Unfinished Socialism [antikvár]

PICTURES FROM THE KADAR ERA s. Sometimes we sense it at the time, or else we come to realize it later, that an era has begun, or ended. Usually, however, a certain distance, the passage of time, is needed to provide the perspective for seeing matters with a degree of certainty. Nonetheless we may declare without taking too much of a risk that the twentieth century — in the historical rather than calen- drical sense — has already ended. One of the decisive features of this century was, if we may say so, the great experiment of socialism. With the failure of this experiment (and the disintegration of the Soviet Union), changes on a world-historical scale followed. An era had come to a close. Those who live through the birth or death of an entire era — as, for example, the majority of Hungary's ten and a half million people — know from experience that historical reversals of fortune are not merely breaks in continuity. History is a process in which we continue to carry with us the time we believe to have passed, the bygone era, including everything from our material surroundings to memories, distilled into life-experience. In this sense, no matter how much things change, some parts are bound to remain with us. Hungary participated in the great transition from state socialism, and many people were fully aware of this while the actual events were taking place. It would probably be much more difficult to recognize what has stayed with us, inside us, and what has changed and when, in the world below or alongside politics, on the level of lifestyles, customs, everyday life. Early in 1996 the two compilers of the present volume began to discuss a curious phenomenon. We had noticed that probably the majority of those who had lived through the socialism of the Kádár era regarded it negatively and considered it irretrievably a thing of the past, and yet quite often they still seemed to speak of it with a nostalgic afterglow. What was the meaning of this! Was it simply a resurfacing of the familiar attitude that reluctantly accepted the regime, despising it and putting up with it at the same time, or was it a new phenomenon! This question could be posed about the former socialist bloc as a whole. Given the difficulty and ambivalence of evaluating the preceding era, and the widespread inclination toward retrospection, the obvious thing to do was to literally take a look at what was then, and is still, directly discernible — in the form of a book of photographs from the Kádár era. For while individual moments tend to be gradually transformed into impressions or memories arranged in a particular order, the photograph has a way of somehow arresting time, and thereby preserving the moment. Because of this ability of photographs to charge remembered images of the past with concrete content, we wanted first of all to show what had — in principle — been available for everyone to see. This entailed the inclusion of photographs of the type intended and produced for publication. In addition, it seemed important to recall the rhetorical environment in which this world that we visually resurrected had been embedded. Toward this end, we have matched contemporary press reports — the area of public discourse controlled exclusively by the regime — with the pictures.