Cold Days in the cold war on the Hungarian–Serbian border

Abstract

Tibor Cseres's 1960 novel Cold Days (‘Hideg Napok’. Budapest: Corvina, 2013), and its 1966 film adaptation directed by András Kovács, are two fictionalised treatments of an act of mass violence during the Second World War, that give us a rare glimpse of the political and ethnic fault lines that were covered over during the cold war between Hungarians, Jews and Serbs. This reading of both texts, their reception, and their afterlives in the post-socialist period, focuses on the trope of ‘recognition’, which functions within the texts as the fabric of loose ties that binds a community together, but is also vital to its destruction. On the meta-textual level, it corresponds to the waves of acknowledgement, denial and polarisation that haunt acts of interethnic violence, and the centrality of artistic expressions like Cold Days in navigating these waters. Lastly, parallel conversations in Holocaust Studies, Lukács’ aesthetics of film and recent public debates throughout the region give us a new context to understand these texts in film history and public memory.