Disclosing the Self: 1956 Hungarian Student Refugees Creating Autobiographies for University Scholarships in the USA

Abstract

ABSTRACT Following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, many students fled and settled in the USA. At the Joyce Kilmer Reception Centre, potential university scholarship candidates were asked to write an autobiography as a contribution to their assessment. Gary Filerman, the World University Service representative at Camp Kilmer archived 18 of the resulting translated texts. Autobiographies played a significant role in controlling people’s aspirations in Soviet communist states. The practice of ordinary people writing autobiographies began after the Bolshevik revolution and eventually became an enforced activity across a person’s life. As journeys of political conformity, these autobiographies have been compared to the submission demanded by a total institution complete with ritual humiliations. In Hungary, potential university students would have been familiar with the form as an autobiography was required for university entrance which rested as much on Marxist Leninist determinism of class origin as talent. The texts utilise the genre, including rhetoric from propaganda discourses, but usurped the form so that it was no longer an enforced activity but one which revealed personal aspirations feelings and motivations. They detail lost ambition, persecution based on ascribed social class, the hope provided by the revolution and subsequent loss of life and flight.