Introduction

Situated on the edge of Zebegény, a small town overlooking the Danube in the north of Hungary, is a memorial begun in 1935 and more or less completed by 1938. It was designed by the architect Géza Maróti (1875–1941) and built by members of the local community as a memorial to the fallen of World War I and a flagstaff for the Hungarian National Colours (Fig 1.1). At first sight it seems a rather low-key affair, neither overwhelming in scale nor alluding to mass graves and wartime atrocities – in fact, there were only ten war-dead from Zebegény. Viewed in the context of political propaganda at the time, however, and of the extensive network of such public memorials erected throughout Hungary in the interwar years, it becomes clear that for many Hungarians the death commemorated at Zebegény was nothing less than that of an entire nation. From 1867 until 1918 Hungary had experienced a ‘Golden Age’ yoked to Austria as a partner in the Dual Monarchy (Gyöngyi and Jobbágyi 1989), but under the terms of the 1920 Trianon Peace Treaty (the part of the World War I settlement dealing with the eastern part of the Habsburg Empire) ‘Greater Hungary’ was cut down to its present size, entailing the loss of about two-thirds of its historic territory and population. In popular parlance Hungary was a nation ‘sentenced to death’, ‘crucified’. The transition from imperial power to impoverished right-wing dictatorship in the thrall of the Axis powers of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy was a painful one. Hungary’s defeat in 1918 had been compounded by Béla Kun’s short-lived Bolshevik revolution in 1919, and then a violent right-wing backlash (‘The White Terror’) directed by Admiral Miklós Horthy, who remained in power from 1920 until World War II. Attempts to revoke Trianon dominated Horthy’s domestic and foreign policies, assuming material form in numerous monuments, and, inevitably, shifts in the historical evaluation of Horthy’s political tenure have coloured interpretations of the public sculpture erected under his aegis. Suppressed under the Communist regime, the subject of Trianon began to resurface after 1989, and has been accompanied by a surge of critical enquiry into the interwar history of Hungary and its material culture (for example, Raffay 1996 and 2008; Zeidler 2008 and 2009; Romsics 2007).