The Contested Post-Socialist Rehabilitation of the Past: Dual Narratives in the Republishing of Tibor Mendöl’s "Introduction to Geography"

Abstract

This paper aims to unravel the contextual layers of the postsocialist republishing of a prominent Hungarian geographer's textbook originally written in the 1950s, which is considered here as a vehicle of the contested narrativity in the "big historical gap" of postsocialist Hungarian geography. Tibor Mendöl's Introduction to Geography [Bevezetés a földrajzba] was a hybrid text written in a dual narrative: first in a traditional "age of discoveries" narrative of the previous conservative-nationalist regime, and second in the obligatory Marxist-Leninist language of the later Sovietized regime. In 1999, the two rehabilitators of the text were driven by different motivations (such as the return to a formerly glorious geographical tradition, or the selective confining of a discredited socialist past), but in both cases through a symbolic contestation of the author. This ultimately led to the arbitrarily reediting of the text, first by deleting its most compromising parts, second by reframing it in a "completed" form by "finishing" its historical span, and third by selectively and incompletely "translating" some of its burdened phrases into a partly de-ideologized language. My aim is to provide a layer-bylayer historical analysis of the text's contexts, because without a dense hermeneutical and historical reinterpretation, we are entangled in the "hermeneutic trap" of Mendöl's interwoven dual narrative. In the last part I also offer a sketch for possible reinterpretations of the textbook in light of critical theories, drawing from anti-Eurocentric literature. Keywords: Tibor Mendöl, History of Geography, Postsocialism, Narrativity, Dual NarrativeBiography: Zoltán Gyimesi is a critical geographer and Ph.D. student of human geography at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE, Budapest), where he teaches courses on the approaches to human geography (in English and Hungarian), the history and philosophy of geography, the geographies of scientific knowledge, critical urban studies, and global inequalities with a focus on world-systems and post-colonial theory. He is a member of several

Communist Geography Instead of Nationalist Geography: The New Cadres and the Case of Sándor Radó

“…A number of closely connected meanings are woven into the concept of postsocialism. A definition of postsocialism, therefore, may include any (or all) of the following: "1) an epoch with historical and structural explanations of demarcation; 2) a state of society or mind (for example culture or psychology) which might still linger on in inherited structures; or 3) a critical epistemology for approaching the middle ground between 'capitalist' and 'socialist' worlds" (Gyimesi 2014). For this current study, the second meaning is the most important, as the structures developed during the decades of socialism have survived in every segment of Hungarian society, and are conspicuous within scholarly life as well.…”