Falsifying a Headshot

A talk by Dániel Ács

As the first event of the series of events, Real Fake Stories, accompanying the exhibition Fake for Real, journalist Dániel Ács gave a lecture on the history of the cult built around poet Miklós Radnóti and its often false elements.

In November 1944 Miklós Radnóti was shot into a mass grave by Hungarian soldiers near the village Abda. The poet’s friends and his widow decided that their beloved, then only known to a small circle, would become the great poet of the new historical era. To do this, however, they had to create a Radnóti image that was appropriate to the needs of the time. Radnóti’s life, the interpretation of his poetry and, above all, his death had to be reshaped. It was like a communist canonization process, in which the biography was shaped and kneaded until it met the requirements of the current requirements. For decades, the official and the organic Radnóti cult were built in parallel. But what was real and unreal in the Radnóti story? What do we think today about the cult-building of the time? Surely it was a mistake? And how does all this relate to the Fake for Real exhibition?