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Discourses of Contemporary History in Hungary After 1989 a Fragmented Report east central europe 44 (2017) 216-248 brill.com/eceu 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 trans- formation. 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, giv- ing 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 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/18763308-04402011Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:49:45AM via free access <UN> 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 ideo- logical 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 insti- tutes 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 ob- viously 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. east central europe 44 (2017) 216-248 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:49:45AM via free access <UN> 218 Rainer backwards. Neither epistemological doubt (and the resulting eagerness to ex- periment) 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 na- tional 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 his- tory 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 east centralDownloaded europe from 44 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 216-248 03:49:45AM via free access <UN> Discourses of Contemporary History in Hungary after 1989 219 and perceived parallel processes of the former being de-ideologized, the lat- ter 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 direc- tions 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
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