Production of and Trade in Food Between the Kingdom of Hungary and Europe in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries): The Roles of Markets in Crises and Famines*

Andrea Fara

Tuscia University of Viterbo

 

Over the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Period, Western Europe was stricken by cyclical crises of subsistence or famines, related to several economic and social factors, such as the trend of production and the increasing price of wheat, the inadequate functioning of the market, the inappropriate intervention policies at the time of particular difficulties, and so on. In the Kingdom of Hungary crises and famines were caused by the same forces. But, surprisingly, cyclical large crises of subsistence and vast course famines had been nearly unknown in the kingdom between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this context, it is argued that the models of Ernest Labrousse and Amartya Sen may explain the emergence and development of crisis and famine not only and simply by the occurrence of exogenous forces such as a fall in crops, environmental shocks, war events and so on, but also and above all through a deeper analysis of the market, its functioning and its degree of integration with other markets. The paper thus highlights the particular Hungarian alimentary regime as characterized by a non-contradiction, but rather a thorough-penetration, relationship between agricultural and sylvan-pastoral activities. This not-contradiction was reflected by an alimentary equilibrium that characterized the kingdom throughout the period. In comparison with other parts of Europe, in Hungary alimentary alternatives such as grain, meat and fish remained accessible to most of the population, so the inhabitants’ normal diet remained diversified and not entirely based on cereals. The specific production and exchange structures of the kingdom permitted the maintenance of this alimentary equilibrium that prevented the rise of vast alimentary crises, unless a shock such as war, climatic difficulties and so on occurred. Another reason for the absence of vast course famines was the kingdom’s place in the exchange structures of Europe. The paper argues that, while wars—first of all against the Ottoman Empire—caused great damages and problems in food supplying, the complex economic interaction between crisis, famine and war that characterized the Hungary between over late Middle Ages and the early Modern Period is evidence of the kingdom’s increasing and notable maturation as a market in the European context.

Keywords: food, production, commerce, market, nutrition, crisis, Hungary, Europe.

 

In the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era, Western Europe was stricken by cyclical famines. In this part of the continent, the crises of subsistence and famines alternated in cyclical waves, both short cycles (at least once a year, in periods preceding the harvest, essentially in relation to an expected increase in the price of wheat) and long cycles (approximately every 7–10 years, in relation to several complicated economic and social factors, such as the trends in production and the increasing price of wheat, the inadequate functioning of the market, inappropriate interventionist policies in a moment of particular difficulty, and so on).1 As remarked by Fernand Braudel, “famine recurred so insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into man’s biological regime and built into his daily life. Dearth and penury were continual, and familiar even in Europe, despite its privileged position.”2

In the Kingdom of Hungary famines were clearly caused by the same forces that caused them in Western Europe, such as a drop in the harvest, environmental shocks, wars, and so on. And, of course, when a famine occurred, it afflicted Hungary no less severely that it did other European regions. But, surprisingly, regular and cyclical large subsistence crises and long famines were nearly unheard of in the Kingdom of Hungary between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Similarly interesting, a growing number of food crises and famines was recorded with the passing of time, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, with the largest number of events in the last one. Why did this happen? Does the admittedly fragmentary documentation provide an incomplete or distorted picture of the food regime of the Hungarian population? Or can the virtual absence of mention of famine and subsistence crises in the sources be interpreted as a sign of the existence of what might be termed a specific “nourishing order”? Can the political and institutional context and the production, distribution, and exchange structures of the Kingdom of Hungary explain the absence or limited impact of famine in these territories between late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era? And can this particular phenomenon be explained by applying to the world of medieval and Early Modern Hungary the models elaborated by Ernest Labrousse and Amartya K. Sen to clarify the appearance and evolution mechanisms of crisis and famine in a preindustrial and industrial context, respectively (with a non-Malthusian approach) through a deeper analysis of the market, its functioning, and its degree of integration with other markets?3

Labrousse has defined the imbalance between production and demand of alimentary goods, and in particular the supply and demand of wheat (which was almost the sole basis of nourishment in the preindustrial societies of Western Europe), as a crise de type ancien. In the absence of intervention by the central or local authorities to address the consequences of a bad harvest or misguided speculation, this imbalance caused a famine, which should not be understood as a shortage of wheat, but rather as an increase in wheat prices. This increase could give rise to a large-scale crisis, and not only with regard to nourishment. In fact, in cases in which wages were non-elastic, i.e. they were not adjusted in any way to compensate for increases in the prices of agricultural goods, the necessary purchase of these goods (primarily of wheat) for daily nourishment meant a drop in available resources to purchase other agricultural and manufactured articles. It brought about a fall in consumption, prices, and the production of some articles. As mentioned, the central or local authorities could eliminate or limit the most negative effects of this imbalance through specific interventions: they could import alimentary goods or regulate prices. However, such measures did not always yield positive results, as they could inhibit the farmers’ will to invest, since the husbandmen expected to earn higher profits thanks to crisis and famine, or rather thanks to increases in the price of wheat. In conclusion, sometimes such steps were followed by a phase of economic stagnation and crisis.4

Amartya K. Sen has explained the rise and diffusion of alimentary crises, including the phases when crises evolve into famines of vast proportions, through the concept of the entitlement approach, meaning the possession (or not) of some suitable entitlement (title). Hunger does not become a problem because of a shortage of alimentary goods (on the contrary, in most cases, goods are available in sufficient if not abundant quantities on domestic or international markets), but because an individual has no useful title with which to acquire alimentary goods or participate on the marketplace. By entitlement, Sen means above all an income (in general, the whole of suitable rights) that guarantees the satisfaction of individual needs, among which the primary need is for nourishment. In order to understand hunger and famine it is therefore necessary to put the accent on market dynamics and dysfunctions: when there is no possibility to join or participate on the marketplace or some market actors are engaged in speculation (even if not on a large scale) and intervention by central or local authorities is lacking, these anomalies can cause the emergence of sudden and unexpected alimentary crises.5

In this sense, the models of Ernest Labrousse and Amartya K. Sen can explain the emergence and development of crisis and famine not simply as a consequence of the concurrence of external forces, such as a bad harvest, environmental shocks, wars, and so on, but also and above all, through a deeper analysis of the market, its functioning, and its degree of integration with other markets more or less distant. It thus exceeds the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian approaches, which attribute the onset of crisis and famine to the imbalance between the growth of food supply (expected to be arithmetical) and the growth of population (expected to be exponential).

So, in order to understand how and when crisis and famine began to appear in the Kingdom of Hungary in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era and to see whether it is possible to apply the models elaborated by Labrousse and Sen, it is necessary briefly to describe: a) the available sources; b) the market, i.e. the structures of production, distribution, and exchange in these territories, in particular with reference to food.

Sources

The first and greatest difficulty for anyone seeking to study the economic history of Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages is caused by the scarcity of the available sources, a consequence of both the more limited use of the written word than in Western Europe and the extensive damages suffered by the archives of the region over the centuries. The Kingdom of Hungary is no exception, and because of this dearth of sources, the economic and demographic conditions of the vast domains that were subject to the crown of Saint Stephen in the Middle Ages in many ways remain obscure.6

There are no comprehensive records regarding the collection of taxes or the number of settlements. The only source of this kind is the records of the collection of taxes prepared by papal collectors active in the Hungarian lands from the end of the thirteenth century to the second half of the fourteenth century, and these records are fragmentary at best.7

It was probably during the reign of Sigismund of Luxemburg (1387–1437) that records began to be compiled for large estates, with inventories of settled tenants and villages, for military and fiscal purposes. But not many of these documents have survived, and they are mostly incomplete until 1531. The most important and extensively used among them are the lucrum camerae registers of five northeastern counties (Abaúj, Gömör, Sáros, Torna, and Ung) from 1427;8 the register of lucrum camerae of the Tramontane district of Nyitra County from 1452;9 the tax list of Nógrád County from in 1457;10 and the register of royal revenues prepared by Sigismund Ernuszt, bishop of Pécs and royal treasurer, for the fiscal year 1494/95, which is also incomplete, but which contains important information, such as the number of estates and tenants in each comitatus of the kingdom.11 Similar documents for noble estates are exceptional before the end of the fifteenth century, and even then, they remain a rarity and are generally incomplete. A notable exception is the record prepared by Ippolito d’Este, bishop of Eger, then archbishop of Esztergom and Primate of Hungary (†1520).12 However, more detailed administrative documents survive from the sixteenth century, and they offer, at least indirectly, valuable data concerning demographics and population.13

For the urban settlements, beginning with the reign of Louis I (1342–82), lists of accounts and taxes paid by the towns begin to survive in increasing numbers.14 Some records of tax estimation have survived from the first period of Ottoman rule in the central territories of the kingdom (1540–90).15 The daily life of peasants, on the other hand, is described only superficially in official documents, and mostly in relationship to legal matters.16

Given this scarcity of sources, it would be foolish to hope to arrive at accurate mortality rates, and in particular mortality rates for times of subsistence crises and/or famines, in the Kingdom of Hungary between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era: the available documents provide no precise information, and they offer only a rather impressionistic and vague image of such events. However, there are good indicators, such as descriptions of the phenomena and their amplitudes, in sources of different types from more or less neighboring geographical areas; prohibitions on the export of alimentary goods and (more or less) simultaneous requests for their import; some information about prices and price increases (though the available sources are not detailed enough to allow us to arrive at any overview of continuous trends in price increases); interventions or regulations concerning prices and markets on which alimentary commodities were sold by local and/or central authorities. Archaeological investigations have also contributed useful information.

Despite these limitations, it is possible to reconstruct a coherent framework of the economic structures and arrive at a realistic picture of the impact of famines in the Kingdom of Hungary between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era.

Market and Food in Medieval and Early Modern Hungary

The sources dating from between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, in particular those of a narrative character, agree in their characterizations of the Kingdom of Hungary as a fertile land, rich in waters, pastures, and woods, where farming and cattle-breeding were practiced with good results.17 At the beginning of the fourteenth century, an anonymous Dominican who traveled a lot in East and Central Europe reported that the Realm of Saint Stephen was rich not only in cereals, meat, fish, and wine, but also in salt, gold, and silver.18 Accordingly, the anonymous chronicler deduced that the ancient names of Messia and Panonia derived from abundant harvests and the availability of bread in Hungarian lands.19

The territorial expanse of the kingdom, Croatia included, was about 325,000 km2, and the average population density was very low. While some areas were more densely inhabited, in general land was available in great abundance, and most villages had a vast area for arable land, pasture, and woods at their disposal. Moreover, urbanization lagged far behind by Western European standards. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, most uncultivated land was colonized thanks to the arrival of hospites coming, above all, from the Holy Roman Empire.20 Colonization proceeded until the fourteenth century, but at the beginning of the fourteenth century the Kingdom of Hungary was still far from densely inhabited. For instance, only a few settlements were clearly identified as civitates.21 Density remained low, with considerable differences between individual regions. The situation may have partially changed by the beginning of the fifteenth century, but the overall size of the population of medieval Hungary (and therefore calculations concerning population density, mortality, etc.) remained a highly controversial issue on account of the lack of relevant sources. As Pál Engel remarks, “it is almost impossible to determine how large the population of Hungary was at the end of the Middle Ages. Indeed, current estimates vary between 2.5 million and 5.5 million, which only serves to underline the prevailing uncertainty surrounding this issue.”

In this sense, the size of the settlements varied greatly throughout the kingdom. The urban network of the Kingdom of Hungary included some 30–35 towns with urban privileges of various degree, but they were all small from a Western European perspective, and the urban population is estimated to have been no more than 3 percent of the total population. Buda had about 10,000 inhabitants; Sopron, Pozsony (today Bratislava, Slovakia), Kassa (today Košice, Slovakia), Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Brassó (today Braşov, Romania), Nagyszeben (today Sibiu, Romania) and the mining towns of Besztercebánya (today Banská Bystrica, Slovakia) and Selmecbánya (today Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia) about 4-5,000 each; Pest, Szeged, Székesfehérvár, Nagyszombat (today Trnava, Slovakia), Eperjes (today Prešov, Slovakia), Bártfa (today Bardejov, Slovakia), Lőcse (today Levoča, Slovakia), and the mining towns of Gölnicbánya (today Gelnica, Slovakia) and Körmöcbánya (today Kremnica, Slovakia) about 3,000 each. In the southern and southwestern part of Transdanubia and in the eastern edge of Transylvania there were hundreds of little villages with a population of well under 100, while in the Great Plain much larger villages were more common. These villages had at their disposal a large quantity of land, albeit with great differences between the various Hungarian territories. According to Engel, in the counties of Abaúj and Tolna the average village territory was around 2,800 acres at the end of the Middle Ages. Yet there existed great regional differences. The Great Plain was characterized by populous villages with extensive territories, whereas in the southern part of Transdanubia and south of the Drava small villages were more usual. For example, around 1500, in the County of Vas the extent of a village’s territory was 2,100 acres on average, while the corresponding figure in Zala was 1,700 acres.22

It is nevertheless important to underline two general features: a) there was a general trend of population increase; b) there was a large availability of land. These two elements, and above all the second one, affected the structures of production in the primary sector (agriculture and livestock) and led to economic specialization. Agriculture (cereals and wine) had represented an important economic sector in the kingdom’s economic structure since the twelfth century, although it was practiced above all through a periodic change of cultivated lands, given the abundance of available land. This remained the principal cultivation method, up to the first half of the thirteenth century, when it was progressively replaced by a more coherent system of open fields, most of which were still exploited in an extensive way, but with the use of more developed techniques (such as the two-field rotation and in some regions even the three-field rotation, as well as the assymmetrical heavy plough). Agricultural productivity increased from a yield of 1:2 at the beginning of the thirteenth century to 1 : 3–4 one century later.23 Nevertheless, livestock breeding (above all the raising of horse and oxen) maintained a fundamental economic role, in accordance with the traditional Hungarian nomadic and semi-nomadic forms of organization, as well as the abundance of land, forest, and pastures.24 Hunting and fishing were also notable natural resources, and in general not closed to peasants; only limited areas were subject to absolute royal and noble control.25

Thus, Hungarian lands produced and exported more agricultural products and livestock than they did raw materials, but they also exported mineral and metals like iron, copper, salt, gold, and silver, as well as slaves (at least up to the beginning of the thirteenth century). Imported goods were mostly luxury products: the crown, the royal court, and the nobility demanded these goods in great quantities. Italian, French, and German cloths of various quality were brought into the country from the West, as were jewels and handicraft products; from the East, goods like skins, wools, and cloths of different types were imported, along with wax and spices.26 Non-luxury items were also imported in large quantities, for instance knives, pottery, etc.27 A considerable share of the imported commodities passed through the region on its way to Eastern or Western Europe.

Western sources almost unanimously describe the Kingdom of Hungary as a land in which it was possible to make good profits through the exchange of Western luxury products for local livestock, precious metals, spices, and other Levantine articles. Unfortunately, the available sources do not enable us to reconstruct price levels continuously from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era. However, on the basis of the available documents, scholars agree that the difference in price between local and imported goods created many profitable bargains, above all for Italian and German mercatores, with a considerable outflow of cheap staples from Hungary to Western Europe.28

For instance, in 1376, the Florentine Bonaccorso Pitti was in Buda and, before going back to Italy, he decided to buy six Hungarian horses. Their local price was very low, though they were famous in Western markets, thus making it possible to make a good profit. During his journey home, Bonaccorso lost one horse, gave another away as a present, and sold two others, losing some of his profits through gaming. Nonetheless, he returned to Florence with two horses, 100 gold florins, and the satisfying experience of having made an excellent bargain.29 Other documents also indicate that the Kingdom of Hungary was rich with economic opportunities.30 At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the price of an ox in Hungary was around three or four florins, and a horse of average quality was not much more expensive. Bertrandon de la Broquière noted that in Hungary a horse of the best quality cost around ten florins, while in Western Europe it could cost as much as 50 florins. On the other hand, a cheap roll of Bohemian cloth could be bought for seven florins, while the same quantity of the best Italian cloth cost around 45 florins, that is, the price of 10-15 oxen.31

In this context, Hungarian households were able to produce a substantial share of their own food instead of purchasing it on the local markets. Of course, it was always possible to turn to the market, but only in cases of specific necessity. This allowed most of the Hungarian population to have almost continuous access to different alimentary resources, such as cereals, meat, and fish, and also to maintain a very diverse diet, not based almost entirely on cereals, as was the case in Western Europe. Moreover, long-distance trade did not affect the availability of food for the Hungarian population. Data gathered by Vera Zimányi confirms that before the ‘price revolution’ in the 1520s, for the price of an ox it was possible to have Moravian cloth [of average quality and largely accessible] sufficient for an item, an item and a half, of clothing; after the differentiating effects of the ‘price revolution’ around the 1580s, in exchange for an ox it was possible to buy cloth sufficient for 2 items and a half of clothing, and, in the 1600s, for 3 and 1/3. […] Livestock breeding, therefore, involved, temporarily, greater advantages than cloth production.32

On average, about 100,000 cattle were exported from the Hungarian lands per annum, with peaks of up to 200,000. In periods of strong demand, more cattle could be added from Moldavia and Wallachia through Transylvania. About four fifths of all cattle reached the Austrian, German, and Moravian markets, while about one fifth went to Venice. Only a few cattle were destined for the Ottoman lands (essentially to satisfy the demand of a section of the armed forces). It is calculated that in 1580 the total number of cattle was about 3 million. This would mean that, at least in that year, the exports comprised merely six per cent of the available livestock: evidently the rest remained available for domestic consumption.33

Indeed, meat was the main protein source for most of the inhabitants of the kingdom, and it played a central role in the Hungarian diet in the Middle Ages and in the Modern Era. If in the Hungarian lands the average annual consumption of cereals was about 112 kilograms (well below the European average, estimated at 175 kilograms), the consumption of meat was very high, 63 to 69 kilograms per capita (well above 50 kilograms in Nuremberg, 47 kilograms in the cities of southern Germany, and 26 kilograms in southern France). Moreover, the large size of the animals should also be kept in mind. Between the tenth and the twelfth centuries, Hungarian cattle lacked the special traits that became their distinguishing features by the sixteenth century, specificially the large size and large horns: these features were probably the product of a selection of species, even for commercial purposes, which took place over the course of several centuries; so, in the middle of the sixteenth century, the weight of an average Hungarian ox was about 300–350 kilograms, a figure which increased to about 450–500 kilograms by the beginning of the seventeenth century, while the European standard was 200 kilograms.34 Not surprisingly, in the Hungarian lands the production and consumption of cereals continued to have only limited importance until the middle of the eighteenth century, when Hungarian agricultural structures underwent a deep transformation, with an increasing economic and commercial integration into the Habsburg Empire and, as part of the Empire, Europe.35

In his Cronaca of 1348, the Florentine Matteo Villani offers information concerning some Hungarian alimentary habits based on meat and the importance of cattle-breeding in the local economy:

The Hungarians [...] are well and easily stocked with food even when they are in inhospitable places. This is because there is a large number of oxen and cows in Hungary which are not used to work the land; and since there are wide pastures in which to graze them, the animals grow faster and fatter. The animals are then slaughtered for leather and fat, which are heavily traded; the meat is boiled in large pots, and when it has been cooked and salted and separated from the bones, it is desiccated in ovens or in some other manner. Once dried, the meat is pulverized in a subtle mode; in this manner, it is preserved. And when they are traveling or marching with the army, when they cannot find anything to eat, they carry pots and copper vessels and each a small bag with this meat powder, as a war provision; and other bags are carried on carriages at the orders of their lord. And when they encounter a river or other water, they stop and fill their pots and pans with water; once the water has come to a boil, they add an amount of the pulverized flesh depending on the number of men who are eating. The meat powder grows and swells, and a handful or two of it can fill a pot with a kind of soup which is very nourishing to eat and which makes men vigorous with little bread, or even without bread.36

Between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era, the general characteristics of production and exchange in the Kingdom of Hungary remained almost unchanged, including in regard to food. With the passing of time, a notable development in the internal market occurred, characterized by a greater use of money and a meaningful increase in commercial activities over short, medium, and long distances. Although the prices of the Hungarian products slowly but consistently increased, potentially these prices remained low in comparison with prices in the West. Thus, the exchange of Hungarian raw materials and livestock for Western and Eastern products (textiles in particular) remained profitable.37

The realm of Saint Stephen was rich in alimentary resources, which were easily accessible to a large stratum of the population. The levels of nutrition in the Kingdom of Hungary were therefore higher, both quantitatively and qualitatively, than in Western Europe. The normal diet of the kingdom’s inhabitants was based not only on cereals but also on fish and, above all, meat, which was available to most of the population. Even if there was a decrease in crops, it was always possible to fall back on the consumption of meat, or even pulse, fish and game.38

The kingdom of Hungary remained in this state of alimentary equilibrium for the whole of the Middle Ages and most of the Modern Era. The absence in the sources of mention of crises or famines suggests that in this period famine, which was cyclically frequent in other territories of Europe, was nearly, if not completely, unknown in Hungary. Furthermore, the structure of exchange in the kingdom also suggests that there were no enduring famines. Keeping in mind the general lacunae in the available documentation, there are very few traces of a resort to the import of alimentary goods (while there are some signs that they were exported), and very few indications of intervention or regulation of prices and markets of alimentary commodities by the crown or by another secular or ecclesiastical authority of the kingdom.39

I will now offer a brief survey of the main events related to hunger and famine in the Kingdom of Hungary between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.40

Crisis and Famine in the Thirteenth Century

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, hunger and famine were reported in 1044, 1074 (or 1075), and 1141. These dates all overlapped with periods of military conflicts, but unfortunately the sources do not permit a real analysis of the economic impact of the events of the wars. One should note that there were wars and conflicts in other years too, but no signs of other hunger or famine events.41

More interesting data are available beginning in the thirteenth century, when a great famine occurred in 1243/45. It was not caused by earlier or repeated bad harvests, however, or by correlated speculations. Rather, the famine was a direct consequence of the Mongol invasions and devastation wreaked by the Mongols, which led to a genuine collapse of the political, economic, and social structures of the kingdom in 1241/42.42 According to the Chronicon Austriacum, in 1243–45 famine took a much bigger toll on human lives than the previous invasions and devastations; in all likelihood, the episodes of cannibalism referred to by the author never took place, but they do give an idea of the emotional impact of the catastrophe on contemporary society.43 The destruction and demographic loss were certainly considerable, estimated to between 20 and 50 per cent of the entire population, and even higher, with high divergences among the different Hungarian territories.44

Another famine was recorded in 1263, in a period characterized by clashes between the Hungarian nobility and the crown, as well as conflicts within the royal family itself (with civil wars in 1262 and 1264–66 between king Béla IV and his son and heir Stephen). So, the uncertain political situation created by the trauma of Mongol invasions seems to have contributed to a breakdown of normal economic and commercial progress.45 In this context, the Chronicon Austriacum reported a maxima fames in 1263, not only in Hungary, but in most of East and Central Europe. Nevertheless, this generic report does not allow us to assess the real impact of the famine.46

Crisis and Famine in the Fourteenth Century

On the other hand, the same wartime events also triggered wide-ranging political, economic, and social changes which overlapped with: a) elements of the previous period of economic expansion and growth (which was interrupted by the trauma of the Mongol invasions); b) the political and economic reforms, institutional stability, and stronger royal power established by the new Angevin dynasty, with Charles I (1301–42) and his son Louis I the Great (1342–82);47 c) the so-called “advantage of backwardness” (as explained by Alexander Gerschenkron).48

In the fourteenth century, the Hungarian markets were still not adequately developed, and thus they offered profitable spaces for investment for European merchant capital, which had fallen on hard times. With the reorganization of the kingdom’s economic structures, Hungarian raw materials and livestock found extensive markets, and trade over short and long distances with the Italian Peninsula and the Holy Roman Empire suddenly grew considerably livelier. These innovations launched and favored dynamic and sustained economic development in the kingdom. The series of subsistence crises that struck Western Europe between 1315 and 1322 had a limited impact on the Hungarian lands.49 This economy continued to grow until at least the beginning of the fifteenth century, and this was followed by a further growth phase in the same century and in the next one, with a different economic cycle in comparison with Western Europe.50

In this political and economic context, fourteenth-century sources report on four main cases of increases in the prices of alimentary goods; three of these cases include mention of famine phenomenon and/or food crises of varying extents. Two events were just local and occurred in the northern regions of historical Hungary (in what today is Slovakia). In 1312, in the Szepesség (Spiš) region, the prices of alimentary goods increased to the point of causing a food crisis; prices increased again in 1316 in Pécsújfalu (today Pečovská Nová Ves, Slovakia), but without bringing about large scale famine.51 In all likelihood, these two episodes were influenced by the struggle for the throne, which divided the kingdom at the time.52 However, there is no evidence of large scale economic or demographic impact.

Two other events were of greater importance with regards to external factors. In 1338, a great locust invasion hit Transylvania, from Brassó up to Lippa (today Lipova, Romania): with the exception of the region around Arad (today Arad, Romania) region, locusts devoured a great share of the crops, triggering an increase in the prices of alimentary goods, which eventually ushered in a food crisis. The famine was not terribly prolonged, however, because summer rains forced the locusts to move westwards.53 A second event is reported to have taken place in 1363/64. The summer was remarkably dry, and it was followed by a hard winter. This caused a fall in agricultural production, which led to an increase in the prices of alimentary goods and therefore a food crisis. Even in this case, the famine was of limited significance. It was felt above all in the eastern territories and the markets of the Great Hungarian Plain. Moreover, with the intention of preventing food crises and famines of greater dimensions, King Louis I ordered his officers to locate and inventory the cereal stocks in order to put the surplus on the market.54

However, beginning in the fourteenth century, with the progressive involvement of the Kingdom of Hungary in the so-called “world economy,”55 crises and famines began to be reported with growing frequency, and they had an ever larger impact, even in prosperous periods, evidently in connection with the oscillations in the functioning of the market.56 Furthermore, wars (first and foremost the conflicts with the Ottoman Empire), caused considerable damage and led to problems in the food supply. However, warfare often created opportunities for profitable bargains.57

Crisis and Famine in the Fifteenth Century

In the fifteenth century, the Kingdom of Hungary played an important role in European politics and the European economy. The strong royal power of Sigismund of Luxemburg (1387–1437)58 and Matthias Corvinus (1458–90)59 and the prestige and valor of Filippo Scolari (Pipo Ozorai or Pippo Spano) (1369–1426)60 and John Hunyadi (c. 1407–56)61 made the crown of Saint Stephen strong again after the political crisis that had weakened the country after the extinction of the Angevin dynasty.

In the fifteenth century, most of the Hungarian political and economic resources were devoted to war. While the “centrifugal forces” of the nobility were thwarted by Sigismund after years of intense struggle, military pressure increased along the borders of the realm. In the north, the Hungarian lands were involved in the Hussite Wars, triggering far-reaching political, economic, and social transformations. In the West, clashes with the Habsburgs became inevitable. In the south, the struggles with the Ottoman Empire increased to the point of constant war. Other conflicts put Hungary in opposition to political entities in the Balkans and the Carpatho–Danubian area (first and foremost Serbia and Bosnia, Wallachia, and Moldavia), which were struggling to maintain an uneasy equilibrium between the long-established power of the Kingdom of Hungary and the increasing strength of the Ottoman Empire.62 Yet, despite the internal political difficulties and the almost endemic warfare along all of its frontiers, the kingdom enjoyed a phase of strong economic growth throughout the whole century.63

The events of the wars interfered with normal commercial activities; but often war was an occasion to make profits and bargains.64 For instance, in the summer of 1438, the eastern territories of Hungary suffered a large scale Ottoman invasion. All of the Transylvanian towns suffered huge damage, and many inhabitants were carried off as slaves.65 This brought about a partial interruption in the import of wheat from the Carpathian regions, a shortfall aggravated by attempts at speculation. For this reason, in January 1439 the authorities in Nagyszeben sent a missive to the authorities in Brassó urging the restoration of the normal flow of wheat imports from the south; in the case of a refusal, Nagyszeben threatened to close paths of communication between the north and Brassó. The sources do not allow us to know whether the city ever actually made good on its threat, nor do they indicate when the situation was normalized. But the attempt is evident: the municipal authorities of Brassó, taking advantage of the fact that their city was situated in a border area through which a significant share of the commodities coming from the Carpathian regions was being transmitted, tried to raise the price of wheat in the Transylvanian territories in order to make huge profits.66

Years of unfavorable climate could also lead to a poor harvest. Documents report on events of greater importance, such as hard winters in 1407/08, 1428/29, 1441–44, 1457/58, 1463, and 1491 and dry summers in 1460, 1463, 1473 (which also bore witness to a locust invasion), 1474, 1478–80, 1491, and 1493/94. In particular, the cold winter in 1428 and the warm summer in 1429 caused a fall in wheat and wine production, again limited to the eastern territories of the Great Hungarian Plain. Food crises of some importance occurred in 1456, 1463, 1470–74, and 1493/94.67

Nevertheless, the documents make no mention of events of widespread or prolonged hunger or famine in any of these years. In 1456, further difficulties arose because of the critical political and military situation of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Ottoman advances towards the west were halted at Belgrade in a battle led by John Hunyadi.68 For 1463, sources mention a particularly unfavorable year, with direct consequences for crops; but the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia, involving a reorganization of markets, probably had a greater impact on commercial exchange.69 In February 1470, King Matthias of Hungary forbade the Transylvanian Saxon towns from exporting “triticum, milium, avenam et alias fruges” to Wallachia in order to avoid a shortage of these products on the Hungarian markets.70 It is not possible to establish, however, whether this decision was motivated by a real shortfall of agricultural products in the eastern territories of the kingdom. Prolonged difficulties due to low crop yields were registered up to 1474.71

It is worth noting, however, that at the time a customs war was underway between the Kingdom of Hungary and the voevodate of Wallachia. The clash dated back to the times of Voevode of Wallachia Vlad III Ţepeş–Dracula (October 1448; 1456–62; November–December 1476), who tried to annul the staple right of the Transylvanian Saxon towns by creating a parallel line of border markets in Wallachian territory and to penetrate the Hungarian markets directly and secure the free circulation of Wallachian merchants in Transylvanian lands.72 So it is probable that the decision of 1470 was intended to protect the Hungarian markets, not only from the commercial threat posed by the Wallachian towns but also from the excessive dynamism of the Transylvanian Saxon towns, which made high profits from the exchange of commodities between East and West, often undermining the interests of the Kingdom of Hungary. Sources do not reveal whether or not the import ban actually took place or, if it did, how it was enforced. The customs war between the Kingdom of Hungary and the voevodate of Wallachia certainly dragged on for a long time. Thus, in all likelihood, it was a combination of political conflicts and adverse climatic factors that badly affected the normal course of the market, giving rise to a new famine in Transylvania in 1493/94.73 Events affected above all the chief urban centers, but not the surrounding villages: for instance, Brassó faced a stagnation of its population in the town center, but not in its outlying territories.74

In conclusion, in the fifteenth century neither wars nor bad harvests exerted a considerable influence on the availability of foodstuffs in the Kingdom of Hungary, and they certainly did not give rise to famines. Only on a few occasions do documents make mention of increases in prices, and they contain no references to alimentary crises of vast proportions. Mentions of hunger and underfeeding are also rare.

Crisis and Famine in the Sixteenth Century

In the sixteenth century, Hungarian territories were characterized by a notable institutional instability and prolonged external and internal wars. The defeat at Mohács (1526), the tripartite division of the kingdom (1541), and the Treaty of Speyer (1570) left the ancient lands of Saint Stephen in a situation of confusion and war, to which the most deleterious effects of famine and the decrease or relocation of the population were added.75 Nevertheless, in the middle of the century the situation quickly normalized in connection with the integration of western and northern Hungarian territories into the Habsburg dominions, the formation of the Ottoman Vilayet of Buda, and the creation of the autonomous Principality of Transylvania. Therefore, in the sixteenth century, a phase of political decadence was not accompanied by a parallel economic decline. A partial adjustment of the commercial network and the exchange flows took place. Documents suggest that merchants of different origins operating in the area looked for and easily opened new and convenient commercial paths. Imports of large consumer goods increased (including cheap textiles from the East and the West), as did exports of raw materials (agricultural products and livestock to the East and the West).76 Hungarian lands were becoming increasingly integrated into the European markets.77

In the middle of the sixteenth century, the so-called Little Ice Age began to affect the entire European continent, and it reached its peak in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Little Ice Age was characterized by increasingly adverse and unstable climatic conditions, which influenced all the spheres of the economy and agriculture in particular. Nevertheless, the shift in the climate did not have an absolutely negative impact on the agriculture, because the disappearance of some crops brought about the introduction of others (including new ones) in the different climatic areas of the continent. Thus, famine was not the product of periodic and ordinary climatic adversities; on the contrary, more often famine was tied to some short term, anomalous, and extreme climatic perturbation, aggravated by the poor functioning of the markets.78

In this context, Hungarian documents report on three famines of local importance: in 1529–31 (when abundant rains and bloody wars for the Hungarian throne between the supporters of Ferdinand of Habsburg and John Szapolyai caused a crop failure), in 1545 (caused at least in part by an invasion of locusts and the continuous wars against the Ottomans), and in 1553 (after a very severe winter). Sixteenth-century documents also refer to another seven years characterized by severe and widespread famines with high mortality rates. The first event was recorded in 1507/08. It was caused by excessive rains and floods, followed by a period of drought. These events caused a food shortage on all of the Hungarian markets, with a general increase in the price of food and the emergence of intense speculation (“magna caristia rerum”).79 Between 1534 and 1536, unfavorable climatic events were recorded: they caused a shortage of various goods, followed by a steep increase in prices. In 1534, a cubulus (80–85 litres)80 of wheat could cost 18 silver coins in Brassó, 12 in Medgyes (today Mediaş, Romania), 14 in Nagyszeben, and up to 3½ gold florins in other territories of Transylvania; the following year, the price of a cubulus of wheat rose to six gold florins. The price of livestock witnessed an analogous rise: a cow could cost six gold florins, a calf 60 silver coins, and a sheep 12 silver coins. Thus, a food crisis of vast proportions was recorded, marked by high mortality rates.81 The excessive drought and the persistent war caused a new food shortage of alimentary goods between 1574 and 1575, with the hardships continuing up to 1577 in some regions. To limit damages and losses, between April and May, the Diet of Transylvania decreed a general tax reduction and total tax exemption for unmarried young people, wage-earning servants, and people belonging to other categories with low incomes.82 Drought again caused low crop yields, and food prices rose between 1585 and 1586: in Kolozsvár and Marosvásárhely (today Târgu Mureş, Romania) a cubulus of wheat ended up costing six gold florins.83

There were other examples of crisis and famine in Transylvania, one of the most economically developed lands in the kingdom. It is interesting to note that, in the sixteenth century, famines had a greater impact in the Transylvanian lands before and after the division of the Kingdom of Hungary. Historical data show that in sixteenth-century Transylvania, over a period of 80 years, crop yields were of exceptional quantity in 28 seasons, on an average level in 27 years, below the average in 18 (only three of which were characterized by limited hunger of only local impact), and in seven years crops were not available in sufficient quantities, resulting in widespread famine.84 Of course, throughout the entire century, these territories were marked by bloody clashes, but the war also offered occasions to make profits. Indeed, Transylvania consistently remained very active from the point of view of commerce, as it was in a favorable position of mediation between East and West. Although it remained in a basically marginal position from a European perspective, Transylvania functioned as an important market up to the Modern Era.85 Even the famines recorded in Transylvania were closely connected to a malfunctioning of the local markets: in particular, in periods of exceptional difficulty (a drop in the harvest, environmental shocks, or events caused by the war), the absence of suitable policies for food imports or price regulation could favor a rise in the prices of food and consequently lead to crisis and famine.86

It is evident that, also in the sixteenth century, famines in the Hungarian territories were conditioned not only by external elements, such as poor harvests, environmental shocks, events cause by the war, and so on, but above all by a malfunctioning of the markets. In fact, in other periods when wars, unfavorable climatic events, and/or crop failures were recorded, there were neither famines nor higher mortality rates, and even the prices of food did not go up. Moreover, it is interesting to note that, although in general the sixteenth century represents a period of political and institutional crisis in Hungary, major demographic crises (which involved significant drops in the population and the desertion of villages and whole regions) only occurred at the end of the century as a result of all of these factors, eventually combined with climatic changes. Thus, the huge population decrease which took place in the last part of the century was not the result of famines.

Conclusion – An Alimentary Equilibrium

Documents and observations thus apparently confirm the hypothesis that it is possible to apply the models of crise de type ancient by Ernest Labrousse and entitlement approach by Amartya K. Sen to the Kingdom of Hungary between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era to clarify the appearance and evolution mechanisms of crisis and famine in a preindustrial and industrial context (according to a non-Malthusian approach).

In comparison with other parts of Europe, in the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era alimentary alternatives in Hungary, such as wheat, meat, and fish, remained accessible to most of the population, which maintained free access to the alimentary resources (agricultural and sylvan-pastoral). Consequently, the normal diet remained diversified and not entirely based on cereals or on wheat, in particular. This permitted the maintenance of an alimentary equilibrium which, in part because it was based on a wide and comparatively diverse array of foods (and on meat in particular), prevented the rise of vast alimentary crises and famines, unless a shock such as war or climatic changes occurred. Moreover, the production and exchange structures were very specific. Raw materials and agricultural articles, in which the country abounded, were exported, while imports consisted mainly of specific luxury articles demanded by the crown, the nobility, and the wealthiest social groups of the kingdom. As a consequence of this economic situation, the Hungarian population turned to the market only in cases of specific necessity, and rarely merely to obtain necessary foodstuffs.87

Western Europe had also had a similar alimentary regime, characterized by vast access to resources and based above all on meat, but this was between the Early and High Middle Ages.88 In the most developed and integrated markets of Western Europe, between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era, cereals and wheat in particular had emerged as the almost exclusive basis of nourishment. The shortage of these goods, the production of which was subject to significant fluctuations as it depended on seasonal rhythms and not (or not completely) on market movement, led to increases in their prices. Therefore, given the rigid wage system and the lack of alimentary alternatives that might be socially approved, and in the absence of adequate policies to complement supplies, shortages could easily lead to famines with large impacts and even to a fall in demand and production (sometimes of significant proportions) of non-agricultural goods and services until the phase of economic crisis passed.89

In contrast, although increasingly integrated into the European markets, Hungary did not suffer periods of serious famine because it preserved an alimentary equilibrium and the free access of its population to the food resources in most of the regions of the kingdom. Engel notes that on the whole, by the 1500s the living conditions of the peasantry had improved rather than deteriorated. They could freely change their place of residence, they were allowed to bear arms and to hunt and they sometimes even took the field alongside the nobles. […] Famine was a rare visitor among them. Although sometimes there was less bread than necessary [...], they had no difficulty in supplementing their diet with pulse, meat, fish and even game. As the density of the population remained rather low, there were abundant expanses of woodland and pasture throughout the country. At the beginning of the sixteenth century an average household raised two or three cattle and—at least in the eastern part of the kingdom—no fewer than eight pigs, not to mention poultry. In the 1510s it was quite natural for the servants of the domain of Ónod to eat meat every day, sometimes even twice, and we have no reason to believe that the diet of the peasantry in general was significantly worse.90

The complex economic interaction of difficulties due to crop yields, climate, war, and famine, together with the responses of the institutional framework to these factors, are evidence of the economic dynamism and increasing and notable maturation of the Hungarian market, as well as its growing integration into and role as a mediator between Western and Eastern markets between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era.91

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Topolski, Jerzy. “A Model of East-Central European Continental Commerce in the Sixteenth and the First Half of Seventeenth Century.” In East-Central Europe in Transition from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century, edited by Antoni Mączak, Henryk Samsonowicz, and Peter Burke, 128–39. Cambridge–Paris: Cambridge University Press – Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1985.

Topolski, Jerzy. “Causes of Dualism in the Economic Development of Modern Europe.” Studia Historiae Oeconomicae 3 (1968): 3–12.

Treptow, Kurt W., ed. Dracula: Essays on the Life and Times of Vlad Ţepeş. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Tucci, Ugo. “L’Ungheria e gli approvvigionamenti veneziani di bovini nel Cinquecento.” In Rapporti veneto–ungheresi all’epoca del Rinascimento, edited by Tibor Klaniczay, 153–71. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1975.

Vadas, András. “Documentary Evidence on Weather Conditions and an Environmental Crisis in 1315–1317: Case Study from the Carpathian Basin.” Journal of Environmental Geography 1 (2008): 67–76.

Vadas, András. Weather Anomalies and Climatic Change in Late Medieval Hungary: Weather events in the 1310s in the Hungarian Kingdom. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2010.

Várdy, Steven Béla, Géza Grosschmid, and Leslie S. Domonkos. Louis the Great, King of Hungary and Poland. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Villani, Matteo. Cronaca, edited by Giuseppe Porta. Parma: Guanda, 1995.

Voit, Pál, and Imre Holl. Old Hungarian Stove Tiles. Budapest: Corvina Press, 1963.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System, vol. 1, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York–London: Academic Press, 1974.

Zimányi, Vera. “Esportazione di bovini Ungheresi a Venezia nella seconda metà del secolo XVI.” In Venezia e Ungheria nel Rinascimento, edited by Vittore Branca, 145–56. Florence: Olschki, 1973.

Zimányi, Vera. “Economy and Society in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Hungary (1526–1650).” Studia Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 188 (1987): 1–119.

Zimányi, Vera. “Mouvements des prix hongrois et l’évolution européenne (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles).” Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 19 (1973): 305–33.

Zimányi, Vera. “The Hungarian Economy within the Modern World-system.” In The Early Modern World System in Geographical Perspective, edited by Hans-Jürgen Nitz, 234–47. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1993.

Zolnay, László. “István ifjabb király számadása 1264-ből” [The accounts of Stephen V of Hungary from 1264]. Budapest Régiségei 21 (1964): 79–114.

Żytkowicz, Leonid. “Trends of Agrarian Economy in Poland, Bohemia and Hungary from the Middle of the Fifteenth to the Middle of the Seventeenth Century.” In East-Central Europe in Transition from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century, edited by Antoni Mączak, Henryk Samsonowicz, and Peter Burke, 59–83. Cambridge–Paris: Cambridge University Press – Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1985.

* This paper is based in part on the following conference papers: Andrea Fara, Crisis and Famine in the Kingdom of Hungary in the late Middle Ages and early Modern Period (XIIIth–XVIth centuries), in XVth World Economic History Congress, Utrecht, August 3rd–7th, 2009 – Session B6, Medieval Central– and Southeast Europe: Towards a New Economic and Social History; Idem, Some Considerations about Crisis and Famine in East–Central Europe in the late Middle Ages and early Modern Period (XIIIth–XVIth centuries), in 7th CEU Conference in Social Sciences: “What Follows after the Crisis? Approaches to Global Transformations.” Budapest, Central European University, May 27th–29th, 2011.

Discursive (De)Constructions of the Depoliticized Private Sphere in The Resolution and Balaton Retro

Zsolt Győri

University of Debrecen

In this article I examine Gyula Gazdag and Judit Ember’s documentary The Resolution [A határozat, 1972] and Gábor Zsigmond Papp’s Balaton Retro [Balaton retró, 2007] as examples of the discursive production of paradoxes permeating the consolidated Kádár regime. I present the first film, portraying the character assassination of József Ferenczi (the executive manager of the Felcsút cooperative farm in the early 1970s) as a case study of state socialist technologies of power and strategies of constructing the narrative of the immoral and profiteering leader type, the corrupted servant of the community. This fabricated narrative is actually contested by members of the cooperative farm for whom Ferenczi is a symbol of the reform spirit and the promise of prosperity. I argue that the critical power of the film resides both in its meticulous dissection of the discursive and administrative methods used to create enemy images and its reluctance to present a local example of vilification as a general feature of the state socialist episteme. The Resolution presents the consolidated Kádár regime as an establishment torn between rigid ideological foundations and society’s desire for a depoliticised market economy, suffering from the political pressure to remain true to the spirit of communism and the social pressure to allow a greater degree of economic liberalism.

In Balaton Retro the popular tourist destination, Lake Balaton, is constructed as a spatial metaphor of both the crisis of the authoritarian system and of Goulash Communism (the name given to the system in Hungary, which constituted a quiet deviation from orthodox doctrines of Marxism-Leninism). The popular notion of the lake as the Hungarian Riviera came into being at the intersection of eastern and western understandings of welfare: on the one hand, the welfare state providing workers cheap holiday opportunities through a network of state-run holiday apartments and camps for children, and on the other, individual welfare, the possessors of which (usually citizens of Western Europe) sought leisure in modern luxury hotels. The emergence of private houses available for well-salaried Hungarian customers was another sign of the many dualities and hybrid meanings uncovered by Papp’s film as symptoms of the general state of the nation during the Kádár era. My analysis of the agency of the voiceover narration will reveal that Balaton Retro is not a manifestation of Ostalgie, but a critical meta-commentary on nostalgic memory. To conclude, I will describe retro as the commodification of a material past and nostalgia as a somewhat sinister legacy of state socialist identity politics.

Keywords: Kádár era, Goulash Communism, cinema, representations of communism, retro, post-communist nostalgia, documentaries

Introduction

Meditating on the nature of commemorations of the 1956 October events, Béla Pomogáts observed that the impassioned anniversary speeches, the lofty rhetoric, the lavish settings, and extravagant bouquets fail to address the moral heritage and teachings of the revolution: “The cult takes the form of heightened celebration, yet the ceremonies are almost exclusively governed by political interests…politics which, most of the time, is clearly party politics.”1 A decade later and in the wake of the 60th anniversary commemorations, this observation is still relevant; the quiet erosion of the revolutionary heritage and commitment to values such as solidarity, dignity, and national consensus continues. Pomogáts was only one of the many survivors, artists, and scholars who warned that the continued exploitation of the legacy to legitimize specific political ends seriously undermined the unique historical status of 1956 in cultural memory and turned it into a historical commodity put into the service of the political elite’s power struggle. The same applies to the Kádár regime, the haunting legacy of which remains unprocessed and insufficiently interrogated. In his acceptance speech at the 2004 Frankfurt book fair for a literary peace prize, Péter Esterházy noted that the shared European duty to problematize national burdens and address the past with honesty is overshadowed by amnesia in Hungary (and in other Eastern European countries), where the open-endedness of the memory-work and the tiresome communal effort to overcome national traumas has discouraged people from undertaking such a task and undermined their willingness to take responsibility for the past.2

The corrupted political culture of today and the “war of memory” surrounding events of the recent past vastly contributed to the lack of communal support for any confrontation with historical traumas, but they also proved that the retrospective production and frequent reconsideration of the past is an essential feature of political regimes lacking legitimacy and popular support. As is the case elsewhere in the region, Hungarian scholars have felt both the increasing political pressure and the popular demand for a consumable historical narrative that would relieve people of the toil of having to work through the past. This demand would sound cynical had historiography been a purely objective, empirical, and positivist academic discourse. However, as Zsolt K. Horváth notes, the historical discipline is also “a social praxis and as such, the knowledge it generates—given the primal role connectivity of memory plays in processes of identity-formation—is intimately linked to power elites.”3 In some cases historiography was mobilized as an auxiliary force of mundane political aims, yet the majority of the scholarly community insisted on professional standards and accountability while exploring new research methods and integrating new areas of archival research.

Historians and the various critical narratives they have offered of the state socialist period could not be expected to serve as an adequate substitute for communal confrontation with the legacy of this period. However, the meticulous exploration of the characteristic features of this legacy have made historians increasingly reliant on the audiovisual medium. Réka Sárközy’s monograph Elbeszélt múltjaink: a magyar történelmi dokumentumfilm útja [Our narrated pasts: The paths of Hungarian historical documentaries], for instance, offers a concise introduction to the generic development, politics, and poetics of historical documentaries, including a comprehensive analysis of films from the 1950s to the present. The chapters dedicated to documentaries of the 1980s,4 which Sárközy describes as films of “a useable past which perceive the cinematic medium as an instrument with which to change the present,”5 are the most relevant to my discussion here. As Sárközy asserts,

 

addressing varied topics and allowing for multiple points of view, the documentaries hope to confront a society—which was a passive collaborator in state offences—with its past and invite people to examine their parts in this(…) the artistic, scientific, and political stake of these films was to reinterpret archives, cleanse them of political influences, and uncover an interpretation which allows the past to be used by progressive practices of the present.6

As the above passage suggests, and as I have argued elsewhere,7 filmmakers contested the corrupting mechanisms of amnesia and appealed to the therapeutic function of collective memory-work. Oral history became a discourse which both revealed the fabrications of official memory politics and supported the empowerment of collective identity through the shared task of coming to terms with the past. Post-socialist historians shared the conviction of documentary filmmakers that narratives of the recent history could raise awareness of the mechanics of power, stereotyping, stigmatization, and the formation of social hegemonies in the present. They believed historical research should catalyze public discussion and self-critical reexaminations of the past by deciphering paradoxes and the dark legacy of state socialism, which hindered the development of civic attitudes and created hypocritical imaginations of national identity. The political appeal of such critical dialogue often proved counterproductive among the general public, which demanded depoliticized narratives allowing for strong affective investments. Svetlana Boym’s assertion concerning the post-Soviet situation offers an apt characterization of Hungarian developments:

 

glasnost intellectuals themselves, with their sense of moral responsibility and passionate earnestness, have become a forgotten tribe and fallen out of fashion… The collective trauma of the past was hardly acknowledged; or if it was, everyone was seen as an innocent victim or a cog in the system only following orders. The campaign for recovery of memory gave way to a new longing for the imaginary ahistorical past, the age of stability and normalcy.8

Social memory sought relief in the past of the private sphere detached from “ambivalence, the complexity of history and the specificity of modern circumstances,”9 the sphere Boym describes as the homeland of restorative nostalgia: “a return to the original stasis, to the prelapsarian moment.”10

Nostalgia’s invention of prelapsarian and authentic communism and the advent of the retro-industry also increased the demand for images of the quotidian aspects of “really existing socialism” and led to the visual commodification of the past. Whereas the historian always considers the constructive relationship between filmmaker and filmed reality and, in effect, presumes that “the (historical) document is not reality, but a linguistic representation that ascribes to it a specific value-structure and power status,”11 retro memory does not necessarily make this distinction and promotes non-ideological identification with both the repackaged material heritage and previous social and cultural rites. As Elizabeth E. Guffey claims, “retro offers an interpretation of history that taps nostalgia and an undercurrent of ironic understanding. Steeped in satire and humor, retro’s revivalist imagery has made its way into the mainstream, shaping how the recent past is presented.”12 As the newly emerging consumer society sought to fight its battle with forgetting in the realms of popular culture, the seriousness of memory was overtaken by the new fashion for amusing historical spectacle.

This article explores the discursive binary of the state-socialist legacy (which crystalizes in the critical-reflexive and the nostalgic-retro approaches) with reference to Gyula Gazdag’s and Judit Ember’s The Resolution and Gábor Zsigmond Papp’s Balaton Retro. Relying on Maya Nadkarni’s arguments concerning the makeup of post-socialist nostalgia, I contend that this memory genre is symptomatic of how citizens and social groups perceive the political sphere and the politicization of the public sphere. According to Nadkarni, retro nostalgia “challenged current regimes of value in post-socialism by finding worth in the cultural detritus of a past once reviled as inauthentic.”13 Thus, it sought to return to an apolitical quotidian world of innocence and stability “where the sharp divide between the private domestic sphere and the public world of political action was the very condition of political subjectivity.”14 Retreat from political activity as a way to maintain one’s personal integrity became the norm and added to the collective sense of identity during the Kádár era. According to Nadkarni, this withdrawal from the public sphere, coupled with fantasies of consumer plentitude, Western wages, and Western lifestyles (constituents of an imaginary elsewhere that promised a return to normalcy), was a symptom of an infantilized citizenry and a society that gradually conformed to being treated as a group of children by a paternalistic-patronizing political elite. Infantilization was a political strategy, while the anti-political attitude citizens were encouraged to cultivate was less an authentic expression of resistance than it was the premeditated space of neutralized resistance. The regime change, in this narrative, marked the moment of “a collective coming-of-age, in which the demise of paternal authority brought about a painful but necessary loss of innocence,”15 while the historical emotion of nostalgia released in the wake of this identity crisis expressed the desire for the insular private realm. There was mounting disappointment in and disapproval of the new political elite, which was blamed for the emerging economic-moral instability, and with large segments of society embracing anti-politics as resistance, the post-socialist citizenry was recaptured by the infantile subject position of imaginary independence constructed during the previous era.

Gyula Gazdag’s and Judit Ember’s The Resolution (made in 1972, censored until 1984, and made available for general audiences only after 1989) is a vivid illustration of the overpoliticised and corrupt public sphere from which there is no retreat apart from illusionary detachment. Having been judged unsuitable for public release and thus doomed to oblivion, the film offers expressive evidence of its non-agreement with official notions of social purposiveness. In order to safeguard the corrupted public sphere, the censors had no choice but to ban the film, which, instead of celebrating the regime, debunked its methods of infantalizing citizens and groups. The Resolution shared the ethical mission of sociographic documentaries described by Horváth as the liberation of reality from rigid ideological discourse.16 It achieved this aim through a method Ferenc Hammer characterises as follows: “[t]he political nature of exploring reality is brought to the surface by the objective gaze of the camera, which unveils the lies of the everyday routine and the oppressive apparatuses of interests.”17 The objective gaze of the camera as a promise to portray actual events and characters (Realism), observe characters and capture the normal, non-artificially dramatized tempo of life (situational filming), and use film as a methodologically solid description of the social sphere (Positivism) is expressive of the proactive attitude adopted by Gazdag and Ember in their film. The historical narrative presented in The Resolution bears witness to both history-from-below and the drama-of-lived-reality as it strives to capture how “reality ‘performs’ and reveals itself with its own resources and ordinary dynamics.”18 More importantly from the perspective of the present discussion, while presenting the battle of an agricultural cooperative president with demagogic bureaucrats who want to expel him publicly, the film reveals the paternalistic practices of forcing rigid political categories and narratives onto the private sphere. As historical meta-commentary, The Resolution documents how the Kádár regime, in its efforts to eradicate the private sphere and nationalize society, was driven not by the grandiose historical mission of communism, but by the pressure to conceal its own legitimacy crisis. I argue that the film renders legible these acts of concealment by capturing the private moments of the regime’s bureaucrats and exposing their political fanaticism. As Ember noted, “filmmakers capable of seizing the human face and gestures in the very moment when they look and sound dishonest are filmmakers with a mission.”19 My analysis situates The Resolution in the context of existing historical research and treats it as an authentic account of how the consolidated Kádár regime sought to secure social support for its weakened ideological foundations and struggled with demons of its own.

Gábor Zsigmond Papp is a key Hungarian representative of the “freelance historian” who emerged “outside the mainstream of artistic and historical thought. This dynamic and ever-changing group of artists, architects, designers, and writers revisit the past not as scholars but as non-professional historians. Their memorialization of the recent past emerges not through traditional historical research but through the identification and acquisition of objects from the recent past, as well as the replication of its images and styles.”20 Balaton Retro recycles images, sounds, and didactic voiceover commentaries into a collage that transforms the geographical location of Hungary’s largest holiday resort into the cultural space of popular imaginations and emotional and intellectual investments. Archival footage of Lake Balaton could have been easily used as a warehouse for restorative nostalgia, yet Papp, I contend, employs this footage as an assortment of documents of the imaginary anti-political subjectivity and childlike citizenry discussed by Nadkarni of a society willing to enjoy the dream projected by Goulash Communism. The parallels drawn in the film between Lake Balaton as the grand jewel of post-socialist nostalgia and the chief symbol of Goulash Communism allows me to further investigate the paradoxes of the private sphere as an illusionary site of detachment from politics. I conclude by proposing a direct link between the identity politics of retreat and the contemporary expansion of political populism.

In principle, this article investigates the failure to establish privacy as a position of authentic political resistance under state-socialism and analyses two films as exemplary narratives of this continuous failure, the legacy of which continues to haunt present-day political habitus in Hungary.

The Resolution: the (Failure of the) Discursive Construction of the Corrupt Farm President21

Beginning in the mid-1960s, the Kádár regime eased political control over various sectors of society and introduced a new model which, according to Tibor Valuch,

 

was styled ‘loosening and opening’–a gradual loosening from the fetters of dogmatically interpreted Marxist socialist ideology and from the country’s isolation from the wider cultural and scientific world, and an opening up to new intellectual ideas and approaches, to the mass media and, later on, information technologies that were increasingly shaping everyday lives, to new trends in the arts, and to the new findings that scientific and scholarly work was throwing up.22

A key element of the regime’s consolidation was the reforms introduced in the economic sector; the 1968 initiation of the New Economic Mechanism (NEM) had a significant impact on agricultural policies, most notably on cooperative farms: newly established auxiliary branches increased the volume of investment for non-farm products and better capacity utilization rates increased profitability and strengthened labor-intensive units. These pragmatic measures were initiated to increase productivity levels and reduce the country’s reliance on the import of agricultural goods. However, as Zsuzsanna Varga points out, they led to serious conflicts between trade pressure groups represented in both national and local bodies of the party apparatus. The strongest of these pressure groups campaigned for industrial workers and, having successfully claimed their primary role in socialist industrialization, overcame the arguments of agricultural interest groups. Their victory set off a retaliatory offensive and a wave of show-trials against more than a thousand cooperative presidents,23 legal procedures to which Árpád Pünkösti referred as early as 1985 as witch hunts.24 Since “the single party system did not allow for the direct clash of interests,”25 and because these conflicts were hard to resolve on economic grounds, representatives of the heavy industry interest group choose to fight the battle on ideological grounds. Varga’s research is founded on records of central administration which make frequent references to social interests, the supremacy of state ownership over cooperative ownership, and ideological arguments proposed by heavy industry delegates who deemed higher wages for agricultural workers unacceptable and warned of the dangers of labor migration from the cities to the countryside.26 Fears of intensifying social conflicts strengthened the anti-reform group led by Béla Biszku and urged the government to undermine the liberalization process initiated by the reform-communist wing of the party.

The correspondence between the termination of the NEM and the witch hunts targeting farm presidents serves as the historical context of the events depicted in The Resolution. The film refers to its historical period by (re)constructing the hermeneutical context in which the ideological fabrication of the immoral, egoistic, and criminal-minded president of the Felcsút New Life Cooperative Farm takes place. Focusing on the conceptual and discursive construction at work in the character assassination of József Ferenczi in a show trial, The Resolution is a meta-discursive document of the post-NEM years. Gazdag and Ember do not tell the story of how local party apparatchiks in collaboration with members of the cooperative farms manage to overthrow a corrupt leader. On the contrary, they document how cooperative democracy is violently curtailed and how attempts to replace Ferenczi fail as cooperative members stand beside their falsely accused president. The meta-discursive quality of the film is established by its makers’ strategy of pointing out the inconsistencies between the discursive production of the public sphere and the corresponding politicization and denial of the private.

Two informal conversations recorded at the local party bureau frame the film. Although these dramatic reenactments of rare intimate moments cannot be regarded as “objective” documents, they are documents of the “authenticity” of privacy, and they aptly illustrate how the private sphere was politicized. With the introduction of bureaucratic types whose gestures and oratorical performances are farcical, viewers are admitted into the formalities and rituals of decision-making, or, in this case, the mechanics of constructing images of the enemy. These scenes capture the mood in which political conspiracies take root and an ideologically partial and deceitful public sphere is discursively fabricated. “The decision is already made, our main concern is its implementation” (06:38–06:41) rings like the thesis statement of any show-trial. The implementation is problematic, since Ferenczi is willing to resign only if his personal reputation is not compromised and he will not have to face further consequences for offences he never committed. This is not an option for the local party representatives, who wish to condemn Ferenczi publicly for moral and financial damages. It is essential that the concept of the corrupt farm president combine criminal, immoral, and anti-social aspects, since these aspects amplify the threat he poses to the community and, furthermore, legitimize both the complex network of state institutions that safeguard socialist morality and the harsh methods used to discipline opportunistic enemies of the system. Gyula Estélyi, the leader of the conversation and chief secretary of the local party committee, clarifies what implementation means in this case: on the one hand, the conceptualization of the corrupt farm president and, on the other, arranging public meetings where this concept will be tested, disseminated, and approved by members of the cooperative. As a dramatic finale of the character assassination, the general assembly will grant public support for the practices of intimidation, and it will force Ferenczi to resign by taking a democratic vote.

As the film testifies, Estélyi and his associate functionaries are ready to enforce the decision and fight their battle on more than one front. They consider the possibility of general support for the president, and although the possible resistance of the coop members is referred to as a potential hindrance, they agree that a direct democratic mechanism must be ensured: “the party makes suggestions, makes an assessment, tries to help, but if people do not need this help, they have the right of veto, the right to a secret ballot, the right to raise a hand” (14:16–14:32). After this cynical and paternalist demonstration of his commitment to participatory democracy, he urges the comrades to act upon the people’s communist consciousness and remind them of their responsibility to advance socialism. In other words, Estélyi wishes to solicit support for his claims not by making an appeal to the self-conscious proletarian, but by reminding people of the ideals they should follow in individual decisions and private conduct. This appeal to hypocritical behavior is a symptom of the public sphere’s artificial authenticity, and it is expressive of an expectation according to which ideologically correct thoughts, feelings, and attitudes must reign over the private sphere. In addition, certain strategies of intimidation are also proposed, as Estélyi requests that his comrades emphasize at future meetings the long-term negative consequences for cooperative members should they continue to support Ferenczi. In another cynical gesture, he contemplates how members will learn from their mistakes before they comprehend the benefits of cooperative democracy. Hence, the retaliatory-disciplinary logic is extended and the whole collective will suffer for its deviation from the ideologically correct path. The concept of the corrupt president is supplemented with the concept of the corrupted community, both of which have, according to the official discourse, violated the practice of peaceful socialist coexistence.

The main body of The Resolution covers the “implementation” phase of the decision, in other words, the practical application of the discriminative concept. At the board meeting of the farm, the head of the district bureau (the supervisory board of the cooperative) claims that Ferenczi has lost political support. He proposes his removal and requests all participants to toe the party line. To emphasize the legitimacy of this paternalist request, general charges are listed, including the employment of an ex-convict associated with prostitution, undermining the reputation of the village, wasting the assets of the cooperative, increasing the budget for entertainment costs, and the private use of the company car.27 Apart from the indisputable proof of the first charge, all additional accusations are declared false by Ferenczi, whom we see for the first time in the film and whose emotionally upset yet logical speech gives an itemized reply to the complaints: the pimp, a certain Fischer, was hired by comrade Szűcs, one of his present accusers; during his presidency, the cooperative became more productive and provided higher living-standards for residents; entertainment costs are negligible in view of total operational costs; no illegal payment or car-use took place; and the local party bureau had fully supported him until its recent turnaround.28 Ferenczi’s methodical invalidation of the charges brought against him and, furthermore, his passionate concluding insistence that, “I will not leave this farm blemished and blackened” (33:34–33:36) indicate that he is aware of both the witch hunt targeting his person and the provocative discursive strategies on which it is based. Other members of the executive board side with Ferenczi and question the moral grounds for the character assassination. They suggest that the president had always valued the interests of the community over his own. Sensing the failure to build a strong grassroots base in their anti-Ferenczi campaign, the strategists who craft the techniques of intimidation adopt more explicit meausures culminating in blackmail when the chief-accountant of the company announces that the lack of political support for the president may result in the withdrawal of a national bank credit worth 10 million forint. He also adds that this sum would have to be raised by members, an absurd claim which, nevertheless, indicates the desperate desire of the functionaries to continue with the discriminatory process.

In the next round of the discursive boxing match, at the general meeting of the local party organization, Ferenczi presents the annual accounts and leaves, allowing the party members to discuss the controversies surrounding his activities. The verbal responses of the party members are as revealing as the images lingering on the frustrated, angry, desperate faces of the participants. These facial gestures, which constitute intimate bodily reactions to the malicious attacks, demonstrate people’s unwillingness to play the public roles they are expected to play and pretend to be ideal cadres. These are the faces of people irritated by the intrusion of politics into their private affairs, people who would rather be pragmatic than dogmatic. This attitude is affirmed by the research of Pünkösti, and more specifically the words of an ex-farm president, Semjén István: “[coop] members were able to evaluate the performance of the president in a more complex manner than paragraphs can ever hope to. Despite minor character flaws, most presidents possessed qualities that made them effective and suitable leaders. Applying laws to measure the worth of such people is like allowing a bull in a china shop.”29 Similar opinions are heard at the general meeting, emphasizing the president’s good planning and management skills, his financial intelligence, and the importance of continuity. A speaker praises the auxiliary branches and their contribution to the national industry, and he points out how they decrease the number of commuters, reduce the migration of qualified labor from the countryside to industrial towns, and contribute to the development of rural Hungary. These arguments were listed by the agricultural pressure group led by Lajos Fehér; nevertheless, spoken by a simple laborer, these words reflect direct social experience and demand pragmatism and economic rationality instead of ideological populism and moral judgements. Another member of the audience touches upon an extremely sensitive topic when asking whether there would be any consequences for the local party bureau if the resolution to remove Ferenczi failed, that is, if the victimization procedure ended in public defeat. Instead of a proper answer, the main speaker gives the following instructions: “like it or not, the party resolution is binding for all party members, so everyone must implement the resolution proposed by the higher authorities” (01:00:16–01:00:28). Potential traitors are threatened with disciplinary action, which sounds like just another empty intimidating remark provided that votes are cast by secret ballot. Nevertheless, it is also a clear symptom of the aspiration to put private choice under ideological control.

The general assembly is the forum which grants social legitimacy for the concept of the corrupt president and ensures that the witch hunt commences with the support of the public. The vote, at the same time, is also about the social acceptance of party rituals that penetrate into their lives, that is, the degree to which they are ready to collaborate with the political leadership in acting out ideologically prescribed roles. With the rising stakes, the anti-Ferenczi rhetoric also reaches new heights and, on top of the already voiced criticism of the president, new accusations are made, like the negative press coverage of Felcsút in the national press and the allegations concerning the excessive salary of the president and occasional transactions involving family members. Bringing up the topic of financial profiteering seems a calculated move, and it reflects the high priority of income levels and material wealth in people’s decisions. Hence, the accusers make a final attempt to present their case on ideological grounds and employ the dichotomy of self-interest and group-interest, while at the same time they appeal to more base human sentiments, like envy and resentment. Repeated references to the moral, financial, and legal consequences members will have to face should they reject the resolution give the impression that the vote is also about the future of the company and imply that cooperative democracy works best when group interests (the interest of the members) are subordinated to ideological interests (the idea of egalitarianism). After the secret ballot has been cast and the votes have been counted, results show a majority for the pro-Ferenczi camp. The feeling of relief is interrupted by the head of the district council, an associate of the party bureaucrats, who announces that a 2/3 majority is required for the vote to be valid. After checking the relevant legal passages, he retracts this statement and the assembly is disbanded.

In the final section of the film, viewers watch the company of familiar functionaries discuss the lessons they have learned. They unanimously agree on the legitimacy of the initial concept and decision, but they point to serious mistakes in the methods of implementation and express regret for not having been able to prove Ferenczi’s criminal nature, political defects, and unorthodox leadership techniques. Speculations are made as to whether they should have settled for disciplinary action instead of trying to remove him and agree on the need for closer cooperation among the separate bureaus, offices, and councils and for more temperate and patient agitprop activities. Criticism from party headquarters, summarized by Estélyi with the question, “[w]hy would you launch a resolution that you cannot guarantee will pass” (1:37:07–1:37:08), might suggest that the initiative was flawed from the outset and that it was a mistake to attack a popular president of a successful farm. This would actually explain why the film was banned: the authorities did not want to expose the public to depictions of events that should never have taken place. If this was the case, Gazdag and Ember’s “offence” was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I believe the opposite is true, however, not only in the sense that they were in the right place at the right time, but also because their film was as much a gain to the power elite as it was a blow.

Widespread lawsuits against cooperative presidents were initiated a year after The Resolution was made, and these legal procedures, according to the research of Varga, followed from the narrative of the corrupted president, which translated into “subordination of public interests to group interest.”30 The film also rendered legible the alliance formed in the years of economic liberalization between presidents and members, a group interest hard to penetrate and break by party officials. To prove the immoral nature of this alliance, authorities chose to vilify and criminalize the activities of presidents who supposedly acted in the service of farm members and made them willing accomplices in illegal activities. Varga presents numerous archival documents criticizing allegedly corrupted group interests, and the anti-Ferenczi alliance, as I pointed out, makes similar claims on several occasions. The film probably guided the political elite to the recognition that presenting members as collaborators in economic and moral wrongdoing would give authorities the necessary public authorization to launch legal and ideological attacks and set off nationwide show-trials. Having given the concept shape and sown the seeds of broad-based anti-agricultural sentiments in the public sphere, the central administration handed over the task of “tracking down” individual presidents to lower-level functionaries with reliable knowledge of local affairs.

In my view, The Resolution was not banned because it documented the failure of the anti-president discourse, since eventually the campaign against the president of the cooperative succeeded. At the end of the film, captions inform viewers about the removal of József Ferenczi by the coop members in 1973, which was followed by disciplinary measures against his person. I also believe the film provided valuable information for the power elite about the shortcomings of paternalist administrative methods and discriminatory practices on the one hand and the desire of farm workers for depoliticized company management and autonomy in financial and economic decisions on the other. In a more general sense, the authorities would have understood the citizen’s increasing desire for individual opinion and the decoupling of the private sphere from politics. In addition to suggesting that the state-socialist regime was upheld by political and not social commitment, the film also showed how past practices of collectivizing private lives and subordinating them to politicized interests provoked people’s anti-political reflexes.

In this context, the behavior of the local party apparatchiks is likewise revealing. Although these men should embody the committed cadre type with full devotion to an ideology, they seem to be more fascinated by the camera, and they willingly act out roles. At the end of the final discussion, they look into the camera smiling. Estélyi strikes the table, imitating the sound of a clapperboard, and says, “Well…that’s all” (1:39:51). In the documentary feature films of the Balázs Béla Studio (BBS) and Társulás Stúdió the choice to cast amateur actors to play social types served the goal of authenticity. Including such scenes of self-performance in a documentary, in my understanding, serves the purpose of meta-commentary on public role playing as a survival method during the Kádár regime. These scenes propose that functionary identities are always performed and constructed through the acting out of idolized roles, ritualistic behavior types, and verbal clichés: politics becomes performance and performance legitimizes and authenticates politics. In other words, maintaining the “authentic” image of the committed cadre is depicted as the greatest service to the regime, since the regime is what people perceive of it in the public sphere. Esse est percipi. The Resolution draws a portrait of a political system which has lost its revolutionary momentum—even cadres and political activists are performed roles—and concentrates most of its energies on maintaining appearances, on constructing the image of integrity. Gazdag and Ember do not theorize the reasons for this lost momentum, but the lack of social support for the discriminatory discourse presented in the film is symptomatic and, I believe, corresponds with the following assertion by Gábor Gyányi: “modern political dictatorships in their founding stage rely on popular movements, but when they eventually solidify (consolidate) into state power they require more than (just) the support of political fanatics.”31 Unless this transition from activist-based to broad-based support is achieved, a legitimacy crisis of the political elite is imminent.

The lessons of The Resolution are manifold: it identifies a communal will for a depoliticized public sphere and, furthermore, describes politics as a stage on which appearances are maintained through authentic performances. The performative qualities of politics might have provided the regime with the illusion of authority over citizens, but they were too weak to ensure full control over them. Recognizing its own limited options to democratize the public sphere, the administration strove to politicize the private by injecting into it the performative qualities of anti-politics and allowing the sphere of intimacy to perform itself as a site of detachment and relative liberty. As such, the power elite opened the fairground of illusionary authenticity to the masses and invited them to act out imaginations of privacy. The political benefits of infantilizing society while regaining control over people who could not be effectively fanaticized were not only merely symptomatic of Goulash Communism, rather, they defined it.

Balaton Retro: Goulash Communism Debunked

Gábor Zsigmond Papp’s Balaton Retro (2007) uses exclusively archival footage which at the time it was made served the single aim of aggrandizing the achievements of the socialist welfare state. Like Budapest Retro 1–2 (1998 and 2003), his previous ventures into retro-documentaries, Balaton Retro also depended on the Hungarian Film Archive for historical resources. Papp would both recycle and re-contextualize archival material, adding popular songs from the period as musical accompaniment and voiceover commentaries to the images. In his grandiose visual montage of Goulash Communism, images that once pretended to be apolitical, carrying softened and disguised overtones of ideological discourses (and then after the regime change becoming material signifiers of a sociocultural elsewhere), are presented as a self-debasing narrative of the Kádár regime. Papp also emphasized this feature of the film:

 

[t]his is not a historical presentation of the Kádár regime, rather it reveals how the regime wanted people to see it. These are propaganda films that debunk themselves. One does not need to add anything, as they are absurd as they are. We never tried to mock anything with the voiceover commentaries, the humor of the films follow from the original footage.32

Apart from distinguishing history from retro-memory, Papp’s reference to the humor of the archival footage suggests that already at the time of their making the recordings were perceived as half serious representations of Lake Balaton, either because they capture comic scenes of holiday makers or because of their pathetic efforts to present ideological narratives as reality. Balaton Retro also subverts the historical sensation of nostalgia, an emotionally saturated sensibility to an ideal but lost past and, likewise, revival(ism), a group strategy to rediscover and reconnect with a past thought to be lost as a result of a sociocultural fracture. Although the film will be enjoyed by viewers yearning for commercial mass produced nostalgia and will allow the younger generation socialized in consumer society to grasp the atmosphere of socialist popular culture, Papp does not attempt to mythologize the era or present the social landscape of the 1960s and 1970s as exemplary or authentic and, thus, worth rejuvenating. The retro-memory employed by the film is not a “rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress,” neither does it wish to “obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time”.33 Rather, it is a self-conscious and ironic attitude to the narration of the past. The discursive strategy of Balaton Retro is closest to Guffey’s definition of retro as an unsentimental memory genre: “half-ironic, half-longing, ‘retro’ considers the recent past with an unsentimental nostalgia. It is unconcerned with the sanctity of tradition or reinforcing social values; indeed, it often insinuates a form of subversion while sidestepping historical accuracy.”34

Papp’s film points beyond the post-socialist culture of nostalgia, and while it does not turn its back on the increasing demand for retro, it refuses to glorify or mythologize the past. I agree with Sárközy’s assertion that Papp’s retro-documentaries follow from the Western-European and American tradition of revisionist history: “propaganda films recently made available by archives are reinterpreted and radically re-contextualized. Thus, they allow us to reconsider our ideas and beliefs about reality.” 35 I would add only that Papp’s revisionism is most productive when linked to the aforementioned paradoxes of the popular demand for privacy under state socialism. Balaton Retro, I contend, reaches beyond the deceptive mask of Goulash Communism, and instead of depicting it as the golden age of egalitarianism, it explores Lake Balaton as the discursive production of the myth of a depoliticized private sphere. Papp investigates the “authenticity” of the lake as a place of retreat, less a geographical location than a spatial metaphor of the much sought-after detachment from a non-egalitarian public life. Although stylistically very different, I consider the film the twin-narrative of The Resolution, a perceptive reading of how consecutive generations continued to find comfort in the lake even after realizing that their initial yearning for equality, privacy, and liberty was compromised, neutralized, and dissatisfied. I propose that Balaton Retro debunks the “authenticity” of Lake Balaton, and more generally the false emotional, economic, and political imaginations about Goulash Communism in a discourse with five layers.

The first layer considers tourism-related infrastructure, mainly housing facilities of very different quality and price. People who were not eligible for cheap trade-union owned resort homes (so-called SZOT üdülő) could choose between different types of accommodation, including hotels, motels, apartment houses, and campsites. This layer of the discourse links the emergence of the socialist welfare state to the modernization of local infrastructure, as a result of which Lake Balaton, also known as the Hungarian Riviera in popular terminology, was transformed into an affordable holiday destination for ordinary people, mainly families. This latter aspect explains why Balaton became a spatial symbol of egalitarianism and a source of shared experience for generations of Hungarians. Actually, its popularity soon exceeded its capacity, resulting in crowded beaches and overpriced catering services. As the planned economy could not provide proper or even basic services for all visitors, the authorities permitted the establishment of private enterprises to satisfy high demand. Lake Balaton, in this regard, exemplifies what economist János Kornai termed a shortage economy: a chronic Eastern European experience during the state socialist period.36 The consequent emergence of lucrative private businesses (apartment houses, takeout restaurants, greengrocers) soon became a characteristic feature of Lake Balaton and transformed popular imaginations of the place from a symbol of egalitarianism to a symbol of ruthless profiteering.

Along with active laborers, the communist youth was a key social resource with which to build future support for the regime. Not surprisingly, youth culture was given increased attention by the political elite, as evidenced quite clearly by the concern shown by propaganda films for the attitudes of this age group. This is reflected in Balaton Retro, the second discursive layer of which introduces student camps and youth oriented subculture around the lake. The pioneer’s camp at Zánka, referred to as a gift of the party to working class children and celebrated as another achievement of the welfare state, is presented in archival recordings as a place where the younger generations share the benefits of global communism and enjoy vacations in a multicultural environment. In Papp’s re-contextualization, however, it seems more an example of ideological indoctrination, when the voiceover narrator reads part of a letter written, allegedly, by children for the anniversary of the Hiroshima attacks: “[w]e enter our forces into a coalition to fight against the threat of nuclear catastrophe and to terminate wars around the world” (00:23:04–00:23:14). The strange wording of these sentences, very different from children’s language, points to the indoctrinating atmosphere of youth camps in the period, which hindered the development of critical, self-aware, and proactive social identities and laid the foundations of a politically infantile citizenry Another form of institutional recreation was organized by the Hungarian Young Communist League (KISZ) at camps around the lake, where teenagers would do (compulsory) voluntary work at agricultural farms or lend a hand at state-owned retailing units, such as supermarkets. Although this represented an ineffective form of labor, the film implies a calculated correspondence between the shortage economy and the rigid labor market which heavily relied on unpaid work. Moving on to the generational experiences of young adults, the film presents visual and verbal documents of the moral panic over young people’s attitudes. The discourse of vilification against subcultures presumed (for reasons unexplained) provocative and threatening to socialist morality is echoed by the voiceover commentary. Although this self-reflective imitation of the paternalist rhetoric becomes its own caricature, it exemplifies how vulnerable the space of liberty was, and it points to the eventual failure to find a refuge from everyday drudgery and non-egalitarian social relations

The next discursive layer of the film explores tourism and introduces Lake Balaton as an outpost of the West behind the Iron Curtain. Western tourists were allowed to spend holidays at Lake Balaton chiefly for economic reasons: to increase reserves of hard currency and thus facilitate commerce with Western companies. These considerations led to increased tourist interest in Lake Balaton, and this had an impact on the cultural image of the space. Either as sites of reunions for separated German families or as inexpensive yet well-equipped holiday resorts offering the best of Hungarian cuisine, Gypsy music, popular entertainment, and access to high art, the hotels and campsites popping up around the lake served as a space of connectivity. In addition to functioning as a contact zone between capitalist, consumer-oriented modernity and socialist modernity, which was proud of its revolutionary advancements in the field of social welfare, Lake Balaton also rendered legible the economic inequalities along the East-West divide. Unlike the international pioneer camp of Zánka, where a shared ideological background eliminated national differences and inequalities of wealth, spaces which were under less control, like streets and hotel parking lots, were sites of encounters of a different kind. As Balaton Retro’s archival footage shows, ordinary Hungarians would stare with amazement at signifiers of material wealth, like cars, trendy cloths, and accessories. Especially revealing are visual passages of young women throwing brief, enthusiastic glances at Western men, but the lack of access to premium leisure activities and spaces (like Hotel Marina) was a burden to most Hungarian holiday makers, and it added to their feelings of inferiority. The most vivid illustration of the imperfection of state-provided welfare is the scene entitled “A foreigner at Lake Balaton,” a mock film-diary of a Hungarian expatriate returning to Balaton for a vacation. The protagonist of this episode, who speaks Hungarian with a heavy accent and resembles characters in vintage recordings, is József Magyar. He visits his homeland and is astonished to find a modern tourist industry on the lakeside. A cloudy day, however, disrupts his routine water-sport activities and forces him to pursue other entertainment. He asks at the reception desk in his hotel whether it is possible to play roulette or billiards, but he is told that such dishonorable games are not available, and although they have a chess board, it has gone missing. Magyar decides to play tennis. After paying a hefty sum at the reception desk, he is told to pick up the key at the hospital, which he does with some reluctance, only to find that the tennis court is already taken. This comic parable is Papp’s most explicit attempt to interpret Goulash Communism as welfare provided by a paternalist state (epitomized by the hotel receptionist) bound by ideological imperatives (concerning what is dishonorable and what is not) and characterized by shortsighted and chaotic planning (as the case of the key suggests).

Kornai draws a similar picture: “[a] paternalist ‘welfare state’ covering the entire population was developed over several decades. Hungary can vie with the most developed Scandinavian countries in the range of codified entitlements to benefits and in the proportion of GDP laid out on social spending, whereas per capita production is only a small fraction of theirs.”37 At a later point, Kornai calls this redistributive system of welfare spending beyond the country’s economic capacity “premature,”38 and he contends that maintaining it “was most important to the government at any time to reassure people. The paternalist redistribution certainly has a soothing effect, compensating to a large extent for the reduction in and uncertainty about real wages earned legally in the market sector.”39 This characterization of the welfare state, the compensatory function of which often led to hasty and unreflective decisions, bears remarkable similarities with Papp’s witty parable of the tourist industry, which appears to work well, but in fact is illogical and, ultimately, dysfunctional. In this insightful segment, Balaton Retro points to the central paradox permeating all discursive layers that ascribe meanings to the lake. Like Goulash Communism, the popular image of Lake Balaton is fractured by the discrepancies between the ideal of egalitarianism and a non-egalitarian reality, the promise of retreat from the corruptness of public life and the frustration over the same demoralizing social relations being reproduced locally.

The iconic business figures (popular heroes for some, profiteers for others) associated with the lake were also the products of a regime lost in its own doublethink. While the authorities, at first, allowed private resources to ease the soaring demand for accommodation and licensed building permits for large family houses which everybody knew served in part as short-term rental properties, they later reprimanded owners for unlawful profiteering. This cat-and-mouse-game is recounted by Papp via an archival interview with a man who built a seven-bedroom house (with numbers hanging from the doorframes) with three bathrooms and two kitchens but claimed that it was for his family and the years he would spend in retirement. Because his narrative will be heard in the public sphere, the man adapts to the official language of egalitarianism presented, in this case literally, as the language of dishonesty. This is another example of the discursive production of privacy, an agency allowed to be formed in the act of being subordinated to and limited by the political rationale.

The same logic characterized Goulash Communism as a social system promising increased quality of life in a world with limited freedoms and consumer choice. The segment on sports around the lake offers an overview of the various forms of water and beach sports enjoyed by vacationers, noting that there were always shortages of the most popular equipment, such as air mattresses. According to the logic of the shortage economy, holiday makers were to blame, as they were demanding an unnecessary item. In the eyes of bureaucrats, the lake was there for swimming, rowing, and sailing, but not for sunbathing on mattresses. Another telling example of the short-sightedness, or in this case the sheer stupidity, of bureaucrats is when the local council advises fisherman to build their huts on the top of the hill because they make the lakeshore unattractive. Some water sports, like sailing and motor-boating, were regarded as too extravagant and damaging to social egalitarianism, so the owners were burdened with extra taxes and restrictions in the 1970s. The strict regulations on motorboat use offer a compelling case of how ideological and pragmatic considerations were seemingly reconciled. This episode of the film begins with a voiceover narration: “in 1978, authorities introduce a total ban on motorboats with the exception of those owners who agree to patrol the lake voluntarily in their free time” (01:01:45–01:02:00). Later, we see an archival interview with a policeman who lists professions, including doctors, professors, company directors, and engineers (people with high qualifications and an unquestionable sense of responsibility), as members of the voluntary water-police community. In the next shot, we hear a segment from an archival audio recording: “[n]owadays, many people criticize the quality of the Hungarian educational system. But can these critics show another country where voluntary policemen solve complicated mathematical formulas and carry out intricate surgical operations?” (01:02:44–01:03:00) The manner in which this information is presented not only offers a sketch of the logic underlying regulations and practices, it also offers a symptomatic reading of the strategies adopted by the regime to appease conflicts arising from economic inequalities. Accordingly, influential and high-income representatives of the professional and industrial elite could maintain their privileges in return for voluntary services provided for the community. The fact that the authorities wished to disguise cosmopolitan hobbies as public service, that is, disguise rather than resolve social inequalities, suggests that despite endless tirades about commitment to egalitarianism, the regime actually operated through clientelism, in-group bias, and a system of favors.

The last discursive layer of the film presents the richness of cheap amusements offered for vacationers, including for instance a beauty pageant, a hairdresser competition, a fashion show, a water theatre, fairgrounds, open-air cinemas, concerts, and festivals, most of which drew large crowds eager for spectacle. These activities, though they suggested affluence and consumer freedom, actually encouraged people to partake in the infantile social rites provided by state-controlled popular culture. Even more openly than in the previous archival footage, young female bodies dressed in bikinis are highlighted, as if narratives of Lake Balaton could be best told from the perspective of a sexualized patriarchal regime. The gendered gaze, as a prevalent feature of the recordings, coupled with regular mention of the easy-going sexual disposition of visitors, draws a picture of Lake Balaton as the bordello of Goulash Communism, a space of tolerated exhibitionism, a spatial safety-valve for otherwise bigoted, puritanical, and self-restraining state-socialist public morals. Serving as a showroom of Hungary’s evolving popular culture, municipalities around the lake were urged to promote cultural events with historical traditions. The Anna-ball in Tiszafüred and the grape harvest celebrations reinvented aristocratic and folk festive traditions for mass entertainment, adding socialist flavors to the events. Reinvention also brought about bureaucratization: a recording of the Anna-ball organizing committee shows easily recognizable party functionaries, like those of The Resolution, discussing details of a festival initiated in the Reform Era, a period of nineteenth-century Hungarian history that saw the awakening of national identity, modernization, and the spread of liberalism.

Conclusion

Balaton Retro evokes the material culture and social rituals of the Kádár era with an observant and elaborative memory which remains alert to the interplay of elements among the various narrative layers of Lake Balaton. Like Gazdag and Ember, Papp also recognizes the schizophrenic nature of the regime, which hopes to resolve its loss of popular support by adopting populist techniques with which to manipulate, neutralize, and infantilize the masses. The films discussed here arrive at the same conclusion as Gábor Halmai: “political legitimacy in Hungary depends on welfarist concessions to the population.”40 The economic rationale of these concessions was, in large part, unfounded and, as Kornai asserts, “did not derive from a forward-looking, long-term government program. It arose out of improvisation, through rivalry between distributive claims. First one group, stratum, or trade then another would demand more or at least struggle against curtailment of its existing rights.”41 It is impossible to run a system founded on improvisation of such a high degree without the collaboration of citizens, who willfully renounce their own interests for the benefit of others. This is, of course, an unrealistic scenario, and if pursued, it would further undermine the legitimacy of the administration and certainly lead to the spread of grassroots resistance and bottom-up populism. Another route, the one taken by the consolidated Kádár regime, was to disguise the improvised nature of policies aiming to raise living standards and pacify citizens’ anti-authoritarian attitudes by allowing them the (illusion of the) political passivity of private life, even if this passivity was used to legitimize the regime and made people unwilling collaborators in their own subordination.

The chosen documentaries portray this control as a paternalistic, top-down model of populism and a partial return to the rhetoric of early communist regimes, which proposed to empower disenfranchised people. The claims made by the party functionaries to protect social interests from egotistic group interests in The Resolution evoke the populist slogans communist activists proclaimed during their rise to power. Documenting the return to these techniques of mobilization, Gazdag and Ember offer empirical proof of how populism, as Francisco Panizza notes, “becomes a tradition embedded in the party’s myths, institutions and official discourse.”42 The populism Gazdag and Ember identify as a seminal strategy of the Kádár-regime also calls to mind Ernesto Laclau’s proposition, according to which “a movement is not populist because in its politics or ideology it presents actual contents identifiable as populistic, but because it shows a particular logic of articulation of those contents – whatever those contents are” (emphasis in original).43 The practice of mobilizing “the people” against imagined “others” was a feature of state-socialist administrative practices, and it revealed strategies of populism in two interrelated aspects. On the one hand, the discursive production of antagonisms (people vs. others, Us vs. Them) requires, as Laclau asserts, “floating signifiers”44 that can take different concrete referents in different circumstances. As suggested above, the intimidation strategies used against Ferenczi involved the constant redefinition and specification of what “corrupt” (as a floating signifier) meant. The same applies to the “people” and the “will of the community.” My analysis of The Resolution has sought to how the regime was struggling to construct the authentic meanings of these categories and in the process revealed its own inauthenticity and legitimacy crisis. Part of this was the unfounded identification of agricultural workers as belonging to the imaginary union of the people (the Us). In fact, the film bears witness to the formation of a bottom-up populist movement stemming from people’s demand for privacy and their desire to retreat from a politicized public life.

This desire is connected to the second aspect of the populism which, according to Panizza, “both depoliticises and hyper-politicises social relations”45 to increase support. De-politicization and the substitution of the “political discourse for the discourse of morals” 46 was a key aspect in the character assassination of Ferenczi and the appeals made to the workers’ sense of ethical responsibility for social interests. The discursive production of Lake Balaton exemplifies how de-politicization may serve as a disguise for hyper-politicization. The archival footage featured in Balaton retro mobilized popular culture to prove that universal access to welfare benefits, leisure and sport activities, participation in festivals, and other common social rituals was falsely perceived as a form of resistance more authentic than open political confrontation. Papp recognizes the paradoxical nature of such authenticity, and he elucidates how propaganda was expected to convince people that the lake was not an artificial space of emancipation, not a patronized escape, and not the site of illusionary retreat when, in fact, it was. Identifying de-politicization as an effect and a form of camouflage of hyper-politicization allows Papp to describe welfarism as populist. Whenever people demanded more and the disguise was exposed, strategies of hyper-politicization would emerge either by posing bureaucratic limits on people’s desires or by forcing them into hegemonic relations. Whenever the moral authority of the welfare state was questioned, like in encounters with more affluent Western lifestyles, propaganda returned to antagonizing dichotomies (Us vs. Them) or, as reports on pioneer camps testify, emphasized the unequal relationship between the people and their patron, the state.

One of my intentions in this article is to have drawn further critical attention to the consolidated Kádár regime as a case of political populism best understood through the widespread social desire to retreat into the private sphere and the private fantasies of an apolitical elsewhere. Present-day populism, as the politics of the disillusioned and nostalgic masses, is similar. It openly critiques the Establishment and continuity, and it petitions for new economic models, social dynamics, and cultural idols. It gains popularity by recognizing people’s anti-political sentiments, allowing such imaginations to enter the realm of politics, and spearheading the outrage against a presumably corrupted elite. Emerging in Eastern Europe, it has recently swept through the West, eroding the status quo of modern democracy and bringing its institutions to their knees. More precisely, it emerged from the Eastern European experience of disillusionment shared by ever-extending segments of the population increasingly vulnerable to the neoliberal economic transformation. The rude awakening from global capitalism increased, as post-socialist nostalgia testifies, citizens’ fascination with the previous regime and prevented them from recognizing that the switch to a market economy was only the catalyst and not the cause of their destitution, that, in fact, societies suffer from the legacy of the very unsustainable socioeconomic models they once passively helped to engineer.

If we accept the assertion that the Kádár regime’s Goulash Communism failed because its weak economic performance, which was unable to support welfare policies and further the process of social liberalization, prompted desires too robust for its narrow ideological framework to hold back (in other words, it was unable to satisfy people’s demands for more welfare), we can make further claims about the recent upsurge in political populism. First, it places people’s expectations and desires above political rationality, but since these expectations are mostly unfounded and derive from the childish belief in the benefits of political inactivity, populism has to maintain society’s dishonest relationship with the past. Secondly, in its support for unreflective, restorative nostalgia and antagonism towards the self-critical reassessment of the state-socialist heritage, populism shelters people’s right to cherish an otherwise false sense of reality. Not only does it accept this new license to dishonesty and promote the freedom of an infantile citizenry, it also obtains political legitimacy as its guardian. Hence, populism eventually translates the private ideology of passive resistance into political action, but only in order to use anti-political subjectivity for its own unpredictable and “authentic” ends.

 

Bibliography

A Határozat [The Resolution]. Dir. Gyula Gazdag–Ember Judit. BBS–MAFILM Objektív Filmstúdió, 1972.

Balaton Retró [Balaton Retro]. Dir. Zsigmond Papp Gábor. Budapest Film, 2007.

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Hammer, Ferenc. “A megismerés szerkezetei, stratégiái és poétikái: szocio-doku a BBS-ben” [The structures, strategies, and poetics of recognition: Socio-documentary in BBS]. In BBG 50: A Balázs Béla Stúdió 50 éve [50 years of the Balázs Béla Studio], edited by Gelencsér Gábor, 263–74. Budapest: Műcsarnok/BBS, 2009.

K. Horváth, Zsolt: “A valóság metapolitikája. Kognitív realizmus a magyar társadalomkutatásban: szociográfia és dokumentumfilm” [The meta-politics of reality. Cognitive realism in Hungarian social research: Sociography and documentary film]. In BBG 50: A Balázs Béla Stúdió 50 éve [50 Years of the Balázs Béla Studio], edited by Gelencsér Gábor, 275–86. Budapest: Műcsarnok/BBS, 2009.

Kornai, János. “Paying the Bill for Goulash Communism: Hungarian Development and Macro Stabilization in a Political-Economy Perspective.” Social Research 63, no. 4 (1996): 943–1040.

Kornai, János. Economics of Shortage. Amsterdam: North Holland Press, 1980.

Laclau, Ernestio. “Populism: What’s in a Name?” In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, edited by Francisco Panizza, 32–49. London–New York: Verso, 2005.

N.a. “A társadalmi folyamatok láthatóvá tétele: Beszélgetés a Balázs Béla Stúdió vezetőségével” [Making social processes visible: Conversation with the leadership of the Balázs Béla Studio]. Filmkultúra 12, no. 5 (1971): 21–24.

Nadkarni, Maya. “‘But it’s ours’: Nostalgia and the Politics of Authenticity in Post-Socialist Hungary.” In Post-Communist Nostalgia, edited by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, 190–214. NewYork–Oxford: Berghahn, 2010.

Panizza, Francisco. “Introduction: Populism and the Mirror of Democracy.” In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, edited by Francisco Panizza, 1–31. London–New York: Verso, 2005.

Pomogáts, Béla. “1956 (eltékozolt) erkölcsi öröksége” [The (wasted) ethical legacy of 1956]. Látó 17, no. 10 (2006): 50–57.

Pünkösti, Árpád. Kiválasztottak [The chosen]. Budapest: Árkádia, 1988.

Sárközy, Réka. Elbeszélt múltjaink: A magyar történelmi dokumentumfilm útja [Our narrated pasts: The paths of Hungarian historical documentaries]. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet/L’Harmattan, 2011.

Sipos, Júlia. “Budapest retró: beszélgetés Papp Gábor Zsigmonddal” [Budapest retro: Conversation with Gábor Zsigmond Papp]. Filmvilág 56, no. 11 (2013): 46–47.

Szabó, Elemér. “‘Körül voltam én véve rendesen [...], ha nincs a film, akkor engem biztos, hogy börtönbe zárnak’: Interjú Ferenczi József egykori tsz-elnökkel, A határozat című dokumentumfilm kulcsszereplőjével” [ʻI was completely surrounded […], were it not for that film they surely would have put me in prison’: Interview with former farm president József Ferenczi, key character of the documentary The Resolution]. Korall 65 (2016): 1–16.

Tarr, Béla. “Beszélgetés Ember Judittal” [Conversation with Judit Ember]. In Beszélgetések a dokumentumfilmről [Conversations on documentary film], edited by György Durst et al., 72–79. Budapest: Népművelési Propaganda Iroda, 1981.

Valuch, Tibor. “A Cultural and Social History of Hungary 1948–1990.” In A Cultural History of Hungary: in the Nineteenth and Twntieth Centuries, edited by László Kósa, 249–349. Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 1998.

Varga, Zsuzsa. “Miért bűn a sikeresség? Termelőszövetkezeti vezetők a vádlottak padján az 1970-es években” [Why is success a crime? Agricultural cooperative leaders on the accused bench in the 1970s]. Történelmi Szemle 54, no. 4 (2012): 599–621.

Erasing, Rewriting, and Propaganda in the Hungarian Sports Films of the 1950s*

Péter Fodor

University of Debrecen

In the years following World War II, the radical structural transformation of Hungarian society and the establishment of the communist dictatorship affected the functioning of sports as a social subsystem. At the time, the Hungarian public still remembered the sporting successes of the Horthy era (the Berlin Olympics, the 1938 FIFA World Cup) from the previous decade. Thus, the Sovietization of sports as a social subsystem had two intertwining goals in Hungary: in addition to creating a new institutional framework for sports, the regime also had to ensure good results, which were regarded as a matter of prestige. Like the daily press, the schematic film productions of the era were also characterized by the ideological utilization of sports. A typical example of the schematic style was Civil a pályán [Try and Win, 1951] by Márton Keleti, which used classical comedy elements to bring together the world of the factory and the world of the soccer field. Keleti’s film was intended to popularize a centralized mass sports movement of Soviet origins called “Ready to work and fight” and to communicate the party’s message to professional sportsmen who were considering emigration. The two versions of Csodacsatár [The Football Star, 1956 and 1957], also by Keleti, reveal a lot about the changes that the role of sports in state propaganda and political image construction underwent after the loss to West Germany in the 1954 FIFA World Cup Final and then after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. My paper seeks to interpret these films within the context of the era’s political and sports history.

Keywords: films and Communism, sports and Communism, football, soccer, Ferenc Puskás, the Golden Team

Introduction

Péter Esterházy, who played an active role in forming the literary memory of the communist dictatorship in Hungary, suggests in one of his texts which was published in a symbolic moment (Christmas 1989) that the relationship between the social-political climate of an age and its sports achievements cannot be understood as the product of a simple causal connection:

The relationships between society and soccer are nevertheless enigmatic. A lot of books have been published in Hungary in the last few years which draw parallels between the anomalies in soccer and society, and rightfully so. Why would soccer be good if the setting is corrupt, if sports cannot function cleanly, because this function is always tainted with extraneous considerations, that is, political aspects. Yes. Still, the greatest Hungarian team of all time, which was a team formed of players who retained their individuality, a team which had not only spirit and elegance, but power, which brought reforms to the whole soccer scene of the age, this team was born under a total dictatorship.1

 

Today, when the memory of the Hungarian national team, the “Golden Team,” which was active in the first half of the 1950s, is retained in the names of stadiums, public statues, tombs in Saint Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest, documentaries and movies, monographs and research essays, Esterházy’s lines do not seem unusual. Yet in the year of the regime change in Hungary, Esterházy’s approach was not at all self-evident, even if the late Kádár system, in a gesture of opening to the West, invited Ferenc Puskás home, and thus rehabilitated the name of the national team’s captain, who earlier had been regarded as a traitor by the regime. However, the Hungarian sports daily newspaper never reported on how Puskás went onto the field and scored goals in the old timers’ match celebrating his return in 1981 in People’s Stadium (People’s Stadium or “Népstadion,” which was opened in August 1953, was renamed Puskás Ferenc Stadium in 2002 and today is under demolition to make room for a more modern stadium). This highlights the politics of silence around his figure. The contrapuntal narrative of Esterházy’s text in 1989 foreshadowed a phenomenon still observable today, namely that the memory of the 1950s in post-transition Hungarian society is mostly negative, with one notable exception: sports. Memories of the regime and of sports have not only grown separate from each other, but they have come to constitute two opposing poles: in the negative memory of the Rákosi regime, sports (especially soccer) is the only constituent that conjures up positive associations. Today, only works related to the history of sports remind us that the “Golden Team” was at least in part an instrument of the Rákosi regime, which sought to profit from the team’s victories and prowess on the field in order to legitimize the regime’s hold on political power. The fact that it was part of the regime’s political image has faded in people’s memories of the national team. In the “imagination” of a significant part of Hungarian society, the players, and especially Ferenc Puskás, the team’s captain, remain distinctive folk heroes who managed to keep their personal autonomy while exploiting—not submitting to—the opportunities offered by the system.

Through an analysis of the film Try and Win [Civil a pályán], my essay examines how Hungarian movie culture in the first half of the 1950s retuned the meanings associated with sports. Subsequently, I will focus on the film The Football Star [A Csodacsatár]2 to demonstrate how this tradition was discontinued after the revolution of 1956.

The Film of Nationalized Sports: Try and Win

The Recent History of Sports Institutions

The structure of Hungarian society changed radically following World War II, and the establishment of the Communist dictatorship did not leave the sub-system of sports untouched. The last significant national competitions preceding the war brought major successes for Hungarian athletes. In the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Hungary came in third in the number of medals won behind the host, Germany, and the United States. In the soccer championship in France in 1938, the Hungarian national team made it to the finals. These successes of the Horthy era were remembered by the public a decade later. The Sovietization of sports required the establishment of a new institutional framework for organized physical training that would ensure that Hungarian athletes could continue to secure important achievements, which would mean prestige and hence a degree of legitimacy for the political system.

Change in the institutional framework of Hungarian competitive sports had started long before the Communists took power. The rise of state intervention in the late 1930s reshaped the image of sports, which until then had been largely a grassroots, civic movement since the turn of the century. In the last decade of the Horthy regime, politics was increasingly involved in competitive sports events. Between 1939 and 1944, the Jewish Laws were applied to sports organizations, and Jews were banned from participating in Hungarian sports. First, Jews were prohibited from leading sports organizations and associations. Later, teams with Jewish owners were abolished. In 1942, Jews were prohibited from playing sports, and after the German occupation, they could not even attend sports events as spectators. State intervention also affected workers’ sports associations. For example, “Vasas,” or the “iron” sports club, which was founded in 1911 by the Hungarian Union of Iron Workers as the “Vas- és Fémmunkások Sport Clubja,” [Sports Club of Iron and Metal Workers] was compelled to change its name and its colors in 1944. State intervention also changed the economic foundations of sports: professionalism, which was introduced into Hungarian soccer in 1926, was eliminated on 1 January 1945.3

After the end of the war, Hungarian sports revived quickly, which was due in part to the fact that the competing political parties were striving to gain influence over the management of various clubs and the new sports institutions. The Independent Smallholders Party, the Social Democrats, and the Communists were especially active in this respect. The influence of politics on sports did not disappear after the fall of the Horthy regime. Professionalism was not reintroduced, and the athletes all had “civilian” jobs. The players of the Újpest TE soccer team, which was supported by the Independent Smallholders Party and which won 3 championships between 1945 and 1947, included industrial workers, officials, and various kinds of entrepreneurs (tradesmen, caterers).4

 

Mass Sports and Competitive Sports Tailored to the Soviet Model

When director Márton Keleti started making the film Try and Win5 in 1951, the Sovietization of Hungarian competitive sports had already been completed.6 Cinematic support for this process was not an important item on the filmmakers’ political agenda. Rather, they were focused on making a movie that would help popularize the mass sports movement that had been imported from the Soviet Union. The finished work bridged the gap between the spheres of the workplace and competitive sports, and it presented an image of nationalized sports which conformed to the official sports politics of the times. It also contained concrete messages for sportsmen who could not imagine their future prospects in the newly Sovietized sports system.

In order to understand the term “civilian” in the original Hungarian title, one must know the lyrics to the title song of the movie.7 The song draws a parallel between (Stakhanovite) labor competition in the sphere of production (industry and agriculture) and competitive sports. The plot of the film unpacks these parallels in more detail. The teams of workers are aspiring to secure victory in the Stakhanovite movement and on the sports field. However, competition is not the objective; it is merely a tool with which to strengthen the community and ensure social integration. Mass sports are portrayed in the film as a vehicle which helps people to become better workers.

Hungarian society became familiar with the slogan “Ready to Work, Ready to Fight” (“Munkára, harcra kész” or MHK in Hungarian) in 1949, when companies (factories, kolkhozes, enterprises) were compelled to organize mass sports activities based on the Soviet model. The program introduced in 1931 by the Komsomol in the Soviet Union played a central role in Soviet athletic culture, which attempted to increase workers’ production output (the modernization of production required a new worker’s body) and their military skills, hygienic awareness, and ideological commitment.8 The program was not set up to train athletes in certain sports, but rather to improve the overall physical condition of the population. The guiding principle was mass involvement, and the concrete goals were broken down by age groups. The socio-political function of sports was to channel the energies of new generations growing up in an urbanized environment into the praxis of healthy pastimes.9

Centrally organized physical education and pre-military training and a system which joined physical training with the workplace existed in Hungary under the Horthy regime, too. In 1921, Statute LIII on physical education created the basis for the “levente” associations (a paramilitary youth organization), and it obliged factories and enterprises with more than 1,000 workers to create the necessary infrastructure for their employees’ physical education. Similarly, the primary aim of the program taken from the Soviet Union at the end of the 1940s was “to engage the masses of workers and peasants who had never done sports before. The movement was extended to schools, offices, and the armed forces. The MHK-movement was expected to discover sports talents as well.”10 Trade unions were given the task of leading the initiative, but this did not always go smoothly. The promotion campaign was introduced with Socialist Realist posters, and it culminated in Márton Keleti’s film (the film features one of these posters), but the movie also reflects on the various difficulties encountered by the MHK-movement in the campaign in 1950.11

The scene following the title and the title song is dramaturgically unexpected, as it stages a soccer match being played in front of crowded stands. A radio broadcast is covering the event, and the stake is to take two points in the championship.12 These circumstances indicate that the game is a first division soccer match, not some mass sports event. The credits inform the viewer that the soccer team Red Truck is playing against the “Dózsa team.” This refers to a typical phenomenon of Sovietization: institutional transformations were always accompanied by the rhetorical act of naming/renaming. (It is a peculiar connection between right and left wing sports politics that in 1944, Vasas, a club which was associated with the left wing, was compelled to use the name “Kinizsi,” whereas in 1951, this name was given to Ferencváros, which was regarded as a team with right-wing sympathies and fans. The name is a reference to Pál Kinizsi, a general who served under Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus. Kinizsi constituted a suitable heroic figure of Hungarian history for the communist regime in part because he allegedly had been the simple son of a miller.) The Újpest Athletic Association was founded in 1885. It was funded by local, mostly Jewish factory owners during the interwar period, and the athletes were quite successful. The club was brought under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1950, and the reference to the district disappeared from the name: the team became Budapest Dózsa. (In the countries of the Eastern Bloc, the police teams usually featured the word “Dinamo” in their names, so the similarity of the initials also motivated the naming.) Thus, in the movie the actual players of a newly renamed ministry team (“Dózsa”) act as the members of a fictional factory team (Red Truck). In the opening scene they are playing a final with a trade union team, the Óbuda Vasas. The film thus reflects the ambition to sever the traditional social roots of major sports clubs by placing them under the lead of trade unions and ministries (they were nationalized).13 This social program is in unison with the characterizations in the film. Specifically, we know nothing of the socio-cultural backgrounds of the characters. They all appear uniformly similar; the only features that make them unique are their flaws, which are not traced back to social factors and which, in the case of the protagonists, are easily overcome. Nobody in the film seems to be a “civilian”: neither the first division soccer players nor the workers stumbling on the athletic field have any kind of private, civilian lives that are unrelated to the workplace. The spaces of private life are almost completely missing. There is only one short scene that takes place in a flat, among family members, but one of the family members is just about to leave for work. The background is usually a factory or the sports pitch belonging to the factory. The characters have no free time: they go to the pitch to play sports, to play on the factory team, or to support their team. The vacation at Lake Balaton is no exception. It is also organized by the factory, so it is no surprise that the female protagonist (Marika Teleki) appears in the sports uniform of the Silk Factory of Újpest. Even though Try and Win stages the first steps in the romance between Teleki and Pista Rácz, the lovers only meet as private individuals once, and even then they are not alone. Moreover, when they talk about their feelings, they never forget that they represent a workplace community. Keeping distance from the community is represented in the film in an explicitly negative light. It is linked to conspiracy and (high) treason: when the forward of the Red Truck team, Jóska Teleki, is not with the team, he is conspiring with the enemy, and his absence from work hinders the Stakhanovite work of the group.

Even the very few leftist clubs that functioned successfully during the Horthy regime could not avoid the restructuring that came with Sovietization. In the first half of the twentieth century, organizations that promoted “cultured” and “meaningful” pastimes became more and more significant in Hungarian workers’ culture. Of these organizations, the Workers’ Physical Training Association (MTE) was the most prestigious. It was founded in 1906 and had among its members sportsmen who participated in Olympic Games and won medals in World and European Championships. Ferenc Pataki, who won a gold medal at the 1948 London Olympics, was a member of this association, and he played himself in the film. He supervised the sports festival in which the Budapest Red Meteor, the Honvéd, and the Építők teams performed gymnastic exercises. MTE was merged into Meteor in 1950, while Honvéd and Építők were new sports associations modeled on Soviet examples. Honvéd was overtaken by the army, while Építők represented the trade union of construction industry workers. In addition to Pataki, five other athletes are mentioned:14 Ferenc Várkői, Ágnes Keleti, Tamás Homonnai, Olga Gyarmati, and László Papp. Several factors, in addition to the prominence of these individuals as accomplished athletes whose names were familiar to the pubic, contributed to their selection as characters in the film. For instance, they all did outdoor sports that could easily be filmed: gymnastics, athletics and boxing. But one aspect stands out: all six of them were successful after World War II. Their achievements mentioned in the film were related to the 1948 Olympic Games, so their characters did not evoke the sports successes of the Horthy regime.15

The changed institutional framework of sports is highlighted by the sentence at the end of the title: “The sports scenes in this film were made with the direction and help of OTSB.” OTSB stood for the National Physical Education and Sports Committee, which was founded at the beginning of 1951. It became the most important organization in Hungarian sports. The success of the film helped the new committee earn legitimacy. We cannot be sure exactly why (perhaps in exchange for support) the protagonist of the film, Rácz, who becomes a successful mass sports functionary at the end of the film, performs the same job in the truck factory as Gyula Hegyi. Hegyi earned his living during the 1920s in the Renault factory as an iron turner. He became one of the most influential leaders in Hungarian sports after 1945 until his death in 1978, and he was acting president of the OTSB when the film was made. The armed forces also had a significant role in Sovietized sports. In addition to the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Ministry of Defense and the ÁVH (State Protection Authority) served as an institutional basis for competitive sports, and between 1948 and 1953 Minister of Defense Mihály Farkas had considerable influence over sports life, too. The prominent role of the military in sports explains why Feri Dunai, who went from being an iron worker to becoming a captain and who was played by János Görbe in the film (who wears a uniform throughout the film) is the most knowledgeable when it comes to how workers’ sports lives should be organized. His character closely follows the example of the “father” figure familiar from Soviet Socialist Realist (literary and cinematic) narratives:16 as the representative of the communist party he is the only character in Try and Win who has a thorough knowledge of the vision of an ideal society, thus only he can be an advisor and mentor to the symbolic “son” (Rácz).17 His first appearance in the movie follows the example of the leading technique of the age: he gives an uplifting speech in front of portraits of Lenin, Stalin, and Rákosi. He does not need to refer to his superiors, the representational context does that for him, and the viewer does not doubt for a single moment that what he says is right and needs to be accepted without question.18 The dialogues between Dunai and Rácz constitute a kind of reconciliation and merging of the two spheres of sports and the military, which were equally important for the communist party. The world champion Dunai argues for the importance of sports successes in promoting a positive image of the country, but he warns Rácz that his mistakes in the footrace do not make him a good soldier. This harmonizes with the vision of the communist party: “the leaders of the country emphasized the importance of physical education and sports from a military perspective,” and they tried to use “the propaganda power of sports successes in an international and domestic context.”19 Dunai also stands beside Rácz when the protagonist is enlightened and decides that he will revise his view on the social usefulness of sports and subsequently becomes the proponent of mass sports. Rácz’s conformist turn of heart also involves rational and emotional moments: the sports celebration at Balaton evokes certain scenes in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympics, which recorded the aesthetics of the moving body with such paradigmatic power. Keleti went beyond this in a certain sense: Riefenstahl photographed the naked body without any erotic appeal, emphasizing its embeddedness in nature, while Try and Win stages Marika Teleki walking among her fellow sportsmen and sportwomen as the object of Rácz’s desire. While the scene with all the red flags and the MHK marching song can be interpreted primarily through the codes of military processions, it also gives way to a touch of the erotic. The silk factory worker Marika Teleki is a lot more than a woman whose attention needs to be won by the protagonist. She embodies the ideal member of the MHK-movement, who is not a world class athlete, but is skilled in many sports (running, sailing, and volleyball). The film portrays a sports system where the boundaries of competitive sports and mass sports are blurred. The sports celebration at Balaton unites the two spheres, as evidenced by the greeting spoken on the loudspeaker: “We cordially greet […] our Olympic, European, and college world champions, the MHK-sportsmen of the factories and the workers sitting in the stands”. The MHK-exercises are led by Ferenc Pataki, and Marika is marching among Olympic champions.

 

Changes in the Official Image of the Sportsman

The communist turn in Hungary also meant that the status of the competitive sportsmen needed to be “addressed.” While in Hungary the status of the professional athlete existed since 1926 at least in soccer, the Soviet Union did not allow athletes to compete as professionals. Soviet sports politics was critical of the British model of elitist amateurism on the one hand, i.e. the tradition according to which aristocratic gentlemen needed no revenues from sports. This was why the Soviet Union did not take part in the Olympic movement until the middle of the century. On the other hand, the Soviet Union also criticized the profit-oriented, businesslike environment in which soccer had come to flourish in England since 1885. In the 1930s, a semi-amateur system was introduced in the Soviet Union. The sportsmen had workplaces (they could be factory or kolkhoz workers, employees, Red Army soldiers, or even university students), and they received remuneration for playing sports. However, sports organizations and clubs were not business enterprises.20 This system did not change much after World War II, when the politicians in the Soviet Union decided to turn the country into a sports superpower which would compete at the most prestigious international events. (The Soviet Union first entered the Summer Olympics in 1952 and the Winter Olympics in 1956). A similar semi-amateur system evolved in Hungary before 1926, but the communists decided to abandon this model and replace it with the Soviet one. Try and Win promoted the system of centrally organized physical education among non-sporting social groups. At the same time, it fleshed out the new image of the competitive sportsmen: these sportsmen were civilians on the field, and they had civilian workplaces. The soccer players of the Red Truck club, which competes in the premier league, were factory workers themselves. Pista Rácz is nominated to serve as the factory’s sports representative by none other than the soccer player played by Géza Henni, the first division goalkeeper who was moved from the Ferencváros team to Dózsa.21 The replacement of the sports representative in the film was also indicative of how the communist party invaded the management of the clubs in 1948/49. The portrayal of this process in the film is essentially the exact opposite of what had actually happened: the new representatives arrive not to enforce political power, but to respond to the requests of the sports sphere. The film’s first conflict is resolved by Rácz’s enlightenment, but the second conflict owes much to the fact that in the world on the screen there was a sport in which the harmony between competitive and mass sports is not total: soccer. It would be an exaggeration to claim that the makers of the film tried to stage this as a systemic problem, but the choice of soccer could not have been accidental.

 

Soccer in the Cross-Hairs

The prominent role of soccer in the film could be explained in many ways: beginning at the turn of the century, soccer was the most popular sport, and it attracted the largest numbers of spectators. Professionalism and a business-mentality emerged most prominently in this sport: players and coaches were well-paid, they received remuneration for playing matches abroad, and players were bought and sold. Towards the end of the 1930s, the radical right wing started to consider soccer a Jewish business, so they tried to sabotage it in various ways. Still, the heritage of this system was tangible after the war, as most of the players and trainers had been socialized in it. However, official professionalism was never introduced again. The deep structural changes that occurred after the communist takeover affected this sport the most: teams were renamed and their identities were altered arbitrarily (e.g. changes in team colors). The destruction and the building of teams was met with considerable antipathy by the public, especially among Ferencváros fans, who were considered “enemies” of the system. The international connections and the professional networks that had been developed in the interwar years were also destroyed after 1945. As Szegedi has observed, “before 1945, more than five hundred Hungarian soccer players and trainers played for and worked on European teams, and they used their knowledge and experience to develop these national teams (many of them are now dominating the pitches!).”22 Many players emigrated to the West after the war: several members of the national team that won the silver medal in 1938 left the country before 1948, including Gyula Zsengellér and Dr. György Sárosi. After the Western border had been closed, the players could only leave Hungary illegally. László Kubala, for example, was successfully smuggled out of the country in 1949 (he later became a legendary player for FC Barcelona), but the same year the ÁVH thwarted the defection of 20 other players (including the goalkeeper of the national team, Gyula Grosics).

This sketch of the historical background helps us understand why the world of soccer was the ideal backdrop against which the image of the enemy working for the capitalist West with the aim of subverting the Communist system could be staged. The tragic actuality and the menacing message of the movie also need to be highlighted. Márton Keleti’s team started shooting the film on 28 June 1951, three weeks after Sándor Szűcs, the defender of Újpest, who played for the national team on 19 occasions, was executed. Together with his girlfriend, the singer Erzsi Kovács, Szűcs tried to emigrate to the West in order to escape political harassment, but the ÁVH lured them into a trap. It was believed that he had an offer from Italy. It tells a lot about the nature of the Rákosi regime that Ferenc Szusza, a former teammate of Szűcs, played the part of a player in Try and Win who was also invited to Italy. Szűcs actually sent Szusza a message from death row asking his friend to try to convince the authorities to grant him a reprieve. While Szusza tried to help, he could do nothing to change the verdict. Márton Keleti’s film, by evoking the fate Sándor Szűcs in the scene in which the organizers of defection are arrested, sent a clear message to all sportsmen highlighting the dangers of embarking down the forbidden path.

 

The Heterogeneity of Cinematic Tradition

In addition to references to real events, Try and Win was also linked to the cinematic traditions of the time. It is quite telling about the situation of cinema in Hungary that it was the 46-year old Márton Keleti, who began his career under the Horthy regime, who directed a film which was a propagandistic portrayal of the change of elites implemented by the communist takeover. Pista Rácz is the prime example of the kind of social mobility, which was triggered by workplace achievements and loyalty to the system, rather than expertise, the significance of which was diminished.23 However, the fact that after 1949 Keleti changed his techniques of representation, as well as the ideological characteristics of his movies, did not mean that he discarded traditional frames of representation.24 Try and Win employs the clichés of production and sabotage films in its representations of the two protagonists (Rácz and Jóska Teleki), but it combines these techniques with features adopted from romantic comedies and operettas. Both the director of and the actors in Try and Win who had become famous under the Horthy regime (Kálmán Latabár, Gyula Gózon) were familiar with these genres, and the scriptwriters (István Békeffi, Károly Nóti) were also representatives of the interwar tradition of Hungarian film comedies. Latabár reenacted the stock characters he had played before the war: he played the loud-mouthed but clumsy figure in Love of Sports (1936). In this amalgam of Socialist Realist and pre-war genres, the traces of the past are not erased, but they represent a world completely different from the one before. One can even spot how the unintentional effect of Rácz’s infantile naivety (portrayed by actor Imre Soós, who only recites dry and lifeless sentences) is juxtaposed with Latabár’s more natural figure (Karikás), who, although he is cartoonish, has a more subtle understanding of interpersonal relationships.25 The songs certainly contributed to the popularity of the film, yet they end up being metafictional mechanisms that emphasize the inauthenticity of the representational strategies and the fictional quality of the story. In the middle of the film, there is a scene in which Karikás and three of his colleagues want to entertain the other factory workers, but the act goes awry. The workers laugh at the four singers, who stand in front of the MHK-emblem and slogan, and as the excessive laughter does not fit the ridiculousness of the situation, the MHK, which tries to make sportsmen out of workers, itself becomes the object of laughter. These kinds of scenes unintentionally subverted the overtly propagandistic content of the film.

The use of features of romantic comedies in the film mellowed the Manichean, bipolar world of the Socialist Realist sabotage-movies: we do not see two antagonistic groups (good vs evil) described in similar detail and in a mirror-like fashion.26 The juxtaposition of MHK and competitive sports is only applied in the case of one character, the manager of the Red Truck soccer team. However, Bogdán, who hopes to profit from the center forward’s illegal Western contract, is not the enemy of MHK. He is a “retrograde” representative of the business mentality of professional soccer that the post-1948 nationalization and centralization meant to erase. The communist party also eliminated the financial foundations of this mentality by sacking the bourgeois sponsors who financially supported the previous system. The agent who cooperates with Bogdán utters the key sentence in the film: “Sports is no longer business in this country.” This utterance is all the more significant as this is the only verbal reference to the fact that there had been an earlier period of sports history before the one that we see on screen: the film otherwise makes no mention of or reference to Hungarian sports traditions before 1948. Although the film’s generic structure and the performances of some of the actors emphatically evoke the heritage of cinematic traditions of the Horthy regime, there are hardly any references to the pre-war period. The filmmakers made sure that this intention found expression in a spatial sense as well. It comes as no surprise that the most important architectural project of the Rákosi regime, People’s Stadium, was also used in the film, and the narrative emphasizes the novelty and monumentality of the building, which as noted earlier was only completed in 1953. Apart from the factory and the pitch attached to it, the film shows only the working class residential districts and the Socialist Realist architecture of the buildings of these districts or the historic city center of Budapest, which is occupied by athletes wearing red stars on their jerseys, pioneers waving their ties or holding portraits of Stalin, Lenin, and Rákosi, and policemen wearing Soviet-style uniforms. Another sign of the appropriation of space is the fact that during the holiday at Lake Balaton factory workers also compete in sailing, which was traditionally regarded as an aristocratic and bourgeois pastime.

Retouched Soccer History: The Football Star

One Title, Two Films

The recipe for Try and Win (a Socialist Realist narrative, the application of techniques of representation suiting the spirit of the age, the use of a new generation of actors together with actors who had been popular before World War II, and the recycling of cinematic traditions inherited from an earlier period) was used again in subsequent films by Keleti.27 In addition to works depicting ideologically informed representations of the world, Keleti also shot historical movies in this period. One of these films, Up with the Head, has a special significance in historical memory, as it was the first feature film in Hungary that took the history of the persecution of Jews as its theme. The theme of sports gained particular emphasis again in 1956, when Keleti started shooting The Football Star. The public response to this film was peculiarly affected by history. While his previous film on soccer represented the world of club soccer in Hungary, The Football Star addressed the fame of the Hungarian national team specifically. The film’s theme was based on a real life event, which indicates the international renown of the team and gives some sense of the media environment of the age. In 1954, the Hungarian press reported that a certain László Veréb had impersonated József Zakariás, a midfielder on the Hungarian national team, in order to secure a contract with Olympique Lille, but one match had been enough to expose him.28 In order to appreciate the historical context of the film, it is worth noting that the image of the national team changed significantly between 1954 and 1956 as a result of the loss in the World Cup final in 1954, after which the reputation of the team started to deteriorate. In fact, when Keleti was shooting the film (between June 18 and August 27, 1956), the “Golden Team” was on the verge of breaking up. Gusztáv Sebes, who put together the team and coached the players on 69 occasions between 1949 and 1956, had had his last match with them on June 9, 1956. When the new coach, Márton Bukovi, managed the team for the first time on 15 July, only four of the players who had participated in the legendary match against England in 1953 entered the pitch. In all likelihood, Keleti had intended to uphold the team’s fame,29 but the film failed to achieve this goal. The premiere was supposed to be held on November 8, 1956, but it was cancelled due to the outbreak of the revolution a few days before. The film lay in a box for some time, and a handful of scenes were re-shot with new actors in 1957. (Ferenc Puskás was replaced by Nándor Hidegkuti, for example.) While some scenes were retained, the sound was altered, clips showing the game were changed, and the photographs were retouched. The new version of the film was eventually screened in cinemas in September 1957. Hungarian television channels broadcast the original version only after 1989.30 Subsequent DVD editions first featured the original film, but since 2016, both versions have been available.

 

A Parodic Use of One’s Heritage

The Football Star31 can be regarded as an exemplary case in historical memory not only because of the differences between the two versions, but also because one can recognize references to events, figures and discourses of both interwar and postwar Hungary in both iterations. The fact that The Football Star entered into a dialogue with Try and Win is obvious from the juxtaposition of the two opening sequences. The opening scene of Try and Win features commentaries about a Hungarian championship match, whereas in the opening scene of The Soccer Star the national teams of two imagined countries (Footballia [Futbólia] and Kickania [Rugánia]) are playing against each other, when one of the Footballia fans exclaims sarcastically, “Civilians on the field!” Keleti invited real sports commentators to act in Try and Win in 1951, while the broadcaster role here is performed by an actor. This decision is symptomatic of a different approach: the openly propagandistic work used real life persons (known journalists and sportsmen) to reinforce the authenticity of the represented world and to affirm the world outside the film. The latter film, however, created a critical distance from the world to which the cinematic narrative refers.32 The Football Star focuses on how soccer becomes intertwined with politics. The commander of the naval fleet of Footballia, Admiral Alfredo Duca, is preparing a military coup, and, at the same time, he tries to increase his popularity among the masses. He uses soccer to achieve this goal: on the pretext of the supporters’ demonstrations following the defeat of the team, he takes control over soccer, and with the help of a Hungarian “soccer star” he tries to make the national team successful again using every media channel to let people know that these successes came about only because of him. Whereas in Try and Win the upper echelons of politics only appear implicitly (for example through the pictures of Rákosi), The Football Star’s story explicitly portrays a conflict between the leaders of an imagined country. The radio commentator of the match in the opening sequence of the film introduces the politicians in the presidential box in the following manner: “The great figures of our country […] are exhorting our team to play with all their might.” Even though the Latin-sounding names, the top hats, and the monocles of the politicians conjure up images from the distant past, the introduction of Duca’s character as “a friend and patron of soccer and the commander of our glorious fleet” encourages a satiric-allegorical interpretation and evokes references to the Minister of Defense of the Rákosi era, Mihály Farkas. The way in which the film stages the rise and fall of Duca can also be compared to Farkas’s career, who belonged to the inner circle of the Rákosi regime. Farkas’s decline started in 1953, when he temporarily lost all his positions. He regained some of them due to Soviet pressure, but in the summer of 1956, when the shooting began on the film, he was already a fallen politician: he had been expelled from the Communist party, he lost his rank in the military, and he was eventually arrested in October. When the retouched version of The Football Star was presented in cinemas in 1957, he was already in jail, like Duca at the end of the film. This partly explains why the early Kádár regime decided to release the film in 1957. The political system intended to consolidate its power by eliminating the legacy of Stalinism in Hungary. János Kádár also played an active role in removing Farkas from his positions in 1956. The fact that from Farkas’s perspective the summer of 1956 was nothing like 1951 is also reflected in the relationship between Márton Keleti’s two sports films. Try and Win also featured the character of Feri Dunai, a character who resembled Mihály Farkas and represented the role played by the military in sports. However, while Dunai, the representative of the party, appeared as a symbolic father-figure, Duca, whose name alliterates with Dunai, is an explicitly negative character. His character bears resemblances not only with the communist Minister of Defense, but also with the memory of Miklós Horthy in at least three aspects: 1. Admiral Duca at the top of his career is promoted to a rear admiral;33 2. as the leader of the army he tries to gain political power; 3. he has a tattoo on his forearm.34 The amalgamation of the memories of Farkas and Horthy in a single character constituted a gesture which would have been unimaginable before 1956 in Hungarian cinema.

There are further examples of symbols that were promoted in Keleti’s film in 1951 but were parodied half a decade later. While in The Football Star the poems, songs, portraits, workers’ choirs, and school compositions (which imitate the ode-like tone and dubious quality of such “works of art” created under the dictatorship) greeting the fake soccer player and the admiral have a comic effect, Try and Win presents the MHK marching song and the portraits of Lenin, Stalin, and Rákosi on the walls of the community room of the iron factory as indispensable components of the social reality of the time. In addition, The Football Star presents the career which is based not on knowledge but on loyalty to the system satirically. At Footballia’s government meeting, Admiral Duca presents his new program for soccer, but it eventually end in failure due to a lack of knowledge and experience:

 

Duca: Gentlemen! First of all: Coach Rodrigo will be thrown out. We will appoint Captain Venturo, my adjutant, as the state trainer.

Venturo: But Admiral! I am no professional.

Duca: Reliability is the key this time.

Venturo: Then I will do it.

As part of the media campaign to popularize the film, the film’s scriptwriter admitted the following in the spring of 1956:

 

[I should have written] a satire, yes, but who would have been the target? The confidence-man, who tries something but later gets exposed. This would be the easier solution. But is he the ‘real enemy,’ the most ridiculous? The people who fall for his trick are more amusing, those who are so blinded and deafened by an anti-communist zeal and soccer ardor that they themselves demand and even ‘produce’ such swindlers?

 

Beyond any doubt, Footballia, with its skyscrapers, elegant hotels, lavish saloons, roofed stands, and sports marketing, seemed a distant land to Hungarian society at the time. The fact that the supporters’ devotion to the players can suddenly turn into anger and culminate in violence was quite familiar in Hungary, especially in light of the protests in Budapest following the world cup finals in 1954. After Footballia’s defeat, the angry supporters even throw their seat cushions at the boxes of politicians, at which Duca comments: “This is a rebellion, this is chaos, this is a revolution!” It is needless to emphasize how differently these words must have sounded in 1957 than at the time of their recording in the summer of 1956. The film’s concluding scene allows us to infer why a reference to revolution could remain in the second version of the movie. After the defeat against Cornerland, Duca’s coup attempt also fails miserably. The frustrated fans invade the pitch, the two leaders of the fans on their way home want to get revenge on the “soccer star,” but the radio reporter—freshly out of jail—persuades them not to, because Duca is already in custody. After the rebellion, chaos, and revolution at the end of the film, order is restored, and the people responsible for the scandal are locked up in jail. The national team plays another match one week later, and the supporters wholeheartedly cheer for them again.

 

Rewritten Media Texts: Radio, Film, Photograph

A comparison of the two versions of The Football Star sheds light on why the film constituted a significant mnemopolitical document of 1956 and the following years. The fact that the two title sequences are the same entails many things. The year of production remains 1956 in the second version, thus the creators wanted to erase the temporal distance, the re-editing, and re-shooting. The act of retouching needs to conceal itself. The retouched work is only functional if it steps into the place of the original in a manner that hides the act altogether. The re-dating created the impression that the film was created before the revolution: only those who were well versed in sports could have known that Hidegkuti was actually touring with his team (MTK) in Western Europe in November and December 1956, so he could not have been available for the shooting. This created the impression that dissident soccer players never featured in the film when it was shot in 1956, as if they had not been part of the Hungarian national team at all. In fact, the opposite was true: József Bozsik, Ferenc Puskás, and Sándor Kocsis played the most matches with the team in 1956. Hidegkuti’s name and fame become all the more important in the scene that differs radically in the two different versions of the film. On the plane trip from Footballia to Switzerland, Admiral Duca and his adjutant, the newly appointed trainer Captain Venturo, are listening to a radio broadcast. The scene appears in both versions, and the images of the first 25 seconds are identical, but the voice-over was changed: the radio commentary is different (though we hear the voice of the same reporter), as is the dialogue between the two men. According to the voice-over, it is the last minutes of the 39th Hungarian–Swiss soccer match that is heard on the radio.35 The commentator mentions the names of two players: Puska and Kocsi. These names clearly refer to the two forward players of the Hungarian team, Puskás and Kocsis. Admiral Duca exclaims, “Hear that? Puska! This is our guy.” In the second version of the film the context of the radio broadcast is the same, but the players mentioned are Bozsik and Hidegkuti. The lips of the actor playing Admiral Duca say Puska here, too, but the voice says, “Hear that? Hidegkuti! This is our guy.”

To understand the background of the name change, we need to go back to November 1, 1956. Budapest Honvéd, the team of the Ministry of Defense, left Hungary to train in Western Europe for the matches against Athletic Bilbao. Between the two games, they played other international matches, and after the team dropped out from the European Cup, the players did not return to Hungary. Political and sports leaders asked the former captain of the team, Gusztáv Sebes, to visit the players in the Belgian capital36 and persuade them to come home. Honvéd chose a South American tour in January instead, from which they only returned to Vienna in February 1957. The team also split. Most of the players returned to Hungary, but Ferenc Puskás, Sándor Kocsis, and Zoltán Czibor decided to stay abroad. When The Football Star was screened in cinemas, Puskás had been accused of high treason, while Czibor, partly because of the role he played in the revolution of 1956, had good reason not to return home.37 The Hungarian press launched a campaign against Puskás: he was accused of acting as the head of a smuggling network and was considered ungrateful to his country.38 The second version of the film mentions the name of József Bozsik, who joined the South American tour, but returned home when it ended. Hidegkuti also had a chance to remain abroad during the MTK’s tour, but he decided to return home. They became crucial members of the new national team in 1957, and they played key roles in helping the team qualify for the world cup in 1958 in Sweden.39

The 25-second segment analyzed above is followed by images of a match to “verify” the words of the radio commentator. The original version of The Football Star uses a scene from the Hungary–East Germany game on June 20, 1954 in Basel, which was won by the Hungarian team with a final score of 8 to 3. Availability could have been the reason for this choice: the creators of the movie might have had difficulties obtaining the relevant archive footage. In any case, the German-language advertisements in the stadium suited the setting for the Switzerland–Hungary match, even though Lausanne is in a Francophone region, and not in a German-speaking one. The montage shows Grosics, who is playing goalie, kicking the ball out of the goal, Bozsik doing a crossover, Kocsis dribbling, and Puskás scoring a goal after an assist from Hidegkuti. (This was the second goal of the game, scored in the 17th minute.) The inserted footage showed Bozsik and Hidegkuti, too, but they were not mentioned, only “Puska” and “Kocsi.”

How does the 1957 version portray the same scene? It also features a montage about the most famous victory of the “Golden Team,” the victory over London with a final score of 6 to 3. At the beginning, the initial moments of the match are shown: after the kick-off, Bozsik crosses the ball to László Budai, who passes the ball to Kocsis. The following sequence shows a play involving Bozsik, Zakariás, Bozsik, and Hidegkuti, but Hidegkuti does not score the goal from a distance like he did in Wembley. Instead, there is a cut that is almost impossible to notice, and the scene jumps ahead in time and shows his goal that was disqualified because of an off-sides call. Two goals from the Hungary–England game were thus merged into one. There must have been technical reasons for the creators of the film not to have used Hidegkuti’s goal scored in the first minute of the match. (At least, I cannot come up with any other plausible explanation.) Images of the off-sides goal could not have been used extensively, because the goal was preceded by a play between Puskás and Hidegkuti. The players in the two different footages in the two versions of the film are mostly the same—in both cases, the “Golden Team” was on the pitch—but the commentary is different, as only “Buda,” Bozsik, and Hidegkuti are mentioned by name.

In the subsequent scenes two Hungarian immigrant fraudsters (Jóska and Brúnó) and the freshly appointed soccer officials of Footballia (Admiral Duca and Captain Venturo) meet in the hotel where the Hungarian national team is staying. The scene in which Jóska and Brúnó are trying to sell low-quality fountain pens to the soccer players is a reference to the connections members of the “Golden Team” had with émigré tradesmen, and it also highlights the way Hungarian authorities overlooked cases of smuggling which supplemented the “civilian” wages of the players. Although Duca and Venturo have explicit political intentions and their aim is to reinforce Footballia’s national team with the Hungarian forward, their proposal might also remind us of the extremely generous contracts Western European clubs offered players on the Golden Team. In the original version of The Football Star, Jóska and Brúnó are recommending fountain pens to Puska and Kocsi, but the two stars reply wittily:

 

Puska: The pens are garbage.

Kocsi: The deal is not that urgent.

 

The 1957 version of the film included a revised version of the scene. Brúnó offers the pens to Hidegkuti, who repeats Kocsi’s sentence. However, the scene remains slightly less effective than in the original film, due to Hidegkuti’s moderate acting and the absence of extras behind the actors, who might have lent a cheerful atmosphere to the setting. In the original version, the members of the Hungarian team are shown drinking and chatting in the background.

It is worth noting at this point how Hidegkuti remembered the role he played in the film. Hidegkuti came from a social background that was not preferred by the regime. His name was originally spelled Hidegkuthy (the letters “h” and “y” in this name suggest an aristocratic background), but Gusztáv Sebes suggested he change the spelling in order to fit into the team. The young man, who came from a middle-class social milieu in Óbuda and whose mother was a factory director while his father was a nobleman, came to be represented as the child of a distinguished workwoman. The proletarian version of the family story was presented in newsreels, and this narrative was still remembered well after the end of the Rákosi regime, partly because Hidegkuti’s own autobiography—published in 1962—reinforced this image.40 Jóska’s image as a soccer star is similarly reinforced by a wholly fictitious feature film (!) after he arrives in Footballia. While Hidegkuti’s autobiography does not mention The Football Star, he later claimed that “he was persuaded to appear in the movie when he was told that the filmmakers wanted to do the film with Puskás, but Puskás remained abroad. He was very surprised when he learned that these scenes had already been shot with Puskás.”41 One could question the plausibility of this explanation, but one thing is certain: Hidegkuti replaced Puskás in several scenes in the film, so he had an opportunity to verify the story he had heard from the makers of the film.

Who were the other team members who were shown in the scene in the hotel? The reporter of Gazette de Lausanne approaches Puska and asks him about the victory. Then, he takes a group photo for which the soccer players in the background also come forward. The camera does not show them for too long, so not all of them are recognizable, even when the film is scrutinized frame by frame (many of them stand behind others). Duca and Venturo later try to identify the legendary Puska with the help of a photograph with the names in close-up: Fenyő, Gula, Szibor, Buda, Puska, Kocsi, Bozsi, Lórád, Dalnok, Buza, Tilly, Kotál, Mátra. The slightly altered names refer to Máté Fenyvesi, Géza Gulyás, Zoltán Czibor, László Budai II, Ferenc Puskás, Sándor Kocsis, József Bozsik, Gyula Lóránt, Jenő Dalnoki, Jenő Buzánszky, Lajos Tichy, Antal Kotász, and Sándor Mátrai: the most prominent members of the national team.

In the 1956 version of the film, Puska’s interview is shot with the four characters facing the camera in a line. As the actor performing Jóska left the country in 1956, he needed to be replaced in the new version. The character had to be near the location of the interview, even though the actor could not be used again. The creators solved this problem by making the characters stand in a circle, and Jóska has his back to the camera (thus, the audience does not see that a different actor is playing the part). His lines concerning the words of the soccer star are spoken by Brúnó and addressed to him (“You hear that Jóska? Good training, half a victory”). Hidegkuti thus took on the roles of Puskás and Kocsis, but since the scene with the group photo was not altered, only shortened, he was not actually present in that sequence in the 1957 version of the movie. While the two-second-long scene is hardly noticeable, it is clear that in a physical sense the second version could not completely erase the “dissident” soccer players from the film: a frame by frame analysis shows that Jóska is accompanied by Zoltán Czibor and Ferenc Puskás, and Sándor Kocsis steps forward from behind the curtain.

The scene in which Duca and Venturo falsely identify the forward based on the photo in the daily newspaper had to be altered as well. (The conflict originates in the film when Puska and Jóska are mixed up, and Footballia’s national team hires not the soccer star, but rather the clumsy “civilian.”) The Admiral and his adjutant compare the names below the photo and the soccer players’ faces and they mention the names of “Fenyő, Gula, Szibor, Buda, Puska.” The newly shot version deleted the pictures of the three soccer players and thus condemned them to oblivion. The scene reused the original photo, but they cut Kocsi(s) from the left side of the image. Szibor’s face also disappeared under an unknown man’s visage, while Hidegkuti’s portrait replaced Puskás’s photo. The filmmakers also made sure that, of the names under the picture, only Fenyő, Gula, Bozsi, and Lórád remained legible for the audience, while the names Szibor and Puska were blurred.

After the selection of the “target,” both films jump forward in time to the Hotel Continental again. The scene shows the elegantly dressed Hungarian soccer players strolling in the hotel corridors. The players are led by Czibor and Puskás, although we need to pause the film in order to recognize them. They are followed by a recognizable Buzánszky, Lóránt, Bozsik, and Budai, while Kocsis does not appear in this section of the film. The 12 second-long sequence was included in the 1957 version without any modifications. The subsequent scene, however, was reshot entirely. In the original film Puska is sitting at a table in front of an ornamented fireplace with Brúnó on his right and Jóska on his left. They are having a conversation:

 

Jóska: Mr. Kocsi?

Brúnó: I promised him a dozen [fountain pens] for today.

Puska: A dozen?

Brúnó: He’s got a big family. They say you like to bring home presents.

Puska: Well, a soccer player’s fame does not last forever. One or two years, one or two matches, you have to live with it while it lasts.

The scene has a crucial role in the narrative because Jóska’s and Brúnó’s knowledge of the world of soccer—knowledge on which they rely after they travel to Footballia—consists of what they learn in this dialogue and the Puska interview. On the other hand, Puska’s arguments in favor of smuggling, euphemistically referred to as “buying presents,” fit the film’s aim to rehabilitate and rebuild the myth of the “Golden Team”: it presents the practice of smuggling, but gives a reasonable explanation for it.

The 1957 version presents Brúnó and Hidegkuti in a similar situation. Jóska’s “double” was not smuggled into this scene, so we hear a dialogue:

 

Brúnó: I’ve brought the fountain pens, a dozen.

Hidegkuti: A dozen?

Brúnó: Yes. They say you like to bring home presents.

Hidegkuti: Well, a soccer player’s fame does not last forever. One or two years, one or two matches, you have to live with it while it lasts.

This particular scene from the second version of The Football Star furthered the attempt to erase the figures (and reputations) of Puskás and Kocsis from the world of cinematic fiction by replacing them with Hidegkuti.

Conclusion

The rivalry among communist leaders in Hungary and the rise and fall of Mihály Farkas in particular were inscribed into the representations in the original versions of Try and Win and The Football Star of the interplay of sports, ideology, and politics. The 1951 film attempted to portray the successes of Hungarian sports as the achievement of the new system, erasing all references to the accomplishments in sports under the Horthy regime. The Football Star depicted in a satirical, critical light the propagandistic use of sports and the ways in which sports contributed to the promotion of a system and its leaders. The almost complete elimination of the dissident soccer players from the 1957 version was the inevitable result of the mnemopolitics of the Kádár regime. Since these players were among the 200,000 Hungarian citizens who fled or chose not to remain in Hungary after the fall of the revolution of 1956, their memory had to erased as well. The erasure of the popular soccer players from cinematic representations of the recent past was part of the process of making the memory of 1956 taboo. The film’s premiere in 1957 was not only about the past and its reinterpretation, it was also about the present and the future. The film was first screened in cinemas when life in Budapest had “returned to normalcy”: entertainment venues opened again, the reorganized Hungarian soccer cup was relaunched, the national team was rebuilt, and in September 1957 the team played twice in the People’s Stadium in front of more than 90 thousand people. The film proved prophetic in the sense that its conclusion shows a world in which soccer is part of mass entertainment, and it is no longer used to pursue a direct political agenda. With the Kádár regime this new “world” came into existence. While the making of the second version of The Football Star implies the political intention of radically rewriting and partially erasing the memory of the most successful Hungarian team, the rehabilitation of Ferenc Puskás in the early 1980s and the 1982 documentary about the “Golden Team” attempted to revive memories of the former achievements by emphasizing their importance in soccer history instead of the political context. At this time, the separation of the memory of the Rákosi regime and Hungarian sports of the era began to take form in the public sphere, and the separation of the two remains very much a part of the popular imagination in Hungarian society today.

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Majtényi, György. “Czibor, Bozsik, Puskás: Futball és társadalmi legitimáció az ötvenes években” [Czibor, Bozsik, Puskás: Soccer and social legitimization in the 1950s]. Sic Itur ad Astra 24, no. 62 (2011): 219–31.

Méray, Tibor: “Egy történelmi tényről van szó” [A matter of historical fact]. Beszélő 4, no. 16 (1993): 17–19.

Rainer M., János, and Gábor Kresalek. “A magyar társadalom a filmen: Társadalomkép, érték és ideológia” [Hungarian society in film: Image of society, value, and ideology]. Szellemkép 10, no. 2 (1990): n.p..

Riordan, James. Sport, Politics, and Communism. Manchester–New York: Manchester University Press, 1991.

Sipos, Péter. “Sport és politika 1949–1954” [Sports and politics 1949–1954]. História 25, no. 8–9 (2003): 16–20.

Szilágyi, Gábor. Életjel: A magyar filmművészet megszületése 1954–1956 [Sign of life: The birth of Hungarian film arts 1954–1956]. Budapest: Magyar Filmintézet, 1994.

Szegedi, Péter. “A magyar futball európai expanziója, avagy hogyan lettek tanítók a tanítottakból” [The European expansion of Hungarian soccer, or how the students became the teachers]. Szociológiai Szemle 12, no. 2 (2003): 3–41.

Szegedi, Péter. Az első aranykor: A magyar foci 1945-ig [The first golden age: Hungarian soccer until 1945]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2016.

Szöllősi, György. Puskás. Budapest: Ringier, 2005.

Varga, Balázs. “Fent és lent: Az ötvenes évek magyar termelési filmjei” [Up and down: The Hungarian films of production of the 1950s]. Art Limes 3, no. 2 (2004): 56–65.

Zsolt, Róbert. Sportpáholy [Sports box]. Budapest: Magvető, 1988.

* This article was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Digital Trauma Processing in Social Media Groups: Transgenerational Holocaust Trauma on Facebook

Anna Menyhért

University of Amsterdam

In recent years, more and more social media (Facebook) groups have been created dealing with memories of the Holocaust in Hungary. In this article, I analyze and compare two groups, “The Holocaust and My Family” and “The Descendants of the Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust” in the framework of my research project on the concept of digital trauma processing, entitled “Trauma Studies in the Digital Age: The Impact of Social Media on Trauma Processing in Life Narratives and Trauma Literature: the Case of Hungary.” I show how the concept of trauma and trauma processing itself are changing in the digital age as a consequence of the element of sharing (in posts and comments in digital media) gains more importance and thus counteracts the element of silence, which was considered the most important element of trauma on several levels. How does digital sharing of memories of traumas help unblock previously blocked avenues to the past, and how does it contribute to the processing of collective historical traumas and consequently to the mobilization of memories, modernization, and the transformation of identities? I examine how the given characteristics of the different types of Facebook groups, public or closed, influence the ways in which people communicate about a collective historical trauma. I touch upon the issue of research ethics in connection with the handling of sensitive data in social media research. I examine the book The Holocaust and My Family, a collection of posts from the group, and analyze as a case study a post and the related comments, in which a descendant of a perpetrator comes out in the group.

Keywords: collective historical trauma, Holocaust, digital trauma studies, social media, Facebook groups, social media research ethics

“This is tough. It took my breath away.

The first Hungarian to apologise for

the crimes of his/her grandfather.”

(Facebook group post, Commenter ‘7’)

 

“This is not a website of tales. These are the dreadful stories of the dead.”

(Facebook group post, Commenter ‘3’)

 

How does the framework of a social media group influence the ways in which people communicate about a collective historical trauma? What is the impact of digital and social media on trauma processing on the personal and on the collective and transgenerational level? Much as the ways of remembering changed because of the mediating presence of the digital environment, online communities such as blogs and social media groups have provided a radically novel context for both personal and collective trauma processing.1 In this article, I analyze two Facebook groups which were established to commemorate the Holocaust on the micro level. I consider these groups as examples of the ways in which social media are contributing to changes in the concept of trauma in the digital age.

Following the emergence of the concept of digital memories, the perception of trauma changed within cultural trauma studies. The now classic but at the time pioneering works of cultural trauma studies were published in the 1990s, after Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was classified as a disease in 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association.2 Research fell back on early twentieth-century concepts of hysteria and combat neurosis (Freud, Janet) and on recent neuro-biological studies that analyzed the state of the brain in the moments of trauma and over the long term in order to identify enduring effects (van der Kolk), although later some psychoanalytically oriented theories called into question the legitimacy of this kind of neuro-biological approach (Leys). In the first phase, cultural and historically oriented trauma studies examined testimonies collected for the growing Holocaust archives for research on collective memory. Notions and ideas such as “postmemory” (Marianne Hirsch3), “re-traumatization” (Jörn Rüsen4), and the possibility of transmitting trauma by reading (Felman, Laub)5 induced a boom of trauma studies in the 2000s, prompting gender-oriented studies and interpretations of testimonies and life-writing. The field of (digital) memory studies has more recently become a site of increasing research, and, especially in Europe, this development coincided with a growing academic interest in the recent history of Eastern Europe. The volume Save As… Digital Memories launched digital memories as a new scholarly field that takes the influence of new media into account, particularly memory mediation and mobile forms of memory. The collection Memory, Conflict and New Media: Web Wars in Post-Socialist States further expanded the field by examining post-totalitarian digital memory practices, highlighting their differences from Western European approaches. The former tend to counteract official practices of “collective cultural forgetting” of the traumatic past in post-socialist states.6

In order to map the impact of the digital environment and digital media on understandings of trauma, I will examine the role of silence, one of the central concepts of cultural trauma studies. The three phases of recovery from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as generally defined in the psychological field since the 1990s are the following: 1. reconstituting the survivor’s feeling of security; 2. reconstructing the trauma narrative; 3. reestablishing the relationships of the survivor and integrating him/her into the community.7 Until recently, the second phase was of interest for literary and cultural trauma studies. In other words, these studies tended to focus on interpretations of texts produced during trauma processing and recovery and the investigation of (adequate) reading strategies. The digital era has brought the third phase into greater prominence in the public sphere, with the instant responses and, hence, dialogues made possible through social media. The practice of sharing traumatic experiences online (in blogs, social networking groups) and reacting to them (in comments and chats) eliminates the element of silence thought to be inherent in trauma on the one hand as its basic characteristic feature (meaning the victim is unable to speak about it) and on the other as a cause of secondary traumatization, when others do not or are not able to listen to the victim, and even on a third level as an official oppressive or tabooing practice (by a totalitarian regime). As silence has been considered a crucial element in most definitions of trauma, this change in focus has the potential to redefine trauma in connection with practices of sharing in digital media.

In contrast with the earlier conception of trauma as fixed in time and space, unspeakable, and beyond representation and mediation, trauma in the digital age is considered multiply configured and represented, multidimensional, diverse, and shared in the digital space (see Figure 1).8

This article was written as part of my larger research project entitled “Trauma Studies in the Digital Age: The Impact of Social Media on Trauma Processing in Life Narratives and Trauma Literature: The Case of Hungary.” The project introduces, defines, and develops the new field of digital trauma studies, which investigates the impact of social media on trauma processing, among other themes. One of the initial hypotheses of the research project is the concept of “frozen currents” or “blocked avenues,” metaphors which refer to certain unresolved collective traumas, a series of events in the twentieth century (World War I and Trianon Peace Treaty, World War II and the Holocaust, the totalitarian dictatorship and the socialist regime and its fall) which hindered modernization in Hungary and Eastern Europe.9 I argue that there are sociological forces that can be mobilized in order to further efforts to overcome traumatic retellings of the historical memory of the twentieth century.

As a consequence of the aforementioned change in the ways in which trauma is perceived in the digital age, digitally mediated trauma processing could be a way to “thaw” “frozen currents” or at least to allow the existence of parallel or multiple versions of traumatic history: official, rigid versions, determined by oppressive ideologies of the past and present, as opposed to other versions, created by communities, civil society, and artists. The latter versions are versatile, mobile, emotionally active, and capable of prompting responses that encourage and facilitate the processing of traumas. One still current example is the now famous living monument on Budapest’s Liberty Square, a collection of letters, photographs, books, personal effects which belonged to victims of the Holocaust in Hungary, and an array of other items. The monument is a poignant response to and quiet rebuke of a monument erected hastily by the state in 2014. The official monument is a statue of an eagle swooping down on a statue of the archangel Gabriel. The eagle represents Germany, and the archangel Gabriel represents Hungary. The implication of the official monument is that Hungary was an innocent victim of German occupation in March 1944, rather than a willing accomplice of Nazi Germany, both in the war effort against the Soviet Union and in the deportation of the Hungarian Jewry. I analyze the relationship between the state’s “Monument to the Victims of the German Occupation” (this is the text at the base of a tympanum above the two statues) and the Living Memorial and the corresponding Facebook group created by protesting civilians in another paper.10 Both studies aim to show that digital trauma processing could be a means to clear officially and ideologically blocked avenues to the traumatic past and induce social and cultural change.

Over the course of the past few years, more and more Facebook groups have been created as forums for the sharing of memories of the Holocaust in Hungary (and in other countries).11 Characteristic examples include the groups named “The Holocaust and My Family,” “The Roma Holocaust and My Family,” “The Living Memorial,” and “The Descendants of the Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust.” Online support groups are powerful examples of the linking capacity of social media. The experiences I gained as a member of two such groups, “The Holocaust and My Family” and “The Descendants of the Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust,” are very important for me. I joined the groups initially out of personal interest, but soon realized their importance in connection with my research, and I came to have a sense of the potential new insights that could be gained from observing these groups, so since then, I have been participating in the role of a “digital participant observer,” i.e. as an anthropologist doing digital fieldwork.12 By participating, I was able to read previously unshared family stories and see pictures of lost family members of people in the group and pictures of family documents, including false identity cards. I have seen how group members were able to connect with one another by discovering connections to a shared past which had hitherto been unknown to them. They established links to the family members or acquaintances of the same victims. Connections were often built upon spaces and locations which had been shared by victims, such as ghettos, labor camps, the yellow star houses of Budapest (designated buildings in Budapest into which, in the summer of 1944, Jews of the city where compelled to move), the deportation journeys, and spaces within the concentration camps.

It was emotionally burdensome to watch people use ordinary measures to establish connections when in fact what had prompted them to do so was the deaths of many loved ones. It was equally moving to see that the establishment of contacts provided some comfort for them. Members felt supported in their shared search for links based on evocations of memories of those who “have not returned” (a phrase frequently used to refer to those who were deported to and perished in concentration camps). Communities have been established, communities which have become places to share, and which had not been able to emerge over the course of decades because of the silence surrounding the collective trauma on all three (aforementioned) levels and its manifold impact on several generations.

The two Facebook groups in question seem very similar at a first glance, especially because their memberships overlap. However, in spite of the fact that members discuss more or less the same themes and the intersections or parallels occur even on the individual narrative level, there are significant differences between the groups. I will describe the differences and similarities, and I will try to account for them in connection with the differing rules of their media platform: the different types of social media groups.

Facebook, the most visited social media site in the world with its 1.86 billion monthly active users (in the fourth quarter of 2016),13 has provided the digital era with many concepts, practices, and functions that have not remained within the boundaries of a digital medium, but have had an influence on our non-digital lives. Liking, friending, and unfriending have gathered weight in the identity formation processes of digital/post-digital generations, as has the constant urge to share information about ourselves and gain approval as measured by the number of likes we have received.14 The Facebook lifestyle expects members to post and share in order to have more catching material on their timelines, with life stories organized in a linear way. This expectation often clashes with the needs for privacy protection, not least because sharing is also a marketing tool for Facebook. Companies and individuals with Facebook pages are willing to pay to get more likes and shares. Commercially or politically aimed sharing differs from sharing private information and sensitive data within a supportive Facebook group, yet both types of sharing are fundamentally digital in nature and constitute the two far ends of the sharing scale, with many variants within the world of social media.

Consequently, for any research on the role of sharing within social media groups in trauma processing it is interesting to consider the extent to which the Facebook framework can determine the nature of interaction within the groups. The main difference between the types of Facebook groups, due to their different privacy settings, is that in the case of public groups anyone can see what members post, whereas in the case of closed groups only members can see the posts and any other mention of the stories posted in the group.15 The second difference is that anyone can join a public group or be added or invited by a member, whereas anyone can ask to join a closed group or to be added or invited by a member. In the case of both public and closed groups, anyone can see the group’s name, its description, its tags, and the list of the members, and anyone can find it via search. (The third type of Facebook group is secret groups, which cannot be seen, noticed, or visited without an invitation from the admins. Membership, furthermore, requires an invitation from a member and the approval of an admin, and only current and former members can see the group’s name, description, and tags or find it in search. Finally, only current members can see other members and read posts and stories about the group.)16

Thus public Facebook group members are aware of the fact that their posts might reach anyone. Closed Facebook group members allow only other group members to see what they post. With reference to the very new area of social media research ethics in a humanities context, posts posted in closed Facebook groups constitute sensitive data which need privacy protection, whereas posts in open Facebook groups belong more to the domain of copyright issues, thus different types of Facebook groups need different research approaches with regards to copyright and protection of personal data.17 Consequently, in the course of my research, I will cite posts that were posted in closed groups only anonymously and with the explicit and informed consent of the members.

The Facebook group called “The Holocaust and my Family” (https://www.facebook.com/groups/holokauszt.csaladom/) is a public group that has approximately 7,200 members (as of September 27, 2016). This group was founded by Mátyás Eörsi in 2014, the year which the Hungarian government made an official Holocaust memorial year. Disagreements, disputes, debates, and protests surrounded the government’s controversial commemoration plans, especially the aforementioned Memorial to the Victims of the German Occupation, which was erected after prolonged protests secretly, as if in a night raid, on July 20, 2014.18 Civilian protesters organized their responses through a Facebook group called “Living Memorial” [Eleven emlékmű], and this led to the founding of other groups, such as “The Holocaust and My Family.” As is stated in the description of the latter group on Facebook, “‘thanks to’ the memory politics of the government, more and more stories have come to light recently, stories that had been kept in silence or secret within families, stories which should not be forgotten.” Another predecessor of this group was the Facebook page of the Open Society Archives project entitled “Yellow Star Houses,” which attracted 4,000 people in the first three days of its existence in 2014. 2,000 apartment buildings were marked with a yellow star in June 1944 in Budapest, and Jewish people were gathered and forced to make their residences in these buildings. Within the framework of the “Yellow Star Houses” project, around 1,600 of these buildings were marked with a yellow star sticker in 2014, and a map with background material was made available online.19 People started to comment on the project’s Facebook page, and then the Holocaust Facebook groups were set up.

The choice of the group type within Facebook’s framework, i.e. that this group is a public one, had several implications. In the description of the group, the founding admin clearly states the reasons for their decision, which are connected to their long-term aims with respect to the legacy of the Holocaust in Hungary:

 

This is going to be a public group. We have made this decision after long debates. Although we understand fears, we opted for the public group because one of our aims is to break with the culture of silence. Our parents and grandparents tried to hide their Jewishness, did not talk about their sufferings, and we could and still can see what this attitude had led to. We cannot accept that the descendants of victims keep their silence whereas the descendants of perpetrators are loud. That is why we will not change our minds about the public nature of this group. We understand those who are unwilling to participate because of this, and we are sorry. If they wish, they can have me post their stories anonymously.

 

The openness of the public group determines ways of communication within the group: the general atmosphere among members, their rules, and also the group’s outputs that do not remain within the digital sphere. This group has clearly set rules of referencing and quoting which basically are the same as academic citation methods, in accordance with copyright law.

On April 22, 2015, admin Zsuzsa Hetényi posted the group’s rules concerning the practice of citing posts, and she informed group members that she had previously consulted Artisjus, the Hungarian copyright agency/collecting society and asked for a legal recommendation concerning the practice of citing the group’s posts. She indicated that Artisjus advised the group that the texts posted in a public Facebook group have a status similar to the legal and copyright status of a book. Copyright and authors’ rights of posts and comments belong to their authors and to the admins (as editors). Consequently, one needs the consent of the authors in order to publish these materials partially or fully. However, short excerpts of the posts can be freely cited for research purposes with the appropriate reference method: with the name of the author of the post, the date it was posted, and the Facebook group, in this case Hetényi and Eörsi, eds., “The Holocaust and My Family.”

The group reached out to the general non-digital public in several ways: they organized a Marathon reading in Central Theatre in Budapest on May 13, 2014, during which guests were able to enter anytime to listen to stories, light a candle, and remember, as well as a Remembrance Day on May 4, 2014 in Budapest’s Rumbach Sebestyén street Synagogue, with readings based on the posts.

Saving the posts outside Facebook and archiving stories that had not been made public before or had been kept secret within families the members of which had not talked about their past and their Jewish roots became one of the most important goals of the group very early after its creation. On February 10, 2014, Kriszta Bíró posted the question, “SOMEONE is archiving what is going on here, aren’t they?” It turned out that arrangements had already been made, and several members, led by academic György C. Kálmán, had already started saving data from the posts into archives.20

A collection of selected posts and comments were published, together with essays analyzing the group and its impact on Holocaust memory in Hungary, in a book entitled The Holocaust and My Family.21 The editors grouped selected posts in thematic blocks in nine chapters representing the most common topics. The chapters are “Survivors,” “Second Generation,” “Grandchildren,” “Jews in Rural Hungary,” “Jews in Budapest,” “Women,” “Mixed Families,” “Gentiles,” and “Rescuers.” An introductory chapter, serving as a kind of motto, entitled “The 70th Anniversary – If Only Zuckerberg Knew,” consists of a post followed by a long thread of comments. (In a somewhat paradoxical way, the last chapter actually endorses the narrative embodied by the Memorial to the Victims of the German Occupation on Liberty Square, as it suggests that the Holocaust in Hungary only started after the occupation of the country by the Wehrmacht in March 1944. It thus ignores the massacre of Kamianets-Podilskyi in August 1941 during which approximately 23,600 Jews were killed. While for the members of the Facebook group 2014 certainly marked the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust, it needs to be highlighted that anti-Semitic atrocities in Hungary had started before the German occupation of the country.)22

This thread is a characteristic example of the way in which digital media/social media allows for new ways of communication, and it calls attention to the impact Facebook can have on collective ways of processing trauma by establishing contacts and networks and furthering recognition. It is also significant that the thread begins with an anecdote which serves as a focal point for a whole web of interconnected ideas, associations, and memories. Vera Surányi posted an anecdote about a Jewish doctor, who, after having returned to his home town from Theresienstadt, is called to see a patient in his home. To the patient’s anxious relatives he says, “Don’t worry, he will recover, but the bed he is lying in is mine.” Another member of the group, István Békés, recognized the doctor in the anecdote as his father. Békés’ family members noticed the post and also commented on it. Then the discussion continued about “lost and found” pieces of furniture. Then, people who had lived in the same neighborhood as children exchanged posts about how these furniture-cases were connected to the silence about the Holocaust and the taboos on Jewish identities. András J. Surányi added that while he did not know about his family being Jewish, he knew his friend’s family was a Jewish family. They then mention a famous actor who also lived in the same neighborhood as a child. He was the son of a housekeeper family and has by now become a prominent theater director and a radical right-wing personality. This is how the topic, which had prompted comments which were not devoid of innuendo (housekeepers of big blocks of flats were in many instances connected to the Arrow Cross party in 1944 and/or were notorious for taking possession of belongings left behind by Jewish people when they were taken to the ghettos or the concentration camps), arrives at the issue of the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust and, in connection with that, the topic of the current political situation in Hungary. The thread ends with a post by Eszter Babarczy, who says “this is the most wonderful comment thread I have ever read, if only Zuckerberg knew.” The whole thread is not published in the book, i.e. on Facebook it continues after Babarczy’s comment. It can be looked up in the group (it was posted on March 20, 2014, and it has 136 comments). The associations and interconnections continue and develop new sub-threads, such as the topic of the varying extents to which members of different social classes were attached to furniture, and how it was easier for families who belonged to certain social classes, such as the intelligentsia, to leave their belongings behind and escape, “carrying” their main capital, i.e. their knowledge and experience, with them. A commenter named Balázs Láng has suggested that such comment threads form a new genre, the “comment-novel,” similar to the epistolary novel; then literary works are mentioned which are in some way connected to the topic of returning from the camps; then writers who died in the Holocaust are remembered; then the topic of whether Jews can be recognized by their “Jewish” appearance, or whether a Jewish person can know if someone else is also Jewish because of some kind of subtle connection to a shared past. This post is a characteristic example of the associative-wandering-multi-focused manners of communication through comments in a social media group, with sharing as a key element in digital trauma processing (see Figure 1).

The group has been significantly less active since the publication of the book and the events connected to it (such as the Marathon reading): it seems that the group has reached its aim. In a certain sense, the activities and the achievements of this group are pointing outside the group, and towards the close of an era: the era of silence surrounding the Holocaust in Hungary, as it was expressed in the initial description of the group cited above. The “Holocaust and My Family” Facebook group works essentially from digital toward/back to(?) the non-digital, linking achievements gained in the virtual space to reality. Katalin Fenyves, the editor of the book The Holocaust and My Family, characterized the book as an “imprint of collective memory,” and a narrative of “the common history of a community.”23 This group talks about the past and links memories to the present in order to create a community in which it becomes possible to tell a story, and telling the story makes it possible to acknowledge and process the traumatic past within the Jewish community and raise awareness among the larger non-Jewish public.

One of the questions that can be asked is how people as members of an online community remember and evoke the memory of historical trauma, and how they remember the stories behind the trauma that might or might not have been passed on to them. According to Aleida Assmann, “remembering trauma evolves between the extremes of keeping the wound open on the one hand and looking for closure on the other.”24 She differentiates between four ways of “dealing with the traumatic past,” among which “remembering in order to forget” describes best the Facebook group “The Holocaust and My Family”: remembering in such cases is a “therapeutic tool to cleanse, to purge, to heal, to reconcile.” Assmann links this practice to transitions from dictatorship to democracy in a South African context on a state level, stressing that the confrontation with traumatic history has the specific goal of “creat[ing] a shared moral consensus.”25 A similar goal of working through the legacy of silence is present in the Facebook group “The Holocaust and My Family.” In this digital community, remembering is a tool with which to mobilize memories in order to build a host forum which makes it possible to share memories. The group aims to further the sharing of memories within the community and form a shared communal identity. The name of the group, which includes the word “family,” is expressive of the intention to deal with the past on a family/community memory level. This is a gesture of inclusion via family history, accepting macro history via micro-history, in order to gain access to the micro-histories of others so as to interlink members and develop a network which can collectively approach a past which had been closed off from them by silence and tabooing. The result is a multi-perspective, multi-centered, shared story with common elements as nodal points which is easier to access and accept for the members of the community. This story offers the reassurance of understanding, which may help victims of trauma find some closure to the painful past and further efforts to work through trauma. The decrease in the level of activity after the publication of the book of the stories collected from the posts confirms the hypothesis that the group was heading for a certain closure, and the outcome of this quest found form in a book which represents the community, overcomes transgenerational taboos, and addresses the public.

In the group, “The Descendants of the Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust” the main tendencies and the general atmosphere are different. It is a closed group with around 3,760 members (as of September 27, 2016). In this group, disagreements, debates, emotionally loaded posts, comments, and even outbursts are more common, and frequently the disagreements concern the group itself: its way of working and its rules, the position and role of members within the group, and the ways in which they interact. As opposed to the other group, this group does not have the clear-cut aim of framing, telling, and interlinking stories of families. It is more concerned with individual and transgenerational identity issues: the identity of the members as descendants of Holocaust victims and survivors, the problems raised by their legacies, and identity on the group level. While “The Holocaust and My Family” collects stories and shares them publicly, and thus deals with the past so as to free the present from its long-term negative impact by incorporating the stories as finalized by the multi-perspective narration, the “The Descendants of the Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust” focuses on the present as defined by the past and on the ways in which traumas have shaped present identities. According to the description of the group, it deals with: “everything about our mothers/fathers/grandparents in this topic, and the related individual or social second-generation and third-generation traumas, the ways in which they find form, and consequences.”

This group does not provide rules for referencing and citing posts. As it is a closed group, keeping in mind the necessity of informed consent and the protection of privacy and sensitive data, I talked to one of the admins on the phone about my research aims, and we agreed that I would seek the consent of the group members to analyze and quote their posts and comments anonymously. I posted a request for consent, described my research, provided contact information, and promised to contact individually the members whose posts I intended to cite, but who would not have given their consent in a comment to my post. Many people indicated in their comments that they welcomed my research, and some of them asked to be informed as to which of their comments I would use.

When analyzing specific comments, I will refer to group members by numbers, and I will not give the dates of the posts in order to ensure the protection of sensitive data. I will refer to each commenter as “(s)he,” “her/him,” and “their” so as not to reveal their gender. The original posts were in Hungarian. All translations and paraphrases are mine. Some of the posts have since been deleted from the group. Raw data collected from the posts is archived according to the Data Management Plan of my research project. It can be shared upon request, after careful consideration of individual requests and only for research purposes.

With regards to reconnecting to the offline mode of relations, as opposed to the public readings organized by the other group, members of this group meet informally and focus on personal connections. On the level of the social media framework, the closed Facebook group is a good fit for this purpose, as well as for the main theme of the group, which seems to be sharing in connection with inclusion and exclusion and group identity. The theme is observable as a general ambivalence and in the oscillation between the need for secrecy and the need for publicity. It is also pertinent to the one specific—and not typical—story thread, the confession of the grandchild of a perpetrator, which I will analyze in detail.

The question of “who has a place in the group” was raised several times by Member 3. (S)he wished to have recommendations for new commenters, adding that everyone was welcome, but (s)he was somewhat mistrustful. Secondly, as the level of distrust grew, (s)he expressed discomfort over many members “disappearing,” and (s)he asked new members to indicate in their posts why they had joined the group. As (s)he explained, “I wouldn’t like some people being interested in our stories in order to read crime stories.” It is interesting to note the use of the word “disappear” in this context: pointing, on the one hand, to unfamiliarity with the workings of an online group, where members come and go, are active or remain passive as they wish, and may well be “fakes,” i.e. people who have been dishonest (possibly entirely so) in their profiles. On the other hand, the increasing anxiety in the posts derives from the traumatic memories of past persecutions which are being triggered by the insecurity felt at not being able to control who has access to members’ painful and sensitive stories. Such anxieties were mentioned in the introductory description of the other group “The Holocaust and My Family,” which opted to be public, regardless of these kinds of fears. It seems that even the framework of the closed group is problematic with respect to fears deriving from the long-term impact of past traumas. Consequently, when Commenter 3 posted for the third time about the wish to identify members, the issue of the potential clash of the religious identity of posting members and silent onlookers came up, and, even though the remark is tinted with self-reflexive, self-doubting tones, the strong sense of feeling threatened connected to victim/survivor vs group identity based on religious differences is unmistakable: “Maybe I am a maniac, but I am asking yet again our Christian friends who joined us to explain why they are with us. We have revealed many things about ourselves, but don’t know anything about those who are not survivors or descendants. I am interested!” As a reaction to this post, many members introduced themselves, but only a fraction of the whole membership. Some people were offended. They did not wish to be checked up on, as they felt that this kind of inquiry constituted an unwelcome inspection which a Jewish community against segregation and racism in particular should not practice. Thus, debates followed, with some people leaving the group and later returning, including the original poster.

The “us” and “them” dichotomy, which is part of universal identity formation processes, is also linked to the legacies of the traumatic past in Hungary. Group identities are often shaped by “chosen traumas” (Vamik Volkan) and the legacies of traumatic experiences in society.26 The “us” and “them” dichotomy is internalized by Hungarian children as early as elementary school, and it is prevalent in everyday identity discourses, in which members of the out-group (“them”) are often presented as unaccountable or unknown aliens or hostile and even vindictive strangers. The pervasiveness of this dichotomy is reflected in the tendency to rely on personal contacts through societal interactions, in order to remain within the boundaries of the in-group (“us”). The Facebook group discussed above represents these kinds of identification processes: the acceptance of new members—i. e. allowing them to become one of “us’”—is now being done via personal recommendations, according to a decision made by the group admins almost two years after the issue was first raised.

The theme of inclusion and exclusion was central to the instance when a grandchild of a perpetrator confessed in the group (Commenter 1). In fact, (s)he had done so in the other group, “The Holocaust and My Family,” some months earlier, in a comment on somebody else’s post about why people kept silent during the Holocaust and why they were silent later. (S)he said that (s)he felt guilty and responsible. The group accepted the confession calmly and offered encouragement. Commenter 1 mentioned that (s)he would understand if (s)he were to be excluded from the group, but others said that exclusion was not a solution, and they thanked him/her for his/her confession. In the group “The Descendants of the Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust” the same confession generated different, emotionally loaded reactions. The confession was the following:

 

I am not the descendant of victims or survivors. I am the grandchild of a perpetrator: my grandfather took part in the deportation of Jews from Pécs. As an officer, he was supposed to bring food to the around 5,000 Jews huddled together in the Lakits barrack. He did not do so, he sold the food instead. Because of what he did, some of the people waiting in the barrack did not survive the transport: they starved to death. Among the victims there were four children. After the war he was not called to account, he lost his captaincy only due to his activities in 1956. He died of a stroke in 1967.

His death was not peaceful: somebody shuffled a Bible to him and hid a plastic skeleton dummy in the pages. I remember only this, I was 8 years old at the time. My mother died when I was 37. That’s when I got his letters. That’s when I learned who my grandfather really was.

Obviously I won’t be able to ask for forgiveness for unforgiveable sins. I only would like the souls of murderers and victims to rest in peace until the Last Judgement. And if you now have me excluded from this group I will understand.

 

In an interesting remark added later as a comment to the original post, the poster mentions the group “The Holocaust and My Family” in the context of inclusion-exclusion. The person posting suggests that the person who posted the confession must have been “removed” from “The Holocaust and My Family.” Later, however, in another comment, the poster confirms that the person who made the confession is still a member of “The Holocaust and My Family.”

The confession of the original poster was followed by a long discussion consisting of hundreds of comments which touched on many dimensions of the long-term impact of the transgenerational Holocaust trauma. I will cite a few examples as part of this case study focusing on the themes of sharing the burden of the past, inclusion-exclusion, and group identity. (Phrases referring to the themes are underlined.)

 

Well, there is no forgiveness and no peace between murderers and victims in any way. I will not sign such a peace treaty at the expense of the victims, and I don’t agree with it at all. I reject even the intention of mentioning innocent victims together with hangmen. Thus, if you want to get into this group with this intention then you are not in the right place. My victims will never reunite with the souls of hangmen, not even via the mediation of the holy spirit. (Commenter 2)

 

Hi! Gosh! I never would have thought that I would read such a text and that someone would dare [post it] and, moreover, to this group! For a minute I was dumb… I am also a grandchild, although my gran survived, but her little boy did not! He starved. It is difficult to speak, to write anything as a reply to your post, there isn’t a single day when I don’t think of that little boy, and those awful people who did that to my family. But, as we know, it is never too late, I wouldn’t say that you have a place in our group, but the fact that someone has told this story is something. Everyone will be punished in their own way sooner or later, just like your grandfather before his death. (Commenter 5)

 

[The poster] is obviously not responsible for the sins of his/her grandfather. I appreciate that (s)he doesn’t want to excuse and falsify the past! (Our present government is not responsible for the sins of the Horthy regime. So they should not falsify the past either…) [The poster] has this heavy bequest from his/her ancestors: the guilt that (s)he should not be feeling. We have a different inheritance: the inheritance of suffering and painful absence. And here we meet at this point, in this place, in virtual space. And the descendants can see the human being in the other from both sides. (What [The poster’s] grandfather did not see, did not sense.) It is an unsettling, strange situation… (Commenter 6)

 

This is tough. It took my breath away. The first Hungarian to apologize for the crimes of his/her grandfather. (Commenter 7)

 

I am greeting the first Hungarian convert shakenly but with pleasure and with the respect that courage deserves. I am requesting her/him to stay, to endure patiently and without anger if (s)he is attacked here. There isn’t anybody else whom those in deep pain could stone. We, who are able to do so, can be friends. (Commenter 8)

 

I understand this, but I state clearly that we are here only because of our own dead, not for others, and we do not wish to allow perpetrators to get close to them even in their death. (Commenter 2)

If you exclude him/her, I will understand, but I will leave the group as well. Nobody is born to be a sinner. I shouldn’t be explaining this to Jewish people. (Commenter 8)

 

Perpetrators are victims as well, if someone doesn’t understand this, they shouldn’t engage in this subject. (Commenter 9)

 

The original poster offered the following response in a second post:

 

I asked to join this group to learn about the wrongs suffered by the descendants of victims. Many say that I am not responsible for the deeds of my grandfather. I don’t agree. (…) I carried this burden from 1996 till last year, that is, for 18 years. And I did not talk about it. (…) I am responsible, and my children are responsible, and my grandchildren will be, too. (….)(Commenter 1)

 

This thread of posts shows how online support groups predominantly work on resolving trauma on the secondary/tertiary level, i.e. trauma which originally was the consequence of the failure to recognize or acknowledge the sufferings of victims and survivors, including non-emphatic reactions of individuals at the time, as well as the silence and tabooing of the decades of the communist era. Historical trauma did not conclude in collective processing. Rather, it was pushed back to the individual level, with everyone carrying their own burden and passing it on as a legacy of post-traumatic symptoms, guilt, mourning, and loneliness to their offspring. But this unintentional bequeathal included not only the descendants of victims, but also the descendants of perpetrators, witnesses, and bystanders. As time passes, boundaries of identities become less clear-cut, resulting in the “trans-generational intersections of identities,” which is a new term I have coined in my research referring to the processes of identity changes and identity intersections related to the roles traditionally listed in the so-called trauma grid.27 Several studies—and also the thread of posts above—show that the descendants of perpetrators are also affected by traumatization.28 In one of the comments in the above cited thread of posts a commenter draws attention to the digital sphere as a meeting place. In this case, the group takes one step further: they meet and integrate a descendant of a perpetrator into the “carrier group”29 of the collective trauma.

Sharing traumatic experiences online in a support group means that there are others “listening,” i.e. the second and third stages of recovery (reconstruction of the trauma narrative, reintegration in a community)30 can be reached at the same time. A study by Michaelle Indian Rachel and Grieve published in 2014 shows that “socially anxious individuals” prefer online support groups to face-to-face meetings.31 One of the reasons for this, in addition to the opportunity to remain anonymous and the ability to withdraw anytime from contact without consequences, is that there is usually a large number of people “around,” and thus in all (mathematical) likelihood posts will be met with at least some emphatic responses. Those unable to comment on or recognize the traumas of the other will remain silent, but this will not be noticeable online, thus their silence will not become un-recognition, and it will not constitute a wall of indifference or lead to secondary traumatization (although the lack of secondary traumatization might be considered illusory, as keeping silent might be a way of shirking the ethical call to respond and thus allowing the silent party to avoid either confronting or denying the trauma of the other). In an article about the transformation of Jewish identity in Hungary in relation to the “strategy of silence” over the Holocaust and Jewish roots and identity practiced by survivors and the remaining Jewish community in communist Hungary, the authors (Erős et al.) cite a respondent who remembers his father, a survivor, as “not existing inside.” The respondent felt the burden of inherited trauma in the “inhibitions within internal family life.” “In a certain sense,” the respondent commented, “this made my family dead.”32 It is a common practice in online support groups, especially closed and secret Facebook groups, to call the group a “family” or a “hive” (“mamahives” are very common), and members often come to regard the group as an extended family. As we have seen in the examples of the Facebook groups discussed here, in a certain sense online group communication can function as a substitute for lost “internal” family life. The group “The Holocaust and My Family” enables its members to accept their family as/even though they are lost. By sharing their loss, they become members of a new, digital family of people who have suffered a loss, and this fact becomes part of their identity. The concept of family is reinterpreted in this process, so that in its new sense it can become the receptive environment for recognition of transgenerational intersections of identities, enabling dialogue among the descendants of the different groups affected by the trauma of the past.

One of the members in the group “The Descendants of the Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust” sent me a private message welcoming my research, in particular because she feels that she cannot process the trauma related to her Holocaust survivor grandparents, whom she did not even know. When she attempts to confront this trauma, she only becomes upset and cries over and over again, even though she is a member of several groups. Further research is needed to investigate whether the digital environment can offer solutions to such problems, and whether trauma processing in online support groups on the collective level can be directed back to the individual level.

 

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Erős, Ferenc, Júlia Vajda, and Éva Kovács. “Intergenerational Responses to Social and Political Changes: Transformation of Jewish Identity in Hungary.” In International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, edited by Yael Danieli, 315–24. New York: Plenum Press, 1998.

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Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Pandora, 1992.

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Past Traumas and Future Generations: Cultural Memory Transmission in Hungarian Sites of Memory

Zsófia Réti

University of Debrecen

Now that we have reached the mid-2010s, a new generation of Hungarian citizens has grown up; the first Hungarian adults to have absolutely no memory of the state socialist period. It is not only a matter of “reconciliation,” “coming to terms with the past,” or “confessing the past” that are at stake here, but also making the past relevant to people who were born too late to experience it. Due to their lack of information, this generation is extremely susceptible to the various, often contradictory interpretations of the past, and because of their age, they bear the specific characteristics of the so-called Gen Z, the digital natives. How is the communist legacy represented to them? What are the primary media of historical knowledge transmission about the Kádár era? What are its main claims, what kinds of narratives are being presented, and how do young people react to these narratives? How does narrating the communist past affect the national identity of the youth? These are the primary questions I seek to answer in this essay. In addition to all the hardships and horrors of the twentieth century (World War I and II, 1956), there is one more trauma that post-socialist Hungarian society needs to deal with: the cultural rupture of 1989/90, which burned all the bridges between past and future, rendering all at once the language of parents unintelligible to their children and changing the ways in which the traumas of the past were contextualized in Hungarian cultural memory. Based on this fundamental assumption, in this essay I compare the practices adopted by the two most prominent Hungarian communism-related memory projects: the House of Terror and Memento Park. I combine two methods—discourse analysis of the written materials found in the two museums and semi-structured interviews with teenagers—in order to provide a balanced, interdisciplinary approach to the topic.

The two museum spaces in question present very different segments of Hungarian cultural memory. More precisely, they reflect on different pasts. The interplay and interference of memories related to the early and the late periods of the Kádár era, which are on display in the two museums, along with the reaction of young people to these memories provide fertile grounds for an examination of collective memory practices related to both the “system change” and the preceding period. I conclude by considering the possible ways, good practices, and existing solutions to the transmission of the traumatic experiences of the recent and not so recent past to the next generation and by offering a framework in which traumatic and nostalgic approaches to the past do not contradict, but rather complement each other.

Keywords: politics of memory, memory of Communism in Hungary, transmission of cultural memory, monuments, museums, Szoborpark, House of Terror

Erased/Confessed/Conveyed

“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” This is the first sentence of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-Between. And indeed, especially in post-socialist countries, there seems to be a major gap between the experiences of those who were born even a narrow generation earlier and people who are in their teens right now. The first children of the post-Cold War world, i.e. children who were born after the democratic transition in Hungary in 1989/90, are now in their mid or late 20s. As of 2016, they have had a chance to vote in the national elections at least twice. These young adults form a new generation of Hungarian citizens, having absolutely no firsthand memory of Hungary’s state socialist period. And behind them, the next generation is already coming of age. These two, non-localized generations, Generation Y and Generation Z, that is, the Millennials and the Digital Natives, need to be educated about their country’s recent past.

Péter György describes the abyss of understanding that has become unbridgeable after 1989:

 

Talking about communism, socialism, which is hoped to be self-evident, that is, the linguistic attempt to evoke the past is both impossible and deceptive, because the cultural space in which that rhetoric was legitimate and exclusively homely is no longer available. […] For those who were born too late, the continent upon which these sentences were articulated is terra incognita.1

The transition of 1989/90 is perceived here as a rupture in the continuity of Hungarian culture, which burned all the bridges between past and future and which, all at once, rendered the language of parents unintelligible to their children and changed the ways in which the traumas of the past were contextualized in Hungarian cultural memory.

Therefore, what one can perceive here, parallel to the shift from the communicative memory of communism to institutionalized cultural memory, is an alteration in the ways in which the past is approached by professionals seeking to communicate it. Starting from the hope of the communist utopia to “erase the past once and for all”2 (which was in line with the communist pedagogical program and the vision of the new Soviet man), in 2002, a decade after the transition, the second Memorial Day for the Victims of Communism in Hungary (which coincided with the opening ceremony of the House of Terror museum) chose a completely different motto. Quoting Attila József’s poem “A Dunánál” (By the Danube), the commemoration was organized under the phrase “A múltat be kell vallani” (“The past must be confessed”). Since then, fifteen years have passed, and now the annual ceremony runs under a very different motto: “Emlékezzünk, hogy emlékeztessünk” (“Remember in order to remind!”). In other words, there is a shift from the imperative that “the past must be confessed” to a new duty: “the past must be conveyed,” and the reason for this is possibly our confrontation with a new generation the members of which cannot in fact remember anything of the earlier regime because they were born after its fall.

Hence, it is not only the matter of “reconciliation,” “coming to terms with the past,” or “confessing the past” that are at stake here, but also making the past relevant and meaningful to people who were born too late to experience it. Due to their lack of information, this generation is extremely susceptible to the various, often contradictory interpretations of the past, and because of their age, they have very different attitudes towards digital media than members of previous generations. How is the near past represented to them? What are the primary media of historical knowledge transmission about Hungary’s state socialist period? What are its main claims, what kinds of narratives are being presented, and how do young people react to these narratives? These are the primary questions I seek to answer in this essay.

In order to explore how historical knowledge is conveyed in Hungary, in the following I compare the practices used by the two most prominent Hungarian communism-related memory projects: the House of Terror and Memento Park. These two institutions are exemplary cases because of their strategic position in terms of post-Kádárian memory practices. Alongside then, a number of other projects could have been included, such as the Iron Curtain Museum of Vashegy or the Pantheon of the Workers’ Movement in the Kerepesi Cemetery. However, the House of Terror and Memento Park stand out because they have by far the largest audiences. Both sites are open to the public and adolescents are encouraged to visit them during school trips, so they can be regarded as the most central means of official practices of remembrance about Hungarian state socialism.

The purpose of the present paper is to look simultaneously at what the two memory projects have to offer, and how young visitors react to them. For this reason, along with analyses of the two sites of memory and the written and/or multimedia material distributed on the spot or available through their websites, I also conducted several semi-structured interviews with young visitors in order to explore the effects the two exhibitions had had on them (in short, to see whether or not the two museums are successful as memory and/or knowledge transmission projects). Altogether, I conducted 17 interviews between 2012 and 2016, 9 with teenage visitors to Statue Park (the first incarnation of what was to become Memento Park) and 8 with visitors to the House of Terror. The interviews were 10–15 minutes long, and they were generally performed one or two days after the trip to the museum. All of the interviewees were 13–14 years old at the time of the interview. Although such a sample is by no means representative of Hungarian youth as such, the answers given by these teenagers were often unexpected in many ways and may offer novel insights regarding the efficiency of the two institutions as memory projects.

After a brief review of the available literature, I explore the differences between various interpretations of the term “postmodern” in relation to the two museums, focusing on the mediality of the memory that they use and the coherent narrative that they seek to present. I then offer a discussion of Piotr Sztompka’s take on cultural trauma in support of my contention that the actual “cultural trauma” that influences both museums is not the terror of the 1950s, but the sudden paradigm shift of 1989. I conclude by identifying a very visible discrepancy between the heritage and the legacy of communism in Hungary. Although the two terms are sometimes used synonymously, referring to the (material, philosophical, or other) remnants of the past, they may represent two very different aspects of the same “remnants.” Heritage is understood here as a deliberately selected narrative of the past, while legacy is passed on involuntarily, usually as a set of semi-conscious actions and behavioral patterns. I conclude with the observation that while the transmission of a clearly defined heritage to subsequent generations should be the duty of any functional memory project, the legacy of the state socialist era makes it extremely difficult if not impossible for the past to be conveyed.

Memento Park and the House of Terror: A Review of the Secondary Literature

After 1989, there was growing public demand to make the “peaceful transition” of the system change visible, or rather invisible. The statues from the public spaces of Budapest were removed, and the unavoidable question about the further fate of these objects was also raised. The idea of simply destroying them was quickly dismissed, since this gesture would have contradicted the expectations that had been placed on the “new Hungarian democracy,” so alternative solutions were needed. The decision was made to remove the statues from the city center and deposit them at a site offered by the 22nd District, where they were fit into the artistic vision of designer architect Ákos Eleőd, who sought to present them in a way that enabled cool observation of the past and many other memory strategies. This is the conception story of Statue Park. Eleőd writes about this issue in his 1991 tender:

 

eventually, we would decide on the fate of artistic pieces based on political ideologies. At this point, the subtle dignity of art should present itself: to find and accept the responsibility, which, in this case, leads to a thin ethical path. [...] It is a joy to participate in the absence of book burning.3

Statue Park was opened in 1993, and later on, in 2006, the state owned but privately run project finally got the funding for major expansion. From that moment on, Statue Park was renamed One Sentence on Tyranny Park, being part of a larger project entitled Memento Park, hence the multiplicity of names.

The House of Terror, which was opened almost a decade after Statue Park, was based on very different considerations. The building at 60 Andrássy Road, in which the museum is housed, itself has a story to tell. First, it served as the Headquarters of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party from 1940 to 1945. Then, from 1945 to 1956, it functioned as the center of the communist secret police services, the State Protection Department and the State Protection Authority. After it was purchased in 2000 by the Public Foundation for the Research of Central and East European History and Society, it was opened as the House of Terror Museum in February 2002, a few months before the elections, with the alleged purpose of erecting “a monument to the memory of those held captive, tortured, and killed in this building.”4

Consequently, although these two very unconventional museums are comparable because they are both related to the memory of communism in Hungary, they actually commemorate two very different segments of the past. While the House of Terror seeks to evoke the suffocating milieu of the 1940s and 1950s, Memento Park, while it certainly reflects on earlier decades, is a self-proclaimed memorial to the successful (i.e. non-violent) democratic transition of 1989/90.

Both museums have been subject to extensive academic engagement in the fields of history, sociology, cultural studies, and museology, not to mention the intellectual debates that sprang up concerning the opening ceremony of the House of Terror in the columns of the weekly Élet és Irodalom (debates which are revived from time to time). However, it is interesting to see that there are differences from the perspective of who writes about the two museum spaces. In the case of Memento Park, most reviewers are not Hungarian, and they often contrast the site with other, similar monuments, such as the Grutas Park in Lithuania,5 the Berlin Wall, and the Casa Poporului of Bucharest.6 Meanwhile, in the case of the House of Terror, the overwhelming majority of texts are written by Hungarians.

Regarding the latter case, critics of the House of Terror seem to have reached a broad consensus regarding the scientifically objectionable nature of the museum. One of the most frequent arguments made in order to support this claim (that the museum is objectionable on scholarly grounds) is that the House of Terror primarily targets emotions without presenting rational arguments along with the affective impact.7 András Rényi, for instance,8 argues that the House of Terror is less a historical and more a rhetorical achievement, proudly admitting that it does not calmly observe history from a distance, but rather directly, dedicatedly, and passionately creates history.

Another recurrent issue in the reception of the House of Terror is the inauthentic or at least unclear nature of the exhibited objects.9 Maybe the most exemplary one such object is the can of pickled cucumbers, which was later replaced with a bottle of vodka,10 as noted by Péter Apor. “The original can of cucumbers,” Apor argues, “represents an unusual epistemological position. Neither the original can nor the subsequent bottle makes any claim to any sort of historical authenticity: there is no visible intention to demonstrate that either of them might derive from the period of the past in question.”11 Aesthete Sándor Radnóti even concludes that the most important object presented in the House of Terror is the building at Andrássy Road 60 itself, as the collection is almost ridiculously modest.12

Partly based on these objections, some critiques argue (in my assessment persuasively) that the House of Terror is not even a legitimate museum. Rényi for instance offers a very sharp dividing line between the general definition of museums and the self-classification of the House of Terror: “It is common knowledge that so far the House of Terror has established no archival background, and it is more than questionable even for laypeople whether the museum’s attempt at a coherent historical conception would stand up to even the most basic professional scrutiny.”13 James Mark also argues that there is a tendency in Central and Eastern Europe to use museums of communism as places of symbolic justice instead of as places of knowledge transmission, a process which usually takes place at very significant historical sites. “The ‘cultural trial of Communism’ took place at sites of terror where the political condemnation of Communism could be made historically credible: these locations allowed their founders to present themselves as uncovering powerful direct evidence of the former regime’s violence and criminality, which could be linked to the ways in which the country as a whole had been victimized.”14

In the case of Memento Park, the early pieces of relevant literature seem to share the perception of the park as an artistic work, emphasizing a civilized, “dignified” kind of remembering, in line with the creators’ intentions. In her 1999 discussion of the site, Beverly James remarks that a number of post-communist features are relevant to an analysis of the park, including “a strong sense of national identity […] and a deep respect for the past.”15 A few pages later, she adds that the “commodification of heritage […] is not yet relevant to museums in Hungary, where […] the past is still treated with respect.”16

A few years later, Maya Nadkarni first mapped out the immense discrepancy between the idea of a past “still treated with respect” and the marketing strategies used by the park, or, more specifically Ákos Réthly, the young entrepreneur who runs it. Nadkarni argues that Réthly’s marketing plan to frame Statue Park as a site of communist kitsch was strongly based on Western expectations of socialism, its ideology, and its iconography, and the marketing did more to confirm than to contest these expectations. “Indeed,” she contends, “Western reports of the park opening often played into these fantasies of monumental ignominy: describing the park’s architecture as a humorous ‘theme park’ or ‘Leninland,’ or romantically locating the park on a ‘bleak’ or ‘windy’ hilltop.”17

The literature on the two memory projects also evokes a number of issues that come up in relation to both museums. Here, I cover only a single feature: the idea of postmodernity at the two sites of memory. Postmodernity seems to have different implications and emphases when applied to different museums. Beverly James for instance argues that Statue Park Museum is postmodern in the sense that “its holdings […] had yet another layer of meaning slapped on them when they were uprooted from their familiar locations and repositioned in the fabricated terrain of an open-air park.” Furthermore, it can be considered postmodern because “it juxtaposes pieces that embody seemingly incongruous versions of communism.”18 Parallel to that, Radnóti identifies the House of Terror as a “postmodern museum of torture,” where the architect and the curator are free to create, and where the wealth of multimedia content is mixed with traditional museum forms, relativizing them.”19 In a similar fashion, Rényi condemns the “aestheticizing intemperance of the postmodern, which, in order to have a more powerful impact, transcends each and every sacred boundary and ignores the most fundamental differences between document and fiction, object and representation, fact and opinion.20

It is interesting to see how critics use the term “postmodern” differently for the two museums. In relation to Statue Park, it can be understood as a kind of inventive, novel, and inclusive attitude towards a difficult past, while for the House of Terror, postmodernity is but a formal solution to present a modernist national grand narrative of the equally problematic recent past. This distinction in meaning is vital if one seeks to understand how the two museums function as more or less successful memory projects. The differences between the two understandings of postmodernity can be mapped out by focusing on two central axes of the exhibitions. First, their mediality, and second, the narrative they create about the past. Although these two aspects are certainly linked, it is still expedient to separate them for analytical purposes.

The Materiality of Memory

The materiality of remembering in the two museums is closely related to how the two museums deviate from the idea of written, textual knowledge. In her 2009 essay “Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory,” Aleida Assmann outlines the trajectory of the written word in the realm of cultural memory, from the Renaissance up to the present day, identifying an important break in the monopoly of written knowledge, which she dates back to as early as the seventeenth century. She argues that while the privileged path to historical understanding was found in the texts of canonical male authors, “different routes of access to the past were opened by bypassing texts and tradition and concentrating on non-textual traces, such as ruins and relics, fragments and sherds, and songs and tales of a neglected oral tradition.”21 In short, what Assmann detects is the origin of mistrust in written language as the only reliable medium through which one can “speak with the dead” in the Greenblattian sense, that is, as the only plausible way to get meaningful information about the past.22 Assmann later moves on to locate one more radical change with the appearance of new media: “We might say that some contemporary writers, searching for authentic traces of the past in a mass media culture, are discovering these in trash. With the development of new technologies and channels of communication, writing is ceding its position as the foremost medium of communication and cultural transmission.”23 This second remark may have twofold consequences, not only for writers, but for more general practices of cultural memory as well. First, we need to admit that knowledge about the past is often incidental and is of an almost random nature, and the most valuable insights may be gained from things discarded, like statues that no one wishes to see in their original places anymore. Second, one also needs to see that the written word as the single most reliable medium of historical knowledge may (sadly) become obsolete; its hegemony is threatened by media, both old and new.

Instead of written media, cultural memory is transmitted through novel and not so novel ways involving tangible remembrance and multimedia devices and contents. In terms of memory projects and museum spaces, objects (remnants, replicas, and things of questionable origin) naturally acquire a key position. The importance of material artefacts as mnemonic devices enhancing individual remembering has been acknowledged since Antiquity. However, their role in establishing cultural memory has only recently been made an object of serious interrogation, and they have gained attention largely due to the contributions of museum studies.

In understanding how museum artefacts can contribute to establishing and maintaining cultural memory, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s take on “presence effects” and “meaning effects” might help. In his book The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Gumbrecht distinguishes between “presence effects” and “meaning effects,” the latter referring to interpretational practices as transcendental meaning attributions, usually associated with the traditionally hermeneutical practices of the humanities and social sciences. In contrast, “presence effects” are defined by the materiality of the object of study, that is, they refer to the ways in which the objects of aesthetic experience occupy a certain space within reality; they “exclusively appeal to the senses.”24 According to Gumbrecht, the metaphysical practice of interpretation should be altered considering that “we conceive of aesthetic experience as an oscillation (and sometimes as an interference) between ‘presence effects’ and ‘meaning effects’.”25 This oscillation is especially relevant in terms of museum experiences, where the materiality of the objects displayed and the interpretations attached to them rarely coincide.

To illustrate this point, let us look at two examples from Statue Park and the House of Terror: texts with very visible and significant materiality, the presence effects and meaning effects of which happen to confront each other, offering subversive interpretations.

 

From Tyranny to ETERNAL GLO

In Statue Park a general characteristic feature of the site is a very visible absence of written texts. Next to the works, one finds only the name of the sculptor, the title of the composition, the date of the erection of the work, and the statue’s original place. This virtual absence of text emphasizes the ideal of the neutral preservation of works of art without contextual references. True, a visitor’s guide can be purchased at the entrance, and the website offers a lot of information, but in general the visitors are left alone with the works and their very symbolic environment. The longest written text visitors encounter during their trip is Gyula Illyés’s poem, One Sentence on Tyranny, which was borrowed as the name name for the park in 2006. As visitors attempt to enter the actual territory of the park, they find their way blocked by a large and rusty iron door, the main entrance to the park, with the poem inscribed on it, exclusively in Hungarian. This manner of presentation can be regarded as a mise-en-abyme of the interplay between presence effects and meaning effects, while parallel to that, it also highlights the fundamental ambiguity between traumatic and alternative approaches to the past, such as nostalgic or ironic.

The materiality and position of the text, along with the interpretational framework it provides for an understanding of Statue Park as a whole, also assigns new dimensions of meaning to the original poem: the mutuality produced by the common context obviously influences the strategies of reading as well. The self as it is presented in the poem not only associates tyranny with a set of activities and behavioral patterns, it also describes it as a universal omnipresent feeling that is always already there in the everyday routines of the people. “Dohányod zamatába,/ ruháid anyagába/ Beivódik, évődik /Velődig” (It penetrates into the flavor of your tobacco, the fabric of your clothes, to your marrow).26 The poem’s image of omnipresent tyranny and the collection of the prominent Socialist Realist works seem to be in dialogue, which underlines the concept that the statues can be regarded as means of oppression. From this perspective, certain lines of the poem might be exceptionally illuminating in nature, since the relationship between art and social milieu (which is one of the focal points of the poem) is obviously not something to be dismissed in the case of Statue Park. Throughout the poem, as “tyranny” is personified and condensed into an indefinite third-person singular, it also penetrates deeper and deeper, from individual relationships to the general perception of the world: “Mert szépnek csak azt véled/ mi egyszer már övé lett” (For you take as beautiful only the things that have already become his). The experience of the senses becomes legible exclusively through the filter of tyranny, and thus the possibilities of artistic reflection are also to be imagined within the framework of oppression.

However, the fact that the poem is displayed just in front of Statue Park provides an ironic position in reading the monuments. The lines “Mert ott áll/eleve sírodnál /ő mondja meg, ki voltál/ porod is neki szolgál” (For he stands there by your grave, he defines who you were, your ashes still serve him) illuminate, for instance, the fate of Socialist Realist statues: being closed into their own materiality, deprived of what they originally signified (i.e. the heroes and ideals of a past era), they become their own parodies. Illyés’ text suggests that the oppressive power owns the soul and body of its subjects, and thus it is able to provide retrospective definitions of the people and objects serving them.

If one considers the mutual influence of site and poem, two crucial observations must be made. First, the verses are scribbled onto an enormous iron door, supposedly the main entrance to the park. Yet these doors remain closed by design, and one can only enter the museum through a tiny sideway. As Réthly explained during a guided tour, “you know that proverb that there is a side-door next to all large gates, which means that if you cannot do something in the official way, we should try to find some other solution.” Thus, the museum offers “alternative,” more inclusive approaches to remembrance of the past, while still preserving a more institutionalized, primary reading, according to which the past is presented as tyrannical: the main door that is always closed. Second, due to the corroding effects of the weather, certain parts of the text have become illegible, which could be understood as a dual game of inscribing and effacing meanings. On the one hand, there is a gesture of guiding the visitors’ frame of understanding by the position of the text, while on the other, the owners of the museum let the rust eat away the letters, making it impossible to assign one single meaning to the park. The visitors have become unable to read the text, and they are once more on their own with the statues.

Similar material damage to written words can also be found in the House of Terror. As opposed to Memento Park, where most of the on-site information texts were absent, in the case of the House of Terror there is an abundance of written texts, which nonetheless results in a similar absence of information. Almost every room in the exhibition features a take-home information sheet, both in English and in Hungarian, and in absence of a guide, most visitors spend a great portion of their time huddled up in one of the dim corners of the exhibition rooms, reading the information materials (especially in the first few rooms). Furthermore, the walls often feature quotes (typically in Hungarian only), and sometimes, as in the Resettlement and Deportation Room and the Justice Room, entire walls are covered with replicas of old reports or indictments, rendering them illegible by their position, the dim lighting, or simply their sheer volume. Words extinguish one another, and they appear as visual noise or decorative fragments that bear no particular meaning.

The Room of Soviet Advisors offers a very fitting example of the dynamics of Gumbrechtian presence and meaning effects. At the time of my last visit to the House of Terror, there was an enormous marble memorial plaque leaning against a large wooden desk, broken in half, with the parts slightly slid behind each other. 27 The visible part of the text is as follows:

“ÖRÖK DICSŐS…RÖS HADSER…

AKIK A SZOVJETUN…AGYARORSZ…

ÉS FÜGGETLENS… VÍVOTT HARC”

I offer the following English translation of this: “ETERNAL GLO …ED ARM… THE SOVIET UN… NGARY… WAR FO… NDEPENDEN…” First, this plaque clearly demonstrates how the ideologies of communism and fascism alike created a pseudo-language that was perceived as intimidating and uncanny precisely because it was rooted in everyday uses of language, but was rendered incomprehensible by the ideological jargon. As Péter György puts it, “communists spoke and wrote in a language unknown to Hungarians, in Hungarian. […] Words partly lost their meanings, partly gained new ones.”28 On the other hand, though, this marble plaque can also be regarded as an allegory for the approach to language and the written word as a source of historical knowledge adopted by the House of Terror. Words are everywhere in the House of Terror, yet they fall apart into sub-intelligible elements, giving the impression that something beyond linguistically understandable knowledge is being conveyed here. It is as if words lost their weight as soon as one enters the realms of terror.

In this sense, there is a fundamental similarity and an even deeper difference between Memento Park and the House of Terror. While both sites of memory exhibit an underlying mistrust of written knowledge (although the websites are both rich in detail text), their reaction to this scenario is entirely different. Memento Park, with the nearly complete lack of verbal interpretational crutches (apart from the rusty poem on the front gate), almost exclusively relies on the oral narration of the site, either by the guide or by older relatives, who tend to accompany young people to the site. One could argue that Statue Park offers a nostalgic pre-literacy medial condition, seeking to evoke the immediacy and intimacy of firsthand experience and even domestic oral history. In contrast, the House of Terror presents an entirely different scenario, which might be described as a post-literal media landscape. Here, the traditional role of written texts is taken over by both affective non-verbal elements, such as smell and lighting, and also by multimedia solutions, such as endless testimonies displayed on LCD-screens and the use of the most cutting-edge technology to support a specific vision of history.

 

Digital Natives in a Pre-literacy or Post-literacy Situation

The use of new media to emphasize certain interpretations of history is especially important when talking about knowledge transmission to members of younger generations. As members of Generation Z, the digital natives, teenage visitors have been socialized from an early age to use all kinds of multimedia and smart devices, and they are very open to technological innovation, for leisure activities and entertainment and also for learning and knowledge acquisition. Their reactions concerning the two museum spaces also underline how the abovementioned pre-verbal and post-verbal arrangements work. In the case of Memento Park, most of my respondents visited the park as part of a class excursion, with a guide. The young visitors all agreed that the presence of the guide brought the objects on exhibit closer to the audience. As one of the 14-year-olds I interviewed remarked, “Without the guide, no one would have cared about the statues.” All of them mentioned that they had positive feelings about the tour; three out of seven said that it helped them better understand “what those symbols actually meant” or confessed that the way they analyzed a particular statue together with the guide made them change their preliminary neutral or negative opinions about the work in question. Furthermore, the guided tour also succeeded in adding a set of memorable anecdotes and humorous personal stories to the display of statues, such as the one about the Smurf marzipan figurines that were dried on the right arm of a bronze Lenin in the early 1990s. According to their accounts, the young visitors were especially keen on these otherwise digressive remarks of the guide. As one of them put it, “there are museums that are dead boring, and all you get is a schematic text that you would learn in history lessons anyway. But this guy told us about really special things. He made us involved.” In this sense, according to the teenage visitors, the Memento Park guided tour managed to convey a kind of “insider,” firsthand knowledge about the years of the democratic transition, offering a chance for a very private and personal kind of knowledge transmission. The very same magic of orality was also mentioned by my other two interviewees from Statue Park, a brother and a sister aged 13 and almost 15 at the time of their visit, which was a Sunday trip on which they had been taken by their parents. Although they said that their parents could recall the locations of only a few of the statues or reliefs, as the family was not from Budapest, they nonetheless told them interesting stories about their youth (the parents were in their early 40s).

As for the House of Terror, the generational position of my interviewees had a very visible impact on the ways in which they perceived the exhibition. Although none of them took part in a guided tour, they were invariably accompanied by older relatives who helped them understand what they were seeing. One of them, a boy of 13, offered the following reply to my warm-up question as to whether or not he had liked the exhibition: “It was interesting all right, but as a child, I didn’t understand everything, unlike mum, so she had to explain things to me.” When asked about the information sheets, all but one of the teens admitted that they had not collected, read, or even looked at them extensively. Five out of eight respondents praised the video displays of the exhibition, claiming that although they had no time to watch all of the videos, those that they did see were all interesting. Most of the teens highlighted the oral history account in the elevator as the most impressive one, while others mentioned “the one at the cashier desk about forgiveness”29 or the newsreels.

As most of the respondents were in the last two years of elementary school (7th or 8th grade), they had not had any history classes about the state socialist era.30 When asked about their knowledge of state socialism in Hungary, many of them mentioned that although they do not generally watch films about “the era,” they do have an impression of it from video games.31 This medial embeddedness was even visible in their reaction to the exhibitions. At the time of my last 3 interviews in 2016, there was a temporary exhibition for the 60th anniversary of the 1956 revolution entitled Egy akaraton (One Nation, One Will), which featured six short, 5-6 minute-long films designed for virtual reality glasses. All three of the teenagers who had seen this show were fascinated by the 360° VR films, which were, according to my respondents, so intense that they somewhat dimmed the experience of the permanent exhibition. By the time of their visit, each of them had at least tried virtual reality glasses (one of the respondents even had one at home), and they even offered technical remarks on how the glasses in the House of Terror were different from the ones they had used previously. “That was a very good point. I really liked them all. They were interesting, and it was better to see them in 360 than from an ordinary video,” one of them remarked. “And also, it was a lot better because it influenced your emotions more than looking at a whole bunch of writing. That was a great idea” another added. One could claim that teenagers are very, and perhaps dangerously, responsive to new digital media in memorial spaces, especially media that are relatively new even to them. The House of Terror presents itself as a conveyor of zeitgeist, so the primary content it seeks to transmit is an impression about the recent past, an artistic expression of the premise that “terror overshadowed daily life.”32 For this purpose, the use of digital media (especially virtual reality technologies) is perhaps the most fitting choice. The caveat concerning such techniques, especially for adolescents, is that a certain version of the past is presented as the only valid past, leaving no room either for criticism or for questions. What is seen on the screen not only becomes believable, but it turns into reality itself. Probably this is one reason why my interviewees seemed to be so a-critical with regards to the exhibition in the House of Terror, while they were considerably more reflective about their Statue Park experiences.33

In contrast, my respondents could not recall much objective knowledge that they had gained from their visit to the House of Terror. Six out of eight teenagers did not realize that the exhibition was about two kinds of dictatorships, although they had a good understanding of Hungary having been under two different forms of occupation during those times. Indeed, the House of Terror has frequently been criticized for the extremely unbalanced nature of the museum’s displays. As one reads on the English version of the House of Terror website, “[h]aving survived two terror regimes, it was felt that the time had come for Hungary to erect a fitting memorial to the victims, and at the same time to present a picture of what life was like for Hungarians in those times.”34 In other words, the House of Terror allegedly describes the two kinds of terror Hungary suffered between 1944 and 1989: the Nazi occupation and the establishment of the communist regime. The House of Terror does not include the Anti-Jewish Laws of the interwar years in its representation of terror, when Germany had not yet invaded Hungary, or the massacre of an estimated 23,000 Jews in near Kamianets-Podilskyi in August 1941, including 16,000 people who had been deported to the newly annexed territory from Hungary, hence denying any complicity Hungary might have had in these parts of the Holocaust. Furthermore, strictly speaking, only 2 or 3 of the 19 exhibition rooms focus on the Nazi occupation and the Hungarian Arrow Cross party and none focus on the crimes and massacres committed under the Horthy regime. However, as Krisztián Ungváry underlines,35 the imbalance is not merely a matter of space. Three rooms perhaps would have been enough to evoke the terror in which many Hungarians lived under Horthy and the Arrow Cross, but as Mark argues, the memory of Fascism is only evoked “where it had the capacity to demonize Communism.”36 In this, the museum succeeds, yet no body of references is actually given in support of this emotional affect.

Instead of facts, the House of Terror offers associations, but when one lacks the relevant historical knowledge, as a 13-year-old visitor sometimes does, the exhibition will not fill in the gaps. Perhaps the most telling example is the Internment room in the basement, which features a miners’ car and some rocks in the middle, next to an LCD-screen on which a formerly interned person is giving testimony. This room is right after the prison reconstruction, which is perceived by many as the most emotionally burdening part of the exhibition. One of my interviewees, whom I followed through the museum, demonstrated significant behavioral change at this point. Prior to this room, the teenage boy was very open, asked many questions, and inspected everything closely, especially the prison part, but here he just looked at the plate with the name of the room, briefly glanced at the miners’ car, and walked away. As he later informed me, he did not fully understand the word internment in this context, and due to the absence of descriptive material, he could not establish a logical link between the car that fills the whole room and the idea of internment. Although the room does have a take-home information sheet, it is only from the website that one can find out that the bogie with the rocks is in fact an original artefact from the Recsk Internment Camp.

This brief episode illustrates why the House of Terror often fails as a site of knowledge transmission about communism. The illusion of a zeitgeist conjured in its entirety by simulacra objects and multimedia devices is not suitable for knowledge transmission on its own, and the supplementary means were, in this case, insufficient to sustain an adolescent’s attention.

From Trauma to Laughter

Closely related to the materiality and mediality of remembering is the question of the various kinds of pasts that are presented to the visitors, especially younger visitors. Critics of the House of Terror condemn the exhibition for offering a one-sided interpretation of the past, which portrays Hungary as a hapless victim of evil foreign powers.37 Péter György, for instance, contrasts the presence of victim-identifications with the absence of perpetrator memories, especially concerning the way in which the past is communicated to members of the younger generations: “We do not need the younger generations to feel personal guilt for the acts committed by their predecessors. But we do need them to know what their predecessors did.”38

This idea is supported by the narrative on the information sheets: it consistently portrays “terror” and its manifestations, such as internment, deportation, secret agency, etc., as something in which Hungarians took no part and which was imposed from the outside. This process of externalization also appears on the level of grammatical structures and word choices. A prevalent use of the passive voice is a characteristic feature of the information sheets, even in Hungarian, which is unusual. While there the sentences make no mention of the names of perpetrators, the victim is almost without exception Hungary or the Hungarian people, who are depicted as silent and inert bystanders in their own history. “Hungary was plunged into a hopeless economic situation,” and then “the country became the theatre of war in the clash between the two Super Powers,” and later on, in the Changing Clothes room, the brochure explains that “the video clip depicts how an entire society was forced to ‘turn coat’, i.e. switch allies.”

The passive voice is but one example in the House of Terror of what Aleida Assmann calls “victim memory.” Assmann coined the term39 to differentiate it from “losers” inasmuch as the victim is a passive target of violence, and the term obviously implies a sense of power asymmetry, while the term “loser” still implies a sense of heroism or a sacrifice made for a cause.40 According to Assmann, the most characteristic feature of this kind of memorial practice is to offer an unambiguous image of the past, in which no dissenting opinions are appreciated or even accepted, since the whole community is imagined as the victim of a power external to it. It is also important to refer to Assmann’s comment in which she emphasizes that while in Western Europe such interpretations are being questioned and subverted, Eastern Europe is still bearing witness to the resurrection of national grand narratives emphasizing collective victimhood. With respect to the House of Terror, Zsolt K. Horváth claims that the institution is, in fact, an allegory of Hungary victimized by Communism.41

The House of Terror does not merely evoke a sense of collective victimhood, it also seeks to commemorate the collective traumatic experience that it links to foreign occupation. It focuses primarily on the “dark decades” of the 1940s and 1950s, but it also broadens the temporal spectrum of occupation significantly: from 1944 to 1989. As one reads on the website, “the Museum, while presenting the horrors in a tangible way, also intends to make people understand that the sacrifice for freedom was not in vain.”42 Such a quest could potentially allow for collective healing: the examination, understanding, and eventually the dissolution of the wounds Hungarian society has suffered (and inflicted on itself), but unfortunately the House of Terror goes down on a different path. As Miklós Takács argues, individual traumatic experiences can be identified by involuntary repetition and by their appearance next to the body and non-verbality, while the prerequisite of cultural traumas is their mediated nature. He concludes that if a traumatic experience is removed from the body and transferred into another medium, it ceases to be a psychic trauma and is considered healed.43 The House of Terror here presents just the opposite method. By using new digital media and reconstructions, such as the infamous basement prison, it de-medializes the horrors that took place in the House, and re-inscribes them into the medium of the body. The moment the visitor enters the elevator, taking a painfully slow ride down to the basement, the information sheets go missing. Visitors are left alone in the corridor with the tiny, wet cells, and they are given no information or no interpretational guidelines. Many of my respondents claimed that they felt “claustrophobic” during their visit to the basement, and although one of them, a girl of 14, ironically remarked that “it was Disneyland,” she also confessed a vague sense of sickness when listening to the testimony about executions in the elevator. This traumatic and potentially traumatizing approach does not allow for elaborate reflections on the space or the historical knowledge it might convey: where there are no words, there is no knowledge to speak of.

In Statue Park, the arrangement of “excluded” public statues enables a whole range of remembering practices, including a traumatic approach to the past. When asked about how the visitors interact with the statues on exhibit in the Park, Réthly spoke about a kind of respect for the past: “All the local visitors have a bit of an agent past, a bit of relocation, a sense of being unheeded... Everyone has a bit of pain. I wouldn’t say that these feelings are brought to the surface here, but it gives a kind of basic restraint to their attitudes.” Therefore, Hungarians would not find it funny to pose with the statues due to their “personal involvement,” or rather the communicative memory that still conveys the underlying idea of the statues being means of an oppressive, dictatorial regime.

Strangely enough, there is a certain ambiguity in the answers provided by the student visitors on this matter. When asked about the idea of posing, all of them said that their teacher had had a number of ideas about different poses even before they arrived to the park, but they also noted that by themselves they would not have thought of these statues as objects next to which to pose. One of them even mentioned that “probably it might be more exciting for the Americans, because we learn about it, we know about it, but they... they did not live through it. For them it’s fun to see... a big dictatorial man (sic!) and ha ha, let’s pose with him. But for us, we can feel what it was like for the people back then, and it’s less amusing to make fun of it.” However, based on my personal experience following them along the park, they actually enjoyed climbing onto the statues, and they started posing the minute the guide turned his back on them.

And indeed, in part due to Eleőd’s initial democratic intentions, the idea of laughter appears in many ways in the reception of the Park, ranging from mockery to irony. Furthermore, the intention of the park’s creators seems to have been very much in line with the way in which Linda Hutcheon defines irony: “Irony rarely involves a simple decoding of a single inverted message; […] it is more often a semantically complex process of relating, differentiating, and combining said and unsaid meanings—and doing so with some evaluative edge.”44 The designer envisioned a multiplicity of interpretations based precisely on this permanent ambiguity of meanings: “I would like this park to be right in the middle: neither a park to honor Communism, nor a sarcastic park that provokes tempers, but a place where everyone can feel whatever they want… People can feel nostalgic, or have a good laugh, or mourn a personal tragedy connected with the period.”45

Maya Nadkarni also identifies a kind of distanced, ironic nostalgia46 in relation to the Park. She argues that “while countless Lenins proved the infuriating fact of Soviet occupation, it was perhaps even more pressing to remove [Ilya Afanasevich] Ostapenko, who called attention to the ways in which forty years of socialism had become cozy and familiar.”47 In this fashion, along with Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past, other kinds of remembering practices, such as irony or nostalgia, are also enabled by the park’s layout.

“We don’t really ask them, so they don’t talk about it”:
Mapping Terra Incognita

Let us return to Péter György’s comment on terra incognita and the unbridgeable abyss between past and present that seems to be an underlying universal trope of the post-socialist condition. The idea of terra incognita is closely related to what Piotr Sztompka calls “cultural trauma.” Sztompka argues that sudden, unexpected, deep social change may lead to a very peculiar condition, cultural trauma, which occurs “when there is a break, displacement or disorganization in the orderly, taken-for-granted universe.”48 One of the fundamental consequences of cultural trauma, according to Sztompka, is a sense of “cultural disorientation,” when “the socialized, internalized culture that they carry ‘in their heads’ or in their semi-automatic ‘habits of the heart’ clashes with the cultural environment in which they find themselves.”49 In line with Sztompka’s definition, I argue that the actual cultural trauma that is reflected in both memory projects is not the hard dictatorship and the terrors of the 1940–50s, or even the retaliation after 1956, as recent memory politics seems to imply, but rather an event that happened much later, in 1989/90.

In the case of Statue Park, admittedly a monument for the transition itself, the narrative focus on the early 1990s is not that surprising. However, the primary cultural trauma on which the House of Terror reflects is also the “change of systems.” The sudden paradigm shift of 1989 created the imperative to remember everything that had been suppressed for decades, yet the transition provided neither a natural shift from communicative to cultural memory to support suppressed memories nor the appropriate language to present these memories to a new generation.

The consequences of cultural traumatization to contemporary museum practices display a sharp dividing line between the heritage and the legacy of communism in Hungary. Heritage may be understood as a selection of items, opinions, or perspectives that can be used by the present in order to create a coherent narrative of the past. This definition bears close resemblance to what Jan Assmann calls “hot memory.”50 This is the realm in which historical museums can feel most at home. Although the two sites discussed here theoretically reflect on two very different pasts, this is not self-explanatory at first sight. Yet they both present a narrative about the past, which, strangely enough, ends with the foundation of the museum: Statue Park or the House of Terror, respectively. However, in both cases, the language they use is not suitable for the transmission of historical knowledge to post-socialist generations, because it is rooted in the legacy of the late Kádár era (and not the hard dictatorship of the earlier decades): the involuntary remnants, the doxa of how people interacted with one another before 1989.

“If a disturbance occurs,” writes Sztompka, “the symbols start to mean something other than they normally do; values become valueless or demand unrealizable goals; […] gestures and words signify something different from what they meant before; beliefs are refuted, faith undermined, trust breached; charisma collapses, idols fall.”51 And this is precisely what happened after the democratic transition. The web of comfortably allegoric, familiar language, the depth of omissions, hints at things or events already known, associative networks of words unspoken, all this was suddenly lost, as it was no longer necessary to learn or reproduce them. In the case of cultural trauma, the language beyond the language is the first to go after such a rupture in the tissue of culture, and this trap might have been overlooked by both memory projects discussed here. The deeply allegorical visual language and the very specific arrangements and combinations of objects they use (such as the infinite circles leading to a wall in Memento Park, allegedly symbolizing the communist project, or the various kitchen interiors in the Resistance room of the House of Terror, alluding to the practice of critics of the system gathering in one another’s kitchens) remain unintelligible to the youth.

One of my interviewees, when I asked him whether he had heard anything about the past from his older relatives, gave the following answer: “Yes, sometimes I hear things. Mum’s mother and father were, well, they were taken away [elvitték őket]. But we don’t really ask, so they don’t talk about it.” This fragment gives a sobering illustration of the unbridgeable hermeneutical gap that lies between Hungarian teenagers and their parents generation and grandparents generation today, and this is by no means a regular “generation gap.” I am convinced that my respondent had no idea what being “taken away,” one of the most euphemistic expressions referring to non-localizable terrors of the recent past, might mean, which is why he never asked questions about it.

Although the legacy of the late Kádár era can be regarded as a burden for Hungarian museums that promote the transmission of historical knowledge, it is also a challenge to be met. The task of such memorial sites is not simply to initiate young people as full-fledged members of a memory community or convey some kind of objective knowledge about the past, but also to awaken their curiosity and make the past seem relevant to them. If they are successful in this, perhaps next time a child will ask his or her grandmother the obvious questions: Why? Where? When? By whom?

 

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