Praefiguratio: Exemplary History and Temporal Order in the Thirtieth Anniversary of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 (original) (raw)
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Journal of Nationalism Memory & Language Politics, 2020
The year 2019 in Hungary was marked by the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the 133-day rule of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The communist regime was established on March 21, 1919, and the news shook the victorious peacemakers at the Paris Peace Conference, as it signaled the spread of the dreaded "bacilli" of Bolshevism from Russia to the West. The short-lived communist dictatorship left a lasting impact on the Hungarian collective memory that was first shaped by the memory politics of the interwar right-wing Horthy regime, which identified itself with the counterrevolution and painted the Soviet Republic and its leaders with the darkest colors. Following World War II, under Soviet occupation, the communist regimes in Hungary reversed the trend and identified the Hungarian Soviet Republic as the glorious precursor to the postwar Hungarian status quo. The collapse of communism, or state socialism, and the rise of western-type democratic governments in Hungary in 1989 indicated that an objective reexamination of 1919 by historians promised balanced interpretations and the shaping of memory history that did not reflect Manichean extremes. All these expectations changed with the rise of the authoritarian Orbán regime in 2010, which is identified with extreme right-wing policies. It shapes memory politics that aim to revive the cult of the authoritarian Regent Miklós Horthy and the denigration of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The symbolic act of this policy during this anniversary year was the removal from Martyrs Square [Vértanúktere] the statue of the martyred prime minister, the communist Imre Nagy, of the ill-fated 1956 Hungarian revolution, and its replacement
’56 after ’89: Re-commemorating Hungarian history after the fall of Communism
SAHANZ proceedings, 2014
Governments and civic groups erect public memorials in national capitals to record and legitimize selected events and people, so as to define collective history. Budapest provides a rich case study of how changing political regimes and their opponents also alter, re-interpret and remove memorials in their attempts to control national narratives and express and consolidate political authority. This paper uses archival research, interviews with memorial decisionmakers, and analysis of individual memorials to explore how various key themes of Hungarian history have been articulated through Budapest’s commemorative works, and how the expression of particular commemorative subjects has been contested, modulated or repressed. Analysis explores which approaches to commemoration have remained constant throughout Hungary’s several regime changes, and what broad shifts have occurred in memorial themes, forms and locations. An examination of major memorials erected, removed and replaced in Budapest up until the 1989 collapse of Communism provides a context for understanding the subsequent proliferation of memorials to the 1956 Anti-Communist Uprising and the newly-completed reconfiguration of the key national space, Kossuth Square. The paper identifies four specific dynamics in the reframing of Budapest’s memorial landscape since 1989 for current consumption: decontextualization, iconoclasm, liberalization, and avoidance.
The Squaring of the Circle: The Reinvention of Hungarian History by the Communist Party in 1952
Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 2008
This article analyses a document, published by the Hungarian Academy of Science as a gift for the dictator Mátyás Rákosi's sixtieth birthday in 1952. The document tries to legitimate governance by the Communist Party, which emerged victorious from the political struggles in the post-war period (1945–1949). The Party had no tradition of public political life and its politics and ‘collective identity’ lacked national roots. For this reason, professional historians with leading positions in the Communist Party used raw material from Hungarian history in its attempt to achieve congruent communist and national traditions. They therefore introduced new heroes to the pantheon and removed others. This new narrative justified the elimination of potential enemies and promised a bright future for the nation. The article highlights the technique of realigning temporal references along a theoretical guideline, which is derived from a specific worldview, and examines the extent to which a new narrative can be successful when forced temporal references and the administrative creation of the past is too obvious. This article assumes that only closed societies enable such a ‘squaring of the circle’.
time , ritual , and post Socialist change in hungary
2013
Time is a social construct and ritual can be a symbolic collective assertion of time reflecting socioeconomic change, spatial and temporal constructs. The past plays a role both officially and unofficially in creating a new image. individuals reclaim past traditions (such as festivals, food, and music) yet fuse them with present day values. Memory recovers cultural practices that reassert a hungarian identity that the soviet system had suppressed. Within today’s troubling post Socialist society, memory and the reconfiguration of time is a tool that reconstructs history and draws on cultural symbols to create meaning. the expression of ritual is one way to explore the constructed and social nature of time. Looking at a Hungarian harvest ritual illustrates the social construction of time which significantly shows a hybrid nature of change yet also the ambiguous disconnectedness with the past and present reflective of the complications of a society in transition. a r t i C l e i n f o
Communist anniversaries as a symphony of power and science (case study of Bulgaria)
Studia Historiae Scientiarum , 2017
The aim of the paper is to show the interplay between the power and the science in the context of cultural memory. The focus is on the Cyrillo-Methodian anniversaries in Bulgaria in the communist period, and the object of the analysis is the anniversary of 1969. The context relates to the process of development of new historiography and the functionalization of the nation-centric narrative. The main issue discussed is how the Communist Party, as a political institution, and the Bulgarian Academy of Science, as an academic institution, cooperated to establish a new vision of society. The discussion offers an interpretation in the light of the Orthodox concept of the symphony of power perceived as a metaphor of the relation between the secular and the spiritual power.
Celebrating May 1: Visual Propaganda from Different Perspectives in Communist Hungary
Historia scholastica, 2022
Celebration has been a key idea in the disciplinary fields of Mentalitätsgeschichte and anthropology: my paper aims to introduce this in the specific context of May Day parades and marches in Hungary in the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the educational nature of the communist system. For decades, verbal and visual propaganda tried to indoctrinate students and their parents and teachers by transforming perceptions of everyday reality through cultural practices and quasi-religious rites. From the perspective of theories about political religion, statues and symbols intended for the unification of leaders and masses in ceremonial–festive surroundings were meaningful elements with both continuous and changing characteristics. I would like to analyse this kind of message associated with May 1 through photographs of official processions in Budapest, choosing a concrete place as a starting point and adding verbal sources and different dimensions to the interpretation. First, party documents, minutes, and preparations establish the basic level of my approach, showing the original (and contemporary hidden) intentions of the ruling power to organize and execute International Workers’ Day. Next, propaganda and photographs of children and students demonstrate how the main celebration of the communist era was staged in order to legitimize its acceptance and popularity. The discussion concludes with a counter-narrative compiled from reports of the US legation and archives of Radio Free Europe, presenting an anti-communist view and a construction of Western propaganda.