Abstract
Reviewed by: Katalin Franciska Rac, University of Florida, USA
Bálint Varga’s The Monumental Nation is a timely book about one of the highest points of Hungary’s nineteenth-century symbolic politics. Through the history of seven monuments erected in 1896 to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin, this book examines the close connection between the politics of commemoration and national identity construction. Statues of the Hungarian forefather and leader of the conquest, Árpád, the female figure of Hungaria, and the mythical turul bird were incorporated in the monuments to communicate a complex message about the glorious past and Hungarian-ness. The monuments attested to the Hungarian government’s efforts to establish a uniform historical consciousness and, through that, to develop a shared Hungarian cultural-political identity across the country, Part I explains. However, the government could not fully control how the monuments’ message was interpreted. The reception of the monuments to a great extent depended on local elites and specific social conditions, largely shaped by the ethno-religious heterogeneity of Hungary’s citizenry. The mixed populations of Mukachevo, Braşov, Zemun, Bratislava/Devín and Nitra, where five of the monuments were planned to stand, reflected this diversity, as detailed in Part II.
Indeed, the relationship with other nationalities played a pivotal role in the history of Hungarian nationalism. János Gyurgyák’s monograph on this subject, for example, demonstrates the lasting effect of the concept of Hungarian supremacy on Hungary’s ethnic politics. By the late 1800s, the demand for linguistic and cultural assimilation of the non-Hungarian groups to ensure political unity under the Hungarian ethnic element’s leadership increasingly defined the Hungarian attitude towards the nationalities. A Felvidék, politikai tanulmány (The Upper Land, Political Study) that parliament member Béla Grünwald published in 1878 about Northern Hungary illustrates this sentiment. It laments the Hungarian failure to assimilate non-Hungarians and, on page 116, explicitly calls for the ‘superior Hungarian race’ to assimilate ‘inferior Slavs’, for the sake of national survival threatened by Pan-Slavism. Yet, Varga interprets Grünwald’s words as a call for further integration (14). According to Varga, the government’s monument-campaign, which confronted the different nationalities with a Hungarian reading of the country’s history, was likewise a measure of integration. It paralleled the post-1867 economic and administrative integrative acts viewed as instrumental to the construction of a modern nation state. While only part of the inhabitants of these five cities embraced the monuments’ message, the history of the two monuments erected in the middle of the Great Hungarian plain, in Pusztaszer, and in the vicinity of the Benedictine monastery of Pannonhalma proved the integration to be a success. In predominantly Hungarian-speaking and Catholic settings, the Hungarian government’s vision was met with only minor opposition, nonetheless illustrating that the encounter between central planning and a local vision of the national past was dynamic and produced something new and lasting.
The arrangement of the book reveals some of the challenges this seven-part comparative study poses. The urban histories are disconnected from the monuments’ reception histories discussed in Part III. For example, on pages 47–72, the examination of the population of Bratislava, the urban centre which the Devín monument was addressed to, is followed by the monument’s reception history over a hundred pages further on, on pages 178–81. The theoretical Chapter 9 connects these two parts. It suggests that in addition to the social stratification of the urban populations and the emotional appeal of the constructed history, the reception of the monuments and, thus, the success of national integration, depended on the local elites’ perception of modernity and whether they viewed the Hungarian government’s efforts as sufficiently progressive (155). Thus, Varga notes, his findings challenge the thesis of the modernist school of nationalism theory, namely that ‘modernity and the spread of nationalism were two sides of the same coin’ (153). While such wording might meet with criticism, readers may also want to learn more about the Hungarian government’s vision of modernity that Varga describes as progressive.
Symbolic politics did not deliver the desired results: like other authors, Varga concludes that the Hungarian government’s failure to recognize its citizenry’s diverse cultural sensitivities contributed to the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918. It ‘prevented the Magyar national propagandists’ dream of a Magyar-Hungarian nation having the same historical memory and looking to Budapest as its center of modernity’ (236). It should be noted, however, that after 1920, Hungary was much closer to ethnic homogeneity than ever before during its millennial history. Yet, the anti-liberal ethnocentric political tone hardly broke.
The late nineteenth-century statuomania at the service of nation building inevitably brings to one’s mind Hungary’s continuing internal conflict over the political role of the street and memorials. Varga’s book demonstrates the persisting significance of symbolic politics as they shape the country’s cultural landscape and spaces of everyday life, while it also highlights that limited political vocabularies contribute to narrow visions of nationhood.