Making Hungary Great Again: Mass Violence, State Building, and the Ironies of Global Holocaust Memory

Abstract

This chapter begins by examining the persecution and destruction of Jews and Jewish communities in the multiethnic and multi-religious borderlands under Hungarian rule during World War II that aimed to create an ethno-national “Greater Hungary.” This vision also entailed an attack by the Hungarian state against other groups, which the state also perceived as dangerous, foreign, or otherwise “non-Hungarian.” The chapter highlights the agency of wartime Hungarian state authorities by offering a novel analysis of bystanders: a close reading of testimonies of Holocaust survivors who witnessed Hungarian state violence against other groups. The chapter then addresses a troubling irony: the current Hungarian government, which spreads anti-Jewish discourse and engages in violent attacks against Roma, also plays an active role in international institutes of global Holocaust memory. State-sponsored Holocaust memory in Hungary furthermore exploits this memory culture to promote a political agenda wherein the “Greater Hungary” vision is still central by referring to the Holocaust in Hungary as an exclusively German history. The government also reclaims as Hungarian the borderland Jews that the Hungarian state had excluded as “non-Hungarian” and destroyed during World War II in order to stress the “Hungarian” character of those “Greater Hungary” territories that are today parts of neighboring states. The chapter concludes by linking this ironic situation very briefly with another irony of global Holocaust memory.