In
the scenic and enchanting lands of Transylvania, the ashes
of a dead fascist have sparked a diplomatic incident.
On May 27, the remains of Hungarian writer and politician
Jozsef Nyiro were supposed to be reburied in the Romanian
town of Odorheiu Secuiesc. The village is today heavily populated
with Hungarians, as it was part of Hungary during the Austro-Hungarian
Empire and then briefly again during World War II. The train
carrying Nyiro’s ashes, called the Blessed Lady Pilgrimage,
was to be followed by a regiment of Hungarian cavalry dressed
in ceremonial Hussar regalia, and the speaker of the Hungarian
Parliament was planning to address a large crowd at the ceremony.
But the extensive plans, undertaken at the expense of the
cash-strapped Hungarian government, came to naught when Romania
refused entry to the train car carrying Nyiro’s urn.
Prior to announcing it would not allow Nyiro’s ashes
to enter its territory, the Romanian Foreign Ministry requested
a meeting with the Hungarian ambassador to voice its objection.
The Hungarian government protested in turn, stating that
it considered the reburial of Nyiro – whose works it
had just added to the national school curriculums — a “cultural
event.” Meanwhile, the Speaker of the Hungarian parliament
denounced Romania’s decision as “unfriendly,
uncivilised and barbaric.”
But Romania had good reason not to want Nyiro reburied in
its ground. That’s because the man was a supporter
of Hungary’s wartime Arrow Cross, the group of pro-Nazi
thugs who sought the reconquest of lands (including Transylvania)
excised from Hungary after World War I. Bucharest has decried
its neighbor’s ”promoting a person that, according
to all international assessments, conducted far-right, anti-Semitic
activities.” That Hungary sees fit to expend state
resources venerating a fascist who has been dead for six
decades is but the latest sign of the disturbing turn the
country has taken under Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his
Fidesz Party.
After Nazi Germany allowed Hungary to annex Northern Transylvania
in 1940 as part of the Second Vienna Award, Nyiro joined
the Hungarian parliament as a member of the extreme right
wing, anti-Semitic Transylvanian Party. In a 1942 speech,
he referred to Jews as “well-poisoners” who “destroy
the Hungarian soul, who infect our spirit,” and declared
that “This concept of the rundown liberal Jewish tradition,
this veiled propaganda, must disappear from Hungarian life.” That
year, his party proposed a ban on Jews using railway sleeping
cars.
In October, 1944, after learning that Hungary’s then-Regent
Miklos Horthy was secretly negotiating with the Allies, the
Nazis backed a coup by the Arrow Cross to seize control of
Hungary and keep it on the side of the Axis. Once installed
in power, Arrow Cross members immediately went about massacring
over 10,000 Jews in Budapest. Throughout this period, Nyiro,
editor of a creepily named, right wing publication “Hungarian
Might,” remained in the puppet parliament. Following
Germany’s surrender, and wanted for war crimes charges
by Romania and Hungary, he fled to West Germany and died
in Franco’s Spain, one of several Hungarian Arrow Cross
supporters to find exile in the Hispanosphere alongside their
German Nazi brethren.
Ironically, Nyiro’s planned reburial coincided with
that of another European fascist sympathizer, Juozas Ambrazevicius-Brazaitis,
who briefly served as puppet prime minister in Nazi-occupied
Lithuania. Brazaitis’ remains in the United States
were recently exhumed and reinterred, with full state honors,
in Lithuania last month. And the glorification of Nyiro is
part of a broader trend within Hungary itself, where the
out-and-out fascist Jobbik party is the country’s third
largest. Fidesz, the ruling party of Prime Minister Orban,
cynically uses Jobbik’s popularity to insulate itself
from criticism, claiming that not only are its respectable
center-right policies the best way to weaken the far right,
but that international criticism of Hungary (by which it
means Fidesz) only gives succor to extremists. (Aside from
the disgrace of honoring an anti-Semite, the reburial controversy
has exacerbated long-simmering tensions between Hungary and
Romania, relations that have worsened since Orban’s
government came to power and announced that it would distribute
Hungarian passports to any ethnic Hungarian living in a neighboring
country who wanted one).
“If there’s any kind of insurance against any
kind of extremism,” Zoltan Kovacs, the government’s
communications minister told me in a February interview in
Budapest, “it is this government.” This point
has been echoed repeatedly by Fidesz and its supporters,
including Hungary’s ambassador to the United States,
who recently wrote a letter to the Washington Post complaining
that, “Presenting a make-believe picture of Hungarian
reality benefits no one but the extreme right-wing party
Jobbik.” Not only, in this opportunistic telling, does
Fidesz serve as the bulwark protecting liberal democracy,
but even well-intentioned criticism of Hungary has the opposite
effect by emboldening fascists.
This critique would have merit if Fidesz did more to combat
the ideas of the far right, rather than mimicking their rhetoric
and venerating their heroes, as it is doing not only now
with Nyiro but, more importantly, with a rehabilitation of
Horthy. “Right wing intellectuals could have said, ‘this
we don’t say, this we don’t do, this way we don’t’ behave,’” Endre
Bojtar, editor of the liberal magazine Magyar Narancs, told
me earlier this year. “So they could have created a
kind firewall between the extreme right and the center right.
What they did instead is they appropriated a lot of their
issues, a lot of their language.” They have also appropriated
Jobbik’s behavior. Last week, the Hungarian Culture
Minister announced that Nyrio’s ashes had been smuggled
into Romania, a move that prompted the Romanian Prime Minister
to demand an apology from his counterpart. Orban has refused.
On the day Nyiro was meant to be buried, the speaker of
the Hungarian Parliament traveled to Romania and told a crowd
of ethnic Hungarians that, in appreciating the man’s
legacy, his politics ought to be separated from his writing.
This is at least a tacit concession on the part of the Hungarian
government that Nyiro’s politics were disreputable.
How to appreciate a writer with authoritarian political sympathies
is a perennial question. Ezra Pound was a fascist. Gabriel
Garcia Marquez is the court novelist of Fidel Castro. That
doesn’t mean they were incapable of producing great
literature and shouldn’t be recognized for it. Yet
rare is the writer who becomes a man of action, and it is
this facet of Jozsef Nyiro’s story that makes it harder
to distinguish his middling literary work from his obscene
political views. The more relevant question is why the Hungarian
government finds it so important to do so.
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