‘The long 1968’ in Hungary and its legacy

Abstract

The year 1968 witnessed many youth movements, at both international and transnational levels. Influenced in part by the American and Western European counterculture movements youth from Eastern and Central Europe started to react against the Communist Establishment. The main sources for the ‘long 1968’ in Hungary are interviews and autobiographies, as well as police and trial reports. Agnes Heller explains the structure of the Marxist Renaissance group in the interview book Biciklizo Majom, Gyorgy Dalos described his experience as a dissident in his autobiography Archipel Goulasch, and Miklos Haraszti wrote books about his experience as a factory worker in the 1980s and about the censorship system in Hungary. Gyorgy Lukacs was by far one of the most controversial, influential and ambiguous characters of twentieth-century Marxism. When discussing him in The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann gave a good glimpse of the complex and unpredictable turns of his character.