László Kontler
The Need for Pride*
Foundation Myths and the Reflection of History in Modern Hungary
Myths of origin and myths concerning other events and processes instrumental in forging the national community are of paramount importance in forming national consciousness and identity. What follows is a series of reflections on some aspects on the state of collective historical memory in Hungary in the past two centuries as it is expressed in the attitudes towards the foundation of the medieval kingdom by Stephen I in 1000 and to the Revolution of 1848. The views advanced will reflect the motivations that led me to publish a book on the history of Hungary,1 to write a short "history without tears", as a Canadian friend has put it. I shall argue that the currently widespread infatuation with the former (1000) and the relative indifference towards the latter (1848) event can be explained in the light of the tendency in Hungary to view national history in pessimistic and pathos-ridden terms, and that all of this is highly relevant to the sense of realism and responsibility in Hungarian historical conscious-ness. It must be added that these reflections are those of a historian whose work (the above-mentioned book notwithstanding) has primarily been on topics from the intellectual history of the Scottish, English and German Enlightenment. As I cannot suppress and do not intend to conceal this aspect of my professional identity, it may not be inappropriate for me to begin by quoting Tom Nairn's opening address at a conference inaugurating the new Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver in spring 2000.
Speaking on "Culture, Community and Nation: Scotland at Home and Abroad", Nairn argued that frustration at the loss of independent political power through the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Union not only bred a certain lack of responsibility and parochialism among Scots, but also made them "world-class experts in nostalgia", cultivating the image of a nation firmly rooted in the glorious past. Hinting at the period of transition at hand (as a result of devolution), Nairn was modestly optimistic as to the future. Nevertheless he emphasised that the past, and in the case of Scottish emigrants the present, too, has been marked by an image of Scottish national history as one of doom and gloom, a sense of glorious struggle in which David has been perpetually losing to Goliath.2
However far-flung it may seem to recall Nairn's claims here, they do have a specific relevance to my theme. A feeling of déja vu immediately struck me upon reading a report on his lecture. The Hungarian is well known, in the first place to himself, as someone apt to contemplate his past as a matter of extreme, almost unbearable gravity, his nation known as one robbed of its erstwhile greatness by a combination of vicious contingencies, some of which can be identified as personages in the great drama of history, in which Hungarians have been all too often rendered helpless outsiders, a small nation struggling and surviving with the greatest difficulty against the odds. Would, then, Hungary, from the eastern periphery of the Occident, join hands with Scotland on the North-West? Even more than that, I have had the occasion to observe Scots giving up their alleged reluctance to take it easy when it comes to sensitive points of their history. Last spring, I witnessed a staging of the ancient martial arts of the clans at Stirling Castle. About a dozen valiant Highlanders appeared on the lawn of the courtyard-heavy swords in hand, thick beards and colourful kilts blowing in the wind. "Anyone from England here?", the most robust of them addressed the audience in a formidable voice. No sooner than some cautious "yeas" were uttered, the cohort, swords swinging, burst out in their direction with a mighty hooray. (All the English survived the charge.) Could the same thing happen, I asked myself, if the scene were an old fortress in Transdanubia (not too many of these are still extant: the Habsburgs had most of them blown up after suppressing the War of Independence led by Prince Ferenc Rákóczi in the early 18th century), if Highlanders were replaced by Hungarians dressed as the "outlaws" led by Imre Thököly or Rákóczi's kuruc soldiers, and the English with a bunch of tourists from Austria? Hardly, I'm afraid. National history is a matter of pathos; irony of this kind is considered disgraceful.
The view of the national past that has been prevalent and is still all too common in Hungary is perhaps best encapsulated in the National Anthem itself. Originally a poem written by Ferenc Kölcsey (1823) at the beginning of the period of national awakening, the music written by Ferenc Erkel at its height in 1844, by its reference to "ill fate that has torn for ages" the Hungarian nation which has "already suffered the doom of times past and future" (and therefore would deserve a "merry season" at last), it clearly reflected the attitudes I am referring to. Roughly a century later they underlie the words of Gyula Illyés, poet, novelist and national icon, from 1938: "Hungarians ... owe their existence to their audacious struggles. These struggles have been defensive from the beginning and became increasingly desperate as time went by. All hopeless. Surprisingly enough, they are at their most hopeless at the moment they are launched: the enemy is always at least twenty times stronger, and sober minds would avoid such a venture. The nation, famous for its calm and objective way of thinking, is aware that its venture can only end in failure, but still, time and again it attacks Goliath. Our forebodings always prove right, but we never learn our lesson. Our history does not teach us logic. It teaches us, and this is comforting and lofty, that things such as courage, audacity and insistence on ideas also have value in the life of nations. It is only through miracles that people can live, by the example of the phoenix, thousands of years." This translation of Illyés's words (which sound more noble and somewhat less pathos-ridden in the original) appears as the cover blurb of The Illustrated History of Hungary,3 a generally excellent and beautifully produced volume, which nevertheless occasionally reflects the spirit which also imbues the lines of the venerated poet it cites. As a final illustration of my point, let me refer to a speech by József Hámori, Hungary's then Minister for the Cultural Heritage, made to a sizeable international audience at the 1999 Frankfurt Book Fair, when Hungary was the "focus country". Much of what the Minister had to say about Hungarian history, identity and their interrelatedness, fits comfortably in the stereotypical straitjacket of a small nation suffering under the blows of adversity but, even in such circumstances, making laudable contributions to European civilization.
After this perhaps overlong introduction, let me explain why I feel this reflection of Hungarian history is inadequate. All stereotypes contain a grain, or even much more than a grain, of reality. Adversity there was, and a lot of it, and the contributions, too, have been remarkable. But when this is distilled into the perspective outlined above, it runs the risk of concealing what remains truly meaningful of the nation's heritage at the threshold of the twenty-first century, or at least of establishing false priorities, and of preventing a responsible and realistic coming-to-terms with the national past. As Hungary has arguably subsisted in many periods under serious constraints, it is all too easy and comforting to persuade ourselves that whatever glory there was, is our own achievement, and whatever is unpleasant to remember, has been imposed on us. I should like to illustrate this point by describing changing attitudes to two watersheds in Hungarian history and by explaining how they relate to this kind of reflection of national history. These two junctures are the foundation of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary by (Saint) Stephen I in the year 1000 and the 1848 Revolution, which could be considered as a symbolic date for the foundation of "modern" Hungary. But before I do this, I ought to create a historical context and attempt to sketch what is relevant of history of a thousand years to my argument.
Hungarians or Magyars are one, and the most populous, of a few peoples of Finno-Ugrian derivation in Europe, and the fact that they have been wedged among Indo-European groups has contributed to their sense of isolation and, sometimes, desperation ever since the national awakening of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries put the issue of ethnicity on the agenda. After long migrations from the Asian side of the Ural mountains, their nomadic ancestors conquered their present domicile in the Carpathian Basin in 896-over four centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the first "barbarian kingdoms", and nearly one century after Charlemagne reconstituted the Western Empire. This relatively late arrival only further stimulated the predilection, general in medieval Europe, to create illustrious, if contradictory, pedigrees-on the one hand as the true (Christian) civilizers of the region, and on the other as the descendants of the Huns, whose Emperor Attila in the fifth century was the first ruler who united both halves of the Carpathian Basin under a common sway. To be sure, during the first decades of their presence at the fringe of the Occident the still pagan Hungarians harassed their Christian neighbours with a ferocity that rivalled that of the Huns. However, after the first setbacks to raids of plunder, their princes keenly stimulated the transition already in progress towards a more settled life, a process that culminated in the baptism and coronation of King Stephen. The new monarch broke the resistance of pagan chieftains, territorial organization replaced that based on blood relationship and kinship, and Hungary became integrated in the community of Christian nations. Defying the hegemoniac endeavours of German and Byzantine Emperors, and in spite of recurrent periods of domestic instability (whose causes were similar to those in the feudal societies of the West), Hungary became a sort of regional power, annexing some and acquiring overlordship over other of its neighbours' territories. It survived, and relatively soon recovered from the disastrous Mongol invasion of 1241. The dynasty of Árpád, the prince who had once led the Hungarians across the Carpathians, died out in 1301. Nevertheless, Hungary not only flourished under the Angevin kings of the fourteenth century, but reached the zenith of domestic strength and international reputation in the second half of the fifteenth under King Matthias, the patron of a lavish Renaissance court, the first north of the Alps.
Despite the ups and downs, this probably sounds like a success story, and to a certain extent it was one. The old Hungarians were the last nomads who created a viable western-type feudal monarchy, together with the social structures underlying it, on the eastern fringes of the civilization marked by Latin Christianity. The several centuries' gap, however, could not be completely bridged. Some of these structures lacked the vigour which their western counterparts possessed to an increasing degree; urbanization and commerce, in particular, lagged behind in Hungary, which bode ill at the beginning of the period when these were to become the vehicles of progress in the West. This circumstance would have occasioned a relative decline, even without the intervention of two external factors at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One of these was the age of discoveries and the resulting shift in trade routes, which consolidated the role of western Europe as the fulcrum of commerce and manufacture and, by implication, that of its eastern periphery, including Hungary, as the supplier of raw materials and agrarian products. As the noble landlords were best positioned to take advantage of this situation, the power of the nobility vis-a-vis the commoners as well as the royal administration grew, exerting in the long run an ossifying effect on Hungary's social structure. Second, in the wake of the collapse of royal authority after Matthias' death, there was no longer a power in the country strong enough to resist the advance of the Ottoman Turks, whose presence in the Balkans had been a menace to Hungarian hegemony there since the late fourteenth century. In the Battle of Mohács in 1526, the King of Hungary, as well as the Kingdom of Hungary as it had been known for five centuries, perished. In the struggles and rivalries that took place in the following three decades the country was trisected. The central, most fertile, areas were occupied by the Turks. Of the two rival factions of the nobility, one invited to the throne Ferdinand of Habsburg (honouring an earlier marriage treaty and in the hope that as an offspring of an international dynasty he could secure aid against the Ottomans), and the other elected one of their own rank, John Szapolyai. Habsburgs continued to rule what remained of the Kingdom of Hungary in the northwest, while out of the territories initially controlled by King John in the east a new entity, the Principality of Transylvania, emerged. The split was also accentuated in cultural and religious terms: Protestantism spread rapidly in all the territories of Hungary (including the Ottoman province), but whereas in Transylvania Calvinism became established and several other denominations enjoyed varying degrees of tolerance, the Habsburgs in their lands pursued a vigorous Counter-Reformation from the late sixteenth century on. Conversion to Islam, unlike in the Balkans, was virtually non-existent in Hungary, while the Turks did everything in their power to exploit the rivalry between the Christian denominations.
The disastrous effect of over one and half centuries of Ottoman rule and the internecine warfare that went with it (especially the "Fifteen Years' War" around the year 1600) on the country's material culture and demography conditions would be difficult to exaggerate. The entire structure of settlements and production was thrown in disarray; at the end of the seventeenth century Hungary's population barely exceeded what it had been under Matthias two centuries earlier-including now the "Greek" (Balkan Slav) settlers who started to penetrate Hungary even before the expulsion of the Turks, and their influx, as well as that of other (Slovak, Romanian, German) settlers continued in the decades that followed to transform the ethnic balance of Hungarians and non-Hungarians in the country from 3:1 around 1500 to 2:3 around 1800.
Exhausted and divided as the country was, the expulsion of the Turks-the liberation of the capital Buda in 1686 and the campaign that ended in 1699-was achieved by an international effort coordinated by the Habsburgs, who thereafter treated Hungary and Transylvania as a conquered province annexed to their hereditary lands. Almost immediately this resulted in ferment, and a powerful rebellion led by Prince Ferenc Rákóczi defied superior Habsburg forces, even proclaiming the independence of Hungary, from 1703 to 1711. Although the revolt failed, the new masters took heed of this warning and the subsequent settlement was a compromise. Hungary's territorial integrity was maintained (though Transylvania was kept as a separate unit) and was promised to be governed according to its customs and statutes ("constitution", as we would say today). With the monopoly they possessed over the country's political institutions, the main beneficiary was again the staunch Hungarian nobility, which played an ambiguous role throughout most of modern history. Jealous of their privileges, they ardently defended the country's political integrity, which they conceived to be identical with those privileges. However, whereas political integrity might be instrumental in advancing socio-economic progress, but is in itself in most cases an insufficient condition of it, noble privileges, at least from the eighteenth century onwards, were increasingly antithetical to the very idea of progress.
Nevertheless, under the circumstances of the post-1711 settlement the whole of the eighteenth century became a period of slow but steady recovery, in which some important steps towards economic, social and cultural improvement were taken. This culminated in the "enlightened" absolutism of Maria Theresa and Joseph II in the second half of the eighteenth century, when these rulers-the former rather cautiously, the latter with a near-revolutionary zeal-themselves undertook to reform the old regime, mainly with a view to enhancing their governments' administrative efficiency, revenues and military potential. As these initiatives inevitably interfered with the privileges of the nobility (their exemption from taxes, their authority over the peasantry, their political influence through county self-governance and the national diet) as well as with those of the Catholic Church, the attempt culminated in turmoil. In the atmosphere created shortly later by the French Revolution, Joseph's successors returned to absolutism without Enlightenment.
However, Josephism did have an impact in the long run. His reform programme created a well-educated intellectual élite with a broad European horizon (mainly recruited from commoners and the numerous gentry), while the same élite, repulsed by Joseph's excessive drive to homogenize the different provinces and cultures of his empire, started to display an increasing consciousness of their Hungarian identity. The tradition thus created lay somewhat dormant in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era, but thereafter the incipient national awakening culminated in the Hungarian Reform Age, in which national goals (initially confined to language reform and the cultivation of the cultural heritage) and the tasks of social reform were propagated in tandem. In the first phase, marked by the iconic figure of Count István Széchenyi, the accent was on distinctly non-political projects (the improvement of the infrastructure, credit facilities, industries, cultural institutions), but the "Reform Diets" from the second half of the 1830s on, dominated by the charismatic Lajos Kossuth, proceeded with increasing vigour towards the ultimate claim expressed in 1848: the rule of law based on civil liberties, representative and responsible government, no closer relationship with Austria than a personal union for a Hungary in which peasants were no longer serfs and noblemen were taxed.
This liberal programme was carried through by the bloodless revolution of 15 March 1848. However, as soon as the Habsburg court recovered its strength, it was less willing to honour the commitment to the new constitution promulgated under pressure; it was also able to exploit the hostilities that arose between Hungarians and the national minorities. In the previous half-century the latter had also been undergoing their own national awakening, and from then on a pattern continued to repeat itself in the relationship of Hungarian liberals and the leaders of the national minorities until the dissolution of historic Hungary. The former insisted on the idea of the "unitary Hungarian political nation" in which each person was individually entitled to the same civil liberties and therefore there was no need to concede specific rights of political autonomy to the minorities. In principle they were willing to grant a broad range of cultural autonomy, which, when codified after the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise, was rather half-heartedly effected in practice, and was anyway less than satisfactory for the national minorities (who together made up the majority of the population). From the autumn of 1848, the revolution became a war of independence in which the new Hungarian army and civil authorities were simultaneously trying to defy Habsburg forces, to set the vast social and political reforms implied by the new constitution into motion and to quell ethnic strife. They did remarkably well until the Russian Tsar came to the rescue of his Austrian fellow-emperor in the summer of 1849.
The shocking brutality of the retaliation brought Hungary into the headlines of the Western press, but neither the sympathy thus generated, nor the efforts of the emigrés, led by Kossuth, to obtain international assistance to revive the struggle, were to any avail. Passive resistance, that is, non-cooperation with the authorities of a system labelled as neo-absolutism, was the attitude of most of the Hungarian political élite, but it could not be sustained long. On the other hand, increasing international isolation inclined Austrian leaders to a compromise with the Hungarians from the early 1860s on. This culminated in the settlement or Compromise of 1867, which, according to many contemporaries as well as later commentators, was "the realistic 1848". Both halves of the Dual Monarchy, as Austria-Hungary came to be called, were independent in their internal affairs, while functioning as a unit externally. To the Austro-Germans and the Hungarians, the measure brought parliamentary government with civil liberties, albeit with extensive prerogatives for the ruler Francis Joseph, and with virtually no further "opening" of the system for the next half-century. The political demands of the national minorities were left unmet and the very elaborate law on their cultural rights was evaded by the authorities, but they, too, benefited from the unprecedented economic and infrastructural achievements of the "happy times of peace". The gap between Hungary and Western Europe in these terms seemed to be narrowing again; the country's growing political weight within the Austro-Hungarian Empire to some extent justified the rekindling ideas of Hungarian grandeur and gloire; and it boasted an exciting urban modernist culture.
Nevertheless, the obstinate conservatism of her political system, her failure to embrace social reform and especially the rampant minorities problem found Hungary ill-prepared to cope with the strains of global war, and at the end of the First World War, which Austria-Hungary and her allies lost, the walls came tumbling down. In the days of military collapse in autumn 1918, a revolution threw into government those democrats who had for long been urging reforms and greater generosity towards the national minorities. However, the latter, backed by the Entente armies, proclaimed secession instead, and the pacifist government of Mihály Károlyi was unable, and unwilling, to use force. In a moment of profound economic deprivation and national frustration, the Communists took their chance, and in concurrence with rapid Sovietization and a Red Terror, they held out against Slovak, Romanian and Entente forces from March to August 1919. After a quick succession of two revolutionary regimes, and while the country was occupied by foreign forces, the extreme right Hungarian "National Army" hunted, with great success, for actual and suspected Bolsheviks. "Order" was restored by the time the Paris Peace Conference presented Hungary with the Trianon Treaty in the summer of 1920.
Trianon reduced Hungary to one-third of her former size, and one-third of ethnic Hungarians found themselves citizens of neighbouring states, in an evidently hostile environment. In terms of economic resources, the blow was even more serious. The peace multiplied the destructive effect of the war. As a result, no serious contender for votes in inter-war Hungary could have abandoned the claim for a full revision of the Trianon Treaty (however unjustified and unrealistic such a claim was)-albeit the government parties during the the regency of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the emblematic figure of the period, were revisionists out of conviction, not mere political expediency. After the turmoil of 1919 was over, when right radicalism was given free rein, and some political and economic consolidation came about, the policies of the regime, like the regent himself, were largely conservative and traditionalist, with the old landed and capitalist élite returning to power. This state of affairs changed after the economic crisis of the early 1930s. Thereafter the extreme right gained ground, alternating in office with the traditional conservative right. Even more importantly and detrimentally, German economic penetration and political influence increased year by year, and the prospect that Hitler might assist Hungary in achieving her revisionist goals was too tempting for the Hungarian political élite to resist. In 1941, Hungary became involved in the Second World War on Germany's side. Deemed an unreliable satellite, it was occupied by German forces in spring 1944; after an amateurish attempt by Horthy to leave the German camp in October that year, a puppet government of Hungarian Nazis was created to implement a reign of terror for the last few months of the war. By the time the Red Army expelled the Germans in April 1945, the country was in ruins. The death toll hit the one-million mark, half of them being the victims of the Hungarian Holocaust.
In the shadow of Soviet arms, in a socio-political atmosphere and material conditions that favoured an ideology promising "to turn the world around by tomorrow" (as a well known marching song had it), experiment with democracy could have started under better auspices. The great events of 1945-the land reform and the general elections-still reflected the spirit of democracy, pluralism and progress; thereafter, the Hungarian Communists ruthlessly exploited the combination of the broad appeal of a utopian dream and the political offices they obtained on the insistence of the Soviet occupying authorities for pressure, blackmail and manipulation. By 1947 their main rivals were either in exile or in prison, their parties demoralized or subsumed into the Communist party; by 1949 the whole of Hungarian industry was nationalized, the collectivization of agriculture was under way, and the country had a new Stalinist constitution. Hungary became a member of Comecon and the Warsaw Pact. Except for Stalin's, Mátyás Rákosi's became the worst personality cult in the whole Soviet bloc; until 1953, Hungary's form of government was terrorist dictatorship. As the public scene all around the Eastern bloc responded to changes in Moscow like a seismograph, upon Stalin's death in 1953 Rákosi was replaced by the reform-minded Communist Imre Nagy, but two years later the clock was turned back in Moscow and, therefore, in Budapest again. However, once the "new course" had let the genie out of the bottle, it could not be squeezed back, and in October 1956 Hungary was the scene of the first (and only?) anti-totalitarian revolution in history. Nagy was brought back to office, the multi-party system rapidly revived and the country's neutrality was announced. After twelve days the dream was over: the Russian military intervened, the expected Western help never materialized, and Moscow's new client, János Kádár, organized a ruthless revenge. But there was no return to Stalinism. Even the post-1956 terror was different from that of Rákosi's: it was not aimed against whole social groups arbitrarily selected in the name of some political strategy, but against specific individuals thought to be "dangerous". Politically the essence of Kádárism was the isolation of this active minority from the passive majority, and the satisfaction of a gradually broadening range of needs for the latter. Once the thaw between a shocked nation and its master began, Kádár openly proclaimed his slogan of "He who is not against us is with us". By the end of the 1960s, Hungary became the home of the first (in fact, unique) experiment of grafting the elements of the market on a nationalized economy, a country in which there was no liberty but the citizen could enjoy many small liberties in cultural and economic life as well as remarkably higher living standards than elsewhere in the Soviet bloc-provided that he/she did not meddle with certain taboos, such as Hungary's membership in the Warsaw Pact, the one-party system, or, of course, the qualification of 1956 as "counter-revolution".
By the 1980s, however, not even the excessive loans that the Hungarian government contracted could counter the effects of the economic crisis on the system; as a result of this, the foundations of the unspoken compromise between the regime and the people became undermined and the fact that the Soviet Union had lost the Cold War removed the international obstacles of political transformation in Hungary. This took place amidst much political debate, but without violence, between 1988 and 1990; the Communists, while apparently retaining many important positions in the economy, even dismantled their old party and eventually opened the way to free elections. Since 1990 the multi-party system has functioned quite satisfactorily. Despite the difficulties of the transition to a market economy-which is by now complete, but at the cost of a GDP which is only just now climbing back to its 1989 value and at the cost of processes which cause half the population to feel themselves "losers" by the changes-and despite often acrimonious debate, each government fulfilled its four year term and at each election the previous opposition took over quite smoothly; political extremism has remained marginal (though recently it is back in parliament). Hungary, together with the Czech Republic and Poland, is a prime candidate for accession to the EU in the next round of expansion of the Union, and since March 1999 Hungary has been a member of NATO.
I tried to make this account sound as dispassionate as can be reconciled with being a decent patriot. But I must say that at the end of it there seems to be a lot in favour of the view of Hungarian history I am criticizing. The vicissitudes I have related to a great extent explain the gloom that surrounds the common perception of this history, and to some extent excuses the notion of a heroic, morally superior but small nation perpetually victimized through the schemes and the power of others (whether Ottomans, Austrians, Entente governments and their Slovak, Serb, Romanian protégés, Germans or Soviets). Explains and excuses; but not warrants. For all three ingredients that are essential for a healthy reflection of history, and consequently a healthy national consciousness, are missing from it. These are a sense of proportion, realism and responsibility. First, this view of Hungarian history is parochial and introverted, it lacks a sense of proportion in that it fails to ask whether Hungarian history is truly unique on account of the glory and the suffering, and whether it is in these that the uniqueness of Hungarian history truly consists. The horizon of the reflection of history must be broadened: everyone is unique, but it is in the uniqueness of others that one might properly recognize one's own. Second, if a community is to take and keep its future fate in its own hands, in its collective memory it must be able very clearly to delineate its own share in its past fortunes and misfortunes. If it fails in this exercise, or even tries to escape this duty, it is very likely to make false value judgements about the past, and therefore to select improperly those traditions that could be relevant for the future.
The "gloom and doom" and "escapist" attitudes to Hungarian history are already themselves part of that history, at least ever since the country's fortunes started their steady decline, from the sixteenth century onwards. As the first tribulations at the hands of the infidels were simultaneous with the rapid spread of the Reformation in Hungary, initially some comfort was taken in Protestant eschatology: Hungarians are God's chosen people whose steadfastness is put to a test by the uncommon plight, but if they show firmness in their belief, their Babylonian captivity, just as that of the Jews, will come to an end. Ideas of elect nationhood4 sustained themselves into the seventeenth century, when it seemed that (Protestant) Hungary was wedged between "two pagans", of which the Habsburg court, armed with the Counter-Reformation, seemed as formidable as the Ottomans. By the time the latter were expelled from the country, Hungarians had to realize that, whereas for nearly two centuries they had tended to think of themselves as "the bulwark of Christendom", on account of their conflict with the Habsburgs, who in the end coordinated the liberation campaign, many in Christian Europe viewed Hungary as an enemy of Christendom.5 To be sure, this view later lost force, only to be replaced by its variant according to which Hungary was "Eastern", in the sense the notion of Eastern Europe, emerging in the eighteenth century, had it: barren and backward, with a barbarous populace and a recalcitrant nobility.6
This view, to say the least, was not entirely out of touch with reality-given the circumstances it would have been surprising if it had been different. It could not have been but recognized by contemporaries, too-but with the result that the view of the Hungarian predicament based on the combination of ideas of glory, plight and what I have called escapism, started to emerge in full armour in this period. The nobility's staunch insistence on their privileges was conceived as ardour for the liberties of the nation. By contemporary standards this was not entirely bogus: the natio Hungarica was supposed to consist only of the nati, the "natives" of the houses with a pedigree, that is, the nobility whose interest was therefore etymologically the national interest. Also, by vigorously defending the estates-based "constitution", that is, by ensuring the continuous survival of deliberative assemblies and organs of self-government on the municipal as well as the national level, they maintained an important political tradition that could be depended on later. However, this was at a serious cost. Elsewhere in the Habsburg lands, the nobility, however grudgingly, abandoned its tax privileges under Maria Theresa, but the Hungarian nobility resisted all attempts at collecting its contribution to state revenues. By its insistence on the maintenance of the whole network of rural relations connected with these privileges, the nobility had a major share in perpetuating the country's backwardness; this, of course, the nobility perceived, but laid it at the door of Vienna which, supposedly, pursued colonial policies towards Hungary. The pattern was set: throughout most of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, Hungarian Diets attributed the dismal conditions of the country to political oppression and economic exploitation by Austria. This policy of grievances was not entirely unsound, but by its neglect of internal causes it certainly did not stimulate self-searching and critical thinking.
It would be grossly unfair not to add immediately that when the unsustainability of the old regime was first recognized, that recognition came from the sons of the enlightened nobility, both its aristocratic and gentry segments, and it also inaugurated the period in which a critical reflection of Hungary's condition and history are more readily observable than ever before or, I am afraid, since. The Age of Enlightenment came to a culmination in Hungary when the magic words were uttered: the primary cause of Hungary's backwardness is not her subordination to Vienna, but the feudal system, and the way to emerge from backwardness was not by the quest for erstwhile glory, but by improvement through the polishing of the human mind and the human environment, and the forging of a sense of community, a societas civilis where formerly there had been only an assemblage of groups of subjects possessing very diverse rights and privileges. Gergely Berzeviczy, perhaps the brightest of the gentlemanly political-economists who came to intellectual maturity under Joseph II's mantle, was the first who pointed out around 1800, the indigeneous roots of backwardness by the most up-to-date statistical methods; doing so inevitably also implied seriously taking stock of and passing judgment on an immense and complex web of customs, statutes, attitudes and interpersonal relationships passed down through many centuries.7 As regards the character of the protagonists of Hungarian history, the nobleman was found to be valiant and chivalrous, and to share the quality of honesty with his antagonist, the peasant. But they were also both found to be equally notorious for being unenterprising and diffident. Whence did these less attractive and, what is more, less respectable qualities arise? From legal arrangements made as long before as the mid-fourteenth century. The inalienability of noble land had once served the purposes of preventing the fragmentation of noble estates and of ensuring the survival of the line; however, under the conditions of modernity it made the nobleman an impossible partner for banks to which he could not offer a security on loans contracted, wrote Count István Széchenyi in a significantly entitled book, Credit, in 1830.8
If entailment was responsible for the lack of incentive for the nobility, statutes deriving from 1351, enacting the jurisdiction of the nobleman over his serfs and standardizing his duties, still in force at the time when Széchenyi was writing, were responsible for the legal disabilities and economic misery of the peasant, which sufficiently explained the same attitude on his part.
With these and other similarly acute insights, Széchenyi's book and initiatives brought about a shift in the whole discourse on Hungary's past and current predicament. The role of foreign agency in the growth of difficulties was not forgotten, but the overall picture became immensely more balanced; historical and public awareness improved in Hungary in the subsequent two decades more than in any comparable period, and may have been at their all time peak. Merely on account of this, the Age of Reform and its apotheosis, the revolution of 1848, would be worthy of our attention. But more than that, a realistic and responsible assessment of Hungary's heritage and condition also produced the powerful vision of a future Hungary erected on the foundation of the reconciliation of interests: a Hungary in which the elite was no longer segregated by legal privilege from the rest of the population, who were thus "lifted within the bulwarks of the constitution" (formerly strictly the property of the nobles); one in which the nation ceased to be divided through difference in legal status and became a "society" in the true sense of the word.9 In this sense it was a republican programme (not primarily in regard of the form of government, although in the heat of the War of Independence the deposition of the Habsburgs was also proclaimed), and a liberal programme, some of which has been rendered obsolete or insufficient during the century and a half since, but other elements of it remained unfulfilled until the changes of 1989-1990 in Hungary. Finally, it was the work of simply the most talented generation of daring and devoted leaders who combined intellectual sophistication with a broad vision and political activism. Besides Széchenyi and Kossuth, there was the jurist Ferenc Deák, the later architect of the 1867 Compromise with Austria, and József Eötvös, a writer and political theorist of (hitherto unfortunately little acknowledged) European stature-and there were many others.
However, they "committed" something that seems to have been unpardonable in the judgement of collective memory: they failed in 1848, and if the Compromise of 1867 was a "realistic" issue of 1848, especially having the post-1867 developments in mind, it was also a somewhat diluted one. The failure, together with its circumstances, made a lasting impact on the evaluation and, what is inseparable from it, the status of 1848 in the public mind.
First, a theory of foreign ascendancy, conspiracy and treachery emerged: the revolution failed because the military superiority of the Habsburg and Russian forces, this was further strengthened by the malicious schemes whereby Vienna instigated the national minorities against the Hungarian government, and the fact that the Hungarian Commander-in-Chief, Artúr Görgey, turned traitor. As to the latter, in spite of his serious differences with Kossuth, Görgey was a loyal soldier of the revolution, and surrendered in August 1849 in an impossible military situation.10 As to the national minorities, even without the overtures from Vienna (of which there were indeed plenty), they had already been explicitly unhappy for some time with the Hungarian liberals' idea of the "unitary political nation"-the illusion that once individual rights are accessible for them, the ethnic minorities, just as the peasants,11 would readily assimilate to the new Hungarian nation. But the sentiments of the poet of the revolution, Sándor Petőfi, who Magyarized his name from Petrovics, were not shared by everyone, and the revolutionary governments' inevitable deafness to the claims of the minorities until it was relatively late, would have resulted in extremely violent ethnic strife even without the interference of the Habsburg court. Somewhat similar is the case of the peasantry: their expectations in the troubled times were not fulfilled at a pace they hoped for, and they became increasingly passive. Nevertheless, the notion of external evil has not merely overshadowed, which could be understood, but effectively annulled the internal tension in the public assessment of 1848/49: generations of high school graduates, for instance, have hardly been aware that there was extremely serious inter-ethnic violence in Hungary in 1848/49.
Second, whatever was not carried over from 1848 in 1867 and was thus not "vindicated by history", might seem secondary in retrospect. Most key issues, as I have referred above, received a treatment in 1867 similar to that of nearly two decades before. What was sifted out was a part of the spirit. Revolutionary euphoria, as always, implied some radical excess, but in the case of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 much more did it reveal the aspiration (if not the reality) of social solidarity, which was impossible to recreate after the experience of suppression, retaliation, neo-absolutism and then negotiating a settlement in a completely unrevolutionary situation.
Third, the status of 1848 was rendered uncertain by its failure: March 15 could never become July 14. How is it possible to enshrine, in a nation which is obsessed by considering itself a victim of history, the memory of a failure? 1848 became an object of veneration and lamentation at the same time, but did not give reason for celebration, and thus it has become, even despite the best intentions, undervalued, and has fallen prey to the nation's general bent of contemplating its history in terms of patriotic pathos.
During the dualist period, 1848 was remembered, and March 15 celebrated, as a symbol of national independence and as an occasion to voice petty grievances vis-a-vis Vienna, but not to express the idea of social solidarity, which was an at least as important a component in the heritage of the Reform Age and 1848-imperfectly expressed and even less perfectly executed at that time, nevertheless (or rather all the more) worthy of being maintained, rejuvenated and further developed. Needless to say, 1848 and all it stood for could not have been a cherished memory in the mood that emerged after the collapse of historic Hungary in war and peace between 1914 and 1920. The circumstances were anything but in favour, first, of historical realism and responsibility and, second, of progressive traditions. As the process of disintegration, overwhelmingy stemming from indigeneous causes, was crowned by a grossly unfair application of the Wilsonian principles by the victors at the Paris Peace Conference, a sober assess-ment of this disintegration was ruled out. Whatever self-searching there took place, put the blame on liberals and democrats, who had sapped the vigour of old Hungary, which thus fell prey to the nationalist aspirations of neighbours and Bolshevik internationalists;12 otherwise all responsibility was imputed to the vicious peace treaty. It goes without saying that in this way the peace treaty also contributed to the survival of precisely those semi-feudal structures whose demolition should have been the main sense of the whole transition process. Significantly, in the interwar period, 1848 as a symbol was only suitable for being placed on the banner of a (rather ephemeral) opposition movevement, the "March Front", launched in 1937 to urge precautions against the spread of Nazism, and to campaign for democracy, land reform and cooperation with neighbouring peoples.
To be sure, 1848 did not fare much better under Communism. This time, rather than ignored or repudiated, it was at first expropriated and adjusted to the ideological needs of the regime, embedded in a fictitious tradition of lower- class revolutionary radicalism whose apogee-so it was argued-was the current Communist revolution. Curiously enough, the traitor-motif survived, and was also accommodated to the view that 1848 was a class war, rather than a struggle for independence: not even Kossuth, the par excellence revolutionary hero, was vigilant enough to prevent the class enemy from infiltrating into the ranks of revolutionaries.13 This was a warning signal to the heirs of the revolutionary tradition, in which 1848 represented the first, uncertain steps, the 1919 Soviet Republic an intermediate stage, and 1945 the true breakthrough. This supposed continuity was cemented in the 1960s into the wonderful idea of the "revolutionary youth days": a sequence of collective commemorations under the aegis of the Communist Youth League, on March 15, March 19 (the anniversary of the 1919 Bolshevik takeover) and April 4 ("Liberation Day", i.e., the expulsion of the Germans by the Soviets in 1945). Then, in my own adolescent years, the mid-1970s, the need was felt to send out to high schools each spring serious looking speakers from the municipal party cells for discussion with the "revolutionary youth", and to lay special emphasis on the fact that of these dates April 4 embodied the highest value and the greatest national holiday-whatever anybody might agitate to the contrary. This measure was a response to the phenomenon that by then 1848 had again started to assume the character of an opposition symbol and March 15 that of an opposition holiday. The first "alternative commemoration" in 1973, emphasizing the national and liberal-democratic character of 1848, resulted in beatings and detentions; there was a hiatus of several years, but it was then revived by the budding opposition to the Kádár regime in the 1980s. These peaceful and by no means massive protest rallies regularly ended in the same fashion as the one in 1973, until that commemorative day in 1989 became perhaps the most visible sign of the changing tide. One of the very few mass actions during the transition in Hungary, a march of about 100,000 people in Budapest clearly sent the message that many of the one and a half century-old endeavours were still unfulfilled and it was time to put them on the agenda.
One year later, in March 1990, free elections took place in Hungary. It seemed that the moment of truth for 1848 may have come, but this did not happen. In answer to the question of what the greatest Hungarian national holiday is-and, by implication, the most decisive item in the national heritage, the standard by which they wish to be measured-well over fifty per cent of Hungarians today would mention August 20 (March 15 coming second with twenty-odd per cent, somewhat ahead of October 23, the anniversary of the October 1956 Revolution and, still, April 4, the day Soviet troops expelled the last German soldier from the country). I have not yet mentioned August 20: it is the day on which, in 1083, the mortal remains of Stephen I were removed from the stone casket in which they had rested for forty-five years, and placed into a silver chest as part of the canonization ceremony of the king who founded the Hungarian state and converted its people to Christianity.14 August 20 is the Feast of Saint Stephen, and by implication the foundation of the Kingdom of Hungary (even though Stephen's coronation took place either on Christmas Day in 1000 or on New Year's Day in 1001). Incidentally, it is also the "feast of the new bread", the first baked from the current year's harvest. I might also add that as Hungary's Communist constitution was issued on the same day in 1949, by way of an ironic transubstantiation the saint king's day was for decades celebrated as "Constitution Day".
The foundation of the medieval monarchy (usually referred to nowadays as the foundation of the state-quite imprecisely, given the fact that this term did not obtain its present meaning before early modern times) was obviously a landmark in the history of Hungary. But as the same event was arguably no less important in the history of any other nation, the quite unparalleled status of it in collective memory and public remembrance, I think, does require an explanation. After all, in spite of François Furet and other revisionist historians, the French celebrate July 14 and not Hugh Capet or Charlemagne or Clovis.
For the United States, the fact that July 4 stands for sovereignty and democracy saves the dilemma, while the English, reputed for cherishing their traditions, commemorate neither Alfred the Great, nor William the Conqueror, nor the Magna Carta with an ardour equal to the Hungarian infatuation with August 20, Saint Stephen and the relics associated with him, and especially the Holy Crown.
One of the clues, perhaps the one most often given in public discourse, is that they symbolize the Hungarian capacity for survival and that they are testimony to the valiance and persistence with which the nation has always maintained "statehood" (another anachronism) in one form or another-a merit already praised, oddly enough (but from personal experience), by the Emperor and King, Francis Joseph, over a hundred years ago, at the millennary celebrations of the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin. But if the horizon of our investigation is raised above the Carpathians, it must be immediately realized that from the north through the west to the south-west Stephen's coronation was witnessed by peoples-Poles, Czechs, Austrians, Croats-who were also establishing, or had already established, themselves in the area and have survived an equal number of equally troubled centuries (not to speak of others further south or north, such as the Bulgars or the Baltic peoples).
Next, the creation of sovereignty (yet another notion non-existent at the time) for its own sake is made out to be a reason to celebrate. There are two problems with this. First, the dimensions-not the fact-of celebrating the creation of monarchical sovereignty a thousand years ago are out of proportion with the reality of a republican constitution today. We are told that the Holy Crown of Saint Stephen (an assemblage of two crowns from the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries, never worn by our first king) has symbolized through the centuries not kingly rule, but Hungarian "statehood", but this is again problematic today. True, when in the early and mid-fifteenth centuries, unruly baronial factions held kings under control, they claimed to govern the country "under the seal of the Holy Crown", representing the community of the kingdom. But this was a community of the privileged: just as the natio Hungarica, mentioned above, the theory of the Holy Crown was based on exclusiveness, and did not regard commoners as members of the political body. In the early nineteenth century the veneration of the crown came into fashion anew (on the initiative of the Habsburgs) as an alternative to revolutionary cults modelled after the French. Though it was Ferenc Deák who first referred to the crown as the symbol of the lands of Saint Stephen in 1861, this usage only became widespread in the interwar years when political semantics invested it with a very specific meaning-a slogan for the revision of Trianon. If it is added that the veneration of relics (which in this case includes Stephen's miraculously preserved Holy Right Hand) is not acceptable to Protestants, another dimension of exclusiveness in the cult of the Holy Crown becomes discernible. However, no effort has yet been made to adjust the tradition of the Holy Crown to the requirements of a society based-I hope-on comprehension and tolerance. The mere assertion that it represents Hungarian "statehood" is begging the question; nor is the underlining of this by the ceremonial transfer of the Holy Crown from the Hungarian National Museum to the House of Parliament, which occurred on New Year's Day in 2000 (the 999th anniversary of Stephen's coronation) fully convincing. So, supposing that people are at least to some extent aware of these stakes, whatever they say, "sovereignty" in itself cannot be the reason why they are attached to August 20.
All the more so as it is not very difficult to provide an iconoclastic (not to say sacrilegious) reading of "Stephen's creation". The hagiographical story that Stephen refused a crown offered by Emperor Otto III in order to avoid taking an oath of fealty and accepted the insignia sent by Pope Sylvester II instead has long been proved apocryphal (although this does not prevent it from being cited again and again). The years around 1000 were a rare moment in history when the ambition of local rulers in Central Europe coincided with the agreement of Pope and Emperor on a "project" of expanding the respublica Christiana eastwards, and the coronation of these new rulers took place with the endorsement of both-it could hardly have been otherwise. Stephen's "creation" took place, with the very active involvement of Roman priests and bishops and German knights, at an enormous cost in terms of ancient customs, traditions and human lives. Sovereignty? Before, by the latter half of his reign, he did rid himself of foreign tutelage, Stephen had initially established his authority against rebellious Hungarian chieftains by recourse to a great amount of foreign support. It may well be that another often quoted, and grossly misinterpreted, statement of his refers to this experience. In his admonitions to his son Prince Emeric, Stephen warns that mono-lingual regni are weak and therefore immigrants should be welcome. This has been taken as an early token of the Hungarians' well known hospitality and general tolerance-another part of Stephen's legend. I do not believe that the Hungarian national character is any less or more hospitable than any other. Alas, regnum in this particular case should be taken to mean not kingdom or country, but the king's retinue-in which foreign knights indeed rendered Stephen great service.
What we have here as "Stephen's creation", then, is a magisterial exercise of reason of state, an uncommon act of great statesmanship. (It is noteworthy that when his canonization was pushed through by Ladislas I, it was not even pretended that Stephen's piety accounted for it: his "saintliness" consisted in converting his people, and there was no concealement of the serious violence that had been involved in this process.) This was so successfully performed that it lay the foundations of some sort of power standing for Hungary during the first five centuries of its existence-something which it then lost, then it is thought to have regained at the end of the nineteenth century, and finally lost again, this time for ever. In 1920, Hungary, from being a medium ranking state of over 20 million-in dreams fuelled by the experience of peace, progress and prosperity at the fin-de-siecle, even 30 million-became a small nation of 7.5 million, with limitations on its sovereign status, but with a historical consciousness still corresponding to the earlier situation. This left an indelible mark on, among many other things, precisely that consciousness. If the recovery of the lands of Saint Stephen is only urged by an insignificant minority in Hungary today, the successful acts of power performed by him, so conspicuously missing from our modern history, are fascinating for a far greater number (many of whom are also undoubtedly confirmed in their sentiments by the religious revival that has taken place since the fall of Communism: after all, the cult of Stephen is to a considerable extent a pious religious cult). In the contest I have implied between the two "foundation myths" of Hungarian history, associated with March 15 and August 20, respectively, reconciliation of interests, solidarity and failure is set against division, statesmanship and power. Hungarian history seems to have shown that you cannot have all of the positive elements of these two combinations together, and the same history inclines more people to prefer the latter to the former. To formulate it in the language of aesthetic theory from my own field, the eighteenth century: 1848 is an unfulfilled love affair with charming beauty, while 1000 is the intoxicated admiration of the awesome sublime.
I deliberately avoid formulating the opposition in terms of a liberal-democratic-republican tradition versus monarchism and authority, because not in the least do I want to imply that Hungarians generally prefer authoritarianism to democracy. What I am suggesting is that there is a discrepancy between the general acceptance of modernity and the transition to democracy on the one hand, and the selection of meaningful traditions on the other. 1848 is still well-respected, but overshadowed in public consciousness, supported by official pageantry, by something that is more remote, less readily adjustable to the properties of a modern political community at the threshold of the twenty-first century; while undoubtedly epochal and, what is even more important from our present point of view, not marked by failure, it can even be represented as a triumph over designs against Hungarian sovereignty (a notion obviously non-existent at the time).
I have claimed that the predominant view of national history in Hungary has for a long time been pathos-ridden, and somewhat lacking in a sense of realism and responsibility; I tried to demonstrate the interplay of these phenomena on the examples of the "foundation myths" associated with the birth of Hungary as an entity and Hungary as a modern nation; I tried to relate this to the discriminating attitudes among the public towards these two myths; and I also attempted to explain each of these themes. While I am not suggesting that this discrimination should in the future be different (though I think there would be sound reasons for this), this might come about if success and power cease to be the dominant standard against which the merit of traditions is measured, and other, more inherent values are set in the focus of the reflection of history. To finish with Tom Nairn: if devolution created a chance for Scotland to move towards such a situation, Hungary could also capitalize on the recent lifting of the limitations on her sovereignty. 1848 may not become paramount, but the state of our historical consciousness and national identity would surely gain.
NOTES
* First read in the series "Myths of Nations" of the Institute of European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I am grateful to the Institute for the invitation, and to OTKA (Hungarian National Fund for Scientific Research) whose fellowship I enjoyed while writing the paper. Back
1 László Kontler, Millennium in Central Europe. A History of Hungary (Budapest: Atlantisz, 1999). Back
2 See "Eighteenth-Century Scotland". The Newsletter of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, No. 14 (Spring 2000), p. 8. Back
3 Csaba Csorba, János Estók, Konrád Salamon, The Illustrated History of Hungary (Budapest: Magyar Könyvklub, 1999); Gyula Illyés, in Magyarok (Hungarians. Budapest, 1938). I owe the reminder of Illyés' words to Nicholas Parsons' review of The Illustrated History and of my own book in The Hungarian Quarterly, No. 158 (Summer 2000), p. 115. Back
4 Works by outstanding Protestant authors such as András Farkas, Gáspár Károli and Pál Medgyesi represent this trend, as do arguments by leaders of anti-Habsburg resistance movements such as István Bocskai. See Kálmán Benda, A magyar nemzeti hivatástudat története (A XVI-XVII. században) (A history of the consciousness of Hungary's national calling. Budapest, 1937); Sándor Oýze, "Bűneiért bünteti Isten a magyar népet". Egy bibliai párhuzam vizsgálata a XVI. századi nyomtatott egyházi irodalom alapján ("God punished the Hungarian people for their sins". An inquiry into a biblical parallel on the basis of ecclesiastical literature printed in the sixteenth century. Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, 1991). Back
5 Béla Köpeczi, Magyarország, a kereszténység ellensége (Hungary, the enemy of Christendom. Budapest, 1977). Back
6 For a comprehensive treatment see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map and the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 1994). Back
7 On Berzeviczy, see Éva H. Balázs, Berzeviczy Gergely, a reformpolitikus (1763-1795) (Budapest: Akadémiai, 1967). On the continuity between Enlightenment and the Age of Reform, idem., Hungary and the Habsburgs 1765-1800. An Experiment in Enlightened Absolutism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1997), especially Ch. 10; Moritz Csáky, Von der Aufklärung zum Liberalismus. Studien zum Frühliberalismus in Ungarn (Vienna, 1981); Charles Kecskeméti, La Hongrie et le réformisme libéral. Problemes politiques et sociaux (1790-1848) (Rome, 1989). For the contrary view, see Domokos Kosáry, Culture and Society in Eighteenth-Century Hungary (Budapest: Corvina, 1980). Back
8 On Széchenyi in English, see George Barany, Stephen Széchenyi and the Awakening of Hungarian Nationalism, 1791-1841 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). In Hungarian the best account still remains András Gergely, Széchenyi eszmerendszerének kialakulása (The formation of Széchenyi's ideas) (Budapest: Akadémiai, 1972). Back
9 Cf. László Péter, "Volt-e magyar társadalom a XIX. században? A jogrend és a civil társadalom képződése" (Was there a Hungarian society in the nineteenth century?) in Az Elbától keletre (East of the Elbe. Budapest: Osiris, 1998). Back
10 Most recently Domokos Kosáry, A Görgey-kérdés története, 2 vols. (The history of the Görgey problem. Budapest: Osiris, 1996). Back
11 The two categories overlapped to a considerable extent: the overwhelming majority of the minorities belonged to the peasant population. Back
12 The authoritative statement of this view was the conservative historian Gyula Szekfü's seminal Három nemzedék (Three generations, 1920). Back
13 Erzsébet Andics, "Kossuth harca az árulók és megalkuvók ellen" (Kossuth's struggle against traitors and opportunists), in Kossuth emlékkönyv (Kossuth memorial volume. Budapest, 1952); for an analysis of the topic, see László Péter, "A nemzeti múlt legendái és tilalomfái" (The legends and taboos of the national past), in Az Elbától keletre, pp. 96. ff. Back
14 On the canonization and its ideological significance, see most recently Gábor Klaniczay, Az uralkodók szentsége a középkorban. Magyar dinasztikus szentkultuszok és európai modellek (Budapest: Balassi, 2000), Ch. III; forthcoming as Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Central European Dynastic Cults in a European Context, at Cambridge University Press. Back
15 It would have been delightful if the masterminds of the move had made it clear that the transfer was intended to establish a new tradition whereby a bridge is created between Hungary's ancient, monarchical past and parliamentary present. (It could have been asked, though, why the building of Parliament, marred by a dubious parliamentary record from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, should be considered a better symbol of Hungary's budding modernity than the National Museum which, more than a storehouse of lifeless objects, was founded in the early nineteenth century precisely to mark Hungary's endeavour to achieve national, social and political emancipation.) This did not happen: instead, the maintenance of old tradition was emphasised, clumsily and with little credibility.
16 For an overview of the literature on the coronation in the post-Second-World War period, see Tamás Bogyay's articles in Új Látóhatár, 1962 and 1970.
17 Elemér Mályusz, "Az egynyelvű ország" (The monolingual regnum), Századok, 1941.
László Kontler
formerly taught at Kossuth Lajos University, Debrecen and at Rutgers University, New Jersey; he is currently chair of the History Department at Central European University, and also teaches at Eötvös Loránd University (both in Budapest). His main field of interest is early modern European intellectual history. He is the author of Millennium in Central Europe.
A History of Hungary (1999).
