The Historiography of the Holocaust

Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial 453
occurred which represents a pivotal landmark in the history of post-communist
Hungary. This was launched by an article – which had a major impact in intellectual
circles – written in 1990 by Sándor Csoori, a rural revivalist and poet
and ‘Hungary’s foremost contemporary populist writer’. This incendiary text
expressed concern at the ‘moral devastation of society after forty years of communist
rule, uncertainty about what it means to be a Hungarian, and the country’s
headlong rush into Western materialism’.
With respect to the central issue of national identity, Csoori wrote that ‘only
those people capable of experiencing the pain of being Hungarian could be
called true members of the nation’. Referring expressly to the Jews, the highly
popular poet opined that ‘before World War I they had been able to empathise
with Hungary’s tragic fate. But no longer! The combined experiences of the
Hungarian Republic of Soviets in 1919, the interwar Horthy regime and
especially .. . the Holocaust, had put an end to the Hungarian-Jewish symbiosis’.
Moreover, the actual trend is one of reverse assimilation of the Hungarian nation
by liberal Jewry through the parliamentary system. The Jews, he asserted,
‘could never understand Hungarian pain, for while they...think in practical,
pragmatic terms and would be perfectly happy to bring today’s truncated
Hungary into the European community, the Hungarians are idealists, whose
activity is determined by the plight of the Hungarian minorities in neighbouring
countries’. 52
In convergence with Csoori the vociferous ultra-nationalist Csurka tried to
convince the attendees at a demonstration organised by his party in June 1995
of the grave danger of replacing the pure-blooded, true-born Hungarians with
Ukrainians, Russians and Jews from the former Soviet Union, such a replacement
being ‘revealed’ as the aim of the governing liberal-socialist coalition then in
power. 53
Despite their clamour, these strident tones remain marginal and Deák’s
study ends on an optimistic note. However, his conclusion is not shared by
András Kovács, who cites Ezra Mendelsohn’s bitter remark that Hungary represents
a singular example of ‘how a country previously “good for Jews” is transformed
almost overnight – in the Horthy era – into a country wrecked with
pogroms and permeated with anti-Semitic hysteria’. Holocaust denial and
racism with its essential antisemitic component, writes Kovács, have the function
of an ‘aggressive compensation for social frustrations’. One of his preliminary
conclusions – which can easily be extended beyond the Hungarian borders
across former communist east-central Europe – is that ‘the manifestation of
such forms of anti-Semitism...after the fall of communism bears witness to
the unquestionable existence of an anti-Semitic potential. However, what
happened after World War I in Hungary could...happen again if this anti-Semitic
potential were combined with a political ideology elevating anti-Semitism to
apolitical program.’ 54