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Integrating victims, externalising guilt? commemorating the Holocaust in Hungary

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Published/Copyright: June 20, 2016
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Comparative Southeast European Studies
From the journal Comparative Southeast European Studies Volume 64 Issue 2

Abstract

Since its rightward political shift, questions concerning how Hungarian society has reflected on the role the country played during the Second World War and how it has confronted its co-responsibility for the Holocaust in particular have been raised with new urgency. After introducing some of the central divisive issues in the interpretation and commemoration of the Holocaust in Hungary, the author analyses current trends based on a case study of the Holocaust’s 70th anniversary. The article assesses the sustained attempts of reinterpreting the recent past of the country in the name of a renewed national canon.

By the beginning of 1944, the Hungarian Jewish community had been persecuted for years, but was still largely intact and thus represented the main Jewish community in the Nazi sphere of influence. As a result of the brutally efficient implementation of the Holocaust in 1944-1945 with a substantial coresponsibility of local authorities, Hungarian Jews ended up constituting the single largest group of victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Due above all to the liberation of a significant part of the Budapest Jewish community, many of whose members subsequently decided to stay in the country, Hungary also has had one of the largest groups of Holocaust survivors in postwar Europe. The utterly devastating experience of this highly acculturated Jewish community thus arguably belongs at the very centre of the tragedy of the European Jews in the 20th century: its catastrophe was most intimately connected to the most infamous Nazi camp complex, whereas the minority of its survivors tended to continue their lives in communist-dominated Eastern Europe.[1]

How has the remembrance of the Holocaust evolved in the case of Hungary under communism, in early postcommunism, and in recent years? Secondly, and more specifically, what major initiatives, public controversies, and scholarly developments came about as a result of the 70th anniversary commemoration of the Holocaust in Hungary in 2014? I shall first briefly discuss the main lines of division in the remembrance of the Holocaust in Hungary and introduce the major waves of dealing with its history, before turning to the central subjects of my essay, the official initiatives, main controversies, and key scholarly activities of the 70th anniversary.[2]

The Making and Unmaking of the Liberal Consensus

Back in 2000, a few years prior to its full inclusion into the European Union structures, Hungary dedicated itself to participating in international eff orts of furthering Holocaust remembrance. As part of this new commitment assumed under the first Fidesz-led government, Hungary introduced its own Holocaust Remembrance Day. 16 April — the day the first ghettos and so-called relocation camps were established in Hungary in 1944 — was chosen as its date.[3] It is improbable that decision makers around the turn of the millennium considered that the commemorations of the Holocaust’s 70th anniversary would practically coincide with the Hungarian electoral campaign of 2014. These general elections were eventually held a mere ten days before the date of the main anniversary. In the early years of the new century, when Hungary could still pride itself with a rather impressive political, economic, and cultural record and was among the most consensually supported candidates heading for European Union membership, few could have expected that by 2014 extensive critical scrutiny would be directed toward the country’s recent political evolution and, more specifically, toward its nationalist politics of history.

After all, Hungary’s entirely peaceful and seemingly unequivocal reorientation made the country an internationally widely praised example during the early phase of ‘the transition’. However, the basic ‘liberal consensus’ of early postcommunism has to all intents and purposes been unmade since then. In recent years, Hungary has arguably offered a radical example of broader regional and European trends.[4] The growing strength of local ethnic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies under the second premiership of Viktor Orbán that started in 2010 has turned the country into one of the most controversial member states of the European Union.[5] As a part of Hungary’s rightward shift in the first decade of the 21st century, in certain layers of society, antisemitism has visibly strengthened too. Since the rightist government took power in 2010, the issues of how widespread Hungarian antisemitism has become and how significant a danger it might be again have become increasingly contested.[6]

Due to controversial political, social and cultural developments, questions concerning how Hungarian society has reflected on the role the country played during the Second World War and how it has dealt with its co-responsibility for the Holocaust in particular have been raised with new urgency. The Fideszdominated government has an ambition to institutionalise a new vision of the country’s recent past, which has been in evidence for years without the exact weight and specific interpretation of the Holocaust in the emerging canon being suffi ciently defined.[7] The 70th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary took place — even beyond its above mentioned rather misfortunate timing — at a time when discussions over the currently dominant and most appropriate forms of Holocaust commemoration have already been turning polemical and ever more politically charged.

Dividing Lines

In relation to the Holocaust, three major questions have divided Hungarian public opinion since the end of the Second World War: the relative responsibility of Hungarians and Germans; the ideological explicability of Hungarian involvement focused on the problems of fascism and antisemitism; and, third, the way the victims ought to be categorised and remembered. Fighting on the Axis side and being involved in the war on the Eastern front as a relatively independent actor, Hungary had a clearly negative but also a somewhat mixed record long into the war years. Whereas the Jews of Hungary suffered ever more severe discrimination and tens of thousands of them had been murdered by 1944, the country started to cautiously distance itself from Nazi Germany in 1942-1943 and refused Nazi requests to deport its large Jewish population still amounting, according to the racist criteria of the perpetrators, to some 5% of its population. The Nazi German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944, however, resulted in heightened collaboration, with the Holocaust being the crucial case in point. Shortly upon March 1944, a joint decision making process involving both Germans and Hungarians led to a massive campaign of deportations from Hungary, which were in fact chiefly executed by Hungarian authorities until the border town of Košice (Kassa in Hungarian), today in Slovakia, from where control was handed over to the Nazis. The aforementioned course of events implies that the large majority of Hungarian Jews were annihilated outside Hungary and not directly by their Hungarian neighbours — according to current estimates, around 4 to 7% of the victims of the Hungarian Holocaust were murdered by other Hungarians.

The juxtaposition of these basic historical facts may help understand why such a broad spectrum of opinion on the level of national responsibility could emerge in postwar Hungary: whereas the responsibilities of Germans and Hungarians were clearly intertwined, particular narratives of the war and the origins of the Holocaust in Hungary have in fact widely differed in their emphases, from blaming the Germans in the interest of exonerating Hungarians to constructing an almost exclusively Hungarian prehistory of genocidal policies. The inner-Hungarian disagreements seem to ultimately revolve around a rarely explicitly addressed question: what kind of effect did the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 have? Did it drastically alter Hungarian trajectories or merely catalyse existing tendencies?[8]

As comprehensive historical explanations, both externalisation and indigenisation attempts prove to be of limited value. Nonetheless, the question of the exact share of local co-responsibility shall in all likelihood continue to preoccupy the Hungarian public. To be sure, the German occupation did radically alter Hungarian behaviour regarding the Holocaust and can be considered one of its primary causes. Yet the resulting shift in Hungarian behaviour was larger than its external trigger. In other words, the German intervention could exert its catastrophic impact precisely through the dramatic change of Hungarian practices.

Next to the question of the forms and extent of national responsibility, the explicability of the Holocaust in Hungary has also been a highly contested matter with various answers emerging as being dominant in diff erent epochs. After the communist consolidation of power, an ideological story was being told with fascist movements and regimes effectively pictured as the precondition for the implementation of genocide. In conformity with the standard European pattern of postwar antifascism focusing much attention on mythicised stories of resistance, the history of those persecuted and murdered on racist grounds was subsumed in larger frames — and might even have been completely overshadowed by them.

In the case of Hungary, there was simply way too much ideological coherence to this communist story. Thus, when Randolph L. Braham, a doyen of Holocaust historiography residing in the United States, published his major two-volume synthesis in the early 1980s on the pages of which he implied that Hungary might have saved its Jewish population if it had remained a loyal ally of Nazi Germany until the end of the war, this led top historians in Hungary to contest his depiction.[9] Braham reasoned that, even though the Holocaust was swiftly implemented upon the invasion of March 1944, Nazi Germany did not invade Hungary because of the presence of what was by then the largest Jewish community within its reach. In his interpretation, the Nazis much rather invaded due to Hungary’s decreasing commitment to the joint war efforts. What Braham thereby posited was an inverse causal relation between the country’s Nazi alliance and the catastrophe of 1944. Such a differentiated view was clearly at odds with the ideological coherence of the official communist version. As it offered complexities and ambiguities in place of antifascist ideological and moral clarities, it was bound to be controversial before 1989.

However, with the gradual decline of communist ideological control, mandatory antifascism lost much of what was still left of its persuasive power. This coincided with the moment when the question of what led to the deportation of Hungarian Jews, could already be more prominently discussed. These may be viewed as positive developments but as a result of these parallel changes — the decline of mandatory antifascism, on the one hand, and rising interest in the history of the Holocaust, on the other — the problem of explicability only deepened. If the country did not have a fascist dictatorship during most years of the Second World War, after all, perhaps not even during the mass deportations of 1944, then why did Hungarian authorities so actively participate in genocidal policies? The transformation of Hungarian historical culture around the end of the communist regime thus resulted in the question of antisemitism acquiring much greater importance, so much so that it emerged as one of the most heavily contested issues in public life.[10]

The third contested issue is, similarly to the first, rather a matter of emphasis, but is no less crucial: should the victims of the Hungarian Holocaust be identified as Hungarian Jews, simply as Jews, or perhaps primarily as Hungarians? While the first option may seem most correct as well as appropriate, powerful narratives have been developed around the latter two options too. Israeli commemorations of the Shoah would typically list Jewish victims from Hungary alongside Jewish victims from other European countries. On the other hand, mainstream Hungarian commemorative practices try to integrate the local victims of the Jewish Holocaust into larger communities of Hungarian victims — not infrequently by including them among the Hungarian victims of the Second World War and thus placing them alongside those who died fighting on the Eastern Front. Moreover, equally controversially, the Holocaust is often assigned a place in a series of ‘national traumas’ alongside ‘Trianon’ and ‘the crimes of communism’.

Major Waves

All three Hungarian contexts — the one concerning national responsibility, the one related to ideological explicability, and the one regarding the exact identification of the victims — have intriguing histories of their own. Whereas in the second half of the 1940s, Hungary was still in the forefront of documenting the history of the Holocaust — through relevant war crimes trials, the recording of thousands of survivor testimonies, dozens of published memoirs as well as the impressive early oeuvre of Hungarian Jewish contemporary historians — Stalinism meant a clear rupture in this respect as well.[11] Large-scale public tabooisation may not have resulted in forgetting; however, the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memories thereupon worked in mostly subterranean ways. In the 1970s and 1980s, various documentary films and publications in the mixed genre of autobiographical fiction — such as those by Mária Ember or Imre Kertész — significantly impacted local forms of cultural memory and were responsible for a certain level of public presence of the traumatic recent past.[12] Whereas several scholars conducted oral history interviews with numerous survivors well before the end of the communist regime, Hungarian Holocaust historiography remained rather marginal all the way until 1989 with the most important works being written and published outside the country.[13]

Some notable shifts in sensibilities during the 1970s and 1980s notwithstanding, ideological explanations of history were still regularly required. The theory of fascism may have been less dogmatically applied but remained an important legitimating tool, and the German Nazis continued to be held chiefl y responsible for the Holocaust in Hungary. In other words, in spite of the unequivocal condemnation of the pre-1945 Hungarian regimes, attempts to externalise guilt were widely practiced. What is more, the Jewishness of the victims was only sporadically mentioned.[14]

Around the fall of the communist regime, important reassessments of all three issues were formulated. Starting prior to 1989 but taking on much greater force afterwards, previous ideological explanations were largely discredited, the Hungarian role in the implementation of the Holocaust was discussed more openly, and the Jewishness of the victims would finally be acknowledged. All three of these developments may be assessed positively since they approximated historical realities much more closely while also contributing to the emergence of a more self-critical debate.

Nevertheless, nearly a quarter of a century after the end of communism, the transformation of Hungarian historical culture proves to have been a rather partial matter. Regarding the Holocaust, even the aforementioned reassessments have given way to rather mixed blessings on the mid-term. Reactions were manifested in outright rejection of Hungarian responsibility, softer forms of historiographical revision and novel practices of symbolic exclusion. They all took on additional force in the early 21st century. Right-wing condemnations of communism have accompanied the Europeanisation of Holocaust remembrance in an uneasy manner. New nationalist approaches to history have explicitly centred on Hungarian traumas and victimhood. What is more, critical discussions of the Hungarian road to the Holocaust were accompanied by much more positive assessments of the interwar period and regime, especially the consolidation under István Bethlen during the 1920s. The Horthy period (1920-1944), on the other hand, was reconceived as a usable past for postcommunism and was often presented as an important element of national continuity. In these more positive assessments, the sustained antisemitic orientation of the regime received limited attention and was even presented as explicable. Ultimately, explorations of the Hungarian road to the Holocaust, which focused on the continuities between the interwar establishment and the perpetrators of genocide, were accompanied by attempts to arrive at a more ‘balanced’ and sometimes even rather positive assessment of the period. This could only result in sharp historiographical polemics.

If new forms of recognising Hungarian responsibility were followed by a wave of rejectionism, and if the role of the establishment in creating the preconditions for as well as in implementing the Hungarian Holocaust were accompanied by reinterpretations of elements of this period as a usable past, then in recent years, radical rightist forces have consciously attempted to symbolically exclude the Holocaust victims from the Hungarian community of victims. According to their binary antisemitic logic, their Jewishness is incompatible with, that is deprives them of, their Hungarianness. All three of these reactions have gone much more public since the economic crisis hit Hungary in 2008 and 2009.

The fall of communism was also followed by a Jewish religious and ethnic revival in Hungary, and approaches to this most profound Hungarian Jewish trauma could finally assume more prominent public roles too.[15] These changes occurred, however, when Hungarian antisemitism was publically manifested again. In retrospect, it may be said that the temporal coincidence of Jewish self-assertion, of new levels and forms of remembering genocide, and the resulting mass traumatisation, and of revived animosities right after 1989 inevitably resulted in a polemical environment. Ever since 1989, topics related to the history of the Holocaust have been emotionally heavily charged. They arguably proved to be the source of friction as much as the object of dignified and consensual practices of commemoration.

What is more, the worsening political polarisation of early 21st century Hungary was accompanied by the consolidation of competing cultures of remembrance. Similarly to several other dominant right-wing political formations in the postcommunist parts of Europe in the early 21st century, Fidesz has heavily invested in institutionalising an anti-totalitarian vision of history with the nation’s victimisation at its heart.[16] However, while early postcommunist Hungarian right-wing forces rather attempted to marginalise the remembrance of the Holocaust, Fidesz’s policy has been keen to incorporate it into their larger narrative about the age of totalitarianism with German nazism and Soviet communism as twin evils.

Holocaust awareness may have increased in Hungarian society, but new forms of rejecting responsibility have also spread and Holocaust denial has emerged as a significant phenomenon.[17] What Hungary thereby seems to demonstrate is that in a society which still harbours antisemitic prejudices and has not adequately confronted its share of responsibility, increased Holocaust remembrance might be followed by the worst kinds of reactions. From the point of view of the right-wing Fidesz government, the pragmatic challenge related to the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary thus consisted of how to continue framing the recent past in a nationalist key while improving its much damaged international reputation by fulfilling expectations toward a more self-critical memory culture. What this difficult challenge eventually resulted in was a dualistic agenda of commemorating the Holocaust: an attempt to commemorate victims without foregrounding historical responsibility.

The 70th Anniversary

The Main Official Initiatives

In 2013, the government led by Viktor Orbán announced its intention to counter ‘forgetting and indifference’ and declared 2014 a Year of Holocaust Commemoration (Magyar Holokauszt Emlékév).[18] The founding document of the official year of commemoration described the Holocaust as a crime against law, humanity, nature, and equality, and called it ‘the tragedy of the entire Hungarian nation’.[19] As a major component of the official initiative to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust, the Hungarian government decided to establish the so-called Civil Fund (Civil Alap).[20]

The intention behind the Civil Fund, as announced by László L. Simon, was to familiarise society ‘with the aims of the year of commemoration through involving the Jewish communities of Hungary’, support ‘processes of dealing with history’ (szembenézés a történelemmel in the original, literally ‘looking into the eye of history’), and help ‘the activities of the civil sphere’.[21] Remembrance was meant to be fostered primarily through programmes that directly dealt with the Hungarian Holocaust (magyar holokauszt), but also through ones that would discuss ‘Jewish traditions’ while tackling ‘the losses suffered by local communities’ — both within Hungary and in Hungarian minority communities abroad. The latter becomes understandable if one considers that a significant part of the victims of the Holocaust in Hungary were not from the postwar territory of Hungary, as upon 1945 Hungary was to lose once more the territories it had reacquired between 1938 and 1941. Moreover, the broad agenda enabled the Fund to support scholarly research projects and publications as well as the creation of artistic works and their exhibition. A rather large sum of around one and a half billion Hungarian forint (approximately five million euros) was meant to be allocated for these related purposes.

By its deadline for submissions in late 2013, the Civil Alap received altogether 1,073 valid applications. According to the official communiqué of the Fund released on 8 January 2014 more than four hundred applicants were meant to receive support in the value of altogether 1,8 billion forint.[22] Due to several controversial decisions, which will be discussed below, by 26 May, eighteen of the winning applicants refused to accept government funding. The resources they were originally meant to receive, amounting to over sixty million forint, were soon reassigned to another nineteen applicants. Some of those who refused to cooperate with the Civil Alap launched an alternative platform Memento 70 — Tisztán emlékezünk (Memento 70 — We Remember Purely) on 17 April 2014. This independent movement of Holocaust commemoration included a host of crucial Hungarian Jewish institutions, such as the Magyarországi Zsidó Hitközségek Szövetsége, the main umbrella organisation of Hungarian Jews, the Magyar Zsidó Kulturális Egyesület, one of the leading Jewish cultural associations of Hungary, the Budapest University of Jewish Studies, the Hungarian Jewish Museum, the Hungarian Jewish Archive, and the Hungarian Zionist Alliance. However, according to the website of the ‘Memento 70’ initiative, their campaign of fundraising largely failed to generate the desired amount of resources.[23]

The controversy surrounding the year of commemoration was triggered by the perceived official ambition to picture the Holocaust in Hungary as the genocide Nazi Germany committed against the Jews of Hungary and thereby downplay the Hungarian share of co-responsibility. The topic of ‘rescue’ has indeed emerged as one of the main foci of offi cial initiatives.[24] Next to important events such as ‘To get to know and to recognise — the message of Hungarian rescuers for the 21st century’ (Megismerni és felismerni — embermentő magyarok üzenete a XXI. századnak) organised by the Tom Lantos Institute and the Institute of Foreign Affairs and Trade,[25] on 16 December an international symposium on the topic was held at the Hungarian Parliament under the title ‘Rescuers — “God announces his arrival through them”’ (Embermentők — ‘Rajtuk át Isten szól: jövök’). The explicit aim of focusing on positive, even uplifting examples of rescuers has been to contribute to moral education. However, as various observers did not fail to point out, the strong focus on rescuers, if it happens at the expense of appropriate attention to Hungarian perpetrators, may also have national-apologetic implications. In any case, the prominent attention the topic currently enjoys — alongside continued interest in figures such as Raoul Wallenberg[26] — has already generated some new research, such as, most importantly, Tamás Kovács’s ‘Bureaucrats who became rescuers during the Holocaust’.[27]

In accordance with the marked emphasis on the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, ‘national resistance’ has emerged as another, even if somewhat less conspicuous focus of conferences and new research. For instance, on 30 October 2014, the Budapest-based House of Terror (Terror Háza), a museum commemorating both fascism and communism, organised a conference under the title ‘Homeland, love — national resistance 1944’ (Haza, szeretet — Nemzeti ellenállás 1944). The most substantial original scholarly contribution connecting Hungarian resistance to rescue attempts to date has been Sweden-based Gellért Kovács’s ‘Dusk above Budapest. The story of rescue and resistance 1944-45’, a monograph on Raoul Wallenberg’s Hungarian network published in Swedish in 2013, of which a Hungarian translation appeared in early 2015.[28]

Key Controversies

The ambition to downplay the Hungarian share of responsibility was arguably already manifested in these topical priorities, but it was more widely perceived to define two new state-endorsed projects in particular: the decision to open a new museum dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust and to erect a German occupation statue in the centre of Budapest. In 2000, upon Hungary making the above mentioned commitment to furthering Holocaust remembrance, the Holocaust Documentation Centre and Memorial Collection Public Foundation were established to serve as the successor of the Hungarian Auschwitz Foundation. Under its aegis, a Holocaust Memorial Centre — the first of its kind in postcommunist Central and Southeastern Europe — was eventually inaugurated in Páva Street, Budapest, in 2004 with a self-critical permanent exhibition entitled ‘From Deprivation of Rights to Genocide’, opening its doors to visitors in 2006. However, in a number of respects the Centre has fallen short of expectations: several rounds of in-fi ghting have hampered its functioning, and visitor numbers have also remained consistently rather low. When Fidesz returned to power with a super-majority in 2010, the leadership of the Centre was swiftly exchanged with Szabolcs Szita, a noted Holocaust historian and former employee, returning to the Centre to serve as its new director. In 2014, Szita was in turn removed, being replaced by György Haraszti, until then only fulfilling the function of chairman of the public foundation’s board. In the summer of 2015, it was György Haraszti’s turn to be removed, with Szabolcs Szita regaining his position as head of the institution.[29]

The latter twists of personnel happened in the context of more encompassing changes that raised anxieties regarding the future of the Holocaust Memorial Centre. The idea to open another Holocaust Museum may have originally been raised by Szabolcs Szita but by 2013-2014 it was no other than House of Terror director Mária Schmidt who was appointed to head the alternative project meant to be called House of Fates. Whereas the idea to devote the new museum to one of the most shocking elements of the Holocaust, the Nazi murder of over a million children, was circulated, not much information regarding the rationale for the new institution and its exact plan filtered through to the public, nor was it sufficiently clarified what its opening would mean in terms of the independence, function, agenda, and content of the already existing Holocaust Memorial Centre.

The ever more transparently dualistic agenda of the year of commemoration combined with the scepticism many of those concerned felt towards Mária Schmidt’s competence and intentions soon led to sharp criticisms of the initiative. The main worry of the critics seems to have been that the new museum would marginalise the perpetrators’ side of the Holocaust and potentially ignore the role played by Hungarian perpetrators in 1944. The largely unspecified though already controversial plans also generated alternative proposals to the effect that a museum of Hungarian-Jewish coexistence would be more timely and useful. Following little evidence of progress on the project except on its planned building, the former train station of Józsefváros, and the resignation of several crucial members of the advisory board, the basic concept of the House of Fates was finally sketched by András Gerő, one of the intellectual masterminds behind the project.

In his extended essay ‘Hungarian representations of the Holocaust’, Gerőintroduced the future museum as an attempt to convey ‘the symbolic and spiritual’ meaning of the Holocaust.[30] He explained that the permanent exhibition would refrain from a conventional historical presentation and would rather aim to offer a cathartic experience to its visitors, which would hopefully result in ‘outraged rejection’ and ‘mobilise their hatred of hatred’. However, if in-fighting weakened the Holocaust Memorial Centre and its lack of public success was, according to Gerő, meant to legitimate launching the House of Fates, further in-fighting in Fidesz elite circles combined with the continued opposition of Hungarian Jewish representatives seem to have condemned this controversial initiative to at least momentary failure. The realisation of a second Holocaust museum in Budapest appears uncertain — even though unexpected twists have by now become an integral part of its far from fateful plot.

The second controversial initiative, that of the German occupation statue, arguably proved even more divisive, leading to an extensive, emotionally charged polemic. This controversy repeatedly entered leading venues of international media and the acclaim the Hungarian government might have received for establishing a fund as generous as the Civil Fund, was irreparably wasted. Focusing on the history of the Holocaust and highlighting Hungarian co-responsibility for it, critics of the German occupation statue saw in the initiative a blunt attempt to visually represent the thesis of the preamble of the new Hungarian so-called basic law whereby Hungarian sovereignty was terminated on 19 March 1944, that is prior to the mass deportation of the majority of the Hungarian Jewish community. The preamble thereby aims to externalise Hungarian responsibilities.

On the other hand, the small minority of its intellectual proponents aimed to interpret the occupation statue as a monument devoted to all Hungarian victims of the catastrophic final year of the Second World War, which may not focus exclusive attention on Jewish victims but was by all means meant to include them. Such an argument revealed the dualistic official agenda of the year of commemoration with special force — honouring the victims without casting doubts on nationalist visions of history. What is more, polemics in favour of the controversial plan opened the space for cruder — arguably even antisemitic — claims according to which the debate opposed those who were interested in an encompassing recognition of victims to those who aimed at the privileged recognition of their own particularistic group of victims. In other words, the response to the critics of the occupation statue also included a dose of what scholars have labelled secondary antisemitism: the suggestion was that Jews can be blamed for foregrounding and abusing the memory of the Holocaust.

Whereas public voices tended to be critical towards both the idea of the statue and the concrete plan of its realisation, as opinion polls conducted at the height of the controversy have shown, the proposal seemed to divide Hungarian society more than anything else. The ever more open clash between the ambition to build a new national canon and the traumatic personal and family memories within Hungarian society thus further polarised interpretations of the recent past. Aiming to take this increasingly embarrassing issue off the political agenda without resigning from its originals plan, the government eventually decided to erect the monument at night and refrained from inaugurating it — even though the German occupation statue, if anything, provided the opponents of governmental policies with a new symbol. In other words, the government persevered in its dualistic agenda for the year of commemoration, but failed to find a convincing balance between its nationalist focus on victimhood and a sincere attention to the actual history of the Holocaust in Hungary.[31]

Scholarly Developments

In 2008, historian Gábor Gyáni offered some sharply critical comments on the historiographical status quo in Hungary: he remarked that contemporary historiographical, theoretical and methodological insights and even several major themes that belong to the very core of Holocaust Studies were practically absent from the Hungarian research landscape. Gyáni viewed these shortcomings as key reasons behind the relatively low international visibility of Hungarian Holocaust scholarship.[32] Gyáni’s reflections were contested by several Holocaust historians, which eventually resulted in a prolonged debate.[33]

Whether or not Gyáni’s original claims of some seven years ago were exaggerated, since then several positive developments took place. For instance, Hungarian sociologist Éva Kovács was appointed research director of the recently established but already prestigious Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. Even if there is no explicitly Hungarian component of the agenda of the Wiesenthal Institute, a new possibility to strengthen the links between Austrian and Hungarian researchers clearly emerged. Perhaps even more crucially, in the meantime a new generation of Holocaust scholars has appeared on the scene, including István Pál Ádám, Ádám Gellért, Attila Gidó, Linda Margitt ai, and Izabella Sulyok.[34] Most of them are currently completing their doctoral studies, which in the case of several of them has been supported by major international donors, such as the Saul Kagan Claims Conference Fellowship for Advanced Shoah Studies, or the short term fellowships of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure. Furthermore, important Hungarian-language PhD theses that are of direct relevance for the history of the Holocaust in Hungary have been completed — or are very nearly so — by András Lugosi and András Szécsényi.[35]

Numerous other path-breaking publications have appeared since 2008. Probably most crucially in terms of the international visibility of scholarship on Hungary, The Holocaust in Hungary. Evolution of a Genocide, the first English-language overview since Randolph Braham’s milestone from over three decades ago, has appeared in the highly esteemed ‘Documenting Life and Destruction. Holocaust Sources in Context’ series of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[36] Vienna-based scholar Regina Fritz published the first ever overview of Hungarian history politics related to the Holocaust since 1944 in German.[37] Our knowledge of various Hungarian fascist movements as well as the Arrow Cross regime has also been substantially advanced.[38] Within Hungary, it was arguably the monograph of Krisztián Ungváry, one of the most widely known historians of the country, on the radicalisation of Hungarian antisemitism — a work inspired, perhaps above all, by GötzAly’s works — that had the greatest resonance while also serving as the subject of extended scholarly exchanges.[39]

Such positive developments notwithstanding, the major anniversary of 2014 saw the release of no more than a few original monographs with direct bearing on the history of the Holocaust.[40] In addition, some historians have released notable works on more local issues.[41] Various scholarly journals, such as Betekintő or Századvég, devoted special issues to the Holocaust.[42] Some collective volumes have appeared, and several more based on conferences held in 2014 ought to follow soon.[43] In the meantime, László Karsai completed a substantial study on the Arrow Cross period, which was released as the introduction to the — much belated — fourth volume of documents on the persecution of Jews in Hungary titled ‘Accusation against nazism’.[44] Judit Molnár published a critical edition of the reports of and other essential materials related to László Ferenczy, one of the chief Holocaust perpetrators in Hungary.[45] A collection of studies by the mentioned US-based doyen of scholarship on the local history of the Holocaust, Randolph Braham, was released in Hungarian.[46]

Arguably, the most exciting new release of an original historical document has been the publication of the diary that Fanni Gyarmati, Miklós Radnóti’s widow who passed away in 2014, wrote between 1935 and 1946.[47] There have also been several important re-publications, such as Miksa Fenyő’s diary from 1944-1945, which proved remarkably popular last year, or Jenő Lévai’s history of the large Pest ghetto originally released in 1946. Lévai was the Hungarian pioneer of Holocaust historiography avant la lettre in the second half of the 1940s.[48] Moreover, some classics of Holocaust historiography — most importantly, an abridged version of Raul Hilberg’s three-volume The Destruction of the European Jews — have finally been translated into Hungarian. However, it appears that no influential works of more recent years have been translated for the occasion.[49] What is worse, comparative, transnational or global historical reflections on the Holocaust in Hungary continue to be exceptional.[50] In spite of the controversy surrounding the issue, there have hardly been any original scholarly attempts to understand the nature of German-Hungarian interactions in the years 1938-1945, nor has much ambition been manifested to place Hungary into a regional frame by comparing it with its neighbouring countries, such as Romania, Croatia, or Slovakia. The continued prevalence of an isolationist approach to the Holocaust in Hungary seems one of the major shortcomings of contemporary scholarship.

In the meantime, Hungary’s leading popular history magazines, such as Múltkor and Rubicon, devoted extended attention to the events of 1944. However, whereas the former released its spring issue of 2014 under the title ‘Remember! The Holocaust in 1944’ (Emlékezz! Holokauszt 1944-ben), the latter devoted its March issue to ‘Occupation’ (Megszállás) and its November issue to ‘The attempt to exit the war. Hopes and doubts 1944-1945’ (A kiugrási kísérlet. Remények és kétségek 1944-1945). Much popular attention has been devoted to websites such as the ‘Yellow-Star Houses’, an initiative of the Open Society Archives that aims to embed the history of the Holocaust into the urban space of Budapest.[51] Among several blogging projects, the blog ‘Timetable of Departures — 1944’ (Menetrend — 1944) is worth mentioning. Edited by András Mink, it covers the deportations 70 years ago on a daily basis.[52] Facebook groups, such as ‘The Holocaust and my family’ (A Holokauszt és a családom), which specialises, with over 6,000 members, in presenting family histories on a voluntary basis, are yet another medium to gather, if not institutionalise, differentiating threads of remembrance.[53]

To be sure, the critical comments regarding the scarcity of original research and the near to absence of a comparative and transnational historiographical agenda do not imply that there have been no avid scholarly discussions on the Holocaust in Hungary in 2014. In fact, a host of scholarly conferences discussing its origins, implementation, and consequences were held within the country as well as outside it. The most prestigious commemorative scholarly events were arguably those held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., on 19 March 2014 under the simple title ‘The Holocaust in Hungary: 70 Years Later’,[54] and a closely related one under an almost identical title — though with a completely different list of presenters — that took place at the Central European University in Budapest on 6 April.[55] A similarly prestigious, though substantially larger conference, ‘From high politics to everyday life. The Hungarian Holocaust from the perspective of 70 years’ (A nagypolitikától a hétköznapokig — A magyar holokauszt 70 év távlatából) was organised on 14-15 May primarily by the Yad Vashem research group on Hungary and held at the University of Szeged — the home university of László Karsai and Judit Molnár and thus far one of the key sites of Holocaust-related research in the country.[56] Whereas the CEU event — rather surprisingly — only included scholars from Hungary, in Szeged — beyond several leading local experts — there were also some highly reputed international scholars of the calibre of Michael Marrus and Dan Michman among the participants. The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute held its own, less conventional event on 16 April, where facets of the Holocaust in Hungary were analysed through the discussion of particularly revealing ego sources.[57]

One of the largest scholarly conferences took place between 16 and 18 March at the Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Genocide Studies of Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers under the title ‘The Holocaust in Hungary, 70 Years On: New Perspectives’.[58] With no less than 48 presenters, it was comprehensive, yet in some respects a quantitative rather than qualitative endeavour. Other events included a conference titled ‘From Kamenets-Podolsk to Auschwitz’ (Kamenyec-Podolszkijtól Auschwitzig), with over fifty speakers, at the John Wesley Theological College in Budapest (12-14 October); a critical examination of the recent past of Hungarian scholarship under the title ‘1944’ and Hungarian Social Sciences (‘1944’ és a magyar társadalomtudományok) at the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (16 October 2014); the inauguration of a new memorial to the victims of the Holocaust and the Second World War at ELTE Budapest, the main university of the capital city (12-13 November), accompanied by the conference ‘Inscribed names’ (Bevésett nevek); and the conference ‘Trauma — Holocaust — Literature’, hosted by the Petőfi Literary Museum (28-29 November), with several leading international scholars, including Aleida Assmann, Wulf Kansteiner, and Alvin H. Rosenfeld. Last but not least, two events addressed key issues in Holocaust-related remembrance rather than history. These were respectively held at the Central European University on 10 June and at the John Wesley Theological College on 17-18 December, both in Budapest. The former, organised by the Tom Lantos Institute, was titled ‘The Future of Holocaust Memorialization. Confronting Racism, Antisemitism, and Homophobia through Memory Work’,[59] whereas the latter, ‘Public opinion of Holocaust memory and antisemitism’ (Holokauszt-emlékezet és antiszemitizmus a közvéleményben), directly probed the connections between Holocaust memory and antisemitic public opinion.[60] This list of major conferences, without meaning to be exhaustive, provides a fair sense of the diversity of occasions and topics as well as the large overall number of contributors. However, it remains to be seen how much original research will result from these, partly scholarly and partly rather commemorative, events — and whether these will exert any significant impact on the official Hungarian politics of history, which have evolved in a decidedly nationalist manner in recent years.

Conclusion

The laudable attempts of the post-89 period to reassess the Holocaust in Hungary in a self-critical way have gradually given way to much more mixed stances. Even though overtly ideological explanations have largely been discredited and the Hungarian role in the Holocaust has been discussed more openly, with also the Jewishness of the victims receiving more adequate attention, reactions to all three of these interpretive shifts gained additional momentum in the early 21st century. This was manifested not only in softer forms of historiographical revisionism, but also in an outright rejection of Hungarian responsibility, and even in the symbolic exclusion of Jewish victims.

From the point of view of the right-wing Fidesz government led by Viktor Orbán, the pragmatic challenge related to the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary consisted of how to continue framing the recent past in a nationalist key while improving its much damaged international reputation by fulfilling at least some expectations toward a more self-critical memory culture. What this challenge resulted in was a dualistic agenda of commemorating the Holocaust, an attempt to commemorate the victims, yet without foregrounding historical responsibilities. The generously endowed Civil Fund may indeed have brought badly needed international acclaim to the Hungarian government. However, by subsequently making several controversial decisions that only evidentialised its dualistic agenda, the government wasted the chance to sustainably improve its reputation. Due, above all, to the erection of a controversial German occupation statue in downtown Budapest, the central part of the year of Holocaust commemoration turned into a public clash between traumatic personal and family memories and Fidesz’s attempt to build a new national canon. The ultimate result of the 70th year of Holocaust commemoration was a further polarisation of Hungarian public opinion. In fact, it only reinforced the bitter divisions it meant to help overcome.

Published Online: 2016-06-20
Published in Print: 2016-06-01

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Article
  3. History’s debris. The many pasts in the post-1989 present
  4. Research Article
  5. ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ dissolved. Yugoslav radio broadcasting in (west) berlin and the changing politics of representation, 1988-95
  6. Research Article
  7. Integrating victims, externalising guilt? commemorating the Holocaust in Hungary
  8. Research Article
  9. Educational policies in Romania from Ceauşescu’s heritage to European mimicry
  10. Research Article
  11. Remembering and forgetting the SFR Yugoslavia. Historiography and history textbooks in the Republic of Macedonia
  12. Research Article
  13. Greek education. Explaining two centuries of static reproduction
  14. Obituary
  15. Michael Kelpanides (18 July 1945–29 February 2016)
  16. Book Review
  17. Verfassungskonflikte zwischen Politik und Recht in Südosteuropa
  18. Book Review
  19. Narrating Victim-hood
  20. Book Review
  21. Transcending Fratricide
  22. Book Review
  23. Imaginary Trials
  24. Book Review
  25. Srebrenica
  26. Book Review
  27. Radovan Karadžić
https://doi.org/10.1515/soeu-2016-0014

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Article
  3. History’s debris. The many pasts in the post-1989 present
  4. Research Article
  5. ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ dissolved. Yugoslav radio broadcasting in (west) berlin and the changing politics of representation, 1988-95
  6. Research Article
  7. Integrating victims, externalising guilt? commemorating the Holocaust in Hungary
  8. Research Article
  9. Educational policies in Romania from Ceauşescu’s heritage to European mimicry
  10. Research Article
  11. Remembering and forgetting the SFR Yugoslavia. Historiography and history textbooks in the Republic of Macedonia
  12. Research Article
  13. Greek education. Explaining two centuries of static reproduction
  14. Obituary
  15. Michael Kelpanides (18 July 1945–29 February 2016)
  16. Book Review
  17. Verfassungskonflikte zwischen Politik und Recht in Südosteuropa
  18. Book Review
  19. Narrating Victim-hood
  20. Book Review
  21. Transcending Fratricide
  22. Book Review
  23. Imaginary Trials
  24. Book Review
  25. Srebrenica
  26. Book Review
  27. Radovan Karadžić
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