Itt-Ott, 1991 (24. évfolyam, 1-2/118. szám)
1991 / 1-2. (118.) szám
Károly Nagy (Middlesex County College): Cognitive and Emotional Traumas and Contemporary Recovery of Social Consciousness in Hungary I. My thesis is that Central, East Central and Eastern Europe — and within the region: Hungary and the area’s Hungarians — show the signs of recovery from states of cognitive and emotional traumatization inflicted upon them for the past fifty years. We are currently witnessing the initial stages of a post-crisis recuperation process, not unlike that of a patient who, after long periods of critical and even comatose conditions, is finally taking the first steps towards recovery. These initial steps are uncertain, hesitating, sometimes disoriented and stumbling; and episodes of partial relapse cannot be ruled out with certainty. But the process is underway, the direction is healthy, and the conditions for a favorable prognosis are promising. This analogy, like all analogies, is imperfect and incomplete. It could be argued that Hungarian society was not “frozen,” so to speak, into a state of coma but suffered from what István Bibó would perhaps have called an exacerbation of it’s already pathological developmental deformities. More important, probably, is to point out and to analyze those significant episodes and landmarks especially in 1956-57 and from the late sixties to the late eighties, which demonstrated very definite signs of healthy awareness, signaling that the traumatic injuries did not cause permanent damage. Given the temporal and other confines of my current presentation, I will merely outline here the main perimeters of my thesis. II The time period of my topic includes •the era of the 1948-1956 totalitarian dictatorship which was defeated for some months by the 1956 Revolution; •the era of the 1957-1963 dictatorial revenge and restoration period; •the 1963-1988 era of a somewhat more tolerant, less oppressive, single-party (Communist) dictatorship, and •the past three years, from 1988 to the present. Paper presented at the Fifth Biennial Conference on Eastern Europe, New College, Division of Social Sciences, University of Southern Florida, Sarasota, March 25-27, 1991 1. The physical, emotional and moral traumas: a. Hungary emerged from the Second World War in a compromised state both internally and internationally. Allied with Hitler’s Nazi Germany during the war as a “reluctant satellite” — and certainly not as the “last ally” —, Hungarian society, nevertheless, had produced its war criminals: 476 of them were sentenced to death and 189 were executed between 1945 and 1950. b. During the war, about 1.3 million Hungarians — approximately 10% of the Carpathian Basin’s total Hungarian population, including 559,507 Jewish Hungarians — perished. At the end of the war, in which 200.000 died, hundreds of thousands of people were held in Soviet and Western POW camps, from where 80.000 did not return, or were simply missing, with their fate unknown. c. The post-war peace treaty annulled the re-annexation of the formerly Hungarian territories and thus more than three million Hungarians, once again, became minorities in Rumania, the Carpatho-Ukranian area of the Soviet Union, in Czechoslovakia, and in Yugoslavia. These Hungarian minorities suffered from large scale genocidal revenge pogroms at the end of the war. d. Between 1948 and 1963 hundreds of thousands were deported into internment camps or forced labor camps, were imprisoned and/or executed. That includes the approximately 26,000 arrested and about 1.000 executed, with or without court proceedings, as revenge for the 1956 Revolution, from November 4, 1956 to 1963. There is, probably, no Hungarian family which could not grieve the violent loss of a loved one during the past several decades. 2. The Taboos: But public expression of such grief, just like public expression of many other topics and issues, was strictly and forcefully prohibited until the eighties, at the risk of becoming one of the victims. The casualties and the prisoners, the deported, the interned, the tortured and executed had to become non-persons. Pain, fear, anxiety and mourning had to be hidden, repressed and refuted, the therapeutic, healing effects of open catharsis, the reassuring support of community consolation was denied to many millions of the population. It is deeply symbolic that the first demonstrative, public act of the peaceful revolution of 1989 was the ceremonial reburial of the executed leaders of the 1956 Revolution, attended by hundreds of thousands and witnessed on television by millions nation-wide. Many other issues of vital concern for the national community were strictly denied open articulation, verbal or written mention. These issues were forced to become non-issues, taboos, dangerous cognitive elements. They were allowed to be expressed only in carefully forged “newspeak” (a la Orwell) distortions. These included 42 ÍTT-OTT 24. évf. (1991), 1-2. (118.) szám
