A Trianon-jelenség pozsonyi tükörben
The Trianon-Phenomenon in the Mirror of Bratislava

Summary/Abstract: In an article published in 2010 in the historical review Historický časopis, the renowned Slovak historian Roman Holec formulated a series of critical remarks upon Hungarian historiography, with a special regard to the problem of Trianon. Holec blamed Hungarian historians before all for instrumentalising the Trianon peace treaty of 1920, for the dominance of the national viewpoint (“the Hungarian optique”), the use of different measures, the lack of self-reflection, and their partiality, as a result of which a kind of distorted view of the past, evocative of the interwar period, is gaining ever increasing ground in Hungary. He based his critique on a number of examples – among others on writings from the reviews História, Rubicon, but especially Nagy Magyarország and Trianoni Szemle –, stating with disapproval that professional Hungarian historians are apparently assisting silently to the spread of nationalist history writing. // The author of the present study, after taking notice of some of the inherent contradictions in the argumentation of Roman Holec, tries to set out some of the possible reasons which underlay the distortion of Hungarian historical mind. Consequently, he demonstrates that the Slovak historian fails to distinguish among the writings analysed and criticised, thus sometimes confusing professional historiography, public history and the peripheries of historiography, as well as historical approaches which are in fact very far from each other (thus, in the case of Trianon, that of “grievance” and the “critical” one). He briefly outlines the place of the Trianon problem in the Hungarian historiography of the past twenty years, and comes to the conclusion that within it the critical school, which looks back upon a tradition of several decades, is still dominant, and is characterised by both high professional standards and a marked tendency to self-reflection. Yet he also states that in the case of the “Trianon subculture”, as well as of reviews such as the Nagy Magyarország and the Trianoni Szemle, which do represent an ethnocentric, “nation-building” historiography, the critical remarks of Holec are well in place, even if the Slovak historian exaggerates the influence and publicity these forums enjoy. Finally, he examines the divergent opinions in Hungary and Slovakia with regard to the figures of Czechoslovak censuses, the Trianon borders and the dissolution of historical Hungary.

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