In November, 2012, the Nobel prize-winning novelist Imre Kertész announced his retirement. The writer, who as a fourteen year-old was transported to Auschwitz, has become one of Europe’s most eloquent and respected literary witnesses to the Holocaust. In books such as “Fateless” and “Kaddish for an Unborn Child,” he has made the paradoxical case that “the concentration camp is imaginable only and exclusively as literature, never as reality—not even—or rather least of all—when we have directly experienced it.” Since his working life has been devoted to this act of imagination, his decision to house his archive not in his native Hungary but, rather, in Germany appears to be a profound gesture of reconciliation. Yet, when I said so on Twitter, a Hungarian writer friend e-mailed to tell me that Kertész’s decision was also driven by more negative concerns:
My friend has asked to remain anonymous, as he fears that if he is publicly identified as a critic of the government it could cause problems for him and the company where he works. His fears appear to be well founded. Across Hungary, the cultural scene is in a state of crisis.
The current Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, has rebranded Fidesz, once a liberal youth party (with the vintage countercultural slogan “Don’t trust anyone over thirty-five”) as a right-wing Christian nationalist organization. After Fidesz won a large majority in national elections in 2010, Orbán set about remaking the country, changing the constitution in ways that observers allege have removed important checks on the power of government. The courts are being packed with government loyalists, and media is scrutinized for “balance,” with the threat of crippling fines for those deemed to have strayed. Dozens of “opposition” journalists have been fired from state-run media, and Klubrádió, the country’s most prominent independent radio station, has been refused a broadcasting license.
The new constitution “recognizes the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood,” and art that is deemed blasphemous or “anti-national” is now the target of a full-blown campaign of suppression. After the election, the mayor of Budapest fired the head of the New Theatre (one of the country’s leading producers of contemporary drama) and appointed in his place György Dörner, an actor who supports the far-right Jobbik opposition party, an openly anti-Semitic, anti-gay, and anti-Roma organization with a recently disbanded paramilitary wing, whose Presidential candidate has declared that Israeli Jews are “lice-infested dirty murderers.” Dörner has promised to reverse what he sees as a “degenerate, sick liberal hegemony,” and to produce only Hungarian plays. Last August, protests forced him to cancel a proposed production of “The Sixth Coffin,” a play set in France after the First World War, featuring “a group of powerful Jews plotting to destroy Hungary and plunge humanity into another world war.”
In the art world, an organization called the Hungarian Academy of Arts (M.M.A.), founded as a private association in 1992, has recently been made into a public body and given control of the lion’s share of the national cultural budget. They will now select the directors of museums and administer prizes. Beginning this month, the M.M.A. has taken control of Budapest’s Mucsarnok, the country’s most significant contemporary-art venue. The eighty-year-old head of the M.M.A., György Fekete, has said that, in addition to artistic excellence, “unambiguous national sentiment” is required for membership in his organization. A member has to be “someone who feels at home and doesn’t travel abroad in order to revile Hungary from there.” He has pledged to prevent blasphemy in state institutions, citing an exhibition at the Mucsarnok called “What Is It To Be Hungarian?” (which had sections on “stereotypes” and “conflicts”), as an example of the kind of show that will no longer be presented. In a TV interview, he stated that Hungary is “built on Christian culture; there is no need for constant, perpetual provocation.” Asked about the separation of church and state, he said that he wished it were not so, despite the fact that the separation is central to modern democracy. “I don’t give a damn for this modern democracy, because it’s not modern and it’s not a democracy.”
Major cultural figures are coming under pressure. The pianist András Schiff has said that he will no longer travel to Hungary because of the prevailing political climate. “It would be suicide for me to go there,” he told a Finnish interviewer. “They would chop off my hands.” In 2011, five left-leaning philosophers, including Ágnes Heller, were placed under investigation for the misappropriation of two million dollars in grant funds. Heller’s colleagues characterized this as harassment. A letter of support was signed by over sixty prominent Hungarian academics, including several Nobel laureates. The social theorist Jürgen Habermas called on the European Union to investigate. In May, 2012, the Budapest police closed the investigation, claiming there was no evidence of a crime. When the veteran journalist Paul Lendvai published (in German) “My Squandered Country,” an exposé of the Orbán government’s corruption of the Hungarian public sphere, a coördinated campaign of criticism was mounted through government-controlled media, including the allegation that Lendvai had spied for state intelligence during the Communist period. Nationalist exiles picketed international readings, forcing the cancellation of an event in Frankfurt after threats of violence. The first publisher of a proposed Hungarian edition cancelled the book.
Then there is the question of what the Culture Secretary said to Béla Tarr. After the director of “The Turin Horse” picked up the Silver Bear at the sixty-first Berlin International Film Festival, he gave an interview to Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel in which he claimed that the Orbán government was cracking down on cultural dissenters. “The government hates intellectuals because they are liberal and oppositional,” he reportedly said. “It insults us as traitors.” Forty-eight hours later, he appeared to repudiate that statement. “That writing is not in my style,” he told a Hungarian news agency. “I do not fight, debate, or argue that way. I consider it very humiliating that all this has soiled the success and reception of our film, sinking it to the level of quotidian politics.” The State Secretary for Culture, Géza Szocs, claimed that during that time he had phoned Tarr “to congratulate him on his win,” and that Tarr had assured him the quotes were fake. Meanwhile, the Hungarian distributor of “The Turin Horse” cancelled its première, and shelved plans to distribute the film.
The situation for Hungarian writers is no less fraught. In 2011and 2012, the same Géza Szocs (who came to prominence as a poet) was the president of Hungarian PEN, which, despite its mandate to protect freedom of speech, has become closely associated with the Orbán government. In 2012, Hungarian PEN instituted a fifty-thousand-euro government-funded literary prize, which it offered to Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The American turned it down, stating that “the policies of this right-wing regime tend toward authoritarian rule and the consequent curtailing of freedom of expression and civil liberties… I hereby refuse the prize in all its forms.” The activist Elie Wiesel has also returned a Hungarian award, in protest against the attendance of government officials at the reburial of a writer who was a member of the National Socialist Arrow Cross Party, which, for a few months at the end of the Second World War, led a brief and bloody “government of national unity,” murdering between ten and fifteen thousand of their countrymen and deporting around eighty thousand to Auschwitz.
Intellectuals who live in Hungary, or who wish to work or lecture there, are extremely circumspect in their criticism. Two internationally renowned novelists I contacted for this article declined to comment. One writer who would speak is the poet and translator George Szirtes, who lives in the U.K. “The government has been looking to impose itself and its view of what it considers to be ‘the nation’ on not only the political sphere but the cultural, too,” he told me. “In effect, it wants to return the country to the condition of the thirties… the atmosphere is full of hatred.” Szirtes laments “the creation of a climate that seems to me inimical to the country I have loved and admired. Little by little, I find every part of it is being dismantled and banished.”
Far from being an unforced reconciliation with his former persecutors, Kertész’s decision to give his archive to Germany should appear as an urgent warning sign. Unlike Germany, which has transformed itself through a national process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”), Hungary remains in a wistful, toxic relationship with the nineteen-thirties, with a fantasy of Jewish conspiracy and national moral decline. As the memory of the iron curtain fades and Europe recenters itself, Hungary’s fascist resurgence should be a matter of concern for all. Kertész’s own reaction is to quote Karl Kraus: “The situation is desperate, but not serious.”
Hari Kunzru’s most recent novel is “Gods Without Men,” which Rollo Romig wrote about in March. Read Kunzru’s short fiction for The New Yorker, “Raj, Bohemian” and “Magda Mandela.”
Photograph, of Imre Kertész, by Csaba Segesvári/Wikimedia Commons.
