In this series of essays, András Gerő offers a narrative of Hungarian history from 1848 through the dualist period (1867–1918). Replacing the “scientific,” often plodding economic determinism that had so long straitjacketed Hungarian historiography, he presents a symbolic, theatrical “new history.” The first section focuses on the cults surrounding the heroes, heroines, and villains of the second-half of the nineteenth century: Ferenc Kossuth, “Father of the Nation, God's Second Son;” Lajos Batthyány, “The Martyr of the Nation, the Hungarian Egmont;” and Ferenc Deák, “Father of the Political System.” These are contrasted to the official cults surrounding the Habsburgs, Palatine Archduke Joseph, King Francis Joseph, and Queen Elizabeth.

Gerő treats Kossuth as the defining national figure, whose journalistic and oratorical skills promoted the nation, liberalism, and his own achievements. Gerő, however, overstates Kossuth's influence in exile. Nevertheless, the Kossuth “brand name” was immortalized on cigarette packs, record labels, and in books through the interwar and Communist epochs. Symbolic politics washed away Kossuth's liberal philosophy, leaving only the nationalist or revolutionary.

By 1900 national liberalism had exhausted its own internal resources. Gerő bristles at the corruption of the dualist system. He mocks the claims of attachment to both Hungarian patriots and Habsburg subjects, but he seeks to salvage the earlier achievements of national-liberalism, sharply distancing it from its pact with monarchism. Gerő writes admiringly of Deák, architect of Hungarian semi-independence, but marginalizes the dualist statesman Gyula Andrássy. He takes issue with István Bibó's influential essays of 1946 and 1948 that dismissed the liberal era as “dead end” (261), simply an expression of the obsolete Habsburg Empire. This shortchanged Hungarian liberalism's achievements and conflated democracy with liberalism. For Gerő it is another example of the problem of theory influencing symbolic politics and narrowing political options. “The closed nature of the thought structure leads to the concealment of historical processes” (226).

The second section examines the packaging of holidays and monuments: the Millennium Exhibition of 1896, a Valhalla-like heroes' monument, and the 15 March celebration. Historical interpretations are handed down to the public with monuments and holidays. The holiday calendar changed and statues were resculpted, removed, or replaced as the usable narrative was altered. These chapters shed a fascinating light on the manipulation of symbolic history at each dramatic turn in the political system.

Mario Fenyo has produced an excellent idiomatic translation of Gerő. English-language readers will benefit from Gerő's witty and at times mordant commentary, but they cannot be expected to have become as weary of the cult of Elizabeth or the stratagems of Deák as Hungarian readers. The book was written originally for a Hungarian audience, all too familiar with Kossuth, Batthyány, and Deák. A bibliography of supplemental English-language readings would have been helpful.

Gerő's work can be read as a statement of the generation of scholars trained in the restricted world of compromise Communism, who experienced the staged May Days as well as the elation of the spontaneous celebrations in 1989. As a practitioner of cultural history, he cites English-language works on nationalism and civic religion but eschews the sociocultural focus on bottom-up history. When it comes to the historiography of Central Europe, Gerő limits his view of Western scholarship to the “fathers,” such as István Deák's Lawful Revolution (New York, 1979) on Kossuth, but none of the more recent works by Deák's students. This was a lost opportunity to develop an international dialogue between cultural historians of the region. “We are the complete history of identity. Everything else is but a sketch” (257), Gerő cryptically concludes, but how or where the individual actually plays a role in this book is unclear.

After 1989 all the symbols were again reevaluated. “Every identity that has entered the twentieth century was still around as a mole” now surfacing (257). When Prime Minister József Antall hung a picture of the martyred Batthyány in his office, Hungarian martyrology gained official voice. The Crown and St. Stephen's Day became the principal national symbol and holiday, respectively. Gerő posits a “nation-religion” (xv) but treads lightly on its Christian character. The penultimate chapter ponders the problem of Jewish identity as both Christian and Jewish identities reassert themselves. Communism had offered the alternative of disguise, “kind of an administratively enforced assimilation,” where the motto was: “do not talk about it [Jewishness], forget it, conceal it” (256). The book provokes the question: what does identity mean in Hungary? Is it a nationality concept that reaches into the recesses of the pagan or Christian past, or can it be a notion of political citizenship and a choice of heroes, constructed or reconstructed by political fashion?