Introduction
In June 2010, the ‘law on Trianon commemoration day’ fell on us, Hungarians. When the Parliament passed the law, many respected scholars in my country claimed that the peace treaty of Trianon (1920) caused ‘a trauma that affects us even today’. 1 Trianon was considered a permanent trauma of the nation by scholars who otherwise do not tend to hold similar views. 2 Two years later, in the mid-summer of 2012, a passionate debate broke out among contemporary historians in Hungary.Reference Laczó 3 The main topics of controversy in what the participants labelled a Historikerstreit (or the Gerő-Romsics debate) were the language of the historians and their attitude to ‘Jewish’ themes such as the Holocaust, and the role played by the Hungarian Jews in the revolutions following the First World War and in the first period of communist rule (1945–1956).Reference Rigó 4 I have discussed this debate in other papers; here I will only present the escalation of using the concept of trauma among its participants.Reference Kovács 5
The Hungarian Historikerstreit
András Gerő and Ignác Romsics are both well-known public intellectuals in Hungary. Gerő blamed Romsics for ‘academic anti-Semitism’. András Gerő is the director of the Institute for Habsburg History, and Professor of History at the Central European University. Ignác Romsics is one of the 13 historians of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He became famous with books on the history of Hungary in the twentieth century, especially on the Trianon Treaty and the interwar period. Both men are around 60, and both are considered to be left-liberals although Romsics is also appreciated by conservatives. Both follow the Grand Narrative of longue durée history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They consider the project of Hungarian nation building as well as economic and social modernisation under the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as a Golden Age in Hungarian history. However, Gerő has a bias toward social history, in particular that of the Jewish assimilation, while Romsics is more interested in political history, especially that of the interwar period. To sum up, their positions are more similar to each other than one might think reading their heated controversy.
According to Gerő, Romsics interpreted the Stalinist takeover in Hungarian historiography after 1948 as a revenge by communist ‘Jews’, who ‘had suffered earlier’. He blamed Romsics, citing another statement of the latter on the overrepresentation of politicians of Jewish origin in the political elite of the 1919 Council’s Republic. Gerő accused Romsics of using the anti-Semitic discourse of the interwar period and therefore of the ‘rehabilitation of the domestic anti-Semitic tradition’. Gerő asked what Jewish origin meant when writing on historical events such as the 1919 revolution or the 1948 takeover. He stressed that these politicians and historians acted as communists and not as Jews. Therefore, using the word ‘Jewish’ is an unconscious invocation of anti-Semitic language in Hungary between the two wars.
The polemic, emotional and denunciative language used by Gerő triggered strong reactions from a great number of historians and modified the scholarly landscape: 350 historians signed a pro-Romsics petition while dozens of experts discussed specific historical details in the ensuing discussion or opened up the debate to broader themes of current public memory. They criticised Romsics or Gerő or both.
Endre Bojtár, one of the main protagonists, reminded readers of the fact that Ignác Romsics, in his Hungarian Peripeties 1920–1989,Reference Romsics 6 did not mention anti-Semitic legislation between the two wars, the Holocaust, and the liberation of the country in 1945, among his ten twists of fate in twentieth-century Hungarian history.Reference Bojtár 7 Romsics excused himself with: ‘I have never researched the Holocaust and anti-Semitism as a specific theme yet.’Reference Romsics 8 Ironically, this argument was fully accepted by the scientific community and the participants of the debate. Nobody asked how it was possible to write a concise history of modern Hungary without studying anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Could one really write popular history books without tackling these issues? Romsics’ statement implies that the chapters on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust do not belong self-evidently to the Grand Narrative of Hungarian history. If not the Holocaust, what else would then be one of the basic elements of Hungarian Zeitgeschichte?
Three months later, another prominent historian, Gábor Gyáni published an essay with the title Trianon versus the Holocaust.Reference Gyáni 9 Gyáni shows the similarities that exist between these two topics of social memory (e.g. self-victimisation, symbolisation and generalisation of particular historical events, mythologisation of history, etc) and discusses them as mutually exclusive forms of remembrance. His conclusion was that currently the construction of the Trianon-trauma occupies a hegemonic position in Hungarian social memory; the Holocaust cannot concur with it.
Similar to Bojtár in the first round of the debate, in the second round the cultural theorist and public intellectual Péter György turned against the ethnocentric, nationalist approach of memory politics (Trianon and the Holocaust – the Future of the Past).Reference György 10 He argued that it would be a real challenge to relax the ‘Trianon pique’ and to create a modern, non-ethnocentric national identity.
Romsics did not respond to György’s challenge of Trianon and the Holocaust, although his article carried the same title (Trianon and the Holocaust – Our Traumas in the 20th Century) but addressed Gyáni.Reference Romsics 11 Romsics now gave a different version of twentieth-century history, with Jews part of the modernisation project of the Hungarian state. He also integrated the Holocaust in this new narrative. In the conclusion, Romsics says that ‘Trianon and the Holocaust were tightly connected components of the tragic failure of Hungarian national-liberal state- and nation-building [sic!],’ and that he puts his faith in a ‘new liberal and integrative model of nation building.’ It is more than interesting that those ‘Jews’ who were assimilated and participated in the nation-building project were suddenly recognised by him as part of the Hungarian nation – what a conceptual turn in two months and without any explanation.
At the end of 2012, the debate blew over without reaching any consensus and now it is being transferred onto the pages of historical journals.
One Side of the Coin: Neo-historicism in Hungarian Politics of History
Why was the Romsics–Gerő debate so obsessive and denunciative? The Hungarian Historikerstreit is closely related to the revival of the Horthy era (1920–1944) in current Hungarian politics and to its neo-historicist tendencies. An old-new state ideology has been in the making since the Millennium ceremonies of 2001 organised by the first FIDESZ government. However, until today, mainstream historians seldom if ever took part in developing the politics of history publicly and directly. In the spring of 2012 Ignác Romsics transcended this border by accepting the invitation of the city leaders of Gyömrő to assess the historical role of Miklós Horthy. This was a long way – not only in the scientific biography of the protagonists, but also in the politics of history.
About 15 years ago, on 1 January 2001, under the first Orbán government, the Holy Crown of St. Stephen was transferred from the National Museum to the Parliament, following a long and heated public debate.Reference Radnóti 12 The millennial anniversary of the foundation of the Christian state of Hungary offered a pretext for the transfer. If not earlier, then at that time neo-historicism became a state ideology, and the core of national propaganda in twenty-first-century Hungary. However, moving the Holy Crown to the Parliament was not the first formative moment following the political transition of 1990, which reinvented a kind of obligatory national identity, among other things with the help of this museal object, on the basis of a neo-historicist ideology. After half a century of Soviet occupation and the loss of Hungarian sovereignty, the conservative-nationalist camp of the new political elite in the newly free Hungary returned, deeply nostalgically, to the political aesthetics of the interwar period.
This historical period, the so-called Horthy era, was heavily influenced by racist right-wing radicalism, anti-modernism, anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism in Hungary. As a political system, it functioned as an autocratic quasi-democracy that acted coquettishly with Nazism and later intensively cooperated with the Third Reich in order to revise the Paris treaties. Turning back today to the political symbolism of that era with restorative nostalgia meant the revival and repetition of the corresponding mentality and political slogans. This nostalgia also strengthened the self-victimisation of the ‘nation’ and fostered an ambivalent attitude towards the memory of the Hungarian Holocaust.Reference Fritz 13 (It would exceed the limits of this paper to describe another important feature of the political aesthetics of the Horthy-nostalgia in detail but I would like to stress that anti-Communism was also an inherent part of it. Thus, since 1990, the memory of the Holocaust has had to concur not only with the memory of Trianon but also with that of Communism – as is shown, for example, by the very controversial and ahistorical exhibition of the House of Terror.)Reference Kovács and Seewann 14
In 2002, Fidesz lost the elections, and political neo-historicism was cherished in the so-called Civic Circles founded by the party all over the country. Simultaneously, a new romantic nationalist subculture began to develop in the surroundings of the extreme right party, Jobbik (The Better),Reference Feischmidt 15 using the popular versions and symbols of a thousand-year-old Christian mythology combined with anti-Semitism and – ironically – with the pagan Hungarian past.Reference Kolozsi 16 Neo-historicism came back to the political arena in 2010 when Fidesz-KDNP won the elections. From that point on, it was not only a historical scenery of political action, but also a highly instrumentalised ideology, which was communicated by the Orbán government as a new political brand of Hungary. I am afraid that the Historikerstreit in 2012 was so heated because the protagonists could not discuss historical questions as pure scientific topics and they were too much irritated by the governmental politics of history.
Even though, fortunately, there is a large gap between the language of the academics and the everyday political uses of the Trianon metaphor, I am afraid that the Trianon commemoration law and the discussion of Trianon as a national trauma in authoritative expert circles create a fragile but walkable bridge over this gap. In the following part of this paper I will ask why and how trauma became a formative concept in Hungarian historiography.
The Other Side of the Coin: The ‘Traumatic (Re)turn’ in Hungarian Historiography
Psychological concepts had their own tradition in Hungarian historiography in the first half of the twentieth century. István Bibó wrote on ‘German hysteria’ and the ‘distorted Hungarian character’, Lajos Leopold on ‘mimetic’ Hungarian capitalism, László Németh on ‘deep’ (‘true’) and ‘shallow’ (‘rootless’) Magyars – and the list can certainly be continued.Reference Balog 17 However, over the last 50 years, Hungarian historians preferred ‘objective’ description and ‘rational’ explanation when discussing the history of twentieth-century Hungary. Emotionalising – or psychologising – history was, on the one hand, part of the special language of nostalgic, revisionist historiography on the margin of academic debate and in the broader terrain of public history. On the other hand, the solid socio-psychological theories of the time unfortunately did not cross their own disciplinary borders. These factors resulted not only in the ‘old-school’ genre of the historical monograph but also in the exclusion of sources, methods and theories that did fulfil the rigid requirements of ‘objective description’ and ‘rational explanation’. Moreover, it was not only socio-psychological but also individual-psychological explanations that were found to be scary and doubtful assets for history writing. Mainstream historians hardly ever used the sources of oral history or biographical research and, if they did, they did so merely to illustrate their texts. Therefore, it came as a surprise that a ‘traumatic turn’ did occur in Hungarian historiography during the past decade, albeit a good 20 years later than in Western historiography and philosophy of history.
The term ‘collective trauma’ has gained global popularity in research projects dealing with the Holocaust.Reference Alexander 18 Even though several people have warned that the use of biological and pathological terminology developed to deal with the individual psyche is not wholly fortunate when the aim is to describe (the imagined) communities of millions of people, this could not hinder the spread of the term, nor prevent it from becoming a cliché. In historical analysis, the metaphor of trauma compresses painful individual experiences, which cannot be or are not dealt with and which then have a significant and measurable impact on action.
In Hungary, the pioneers of interdisciplinary approaches were, on the one hand, psychiatrists and social psychologists such as Teréz Virág, Judith Herman, Ferenc Erős, János László, György Csepeli and Ferenc Pataki, who connected the historical experiences of the twentieth century with psychological and sociological theories on trauma, memory and identity.Reference Erős 19 Empirically, they focused first and foremost on the trauma of the Holocaust survivors but also surveyed representations of Hungarian national identity and social memory in general. On the other hand, in the late 1990s, at the University of Pécs, literary historians around Beáta Thomka started to study and teach narratology, and translated and published the most important theoretical works of the Assmanns, Ricoeur, Rüsen, White, Carr, Ankersmit, etc. It would be unfair to ignore two early attempts to combine mainstream history-writing with current memory studies on the Holocaust. In the early 1990s the PhD thesis of Róbert Braun that had been rejected by the historians, was accepted by the philosophers.Reference Braun 20 Second, in 2000 the Hebraist Géza Komoróczy published his collected essays on the Holocaust. It reached a broader audience but was seldom cited in later historical publications on trauma.Reference Komoróczy 21
Gábor Gyáni was the first to raise awareness among historians asking new theoretical questions of current historiography.Reference Gyáni 22 It is also to his merit that memory studies became popular not only in sociology and literary theory but also in the contemporary debates on Hungarian history in the academia.Reference Virágh 23 It does not matter whether it was an irony of fate or the consequence of a rigid, segmented and authoritarian academic discourse that it was neither an expert on social psychology nor a researcher of the Holocaust but a social historian who played the role of mediator between history and the study of emotions. As a result, however, the formula ‘Trianon versus the Holocaust’ cannot be ignored nowadays. Even if it is true that the terminus technicus of ‘trauma’ was spreading in history writing in Hungary as rapidly as it had triumphed in Western historiography in the 1990s, a reflexive, critical underpinning of the use of trauma theory in the Hungarian case has not yet materialised. To put it simply: Hungarian historians adopted the very problematic term ‘cultural trauma’ (which was heavily discussed especially in the Western Holocaust literature)Reference Kansteiner 24 and inserted it in the explanation of the Trianon phenomenon. They could do so easily, based on their own tradition of history writing from the interwar period. Thus, the use of the term ‘trauma’ in Hungarian historiography is, with certain exceptions, still an unconscious adaptation of a fashionable Western category.
Checking the Trauma Concept: Trianon as Historical Experience
The trauma of Trianon became commonplace in Hungarian history writing without proving its socio-psychological relevance in systematic historical research. As we learned from sociological surveys and ethnographic studies,Reference Feischmidt 25 the social memory of Trianon is amorphous: imaginations of ethnic landscapes, mental places and habitual resemblances are mixed in it.Reference Connerton 26 This social memory is emotional: it always covers the emotions of a lost homeland. It has a special narrative character as well: when it speaks, it is always ethnocentric and often has an anti-Semitic voice. It is burdened by an eternal contradiction: from an ethnocentric point of view it is impossible to tell a version of Trianon that could be valid in all successor countries. Nowadays, we – Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Ukrainians, and so on – do not have a consensual narrative about our common history under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We cannot answer the question ‘what happened to us, former citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (K.u.K.), in 1920?’Reference Benko, Hanula, Hollý, Hudek, Michela, Rybářová, Sabol, Schvarc, Segeš, Šoltés, Vörös and Zavacká 27
At the same time, the social memory of Trianon is also well shaped. Paradoxically, its commemoration rituals, slogans and visualisations were produced extremely fast, immediately after 1920 and they have managed to survive the past hundred years. It was a clear symbolic system, which communicated a whole universe of national resentment called ‘Trianon’. This was not only so in Hungary: as we know, all successor states used to have similar ethnocentric identity politics in the interwar period. Hungary forced an official version of national mourning whereas the neighbouring countries vehemently prevented their Hungarian minorities from taking part in it, and celebrated the birth of their own nation states.
The historical metaphor of Trianon revolved around the experience of unclaimed loss and defeat. Since metaphorical speech was employed, the contemporaries could evade naming the concrete object of loss. Almost anything could be meant by it – from territory, population through middle power status to economic and social resources, and so on. An orgy of emotions followed: the country got ‘amputated’, its territory was ‘stolen’, and its inhabitants were ‘kidnapped’.
Meanwhile, contemporary historians know that Trianon was not a social trauma for the whole population of former Great Hungary. What is more, there were people living in the ‘lost’ territories, and more than just a few of them, for whom the new state borders caused unexpected joy. Let me take the case of Czechoslovakia as an example. In 1920, millions of Slovaks were happy to have gained their independent statehood, to see their discrimination under dual Monarchy end, their mobility improve, and their chances of political representation multiply – they turned from an oppressed minority into a victorious majority, a partner nation in Czechoslovakia. Somewhat later, when the uncertainties of belonging ended, tens of thousands of Hungarians now living in Czechoslovakia were also grateful for not having to live in the Hungary of Horthy – and the gap between the two political systems only widened during the two decades of the existence of the First Czechoslovak Republic. There were more than just a few who wanted Czechoslovak ‘rule’ to return after the reacquisitions of 1938.
This shows that the metaphor of Trianon that has now entered even scholarly discourse is ethnocentric as it focuses exclusively on the Hungarians and thus it retrospectively ‘Magyarizes’ multinational Upper Hungary. The use of the metaphor does not automatically mean recognition of the losses felt by individual Hungarians either since these losses are mixed with the abstract losses of a whole state which can only partially be experienced by individuals . The possibility of a free passage between the realms of reason and instinctive emotions is thereby created.
It is hard to conceive of states suffering from trauma. This contradiction is usually overcome through reference to the imagined community of the nation, which in the metaphor of Trianon appears (as opposed to the K.u.K. metaphor) as a nation state and not as a state nation (Staatsnation). In this homogenising interpretation, there is no place for the heterogeneous experience of individual loss, in spite of the fact that this is precisely the level where we ought to discuss individual traumas (although tragedy might be a more appropriate term even here).
We know precious little about individuals and families traumatised as a consequence of Trianon and certainly not enough to base the Trianon phenomenon of today on the testimonies of this perhaps very large group. Nor is it legitimate to call Trianon a trauma that impacts us even today, merely through referring to their individual suffering. The works of Miklós Zeidler, Balázs Ablonczy and Dávid Turbucz give us some familiarity with the machinery of revisionist propaganda but this is only a small fragment of the communicative memory of Trianon in the interwar years.Reference Ablonczy 28 We continue to lack the presentation of the direct experience of those ‘annexed away’, the everyday experiences of living within the new state borders, the specific reactions of local communities to partition and the new social identities that the change of borders required.
Based on the sporadic research we have, it seems probable that Hungarian people living close to the border (and more generally all those who were assigned to the neighbouring states) became dramatically disappointed with the politics of Hungary and the Hungarian state in 1920. Their experience was that of being left alone, not being wanted by anyone and not being able to trust anyone. When we use the psychological meaning of trauma in its strict sense, it means the unclaimed experience of Trianon, which remains suppressed and in the unconscious until today – this is what may have valid consequences even today.
Looking at interwar Hungarian society, the middle class became the medium of the Trianon feeling, regardless of political orientation and ethnic background. The language reproduced by the revisionist propaganda of the political elite was amazingly successful with all social groups of this middle class, although it could not reach the lower social classes, including the poor agrarian population.
Trianon and the Holocaust
And yet, how could it happen that despite the different kinds of experience involved, the story of Trianon was a – sociologically speaking – extremely integrative narrative in the interwar period? The horror of the half million dead and 1.5 million wounded soldiers and 1,800,000 war prisoners, the war neurosis (the so-called ‘shell shock’) affecting hundreds of thousands of front soldiers, and all further social trauma rooted in the unimaginable violence, starvation and the 1918 flu pandemic did not spare any family. From today’s perspective, Trianon overshadows the memory of the First World War, although once it had been part of the war’s social complexity. Social anomy during the war was unmanageable in both everyday life and social policy. It is no wonder that the traumatic occurrences of the Grand War were sublimated into national mourning and the desire for revenge. The old-new Hungarian political elite, by receiving state sovereignty, could have tried to reintegrate post-war society by democratic and inclusive politics – but it did not happen that way. The Trianon myth temporarily helped to restore the pre-war power structure, and to stabilie the shattered social order, at least within the upper and middle classes.
In current social memory, it has not become clear yet that fulfilling of the desire for revenge went hand in hand with the persecution, deportation and extermination of Jewish citizens. The scapegoating mechanism, which began in 1919, reached its final chapter in 1944–1945. And not only in today’s Hungary but also in the former – bigger – one. Moreover, the Trianon myth incorporated the idealisation of the Hungarian minorities living in the neighbouring countries. Thus, we also have to check, finally, their role in the Shoah.
Looking back on the political and cultural life of Hungarian minorities in the neighbouring countries during the interwar period, Hungarian Jewry became an important component of this minority politics. Anti-Semitism as it permeated society in Hungary, blaming the Jews for the loss in the First World War and Trianon, did not sink deep roots in minority communities abroad. These minorities had to relearn anti-Semitism after 1938, although they did so pretty fast. In the infernal escalation of anti-Semitism, the responsibility of Hungarian minorities in the re-annexed territories was, if possible, bigger than that of the mother country: they allowed that even those Jewish communities that earlier had shared their fate as brothers and sisters in exile were deprived of their rights, goods and finally their lives in the beat of a heart.
Conclusion: From War Neurosis to Restorative Nostalgia
To sum up, the complex made up of all pains, wounds and mourning of First World War was sublimated and therefore minimised and repressed with the help of the Trianon metaphor. From the very beginning, this metaphor contains an immanent element of ethnocentrism and anti-Semitism. Trianon is inseparably linked to the history of Hungarian nationalism, anti-Semitism and the Shoah. If the current construction of the trauma of Trianon retains its hegemonic position in Hungarian social memory, excluding the Holocaust, it will continue to function in competition with other myths and it will block, as we actually see in Hungarian politics of memory, the reckoning with the past. Emotionalising history writing that way does not help, although the temptation to participate in forming the current politics of history is enormous. It makes no sense to say, as in our new Historikerstreit, that ‘Trianon and the Holocaust were tightly connected components of the tragic failure of Hungarian nation-building’, if in another sentence one stresses that ‘Trianon caused a trauma that affects us even today.’
This oscillation between analytic understanding and political involvement is not new in the Hungarian history of ideas at all. In the autumn of 1918, the Fifth International Congress of Psychoanalysis was held in Budapest. All today’s classics from Freud to Ferenczi took part in the event. Its theme was, not by accident, war neurosis.Reference Freud, Ferenczi, Abraham, Simmel and Jones 29 Hundreds of thousands of mentally injured soldiers came home from the front. War neurosis, or, to use a presentist term, ‘post traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD), as a basic psychological concept to understand war experiences, was in the air. But, the new hegemonic cultural and political concept of Trianon does not resonate with this concept at all. (By the way, the first steps of the Horthy regime included the expulsion of psychoanalysis from the medical – and more generally from the cultural – discourse.) Human suffering and mourning were suddenly replaced by revenge and self-victimisation of the nation in the propaganda of the interwar period. The politics of history and, in general, identity politics may win such battles against scientific analysis over a long time. In 2010, it was still debatable, but in 2014 it turned into a commonplace that Trianon was, is and will be, the trauma of Hungarian society – without ever defining the meaning of the concept.
Éva Kovács is a sociologist, Head of the Department of Methodology and History of Sociology in the Institute of Sociology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Research Program Director at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. She does research on the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, on memory and remembrance, and on Jewish identity in Hungary and Slovakia. She has authored five monographs, edited eight volumes and published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals. She co-founded the audio-visual archive ‘Voices of the Twentieth Century’ in Budapest.
