Of all the bonds that combine to sustain a nation, memory is perhaps the most essential. It ensures that most of the other bonds – language, loyalties, poetry and songs, shared sacrifices – are extended through time. They continue to live when the present moment fades. It may even be that the memory of a shared past unites people far more deeply than the experiences it preserves did at the time. A wedding
Arnold Toynbee, the deservedly famous British historian and philosopher, in his monumental A Study of History described the rise and fall of dozens of civilisations. Based upon that model it is easy to predict the fall of our western civilisation. But that was predicted already a hundred years ago by Oswald Spengler in his Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) published in 1918, in
1 Had he lived to see it, the Hungarian 1956 would have also been George Orwell’s Revolution. His most acute, but also most generous mind would have understood and appreciated a modern nation’s rising in unprecedented unity, and also with striking magnanimity. Stalinist Hungary indeed was created to be a
The missing 1956–57 part of the Diary of Gyula Illyés (1902–1983) was found in the attic of the family house in Buda, in April 2014, in an envelope, hidden among miscellaneous papers in a wooden box. It covers the days of the Revolution and the early days of the Soviet retaliation, from 25 October to 31 January. The loose bundle of papers seems
MEMORANDUM: HUNGARY , A SCANDAL AND A HOPE OF THE WORLD1 Excerpts István Bibó The social and political thinker István Bibó (1911-1979) was a Minister of State in the last Imre Nagy government of 1956, delegated by the re-established Petőfi Party (in 1945 the National Peasant Party). While the closest circle of Imre Nagy, with their families, sought refuge at the
IMRE NAGY AND THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION1 Excerpt CHAPTER 9 REVOLUTION When Mikoyan deposed Rákosi on 17 July and sent him into exile in the Soviet Union, he was removing from the scene the strongest personality in Hungarian political life. Rákosi was hated, discredited. His judgement had failed, he was on the run. But there was no one else in the Party with anything like his experience of power and office.
INTERVIEW WITH ISTVÁN B . RÁCZ, 19571 Columbia University Research Project Hungary, 1957–59 István B. Rácz was born in Túrkeve, Hungary, in 1923. He was educated at the local Jewish school because his mother knew that he would get the best education there. He was Calvinist. He went to the University of Economics in Budapest.
MY REVOLUTION Recollections of the 1956 Revolution* Part II “IF THE RUSSIANS RETURN, WE ARE GOING TO FIGHT” János Martonyi “Student meeting! Tonight at 7.00 p.m. at the latest, we want to respond to the call of the Budapest university students. Let’s make a free, truly democratic, independent university life! Everybody should come!” Szeged, 16 October 19561 “JOIN
In the war the Gestapo laid hands on Mitzi’s possessions in Austria, and after the war the Communists laid hands on her possessions behind the Iron Curtain. Real estate, it turned out, could fly away. These were facts of life; totalitarian orders were doing what they had been set up
At noon on 31 October 1956, the streets of Ferencváros, like the rest of the Budapest, were free of fighting. The Red Army, who twelve years before had smashed its way into the city, was gone. It had been just a week earlier (24 October) that the Soviets had deployed their 92nd Armoured Division to the capital, from its base in Székesfehérvár 70 kilometres
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