The Feszty Panorama, Spatial Politics, and the Crisis of Modern Bodies Founding and Finding Modern Hungary in Fin de Siecle Budapest by Dorothy Lyly Juliana Barenscott B . A . , Okanagan University College, 1999 Dip . Art History, University of British Columbia, 2000 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, Ar t History) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard The University of British Columbia October 11,2002 © Dorothy Lyly Juliana Barenscott, 2002 I n p r e s e n t i n g t h i s t h e s i s i n p a r t i a l f u l f i l m e n t o f t h e r e q u i r e m e n t s f o r an advanced degree a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f B r i t i s h C o l u m b i a , I agree t h a t t h e L i b r a r y s h a l l make i t f r e e l y a v a i l a b l e f o r r e f e r e n c e and s t u d y . I f u r t h e r agree t h a t p e r m i s s i o n f o r e x t e n s i v e c o p y i n g o f t h i s t h e s i s f o r s c h o l a r l y p u rposes may be g r a n t e d by t h e head o f my department o r by h i s o r h e r r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s . I t i s u n d e r s t o o d t h a t c o p y i n g o r p u b l i c a t i o n o f t h i s t h e s i s f o r f i n a n c i a l g a i n s h a l l not be a l l o w e d w i t h o u t my w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . Department o f The U n i v e r s i t y o f B r i t i s h Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date /$C?&k&y If, aoox-A B S T R A C T In 1896, Arpad Feszty's panorama Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians into the Carpathian Basin in 896, was among the most visited and popular attractions at the Budapest World 's Fair—an international exhibition set to simultaneously celebrate a millenium of Hungarian history and the themes of technological progress and modernity. Exploring the visual and spatial dynamics of the panorama medium, this thesis investigates the significance of the Feszty Panorama in relation to specific claims about the origin of modern Hungary and within the nexus of concerns around ethnicity, liberal politics, notions of the modern subject, and definitions of social and political power within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The thesis concentrates on three inter-related areas. First, the strategic spaces marked out by the panoramic field of vision are explored as a mode of collective spectatorship that, in placing viewers at the center of a 360 degree view, functioned to liberate human vision to a boundless canvas while simultaneously imprisoning it within a frameless construction. Within this context, the notion of virtuality is raised, not as a false reality, but a space of possibility where national imaginings and historical records could be challenged and reconfigured. Second, drawing on contemporary theories around "nomadism," this thesis examines how the themes and implications of the glorified nomadic past of Magyar settlers in 896, and conjured up by the panorama's imagery, were linked to conflicted liberal discourses in 19 t h century Hungarian nation building. These, emphasizing freedom of movement, leadership through coalition, cultural miscegenation, and technological innovation as a means to domination, disrupted and called into question traditional models of social and political organization within the problematic Austro-Hungarian Empire. Third, this thesis suggests that these discourses were activated by the visual forms and spaces of the panorama itself, both in terms of the specificity of the events surrounding the Budapest World's Fair in 1896, but also in terms of the larger history and theory of the panorama— that is, its status as a mass medium which challenged and blurred the boundaries between artistic genres, communities of viewers, claims to knowledge, and other technologies of vision such as photography and early cinema. Ill T A B L E OF C O N T E N T S Abstract i i Table of Contents i i i List of Illustrations iv Acknowledgements v i i i I N T R O D U C T I O N : Contesting Legitimacy in Fin de Siecle Hungary 1 Panoramas as Instruments of Power and Knowledge 3 Dualism, "Magyarization," and Ethnic Conflict 9 Technologies o f Vis ion : The City as Site of Contestation 10 Rearticulating Identities Through the Rearticulation of Space 12 C H A P T E R O N E : Constructing Myths of Origin—Magyarization 1894-1896 15 The Reception o f the Feszty Panorama: Locating a "Magyar Discourse" 15 Topographies of Power: The Carpathian Basin in the Hungarian Imaginary 18 Liberal Desires and the Emergence of "Magyarization" 20 The Question of Space and Perspective: Nomadology as Politics 31 C H A P T E R T W O : Seeing and Being Seen - The Feszty Panorama and the Modern City of Budapest 34 Constructing Identities: The City and the Public Sphere 34 Modern Visualizing Processes: The Urban Context 37 The Panorama as Virtual Space 40 Spatial Wars in Fin de Siecle Budapest 43 C H A P T E R T H R E E : Invention and Invasion—Showcasing Technology, Heritage, and Opportunity inl896 46 Before the Railway: The Horse and the Stirrup 47 The Photograph: Trafficking in Culture 52 Mobi l iz ing the Cinematic Gaze 55 E P I L O G U E : Hungary After 1989 62 Bibliography 68 Illustrations 72 iv L I S T OF I L L U S T R A T I O N S 1. Anonymous, Diagram of Panorama Platform, (n.d.) drawing. Reproduced in: Arpad Sziics, and Malgorzata Wojtowicz. A Feszty Korkep. Budapest: Helokon, 1996. 2. Edouard Detaille and Alphonse de Neuville, Battle of Champigny (1882) detail of panorama, oi l painting on canvas. Private Collection. Reproduced on: Private website, http://mapage.noos.fr/iflecaillon/Pages/Tableaux de la guerre.htm 3. Anonymous, Arpdd Feszty posing in front of the panorama (c l 894) photograph. Reproduced in: Andras Varga, ed. Arpdd Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars ed. Andras Varga (Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000) C D - R O M . 4. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oil painting on canvas, plate 1. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 5. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oi l painting on canvas, plate 2. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 6. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oil painting on canvas, plate 3. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 7. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oi l painting on canvas, plate 4. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 8. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oi l painting on canvas, plate 5. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 9. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oi l painting on canvas, plate 6. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 10. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oil painting on canvas, plate 7. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 11. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oi l painting on canvas, plate 8. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 12. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oil painting on canvas, plate 9. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 13. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oil painting on canvas, plate 10. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 14. Mihaly Munkacsy, Conquest (1896) oil painting on canvas. Parliament, Budapest. Reproduced on: Arpad Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars ed. Andras Varga (Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000) C D - R O M . 15. Gyorgy Klosz , Vienna Anthropological Congress Outing Near Budapest (1889) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced in: Klosz Gyorgy: Photographs (Budapest: Polgart, 2002). 16. Anonymous, Portrait of Francis Joseph (n.d.) oi l painting on canvas. Unknown Collection. Reproduced in: Arpad Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars ed. Andras Varga (Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000) C D -R O M . 17. Anonymous, Millennial Monument (cl996) photograph. Reproduced on: Hungarian Pavilion, Internet 1996 World Exposition website, http://www.idg.hu/expo/index e.html 18. Anonymous, Millennial Monument (cl894) drawing. Reproduced on: Hungarian Pavilion, Internet 1996 World Exposition website, http://www.idg.hu/expo/index_e.html 19. Gyorgy Zala and Albert Schickedanz, Millennial Monument Design Plans (1894) aquarelle on carton. Reproduced in: A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896-1914, trans. Zsuzsa Beres and Peter Doherty (London: Barbican Ar t Gallery). 20. Anonymous, Millennial Monument (cl996) photograph. Reproduced on: Hungarian Pavilion, Internet 1996 World Exposition website, http://www.idg.hu/expo/mdex_e.html 21. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oil painting on canvas, plate 11. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 22. Anonymous, Budapest City Map (1896) reproduction print. Source: Personal Copy. 23. Imre Steindl, Hungarian Parliament Building Plans (cl885) drawings. Reproduced in: Akos Moravanszky Competing Visions: Aesthetic Inventions and vi Social Imagination in Central European Architecture (Cambridge: M I T Press, 1998). 24. Anonymous, View of Parliament from the Danube (cl890) photograph. Reproduced in: A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896-1914, trans. Zsuzsa Beres and Peter Doherty (London: Barbican Art Gallery). 25. Anonymous, Scene on the Duna Corso (cl880) photograph. Reproduced on: Hungarian Pavilion, Internet 1996 World Exposition website, http://www.idg.hu/expo/index e.html 26. Anonymous, Mihdly Munkdcsy 's Conquest in the Upper House of Parliament, (c.1900) photograph. Reproduced in: A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896-1914, trans. Zsuzsa Beres and Peter Doherty (London: Barbican Ar t Gallery). 27. Anonymous, Rotunda Housing Feszty Panorama (c l 894) photograph. Reproduced on: Arpdd Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars ed. Andras Varga (Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000) C D - R O M . 28. Advertisement for Feszty's Panorama (cl894) poster. Reproduced in: Arpdd Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars ed. Andras Varga (Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000) C D - R O M . 29. Gyorgy Klosz , The Hall of Industry at the Millennial Celebrations (1896) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced in: A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896-1914, trans. Zsuzsa Beres and Peter Doherty (London: Barbican Ar t Gallery). 30. Anonymous, Complaints Against Wires Cartoon Series (1896) newspaper cartoon. Source: Fovdrosi Lapok, 28 June 1896. 31. Anonymous, Millennial Monument at Pusztaszer (1896) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced in: Once Upon A Time in Hungary ed. Judit Borus and Andrea Sooky (Hungarian National Museum, 1999) C D - R O M 32. Anonymous, Ceremony at Pusztaszer (1896) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced in: Once Upon A Time in Hungary ed. Judit Borus and Andrea Sooky (Hungarian National Museum, 1999) C D - R O M 33. Anonymous, Millenium Underground (1896) drawing. Reproduced in: A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896-1914, trans. Zsuzsa Beres and Peter Doherty (London: Barbican Art Gallery). 34. Gyorgy Klosz , Old Stock Exchange Building (cl873) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced in: Klosz Gyorgy: Photographs (Budapest: Polgart, 2002). 35. Gyorgy Klosz , Siemens andHalske Tram on Calvin Square (1890) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced in: Klosz Gyorgy: Photographs (Budapest: Polgart, 2002). 36. Gyorgy Klosz , Construction of the Francis Joseph Underground Electric Railway (cl895) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced in: Klosz Gyorgy: Photographs (Budapest: Polgart, 2002). 37. Gyorgy Klosz , Gabor Baross Ignites the Explosives for the First Shaft of the Iron Gate (1890) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced in: Klosz Gyorgy: Photographs (Budapest: Polgart, 2002). 38. Advertisement for Early Cinema in Budapest (cl896) poster. National F i lm Archive of Hungary. Reproduced on: National F i lm Archive of Hungary website, http://www.filmkultura.iif.hu 39. Lumiere Brothers, LArrivee d'un Train (1895) film still. Reproduced on: Institut Lumiere website, http://www, institut-lumiere.org 40. Lumiere Brothers, La Sortie des Usines Lumiere (1895) f i lm still. Reproduced on: Institut Lumiere website, http://www.institut-lumiere.org 41. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oil painting on canvas, plate 12. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 42. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oi l painting on canvas, plate 13. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 43. Eadweard Muybrige, Horse In Motion (1878) photograph. Reproduced on: Early Cinema Resources website, http://www.earlycinema.com A K N O W L E D G E M E N T S I would like to thank my advisor and first reader Dr. Maureen Ryan for her constant support, critical insights, skillful editing suggestions, and overall enthusiasm for a seldom explored and non-traditional area of art historical research. It was in Dr. Ryan's graduate seminar, Crisis and Representation 1750-1850: Re-considering Vision and the Visual, that I first truly appreciated and understood the significance of spatial dynamics, ethnicity, class, and gender in relation to visual culture and theory. This thesis grows out of an essay I completed for that seminar. For his wise counsel, never-ending faith in my abilities, and as the individual who first sparked my enthusiasm for the critical and close study of images, I would also like to thank my second reader Dr. John O'Brian. Thanks are also in order to the faculty and graduate students in the Department of Art History, Visual Art , and Theory at the University of British Columbia for all of their suggestions, input, and ideas in relation to my thesis. The primary research I conducted in Hungary for this thesis was made possible by the Art History Travel Research Scholarship I was awarded through my department in 2001. Over the course of my research trip, I was fortunate enough to correspond with and interview a number of historians and museum personnel in Hungary. I would like to thank Dr. Laszlo Kontler and Dr. Andras Gero from Central European University in Budapest, Emoke Tomsics from the Photography Archives at the Hungarian National Museum and Laszlo Nagy from the National Historical Memorial Park for their assistance and interest in this project. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support, patience, and understanding of my family during the period of researching and writing this thesis. I would like to dedicate this work to Brian Barenscott—my friend and life partner—for his unconditional love, and for best understanding what this process has meant to me. 1 Introduction: Contesting Legitimacy in Fin de Siecle Hungary Encompassing a composite of ethnicities, languages, religions, and cultural practices, the region of Central Europe stands at the heart of a discursive labyrinth. Understood as an idea or conflicted spatial arrangement more than any concrete place, the very notion and geographic specificity of a "Central Europe" has been widely debated since the eighteenth century,1 fueling speculative discussion with the fall o f the Berlin Wal l and the growth of the European Union. The observations of historian and journalist Timothy Garton A s h are a case in point: Tel l me your Central Europe and I w i l l tell you who you are... .For to be "Central European" in contemporary political usage means to be civilized, democratic, cooperative—and therefore to have a better chance of joining N A T O and the E U . In fact, the argument threatens to become circular: N A T O and the E U welcome "Central Europeans," so "Central Europeans" are those whom N A T O and the E U welcome. 2 Since 1989, a growing number of conferences, symposia, and texts have emerged attempting to locate the boundaries and theoretical significance of the region. These initiatives, however, have often compartmentalized individual nations within Central Europe into their own chapters or sessions, leading to competitive and protracted arguments between scholars over which nation can claim certain origin myths as uniquely their own—arguments like "who really is the Bulwark of Europe?"—obscuring instead of focusing attention on the constructed nature of these myths. 3 A s a result, certain 1 See Larry Wolff. Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 2 Timothy Garton Ash "The Puzzle of Central Europe," New York Review of Books X L V I , no. 5 (March 18, 1999): 18. Garton Ash is the Director of the European Studies Centre at St. Antony's College, Oxford and a key English-speaking commentator, historian, and journalist covering events in Central Europe since the mid 1980's. Besides his numerous essays and reviews for the NYRB and The Guardian, Garton Ash has published several widely disseminated books on the transformation of Europe since the collapse of the Berlin Wall including: The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (New York: Random House, 1989); We the People: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (Cambridge: Granta Books, 1990); History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990's (London: Penguin Press, 1999). 3 While the number of international conferences and symposia related to Central European topics grows exponentially, they continue to be organized largely in relation to themeatics that highlight individual nation states or a comparative of a number of nation states. My direct reference is to an international 2 hesitancies have emerged in connection with these discourses, a major one being an overall reluctance to truly interrogate where boundaries between myth and history, nation and culture, blur. Thus, many scholars have ignored the unique transformation of the region's public sphere, distinct from Western Europe, choosing instead to focus on the common roots of national development in Central European nations on a strictly Eurocentric model. In turn, little attention has been paid to how unique transformations of individual and national identities within the region often occur in tandem with fraught moments of contested cultural and national representation. I raise the problems attending the definition of Central Europe here because these debates and issues have at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century a relevance to those current at the end of the nineteenth century in relation to one region of "Central Europe"— Hungary within the dual monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In particular, Hungary's first international exhibition, the Budapest World's Fair of 1896, and one of its most popular and visited attractions, Arpad Feszty's panorama Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians into the Carpathian Basin, 896, provides a highly charged site where competing representations of historical myth, nation, and modernity were negotiated and given form. In 1894, Hungarian artist Arpad Feszty formed the "Hungarian Panorama Company" with a number of private investors and debuted the large scale (1760 square foot) cylindrical painting, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians, in one of the largest public parks in the city of Budapest. Housed in a spacious rotunda that could accommodate over one hundred viewers at one time, the panorama was located at the entrance of what was then the planned site of Hungary's first World 's Fair in 1896. The Fair, also known as the Mil lennial Celebrations, was designed to commemorate one thousand years of Hungarian history in the Carpathian Basin and to celebrate new fin de siecle technologies in the areas of modern industrialization, transportation, and communication. This thesis w i l l explore Feszty's panorama designed for the Budapest World's Fair in relation to claims concerning the origins of modern Hungary, and in the conference held at the University of Alberta in 2001, Nationalist Myth and Pluralistic Reality in Central Europe, where a debate ensued about European bulwarks. For the full conference schedule, see: http://www 1 .minn.net/~graczar/FTR-208/nationalist.htm 3 context of debates around ethnicity, politics, and notions of the modern subject in 1894 and 1896. A s w i l l emerge in this study, this period at the end of the nineteenth century was one of crisis in terms of defining social and political power within Hungary itself and within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Europe as a larger whole. Panoramas as Instruments of Power and Knowledge From two Greek roots, pan (all) and horama (view), the panorama painting introduces a powerful technology of seeing by placing viewers in the centre of a 360-degree view of the scene depicted (fig. 1). Invented and patented in late eighteenth century Britain by artist and entrepreneur Robert Barker, 4 panoramas as a mass medium became a popular and regular attraction in larger urban centers throughout Western Europe by the early to mid nineteenth century. Yet, despite the panorama's long tradition of exhibition in Western Europe, paintings of this type were rarely seen and experienced in Central Europe outside the Habsburg enclave of Vienna where a history of panorama making and exhibition dated back to l801. 5 Therefore, when Hungarian painter Arpad Feszty, on a field trip to Paris in the mid-1880's, had occasion to view the evocative and controversial Battle of Champigny (1882) by French artists Edouard Detaille and Alphonse de Neuville, he is reported to have become immediately interested in introducing the medium to Hungary. 6 Depicting the site of two battles in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1, Detaille and Neuville 's Battle of Champigny recreated a view of the bloody confrontation between two nations with such a level of horrific detail and realism that the work quickly garnered international interest (fig. 2). Importantly, Detaille and Neuville 's panorama gave reference to defeat, that of self styled Emperor Louis Napoleon — i n power since 1851— and of France as a whole. But in 1882 when the panorama was exhibited, the defeat was one which already had ushered in a more liberal Republican regime and a period of vital rebuilding. Feszty, surely noting the great 4 For a discussion of the first panoramas, see Denise Oleksijczuk, Introduction to "The Dynamics of Spectatorship in the First Panoramas: Vision, The Body and British Imperialism, 1787-1829" (Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, 2001). 5 The history of the panorama medium is a relatively under-examined area of study. The most comprehensive, yet general, overview of the medium can be found in Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium. Trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997) and Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama (New York: H.N. Abrahms, 2000). 6 Arpad Szucs, and Malgorzata Wojtowicz. A Feszty Korkep. (Budapest: Helokon, 1996): 9. 4 interest and debate around such a politically charged work, may also have recognized the paintings significance to both a broadly defined French nationalism and the specific interests of France's liberal Republican government.7 In other words, the example of Detaille and Neuvil le 's painted panorama underscored how the medium could represent past war and conflict in a way that both literally "moved" people through a collective experience and articulated contemporary concerns and interests. It was after returning to Budapest in 1891 that Feszty formed the Hungarian Panorama Company to finance a panorama with a number of private investors and begin the task of selecting a theme for his composition (fig. 3). It was also at this moment that plans were in the works to launch an international World 's Fair in Budapest, set in 1896 to coincide with the thousand-year anniversary of what was argued to be the founding of an Hungarian culture in the Carpathian Basin. A s plans for the panorama proceeded with an eye to exhibiting the panorama painting at the Fair, Feszty secured a lease in order to erect a temporary rotunda at the entrance of what was to be the exhibition grounds.8 The Hungarian government's decision to plan and execute an international World's Fair in Budapest was seen by many within the government as an opportunity to both rival Vienna as centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and provide an opportunity to bring the citizens of Hungary together in a display of unification and solidarity. The process began in 1891 with a proposal by the Budapest General Assembly to erect a monument to celebrate the one thousand-year anniversary of the conquest of Hungary and the settlement of the Carpathian Basin. 9 Controversy, however, emerged in relation to pinpointing the exact date of the conquest. The Hungarian government called upon the Academy of Sciences in 1882 to agree upon a period of time in which the conquest likely occurred. A twelve-year window between 888 and 900 A . D . was established and a government statute declared setting the Millennium for 1895. 1 0 Once organizing began, however, that date was pushed up to 1896 to accommodate the construction planned for 7 Vanessa R. Schwartz discusses the reception of the Detaille and Neuville panorama in Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siecle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 158-162. 8 Sziics and Wojtowicz, 10-15. 9 Andras Gero, Modern Hungarian Society in the Making: The Unfinished Experience, trans. James Patterson and Eniko Koncz. (Budapest: Central University Press, 1995): 204. Gero provides an insightful chapter on the history of the Millennium Monument in the context of political changes in Hungary through to the present day on pages 203-221. 5 the event. Ironically, as historian Andras Gero suggests in his account of these events, the attempt to fabricate a solid temporal and spatial dimension of origin for the Hungarian people paralleled attempts to consecrate and form such a dimension within the national psyche: [T]he Millennial celebration was not just an occasion for revelry; it was an historic opportunity for the Hungarian government to construct an integrated national and historical ideology depicting the de facto imperfect state as de jure a whole, inspiring a sense of continuity, of permanent and unshakeable stability, while at the same time presenting the status quo as inevitable. 1 1 Since 1867 Hungary had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Habsburg ruler Francis Joseph I. For the monarch and his supporters, the 1896 World 's Fair was also seen as an opportunity to bring the people of Hungary together in a display of unification and harmony— one that existed, however, under Habsburg rule. The resulting frustration and anxiety in attempting to reconcile what Gero has termed "conflicting principles of legitimacy" came to characterize Hungary's governing body and the obstacle to stable and representative government. 1 2 A s such, in the years leading up to the Millennial Exhibition, the forced hybridization of Austria and Hungary often took form in the visual production, monuments, and urban planning initiated in preparation for the fair, exposing a precarious balance of interests. Feszty's panorama opened to the Budapest public in 1894, two full years before the official World's Fair was to commence. Better known at the time by its Hungarian title Honfoglalds, which translates to "original conquest," the image re-presented the key moment that the Mil lennial Fair was designed to commemorate. 1 3 Set in 896, one thousand years in the past, the panorama claimed to represent the ancient nomadic Magyar peoples who were believed in Hungarian origin myths to have conquered the 1 0 Ibid, 203. 1 1 Ibid. 1 2 Ibid, 177. This is a useful conceptual term that has shaped my own thinking of this particular historical moment. 1 3 The etymology and usage of this Hungarian word is connected directly to this episode of Hungarian history. See T. Magay and L. Kiss ed, English/Hungarian and Hungarian/English Standard Dictionary (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1995). 6 local Slavic and sedentary populations of the Carpathian basin. 1 4 A rich expanse of fertile land stretching from modern day Slovakia, through Hungary and into Romania, the Carpathian Basin was marked by human movement where the first human settlements date back a half mil l ion years. 1 5 Importantly, representation of this space in Feszty's circular panorama painting is highlighted by the presence of the Magyar Prince Arpad and his seven chieftains who overlook the gateway to the basin that stretches out in the distance (fig. 4). These figures, who would have been immediately recognizable to the Hungarian public, were viewed as the Magyars' mythic ancestors and were evoked in Hungarian folktales and popular historical novels of the day as the heroic founding fathers of the Hungarian people. 1 6 A s one's eyes scanned the panorama, a number of episodes related to this moment were simultaneously enacted. The Hungarian Panorama Company published a description in 1894, which emphasized the strength of the Magyar invaders: It is advisable to begin the inspection with the prominent group of the chiefs. Among these you wi l l at once distinguish the noble figure of Arpad who, on his snow-white steed and in rich oriental attire, has taken up position on a h i l l (fig. 5). It seems he arrived this moment with his fellow-chiefs and the steep precipice caused them to stop their horses....On the place before the chiefs you w i l l remark Latorcz [Slavic ruler] and other captives who, with dazzled eyes, look at the radiant leaders of the unknown invading nation (fig. 6). Who are these? Whence do they come? The fertile level attracts his [Arpad's eyes] (fig. 7). He enjoys the sight of these plains stretching into unbounded distance, where the rising waters of the Latorcza are flowing like a silver serpent.... To the right there roars the battle of the Magyars; the fierce troop rushes down 1 4 Andras Varga, ed. "Description of Painting" in Arpdd Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars (Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000) C D - R O M . 1 5 While interest in the Carpathian Basin as a site of early human populations has existed since the medieval period, the first methodical archaeological excavations in Hungary began in 1791. This coincided with the establishment of Hungary's National Museum in 1802, housing one of the earliest European national archeological collections. For a comprehensive overview of the early history of Hungarian archeology, see the Introduction to A. Lengyel and G.T.B. Radan, The Archaeology of Roman Pannonia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1980). 7 the hi l l like a blustering storm (fig. 8). They seem to be innumerable, just as i f the earth would bring them forth, as i f their horses had wings.... The descriptive text also stresses the inherent superiority of the Magyars over the soon to be conquered Slavs in terms of both constitutional and political development, and agricultural wealth. The conquering Magyars religious practices are also delineated: The enemy, have already diminished: the rest of the Slavonians oppose with valorous resistance. They die on the spot where they lived; it was their home though it was not fortified by constitution and political bulwarks.. .The women's carriages pass by the destroyed Slavonian altar (fig. 9) .. .On the other side of the road there you see the smoking ruins of a wooden watch-tower, where fair Slavonian women have tried to hide themselves. But the new lords of the country carry them away from their hiding-place (fig. 10) ... More pleasing is the view of the settlers on the edge of the forest. It describes their first peaceful rest. Numerous herds and flocks of horses, cattle, sheep, coming-forth from the clouds of dust, pass before our eyes and hasten towards the plain (fig. 11) .. .There can be no doubt about the end of the fight. The picture shows us the last moments of the resistance. The chiefs just ordered to give signal for the finishing of the battle. On a cleared place, the large pile already smokes. The "Taltos", that is the Hungarian heathen priest, stands before it with stretched-out arms and invokes the Spirit of Fire (fig. 12); behind him the "Bonczes" brings a fine white horse and the "Kadar" with a drawn sword waits to offer it to the God. Dancing girls strew flowers round the pile (fig. 13). 1 7 Feszty's panorama represents the entry of the Magyars, the destruction of the land's inhabitants, emphasizing the rape of Slavic women, and the rush of conquering invaders Varga, "Description of Painting." Ibid. 8 in detailed academic illusionism. Adding to the veracity and immediacy of the scene, a three-dimensional diorama of real rocks, turf and soil was built up in the foreground, forcing the eye to seek where the three-dimensional space stopped and the flat canvas began. Striking for its attempts at verisimilitude, Feszty's panorama worked to evoke the moment of Hungary's birth as a nation. Popularized in the late eighteenth through mid nineteenth centuries, the panorama, in the years following 1850, often appeared in the context of World 's Fairs, depicting historic events and reasserting national myths. Yet by the 1890's, when Feszty's panorama was created, the medium was seen by some as altogether outmoded and even retrograde.1 9 Indeed, as a popular tourist site and featured attraction of the Fair, the Feszty panorama did not appear to look at the present or the future, but rather conjured up familiar tropes around invasion, conquest and domination, and a primitive past with its ancient technologies. But while it is indeed tempting to dismiss Feszty's work as pure spectacle and declare the image as nothing more than a trite manifestation of national propaganda, my purpose in this thesis is to show that themes and conflicting histories around Magyar settlement and domination of Slavic inhabitants, at issue over the course of the nineteenth century and evoked in this panoramic image, worked to destabilize and reveal fractures in the Hungarian social body. What emerges in this study is that the facile and disturbing illusionism of Feszty's image of the arrival of the conquering Hungarians gave form all too clearly to a moment of crisis in fin de siecle Central Europe—one wherein the rhetoric of multinationalism and emerging modernity was situated in uneasy juxtaposition with rapid technological change and displacement of populations. In this context, the Feszty panorama through a complex visual vocabulary and specific allusions to the theme of conquest, technology, and conflicted subjectivities, emerges as a site of contestation where effects of technology are mobilized in new and highly charged ways. Sziics and Wojtowicz, 13. 1 9 Varga, "Reviews of Feszty." Even if a popular perception, Schwartz argues that the fin de siecle panoramas were technologically superior to their predecessors, that is they achieved a level of verisimilitude through the use of photographs and diorama assemblages that would have been impossible before the late nineteenth century. Schwartz, 156. 9 Dualism, "Magyarization" and Ethnic Conflict The struggles and conflicts within Hungary's government over the experience of Austro-Hungarian dualism marks a pivotal aspect of my thesis. A t the time of the 1848 Revolution, the Austrian Habsburgs had quelled aspirations for the independence of the Carpathian Basin region. The Compromise of 1867 marked a pivotal shift in power 90 relations. A two-nation state under an unprecedented dual constitutional monarchy was created whereby Austria and Hungary would share joint foreign policy, finances, and military affairs, while retaining separate constitutions, administrations, legislatures, and national militia. The legitimacy of power was based, however, in two competing principles: the more liberal principles of a newly configured nation state (Hungary); and the feudal concept of investing power by God's grace to one ruler (Austria). 2 1 The Austrian Habsburg ruler, Francis Joseph I, was crowned K i n g of Hungary in 1867. A n d while Hungarians were able to gain some measure of legitimacy for themselves, the, . consequences of dualism were far more than a compromise for other ethnic groups, particularly those of Slavic origin, who had their own nationalist aspirations. In recognition of this power imbalance and under pressure from Vienna to deal with growing minority demands for rights, the Hungarian government passed the Nationalities Act in 1868 guaranteeing the rights of all Hungary's citizens through a series of laws. 2 2 This Act , however, was increasingly interpreted by less tolerant members of the newly formed Hungarian government to suggest that only those non-Magyars who had assimilated to becoming fully Hungarian would be considered equal. This process, referred to as "Magyarization," made it difficult to attain high-ranking positions in 2 0 The agreement to establish the Dual Monarchy was worked out primarily by the Austrian foreign minister, Count Beust, and two Hungarians, the elder Count Andrassy and Francis Deak. The Habsburg Empire was divided into two states. The first state comprised Austria proper, Bohemia, Moravia, Austrian Silesia, Slovenia, and Austrian Poland and was to be ruled by the Habsburg monarchs in their capacity as emperors of Austria. The second state included Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia, and part of the Dalmatian coast and was to be ruled by the Habsburg monarchs in their capacity as kings of Hungary. Croatia was given a special status and allowed some autonomy but was subordinated to Hungarian rule. 2 1 For a full discussion of neo-Absolutism in Hungary, see Laszlo Kontler, Millennium in Central Europe: A History of Hungary (Budapest: Atlantisz, 1999): 264-279. 2 2 Some historians argue that Austria-Hungary provides the greatest recent example of a multinational state in Europe. However, of the four chief ethnic groups (Germans, Hungarians, Slavs, and Italians) only the first two received full partnership. The Habsburg-held crown of Bohemia was conspicuously omitted in the reorganization. Both halves of the kingdom elected independent parliaments to deliberate on internal affairs and had independent ministries. A common cabinet, composed of three ministers, dealt with foreign 10 government or in the social sphere without claim to a Magyar heritage through language and family name. Ironically, those Hungarian liberals who, before 1867, had disputed the Act for not going far enough in its guarantees of ethnic equality in the region would later be viewed as unwilling to uphold and enforce the very terms of its laws. 2 3 Technologies of Vis ion: The City as Site of Contestation Importantly, it was the city of Budapest, the second capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire that lead the pace of rapid modernization and transformation of the public sphere in late nineteenth century Austria-Hungary. These developments, however, also fuelled intense anxieties about what the final shape of the empire would literally look like—anxieties emerging from within governing forces of Vienna and Budapest. Indeed, with the movement of large sectors of the landless peasantry to Budapest and the immigration of large numbers of foreign entrepreneurs to the Hungarian controlled regions of the empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century, fears mounted about how Hungary could sustain its distinct power position over the region. In this context, any investigation of Feszty's panorama designed for the Budapest World 's Fair of 1896 must explore the mechanisms through which the visual destabilized and produced conflicted readings of Hungary's past. The rhetoric of nomadism is key to these mechanisms since the movement of bodies marked the period leading up to and during the Millennial Celebrations. In the course of my exploration of the Feszty panorama in 1894 and 1896,1 w i l l argue that the Feszty panorama intervened in narratives concerning Hungarian nationalism post-1848 that linked modern Hungarian subjects to a glorified nomadic past. This past, born at a time of mid-nineteenth century revolutionary politics, emphasized for liberals freedom of movement, leadership through coalition, cultural miscegenation as a means to domination, and technological innovation. This kind of nomadism was linked to aspirations for political consolidation and liberal values advocated and sought out in 1848, 1867, and still in 1896. However, i f taken as a form of relations, common defense, and common finances. It was responsible to the Emperor-King and to the delegations of 60 members each (chosen by the two parliaments), which met to discuss common affairs. 2 3 Laszlo Kontler, Millennium in Central Europe: A History of Hungary (Budapest: Atlantisz, 1999): 283. 11 resistance, it also appeared to disrupt several tenets of modern nation building—-namely stable borders, and a clearly marked citizenry. In the course of my analysis, I w i l l argue that visually, the panorama of Prince Arpad and his chieftans entering the Carpathian Basin could at one level appear well suited to the representation of the liberal aspirations sketched out above because, for one, as panorama historian Bernard Comment suggests, the panorama format offered particular possibilities: "Abolishing the frame was the only way of transcending the limits of traditional representation."2 4 In addition, the Feszty panorama formulated a particular representation of the Hungarian past that depended upon the illusionism, theatricality, and corporeal experience provided through the panorama medium—features that were lacking in traditional history painting. I w i l l also argue, however, that there are bounds, limits, and contradictions here. On its surface, the Feszty panorama depicts conquering Hungarian nomads. Yet, as I realized when I had the opportunity to visit the restored panorama and stand inside the space of the reconstructed painting , the viewing body becomes suspended, existing between two contradictory points of action. Turned one way, the viewer is placed precariously and dangerously, as i f a victim, in the path of the conquering invaders and moving cart carrying the Magyar princess. When turned around, the viewer is no longer a victim but rather is made part of the conquering procession, looking out at the shaman priest figure in direct line with the horizon, positioned, in other words, with the conquering Hungarians in the direction of flow and future generation of the nation. Therefore, one direction threatens the body while the other direction opens up into a historical narrative tied to ongoing nation building and political liberation. This, a technique of folding in new followers, not unlike the panoramic space itself, positions bodies at the very center of a multi-sensory process. 2 4 Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama (New York: Abrams, 2000): 100. 2 5 The Feszty panorama was restored over a period of 42 months in the early 1990's and put on permanent display in 1995 in a new rotunda at Hungary's National Historical Memorial Park. This park, located approximately 200 kilometres south of Budapest and built at the same time as the panorama's restoration, was developed on the very spot depicted in the panorama where the Magyar peoples were first believed to settle the Carpathian Basin. I visited the panorama during the summers of 2000 and 2002 and was given special privileges to videotape and view the panorama alone. 12 Rearticulating Identities Through the Rearticulation of Space The disjuncture and slippages between what was literally seen as real and/or imagined, myth and/or history, entertainment and/or art, punctuates the contradictions around the rhetoric associated with nomadism taken up in the Feszty panorama. Moreover, the disjuncture and slippages reveal how competing narratives of origin and conflicts over the desire to adopt a Western model of liberal democracy shaped the political landscape in the years leading up to the Millennial Celebrations of 1896. Within this matrix, shifting notions of visuality and individual subjectivity brought about through the process of modernization reveal still further dimensions in the overall crises of identity seen in the social sphere of fin de siecle Central Europe. If nomadism through the process of Magyarization held out some possibility for a common community in 1896, it did so problematically and at the expense of other claims. A s a theoretical consideration of this problem, I w i l l examine recent critiques of the poststructural theorists Gilles Deleuze and Fel ix Guattari's ideas of "nomadology" as set out in their A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia in order to shed light on how these crises of identity may have materialized. These studies discuss how Deleuze and Guattari read and used highly problematic and selective anthropological data in tandem with politically charged notions of the "free" and "landless" nomad to arrive at their theory of "nomad thought." That is to say, Deleuze and Guattari oscillate between what Christopher Mi l le r characterizes as "purely intellectual nomadism and anthropological nomadism." 2 6 What interests me in these discussions is the conceived flux—the paradox between referential and non-referential identities. Importantly, the narrative of nomadic conquest in the Carpathian Basin drew increasing strength in the late nineteenth century as anthropological evidence was being extracted from the area depicted in the panorama. For the first time, this material "evidence" was being used to concretize and create empirical histories for a people who had, up to that point, only been imagined through folklore and myth. With these emerging histories came the task of distinguishing the Christopher Miller "The Postidentitarian Predicament in the Footnotes of A Thousand Plateaus: Nomadology, Anthropology, and Authority." Diacritics (Fall 1993): 25. 13 Magyars from Eastern invaders like the Turks who were seen as heathen, savage and despotic. Chapter One w i l l investigate the panorama's 1894 debut in Budapest and explore debates over Magyarization and the process through which the 1896 World 's Fair was being actively recontextualized in the two years of preparation leading up to the event. In Chapter Two, I w i l l discuss the important role the city of Budapest played in shaping the vision of the Mil lennial Celebrations and suggest how conflicted identities emerged in relationship to the experience of rapid modernization and were taken up as discourses through the Feszty panorama. A n d finally, in Chapter Three, I w i l l describe how the Millennial Exhibition was seen as an opportunity, unmatched by any prior event in the emerging capital, to showcase and market new inventions, attract new investors, and present the Hungarian industrial complex as fully modernized, i f not on the cutting edge, of technological advancements. Within the context of these expectations, I w i l l show how the Fair was shaped by a desire to show that Hungary had indeed "arrived" in every sense of the word. This "arrival," however, like the one detailed in Feszty's panorama, was also constructed within a tradition of technological invention that linked innovations in 896 to those of 1896. Therefore, the task of detailing one thousand years of Hungarian history became the simultaneous task of detailing one thousand years of technological capability and fortitude. To this end, I w i l l explore the technologies of vision taken up through the Feszty panorama in relationship to other modes of visuality emerging in fin de siecle Budapest—specifically photography and early film. It was these emerging technologies, so important to the process of modernizing vision, that became an integral part of the Millennial Exhibition and transformed the way members of the public viewed the spaces of Budapest and indeed themselves. The notion of circulation, linked to ideas around progress, cultivation, and technology, extended to the material build-up of a burgeoning Budapest and wi l l shape my discussion. Looking from the perspective of growing entrepreneurial and industrial classes within Budapest, the promise of legitimacy indeed held different stakes. In this way, the celebration of a thousand years of Hungarian conquest became joined to a theme of technological innovation. The exhibition thus marked a turning point in Hungary's history that had as much to do with manufacturing a particular past for the Hungarian nation as it had to do with presenting the latest in 14 manufacturing technology. But perhaps more important and more significant to this thesis, I w i l l argue that there was a concerted effort to normalize the idea of technological vanguardism as an integral part of the Hungarian heritage. 15 Chapter One: Constructing Myths of Origin— Magyarization 1894-1896 The Reception of the Feszty Panorama: Locating a "Magyar" Discourse When the Feszty panorama opened to the Budapest public in 1894, the reception of critics (both professional and general) was for the most part enthusiastic.1 In the days leading up to and following the opening, the Budapest press was filled with descriptions and opinions of the merits of the work. O f these, many played up Feszty's artistic talent and credentials despite his lower status as a painter of popular panoramas (as opposed to a history painter within the accepted definition of the Academy), and emphasized his ability to render the scene with a high level of emotion and technical accuracy. For example, the Magyar Hirlap, a popular Budapest daily declared Feszty "the most serious Hungarian history painter today" and the panorama a work of art that "impregnated the imagination." 2 Several comparisons to academic Hungarian painter Mihaly Munkacsy's large scale history painting Conquest (1896) surfaced (fig. 14). The painting (which wi l l subsequently be discussed in more detail) was commissioned by the Hungarian government for the Upper House of Parliament, focusing on the similar theme of Prince Arpad. The overwhelming consensus, however, was that Feszty had achieved a far superior work. The Budapest Hirlap described the panorama's "outstanding illusionism," as one that evoked "the deepest variety of impressions through a full range of emotions." The critic emphasized that: Since it is a panorama of which I speak, it is not the duty of this work to appear as a picture. Instead, in the simulated light of a simulated landscape that exists, we feel the reality: the artist had to recreate the entire composition to appear in this reality, and he had to create it to a scale that elicited that reality. He could only choose one moment, be had to take that moment and actualize it. 3 The common finding was that Feszty had created something beyond a mere painting. 1 1 assessed the general tone of the reviews by looking at writings in four of the major Budapest newspapers on the date of the panorama's debut. These included the widely distributed Budapest Hirlap, Magyar Hirlap, Magyarorszdg, and Pesti Hirlap. I also drew quotes from a number of anonymous reviews from 1894 listed in Andras Varga, ed. Arpdd Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars (Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000) C D - R O M . 2 Review. Magyar Hirlap, 13 May 1894. Translation by author. 16 He had achieved a level of unsurpassed verisimilitude together with what was claimed to be accuracy rendered through years of intensive historical research and painstaking attention to detail. Critics outlined the time and effort Feszty spent investigating the events, visiting the site of the supposed initial entrance of Magyar nomads into the Carpathian Basin, and researching the people known as the first Magyars. 4 In this way, one critic termed Feszty "a scholar and scientist first and then a painter." 5 Moreover, one critic clearly attempted to do away with conception of the panorama medium as somehow retrograde: This cyclorama hasn't got anything to do with its now-antiquated predecessors. This is a circular picture as conceived by Detaille and Neuville, a form of artistry that transcends even illusion. Imagine a giant canvas 115 meters long and 13 meters tall sewed together at its two ends and, suspended from a giant iron ring of a diameter of twenty meters... One stands in the center of this cylinder and looks from there at the canvas painting which surrounds one as surely as a horizon. The twenty-meter-wide space that separates one from the painting is in effect its three-dimensional extension, and the painting is arranged so that objects and figures in the foreground appear to be of natural size when viewed from the proper distance but grow smaller, seemingly out of proportion, the closer one gets, and only once one arrives right beside the canvas is it evident that they are in fact of a size approximating those in the other painted scenes. This artistic device creates the surprising illusion whereby the viewer, not knowing where the painting begins and where the three-dimensional world ends, views the painting with a sense o f verisimilitude. 6 3 Review. Budapest Hirlap, 13 May 1894. 4 Szucs and Wojtowicz, 10-13. 5 Review. Magyar Hirlap, 13 May 1894. 6 Review in an unnamed Budapest publication cited in Andras Varga, ed. Arpad Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars (Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000) C D - R O M . 17 In this way, the descriptions of the work's technical excellence and progressiveness together with suggestions of its authenticity and ability to move individuals (both physically and emotionally) evoked what I am terming a rhetoric of the nomadic, that is, a parlance that emphasized freedom of expression and individual initiative unhampered by government influence, one that was predicated on exclusively Magyar origins. It would seem then that the press coverage not only worked to prepare audiences for the scene depicted, but for the scene's legitimacy as well . This "preparation" occurred in at least two ways. First, since the identity of the artist was claimed as wholly Magyar and the work was not a commission of the state, the Feszty panorama was viewed by many critics as an indigenous and thus "more real" work of art than many of the commissioned works paid for by the government.7 In sharp contrast to an Academic artist like Munkascy who was an exhibitor at the Paris Salon, and who was in turn viewed as Westernized and by extension Habsburg influenced, Feszty was described as possessing an "inborn intuition," an artist of the Hungarian people, painting for the Hungarian Q people. Second, and importantly, the apprehension of the panorama's visual vocabulary in tandem with that generated by the textual critiques was similar to the vocabulary and discourses activated within the press to debate and "picture" the political problems and social anxieties around nationalism within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A s a result, the attempts to describe and legitimize Feszty's work were immediately linked to, but also problematized by, the ongoing crisis of political representation under Austro-Hungarian dualism. Thus, while panorama historians often discuss the medium in terms of its disciplining effects—discipline of the body and of vis ion 9 — what I am more interested in here is how the Feszty panorama worked to reveal the disjuncture and slippages in an emergent Hungarian national body. Who "the people" constituted was at the heart of the 7 see especially Review. Magyarorszdg, 13 May 1894. 8 Review. Pesti Hirlap, 13 May 1894. 9 1 believe that this particular understanding of the panorama stems from the influence of philosopher Michel Foucault's work on the closely related, yet still distinct, conceptual dynamics of panopticism in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). In turn, the few comprehensive works on the panorama that exist (see Oettermann, Comment, and even aspects of Schwartz) tend towards this discipline inducing understanding of the panorama medium. Denise Oleksijczuk's work on the early panoramas, "The Dynamics of Spectatorship in the First Panoramas: Vision, The Body and British Imperialism, 1787-1829" (Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, 2001), is perhaps the first concerted attempt to move panorama research into new areas of understanding and is discussed further in the latter part of Chapter Two. 18 debate in Hungary. Claims to being a "true Magyar" had multiple and conflicting connotations and political motivations. Feszty's panorama, first exhibited in 1894 and again when it was featured as a major site at the Budapest World 's Fair of 1896, provided a potent medium to re-present and shape these conflicts. But the panorama also allowed for these debates to emerge in relation to the conflicted position of individual viewers— in other words, in relation to a far more modern configuration of embodied visuality and subjectivity. A s cultural historian Vanessa Schwartz suggests in her analysis of French spectacles in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, the panorama allowed for a convergence of corporeal and intellectual responses: The new panoramas delivered their "realism" by enveloping spectators. B y manipulating the spectators' bodies, the scene intended to move the spirit as well . The collective body of the nation was to be built through the literal sensations of individual bodies. For at least some visitors to the attractions, the sensations mixed with memories they already had from childhood or even from firsthand experience with the moment represented. The spectacle thus embellished a narrative visitors already knew through visual representation and sensation. 1 0 Topographies of Power: The Carpathian Basin in the Hungarian Imaginary The decision to re-present a panorama of the mythic moment of the Magyar peoples' arrival in the Carpathian Basin, whether conceived by the artist Feszty or in conjunction with subscribers to his panorama company, intervened in debates over the past. The scene of entry into the Carpathian Basin was created at a moment when the first comprehensive histories of Hungary after the Compromise of 1867 with Austria were being written and debated. 1 1 These empirical histories, influenced in part by the archeological discoveries being made in the Carpathian Basin, attempted to locate the 1 0 Schwartz, 162. 1 1 Steven Bela Tardy, Modern Hungarian Historiography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976): 38-40. Significantly, the development of what Vardy terms the "Hungarian Positivist School" of history emerged around 1860-70 and would by 1895 become a regular part of the education of prospective historians. As Vardy writes: "This method attempted to collect, select, evaluate and utilize historical sources with the precision of natural and physical sciences" (39). 19 material evidence for a people who had, up until the nineteenth century, only been known through myth and legend. In this way, Feszty's task of recreating Hungary's "founding moment," around which the entire Millennial Celebration of 1896 was also conceived allowed him to position his representation in relation to a contested field. Hungary maintained the dubious distinction of being among the most occupied and contested land areas in the region of Central Europe. Waves of invasion and occupation marked the territory where control often came at the hands of foreign occupiers who sought to systematize a complex web of regions, settlements, and multi-ethnic groups within one nation. The Kingdom of Hungary, which emerged in the eleventh century, had witnessed numerous transitions of leadership and cultural transformation. The first recorded attempts to rule over the Carpathian Basin's inhabitants begin in 1000 A . D . with the region's first documented K i n g , St. Stephen. After two centuries of relatively stable leadership, the Mongolian Tartars began an invasion in 1241 that would lead to nearly two hundred years of fighting and instability in the country. During this period, Hungary fell under the control of other foreign rulers, emerging for a few short decades between 1458 and 1490 under K i n g Matthias, Hungary's so-called "renaissance king," who managed to centralize power and ensure a degree of security in the region. But with Hungary's defeat at the hands of the Turks in 1525, a one hundred and fifty year period of Ottoman rule would see the tripartite division of the Hungarian Kingdom. The Habsburgs would rule the Western region, the Turks the central areas, with the south-east principality falling under the rule of 13 Transylvanian princes. After 1686, when Buda was recaptured from the Turks, the peoples of the Carpathian Basin began to seek support from the Habsburgs for protection from further Turkish incursion. When this support did not come, largely because the remaining lands of Hungary made up a tactical buffer zone from further Ottoman advancements into Europe, an uprising against the Habsburgs (as a joint French-Hungarian offensive) was plotted under the Transylvanian king. A n d even though the 1 2 Ibid. 1 3 It was (and still is) believed that Transylvania existed as the citadel of Hungarian culture where all things "Hungarian" would be protected. See, for example, Gyula Zathureczky, Transylvania: Citadel of the West (Astor Park Fl : Danubian Press, 1967). For a more recent critical look at this tradition, see Laszlo Kiirti, The Remote Borderland: Transylvania in the Hungarian Imagination (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2001). 20 region finally gained independence from Turkish rule in 1699, the sentiment against Habsburg rulers only grew when they violated the interests of area landowners by not returning estates in the areas under former Turkish control. The final attempts at a war of independence from Habsburg forces, between 1703-1711, failed however and the people of the Carpathian Basin, formerly the area of the Kingdom of Hungary, came back under Habsburg rule. 1 4 Importantly, the economic potential of the Carpathian Basin, that is, the opportunities available to exploit rich resources and facilitate the growth and expansion of human populations, had proven among the most attractive and valuable motivators in the fight over control of the region. But perhaps more significantly, the ability to foster and harness the region's resources became wedded to the civi l izing potential of the lands' inhabitants.1 5 Beginning in the nineteenth century, when archeologists began to actively excavate vast areas of the Basin (fig. 15) and distinguish what were considered to be different "Ages of human progress" along technological lines (i.e. the ability of humans to create their own tools, domesticate animals, and increase their numbers), the territory emerged with a rich and varied genealogy. This pedigree tied the land and contemporary Hungarians to a range of peoples including the earliest recorded Neolithic populations, the ancient Celts, ancient Romans, and as well as the powerful nomadic tribes from the Near East including the Huns, Avars, and later the Magyars. 1 6 In turn, this literal deep-rootedness, the close connection to a long and dynamic history of numerous civilizations provided a basis for multiple and often conflicting readings of the past. Liberal Desires and the Emergence of "Magyarization" A t the time of the exhibition of Feszty's panorama in 1894, and during preparations for Budapest's World's Fair in 1896, narratives concerning the significance of the nomadic Magyar settlers of the Carpathian Basin were indeed varied. Feszty's 1 4 For a recent postcommunist chronology of Hungarian history, see Peter Sugar, Peter Hanak, and Frank Tibor, A History of Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 1 5 Kontler too makes this suggestion (22). Nineteenth century archeologists and anthropologists, influenced by Darwin's evolution theory, often categorized civilizations according to criteria that ranked those peoples with a greater level of self-sufficiency and ability to harness and control nature superior to less technologically equipped peoples. 21 father-in-law, M o r Jokai, a former revolutionary of 1848, an M P in the Lower House of the Hungarian Parliament, and one of the subscribers to the Hungarian Panorama Company, became famous in Hungary as a historical novelist and emerged as a key figure believed by some historians to have convinced Feszty to depict the Magyars' 896 entry into the Carpathian basin. 1 8 Jokai, who had popularized the convention of the historical novel after 1848, combined his skills in journalism, social commentary, liberal politics, and the prevailing tastes for romantic novelists, to produce highly moralistic commentary on social and political issues of the day. 1 9 Jokai's works were frequently set in the ancient and medieval past. A s well , he often used the Carpathian Basin as a setting for many of his novels. The exhaustive descriptions of the soil and Jokai's almost obsessive interest in the terrain and geography of the region may have provided something of an inspiration for Feszty. It is also possible that Jokai recognized the power of the panoramic medium's broad spectatorship, not unlike the broad readership his works enjoyed through the power of print media. 2 0 For 1848 revolutionaries like Jokai, the Magyar nomadic peoples provided a model of community with social, political, religious, and even economic practices that 1 6 For a comprehensive overview of the early history of Hungarian archeology, see the Introduction to A. Lengyel and G.T.B. Radan, The Archaeology of Roman Pannonia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1980). 1 7 Szfics and Wojtowicz, 10. 1 8 Ibid, 9. It is difficult to know how much this is a construction of Jokai's persona in relation to the famous painting. 1 9 Jokai's liberal values permeated his published works. Historian Anna Fabri has noted: "[Jokai's novels] proclaimed that life was worth living, that people could shape their individual fate themselves; nothing that happened was accidental; people were not forcefully subjected to developments; individual lives were always determined by individual decisions; and there was always a chance to find out what was right and what was wrong." "Mor Jokai" in Hungarian Liberals, ed. Andras Gero (Budapest: Uj Mandatum, 1999),114-127. 2 0 The fact that Feszty had been so drawn to the Detaille and Neuville panorama in Paris is not without significance to his family ties or their strong liberal leanings. As historian Laszld Deme argues, the culture and spirit of change that emanated from France was a continuing influence upon the Hungarian imaginary, especially to those committed to the liberal spirit of the 1848 revolution. Jokai also wrote passionately about the French in his memoirs where he stated: "We were all Frenchmen. We read only Lamartine, Michlet. Louis Blanc, Sue, Victor Hugo, and Bernager. If we deigned to read an English or German poet, it was Shelly or Heine, disowned by their own countrymen and English and German with respect only to their language: in spirit, they were French." Laszlo Deme, The Radical Left in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 10. Moreover, it is entirely possible that Jokai and Feszty had occasion to see the other controversial panorama painted of the Franco-Prussian War, Henri Philippoteaux's The Seige of Pahs (1878) that traveled to Vienna in the 1880's and was much written about and debated in its day. 22 directly challenged the Austrian and Viennese "strong civil izing mission." 2 1 While these earliest liberal reformers were often at odds with how much of a problem the ethnic diversity in the Carpathian Basin posed, there was a consensus on the necessity of breaking down the feudal order which served Austrian rule. The first step in this direction had come in 1848 with the emancipation of the serfs (and in part the Jews) and the abolition of tax privileges for the r i ch . 2 2 This was followed by a push to extend the constitution to non-nobles and propagate economic modernization as a means to more equitable distribution of capital both geographically and across social classes. A n important aspect of these reforms came with the philosophy of laissez faire, or noninterference by the State in the aspirations of individuals. These rights also extended to the public sphere with the separation of church and state and the creation of a justice system. For liberal reformers of 1848, the middling classes were believed to be the vehicle of the process. Historian Laszlo Kontler explains that, the organizing principle behind the concept of the 'unitary Hungarian political nation' of Hungarian liberals was that the extension of individual rights would render collective rights superfluous even in the eyes of the ethnic minorities who, just as emancipated serfs would be reconciled with their former lords, would voluntarily assimilate into the Hungarian nation. 2 3 The process of Magyarization was the cornerstone of this transition to a modern liberal society. Predicated on a heritage that could boast of its liberal antecedents, the revolutionaries claimed that the ancient Magyars provided a ruling order of proclaimed 2 1 This is a term that Kontler uses to describe the mandate of the Austrians. Laszlo Kontler, Interview by author, 17 June 2002, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. For accounts of the construction of democratic roots and constitutional laws of the Magyar peoples in Hungarian history, see Tardy, Kontler, and Gero. 2 2 Kontler, 259. 2 3 Ibid, 242. To get an idea of the true ethnic mix of the period, Konlter appends the following statistics: "Hungary's population was nearly 13 million in 1842. Merely 38 percent of this figure, 4.8 million, were Magyars; Romanians numbered 2.2 million (17 percent); Slovaks 1.7 million (13 percent); Germans 1.3 million (10 percent); Serbs 1.2 million (9 percent); Croats 900,000 (7 percent); Ruthenes 450,000 (3.5 percent); Jews 250,000 (2 percent), and there was no less than ten further small groups as well" (242). 23 representative government where chieftains ruled collectively. 2 4 These ancient people, in turn, were free to move across the land incorporating other populations along the way. 2 5 The emergence of Magyarization—the official Hungarian government policy through which non-Magyars were folded into the Hungarian nation— was originally conceived as a means to consolidate political power in the Carpathian Basin and grew out of the more radical movements waged against the Austrian crown ever since the revolution of 1848. A t that time, the Hungarian language came to serve as potent opposition to what was construed as the process of Austria's "Germanization" of the region. In particular, Hungarian was positioned during the 1848 revolution as a language that could literally tie all the lands' inhabitants to a distinct construction of history and society that radically differentiated Austria from Hungary. Unlike their Austrian rulers, the Hungarian reformers claimed that the Magyar peoples' tradition of what was claimed to be a collective rulership over the territory, pointed to a long and inherent tradition of liberal democracy. Even the word "Magyar" derived its literal meaning from the Ugrian and Turkish word "Megyer," translating generically to "men." Indeed, many of the protagonists whose works and actions figure in 1894-96 had been powerfully influenced by the legacy of Magyarization. Beginning in 1794 when Hungarian literature was given new impetus under the failed Jacobin revolution in Buda, and then again in 1825 when the issue of culture and heritage became central to the founding of the Hungarian reform movement, the issue of language and heritage began to frame debates around Hungarian sovereignty. 2 7 2 4 Andras Rona-Tas, Hungarians and Europe in the Early Middle Ages : An Introduction to Early Hungarian History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999). 2 5 Ibid. 2 6 Hungarians refer to themselves and their language as "Magyar" and the nation of Hungary as "Magyarorszag," literally "land of the Magyars." This can be confusing to outsiders since the name "Magyar" is somewhat generic and derives its meaning from a Ugrian word "Megyer," simply meaning "men." The term "Hungarian" (given to the people by foreigners) erroneously suggests a link between Hungarians and the ancient Huns who occupied the region in the fifth century. Ironically, however, it is generally considered a solecism for English speakers to refer to Hungarians as Magyars (just as it is to refer to the Germans as "Deutsch") because it insinuates a kind of chauvinism. 2 7 Leading the more radical reformers was Lajos Kossuth who, imprisoned between 1837-40 for his political views, became the most influential member of the liberal opposition during the revolution, editing the largest Hungarian newspaper in the empire. Besides advocating an uncompromising opposition to Vienna, the revolutionaries fought for the liberation of the serfs against an indemnity paid to their lords, thereby ending the nobility's privilege of not paying taxes by proposing the gradual introduction of universal franchise and equality before the law. Such a move was to abolish the system of entailment, one of the most ancient laws governing feudalism, and to remove blocks to the development of the modern 24 It is important to stress that the Hungarian leadership that emerged during the one-year overthrow of the Habsburg rulers in 1848-49, the longest European national revolution, was not in theory at least, opposed to people of non-Magyar descent. In fact, the claims to a shared Hungarian past and language in 1848 sought to override ethnic diversity. This does not mean, however, that repression of regional minorities did not occur. M y point here is that in liberal rhetoric a shared "Magyar" past could ideally supersede such alterity and difference. The Hungarian reform movement was originally made up of many diverse groups of peoples residing in the region who chose to adopt the mantle of Magyarization as a form of resistance. Significantly, as news and events of the reform movement in 1848 spread, they did so in Hungarian and with a perspective taken from the spaces of Vienna's urban nemesis, Budapest. Indeed, when the reform movements' "Twelve Points" were declared on March 15, 1848, they were declared in Hungarian and they were declared in Pest. A n d when poet Petofi Sandor recited the famed "National Song" on the same day, punctuating the more radical elements of the points, he did so by invoking the spirit of specifically Magyar leaders and peoples who were believed to live and die as free men: "Should we be slaves or free? This is the question. Choose!" 2 8 Even so, many "ethnic Magyars," those who claimed Hungarian identity by blood, continued to hold themselves above their Slavic, German, and, increasingly Jewish, neighbors. Anti-Semitic riots were therefore not uncommon during the early days of the revolution. These and other growing acts of discrimination against "minority" groups within Hungary brought to light ethnic tensions that many early liberal reformers appeared not to anticipate. capitalist system. In turn, Kossuth and his supporters were attempting to undermine the very core of Habsburg control over Hungary while democratizing and modernizing the social sphere. For a discussion of the 1848 revolution in Hungary, see: Laszlo Deme, The Radical Left in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); Istvan Deak, The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848-1849 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Domokos G. Kosary, The Press During the Hungarian Revolution of1848-1849 (Boulder, CO : Social Science Monographs ; Highland Lakes, NJ : Atlantic Research & Publications: distributed by Columbia University Press, 1986); Gyorgy Spira The Nationality Issue in the Hungary of 1848-49 (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1992). 2 8Deme, 18. Notably, Sandor's poem was the first document to be freely printed and dispersed widely during the revolution. 2 9 Kontler, 241. The revolutionary government, however, was short lived, and little less than a year later with the revolution failed and Kossuth exiled, the Habsburgs once again placed the Carpathian Basin under absolute rule. And while the Habsburgs immediately overturned the revolutionary's "Twelve Points," they could do little to control or overturn the emancipation of the land's serfs. This would prove of vital importance as increased agricultural output and the movement towards industrialization and urbanization 25 B y the late nineteenth century, however, as Hungarian liberal politics were under challenge, the liberalism that had prevailed since the 1848 revolution had become fractured under the experience of Austro-Hungarian dualism following 1867. The first obvious split emerged from the makeup of the two parliamentary houses in Hungary. The Upper House consisted almost exclusively of the aristocracy who were entitled to their position by birth, while the Lower House consisted of elected members and functioned to represent a broader public constituency. While this did not differ from other constitutional monarchies at the time, the significance of the distinction between the Upper and Lower Houses in Hungary lay within a context of conservatizing forces that had brought about the guise of constitutional reform through the Compromise of 1867 with Austria. A s historian Andras Gero has argued, central to the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary following 1867 was acceptance of the Emperor o f Austria as the K i n g of Hungary and by extension acceptance of absolute authority: The Compromise not only concerned itself with political power and national issues, but was also a bargain struck about values. Certain aspects of absolutism were to remain unchallenged, with the implication that in public affairs a certain authoritarian attitude would continue to prevail with a strong attachment to an essentially feudal centre—the sovereign—and that conformity to these values would be accounted a fundamental norm. Post-Compromise political structures would therefore incorporate an irremovable and extremely powerful body, any criticism of which would be considered a criminal offence, and the prestige of which was underpinned by hundreds of years of tradition. 3 0 One result of such hierarchical power was the insidious fracturing of Hungarian liberal politics within the elected body of the Lower House. While on the surface, a liberal democratic order was endorsed, the attempt to govern in the spirit of liberalism that had spawned the Revolution in 1848 proved difficult. Many M P ' s , feeling essentially shackled to a feudal and conservative structure, simply softened their resolve to institute placed the Austrian monarchy in a position to modernize its holdings and create a nation ready to compete on a global scale. 26 31 • liberal reforms. This lead to a climate of moral decline wherein many M P ' s used their positions to gain in social rank without regard for their constituents. Other M P ' s , galvanized to fight against what they believed had been a bad compromise to begin with, took to opposite sides of the political spectrum, resulting in radical parties on both the right and left of the ruling centre. Increasingly, the uniting feature o f these opposition parties was their belief that a recovery of Magyar power (however different their aims and motivations) was essential to break from the status quo. The charged politics over Magyarization in light of attempts to politically legitimize or challenge the dual monarchy of the modern Austro-Hungarian Empire played an important role in the framing and display of the 1896 World 's Fair. Despite the plan to celebrate Hungary's heritage and despite the fair's theme of modernization and technological innovation, the planning of the Exhibition remained largely in the controlling hands and interests of the conservative aristocracy who, loyal to Austrian dualism, dominated the Upper House of the Hungarian Parliament and were increasing their presence in the Lower House as well. The only overriding consensus of both houses of parliament appeared to be that a unifying Magyarization and the national language serve as cultural touchstones of the country, and that a continued effort to assimilate Slavic and other minority groups to the nation be encouraged. A s has been noted earlier, the parliamentary majority remained loyal to dualism, thus the tendency was to accommodate the wishes of Vienna to the largest extent possible. A s such, the genre, styles, and art forms taken up by officially commissioned artists associated with the 1896 Fair more often reflected the tastes and preferences of the Viennese. 3 4 Reconciling a 3 1 Adding to these difficulties was the demography of the Lower House, which continued to attract large numbers of aristocrats. See Gero's chapter "The Two Houses of Parliament: History of a Changing Atmosphere" for a complete description of the Hungarian government in the years leading up to 1896. 3 2 Ibid. 3 3 Ibid. 3 4 While this is an unexplored research area that I plan to take up in the future, I would argue that the planning committee attempted to commission works that drew more on Budapest's associations to an imperial Roman past (and all the accompanying styles this would call up) versus indigenous or folk art traditions. Andras Gero suggested to me in an interview that the legacy of Pannonia (being the name of the Hungarian territory that became an imperial province of Rome in 10 A.D.) was significant to the establishment of Hungary as "civilized" and the female figure of Pannonia was often used to signal this connection, for example, in the fair's official posters. Moreover, Gero described what he terms the "feudal flavour" of the ceremonies surrounding the fair and the ways in which certain colours and costumes worn by Francis Joseph and his procession signaled Austrian imperial power over Hungary. Interview by author, 17 June 2002, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. 27 festival of Hungarian statehood with loyalty to the House of Habsburg thus remained a key challenge for Exhibition organizers. In particular, the Exhibition's central theme of Prince Arpad and the Magyar's entrance into the Carpathian Basin proved particularly daunting as Hungarian claims to full legitimacy over the Carpathian Basin rested with this particular event. Arpad, in particular, was a powerful symbol of Magyar authority and had to be carefully represented. One outcome of the challenge to represent Prince Arpad was that the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph was increasingly represented as the "New Arpad," taking the position of the mythic Hungarian chieftain who in Hungarian national myths was claimed to first settle the Carpathian Basin (fig. 16). A s early as 1892, Hungary's national archivist and leading historian, Gyula Pauler, wrote a two-volume text titled The History of Hungary under the Arpdd House of Kings which skillfully wove a narrative that responded to contemporary interest in Magyar history while acknowledging the modern fact of Austrian rule. Pauler used anthropological evidence to scientifically "prove" the Magyar peoples superiority over their Slavic neighbors. A n d while he did describe the events of conquest in all their violence, he suggested that the Slavs downfall was more than just a result of physical force, it was constructed as inevitable and even justified because of their Slavic "backwardness": They [the Slavs] weren't yet as brave as Magyars, nor were they as proud and self-respecting, nor as combative in nature, nor as dominant, but were rather disposed toward heedless obeisance and servility.. .The fact that the sundry Slav tribes did not accept the newcomers with leisure and tried to resist is not at all surprising. The degree of resistance was varied, however; while Hungarian tradition has retained many such episodes, it would be wrong to conceive of such resistance as heavy or as a menace to the Magyars. The weak and widely dispersed Slav tribes could not 3 5 Lajos Nemeth, "Art, Nationalism, and the Fin de Siecle" in Gyongyi Eri and Zsuzsa Jobbagyi, A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896-1914, trans. Zsuzsa Beres and Peter Doherty (London: Barbican Art Gallery): 20. 28 resist the concentrated attack led by Arpad, a brilliant military man and equally talented head of state. Throughout Pauler's narrative, it is the Magyars, described as "noble" and "valiant" that are pictured to be civilized beyond their neighbours. Paradoxically, however, the narrative drew on a history projected in hindsight —a history that linked the nomadic Magyars with the same imperial powers and foreign incursions that were constructed in other histories as oppressing the Magyars modern day descendants. In fact, Prince Arpad was directly linked to Francis Joseph through this configuration since the Austrian K i n g wore the crown of Hungary. A n important commission that helped shape the transfer of Magyar power to the Austrian crown was seen in Mihaly Munkacsy's large history painting Conquest of 1896, which was placed—not insignificantly—in the Upper House of the Hungarian parliament. However, Munkacsy's final work, taking the very same theme of the Magyar's arrival as that depicted in the Feszty panorama, produced a far different narrative than the one on which Feszty was working. Positioning an imposing, gigantic, and static Prince Arpad as the dominant focus of the canvas, Munkascy pictured the scene of conquest in ceremonial terms, importantly without signs of struggle or resistance. Here was a Prince that looked more like a ruler in a royal procession than a nomadic warrior. Munkacsy, who had lived and worked in Western Europe and become 38 well known through his affiliation with the French Impressionists, was Hungary's most famous artist l iving outside of Hungary. A s such, there was a sense on the part of some critics that Munkascy may have had less loyalty towards Hungary and more towards his government patrons. His painting indeed bears out this criticism to some extent in that the work also references a long history and tradition of imperial rule over Hungary. 3 9 i b I discovered this excerpt from Gyula Pauler's The History of Hungary under the Arpad House of Kings in Arpad Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars ed. Andras Varga (Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000) C D - R O M . Pauler was one of the leading members of the positivist school of Hungarian history outlined by Vardy. 3 7 Francis Joseph was crowned the King of Hungary during a coronation ceremony August 6, 1867. 3 8 Andras Szekely, Munkacsy (Budapest: Corvina, 1979): 5-6. 391 was unable to find any contemporary discussion of Munkacsy's large mural beyond the fact that he was at the end of his career when it was completed. Those interested in Munkacsy's early work would probably find little continuity between this image and the paintings he produced in Paris. Even so, the commission was presumably viewed by some members of the Fair's planning committee as an opportunity to bring the famed Hungarian painter home. The debates over his allegiances and motivations to paint the scene as he 29 Another project designed for the 1896 World's Fair, the Mil lennial Monument, commissioned by the Hungarian government to be placed at the entrance to the exhibition grounds, also attempted to represent this complicated narrative of a Hungarian past within the context of Austro-Hungarian dualism. The monument consisted of a central sculptural group of Prince Arpad and his seven chieftains (fig. 17) encircled with an imposing pantheon of historical leaders from other sovereign dynasties of Western Europe (fig. 18). The monument's planning, begun during the same period as Feszty's panorama, 4 0 was the Hungarian government's attempt to image glorification and pride in the Hungarian lineage of leaders in a way that linked the past to the modern present. A n d although the complex would not be fully completed until several years following the World's Fair, the plans were well in place and made public during the time of the Millennial Celebration 4 1 A t the center of the square, the seven equestrian statues representing the seven chieftains led by Arpad were positioned under a 36 metre tall column (fig. 19). Placed on top of the column was the Archangel Gabriel (fig. 20), signaling victory — a figure that bore a remarkable resemblance to the shaman priest figure situated in Feszty's panorama (fig. 21) with arms outstretched facing towards the horizon. Gabriel served as an important marker in Hungarian origin myths both as the traditional symbol of the conversion of the Hungarian peoples to Christianity and as a sign of the continuity of Prince Arpad's bloodline to that of St. Stephen's, who a century following the entry into the Carpathian Basin, would be crowned Hungary's first Christian king. Legends claimed that Gabriel had appeared in a dream to St. Stephen, inspiring the leader to convert the Magyars to Christianity. 4 2 Munkacsy's history painting and the Millennial Monument linked Hungarian narratives of the past to dynastic rule and the authority of the Catholic Church. Within did I have surmised from the tone of the Feszty panorama reviews. These suggest to me that Munkacsy's patriotism was questioned since he chose to live the majority of his life away from Hungary. 4 0 Gero, 155. 4 1 Ibid. 4 2 A well known myth to most Hungarians, Stephen Sisa discusses it in detail in The Spirit of Hungary (Morristown: Vista Books, 1990): 15-18. Feszty's panorama opened in fact on the Whitsun holiday (May 13, 1894), which celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit onto the first disciples and coincided with the date of St. Stephen's confirmation. The holiday, however, also merged Christian and pagan traditions and was better known in its pre-Christian context as the outdoor horse festival celebrating the traditional time of year when herdsmen drove horses and cattle out to pasture. Through these festivities, the connections between the dead and living, past and present, pagan and Christian are strongly suggestive in the proximity of the planned panorama and the Millennial monument. 30 this context, Feszty's panorama emerges as an alternative national history—one I would argue that could be associated with liberal investments in Magyarization. Within the panorama interior, Arpad and his chieftains call up the collaborative and collective rule that liberal reformers associated with the earliest Magyar nomads. In this respect, the site of Pusztaszer in the Carpathian Basin is of particular importance. For Hungarians in 1896, it was not only known as the site of entrance of the first Magyars into the Carpathian Basin, it was also celebrated as the site of the first "Diet"—where leaders of the Magyar tribes came together to establish what was termed the first "assembly" or government of the region. 4 3 Special festivities in 1896 asserted the importance of the event, which for liberals signaled the longstanding constitutional traditions in Magyar social and political organization 4 4 The viewer's position on the centre of the platform was also significant to the conjuring up of another particularly current tenet of liberal concern—the separation of church and state.45 Whether turning to face the oncoming invaders, or, turning to jo in and move with the conquering procession, the viewer is inevitably struck with the distance between Prince Arpad and his entourage, and the officiating shaman priest. Here it is worth noting that one reviewer, in 1894, in stressing the movement and animation of the painted scene, had noted that only these two static figures countered the dynamic flow in the image— effectively drawing the viewer's eyes to their presence and location. 4 6 Given these features, I would suggest that the positive response to Feszty's panorama grew out of a particular segment of the Hungarian public, in both 1894 and 1896, who sought signs of a liberal Magyarization in the aftermath of Compromise with imperial Austria. However, while the rhetoric of Magyar nomadism and the enfolding principles of Magyarization could serve to challenge the imperial and feudal power structures of the 4 J This particular understanding of the Magyars arrival at Pusztaszer is a well entrenched narrative in many Hungarian histories. It is underscored in an 1896 Budapest newspaper article (Fovdrosi Lapok, 27 June 1896) during the time of special ceremonies related to the site of the Hungary's first Diet. 4 4 1 discuss these celebrations and the connections of the Magyars "Diet" to England's Magna Carta in Chapter Three. See Kontler, 280 for a discussion of Hungarian liberals' interest in the Magna Carta as an important conceptual tool in claiming the early roots of Hungarian liberalism in the ancient past. 4 5 The early 1890's were marked by political debates in Hungary about the separation of church and state. The Austrian crown, reluctant to diminish the power of the Catholic Church as a pillar of his strength, finally gave in to pressure from opposition parties that ran platforms on the issue. The reforms were introduced into law in 1894 and 1895. See Kontler, 291. 4 6 Review. Budapest Hirlap, 13 May 1894. 31 Austrian Habsburgs that were legitimized in 1867, other and more problematic aspects of modern liberalism were also given form. The prominent image of Prince Arpad and the seven chieftains presiding over the scene of the defeated and humiliated Slavs could only have registered the conflicted status of ethnic groups within ongoing liberal programs. For some members of the Hungarian public, the panorama's violent imagery of pillage, rape, and destruction, could have augured that the embracive claims of Magyarization— evoked in the image by the dynamic charge of nomads that urged viewers to move with and not against the conquerors—were in fact tenets of exclusion, even eradication. In dialogue with the Mil lennial Monument and Munkacsy's Conquest at the exhibition of 1896, the privately sponsored Feszty Panorama effectively offered a counterpoint to official representations of the founding of Hungary. Yet in doing so, it raised the contradictions facing modern liberals within the dual Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Question of Space and Perspective: Nomadology as Politics A reading of contemporary theorists Deleuze and Guattari's "Treatise on Nomadology—the War Machine" in A Thousand Plateaus provides insights into the significance of the kind of rhetoric of nomadism and liberal emancipation conjured up through Feszty's panorama in the late nineteenth century. In the opening passage of the "Treatise" Deleuze and Guattari introduce two pivotal ideas that frame their discussion of what they term "nomad thought:" " A x i o m I. The war machine is exterior to the state apparatus'''' and "Proposition I. This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic, drama, and games."41 Deleuze and Guattari's axioms and propositions posit an important concept that works to undermine traditional conceptions of war, namely that the forces of change and rupture that occur in its wake cannot be contained. Furthermore, they go on to attribute these "truisms" to the realm of Indo-European mythology, outside the familiar domain of a Judeo-Christian heritage. Likening the war machine to a kind of nomadic warrior god from the East, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that it is the potential to act and the threat of rapid mutation and change which challenges sedentary culture and the State apparatus that controls it: He (the warrior God Indra) is "like a pure and immeasurable Deleuze Gilles, Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 351. 32 multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral and the power of metamorphosis.... In every respect, the war machine is of another species, another nature, another origin AO than the State apparatus." Paul Patton, in his discussions of the "Treatise on Nomadology" in his study Deleuze and the Political, notes that Deleuze and Guattari's concept of nomadism rested on nineteenth century anthropological distinctions that viewed sedentary agriculturists as more civilized than nomadic groups. Patton explains that every time an insurgency against the State erupts (in the form of revolution, guerilla warfare, or c iv i l disobedience) it can be said that a "nomadic potential has appeared." Patton goes on to add that "the fundamental antipathy between "the war-machine" and "the State" derives from their relations to two incompatible kinds of space." 4 9 The smooth spaces (or "nomad space") of the war-machine seek to displace and expand, while the homogenous and measurable striated spaces of the State (or sedentary space) seek to root and mark out. A s Patton argues, Deleuze and Guattari's theories were historically situated. For the French left post-1968, the model of nomadology was strategic as a reconcepualization of the politics of resistance: Might not the choice of nomads to specify the characteristics of war-machines and smooth space betray a Eurocentric primitivism and a fascination for the Other, the limits of which were already present to the authors... For, as in Deleuze's revalorization of simulacra or processes of becoming, the association of nomadism with qualitative multiplicity, smooth space, and the conditions of transformation is intended to controvert a deep stratum of the European imaginary. In particular, it is a concept designed to overturn the priority attached to sedentary forms of agriculture and social life at the expense of more fluid and mobile relations to the earth... If, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, 'history is always written from a sedentary point of view,' their nomadology is an attempt to provide another perspective. 5 0 Ibid, 352. Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (London: Routledge Press, 2000): 111-112 Ibid, 119. 3 3 While I would avoid a simple conflation of Magyar nomadism mobilized in the nineteenth century with those of Deleuze and Guattari in the twentieth century, what is significant in both cases is that the nomadic suggests a radical conceptual shift in perspective (historic and social), accompanied by unstoppable movement and uncontrollable and irreversible transformation. Viewed in these terms, the power of a rhetoric of nomadism for nineteenth century Hungarian liberals becomes clear. When wedded to narratives of freedom, Magyar nomadism was viewed by many reformers as pivotal to gain support and motivation for the kind of political change that could break open and recast the social order. Within the context of visual production, it can be argued that traditional history painting as a tool of liberal resistance and shaping of national historical consciousness had lost much of its authority and appeal by the late nineteenth century. 5 1 The panorama, in contrast, despite its traditional illusionism, offered a new technology that could evoke new aspirations. A n d the dynamic movement and energy of Feszty's Magyar nomads, the disruption of the static and the sedentary as they surge to an expanding horizon, argues for the potency of the fluid and the mobile, not only in the past but as a way of challenging and reconfiguring the present. 5 1 Prior to 1867 and especially during the period between the 1848 uprisings and the establishment of Austro-Hungarian dualism, history paintings served as an important outlet for nationalist yearnings and resistance to foreign rule. Drawing from diverse time periods and popular narratives in the history of occupation, artists from the Carpathian basin tended to portray episodes of confrontation and battle with both Turkish despots and those moments of struggle between Hungarian national heroes and blood thirsty Kings of the past as a way to talk about the struggles and resistance to imperial Habsburg domination. Among these are paintings are Bertalan Szekely's Discovery of the Body of King Louis the Second (1860) and The Battle at Mohacs (1866), both depicting key episodes in the critical battle that sealed the fate of the Carpathian Basin against the Ottoman Turks. More provocative is Viktor Madarasz's The Bewailing of Laszlo Hunyadi (1859), an image depicting the tragic fate of the son of the great 15 t h century national hero Janos Hunyadi, who was beheaded at the orders of the jealous young Habsburg king. This painting, garnering a gold medal in the 1861 Paris Salon, was a powerful signifier of Hungary's failed revolution and Kossuth's forced exile. After 1867, however, the representation and discourses around Turkish battles and foreign imperial rule had to change in order to justify Habsburg dualism. An early suggestion of these themes are found in Peter Krafft's 1825 work The Attack ofZrinyi, a painting commissioned by the Vienna court during the time of full Habsburg authority over the Carpathian territory. The image recalls the Turkish defeat of a Hungarian count and his men in 1566—a savage battle that the Habsburgs felt would stress the duty of Hungarians to defend the House of Habsburg at any cost. By 1896, the apparent corollary to this earlier work emerged in time for the exhibition with Gyula Benczur's large and prominently featured history painting The Recapture ofBuda Castle in 1686. Depicting the end of 150 years of Turkish occupation, the painting was created to emphasize the role of Austrian imperial forces in the freeing of the Carpathian Basin. 34 Chapter Two: Seeing and Being Seen—The Feszty Panorama and the Modern City of Budapest Constructing Identities: The City and the Public Sphere In an era of emerging nation-states, Hungarian national identity was constructed in large part through the experience of the growing metropolis of Budapest. Based on highly abstract markers which did not preclude ethnic purity or a long established claim to land, one became Hungarian i f they simply spoke the non-Slavic language and took a Magyar name—or so it was claimed. Thus, becoming a part of the Hungarian nation was increasingly tied to the multi-sensory (visual, corporeal, intellectual) experience of rapid urban growth. A n d despite undercurrents of social unrest, great industrial and economic prosperity indeed marked the decades following the establishment of Austro-Hungarian dualism brought about by the Compromise of 1867. The active build-up and move towards modernizing the Austro-Hungarian Empire became part of the larger effort to present a unified image to the rest of Europe. 1 N o doubt a response to Hungary's fraught political situation, the rapid urbanization and development of Budapest was bound to an odd juxtaposition of representing an ancient past and portraying modern political relations. The joining of Buda and Pest, the older medieval and newer bourgeois parts of the city, perhaps first signified this process. A permanent link had already been established with the building of 1 The output of the Hungarian economy grew at least threefold between 1867 and 1914, transforming an underdeveloped agrarian country into a more rapidly developing agrarian-industrial one. And although agricultural production and exports from Hungary did rise tremendously during this period, the pace of growth and subsequent income levels were far greater in the urban labour force than in the rural sector. Moreover, technological innovations in farming practices together with the consolidation of several mega-farming operations, served not only to keep the pace of modernization out of reach for many rural peoples, but also to deepen rifts between social classes. The birth of Budapest as a major European metropolis became central to the establishment of a growing bourgeoisie and urban working class, fueling the economic and technological transformations of the period. As Europe's fastest and youngest growing city in the final decades of the nineteenth century, Budapest's population grew from 280,349 to 617,856 from 1869 to 1896, folding in large numbers of landless peasants from throughout the Empire, German and Austrian entrepreneurs, and a growing Jewish population. This rapid growth was only matched by efforts to root the Magyar language and culture as official parlance of the city. Significantly, only 18% of Budapest citizens spoke Hungarian as a first language in 1880, yet by 1910, this figure had grown to 47%, up to 90% for civil servants and members of the upper classes. If one word could best characterize these decades, that word would be transition. See Kontler, 281, 292 and Karoly Voros, "Birth of Budapest: Building a Metropolis, 1873-1918," in Budapest: A History from its Beginnings to 1998, ed. Andras Gero and Janos Poor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 103-104 35 the Chain Bridge in 1849. A commission of public works was quickly established after the failed revolution to extend and solidify connections within the second capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. One of the first projects was the construction of Andrassy Avenue, a 2,318 meter long street that would extend the connection of the Chain Bridge into Pest, connecting the inner heart of the fastest growing part of the city with its largest 600,000 square meter park—the Varosliget (fig. 22). It was this park that would eventually serve as the staging ground for the Millennial Exhibition. One of the distinctive features of the park, as sociologist Gabor Gyani points out in his discussion of the space, was in its commission and planning. German park planner Christian Heinrich Nebbien built the park after what was probably the first competition in the history of landscape architecture in 1813. But in an effort to perhaps disassociate himself from prevailing trends in gardening which privileged what he termed the "contemplative and edifying recreation of the individual," Nebbien envisioned a garden that he claimed would be "to be the immediate possession and creation o f the people" and "the purest expression of the great virtues of a people and the product of the spirit, the taste, the patriotism and the culture of a noble nation." One aspect of Nebbien's plan was to create large monuments to the major historical figures of Hungary's history. These developments, stalled for nearly seven decades, provided a blueprint and location for the eventual 1896 exhibition. 3 Indeed, by the middle of the 1890's, the fashionable Andrassy Avenue (also known as Hungary's Champs-Elysees 4), was among the busiest thoroughfares in Budapest, at the end of which Feszty's panorama and the planned millennial monument stood in dialogue. Extensive building projects that declared the character of Budapest to the world marked the years leading up to the Millennium Fair. The attempts, however, to create a 2 Gabor Gyani, "Uses and Misuses of Public Space in Budapest: 1873-1914," in Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994), 85-107. A l l of Nebbien's quotes are found within this essay. 3 The inherent contradictions, however, in creating a wholly public space (in accordance with Nebbien's Utopian vision of a "peoples' park") at the end of one of the most fashionable bourgeois neighborhoods in Pest took form in the final shape of Andrassy Avenue. This, a street which architectural historian Akos Moravanszky describes as "one of the most paradigmatic urban ensembles in Central Europe" failed in its connecting function—see Akos Moravanszky Competing Visions: Aesthetic Inventions and Social Imagination in Central European Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998): 47-48. A quick glance at any Budapest city map reveals this as fact. 4 Moravanszky, 48. 36 modern bourgeois city while projecting a distinct national style exposed, at times, competing historical contexts that were simultaneously deemed "Hungarian." The physical planning and literal "build up"of discourses around Hungary's new parliament building are telling in this regard. Commissioned in 1882 to establish a large and powerful symbol of Hungarian legislative authority in the nation's capital, the Parliament building provided yet another opportunity to signal its distinctiveness from Vienna. Imre Steindl's winning entry presented a colossal structure (fig. 23-24). His choice of a neo-Gothic style, apart from its popular revival in Western Europe and connections to modern nation building, was rooted in attempts to reinterpret the style of a period that was viewed as Hungary's "Golden A g e . " 5 A s one representative of the building's planning committee suggested, the effect was to blur a tradition of feudal power with modern liberal aspirations: Gothic is not a national style; but since we have no national style, [the committee] agrees to select this style o f not German but French origin, to represent the most majestic ideals of freedom and state power. We can find beautiful and majestic examples of this style not only abroad but also in this country... When it is placed on the Danube facing the Royal Castle the scale and proportions of the Parliament building should be worthy of the constitution's old and the state's sublime ideals. 6 The final neo-Gothic structure was therefore an attempt to restore and reshape, revealing a tension founded in the very nature of late nineteenth century Hungarian politics. Furthermore, as architectural historian Akos Moravanszky argues, the building resulted in a "didactic assemblage, presenting history as seen from a rearview mirror that condenses the view into a compact scope." A s I've suggested, the rapid urbanization and restructuring of Budapest appears to have followed in this vein. Yet, as Moravanszky goes on to allude, the Parliament building also provided early evidence of an entirely 5 Ibid, 68. The shifting notions of what constitutes Hungary's "Golden Age" are of note here. Some claimed that it existed with the reign of the "renaissance" King Matthias in the fifteenth century while others placed it with Prince Arpad. The distinction of course ran along political lines, but it is interesting to mention here that the period of Budapest's growth under Austro-Hungarian rule is often referred to as yet another "Golden Age" by contemporary historians. 6 Ibid. 37 different technology of seeing, one that sought to liberate itself from certain past traditions (in this case, Viennese and Austrian associations) while constructing new ones in its place: The Gothic of the Budapest Parliament was a clear rejection of the Ringstrassentsil [Vienna's architectural style] and a reaffirmation of the reformist goals of Gothic revival, with all its associations of joyful labour, craftsmanship, and national virtues. But finally it was the baroque principle of a theatrical spatial arrangement of historical fragments as parts of a new spatial entity that dominated... 7 A s such, the turn towards theatricality in tandem with the reconceptualization of the spaces of Budapest provided a ready backdrop for a whole new way of experiencing and seeing the city. Modern Visualizing Processes: The Urban Context The construction of Budapest, the process of a capital and social body "becoming" through technological innovation was crucial to shaping a modern and specifically Magyar historical consciousness. O f central importance for Budapest's relatively late fin de siecle moment was the relation between vision and the formation of the modern human subject. Vis ion, in particular, seemed privileged in the context of Budapest's preparation for a World 's Fair because of the tremendous effort to prepare the city to be seen and inspected by the outside world. Historian Jonathan Crary links vision and visuality to the changing perceptions of human subjectivity and identity where the experience of observation belongs to the observer instead of the observed. Crary posits that new technologies of vision such as the camera obscura performed "an operation of individuation" and defined an observer as "isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confines impelling a kind of withdrawal from the world in order to regulate and 7 Ibid, 70. 8 Moreover, there was an interest in exhibiting the very kinds of optical technologies that could continue fueling the relation between observers and their experience of modernity. This provides an area of investigation I plan to address in future research. 38 purify one's relation to the manifold contents of the now 'exterior' wor ld ." 9 In turn, the relations between a mechanical apparatus and a pre-given world of objective truth displaced the observer's multi-sensory experience. Therefore, Crary suggests that an internalized view could, through the mediation of technologies, be projected externally as well. Documenting and creating discourses around the transformation of the city was pivotal in this regard. The addition of photographs, for example, to Budapest city archives beginning in the 1880's allowed a process of recording new histories for Hungarians that provided a level of power and legitimacy. 1 0 In this case, photography allowed the precise type of indexical record that could trace and shape each step in the process of Budapest's shift towards modernization. 1 1 This process in turn facilitated the creation of those new spatial entities that Moravansky argues emerged with the building of the Parliament building. M y point is that the creation of a modern Budapest involved simultaneously a kind of seeing and being seen. Other aspects of an emerging metropolis worked to embody this shifting visuality. The creation of wide boulevards and greater access to public transportation allowed people to move around neighborhoods and glimpse parts of the city from new perspectives. One of the most important developments during Budapest's rapid build-up was the creation of several important promenades in the 1870's. Among these, the Duna Corso (fig. 25), running along the banks of the Danube, provided impressive i f not picturesque views of the Buda hills and river. On the Buda side, several walks were established in the hills that likewise allowed for sweeping and indeed panoramic views of an emerging Pest. 1 2 A s a leisure activity, walking the promenade combined the pleasure of viewing with movement. Moreover, the function of being seen on the promenade set the individual within a framework of another's view. These multiple views increasingly took shape through a steady rise in the number of newspapers and periodicals available in the city —each attempting to capture and legitimize yet another voice in the diverse and multiethnic makeup of the city. Through 9 Jonathan Crary. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990): 245. 1 01 discuss the Budapest City Archive in Chapter Three. 1 1 Photographs were an important part of the growing Budapest archive beginning in the 1880's under Budapest's chief archivist Laszlo Toldy. See Simon Mihaly, The Comprehensive History of Hungarian Photography (Budapest: Hungarian Photography Museum, 2000), 61-65. 39 this process, the print media contributed to a kind of panoramic literature in the nineteenth century, what historian Margaret Cohen has described as works that "sought to 13 tell the collective story of the city." These urban developments have implications for Feszty's panorama. Within the context of Hungary's and particularly an urban Budapest's drive for a unique identity within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in light of the crisis of representation leading up to the Mil lennial Celebrations, Feszty's panorama of the Magyar's entrance into the Carpathian Basin was a particularly potent site since it was aimed squarely at a growing bourgeois public. It was this public, more apt to embrace new technologies of vision over "high art," who were actively and rapidly constructing the new social fabric of the modern Hungarian nation. It was also this public that was being ignored in much of the visual production commissioned for the fair. What I am arguing is that the Arr ival of the Conquering Hungarians in 896, with its painted illusionism and its use of real soil and rocks from the Carpathian Basin in the foreground, involved a kind of "seeing" that was fast becoming an important part of a growing Budapest. But the urban phenomena of "being seen" has other inferences. Descriptions of the Feszty panorama in 1894 underscore a full range of conflicting bodily sensations, including dizziness, nausea, joy, and fear. These derive in part from accounts of viewing the medium, but also from simultaneous scenes of rape, murder, ceremony and salvation. A s such, the Feszty panorama's depiction of a single moment is one represented in meolias res— a moment positioning viewers between the projected past and future, firmly in the indeterminate present. Take for example this opening passage from an 1894 review of the panorama in the Magyar Hirlap. Not only does it compellingly describe the city of Budapest caught anxiously between the past and future, it links that urban body (here in the form of an upper class woman) to the fashionable world of consumer culture and leisure, where how one is seen and with whom becomes paramount: 1 2 Gyani, 89-92. 1 3 Margaret Cohen, "Panoramic Literature and the Invention of Everyday Genres," in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 238. Cohen also remarks on bodily sensation in this context: "The panoramic text's use of discontinuity captures the discontinuities in sense perception characterizing the urban metropolis and processes of industrial production, what Benjamin has famously termed the shocks of modern life" 40 Budapest is today like a beautiful genteel lady who is preparing for her first ball. She is already nervous with two full seasons left until the Millennial Celebrations. She can barely think of it, she is filled with plans, daydreaming, hoping. She feels her fate depends on it, wondering i f "monsieur de Monde" w i l l take her hand. W i l l she, w i l l she not be Mrs. de Monde? 1 4 The Panorama as Virtual Space The Feszty panorama engaged the modern viewer in other ways, tied to notions of shifting perceptions and the sense of being between two worlds. Media theorist Pierre Levy in his mediations on the virtual aptly describes the process of virtualization not as a specific mode of being but as "the process of transformation from one mode of being to another," a procedure of humanity's "becoming other." 1 5 In this way, virtuality, instead of some type of false reality, can be conceived as a kind of perpetual movement that mediates between possibilities. Moreover, Levy draws a distinction between the possible and the virtual on the basis of existence. Levy writes: The possible is already fully constituted, but exists in a state of limbo. It can be realized without any change occurring either in its determination or nature. It is a phantom reality, something latent. The possible is exactly like the real, the only thing missing being existence...The virtual should, properly speaking, be compared not to the real but the actual. 1 6 As such, Levy stresses that the virtual as a "knot of tendencies or forces that accompanies a situation, event, object, or entity" invokes a process of actualization that belongs and 17 even constitutes an element of what is virtual. In this way, the virtual tends towards 14 Magyar Hirlap, 13 May 1894. Note the use of gender and class to shape this particular sense of anxiety. Translation by author. 1 5 Pierre Levy, Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. trans. Robert Bononno (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), 16. 1 6 Ibid, 24. 1 7 Ibid. Levy introduces the problematic dynamic constructed around the duality of the real and the virtual a page earlier. He writes: "Consider the simple and misleading opposition between the real and the virtual. As it is currently used, the word "virtual" is often meant to signify the absence of existence, whereas "reality" implies a material embodiment, a tangible presence. Reality is implied when someone says "I've 41 actualization without undergoing any form of effective or concrete shift. The fact of not being associated with any "there," of occurring between things that are clearly situated, does not prevent us from existing. Within the Feszty panorama, there is an inexorable parallel between Levy 's characterization of the virtual and the viewer's situation within the panoramic space. Oscillating between forces of capture, invasion, and salvation, the viewing body is literally activated with an intense urgency to "fit i t s e l f within the narrative o f Hungarian conquest, sparking a kind of actualization. This sense of virtuality gains in strength through a viewing body outside the detached and stationary position of mainly observing (as experienced when viewing a traditional painting). A s Levy argues, this power to invoke an actualizing response is potent; the actual tree is already present in the potential seed. This, however, does not suggest that the seed can predetermine what the shape of the tree w i l l be, instead, "the seed w i l l have to invent the tree [and] coproduce it together with the circumstances it encounters." 1 8 Therefore, the dynamic of virtualization is interdependent with reality. Levy writes: If virtualization were nothing more than a transition from a reality to a collection of possibilities, it would be derealizing. But it [the virtual] implies a great sense of irreversibility in its effects, indeterminacy in its processes, and creativity in its striving, as actualization. Virtualization is one of the principle vectors in the creation of reality. 1 9 Within this context, Denise Oleksijczuk's groundbreaking work on the first panoramas links well with Levy and highlights the importance o f multiple perspective positions within panoramic space as a way to problematize attempts by early panorama * 9ft artists to determine the way viewers experienced the image. Moreover, Oleksijczuk got it," virtually when they say "You'll get it." The illusion involved generally allows us to introduce a sense of trivial irony to evoke the various forms of virtualization" (23). 1 8 Ibid. 1 9 Ibid, 27. 2 0 Denise Oleksijczuk, Introduction to "The Dynamics of Spectatorship in the First Panoramas: Vision, The Body and British Imperialism, 1787-1829" (Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, 2001). Oleksijczuk writes, "At its broadest level, my argument in this thesis is that by transporting its spectators to other places in the city, country or world, the panorama created a spatial and temporal disjunction between a 'here' and a 'there' that became a crucial locus for the formation of new identities. In other words, the panorama functioned as a forum for the production of a new sense of self..." (5). 42 distinguishes the importance of an internalized view and experience of visuality as a "radically new relationship between spectator and image." Oleksijczuk argues: Thus, at the same time that the panorama offered spectators a sense of embodiment, a sense that the space their bodies occupied was contiguous with the space of the image, it also gave them multiple ways of interacting with, or being subjected to, its representational power. B y completely immersing the spectator in the middle of a phenomenalistic, multiperspectival and cylindrical painting which could not be grasped all at once, the viewing situation in the panorama could also lend spectators a greater awareness of the limits of human vision (because the panorama could not be entirely seen from one point without turning around) and of the spaces occupied by their bodies (because it forced them to move). 2 1 A n d while I contend that the Feszty panorama was successful in limiting these viewing positions by the sheer momentum of the scene, a point to which I w i l l return, what remains critical is Oleksijczuk's suggestion that panoramas invited an alterity in the experience of viewing that complicated and even challenged what viewers were encouraged to believe. In late nineteenth century Austria-Hungary, this alterity facilitated a level of agency and invited a kind of identity formation and conception of reality that was particularly threatening to existing power structures—an abstract and nomadic identity with no clear spatial or bodily configuration. Indeed, I wish to underscore that the critical aspect of Levy 's work that I am interested in resides in its direct references to nomadism. A s Levy repeatedly argues, the elements of the virtual are specifically nomadic and dispersed with "the pertinence of their geographic position significantly diminished." 2 2 It is through the idea of nomadic movement that Levy conceives of the virtual and it is through nomadic practices that Levy introduces an intriguing metaphor for the process of establishing virtual communities. Yet the experience of embodied 2 1 Ibid, 13-14. 2 2 Levy, 27. Geography is therefore not discounted as an important element of the virtual; rather, it is the problematizing of settlement that is being introduced by Levy. As Deleuze and Guattari write, " A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo (380). 43 vision together with the kinds of spaces the Feszty panorama opened up only revealed a virtual community in a state of flux. Spatial Wars in Fin de Siecle Budapest Recalling Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of space, Feszty's panorama of conquering nomads with a proliferation of moving figures moving outwards to a distant horizon, at first appears to take up a smooth (or nomadic) space which displaces and expands. In contrast, an image like Munkacsy's Conquest (recall fig. 14) with a static central figure and little or no motion appears to take up striated (or sedentary) space that roots and marks out. Munkacsy's-imposing Prince Arpad filled a square canvas and found prominent display to a limited aristocratic audience in the Upper House of Parliament (fig. 26) while Feszty's Prince Arpad became one body among an infinitely expanding number of bodies filling a panoramic scene that was displayed to a broad and diverse public (fig. 27). A s a mass medium with the ability to accommodate up to 150 viewers of mixed classes and ethnicities in one viewing, panoramas effected the most serious attack on traditional artistic sensibilities, that of commodification and proliferation of art to an ever widening audience. Moreover, the appeal of the panorama existed in its attempts to literally capture life through a level of verisimiltude lacking in traditional history paintings. The spatial war that Deleuze and Guattari outline in the Treatise on Nomadology helps to elucidate the differences between the two works and by extension underscore the conflicted spatial politics of the city and the nation. But the space of the Feszty Panorama was also conflicted for liberals of 1848, like Feszty's father-in-law M o r Jokai who continued to call for the voluntary assimilation of ethnic minorities to the Hungarian nation. For them, nomadism was conceived in its inclusive and abstract form as a way of folding new members into a more promising future. But for a new generation of liberals within the shifting political environment of late nineteenth century Hungary, nomadism was conceived in its more virulent form. For 2 3 Brian Massumi, in the Foreward to Deleuze and Guattari's Treatise provides a useful summary: "The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space. Air against Earth. State space is "striated," or gridded. Movement in it is confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of the plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points. Nomad space is "smooth," or open-ended. One can rise up at any given point and move to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: 44 these individuals, a radical politics of either exclusion or a forced identification with the Hungarian nation was seen as the only option to save any vestige of legitimacy for what was construed as Hungary's heritage and modus operandi?4 Conceptually speaking then, within the kind of spatial war being waged in Budapest in the years leading up to 1896, Feszty's panorama seemingly suspended bodies at its very centre and was a major expression of a space that worked to either entirely mobilize or exclude the spectator. In an ironic twist, in terms of nineteenth century anthropological dictums that posited sedentary agriculturalists on a higher rung of civilization than nomadic peoples, the ancient and nomadic Magyars were pictured as a "civi l iz ing force" in the Carpathian Basin. With such apparent claims of manifest destiny, it is no surprise that one critic characterized the scene of Feszty's panorama as the "Magyar Eldorado," drawing on the Spanish myth that helped to drive ambitions of European colonizers penetrating Amerindian territories in the vain search for gold. "This is the promised land," writes the review. In the official explanation of the panorama, cited at the outset of the thesis, these overtones are made clear: They [the Magyars] feel perhaps that the God of the Magyars has appointed for them this land to be, after many years of restless wandering, their inheritance, which was to be consecrated for their lasting home by the blood of many heroes. ..The enemy, have already diminished: the rest of the Slavonians oppose with valorous resistance. They die on the spot where they lived; it was their home though it was not fortified by constitution and political arraying oneself in an open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort)" (xiii). 2 4 Kontler outlines the rise of several political movements beginning in the mid 1870's (288-302), that were opposed to the Liberal government and the Compromise of 1867 that brought about dualism. Significantly, a number of disparately organized labour movements merged over a period of two decades, adopted a Marxist line, and formed the Hungarian Social Democratic Workers' Party. As Kontler notes, "a major role was played by Leo Frankel, a prominent figure of the Paris Commune of 1871." Another development was the National Anti-Semetic Party, established in 1883, which Kontler writes was "outspoken, indeed aggressive in its attempts to mobilize the instincts of national 'self-defence.'"By 1896, the agrarian populations outside Budapest were also organizing their own political parties (some of which adopted anarchist ideas) and staging strikes. 2 5 Review. Pesti Hirlap, 13 May 13 1894. Indeed, the influence of American frontierism and expansion upon the Hungarian imaginary is worthy of further consideration, especially in light of the mixed ethnic composition of both nations. Interestingly, the modern day Puszta or men who train and race horses on the plains of Hungary are commonly referred to as "Hungarian cowboys." 45 bulwarks: just as the wi ld forest is the home for the bear and the plain is the home of the hamster. In this land they were born and here they are crushed by the suddenly appearing great strange nation. 2 6 The elements of spectacle and theatricality that the panoramic medium held over more traditional forms of art may have played an important part in promoting a passive acceptance of these themes. A t one level, audiences expected to be entertained and the advertisements for Feszty's work capitalized on visitor's desire to be transported to another place and time (fig. 28). Recalling the Feszty panorama's well publicized connection to M o r Jokai, audiences may very well have approached the scene as the manifestation of one of his many popular historical novels—works often criticized by literary critics for fantastic projections. 2 7 Even so, the liberal Jokai's popularity came about through the moral questions he posed, questions focused on "how-shall-we-live?" To be sure, the Feszty panorama may have been read by some spectators as a message of passive resistance, evoking the power and strength to be gained from a kind of collective victimization. If so, these themes had become muddied and even obscured by the immense transitions in the political and social landscape of late nineteenth century Austria-Hungary. B y 1896, Jokai too may have (quite literally) seen the writing on the wall . A s Fabri argues in her biography of Jokai: "instead of producing direct answers (bourgeois civilization, public commitment, etc.), he increasingly tended to provide his 98 readers with dilemmas only." It is possible then that the Feszty panorama was viewed in a similar way. Standing inside the space, the viewer was confronted with an onslaught and a choice—was one to be trampled, or, was one to turn and be moved along with the flow of the conquered? Varga, "History of the Hungarian Peoples." Fabri, 120. Ibid, 123. 46 Chapter 3: Invention and Invasion—Showcasing Technology, Heritage, and Opportunity in 1896 When the time came in M a y 1896 to invite the world to Hungary's Mil lennial Exhibition, the level of anticipation and desire to present Budapest as a modern and industrialized world class city had reached its zenith. If nothing else could unite the conflicted interests and concerns of its citizens, there at least existed the collective affirmation that the fair would bring about further inexorable changes to the rapidly transforming public sphere. A s I have noted earlier, from the perspective of many politicians, the idea of a World 's Fair held out the promise of legitimizing Hungarian nationhood and gaining acceptance for the nation as a full member of a liberal and democratic Europe. 1 However divergent and problematic the basis of that legitimacy was, the overriding interest was to establish some sense of sovereignty or at least parity with their Austrian neighbors. Yet from the perspective of a growing entrepreneur and merchant class within Budapest, the promise of legitimacy would have held slightly different stakes. For these individuals, the desire to promote Hungary and Budapest's World Fair was tied (however indirectly) to financial gain and the opportunity to capitalize upon an international exhibition (fig. 29). For individuals residing within Hungary and especially the Budapest public, the planning and final execution of the 1896 world's fair was thus shaped and experienced as an interpenetration of two discourses— the competing narratives of Hungarian conquest and the celebration of technology. In this way, the millennial festivities together with the material and visual build up of the city emerged within the context of circulation and transportation. A n important element of this phenomenon, as witnessed by the widespread popularity of Feszty's panorama, was the normalizing effects of new technologies, particularly technologies of vision. The popularity of photography and the introduction of cinema and the first Lumiere films to the fair goers of 1896 is critical in this context, specifically because the powerful mobilization of still images and that of the cinematic gaze was already being rehearsed 1 Ivan T. Berend, "From the Millennium to the Republic of Councils," in A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896-1914 ed. Gyongyi Eri and Zsuzsa Jobbagyi, trans. Zsuzsa Beres and Peter Doherty (London: Barbican Art Gallery): 9. 2 Ibid, 12-13. 47 through the specific conventions of the panorama. These included the articulation of multiple perspectives, spectatorship in groups, and the expectation of being transported to another space. But the Feszty panorama provided something further. B y thrusting panorama viewers into the path of a conquering hoard, the momentum of Feszty's image of Prince Arpad entering the Carpathian Basin gained strength through its ability to position viewers at the center of a particular kind of historical narrative—one tied to the promise of salvation (individual and national) through technological vanguardism and the nomadic as a priori tradition. Before the Railway: The Horse and the Stirrup One of the most critical developments within Hungary that drove identification of technology with nationhood was the railway. Before 1870, regions of the Carpathian Basin were effectively isolated from one another and from the capital city Budapest. A s such, the market for exports was limited by distance and the ability to organize disparately situated operations. Yet in the three short decades leading up to the Millennial Exhibition, Hungary's rapid and intensive construction of rail lines (a network of 17,000 kilometers by 1900 ranked sixth in Europe for density, ahead of Austria and even the United Kingdom) allowed Hungarian exports to penetrate lucrative Western markets and spark the steady flow of Austro-German and French capital into the country. In this way, the Hungarian industrial complex was able to supersede its economic dependence on Austria and obtain the much needed capital and markets to fuel its own industrial revolution. Nationalized in the early 1890's, the Hungarian railway was indirectly responsible for half of all mortgages taken out on Hungarian land, allowing for economic expansion outside traditional markets and the development of smaller urban centers beyond Budapest. 4 A n d while railway expansion saw similar industrial developments in other parts of the world in the late nineteenth century, the railway within Hungary emerged at the same moment that critical debates about national identity and sovereignty from the Austrian crown were being waged in the public sphere. Indeed, the railway provided a useful and potent conceptual tool around which to construct and connect a 3 Ibid, 9-11. 4 Ibid. 48 Hungarian national heritage. A s historian Ivan Breed suggests, the technological marvel of the railroad managed at times to unite Hungary through the promise of opportunity and prosperous new futures: "The railway became a symbol of improving times, praised by poets and lauded by painters as the very embodiment of momentum, of forward surge, and the speed that had overcome lethargy."5 In turn, the railway began to define a particular sense of ownership and control over the land, a radically different spatial relationship that challenged traditional modes of feudal organization. A s fi lm historian Tom Gunning has argued, it was within the context of the railroad that new perceptions and experiences of the body in modern culture could be imagined and created: This new landscape, which was organized according to circulatory needs, exemplifies the perceptual and environmental changes which define the experience of modernity: a new mastery of the incremental instants of time; a collapsing of distances; and a new experience of the human body and perception shaped by traveling at new rate of speed and inviting new potentials of danger.6 The representation of technological invention and mobility played an important role in Feszty's panorama. Indeed, it would seem that an underlying mechanism of the work was to construct a lineage for modern day technological innovations—like the railway—that dated back to a pre-feudal time and place. In particular, the use of the stirrup by the early Magyar invaders forged connections between modern day Hungarians and the construction of their ancient ancestors. The stirrup is described by historians of technology as abling the rapid movement of mounted peoples into present day Europe through an ability to increase their speed.7 The forerunner of these advancements, of mythic proportion for the Magyars, was the horse. Evoked in terms of both freedom and mastery in Magyar folklore, the horse could conjure up the kind of primal cultural 5 Ibid. 6 Tom Gunning, "Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema," in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 16. Gunning draws upon and expands the idea of circulation in relation to the railway worked through earlier by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Urizen Books, 1979). 7 Anthony Tihamer Komjathy, A Thousand Years of the Hungarian Art of War (Toronto: Rakoczi Foundation, 1982), "The use of stirrups—unknown in the western cavalries—made it easy for them [the Magyars] to make sudden stops, turns, and starts, individually or in formation. Thus, their horsemanship secured their superiority over the knight armies" (13). 49 identification around themes of mobility and speed so critical to the rapid modernization Q of Hungary over a few short decades. Recalling the rhetoric of Magyar nomadism, the nomadic body constructed in relation to this mobility was active, attentive, moving, and unpredictable. In this way, we are reminded once again of Deleuze's nomadic bodies— bodies resisting the "technological management" of their sedentary counterparts. But in light of the problematics raised around the rhetoric of nomadism in the previous chapter, the theme of regeneration and proliferation that takes shape in Feszty's panorama is also one that raises many contradictions and anxieties. First and foremost, it is carried out violently, ironically enough through the theme of agriculture where plows and oxen wi l l seed the soil and through physical force that damages and inflicts harm upon bodies. Reproduction is also suggested through the rape and insemination of the Slavic women and through the references to animal husbandry elucidated through the livestock herds and hundreds of horses fill ing the canvas. A t each level, regeneration is powerfully controlled by the ancestors of modern Hungarians (over land, animal, and people), suggesting a level of mastery that has sustained the nomadic movement for thousands of years. This power also stems from selective breeding through an understanding of the survival of the fittest. A s I noted at an earlier point in the thesis, Magyar, derived from the word Megyer, translates to "the strongest tribe in the alliance," a generic term given to whomever is in control of the tribe at any given time, 9 suggesting that those non-Magyars folded into the Magyar nation (i.e. Slavs, Jews, Germans, and other "foreigners") were not considered equal to their "masters." 1 0 Overtones of asserting "technological" control and evoking a sense of danger thus remain in tension with being part of a collective without pedigree, marks of purity, or geographic certainty (recall 8 Evoked in Hungarian folklore in terms of freedom and mastery, the horse often appeared on military objects such as armour that were being excavated in ambitious archeological digs funded by the Hungarian government in the late 19 t h century. I viewed a number of these objects in the archeological collections of the Hungarian Museum of Ethnography and the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. 9 Zoltan Halasz, Hungary, 4 t h ed. trans. Zsuzsa Beres (Budapest: Corvina, 1998), 1-2. The word "Magyar" derives from the Ugrian "Mansi- or "Magy-" with the addition of the Turkic "-eri." forming "Megyeri" -"Magyen." - "Magyar", which became a generic label meaning "the largest tribe in the group" or "masters." Both particles mean "men". The name given to them by the western historians, 'Hungarian" (Latin: "Hungarus"), is a variation of the name "Hun-Ogur" - "Onogur" - "Hungur" used since the fifth century by foreign chroniclers, a reminder of their association with TurkicOnogur-Hun peoples. 1 0 See Peter Hanak and the chapter "The Image of the Germans and the Jews in the Hungarian Mirror of the Nineteenth Century" in The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998): 44-62. 50 Levy's virtualized body— a body that is recreating, encouraged to travel and exchange, crossing boundaries). Yet the idea of unbridled economic growth and proliferation would have remained attractive to many sectors of the Budapest public specifically because it allowed a measure of prosperity and social mobility unseen in other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In particular, those "self-made men"— bankers, industrial barons, and inventors, together with a growing intelligentsia that took full advantage of liberal capitalism— also appeared to threaten traditional hierarchies most directly. The ephemeral nature of laissez faire economics with its invisible hand and shift towards individualism and private ownership were indeed hallmarks of the liberal age. A s such, the identification of the ancient Magyars with speed, invasion, and superior technological ability only allowed for the strengthening of these convictions in the urban context. These identifications may have also shaped the production of significant Hungarian inventions emerging at the time. These inventions, including the transformer, the carburetor, A C power, and the telephonograph, sought to harness energy for the purpose of mobility, information exchange, and mechanical reproduction. 1 1 But such new technologies also aroused a level of anxiety among other sectors of the public who feared that all traditional bearings would be lost and swept away in the tide of modernization. A particular series of cartoons published during the millennial year alongside an article titled "Complaints Against Wires" illustrates these fears (fig. 30). What these humorous drawings reveal is the deep-seated fear of the unknown and the possibility that citizens would soon be answering to a power that could not be seen or readily resisted. 1 2 In other words, while modernizing processes attempted to abolish the perceived "backwardness" of the Carpathian Basin, they did so in tension with a tradition of feudal hierarchy that was deeply entrenched in both the psyche and governing body of the nation. Moreover, an agrarian majority (continuing to reside under largely feudal conditions) constituted sixty percent of the Hungarian population. Ironically, it was this sector of society, sedentary agriculturists, who were working the same land and embodying the same position pictured in the Feszty 1 1 A full list of Hungarian inventors and their biographies can be found on the Hungarian Patent Office's website at www.hpo.hu. Notably, the Hungarian patent office was created in 1896, the year of the fair. See also: Andrew L. Simon, Made in Hungary: Hungarian Contributions to Universal Culture (Safety Harbor, FI: Simon Publications, 1998). 51 panorama as under attack. Sti l l , the importance of the land continued to be evoked through the discourses circulating around the millennial celebrations, including Feszty's work. This despite agriculturists and many industrial workers growing concerns and fears that Hungarian agricultural and industrial production was slipping into increasingly 1 T distant and indifferent hands. Even so, the power of faith and the forward thrust of historical positivism underwrote the scene of the Magyars' triumphant arrival pictured in the Feszty panorama and would have fostered a sense of pride, i f only temporarily, for many Hungarians. These forces, carefully connected to the narrative of destiny, remained a powerful draw to audiences of the Feszty panorama and were echoed through daily ceremonies around Hungary that sought to connect the present and the past. 1 4 O f these scheduled events, one of the highest profile rituals occurred over a weekend in late June 1896 when Pusztaser, the location of the supposed first Diet of Prince Arpad and the setting for the Feszty panorama, took center stage in a dedication ceremony. A large monument dedicated to Prince Arpad in the shape of a neo-classical triumphal arch was erected in the quiet agricultural community with the simple though significant engraving 896-1896 (fig. 31). Newspaper accounts of the event extolled the importance of the monument, stressing with suggestive Christian overtones that the Magyar soil and people were "blessed." 1 5 Importantly, however, editorials continued to underscore the democratic roots and constitutional laws of the Magyar peoples, linking the collaborative order to those acknowledged by England's Magna Carta. 1 6 Accounts detailed "rich and poor standing side by side" during the ceremony, emphasizing how participants traveled (importantly in these accounts, by train and car) from all parts of Hungary to take part in the event (fig. 17 32). Interestingly, it was this same experience that typified how many spectators came 12 Fovdrosi Lapok, 28 June 1896. 1 3 For a discussion of the "peripheralization" of the Hungarian economy, see Mario D. Fenyo, "The Future of the Nineteenth Century," in Hungary's Historical Legacies ed. Dennis P. Hupchik and R. William Weisberger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000): 55-61. 1 4 Many of these daily ceremonies are shown in photographs on the C D - R O M put out by the Hungarian National Museum, Once Upon A Time in Hungary (Budapest: Balassi, 1999). 15 Fovdrosi Lapok, 27 June 1896. 1 6 Kontler discusses Hungarian liberals' interest in the Magna Carta, "Another element of Hungary's past cherished among liberals was the supposed parallel between the constitutional development of Hungary and that of England" (280). The description in Fovdrosi Lapok, 27 June 1896 actually cites the "Magna Carta" in its textual descriptions of the ceremony. For liberal readings of the Magyar peoples, see Gero. 1 7 Ibid. 52 to view the Feszty panorama. A s among the most popular and visited sites of the Millennial Exhibition, the Feszty panorama also stood at the entrance of the Millennial grounds and at the final stop of the Fair's technological showstopper—the underground Millennial Metro (fig. 33). The first subway on the European continent and the world's second oldest after London, Budapest's Millennium Metro was constructed under Andrassy Street (the large boulevard leading to the fairgrounds) and put into service in 1896, carrying passengers over the four kilometres in less than ten minutes. 1 8 Therefore, the experience of rapidly traveling from distant locations to arrive at the fair became an important element of the viewing experience. The process of spectatorship, often in a crowd of mixed classes and backgrounds, was one being rehearsed through the kind of ceremonial descriptions circulating around the actual locale of Pusztaszer in the Carpathian Basin. The immediate result was an altered conception of space and the body. And , i f there was any question of faith in technology, it was bolstered by the figure of the pagan shaman priest in the Feszty panorama and the Archangel Gabriel on top of the Millennial Monument. A s I noted in the first chapter, both referenced each other in an allusion to faith and victory and the conversion of Arpad's people to Western Christianity. In turn, discussions of Magyars as a "timeless" people, beyond a mere nation, even a "race onto itself," 1 9 shaped much of the discourse around the 896 moment. The Photograph: Trafficking in Culture Feszty's panorama was thus embedded in a larger network of modern visualizing processes and technological invention that came into a kind of dialogue by the time of the 1896 world's fair. Driving the early development of these discourses was the growing popularity and availability of photographs with the advent of photographic portraiture, documentary photography, and picture postcards—objects that entered into new systems of exchange that transgressed boundaries and allowed for new configurations of power. Within Budapest, photography became an instrumental tool through which the public came to view the city in the decades preceding the Millennial Fair. This was accomplished, in part, through the work of photographer and publisher Gyorgy Klosz . 1 8Berend, 11. 1 9 These are direct quotes from an editorial on the importance of maintaining a strong Hungarian identity for the nation. Fovdrosi Lapok, 27 June 1896 53 Beginning in the 1880's, Klosz began producing and distributing a series of photographic prints called the "Pictures o f the New Budapest" following up on an earlier series of photographic prints created in the 1870's called "Pictures of the Old Budapest," some of which featured images of old demolished buildings. Taking advantage of the new dry plate technology that allowed for greater sensitivity, shorter exposure times, and greater reproducibility, Klosz was able to capture photographs that produced a radically different image of the city. A s Klosz biographer Laszlo Lugo Lugosi explains, rather than the static nature of his earlier Budapest series that seldom had people in them, the new Budapest photographs and "snapshots" revealed streets that were "full of life and people" (fig. 34-35). 2 0 A s Klosz ' s work grew in popularity and appeal, an important element of his series was to document the creation of Budapest's tram system and new underground railway together with the general demolition of old structures and construction of new buildings taking place throughout the city in preparation for the fair (fig. 36-37). These and other photographs in his series appeared in several Hungarian magazines, including the Budapest Visitors' Paper, a publication that helped orient tourists (and most probably, potential investors) to the city. Klosz also contributed photographic images to the growing city archive through a series of portraits that aimed to photograph "the country's most famous personalities" and through his extensive set of photographic images that documented the actual year of the Millennial Exhibi t ion. 2 1 In this way, Klosz ' s work helped to establish a way of looking at the city that not only connected its transformation to a particular segment of society, but also to the circulation of new capital that drove the changes. A s Gunning has argued, alluding to American essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr's mid-nineteenth century speculations on the "dissolving power" of the "traffic in 2 U Lugosi Lugo Laszlo, Klosz Gyorgy: Photographs (Budapest: Polgart, 2002). This is the first book published on the photographer, largely made up of Klosz's photographs and biography. Lugosi writes that the most "exciting discovery" of preparing the book and finding the images was that Klosz "recorded nearly all the significant phenomena of the last third of the 19 th century" (25). Indeed, when I visited the Hungarian National Museum's photography archives, I was struck with the disproportionate number of Klosz photographs in the collection. 2 1 Ibid, 267. ".. .the Budapest Visitors' Paper was not printed by Klosz's company but by the Legrady brothers, although Klosz became a joint owner and publisher of the paper in 1890. He part-owned the paper until 1894, publishing many of his photographs, which show a variety of themes. A l l issues included scenes from both Budapest and the provinces, and photographs made for the Budapest Visitors' Paper must have provided a good excuse for Klosz to expand his photographic series and use those already existing." 54 images," photography contained all the "dominant characteristics of the modern capitalist economy" and points to "the role of money in ever increasing the pace of circulation." 2 2 Turning back to the Feszty panorama, one can locate the expression of circulation tied to ideas around capital expansion and free enterprise in a number of ways. First and foremost, the panorama itself was born of a private business initiative that sought investors for its production and hired workers for its creation. 2 3 In turn, Feszty's Hungarian Panorama Company had a fiduciary duty to its investors (largely members of Budapest's bourgeois elite), as a business venture, the main function of which was to create a commodity that could generate profits. Feszty thus worked within the confines of a business plan and deadline for completion that strategically divided the labour needed to create the final painting across a number of hired painters, craftspeople, and technicians. 2 4 In this way, the panorama's production could be likened to a modern factory or assembly-like atmosphere where individual labourers were responsible for the completion o f isolated tasks. These labourers, in turn, were seldom associated or recognized as contributors of the final product, thereby distancing their mark on the canvas. 2 5 Within the actual scene of the panorama, this act of distancing and extension of the circulation of power is witnessed through Feszty's use of photographs to render the illusion of reality more seamless. 2 6 These photographs were taken at the actual locale of nineteenth century Pustaszer, the constructed site in Feszty's panorama of Prince Arpad's entrance into the Carpathian Basin. Developed into slides and projected onto the large panorama canvases, the photographs of Pustaszer were traced by Feszty's crew before 2 2 Gunning, 18. Gunning quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes famous essay, "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph," in Classic Essays on Photography ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete's Island Books, 1980), where Holmes writes, "Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please... There is only one Colosseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed—representatives of billions of pictures—since they were erected. Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable... There may be something like a universal currency of these bank-notes, or promises to pay in solid substance, which the sun has engraved for the great Bank of Nature " (80-81). 2 3 A full description of all the painters involved is found in Sziics and Wojtowicz, 13. 2 4 Laszlo Nagy, interview by author, 18 June 2002, Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, Opusztaszer, Hungary. Nagy is the museum director in charge of the Feszty Panorama. 2 5 My suggestion here is that the panorama was discussed almost exclusively as one artist's creation in the 1890's despite today's aknowledgments of the assistance of dozens of high profile Hungarian landscape artists. 2 6 Laszlo Nagy, Interview by author, 18 June 2002. 55 being painted over. 2 7 The well publicized use of camera technology thus allowed the final panorama to effectively transport the actual landscape of a Hungarian agricultural community to an imagined nomadic past. With this act, the original photographs' ties to a referent were essentially severed and positioned within (quite literally) a new landscape of power. Movement and outward expansion mark this new landscape, importantly, on the ruins of existing structures. Recalling and perhaps referencing Klosz ' s photographs of Old Budapest's demolished buildings 2 8 , the scene of smoldering ruins suggests a transition of power to a new force. Significantly, this new force takes shape through Feszty's image in his panorama of mounted nomadic tribesmen, bodies that could be quickly and efficiently transported via the mediation of technological invention seen through the stirrup. It is a body, not unlike the modern liberal body, cloaked in the rhetoric of individual freedom with the propensity to expand and spread over existing territory. Mobil iz ing the Cinematic Gaze Indeed, Budapest's 1896 Exhibition became a showcase for the very kind of commercial entertainment that would accelerate the transformation o f the public sphere and extend the parameters and social contexts of traditional representation. In turn, new technologies of vision, in tandem with the Feszty panorama, enabled the continuation of conflicting discourses related to Hungarian nationalism. Importantly, the Budapest Fair intersected with the early cinema's first year of intensive and mass international distribution. The Lumiere Brothers' films were first shown in Budapest only five months after their world debut in France (fig. 38). 2 9 Importantly, however, the much anticipated medium became a central attraction of Budapest's fair not only because of its novelty as a new technology, but because the first films included a series of shots taken of the city. Arnold Sziklai , who on a trip to Paris had seen a projection by the Lumiere Brothers, purchased and brought the equipment to Budapest and started to produce and show films regularly from M a y 1896 in the coffee shop of the Hotel Royal in Budapest. With an I discuss the rapid construction of Budapest in Chapter Two. 2 9 Laurent Mannoni, Donato Pesenti Campagnoni, and David Robonson, Light and Movement: Incunabula of the Motion Picture 1420-1896 (Torino: Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 1995), 400. 56 entrance fee of 50 pence and several screenings daily, spectators were shown a diverse collection of short films that usually displayed some sequence of apparently non-narrative events, mixing together everyday scenes with those of far off destinations. 3 0 A s such, audiences came to view the films in a forum analogous to that of the Feszty panorama —as a blend of real and imagined. Promoted as another spectacle of the Budapest's World 's Fair, the early films and their exhibition thus expanded the potential for new spaces of publicity. In turn, the technical features of Feszty's panorama fit cultural historian Vanessa Schwartz's description of how cinema marked such an important shift in the overall experience of a new visual culture: It [the cinema] arose from and existed in the intertwining of modernity's component parts: technology mediated by visual and cognitive stimulation; the re-presentation of reality enabled by technology; and an urban, commercial and mass-produced technique designed as the seizure of continuous movement ?x In a sense then, the transformation of Hungary's public sphere, a public constructed on the periphery of Europe, was already being prepared to embrace cinema as an unfolding chapter of Hungary's tradition of technological prowess. Moreover, as film theorist Mir iam Hansen has argued concerning the advent of cinema— and a similar claim can be made for both the conventions of a privately funded panorama and the free enterprise system that enabled entrepreneurs to produce and exhibit early films—the "deterritorialized structures of public life"—opened the door to new conceptions and constructions of social relations: . . . early cinema and the persistence of early exhibition practices through and even beyond the nickelodeon period, provided the conditions for an alternative public sphere. Specifically, it did so as an industrial-commercial public sphere that during a crucial phase depended on peripheral social groups (immigrants, members of the recently urbanized working class, women) and thus, will ingly or not, catered to people with specific needs, anxieties, and The history of Hungarian film is detailed on the website of Filmkultura, Hungary's National Film Archive at http://www.filmkultura.hu 3 1 Schwartz, 178. 57 fantasies—people whose experience was shaped by more or less traumatic forms of territorial and cultural displacement.32 What I am arguing then is that modern culture and national identity, particularly as it developed in Budapest in the late nineteenth century, was more conducive to the moving image or cinematic view specifically because of the rapid and compressed experience of conflicted modernization and the proliferation of discourses (visual, textual and otherwise) surrounding it. The public's heightened self-consciousness about technological change, brought about through preparation for a World 's Fair on the theme of industry and technology and the precipitous build up of the city and the nation's railway system in a few short decades was also marked at a moment of anxiety around territorial and cultural legitimacy for a number of ethnic groups residing within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Within this context, the Hungarian government's mandate to cultivate an overall national identity on the basis of abstract markers discussed in Chapter One —namely the adoption of the Hungarian language and a Magyar name to claim Hungarian identity — allowed for gaps and fissures between referential and non-referential, corporeal and immaterial, identification. For example, a Slovakian individual by birth could claim to be a Hungarian citizen while continuing to identify themselves through Slavic traditions. The final effect was to expose new ways of thinking about power relationships and individual subjectivity that, at times, troubled a stable material presence. Indeed, as Tom Gunning argues in his discussion of other late nineteenth century World 's Fairs, innovations in rapid transport and new processes of manufacturing worked to unbind traditional conceptions of the body in space: In all these new systems of circulation, the drama of modernity sketches itself: a collapsing of previous experiences of space and 3 2 emphasis mine. Miriam Hansen, "Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformation and the Public Sphere," in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film ed. Linda Williams (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 147. 3 3 An effect of Magyarization or, for some, an act of patriotism particularly during and shortly after the 1848 Revolution, changing ones family name (first and/or last) to a Hungarian one involved choosing a new name that either closely resembled the old one (i.e. Mor Jokai was born Maurus Jokai) or choosing a name based on the town or region you lived in (i.e. the artist Mihaly Munkacsy was born Michael Leo Lieb to non-Magyar parents and took his name from the region he lived in, Munkacs). In this way, many individuals who are claimed "Hungarian" are also known by their Slavic, German, or other names in different contexts. 58 time through speed; an extension of the power and productivity of the human body; and a consequent transformation of the body through new thresholds of demand and danger, creating new regimes of bodily discipline and regulation based upon a new observation of (and knowledge about) the body. 3 4 A n d while Gunning contends that cinema would manifest a new experience of motion that "unmoored" stable identities, "a modern experience of rapid alteration," 3 5it is arguable that in the case of Budapest, cinema would only accelerate and provide another medium through which to embody and define a particular experience of Hungarian nationalism—one that incorporated and re-presented the existing conflicts of identification and transformation, particularly in the urban context. Early cinema monopolized on a number of tensions and visual configurations already being played out through the Feszty panorama. Among these were the oscillations between narrative and non-narrative aspects of the medium. Within early film, a similar phenomena emerged that is best summarized in Tom Gunning's formulation of the "cinema of attractions"— a cinema that "directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle—a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in 36 itself." A s an attraction to be experienced, cinema's earliest engagements with a theatre format took place within pre-existing public venues such as World 's Fairs, amusement parks, and cafes where spectators were as interested, i f not more, in the demonstration of cinematograph technology as in what was being projected. The earliest productions, called "actuality films,"were in fact created to produce "special effects" such as the feeling of being run over by a train as in Lumiere Brothers' famous L 'Arrivee d'un Train (1895) where the locomotive moves rapidly and perilously towards the spectator (fig. 39). In other words, early cinema differed from later forms of narrative filmmaking through an equal fascination for the thrill of display and the telling of a story. A n important aspect 3 4 Gunning, 16. 3 5 Ibid. 3 6 Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde," in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 58. 59 of this configuration was the overt attempt to establish a sense of contact with the audience, thereby providing breaks in the illusionary aspects of the medium. M y point here is that the Feszty panorama, although artistically conservative in terms of its illusionistic detail and almost outmoded as a medium, still articulated a kind of newness. What I mean is that critics of the Feszty panorama detailed and marveled at the fascinating qualities of the panorama as a technology of vision in itself, describing the process and difficulties involved (such as painting in perspective) in presenting the work. B y drawing attention to its own visibility, the panorama and the earliest films thus displayed a kind of exhibitionary quality that Gunning argues reflects a lack of concern with creating a self-sufficient narrative world: The cinema of attractions expends little energy creating characters with psychological motivations or individual personality. Making use of both fictional and non-fictional attractions, its energy moves outward towards an acknowledged spectator rather than inward towards the character-based situations essential to classical narrative. 3 7 Adding to this perceived lack of a self-sufficient narrative was the use of the single shot in almost all actuality films. The spectator, placed within the position of the camera, experienced the action with little or no narrative cues via plot shifts or scene changes. In this way, Gunning argues that the "enunciator of early film is less a narrator than a monstrator,"—the effect of simply providing a scene instead of providing and processing that scene to a passive viewer. In turn, early films were "enframed rather than emplotted." 3 8 Importantly, the Feszty panorama provides traces of its own visibility that reveal and demonstrate how cinematic vision was being anticipated and mobilized before the emergence of film in Budapest. Recalling the position of the spectator within the Feszty panorama, the experience of viewing the panorama was also far from a passive act. Indeed, the momentum and energy created from the representation of thousands of horses and people moving in one direction, and particularly the cart carrying the Magyar J / Ib id , 59. 3 8 Tom Gunning, " 'Primitive Cinema: A Frame-Up? Or The Trick's on Us" in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 101. 60 princess that hurtles towards the viewer, produced the visceral effect of being run over, perhaps not unlike the filmic subterfuge in L Arrivee d'un Train. Moreover, the placement of figures at various distances from the viewer together with attempts to blend the canvas into the viewer's space by the addition of real soil, rocks, and implements, worked to produce subsequent effects of illusion that "showed o f f the medium. In turn, audiences that came to see the Feszty panorama were forced to engage with the image in a way that incorporated bodily and intellectual faculties—not unlike the engagement with early cinema. A s Gunning argues, translating a famous quote by fi lm historian Jean Mitry, "it is not the spectator who was introduced into the space of the fi lm but rather the space which comes forward to present itself to h i m . " 3 9 A n example of this comparative spatial dynamic can be made between the sequence of events in Lumiere's La Sortie des Usines Lumiere (1895) and the viewing body within the Feszty panorama as it turns to face Prince Arpad and the conquering hoards. In the film, the workers are seen to come out of the factory doors, walk towards the viewer, and split around either side of the screen, giving the effect of walking to the right or left of the viewer (fig. 40). In the panorama, the conquering people and horses similarly approach the viewer and likewise split around to the right and the left of the canvas (fig. 41). In both cases, the scene attempts to enter the spectator's space and the body is provoked into turning to follow the sequence and momentum of events. While this movement of the spectator's body does not literally happen when viewing the film, early accounts of the film's reception reveal that people would turn back to the film projector to see where the people had moved to. 4 0 Andre Gaudreault in his discussions of early Lumiere films describes the two articulations of mobility which produces this arrangement as the mobility of the subjects represented and the mobility of the "spatio-temporal segments" made possible by the sequence of shots that run together. A s Gaudreault argues, the two levels tend to cancel themselves out in film, so that over time "the macro-narrative is formed not by the micro-narratives being added together but by their being systematically disregarded as such." 4 1 In Feszty's panorama, however, the traces of this process are represented through the 3 9 Ibid, 58. 4 0 Andre Gaudreault, "Film, Narrative, Narration: The Cinema of the Lumiere Brothers," in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 69. 4 1 Ibid, 72-73. 61 sequence of horses, in various stages of running, that appear almost like slowed down frames of a film (fig. 42). Like Eadweard Muybrige's photograph's of horses first produced in 1878 and known to a European public by the 1890's, the individual movements are strung together to create the sense of motion (fig. 43). 62 Epilogue: Hungary After 1989 In the summer of 1995, almost a century after Hungary's Mil lennial celebrations, and following a widely publicized opening ceremony in the National Historical Memorial Park, the first tourists came to view the restored Feszty panorama. Located in Pusztaser— the site claimed to be the Magyar peoples' first settlement of the Carpathian Basin, and housed in a newly constructed rotunda adjacent to the triumphal arch dedicated to Prince Arpad in 1896 1, the panorama saw its second debut after two decades of planning and forty-two months of labour. The process of funding the panorama's restoration, which had begun in 1970 with a request for a loan guarantee from the residing communist government , was a difficult one. The painting had been cut into many small fragments after the Second World War and the Russian occupation. These, dispersed throughout Hungary and hidden in the attics and back rooms of Hungarian homes in the 1940's 3, had signaled something of a temporary dismantling—the breaking apart of a system of signs tied to capital expansion, consumer culture, and modern nation building. Through state-funded public announcements on television and word-of-mouth, pieces of the famous painting were located and delivered to the restoration committee. 4 Ironically, while the rest of the world marveled at Hungary's "goulash communism" (a term given by 1980's economists to Hungary's more "successful" and relaxed form of communist rule that allowed for a level of free enterprise and independent initiative 5), the mobilization of the individual fragments of what was treated as one of Hungary's most important cultural objects, helped fuel an already well-established nationalist revival. This revival had earlier antecedents in the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the memories and stories of an 1896 international world's fair that declared the moment of Hungary's 1 This was the arch discussed in Chapter Three, which had been unveiled during a millennial ceremony in June 1896 in the small village of Pusztaser, approximately 200 kilometres south of Budapest. The Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park was quietly founded at this archeological site in 1970 and transformed in the late 1990's into the modern and internationally promoted "theme park" that exists there today. 2 Laszlo Nagy, interview by author, 18 June 2002, Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, Opusztaszer, Hungary. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Goulash democracy is the newest incarnation of this term. Goulash is a popular Hungarian stew and is also a noun used to describe something with a mixture of many different elements. The Barnhart Dictionary Companion listed goulash communism as the antecedent to the phrase goulash democracy as a new phrase 63 arrival into the larger European economy and modern global consciousness. It was precisely this combination of demands for national sovereignty and open markets that would explode by 1989 when Hungary opened its borders to Austria, becoming the first Soviet-bloc country to begin the wave of events that would signal the end of communist power in Central Europe. 6 M y first visit to the restored Feszty panorama occurred in the early summer of 2000. Arr iving at the National Historical Memorial Park, I was not sure what to expect. Recalling past visits to dusty old museums under the communist regime, I was surprised to find such a highly polished and modern park dedicated to Hungarian history and heritage. The parks' centerpiece and main attraction, the Feszty panorama, did not disappoint. What I experienced when I initially climbed the long dark ramp to stand encircled by the enormous and beautifully restored painting on the wide viewing podium was simultaneously breathtaking and shocking. Not knowing where to look first, my eyes turned to the endless expanse of brilliant sky as it met the horizon. I immediately began to move, unable to stand still as I paced around the podium, attempting to make sense of the scene. Feeling enveloped but also strangely trapped, I turned my eyes towards the foreground, fixated on finding a break in the illusion between the canvas and the earth built up around the base of the image. It was then that the violence, chaos, and force of the actual scene hit me, where the aftermath of battle with the resident Slavs, episodes of rape, smoldering ruins of Slavic dwellings, and the charge of thousands of mounted warriors intermingled with scenes of pagan ceremony, Magyar people dancing, and the pitching of nomadic camps in the distant valley. M y immediate response was visceral as I faced the princess's carriage bounding towards me, realizing all around me the scenes of physical attack, destruction, and conquest. Yet as I turned again to follow the line of movement, I found a temporary calm. M y companion pointed out with some amusement that it was he who was under attack since I was "one of them"—a Hungarian. A n d while such an identification was one that I normally countered with my own conflicted identity in 1989, describing the term as "the political-economic system adopted in Hungary following the collapse of Communism." 6 After 1989, the overriding motivation to complete the Feszty panorama restoration became the planned staging of another World Fair in Budapest, set to coincide with the now 1100 th anniversary of the Magyar peoples arrival in the Carpathian Basin. Originally planned in conjunction with Vienna, the 1995 World's 64 as a Canadian born to Hungarian parents, a disturbing sense of nationalism and belonging swept over me—a sense that no matter where you ended up in the world, an ancestral home, language, and culture would bind you to a particular allegiance. Facing the reality of what this work evoked in me only underscored my own anxieties around the kind of spatial dynamics and ethnic conflicts developing in today's Central Europe. To be sure, much of the recent interest in Central Europe, and Hungary in particular, has emerged under the auspice of shaping and understanding another hotly debated idea—that of postcommunism. Indeed, the prevailing tendency of recent academic and popular writing on the region has been to focus on contemporary economic and political developments that have seldom allowed for farther reaching critical engagements with notions of the public sphere and shifting modes of cultural production. 7 A n d while today's stakes are high for those individual nation states competing to be a part of a growing and centrally placed Europe, a major point underlying my thesis has been that there is a need to explore the broader theoretical concerns and interconnected histories, anxieties, and processes underlying the social and cultural construction of diverse histories and identities within Central Europe in the past and the present. Thus: What are we to make of the Feszty panorama's postcommunist restoration in a highly interactive and technologically driven theme park dedicated to the Hungarian nation? Why was an image of Hungarian nationalism, a popular mass spectacle so palatable to fin de siecle concerns, revisited in a prominent theme park in the late 1990's? What exactly was and is being restored that the modern cannot provide? Fair was eventually cancelled when the Viennese withdrew and Hungarian government that came into power in 1994 cancelled the project for financial reasons. 7 Richard Sakwa's groundbreaking and key text Postcommunism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999) has, in my opinion, influenced the direction of research related to Central Europe in many ways. In particular, Sakwa's economic and political science models, while extremely revealing and useful, fail to account for a wider consideration of Central European cultural production and the public sphere. One recent work that attempts to construct a more comprehensive examination of the region is Andrew C. Janos's East Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre- to Postcommunism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). While insightful, this examination is perhaps too overarching and thus tends to dilute key points. For an engaging discussion on the recent direction of Central European studies and the influence of postcommunist discourses in this context, see Charles King, "Post-Postcommunism: Transition, Comparison, and the End of "Eastern Europe" World Politics 53, no. 1 (2000): 143-172. 65 I have argued through this thesis that the histories and identities taken up in late nineteenth century Hungary were shaped in part by the phenomena of rapid modernization and exposure to new fin de siecle technologies pivotal to the process of a modern and embodied vision. Importantly, it was within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the unusual spatial relationships of the Carpathian Basin which come into critical focus in the late nineteenth century, that both the multiple and often conflicting histories of the region, and a concept of modern nationalism were constructed. They emerged in connection with a fraught experience of occupation, feudalism, and autocracy that drew from traditions and myths-of-origin from both sides of the "center"—that is, from the east and the west o f where the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on the periphery of Western Europe, stood. Within this context, the late twentieth century collapse of Soviet communism in Hungary and the turn towards the West is not as straightforward as some would believe. Once again, the region is caught spatially and conceptually between two radically different worlds—the world of liberal capitalist democracies to the west and the memory of Soviet centralized power and confederacy to the east. It would seem that after fifty years of virtual seclusion from the West, Hungary like much o f Central Europe is faced with some of the same anxieties and conflicts that had shaped its relations in the late nineteenth century. One hundred years after the nation's first engagement with an international audience through the Budapest World's Fair, Hungary is once again negotiating its cultural, economic, and national identity in relationship to the West and the "promise" of modernism. A n d once again, Hungary and its citizenry are struggling with the ways in which they w i l l be seen, both internally, within the emerging European Union, and in the larger global community. A t the same time, rapid modernization and exposure to new communication and industrial technologies is once again transforming the nation's social sphere, where the growing disparity between social classes, ethnic groups, and political ideologies threatens to revive the troubled environment seen pre-W W I . Central to the chapters of this thesis is that vision and visuality played a critical role in the dynamics attending a period of tremendous change. In the late nineteenth century, as indeed today, the strategic spaces marked out by the panoramic field of vision allow for a mode of collective spectatorship that, in placing viewers at the center of a 66 360-degree view, work to liberate human vision to a boundless canvas while simultaneously imprisoning it within a frameless construction. Within this context, as 1 have argued, the "virtual" technologies of the Feszty panorama created not a false reality, but a space of possibility where national imaginings and historical records could be challenged and reconfigured. Drawing on contemporary theories around "nomadism," I have also suggested how themes and implications of the glorified nomadic past of Magyar settlers in 896, so powerfully conjured up by the panorama's imagery, were linked to key liberal discourses in 19 t h century Hungarian nation building. These, emphasizing freedom of movement, leadership through coalition, cultural miscegenation, and technological innovation as a means to domination, disrupted and called into question traditional models of social and political organization within the problematic Austro-Hungarian Empire. These discourses were activated by the visual forms and spaces of the panorama itself, both in terms of the specificity of the 1894-96 events in Hungary, but also in terms of the larger history and theory of the panorama— that is, its status as a mass medium which challenged and blurred boundaries between artistic genres, communities of viewers, and claims to knowledge. In turn, these experiences of modernity intersected with other spectacles and features of the international exhibition and its theme of Hungarian history and modern technology. What I have been interested in bringing to light through this examination is how the drive to normalize the idea of technological vanguardism as an integral part of the Hungarian heritage in 1896 could open up ways of thinking about the precarious balance between notions of the local "homeland" in relation to a larger global community both i n the present and the past. The recent costly restoration of the Feszty panorama and the rehabilitation since 1989 of important symbols, monuments, and museums related to what is claimed as a uniquely Hungarian heritage , suggest that these relationships w i l l 8 Most of Hungary's major museums, archives, and libraries have undergone extensive renovation, restructuring, and name changes during the period after 1989 to reflect their new mandate of promoting and educating the national and international public on Hungarian history and culture. At the same time, new museums and cultural institutions continue to be founded, often with the funding of outside agents, such as the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest and the controversial House of Terror Museum in Budapest that memorializes "the victims of totalitarian terror" under the Nazis and the Soviets. The Hungarian Crown and coat of arms have been restored as symbols of Hungary and many street names have been changed back to their pre-communist designations (many of which incidentally had been named as such in the fin de siecle period). Most of the monuments and statues associated with the communist era 67 persist well into the twenty-first century. More important, however, is that these restorations w i l l continue to merge with a new generation of technologies of vision and the revival of Hungary's status as the technological vanguard of Central Europe. 9 Today, Feszty's Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians into the Carpathian Basin in 896 is available to spectators through video, C D - R O M , and the World Wide W e b 1 0 , creating new ways of engaging with and producing meaning for the image. In turn, the Feszty panorama re-enters into contemporary critical discourses around the rhetoric of nomadism and freedom first visited in 1896—discourses that are joined to the liberal politics of an emerging postcommunist nation, the activation of origin myths related to the ancient Magyars, and the mobilization of mass media. These issues which played a role in s h a p i n g ^ de siecle Hungary continue to have relevance to our contemporary world: the ever-widening circulation and proliferation of media and information technology; changing topographies and landscapes of power; the creation and policing of boundaries; and the institutionalization of new technologies in relation to the modern body. have been dismantled and are now housed in the infamous Statue Park Memorial Museum in Budapest, the only park of its kind showcasing Soviet-era cultural objects. 9 In a 2002 report by the American-based National Science Board Subcommittee on Science & Engineering Indicators, Hungary emerged as the leader among all other Central European nations with the potential to become more important exporters of high-technology products during the next 15 years. This was based on the following leading indicators: national orientation, socioeconomic infrastructure, technological infrastructure, and productive capacity. 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Modern Hungarian Historiography. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Varga, Andras., ed. Arpdd Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars. Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000. C D - R O M . Voros, Karoly. "Birth of Budapest: Building a Metropolis, 1873-1918." In Budapest, A History From Its Beginnings to 1998. Edited by Andras Gero and Janos Poor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Newspapers: Budapest Hirlap, 13 May 1894. Fovdrosi Lapok, 25 June- 28 June 1896 Magyar Hirlap, 13 M a y 1894. Magyarorszdg, 13 M a y 1894. Pesti Hirlap, 13 May 1894. 72 1. Anonymous, Diagram of Panorama Platform, (n.d.) drawing. Reproduced in: Arpad Sziics, and Malgorzata Wojtowicz. A Feszty Korkep. Budapest: Helokon, 1996. 73 2. Edouard Detaille and Alphonse de Neuville, Battle of Champigny (1882) detail of panorama, oi l painting on canvas. Private Collection. Reproduced on: Private website, http://mapage.noos.fr/iflecaillon/Pages/Tableaux de la guerre.htm 7 4 Anonymous, Arpdd Feszty posing in front of the panorama (c l 894) photograph. Reproduced in: Andras Varga, ed. Arpdd Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars ed. Andras Varga (Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000) C D - R O M . Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oil painting on canvas, plate, 1. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan Arpad Feszty, Arrival of'the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oi l painting on canvas, plate 2. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oi l painting on canvas, plate 3. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oi l painting on canvas, plate 4. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 8. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oi l painting on canvas, plate 5. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, o i l painting on canvas, plate 6. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 10. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oil painting on canvas, plate 7. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 11. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, o i l painting on canvas, plate 8. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 12. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oil painting on canvas, plate 9. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 13. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oil painting on canvas, plate 10. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 14. Mihaly Munkacsy, Conquest (1896) oil painting on canvas. Parliament, Budapest. Reproduced on: Arpdd Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars ed. Andras Varga (Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000) C D -R O M . 86 15. Gyorgy Klosz , Vienna Anthropological Congress Outing Near Budapest (1889) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced in: Klosz Gyorgy: Photographs (Budapest: Polgart, 2002). 16. Anonymous, Portrait of Francis Joseph (n.d.) oi l painting on canvas. Unknown Collection. Reproduced on: Arpdd Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars ed. Andras Varga (Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000) C D -R O M . 17. Anonymous, Millennial Monument (cl996) photograph. Reproduced on Hungarian Pavilion, Internet 1996 World Exposition website, http://www.idg.hu/expo/index e.html 89 18. Anonymous, Millennial Monument (cl894) drawing. Reproduced on: Hungarian Pavilion, Internet 1996 World Exposition website, http://www.idg.hu/expo/index e.html 90 19. Gyorgy Zala and Albert Schickedanz, Millennial Monument Design Plans (1894) aquarelle on carton. Repr6duced in: A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896-1914, trans. Zsuzsa Beres and Peter Doherty (London: Barbican Ar t Gallery). 20. Anonymous, Millennial Monument (cl996) photograph. Reproduced on Hungarian Pavilion, Internet 1996 World Exposition website, http://www. ida.hu/expo/index e.html 21. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oi l painting on canvas, plate 11. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 93 22. Anonymous, Budapest City Map (1896) reproduction print. Source: Personal Copy. 9 4 23. Imre Steindl, Hungarian Parliament Building Plans (cl885) drawings. Reproduced in: Akos Moravanszky Competing Visions: Aesthetic Inventions and Social Imagination in Central European Architecture (Cambridge: M I T Press, 1998). 95 24. Anonymous, View of Parliament from the Danube (cl890) photograph. Reproduced in: A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896-1914, trans. Zsuzsa Beres and Peter Doherty (London: Barbican Art Gallery). 96 25. Anonymous, Scene on the Duna Corso (cl880) photograph. Reproduced on: Hungarian Pavilion, Internet 1996 World Exposition website, http://www.idg.hu/expo/index e.html 26. Anonymous, Mihdly Munkacsy's Conquest in the Upper House of Parliament, (c.1900) photograph. Reproduced in: A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896-1914, trans. Zsuzsa Beres and Peter Doherty (London: Barbican Ar t Gallery). 98 27. Anonymous, Rotunda Housing Feszty Panorama ( c l 894) photograph. Reproduced on: Arpdd Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars ed. Andras Varga (Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000) C D - R O M . 9 9 B EI0VETE1E / ;{ FESZTY ORIASIKORKEPE AFOESSZEKVAROS LEGSZEBB UTVANYOSAGA V A R O S L I G E T A n d r a s s y - u l v e g e n . a z uj k o r k e p palotaban. REG6EL 6 - E S T M O — AZ EOT omm mmm UOIMSML B E L E P O - D U : Regjel 6iM«f«lelpil 9omq 3 0 k. Gyermekjegy 2 0 Iff. 0«9^sSe1Oorai§. . . 5 0 fcr. Syermskjefy | Kafona /^ornKsfwiJl Mi . { 3 0 kr. 28. Advertisement for Feszty's Panorama (cl894) poster. Reproduced on: Arpad Feszty: The Entry of the Magyars ed. Andras Varga (Opusztaszer: Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park, 2000) C D - R O M . 29. Gyorgy Klosz, The Hall of Industry at the Millennial Celebrations (1896) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced in: A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896-1914, trans. Zsuzsa Beres and Peter Doherty (London: Barbican Art Gallery). 30. Anonymous, Complaints Against Wires Cartoon Series (1896) newspaper cartoon. Source: Fovdrosi Lapok, 28 June 1896. 102 31. Anonymous, Millennial Monument at Pusztaszer (1896) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced in: Once Upon A Time in Hungary ed. Judit Borus and Andrea Sooky (Hungarian National Museum, 1999) C D - R O M 32. Anonymous, Ceremony at Pusztaszer (1896) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced on: Once Upon A Time in Hungary ed. Judit Borus and Andrea Sooky (Hungarian National Museum, 1999) C D - R O M 104 33. Anonymous, Millenium Underground (1896) drawing. Reproduced in: A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary 1896-1914, trans. Zsuzsa Beres and Peter Doherty (London: Barbican Art Gallery). 34. Old Stock Exchange Building, c l873. Photograph. Source: Klosz Gyorgy: Photographs (Budapest: Polgart, 2002). 106 35. Gyorgy Klosz , Siemens andHalske Tram on Calvin Square (1890) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced in: Klosz Gyorgy: Photographs (Budapest: Polgart, 2002). 107 36. Gyorgy Klosz , Construction of the Francis Joseph Underground Electric Railway (cl895) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced in: Klosz Gyorgy: Photographs (Budapest: Polgart, 2002). 108 37. Gyorgy Klosz , Gabor Baross Ignites the Explosives for the First Shaft of the Iron Gate (1890) photograph. Budapest City Archives. Reproduced in: Klosz Gyorgy: Photographs (Budapest: Polgart, 2002). 109 Gyflral;i S g»Kt4Sl*«Mftb(inyfti i : ttaronipwSa f « n ¥ 3 r si I C i n v f d II V p A t a Budapwl, V„ Oa?oUy*utc* 5-7, ^HikM^lsUi RiHlnpcl, I V . , K *ul'l. M J ^ - H i c * I N AJfatfa: g £ z « * * * S n h * " ^ ^ " ^ ^ MindtiwowG liajii»g-^t f abator 6^ k^rti frutor. l l m l n c s . „ X s It L R I O S - H K * l l — * — - — - ~ j g 38. Advertisement for Early Cinema in Budapest (cl896) poster. National F i l m Archive of Hungary. Reproduced on: National F i l m Archive of Hungary website, http ://ww w. filmkultura. iif. hu 110 39. Lumiere Brothers, L 'Arrivee d'un Train (1895) film still. Reproduced on: Institut Lumiere website, http://www.institut-lumiere.org I l l 40. Lumiere Brothers, La Sortie des Usines Lumiere (1895) film still. Reproduced on: Institut Lumiere website, http://www.institut-lumiere.org 41. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, o i l painting on canvas, plate 12. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 113 42. Arpad Feszty, Arrival of the Conquering Hungarians (1894) panorama, oi l painting on canvas, plate 13. Hungarian National Historical Memorial Park. Source: Postcard series photographed by Enyedi Zoltan 114 I I. R " I K S X >K) i t o w . 43. Eadweard Muybrige, Horse In Motion (1878) photograph. Reproduced on: Early Cinema Resources website, http://www.earlycinema.com