FEUILLETON
Seventy years after the Hungarian Uprising: on Beethoven’s “Egmont,” Hannah Arendt’s councils, and the question of who owns a date
An Overture from the Parliament
On the evening of October 23, 1956, the Budapest Radio Building on Bródy Sándor Street was no longer a place from which broadcasts could be made. Outside the building, students had demanded that their sixteen demands be read over the airwaves; from within the building, shots had been fired. In the days that followed, anyone who turned on the radio heard news reports coming from an improvised studio inside the Parliament building—and, in the intervals between these reports, phonograph records that someone had grabbed in the haste of the moment. One of these was played again and again: Beethoven’s overture to Goethe’s "Egmont." The radio station of the revolution adopted it as its signature tune, and thus a piece of music from the Vienna of 1810 became the sonic emblem of a nation that, for thirteen days, believed itself to be free.
I have listened to the overture several times this week, accompanied by that faint, uneasy conscience one feels when consuming music for commemorative purposes. One is familiar with the F minor of the introduction—those heavy, seemingly shackled chords—and one knows the breakthrough into F major at the end: the triumphant symphony with which Beethoven transforms the death of his hero into a victory. Anyone sitting by a radio in Budapest in 1956 would have heard both at once: the shackles and the liberation.
And there is something else, too—something easily overlooked. Lamoral, Count of Egmont—the Dutch nobleman whose downfall Goethe dramatized—was beheaded on June 5, 1568, in the Grand Place of Brussels, by order of the Duke of Alba and in the name of a distant central authority. Brussels, as a place where the freedom of a province fell beneath the executioner’s axe—it is one of those historical ironies that history provides, only for later orators to exploit. We shall return to this.
Thirteen Days
The chronicle can be recounted quickly, yet it remains almost impossible to grasp. On the afternoon of Tuesday, October 23, students marched to the monument of the Polish general Józef Bem to express their solidarity with the reformers in Warsaw. By evening, the bronze statue of Stalin lay on the pavement at the edge of the city park; only his boots remained on the pedestal. That night, the first Soviet tanks rolled into the city. Imre Nagy—the reformist communist whom the party had only recently sidelined—became Prime Minister. At the end of October, the Soviets withdrew from Budapest; on November 1, Nagy declared Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and its neutrality. At dawn on November 4, the tanks returned—this time with overwhelming force. Nagy’s final appeal was broadcast to the world. The world listened, and did nothing.
Approximately two thousand five hundred Hungarians lost their lives; thousands were convicted, hundreds were executed, and more than two hundred thousand fled across the border. In June 1958, following a secret trial, Imre Nagy was hanged.
Thirteen days, then—from October 23 to November 4. In her essay, Hannah Arendt counted twelve. This discrepancy is not a failure of arithmetic, but a matter of perspective: whether one considers the day of the suppression as part of the period of freedom or as the beginning of subjugation determines how the story is told. Even the arithmetic of remembrance is an act of interpretation.
The Miracle of the Councils
Arendt wrote her reflections on the Hungarian Revolution a year after the events took place. In 1958, they appeared in the *Journal of Politics*; that same year, they were published in German under the title *Die ungarische Revolution und der totalitäre Imperialismus* (“The Hungarian Revolution and Totalitarian Imperialism”); and finally, they were included as an epilogue to the expanded new edition of the book known to German readers as *Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft* (“Elements and Origins of Totalitarian Domination”). The text is absent from later editions; Arendt removed it. One can only speculate as to why.
What captivated Arendt about Hungary was not the heroism of the fighters, but something less conspicuous: the councils. Within a few days, workers’ councils, revolutionary councils, student councils—councils in factories and villages—sprang up all across the country. No one had planned them, no party had ordered them, and no theorist had devised them. They emerged from the simple fact that people acting in concert also wished to deliberate in concert. For Arendt, this was no coincidence, but a recurring pattern: the same form had appeared in Paris in 1871, in Russia in 1905 and 1917, and in Germany in 1918—and each time, it was the very first thing to be stifled by those who seized power in the name of the revolution. Five years later, in *On Revolution*, she would describe the concept of the councils as the “lost treasure” of the revolutionary tradition.
For Arendt, the councils were not merely a tool for insurrection, but a distinct manifestation of freedom—spaces where citizens are not represented by others, but instead appear, speak, and pass judgment for themselves. The totalitarian state had gone to great lengths to atomize individuals, transforming them into a mass of isolated units. In Hungary, it became clear that twelve years of oppression had failed to destroy the space between human beings. He had merely been buried. A few days were enough to uncover him.
Natality
There is a concept that holds Arendt’s political thought together, one that took shape in 1958: natality. In *The Human Condition*—published the same year as her essay on Hungary—she describes "action" as the capacity to initiate something new; a capacity rooted in the fact that every human being, by virtue of their birth, is a beginning in their own right. Indeed, at the end of her chapter on ideology and terror, she cites a line from St. Augustine: "That there be a beginning, man was created."
For Arendt, the events in Hungary served as a test of this thesis under the most adverse conditions imaginable. Totalitarian rule aims to eradicate spontaneity, to abolish the unpredictable, and to render human beings as predictable as inanimate objects. Yet, on a Tuesday in October, a few students walked toward a monument—and the entire edifice began to totter.
This is the deeper meaning of natality: it is not a sentimental celebration of life, but the sober recognition that the new cannot be prevented as long as human beings exist. At the same time, Arendt insisted that an event does not derive its dignity from its success. The Hungarian Revolution, she argued, was a genuine event—one whose greatness did not depend on victory or defeat.
One image from her essay remains unforgettable: the silent procession of women dressed in black, moving through occupied Budapest after the uprising had been crushed, to publicly mourn their dead. For Arendt, this was the revolution’s final political gesture. A year later, on the first anniversary, the people of Budapest—as if by a silent, unspoken agreement—avoided theaters, cinemas, cafés, and restaurants. A people no longer permitted to act took action through their absence.
Camus and Shame
If Arendt was the analyst of the Hungarian Uprising, then Albert Camus was its accuser. As early as November 1956, in a message to French students, he spoke of the shame and powerlessness with which the West had watched the suffering of the Hungarians. On the first anniversary, he wrote a piece whose very title serves as a judgment: "Le sang des Hongrois"—The Blood of the Hungarians.
It contains an idea that remains painful to this day because of how uncomfortable it is: that a defeated and shackled Hungary had done more for freedom and justice than any other nation in the preceding twenty years. Camus’ writings on Hungary were directed not only against Moscow, but also against those in Paris who insisted on viewing the events in Budapest as a fascist counter-revolution. He demanded something that, in its simplicity, might seem almost naive—yet it is perhaps the most demanding requirement of all: that the truth about the victims must not be sacrificed for the sake of the convenience of one’s own political camp.
Both Arendt and Camus refused to force the event into a pre-existing, rigid framework. And both understood that the West had been, above all else, a spectator.
Buchs, November
Observers—and hosts. For Switzerland, the year 1956 carries a distinct resonance, beginning at the border station of Buchs in the St. Gallen Rhine Valley, where trains carrying refugees from Austria arrived that November. The Federal Council had initially opened the border to ten thousand people; in the end, around fourteen thousand Hungarians were taken in—a number that, relative to the total population, was higher than in almost any other country. In Bern, railway workers observed a minute of silence, while students collected blood and donations. At the time, the *NZZ* wrote that one of the dark nights of history had once again descended upon humanity and the continent.
Among those fourteen thousand was a fourteen-year-old boy from Budapest named Andreas Oplatka. He went on to become an editor at the *NZZ*, reporting from Stockholm, Paris, and Moscow, before returning to Budapest in the 1990s as a correspondent. There is perhaps no more poignant illustration of what it means to offer refuge: that a child arriving on a train of exiles might, decades later, explain to the world where he came from.
Yet, those who cherish this memory should be careful not to romanticize it. The generosity shown in 1956 followed a specific political logic. The Hungarians arrived as heroes of anti-communism—and often as highly skilled professionals entering an economy in need of labor. Jewish refugees who reached Switzerland from Egypt that same winter experienced little of the "culture of welcome" that defined those months. This does not diminish the aid provided, but it serves as a reminder that even compassion has a history—and that a nation’s collective memory can be selective.
One Date, Many Masters
Few dates in European history have been reinterpreted as often as October 23rd. For the regime of János Kádár—which had come to power on the back of Soviet tanks—the date remained, for three decades, a "counter-revolution," a subject to be met with public silence. In January 1989, the reformist communist Imre Pozsgay described the events as a "popular uprising," and that single term set the regime’s foundations sliding. On June 16, 1989, Imre Nagy was ceremonially reburied in Heroes' Square. There, before hundreds of thousands of people, a twenty-six-year-old law student named Viktor Orbán demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops. On October 23, 1989, the Republic of Hungary was proclaimed. The date had been reclaimed.
It did not remain in one set of hands for long. In his later years as head of government, Orbán—the orator of 1989—turned October 23rd into a stage for a new struggle for freedom, this time directed against Brussels. In the autumn of 2021, he declared that Brussels ought to realize that even the communists had failed to subdue the Hungarians. Two years later, in Veszprém, he described Moscow as a "tragedy" and Brussels as its poor, contemporary parody. The date once associated with tanks from the East was transformed into a cipher directed against the West.
Here, the circle closes back to Egmont. For the logic that transmutes Moscow into Brussels is the same logic that could cast a Count—who died in 1568 in Brussels under the axe of a Spanish governor—as a key witness against the European Union. History provides the analogies, but it bears no responsibility for how they are used. There is a categorical difference between a tank division and a legal proceeding concerning the rule of law—a distinction that rhetoric may blur, but can never erase. And now, this Friday. For the seventieth anniversary, Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa are coming to Budapest—to a Prime Minister, Péter Magyar, whose Tisza Party secured a clear electoral victory in April and who has promised to lead Hungary back into the European mainstream. Magyar says he has invited all European heads of state and government—with the exception of Vladimir Putin. The date, which for years was turned against Europe, is now becoming the stage for a return.
One may well be pleased by this. Yet, one should not confuse it with the event itself. Anyone who takes Arendt seriously becomes wary when governments co-opt a date—even if those governments happen to be the more agreeable ones. The councils of 1956 were, by definition, not an initiative from above; they emerged precisely where no one was governing. A commemoration featuring state guests, flags, and television broadcasts is legitimate, but it belongs to a different order than the event it seeks to honor. Intellectual honesty demands that this be stated—especially on a day when the sense of relief is so profound.
Coda: The Overture, Once More
So, what remains of thirteen days? Perhaps this: that for Arendt, freedom is not a possession to be managed, but an event that unfolds when people begin to act in concert. It cannot be bequeathed like a monument, nor can it be decreed like a public holiday. Each generation must initiate it anew, and each risks squandering it. The fact that Hungary—this spring, at the ballot box and without bloodshed—achieved a turning point, is perhaps the most fitting conclusion to this anniversary: not a repetition of the tragedy, but a new, unspectacular beginning.
Anyone listening to the *Egmont* Overture today should pay attention to its opening bars, not just the finale. Beethoven allows the triumph to emerge only after making the weight of the shackles audible. The jubilation at the end is credible precisely because it has been wrested from that heavy burden. This would be a sound principle for commemoration in general. The best way to celebrate freedom is to never forget how heavy it once weighed, and how briefly it endured during that autumn. Thirteen days. Or twelve—depending on how you count.
Sapere aude!
S.
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