Writing Mythology. Representations of the Hungarian Soviet-Republic in Pál Somogyi’s works

Abstract

The knowledge of history is a form of representation for societies, which is indispensable in maintaining collective identity.1 It is possible for the individual to tell “his own” story, thus forming the canonized past-narratives in order to express his own relations in a community. How these individual social representations appear, are ways of “world making”.2 The “nineteener” past was an important aspect of the self-representation of individuals in the Rákosi and more significantly in the Kádár era. This was a two-way mechanism in which the veterans shaped their own social representations by telling stories about their heroic past. By doing so, they inevitably shaped the representations of the Soviet-Republic in society. On this ground, it seems like a profitable historiographic venture to analyse how certain individuals took part in this two-way mechanism and how they shaped the representation of the past and their own selves. Pál Somogyi was one of the most prominent of these veterans in the city of Kaposvár after World War II. In this study we examine his representations of the 1919 Hungarian Commune.