Introduction

The centennial of the Hungarian Republic of Councils in March 2019 has passed without much fanfare in Hungary, its commemoration largely overshadowed by events centered on the approaching hundredth anniversary of the Trianon Treaty and highlighting the significance of the country’s twentieth-century history as the main battlefield of current memory politics. In 2018, a representative volume examining the political and cultural legacy of the Hungarian Soviet Republic at its centennial was published not in Hungary but in Vienna, edited by Austrian and Swiss historians.¹ The volume contains contributions, in German, by Hungarian historians based in Hungary and abroad, as well as by many young Austrian, German, and Swiss scholars. Though until very recently this was the only substantial volume on the Hungarian Republic of Councils,² the collaborative effort offers evidence of the lively scholarly interest in the Hungarian revolutions, and demonstrates the benefits of a transnational approach to...