The Long 1968 in Hungary and Romania

This book advances a local, regional, and comparative analysis of the history of the sixty-eighters from Hungary and Romania between 1956 and 1975. The aim of the book is to answer to the following research question: to what extent does ‘the long 1968’ mark and change protest history? Another axis of my research, equally important, is: how can one genuinely distinguish between a protest, an opposition, and a pastime? Where did radicalisation truly begin, and when was it solely an auto-perception as a dissident? In other words, how can one truly distinguish between a leisure activity like listening to Radio Free Europe or exploring an altered state of consciousness, and an explicit political activity like organising a protest or writing subversive texts? Among other aims, the books’s scope is to understand where a leisure activity ends, and a protest starts. By ‘practicing counterculture,’ did the youth wish to contest the system or simply express themselves?

As method, oral history plays a crucial part. On a superficial level, the interviews helped to fill in the archival gap. However, oral testimonies proved to reveal much more than essential factual information. Oral history clarified how political and social events influenced the subjects' memory formation.