Following the track of Ariadne’s thread. Reflexions to the Miroslav Michela’s work “In labyrinths of Trianon”
Ondrej Ficeri, Centre of Social and Psychological Studies of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Social Sciences, Košice, [email protected]
FICERI, Ondrej. Following the track of Ariadne’s thread. Reflexions to the Miroslav Michela’s work “In labyrinths of Trianon”. Človek a spoločnosť [Individual and Society], 2016, roč. 19, č. 4, s. 101-111.
Abstract: In 2016, one of the most renowned Slovak historians Miroslav Michela published collection of his earlier essays and papers in the book “Trianon labirintusaiban” (“In Labyrinths of Trianon”) written in Hungarian language. A dominant part of the book is devoted to analysis of mutually influencing and overlapping Slovak-Hungarian national interpretation frames and author’s pursuits of their comprehension and explication. In the book, the author renders several substantial theses—smashing the classic Slovak national narrative—which from the part of Slovak historians have not been formulated yet in such a compact form. Therefore, the book shall by classified as a pioneering and, at the same time, successful attempt for archaeology of antagonism in the Slovak and Hungarian “regimes of truths” (in the Foulcauldian way). By publishing the book, the primal aim of the author was to supply the profession with raw material which would stir discussion about ideological starting points and various terminological and interpretative strategies in Slovak and Hungarian historical writing. Michela’s main auctorial intention is to make clear that both parts (the Slovak one and the Hungarian one as well) are responsible for the construction of antagonism between the two national communities, and especially those historians on both sides of the border who reproduce antagonism by their ethnocentric and non-analytic approach in history writing. My reflexive text—a reaction to his requisition—contains commentaries on significances and values which stem from the narrative strategies and discursive practices applied in the book. Last but not least, I attempt to explain to the reader why the book “In Labyrinths of Trianon” is pioneering in Slovak historiography and why one day it will become a significant material for studies of intellectual history in Slovakia and the whole Central European area. Containing an extensive critique of work of Slovak historians, the book belongs to a series of the most reflexive texts ever written in Slovak historiography (Ľubomír Lipták, Ján Mlynárik, Dušan Kovác, Roman Holec). The author argues why professional historiography in Slovakia is politized, polarized and burdened with a nationalistic paradigm in interpretation of history. However, the deficiency of the whole Michela’s narrative about bipolarization of Slovak history writing lies in presenting the two fractions (“established historians” versus “rehabilitators of Tiso’s regime”) equal in the amount of personnel, institutional anchoring, foreign acknowledgements, and partially in the quality of historiographical production as well. Despite considering the text of the book “In Labyrinths of Trianon” as a moderate condemnation of rehabilitators of the Tiso’s regime, it is one of the most erudite and very needed critiques produced in this agenda by Slovak scientists.
Keywords: Trianon. Slovak-Hungarian relations. National narrative. Discussion. Critique of Slovak historiographie.
Note: This text is an English version of the Slovak original, which is available at: https://sav-sk.academia.edu/OndrejFiceri
Historian Miroslav Michela, a representative of the middle generation among Slovak historians employed mostly abroad, has—in a relatively short time—gained respect not only in foreign scholarly circles, but also in domestic ones, which was recognizable this year (2016), when he
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Človek a spoločnosť [Individual and Society], 2016, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 101-111. Following the track of Ariadne’s thread. Reflexions to the Miroslav Michela’s work “In labyrinths of Trianon” was almost called to the chair of the Slovak Historical Association (he was missing only three voices to the appointment). There are not many historians coming from Slovakia with similar social capital and status. His Slovak-Hungarian bilingualism, knowledge of wold languages, a prestigious institutional base in Czechia and Slovakia, transnational problematization of his research subjects and its interdisciplinary operationalisation, yet adopting the most actual scholarly concepts, it all together allows to classify him as a “national” historian only with regard to his birthplace (Komárno in Slovakia).
Due to a technique of his work, it is possible to label Miroslav Michela as an faithful operator of „memory work“ (in the sense of Ricoeur). The narration of his works is characterized by attempts for a reconciliation of historiographic polemics, criticism of injustices and disclosure of grievances, first of all in the Slovak-Hungarian relations. Undoubtedly, this are the qualitative reasons why representatives of the Slovak Scholarly Board in Hungary and Institute of History of Hungarian Academy of Sciences decided to make available for the broader Hungarian public a collection of his scholarly articles and reflexive texts published in one monograph with a symbolic name “In Labyrinths of Trianon – History, Politics of Memory and Parallel Histories in Slovakia and Hungary”.1 By publishing the book in Hungarian, a Slovak reader is anyhow left short for, because all of its three thematic blocks (I. establishment of Czechoslovakia and the reaction on Lord Rothemere’s campaign;2 II. memory studies and the Slovak-Hungarian relations;3 III. the character of Slovak historiography4) have been already published in a form of journal studies in Slovakia or Czechia in the period of 2004–2015, hence, they are very well known in scholarly circles. For a laic reader, on the other hand, a disadvantage of the book could constitute the fact, that various chapters of the book—originally addressed to scholarly audience—were published basically without any comprehensive supplements of the text, and therefore, many of noted historiographic polemics are not explained into details and could be perceived as unclear for a laic reader without any farther additional reading. In respective chapters, the author does not handle the chosen research areas in complexity, his primal aim was to bring raw material which would stir a discussion about
1 Trianon labirintusaiban : Történelem, emlékezetpolitika és párhuzamos történetek Szlovákiában és Magyarországon. Békéscsaba; Budapest : Magyarországi Szlovákok Kutatóintézete; Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 2016, p. 272. 2 Vznik Československa a slovenská otázka 1918-1920 [online]. In Moderní Dějiny - Vzdělávací portál pro učitele, studenty a žáky [cit. 15. 9. 2016]:
Človek a spoločnosť [Individual and Society], 2016, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 101-111. Following the track of Ariadne’s thread. Reflexions to the Miroslav Michela’s work “In labyrinths of Trianon” mutual ideological starting points and various terminological and interpretative strategies in Slovak and Hungarian historiographies. As a consequence, I do not regard this paper—my reaction to his requisition—as a regular book review in the traditional sense of this publication category, but rather as a compilation of commentaries on significances and values which stem form narrative strategies and discursive practices applied in the book. Not last but the least, I attempt to follow a task to explain to a reader why the book “In Labyrinths of Trianon” is pioneering in Slovak historiography and why in the period of several centuries, and perhaps earlier, it will become a significant material for studies of intellectual history in Slovakia and the whole Central Europe area.
I. In the first thematic block, the author explains circumstances of establishment of the first Czechoslovak Republic in 1918–1920. He attempts to avoid one-sided evaluations of this breaking events which were typical for older interpretations from the parts of both national historiographies. In consequence, he succeeded in building a neutral narrative, constructed on reasoning from both parts, with references to older, but primarily to current Hungarian and Slovak scholarly works. At the same time, regarding the breakup of historical Hungary and the establishment of Czechoslovakia, he lays stress on explanation of those causal nexuses which are not sufficiently anchored in Hungarian historical memory due to the preferable ethnocentric interpretations schemes of the Hungarian national narrative in the past. To list some of those: the establishment of Czechoslovakia as an independent state was approved by the Allies in advance of breakup of the historical Hungary, hence, any imposition on territorial integrity of the collapsing kingdom was not attainable at that time. To list another nexus connected to the previous one: the Slovak political elites voluntarily claimed their right to belong to the establishing republic by the Martin Declaration (Martin, a city in northern Slovakia), hence, the detachment of Upper Hungary (nowadays the Slovak territory) shall not be perceived as an act of foreign pressure, because the declaration was approved by the Slovak elites themselves. On the other hand, the author acknowledges that the demarcation of the Slovak-Hungarian border in the form, which was accepted after 1920, posed a feeling of injustice and tension in the Central European area which is not a one-sided problem of Hungarians only. Therefore, the last sentence of the chapter could be understood as an ideological manifest addressed to the Slovak scholarly circles: “Hence, when it comes to the ‚Hungarian Trianon trauma‛, it is necessary to point out that this significant historical event has—to a certain amount—also influence on social life of Slovaks (…) ‚Trianon‛ is not only the matter of Hungary, but of Slovakia as well…” (p. 28). The questioning why Trianon was (and still is) a problem of Slovakia and Slovaks at the same time, is contested in the chapter “Anti-Rothemere’s Action in Czechoslovakia in 1927” which could be perceived as a case study mirroring one episode of the Slovak-Hungarian ethnic conflict in the post-Trianon era. The author investigates not only the dismissive attitude of Czechoslovak political elites toward Lord Rothemere’s campaign, but also instruments, by which these elites mobilised inhabitants of Slovakia to express loyalty to the new state, and last but not least reactions of inhabitants—differentiated by ethnicity—to these enforces pursuits. Resulting from his research, it shall not be claimed that Hungarians in Czechoslovakia supported revision of Trianon univocally. By contrary, Michela refuses a discourse of groupism (in a sense of criticism by Brubaker) about homogenously acting national entities because inside of these imagined communities there could be recognized differentiated levels with different attitudes to relevant political and legal issues. As an example, he brings forward the attitude of the so called activist Hungarians, i.e. of those Hungarians who became conformed with the democratic political regime of Czechoslovakia. However, if the author efforts to persuade us that majority of Czechoslovak Hungarians was not interested in the campaign, or adopted a
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Človek a spoločnosť [Individual and Society], 2016, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 101-111. Following the track of Ariadne’s thread. Reflexions to the Miroslav Michela’s work “In labyrinths of Trianon” cautious standpoint due to fears from potential persecution (based on press reports and state administration documents), he could have also investigated how the campaign had influenced the political behaviour of this community in the local election (1927), the county election (1928), or the parliamentary one (1929). That is to say, political affiliations of respective population reveal the right proportion between the activist and negativist Hungarians, i.e. reveal how big part of Hungarians took a revisionism stand – even though, in a latent form. Presenting both camps (activists versus negativists) as of the same or approximate rate, or not even mentioning their rate whatsoever, changes the field of meaning of the conflict and evocates that majority of inhabitants identifying themselves as Hungarians was satisfied with living outside Hungary, or passively accepted living in Czechoslovakia. Attila Simon, who researched the field of activist Hungarians in Czechoslovakia, and whom the author cites, mentions “only” around 15 % of Hungarians electorate who voted for activist parties.5 For what remains, one of the most tangible consequences of Rothemere’s campaign on the Slovak political scene was inclination of representatives of Hungarian National Party—otherwise attempting for activism from 1925—to revisionist political course of Christian Socialists, which, ultimately, led to a progressive merging of both political parties. Therefore, whereas the votes for Hungarian National Party in the election of 1925 (before Rothemere’s campaign) are to be counted in benefit of activism, after 1927 (after Rothemere’s campaign), the votes for the same party contributed exclusively to the rate of the negativists.
II.
The second thematic block clusters articles dealing with memory studies – the search of myths, stereotypes, propaganda, historical consciousness and other cultural and public representations of the past. A dominant part of this block is devoted to analysis of mutually influencing and overlapping Slovak-Hungarian national interpretation frames and author’s pursuits of their comprehension and explication. This essayistic and reflexive thematic block, which is to be classified as a pioneering and, at the same time, successful attempt for an archaeology (in the Foulcauldian way) of antagonism in the Slovak and Hungarian “regimes of truths”, constitutes a crux of the whole book, in which the author renders several substantial theses—smashing the classic Slovak national narrative—which, from the part of Slovak historians, were not formulated yet in such a compact form. In this context, these theses could be perceived as an entitled satisfaction in benefit of the Hungarian part, however, for now, this comes as an initiative of an individuum only. On this place I name, perhaps, only some of the most significant theses in the chronological order: — the author admits that in the frame of the religiously, intellectually and territorially differentiated Slovak society, Slovak agents of the nationalising project at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries were not numerous and univocally supported; — with demarcation of the new state borders after WWI, the right of nations to self- determination was not fully respected, hence, regarding the ethnic principle of border demarcation, the author de facto admits injustice of the Trianon Treaty; — some hundred thousands of Hungarians were included to the frame of the newly established Czechoslovakia who were misused by Czechoslovak elites as hostages in negotiations with Hungary and, also, there was an expectation of the authorities that majority of those should be dissimilated (the so called “magyarized Slovaks”); — argumentation strategies for legitimation of the new regime (e.g. “the thousand-year-oppression”) deepened the already negative perception of Hungarians and Hungary in Slovak national discourse and, what is more, this was supported by an argument of paternalistic Czech “democratization mission” which, on the other hand, was being rejected by a significant part of Slovaks (separatists, Ľudáks); — a credit for formation of the modern
5 SIMON, Attila. Zabudnutí aktivisti. Príspevok k dejinám maďarským politických strán v medzivojnovom období. In Historický časopis, 2009, vol. 57, no. 3, p. 511-530. 104
Človek a spoločnosť [Individual and Society], 2016, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 101-111. Following the track of Ariadne’s thread. Reflexions to the Miroslav Michela’s work “In labyrinths of Trianon”
Slovakia in the interwar period is to be assigned from a big part to Czechs; — the appropriation of the “national” territory by Czechoslovak elites after 1918 was identical with the appropriation of the territory of the historical Hungary by Hungarian elites before that year; — regarding enforcing territorial claims towards Hungary in 1938–1944, the Slovak politicians were no less aggressive and radical then their Hungarian counterparts toward Czechoslovakia in 1920–1938: “In the case of the First Vienna Award, when observing and analysing the official language and contemporary propaganda, it is to say that political argumentation of Slovak political elites connected with the Award is pretty comparable with the Trianon rhetoric scattered in the interwar Hungary, and, what is more, they are compatible in many aspects” (p. 131). Michela’s main auctorial intention was to make clear that both parts (the Slovak one and the Hungarian one as well) are responsible for the construction of antagonism between the two national communities, and especially those historians on both sides of the border who reproduce antagonism by their ethnocentric and non-analytic approach in history writing.
In author’s opinion, one of the keys to comprehension of Slovak-Hungarian relation is an explanation of issues connected to the breakup of the historical Hungary and establishment of the successor states, which is undoubtable, but at the same time, it is necessary to point out that the mutual relations are much more ballasted by acuter research fields of chronologically older data. I agree with the Hungarian historian István Kollai,6 according to whom the dialogue between the two camps is failing not because of events of the modern age period, but pretty much because of questions connected with the “origins of the nations” – the breakup of the Great-Moravian Empire and the grounding of the Hungarian Kingdom. In this field both parts show the most inappeasable dichotomic interpretations so far. After all, Michela himself emphasises that the cultural memory of national collectivities was constructed on “the ancient national past”, hence specifically, on the Great-Moravia-tradition in the case of Slovaks, and the Saint-Stephen-tradition in the case of Hungarians (if the nations are understood in an essencialistic way). Accordingly, Michela’s metaphoric discursive practice to label the crucial years 1918–1920 as “Point Zero” – even fixed in the title of one of the subchapters of this block – falls somehow contradictory.
Already in the foreword of the book, Miroslav Michela comments on the permanently missing progress in the mutual Slovak-Hungarian dialogue: “In the last hundred years neither rivalry nor attempts for cooperation in scholarly interpretations of the mutual history have led to conclusive results” (p. 7). Hence, it is legitimate to ask why? In my opinion, the mutual discussion and reconciliation of Slovak-Hungarian relation cannot progress any farther without re-negotiating the validity of the Great-Moravia-tradition, specifically, its most principled cultural code: the ethnic continuity between the Great-Moravian inhabitants settled above the river Danube (Nitra region) and the Slovak ethnic group. This thesis was not recognized in Hungary yet which has a huge impact on perceiving any other chronologically younger scholarly polemics, including the above mentioned “point zero”. An example: even acceptation of the border on the Danube gets different quality after adopting the fact that Slovaks are posterity of the Nitra Slavs (Sloveni) – inhabitants of the Duchy of Nitra (805–1108),7 who had been settled also in the very proximate territory north of the river Danube before Hungarians entered the Carpathian Basin, hence, the same territory which is nowadays mostly populated by Hungarian population. Despite the enormous effort accredited by the Slovak social and human
6 KOLLAI, István. Slovenskí a maďarskí historici sa nezhodnú najmä pri téme zakladania Uhorska. In Maďari.sk [online]. The original published as: Czajlik Katalin: Kotleba a történelemtanítás kudarca. (Új Szó, 11. máj 2016), [cit. 15. 9. 2016].: < http://madari.sk/magazin/aktuality/kollai-slovenski-a-madarski-historici-sa-nezhodnu-najma- pri-teme-zakladania-uhorska>. 7 STEIHÜBEL, Ján. Nitrianske kniežactvo : Počiatky stredovekého Slovenska. Bratislava : Rak, 2016, p. 598. 105
Človek a spoločnosť [Individual and Society], 2016, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 101-111. Following the track of Ariadne’s thread. Reflexions to the Miroslav Michela’s work “In labyrinths of Trianon” scientists (historians, archaeologists, linguists) to legitimation of the Great-Moravia-tradition – this fundamental Slovak “national” agenda – this profound construction pillar of the Slovak national identity is still called into question from the Hungarian part, therefore every attempt of Slovak scientists to “notify” the Hungarian part about the results of their research in this field shall be designated as their actual failure.8 Namely, any discussion with a partner who challenges your identity is entirely pointless. In such a case, there are not two equal partners in a discussion because one part always principally prevails. Or alternatively, are Hungarians right about Slovaks being “under a Great-Moravia misapprehension” and Romanians being “under a Daco-Roman” one? Hence, as we can experience, a necessity to negotiate mutual historical traumas and conflicting interpretations in the past does not rest on modern-era historians only. Along this line, it is necessary to include into this polemical agenda also medievalists, archaeologists, and linguists…
But, let’s get back to the text of Miroslav Michela’s memory studies related to the interwar era, because it does not sufficiently mirror the fact that Slovak-Hungarian antagonism gained even far radical form during and after the WWII. Author’s claim about a replacement of the whole pantheon of significant historical personalities commemorated in the public space of Slovak cities after 1918–1920 is not entirely right because such a praxis occurred only after 1939, respectively 1945 (if we take into account the united territory of Slovakia, including the southern Slovakia). Politics of memory of the first Czechoslovak Republic was aimed to eradicate all names of streets and squares which referred only to those personalities “who manifested inimical sentiments against the Czechoslovak nation, or to its allies, and who recall treasonous events” (the Act of Parliament No. 266/1920). Thus, it shall be a very useful educational observation for a Hungarian reader that the public space of the interwar Slovak villages and towns was named also after Rákóczi, Vörösmárthy, or Kazinczy who were not banned according to the above cited law, and that many personalities of Hungarian history – those fighting against Habsburgs—were portrayed in the Czechoslovak history books positively. However, in a later social praxis (from the 1925s) the Hungarian minority community started to nationally code also these “allowed” personalities, e. g. Francis II Rákóczi. Representatives of the Hungarian oppositionist parties capitalized the presence of Rákóczi’s remnants on the Czechoslovak territory (the crypt of St. Elisabeth Dome in Košice) on recultivating his pre-Trianon cult of personality, which was re-coded from a symbol of the fight for national independence to a symbol of an “unbreakable” national identity of Hungarians living beyond the borders and their unity with the mother nation. As a consequence, by doing so, they prepared a fait accompli with which protagonists of the Czechoslovak politics of identity struggled to cope.
In a contras to Rákóczi, Stephen I, the first Hungarian king, belonged to the group of „banned“ personalities, and the politics of memory connected to commemoration of this conflicting personality in Hungarian and Slovak mutual relations became the main focus of Miroslav Michela in the chapter “Representations of the cult of St Stephen in Slovakia in the interwar era”. In the chapter, he applied the Assmanian concept of cultural memory when analysing
8 Richard Marsina, one of the most valued authorities of Slovak historical science, is aware of this insufficiency when speaking about „a huge ignorance“ from the part of Hungarian scholars: MARSINA, Richard. K problematike etnogenézy Slovákov a ich pomenovania. In MARSINA, Richard – MULÍK, Peter (eds.). Etnogenéza Slovákov : kto sme a aké je naše meno. Martin : Matica slovenská, 2009, p. 19. — Lately, it seem that Slovak scientists will have to re-elaborate the theory of etho-genesis of the Slovak ethic group/nation from the beginning. The up until today enforced thesis of Slovak mainstream historiography about Slovaks forming an independent ethnic group since the 10th century was methodologically challenged even from inside of Slovak historiography: KŠIŇAN, Michal. Politika vs. história? Diskusie v slovenskej historiografii. In Historický časopis, 2014, vol. 62, no. 1, p. 97-102. 106
Človek a spoločnosť [Individual and Society], 2016, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 101-111. Following the track of Ariadne’s thread. Reflexions to the Miroslav Michela’s work “In labyrinths of Trianon” empirical material of the (Czecho)Slovak provenience (decoding rituals of festivities, first of all orations and news releases). He is interested in metamorphosis of symbolic meaning of the cult and its instrumentalisation by political power up until today, what makes him one of a few historians coming from Slovakia who work with materials from the field of public history (the research of cultural representations about the past circulated and propagated in the public sphere by significant personalities, and as such becoming an integral constituent of mass culture and collective memory9). This way, Michela enriches his narrative with a dimension of interconnecting the past and the presence as two shapable communicating vessels that unveil ideological essence of historical representations. However, in this chapter, the author committed himself an unfortunate discursive praxis, to be specific, a selection of presented facts when recounting a conflicting event from the Slovak city of Komárno in 2009. On the 21st August that year, the president of Hungary László Solyóm was disallowed by the Slovak authorities to enter the country for the purpose of unveiling a statute of Stephen I. When using this plot as a plausible intro to this chapter to demonstrate the dichotomic cultural coding of St Stephen in Slovak and Hungarian national discourses, the author did not mention the official reason for the Hungarian president’s disallowance which was not the negative cultural code connected with St Stephen in the Slovak historical culture (a national hero, a symbol of Magyarization), or tense diplomatic relations – as it could be understood from the text – but the 41st anniversary of the military occupation of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the Warsaw Pact which fell exactly on the 21st August, hence, on the same day in which the local organisers had invited the president of Hungary to Komárno. Excluding this important information from his narrative, the author changed the field of meaning of this event which, according to my opinion, unjustly penalizes the Slovak part in this conflict. Besides, there is a second diameter to be mentioned in the narrative of this conflict which author concluded in the text only several pages after (by means of one of populists speeches of the Slovak prime minister Róbert Fico), namely, that the incident was anticipated by a reluctance of the local self-government of Komárno to approve locating of a statue of St Cyril and Methodius in a representative public site of the city, despite the fact that one third of all inhabitants of the city are Slovaks. In this case, again, we can observe here a “dialectic dichotomy” of the Great-Moravia- and St-Stephen-traditions, reciprocal disrespect of which – especially in this region of mutually overlapping national histories – leads to a needless escalation of ethnic conflict, and in this sense, unfortunately, the conflict was reproduced in the Michela’s discourse. Nevertheless, neither St Stephan nor St Cyril and Methodius had had to serve as dividing symbols in mutual relations, but integrating ones, if all interested parties in conflict would have come to an arrangement, hence, if organizers would have let the statue unveil any other day (not the commemorative one for Slovaks), would have cooperated with the state authorities on preparation of a diplomatic visit of the president of Hungary in Komárno, and would have agreed with representatives of Matica slovenská on placing the statue of St Cyril and Methodius in a plausible urban space in Komárno. Regarding the latter point, the local self-government did not display any willingness to do so, therefore I would like to openly point out to a bearer of responsibility for this conflict. The president of Hungary was by a diplomatic note notified about the possible response from the Slovak part, therefore his decision to cross the border shall be interpreted as a disrespect to historical culture of a neighbouring country and, in the end of the day, as a provocation which was followed by a notified, and hence adequate reaction. Moreover, observing this conflicting situation, it could be explained how mechanism of Slovak-Hungarian antagonism actually works: it is a series of expectations and disappointments on both parts, but once the responsibility for triggering the
9 Compare studies in the magazine: Történelmi Szemle, 2012, vol. 54, no. 3: GYÁNI, Gábor. Nemzet, kollektív emlékezet és public history, p. 357-376; HALMESVIRTA, Anssi – VILKUNA, Kustaa H. J. A születőben lévő public history. Az emlékezetteremtés kutatásának új megközelítése, p. 377-388; HOLGER, Fischer. Public history, emlékezetkultúra, történelempolitika. Helyük Németország jelenkori történettudományában, p. 387-410. 107
Človek a spoločnosť [Individual and Society], 2016, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 101-111. Following the track of Ariadne’s thread. Reflexions to the Miroslav Michela’s work “In labyrinths of Trianon” mechanism lies with the Slovak part, another time with the Hungarian one. Only an agreement of two equal partners could lead to a progress. And not only in Slovak-Hungarian relations, but Romanian-Hungarian ones as well.
III.
The third thematic block of the monograph contains Michela’s essayistic texts about the character of historical culture in Slovakia. Containing an extensive critique of work of Slovak historians, the chapter belongs to a series of the most reflexive texts ever written in Slovak historiography (Ľubomír Lipták, Ján Mlynárik, Dušan Kovác, Roman Holec). The author explains to a reader why professional historiography in Slovakia is politized, polarized and burdened with a nationalistic paradigm in interpretation of history. He states manifold reasons for it, among them a weak openness toward foreign historiographies, a service in benefit of particular interests of political circles, or a reluctance of majority of historians (“grey zone”) to take part in discussions about controversial fields of historical science. In this section, the author adhered to generalizations rather than specifications, therefore it is fairly to presuppose that the critique falls on unfertile ground. The chosen “disguise” strategy could be deciphered as a caution, and overall auctorial intention not to come into a direct confrontation with various historians in the local narrow community of historians. That is to say, his critique is not oriented only toward one historiographical fraction in the frame of bipolar interpretation of national narrative – in this paper, the two fractions are called established historians versus rehabilitators of Tiso’s regime—but it is launched against the local historical community as a whole. From the discourse of the chapter it could be deducted that the author does not consider the ideologically conditioned segmentation on “good” and “bad” historians to be ideal. But Michela’s pursuit of objectivity and impartiality in this cardinal scholarly and, at the same time, all-society conflict contradicts with his own argumentations, whereas the majority of criticized ailments in professional work of Slovak historians (ethnocentrism, adherence to national paradigm, absence of scholarly concepts) relates mainly to rehabilitators of Tiso’s regime. Belauding of high-class and abroad competitive crucial works of Slovak historiography that come exclusively from the circle of established historians is not appropriately made provision for. Anyhow, a deficiency of the whole Michela’s narrative about bipolarization of Slovak history could be seen in presenting the two fractions as equal (regarding personnel countability, institutional anchoring, foreign acknowledgements, and partially regarding the scholarly quality of historiographical production as well). This way, an unconcerned reader gets an image of two parallel interpretation schemes of Slovak history which enjoy equal position in Slovak historical culture. But this is an error, how it uncompromisingly expressed Dušan Kováč.10 If production of such an image was not intention of the author and editor, then it was a mistake to publish older essay chapters – originally dedicated to a narrow scholarly community – without an appropriate supplementation of the text. For any Slovak historian, it is clear that rehabilitators of Tiso’s regime form only a minority of local scholarly community (a detailed sociological study would be welcomed), they are ostracized by the majority of established historians, and generally unaccepted abroad at international events, but a regular Hungarian (or even a Slovak one) laic reader doesn’t have to necessarily understand it. Similarly, he would not understand what established historians found specifically fault with Ďurica’s book from 1997, or for the sake of what symbols and cultural codes established historians protested against the statue of Svätopluk in Bratislava Castle in 2010, or because of what reasons they refused to accept interpretation of ruler’s title for Svätopluk as a royal one – hence which fraction had disposed forcible arguments in this disputes – because it remains unexplained in the text. In that manner,
10 KOVÁČ, Dušan. O historiografii a spoločnosti. Bratislava : Historický ústav SAV, 2010, p. 234. 108
Človek a spoločnosť [Individual and Society], 2016, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 101-111. Following the track of Ariadne’s thread. Reflexions to the Miroslav Michela’s work “In labyrinths of Trianon” because of conservative and moderate discourse, a well-intentioned critique gets fragmentized and loses an actual recipient, which is a pity, because the author – which is more than enough familiar with local scientific conditions – is competent to point out to all problems in a more specific and radical way, as evidenced by his press contributions which I recommend to read as an obligatory supplement to his book.
Michela’s moderate reservation against rehabilitators of Tiso’s regime could be understand in the context of the fact that he started his scholarly career (2002–2004) as a fosterling of the “generation of young historians”. For some of these young historians, the rehabilitation of Tiso became a paradigm. That was definitely not the case of Michela. However, in the text of his book, there is also a reference about creating a compromise narrative in Slovak historiography, a sort of “the third way”, the proponents of which would make provision not only to “positives” of Tiso’s regime, but also to the legacy of the Slovak national upraising. In my opinion, if such a tendency occurred (mainly in 2000s), in the end of the day, it was only a variation of the rehabilitation narrative.
However, Miroslav Michela strongly reserved himself against rehabilitators in one point, when refusing a thesis of some of rehabilitators about detaching the controversial political regime of 1939–1945 from the Slovak statehood. He considers such a thesis as a sign of moral relativism which is a way of a critique that shall be more assertively followed in Slovak historiography. Namely, in global comparison, the Slovak rehabilitation narrative has to do with reproduction of defected codes of memory, the spreading of which (a denial of crimes of fascism and communism and its ethnicization) is noticeable in manifold countries of the world. Analysts of defected codes of memory warn against these codes having ability to reverse the current moral order via obliterating of memory and negative evaluating of acts leading to crimes. A consistent usage of defected codes in communication could lead to permanent re-programming of a narrative, thus to changes in collective memory of whole communities.11 This theory proved right in Slovak election of 2016 when a neo-fascist political party – ideologically declaring its support for the criminal Tiso’s regime and praising his personality – became a parliament party. In insufficient reserving from Tiso’s regime in collective memory of Slovaks – as evidenced by an abundance of votes in benefit of neo-fascists in election of 2016 – takes also share Slovak historiography which, in reaction to condemn Marxist paradigm and terminology in the post- November period (after 1989), abandoned coding of Tiso’s regime as a (clero-)fascist one despite actually being one. The American historian James M. Ward, who as a sole scientist in the world so far took courage to operationalize currently valid theories of fascism (including “the new consensus”) in Slovak conditions in 1939–1945, designates Tiso specifically as a Christian-National Socialist: “He is the only Catholic priest to head a national state that willingly participated in the Holocaust”.12 Despite the fascist theories not being longer unknown among Slovak historians,13 their application in local conditions seems to hit an inconquerable snag deeply imbedded in Slovak historical culture. The Slovak historian Anton Hruboň, who accepted that according to the theory of new consensus even the Hlinka’s People Party shall be considered as fascist, pointed out that such an interpretation will not find any proponents in the circle of Slovak historians due to inflation of the term fascism during the period of the state
11 NOWAK-FAR, Artur – ZAMĘCKI, Łukasz (eds.). Defective Codes of Memory : How the Memory of International Crime is Distorted in Public Discourse. Warsaw : Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Poland, 2015, p. 224. 12 WARD, James M. Priest, Politician, Collaborator : Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia. Ithaca; London : Cornell University Press, 2013, p. 289-290. 13 DRÁBIK, Jakub. K problematike definície pojmu fašizmus, „nového konsenzu“ a vývoja v bádaní o fašizme. In Historický časopis, 2014, vol. 62, no. 4, p. 695-718. 109
Človek a spoločnosť [Individual and Society], 2016, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 101-111. Following the track of Ariadne’s thread. Reflexions to the Miroslav Michela’s work “In labyrinths of Trianon” socialism.14 But why should we consent ourselves with such a constatation? Shall not be abandoned an approach, according to which everything claimed during the state communism was ideologically conditioned and thus inevitably defected? Are we not betraying ourselves, if we claim that Tiso’s regime was not fascist (but authoritarian only), because, perhaps, our fathers, grandfathers and grand grandfathers did not remember it as such, only the communists did? Is it not a contradiction between national collective memory and universal scientific theory? This questions need detailed analysis, because, for example, Rodobrana, Hlinka’s Garda or Hlinka’s People Party were classified as fascist organizations already in the after-war legislation of the third Czechoslovak Republic, hence before formation of socialist dictatorship.15
Pictures 1 and 2: Both fascist regimes, the Slovak Ľudák one and the Croatian Ustaše one, were grounded as by- products of the Third Reich’s foreign policy. Cultural transfer of fascist ideology into Central and Southeast Europe is obvious even in such an elementary human activity as an act of greeting (Heil Sieg). In contrary with the Croatian leader Ante Pavelić (pictured right), who demanded preservation of the Croatian state from the Allies on 4th of May 1945 (unsuccessfully), the president of Slovakia Tiso remained implicitly faithful to the Naci visions of the world till the end of his life.
In every case, in my opinion, the failure of Slovak historiography to recognize – following the scientific methods – in Tiso’s regime a local variant of fascism leads to a reproduction of defected codes of memory, which causes malfunction of cognitive ability of many Slovaks to evaluate acts leading to crimes in accordance with the moral and ethics principles valued in Western civilisation. It concludes an ignorance of war crimes (foreign politics of an aggressor) and crimes against humanity (the Holocaust and other racial, ethnic or religiously conditioned persecutions) committed in competence of Tiso’s regime between 1939–1945, which allows trouble free identification with the legacy of such a regime, its ideology and political praxis – if this was not fascist in opinion of Slovak historians – prospectively exercisable in the present when solving burning social problems (such as the “Roma question”).
14 HRUBOŇ, Anton. Fašistický mýtus znovuzrodenia v kontexte ideológie Národnej obce fašistickej a Rodobrany. In Český časopis historický, 2015, vol. 113, no. 2, p. 454-487. 15 Compare the Presidential Decree: „Dekret presidenta republiky ze dne 19. června 1945 o potrestání nacistických zločinců, zrádců a jejich pomahačů a o mimořádných lidových soudech“. However, in Slovakia valid the Act of the Slovak National Council: „Nariadenie Slovenskej národnej rady č. 33 zo dňa 15. mája 1945 o potrestaní fašistických zločincov, okupantov, zradcov a kolaborantov a o zriadení ľudového súdnictva“. 110
Človek a spoločnosť [Individual and Society], 2016, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 101-111. Following the track of Ariadne’s thread. Reflexions to the Miroslav Michela’s work “In labyrinths of Trianon”
However, is such a development desirable? Social praxis should be exactly retrograde: in the context of politics of memory of a democratic constitution, it is inevitable to consider re- cultivation of the rehabilitators narrative in Slovak historiography as propagation of fascist ideology, and as such it shall be prohibited by law. Hereafter, it is a civilisation mission of such moral authorities – as Miroslav Michela undoubtedly is – to effectively eliminate defected codes of memory of inhabitants, pointing out to dangers resulting from self-identification with undemocratic ideologies, and elaborating on moral lessons learned from criminal acts which international community experienced in consequence of two world wars. Simply said, one Slovak shall feel the same moral responsibility for 71 000 killed Jews as one German already feels for 6 000 000. Otherwise, we will never reconcile with the fascist past of our ancestors and our country.
Despite considering the text of the book “In Labyrinths of Trianon” as a moderate condemnation of rehabilitators of the fascist Tiso’s regime, it is one of the most erudite and very needed critiques produced in this agenda from the fraction of established historiography in Slovakia.
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