Abstract
Despite of the fact that during the time of state socialism commuters meant a continuouslygrowing social group both in proportion and in size, writing about their social history hasbeen pushed into the background so far. The author’s aim is to fill this gap by trying to discoverthe most of the available sources of different genres. The present study shows part of thislarger volume work, it shows what it can add to our knowledge about a social group throughtraditional sources if we include caricatures of a given social group as visual historical sourcesin the analysis.In this paper, the author analyses sixteen caricatures of commuters, published in “LudasMatyi,” comparing written and audio visual sources. In the study, she tries, among other things,to find out if there was a definite commuter picture of “Ludas Matyi”, and if so, to what extentdid this commuter’s image differ from that of other products in the press? To what extent did thesatirical portrayal of commuters refer to long-distance commuters and to what extent to dailycommuters? Were the real anomalies of commuting in the era reflected in Ludas Matyi?The analysis discusses the economic and social processes that characterize the time ofpublishing the caricatures, and denominates the external and internal characteristics andemotions commuters were endowed with.The aim of the author is to present the method ofcaricature analysis, which emphasizes the comparability of resources.
Highlights
In this paper, the author analyses sixteen caricatures of commuters, published in “Ludas Matyi,” comparing written and audio visual sources
The analysis discusses the economic and social processes that characterize the time of publishing the caricatures, and denominates the external and internal characteristics and emotions commuters were endowed with.The aim of the author is to present the method of caricature analysis, which emphasizes the comparability of resources
If we look at the way how experts examined the individualfamily relationship, we can see that the representatives of the disciplines that placed commuting in the focus of the examination – demography, statistics, urban planning, transportation science, treated commuters as individuals.So did economists, among the representatives of disciplines focusing on commuters, who saw commuters mainly as workforce
Summary
“Ludas Matyi” distributed its caricatures for almost fifty years nationwide; the caricatures many times criticized the society and often mediated a higher political will. The other two caricatures out of the three focusing on family (Pictures No1 and No8) were published earlier, during the time of the collective farm organizational period (1958–1961) In my opinion, these drawing deliberately depict commuters in home environment in the village. László Berettyán after analysing the total labour force balance of the National Planning Office (“Országos Tervhivatal”), was among the firsts to come to a conclusion, that: “The situation of spending a long time travelling, and being far away from home, can lead to adverse consequences in many other respects, e.g. loosening of family ties, alcoholism, etc.” (Berettyán 1965: 46) In later years, most authors from different disciplines attributed deviant behaviour only and exclusively to the lifestyles of long-distance commuters.16I would quote only from József Gödöny, director of the National Institute of Criminology, who stated in his monograph “The socio-economic development and crime”, in 1976, 15 See: 21–28. The hopeless life of commuters entailed that commuters rather chose the pubs and buddies over their families as it was shown for example in the documentary Black Train, “Fekete vonat”
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