Discourses of Contemporary History in Hungary After 1989 a Fragmented Report

east central europe 44 (2017) 216-248

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Discourses of Contemporary History in Hungary after 1989 A Fragmented Report

János Rainer M. Hungarian National Széchényi Library, 1956 Institute; Eszterházy Károly University, Eger, Hungary [email protected]

Abstract

The study examines Hungarian historiography since the Hungarian democratic transformation. Its main question is how Hungarian history writing was able to r eformulate itself during the short period after 1989. In academic and public discourse one can observe parallel processes of de-ideologization and re-ideologization towards a one- sided commitment to the national(istic) viewpoint. The study starts by setting the general scene and examining the politics of memory within the fields of general focus, i.e., the discourses of memory politics and institutions. Afterwards, it discusses two focal themes in greater detail: 1956 and the Kádár era on one hand, and the Horthy era on the other. The discussion follows the order in which these themes emerged in the discourse. It also contains a short overview of the memory politics linked to the given theme as well as the various currents in history writing, narrating and interpreting these important issues of the national historical canon.

Keywords

Hungarian contemporary history – historiography – memory politics – Eastern Europe – post-Communism – interwar era – 1956 Hungarian revolution – Kádár period

The two and a half decades that have elapsed since the Hungarian democratic transformation is a short period of time in historiography. Nevertheless, giving an account of this period that covers the whole span of history writing is very difficult, even in the case of such a small country as Hungary. A 2011 book

Discourses of Contemporary History in Hungary after 1989 217 by Ignác Romsics, Clio bűvöletében. Magyar történetírás a 19–20. században (“Under Clio’s charm. Hungarian history writing in the 19th–20th century”), offers only a short glimpse at the post-1989 era and deals exclusively with the system of institutions, journals, book publishing, etc. Romsics refrained from raising thematic issues and did not discuss the works of historians born after 1945. In the last sentences of the book he remarked that the pre-1989 ideological barriers disappeared and the historical discipline’s mainstream was constituted by those who had already committed themselves to an “objective approach” well before 1989. Besides the mainstream, two other groups were formed: the politically committed and charlatans. In a lecture given at the time his book was published, he went a little further (Romsics 2010). Rather than discussing tendencies and methodological issues, he seems to have been sug- gesting some sort of overproduction crisis. In his view, in Hungary there are too many universities that give a history degree and there too many research institutes as well, something which has a strong detrimental effect on quality: “Is there really need for so many institutes? For instance, three minority research institutes and several institutes dealing with twentieth-century Hung arian history? As is well known, some of these were bound to political trends and ideologies at the time of their establishment and to a certain extent have kept functioning on the same grounds ever since. Following this logic however, at least two more institutes should urgently be established: one that is righter, and one that is different in comparison with the others.”1 Insofar as journals are concerned, their numbers are equally high, but “none of them could be seen as representative, fulfilling the same orienting role that the Historische Zeitschrift, the Revue Historique, or the American Historical Review does.” Romsics was obviously advocating for a center that, with its politics-free, positivist authority, would establish directions in a field defined by political, methodological, and thematic pluralism and market competition. In the early 2000s, the social historian Gábor Gyáni, who has a wide range of research interests besides historiography, devoted several essays to the post- 1989 transformations of the discipline of history (Gyáni 2002; 2007). As a phi- losopher of history, Gyáni was most of all interested in the epistemological and methodological foundations and the practices of Hungarian history writing. According to him, the regime change was not accompanied by a change of either fields, and the transformation—if there was any—was more of a step

1 Romsics is alluding here to the two new political parties which got into the parliament that year: Jobbik (meaning both “better” and “the one to the right”) and Lehet Más a Politika or lmp (trans.: Politics Can Be Different)—in his view all other parties already had their own institutes of contemporary history.

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218 Rainer backwards. Neither epistemological doubt (and the resulting eagerness to experiment) nor the new, sociological methods have made a deep impact. As Gyáni put it in 2004, the Hungarian mainstream was still writing history in a nineteenth-century historicist fashion; what is more, this trend only gained real momentum after 1989. This “naïve positivism,” producing a plethora of syntheses on the political history of the nation, is usually enclosed within a national framework and creates primarily histories of statehood. This tendency affects school curricula as well. Meanwhile, social history remained a subcul- ture. Elsewhere Gyáni was more lenient and claimed that a series of up-to-date methodologies did persist, develop, and had their own workshops and forums. He further mentioned social history writing, cultural history and microhistory, and even contemporary political and diplomatic history which started flour- ishing in the wake of the “archival revolution.” The same opinion was voiced ten years ago by Sándor Horváth (2006) regard- ing the narrower field of contemporary history. He examined the paradigms that shaped depictions of state socialism in Hungary and in the world. In the 1960s–70s, revisionist social history and the parallel explanatory framework of modernization replaced the totalitarian paradigm, and was itself supplanted in the 1990s by the new cultural history, inspired by the linguistic turn. This new paradigm defined culture as a sum of social practices. By contrast, in Hungary—according to Horváth—it was the revolution-centered historical narrative that persisted, the roots of which reached back to the 1950s. After 1990, the dawn of the new era was located in 1956, and was being described in similar terms as 1917 once was in socialist salvation histories. This teleological view of history that interpreted the socialist era as a route to 1989 embraced the totalitarian framework with ease. Meanwhile, the adoption of social history was belated and everyday history was barely existent. In a study written few years ago, Horváth (2014) already enumerates several works that reject teleology and the totalitarian paradigm and that experiment with up-to-date methodologies, albeit only in relation to one aspect of the socialist period, namely collaboration. The most comprehensive account of the era’s Hungarian historiography was written by two (back then) young historians, Balázs Trencsényi and Péter Apor in 2007. In their view, fundamental changes occurred, among them, most importantly, a breakthrough in social history approaches and methods. A marked generational change also took place, even though they did not label that a breakthrough. Further, some of the methodological novelties charac- terizing Western scholarship appeared in Hungary as well. All this, however, did not challenge the solid objectivist convictions (even consensus) of the “guild.” Trencsényi and Apor examined both academic and public discourse

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Discourses of Contemporary History in Hungary after 1989 219 and perceived parallel processes of the former being de-ideologized, the latter re-ideologized. They found it significant that historians who participated in the latter discourse were authors on the periphery, non- or ill-integrated into the “guild” (elsewhere: profession), and had a one-sided commitment to the national viewpoint. Ten years ago, they posed the following question:

It remains to be seen—and most probably will be the topic of the essay somebody will write in 2015 about Hungarian historiography of the first decade of the third Millennium—whether this apparent plurality will have a paideistic value. That would entail the socialization of the old and new participants into a communicative culture where one has to accept the existence of radically divergent approaches and ideological directions and, what is more, learn to translate them into one’s own language in order to utilize some of their findings. Alternatively, plurality might well lead to the formation of mutually exclusive sub-cultures, based on specific internal norms of selection and vehement emotions towards the “insiders” who seem to possess the truth, and towards the “uninitiated,” who are at best “uninterested” or right-away “inimical.” In this case, it is a further question whether it will be possible at all to retain the plurality of sub-cultures in the long run. It may happen at some point that some political elite in power will tilt the balance to such an extent that it will become possible to re-impose a certain ideological homogenization.

Back then, Trencsényi and Apor still believed that Hungarian history writing “will be able to reformulate itself in a way that valorizes multiplicity not only in terms of the usual post-Herderian (or post-modern) legitimation, according to which every national culture adds something to the completion of human culture, but in the other direction as well, realizing that a culture gets richer and more interesting, and opens more windows to the external world, by the multiplicity of the pasts, sub-cultures, and alternative intellectual canons it manages to incorporate” (Trencsényi and Apor 2007: 63). It is exactly this issue that this following fragmented status report aims to address: Has this come to pass? I will start by setting the general scene and examining the politics of memory within the fields of general focus, i.e., the discourses of memory politics and institutions. Afterwards, I will discuss two focal themes of contemporary history (in Hungary this usually refers to the study of the twentieth century up to today) in greater detail: 1956 and the Kádár era on one hand, and the Horthy era on the other. The discussion will follow the order in which these themes emerged in the discourse. At the beginning of each section I will make a short overview of the memory politics relevant for the given theme and then

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220 Rainer discuss the various currents in history writing. Finally, I will make an attempt at answering the question posed by the two historiographers above.

1 Politics of Memory and the Institutions

Before 1989, the elite of Hungarian history writing (i.e., the Institute of History at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences [mta], a couple of departments at one or two universities, and a handful of independent scholars scattered in various institutes) could be counted among the crème de la crème of the E uropean scholarly community. They were living on a little island of freedom; could move, research, and express their opinion relatively unhindered. Significant works, even oeuvres were born this way, schools were founded, and professional and personal relations became established across borders (Gyáni 2010a). It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that having experienced the democracy of science, this elite generally was committed to liberal democratic values. This situation ceased after 1989: opportunities opened up for almost anyone who was able to take part in this free international and national discourse. Con- temporary history writing, however, was a special case. Like in other countries that had been following the Soviet model, basically no contemporary history writing of an academic level existed before 1989. Historians were not allowed to express their opinion freely or to make their research findings public. (Very few of them undertook to publish in samizdat form or in the West—they of course could write freely.) The academic field of contemporary history itself practically came into existence after 1989. Compared therefore to what had been before, the situation undoubtedly and fundamentally improved. The year 1989 seemed to be a very fortunate time for other reasons as well. First, the Soviet-type system not only controlled and restricted science, but paradoxically imbued it with great authority at the same time. Science—which of course meant an ideologically “conforming” and committed practice even in the freest countries in this respect, such as Hungary and Poland—was considered to be an engine behind the communist modernization project. Invested with this authority, the historian of the contemporary era thus became one of the important actors in the democratic change. They could explain—in 1988–89 already freely—how crucial the recent past was for a newborn democracy. Secondly, 1989 was the year of the “archival revolution” in Hungary as well. The Soviet-type system’s information monopoly ceased to exist and the various archives opened up. In the case of certain source groups, this was an especially problematic process (it actually still is, for instance in relation to the political police and foreign affairs), but the breakthrough is undisputable. Even though

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Discourses of Contemporary History in Hungary after 1989 221 the 1992 Act on the protection of personality rights restricted access, “academic researchers”—those, who could obtain “the supporting statement of an institution professionally engaged in academic research”—could get to know their contents. Thus, democratic legislation created (in a not-so-democratic fashion) a virtual order of professional researchers. However, historians of the contemporary period (not unlike historians of other eras), also had to face a series of challenges after 1989. One of these was generated by the rehabilitated and liberated communicative memory (Assmann 1999; Gyáni 2010b; Gyáni 2012: 357–375). The revered, mythical stories about the national past endured and were transmitted but were not pre- sented publicly (of course with a few exceptions, among them György 2000 and several others). This traditional collective story focused on politics and the nation, and was about the latter’s exposure, betrayal, and innocence. Sudden- ly, it became possible to access and formulate all the individual experiences of actors and witnesses. After the long silence and the lack of confrontation between various experiences,2 this change sounded like a sonic boom (for the theoretical implications of this situation in a national and international context, see Kovács 2008). The second challenge undermined the inherited and—during the regime change—seemingly reinforced authority of science. For who else substantiated the anti-national communist image of the past, if not the historian? The third challenge came in the wake of the need for a methodological rejuvenation. Epistemological doubt and skepticism affected the academic micro-community that was serving the new historical legitimacy of the democratic transformation as well. The challenges converged: “science” pointed out in vain that what was heard was in fact memory constructed by the new situation, and that it had to transpire through three decades of Kádár era experiences. The conflict was impossible to avoid. The most significant challenge was posed by the new politics of memory. In the late period of the Soviet-type system, this politics was influencing history writing less and less: basically, it was only supervising a number of taboo areas. Such an area above all was 1956, the cornerstone of which was neither the 23rd of October, nor the 4th of November for that matter, but December 1956, with the establishment of the Kádár regime. At the same time, a couple of years after 1956, the regime basically stopped further conceptualizing the by then canonized and carefully guarded image of 1956. The places of memory created

2 Access to Western émigré memoirs was extremely limited, and in Hungary it was only the appointed representatives of the official standpoints who were allowed to reflect on them. The situation was the same with the samizdat, which also gave voice to memories, but these were far from reflecting the pluralism of collective memory.

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222 Rainer by memory politics were few or blatantly empty. In 1989, new ideas made their way into memory politics and Hungarian history appeared a pluralistic interpretative field. The political sphere laid claims to history—each actor to its own history, which sooner or later naturally developed an exclusivist attitude. Nevertheless, the method, intensity, and dynamics of using history unfolded in a very specific way in Hungary (Black 1995). All political elites are inclined to historicize, and Hungarians are no exception. Among the regime-changing political forces, the Soviet-type system’s liberal opposition3 relied heavily on the memory of democratic eras and trends in contemporary Hungarian history: on early twentieth-century modernist, antinationalist radicalism, on the Horthy regime’s democratic opposition, and most importantly, on post-1945 democratic and non-communist left-wing political currents (notably István Bibó’s ideas, whose “discovery” is the democratic opposition’s merit), and on 1956. The nationalist-conservative opposition also has its roots in the opposition forces of the Horthy era4 and for a long time seemed to embrace the democratic legacies of the post-1945 era and of 1956 too. This provided the common language needed for engaging in joint action, targeting shared aims. The symbolic space of 1989 was dominated exclusively by history, more specifically by 1956. Afterwards, however, this joint history quickly came to an end. The protagonists of the new democracy did not agree on the necessity of historical legitimacy. They did not base their identity on a historicizing common language to the same extent. Their identities were not shaped by the same stories either. The first cracks on the edifice of memory politics thought to be common appeared already when the first law of the new democratic parliament on the historical significance of 1956 was being formulated. The leaders of the election-winning national-conservative party, mdf (Hungarian Democratic Forum), omitted Imre Nagy’s name from the text. By doing so, they sent a clear message rejecting left-wing interpretations of the revolution together with its symbolic, communist leader. Later, disputes about the republic’s coat of arms and national holidays further deepened the conflict. The choice fell on the coat of arms with a crown that was in use until 1944, instead of the so-called Kos- suth coat of arms of 1956; at the same time, instead of the 15th March or 23rd

3 The self-designation used in their contemporaneous writings and forums was “democratic opposition.” 4 Namely in the literary-political movement led by ‘népi’ writers and sociologists. The Hungar- ian word ‘népi’ means ’populist,’ but in the late thirties it reflected upon the origins of the group (coming from the ranks of ordinary people) on the one hand, and their main subject (the life and conditions of the common people, especially the peasants) on the other.

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Discourses of Contemporary History in Hungary after 1989 223 of October, it was the 20th of August, St. Stephen’s Day, that became elevated to the status of national holiday. These moves shifted the emphasis from the memories of late modern democratic and independence movements to the thousand-year continuity of the Hungarian state, within which democratic emancipation was only an episode. The new prime minister József Antall originally was a historian, which means that this shift most probably was the result of a conscious decision. Antall gave space to initiatives of (a not very successful) lustration and transitional justice, but was not especially active in other areas of memory politics. Despite various initiatives, he did not alter the institutional system of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (mta). He respected university autonomy, and thus their staff remained unchanged for a time. The documents of the communist state party (1948–89) were nationalized, but the remainders of the former party archives and the onetime institution for party history could transform it into a research institute for contemporary history, loosely tied to the Hungarian Socialist Party (mszp). The establishment in 1991 of the only newly founded research institute, the 1956 Institute, indi- cates the special role the revolution’s memory played in the regime change. The Open Society Archives, the other new institution, was entirely linked to György Soros (who also gave support to the 1956 Institute), and was founded in 1995 within the framework of the Central European University and since then has become an important site of research, as well as an archive of contemporary history, with state-of-the-art technology. In the early years after the transition, the liberal side was the strongest opposition to the nationalist-conservatives. They attempted to create an alternative view of the recent past, in which the movements critical of and oppositional to the Soviet-type system received an emphatic role. On the conservative side these movements were depicted as insignificant at the time. Meanwhile, the socialists remained passive in this issue, which is understandable, since a significant portion of their second- and third-rank leadership derived from the Kádár era elite. After winning the 1994 elections, they did make a few symbolic gestures (Gyula Horn, party leader and prime minister, demonstratively laid a wreath on Imre Nagy’s grave), but they mostly handed memory politics over to their coalition partner, the Alliance of Free Democrats (szdsz). From then on, the nationalist-conservatives started to emphasize anti-communism more and more vigorously, something that before was only one part of their eclectic politics of memory. When the 1998 elections were won by the Alliance of Young Democrats (fidesz), a party that used to be liberal-alternative but went through a national-conservative conversion, their leader, Viktor Orbán partially reached back to the Antallian legacy. Once again, the rhetoric and

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224 Rainer representation of the thousand-year-old Hungarian statehood came into the spotlight of memory politics. In 2000–2001 a veritable campaign was organized, during which the royal crown was transported from the National Museum to the most majestic, most spectacular section of the House of Parliament, the middle of the hall beneath the dome. The theory that the “communist” period was a dead end also derives from József Antall. In this narrative, the Hungarian state’s (legal) continuity was bro- ken in 1944–45, after which only a single mythical event, 1956, can be singled out, and even that lasted only for a split second and bore no result. Orbán, however, did include 1956 into his historico-political narrative of contemporary history. In this view, the time between 1945 and 1990 was the great history of grievances against Hungarian society, affecting the whole of society continuously and in an undifferentiated manner. A double repression was exercised by for- eigners (Soviets) and by the communists simultaneously. For the construction and propagation of this narrative, new institutes were founded: the Institute of the Twentieth Century in 1999 to deal with the post-1945 era, and the Institute of the Twenty-First Century (2001) to research issues of the new Hungarian democracy. At the same time, in 1998 state support was abolished for the research institutes founded earlier, such as the 1956 Institute and the Institute for Political History, which received funding under both mdf and mszp gov- ernments. Finally, in 2002, the House of Terror museum was established as the central memorial place of the new narrative. The museum’s permanent exhibition created a direct continuity between Hungarian Nazis and Communists. This theory was not only based on the coincidence that in 1945 the abandoned building of the Arrow Cross headquarters was occupied by the Communist state security police. According to the creators of the House of Terror (most importantly Mária Schmidt, political advisor to Viktor Orbán and chief director of the Institutes of the Twentieth-Century and the Twenty-First-Century and of the House of Terror), the main element of continuity was violence. At the same time, in the presentation of the House of Terror, the violence used by the Communist regime was more wide-ranging and oppressive than the Hun- garian state’s participation in the Holocaust. The talented and powerful combi- nation of Madame Tussaud-style naturalism (reconstructed torture chambers in the cellar) and twenty-first-century interactive media devices converges into an impressive exhibit, which invokes strong emotions. The problem, however, lies in the simplifying approach and proportions. For this reason, the House of Terror incited a heated debate and strengthened the political nature of the discourse on contemporary history. The socialist-liberal government that returned to power in 2002 did not re- strict the operation of the House of Terror. The exhibition remained unchang ed

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Discourses of Contemporary History in Hungary after 1989 225 and became a pilgrimage site for those of a national-conservative mindset, as well as a major attraction of the city. The socialist side still had no answer, and prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány came up with an original initiative of memory politics (albeit tailormade for the socialists) only after their second electoral victory in 2006. He proposed that the socialist party had to choose between the “legacy” of Imre Nagy or János Kádár. He himself opted for the leftist legacy of Imre Nagy and 1956. The conservatives were distrustful and interpreted it as either mere rhetoric or deceit, the same way they rejected all other initiatives by the prime minister. At the same time, Gyurcsány’s own supporters were not enthusiastic either. Meanwhile, the discourse of contemporary history (together with its major fissures) reached the period of the regime change in 1989. In this respect, the rising far right resurrected two, earlier radical conservative theories from the early 1990s. The first one had an inherently critical attitude towards the regime change because a radical change of elites had not taken place. According to the other, those responsible for the “crimes” of the previous system should have been impeached. The far right claimed that in fact no regime change had taken place, since all the leading positions were held by the same “old communists”; moreover, those “liable” for the previous system and those liable for the transition should all be tried in court. In 2010, the victorious national-conservative memory politics had two decades of experience to rely on. Essentially, there was only one novel element: a peculiar, “modernized” version of an interwar theory. In this view, the prevailing left had been fighting for anti-national causes throughout the twentieth century, occasionally in the direct service of foreign powers. This is essentially the extension of a basic tenet of the Horthy era discourse, the responsibility Hungarian liberals, radicals, leftists, Jews, and communists had for Trianon, pushed onto the entirety of the twentieth century, even 1989. The 2010 Manifesto of National Cooperation labeled the period between 1990 and 2010 as the “muddled decades after the regime change.” The preamble of the 2011 constitution—in a somewhat contradictory way to the manifesto—states that Hungary’s “political self-determination which was lost on 19 March 1944, was restored on 2 May 1990, the formation of the first freely elected system of parliamentary representation.” This was in fact a step back from the euphoria of the great 2010 victory, when memory politics was considering fairly extreme ideas as well, such as the notion of a 2010 “revolution.”5 The grievance-based national rhetoric that denied and transferred responsibility did not change: the undifferentiated national history of grievances applied to the whole twentieth century. The Hungarian story was still fashioned as discontinuous, but it

5 Orbán’s words in his speech after the announcement of the 2010 election results.

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226 Rainer was not anymore only the Soviet-type system’s variants that led to a dead end: the new construction warmed up to the denial of the values of (Western-style) modernization as well. The number of social-political traumas that had dominated historical discourse now increased with the trauma of the regime change of 1989. Meanwhile, the Hungarian Holocaust and especially the responsibility of Hungarian administration and society in the deaths of more than half-a- million Hungarian citizens, and in the deprivation of rights of many more, was still missing from that list traumas (Karsai 2016a). In the 2010s the state made investments of an unprecedented proportion to canonize this historical narrative. A series of new institutions were established (Institute for the Research of the History of the Regime Change, Institute for the Research of Communism, VERITAS Historical Research Institute, Com- mittee of National Remembrance, Institute of National Heritage), where the number of people researching the twentieth century was at least 3–4 times more than at the end of the previous decade. Funding for research is abundant: the 2015 government budget of Hungary included ten million euros for these new institutions, which was increased again in 2016.6 The institution leaders are not shy about their offensive aims: eradicating the “leftist historical perspective” that (in their view) has been dominant so far. Part of the strategy is the infusion of the new canon into education, which is only a matter of time: the national curriculum framework has already been created and the com- plete series of unified and compulsory textbooks is under way. Furthermore, attempts have been made to create new symbolic places (points of memory in physical and virtual space), the crown jewel of which was meant to be the Me- morial for the Victims of the German Occupation, erected in 2015 at Szabadság Square. Unexpectedly, this intention was partially thwarted by society’s resistance: the memorial became a symbolic place for those opposing the nationalist politics of memory. By now it should already be clear what a lopsided story this is. Starting from the ‘népi’ beginnings, to the Antallian conservative attempts, and then the right-wing radicalism of Orbán and his companions, the Hungarian right has always had a politics of memory. Often (even today), it seems that within the field of humanities, the right is in fact only interested in the recent past. By contrast, the silence of the Hungarian left in memory politics has changed little.7

6 For the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of 1956, the government designated 44 million euros at the disposal of a commission led by Mária Schmidt, the leading memory politician of fidesz. More than half of this sum was aimed at financing the central state celebrations and commemorative events. 7 See footnote 4 above.

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Discourses of Contemporary History in Hungary after 1989 227

The liberals’ attempt at the creation of a sort of realist national self-imag e proved to be weak and inefficient. The alternative leftist historical narrative is fundamentally defensive. If not, then it focuses on the often highly abstract concepts of progress and modernization, which to a certain degree apply to the Soviet-type system as well. So far, however, this narrative does not seem to be very successful. The images of the recent past entertained by the various political communities are at present incompatible. The “leftist interpretation of history” that is targeted for eradication by the nationalist-conservatives seems to mean any non-politicized (or non-nationalist, non-ethnicist) mode of talking about history, including all approaches (be they conservative, avant-garde, or anything in between) based on analysis and comprehension—perhaps especially those.

2 Historical Discourses—1956 and the Kádár Era

In a sense, the democratic transition in Hungary started with the liberation of discussions concerning 1956. As far as politics of memory was concerned, in 1989 it seemed that 1956 would become the new Hungarian democracy’s prime positive basis of legitimacy. However, it quickly became only one among many. Its place and interpretation was to be understood within a greater context, that of the remembrance of the Soviet-type system. In the beginning, this place undoubtedly was an important one, a stage on the road to 1989, or possibly its beginning, its dramatic, early prelude. Thus 1956 was inscribed into a teleological narrative.8 Towards the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, this state of affairs changed significantly. The particular identity-shaping power of 1956—and thus its significance in memory politics—continued to weaken. After 2010, its only surviving aspect was the one related to communist crimes, and even that existed exclusively within right-wing memory politics. The last living representative of the Kádárist elite that gained power in 1956, Béla Bisz- ku was tried at court in 2015 for the crimes committed during the revolution. His conviction was obviously meant to set the scene for the revolution’s sixtieth anniversary commemoration. Biszku, however, died in the spring of 2016, before the second verdict was passed, and so this project seems to have failed. Meanwhile, in 2014, a (more) moderate, but undoubtedly politically right-wing way of history writing gained institutional legitimacy through the Committee of National Remembrance. The committee’s president, Réka Kiss, underlined

8 The title of the 1991 June international conference in Budapest and the following publication (“The place of the 1956 Hungarian revolution in the collapse of the Soviet communist system”) was strongly suggestive of this interpretation, see Békés (1993).

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228 Rainer the importance of research and scholarly approach in several statements. It seemed possible that parallel to the hegemonic tendencies, the right-wing politics of memory will become pluralized. The Orbán government entrusted a committee with organizing the sixtieth anniversary commemorations of 1956. Its president was a minister, while the actual leader was the government’s chief advisor in memory politics, the former historian Mária Schmidt. I will not discuss the details of the campaign, only the interpretation of history at its core. This particular interpretation equated the revolution exclusively with its most radical actors, the young armed insurgents of Budapest. Only they are the heroes was the message of both the rhetoric and visuals.9 The extensive social involvement, the various revolutionary institutions, and the colorful political spectrum basically disappeared. What did 1989 mean for the historians’ discourse on 1956? First, it was 1989 and the archival revolution (i.e., the accessibility of contemporary history’s documents) that created the scholarly discourse in Hungary. It seemed that the most important new primary sources were those shedding light on the revolution’s international (especially the diplomatic) context and the ones documenting the reprisal following the revolution. The revolution’s former interpretation became discredited and soon disappeared from both public and scholarly discourse. The first interpretation to become dominant was the liberal-democratic version about an antitotalitarian political revolution. It relied on the paradigm that emphasized the totalitarian character of the Soviet Union and the Soviet-type systems. At the same time, in the early years after 1989, a leftist 1956 reception was still strong, which was critical towards the totalitarian paradigm and had ties to revisionism. This view understood the events as a socialistic/socialist/council-based or (socialist) workers’ revolution.10

9 The campaign relied mostly on a somewhat outdated method of visual influencing: gi- ant posters hung on buildings and walls. These posters all showed (with one exception) armed young people. The exception was cardinal József Mindszenty, who was released from prison during the revolution and seemed to be the most conservative participant in the events. The internet-based culture practically exploded these intentions, especially when it turned out that one of the pictures did not correspond to the name on the cap- tion. Instead of the well-known right-wing theater actor, the picture showed a young in- dustrial apprentice, who was an accidental passer-by in all probability. 10 A very telling indication of the historiographical situation in 1989 is the conference report containing the materials of a three-day conference held in Budapest in June 1991 (Békés 1993). Forty-four scholars from three countries delivered lectures at this scholarly event on 1956, that had been the greatest to date in Hungary. The event featured several generations and very different political and historiographical approaches. On the

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Up till the beginnings of the 2000s, the Hungarian revolution’s historiography was relatively little influenced by the changes in Hungarian memory politics. For a long time, this historiography remained emphatically centered on politics, related in many ways to the discourses of New Cold War Hist ory. In general, it seemed that the teleological interpretation based on the totalitarian paradigm was able to offer a long-term answer to questions about the historical significance of the Hungarian revolution. Within the ’56–’89 framework, the revolution was the prelude to a long-span structural change. That this dignified role was “claimed” by several other events (such as the Pol- ish Solidarność revolution in 1980–81), as well, did not really bother this cliché. From the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, however, more and more voices expressed the view that the Hungarian revolution did not fundamentally alter the existing structures. One of the explanations was that they had already been changing independently since the death of Stalin or even before; in this sense, 1956 temporarily actually hindered, disturbed the process. Another explanation was that from a structural point of view, the system did not really change. Both explanations rely on theories about the post-totalitarian or authoritarian phase of the Soviet-type system (Rainer 2011; Mitrovits 2012; Ripp 2012). The former view posits two structural phases, but claims that the cause of change was neither a political event, nor (or not only) the movements of subjected societies, but the inner logic of totalitarian institutions and the leading elite’s realizations. According to the latter, the totalitarian institutions and potentials remained unchanged; it was the practice and style of functioning that was transformed. In 2006, Gábor Gyáni even questioned the Hungarian term forradalom (meaning “insurgency” and related to “fermentation”), which is customarily applied for the 1956 events and proposed instead the notion revolúció (in the sense of “reversal”) (Gyáni 2007b). From the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, the historian protagonists of right-wing memory politics did not engage in this discourse. Instead, they formulated their works (written mostly on particular questions) within the narrative of “communist crimes.” In a similar fashion to 1956, research on the Kádár era also only has a recent history in Hungary. Apart from few achievements of economic history (the an- tecedents of the economic reform), everything started in 1989 in this field as well (Rainer 2011: 97–137). Research on the era was influenced by three important factors. The first was the collective memory of the period. Its dominant narrative was about solid ascent and stability, which exhibited signs of crisis in the 1980s, but tensions remained under the surface (of public discourse).

workers’ revolution for instance see the articles by Bill Lomax and Cornelius Castoriadis (Békés 1993: 65–67 and 67–71).

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The other determining factor was the one-sided focus of memory politics on 1956. In this view, the Kádár era was nothing but a history after 1956. It starts on 4 November 1956, is defined by the post-revolution terror, and its emblematic event is 16 June 1958, with the execution of Imre Nagy and his companions; later on, the execution of the unnamed freedom fighter. The national-conservative memory politics had no other focal points in the Kádár era. The third factor was the accessibility of an enormous amount of primary sources, the process- ing and empirical research of which needed time, and consequently proper analyses appeared only towards the end of the 1990s. All this means that the relevant historiographical discourse has not been influenced by intentions of memory politics, and is still not really influenced to this day. The contemporaneous analyses of Kádárism were mostly authored by Hungarians writing in the West, and were also published there. Even the democratic opposition’s historiography was looking for inspiration in this pool of literature. These analyses were diverse, theoretically well-grounded and fresh, and constantly reflecting on ongoing debates about Soviet-type systems. The great post-1989 momentum however did not seem to rely on these works. Its theoretical framework remained the totalitarian paradigm (Gyáni 2002; Bartha 2003; Horváth 2006; Gyáni 2007a). Thus 1989 resulted in a theoretical void of some sort, in a positivist renaissance (Rupnik 1988). Differing voices were rather exceptional, but among them Melinda Kalmár’s monograph (applying modernization theory) on the ideology of early Kádárism definitely stands out (Kalmár 1998; Gyarmati 1996). Ever since, in Hungary no scholarly monograph has been written on the period. This, however, should not be surprising once we consider that a summary of the shorter and in many ways more extensively researched period of 1945–56 was only published as late as 2011, by György Gyarmati (2011). By contrast, abroad the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of the Kádár era was published relatively early. Rudolf Tőkés (1998) originally intended his work, which is essentially a history of the Hungarian regime change, for an American audience. The description of the Kádár era nevertheless is much more than a preface: it takes up almost three-quarters of the book.11 Tőkés was the first to use the documents of political decision-making bodies (the Central and Political Committees of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party [mszmp]) that were made accessible in 1989. His interpretative framework, though implic- it, was the totalitarian paradigm, and his aim was giving an explanation for the collapse of 1989. The causes of collapse in his view were “structural and

11 Before Tőkés, András Felkay (1989) published a monograph (naturally abroad) on the relations between Kádár era Hungary and the Soviet Union.

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Discourses of Contemporary History in Hungary after 1989 231 situational forces”: Hungary’s belonging to the Soviet alliance system and the communist party state’s “imperfect genetical code,” on the one hand, and the legacy of 1956, Kádár’s political personality, and the elite’s political culture, on the other. According to him, it was a totalitarian system that arrived at the threshold of the regime change, even though he did draw a marked distinction—referring to Richard Lowenthal (1983), who carried out a par- tial revision of the totalitarian paradigm—between three styles of political leadership, or rather, between the communist party’s three modes of behav- ior: the vanguard detachment-style, the system-management mode, and the “rearguard”-style (Tőkés 1998). Today, the most detailed Hungarian depiction of the Kádár era is chapter seven of Ignác Romsics’s magnum opus, the most widely accepted historical synthesis of contemporary history. Romsics’s book is problem-centered and uses a thematic, instead of a chronological narrative. He hardly wrote anything about the Kádár era’s political history, with the strange exception of foreign policy. Romsics uses the term “Hungarian model” for describing the Kádár- style system, a post-totalitarian, authoritarian dictatorship, in which social subsystems could achieve a degree of autonomy, such as in the rationalization of the planned economy during the 1968 economic reform, or in the cessation of ideological hegemony. Everyday life became de-politicized and satisfying society’s consumption needs became an important governmental ambition. The authoritarian system was thus characterized by a certain degree of flex- ibility, which, however, was not unlimited: the changes or the initiatives aimed at change were not allowed to touch upon the single-party system and the role of the Soviet Union (Romsics 1999: 399–400). The shift in approaches, themes, and generations of the early 2000s affected the depiction of the Kádár era as well. The mostly political system-related concepts gave way to methods and approaches heavily influenced by the linguistic turn and by postmodern interpretations and primarily coming from social history and the history of mentalities. Eszter Zsófia Tóth (2007) for instance was not that much interested in the period itself, but in the kinds of texts and signs through which the Kádár era Hungary constructed the actors of its own everyday, and the kinds of texts into which these actors formulated (and are formulating) their own life histories, ten years after the end of that world. She contrasted the official discourses with those of the memories, and did the same with memories themselves. Another book, written by Sándor Horváth (2009), is about the process in which the history of a youth street gang (the infamous “Nagyfa-galeri”) was fabricated in 1970. Here, sources shed light on the circumstances of the generation of the concomitant public story and on the motives of the story’s creators—and not on what really happened.

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Eszter Bartha (2009), who writes empirical social (working-class) history, published a work in which ample attention is given to the system paradigm of (post-)Stalinism as well. In her opinion, between the mid-1950s and 1968, Stalinism was replaced by a system called welfare dictatorship. Taking a different perspective, Péter György’s book, Néma hagyomány (“The silent tradition,” 2000) deals with the greatest taboo of all, the repression of the memory of 1956, positioning the moment of utterance, 16 June 1989, into focus. In a later collection of essays, he emphasized that on both sides of the world divided by the Cold War, modern societies were at work, having “differences of dramatic depths” and “being identical and in concord in the deepest sense.” The “simi- larity of the anthropological programs among the opponents was as great as the difference between the political interests and practices” (György 2005). At the end of the first decade of the 2000s, in a deeply personal historical essay based on his own father’s remembrance (or rather non-remembering), he expli- cates how Kádárism was the era of silences. Reflections on the series of mostly traumatic experiences that had been accumulating since the early twentieth century were finally concluded by the middle of the century (in György’s view, exactly in 1960–62). It was a conclusion, however, that did not organize them into stories, and hence there was no need to bother with interpreting them. What Kádárism offered to all groups and generations of society was the freedom of forgetting and of remaining silent, while the time of storytelling only arrived with the 1980s (György 2010). Kádár and Kádárism could have been brought into the spotlight of public discourse again either on the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolution, or the centenary of Kádár’s birth—but it did not happen. The national- conservative history writing did not have much to say about Kádár and his era: it was mostly about castigating his politics and his persona on an ethical basis (Vargyas 2007), without posing substantial questions. Sándor M. Kiss, in his 2012 survey, labeled the Kádár Regime (using a typical contradiction in terms) a “necessary forced compromise,” the legacy of which is “the collapse of a society led by a talented man, as a consequence of not having been able to meet even the minimal ethical requirements because of ideological commitments” (M. Kiss 2012: 48–55). It is not even clear whether in this section M. Kiss casti- gates Kádár or Hungarian society itself. In 2012, György Majtényi, a prominent representative of the turn of the millennium’s new generation, published a book on everyday life Kádárism (2012). He introduced a concept so far not used for Kádárism, ressentiment, which in his opinion describes Hungarian society’s mental state after the 1956 defeat very well. “It is the forcefully suppressed resistance, the post-terror state, the coerced surrender of resistance. Ordinary people in such situations—in the absence of an opponent who is possible to defeat and of space for real

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action—become unable to resist. Ressentiment is the expression of collective anger and envy that does not assume a visible form, and that does not have a clean-cut target. This is because individuals’ actions almost exclusively serve personal interests, work against each other, and hinder each other.” The society of ressentiment is stubborn (Majtényi took this from descriptions of communism in German social history), its members are neither followers, nor opponents of the dictatorship, they are individuals “able to adapt and always adapting to the various forms of power,” who “exclusively followed their own, direct interests” (Majtényi 2012: 11–12). Kádár acted so as to be seen by society (or by those stubborn individuals) as a man of ressentiment himself: someone, who also suffered a lot and to some extent—up there, at the peak of power— was a prisoner of the situation. “The first secretary became an emblematic fig- ure of society in public imagination, an antihero symbolizing the world after the suppressed revolution, a man without any specific characteristics, who was characterized exactly by a resemblance to ordinary people, by facelessness, by simplicity” (2012: 11–12). On the centenary of Kádár’s birth, the most significant publication was prepared by the openly leftist workshop of Hungarian contemporary history, the Institute of Political History.12 Earlier, the director of the institute, György Földes (2007), analyzed Kádár’s politics concerning Transylvanian Hungarians in a lengthy monograph. In his talk given at the conference, he opined that Kádár’s politics cannot be judged either based on its beginnings (his role in the suppression of the 1956 revolution and in the reprisals), or based on its end (the collapse of the Soviet-type system). In his view, one should rather examine how the society’s, the country’s (the state’s), and the nation’s fate unfolded within the frame of this individual’s lifetime and in interaction with it. The aim of such an exploration is to understand “the life in the face of challenges” (Földes 2012: 33). Földes tried to fulfill this ambitious task in his 2015 monograph on Kádár’s international negotiations and foreign policy. The essence of Kádárism in his opinion was “antinationalist nation-building.” The list of national interests to be enforced (“independence, sovereignty, the country’s security, ensuring the conditions of socioeconomic development, the

12 The institute’s journal, Múltunk (meaning “our past”), published a two-volume double issue titled “János Kádár and the faces of an era” (“Kádár János és egy korszak arcai”): Múltunk, 2012, vols. 1–2; they also organized a conference, see: Földes and Mitrovics (2012). Both at the conference and in the journal several historians expressed convictions different from those of the Institute of Political History, among others Ignác Romsics, László Borhi, Ervin Csizmadia, Roger Gough, György Majtényi, Béla Tomka, or for that matter the author of the present study.

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enrichment of common cultur al wealth,” responsibilities towards Hungarians stuck on the other side of the border, and the protection of their interests) was shortened by dropping the aim of independence. The success of the “antinationalist nation-building” depended on sovereignty, that is, on the Soviet-type social engineering project modified after 1953 and 1956. According to Földes, Kádár subordinated his foreign policy to this “strategy.” Földes interprets the Soviet-type system within the modernization paradigm, from which angle he sees Hungary as a successful variant. This is in line with the works of Iván T. Berend in the mid-1990s and Melinda Kalmár’s great opus of 2014 (Berend 1996; Kalmár 2014). The latter weaved the Kádár era’s entire history (even including the regime change) into the texture of international history; however, the grandiose depiction of the Soviet “galaxy” eclipses that of the Hungarian variant, rendering it almost insignificant. At present, the most fashionable research theme of Kádár era Hungary is the reprisals following 1956. The authors of works on the activities of the post-1956 state security service examine the Kádár era’s structures primarily through the totalitarian paradigm (in cases where the urge for a theoretical approach ap- pears at all) (Tabajdi and Ungváry 2008).13 It is as if histories of the state security (almost) took the place of traditional political history, even though as yet we have not even a linear, chronicle-type, comprehensive description about the workings of the Kádár era’s decision-making mechanisms.14

3 Historical Discourses—The Horthy-Complex

In 1989 and immediately after, the “recent past” in public discourse mostly meant post-1945 times: the period of the Soviet-type system, 1956, and the Kádár era. As a parallel process, from the 1990s onwards there was a height ened interest in the preceding era as well, primarily in those phases that earlier had been tabooed. Such phases were the beginning and end of the era, the 1918–19 revolutions, the Trianon Peace Treaty, and Hungary’s role in World War II. After 2010, a perceptible change took place—the post-1945 era’s privileged position was taken over by the Horthy era. This “renaissance” of Horthy and his era seems to have been the conscious decision of right-wing memory politics.

13 A comprehensive survey of the literature on the history of the state security service has yet to be written, and the topic’s significance renders it as much needed as its breadth makes it difficult to accomplish. 14 Naturally, we do have such accounts focusing on certain periods of crisis, see for instance Huszár (1998).

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The Hungarian right’s strategy of historical legitimization changed. Before, it had been characterized by an undifferentiated anti-communism, that is, by negative historicization. This became substituted by references to the Horthy era, i.e., by positive historicization. The shift is defined by strong symbolic politics on the part of the government. Alongside or instead of particular place constructions (such as the already mentioned memorial of occupation), whole spaces are being reconstructed: the project of refashioning the Kossuth Square in Budapest into its 1944 appearance, the Buda Castle’s planned restoration, and even the Városliget’s reshaping exhibits such “retro” features (like the rebuild- ing of the pre-1944 edifice of the Museum of Transport). Today, it is not simply that national-conservative memory politics uses symbols, themes, and occasionally the language of the Horthy era—it is more and more this tradition that integrates their camp. One of the marked manifestations of this situation is the constant reflection on the “trauma of Trianon,” and, as a solution to this, keep- ing some form of revision covertly on the agenda. Another characteristic is the supposition of Hungarian exclusivism and superiority. A further one is modern Hungarian xenophobia, the target groups of which are diverse (Jews, Gypsies, Romanians, more recently immigrants, etc.). And finally, the anti-liberalism that has replaced anti-communism (Tamási 2016). Within discourses of the intelligentsia, still only few commit themselves overtly to these features (with the exception of anti-liberalism), but their number is growing. The aggressive variant is (so far) extant only in subcultures, but the latent camp of “believers” is much greater, and the culture of allusions is simply in bloom. The “renaissance” of the Horthy era is a long story in itself.15 Kálmán Kéri, retired general and representative of mdf (the 1990 governing coalition’s leading party), stated in a speech as early as summer 1990 that the Hungar- ian army in World War II was fighting exclusively against Bolshevism—on whose side, is an almost marginal question. Prime Minister József Antall did not agree with this, but left room for this interpretation. The next stage in this debate was Miklós Horthy’s 1993 reburial in Hungary. Later, in the 2000s it was statues and memorials erected to the era’s personalities that incited similar controversies: Pál Teleki, former prime minster (2003), Miklós Horthy, former governor (2007), Ottokár Prohászka, Catholic bishop and ultraconservative thinker (2014), the Memorial for the Victims of the German Occupation (2014), Bálint Hóman, historian and minister of education and religion (its planned erection in 2015 was in the end cancelled), etc. In one of his statements Sándor

15 For an overview see László Karsai’s survey (2016). Karsai in my opinion was entirely right in situating the revisionist elements of the Horthy era within the history of contemporary Hungarian anti-Semitic discourse.

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Szakály, leader of the state research institute, Veritas, founded in the mid- 2010s, consciously borrowing a term from the bureaucratic vocabulary of the time, labeled the early phase of the Hungarian deportation and mass killing of Jews as a “procedure of policing immigrants.” Later, he openly questioned the anti-Semitic nature of the 1921 numerus clausus law. The institutions that are not openly pro government-nationalist usually react in a cautious and re- served manner to such signs. Among them, the most important is the Hungar- ian Academy of Sciences (mta), which tries to maintain the balance, and gives space for scholarly conferences that decidedly oppose revisionism as well. The Academy itself created a new institution under the name Trianon 100 Research Group (Trianon 100 kutatócsoport) with the leadership of an acknowledged scholar, Balázs Ablonczy. Ablonczy’s first statement promised a scholarly agenda at the same time reflecting the scholar’s anxiety at being situated in this very specific field of memory politics: “We have all reason to hope that by the time research will have come to an end in 2021, an 8–10 volume corpus (consisting of both primary sources and monographs) will be at our disposal that shall define research on the period for a long time and shall eliminate the lacunas in the era’s history. This way, the criticism frequently raised against Hungarian historiography, that ‘historians do not deal with Trianon’ will surely cease to be valid” (Ablonczy 2016). As far as relevant historiography (moving within this specific field) is concerned, its initial position was entirely different from that of 1956 and the Kádár era: unlike these, the interwar period was no terra incognita at the time of the 1989 reassessment. Hungarian historiography had been dealing with it especially vigorously since the early 1970s, and there were several ongoing debates. The most important of these seemed to be the one about the nature of the system. In 1989, the post-1945 simplified, one-sided interpretation (fascist, fascistoid, etc., regime) was already history. The leading representatives of late Kádár era Hungarian history writing, who had created a more complex and more scholarly image of the Horthy era, were still productive authors at the time of the transition: Miklós Lackó intellectual historian, political historians Mária Ormos, Zsuzsa L. Nagy, and Tibor Hajdu, social historian Péter Hanák, and historian of diplomacy Pál Pritz were all in their sixties. Perhaps it was only the highly distinguished György Ránki, originally economic historian and director of the Historical Institute at the mta, who passed away as early as 1988.16 The community of scholars was greatly layered, while conclusions were drawn

16 In surveying the historiography of the Horthy era, I mostly relied on Ignác Romsics’s studies and essays (Romsics 2004: 315–369; 2015: 329–412). See also: Turbucz (2012).

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Discourses of Contemporary History in Hungary after 1989 237 based on thorough research and more-or-less free disputes. Unlike scholars of the post-1945 period, historians dealing with the Horthy era did not come into the spotlight because of the regime change. The first important contribution of newer history writing is the book by Ignác Romsics, the preeminent specialist of the era in Hungary. His monograph on István Bethlen still counts as a foundational work on the interwar period. The author was right in considering Bethlen to be a politician defin- ing the character of the era: even though it was not named after him, he was the one who created its political system that lasted until 1944. Adapting the results of Western political science and hermeneutics, Romsics wrote an essentially neopositivist work, based on a large collection of sources. The same is true of his above-mentioned synthesis of twentieth century history. Following Romsics’s footsteps, one of the dominant genres of newer history writing on the era is political biography. Its most prominent representatives are: Mária Ormos’s monograph on Miklós Kozma (2000), Balázs Ablonczy’s biography of Pál Teleki (2005), Dávid Turbucz’s short summary of Miklós Horthy’s life (2011), and most recently László Karsai’s political biography of Ferenc Szálasi (2016). Ablonczy’s description of Teleki is a telling example of how this kind of historiography saw the Horthy era’s elite: “[Teleki’s] intellectual commitment, his mental habitus can be described most precisely as conservatism. He did not represent pre-revolution [1918–19] old conservatism, but neither was he committed to the political ideas of the Dualist era imbued with liberal elements. His conservatism was open to the ideas of the age, among them far-right to talitarian ideas as well.” Led by Romsics, it was mostly his disciples who elabo- rated on the Hungarian right-wing tradition, defined by the political structure, thinking, and values of the Horthy era (2009). The Horthy era determined two fundamental features of this tradition. The first one is the anti-liberalism inherited from neoconservatism, the deeply rooted skepticism towards democratic institutions, and the unclear attitude towards Western market economy. The second feature is the normative, ethnicist nation concept of the far right that often is exclusivist (back then anti-Semitic, but able to target all kinds of “aliens”), and mostly is only able to imagine social reform at the expense of these “aliens.” After World War I, the Hungarian right-wing tradition became once and for all bound to Trianon and revisionism. Miklós Zeidler wrote a monograph on the latter element (2009), which in fact is a history of Hungarian interwar foreign political thought, which understandably had the idea of revision at its focus. However, there is an enormous difference between a revisionism based on understanding and self-critical reflection and a revisionism substituting understanding and self-critical reflection. As Zeidler emphasized, Hungarian revisionism assumed the latter role in the interwar period.

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The history of political ideas in the broadest sense was researched by János Gyurgyák and Iván Zoltán Dénes. The Horthy era occupies only a chapter (though a book-sized one) in Gyurgyák’s two monographs on the discourses of the Jewish question and on the history of the concept of the Hungarian nation (2001; 2007). The third, final volume of his series, on the Hungarian “race defense movement,” deals with a par excellence interwar phenomenon (2012). The most important piece of Iván Zoltán Dénes’s multifaceted work (2015) is the grandiose biography of historian Gyula Szekfű, the interwar period’s most distinguished conservative intellectual. Rudolf Paksa published a monograph (2012) on the history of far-right political trends, while one of the most important opposition trends, the Hungarian ‘népi’ movement was dealt with by Gábor Kovács (2004) and István Papp (2008; 2012). Mária M. Kovács (2012) in her monograph on the first European anti-Semitic discrimination law gave an exemplary analysis of anti-Semitic public discourse and its legislative and social consequences. Krisztián Ungváry (2016) traced the history of the peculiar “white revolutionary” endeavor that tried to resolve social problems through restricting the wealth and work possibilities of Hungarians considered to be Jews.17 His time frame ranges from the second wave of anti-Semitic legislation towards the end of the 1930s to the Arrow Cross Party (Hungarian fascist) rule. After 1989, the historiography of the Hungarian Holocaust also became full- fledged, marked by the works of László Karsai (2001), as well as Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági (2014). Even though it is unquestionably politics, political ideas, and ideologies that are the focus of historiographical interest on the Horthy era, the summary work on the social history of the age was also published relatively early, by Gábor Gyáni (Gyáni and Kövér 1998, Gábor Gyáni’s section). The list is endless; I have not even mentioned for instance the excep- tionally intense research on military history. One of the major disputes about the era centered on its economic performance, something seen in a very negative light in earlier history writing. Based on Béla Tomka’s comparative analysis, today it is relatively widely accepted that this performance in fact deserves appreciation, and that the gap between Hungary and the European center did not widen in the era (Tomka 2011). The other important debate was waged by social historians: sociologist and returned Paris émigré Viktor Karády opined that Hungarian capitalist development did not create an integrated civil society. Its modern elements separated from the groups harboring premodern features, and the two societies even exhibited real or attributed ethnic, religious, and tradition-related differences.

17 The book’s first edition appeared in 2013 under a slightly different title.

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Gábor Gyáni strongly disputed Karády’s views, which were based on the works of Ferenc Erdei, the most eminent representative of interwar ‘népi’ sociogra- phy. In Gyáni’s view, the distinction mentioned above did not appear before the 1930s, and the idea that Hungarian society was a dual society is not tenable either (the debate was fought on the pages of the journal buksz (Budapest Book Review) in 1997–98, see Gyáni 1997; Karády 1998; Gyáni 1998). Despite these debates and some other (smaller or greater) disagreements, in the certain following fundamental questions the era’s historiography was relatively in concord: The peace treaty of Trianon and the partition of Hungary were consequences of long-term processes, which (at least to a certain degree) were immanent and stemmed from modern Hungary’s internal configuration. In a similar vein, the revolutions can also be traced back to longer-term social and political causes. The interwar political configuration cannot be labeled democratic; Hungary needed democratic reforms. Significant groups of society—most of all lower peasantry—were living a dire, peripheral life from a material and mental point of view as well; a modernizing social reform thus seemed to be inevitable. The forefront of the Hungarian elite’s thinking was occupied partly by territorial revision and partly by retaining its own power positions, which was seen as natural and which increasingly became understood in a purely political sense. Most of this elite expected solutions to these problems from the alliance with Hitler’s Germany. In the 1930s the conservative reformist thinking moved closer and closer to the ideas of the “race-defending” far-right, in the sense that they saw the solution to social problems in the economic and political discrimination, and later pillaging (i.e., the redistribution of their positions and wealth) of social groups labeled Jewish. This scholarly consensus seems to have become void after 2010. The field of revisionist initiatives is not the discipline of history, but public history; its vehicle is not the academic rostrum and book publishing but mass media— its language therefore is mediatized. The major representatives of revisionism are also journalists and other intellectuals, but historians can also be found among them from the beginning. They were strongly supportive of the initiatives in memory politics to reinterpret the Horthy era and tried to buttress this trend. This, however, was not an easy task, and on most occasions, they did not support their arguments with research, studies, or books. The leading “historians” of the current national-conservative trend (such as Mária Schmidt, the public intellectual, László Tőkéczki, Sándor Szakály, and others) published their last monographs usually in the 1990s. The books they have published since then are mostly collections of newspaper articles, memorial speeches, and ad hoc publications. Most of their writings are either the result of routine obliga- tions stemming from their positions or direct contributions to political-public

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240 Rainer issues. In spite of this, they define themselves as historians and it goes without saying that the public also considers them to be such. The majority of historians of a left-wing or liberal commitment oppose these revisionist endeavors. This is not to say that the only dividing line is between the professional historians and historians involved in the right-wing politics of history. At the third national conference on contemporary history in August 2000, in Debrecen, Ignác Romsics gave a talk. He suggested that one of these divisive questions (he mentioned six of them) is the “responsibility of Hungarians in the Holocaust.” On one side there are those who emphasize the absolute responsibility of the Hungarian state and society, while on the other are those who try to “relativize” this responsibility. He himself did not take a stance, but among the participants of the debate the (back then) young Krisztián Ungváry for instance was unusually vehement in challenging the views of “relativizers,” among them the academician Mária Ormos, whom Romsics referred to (Püski and Valuch 2002: 27–30, on Romsics, and 135–136, on Ungváry). Ten years later, in an essay the sociologist Éva Kovács spoke up against the unconsidered and imprecise use of the word “trauma” in relation to Trianon. She suggested that historians should rather examine, who, when, and to what extent the decision at Trianon and its consequences were experienced as a trauma. The term “trauma” cannot characterize the collective memory of current Hungarian society’s remembrance: the cliché is rather the symptom of a kind of collective neurosis as well as the manifestation of intentions of memory politics. This suggestion, however, was rejected by several specialists, most prominently by Krisztián Ungváry, arguing that after 1920, the successor states were threatening the identities of Hungarian minorities in several ways. This would then mean that the trauma also involves everything that happened after 1920 (Laczó 2011). In Kovács’s opinion, however, the trauma-centered discourse is a typical symptom of the 1980s ethnicist turn of Hungarian historiography, and during another debate (Rigó 2012) added that this turn exerted an unbroken effect even after 1989. What is more, the initiative to claim “the nation’s historiography back from the Marxists/communists” gave further momentum to it. “It was impossible to debate whether Trianon was a social trauma for contemporary (and not contemporaneous!) generations already back in 2010. Historians instinctively took over or took back the expression ‘trauma of Trianon.’ We can definitely conclude therefore—even if what happened was a coincidence and not a conscious choice—that the last time the relationship between the historical canon and the prevailing national propaganda was as tight as it is today, was in 1948, after the communist Gleich schaltung” (Kovács 2013). She wrote a summary published a few years after the debates:

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Discourses of Contemporary History in Hungary after 1989 241

My supposition is that the Trianon cult did not only absorb the territorial loss, but also all the wounds, sufferings, and sorrows of World War I. What I was trying to show is that ethnocentrism (and anti-Semitism) were immanent elements of this cult right from its beginnings, and therefore the historiography and social remembrance of Trianon are inseparable from the history of Hungarian nationalism and the Holo- caust; but the ‘traumatic turn’ is striving to achieve exactly this separa- tion. In case, in the wake of today’s trauma concept, Trianon gets to fulfill an exclusive role in Hungarian historical memory (with which the Holocaust cannot even compete), then this situation can revive the interwar desire of revenge and can relegate us back to the methodological nationalism that hinders the understanding of the history of both social and political processes … The stake of the ‘traumatic turn’ is whether it will be possible to define the victimized groups, and whether it will then be possible to cooperatively build a progressive narrative both within history writing and on the battlefield of the politics of history—a narrative that is based on solidarity with the victims but embedded in historical facts (and hence clarifying the responsibility of both perpetrators and passive bystanders) and that could integrate today’s society. The original concept of trauma, scilicet, included both mourning and healing. kovács 2015

On the surface, though this particular debate was resolved, it is in fact still ongoing—and we do not seem to have reached the stage of healing at all.

5 In the Absence of Resolution, Conclusions Instead

Balázs Trencsényi and Péter Apor in their above work from 2007 posed the question of whether a discourse would develop between the various methodological and ideological camps in the pluralized space of Hungarian history writing. They also thought it possible that these camps would become organized into exclusivist subcultures without any kind of substantial dialogue. In this case, they were warning us: “some political elite in power will tilt the balance to such an extent that it will become possible to re-impose a certain ideological homogenization” (Trencsényi and Apor 2007: 63). Ten years later, we can state that those engaged in today’s Hungarian contemporary history writing base their work on fundamentally differing ethoses, but the various methodological subcultures are not yet hermetically isolated from each other.

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Those who serve political orders are active primarily on the national-conservative side, and fulfill their role with remarkable zeal. Even though discussions do take place every now and then, today there hardly seems to be hope for conducting historiographical discourses in a normal manner based on consen- sual democratic or scholarly values. In his article cited earlier, Balázs Ablonczy (2016) was of a similar opinion:

Historians and social scientists usually become anxious upon seeing the jumble of unclarified concepts, the confusion of layers, of important and insignificant viewpoints, and the intervention of politicians into public history; they address ardent speeches again and again to the nation, to society, or to the community of taxpayers: they call for a differentiated view of history. Unfortunately, however, this will not happen. Because it cannot happen … Public opinion has always preferred monocausal explanations; it is no use lamenting this. And sentences starting like “politicians should not meddle in this” will only have meaning when Trianon no longer has resonance in voters’ souls. As long as this is not the case, politicians will keep talking about it. Improvement can only be expected once we stop suicidal measurements … and once we finally understand and recognize others’ sufferings, and we no longer treat our history as a game.

The recognizable intention of the regime in power since 2010 is ideological homogenization, and the camp of national-conservative historians obviously agrees with this. Trencsényi and Apor’s pessimistic script is on its way to be- coming true. As far as the future is concerned, our only chance is perhaps a positive politics of memory. But is it necessary to have a politics of memory at all? How can history writing possibly relate to this influential form of communicative memory? The question is difficult not only in today’s Hungary. “Positive” memory politics means accepting a critical and comprehensive description of the past that inspires the cultivation of a democratic, value-based tradition. In this sense, the answer to the first question might as well be “yes”. However, because of its own continuous transformations, its own dynamics that gives birth to newer and newer narratives by all the time challenging the validity, approach, and methodology of previous views, history writing ought to keep a distance from all types of memory politics. Guarantees such as the freedom of cognition, of research, and of discourse—if they indeed exist—are sufficient; historians do not need a politics of memory. Nonetheless, it still exists and shall continue to exist.

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Organizers of a discussion held in the beginning of 2015 posed the question to participating historians whether history writing has the possibility and means to create a realistic national self-image. Is there any way to counter the mythmaking political initiatives trying to revise history? The answer to both questions is rather “no.” It is of course possible to make thematic suggestions. One could point out, for instance, that researching and analyzing traditions of workers’ and peasant movements, social democracy, the 1956 direct democracy, the democratic opposition, and the 1988–89 “civil” movements has disappeared from the agenda of Hungarian historians.18 However, the current state of Hungarian history writing will only be tilted out of its current position if the country itself moves from this standstill—which depends on Hungarian society’s will, or even resolution.

Translated by Ádám Mézes

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