Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest: Myth, History and Holocaust (review)

Raoul Wallenberg's story has emerged as one of the bright lights shining through a dark period of modern European history. Some Hungarian Jewish survivors have viewed him as virtually an angel from heaven, others as a genuine "altruistic personality." For some he was a hero racing around Budapest to save Jews. Literature, film, and television have created a man of mythic heroism. As Levine suggests, however, Wallenberg can also be seen as an ordinary man confronting extraordinary evil.

Levine effectively argues that the myths detract from Wallenberg's real-life story, contending that Wallenberg becomes an even more significant moral symbol when the historical complexities are understood. At age 32 Wallenberg disappeared into the Soviet Gulag, and never lived to witness the freedom for which he fought. By the same token, he never clarified his motives. Levine's goal is to enhance Wallenberg's significance by offering a methodologically sound study of the genocidal context in which Wallenberg worked. Levine has nuanced the "cult of personality" surrounding Wallenberg since 1945, helping us bypass his one-dimensional portrayal as a knight battling the Nazis' war of extermination.

Levine uses all available sources, especially Swedish, including diplomatic materials, correspondence, and memoirs recounting Wallenberg's activities and anxieties. Documents from Sweden's National Archives provide insights from German, American, and Hungarian sources as well. Wallenberg's letters to his beloved grandfather in the 1920s and 1930s provide insights into his intellectual formation.

In this comprehensive monograph, Levine also reviews the extensive hagiographic literature, while modeling his own research on what Primo Levi has called the "grey zone": avoiding simplification, explicating complexity, and thus making the hero human. For him the survival of the Wallenberg myth is predicated in part upon a failure to take into account international advances in the study of the Holocaust.

Levine debunks twenty-one misunderstandings, among them the following: Wallenberg was part Jewish, one of the motivating factors for going to Budapest; Wallenberg was sent to Budapest by the American government; Wallenberg intervened with the Hungarian leader Admiral Horthy, who subsequently halted the deportation trains; during a dramatic dinner with Adolf Eichmann, Wallenberg created doubt in the Nazi's mind about the morality of the genocide; Wallenberg was responsible for saving 100,000 Jewish lives; he worked entirely on his own, at times against directives from his superiors; he was arrested by the Red Army because he had extensive plans for the postwar reconstruction of Hungarian society and because these threatened Soviet plans; he was a Nazi or American spy. Discrediting the myths brought Levine to stress in his conclusion the role of the professional historian in influencing popular discourse in democratic societies.

Levine's corrective stresses the ways in which circumstances limit and enable particular ranges of response. Wallenberg had manifested no particular concern for Jewish suffering before June 1944. His interests centered on his professional future as a businessman—one who saw that the end of the war probably would bring new opportunities. It would seem that Wallenberg went to Budapest to further his career, but that when an opportunity to do some good appeared, he seized it. He chose to do what circumstances offered. Levine offers a provocative insight into the behavior of rescuers: ambiguities surrounding Wallenberg's behavior lie less in his personal motives and more in the unprecedented situation confronting neutral diplomats in Budapest. Levine argues that saving lives was less a reflection of lofty goals than the result of individuals responding to specific challenges: just as circumstances had recently fostered "desktop killers," new circumstances now permitted the emergence of "desktop rescuers." Still, to do something required will, and Wallenberg took up the challenge aggressively. Levine uses Wallenberg's reports to Stockholm to provide a perspective on what it was like to be in Budapest up to the end of 1944, after which normal reporting became impossible. These reports add to our knowledge of the Holocaust and help dispel the...