Ivan T. Berend is the author of several monographs on modern Hungarian and European economic development, many of which were coauthored with his colleague and friend, the late György Ránki. Berend has also conducted regional comparisons since the mid 1960s with a focus on the question of backwardness. Marxism has provided his primary frame of analysis, though it has decreasingly served as his “omnipotent key.” While active in Communist Hungary, Berend showed a growing interest in contemporary problems and questions of economic policy. In recent decades, he has completed historical syntheses of modern Central and Eastern Europe modeled on Eric Hobsbawm's famous series of books, incorporating political, social, and cultural factors. At the same time, he remains firmly opposed to postmodern theorizing and historiography (124–26).

His career as a scholar can be considered fortunate in several ways. Even though his formal university education took place during the Stalinist years, Berend was also among the first historians to have access to archival materials around the time when the study of the twentieth century first became an integral part of the discipline of history (120). His career as a researcher started immediately after he completed secondary school: His gymnasium history teacher, Zsigmond Pál Pach, was promoted and helped him with early appointments (83). At just 30, Berend was awarded the highest Hungarian state prize for scholars. Second, his domestic successes coincided with what was, for him, a clearly advantageous political situation: Through the impact of détente on intellectual life in the 1960s, Berend had the opportunity to participate in international scholarly life (108). Moreover, he is among the few historians who, despite having been a member of the academic elite of a Communist country (he served as University Rector and President of the Academy of Sciences in the 1970s and 1980s), upon the change of regime managed to establish himself at a prestigious American university, UCLA.

Berend stresses how much the inseparability of the historical and the personal defined his experience: “History was not a subject but life itself, penetrating into the private and everyday life of Central and Eastern Europe” (119). In History in My Life, his newly published memoir, Berend somewhat curiously declares that “I do not like to look back on my life” (136), but he does recount painful childhood memories here. Born in 1930 in Budapest as the second son of a lower-middle-class Jewish family, Berend lost most of his family members, though fortunately not his parents, during the Shoah and was put through terrible experiences, including deportation to Dachau. While narrating these events of 1944–1945, he rather surprisingly concludes that they had “a positive internalized impact” (36). Even though Berend concedes that belonging to an oppressed minority and his horrible childhood experiences contributed to his longing for justice and explains the appeal Communist anti-nationalism had for him (50), his Jewishness does not seem to have played much conscious role in his life.

History in My Life includes more than the personal story of this prolific and successful economic historian. Throughout the book, Berend writes about rather general matters at length, so much so that, for instance, the first five pages, as well as the last chapter on America, are entirely devoted to the discussion of basic features of the Horthy era and the United States, respectively. What is almost entirely missing is the mezzo level, the more immediate context of his experiences. There is hardly anything on fellow Hungarian historians in the book, nor do we get a discussion of how his ideas and scholarly results relate to those of other historians of the Central and Eastern European region. Similarly, his relation and proximity to members of the Kádárist political elite receive scant treatment, though he does refer to annual meetings with Kádár and helpful phone calls by György Aczél.

Crucially, History in My Life includes an extended political polemic with the clear aim of justifying Berend's official roles in Kádárist Hungary. Berend questions what he sees as the undifferentiated perception of Soviet bloc Communism and critiques the dissident version of Kádárism. According to Berend, the Kádár regime could boast a strong reformist tradition, a sort of Social Democratic wing within the party, which was responsible for the emergence of “a distinct Hungarian economic model” (88). He argues that active participation in such reform-oriented groups was both more useful and seemed to display a higher sense of realism at the time than oppositional practices or isolationist choices in the manner of János Kornai. His account of the political realities of the times largely overlooks the basic dictatorial character of the regime.

In justifying his own involvement, Berend makes some arguments worth considering, but his overall case remains rather unconvincing. Although Berend refers to major (though “cautiously veiled”) reforms, radical changes, and how Kádár supposedly became legitimate even among his early opponents (87), he admits that the attempt to combine reform with continuity posed an “unsolvable task” (86). Berend also seems rather inconsistent on the accomplishments of reform. He writes that the “often interrupted and halted but still progressing, gradual reform policy actually worked” (202), but elsewhere mentions that he had already diagnosed the “eventual basic failure” of reform in the early 1980s (138).

Berend's assessment of reformism reaches its climax when he credits his own group as the central agents of the regime change (202). In the middle of a crucial passage, he presents the Hungarian reformist elite as analogous to Polish Solidarity and Czech dissidents, even if their story is ultimately rather ironic. First, the Hungarian Communist reformers unsuccessfully tried to legitimate their power through elections (217), and second, it is questionable how Berend's own involvement can be presented solely as a contribution to change (194). History in My Life avoids raising more controversial questions about “false realism” and the assistance such reformism provided to the solidification of the dictatorship with a liberalized image. Arguably, it was this image that fostered the international acceptance of the Kádár regime and led, among other things, to Western credits and huge indebtedness by 1989. In sum, History in My Life combines the life story of an exceptionally successful historian from Communist Eastern Europe with the discussion of larger historical issues. Unfortunately, the memoir of Berend does this without properly addressing the mezzo level. The book is clearly apologetic about the role the author played in Kádárist Hungary.