6 - Remembering the World Revolution

Summary

In the deeply divided political environment of interwar Central Europe, memories of the 1919 revolutions were fitted into preexisting cognitive frameworks of both political Left and Right. My focus is on certain “acts” of remembering, such as the writing of memoirs, the celebration and memorialization of the dead, and debates about the past. This chapter focuses on the two main political “communities of remembering” which developed in the postrevolutionary period in Bavaria and Hungary, the Right and the Left. It in some ways leaves aside the majority of the population, for whom the 1919 revolutions often were simply rolled into the story of the many horrors of the time: war, hunger, displacement, personal loss, inflation, and disease. Perhaps partly because the events of 1919 were not universally viewed as pivotal, even at the time, and often were relegated to a minor role compared with the events of the world war, those with a strong political commitment on the Left or the Right fought not only for their interpretation but also for the historical significance of the revolutions.