2.1. The Context of Historiograpy: The Canon of National Liberal Historiography

In 1898, in the eighth volume of the millennial History of the Hungarian Nation, Henrik Marczali (1856–1940), some years later professor and doctoral dissertation director to Gyula Szekfű, in evaluating Rákóczi’s historical role, significance and influence, summed up the canon of national liberal historiography on the issue as follows:

In his History of Hungary published in 1911 in the series Library of Culture, Marczali assessed the independence movement led by Rákóczi (1703–1711), his historical role, the Treaty of Szatmár (1711) and Rákóczi’s emigration (1711–1735) as follows, presumably based on his university lectures:

In Henrik Marczali’s interpretation the revolt prevented assimilation and thereby altered Hungary’s subordinated and weightless position within the Habsburg Empire. Rákóczi’s departure into emigration was an unselfish, dignified and wise act, in his opinion. He formulated this opinion after giving an empathic and objective review of the exile, its possibilities and special characteristics, of the exiled person’s intentions, deeds and dilemmas, embedded in the international context.

What Gyula Szekfű questioned in 1913 was not only the cult of Rákóczi by Kálmán Thaly (1839–1909), politician and amateur historian, and the confessional closing passages of Sándor Márki’s Rákóczi biography, but also the Whig interpretation of Hungarian history, the pertinent canon of liberal historiography. To this canon he came somewhat closer in his Der Staat Ungarn of 1918, the volume on the eighteenth century of his Hungarian History of 1931 and Hungarian History in Brief of 1939, as well as in his essay The National Character in Our History. However, his concept of Rákóczi was only modified in details and remained unchanged in the essence. Notably, contrary to the national liberal canon, he insisted that one could not do justice to Rákóczi who rejected the Treaty of Szatmár and to Sándor Károlyi who concluded it, at the same time. These – in his view – mutually cancelled each other out. In this either–or alternative, he took the side of Sándor Károlyi in opposition to Rákóczi.

2.2. The Context and Parallels of Memory Politics

The very successful Hungarian writer Mór Jókai (1825–1904) kept a picture above his bed of the execution of the 13 Hungarian generals hanged in Arad after the fall of the 1848/49 war of liberation. And he prayed for Francis Joseph I, emperor of Austria and king of Hungary, every day: the person in whose name the executions were carried out in Arad and Pest, and who was the reason why Lajos Kossuth had to die in exile. By Jókai’s time, everything breathed fusion of irreconcilable figures, events and values torn from their historical context and desiccated into abstract schemes, such as Ferenc Rákóczi and Sándor Károlyi, the 13 martyrs of Arad and Francis Joseph, independence and compromise with foreign rule. It was Francis Joseph who did not let the election-winning opposition form a government until they had given up the most important points of their programme. The independence-party opposition that formed the government in 1906 offset their political failure with symbolic politics. Its main achievements were bringing home and reburying the ashes of Rákóczi, Thököly and Ilona Zrínyi, as well as the codification of the historical merits of Ferenc Rákóczi II sanctioned by this very ruler. At the 1910 elections the one-time opposition – now governing – parties were defeated and the former governing party was given the chance to form a government. ⁶

Ferenc Rákóczi II, together with Lajos Kossuth (1802–1894), stood as a symbol of Hungarian independence and was put to eternal rest in the crypt of Kassa’s St Elisabeth Cathedral as hero of the nation. Rákóczi and his comrades now being buried in Kassa (Košice), the town joined the group of the sacred shrines of national piety, remembrance and identity. It came to stand on a par with national symbols such as the Parliament, Buda Castle, St Michael square and the Matthias Corvinus statue in Kolozsvár (Cluj), Mohács, Arad, Világos (Șiria), Segesvár (Sighișoara), Nagycenk, the Kossuth-, Deák- and Batthyány-mausoleums and the graves of the army officers of the 1848–1849 war of liberation in Kerepesi cemetery and elsewhere. All these together constituted the national pantheon, similar to Rome’s Vittorio Emmanuelle memorial (‘the great type-writer’), the Paris Pantheon, Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s in London, the mass graves of the Spanish civil war, Monticello, the Capitol of Washington (together with the Jefferson, Washington and Lincoln memorials nearby and the monument of the Vietnam veterans), הכותל המערב(the western wall of the Jerusalem temple, the wailing wall), יד ושם(Yad Vashem), the graves of those buried on Mount Herzl, Katyn, and Auschwitz, all of which are lieux de memoire, places of national memory, halls of national identity. For the Americans the terrorist attacks against the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 did not only mean the death of thousands. It also meant that a symbol of the United States was attacked. The dead are mourned individually and collectively every year. By tracking down and killing the mastermind behind the terror attack, Osama bin Laden, the Americans avenged the dead along with the damage done to their national dignity.

The construction of memory is not always unidirectional. There are innumerable examples of parallel memory constructions, rival, conflicting and often mutually denunciatory memories and victimologies. Such are the places of commemoration of Francoists and Republicans, including the mass graves explored upon civilian demand in Spain. Tensions and conflicts between Estonian and Russian memories surfaced in the spring of 2007 when the Soviet heroes’ monument, the bronze statue of the Soldier of the Red Army in the main square of Tallinn, was dissembled, moved to a cemetery and re-installed there, triggering off a series of disturbances in Tallinn.Reference León ⁷ Contesting republican and royalist lieux de memoire in Paris range from the Place de la Concorde through the Jeanne d’Arc monument to the Madeleine. An annually repeated instance of symbolic civil war is the protestant demonstrators’ procession through the Catholic neighbourhoods of Belfast celebrating a victory won more than 400 years earlier. An epitome of the construction of parallel memories is the division of the Leuven University library in Belgium: the library and the catalogue cards of the first half of the alphabet remained in the Flemish university and the second half of the cards went over to the newly founded Walloon University. The transformation of Breslau into Wroclaw was served by the population resettlements just as much as by the transfer of statues and institutions from Lwow-turned-Lviv. In the cemetery of Lviv/Lwow/Lemberg, Polish teenage soldiers and the warriors of Bandera’s Ukrainian army interred in iron-cross shaped graves lie side by side, as if continuing the hostilities. Rigómező/Kosovo (Kосово Поље, Fushë Kosova) has different meanings for the Serbs and the Albanians. Mohács is ‘the great cemetery of national greatness’ for the Hungarians and a place of victory for the Ottomans. There is rivalry between the parallel Romanian and Hungarian main squares of Kolozsvár (Cluj). In what might be conceived of as a symbolic civil war, the rival Hungarian post-communist policies of memory pit Trianon, the Shoa and the Gulag against the one another.Reference Thum ⁸ The parallel constructions of memory, the conflicts of policies of identity are the symbolic civil wars escalating into political hysterias between communities of memory from Ireland to Greece, from Ukraine to Spain, each declaring themselves victims, with hurt self-respect and seeking reparation at any cost.

In Hungary, István Bocskai (1557–1606), Gábor Bethlen (1580–1629), Imre Thököly (1657–1705), Ferenc Rákóczi II and Lajos Kossuth (1802–1894) were and still are symbols of Hungarian independence and self-government.Reference Dénes ⁹ Rákóczi’s historical significance was codified by the Hungarian parliament seven years before the release of Rákóczi in Exile. In Austria, the freedom fighters of Rákóczi’s age, called kuruc, were krucitürks or Christian Turks, havoc-wreaking auxiliary troops of the Ottoman Empire and not only in the eyes of the ruling dynasty. In and around Tarpa, Hungary, as well as in several villages along the river Leitha, Kuruc Tage were (and are still) held to remember that in days of yore the kuruc fighters set fire to their villages and to commemorate the villagers’ survival. In the ideology of Hungarian independence it was a hard nut to crack how to reconcile the exemplary anti-Habsburg struggles with loyalty to the Habsburg monarch. On the other hand, the cult of the freedom fights was a source of grave tensions in the thinking of the ruling party in the Dualist period (1867–1918).

What Gyula Szekfű’s book rejected was not only Kálmán Thaly’s dilettantism and Sándor Márki’s devotion, but also the positive evaluation of freedom fights (all of them, not only the revolt led by Rákóczi), which had an unquestionable weight in the Hungarian national liberal master narrative, from the History of the Hungarian Nation published for the millennium to Henrik Marczali’s History of Hungary released in 1911. He depreciated them and banished them from the realm of symbolic politics. In this way, he resolved – but resolved at this cost – the contradictions between the uncritical and false acclamations for, and the flatly negative critiques against, the freedom fights. That, in turn, brought him closer to the anti-kuruc pamphlets and aulic historiography of earlier times, and to the position of diversely motivated advocates of Austrian centralization and anti-nationalist modernization including, among others, the circle of Franz Ferdinand (planning to federalize the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy). He certainly did not write his book upon commission from anyone. He wrote it by his own will and initiative, somewhat rashly. The political situation was such that some people sympathized with his book and some rejected it as unacceptable, particularly because its reception transgressed the boundaries of professional criticism. And it did transgress them, which made it extremely hard or almost impossible to elicit objective, convincing and authentic professional reviewing, although it would have been vitally important for the author.