A museum curator with extensive experience in archives and art collections who has since become a scholar, Nóra Veszprémi sets herself the task of—both literally and metaphorically—translating the entanglements of interwar Hungarian art and politics into categories intelligible to a heterogeneous English-speaking readership. Having joined academia and the first European Research Council (ERC) project in art history focusing on the region, Continuity and Rupture in Central European Art and Architecture, 1918–1939 (which was concentrated on the successor states that emerged after the collapse of Austria-Hungary), after a long a decade as a nineteenth-century specialist in a main state museum in Hungary, her book invites also a readership familiar with her material, but one that is keen to see how she now reframes the “big picture” through the intersecting lenses of national, regional, and European historiographies.
Persistent Illusions claims that the Horthy regime’s memory and cultural politics, informed by Fascism’s alternative modernism, fused stylistic conservatism with ideological innovation—an argument Veszprémi develops through both top-down and bottom-up perspectives, spanning the banal and everyday as well as elite and official culture in the service of a revisionist foreign policy pursued by a country that had lost the war, large portions of its territory, and a significant share of its population. In dialogue with fellow scholars from the aforementioned ERC project, she identifies and analyzes visual configurations and semantic conglomerates—composites of seemingly competing ideologies such as modern versus national and vernacular versus elite (Marta Filipová, Modernity, History, and Politics in Czech Art [New York, 2019], and Julia Secklehner, Modernism in Central Europe Beyond the Metropolis [New York, 2024]). Her command of the visual material, her layered conceptual apparatus (notably Bakhtin’s chronotope [107–11], reworked into the notion of “irredentist spacetime” [69–101]), and her critical engagement with nationalist cultural production can be traced throughout her oeuvre, and partly back to the scholarship of Katalin Sinkó at the Hungarian National Gallery.
Veszprémi demonstrates in this vein how post–World War I irredentist memorials, along with subsequent left- and right-wing festive processions and jubilees, not only reorganized and colonized urban space for competing memory politics (chapter 1) but also, in a distinctly modern manner, reshaped the teleological understanding of national history (grasped by the notion of “irredentist spacetime,” chapter 2). By shifting the spatiality from the urban to the two-dimensional landscapes of illustrations and prints, the book exposes competing national expropriations of land and history, referring to either the elite culture or the essentialized vernacular people (chapter 3). Veszprémi further draws an illuminating parallel between the representational techniques of Geistesgeschichte in interwar historiography and the commissions of cultural politics, both of which deliberately blur the boundaries between historical documents and relics, history, and roman national—the symbolic narrative of a nation’s past (chapter 4). Finally, the malleability, overlap, and reappropriation of the Hungarian national pantheon by communists and nationalists alike in the interwar period (chapter 5) reinforces her argument—following Roger Griffin—for an expanded understanding of modernism that encompasses both revolutionary and reactionary positions (19).
Although Veszprémi foregrounds her engagement with the politics of memory surrounding the interwar Horthy regime, the book’s macro perspective also implies a more general positioning vis-à-vis the historiography of Hungarian political history. Veszprémi repeatedly argues that while interwar Hungary’s “right-wing authoritarian system” was not a Fascist state—lacking “revolutionary fervor” and retaining “conservative traits”—its ideology of regeneration and its “stylistically conservative yet ideologically innovative” official culture can nonetheless be understood through analytical frameworks developed for Italian Fascism by scholars such as Roger Griffin, Matthew Affron, and Mark Antliff, among others (3–4, 30–31). Her interpretation of the 1938 St. Stephen jubilee as a symbolic watershed—“from where a straight line led to the war and the Holocaust” (58, 89)—aligns the book with a revisionist, post-state-socialist historiographical tradition rooted in Miklós Lackó’s writings of the 1970s. These identified only some characteristics of the regime as Fascist, not the regime as a whole, and advocated for a differentiated periodization of the interwar years in contrast to the homogenizing accounts produced by Marxist historians of the 1950s.
Yet Veszprémi’s reading of state-funded cultural production and its initiators differs from recent scholarship on cultural policy. Veszprémi posits a fundamental continuity along “a shared program of bolstering the illusions of ideology through the venerable aura of historical facts” (142) between the ministerships of Kuno Klebelsberg (1922–31), described as a “firm believer in Hungarian cultural superiority,” and Bálint Hóman (1932–38; 1939–42), “a politician of the hard right” advancing “an image of history that was explicitly politicized” alongside “openly racist policies” (58–59, 139). Within this framework, the state-funded art scholarships in Rome in the 1930s functioned as an efficient mechanism for producing a skilled labor force capable of “fulfilling state and church commissions” in a modernist style (152–53). A recent concurrent interpretation construes Klebelsberg’s notion of Hungarian cultural superiority—central to his cultural and national politics—as resting largely on claims of “more favorable data of social statistics,” thereby omitting its ethnic aspects (Gábor Ujváry, Egy európai formátumú államférfi. Klebelsberg Kuno (1875–1932), [Pécs, 2014], 28, 160). Equally divergent is the neutralizing narrative that casts the Roman scholarship scheme as a recurring “triumph of culture over politics” (Ujváry, ibid., 122, and “Amikor a kultúra a politika fölé kerekedett…: Gerevich Tibor és a Római Magyar Akadémia,” Európai Utas 19, no. 2–3 [2008]: 74–82).
While offering a persuasive analysis, Veszprémi also explicitly acknowledges its limitations, from the shifting visibility of works that complicate assessments of their one-time significance (206) to the necessarily fragmentary picture produced by case studies in light of persistent lacunae in Hungarian art and cultural history. Her allusions to ostensibly grassroots organizations acting as proxies for the state in the implementation of cultural and memory politics (90–91), to the prevalence of (at times radical) right-wing positions among art historians closely tied to these bodies, and to the shift from early overlaps between populist (agrarian populists or népi) and left-wing movements in the 1920s to open hostility by the 1940s (191) point toward future research—and raise the hope that only Hungarian illusions, rather than our historiographical shortcomings, may prove persistent.
