Carolyn Smith on Sat, 12 Oct 96 23:22 MET |
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nettime: Budapest 1956: an invitation |
Dear Nettimers re. Budapest 1956 collaborative web site Apologies for haste. I feel I am like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Your thoughts please, on this proposal for a collaborative web site constructed during the two weeks that mark the 40th anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising. All suggestions welcome. Comments, criticism, ideas, contributions to carolyn@isys.hu Many thanks Carolyn Budapest 1956 ----- An invitation: 23 October - 4 November 1996 ----- Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956: a 'failure in strategic intelligence' CIA FAQ 0.02 for alt.politics.org.cia "In no way this 'political unrest' was less than any of the great revolutions of History, including the American and French Revolutions." Csaba Gaal, Etobicoke, Ontario,Canada in a letter to Time Life magazine, at the instigation of 'The Hungarian Lobby' "...As a young '56er, were you to ask me of the revolution, the last phrase I would use is a 'glorious uprising against Communism'. And I would be correct - for me it was my nation reduced once again to animal-like fratricide..." L‡szl— Petrovics Ofner [Brown Shoes and the Demystification of 1956, The Hungary Report, 23 October, 1995] ----- "I rebel - therefore we exist". Albert Camus October 23 1996 marks the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. In Hungary its failure was followed by mass emigration, official and personal silences, repression, recrimination, and then conciliation and concealment. Internationally the repercussions were significant and contradictory: the 1956 uprising dented the course of the destalinisation process initiated by Krushchev by provoking the Politburo to crush the revolt, yet inspired other rebellions in Soviet bloc against totalitarianism; it served Politburo purposes (in terms of undermining the local stalinist leadership) as well as those of British and US governments, to deflect criticism of the handling of the 'Suez crisis' / nationalisation of Suez Canal. Both major powers of the Cold War used the event to reinforce their ability to retain control over their own citizens aswell as providing inspiration for those attempting to overthrow them. Recent revelations of Politburo discussions advocating complete military withdrawal from Hungary and CIA sponsorship of an(other?) AVO-inspired uprising have encouraged a more critical evaluation of events whilst adding to the confusion. Forty years later as official commemorations abound, understanding the events and their implications is hard - and controversial. Memory has been isolated from action, distorted by myth. Critical interrogation leads to investigation of equally broad concepts: the politics of linguistic definitions, the distortion of cold war propaganda and current censorship, the confrontation of official silences: the conflicts inherent in the development and mediation of collective and individual memories. ARTISTS AS 'ARCHAEOLOGISTS' Artists, writers, historians, (psycho)geographers and all those with a creative approach to historical, cultural and spatial analysis are invited to interrogate how perceptions of these events have come to be seen as 'truth' and 'reality', exposing the strategies of domination and resistance that have defined our understandings. The problem of 1956 will be approached by asking the question '1996?', concurrently producing a critical history of the present through an analysis of the past. Results of these investigations will be displayed on a collaborative web site constructed between the 23rd October and 4th November, the dates that mark the uprising 40 years ago. Excavations will start with the city itself. Participants are asked to start by exploring present places, examining past processes and confrontations that have created them, thus uncovering the temporal depth of spatial phenomena. The city will be read as a mnemnonic text of perpetual conflict and resolution - a historical document that can be understood in any number of ways, and its structures and chaos analysed as strategies of domination and resistance in themselves. Participants are invited to use the psychogeographic techniques of the dŽrive, detournement and play; to pay attention to the forms of mediation and contestation of collective and individual memories, and the use of popular and material culture in their transmission and transformation; to manifest the presence of absence, silences and thoughts, beliefs and ideologies. The site will form a historical subjective document, offering multiple and contradictory interpretations of the events and their transformation. The aim will be to encourage, provoke or demand a critical and personal response from the reader. There will be a forum for reaction and discussion for those both producing and encountering the site, with the intention of bringing the representation and interpretation of history back into a public domain. A mailing list will also be set up for the two weeks that mark the uprising, encouraging live participation and fresh cataclysms of dissent, outrage, hope, critical evaluation and action. Both forum and mailing list will be archived as part of the historical document. The exploitation of hypertextual form of the internet permits spatial and temporal conceptual clarity in the representation of historical investigation, visually illustrating the uncovering of layers of history and enabling a heightened contextualising of events and material objects. Hypertext also helps clarify the conceptual structure of the investigation paralleled by a structural representation of space and time. This site will also be an ironic but very practical use of a medium that is the latest (and therefore most efficient) technology to speed the (post)modern experience of 'time / space compression' - an experience that has been charged with leading to the 'end of history'. SOME KEYWORDS AND CONCEPTS cold war * propaganda * censorship * revolution * counter revolution * * uprising * rebellion * treason * patriotism * neutrality * alignment * exposure * concealment * silence * the American Dream / the 'American Empire of the Senseless' [Acker] * the 'Evil Empire' [Reagan] * the 'end of history' [Fukuyama] * confession * accusation * guilt * betrayal * loyalty * identity * scarcity * abundance * you are what you wear * fratricide * jetztzeit * jail is a good school * the Iron Curtain * find the Warsaw Pact: a game (I was going to ask the Invisible College for this). ----- BUDAPEST 1956 "...The demonstration voiced nation wide demands for an end to dictatorship, withdrawal of Soviet troops, freedom of the press and the appointment of Imre Nagy as Prime Minister. Nagy had headed briefly a mildly reformist government in 1953. Later on the same day when State Security forces fired on demonstrators at various places, notably outside the building of the Hungarian Radio in Br—dy S‡ndor Street. The army was called in. Many units simply handed over their weapons to the demonstrators. The revolution had begun...." RADIO BUDAPEST publicity, 1996 ".... And this is what I saw. By Gorky Row students with the tri-colored armbands rushing and shouting about a traitor. The "secret policeman," or so presumed, was hung by his legs over a small fire. The loud plaid trousers that covered his frame only partially, was singed, but recognizable at once - the used pair of trousers received in a care package from relatives in the States weeks earlier, '50s wild-plaid, belonged to Gyula Bacsi, the father of a neighbor, Pisti, a friend in third grade, two ahead of me.... I stood transfixed and numb from trauma. Gyula was a plumber, no member of the Party and a true patriot, this much I knew. A white light overcame my child's consciousness. I saw his charred skull, face half eaten by flame. I looked into the heart of darkness, a blackness now consuming all light, the heart of Hatred. I heard the cry, 'Barna cip™', rotten brown-shoed, the color of the shoes of the sercet service officers. It was only years later, in psychoanalysis, that I reconstructed that the man had been lynched for wearing his only pair of shoes - a deadly color at the time." L‡szl— Petrovics Ofner [Brown Shoes and the Demystification of 1956, The Hungary Report, 23 Oct, 1995] ------ THE SITE(S) 1. the city itself 2. website/mailing list/forum hosted by ISYS 3. locations of your choice Investigations / excavations will take place throughout the month of October. The site will be constructed so that something is running by the 23rd so that it is newsworthy and to heighten user participation. Construction will be halted on the 4th November. It is anticipated that the site will be intergrated with other evaluative events taking place in the city. There will then be a month period of review when its impact can be evaluated and further changes made. Participants are also encouraged to leave traces on city as a 'memorial', perhaps a catalogue with critical texts, physical marks on the city (permanent or impermanent) or live presentations - exhibitions, performance, video/film. The website will work on the following planes (following Lefebvre's conceptual triad of spatial production: * the perceived, * the conceived and * the lived. Different planes, different themes will be interlinked. Internal links will be based on antagonisms and contrasts rather than logical connections. LEVEL 1: THE PERCEIVED City map or a textual map related to sites of the uprising - places linked to individual themes of level 2. Some of the places to explore: * bridge at Andau (the book at least is at the CEU!) * Heroes Square * Ujkšztemet™ cemetery * Kerepesi cemetery * Blaha Lujzsa tŽr * New York k‡vŽh‡z * Brody S‡ndor utca / Magyar R‡dio * Luk‡cs kavŽh‡z * Lott—h‡z * Corvin cinema * Museum of Applied Arts * Statue of Imre Nagy (near Parliament) * Parliament building * the 'White House' * Bem tŽr * Csepel island - steel works, soviet barracks * Former police interrogation center on F™ utca * Former secret police HQ on Andr‡ssy œt * Tram 38 * Damnaijich utca * statue park * Morisz Zsigmond tŽr * routes in and out of the city * the road to Vienna LEVEL 2: THE CONCEIVED Strategies of domination or resistance - participants will define and interrogate one (or more) of these, sparked off by place(s) chosen. Here are some thoughts to set you off: * revolution / counterrevolution / uprising / rebellion / treason / patriotism * mindszenty syndrome - false confession and accusation, guilt / betrayal / loyalty - who am I? * neutrality / alignment * city as spectacle * heroes / villains * exposure / concealment * the way out * better dead than red * silence * you are what you wear * the end of history? the triumph of the American Dream (and the dawning of centuries of boredom) * freedom / imprisonment: 'jail is a good school' where is one truly free? * borders / boundaries / isolation / intergration: the Iron Curtain Perhaps to finish on a question that the reader has to answer, leading to... LEVELS 3 & 4: THE LIVED Forum: to facilitate a dialogue between authors and readers. Mailing list: set up for the two weeks that mark the uprising. Vibrant discussion and argument encouraged and provoked. Participants may also choose to have direct reader reaction / intervention on their pages. CONTACT Interested? Outraged? Bewildered? Would rather dŽrive around the sites for a few beers instead? Do contact Carolyn Smith at iSYS Hungary tel: 117-1798, email: carolyn@isys.hu Time is short. -- * distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission * <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, * collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets * more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body * URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de