Reprise the Revolution: The Cultural Politics of the 50th Anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising

Abstract

This paper argues that during the protests and riots of October 23, 2006, Hungarian groups previously excluded from the social and political public sphere used certain sites of memory in order to reassert their own readings of 1956, the messages it communicates to the present, and the visions it conjurs up for the future. This study analyzes their actions as "commemoration by re-enactment," and while condemning the violence they generated, Ithe author argueds that the mental and physical spaces should be kept accessible for further appropriations and constructions of the present through the past.