In this fascinating book, Sándor Horváth describes how in socialist Hungary a hapless group of young people was politicized and criminalized and thus turned into a “gang” that needed to be persecuted and disciplined. In the summer of 1969, a group of young adults started the afternoon with a stroll in commemoration of Rolling Stones’ lead guitarist Brian Jones, who had just died a week before. For the Hungarian group, the day ended with a full-grown police investigation into alleged fascist machinations. A myth began to grow (or rather to be built) about a supposedly dangerous juvenile gang that could possibly put the entire socialist society in jeopardy. Half a year later, ten young people (out of a group of 80–100) were sentenced to prison terms. This story sounds like the perfect model for a screenplay. I fact, a BBC-audio-drama has already been produced, and I have to admit that I am waiting for more.
Yet Horváth's book contains much more than just a good story. It offers a compelling analysis of the mechanisms that were able to build up moral panics in a socialist society. Thirteen years after the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and just one year after the violent ending of the Prague Spring, communist regimes in all of eastern Europe were searching for effective means to govern and control their societies. Post-Stalinist governing was generally determined by a fluid mix of repression and accommodation, and a steady concern for an imminent counterrevolution. The population was required to be obedient and vigilant and, above all, content with the legitimizing consumerism offered to them within a new social contract. The case of the “Great Tree Gang” demonstrates not so much how this plan could go wrong, but rather how deviance was constructed and harnessed in order to reinforce submissiveness and uniformity.
Using a perhaps a bit hyperbolic narrative strategy, Horváth contrasts a fortuitous coincidence (a couple from Budapest leaves their apartment in order to visit a concert, meets a group of young people and misunderstands their chants as politically dangerous) with the following actions and events that originated from the structures of post-Stalinist socialism. We see the unscheduled yet structurally ingrained collaboration of police, political officers, the tabloid press, judiciary, and the youth welfare system, all backed up by a first latent and then virulent and always highly effective moral angst. Another useful instrument to keep the population in check was a new spatial imagination of the city. Parts of Budapest known as socially disadvantaged, or “slums,” were now re-narrated as dangerous spaces, controlled by alleged “hooligans.” Well-known problems were rearranged according to new discourses and new, morally loaded stereotypes of youth, and in particular of young men.
Such structures, of course, were not specific for socialist systems at all; Horváth claims that the communist system was (intentionally?) borrowing from western discourses of moral panics and a generally cautious approach to adolescents in order to support their own political and social system. Ironically, it was very often the young peoples’ interest in western popular culture that provided a welcome opportunity to apply these strategies.
Most important in Horváth's analysis is the process of politicizing the “Great Tree Gang.” Originally, the young peoples’ actions and ideas, he argues, were not political at all. Only the narratives constructed by the police and the media, but eventually also by the supposed gang members themselves, turned an act of youth rebellion into a politically dangerous event. Horváth fits this story of attribution and subjectivization into a grand explanation of post-Stalinist Hungary. The governments required new forms of legitimization and strategies to integrate fundamental and potentially dangerous social transformations into a stable political system. Repression was one way to achieve this goal, but it had to be combined with persuasion and participation. In order to make citizens compliant, cooperative and vigilant, morally loaded narratives were useful tools. Horváth's book demonstrates how perfectly the complex field of youth culture, the modern focus on adolescence as a crucial life stage, and the cultures of moral panics fit into this political system.
