London-based Hungarian freelance journalist Vali Tóth gave an excellent talk last year concerning contemporary journalism in Hungary and the impact of political transformation and the internet on news media.

Vali contextualised technological and political changes of the past decades, from the late 1970s when there were no direct phone calls between Szeged and Pécs, to the present day, where online news content is generated to attract the highest number of clicks from online visitors.

The Hungarian media landscape was transformed from a patrician Party-dominated system to a multi-party democracy in which influence over the media remained a political priority, and free market pressures discouraged investigative journalism in favour of plagiarism and superficial coverage of economic questions.

We discussed Hungarian media and journalism in a broader post-Communist context, and a few examples Vali provided of changing forms, content, language and presentation.

Mi a hír ma? Hír-e még, ami öt éve az volt? Hogyan alakult át a hírek tartalma és formája a modern technika jóvoltából? Mik a modern magyar sajtónyelv jellegzetességei? Hogyan változtatta meg az internet a magyar média, különösen a hírek nyelvezetét?

Knowledge of Hungarian is advantageous, but not compulsory. The talk will take place from 5.30 pm in Room 519 of UCL-SSEES, 16 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW.

Andrea Talabér recently presented the work of Hungarian historian and Open Society Archives director István Rév, together with articles from Népszabadság covering the official 15 March celebrations of 1967 and 1974. Andrea outlined Rév’s focus on the function of show trials, and the manipulation of personal histories (not to mention historical dates), within the context of a broader discussion of competing historical narratives, and national holidays and official ritual under socialism.

With reference to Rév’s work (in particular, the essays in Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Postcommunism, Stanford CA, 2005), Andrea noted the sheer number of ‘revolutionary’ public holidays in the early 1970s, (re-)burial practices, and archival ‘findings’ produced to rewrite history. Reading the Népszabadság articles (‘Gazdag program a forradalmi ifjúsági napokon’, 1967, and ‘Forradalmár elődeinkez méltóan dolgozunk, harcolunk’, 1974), we discussed the elevation of 1848 and erasure of 1919 from Hungarian Communist chronology, convergent interpretations of 1956 as an anti-Communist revolt, as well as the more general coincidence of rhetorical styles adopted by the Kádár regime and, the subject of a number of our earlier talks, the contemporary Right. 

2006

In her recent talk on the subject of her research in progress (nationalism in Hungarian popular culture), Jenny Rasell addressed a number of matters. Remarking on the sudden proliferation of nationalist symbols, and with reference to recent opinion polls and academic research on xenophobia, antisemitism, racism and homophobia in Hungary, Jenny presented a number of texts taken from various radical-right websites, weblogs and chat forums, as well as the Magyar Gárda oath.

Discussion focussed on symbols in popular culture (crosses, religious and medieval articles, maps, flags and so on), concepts of kinship, the promise to create order out of chaos, and the relationship between the parliamentary and (extra-parliamentary) radical right. We also considered the profile of the radical right, in terms of age, class, educational qualifications, and so on, and examined instances of ‘tough guy’ talk in colloquial Hungarian.

A pdf file of Pál Tamás’s recent research findings on radical right attitudes is available in Hungarian here, or in English.

We discussed the interwar népi-urbánus vita, with a view to understanding its context, semantics and contemporary articulation. Commonly referred to in English as the dispute between (agrarian) populists and urbanists (or ‘metropolitans’), and undoubtedly a major component of public political discourse since 1989, we began by reaching consensus on what it was not: a clash of two opposing worldviews, one rural and one urban. Rather, it was one cultural response to the economic and political crisis that gripped Europe and North America after the 1929 Wall Street crash, the articulation of two historically-constituted structures of understanding, from which alternative versions of modernisation emerge.

Where népi intellectuals distinguished themselves from ‘epigone’ romantics of the peasant myth, and urbánus ideas of the 1930s evolved from a critique of népi thought, the vita did nothing to clarify or even produce consensus on the terms of debate: nép, polgár, humanizmus, faj, szocializmus, harmadik út (the ‘third way’). All participants were reformist intellectuals hostile to the status quo, to the inequitable distribution of land, and to capitalism, and socialism, as it had been tried and tested in Hungary. We agreed that, as the 1930s wore on, the vita was frequently an exercise in antisemitism by other means, but that the critique of the city held primacy over resentment of Jews.

The interwar népi generation’s failed attempts to collaborate with the Gömbös government, and the various retractions made once the Anti-Jewish Laws came into being, provided a stark contrast with the utilisation of népi and urbánus narratives by contemporary urban élites vying for power. Indeed, the great bedrock of modern Hungarian discord had been appropriated and utilised by the Socialist state from 1948 onwards, and enjoyed a revival from the mid-1980s onwards, in oppositionist circles initially. The ideas of Pierre-André Taguieff and others helped clarify populism as a syncretic form of political speech, a distinctive style of political mobilisation, the very hybrid nature of which allowed the incorporation of Leftist and Rightist ideologies; its conceptual flexibility makes it attractive to both democratic and authoritarian/totalitarian structures. The polarisation of Hungarian politics today is not a straightforward continuation of interwar polemics, revived after ‘hiatus’ of Communism, but perhaps rather the reproduction of a symbolic politics, frequently dislocated from actual social cleavages, which mediates and revises history to suit. If one things has remained constant throughout, though, it is the utter instability of the term polgár. 

Police vans on Andrássy

On 5 July, the thirteenth annual Gay Dignity march (Meleg Méltóság Menet, or melegfelvonulás) took place in Budapest. On the same day in London, around half a million people celebrated Gay Pride; even Boris Johnson wore a pink cowboy hat on the procession. In Budapest, around one thousand people marched in between metal barriers, accompanied by twice as many police, and surrounded by several hundred ‘counter-demonstrators’, and a similar number of journalists and photographers. The march was attacked by various radical right-wing groups and individuals, and protected by the police.

Last year’s Pride events represented something of a turning point in Hungarian LGBT history. The festival was opened by Gábor Szetey, then Secretary of State for Personnel, who came out. Two days later, however, participants in the parade were subjected to acts of organised violence, and received inadequate (if any) protection from the police. Szetey was the first, and to date, the only openly gay member of government. In an interview published in Magyar Narancs, he said:

If the question is whether all of this would still have happened had I not come out, then my answer would be yes. The counter-demonstration was organized, we knew weeks beforehand that something was being planned. It is possible that my speech intensified the extremists’ passions, which makes me feel bad, but sadly we must be clear that since 19 September [2006], we have been living in a different country than [the one] before. If we pay close attention, the Árpád flags, the faces and the symbols were the same on Saturday as they were [during the riots]. This is an extreme-right group which is not large, but is vocal and provocative.

One year on, Szetey is no longer an MP, the radical right is still in carnival mood, and it is still unclear whether throwing eggs at people is a protected form of free speech under Hungarian law. As soon as permission for the 2008 march was finally granted (the Budapest Chief of Police had originally banned it on 11 June on the grounds that disruption to traffic would be too great), the drums started beating in the virtual realm of the radical right. Bearing in mind the events of the previous year, press coverage of various ‘calls to arms’ to defend the Hungarian capital, and the firebombing of a gay club on 2 July, participants in the 2008 melegfelvonulás, whether gay or counter-counter demonstrators, took part in the knowledge that the threat of physical danger was very real. The march was marshalled between sets of temporary metal fencing, separated from would-be lynchers by further fencing, and escorted by numerous riot police and vans from start to finish. The march lasted roughly two hours, one hour to get down Andrássy, and one penned in at 56-osok tere (formerly Felvonulási tér), waiting and wondering how we would get out.

Although the felvonulás was not much of a celebration or carnival, it was a galvanising experience for all those who marched. Everyone remained calm, despite the enormously tense atmosphere. There were surreal moments: both sides documenting each other through the fences, so that people were filming themselves being filmed, and the Budapest police have since posted photographs of counter-demonstrators they want to identify on their website. Afterwards, the uneventfulness of an early Saturday evening in the rest of town away from Andrássy seemed unreal; it was as if none of that had happened. With a few notable exceptions, coverage of the march focussed on the violence and its perpetrators, rather than its intended victims.

Our discussion returned to a number of issues. On whether homophobia was motive or excuse for the violence, the overall consensus was that it was one element in the mix. Together with the verbal and physical abuse (graphic descriptions of sexual acts, and a fixation with bodily issue, namely spitting, throwing eggs, spraying water mixed with excrement from huge water pistols), there was distinct pro-natalist outrage (‘nem csináltok gyerekeket!’; ‘kihalunk!’) and a post-socialist moral majority pose which does not, one assumes, extend to hardcore porn. At times it could seem that ‘buzi’ is the new ‘zsidó’: ‘lopnak, csalnak, hazudnak’; ‘azért vagyok itt, mert a buziknak van pénzük, s nekünk nincs’, etc.

The ‘majority’ stance is, essentially, anti-minority though, again, this does not apply to Hungarian minorities outside Hungary, as Szetey also argues in the interview cited above. The Right’s victim complex, and the thugs’ conviction that men shouting obscenities define and embody who and what is Hungarian (‘Ez nem Hollandia, nem Amerika, ez Magyarország!’), were the product of a longer-term appropriation of leftist discourses by the Right, borne out on the ‘korlátlanul magyar’ website kicked off its US server, as well as in opinion columns of right-wing dailies. Finally, two questions were familiar to students and researchers of the inter-war era: the relationship between hyper- and anti-liberalism; and the desire to ‘cleanse’ the city. Whether or not one buys into the notion of a state of cold civil war existing in Hungary, the antecedents to and rhetoric of this current crisis are depressingly familiar.

• Hogymondom.hu, a dictionary of contemporary slang to which readers can contribute. Lots of fun, expect profanity.
• Hungarian Spectrum, an excellent English-language blog on current affairs, written by Éva Balogh, which features intelligent and insightful posts on politics, media and history.

Curated by Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Nemes’s presentation for the Hungarian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale

is conceived as a series of animation films entitled Remake, which takes as their subject the dramatic public events in Budapest that gripped the world in autumn 2006. These ten short films focus on intensive media coverage of the disturbances, individual experiences through personal narratives and the emancipatory power of nascent urban myths. On a more general level, Remake as a contemporary art project creates a space to investigate the modalities of disorder, and the possibilities and problems inherent in it.

The reason given for the last-minute rejection of Nemes’s piece was that it had been curated by two individuals, rather than one. A selection of press commentaries translated into English is available here, the artist’s statement can be read here.

The disturbances on the streets of Budapest and other cities and towns last year put Hungarian current affairs on newspaper front pages around the world. Ostensibly a reaction to Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány’s speech leaked on 17 September, demonstrators demanded Gyurcsány’s resignation on the basis that he had lied to the electorate.

Nemes engages with the claim to re-enact history fifty years on from the 1956 Uprising, the theatricality of protest, and the mediation of such imagery in the press. The 2006 disturbances may not have constituted a revolution, but they certainly were televised: a picture gallery is available here on the Index news site; a selection of videos is here. More recently, the barrier around Kossuth Square was dismantled in what was described by participants as a repeat performance of the demolition of the Berlin Wall, and further demonstrations have been planned for 15 March, the anniversary of the start of the 1848 revolution.