Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

uncover the capillaries of common history at regional level or within
the framework of cultural history. Sometimes they mystify and at
other times they simply register attempts to create a common
framework for interpretation. This idealised common history is
mainly found in Hungarian interpretations.
Secondly, there is the narrative that emphasises the permanent
conflict during the many centuries in which Hungarians and Slovaks
have co-existed. This is more typical of Slovak historiography.
The military liquidation of Great Moravia by the conquering Hungarians,
the suppression of the Slavic population’s land and power,
anti-Slavic behaviour by the noble and bourgeois elite, and later
the assimilation are recurrent themes in this discourse. The fight for
language and schooling, the political fight for autonomy, and then
efforts aimed at independence and self-determination, all come
under this umbrella, which excludes compromise, dual identity or
inter-ethnic contacts.
Thirdly, the expropriated ‘palimpsest’ history overwrites the other’s
interpretations. Such historiography, both Slovak and Hungarian,
tries to make the Slovak region of upper Hungary its own in an intellectual
sense.
Finally, both sides sometimes espouse a history of suspicion, which
marks out the borders of national history and looks with mistrust
upon those who cross those borders or are inclined towards assimilation.
In the monumental historical summary of Marxist Hungarian historiography,
published in the 1970s and 1980s, the volumes for the
18th and 19th centuries devote a great deal of attention to the history
of non-Hungarian national movements. On the Slovak side, first
Anton Špiesz and then Dušan Kováč tried to write Slovak history in
a multi-ethnic way. In spite of these sober endeavours, the endgame
of communist state historiographies was characterised by head-on
defiance. Slovak historical self-determination and their efforts to
distance themselves from a common Hungarian-Slovak history
started with the Slovak transliteration of Hungarian surnames and
continued to the wholesale announcement of so-called ‘de-
Magyarisation’ of Slovak history.
184