This session is dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. The session aims to explore the contested memories of the event and its commemoration as shaped by various political agendas, in different countries, and by various actors.
The 1956 Hungarian Uprising has been remembered, reinterpreted, and mobilized by successive regimes and generations in diverse ways. In Hungary, official narratives have shifted—from suppression and erasure under state socialism, to rehabilitation and national mythmaking after 1989, and more recently to instrumentalization within illiberal nationalist discourse. Yet, the memory of 1956 also persists beyond state control, kept alive through art, oral history, and civic activism, all of which challenge hegemonic interpretations. Internationally, the 1956 uprising had a significant impact on parties, movements, and ideologies. Importantly, the approximately 200,000 Hungarian refugees who, fearing repression, fled the country in November 1956 had a significant impact on Hungarian diasporas worldwide.
By bringing together perspectives from history, political science, cultural studies, and memory studies, this session aims to examine the dynamic politics of remembering 1956 across time and space. By situating 1956 within broader debates on historical memory and political instrumentalization, the session invites reflection on how remembrance itself becomes a site of struggle over identity and legitimacy.
The panel will investigate:
• How commemorative practices, monuments, art, and other cultural representations have reflected the 1956 Uprising and, in relation to that, the changing ideas of nationhood, heroism, and democracy.
• How the Uprising’s meanings were shaped by global reactions in 1956—from solidarity movements and media coverage worldwide, to repression and reform across the socialist bloc.
• How these transnational responses helped shape Cold War imaginaries of freedom, resistance, and revolution.
• The impact of 1956 on the Hungarian diaspora.
Adriana PETRA, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET), Argentina - "Title: 1956: Argentine Readings of the Soviet Invasion of Hungary" Abstract: This paper examines how the events of 1956—the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the denunciation of Stalinism, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary—were interpreted in postwar Argentina, in a context marked by the overthrow of Juan Domingo Perón and the reconfiguration of the left. Unlike in Europe, where the Hungarian crisis generated a deep rupture within the communist movement, in Latin America—and particularly within the Argentine Communist Party—its reception was limited and did not lead to internal splits. Drawing on an analysis of the liberal press (La Nación and La Prensa) and the official discourse of the self-proclaimed “Revolución Libertadora,” the study explores how the Hungarian uprising was read through an anti-totalitarian lens, enabling the equivalence between communism and Peronism as comparable forms of political despotism. This discourse, functional to the anti-Peronist policies of the military government, contributed to positioning Argentina within the bipolar logic of the Cold War. The paper also addresses the convergence between proscribed Peronists and communists around anti-imperialist causes—such as the defense of Arab nationalism during the Suez crisis—and the impact of this convergence on trade union reorganization and the redefinition of political identities. In this framework, international events became a prism through which domestic conflicts were reinterpreted. Ultimately, the paper argues that the Argentine reading of 1956 was less a revision of Soviet communism than a political and ideological operation aimed at redefining the boundaries between liberalism, communism, and Peronism, and at consolidating an anti-communist language of state power within Argentina’s Cold War political culture.
Piroska CSÚRI, Center for Hungarian Studies Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires, Argentina "From scarred witnesses to fighting heroes: The shifting representation of youth in Hungarian cinema on the 1956 revolution" Abstract: This paper explores aspects of the construction of social memory by analyzing the cinematographic representation of youth in Hungarian cinema related to the 1956 revolution. From the early 1980s, the experience of youth related to the 1956 revolution emerged as a subject in key Hungarian cinematographic narratives. Adopting the viewpoint of children or early youths, a new wave of filmmakers grappled with their generation’s early experiences in seminal works such as Time stands still (1982), Daniel takes a train (1983), Diary for my father and mother (1990). Depicting themselves as a generation deeply affected by the Revolution and its social backlash, the directors seem to conform to the relative timing and dynamics of transgenerational transmission of social memory well known from Holocaust related films. Crucially, these productions accompanied the consolidation of Hungary’s democratic opposition movement, a generation of young witnesses of the 1956 events who morphed into rebellious, politically active subjects by adulthood, constituting the driving force pushing towards the regime change that resulted from 1989 on. With the transformation, when the Hungarian revolution of 1956 became a cornerstone of the construction of national identity, a new perspective emerged in the representation of 1956 youths as fighters, political agents and armed combatants actively shaping the course of the revolution (e.g. The Sun Street boys (2007), Court Record: In Memoriam Péter Mansfeld (2007). This paper therefore focuses on this shift in cinematographic representation from depicting children and youths as witnesses of the 1956 revolution to a post regime change cinematic construction of youth figures as combative heroes and and agents of political change.
Ágnes ERŐSS, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, HUN-REN CSFK, Hungary & Graziela ARES, University of Coimbra, Portugal - "Between Freedom and Fear: The Illiberal Conquest of 1956 in Hungary’s Political Landscape"
Abstract:
This paper examines the political uses of the 1956 uprising after 2010 in Hungary. While the preamble of the 2011 Fundamental Law celebrates 1956 as the origin of modern Hungarian freedom, it simultaneously condemns the communist era. Consequently, the post-2010 memory politics of 1956 reframed the Uprising through narratives of victimhood and perceived threats to national sovereignty posed by Communism (or any group subject to othering, e.g. migrants). The reframing of the history of 1956 was accompanied by the transformation of the memoryscape, through processes of dememorialization and rememorialization.
Combining field observation, spatial and object ethnography, and the analysis of documents, media, and literature, this qualitative study investigates the spatial, material, and symbolic reinterpretations of 1956 after 2010. Focusing on the reconfiguration of the 1956 monuments in Kossuth Square and their role in contemporary politics, as reflected in Orbán’s speeches at Imre Nagy’s symbolic reburial in 1989 and the national commemoration in 2025, the paper develops a longitudinal perspective on the evolution of illiberal memory politics (Pető 2023) in Hungary.
Empirical research found that 1956 is recalled through minimalist memorials and narratives of collective victimhood that depersonalize the event, reinforcing the anti-communist discourse enshrined in the 2011 Fundamental Law. The paper argues that the reinterpretation of 1956 has conquered both the historical narrative and the material memoryscape, transforming history into a reservoir of symbols that legitimize the secular theodicy (Traverso 2006): the existing order as the embodiment of absolute good, contrasted with the remembrance of absolute evil, such as the communism.
20260729T173020260729T1900America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires4.4. The 1956 Hungarian Uprising Seventy Years On: Narratives, Instrumentalization, and Identity Politics in National and Global contextSV304MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
