Discreta „Școală de la Târgoviște”. Costache Olăreanu, portret

Author(s): Ramona Maria Mocanu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 12/2019

In a period of great research and controversy, there appears a literary group that does not fit in any way with the norms already stated by the literary theory until then. Considered to be the vanguard of Romanian postmodernism and the model of the writers in the 1980s, the components of the Targoviște School were the ones who, discreetly, by the style they approached in their writing, modified the optics regarding literary construction. They were the ones who, in a game, paved the way for a current that will be one of the most interesting in literature. Apart from Radu Petrescu, Mircea Horia Simionescu and Costache Olăreanu, who constituted the „hard core” of the School, we find Petru Creția, Al George and Tudor Țopa.All of them, with subsequent composition fluctuations, were the ones who managed to propose a new vision regarding literature, both in terms of writing methods and techniques, and concerns its way of being understood, thus changing the general perception over the literaryact as meaning production.

Jaroslav Šulc – paleontolog ve službách národa

Author(s): Michal Pehr,Stanislava Vodičková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 01/2020

The society-wide thaw in the late 1960s lived up to the expectations not only of the inhabitants of the then Czechoslovakia, but also of the émigrés. Joy and hope were also reflected in the correspondence between the Archbishop of Prague Josef Cardinal Beran during his exile in Rome and believers behind the Iron Curtain as well as expatriates scattered all over the world. He kept receiving letters from Mexico, written by Olga Šulcová, then 85, in which she recalled her home and especially her son Jaroslav, executed in Berlin-Plötzensee: “[On] 20 May [1968] […] it will be 25 years since my son Jaroslav laid down his life to save his dear prison inmates. Please pray for him!” In another of her letters, she wrote: “Let us hope to God that the past was the last test for our country! […] I have a task to fulfil, that is to finally pay tribute to my son in my home country.” However, the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies put a definitive end to this hope. After that, the name of Jaroslav Šulc was to be briefly mentioned only in less prominent scholarly texts. Owing to his patriotism and democratic belief he was destined to be completely forgotten.

1956 and the Collapse of Stalinist Politics of History: Forgetting and Remembering the 1942 Újvidék/Novi Sad Massacre and the 1944/45 Partisan Retaliations in Hungary and Yugoslavia (1950s–1960s)

Author(s): Árpád V. Klimó / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2016

Two acts of mass violence that occurred during World War II have strained relations between Hungarians and Serbs for decades: the murder of several thousand civilians in Novi Sad (Újvidék) and the surrounding villages in January 1942, committed by the Hungarian army and gendarmerie, and Tito’s partisan army’s mass killings and incarceration of tens of thousands civilians, most of them Hungarians, at the end of the war. Remembering these atrocities has always been difficult and strongly politicized, but this was particularly the case when the Communist regimes in Hungary and Yugoslavia based the legitimation of their authority on anti-Fascist narratives and interpretations of the war. The conflict between Stalin and Tito, and the anti-Stalinist revolution of 1956 made it even more difficult to propagate the original Stalinist narrative about the war, which stood in ever starker contrast to everyday realities. When Kádár began to revise the political justification of his regime with a narrative that was both anti-Fascist and (moderately) critical of Stalinism in the 1960s, the remembrance of the 1942 massacre changed. In Yugoslavia, the weakening of the central government in the 1960s contributed to a local re-appropriation of the memory of 1942, while the 1944 killings remained a strict taboo until 1989.

Phantom Voices from the Past: Memory of the 1956 Revolution and Hungarian Audiences of Radio Free Europe

Author(s): Gábor Danyi / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2016

Following the short period of consolidation under János Kádár in the immediate aftermath of the 1956 revolution, expressions of the legacy and memory of the uprising were no longer permitted in the public sphere and had to be confined to the private sphere. The activity of émigré actors and institutions, including the broadcasts of Western radio stations, played a crucial role in sustaining the memory and the mentality of the revolution. In 1986, thirty years after the national trauma of 1956, Radio Free Europe broadcasted an array of programs commemorating the revolution, while the official socialist media in Hungary contended again that what had happened in 1956 had been a counterrevolution. This study primarily investigates two questions. Firstly, it casts light on the importance of the RFE’s archival machinery, which recorded on magnetic tape the broadcasts of the Hungarian radio stations during the revolution in 1956. Sharing these audio-documents with audiences 30 years later, RFE could replay the revolution, significantly strengthening the interpretation of the events as a revolution. The idiosyncratic voices of the key figures of the revolution guaranteed the authenticity of the commemoration programs even for members of the younger generation among the audiences. Secondly, this study sheds light on the counter-cultural practices through which listeners tried to reconstruct the “body” of the “specters” of the suppressed cultural heritage and eliminate the asymmetry between the radio’s accessible voice and its non-accessible physical vehicle.

In the Pull of the West: Resistance, Concessions and Showing off from the Stalinist Practice in Hungarian culture after 1956

Author(s): Róbert Takács / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2016

The article explores the representation of Western culture in Hungarian journalism, print media, and public life in the months following the 1956 revolution, when the party lost its strict control over Hungarian society and only gradually was able to reassert its dominance in all spheres of life. Did representations of Western culture really constitute a kind of resistance, or should they perhaps be understood as concessions to prevalent public opinion? Or did they in fact harmonize in some way with the actual intentions of the people who crafted cultural policy? How did the content of newspapers begin to change in November 1956, clashing with the earlier “socialist cultural canon” by presenting formerly censured or anathematized Western cultural products and actors? How was the supply of movies adjusted to public opinion and then slowly readjusted to correspond to former norms? How did theater programs and plans for book publishing reflect the uncertainty of the period, resulting in the publication of works and performance of productions later criticized for bringing values to the stage that were contrary to the spirit of socialism? In this paper, I analyze a provisional period in which earlier norms of journalism, print media, and cultural life were partially suspended and the party made little or no real attempts to reassert Stalinist norms. Moreover, in this period the party did not deny or bring a stop to the de-Stalinization of cultural life, although it did repress open forms of cultural resistance to the Kádár-government.

Unspectacular Destalinization: The Case of Slovak Writers after 1956

Author(s): Juraj Marušiak / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2016

On the basis of archival sources, in this essay I examine the debates that took place among Slovak writers in the spring of 1956 and afterwards. I focus on the clashes between the Union of Slovak Writers and the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPCz) that began at the time, and also on the internal discussions among the pro-Communist intellectuals concerning the interpretation of de-Stalinization process. The CPCz leadership essentially brought an end to the “political discussion” which temporarily had been allowed during the “thaw” following the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Research shows that the relatively weak persecutions allowed the gradual development of reformist thinking and the pluralization of the literary life in Slovakia in the second half of the 1950s and, later, in the 1960s. The political clashes between writers and Communist Party took place in both parts of Czechoslovakia in different ways.

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

Author(s): Zsolt Győri / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

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.

Featured Review

Author(s): Andrea Pető / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2018

A szovjet tényező: Szovjet tanácsadók Magyarországon [The Soviet factor: Soviet advisors in Hungary]. By Magdolna Baráth. Budapest: Gondolat, 2017. 254 pp.

Was There a Socialist Type of Anthropocene During the Cold War? Science, Economy, and the History of the Poplar Species in Hungary, 1945–1975

Author(s): Robert Balogh / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2018

The paper argues that exploring the content and sites of transnational entanglements is a more adequate way to study the relationship between the Cold War and the Great Acceleration phase of Anthropocene than looking at the so-called East vs. West in isolation. By focusing on how scientific ideas, economic concepts, industrial projects, and data production emerged and intertwined in the case of activities related to poplar trees in Hungary, it becomes clear that anthropogenic landscape change during the state socialist period was embedded into the global circulation of ideas about forests, materials and ecology. The paper also points out that forestry is a relevant area of knowledge for studying the reasons behind anthropogenic change leading to the Anthropocene because of continuities it provides across World Wars and regions, and because the profession engages with biological knowledge production, business interests, political demands regarding long-term economic growth, and notions of ecological crisis in its everyday practice.

A forradalom anatómiája: a lokalitás megkerülhetetlensége

Author(s): Gergely Krisztián Horváth / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2018

Bank Barbara – Mészáros Gyula: Az 1956- os forradalom és szabadságharc Sümegen és a sümegi járásban. MNL VeML, Veszprém, 2017. (A Veszprém Megyei Levéltár kiadványai 40.) 168 oldal

Baranya szüntelen vonzásában

Author(s): Gábor Koloh / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2019

Benda Kálmán: Baranyai útinapló 1955. Szerkesztette: Keresztes Dániel. A bevezetőt és a jegyzeteket írta: Hamarkay Ede. Az előszót írta: Sebők Magda. utóhangot írta: Németh Balázs. Exodus Kiadó, Erdőkertes, 2018. 126 oldal

A családi ház a magyar lakáspolitikában a második világháború után: transzfer, átvétel, hibridizáció

Author(s): Márkus Keller / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2019

The essay analyses the role of the detached house as a type of accommodation in the housing policy of post-war Hungary in comparison to Western Germany. Since it is a controversial type of housing in the discourse of architecture, the detached house is a suitable example for showing the aims and guidelines of the state in solving the resurfacing housing problems after WWII. It also allows us to explore how the international (primarily West German) examples in solving the housing issue were adopted and applied to Hungary by the new architectural and intellectual elite emerging in the years following the war. The Hungarian architectural elite, which was an important participant of the European architectural and housing discourse before and immediately after the Second World War, realized how pressing the housing situation was, and tried to modernize housing in Hungary by following Western models. These modern approaches however came in conflict with the housing traditions of the countryside. This was the main reason why the Hungarian architectural elite refused to accept the detached house as a form of mass housing and considered the prevalent desire to live in a detached house to be psychosis, not a reasonable need. At the turn of the 1950s and 60s housing became an important area of the search – by a contemporary expression – for the modern socialist lifestyle. Witnessing the popularity of the detached house the participants of this discourse considered whether this type of accommodation was compatible with the new, socialist social organization. This discourse clearly shows that the aversion towards the detached house adopted from modern architectural trends has been amended by a new argument, which attempted to stop the spread of this form of housing not because of economic or aesthetic reasons, but because it was deemed unfit for the new society. Therefore, the original idea transformed and got modified during the transfer.

Fogyasztás a második világháború utáni Kelet-Közép-Európában: politikai meghatározók és transznacionális hatások

Author(s): Béla Tomka / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2019

The study explores the characteristics of the consumer culture of East-Central European communist societies – Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary – during the decades following WWII. It argues that the significant role of politics in the formation of consumption patterns and consumer culture was a major feature of the region’s consumption history during this time period, but consumption policy shouldn’t be considered the sole determinant of changes. Besides consumption policy, economic and social factors should also be taken into account. The effects of consumption policy were not as significant as several previous studies suggest. The widening gap between consumer aspirations and the actual possibilities was the most important factor shaping consumption policy. In general, the level of consumption advanced in the region during the decades after 1950, but consumer satisfaction didn’t increase with it, and even started to decline towards the end of the period. The rapid rise in consumer aspirations had several reasons, but we consider the transnational factors, namely the demonstration effects of Western countries to be the most significant. Economic policy reacted to this with changes in direction, but these measures were strongly constrained by the political and economic system. This constellation can help us understand how East-Central European consumer culture was connected to political changes, and how it contributed to the destabilization of the communist regimes.

A „porosz utas” fejlődés „lassú” változata. Szabó István opponensi véleménye 1955-ből Szántó Imre könyvéről

Author(s): Vilmos Erős / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2019

Egy torzóban maradt életmű darabjai

Author(s): Gyula Dávid / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 10/2020

Szoboszlay Aladár: Áldozatok és áldozottak. In memoriam Szoboszlay Aladár I. Közzéteszi Vekov Károly. Magyar PEN Club, Bp., 2018.

Hóman Bálint és népbírósági pere

Author(s): Dávid Ádám Ligeti / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 10/2020

Hóman Bálint és népbírósági pere. Szerk. Ujváry Gábor. Ráció Kiadó – Városi Levéltár és Kutatóintézet, Bp.–Székesfehérvár, 2019.

Amintiri radiofonice

Author(s): Dan Ciachir / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 11/2018

The author evokes memories of the period he spent as collaborator of the national radio station Radio Romania. It was the period of the communist regime’s detent, when Radio Romania had remarkable cultural programs. He mentions editor Iulius Ţundrea, writer Florian Potra and famous Italian novelist Giorgio Bassani, Professor Alexandru Balaci, as well as other writers, editors or actors meeting at Radio Romania studios. Although a time of repressions and restrictions, the years 1960-1985 meant for Radio Romania a high quality cultural activity.

Tablouri de epocă (VIII)

Author(s): Dan Ciachir / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 08/2018

The author describes how, in the midst of the communist period, the Romanian commoners were undertaking leisure activities on the seaside, especially in the hotels and pubs of Mamaia resort. He also presents the fiddlers playing violin at the parties in the restaurants of Bucharest. The author offers glimpses into daily life, suffocated by communist ideology and how to escape from it.

Tablouri de epocă (VII)

Author(s): Dan Ciachir / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 07/2018

The article evokes the realities of the Communist period in Romania, a time of restrictions and prohibitions. The author recounts about the type of cars that were then used in Romania, first of Russian manufacturing, then, with the emergence of political thaw, of Western manufacturing. The buyers of these cars, very few in number, were doctors, artists, engineers, athletes medalists of the regime. The article also describes how Bucharest residents were spending their leisure time, by walking, traveling, touring.

Tablouri de epocă (VI)

Author(s): Dan Ciachir / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 06/2018

The author describes how political governance influenced artistic expression in Romania. Statues are the case study. Communist governance has ideologically influenced this kind of art. Statues located in public spaces are, in most cases, national and political symbols, thus the Soviet occupant began to be represented in plastic art since 1950 in more and more places in Bucharest and across the country. Instead of the statues of King Carol I or the political man Ion C. Bratianu, for example, emblematic statues for Communist ideology began to emerge: the monument of the Liberator Soviet soldier, Lenin, Stalin and others. Great Romanian artists have been forced to make artistic compromises. In the mid-1950s, the most obscure era in the history of Romanian plastic art came to an end, a time saturated with ridiculous works executed according to the canons of Soviet socialist realism. The only consecrated painter who did not make any concessions until his death (1957) was Theodor Pallady who even expressed in public his contempt for the ineptitudes of socialist realism.