8 April 2020.
László Lőrinc
‘Even in my previous life I didn’t believe in reincarnation.’ This is more or less the argument for success-oriented history teaching in the 9th-12th grade curriculum.
Which is surprising, since before the publication of this detailed regulation, the proponents of the already well-known framework document, the new NAT (the national framework curriculum), pointed out that the teaching of Hungarian history had so far ‘very often focused on tragedies’, according to the narrative, ‘[there was] the defeat from the Pechenegs at the time of the Magyar conquest of the Carpathian basin, then the defeat at Augsburg during the Magyar raids on Wester Europe, and then the Mongol invasion, so basically the history of the Árpád Dynasty was presented as if it had consisted of but defeats’ – as it was said in a debate by Mihály Nánay, President of the TSZE (the Professional Association of History Educators), founded in 2016.
History teacher Gergely Czuczor, chairman of the Fidesz-branch in Budaörs, defended the new curriculum with similar arguments, saying ‘the previous curriculum highlights the series of lost battles, the Battle of Merseburg, the Battle of Augsburg, while the Battle of Bratislava is not mentioned, so we have neglected the victorious battles, we have always presented children with such a depressing and negative image’. All that is happening now, they say, is that the victories are finally being included alongside the defeats. ‘There was an ideological background to the absence of events making us proud of our national feeling’ in pre-1989 textbooks, Czuczor said, referring to the internationalism of the communists; but now things are finally being put in place so that ‘we no longer live as a small, depressed nation without a sense of self’. We have read much the same arguments in many other articles and statements.
Even the prime minister himself found it necessary to address the question of the curriculum speaking to an audience of entrepreneurs, saying the question was ‘whether we want to educate them [our children] to be proud … or whether we want to teach them about the wars we lost, which is undoubtedly important knowledge, but should not be the core of the curriculum.’ But how much basis in reality do these statements have?
- ‘The Battle of Bratislava was not included in the previous curriculum, now it is finally included.’ The statement is not true. It was included in the previous curriculum of 2012, also created during he rule of the Fidesz, so it wouldn’t be worth to re-write the curriculum with such a fuss and secrecy. Besides, the battle was included in the 1997 textbook of Pál Ujvári, before the very first framework curriculum was written, as well as in the later ones. It is true that the battle was neglected for a long time before that, which we will come back to.
- ‘The new regulation seeks to balance winning and losing battles.’ In the context of the Magyar raids on Western Europe the claim certainly does isn’t justified: the new framework retains the victorious battle of Bratislava from the old curriculum, but takes out the lost one of Augsburg.
- ‘The consequence of emphasising the defeat at Augsburg is a depressing national history and, indirectly, a nation without a positive identity.’ False. Augsburg was discussed by even the most vicious communists – just like before 1945 – as the inspiring starting point for the success that underpinned our entire history: the founding of the Hungarian state. For Augsburg did not mark the end of a golden age, but the end of the elite’s raids, leading to a highly successful and peaceful integration into Christian Europe.
- ‘The new regulation puts the emphasis on historical successes.’
And this brings us to the quip about reincarnation we used as a motto. For, despite all the promises, the new curriculum has moved in the direction of failure stories. It is quite revealing that the phrase ‘the Trianon Peace Dictate’ occurs a total of seven times, and István Bibó was right to say that ‘the role of the victim of injustice … is one of the most unproductive psychological positions’. Trianon relates to a defeat in a war that was pointless from the start. To this end, one of the activities proposed by the curriculum is ‘comparing the territorial losses of the defeated powers’, which, especially without the sobering ethnic maps, is only good for mongering mournful self-pity. To add insult to injury, the task of ‘collect and analyse texts, images, posters and songs on the internet on the subject of revisionism’ will also lead to esthetically displeasing results. Could perhaps this be counterbalanced, in the spirit of positivity, by ‘collecting examples of the heroic conduct of Hungarian soldiers in World War I’ and ‘visiting World War I memorials and graves of Hungarian soldiers in the area of residence, and exploring the life of a hero’? Hardly: these are dedicated to defeat, death, mourning and a militaristic apotheosis of ‘hatred and madness’ (Karinthy).
On the other hand, the curriculum does not require students to be able to cite examples of those who managed to keep up their humanity: those who fraternised on the front, those who lent a voice to the cry for peace of those forced into the trenches by terror and demagogy, or the millions who were starving and suffering in the hinterlad. (Ady, Babits, Kassák and the history of their progressive mouthpiece, Nyugat (The West) are now out of the history curriculum. True enough, the new concept features no literary connections at all. And of course there’s no room in it any more for Oszkár Jászi, who had opposed the war from the very beginning.)
This indeed is an innovation compared to the previous version, except that there are no new winning battles in it nor anything positive. The teacher reciting Hungarian history turned into an epic poem of heroes will be stupefied if a clever student happens to read The Good Soldier Švejk and asks some questions based on it…
Okay, but then what victorious battles and wars did they add to the curriculum if they couldn’t add the Battle of Bratislava?
Well, they tried it with the Rongyos Gárda, ‘the rag-tag squad’, which indeed played a key role in keeping Sopron in Hungary. But the success index of the concept is diminished by the fact that the whole of the Burgenland region except for the actual town of Sopron had to be handed over to Austria, another losing country, and that there was no proper battle to go with it, since the squad were not met by soldiers but by four hundred Austrian gendarmes. Not to mention the fact that they were led by two of the mass murderers of the White Terror, Iván Héjjas and Pál Prónay, which could be invalidated by the fact that the term ‘White Terror’ was removed from the curriculum. (Meanwhile, the ‘Red Terror’ remained in it, faithfully following the government’s directives on national memory and attitude to history.) But can these embarrassing details be kept secret in the age of mobile phones? All in all then, the pride-inducing potential of the Rag-tag Squad episode is pretty meagre.
Apparently, after searching high and low, the only battle they could force into the curriculum as a new one was the Battle of Torda, that they presumably considered to be glorious. The battle is famous for the fact that the Nazi Wehrmacht and the Hungarian army, which was subordinate to them and still held its ground, between 15 September and 7 October 1944 temporarily staved off the Red Army complemented with the Romanian forces (after the Romanians had cleverly manoeuvred over to their side in time). Yes, it was another failed battle of a war that was shameful from the start and ultimately a total failure, and its only result was to prolong the worldwide suffering and increase the number of casualties. (The soldiers were really fighting bravely – and dying in their thousands needlessly, as they had no chance even to know that during the battle Hungarian-Soviet armistice negotiations were already under way in Moscow and preparations were being made in the Buda Castle for Hungary’s quitting the war.)
What can we say? Fatal blows dealt to internationalism indeed…
In contrast, Hungary’s more recent historic success of joining the EU is called into question in the curriculum. There is a tasks that calls for ‘presenting different views on the evaluation and future of the functioning of the European Union’. And immediately afterwards, ‘arguing in favour of central European cooperation.’ What a subtle distinction: different positions should be presented on the EU (in line with the constant ‘Brussels-bashing’ of the Hungarian government), and only one position should be elaborated concerning a separate Central European cooperation within the EU, much promoted by current Hungarian foreign policy. Of course, it would not be wrong for the document to propose such a debate on the functioning of the Union, would it also be proposed on controversial moments such as the Rag-tag Guard or the Battle of Torda. However, these moments do not seem to be as debatable as the EU ascension, despite the Union having created peace and cooperation on the continent for a period of unprecedented duration.
So what Czuczor and Nánay should really have said, instead of rambling about the Battle of Bratislava and the Pechenegs, was that, ‘breaking with the unpatriotic and depressing view of history, we will finally teach another battle lost on Hitler’s side and give arguments for devaluing one of the greatest achievements of this country’. In this case, their rhetoric would at least have been in line with their policy.
- ‘The unpatriotic approach of the pre-1989 communist era pushed the Battle of Bratislava into the background and the Pecheneg attack in the context of the conquest of the Carpathian basin into the foreground.’ This suggestion is not true either. Even Bálint Hóman, the Horthy-era’s pet historian, already wrote that the tribes, ‘surprised by the sudden attack of the Pechenegs, unable to defend themselves in the absence of most of the warriors, all fled westwards’. The original story was written down before well Marx, by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, around 952 AD. As for the neglect of the Battle of Bratislava, that is also very old: no Hungarian medieval chronicle ever mentioned it, nor did it interest the historians of the interwar period. It was only around the turn of the millennium that its real significance began to be appreciated.
- ‘The teaching of Hungarian history and the state policy on historic remembrance has traditionally been negative and gloomy.’ Well, this statement is true to a large extent. The idea that our heroic but lonely defeats are the core of our history has deep roots in Hungarian public thinking.
But as we have seen, the new concept of history-teaching does not work against this, but actually reinforces it. Moreover, in conjunction with the literature curriculum, which now includes Ferenc Herczeg’s novel Az élet kapuja (‘The Gateway of Life’) as compulsory reading, a long – and historically dishonest – moping and wallowing in self-pity.
We have already written in connection with the previous framework curriculum that the prejudicial view of the past is purging out the examples when foreign support brought the Hungarians great success, such as Kaiserfeld or Charles of Lorraine, and more recently even the Battle of Zenta has been dropped from the curriculum.
We also traditionally turn our struggles for freedom into stories of failure. Yet Rákóczi’s ended with a long and successful period that laid the foundations for a peaceful era, and many of the achievements of the 1848 Revolution (emancipation of the serfs, equality before the law, public taxation, abolition of the ancien régime) remained in force after the revolution was brought down, or were only temporarily put on hold (free press, civil constitutionalism).
However, the far biggest problem is the obsessive linking of the idea of success to wars. Over the last century, European historiography and history teaching have increasingly focused on peaceful everyday life: on the living conditions and mindsets of ordinary people, including women and children. Approached from this perspective, history is not only more substantial and authentic, but also dethrones the zero-sum, tit-for-tat, success-failure games between nations and classes. For example, instead of the unpeaceful periods, the 18th century, which brought enormous progress, could be brought to the fore, and more generally the compromises and coexistence of peoples from Hungarian history. The new curriculum does not move in this direction. A small but typical point: while the bloodily lost Battle of Torda is included, the internationally renowned developer of the electric locomotive, Kandó Kálmán, and the Sekler genius whose inventions paved the way for radio technology and the internet, Tivadar Puskás, are left out.
But this peaceful, constructive success story is clearly not what Orbán needs. According to one of his speeches the ideal ‘core of the curriculum is that after a hundred years, having lost two-thirds of the territory and 60 per cent of the population, here we are, talking about how to defend our success in the next ten years. That’s what we have to teach fundamentally, not denying our failures of course.’ He believes this is the key to future economic success. In other words, he would use the fake grievance of the past (a third of the Hungarian population was in fact annexed) as an engine for his present policy, perhaps because he sees it as a heroic forerunner of his own skirmishes. This narrative, of course, is deeply rooted in the people’s psyche and national traditions, and he would only amplify and use it. The point is not actual success, peaceful prosperity, but heroic war. He may believe that the Kálmán Thaly- and Aladár Mód-like retrospective martyr cult can legitimize his own lonely European struggle for freedom and his enemy-oriented rhetoric and policy.
In the same way, the illiberal framework curriculum (and the textbooks as well) has only good things to say about the pre-war period as its own forerunner. In the previous, 2012 version of the national curriculum there were already signs of this attitude, but an analysis of the whole process would merit a separate study.
All this brings us to the ultimate argument of the supporters of the new curriculum: ‘the central curriculum is being attacked by its opponents on ideological, political and above all non-professional grounds’. It’s like an admiral complaining that his attacking fleet is being hit by the defence at sea. It is clear from the Prime Minister’s above-quoted speech that the ideological terrain for this defence was not chosen by the government’s debating partners. Obviously, the new regulation is also bleeding from non-ideological wounds. However, if a framework curriculum has not only official ideology, but also the immeasurable traces of current political doctrine poking out in all directions, is it not professionalism when we are pointing this out?
Perhaps some will say: why not sacrifice the professionalism of history teaching on the altar of politics if it is good for society? The question is whether a tampered view of history has ever brought any prosperity to a nation. As ‘The Greatest Hungarian’, István Széchenyi, being himself famously success-oriented, warned, ‘We cannot fool others with this, for history speaks loud and clear; and self-deception is a folly.’ We have seen many such foolish attempts at self-deception in various nations on the eve of all kinds of disasters, just think of Ceaușescu’s Daco-Romanian theory. In any case, it is ominous that the South Slavic war began with this kind of re-identification of Croatian and Serbian memory politics.
*The article was published on hvg.hu.
