Painting the Town Red

Bob Dent

Description

The intensely political cultural production that erupted during Hungary's short-lived Soviet Republic of 1919 encompassed music, art, literature, film and theatre. Painting the Town Red is the little-known history of these developments.



The book opens with an overview of the political context in Hungary after the First World War and how the Soviet Republic emerged in the chaotic months which followed the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. It looks at the subsequent roles during the Soviet Republic of artists, film-makers, actors, musicians and writers, and the attitude of the newly established People's Commissariat for Education and Culture, in which the future internationally renowned Marxist Gyorgy Lukacs played a leading role.



At its centre are the questions: why did so many prominent people in the arts world participate in the Soviet Republic and why did their initial enthusiasm later subside? Painting the Town Red is an important contribution to the lively debate about the interaction between art and politics.
Author's Preface

Acknowledgements

A Note on Terminology

Introduction

1. The Political and Historical Context

2. Budapest Turns Red

3. Poster Power

4. Art for the People

5. Cultural Polemics

6. The Silent Screen Talks Politics

7. Opening up the Auditoriums

8. Music for All

9. The Pen Goes to Battle

10. Why?

11. What Went Wrong?

Postscript: What Happened to Them?

Sourced Used and Useful Sources

Index

Sujets

• Political Ideologies
• Political Freedom
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• Revolutions
• Hungría
• Theatre
• Communism
• Revolutionary
• Interwar period
• Workers' council
• György Lukács
• General officer
• Cultural studies
• Writer
• Revolution
• Hungary
• Cinema
• Anthropology
• Children
• Tibor Szamuely
• General
• History
• Zsigmond Móricz
• Communisme
• Béla Kun
• ART
• Budapest
• Hongrie

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786802736
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

Painting the Town Red
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Painting the Town Red
Politics and the Arts During the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic
Bob Dent
First published 2018 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Bob Dent 2018
The right of Bob Dent to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3777 7 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3776 0 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0272 9 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0274 3 Kindle eBook
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Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
For Kati and Anna, with love
Contents
Author s Preface
Acknowledgements
A Note on Terminology
Introduction
1. The Political and Historical Context
2. Budapest Turns Red
3. Poster Power
4. Art for the People
5. Cultural Polemics
6. The Silent Screen Talks Politics
7. Opening up the Auditoriums
8. Music for All
9. The Pen goes to Battle
10. Why?
11. What Went Wrong?
Postscript: What Happened to Them?
Sources Used and Useful Sources
Index
Author s Preface
The Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 has received relatively little attention outside Hungary-despite its dramatic nature, comparable in some ways to what happened in Russia in 1917-18 and beyond. The reasons are arguably twofold. So much was happening elsewhere in the aftermath of the First World War, that Hungary s short-lived Bolshevik experiment of 1919-which lasted for a mere 133 days-has been overlooked. Perhaps the language difficulty has also been a factor. How many non-Hungarian historians have been familiar with Hungarian to make research a practical possibility?
When Hungary s 1919 revolutionary period is mentioned, almost invariably the focus has been on the international situation and the country s unstable position. Hungary was on the losing side of the First World War and in 1919 was subject to pressure-including military pressure, particularly from Romanian as well as Czechoslovak forces-which threatened the country s territorial integrity. (The threat became a reality and would be set in stone by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, one of the treaties of the post-1918 Versailles peace process.)
If the domestic politics of the Hungarian Soviet Republic are touched on by non-Hungarian writers, normally highlighted, sometimes to the exclusion of all else are the dictatorial nature and use of terror of the regime under its communist leader B la Kun. Only rarely is reference made, usually in passing, to broader domestic issues, including the interaction between politics and the arts in 1919, and to the role that many prominent personalities of Hungarian cultural life-painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, film-makers, actors and others-played during the Soviet Republic, at least in its early period.
This book aims to redress that imbalance by describing and examining that interaction with a view to casting some light on how it came about that many noted cultural figures wholeheartedly supported what were presented as, and perceived to be, revolutionary developments of an extreme nature. The intention is neither to justify nor to condemn the Soviet Republic, but to survey and understand one of its hitherto neglected aspects.
Within Hungary, itself the memory of 1919, has involved both condemnation and justification, ranging from extremely negative to very positive interpretations. The ultra-conservative regime of Mikl s Horthy, which followed the Soviet Republic and lasted for over 20 years, understandably wanted to erase all positive memory of what had happened. From its perspective, that was fuelled by the fact that a large number of the Soviet Republic s leading figures were Jewish or of Jewish descent. Indeed, that enabled many people after 1919 to conflate Bolshevism and Jewishness, conveniently mixing anti-Communism and anti-Semitism, even though the majority of Hungarian Jews cannot be said to have been out and out supporters of the Soviet Republic, nor did the new commissars act in the name of Jews as such. However, that didn t stop the conservative nationalists. From their point of view the experience of the Commune, as it was often called, helped to justify the widespread atrocities which followed in the wake of its downfall. It perhaps also partly explains Hungary s Numerus Clausus of 1920, one of the first anti-Jewish laws of twentieth-century Europe.
After 1919, Hungarian Communists also had problems with the Commune in terms of proclaiming its glories, while explaining (away) its utter defeat. It wasn t just, as is often stressed, that B la Kun and his comrades had not followed Lenin s example of distributing the land to the peasants, thus losing their sympathy (in this sense they were more radical than Lenin, preferring, at least in theory, collectivisation). More important as time passed, certainly from a psychological point of view, was the fact that the majority of the communist people s commissars of 1919, who, in various stages, had emigrated to Moscow, fell victim to the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s. When the Hungarian Communists came back into power soon after the Second World War, how could they extol the achievements of 1919 when many of its leaders, including Kun, had lost their lives under Stalin, who continued to rule in Moscow until his death in 1953?
In contrast, in the decades following the 1956 Uprising, a central element of which involved breaking with the Stalinist model, there was a significant shift in the amount of attention paid in Hungary to the 1919 events. Beginning with the 40th anniversary in 1959, there was an explosion of publication, particularly in specialist journals, about what had happened in 1919. Thereafter, each round-figure anniversary would see the appearance of new books and studies about the period.
After the political changes of 1989-90 there was another shift. Recent times have seen a downturn of interest in the Soviet Republic, and what happened during the period is now commonly regarded as constituting one of the most negative episodes of the country s twentieth-century history.
Among the foreigners who very early on reported about 1919, British journalist H. N. Brailsford was an early enthusiast, as were the American reporters Alice Riggs Hunt and Crystal Eastman. All three wrote quite positively about their experiences in the Budapest of 1919. Such enthusiasm could perhaps be explained by the politically friendly outsider factor, famously exemplified by the Americans John Reed and Louise Bryant, and reflected in the former s dramatic eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook The World , and in the evocative 1981 film Reds . Indeed, like John Reed in Russia, Crystal Eastman was an activist as well as a reporter. At one point she prepared a message of greetings for a meeting of the Budapest Workers and Soldiers Council. 1
At the same time, a positive reflection of the Hungarian events by a then youthful insider has been left by Arthur Koestler, who was a 13-year-old Budapest schoolboy in 1919. In his autobiographical volume, Arrow in the Blue , Koestler emphasises his upbeat impressions of the time. He was stirred by the music in public places, whether it was Chopin s Funeral March being played during communist burial ceremonies, or the then ever-present La Marseillais and The Internationale . He was struck by the new teachers who appeared in his school, dealing with subjects which were novel for him, ranging from the life of farm workers to economics and constitutional government. On May Day 1919 a schoolmate of his gave a speech praising Danton and Saint Just, prominent figures of the French Revolution. He was also impressed after attending a workers class his cousin Margit had given at a factory in jpest, on the north side of Budapest. It seemed to him, on reflection years later, that something exciting was happening and that the world was gloriously being turned upside down.
How far can we trust this cheerful recollection of a teenager s experience? In his monumental and scholarly biography of Arthur Koestler, David Ceserani shows that Koestler wrote and re-wrote his autobiographical essays and works with a view to the time when he wrote them and with an eye as to which audiences he believed he was writing for. Arrow in the Blue appeared not in the early 1930s, when Koestler was an ardent communist, but 20 years later, when he was well into his anti-communist and Cold Warrior phase, and so it is of some interest to note his summary of the Hungarian Commune.
While remarking that the 1919 communism of Hungary would in due course have degenerated in a totalitarian police state, forcibly following the example of its Russian model , believing that no Communist Party in Europe has been able to hold out against the corruption imposed on it from Moscow , Koestler admits that this later knowledge does not invalidate the hopeful and exuberant mood of the early days of the Revolution in Hungary 2

____________
1. Luk cs (1987), p. 618.
2. Koestler (1952), p. 66.
Acknowledgements
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