Darkó Jenő – Erdősi Péter (szerk.): Történeti tanulmányok - Studia Comitatensia 32. (Szentendre, 2011)
Kovács Annamária: Egy kiállítás margójára. József Attila emlékkiállítás a Dunakanyarban
Abstracts 175 an autonomous school while the latter, in exchange for the state’s support, sought for increasing its control over the curriculum and required greater financial participation from the Order. The French legation in Budapest backed such a quest for independence with some reserve, trying to avoid resentments from pro- German groups. Although the defeat of France from Germany disrupted supply with French teachers, some French war prisoners (évadés) arriving from occupied Poland’s and Austria’s POW camps were at hand to substitute them. In 1944, the German occupation and the Soviet invasion interrupted the schoolyear and the Soviet army took up its quarters in the building and set up a POW camp: the consequence was the destruction of the school’s archives and materials. In the postwar setting, Hungarian cultural policy promoted the spread of French language and culture (as they were closely associated with the alluring idea of democracy) in state schools but refused an ecclesiastical participation in that mission, and the Budapest representatives of the Quatriéme République did not show disagreement either. Initially, the Premonstratensians revitalized their activity, however, in 1948, in accordance with the law on the nationalization of schools, they were ordered to stop teaching for good and to transfer property to the state. In the forthcoming decades, many students educated in the French section of the Premonstratensian school became respected personalities both in Hungary and in France, but others were humiliated because of their ecclesiastical schooling and prohibited from making an intellectual career. Despite the difficulties accompanying its short existence and the violent break putting an end to it, the French secondary school of Gödöllő represents a notable endeavour in the history of pedagogy and in that of French-Hungarian cultural relations. As most documents produced by the school before 1945 were partly destroyed, the author of the present essay based mainly his account on his research made into foreign policy papers kept by French and Hungarian archives, yearbooks, press articles, memoirs and his interviews with former students and teachers. TAMÁS KENDE Szentendre: a forgetting and forgotten town in the memory and recollections of Ferenc Dezsőfi This essay presents the career of Ferenc Dezsőfi, mayor of Szentendre between 1944 and 1948, and the influential image of the town’s history constructed in his writings. After some unsuccessful attempts to be elected the town’s mayor in the mid 1930s, the able and agile lawyer, being the senior civil servant of the town throughout 1944, gained the desired position immediately after Szentendre’s occupation by the Red Army in late December 1944, as the Soviet commandant of the town chose him for that rank. Dezsőfi was dismissed from his office after the Communist takeover in 1948. During the Stalinist-Communist dictatorship, his name did not ever appear in the texts commemorating the town’s “liberation”, but, after the revolution of 1956, he was gradually rehabilitated as a key figure and a positive hero of the liberation of 1944. After his rehabilitation, the former mayor was writing, besides his own memoires, personal accounts of Szentendre’s history. He presented the town as a tiny settlement inhabited by decent hardworking craftsmen and merchants, artists and bohemian civil servants. Since his writings were frequently and uncritically quoted by local historians, this bucolic image became a fundamental element for most historical narratives on Szentendre. In 1944, the internment and the deportation of Szentendre Jewry took place in the time when Dezsőfi served there as mayor, but these events were simply absent in his personal accounts.The Jews of Szentendre, deported to Auschwitz, are still missing from most narratives of local history in Szentendre. Dezsőfi and his uncritical followers preferred bucolic (fairy-) tales rather than the often disturbing historical facts in the (re-)construction of local history. Finally, such a historical narrative turned into “material force” under the consolidated Kádár regime, during the town’s boom period in the 1970s and 1980s. Dezsőfi’s historical fundament and legacy proved to be durable even after the regime change of 1989. ERZSÉBET REZNÁK Cegléd, 1989: notesfor the history of a regime change This essay outlines the events that took place in Cegléd during the year 1989, in one of the most decisive periods of Hungarian history. That year, later associated with the notion of regime change, brought about previously unimaginable changes in the life of Hungarian citizens. Those were interesting, variable, eventful times which, in spite of their deficiencies, disappointments, and their comic or tragicomic elements, are rightly labelled with the epithet “historical”. The purportedly Socialist regime vanished in the span of a few months, and the system, constructed painstakingly over more than forty years, and which seemed impossible to overthrow, collapsed unexpectedly — and, in fact, not many cried for it. Cegléd engaged into these nationwide events when Prime Minister Miklós Németh held a speech there on the occasion of the National Day of 20 August, but it was a different commemoration that made the city
