Politics and literature clash in a controversy over the government’s sanction
of authors linked to the country’s fascist past.
BUDAPEST | It is not uncommon in Hungarian living rooms to
find the walls lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling.
Nor is it odd to find on those shelves a novel or two by
the 20th-century Transylvanian writer Jozsef Nyiro.
Nyiro’s heroes are ordinary folk. In books such as Jezusfarago
ember (The Jesus Carving Man, 1924) and Uz Bence (1933),
their adventures unfold amid the villages and hills of the
Hungarian-populated Szekely Land in the heart of Romanian
Transylvania, a region severed from Hungary by the post-World
War I Treaty of Trianon. They are stories, Nyiro’s fans say,
that burst with magyar lelkiseg – Hungarian spirituality
and soul – and are an important part of the national identity.
So far, so inoffensive. But the inclusion of Nyiro in Hungary's new National
Core Curriculum for high schools, and of fellow Transylvanians
Albert Wass and Deszo Szabo, has opened a new front in the
country’s ongoing culture wars. On one side are those for
whom the three interwar writers are Hungarian patriots; on
the other, those who view them as anti-Semitic fascists with
no place in the state's official literary canon.
The new curriculum is a central part of what the government,
led by the conservative Fidesz party, calls a “fundamental
reform” of all elements of the country’s education sector.
Rozsa Hoffmann, secretary of state for education and member
of junior coalition partner the Christian Democrats, calls
the revamp “modern and in line with the latest EU trends.”
To Andras Nyiri – formerly a leader of the Hungarian Association
of Independent Teachers, now an education consultant and
a member of the Network for Freedom of Education, one of
several groups that have sprung up in opposition to the changes
– it’s a “nightmarish centralized system with a strange retro-Hungary
image that prioritizes a ‘national middle class.’ ”
The curriculum, set to be implemented in September 2013,
contains plenty of retro. According to Hoffmann herself,
it represents a return to the old traditions and baseline
standards of cultural literacy. Around 90 percent of what
high school teachers can teach will be fixed, providing the
basis for a unified “cultural language” throughout Hungary.
The literature element includes hundreds of writers, among
them the three Transylvanians, who, grouped together as a
“national conservative school,” made the final cut after
being omitted from a first draft. The controversy over their
inclusion has less to do with the authors’ literary prowess
than with their political stripes.
Nyiro, a former Catholic priest, edited far-right propaganda
newspapers during World War II and was a member of the wartime
Hungarian parliament following the annexation of northern
Transylvania in 1940. An admirer of Joseph Goebbels, he kept
his seat even after the fascist Arrow Cross coup in October
1944 toppled Miklos Horthy, the regent who had ruled Hungary
from 1920.
“Long live Adolf Hitler,” Nyiro told parliament on one occasion.
Jews are “foreign to magyar lelkiseg,” he said, and liberal
Jewish tradition “has infected many Hungarians and must disappear
from Hungarian life.”
Both Wass, whose novels still sell well, and Szabo, an essayist
regarded by many as a brilliant talent, had significant anti-Semitic
strains in their work. Szabo would later become strongly
anti-fascist, but Nyiro and Wass, both of whom fled Hungary
at the end of the war, believed until their deaths that America
had made a fatal mistake in siding with the atheist Bolsheviks
against Nazi Germany. Wass is still considered a war criminal
by Romania for his alleged role in atrocities during the
annexation of northern Transylvania, charges he denied until
his death in Florida in 1998.
Whether the works of such writers should be taught to high-school
students depends on what filter you view them through.
Jewish-American author, Holocaust survivor, and Nobel Peace
Prize winner Elie Wiesel, a native of northern Transylvania,
renounced a state award given to him by Hungary in 2004
after hearing that Laszlo Kover, co-founder of Fidesz and
current speaker of the parliament, had attended a ceremony
honoring Nyiro in late May. In a letter to Kover, Wiesel
called Nyiro “a fascist ideologue.”
Kover replied in writing that postwar Allied generals had
not deemed Nyiro a war criminal, fascist, or anti-Semite,
and had refused to extradite him back to Hungary to stand
trial. Nyiro deserves respect, the speaker said, not for
his “tragically mistaken political activity, but for his
body of literature,” in which “Nazi sentiments or anti-Semitism
do not appear.”
Kover’s implication – that a distinction should be made between
the quality or content of a writer’s works and his or her
philosophical, ideological, or political views – has become
a hot topic of Hungarian debate.
“A literary work is not an ‘object’ that is independent from
its author,” says Peter Rado of Expanzio Human, an education
policy consultancy in Budapest. “It is interpreted in the
light of the whole personality of the person. This doesn't
mean that a person’s politics discredit a literary work,
even if his political views are questionable. Great writers
with controversial views, be they conservative, liberal,
or leftist, can be exciting raw material for discussion and
free interpretation in the classroom. These are very different,
though, from anti-Semitism, which is not a legitimate value.”
Quality should be the key criterion for inclusion in a curriculum,
according to Laszlo Arato, president of the Hungarian Language
and Literature Teachers Association. The literary bona fides
of American poet Ezra Pound or German essayist Gottfried
Benn go unquestioned, he says, despite their having been
linked with fascist parties. Two other Hungarian writers
of that era, poet Lorinc Szabo and essayist Laszlo Nemeth,
are regarded as eminences in spite of some anti-Semitic or
pro-fascist references in their works or statements.
Arato does not believe the Transylvanian writers make the
grade but says his judgment is strictly literary. If the
curriculum represents baseline national knowledge, he says,
“it should contain only the greatest works of the greatest
writers. Nyiro, Wass, and [Dezso] Szabo do not belong in
that category.”
Despite their lack of literary gravitas, Nyiro and Wass retain
an appeal for many Hungarians, especially those with family
connections to or sympathies with Hungarian communities in
Transylvania. Both writers were banned during the decades
of communism, but there are plenty of pensioners who remember
buying their books illicitly in secondhand shops in the 1950s.
Their works, accessibly written and rich with anti-communist
sentiment, portray lives in the post-Trianon “lost lands”
in a way that resonates with the Hungarian psyche and experience.
To curriculum critics, politicians are using the education
system to play to these sentiments.
“What we are dealing with in the curriculum is political
intention, definitely not a scientific discussion about literary
merit,” Rado, the education consultant, says. “The inclusion
of these authors serves nothing else but the delivery of
political-ideological expectations.”
The Transylvanian trio’s route to the curriculum was largely
paved by historian Mihaly Takaro. A member of the Cecile
Tormay Association – named for another anti-communist author
– Takaro has written two books about Albert Wass and delivered
lectures at meetings of Jobbik, the radical nationalist party
that finished third in 2010’s parliamentary elections. Furious
at the composition of the first draft curriculum, Takaro
launched a media campaign to include Wass, Tormay, playwright
Ferenc Herczeg, poet Istvan Sinka, and other writers he called
“national conservatives,” urging teachers to lobby the Education
Ministry.
The insertion of Nyiro, Wass, and Szabo in the final version
was announced with great fanfare (although Hoffmann, the
education secretary, would subsequently, and more discreetly,
reveal that teaching them would not be compulsory). According
to many political analysts, Fidesz played up the decision
in a bid to win votes from Jobbik.
“The government has been trying to steal the symbolic and
ideological proposals of Jobbik for two years now,” says
Andras Biro Nagy of Policy Solutions, a political research
and consulting house in Budapest. He notes several such gestures:
the naming of a Budapest square for Albert Wass; the removal
from outside parliament of a statue of Mihaly Karolyi, the
left-leaning post-World War I prime minister; compulsory
school visits to parts of Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, and
Ukraine that were part of Hungary prior to the Treaty of
Trianon. All were proposed by Jobbik in its 2010 election
manifesto. Lately, statues of the interwar authoritarian
ruler Horthy, who made a pragmatic alliance with Nazi Germany
in order to win back the pre-Trianon territories, have begun
popping up in provincial towns and villages, a phenomenon
many say Fidesz has been conspicuously quiet on, even tacitly
sympathetic toward.
“The purpose of the strategy is clear,” Biro Nagy says. “They
want to defend the border between Fidesz and Jobbik voters.
Polls are showing that several hundreds of thousands of people
are hovering between the two parties, so Fidesz is trying
its best not to lose them to Jobbik. They appear to have
calculated that they have more to lose on the far right than
to win in the center.”
The need to outflank Jobbik could also explain the circus
over a failed campaign to transport Jozsef Nyiro’s ashes
from Spain, where he died in 1953, to his hometown of Odorheiu
Secuiesc (Szekelyudvarhely to its ethnic Hungarian majority),
which caused an ugly diplomatic spat. Bucharest refused entry
to the train carrying Nyiro’s remains, and Romanian Prime
Minister Victor Ponta denounced the attempt to honor “a person
who, according to all international assessments, conducted
far-right, anti-Semitic activities.” Fidesz’s Kover, who
had traveled to the Transylvanian town for the abortive 27
May reburial, said denying Nyiro the opportunity to rest
in his native land was “unfriendly, uncivilized, and barbaric
behavior.” Ponta requested an official apology from Hungarian
counterpart Viktor Orban, in vain.
How teachers will approach figures such as Nyiro and Wass
in the classroom is unclear. While the Core Curriculum has
passed into law, school-specific “framework curricula” drawn
from the state’s authorial roster have not yet been decreed.
The controversial Transylvanians are unlikely to be required
reading.
Laszlo Arato, a high school teacher himself, predicts that
most of his peers, faced with an overloaded curriculum that
leaves little time to cover much of anything in depth, will
ignore them, giving a nod to the national conservative school’s
existence but little else.
“Teachers who want to be loyal to the government, or those
whose views are close to those of Jobbik, will be happy to
teach them, but most won’t,” Arato says. “Some will teach
them in a critical way, which I think is fine. I have already
taught Albert Wass as a popular best-seller writer, and may
do again just to show students why he is not so valuable.” tol.org
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