The RC in Hungary case study analyses the significance of the late-Communist era to the lives of Hungarians today, as seen in the internationally popular TV series A Besúgó [The Informant]. The case study highlights sociopolitical parallels between life during the Kádár era (1957-1989, when A Besúgó is set) and life during, what can be termed, the Orbán era (2010-today). We suggest that A Besúgó's depiction of the anti-Communist youth movement during Hungary’s ‘soft dictatorship’ reflects today’s intergenerational and political tensions concerning civil liberties.

Hungarian TV is neglected in media scholarship. To address this gap, RC in Hungary takes a multi-disciplinary approach that will diversify the field through the synthesis of original archival materials, an interview with A Besúgó's writer-director Bálint Szentgyörgyi, and the close textual analysis of contemporary Hungarian TV aesthetics. 

We hope that RC in Hungary will bring Hungarian television into the academic and public spotlight at a critical time for understanding Eastern European identities when considering Viktor Orbán’s anti-European rhetoric, anti-Eastern European sentiment surrounding Brexit, and the war in Ukraine. 

A Besúgó tells an interconnected story of the lives of university students who organise and participate in the Democratic Opposition movement in 1985, the twilight hours of Communist Hungary. 

The series begins with a scene depicting Geri Demeter, the protagonist, being blackaimed by the State Police on a train from rural Hungary to Budapest where he is due to begin his university studies. It is in this moment that Geri becomes 'a besúgó', an informant, as he is enlisted to report on Zsolt Száva who leads the student opposition. A Besúgó sees Geri walk a tightrope as he balances his duties as an informant with his desire to belong and be free. 

With its fast-paced espionage plot, use of Hungarian rock music, and depictions of the chaotic lives of university students, A Besúgó raises interesting questions about intergenerational trauma and postmemory. Specifically, research combines Alison Landsberg’s ‘prosthetic memory’ theory, an understanding of the sociopolitical parallels between 1980s Hungary and Orbán’s ‘illiberal democracy’, and Szentgyörgyi’s perception of the Kádár-era (as a person born after 1989) when creating A Besúgó, offering original insights into why Communist histories speak to viewers today.

Read Veronika Hermann's chapter to find out more: Socialist Settings in Contemporary Hungarian and Czech Quality Television. 

In this short feature, Kateryna Yeremieieva discusses how her life and academic interests developed, leading to her research on the importance of humour as a discourse that can be used to destabilise communities during times of political oppression. 

"Soviet political jokes was one of the topics that inspired me to pursue academic research as a student. At that time, I perceived Soviet anecdotes almost outside their original Soviet context: as interesting, absurd, and sometimes cruel cultural forms that could be analysed as texts in their own right.

Years later, when teaching courses on Ukrainian history, I began using these jokes as illustrative material in my lectures. To my surprise, my students often did not understand what was funny about them — or even what their point was. Yet this misunderstanding did not worry me. On the contrary, it made me quietly happy. It meant that a new Ukrainian generation had grown sufficiently detached from the Soviet symbolic universe to form its own narratives, references, and systems of meaning. Soviet jokes no longer spoke to them — and that, in itself, felt like a sign of decolonial distance.

That is why April 1, 2022, came as such a shock. On International Day of Laughter, Russian state media released a documentary devoted entirely to Soviet-era anecdotes. This happened just as evidence of mass atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine was emerging, including the massacre in Bucha. The juxtaposition was chilling. 

Why were Soviet jokes being revived at this moment? For whom were they being told? And what cultural and political work were they meant to perform?

These questions served as the starting point for my chapter in Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production, edited by Lucy and Anna. You can find out about the volume by listening to their podcast here. 

In my contribution, I focus on Soviet anecdotes as a particular form of cultural memory. Far from being harmless humour, these jokes operate as compact narratives that require historical knowledge to be understood. Today, in Russia, they increasingly function as tools of nostalgic storytelling, reinforcing generational hierarchies and offering a familiar symbolic language in times of crisis. When retold by state actors — including Vladimir Putin himself — Soviet jokes help normalise the Soviet past and make the present appear less alarming by comparison.

At the same time, these anecdotes remain deeply ambivalent. They mock power while preserving attachment to it; they expose absurdity while softening critique through laughter. Examining their contemporary circulation allows us to see how humour participates in memory politics, affective coloniality, and the normalisation of violence.

If you are interested in how seemingly “small” cultural forms, such as jokes, carry trauma, nostalgia, and political meaning long after their historical moment has passed, I warmly invite you to explore Replaying Communism and the conversations it opens."

I research how radio features turn everyday lives into public history by analyzing directors’ editing decisions and the emerging tensions between “real” recordings and scripted scenes. From listening closely, I can understand how state-run institutions in the German Democratic Republic (GDR; East Germany) wanted people to perceive and remember themselves and others. Through my research for Replaying Communism and my ongoing work on the “Broadcast Biographies” project (which I discuss below), I engage with how audio legacies today can be an act of memory work.

Though often overlooked, radio was an important medium in East Germany. Along with watching television and reading, listening to the radio was among the most widespread leisure-time activities in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall (Hanke 1990, p. 179). It was also a means by which East Germans could receive Western broadcasts (if signals could reach their antennae). 

In 1963, at the height of the Cold War, East Germany’s state radio broadcaster, Rundfunk der DDR, established a radio features unit within its dramaturgy department (Conley 1999, p. 5). The unit produced more than 1,000 audio works until its dissolution in late 1991, fictionalizing real stories through a blend of scripted scenes and actuality recordings. 

Today, surviving features preserved in radio archives can function as a kind of time machine, taking researchers and radio enthusiasts alike back to East Germany, allowing them to hear how life there was rendered in sound. Read my chapter 'Germany's Traumatic Communist Past through Contemporary Radio Life Narratives' to find out more. 

In this feature about the cultural production that emerged out of East Germany, I’m going to give you a couple of examples of radio plays that were popular in the region before the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

Meine Schwester Ursel (1986) by Karlheinz Tesch, directed by Fritz-Ernst Fechner, follows a day in the life of a district nurse named Ursel living in East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg. Tirelessly visiting patients from door to door, she embodies the ideal of the socialist everyday hero. The depiction is affectionate yet sanitized, prompting the contemporary listener to ask: how authentic were these “officially approved” radio portraits? 

Der dicke Lipinski (1989) written and directed by Sieglinde Scholz-Amoulong was intended as a tribute to a loyal party comrade, Hans Lipinski, a genial brigade leader at a power plant. The author recorded him before, during, and after the Wende (transition). This turned the feature into a chronicle of a collapsing regime; a documentary record of the GDR’s final days, captured in real time.

These audio pieces offer a rich archive of lived experience and speak directly to my research project, “Broadcast Biographies: Innovations of Genre and Medium”, funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), which I am undertaking with Professors Inge Arteel and Birgit Van Puymbroeck. To learn more about this project, follow this link. For anyone interested, radio plays are held at the German Broadcasting Archive and are accessible online through platforms such as Deutschlandfunk Kultur’s Hörspiel und Feature and Wirklichkeit im Radio. 

Radio features allow anyone interested to listen to voices from the past and draw their own conclusions. 

Works cited

Conley, Patrick. (1999). Features und Reportagen im Rundfunk der DDR. Berlin, Askylt Verlag.

Hanke, Helmut. (1990). “Media culture in the GDR: characteristics, processes and problems.” Media, Culture & Society, 12(2), 175–93.

My research examines private museums of communist history, many of which have either been ignored in English-language scholarship or disregarded as kitsch, commercial endeavours. I explore how post-communist national identity is both reflected and constructed in these spaces as well as in national museums and other state-sponsored cultural institutions. From this research, I have become a firm believer that private museums are in fact important components of the post-1989 museal landscape. 

I began exploring the role and reception of private museums by considering how foreign visitors who did not grow up under communism or in a post-communist country engage with this history in museum spaces. Inspired by my own journey of trying to learn about and make sense of this era through many museum visits, I asked myself if visitors’ perceptions of communism could be challenged and/or reinforced by contemporary exhibitions. My findings surprised me.

Firstly, I learned that privately owned museums have a long history of being denigrated as flippant, inauthentic, and unscholarly attempts at presenting a complex history to fee-paying tourists. This criticism intensifies if the museums are owned by foreign investors. The museums dedicated to everyday life under communism, like Warsaw’s Museum of Life Under Communism / PRL museum (which I analyse in my chapter for Replaying Communism), are often accused of ignoring the harsher realities of authoritarianism in favour of a more “playful” representation of the past that is more palatable for tourists.

Secondly, I found my first finding to be problematic! The visitors to privately owned museums with whom I spoke found these spaces to be interesting and valuable. Museums like the PRL museum revealed a concerted effort on the part of their designers to promote a particular understanding of Polish national identity, which often fell in line with tropes of nation-building narratives found amongst state-run institutions. This includes things like the “us vs them” narrative aimed at highlighting the distinctiveness of the nation, the symbolic images and objects museums draw on to create what Benedict Anderson (1983) refers to as an “imagined community”, and stories of heroism and suffering which elevate the importance of the nation.

This led me to question the relevance of nationhood and national identity in the context of heritage sites, curation, and tourism. So, I asked: 

why should we care what private museums promote and what foreign visitors’ perceptions are of a nation’s identity?

To answer this question, I turned to Duncan Light’s assessment of the post-communist heritage landscape at the turn of the century. Light argued that tourists were disrupting post-communist countries’ desire to construct what he described as new “democratic, pluralist, capitalist and largely Westward-looking” (Light, 2000, p. 158) identities because they were coming to the region to see the very “unwanted” heritage these countries sought to move away from. Twenty-five years after Light’s research was published, I found that many of the foreign visitors to Poland’s PRL museum with whom I spoke said that democratic ideals are worth fighting for, especially now in an increasingly divided Europe. These visitors added that they left these private museums feeling hopeful about what the country’s citizens can withstand. 

Private museums, then, are doing important cultural and political work in their defence of post-communist democratic identity. Is it fair or representative of their value that they are still considered trivial or kitsch? I hope that this unfortunate reputation fades and their role in creating awareness about the communist past as well as building and promoting post-1989 national identities is more widely accepted and respected.

Works cited

Anderson, Benedict. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, Verso. 

Light, Duncan. (2000). “Gazing on Communism: Heritage Tourism and Post-Communist Identities in Germany, Hungary and Romania.” Tourism Geographies 2(2), 157–76.