Resignifying Space and Time
in Hungarian Historical Memory
A Discussion of Public Celebrations and Reburial
Practices
The work of French culture historian Pierre Nora (Les lieux de mémoire) has shown how, during the long 19th century, the historical heritage and the historical consciousness of a nation became components of the nation itself. They were then instrumentalized by the state and used in order to hold the nation together. What is obvious in the case of France is even more relevant for Hungary. Its historical heritage needed the longue durée of the 19th century in order to constitute a political elite, which then made of its historical myths and symbols a corpus of Magyar identity to serve after the Treaty of Trianon as tools for the Horthy regime. These myths and symbols bear the holy virtues of the nation and are seen as witnesses of a better past. Most of the small nations of Eastern and Central Europe have to live with the trauma of once having been great, and now (1918, 1945, 1989) having to struggle for their existence. This form of historical nostalgia explains not all but many of its places and dates, of memory.
During the Communist period, the State controlled and directed the content of official memory and transformed parts of it, either by declaring some taboos or by falsifying others in order to adjust them to the ideology. The new history was embodied by the heroes of the national Communism, who relegated the older characters into oblivion. Thus lies and oversights prevailed at that point in the historical memory. In the 1980s, some Hungarian historians began to write about these “blind spots,” reconsidering, for example, the heritage of the Habsburg monarchy, or the history of Hungarian Jewry and the Holocaust. They aroused the interest of public opinion and gave rise to its need for historical truth. One of the many demands which marked the demonstrations of 1988 and 1989 was for an acknowledgment of the tragedy of the 1956 revolution, which led to its victims being paid their last respects.
The return of history also brought with it its own victims. Street names and statues of unworthy heroes, or at least those judged so, were sometimes removed from one day to the next, as if one had wanted to erase them from the national memory, either because of the crimes committed under their name and rule, or because they represented the Soviet occupation. Once martyr László Rajk, whose reburial in October 1956 had been the first step towards the revolution, was regarded after the transition as a Communist like all the others and the street in Pest which had been named after him was given back its original name. In what follows, I will show how what applies to place and names also applies to time and dates by considering the changing fates of three dates important in Hungarian history, and then I will discuss the significance of the ritual of reburial.
1. The return of the great dates
March 15th
The first spontaneous demonstration after 1848 took place on March 15, 1860, and was supposed to express Hungarian solidarity with the Italian struggle for unity. Following the Compromise of 1867, the date of the 1848 revolution became an occasion for unofficial commemorations like gatherings of veterans’ Honvéds, meetings of patriotic associations, etc. The statue of the poet Sándor Petofi on the left bank of the Danube was erected in 1882 and became a new stop for such memorial marches. However, the law V/1898 chose April 11th, the day of the imperial sanction of the independent and responsible Hungarian government and of the decrees passed by it, as the official memorial date of the 1848 revolution and not March 15th, despite a proposal made by Ferenc Kossuth, Minister of Trade and son of Lajos Kossuth. It was not until March 15, 1919, that the first official demonstration took place, where the state and the people celebrated together. A few days later, the Communist party came to power. Although March 15th is associated with revolutionary ideas, the reactionary regime of Admiral Horthy confirmed the memorial day, partly because it lacked a basis for national consensus. Following this, the Kossuth monument was built in 1927 in the square behind the Parliament and has since then marked the end of the processions. During the war, on March 15, 1942, a group of demonstrators against Fascism convened at the feet of the Petofi statue. They tried to reach the Parliament but were stopped by the police, which led to massive arrests. What the Horthy regime had not dared to do was achieved by the Communists, who did not hesitate, five days before March 15, 1951, to remove the date from the list of public holidays. It was then remembered only in theory, and only schools remained closed on that day.
When the 1956 revolution came to an end, the insurgents demanded that March 15th be reestablished as a national public holiday. During the Kádár period, the first illegal demonstrations were called on that day and the most significant ones took place in 1971 and 1972, and later in 1987 and 1988.
The still Communist Parliament decided finally on February 22, 1989, to abolish the public holiday which was celebrated on November 7th to commemorate the Russian revolution, and to reinstate in its place March 15th, the day memorializing the 1848 revolution. Before that, the national memorial day had been April 4th: this date recalled the liberation of Hungary by the Red Army, which was also suppressed by the same legislation.
The first officially sanctioned commemoration was thus celebrated on March 15, 1989, and it was occasion for a huge patriotic happening in Budapest as well as in the provinces. In the capital, the procession was headed by the most renowned leaders of the opposition, and it marched along the ritual path: from the National Museum to the Petofi statue all the way to the Parliament and the Kossuth monument. Around 120,000 people were present in the procession and in the streets, among them the American Ambassador, whose participation in the celebration was particularly noticed and appreciated.
August 20th
At the end of 1990, the Parliament met to decide on the matter of an official national holiday and three dates were proposed: March 15th, August 2oth and October 23rd. The majority of the representatives voted for August 20th, which can be explained by the centre-right and Christian-Democrat orientation of József Antall’s government. Although the next term was dominated by the Socialists, they did not change the hierarchy of the public holidays. The problem with this date lies in its Christian, if not Catholic, context, for it symbolizes the day of Saint Stephen, the first king of Hungary. The commemoration has been held since the 19th century and the Communist state, which always pretended to have a national dimension, transformed it in a “Constitution Day,” which it celebrated on that date.
After the transition to democracy, there was no objective reason why the Christian character of the commemoration should have raised any particular indignation, first because of the general return to religious practice which occurred in the region after the fall of Communism, and second because the majority of Hungarians are Christians. The government therefore placed a greater emphasis on the personality of the king than on his holy nature. But imperceptibly the message became slowly inflected with Catholic overtones. The visit of Pope John Paul II on August 20, 1991, was interpreted as religious support for the government and encouraged its growing Christian national tendency, which caused rumors among the population and soon contributed to a worsening of Antall’s political image. Since then, the day has taken on both heritages, the holy king as well as the constitution, which theoretically enables the entire nation to participate. After two change-overs in political power, once to the left and once to the right, the commemoration remains unaltered, even if the Orbán government has recently tried to re-Catholicize it.
October 23rd
October 23rd is the third public holiday in Hungary. It was chosen on October 23, 1989, when the still Communist Parliament abolished the Communist constitution of 1949 and proclaimed the new Hungarian Republic. More than the other two dates discussed here, it is not only an act of memory, but also precisely linked to the Communist past and as such unique in Central Europe, partly because of the specificity of the 1956 revolution in the Soviet block.
Therefore this national holiday is, compared to March 15th, even more of an occasion for political speeches, gatherings in cemeteries, laying of wreaths, etc., for its meaning touches nearly everybody in Hungary, which is of course no longer the case for 1848. The memory of 1956 is also a manifold symbol encompassing historical truth, the end of the official lie and the nation’s grief. But it can be noticed nowadays, more than ten years after the transition, whenever the debate over 1956 erupts sometimes very strongly in the press, that the commitment of Hungarian public opinion to these “events,” as they were once called, has gradually diminished.
2. A Hungarian SPECIALTY: the political reburial
A typology
Revolutions, wars, occupation and totalitarianism have created a series of martyrs, suicides and exiles who died violently both abroad and on Hungarian soil and whose bodies were either hidden or improperly buried. The need for proper burial is therefore stronger in Hungary than elsewhere for it is one of the European countries to have experienced the most traumatic changes over the past century. To this it to be added that, as in the Austrian part of the monarchy, the Baroque heritage left a taste for decorum and for the stage, and death is an integral part of the show. If Viennese rush to see a “schöne Leiche” (a beautiful corpse), the Hungarians are more sensitive to the political (in the broad sense of the word) personality of the deceased.
This ritual was first invented in 1870 on the occasion of the reinterment of Prime Minister Lajos Batthyány, who had been executed in October 1849 following the repression of the Hungarian 1848 revolution. It was then further developed and improved. When Lajos Kossuth, the most famous leader of the 1848 revolution, died in 1894 in his Turin exile, the Hungarian government decided to repatriate his body. The “return” of Kossuth was the occasion for the largest procession of this type ever organized in the capital. This post mortem celebration made the link between the memory of the glorious but at the same time tragic days of the revolution and the new affirmation of Hungarian self-confidence which accompanied the 1867 Compromise. The reburial in 1906 of the bones of Prince Ferenc Rákóczi, who died in exile in the Ottoman empire, was another such ritual and made it a component of the Hungarian nation. The ceremonial was later adapted by Prime Minister Antall for the reinterment of Regent Horthy and served also for his own funeral in December 1993.
The Communist regime took over the ritual and in 1947 organized the proper reburial of Hungarian victims of Fascism (the eulogy was read by László Rajk, then Minister of the Interior and himself later a victim of a show trial). Later on, the ritual became part of the demands for historical truth and political settlement. Rajk was reburied on October 6, 1956, which paved the way for and was actually the first episode of the 1956 revolution. The same significance can be attributed to the reinterment of Imre Nagy and four of his comrades, which on June 16, 1989, embodied the end of Communist rule in Hungary. The ceremony was organized partly by László Rajk Jr., a member of the SzDSz (Alliance of Free Democrats, founded on April 16, 1989), and the director Gábor Koltai staged it for television. The ritual followed two major steps, first on Heroes’ Square in Budapest, where it took the form of a national tribute paid by about 250,000 people and millions of TV viewers, and second, in the central cemetary (Újköztemeto) of Rákoskeresztúr, also in Budapest, where personalities from the intelligentsia, the media and the arts took turns reading the names of the victims of the repression. Homages were then paid on the 301st parcel, where the bodies of the executed persons had been buried face-down, in unmarked graves without coffins. Among the speakers were the journalist Miklós Vásárhélyi, who had been tried together with Nagy, and a young fiery member of the FIDESZ (Alliance of the Young Democrats), who appears to be the Prime Minister in office, Viktor Orbán. The Committee for Historical Justice (Történelmi Igazságtétel Bizottsága), which represented the survivors and the families of the victims, had banned the leaders of the Communist party from the ceremony and only State officials were allowed to take part, which is why one should not be surprised to have seen Prime Minister Miklós Németh and State Minister Imre Pozsgay standing near the coffins.
An official monument made of white marble, looking like a dolmen, the work of the sculptor György Jovanovics, was erected in 1992. The 301st and 298th plots were later transformed into a place of national piety (nemzeti kegyhely) dedicated to the victims of the repression, who were properly reburied with, for many of them, the addition of the traditional kopjafa (wooden funeral pole).
The years following the transition to democracy saw many other reburials. Those like Nagy, who had died and been buried in a secret and unworthy way, and those who had indeed been given a proper burial but remained exiled (they had either fled Hungary or their families had refused to have them buried in a Communist country) formed the majority of the reinterments. The calendar began in 1990 with the reburial of Anna Kéthly, leader of the Social Democratic party, which she had help to refound in 1956. The year 1991 was the greatest moment in this decade of funerals: the Cardinal Mindszenty, repatriated from Austria; the politician and radical thinker Oszkár Jászi, from the US; Gábor Földes, victim of the 1956 repression, and the government decided to elevate the two plots of the Rákoskeresztúri cemetary to the rank of national pantheon. From 1992 on, the Antall government began to work for the rehabilitation of conservative politicians from the interwar period, which led to the reburial of Prime Minister Miklós Kállay and Colonel László Erdos. The climax of this process was reached in 1993 with the return of the bones of Regent Admiral Miklós Horthy, who had died in 1957 in his Portuguese exile. The ceremony, broadcast on television, was greeted with a wave of protests, for public opinion saw in it not only a form of rehabilitation but also praise of the reactionary regime Horthy personified. Despite the denial expressed by Prime Minister József Antall, who had promised that the ritual would be held in private, the ceremony took on an official aspect (television, presence of an honor guard, minting of a medal, etc.); this proved to be another blow to the ailing government and played a decisive role in the result of the elections of 1994.
The last reinterments, which took place in 1994, had less of a political meaning. The poet Attila József, the first artistic creator to be reburied since Béla Bartók, was taken out of the Pantheon of the Working Class in Kerepesi cemetery, to which he had already been transferred after the war, and was thus buried for the third time. Finally, a last personality from the Horthy times was also reburied but the event did not arouse much ado or polemics: Prime Minister István Bethlen, whom the Red Army arrested in March 1945 in Budapest and deported to the Soviet Union, where he apparently died in prison in October 1946. His bones were put to rest in June 1994 inside the mausoleum of Lajos Batthyány, in Kerepesi cemetery.
The ritual of reburial leads to a definition of the anthropology of patriotism (patriotizmus antropológiája) in Hungary. The patriotic ritual thus expresses a globality in its national signification, for it encompasses all historical periods since the interwar years; it is also the expression of a political religion, which concerns all confessions (Catholics, Protestants, Jews). Therefore, being a political ritual, it reaches a consensus that very few polemics were able to disturb, with the exceptions of the debate on the reinterment of Cardinal Mindszenty, known to have been ultra-conservative, and also in the case of Admiral Horthy. The reburial of Imre Nagy offers one of the best examples of the political aspect of this ritual, for it was the first, contributed to the fall of the regime, and gathered within it several elements of national consensus. The anthropologist Susan Gal has defined five distinctive groups of images which allow for an analysis of this kind of ritual: nationalism and the rebirth of the nation; religion; the image of Nagy as a true, human Communist; generational images with the demands of the younger generation for historical truth. Finally, the ritual deals with the memory of (emlékezés ritusa), as well as with the political settlement with the past, which is also linked to Vergangenheitsbewältigung. This last element is most obvious in the case of Horthy even if the debate on this period is far from being closed.
The first step in the course of the ritual is constituted by legitimation with the presence of reliques and/or members of the family, and also by an emotional content. Political legitimation follows, built through the historical debate. It takes place before the reinterment. Simultaneously, a political and juridical rehabilitation is achieved, although at the reburial of important personalities like Rajk, Nagy, Mindszenty or Horthy, no real confrontation took place in public opinion about their political legacy. That is how consensus comes into being and leads sometimes to the setting up of a new taboo, one forbidding criticism of the dead. However, this process greatly helped Hungarian society construct a new historical memory, after the achievement, during the first years of the democratic transition, of a political consensus which succeeded in unifying the past with the present and restituted the continuity of Hungarian history without any exclusions or “blind spots,” from Nagy over Mindszenty up to Horthy.
3. From the Millennium to the Millecentenarium
Nostalgia for 1896
The celebrations of the Millennium in 1896 revealed the self-confidence Hungary had attained after 1867. This historicism was largely used in order to materialize the successes of the Hungarian economy, arts and sciences, but the event was above all an occasion to present an image of modernity and westernization, which, in going beyond Vienna, would reach Paris and London. After 1989, Hungary wanted once again to prove that it belonged to the Western world. At the beginning of September 1998, the Hungarian Minister for Foreign Affairs, János Martonyi, announced in front of a puzzled French audience that Hungary was a part of Western Europe because of the will of her king Saint Stephen. Martonyi was not the first to evoke this king, famous for his favorable disposition towards Western Christianity, but it was practically impossible for a Western public, not used to such distant references and unaware of Hungarian history, to understand this. In the phase of transition to democracy, Hungary was clearly looking for historical models and promoting its medieval relations to Western Christianity. Therefore the choice of August 20th as a public holiday is not a real surprise and also a part of this policy of coming closer to the European Union. Simultaneously Hungary was putting forward an image of dynamism and modernity in order to consolidate her reputation as best pupil of the former Eastern Block.
The comparison between fin-de-siècle 1896 and 1996 appeared frequently in the Hungarian media, but historians, among them the late Péter Hanák shortly before his death, showed how this parallel was artificial and superficial, by insisting first on the distance between the two periods, and second on the fundamental differences in the global situation of Hungary then and now, pointing to the necessity then for Hungary of asserting herself against Vienna on the one hand and to some extent against her own national minorities on the other, while today Hungary pretends to integration and plays a key role in regional stabilization. It is thus only the atmosphere of feverish modernity and societal dynamism that is reminiscent of 1896.
The failure of the World Fair
Already before 1989, when Hungary breathed more freely than the other countries of the region, the then Communist government and the Budapest municipality had begun to organize a World Fair together with Vienna. The chosen theme, “Communication for a Better World,” would have permitted, among other things, the complete renovation of the communication and transportation network of Budapest. After Austria withdrew from the project, the Hungarians tried to go on, partly because they wanted to celebrate the approaching 1996 Millecentenarium. But they soon had to admit that the internal requirements of the economic transition reached far beyond the organization of a World Fair.
The last political and historical shows: 1996, 1998, 2000...
Nevertheless, the idea of celebrating oneself was not abandoned and was converted above all into an intention to show to the world how energetic and modern Hungary is, and at the same time that it is a nation belonging to Western history and civilization. The year of the Millecentenarium was staged with great zeal, with large exhibitions which toured worldwide and introduced Hungary and all its national treasures. Consequently the 40th anniversary of the 1956 revolution faded into the background and remained discreet, something the Socialist government and its representatives did not regret for they were embarrassed by the memory of the years which followed during which some of them had served the Communist regime.
Yet 1998 was the 150th anniversary of the 1848 revolution, and it was celebrated in places of remembrance throughout the country. A great number of exhibitions and conferences were organized not only in Hungary but also in its cultural institutions abroad. State grants were made available for an important part of this wave of remembrance and allowed, for example, the publication of several books on the topic. The public television and radio network had its share by broadcasting debates, special programs and films.
The new conservative government which came into power in 1998 seemed eager to revive the Christian message promoted by József Antall. The year 2000, the Millennium, was celebrated with great pomp for it marked the anniversary of the coronation of Saint Stephen as the first Hungarian king. Using this pretext, the government decided that the Hungarian crown should be transferred from the National Museum to the Parliament. The result was a stormy debate during which opponents condemned the growing conservative tendency of the government, its pretense of sanctifying the State and its challenge to secularism.
The struggle surrounding the crown and growing criticism of the christianization of the State did not prevent the government of Viktor Orbán from staging further commemorations the following year, also declared a Millennium: 2001 is thus the occasion to celebrate Hungarian culture in France. Then 2002 will be the bicentenary of Lajos Kossuth’s birth – Hungarian historians are already busy preparing films, books and exhibitions recalling his memory. The government’s program, including all of its legislative activity, was put under the patronage of Count István Széchenyi, the great Hungarian reformer of the Vormärz era. However, national consensus could become fragile if the government persists in its propensity for exclusivity when it tries to orientate the national memory in a Christian and conservative direction. But one has to wait for the next general elections, due in 2002, to see what changes its results will bring to the official discourse on historical memory.
Dr. h. Catherine HOREL
Research fellow at the
C.N.R.S.
(French National Center for Scientific Research, Center for German Studies
in Strasbourg).Ph.D.
“Les Juifs de Hongrie 1825-1849, problèmes d’assimilation et d’émancipation” (The Jews of Hungary 1825-1849, problems of assimilation and emancipation), defended at the University of Paris1-Sorbonne in 1993, published in 1995 and about to be translated into Hungarian (Múlt és Jövö).
Habilitation thesis “La restitution des biens juifs et le renouveau juif en Europe centrale (Hongrie, Slovaquie République Tchèque)” (The Restitution of Jewish Property in Central Europe), defended at the University of Paris1-Sorbonne in 1999.
She is the author of Histoire de Budapest (Paris: Fayard, 1999), The restitution of the Jewish property and the Jewish Revival in Central Europe - Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic (Wiener Osteuropa Studien, Bern: Peter Lang, 2001) and De l’exotisme à la modernité, un siècle de voyages français en Hongrie (1818-1910) (Budapest: Officina Hungarica, 2001), as well as of numerous articles.