| THE MEDICAL MODEL OF
JEWISH IDENTITY
It seems to be a commonplace
by now that the events during the period between 1938 and 1945 – discrimination,
various forms of persecution, and most significantly, the Holocaust itself
– had a decisive impact not only on the life histories and mental conditions
of the first generation, but also on the life of their children:
parents unwillingly passed on their traumas to the subsequent generation.
The transmission of the trauma, however, was not always a taken-for-granted
fact; it had to be recognized and disseminated among a wider public.
This recognition was the merit of psychiatric and psychoanalytic case histories
which, from the sixties on7 (in Hungary since the eighties, by the pioneering
work of Teréz Virág, György Vikár and other psychotherapists8) systematically
revealed the mechanisms, conditions, and varieties of the transmission
of the trauma. These studies also explored how the trauma itself
and its repercussions in the next generation might become bases for identity
formation.
In this therapeutic discourse
the problem of Jewish identity was postulated as massive pathology, in
which the Holocaust experience, direct or indirect, leads to serious psychic
crises. The resulting symptoms and syndromes defy comparison, they
are unique manifestations of a Self that is severely injured and permanently
jeopardized, and consequently left groundless, laden with anxiety, fear,
guilt, depression, and aggression. The massive psychological violence
that the survivors had to endure became the starting point for the identity-pathology
of the offspring as well: it indirectly deprived the second generation
of early identification patterns, attachments and object relations that
are indispensable to normal identity formation and development. The
aim of psychotherapeutic studies is to reconstruct each individual case
by penetrating into the deepest possible layers of a life history, and
to find similarities and dissimilarities between the cases. Nonetheless,
there is a long debate as to what extent the results of such an investigation
can be generalized to a population as a whole – to the majority who never
go to therapy, or to cases never ‘compiled’ into a case history.
Of course, the issue cannot be decided on an empirical basis, though evidence
from the international literature suggests that it would be a bold overstatement
to label the whole second generation as ‘sick’.9 Opinions also vary
on the specificity of the post-Holocaust symptoms. We now have abundant
literature on the ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ syndrome that suggests
that the psychic aftermath of the most diverse disasters, wars, deportations,
massacres, ethnic cleanings and genocides show structural similarities
(Eitinger and Major 1993). The trauma of the Shoah, however, seems
to be beyond comparison in the profound and long-term nature of its overall
psychic consequences.
However debatable the validity
criteria of the case history approach are, psychotherapeutic discourse
has engendered a paradigm shift in mainstream psychological research on
the Holocaust and significantly changed its language. This new language
was then found to offer a viable means of conceptualization and interpretation
of the Holocaust syndrome, and in this respect, it contributed largely
to the process in which the concept of a real, diagnosable and classifiable
disease had itself grown into an almighty metaphor. ‘Holocaust as
a disease’ thus became a component of a peculiar ‘biopolitics’: the
Holocaust victim, with a tormented, humiliated, and stigmatized body and
endlessly tortured psyche, loses his/her human identity in the same way
as the offspring who is born into this transgenerational trauma.
Even if s/he denies or ignores it, or if s/he tries to find some kind of
compensation for her/his situation, the person’s whole effort will be labeled
as pathological and thus s/he will find herself/himself in an endless “psychological
labyrinth”.10
Although psychotherapeutic
discourse offers a reasonable, rational, and causal explanation for all
sufferings and crises of the patient, it somehow lacks the ‘community quality’
of healing. It postulates the ‘disease’ first as a private issue
of the individual, then as a dyadic/dialogic issue between the therapist
and the patient. The community aspect emerges only at some later
phases: first, when the patient himself is represented as a case
study, and to a certain extent he becomes ‘the voice of the therapist’
within the professional community of therapists; and second, when
the case study is published and becomes available for a larger public.
This is the point where the medical model becomes situated in a social
psychological perspective.
The medical model of psychotherapeutic
discourse has and will always have its merits in the postulation of the
transgenerational problems of post-Holocaust Jewish identity. It is no
accident that when we started to study Jewish identity fifteen years ago,
even in our – non-therapeutical – in-depth interviews, we had eagerly ‘hunted’
for symptoms classified as components of the Holocaust syndrome, such as
object relational problems, anxiety, persecution dreams and fantasies,
and so on, and our results were in agreement with those revealed in the
studies applying the therapeutic discourse. Nevertheless, we maintain
that the widespread medical model has not only created the psychotherapeutic
discourse on the second generation, but has also put a challenge to it.
It seems that an overall paradigmatic change can be witnessed nowadays:
distinct narratives of the dyadic therapy are gradually grouping into a
common pool. Therapeutic results with second generation patients
are abundantly published by now even in Hungarian, and the ‘naive patient’,
the ‘unexperienced’ patient, who has no previous ideas about the concepts
of pathology and its treatment, seems to disappear. A further contribution
to this ‘extraclinical effect’ was that many new documents have been published
in the past ten years, and the process was ‘capped’ by a series of events
connected to the fiftieth anniversary of the Holocaust. A multitude
of autobiographies, memories, recollections and analyses on behalf of first
generation survivors surfaced. This kind of ‘narrative self-healing’
seems to have become a new social phenomenon, which cannot be neglected
by the ‘medical model’ any more.
THE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
OF HUNGARIAN JEWISH IDENTITY:
THE NARRATIVE MODEL
Literary works, interviews,
spontaneous autobiographies and psychotherapy are all composed of words,
stories, and narratives. The common feature in all autobiographic
recollections is the movement toward coherence, the organizing force inherent
in the story itself. In-depth interviews dwell on the boundary between
therapeutic conversation and autobiographic literature. They are
not as secret as therapy, and their form and content are not as organized
as published autobiographic works. The written text carries the same
motives and defense mechanisms of the subject that can be revealed in therapy;
breaks, denials, and hidden, concealed textual layers can also be identified
and exposed to view by qualitative data analysis. In-depth interviews,
however, carry the dual tragedy of all autobiographies: they are
helplessly subjected to the curious eyes and the multiple interpretations
of subsequent ages, and a great many things that are omitted from them
are lost without a trace.
Our interviews always started
with questions about the very beginning of the interviewee’s family history,
that is, earlier than the subject’s childhood. The interviews focused
on Jewish identity, but – as a by-product – the questions linked the individual,
with all of his or her traumas, to the endless string of generations, nesting
him or her in a broader historical context. We found that despite
our efforts to get the subjects to adhere to a linear time line, the narrative
created a chronology of its own. The text was not linear, but neither
was it chaotic: it created its own ‘meta-chronology’, subordinated
to the strict laws of the organization of personal life history.
Our subjects showed some marked analogies: their history was a road
from a fragmented representation of Jewishness to a more or less complete,
sophisticated entity. As the hidden secrets of family history, persecution,
loss, and trauma became easier to verbalize in the course of the interview
process, to the surprise of both the interviewer and interviewee, a coherent
story took shape in front of our eyes. Something new was created.
The language allowed for conceptualizing the deficiency, and the ‘unspeakable’
became the story itself, ready to enter public discourse.
When we started to conduct
these interviews more than a decade ago, we had no intention of ‘creating’
a narrative model of Jewish identity in Hungary, nor did we want to ‘contribute’
to the later narrative turn in identity research and social psychology
in general. It was our good luck that not only the narrative approach
has grown into a new methodological paradigm of our time, but a technological
innovation, namely the availability of CAQDAS (Computer Aided Qualitative
Data Analysing Softwares), also came to our help. This has been beneficial
not only because the softwares enabled us to mark, encode, ‘cut and paste’,
and rearrange huge volumes of texts, but also because they had a new impact
on the methodology of handling large databases simultaneously (see Denzin
and Lincoln 1996; Miles and Huberman 1994; Weitzman and Miles
1994).
On these grounds, we suggest
a new framework for narrative analysis. In the following, we present
the layers of Hungarian Jewish identity as we excavated them from our oral
history basis. A new feature of our narrative model is that the ‘symptoms’
are postulated not as end points of a causal scheme, but as starting points
– in the sense that within a dialogue, the ‘symptom’, the life crisis,
is organized into a story, and as such, enters the sphere of public remembering,
discussion, and testimony.
THE HOLOCAUST NARRATIVE
Our most important finding
was that the ‘thickest’ and ‘deepest’ layer of Jewish identity was ‘belonging’
to a persecuted group. The ‘children of the Holocaust syndrome’ meant
that in the eighties, in Hungary, the main reason our interview subjects
considered themselves as Jews was that their parents had suffered for their
Jewishness, and the experience of persecution was imprinted ‘in their genes’.
The Holocaust, in this sense, was a primary constituent of identity, as
illustrated by the following dream report:
The most menacing was when
I dreamt that some junta was ruling Hungary, and they decided to kill all
the Jews. Though the fact that they wanted to kill the Jews came
up only at the end of the dream. The dream started with the announcement
of a great folk festival through loudspeakers on the streets, promising
that all kinds of candy, games, music, entertainment would be available
along the Danube bank, and everybody was to go there. And when everybody
was there, large watering-carts started to work and a huge water jet washed
the people into the Danube. And then, when I saw this – because I
was not carried away by the water –, I learnt that they wanted to kill
the Jews, and that was why they organized the folk festival. This
was horrible, and then I woke up and heard a watering-cart working on the
street. Obviously, this mode of killing came from an external stimulus.
I very often dream that I am personally persecuted and on the run troughout
the town, hiding in back-streets and gateways, and when the events are
culminating, I suddenly wake up.
A great many sources – such
as interviews, case reports, or literary works – reveal the difficulties
of speaking about the traumas survived. We also discovered that first
generation survivors could hardly recall any stories of their suffering
– of course, by this, they tried to protect both themselves and their offspring
–, but remarks, involuntary allusions, sudden silences, tears, and other
responses made the children figure out the existence of a formidable family
secret.
My parents have always tried
to forget those years. And since they also wanted to forget the years
of their young adulthood, that is the war years, their earlier years were
also washed away, and they did not tell me about those years, either.
In an earlier publication
(Erős and Ehmann 1996b), we reported several types of first generation
Holocaust narratives recalled by our second generation subjects.
They can be roughly categorized into loss stories and survival stories;
none of which are complete narratives with all the necessary features of
a story. Real names are mentioned rarely in these fragmented narratives:
roles like ‘the father’, ‘the mother’, ‘a woman’, and so on, appear in
these ‘second-hand’ legends, and this out-of-time, out-of-place nature
gives the stories a color of some eternal, surrealistic absurdity:
I was told a story that
someone reprimanded the wife for giving her baby to the grandma; then she
took the baby back into her lap, and then a soldier pushed her into the
group that marched then to the gas chamber.”
In many cases, these unrevealable,
mysterious secrets channelled family communication in a specific manner,
and the children may have found themselves among ever more impenetrable
walls of silence. Nevertheless, in the human psyche, there seems
to be an inborn need for perceiving the world through stories and their
interpretations, and this way, with years passing, these non-stories, half-stories
and fragmented legends slowly but steadily become integrated into the six-thousand-year-old
‘great narrative’ of Judaism, into the endless line of stories concerning
historical affliction. The latter seems to be an integral part of
the mentality of almost all groups of Jewry all over the world – to some
extent even those American Jews whose families were not closely affected
by the Shoah.
The Holocaust layer of Jewish
identity is composed of imaginary identification with those who perished,
as well as alternating between the roles of the passive victim and the
revenging hero. The phenomenon is well described in Le Juif imaginaire,
a book by the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut:
Jewry to me was the most
precious present a post-Holocaust child can ever dream of. I inherited
sufferings I had not gone through; I was subject to persecution that
never happened to me. I was invited to play a star in an extraordinary
movie: I become a hero without enduring real danger. The mere
fact that I was a Jew helped me to avoid the anonymity of an accidental
existence, the plain boredom of an uneventful life. Not, of course,
was I protected against melancholy, but there was something in which I
was superior to my peers: I had the skill to dramatize my life. ...
Judaism was a redemption from the ordinary. How did my life come
to be a trifle? My banal gestures were mere camouflage: I was
a wondering nomad, an armchair Ahasverus, I was a scared philistine, but
in my daydreams I took heroic revenge for the horror of the pogroms (Finkielkraut
1980).
THE STRATEGY OF SILENCE
CREATES THE LANGUAGE OF ALLUSIONS
Latent or marked Holocaust
identity affected communication not only within the family but also beyond
its boundaries. One had to cope with this mysterious experience of
‘otherness’ outside the family; however, for societal reasons, this
was almost impossible or at least difficult and not without social and
political risks.
The main goal of the official
‘identity politics’ of the post-war era was, in Hungary as well as in other
Communist countries, to deprive people of their multifaceted individual
identities and to force a uniform identity pattern onto them. This
goal, however, was actually impossible to realize, since this would always
remain a mere ideological, utopian objective even in the most extreme totalitarian
dictatorships. Nonetheless, it had a bitter consequence in that a
wide gap opened between public and private forms of identity.11 Of
course, administrative and informal pressure aimed at the annihilation
of group specificities could not foreclose the possibility of publicly
manifesting Jewish identity. The historical and sociological literature
on the post-war situation of the Jewry in Hungary, such as the aforementioned
writings by Viktor Karády, András Kovács, and Péter Várdy, give a detailed
description of the forced assimilation policy of the Rákosi regime in the
fifties.
While secondary traumatization
means the unconscious transmission of the trauma suffered by the parents,
there was a more or less conscious effort on the parents behalf to conceal
their belonging to the once-persecuted group: the strategy of silence.
Children in these families were socialized in an environment where tradition
was more or less eliminated and the generational continuity of the family
history was broken. When facing the question ‘How did you come to
realize that you are Jewish?’, many respondents in our interviews admitted
that learning that they were Jewish proved to be an extremely conflict-ridden
emotional experience. Often they had been ‘enlightened’ by strangers,
and even when the information was revealed in the family, it was typically
a reaction to a painful situation experienced by the child or adolescent
outside the family (see Erős, Kovács, and Lévai 1985). A respondent
told us:
At the age of 13, I didn’t
know what it meant to be Jewish. I didn’t even know the word.
This may sound funny, but at that time, when I first heard the word, it
was not from them [the parents], but from a friend four years older than
myself. He told me that we were Jews and told me all about what had
happened to the Jews. It was then that I learned for the first time
what had happened to us, and I became very frightened, and ever since I
haven’t been able to accept these facts. The truth of the matter
is that I have never been particularly willing or able to deal with it,
believing, as a matter of principle, that if I close my eyes they cannot
see me. In short, if I don’t deal with the problem, then there won’t
be any, just there won’t be any anti-Semitism.
In some families – for some
reason or other – the parents were loyal to the Communist regime.
An alternative to deny Jewish background completely was to find a brand
new, a ‘progressive’, and a viable narrative instead of the lost and banned
one. The ‘we are not Jews, we are Communists’ type of strategy seemed
to be a good solution; a Hungarian counterpart to the narrative strategy
widespread at the neighboring Big Brother: ‘We are not Russians,
Kazakhs or Lithuanians, we are citizens of the Soviet Union.’
It was not an easy narrative
game, however, as illustrated by the following interview fragment:
My parents thought that
in this new system Jews would not be persecuted, and in return, they would
have to act as if they were not Jews. ... I think they believed that
the Jewish past had to be repressed, had to be forgotten. ... There was
constant debate about this between my parents and my grandma. Granny
had the idea that I should be educated as a Jewish child, including the
knowledge of religion, Hebrew language and prayers, and she wanted to tell
me about Jewish mythology and history, the Passover, the Egyptian calamities,
and so on. But my mom wanted to educate me in a Communist way. ...
Granny also wanted me to like the regime, to like Communism ... but she
wanted me to remain a good little Jewish boy at the same time. ... My mom
blindly trusted Communism, but she accepted granny as a bourgeois relic.
My mom believed in the world-wide victory of Communism. ...
My granny has always been a little bit reserved as to the outcome of this
grandiose plan, the only thing she did was to pay the annual three-Forint
membership fee to the Hungarian–Soviet Friendship Society, and kept the
membership card in her prayer book.
The above examples may offer
some insight into identity conflicts and identity strategies common to
adolescent and young Jews within and outside the family. Toward the
outgroup, the primary strategies are stigma-handling techniques, such as
concealing, hiding, and information control in the sense of Erving Goffman’s
theory of stigma management.12 An example of this phenomenon was
related to the ‘double mentality’ common to the gentile Hungarian population
(the secret observance of Catholic holidays while pretending to be loyal
to the regime) during the years of ‘hard Communism’ in the fifties and
even later. Our subjects had to handle this situation in their school
years:
Christmas was always a difficult
situation. I was in constant fear of it. In school I had to
say something about the presents I got. ... Of course, I did not get anything,
since we were not the type to observe gentile holidays, and I had to lie,
I mean I said I got, for example, very nice pyjamas. But I felt it
was not too convincing to my classmates. ... So I was a Christmas-lier,
and so was my sister...”
Identity problems abounded
even in families where some elements of Jewish traditions were preserved.
Another ‘assimilation strategy’, a typical solution for the problem, was
the observance of some ‘Jewish Christmas’, or ‘ChannuChristmas’, to create
some workable holiday, given the fact that Jewish traditions seemed to
sink into oblivion in those years:
My mom just explicitly declared
she was going to celebrate Christmas, because she did not get anything
when she was a child, and she had envied her gentile peers. So we
would get a huge pile of presents. ... But the whole thing was a
bit silly … because the food was matzoth dumplings … prepared by
grandma, who was otherwise sick, but this time healthy and enthusiastic
about making it herself. So we ate a huge pile of matzoth dumplings
under the lights of the Christmas tree...
A Hungarian social psychologist,
Ferenc Mérei, though in another context, proposed the term allusion in
characterizing the language of groups sharing common experience (see for
example Mérei 1989b). In both verbal and non-verbal communication,
this tool has developed into a kind of a ‘mother tongue’ in which the precarious
nature of Holocaust-laden Jewish identity was easier to share and speak
about. The positive contents of social identity in terms of classic
social psychology were, at least partially, replaced by a diffuse negative
or marginal social identity (‘There is no group I really belong to’).
Though growing into a substantial domain of personal identity, the awareness
of this marginality was kept dormant in everyday public communication.
As an open response, it was activated either in hostile social situations
(“I am a Jew only in cases when I am called a ‘Jew’”), or in cases when
similar marginal identities were thematized (“Both of us knew we were Jews,
but it was not discussed in an explicit manner. In the context of
connection or relatedness, the word ‘Jew’ was not even uttered.”)
The strategy of silence
and the language of allusions in the family had their counterpart in the
social sphere. The topic of Jewishness, as a whole, was taboo, or
at least unheimlich for discussion, and this often led to awkward situations.
I created the image of the
Jew from various information circulating at the university. To me
this was absolutely new, and I slowly learnt what Jewish hair, Jewish nose,
Jewish mouth, Jewish behavior, and so on, were like. So there was
a fellow in our group who was permanently mocked for being a Jew.
Not malignantly, only in an innocent way. Because he scanned
and bowed when reading, and spoke in a chanting manner, so he was like
the Rabbi of Bacherach. He was mocked behind his back, people whispered
among each other: He is Jewish, isn’t he? Rumors came to me about that.
I myself have never been mocked. I think in the end they knew I was
Jewish, but no one has ever mentioned it to me. People say that I
do not look like a Jew.
Another respondent recalled
a story where hostility was communicated in the language of allusions:
I was in love with a gentile
guy and he took me to his mother because he wanted to introduce me to her.
And the mother looked at me, and asked about my religion. I said
I was not religious, but my parents are Jewish. I was embarrassed
and stuttered a bit. And then the mother, a high school teacher,
yawned at me in a way that I could see her tonsils, took a women’s magazine,
and lay down to read. By this I understood I had to leave.
And then the boy was about to come with me, and the mother looked at him
with astonished eyes: ‘You are not going to escort her down, are you?’
The language of allusions,
or ‘double communication’ as Júlia Vajda and Éva Kovács termed it in their
study of the socialization patterns of children educated in the fifties
(Kovács and Vajda 1996), was an unavoidable result of the ‘strategy of
silence’. Double communication was the flip side of double silence,
and the two reinforced each other. As one of our subjects expressed:
If I declare I am a Jew,
then I make a covert situation open. They guess that I am a Jew,
and I guess that they guess, but guessing and knowing are different.
And I think this difference is better to preserve than to lose.
THE ACHIEVED PRIVATE NARRATIVE
Laden with the Holocaust
experience, with the strategy of silence and allusion, the issue of Jewish
identity in Hungary is deeply intertwined with the problem of assimilation
as well. Though the majority of our interviewees were assimilated
to a great extent, the above illustrated layers of group narrative seemed
to serve as common points of reference. They offered paths to a variety
of identity-seeking processes. Recently, we began to analyze the
outcomes of this process on a more systematic basis. In short, our
findings seem to outline a continuum ranging from being trapped in some
‘hypercathected’ searching process to declaring an ‘achieved personal narrative’.
Taken from different interviews,
we illustrate some stages on this long road:
I am searching for my roots,
and I hope to reach some time a normal plateau where I will be able to
handle all of this confusing stuff. I am searching for Jewish traditions,
and so on... But all this started only a couple of years ago.
The fact that my granny
was religious and observed all kinds of holidays caused no conflict in
me at all. And now I think this openly brutal double education has
helped me to form a delicate, a highly differentiated mentality.
I think of myself as A.
A., a Hungarian citizen, cursed with all the curses, and blessed with the
blessings of my compatriots. Since I was not educated in a Jewish
mentality, and the words, gestures, and everything that would refer to
my being a Jew were exiled from my education, maybe I have very little
in common with Jewish culture, with Jewish way of speaking, and so on.
Maybe I have much more in common with a ‘Jewish emotional world’ – if we
want to create something like that. ... To be a Jew – I think there are
as many ways as there are people. To me it means a little bit of
safety, I mean that I still belong somewhere, if not in effect, but somewhere
in depth. And belonging somewhere is a very good thing.
To be a Jew – I am a Jew,
but not in the same way as my brother-in-law, and not in the same way as
the Schwartz or the Kohn or whosoever. I am myself, I am a Hungarian
Jew, that’s all.
Our most recent interviews,
and other research (e.g., the study by Júlia Vajda and Éva Kovács of parents
whose children attend Jewish school, Kovács and Vajda 1994, 1995) as well,
confirm the idea that there is no singular or ubiquitous model of Jewish
identity. On the other hand, the situation is not altogether clear.
Let us quote the philosopher Ferenc Fehér in this context:
...the complete and neurotizing
loss of identity, accompanied by the feeling of remaining a stranger forever
– this ‘Jewish’ feeling now seems to emerge in some general form in the
demands of a wide variety of groups in our ‘post-modern’ condition:
in the offspring of former slaves, in ethnic minorities sentenced to death
by the iron hand of centralizing governments, in native Indian populations
in Latin-America, and so on. Fighting for the societal recognition
of difference in its positive forms, is referred to as ‘multiculturalism’.
Multiculturalism, as a political and societal demand, now surfaces as the
whole complexity and sophistication of the (post-modern) politics of difference
(Fehér 1993).
In conclusion, we argue
that even the most extravagant or seemingly rootless ‘micro-narratives’
are firmly anchored to various sets of community narratives. We think
that the narrative approach is a promising contribution to the research
of Jewish identity, and identity in general. Its primary theoretical
yield is that it offers a useful method for the identification of different
substrata of personal and societal identity even in cases where locating
such an identity seems to be difficult or even impossible at first sight.
As to our particular material, we think that the first two layers, namely
the Holocaust and the six-thousand-year-old grand narrative, seem to be
generally present in contemporary Jewish identity, while the strategies
of silence and allusion, though also quite common, may show regional varieties
between Jewish groups who live in different parts of the world. And,
finally, the ‘achieved private narrative’ substratum, embedded in this
multi-layered, ‘higher-rank context’, seems to be specific to each and
every individual.
In the long run, this model
may not only help to identify and interpret further identity strata of
Jewish people in Israel and in the Galut, but may offer a methodological
approach to the investigation of social and ethnic groups with injured,
threatened identities, where transgenerational and/or massive, cumulative
personal traumas seem to appear as either inextricably interwoven or just
as poorly structured, rootless micro-narratives to the non-professional
eye.
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* This essay is an edited
version of an article published by the first author (Erős 1997), with additions
taken from Erős and Ehmann 1996a; Erős and Ehmann 1996b; Erős and Ehmann
1997.
1 The term ‘second generation’
here and throughout the article refers to the children of Holocaust survivors.
2 See the following articles
and volumes: Erős 1988, Erős and A. Kovács 1988; Erős, A. Kovács
and Lévai 1985, 1988; Kashti, Erős, Schers, and Zisenswine eds. 1996;
M. Kovács, Kashti, and Erős eds. 1992.
3 On this historical process
see, for example, Raphael Patai’s comprehensive study (Patai 1996).
4 International literature
on the problem of Jewish identity provides detailed analysis of changes
and problems of the phenomenon in the past one and a half centuries (see,
for example, Herman 1974).
5 ’Populism’ and ‘urbanism’
were influential intellectual currents among Hungarian literati and political
thinkers between the two world wars. Populists advocated poor peasantry
and demanded radical social reforms to change their desperate living conditions
in a semi-feudal, rural Hungary. Many of the ‘populists’ despised
‘the city’, ‘the sinful town’, and the bourgeoisie (including the Jews),
who, according to them, were insensitive to the sufferings of poor people.
They also regarded the socialist and communist working class movement with
suspicion; in their romantic anti-capitalism, they prophetically
advertised a ‘third way’, a ‘Hungarian way’ between capitalism and socialism.
Their opponents, the ‘urbanites’ were Jewish or non-Jewish intellectuals
who advocated, by and large, a Western-type modernization in the country.
Populism was not free of a ‘völkisch’, anti-bourgeois anti-Semitism, and
quite a few representatives of the movement landed at the extreme right
of the political spectrum, especially during the World War II.
6 The phrase ‘hard dictatorship’
denotes the Stalinist regime in the fifties, while ‘soft dictarorship’
has been a common reference to the relatively liberal era of the Kádár
regime from the sixties on.
7 From the vast literature,
see such comprehensive works as Bergman and Jucovy 1982; Daneli 1980;
Kestenberg 1972; Krystal 1968; Wardi 1992.
8 See Virág 1984, 1988,
1994; Cserne et al. 1992; Mészáros 1990, 1992; Pető 1992;
Szilágyi 1994; Várnai 1994; Virág and Vikár 1985; Vikár
1994.
9 For some of the comparative
studies, see Dasberg 1987; Major 1991; Russel, Plotkin, and
Heapy 1985.
10 A term used by the Hungarian
social psychologist Ferenc Mérei to describe pathological “detours” in
psychic life (Mérei 1989a).
11 For more details, see
Erős 1994.
12 See Goffman 1968;
on the application of Goffman’s categories to our interview material, see
A. Kovács 1992.
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