Prevention of Right-Wing Extremism, Xenophobia and Racism in ...

One year the Association of Hungarian History Teachers announced a call for applications;
those chosen visited the Auschwitz museum as part of a fi ve-day tour. The applicant teach-
ers and students were requested to outline in a few pages “how they in their lives, studies,
or family past came across the events of the Second World War, what arouses their interests
in the victims of the war, be they individuals, families, or even masses, and how Hungary’s
role in the Second World War was discussed in class with particular attention to the individual
victims, families, or masses, and the personal accounts of their tragedies”. This excluded stu-
dents who lacked the appropriate writing and expressive skills; what is more, the vast majority
of teachers that applied were actively involved in the subject matter anyway and had already
been using holocaust-related teaching material in the classroom.
On October 10th, 2002, Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness was awarded the Noble prize in literalitera- ture. He commented, “It is very interesting for me that I receive the prize for my work on the
holocaust and anti-dictatorship. Could this carry an educational hint for the East European
countries?” (as quoted by the Frankfurter Rundschau). This incredibly high recognition of
Kertész’s work greatly divided the public opinion of the nation. While at fi rst the vast majority
of people celebrated and identifi ed ed with the success of the book, later – due to the infl uence uence
of certain right-wing and right-wing extremist parties – many found the “Jewish” author unde-
serving of the Noble prize, and some began to think of him as a foreigner. The situation is best
illustrated by the fact that certain leading right-wing politicians had begun to call the author
Imre Kertész (as opposed to Kertész Imre, which would be the original Hungarian order of the
name – family names come fi rst followed by second names in Hungarian), thereby indicating
that he is in fact not Hungarian and that the prize was not a real acknowledgement of literary
performance of a Hungarian author author because foreign powers and forces were at play. Neverthe-
less, the book has has been sent out to all school libraries through fi nancing from the Ministry of
Education.
The Kurt Lewin Foundation issued a 48-page publication on Hungary’s accession to the
European Union on May 1st, 2004 entitled XENO.HU. The aim of the publication was to present
xenophobic, extreme right-wing ideologies, bands, websites, jokes, and books in the hope
that this would strengthen the defenses of secondary school students against extremism.
The XENO.HU booklet’s plentiful illustrations free of didactic approaches is quite schocking.
Whereas the fi rst part of the book is no more than a presentation of facts, the second half
discusses the underlying reasons behind the facts.
Although an increasing number of social and civic information books are being published
in the country, most of them are structured like classroom texts and thus contain a lot of text,
and this entails a gap between the message they wish to convey and the masses of students
that fi nd reading diffi cult. One of the best publications in this genre is the booklet entitled
Multiculture (Rózsavölgyi, 1995) by the Másképp Alapítvány (Másképp Foundation), which disdis- cusses human rights, racism, unemployment, and people of different abilities. It also provides
students with group assignments that may form the basis of long-term attitude change. One
of the special advantages of the book is that it is supplemented with a teacher’s edition, which
explains the context and the network of cause and effect that the book is about.
Right-Wing Extremism in Hungary
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