Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

MÓNIKA BAÁRWriting contemporary history is a delicate issue. Personal reminiscencesmay easily become a temptation for writing a piece which bettersuits the genre of memoirs than that of professional history. Horváth’ssuccess can be explained (apart from his talent, of course) by his uniqueperspective: he presented those events which he witnessed and remembered,while the decades that had passed provided him with a certain distanceas well. Emigration does not always have a positive effect on thework of a historian: the difficulties of adapting to the new circumstancesin a foreign country and homesickness might cause a shock that can resultin a radical shift in the historian’s world view. It can often lead to eitherthe idealization or the complete refusal of the home country. Fortunately,in Horváth’s case, the experience of emigration did not lead to extremism.It affected him only on a material level: he lived far away from his sourcesand sometimes could not easily afford even to purchase a postage stamp.While living outside of his home country, he remained a bystanderin contemporary Hungarian political debates which could have distortedhis line of argument. This is perhaps why he maintained his belief in thehistory-forming nature of civilization, almost in the sense it was understoodin the Reform Era. His writings preserved the theoretical frameworkof political thinking of that age, and, upon his return to Hungary in1867, he brought home those ideals. These thoughts did not become outdatedin contemporary Hungary, on the contrary, they sounded moremodern than Romantic historiography.In appreciating Horváth’s lifework, a contemporary historiandescribed him as the founding father of modern Hungarian historiography.Nevertheless, he is not considered a “national historian” the wayFrantišek Palacký is for the Czechs or Joachim Lelewel for the Poles, andhe has been given incomparably less attention than his two aforementionedcolleagues. The reason for this might be found in the heterogeneousnature of Hungarian historiographical literature of the period,which prevented the emergence of “the historian of the nation,” but hisabstinence from the mainstream romantic currents might have also beena factor. Nevertheless, his contribution to the professionalization andinstitutionalization of the discipline cannot be neglected. He made animpact on the public not only through his books, but also through hisactivities in various learned societies, such as the Hungarian HistoricalSociety. In 1848, he suggested the organization of the National Archivesand was engaged in source publishing. His works enjoyed a considerablepopularity at home, and his opus magnum became available for the foreignacademic community through translations to German and French.In the seminary, Horváth was instructed on antiquity in numeroussubjects, yet his interest laid in modern history. Uniquely, he found the38