The task in this paper is quite simple; first, to enumerate the main contributions historical studies of the Department of History and Ethnology has made to Hungarian Studies over some fifteen years of co-operation, and secondly, to tentatively evaluate their value as such.
One may wonder whether the present author is the right person to perform the second part, since he is rather compromised by being one of the contributors. But as it turned out, he was the only person willing to do it, and certainly whatever he tries to reconsider is open to criticism. His straightforwardness may also be apologized because most of what we have produced has rarely met the eye of an expert reader and invited anyone to write a review of this or that book or article, so marginal our studies have been.
Irrespective of some occasional articles some of us wrote for the respectable Hungarologische Beiträge (HB) already in the early 1990s (the present author’s first paper was about Molnár Ferenc’s Pál utcai fiúk), the first more serious attempt to approach the wide circle of hungarologists happened in the Rome-Naples International Congress of Hungarian Studies in 1996. Some of us had prepared papers to read and some of them were duly published among the congress papers – in this way we made our humble headway into the nucleus of Hungarian Studies.
It was after that Congress that we started regularly to take part in the intensive courses managed by the ERASMUS/SOCRATES network for Hungarian Studies run by Professor Holger Fischer from Hamburg University, once held also here in Central Finland, Pertunmaa, on Hungarian film. Also a few of the talks during these courses were being published, when on the translation processes and reception of Hungarian literature in Finland, when on American attitudes towards the Hungarian policy of revision of the Trianon Treaty of 1920, when on the reporting of Finnish diplomacy on the 1956
uprising and so on. Since they all cannot be listed here, one can peruse them in the early volumes of the HB.
Since the end of the 1990s a continuous flow of minor contributions and major publications have come out of our Department, and we were at times called to edit issues of the HB on themes directly related to Hungarian history or to Hungarian-Finnish relations since the end of the 19th century. In these issues some illuminating papers came out, for instance, Dr Vesa Vares wrote a comparison between Hungarian and Finnish parliamentary systems in the 1920s–1930s, his now wife, Mari, started her studies in the Burgenland question after Trianon (it grew into a full-blooded doctoral thesis) and the present author analyzed the first ever comprehensive travel book in Finnish, Antti Jalava’s Unkarin maa ja kansa (1875), a controversial and critical exposé of Hungarian ways and politics still quite unknown in Hungary.
The quite positive atmosphere and encouraging research environment within Hungarian Studies prompted us to launch the first truly scientific and ambitious research project in the year 2000. The 5ht International Congress of Hungarian Studies in Jyväskylä , of which we are still very proud and famous, was approaching and we gained a considerable grant from the Academy of Finland for a project titled ‘Kádár’s Hungary – Kekkonen’s Finland’ (2000–2003) to study the relations, political, scientific and cultural, between one capitalist and one socialist country. Preliminary results of the project were reported in the congress and the main ones were collected into two volumes of the HB (nos. 14 and 18). A separate monograph was published on the scientific relations titled Co-operation across the Iron Curtain published only in 2005. Almost all historians at the Department who were somehow connected to East European studies contributed and some experts were called in from other universities in Finland and abroad to write articles. This was the period when we established fruitful working relations between historians of the ELTE, Hamburg and Jyväskylä, with our honored quests here, Professors Ignác Romsics and Holger Fischer. It is a pity that Prof. Zsuzsanna Varga from the ELTE could not attend for she has been the key-person in organizing our joint seminars and conferences down there in Budapest.
To say the least about success of the 2001 Congress, for us historians it gave a boost to continue our Hungarian Studies and many new ideas and research plans were born during it. One of them was the quite extraordinary attempt to show Hungarian and Finnish history side by side, from a comparative and contrastive perspective from prehistory to membership in the EU. This was the grand idée of Professor Fischer’s and he had dug the money for its realization from the European Union. Of course, we in Jyväskylä were more than happy to jump in the cave. After some rough ride, the copiously illustrated and interspersed with specific info-columns, multimedia CD-rom appeared in 2002 and is still popular and widely disseminated in Germany. Has it made any effect on readership there and here, one cannot venture to say anything – nobody has ever sent to us a review or an evaluation of it. Anyhow,
its accomplishment would not have been possible without the help of the Hungarian Studies network.
Another very inspiring project followed the Kádár-Kekkonen one, namely
‘Cult and Community’, the latest results of which were being published quite recently. This was also financed by the Academy of Finland but now jointly with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The historians’ contributions were published in the volume Cultic Revelations this year, and it contains, among others, studies in the personality cults of Napoleon, Hitler, Rákosi, Sissi, Kossuth and Horthy. The studies in cults of Lenin and Mannerheim had been published already earlier in Rubicon and the Scandinavian Journal of History. It may be mentioned separately that Professor Varga’s article deals with one special, socialist cult-site in Hungary, namely the model-farm of Bábolna, which President Kekkonen visited in 1969 telling Kádár that if Hungary only had 200 more Bábolnas, it would easily beat capitalist agriculture. Very illuminating is also Veera Rautavuoma’s deep analysis of the exhibitions of socialist achievements in Hungary. It nicely shows us the distancing effect of socialist aesthetics from socialist realities. These articles are accessible also through internet in the Spectrum Hungarologicum which has recently replaced the HB.
The most exciting prospect to widen our perspective opened even before the 2001 Congress when the always dynamic Professor of Ethnology, Bo Lönnqvist, challenged us historians to join his field-work trips to the Romanian Banat – the late great granary of Europe – to learn of the dire situation of the Hungarian and German minorities. ‘Bosse’ was instrumental in bringing together ethnologists, sociolinguists and oral historians and in taking us in the years 1999–2001 for weeks to that almost God-forsaken, multicultural region.
We conducted more than a hundred interviews and experienced some hair-raising adventures. It was a very productive period of intensive research, and consequently, we published a lot (e.g. Ethnic Minorities and Power. Eds. Pasi Hannonen, Bo Lönnqvist and Gábor Barna. Fonda Publishing: Tammisaari, 2001) and some of the results still await publication. After ‘Bosse’ retired, we continued the field-work among Hungarians in Slovakia and this sub-project is still going on. What has been especially rewarding is that now we can see how some of our post-graduates preparing their theses have taken up the flag and followed in our footsteps to wider foreign fields. We have at the moment half-a-dozen doctoral students working on Hungarian themes, some of them defending their theses in a couple of year’s time.
It seems that the historians’ liaison with ethnology at our Department cannot be broken since we have every now and then made incursions in their projects, thanks to the lesson ‘Bosse’ taught us. For instance, when the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest organized the exhibition titled (M)ilyenek a finnek?
in 2009 we went with our ethnologists down there to give papers in their seminar on ‘Hungarian-Finnish Stereotypes’. The seminar itself and excursions to ethnologically remarkable sites showed us how ethnological studies strive in Hungary and how these two fields of study, history and ethnology may nourish each other in friendly circumstances.
Out of our special activities at the Department, one should mention two exhibitions which were laid out there and with the co-operation of the University Library. The first one was to commemorate the 1000th anniversary of the Hungarian state in 2000, and the second one of the painful 1956 revolution.
The latter one has been circulating in libraries in Central Finland thus making it known to the Finnish public how the Hungarians desperately, but in vain fought for their freedom. It was also reworked into a book by Heino Nyyssönen and the present author and came out in Finnish as Unkarin kansannousu 1956. The present author wrote the 1956 and aftermath part, Dr Nyyssönen wrote about how the 1956 is still (forever?!) present in Hungarian politics. One dare say that this was the first scholarly volume on the revolution here in Finland. In connection to the 1956 boom we also made a study-trip with students to Budapest where we took part in 1956 seminar organized by Professor Varga and Dr Miklós Zeidler. Besides individual contributions, during it, students from Hamburg, Jyväskylä and Budapest could better get acquainted with each other and lay some foundations for future contacts. It was an achievement on our part to be able to show with our papers some historical understanding of the tragedy Hungarians had had to experience.
Curiously enough, what we had so far, until 2006 accomplished was regarded as a moderate merit in Hungarian Studies but something of an anomaly at our own Department and Faculty. The explanation for this is still a mystery and may remain so. Fortunately, as our presence here proves, the times have been changing.
What have we been up to recently? A couple of projects deserve attention.
In collaboration with docent Heikki Roiko-Jokela the present author recently published the book titled Rakkaat heimoveljet: Unkari ja Suomi 1920–1945 dealing with the infamous ideology of kinship and pan-fenno-ugrism. There are prospects to have it published in Hungary in Hungarian but it may take some time. In this connection, it is proper to thank Professor Gábor Gyáni for having a revised section of the book about Pál Teleki’s expedition to Finland in 1924 published in the respectable Történelmi Szemle.
What is burning at the moment in our hands is the project to have a one-volume illustrated cultural history of Finland (Under the North Star) published in Hungary in 2013, later followed by its publication also in German. The manuscript is on its way and we are already sending chapters of it to Debrecen where our beloved colleague and friend Sándor Maticsák oversees its translation and publication. This is a follow-up product of the already published History of Finland for Hungarian readers from the year 2000 which has run two editions. We hope that this new volume may become a hand-book for Hungarian students to learn about the rise and development of the Finnish culture from a fresh perspective.
At the moment we also co-operate with our Hungarian colleagues in the fields of administrative and organizational reshuffling of Hungarian Studies about which there is no need to ponder here. Of what we have personally been delighted is that we historians have always been heartily welcome to many
Hungarian projects, be they led by the Hajnal István Kör (Prof. Gábor Gyáni), ELTE, Debrecen, Pécs or the Academy. We have a few projects on the table for the future of which you may hear more during the next anniversary.