Memorial culture of modern Hungarian monarchism

Abstract

The author in the presented article analyzes monarchism as a form of memorial culture and historical politics of society in modern Hungary. The purpose of the study is to analyze monarchism as a form of historical memory. The author analyzes the role and place of monarchical intellectuals in the development of historical politics and the memorial culture forming and developing in monarchical political imagination. The novelty of the study lies in the study of the current (modern) stage in the development of monarchical ideology in Hungary not as a form of political participation, but as a version of the development of historical memory and memorial culture, based on the principles of historical revisionism and Hungarian political and ethnic nationalisms. The article shows that; monarchism forms and cultivates its own ideas about the past and history; the historical imagination of Hungarian monarchism is a form of historical revisionism, since the monarchical past and heritage is subject to consistent positive mythologization and ideologization in the political imagination of supporters of the monarchy; monarchism in its historical imagination forms alternative versions of historical memory and memorial culture, different from those versions of national historical memory that are offered by civic identity. The article shows that monarchical forms of historical memory contribute to further transformations of the Hungarian memorial culture, stimulating the parallel co-development of alternative counter-memories operating in the political and ideological coordinates of monarchism. It is assumed that the visualization of the collective historical memory of the unique historical experience of the monarchy, including visual, narrative and discursive tactics and strategies of modern monarchists, contributes to the actualization of the heterogeneous nature of the memorial tradition of modern Hungarian society, stimulating the consolidation of unique ideas about the past that form the basis of the monarchical historical imagination and memorial culture as forms of alternative memory.

Keywords

• hungary
• monarchism
• political nostalgia
• historical memory
• politics of the past
• revisionism
• counter-memory
• memorial culture