Marginalizált emlékezet:Közbeszéd és biográfia egy volt operatív tiszt élettörténeti elbeszélésében
Marginalized memory. Public discourse and biography in the life story narrative of a former operative officer

Summary/Abstract: This paper is a narrative analysis of a former operative officer’s life story who was working in the framework of Communist Hungary’s State Service Authority. The main question of the paper concerns the ways in which the narrator—as a former ’collaborator’ of the socialist system—creates continuity among events and periods, which are interpreted by most of the current public discourses in terms of discontinuity. Szabó, the narrator came from a poor peasant background and after World War II seized the opportunities for social mobility provided by the armed forces of the dictatorship. The narratives informing about his entry into the ranks of the system’s ‘favored ones’ are both characterized by the motifs of ‘passive voice’ and the ‘circumventing’ of the regime. The dual script of cooperating with and circumventing the regime is not limited to the narratives about the Communist regime. The narrator used similar patterns when he was warned about the possibility of having to answer for his past deeds by public discourses about the past, by his own neighbours, or even by the researchers interested in his life-story-narrative.

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