Years of Euphoria 1988-1990
The photographs on this website were published in the book Years of Euphoria , edited and translated into English by Piroska Nagy and published by Kieselbach Gallery in 2011. The body of work is introduced by János Rainer, and the book ends with the reflections of Tamás Kieselbach. Each event is preceded by a brief summary, and several are illustrated through the recollections of those visible in the photographs.The appendix includes two indexes: one contains brief biographies of the more well known people in the photographs, while the other is a list and description of the political parties and various organizations active during the period of regime change.
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Excerpt from the introduction
The story of this book begins with two photographs. In the first my father and his family are in Vienna, refugees of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. It is November. Everyone is looking into the camera, except my father, who is looking out of the picture as if he were not even there. He didn’t want to be. That September he had been transferred from his hometown of Nyíregyháza in Eastern Hungary to teach in Erdősmecske, a small mining village in southwestern Hungary. When the revolution broke out, the villagers elected him president of the Revolutionary Council, probably because he was the only intellectual in the village, and perhaps also because they thought it safer to choose someone who was from far away. If something was to go wrong they didn’t want someone from among them to be arrested. A few days after the Soviet Union crushed the revolution on November 4, my father received a phone call from the township seat that a security police Jeep was on its way to the village. He had to leave.
The following people contributed their writings to the book (names are in Hungarian name order):
Deutsch Tamás, Donáth László, Fodor Gábor, Haraszti Miklós, Hegedűs István, Hodosán Róza, Horn Gábor, Jánosi Katalin, Kis János, Kósa Ferenc, Kőszeg Ferenc, Lovas Zoltán, Maléter Pálné Gyenes Judit, Mécs Imre, Molnár Péter, Nagy Károly, Orbán Viktor, Pálinkás Szűts Róbert, Mark Palmer, Pesty László, Philipp Tibor, Rainer János, Rajk László, Rockenbauer Zoli, Sólyom László, Szelényi Zsuzsanna, Szilágyi Júlia, Szilágyi Sándor, Tirts Tamás, Tamás Gáspár Miklós, Wachsler Tamás