ABSTRACT
Using oral history, this contribution explores the reshaping of individuals’ public and private autobiographies in response to different political environments. In particular, it analyses the testimony of those who were communists in Hungary between 1945 and 1956, examining how their experiences of fascism, party membership, the 1956 Revolution and the collapse of communism led them in each case to refashion their life stories. Moreover, it considers how their biographies played varying functions at different points in their lives: to express identification with communism, to articulate resistance and to communicate ambition before 1956; to protect themselves from the state after 1956; and to rehabilitate themselves morally in a society which stigmatised them after 1989.
I didn’t use this word ‘liberation’ (felszabadulás), because in 1956 my life really changed. Everybody’s lives went through a great change, but mine especially.… I wasn’t disgusted with myself that I had called the arrival of the Red Army in 1945 a liberation, but [after 1956] I didn’t use it anymore.
The above respondent came from a middle-class Jewish Budapest family. Members of his family had died in the Holocaust after the German occupation of the country in March 1944. He experienced the arrival of the Red Army as a ‘liberation’ from the threat of deportation, and joined the communist movement immediately after the war. Until 1956 he had seen the world in antifascist terms; fascism was considered to be the greatest evil, and communists the most effective protectors of Hungary from its return. In the uprising of 1956, he had supported the reformed communist forces fighting for a democratic socialism; following the suppression of the revolution by Soviet tanks, he vowed to reject his earlier antifascist history: he revised his notion that the Soviet army had liberated him in 1945 and now cast them as foreign occupiers. When faced with major political or social ruptures, individuals may be forced to rethink the meanings of their lives. Confronted with new political environments and public narratives about the past, they may be compelled to reconsider the stories they tell about themselves (Ashplant et al. 2000, pp. 16 – 25; Portelli 2003, pp. 248 – 276; Mark 2005a; Dower 1996; Thomson 1998). Life stories that once seemed unproblematic might now become politically charged. Narratives that were at one time publicly taboo might be revived, and need to be reshaped, for public consumption. This article will address how one group—Communist party members who joined the movement immediately after World War Two and left after 1956—experienced and reacted to three different political systems, and how their private and public autobiographies were moulded in response.