Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History, 1929-1948 9004328653, 9789004328655

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgement
Note from the Series Editors
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Jewish Studies in the Horthy Era
Chapter 3 Intellectual Agendas in the Shadow of Catastrophe
Chapter 4 The Audible Voices of the Persecuted
Chapter 5 Articulating the Unprecedented
Chapter 6 Narrating Survival
Chapter 7 Interpreting Responsibility
Chapter 8 Conclusion
Biographical Notes
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide

Central and Eastern Europe Regional Perspectives in Global Context

Series Editors Constantin Iordachi (Central European University, Budapest) Maciej Janowski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw) Balázs Trencsényi (Central European University, Budapest)

VOLUME 8

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cee

Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide An Intellectual History, 1929–1948 By

Ferenc Laczó

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: the synagogue of Subotica/Szabadka, by Rudolf Klein, courtesy of Rudolf Klein. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data   Names: Laczó, Ferenc, author. Title: Hungarian Jews in the age of genocide : an intellectual history,  1929–1948 / by Ferenc Laczó. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2016] | Series: Central and Eastern  Europe : regional perspectives in global context, ISSN 1877-8550 ; volume 8 |  Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016032807| ISBN 9789004324640 (hardback : alk. paper) |  ISBN 9789004328655 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Hungary. |  Antisemitism—Hungary—History—20th century. |  Jews—Persecutions—Hungary—History—20th century. Classification: LCC DS135.H9 L25 2016 | DDC 940.53/1809439—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032807

Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1877-8550 isbn 978-90-04-32464-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-32865-5 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Dedicated to the memory of Nagyi

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Contents Acknowledgement ix Note from the Series Editors xi 1 Introduction 1 2 Jewish Studies in the Horthy Era 25 3 Intellectual Agendas in the Shadow of Catastrophe 50 4 The Audible Voices of the Persecuted 80 5 Articulating the Unprecedented 99 6 Narrating Survival 134 7 Interpreting Responsibility 161 8 Conclusion 197 Biographical Notes 207 Bibliography 212 Name Index 233 Subject Index 236

Acknowledgement The present monograph is one of the main results of the recent academic journey which led me from being a doctoral student at the Central European University in my hometown, Budapest through a research fellowship at the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena on to a lectureship at Maastricht University. The first half of the book presents key findings of my doctoral dissertation in a heavily abridged form, whereas the second half is based on postdoctoral research conducted while at the University of Jena. I am grateful to members of both the Department of History of the Central European University and the Imre Kertész Kolleg for their support and encouragement. I have had the fortune of encountering many brilliant scholars in Budapest and Jena as well as various other locations. Viktor Karády, my doctoral supervisor and Balázs Trencsényi, one of the members of the defense committee have been of special importance and immense help throughout the years. I have tried my best to profit from their profound knowledge of Central and Eastern European history and sharp insights into matters related to the subject of this book. I would also like to acknowledge the following colleagues and friends of mine who have accompanied the long gestation of this book and made academia an exciting place to be: Balázs Ablonczy, Mónika Baár, Nándor Bárdi, Péter Bencsik, Kata Bohus, Jochen Böhler, Stefano Bottoni, Elias Buchetmann, Kateřina Čapková, Holly Case, László Csősz, István Deák, Gábor Egry, Maria Falina, Michal Frankl, Regina Fritz, Kinga Frojimovics, Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič, Christian Gerlach, Attila Gidó, János Gyurgyák, Paul Hanebrink, Pablo del Hierro, Stanislav Holubec, Sándor Horváth, Adam Hudek, Bogdan Iacob, Tom Junes, Gábor Kármán, László Kontler, Michal Kopeček, Alexander Korb, Éva Kovács, Rudolf Kučera, Ilse Lazaroms, Zsófia Lóránd, Guy Miron, Judit Molnár, Lutz Niethammer, Attila Novák, Jannis Panagiotidis, Kiran Klaus Patel, Vladimir Petrović, Joachim von Puttkamer, Béla Rásky, Julia Richers, Matthias Riedl, Máté Rigó, Clara Royer, Sabine Rutar, Tamás Scheibner, Benjamin Schenk, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Mirjam Thulin, Krisztián Ungváry, Péter Vámos, György Vári, Georgi Verbeeck, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Piotr Wciślik, Christian Wiese, Anna Wylegała, Ulrich Wyrwa, Márton Zászkaliczky, and Marko Zubak. As always, my gratitude goes, above all, to Vera, Ferenc Albert, Anyu, Apa, Saci and Dani. This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother who almost lived till her hundredth birthday and nearly saw the appearance of this book.

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acknowledgement

Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript whose criticisms and suggestions have proven to be of ­substantial help. It goes without saying that I am solely responsible for all remaining shortcomings. Maastricht, March 2016

Note from the Series Editors This peer-reviewed book series publishes innovative research on various historical, social, and cultural aspects of Central and Eastern Europe. Its main aim is to stimulate dialogue and exchange between scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe and other academic research traditions, in a global context. Although we distance ourselves from the traditional perspective of ‘area studies,’ which tends to approach historical regions in isolation and thus runs the risk of parochialism, we posit nevertheless that there is an immense analytical potential in comparative and transnational research on particular regions. Without pleading for any rigid definition of regions, we argue nonetheless that concepts of historical regions are able to serve as privileged angles through which to approach the history of certain geographical spaces and as useful devices for tackling certain research topics. One can gain from employing a regional framework of interpretation the drive for historical comparison, a permanent challenge to retain the complexity of the units of analysis, the plurality of scales, as well as the reflection on the fuzziness of the very categories of comparison. Regional perspectives have the potential to overcome isolated national ‘grand narratives’ by inscribing seemingly local or nation-specific phenomena into larger contexts. Such approaches provide a remedy against discourses of national exclusivism and exceptionalism, facilitating the reappraisal of a wide range of regional or European topics. On a more general level, this exercise in regional comparative research can potentially enrich European or global narratives. While sharing larger, Europewide developments, the rich historical experience of Central and Eastern Europe in the early modern and modern periods – marked by massive demographic and sociopolitical transformations, competing projects of nationbuilding, the impact of fascist and communist dictatorships, the processes of political democratization and European integration – presents certain particularities that makes these regions laboratories for the study of social, cultural and political transformation. The imperious need to integrate the history of these regions into a common European framework demands novel transnational perspectives of research, potentially leading to new integrative fields of study. To reach its aims, the book series has an interdisciplinary orientation, including history, anthropology, archaeology, political science, sociology, legal studies, economics, religion, literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, theater, film, and media studies, and art history. We invite s­ubmissions of monographs, collections of studies, and editions of source materials on

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Central and Eastern Europe. Especially welcome are comparative studies at various subnational, national, and transnational levels, and studies of the shared/entangled history of these regions. Central and Eastern Europe: Regional Perspectives in Global Context is edited in cooperation with Pasts, Inc., Center for Historical Studies (www.pasts. ceu.hu) at the Central European University, Budapest, which acts as its academic host. It builds on the successful experience of, and is developed in close cooperation with, the journal East Central Europe (www.ece.ceu.hu), founded in 1974, which has been providing a forum of scholarly exchange among local and foreign scholars working on Central and Eastern Europe during the last decades. Constantin Iordachi Central European University, Budapest Maciej Janowski Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw Central European University, Budapest Balázs Trencsényi Central European University, Budapest

CHAPTER 1

Introduction By early 1944, the Jewish community of Hungary had been persecuted for years, but was still largely intact and thus represented the major remaining Jewish community in the Nazi sphere of influence.1 Members of the Hungarian Jewish intellectual elite were largely aware of the catastrophe that had befallen European Jewry and thus also their own exceptional situation. They were deeply frightened of what the future might bring, but had hopes that Nazi Germany would soon be defeated. With the limited means at their disposal in anti-Semitic but not yet genocidal Hungary, a number of Hungarian Jewish intellectuals already anticipated some of the main cultural priorities of the early postwar years. They not only aimed to preserve what was left of the European Jewish heritage, but were also beginning to record the unprecedented destruction of Jewish people from across the continent. However, upon the entry of Nazi Germany into Hungary on March 19, 1944, the nearing end of the war was to prove fatally far away. As a result of Nazi genocidal intentions and active Hungarian collaboration, Hungarian Jews were soon mercilessly targeted.2 The brutally efficient implementation of the politics of genocide in 1944–45 eventually resulted in Hungarian Jews constituting the single largest group of victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex.3 In a most terrible irony of history, Jewish intellectuals in Hungary 1  In the years 1941 to 1944, Hungary was surrounded by territories under the direct control of Nazi Germany or by states allied to the Nazis, such as Romania, Slovakia and Croatia. 2  On the Holocaust in Hungary, see the major overview by Randolph L. Braham. The Politics of Genocide. The Holocaust in Hungary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). See also Zoltán Vági, László Csősz, and Gábor Kádár, The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2013). How to assess the causes of the Holocaust in Hungary remains a subject of contention among historians. For a perceptive analysis of recent historiographical trends, now see András Kovács, “A magyar intencionalizmus. Új irányok a magyar holokauszt történetírásában” in Randolph L. Braham and András Kovács (eds.), A holokauszt Magyarországon hetven év múltán (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 2015). 3  It was arguably the campaign from Hungary that made Auschwitz-Birkenau into a synonym for the annihilation of European Jewry. On the early postwar treatment of the former camp, see Imke Hansen, »Nie wieder Auschwitz!« Die Entstehung eines Symbols und der Alltag einer Gedenkstätte 1945–1955 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014). On the Nazi camps in Poland during early postwar period, more generally, see Zofia Wójcicka, Arrested Mourning. Memory of the Nazi Camps in Poland, 1944–1950 (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2013).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004328655_002

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thus anticipated the cultural priorities of the early postwar period ahead of the destruction of their own community’s majority. Due to the survival of a substantial part of Budapest Jewry and the return to their country of origin of a significant number of Hungarian Jews liberated in the Nazi camps, Hungary also had one of the largest communities of Holocaust survivors. Prior to the Stalinization of their country in the late 1940s, they were in the forefront of articulating responses to the genocide, recording thousands of witness accounts, publishing dozens of memoirs and even completing several contemporary historical works. However, the rich variety of Hungarian Jewish intellectual responses to their exceptional drama and unprecedented tragedy has never been subjected to monographic study. This book aims to tell the story of Hungarian Jews in the age of genocide, both shortly before and right after the Holocaust, through a series of interlinked intellectual historical case studies. Individual chapters will draw on large and previously unexplored pools of sources on how Jewish intellectuals in Hungary responded to persecution and annihilation both during their implementation and in their immediate aftermath. To capture the tremendous drama and immense tragedy as fully as possible, chapters of this book shall cover the years 1929 to 1948. Adapting the terminology of Saul Friedländer to local circumstances, the book conceives of the years 1938–44 as the age of persecution, 1944–45 as the age of extermination, and 1945–1948 as the years of immediate aftermath.4 This introduction has three aims: to provide a brief overview of Hungarian Jewish history before, during, and after the unprecedented destruction wrought by the Holocaust, to reflect on previous historiography and the current state of research, and to define the subject, themes and sources of subsequent chapters.

Hungarian Jewry before and after the Holocaust

From the first raising of its specter in the early 1840s till its ultimate discrediting through its Nazi encoding, the “Jewish question” was recurrently posed in Europe for almost exactly one hundred years.5 If the notion was to be 4  Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews. The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997). Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007). 5  On Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda, see Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy. Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). For an innovative study of the role of language in the Nazi genocide, see Thomas Kaplan Pegelow,

Introduction

3

temporarily revived here for strictly analytical purposes, it is with the intention of approaching it as a series of public debates pursued over the current and desirable legal status, societal roles, economic activities and cultural particularisms of Jews. In modern Europe, such public debates constituted a transnational phenomenon with local resonances and specificities. In Hungary during the long 19th century, the Jewish question did not yet emerge as a centrally important political issue, even though anti-Semites made several spectacular attempts to achieve its recognition as such.6 Major changes in the legal and political status of Jews constituted parts of larger transformations and could be sufficiently explained by reference to them.7 Conditional Jewish emancipation was first declared in the course of the Hungarian revolution and war of independence of 1848–49. The law was part and parcel of the creation of the multidenominational modern nation and was passed partly as a reward for Jewish participation in the Hungarian military efforts.8 When the compromise between Hungary’s political elites and the House of Habsburg was reached in 1867, the establishment of the new constitutional order implied granting unconditional Jewish emancipation.9 The belated declaration of Judaism as a so called received religion of the state in 1895, which made it equal to other officially endorsed religions of the Kingdom, was among the results of the local variant of the transnational struggle over the status of Catholicism.10  The Language of Nazi Genocide. Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 6  On the history of Hungarian anti-Semitism, see Rolf Fischer, Entwickelungsstufen des Antisemitismus in Ungarn, 1867–1939 (München: Oldenbourg, 1988). On the major affair of the period, the blood libel case of Tiszaeszlár in its social historical context, now see György Kövér, A tiszaeszlári dráma (Budapest: Osiris, 2011). 7  On the details of this, see Ferenc Laczó, “Jewish Questions and the Contested Nation. An Analysis of Major Hungarian Debates of the 19th Century” in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2014/3. On the European variety of paths, see Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (eds.), Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States and Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 8  For the details, see Ambrus Miskolczy, A zsidóemancipáció Magyarországon 1849-ben (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 1999). 9  On the compromise, see R.J.W. Evans, “From Confederation to Compromise: The Austrian Experiment, 1840–1867” in R.J.W. Evans, Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs. Essays on Central Europe, c.1683–1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 10  Móritz Csáky, Der Kulturkampf in Ungarn. Die Kirchenpolitische Gesetzgebung der Jahre 1994/95 (Graz: Herman Böhlaus Nachf., 1967). See also Paul A. Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary. Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–1944 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

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However, with the establishment of the Horthy regime in 1919–20 changes in the status of Jews were no longer derived from more generally applied principles. The birth of the self-declared counter-revolutionary regime in 1919–20 coincided with the emergence of the “Jewish question” as an independent factor in Hungarian politics.11 The infamous numerus clausus law on university enrollment that restricted the proportion of Jews to their proportion in the overall population was adopted as early as 1920.12 The supposition of a specifically Jewish deficit of “national loyalty” was thus officially endorsed right after the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy,13 which included the severe dismantling of the Kingdom of Hungary and the experience of the Republic of Councils in 1919.14 Until then a question of secondary importance, between 1919 and 1944, “the Jewish question” became a source of ever more severe discriminatory demands and arrangements. From then on, its supposed existence was meant to legitimate the social exclusion of Jews and even their worsening persecution. Historians of Hungarian Jewry have been prone to interpreting this law as the one-sided cancellation of the “contract of assimilation” – an imaginary contract, exchanging individual rights for national contributions, dictated by a nationalizing state that was, as if only to make things more peculiar, part of a larger empire and had no ethnic majority.15 In this manner, the period 11   For the theory of the metamorphosis of Hungarian nationalism, see Vera Ránki, The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Jews and Nationalism in Hungary (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1999). 12  In effect, this law redefined the status of Jewry in Hungary. Moreover, as Mária M. Kovács has demonstrated, the 1928 revision of the numerus clausus law concerned the form rather than the substance of the stipulations. See Mária M. Kovács, Törvénytől sújtva. A numerus clausus Magyarországon 1920–1945 (Budapest: Napvilág, 2012). 13  Various elite perspectives on the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy as they were reflected in memoirs are analyzed in Gergely Romsics, Myth and Remembrance: The Dissolution of the Habsburg Empire in the Memoir Literature of the Austro-Hungarian Political Elite (Boulder, Colorado: East European Monographs, 2006). 14  On the end of the Kingdom of Hungary, see Ignác Romsics, The Dismantling of Historic Hungary. The Peace Treaty of Trianon, 1920 (Boulder, Co.: East European Monographs, 2002). The Republic of Councils was already widely interpreted through the scheme of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth. On this, see Paul Hanebrink, A Spectre Haunting Europe: The Idea of Judeo-Bolshevism in Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). 15  For a critical analysis of the notion of a social contract, see Kati Vörös, “A Unique Contract. Interpretations of Modern Hungarian Jewish History” in András Kovács and Eszter Andor (eds.), CEU Jewish Studies Yearbook 2002–2003 (Budapest: CEU Jewish Studies Program, 2003).

Introduction

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under the regency of Miklós Horthy tends to be depicted as “beyond the age of assimilation” without its specific features being positively defined.16 It remains unclear what characterized this quarter of a century of Hungarian Jewish history, unless the period should be conceived, in a teleological fashion, as a mere prehistory of its genocidal final year. Through mapping the major themes, internal plurality and gradual transformation of Hungarian Jewish intellectual discourses in the Horthy era, the first part of this book aims to paint a nuanced picture of this “grey zone” between the emergence of enlightened religiosity in the long 19th century and a decidedly modern catastrophe. By the end of the First World War, the reorganization of the East Central European region and the Jewish question, as defined above, got deeply entangled. The twisted road to the collapse of historic Hungary, including its partial and temporary reestablishment between 1938 and 1944 through an alliance with Nazi Germany, profoundly impacted the history of Jews in the Carpathian Basin. The peace treaty terms of 1920 left large Hungarian Jewish communities outside the new borders of Hungary. While their contacts to the country were never completely severed and parallels remained, the composition of these communities and their political and cultural development in the inter-war years significantly differed from those characterizing the Jewish communities within Hungary.17 The sea change in the political context of Hungarian-Jewish coexistence created a novel situation also within the much reduced territory of post-WWI Hungary. Whereas in the nationalizing Hungarian half of the Habsburg Empire, Jews could acquire crucial roles as members of the Hungarian majority, the possibility of such contributions to the Hungarian national cause no longer existed after the empire’s dissolution. The Hungarian demands for Jewish participation greatly weakened at this time, even though this was much rather due to the rise of intransigent illiberalism with its heavy dose of anti-Semitism than the changes in the international order and state territory. There are substantial reasons to argue that the Horthy regime pursued anti-Semitic policies throughout its quarter of a century. At the same time, as 16  On Horthy in English, see Thomas Sakmyster, Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback. Miklós Horthy, 1918–1944 (Boulder, Col.: East European Monographs, 1994). In Hungarian, now see Dávid Turbucz, Horthy Miklós (Budapest: Napvilág, 2014). 17  The Jewish national platform, for instance, was much more popular in Slovakian as well as Transylvanian territories. On the case of Transylvania, see Attila Gidó, Úton. Erdélyi zsidó társadalom- és nemzetépítési kísérletek (Csíkszereda: Pro-Print, 2008). See also Clara Royer, La Royaume Littéraire. Quêtes d’identité d’une génération d’écrivains juifs de l’entredeux-guerres (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011).

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Guy Miron explained in a comparative frame, a key specificity of the evolution of Hungarian anti-Semitism was that it annulled Jewish emancipation as the eventual outcome of a gradual process.18 With the ever further radicalization of Hungarian anti-Semitism especially in the late 1930s and early 1940s whose ultimate limits, if any, remained unclear, there was continuous need for Hungarian Jews to reassess their situation and previous choices. Due to the devastating fact that by the early 1940s the radicalization of Hungarian anti-Semitism coincided with the making of the Nazi “Final Solution”, Hungarian Jewish intellectuals had to do so in the context of a multidimensional process.19 At this time, the anti-Semitic radicalization of Hungarian ethnic nationalism may have meant everyday discrimination, mass murder and the gravest of threats to them too, but still offered the hope – soon to be betrayed – that the majority of their community would survive. As we shall see below, the constellation of 1941 to early 1944 raised the questions of orientation and loyalty in complex, almost paradoxical ways. Hungary was a dedicated ally of Nazi Germany, however, the key reason behind this alliance was arguably not so much ideological affinity, even though that certainly existed too, but rather the desire to revise the punitive terms of the Trianon peace treaty.20 Somewhat ironically, the Jewish elites of Hungary tended to support the border revisionism of the Horthy regime in spite of the anti-Semitic orientation of the regime; they might have done so precisely because of the fond memories they held and the illusions they cherished regarding Greater Hungary.21 In fact, Hungary was to accept ever more severe anti-Jewish legislation between 1938 and 1941 just as it was recovering parts of 18  See Guy Miron, The Waning of Emancipation. Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 2011). 19  See Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution. The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 20  On Hungarian revisionism, see Miklós Zeidler, Ideas of Territorial Revision in Hungary, 1920–1945 (Boulder, Colorado: East European Monographs 2007). 21  If anything, it is an even graver historical paradox that the (re)assignment of Northern Transylvania to Hungary in 1940 was welcomed by many local Jewish inhabitants too, but it was precisely this territorial rearrangement that ultimately led to their deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau four years later, whereas members of the Southern Transylvanian Jewish communities, who remained in Romania, survived. On Transylvania during WW2, see Holly Case, Between States. The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009). National communist antifascism in Romania recognized the anti-Hungarian propaganda value of this and tried to capitalize on it. This provides an important background to the Hungarian unwillingness to discuss this entanglement, but is remains an insufficient reason.

Introduction

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the territories it had ceded at the end of the First World War.22 Even if these laws were not promulgated under the direct influence of Nazi Germany, they would have to be seen as part of a transnational anti-Jewish turn in Europe – considerations on foreign and internal policy were far too closely interrelated for them to be adopted independently of extra-Hungarian developments. The Hungarian anti-Semitic policy of these years may, to a significant extent, have overlapped with that of the Nazis, but their primary aims were not identical. The dominant Hungarian agenda of ethnic homogenization arguably substantially differed from what Saul Friedländer called the Nazis’ redemptive anti-Semitism. At the same time, various Hungarian agencies did contribute to the implementation of the Nazi genocide against European Jewry as early as 1941 with deportations from Hungary to Kamenetz-Podolsk, as auxiliary forces on the Eastern Front,23 through mass murder in the Hungarian-annexed parts of Vojvodina in early 1942, which was partly directed against Jews, as well as through the so called labor service of adult Jewish men in the context of which tens of thousands perished by early 1944.24 In spite of Hungary’s military alliance with the Axis powers and the aforementioned forms of persecuting Jews before 1944, there was hope that the country might not only remain marginal to Nazi German imperial-genocidal plans, but also stay on the relative periphery of the raging military conflict. Long into the war years, the chance remained that Hungary might avoid becoming a theater of war, in the same way that the Nazi-Soviet alliance of 1939 had no fundamental impact on her. In his widely discussed Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder also noted the special position of Hungary during the global 22  See Nathaniel Katzburg, Hungary and the Jews: Policy and Legislation, 1920–1943 (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1981). On the parliamentary debates surrounding the passing of anti-Semitic legislation, see Claudia K. Farkas, Jogok nélkül. A zsidó lét Magyarországon, 1920–1944 (Budapest: Napvilág, 2010). On Hungarian revisionist success against Czechoslovakia and anti-Semitic radicalization on the ground, now see Attila Simon, Magyar idők a Felvidéken, 1938–1945 (Budapest: Jaffa, 2014). 23  For the former, see George Eisen and Tamás Stark, “The 1941 Galician Deportation and the Kamenets-Podolsk Massacre: A Prologue to the Hungarian Holocaust” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2013/2. On the latter, now see Krisztián Ungváry, Magyar megszálló csapatok a Szovjetunióban, 1941–1944 (Budapest: Osiris, 2015). 24  See the chapter “Discrimination, Radicalization and the First Mass Murders” in Zoltán Vági, László Csősz, and Gábor Kádár, The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2013). On the labor service, now see Robert Rozett, Conscripted Slaves. Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front during World War II (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Publications, 2014). See also Randolph L. Braham, The Hungarian Labor Service System (Boulder, Col.: East European Monographs, 1977).

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conflict, expressing uncertainty whether Hungary belonged to the epicenter of violence. Snyder wrote that it “might arguably have been included, since it was occupied briefly by the Germans late in the war, after years as a German ally, and then occupied by the Soviets.”25 Nonetheless, Bloodlands ultimately suggested that the core area of violence ran North and North-East of Hungary – and had Snyder ended his story in early 1944, he would surely have been right. The Nazi German intervention in Hungary was launched on March 19, 1944 and resulted in heightened collaboration. Upon this preemptive Nazi German occupation of its ally, joint decision making of Germans and Hungarians led to the deportation of the large majority of Hungarian Jews.26 Even if their great majority were ultimately murdered outside the country and not by other Hungarians, the Hungarian state’s share of responsibility clearly remains substantial.27 Even if dubious teleologies of genocide were to be avoided, the ever more radical legal discrimination and increasingly rigid social exclusion of Hungarian Jews in the years 1938 to 1944 may in retrospect be viewed as preparatory steps for co-organizing the politics of genocide. What is more, Hungarian apparatuses were chiefly responsible for implementing the ghettoization and deportation of Hungarian Jews until the border town of Kassa (today Košice, Slovakia).28 In one of the largest and fastest genocidal campaigns in the history of the Holocaust, 437 000 Hungarian Jews were deported to AuschwitzBirkenau in the course of less than two months with over 300 000 of them being murdered there practically immediately upon arrival. Whereas deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau were halted before the Jews of Budapest would have fallen victim too, Hungarian responsibility also includes the subsequent perpetration of mass murder in the capital city and by means of death marches under the Arrow Cross government during the closing stages of the war.29 25  Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 409. 26  Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági, A végső döntés. Berlin, Budapest, Birkenau 1944 (Budapest: Jaffa, 2013). 27  According to current estimates, 4–7% of the victims of the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry were murdered by other Hungarians. 28  On the role of the gendarmerie, see especially Judit Molnár, Zsidósors 1944-ben az V. (szegedi) csendőrkerületben (Budapest: Cserépfalvi, 1995). Judit Molnár, Csendőrök, hivatalnokok, zsidók (Szeged: Szegedi Zsidó Hitközség, 2000). 29  The Arrow Cross came to power in mid-October 1944, after the deportations of the majority of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. On Arrow Cross involvement in the Holocaust, now see László Karsai, “Zsidósors Budapesten a nyilas uralom idején” in Elek Karsai and László Karsai (eds.), Vádirat a nácizmus ellen 4. 1944. október 15–1945. január 18. (Budapest: Balassi, 2014). In English, see “The Arrow Cross Regime” of Zoltán

Introduction

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A moot question concerning the Holocaust in Hungary remains what effect the German occupation of the country had. Can it be considered its trigger or should it rather be seen as a pretext for its implementation? Did it radically alter Hungarian trajectories or merely catalyze pre-existing tendencies? The German occupation indeed transformed Hungarian behavior regarding the Holocaust and may thus be considered the starting point of its main phase. However, the German intervention could exert its genocidal impact on Hungarian Jews precisely through the dramatic change of behavior on the Hungarian side. The exceptionally brutal Nazi-Soviet war in Eastern Europe was to engulf Hungary during the last stages of the war.30 Not only were Hungarian Jewish hopes for the survival of the large majority crushed in the penultimate moment, but all the major aspirations of the country were to be betrayed too. The war Hungary willingly participated in eventually devastated the country, none of the territorial ambitions got fulfilled, and the political outcome most feared by the elites – Soviet occupation followed by Sovietization – was to materialize. Even though Hungary started 1944 from a relatively fortunate position it had managed to preserve for years, by 1945 it was a decimated, destroyed, defeated and occupied country. However, the triple tragedy of war devastation, Soviet conquest and the reestablishment of the Trianon borders happened after agents of the Hungarian state effectively organized the deportation of hundreds of thousands of its already legally discriminated citizens, the majority of whom resided in territories (re)acquired between 1938 and 1941 – and many of whom would otherwise have been eager to define themselves as Hungarians. In 1944, extremist anti-Semitic policies clearly overruled Hungarian considerations on future territorial arrangements. The Holocaust in Hungary thus not only amounts to a major chapter of the ultimate crime of the twentieth century, but may also be viewed as an act of national suicide that preceded further national calamities. The defeat of Nazi Germany and their Hungarian allies brought about liberation for Hungarian Jews as well as the Soviet conquest of the country. In the early postwar years, two relatively large and rather distinct groups of Holocaust Vági, László Csősz, and Gábor Kádár, The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2013). On the history of Hungarian national socialism, see Rudolf Paksa, Magyar nemzetiszocialisták (Budapest: Osiris, 2013). On the death marches, see Daniel Blatman, The Death Marches. The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). 30  See Krisztián Ungváry, Battle for Budapest. Hundred Days in WWII (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).

10

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survivors lived in Hungary: those who had been deported to the Nazi camp universe, but managed to survive, and those who had escaped deportation, most of them being liberated in one of the two major ghettos of the capital city. Whereas members of the former group had to decide whether to return to Hungary, members of the latter would often consider the possibility of emigration. Those who at first continued their lives in Hungary formed a slight majority.31 Their by far largest cohort made Budapest the third most populous Jewish city on the European continent right after the Holocaust.32 Unless they decided to emigrate thereafter, members of this substantial community of survivors had to experience the imposition of Stalinist rule around the onset of the Cold War.33 In the intervening few years, Hungarian Jewish survivors were preoccupied with the immensely difficult tasks of reorganization, repatriation, and relief.34 In the very same years, they also managed to produce a large amount and variety of intellectual responses to the Holocaust (avant la lettre). What makes their accomplishments in the latter regard all the more impressive is that, as Laura Jockusch put it in her panorama, they had to be created “in extremis by traumatized survivors facing severe material want and unstable and insecure living conditions, troubled by anxieties over their past, present, and future.”35 31  The Holocaust in Hungary encompassed a larger territory than postwar Hungary. Any calculation of the exact numbers of Hungarian Holocaust victims, survivors and returnees is severely complicated by the repeated territorial changes. 32  See Michael Brenner, Kleine jüdische Geschichte (München: C.H. Beck, 2008), p. 365. On the losses of Hungarian Jewry, see also Tamás Stark, Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust and after the Second World War, 1939–1949. A Statistical Review (Boulder, Col.: East European Monographs, 2000). 33  On the Sovietization of Hungary, see Peter Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: The Establishment of the Communist Regime in Hungary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Mária Palasik, Chess Game for Democracy. Hungary between East and West, 1944–1947 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). On foreign policy, see László Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War, 1945–1956. Between the United States and the Soviet Union (Budapest: CEU Press, 2004). For Hungary in comparative context, now see Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain. The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (London: Allen Lane, 2012). 34  See Viktor Karády, Túlélők és újrakezdők. Fejezetek a magyar zsidóság szociológiájából 1945 után (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 2002). On the daily aspects of rebuilding Jewish lives in Poland and Slovakia in these years, now see Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence. Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 35  Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 203.

Introduction

11

The early postwar years indeed constituted a moment of great uncertainty, but also great political excitement with leftist and Zionist agendas enjoying much increased popularity among the Jews of Hungary. How exactly Jewish political choices of these years related to the experience of persecution and survival remains to be researched in detail. What is already clear is that surviving the Holocaust could as much lead one to support communist utopianism and in certain cases even to temporary moral blindness, as it could foster profound dissections of the communist system and result in courageous condemnations of its practices. As the cases of several exceptionally sensitive Hungarian Jewish intellectuals show, the two would at times form a sequence.36 It is similarly clear that the major initial wave of responses to the Holocaust was first followed by years of practically wholesale and then by decades of widespread tabooization. The strict tabooization of the Holocaust in Hungary until 1956 may have been the direct consequence of Stalinist rule, but it by and large corresponded to all-European trends. Certain key features of the official Hungarian memory regime arguably only started to diverge from mainstream European expectations several decades later. Whereas the Holocaust became a major international subject during the late phase of the Cold War and there was growing public interest in Hungary too, the key roles Hungarians played in its implementation were to be openly acknowledged only in the post-1989 period in the broader context of new-old ethnic nationalism.37 When formal expectations towards a more self-critical politics of history were raised around the turn of the millennium, significant parts of the Hungarian Right already appeared eager to establish symbolic continuities with the Horthy era. By the early 21st century, the Hungarian remembrance of what was meant to be the most consensually negative reference point in twentieth-century European history thus increasingly turned into a contested and politicized affair.

36  See, for example, János Kornai, By Force of Thought. Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006) and Ágnes Heller, Der Affe auf dem Fahrrad. Eine Lebensgeschichte (Berlin: Philo, 1999). See also the biography of Miklós Gimes: Sándor Révész, Egyetlen élet. Gimes Miklós élete (Budapest: 1956-os Intézet és Sík Kiadó, 1999). 37  On the popular culture of nationalism in early 21st century Hungary, see Margit Feischmidt et al., Nemzet a mindennapokban. Az újnacionalizmus populáris kultúrája (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2014).

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Jewish Intellectual History and the Case of Hungary

Prior to 1989, the most important works on Hungarian Jewish history were written and published outside Hungary.38 Over the past quarter of a century, this has no longer been the case.39 Next to a renaissance of Jewish writing and the republication of classics of modern Hungarian Jewish thought,40 new historical studies started to appear too.41 They included general overviews,42 monographs on the changing identity strategies of Jewish writers in Hungary,43 38  For the history of Hungarian Jewry, see László Gonda, A zsidóság Magyarországon, 1526–1945 (Budapest: Századvég, 1992). On the history of the Holocaust, see Randolph L. Braham. The Politics of Genocide. The Holocaust in Hungary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). On the postwar period, Péter Kende (ed.), Zsidóság az 1945 utáni Magyarországon (Paris: Magyar Füzetek, 1984). 39  For an overview of historiographical developments of the 1990s in particular, see Balázs Trencsényi and Péter Apor, “Fine-tuning the Polyphonic Past: Hungarian Historical Writing in the 1990s” in Sorin Antohi, Balázs Trencsényi and Péter Apor (eds.) Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007), pp. 46–50. 40  See Ignác Goldziher, A zsidóság lényege és fejlődése (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 2000). Lajos Blau, Zsidók és világkultúra (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 1999). Vilmos Bacher, Szentírás és zsidó tudomány (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 1998). István Hahn, A próféták forradalma (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 1998). Sándor Scheiber, A feliratoktól a felvilágosodásig. Kétezer év zsidó irodalma (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 1997). 41  The first collections on the recent past to be released in Hungary were published in 1989 and 1990. See Balázs Fűzfa and Gábor Szabó (eds.), A zsidókérdésről (Szombathely: Németh László Szakkollégium, 1989). Ferenc L. Lendvai, Anikó Sohár and Pál Horváth (eds.), Hét évtized a hazai zsidóság életében, I–II. (Budapest: MTA Filozófiai Intézete, 1990). 42  See Ferenc Fejtő, Magyarság, zsidóság (Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézete, 2000). Anikó Prepuk provides an overview of Jewish history in Central and Eastern Europe in Anikó Prepuk, A zsidóság Közép- és Kelet-Európában a 19.-20. században (Debrecen: Csokonai, 1997). In Israel, an illustrated overview appeared under the title Anna Szalai (ed.), The Land of Hagar. The Jews of Hungary: History, Society and Culture (Tel Aviv: Beth Hatefutsoth, The Nahum Goldman Museum of the Jewish Diaspora and the Israeli Ministry of Defence Publishing House, 2002). See also Raphael Patai, The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996). 43  See especially Katalin Fenyves, Képzelt asszimiláció? Négy zsidó értelmiségi nemzedék önképe (Budapest: Corvina, 2010). Exploiting an exceptional source, the fourteen volumes of József Szinnyei’s Magyar írók élete és munkái originally released between 1891 and 1914, a non-standardized encyclopedia which includes ample autobiographical materials of writers, Fenyves’ monograph compares the identity strategies of four generations of writers in mostly quantitative terms. Whereas Fenyves’ findings are suggestive of trends prior to the Horthy era, both the source base and the method of analysis of the present book

Introduction

13

and on the controversial history of the “Jewish question” in the country.44 They also included major source editions,45 social historical analyses,46 locally and regionally focused works,47 and in-depth studies of major events,48 key individuals,49 and social groups.50 substantially differ from hers. It has therefore proven impossible to directly extent (and potentially refine) her valuable findings. 44  See János Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon. Politikai eszmetörténet (Budapest: Osiris, 2001). Tamás Ungvári, Csalódások kora. A „zsidókérdés” magyarországi története (Budapest: Scolar, 2010). For an earlier version in English, see Tamás Ungvári, The “Jewish Question” in Europe. The Case of Hungary (Boulder, CO: Atlantic Research and Publications, 2000). Vera Ránki, The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Jews and Nationalism in Hungary (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1999). 45  Géza Komoróczy et al. (eds.), Héber kútforrások Magyarország és a magyarországi zsidóság történetéhez: a kezdetektől 1686-ig (Budapest: Osiris, 2003). Géza Komoróczy (ed.), „Nekem itt zsidónak kell lenni.” Források és dokumentumok (965–2012) (Pozsony/ Bratislava: Kalligram, 2013). Géza Komoróczy (ed.), Zsidók a magyar társadalomban I–II. Írások az együttélésről, a feszültségekről és az értékekről (1790–2012) (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2015). János Kőbányai (ed.), Zsidó reformkor (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 2000). 46  See Viktor Karády, Zsidóság, polgárosodás, asszimiláció. Tanulmányok (Budapest: Cserépfalvi, 1997). Viktor Karády, Zsidóság és társadalmi egyenlőtlenségek (1867–1945): történeti-szociológiai tanulmányok (Budapest: Replika-kör, 2000). Kinga Frojimovics, Szétszakadt történelem. Zsidó vallási irányzatok Magyarországon 1868–1950 (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2008). Yehuda Don, A magyarországi zsidóság társadalom- és gazdaságtörténete a 19–20. században: tanulmányok (Budapest: MTA Judaisztikai Kutatóközpont, 2006). 47  Relevant works have been released on Kassa/Košice, Miskolc and the Banat region, among others. Howard N. Lupovitch, Jews at the Crossroads: Tradition and Accommodation during the Golden Age of the Hungarian Nobility, 1729–1878 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2006). Victor Neumann, The End of a History: The Jews of Banat from the Beginning to Nowadays (Bucharest: Bucharest University Press, 2006). Éva Kovács, Felemás asszimiláció. A kassai zsidóság a két világháború között (1918–1938) (Dunaszerdahely: Fórum Kisebbségkutató Intézet, 2004). 48  Jacob Katz, A House Divided. Orthodoxy and Schism in Nineteenth-Century Central European Jewry (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1998). Péter Bihari, Lövészárkok a hátországban. Középosztály, zsidókérdés, antiszemitizmus az első világháború Magyarországán (Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó, 2008). 49  Ambrus Miskolczy, Horn Ede. A magyar-zsidó nemzeti identitástudat forrásvidékén (Gödöllő: Attraktor, 2007). Tibor Frank (ed.), Honszeretet és felekezeti hűség. Wahrmann Mór 1831–1892 (Budapest: Argumentum, 2006). László Tőkéczki, Vázsonyi Vilmos (Budapest: XX. Század Intézet, 2005). 50  See especially Mária M. Kovács, Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics: Hungary from the Habsburgs to the Holocaust (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1994).

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The Hungarian research environment greatly improved, but arguably did not change fundamentally.51 In spite of the revival of Hungarian Jewish historiography, the overall situation has remained rather ambivalent. The new interest in Hungarian Jewish topics has continued to be accompanied by certain thematic anachronisms. Growing international attention made Hungarian Jewish historiography only somewhat less insular. Significant research efforts have left some major gaps, especially when it comes to the Horthy era and the early postwar years. Research for this book was originally triggered by the realization that, even though both Jewish themes and intellectual historical methods have been revived since the fall of the communist regime,52 the two trends have developed practically independently of each other. The pools of sources created by authors who identified themselves as Jewish and published as much on Jewish as on other themes, i.e. the specific sources of Hungarian Jewish intellectual history, have remained heavily underexplored.53 Until now, intellectual historians have devoted significantly more attention to the stories of ‘non-Jewish Jews.’54 György Lukács and his disciples have been repeatedly researched and interpreted.55 There has been notable interest in other prominent ‘non-Jewish Jews’ from Hungary too, such as Karl and Michael Polányi or Karl Mannheim.56 Detailed biographies were devoted to Oszkár Jászi, Miklós Radnóti, and Antal 51  For an overview of recent scholarly developments, see András Kovács and Michael L. Miller, “Jewish Studies in Contemporary Hungary” in Modern Journal of Jewish Studies, 2011/1, pp. 86–89. 52  See Gergely Romsics, The Memory of the Habsburg Empire in German, Austrian, and Hungarian Right-Wing Historiography and Political Thinking, 1918–1941 (Boulder, Col.: Social Science Monographs, 2010). Balázs Trencsényi, The Politics of “National Character.” A Study in Interwar East European Thought (London: Routledge, 2011). József Takáts, Modern magyar politikai eszmetörténet (Budapest: Osiris, 2007). 53  The biographical notes included at the end of this manuscript cover many of their most significant representatives. 54  For the original proposal of this concept, see Isaac Deutscher, The non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1968). 55  See George Lichtheim, Lukács (London: Fontana, 1970). Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1979). Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991). 56  On Michael Polányi, see Mary Jo Nye, Michael Polanyi and His Generation. Origins of the Social Construction of Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011). See also Lee Congdon, Exile and Social Thought. Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919–1933 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991).

Introduction

15

Szerb who may have been of Jewish origin, but were either baptized upon their birth, or decided to leave the Hungarian Jewish community at later stages of their lives.57 ‘Non-Jewish Jews’ who emigrated from Hungary were also already the subject of scholarly monographs.58 On the other hand, the more explicitly Jewish intellectual historical sources, those of the burgeoning field of Jewish studies in Hungary and, more broadly, those produced in the framework of various educational and cultural institutions of the dominant Neolog branch of Judaism, have remained insufficiently studied.59 The marginalization of specifically Jewish sources in Hungarian scholarship has in fact remained so pervasive in early post-communist Hungary that even the intellectual historians dealing with the history of the “Jewish question” have refrained from drawing on them to any significant extent.60 There are doubtlessly multiple reasons behind this conspicuous neglect of Jewish intellectual historical sources. The pattern of tabooization created by the traumatic recent past of Hungarian Jews and what some have called the emergence of a largely negative community of memory appear to be crucial among them.61 Another factor of relevance is the marginalization of Jewish topics in 57  József Havasréti, Szerb Antal (Budapest: Magvető, 2013). Győző Ferencz, Radnóti Miklós élete és költészete: kritikai életrajz (Budapest: Osiris, 2005). György Litván, A TwentiethCentury Prophet: Oscar Jászi, 1875–1957 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2006). 58  Tibor Frank, Double Exile. The Migration of Hungarian-Jewish Professionals through Germany to the United States (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009). Eszter B. Gantner, Budapest – Berlin. Die Koordinaten einer Emigration 1919–1933 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2011). 59  Recent republication projects pursued, above all, by the publishing house Múlt és Jövő have not succeeded at generating new waves of reception either. See especially the volumes in the series Zsidó Tudomány: Ignác Goldziher, A zsidóság lényege és fejlődése (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 2000). Lajos Blau, Zsidók és világkultúra (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 1999). Vilmos Bacher, Szentírás és zsidó tudomány (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 1998). Sándor Scheiber, A feliratoktól a felvilágosodásig – Kétezer év zsidó irodalma (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 1997). István Hahn, A próféták forradalma (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 1998). Now see also the anthologies Géza Komoróczy (ed.), „Nekem itt zsidónak kell lenni” Források és dokumentumok (965–2012) (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2013) and Géza Komoróczy (ed.), Zsidók a magyar társadalomban I–II. Írások az együttélésről, a feszültségekről és az értékekről (1790–2012) (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2015). 60  János Gyurgyák may have published the most substantial monograph on the debates ­surrounding the “Jewish question” in Hungary, but had to highlight in the bibliographical appendix of his work that “we continue to lack a bibliography of Hungarian Jewish intellectual trends and do not have an overview of historical and religious changes either.” See János Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon (Budapest: Osiris, 2001), p. 630. 61  See Éva Kovács and Júlia Vajda, Mutatkozás. Zsidó identitás történetek (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 2002). On more recent trends, see Kata Zsófia Vincze, “About the Jewish Renaissance

16

CHAPTER 1

the decades of communist rule and the sharp decline of religious and ethnic identification under a regime enforcing policies of secularization and national homogenization. Last but not least, the persistence of anti-Semitism and especially its heightened visibility since the fall of communism have been responsible for a rather misfortunate debate on Hungarian Jewish history.62 In a context where anti-Semites continued to be intent on symbolically excluding Jews from Hungarian society and repeatedly questioned their Hungarianness, the discourse on Jewish assimilatedness came to be seen as a ‘politically correct’ answer to this malevolent challenge. In recent years, such an apologetic perspective on Jewish assimilation has been recurrently taken when topics in modern Hungarian Jewish history have been addressed.63 The liberal emphasis on Jewish assimilatedness during post-communist debates in turn hindered the further development of Jewish historiography and resulted in an insufficient level of its institutionalization. The scarcity of Hungarian Jewish intellectual historical research is thus only part of a larger problem complex. The few studies published after 1989 that did devote attention to Hungarian Jewish intellectual discourses in the Horthy era tended to combine analytical agendas with evaluative statements. Key examples include historical accounts by the likes of László Csorba or Péter Bihari that point to the widening gap between Hungarian Jewish loyalism and the experience of anti-Semitism.64 in Post-1989 Hungary” in Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasvári (eds.), Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2011). 62  On Hungarian anti-Semitism since 1989, see András Kovács, The Stranger at Hand. Antisemitic Prejudice in Post-Communist Hungary (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 63  See especially Tamás Ungvári, Csalódások kora. A „zsidókérdés” magyarországi története (Budapest: Scolar, 2010). The main problem with this stance is not so much its apologetic intention – after all, defending a stigmatized minority is a laudable aim, even if, strictly speaking, not a scholarly one – but that, ironically enough, it reproduces the expectation of national homogeneity. From among the previous Hungarian-language criticisms of assimilationist historiography, see Gábor Gyáni, “ ‘Erkölcstelen emancipáció’ és ‘illuzórikus asszimiláció.’ Diskurzusok a zsidókérdésről” in Ibid., Történészdiskurzusok (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2002). 64  In this critical vein, László Csorba maintained that Hungarian Jews ambitioned, above all, “to preserve liberal appearances. They enthusiastically declared their assimilatedness as well as their commitment to furthering the cause.” László Csorba, “Zsidó szellemi élet a húszas-harmincas évek Magyarországán” in Ferenc L. Lendvai, Anikó Sohár and Pál Horváth (eds.), Hét évtized a hazai zsidóság életében I. (Budapest: MTA Filozófiai Intézet Kiadása, 1990), p. 247. Péter Bihari was equally critical when he explained that “there are no traces that the leaders of the Neolog community would have reflected on the sustainability of their position. They did not properly consider their situation; their stance

Introduction

17

This observation in turn leads both Csorba and Bihari to critique the anachronism of Hungarian Jews, which was supposedly responsible for their fatal unpreparedness in the face of the genocidal onslaught. The key idea behind these criticisms is that even though the Horthy era was a period beyond assimilation, Jewish contemporaries by and large failed to acknowledge this and did not reorient in an adequate manner. Through mapping the major themes, internal plurality and gradual transformation of Hungarian Jewish intellectual discourses in the Horthy era, chapters two to four of this book aim to present an alternative to such one-sided and rather judgmental interpretations. In such a historiographical context, a key challenge of empirical research has consisted not so much of locating plenty of potentially relevant but barely explored sources, but much rather of how to define and delimit the scope of Hungarian Jewish intellectual history in the age of genocide so that the results would possess sufficient validity while the corpus would remain manageable.65 Two chief criteria were applied in the course of the research: Hungarian Jewish intellectual history had to cover authors who, on the one hand, prominently employed the Hungarian language – a recently acquired but already major Jewish language in Europe of the twentieth century – to discuss Jewish themes. On the other, these authors expressed a level of Jewish self-consciousness in the frame of explicitly Jewish intellectual projects in the Hungarian language or at least conceptualized parts of their own experiences as in important respects specifically Jewish ones. These two criteria were applied to authors and their texts produced between the global beginnings of the Great Depression and the regional imposition of Stalinist rule in order to incorporate a representative sample of relevant intellectual phenomena without imposing overly strict group boundaries.66 remained rather confused. They merely offered a plethora of repetitions and did not show any real awareness of the changed circumstances.” Péter Bihari, “A magyarországi zsidóság helyzete a zsidótörvényektől a deportálásig” in Ferenc L. Lendvai, Anikó Sohár and Pál Horváth (eds.), Hét évtized a hazai zsidóság életében II. (Budapest: MTA Filozófiai Intézet Kiadása, 1990), p. 15. 65  On the contested question whether to define Judaism as a religion, see Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion. An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). Since the 19th century, Jews in Hungary were officially defined as a religious group with the inter-war period bringing new ambiguities and uncertainties. As Hungarian Jewish intellectual historical sources of the 1930s and 1940s show, alternative categorizations of Jews as a people or a nation were in circulation in this milieu too. 66  Such a rather flexible definition of Hungarian Jewish intellectual production implies that even if the Orthodox and Zionist intellectuals of Hungary may not appear as central

18

CHAPTER 1

The attempt to analyze a representative sample of Hungarian Jewish intellectual discourses in the Horthy era implies that the liberal conservative and almost exclusively male intellectual elite of the community will receive extended attention. Chapter two to four will explore in detail the variety and transformation of their discourses until 1944. The approach taken in the second half of the book (chapters five to seven) reflects the major sociopolitical and discursive shifts that the horrific experience of 1944–45 and the end of the war brought for the community of survivors. Whereas the defining intellectual genres prior to 1944 were the scholarly study and the high-brow article and arguably the key debate of intellectual life concerned the (ever narrower) possibilities of Hungarian Jewish identity, the years following liberation brought about a great pluralization of voices. They saw Hungarian Jewish efforts to document and interpret the unprecedented destruction through a significantly wider variety of genres that ranged from interview protocols through memoirs to contemporary historical monographs. Aiming to reflect this intellectual sea change accompanying the most radical discontinuity in Hungarian Jewish life, chapters in the first half of the book shall be organized by venues of publication, such as leading journals or yearbook series, whereas those in the second half shall each be devoted to a crucial type of source. The chosen timeframe of 1929 to 1948 also ought to enable the exploration of some of the more subtle lines of personal and discursive continuities in the aftermath of the Holocaust.67 Having identified significant research gaps, more words are due on the major precursors to this study. The three chapters in the first half will build on Guy Miron’s The Waning of Emancipation in particular, a pioneering endeavor that compares Hungarian Jewish intellectual reactions of the Horthy era to those

actors in most chapters, some of their voices shall be included. Budapest-based initiatives may recurrently be in the focus, but the seminal contributions made by Hungarian Jews from other parts of the country shall be treated equally seriously. Last but not least, initiatives from Hungary within its Trianon borders may be overrepresented compared to relatively independent Hungarian Jewish regional centers outside of them, such as in Translyvania, without the latter being entirely neglected. On the self-organization and attempts at nation building of Transylvanian Jews, see especially Attila Gidó, Úton. Erdélyi zsidó társadalom- és nemzetépítési kísérletek (Csíkszereda: Pro-Print, 2008). 67  Irrespective of how much the Holocaust may be perceived as the ultimate rupture in human civilization, conceptualizing which requires methodological and conceptual innovation, it stands to reason that Jewish survivors of the early postwar period often tried to respond to the Nazi genocide through more conventional intellectual means which had already been at their disposal.

Introduction

19

of their French and German counterparts.68 The Waning of Emancipation is primarily interested in how various groups of Jewish intellectuals responded to the withdrawal of emancipation in their countries, how they reassessed their hopes of emancipation, and how they came to view their past. Miron finds that German, French and Hungarian Jewish intellectuals all turned to Jewish history and memory in the Nazi era, but the latter two were still intensely engaged with questions of French and Hungarian history as well. As he argues, French and Hungarian Jews in fact continued to equate the national and political tradition of their respective countries with elements they appreciated, systematically underestimating and partly externalized their increasingly prevalent anti-Semitic components.69 Regarding Hungary, Miron notes the similarity of Neolog and Orthodox positions, claiming that the latter, as exemplified by Dezső Korein, above all, also tended to emphasize the positive side of Hungarian traditions. At the same time, The Waning of Emancipation explores the emergence of a Neolog discourse critical of assimilation during the 1930s and early 1940s. Miron depicts literary critic Aladár Komlós as the main representative of this trend and argues that it brought some mainstream Neolog intellectuals close to Zionist positions. While Miron’s monograph offers highly insightful analyses, it is almost exclusively focused on historical perspectives and their relation to the withdrawal of Jewish emancipation in Europe. Building on the book’s important findings, chapters two to four will aim to expand the scope of exploration to a host of additional themes, including Hungarian Jewish identity options, cultural programs, political platforms, discourses on contributions, interpretations of contemporary events, and the more abstract discussions of historicity. These chapters shall also foreground the transnational dimension, addressing how Budapest-based publications responded to the Nazi genocide against European Jewry prior to 1944 and how

68  Until now, the book was published only in Hebrew and English, but not in Hungarian. The English version is Guy Miron, The Waning of Emancipation. Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 2011). A somewhat dated but still useful overview of the East Central European region in this period can be found in Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). On Bohemia, see Kateřina Čapková, Czechs, Germans, Jews? National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012). On Poland, see, among many others, Katrin Steffen, Jüdische Polonität. Ethnizität und Nation im Spiegel der polnischsprachigen jüdischen Presse 1918– 1939 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). 69  Miron, The Waning of Emancipation, p. 219.

20

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awareness of the ongoing genocide impacted Hungarian Jewish intellectuals’ perspectives. The second part of the book in turn analyzes Jewish responses to the Holocaust in the event’s immediate aftermath. These chapters engage polemically with an influential narrative on the history of Holocaust remembrance. In recent decades, the Holocaust has often been understood as an event that acquired its wider cultural and political significance only several decades after the war when the widespread silence that used to surround it was finally broken. In favor of this interpretation, two key reasons have been cited: survivors were at first supposedly generally unable to articulate their traumatic experiences and the full scope and coherence of the Nazi program of extermination could only be recognized belatedly. According to this influential interpretation, no major early postwar wave of responses to the unprecedented destruction could have taken place. Without questioning that in more recent decades Holocaust remembrance has exerted much wider resonance ansd even made a global impact, a new wave of scholarship emphasizes that Jewish survivors were anything but silent during the early postwar period. The late David Cesarani, editor of one of the most important collections arguing this point, has insisted, in a supremely ironic manner, that Jewish survivors, “if anything, succeeded too well, too soon” in discussing and commemorating the Holocaust.70 Chapters five to seven build on this growing body of scholarship to offer in-depth intellectual historical case studies of the rich and varied Hungarian Jewish survivor responses in particular. Collect and Record!, the pivotal 2012 monograph by Laura Jockusch, begins by explaining that Jewish ‘memorians’ developed modern techniques of docu­ menting violence in the late nineteenth century and came to understand the collection of witness accounts as an essential part of their scholarlycommemorative response to human-made catastrophes.71 Jockusch’s book shows how Jewish survivors of the Holocaust subsequently applied these techniques to the unprecedented crimes committed during the Second World War. The collection of witness accounts thus became an eminent part of the agenda of the historical commissions and documentation centers that were launched as soon as the Nazi genocide had ended – or, as in Poland or France, may have

70  David Cesarani, “Challenging the ‘Myth of Silence’. Postwar Responses to the Destruction of European Jewry” in David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (eds.), After the Holocaust. Challenging the Myth of Silence (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 32. 71  Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Introduction

21

already been launched during its implementation.72 Beyond creating manifold sources on the Holocaust before the end of the 1940s, survivors also completed a broad array of publications which, however, came to be neglected afterwards and remain underexplored to this day. One of the explicit aims of Laura Jockusch’s groundbreaking monograph was to retrieve from oblivion the remarkable efforts survivors made in the immediate aftermath of the genocide and help “establish their rightful place as the foundation stone for later historical writing on the Holocaust.”73 In her conclusion, she argued that scholars of the early post-war years in fact anticipated many current debates and present-day historians ought to feel encouraged to return to their works. This is what chapters five to seven aim to accomplish by focusing on Hungary, a country offering one of the richest source bases in Europe, but which is unfortunately neglected in Jockusch’s otherwise impressively researched panorama. These chapters will not only show that Holocaust survivors from Hungary, many of them highly acculturated Jews, produced detailed knowledge about various facets of the Nazi program of extermination in the early postwar years. They shall also critically engage with hundreds of their witness accounts, published memoirs and early contemporary historical monographs to argue that in Hungary, in contrast to Poland and France (the two major cases analyzed by Laura Jockusch), it was not so much local Jewish intellectual traditions, but rather the shockingly open politics of genocide in the last stages of the war, by which time the Nazi genocide had become an open secret, that resulted in an intense and profound engagement with the Jewish catastrophe in its immediate aftermath.

Themes and Sources

During the Horthy era, Budapest ranked, right behind Warsaw, as the second most populous Jewish city on the European continent.74 At this time, the Hungarian capital was the primary setting for avid Jewish intellectual discussions in the ambivalent environment of inter-war Hungary and the increasingly desperate years of the Second World War. The mid-1930s in fact constituted the 72  On the profoundly impressive Polish Jewish efforts during the war, see Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 73  Jockusch, Collect and Record!, p. 17. 74  See Michael Brenner, Kleine jüdische Geschichte (München: C.H. Beck, 2008), p. 365.

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high point of Jewish intellectual and cultural activities in modern Hungary, with fifty-three different Jewish periodicals being released in 1936 alone.75 By the late 1930s, the number of such periodicals was drastically reduced, but some of them, including all three chief sources from the Horthy era to be analyzed below, continued to be published practically until the very last moments before the mass ghettoizations and deportations. By 1941–43, Hungarian Jewish intellectuals may still have trusted that the large majority of their community would largely survive the unprecedented wave of antiJewish violence across the continent. At the very same time, they would grow to despair in the face of ever worsening news, leaving behind plenty of understudied documents that reveal their complex reactions to and reflections on ongoing developments. Much of previous scholarship has tended to treat the Hungarian Jewish community in isolation. Numerous authors have overemphasized the Hungarian identification of this major European Jewish community without paying sufficient attention to its internal plurality and the transformation of its strategies of identification. As mentioned, chapters in the first half of this book shall consciously aim to place Hungarian Jewish history in transnational frames too. Individual case studies will highlight Hungarian Jewish intellectual connections to German Jewry in particular, and analyze how these connections acquired new relevance and tragic coloring with the establishment of Nazi Germany and the ensuing persecution of German Jews. Chapters two to four shall explore the key ideas, characteristic reactions and changing self-understanding of Hungarian Jewish intellectuals with a focus on the years of ever more severe legal discrimination, socioeconomic exclusion and the first instances of mass violence between 1938 and 1944. The chief sources of these chapters are publications which were not only representative forums of Hungarian Jewish intellectual discussions during the Horthy era, but which were still released during the implementation of the Holocaust just outside the borders of Hungary. Beyond their continuous appearance until 1944, the 75  Sándor Scheiber, Magyar zsidó hírlapok és folyóiratok bibliográfiája 1847–1992 (Budapest: MTA Judaisztikai Kutatócsoport, 1993). On the history of the German Jewish press, see Eleonore Lappin and Michael Nagel (eds.), Deutsch-jüdische Presse und jüdische Geschichte: Dokumente, Darstellungen, Wechselbeziehungen = The German-Jewish Press and Jewish History: Documents, Representations, Interrelations (Bremen: Edition Lumiere, 2008). On the German Jewish press under the Nazis, see Katrin Diehl, Die jüdische Presse im Dritten Reich. Zwischen Selbstbehauptung und Fremdbestimmung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1997).

Introduction

23

three leading intellectual publications, the Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat évkönyvei (the Yearbooks of the Israelite Hungarian Literary Society), the journal Libanon and the Ararát évkönyvek (the Ararát Yearbooks) were chosen as the subjects of case studies due to their representativeness in different areas.76 The IMIT Yearbooks were released altogether fifteen times between 1929 and 1943 and constituted the key forum for Hungarian Jewish popular scholarly discussions during the Horthy era.77 Libanon appeared from 1936 till the end of 1943 and provided a main platform to express the agendas and insights of the middle generation of Hungarian Jewish intellectuals, whereas the Ararát Yearbooks served as a key stage during the Second World War to articulate political conceptions and elaborate narratives of modern Jewish history. The second chapter draws on the IMIT Yearbooks to dissect prevalent traditions and canonized values of Hungarian Jewish scholars, analyze their discourses on identity and Jewish contributions, and approach their varied takes on the question of historicity. The two parts of chapter three analyzing the Ararát Yearbooks will compare historical narratives and map the spectrum of political stances, whereas those on Libanon shall contrast two characteristic conceptions of Jewish culture and study the transformation of Hungarian Jewish perspectives in the local age of persecution. Chapter four of the book shall in turn explore the interpretations of contemporary events to show how the unprecedented nature of the ongoing violence was realized well prior to the main stages of the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry. Aiming to overcome the division between Jewish historians and historians of the Holocaust in accordance with the recent critique and proposal of David Engel, the second part of the book will study the exceptionally rich 76  Other journals, such as Egyenlőség or Múlt és Jövő, might have been included, but either did not entirely fit the agenda of my study or were already studied elsewhere. The central organ of Neolog Jewry, Egyenlőség, stopped appearing in 1938. Múlt és Jövő is the subject of the dissertation of János Kőbányai, the chief editor of its revived (post-1988) version. See János Kőbányai, Szétszálazás és újraszövés. A Múlt és Jövő, a Nyugat és a modern zsidó kultúra megteremtése (Budapest: Osiris, 2014). 77   Magyar Zsidó Szemle, the leading Jewish Studies periodical released in Hungarian that recurrently published materials in Hebrew and German as well, could have offered an alternative to the IMIT Yearbooks. Magyar Zsidó Szemle was launched in 1884 and served as the official organ of the Rabbinical Seminary after 1927. Prior to its current series started in 2004, Magyar Zsidó Szemle released a total of 65 volumes. However, its discussions tended to be of a more narrowly scholarly nature and thus of less interest to the wider public. At the same time, many of its contributors also appeared in the IMIT Yearbooks, which resulted in a significant amount of overlapping content.

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CHAPTER 1

and varied Jewish responses to the Holocaust prior to the Stalinization of Hungary.78 Chapter five will explore the protocols of the Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság (the National Relief Committee for Deportees), one of the largest collections of early witness accounts worldwide, whereas chapter six will compare seven book-length narratives of persecution published in 1945–46. Chapter seven will in turn explore the beginnings of Holocaust historiography in Hungary, focusing on key monographs of four largely forgotten Hungarian Jewish pioneers of research on Nazism and the Holocaust from 1947–48. The conclusion will draw connections between the case studies of the book with the aim of exploring personal and discursive continuities and discontinuities across the ultimate rupture of genocide. It will also aim to place the history and memory of Hungarian Jews into comparative and transnational contexts to suggest an explanation why Hungarian Jewish experiences have been rather marginalized in mainstream European narratives, despite Jewish survivors from Hungary being in the forefront of documenting and interpreting the Holocaust upon their liberation.

78  See David Engel, Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). In this vein, now see Norman J.W. Goda (ed.), Jewish Histories of the Holocaust. New Transnational Approaches (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014).

CHAPTER 2

Jewish Studies in the Horthy Era The Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest has served as the main center for the pursuit of Jewish scholarship in modern Hungary.1 Founded in 1877 and modeled primarily on the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, the key luminaries of the Seminary were actively involved in international networks of Jewish scholars, cherishing close German Jewish affiliations, above all. However, as an institution of higher education supported by the nationalizing Hungarian state, the Seminary was expected to combine its commitment to Judaism and modern scholarship with expressions of Hungarian identification.2 Whereas several leading scholars of the first generation at the Seminary still worked primarily in German, the generation that came to dominate the institution by the early 20th century was already more Hungarianized.3 Both the transnational embeddedness and the increasing Magyarization of Hungarian Jewish Wissenschaft can thus be considered factors of major importance. Leading scholars affiliated with the Seminary such as Vilmos Bacher (1850–1913), Ignác Goldziher (1850–1921), or Sándor Scheiber (1913–1985) made Budapest one of the most important European centers of Jewish Studies from the times of the Dual Monarchy into those of the postwar communist regime. Nonetheless, essential parts of their work have received only limited attention until now and this is especially true, both within and outside Hungary, for those available only in Hungarian. The close contacts and striking similarities between Hungarian and German Jewish intellectuals notwithstanding, our current level of knowledge about the former can thus hardly be compared to those 1  On the history of the Seminary, see Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger (ed.), The Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest, 1877–1977: a Centennial Volume (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1986). József Schweitzer (ed.), „A tanítás az élet kapuja.” Tanulmányok az országos Rabbiképző Intézet fennállásának 120. évfordulója alkalmából (Budapest: Universitas Kiadó, Országos Főrabbi Hivatal, 1999). 2  The Hungarian state expected its modern rabbis to have completed tertiary education of two kinds. All graduates of the Seminary were required to graduate from the University of Budapest. 3  See particularly Imre Benoschofsky, “The Second Era” in Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger (ed.), The Rabbinical Seminary, p. 68. I ought to note that Lajos Blau was active at the Seminary only until 1932 and Bernát Heller until 1935. From among the great scholars of the second generation listed by Benoschofsky, only Mihály Guttmann (who assumed the role of Rector in 1933) continued to be active in the second half of the 1930s.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004328655_003

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reached in the historical study of the German Wissenschaft des Judentums and, more broadly, German Jewish intellectual history.4 Much remains to be done before we shall have a nuanced grasp of how the towering achievements of the aforementioned scholars fit into the broader context of Hungarian Jewish and transnational intellectual discussions.5 This chapter aims to partially remedy these shortcomings by exploring Hungarian Jewish popular scholarly discussions of the Horthy era on five key questions: Jewish identity, traditions, values, contributions, and histori­city. I shall analyze them on the basis of the Yearbooks of the Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat (the Israelite Hungarian Literary Society), the most important popular scholarly release of the times. Whereas the circumstances drastically worsened in the years of publication between 1929 and 1943, basic characteristics of the communicative situation, such as the group of speakers, the type of audience, or the venue, remained much the same. What is more, contributors to the IMIT Yearbooks tended to articulate their stances in rather explicit terms. These factors make these yearbooks an exceptionally valuable source to map the various positions Hungarian Jewish intellectuals took on the aforementioned five questions. The Israelite Hungarian Literary Society was a leading organization of Hungarian Jewish elites that originally established its forum for popular scholarship in the 1890s. The yearbooks of the Horthy era, edited at the Rabbinical Seminary, were on average 360 pages long and were printed in 800 copies. In the years 1929 to 1943, chief editor Samu Szemere (1881–1978) managed to recruit altogether 114 authors.6 Most of the regular contributors 4  On the German case, see Michael Brenner and Stefan Rohrbacher (eds.), Wissenschaft vom Judentum. Annäherungen nach dem Holocaust (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000). See also Christian Wiese, Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie im ­wilhelminischen Deutschland. Ein Schrei ins Leere? (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999). On the Wissenschaft des Judentums in comparative contexts, see Christian Wiese and Mirjam Thulin (eds.), Wissenschaft des Judenthums in Europe. Comparative Perspectives (Berlin: DeGruyter, forthcoming). 5  As a major exception, see the following study on the transnational network of David Kaufmann, one of the leading scholars of the Seminary in the late 19th century: Mirjam Thulin, Kaufmanns Nachrichtendienst. Ein jüdisches Gelehrtennetzwerk im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). 6  Sixty-nine of them only contributed once, seventeen of them twice and thirteen three times. The list of the fifteen most frequent contributors looks as follows: Bernát Heller (1871–1943) with thirteen publications, Fülöp Grünvald (1887–1964) with nine, Mihály Guttmann (1872– 1942) and Pál Nádai (1881–1945) both with eight. Aladár Komlós (1892–1980), Sándor Scheiber (1913–1985), Jenő Zsoldos (1896–1972), Bertalan Kohlbach (1866–1944), Aladár Fürst (1877–?),

Jewish Studies In The Horthy Era

27

were either already employed at the Rabbinical Seminary during this period or, were they to survive the genocide, were often hired there shortly after the Second World War.7 The yearbook of 1930 listed 519 regular members of the Israelite Hungarian Literary Society, of whom slightly more than half were residents of Budapest. At the same time, nearly 90% (63 out of 72) of the contributing members of the Society were from the capital city.8 Next to publishing its yearbooks, the Literary Society also initiated the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Hungarian and could thus be usefully compared to the Jewish Publication Society of America, among others.9 Moreover, in the course of the 1930s, the Society managed to release three additional volumes of historical documents in its series Magyar-zsidó oklevéltár (Hungarian Jewish Archives).10 Bertalan Edelstein (1876–1934), Miksa Pollák (1868–1944), Mór Fényes (1866–1949), Oszkár Elek (1880–1945), József Turóczi-Trostler (1888–1962), and Károly Sebestyén (1872–1945) all contributed at least four times. 7  Mihály Guttmann was the Rector of the Seminary between 1933 and 1942. Heller served as professor between 1922 and 1935. Bertalan Edelstein taught at the Seminary between 1922 and 1934, while Fülöp Grünvald, who took over his task of report writer in the mid1930s, was employed there in 1950. Similarly to Grünvald, Sándor Scheiber started to teach at the Seminary only in 1945, but was appointed Rector a mere five years later. Bertalan Kohlbach taught at the secondary school of the Rabbinical Seminary. In other words, with the exception of Ármin Hoffer and Ernő Róth (the latter anyhow being appointed only in 1942), all the rectors and professors of the Seminary made contributions to the yearbooks. 8  Moreover, the nine contributing members from outside Budapest included five Jewish communities (those of Győr, Kaposvár, Nagykanizsa, Szeged and Szentes) as well as one individuals from both Vienna and Novi Sad (Újvidék). Thus, merely two indi­viduals ­living in Hungary but outside Budapest were contributing members, whereas seven contributing members had an address on Andrássy út alone. The dominance of individuals from Budapest was truly overwhelming: 28 contributing members were from the 5th district (Lipótváros) alone, 17 from the 6th (Terézváros) and 11 from the 4th (Belváros). The 5th district was first and the 6th second among the regular members too with 91 and 44 members, respectively. The 7th (Erzsébetváros) and the 2nd district with their 41 and 29 members, respectively, could claim more members than the 4th with its 19 though. This means that in the inner districts of Pest contributing members constituted more than a quarter of all members, whereas in the 7th and 2nd only about 10%. 9  The bilingual edition published in Budapest between 1939 and 1942 was modeled on the The Pentateuch and Haftorahs edited by Dr. J.H.Hertz, the Chief Rabbi of England. See Mózes öt könyve és a Haftárák I-V. (Budapest: Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat, 1939–1942). 10  For the whole series, see Magyar-zsidó oklevéltár = Monumenta Hungariae Judaica (Budapest: 1903–1980, eighteen volumes).

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Last but not least, next to the Neolog community of Pest, the Israelite Hungarian Literary Society was one of the two chief supporters of the newly established Jewish Museum in Budapest.11 Identity The yearbooks of the Israelite Hungarian Literary Society contain, among others, a representative sample of Hungarian Jewish popular scholarly identity discourses. Close reading of these discourses has revealed notable differences between seven identity options. The first four of these seven were various takes on dual identity that presented the relations between the Hungarian and Jewish parts in alternative ways. The first option assigned these two levels of identification to separate planes, emphasizing the denominational quality of Jewishness. In 1931, writer, historian of literature and chief editor of the leading Neolog paper Egyenlőség (Equality) Lajos Szabolcsi (1889–1943) wrote of a “sacred duality” precisely in this vein, stating that “homeland” and “religion” were meant to be loved equally.12 Philosopher, aesthetician and translator Samu Szemere (1881–1978), who (as was just mentioned) served as chief editor of the yearbook series during the Horthy era (and was to be appointed director of the Society in 1945), discussed poet Lajos Palágyi in a comparable manner, claiming that Palágyi was “an inspired poet of his nation and a self-conscious son of his denomination.”13 In his analysis of the Neolog paper Egyenlőség, Simon Hevesi (1868–1943), who served as president of the Association of Rabbis and was also among the board members of the Literary Society, quoted the conviction of Ferenc Székely that this leading journal articulated two sentiments, namely “dedication to the ancient religion” and “unshakable loyalty to the Hungarian homeland.”14 In these discussions, national and religious affiliations had parallel subjects and could be smoothly combined.15

11  See Ilona Benoschofsky and Sándor Scheiber (eds.), A budapesti Zsidó Múzeum (Budapest: Corvina, 1987). 12  Lajos Szabolcsi, “Emlékbeszéd Lucien Wolfról” in IMIT évkönyv, 1931, pp. 33–4. Translations from Hungarian and German into English are my own throughout the book – FL. 13  Samu Szemere, “Palágyi Lajos” in IMIT évkönyv, 1936, p. 254. 14  Simon Hevesi, “Az ‘Egyenlőség’ ötven éves jubileumára” in IMIT évkönyv, 1929, p. 199. 15  I ought to clarify that those who articulated the denominational definition of Jewry tended to employ the concept of homeland (haza or hon) as much as that of the nation.

Jewish Studies In The Horthy Era

29

The second option rejected this image of harmony through separation and preferred to regard Hungarianness and Jewishness as existing on the same level of identification. Bank director and president of the Literary Society Adolf Wertheimer (1868–1955), for instance, wrote of “joining” Hungarianness and Jewishness: Hungarian Jewish life had its “special color”, but it was “Hungarian life nevertheless”, he emphasized. When discussing József Kiss, perhaps the leading Hungarian Jewish poet of the late 19th century, Wertheimer explained that “with, so to speak, the ‘racial purity’ and masterful use of the Hungarian language, Kiss articulated the captivating and noble sentiments arising from his Jewishness. The artistic creations of Kiss truthfully reflected the spiritual world of his parental house and his Jewish environment.”16 The identity of this leading Hungarian Jewish artist, as presented by Wertheimer, may thus be qualified as mixed: Kiss was Hungarian-Jewish with a hyphen. The third option, while favorably inclined toward assimilation, strongly insisted on the preservation of a distinct Jewish identity within Hungarian society. In other words, this option was strictly opposed to conceptions linking assimilation to the disappearance of Jewry and maintained instead that societal assimilation and explicitly Jewish characteristics were eminently reconcilable. Historian and historian of literature Ármin Kecskeméti (1874–1944), Rabbi of Makó, for instance, argued that “the frame of European Jewish life can only be assimilation, the creation of unity between European and national culture.”17 At the same time, Kecskeméti eagerly explained that “assimilation cannot mean heroic death, cannot require our dispersal into European culture without leaving any signs.”18 In the interest of Jewish self-preservation Kecskeméti recommended the pursuit of Jewish scholarship in particular, which he presented as the coupling of “Jewish consciousness” with “Jewish Europeanness.” This, of course, amounted to a direct reversal of the infamous statement of Moritz Steinschneider on Wissenschaft des Judentums merely wanting to provide a decent burial. The fourth option within the dual identity cluster aimed to reconcile dual identification with the notion of Jewish peoplehood. This could result in a rather feeble attempt at reconciliation that made the reference to the Hungarianness of Jews appear almost purely formulaic. Dual identity was presented here as a non-conflictual though rather superficial matter for Hungarian Jews. Discussing the recently deceased Péter Újvári, the chief editor 16  “Wertheimer Adolf elnöki jelentése” in IMIT évkönyv, 1930, p. 316. 17  Ármin Kecskeméti, “Mendelssohn kétszáz esztendeje” in IMIT évkönyv, 1929, p. 158. 18  Ibid., p. 160.

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of the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929, Andor Peterdi employed the notion when writing that Újvári “knew his people [i.e. the Jews] best and managed to delve into their spirit in the most profound way”, supposedly dedicating “his entire life to his kind [fajta].”19 At the same time, Peterdi argued that in Újvári’s oeuvre a “miraculous unification” took place: he was at once “the golden storyteller of his kind, his people” and “a true artist in the Hungarian language.”20 This emphasis on the primacy of his Jewishness was, however, directly coupled with the desire to have his dual identity recognized: Peterdi felt the need to explicate that “When I state that Péter Újvári was primarily Jewish, this was not at all meant to be understood at the expense of his Hungarianness.”21 Perhaps the most formal attempt at squaring the two main components of identity could be found in Pál Weisz’s article on the recently deceased Miksa Weisz, a pedagogue at the Hungarian Jewish Teacher Training Institute. Pál Weisz clearly asserted the primacy of Miksa Weisz’s Jewishness, presenting him not only as a Jew faithful to traditions, but also as a dedicated conservative who was “very angry at the imitation of foreign habits” and hurt by the “lack of ‘Nachwuchs’ of traditional Jewry.”22 Moreover, Pál Weisz emphasized that Miksa Weisz demanded Jewish self-respect and was furious when o­ thers questioned that Jews constituted a people. At the very same time, in Pál Weisz’s interpretation, Miksa Weisz was also “an enthusiastic Hungarian” in favor of “religious freedom.”23 In the end, such references to Miksa Weisz’s supposed liberalism and Hungarian sentiments were rather incongruent parts of his portrait. None of these four dual identity options posited a conflict between the Jewish and Hungarian parts of identity. Writer, poet and historian of literature Aladár Komlós (1892–1980) can be qualified as an atypical contributor to the IMIT Yearbooks since he employed the notion of Jewish peoplehood precisely to express such an inner conflict.24 In his treatment of József Kiss, Komlós asserted that the “outlook Kiss inherited from his people” was “at odds with

19  Andor Peterdi, “Újvári Péter emlékezete” in IMIT évkönyv, 1931, p. 73. 20  Ibid., p. 78. 21  Ibid., p. 78. 22  Pál Weisz, “Weisz Miksa” in IMIT évkönyv, 1932, p. 77. 23  Ibid., p. 77. 24  For a more elaborate discussion of Aladár Komlós’ texts on Jewish themes published during the Horthy era, see my Hungarian-language Ferenc Laczó, Felvilágosult vallás és mo­dern katasztrófa közt. Magyar zsidó gondolkodás a Horthy-korban (Budapest: Osiris, 2014).

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the outlook he acquired by way of culture.”25 On a more general level, Komlós interpreted the inner conflicts modern Jews experienced as resulting from the opposed demands of their “Jewish instincts” and their broader social environments. According to Komlós, such inner conflicts, which were at the heart of a fifth identity option, did not arise out of the lack of Hungarian identification, but were much rather due to the exaggerated form such identification took in a society unready to recognize Jews as equals. Beyond critiquing the concrete forms it took, dual identity could be rejected in favor of the clear primacy of Hungarianness as well as Jewishness. The sixth identity option identified through close reading referred to the thousand years of shared history in a common state or the much more recent process of Magyarization in order to emphasize the “melting” of Jews into the Hungarian nation. According to this identity option, the result was their perfect amalgamation. Perhaps more decidedly than any other contributor, novelist Tamás Kóbor (1867–1942) suggested a version of Hungarian identity free of ambivalences, combinations or mixing, affirming that Hungarian Jews shared their past and present with “Hungarians of other origins.” In Kóbor’s eyes, local Jewish traditions and Jews’ complete identification with “national literature” made them “fully Hungarian.”26 A greater number of leading personalities, including Mór Wahrmann, Bernát Alexander, or Sámuel Kohn, were discussed in a comparable manner. Gyula Mérei’s presentation of Mór Wahrmann spoke of amalgamation (beolvadás) to thereby contradict options of dual identity, discussing how “the complete assimilation of Jews to Hungariandom intended to melt Jewry into the life of the Hungarian nation. This was pursued in response to the emancipatory call.”27 Meanwhile, Samu Szemere emphasized that in the cultural under­standing of Bernát Alexander “collective spirits” were predominant and, according to his worldview, pride of place belonged to “the [Hungarian] national community.”28 25  Aladár Komlós, “Kiss József emlékezete, vagy: A zsidó költő és a dicsőség” in IMIT évkönyv, 1932, p. 57. 26  Tamás Kóbor, “Magyar nyelven írt idegen irodalom” in IMIT évkönyv, 1929, p. 61. Kóbor construed a national model transcending the inter-war borders of Hungary, effectively arguing that Jews were “just as Hungarian as Swabians, Serbs, Cumanians or Pechenegs.” All these groups supposedly belonged primarily to the Hungarian nation. Ibid., p. 62. 27  Gyula Mérei, “Wahrmann Mór” in IMIT évkönyv, 1943, p. 340. Note that Mérei switched from writing of intentions to a discussion of what actually happened. On Mór Wahrmann, see Tibor Frank (ed.), Honszeretet és felekezeti hűség. Wahrmann Mór 1831–1892 (Budapest: Argumentum, 2006). 28  Samu Szemere, “Alexander Bernát emlékezete” in IMIT évkönyv, 1929, p. 33. Szemere emphasized that, notwithstanding malevolent accusations to the contrary, Alexander was “consistent in his national commitments.” Ibid., p. 47.

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Alexander’s name supposedly “became inherently connected” (összenőtt) to Hungarian national culture in its period of development, enrichment, and elevation.29 Similarly, in the 1941 IMIT Yearbook, historian Zsigmond Groszmann (1880–1945), Chief Rabbi at the Dohány Street Synagogue and president of the National Association of Rabbis, devoted an article to Sámuel Kohn and presented him as intent on “fulfilling a mission” by Magyarizing the pulpit in Pest.30 Groszmann elaborated that Kohn may not have paraded his patriotism, but, in his unostentatious way, he admired his homeland and fulfilled all his moral duties towards it. Beyond such Hungarian nationalistic discussions, which at times almost verged on sloganeering, the yearbook series also contained the rather complex portrait of József Vészi painted by literary historian Károly Sebestyén (1872– 1945), the former head of the Drama Academy. Sebestyén considered Vészi’s Hungarianness to be his defining trait, maintaining that Vészi “fought for the most cherished goals of his nation.”31 At the same time, Vészi was depicted here as a democratic idealist so committed to universal suffrage as to be ready to “sacrifice his popularity, his authority, his future and his newspaper to help realize this great idea.”32 Sebestyén argued that Vészi’s principled national and democratic stance ultimately led him, at the very peak of his popularity in 1905–06, to side with the (from a Hungarian nationalist point of view particularly controversial) darabont government.33 Presenting Vészi as a conscious national democrat, Sebestyén questioned the validity of the dilemma of the times that tended to conceive of the future safety of the nation and the establishment of a democratic system as mutually exclusive options.34 His portrait of Vészi in fact offered a marked reinterpretation of the Hungarian national interest: Sebestyén aimed to justify Vészi’s decision to support the darabont government by claiming he foresaw that the “survival of the country was at stake” and “only therefore did he ever want to serve Fejérváry, accepting 29  Ibid., p. 50. 30  Zsigmond Groszmann, “Dr. Kohn Sámuel emlékezete” in IMIT évkönyv, 1941, p. 337. For some reason, this contribution was released among the Announcements of the Society. 31  Károly Sebestyén, “József Vészi” in IMIT évkönyv, 1941, p. 40. Sebestyén explained that Vészi used the German language in order to do this all the more effectively. In the words of Sebestyén, Vészi employed German as a “weapon” in the arsenal of Hungarians. 32  Ibid., p. 42. 33  The expression darabont government refers to the government appointed directly by Emperor Francis Joseph in 1905, which was headed by Géza Fejérváry in 1905–06. 34  On this dilemma in early 20th century Hungary, see György Litván, “Magyar gondolat – szabad gondolat”: nacionalizmus és progresszió a század eleji Magyarországon (Budapest: Magvető, 1978).

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all the odium of his deed.”35 In this intriguing account of Vészi’s behavior, nationally conscious foresight determined even his seemingly most normatively pro-democratic decision. The seventh identity option offered an alternative to modern Hungarian nationalism by relying on patriotic themes such as principled loyalty to state and ruler to maintain that Jews practiced an ethic of service.36 One of the outstanding articulations of this was “Itéletrehívás” (A Call to Judgment), a story of Bildung through war and occupation penned by popular writer and former lawyer Gyula Csermely (1869–1939), a parable whose aim was to show that in the case of consecutive occupations Jews behave like passionate patriots on both sides. Strikingly, Csermely presented an example from the times of the First World War related to the occupation of Transylvania by Romanian troops in 1916 with the participation of Romanian Jews, to be followed by the occupation of Bucharest by the Central Powers with the involvement of Hungarian Jews. At the end of the parable, as the conflict subsided and mutual understanding between dedicated patriots was reached, the Jews who found themselves on opposite sides of the war would announce to each other: “I am proud of myself and of you too, proud that we are both Jewish.”37 The patriotic identity discourse had another variant focused more on local, Hungarian patriotic service. The most elaborate formulation of this can be found in “Magyar államférfiak házi zsidói” (The Private Jews of Hungarian Statesmen), a study contributed by literary historian Albert Kardos (1861– 1945), the former director of the Jewish Gymnasium of Debrecen. Kardos begins his argument with the assertion that it was as customary for Hungarian lords to have their “private Jews” as to support poets or ride splendid carriages. Subsequent pages of the article aimed to show that this noble attitude remained unchanged throughout the 19th century and the most exemplary Jews of Hungary continued “to serve their landlords, who in the meantime turned into statesmen, only now they did so by means of intellectual work, as journalists, publicists, editors, scholars, as committed fans of grandeur.”38 The gist of Kardos’ elaborate story was that “great individuals of three generations were connected to each other and followed in each other’s footsteps. Next to each 35  Sebestyén, “Vészi”, pp. 50–1. 36  I ought to clarify that the discourse on patriotism cannot be qualified as another variation of dual identity since Jewry was its sole subject. 37  Imre Csermely, “Itéletrehívás” in IMIT évkönyv, 1930, p. 158. 38  Albert Kardos, “Magyar államférfiak házi zsidói” in IMIT évkönyv, 1939, p. 96. Similarly to Csermely, Kardos thus asserted that the kind of relations and roles many must have thought belonged to previous eras continued to exist in modern Hungary.

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great Hungarian statesman there stood a highly intelligent and useful Jewish worker.”39 The narrative ended with Lipót Vadász serving as the “­irreplaceable assistant” of István Tisza, “the absolutely just statesman.”40 Kardos concluded his story of three generations that since Vadász simultaneously acted as president of the Israelite Hungarian Literary Society, his case offered conclusive evidence that Jewish assimilation had been completed. Offering his narrative of three generations, Kardos unmistakably rewrote the influential antiliberal narrative of decline leading Hungarian historian Gyula Szekfű penned at the time of the Hungarian collapse.41 Kardos’ central aim appears to have been to re-describe the role of Jews: whereas according to Szekfű, they were profiteers of the national crisis whose assimilation was superficial and ultimately illusory, here they appeared as close allies and useful associates of the greatest Hungarians together with whom they made the country flourish.42

39  Ibid., p. 96. As part of this chain of relations, Miksa Falk was the trustee of István Széchenyi who, among others, dictated to him his Ein Blick auf den anonymen Rückblick in Döbling; Ignác Helfy helped Lajos Kossuth as his personal secretary; next to Falk who helped him strike the Compromise with timely articles in Vienna, Manó Kónyi stood by Ferenc Deák in Pest; Lajos Dóczy led a department of the Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry under Gyula Andrássy in Vienna; Kálmán Tisza could rely not only on Falk who was by then the editor of Pester Lloyd, Hungary’s leading German-language newspaper, but also on Mór Wahrmann and Ede Horn. Kardos added that leading Jewish public figures of the next generation, such as Vilmos Vázsonyi or Mór Mezei, may have belonged to the ranks of the indepedentists (i.e. the opposition), others, such as Ferenc Hevesi, were affiliated with the government and its outstanding politicians such as Gábor Baross. Kardos pointed out that even Ágoston Trefort, perhaps the least liberal of leading Hungarian politicians, relied on the services of the (Jewish) Mór Kármán. In Kardos’ eyes, a further sign of the ever closer rapprochement between Jews and Hungarians was the secretarial work that József Szterényi performed for Ferenc Kossuth, Lajos Kossuth’s son. 40  István Tisza was the Prime Minister of Hungary in 1914 who got to be murdered in the moment of Hungary’s defeat four years later. In English, see the biography of Gábor Vermes, István Tisza. The Liberal Vision and Conservative Statescraft of a Conservative Nationalist (Boulder, Co.: East European Monographs, 1985). 41  Gyula Szekfű, Három nemzedék: egy hanyatló kor története (Budapest: Élet, 1920). On Szekfű, now see Iván Zoltán Dénes, A történelmi Magyarország eszménye. Szekfű Gyula a történetíró és ideológus (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2015). On the Peace Treaty of Trianon, see Ignác Romsics, The Dismantling of Historic Hungary. The Peace Treaty of Trianon, 1920 (Boulder, Co.: East European Monographs, 2002). 42  It ought to be mentioned that, unusually for a non-Jewish author, Szekfű published in the last IMIT Yearbook of 1943: Gyula Szekfű, “Marczali Henrik” in IMIT évkönyv, 1943.

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The pages above have aimed to show that Hungarian Jewish dual identity clearly had mainstream status in Hungarian Jewish popular scholarly discussions of the 1930s, but there were significant differences between its various forms. The various shapes Hungarian Jewish popular scholarly identity discourses took might be placed on a scale from the combined and mixed forms through the option of self-consciously Jewish assimilants to the one that emphasized Jewish peoplehood without fully abandoning Hungarian identification. The dual identity option which highlighted internal conflicts may be located at the edge of the scale.

Modern Traditions

A comprehensive treatment of how various Jewish traditions were negotiated on the pages of the IMIT Yearbooks would greatly exceed the limits of a single subchapter. Only select pieces will be covered below, which address centrally important dilemmas of the modern Jewish condition. Articles on Moses Mendelssohn were chosen as a case study since discussions of his role and impact tended to offer assessments of prevalent modern traditions and may thus reveal the broad spectrum of opinion among Hungarian Jewish intellectuals of the Horthy era. Ármin Kecskeméti’s “Mendelssohn kétszáz éve” (The Two Hundred Years of Mendelssohn), the first contribution on Moses Mendelssohn and modern Jewish traditions, appeared in the yearbook of 1929. This learned essay by a leading scholar of Jewish history and literature painted a rather nuanced picture of the views, activities, and impact of the Haskalah’s key personality. “Mendelssohn kétszáz éve” offered an apologetic depiction of Mendelssohn’s person while critiquing his followers who have, in Kecskeméti’s eyes, misused his legacy. Kecskeméti’s piece asserted that Jewish emancipation was a perfectly honorable, in fact a most natural Jewish demand. In defense of Mendelssohn, Kecskeméti also explained that he had not been a reformer. His passion for knowledge might have seemed boundless, but his religious commitment clearly regulated this mighty desire.43 In Kecskeméti’s interpretation, Mendelssohn directed all his energies towards establishing harmony between 43  In other words, Moses Mendelssohn wanted to harmonize free thinking with compliant acts. Ármin Kecskeméti, “Mendelssohn kétszáz éve”, pp. 146–7. Kecskeméti emphasized that Mendelssohn practiced Judaism and also pointed out that the proponents of religious reform attacked his theories. Ibid., p. 145.

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“the religious Jew” and “the Jewish citizen” and it was this program of reconciliation which gave birth to modern European Jewry.44 By aiming to “sacrifice the ghetto” while preserving Jewry, Mendelssohn also created “the Jewish dilemma of the modern age”, Ármin Kecskeméti ­emphasized.45 It was in this connection that the author added to all his laudatory remarks that Moses Mendelssohn in fact caused ill without intending to “because his colleagues and trusted friends lacked Jewishness.”46 Assertions concerning the negative mid-term impact of Mendelssohn were accompanied by a more general and specifically Jewish criticism of the Enlightenment.47 Kecskeméti maintained that it was the “one-sided and excessive” desire to enlighten people which undermined the dominant position of traditional literature, that “timeless accomplishment of the Jewish genius.”48 Kecskeméti performed a rather peculiar balancing act, asserting that assimilation was “an old and natural life phenomenon of the Jewish Diaspora”,49 yet criticizing its misfortunate practical consequences in modern times. The rest of Kecskeméti’s article elaborated how the harmonious relationship between “culture” and “religion”, between “Europeanness” and “Jewishness” was dissolved in the course of the 19th century.50 In spite of the later failure of the harmonization attempt, however, Kecskeméti’s final assessment of Mendelssohn’s role remained positive. He insisted that the Mendelssohnian spirit brought “culture into Jewry, and let us not forget his even greater

44  Kecskeméti “Mendelssohn” in IMIT évkönyv, 1929, p. 134. In the innovative project of Mendelssohn, cultural and political components were closely connected: the intellectual weight of Jews was supposed to prove that they were worthy of civic rights. Ibid., p. 133. 45  Ibid., pp. 149 and 143. In Kecskeméti’s view, Mendelssohn knew well that Jewry meant much more than some theological views and amounted to a whole way of life. It was not only some kind of “emotional”, but very much a “historical reality”. 46  Ibid., p. 137. 47  He wrote that “people in that period [the 18th century – FL] also hit the firmament with their heads, but not in order to make the idea of God the culmination of their thinking, but to break through the sky, overstep revelation, and transgress traditional belief.” Ibid., p. 140. 48  Ibid., pp. 141–2. 49  Ibid., p. 152. 50  Kecskeméti was convinced that by this time acculturation and education were both opposed to religion and acquired ever greater role at the latter’s expense. He added that among those who aimed to address the spiritual crisis, religious exclusivity became the dominant platform. Ibid., p. 155. As a result of the “fierce battles” between believers and citizens, both sides ended up as prisoners of half-truths.

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significance: he wanted cultured Jewry to be Jewish, because our historical abilities cannot be preserved without religion.”51 Other evaluations of Moses Mendelssohn in the yearbooks ranged from much more positive to decidedly more negative ones. On the one hand, literary historian Jenő Zsoldos (1896–1972) published his study “Mendelssohn a ma­gyar szellemi életben” (Mendelssohn in Hungarian Intellectual Life) in 1933, in which, similarly to Kecskeméti, he presented Mendelssohn as the author who first articulated the human ideal of the religious and cultured Jew.52 More specifically, Zsoldos’ text focused on the Hungarian reception and adaptation of Mendelssohnian ideas.53 The balance sheet drawn of Mendelssohn’s activities was thoroughly positive, lacking the ambivalences expressed by Kecskeméti. According to Zsoldos, Mendelssohn not only turned “the problem of rationalist theology into a timely question, and launched the system of thought known as popular German aesthetics”, but “symbolized the Jewish ideal of the human being and represented immortality to us, thereby strengthening our connection to our religion.”54 On the other hand, Károly Sebestyén’s “A zsidóság története levelekben” (Jewish History in Letters) focused almost exclusively on those rather negative aspects of Mendelssohn which Kecskeméti also referred to, but did so as parts of a more complex assessment. Sebestyén asserted that Mendelssohn stood at the beginning of a process within Jewry that “alienated the best of our denomination from our religion” and “provided a pretext to belittle, even to persecute Jewry in the spiritual and intellectual realms.”55 In light of such sharply opposed assessments, the observation of László Bakonyi (1891–?), the chief secretary of the National Israelite Office, to the effect Moses Mendelssohn, “without intending to, caused divisions among his people” ought to come as no surprise.56 Bakonyi’s “Visszaemlékezés 51  Ibid., p. 162. 52  Jenő Zsoldos, “Mendelssohn a magyar szellemi életben” in IMIT évkönyv, 1933, p. 58. The idea of a religious and cultured Jew closely resembled the proposal of harmonization that Kecskeméti identified as central to Mendelssohn’s agenda. In both cases, the core idea was that it was possible to combine Jewish and worldly pursuits and this combination could produce valuable results. 53  In his view, the early stages of his philosophical reception may have been promising, but they proved rather short. At the same time, Zsoldos claimed that Mendelssohn impacted Hungarian aesthetic literature much more lastingly, his influence surpassing even that of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Zsoldos, “Mendelssohn” in IMIT évkönyv, 1933, pp. 73–4. 54  Ibid., p. 79. 55  Károly Sebestyén, “A zsidóság története levelekben” in IMIT évkönyv, 1935, p. 51. 56  László Bakonyi, “Visszaemlékezés az első magyar zsidó kongresszusra” in IMIT évkönyv, 1929, p. 253.

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az első magyar zsidó kongresszusra” (Remembering the First Hungarian Jewish Congress) went well beyond noting this, interpreting Mendelssohn’s activities as the first stage of a process that ultimately resulted in the institutional split of the Jews of Hungary in the late 1860s and early 1870s. It was one of the editors of Magyar Zsidó Szemle, Rabbinical Seminary employee Mózes Richtmann (1880–1972) who reflected on the chasm that separated Zsoldos from Sebestyén most directly. Mendelssohn has continued to be a living force in the Jewish world a century and a half after his death, Richtmann asserted, while remarking that there were Jewish strands offering various criticisms and even some rather condemning assessments of him.57 Richtmann reflected on Mendelssohn’s polarized reception thus to make an attempt to convince Mendelssohn’s opponents of the untenable nature of their position. He did so by elaborating a dialectical interpretation according to which even Jewish Orthodoxy profited from Mendelssohn’s deeds.58 The catalyzing role of Mendelssohn may have pointed in several, seemingly diametrically opposed directions, but his role supposedly only urged the realization of unavoidable processes.59 Richtmann’s final evaluation strongly idealized the leading representative of the Haskalah, depicting him as a uniquely important personality in post-Biblical history who contributed to the development of several branches of knowledge, exerted a significant cultural impact, followed religious traditions, and applied contemporary philosophical insights to formulate a persuasive apologia for Judaism.60 The above coverage of positions regarding the role and impact of Moses Mendelssohn was meant to illustrate how some of the most fundamental modern European Jewish dilemmas, above all, the difficulties of simultaneously realizing renewal and self-preservation, were negotiated on the pages of the IMIT Yearbooks. Some contributors highlighted that the modern principles of renewal Mendelssohn had established were essentially correct, whereas other authors pointed to their longer term consequences that appeared at best ambiguous to them. Moses Mendelssohn thus offered a symbol of Jewish 57  Mózes Richtmann, “Mendelssohn Mózes mint a zsidóság védelmezője” in IMIT évkönyv, 1936, p. 79. 58  According to Richtmann’s interpretation, Mendelssohn merely triggered a “beneficial disorganization” in reaction to which intransigent Orthodoxy was born. 59  Richtmann thus argued that the accusations of his detractors were without foundation. To him, Mendelssohn symbolized an inevitable historical process rather than being personally responsible for some undesired (and merely temporary) effects. In stark contrast to Sebestyén, Richtmann singled out from all of Mendelssohn’s positive impacts how his example “undeniably strengthened the esteem in which Jewry was held.” Ibid., p. 81. 60  Ibid., pp. 80–1.

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modernity to Hungarian Jewish scholars in the Horthy era, a symbol which now revealed the profound anxieties many of them felt concerning its direction. Values What did Hungarian Jewish scholars writing under the Horthy regime present as some of the most important Jewish characteristics? What did they consider to be the central values of Judaism?61 Ármin Kecskeméti emphasized Jewish ethics, above all, and connected it to his belief in the universalism and idealism of Jewry, explaining that “the secret of the triumph of the Jewish spirit” was that it “aimed to sanctify life and dreamt an ethical dream.”62 Drawing on Hermann Cohen in particular, Kecskeméti stated that “in the same way that our religion is ethical universalism, our cultural progress leads to spiritual universalism.”63 Similarly to Kecskeméti, Rabbinical Seminary employee Ottó Komlós (1913–1988) insisted that the Jewish ideal centered on the sanctity of life, the practice of virtues and the eternal striving for perfection and the divine. “The aim of Jewish life is to approach sanctity and realize imitatio dei as presented in Jewish sources through ethical behavior”, Ottó Komlós declared.64 Others focused on the truth inherent to Judaism. Orientalist and famed Meacenas of the arts Bertalan Hatvany (1900–1980) argued that “the people of Moses were not a nation and not a denomination either, they were the carriers of truth,”65 adding that diasporic Jews were in permanent search for the truth. Mózes Richtmann also defined the key task of Jews as “the continuation of the struggle for truth, which is the universal human truth.”66 Rather similarly, Rabbi of Páva Street (the current location of the Holocaust Memorial Center) József Farkas (1866–1944) wrote of liberation and

61  Such redefinitions of Judaism are analyzed in Leora F. Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion. An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). Batnitzky emphasizes the ambivalence of applying the concept of religion to Judaism and highlights the creative tensions that resulted from basic definitional uncertainties regarding Jewry in modern times. 62  Ármin Kecskeméti, “Mendelssohn kétszáz esztendeje” in IMIT évkönyv, 1929, p. 161. 63  Ibid., p. 140. 64  Ottó Komlós, “Az imitatio dei a zsidóságban” in IMIT évkönyv, 1942, p. 164. 65  Bertalan Hatvany, “Kínai és indiai zsidók” in IMIT évkönyv, 1933, p. 46. 66  Mózes Richtmann, “Mendelssohn Mózes mint a zsidóság védelmezője” in IMIT évkönyv, 1936, p. 99.

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redemption as the main goals of Jewry while asserting that the way to achieve them was to commit to the truth without “tactical compromises.”67 Third, Jewry could be pictured as representing a special spirit (szellem, Geist) and cultural quality. Nyugat-affiliated poet and critic László Fenyő (1902–1945) expressed this in a rather basic way when he stated that “all the hopelessness of the past two millennia were insufficient to destroy the permanent yearning of the Jewish soul for higher spiritual horizons.”68 Meanwhile folklorist and ethnographer Ervin György Patai (1910–1996), who was to achieve international academic reputation as Raphael Patai in later decades, articulated his conviction that “Jews have always been the people of the book, the people of culture and the spirit.”69 Young Rabbi Emil Róth (1907–1944) also drew on the notion of the people of the book, claiming that “Jewish history amounts to the history of the Jewish book and Jewish writing.”70 Róth subsequently mildly historicized this concept to assert a long pedigree, arguing that “three millennia of education” exerted a profound impact on Jews and that is why they were “devoted to culture and supported books in such exceptionally great numbers.”71 Beyond this central triad of Jewish values, two further ones were also repeatedly highlighted. Whereas several contributors were visibly impacted by Lebensphilosophie and emphasized the “demands of life,” some other authors wrote of the Jewish proclivity to adapt and valuation of loyalty. For instance, in his “Hagyományos irodalmunk fejlődése a görög-zsidó kultúrkapcsolatok tükrében,” (The Development of our Traditional Literature in the Mirror of Greek-Jewish Cultural Relations), the new director of the Rabbinical Seminary Sámuel Lőwinger (1904–1980) discussed the Jewish and Greek bases of Western civilization, maintaining that Jewish culture not only produced cultural values, but also assured that they would remain living force.72 One of Lőwinger’s crucial assertions was that Judaism “was not a rigid religion of law, even if it tends

67  See József Farkas, “Élia próféta” in IMIT évkönyv, 1933. 68  László Fenyő, “Palágyi Lajos emlékezete” in IMIT évkönyv, 1934, p. 134. 69  Ervin György Patai, “Kultúrélet a Szentföldön” in IMIT évkönyv, 1934, p. 297. 70  Emil Róth, “Zsidó könyvek, zsidó sorsok” in IMIT évkönyv, 1938, p. 156. 71  Ibid., pp. 172–3. 72  See Sámuel Lőwinger, “Hagyományos irodalmunk fejlődése a görög-zsidó kultúrkapcsolatok tükrében” in IMIT évkönyv, 1943. Lőwinger used the words nyugati kultúra, which I chose to render as Western civilization in English. Lőwinger asserted that the religious, ethical, and social bases of Western civilization were Jewish, whereas the scientific, literary, philosophical, and artistic ones were Greek. For Lőwinger’s major contribution to the early postwar discussion on the intellectual origins of Nazism, see chapter seven.

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to be characterized as such, but a living organism.”73 In his “Hagyomány és élet” (Tradition and Life), Mihály Guttmann (1872–1942), former teacher of the Rabbinical Seminary who at the time of writing in 1931 was employed at the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau (and who was to become director of the Rabbinical Seminary upon his return in 1934), depicted religion (vallás) as unified and indivisible, and asserted that it played a fundamental role in preserving Jewry across ages of persecution. Similarly to Lőwinger, Guttmann propagated an intimate connection between the Jewish tradition and life, asserting that such a connection was “the lasting principle of religion which assures its sustenance.”74 Last but not least, several authors considered adaptation and loyalty to be of outstanding importance. For instance, Gyula Gábor (1868–1936), chief prosecutor and later chief secretary of the Israelite Community of Pest, argued that “Jews have adapted to their environment, have been willing, even eager to borrow habits from others. They have ‘assimilated’, to use a contemporary term, already in ancient times.”75 Bertalan Hatvany made a similarly broad-brushed statement on the reliability of Jews and their positive roles: “Into whichever soil or culture Jews may be planted, they shall prove useful and trustworthy members of their society and nation. They will unfailingly enrich their land with their diligent work”, he asserted.76 As the presentation of the patriotic identity option above has also indicated, references to Jewish adaptation were accompanied by the valuation of loyalism. For example, former teacher of the Jewish Gymnasium of Pest Aladár Fürst (1877–1950), one of the few in this group of authors who departed to the Mandate territory before 1933, expressed a widely shared opinion when stating that “just as every truly religious soul, Rabbi Akiva Eger was a loyal son of king and country.”77 When Hungarian Jewish scholars discussed the character of Jewry, life philosophy as well as discourses of adaptation and loyalism left visible impacts on their texts. The three largely complementary assertions even more frequently made concerned the ethical nature of Judaism, its relation to truth, and its spiritual and cultural elevatedness.78 73  Ibid., p. 44. 74  Mihály Guttmann, “Hagyomány és élet” in IMIT évkönyv, 1931, p. 21. 75  Gyula Gábor, “Római kori zsidó emlékek Magyarországon” in IMIT évkönyv, 1931, p. 151. 76  Bertalan Hatvany, “Kínai és indiai zsidók” in IMIT évkönyv, 1933, p. 54. 77  Aladár Fürst, “R. Éger Akiba” in IMIT évkönyv, 1937, p. 180. 78  The first of these three tended to emphasize the universalism of Judaism and the last one its model role in the wider world, whereas the second one was arguably in an implicitly polemical relation with the non-Jewish world. Whereas ethics is to be shared and

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Contributions The inter-war period constituted the highpoint of the discourse on Jewish contributions. To mention only English-language publications, authors such as Joseph Jacobs, Chaim Newman or Cecil Roth published significant works under titles such as Jewish Contributions to Civilization, The Real Jew: Some Aspects of the Jewish Contribution to Civilization or The Jewish Contribution to Civilization.79 As Moshe Rosman recently argued, contribution discourse had a markedly apologetic component as it insisted on the loyalty and usefulness of Jews and aimed at achieving a more secure status for them.80 As Yaacov Shavit underlined, contribution discourses not only emphasized how Jews were an integral and inseparable part of larger cultural or civilizational units, but also claimed they made original contributions to them and in fact often presented Jews as the source of what was finest in them.81 In a concurring manner, Richard I. Cohen explicated that in the inter-war period the Jewish emphasis on the universal role of the Bible went hand in hand with its increasing identification with Judaism just when many Christian theologians tended to contrast Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism.82 The contest over who was the rightful owner of the Bible thus became ever more polemical.83 elevatedness is to be ambitioned by all, the concept of truth implies indivisibility. These Jewish characteristics could nonetheless be seen as consistent with each other. After all, similarly to Jewish ethics and elevatedness, a privileged relation to truth also calls for a universal role. 79  Joseph Jacobs, Jewish Contributions to Civilization (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1919). Chaim Newman (ed.), The Real Jew: Some Aspects of the Jewish Contribution to Civilization (London, A.&C. Black, 1925). Cecil Roth, The Jewish Contribution to Civilization (London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1940). 80   Moshe Rosman, “From Counterculture to Subculture to Multiculture: The ‘Jewish Contribution’ Then and Now” in Jeremy Cohen and Richard I. Cohen (eds.), The Jewish Contribution to Civilization. Reassessing an Idea (London: Littman, 2008). 81  Yaacov Shavit, “From Admission Ticket to Contribution: Remarks on the History of an Apologetic Argument” in Cohen and Cohen (eds.), The Jewish Contribution to Civilization. 82  See Yaacov Shavit and Mordechai Eran, The Hebrew Bible Reborn: from Holy Scripture to the Book of Books. A History of Biblical Culture and the Battles over the Bible in Modern Judaism (Berlin: Gruyter, 2007). On Roman Catholicism and its relation to the Jews in Central Europe around the time, see, John Connelly. From Enemy to Brother. The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). 83  Richard I. Cohen, “ ‘Jewish Contribution to Civilization’ and its Implications for Notions of ‘Jewish Superiority’ in the Modern Period” in Cohen and Cohen (eds.), The Jewish Contribution to Civilization. As part of this transnational debate, Bernát Heller, the most

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The ambition to document that Jews made positive civilizational and national contributions played a significant role in the Hungarian Jewish popular scholarly discussions of the inter-war period too. This seems unsurprising in light of the fact that whereas contribution discourses expressed Jewish pride, they were often employed in fragile and threatening moments. Jews played highly significant roles in Hungarian society until the end of the First World War,84 but their full equality as citizens was denied as early as 1920. Inter-war Hungary thus offered ample grounds for a sense of pride, but a rather acute need for apologetic arguments was also felt, constituting precisely the kind of environment where one would expect a vocal contribution discourse. Gyula Gábor in fact openly asserted how Jews were meant to “produce ever more data on being responsible for the spread of culture in this land from the earliest centuries, as such data have direct political significance.”85 Yearbook articles recurrently discussed how Jews had made positive contributions in various areas such as the realm of religion, intellectual life, art or that of the economy. For example, the report of the Chief Rabbi of Buda and teacher of the Rabbinical Seminary Bertalan Edelstein (1876–1934) from 1933 claimed that “in our current state of mourning we may only find solace in the fact that the merits of Jews are highlighted nearly everywhere. Their merits in scientific and intellectual life are underlined and the beneficial contributions Jews have made to human development are emphasized more generally too.”86 In his directorial report on the Jewish Museum from 1937, Ernő Munkácsi (1896–1950) in turn aimed to clarify what role Jews played in Hungarian economic history. Munkácsi argued that modern capitalism that made the country economically powerful and strengthened the central organs of the state and that the creation of the capitalist economy in Hungary was “almost entirely the historical accomplishment of Hungarian Jewry.”87 Similarly, in his “Spanyol földön” (In the Land of Spain), which was part travel report, part historical reflection and part discussion of the contemporary situation, historian Sándor regular contributor to the IMIT Yearbooks, once stated that the Bible was at once the national treasure, history, language, literature, pride and support of Jews. Bernát Heller, “Zunz Lipót” in IMIT évkönyv, 1936, p. 64. 84  See Michael K. Silber, “Hungary before 1918” in Gershon D. Hundert (ed.), The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, Vol. I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 85  Gyula Gábor, “Római kori zsidó emlékek Magyarországon” in IMIT évkönyv, 1931, pp. 154–5. 86  Bertalan Edelstein, “Az 5692. és 5693. év” in IMIT évkönyv, 1933, p. 218. 87  “Az igazgatóság jelentése a múzeum 1936. évi működéséről” in IMIT évkönyv, 1937, p. 331. Munkácsi also emphasized in his report that the “Jewish conquest of space” (térfoglalás) took place in the interest of the Hungarian state and at the expense of what he called “foreign nationalities.”

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Büchler (1870–1944), the Chief Rabbi of Keszthely, highlighted the contribution Jews made to the economic development of medieval Spain.88 While there were thus diverse studies on Jewish contributions, their most significant segment dealt with the impact of the Bible on modern Hungarian literature, an impact that was regularly, though certainly not uncontroversially in the Hungary of the inter-war period, presented as a form of Jewish impact. Young Rabbi Pál Takács (1913–1945) went so far as to assert that the presence of the Bible, European thought and Hungarian literary culture were inextri­cably linked. In Takács’ assessment, the Bible provided “the main basis, primary source and highest stage” of Hungarian culture as well as its strongest link to Europe.89 The authors most elaborately analyzed with regard to the Jewish (i.e. Hebrew Biblical) influence in their works were centrally important representatives of the Hungarian literary canon such as Mihály Csokonai Vitéz, János Arany, Imre Madách, or Mihály Babits. Non-Jewish authors in fact received most detailed attention in articles of this kind. To briefly illustrate the pattern: literary historian Albert Kardos argued that the great poet and the true prophet were often one and the same person, attempting to show how Mihály Csokonai Vitéz provided an illustration of this convergence of roles. Kardos called the famed Hungarian poet “a belated, but not unworthy disciple of the ancient prophets,”90 though subsequently wondered whether he had not gone too far in emphasizing similarities. Last but not least, teacher, poet and translator Piroska Reichard (1884–1943) concluded her study on Mihály Babits’ literary oeuvre with the words that Babits “fully filled the golden cup borrowed from the infinite treasure house that is our Bible.”91 In other words, Reichard maintained that Babits, perhaps the leading Hungarian literary authority of her age, borrowed the form of his most precious artistic achievements from the Jewish collective. While Hungarian Jewish contribution discourse indeed had an apologetic strain, as scholarly discussions of the Bible show with particular force, it also aimed to reveal the crucial Jewish contribution to Hungarian high cultural creativity.

88  Sándor Büchler, “Spanyol földön” in IMIT évkönyv, 1930, p. 159. 89  Pál Takács, “A magyar gondolkodás első találkozása a Bibliával” in IMIT évkönyv, 1943, p. 262. 90  Albert Kardos, “Csokonai ószövetségi látomása” in IMIT évkönyv, 1943, p. 284. 91  Piroska Reichard, “A Szentírás Babits Mihály költeményeiben” in IMIT évkönyv, 1942, p. 299.

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Historicity The progressive teleology of History in the singular, whose emergence during the Sattelzeit Reinhart Koselleck insightfully traced, was heavily challenged by the nature and consequences of the Great War.92 The First World War triggered a powerful crisis discourse across the continent and can be considered one of the chief causes of a notable antimodernist shift within East Central Europe.93 Under the impact of these broad transformations, Hungarian Jewish intellectuals also pursued complex negotiations regarding the modern conception of history. As will be shown next, the Hungarian Jewish discussion of historicity during the Horthy era reveals a marked shift away from the liberal optimism and the dominant normative future horizons of the long 19th century. However, a few words on the historical background to these discussions might be due first. In recent decades, the rise of modern historical consciousness among Jews and its clear difference from previous Jewish ways of relating to the past have become the subject of sustained scholarly attention. Yosef Yerushalmi explored the novelty of the scholarly study of history among Jews, as opposed to the centrality of historical memory, and traced the wide-ranging success of history in the 19th century at redefining the concept of Judaism.94 Similarly, Ismar Schorsch asserted that it was the age of emancipation that made Jews 92  See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). On Koselleck’s work, now see Niklas Olsen, History in the Plural. An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck (London: Berghahn, 2012). 93  Diana Mishkova, Marius Turda and Balázs Trencsényi (eds.), Anti-Modernism. Radical Revisions of Collective Identity (Budapest: CEU Press, 2014). The volume appears as the fourth and final one in the series Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe, 1770–1945. Texts and Commentaries. Bernát Heller’s article on Leopold Zunz from 1936 provides an example of the curious intermingling of epochal and rather anachronistic arguments. Significant parts of this text from 1936 feel like they might have been written in the 19th century, but other parts clearly reflect the uncertainties of the inter-war years. On the one hand, Heller still maintained that Zunz was not only the founder of the modern scholarly study of Judaism, but also its very best representative whose rightful place in the Jewish canon is next to Philo and Maimonides. On the other, Heller explained that Zunz was entirely convinced that scholarly pursuits would contribute to moral progress and the spread of truth even though there actually seemed to be little evidence of this. See Bernát Heller, “Zunz Lipót” in IMIT évkönyv, 1936. 94  See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).

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recognize the importance of the temporal dimension and made them value contextual analysis. Schorsch directly linked the rise of historicism among Jews to the emergence of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and called the result no less than an intellectual revolution.95 However, in his exploration of the social history of ideas in Eastern Europe in particular, Shmuel Feiner asserted that modern Jewish historical consciousness arose rather gradually. Feiner explicated that the more popular variants of the Haskalah provided a venue for the rise of modern historical consciousness parallel to the Wissenschaft.96 As David Myers recently argued, historicism had its discontents in various European Jewish intellectual milieus as well. In Jewish thought, tensions bet­ ween theological and historical modes of thinking or, more generally, between the transcendent and the contingent realms could never be resolved. These tensions produced various Jewish attempts, including famed works by Franz Rosenzweig or Leo Strauss, to guard against what were perceived as the negative, atomizing consequences of modern historicism. At the same time, Myers explicated that in modern times even seemingly antihistorical thinkers drew on historical narratives for the justification of their vision, making their revolt against historicism partial and ambivalent.97 The historicity of Judaism was heavily contested among Hungarian Jewish scholars as well. Stances towards the modern conception of history ranged from studying historical evidence to claim a special Jewish pedigree on a rationalist basis through denigrating the importance of empirical evidence on a teleological basis all the way to denying the relevance of historical changes altogether for the sake of ahistorical essentialism. Some contributors to the yearbooks emphasized the insignificance of history as opposed to the unity of the Jewish tradition, or may have highlighted its cruel injustice in order to contrast it with the defining qualities of Jewry.98 Others suggested utopian ways

95  See Ismar Schorsch, “The Emergence of Historical Consciousness in Modern Judaism” in Ibid., From Text to Context. The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1994), p. 177. 96  Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History. The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (London: Littman, 2002). 97  David N. Myers, Resisting History. Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 98  For the former, see Pál Hirschler, “A zsidó messianizmus” in IMIT évkönyv, 1941. Bernát Heller, “Prófétáink” in IMIT évkönyv, 1941. For the latter, see Mátyás Rubinstein, “Az ember értéke a zsidó gondolkodásban” in IMIT évkönyv, 1932. Bertalan Edelstein, “A külföldi zsidóság története a háború utáni évtizedben” in IMIT évkönyv, 1929. Bertalan Kohlbach, “A bűnbocsánat napja” in IMIT évkönyv, 1934.

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out of the historical condition,99 and may have fused their utopian notions with eminently political agendas.100 The analysis of Hungarian Jewish popular scholarly discussion of historicity has not only revealed a broad variety of perspectives, but suggests that key differences between contributors had much to do with generational socialization and experiences. Rabbi, literary historian and historian Lajos Venetianer (1867–1922) who published a conventionally apologetic Hungarian Jewish history in the early years of the Horthy regime,101 and historian of literature, folklorist, Orientalist and Bible scholar Bernát Heller (1871–1943), who believed in the unity of tradition and the logical nature of evolution, were both born around 1870.102 They were socialized well before the First World War and belonged to the first generation of Hungarian Jews educated at Rabbinical Seminaries. Other authors belonged to the generation whose young adulthood coincided with the shattering experiences of the Great War. This middle generation included authors such as Germanist and comparatist historian of literature József Turóczi-Trostler (1888–1962) who believed in historical tele­ ology, but instead of positing the logical nature of evolution, propagated a dialectical conception to allow for the temporary strengthening of irrationalism.103 The same generational cohort included Aladár Komlós (1892–1982) who appeared convinced that Hungarian-Jewish dual identity was internally conflictual, was critically disposed towards the dominant form Jewish assimilation took in Hungary, and conveyed rather pessimistic ideas about “Jewish fate.”104 In the late 1930s and early 1940s some exceptionally talented young scholars born after 1900, most notably historian of religions and ancient history István Hahn (1913–1984) and linguist and historian of literature (as well as future Rabbinical Seminary director) Sándor Scheiber (1913–1985), made their early scholarly contributions to the yearbooks. Their intellectual socialization took

99  See, for instance, Mór Fényes, “A Tízige” in IMIT évkönyv, 1941. 100  See especially the following two articles: Zsigmond Groszmann, “Mezei Mór és kora” in IMIT évkönyv, 1936. Ervin György Patai, “Sabbatai Zevi alakja a modern zsidó irodalomban” in IMIT évkönyv, 1931. 101  His chief work was Lajos Venetianer, A magyar zsidóság története a honfoglalástól a világháború kitöréséig, különös tekintettel gazdasági és művelődési fejlődésére (Budapest: Fővárosi Nyomda Részvénytársaság, 1922). On Venetianer in the IMIT Yearbooks, see Ernő Winkler, “Venetianer Lajos” in IMIT évkönyv, 1935. 102  Bernát Heller, “Prófétáink” in IMIT évkönyv, 1941. 103  See József Turóczi-Trostler, “Stefan Zweig (Szellem és forma)” in IMIT évkönyv, 1942. 104  See Aladár Komlós, “Kiss József emlékezete, vagy: A zsidó költő és a dicsőség” in IMIT évkönyv, 1932.

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place in the inter-war period and, as these early publications of theirs attest, they proved receptive to ahistorical-essentialist ideas.105 Conclusion This chapter has explored Hungarian Jewish popular scholarly discussions of the Horthy era on five key questions: Jewish identity, traditions, values, contributions, and historicity. They were analyzed on the basis of the most important popular scholarly release of the times, the yearbooks of the Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat. The pages above presented seven ways of fusing and hierarchizing Jewish and Hungarian identities and thereby showed that the denominational redefinition of Jewry and the employment of Hungarian national topoi, which have received disproportionate attention in mainstream narratives of modern Hungarian Jewish history until now, in fact constituted no more than two out of the seven options articulated by Hungarian Jewish scholars during the Horthy era. Alternative theories, such as on Jewish peoplehood or on the internally conflictual nature of dual identity, were also formulated, while patriotic discussions continued alongside nationalistic ones. The chapter has also discussed various positions regarding the role and impact of Moses Mendelssohn to illustrate how some of the most crucial modern European Jewish dilemmas, above all, the difficulties with simultaneously realizing renewal and self-preservation, were negotiated in the IMIT Yearbooks. Some contributors emphasized that the modern principles of renewal Mendelssohn established were essentially correct, whereas others focused on their longer term consequences which appeared to them highly questionable from the point of view of Jewish self-preservation. Some have gone so far as to articulate fundamental doubts concerning the agenda of the Haskalah. Moses Mendelssohn thus continued to offer a symbol of Jewish modernity to Hungarian Jewish scholars during the Horthy era, but a symbol which at this time revealed the profound anxieties many of them felt towards the consequences of modernization. The chapter has subsequently assessed the discourse on Jewish values, exploring central assertions regarding the Jewish spirit, Jewish ethics and the truth, and dissected the discourse on Jewish contributions to civilization that combined apologetic and assertive arguments in a highly ambivalent manner. Last but not least, a broad variety of positions on the question of historicity 105  See, in particular, István Hahn, “Zsidó szekták a talmudi korban” in IMIT évkönyv, 1937 as well as Ibid., “A törvény vallása” in IMIT évkönyv, 1943.

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was uncovered with the special explanatory power of generational differences being highlighted. Taken together, these thematic explorations have revealed that popular scholarly writings of the Horthy era were characterized by a rather strict division between Hungarian Jewish and general Jewish themes.106 When themes related to modern Hungary were discussed, it was exceptional not to evoke the Hungarianness of Jews.107 However, other subjects, such as historicity, were negotiated in articles dealing with topics of general Jewish concern that made hardly any references to Hungarian matters. Popular Hungarian Jewish scholarly discussions of the Horthy era may thus have accommodated diverse worlds, but integrated them only to a limited extent.

106  In the fifteen IMIT Yearbooks released between 1929 and 1943, 93 belonged to the former and 76 to the latter category. (In most cases, the classification can be safely decided on the basis of the title alone.) 107  Out of the seven identity options only the patriotic one refrained from highlighting this.

CHAPTER 3

Intellectual Agendas in the Shadow of Catastrophe This chapter offers detailed analyses of the journal Libanon (1936–1943) and the Ararát yearbook series (1939–1944), two exceptionally valuable sources to explore Hungarian Jewish intellectual agendas in the shadow of looming catastrophe. The analysis shall start with Libanon, a journal launched in the mid-1930s at the peak of Hungarian Jewish intellectual activities in the Horthy era, which subsequently served as one of the central forums of the increasingly desperate search for new orientation.1 Between 1936 and 1943, Libanon released altogether thirty-four issues and the journal thus served as one of the few remaining publications during the years of Second World War where Hungarian Jewish intellectuals could still articulate their ideas, formulate their – typically rather veiled – reactions to contemporary developments and give expression to their hopes and fears.2 Its high quality, inner plurality and special – though certainly unintentional – historical timing all make Libanon an exciting source for intellectual historians. Nonetheless, no detailed analysis of its contents has ever been attempted. After a brief overview of the overall characteristics of this journal, the first part of this chapter will gauge its contents through two analytical lenses. The divergent conceptions of Jewish culture articulated by its two chief contributors shall be explored first. Subsequently, a diachronic analysis scrutinizing the impact of and reflection on drastic historical changes will be offered. Libanon explicitly wished to serve “the smoldering interests of Hungarian Jewry” and conceived of its task as “filling a gap.”3 Over the eight-year period of its release, 1  The choice of the title was not explained in the journal. The cover depicted the Cedrus Libani, an important Biblical as well as Talmudic symbol. 2  There is in fact no other Hungarian Jewish periodical that would have been launched shortly prior to the beginnings of ever more radical anti-Semitic discrimination and would nonetheless have survived long into the war years. For the year 1936, Sándor Scheiber listed fourteen newly launched Jewish periodicals in Hungary and a total of fifty-three (which were not necessarily in Hungarian). By comparison, ten years earlier there were only twenty-two and thirty years earlier merely twelve. By 1943, only thirteen were allowed to be released, among them Libanon, by then the organ of the National Jewish Museum. See Sándor Scheiber, Magyar zsidó hírlapok és folyóiratok bibliográfiája 1847–1992 (Budapest: MTA Judaisztikai Kutatócsoport, 1993), p. 216. 3  “Beköszöntő” in Libanon, 1936, p. 1.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004328655_004

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the journal managed to assemble altogether 107 contributors. Whereas fiftytwo of them appeared in only one of the eight volumes, three authors, József M. Grózinger, Fülöp Grünvald (whom we shall repeatedly encounter in the next chapter) and Jenő Zsoldos published in each of them.4 Many of the personalities shaping Libanon also had a common institutional affiliation. In fact, most of the teachers of the Jewish Boys’ and Girls’ Gymnasium of Pest who – bearing in mind the journal’s focus on the humanities – could be considered potential contributors, did write for this publication.5 Even though generational discourses were sparsely articulated on its pages, in a purely objective sense Libanon might be considered a generational initiative; key contributors, such as József M. Grózinger, Fülöp Grünvald, Aladár Komlós, József Turóczi-Trostler, or Jenő Zsoldos, were all born in the decade and a half prior to 1900 and were thus between forty and fifty years old when Libanon was launched in 1936.6 Until 1940, Libanon was published under the subtitle Zsidó tudományos és kritikai folyóirat (Jewish Scholarly and Critical Journal). In 1940, when the number of Hungarian Jewish periodicals was again forcibly reduced, this time from thirty-seven to twenty-four, the National Jewish Museum assumed the role of Libanon’s publisher. This institutional affiliation proved the key to the journal’s survival for another four years.7 In the same year, Ernő Munkácsi, the director of the Museum (whom we shall also encounter in the last chapter of this book) was newly appointed chief editor. At the beginning of 1942, the 4  Libanon compiled a list of contributors for every year of its publication except 1943 (when it still had ten new ones). Zoltán Kohn wrote for seven volumes and is missing only in 1943, unless he published under the initial of “K.” Sámuel Kandel, Lenke Steiner and József TurócziTrostler published in six Libanon volumes. The fluctuation between the volumes in terms of key contributors was generally moderate. 5  The three editors of the first four volumes, József M. Grózinger, Zoltán Kohn, and Jenő Zsoldos were all employed at the gymnasium. On the relevant period of the Gymnasium, see László Felkai, A budapesti zsidó fiú- és a leánygimnázium története (Budapest: Anne Frank Gimnázium, 1992), pp. 72–75. 6  To highlight the birthdates of five significant authors: Fülöp Grünvald was born in 1887, József Turóczi-Trostler in 1888, József M. Grózinger in 1891, Aladár Komlós in 1892 and Jenő Zsoldos in 1896. This means that they belonged to the so called front generation of the First World War. 7  In 1940, simultaneously with the enforced appearance of Zsidó lap (Jewish Paper) on its cover, Libanon adopted the subtitle Az Országos Magyar Zsidó Múzeum Tudományos és Művészeti Egyesület tudományos és művészeti folyóirata (The Scholarly and Artistic Journal of the Scholarly and Artistic Association of the National Jewish Museum).

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editorial board of Libanon was expanded to seven members and from then on, Ernő Kanizsai and Jenő Zsoldos served as the two main editors.8 During the second period of the journal, employees of the Jewish Gymnasium of Pest played a less central role.9 In these years, the journal attracted an impressive number of the grand old men of Hungarian Jewish letters too, such as Bernát Heller (1871–1943), Sándor Büchler (1870–1944), or Béla Bernstein (1868–1944). At the same time, some of the most promising members of the youngest generation of scholars, such as István Hahn or Sándor Scheiber, made several of their early contributions to Libanon.10 No introduction to this journal could be complete without at least a brief note on the impressive and multifaceted intellectual network of its contributors. In fact, we find references to some of the most exciting Jewish intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, several of whom may not have yet been that widely known at the time.11 During the war years, the agenda of Libanon became more diverse, above all, because of the recurrent presentation of the activities and possessions of the Museum.12 At the same time, the contours of different parts of the 8  In 1942 and 1943, the seven members were Ernő Kanizsai and Jenő Zsoldos as editors, and György Balázs, Fülöp Grünvald, József M. Grózinger, Zoltán Kohn, and Ernő Munkácsi as board members. 9  Jenő Zsoldos and József M. Grózinger, the two authors who arguably set the tone of the entire journal in its early years (and who shall both be discussed in detail just below), proved somewhat less prolific after 1940. 10  István Hahn wrote for Libanon on numerous occasions. Sándor Scheiber was first mentioned as a student and later on published some of his early writings here. 11  References were made to Gershom Scholem, for instance, the researcher who first launched scholarly inquiries into Jewish mysticism and Messianism, to Hugo Bergmann, who served as the Rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, or to Salo Baron, perhaps the leading Jewish historian in twentieth century America who taught at Columbia University from 1930 until 1963. Other articles referenced Abraham Heschel who had just completed his dissertation in Berlin and was to become influential in more conservative circles in the United States, Ernst Cassirer some of whose impressive works in the history of philosophy have only recently (some seventy years later) appeared in Hungarian translation, or Leo Strauss who would serve as a source of inspiration for neoconservatives decades later, but who was at this time still composing his early works on Jewish topics. 12  Annual reports, summaries of annual assemblies, presentations of exhibitions, descriptions of explorations, pictures of important objects belonging to the Museum as well as reproductions of written documents which were in the Museum’s possession were all manifestations of this. At the same time, largely due to the ever more radical restrictions of the war years, the otherwise highly prominent book review section covered narrower ground. In 1936, Libanon reviewed altogether sixty-one books (there were forty reviews

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journal arguably became sharper, with several new article series being introduced, such as the one discussing diverse spiritual-political directions of modern times. It would nonetheless be an exaggeration to write of a consistent change of direction.13 Many of the structural changes of the early 1940s were rather peripheral, leaving the three basic elements of Libanon – Studies, Criticisms, and Smaller Contributions – intact.14 However, as my analysis below will aim to show in detail, there were highly significant shifts between the contents of various volumes.

Conceptions of Jewish Culture

The two most prolific contributors to Libanon were Jenő Zsoldos and József M. Grózinger. They were equally instrumental in defining the journal’s contents. and twenty-one notes), in 1937 fifty-four (thirty-one and twenty-three, respectively), in 1938 sixty (thirty-four and twenty-six), in the brief volume of 1939 only twenty-one (thirteen and eight), in 1940 again fifty-three (twenty-five and twenty-eight). In the last three years, however, there were no more book notes, and the journal only published ­sixteen reviews in 1941, twenty in 1942 and fifteen in 1943. Thus, until the beginning of the age of persecution the average was close to sixty, wheras in the last three volumes it fell below twenty. The fact during the war years, most of the seventeen items of the Javne book series released under the auspices of the Magyar Zsidók Pro Palesztina Szövetsége (the Alliance for Palestine of Hungarian Jews) were reviewed could serve as an illustration of this narrowing of ground. 13  In spite of the fact that the shifts in the early 1940s are best understood as a modification, rather than as a genuine change of direction, this periodization of Libanon holds up to closer scrutiny on another level. The year 1940 can be considered a new beginning since until 1939 the story of Libanon was one of decline. Quantitative indicators may illustrate this best: in its first year of publication, Libanon had six issues on 276 pages, but by 1939, when the so called Second Jewish Law was adopted, it only managed to release a meager two issues on altogether forty pages. The overall picture of the years 1940 to 1943, when Libanon was published by the Museum, shows much greater stability. There were three or four issues each year and never less than ninety-six but never more than 128 pages of text in a year. 14  The last of these represented something in between the former two. Pieces in Smaller Contributions would at times be longer than those in Studies, even if this could be concealed by the difference in font size. Until 1939, Libanon also had a Journal Review section that covered publications in six languages. In the first issue of 1939, certain Hungarian, Hebrew, German, French, Italian and English journals were all under review, with most attention being devoted to German and Hebrew publications (both of which were ­covered by József Grózinger).

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However, there was a stark contrast between their conceptions of Jewish culture. Literary historian and long-serving director of the Jewish (later Anne Frank) Gymnasium Jenő Zsoldos (1896–1972), indubitably the more widely known of the two, published mostly literary historical articles and was primarily interested in the Hungarian past and its Jewish aspects. He was particularly keen on exploring Hungarian-Jewish connections with a special emphasis on the first half of the nineteenth century.15 It seems that Zsoldos’ contributions to Libanon intended, above all, to inquire into the broadly conceived story of cultural assimilation, and to this end he labored to present many precious details, often on the basis of newly uncovered sources.16 As Zsoldos stated in one of his articles, “the story of Hungarian-Jewish cultural assimilation remains unwritten” and “we lack an overview of Hungarian-Jewish history that would be of real scholarly value.”17 In all likelihood, Zsoldos hoped that by making his readers aware of laudable local traditions, he could help develop a sense of shared pasts and, more particularly, a Hungarian literary canon opposed to those of anti-Semitic inspiration. Characteristically, already in the very first issue of Libanon, Zsoldos discussed the Jeremiadic sources of Hymnus – the Hungarian National Anthem – by Ferenc Kölcsey, writing of a Hungarian-Jewish parallelism springing from a

15  What he called the “Romantic period of Hungarian history” and its specific perspectives on Jews were among his recurrent themes. On other occasions, Zsoldos focused on the Judeo-Christian fundaments of European civilization, at one point even maintaining that “perhaps there is no other literature in Europe, which for centuries was as closely related to the Bible as Hungarian was.” Jenő Zsoldos, “Irodalmunk új talmudszemlélete” in Libanon, 1942, p. 16. 16  This ambition of Zsoldos yielded the following explorations: a piece on the Talmudic borrowings and its concrete sources in a book of anecdotes by Péter Bod from 1760; on Jews in Hungarian plays of the late eighteenth century and the appearance of the first “Hungarian Hungarian Jew” on stage in 1820; on a Hungarian article by Zsigmond Hirsch; on Ignác Benedek who wrote pro-Jewish pamphlets in 1848; and on why the accusation of anti-nationalism was unjustified when leveled against Zsigmond Saphir. See Jenő Zsoldos, “Bod Péter Szent Hiláriusa és a Talmud” in Libanon, 1936, p. 212. Idem., “A zsidó a XVIII. századvég magyar drámájában” in Libanon, 1937, pp. 63–65. Idem., “Egy ismeretlen ­magyar-zsidó író” in Libanon, 1940, pp. 44–46. Idem., “Benedek Ignác és emancipációs röpirata” in Libanon, 1937, p. 90. Idem., “A Pesther Tageblatt és az Athenaeum” in Libanon, 1940, pp. 6–11. 17  Jenő Zsoldos, “A zsidóság szerepe Pest és Buda megmagyarosodásában” in Libanon, 1937, pp. 125–128. Zsoldos also aimed to account for this absence: he believed the religious strata were not preoccupied with it, the worldly strata did not consider it a relevant task, and it had no place in the curricula of Hungarian universities either.

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shared ancient source.18 Six years later Zsoldos made a similar, though rather generalized statement: “the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries was the time when the ‘Jewish’ Bible and the Talmud started to be treated in a fair manner in our homeland,” to which he added that the Romantic era also discovered previously unexplored areas of Jewish material life.19 A great number of Zsoldos’ contributions to Libanon may in fact be read as an attempt to establish a canon of Hungarian writers particularly fond of Jewry. For instance, in the second issue of Libanon Zsoldos presented the pro-Jewish views of Péter Vajda who believed that the Hungarian and Hebrew languages were closely related. In Zsoldos’ interpretation, Vajda was the first to turn “the idea of emancipation into a general national problem without any reservations,” adding that, when the Hungarian past was just being discovered, the Jewish past already had a vivid presence in Hungary as religious-Biblical knowledge.20 Zsoldos also discussed Viktor Cholnoky’s theory that placed “the Semitic” next to “the Turanian,” tellingly referring to Cholnoky as the successor of Vajda.21 Elsewhere, he devoted attention to János Hetényi, a “progressive, romantic and rationalist” author who was supposedly the only “respectfully objective” evaluator of Jewish trading activities in the Hungary of his days.22 The Biblical images found in the writings of András Fáy – an author who, in Zsoldos’ words, “consistently validated the spirit of rationalism in his Protestantism,” – also appeared among his numerous subjects.23 In the second volume of Libanon, Jenő Zsoldos narrated the history of “the fiction of the common fate of Jews and Hungarians”, which may be viewed as his attempt at self-historicization. Discussing non-Jewish Hungarian literary references to the destruction of ancient Jerusalem in particular, Zsoldos provided an illuminating overview that covered both the propagators and opponents of the idea of common fate since the sixteenth century.24 Besides such an act of seeming self-historicization, however, Zsoldos clearly intended to promote the idea. Most strikingly, when dealing with the book of Frigyes Riedl on Kölcsey, Zsoldos specified the Biblical or Jewish equivalents of “three 18  Jenő Zsoldos, “Kölcsey és Jeremiás” in Libanon, 1936, p. 28. 19  Jenő Zsoldos, “Irodalmunk új talmudszemlélete” in Libanon, 1942, p. 17. He published on József Ponori Thewrewk, the first author to compile a collection of the “treasures of the Talmud” in Hungarian, even ahead of all Hungarian Jews. Jenő Zsoldos, “Az első talmudi gyöngyszemek irodalmunkban” in Libanon, 1942, p. 82. 20  Jenő Zsoldos, “Vajda Péter zsidószemlélete” in Libanon, 1936, p. 50. 21  Jenő Zsoldos, “Cholnoky Viktor és a semi kultúra” in Libanon, 1936, p. 225. 22  Jenő Zsoldos, “Irodalmunk zsidószemlélete: Hetényi János” in Libanon, 1938, pp. 131–138. 23  Jenő Zsoldos, “Bibliai képek Fáy András műveiben” in Libanon, 1939, p. 7. 24  Idem., “Jeruzsálem pusztulása a magyar irodalomban” in Libanon, 1937, p. 91.

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of our [i.e. Hungarian] mission-devoted” poets. According to this interpretation, Sándor Petőfi “made the role of poets seem similar to the people-liberating leadership of Moses,” Jenő Komjáthy “reached a logical end-point of his worldview through identification with the Messiah” whereas Ferenc Kölcsey “assumed the role of the Prophets of the Old Testament.”25 This peculiar convergence theory was probably the most radical expression of Zsoldos’ Hungarian-Jewish ideas (note that he recurrently used the expression with a hyphen) and serves as the final illustration of his assimilationist-integrationist perspective on Hungarian Jewish culture here. The other exceptionally prolific contributor to Libanon, József M. Grózinger (1891–?) was a historian and historian of philosophy particularly fond of German Jewish culture who published most of his articles in the first volumes of the journal.26 However, his writings in Libanon also suggest that he increasingly reoriented himself towards the new Hebrew culture. On the pages of the journal, Grózinger analyzed, above all, various episodes in the history of philosophy, focusing on aspects he considered relevant from the Jewish point of view. It appears that Grózinger conceived of his two main tasks as showing that the Jewish religion and philosophy constituted a harmonious unit and, second, as offering Hungarian-language summaries of important Jewish-related philosophical works published in languages such as German or Hebrew. In other words, it was among Grózinger’s most important aims to refute the idea, widely shared in inter-war Europe, that Jewry was unphilosophical. He explicitly ambitioned to prove that “Prophetism has given European thought not only monotheism, but also philosophy.”27 Maimonides, Spinoza, and Hermann Cohen proved particularly important for him in this quest. Grózinger referred to Maimonides as the founder of European monotheist philosophy,28 and considered Spinoza a mystical and fanatical believer but also a rationalist philosopher.29 Hermann Cohen, the Marburg-based neo-Kantian, was clearly 25  Idem., “Riedl Frigyes: Kölcsey Ferenc” in Libanon, 1939, p. 34. 26  In 1931, Grózinger published his main work on the history of Jewish philosophy in German. József Grózinger, Geschichte der jüdischen Philosophie und der jüdischen Philosophen von Moses Mendelssohn bis zur Gegenwart. Bd. 1: Von Moses Mendelssohn bis Salomon Maimon (Berlin: Philo, 1930). In his introduction, Grózinger announced that he had intended to write his history in Hebrew, but eventually decided in favor of German since he was convinced that his presentation of Jewish philosophers would be able to reach a larger audience that way. 27  József M. Grózinger, “A prófétizmus útja a legújabb gondolkodásig” in Libanon, 1941, p. 79. 28  József M. Grózinger, “Maimonides és a mai filozófia” in Libanon, 1936, p. 120. 29  Grózinger even stated that Spinoza was a saint committed to both religion and freedom. Spinoza was considered a heretic for centuries and his symbolic reintegration as a Jew

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among Grózinger’s most favored philosophers. The fact that Cohen viewed religion as a universal function of reason and thought of Jewry as its most ancient source visibly held particular appeal for him.30 Regarding Grózinger’s conception of Jewish culture, the following statement of his appears especially revealing: Jewish philosophy, as we have already discussed in several places, has always pronounced Jewish ideas. Whether it happens to be Platonic in Alexandria, whether it builds a geometric system of philosophy in Amsterdam or establishes a new Kantian School in Marburg, it always teaches Jewish philosophy. The thinking of the Jewish philosopher can only be Jewish as it has a Judeogenic basis and is rooted in the Jewish soil. Even though external influences may modify the rudiments of thought, they cannot change their origins.31 Such attempts to determine the essential qualities of Jewish thought clearly played a central role in Grózinger’s philosophical reflections. Analyzing his choice of concepts may reveal a telling ambivalence in his thinking which points in a similar direction. Two of the expressions Grózinger repeatedly employed were Wille zur Wahrheit (the will to required a new concept of Jewish ethnicity. This concept was developed p ­ ractically simultaneously with another great debate on pantheism that greatly raised interest in his thinking. On these matters, see Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted. Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 77 and 84. 30  In spite of them appearing next to each other on József Grózinger’s platform of Jewish philosophy, the abovementioned trio was rather eclectic. It is suggestive of this eclecticism how Hermann Cohen actually believed Spinoza’s ideas caused Jews great misfortune. Cohen also denied that Spinoza’s thinking had Jewish sources and firmly supported his expulsion from the community. However, Grózinger’s rather idiosynratic canon of Jewish philosophers clearly preferred to stress commonalities. 31  József M. Grózinger, “Kurt Sternberg. Philosophische Probleme im biblischen und apokryphren Schrifttum der Juden” in Libanon, 1938, p. 123. Grózinger employed an almost identical formulation three years later: “The Jewish philosopher – no matter whether he creates Platonic philosophy in Alexandria, builds on Aristotelian bases in Spain, spins Cartesian mathematical formulas in Amsterdam, or propagates antimechanistic vitalism in Paris – always writes Jewish philosophy.” Idem., “Bergson” in Libanon, 1941, p. 12. Elsewhere, Grózinger asserted that the “meaning of life and existence, the peculiar meaning and goal of Jewish existence and life can only be sought through a philosophy emerging out of the Jewish soil and mentality.” József M. Grózinger, “A zsidó filozófiai időszerűsége” in Libanon, 1936, p. 212.

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truth)32 and Wille zum Wert (the will to ethical value),33 with which he aimed to challenge thinkers who drew on the Nietzschean concept of the will to power. Grózinger thereby asserted that human endeavors were meant to be both reasonable and ethical. However, when discussing a Hebrew ­volume published in Cracow, Grózinger employed precisely those expressions he so categorically rejected elsewhere, referring not only to “the vitality” of Hebrew culture but, even more strikingly, to “the absolute will” of the Hebrew spirit.34 In conclusion, whereas his co-author Jenő Zsoldos presented an a­ ssimilationist-integrationist concept that emphasized the shared traditions of Jewish and non-Jewish Hungarians, József Grózinger reflected on the charac­teristics of the Jewish spirit and sketched a philosophical canon founded on the idea of a Jewish essence with universal relevance or, in short, a universalist-essentialist concept of Jewish culture.35

From Creating to Saving Jewish Culture

Even though analyzing political developments was not among the explicit aims of Libanon, due to its (obviously unintentional) timing Libanon is a fascinating primary source to study how Hungarian Jewish intellectuals reflected on historical changes. The journal started to appear in 1936, shortly before the beginning of ever more encompassing anti-Jewish legal discrimination and socioeconomic exclusion in Hungary. In its very last issue of late 1943, some of its authors already addressed, in deep despair and complete uncertainty concerning their own future, the ongoing extermination of European Jewry: We do not know what divine providence has ordered, whether it will allow Hungarian Jewry to welcome the dove signaling the end of the cataclysm. But we have to trust in this and keep [. . .] those spiritual treasures above water, which on our continent we almost alone have the chance to protect.36 32  Grózinger, “A neokantianizmus legújabb héber rendszerezője” in Libanon, 1938, p. 51. 33  Grózinger, “A gonoszság szerepe a világtörténelemben” in Libanon, 1940, p. 120. (Grózinger used both expressions in German.) 34  Grózinger, “Széfer hasanah lijhudé polánija . . .” in Libanon, 1938, p. 88. 35  As Grózinger put it in one of his articles, “the Jew” was essentially forward-looking and “respect for traditions and history were mere instruments to him [. . .] for building the future.” Grózinger, “Az individuálpszichológia zsidó eredete” in Libanon, 1937, p. 194. 36  “Az Országos Magyar Zsidó Múzeum közgyűlése” in Libanon, 1943, p. 110. Emphasis added.

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One of the most remarkable components of the first volumes of Libanon was the open polemic with Nazi ideas.37 It is entirely unsurprising to find authors of Libanon highlighting the unscientific nature of racism.38 It may be much more unexpected that their recurrent polemic with Nazi ideas often took the form of recontextualizing such ideas to subvert the Nazi sense of superiority and symbolically reverse its hierarchies. In one of the most elaborate articles polemicizing with Nazi ideas, co-editor Zoltán Kohn’s (1902–1944) “Régi és új pogányság” (Old and New Paganism), Kohn construed an opposition of world historical significance between Greek or Western pagan ideals and monotheistic Eastern Semitism.39 In the “mad Nazi myth of blood” Kohn perceived a vicious hatred of Judeo-Christianity, while he also highlighted rationalism as one of the indirect causes of Nazi misanthropy.40 With a touch of irony, Kohn called Der Mythus des 20. Jahr­ hunderts, the infamous work of Nazi chief ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, “the Bible of the new German revelation,”41 and added in a mocking tone that Rosenberg might have been entirely correct in believing that Germans were truly pagan. A primary aim of Kohn’s article was to underline that, even if they may have seemed opposed in certain respects, Judaism and Christianity in fact shared essential features. As part of the same intellectual polemic with Nazism, József Grózinger responded to the ideas of Erich Jaensch, a representative of Nazi ­philosophical anthropology and anthropological psychology. Grózinger not only called Jaensch’s attempts futile, but also employed the abovementioned method of subversion, posing the pointed question whether the idea of a philosophy close to life “wasn’t perhaps borrowed from homo iudaicus?”42 Meanwhile, writer, critic, musical expert and translator Imre Keszi (1910–1974) discussed the “arsenal of our enemies in the Geisteswissenschaften” on the basis of the ideas of Wilhelm Stapel, one of the key thinkers of the conservative revolution 37  Such polemics presupposed a climate of debate, which was perhaps not meant literally, but n ­ evertheless defined the tone of these contributions. 38  At this point, the contributors’ belief in the power of scholarship (tudomány, Wissenschaft) seemed unshaken. 39  See Zoltán Kohn, “Régi és új pogányság” in Libanon, 1936. Kohn applied this opposition even to Italy, contrasting the “Greek ethos” of the South with the “religious ecstasy” of the North. 40  Mechanistic-naturalistic worldviews, monist-pantheism, atheism, and the self-serving love of science were the successive results of the genealogical chain Kohn suggested. 41  Zoltán Kohn, “Régi és új pogányság” in Libanon, 1936, p. 65. 42  József M. Grózinger, “A mai német filozófia és a nacionálhumanizmus” in Libanon, 1936, p. 242.

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of the 1920s who was to commit to the National Socialist Weltanschauung at the beginning of the 1930s. With the confidence of someone much more erudite than his fierce opponent, Keszi ultimately observed: “I am not sure whether we can rejoice over all these inferior ideas without feeling some inner pain. Let us not forget that this used to be the nation of Dilthey!”43 In short, similarly to their German Jewish counterparts, several contributors to Libanon also ­fashioned themselves as more legitimate representatives of German culture than the intellectual Führers of the new regime. In the same volumes of Libanon from the mid-1930s, however, there were also laudatory statements on the German nation and culture. In a characteristic instance, György Bokor categorized Bertalan Hatvany’s rejection of Germans as “unfortunately one-sided and politically motivated.”44 It thus seems that while various authors of Libanon considered Nazi anti-Semitism a most serious threat, the monstrosity of the new German regime had not become entirely clear to all of them yet. After all, a large segment of Hungarian Jewish intellectuals was known both for its active bilingualism and its deeply held respect toward German culture and the latter in particular must have played a certain role in hindering a clearer appreciation of emerging realities.45 Characteristically, the single explicit reference to the ongoing destruction of German Jewry would only be printed in the Journal Review section of 1938: “an unknown author paints a shocking picture of the quiet, cruel and well planned erasure of German Jewry.”46 The ways doubts concerning the future started to be expressed can provide a much better indicator of Hungarian Jewish reactions to the massive 43  Imre Keszi, “Wilhelm Stapel. Die literarische Vorherrschaft der Juden in Deutschland 1918 bis 1933” in Libanon, 1937, p. 32. 44  György Bokor, “Ázsia lelke” in Libanon, 1936, p. 209. 45  There are several interesting signs of this German orientation: Birobidjan was spelled Birobidschan (instead of Birobidzsán), Sestov appeared as Schestow (instead of Sesztov), while a quote from Polish writer Władysław Reymont was rendered in German. When IMIT’s British style Pentateuch was discussed in 1942, it was explained that “For readers used to German commentaries it will perhaps appear somewhat strange that there are hardly any philological references.” Ottó Komlós, “Mózes öt Könyve és a Haftárák” in Libanon, 1942, p. 61. Further counter-intuitive remarks on the role of German in scholarship were made as late as 1943. For instance, in his review of Ferenc Hevesi’s Hungarianlanguage book on ancient Jewish philosophy, Grózinger stated that “The German summary included at the end of the book enables the scholarly world to properly value Ferenc Hevesi’s merits.” József M. Grózinger, “Dr. Hevesi Ferenc. Az ókor zsidó bölcselete” in Libanon, 1943, p. 85. 46  “Folyóiratszemle” in Libanon, 1938, p. 32.

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changes taking place already prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. For instance, during Libanon’s discussion of Endre Sós’ In Front of Doors Slammed Shut the following rhetorical question was posed: “Who could reasonably expect works by a new generation of scholars amidst the current circumstances?”47 As early as 1938, a sense of fatalism would occasionally be expressed. For instance, when reviewing the book of Ernst Sommer on the expulsion of Jews from Spain in the fifteenth century, literary historian and translator Pál Kardos (1900–1971) wondered whether “its topicality would not remain eternal – despite the intentions of its author?”48 An arguably even clearer symptom of how Jewish intellectuals in Hungary reacted to their worsening situation in 1938 is that Zoltán Kohn now thought of the devastating situation of German Jewish youth as reflecting the worldwide tragedy of Jewish youth.49 Soon after, Kohn adopted a much more militant voice to express a rather utopian desire: “how I wish the fight of the silenced moral law in the true spirit of the Prophets would begin as soon as possible against the mad godless forces.”50 By 1940, historian of philosophy József Grózinger also went much further than simply revealing his growing doubts: “wherever we look, we see despair, suffering, resignation, uncertainty, and hopelessness,” he would emphasize.51 By this time Grózinger seemed convinced that when a future historian of the spirit shall glance at the distorted face of “the first four decades of the twentieth century, he will have to call this century saeculum diabolicum.”52 By 1940, his age appeared as “a bottomless, putrid and insidious swamp” to Imre Keszi too.53 By contrast, E.M. – most likely Ernő Munkácsi – sounded nearly optimistic when he chose to remark on historical repetitions. In 1940, he asserted that the current problems of Hungarian Jewry were “the same as a hundred years ago” and related to the lack of emancipation.54 In the same year of 1940, fresh 47  (-ld-), “Sós Endre: Becsapott ajtók előtt” in Libanon, 1938, p. 62. 48  Pál Kardos, “Ernst Sommer: Kelt Granadában 1492” in Libanon, 1938, p. 86. 49  Kohn asserted that hope should be invested in fleeing. He discussed the possibility of migrating outside Europe, but even to this he added whether “life could truly be better and more peaceful anywhere for Jewish youth today?” Zoltán Kohn, “Günther Friedländer. Jugend zwischen gestern und morgen” in Libanon, 1938, p. 110. 50  Zoltán Kohn, “A profétizmus Ignaz Ziegler szemléletében” in Libanon, 1939, p. 6. 51  József M. Grózinger, “Vallásfilozófiai kórkép” in Libanon, 1940, p. 19. 52  Idem., “Sigmund Freud irracionalizmusa” in Libanon, 1940, p. 37. 53  Imre Keszi, “Fenyő László: Hűség” in Libanon, 1940, p. 26. 54  E. M., “A magyar zsidóság újta vezércikkek tükrében. Összeállította Dr. Ballagi Ernő” in Libanon, 1940, p. 59. (E. M. stood as M. E. in the original.).

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PhD and Museum employee György Balázs (1914–1945) assessed the situation rather similarly when he wrote about their grandfathers’ generation that they could “not have imagined that two generations later the same troubles, dangers and tribulations will await their descendants which they and their ancestors had to endure for centuries.”55 In another contribution of Ernő Munkácsi we find yet another historical analogy: here Munkácsi maintained that his generation had to experience “times which were almost unprecedented in the past 2000 years”56 as “our generation passed, all at once, from legal equality and the possession of the full rights of citizens to a condition without them, even having to suffer under the imposition of specific restrictions.”57 It was another important symptom of the changing times that, even though some supportive remarks appeared in previous volumes already, by 1940 the Zionist movement started to be presented in a wider perspective. For instance, painter Lipót Herman (1884–1972) argued in a remarkable fashion that “The construction of Palestine amounts to the defense of honor of a civilization which enables pogroms, the persecution and murder of Jews.”58 A new type of soul searching also became more vocal around this time. Quoting the ideas of Martin Buber, teacher of the Jewish Gymnasium Sámuel Kandel (1884–1944), for instance, wrote of the necessity to renew popular religious beliefs and referred to “the idea of the sacred gathering of a truly humane community” in Zion.59 József Grózinger also addressed the possibility of a religious rebirth and asserted that the belief in the divine order would “emerge renewed out of the current catastrophe.”60 By the early 1940s, references to the lack of appropriate Hungarian Jewish self-organization and self-defense not only became more frequent, but they also turned more accusatory. When discussing a recent book by Pál Kardos, Jenő Zsoldos addressed the “causes of internal decay” and complained in particular that hardly any efforts were exerted to create a meaningful intellectual and spiritual life for the Jewish youth.61 Lawyer, journalist and writer Endre Sós (1905–1969), who shall make a more prominent appearance on the pages below, voiced comparable observations in a partly self-accusatory manner: 55  György Balázs, “Az erdélyi szombatosok 1941. tavaszán” in Libanon, 1941, p. 22. 56  Ernő Munkácsi, “Az ókori zsidóság feliratos történeti forrásai (I. közlemény)” in Libanon, 1940, p. 68. 57  Ibid., p. 68. 58  Lipót Herman, “Gerő Ödön” in Libanon, 1940, p. 13. 59  Sámuel Kandel, “Martin Buber. A zsidóság megújhodása” in Libanon, 1940, p. 88. 60  József M. Grózinger, “A gonoszság szerepe a világtörténelemben” in Libanon, 1940, p. 121. 61  Jenő Zsoldos, “Kardos Pál. Levél egy kibujdosott barátom után” in Libanon, 1940, p. 59.

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“We did not show enough resistance against the mass of accusations directed at us, even though these accusations at times amounted to blood libels in only seemingly literary form.”62 What a few years earlier would typically have been formulated as positive plans and at worst seemed to be corrigible mistakes, by the early 1940s appeared as proofs of sinful negligence. However, the most dramatic expressions from the very early 1940s can be found in the report of the annual assembly held shortly after the outbreak of the Nazi-Soviet war in 1941 and the massive transnational wave of anti-Semitic violence that accompanied it. “Many of us feel that the cup of our misfortune is close to being filled. In these horror-filled, apocalyptic times, Messianic, miracu­lous beliefs are spreading among the masses.”63 The director of the Museum, Ernő Munkácsi clearly attempted to assume the idealism and fanaticism of Prophets and adopt their tone when asking “isn’t it the sin of sins that in its hour of critical need, Hungarian Israel isn’t ready to recognize reality and draw appropriate conclusions from it? [. . .] Do we deserve a divine miracle when our ranks are rife with undisciplined behavior and internal discord?”64 As the recognition grew that what was at stake was the bare survival of Hungarian Jews amidst a continent-wide campaign of murder,65 the historical analogy with Spanish Jews gained new prominence. The aim of Hungarian Jews, as expressed in the Report of the Museum Society of 1941, would now be, “besides the saving of our lives, the saving of our spiritual treasures,”66 a dual agenda Spanish Jews supposedly managed to fulfill since the late 15th century. By 1942, Zoltán Kohn formulated a comprehensive critique with emancipation as his main culprit. “The distancing of the modern Jewish soul from religion and faith started with European emancipation and we see the culmination of this process today,” he asserted.67 In Kohn’s assessment, form had always been essential to Judaism, and the modern attempt to make belief independent of it

62  Endre Sós, “Makai Emil” in Libanon, 1941, p. 46. 63  “Az Országos Magyar Zsidó Múzeum Közgyűlése” in Libanon, 1941, p. 56. The meeting in question was held on September 21, 1941. 64  Ibid., p. 57. 65  “Múzeumegyesületi közlemények” in Libanon, 1941, p. 95. 66  Ibid., p. 96. 67  Not much earlier, writing on the biography of Nordau by Béla Révész, Kohn argued that Libanon’s approach was retrospectively justified: “Only few people know [. . .] but professional literary scholars have never forgotten about the Jewishness of Béla Révész. What is more, our journal addressed it in a study that appeared a few years ago.” Zoltán Kohn, “Révész Béla: Max Nordau élete” in Libanon, 1941, p.27.

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could only result in its eventual weakening.68 Whereas Neolog Jewry supposedly offered no more than a “substitute” during “a 150 year-long short circuit of religion and belief”,69 Orthodoxy was presented as a positive example here: “Only the minority of closed and traditionally loyal Jews defended themselves adequately against the dangers of dissolution.”70 Zoltán Kohn offered a narrative of decline to emphasize the decisiveness of the current moment. He did so with trust in the coming religious rebirth: somewhat unexpectedly, he closed his lines in the hope that current developments would lead to “the rebirth of a Jewish and sacred humanity.”71 In the 1943 volume of Libanon, several references to the ongoing genocide of Jews were published – a term Raphael Lemkin coined only around this time and which was not yet known to the authors and readers of Libanon. Nonetheless, the article titled “A cionizmus” (Zionism) by Ernő Szilágyi (1898– 1973), a prominent participant in Zionist rescue operations and close associate of Rezső Kasztner, included unmistakable utterances. In this article of his, Szilágyi interpreted the Nazi campaign of murder as the destruction of the Ostjude: “We do not yet see, cannot gather the courage to see the elementary and unprecedented change which the perdition of Eastern European Jewry amounts to”, he stated.72 Szilágyi’s article addressed the utter horror from a decidedly Zionist point of view and made a prognosis in closing that national rebirth would follow the immeasurable misfortune: “And when the grass starts to grow on the millions of new graves in the Galuth, the message will be heard everywhere that they should all come up here.”73 In the fourth issue of volume eight, the very last issue of Libanon, the report of the annual assembly of October 31, 1943 was also included. This report described the ongoing catastrophe in more concrete terms than Szilágyi, while introducing several hardly known and unspecified expressions. Readers of the journal were informed here for the first time that the contemporary Jewish tragedy had no historical analogy: “We read in Josephus Flavius that at the siege 68  In other words, Kohn explicitly argued that the Jewish connection between culture and religion was unalterable: “the meaning of Jewry cannot be transformed so radically as to become a false analogy of the original and primary meaning of it as a religious phenomenon.” Zoltán Kohn, “Holtponton (A mai zsidóság helyzetképe) (Folytatás)” in Libanon, 1942, p. 109. 69  Ibid., p. 108. 70  Zoltán Kohn, “Holtponton (A mai zsidóság helyzetképe)” in Libanon, 1942, p.79. 71  Kohn, “Holtponton (A mai zsidóság helyzetképe) (Folytatás)” in Libanon, 1942, p. 110. 72  Ernő Szilágyi, “A cionizmus” in Libanon, 1943, p. 49. Szilágyi’s diary was published as Ernő Szilágyi, Ismeretlen memoár a magyar vészkorszakról (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2005). 73  Ibid., p. 51. Note Szilágyi’s misleading reference to graves though.

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of Jerusalem a million Jews perished. In the course of last year, more weaponless men, weak women, innocent and helpless children and old people have become victims of furious racial struggle.”74 At the same time, when discussing the fate of Hungarian Jewry, “complete deportation” was explicitly mentioned as the most extreme possibility and was also linked to the notion of a “final solution of the Jewish question.” The deployment of the Nazi expression could be taken to mean the mere forced resettlement of Jews from Hungary, or be correctly interpreted by those who suspected the worst: “State laws and decrees, anti-Jewish societal movements [. . .] wish to prepare the final ­solution of the Jewish question, which – as was repeatedly stated – could be nothing else but the complete deportation of Jewry.”75

Political Discourses

The following pages will study Hungarian Jewish political discourses and historical narratives articulated on the pages of the Ararát yearbooks during the Second World War. The Ararát series was launched in Budapest in the year 1939 when several anti-Jewish laws and decrees were already in place and many more were in the making. Despite its inauspicious start in the year when Nazi Germany launched its attack on Poland, triggering the Second World War, altogether six Ararát yearbooks were released with the last volume being published for the catastrophic year of 1944. In the course of the six years of its release, altogether 106 authors contributed to the Ararát yearbooks (excluding those who were published posthumously, only republished, or translated).76 The role played in the case of Ararát 74  “Az Országos Magyar Zsidó Múzeum igazgatóságának jelentése az 1942–43. évről” in Libanon, 1943, p. 112. 75  Ibid., p. 118. 76  Only two eminent literary authors, Károly Pap and Ernő Szép, published in all six volu­ mes. The name of five authors can be found in five and those of another five in four of the volumes: Aladár Komlós, Béla Vihar, Ákos Molnár, Zseni Várnai and Piroska Reichard belong to the former group, whereas Béla Zsolt, László Bródy, Géza Szilágyi, Jenő Mohácsi and Gábor Goda to the latter. Out of the 106 contributors to Ararát, 23 also wrote for Libanon. However, if the criterion of at least three pieces here and contributions to at least three volumes there was employed, only three people could be regarded as regular contributors to both: Aladár Komlós, László Bródy, and Imre Keszi. 64 of the 106 authors in fact published only once in Ararát. (It is noteworthy that the names of eleven new contributors were added to the list when the yearbook for 1943 was released and another fourteen were added the year after.)

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by the Pesti Izraelita Nőegylet (the Association of Israelite Women of Pest) and, more specifically, the Orphanage for Girls it operated on Hungária körút is roughly comparable with the function the Jewish Museum assumed for Libanon after 1940.77 This institutional embeddedness similarly proved crucial in enabling the continued release of Ararát long into the darkest years of the war.78 Individual Ararát yearbooks were rather diverse in terms of the form as well as the contents of their contributions,79 however, a thematic thread ran through them all: studies covering various areas of modern Jewish culture were repeatedly published.80 In later volumes, there were three important novelties too: smaller enquêtes, the publication of winning entries of competitions on the themes of music, literature and the most timely duties of Jewry, and overviews on the most significant Jewish publications of the year.81 77  According to one contemporary source, this charitable institution, originally opened in 1867, cared for 110 orphans. Its caretaker organization, the Association of Israelite Women of Pest was founded the year before. In the mid-1930s, the association had 1 528 members. It was officially abolished in 1945. On the history of the Association, see Julia Richers, “Johanna Bischitz, Katalin Gerő, and Budapest’s Jewish Women’s Association (1866–1943)” in: Judit Gazsi, Andrea Pető and Zsuzsanna Toronyi (eds.), Gender, Memory, and Judaism (Budapest: Balassi, 2007). 78  However, the Association of Israelite Women of Pest could only support limited number of copies. The number mentioned in one of the volumes is 150. The yearbooks attracted significantly more attention than this may lead us believe. For instance, one of its essay competitions received as many as 112 submissions, or three-quarters of the nominal readership. 79  The first yearbook may illustrate the variety of materials, as it included seven poems (one of which was a translation), three short stories, a fragment of a play, two letters (by the same author), two forewords, a calendar (and an accompanying text introducing its meaning and significance), eleven pieces without a specific label (most of them brief studies on such diverse themes as the legal situation of Jewry, Jewry and capitalism, Bergson, synagogue music, politeness, etc.) as well as reproductions of works of art (three drawings, one pastel, one painting and seven more visual illustrations). 80  To name but the key contributions, Ödön Gerő published on Hungarian Jews and Hungarian fine arts, József Balassa discussed Jewish scholars in Hungarian linguistics, Komlós made a contribution on Jewish poets in Hungarian literature, Hugó Csergő wrote on Jewish journalists and Grünvald presented the story of Jewish historians in Hungarian historiography. One of the basic aims of these sketches seems to have been to provide a sense of Jewish achievement and thereby help strengthen Jewish self-respect. 81  In the yearbook of 1940 several contributors discussed the racial question and the Jewish (i.e. anti-Jewish) laws. In 1943, there was a discussion on the current crisis of Jewry and the lessons to be drawn from it. In 1944, a number of authors elaborated their answers to the question “Why am I a Jew?”

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The analysis below shall draw on the non-fictional materials in Ararát and follow two main lines of inquiry. It shall first focus on assessments of the Jewish situation to map the spectrum of political positions. Subsequently, attention will be devoted to narratives of recent history to thereby inquire into Hungarian Jewish intellectuals’ sense of crisis during the Second World War. My starting point for analyzing political ideas is the reception of discriminatory legislation in the late 1930s and the proposed modes of reaction. The changed legal status of Jews and its practical consequences constituted one of the most important conflicts of interpretation in the first Ararát volume. According to Ernő Munkácsi, “the idea of legal equality was, at least in principle, not violated through this legislation”, i.e. the anti-Jewish law of 1938.82 Munkácsi argued that even if the equality of all citizens as known from the 19th century was no longer fully in force, civil and political rights had not been denied to Jews. In other words, Munkácsi propagated the idea that legal discrimination should be conceived as an exception. Whereas Munkácsi thus tried to maintain trust in the Hungarian legislators – to prove their supposedly benevolent intentions, he would extensively quote their self-justification – he had to admit that the status of Hungarian Jewry became uncertain.83 This overly benevolent, almost apologetic stance was directly challenged by aesthetician and publicist Lajos Dénes (1879–1942). In a letter Dénes published in the same (first) volume of Ararát he opined that “it would be a foolish and sinful delusion to maintain that we may still consider ourselves equal to our Christian fellow citizens, the only difference being that we happen to be very misfortunate. We have to realize that we were forcibly reduced to the status of a minority and be fully aware of this fact and all its consequences.”84 The adoption of the so-called second Jewish (i.e. anti-Jewish) law of 1939 triggered a further round of discussion in Ararát. At this time, the most notable contributions advocated a semi-liberal compromise. Géza Ribáry (1891–1942), a lawyer by profession who served as vice-director of the Israelite Community of Pest, directed the Hungarian Israelite Cultural Association and also initiated the Hungarian Jewish Aid Action, for instance, rhetorically supported the idea of “establishing numerical proportions” and maintained that “parallel reeducation” might serve as its means. At the same time, Ribáry 82  Ernő Munkácsi, “A magyar zsidóság és a zsidóvallású magyarok jogi helyzete” in Ararát, 1939, p. 19. On the development of anti-Jewish policies, see Nathaniel Katzburg, Hungary and the Jews: Policy and Legislation, 1920–1943 (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1981). 83  Munkácsi did not fail to note that, inconsistently, both racial and denominational definitions were now partly valid. 84  Lajos Dénes, “Két levél” in Ararát, 1939, p. 94.

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considered state-imposed limitations on the “conquest of space” (térfoglalás) to be unacceptable.85 Somewhat similarly to Ribáry, though three crucial years later, i.e. already in 1942, László Bakonyi accepted the notion of the “unhealthy stratification” of Hungarian Jewry and affirmed that there was a need to alter it,86 so much so that he labeled it “the sacred duty” of Jews to exercise “wise self-restraint” and even referred to the “evidently deserved supremacy of ethnic Hungarians” (törzsökös magyarság).87 While making such overly conciliatory gestures, Bakonyi also expected emancipation to be granted in the reemerging greater Hungary. Bakonyi’s concept of the Hungarian nation thus oscillated between a narrow, ethnic definition and a more inclusive imperial understanding; he demanded legal equality in a state he knew would not be neutral from an ethnic point of view. We find a milder propagation of Jewish self-restraint in the 1943 contribution by a leading representative of the Office for the Support of Hungarian Israelites, György Polgár, which called for “honest and serious attempts at economic assimilation.”88 While Polgár expressed his support for a “more appropriate distribution” of societal positions, he added that such goals should not imply the enforcement of strict numerical proportions – without being able to specify how the collective and voluntary self-restraint he thought advisable was supposed to be realized then.89 Even so, Polgár expressed more clear criticism of discriminatory legislation than the aforementioned two authors and remained closer to a liberal position. Géza Ribáry, László Bakonyi and György Polgár may have differed in their emphases, but the substance of their key arguments was nearly identical. They all seemed ready to endorse the theory that Jews had played an excessive societal and economic role in Hungary and aimed to offer an alternative to harsh exclusion through compromise solutions. In other words, their semi-liberal discourses were based on accepting some of the declared aims of discriminatory legislation, while contesting its means, which they variously called the 85  Géza Ribáry, “A magyar zsidóság és a zsidóvallású magyarok jogi helyzete” in Ararát, 1940, p. 75. Ribáry used the expression térfoglalás (conquest of space) in an idiosyncratic way. According to its mainstream use, space could only be conquered from somebody else. (The meaning of the term was thus based on the idea of unavoidable struggle between groups and essentially presupposed a zero sum game.) Ribáry consciously aimed to recode it by expressing his belief in the possibility and desirability of simultaneous, ­parallel conquests of space. 86  László Bakonyi, “Zsidó gondok és remények” in Ararát, 1942, p. 29. 87  Ibid., p. 30. 88  György Polgár, “A zsidó jövő gazdasági kérdése” in Ararát, 1943, p. 10. 89  Ibid., p. 9.

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denial of rights, artificial proportionalism, or restrictions on the conquest of space. These exceedingly cautious texts ought to be interpreted by reflecting on their primary contexts. In all likelihood, the ambition of Géza Ribáry, László Bakonyi, and György Polgár was to formulate a position which would have preserved crucial liberal principles and would thus have been acceptable to Jews, but would also have been agreeable to milder proponents of anti-Semitism by affirming the supposed existence of “higher national goals.” The fact that László Bakonyi’s and György Polgár’s pieces were released in the yearbooks of 1942 and 1943, respectively, i.e. during the years of the premiership of Miklós Kállay, also reveals that a curious middle position between previous Jewish demands for equality and ethnic Hungarian demands for anti-Semitic exclusion could be maintained even during the war years. For Hungarian Jewish authors such as Bakonyi or Polgár, it seems to have remained evident that they should address Hungary’s political leadership as their partners, even when this could only be done at the price of notable compromises. In the last Ararát yearbook of 1944, Zoltán Kohn discussed the right way of assimilation, opposing through conservative arguments the idea of re-stratifying Jewish society as advocated by Ribáry, Polgár and Bakonyi. Kohn appeared convinced that “fast, exaggerated and loud” Jewish adaptation would only “raise further suspicions”,90 and that “quick fix” approaches to assimilation constituted the problem rather than the solution. At the very same time, Kohn argued that such programmatic approaches to assimilation were deeply rooted in the Jewish condition, considering what he called “the revolt against one’s origins” particularly forceful among Jews. He ascribed this c­ urious beha­vior, above all, to Jews’ lack of a homeland and stable communities. Kohn’s conservative polemic thus amounted to a sharp critique of contemporary Jewry. However, his article in the last Ararát yearbook also asserted that “special laws” were in force above the level of the will and the “miracle of the spirit” hindered the disappearance of Jews.91 The political ideas the chief editor of Ararát, Aladár Komlós expressed were similar to those of Zoltán Kohn; instead of a new assimilationism in an anti-Semitic environment, Komlós also propagated a new internal balance. A signifi­cant difference nonetheless existed between these two authors: whereas Kohn wished to slow down the process of Hungarian assimilation, and would have preferred to turn it into a “natural process” to thereby preserve the Jewish community, Komlós thought that under the obliging circumstances of the 90  Zoltán Kohn, “Miért vagyok zsidó?” in Ararát, 1944, p. 86. 91  Ibid., pp. 83–85.

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times the process needed to be reversed. In other words, Komlós’ proposal revolved around taking Jewishness more seriously and moderating what he saw as one-sided Hungarian identification and commitment.92 In 1939, he explained that “We are not only Jews but also Hungarians and humans. Our aim is merely to emphasize the aspects of our many commitments which are required by our current situation, and which we are anyhow exclusively allowed to openly express.”93 However, by 1942, Aladár Komlós deduced from “the dramatic worsening of the situation” that it had become obligatory for Jewish artists to “fully experience the fate of their people.”94 Elsewhere Komlós’ choices of expressions closely resembled those of Kohn. In his “Zsidóság, magyarság, Európa” published in the yearbook of 1943, Komlós declared that “what can save us from the fever of headless assimilation is a calm and gradual form of assimilation.”95 Komlós may have rhetorically derived the legitimacy of this new kind of dual identity from the interests of Hungariandom (magyarság), writing, for instance, that “it is necessary to be more aware of our Jewishness precisely in order to make our relation to Hungariandom less tense and problematic.”96 Yet, his practical proposal remained largely unchanged: suggesting this new duality, Komlós advised a shift in the relative weight of the two central elements in favor of Jewishness. Ararát’s chief editor regularly supposed that the strengthening of Jewish consciousness was inversely related to the intensity of Hungarian identity, with the former essentially filling the vacuum created by the weakening of the latter.97 In stark contrast to such rather conservative ideas, radical plans to transform Hungarian Jewish society were also formulated on the pages of the yearbooks. The most detailed plan of reorganization were to be found in a piece by 92  For a more elaborate discussion of Aladár Komlós’ texts on Jewish themes published during the Horthy era, which reveals their notable consistency from the early 1920s onward but also some more subtle shifts towards the end of the period, see my Hungarianlanguage Ferenc Laczó, Felvilágosult vallás és modern katasztrófa közt. Magyar zsidó ­gondolkodás a Horthy-korban (Budapest: Osiris, 2014). 93  Aladár Komlós, “A magyar zsidó író útjai” in Ararát, 1939, p. 132. 94  Previous circumstances may have forced Jewish artists to turn their backs on their community, Komlós argued, but the unfolding persecution necessitated that they express “the sentiments of their own collective.” Aladár Komlós, “Zsidó költők a magyar irodalomban” in Ararát, 1942, p. 169. Komlós used the Hungarian equivalent of the German term Volksschicksal here. 95  Aladár Komlós, “Zsidóság, magyarság, Európa” in Ararát, 1943, p. 25. 96  Ibid., p. 26. 97  For instance, Komlós argued that “If our relation to Hungarianness becomes somewhat cooler, we have to make our relation to Jewry warmer.” Ibid., p. 27.

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Marcellné Denker.98 The fact that her submission was selected by Béla Zsolt, Aladár Komlós and Lajos Dénes as the finest of forty-six entries on “the most urgent tasks and duties of Hungarian Jewry” in 1941 lends additional importance to her corporatist thoughts.99 In her article, Denkerné sketched the contours of a more just societal order that would be based on Jewish unity and solidarity.100 Curiously, Denkerné maintained that “the best solution would be to follow the governing principles of the Portuguese economic model of social policy”,101 adding that the demands of economic self-sufficiency necessitated the assimilation of the Jewish youth to the Hungarian peasantry.102 Denkerné proposed these ideas as temporary solutions, expressing her belief that a subsequent phase of development would bring about a more just societal order and the Hungarian national integration of Jews.103 Thus, Denkerné’s awardwinning contribution advocated self-sufficiency in the present, but also predicted reintegration into local society. One of the anonymous contributions to Ararát’s discussion of lessons to be drawn from the contemporary crisis of Jewry maintained that “the real Jewish question” was “the inner Jewish question.” The author defined the latter as the meaning and sense of Jewish distinctiveness, suggesting that specific reasons had to be found for the identification of unreligious people as Jewish and that Jewry would only find solid ground under its feet when awareness of its “worldly mission,” that of spreading the idea of the divine, would become widespread again.104 Offering a strikingly similar approach, philosopher, writer and translator Béla Tábor (1907–1992) asked whether Jewry still amounted to a “real community” possessing “specific contents.” More concretely, Tábor’s article inquired whether Jewry had an elite group that was able to articulate such a specifically Jewish content and whether members of the community felt at least passive solidarity with it.105 In Tábor’s assessment, in the present, 98  Her maiden name was Bea Szántó, but she used her married name (Marcellné Denker, literally “the wife of Marcell Denker”). 99  On the essay competition, see Lajos Dénes, “Pályázati jelentés” in Ararát, 1941, pp. 36–8. 100  Marcellné Denker, “A magyar zsidóság jelen feladatai” in Ararát, 1941, pp. 40–41. 101  Ibid., p. 42. The source of this rather unusual reference might have been the contemporaneous book on Portugal by Catholic theologian Vid Mihelics. The reception of this important work was explored by Iván Bertényi Jr., “Fasiszta diktatúra vagy a keresztény társadalmi tanítás megvalósulása? Salazar rendszerének megítélése a II. világháború előtt Mihelics Vid: Az új Portugália című könyve alapján” in Protestáns Szemle, 2000/4. 102  Marcellné Denker, “A magyar zsidóság jelen feladatai” in Ararát, 1941, p. 43. 103  Ibid., pp. 43–44. 104  Anonymous, “A zsidóság életproblémája” in Ararát, 1943, p. 15. 105  Béla Tábor, “Szakzsidóság vagy zsidó világnézet” in Ararát, 1943, p. 82.

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Hungarian Jewry could hardly claim to have an “internal content” capable of making a distinguished elite opt for it. Having traced the current crisis to a single “root cause,” namely the crisis of “the Jewish possession of the Bible”,106 Tábor ultimately defined the key task of the present as enabling religious belief for a generation lacking it. One of the most important Zionist contributions to Ararát was written by Mózes Bisseliches (1878–1970), one of the pioneers of the Zionist movement in Hungary and former president of the Hungarian Zionist Alliance. The ongoing crisis was the starting point for Bisseliches’ reflections too with the first part of his article seeking to uncover its deepest causes. The author offered a rather deterministic view of history, declaring that “Jews, supposedly such smart people, were unable to see that developments would directly lead to catastrophe,” adding that “Tivadar Herzl was the only person who could see clearly what the situation was actually like.”107 According to Bisseliches’ Zionist perspective, the current situation was of a transitional nature; even though the constant rise of anti-Semitism had already proven “the necessary truth” of the Zionist idea, there remained much to be desired in terms of practical achievements.108 The tragedy of the present was thus pictured here as one between the victory of an idea and its practical realization. Three semi-liberal stances have been analyzed above, which accepted the notion that there was an urgent need to transform Jewish society, de-develop it in relative or absolute terms in order to reach a compromise with those pursuing more moderately anti-Semitic agendas. Aladár Komlós’ views according to which Jewish identity needed to be strengthened and the conservative, gradualist ideas of Zoltán Kohn have also been sketched. A counterpart to them was provided through discussing Marcellné Denker’s conception of an alternative, corporatist society. Last but not least, the views expressed by advocates of a new role for Judaism as well as those of a leading Hungarian Jewish representative of the Zionist movement were briefly explored too.

106  Ibid., p. 88. 107  Mózes Bisseliches, “Ankét a magyar zsidóság legfontosabb feladatairól. Tanulmány” in Ararát, 1941, p. 17. 108  Ibid., p. 18. At the same time, Bisseliches explained that the ultimate aim was not to let all Jews emigrate, but rather the reestablishment of societal “balance” through the emigration of a part after which a “normalized relationship” with other peoples could be achieved. Ibid., p. 19.

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Narratives of Crisis

Historical narratives tended to be presented in rather concise forms in the Ararát yearbooks. Even though some of them may appear sketchy, they nonetheless allow glimpses into larger historical visions. The Zionist narrative of Bisseliches and Bakonyi’s vision of the reappearance of tolerance in greater Hungary were already analyzed above and shall not be rehearsed here. However, in order to map the spectrum of narratives, a brief return to the ideas of Aladár Komlós appears needed. The analysis will subsequently focus on narratives of decay and inner split, to be followed by pro-reform and liberal historical visions. As we shall see, each of these historical narratives were narratives of crisis, but their sense of what, since when, and why exactly was in crisis differed markedly. Aladár Komlós’ articles expressing his agenda of Jewish literary history were based on a coherent narrative. According to the periodization Komlós offered, until 1860 Hungarian Jewish authors created semi-political works which dealt with the question of emancipation. It was in the course of the 1860s that external pressures on literature would finally lessen, Komlós argued, though societal and political ambitions continued to make a visible impact on literary works at least until 1868, if not later.109 After emancipation, Jewish private life would receive its first artistic depictions, even though in the oeuvre of József Kiss, the most significant Jewish artist of the period, the ­aesthetic agenda was still intertwined with a desire to strengthen the Jews’ connection to Hungary. Komlós maintained that for members of the subsequent generation, who started their literary careers in the 1890s, their Hungarian identity already appeared self-evident. Much of this generation was ready to critique Hungarian affairs precisely because of their clear sense of belonging. Simultaneously, they would have liked to detach themselves from traditional Jewish bonds, which they conceived as mere prejudices.110 For the cause of Jewish literature, this talented generation was thus completely lost. As traditional and modern culture came into opposition by the turn of the century, Komlós argued, Hungarian Jewish literature also split. Modern, urban artists managed to become successful while leaving their community, their art thus becoming the source of much controversy among the Jews.111 Komlós complained that in spite of the catastrophe befalling Hungarian Jewry after the First World War, such modern artists hardly ever showed awareness of the 109  Aladár Komlós, “Zsidó költők a magyar irodalomban” in Ararát, 1942, p. 163. 110  Ibid., p. 165. 111  Ibid., pp. 168–9.

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“fate of their people.” The literary historical narrative Komlós offered was thus based on two key ideas: the split into two fractions and the secession of modern artists from the Jewish community. Aiming to present topical and Jewish literature in a collectivist spirit as a superior synthesis of previous trends, Komlós depicted the consequences of these developments in a highly negative manner. By the 1940s, Komlós considered the modern separation of spheres anachronistic, going so far as to accuse of backwardness the proponents of literature’s autonomy. In Komlós’ eyes, under the obliging circumstances of the age of persecution, Jewish artists could only relate to their “true fate” and create great art by emphasizing their belonging to the Jewish people. In the first Ararát yearbook of 1939, music historian Bence Szabolcsi published a study on the cultural geography of synagogue singing, discussing a number of regional types and characterizing Hungary as a territory between East and West. At the same time, Szabolcsi argued that the essential trait of Hungarian development was that it transformed Eastern phenomena into Western ones.112 The historical narrative he offered was based on an idea of radical discontinuity, the complete exhaustion of the age of organic progress. In Szabolcsi’s interpretation, the 19th century began with attempts to implement encompassing “Westernizing” reforms within Judaism. For the lifespan of two generations, in the years between 1830 and 1890, such reforms acquired a dominant position and managed to modernize the Jewish tradition while preserving its essential features. According to Szabolcsi’s narrative, it was this organic trend of reform that declined around 1890, beyond which point the fading of the liberal spirit no longer enabled its worthy continuation.113 Much like Komlós, Szabolcsi thus dated the beginning of the Jewish crisis in Hungary at around 1890. However, unlike Komlós, he did not understand it as caused by an inner split, but merely saw decline. Nor did Szabolcsi complain about the modernist rejection of the Jewish tradition, but much rather asserted that the crisis was precisely that of a moderately reformist tradition. Economist and art historian Ernő Naményi’s (1888–1957) article “Vallásos reformmozgalmak Magyarországon” (Movements of Religious Reform in Hungary) offered an even more decidedly pro-reform narrative, which implied that Naményi actually contested the idea that religious reformism ever attained power in Hungary. Naményi maintained that the reformist tradition attracted large masses elsewhere and asserted that real reformism was defeated in Hungary not through its own weakness either, but “exclusively by leaders of

112  Bence Szabolcsi, “A magyarországi zsinagógai ének” in Ararát, 1939, p. 123. 113  Ibid., p. 124.

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the Jewish community focused only on their own material interests.”114 From his perspective, the moderate reformism of the Neologs was both incomplete and superficial. Naményi believed this to be the reason why Neolog Jewry could neither protect the unity of the Hungarian Jewish community, nor hinder the decline of religion and the accompanying spread of materialism.115 He concluded that a vacuum opened up as a consequence between the “completely Orthodox” and the “completely unreligious” strata. According to this story, the very survival of religious Jewry – which Naményi suddenly defined as non-Orthodox, diverging from his previous conceptual opposition between the Orthodox and the unreligious – depended on the implementation of “real religious reform.”116 Naményi’s reformist narrative also included an account of what Komlós diagnosed as secession from the Jewish community starting around 1890, but which Komlós did not quite attempt to explain. In Naményi’s version, it was precisely due to the lack of earnest and sustained reform that Neolog Jewry could not assure the continued relevance of religion. It is also worth comparing Naményi’s narrative with that of Szabolcsi: since Szabolcsi supported moderate reform, he presented the 19th century as an epoch when the reform process developed harmoniously, whereas in the more radically reformist version of Naményi the same period was characterized by externally disabled, even malevolently suppressed attempts at reform. Meanwhile, Fülöp Grünvald narrated the story of Jewish historians in ­modern Hungary. Grünvald explained that Jews concerned with historical knowledge at first wished to use their insights primarily as means in their politi­ cal struggles, but once 1848–49 created a “real community of sentiments”, they began to write on the past of non-Jewish Hungarians too.117 According to this narrative, Jewish historians came to assume a Hungarian national perspective after their legal emancipation in 1867, which acquired its highest manifestation in the works of Henrik Marczali and Ignác Acsády. In Grünvald’s interpretation, “severe attacks were launched against Jewish historians” as early as the first years of the 20th century and the exclusion of Jewish historians was soon so thorough that those places which provided opportunities to conduct professional research “no longer employed any Jews in the 20th century. What is more, not even secondary school appointed Jews as history teachers

114  Ernő Naményi, “Vallásos reformmozgalmak Magyarországon” in Ararát, 1941, p. 140. 115  Ibid., p. 140. 116  Ibid., p. 141. 117  Fülöp Grünvald, “A magyar történetírás zsidó művelői” in Ararát, 1940, pp. 135–6.

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any longer.”118 In Grünvald’s critical assessment, following the passing away of the first generation of post-emancipation historians, the line of Hungarian Jewish historians was thus broken.119 His narrative identified the turn of the century as the beginning of a decisive anti-Semitic shift, claiming that exclusion started well before the First World War – Grünvald explicitly considered Dávid Angyal’s later career exceptional. In accordance with his presentation of a long and deep Hungarian tradition of anti-Semitic exclusion, Grünvald did not consider future national reintegration certain or necessarily desirable, calling future Jewish contributions “doubtful.”120 Ernő Ballagi (1890–1944), defense lawyer, former associate of the journal Egyenlőség and at the time of writing chief editor of Magyar Zsidók Lapja, was practically alone among the contributors of the Ararát yearbooks in offering a liberal and wholly legalistic interpretation of Jewish emancipation. Emancipation was not a consequence of the Hungarian legislators’ benevolence for Ballagi either, but was based on the rational conception of a mutually beneficial exchange. As Ballagi explained, the concept of emancipation was not solely underpinned by the ideas of legal equality and religious freedom, but was solidly rooted in the modern Hungarian national program.121 He argued that these overlapping agendas enabled the seamless reconciliation of Jewish commitments to religion and motherland. In the liberal version of Ballagi, the balance sheet of the age of emancipation was decidedly positive as it “not only brought the flourishing of Jewry, but the enrichment of humanity as well.”122 Trying to clear the image of the age of liberalism, Ballagi directly connected the waves of conversion to the onslaught of discrimination.123 In his conception, Jewish emancipation could not be ­separated from the spread of modern notions of liberty, which rekindled his hopes that sooner or later its age would return. In short, what distinguished Ballagi’s liberal narrative was that it did not follow the usual chro­nology of crisis formulated in Ararát. According to him, the current crisis, which he viewed, 118  Ibid., pp. 138–9. 119  Ibid., p. 139. 120  Ibid., p. 140. 121  “They wanted to endow Jews with rights and a homeland, to make the Jew work in the service of the homeland.” Ernő Ballagi, “A százötvenéves európai emancipáció” in Ararát, 1942, pp. 33–4. 122  Ibid., p. 32. 123  As opposed to several of his fellow contributors to Ararát, Ballagi maintained that “the age of liberty did not shake the leading strata of Jewry. The threat of liberty’s loss did.” Ibid., p. 35.

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similarly to chief editor Aladár Komlós, as the desertion of Jewish elites, stemmed directly from the denial of rights and thus only started in e­ arnest in the late 1930s. Conclusion Libanon was the only Hungarian Jewish intellectual journal launched shortly prior to the beginning of ever more severe anti-Semitic discrimination and exclusion in 1938 which continued to be released deep into the years of the Second World War. The impressive erudition of its contributors, its highly pluralistic contents as well as its exceptional – though certainly unintentional – timing all made Libanon one of the most precious sources to study Hungarian Jewish intellectual discourses of this momentous period. In addition to the insights this journal provides into parallel conceptions of Jewish culture, Libanon can also help us grasp how the drastic changes between 1936 and 1943 were perceived and discussed by a crucial segment of intellectuals. The first part of the above analysis of Libanon compared and contrasted the conception of Jewish culture that the two most prolific contributors of the journal, Jenő Zsoldos and József Grózinger articulated. It showed that Jenő Zsoldos’ explorations in literary history presented multiple examples of the Hungarian appreciation of Jewish culture whereby Zsoldos intended to strengthen the sense of having common predilections. József M. Grózinger, on the other hand, focused on the specificities of the Jewish philosophicalreligious spirit to argue that Jewish philosophers were entirely Jewish in their thought and also the greatest of modern philosophers; in Grózinger’s eyes, their ideas, which had undeniable Jewish qualities, were at the same time of universal relevance. The drastic changes of the years 1936 to 1943 left a dramatic impact on the contents of Libanon. Even though reflections on current issues rarely took more elaborate forms on the pages of the journal, the passage of time saw several massive discursive transformations; within the eight years of Libanon’s release, Hungarian Jewish authors arrived from setting new agendas of Jewish cultural creation to a sense of responsibility towards the future of what remained of European Jewish culture. In the early volumes, cultural discussions were futureoriented and an open intellectual polemic was pursued against Nazi ideas. As legal discrimination and social exclusion worsened in Hungary from the late 1930s onwards, contributions started to express increasingly profound uncertainties. By the early 1940s a significant cohort of authors argued that only a

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Jewish religious and ethnic revival could possibly offer an escape route from the desperate contemporary situation. Not only did Libanon publish articles critical of Neolog Jewry in the war years, supportive attitudes towards Zionism started to be more explicitly expressed too with novel arguments being used to legitimize the movement. By 1943, Libanon included several references to the Holocaust (avant la lettre), which may not have been grasped in its enormity yet, but was already interpreted as an unprecedented event in Jewish history. Stances taken in the parallel Hungarian Jewish intellectual project of the Ararát yearbooks ranged from how Jewish Hungarians in Transylvania were more intransigent in their Hungarianness than non-Jewish ones all the way to arguments that the most widely accepted Jewish program insisted on the elimination of “life community” (életközösség) with European peoples. Some contributors to these yearbooks saw the root problem in the decline of religiosity, while others would have preferred softer forms of Jewish self-restraint to thereby encourage their further socioeconomic assimilation. Last but not least, certain authors, most notably chief editor Aladár Komlós, sought a new balance between the Jewish and Hungarian elements of identity by propagating an increased role for the Jewish part. The palette of contributions to the Ararát yearbooks was not only colorful, but the political stances unearthed arguably closely resembled the all-­ Hungarian spectrum. Semi-liberal attempts at compromise, conservative critiques, hope in religious revival, the formulation of nationalist programs and the vision of a corporatist order were all present in the broader public sphere of Hungary too.124 It goes without saying that some other platforms with a ­significant presence in the non-Jewish Hungarian realm – most notably and obviously, militant anti-Semitism – found no parallel in these yearbooks, but they nonetheless offer much relevant material for extra-Jewish comparisons.125 The analysis of Jewish historical narratives has not only revealed a broad variety of perspectives on the main lines of development, but also significant correlations between them and the political positions of their authors. Practically all relevant authors of Ararát, with the exception of Ernő Ballagi, attempted to locate the origins of the ongoing crisis. They may have variously identified the crisis as the rise of a modern elite disconnected from communal traditions and the separation of spheres (as in Aladár Komlós’ texts), the suppression of religious reform which led to the decline of Jewish religiosity by 124  An important, if somewhat dated, intellectual historical study of these years is Gyula Juhász, Uralkodó eszmék Magyarországon, 1939–1944 (Budapest: Kossuth, 1983). 125  In other words, such future analyses of the years of Hungarian Jews’ persecution may thus result in uncovering many counter-intuitive and even some profoundly ironic parallels.

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the end of the 19th century (as in Ernő Naményi’s contribution), the loss of a dynamic equilibrium that emerged between liberal Westernization and tradition in the 19th century (as in Bence Szabolcsi’s narrative), or the rise of antiSemitic exclusion by the early 20th century (as in Fülöp Grünvald’s overview). However, in all these cases the beginning of the crisis was seen as preceding by several decades the anti-Semitic radicalization of the late 1930s and early 1940s; only Ballagi’s decidedly liberal narrative identified the period of crisis with the ongoing years of ever more radical anti-Semitic discrimination and exclusion. These historical narratives were also intimately connected to their authors’ suggestion of potential remedies. Whereas Ballagi wanted to defend the times of emancipation and assimilation and asserted that its return was all Jewry should wish for, Grünvald warned against investing naive hopes in Hungarian national reintegration. Whereas Naményi advocated more comprehensive religious reform, Komlós wished for a new synthesis based on Jewish unity and communal art. Only the type of crisis Szabolcsi identified had no obvious counterpart in terms of a contemporary agenda; Szabolcsi simply did not elaborate on the contours of the age that followed the passing of the 19th century beyond noting that it proved much less harmonious. In the case of all the other authors, the narratives of Jewish history they elaborated during the Second World War also gave expression to their profound existential concerns.

CHAPTER 4

The Audible Voices of the Persecuted

Hungarian Jewish Scholars and the Horthy Era

In the inter-war period, the dominance of Central European Jewish scholarship was increasingly challenged by the rise of alternative intellectual centers: the Hebrew University was established in Jerusalem, the YIVO launched its research program in Europe, and Jewish subjects also started to be taught in new formats at several American and Polish universities. More crucially, the Central European realm Hungarian Jewish scholars were so intimately familiar with from before the First World War practically disappeared as Hungary gradually negated its previous politics of inclusion and Germany annulled Jewish emancipation within a few years of the Nazi takeover in 1933. This chapter studies how leading Hungarian Jewish intellectuals made sense of the present and how they tried to conceptualize the meaning of the rapidly evolving events by focusing on two questions in particular: how did contributors to the yearbooks of the Israelite Hungarian Literary Society, the major Hungarian Jewish popular scholarly publication, perceive their epoch during the regency of Miklós Horthy, and how did they interpret the history of Nazi Germany between 1929 and 1942? Bertalan Edelstein, the chief rabbi of Buda, was the one to provide the first detailed interpretation of the postwar world. In his report of 1929, Edelstein employed many items familiar from the vocabulary of crisis literature, using terms such as moral decay, savagery, debauchery, writing of the “horrific disappointment of cultured human beings” and describing what he saw as the “reign of mercilessness.”1 Edelstein sought to portray the grave difficulties of the new epoch in more general terms too: “We have not expected and could not have expected how complicated and horribly difficult peace would turn out to be, the same way we were previously caught by surprise by the merciless nature of the war.”2

1  Bertalan Edelstein, “A külföldi zsidóság története a háború utáni évtizedben” in IMIT évkönyv, 1929, p. 296. “Cultured human being” is kultúrember in the Hungarian original (a literal translation of the German word Kulturmensch). 2  Ibid., p. 295. Edelstein considered the situation of Jews to be extremely severe already in the late 1920s: “since the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, the hand of fate has not treated Israel as heavily as in the years since the war.” Ibid., p. 298. His assessment was that there

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Whereas internal periodizations of the Horthy era were occasionally offered in the course of Hungarian Jewish intellectual discussions, it was much more common to draw a dividing line between the periods before and after the First World War. The annual directorial report of IMIT from 1933, for instance, explained that the rebirth of historical thought since the war “had special ­relevance in the life of Hungarian Jewry, the group that has widely been offered as a scapegoat for the catastrophe befalling Hungariandom.”3 Other authors, however, saw the loss of spiritual values as the cause of the Jewish crisis. Writing of secularization as the impoverishment of Jewish religious life, the Chief Rabbi of Buda and Seminary teacher Arnold Kiss (1869–1940) observed rather nostalgically that “becoming a rabbi at that time [in the second half of the 19th century – FL] still seemed to be a desirable path in the eyes of many Jewish parents and youth.”4 Imre Benoschofsky (1903–1970), who also fulfilled the function of Chief Rabbi of Buda and was to become National Chief Rabbi by the 1960s, proposed an altogether different understanding of the crisis ­experienced in Hungarian-Jewish relations, presenting the changes as a painful process of clarification. In Benoschofsky’s eyes, the worsening relations between Jews and Hungarian were meant to put an end to an age of illusions: “previously we did not dare trust our own eyes and ears, wanting to accept only the illusions our hearts cherished. We seemed convinced and kept on repeating to ourselves that what was possible in Romania or Russia could never happen here.”5 Benoschofsky’s Jewish critique of the liberal epoch received its clearest expression when he went on to explain that these self-enforced illusions were “the unconscious work of some death instinct in us.”6 Even if primarily focused on the somber external situation, the abovequoted Bertalan Edelstein occasionally emphasized what he saw as the consoling complementary side, namely that the age since the war brought about the “awakening” of Jewry. Edelstein saw this happening, above all, in Germany, but also elaborated how traditional Jewish learning was “reawakened and newly

emerged an anti-Semitic consensus on several crucial matters, such as the undesirability of Jewish citizens. Ibid., p. 312. 3  “Igazgatósági jelentés (1932. dec. 26.)” in IMIT évkönyv, 1933, p. 295. This report also argued that anti-Jewish scapegoating took the forms of “denying the national value of Hungarian Jewry, questioning that it ever belonged to Hungarian history, and contesting its cultural and moral standing.” Ibid., p. 295. 4  Arnold Kiss, “Bánóczi József egyénisége” in IMIT évkönyv, 1932, p. 172. 5  Imre Benoschofsky, “Áron öt könyve” in IMIT évkönyv, 1931, p. 249. 6  Ibid., p. 249.

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strengthened” in the United States.7 The Jewish awakening provided a stark contrast to the worsening situation here, even as it was presented as a reaction to it. Meanwhile Simon Gedő (1880–1956), teacher of the Gymnasium affiliated with the Rabbinical Seminary, discussed the life and works of Martin Buber and adopted his characterization of the first quarter of the 20th century as the time of a “Jewish renaissance.”8 Gedő described the Jewish revivalists as forging a new synthesis between tenets of the Enlightenment and mystical insights who wanted to attain knowledge of the “living Jewish Volksseele [néplélek in the original – FL].”9 He explained to his readers that Jewish themes which were previously “mocked and despised” were now “dealt with in serious scholarly works” and received “due appreciation.”10 In short, in spite of all the recurrently evoked hardships, various articles released around 1930 assessed recent developments in the Jewish world rather positively. Upon the Nazi seizure of power, voices critical of the age gained in strength and measurably increased in quantity too.11 The directorial report Adolf Wertheimer delivered on June 29, 1933 asserted that “the most important event in Jewish history is the tragic change in the situation of German Jewry.”12 The report stated that “with the destruction of German Jewry, Jewish scholarship came under threat too” in order to emphasize that, beyond all the pain and empathy, the changes also “oblige us, Hungarian Jews, who are so near German Jews in both spatial and cultural terms, to accomplish additional tasks.” Remarks such as Károly Sebestyén’s to the effect that the present was the “house of s­ lavery” in which frightening darkness had descended on

7  Edelstein, “Évtized” in IMIT évkönyv, 1929, p. 329. In his explanation, this was due to three main factors: the severe poverty of the war years, the appealing image of Palestine, and the more conservative orientation of recent Jewish immigrants to the United States. 8  On the idea of Jewish renaissance, see Asher D. Biemann, Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 9  Simon Gedő, “Martin Buber” in IMIT évkönyv, 1931, p. 163. The narrative offered by Imre Csetényi on local developments echoed this: Csetényi claimed that following the ­“terrible year” of 1919, Hungarian Jewish audiences became more receptive to mystical trends. Imre Csetényi, “Az Egyenlőség és a magyar irodalom” in IMIT évkönyv, 1930, pp. 121–2. 10  Gedő, “Buber” in IMIT évkönyv, 1931, p. 171. 11  As a significant exception, Edelstein articulated a rather optimistic interpretation in 1933: “this [the Nazi Machtergreifung – FL] is an extraordinary challenge to Jewry that history shall record with words of amazement and recognition” since “both the level of persecution and the generosity of help has superseded those known from the past.” Edelstein, “Az 5692. és 5693. év” in IMIT évkönyv, 1933, p. 221. 12  “Igazgatósági jelentés (1933. június 29.)” in IMIT évkönyv, 1933, p. 309.

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“our mournfully fated nation”,13 or László Fenyő’s observation that “our age is defined by dictatorships against the spirit and the ‘treason of intellectuals’ ” provide further illustrations of immediate reactions to the emergence of Nazi Germany.14 By 1936, Fülöp Grünvald depicted his epoch as one leading to the drastic worsening of Jewish fortunes: “contemporary events brought a catastrophic regression in the evolution towards complete Jewish legal equality, mercilessly disrupting the line of development of the previous century and a half.”15 There were two narratives which diagnosed radical change as early as 1934, one of which dealt specifically with Hungarian literary life and the other with Hungarian Jewish history writing. On June 20, 1934, Adolf Wertheimer used his status as president of the literary society to critically address the situation of Jews in Hungarian literary life. Wertheimer described the ongoing changes in somewhat ambivalent terms, referring simultaneously to the danger of the cessation of Jewish participation and the potential future underrepresentation of Jewish writers as compared to their overall share of the Hungarian population.16 In the same yearbook, Fülöp Grünvald declared that the idea of emancipation may have defined the lives of three previous generations, but it had lost much of its attraction. As Grünvald expressed it, the “glitter” it used to possess had faded and Jews were “departing from the path their ancestors walked.”17 Applying a generational scheme, Grünvald explained that Lipót (Leopold) Lőw (1811–1875) was active at the time of “constructive development”, the activities of Sámuel Kohn (1841–1920) merrily coincided with the time of the golden

13  Károly Sebestyén, “Alexander Bernát” in IMIT évkönyv, 1934, p. 96. 14  László Fenyő, “Palágyi Lajos emlékezete” in IMIT évkönyv, 1934, p. 152. 15  Fülöp Grünvald, “Az elmúlt év története. 5696” in IMIT évkönyv, 1936, p. 299. Grünvald maintained that from the Rhine to the Volga and from the Northern Sea to the Black Sea stretched a territory where “six million Jews” were terribly vulnerable and fully exposed “to the whims of fate.” He pleaded that their emigration needed to be urgently organized. Ibid., p. 307. 16  He warned that “of the many Hungarian Jewish writers, there are barely some left. [. . .] Hungarian Jewry, six percent of the overall population, has included ninety percent of all Hungarian readers, but the time seems near when not even six percent of Hungarian writers would be Jewish.” “Az IMIT felolvasó-bizottságának jelentése az 1933–34. évi működéséről” in IMIT évkönyv, 1934, p. 329. Wertheimer mentioned the emerging exclusionary regime in journalism as the problem that most directly worsened the circumstances of many Jewish writers. 17  Fülöp Grünvald, “A magyar zsidó múlt historikusai” in IMIT évkönyv, 1934, p. 225.

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age of Hungarian Jews, whereas Lajos Venetianer (1867–1922) already labored once the time of blossoming had passed.18 In the course of the same year, a commemorative evening was dedicated to Lipót Vadász. Remarkably, in front of an audience including prominent nonJewish personalities, hopes for the future were wrapped in Hungarian national colors and the widespread sense of crisis was explicitly opposed.19 When the main speaker of the event, member of the Upper House József Vészi (1858– 1940) came to assess his own days, he explicated that even though the curse of the Treaty of Trianon was “still in force”, the “conscience” of many countries of the world had already “awoken” and this would soon enable Hungary to regain what was stolen from her “unjustly” and “with godless violence.”20 Vészi also addressed the Hungarian political situation, stating that the “spirit of noble tolerance has revived in the nation” and Orgovány – the name of a village, the events in which were used pars pro toto for the White Terror – “has been left behind forever.”21 Speaking in front of a distinguished mixed audience, Vészi suggested overcoming harmful internal discord; presenting the White Terror as an exception to the normal course of national history, he proposed renewing Hungarian-Jewish cooperation. In the Hungary of the 1930s, the years between the end of the First World War in 1918 and the peace treaty of 1920 arguably constituted the politically most divisive period. It may thus be worth remarking how rarely these years were actually discussed in the IMIT Yearbooks. Sámuel Lőwinger made a rather exceptional reference to the Republic of Councils of 1919, when he 18  Ibid., p. 225. One of the main findings of the recent scholarly monograph of Katalin Fenyves on the careers and identity strategies of four generations of Hungarian Jewish writers in the long 19th century was that the year of birth 1836 functioned as an important caesura. Those born prior to 1836 typically had successful careers, often acquired official recognition and got positions in the public sector, whereas those born after had less outstanding career trajectories (even though a significant number of them did acquire respectable positions). Katalin Fenyves, Képzelt asszimiláció? Négy zsidó értelmiségi nemzedék önképe (Budapest: Corvina, 2010), p. 82. 19  The presidential introduction included statements such as “I wish the tree of Hungarian hope would blossom as soon as possible and the sky, at present covered by dark clouds, would shine brightly on our dear homeland.” “Wertheimer Adolf elnöki megnyitója” in IMIT évkönyv, 1935, p. 114. 20  József Vészi, “Vadász Lipót” in IMIT évkönyv, 1935, p. 118. 21  József Vészi, “Vadász Lipót” in IMIT évkönyv, 1935, p. 139. Orgovány was where in the fall of 1919, the battalion of Iván Héjjas committed one of its most infamous massacres. On these events see Béla Bodó, “The White Terror in Hungary, 1919–1921: The Social Worlds of Paramilitary Groups” in Austrian History Yearbook 42 (2011).

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evaluated this much maligned period thus: “the situation was especially grave under communism when the Republic of Councils declared the dissolution of the [Rabbinical – FL] Seminary.”22 Similarly, the self-declared counterrevolution which followed was only sporadically evoked. It was teacher of Jewish subjects Mór Fényes (1866–1949) who went furthest in this respect when in his 1939 ­article “A zsidóság erkölcstana” (The Ethical Teachings of Judaism) he attempted nothing less than to integrate the counter-revolution, which included large-scale anti-Semitic violence, among the Hungarian Jewish political traditions. Fényes identified three historical moments which, in his eyes, exemplified the shared political traditions of Jewish and non-Jewish Hungarians: the freedom fight (i.e. 1848–49), the world war and the counterrevolution. Fényes insisted that “among the heroes of the counter-revolution, the share of Jews was truly significant,”23 a seemingly highly controversial statement, which, however, ought to be placed in the context of how exceptions to the anti-Jewish laws were defined.24 Emphasizing Hungarian Jewish affinities with the Horthy regime even in the shadow of worsening legal discrimination clearly put Fényes at odds with other contributors. By the late 1930s, the contemporary era had practically become the subject exclusively of critical reflection. After the adoption of the first general anti-Jewish law in 1938, perspectives on the age changed rapidly and significantly. As Adolf Wertheimer phrased it, “the Jewish law as well as its justification deeply hurt, mortally offend and humiliate the spirit of Hungarian Jewry.”25 Beyond this point, the belief in modernity and progress was muted. As early as 1938, the contemporary situation reminded folklorist and former Rabbi Bertalan Kohlbach (1866–1944) of the “most severe era” in Jewish history 22  Sámuel Lőwinger, “Dr. Blau Lajos élete és irodalmi munkássága” in IMIT évkönyv, 1936, p. 17. 23  Mór Fényes, “A zsidóság erkölcstana” in IMIT évkönyv, 1939, p. 38. 24  The anti-Semitic law of 1939 “extended exemption from those with distinguished military service in the First World War, to those who ‘risked their life and suffered for the national movement during the 1918/1919 revolution’ as well as other wars fought for the nation.” Quoted from Tim Cole, Traces of the Holocaust. Journeying in and out of the Ghettos (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 15. 25  “Wertheimer Adolf elnöki megnyitója” in IMIT évkönyv, 1938, p. 274. Ernő Munkácsi maintained upon the adoption of the law that the “great attack” against legal equality had been in preparation for almost two decades. Munkácsi thought that the main arguments of anti-Semites consisted of contesting the ancient settlement of Jews in Hungary and denying both the obvious signs of their adaptation and all the benefits resulting from their actions. “Az igazgatóság jelentése a múzeum 1937. évi működéséről” in IMIT évkönyv, 1937, pp. 292–3.

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between the 13th and 16th centuries.26 Adolf Wertheimer, the president of IMIT recommended facing the newest chapter in a book of constant Jewish tribulations through “unshakable trust in divine providence” and, if necessary, by preparing for martyrdom.27 Two years later, Ernő Munkácsi stated that even though the present moment seemed to resemble the 16th century, contemporary times were such that there was “simply no point in speculating about the characteristics of the future.”28 The views historian Fülöp Grünvald (1887–1964) articulated in the late 1930s merit special attention. According to Grünvald, who acted as teacher at the Jewish Gymnasium of Pest, it had become abundantly clear by 1939 that “the Jewish question had turned into a severe global problem” with its “center of gravity” in Central Europe.29 At this point, Grünvald tried to interpret the drastically deteriorating situation partly through historical analogies. “The restrictions known from centuries long ago are coming into force again”, he would opine.30 At the same time, Grünvald warned that European states now aimed at the hermetic separation of Jews, an ambition which could draw on no historical precedent (whereby he acknowledged the limitations of such analogies).31 In spite of such occasional warnings, a descriptive tone continued to dominate the yearbooks even during the Second World War. Contributors may have recurrently referred to various “disappointments” but typically did so without

26  Bertalan Kohlbach, “Dr. Weisz Miksáról” in IMIT évkönyv, 1938, p. 303. In 1938, Lőwinger also declared that “our generation experiences a chapter of crisis in world history.” Sámuel Lőwinger, “A zsidó nép szerepe világtörténeti megvilágításban” in IMIT évkönyv, 1938, p. 127. 27  “Wertheimer Adolf elnöki megnyitója” in IMIT évkönyv, 1938, p. 273. 28  “Igazgatósági jelentés” in IMIT évkönyv, 1940, pp. 340 and 350. In 1940, Adolf Wertheimer referred to his epoch as “apocalyptic times.” “Wertheimer Adolf elnöki megnyitója” in IMIT évkönyv, 1940, p. 315. 29  Fülöp Grünvald, “Az elmúlt év története” in IMIT évkönyv, 1939, p. 262. 30  Ibid., p. 267. 31  Fülöp Grünvald, “Az elmúlt év története” in IMIT évkönyv, 1940, p. 300. In 1938, Grünvald still spoke of the near future with words of trust, expressing his hope that tensions would finally ease. His prognosis was that the territorial distribution of Jews would change, which would produce a “healthier” occupational stratification. At this point, Grünvald discussed two parallel trends. On the one hand, a new Jewish center was emerging in “the land of our historical traditions”, on the other, European Jewish centers were being forcefully eliminated, leading to an even more radical dispersal of Jews across the globe, he argued.

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much pathos. At the same time, quiet despair was occasionally expressed due to how Jews were increasingly forced to live “outside time.”32 Barely into the second year of the war, almost every European country, whether governed by occupation authorities or Nazi-allied regimes, had introduced anti-Jewish laws and decrees. As the recent volume by Alexandra Garbarini with Emil Kerenji, Jan Lambertz, and Avinoam Patt on Jewish responses to persecution between 1938 and 1940 explain, Jews widely discussed in and around 1940 whether there was any coherence or obvious trajectory to these events, and many who participated in these discussions interpreted the developments as the end of the era of emancipation.33 In Hungary, the adoption of a whole series of anti-Jewish measures made some authors arrive at the conclusion that the liberal age was definitely over. Ernő Ballagi’s contributions are particularly intriguing in this regard as they elaborately argued that the current days constituted the final ones of the liberal epoch of a century and a half. Ballagi expressed the theory that the situation of Jews could be understood on the basis of overarching historical trends and movements opposed to them (i.e. reactionary, anti-Jewish movements).34 Furthermore, he explained that dramatic historical changes tended to transform the philosophy of history too. They often made groups negatively impacted by them develop nostalgic forms of remembrance and attempt to flee into the past. (Ballagi considered such nostalgia fully understandable, yet insisted that it could not be fruitful.) While diagnosing the end of the liberal age, one of Ballagi’s goals was to articulate a historical narrative that would show how liberalism and the Hungarian national principle had actually been in perfect harmony. In 1941, Ballagi thus simultaneously buried and provided an apologia for the liberal epoch.

32  An example is the way Mózes Rubinyi wrote on Ede Kisteleki’s quiet and peaceful life after 1920. Rubinyi explicitly discussed how Kisteleki was “like a living anachronism; he refrained from hatred.” Mózes Rubinyi, “Kisteleki Ede emlékezete” in IMIT évkönyv, 1941, p. 261. In his commemorative speech on József Vészi from 1941, Károly Sebestyén emphasized that “this world was no longer his” and he had to face “the worst kind of disappointment: what he believed in more than anything else let him down.” Károly Sebestyén, “Emlékbeszéd Vészi József felett” in IMIT évkönyv, 1941, pp. 52 and 55. In 1942, József Turóczi-Trostler discussed how the world of Stefan Zweig collapsed. József TurócziTrostler, “Stefan Zweig (Szellem és forma)” in IMIT évkönyv, 1942, p. 108. 33  Alexandra Garbarini with Emil Kerenji, Jan Lambertz, and Avinoam Patt (eds.), Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume II, 1938–1940 (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2011). 34  Ernő Ballagi, “Szabadelvűség és magyar zsidóság” in IMIT évkönyv, 1941, p. 223. Ballagi formulated this in explicit agreement with Győző Concha.

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As late as 1942 Lenke Steiner (1910–1944), teacher at the Jewish Gymnasium of Kolozsvár (Cluj), envisioned, similarly to some of the texts from the 1930s quoted above, that the ongoing assault against Jews and the internal process of “gaining strength” pointed in the same direction, that of much increased Jewish autarky. In her eyes, no matter how frightening the situation may have seemed, they promised the restoration of Jewish self-confidence, deepened self-knowledge and a more conscious cultural orientation.35 In clear contrast to Steiner’s optimism, the sense of helplessness was also given clear expression in the very last IMIT Yearbook of the Horthy era. In 1943, writer and journalist Zsigmond Szőllősi (1872–1953) intoned the utter futility of intellectual engagement, lamenting that there was “no point in discussing and trying to contest facts when the force of events is shaking the entire world.”36 In conclusion, there were three distinct periods in the Hungarian Jewish popular scholarly interpretation of the age between 1929 and 1943. In the years prior to 1933, the descriptions of the contemporary epoch displayed certain ambivalences. Contributors tended to depict the situation of Jews as immensely difficult, but they recurrently assessed inner-Jewish developments in much more positive terms. Whether they saw the transformation the interwar period brought as harmful or beneficial depended, above all, on their ­evaluation of liberalism and its consequences for Hungarian Jews. 1933 brought swift quantitative and qualitative changes. Beyond this point, voices critical of the age predominated, showing how the Hungarian Jewish scholarly elite’s clock was tuned to Central European time. Narratives of decline and crisis may have become the standard ones already before 1938, but they acquired added strength after 1938 and were joined by ever more vocal expressions of uncertainty about the future. By the early 1940s, theories concerning the end of the liberal era were developed. Cyclical conceptions of history, with historical analogies as their correlates, moved into the foreground at this point.

35  Lenke Steiner, “Somlyó Zoltán” in IMIT évkönyv, 1942, pp. 112–5. Once these reassessments shall prevail, Jewish products currently only mentioned as part of anti-Jewish accusations will finally be upheld as signs of merit, Steiner argued. She mentioned cabaret, Schlagers (“kitschy popular songs,” as she called them), and the attractive literary depictions of the streets of Pest as cases in point. Ibid., p. 122. 36  Zsigmond Szőllősi, “Kóbor Tamás, az újságíró” in IMIT évkönyv, 1943, p. 35.

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A Contemporary History of Nazism

During the late 1930s and early 1940s, the emphasis on Hungarian affiliations notably weakened and there was also a general decrease of Hungarian themes in Jewish publications. By 1942–43, however, the Hungarian state provided the only – and soon to be betrayed – hope of survival for the large majority of the Jews of Hungary. As a consequence of this ambivalent constellation, the few remaining Hungarian Jewish publications newly articulated some nationalistic topoi in an anti-Semitic country. It is indicative of this trend that, next to the IMIT Yearbook of 1929 (9-1) and 1932 (8-3), that of 1943 had the highest proportion of studies on Hungarian Jewish as opposed to general Jewish themes (11-3). In other words, the renewed emphasis on Hungarian national affiliations in 1942–43 might have happened not in spite of, but much rather because of awareness of the ongoing genocide. To assess whether there is substantial evidence to support this suggestion, the ways the IMIT Yearbooks reported on Nazi Germany and what they contained regarding Nazi policies during the years of the Second World War in particular shall be explored next. As early as 1930, Bertalan Edelstein dealt elaborately with German political developments whose direction at that point remained uncertain, but which already looked to him threatening enough. Demonstrating sharp foresight, Edelstein explained that “in Munich, the party of Hitler decided that it would continue its agitation until the Jewish question found a solution.”37 Edelstein devoted additional attention to the Nazis the year after and connected their frightening acts and equally frightening popularity to the collapse of the image of German reasonableness.38 At this point, the question of anti-Semitism appeared to Edelstein more important than that of fascism. His assessment of fascist Italy, an important ally of Hungary where substantial numbers of young Hungarian Jews went to study due to the discriminatory numerus clausus law of 1920, was in fact rather positive.39 37  Edelstein, “5689” in IMIT évkönyv, 1930, p. 293. 38  He wrote that “Hugenberg, the leader of the national party and Hitler, the leader of the national socialist party who counts on the lowliest passions of the lower members of society even more, have profoundly shaken our belief in the sobriety of Germans. They agitate the immature and irresponsible classes and make defamatory calls to evil deeds.” Edelstein, “5690” in IMIT évkönyv, 1931, p. 300. By 1932, Edelstein described Germany as the leading anti-Semitic might. 39  Edelstein noted explicitly that “the fascist party was far from accepting anti-Semitic ­conceptions.” He even predicted that Italian Jewry would become “stronger and more unified” under the rule of Mussolini. See Edelstein, “5692 és 5693” in IMIT évkönyv, 1933, p. 225 and Edelstein, “5691” in IMIT évkönyv, 1932, p. 291.

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On the other hand, Edelstein already pointed to the grave danger that Germany might be “swallowed up in mass anger and the outbreak of passions” in the years of political uncertainty and worsening violence before 1933.40 Edelstein depicted anti-Semitism as a central and consensual issue in German politics already before the Nazi takeover, stating that “an undeclared civil war is raging in which several parties can find common ground only on one issue, their hatred of Jews.”41 He added though that the rise of (what he still called) the party of Hitler (Hitler-párt) continued to cause the most profound shock and fear.42 To indicate the sharp contrast between Germans as they were known to him before and the character of the new regime emerging in 1933, Edelstein evoked the famous formula of Wolfgang Menzel: “the nation of poets and thinkers can no longer be recognized.”43 More concretely, Edelstein characterized the beginnings of the Nazi regime thus: “the rule of open violence has started, individual freedom is suppressed with terror employed merely to frighten and the most boundless hatred of Jews gets manifested.”44 In seemingly alarmist tone, he explained how it was “widely believed that the Third Reich would starve or shoot its Jews dead.”45 This explicit prognosis from 1933 indicates that, even if the road to genocide was far from straight, it was nonetheless possible to perceive the gravity of Nazi intentions well in advance.46 Besides referring to the horrific transformation of Germans, Edelstein’s report from 1933 also discussed Goebbels and Nazi propaganda at some length as their overwhelming successes raised the problem of historical time. The 40  Edelstein, “5691” in IMIT évkönyv, 1932, p. 292. 41  Ibid., p. 292. 42  While the sense of shock and fear was very real, Edelstein also tried to mock the Nazi type of anti-Semitism. He sought to reveal the absurdity of Nazism’s racial basis in particular, making ironic statements such as “It is quite marvellous that the Germanic people [he used the word “germán” instead of “német” here – FL], so proud of their racial might and talent, should find their gravediggers in some 600 000 Jews.” Edelstein, “5692. és 5693. év” in IMIT évkönyv, 1933, p. 232. 43  Ibid., p. 211. 44  Ibid., p. 215. 45  Ibid., p. 212. The danger Nazism posed immediately changed a number of Edelstein’s perspectives. For instance, he now depicted Austria, a country he recurrently criticized in earlier years, as making “an admirable effort to preserve its independence and cultural autonomy.” Ibid., p. 223. 46  On recent historiographical trends with bearing on the intentionalist-functionalist debate of previous decades which show how the sharp opposition betweeen the two positions is now a thing of the past, see Chapter Two “The Decision-Making Process in Context” in Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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author pondered how with the help of the newest technology the Nazis managed to spread hatred in much more effective ways, frightening not only Jews, but all those “who still believed in the rather gradual and slow improvement of humanity.”47 In other words, immediately upon the Nazi seizure of power, Edelstein pointed to a heavy contradiction: technological developments, if detached from moral values, could have devastating effects. Bertalan Edelstein passed away in 1934 and it was Hungarian Jewish historian Fülöp Grünvald who took over his task of report writing, beginning his very first contribution from 1935 with remarks on the increasingly desperate situation of German Jews. Writing shortly before the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, Grünvald explained that the Third Reich was built on the idea of a racially defined German Volk and was intent on reducing its “non-Aryan citizens” to second-class status. He mentioned the systematic discrimination of Jews in the courtrooms and bureaucratic offices of Nazi Germany as relevant illustrations.48 At this point, Grünvald believed the Nazis’ ultimate ambition was to establish a “new kind of ghetto.”49 In 1935, Grünvald maintained that the drastic changes under way since 1933 shook German Jews “profoundly and in their whole being”, though also claimed that Jews had begun to recover from their initial sense of shock and despair.50 Grünvald focused some attention on the hurried preparations for mass emigration, estimated that approximately 200 000 German Jews would emigrate in the course of the coming ten years, and discussed Zionist programs to reeducate Jewish youth in particular.51 47  It constituted a special problem for Edelstein that “passions, blindness, racial hatred and the predilection to do harm have become dominant in a country we used to think of as highly cultured.” Edelstein, “5692 and 5693”, p. 211. In the eyes of Grünvald too, the fact that the persecution of Jews was happening in the very center of Europe, where “our ancestors lived from early on”, “out of the language of which country jargon [meaning Yiddish – FL] was developed,” and “whose culture we have completely assimilated”, all added to the difficulty when trying to explain the ever more drastic turn of Germany. See Grünvald, “5696” in IMIT évkönyv, 1936, p. 299. 48  Fülöp Grünvald, “Az 5694. és 5695. év” in IMIT évkönyv, 1935, p. 293. 49  Grünvald “5694 és 5695” in IMIT évkönyv, 1935, p. 293. 50  Ibid., p. 293. “Being forcibly excluded from the German Volksgemeinschaft [német népi közösség in the original – FL], they now feel part of the Jewish community” and had started to care for “their own culture”, Grünvald argued. He related that the forced separation from so called ethnic Germans meant that right after 1933 Jewish papers “acquired readerships previously unseen in Germany” and remarked on comparable tendencies in several other areas as well, such as those of cultural associations, sport clubs, Jewish lectures, Hebrew language courses. Last but not least, Grünvald pointed to the “spectacular” growth of religious observance. Ibid., p. 296. 51  Grünvald, “5694 és 5695” in IMIT évkönyv, 1935, p. 296.

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In 1936, Grünvald reported on the adoption of the Nuremberg laws and ruminated at length over the ever more encompassing exclusion of German Jewry and their looming economic ruin. Listing plenty of highly tangible problems, Grünvald still called “the humiliation of German Jews, the utter denial of their human dignity” the most painful development of all.52 By 1938, he explicated that the Nazis were intent on creating an encompassing system to deprive Jews of all their possessions.53 Grünvald also discussed the Nazi objective of the complete cessation of contacts between Jews and non-Jews.54 Already before the November pogroms, he predicted that the Nazis would not refrain from any imaginable means to achieve their goals and their “campaign of psychological terror” might easily be accompanied by “acts of physical terror.” By 1938, Grünvald’s overall assessment was that “the liquidation of the Jewish community of Germany” was under way.55 Nazi policies posed a profound challenge to the contemporary analyst: whereas they were radical from the very beginning, they would continuously reach new levels of extremity. Shortly prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, Grünvald reacted to this process with an intriguing, but essentially nonpolitical theory. He pondered how hatred needed to be justified and could fuel added resourcefulness, arguing that “We start to hate whom we have harmed and, the more we go on harming the Jews, the more we need to raise hatred against them to justify our treatment.”56 Placing the self-strengthening nature of anti-Semitism at the center of his interpretation, Grünvald seems to have sensed that what he had observed was merely the beginning of something altogether more horrifying. The internal Jewish situation dramatically worsened in the aftermath of the November pogroms as institutions of Jewish culture, with very few exceptions, were abolished.57 Confronted with the brutal force and suddenness with which German Jewish culture had been destroyed, Grünvald tried to cope by imagining what greater historical distance from contemporary events would imply: “an epoch of Jewish cultural history is coming to a close, namely that of 52  Grünvald “5696” in IMIT évkönyv, 1936, p. 302. 53  Grünvald, “Elmúlt” in IMIT évkönyv, 1938, p. 243. On this process in an all-European frame, see Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 54  Ibid., p. 244. 55  Ibid., p. 246. 56  Ibid., p. 244. 57  On the November pogroms, see Alan E. Steinweis, Kristallnacht 1938 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010) and Raphael Gross, November 1938: Die Katastrophe vor der Katastrophe (München: C.H. Beck, 2013).

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German-Jewish culture in the way the Hellenic-Jewish and the Arab-SpanishJewish centuries disappeared previously. Subsequent generations will assess in a fair manner the results of German-Jewish cooperation and interaction in ­philo­sophy, in the most varied branches of scholarship and science, in poetry and art.”58 Fülöp Grünvald’s report in the yearbook of 1940 focused, above all, on antiJewish practices in the newly occupied Polish territories. “The most densely populated Jewish land in the world, Poland, has become a battlefield once again”, the reporter declared to set the scene for his dramatic descriptions.59 Grünvald discussed the complete exclusion of Jews from society in the Nazioccupied territories, their forced separation from their Polish neighbors and deportation to the area around Lublin, claiming that the area was meant to become a “reservation” for over half a million Jews.60 By 1941, Grünvald argued that the war was fought “for the reorganization of Europe, and getting rid of the Jewish question [a zsidókérdés elintézése – FL] amounts to one of the most important tasks within this plan.”61 In the early 1940s, Grünvald thus assigned the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazi regime high though not absolute p ­ riority. He clearly reiterated that the aim of the new Germany was to be Judenfrei (zsidómentes), quickly adding that Jews already constituted a “­quantité négligeable” within the Nazi Empire as their numbers were reduced by more than two-thirds. At the same time, the Nazis continued to appear unsatisfied and, as Grünvald euphemistically put it, “called for the disappearance” of Jews.62 In 1941, Grünvald also drew his readers’ attention to the fact that the principal aims of the Nazis were being implemented not only in the Reich, including its newly occupied territories, but also in allied states. This clarification acquired extra meaning when Grünvald stated, without explicitly mentioning the deportations through Kőrösmező, that “Hungary conducts its policies in closest alliance with the Axis powers.”63 Taken together, these two statements show just how courageously he communicated about the horrors and threats Hungarian Jews were exposed to by 1941. Grünvald explicitly discussed the newer rounds of deportations as well, reporting that “Jewish transports to the area of Lublin, which had temporarily stopped, are again under way since

58  Grünvald, “Elmúlt” in IMIT évkönyv, 1939, p. 270. 59  Grünvald, “Elmúlt” in IMIT évkönyv, 1940, p. 290. 60  Ibid., pp. 294–5. 61  Grünvald, “Elmúlt” in IMIT évkönyv, 1941, p. 300. 62  Ibid., p. 300. 63  Ibid., p. 308.

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February” and would arrive with the last Viennese Jews soon.64 He described the conditions in the newly created Nazi ghettos briefly though rather revealingly, explaining for instance that the ghetto of Warsaw cramped a staggering 500 000 people.65 Regarding neighboring countries, Grünvald discussed the “horrible bloodbath” that took place in Romania when the Iron Guard was defeated and observed that in Slovakia “medieval restrictions were coming into force again,” adding that “labor camps” of a kind unfamiliar from the Middle Ages were established too.66 Grünvald published his last report in 1942 where he voiced his realization that historical analogies would no longer prove sufficient to describe the present. He started by explaining that “there were many pretexts to launch attacks against the Jews of the Galuth in the course of their almost two millennia of homelessness, but the most terrible accusation of them all is the one with which they are currently brought to the court of justice that history is: international Jewry is supposed to be responsible for the outbreak of war and therefore has to be severely punished.”67 While rejecting historical analogies, Grünvald continued to employ more comforting phrases such as “the court of justice that history is” which could only prove misleading in the given context.68 In this last report, Grünvald noted that any nearly accurate description of ongoing events would lead to his punishment. He might well have announced this so explicitly in order to lull the censors since the subsequent pages covered many crucial facts, starting from the assertion that in the territory of Greater Germany, which he defined as stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the banks of the Don, “the solution of the Jewish question at its root” had already ­started.69 Grünvald explained that the number of Jews in the original territory of the Reich fell “well below 100 000” and their institutions could no longer be 64  Grünvald, “Elmúlt” in IMIT évkönyv, 1941, p. 302. 65  Ibid., p. 304. Due to its special relevance for Hungarian Jewish history, he stressed the significance of “the complete depopulation” of Czech and Moravian Kehillas, “such as Nikolsburg, Ungarisch-Brod, Prossnitz, etc.”, that in the 17th and 18th centuries served as “the towns of origin of emerging Hungarian Jewish communities.” Ibid., p. 303. On the Jews of Moravia in the 19th century, see Michael Miller, Rabbis and Revolution. The Jews of Moravia in the Age of Emancipation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 66  Ibid., pp. 314–316. 67  Grünvald, “Az elmúlt év története. (5702.)” in IMIT évkönyv, 1942, p. 333. 68  After all, how was the image of a court of justice supposed to be reconciled with the unfounded and most terrible nature of the accusation and, even more crucially, with the way the accused were treated in this collective proceeding where not the accused but the accusers were the criminal party? 69  Grünvald, “5702”, p. 333.

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maintained, concluding that the “shared life of Germans and Jews thus completely dissolved.”70 Next to the “extinction” of German Jews through migration and mass murder, Grünvald also discussed the deportations. He emphasized that what was taking place was not merely “compulsory emigration”, but the forced movement of people; the German state was taking masses of Jews to pre-war Polish territories against their will. Grünvald could not find any historical analogy for this either and sourly remarked that Jews could choose their destination even during the expulsions of the 14th and 15th centuries. He nonetheless tried to explain the consequences through the use of an analogy, suggesting that the “clearing” of Central Europe of Jews would result in the quasi-reemergence of the “Ansiedlungsrayon” known from Tsarist Russia. Grünvald reported that the Nazis and their collaborators were intent on creating “closed Jewish reservations” in these Eastern territories, sealed ghettos next to townships in which, to his knowledge, 1 350 000 Jews had already been interned. Grünvald presented ghettoization as a temporary measure since, as he emphasized, “the great European Lebensraum [élettér] has to be completely freed from Jews after the war.”71 This reference to what would happen after the war, which obviously implied what would not happen during it, might have been added to mislead censors, but it might also have had to do with Grünvald’s awareness of – as we know, mistaken – German expectations that they would promptly win the war against the Soviet Union and have the entire continent under their control. In spite of coded expressions and some misleading utterances, the report as a whole painted a surprisingly detailed and accurate picture of the early phase of the Nazi Judeocide. In addition to briefly covering developments such as the creation of the special camp of Theresienstadt and the launching of forced expulsions from the Bohemian provinces,72 Grünvald also remarked on the institution of forced labor in Croatia,73 the creation of the Sofia ghetto,74 the setting up of ghettos in Romania, the introduction of “stigmatizing signs,” and the “resettlement” of Jews to Transnistria – which, as we know, led to genocide.75 Last but not least, Grünvald addressed the deportations from the territory of Slovakia and in this context employed the ominous though

70  Ibid., p. 335. 71  Ibid., p. 336. 72  Ibid., p. 336. 73  Ibid., p. 339. 74  Ibid., p. 344. 75  Ibid., p. 344.

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unspecified expression “the final solution of the Jewish question.”76 He concluded that “the place of dying European Jewry” is “taken over by ‘a reserve army’, the Jews of America.”77 Regarding Hungarian Jewish policy, Grünvald used more cautious, even purposefully inaccurate formulations. According to his presentation, Hungary was intent on reviving “the state idea of Saint Stephen” and was about to “implement nationality laws in line with the ideas of [Ferenc] Deák and [József] Eötvös even though it discontinues the liberal traditions of the age of the Compromise regarding the Jews” – seemingly as an exception in a state otherwise generously disposed towards its minorities.78 Due to the politically sensitive nature of such statements in a Jewish yearbook published in Budapest, Grünvald also chose to emphasize that Hungarian anti-Jewish measures were “entirely lawful,” thereby repeating verbatim one of the main slogans of officialdom. Following such cautious formulations, Grünvald went on to list numerous Hungarian anti-Jewish measures. He discussed the annulment of the reception of Judaism, the race protection law, the drastic measures aimed at the economic exclusion of Jews, the cessation of social and cultural contacts and the requirement to “help out the military” (officially known as labor service).79 However, he did not refer to the two most infamous cases of mass murder of 1941–42, those committed at Kamenetz-Podolsk and Novi Sad. Next to the omission of these highly sensitive pieces of information, the destruction of German Jewry, “the fate” of Jews under direct German occupation, and the collaboration or parallel practices of Germany’s allies, including the last concrete steps taken towards genocide, such as ghettoization and deportation, were all included in Grünvald’s last report of 1942. Conclusion As the above analysis of the IMIT Yearbooks released between 1929 and 1943 has shown, both the Nazi takeover of 1933 and the beginning of the process of ever more severe Hungarian discrimination in 1938 exerted an immediate impact on the perspectives of Hungarian Jewish intellectuals. It has thereby been demonstrated that, even as Hungarian Jewish intellectuals tended 76  Ibid., p. 338. 77  Ibid., p. 350. 78  Ibid., p. 339. 79  Ibid., pp. 340–2.

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to pursue various discourses of dual identity, which localized them in their immediate national environment, how they made sense of their present can only be properly grasped in transnational frames. Hungarian Jewish intellectuals in the Horthy era may have fashioned themselves as conscious and eminently loyal Hungarians, but they were also capable of assessing the relevance of broader European and global developments for their Jewish lives in a sober and nuanced, if also increasingly frightened manner. It was during the months between the summer of 1941 and the summer of 1942 that the persecution of Jews converged into a highly coordinated pattern. The Nazi “Final Solution” coalesced, which would destroy most of European Jewish lives within a few years. This catastrophic development inevitably transformed the aforementioned balance Hungarian Jewish intellectuals struck between their Jewish and national belonging and their understanding of transnational trends. As Jürgen Matthäus, Emil Kerenji, Jan Lambertz, and Leah Wolfson, the editors of a major new volume on Jewish responses to persecution in 1941–42 rightly emphasize, Jews across Europe experienced the evolving “Final Solution” through diverse channels, with a widening gulf between those subjected to extreme victimization, those outside the reach of the Nazi Empire, and those in an unstable, intermediate position.80 Hungarian Jews belonged to the third, intermediate zone at this time; they were partly persecuted by 1941–42, but were not yet collectively subjected to extreme forms of victimization. Matthäus, Kerenji, Lambertz, and Wolfson also remind their readers how ahistorical it would be to expect persecuted Jews to have grasped the exact meaning of the Nazi vision of a “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” when it was just emerging. They assess the challenges of forming a coherent image of the Nazi genocide against European Jews to have been “exceedingly difficult.” Both of these assertions are correct with some minor qualifications. As presented above, Hungarian Jewish intellectual forums did make available rather precise, if somewhat fragmentary, information about the emergence of genocidal policy.81 In the course of 1942 (well over a year before the central events of the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry), a few exceptional intellectuals, most 80  Jürgen Matthäus with Emil Kerenji, Jan Lambertz, and Leah Wolfson (eds.), Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume III, 1941–1942 (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2013). 81  The possibility to publish such highly sensitive pieces of information in wartime Budapest also reveals that the anti-Semitic policies of the Horthy regime may have taken ever more severe forms from the late 1930s onwards, but the Hungarian Jewish elite continued to have some, if fewer and ever more regimented, means of communication at its disposal in the early years of the 1940s.

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notably leading historian Fülöp Grünvald perceived the path to genocide (avant la lettre), described the ongoing campaign of murder in some detail, and could assert the unprecedented nature of the violence even without being aware of the most horrific novelties of wartime “Jewish policy.” This chapter has thereby suggested that a Jewish historian residing in a geographically rather central metro­polis of the continent might have emerged as one of the courageous heroes expressing the devastating truth at the time of the crime of the ­century – if only the audible voices of persecuted Hungarian Jews had not remained without contemporary echoes. Between 1941 and 1943, the circumstances of Hungarian Jewish intellectuals continued to deteriorate in the context of genocidal policies being extended to a nearly continental scale – 1942 turned out to be the last year Grünvald could still publish his annual report. During these years, the country’s Jewish intellectuals would simultaneously assess the policies of Hungary as increasingly anti-Semitic and as the source of the last hope for their community’s survival. To put it even more pointedly, by 1942 Hungarian Jewish loyalty to the Horthy regime may at times have been expressed despite the genocide unfolding across much of the continent, but it also started to be expressed precisely because of the implementation of the Holocaust. It was in part due to this highly ambiguous constellation that levels of Jewish elite loyalty to Hungary remained so conspicuously – and by the spring of 1944, wholly misguidedly – high.82

82  The story of the Jews in Łódź – who could also hope for survival until late in the war – might offer a fruitful case for comparison here. Their story is analyzed in Gordon J. Horwitz, Ghettostadt: Łódź and the Making of a Nazi City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

CHAPTER 5

Articulating the Unprecedented Witness accounts of Holocaust survivors may have served as key sources of various sociological and psychological investigations and may also have become the subject of broader cultural debates, but the plentiful ones among them recorded before “the era of the witness” are yet to be analyzed more systematically.1 In spite of growing interest in the Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers that were launched practically as soon as the Nazi genocide was over, or may already have been active during the war years,2 the manifold Jewish survivor testimonies produced closest to the event remain curiously underrepresented in contemporary scholarship. This chapter aims to redress this peculiar imbalance by focusing on the earliest postwar voices and perspectives of Hungarian Jews on the Holocaust (avant la lettre). The collection of the National Relief Committee for Deportees (Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság or DEGOB), which includes interview protocols with over 5 000 survivors recorded by twenty-nine interviewers in 1945–46, shall serve as the main source base below. Some notable scholarly efforts, above all, by Rita Horváth notwithstanding, the DEGOB interview protocols, one of the largest corpuses of its kind worldwide, has remained especially underexplored in international scholarship. As this chapter aims to demonstrate on a more ­general level, qualitative and, more specifically, conceptual analyses of this

1  On the parallel interview project of David Boder, now see Alan Rosen, The Wonder of their Voices. The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). I take the expression “the era of the witness” from Annette Wieviorka. According to Wieviorka’s theory, this era begun only with the Eichmann trial. See Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 2  For the best overview of them, see Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (eds.), After the Holocaust. Challenging the Myth of Silence (London: Routledge, 2012). On the origins and early years of Holocaust research in Israel, see Boaz Cohen, Israeli Holocaust Research. Birth and Evolution (London: Routledge, 2012). On the history of the emblematic Ringelblum archive in particular, see Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004328655_006

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vast collection can yield original insights into the early postwar discourses on the Holocaust.3 After sketching some important characteristics of the collection as a whole, the chapter will analyze the plentiful Hungarian Jewish accounts of Buchenwald from 1945–46. How did survivors articulate their experiences soon after their release from the concentration camp, despite the immense difficulties of verbalizing suffering and in the absence of widely shared discursive frames?4 More specifically, how did Hungarian Jewish survivors categorize, represent and assess Buchenwald in 1945–46? How did they retrospectively describe the condition they were in while there? Last but not least, how did they narrate the liberation of the camp? The second half of the chapter will in turn inquire into how two crucial novelties of the Holocaust (avant la lettre) were articulated in these interview protocols.5 It shall discuss which camps were categorized as annihilation or death camps and what this reveals about the circulation of these terms upon liberation. The focus will subsequently be on how survivors reported on their confrontation with the existence of the gas chambers and what kind of information they conveyed about them at the DEGOB offices. The decision was taken to study these two matters in particular since both tend to be explicitly mentioned practically whenever the unprecedented features of the Nazi genocide are specified. Exploring how the unprecedented features of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry were expressed in these protocols of 1945–46 thus promises to contribute to our understanding of how the Holocaust started to be conceptualized well before the emergence of our contemporary terminology. 3   See especially Rita Horváth, A Magyarországi Zsidó Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottsága (DEGOB) története (Budapest: Magyar Zsidó Levéltár, 1997). In English, see Rita Horváth, “ ‘A Jewish Historical Commission in Budapest’. The Place of the National Relief Committee for Deportees in Hungary [DEGOB] among the Other Large-Scale HistoricalMemorial Projects of She’erit Hapletah after the Holocaust (1945–1948)” in David Bankier and Dan Michman (eds.), Holocaust Historiography in Context. Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements (London: Berghahn, 2009). 4  On the vexed relationship between pain and linguistic expression, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 5  In this chapter, the DEGOB collection is approached as a project of historical documentation, which implies that it will not be addressed which experiences traumatized survivors might have suppressed and how the lacunae of their accounts functioned. The latter are doubtlessly key questions that have often been usefully raised with regard to witness testimonies. However, here I am more interested in what kinds of explicit information the DEGOB collection contains.

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However, some more words on the historiographical context may be due first. The disinterest in, even ignorance of early survivor voices is arguably closely related to how the historiography of the Holocaust has tended to frame its subject as well as its own history. On the one hand, the Nazis’ systematic extermination of European Jewry during the Second World War seemed so complex and generally incomprehensible that any nearly adequate historical analysis of it seemed to require a gradual and slow process. On the other hand, it has also been recurrently emphasized that, due to the psychological consequences of their persecution, survivors were at first unable to articulate their ­experiences.6 For these two main reasons – the generally belated recognition of the full scope and coherence of the Nazi program of extermination and the supposed silence of traumatized survivors –, the Holocaust has been broadly understood as an event that acquired wider political and cultural significance only several decades after the war. Influential narratives of this kind, however, are currently facing a serious challenge. A substantial body of scholarship has been published that offers a plethora of evidence to discredit notions of early postwar silence and repression. Without questioning the increased importance of Holocaust remembrance observable in more recent decades,7 this new wave of scholarship aims to show in particular that Jewish survivors were anything but silent during the early postwar period. David Cesarani, editor of one of the most important collections demonstrating the point, insisted, with more than a slight touch of irony, that Jewish survivors, “if anything, succeeded too well, too soon” in commemorating the Holocaust avant la lettre, and therefore it would be much more appropriate to inquire into the early postwar “deafness” of the surrounding world than to continue discussions of supposed Jewish silence.8 Drawing on evidence in a wide variety of languages and covering a host of European countries (primarily Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Poland), Collect and Record!, the 2012 monograph by Laura Jockusch demonstrates that 6  On the political aspects of trauma discourses, see José Brunner, Die Politik des Traumas. Gewalt, Gesellschaft und psychisches Leiden (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014). For a critique of contemporary discourses of cultural trauma, see Wulf Kansteiner, “Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor” in Rethinking History 8 (2004). 7  For an interpretation of Holocaust remembrance in the age of globalization, see Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2001). 8  David Cesarani, “Challenging the ‘Myth of Silence’. Postwar Responses to the Destruction of European Jewry” in David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (eds.), After the Holocaust. Challenging the Myth of Silence (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 32.

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manifold sources on the Nazi Endlösung were created and a broad array of publications was completed before the end of 1940s, only to be largely neglected and almost fully forgotten afterwards and remain underexplored to this day.9 Jockusch’s book shows that from the late nineteenth century onwards the Jews of Eastern Europe developed new techniques of documenting anti-Jewish violence and came to understand the collection of witness accounts as an essential part of their scholarly-commemorative response to human-made catastrophes. Her book argues that Jewish survivors subsequently applied these techniques to the unprecedented crimes committed during the Second World War.10 The collection of witness accounts was indeed an eminent part of the agenda of early historical commissions and documentation centers Collect and Record! focuses on, and this observation can clearly be applied to the case of Hungary as well. At the same time, Collect and Record! unfortunately makes no reference to early postwar developments in Hungary, which is all the more regrettable since at the time Holocaust survivors from Hungary were in the forefront of documenting the genocide that had just been committed against European Jews. In the short years between 1945 and 1948, they made an impressive start in producing detailed knowledge about various facets of the Nazi program of extermination with a clear focus on the fate, or rather fatelessness, of their own community. In their case, unlike in those studied by Jockusch, it was arguably not so much a matter of applying local intellectual traditions to novel phenomena, but rather the shockingly public implementation of genocide in the last stages of the war, when a level of awareness of Nazi wartime policies was already present in the local Jewish intellectual milieu, which caused an immediate and highly intense engagement with the Jewish catastrophe. As noted, thousands of Hungarian Jewish survivors articulated their experiences in the offices of the Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság (the National Relief Committee for Deportees or DEGOB) as early as 1945–1946. As chapter five will show, survivors of persecution published dozens of memoirs in Hungarian before the consolidation of Stalinist rule in the late 1940s. As the last chapter will analyze, by 1947–48, four remarkable Hungarian 9  Jockusch explicitly aims to retrieve these “remarkable efforts from oblivion and establish their rightful place as the foundation stone for later historical writing on the Holocaust.” Jockusch, Collect and Record!, p. 17. 10   Collect and Record! highlights the seminal contributions Jews originating from Eastern Europe made to these early postwar endeavors, explaining that Polish Jewish survivors were the crucial actors in both major European centers of documentation, in Poland as well as France.

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Jewish intellectuals completed substantial monographs on the origins of Nazism and the implementation of the Holocaust. In other words, more analytical and objectivist approaches were already being developing at the time of the imposition of Stalinism. Last but not least, crimes committed against Jews during the war years were prominently addressed in early postwar trials, constituting another massive and precious source base that remains to be systematically explored.11 The fact that these impressive early postwar Hungarian Jewish efforts remain underrepresented in contemporary English-language scholarship is arguably only part of a larger problem, namely the rather peripheral position of the Holocaust in Hungary in international scholarship.12 Some Hungarian scholars, most notably Gábor Gyáni, recently offered critical comments on the historiographical status quo, remarking that several themes and approaches that belong to the core of contemporary Holocaust Studies are practically absent from the Hungarian research landscape.13 Most relevantly with regard to the present chapter, Éva Kovács, András Lénárt, and Anna Lujza Szász studied the context of the creation and the major characteristics of the most important Hungarian oral history collections on the Holocaust.14 Beyond the main focus of their study, Kovács, Lénárt and Szász also discussed to what extent historians have drawn on accounts of Hungarian Jewish survivors only to conclude that Bristol-based Tim Cole and Vienna-based Eleonore Lappin-Eppel remain practically alone in having used such accounts to a significant degree.15 In this 11  For a sociohistorical analysis, now see Andrea Pető and Ildikó Barna, Political Justice in Budapest after WWII (Budapest: CEU Press, 2015). 12  For a detailed bibliography of publications on the Holocaust in Hungary, see Randolph L. Braham, Bibliography of the Holocaust in Hungary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 13  See Gábor Gyáni, “Helyünk a holokauszt történetírásában” in Kommentár, 2008/3. For an elaborate reaction to this critique, see László Karsai, “A magyar holokauszt-történetírásról. Válasz Ablonczy Balázsnak, Csíki Tamásnak, Gyáni Gábornak és Novák Attilának” in Kommentár, 2008/6. 14  See Éva Kovács, András Lénárt and Anna Lujza Szász, “Oral History Collections in the Holocaust in Hungary” in S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods, Documentation, 15. Oktober 2014. http://simon.vwi.ac.at/index.php/working-papers/43-kovacs-eva-lenartandras-szasz-anna-lujza. Last accessed February 10, 2015. 15  See Tim Cole, Traces of the Holocaust. Journeying in and out of the Ghettos (London: Continuum, 2011) and Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, Ungarisch-Jüdische Zwangsarbeiter und Zwangsarbeiterinnen in Österreich 1944/45 (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2010). The authors might have mentioned Ilana Rosen, Sister in Sorrow: Life Histories of Female Holocaust Survivors from Hungary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008). See also Raz Segal, Days of Ruin. The Jews of Munkács during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2013).

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larger context, it might not come as a surprise that historians have devoted less attention to the interview records of the National Relief Committee for Deportees than they would merit. The DEGOB Interview Protocols The three main tasks of the National Relief Committee for Deportees were to help the repatriation of survivors to Hungary, provide social aid, and pursue projects of documentation. In 1945–46, several parallel institutions, most of them transnational actors, such as the Joint, the Szochnut, or the Red Cross, were trying their best to accomplish complex and urgent tasks related to the large masses of ailing Holocaust survivors in Hungary. The documentation project of DEGOB emerged in this broader context of early postwar Jewish responses to the Holocaust. Documentation efforts were in fact part and parcel of practical tasks.16 DEGOB was established by the Israelite Community of Pest in March 1945. The organization may have kept its central offices on Bethlen Square throughout its brief period of existence in 1945–46, but there were several rounds of change in its institutional position.17 Early on, DEGOB was operated with the support of Joint and then briefly functioned as a department of the National Jewish Aid Committee. From June 1945 onward, Szochnut was to provide employment to DEGOB members. The documentation project remained under the umbrella of Szochnut even after DEGOB’s aid and documentation activities got separated.18 DEGOB’s documentation activities partly revolved around demographic and economic questions, both of which were essentially of a statistical nature. As the documentation project aimed to discover what exactly happened, who was murdered and who survived, registering returnees and gaining information from them emerged as crucial tasks.19 More concretely, DEGOB first 16  The documentation project of DEGOB aimed, among others, at ascertaining how many Jewish survivors from Hungary there were and where they resided. 17  In 1945, around 200 employees worked at the center and another 400 were employed in the related activities of hospitals, ambulances, sanatoria, and schools. 18  Rita Horváth, A Magyarországi Zsidó Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottsága (DEGOB) története, pp. 19–22. 19   D EGOB recorded the arrival of 82 144 survivors in 1945, with the months April to August 1945 being the high point of return with over 9 000 individuals registered in each of these five months. June 1945 provided the peak with 26 578 returnees. Around 63 000 of the slightly more than 82 000 people were deported from territories that belonged to postwar Hungary. The number of registered individuals dropped to a mere 500 by December

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asked survivors who entered its premises to fill in two questionnaires, one on those who perished and another on those who were still alive, but have not returned to Hungary yet.20 Besides collecting such basic data, members of DEGOB soon decided to conduct more elaborate interviews.21 The thousands of resulting interviews were based, with the exception of the earliest ones, on a detailed guideline of some fourteen pages.22 In practice, however, the ­interviewers often followed some of their personal interests as well.23 The interview p ­ rotocols were the result of semi-structured interviews and ought to be considered ­co-products of interviewer and interviewee. Whereas v­ arious pieces of personal information regarding the interviewees are included right

1945 and there were only 1 187 more of them until the project came to its end in September 1946. (It ought to be noted that some 270 000 Jewish survivors passed through Hungary in 1946 alone.) See Rita Horváth, A Magyarországi Zsidó Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottsága (DEGOB) története, p. 25. 20  Information was not only collected but also circulated, primarily through the newsletter Hírek az elhurcoltakról (News on the Deported). 21  The length of the protocols varies from just a few paragraphs to dozens of pages, however, they tend to be rather concise and descriptive. Next to its main office at Bethlen Square, DEGOB also operated offices in Dózsa street, Ajtósi street and Nyár street. The large majority of the thousands of interviews were conducted at these four locations in Pest. 22  To facilitate the task of the interviewers and standardize the contents of the witness accounts, a questionnaire with twelve major topics was developed. This defined the main subjects of the interviews as follows: personal data; the situation of Jews at their place of residence; ghettoization and its prehistory; deportation; arrival; the destination of the first deportation, its organization and life in the camp; labor camps, their organization and life in them; evacuation; stages following evacuation; liberation; life in the camp upon liberation; the way home. The complete questionnaire is reproduced in Gábor Murányi “ ‘Hallottam, amikor azt válaszolta: alles ins Gas!’ A Deportáltakat Gondozó Bizottság jegyzőkönyvei 1945-ből” in Phralipe, 1990/11–12. The way these thematic areas were defined shows that the interviewers were at first unready, or simply unable, to use a more accurate terminology for the Holocaust. For instance, the main subjects of the questionnaire inquired about “life in the camp” but not death, and specified “labor camps” but did not mention other kinds of camps. A host of survivors arguably articulated these ­crucial facets of the Holocaust in spite of this rather limiting interview agenda. At the same time, the intentions and editing practices of the interviewing authority directly impacted what was ultimately included in the transcripts. 23  A number of the interviewers conducted some of their interviews pro-actively. They searched for key witnesses and at times left Budapest to meet survivors in other parts of the country.

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at the beginning, the records unfortunately only contain their initials and, somewhat disturbingly, can best be identified by number.24 What is more, the interviews were originally recorded in shorthand, only copies of which are available.25 Since the protocols do not contain literal transcripts, any textual analysis of them has to reflect on the element of mediation, even if its extent and exact manner cannot be precisely determined. In spite of all these limitations of the material and the difficulties involved in its analysis, the DEGOB collection still provides unmatched evidence of how hundreds of survivors reported on the annihilation and death camps as well as the gas chambers at a time when key features of the Nazi genocide against European Jewry still needed to be comprehended, and before specific designations of this unprecedented crime would have emerged.26 Before turning to qualitative analyses of hundreds of these interview protocols, a number of temporal and geographical characteristics of the Holocaust in Hungary ought to be highlighted since they are directly reflected in the collection. Even though the rounds of deportations of Jews from Hungary started as early as 1941 with the one through Kőrösmező that eventually resulted in the first Nazi massacre with over 10 000 victims,27 Hungarian forces committed mass murder against Jews on the Eastern Front and within the enlarged borders of the country,28 and Hungarian Jewish men were forced to perform what was euphemistically called “labor service” under extremely harsh 24  For lack of a more acceptable alternative, the notes below also employ these numbers to identify the testimonies of various individuals. Whenever an interviewee’s statements are cited more extensively, the basic data known about the person is provided in the main text. 25  The bulk of the collection was acquired by the World Jewish Congress in June 1946 (by which time the documentation activity of DEGOB had practically ceased). A massive though incomplete part of the collection is located at the Hungarian Jewish Archives and has also been digitalized. I have used the latter version of the collection available at www.degob.hu. Last accessed: February 14, 2015. 26  There is an obvious difference between historical experience and historical knowledge and it would be unreasonable to expect survivors to be fully accurate in the latter sense. At the same time, one of the chief aims of the DEGOB collection was to document the Holocaust and therefore it appears appropriate to want to assess how the project worked and what it actually achieved in this regard. 27  See George Eisen and Tamás Stark, “The 1941 Galician Deportation and the KamenetsPodolsk Massacre: A Prologue to the Hungarian Holocaust” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2013/2. 28  See Chapter Two titled “Discrimination, Radicalization and the First Mass Murders” of Zoltán Vági, László Csősz, and Gábor Kádár, The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2013).

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conditions and with high casualty rates,29 nearly all DEGOB interviewees gathered their horrific experiences of Nazi camps in 1944–45.30 The Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry in 1944–45 also had a marked geographical profile. Its central location was indubitably Auschwitz-Birkenau, but during the last year of the war large groups of Hungarian Jews were deported to almost all major camps within the territory of the Nazi Reich. During the Arrow Cross rule after mid-October 1944, the mass murder of Jews was then brutally continued on the ever shrinking territory of pro-Nazi Hungary.31 The word Auschwitz can indeed be found in a slight majority of DEGOB records, no fewer than 1895.32 With the sole exception of Neuengamme, mentioned “only” in four DEGOB protocols, each camp in the territory of Nazi Germany with altogether over 100 000 inmates were referenced in more than one hundred of them.33 In short, in accordance with the geographical profile of 29  On the labor service, now see Robert Rozett, Conscripted Slaves. Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front during World War II (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Publications, 2014). See also Randolph L. Braham, The Hungarian Labor Service System (Boulder, Col.: East European Monographs, 1977) and Ilana Rosen, “Soldiers or Slaves? Narratives of Survivor of the Hungarian Army’s ‘Labor Service’ in World War II and the Holocaust” in Dapim. Studies on the Holocaust, 2012/1. On the occupation of the Soviet Union, see Dieter Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht: Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 (Berlin: S. Fischer, 2011) and Krisztián Ungváry, Magyar megszálló csapatok a Szovjetunióban, 1941–1944 (Budapest: Osiris, 2015). 30  The major exceptions in the collection are the occasional Jewish interviewees from countries other than Hungary, most notably Slovakia and Germany, who were deported to camps years earlier. The frequency with which witness accounts refer to various years provides an indicator of the temporal focuses of the Holocaust in Hungary. Whereas the years between 1938 and 1941 were all referred to more than 50, but less than 200 times, with the numbers gradually increasing from 54 to 197, the years 1942 and 1943 were already mentioned in more than 400 cases. However, there is a dramatic quantitative increase related to 1944. Explicit references to this year are found in altogether 1773 records, i.e. almost half of all. 1945 is still mentioned 678 times and thus significantly more often than any year before 1944. References to 1946, when some of the later interviews were conducted, can only be found in five of the records. 31  Now see László Karsai, “Zsidósors Budapesten a nyilas uralom idején” in Elek Karsai and László Karsai (eds.), Vádirat a nácizmus ellen 4. 1944. október 15–1945. január 18. (Budapest: Balassi, 2014). In English, see Chapter Five titled “The Arrow Cross Regime” of Zoltán Vági, László Csősz, and Gábor Kádár, The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2013). 32  The name of Birkenau also appears in 426 records, some of which do not refer to Auschwitz. Monowitz is mentioned in 44 files. 33  The name of Mauthausen can be found in 851 of the files, Bergen-Belsen in 518, Dachau in 376, Buchenwald in 349, Ravensbrück in 253, Theresienstadt in 173, Stutthof in 132,

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the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry, survivors interviewed at the DEGOB offices gathered their terrible camp experiences in places such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Stutthof and in a long row of other major and more minor Nazi camps west of them,34 whereas there were hardly any references to camps eastwards of the aforementioned two.35

Remembering Buchenwald

My choice of Buchenwald concentration camp as a case study was determined, apart from the availability of numerous diverse accounts about it from 1945–1946, by the fact that Buchenwald was one of the largest and oldest camps in the Nazi German environment and has remained a rather contested lieu de mémoire since. Buchenwald is right next to one of the symbolic centers of Germany, the city of Weimar, and the memory of the Nazi camp was heavily instrumentalized under the East German communist regime.36 After 1989, Flossenburg in 129, Gross-Rosen in 119 and Sachsenhausen in 104. On the Nazi camps, Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth and Christoph Dieckmann (eds.), Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager: Entwickelung und Struktur I–II. (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1998) as well as Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager I–IX. (München: C.H. Beck, 2005–2009). The names of Bełżec, Chełmno, Sobibór and Treblinka, the major annihilation camps where millions of Polish and other Jews were murdered during the Nazis’ Aktion Reinhardt, are not mentioned in the collection at all since the horrific experiences of Jewish survivors from Hungary were not directly connected to them. (The city of Lublin was evoked twentyfour times, whereas the name of the camp Majdanek, established in 1941 and turned into one of the annihilation camps during the extermination of Polish Jewry, appears in three files. It thus constitutes a minor exception to the more general rule, even though the expression KZ Lublin, the official name of Majdanek, does not appear either.) On Aktion Reinhardt, see Sara Berger, Experten der Vernichtung. Das T4-Reinhardt-Netzwerk in den Lagern Belzec, Sobibor und Treblinka (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013). 34  On the murder of the Jews in the territories incorporated into the Reich, see Jacek Andrzej Mlynarczyk and Jochen Böhler (eds.), Der Judenmord in den eingegliederten polnischen Gebieten, 1939–1945 (Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag, 2010). 35  The largest cities in the territory of the Generalgouvernement such as Warsaw or Cracow were occasionally referenced, but the numbers remain modest. Warsaw appears 85 times in Hungarian (as Varsó) and 21 times in German (as Warschau). Cracow can be found 61 times in Hungarian (as Krakkó) and 23 times in German (as Krakau). 36  Volkhard Knigge and Thomas A. Seidel, Versteinertes Gedenken. Das Buchenwalder Mahnmal von 1958 I–II. (Spröda: Pietsch 1997).

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there were fierce debates about its history, especially concerning the Soviet camp operated on the former site of the Nazi one between 1945 and 1950 and the most appropriate ways to relate the histories of the two camps to each other.37 Therefore, the question is all the more intriguing how hundreds of its survivors discussed the Nazi camp of Buchenwald before canonical interpretations of it could have emerged and stereotypical images of it would have become dominant. The following analysis draws on all of the 349 testimonies in the DEGOB collection that refer to the Buchenwald concentration camp.38 Since some of these protocols contain contributions from more than one person, they include the accounts of altogether 393 survivors.39 The files provide basic information on the background of most of these individuals. Even though the collection cannot make claims to representativeness, not even regarding the group of “returnees”, exploring the general characteristics of the sample still promised to yield important insights; the sample shall be analyzed next with particular attention to the gender, age, locations of ghettoization, and routes of deportation of the interviewees. Due to the gendered manner of deportation and especially the almost exclusively male camp society of Buchenwald, the sample has a great gender imbalance: only thirty of the 393 individuals are female, i.e. less than one in 37   Volkhard Knigge and Bodo Ritscher, Totenbuch. Speziallager Buchenwald 1945–1950 (Weimar: Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora, 2003). 38  Whereas most of these records are in Hungarian, 69 of them – nearly 20 percent – are in German. Two of these reports actually repeat parts of previous ones: number 757 is partly identical to 756 and 1675 to 1673. With the exception of the interviewee of record 738, all witnesses seem to have been Jewish. 39  With the exception of two people born in Germany, all of the 393 interviewees seem to have come from the enlarged war-time territory of Hungary. The territory of Hungary was enlarged four times between 1938 and 1941 to incorporate regions that the country had ceded to Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia (officially the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes until 1929) at the end of the First World War. While some of the names of the interviewers are missing or proved illegible, I could identify them in 332 out of 349 cases. These 332 interviews that deal with Buchenwald one way or another were conducted by altogether 21 interviewers: Margit Obláth conducted 35 of them, György Lázár 30, Lili Reiner 28, Franziska Pollák 27, Otto Rauch 25, Klára Vincze 24, Margit Weiss 23, Lilly Blau 17, Márta Bíró 16, Teréz Alexander 13, Márta Gutmann, Klára Kandel and Miksa Weisz 12 each, and Ilona Haas 10. The remaining seven interviewers conducted less than ten interviews each. It ought to be noted that with three exceptions, all 21 interviewers were female.

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thirteen.40 In the overwhelming majority of cases (386 out of 393), the year of birth of the interviewee is indicated too. It is thus known that when they returned to Hungary and entered the premises of DEGOB in 1945–46, the ­oldest among them was 58 while the youngest merely 12. Their average age was 27.85, with a significant majority below 30.41 Conspicuously, nearly half (172 out of 386) of them were born between 1924 and 1929 and were thus past 16, but not yet 22 years of age at the time of their liberation.42 Regarding the location of ghettoization, the information is less systematic and the entries are not entirely consistent either.43 Nevertheless, the 243 cases give a reasonable estimate of the regional origins of the interviewees and the results prove striking. The most commonly appearing ghetto names are those of Munkács (Мукачеве in Ukrainian) with 39,44 Ungvár (Ужгород) with 35, 40  The separation of men and women is addressed in the following records: DEGOB Records Number 730, 2570, 3128, 3158, 3213, 3290 and 3348. This sharply differs from the overall proportion of men and women in the DEGOB collection as a whole, where men constitute a very slight majority of 51%. The contrast is all the more striking since significantly more women than men were interviewed from certain regions and this includes Kárpátalja, from where most of the Buchenwald interviewees came. (69.2 percent of all inter­viewees from this particular region are women, notwithstanding the heavily male-dominated group that has been to Buchenwald.) “A DEGOB-jegyzőkönyvek túlélőinek nemek szerinti megoszlása.” http://www.degob.hu/index.php?showarticle=51. Last accessed August 2, 2013. 41  This closely resembles the overall sample of interviewees, in which the average age was 27.3. “A DEGOB-jegyzőkönyvek mintájának életkor szerinti elemzése.” http://www.degob. hu/index.php?showarticle=52. Last accessed August 2, 2013. In the Buchenwald sample, 119 were still in their teens and 117 in their twenties in 1945. 65 were in their thirties, 59 in their forties, and 26 in their fifties. 42  The two most common years of birth are 1927 with forty and 1924 with thirty-four individuals. The percentage of those between 16 and 25 in 1945 thus amount to 52.33 percent. Similarly, those aged between 16 and 25 also constitute a majority (53.7 percent) of the interviewees in the collection as a whole. “A DEGOB-jegyzőkönyvek mintájának életkor szerinti elemzése.” http://www.degob.hu/index.php?showarticle=52. Last accessed August 2, 2013. 43  Not only do some entries use, somewhat confusingly, the term concentration (koncentráció in the original) to refer to ghettoization in Hungary, but in twenty-five cases the location of ghettoization refers directly to labor battalions. It does so through the emloyment of various terms, most frequently muszos, the colloquial short form to refer to the person who had to perform it. Some places in Budapest were concretely named, such as the KISOK-pálya, Teleki tér, Bethlen tér or even “csillagos ház” (literally “house with a star,” in which Jews were forced to live in Budapest between June and late November or early December of 1944). Buchenwald is mentioned twice as the place of ghettoization. 44  On the Jews of Munkács, see Raz Segal, Days of Ruin. The Jews of Munkács during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2013).

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Beregszász (Берегове) with 25 and Szeklence (Сокирниця) with 21, all of which are in Kárpátalja (Subcarpathia).45 There are altogether twelve cities in the sample in which at least five of the interviewees were ghettoized, of which nine are in Kárpátalja.46 These nine cities among themselves already account for nearly two-thirds (157 out of 243) of all cases when the location of ghettoization is known, surpassing even the disproportionately high percent (48.6) of interviewees from this region in the DEGOB collection as a whole.47 In the case of 362 individuals, the various camps to which they were deported are also listed at the beginning of their protocols. On this basis, the sample can be divided into three large groups: 198 were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau and 123 were not, whereas there are also 41 cases in which Buchenwald is not included in the list of camps visited at the beginning of the file, but the name of the camp is nonetheless mentioned in the text. According to these lists, of the 198 persons who had been to Buchenwald and had to go through AuschwitzBirkenau too, 121 were taken from Auschwitz directly to Buchenwald and 70 arrived there through one or more camps in between.48 Members of the second group, i.e. the 123 Hungarian Jewish individuals in the sample who were taken to Buchenwald, but not Auschwitz, were typically deported from Hungary directly to Buchenwald.49 45  On the history of Jews in this region, see Viktória Bányai, Csilla Fedinec and Szonja Ráhel Komoróczy (eds.), Zsidók Kárpátalján. Történelem és örökség (Budapest: Aposztróf, 2013). Mátészalka in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county is mentioned 16 times as the location of ghettoization, and is thus fifth on the list and first among the cities in the territory of postwar Hungary. Mátészalka is followed by Huszt, Iza, Aknaszlatina, Felsővisó, Nagyszőllős and Técső. With the sole exception of Felsővisó from Máramaros (Maramureș in Romanian) county, all of these places are in Kárpátalja as well. 46  Twenty-four locations are mentioned three or fewer times. There are several important Jewish centers among them, such as Debrecen, Kassa (Košice), Kolozsvár (Cluj), Nagyvárad (Oradea) or Máramarossziget (Sighetul Marmației). 47  “A DEGOB-jegyzőkönyvek túlélő a régiók szerinti megoszlás tükrében.” http://www.degob .hu/index.php?showarticle=54. Last accessed August 2, 2013. 48  This path is depicted in Fateless, the semi-autobiographical novel of Hungarian Nobel laureate Imre Kertész. Upon his return from Buchenwald, György Köves, the main character of the novel, visits what appears to be the DEGOB offices, however, without the name of DEGOB being mentioned. See Imre Kertész, Fateless (London: Vintage, 2008). I ought to clarify that there is an individual in the sample who has been to both, but it seems he was deported to Buchenwald before Auschwitz – that is why the two numbers do not add up to 198. 49  Those who have not been to Auschwitz were typically deported under Arrow Cross rule. The largest group here consists of those whose protocol claims that in December 1944 they spent 18 days on the deporting train to eventually arrive in Buchenwald. See DEGOB

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The accounts practically unanimously characterize the dominant conditions of train journeys to Buchenwald – a topic most famously depicted by Jorge Semprún in his Le Grand Voyage – as hardly bearable.50 The arrival in Buchenwald tends to be described in nearly identical ways too. A host of DEGOB accounts explain that it involved being deprived of the few remaining items of personal property, a mass shower as well as being given inmate clothing.51 On the other hand, the interpretations of later experiences as well as the overall assessments of Buchenwald strongly diverge. To begin with, there is no clear consensus in the files on what kind of establishment Buchenwald was. Many witnesses referred to it as a concentration camp, but some labeled it a death camp or even an extermination camp.52 Several Hungarian Jewish witnesses testifying in 1945–46 in fact spent only a few days or weeks in Buchenwald and essentially understood it to be a distribution center (gyüjtőhely or gyüjtőtábor in Hungarian).53 Hardly any of the accounts relating personal experiences in Buchenwald map the camp, indicating that Jewish inmates deported from Hungary in 1944 were not in the position to gain detailed knowledge of it. There is only one account, that of a sixteen-year-old carpenter apprentice from Mátészalka, which at least aims to list the main parts of the camp and it does so in the following manner: “there were three camps here: the small Lager, the Zeltlager and the great Lager.”54 Beyond this, there is the occasional reflection on the faulty nature of memory, such as “my memories [of Buchenwald] were blurred by later horrors.”55 Such statements are at times followed by explicit admissions

Records Number 392, 552, 1309, 1762, 2032, 2127, 2245, 2319, 2327, 2601, 2724, 2785, 2786, 2839, 2847, 2862, 2988, 3213, 3289, 3471, 3480, 3520, and 3553. 50  See Jorge Semprún, The Cattle Truck (London: Serif, 2005). 51  Several reports also explicitly refer to the experience of being reduced to a mere number within the camp. See, for instance, DEGOB Records Number 87, 952, 1750, 2618, 2623, 2789, 3091 and 3587. 52  For concentration camp, see DEGOB Records Number 651, 1318, 3290, 3291 and 3515. For death camp, see DEGOB Record Number 716. Buchenwald is called “Germany’s greatest extermination camp” in DEGOB Record Number 3103, whereas the German expression Vernichtungslager is applied to it in DEGOB Record Number 177. 53  These notions or their semantic equivalents are found in DEGOB Records Number 83, 363, 911, 1178, 1348, 2386, 2706, 3071 and 3158. DEGOB Record Number 3587 explicitly claims that “in Buchenwald everybody was assigned to an Arbeitstransport.” 54   D EGOB Record Number 3290. I left German terms in my translation, if they were employed in the Hungarian original. 55   D EGOB Record Number 952.

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of possessing no “real knowledge” of what the camp as a whole looked like and how it was operated. Characterizations of Buchenwald camp society recurrently include remarks on its multinational or multireligious character.56 One of the rare witnesses from Germany, a 41-year-old hairdresser from Frankfurt a.M., listed various kinds of inmates as follows: “those captured belonged to different categories: there were political Jews, homosexuals, criminals, so called action Jews, such as those from the June action.”57 On the other hand, several reports underlined that in this multiethnic camp Jews were segregated and specially ­discrimi­nated.58 Some survivors offered concrete estimates of the number and proportion of Jews. One of them, a eighteen-year-old tailor from Aknaszlatina, stated that 10 000 inmates were Jewish out of altogether 60 000,59 a locksmith apprentice of the same age from Kispest maintained that there were altogether 80 000 inmates and “only” three blocks of Jews,60 whereas a third interviewee, a packager from Nagyvárad (Oradea) in his fifties, asserted that at the beginning of April 1945 there were some 30 000 Jews in Buchenwald.61 The DEGOB protocols tend to refer not only to “indescribable” forms of suffering,62 terrible humiliations,63 aimless brutality and sadism,64 and ­occasionally to one’s own dehumanization,65 but extensively dwell on basic circumstances of life, such as the meager possibilities to eat and sleep, including recurrent remarks on the amount of weight lost,66 as well as the extreme 56  For remarks on multinationality or multiethnicity, see DEGOB Records Number 177, 1313, 1348, 3095, 3402 and 3497. For a remark on the multireligious nature of the camp, see DEGOB Record Number 489. One Hungarian Jewish witness simply remarked that Buchenwald was not established specifically for Jews. DEGOB Record Number 2235. On Jews being mixed with Russian prisoners of war, see DEGOB Record Number 2968. 57   D EGOB Record Number 2377. 58  On the question of segregation, see DEGOB Records Number 1729, 2865 and 3290. Forms of anti-Jewish discrimination are discussed in DEGOB Records Number 1183 and 1436. 59   D EGOB Record Number 1178. 60   D EGOB Record Number 489. 61   D EGOB Record Number 2623. 62  The term “indescribable” appears in a number of records that include DEGOB Records Number 2096, 2706, 2786, and 3029. 63  See, for example, DEGOB Record Number 1616. 64  See, for example, DEGOB Record Number 2789. 65  See DEGOB Records Number 1178, 1348, 2132, 2789, 3068 and 3587. 66   D EGOB Records Number 664 and 3587. DEGOB Record Number 2865 provides reflection on the food question thus: “I speak so much about food because at that time nothing else interested us. Food meant life.”

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cold.67 In the following excerpt taken from the interview protocol of an ­eighteen-year-old student, one finds a concise list of many of these terrible elemental experiences: In Buchenwald, 1 500 people were put into a single block. We had to sleep on wood in our clothes and shoes and suffered a lot. My weight was down to 32 kilograms. The Kapo of the SS would beat us for no reason. Roll calls lasted two to three hours per day. We had to get up at 5 am, got black coffee, one loaf of bread for six people and three-quarters of a liter of soup. We had no blankets and felt very cold. Many died of exhaustion. Life was unbearable.68 The Hungarian Jewish accounts of Buchenwald are indeed replete with descriptions of experiences of freezing, severe hunger, the lack of space, and brutal violence. Several Hungarian Jewish survivors depicted their time in the camp in extremely dark colors as can be illustrated by the account of a trader from Újpest in his already forties: We were subjected to the cruelest treatment there, we had to step on dead bodies and people were in constant pain. They were whining and shouting due to the lack of space, but no one cared. The provision of food was the weakest imaginable, I had to put up with awful suffering due to hunger too.69 Nonetheless, the overall assessment of the camp was far from uniform. In the DEGOB collection, one finds statements on how Buchenwald had “good” or at least “better” food than other camps,70 that the treatment inmates received here was “relatively mild,”71 at times even “quite decent,”72 that they were

67   D EGOB Records Number 395 and 3291. Buchenwald concentration camp was purposely built at a spot with a frightening climate. As I noted above, the time of arrival could matter a great deal for how they experienced and described Buchenwald. Those who were deported in December 1944 arrived in the winter and the experience of freezing was among their most frequently discussed memories. 68   D EGOB Record Number 1430. 69   D EGOB Record Number 3471. 70   D EGOB Records Number 60, 83, 1852 and 3033. 71   D EGOB Record Number 1994. 72   D EGOB Record Number 2657.

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“relatively free,”73 or that the camp was “quite bearable.”74 Some survivors highlighted that they had no tasks in the camp and all they could do was lie around.75 Rather ironically, others experienced Buchenwald not as a place of suffering and dying, but of recovery: these witnesses got sick elsewhere and practically gathered all their experiences of Buchenwald in the camp hospital where they were eventually liberated.76 Even so, the most crucial question to emerge from the witness accounts is how inmates struggled to survive and how they died in the camp. Numerous survivors described the condition they had been in as between life and death. Four of the DEGOB protocols discussing Buchenwald even employed the concept of Muselmann (in three cases the expression was used in Hungarian, i.e. as muzulmán), an infamous term in the vocabulary of the Nazi camps used derogatively to refer to those who were exhausted, starved and lethargic to the point of being resigned to their death.77 In addition to discussing the human condition between life and death, a great number of accounts specified the predominant causes of death. The various forms mentioned included freezing to death,78 starvation,79 being shot,80 dying through the brutal treatment of

73   D EGOB Record Number 416. 74   D EGOB Record Number 1177. A survivor even called it his “luck” to have been taken to Buchenwald. DEGOB Record Number 327. Another explained that “I stayed ten days in Buchenwald, where I was put into the Zeltlager [tent camp]. This place felt like a holiday compared to Auschwitz.” DEGOB Record Number 1966. 75  For the former, see DEGOB Record Number 1939. For the latter, DEGOB Record Number 1972. According to some witnesses, life could be “monotonous,” even “boring” there. See DEGOB Record Number 3253 and 1830, respectively. The experience of waiting is ­highlighted, for instance, in the following reports: DEGOB Records Number 1676, 2374, 2475, and 3237. 76  For such stories, see, among others, DEGOB Records Number 189, 192, 551, 1309, 1808, and 3091. 77   D EGOB Records Number 731, 1966, 1995, and 2865. Interestingly, three out of these four refer to the previous condition of the speaker. Another protocol elaborated on the interviewee’s complete resignation to his fate without using the expression Muselmann. See DEGOB Record Number 848. 78   D EGOB Record Number 2623. 79   D EGOB Record Number 2096. 80   D EGOB Record Number 226.

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SS men,81 being bombed by the Allies,82 and even passing away in the camp shower under the weight of falling water.83 According to the protocols, survivors rarely affirmed their Jewishness. This certainly had to do with the “Jewish” context of the interview situation, which made more explicit statements redundant, but also the fact that the Nazi perpetrators imposed their own category of Jewishness during the extermination process.84 More surprisingly, the refusal to respond to orders directed at Jews was a key element of several accounts. Some survivors even reported on successful attempts to acquire a different ethnic marker in the camp universe. The most frequently reported case of managing to avoid being subjected to the potentially lethal Jewish label looked as follows: shortly prior to the evacuation of Buchenwald, Jews were called to the Appellplatz, but as one of several nearly identical stories, that of a leather trader from Budapest in his mid-forties, maintained, “I refused to go, so when the Americans liberated the camp I was still alive, though sick.”85 As noted, stories of escape centering on the refusal to be identified as Jewish were accompanied by others focusing on the successful change of the ethnic marker. As one of the survivors, a trader in his forties from Kassa (Košice), explained “I cannot tell what happened to this fellow of mine. I got hold of a Yugoslav badge, which I put on my coat. From that moment on, I qualified as an Aryan.”86 “The next morning an Appell of the whole camp was called. Three SS men were there to select Jews and take them to work in a factory. I managed to go over to the Russians. The next day, I was transported to Theresienstadt alongside them,” another interviewee, a Subcarpatian teenager reported.87 In addition to such changes of ethnic belonging in the camp, some survivors, including a sixteen-year-old mechanician apprentice from Budapest, indicated that they were classified as Christians in Buchenwald. “I stayed at a carpenter shop 81   D EGOB Record Number 1851. 82   D EGOB Record Number 1228. 83   D EGOB Record Number 1788. Some reports list numerous causes, such as “People died from diarrhea, typhus or exhaustion. The sick were supposedly murdered with injections.” DEGOB Record Number 1333. 84  Exceptions to this rule include DEGOB Record Number 2046 and DEGOB Record Number 2203. 85   D EGOB Record Number 323. See also DEGOB Record Number 2657: “The next evening all the Jews were gathered on Appellplatz. I sensed the danger and decided to return to the small Lager alongside a few others. The next day the order Appell Juden antreten was repeated, but I did not show up then either.” 86   D EGOB Record Number 289. 87   D EGOB Record Number 1163.

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and was again registered as a Christian. When I heard the megaphones shout Sämtliche Juden antreten, I thought that this could only get me into trouble and went over to the Christians instead.”88 Such fortunate escapes from the clutches of the Nazis were untypical, however, as the microanalysis of hundreds of DEGOB documents reveals, they were not unique. Numerous interviewees were liberated in Buchenwald, and several of them told relatively detailed stories of their liberation.89 Apart from the day of arrival, no day was more often and more extensively discussed than the day of liberation.90 Its date was usually specified too, with (the correct one of) April 11 being most commonly given.91 In the DEGOB offices, two major types of stories were told regarding the liberation of Buchenwald. One focused on the Nazis’ last minute plans and amounted to a story of the narrowest of escapes from looming extermination. The other was a narrative of the resistance and successful uprising of the inmates that contributed to the canonization of their heroic image under communist regimes and elsewhere.92

88   D EGOB Record Number 2100. See also DEGOB Record Number 2524, especially “in the children’s block, the Blockältester [barrack leader] was Czech. After much effort, he managed to arrange to have the bureau of the Lager register us as Christians.” 89  Among those interviewed at the DEGOB offices, there were far fewer survivors of the death marches. For such rather exceptional cases, see DEGOB Records Number 1584 and 1811. Whereas many accounts refer to camp inmates being taken away just prior to liberation, there seemed to be hardly any information on how many people were concerned and what was subsequently done to them. 90  On the liberation of the camps focused on the stories of Jewish inmates, now see Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps. The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). On the experience of Mauthausen’s liberation in Hungarian, see Anna Lujza Szász and Júlia Vajda, “Mindig van éhség.” Pillanatképek Mauthausen ­felszabadulásáról (Budapest: ELTE Eötvös Kiadó, 2012). 91  April 11 can be found in DEGOB Records Number 538, 664, 756, 810, 818, 841, 855, 905, 906, 1349, 1582, 1590, 1687, 1692, 1946, 2052, 2203, 2227, 2492, 2706, 2760, 2789 and 2973. Other accounts mentioned April 12 (DEGOB Record Number 565), 13 (DEGOB Record Number 226), 14 (DEGOB Records Number 540, 669, 675, 2720 and 3373; this makes April 14 the second most common reference), 15 (DEGOB Record Number 2519), 25 (DEGOB Record Number 645), May 6 (DEGOB Record Number 498) or simply “the beginning of May” (DEGOB Record Number 258). There is a case where the camp discussed appears to have been falsely identified as Buchenwald: DEGOB Record Number 2576 claims that Buchenwald was liberated by the Russians on May 15. 92   On the International Committee of Buchenwald-Dora and Sub-Camps, now see Philipp Neumann-Thein, Parteidisziplin und Eigenwilligkeit: Das Internationale Komitee Buchenwald-Dora und Kommandos (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014).

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The following citation from a sixteen-year-old student from Munkács may illustrate the former plot: There were altogether 80 000 people in the camp. 56 000 were taken away at the beginning of April. They wanted to murder the 24 000 weakened and sick ones, including me, who were left in Buchenwald. They did not manage to do so since the Americans arrived just an hour in advance and hindered the execution of the plan.93 The other rather widely circulated narrative regarding the last moments of the Nazi camp concerned the uprising of the inmates and their defeat of the SS. Such stories of self-liberation had marked political connotations with several of them including explicit statements on the central role played by the communists in the resistance movement.94 At the same time, the DEGOB protocols reveal that, as early as 1945–46, the self-liberation narrative circulated in various versions. Some presented the uprising as the singular achievement of a group of inmates,95 while others depicted it as the result of cooperation between them and the arriving Allied forces.96 Three students in their late teenage years from Ungvár claimed to have participated in it: 93   D EGOB Record Number 1582. See also DEGOB Record Number 1994: “I only found out later that we were in mortal danger. The SS Commandant of Weimar had ordered the execution of the whole Lager, however, they did not have enough time anymore. The Americans were already very close and the Lagercommandant of Buchenwald decided to flee. We were thus saved from certain death.” 94  See DEGOB Records Number 162, 1228, and 2132. 95  According to three of the survivors interviewed together, Russian prisoners of war and some French inmates were the key actors in the successful uprising: “Another Frenchmen managed to cut the wires by sacrificing his life. Electricity was gone. Russian prisoners of war got hold of rifles in the nearby ammunition factory and defeated the SS in six hours.” DEGOB Record Number 1232. 96  A version of the self-liberation story held that cooperation between the inmates and the American liberators led to the successful operation: “With hidden weapons and American help, the Häftlings [Inmates] captured 90 percent of the SS men.” DEGOB Record Number 327. The idea that the inmates managed to communicate with their subsequent liberators is also found in DEGOB Records Number 1349 and 2789. An alternative narrative focused on the Spanish inmates of Buchenwald while also assigning a significant role to the Americans: “By this time the white flag flew over the entrance to the camp. In the meantime we found out that the Spanish inmates had managed to cut the high-voltage cables and attacked the SS from behind, getting hold of their weapons. They captured some 200 of them. In subsequent days, the Americans captured the rest.” DEGOB Record Number 2789.

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We took rifles from the external factories into the camp somewhat earlier and finally rose up against the SS. We were 200 and many of us died. The SS consisted of around 400 men but we got hold of many of their rifles. Having managed to acquire more weapons, we were ultimately victorious.97

Annihilation and Death Camps

By 1944, the Nazi genocide against European Jews had become an open secret. As we have seen in previous chapters, members of the Hungarian Jewish intellectual elite had gathered indicative pieces of information on what had been taking place just outside the borders of their country and some of them even managed to publicize at least some of these in the course of 1942–43. At the same time, ordinary Hungarian Jews were not only deeply shocked, but also taken by surprise when in the course of 1944 they were forced to realize that a project of annihilation was being implemented against their community. Still, it remains underexplored to what extent and how exactly surviving members of this last major European Jewish community to be annihilated by the Nazis managed to articulate key features of the Holocaust in the immediate aftermath of their liberation. Based on the understanding that practically any narrow definition of the unprecedented features of the Holocaust includes references to annihilation or death camps and, more specifically, to the gas chambers,98 the next pages shall approach early postwar discussions of these two novel phenomena in particular.99 For European Jews, the experience of being persecuted by the Nazis also included learning a host of terms, many of which were newly invented or coined to denote products of Nazi evil. The three key terms to be 97   D EGOB Record Number 3497. 98  Such definitions of the unique or unprecedented features of the Holocaust tend to qualify the gas chambers as the crucial means of Nazi annihilation policies, even if a substantial part of Holocaust victims were murdered in various other ways. The scholarly debate on the uniqueness and comparability of the Holocaust now has a substantial history of its own. Among the many recent contributions, see Daniel Blatman, “Holocaust Scholarship: Towards a Post-Uniqueness Era” in Journal of Genocide Research, 17 (2015)/1. 99  It ought to be remembered that such Nazi camps were developed in the course of 1941–42 when the method of gassing started to be applied on the scale of millions. They represented evil innovations of the early 1940s and the terms we use to refer to them were previously unknown. They remain key terms whose origin and early uses deserve special attention.

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analyzed below eminently belong to this category as neither the terms death and annihilation camp, nor that of gas chamber could be familiar from before the Holocaust. Aiming to name these phenomena in Budapest in 1945–46, DEGOB’s interviewees thus had to use terms they newly acquired, which would lead to a partial Germanization of their accounts or result in them employing as yet unfamiliar terms in Hungarian. For the deported from Hungary, their horrific camp experiences constituted multilingual experiences which tended to be coded primarily in Hungarian and German. Whereas most of the thousands of DEGOB interviews were recorded in Hungarian, a substantial portion of them was protocoled in German.100 The DEGOB collection suggests that even in the case of survivors whose primary language was Hungarian, certain facets of their terrible experiences may have been recalled primarily in German. Whereas the substantial minority of German-language accounts found in the collection typically do not draw on Hungarian expressions, Hungarian-language ones tend to employ certain German ones, including that of Vernichtungslager, or annihilation camp.101 Moreover, DEGOB’s protocols with survivors from 1945–46 also recurrently include the terms death camp (mostly in Hungarian) and gas chambers (in both German and Hungarian).102 The German term Vernichtungslager appears in altogether 144 of the DEGOB files.103 Notably, only 45 of these records are in German, whereas the others, amounting to over two-thirds of all cases, are otherwise in Hungarian.104 The 100  In fact, some of the latter may have been conducted in Yiddish, only to be transcribed in German. Other languages, notably French and English, also appear in the collection, though much less frequently than Hungarian or German. 101  The protocols in Hungarian and German tend to use somewhat different nomenclatures. For instance, the German term Vernichtung (annihilation) appears significantly more often than its Hungarian equivalent megsemmisítés, whereas the Hungarian word kiirtás (eradication) can be found more frequently than its literal German translation Ausrottung. 102  The frequency of these concrete references may be contrasted with the sparse use of abstract terms such as tragedy, catastrophe, the persecution of the Jews, or ideological ones such as nácizmus. The concreteness of references may also be illustrated by the fact that Josef Mengele, the physician of Auschwitz-Birkenau who supervised the selection of the arriving masses and whom many Hungarian Jewish interviewees thus had to encounter personally, was referred to much more often than political leaders Adolf Hitler, Miklós Horthy or Ferenc Szálasi. The numbers are 344 versus 89, 41 and 90, respectively. 103  It is spelled correctly in 135 cases and incorrectly in another nine. 104  The term Vernichtung is mostly used in combination with the word Lager, but it does appear in a further forty files in which the expression Vernichtungslager does not. (The verb form vernichtet appears in 35 files.).

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Hungarian adjective megsemmisítő (literally: annihilatory) was also employed in combination with camp in thirteen instances, however, the term was spelled in four different ways, indicating how uncustomary it must still have been at the time.105 On the other hand, the German term Todeslager appears in just two DEGOB records, whereas its Hungarian equivalent haláltábor can be found in 31.106 What is more, the seven alternative spellings of this Hungarian expression together appear in a further 44 instances.107 Even though terms for camp – such as, most importantly, Lager or tábor – are used more frequently in the collection as a whole,108 the categorization of some camps as annihilation or death camp constitutes a highly significant segment of all such sub-categorizations.109 But which camps did these early Hungarian Jewish witness accounts refer to as annihilation or death camps? Unsurprisingly, Vernichtungslager and its Hungarian equivalents were most commonly used with reference to Auschwitz-Birkenau.110 However, a number of other camps were also called Vernichtungslagern more than just a few times. For instance, Bergen-Belsen was categorized as an annihilation camp in nine of these protocols, whereas Gunskirchen – a sub-camp of Mauthausen-Gusen operated in the last stages of the war which served as the last station of horrific death marches and where the majority of inmates were diseased and starving Jews from Hungary – was 105  Camp could be written in German (as Lager) or Hungarian (as tábor). The German term would occasionally be spelled in Hungarian as láger. The various Hungarian forms for Vernichtungslager were megsemmisítő tábor, megsemmisítő láger, megsemmisítő-láger and megsemmisítő lager. 106  The uses of the term halálgyár, Hungarian for Todesfabrik or death factory, offer a similar case: it is found in three cases, though the German term was not used at all. These three cases refer to Auschwitz (DEGOB Record Number 3551), Kőszeg (DEGOB Record Number 2380) and to the German death factories in plural (DEGOB Record Number 3651). The term was used as the title of a Hungarian book released in 1945: Vilma Sz. Palkó, A német halálgyárak (Budapest: Gábor Könyvek, 1945). 107  These versions are halál-tábor (three instances), halálláger (sixteen), halál-láger (seven), halál láger (two), halállager (five), halál-lager (eight), halál lager (three). 108  They were used in altogether 1828 and 1143 files, respectively. 109  The terms for Vernichtungslager appear almost as frequently (in 157 protocols) as the terms for labor camp (Arbeitslager and munkatábor were used in 114 and 97 cases, respectively, munkaláger and munkalager can be found a further nine times) and more often than concentration camp (Konzentrationslager was used 28, while its Hungarian equivalents 89 times). The various terms for Todeslager were used nearly as often as those for Konzentrationslager (77 versus 117 instances). 110  Auschwitz-Birkenau camp appears in this context in altogether 62 instances, i.e. nearly half of all the cases.

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labeled one in eleven.111 Altogether 38 different camps were referred to as annihilation camps in at least one of the protocols.112 The term death camp was used in the collection to refer to an only somewhat shorter list of Nazi camps, twenty-one in all. However, the distribution of referents was significantly different. The expression death camp was used to categorize Bergen-Belsen no less than thirty times, much more often than any other Nazi camp.113 Somewhat unexpectedly, Gunskirchen received the second most mentions in this respect too. The third most common reference concerned the camp operated in the Hungarian border town of Kőszeg.114 All other Nazi camps were categorized as death camps in three or fewer instances.115 Whereas the frequency with which camps were labeled annihilation or death 111  They are closely followed by Ebensee (with six mentions), Ravensbrück (with five), Stutthof and Gross-Rosen (with four). 112  A great number of camps were called Vernichtungslager in three or fewer instances. They are Buchenwald, Dörnau, Kaufering, Mauthausen, Ohrdruf (three instances), Landsberg and Nordhausen (twice), Berga am Elster, Blechhammer, Dachau, Donnerskirchen, Dora, Ehrlich, Flossenburg, Halberstadt, Henkel, Krasnow, Ludwigslust, Majdanek, Plaszów, Remsdorf, Salzwedel, Schirokopaz (?), Trautenau, Huta and Demba, Opelo, Meserice and Toschwitz, Oranienburg and Fehrbellin (one instance each). 113  In his recent book on 1945, Ian Buruma wrote that “Images from Belsen were among the first to be published in the Western press, and in Britain Belsen became the main symbol of Nazi mass murder. [. . .] What neither he [Brian Urquhart], nor the other British soldiers, realized was that Belsen was not even an extermination camp.” Ian Buruma, Year Zero. A History of 1945 (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), p. 29. 114  During Arrow Cross rule, a large group of Hungarian Jewish forced laborers struggled to survive in Kőszeg. Many of them died there due to various causes such as starvation, freezing, sickness and some of them were gassed or shot. The exhumations of the early postwar years uncovered 2 400 corpses, however, they remained incomplete and were only continued in the early 21st century. The events that took place in Kőszeg during the last stages of the war would still have to be studied comprehensively. For an important earlier study, see Szabolcs Szita, Halálerőd. A munkaszolgálat és a hadimunka történetéhez 1944–1945 (Budapest: Kossuth, 1989). 115  Notably, the term was used merely twice in connection with Auschwitz-Birkenau. One of these two uses was by a person who had not been deported to it. The other remark was made in the context of a discussion of Buchenwald and stated that Buchenwald was a death camp like Auschwitz. See DEGOB Records Number 836 and 3618. The list of further camps labelled a death camp in one or more protocols is as follows: Mauthausen (three times), Buchenwald (twice), Berg am Elster, Dora, Dörnau, Ehrlich, Hersbruch, Hidegség, Kaufering, Landsberg, Mőhldorf, Ohrdruf, Ostrowosk (exceptionally, the story of Ostrowosk concerns experiences of labor serviceman on the Eastern Front), Kaufbeuren (corrected by the interviewer to Riedelau), Seifenwasser, Spaichingen and Wöbbelin (once).

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camps provided a certain sense of their overall import in the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry, the length of the list also shows the force of personal experiences (with Gunskirchen appearing as the most horribly forceful). How were these kinds of camps described in the DEGOB protocols? Statements on them included quantitative ones, such as on the number of people who died per day. In more than just a few of them, the overall death rate was estimated too with the percent given often surpassing ninety.116 Besides various quantitative indicators, more qualitative descriptions were occasionally used to describe these camps. Some definition-like statements were also made, such as (concerning Gunskirchen) “this was a Vernichtungslager, its purpose was to destroy the Häftlings,”117 (regarding Landsberg) “no work was to be performed here, there was only one task: to die,”118 (regarding Ohrdruf) “all of it served the purpose of our systematic murder and unfortunately they succeeded to a very large extent.”119 These statements clearly show that beyond recounting personal experiences, a number of survivor accounts also related to the functioning of Nazi camps in more holistic ways. It may be true that many of the camps categorized as annihilation or death camp have been described rather briefly without any specific arguments in favor of the use of these novel labels, however, the DEGOB collection as a whole provides quantitative as well as qualitative evidence to justify the distinction between different kinds of Nazi camps. In short, with the help of their interviewers, the thousands of camp survivors made crucial terminological distinctions in a fairly accurate manner and thereby produced original and valuable historical knowledge as early as 1945–46. Both of the analyzed expressions were also employed to contest the more customary categorization of certain camps, specifically the term labor camp. One of the survivors, a twenty-year-old upholsterer from Budapest interviewed at the premises of DEGOB explicitly aimed to challenge the notions of his tormentors, providing the following corrective: “the Germans stated that we were 116  See concerning Demba in DEGOB Record Number 122, Kaufering in DEGOB Record Number 3193, Nordhausen in DEGOB Record Number 1248, and Hersbruck in DEGOB Record Number 3156. 117   D EGOB Record Number 2559. 118   D EGOB Record Number 141. Another argued that in Gross-Rosen “people did not have to work, only go hungry and die.” DEGOB Record Number 610. 119   D EGOB Record Number 323. There was also a unique description of Dachau as an annihilation camp out of function: “We were taken to the Vernichtungslager of Dachau. The goal was to murder all of us, but there was no coal. Gas could not be developed and so they let us go.” DEGOB Record Number 2573.

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merely quarantined, but it was actually a place of annihilation.”120 A seventeen-year-old upholsterer apprentice from Husztsófalva provided a comparable assessment of Mittelbau-Dora: “officially it may have been a labor camp, but in my view it was an annihilation camp. The work duties and their circumstances were such that sooner or later people had to die.”121 In conclusion, while dozens of camps were categorized as annihilation or death camps in this major early postwar collection of interview protocols, three camps – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen and Gunskirchen – have emerged as the most frequent objects of such references. Whereas AuschwitzBirkenau was recurrently called an annihilation camp, but hardly ever a death camp, Bergen-Belsen was called a death camp more than three times as often as an annihilation camp. Somewhat surprisingly, only the much lesser known camp of Gunskirchen, one of the sub-camps of Mauthausen-Gusen, was labeled annihilation as well as death camp at least ten times. Whereas the terminological patterns characterizing the DEGOB collection suggest that the interviewers attempted to impose a level of discursive uniformity, the ways subcategories of camps appear in the individual protocols indicate that different terms circulated in various milieus of survivors. The analysis of the protocols has further revealed that a number of survivors interviewed at the DEGOB offices did not merely reproduce the conventional categorization schemes of their immediate milieu, but employed these novel terms in highly conscious, individualized ways, mostly to contest widespread but, in their eyes, misleading labels.

120   D EGOB Record Number 2730. 121   D EGOB Record Number 1851. Further examples include: “As I saw it, Schirokopaz was an annihilation camp. Officially our work was to develop tank traps, but I quickly noticed that the point was not so much the result, but rather to make us physically worse off every day.” DEGOB Record Number 3001. Another interviewee maintained that Ebensee “was supposedly no annihilation camp, but the result would not have been any different if it had been.” DEGOB Record Number 2197. There was even a specific term, Zweckarbeit (purposeful work), to express the close connection between what was nominally labor and the implementation of annihilation policies: “We already knew that some annihilation camps were disguised as labor camps. In such places purposeful work [Zweckarbeit] had to be done, that is work with the aim of eliminating the workers as quickly as ­possible.” DEGOB Record Number 3208.

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Witnessing the Gas Chambers

What kind of information did survivors convey about the gas chambers at the DEGOB offices and how did they report on their confrontations with their existence? A striking element of numerous records is that witnessing the extermination process was described as an intense multisensory experience. The following excerpt from the interview with a female student from Alistál (Dolný Štál) in Southern Slovakia succinctly shows how exposure to it impacted vario­us sensory organs: It lasted a whole two hours till we were counted. In the meantime, we saw how the chimney of the crematorium was letting smoke out and smelled human flesh burning. At 6 am we were taken to work and saw the arrival of many transports and how the misfortunate ones were taken to the gas chambers. They were undressed and told that they would take a shower. Gas was let into the showering room, which was otherwise a great and beautiful room with mirrors. We often heard their terrible wailing and crying.122 However, reporting on the operation of the gas chambers posed a complex problem even beyond the heavy psychological burden involved.123 As various observers remarked, the Nazi perpetrators purposefully sought to disable detailed testimonies of this means of annihilation, consciously aiming at the whole­sale murder of members of the so called Sonderkommando in particular.124 Beyond the elimination of the chief witnesses’ large majority, leaving testimony was further complicated by the problems of communicability 122   D EGOB Record Number 3532. Emphasis added. The quote also illustrates how recalling the real time experience rather than its immensely difficult later processing tend to define many of these accounts. 123  In the main text, I am not referring to the evident impossibility of witnessing and leaving a testimony of the gas chamber: such actual witnesses were all murdered. 124  See DEGOB Records Number 313, 443, and 1931. Several reports refer to the recurrent elimination of Sonderkommando members in particular, specifying that they were eliminated every three (DEGOB Records Number 80, 3150, and 3177) or six months (DEGOB Records Number 193 and 2817). One of the interviewees discussed the attempted murder of all witnesses that took place just before the clearing of the camp, presenting her escape as a purely accidental exception. DEGOB Record Number 1426. Similarly, another interviewee explained that she was forcibly involved in eliminating the traces of the extermination process and feared she would be murdered because of the insights she had gained. See DEGOB Record Number 2395.

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and even of conceivability. Numerous survivors directly reflected on such issues as early as 1945–46.125 The following citation from the interview protocol of a Subcarpathian woman in her mid-twenties is suggestive of several of the main ones: I am unable to describe it all. All I can say is that all these things were true which today appear impossible to me too. It may all sound incredible and I would not be surprised if normal and sensitive people were to react that these must be the products of a tortured imagination. However, I am convinced that my statements will be confirmed by very many others.126 Despite all the substantial complications related to leaving one’s testimony of the gas chambers, altogether over two hundred interview transcripts include explicit references to this most notorious means of annihilating European Jewry and contain concurrent descriptions of them.127 In light of the fact that more than half of the 3 666 DEGOB records relate personal experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 223 does not appear like an exceedingly large number.128 It thus seems worthwhile to delve deeper into the question which survivors actually made these explicit references.

125  Some interviewees who had been deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau called this camp complex “beyond the conceivable” or stated that they were unable to properly discuss it since “unbelievable” things happened there. For the former, see, for example, DEGOB Record Number 1426, for the latter, DEGOB Record Number 1345. 126   D EGOB Record Number 3177. 127  The Hungarian term gázkamra appears in altogether 163 protocols and its German equivalent Gaskammer in another sixty. Only one of the sixty accounts in which the German term appears is otherwise in Hungarian. While expressions directly related to the gas chambers, such as into the gas (ins Gas in German, gázba in Hungarian), gassing (Vergasung or gázosítás) and the terms for gas-related death (Gastod or gázhalál) appear in a host of instance (156, 57 and 12, respectively), these are beyond the scope of the current investigation – I focus here on explicit references to the gas chambers. I did not manage to find any recurrently used functionally equivalent terms. Minor exceptions are gázosító (which would translate into German as Vergaser) and gázfürdő (gas bath) that appear in nine and three instances, respectively. 128  In other words, even when the reigning conditions and genocidal practices in AuschwitzBirkenau were discussed in some detail, the gas chambers were often not mentioned explicitly. Instead of specifying this crucial component of the Holocaust, Hungarian Jewish returnees frequently either preferred to or could only employ more conventional references, such as to the crematoria, occasionally also in places where it would have been more accurate to refer to the gas chambers. (The Hungarian and German words for crematorium appear in altogether 800 DEGOB files.).

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Since whole families were deported to Auschwitz, only few of whose members managed to survive, it was to be expected that the gas chambers were frequently mentioned as the place where close relatives were murdered.129 This group of interviewees usually did not offer, and probably could not have offered, detailed descriptions of the gas chambers’ functioning.130 The question thus emerges which groups of survivors have actually seen the gas chambers and could offer eye-witness accounts of them?131 First, there are those who reported on having come extremely close to being murdered in them. For instance, several witnesses discussed their escape from what they called the Vorraum of the gas chamber.132 There were also two smaller groups of individuals who reported on the gas chambers either because they were forced to take part in their dismemberment,133 or were shown what was left of them upon liberation.134 Ultimately, the DEGOB collection reveals a strong correlation between the place where the inmates were forced to labor and the types of knowledge they subsequently articulated. The largest segment of testimonies discussing the gas chambers was given by those who had to work, as one of them, a thirtyyear-old female teacher, put it, in the “separate world of the crematorium and the gas chambers.”135 This could either mean the so called Aufräumungskom­ mando or the so called Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau.136 While the 129  See DEGOB Records Number 1, 595, 614, 908, 1149, 1181, 1526, 1547, 1631, 1784, 1932, 2110, 2134, 2136, 2214, 2289, 2379, 2583, 2591, 2808, 2853, 3125, 3524, 3551 and 3593. 130  More often than not, their accounts merely noted the horrific fact that their relatives were murdered there. Some of these interviewees clarified that they were informed about this post factum, in certain cases only upon liberation. See DEGOB Records Number 595, 2583 and 3125. 131  The interviewers for DEGOB were clearly after first-hand information. In accordance, one of the interview protocols states that “even though the gas chamber was described to me, I have not seen it and cannot report on it credibly.” DEGOB Record Number 2257. 132   D EGOB Records Number 1267 and 1547. See also DEGOB Records Number 350, 814, 1887, 3147, and 3148. 133  See, for instance, DEGOB Records Number 407 and 2395. 134  Among the camp inmates who reported on having seen the gas chambers upon liberation, a nurse who had supposedly worked “only two to three meters away from the gas chambers” even claimed to have entered and observed them with “great curiosity.” See DEGOB Record Number 180. A more surprising rendition of similar experiences can be found in DEGOB Record Number 2060. In this protocol, a survivor maintains that SS members showed her the gas chambers which were no longer in use. 135   D EGOB Record Number 313. 136   Sonderkommando is explicitly mentioned in 49 of the files and is variously spelled as Sonderkommando, Sonderkommandó, Sonder-kommando or Sonder-kommandó. The expression Aufräumungskommando does not appear in the files.

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overwhelmingly members of the Aufräumungskommando, frequently referred to as “Brezsinka” and less often as “Kanada” in the protocols,137 had better ­living conditions than other inmates, there was a repeatedly remarked contrast between their relatively bearable living conditions and their daily exposure to the worst horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau.138 The typical testimony given by a former member of the Aufräumungskommando recalled that she had been made responsible for the selection of clothes or packages,139 and thus had to work in close physical proximity to the gas chambers, but did not report on having been to its actual area.140 Some of the accounts were more specific about some of the tasks involved and specified, for instance, that it included selecting the clothes of those sent to the gas chambers or already cremated.141 One of the most cruel and atrocious aspects of Auschwitz-Birkenau was that the Nazis forced Jews, on the threat of death, to be part of the destruction of their own people.142 This horrific policy was enforced, most infamously, through members of the so called Sonderkommando who had to help with the operation of the gas chambers and the crematoria. As mentioned above, the large majority of Sonderkommando members were murdered, nonetheless, 137  Kanada, the Hungarian word for Canada is used in reference to one’s own place in DEGOB Records Number 313, 701, 1513, 2280 and 3125. Brezsinka is the Polish name of Birkenau spelled according to Hungarian conventions. 138  This contrast was emphasized in numerous accounts. See DEGOB Records Number 1272, 1763, 135, 3523, 291, 2464 and 3125. It was in fact rather exceptional to highlight only the negative or the positive aspects of working for the Aufräumungskommando. 139  Selecting clothes is specified in DEGOB Records Number 135, 407, 1426, 1763, 3523, and 3526, whereas selecting packages is mentioned in DEGOB Records Number 1063, 1513, 1569, 1938, 2280, and 2817. According to her interview protocol, one former member explained that her task was to select and package “all the treasures of Europe.” DEGOB Record Number 313. 140  Some of these witnesses, however, reported on having moved between the area of the Aufräumungskommando and that of the gas chambers. One of them explained that she had visited the Vorraum of the gas chambers to take pieces of clothing from there. See DEGOB Record Number 3510. See also DEGOB Record Number 1802. 141  For the former, see DEGOB Records Number 1978 and 3125. For the latter, see DEGOB Records Number 385 and 443. It is worth noting that, while numerous testimonies of former Aufräumungskommando members offered accounts of the locations of extermination, only one of these protocols discuss the issue of witnessing in connection with the profound fear that, according to the Nazi logic, the interviewee would have had to be murdered too. See DEGOB Record Number 2464. 142  One of the protocols explicitly states that Jews being assigned to these places was the single most terrible aspect of all the terrible experiences. DEGOB Record Number 1345.

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a notable cohort of interviewees reported at the DEGOB offices that they had been members.143 Whereas a few of them simply stated this without elaborating what membership implied, others specified at least some of the tasks that had been involved.144 These exceptionally valuable protocols make the DEGOB collection one of the earliest historical sources by survivors on what these atrocious camp functions entailed and what kind of awareness they fostered.145 However, even if a significant cohort of former Sonderkommando members proved willing to speci­fy some of the tasks they had been forced to perform in Auschwitz-Birkenau, their brief and rather descriptive DEGOB accounts tend not to provide more profound insights into their horrific experiences, behavioral patterns, and excruciating dilemmas. The dozens of interviewers might not have realized just how exceptional these interviewees were and seem not to have raised any specific questions when encountering them in their offices, they may also have chosen to refrain from extracting more from these especially wounded survivors.146 143  For more extensive reports of members of the so called Sonderkommando, see Gideon Greif, ‘Wir weinten tränenlos . . .’ Augenzeugenberichte des jüdischen ‘Sonderkommandos’ in Auschwitz (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 2011). 144  Two interviewees reported on delivering wood and a third on delivering coal to the crematorium. See DEGOB Records Number 453, 1017, and 2437. Another interviewee stated that he worked at the crematorium “whose equipment consisted of a huge chimney,” then continued in the third person plural, stating that the naked corpses were put into carts and moved along the tracks to the oven – though then added that he often had to wash the corpses of the victims with his own hands. See DEGOB Record Number 3533. There was even a survivor who explicated that he brought the living to the gas chambers and the dead as well as some who were still alive to be burned in the crematoria. A further witness reported that, for three days, he brought victims into the gas chambers as well as removed their corpses, before continuing that for another six days he was assigned an easier job, by which he meant work at a “more modern” gas chamber where he “merely” had to “beat, direct and rush” people. See DEGOB Record Number 90. 145  The witness accounts of Aufräumungskommando and Sonderkommando members made concurrent points and referenced some of the same events, such as the Sonderkommando revolt, which took place on October 7, 1944. For its discussion, see the following protocols: DEGOB Records Number 193, 313, 380, 600, 1272, 1802, 1931, 2114, 2435, 2678, 3177 and 3183. 146  For much of DEGOB’s interview project, the interviewers were practically overwhelmed by the amount of testimony and unable to pursue individual stories at greater length. How limited the time interviewers were able to devote to individual interviewees during most of their interview project is also indicated by the fact that interviews recorded towards the end of the project – when way fewer survivors arrived per day – tend to be substantially longer. One of the results was that, even though a significant number of

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Other interviewees recurrently discussed how and when they found out about the gas chambers and how they related to this horrific knowledge. Awareness of the gas chambers was so terrible and unsettling that many at first simply refused to believe what they had come to know.147 For instance, one former inmate of Auschwitz-Birkenau, an electrician-mechanician from Pápa in his mid-forties, recalled his outraged protest when first being told about the gas chambers.148 Others focused in their accounts on how gradually they came to accept that the gas chambers truly existed, with some of them specifying how long their incredulity lasted.149 Numerous survivors also remarked on who the inmates were who informed them.150 The knowledge of inmates rarely former Sonderkommando members were interviewed in Hungary as early as 1945–46, the by far most detailed account of the gas chambers in the collection comes from József Nyiszli, a pathologist who belonged to Josef Mengele’s team. See DEGOB Record Number 3632. Nyiszli published his recollections as early as 1946, which has subsequently been translated into multiple languages. In English, see Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account (London: Penguin, 2010). 147  The point about preserving disbelief is made in DEGOB Records Number 271, 343, 826, 1272, 2057, and 3543. 148   D EGOB Record Number 1748. Another account explicated that initially they did not believe in the existence of the gas chambers, but noticing strange smells and repeatedly hearing all the shouting made them “believe what we previously tried to deny even to ourselves.” See DEGOB Record Number 2336. One of the interviewees employs an especially apt phrase when stating that she “started to believe what at first seemed unimaginable.” See DEGOB Record Number 2961. One of the accounts traced a more complex reactive process: it described how fear grew into panic, which in turn gave way to the realization of utter hopelessness and ultimately resulted in a completely resigned attitude. See DEGOB Record Number 1938. 149  For survivors reporting on their gradual process of finding out, see DEGOB Records Number 1441 and 3223. For the latter, see “two weeks” in DEGOB Record Number 1748 and “two months” in DEGOB Record Number 2150. A person who worked as Schreiberin claimed to have gotten to know about the gas chambers in September 1944 when “the selection of the so called Muselmänner started.” DEGOB Record Number 2641. Some reports simple stated that knowledge levels increased over time and victims in the later stages were already generally aware of the chief means of murder. See DEGOB Record Number 1763. 150  Such inmates could either be those who worked at the crematorium or directly where “the gas bath” was operated and “people disappeared”, or those who worked at the washroom where they received the clothes of those already murdered. They could be those who worked in relatively close proximity and thus became eye witnesses. They could also be new arrivals who had already been informed. See DEGOB Record Number 2, 27, 2150, 2525, 2531.

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derived from a single source. Several witnesses explained that by the time they received information from others, they had already been drawing their conclusions.151 Remarkably, three survivors recalled verbal exchanges that informed them about the gas chambers prior to their arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau.152 A number of further interviewees also claimed that they had been aware of the gas chambers when undergoing the infamous round of selection upon arrival.153 Such awareness would, of course, make inmates try their best to avoid further rounds of selections or, was that to prove impossible, do their utmost not to be selected.154 At the same time, some of the more knowledgeable former inmates expressed jealousy of the ignorance of others.155 Some described the negative effects of being aware of the gas chambers such as constant fear and occasional panic attacks.156 One of them, a female tailor from Budapest in her midtwenties, aimed to explain to her interviewer that it was better to die without prior knowledge of what lay ahead.157 Further survivors recalled how awful it felt to view the arriving transports in the full knowledge of what awaited them – and, as one of them added, thereby being constantly reminded of the murder of their close relatives.158

151  See DEGOB Records Number 877 and 1782. 152  One of them was told by an engine driver in Cracow who wanted to acquire some property, another by a Hungarian gendarmerie member at the train station of Košice (Kassa, Kaschau), while a third by a German who wanted to steal his clothes in the latter place. See DEGOB Records Number 1945, 3512, and 3510 in the latter place. 153  See, for example, DEGOB Records Number 1444. 154  See DEGOB Records Number 3315 and 3381. How selections worked was the source of disagreement. People variously claimed that the old and the young (DEGOB Record Number 2872), the old, the young, and the sick (DEGOB Record Number 3145), the weak and the sick (DEGOB Record Number 3524), or simply the sick (DEGOB Record Number 3137) were selected. Others remarked on the element of complete arbitrariness. For this point, see DEGOB Records Number 1426, 2344, 2817, and 3382. Some other accounts maintain that the principle of selection was abolished over time. See DEGOB Records Number 1763 and 3125. One of the accounts claims that during the last phase only important functions could save people from the gas chambers. See DEGOB Record Number 2641. 155   D EGOB Records Number 1802 and 3526. 156   D EGOB Records Number 1087 and 1885. 157   D EGOB Record Number 3487. The interviewee also claimed to have left some of the questions of the newly arrived unanswered to spare them prior knowledge. 158   D EGOB Record Number 3125.

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Conclusion Thousands of Holocaust survivors articulated their experiences of persecution in the offices of the National Relief Committee for Deportees as early as 1945–46, well before the onset of “the era of the witness” as identified by Annette Wieviorka. The resulting Hungarian collection, one of the largest of its kind from the early postwar period, includes substantial corpuses on the typically horrific, but also rather divergent experiences of individual survivors of concentration camps. The case study of altogether 349 survivor accounts of the Buchenwald camp recorded in 1945–46 first characterized the sample of interviewees in terms of their gender, age, locations of their ghettoization and routes of deportation. Beyond quantitative ways of describing the sample, the inquiry focused on various categorizations, descriptions, and assessments of the camp, recollections of the inmates’ condition as well as stories of liberation, resistance, and chance escape. These textual analyses have revealed that horrible train journeys as well as previous camp experiences, most commonly that of Auschwitz-Birkenau, would occasionally provide bases for comparison, which could make Buchenwald appear in a less unfavorable light – in spite of the brutal violence, harsh working conditions, severe hunger, terrible cold, insufficient space, poor hygiene and, ultimately, mass death characterizing it, all of which were recurrently emphasized. Second, the chapter explored how interview protocols with Hungarian Jewish survivors from 1945–46 addressed key features of the Holocaust (avant la lettre), focusing on the question which camps were labeled annihilation or death camps. This terminological exploration has shown that a significant number of accounts not only employed these recently invented terms to refer to novel phenomena, but characterized Nazi camps of this kind in both quantitative and qualitative ways. The linguistic microanalysis concluded that, as a whole, the early postwar collection of the National Relief Committee for Deportees offered crucial distinctions between various Nazi camps. The sheer force of camp survivors’ personal experiences may have led to certain exaggerations and other forms of inaccuracies, but as a group, they conveyed essential historical insights. The project thus largely succeeded at its primary goal, that of documenting the extermination of Jews (with a clear accent on the specific experiences of persecution survivors from Hungary gathered). Last but not least, the chapter has studied how interviewees discussed their awareness of the gas chambers, who or what was identified as the source of this knowledge, and how they described the impact this awareness had on them while still in the camp. Even though most camp inmates addressing the subject explained that they processed this utterly devastating information only

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gradually, a substantial minority of them – most relevantly, surviving members of the so called Aufräumungskommando and the so called Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau – articulated suggestive parts of their horrific knowledge and tended to specify some of their own atrocious tasks. The DEGOB interview collection shows that, in spite of major obstacles (such as those imposed by the very recent nature of often traumatizing experiences, the immense difficulties of verbalizing physical pain and mental suffering, and the lack of well-developed discursive frames), a substantial number of Hungarian Jewish witnesses were able and willing to articulate revealing details of their devastating knowledge shortly after their liberation. The DEGOB collection thus not only offers one of the largest and most precious sample of interview protocols from the early postwar years on the experience of survivors, but sufficiently clarifies what made the Nazi genocide unprecedented in the long human history of mass crimes. It is another matter, which this chapter has made no attempt to discuss, how such insights were received and dealt with in the public sphere of early postwar Hungary where the DEGOB protocols seem to have exerted little notable impact. It shall be the task of the next chapter to explore how the anti-fascist consensus was made through published narratives of survival and why this emerging consensus assigned a rather marginal place to the memory of the annihilation of Hungarian Jews. Analyzing these questions in substance will require diversifying the source base to incorporate the early postwar voices of prominent non-Jewish Nazi camp survivors and compare their specific narratives with those of select Jewish memoirists.

CHAPTER 6

Narrating Survival By 1958, Arthúr Geyer compiled what he intended as the second part of his Magyarországi fasizmus zsidóüldözésének bibliográfiája (Bibliography of the Fascist Persecution of Jews in Hungary).1 The volume in question, the only one Geyer managed to complete, was concerned only with publications from the years after 1945.2 Next to articles originally released in dailies and journals, Magyarországi fasizmus zsidóüldözésének bibliográfiája lists altogether 250 historical, literary, and art books.3 This detailed bibliography thus makes it clear that not only did concrete facets of the Hungarian and Nazi German persecution of Hungarian citizens serve as the subject of dozens of memoirs within a few short years of liberation,4 but the main characteristics of the persecution

1  Arthúr Geyer, Magyarországi fasizmus zsidóüldözésének bibliográfiája (Budapest: A Magyar Izraeliták Országos Képviseletének Kiadása, 1958). In the foreword to his bibliography, Geyer promises content summaries, but his summaries tend to be restricted to the naming of the main topics of individual releases. 2  The Bibliography of the Fascist Persecution of Jews in Hungary was realized with the help of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims. It was published with a foreword by leading Hungarian Jewish scholar Sándor Scheiber. Geyer emphasized that the volumes published right after 1945 presented “fascist oppression authentically” and “without any interference from censors” and he therefore hoped that his bibliography would serve future historians of what he called “the Horthy-Szálasi period” as an indispensable guide. However, the Hungarian authorities did not allow his bibliography to appear on the book market. Only a small number of copies have been deposited in library sections with restricted access. 3  These impressive efforts in Hungary were certainly not independent of the fact that the persecution of most Hungarian-language authors started in 1944, shortly before the end of the war. This meant that their terrible tribulations notwithstanding, they may on average still have been in a slightly better shape than survivors from other countries. However, as we shall see, authors of memoirs tended to be far from the “average survivors” in terms of their status and experience. 4  Some of the internationally most famous Hungarian-language memoirs of the early postwar years are Béla Zsolt’s Kilenc koffer, Ernő Szép’s Emberszag, and Miklós Nyiszli’s Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitzi krematóriumban. In translation, see Béla Zsolt, Nine Suitcases (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), Ernő Szép, The Smell of Humans. A Memoir of the Holocaust in Hungary (Budapest: CEU Press, 1994), Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account (London: Penguin, 2010). The relevant diaries of Sándor Márai and Miksa Fenyő, two leading intellectuals of Hungary were also published as early as 1945–46.

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and extermination of Hungarian Jews were widely discussed in several other genres as well.5 This chapter analyzes seven key autobiographical narratives by Jewish and non-Jewish Hungarians on the experience of deportation and survival in 1944– 45 which were all published in the immediate postwar months of 1945–46. The comparison of these interpretations of personal experiences will aim to answer how come the politically persecuted were in the position to define the mainstream narrative of wartime suffering in Hungary. In other words, this chapter is intended as a contribution to our understanding of how the anti-­fascist consensus was made through personal stories and why this emerging consensus consigned the history and memory of the extermination of Hungarian Jews to a rather marginal position.6 My main sources are – in alphabetical order of their authors – János Fóthy’s (1893–1979) Horthyliget, a magyar Ördögsziget (Horthyliget, the Hungarian Devil’s Island), Sándor Millok’s (1887–1959) A kínok útja (The Tortured Road), László Palásti’s (1903–1979) A bori halálút regénye (Novel of the Death Road of Bor), György Parragi’s (1902–1963) Mauthausen, István Rásonyi’s A halálvonat utasa voltam (I Have Been a Passenger on the Death Train), Károly Rátkai’s (1895–1964) A két torony (The Two Towers), and József Spronz’s Fogoly voltam Auschwitzban (I Have Been a Captive of Auschwitz).7 Whereas these works See Sándor Márai, Napló 1943–44 (Budapest: Révai, 1945) and Miksa Fenyő, Az elsodort ország. Naplójegyzetek 1944–1945-ből (Budapest, Révai, 1946). 5  It is a different matter how widely this information circulated and which layers of Hungarian society were receptive to it. On this question, see Regina Fritz, Nach Krieg und Judenmord. Ungarns Geschichtspolitik seit 1944 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012). (I ought to clarify that early postwar Hungarian publications deal mostly with crimes committed against Hungarian Jews and only some of them offer broader perspectives, even though camp experiences certainly had several transnational aspects as well.) 6  On the making and unmaking of the antifascist consensus during the postwar period, see Dan Stone, Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 7  Beyond memoirs on the experience of deportation and camp life, several authors recalled their terrible experiences of the Hungarian labor service. See István György, Fegyvertelenül a tűzvonalban (Budapest: Cserépfalvi, 1945). Elemér Salamon, A mozgó vesztőhely. Emlékezések (Budapest: Szerzői kiadás, 1946). Oszkár Zsadányi, Mindenki szolgája. Feljegyzések az ­oroszországi és ukrajnai munkaszolgálatosok kálváriájáról (Budapest: Magyar Téka, 1946). Endre Barát, Rabszolgák voltunk. Napló 1942–1943 (Budapest: Cserépfalvi, 1948). There were publications dealing with events at specific localities. On Nyíregyháza: Aladár Király, A nyíregyházi gettó története (Nyíregyháza: Szerzői kiadás, 1946). On Nagyvárad: Béla Katona, Várad a viharban (Nagyvárad: Tealah Kórháztámogató Egyesület, 1946). On Sopron: Aladár Erdős, Gestapo! . . . Nyilasok! . . . Deportáltak! Szemtanú riportsorozata a náci gyilkosok és

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articulate comparable experiences, the sample intentionally includes individuals who struggled to survive in various localities: works by authors will be discussed who survived the last year of the war and the Holocaust in some of the most infamous Nazi camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau or Mauthausen, in the Organization Todt-controlled camps around the Serbian mining town of Bor and on “the death road” from there, in an internment camp just outside Budapest as well as in the Eastern parts of Hungary after a successful escape from the deporting train.8 Crucially for the comparison, the sample includes authors who were persecuted on political and on racial grounds.9 More concretely, István Rásonyi and József Spronz were Hungarian Jewish individuals performing labor service in 1944 when their train was unexpectedly diverted to Auschwitz-Birkenau, however, as we shall see, their subsequent experiences radically diverged. László Palásti and János Fóthy were both labeled Jewish and persecuted by other Hungarians, even though the latter was affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church. Three of the memoirists, Sándor Millok, György Parragi, and Károly Rátkai were captured as prominent opponents of the Nazis right after March 19, 1944. Their different political affiliations notwithstanding, they were all deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp. Their elaborate memoirs from 1945 not only address numerous common themes, but also repeatedly refer to their personal acquaintance in the nyilas ­banditák szerepléséről (Sopron: Új Sopron Különnyomata, 1945). Other authors recalled their participation in the resistance or time in hiding. For the former, see Lajos Fehér, Harcunk Budapestért. Fejezetek a magyar ellenállási mozgalom történetéből (Budapest: Szikra, 1946). For the latter, see Lili Fehér, Nem ér a nevem . . . Egy szökött zsidó naplója (Budapest: Szerzői kiadás, 1945). Ágnes Fedor, Különös karnevál (Budapest: Magyar Téka, 1947). 8  Further early postwar works address experiences gathered in Mauthausen, however, the quality of these works does not quite match that of the three to be analyzed. See especially Manó Buchinger, Gestapo banditák bűnhalmaza. Tizennégy hónap a hitleri koncentrációs táborban (Budapest: Szerzői kiadás, 1945) and László Tolnai, Kőszegi végállomás (Budapest: Vörösmarty, 1947). 9  Beyond their high quality, these seven memoirs were chosen with several criteria of representativeness in mind. Even so, the list of works to be analyzed necessarily remains selective. The greatest omission is probably the lack female authors. Even though most of the early memoirs were written by men, there was a substantial minority of female ones among them. For some of the most significant works, see Teri Gács, A mélységből kiáltunk Hozzád! (Budapest: Tábor, 1946) and Teréz Rudnóy, Szabaduló asszonyok (Budapest: Dante, 1947). The representativeness of the sample is further diminished by the fact that five out of the seven authors used to be employed as journalists, even if writers of all sorts were heavily overrepresented among those who published their memoirs. On journalists in the Hungarian resistance in 1944, see Balázs Sipos, “Újságok, újságírók az 1944-es polgári ellenállásban – és emlékezetük” in Múltunk, 2008/1.

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camp, thus offering especially intriguing materials for direct comparison. Their memoirs will be analyzed first to then turn to the specific narratives of survival of four lesser known authors all persecuted as Jews in 1944–45.

The Privileged among the Terrorized

The German occupation of Hungary launched on March 19, 1944 aimed at assuring the continued cooperation of the country. To achieve their goal of pacification, the German invaders quickly moved to arrest key members of Hungarian society they considered politically dangerous.10 Sándor Millok, György Parragi, and Károly Rátkai were among those who immediately appeared on the radar of the Nazi German apparatus of repression. Due to their journalistic-political activities, above all, all three of them were arrested in the earliest phase of this curious occupation by an ally and subsequently deported to Mauthausen. A kínok útja (The Tortured Road), A két torony (The Two Towers) and Mauthausen, their memoirs from 1945 thus primarily recall their very recent experiences of this concentration camp. Their status and position in the Nazi camp may to an extent have differed, but Millok, Rátkai, and Parragi were all members of the small minority of prominent Hungarian inmates.11 They clearly had above average possibilities to observe the concentration camp, whereas their expertise as writers also must have encouraged them to articulate their experiences practically immediately upon liberation. Their in-depth memoirs are exceptionally valuable sources on the main events and everyday life of Mauthausen, which also offer markedly different interpretations of the last year of Nazi rule. By 1944, Sándor Millok (1887–1959) had been active as a social democrat for over three decades. Between 1941 and the spring of 1944, Millok also served as the chief editor of the party daily Népszava.12 According to his memoir A kínok útja (The Tortured Road), the defeat of the Nazi-dominated alliance, 10  On this, now see Szabolcs Szita, A Gestapo tevékenysége Magyarországon 1939–1945 (Budapest: Corvina, 2014). 11  In other words, even though they had to undergo terrible suffering during the last year of the war, they did not belong to the masses of Hungarian citizens whom the Nazis intended to murder in 1944. 12  On the pages of his memoir, Millok describes himself as somebody who devoted ­several decades of study and argument to the Jewish question, the question of the Hungarian ­middle class and that of land reform. Sándor Millok, A kínok útja. Budapesttől Mauthausenig (Budapest: Müller Károly, 1945), p. 37.

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what Millok explicitly called “our victory,” only seemed a matter of time when Hungary was suddenly occupied by its overbearing ally. The narrative of A kínok útja starts exactly at the time of the Nazi German occupation with the author recalling how he pondered the meaning of the event at the time: “We are lost! This is the beginning of the end! The Germans are lost! They have thrown their very last card onto the table! [. . .] The occupation of Hungary? But then the internment, torture and murder of socialists, Jews, and progressive citizens, all that has been happening in Austria, the Czech lands and Yugoslavia, will also take place here. [. . .] The underground struggle of the Hungarian Left, which we have not sufficiently prepared for, will now commence.”13 A kínok útja provided a brief account of how Millok started to organize the Hungarian resistance before his arrest by the Gestapo a mere three days into the occupation, an arrest which, as he did not fail to note, was in evident contravention of Hungarian law. Millok was thus imprisoned in Budapest, but weeks and months passed without the uncertainties regarding his future lessening.14 On July 13, however, Sándor Millok was suddenly deported to Mauthausen. At first, he seemed to have little idea what kind of place he arrived at.15 According to his memoir, Millok would soon encounter some of his old acquaintances in the camp whose sharply distorted features made him almost unable to recognize them. As Millok argued, such shocking encounters made him instantly realize the prevailing conditions in and the overall purpose of this Nazi camp.16

13  Sándor Millok, A kínok útja. Budapesttől Mauthausenig (Budapest: Müller Károly, 1945), p. 10. 14  Millok’s memoir recorded that until his 105th day in prison he was not even interrogated. 15  Millok, A kínok, p. 59. 16   A kínok útja categorizes Mauthausen as a concentration camp, but also quotes the opinion according to which it was “actually a Vernichtungslager.” Ibid., pp. 58 and 62. Unlike Parragi and Rátkai, whose memoirs are to be discussed just below, Millok was at first not among the twelve relatively privileged Hungarians in Mauthausen, but former social democratic leader Károly Peyer soon helped him enter “the more favorable camp number one.” Ibid., pp. 80 and 106. Millok distinguished three groups among the prominent inmates from Hungary, the legitimists, the liberals and the social democrats. Ibid., pp. 67–8. Millok confessed that upon his arrival he strongly believed in the popular front idea and at first aimed to convince members of the Hungarian political elite of it, but had to realize that it was impossible to find common ground with “the legitimist lords.” Ibid., p. 77. Over the question of journalistic ethics, Millok got into an argument with the liberally oriented Rátkai, which made him conclude that “we cannot reach an agreement over basic matters with members of the bourgeoisie who call themselves liberals.” Ibid., p. 112. Millok thereby fully abandoned his ideas of a popular front.

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A kínok útja also reveals how Millok employed some of the dominant discourses of exclusion only to reverse their direction. First of all, he identified the social democrats as true Hungarian patriots. Maintaining that after March 1944, class differences were no longer decisive and there were “only Hungarians versus Germans left,” he labeled all supporters of the German occupiers traitors of their country.17 Moreover, even though Millok was not a practicing Christian, he maintained that the true values of Christianity were to be found in the socialist movement.18 In other words, A kínok útja not only turned the accusation of treason against the Hungarian Right, but also frontally challenged the rightist claim that the Left was anti-Christian. Sándor Millok’s narrative of survival was decisively impacted by his socialist identity. For instance, when the narrator was still imprisoned in Budapest, he explained to one of his comrades that “even if extermination by the Germans was to become our fate, we should not bring shame to our family and party. We shall die, if we have to, but let us die like true socialists!”19 In the socialist hierarchy of values expressed on the pages of his memoir, pride and courage played central roles; Millok’s socialist identity arguably functioned much like national identities tend to. This committed social democrat’s remarks on the Jews belong among the most controversial aspects of his memoir. On the one hand, Millok was eager to depict himself as an expert on the Jewish question and even recalled holding a presentation on the topic in Mauthausen. In the course of his talk, Millok seems to have articulated rather conventional socialist views, such as that under conditions of peace Jews would be assimilated and that the classless society of the future shall not know any Jewish questions. On the other hand, A kínok útja painted a markedly anti-Semitic image of Jewish capitalism,20 and articulated the clearly apologetic perspective that “the true spirit of the 17  Ibid., p. 17. Accordingly, Millok interpreted his deportation to Mauthausen as a consequence of his “anti-German stance.” Ibid., p. 124. 18  Ibid., p. 41. Millok even polemicized that his strong belief in the principles and acts of Jesus Christ led him to the socialist movement. 19  Ibid., p. 20. When recalling how he considered committing suicide in Mauthausen, Millok concluded that “the socialist in me won out in this most desperate inner struggle.” Ibid., p. 105. In the last message Millok was allowed to send to his family, he emphasized that “I do not curse my fate for a single moment that I became a socialist and that it has brought me here. Quite on the contrary, I am genuinely happy that I have done so.” Ibid., p. 65. 20  Millok wrote, for instance, of an “international, global trust [. . .] that was able to get hold of the keys of prisons even in Hitler’s empire in order to liberate [. . .] the capitalist Jew.” Ibid., pp. 110–111. The way Millok interpreted the persecution of the Jews as a “lesson”, which the survivors had to internalize, also appears gravely insensitive. He continued that

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Hungarian people had nothing to do with the persecution of the Jews, nor does it have anything to do with it today.”21 What is more, at one point A kínok útja even depicted the Holocaust as an anti-Hungarian conspiracy. To the question “why the Germans needed to deport the Jews from Hungary” – the formulation of which already ignored the question of Hungarian responsibility –, Millok provided the curious answer that “Hungary had to be deprived of most of its economic experts. Those who mattered in industry and trade had to be exterminated. It was not enough to steal the shares of companies; those who could have helped rebuild what the Germans had destroyed had to be murdered as well.”22 In other words, depending on the context, Jews were depicted as exploiters or as useful economic experts. According to this interpretation, Jewish Hungarians harmed non-Jewish Hungarian through the capitalist system, true Hungarians (socialists) did not harm Jews, only Germans and their lackeys harmed Jews and they thereby also harmed Hungarians. The final part of A kínok útja not only extensively quoted documents detailing various crimes committed in Mauthausen,23 filling the pages of the book with images of the most brutal forms of violence, but also elaborated on the early postwar situation with a focus on the difficulties of return to Hungary. Between 1945 and 1947, Sándor Millok served as head of the governmental committee responsible for returning citizens to Hungary and it is thus unsurprising that his memoir devoted extensive attention to the period when he had to wait “impatiently to return, in unchanged love of the socialist idea and movement, unbroken in spirit and ready to fight again” for his homeland,24 and when, in his assessment, all his fellow liberated inmates also “suffered from terrible homesickness.”25 Millok’s narrative of survival closed with the restatement of his socialist identity. On the last pages of A kínok útja, he declared that he had survived Mauthausen and returned to Hungary in order to continue the fight for a free, democratic, and independent country. “I clenched my fists. I can sense that one of them is going to punch and the other is going to work,” Jews had to oppose attempts at restoring the old order to avoid the continuation of their persecution. Ibid., p. 103. 21  Ibid., pp. 92–3. As he explained, “misery made the Hungarian people into servants” and their servility in turn “made them into instruments of lowly political manipulation”, but the people nevertheless deserved their freedom. Ibid., p. 72. 22  Ibid., p. 93. 23  Ibid., pp. 146–154. 24  Ibid., p. 141. According to the presentation of Millok, prominent Hungarian survivors could not board the ship they had requested since counter-revolutionary agents ­continued to occupy it. 25  Ibid., p. 143.

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Millok expressed some three years before he was to be expelled from the social democratic party for his stance against “workers’ unity.”26 Millok’s similarly prominent journalist colleague György Parragi (1902– 1963) worked for the daily Magyar Nemzet in early 1944.27 In his 1945 book simply titled Mauthausen, Parragi not only intended to describe some of “the main crossroads of his group travel in hell”, but explicitly ambitioned to articulate the response to Nazi persecution of those who were “forced to personally experience the concentration camps, the crematoria and the gas chambers.”28 Similarly to Millok, György Parragi started his narrative in early 1944 when, in his words, “the days of the Nazi beast were already counted,” the entire world was preparing to “get rid of the yoke of slavery” and only in “deeply deceived Hungary” seemed there be no changes at all.29 Aiming to explain the Europewide spread of Nazism in previous years, Mauthausen formulated the following thesis: the swastika was followed by the Deutschmark and whenever this did not prove sufficient “the German force of arms, the German SS would appear too.”30 According to Mauthausen, this logic of Nazi expansion led to March 19, 1944,31 which Parragi called, in full accordance with his sympathies for national independence, “the darkest and most shameful day” of Hungarian history.32 In his words, “the age of deportations” soon followed.33 Parragi’s memoir maintained that on March 19 the responsible Hungarian authorities were not yet aware of “the true essence of the Gestapo and the system of the SS,”34 which “saw the occupation of foreign states as an opportunity 26  Ibid., p. 168. 27  Parragi explains that Sándor Pethő, the chief editor of Magyar Nemzet asked him to move to Budapest. György Parragi, Mauthausen (Budapest: Keresztes, 1945), p. 33. In the Hungarian capital, Parragi supposedly lectured on the “unavoidable defeat of Germany”, on “the unavoidable fall of dictatorships and overbearing powers who aim to achieve hegemony in Europe at the expense of the freedom of other peoples.” Ibid., p. 43. 28  Ibid., p. 22. 29  Ibid., p. 6. 30  Ibid., p. 8. 31  Parragi explained that this might have surprised a wide segment of Hungarian public opinion, but he was not surprised at all since he had been well aware that the Germans could not afford losing Hungary if they intended to continue their military struggle. 32  Ibid., p. 10. György Parragi described the day as “the moment when the host was thrown out of his own property.” Ibid., p. 10. He referred to Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, arguably the most famous Hungarian martyr and hero of the resistance, as “his best friend” and “a fellow fighter.” Ibid., p. 15–16. However, he also explained that Bajcsy-Zsilinszky’s lonesome heroism revealed “the depth of the nation’s misery.” Ibid., p. 18. 33  Ibid., p. 10. 34  Ibid., p. 13.

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to despoil nations, bring people into slavery, forcibly deport the patriots most committed to freedom and independence, and rob and exterminate Jewry.”35 At the same time, Parragi expressed the opinion that the German intervention in Hungary did not only cost “goods, lives, and blood,” but also robbed Hungarians of “their honor.”36 Mauthausen thus depicted the Hungarian nation in 1944 as both victimized and shamed.37 According to his memoir, Parragi belonged to the very first transport from Hungary to be taken “on the road flooded with blood and surrounded by death” with Mauthausen as the final destination.38 Similarly to A kínok útja, Mauthausen recounts the shock its author felt upon his arrival there, stating that “we began to believe what nobody could convince us of back home, namely that gas chambers are not the subject of horror tales but truly exist.”39 At the beginning of Mauthausen, Parragi wrote of the Nazis “burning millions of the deported who belonged to all kinds of nationalities and religions” ­without making any explicit reference to Jewish victims.40 Even if his narrative soon explained that “the worst developments followed whenever Christian and Jews were divided,”41 it did so without specifying these developments and what the difference between the treatment of Jews and Christians consisted of. As opposed to the memoirs of both Sándor Millok or Károly Rátkai (to be analyzed right below), György Parragi invoked only a few aspects of his personal experiences, explaining that he “would be able to recount all the 35  Ibid., p. 13. 36  Ibid., p. 11. Upon March 19, “a selfish, money-craving, careerist, servile generation sold the honor, life, future, and salvation of a nation of a thousand years.” Ibid., pp. 10–11. 37  According to the Christian symbolism of Parragi’s memoir, the nation was deprived of “all signs of its manliness, independence and sovereignty in the way altars are emptied on Maundy Thursday.” Ibid., p. 19. At the same time, Mauthausen articulated a rather ambivalent position on the controversial question of legal continuities across March 19. On the one hand, Parragi opined that the German intervention meant “the complete abolishment of the Hungarian constitution.” On the other, he stated, using suggestive quotation marks though, that “the Regent appointed the Hungarian Quisling ‘constitutionally in a formal sense’ ” when the Parliament committed suicide in an immoral and cowardly manner. He asserted that he did not for a second consider the Sztójay government “a lawfully and constitutionally established government.” Ibid., pp. 20, 21 and 43. 38  Ibid., p. 29. 39  Ibid., p. 50. Parragi qualified Mauthausen as the worst German concentration camp, which Himmler “from the very first moment intended to be a so called Vernichtungslager, an extermination camp” and from where “nobody was allowed to escape alive.” Ibid., p. 56. 40  Ibid., p. 7. 41  Ibid., p. 54.

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horroristic and bloody episodes for days,”42 but that he did not mean to “disturb the souls of his readers.”43 His memoir thus refrained from discussing his tasks and deeds in Mauthausen in detail though made a revelatory remark to the effect that “our duty consisted, among others, of delivering coal for the purposes of the SS.”44 The overall conclusion György Parragi drew from his experiences in Mauthausen was that the “dangers of death made us respect the human being in each other irrespective of race, denomination, nationality, or class.”45 The author also advised how survivors of the Nazi camps needed to be led “by the ideals and warnings of the dead” and not “the political fashions and shaky morals of the living.”46 Whereas the Hungarian pantheon Mauthausen sketched consisted, in accordance with the dominant views in Parragi’s own Small Landholders Party, of rather diverse individuals,47 Parragi also explicitly wanted his murdered fellow inmates to be remembered right next to “the great martyrs of the nation.”48 György Parragi’s memoir from 1945 ultimately called on his readers “never to forget” what had happened so that “terror could suppress freedom no more.”49 Upon his return from Mauthausen in 1945, next to continuing his journalistic work, Parragi also entered the world of politics. Besides serving as editor of the Small Landholders Party’s weekly Igazság (Truth), he became a representative in the Hungarian Parliament. By 1947, Parragi would leave the center-right agrarians to join the Hungarian Pro-Independence Democratic Party, only to emerge as one of the most prominent fellow travelers during the age of high Stalinism.50

42  Ibid., p. 61. 43  Ibid., p. 38. Parragi did explain that the scale of death in the camp “was unimaginable” and the crematoria of Mauthausen could not cope with all the corpses. He elaborated that “the gas chamber was in operation day and night. Perhaps what nonetheless kept us alive was its scale, which was less grand than in Auschwitz where hundreds of thousands of Jews and Russians could be destroyed within a few days.” Ibid., p. 72. 44  Ibid., p. 68. 45  Ibid., p. 54. 46  Ibid., p. 88. 47  Parragi mentioned Mihály Vörösmarty, Sándor Petőfi, István Széchenyi, Lajos Kossuth, Endre Ady, Sándor Pethő and Endre Bajcsy-Zsiliniszky as canonical persons. Ibid., p. 88. 48  Ibid., p. 90. 49  Ibid., p. 90. 50  György Parragi was member of the Presidium of the communist regime between 1951 and 1958.

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A third significant early postwar memoir of Mauthausen was authored by Károly Rátkai (1895–1964), a Calvinist priest, secretary of the Party of Civic Freedom (Polgári Szabadságpárt) headed by Károly Rassay, and a journalist and editor of Esti Kurir since 1937.51 A két torony (The Two Towers) is a detailed work on Rátkai’s shattering experiences in 1944–45, which, similarly to Millok’s A kínok útja, begins, highly symbolically, on March 18, 1944 with Rátkai watching a theatre performance organized by the Hungarian Israelite Cultural Association.52 Mihály Petyke, his colleague at Esti Kurir called Rátkai the next morning with news of the German entry into Hungary,53 a notification which, in his own words, had “the horroristic effect of a shocking surprise.”54 According to his memoir, Rátkai at first pondered whether “Christian journalists would be forcibly removed too and whether the extermination of the Jews would now be continued in Hungary, or would we as citizens of an allied country perhaps enjoy exceptional status?”55 Rátkai soon received a definite answer to his first question: Esti Kurir could be released only twice more and he got arrested on the last day of March 1944.56 On the seventh day of his arrest, Rátkai was then taken, “already tortured in body and soul”, to be interrogated.57 At this point, he still seemed to cherish hopes that he would be left in Hungary.58 The Nazis, however, decided to

51  The protocol of Rátkai’s interrogation supposedly stated that “for quarter of a century he only ever worked for leftist papers, never even for any centrist ones.” Károly Rátkai, A két torony. Magyar politikusok Mauthausenben (Budapest: Génius, 1945), p. 17. Regarding party head Károly Rassay, Rátkai explained that “I could explain to him my personal opinion regarding many subjects here, which I could not have done so honestly back home”, even confessing that “I only really got to know Károly Rassay here in Mauthausen.” Ibid., pp. 98 and 139. 52  Ibid., p. 5. On the history of the Hungarian Israelite Cultural Association, see László Harsányi, Minerva a gettóban. OMIKE művészakció (forthcoming). The title of the memoir refers to the infamous two towers at the entrance to the Mauthausen concentration camp, the symbol of “captivity, blood, and death,” as Rátkai put it. Ibid., p. 33. 53  Petyke also published his memoir about his captivity in the same year as Mihály Petyke, A Gestapo foglya voltam (Budapest, Gábor Áron, 1945). 54  Rátkai, A két torony, p. 6. 55  Ibid., p. 11. 56  According to Rátkai, “the Hungarians, more precisely Jenő Gáspár, delivered everyone to the Germans within a few short days.” Ibid., p. 10. 57  Ibid., p. 15. 58  Towards the end of April, Rátkai was taken to the internment camp of Kistarcsa just outside Budapest where “as the only Christian person present,” he was separated from the others. Unexpectedly, he was soon returned to his Budapest prison. Ibid., p. 24. This chain

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deport him some weeks later and on May 20, Rátkai arrived in Mauthausen.59 Describing the author’s arrival, A két torony immediately stated that “We were a special transport since we belonged among the so called prominent politicians and were thus received with special attention. The Jews were subjected to most of the cursing and were also segregated from us.”60 Being among the prominent inmates had crucial practical consequences since, according to the author’s awareness, “the commandants of the camp received orders from Berlin that Hungarians like us should not be sent to sub-camps and even in the central camp we could only be made to perform lighter work.”61 Trying to account for his eventual survival, Rátkai could thus argue that “despite our terrible suffering, we were relatively fortunate. We arrived in the camp in the last month of the war when, fearing defeat, the murderous lust of the Germans was already somewhat weakened.”62 Rátkai was assigned to the so called Effektenkammer where the stolen belongings of the inmates were ­registered and stored, and where he even had his own desk.63 What is more, the Hungarian Foreign Ministry supposedly placed Rátkai on the list of “the most privileged ones who once a week could receive packages from home. of events must have created an administrative problem, Rátkai argued, and that is why his deportation ended up being postponed for so long. 59  Rátkai explained that he was deported to Mauthausen, alongside Italian diplomats and Jewish politicians of the Rassay party, whereas his party’s leaders were deported two weeks earlier, arriving already on May 5, 1944. Ibid., p. 189. Rátkai thus spent precisely one year in the camp. Ibid., p. 243. A két torony categorizes Mauthausen in various ways: in places Rátkai refers to it as a concentration camp or a “kácett” (KZ spelled in Hungarian), elsewhere he calls it a Vernichtungslager “which could perhaps most aptly be translated into Hungarian as a finishing camp [‘kikészítési’ tabor].” Ibid., p. 144. Moreover, Mauthausen is also called a haláltábor (Ibid., p. 236), halál-tábor (Ibid., p. 126) and a halálláger (Ibid., p. 133) in different places, all three meaning death camp. 60  Ibid., p. 32. 61  Ibid., p. 55. Rátkai summarized his experiences of July 1944 thus “life in the camp was rather bearable for us. If only the crematorium wasn’t fuming all day and all night long! If only we did not have to see so many corpses all day long!” Ibid., p. 96. Later on, the memoirist remarked that “only when we visited the hospital, did we truly understand that we were in a death camp and thanked the Lord to be among the more fortunate ones.” Ibid., p. 133. The memoir noted that he had exceptional opportunities to “look into places, meet people on the way and exchange news.” Ibid., p. 119. Importantly, upon the liberation of the camp, Rátkai was elected president of the self-governing body of Hungarian camp survivors. Ibid., p. 238. 62  Ibid., p. 60. 63  Ibid., p. 81. Regarding his tasks, Rátkai simply noted that he did not have to exert much of an effort. Ibid., p. 63.

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From then on, I was provided with everything I needed [. . .] There were altogether five such inmates in the entire camp,” his memoir reported.64 On the pages of A két torony, Rátkai displayed awareness of the inescapable moral ambiguities of his situation as a privileged Hungarian inmate of Mauthausen, explicating that “We could hope to survive as long as the Hungarian government remained allied to Hitler, but had there been changes in this regard, we would have had to bid farewell to this world.”65 A két torony also related the fierce debates that developed between prominent Hungarians inmates regarding their situation as well as the expected end of the war.66 Rátkai explained that he personally took the stance that the Sztójay government willingly subordinated the country to Nazi i­ nterests.67 Second, he did not share the optimism of others concerning how soon the war would be over.68 In the course of these debates Rátkai also expressed his opinion that “there may be Hungarians among the inhabitants of Hungary, but they have been pariahs for centuries.”69 According to his memoirs, the latter assertion in particular caused a “storm that damaged our entire life in Mauthausen.”70 From then on, aristocrats and democrats (the lords from the casino” and “the proletarians”, as he called them) were supposedly staunchly opposed to each other.71

64  Ibid., p. 78. 65  Ibid., p. 97. Rátkai explicitly raised the unresolvable dilemma: “What should we invest our hopes in, that Hungary would remain an ally of Nazi Germany till the end?” Ibid., p. 138. 66  As Rátkai put it, “the sole questions were how long the war would last and whether it would last longer than our lives.” Ibid., p. 40. 67  Ibid., pp. 36–7. 68  In 1945, Rátkai recalled the latter debate in particular with the professional pride of a journalist. He opined that of all the Hungarians in Mauthausen, “Szvatkó, Parragi and I had the most realistic ideas” and declared that “in general, journalists proved to be more clearsighted than politicians.” Ibid., pp. 118 and 37. His fellow inmates supposedly accused him of pessimism, which he countered in his memoir with the argument that “I was the true optimist since I was preparing myself for the winter with the conviction that I would survive it.” Ibid., p. 130. 69  Ibid., p. 152. 70  Ibid., p. 152. 71  However, elsewhere Rátkai maintained that socialists constituted a separate group. Rather similarly to Millok, A két torony concluded that the group of twelve Hungarians consisted of “such heterogeneous elements” that it was “impossible to imagine any substantial form of national unity.” Ibid., pp. 135 and 147. Rátkai opined that Parragi did not belong to any of the groups. Ibid., p. 152.

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Besides Rátkai’s mixture of left-liberal political values and ethnic radicalism, his religiosity also left a clear mark on his interpretation of the concentration camp.72 In Mauthausen, Rátkai also performed the functions of a priest, holding “simple Calvinist” masses in which, according to his own claim, “all Hungarians participated, irrespective of denomination or race.”73 A két torony also contributed to the raging theological controversy over the presence of God in the Nazi camps. At one point, the book described how “in Mauthausen, in the terrible, bare, cold winter days everyone was fully justified in desperately seeking the Almighty, but could not find Him anywhere.”74 Later on, however, Rátkai explicated that “wherever you find selfless love, God is certainly present” and that this was very much the case in Mauthausen.75 A két torony raised another question of key importance: “Endless masses of innocent people were brought to the slaughterhouse, but who was responsible for these unprecedented campaigns of murder in world history?”76 The ­memoir clearly suggests that Rátkai saw the German people as primarily responsible. At one point, he directly identified them with the SS.77 Concerning the persecution and extermination of Hungary’s Jews, the book of this liberally oriented though ethnicist Calvinist partly simply repeated what the author came to hear from a former Kapo of Auschwitz: “from the middle of June until approximately the end of September ten thousand new inmates, mostly Jews from Hungary, were thrown into the gas chambers on a daily basis. We believed him and it was, unfortunately, literally true.”78 Károly Rátkai emphasized that “the 72  This peculiar combination can probably best be explained by the influence of his heterogeneous Calvinist milieu: Hungarian Calvinism has generated strands of both liberalism and ethnic radicalism. 73  Ibid., p. 111. In A két torony, Rátkai even maintained that he considered himself “glad that I could take part in this communal suffering” and “I could provide consolation to my fellow inmates”, explaining that “if God wills it, even the greatest tribulations can turn into an advantage for you!” Ibid., p. 192. Moreover, he explained that he went through a terrible crisis in the camp, after which his fears and physical pain vanished and he started to sleep much better. Ibid., p. 167. 74  Ibid., p. 191. 75  Ibid., p. 104. 76  Ibid., p. 59. He explicitly remarked that “not only political opponents were murdered there”, but “also those who were simply not Germans.” Ibid., p. 59. 77  “Every member of the SS was a thief and a murderer. A terrible amount of hatred has accumulated in me towards them. I have never expected that I would come to hate a people so much.” Ibid., p. 145. Elsewhere Rátkai explained that “they must be a godless people of murderers to treat sick people like that.” Ibid., p. 131. 78  Ibid., p. 204.

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Jews of Mauthausen always have to be discussed separately since the Hitlerite distinction was most powerfully applied here”,79 adding for the sake of clarification that “I could not understand why they were treated as Jews, they were suffering Hungarians just like me.”80 Rátkai’s A két torony thus explicitly aimed to recognize Jews as a group which was exposed to highly specific experiences of persecution and mass murder while symbolically reincorporating them into the community of Hungarians – the kind of reconciliation neither Sándor Millok, nor György Parragi pursued. Such a nuanced stance in fact made Károly Rátkai rather exceptional among the politically persecuted from Hungary and would soon turn him into an open critic of his Reformed Church.81

On the Devil’s Island, on Tortured Roads

In early 1944, János Fóthy (1893–1979) was a Catholic journalist of “Jewish ­origins” employed at the daily Pesti Hírlap and severely threatened by ­racist anti-Semitism. Similarly to the authors analyzed above, Fóthy published his memoir under the title Horthyliget, a magyar Ördögsziget (Horthyliget, the Hungarian Devil’s Island) already the year after. However, Fóthy started his narrative on April 24, 1944, somewhat later than Millok, Parragi or Rátkai, by which time his name had been removed from the press chamber’s list. It was supposedly no other than the president of the chamber, Jenő Gáspár who reported him to the Állambiztonsági Rendészet (the State Security Force) colloquially known as the Hungarian Gestapo.82 Thus, alongside fifty-three of his journalist colleagues, Fóthy soon received a letter from the Jewish Council to enroll and, as he recalled, he still found it “unimaginable that such commands could be opposed.”83 János Fóthy clarified at the very beginning of his memoir that he never belonged among the “so called ‘prominent Jewish personalities’.”84 He ­stylized 79  Ibid., p. 38. 80  Ibid., p. 153. 81  See Áron Monori, “A szembenézés kudarca. A Haladás ‘holokauszt-vitája’ 1946-ban” in Beszélő, 2004. július–augusztus. Upon his return to Hungary, Rátkai continued as a journalist. Until 1948, he contributed to papers such as Kis Újság and Szabadság. Later he was appointed the head of the press office of the capital city and the chief editor of Fővárosi Közlöny (The Bulletin of the Capital City of Budapest). 82  On the Hungarian State Security Force led by Péter Hain, now see Szabolcs Szita, A Gestapo tevékenysége Magyarországon 1939–1945 (Budapest: Corvina, 2014). 83  János Fóthy, Horthyliget, a magyar Ördögsziget (Budapest: Müller Károly, 1945), p. 11. 84  Ibid., p. 7.

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himself as “just a simple Hungarian journalist, a writer of Jewish origins who for a quarter of a century dared to serve Hungarian culture and European humanity modestly, dedicatedly, even enthusiastically.”85 His misfortune, as he put it, was to have tried to do so in an age when it was sufficient “to be human amidst inhumanity” to become politically suspect.86 Fóthy’s memoir, Horthyliget, a magyar Ördögsziget essentially recounts how he “enjoyed the hospitality of Sztójay-Baky” for four months and one week, being an inmate of what he called “the Hungarian Devil’s Island.”87 Fóthy depicted his internment in the spring of 1944 as part of the Sztójay government’s attempt to “radically solve the Jewish question, the dream of the Swabian majority of the Hungarian middle classes and additional parts of it on the Germans’ payroll.”88 His memoir described what was done to him as sharply opposed to Hungarian traditions and even maintained that Hungarian criminal law did not know the concept of internment camps.89 Being forced to leave his flat in April 1944, Fóthy was first held captive in the building of the Rabbinical Seminary. He was subsequently moved to the Tsuk-telek, another Vorraum of his internment, as he called it.90 On May 10, 85  Ibid., p. 7. 86  Ibid., p. 8. Fóthy’s phrase “to be human amidst inhumanity” (ember az embertelenségben) reproduced the title of a poem Endre Ady wrote during the First World War. 87  Ibid., p. 7. When Fóthy looked at the inmates upon his arrival, “my first thought was that they were like the prisoners of Guyana.” Ibid., p. 36. Later on, he remarked that “Horthyliget was transformed into the Devil’s Island with the accession of the factory-controlling lords to the throne.” Ibid., p. 61. In all likelihood, Alfred Dreyfus was the most famous prisoner of Devil’s Island in French Guyana. On the Dreyfus Affair, see Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island. Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France (London: Allen Lane, 2010). 88  Ibid., p. 4. In these expressions, the externalization of negative aspects of Hungarian political traditions can be detected. Guy Miron presented such attempts as a central feature of Hungarian Jewish thought of the Horthy era in Guy Miron, The Waning of Emancipation. Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011). 89  Ibid., p. 7. In other words, in his interpretation, Jews were interned in 1944 despite, not because of local political traditions. According to Fóthy, chief responsibility lay with László Baky, his former classmate in the Gymnasium of Kaposvár. Regarding who were primarily responsible for Horthyliget, Fóthy appeared much less certain though. See Ibid., p. 56. 90  Fóthy maintained that, next to fellow journalists, Jews were also interned there by the Authority to Control Foreigners in Hungary. He described the latter group thus: “they may have been Jewish citizens of the Czech, Slovak, Austrian, Yugoslav, and Romanian states, but they were, almost without exception, native speakers of Hungarian, of course.” Ibid., p. 24. Fóthy recalled how a completely new life started for him in those days, a life where

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the memoirist was eventually transported to an internment camp right next to the town of Szigetszentmiklós, which was connected to an airplane produ­cing factory and thus played a significant role in the Hungarian war effort.91 His memoir shows how Fóthy at first observed this place from the viewpoint of a Kulturmensch (kultúrember in Hungarian), even expecting that as new inmates they would be greeted with “a certain empathy and respect.”92 Instead, the inmates soon had to go bold and were forced to stay inside even when the bomb alarm went off. As Fóthy recalled, these developments had a shock effect and “made us realize at once why we were brought here: the evident goal of the Sztójay, Baky, Kolosváry-Borcsa, Gáspár gang was to exterminate us.”93 On its subsequent pages, Horthyliget, a magyar Ördögsziget described in detail the psychological and physical consequences of internment.94 The memoir discussed the hard labor inmates had to perform,95 the insufficient provision of food as well as several other highly disturbing aspects of the place. Fóthy focused much attention on the brutal humiliations inmates had to face and their repeated exposure to the danger of death.96 As Fóthy was to be precisely informed later, on July 30, 1944, some 1 200 bombs fell onto the internment camp within the course of twelve minutes. “individual responsibility no longer existed. We could no longer expect good or bad from ourselves, but only from those we were at the mercy of. At the same time, taking care of us became their responsibility too. We could do nothing more than wait for the storm to pass.” Ibid., p. 16. Fóthy’s memoir also quotes the advice of his journalist colleague Jenő Mohácsi, according to which “there is no dignity, no truth and no beauty in this world, and there never has been any. Such concepts have to be denied, if we intend to bear the kind of life ahead of us. [. . .] We should neither think and hope, nor remember and feel.” Ibid., p. 22. 91  Ibid., p. 35. 92  Ibid., p. 28. 93  Ibid., p. 29. He remarked that “I started to think in the past tense only, but how could I have guessed that there will be a time, the time of the Arrow Cross paradise, when all of us would only think in the past tense . . .” Ibid., p. 13. However, Fóthy’s memoir refrained from discussing the months of Arrow Cross rule. 94  Fóthy was also known as a poet and the power of the memoir is partly due to its fine lyricism. 95  He discussed the system of economic exploitation thus: “lord Baky and his accomplices thought of this very well: they made us work in factories for free, we helped the military and they did not even have to provide our meals.” Ibid., p. 42. 96  He assessed the overall impact the experiences had on the inmates’ personality as follows: “suffering may ennoble the grand, exceptional souls, but the average souls lose all their empathy, sentiments, and humaneness. All that remains in them is selfishness, brutishness, indifference.” Ibid., p. 19.

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“What I felt then was no longer just fear, but rather deep sourness resulting from ineffable humiliation. [. . .] those people started to bomb us whose victory I had been praying for day and night and whose bombs were not meant to be aimed at us at all [. . .] I wanted to cry, scream and go mad, but only my heart would beat ever faster and my lips murmured Ave Maria” is how Fóthy described the most dramatic moments of his experience of persecution.97 Not long after this major bombing attack of late July, Hungarian internal policy was moderated, which eventually brought changes to the area around Szigetszentmiklós too. János Fóthy offered a much less elaborate treatment of the days that followed, declaring that “my memory has retained all that happened to us afterwards only as incoherent images, as glimpses into a hellish montage.”98 The only events Horthyliget, a magyar Ördögsziget described in somewhat greater detail were the two Catholic camp masses held in the month of August. Fóthy explained that the visiting priest holding the mass on August 15 “avoided in his embarrassment to even look at the group carrying the yellow star.”99 Fóthy’s resulting sense was that “I was looking for God, but this priest stood between us and wanted to deny our very existence . . .”100 On August 20, however, another priest came to the internment camp to celebrate mass. He “delivered his sermon looking at us almost continuously” and explained that “Saint Stephen knew of no racial difference.”101 This righteous preacher consoled the Catholic author of “Jewish origins” for his grave disappointment five days earlier and restored his faith in the Church. Before the end of August, Fóthy was finally allowed to leave the internment camp and return to Budapest where, to his shock, he encountered an unfamiliar city: “I felt that God had departed from this place and Christ would have to judge its inhabitants.”102 However, his memoir did not discuss the Arrow Cross era, which was to begin soon, conveying only that the author chose to go into hiding.103 Horthyliget, a magyar Ördögsziget closed with Fóthy’s affirmation that it was the grace of God that enabled him to experience the moment of 97  Ibid., p. 78. 98  Ibid., p. 81. 99  Ibid., p. 85. 100  Ibid., p. 85. 101  Ibid., p. 85. 102  Ibid., p. 88. 103  “I preferred to sleep in different place each evening over moving into a yellow star house. Only later could I fully appreciate how right my decision proved,” Fóthy recalled. Ibid., p. 88.

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liberation.104 At the same time, the memoir expressed deep despair, emphasizing that “the school of life I had to attend cannot be mastered.”105 Ultimately, the narrative concluded how the worldview of the author darkened as a consequence of 1944–45. “In the battle between good and evil, between light and darkness, evil will temporarily always have the upper hand,”106 János Fóthy asserted shortly after his liberation. László Palásti (1903–1979) opened his A bori halálút regénye (Novel of the Death Road of Bor) with the remark that even though he had lost his desk back in 1938, the year of the first anti-Semitic law in Hungary, he got convinced by 1944 that “the tyranny of Hitler would soon end and the country would be liberated.”107 In the spring of 1944, Palásti was already enrolled as a labor serviceman but, as he recalled, could not suspect that he would soon be “sold to Hitler” and “be brought to a slaughterhouse like an animal.”108 However, Palásti was soon transported to the Vorarlberg camp operated by the Organization Todt, one of the camps surrounding the infamous copper mine of Bor in Serbia, where he was forced, alongside his fellow labor servicemen, “to pickaxe, smoothen the surface and bring extra soil in order to create railway tracks for Hitler” in the wild mountainous area of South-East Europe.109 The first part of Palásti’s A bori halálút regénye ambitioned to offer “an objective discussion of the atmosphere in which the deported were forced to live.”110 These pages described the Vorarlberg camp through numerous individual character sketches of both the perpetrators and the persecuted, depicted various 104  Ibid., p. 89. He elaborated that at the moment of his writing in 1945, “former exiles with deep wounds” populated the seemingly peaceful homes of his city who, after all their humiliation and “yellow signs of exclusion,” could appreciate all the more what it meant “to carry the blood red flower of freedom above their hearts.” Ibid., p. 89. 105  Ibid., p. 57. 106  Ibid., p. 68. Fóthy also pondered how much his personality changed due to his camp ­experience and how he grew distant from his relatives. He described their late visit to him in the internment camp thus “So many things happened to me, so many things were now in the room which only belonged to me, were my secrets, my entirely separate life. So many fears, so much humiliation, such deep sadness I wanted to keep as my secret, so many dark shadows inside me now, whereas they appeared to be just the same.” Ibid., p. 84. 107  László Palásti, A bori halálút regénye (Budapest: Gábor Áron, 1945), p. 3. 108  Ibid., p. 4. 109  Palásti, Halálút, p. 35. Bor was the subject of further book publications as early as 1945. See László Szűts, Bori garnizon (Budapest: Renaissance, 1945) and Miklós Bánáti, Égő gyűlölet. Organisation Todt 1943–44 (Budapest: Béke Nyomda, 1945). 110  Ibid., p. 42.

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situations and verbal exchanges, and focused extensively on the ­methods of torture, mixing all this with more than a little bit of black humor.111 The second half of the memoir in turn dealt with the events after September 17, 1944 when, alongside thousands of fellow inmates, Palásti was made to leave the camp of Vorarlberg, not suspecting that their fate might become even crueler, not being able to imagine that “there would be Cservenka along the way . . .”112 “Executions at Cservenka”, chapter seventeen, is arguably the key chapter of the entire memoir. Here Palásti recounted how his fellows “were downed by SS bullets on the Hungarian territory of Bácska” even though “they had committed no other crime than that they were born Jewish, or perhaps not even that, but only their fathers or grandfathers.”113 According to Palásti, “altogether 529 people were murdered at Cservenka and only eleven of us survived.”114 A bori halálút regénye also depicted how two Hungarian soldiers wanted to steal the former possessions of the murdered and killed an additional twenty-seven people so that their act of robbery would have no witnesses.115 However, as the author noted, a single witness, Emil Rosenberg managed to survive and report the mass murder.116 The last scene the memoir sketches takes place in Aggteleki street of Budapest at the newly opened office of the deported. The final remarks of the author emphasize that “the suffering of those who accidently managed to 111  See, for instance, sentences such “they were right all along, how did Frici Démán dare to go there when that is what they ordered him to do . . .” Ibid., p. 55. In the interpretation of Palásti, camp society consisted of two main groups: Jews from Subcarpathia who were used to difficult physical labor and intellectuals from other parts of the country who had major difficulties getting accustomed to it. 112  Ibid., p. 63. Some information about the identification strategy of Palásti can be gained from his description of the first part of the march. His memoir explains that at the SerbianHungarian border “we wanted to sing the Hungarian anthem but the guards stopped us with their guns.” To this, he added that “we had to rush across the bridge. We could not feel any joy seeing the Hungarian authorities, the gendarmes, and all the Hungarian signs since we were literally chased into a brick factory.” Ibid., p. 65. 113  Ibid., p. 69. 114  Ibid., p. 71. Palásti finished his description of the road with the following words: “1 587 labor servicemen arrived in the town of Baja. Of the 3 600 men, they were the only ones still alive and maybe some 200–300 more were left behind. 1 800 got killed.” Palásti, Halálút, pp. 75 and 83. 115  Ibid., p. 79. 116  On the problem of unique witnessing in such contexts, see Carlo Ginzburg, “Just One Witness” in Saul Friedländer (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation. Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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survive has not yet ended. Their wounds still hurt and the wounds inflicted on others feel even more painful to them.”117 The closing pages also make explicit one of the main ambitions of this detailed memoir: to publically name deeds and their perpetrators. Regarding Ede Marányi, “the horroristic ruler of Bor”, Palásti declared that “wherever he may be, there shall be no escape for him. Six thousand witnesses demand his punishment. Three thousand survivors and the same number of innocently murdered witnesses are calling out loud.”118 A bori halálút regénye thereby played on the idea that the murdered were the real witnesses while on another level it constructed a single community out of victims and survivors. However, the case against Ede Marányi in Hungary was closed in early 1949 without as much as the passing of a sentence. The former lieutenant-colonel in exile also avoided legal punishment for the rest of his life.119

Diverging Fates

István Rásonyi’s (1909–1988?) rather brief memoir of his unusual experiences in 1944, A halálvonat utasa voltam. Visszaemlékezés 1944-re (I Have Been a Passenger on the Death Train) was published in 1946. The anonymous foreword to the volume already explained that the book would recount “a journey with a fortunate ending in a year of horror and inhumanity.”120 On subsequent pages, Rásonyi narrated how he managed to escape persecution through a courageous act. If this was an exceptional story to be told by a Hungarian Jew about 1944, the way Rásonyi depicted the treatment he received from the Hungarian authorities was equally unusual. István Rásonyi began his story in June 1944 in the middle of the most intense period of mass deportations from Hungary when, as a consequence of the Hungarian military aiming to protect the forces of the country from the

117  Ibid., p. 93. 118  Ibid., pp. 89–90. 119  Ede Marányi died in 1985. On Hungarian citizens in the camp complex of Bor as well as the mass murders during their evacuation, see Tamás Csapody, Bori munkaszolgálatosok (Budapest: Vince, 2012). On the camp complex more generally, see Sabine Rutar, Arbeit und Überleben in Jugoslawien. Regionale Bergbaugesellschaften unter NS-Besatzung (1941–1944/45) (Essen: Klartext, forthcoming). 120  Károly Rásonyi, A halálvonat utasa voltam. Visszaemlékezés 1944-re (Budapest: Horváth, 1946), p. 5.

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occupying Germans, he was called up to perform labor service.121 The period in question is labeled “the German occupation” in this memoir too, but it is characterized as the time when “the mad tyrannical rule of Endre and Baky was exercised in the Hungarian countryside.”122 A halálvonat utasa voltam narrates how Rásonyi and his fellow labor servicemen were ­forcibly removed from their train heading for Jászberény at the Hatvan station and closed into the ghetto that had been established on the territory of the sugar factory of the town.123 When the group of labor servicemen was forced back onto the train, Rásonyi immediately started considering ways to escape and ultimately managed, alongside twelve of his fellow travelers, to jump off the train redirected to Auschwitz-Birkenau.124 The story Rásonyi told arguably took an even more surprising twist at this point. When the narrator got woken by a Hungarian gendarme the next morning, he decided to recount his story in detail to him. This supposedly met the great appreciation of this man of authority. Rásonyi explained that the courage they had shown was subsequently applauded at the gendarmerie station of Emőd too where “even the anti-Semitic young recruits listened to our confession in awe.”125 Hungarian authorities supposedly treated the escaped labor servicemen “very politely” and in an “overly friendly manner.” In Jászberény, the colonel they encountered reacted to their story with the words “very well done, boys!” which, according to the assessment of the author, amounted to “the greatest possible recognition a labor servicemen could hope to receive from representatives of the military in 1944.”126 The author of A halálvonat utasa voltam thus not only escaped the deportations, but according to the depictions of this remarkable, even exceptional memoir, he practically escaped the status of being persecuted as early as June 1944. István Rásonyi emphasized that, even though the subsequent fate of those who had stayed on the redirected train continued to preoccupy his thoughts, he was not yet ready to face the facts.127 As he explained, he could simply not 121  Rásonyi claims that the final destination of the trains may have been unknown, but the suspicion that the journey led to death was difficult to suppress. 122  Ibid., p. 5. 123  The author recalled how Márton Zöldi, one of the chief Hungarian war criminals (who actually acted in an SS uniform at this time), exercised unlimited power and the inmates were “no longer treated as humans by anyone.” Ibid., p. 27. 124  Ibid., pp. 46–7. 125  Ibid., p. 56. 126  Ibid., p. 66. 127  Ibid., p. 67.

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bring himself “to suspect people of such immeasurable crimes.”128 Ultimately, this unusual memoir may have been focused on its author’s courageous deed and its fortunate consequences, but it also affirmed “the silent heroism” of all the incomparably less fortunate Hungarian Jews.129 In the foreword to his memoir Fogoly voltam Auschwitzban (I Have Been a Captive of Auschwitz), József Spronz (b. 1905) announced to his readers that he considered publishing his experiences a moral duty and that he was fully committed to objectivity in describing “what has happened to me, what I have seen, and what I have experienced on my own skin.”130 József Spronz was, like István Rásonyi, among the labor servicemen whom members of the Hungarian gendarmerie removed from their train in Hatvan and whose journey was subsequently redirected to Auschwitz-Birkenau.131 However, Spronz was far less fortunate than Rásonyi. On June 15, after three terrible days on the train, he arrived at the infamous station of the Nazi camp complex. A gendarme warned him at the border station of Kassa that “Germany could only make use of labor force and nothing else had a right to exist there.”132 As Spronz recalled, this statement echoed in his ears until the end of his journey. At the same time, he could never have imagined that seventy percent of his fellow travelers would be murdered immediately upon arrival.133 Having survived the initial round of selection, József Spronz developed contacts to members of the so called Sonderkommando and was soon wellinformed about the Nazi methods of mass executions. Breaking the narrative of 128  Ibid., p. 68. However, A halálvonat utasa voltam does not inform its readers about details of these immeasurable crimes. In fact, rather similarly to the book of Fóthy, it does not even refer to how its author survived the months between the summer of 1944 and his liberation in 1945. 129  Rásonyi called those who remained on the train “precious and decent human beings” who “silently and heroically suffered their fate.” Ibid., p. 68. 130  József Spronz, Fogoly voltam Auschwitzban. Emlékezések (Budapest: Gergely, 1946), p. 3. 131  All we find out about his personal background from the memoir is that József Spronz used to run a leather shop prior to 1944. On his story, see Gershon Shafir, “Joseph Spronz. From the Holocaust to a Safe Shore” in Mark LeVine and Gershon Shafir (eds.), Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 132  Ibid., p. 7. 133  Ibid., p.  8. Fogoly voltam Auschwitzban quoted as “generally shared opinion” that whoever managed to survive the first days “had a chance to survive until the day of liberation.” Ibid., p. 23. At the same time, Spronz explained that it was extremely difficult to resist and escaping was practically impossible, so the only hope was that the Soviets would break through with such speed that the Nazis could not carry out the evacuation of the camp. Ibid., p. 21.

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his personal experiences right after his arrival to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Spronz decided to present these unprecedented features of Nazi crimes. Fogoly voltam Auschwitzban described the camp in detail, listing the different occupations inmates had to practice, sketching the place of women in camp society, and also discussing the characteristics of sexual life. Spronz concluded his description with the words that “all these arrangements aimed at breaking our bodies and souls, at transforming us completely, so that we would seek enjoyment in labor and thus become a useful slave of Nazi society.”134 His awareness of the immense threats led József Spronz to request his assignment to hard labor and he was indeed soon moved from Birkenau to the labor camp of Auschwitz.135 However, he stayed there only some ten days before being reassigned over and over again, first to take care of animals, then to labor in a factory and in the agricultural realm, and later to do construction work. In his memoir, Spronz approximated that he had spent some six weeks on these various tasks when he decided to try and join his friends whose job was to extend the SS canteen. He succeeded and soon carried weighty objects around the camp before unexpectedly getting appointed to cook – ­according to his knowledge, he was among “the first Jewish cooks of Auschwitz.”136 However, Spronz soon had an accident, got hospitalized on October 19, 1944, and was not to leave the hospital again until the liberation of the camp in January 1945. The memoir continued that once all perpetrators seemed to have departed, the author’s sense of duty proved decisive and made him stay with the sick inmates who simply could not be transported.137 Spronz recalled that in the first moments he felt calm, but this feeling was soon replaced by “depressing anxieties.”138 His Fogoly voltam Auschwitzban related how the former inmates of the camp looked into the future “with much trust but also an equal amount of justified fear,”139 and would soon find themselves in front of an executioners’ squad. According to the, likely rather exalted, memories of the author, they escaped certain death almost miraculously, in the very last possible moment.140 134  Ibid., p. 15. 135  His fellow inmates there “still worked under the impression of the methods of 1942”, he claimed, “when no more than forty percent of the people were able to return in the evenings.” Ibid., p. 15. 136  Ibid., p. 27. Spronz added that their promotion to cooks on October 9, 1944 took place in the context of “Aryan-Poles” already being carried off westwards. 137  Ibid., p. 38. 138  Ibid., p. 44. 139  Ibid., p. 40. 140  Ibid., p. 41.

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The memoir recalled how they continued to live in “profound despair and suffocating hope” afterwards, being fully aware how their enemies understood “all surviving Häftlinge to be witnesses and prosecutors in one,”141 and that they thus had to intensely fear every German. József Spronz eventually managed to escape and immediately attempted to return to Budapest, reaching the Hungarian border as early as February 19, 1945.142 Upon his arrival, Spronz decided to launch a pioneering project to docu­ment the camps. He finalized his memoir Fogoly voltam Auschwitzban, which he understood as part of a much more ambitious undertaking, as early as the summer of 1945. He eventually managed to publish the memoir in 1946, on the final pages of which he announced his intention to continue with a Striped Book, “a multilayered, multidimensional collection including all strata and providing an accurate and objective mirror of the deportations.”143 He was to close his Fogoly voltam Auschwitzban, one of the very first Hungarianlanguage books to report in detail about what came to be called the largest cemetery of Hungarian citizens, on a rather personal note, expressing the hope that his “relatives would still return from the German hell and we could dedicate our remaining years to each other in happiness, curing our terrible wounds.”144 Tragically, József Spronz soon found out that his wife and three siblings had all been murdered.145 Conclusion In Hungary, several dozens of Jews and non-Jews who had just survived severe forms of persecution on political or racial grounds published their ­memoirs upon liberation. However, most of their intriguing early postwar narratives have never been studied. This chapter attempted to contribute to the 141  Ibid., p. 42. 142  Spronz maintained that he was “in the very first group of the deported to return to Hungary.” Ibid., p. 47. His memoir mentions that he entered Miskolc first where the local branch of the National Committee interviewed him about his experiences. 143  Ibid., p. 49. Spronz elaborated that multilayered and accurate information needed to be collected to prepare a chronicle of “the deportations.” Ibid., p. 49. He emphasized that “whoever had to experience the deportations qualifies as a colleague of ours in the work of documentation.” (Emphasis in the original.) Ibid., p. 49. 144  Ibid., p. 48. 145  On the further development of his life, see Gershon Shafir, “Joseph Spronz. From the Holocaust to a Safe Shore” in Mark LeVine and Gershon Shafir (eds.), Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

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recuperation of some of the characteristic early autobiographical voices on persecution and survival in the Hungarian language by comparing seven signi­ ficant memoirs from 1945–46. The memoirs of Sándor Millok, Károly Rátkai, and György Parragi all the presented experiences of relatively privileged non-Jewish Hungarian inmates in the Mauthausen concentration camp, but did so with markedly different emphases. What united the narratives of these three prominent journalists was that they all depicted the German occupation of Hungary on March 19, 1944 as the beginning of their tribulations and focused primarily on the responsibility of German perpetrators. Importantly, the three memoirists were all captured by the inva­ ding Nazis already prior to the mass deportation of Jews from Hungary. This was arguably a key factor why these memoirs of their shattering experiences focused only rather marginally on the largest group of victims from Hungary. Károly Rátkai’s memoir provided a notable, even if partial exception to the emerging convention of neglect. Even as A két torony articulated Rátkai’s experiences from a decidedly Calvinist perspective, the author proved significantly more sensitive than his two colleagues in acknowledging the exceptionality of the Hungarian Jewish tragedy. Ultimately, Rátkai managed to address what came to be called the Holocaust without thereby meaning to separate Jews from other Hungarians. On the contrary, Sándor Millok’s A kínok útja was based on the author’s socialist identity and remained insensitive to the unprecedented crimes committed against Jews. The clear independentist sympathies of its author notwithstanding, György Parragi’s Mauthausen painted a multidimensional picture of Hungarian roles in 1944, but similarly failed to devote significant attention to the extermination of Hungarian Jewry. Just like his three more prominent colleagues, János Fóthy worked as a journalist until 1944. Despite his Catholic faith, local authorities decided within a month of the German invasion to put Fóthy into an internment camp as a “racial Jew.” Horthyliget, a magyar Ördögsziget essentially recounted the shock of a Kulturmensch at his grave mistreatment in the camp. The memoir also told a highly symbolic story of the reaffirmation of the author’s Catholic faith and briefly related how he was wise enough to go into hiding with the experience of internment behind him. László Palásti worked as a journalist in earlier years of his life too, but due to the anti-Semitic laws, he lost his position already in 1938. Palásti’s A bori halálút regénye depicted how the author was brought to the Vorarlberg sub-camp of the Bor camp complex as a labor serviceman and was forced to witness the most brutal forms of torture there. Equally importantly, Palásti’s memoir described in detail the infamous “death road” of the evacuated inmates, one of its explicit purposes being to offer testimony on the perpetrators and call for their punishment.

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A halálvonat utasa voltam and Fogoly voltam Auschwitzban, the narratives of István Rásonyi and József Spronz, two Jewish individuals who were also enrolled as labor servicemen in 1944, both begin with the cruel redirection of their train in Hatvan toward Auschwitz-Birkenau. However, their stories subsequently radically diverge. Whereas Rásonyi had the chance to depict his courageous and fortunate escape from the clutches of the Nazis while still in Hungary, the memoir of Spronz offered, beyond recollecting the horrific experiences of its author, one of the first detailed descriptions of AuschwitzBirkenau in the Hungarian language. These seven memoirs of persecution published upon liberation not only provide well-crafted reports on (to use Parragi’s fitting expression) “the main crossroads of group travels in hell”, but also shed light on some crucial differences between early postwar attempts to make sense of such expe­riences. One of the first conclusions to be drawn from the analysis of such differences is that formerly politically persecuted authors, being the first ones to be captured upon March 19, 1944, tended to present the German occupation of their country as the beginning of their tribulations. These prominent non-Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution had already been imprisoned and deported by the time the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews started in early May 1944 and tended to relate only marginally to the genocide committed against European Jews. An equally important conclusion is that the experience of Jewish survivors was not only significantly more diverse than those of the politically persecuted, but that their early postwar memoirs also tended not to express clear political messages. Hungarian Jewish memoirists, unlike their non-Jewish peers, were typically searching for the personal meaning of their exceptional survival rather than connecting the meaning of their persecution to the question of the future direction of their political community. By painting such contrasts and clarifying some of the key reasons behind them, the above analysis was ultimately meant as a contribution to our understanding of how the anti-fascist consensus was made through personal stories of the persecuted and why this emerging consensus consigned the history and memory of the extermination of Hungarian Jews to a rather marginal position.

CHAPTER 7

Interpreting Responsibility Besides the plethora of early oral testimonies and witness accounts analyzed in the previous two chapters, the second half of the 1940s already saw the first Hungarian Jewish attempts to document the recent genocide in a more objective and analytical mode. Whereas some of the volumes released in the early postwar years informed their readers about the novel methods of the Nazi genocide,1 others included conversations with key Hungarian perpetrators.2 By 1946–47, a number of edited volumes were released on the recent experiences of persecution which used diverse interpretative keys, such as religious, anti-fascist, etc.3 What is more, by 1947–48, several Hungarian Jewish monographs on the origins of Nazism and the implementation of the Holocaust were completed. The most significant of these monographs shall be analyzed and compared in this chapter, which, as shall be shown, belong to alternative intellectual traditions. Accordingly, they employ a variety of genres and styles, define the group of perpetrators and even refer to their subject in alternative ways. The monographs in question are Sámuel Lőwinger’s Germánia “­prófétája.” A nácizmus száz esztendeje (“The Prophet” of Germania. The Hundred Years of Nazism), Ernő Munkácsi’s Hogyan történt? Adatok és okmányok a magyar zsidóság tragédiájához (How did it Happen? Data and Documents on the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry), Jenő Lévai’s Zsidósors Magyarországon (Jewish Fate in Hungary), and Endre Sós’s Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus (European

1  See especially Miklós Nyiszli, Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitzi krematóriumban (Nagyvárad: Szerzői kiadás, 1946). English translation: Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account (London: Penguin, 2010). See also Vilma Sz. Palkó, A német halálgyárak (Budapest: Gábor Áron, 1945). 2  See Rezső Szirmai, Fasiszta lelkek. Pszichoanalitikus beszélgetések a háborús főbűnösökkel a börtönben (Budapest: Fauszt, 1946) and István Kelemen, Interjú a rács mögött. Beszélgetés a háborús főbűnösökkel (Budapest: Müller Károly, 1946). 3  See the following collections in particular, Sándor Mester (ed.), A toll mártírjai (Budapest: A Magyar Újságírók emigrált, deportált, internált csoportja kiadó, 1947). Dezső Pór and Oszkár Zsadányi (eds.), Te vagy a tanú! Ukrajnától Auschwitzig (Budapest: Kossuth, 1947). Imre Benoschofsky, Maradék zsidóság. A budai aggok és árvák menházegyesületének évkönyve (Budapest: Officina, 1946).

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Fascism and Anti-Semitism).4 Beyond providing brief overviews of the main contents of these four monographs, this chapter focuses on the stances their respective authors, Sámuel Lőwinger, Ernő Munkácsi, Jenő Lévai, and Endre Sós took on key questions such as the sources and character of genocidal antiSemitism, the responsibility of Hungarian authorities, or the types and consequences of Jewish responses to persecution. The comparison of these equally significant, though rather diverse monographs shall ultimately aim to map the spectrum of early Hungarian Jewish intellectual responses to the Holocaust.

Nazism as Falsified Genealogy

In 1947, Sámuel Lőwinger published Germánia “prófétája.” A nácizmus száz ­esztendeje, an intriguing intellectual historical interpretation of Nazism’s ­origins.5 Lőwinger’s book focused, above all, on attempts that were made prior to 1933 to reevaluate, in a retrograde fashion, the history of religions in general and the impact of Judaism in particular.6 Lőwinger argued that with regard to the latter even the seemingly scholarly contributions of influential German thinkers reached predetermined results. As he put it, “their national goals made it seem necessary to them to underestimate Judaism, so that the foundations of Christianity could be corroded, and the way for a new German national religion would be prepared.”7 Even though Germánia “prófétája” repeatedly distinguished between cultural anti-Semitism, cultural Nazism, and political Nazism, Lőwinger recurrently employed the concept of a new national religion to emphasize their intimate connectedness and thereby locate the key sources of Nazism in the mainstream of German intellectual history. The release of Germánia “prófétája” in 1947 was a significant event not only since this was the very first Hungarian-language book on the origins of Nazism by a Jewish author after the Holocaust, but also because it was penned by perhaps the leading Hungarian Jewish scholar of the age. Its author, Sámuel 4  Relevant works were released in earlier years as well, such as Jenő Lévai’s numerous publications (to be listed below), but also collections of documents such as Béla Vihar, Sárga könyv. Adalékok a magyar zsidóság háborús szenvedéseiből (Budapest: Hechaluc, 1945). 5  Lőwinger called his own study a cultural history, but the type of exploration he offers arguably rather resembles the way intellectual history is conventionally conceived nowadays. 6  In this sense, Lőwinger’s interpretation, all the differences notwithstanding, could be usefully compared to Alon Confino, A World Without Jews. The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 7  Sámuel Lőwinger, Germánia “prófétája.” A nácizmus száz esztendeje (Budapest: Neuwald, 1947), p. 223.

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Lőwinger (1904–1980) was appointed professor at the Rabbinical Seminary of Pest as early as 1931. From that point onward, Lőwinger was also among the editors of Magyar Zsidó Szemle, the most prestigious Jewish scholarly periodical to be published in Hungary, serving as its chief editor in the years 1942 to 1948.8 He was also among the five editors responsible for the Hebrew-Hungarian edition of The Pentateuch and Haftorahs, the major project of the Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat realized between 1939 and 1942.9 Lőwinger was appointed director of the Rabbinical Seminary in 1942 and was to remain in that position practically until his departure to the newly founded state of Israel in 1950.10 He left Hungary for the Jewish state within a few years after the release of Germánia “prófétája” and would spend the last three decades of his life there, his Hungarian-language book from 1947 remaining his major scholarly statement on the intellectual historical place and cultural meaning of Nazism.11

8  In the course of these six years, Magyar Zsidó Szemle was published altogether four times. There was a single volume for the years 1942–45 called volumes 59–62. 9  See Mózes öt könyve és a Haftárák I-V. (Budapest: Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat, 1939– 1942). József Balassa, Henrik Guttmann, Mihály Guttmann, and Simon Hevesi were the other four Hungarian editors. 10  Beyond being among the editors of several memorial volumes dedicated to internationally famed Jewish scholars from Hungary, such as Lajos Blau or Ignác Goldziher, Lőwinger was also involved in writing the history of the Rabbinical Seminary. Sámuel Lőwinger, “Rabbiképzőnk hatvan esztendője” in Magyar Zsidó Szemle, 1937. David Samuel Loewinger (ed.), Seventy Years: a Tribute to the Seventieth Anniversary of the Jewish Theological Seminary of Hungary: 1877–1947 (Budapest: Neuwald, 1948). See Simon Hevesi, Mihály Guttmann and Sámuel Lőwinger (eds.), Tanulmányok Blau Lajos (1861–1936), a Ferenc József Országos Rabbiképző Intézet néhai igazgatójának emlékére (Budapest: Neuwald, 1938). Simon Hevesi, Mihály Guttmann, and Sámuel Lőwinger (eds.), Emlékkönyv dr. Kiss Arnold budai vezető főrabbi hetvenedik születésnapjára (Budapest: Neuwald, 1939). Sámuel Lőwinger and Joseph Somogyi (eds.), Ignace Goldziher Memorial Volume (Budapest: Globus, 1948). Sámuel Löwinger, Alexander Scheiber, and Joseph Somogyi (eds.), Ignace Goldziher Memorial Volume, Vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1958). 11  Before that, Lőwinger also made a contribution to the debate surrounding the publication of István Bibó’s treatise “The Jewish Question in Hungary after 1944” with an article under the same title. See Sámuel Lőwinger, Zsidókérdés Magyarországon 1944 után (Budapest: Neuwald, 1948). For István Bibó’s political writings in English translation, now see István Bibó, The Art of Peacemaking. Political Essays by István Bibó (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). Lőwinger’s best known work from his later years in Israel is probably his co-edited volume David Samuel Loewinger and Bernard Dov Weinryb (eds.), Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Library of the Jüdische-Theologisches Seminar in Breslau (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1965).

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Lőwinger started Germánia “prófétája” by posing as his key questions how could Nazism happen and who was responsible for it.12 In response, he first asserted that the unprecedented crimes that were committed during the Second World War had their roots in “previous centuries”,13 even if “their ultimate realization went beyond even the most shocking plans.”14 Lőwinger’s book thus aimed to present the two world wars as merely the most radical manifestations of a German orientation that had developed over a long period of time and was in permanent opposition to “healthy social development” and the principle of “cooperation among nations.”15 The first chapter of Germánia “prófétája” was titled “Three Revolutions and Three World Wars of a Century and a Half” and introduced some of the author’s ideas on world history.16 Lőwinger essentially offered a comparison between the French, the Russian, and the German revolutions here, stating that even though they had all delivered a “letter of resignation” to Christianity, 12  Lőwinger, Germánia “prófétája.” A nácizmus száz esztendeje (Budapest: Neuwald, 1947), p. 1. 13  Ibid., p. 2. In this sense, the book could also be understood as a continuation of his study Sámuel Lőwinger, Hitlerizmus és bojkottmozgalom a XVI. század második felében (Budapest: Neuwald, 1934), which dealt with the anti-Jewish policies of Pope Paul IV in particular. According to Lőwinger, the German question emerged as a global problem in the mid-19th century when the ambition to unify Germany gave way to a program of global conquest. Ibid., pp. 28–9. In his interpretation, instead of propagating a universal idea, Germans chose to ambition great power status without recognizing international political realities. Ibid., p. 31. Lőwinger thus asserted that “national socialist politics was not the product of the inter-war decades or the 20th century.” Its central ideas gained ground rather gradually and the Second World War should rather be viewed as a renewed German attempt at conquest and domination. Ibid., p. 226. 14  Ibid., p. 5. On the very first page of Germánia “prófétája”, Lőwinger summarized the crimes of Nazism thus: Germany has to be held responsible “for the merciless destruction of open cities, starving millions of prisoners of war as well as for deporting and hanging tens of millions of civilians – women, the elderly, children, the sick.” On the penultimate page, Lőwinger wrote of “more than six million victims of barbarism” and asserted that “the fate of the Jewish people” provided the most tragic proof of “all the suffering and all the blood that had to be shed” due to the world’s ignorance and belated reaction to Nazism. Lőwinger, Germánia, p. 227. It seems worth noting that instead of picturing Nazism as the conspiracy of a narrow clique, Lőwinger argued that “The protagonists and criminal actors in the greatest drama of world history were realizing the will of the decisive majority of the German people.” Ibid., p. 4. 15  Ibid., p. 3. 16  Lőwinger sketched key developments in the “British-American”, Romance, Slavic, and Germanic worlds (without as much as mentioning Hungary).

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“neither the French, nor the Russian revolution turned against the ideals that the Church ought to have represented, if its acts had been in accordance with the essential contents of religion.”17 Consequently, the orientation of these two revolutions was not anti-Semitic either. The origins of Nazi thought, on the other hand, could be traced to the conscious rejection of the French revolution, Lőwinger asserted, and the stance of the German revolution was in fact entirely different both toward Christian ideals and the “Jewish question.”18At the same time, Germánia “prófétája” emphasized that Nazism was intimately connected to Germans’ plagiarized and falsified sense of mission as the chosen people.19 The book’s subsequent chapters studied the debate regarding the creation of Western and European culture. Lőwinger maintained that in searching for culture’s primary sources, modern German scholars had very much been in the vanguard.20 However, their findings happened to show “what an insignificant role Germans actually played in the foundation of European culture.”21 The “map of the spirit” their scholarship drew indicated that European culture had mainly Greek and Jewish roots.22 Emphasizing this in his book on “the hundred years of Nazism,” Sámuel Lőwinger elaborated on one of the main theses of his “The Development of our Traditional Literature in the Mirror of GreekJewish Cultural Relations” released in the IMIT Yearbook of 1943 (and analyzed in chapter two). Lőwinger’s Germánia “prófétája” subsequently discussed those scholars who aimed to destroy this picture and reshape the histories of religions and the human spirit in parallel with novel developments in German politics. Unequivocally presenting Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891), the “prophet” of Germania referred to in the title of the book, as the intellectual founder of Nazism,23 17  Ibid., p. 24. 18  Ibid., p. 25. 19  Lőwinger also explained to his readers that Nazi thinking maintained that the highest ideas of the Bible were not of Jewish origin and Jews were only responsible for the harmful elements in Christianity. 20  Ibid., p. 38. 21  Ibid., pp. 38–9. 22  Ibid., p. 39. 23  Lőwinger explicitly stated that Nazism was born in 1853 when Lagarde held his first ­relevant lecture. Ibid., p. 3. He believed that future scholars would need to trace the history of Nazism “from its founder to the executioners.” Regarding the implementation of the Holocaust, Lőwinger made only brief remarks such as that “the Germans had the chance to show how they conceived of the place of people whose position they were free to determine and whose life chances and rights would be directly decided by their

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Lőwinger explained that some of the most radical political goals were laid down by a famed professional historian of religion.24 Germánia “prófétája” was to devote extended attention to Lagarde’s ideas, so much so that its first half was practically taken up by a detailed presentation of his plans from the second half of the 19th century, with a strong focus on his peculiarly hostile attitude to Judaism. Lőwinger aimed to show in particular that Lagarde intended to exclude Jews from “Eastern” territories that, according to his plans, Germany was meant to conquer. Moreover, Lőwinger asserted that Lagarde may have had slightly different plans for Jews within Germany, but he ultimately aimed at abolishing Judaism as a religion in Germany too in order to terminate the Jewish national group. The author explicated how much Lagarde believed German society could only be properly integrated once a new German national religion had replaced the three old ones, i.e. Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism,25 and repeatedly reminded his readers that the ambition to invent such a new national religion also implied a megalomaniac political

legal views.” Ibid., p. 87. By highlighting Paul de Lagarde’s role in 1947, Lőwinger’s interpretation preceded influential ones, such as Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair. A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961), or Ulrich Sieg, Deutschlands Prophet: Paul de Lagarde und die Ursprünge des modernen Antisemitismus (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2007). 24  Ibid., p. 42. Lőwinger asserted that the development of a specifically “German angle to the results of the history of religions and the spirit” went hand in hand with the “revaluation of political concepts and possibilities.” Ibid., p. 43. Germany was to innovate not only in the political and military realms, but also in the sphere of ethics. Lőwinger underlined that the scholarly and political publications of Lagarde, a world famous Bible scholar, Eastern linguist, and historian of religions, were deeply interconnected. Lőwinger also explicated that there were professional connections, but also professional strife between his alma mater, the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest and Paul de Lagarde. As he put it, the Seminary was the most respected institute of Jewish studies in Europe in the last quarter of the 19th century, which “makes it understandable that when the German ‘national’ spirit made its first attacks against Jewry in scholarship, the counterattack was launched from here.” Ibid., p. 6. 25  Ibid., p. 116. Lőwinger asserted that Lagarde’s fiction of national religion directly opposed two millennia of Christian and three millennia of Jewish teachings. Ibid., p. 134. It was impossible to reconcile Lagarade’s political plans with the spirit of the Bible: the universal ideals of the latter could never have served as the foundation of his Germanic system. Ibid., p. 133. Lőwinger also explained that Lagarde thought of Catholicism and the Jews as the two great international enemies of Germany. In Lagarde’s understanding, both aimed to conquer the world and were thus unavoidably opposed to German plans.

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agenda, the core ambition being nothing less than to make Germany the dominant nation in the world.26 At the same time, Sámuel Lőwinger asserted that Paul de Lagarde wanted Germans to imitate Jews the way he imagined them to be. He argued that Lagarde had been visibly jealous of the sanctity of family traditions among Jews, their supposed racial arrogance, group coherence through laws, disciplined nature, etc. As Lőwinger explained, the Jewish idea of chosenness was incorporated into the Nazi worldview in an entirely mistaken form, since the Jewish tradition did not treat it as a source of pride or entitlement to privileges – for the Jews, chosenness rather implied additional obligations. Lőwinger also maintained that Lagarde had been willing to copy certain Jewish political methods, as he understood them, if only they could contribute to the realization of German imperial plans.27 Germánia “prófétája” thus made a consistent attempt to reverse the terms of the debate on originality, explaining to his readers that it was German ideas that were plagiarized and falsified. Other than Paul de Lagarde, Sámuel Lőwinger consciously refrained from discussing authors whose close connection to Nazism appeared indubitable to him.28 He chose to analyze Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler instead, “two authors whose roles, teachings and relation to the development of Nazism have all been much contested.”29 Furthermore, Germánia “prófétája” focused on select ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud, two authors whose works, to Lőwinger’s knowledge, “have not been discussed in this connection before.”30 However, the basic ambition of these intellectual portraits was similar to that of Lőwinger’s significantly more elaborate one of Lagarde, namely to assert that cultural historical anti-Semitism led to cultural historical Nazism, which in turn resulted in political Nazism.31 26  Ibid., p. 122. 27  Ibid., p. 85. He even asserted, though without providing specific evidence, that the types of political writings included in Lagarde’s Deutsche Schriften had their Jewish source in Spinoza. 28  In this context, Lőwinger mentioned Arthur de Gobineau, Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Erich Ludendorff, and Friedrich Delitzsch by name. Ibid., p. 153. 29  Ibid., p. 153. 30  Ibid., p. 153. 31  In Lőwinger’s words, the first three of the aforementioned authors, i.e. Nietzsche, Spengler and Le Bon, all aimed at “transforming the map of the sky.” As Lőwinger explained, such authors “consciously or unconsciously identified themselves with the opposing culture or its leading representatives, and would have liked to see the people or community to which they felt they belonged in the role in which they imagined their opponents to be.” Ibid., p. 159. Lőwinger approached Nietzsche as a cultural historian and a philosopher of

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Germánia “prófétája” thus provided an intriguing analysis of negationism in the intellectual contest over the impact of Jews. Whereas Lőwinger took a clear stance on the matter of Jewish impact, writing of contemporary Jews as the direct descendants of their Biblical ancestors and asserting that Jewry exerted world historical influence through Christianity, its “daughter religion”, he also offered a wide-ranging interpretation of how professional scholars of the 19th century had reconceived the relationship between Jews and Christians.32 Lőwinger in fact located the cultural roots of Nazism in the modern scholarly study of religions and its reevaluation of both Judaism and Christianity. He maintained that the 19th century scholarly search for origins at first resulted in Christianity being “completely moved over onto the account of the Jews.”33 This happened in a larger cultural context in which the adjective “Jewish” ­ istory, exploring his stance on anti-Semitism, Jewry, Christianity, the democratic idea h and social development. Lőwinger found that in his historical reflections on religions and the spirit, Nietzsche was instinctively hostile to the impact of Jews, concluding that his vision of cultural history was staunchly anti-Semitic. Ibid., pp. 154–66. What is more, he asserted that when Nietzsche attempted his radical subversion of ethical standards, he opposed the unity of humanity and the universality of human rights. Ibid., p. 183. In Lőwinger’s assessment, this not only amounted to cultural historical Nazism, but by infecting the sentiments of intellectual circles, it also prepared the ground for political Nazism. Ibid., p. 182. In sum, whereas Lőwinger maintained that Lagarde consciously invented and explicitly served political Nazism, he thought Nietzsche was rather instinctively drawn to it. In Lőwinger’s interpretation, the overarching ambition of Oswald Spengler was, similarly to Lagarde and Nietzsche, to overthrow the most basic cultural historical formula of the 19th century, according to which the ancient Greeks stood at the origins of science, philosophy, and the arts, and Jews created religious, ethical, and socialistic thought. Ibid., p. 189. What The Decline of the West revealed to Lőwinger was that Spengler’s cultural historical anti-Semitism was significantly broader than his anti-Hellenism. Unready to accept Jewish influence, Spengler did not even include Jewish or Christian cultures among the major ones of world history. Ibid., p. 190. Moreover, according to the vision of history Spengler articulated, a collapse had to precede the development of the fourth millennium’s new culture. In Lőwinger’s final assessment, Spengler thereby “seduced his contemporaries to a dead end.” Ibid., p. 201. According to the interpretation of Germánia “prófétája”, Gustave Le Bon also proved unready to accept the immense power of Jewish ideas and ambitioned to develop a new psychology and view of history. Ibid., p. 202. Even if conventional anti-Semitic sentiments were admittedly “repressed” in Le Bon’s writings, Lőwinger emphasized that these writings displayed a cultural historical anti-Judaism: Le Bon’s starting point, methods and results were ultimately by and large the same as those of Nietzsche and Spengler. 32  Ibid., p. 120. 33  Ibid., p. 157.

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tended to be placed in front of systems of thought or people authors wanted to condemn.34 Sketching such modern scholarly reassessments as well as their larger context, Lőwinger provided an explanation why the new professional histories that Judaized the image of Christianity provoked such vehement attacks. Germánia “prófétája” subsequently showed how German thinkers, eager to undermine the foundations of the established conception of history, constructed alternative genealogies with the ultimate aim of establishing an “authentically German religion.”35 Yearning to develop an “alternative map of the sky”, they started to look for different ancestors and would soon discover their Indo-Germanic and Aryan connections.36 Not only would such German authors conceive of pagan Latin-Greek culture as the achievement of their “race”, but would now also present Persian and Indian cultures as the products of their extended racial community. According to Lőwinger, beyond connecting Christianity to Judaism, ­modern thought also tended to identify Jews with socialism and democracy, and Jews “thus acquired higher values than their German counterparts.”37 Germánia “prófétája” thereby constructed a broad popular front of Jews, Christians, democrats, and socialists engaged in a fierce struggle against their anti-­universalistic and anti-progressive enemies. Penning his book in the shadow of the Holocaust and liberation, Lőwinger seemed convinced that “attempts to enslave humanity” were doomed to fail, even if “the triumph of liberty” might take decades or even centuries.38 The narrative of world history the director of the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest developed in this insightful early postwar intellectual history of Nazism’s origins was thus rather optimistic. Lőwinger believed that humanity was about to enter the fourth

34  Ibid., p. 136. This statement is echoed in David Nirenberg’s major intellectual history of anti-Judaism, see David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism. The Western Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013). 35  As Lőwinger expressed it, this could either imply a return to German mythology or an attempt to create a “Germanen-Bibel.” 36  As Lőwinger noted, this was the time when linguistic concepts were beginning to be applied to peoples and races. 37  Ibid., p. 162. Lőwinger argued that the intellectual innovations Germans would now proudly claim as their own concerned the past and faraway territories, whereas the ­present epoch and the possibilities of the future were clearly connected to the Jewish people. 38  Ibid., p. 227.

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millennium, which would be based on socialistic and democratic principles.39 In the shadow of the unprecedented Jewish catastrophe, Germánia “prófétája” expressed its author’s hope that “the salvation of humanity” would be achieved “in the near future.”40

The Profound Ambivalences of a Key Witness

The implementation of the Holocaust in Hungary on the verge of the total defeat of Hitler’s Germany made prior awareness, its relation to decisions made in 1944, as well as the corresponding levels and types of responsibility into some of the most controversial questions in postwar Hungary. Albeit in markedly different shapes, both the Hungarian political establishment and the Jewish community elites of the war years were extensively scrutinized practically as soon as the war was over. The fatal choiceless choices of the Central Jewish Council during the Holocaust in particular fuelled profound bitterness and led to accusations of the failure of leadership.41 Members of the Council were accused of having betrayed the persecuted masses and, in some cases, even of having collaborated with the Nazis. Ernő Munkácsi (1896–1950) was a leading member of the Hungarian Jewish elite during the Horthy era, including the time of the Holocaust, as well as the early postwar community of survivors.42 His directorship of the 39  Ibid., p. 192. 40  Ibid., p. 228. 41  A single day after the German occupation of Hungary on March 19, 1944, Eichmann’s Sondereinsatzkommando ordered the Jews of Hungary to establish a Central Jewish Council. The invaders aimed to create a body to which they could send their orders and which would be of help to them in their smooth implementation. See Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági, “Compulsion of Bad Choices – Questions, Dilemmas, Decisions: The Activity of the Hungarian Central Jewish Council in 1944” in András Kovács and Michael Miller (eds.), Jewish Studies at the Central European University. Vol. 5 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009). 42  Son of the famed linguist and ethnographer Bernát Munkácsi and a lawyer by profession, Ernő Munkácsi served as chief secretary of the Jewish Community of Pest and as the director of the newly established Jewish Museum between 1934 and 1942. In 1943, Munkácsi released a collection of his studies and articles, which offers key insights into his stance during the years of persecution. See Ernő Munkácsi, Küzdelmes évek . . . Cikkek és tanulmányok a magyar zsidóság elmúlt évtizedéből (Budapest: Libanon, 1943). Having survived the last stages of the war in Budapest and Kistarcsa, Munkácsi was appointed executive director of the National Office of Hungarian Israelites.

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newly e­stablished Jewish Museum and the resulting chief editorship of Libanon between 1940 and 1943 as well as his contributions to the IMIT and the Ararát yearbooks meant that Munkácsi’s ideas during the Horthy era were repeatedly discussed in the first half of this book. As chief secretary of the Neolog Congregation of Pest, Ernő Munkácsi was forced, along with other leaders of the Jewish community, to join the Central Jewish Council, becoming its secretary, a role he was to exercise until the Arrow Cross takeover in mid-October 1944. Although Munkácsi was arguably not among the Council’s most important members – the strategy of the Council being shaped, above all, by Chairman Samu Stern and his two deputies, Ernő Pető and Károly Wilhelm – he also had to face the aforementioned heavy charges. In early 1946, Munkácsi decided to publish his own detailed version of the main events of 1944 in the Jewish weekly Új Élet, which he released in a book format the year after.43 Hogyan történt? Adatok és okmányok a magyar zsidóság tragédiájához (How did it Happen? Data and Documents on the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry) was a seminal, though profoundly ambivalent contributions to the raging debate by a key witness. Munkácsi’s book did not ambition to offer a final assessment and did not purport to be a full and systematic history either. It was much rather intended as an original documentary account of the Holocaust in Hungary (avant la lettre)44 narrated primarily from the perspective of the persecuted.45 Accordingly, Hogyan történt? was based primarily on 43  The book focused solely on the events between March 19 and October 16, 1944. Somewhat curiously, Munkácsi – similarly to János Fóthy’s memoir analyzed above – closed his narrative with the beginning of Arrow Cross rule when, in his words, “the streets of the capital city opened to the pogrom groups” and “the Jewish people of Budapest have never been closer to their death.” Ernő Munkácsi, Hogyan történt? Adatok és okmányok a magyar zsidóság tragédiájához (Budapest: Reinaissance, 1947), p. 244. 44  Munkácsi wrote his book shortly after the war and the expressions Holocaust or Shoah were not yet available to him. Hogyan történt? used a host of concepts practically interchangeably, writing of extermination, destruction, catastrophe, tragedy, but also martyr’s death. 45  In accordance with the focus of his book, Munkácsi stated that “the true protagonist of the tragedy of 1944” was the Jewish people. Munkácsi, Hogyan történt?, p. 145. Munkácsi made a number of explicitly Jewish references in his text, which included several historical analogies. Whereas Hungarian perpetrator László Ferenczy was presented as the successor of Khmelnytsky, the story of Kasztner reminded Munkácsi of a Haggadah illustration while Kasztner’s character was meant to resemble those of David Reubeni, Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank. Ibid., p. 56. What is more, to Munkácsi’s mind, the Holocaust in Hungary echoed “the destruction of Jerusalem”, whereas in Budapest “the wonder of Jericho was repeated the other way round” when “all bastions have fallen, but Jewry survived behind the walls of the capital city.” Ibid., pp. 20 and 179.

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documents of Jewish provenance, mostly from the archives of the National Office of Hungarian Israelites and including the Council’s reports.46 Besides drawing on these sources, Munkácsi added insights from his personal experience, though without discussing his own role in greater depth.47 Even so, the book was clearly intended as a rather apologetic depiction of the Hungarian Jewish leadership and a definite vindication of the author’s former role.48 The explicit aim of Hogyan történt? was to document “key scenes of the darkest crimes ever committed” during what Munkácsi labeled the time of “the German occupation of Hungary.”49 Munkácsi chose to begin his narrative by pointing to the internal causes of Hungarian Jewry’s destruction, such as its 19th century religious schism, the “naïve optimism” of its elite preserved even in the early 1940s, the detachment of this elite from the Jewish masses and its resulting impotence in the face of the genocidal onslaught.50 Besides the cunning methods employed by the Germans, Munkácsi would thus ascribe the fateful choices of the Jewish Council in 1944 to their ignorance, naivety, and lack of foresight. A key point in the book’s narrative was the arrival of the Auschwitz Protocols in Hungary. Munkácsi asserted that its reception had brought about decisive change as it supposedly belatedly dissolved the “sinful optimism” of “the great

46  Munkácsi clarified that he could draw neither on the minutes of the Jewish Council meetings (which got lost), nor on the documentation of their interaction with the Hungarian and the German authorities. Ibid., p. 8. 47  It is telling that Munkácsi preferred to write of himself in the third person and only occasionally switched to the first. The point where he wanted to highlight his own role was related to the preparation of a pamphlet, which, in his interpretation, if released, would have meant the beginning of resistance. Ibid., p. 120. Even though Samu Stern, the head of the Jewish Council decided against issuing it and submitted a request to Prime Minister Döme Sztójay instead, their “Call to Hungarian Christian Society” was nevertheless circulated. Munkácsi was eager to add that he was among those who were investigated after the event. Ibid., p. 124. 48  Munkácsi explicitly argued that he foretold the events and they justified his stance. 49  Ibid., p. 7. 50  Munkácsi depicted Jewish society as unorganized, lacking solidarity, and even including spoilsmen. In the same self-critical vein, he complained that too few Jews committed themselves to “positive Judaism” in Hungary and many even converted. Ibid., p. 136. He also used the comparison with Polish Jewry or, more precisely, with the Warsaw ghetto uprising, to argue that the Hungarian Jewish people possessed “less natural life instinct.” Ibid., p. 119. At the very same time, Munkácsi praised the Zionists for their Realpolitik, emphasizing that they alone made illegal rescue attempts.

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majority” of Hungarian Jews.51 Munkácsi thereby suggested, contrary to the evidence presented in chapter three and four, that until then – and the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands from Hungary had already been implemented at the time – even members of the Central Council had been largely ignorant of the ongoing genocide.52 In this manner, Hogyan történt? would paint a highly critical portrait of Hungarian Jewry, while clearly aiming to exonerate its 1944 leadership from the weightiest accusations.53 Ernő Munkácsi showed in detail how the Jewish Council aimed to rescue the Jewish people through a defensive strategy mixing compliance and petitioning, doing “all that was humanly possible.”54 Munkácsi presented compliance as a choice in favor of the lesser evil and petitioning as revealing the fully agreeable attitudes and intentions of the Council. More concretely, Munkácsi’s overview of the main phase of the Holocaust in Hungary argued that the Jews of Hungary developed altogether seven policy directions in the face of the Nazi genocidal onslaught. Their mainstream choice was to stay in contact with the Germans and try to decrease “friction” that way,55 but then there was also 51  Munkácsi maintained that this document caused “deep horror among the Jews and meant a deep shock for Christians too”, but claimed that the power to act was “absent on both sides.” He nevertheless interpreted the Protocol’s reception in Hungary as bringing about decisive change, curiously arguing that “it became clear all at once that the fate of Hungarian Jewry, its extermination, is also the tragedy of Hungariandom – since defeat in the war appeared certain to all sober minds.” Ibid., p. 111. 52  Munkácsi explicitly claimed – “no matter how incredible this may sound” – that the horrors of the extermination camps and the details of the deportations were not known until the second half of May 1944. Ibid., p. 76. In order to support this improbable thesis, he reminded his readers that not even the name of Auschwitz was known and even stated that “nobody suspected” that the ongoing “reorganization” of the countryside would lead to “the ghettoization, deportation and extermination of Jews.” Ibid., p. 62. All of this, including the emphasis on the Auschwitz protocols, is strangely akin to a recurrent mode of argumentation pursued by Miklós Horthy’s defenders concerning the Regent’s role in 1944. However, Munkácsi revealingly remarked that in early 1944 Hungarian Jews still believed that “all of European Jewry may perish, but we shall not be harmed.” Ibid., p. 78. 53  Munkácsi was eager to underline that even if the Council had acted differently, the results would not have been better. Ibid., 52. At the very same time, he maintained that the scarcity of resistance revealed how sick the community had been. 54  In Munkácsi’s own words, they were “groping in every direction to save what could be saved.” Ibid., p. 53. He also tried to explain that the submissive tone of their petitions was part of a strategic attempt to appeal to the taste and sentiments of Christian intellectuals. Ibid, p. 119. 55  According to his strangely balanced assessment, this choice had both its advantages and disadvantages: it worked against the spread of knowledge and the development

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the path of the Zionists who, in Munkácsi’s own words, “had the most realistic assessment of the situation, the best contacts abroad, and also dared to do the most.”56 Further choices consisted of investing hopes in the Christian Churches, in the Hungarian Ministry of Defense, and in the neutral foreign powers which maintained their diplomatic representation in Budapest. Some controversial Jewish individuals, notably rabbi Béla Berend, lent their support to the policy of “Jewish emigration.” However, in the author’s final assessment, the sole means of saving Hungarian Jewry would have consisted of relying on “the Hungarians,” and mobilizing both “the leftist forces” and “the independently thinking members of the Christian ­middle classes.”57 Hogyan történt? explained that the evolution of the Jewish Council’s behavior in 1944 consisted of four main stages. Munkácsi argued that the first six weeks of the German occupation were characterized by Jewish inactivity, but regular contact were reestablished with the Hungarian authorities during the months of May and June.58 This period ended in early July and was followed by a phase lasting until the Arrow Cross takeover of mid-Oct 1944 characterized by the halting of the deportations before the Jews of Budapest would have fallen victim too. Munkácsi depicted this third phase as shaped by the increased activities of the Christian Churches and some parts of the Christian middle classes.59 In Munkácsi’s interpretation, this phase also saw the gradual decline of the Jewish Council’s authority as the Germans no longer of resistance, but it supposedly proved effective in gaining time and thereby rescuing Budapest Jewry. 56  Ibid., p. 134. In his interpretation, the Holocaust provided special justification for Zionism and also made Hungarian Jews more receptive to it: “The torture of the Gestapo and the gendarmerie, ghettoization, the bitter experiences of deportation made Hungarian Jewry aware of the historical aim of uniting Jews in one country and into one people, where it will not be humiliated and tortured. The dialectics of Zionists reached the Marxian turning point of the ‘Zusammenbruch’.” Ibid., p. 182. 57  Ibid., pp. 14 and 52. However, at another point in the book, Munkácsi explained that the two main forces of resistance in Hungary were the Churches and the neutral foreign ­powers, explicitly admitting that “unfortunately the results of the deepening relationship with the organizations of resistance, the Hungarian leftist strata, lagged behind.” Ibid., p. 59. 58  Munkácsi did not specify that this phase of reestablished relations coincided with the period of mass deportations. At another point, however, he stated that “All the horror of the deportation was connected to the puppet government of Sztójay” – note the use of the expression “puppet government” though. Ibid., p. 224. 59  As mentioned above, Munkácsi refrained from addressing the fourth stage, the months of Arrow Cross rule.

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“trusted” it.60 As he saw it, these months brought a widespread Jewish movement away from the Council’s center in Síp utca and toward the Embassies of neutral countries and the International Red Cross.61 Ernő Munkácsi’s assessment of the causes and evolution of the Holocaust in Hungary was thus rather differentiated, but also profoundly ambivalent. The book explicitly argued that it had been “the last, the fastest, the most general as well as the most brutal” part of the Europe-wide genocidal campaign.62 As its central causes, Munkácsi named plans of “Germanic cultural superiority”, the Hungarian counter-revolution and the rise of “the right-wing Arrow Cross middle class.”63 More concretely, he argued that “the liquidation of Hungarian Jewry” was the result of an agreement between the teams of Adolf Eichmann and László Endre,64 and that four persons, “Adolf Eichmann, László Endre, László Baky and László Ferenczy, the immediate chief executioner,”65 were chiefly responsible for its implementation. What is more, Hogyan történt? directly addressed whether the Germans could have carried out the deportations without Hungarian help. In his response, Munkácsi unequivocally stated that “incontestable facts prove that the way the deportation of Hungarian Jewry took place could only have happened with the fullest cooperation of the Hungarian gendarmerie.”66 60  Ibid., p. 189. 61  Ibid., p. 235. Munkácsi called the process the transfer of the Hungarian Jewish “governing center.”. 62  Ibid., p. 162. 63  Ibid., p. 88. 64  “Now we know that Eichmann and Endre decided about the deportation of Hungarian Jewry at a meeting of the Ministry of the Interior during the first week of April.” Ibid. p. 79. 65  Ibid., p. 156. Munkácsi claimed that Ferenczy provided Eichmann with the armed forces “to round-up, to ghettoize, and to deport.” Ibid., p. 157. 66  Ibid., p. 215. Elsewhere, Munkácsi stated that “hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews, the very best of them, were chased into death trains by Hungarian gendarme.” Ibid., p.236. Hogyan történt? posed the question of continuities in the following terms: “Is it possible that Horthy did not consider [. . .] where ‘the ideas of Szeged’ led after the drunken ‘Christian and national’ slogans, that he did not consider that they led to the world of the numerus clausus and the Jewish laws that denied divine laws and human rights?” Ibid., p. 236. Munkácsi was also eager to explain that the decision to halt the deportations was triggered by the Allied landing in Normandy, the “approach of the Russians” and the attempted Baky putsch and was “not taken in the interest of Jews but merely in order to save themselves, their own power positions, and in the interest of the country they led.” Ibid., pp. 111 and 175.

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However, Hogyan történt? offered an alternative interpretation too. Munkácsi may have asserted that, unlike in other countries occupied by Germany, the state administration had in theory remained an internal Hungarian matter,67 but also claimed that the Hungarian government de facto “removed its protection” from Hungarian Jews and in effect “extradited” them to the Germans.68 Even in retrospect, he wanted to reassure his readers that the governmental notification according to which the Jews would have to submit to the Germans “was neither final, nor an honest one, nor was it the stance of all Hungarian authorities or public figures.”69 Munkácsi thereby provided support for his position (already mentioned above) that “those who fought for the rescue of Hungarian Jews” should have “relied on moderate Hungarian strata whereby the German deportations could have been defied.”70 Munkácsi may have pointed to Hungarian responsibility in a clear manner, but combined such assertions with a strange idealization of the potentiality of Hungarian politics.71 What is more, Hogyan történt? may have emphasized the local share of responsibility for the Holocaust in Hungary, but its author still seemed to believe in the “common fate” of Jews and Hungarians.72 Munkácsi’s book from 1947 would in fact depict the last year of the war as a common tragedy and downfall of Hungarian Jewry and the country as a whole.73 Giving expression to the Hungarian part of his identity, Munkácsi interpreted the events of 1944 as a regrettable loss of reputation for Hungarians, arguing that, if there had been more courageous activities opposing the tragedy, “we [i.e. Hungarians – FL] would not stand so alone, without anybody’s empathy, at the court of judgment of peoples today.”74

67  Ibid., p. 34. 68  Ibid., p. 15. 69  Ibid., p. 71. Tellingly, Munkácsi interpreted Miklós Horthy’s decision of July 6 to finally halt the deportations as “the reawakening of Hungarian sovereignty”, of which, according to his interpretation, there have been “no previous instances” since March 19. Ibid., p. 177. 70  Ibid., p.  72. Hogyan történt? kept on repeating that the only way Hungarian Jews could have escaped was through “awakening” the Hungarian authorities and starting to resist. Ibid., p. 215. 71  Munkácsi would assert within one and the same paragraph that the connection to the Hungarian resistance would have been of decisive importance in saving Hungarian Jewry and that the Hungarian gendarmerie ought to be qualified as the key perpetrators. See especially the last paragraph on p. 112. 72  Ibid., p. 18. 73  As Munkácsi put it, “The stone started to roll and swept away Hungarian Jewry, but also brought the entire country onto the brink of final destruction.” Ibid., p. 53. 74  Ibid., p. 146.

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On the concluding page of Hogyan történt?, however, the Holocaust was again placed into a Jewish religious and national frame. Ernő Munkácsi encouraged members of the Jewish remnant in Hungary to return to their religiosity and peoplehood and also expressed hope that their community would be “spiritually purer, morally more righteous, and stronger in its convictions and popular sentiments” than the “fallen” one of recent years.75 In closing, Ernő Munkácsi quoted Jeremiah’s admonishment of the sins of Jerusalem as well as Theodor Herzl’s prophecy about the grave consequences “the blindness” of Hungarian Jewry would have. Munkácsi’s apologetic and ambivalent narrative thus not only reiterated the idea of a common fate of Hungarian Jews and their country, and pleaded for the renewal of Hungarian Jewry after its crisis and tragedy, but also understood the Holocaust as proof that the Hungarian-born “founding father” of Zionism was essentially correct.

An Integrated History of the Holocaust in Hungary

Jenő Lévai (1892–1983) was arguably the crucial pioneer of Holocaust historiography in Hungary.76 Having just survived the Holocaust, Lévai proved prodigiously productive in the years 1945 to 1948, releasing four relatively brief 75  Ibid., p. 245. 76  A graduate of the Budapest University of Technology and a sports journalist in his youth, Jenő Lévai was captured during the First World War and was forced to spend years in Russian captivity. He was to publish three volumes on these experiences of his during the inter-war years. See Jenő Lévai, Éhség, árulás, Przemyśl (Budapest: Magyar Hétfő, 1933). Jenő Lévai, Éhség, forradalom, Szibéria (Budapest: Magyar Hétfő, 1934). Jenő Lévai, Éhség, panama, Hinterland (Budapest: Magyar Hétfő, 1935). He subsequently managed to establish himself as a journalist, working first for Az Újság and later for the Est papers, popular dailies which opposed the political establishment. During the 1930s, Lévai was also the owner and chief editor of papers such as Magyar Hétfő and Kis Újság and also devoted himself to exploring the history of Hungarian journalism. See Jenő Lévai, Kossuth Lajos néplapjai. A magyar újságírás hőskora 1877–1937 (Budapest: Kis Újság, 1938). As part of his attempt to expose the dealings of the increasingly powerful radical right-wing forces in Hungary, Lévai released a book shortly before the outbreak of the war that aimed to show how intimate their connections were to the German Nazis. See Jenő Lévai, Gömbös Gyula és a magyar fajvédők a hitlerizmus bölcsőjénél (Budapest: Szerzői Kiadás, 1938). During the early years of the Second World War, Lévai served as the editor of the Hungarian Jewish Képes Családi Lap where he devoted significant attention, among others, to the mistreatment of labor servicemen. He also edited several volumes in defense of the Hungarian Jewish community. See Jenő Lévai (ed.), . . . Védelmünkben! Vezércikkek, tanulmányok, vi­tacikkek (Budapest: Képes Családi Lapok, 1942). Jenő Lévai (ed.), Írók, írások . . . : vígasztalás van az irodalomban (Budapest: Faragó, 1943). Jenő Lévai (ed.), Írók, színészek,

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Hungarian-language volumes before the end of 1945, continuing with the publication of three interlinked books in 1946, adding two more before the end of 1947, and then another two in 1948, besides appearing in Swedish and English translations. In 1945, Lévai published a slim volume on László Endre whom he labeled the chief Hungarian war criminal,77 and also told the story of Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, the resistance fighter who quickly became enshrined in the anti-fascist pantheon.78 Right upon the end of the war, his three major themes thus appear to have been fascism, war crimes, and resistance. Lévai may have already put a strong emphasis on anti-Semitism in his earliest postwar writings from 1945 and may even have made recurrent references to the genocide against Jews, but they had not yet emerged as his central preoccupations. In 1946, Jenő Lévai continued with the publication of his complementary black, grey, and white books.79 The black book provided his first overview of the Holocaust in Hungary, whereas the white and grey books were devoted to rescue attempts by Jews and non-Jews, respectively, and intended to offer stories of “great heroism” and “exceptional humaneness.” In the same year, Lévai released his overview of the larger, non-international ghetto in Pest, providing a complex treatment of its story while framing it as the unique “miraculous” survival of a Jewish ghetto during the Second World War.80 By 1947, on the request of the Raoul Wallenberg Committee composed of former colleagues of the world-famous Swedish diplomat as well as individuals who owed their lives to his rescue mission in Hungary, Lévai finished a book on Wallenberg that would soon appear in Swedish translation too.81 énekesek és zenészek regényes életútja a Goldmark-teremig: Az OMIKE színháza és művészei (Budapest: Szerzői kiadás, 1943). 77  Jenő Lévai, Endre László. A háborús bűnösök magyar listavezetője (Budapest: Müller, 1945). 78  Jenő Lévai, A hősök hőse . . .! Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Endre, a demokrácia vértanúja (Budapest: Müller, 1945). 79  Jenő Lévai, Fekete könyv a magyar zsidóság szenvedéseiről (Budapest: Officina, 1946). Jenő Lévai, Fehér könyv. Külföldi akciók magyar zsidók megmentésére (Budapest: Officina, 1946). Jenő Lévai, Szürke könyv magyar zsidók megmentéséről (Budapest: Officina, 1946). In this respect, Jenő Lévai’s work could be usefully compared to that of his Romanian Jewish contemporary Matatias Carp. See, above all, Matatias Carp, Cartea neagră. Fapte şi documente. Suferinţele evreilor din România, 1940–1944 (Bucharest: Societatea Nationala de Editura Dacia-Traiana 1946–48, vol. 1 to 3). 80  Jenő Lévai, A pesti gettó csodálatos megmenekülésének hiteles története (Budapest: Officina, 1946). 81  Jenő Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg regényes élete, hősi kűzdelmei, rejtélyes eltűnésének titka (Budapest: Magyar Téka, 1948). In Swedish: Jenő Lévai, Raoul Wallenberg, hjälten i Budapest (Stockholm: Saxon-Lindström, 1948).

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If this was not plentiful enough, by 1948, Jenő Lévai completed a significantly more elaborate monograph on the Holocaust in Hungary, speaking of Jewish fate (zsidósors) in its title.82 In the same year, he would also release a volume under the title Zsidósors Európában in which he nominally broadened his horizon to the whole continent, though admitted to offering no more than a “representative mosaic” of documents, which in fact mostly related to the international rescue of Hungarian Jews.83 Last but not least, besides the eleven Hungarian-language books he authored between 1945 and 1948, 1948 year also saw Lévai emerge as an international author with the publication of his Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry in Zurich.84 Its temporal scope, thematic diversity, and rich source base all make Jenő Lévai’s Zsidósors Magyarországon an exceptional publication a mere three years after the end of the war. The declared aim of the book was no less than to “provide a summary of the whole question while being objective in tone.”85 On its pages, Lévai indeed touched on a whole row of themes that have preoc­cupied historians since,86 and combined a narrative account with the reproduction 82  Jenő Lévai, Zsidósors Magyarországon (Budapest: Magyar Téka, 1948). 83  Jenő Lévai, Zsidósors Európában (Budapest: Magyar Téka, 1948), Ibid., p. 5. The explicit focus of this work was Central Europe and, more particularly, the Mantello Rescue Mission El Salvador conducted in Switzerland which was led by George Mandel-Mantello, a Hungarian Jewish émigré. 84  Eugene Lévai, Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry (Zürich: Central European Times Publishing, 1948). Lévai’s most productive years were indubitably those between 1945 and 1948, but he made several other important contributions during his lifetime. His impressive early postwar works may have been followed by abrupt silence, but he would return with several further volumes in the 1960s. These volumes included a documentary one released on the occasion of the Eichmann trial: Jenő Lévai, Eichmann in Hungary. Documents (Budapest: Pannonia Press, 1961), a volume on Kurt Becher, Chief of the Economic Department of the SS Command in Hungary, Jenő Lévai, A fekete SS “fehér báránya” (Budapest: Kossuth, 1966), and another on the interventions of Pius XII and the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, Jenő Lévai, Hungarian Jewry and the Papacy: Pope Pius XII did not remain silent (London: Sands, 1968). 85  Jenő Lévai, Zsidósors Magyarországon (Budapest: Magyar Téka, 1948), p. 5. 86  Lévai devoted some of his attention to the impact foreign policy considerations had on internal policy, as well as to the connection between Hungarian revisionist successes and anti-Semitic legislation. Ibid., pp. 22 and 29. He briefly described the socioeconomic consequences of anti-Jewish laws, the military labor service system, and Jewish cultural life during the war years, and addressed the fraught relations between international Jewish organizations and Hungarian Jewry. Ibid., pp. 51–53 and 60. Zsidósors Magyarországon also referred to the infamous Hungarian Institute for Research on the Jewish Question, the destruction of Jewish books orchestrated in 1944, and the massive looting of art works.

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of relevant primary sources without, however, specifying where their originals were located.87

Ibid., pp. 135, 173, and 251. Moreover, Lévai mentioned several specifics of the Holocaust in Hungary such as the humiliating searches Jews were forced to undergo before being deported, or the creation of the so called yellow-star houses in Budapest. Ibid., pp. 139 and 166. His book evoked famous individual cases, such as those of resistance martyr Hannah Szenes and of László Ocskay and his thousands of protected workers, but also that of German major general Gerhard Schmidthuber who provided assistance to Hungarian Jews in the Budapest ghetto. Ibid., pp. 379, 376 and 396. Anticipating further thematic priorities of later decades, Lévai referred to the international press campaign to save the lives of the threatened Jews of Hungary and posed the question, repeatedly raised since, why the train tracks to Auschwitz-Birkenau had not been bombed, even though this could have been done. Ibid., p. 357. 87  The sources quoted or reproduced included perpetrator sources, such as a letter ambassador Döme Sztójay sent in 1943 from Berlin recommending the implementation of the Holocaust in Hungary (Ibid., pp. 48–51); the detailed reports of László Ferenczy, “the leading expert of the deportations” (Ibid., p. 144) from 1944 (Ibid., pp. 151–4); the presentation of László Endre on the “Jewish Question” at the governmental meeting of June 20, 1944 (Ibid., pp. 214–8); Endre’s contemporaneous interview in the Berliner Lokalanzeiger (Ibid., p. 163); and parts of the postwar account of Edmund Veesenmayer, Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary during the Holocaust (Ibid., p.101). Lévai also used various sources of Jewish provenance such as the diary of Central Jewish Council leader Samu Stern (Ibid., p. 168); letters sent by the Council to Minister of the Interior Andor Jaross (Ibid., pp. 112– 6); telegraph messages of Zionist activists Miklós Krausz and Ottó Komoly which were meant to further the cause of rescue (Ibid., pp. 157–8); as well as Jewish leaflets addressing Hungarian Christian society that had been distributed without legal permission in 1944 (Ibid., pp. 164–6). In the course of his attempt to reconstruct the ways Jews were physically attacked, Lévai even employed less conventional historical sources such as ambulance diaries (Ibid., p. 380). Last but not least, he made use of the account of the single witness who survived the horrendous Buda hospital massacres committed under Arrow Cross rule (Ibid., p. 398). Zsidósors Magyarországon also featured some social historical data on Jewish demography, conversion rates and migration. Ibid., pp. 26–27. The appendixes feature documents from the Jewish Council on the ghettos and concentration camps in the countryside; calculations on the cost of the Nazi occupation; protocols concerning Auschwitz-Birkenau and various other Nazi camps; documentation of Arrow Cross crimes based on Court proceedings; documents of rescue attempts by the neutral states with representation in Budapest, the Red Cross and international Jewish organizations; documents on humanitarian help after the end of the war; statistics on the losses of Hungarian Jewry as well as legal documents condemning the persecution of Jews from 1946. Lévai named many of his sources in the text and also included 179 footnotes. However, this proves far from sufficient to identify, let alone to be able to locate many of the sources he used.

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The book consists of four chronologically arranged parts. The first of these discussed the impact of Nazism on Hungarian Jews in the years 1933 to 1943 when, in the words of Lévai, the German Nazis acted as threatening neighbors. The second covered the months of the deportations from Hungary between March 19 and July 10, 1944 when, according to the author’s seemingly unequivocal title, the German Nazis “directly ruled” over these months.88 Similarly to Munkácsi, Lévai devoted extensive attention to the months prior to the Szálasi putsch of mid-October 1944. His large chapter devoted to these months focused, potentially with national-apologetic implications, on Hungarian attempts to liberate the country and its Jewish community from the Nazi German yoke. The last part in turn presented developments during the last months of the war and the Holocaust, reporting on the life and death of Budapest Jews under Arrow Cross rule in particular. A major organizational novelty of Zsidósors Magyarországon was that whereas in 1946 Lévai still divided the story of the Holocaust into three separate volumes (his black, grey, and white books), by 1948 he tried to integrate all major aspects into a single narrative. Zsidósors Magyarországon also assumed clear stances on a host of contested questions related to the Holocaust in Hungary that enable us to study how Lévai revised some of his previous assessments by 1948.89 As compared to his Fekete könyv from 1946, Zsidósors Magyarországon offered four significant interpretative novelties: Lévai took a much more critical stance toward the Jewish Council, devoted added attention to the Zionist role in self-rescue operations, including a discussion of Rezső Kasztner’s acts, covered the rescue missions of neutral states which still operated their embassies in Budapest in 1944–45, and provided detailed documentation of – as well as repeated praise for – the efforts of the Christian Churches. Potentially drawing directly on Ernő Munkácsi’s Hogyan történt? to develop his depiction of the Jewish Council, Lévai first remarked on the unfathomable ignorance they displayed in 1944 and their apparent inability to interpret 88  Lévai excused himself in a clichéd, not to say unconvincing manner when he wrote that “Due to the limited space available, the authentic story of the concentration and deportation of Hungarian Jews from the countryside will unfortunately have to be presented relatively briefly.” Lévai, Zsidósors, p. 97. At the same time, he assigned genocidal intentions to Hungarian ghettoization, claiming that it “aimed at killing as many people as possible.” Ibid., p. 96. 89  Lévai, Zsidósors, p. 6. Zsidósors Magyarországon drew substantially on Lévai’s previous works, especially on his first attempt at an overview of the Holocaust in Hungary relased under the title Fekete könyv in 1946. As Lévai explained in his introduction: “My materials continuously grew. They were further selected and improved. It is only natural that my later works are more accurate and correct than my previous ones.” Ibid., p. 6.

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even the clearest signs. Lévai’s assessment of all this was rather different from that of Munkácsi though: Lévai argued that the shocking naïveté of the Jewish leadership had resulted in “servile behavior”, “exaggerated benevolence aimed at fulfilling all demands and wishes”, even “enthusiastic expert cooperation.”90 Zsidósors Magyarországon went beyond Lévai’s previous valuation that it had proven “fatal” that the Council had not ambitioned to organize Jewish selfdefense and resistance,91 and assigned partial responsibility to its members.92 Even as Lévai still praised the activities of Lajos Stöckler and Miksa Domonkos, members of the Jewish Council during the rule of the Arrow Cross (whom Lévai depicted as heroic leaders in his book on the Pest ghetto), he now concluded that “our fathers” had proven “too weak in the storm.”93 Zsidósors Magyarországon also declared the bankruptcy of Jewish endeavors to assimilate, propagating a new form of Jewish unity that would include close cooperation with the Zionists.94 In accordance, Lévai intended to help improve the reputation of the Zionists and would now assess their wartime role in markedly positive terms.95 For instance, remarking briefly that “no ultimate judgment” could be passed over Rezső Kasztner yet,96 Lévai argued that his efforts “at least” resulted in the rescue of 1 700 people from the clutches of the Nazis,97 for which Kasztner deserved recognition he had not yet received.98 90  Ibid., p. 76. 91  Lévai, Fekete könyv, p.105. 92  “A part of Hungarian Jewry from outside Budapest would have certainly survived, if it had been warned on time and called on to resist”, Lévai concluded his discussion of the Hungarian Judenrat here. Lévai, Zsidósors, p. 83. He elaborated that the undemocratic nature of Jewish community organizations had grave consequences once their leaders were forced to take on the role of political representatives. Ibid., pp. 31–2. Lévai also remarked on the deep divides within Hungarian Jewry and the poverty of the large majority. At the same time, he did not fail to note that there was a modest level of democratization after 1938 as well as more cooperation between different Jewish fractions. Ibid., pp. 57–8. 93  Ibid., p. 403. 94  Ibid., p. 403. Such a statement at the end of the book is all the more intriguing since Lévai opened his narrative with several Hungarian national topoi. See Ibid., p. 7. 95  The discussion of Zionist activities was concluded with the statement that “their work under the label of the Swiss Embassy was the only truly democratic mass movement of self-defense. It merits fair treatment, which it has not yet received.” Ibid., p. 337. 96  Ibid., p. 357. 97  Ibid., p. 357. 98  Ibid., p. 160. However, Lévai extensively quoted Miklós Krausz, secretary of the Palestine Office, who accused Kasztner of having committed several grave mistakes. Ibid., pp. 163 and 275. For his part, Lévai explained that Krausz and Kasztner followed different

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Zsidósors Magyarországon documented the activities of the Christian Churches on more than thirty pages, which amounted to the longest section of primary sources in the entire book.99 The author concluded these pages with the generous assessment that “the vast movement of the Christian Churches doubtlessly impacted members of the government as well as Regent Horthy and made them revise their helpless and indifferent ways.”100 Lévai credited here the efforts of the embassies of neutral countries in novel ways too. As opposed to the almost exclusive praise reserved for the Red Army in his Fekete könyv, Lévai now argued that the survival of a significant part of Budapest Jewry was due to “the victory of the Red Army and the persistent efforts of the neutral embassies.”101 Lévai’s depiction of Arrow Cross rule did not significantly change as compared to his previous works, though some of his claims became even more pointed. Zsidósors Magyarországon still depicted Ferenc Szálasi’s reign as characterized by brutal atrocities, theft, and corruption, but also as a time when there was no supreme authority to control violent local struggles.102 Lévai also argued that the system of labor service was transformed under Arrow Cross rule, with around 60 000 Jews from Budapest being forced on “death roads” and those among them who managed to survive till the Western border of the country being handed over to be exterminated by the Nazis.103 Lévai thus asserted that next to around 6 200 Arrow Cross murders in Budapest that the People’s Tribunals had already investigated,104 the deportations of Jews to their certain death were also renewed after mid-October 1944.105 strategies – whereas the former sought ways to strike deals with the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, the latter “negotiated with the SS” – without taking a stance on the relative merit of their choices. Ibid., p. 241. 99  See Ibid., pp. 145–9 and pp. 179–206. 100  Ibid., p. 206. However, Lévai did not fail to remark on how the Christian Churches contributed to anti-Semitism and how their leaders supported the anti-Semitic laws of the late 1930s. 101  Ibid., p. 400. 102  Ibid., p. 334. 103  Ibid., p. 350. The number 60 000 appears on p. 358, 59 000 is found on p. 467. 104  Ibid., p. 386. 105  In an exaggerated manner, Lévai maintained that Szálasi had re-launched the war against Jews “in a more drastic manner than ever.” Ibid., p. 319. This is one of the points where more recent scholarship, especially publications by László Karsai, has clearly contradicted Lévai. Szálasi’s rule was characterized by mass murder against Hungarian Jews, but – unlike during the premiership of Döme Sztójay – no systematic program of annihilation was being implemented. Now see László Karsai, “Zsidósors Budapesten a nyilas

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On the pages of Zsidósors Magyarországon, Lévai continued to be preoccupied with the highly complex and no less controversial question of GermanHungarian relations. In this major early postwar synthesis, he essentially argued that the meeting where the agenda of “cleansing” the whole country of Jews was agreed took place at the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior on April 4, 1944 and that it was a joint Hungarian-German one.106 Lévai explained that the Gestapo and the Nazi Sonderkommando arrived to Hungary with the intention to implement the deportations, but that subsequently Adolf Eichmann and László Endre decided together “how to apply their ideas to the Hungarian circumstances and how to develop a detailed plan of deportations.”107 In Zsidósors Magyarországon, Lévai thus assigned heavy responsibility to the Hungarian side, arguing that “Eichmann and Endre, the German and the Hungarian ‘dejudaizer’, having the approval of Baky, started to implement their common program. Sztójay and Jaross are chiefly responsible that they could do so: without their approval this could not have happened [. . .] it is certain that Regent Horthy was not against the expulsion [kitelepítés in the original – FL] of the Jews either.”108 What is more, Jenő Lévai’s major synthesis at one point maintained that documents from the People’s Tribunals had conclusively proven that the deportations had been the exclusive responsibility of Horthy and the Sztójay government. Such a clear emphasis on Hungarian responsibility is all the more striking since, similarly to Lévai’s earlier works, Zsidósors Magyarországon pursued starkly anti-German discourses and explicitly blamed Nazi Germany for the rise of Hungarian anti-Semitism during the 1930s.109 uralom idején” in Elek Karsai and László Karsai (eds.), Vádirat a nácizmus ellen 4. 1944. október 15–1945. január 18. (Budapest: Balassi, 2014). 106  Ibid., p. 97. 107  Ibid., p. 107. At the same time, Lévai repeatedly asserted that the deportations and their consequences could not have remained unknown to the Hungarian government. He in fact explicitly claimed that they fully approved them. See Ibid., pp. 140, 161 and 172. Lévai also informed his readers of the revealing detail that Endre pleaded for a speedier policy than the German Nazis: he recommended operating six trains per day between Hungary and Auschwitz-Birkenau with as many Hungarian Jews on them as possible, whereas the Germans were ready to agree “only” to four. Ibid., p. 143. 108  Ibid., p. 99. Lévai also explained that the Hungarian gendarmerie was responsible for the brutal implementation of the deportation decrees. Ibid., p. 97. 109  Lévai not only – exaggeratedly – claimed that Hungarian anti-Semitism was essentially due to German influence, but also – falsely – maintained that the Nazi leaders heavily pressured Hungarian leaders to adopt anti-Semitic measures from the late 1930s onwards and viewed their willingness to do so as a decisive criterion of their reliability. He even

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As part of his discussion of the Hungarian share of responsibility, Jenő Lévai related again to the struggle that emerged between Germans and Hungarians for the wealth of Hungarian Jewry. The book discussed several alternative ways the pursuit of genocide and the program of robbery could be connected. Calling the Holocaust “the greatest and dirtiest campaign of robbery in history,”110 Lévai argued that Adolf Eichmann prioritized “the physical annihilation of Jewry over military interests” and intended to acquire “Jewish wealth” for himself and his organization.111 He maintained that László Endre and László Baky were fully committed to the program of genocide too, whereas other members of the Döme Sztójay government seemed “barely interested in the fate of the Jews, but all the more so in their wealth.”112 This distinction was coupled with the assertion that regarding the “Jewish question”, all ministers of the Sztójay government, with the sole exception of Defense Minister Lajos Csatay, stood closer to the Germans than to that of Regent Horthy.113 It is apparent that Zsidósors Magyarországon drew on years of intense research, which enabled Jenő Lévai to produce, as early as 1948, a multifaceted overview of the Holocaust in Hungary. This impressive early monograph on a major chapter of the Europe-wide Nazi genocide not only covered a wider scope of themes and employed a greater number and variety of sources than Lévai’s previous works, but also reveals how Lévai grew less interested in placing the blame on the Germans. In Zsidósors Magyarországon, his interpretation of Hungarian but also Hungarian Jewish behavior during the Holocaust appeared markedly more critical than in his earlier works. By 1948, Jenő Lévai articulated a rather accusatory view on the activities of the Jewish Council. Much more crucially, within three years of the end of the war, the major early historian of the Holocaust in Hungary assigned critical responsibility to the Hungarian authorities for the deportations from the country in 1944–45.

wrote of a “German invasion” through which, by the end of the 1930s, Hungary clearly came to belong to the German sphere of influence. Ibid., pp. 22–3. Asserting that the “real interests of the masses” were anti-German, Lévai maintained that Hungarian antiSemit­es essentially constituted a fifth column of Nazi Germany. Ibid., pp. 44 and 33. 110  Ibid., p. 249. 111  Ibid., p. 240. 112  Ibid., p. 240. 113  Ibid., p. 266. Horthy may have been presented here as a counterpole of sorts, but the Regent was rather depicted as a helpless leader throughout who was nonetheless responsible for the deportations.

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A Communist Panorama of the European Jewish Catastrophe

Endre Sós (1905–1969) is remembered, above all, as a politician of the early, ­brutal years of the Kádár era when he played a highly controversial role as president of the Magyar Izraeliták Országos Képviselete (the National Representation of Hungarian Israelites).114 It may be much less known that Sós was also a prolific Hungarian Jewish intellectual who published dozens of books on literary and historical topics. His release of Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus in 1948 in fact made him the earliest Hungarian Jewish author, and one of the earliest worldwide, to draw a transnational panorama of the Holocaust.115 Prior to 1938, Endre Sós has not only been a regular contributor to various Hungarian newspapers and journals, but also published several short books on developments in international politics.116 During the age of persecution in Hungary before the mass deportations of 1944, Sós may have been repeatedly forced to enroll as a labor serviceman, but was nonetheless able to make important contributions to Jewish intellectual discussions.117 Upon his liberation, 114  On Endre Sós’ assimilationist stance and collaborationist practices as leader of Hungarian Jewry between 1957 and 1965, see Róbert Győri Szabó, A kommunizmus és a zsidóság az 1945 utáni Magyarországon (Budapest: Gondolat, 2009) and Kata Bohus, Jews, Israelites, Zionists: the Hungarian State’s Policies on Jewish Issues in a Comparative Perspective (1956– 1968) (Budapest: Central European University, 2014, unpublished dissertation). Sós also regularly reported to the Hungarian State Security, often denouncing other members of the Jewish community. 115  Accordingly, Sós highlighted that there were not only German, Japanese, and Spanish but also Italian, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian and Croatian perpetrators. (His emphasis on Spain underlines that his subject was indeed fascist crimes rather than, more narrowly, the Second World War and the Holocaust.) Endre Sós, Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus (Budapest: Magyar Téka, 1948), p. 204. However, in line with his ideological agenda, he asserted that the people of the Soviet Union did not participate in anti-Jewish actions and that the Yugoslav partisans helped all the Jews they possibly could. Ibid., pp. 204 and 207. In other words, here we see the beginnings of an ideologically cleansed vision of history that has become deeply influential and that Timothy Synder, among others, has done so much to debunk in recent years. See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 116  Endre Sós wrote for Esti Kurír, Az Újság, Magyar Hírlap, Reggeli Újság and A Toll, among others. His major books on political issues from the 1930s are Endre Sós, Mi lesz Európával? (Budapest: Magyar Cobden-Szövetség, 1931). Endre Sós, Diktátorok és diktatúrák (Budapest: Magyar Cobden-Szövetség, 1933). Endre Sós, Európa drámája (Budapest: Viktória, 1936). 117  Endre Sós, Becsapott ajtók előtt: a magyar zsidóság sorskérdései (Budapest: Periszkóp, 1938). Endre Sós, Emberdömping: az eviani konferencia és a zsidó kivándorlók világproblémája (Budapest: Periszkóp, 1939). Endre Sós, Fejek és elvek (Budapest: Viktória, 1940). Endre Sós,

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Sós started to work again as a journalist, serving as chief editor of the Hungarian Jewish periodical Új Élet while also being employed by the daily Magyar Nemzet until his untimely death in 1969.118 Similarly to Lévai, the early postwar years were among Sós’ most prolific as they saw him complete a host of political and contemporary historical works. In 1945, he published works on anti-fascist heroes and human rights.119 In 1947, merely one year before the release of his major work to be analyzed below that inevitably focused much attention on Nazi Germany, Sós covered the “fateful path” taken by Weimar Germany under the title The Suicide of Democracy.120 In later years of his life, partly already coinciding with his top-level collaboration with the repressive Kádár regime, Sós authored popular biographies and published autobiographical reflections.121 After 1956, he occasionally worked as a translator too, being responsible, among others, for the Hungarian edition of Polish diaries related to the Warsaw ghetto and its uprising against the Nazis.122 Notwithstanding these later activities, Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus, a work from 1948, clearly remained his major statement on the genocide against Jews in its European dimension as well as the major Hungarianlanguage statement of its kind until the end of the communist regime.123 Zsidók a magyar városokban (Budapest: Libanon, 1941). Endre Sós, A nagyváradi zsidók útja (Budapest: Libanon, 1943). 118  Endre Sós was killed in a car accident. 119  Endre Sós, Három mártír (Budapest: Officina, 1945). Endre Sós, Az emberi jogok (Budapest: Dante, 1945). 120  Endre Sós, A demokrácia öngyilkossága. A weimari Németország végzetes útja (Budapest: Téka, 1947). 121  For the former, see Endre Sós, Zola (Budapest: Művelt Nép, 1952). Endre Sós, Cervantes (Budapest: Művelt Nép, 1955). Endre Sós and Magda Vámos, Thomas and Heinrich Mann: a két írótestvér szenvedése, küzdelme és nagysága (Budapest: Gondolat, 1960). Endre Sós and Magda Vámos, Lincoln (Budapest: Magvető, 1964). Endre Sós and Magda Vámos, Franklin vagyok Philadelphiából: Benjamin Franklin élete (Budapest: Móra, 1970). For the latter, see Endre Sós, Tanúvallomás. Cikkek, emlékezések (Budapest: Magyar Izraeliták Országos Képviselete, 1962). Endre Sós, Felvillanó arcok. Arcképek, emlékezések (Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1965). 122  Dorka Goldkorn, Leon Weiczker, and Noemi Szac-Wajnkranc, Fellázad a gettó (Budapest: Kossuth, 1959). However, Sós translated the work not from the Polish original but from its German version titled Im Feuer vergangen. Tagebücher aus dem Ghetto. 123  Notably, the events in the Soviet Union were covered primarily through German and Yiddish sources. Sources in Slavic languages – and thus also much of Central and Eastern Europe – may have been evoked in the book, but clearly remain somewhat ­underrepresented. Sós’ chapter on anti-Semitism constitutes a partial exemption as it not

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Drawing on relev­ant publications in a great number of languages (German, French, English, Hungarian, and Yiddish, above all) and addressing a host of key themes, Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus was, similarly to the works discussed above, a remarkable feat a mere three years after liberation. What is more, contrary to Jenő Lévai or Ernő Munkácsi, Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus offered a broad international coverage not only of Holocaust-related topics, but also of secondary sources.124 In some respects, Sós may also be qualified as the most professional of early Hungarian Jewish survivor historians dealing with the origins and implementation of the Holocaust,125 even if he could occasionally be faulted for his rather uncritical use of sources.126 Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus was released shortly before the establishment of the Stalinist dictatorship of Hungary, the foundation of the state of Israel, and the fallout between communist regimes and the Jewish state. In only presents the links between Nazi Germany and Hungary, but also devotes significant attention to Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia and also Romania. 124  Sós’ bibliography includes a broad variety of crucial authors, from Simon Wiesenthal to Léon Poliakov, from Raphael Lemkin to Vasily Grossman, from Itzhak Katzenelson to Ilja Ehrenburg, and from Emanuel Ringelblum to Karl Jaspers, with most of them being cited in the main body of the text. Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus was clearly much less engaged with Hungarian discussions: from among the Hungarian publications beyond official statistical releases, Sós seems to have drawn more heavily only on Béla Székely’s history of anti-Semitism from 1936. Béla Székely, Az antiszemitizmus és története (Budapest: Tabor, 1936). 125  Unlike Lévai, Sós did not use footnotes. However, he added scholarly devices such as an elaborate bibliography and various statistical tables. The statistical tables included in the book run to some fifteen pages. A notable feature of them is that they offer three calculations on the number of Jewish victims by country – those prepared by the AngloAmerican Committee of Inquiry, the 1947 Zionist Congress, and The Jewish Chronicle – without ever combining them. (They variously add up to 5 747 700, 6 065 000, and 5 978 006 Jewish victims.) The closest example of providing such a number can be found on page 254 where the European Jewish population numbers of 1939 and 1947 are both given: they are 9 855 500 and 3 833 000, respectively. The statistical section finishes with details on Hungary that put Jewish losses, according to the racial criteria of the Nazis, at 496 507 in the wartime territory of Hungary and at 262 771 within the postwar borders. 126  For instance, Sós could be blamed for his uncritical use of sources related to the Katyn massacre (which was also clearly in line with his ideological commitment). The book even argued that the operation of the crematorium of Majdanek “was to some extent necessitated by the Katyn case. The German feared that their crimes might be discovered one day.” Sós, Európai, p. 125. A more obvious instance of the unintentionally uncritical use of sources, which actually intended to falsify events, is when Sós presents cases of Jewish resistance verbatim from SS reports. See Ibid., p. 179.

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it, Sós provided a communist interpretation of the recent past while using one of the last possible moments to focus on the genocide against Jews. Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus in fact offered an intriguing combination of procommunist and pro-Zionist perspectives,127 with Sós explicitly arguing that the agenda of socialism and Jewish ambitions in Palestine were in perfect harmony.128 At the same time, Sós’ conceptual choices in Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus unequivocally opposed the Jewish heroism and martyrdom narrative of the Holocaust. This is indicated, for instance, by his reflections on the most appropriate term to denote the genocide against European Jewry where he essentially argued that the term catastrophe was much more appropriate than tragedy since Jews were generally “misfortunate victims” of the Nazis who qualified as heroes neither ethically, nor aesthetically.129 Such a clear 127  On the one hand, Sós repeatedly linked the very recent catastrophe to what he called “the necessity of socialism.” He not only made statements such as “What happened to the Jews in Europe could only have happened because the historical destiny of the capitalist social order is finished: it is economically and morally bankrupt! / Practical Christianity that aims to legitimate capitalism is bankrupt too!” Ibid., p. 29. Referring to “the solution of the Jewish question” as inseparable from “humanity becoming freed from the shackles of capitalism,” Sós even asserted that “The memory of six million murdered Jews obliges all Jews to become pioneers of the socialist world. / There is no other salvation for the Jews of the world than Socialism!” (Emphasis in the original.) Ibid., pp. 229 and 235. On the other, certain parts of his book reveal the marked impact of the emerging Zionist interpretation. For instance, the photos included at the end of the book start with a portrait of Amin alHusayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, whom Sós denounced as somebody who played “a serious role in the establishment of death camps” and was “one of the chief war criminals” (see Ibid., pp. 44 and 47), then feature images of Majdanek, Treblinka, Buchenwald, and Nordhausen, and combine pictures of resistance (above all, those of the Warsaw ghetto uprising) with depictions of the Zionist struggle. The visuals of the book thus clearly cohere into a Jewish national narrative. 128  Sós argued that “the Jewish spirit” had “profound social content” to then assert that in “the century of the realization of socialism”, Palestine would have to become socialist too. Ibid., pp. 176 and 231. While speaking of the common interests of the Jewish and Arab people, Sós maintained that Jews had a “more developed class consciousness” in Palestine, whereas Arab nationalism was “reactionary” – and that these were facts the Soviet Union recognized. Ibid., pp. 175–6. More generally, he asserted that, “as the example of the Soviet Union showed,” socialism “does not demand of anybody the denial of one’s religion, nationality or ethnicity” and does not raise the question of assimilation. Ibid., pp. 233–34. Sós presented Ilya Ehrenburg as a model Jew who was at once “a Soviet citizen, a communist, and a Jew.” Ibid., p. 230. 129  Ibid., pp. 219 and 223. Sós argued that the behavior of the large majority of Jewish victims was rather conformist, even servile and certainly “not worthy of tragic heroes.”

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conceptual preference notwithstanding, Sós’ overall evaluation of Jewish behavior during the Second World War proved rather ambivalent. On the one hand, the book claimed that “From the very beginning of the Second World War, Jews were allies of the nations fighting against fascists and their alliance.”130 According to its presentation, Jews not only made significant military contributions, but were also highly active as leaders and members of resistance groups. The book repeatedly cited examples of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust too, highlighting the heroic acts in annihilation camps such as Sobibór, Treblinka and Auschwitz as well as the cases of resistance in Białystok, Vilna and Lemberg. Drawing on David Knout’s La Bataille du ghetto de Varsovie in particular, Sós focused primarily on the Warsaw ghetto uprising, but also paid ample attention to Anna Szenes as a “shared martyr” of “the Palestinian Jewish antifascist struggle and the Hungarian resistance movement.”131 Irrespective of his elaborate presentation of Jewish acts of struggle during the Second World War, Sós concluded that “in their overwhelming majority”, Jewish behavior was “just like the European average.”132 As this ambivalent presentation indicates, Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus amounts to a rich source of valuable information on the genocide rather than a fully coherent narrative of it.133 He asserted that their murder was nevertheless shocking but rather due to the number of victims. Ibid., p. 223. Sós’ argument in favor of the term catastrophe contested the use of tragedy (employed, among others, by Ernő Munkácsi) in particular. Moreover, Sós proposed that the victims be called Jews and not Jewry since “economically, socially, politically” Jews in modern Europe have no longer formed a unit. He explicitly argued that Jews “only became” Jewry at the time of their brutal persecution. Ibid., p. 219. 130  Ibid., p. 171. 131  Ibid., p. 174. See David Knout, La Bataille du ghetto de Varsovie (Paris: Editions du Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, 1946). 132  Sós, Európai, p. 223. 133  Sós’ chapter titled “From the Timetable of Anti-Semitism” may illustrate how rich and internationally diverse the coverage of the book was. This chapter remarks on the Nazi book burnings of 1933; the Nuremberg laws of 1935; the Novemberpogrome of 1938; the race to acquire Jewish property in the Czech Lands in 1938–1939; the swiftness of Slovak anti-Semitic action upon the foundation of the Slovak state in 1939; the terrible murders in Jassy, Cernauti, and Odessa in 1941; the deportations from Hungary orchestrated by the Central Authority to Control Foreigners in 1941; the mass murders in the temporarily reacquired Southern parts of the country in 1942; the German use of gas vans (fojtókamragépkocsi) in the early stages of the Holocaust; the participation of Ukrainian and French militias in the genocide; the establishment of Jewish Councils in Poland; the mass murders in Soviet territories; the setting up of Dutch deportation camps; the destruction of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Croatia; the hunger plan; the public declarations

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Endre Sós’ book covered a palette of themes, beginning with the profiles of chief Nazi perpetrators, their major crimes,134 and the sentences they received at Nuremberg,135 and finishing with a chapter of reflections on the German situation in the early postwar years titled “Crime and Punishment.”136 In between these two closely connected chapters, Európai fasizmus és concerning genocide made by Goebbels; the Posen speeches of Himmler; the Polish underground’s reports on the murder of the Jews; and how Hungarians wanted to speed up the deportations in 1944. It goes without saying that all these are rather evoked than systematically analyzed on the pages of this chapter. 134  Like many of his contemporaries, Sós believed that propaganda was the ultimate means of transforming people and that Goebbels was in complete control of the radio, the press, the film industry, the theaters, the literary life, and the fine arts in Nazi Germany. Ibid., pp. 36–9. At the same time, he discussed how Himmler “acquired greater power during WW2 than any chief of the Nazi party or any minister” and repeatedly addressed the role of Adolf Eichmann, arguing – well before and very much contrary to Hannah Arendt – that he was an ideological fanatic who, when he became “the dictator in Jewish matters,” proved “obsessed with a single idea: the extermination of all European Jews.” Ibid., pp. 40 and 43. Remarkably, on two occasions, the book called Eichmann “the main manager of the Europe-wide German dejudaizing actions.” Ibid., pp. 77 and 89. 135  The book begins with the words of Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials on the unprecedented number of Nazi victims and how Nazism was an international conspiracy held together by the plan to destroy Jews. Ibid., p. 9. In accordance, Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus offered an intentionalist interpretation of the Holocaust and propagated the notion of collectively responsible organizations. The first chapter also discussed a long list of anti-Jewish crimes which were categorized as crimes against humanity in Nuremberg and ended with introducing the new concept of genocide to its Hungarian readers. Genocide appears as genocid bűncselekmény (genocidal crime) in Sós’ translation, though he also suggested it may be called peoplemurder (népgyilkosság) and used various alternative expressions too, such as népek tömegirtása (mass destruction of peoples) and tömeges emberirtás (mass destruction of humans) as well. Népirtás (people destruction) was to become the accepted Hungarian equivalent of genocide. 136  In the course of his assessment of early postwar Germany, Sós argued that Germans failed to draw lessons. He even posed the question whether such brutalized people might be “saved” at all, but eventually argued that if they were willing to show repentance, they would have to be allowed to become a member of “the cultured peoples of the world” again. Ibid., p. 240. At the same time, Sós was in complete agreement with Josef Gottfarstein that “if the Third Reich used anti-Semitic examples in school textbooks, a democratizing Germany would have to use examples from Majdanek, Treblinka, Auschwitz and Birkenau.” Ibid., p. 152. See Josef Gottfarstein, L’école du meurtre (Paris: La Presse française et étrangère, 1946). Regarding Hungary, Sós called for the repentance of those who were “terrified and misled”, but also argued that no reconciliation was possible with those who were directly responsible for the deportation of Jews.

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antiszemitizmus discussed, in the following (admittedly somewhat unusual) order, the persecutors; the history of anti-Semitism; the death camps; the education of murderers;137 the chief intellectual source of radical anti-Semitism;138 the military struggle of the democratic countries and attempts at resistance and revolt against the Nazis; “the helpers” of the persecuted;139 and last but not least, sociological aspects which purported to offer no less than an explanation of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. The explanation of genocidal anti-Semitism incorporated mythical thinking and psychological aspects as well, but presented anti-Semitism primarily as an expression of economic interests in political garb.140 Sós saw Hungarian anti-Semitism in particular as driven forward by a coalition of “feudal lords” 137  This chapter has important lessons concerning the image of Nazi perpetrators. Endre Sós, largely in accordance with recent research by the likes of Ulrich Herbert or Michael Wildt, argued that the chief executioners were “mostly people with university degrees.” Ibid., p. 143. See Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996) and Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). Sós asserted that the “school of fascism” may have been focused on racial theory, and may also have encouraged people to suppress all their human sentiments and become murderers, but that the Nazis led vicious campaigns against the Bible at the very same time. Sós maintained that the Nazi worldview was “total” and even impacted the natural sciences, with the “Jewish question” permeating practically every subject. Ibid., pp. 147–151. One of the most shocking results, he argued, was “the ritual murder of Jewish children.” Directly reversing the argument of anti-Semites here, Sós explicitly argued that “Not a single accusation of child murder against Jews has ever proven to have any basis. It is indubitable that the Nazis killed over a million Jewish children. Their ritual was that of gassing and burning them.” Ibid., p. 151. 138  The chapter basically discusses the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. On its pages, Sós again employs the rhetorical strategy of reversing arguments, underlining that the global threat was actually the one posed by anti-Semitism. The chapter stated, more concretely, that “the true global conspiracy was that of the elders of Erfurt” led by Ulrich Fielschhauer. Ibid., p. 164. 139  Concerning helpers (segítők), Sós argued that Jews were primarily saved “due to the selfless actions of nameless proletarians and the incredibly fast advance of the Red Army.” Ibid., p. 203. He polemicized with what he called the Christian “legends” of rescue in particular, assessing the role of the Churches and their faithful in a highly negative way, to the point of maintaining that Nazi crimes were “implicitly appreciated” by the Churches. Ibid., p. 204. 140  Ibid., pp. 224–5. Sós asserted that anti-Semitism may have had primarily economic causes but that it could not be qualified as “an exclusively economic” phenomenon. Ibid., p. 229. Whereas Sós spoke of anti-Semitic mobilization and policies as a “diversion of attention” from “the real issues”, he also related that temporarily they had proven rather popular. Ibid., p. 227.

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and “great capitalists” who managed to convince “the impoverished petty nobility” as well as “Hungarian state bureaucrats” of their cause. At the very same time, Sós admitted that these groups of Hungarian profiteers would have been generally satisfied with the solution proposed by Prime Minister Béla Imrédy in the late 1930s and far from all of them desired the genocidal policies of 1944–45. In other words, Sós maintained that the legal discrimination, even the persecution of Jews was widely supported by crucial Hungarian strata, but the same could not be stated regarding the politics of extermination. At the very same time, Sós presented the extermination of European Jewry as the ultimate realization of the plan “to get rid of Jewish competition and acquire Jewish wealth.”141 In this nuanced interpretation, one may thus have contributed to the realization of genocide without endorsing its implementation. The extended chapter on violence and the camps discussed several major Nazi camps such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Neuengamme at some length and reflected on the beginnings of their memorialization.142 Sós devoted particular attention to Auschwitz, the name of which, as he claimed, has become “familiar across the world and would remind people until the very end of times of the most terrible mass murder in human history” where, among many others, “hundreds of thousands” of Hungarian Jews, “the large majority of those deported from Hungary” were murdered.”143 The book also listed a staggering 388 camps to which at least some Hungarian Jews were deported in 1944–45.144 The perspective of Európai fasizmus és a­ ntiszemitizmus was not restricted to the Holocaust in Hungary in this respect either, but discussed Majdanek on the basis of Konstantin Simonov’s,145 and Treblinka on the basis of Vasily Grossman’s work,146 mentioned both Sobibór and Chełmno,147 and once even referred to “Globotschnik” (Globocnik) as one of the key perpetrators who had ruled over the Lublin district.148 Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus distinguished between different kinds of Nazi camps, though Sós used various expressions to refer to the new type of camp the Nazis developed during the war years, writing of death camps, death 141  Ibid., p. 226. 142  The chapter drew on a variety of sources, including trials of key perpetrators, diaries of German soldiers, publications by survivors as well as interview-based witness accounts. 143  Ibid., p. 101. 144  Ibid., pp. 98–100. 145  Ibid., p. 123. See Constantin Simonov, Maïdanek, un camp d’extermination (Paris: É ditions sociales, 1945). 146  Ibid., pp. 138–142. The latter appeared in Hungarian translation as early as 1945. Vaszilij Grossman, A treblinkai pokol (Budapest: Cserépfalvi, 1945). 147  Ibid., pp. 182 and 186. 148  Ibid., p. 131.

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plants, death factories, death chambers, execution camps, and occasionally employing the German term Vernichtungslager too. Moreover, the book introduced the Einsatzgruppen to its readers, calling them special execution units (különleges kivégző osztagok in the original) “who murdered around one million people” and whose unit of operation, as the author expressed it, “may be viewed as one gigantic death camp.”149 While other chapters of the book provided an essentially economic theory of anti-Semitism, in his chapter on violence, Endre Sós emphasized the self-reinforcing nature of Nazi violence, claiming that “the soldiers and policemen got so used to the massacres in the end that they continuously committed murder.”150 Beyond Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus, truly pan-European ambitions and, one should add, despite the markedly ideological platform of the author, such post-genocidal reflections on the functioning of mass violence constitute another respect in which this early panorama resembles much more recent trends in Holocaust historiography. Conclusion Having analyzed the four most significant Hungarian Jewish monographs on the origins of Nazism and the implementation of the Holocaust published in 1947–48, this conclusion would briefly summarize and compare the intellectual responses they articulated. In Germánia “prófétája” from 1947, Sámuel Lőwinger, a leading Hungarian Jewish representative of the Wissenschaft des Judentums tradition of his age, offered an intellectual history of Nazism’s origins and agenda. Drawing on his profound knowledge in the history of religions, Lőwinger interpreted Nazism as the result of a specifically German attempt to invent a new national religion that would exclude all Jewish influences, but that in fact plagiarized and falsified parts of Judaism. According to Lőwinger, Judaism remained the authentic source of true religion that made an impact on the world through the Bible and its “daughter religion”, believed in human and social progress, and was thus allied to democratic and socialist movements. The narrative of Germánia “prófétája” thereby not only articulated a Jewish religious-scholarly critique of Nazism, but also provided legitimating arguments for the joint victory of the Allies.

149  Ibid., p. 143. 150  Ibid., p. 75.

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Ernő Munkácsi’s Hogyan történt? from 1947 was based primarily on documents of Jewish provenance and maintained that the pre-1945 Hungarian Jewish community had failed. As a member of the Hungarian Jewish establishment who acted as secretary of the Central Jewish Council during the mass deportations from Hungary, Munkácsi critiqued the community while largely exonerating its leadership and vindicating his own wartime stance in particular. Somewhat oddly, even as Hogyan történt? clearly expressed just how responsible Hungarian authorities were for the implementation of the Holocaust, Munkácsi continued to cherish notions of the common fate of the Jews of Hungary and their country. The book in fact interpreted the last stages of the war as closely connected tragedies of the two, rather revealingly calling Miklós Horthy’s July 1944 halting of the deportations “the moment of reasserting Hungarian sovereignty.” Jenő Lévai’s Zsidósors Magyarországon from 1948 was the major early overview of the Holocaust in Hungary that, in spite of giving expression to its author’s anti-German sentiments, arrived at a thorough articulation of Hungarian responsibility. However, Lévai also focused disproportionate attention, potentially with apologetic intentions, on the months after the mass deportations between mid-May and early July 1944. Intriguingly, both Ernő Munkácsi, a member of the Jewish community elite who released his version of the events with apologetic intentions, and Jenő Lévai, who painted a rather nuanced picture while arguing from a decidedly leftist position, articulated just how significant the share of Hungarian responsibility for the Holocaust was, but also rehearsed Hungarian national positions. They detailed and condemned the Hungarian involvement in genocide but, curiously, appeared to have idealized “true Hungarian intentions.” Last but not least, in Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus from 1948, Endre Sós provided an impressive European panorama of the Holocaust that depicted anti-Semitism as a primarily economically motivated phenomenon, which partly through the self-reinforcing nature of violence, resulted in policies of extermination. Of the four key authors analyzed in this chapter, Sós drew the most directly political conclusions from the genocide. According to the key argument of his Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus, the unprecedented antiSemitic crimes necessitated socialist revolutions. As a committed communist, Sós not only articulated a wholesale condemnation of fascism, but would refer to no mitigating circumstances in the case of wartime Hungary either. It is equally remarkable, especially in the light of the author’s subsequent biography, that in the decisive year of Sovietization, Endre Sós’ monograph still combined clear endorsement of the communist project with explicit support for Jewish nationalism.

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The above analysis of four key monographs on the origins and implementation of the Holocaust has revealed just how intricate and diverse major early intellectual statements were. By 1947–48, the intellectual origins of Nazism were subjected to an in-depth investigation by a leading scholar of Judaism. The Holocaust in Hungary was already studied from the perspective of a key representative of the Jewish wartime establishment and also from that of a prolific and increasingly critical researcher. The Judeocide was also already explored from the point of view of an ideologically committed communist with a broad European horizon. A melancholy way to highlight the intellectual achievements of Hungarian Jewish survivors in the early postwar years would be to remind that not since 1947–48 has Hungary seen such a plurality of ­prominent interpretations of the origins and implementation of the Holocaust.

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Conclusion The above intellectual historical analyses of the prolific, but relatively understudied Hungarian Jewish community attempted to capture their immense drama and unprecedented tragedy in the years 1929 to 1948. Individual case studies drew on rich and multifaceted sources from popular-scholarly yearbooks and intellectual journals through incipient historiographical works to memoirs and interview protocols created either during the local age of persecution or in the genocide’s immediate aftermath. Whereas much of previous scholarship tended to overemphasize the Hungarian identification of Hungarian Jews and treat its subject largely in isolation from other Jewish communities, the chapters above have suggested ways of placing Hungarian Jewish intellectual history in transnational frames, highlighting connections to German Jewish history in particular and analyzing some of their implications in the age of Nazi Germany.1 The first half of the book showed that, contrary to what the mainstream discourses on the overwhelming assimilatedness of Hungarian Jews would suggest, there was a substantial intellectual interest in Jewish subjects under the Horthy regime.2 Chapters two to four focused primarily on the intense discussions pursued in the years of ever more severe legal discrimination and socioeconomic exclusion between 1938 and 1944. These chapters mapped the major themes, internal plurality, and gradual transformation of representative Hungarian Jewish intellectual publications in what was labeled the local age of persecution. These chapters analyzed Hungarian Jewish intellectuals’ negotiation of subjects such as Jewish identity, cultural traditions, historical memory, political ideologies and, last but certainly not least, Nazi Germany and its genocidal policies. The second chapter, “Jewish Studies in the Horthy Era” offered a synoptic presentation of Hungarian Jewish popular scholarly discourses in the Horthy 1  Guy Miron also emphasized that “in many respects, the internal development of Hungarian Jewry and the forms of Jewish identification in its public discourse should be conceptualized more in the context of the West and Central European emancipated Jewries.” See Guy Miron, The Waning of Emancipation. Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 2011), p. 5. 2  Such trends may be broadly comparable to those studied in Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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era with a focus on the questions of identity, traditions, values, contributions and historicity. My close reading of hundreds of popular scholarly articles published in the IMIT Yearbooks found that the denominational redefinition of Jewry and the employment of Hungarian national topoi represented no more than two out of seven identity options Hungarian Jewish scholars articulated in the period. Next to Hungarian national discourses, patriotic ones continued to play a significant role and alternative theories, such as on Jewish peoplehood or on the internally conflictual nature of Hungarian Jewish dual identity, were also formulated. The positions Hungarian Jewish intellectuals took concerning the role and impact of Moses Mendelssohn in turn illustrated how one of the fundamental modern European Jewish dilemmas, the one that arose from the need of preserving Jewry while achieving renewal, got to be negotiated in the Horthy era. It was argued that Mendelssohn continued to offer a symbol of Jewish modernity in the inter-war period, a symbol which now revealed various anxieties regarding the direction historical developments had taken. The chapter subsequently assessed the discourse on Jewish values, exploring central assertions regarding the Jewish spirit, Jewish ethics and the truth, and dissected the discourse on Jewish contributions to civilization that combined self-assertive and apologetic arguments in a profoundly ambivalent manner. Last but not least, “Jewish Studies in the Horthy Era” introduced widely divergent perspectives on historicity and highlighted generational difference as a key factor determining them. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, older Hungarian Jewish intellectuals still expressed their belief in progress, members of the middle generation tended to speak of conflicts and dialectic processes, whereas some of the youngest ones articulated some markedly ahistorical ideas. The next chapter, “Intellectual Agendas in the Shadow of Catastrophe”, offered case studies of the journal Libanon and the Ararát Year­books, both sophisticated intellectual publications whose release largely coincided with the Hungarian years of persecution. The analysis of Libanon first contrasted the conceptions of Jewish culture of Jenő Zsoldos and József Grózinger, two of the most prolific contributors to the journal, describing them as ­assimilationist-integrationist and universalist-essentialist, respectively. The chapter also explored in detail the dramatic impact historical changes of the years 1936 to 1943 left on Hungarian Jewish intellectual discussions, tracing how Hungarian Jewish authors arrived from setting new agendas of Jewish cultural creation to expressing their sense of responsibility towards the future of what remained of European Jewish culture. Political discourses in the parallel Hungarian Jewish intellectual project of the Ararát Yearbooks ranged from semi-liberal attempts at a compromise

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with the Hungarian establishment through conservative critiques of Jewish assimilationism, the formulation of Jewish national programs, and hopes invested in a religious revival all the way to the vision of an alternative, corporatist order. Evident differences notwithstanding, this spectrum of political discourses, ironically, strongly resembled the all-Hungarian diversity of political-ideological positions during the Second World War. The analysis of historical narratives in Ararát has furthermore shown that during the local age of persecution practically all Hungarian Jewish authors identified more persistent crises. Contributors may have variously identified the crisis as the rise of a modern elite disconnected from communal traditions, the suppression of serious religious reform leading to the decline of Jewish religiosity, the loss of equilibrium between liberal Westernization and tradition, or the prevalence of anti-Semitic exclusion. In all these cases, the suggested beginning of the Hungarian Jewish crisis preceded the anti-Semitic radicalization of the late 1930s and early 1940s by several decades. Thus, the historical narratives articulated in the Ararát yearbooks may have been intimately connected to their respective authors’ distinctive preferences and agendas, but they all reveal to us the profound existential anxieties members of a persecuted community in crisis felt. The fourth chapter, titled “The Audible Voices of the Persecuted”, focused on contemporary historical perspectives, discussing in detail how contributors to the IMIT évkönyvek in particular conceptualized their own era and how they interpreted the history of Nazi Germany between 1929 and 1943. The chapter argued that both the emergence of Nazi Germany in 1933 and (what turned out to be merely) the beginning of legalized discrimination in Hungary in 1938 exerted an immediate impact on the perspectives of this key group of Hungarian Jewish intellectuals. The chapter traced the transformation of these interpretations all the way until historian Fülöp Grünvald published his detailed and largely accurate reports on the beginnings of the genocide in the early 1940s. The IMIT Yearbooks, the Ararát Yearbooks and the journal Libanon were all regularly released until the catastrophic year of 1944 and thus constitute an exceptionally valuable corpus of published Jewish sources in the Nazi sphere of influence. They lead us to conclude that Hungarian Jewish intellectuals tended to affirm their dual identity while they attempted to inhabit parallel homes, those of Judaism and modern Hungary. Ironically, their political ideas significantly overlapped with non-Jewish Hungarian ones even during the years of persecution and their varied narratives of Jewish crisis resonated with the discourses on the crisis of modernity so characteristic of their European age. These representative sources of Hungarian Jewish intellectual discussions

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have also shown that leading intellectuals in Hungary were largely aware of the unfolding Nazi genocide. What is more, these sources have revealed that some of them, mostly notably Fülöp Grünvald, assessed the ongoing events as an unprecedented tragedy already prior to the main phase of the Holocaust in Hungary in 1944–45. In the years 1942–43, the anti-Semitic radicalization of Hungarian politics not only meant everyday discrimination to Hungarian Jews but also constituted a frightening threat. At the very same time, the politics of Hungarian nationalism offered the hope to intellectuals that the large majority of their community would survive the Nazi onslaught. Thus, in the context of ever more severe legalized discrimination from 1938 onward, Hungarian national discourses at first seemed to be gradually replaced by more emphatically Jewish agendas, however, some of the former discourses were revived from 1941 onward when genocide was already being implemented just outside the borders of the country. It thus appears that the expressions of loyalty to a radically anti-Semitic state – which was not yet genocidal, but was already actively involved in several forms of persecuting its Jewish population – was strengthened not in spite of, but rather because of the ongoing genocide. The continuation of this (admittedly deeply ambiguous) strategy would soon prove a tragic political mistake; what must have appeared to many as the only viable strategy of Jewish survival in the Hungary of 1942–43 turned into a fatal misjudgment under the radically changed circumstances of 1944. This was one of those devastating stories of the war years that the Hungarian Jewish intellectual elite could not articulate in the aftermath of the war and genocide. The story sketched above had an overly complicated plot to be immediately convincing to a broader public. What made it worse was that it revealed the Hungarian Jewish Realpolitik to be morally ambiguous and a terrible failure too. This was why, as shown in chapter seven, Ernő Munkácsi, a key author with a strong sense of dual identity, preferred to align himself with significant parts of the apologetic discourse on Hungarian “involvement in ignorance.” It matched his need to overlook what was already known among Hungarian Jewish intellectuals by 1942–43, what conclusions were drawn at the time, and how these conclusions led to fatal misjudgments in 1944. Chapters five to seven in turn contributed to the growing scholarly literature on the early postwar documentation and interpretation of the genocide against Jews. These chapters drew on exceptionally rich and varied Hungarian Jewish corpuses of witness accounts, memoirs and historical narratives produced prior to the imposition of Stalinism in the late 1940s to complement Laura Jockusch’s panorama of early postwar historical commissions and documentation centers with in-depth intellectual historical case studies. These case

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studies have revealed that Holocaust survivors from Hungary in 1945–46 created one of the largest early collections of interview protocols worldwide that grappled with new concepts to document the unprecedented features of the Holocaust in a largely convincing manner; survivors of persecution in Hungary published a plethora of memoirs in the earliest postwar months and years whose analysis enabled revealing contrasts between Jewish and non-Jewish narratives of survival; and several prominent Hungarian Jewish intellectuals already completed divergent monographic works on what came to be called the Holocaust before the end of the 1940s. Chapter five, titled “Articulating the Unprecedented”, focused on hundreds of interview protocols from one of the largest early postwar collections worldwide, that of the Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság (the National Relief Committee for Deportees), to analyze and compare diverse survivor narratives of Buchenwald concentration camp and explore how key features of the Nazi genocide against European Jewry were conceptualized in the course of semistructured interviews from 1945–46. It was indicated that many of these protocols offer disturbingly direct evidence; broader interpretative schemes or any more abstract terminology, for that matter, are largely absent from their pages. Approaching DEGOB’s collection of interview protocols as a project of historical documentation, the chapter found that a substantial number of survivors were able and willing to articulate key facets of their horrific experiences. The collection as a whole thus managed to reveal the unprecedented concrete features of the Holocaust in a largely accurate manner. If DEGOB’s interview project of 1945–46 had a rather narrow factual focus (the primary intention of its interviewers being to document ‘what really happened’), the personal and political meaning of experiences of persecution and survival was elaborated in numerous memoirs published during the same months. The next chapter compared book-length narratives of persecution published in 1945–46 to investigate how the antifascist consensus was made through personal stories. It tried to explain why, despite the circulation of an abundance of rather accurate factual information, this emerging consensus eventually consigned the history and memory of the extermination of Hungarian Jews to a rather marginal position. This question appeared all the more puzzling since Hungary was one of the few countries in Europe where Jewish victims of genocide constituted the clear majority of the country’s victims during the Second World War. The discussion of seven of these earliest memoirs in chapter six concluded that the experiences and subsequent interpretations of Jewish survivors were significantly more diverse than those of the politically persecuted. What is more, memoirs of Jewish survivors tended to search, unlike those of

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their non-Jewish peers, for the personal meaning of their own exceptional survival rather than aiming to connect the meaning of their persecution to the future direction of their political community. The comparison of memoirs also revealed that politically prominent, typically non-Jewish individuals were the first to be captured by the German Nazis upon March 19, 1944 and their memoirs depicted the German occupation of their country as the beginning of their tribulations. Such individuals had already been imprisoned and deported by the time the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews began in early May 1944, which helps explain why their early postwar memoirs tended to assign only a marginal place to the extermination of Hungarian Jewry. More generally, these insights – the greater prominence and visibility of the politically persecuted; the more explicit and more directly concurrent interpretation of their experiences; the fact that the beginnings of their tribulations practically coincided with the German occupation and preceded that of the masses of Hungarian Jews – can help us account for the exact shape the emerging antifascism consensus took in early postwar Hungary. The inclusion of these few non-Jewish memoirs in this book on Hungarian Jewish intellectual history seemed all the more apt since their analysis could suggest why the major and highly impressive efforts at documentation and interpretation of the Holocaust (covered in the previous and the subsequent chapter) have proven insufficient to shape Hungarian remembrance in more decisive ways. Second, non-Jewish memoirs seemed relevant to discuss also since key features of a peculiarly ‘ethnicist anti-fascism’, prominently represented by Sándor Millok’s and György Parragi’s memoirs from 1945, have been officially endorsed again in recent years.3 (The two key features of Hungarian ‘ethnicist anti-fascism’ can be defined as the high significance assigned to the German occupation of March 19, 1944 as a moment of supposed rupture and the lack of specific attention to the plight of Jewish victims and their local persecutors.) “Interpreting Responsibility”, the last chapter of the book based on primary sources, explored the incipient historiography of the genocide in Hungary, analyzing four key works by leading Hungarian Jewish intellectuals on the origins of Nazism and the implementation of the Holocaust from 1947–48. The chapter concluded that in the course of the nearly seven decades that have 3  In reaction to the prominent European and increasingly global remembrance of the Holocaust in the early 21st century, a process which was connected to the scrutinizing of Hungarian ­co-responsibility in novel ways, the current rightist regime has arguably adapted precisely these two parts of the early postwar anti-fascist narrative. For more on this q­ uestion, see my Ferenc Laczó, “Integrating Victims, Externalizing Guilt? Commemorating the Holocaust in Hungary in 2014” in Südosteuropa. Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft, 65 (2016)/2.

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passed since the release of these works, Hungarian-language Holocaust historiography has managed to match neither the richness and diversity of the source bases, nor the detail of the interpretations of this incipient scholarship. More concretely, the chapter argued that within a few years of liberation, Sámuel Lőwinger, a leading scholar of the Wissenschaft des Judentums offered an interpretation of the unprecedented radicalism of Nazi ideas as an attempt to create a new national religion, an argument which directly built on his reflections on the Greek and Jewish bases of Western civilization published in the last wartime IMIT Yearbook of 1943. Patterns of discursive continuity with wartime utterances and the retrospective denial of wartime awareness both emerge as key issues when approaching one of the first primary-source based narratives on the history of the Holocaust in Hungary originally released in 1946–47. Hogyan történt? was written from the rather apologetic point of view of Ernő Munkácsi, a crucial representative of the Jewish wartime establishment, and repeated several of his ideas, originally formulated before the genocide, on the failures and potential revival of the Jewish community of Hungary while denying that its author’s warnings of former years were already coupled with awareness of Nazi genocidal policies. By 1948, the genocide against Hungarian Jews also served as the subject of a major monograph by Jenő Lévai, clearly the most prolific of early researchers. Lévai was interested in key events in his country and related the stories of the perpetrators as well as the victims. Last but not least, Nazi policies of extermination were explored, shortly before the onset of Stalinism, from the perspective of Endre Sós, an ideologically committed communist with a broad European horizon. The monographs by the latter two authors show with particular clarity how the incipient research tradition got heavily politicized by 1948. Jenő Lévai, the most prominent of early Hungarian Jewish researchers of the catastrophe, was to fall silent upon the imposition of the Stalinist dictatorship. Endre Sós, who simultaneously articulated a communist and a Zionist perspective on the novel subject of genocide in 1948, soon had to drop not only his Zionist ideas, but the entire subject in the pursuit of his communist commitment. In 1948, Sós still wrote about fascism and anti-Semitism, however, the mandatory subjects soon became fascism and anti-fascism – and, as stated just above, they tended to be approached in an ethnicist key, which marginalized the history of anti-Semitism and also of Jews as such. Taken together, these three chapters argued that, in the case of Hungary, it was not so much local Jewish intellectual traditions, but rather the shockingly visible implementation of genocide during the last stages of the war, by which time the basic features of Nazi wartime ‘Jewish policy’ could be widely perceived, that fostered an intense engagement with the Jewish catastrophe in its

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immediate aftermath. The direct exposure of survivors from Hungary to Nazi German genocidal policies was brutal and cruel to a previously unimaginable extent, but also tended to be shorter on average than that of Jews from most other European countries engulfed in the Holocaust. The survival rate of the minority of the deported who got to be registered in the camp system (the majority being murdered practically immediately upon arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau without as much) was therefore somewhat higher than that of Jewish camp inmates from most other European countries – two factors which it would be inappropriate to overemphasize, but which both helped to enable the impressive early wave of intellectual responses in Hungary. Moreover, the end of genocide in early 1945 coincided with a brief democratic opening for the country as well as its decimated Jewish community. Hungarian Jewish society, just like Hungarian society as a whole, at first became more pluralistic in the aftermath of genocide, destruction, defeat and occupation; the varied types of sources used in the second half of this book aimed to reflect this sea change as well. In the case of Hungarian Jews, awareness of numerous basic features of genocidal policy from before the major phase of the Holocaust in Hungary, a substantial number of returnees from the Nazi camp universe, and the sudden (and short-lived) democratization of public life all played an important role in enabling a major early wave of intellectual activities. Genocide and liberation in 1944–45 could thus be immediately followed by a plethora of intellectual responses. Attempts to deal with the recent experience of genocide and the mode of democratization were closely connected in the few short years between Nazism and Stalinism, with both heavily contested. If the close connection between dealing with the mass violence of the recent past and the process of democratisation has often been emphasized in the case West Germany during the 1960s (and also since), the connection appeared strong in Hungary some two decades earlier, but barely since. During high Stalinism, the first major wave of responses to the Holocaust was followed by almost complete tabooization. As shown by Laura Jockusch, this wave of tabooization in Eastern Europe by and large corresponded to Western European trends of the 1950s. In later decades too, communist-ruled Hungary to some extent took part in transnational waves of dealing with the history of the Holocaust. Not only did survivors from Hungary play eminent roles in the course of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, but the trial also had a significant role in re-launching discussions within Hungary.4 There was growing interest in the extermination of Hungarian Jewry between the mid-1970s 4  On this, see Hanna Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann (New York: Schocken, 2004), pp. 25 and 90. On the contemporary Hungarian reception of the trial, see Kata Bohus,

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and 1989, a wave whose beginning is epitomized, at least in retrospect, by the publication of Fateless, the autobiographical novel of Hungarian Jewish Nobel laureate Imre Kertész.5 It may have appeared that, in accordance with an even greater wave of interest in the history of the Holocaust in the 1990s, the years after the fall of communism would bring decisive change to Hungary too. It is true that the key roles local perpetrators played in the implementation of ghettoization and deportations in 1944 finally began to be openly acknowledged. However, such crucial steps in confronting the history of the Holocaust and facing local responsibility already coincided with nationalistic attempts at reestablishing historical continuities that were at odds with the requirements of a self-critical memory culture. In more recent years, the appropriate manner to remember the seminal crime and catastrophe of 20th century Hungarian history has become increasingly politicized. Recent discussions of Hungarian responsibility have already been pursued in a rather polarized public sphere.6 Irrespective of such controversial developments, the history of Hungary in the 20th century continues to offer the possibility to study a major Jewish community whose members ended up constituting, practically in the last moment of the Second World War, the single largest group of victims of the most infamous Nazi camp complex. At the same time, the recent history of Hungary also offers the chance to explore a relatively large community of Holocaust survivors – many of them survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau – who resided in postwar, communist-ruled Eastern Europe. The Hungarian Jewish story thus “Not a Jewish Question? The Hungarian Holocaust in the Kádár Regime’s Propaganda during Adolf Eichmann’s Trial” in the Hungarian Historical Review, 4 (2015)/3. 5  See Imre Kertész, Fateless (London: Vintage, 2008). Seminal publications of the mid-1970s include Mária Ember, Hajtűkanyar (Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1974) and György Száraz, Egy előítélet nyomában (Budapest: Magvető, 1976). For a recent reflection on the wave of the 1970s, see Gábor Gyáni, “A holokauszt magyar emlékezete” in Randolph L. Braham and András Kovács (eds.), A holokauszt Magyarországon hetven év múltán (Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 2015). Gyáni interprets this wave of interest to mean that the Hungarian Holocaust remembrance of the 1970s should not be considered “belated” compared to Western trends. On the massive change of sensibilities during the 1970s and 1980s in the two Germanies and Poland, see Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces. Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). 6  On one of the most significant debates concerning Hungarian responsibility on the 70th anniversary commemoration of the Holocaust in Hungary, see Ferenc Laczó, “German Occupation or Hungarian Responsibility? A Hungarian Debate on March 19, 1944” in Cultures of History Forum, Hungary, Version: 1.0, 23.04.2014. http://www.imre-kertesz-kolleg.uni-jena. de/index.php?id=570&l=0. Last accessed: January 18, 2015.

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contradicts Timothy Snyder’s somewhat facile recent identification of the survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau as “largely West European Jews.”7 Snyder is entirely right in underlining that Jewish victims who were “culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews” have to some extent been marginalized in mainstream depictions of the Nazi genocide against European Jews.8 However, the problem Snyder grapples with seems more complex than what his distinctions between Western and Eastern Europe, and Western and Eastern Jews allows him to address. After all, as this book in intellectual history set out to study in detail, one of the most substantial groups of acculturated Jewish survivors of Nazi camps whose community’s murdered majority constituted the largest single group of victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau ended up in communist-dominated Eastern Europe. It was arguably the postwar compartmentalization of European and European Jewish history into East and West, a scheme into which the history of Hungarian Jews could simply not fit, combined with overwhelming attention devoted to Nazi Germany and occupied Poland in histories of the Holocaust, partly at the expense of other countries, that resulted in the relative marginalization of the Hungarian Jewish story in the age of genocide. The chapters above could thus constitute no more than a first attempt at a long overdue rediscovery of the immense drama and unprecedented tragedy of this major European Jewish community with a marked focus on key intellectual discourses between 1929 and 1948. They were ultimately written with the intention of placing the devastating story of this once prolific Jewish community at the dark heart of the European Jewish experience in the 20th century.

7  See his lines “We know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent.” See Timothy Synder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality” in The New York Review of Books, 56 (2009)/12 (July 16). 8  See Snyder, “The Ignored Reality.”

Biographical Notes Ernő Ballagi (1890–?), journalist and lawyer, regular contributor to the leading Neolog paper Egyenlőség, defense lawyer in numerous press-related trials. Between 1939 and 1944, Ballagi served as chief editor of Magyar Zsidók Lapja and was also the ­editor of the volume A magyar zsidóság útja vezércikkek és beszédek tükrében, 1840– 1940 (The Path of Hungarian Jewry in the Mirror of Lead Articles and Speeches, 1940). Imre Benoschofsky (1903–1970), Rabbi of Lágymányos (1926–28), Rabbi of Buda (1928–1936), from 1936 onward Chief Rabbi, from 1960 National Chief Rabbi. After 1945, Benoschofsky taught homiletics and religious philosophy at the Rabbinical Seminary. He published and edited several books, including Zsidóságunk tanításai (The Teachings of Judaism, 1941) and Maradék-zsidóság (The Jewish Remnant, 1946). Mózes Bisseliches (1878–1970), graduate of the Rabbinical Seminary and one of the pioneers of the Zionist movement in Hungary, president of the student organization Makkabea and later also of the Hungarian Zionist Alliance, editor of the Zionist periodical Zsidó Szemle. Lajos Blau (1861–1936), historian and philologist, Rector of the Rabbinical Seminary (1913–1932), editor of and regular contributor to the scholarly periodical Magyar Zsidó Szemle (1891–1930), initiator of the Hebrew journal Ha-Tsofeh (1911). Sándor Büchler (1870–1944), Chief Rabbi of Keszthely, Jewish scholar and historian of Hungarian Jewish history. Bertalan Edelstein (1876–1934), Rabbi in Buda, from 1924 Chief Rabbi, taught subjects such as the Bible, the Talmud, and introductory courses to religious studies at lower grades of the Rabbinical Seminary. Mór Fényes (1866–1949), Rabbi from 1893 onward, teacher of religious subjects, author of pedagogical works and supervisor of educational institutions. Aladár Fürst (1877–1950), from 1921 teacher of Hungarian and German at the Jewish Gymnasium of Pest, contributor to various publications. Made Aliyah in the 1930s. Zsigmond Groszmann (1880–1945), Chief Rabbi at the Dohány Street Synagogue between 1906 and 1945, president of the National Association of Rabbis, author of historical works dealing mostly with the 19th century. József Grózinger (1891–?), teacher of philosophy at the Jewish Gymnasium of Pest, ­editor of and regular contributor to Libanon, his most important work is Geschichte der jüdischen Philosophie und der jüdischen Philosophen von Moses Mendelssohn bis zur Gegenwart. I.: Von Moses Mendelssohn bis Salomon Maimon (History of Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Philosophers from Moses Mendelssohn until the Present Day. Volume One: From Moses Mendelssohn till Salomon Maimon, 1930).

208

Biographical Notes

Fülöp Grünvald (1887–1964), historian, teacher at the Jewish Gymnasium of Pest during the Horthy era, head of the History Department of the Rabbinical Seminary between 1948 and 1959, director of the Jewish Museum for three decades. He authored A zsidók története Budán (History of the Jews of Buda, 1938) and edited, together with Sándor Scheiber, four volumes of Magyar-zsidó oklevéltár (the Hungarian Jewish Archives). Mihály Guttmann (1872–1942), researcher of Halacha and the Talmudic method, teacher of the Rabbinical Seminary between 1907 and 1921. Employed at the JüdischTheologisches Seminar in Breslau between 1921 and 1934. Guttmann became director of the Rabbinical Seminary upon his return in 1934. His main work is Das Judentum und seine Umwelt (Jewry and its Environs, 1927). István Hahn (1913–1984), historian of religion and of the ancient Orient, Greek and Roman history, university lecturer, head of department, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His chief works include Zsidó ünnepek és népszokások (Jewish Holidays and Folk Customs, 1940), A zsidó nép története a babiloni fogságtól napjainkig (A History of the Jewish People from their Captivity in Babylon until Our Days, 1947), Az ókor története (History of Ancient Times, 1967), Istenek és népek (Gods and Peoples, 1968). Bernát Heller (1871–1943), Bible scholar, Orientalist and folklorist, historian of literature dealing with legends and fairy tales in particular. Graduate of the Rabbinical Seminary, between 1919 and 1922, director of the Jewish Gymnasium of Pest, until 1935 teacher of the Rabbinical Seminary. His most important work on a Jewish theme is A héber mese (The Hebrew Fairy Tale, 1923–24). Simon Hevesi (1868–1943), rabbi of Kassa, Lugos and Pest, teacher of the Rabbinical Seminary, president of the Association of Rabbis, founder of the Országos Magyar Izraelita Közművelődési Egyesület (Hungarian Israelite Cultural Association), editor of Magyar Zsidó Szemle, board member of the Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat (Israelite Hungarian Literary Society), was active both in Hungarian and Hebrew and published works, among others, on Maimonides and Immanuel Kant. Albert Kardos (1861–1945), literary historian, teacher, director of the Jewish Gymnasium of Debrecen until 1929. His main works include A magyar zsidóság nemzeti hivatása (The National Destiny of Hungarian Jewry, 1892) and A magyar szépirodalom története. A legrégibb időktől Kisfaludy Károlyig (A History of Hungarian Literature. From the Earliest Times till Károly Kisfaludy, 1892). Ármin Kecskeméti (1874–1944), Chief Rabbi of Makó, historian and historian of literature, author of A zsidó irodalom története (History of Jewish Literature, 1908–9), A zsidók egyetemes története (Universal History of the Jews, 1927) and Izrael története a bibliai korban (A History of Israel in Biblical Times, 1942). Imre Keszi (1910–1974), writer, critic, musical expert, translator, editor of the cultural section of the communist daily Szabad Nép between 1946 and 1949. His main works include Elysium (1958) and Végtelen dallam (Infinite Melody, 1963).

Biographical Notes

209

Arnold Kiss (1869–1940), Rabbi of Zsolna and Veszprém, from 1901 Chief Rabbi of Buda, writer, poet, translator, teacher of Hebrew literature at the Rabbinical Seminary. His main works include A héber költészet (Hebrew Poetry, 1924), Kiss József élete és művei (The Life and Works of József Kiss, 1927), Petőfi Sándor (Sándor Petőfi, 1925). Tamás Kóbor (1867–1942), writer and journalist, his most significant novels such as his Budapest (1901) and Ki a gettóból (Out of the Ghetto, 1911) address Jewish themes, among others. Bertalan Kohlbach (1866–1944), Rabbi of Temesvár (1890–96), folklorist, teacher. Zoltán Kohn (1902–1944), teacher of the Jewish Gymnasium of Pest, editor of Libanon between 1936 and 1941, co-editor of the yearbooks of the Országos Magyar Zsidó Segítő Akció (Hungarian Jewish Aid Action). Next to his publications in journals, Kohn was also the author of Hitoktatásunk korszerű problémái (Contemporary Issues in Our Religious Education, 1941). Aladár Komlós (1892–1980), writer, poet, historian of literature, teacher of Hungarian and Latin at the Jewish Gymnasium of Pest. His unfinished history of Hungarian Jewish literature was published posthumously, most recently under the title A magyar zsidóság irodalmi tevékenysége a XIX. században (The Literary Activity of Hungarian Jews in the 19th Century, 2008). Jenő Lévai (1892–1983), journalist and contemporary historian instrumental in launching Holocaust research in Hungary (avant la lettre). His major works include Fekete könyv a magyar zsidóság szenvedéseiről (Black Book on the Suffering of Hungarian Jewry, 1946), A pesti gettó csodálatos megmenekülésének hiteles története (The Authentic Story of the Miraculous Escape of the Pest Ghetto, 1946), Zsidósors Magyarországon (Jewish Fate in Hungary, 1948). Sámuel Lőwinger (1904–1980), professor of the Rabbinical Seminary from 1931 onward, director of the Seminary between 1942 and 1950. In 1950, Lőwinger migrated to Israel where he was employed at the National and University Library in Jerusalem. Ernő Munkácsi (1896–1950), lawyer, folklorist, art historian, Orientalist and Finnugrist, secretary of the Neolog Community of Pest, director of the Jewish Museum, chief secretary of the Central Jewish Council in 1944, Executive director of the National Office of Hungarian Israelites after liberation. Ernő Naményi (1888–1957), economist, art historian, director of the Jewish Museum, director of the Hungarian Industrial Society, teacher of the Business Academy, chief secretary of the Association of Hungarian Book Artists. Ervin György Patai (1910–1996), used the name Raphael Patai in his later years, folklorist and ethnographer, made Aliyah in 1933, worked at the Hebrew University, departed to the United States in 1952, author, among many other books, of The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology (1996).

210

Biographical Notes

Piroska Reichard (1884–1943), poet, teacher, translator. Her volumes of poetry include Az életen kívül (Outside of Life, 1911), Őszi üdvözlet (Autumn Greetings, 1922) and A változó napokkal (Changing Days, 1936). Géza Ribáry (1891–1942), lawyer, vice-director of the Neolog Community of Pest, director of the Országos Magyar Izraelita Közművelődési Egyesület (Hungarian Israelite Cultural Association), initiator of the Országos Magyar Zsidó Segítő Akció (Hungarian Jewish Aid Action). Mózes Richtmann (1880–1972), researcher, teacher of the Rabbinical Seminary and of the Hungarian Jewish Teacher Training Institute, editor of Magyar Zsidó Szemle. His main works include A régi Magyarország zsidósága (Jews in the Hungary of Old Days, 1912) and Ortodoxia és cionizmus (Orthodoxy and Zionism, 1920). Sándor Scheiber (1913–1985), linguist, historian of literature, Rabbi of Dunaföldvár between 1941 and 1944, director of the Rabbinical Seminary from 1950 onward. His works include his Geniza Studies (1981), he served as co-editor of Magyar-zsidó oklevéltár (the Hungarian Jewish Archives). In 1970, he relaunched the Yearbooks under the aegis of Magyar Izraeliták Országos Képviselete (National Representation of Hungarian Israelites). Károly Sebestyén (1872–1945), literary historian, teacher, critic, translator, philosopher, taught aesthetics and dramaturgy at the Drama Academy, headed the institution between 1928 and 1930, taught also at secondary schools, was a regular contributor to the press. Endre Sós (1905–1969), lawyer, journalist, writer, president of Magyar Izraeliták Országos Képviselete (the National Representation of Hungarian Israelites) between 1957 and 1965, his many works include Európai fasizmus és antiszemitizmus (European Fascism and Anti-Semitism, 1948). Lajos Szabolcsi (1889–1943), writer and historian of literature, chief editor of the leading Neolog paper Egyenlőség between 1915 and 1938. His memoir, focused on the history of the journal, was published posthumously under the title Két emberöltő. Az Egyenlőség évtizedei (1881–1931) (Two Lifetimes. The Decades of Egyenlőség (1881–1931), 1993). Samu Szemere (1881–1978), philosopher, aesthetician and translator, director of the Hungarian Jewish Teacher Training Institute between 1927 and 1942, from 1945 onward president of the Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat (Israelite Hungarian Literary Society). Author of numerous works on authors such as John Dewey, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Oswald Spengler. Béla Tábor (1907–1992), philosopher, writer, translator, his main works include (with Lajos Szabó) Vádirat a szellem ellen (Accusation against the Spirit, 1936) and A zsidóság két útja (Two Paths of Jewry, 1939).

Biographical Notes

211

József Turóczi-Trostler (1888–1962), historian of literature, Germanist and comparatist. Head of Department of World Literature at the University of Budapest during the Republic of Councils in 1919, removed from his position afterward, from 1922 onward taught at the secondary level, Head of Department again after 1945, later also member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, elected to the Hungarian Parliament in 1945 as a social democrat. His main works include A magyar irodalom európaizálódása (The Europeanization of Hungarian Literature, 1946), Petőfi a világirodalomban (Petőfi in World Literature, 1955), and Magyar irodalom – világirodalom (Hungarian Literature – World Literature, 1961). József Vészi (1858–1940), writer, journalist, editor, member of the Hungarian Parliament, head of the Press Office of the Fejérváry government in 1905–06, chief editor of Pester Lloyd from 1913 onward, president of the Association of Journalists in Budapest, from 1927 member of the Upper House of Parliament. Miksa Weisz (1872–1931), Rabbi, theologian, from 1917 teacher at the Hungarian Jewish Teacher Training Institute. His main works include Izrael története (A History of Israel, 1902), (with Lajos Blau and Simon Hevesi) Etika a talmudban (Ethics in the Talmud, 1920) and Zsidó etika (Jewish Ethics, 1923). Adolf Wertheimer (1868–1955), president of the Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat (Israelite Hungarian Literary Society) in the Horthy era, economic expert, bank director, art collector. Jenő Zsoldos (1896–1972), literary historian and pedagogue with degrees in Hungarian and Latin, teacher of the Jewish Gymnasium of Pest after 1920, director of the aforementioned Gymnasium between 1939 and 1965. During the age of persecution in Hungary, he edited the following two volumes: Száz év előtt. Az első magyar-zsidó írónemzedék (The First Generation of Hungarian-Jewish Writers, 1940), and (with József Turóczi-Trostler) Magyar irodalom és zsidóság (Hungarian Literature and Jewry, 1943).

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Name Index Acsády, Ignác 75 Alexander, Bernát 31–32 Angyal, Dávid 76 Arany, János 44 Babits, Mihály 44 Bacher, Vilmos 25 Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, Endre 178 Bakonyi, László 37, 68–69, 73 Baky, László 149–150, 175, 184–185 Balázs, György 62 Ballagi, Ernő 76, 78–79, 87, 207 Benoschofsky, Imre 81, 207 Berend, Béla 174 Bernstein, Béla 52 Bihari, Péter 16–17 Bisseliches, Mózes 72–73, 207 Blau, Lajos 207 Bokor, György 60 Buber, Martin 62, 82 Büchler, Sándor 44, 52, 207 Cesarani, David 20, 101 Cholnoky, Viktor 55 Cohen, Hermann 39, 56–57 Cohen, Richard I. 42 Cole, Tim 103 Csatay, Lajos 185 Csermely, Gyula 33 Csokonai Vitéz, Mihály 44 Csorba, László 16–17 Deák, Ferenc 96 Dénes, Lajos 67, 71 Denker, Marcellné 71–72 Dilthey, Wilhelm 60 Domonkos, Miksa 182 Edelstein, Bertalan 43, 80–81, 89–91, 207 Eger, Akiva 41 Eichmann, Adolf 175, 184–185

Endre, László 175, 178, 184–185 Engel, David 23 Eötvös, József 96 Farkas, József 39 Fáy, András 55 Feiner, Shmuel 46 Fejérváry, Géza 32 Fényes, Mór 85, 207 Fenyő, László 40, 83 Ferenczy, László 175 Flavius, Josephus 64 Fóthy, János 135–136, 148–152 Freud, Sigmund 167 Friedländer, Saul 2, 7 Fürst, Aladár 41, 207 Gábor, Gyula 41, 43 Garbarini, Alexandra 87 Gáspár, Jenő 148, 150 Gedő, Simon 82 Geyer, Arthúr 134 Globocnik, Odilo 193 Goebbels, Joseph  90 Goldziher, Ignác 25 Grossman, Vasily 193 Groszmann, Zsigmond 32, 207 Grózinger, József M. 51, 53, 56–59, 61–62, 77, 198, 208 Grünvald, Fülöp  51, 75–76, 79, 83, 86, 91–98, 199–200, 208 Guttmann, Mihály 41, 208 Gyáni, Gábor 103 Hahn, István 47, 52, 208 Hatvany, Bertalan 39, 41, 60 Heller, Bernát 47, 52, 208 Herman, Lipót 62 Herzl, Tivadar 72, 177 Hetényi, János 55 Hevesi, Simon 28, 208

234

Name Index

Hitler, Adolf 89–90, 146, 152, 170 Horthy, Miklós 5, 80, 183–185, 195 Horváth, Rita 99

Lőwinger, Sámuel 40–41, 84, 161–169, 194, 203, 209 Lukács, György 14

Imrédy, Béla 193

Madách, Imre 44 Maimonides 56 Mannheim, Karl 14 Marányi, Ede 154 Marczali, Henrik 75 Matthäus, Jürgen 97 Mendelssohn, Moses 35–38, 48, 198 Menzel, Wolfgang 90 Mérei, Gyula 31 Millok, Sándor 135–142, 148, 159, 202 Miron, Guy 6, 18–19 Munkácsi, Ernő 43, 51, 61–63, 67, 86, 161–162, 170–177, 181–182, 188, 195, 200, 203, 209 Myers, David 46

Jacobs, Joseph 42 Jaensch, Erich 59 Jászi, Oszkár 14 Jockusch, Laura 10, 20–21, 101, 200 Kállay, Miklós 69 Kandel, Sámuel 62 Kanizsai, Ernő 52 Kardos, Albert 33–34, 44, 208 Kardos, Pál 61–62 Kasztner, Rezső 64, 181–182 Kecskeméti, Ármin 29, 35–37, 39, 209 Kerenji, Emil 87, 97 Kertész, Imre 205 Keszi, Imre 59–61, 209 Kiss, Arnold 81, 209 Kiss, József 29–30, 73 Knout, David 190 Kóbor, Tamás 31, 209 Kohlbach, Bertalan 85, 209 Kohn, Sámuel 31–32, 83 Kohn, Zoltán 59, 61, 63–64, 69–70, 72, 209 Kolosváry-Borcsa, Mihály 150 Komjáthy, Jenő 56 Komlós, Aladár 19, 30–31, 47, 51, 69–75, 77–79, 209 Korein, Dezső 19 Koselleck, Reinhart 45 Kovács, Éva 103 Kölcsey, Ferenc 54–56 Lagarde, Paul de 165–167 Lambertz, Jan 87 Lappin-Eppel, Eleonore 103 Le Bon, Gustave 167 Lemkin, Raphael 64 Lenárt, András 103 Lévai, Jenő 161–162, 177–185, 187–188, 195, 203, 209 Lőw, Lipót (Leopold) 83

Naményi, Ernő 74–75, 79, 210 Newman, Chaim 42 Nietzsche, Friedrich 157 Palágyi, Lajos 28 Palásti, László  135–136, 152 Parragi, György 135–137, 141–143, 148, 159–160, 202 Patai, Ervin György (Raphael Patai) 40, 210 Patt, Avinoam 87 Peterdi, Andor 30 Pető, Ernő 171 Petőfi, Sándor 56 Petyke, Mihály 144 Polányi, Karl 14 Polányi, Michael 14 Polgár, György 68–69 Radnóti, Miklós 14 Rásonyi, István 135–136, 154–156, 160 Rátkai, Károly 135–137, 142, 144–148, 159 Reichard, Piroska 44, 210 Ribáry, Géza 67–69, 210 Richtmann, Mózes 38–39, 210 Riedl, Frigyes 55 Rosenberg, Alfred 59

235

Name Index Rosenberg, Emil 153 Rosman, Moshe 42 Roth, Cecil 42 Róth, Emil 40 Rosenzweig, Franz 46

Szenes, Anna 190 Szerb, Antal 14 Szilágyi, Ernő 64 Szőlőssi, Zsigmond 88 Sztójay, Döme 146, 149–150, 184–185

Scheiber, Sándor 25, 47, 52, 210 Schorsch, Ismar 45–46 Sebestyén, Károly 32, 37–38, 82, 210 Semprún, Jorge 112 Shavit, Yaacov 42 Simonov, Konstantin 193 Snyder, Timothy 7–8, 206 Sommer, Ernst 61 Sós, Endre 61–62, 161–162, 186–195, 203, 210 Spinoza 56 Spronz, József 135–136, 156–158, 160 Stapel, Wilhelm 59 Steiner, Lenke 88 Steinschneider, Moritz 29 Stephen I, King of Hungary (Saint Stephen) 96, 151 Stern, Samu 171 Stöckler, Lajos 182 Strauss, Leo 46 Szabolcsi, Bence 74–75, 79 Szabolcsi, Lajos 28, 210 Szálasi, Ferenc 181, 183 Szász, Anna Lujza 103 Székely, Ferenc 28 Szekfű, Gyula 34 Szemere, Samu 26, 28, 31, 211

Tábor, Béla 71–72, 211 Takács, Pál 44 Turóczi-Trostler, József 47, 51, 211 Újvári, Péter 29–30 Vadász, Lipót 34, 84 Vajda, Péter 55 Venetianer, Lajos 47, 84 Vészi, József 32–33, 84, 211 Wahrmann, Mór 31 Wallenberg, Raoul 178 Weisz, Miksa 30, 211 Weisz, Pál 30 Wertheimer, Adolf 29, 82–83, 85–86, 211 Wieviorka, Annette 132 Wilhelm, Károly 171 Wolfson, Leah 97 Yerushalmi, Yosef 45 Zsoldos, Jenő 37–38, 51–56, 58, 62, 77, 198, 211 Zsolt, Béla 71

Subject Index Christianity Calvinism, Reformed Church 144, 147–148, 159 Catholicism, Roman Catholic Church 3, 136, 148, 151, 159, 166 Christianity, Christian Churches 42, 59, 67, 116–117, 139, 142, 144, 162, 164–165, 168–169, 174, 181, 183 Protestantism 55, 166 Cities and villages Budapest 2, 8, 10, 19, 21, 25, 27–28, 65, 96, 116, 120, 123, 131, 136, 138–139, 151, 153, 158, 169, 174, 181, 183, 209, 211 Hatvan 155–156, 160 Jerusalem 55, 65, 80, 177, 204 Kamenetz-Podolsk 7, 96 Kassa 8, 116, 156, 208 Kőrösmező 93, 106 Munkács 110, 118 Szigetszentmiklós 150–151 Ungvár 110, 118 Vienna 94, 103 Warsaw 21, 94, 187, 190 Weimar 108, 187 Fascism and Nazism Anti-fascism, anti-fascist 161, 178, 187, 202–203 Anti-fascist consensus 133, 135, 160 Fascism, fascist Italy 89, 134, 162, 178, 190, 195, 203 Germany, Nazi Germany 1, 5–9, 19, 22, 25–26, 37, 47, 56, 59–60, 65, 80–83, 89–96, 101, 107–109, 113, 120–121, 123, 134, 137–142, 144–145, 147, 149, 155–156, 158–170, 172–176, 181, 184–185, 187–188, 191, 195–197, 199, 202, 204, 206–207, 211 Nazi Empire 93, 97 Nazi seizure of power 82, 91 Nazi sphere of influence 1, 199 Nazism 161–165, 167–169, 181, 194–196, 202, 204 Nuremberg Laws 91–92 Organization Todt 136, 152 Terror 90, 92, 137, 143

First World War 5, 7, 33, 43, 45, 47, 73, 76, 80–81, 84 History of communism Communist 11, 16, 118, 186, 189, 195–196, 203–6, 209 Communist regime 4, 25, 109, 117, 187–188 Kádár regime, Kádár era 186–187 Post-communism, post-communist 15–16 Sovietization 9, 195 Stalinization, Stalinism 2, 10–11, 17, 24, 103, 143, 188, 200, 203–204 History of Hungary Anti-Jewish laws, anti-Jewish legislation 6, 58, 65, 67, 85, 87, 152, 159 Anti-Semites and anti-Semitism in Hungary 5–7, 9, 16, 19, 54, 69, 72, 76, 79, 85, 89, 98, 148, 155, 184, 192, 199–200 Arrow Cross 8, 107, 151, 171, 174–175, 181–183 Borders of Hungary 5–6, 8–9, 22, 106, 119, 122, 156, 158, 183, 200 Counter-revolution 4, 85, 175 Ethnic nationalism 6, 11 Gendarmerie (Hungarian) 155–156, 175 Greater Hungary 6, 68, 73 Habsburg Monarchy, Habsburg Empire 3–5 Horthy era 11, 14, 16–18, 21–23, 25–26, 28, 35, 39, 45, 48–50, 80–81, 88, 97, 170–171, 197–198, 208 Horthy regime 4–6, 39, 47, 85, 98, 197 Hungarian collaboration 1, 8, 96 Hungarian military  3, 7, 96, 154–155, 185 Hungarian Right 11, 139 Hungarian state  8–9, 25, 89 Hungarianness, Hungariandom (magyarság) 16, 29–32, 49, 70, 81 Nationalizing, Magyarization 4–5, 25, 31–32 Numerus clausus law 4, 89

Subject Index Radicalization of Hungarian antiSemitism 6, 79, 199–200 Republic of Councils 4, 84–85, 211 Sztójay government 146, 149, 184–185 Trianon Treaty 6, 9, 84 History of the Holocaust Aftermath 2, 18, 20–21, 92, 119, 197, 200, 204 Annihilation camp (Vernichtungslager) 120–124, 190, 194 Aryan theory  81, 116, 169 Aufräumungskommando (AuschwitzBirkenau) 127–128, 133 Catastrophe, catastrophic 1, 5, 20–21, 50, 62, 64–65, 72–73, 81, 83, 97, 102, 170, 186, 189, 198–199, 203, 205 Jewish Council 148, 170–174, 181–182, 185, 195, 209 Crematoria (Nazi camps) 125, 127–128, 141 Death camp 100, 106, 112, 119–124, 132, 192, 194 Death march, death road 8, 121, 135–136, 152, 159, 183 Deportation, train journey 7–10, 22, 65, 93, 95–96, 106, 109–110, 112, 132, 135, 141, 154–155, 158–160, 173–176, 181, 183–186, 195, 202, 205 Documentation center 20, 99, 102, 200 “Final Solution” 6, 65, 96–97 Gas chamber 100, 106, 119–120, 125–128, 130–132, 141–142, 147 Genocide 1–2, 7–8, 17, 19–21, 24, 64, 89–90, 95–100, 102, 106, 119, 133, 160–161, 173, 178, 185, 187, 189–190, 193, 195, 197, 199–204, 206 Ghetto 10, 36, 91, 94–95, 110, 155, 178, 182, 187, 190 Ghettoization 8, 22, 95–96, 109–111, 132, 205 Helpers, rescuers 64, 173, 176, 178, 181–182, 192 Historical commission 20, 99, 102, 200 Holocaust in Hungary, Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry 9, 11, 23, 97, 103, 106–108, 123, 161, 170–171, 173, 175–179, 181, 185, 193, 195–196, 200, 203–204 Holocaust remembrance 11, 20, 101, 202

237 Hungarian responsibility 8, 140, 176, 184, 195, 205 Internment camp 136, 149–151, 159 Judeocide 95, 196 Kapo 114, 147 Labor camp 94, 123–124, 157 Labor service, labor servicemen (Hungarian institution) 7, 96, 106–107, 136, 152, 155–156, 159, 183, 186 Liberation 9, 18, 24, 39, 100, 110, 117, 119, 127, 132–134, 137, 152, 157–158, 160, 169, 187–188, 203–204, 209 Nazi worldview (Weltanschauung) 60, 167 Perpetrator 116, 125, 152, 154, 157, 159, 161, 191, 193, 203, 205 Persecution, age of persecution 2, 4, 11, 22–24, 41, 62, 87, 97, 101, 103, 132, 134, 140–141, 147–148, 151, 154, 158–162, 186, 193, 197–199, 201–202, 211 Program of extermination 20–21, 101–102 Resistance 63, 117–118, 132, 138, 178, 182, 190, 192 Sonderkommando (AuschwitzBirkenau) 125, 127–129, 133, 156 Starvation 90, 115, 121 Survivor 2, 10, 18, 20–21, 24, 99–106, 108–109, 113–116, 120, 123–127, 129–133, 143, 154, 160, 170, 188, 196, 200–201, 204–206 Tabooization 11, 15, 204 Torture 126, 135, 137–138, 144, 148, 153, 159 Trauma 10, 15, 20, 101, 133 Unprecedented features of the Holocaust 100, 119, 157, 201 Witness account, testimony 2, 20–21, 24, 99, 102, 109, 115, 121, 125–128, 159, 161, 200 Jewish history Assimilation 4–5, 16–17, 19, 29, 31, 34, 36, 47, 54, 56, 58, 68–71, 78–79, 198–199 Bible 27, 38, 42, 44, 47, 55, 59, 72, 168, 194, 207 European Jews  97, 102, 119, 160, 206 German Jews 22, 25–26, 56, 60–61, 82, 91–92, 95–96, 197 Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) 35, 38, 46, 48

238 Jewish history (cont.) Hebrew culture, language 55–56, 58, 80, 163, 207–210 Hungarian Jewish intellectuals, intellectual elite 1, 6, 11, 19–20, 22–23, 26, 35, 45, 50, 58, 60, 67, 80, 96–98, 102–103, 119, 197–202 Hungarian Jewish intellectual history 14, 16–17, 197, 202 Hungarian Jewish community 1, 15, 22, 75, 195, 197, 203 Hungarian Jewish scholars 23, 39, 41, 46, 48–49, 80, 88, 163, 198 Jewish culture 23, 40, 50, 53–54, 56–58, 66, 77, 92, 198 Jewish elite 6, 26, 77, 98, 170 Jewish emancipation 3, 6, 19, 35, 76, 80 Jewish historicity 19, 23, 26, 45–49, 198 Jewish peoplehood 29–30, 35, 48, 198 “Jewish question” 2–5, 13, 15, 65, 71, 86, 89, 93–94, 96, 139, 149, 165, 185 Jewish tradition 31, 35, 41, 46, 74, 167 Popular scholarship 23, 26, 28, 35, 43, 47, 49, 80, 88, 197–198 Prophets, Prophetism 44, 56, 61, 63 Reform 35, 73–75, 79, 199 Wissenschaft des Judentums 26, 29, 46, 194, 203 Zionism, Jewish nationalism 11, 19, 62, 64, 72–73, 78, 91, 174, 177, 181–182, 189, 196, 199, 203, 207, 210 Jewish Institutions Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság (the National Relief Committee for Deportees, DEGOB) 24, 99–100, 102, 104–115, 117–118, 120–121, 123–129, 132–133, 201 Hungarian Israelite Cultural Association 67, 144, 208, 210 Hungarian Jewish Aid Action 67, 209–210 Hungarian Zionist Alliance 72, 207 Israelite (Neolog) Community of Pest 28, 41, 67, 104, 209–210 Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat 26–28, 34, 81, 86, 163, 208, 211 Jewish Gymnasium of Debrecen 33, 208 Jewish Gymnasium of Pest 41, 52, 62, 86, 208–209, 211

Subject Index Jewish Museum in Budapest 28, 43, 51, 66, 171, 208–210 Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau 25, 41, 208 Neolog Judaism 15, 19, 28, 64, 75, 78, 171, 207, 209–210 Orthodoxy, Orthodox Judaism 19, 38, 64, 75, 210 Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest 25–27, 38–41, 43, 47, 82, 149, 163, 207–210 Nazi camps and ghettos Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau 1, 8, 107–108, 111–112, 121, 124, 126–133, 135–136, 147, 155–158, 160, 172, 190, 193, 204–206 Bergen-Belsen 121–122, 124, 193 Bor 135–136, 152–154, 159 Buchenwald 100, 108–118, 132, 193, 201 Gunskirchen 121–124 Mauthausen, Mauthausen-Gusen 121, 124, 135–148, 159, 193 Nazi camps 2, 107–108, 115, 122–123, 132, 136, 143, 147, 193–194, 206 Neuengamme 107, 193 Sobibór 190, 193 Theresienstadt 95, 116 Treblinka 190, 193 Vorarlberg (camp) 152–153, 159 Warsaw ghetto 94, 187, 190 Political and analytical concepts Conservatism 59, 69, 71–72, 78, 199 Corporatism 71–72, 78, 199 Crisis discourse, crisis literature 34, 45, 67, 71–73, 76, 78–81, 84, 88, 177, 199 Generation 23, 25, 33–34, 47, 49, 51–52, 61–62, 72–74, 76, 83, 93, 198 Historical narrative 23, 46, 65, 73–74, 78–79, 87, 199–200 Historiography 2, 14, 16–17, 24, 101, 103, 177, 194, 197, 202–203 Intellectual history 2, 12, 14–17, 20, 26, 50, 162–163, 169, 194, 197, 200, 202, 206 Liberalism 16, 18, 30, 45, 68–69, 73–74, 76, 79, 81, 87–88, 96, 147, 199 Literary history  32–33, 37, 44, 47, 54, 61, 73–74, 77, 208, 210–211

Subject Index Orientalism 39, 47, 208–209 Semi-liberal 67, 69, 72, 78, 198 Socialism, social democracy 137–141, 159, 169–170, 189, 194–195, 211 Publications Ararát (yearbooks) 23, 50, 65–67, 69–74, 76, 78, 171, 198–199 Egyenlőseg (journal) 28, 76, 207, 210 Izraelita Magyar Irodalmi Társulat (IMIT) évkönyvei 23, 26, 30, 32, 35, 38, 48, 80, 84, 88–89, 96, 165, 171, 198–199, 203 Libanon 23, 50–56, 58–61, 64, 66, 77–78, 171, 198–199, 208–209 Magyar Nemzet 141, 187 Magyar-zsidó oklevéltár 27, 208, 210 Magyar Zsidó Szemle (journal) 38, 163, 207–208, 210 Új Élet (Jewish weekly) 171, 187 Regions and countries Austria 101, 138 Central Europe 80, 86, 88, 95 Czech lands, Bohemia  95, 138 East Central Europe 45 Eastern Europe 46, 64, 102, 204–206 Europe 1–3, 5, 7, 10–11, 17, 19, 21–22, 24–25, 29, 36, 38, 44–46, 48, 56, 58, 63, 70, 77–78, 80, 86–87, 93, 95–97, 100–102, 106, 119, 126, 141, 149, 160–162, 165, 175, 179, 185–191, 193–196, 198–199, 201, 203–204, 206, 210

239 France 20–21, 101 Germany see Fascism and Nazism/ Germany, Nazi Germany Hungary 1–12, 14–15, 19, 21–22, 24–25, 33, 38, 43–44, 47, 49, 55, 58, 61, 65, 68–69, 72–75, 77–78, 80, 84, 87, 89, 93, 96, 98, 102–107, 110, 112, 120–121, 132–138, 140–142, 144, 146–148, 152, 154, 158–161, 163, 170–173, 175–179, 181, 184–186, 188, 193, 195–196, 199–205, 207, 209–211 Israel 163, 188, 209, 211 Poland 20–21, 65, 80, 93, 95, 101–102, 187, 206 Romania 33, 81, 94–95 Russia 81, 95, 116, 164–165 Slovakia 8, 94–95, 116, 125 Transylvania 33, 78 United States of America 27, 80, 82, 96, 116, 118, 210 Yugoslavia 116, 138 Second World War Axis powers 7, 93 Eastern Front 7, 106 German occupation of, entry into, intervention in Hungary 1, 8, 136–137, 141, 159, 172 Nazi-Soviet war 9, 63 Second World War 20–21, 23, 27, 50, 61, 65, 67, 69, 79, 86, 89, 92, 101–102, 164, 178, 190, 199, 201, 205