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Reviewed by:
  • Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto
  • Zsuzsanna Ozsvath
Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto, Tim Cole (New York; London: Routledge, 2003), xv + 303 pp., cloth $125.00, pbk. $29.95.

The purpose of Cole's book is to investigate the relationship between the physical layout of the Budapest ghetto and the ways in which the ghetto planners utilized city space for their own purposes. This relationship involves the question of how ordinary political, military, and bureaucratic officials were able "to create distinct 'Jewish' and 'non-Jewish' space" out of "something so ordinary as the very spaces and places of a city" (p. xii). But beyond this well-defined focus, Cole's book grapples with another, more controversial issue: the urgent impulse that "obsesses anyone who encounters the Holocaust: Why?" (p. xii).

A study of the geography and architecture of Hungarian ghettos, Cole maintains, might illuminate heretofore unnoticed aspects of the decision-making process in the countryside and in Budapest alike and contribute to our understanding of the plans of those who implemented the Hungarian Holocaust. Demonstrating great expertise in analyzing the circumstances under which the Budapest ghetto was created, he explains a variety of contemporary laws as well as the plans of and decisions by upper- and even mid-level bureaucrats. He also discusses the denial of the Holocaust by the post–World War II communist regime as well as the post-communist regime (pp. 221–49).

To explain "why it happened," however, is a difficult task, raising issues of "intentionality" and "functionality" (pp. 29–36)—issues that have characterized much of the historiography of the Shoah. Discussing the approaches of the historiography of the Hungarian Holocaust, Cole cites some scholars who seem to suggest that Hungarian national-socialist policy after the occupation concerned solely the murder of the country's Jews; and others who maintain that these policies lacked a central direction as they were carried out haphazardly under chaotic circumstances (pp. 49–80). The latter argument suggests that there was no "master plan of murder," but rather a variety of contradictory pressures on the Hungarian government, which was forced to deal with large masses of Jews during wartime. Cole favors this approach—despite his initial statement that "the intentionalist-versus-functionalist debate no longer holds a position of dominance" in the historiography of the Holocaust (p. 32). In fact, for Cole, the functionalist approach is "less biased" and more "complex" than the teleological approach of the intentionalists (pp. 77–80).

What he describes as a "less biased" and "more complex" approach, however, is a large collection of opinions, some of which reveal understanding and expertise on [End Page 515] all the issues, and some of which do not. Of course, one could always say that we need to give "equal time" to all voices and all interpretations (just as we must listen to all participants in the events, both inside and outside the ghetto). But this has already been done, by Randolph Braham among others. And Braham arrives at another conclusion: he observes that the statements of the Hungarian bureaucrats of the time do not reflect any general conclusion, but rather their desire to camouflage murder.1

Cole's aim is not to camouflage anything, but rather to illuminate the role that coincidence and random developments played in the creation of the ghetto. He calls attention to the opportunity that many Jews (and non-Jews) had to petition the housing authorities to change which buildings were designated as ghetto houses. Arguing for a "complexity" of motifs rather than simply the pro-Nazi leadership's decision to isolate and deport the Jews, Cole finds it especially significant that even Jewish petitioners sometimes successfully contested the original designation of ghetto houses. On a broader level, then, Cole shows the interaction between the "Nazi German, Hungarian national . . . and Hungarian local government . . . in much more complex ways than simply the top-down implementation and following of orders" (p. 183). Braham has a significantly different take. With the "overwhelming majority of the pleaders [being] Christians" and with the Jews mostly undergoing "another drastic reduction in their assigned living space," he does not ascribe to the negotiations any...

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