Disclosing the Self: 1956 Hungarian Student Refugees Creating Autobiographies for University Scholarships in the USA

ABSTRACT

Following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, many students fled and settled in the USA. At the Joyce Kilmer Reception Centre, potential university scholarship candidates were asked to write an autobiography as a contribution to their assessment. Gary Filerman, the World University Service representative at Camp Kilmer archived 18 of the resulting translated texts. Autobiographies played a significant role in controlling people’s aspirations in Soviet communist states. The practice of ordinary people writing autobiographies began after the Bolshevik revolution and eventually became an enforced activity across a person’s life. As journeys of political conformity, these autobiographies have been compared to the submission demanded by a total institution complete with ritual humiliations. In Hungary, potential university students would have been familiar with the form as an autobiography was required for university entrance which rested as much on Marxist Leninist determinism of class origin as talent. The texts utilise the genre, including rhetoric from propaganda discourses, but usurped the form so that it was no longer an enforced activity but one which revealed personal aspirations feelings and motivations. They detail lost ambition, persecution based on ascribed social class, the hope provided by the revolution and subsequent loss of life and flight.

KEYWORDS:

• Communist autobiography
• Hungarian revolution
• 1956
• refugee students
• Soviet Russia

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Open Society Archives in Budapest and to their staff. I am also grateful to the Faculty Journal Publishing Scheme which created the initial time and space for writing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See film record titled Big Picture: Operation Mercy. Record Group 111: Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, 1860-1985. Series: Motion picture films from “The Big Picture” programme series, ca 1950-ca 1975. Item: Operation Mercy. National Archives Identifier 2569633. Local Identifier 111-TV-364. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/2569633ocal Identifier 111-TV-364. View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM4rC86-uS8

2 The texts form part of the Filerman file, reference number HU OSA 412, donated by Gary Filerman to the Open Society Archives in Budapest.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vera Sheridan

Vera Sheridan has a strong publishing record in the area of identity across educational, organizational and national settings. Present interests focus on historical and contemporary research on refugees with a particular interest in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.