Abstract
The incarceration of those determined to be security risks was a common feature of the wartime regimes of most European belligerents throughout the Great War. Yet, especially in several of the Habsburg successor states, internment and politicised incarceration continued as the war morphed into smaller wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions. This paper traces the social history of political incarceration in Hungary between approximately 1914–1924, with special attention to the post‑armistice period, during which wartime emergency laws were extended or revised to deal with political upheaval and renewed regional warfare. Within this framework, the paper focuses on the experience of one woman, a university‑educated teacher, who became a leading leftist educator and was imprisoned for her role in the Hungarian Republic of Councils (also called the Hungarian Soviet Republic) in 1920. She left Hungary for the Soviet Union in the 1920s as part of a prisoner exchange, and she remained there until the end of World War Two. She later returned to Hungary, and in 1953, published a memoir about her experiences during World War One and its aftermath. Using a gendered analysis to move from the larger context to the individual experience helps reveal continuity and change from Hungary’s Great War to its “war after war,” as well as the systematic and improvised nature of carceral deprivation and violence against female political prisoners. It also shows how the gendered memories of the Long World War One inflected the post‑1945 socialist party’s ideological mobilisation of women, putting forward an example of socialist womanhood that simultaneously challenged and reinforced the categories of prisoners and activists.
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