In the spring and summer of 1919, contemporaries were convinced that they had been witnessing history in the making. The famous liberal historian Henrik Marczali made what we today would call the first “oral history” interview with Béla Kun, the de facto leader of the Republic of Councils.1 At the same time, but to a different end, the novelist Cécile Tormay was recording events as she saw them in her An Outlaw’s Diary.2 The battle over the sovereignty of interpretation (Deutungshoheit) of the recent past thus began even before the demise of the Republic of Councils at the end of July 1919. For the first several months after the collapse, its exiled leaders did not discuss the recent past; preoccupied by survival, the refugees, if they committed their thoughts to paper at all, focused their attention on the White Terror: on the paramilitary and mob...

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