Yigal Schleifer spotlights how a new memorial to the victims of the Nazi occupation reflects the revisionist nationalism of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party, and hints at the creeping resurgence of Hungarian anti-Semitism:
The government is erecting the monument to honor the victims of Nazi Germany’s March 1944 occupation of Hungary—including 565,000 Jews. But the country’s opposition parties and Jewish groups are unhappy: They believe the monument—a historically and artistically challenged creation that will feature an eagle (Germany) swooping down on the archangel Gabriel (Hungary)—whitewashes the extensive and troubling role Hungary’s Nazi-sympathizing government played in the massive deportation of Jews to Auschwitz.
The Fidesz ex-party official I’m with explains that the monument is a powerful example of how Orban has reached back into Hungary’s history for inspiration. “It isn’t modern right-wing politics, but a 19th-century conservatism that plays well with the Hungarian sense of the past. That’s what he’s doing here,” he says, pointing toward the monument site.
The official approach to the memory of the Holocaust fits uncomfortably into all of this. On the one hand, Fidesz has been credited with taking positive steps, such as setting aside 2014 as a year to commemorate the Holocaust and dispensing government funds for memorial projects and events. On the other hand, as with the monument in Szabadsag Square, Fidesz is being accused of rewriting history by offering up a narrative in which Hungarian responsibility for the systematic deportation of nearly 440,000 Jews—the majority to Auschwitz-Birkenau—is diminished: The monument portrays all Hungarians, by linking it to the 45-year Soviet occupation and the continuum of Hungarian suffering. During my stay in Hungary, it was the construction of the monument that almost every government critic I spoke to—Jewish or not—considered the defining symbol of the Orban government’s efforts to toy with the past in order to bolster its political future.
The Dish 