A Nation Divided by History and Memory

Hungary in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Gábor Gyáni

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000090758
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Histoire
• Thema: Histoire du monde

During the last few decades there has been a growing recognition of the great role that remembering and collective memory play in forming the historical awareness. In addition, the dominant national form of history writing also met some challenges on the side of a transnational approach to the past. In A Nation Divided by History and Memory, a prominent Hungarian historian sheds light on how Hungary's historical image has become split as a consequence of the differences between the historian's conceptualisation of national history and its diverse representations in personal and collective memory. The book focuses on the shocking experiences and the intense memorial reactions generated by a few key historical events and the way in which they have been interpreted by the historical scholarship. The argument of A Nation Divided by History and Memory is placed into the context of an international historical discourse. This pioneering work is essential and enlightening reading for all historians, many sociologists, political scientists, social psychologists and university students.

Part I

The past as experience and memory

1 The experience and remembrance of World War I

Libraries have been filled with heaps of scholarly literature on the military, economic and diplomatic history of the Great War. Much less attention has been devoted, however, to the question of how Europeans processed the experience of the World War I psychologically. No or few attempts – especially comparative ones – have been made at the analysis of the various sites of remembrance, the places of mourning and collective (official or state) commemoration and the relation of these two to each other. The veracity of Jay Winter’s statement¹ is confirmed by the observation of Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker:

For eighty years, historians of the Great War overlooked the long, painful scars of grief that followed after the conflict was over. True, the mass deaths were recorded (not without difficulty), but the bereavement, the mourning process went unrecorded… . They [historians] put the catastrophe into a demographic context but not into the equally important context of collective grief. Yet little in twentieth-century history can be understood unless close attention is paid to the immense grief experienced during and after 1914–18. This is an issue that transcends the history of the conflict per se.²

It is for this reason that our study will focus on the remembrance of massive death, and we will examine the phenomenon that George L. Mosse defined as the cult of the fallen soldier, also regarded as a civic religion.

Fallen soldiers and mourners

According to Mosse, the memory of war has been fixed in the collective mind as a myth that endowed the fallen soldier with symbols and symbolic meanings and which served as the foundation of war remembrance. Mosse only examined the public manifestations of war remembrance, so he tended to remark the heavily politicised character and fundamentally nationalist attitude of the cult.³

In his essay dedicated to war memorials, Reinhart Koselleck also emphasised that the memory of the war highlighted collective political and national identity. According to Koselleck, war memorials transfer the remembrance of the soldiers’ deaths into a profane functional context and thus become an issue affecting the future of survivors. “The decline of a Christian interpretation of death thus creates a space for meaning to be purely established in political and social terms.”⁴ But later he adds: “Admittedly, it cannot be denied – across all national differences and in spite of the distinction between triumphant and non-triumphant war memorials – that no monument is completely absorbed by its political function. No matter how much dying for a cause is thematized in order to derive a particular group identity, dying itself is also always a major additional theme.”⁵ Nonetheless, he does not examine this aspect of the question even though he admits that the political function that the state assigns to war monuments can be different depending on whether the latter have been erected by a victorious or losing state (country).

Today we have a clear understanding of the fact that the meaning attributed to the memorials by the community of mourning is partly, or entirely, different from their official meaning. As revealed by the research of Jay Winter and numerous French historians, the social use of monuments also acts as a meaning-making entity. The tangible manifestations of the latter are the rites of collective commemoration related to the memorials, which bring to light the exceptional importance of the “communities of mourning” inherent to the cult and making it live.⁶

Mosse also believes that it is only the Great War that created – after certain antecedents – the novel collective cult of the war dead that was also fanned by the state. Mosse talks about the nationalisation of death, which, according to him, was a decisive step that allowed for the creation of the myth of the fallen soldier that also affected private grief.⁷ The remembrance of the dead (soldiers) is democratised by this new kind of sensitivity and some sort of a modern commemorative culture, but the brutal fact of massive war casualties is simultaneously impersonalised. From that point, the object of the cult is the common soldier and no longer the commanding officers and generals of the armies, as it used to be in the not so distant past. The democratisation of death corresponded to the “democratic spirit” of the Great War: everyone (i.e. men in certain age brackets) had the right and the duty to fight and die on the front. This is why Koselleck labels the commemoration of the fallen soldier as a civic commemorative cult. The other side of the coin is that war memorials and sometimes related commemorative rites as well were assigned a function by being filled with political content. This is how they could fulfil the democratic legitimising role destined for them, communicating to the survivors that each and every citizen of a nation-state had equal rights and was thus entitled to be personally remembered, especially if they died in a war.⁸

The fact that war death affected such huge masses was another obvious catalyst for this new type of death cult. Ten million soldiers were killed in battle.⁹ As for the Hungarian loss, it amounted to about 611,000 people.¹⁰ And how many actual and potential mourners may there have been? According to the estimates, nearly one third of the soldiers killed left behind a widow, but the number of orphans was even higher; Jay Winter estimates this figure at 6,000,000 only in the European context.¹¹ And with that, we have not yet taken into consideration the rest of the community of mourning composed of the parents, close and distant relatives and other personal relations, the so-called “fictive kinship” of those killed in action. Estimates for France put the number of direct mourners (i.e. the relatives of fallen soldiers) to 2,500,000. “Virtually an entire society was probably in mourning; an entire society formed a community of mourning.”¹² Moreover, wartime grief differs from grief in times of peace, mainly because the former hits only one of the sexes and only young adults. What is more, death tolls were enormous within a short time frame, which also devastated those left behind. Finally, as a result of the demographic shifts of the 19th century, it was relatively rare at the beginning of the 20th century for the offspring to die before their progenitors – a daily and completely ordinary experience during the World War I. This made the death of the soldiers even more shocking for those left behind.¹³ It was a source of “eternal grief,” meaning that the traumatic experience of loss could never be entirely processed. And there was one more thing: the inconceivably high number of dead bodies that were unidentifiable and not taken care of, the ones that could not be “properly” buried. That was also a serious obstacle to processing the grief. If those tombs existed at all, they were inaccessible for the mourners. Sometimes the community of mourning wanted to take the corpse into its possession (and bury it at home) or at least visit the tombs.¹⁴

Every person’s death is the fulfilment of their individual destiny, which necessarily triggers an individual mourning process. One of the conspicuous particularities of the Great War was that – for the first time in history – massive death generated collective commemorative rites besides leaving the individual character of grief intact. It is still a question to be answered how these two related to each other or, to be more precise: did the collective commemorative cult influence individual grief and if yes, how so? Did the former attenuate the latter or not?

Heroisation and/or paying tribute

The collective commemorative rites emerging in the wake of the Great War put the heroised figure of the fallen soldier into the focus of the memory work. According to the general conviction of historiographers, heroisation leads to the instrumentalisation of the cult and, as such, it contributes as a tool to the (political) process that (by the way) attenuates the pain of the mourners to some extent. If they go through grief together, then (hopefully) it will reduce the burden of the individual ordeal imposed by the feeling of loss that people usually experience in a terrifying solitude.¹⁵ What is more, the war death of the soldier, besides triggering individual grief, (also) receives a general meaning as an event of heroic devotion to the community and the nation. Would that be the sole meaning of the cult of war remembrance exercised all over Europe and the whole world, embodied by the monuments? And if it is so, to what extent was the nationalisation of the death of the soldiers efficient (or could it be) in attenuating the pain of the individual (of the micro-community)?

If we take a quick glance at the specific content of collective grief, and examine what corresponded to the public and cult remembrance of the fallen soldier, we may have doubts about the omnipotence of the collective cult of the dead. Although Mosse insists that “Modern war memorials did not so much focus upon one man, as upon figures symbolic of the nation – upon the sacrifice of all of its men.”¹⁶ However, this observation needs some correction today. It is a fact that the fallen soldier was mostly and almost exclusively depicted in official commemoration as a hero and not as a victim. That was a logical consequence of the democratisation of the cult. In relation to that as well, the soldiers of the hostile army could under no circumstances be the object of commemoration (and the cult of the dead). Typically, the defeated were never represented on the memorials in their own right, and even their tombs (cemeteries) were put at a great disadvantage in the preservation of the post-war military cemetery cult.¹⁷ According to our hypothesis, the official meaning attributed to local (and especially central) state war memorials did not necessarily equal the meaning assigned to these objects by the community of mourning when the latter used them for its own commemorative rites. Needless to say, similarly, the “original” meaning of the monuments erected for the purposes of the cult did not survive the generation that had erected them and had used them for the purposes of commemoration.¹⁸

Jay Winter distinguishes between three non-contiguous spaces and times of war memorials. The monuments erected before 1918 were usually scattered in the territory of the hinterland, whereas in the decade following the armistice they were, most of the time, erected in churches and in mundane sites (in the centre of each of the settlements). In the third phase, such objects were mainly placed in cemeteries. In the beginning, the practice of monument erection was imbued by exaggerated war patriotism and heroism because they were meant to fan the flames of enthusiasm for the war. The monuments of the second phase were dominated by religious ecumenism coupled with conventional patriotism, which expressed the universality of the loss (individual grief) as well as the national, political and aesthetic approach to remembrance. The universal language of grief as a memory work was formed only in the third phase, drawing on particular (sub-national level) traditions and often surpassing them.¹⁹

This is how the issue is put into a more nuanced light, without an exaggerated emphasis on the politicisation of war remembrance anymore. As highlighted by the studies of Antoine Prost, Annette Becker and Jay Winter, besides projecting an image of national heroism, monuments had always comprised a message enabling the personal mourning process if only in a coded form and submitted to the former. This cannot be a pure accident. In most cases, it was the war monument that constituted the only place of commemoration available for the mourners because, during the frontline combats, multitudes of corpses disappeared without a trace and ended up in mass tombs. (In France, even the creation of ossariums came into fashion after the...