In the Darkroom

by Susan Faludi

  That quest for nationhood played out not as an intermediary adjustment or evolutionary progression, but as a thoroughgoing renunciation of one self-definition to assert its opposite. The identity that the post-1989 generation was seeking to assume was 180 degrees from the one it had been born into, an abrupt flip from atheist Bolshevik to Christian authoritarian. By the late 2000s, Kuruc.info, a far-right electronic portal, had become a popular news site for young Hungarians; reactionary heavy-metal bands were rocketing to the top of the charts; and the extremist Szent Korona Rádió (Holy Crown Radio) ranked as one of the nation’s top ten online stations. These were the forums where young Internet-savvy Hungarians were flocking to defend a “true” Magyar self. When Hungarian sociologist Pál Tamás reviewed the 2008 results of a general population poll, he was alarmed by what he found: a surge in extreme rightist sentiments and a profound longing for a reigning strongman. Three-quarters of the respondents agreed with this statement: “We need a resolute leader who rules this country with an iron fist.” Such views were now so widespread, Tamás wrote, that “in some sense, we can hardly call these extreme anymore.”

  Totalism, Erik Erikson had cautioned, could set in when the search for identity becomes an insistence on a “category-to-be-made-absolute,” displacing psychological complexity and self-awareness. Instead of teasing out the component desires and conflicts and injuries that shape a personality, instead of inspecting (and confronting) the social and economic conditions and history that form and deform individual lives, identity could dangle the dangerous panacea of a single global fix. Could a nation succumb to the same temptation? What happens when a government champions a unitary image as a substitute for reckoning with its country’s real historical baggage and grappling with its citizens’ real problems? The political equivalent of totalism was totalitarianism.

  It was no mystery why my father had deep-sixed her psychological report: it blocked her path to the operating room. But I suspected there were other reasons. Its analysis had concentrated on the particulars, on details from a past my father preferred to keep buried. And it highlighted contradictions in a psychology—what transgender writer Sandy Stone would describe as “the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience”—that my father did not want examined. The larger questions the report raised were the very ones my father hoped to quash with a category-to-be-made-absolute surgery. The psychologist saw a patient troubled by “disharmony of the desires,” whose “impersonal eroticism” was entangled with “feelings of guilt” and whose mental landscape was “impregnated with an uncertainty” that ranged far beyond sexuality and gender. What my father wanted the psychologist to see and validate was a patient whose conflicts were either contained within or irrelevant to a single problem of identity, which could be resolved with a physical solution.

  “There’s no ‘problem,’ ” my father told me. It was the summer of 2010, a few months after the national election, and we were sitting in her living room, watching the news on her giant television set. She was talking about her nation’s politics. “It’s democracy in action,” she said.

  In the wake of the country’s humiliating fiscal collapse and rampaging rates of poverty and unemployment, the Hungarian right had swept the ballot. The Fidesz Party, which had undergone a wholesale transformation from liberal to conservative, landed commanding victories even in historically more left-leaning Budapest and in virtually all the local and county governments. The far-right Jobbik Party won nearly a fifth of the electorate and a quarter of voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, making it the nation’s third-largest party. I suppose that it was just a creepy coincidence that Jobbik took the same percentage of the vote in 2010 as the Arrow Cross did in 1939. Still, it was hard not to see in the aftermath of the elections a shadow play haunted by ghosts from Hungary’s darkest years.

  My father voted for Fidesz.

  Now we watched as more than a thousand black-shirted supporters of the Magyar Gárda who had rallied in the capital’s Erzsébet Square paraded before the news cameras, hurling bottles at police and brandishing air guns. Or rather, these were black-shirted supporters of the Új Magyar Gárda, the New Hungarian Guard. A year earlier, the courts had ruled that the Gárda had “overstepped” its constitutional rights as an association and ordered it dissolved. Unfazed, the guard reorganized under a new name, declaring itself a “civil service association” dedicated to “cultural and nation-building” activities, and carried on as before.

  “It is a problem,” I retorted. “The Gárda are terrorizing innocent people.” She waved away the remark and scootched her chair closer to the TV screen, where several Jobbik MPs and a priest were extolling the demonstrators, who marched with raised fists beneath the “Árpád stripes” banner that so closely resembled the Arrow Cross insignia.

  “Terrorizing your people,” I added.

  Since its inauguration, the Gárda, along with a proliferating constellation of other far-right groups, had been pursuing an ever more aggressive campaign against the two identities it regarded as “foreign” threats to Magyar selfhood. They were the same two identities the Hungarian fascist authorities had sought to purge from the nation in 1944, Jew and Roma. Throughout the aughts, the assault would intensify: Jewish cemeteries were desecrated, monuments mutilated, synagogues vandalized, worshippers beaten, religious leaders accosted. In the countryside, vigilante “patrols” beset Roma villages. Black-booted thugs—some armed with whips, axes, and snarling dogs—harangued residents and hurled slurs and threats like this one, caught on a cell-phone video: “Dirty Gypsies! We should exterminate all the Roma and their children.” In 2012, after the patrols stormed the streets of a town north of Budapest for two months (while the police largely turned a blind eye), the Red Cross evacuated six busloads of traumatized Romani women and children. In the late 2000s, human-rights workers recorded more than sixty hate crimes against Romani citizens in two years: beatings, shootings, arson, and the deaths of seven adults and two children. More than a third of the attacks involved firearms, Molotov cocktails, or hand grenades. In Budapest, hate crimes were also accruing against Jews: a ticket office in a Jewish district torched, the home of a prominent rabbi stoned on Passover, bloodied pigs’ feet hung around the neck of the statue of Swedish Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg in St. Stephen’s Park. These insults were less alarming to some Hungarian cultural observers than the proliferating reformulations of history: Holocaust denial, rehabilitation of the Horthy regime, a poisonously coded politics.

  Rightist politicians lent their support, both tacit and open. During the campaign for the 2010 national election, Jobbik announced its alliance with a far-right Hungarian police union that declared anti-Semitism to be “the duty of every Hungarian homeland lover” and instructed its forces to “prepare for armed battle against the Jews.” The cover of the election eve issue of Barikád, Jobbik’s party magazine, displayed a photomontage of the statue of Saint Gellért, the patron saint of Budapest, holding a menorah instead of a cross over the capital. The caption read, “Wake up, Budapest! Is this what you want?” Csanád Szegedi, Jobbik’s twenty-eight-year-old vice chairman, was particularly voluble, accusing Jews of desecrating Hungarian national symbols, conducting “massive real estate purchases” throughout Hungary “to bring in Israeli residents,” and entering into an alliance with the Roma to turn “pure” Hungarians into a minority in their own nation. Szegedi demanded that Roma families be forced out of their homes and “sealed off” in “public order protection camps.” By 2012, Jobbik’s deputy parliamentary leader Márton Gyöngyösi was pressing for another sort of roundup. On the floor of the parliament, he called on the government to draw up a list of Jewish residents “who, indeed, pose a national security risk” to Hungary.

  The party made no apologies for its explosive rhetoric. Jobbik deputy chair Levente Murányi told the media he was proud to be a “Nazi, a fascist, an anti-Semite if that is what is necessary to represent the true Hungarian interests and the sanctity
of the thousand-year-old Hungarian state.” His words resonated: public opinion polls found that the proportion of Hungarians who felt extreme antipathy for Jews had doubled between 2003 and 2010. Hungary now ranked as one of the most anti-Semitic nations in the European Union. Among young adults, that hostility was at its highest levels since the fall of Communism: by 2013, one-third of Hungarian citizens between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine were telling pollsters they harbored animosity toward Jews. Sociologist András Kovács, the leading researcher on contemporary anti-Semitic attitudes in Hungary, observed that anti-Semitism was operating as an “identity peg,” symbolically useful to bond people who were drawn to the right wing for many conflicting reasons. The “primary function” of anti-Semitism for parties like Jobbik, Kovács concluded, is to make “members of the group recognizable to each other”—that is, “to establish a common identity.” Earlier generations had used anti-Semitism as a way to express their opposition to modernity; “nowadays,” Kovács wrote, “Hungarian antisemitism on the extreme right seems to serve as code for the political identity of those who oppose the system of parliamentary democracy.” To be a Hungarian rightist in the 2000s, as in the years leading up to World War II, was not to be a Jew.

  “How can you watch this?” I said to my father as the “new” Magyar Gárda marched through Erzsébet Square.

  “Should they have shot the Nazis when they marched in Skokie?” my father said. “Should the American police exterminate the Klan?”

  “Dad, I wasn’t saying they should be killed.”

  “It’s a democratic country now. They were freely elected.”

  “No one elected the Magyar Gárda.”

  “Waaall,” my father said, “we elected the Fidesz Party. And Fidesz will put Hungary back on a good path. Viktor Orbán”—Fidesz’s founder and now Hungary’s prime minister—“will stand up to all these EU people who are bankrupting the country with their stupid policies.”

  “And Jobbik?” I parried.

  On the first day of the new parliamentary session, Jobbik leader Gábor Vona had stepped up to take the oath of office—and flipped into Superman mode, whipping off his suit jacket and puffing out his chest to the cameras. He was wearing the black vest and symbols of the old and banned Magyar Gárda. A few Socialist ministers objected to the stunt. The governing Fidesz leadership ignored them.

  “Fidesz will keep Jobbik in line,” my father said. “It’s like with the Regent Horthy. He kept the extremists in check.”

  Until, of course, he didn’t.

  Anyway, my father said, Fidesz had promised to stop the corrupt handouts of real estate. “Maybe we will finally get our property back.”

  I doubted it.

  Under the Fidesz administration, the economy continued its free fall, poverty soared, social support services were slashed, and professionals fled the country in droves. By the end of Fidesz’s first term in 2014, a third of the population was living at or below the subsistence level, child poverty was growing faster than in any other country in the European Union, and more than a fourth of citizens were “seriously deprived” (that is, unable to pay for such basics as rent, home heat, or groceries). Nearly a half million citizens had left the country, a sixfold increase in emigration since Fidesz had taken power. A third of the expatriates were college-educated. The brain drain hit all professional sectors: medicine, science, finance, academe, culture. By 2015, there was an alarming shortage of physicians, health care workers, engineers, and computer scientists. “We have become a country of emigrants,” a headline lamented. Emblematic was psychiatric care. A mental-health crisis, aggravated in no small measure by socio-economic distress, afflicted the nation at the very time when thousands of psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric nurses—grossly underpaid, despite “pseudo-solution” gratuities—were decamping. Severe austerity measures had driven the national hospital system to the brink of bankruptcy. Earlier and without explanation, the state had shut down the nation’s premier institute for psychiatric training, treatment, and research (established by Franz Josef in 1868) and eliminated 25 percent of the nation’s acute psychiatric hospital beds. The cutbacks were hardly due to lack of demand: Hungary has one of the highest rates in the EU of depression, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, and suicide. As these rates rose even higher in the new millennium, the psychiatrists available to treat them would shrink by 40 percent.

  Faced with such real problems, the Fidesz regime peddled the pseudo-solution elixir of identity. Within weeks of Fidesz’s victory at the polls, the new government had moved to grant “ethnic Hungarians” outside its borders (that is, Hungarians supposedly “stranded” in the Trianon successor states) the right to Hungarian citizenship, and declared June 4 (the day the Treaty of Trianon was signed) the Day of National Cohesion, mounting countrywide demonstrations of Magyar folk dances, handicrafts, and cuisine to “strengthen national identity.” Fidesz legislators championed municipal initiatives on “what it means to be Hungarian,” and took pains to define who was not Hungarian. The Hungarian Parliament renamed streets and erected monuments to “Hungarian patriots,” more than a few with a fascist past. Reviving the authoritarian state seemed to be an integral part of reviving Hungarian selfhood.

  In 2015, the Fidesz government sponsored a billboard campaign accusing foreign invaders of “taking” Hungarian jobs and conducted a survey on “immigration and terrorism” that fanned the flames with such leading questions as “Do you agree with the Hungarian government that instead of migrants, we should support families and their future babies?” Prime Minister Orbán ordered the construction of a thirteen-foot razor-wire fence along the 110-mile border with Serbia to keep out refugees (and soon after, another one on the border with Croatia). That summer the feared wave arrived, and the fence famously didn’t hold. Orbán greeted the scandal of thousands of migrants stranded at the Serbian border and in the Keleti train station in Budapest with a military response and declarations like “We want to preserve the Hungarian Hungary” and “Those arriving have been raised in another religion and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians.” Hungarian police herded the migrants into holding pens and locked them in train cars without drinking water. “They tell them that the train is going to Austria and then take them to a camp instead,” Robert Frölich, chief rabbi of the Dohány Street Synagogue, told the New York Times that September. “I don’t think the police got instructions from the government to do it this way, but it is very similar to what happened to Jews in the 1940s.”

  There were other echoes: The Orbán administration, which my father had counted on to curb Jobbik’s worst instincts, moved quickly after the 2010 election to pass a battery of laws that undermined the independence of the courts, the central bank, the national elections commission, the media, and a host of government oversight bodies. The Hungarian Constitution was rewritten, expanding the powers of the state, curtailing civil liberties, defining life as beginning at conception and abortion as homicide, and forbidding same-sex marriage. Its preamble (“the National Credo”) enshrined the “Holy Crown” of Saint Stephen as the embodiment of national “unity” and recognized “the role of Christianity in preserving our nationhood.”

  The government began aggressively firing the heads of cultural and academic institutions (a notable number of them Jews or liberal intellectuals suspected of a “foreign” mind-set) and installing in their stead true believers in the Magyar way. The new Fidesz mayor of Budapest replaced the director of the New Theater with an unapologetic anti-Semite and Jobbik adherent, who vowed to liberate the stage from a “degenerate, sickly, liberal hegemony” and “instill patriotic values” with programming that would feature only “pure” Hungarian plays. (His first, though abandoned, choice: a notorious anti-Semite’s play, “The Sixth Coffin,” which blamed the Jews for Trianon.) When a Fidesz minister handed out government awards in 2013 to “those who represent the best of the nation” in the arts and sciences, the prizes went to several
anti-Semitic reactionaries, including the guitarist for the neo-Nazi band Kárpátia, who had composed the official anthem of the Magyar Gárda militia. Most Fidesz officials were careful to speak in euphemisms, but not always: Zsolt Bayer, a founding member of the party and a personal friend of the prime minister, published a scabrous attack on three prominent Jews who had been critical of Fidesz policies (including Hungarian-born concert pianist András Schiff). Bayer equated one of the critics with “stinking excrement” and expressed his regret that they “were not all buried up to their necks in the forest of Orgovány,” the site of a 1919 pogrom.

  Jobbik officeholders rarely bothered to conceal their anti-Semitism. “Hitler was right in everything,” one Jobbik MP pronounced, “except he made a mistake with this holocaust thing which is a weapon in the hands of the Jewry.” The Jews, he added, “are people of Satan.” Krisztina Morvai, Jobbik’s declared future nominee for president and one of its best-known figures (though she claimed to be independent of the party), announced that “we will not allow Hungary to become a second Palestine.” She advised Hungarian Jews, “Your kind’s time is over.” While serving as an elected representative to the European Parliament, Morvai wrote an open letter to the Israeli ambassador to Hungary in which she said she “rejoiced” over Israeli deaths in the country’s war in Gaza: “I wish all of you lice-infested, dirty murderers will receive Hamas’s ‘kisses.’ ” After a conservative Jewish expatriate (who styled himself a “proud Hungarian Jew”) expressed dismay over Morvai’s remarks, he received the following response from her: “Your kind expect that if you fart our kind stands at attention and caters to all your wishes. It’s time to learn: we no longer oblige! We hold our heads high and no longer tolerate the terror your kind imposes on us.” In conclusion, Morvai advised all of “the so-called proud Hungarian Jews” to “go back to playing with their tiny little circumcised tails rather than vilifying me.”