“What do you call a Communist historian?” historians throughout the East Bloc ruefully joked around their kitchen tables during the Cold War period. The answer was: “One who predicts the past.” Writing history under totalitarian conditions was hard enough, but how does one write the new national history after the one-party monopoly has ended? How does one treat controversial figures like the slain Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy, when disparate political parties governing the country in coalition cannot agree among themselves whether or not Nagy was a worthy hero who fit their political platforms?

Originally published in hard cover in 2008, Karl Benziger's book Imre Nagy. Martyr of the Nation, addresses these and other questions. The book is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature about the processes by which former Communist countries have grappled with their pasts to produce a more realistic and coherent history for new generations to digest.

The book is composed of nine concise chapters. In chapter one, Benziger discusses the politics of commemoration and the role of kegyelet (piety, or “duty toward the dead”) in Hungarian history (7). Chapter two is devoted to the ceremonial reburial of Imre Nagy on 16 June 1989. In chapter three, entitled “An Unlikely Hero,” Benziger explains the difficulties the former Communist Party (renamed the Hungarian Socialist Party or MSZP), as well as center and Right parties—such the Alliance of Young Democrats (FIDESZ) and the Christian Democrats (KDNP)—had in wholeheartedly embracing Imre Nagy as their hero. Chapter four outlines Nagy's actions during the revolution, characterizing him as an initially hesitant revolutionary who in the end made a “fatal gamble.” Chapter five covers the Kádár regime's process of “demobilizing” the revolution and the various coping methods of history teachers and professors. In chapters six and seven the author fast-forwards to the 1980s and 1990s again, outlining the economic decline leading to the resignation of János Kádár and the political debates that led both to the ceremonial reburial of Nagy and to the Imre Nagy memorial bill of June 1996. Chapter eight analyzes how new textbooks used in high schools in recent years cover the subject of the 1956 revolution. Finally, in chapter nine (“Epilogue”), Benziger analyzes the fiftieth anniversary demonstrations in September-October 2006, which “betrayed deep divisions within the polity rather than a sense of national solidarity” (152).

As Benziger points out, the ceremonial reburial of Nagy in June 1989 temporarily united the political opposition groups. As early as 1986, opposition figures, such as Imre Mécs, had asserted their right to kegyelet by attempting to light a candle and lay flowers at Plot 301 where Nagy and his supporters were buried (103). Guards prevented Mécs from performing this observance, and he was fired from his job. Similarly, Communist authorities confiscated the film and notebooks of BBC journalists and crew filming Plot 301 for the documentary “Cry Hungary” on 16 June 1986 (103). The turning point leading to the reburial was the publicized statement on 28 January 1989 by Imre Pozsgay, the reform-minded Central Committee member, namely that 1956 had been a popular uprising. The Historical Justice Committee composed of dissidents and the victims' families then demanded a proper burial for Nagy. Their logic was: If 1956 had not been a counterrevolution, then Nagy had not been an anti-Soviet, counterrevolutionary leader and should be honored (99). All opposition members had attended, except Károly Grósz, then the general secretary of the Communist Party after Kádár's resignation.

Soon thereafter, in a process similar to those in other former bloc countries, once the common enemy was eliminated, unity among the opposition parties evaporated and they fought among each other. (The Communist Party lost its monopoly in a historic session of Parliament on 16–20 October 1989, and the country was renamed the Republic of Hungary.) It was no longer enough to be “anti-Communist.” One had to define one's proactive platform for reform.

As the author explains, the idea itself of the Hungarian revolution and the symbol of Imre Nagy initially served all the opposing parties in 1989 as a “political lever” (102, 118). However, Imre Nagy's biography later put each of the parties—including the new Socialist, or former Communist, Party—in a quandary. West-leaning, reformist parties liked Nagy for his earlier ideas about land reform; his withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact; his refusal to compromise with the quisling Kádár regime; and his espousal of the Bandung principles of national sovereignty and external noninterference. On the other hand, they found it difficult to downplay Nagy's role in establishing the Hungarian Communist Party and police state; his belief in pluralism within a one-party Socialist system, rather than in a full democratic, capitalist system; and his initial hesitation during the revolutionary events in 1956 (166). Another unpalatable issue, which the author barely mentions, is Nagy's probable collaboration with the NKVD in Moscow during the 1930s.

Although it was the Socialist Party that proposed and passed a memorial bill on 26 June 1996, declaring Nagy to be a national martyr, the Socialists and former Communists also found Nagy unpalatable (120). After all, Nagy had gone over to the side of the revolutionaries in 1956. He had declared Hungarian sovereignty and neutrality, had withdrawn from the Warsaw Pact, and had appealed to the West for aid. Moreover, the Hungarian Communists had executed Nagy and buried him in an unmarked grave.

Opposing parties such as the Free Democrats and individuals like Jenő Fónay of the Political Prisoners' Society opposed the Nagy memorial bill, averring that such a “compromise” represented further “surrender of the goals of the Revolution” (120–21). Ten years later, on the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution, in September and October 1956, conflicts arose again between the Socialists and FIDESZ coalitions. After a secret tape recording revealed that Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány had lied about the state of the economy, FIDESZ boycotted the official government commemorations (151).

Benziger finds that, in contrast to the feuding political parties, textbooks written after 1989 generally portray 1956 as a noble “war of independence” and Nagy as a national hero (127). Chapter eight is one of the more interesting chapters in the book. Here Benziger shares his findings from his interviews of high school teachers in Budapest, Debrecen, and Szeged in 1998. Since the 1956 revolution was a strictly taboo topic, many of the Kádár-era textbooks had simply ended with 1945. Others constructed a counternarrative with Nagy as the key villain. Benziger quotes one teacher who confessed that it was very hard for teachers to “empty their heads overnight” (140). Many teachers were confused by the events in 1989 and had to learn about the 1956 revolution alongside their students (141). One poll as late as 1988 showed that over 50 percent of Hungarian citizens in Budapest still construed 1956 as a “counterrevolution” (91).

No book is perfect. Given Nagy's status as national martyr, Benziger appears timid in his ginger treatment of the issue of Nagy's probable collaboration with the NKVD in the 1930s (34, 50). Acknowledgment, at least, of the KGB archival documents released in 1989 (intended, of course, to discredit Nagy) and some objective analysis of them, drawing on the studies of scholars living outside Hungary, like Charles Gati, would be better than simply citing Hungarian historian István Rév, who tends to downplay them, especially since Rév himself stated in his book Retroactive Justice (2005, 15) that some of the KGB documents were, indeed, original. Whether “willful denunciations” or not, Nagy's willingness to hand over to the NKVD in April 1939 a list of 150 personal acquaintances is itself a form of collaboration with Soviet security agents. Moreover, Benziger provides useful background sketches of the parties in “Appendix C,” but this information probably should have been incorporated into chapter seven to help readers make sense of the numerous acronyms. The nonchronological sequence of chapters can also confuse readers.

Nevertheless, Imre Nagy: Martyr of the Nation is well worth reading and encourages reflection on the evolution of Hungarian historiography. Apart from Rév's above-mentioned book and Janos Rainer's excellent studies of Imre Nagy, other stimulating studies on history and memory include Katherine Verdery's The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial And Postsocialist Change (1999); Maria Bucur and Nancy Wingfield's Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (2001); and Terry Cox's Challenging Communism in Eastern Europe: 1956 and Its Legacy (2008).