Péter Apor. <i>A hétköznapi hatalom: Politikai nyelv, szaktudás, társadalmi cselekvés</i> [Everyday power: political language, specialized knowledge, social action]

The publication under review was published by the Hungarian Research Centre for the Humanities’ Institute of History as part of the series “Értekezések.” The word, like so many other Hungarian words, is difficult to translate. It could mean dissertations (such as a doctoral dissertation), discourses, tractates, or treatises. I think the word “treatise” best describes Péter Apor’s work because it is a combination of a methodically driven discussion and historical essays focusing on the nature, implementation, and depiction of state power and its relation to everyday life. As the author explains, the book is divided into three separate yet interrelated sections. The first two chapters in section 1 provide a succinct yet very informative examination of the historiographical development of everyday history in the East Central European setting, emphasizing the methodological and research challenges of everyday history as a category of analysis. In section 2, the four essays are examples of the various approaches that historians might use to examine the impact of socialist state power on everyday life. The last section and chapter of the book depicts the challenges of exploring the question of postsocialist memory construction.The first chapter engages with the difficulties that a historian might face while conducting archival research on the socialist regime’s documentation of everyday life. Historians are supposed to approach their sources with a degree of skepticism. However, early researchers in the socialist archives, excited to see the socialist regimes’ own documentation of the period, were exposed to collections of files distorted by political and ideological language that often misrepresented and even obscured the reality of everyday life. What should a historian do in this situation? One solution was a turn toward ethnography, as Apor shows through his discussion of Gail Kligman’s experience in socialist Romania. Approaching the history of socialism from below by conducting interviews—utilizing the methodological approach of oral history—could be another way to study the subject. The inclusion of approaches from sociology is yet another beneficial tool to examine the regimes, for, as Apor argues, sociological scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s provided the most clear and explicit critiques of state socialism (30). Lastly, the author explores the value of microhistory as a way to overcome the challenges of the socialist parties’ own documentation of the realities of socialist life. The chapter is undoubtably informative, yet I found the author’s own assessment and critique of the various approaches missing here.The second chapter looks at the different attempts of various regimes in 1918, 1945, and 1989 to imagine what the future could be after the major events of World War I, World War II, and the end of the Cold War. The chapter does a good job of depicting the uncertainties and ambivalent feelings of those in charge of the present about the nature and characteristics of the future.Chapter 3 is an attempt to offer a comparative analysis of East Central European Roma/Gypsy politics. In this chapter, Apor brilliantly illustrates how the combination of archival sources and ethnographic investigations can yield a significant study even on a topic that is as neglected as the Roma/Gypsy question. The author shows the degree of continuity that characterized the various East Central European regimes’ approaches—laden with prejudices—to the Roma population. The early postwar socialist regimes, not unlike their predecessors, saw the Roma as socially and culturally “backward” and for the most part an inconsequential group. By utilizing archival sources, ethnographical studies, and well-selected secondary sources, Apor shows how socialist views and approaches changed from seeing the condition of the Roma as a humanistic issue with a focus on the elimination of poverty to presenting the Roma as a danger to the health and safety of society at large. Apor engages with various scholarly publications to depict how academia was responsible for creating a climate that legitimized the discriminatory treatment of the Roma. For example, the 1952 Czech language dictionary defined Roma/Gypsy as a “member of a wandering ethnic group; the symbol of mental health problems (elmezavar) and theft; a roaming, scamming, and lying person, a troublemaker, and a cheat” (74). Hungarian ethnographic studies oscillated between romanticizing the Roma and providing a “scholarly” explanation for the Roma’s “archaic nature” and their backwardness that, according to these studies in the 1950s, was the result of a lack of continued and persistent engagement with productive work. These studies in a way legitimized governmental actions such as forced bathing and dusting the Gypsies with DDT. The various regimes arrived at their centralized Roma/Gypsy policies at different times (Poland in 1952, Bulgaria in 1957, Czechoslovakia in 1958, Hungary in 1961, and Romania in 1977). However, as Apor shows, their approaches agreed on the cultural and social “inferiority” of the Roma and focused on prohibiting roaming, making them sedentary, and forcing their permanent employment.Chapters 4 and 5 are, in my opinion, the strongest. These chapters superbly demonstrate the very clear utility of socialist archival sources in the hands of a talented historian. Yes, a certain degree of skepticism is undoubtedly necessary when reading these documents, but it does not mean that they are useless. Apor’s decision to examine the relationship between the socialist state and education by taking his research to the countryside—and focusing on the mid-size city of Szombathely in Vas County—exemplifies the very best that microhistory can offer. Chapter 4 looks at the transformation of schools and education from the end of World War II to 1972. Through the carefully selected and analyzed sources the reader can clearly see the development of the socialist educational system from postwar reconstruction—both physical and ideological—to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when focus shifted to personality formation as the key element of building a new type of socialist modernity and a new type of socialist society. Chapter 5 examines socialist governments’ ever-so-diminishing capacity, and, perhaps more importantly, willingness to make schools places of political-ideological education. Instead of this, schools and teachers were allowed and even encouraged to approach education based on professional considerations.The next chapter examines the relationship between late socialist norm and legal code and that of the incredibly complex issues of sexual development, sexual harassment, and corporal punishment. The strength of the chapter, in my reading, is to bring these topics to light, to incorporate them into the discourse of everyday socialism, and to provide possible avenues for future research.The last chapter of the book looks at the thorny issues of postsocialist memory construction, historical remembrance, and history at large. The author’s assessment that “East-Central European societies are seemingly unable to wrestle with and overcome some of the most traumatic chapters of their recent past” (143) might seem a bit pessimistic, but I am afraid it is actually rather objective. How should the historian approach a period that brings forth nostalgia as well as rejection? What should the historian do when large segments of the society are willing and even want to forget about the recent past? “What is the historian’s responsibility under these circumstances?” (163), asks Apor in his closing paragraph.I think that Péter Apor, by writing this book, answers his own questions about how to approach state socialism. At first, I was not entirely certain about the intended audience of the book. The first two chapters, by providing a scholarly overview of the research methodologies and historiography, seem to be targeting those entirely new to the concept and approach of everyday history. The main chapters of the book however provided an outstanding model for both Hungarian and non-Hungarian scholars who aim to make sense of the complex relationship between state-socialist regimes and everyday society. By actually showing how the different methodological approaches could yield quality results, Apor merges the various chapters into one coherent study and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how we could conceptualize researching, studying, and writing the everyday history of socialism.

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