Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe

9. The Memory of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Hungary

261 paul hanebrink 9. The Memory of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Hungary part 1: The Politics of Holocaust Memory In 2004 the Budapest city council debated whether or not there should be a statue of former prime minister Pál Teleki erected in Hungary’s capital city. Born in 1871, Teleki was the scion of an ancient Transylvanian noble family. During the years between the two world wars, he used his training as a geographer to amass social and geographic data that supported arguments for reversing the 1920 Treaty of Trianon , which reduced Hungary’s size by two-thirds and attached many historic regions (including Teleki’s native Transylvania) to Hungary’s regional neighbors. But Pál Teleki is best remembered as a politician. He served twice as prime minister, first in 1920–21 and then again between 1939 and 1941. During his second term in office, Teleki tried to balance a pro-German orientation in foreign policy, which made possible the wildly popular return of some formerly Hungarian territories , and a pro-British course, which he and traditional conservatives like him felt was better for the country’s long-term interests. For two years, he tried to contain pro-Nazi sentiment at home while also resisting Nazi calls for war. Ultimately, however, his strategy failed. Faced with the choice to join Germany in an attack on Yugoslavia, a move favored (and ultimately made) by the Hungarian army’s general staff, or face a probable German invasion of Hungary, Teleki wrote a letter to the head of state, Admiral Miklós Horthy, saying that Hungary had destroyed its national honor by joining Germany’s war of aggression. Then he shot himself.1 Winston Churchill, writing in his massive history of the Second World War, saw Teleki’s last act as a “sacrifice,” intended to absolve his nation from its role in a criminal war.2 Since 1989, Hungarian 262 hanebrink politicians have also praised Teleki for his life-long commitment to Hungarian minority communities in neighboring countries. Viktor Orbán, leader of Hungary’s right-wing Fidesz party and prime minister from 1998 to 2002 and again since 2010, described Teleki as an intellectual model in a December 2000 radio interview, admiring him for his unwavering commitment to the national interest and declaring that his writings from the interwar years on minority questions still had merit in the present day. Similarly inspired, the Teleki Pál Memorial Committee proposed that a statue of the prime minister should be erected in front of the palace on the Castle Hill where he governed his country and, ultimately, took his own life. But other Hungarians viewed the proposed Teleki statue with grave misgivings. Pál Teleki had also played an important role in the history of political anti-Semitism in Hungary. During his first term as prime minister, the Hungarian Parliament passed a so-called numerus clausus law, limiting the number of Jewish students who could be admitted into Hungarian universities. As Nazi influence grew in the 1930s, Hungary’s extreme right demanded more and tougher antiJewish sanctions. Teleki found it wisest to appease them by accepting one anti-Jewish law passed by parliament and having his government prepare another. His government also enforced numerous anti-Jewish administrative decrees, including the policy that drafted Jewish men of military service age into unarmed and physically demanding labor service battalions. An opponent of Nazism, Teleki did this partly for tactical reasons—to “take the wind out of the sails” of the radical right, as the phrase of the day went. But the fact remains that Teleki and his government systematically denied legal equality to Jewish Hungarians by accepting and enforcing anti-Jewish laws, a crucial precondition for the ghettoization and deportations that came later. For this reason, both the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities and the Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned the plan. Historians of the Hungarian Holocaust were also outraged. László Karsai, the most prominent historian of the Holocaust active in Hungary, analyzed Teleki’s career in Life and Literature, a weekly newspaper that is something like a Hungarian New York Review of Books. He concluded that “Pál Teleki did not deserve a public statue in Hungary in 9. Pt. 1: The Politics of Holocaust Memory 263 2004, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Hungarian Holocaust,” since Teleki had been a nationalist and racist anti-Semite, an enforcer...