The Funeral of Imre Nagy: Contested History and the Power of Memory Culture

On 16 June 1958 Imre Nagy, who had been the prime minister of Hungary during the ill-fated Revolution of 1956, was put to death by the Soviet-backed regime of János Kádár and buried in an unmarked grave. Thirty-three years later, in a spectacular reversal of fortune, the communist regime was delegitimized by the funeral and reburial of Imre Nagy. Well over 300,000 Hungarians attended the ceremony, a very sizable portion of the population for a country with less than ten million citizens. In a forceful assertion of the collective will, the Hungarian people demonstrated their power to resist the tyranny of foreign occupation and made plain their desire for an autonomous state.

The funeral dramatically symbolized how Hungarian memory culture reasserted its demand for sovereignty and was powerful enough to sweep aside the thin veneer of legitimacy of the Soviet-backed regime. Embodied in the Hungarian people's imagined past, always at work just below the surface of daily life, this memory culture must be understood in the context of Hungary's long history in Central Europe and beyond. Hungary had been a powerful medieval kingdom until its defeat at the hands of Suleiman the Magnificent, at the battle of Mohács on 29 August 1526. From that time on, except for brief intervals, the Hungarians had been under occupation, or under the hegemony of another state, most notably the Ottoman Empire, the Austrian Hapsburgs, Germany and the Soviet Union.

Occupation, warfare and migration changed the nature of the Hungarian population over time. Instead of allowing this history to destroy their identity, however, the Hungarians managed to maintain their cohesion as a people and a nation by clinging to their language, culture and memories. The idea of Hungary was strong enough to create a national culture, which is today an ethnic religious composite of Magyars, Jews, Germans, Serbs and Slavs. ¹ In spite of the diverse traditions embodied within each of these groups, enough elements remain constant to create a sense of primordial loyalty to the idea of being Hungarian. According to Clifford Geertz, primordial attachments are "those congruities of blood, speech, custom and so on that seem to have an ineffable and at times overpowering coerciveness in and of themselves." ²

One of the most important rituals that embodies memory in Hungarian society is the concept of kegyelet. Kegyelet is synonymous with Emile Durkheim's concept of piacular rites and is defined as duty toward the dead. Hungarians often use the analogy of Antigone's obligation to her brother in describing how powerfully this value operates in Hungarian society. Kegyeleti ritual reinforces that value in order to interpret the historical context of the present through the remembrance of the past. The hope of continuity is made manifest in the context of funereal rites. Memory culture in Hungary is powerfully reinforced through the various rites of memorial that include not only the burial of the dead but also the remembrance of symbolic figures who help link Hungarian identity to the concept of community and nation.

A cultural performance such as a funeral or memorial rite provides a context in which the contemporary understanding of symbols can be examined. The ritual process gives access to aspects of complex societies that modern life can occlude and political analysis cannot penetrate. ³ To simply examine the political discussions surrounding the political transition in Hungary in 1989 would not be enough to understand why the transition occurred the way it did. A study of the funeral of Imre Nagy thus links the essential institutions of social life with the memory of Nagy's role as a charismatic national symbol.

This article examines how people can dramatically incorporate memory culture into the political process of a complex society and provide the impetus for change.

Kegyelet: the power of memorialization in hungarian society

Symbolically, the funeral...