CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Kollár, Flóra |
|---|---|
| Title | Reports as Confessions: Priests as Agents of the State Security in Communist Hungary. Case study of Istvan Kormendi. |
| Summary | Could an informer employed by the State Security deceive his officers for years? Could his personality remain healthy having had to report on his friends? Is someone who was blackmailed into becoming an agent a victim of the system or a collaborator? These are the questions I investigate in my thesis by looking at and analyzing the reports of a priest who informed for years during the 1950s in Hungary. The hundreds of pages of his reports can be found in the Archive of the State Security (ÁBSZTL) in Budapest. The relationship of the contact officer and the agent can be likened – and perhaps in the mind of a Catholic priest this idea also occurred – to that of the confessant and the priest he confesses to; his reports likened to confessions. Is this a false parallel, or a striking similarity? How could the informer maintain his integrity outwards? I investigate this by comparing the person coming through from his reports to how his still living fellow priests (who served prison sentences) remember him. Through this case study I show the complex problem of dealing with agents; the role they assume as both victims of the system they lived in, but also as collaborators with it. Moreover, the case brings up the current problem of dealing with the communist past of the Hungarian Catholic Church and investigating the reaction of the Church to the whole issue of agents and the agreements the Church made with the government, whether it had been a struggle for survival or a form of collaboration, or perhaps – as I argue – both. |
| Supervisor | Rev, Istvan; Riedl, Matthias |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/kollar_flora.pdf |
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