How to confront our grandparents’ deeds?

Thanks to the Center for Arts and Culture a really interesting documentary, Grandfathers and Revolutions, was screened at CEU dealing with the Hungarian Communist past from an uniquely personal perspective. Péter Hegedüs, an Australian-Hungarian film director at the age of 22 shot a film about his grandfather, András Hegedüs, who was the most interesting personality of the Hungarian Communist regime, having made a long journey from being a Stalinist to become a critical and socially engaged leader of the opposition of János Kádár’s dictatorship.  He is famous in Hungary for having been the prime minister of Hungary in 1955-56, whose government was put down due to the revolution.

Hegedüs András. Former prime minister of Hungary, sociologist

Since he signed a legal document that justified the Soviet intervention of the 24th October, many blame him to be responsible for the bloody suppression of the revolution. It is true that he belonged to that fraction of the Communist Party, which was loyal to the Soviet leadership of Stalin and that of Hrustov alike. Nonetheless it can be taken into consideration also that his government’s provisions made it possible to flee towards West for 200 thousands of Hungarians after the second Soviet intervention of 4th November ’56.

The grandson, the director of the film, knew and admired his grandfather as the leader of the opposition of the 1980s and faced András Hegedüs of the 1950s only later in Australia, after having discovered that Hungarian emigrants hated his grandfather. This touching experience motivated him to research and get closer to the past of his country and of his family. He was curious to know both sides of the barricades of the revolution, so he made interviews with revolutionaries who fled Hungary after the revolution, not only with his grandfather, who was involved in inviting the Soviet troups. His questions addressing the grandparents were sometimes almost redicously naïve, but in the end he got closer to understand them.

On the one hand I liked the method,  that the first questions aimed to discover the childhood and youth of András Hegedüs, searching for the explanation how did he become Communist and Stalinist, and the confrontation of these interviews with those made with revolutionaries was also very exciting. On the other hand I missed the actual deep dialogue between the generations. The grandfather appears in front of the audience simply as one of the cutest grandpas ever and the grandson easily concludes that posterity can not judge the deeds of the ancestors without understanding the complexity of historical circumstances.

I guess nobody is surprised by this conclusion. Nevertheless, this film gave a demanding food for thought, since the majority of us Eastern-Europeans has grandparents who lived and acted in the age of Communist dictatorship and we have to confront their deeds, misdeeds and the things they missed to do – if we suppose that everybody plays a role in history, not only political leaders. I do believe so.

Agnes Kelemen

Nationalism Studies Department