Holocaust Remembrance in Hungary after the Fall of Communism

Memory helps us to create our own continuity. Questions such as 'Who are we?', 'Where do we come from?', and 'Where are we going?' can only be answered if we know our past. We all belong to groups, but we all belong to ourselves as well. We try to create a continuous life-line from the stories that happened to us. The past is always adapted to the present, serving a teleological purpose. Trauma interrupts the life-line and the continuity of sense. Victims and also perpetrators, when confronted with their wrongdoing and shame, experience trauma. These are painful stories and they need time to heal. This is also the case in Hungary.

Jews in hungary until the deportations of 1944

A large proportion of the Hungarian Jewish population was acculturated and assimilated.¹ The Emancipation Act of 1867 gave Jews equal legal status and provided the conditions for unprecedented economic and cultural growth. A tolerant, liberal policy prevailed in respect to them in the second half of the nineteenth century.² This changed for the worse from the 1880s as antisemitism intensified. Viktor Karády has reviewed the development of the statistical literature on the situation of the Jewish population in Hungary.³ The emergence of political antisemitism is reflected in the use made by political groups of statistics broken down according to religious denomination for militant antisemitic purposes in the 1890s.⁴ The first strongly Judaeophobic books were published at this time: these contrasted the situation of the Jews with that of the majority population from a statistical perspective and emphasized the advantageous position of the former in the achievement of middle-class status and financial well-being. In this context the topoi of 'flooding' and 'invasion' were already being used. As early as 1907 a numerus clausus was proposed in the Hungarian Parliament.

The concept of a 'Jewish problem' drawn from the statistics of Jewish upward social mobility also appeared on the political left. In 1917 with the publication of The Way of the Jews by Péter Ágoston, a professor at the legal academy in Nagyvárad, 'the Jewish problem', which had been swept under the carpet before, suddenly came into the limelight and the hitherto peripheral antisemitic voices grew louder.⁵ In response, Oszkár Jászi, a social scientist and the leader of the Civic Radical Party, called a conference to clarify whether there was a 'Jewish question' in Hungary. The proceedings of the debate were published.⁶ Lajos Szabolcsi, editor of the weekly Egyenlőség, organ of Neolog Hungarian Jews, wrote in his diary:

I firmly believe that the catastrophe of the Hungarian Jews started here. The concept of a logically identified 'Jewish problem', the numerus clausus, and the disastrous idea of 'resolving the Jewish problem through legislation' was forged there in Jászi's circle in 1917.⁷

According to Gábor Gyáni, 'the discourse of critical Jewish self-reflection (including that of Jászi) often gave rise to a view of society identical with or fairly similar to the antisemitic formulation of the Jewish issue, albeit with totally different conclusions and solutions'.⁸ The concept of 'two Hungaries' was created in left-wing publications before and during the First World War and this was utilised in the political rhetoric and statistical literature of the Christian regime after 1920 but with an explicitly antisemitic emphasis.⁹ Karády's view on the emergence of antisemitic discourse is supported by a report of Father Hartmann, a Catholic priest from the western province of Vorarlberg, who travelled throughout Hungary in 1900. He enthusiastically welcomed the antisemitic posture of the Hungarian Catholic People's Party and urged his co-religionists to place breaking the power of the Jews at the centre of their political programme because in this way they would be able to gain massive electoral support.¹⁰

Before the First World War many of Hungary's Jews were assimilated. The Neolog, who formed the majority of non-Orthodox Jews, took part in the national mourning over the...