The Poetics and Politics of Historical Memory in Hungary
BORN IN 1969 IN BUDAPEST, Gábor Schein is the author of ten books of poetry, five novels, and four children’s books. Schein’s is a poetry of witness: not only as the descendent of survivors but as a witness of Hungarian society post-1989 and its abrupt transformations. His verse delineates the corruption and cynicism, the grittiness of Budapest and its strange urban beauty, and, in this millennium, a nebulous, but ever-encroaching illiberalism. In his novel Autobiographies of an Angel, he weaves together, with ironical lyricism, two disparate Jewish lives in European history marked by disguise and compromised survival, relating incidents generally ignored in Hungarian literature, such as, for example, the antisemitic riots following the 1956 Revolution.
In a small central European nation such as Hungary, the politics of memory can be a subject of contention, if not indeed hotly contested. In the following essay, Schein delineates the main features of the politics of memory as practiced by the government of Viktor Orbán—elected by a landslide in 2010 and in power ever since. The collective memory-work that Schein practices through his writing is, it must be said, the polar opposite of the politics of memory as envisioned by the current regime.
—Ottilie Mulzet
Monuments and memorials, museums and heritage sites, textbooks, theater, state speeches—such are the elements out of which a common national memory is spun. In an authoritarian regime like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, the mechanisms of commemoration are manipulated by the strong hand of state power to create an overbearing and sovereign narrative in which the weight of the past is deployed to justify current policies. This is not a new phenomenon in Hungary. The communist regime played similar games with history from 1948 until its rule was disrupted by the 1956 Revolution. But no one has played it as brazenly as Orbán.
What are the main components of Orbán’s politics of memory? In the first place, Hungary is viewed, alongside Poland, as one of two decisive state-creating nations in Central Europe, and thus deserving of unconditional respect. Hungary is said to have been, in every age, a nation-state, even before the modern concept of the nation-state existed, and even when, within the historical Kingdom of Hungary, Hungarians did not exceed 50 percent of the population. The role other ethnicities played in forming the Hungarian state is strenuously denied. As for the Romany, who have been living here for many centuries, they are not even seen as part of the political nation, are not granted historical memory, are deprived of museums and ignored in textbooks. In the view of the current regime, they merely form the nation’s greatest social burden.
Moreover, in every age, Hungarians fought for their own independence, in a struggle that was not supported by either the West or the East. The West is particularly condemned for its hypocrisy, for its promised and unrealized alliance during the 1956 Revolution, and worse, its alleged support, motivated solely by self-interest, in the post-1989 era, when, it is claimed, the greater part of the Hungarian industry and banking sector ended up in Western hands. Nor were Hungarian interests ever upheld by the country’s political left wing—socialists, social democrats, civil radicals—who form one homogenous mass, labeled as communist. Rather, they are internal enemies, traitors whose goal is the downfall of the country and whose coming to power would spell the death of the nation, the future of which is embodied solely in the person of Viktor Orbán, who was granted by the grace of God to his beloved nation, the Hungarians.