Seeking Facts and Witnesses in a Post-Factual Age: The Year in Hungary

January 2015 to November 2016 was a particularly lively time for the publication of life writing texts in Hungary. In the beginning of 2015, the prestigious literary publishing house Magvető relaunched its nonfiction book series, Tények és tanúk. The book series had a cult following in the seventies and in the eighties, probably because it was one of the few public sources for testimonies representing twentieth-century Hungarian history from an angle different than the one official history books offered. Several memoirs, diaries, and autobiographies that important figures (writers and politicians, among others) and also common people wrote on Hungary’s twentieth-century history were published during this first period of the series and appreciated by a large readership. The series ceased after the political climate changed in 1990, at which point censorship was lifted and memoirs of all kinds concerning collective traumas in twentieth-century European and Hungarian history became available. Another reason that the series ceased publication may be the hostile theoretical and critical climate of the time, during which critics and readers—influenced by the freshly imported theory of the “death of the author”—at large refused to address the biographical interpretation of literary works. However, in the past decade contexual approaches of literary works became popular again, and a new theoretical interest rose for different types of biographical and autobiographical reading. The recent success of life writing in the Hungarian book market could be explained by the “memoralist turn” both in history and in literature, and also by a growing need to replace the great historical narrative with lived experiences. In 2016, again, under the leadership of former director of Magvető, Krisztián Nyáry, whose bestselling books on love stories of Hungarian writers and artists have contributed to the popularization of biographic genres, a new publishing house, Szépmíves Könyvek Műhelye, was launched, dedicated to the republication and the re-discovery of several nineteenth- and twentieth-century diaries and autobiographies unnoticed at the time of their release, or forgotten since then.

It is impossible to give an exhaustive account of the latest Hungarian auto/biographical production in such a small space, but it is possible to describe some important tendencies in it. From a thematic and quantitative point of view, historical subjects—especially twentieth-century’s events—prevail in this year’s auto/biographical production. If we have a look at new publications, the number of diaries and other forms of life writing produced during World War II might strike us. Some of them are republications (such as the memoirs of Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish pathologist and survivor of Auschwitz, whose writings served as resource and inspiration for the Oscar-winning film Son of Saul), but most of them are previously unpublished materials representing the last year of the war: Hungary’s German invasion in March 1944, the siege of Budapest, the terror of German and Hungarian Nazis, and the arrival of the Russian Red Army. Recent releases are part of a new politics of remembrance that encourages the Hungarian society to face its own repressed past, and are also part of a new scholarly interest in history as lived experience. Life stories of common people in historical moments broaden the meaning of history for a larger readership; they introduce social history and historiographic methods as integral parts of historical understanding. In other words, they “help reconstruct the experience of everyday life in wartime from the micro-historical vantage point of the writers, who could not know how the events around them would end, as well as to shed light on their day-today personal experiences in ways that formal historical documents cannot” (Vasvári).¹ However, in wartime everything is extraordinary, so everyday life stories ought to be understood as war stories lived and recorded by ordinary people (and not by agents of historical actions like politicians and soldiers).

Autobiographical texts about historical events of 1944 and 1945 published in the last year could be described according to two different divisions: on one hand, their writers are...