Still from the cinefilm titled “Hungarian Hockey Club – Amateur Hockey Club match, 1930. Old Raceground, Budapest.”
Credit: Hungarian National Film Archive, MGYSZ Video Archive.
Among the International Hockey Federation’s (FIH) founding members back in 1924 was the Hungarian Hockey Federation, which had been founded in the same year. As part of their centenary celebrations, they have been working with the Hungarian National Film Archive to share digitised cinefilm online.
People’s Republic of Hungary pennant, 1970. From THM collection.
These black and white films of men’s hockey include footage of Hungary’s first hockey club, Magyar Atlétikai Club, whose ice hockey members played (field) hockey in the summer, and Magyar Hockey Club, the first Hungarian club entirely devoted to hockey, founded in 1918. There is also national team footage of matches against Switzerland and India in the 1930s. The films span the 1920s-’50s capturing the formative decades of Hungarian hockey during a time of great geo-political upheaval in Europe.
At present, hockey is one of the least popular sports in Hungary – apart from a limited number of devoted supporters.” – József Vetö, 1965; author of Sports in Hungary whose book resides in THM library.
The historical background to these hockey films is the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following the First World War (WW1) and the punitive Treaty of Trianon in 1920, which saw the loss of 71% of Hungary’s historical territory. During the 1930s, the Hungarian government relied on trade with Europe’s authoritarian powers to help it pull out of the Great Depression and its politics became increasingly nationalistic and territorially aggressive. In 1940, Hungary formally allied itself with the Axis powers and joined WW2 by signing the Tripartite Pact.
Hungary’s founding affiliation to the FIH survived all this upheaval. After 1945 Hungary fell under the influence of the Soviet Union, which ensured the country became a communist state. Hungary remained an FIH member and supported the Soviet Union’s entry in 1956.
Can you see anything in these films that echo the state politics of their time?
