3
NOSTALGIA AND THE REMAINS OF EVERYDAY LIFE
In the early summer of 2002, I met a group of friends at West Balkán, a newly popular open-air bar. Tucked into a wooded area of Buda, West Balkán was so far off the beaten path that its owners hired bicycle rickshaws to ferry passengers from the street to the bar’s location. As we sat chatting in the early evening, my friend Róbert suddenly stood up and walked over to a nearby table where two teenaged girls were loudly complaining as they struggled to open bottles of Bambi soda. A citrus-flavored soda produced in the 1960s as a Hungarian socialist alternative to banned Western brands such as Pepsi and Coca-Cola, Bambi had been recently rereleased by the mineral water bottler Pannon-Aqua ’95 Rt and was briefly available in the soda’s original distinctive swing-top bottle (csatos üveg). Its return was part of a growing nostalgia industry in Hungary that sought to capitalize on fond memories of the material and popular culture of the socialist past. As I watched, the teenagers laughed as Róbert quickly showed them how to flip up the wire cage that surrounded the bottle cap. Róbert, then in his early fifties, returned to our table with a shrug. “Well, why would they know how to open it?” he commented as he returned to his own beer. “They didn’t grow up with it.”
From previous discussions, I knew that Róbert had suffered personal and professional hardships under the communist regime. Yet, as we settled back into our conversation, he merely shrugged at the sudden experience of expertise based on his own childhood as a socialist consumer. “I never thought there would be anything useful about what I learned under communism,” he joked.
Bambi was not the only remain of socialism to make a comeback more than a decade after the end of the regime. Beginning in the late 1990s, nostalgia for socialist mass culture became a popular marketing trend not only in Hungary but across the former Soviet bloc.1 In Budapest, entrepreneurs furnished new coffeehouses and restaurants with carefully salvaged furniture and objects from the former era. Hungarian manufacturers reintroduced Bambi and other snacks and beverages from the 1960s and 1970s, while advertisers revived old socialist-era television spots or created new ones that attempted to target similar memories. A number of films, invariably narrated from the limited perspective of a child or teenager, managed to win local audiences back to Hungarian cinema with their sympathetic narration of the conflicts and everyday pleasures of life under late socialism. And, just as several popular books and museum exhibitions cataloged the material culture of the recent past, collections of official socialist-era songs also topped the charts.
Even the word “nosztalgia” itself became fashionable, giving its name to parties, raves, bars, and even new business ventures without explicit reference to what, if anything, was intended to be the target of this emotion. As Róbert’s experience at West Balkán suggests, the success of marketing socialist nostalgia may have derived precisely from the ambiguity of nostalgia’s references and ideological content—and thus its ability to mobilize different consumers with very different relationships to the socialist past. For the teenagers who could not open the bottles of Bambi they had ordered, the appeal of such nostalgic marketing lay in its exoticism: objects that represented a temporal remoteness as glamorous as the spatial inaccessibility of the trendy West Balkán and the geographical region its name invoked.2 For members of the older generation, particularly those dispossessed by the social and economic uncertainties of postsocialism, nostalgia offered an idiom through which to voice longing for the safer and more secure material circumstances of late state socialism. And for others like Róbert, who explicitly denied any desire to return to the injustice and oppression of the past (and who perhaps, as Róbert insisted, never enjoyed the taste of Bambi anyway),3 nostalgic marketing prompted the bemused recognition of a set of skills and experiences, however unwillingly acquired, that was suddenly acquiring ironic new value from the capitalist recuperation of socialist-era mass culture.
The previous two chapters examined official efforts to master remains of socialism by banishing relics of communist ideology. Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, consumers in Hungary turned to what remained in everyday material culture: not to eliminate it, but to redeem it. Their nostalgic enjoyment might seem to have little in common with the emphatic disavowal that characterized earlier efforts to transform the everyday into history. But the practices of nostalgia and debates about its politics would reveal a discomfort with the ambiguities of the Kádár era similar to that visible in the battles to determine the fate of communist statues and national holidays. The difference here was that nostalgia simply inverted the previous logic through which many sought to reconcile competing memories of material security and political oppression. Rather than repudiate remains of the past era as overdetermined by their ideological purpose, nostalgic consumers would insist that the objects of their enjoyment possessed little political content at all.
Moreover, what all these practices shared was the fantasy of an easily distanced past and the optimistic future that soon awaited. If the Statue Park Museum preserved the physical memory of communism in order to materialize democracy, nostalgia similarly celebrated the consumer culture of the socialist past in order to assert the victory of capitalism. Nostalgic marketing gave new capitalist value to remnants of the past era recently discarded as the trivial, worthless, and inauthentic leftovers of Soviet occupation, and thus now irrelevant to Hungary’s democratic present. And as Róbert’s sudden experience of “expertise” demonstrates, nostalgia would also revalue everyday skills, habits, and memories of the past era that were themselves on the brink of vanishing—and thus enable its consumers to resist being themselves devalued as mere communist leftovers as Hungary entered the global market economy.
Nostalgia and the Fantasy of the West
Nostalgia’s etymological meaning is “homesickness”: from Greek nostos and algia, a longing for home. Despite its seemingly antique origins, the word is a recent invention, introduced in the seventeenth century to describe the physical illness experienced by sailors, soldiers, and other military sent far from home (Boym 2001, 3). The meaning of the term soon shifted, however, from the individual pain of spatial displacement to the more pervasive sense of loss and alienation produced by the transformations of modernity, “with its alienation, its much lamented loss of tradition and community” (Hutcheon 2000, 205).
This transformation from an individual medical condition into a cultural response also entailed a transformation in the object of nostalgia’s longings. Once cured by a trip home, nostalgia now mourns the impossibility of returning to the past. It is thus, as Svetlana Boym reminds us, a “historical emotion” (2001, 10): the product of a particularly modern temporality that views individuals and societies as caught up in a destructive and irreversible flow of time. Nostalgia responds to the subject’s perception of exile from the present by imagining the past as the site of a lost and utopic “immediacy, presence, and authenticity” (Hutcheon 2000, 107 discussing S. Stewart 1993, 23).
Such longing can take the form of a recuperative, virulent nationalism: what Boym calls “restorative nostalgia,” which insists on the unattainable project of resurrecting past presence. But, as she argues, nostalgia can also be “reflective,” focused on the breach between then and now, rather than a desired return (2001, 49–50). For while nostalgia is often interpreted as the insistence that the past be made present again, it is in fact the impossibility of returning to the past that makes such longing possible. Nostalgia, in other words, is defined by “its inability to approach its subject” (Fritzsche 2004, 65)—by the irreversibility of time and the irretrievability of its object.
Communist ideology was emphatically antinostalgic, locating its utopic yearnings in the future rather than in a largely discredited national past.4 Yet Soviet citizens were not immune from a nostalgic longing that fantasized overcoming spatial instead of temporal distance: the imagined dream of the West and the mobility and abundance it represented. For the ordinary citizen, such aspirations were as unattainable as the space travel produced by communism’s imperialist ambitions. As Boym argues, remembering her childhood in 1960s St. Petersburg, “it seemed that we would travel to the moon much sooner than we would go abroad” (2001, 60). Possibilities of emigration or exile were thus so circumscribed that they retained the sense of irreversibility and finality that characterizes temporal nostalgia (Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004, 492).
Such fantasies of mobility were modulated in the Hungarian context by Hungary’s exceptional status as “the happiest barracks in the Soviet bloc,” with greater access to Western goods, media, and travel than many of its socialist neighbors. Hungarians thus articulated their dreams of escape in terms of material consumption and a Western standard of living broadly perceived as superior to what socialism offered. One study from the mid-1970s, for example, quotes a factory worker who defined his fantasized life in the West not in terms of democracy and freedom of expression, but as “living with two cars of my own” (Halmos 1978, 131–132, cited in Pittaway 2006). And even in the early years after the end of socialism, people I met were eager for me to evaluate their possessions and furnishings in comparison to a Western standard that they considered Hungary still struggling to achieve. The middle-class family who hosted me during my first visit in Hungary in 1993 (a schoolteacher, engineer, and their two young children) lived in a split-level two-story house that they had constructed in their village during the last years of socialism. Walking me through the sunlit and spacious rooms—which included separate bedrooms for the children, a formal parlor, and a TV room where I slept and prepared my lessons—the schoolteacher Orsolya compared it negatively to homes in the United States, asking me, “This is where a factory worker would live, isn’t it?”
Ironically, it was the socialist regime’s own policies that encouraged the emerging consumer consciousness that made such comparisons possible (Fehérváry 2002, 2013; Pittaway 2006; Valuch 2000). As we have seen, one way for the regime to distance itself from the hated Stalinism of the 1950s was to emphasize consumption and an ever-increasing standard of living as the basis for its political legitimacy. As Krisztina Fehérváry argues, the regime reconceptualized its project of modernizing Hungary as a specifically material one, in which the production of a utopian society necessitated transforming both the lived environment and the material expectations of Hungary’s citizens (2013, 4–5). This policy would help to produce modern consumer subjectivity in Hungary’s socialist citizens, even as the state system lacked the products to fully satisfy this demand. By the time Hungary opened its border to Austria in the last days of communist rule (to enable East Germans to escape through Hungary to the West), many Hungarians had already been taking advantage of lax regulations to make shopping daytrips to Vienna for years. On the anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1989 (November 7), for example, 10 percent of the country’s population was estimated to be in Vienna doing their Christmas shopping (Böröcz 1992, 207).
The Western standard of living became the benchmark of the “normal” (normális) through which Hungarians developed consumer consciousness (Fehérváry 2002, 2013). As a result, many Hungarians articulated their critique of the regime precisely through the idiom intended to stave off their dissatisfaction: that is, consumerism. The lower quality of Hungary’s mass-produced goods, perceived as cheap imitations of Western ones (such as Trapper, socialist Hungary’s brand of designer jeans) became emblematic of the lower quality of life within the Soviet bloc more generally. Many people thus recalled the innocence with which they had endowed Western products with a magical and transformative capacity based on their perceived higher quality, unavailability, and the prestige in their consumption. My friend Levente, whom we met in the introduction, remembered fantasizing about Tic Tacs and Mars bars because they were advertised on Austrian television and only available in foreign currency shops. Gazing at them in the window of the one foreign currency shop in the town where he grew up in Western Hungary, he would long for “just one dollar!” with which he could go in and purchase these forbidden treasures. Utopia thus appeared to be located just outside Hungary’s borders, in a Western European and North American consumer culture characterized by unlimited Coca-Cola, bananas, and consumer choice.5
With the demise of socialism in 1990 and the entrance into democracy and the free market economy, many Hungarians initially hoped that they would quickly gain not only the political freedoms but also the consumption patterns and living standards of the West. Enthusiasm for all that was Western and new thus characterized the advertising and consumption during the first years of postsocialism, as Hungarians sought to counter the image of being backward, dowdy socialist neighbors and to repudiate a perceived past identity as consumers of both socialist ideology and inferior material culture. To return to the example of “national spring cleaning,” many people greeted the disappearance of socialist products in favor of new Western goods and advertising with far more enthusiasm than the removal of statues and communist monuments from public spaces.
But the economic challenges of postsocialism soon disenchanted this dream of consumer plentitude—as well as the romantic vision of the West that had undergirded the fantasy. After the initial euphoria of entering the world of Western consumerism, Hungarians quickly discovered that access to such products was still limited by financial constraints, if not political ones. Moreover, after decades of knowing how to read between the lines of official state discourse, many people told me that they found themselves suddenly ill-equipped to decipher the claims of Western advertising with the same skepticism. Mária, whom we met in chapter 2, was a former office administrator who lost her job in the early 1990s and now worked as a housecleaner. Many of our conversations concerned the hardships she and her husband, both in their late fifties, faced due to rising prices, the end of many state subsidies, and their loss of economic security and social status at a time when Hungarian society was becoming increasingly stratified. “We were all so innocent then,” she recalled to me in an interview in 2001, as we discussed her naiveté in the early years after transition. “For years [under socialism], we had seen all those advertisements on Austrian TV, and we thought they were true.” Although Western brands still remained popular, people like Mária now insisted that the quality of these products was not necessarily superior to local ones. She was thus able to justify buying cheaper Hungarian products not only in terms of her need to economize but as evidence of her growing capitalist consumer sophistication.
One of the first commercial successes of Hungary’s postsocialist film industry was a nostalgic revival of outdated fantasies of Western consumerism: the low-budget musical Dolly Birds (Csinibaba, 1997). Set in the early 1960s to evoke both the privation and optimism of the first years of normalization, the film’s loose narrative chronicles the activities of the members of a socialist housing block under the bumbling supervision of the block warden Uncle Simon. Inspired by the chance to win a trip to Helsinki in a talent contest, a group of teenagers forms a rock band, dreaming of an escape to a West imagined as a fantastic surplus of commodities: Coca-Cola, Chesterfield cigarettes, and the spectacular figure of Anita Ekberg (whose projected image sparks a riot in a theater showing La Dolce Vita). These fantasies of escape—epitomized in various characters’ performances of old pop hits from that era—are crushed when the group learns the talent contest has been rigged, and the state has chosen a “traditional” women’s choir to represent Hungary abroad. The film nonetheless ends on a cheerful note: the teenagers shrug off the contest, a new couple falls in love, and, after much nagging, the block warden Uncle Simon finally agrees to play a children’s game with an older neighbor in the park—a salient metaphor for the limited pleasures available under state paternalism.
FIGURE 3.1 Film still from Dolly Birds (Csinibaba, directed by Péter Timár, 1996).
Dolly Birds is a film about the losses and fantasies experienced under state socialism—dreams of a Western “normality” impossible to achieve—but its enthusiastic reception reflected distinctly postsocialist realities.6 The film mourns a specific configuration of the “West” as an object of longing around which socialist-era subjectivities were constituted. By mythologizing the now-lost pleasures of everyday life in early 1960s Hungary—outdated fashions, teased hair, Bambi soda, and the popular hits of the day—it revives the dreams of that era: a time when both the socialist utopia predicted by communist ideology and the fantasy of self-fulfillment promised by Western consumerism had not yet failed to materialize. Its local success (unusual in the context of the 1990s film industry that specialized in art films for international festivals) paved the way for a plethora of nostalgic phenomena that began to emerge in the late 1990s. This included not only a number of films that similarly conjured up the fantasies and imaginative constructs of the past era,7 but the recuperation of the remains of state socialist everyday life that Hungarians had previously rejected as inauthentic.
Remains of the Everyday
The marketing of such nostalgia was indeed particularly suited to Hungary’s entrance into the temporality of the market economy, with its accelerated obsolescence and the commodification of age value (Jameson 1991). Capitalism makes a fetish of authenticity: the auratic perception of an object’s singularity, which, as Walter Benjamin (1968) reminds us, only arises at the time of its reproduction. As we have seen, the production of socialist remains by commodifying relics of official state culture began even before Hungary’s first democratic elections took place. The very speed with which such communist kitsch became fashionable demonstrated that it had little to do with a desire for restoration or return. Rather, it helped to produce the difference between the communist past and the “Western” present by rewriting the socialist era solely in terms of Soviet occupation.
The wave of nostalgia that appeared in the late 1990s differed from this earlier phenomenon, which used ironic humor to invoke the past in order to break with it. Instead, nostalgic consumers sought to commemorate a way of life they now viewed as irretrievable, through gentle, more affectionate attempts to recapture the fantasies, knowledges, and practices embedded in objects of socialist everyday life. What drove this nostalgia was not the desire to re-create or recover the socialist past. Rather, this nostalgia reflected the fundamental logic of nostalgia as the “desire to desire” itself (S. Stewart 1993, 23). That is, these consumers paradoxically attempted to recapture the structure of fantasy under the previous regime by projecting it onto a new target: socialist-era consumer and material culture now assigned the same emotional value once invested in foreign goods. Once reviled as cheap imitations of the West, these remains of socialism now appeared auratic and desirable compared to now-familiar Western brands and products.
In some popular cafés, Coca-Cola stood alongside not only Bambi but the local grape soda Traubi (which became the object of litigation by two competing firms who both claimed to own the rights to this socialist-era product). The formerly despised Trapper jeans reappeared, and Tisza sneakers (Hungary’s 1980s answer to Adidas) became trendy again thanks to viral marketing among club DJs too young to have worn the original brand. And in an underground passage across from the Kálvin square metro entrance, the popular Cha-Cha-Cha Eszpresszó tempted nostalgic consumers with a stylishly retro interior and murals based on black-and-white photographs. Its use of Westernized spellings made visible the recursive nature of socialist nostalgia, in which conjuring up the atmosphere of 1960s Hungary also necessitated evoking fantasies of that era: the longing to appear glamorously Western to both locals and tourists, as well as the desire to participate in Western levels of consumption.
FIGURE 3.2 Interior of (now closed) Cha-cha-cha Eszpresszó in 2002. The neon sign borrowed from the Italian spelling of “espresso,” and the name of the café itself was a Westernized “Cha-cha-cha” rather than the Hungarian “csacsacsa.” Personal photograph, 2002.
Meanwhile, a number of popular books and museum exhibitions presented collections of socialist-era mass and material culture. Examples included Zoltán Poós’s book Rainbow Department Store (Szivárvány Áruház, 2002), the historian András Gerő’s book and exhibition series Fingerprint of the Twentieth Century (A XX. század ujjlenyomata, 2001), and the 1999 exhibition Kitsch and Cult (Giccs és Kultusz), which displayed household objects from the 1950s and 1960s. The accompanying essays functioned as inventories of the cultural emotions of a lost age, chronicling not only the cultural histories of these remains, but also the memories, fantasies, and associations these objects once inspired.
In the autumn of 2000, I attended an all-night festival dedicated to the experience of growing up as consumers of the arts and mass culture of the 1970s and 1980s: the childhood era of what I term Hungary’s “transitional generation,” who came of age just as the regime was ending. Held to promote the nostalgia film, Little Journey (Kis Utazás, 2000), the festival took place in the (now-closed) Almássy Square Recreation Center, which had opened as a youth and Young Pioneer recreation center in 1983 and thus evoked nostalgic remembrance of the famous concerts and other cultural events held there during the final years of state socialism. Throughout the evening and into the early morning hours, the space was densely packed with visitors: primarily those in their late twenties and thirties, but including teenagers as well. People attended roundtable discussions and walked through exhibits of socialist-era styles and material culture, while others laughed at the old television commercials and socialist public service announcements—from ads for Fabulon cosmetics and the former Etc. (Satöbbi) fashion boutique to notices regarding litter and car maintenance—that played on numerous television monitors in the dance hall.8
The local architecture and design magazine Octogon produced a publication to promote the event, featuring old advertisements and fashion spreads as well as an article that asked local celebrities and business leaders what they personally considered to be the most memorable objects from the era. Many interviewees fondly remembered the Western goods (such as Adidas and Levi’s 501s) that by the 1980s had become available to those who purchased them abroad (or, in some cases, could afford them at home),9 as well as those objects (such as the amcsi dipó, an “American” attaché case—sometimes called “diplomat case”—used as a school satchel) that conjured up the glamour of Western consumption. The majority of interviewees, however, emphasized the local fashions of the time, such as the szimatszatyor, a military surplus gas-mask bag also used as a school satchel, and the Alföldi papucs, a Hungarian-made closed-toe sandal (Octogon 2000).
Zoltán Poós, another member of the transitional generation whose collection of memories of socialist-era objects, Rainbow Department Store (2002), went through several editions, explained the appeal of such objects in an interview with the newspaper Népszabadság. His encounters with these items, which ranged from candies, drinks, and cigarettes to toys, games, and knick-knacks, lacked what he termed the “pathos” and “false elevation” found in other, more triumphalist popular memories of life under state socialism (such as Hungary’s famous 1953 soccer win against England). Instead, these objects told a story of cultural invention and national idiosyncracy: “My favorites are the injection-molded plastic products made in the garages of Budaörs: the somewhat futuristic MK-27 tape recorder; the space-gun with a flint stone; the Rolli Zoli, which was a real piece of art; and the miniature car [törpeautó]. It was awkward, clumsy and inconsistent like the era itself in which it was made, but it still had some sort of compelling loveliness in it” (Trencsényi 2001). His affection for these remains thus included the context of their creation: what Daphne Berdahl describes as a nostalgia for an era of production itself (1999, 198–199), in contrast to Hungarians’ postsocialist identities as consumers of primarily Western goods.10
FIGURE 3.3 Window display at Pont bookstore advertising the publication of Rainbow Department Store (Szivárvány Áruház, 2002). Personal photograph, 2002.
Such nostalgia mourned a disappearing sociality as well as a lost material culture. Hungarians under state socialism were never fully cut off from Western media and mass culture, and they did their best to follow international fashions and trends. Nonetheless, the production and distribution of socialist mass culture did not function according to capitalist principles of market segmentation, product differentiation, and planned obsolescence. The experience of playing with the same toys, same brands, and having more or less similar access to Western goods thus enabled collective generational identities that only now became visible at the moment of their disappearance, when increasing socioeconomic stratification was resulting in very different capacities to consume both local and Western products. Remembering the consumption practices of the past era—and the now quaint envy toward those who could travel abroad, own a car, or have access to hard-currency stores—thus helped to ameliorate the new class distinctions emerging under postsocialism. In so doing, nostalgia for socialism’s remains also brought glamour into the present day by reminding contemporary consumers of greater scarcity and lack of consumer choice in the previous era. Levente, who as a child in socialist Hungary had longed for “just one dollar” to take to the hard currency stores, told me that he now periodically bought himself Toblerone, although he did not otherwise enjoy eating chocolate, simply out of the nostalgic pleasure of recalling how exotic and unattainable it had once seemed. Giving shape and form to the fantasies of the past era, the appeal of such nostalgia lay in its potential to bring new value to the forgotten memories, unrealized futures, and long-dormant socialities hidden in Hungary’s remains of socialism—and in so doing, enable new ways to imagine mastering the challenges of the present.
“I Only Remember the Beautiful”
Many international commentators nonetheless deplored socialist nostalgia as the uncritical attempt to resurrect past presence and imagined origins that sought to forget everything that was painful and difficult about the socialist era. Treating the status of memory in postsocialist societies as a cultural diagnostic, these critics assumed that nostalgia possessed an intrinsic political content that threatened Hungary’s national well-being. As a result, each new film or fad inevitably inspired articles and reviews by Hungarian journalists who made a point of arguing that these remains of socialism had little to do with politics, and even when they did, they were not actually perceived this way at the time.
For example, Ákos Réthly, the manager of the Statue Park Museum whom we met in chapter 1, produced a collection of socialist songs called The Best of Communism that quickly shot to number one in Hungary for several weeks in 1997. Although the foreign media interpreted the popularity of the album in terms of political kitsch or reactionary politics (Legge and Jordan 1997; Sunley 1997), many people in their twenties and thirties explained to me that they valued these songs neither despite nor because of their political content. Their nostalgia was based on the personal and communal childhood experiences associated with these songs (such as sitting around the campfire at summer camp or stealing one’s first kiss), rather than the ideology they represented. Socialist nostalgia provided an idiom through which to celebrate the experience of membership in a generation, understood not merely in the sense of life cycle or lineage, but as a specific place within—and thus relationship to—history.11 One Dutch acquaintance was delighted to find the album to buy as a gift for his Hungarian girlfriend; he remembered that when she and her friends went out drinking, they sometimes would burst into these songs. Eszter, the student who worked part-time as a secretary, similarly told me that when she and her friends played the guitar and sang, their repertoire included both popular songs and these old songs from their days in the Young Pioneers.
Even more overtly political memories were still overlaid with the innocence of childhood. Győző, the owner of a trendy clothing shop on a fashionable street in central Pest told me that “Liberation Song” conjured up memories of being in school and celebrating the April 4 holiday (the day the Soviet army “liberated” Hungary from Nazi occupation) on one of the first warm days of spring. Local reviews of Best of Communism similarly emphasized personal memory over political meaning (Magyar Narancs 1997). An article that reviewed a dance music cover of the Soviet standard “Polyushka” (released just a couple of months before Best of Communism) likewise argued that the enthusiasm of the workers’ movements and the free wieners and beer of the May 1 celebrations “didn’t have much to do with [nem sok köze volt]” the injustice and repression of the past era (Internet Kalauz 1997, 15). From these perspectives, nostalgia was thus nothing more than the universal yearning for childhood itself as an easier, more innocent time. This position is canonized in the title of a popular ballad from the 1960s that people often invoked in this context: “I Only Remember the Beautiful” (Csak a szépre emlékezem). Yet explaining the appeal of such songs simply in terms of childhood memory as a transhistorical experience enabled these nostalgic consumers to misrecognize the politics of state socialism. Under socialism, the paternalist regime constructed its citizens, regardless of age, as childlike by encouraging them to focus on personal interests and to leave the work of politics to the communist leadership. As a result—as Fehérváry observes in her discussion of the film Dolly Birds—many Hungarian adults perceived the demise of state socialism as a collective coming-of-age, in which their entrance into the harsh realities of democracy and market capitalism also represented the passage from youth into the freedoms and responsibilities of adulthood (Fehérváry 2006, 55). The emergence of nostalgia under postsocialism thus reflected a broader cultural fantasy about what many Hungarians now remembered as the relative innocence and insularity of private life under socialism—and it thus stood in stark contrast to the economic uncertainties and political battles of the present day.
Although these narratives comprised a common cultural vocabulary, they spoke most directly to what I have been calling the “transitional generation”: those Hungarians who came of age just as the regime was ending, and whose entrance into adulthood was simultaneously tasked with the broader national project of remaking themselves as new postsocialist subjects. As Péter Mújdricza notes, this younger generation mostly knew only from their parents the experience of policemen knocking on the door late at night, and thus “experienced the provincial forms of vulgar ‘empire’ culture as some magical high camp: a world of red-tie fairy tales with May-Day balloons and penny ice-cream cones—all real, and for lack of anything better, of value” (1993, 152). Tibor, a software engineer then in his early thirties, reflected:
A few months ago on TV I saw a program with some of the so-called “smart people”: you know, the founder of Pesti Est [a weekly entertainment guide], the president of Matávnet [an internet provider]—actually, I know some of these people. They said that this generation had the best of both worlds. Most of what they said was stupid. But not that.…
I would have hated to have to work in college. Money from Mom was enough. I could buy beers and I could get drunk off two beers. There wasn’t any thirst … hunger … to crave more. Nobody had more, everyone had Trabants. This was great for kids, not wanting more. When you’re an adult, you know the Trabant sucks. But we never had to face it.
Now, it’s not the same, you have to pay for it. When the changes took place, we got a different chance—we didn’t have to join [the] communist party, we could be creative. It’s kind of magic that the system ended when my studies did.
In late socialism, films about adolescence tended to be films about political optimism and its disillusionment, as a new generation of idealistic youths confronted—and ultimately was forced to resign themselves to—the deeply tired and cynical system created by their parents and grandparents.12 In contrast, postsocialist nostalgia films about late socialist life resembled the way Tibor recounted his memories of the era, by paralleling the youth of their protagonists to the perceived overall immaturity of Hungarian society as a whole. The young protagonists of these films invariably emphasized consumption over political participation, and they gave priority to personal rites of passage over national ones. For example, the film Moscow Square (Moszkva Tér; 2001) is a gentle comedy that follows a group of graduating male high school students in the final days of state socialism. Concerned with parties, girls, and cars (the film’s slogan: buli, csajok, verda), these teenagers are insouciantly indifferent to the adult world of politics. For them, the fall of the regime means the chance to travel West, to purchase new exotic foreign goods, and to skip their graduation examination in contemporary history, which the recent events force the state to cancel. Even the most defining moment of this period of political turmoil fails to attract the students’ attention: the 1989 televised reburial of Imre Nagy, martyr of Hungary’s failed 1956 uprising, is met with apathy: “Who the fuck is Imre Nagy?”
Similarly, the Little Journey festival’s celebration of the styles and fashions of the final decades of late socialism brushed aside the political context of such consumption as irrelevant to the commemoration of generational experience. “The festival wants to show that it’s good to be young in any system, even if our history coincides with a dull and inglorious era,” one journalist commented in his coverage of the event. “The essence is that ‘That’s when we met girls, that’s when we got drunk for the first time, that’s when we were young.’ ” In other words, he sardonically concluded, “The Kádár-era pancake was filled with crap, but on top of it, it seems, there was pudding” (Barta 2000).
Nostalgia for childhood is for a time of limited perceptions, when one is not even aware of political considerations. Yet, although the forms, practices, and structures of feeling found in Hungary’s nostalgia were quintessentially postsocialist, the ideological distinctions it drew between childhood and adulthood, private life and politics, were inherited from the previous era. Nostalgic consumers may have argued that everyday life under state socialism was free from politics, but this retreat from public participation into a private realm of action was in fact the condition of political subjectivity under late socialism. Nonetheless, because those who enjoyed nostalgia considered it to be apolitical, attempts to harness nostalgic passions for political ends would fail under postsocialism.
The Politics of Nostalgia
On the eleventh anniversary of János Kádár’s death on July 8, 2000, I went to Budapest’s Kerepesi Cemetery to attend a memorial event in his honor, which I had seen advertised on a photocopied flyer taped to a lamppost several days earlier. As general secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, Kádár had led Hungary through three decades of the relative economic security known as “goulash communism.” Representing the face of post-1956 normalization—epitomized in his slogan that “those who are not against us, are with us”—Kádár was known as an avuncular, plainspoken leader whose policies emphasized a steady increase in living standards, subsidized by foreign loans. Only in 1988, when political reform became inevitable in light of Gorbachev’s perestroika and Hungary’s own economic crises brought on by foreign debt, did reformers in Kádár’s party nudge him out of office. He died a year later.
Organized by the Workers’ Party (Munkáspárt),13 one of two successor parties to the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt), the anniversary event attracted perhaps a hundred mourners to the cemetery: primarily the older generations, although several of them told me that they were pleased to see a handful of children and teenagers with their grandparents in attendance as well. At the cemetery gates, members of the Workers’ Youth Organization and Left-Wing Front sold red carnations, political pamphlets, and Che Guevara T-shirts, and closer to the event, the loudspeaker warned the crowd to make way for party officials to put flowers on Kádár’s grave beneath banners reading “Workers’ Party” and “To remember is our historical responsibility [Emlékezni történelmi felelősségünk].” As the crowd waited for the speeches to begin under the hot July sun, old friends and colleagues greeted each other and praised the beauty of the event or complained about a poor view, while a television reporter walked through the crowd looking for likely candidates to interview. My tape recorder and notebook also attracted attention; an elderly man beside me attempted to help me by shushing the surrounding crowd and offering to hold my backpack. I told him that I was an anthropologist from the United States and that I was interested in what people think of the communist past today. This memorial would be “instructive [tanulságos]” for me, the man responded, with a sweeping motion toward the rest of the crowd. “These people believed in something—something beautiful,” he told me earnestly. “They received no reward, but this is common in Hungarian history. They are poor. But we will win—it’s just a matter of time. It’s worth it to do the right thing [Érdémes jónak lenni]. That’s why we’re born. And that’s what matters at the end of your life.”
The speeches that began soon afterward echoed his critique of both the quality of present-day life and the moral principles that undergirded it. “Ten years ago, we lived better than today,” the head of the Workers’ Party, Gyula Thürmer, declared, citing the problems of homelessness, growing poverty, declining pensions, and corruption, among many others.
Ten years ago, we believed that all men are created equal, and what matters in this country is honest work, integrity, and humanity. Today, there is no value to honest work in Hungary …
Ten years ago, the workers were removed from power, and in return they received so-called “rights.” You have the choice to work or not to work, but only if you can find a job. If you want to go abroad, you can go, but only if you have the money. You can criticize the government and the police won’t take you away, but what you say will not get on TV. You have the right to stare at advertisements for washing powder. You have the right every four years to choose a washing powder: Fidesz washing powder, MSZP [Hungarian Socialist Party] washing powder, Smallholders [Independent Smallholders’ Party] washing powder.…
Were we deceived? Yes! For ten years, every day, every hour. But still, I say: don’t just always point at others. We too are responsible. We could not resist the temptation. We wanted a taste of capitalism. We wanted to know what private property is like, what free enterprise is like, what the European economy is like. Now we know it, we got it, and we went shopping with it, but at least now we know.
Urging his audience “not to waver” any further, Thürmer ended by invoking the legacy of Kádár to support his bid for election: not to restore the past, but to create a “modern, competitive, democratic Hungary” that would ensure the promise of a “better life” that Hungarians had once enjoyed.
Thürmer’s speech did not reflect a nostalgic desire to return to the socialist era, and in an interview with me several months later, he was insistent that a return to a socialist system was neither possible nor desirable.14 Instead, Thürmer drew on the memory of Kádár in order to launch a moral critique of the failed promises of transition and the need to envision the future in a more humane and socially just form. Yet in light of his party’s lack of popularity as a contemporary democratic socialist movement, Thürmer’s appeal to nostalgic memories of the previous era was clearly strategically important. It enabled him to gain support from those who did embrace the memory of Kádárism less ambivalently—such as the elderly man who stood beside me during the speeches, for whom the dream of a communist future had been only delayed, but not destroyed.
Considering the relatively small size of the crowd at the memorial and the disproportionate number of older members, as well as the marginalization of the Workers’ Party in public and political debate, the stakes of such efforts to recuperate the experience of Kádárism would only become clear a year later, in the summer of 2001, when Thürmer proposed that the state permit the erection of a statue to Kádár. This suggestion to memorialize Kádár—and thus also to elevate the public profile of the Workers’ Party—probably would not have registered on the public radar had it not been issued during the height of the annual political summer news drought that Hungarians call “cucumber season” (uborkaszezon). One of Hungary’s recently established commercial television stations, TV2, picked up the story, devoting one of its most popular programs, the weekly news roundup Diary (Napló), to examining this campaign and to collecting viewer opinions via its weekly phone-in poll. To everyone’s apparent surprise, 80 percent of those who phoned in agreed that Kádár deserved a statue of his own, and the question for the following week’s poll (“Is it better to be young now?” [Jobb-e most fiatalnak lenni?]) also received an emphatic response in favor of the past.
A revised version of this catchphrase (“When was it better to be young?”) later found its way back into public currency as the Workers’ Party campaign slogan for the national elections in spring 2002. Yet, despite the apparent popularity of this argument in the phone poll months earlier, the party was unable to leverage the emotional capital of Kádárism into political gain. Instead, in the first round of elections, the Workers’ Party once again failed to win the 5 percent necessary to gain parliamentary representation.
What accounted for the Workers’ Party’s inability to mobilize the emotions summoned by nostalgia for political ends? One answer concerns simple political expediency. Nostalgia in Hungary was about fantasy: both the fantasy of a more innocent past, and the past’s own fantasies about what the future might bring. As a specific ideological project of restoration, however, nostalgia had little appeal in a country then already committed to joining the European Union. Politicizing the homey sentiments summoned by nostalgia would have opened the policies of the past regime to political critique, thus invalidating nostalgia’s usefulness and emotional legitimacy across the political spectrum. It would subject those on the left to a condemnation of the Kádár regime’s lack of democracy, and at the same time, it would also be read as a rejection of, and hence incompatible with, right-wing ideology. As we shall see in chapter 4, the Fidesz party’s anticommunist rhetoric during its 2002 reelection campaign targeted such nostalgia as a particular danger. Warning that the victory of their chief rival, the MSZP (Hungarian Socialist Party), would mean the “return” of communism to Hungary, they rejected the MSZP’s attempts to reinvent itself as a European social democratic party, instead portraying it as the inheritor of all the sins and corruption of the past era.
On the other hand, as long as voters could justify their fond memories solely in terms of their “stomachs”—that is, their memories of material comfort and security—the emotions summoned by nostalgia could be effective on both sides of the political divide. The MSZP, impatient to put its past behind it, could make vague reference to protecting the concerns of the “simple people” without taking responsibility for the injustices of socialism. Meanwhile, the right wing could explain nostalgic practices as merely the expression of dissatisfaction with postsocialism on the whole, rather than an endorsement of communism and hence a specific rejection of right-wing anticommunist discourse.
Public and Private Worlds
More important than the ideological incompatibility between the fantasized past and present-day ends is that those who enjoyed nostalgia viewed the domestic realm evoked by nostalgia as the absence of politics itself. As we have seen, this ideological distinction between the private domestic sphere and the public world of politics was the product of post-1956 normalization, which no longer required society to subordinate personal interests to the utopia of collectivism. The policies under Kádárism thus represented a significant shift from earlier attempts by the Soviets to revolutionize everyday life by breaking apart the bourgeois distinction between the private domestic realm and the public arena of political thought, culture, and action. As Boym describes, these efforts included interventions such as communal apartments and a revolutionary aesthetics that pathologized even rubber tree plants and kitschy bric-a-brac as emblems of the bourgeois private interior (1994, 32–38).
After 1956, the regime switched course to reinforce, rather than undermine, the public/private divide. Political compliance, rather than active participation, was the goal. One unanticipated result of the regime-encouraged enthusiasm for consumer luxuries and weekend houses (as well as the second jobs necessary to acquire them) was the production of an atomized population whose overriding concern for the pursuit of private happiness ended up being not all that different from what is found in the West (Fehérváry 2013; Lampland 1995). Yet regardless of the ideological problems this policy produced, it nonetheless served a pragmatic purpose. As Slavoj Žižek observed in an interview, by the years of late socialism, the last thing the regime wanted was for its citizens to believe in communism, because such politicization might incite them to revolt against a system that had failed its own ideals. “The paradox of the regime was that if people were to take their ideology seriously it would effectively destroy the system” (Boynton 1998, 44–45).
Instead, the insistence on a sharp division between public and private worlds enabled Hungary’s citizens to maintain a sense of autonomy and moral integrity in the face of a poorly functioning and dishonest system. As Martha Lampland explains:
All throughout the socialist period in Hungary, a stark opposition was drawn by Hungarians between the public and private domains, between what was seen as the posturing of vacuous politics and the real, substantial, truthful site of the home and hearth.… Everyone still engaged in public activities: wrote and fulfilled plans, built socialism in the factory, and learned lessons about party heroes in school. Once they returned home, however, Hungarians ridiculed the plan, criticized their bosses, worked fervently in their private gardens, and forgot as much of the Communist moralizing as possible. (1995, 246)
As Lampland goes on to argue, however, this common understanding of a chasm between public obligations and the meaningful activity conducted in private only served to conceal striking continuities across both realms: whether in the ways that Hungarians thought about “human nature, personal utility, and individual interest” or the similar attitudes and practices found in the first and second economy (1995, 246, 340). At the same time, the dichotomy of public and private also effaced the significant differentiation (by class, gender, and generation, among others) to be found in different people’s domestic worlds (333).
The nostalgia that appeared after the system’s demise could thus claim to be free of political considerations precisely because many Hungarians experienced the material culture and everyday life of state socialism as similarly outside the sphere of politics. Yet, because this division was itself an ideological relic of the past regime, those who now defended nostalgia as politically irrelevant ironically only reproduced, rather than overturned, the political subjectivity of the previous system. And by maintaining the ideological distinction between warm memories of everyday life and the harsh context that enabled these fond recollections, nostalgia also inherited the impossibility of overcoming the tension between them.
Incommensurable Pasts
This tension was evident in the interviews conducted during Diary’s follow-up poll, in which the program asked Hungarian celebrities whose affiliations spanned the political spectrum about their opinions on nostalgia and whether they supported a statue to Kádár. At stake was the suitability of bringing a nostalgia based on youthful private memories of Kádár’s “childlike” citizenry into the political sphere of urban monumentality.
I had a very nice childhood. I was a Young Pioneer and I was in a pioneer camp, and it was nice. There was no ideology, but simply a very nice childhood. Okay, we didn’t have beautiful shop window displays or branded items, there was only one type of things: it was a rather gray world that we lived in. But I think it was very beautiful. Then the school years came, I studied at a music gymnasium, and we played on the best instruments. The state bought me the best instruments: Steinway and Yamaha pianos. And it was the same at music academy. So I can say that I was educated on the money of the previous state. I can’t say anything bad about it. [Lajos Galambos (“Lagzi Lajcsi”), musician and host of the popular musical variety television show, Dáridó]
I don’t like the idea that people of dubious fame get a statue, and in general, I don’t really like when people are heroized, unless they were a great historical person. Kádár was a historical personality, but Hitler was too, and I’m sure there are some who would still like to raise a statue to him.… But I was otherwise very surprised at the results—82 percent—I didn’t think that people still think of old times with such nostalgia. I see similar tendencies in East Germany. Whether it’s about Erich Honecker or the era, I can’t really judge, but I think that it comes from a certain level of dissatisfaction for the present and a desire for safe existence. [Gábor Bochkor, radio host]
The program interspersed these interviews with archival clips of Kádár: speeches in which he called for raising the standard of living—“not radically but consistently”—and scenes of him playing with children, with the words, “Today, there is no child whose parents have to say that my child cannot eat because ‘the bread went to sleep.’ If our fight did not achieve anything else but this, then it was worth it.” The lack of commentary to contextualize these clips suggested that these claims were to be taken at face value—a rosy vision of socialist-era consumption that another interviewee, the right-wing rock musician Ferenc “Feró” Nagy, contested.
I don’t understand—no, I do, they are nostalgic for back then, when bread was only 3,60 forints. So that was a “safe” world, but then people forget that they couldn’t buy a car, couldn’t buy a fridge, there was nothing really in the shops.…
But I understand that they cry back for the pseudo-safety. It’s true, there was nothing, but you could build on that nothing, and people still live in the houses that were built on this nothing.
Any evaluation of the socialist era was thus torn between what Diary’s reporter summarized as “freedom” and “material security”: values that the Kádár regime rendered irreconcilable. “It’s interesting to see that when we asked famous people the usual reaction was anger or laughter,” the program’s announcer concluded. “Kádár’s name still divides society.”
Although the historical place of Kádár may have been divisive, it would be a mistake to merely interpret this disagreement as a split between two communities of memory: one with positive memories of the socialist past, and the other without. After all, many members of the transitional generation who enthusiastically consumed socialist nostalgia were also the same ones who, in other contexts, decried the past regime and called attention to what they perceived to be troubling social and economic continuities between the socialist past and postsocialist present. Rather, the question was one of reconciling memories constructed as free of politics with more painful (and hence explicitly politicized) experiences of oppression under the previous regime. The perceived incommensurability of these two sets of memory was what enabled most Hungarians to reject any notion of returning to the socialist era, yet still select Kádár as the most positive politician in twentieth-century Hungarian history in a 1999 public opinion poll (Medián 1999). It is why, as demonstrated in Feró Nagy’s quote above, even those who argued against nostalgia often phrased their critiques in nostalgia’s own idiom (the world of material goods), rather than explicitly political ones. A piece in the far-right weekly Demokrata, for example, condemned the current nostalgia trend by pointing out how the now-idealized socialist past lacked much of what today’s postsocialist consumers take for granted: mobile phones, bananas and other once-exotic fruits, fresh and reliably stocked goods at the grocery store, and so on (Zs. Ungváry 2001, 41).
The film Dolly Birds illustrates this dilemma in its opening scene of block warden Uncle Simon broadcasting the morning lottery numbers over the local public address system. He stutters when he discovers that one of the numbers is “56” (the year of Hungary’s failed uprising against the Soviets), and hastily instructs block residents to check the newspaper for the numbers instead. Within the film’s narrative, of course, we are to understand that Uncle Simon refuses to say the words out of fear of political reprisals. But this scene also has a purpose outside the film’s plotline. “Not saying 1956” is the film’s condition for all that comes after: a portrayal of the early years of post-1956 normalization as greatly circumscribed and built on repression, but potentially joyful nonetheless.15
Nostalgia in the Hungarian context thus functioned as the limit of politics. It gave voice to broadly perceived social truths that could not be spoken in a political context because it would have subjected these claims to a critique of the past regime’s antidemocratic policies. Rather than represent the desire to return to the past, the impossibility of returning to that past was what made such discourse possible: Hungarians could “afford” their nostalgic enjoyment of socialism’s remains, because at that time, they saw no actual possibility of return to the Kádár era. In this way, the elegiac idiom of nostalgia impeded recognizing the ways in which the experience of political subjectivity under Kádárism continued to penetrate the present, by shaping the very possibilities of how it could be remembered.
The Workers’ Party thus not only made a mistake by confusing nostalgia for socialism for an endorsement of perceived representatives of the past regime. More crucially, it failed to understand nostalgia in the Hungarian context as a specific refusal of politics—even when embodied in the figure of the country’s former leader. As the Diary interviews made clear, support for a Kádár statue did not necessarily entail support for him as a historical actor. Rather, as many interviewees argued, the statue’s supporters wanted to commemorate Kádár as a symbol of when the past itself felt safe and childlike: a time when the populace felt protected by the hand of the paternalist state, and a basic standard of living seemed assured.
Of course, many others criticized erecting a monument to Kádár, arguing that it would reverse the work of the Statue Park Museum a decade earlier by reinstating ideological content long-removed from the cityscape. But the creation of the Statue Park Museum had not simply removed communist ideology from the streets and squares of Budapest. It had been the outcome of struggles among city authorities, politicians, art professionals, and the media to transform unnoticed landmarks of everyday urban life into scandalously visible remains of Soviet occupation. This new semiotics of public space distanced the recent past by reducing the meaning and purpose of monuments to their intended political message. In turn, the proposal to erect a monument to Kádár did not simply threaten to reinsert political content into the city, as critics worried. Such criticism missed what was truly radical about the nostalgia that fueled both the Workers’ Party’s proposal and its enthusiastic reception. The erection of a monument to Kádár would invert the logic that created the Statue Park Museum: instead of defining the remains of the past era solely in ideological terms, it insisted that such remains were free from politics altogether.
A monument to Kádár would thus not simply be the equivalent of returning statues from the Statue Park Museum to their former locations. Rather, it would be as if Osztyapenkó, the statue discussed in chapter 1, was reerected not to commemorate Ilya Afanasyevich Ostapenko, the Soviet captain who died liberating Hungary, but to serve as a memorial to the monument’s role in the everyday life of state socialism: a popular hitchhiking stop whose waving flag welcomed Budapest residents when they returned from a vacation at Lake Balaton. In this sense, a statue to Kádár would serve as a memorial to the domestication of socialism itself.
Nostalgia for the everyday life of Kádár’s Hungary offered one of the few safe discourses available for talking about the past. Because it evaded being harnessed for political ends, it provided a powerful tool for collective identity that was otherwise unavailable in Hungary’s polarized political and cultural climate. For some, nostalgia offered a frame to give sense and coherence to personal memories, and thus to maintain personal continuity in the face of historical disjuncture and irresolution: it enabled its subjects to integrate their memories into narrative without either endorsing or condemning an era not yet perceived to have fully resolved into history. For others, particularly the transitional generation, the emphasis was on finding a common idiom for discussing the past with others, regardless of how these memories fit into their larger family or social history during the socialist era, and independent of how positively or negatively they chose to evaluate the former system as a whole.
Indeed, the perceived incompatibility of nostalgia with such divisive political topics made the nostalgic consumption of socialist remains perhaps the only idiom through which to find common ground in discussions of the socialist era. Socialist nostalgia enabled Hungarians “to not talk about the past while talking about it.” It permitted its consumers to retain their childhood memories while refusing to pass definitive judgment on the larger political and historical context within which these experiences took place, and thus functioned as both a counterpoint to and evasion of the highly polarized representations of the past in the public sphere. Nostalgia thus worked not merely as a discourse about the past, but as a metacommentary on what it meant to talk about the past in postsocialist Hungary. In so doing, nostalgia also offered a way to envision mastering both the troublesome socialist past and the uncertain postsocialist present: by embracing remains of socialism as both the refusal of politics and the source of uniquely Hungarian cultural value.
Remains as Cultural Heritage
One of Hungary’s most popular socialist-era films, Péter Bacsó’s 1969 comedy The Witness (A Tanú), tells the story of József Pelikán, a dike keeper who becomes trapped in the regime’s absurd machinations in the years before 1956. Caught for illegally slaughtering a pig, Pelikán expects years of hard labor and jail time, but he is instead befriended by the mysterious party functionary Comrade Virág. Virág rewards Pelikán with a series of increasingly prestigious positions, despite the fact that Virág fails at each one. The hapless Pelikán has no understanding of the reasons for his preferential treatment—until, in the final sequences of the film, Virág orders him to provide false testimony against a friend in a show trial.
Banned for over a decade by communist authorities, The Witness met with an enthusiastic reception when it was finally permitted general release in the early 1980s. Its jokes and portrayal of the well-intentioned yet bumbling Pelikán (whose literal-minded attempts to fulfill the requirements of each position inevitably expose the absurdity of the system that gave him these assignments) soon gained a wide and enduring cultural currency. For example, Pelikán is put in charge of creating a haunted-house ride in an amusement park. Instructed to give the ride a socialist flavor, he produces tableaux that literalize some of Marx’s most famous expressions: a clumsy mechanical ghost represents the specter of communism haunting Europe and manacled stick figures of the proletariat rattle their chains.
One of the film’s most famous scenes depicts Pelikán’s job of running an agricultural institute tasked with creating a “Hungarian orange.” Despite the difficulty of growing such southern fruit in Hungary’s continental climate (Pelikán himself says that he has not eaten one in twenty years), the institute finally succeeds in producing a solitary orange, which is then celebrated with a visit from a leading party official. Moments before the ceremony is to begin, Pelikán discovers that his son has stolen the orange and eaten it. In desperation, he turns for help to Virág, who orders him to use a lemon instead. The visiting party official tastes it and screws up his face in dismay, but—with a glance at Virág—Pelikán hurriedly explains, “It’s the new Hungarian orange. It’s a little bit yellow, a little bit sour. But it’s ours!” With this appeal to national pride and socialist advancement, Pelikán is saved, and the official’s grimace relaxes into a smile.
The ironies of the “Hungarian orange” (magyar narancs) caught hold of Hungary’s cultural imagination in the last years of the state socialist regime. As a symbol of the irrationality of the communist system, the Hungarian orange could be interpreted a number of ways: as a demonstration of the power of the regime to determine reality; as another example of the “shared lie” of communism (summed up in the well-known joke, “you pretend to work and we pretend to pay you”); and as a critique of the unnaturalness of any attempt to plant Soviet communism in Hungary’s presumably inhospitable cultural soil. In other words, the Hungarian orange became the epitome of the inauthenticity of Hungarian communism itself—so often qualified as “goulash communism,” “real existing socialism,” and other such terms to distinguish the lofty ideals of communism from the reality of the “new Hungary” actually produced in its name.
During the years of my fieldwork, friends and colleagues often recommended that I watch—or rewatch—The Witness, insisting that I could not understand the absurdity and frustration of life under communism without it. I soon began to realize, however, that pride in The Witness and its risible tale of the Hungarian orange reflected postsocialist realities as well. We have seen how much political and cultural labor was exerted to expel official state symbols as unwanted remains from the recent past. In contrast, the Hungarian orange became firmly established in Hungary’s postsocialist cultural vocabulary. In its early years as a liberal youth party, Fidesz chose the image of an orange to represent itself as the icon of anticommunism, and a popular left-wing weekly founded in 1989 similarly used the Hungarian orange (Magyar Narancs) as its title. It is proof of this icon’s broad appeal across political lines and the significant symbolic capital it was still perceived to mobilize that, in the late 1990s, the now center-right Fidesz launched a lawsuit that temporarily prevented the magazine Magyar Narancs from using its name.
But the meaning of the Hungarian orange did not remain the same. As the battle to control the symbol suggests, the primary appeal of the Hungarian orange under postsocialism no longer derived from its critique of the former regime’s irrationality. Instead, the emphasis shifted to an appreciation of how the orange exemplified the resilience, imagination, and humor of Hungary’s response to the imposition of communism. Most important of all was the claim to the national specificity of this response. That is, if during socialism the stress was implicitly on the humorous understatement of Pelikán’s “It’s a little bit yellow, a little bit sour,” and on how his forced denial of reality exemplified the blindness of the regime, what resonated in the postsocialist context was the claim to national ownership and uniqueness—“But it’s ours!”—that nonetheless endowed this sour lemon with value.
The saga of the Hungarian orange offers a new perspective on the challenge that socialist remains posed to the problem of mastering the previous era. Up to now, we have seen that the production of the socialist past in the form of isolated remains enabled Hungarians to distance and disavow the socialist past as merely a divergence from the authentic course of national history. In contrast, the logic of nostalgia—“But it’s ours!”—made visible the cultural productivity of socialist inauthenticity, whether the Hungarian orange or the clothes and foods produced to imitate Western products. However unwanted and “unnatural” the decades of state socialist rule were for those who lived through them, the memories and meanings invested in its detritus could nonetheless inspire novel ways to envision national value, community, and identity under postsocialism.
Nostalgia for socialism’s remains also provided a way to express the frustrations of Hungary’s long-desired entrance into the Western regimes of cultural recognition. It did so through the language of national heritage: a global discourse of cultural value that simultaneously reinforced and challenged the ways Hungary was represented in the West—and how Hungary in turn represented itself as a new Western subject.
We have seen how the marketing of state kitsch at the time of the political transformation enabled its consumers to demonstrate their distance from a quickly receding unpalatable past. These attempts to disavow the recent era were forced to confront the Cold War nostalgia of Hungary’s Western visitors, whose mass-mediated fantasies of defaced and toppled monuments had erroneously been used to characterize Hungary’s bloodless and peaceful democratic political transformation. As Žižek argues, what made such imagined spectacles so compelling—and necessary—was that they reinvented democracy by reinventing the West as an object of desire: “in a likeable, idealized form, as worthy of love” (1990, 50).
The real object of fascination for the West is thus the gaze, namely the supposedly naive gaze by means of which Eastern Europe stares back at the West, fascinated by its democracy. It is as if the Eastern gaze is still able to perceive in Western societies its agalma,16 the treasure that causes democratic enthusiasm and which the West has long lost the taste of. (Žižek 1990, 50)
As the boom in scholarship and media coverage of socialist nostalgia over the past decades indicates, many Western observers have similarly interpreted the subsequent efflorescence of nostalgic practices in Hungary and elsewhere in the Soviet bloc as confirmation of the West’s own fantasies about the failures and triumphs of socialism and communism. For some, the commodification of socialist-era goods has proved the victory of market capitalism. For others, socialist nostalgia offers a vision of popular resistance to capitalism that more traditional forms of political mobilization have failed to provide. Depending on the ideological stance of its observers, identical nostalgic practices can thus be interpreted as subversive or maintaining the status quo.17
For Hungarians, encounters with the West’s own (often inaccurate) fantasies and assumptions about past and present-day Hungary have entailed a double loss of the dream of the West through which socialist-era Hungarians constructed their own identities. On the one hand, this fantasy represented the dream of utopia and a “normal life”: the desire to consume Western products at Western levels and to catch up with its industrial production and consumer culture. The appeal of nostalgia thus lay in its reinvigoration of both memories of the past and a much-desired future of color, variety, and abundance: a time when, as Tibor ironically summarized in an unintentional echo of Thürmer’s speech at Kádár’s memorial, “your choice of washing powder could change your life.”
On the other hand, what made these memories of what now seemed to be an unimaginable innocence and gullibility to the claims of Western advertising so poignant was the very optimism that had inspired them—the expectation that with the fall of communism, Hungarian citizens would soon become full members of the West in both political and economic terms. Such nostalgia symbolized the longing to be accepted and recognized as preexisting, rather than potential, members of the European cultural and historical community.18 The frustrations of this were perhaps best exemplified by the Rubik’s cube (bűvös kocka), a toy that in the early 1980s found its way into nearly every Western household just as it did in Hungary, but was rarely recognized as a specifically Hungarian invention. It thus failed to export the self-image of Hungary as a nation whose scientific skill and creativity was on par with that of more affluent countries, even as it demonstrated that its products could indeed provoke reciprocal consumer desire.
Socialist nostalgia responded to this perception of misrecognition as well as to the more general sense of disenchantment with the extravagant claims of capitalist advertising and Western consumer products and culture. Now, not only was access to products limited by price rather than politics, but also many Hungarians believed that Western firms and advertisers failed to acknowledge them as sophisticated and knowledgeable consumers. Beginning with my first trip to Hungary in 1993, my friends and interview subjects were eager to reject this perception. One spoke resentfully of a visit abroad where she was greeted as an uncultured naïf and was assumed not to know how to operate appliances such as microwaves or hair dryers.19 Although these Hungarians may not necessarily have believed that their North American and Western European interlocutors actually looked down upon them, the risk of wholeheartedly accepting what they perceived to be “Western” values, standards, and logic was that, at best, it constructed them as inadequate imitations, and, at worst, it rendered their recent history and cultural experience pathological and inassimilable: a backward East, burdened by its discredited origins, versus the sophisticated consumers in the advanced West.
Many in the transitional generation responded to this perceived stigma by explicitly describing their shared experience and now obsolete cultural knowledge not as an unwanted legacy, but as cherished evidence of cultural intimacy and untranslatability. As one friend explained, “We know how to consume as Westerners, but we have additional knowledge that Westerners lack.” A corporate executive from the United States echoed this observation when he told me with some surprise that “Hungarians want to consume like Westerners—but I don’t think they want to be Western.” For example, a 2001 television commercial for the popular Hungarian beer Dreher presented a dazzling selection of teenaged slang, images, and icons from the socialist 1980s with the slogan: “We speak one language” (Egy nyelvet beszélünk). My friend Levente, who had longed to purchase goods from hard-currency stores, praised the historical accuracy of these references, so dense in narrative, visual, and linguistic citations of the previous era that he watched, rewatched, and discussed the commercial with me for nearly half an hour in order to explain the references in this thirty-second spot.
In a rapid-fire series of clips linked by voice-over dialogue, the ad reviewed some of the defining memories of being a teenager in the last decade of socialism.
“We did not believe when they scored the sixth against us in Mexico. Oh, how devastated we were” (Hogy kivoltunk).
This refers to a soccer world championship fought against the USSR; Hungary’s loss was narrated as a “national disaster” that Levente jokingly compared to the Kennedy assassination in the United States. The ad then switched to scenes of Hungarian teenagers dancing in a nightclub. Levente praised both their clothing and their habit of staring at televised videos rather than each other as “very eighties,” remembering also the circulation of much-copied videotapes from the West among his friends and classmates.
“But the videodisco consoled us. We loved Zsuzsa and the “break” [break-dancing]. But Regős only loved his Walkman.”
The screen then split in a nod to early music videos.
“And you remember the first western car [verda] in the neighborhood? What was even weirder [meredek] than the color was its owner.”
Levente explained that both the eighties’ slang for “car” (verda) and “weird” (meredek—steep) were no longer in common use.
“Like an actor from the horror movies we stole from your brother.”
The ad showed a group of teenagers crowded around a television, screaming in gleeful fright at the events on the screen.
“We really ate it up. [Nagyon kajáltuk]. Just like the kiwi.”
Remembering the kiwi conjured up the former fascination with exotic fruits whose limited availability made them a symbol of not only economic but also cultural capital under late socialism—as illustrated in the following line, in which the advertisement cut to one man teasing another for his ignorance in not knowing how to consume the fruit properly.
“Do you still eat the kiwi with the peel?”
The ad then ended with a shot of prosperous thirty-something yuppies sitting in a pub and laughing in reminiscence.
Announcer: “Dreher: We speak one language.”
Levente commended the ad for evoking very specific memories that only people in his generation would know, as well as for doing so through a particularly nostalgic combination of pride in present-day success and amusement at former naiveté. Levente had participated in political marches and demonstrations in the final years of state socialism; for example, he was proud that he could be seen among a sea of faces in a well-known photograph from a 1988 demonstration to show solidarity with Hungarians persecuted in Ceausescu’s Romania. Nonetheless, he viewed his experience of the past regime as mostly positive, describing himself as coming from a “typical Kádárist family”: “We were peasants who moved into the lower middle class. We didn’t have everything, but we had enough and we had this idea that the middle-class was achievable.” Each image or line of dialogue in the ad thus set off its own chain of fond personal as well as cultural memories in Levente—from watching the world championship at a high school camp (where he, as a “good leftist,” chose to root for the USSR because he thought the Hungarians were playing poorly) to the videos he used to circulate with his friends to the kiwi-flavored soda that he used to love.
Similarly, Zoltán, a self-described “yuppie” in his early thirties who worked for a Western European multinational firm, praised the film Moscow Square not merely because it rewrote his personal biography in terms of the collective memory of his generation: as he said several times, the film “was about me—I am that character.” The film was also “important,” he argued, because it brought back to life the tiny objects and gestures that he was on the verge of forgetting. Its appeal lay in the perceived authenticity of its minuscule details that conjured up the prosaic textures of a now seemingly distant reality, such as the kind of shopping bag used by the protagonist’s grandmother, or the way she, upon entering her apartment, opened a small wooden box of cigarettes and lit one with a match.
The density and the specificity of these cultural references and their meanings for the present thus stood in stark contrast to the earlier wave of communist kitsch, so easily commodified, interpreted, and consumed by foreigners and locals alike. Yet when pushed to explain the significance of such small details or to extrapolate a larger narrative of everyday life under state socialism from the memories of such scenes and objects, many people I spoke with insisted on the self-evidence of the memories themselves as a form of explanation. The mere fact of personal significance was its own justification, and attempts to analyze a larger meaning behind these memories and references would thus often lapse into what these people themselves termed banalities—reminiscent of Pelikán’s defense of the Hungarian orange decades earlier. “It was stupid, but it was our life.” “It had soul [lelke volt].” “It was ours.”
On the one hand, this inability or refusal to extract broader meaning can be read as a protest against abstraction itself: against the very fantasy of pure translatability epitomized by the capitalist logic of exchange value. It thus reflected a mourning for what was now narrated as a different, more authentic relationship to the material culture of the socialist era. As Gerald Creed notes, under state socialism, commodities were not fully fetishized: the effort exerted and connections necessary to acquire them were part of their perception and meaning. Thus, even the packaging of valued or exotic goods was preserved and displayed in order to make visible “social relations and valuable connections or resources that transcended the time or period of consumption” (2002, 120).
On the other hand, the assertion of indefinable uniqueness is at the heart of that unnamable, irreducible substance that Žižek terms the “Nation-Thing” around which modern national identities are constituted (Žižek 1990, 51–53). That is, the emphasis that Hungarian consumers and audiences placed on the authenticity of the atmospheres, gestures, and memories conjured up by these objects and films—rather than their practical or narrative value—functioned to signify the uniqueness and incommunicability (which, crucially, does not prohibit the commodifiability) of the shared experience of growing up under state socialism. Many people I spoke with were thus insistent on the impossibility of foreigners understanding local nostalgic texts and references; a colleague, for example, discouraged me from watching Dolly Birds based on the logic that—much like the Dreher advertisement—the density of its wordplay would be too difficult for a non-Hungarian to grasp. But I soon discovered that this shared vocabulary could be impenetrable to Hungarians as well. For example, when I sought out a translator for help deciphering some unfamiliar terms in a news article that described the Little Journey nostalgia festival, she also did not recognize them and eventually consulted her husband, who was ten years older, to translate expressions such as pucsít (which he defined as to stick out one’s bottom) or tiki-taki (a game of two balls on a string). Thus, the common insistence on the inaccessibility of nostalgia to non-Hungarians was as much ideological as factual: a way to support the fantasy of a national community that all did “speak one language” through a shared experience of history that denied both generational differences and the social stratifications under socialism and postsocialism.
As Boym observes, this logic is perhaps best epitomized by the fact that many nations insist that their word for a culturally specific kind of nostalgic longing (for example, the Czech litost, the Russian toska, the Portuguese saudade) is itself untranslatable: “While each term preserves the specific rhythms of the language, one is struck by the fact that all these untranslatable words are in fact synonyms; and all share … the longing for uniqueness” (Boym 2001, 13). From this perspective, nostalgia in Hungary was not so much a discourse of cultural intimacy as it was a discourse about cultural intimacy, which Michael Herzfeld defines as “not the public representation of domesticity … but the often raucous and disorderly experience of life in the concealed spaces of public culture” (2004, 320). Ironically, nostalgia offered a way for Hungarians to assert distinctiveness from the West by deploying an idiom of benign cultural heritage that was itself part of what Herzfeld calls a “globalized system of cultural value” (322).
The self-proclaimed otherness and untranslatability of socialist nostalgia thus responded to the dilemma of identity politics in globalizing capitalism: the longing to be accepted as equal partners of the West and the simultaneous desire to be seen as unique (and not a secondhand imitation).20 The Dreher beer ad, which attempted to unify its Hungarian audience under the slogan “We speak one language” represented the fantasy of resolving this tension, by framing its scenes of the socialist 1980s through the memories of a group of successful, yuppie Hungarian thirty-somethings, enjoying their Dreher beers at a fashionable pub. It used socialist nostalgia not to mourn the past, but to suggest that its consumers could “have it all”: be culturally distinctive and, at the same time, produce themselves as European by consuming and achieving at Western levels. (Not only the ad itself but the very fact of its existence suggests this, by targeting the people who had such memories as a desirable market demographic—a strategy made even more clear in its print campaign, which declared “We grew up together” alongside the slogan “We speak one language.”) In so doing, this nostalgia functioned as a “narrative fetish,” which Eric Santner in his work on Holocaust memory defines as a mode of representing the past that seeks to eliminate from recognition the “trauma or loss that called that narrative into being in the first place” (1992, 144). The narrative fetish offers “a strategy of undoing, in fantasy, the need for mourning by simulating a condition of intactness” (144): here, a dream of personal and cultural transformation in which everything changes, but nothing is lost.
In the early years of postsocialism, the upheavals of the market economy, loss of state subsidies, and rapid privatization forced Hungarians into a frantic struggle for social and economic positioning. Fehérváry observes that this period of ambition and anxiety was marked by a discourse of “winners” and “losers,” as people fought to ensure their future stability and feared being identified as or associated with those who were downwardly mobile (2013, 188). Now, as the first decade after the change of system came to a close and people began to consolidate their social positions, nostalgia made visible two interconnected fantasies about Hungary’s remains of socialism. It represented the fantasy of leaving the past completely behind and a fantasy of oneself not being left behind either—of succeeding under new economic and social demands not in spite of but because of one’s past experience. By recovering a presumably inassimilable past as valued cultural heritage, nostalgia helped Hungarians to argue for an identity that was distinct from the Soviet past and the Western present—and, in some ways, superior to both.
This fantasy appealed most directly to those members of the transitional generation who had succeeded in joining the urban middle class. Nostalgia would enable this generation to recuperate the value of their socialist-era childhoods, while at the same time paradoxically demonstrating their mastery of the postsocialist present as savvy capitalist Western consumers. But for those who had not yet enjoyed the fruits of Hungary’s political and economic transformation, nostalgia also served as a source of aspiration, and it lent legitimacy to what Boym calls more “restorative” nostalgias by an older generation dispossessed of socialist-era security and entitlements.
For the transitional generation, nostalgia celebrated the experience of bridging two incommensurable lifeworlds—and the fantasy of mastering both. The self-identified “yuppie” Zoltán thus told me he enjoyed the film Moscow Square not just because it commemorated his own coming-of-age at the end of socialism, but because its epilogue in modern-day Hungary accommodated his current experience of the Western European business world where he had found professional success. “It’s true that by Friday I’ve usually had it up to my balls with globalization,” he commented one evening. “But then I rest up over the weekend, and I’m ready to jump back in it again.” He praised the final scene of the film, in which the now adult protagonist reports on the varied postsocialist career paths of his high school classmates and reflects on his own. The monologue ends with a reference to the opening scene of the film, when as a teenager in late socialist Hungary, the protagonist disgustedly threw away csalamádé—the quintessentially Eastern European pickled vegetable mix—from atop the “Western” hamburger he bought at a kiosk. “I’m fucking hungry,” he now says, in the film’s final, now famous lines. “I’m going to run over to McDonald’s [Meki] and get a mad-cow burger with fries. Maybe it will eat my brain, but at least there isn’t any csalamádé in it.” Zoltán laughingly agreed with this grudging embrace of the dangers of the globalized present over the indignities of a provincialized past—but, he told me, “I still like csalamádé on my burgers.”
The Paradoxes of Nostalgia
A number of paradoxes characterized nostalgia as Hungary’s first decade of postsocialism came to a close. Nostalgia celebrated its distance from the past, even as it appeared to draw the past near. It found enchantment in remains once perceived as valueless and inauthentic, but it did so in response to the disappointments of a present that the past had once yearned for. Nostalgia’s focus on the material texture and sociality of daily life enabled its consumers to interpret it as apolitical, yet this ideological distinction was inherited from the politics of the past era. And although the appeal of nostalgia lay in its ability to unify Hungarians otherwise divided by age, socioeconomic status, and political affiliation, it would find its most enthusiastic audience not among those dispossessed by postsocialism’s transformations, but among those members of the transitional generation who had navigated its challenges most successfully.
But as the dream of “having it all” promised by the Dreher beer commercial suggests, the productivity of these paradoxes would be possible only as long as the present appeared to have triumphed over the past. That is, the condition for socialist nostalgia would be not only the impossibility of returning to state socialism but also the superiority of what emerged to replace it. This fantasy of a mastered past and victorious present links the different remains we have explored in chapters 1, 2, and 3. Whether remains took the form of banished monuments, outdated histories, or cherished mementos, the processes of removing, replacing, or domesticating these cultural objects enabled Hungarians to cast recent history aside and envision a triumphant and prosperous future.
As Hungary entered the second decade of postsocialism, such optimism would quickly fade. In chapters 4, 5, and 6, I explore the demise of these dreams of mastery, and their replacement by ever-increasing warnings of hidden terrors, secrets, and national crisis. Once used to demonstrate victory over the past, Hungary’s remains of socialism would instead become proof that the past continued to persecute the present.