Persistent Illusions: Visual Culture and Historical Memory in Interwar Hungary

Persistent Illusions

Visual Culture and Historical Memory in Interwar Hungary

Nóra Veszprémi

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.Spectacles of Renewal

2.Irredentist Spacetime

3.History into Landscape

4.The Archive and the Ruin

5.Heroes and Rebels

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

0.1. View of Freedom Square, Budapest, with the Irredentist Sculpture Group in 1943.

1.1. Decorations for 1 May 1919 in Budapest with busts of Lenin and Karl Liebknecht.

1.2. Page from the 22 November 1919 issue of the magazine Képes Krónika with scenes from Horthy’s procession on 16 November 1919.

1.3. Andor Dudits, Oath in the Vérmező, sketch, 1920, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest.

1.4. Mihály Bíró, In the Woods of Orgovány (Horthy V), 1920, National Széchényi Library, Budapest.

1.5. Mihály Bíró, The Beasts (Horthy XVII), 1920, National Széchényi Library, Budapest.

1.6. Tibor Gönczi-Gebhardt, poster for the Saint Emeric jubilee, 1930, National Széchényi Library, Budapest.

1.7. Ferenc Sidló, Saint Stephen, Székesfehérvár, 1938.

1.8. Sándor Légrády, stamp series for the Saint Stephen jubilee, 1938.

1.9. Noémi Ferenczy, Saint Stephen tapestry, 1940–1941, Jósa András Museum, Nyíregyháza.

2.1. János Pásztor, East, 1920, and Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl, North, 1920.

2.2. Ferenc Sidló, West, 1920, and István Szentgyörgyi, South, 1920.

2.3. Cover of Ottó Légrády, ed., Justice for Hungary: The Cruel Errors of Trianon (Budapest: Légrády Brothers, 1930).

2.4. Postcard depicting the Reliquary Country Flag, c. 1929.

2.5. Lajos Márton, series of irredentist stamps, c. 1928, National Széchényi Library, Budapest.

2.6. Irredentist memorial in the Maria Theresa barracks, Budapest, 1927.

2.7. Sándor Petten, Hungarian for Hungarian, series of stamps, 1939.

3.1. Nándor Lajos Varga, Turkish Wars (Hungarian Past XXII), early 1930s/1940.

3.2. Nándor Lajos Varga, 1919 (Hungarian Past XXXVIII), early 1930s/1940.

3.3. Ernő Jeges, The Castle of Beckó/Beckov, illustration from the volume Vérző Magyarország, ed. Dezső Kosztolányi (Budapest: Pallas Nyomda, 1921), 81.

3.4. Nándor Lajos Varga, The Miracle Stag (Hungarian Past I), early 1930s/1940.

3.5. Jenő Haranghy, The Unity of Hungary, poster, 1919, National Széchényi Library, Budapest.

3.6. Ferdiš Duša, At the Black Váh (from the series Down the Váh), 1930–1933, Slovenská národná galéria, Bratislava.

3.7. Ferdiš Duša, Hričov (from the series Down the Váh), 1930–1933, Slovenská národná galéria, Bratislava.

3.8. György (George) Buday, illustration from Bátorligeti mesék (Tales from Bátorliget), 1937.

3.9. Imro Weiner-Král, Devín (from the series Bratislava), 1937, Slovenská národná galéria, Bratislava.

3.10. Imro Weiner-Král, City and People (from the series Bratislava), 1937, Slovenská národná galéria, Bratislava.

4.1. Andor Dudits, Antal Grassalkovich with András Mayerhoffer, mural in the National Archives of Hungary, Budapest, 1927–1928.

4.2. Andor Dudits, The Golden Bull, mural in the National Archives of Hungary, Budapest, 1925–1926.

4.3. The Székesfehérvár Medieval Ruin Garden in 1938 with Saint Stephen’s Mausoleum in the background.

4.4. Vilmos Aba-Novák, The History of the Holy Right Hand, 1938, reconstruction early 1990s, Medieval Ruin Garden, Székesfehérvár.

4.5. The interior of Saint Stephen’s Mausoleum, c. 1940, with Vilmos Aba-Novák’s mural The Mystery of the Holy Crown.

4.6. Vilmos Aba-Novák, The Mystery of the Holy Crown, detail.

4.7. Lili Sztehlo, two panels from the Saint Stephen window, 1938, reconstructed by Gábor Gonzales and Judit Fűri, 1997, Medieval Ruin Garden, Székesfehérvár.

4.8. Lili Sztehlo’s stained glass window with the Saint Stephen sarcophagus, Medieval Ruin Garden, Székesfehérvár, 2022.

5.1. Gyula Derkovits, Dózsa on the Throne of Fire (1514 IX), 1928–1929, Budapest History Museum—Museum Kiscelli, Municipal Gallery, Budapest.

5.2. Unknown lithographer after László Hegedűs, Matthias at the Gates of Vienna, teaching aid, 1913, Hungarian National Museum Historical Picture Gallery.

5.3. János Horvay, Lajos Kossuth monument, 1911–1927, Budapest, Kossuth Square.

5.4. Gyula Derkovits, Clash (1514 VI), 1928–1929, Budapest History Museum—Museum Kiscelli, Municipal Gallery, Budapest.

5.5. Gyula Derkovits, Dózsa on the Bastion (1514 V), 1928–1929, Budapest History Museum—Museum Kiscelli, Municipal Gallery, Budapest.

5.6. Gyula Derkovits, placard for workers’ demonstration, 1930, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest.

5.7. Nándor Lajos Varga, Dózsa (Hungarian Past XVI), early 1930s/1940.

5.8. The Gate of Heroes with Éva Lőte’s statues and Vilmos Aba-Novák’s Christ and Allegory of Action, 1936.

5.9. Vilmos Aba-Novák, Soldiers with Their Graves, detail from the Gate of Heroes, 1936.

5.10. Károly László Háy, The Death of Zrínyi (Between Two Pagans for One Homeland), 1941, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest.

5.11. Károly László Háy, History, sketch for a fresco, 1941. Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the support of many institutions and colleagues, without whom it would not have been possible to complete this book. First of all, I want to thank the European Research Council for funding my research for more than five years. From 2018 to 2024, I held a research fellowship that formed part of the ERC Advanced Grant project Continuity/Rupture: Art and Architecture in Central Europe 1918–1939. This funding not only provided me with invaluable research time and covered the costs of my work but also meant that I was part of a close-knit research team. The support, encouragement, and feedback I received from my colleagues over the years has been essential to this book and is present on every page. I am grateful to the principal investigator, Matthew Rampley, and to my colleagues Christian Drobe, Marta Filipová, and Julia Secklehner for all their advice, help, and friendship throughout the project. Special thanks are due to the project administrator, Jana Hájková, for her incredibly effective and patient support in all my administrative needs.

The project began at the University of Birmingham and subsequently moved to Masaryk University, Brno. I am grateful to both universities for the support they provided and to the Department of Art History, Curating, and Visual Studies at Birmingham and the Department of Art History in Brno for welcoming me. The University of Birmingham granted me an honorary fellowship after the project moved, helpfully providing me with a base in the United Kingdom. In 2023, I held a four-month visiting position at the Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities at Coventry University, where I greatly benefitted from discussions with colleagues.

In the past almost six years, many colleagues and friends have supported me in numerous ways—by helping me access sources, providing me with information, discussing my ideas with me, giving me feedback on drafts, inviting me to present or publish my research. I am grateful for all the help I have received. In particular, I would like to thank Samuel Albert, Eszter Békefi, Elizabeth Benjamin, Katarína Benˇová, Francesca Berry, Judit Boros, Wendy Bracewell, Barbara Büki, Lenka Bydzovská, Cornelia Cabuk, Orsolya Danyi, Gábor Egry, Kati Evans, Robert Evans, Tim Haughton, Michaela Hojdysz, Claire Jones, Anna Kopócsy, Nazar Kozak, Janet Landay, Zsóka Leposa, Elizabeth L’Estrange, Walter Moberly, Radka Nokkala Miltová, Bernadett Piskolti, T. Csaba Reisz, Klaus Richter, Enikő Róka, Juliet Simpson, Camilla Smith, Anita Szarka, László Százados, Erika Szívós, György Szücs, Robert Waterhouse, and András Zwickl.

I am grateful for the editorial support I received from Bethany Wasik at Cornell University Press and to all who contributed to the publishing process. I also want to thank the two anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful comments, which have been extremely helpful.

It would not have been possible to sustain this long project without the support and companionship of my friends, who were always there for me even when we were separated by thousands of kilometers and COVID lockdowns. As always, I am grateful to my family, Tamás Veszprémi, Zsuzsanna Németh, Ágnes Veszprémi, and Éva Veszprémi, for the countless ways in which they have unfailingly supported and encouraged me in these long, and often difficult, years.

Introduction

Memorials usually commemorate events or people. In Budapest, in 1921, a new memorial commemorated space (fig. 0.1). The previous year, the Treaty of Trianon signed in Versailles had codified Hungary’s new borders, awarding two-thirds of the country’s former territory to neighboring states. Inaugurated in January 1921 in Freedom Square (Szabadság tér) in the city center, the Irredentist Sculpture Group consisted of four sculptures, each representing a direction on the compass and a corresponding former region of Hungary. In the allegorical figures, the lost lands materialized in an urban square in the center of the capital, marking out a space where crowds could gather to commemorate the country’s territorial loss. Freedom Square had previously been associated with the memory of the 1848 revolution. From the moment of its inauguration, the Irredentist Sculpture Group overwrote these old meanings with a new message that would profoundly shape Hungarian politics and culture in the next two decades.

Figure 0.1.

Carl Lutz, View of Freedom Square, Budapest, with the Irredentist Sculpture Group in 1943.

Photo: Archiv für Zeitgeschichte ETH Zürich / Agnes Hirschi / fortepan.hu

As individual works of art, the irredentist sculptures followed nineteenth-century models. Stylistically, they could hardly be seen as innovative. Nevertheless, their conflation of spiritual and material space and their reinterpretation of an urban square through their mere presence were definitely unsettlingly modern. Analyzing identity and ritual in Italian Fascism, Mabel Berezin has described how Fascism colonized time and the everyday by inscribing its ideology into patterns of daily life through recurring events and commemorations.¹ Almost two years before Benito Mussolini took power in Italy, the irredentist sculptures similarly appropriated central Budapest to inscribe a spiritual vision of the former Greater Hungary into the fabric of the city and the daily routines of its inhabitants. They proclaimed that understanding national territory as a transcendent, indivisible whole was an essential element of Hungarian national identity, a principle to live by in every moment. Miniature versions and images of the sculptures cropped up everywhere in Hungarian public life—in pubs, in shops, on postage stamps—to disseminate this message. The sculptures were old-fashioned in a formal sense. Nevertheless, intended to reshape broader understandings of historical time and space rather than just conveying a certain interpretation of a specific event, they were at the forefront of developments in their own time and were powerful vessels of meaning that foreshadowed the ideological trajectory of interwar Europe.

This book explores how visual representations of the historical past in interwar Hungary helped reframe cultural memory by saturating various aspects of modern life and wide sections of public discourse. I argue that modernity and modernism played a crucial role in the culture of the conservative regime headed by Admiral Miklós Horthy (1868–1957), influencing the visual representation of history in the service of the regime’s memory politics. Furthermore, I trace a variety of ways in which modernist artists tackled historical subject matter, whether expressing viewpoints that supported, complicated, challenged, or rejected official ideologies. My approach is unconventional for two reasons: First, images of history are rarely considered central to early twentieth-century modern culture; in fact, modernists around the turn of the century often defined themselves and their art in opposition to the historicism of the previous period. Second, the official culture of the Horthy regime in Hungary is rarely characterized as modern. Before 1989, the artistic production of the regime was routinely described as historicist and contrasted with modernism, as exemplified by the comprehensive handbook on Hungarian art between 1919 and 1945 published by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1985, which discussed most official art under the heading Historicism and Academicism.² From the 1980s onward, an increasing number of studies have complicated this simplified picture by examining right-wing modernist movements, modern official commissions, the broad appeal and political diversity of neoclassicism in interwar art, and artistic interactions that crossed the political spectrum.³ Research has highlighted the strong opposition between national and modern—the latter conceptualized as alien—that informed the ideology of nationalism in early twentieth-century Hungary and the ensuing quest for an acceptable national modern art.⁴ There has, however, been no systematic attempt to analyze the modernity of the Horthy regime—one that would account for stylistically conservative yet ideologically innovative works such as the Irredentist Sculpture Group as well as for the more clearly modernist formal idioms of official art.

Interwar right-wing movements often rejected modernist art, but they also drew on it in their self-representation. In exploring the modernity of the Horthy regime, this book draws on international scholarship that has, in the past decades, analyzed the ambivalent relationship between modernism and right-wing politics with much nuance. In Modernism and Fascism, Roger Griffin described Fascism as an alternative modernism that offered new answers to the tensions of modernity.⁵ As he noted in the book, many of the most innovative modern artists offered their services to right-wing regimes, even in Nazi Germany, where products of modern art were famously branded as entartete Kunst (degenerate art). In Fascist Italy, where art was not restricted stylistically, many official commissions took on an impeccably modern, often radically avant-garde form.⁶ Elsewhere, too, modernist art was often married with right-wing or conservative politics, and art historians have explored examples of this, as well as of moderate and classicist modernisms, from Poland to France.⁷

Horthy’s regime in Hungary was a right-wing authoritarian system.⁸ It was built on resentment against the Versailles peace treaties and hence on belligerence against neighboring countries. Its inherent antisemitism manifested not only in exclusionary rhetoric but also in anti-Jewish legislation and culminated in the Hungarian Holocaust. Its suppression of left-wing activism affected many modernist and avant-garde artists, who emigrated around the time of its inception and could only return—if they chose to—in the late 1920s. Many government ideologues and right-wing critics voiced their hostility to modern art in terms resembling the Nazi rhetoric of entartete Kunst; the idea that modernism was foreign and alien to the national spirit had been deeply rooted in Hungarian nationalism since the late nineteenth century.⁹ Nevertheless, although its political and cultural elites sought to build close contacts with Mussolini’s Italy, Horthy’s Hungary was not a Fascist state. Its governance allowed for some political competition, and it was not ruled by one man alone. Despite borrowing some of the aesthetics of Fascism, it lacked the revolutionary zeal of the Italian movement and was much more conservative. Nevertheless, it did not ban modern art for formal or stylistic reasons; works directly criticizing the regime faced censorship, but the art world was otherwise not restricted by the state. Indeed, modernism played an important role in some of the regime’s prestige projects, and in such cases, the political as well as the artistic fault lines became blurred. At the Hungarian pavilion of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, one contributor was the Gobelin artist Noémi Ferenczy (1890–1957), a lifelong Communist whose art was celebrated as a key achievement of Hungarian modernism by prominent progressive critics (see chap. 1). Despite her political convictions and artistic approach, Ferenczy participated in the 1937 pavilion and gained a major commission in connection with the 1938 Saint Stephen jubilee, the regime’s most extensive and lavish representation of its ideology as it entered its final, destructive phase.

Illuminating these blurred areas is an important aim of this book, but there is more at stake than adding one more example, one more country and regime, to the panorama of right-wing modernisms already discussed in literature. Focusing on the relationship between visual culture, historical memory, and modernity, this book explores how great ruptures in the present can change understandings of the past, and how the visual imagery of these new interpretations becomes structurally embedded in the modern world. In the aftermath of the First World War, Europe struggled to make sense of the devastation and the ensuing seismic shifts that reshaped the continent. Empires disappeared, new countries were born, national borders were moved. Communism erupted onto the world stage as a movement with immense international resonance. Industrialization seemed to be speeding up. As Walter Benjamin so poetically put it: A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.¹⁰ According to Benjamin, the forceful, rapid modernization brought about by the war had extinguished the last sparks of a dying tradition—that of storytelling based on memory. The memory of the time before the war was no longer organic; it was dislocated from a present that no longer understood. In the fundamentally transformed context of postwar Europe, the past had to be narrated and visualized in new ways. Even if the stories and images seemed old, they were no longer the same. This book examines these transformations and their continued resonance in twenty-first-century cultural memory through the example of Hungary.

The Treaty of Trianon, which drastically reduced the country’s territory, was the core event that defined Hungarian politics in the next decades. The conceptualization of this loss as a decisive national catastrophe formed a cornerstone of the ideology of the Horthy regime, and the drive to win back territories fueled right-wing nationalist movements. Resentment over Trianon stretched across the political spectrum and played a role in Social Democratic and Communist activism, too.¹¹ Although often fashioned in Hungarian commentary as a unique catastrophe that concluded a long line of national catastrophes, Trianon was not one of its kind; it was the Hungarian version of the enormous shifts affecting countries across Europe after the Great War. Several other countries had lost territories in the peace treaties or had expected to gain more—so much so, in fact, that revisionism, the idea that the treaties should be revised, can be investigated comparatively as a Europe-wide, consistent ideology.¹² Changes in countries’ borders meant that concepts of nation, history, culture, and national territory were also reshaped. German culture provides many examples of this from the 1920s—not all of them associated with the Nazis—stretching across a broad political spectrum.¹³ Even in countries that had benefitted territorially from the peace treaties, historical memory needed to be reframed. Some of these countries, such as Czechoslovakia, were brand-new, and history was indispensable for creating and shaping national identities and loyalties.¹⁴

How did these profound geographical and political shifts change the popular perception of national history? How were these changes related to constructions of national identity? An examination of the representation of history in interwar Hungarian political culture offers intriguing lessons in this regard. Bringing this together with the question of modernity and modernism takes this line of inquiry further. In the early twentieth century, modern technology was transforming culture and its consumption. Understandings of nation, of identity, of the role of one’s nation in the world, and of national and world history were disseminated in brand-new ways. In modern culture, the imagery of nation, country, and history could envelop the public like never before, suffusing the everyday and reshaping people’s mental maps with a previously unseen force. Art and visual culture engaged people through new modes of expression, whether through the formal innovations of modernism or through traditional imagery that employed the features of modernity to colonize the mental and physical spaces of everyday life.

Today, perhaps, we are in a particularly salient moment to assess these developments. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has called the world’s attention to how conceptions of history, disseminated through the latest technology and tailored to today’s society, can serve to construct and impose a revised understanding of patriotism, of the meaning of Russianness and even of truth itself.¹⁵ It is timely to discuss how such constructs are formed and disseminated and how old and new technologies and traditional and modern forms of expression can simultaneously participate in these processes. This book explores how historical memory is formed through political agency but also how some of its imagery lives on as political interests change. In today’s Hungary, irredentist imagery is still present: invoking a historical trauma, it . . . speaks to current feelings of loss and disenfranchisement, offering symbolic compensation through the transference of historical glory, pride, and self-esteem within a mythological framework.¹⁶ Many images and notions discussed in this book possess a continued allure.

This is why the modernity of the Irredentist Sculpture Group matters. Interpretations of history formed in the interwar period are often long-lived and resistant. We still inhabit the modern culture in which they were created, and the answers they offer to the ambiguities and crises of modernity seem familiar. This book explores products of modern visual culture and the mental frameworks they reflected and shaped. By analyzing examples from Hungary, I aim to offer a more general lens for examining the ideological shifts in Europe after the First World War and the role of visual culture in making ideas and identities feel tangibly real.

Locating Memory

Emphasizing the locations where past events had taken place was an important element in making historical narratives tangible; hence, the question of memory and space meanders through this book. The connection between the two is an essential aspect of the crisis in memory and identity reverberating across Europe after the First World War. The remembrance of Trianon in Hungary was a manifestation of this broader crisis, even if it was exploited by political propaganda to such an extent that this has become hard to see. Trianon certainly was—and is—a site of memory, a node in the nation’s collective memory that has a symbolic function in conceptualizations of national identity.¹⁷ In the interwar period, however, it was more than that; it was a central driver, an encompassing framework for the remembrance of the past. This was due to its immediate political significance and continuous exploitation by various political actors but also to how it expressed broader anxieties about nation and identity. These two aspects are almost impossible to disentangle. With its major territorial losses, Hungary was a new country. Historical memory had to be reframed to fit this new geopolitical reality. What did it mean to be Hungarian? Did Hungarian history equal the history of the Hungarian state? How could the important locations of Hungarian history be remembered if those locations now lay outside the borders? Throughout the book, and especially in chapters 2 and 3, I argue that the spatial dimension of history gained increased importance in interwar Hungary, and much of the visual culture expressing historical memory gave material form to these issues. As chapter 5 demonstrates, this was not restricted to products of official culture but also surfaced in the midst of its most strident opposition.

In recent historiography, interest has shifted from the purely political toward the cultural and social implications of post-1918 border changes in Central Europe.¹⁸ The cartographical imaginary has received attention in studies exploring the power of mental maps in political decision-making or the relationship between geographical research and nationalism.¹⁹ Originating from cognitive psychology, the concept of mental maps describes how we assign values to specific locations in our mental images of our spatial surroundings.²⁰ Their historical study explores how collective representations of an—experienced or imagined—spatial environment . . . affect processes of cultural group formation.²¹ Drawing on this line of inquiry, I employ the concept of mental mapping to investigate how the meanings of historically significant locations shifted after 1918. Throughout the chapters, a variety of examples—monuments, posters, book illustrations, stained glass windows—show how Trianon recalibrated the mental maps of interwar Hungarians. Meanings shifted, and the detached lands turned into one unified site of memory, while Dismembered Hungary was a site of disappointment but also one that stood in for the entirety of Greater Hungary. Works of art and visual culture expressed this in a wide variety of ways.²²

One iconic image—that of Greater Hungary with the new borders dissecting it—performed a large share of the memory work to reshape interwar Hungarian mental maps and would become ubiquitous in the interwar period in a wide variety of incarnations. There were, however, many other ways to invoke spatiality in commemoration. The memorial described earlier, the Irredentist Sculpture Group, is a case in point. In some way, monuments always connect space and time—they mark a location for commemorating events from the past. Literature on monuments tends to assume that until the late twentieth century, monuments did this in a simple and uniform way. The state-sponsored monument’s traditional function as self-aggrandizing locus for national memory, as James E. Young put it, was expressed in a large-scale, monumental object, permanently placed in a public space, that shouldered the memory work for its viewers by promoting the preferred interpretation of the past as unquestionable truth.²³ There is no doubt the Irredentist Sculpture Group has such a function, and chapter 2 describes how it molded the public remembrance of Trianon into a preferred narrative that remained influential for decades to come. Yet, in other ways, the irredentist sculptures differed from the model I have just described. Made of artificial stone, they were not intended as permanent. Although their figures were life-size, their ensemble was not monumental in the vein of public monuments that dominate the urban space around them; as figure 0.1 shows, they were dispersed under the trees, making them more reminiscent of the decorative sculptures of gardens than an imposing public monument. This was because the real monumentality of the Irredentist Sculpture Group lay in the empty space they marked out in front of them—a space for crowds and rituals. The monuments created an absence that had to be filled, a gesture particularly apt for commemorating the loss of territories.

As I explain in chapter 2, the rituals performed by various activist groups near the Irredentist Sculpture Group connected Trianon to other events of Hungarian history and even to the religious calendar. In this way, the sculptures defined national territory as a central lens through which to view historical time. A host of subsequent representations of territorial loss shaped Trianon into a framework for understanding Hungarian history and national identity. In the memory politics of the Horthy regime, previous national tragedies became prefigurations of Trianon. The tragic narrative forged in this process is a striking example of what Ann Rigney has called the scarcity of memory.²⁴ This phenomenon, where certain narratives provide a cultural framework for other stories [and l]ater events are superimposed on earlier ones to form memorial layers, explains how interwar interpretations of history fit into older narratives and how this ensured their resilience.²⁵ The metaphor of layering is itself spatial, and the example of Trianon in interwar Hungarian cultural memory shows how chronological narratives can merge with their spatial dimensions in national cultural memory as they historicize, and hence naturalize, concepts of national territory—the true shape of the country.²⁶

This brings me to another reason why the spatiality of memory is central to my investigation. The lands Hungary lost in 1920 were multiethnic. Incorporated into Czechoslovakia, Romania, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia), and Austria, the regions were home to speakers of Slovak, Romanian, German, Ruthenian, Yiddish, and Hungarian. From the nineteenth century, the national movements of different groups had created their own narratives, attaching their interpretations of history to places in the contested lands. The mental maps of different nationalisms overlapped and their narratives intertwined, necessitating a transcultural approach to memory.²⁷ In examining the politics of memory in visual culture, I highlight how the Hungarian government’s concepts of history and place clashed with other interpretations. Populations in the lost territories were, of course, important targets for Hungarian memory politics, which aimed to convey that Hungarian speakers—and the lands they inhabited—naturally formed part of the Hungarian nation, while other ethnic groups were also better off under the guidance of the Hungarian nation. Minorities in the contested territories were caught in the triadic nexus described by Rogers Brubaker—between the nationalizing nationalism of the state they lived in and the homeland nationalism of Hungary.²⁸ The overlaps and contrasts between the models of history promoted by the Hungarian government, the government of the nationalizing state, as well as of the various nationalities living together in the territories in question are wonderfully visualized in artworks that depict historical memory in geographical space. In chapter 3, I examine a range of historical landscapes that depict places in Slovakia and reveal kin-state Hungarian, minority Hungarian, Slovak, and Czechoslovak perspectives. In the ethnically diverse space of Central Europe, dissected by new borders and reshaped by new identity politics, it is always important to keep in mind this multiplicity of perspectives that opens up transnational vistas even in a book that largely focuses on Hungary itself.

By highlighting the reach of the historical narratives of the Hungarian state beyond its post-1920 borders, I have veered into a new topic: the memory politics of the Horthy regime. To introduce some of the themes examined in this book, I provide an introductory overview of the regime itself and the ideological uses of the past in its politics.

The Horthy Regime and Its Politics of Memory

The terms cultural memory, collective memory, social memory, and historical memory are often used interchangeably, with slight nuances in meaning, to denote common understandings of the past accepted by smaller or larger social groups. I have chosen historical memory as the central concept in this book to express that my focus is on events from the (often distant) past that belong to broader narratives of national history and receive attention from scholars of history as well as from the wider public. Nevertheless, I also employ the other terms when appropriate. Whether historical, cultural, or collective, these concepts of memory encompass not only the narratives societies construct about their past but also the practices and institutions that preserve these interpretations. Such narratives are fundamental to group identities, but they are always in flux, constantly reiterated and reshaped by memory practices. In this book, I do not treat historical memory as an entity that exists independently from the actions that shape it. The field of memory studies emphasizes that memory is a process rather than a fixed entity.²⁹ The shaping and mediation of collective memory involves ongoing work, while the canons and interpretations of memory sites are subject to constant revision in line with the political and cultural aims of different groups.³⁰ To highlight the role of political will in shaping historical memory, I often refer to the politics of memory.³¹

The Horthy regime cultivated an elaborate politics of memory in support of its political goals. Its opponents promoted their own alternative narratives, although with more limited means. At a time of crisis and insecurity, narratives that highlighted the continuous history of the nation, its ancient origins, and its justified claims to territories outside the borders had heightened appeal. This, again, was not unique to Hungary; such narratives—and with them, debates about the historical primacy and territorial rights of different groups—tend to resurface with greater ferocity in periods of national identity soul-searching.³² In many countries in East-Central Europe, the interwar period produced (often mythicized) narratives about national history that live on to this day.³³ This book examines artworks promoting some of these narratives and interpretations. It is therefore useful to provide an overview of the most important themes in the regime’s memory politics.

A central aim was to fit the chaotic events around the end of the First World War into a narrative that presented Horthy’s regime as the purveyor of hope. Assigning blame for Trianon to opponents was crucial. The regime defined itself in opposition to the two revolutionary regimes that had arisen, in quick succession, in the immediate aftermath of the war. As the Habsburg Empire disintegrated, in October 1918, the Hungarian government declared the end of the union with Austria. On 31 October, the so-called Aster Revolution elevated the liberal Count Mihály Károlyi (1875–1955), a prominent pro-independence politician, to lead the country as prime minister. Having formed a government of liberals and Social Democrats, on 16 November, Károlyi proclaimed the Hungarian People’s Republic. Governing a war-torn country while desperately trying to fend off attacks from Czech, Serb, and Romanian armies aiming to enforce their territorial claims, the People’s Republic could not hold. On 21 March 1919, the Social Democratic Party merged with the Hungarian Communist Party, a Bolshevik organization led by Béla Kun (1886–1938), and the Hungarian Soviet Republic was born. In existence for just 133 days, the Soviet Republic never truly consolidated itself and remained a chaotic conglomerate of various ideologies and ambitions. It comprised progressive ideas and a quest for positive change, which drew in some of the best minds of the time, but these coexisted with the brutality and die-hard dogmatism that ignited the Red Terror, the politically motivated murder of three to four hundred people across the country.³⁴ Faced with the Romanian invasion, a hostile Entente, and growing counterrevolutionary activity, the Revolutionary Council of Governance finally resigned. On 16 November 1919, Horthy, a central figure of the growing counterrevolutionary movement, triumphantly rode into Budapest on a white horse, leading his army and being celebrated by sympathizers.

Horthy’s march into Budapest was an iconic event, conceived as a symbolic recapture of the city. It was designed to overwrite the public events the Soviet Republic had held in the city just months before, especially the grandiose celebrations organized on 1 May. Chapter 1 examines these public spectacles and how they shaped memory and space in the city. Here, I am more concerned with how Horthy’s procession and its subsequent memorialization expressed the overall narrative that was beginning to form. The country’s territorial loss—only codified on 4 June 1920 by the Treaty of Trianon but in effect since late 1918, when Czech, Romanian, and Serbian forces swiftly occupied parts of what was still officially Hungary—was interpreted as a national catastrophe unfairly imposed on the country by hostile outsiders,