Seventy Years - Ego History 1951-2021 - Volume 2

"Many people believe that historians have nothing to do with unprofessional, propagandistic, manipulative or simply amateur interpretations of the past. I do not share this opinion. On the contrary: I believe that an important social task of the historian is to discredit ideologically roughly defined interpretations that deviate from the known and accepted facts of the past, and that have manipulative and propagandistic purposes - even if the absolute objective truth cannot be revealed." The first volume of "My Egohistory" is about how I became a historian. The second, which the reader holds in his hands, is about what kind of historian I became. How I did my work as a researcher of modern Hungarian history, as a research organizer, as an author and series editor of Osiris, Akadémiai and Kossuth Publishing House, as a speaker at domestic and foreign conferences, as a participant in radio and TV programs and, not least, as a lecturer at ELTE, then Eszterházy Károly College in Eger and several foreign universities, above all Indiana University in the US and Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. Similar to the first volume, I tried to look at myself from the outside in this one, and to show my historical activity through the lens of both my critics and my admirers. Although I consistently kept myself away from battles related to party politics, I still found myself in the crossfire of personal attacks from time to time. In the process, some people tried to attach a variety of political labels to me. I believe that these stigmatizing efforts were not only about me, but also reflected the sensitivities, emotions, and frustrations of Hungarian society after the regime change. Therefore, I will report on these in detail in my retrospective.