidesz; Orbán, V. Great Plain 43, 45 Greenfeld, L. 103; concept of semantic permutation (see nationalism) “grounding narrative” 88 – 89; myth 158 Gulag 75; see also Malenkij robot; POWs Gyáni, G. 42 Gyertyán, E. 78 Habsburg: Monarchy (see Austro-Hungarian Monarchy); rule 109 – 110, 120 Halbwachs, M. vii, 2 – 4, 8, 155; collective memory (see memory) Halecki, O. 121, 123 Hanák, P. 40, 47, 123 Handelstam, M. 121, 123 Hatvan 29 Herder, J. G. 111 hermeneutics 6, 95 historical: Archive of the State Security 57; experience 156; objectivity 95, 155; policy 73 – 74, 76, 156 – 157; see also Geschichtspolitik history: memory- 5; mnemo- 8; monumental 133; oral 141; public 10, 116, 155; “return to history” vi, 93, 131; Universal 104, 158 history writing: Alltagsgeschichte 7, 132; Begriffsgeschichte 137, 139; ethno- 110, 117; Geistesgeschichte 110, 117; Göttingen 111; historicism (historism) 7, 158; historische Sozialwissenschaft 130, 132; micro 132; New Cultural 7; social 130 – 132; transnational 130; Volkstumkunde (Volksgeschichte) 110; see also French, Annales Hitler, A. 28 Hobsbawm, E. J. 102, 119; concept of inventing of traditions (see nationalism)

182 Index Hódmezővásárhely 62; Memory-point Museum (see museums) Hoffmann, J. 71 Holocaust vii, 10 – 11, 77 – 79, 81 – 82; consciousness 83; Day 72 (see also commemoration); diary 78; discourse 157; experience viii, 76, 78; limit event 78 – 79; memory 72, 76, 78, 80, 83, 157; novel 78; see also Shoah Hóman, B. 119 Horne, J. 26; cultural demobilisation (see cultural) Horthy, M. 45; era 30, 59, 64, 75, 94 156; regime 45, 124, 149 Hungarian: Academy of Sciences Institute of History 62, 111, 129 – 130; Catholic Church 82; Communist elite 72; Conquest 30; Kingdom 109, 119; 158; nobility 150; October 147 (see also revolution); Parliament 59 – 60, 81, 94, 116, 132n2; Second Army 75; self-consciousness 121, 157, 159; State TV 90; victimhood 74 – 75 (see also victimhood) Hutton, P. vii, 5 – 6 identity see Geschichtspolitik; Jewish; national; politics Illyés, G. 43 Im Felde unbesiegt 27; the stab-in-theback (see theory) industrial management 145; see also classes and social groups industrial workers 143, 145; see also classes and social groups Institute: for History of 1956 94, 129; of History Hungarian Academy of Sciences 62, 111, 129 – 130; of Party History 129 intellectuals (intelligentsia) see classes and social groups Israelite see Jew István Hajnal Circle 129, 132 Jacobin 151 Jászi, O. 62, 70 Jerusalem 69 Jew 49 – 50, 67 – 69, 71, 73; Hasid 68; Neolog 69; Orthodox 68 – 69 Jewish(ness) 48 – 50, 52, 67 – 68, 70 – 72; Alliance 69; assimilation (see assimilation); Budapest 50, 156; commisars 69; committee 73; community 81; consciousness 69 – 71;

discrimination 34, 68 – 69; experience 78; genocide 74, 83; Holocaust 72 – 74, 157 (see also Holocaust); identity 80; life story 78; martyrdom 81; memory 3 – 4; memoir 78, 157; upper and middle class 127, 156 (see also bourgeois); middle class; origin 67; “question” 80; “race” 68; sacrificial community 83; self-image; 76, 157; tragedy 72, 81; victims 72, 75, 76 – 78, 81 (see also victimhood) Jobbik (Better) 61; see also parties Johnston, W. M. viii Jókai, M. 107 Juhász, G. 75 Kádár, J. 57, 118, 149, 151; era 57, 89, 127, 129, 152; regime 58, 93, 118, 140, 149, 156 Kádárism 129; “merriest barracks in the block” 88 Kádárite: leadership 118, 158; memory politics 89; political police 89; political system 88 Kalotaszeg 107 Kansteiner, W. 9 Karácsony, S. 51 – 52 Károlyi, M. count 62; government 70 Karsai, E. 73 Katz, J. 69 Kedourie E. 102 Kende, P. 144, 147 – 148, 151 Kertész, I. 78 – 80; Sorstalanság (Fatelessness) 78 – 80 Khuen-Hédervári, K. count 69 King Béla 108 King Louis XVI 139; French Revolution (see revolution) Kis, J. 138 Kisfaludi, S. Z. 31 Klaniczay G. 132 Kłoczowski, J. 124 Kodolányi, J. 43 Kohn, H. 106 Kollvitz, K. (Parents) 29 Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) 70 Komlós, A. 67 Korall 132 Koselleck, R. 19 – 20, 23 – 24, 102, 139 – 140; Begriffsgeschichte (see history writing); Neue Zeit 102 Kossuth, L. 39, 109 – 110, 115 – 116; see also cult

Index  183 Kovalovszky, M. 30 Kovács, Á. 29 Kovács, I. 43 Kövér, G. 42 Kristó, G. 108 Krúdy, G. 47 kulaks see classes and social groups Kulturkampf (Cultural Warfare) 63; see also Geschichtspolitik Kun, B. 69 – 70 Ladurie, L. R. 7 landowners see classes and social groups Laqueur, T. W. 25; hypernominalism (see commemoration) Laws: Act VIII of 1917 29; Act XIV of 1924 29; anti-Semitic 69; Instruction issued on December 4 1957 141; land reform of 1920 45, 51; Ministerial decree n. 61.265/1914 33 Lefebvre, G. 6 Lenin, V. I. 140; Leninist 150 lieux de mémoire (Nora) 5, 24, 72, 79 Litván, G. 70 Lomax, B. 138 “lost generation” 34 Lukacs, J. 47 Malenkij robot 74; see also Gulag Mályusz, E. 110; ethno-history (see history writing) Markos, G. 78 Marx, K. 140; Marxism 111, 120, 130 – 131, 138 – 140, 145, syndicalism 138, 158 McLuhan, M. 6 Medgyesi, P. 57 Megill, A. 10 – 11 Meinecke, F. 106 memory: biographic 76, 79; boom 10; cold 88; collective vi – vii, 3 – 4, 6 – 12, 76, 88, 90, 96, 129, 155; coming to terms with the past 57 – 58, 79, 157; communicative 8, 78; community of 3; cultural 8 – 9, 78; exemplary recalling 2; film 91; floating gap 9, 78; “framework story” 141; history 5; hot 88; personal remembering vi, 9, 12, 76, 91 – 92, 96; -point Museum 62; politics 118 (see also Geschichtspolitik); selective recollection 77; social 3; spontaneous 4; work 2 Michelet, J. 6

migration: chain 125; DPs: Displaced Persons 125 – 126; ’56 émigrés 140 – 141; Galician in- 69; overseas migration 124 – 125, 140; refugees and wagon-dwellers 125 – 126 military: cemetery 22 – 23, 25, 35n24; Labour Service 83, 157; ossarium 22 Millennium: celebration 50, 108; exhibition 108; history synthesis 107, 110, 117, 120 (see also synthesis of Hungary’s history) Mindszenty, J. Cardinal 138 Molnár E. 111, 118, 122; debate 118 – 119 “moral revulsion” 145 mourning 19 – 20, 25 – 26, 31 – 34, 77 Mosse, G. L. 19, 21; cult of fallen soldier (see fallen soldier) Műcsarnok [Art Gallery] 48 multiple modernity 127 museums: Budapest Holocaust Museum and Education Center 82; Memory-point Museum (Emlékpont Múzeum) 62; Trianon Museum 62 Nagy, E. 90, 92 Nagy, I. 89 – 91, 94; Institute of in Brussels 96; reburial of 89; statue of 94 Nagykanizsa 71 Nagy Magyarország 62 Narodnie Noviny 108 nation: ethnic 117; “imagined community” 101 – 102; 117 national 103 – 104; -communist 111; consciousness 12, 102; Cooperation Proclamation 60; heroism 22; historical paradigm and historiography 13, 105 – 107, 115, 117, 119, 131 – 133, 158; identity 19, 101, 124, 131, 133, 158 – 159; memory 118; uprising 158; “revolution” 147; System of Cooperation 60; uprising 117 nationalism 101 – 105, 115, 119; concept of inventing of traditions 94, 102 (see also Geschichtspolitik); concept of semantic permutation 103; constructivist concept 102 – 103; cultural 105, 110, 117; ethnic 71; ethno-symbolic concept 101 – 103; political 105, 110, 117; SovietRussian 139 nationalisation of death 21 nationality 103 125

184 Index Naumann, F. 121 Nemeskürty, I. Requiem egy hadseregért (Requiem for an Army) 75 Németh, L. 51, 119, 121 New York City 74 Nietzsche, F. 2, 133; monumental history (see history) NKVD: The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs 91 Nógrád 142 Nora, P. vii – viii, 4 – 5, 24; lieux de mémoire (see lieux de mémoire) Oakeshott, M. 13, 44, 155; practical and historical past (see past) Óbuda 47 – 48 Olick, J. viii one-child system 42 – 43 Ong, W. J. 6 Opera House 48 Orbán, V. 56, 61, 94, 132; government 56, 63, 92, 94, 157; regime 62; see also Fidesz government origo 108 Pach, Z. P. 122, 130; “deviation theory” (see theory) Paris 139; Peace Treaty 26, 44; see also Trianon Peace Treaty parties: Arrow Cross 73, 83; Communist 73, 138, 144 (see also Fidesz, Union of Young Democrats); Jobbik: Better 61; SZDSZ: Alliance of Free Democrats 116 past: historical 13, 59, 155; practical 13, 44, 59, 155; unmasterable 10; “usable” 116, 119 peasantry see classes and social groups Pécs 45 perpetrator 73, 78 – 79 Pest 47 – 49, 52, 72; ghettos 72, 81 petite bourgeoisie see classes and social groups Piłsudski, J. 27 political: code 71; change of 1989 157; regime (see Horthy; Kádár, J.; Rákosi system) Pope John Paul II. 82 Popkin, S. L. 142 populist writers 43 – 44, 51, 64, 156 POWs 74 – 75, 77, 124, 126; German 77 Prohászka, O. 71 Prost, A. 22, 25

Raffay, E. 61 Rainer, M. J. 90 – 91 Rákóczi, F. II. 109, 115, 117, 133, 133n2; see also cult; war Rákosi system 93, 141 – 142 Rakowski, M. 138 Ranke, Leopold v.: wie es eigentlich gewesen ist 3 Ránki, G. 41, 73 – 74, 122, 127, 130 – 131 “realistic compromise” 118; see also Austro-Hungarian Compromise Red Cross 32 – 33 Reform Age 120 regime change of 1989 127, 130 Reichsbanner 28; see also commemoration Remarque, E. M. (All Quiet on the Western Front) 36n41 remembering see memory Renan, E. 106, 117 “return to history” see history Révai J. 111 “revolutio” ix, 137, 149 – 151, 159; see also revolution revolution: American 159; antitotalitarian 147 – 148, 159; civil war 137, 149, 151, 159; counter- 149, 151; discontent 143; of 1848 and War of Independence 120; English 159; French 23, 112, 148 – 149; freedom fight 138 – 139, 151; insurgence 149; Lawful 150; of 1918 6, 148; 1919 Republic of Councils of 1919 45, 70, 94, 148; “printing” 102; rebellion 146; revolt 138; social 118; “uprising” 137 – 139, 144, 149, 158 Ricoeur, P. vii, 11 – 12; Time and Narrative 12 River Don 75; Hungarian Second Army (see Hungarian) Roma (Gypsy) 82 Romsics, G. 60 Rosenfeld, G. 1 Ruhr region 26 Russia: Tsarist 23, 121, 124 Russian 29, 122; Tsar 90 Saint Stephen 108 Sallai, E. 78 Samuel R. viii samizdat 122 Sára, S. 75; Pergőtűz (Drumfire) 75, 157 Schievelbusch, W. 133 Schlözer A. L. v. 111; Göttingen history writing (see history writing)

Index  185 Schmidt, M. 63, 97n12; House of Terror (see state-run institutes) Schorske, C. L. 47 Schwarzenberg Sq. 29 Secret Police: Historical Archive of the State Security; informer’s cases 57 – 58, 157; NKVD (see NKVD) Semprůn, J. 77; Le Grand Voyage 77 Settlement of 1867 40, 45, 47; see also Austro-Hungarian Compromise Shoah 82; see also Holocaust Šiklova, J. 58; “solidarity of the culpable” 59 Simmel, G. 68 Sixty-four Counties 60 Slovak people 107, 129, 125 Smith, A. D. 101 – 103; ethno-symbolic concept (see nationalism) social: Democratic Party 28; hybridity 143; “imaginary” 7 – 8, 42, 46, 52, 128; mobility trap 144; resentment 143 soldiers: British 27; Czech 27; French 27; German 28; Polish 27; Slovak 27 Sonderweg 122 Soviet: army 88, 158; imperial rule 118 – 119, 131; “liberators” 72; Republic of 1919 45; type system 147; Union (see countries) Sovietisation 122 state-run historical institutes 63; Gyula László Institute of 62; House of Terror 62 – 63, 65n18, 81, 97n12; Institute for Researching the Change of Regime 62; Institute of Researching Hungariannes 62; NEBI: Committee of National Remembrance 62; Veritas 62, 94; see also Geschichtspolitik Strasshof 80 street fighters (pesti srácok) 146, 97n12 squares in Budapest: Deák Sq. 29; Hősök tere (Heroes’ Sq.) 89; Köztársaság tér (Republic) Sq. 58, 89; Szabadság tér (Liberty) Sq. 83 syntheses of Hungary’s history: History of Hungary in ten volumes 129; History of Hungary in two volumes 73; Magyar történet (Magyar Story) 119; Millennial History of the Hungarian Nation 107, 110, 117, 120 Szabad G. 116 Szabó, I. 57 – 58, 157 Szabó, M. 30 szakérettségi (specialised school-leaving certificate) 143

Száraz, G. 80 – 81, 157 Szász, J. 32 Széchenyi, I. count 39, 116, 133; see also cult Szeged 45 Szekfű, G. 115 – 116, 119, 133, 158; Great and Small Hungarian (see concept) Szekler Land 33 Szelényi B. A. 42 Szelényi, I. 94; “interrupted embourgeoisement” (see embourgeoisement) Szűcs, J. 12, 103, 106, 119, 122 – 123; Three Historic Regions of Europe 123 terror: Red 94; White 94 theory: centre-periphery 122; constructivist 102, 158; “deviation” 121; “invisible narrative template” 92; narrativity and tropology 155; the stabin-the-back 28 Thukydides 11 Todorov, T. 2; exemplary recalling (see memory) Tomka, B. 132; social history (see history writing) Transylvanian artefact 107; publisher 78; Vlach 107 trauma: 7, 132; see also perpetrator; victimhood Trencsényi, B. 131 Trianon: consciousness 156; cult 59, 62 – 64; discourse 60 – 64; human losses 59; industry 156; Museum 62 (see also museums); Peace Treaty 42, 44 – 45, 57, 59 – 61, 63, 74, 106, 124, 156; politics 61; Research Institute 61; Szemle 61; see also Geschichtspolitik Uhl, H. viii Universal History (Mink) 104, 158 university and department: Budapest University of Economics 143; College of the Film and Theatre Arts 58; Kolozsvár Protestant College 70; Roland Eötvös, Department of Historical Sociology 131; Roland Eötvös, Economic and Social Department 131; students 142; see also classes and social groups urbanists 44 urbarial peasants see classes and social groups

186 Index Vajda, J. 40; embourgeoisement (see embourgeoisement) Váli, F. 139, 144 Vansina, J. 9; floating gap (see memory) Várpalota 61; Trianon Museum (see Museums) Várszegi, A. 82 Verbürgerlichung 40, 121; see also embourgeoisement victimhood: German 77; Hungarian 74 – 75; Jewish 72, 77 – 78, 81 Vienna 29, 44, 47, 80 Vladslo 29; see also Kollvitz Volkov, S. 71; cultural and political code (see code) Wallenberg, R. 72 Wallerstein, I. 122; centre-periphery theory (see theory)

war: Great Patriotic 74; human losses 124, 157; of Independence of 1848/49 115, 117, 120; Rákóczi War of Independence 118 war memorials 19 – 24, 30 – 31; German 28; Memorial for the Victims of the German Occupation 83; monuments aux morts (monuments to the dead 26; “National SelfSacrifice” 29); The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier 24, 36n28; Wehrmann im Eisen 29 Warsaw 123 White, H. 95, 104; theory of tropology (see theory) White Books 89 Winter, J. 19 – 20, 22, 27, 31 Workers’ councils 137 – 138, 146, 158 Yerushalmi, Y. H. vii, 2 – 4 Yiddish 68