Keyword – social imaginary

Hermann, Veronika:

What happens in Lelle

Lake Balaton plays an important part in Hungarian cultural memory and social imaginary. The rhetorical and political application of the lake has been an established practice since the early 19th century and has had a similar structure as the maturing national literature of the era. Since then, social and cultural images of the lake have been shaped by collective and individual myths, legends, anecdotes and memories. This study looks at the role of the lake in movies made under the Kádár-regime, particularly three coming-of-age stories (Pál Sándor’s Bohóc a falon [1967], András Jeles’ A kis Valentino [1979] and Péter Gothár’s Megáll az idő [1981]), each of which represents a decade under state-socialism in Hungary. It analyses how this historical context determines the image of Lake Balaton as a rhetorical figure in the popular themes of coming-of-age movies.

Keywords: cultural memory, Hungarian new-wave, mediated memory, the politics of representation, social imaginary, societal nostalgia, state-socialism