Baptism or naming ceremony? A religious funeral or a civil service? These were important questions that citizens of Communist states had to decide for themselves, and the decisions they made turned a clash of contesting world views—a clash that found various manifestations wherever the Communist party gained influence on both sides of the iron curtain—into a most intense personal experience. While the characterization of everyday life as a battleground between a religious and a Communist world view can be considered a polarized simplification, it does make sense to think about the struggle between various discursive powers—not necessarily defined in such simplified binary terms as “church” and “state”—for providing convincing answers to the questions of human existence after the Second World War. The proverbial feud between Giovanni Guareschi’s popular fictional characters, the Catholic priest Don Camillo and the Communist mayor Peppone, with all its comic and tragic implications, was an essential part of everyday reality in Eastern Europe.
The paper will first broadly discuss the Hungarian state’s attempts at building up a secular ritual culture and will then focus on rituals connected death and dying. After a discussion of the work of Zoltán Rácz, the key figure behind creating a socialist ritual culture, and a brief overview of the legal regulations of civil ceremonies, the paper will explore the burial of Zoltán Kodály. Kodály’s burial in 1967 became an important instance where the personal wishes of the artist to be buried in a religious ceremony clashed with the state’s need to assert control over its intellectuals. The paper will close with a brief parallel to Paul Dessau’s funeral in East Germany and a suggestion for a more nuanced understanding of the conflict between church and state in Communist societies.
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