HUNGARIAN STUDIES 16. No. 2. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [2002]

Pál Hatos: Kossuth and the Images of Hungarian National Identity after 1989

PÁL HATOS methodological and theorethical shortcomings of a rigid application of the multiculturalist antropology, and the ideological biases of the teleologically ori­ented antigeneological concepts.36 In the face of the recent wars and the religious and ethnic tensions in the territory of the former Yugoslavia and the gratification of tribal and national virtues by cynical politicians one is easily tempted to see and condemn in the concept of the nation an inherent feature of exclusivism. Yet it may lead to a seriously distorted and dogmatically ignorant optic of historical understanding. At the end of this intentionally eclectic review of the collective memory one must soberly diagnose that more than a decade after the "negotiated revolution" none of the lieux de mémoire of the collective memory enjoys consensus, and 1848 is no exception. Instead, there is a competing and even conflictual pluralism of the different historical discourses at work. Those who emphasise the national character and the continuity of a thousand-year-long Hungarian history put Széchenyi in the forefront and tend to ignore Kossuth; while the liberals try to revitalise Kossuth's memory by iconizing him as a modern, progressive, liberal and democratic statesman and leaving his emphatically nationalist rhetoric in the shadows. Still far from being primarily the property of intellectual curiosity, the primum movens of historians, Kossuth's memory continues to haunt our designs of the present and the future. Notes 1. Gyula Szekfïï, "Az öreg Kossuth", m Emlékkönyv Kossuth Lajos születésének 150. évfordulójára, I-n, Ed. Zoltán I. Tóth (Budapest, 1952), H, 409-410. 2. See Róbert Hermann, "Kossuth Lajos életútja", in "... Leborulok a nemzet nagysága előtt", A Kossuth-hagyaték (Budapest, 1994), 155. 3. Béla G. Németh, "Nagysággal gyengeség gyengeséggel nagyság", Magyar Tudomány 1994/9, 1045-1046. 4. On the epistemological distinction between the national identity see Pál Hatos, "Emlékezet, identitás, ünnep. A genfi történeti hagyomány eszköztára", in Rendi társadalom - polgári társadalom XIV (to be published in 2002). 5. Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 349-375; onKoselleck's views, see Reinhard Mehrings, "Carl Schmidt and His Influence on Historians", Cardoso Law Review vol. 21 (2000): 1659-1664. 6. See especially Hayden White, The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation in the Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 58—82. 7. François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 23-24. 8. Kunó Klebeisberg, "Reálpolitika és neonacionalizmus" [1928] in ibid., Tudomány, kultúra, politika, Gróf KlebelsbergKunó válogatott beszédei és írásai (1917-1932) (Budapest: Európa, 1990), 445; on Klebelsberg see Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, A Cultural History of Hungary (Bu­dapest: Corvina Osiris), 2000, 214.

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