There has been a blind spot in the Hungarian history of education, namely the physical aggression, relating to the teachers after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. This paper introduces a lost and found theme, which was sentenced to silence: how the members of the armed forces punished and disciplined professors and teachers, who were accused by revolutionary (in the communist terminology counterrevolutionary) activities. I will show the process of arrest, different forms of humiliation and intimidation and the beatings, regarding to the elementary, secondary schools and universities.

The everyday experience of the violence was an important mental disposition after the first and second World War in the Central-Eastern European region (to the latter, see: Snyder, 2010), especially the sensitive and suppressed history of rape (Pető, 2017). The physical brutality continued after 1945 and legitimized by the communist power, against the enemies of the revolution (kulaks, bourgeoisie etc.), with a purifying rhetoric (Reemtsma, 2012) – the politics functioned as violence (Tilly, 2003). Intellectuals (included teachers) were targets of these campaigns for different reasons, like their nationalist or religious thoughts, cultural background, middle-class origins, and so on. In an ideology ruled-system, every teacher could be persecuted by a discrepancy from the official line (Kalmár, 1998), every expression necessarily became political in a “totalizing” environment, and the sanctions were equally severe (Johnson, 1996). The 1956 revolution was the biggest experiment to diverge from the Soviet model, a lot of students and teacher were involved in it – that is the starting point of my presentation.

Not surprisingly, after the collapse (4 November 1956), a slogan spread amongst the orthodox communists: “Every teacher is a fascist!”. Several armed forces organised (there wasn’t any general regulation about their activities, they didn’t belong neither the police, nor the army) to restore and strengthen the communist power, as an eyewitness said after years: “They beat all over the country.” From December 1956, the revolution became counterrevolution, a revolt against the state of workers and farmers from the official viewpoint, and the number of these incidents (connecting with fight and resistance) increased. There were a lot of similarities amid these: verbal and physical aggression appeared together, as the public degradation (e. g. beating in front of the class) and the manifestations of anti-intellectualism. Possible motivations were the scapegoat theory (teachers were responsible for the revolution), individual vengeances, selecting teachers’ society, consolidating power.

Different emotions and effects intertwined, mostly these stories were about mutual fear and hate between the participants. The armed forces feared because a possible next revolution, educators and students because the likely pain and repression, furthermore there was a deepen rooted hate against to each other. After 1957 these feelings and experiences underwent a traumatizing process, the perpetrators, victims and witnesses haven’t wanted to speak a word about these events: the silence dominated for a long time. In this analysis different theories can be used to make convincing interpretations, the first is related to the restrained part of school memories (to the new trends of this idea: Yanes-Cabrera, Meda & Viñao, 2017) and forgetting tabooed things of the past. The other key idea of studying emotions has been current trends since the 2000s, linked to various fields of history (Rosenwein, 2002) and history of education (Sobe, 2012). These actions affected human’s body through all senses; the entirely physical, mental and psychological sphere were involved (Grosvenor, 2012), inseparable in the analysis. The state allowed violence meant total control over the body, which caused a shocking impression, a case against rationality (Veiga, 2018), most of these teachers did not make any crimes, they were innocent people.

The theme has got an emphatic ethical dimension. People, who were engaged, do not undertake talking about it in public, even nowadays: I can’t use their information, because they speak only in private. During my researches about 1950s education, I found a dossier in the Hungarian National Archive, sources of the Education Ministry, without filing and any register number. There are a lot of letters, reports, records in the folder about physical brutalities against teachers, signed to the Minister directly – these documents have not been investigated yet in the Hungarian historiography. This lucky and accidental finding was the basic of the presentation, further pieces of the puzzle followed after this. From the sporadic evidences of violence, I created different narratives during three years of research, from five different groups of sources (I sign the origin of the evidences in parentheses): - Ministry documents, complaints (Hungarian National Archive), - Party reports and officials (Hungarian National Archive and county archives), - papers of the Armed forces (Military Archive), - articles, - and in one some cases, victim’s testimonies about the revolution and repression in the schools and universities (Oral History Archive). This gives a unique opportunity to confront differing (and sometimes changing) viewpoints and voices. For example, three perspectives present the events at the University of Miskolc in February 1957 – a student, the university president and the leader of the local armed forces –, with different intentions and frames of perception, constructing particular realities. At this point, a lot of questions arise about historical truth and evidence, the agency of knowledge, networks between ideology, power, propaganda and indoctrination, influenced by the Foucaultian paradigm (Depaepe & Huelstaert, 2015). These cases are extremely sensitive, in Central Eastern European countries the personal responsibilities of the former regime are still political topics and part of the debates, so the outline of the period (from November 1956 to April 1957) is anonymous. I do not name the executioners or sufferers, the important is here to show the functioning physical power, the conflicts between the actors (not just the power and the suppressed, but inside the political and armed bodies, between the children), the interpretations and the patterns of violence. Two waves of punishment could be recognised in this context: in December 1956 the Party began to “make clean” the higher education, from February-March 1957 the elementary and secondary education came on the same situation.

The violent aspect of the 1956 revolution has been an important subject in different Hungarian discourses since decades. From 1957 until the regime changes (1989), the only feasible way of speaking about it was the subject of atrocities by the rebelling masses against police, state security or party officers (the mob laws); after 1990, the opposite direction appeared and became the outstanding narrative in the Hungarian history, concentrating the power made crimes against their own citizens (e. g. Kahler, 2003), lately studies about constructing discourses of revolutionary, and counterrevolutionary violence occurred too (Müller, Takács & Tulipán, 2017). There have been only a few studies about clashes in the schools and universities during 1956 and 1957 (Gergely, 2006; Maruzs, 2018), and the theoretical reflections is still missing in the Hungarian historiography, although different forms of violence widely spread in late 1956, early 1957. The situation can be similar in the post-Soviet region, like we can read about another under-researched topic of 1968 and the normalization era in Czechoslovakia, from an educational point of view (Zounek, Šimáně & Knotová, 2018): a possible gap can be supposed in the Central-Eastern European history of education, about investigating state socialist power in crisis periods, with its mental and physical impacts in schooling, connected to the topics of body and memory. We all know that the education and issues of power are closely connected (Kestere, Rubene & Stonkuviene, 2015), we can study its most radical form in my proposal, when the traditional hierarchy of surveillance, discipline and punishment (Margolis & Fram 2007) was upset. Teachers, perhaps one of the prestigious people were touched by these actions and injured mentally and physically – they were the leaders of the local communities, and this was an element of the submission process, which broke the resistance.

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