Over the past two decades, humanities and social sciences have been increasingly preoccupied with the question of memory. It has by now become clear that the practices of memory which became wide-spread in the 1970s in connection with the trauma of the Second World War, and especially the Holocaust, are perceivably different from those after the Great War, even though scholarship in this field usually goes only as far back as Maurice Halbwachs’s seminal work published in 1925. Does the concept and practice of memory mean the same today as in the post-First World War period? Can the proliferating research in the field of memory can reconstruct the structures of temporality in this period? Responding to Eugène Minkowski’s 1933 work discussing the phenomenology of time through the psychopathology of soldiers surviving the Great War, the present study adopts Minkowski’s focus on the ‘future’ and argues that, in addition to ‘memory’, the analysis of this period’s structures of temporality must also consider the concept and experience of ‘future’. This fresh approach brings together Halbwachs and Minkowski, two scholars associated with Henri Bergson’s philosophy, both arguing for the primacy of seemingly disparate experiences of time.

Examining the biography of psychologist, educator and politician Ferenc Mérei, this study addresses the question whether the linearity and continuity traditionally associated with biographies constitute an appropriate concept for the study of the complex historicity of a human life. Separating life and biography, the study’s premise is that the disparate data about a life, often carrying no meaning in themselves, are not of the same quality as the facts of a biography (let alone of an autobiography), ordered in hindsight and interpreted along preconceptions. In short, research must differentiate between the experienced and narrated levels of biographies. Through the application of the concept of ‘event of fate’ and a synoptic and parallel examination of documents (in the widest sense of the word), the study probes both these registers of biographic space from the angle of faultlines. Reaching beyond the narrated and ordered life history of a man so skilled in self-interpretation as Mérei, faultlines provide opportunities to explore those incongruent elements that do not fit in the narration, even though they comprise an integral part of the experienced register. Thus, by disrupting the homogeneous, linear and continuous temporality of biographies, this study reclaims the tentative, the aborted, the unexpected, and the unintentional; and by doing so, attempts to restore the complex, non-linear and heterogeneous temporality in historiography.

This study aims at answering the questions of where and how the avant-garde scene of the 1970s, home of the art punk band Spions, was organised. Besides the semi-publicity created by extending the private sphere of personal residences, the second half of the decade found this scene returning to venues supported by the official cultural policy: the cultural centres. How was it possible for these supported venues to house forbidden shows? The answer lies in the transforming modes of social identification and recreation choices whose exhaustion was already visible, even for the sociology of the day. The avantgard scene, thus, did no more than repopulate these depleted cultural spaces. This transformation is signifi cant, as the creation of the Spions would have been unimaginable without cultural centres. In their case, the Ganz-MÁVAG Cultural Centre, under the directorship of Tamás Papp, provided the environment where the band first started during a lecture series about utopias. This fi rst Hungarian punk band, however, was far from ordinary; it was set up with the aim to develop poetics and create a musical idiom. The founders, Gergely Molnár, Péter Hegedűs (with György Kurtág, Jr) and Tibor Zátonyi, were originally involved, respectively, in neoavantgard art, contemporary classical music and photography. The band, arriving at popular culture from the exclusivity of avantgard aesthetics and contemporary classical music, was in many respects atypical and defied the logic of pop. Their communication was hierarchic, rather than emancipatory, and the thematics of escape, self-destruction and hate were characterised at the same time by the implicit criticism of state socialism and the New Left’s denunciation of capitalism. The Spions, using pop as a mere medium, reduced the people’s celebrated leaders to the same morphological level as the adored celebrities, fashion models and dandies.

The paper, a preliminary study to the biography to be written about the psychologist Ferenc Mérei (1909-1986) is an attempt to understand the experiences of the period of forced labor service between 1942–1944. The fundamental question is this: why does Mérei almost always speak positively about the forced labor service? Using the so called cross treatment of sources, the documents in the archives, unpublished manuscripts, interviews, conversations about Mérei and his own scientific work two simultaneous patterns of life-conduct can be reconstructed: (1) “Nocht–Nicht–Sein”, the revolutionary teleology looking into the future, the belief that joining the Red Army is a possibility for the realization of the “communist revolution”; and (2) the pleasure principle, the a hic–et–nunc existence that regards the given life situation as empirical reality and gains consciousness of itself by making use of the minor pleasures aimed at survival. According to the paper’s conclusions it is the political creed and the genuineness of the experience of minor pleasures as well as the elaboration of traumas that resulted in successful psychic elaboration in Mérei’s case (compared to other survivors of the holocaust and forced labor service).