Ákos Bartha. <i>Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Endre: Életút és utóélet</i> [Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky: life and legacy]

Visitors to Budapest who set out on the grand avenue that runs north from Deák Square to the Western Railway Station will find themselves walking on Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Street. Before World War II, the street was named Emperor Wilhelm Street, to symbolize good relations between Hungary and Germany. In April 1945, it was renamed for Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, a journalist, intellectual, and radical nationalist politician. Bajcsy-Zsilinszky was a leader in the anti-Nazi opposition who was executed by the fascist Arrow Cross at the end of 1944 for taking up arms against the German occupation of his country earlier that year. That he had been a counter-revolutionary after World War I and a well-known race defender with close ties to Hungary’s right-wing establishment troubled no one. Nor did his lifelong opposition to communism prevent the postwar Communist regime from elevating him into the ranks of the regime’s anti-fascist heroes. In the years after 1945, a cult of martyrdom preserved his memory, and his name soon graced street signs in towns and cities across Hungary.In his exhaustively researched biography of Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, Ákos Bartha takes the measure of this complicated and endlessly fascinating figure. He follows Bajcsy-Zsilinszky from his childhood in Békescsaba through his career as a politician to his death in 1944. Bartha carefully reconstructs important episodes in Bajcsy-Zsilinszky’s life, including his role as a young man in the deadly shooting of the peasant socialist leader András Achim, his many efforts in the 1920s and 1930s to build a platform for his brand of nationalist radical politics, and his struggle during the war years to free Hungary from German hegemony. Most impressively, Bartha comprehensively surveys the staggering range of Bajcsy-Zsilinszky’s public writings—over 1,300 articles and essays, in addition to many books, interviews, and speeches—in order to situate him in important debates of the period about Hungary’s place in the Carpathian Basin, how to secure and defend the country’s sovereignty, the character of Hungarian national identity, and the history of ethnic Hungarian relations with Jews and Germans.In the last and most interesting section of the book, Bartha considers Bajcsy-Zsilinszky’s afterlife as a symbol of anti-fascist resistance. When the fighting stopped in 1945, a wide variety of political forces transformed his words and deeds into an ideologically useful memory, highlighting certain aspects of his life, distorting others, and excluding some parts entirely. Communists and noncommunists alike celebrated Bajcsy-Zsilinszky for his virulent hostility to Hungary’s German minority, which they used to justify the expulsion of ethnic Germans from the country. They also praised Bajcsy-Zsilinszky as a reformer who had consistently demanded policies to improve the living conditions of ethnic Hungarian peasants. The Communist Party even managed to place the one-time counterrevolutionary into their pantheon of martyrs, since he had been pragmatic enough to find common ground with Hungary’s tiny communist resistance in the darkest days of German occupation. In the years that followed the establishment of one-party rule, a variety of actors—the anti-fascist Patriotic Popular Front (Hazafias Népfront); his widow; and historians like Károly Vigh, whose work Bartha analyzes in depth—safeguarded the official memory of Bajcsy-Zsilinsky’s heroic life and death. “It may seem absurd, but it is true,” Bartha writes, “Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky’s ‘political success’ began with his death” (484; my translation).“Unlike memory,” Tony Judt once wrote, “history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.”1 In this spirit, Bartha sets himself the task of stripping away the glow of myth that surrounded the official state hero to reveal the truth about the man. As he shows throughout the book, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky resisted clear labels and easy classification. He began his political career as an antisemitic race defender, but nuanced his anti-Jewish rhetoric over time. Yet he never abandoned the idea that Hungary needed to practice a selective and “spiritually Hungarian” (magyarszellemű) resistance to Jewish power. He fought for a free and independent Hungary, but saw no place for a German minority in it. He opposed Hitler, but admired fascism elsewhere in Europe. He searched constantly for new political allies and found them among the country’s populist (népi) reformers and anti-Nazi resistance. But he kept the old friends he had made during the anti-Bolshevik White Terror. During the Communist era Bajcsy-Zsilinszky’s status as anti-fascist paragon rested on the claim that he had migrated ideologically from right to left over the course of his career as his political consciousness developed. Bartha finds no evidence for this. Instead, he provides numerous examples to show that Bajcsy-Zsilinszky had a talent for integrating long-held beliefs into a point of view that evolved as new political opportunities opened and old ones closed down.Bartha’s portrait of Bajcsy-Zsilinszky highlights another set of issues as well. After 1945, the anti-Nazi resister was celebrated everywhere for his courage in the face of tyranny. Without question, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky considered his military service during World War I a formative experience that shaped and strengthened his ideas about honor and manly valor. But Bartha shows that he was hot-tempered and quick to fight throughout his life. He and his brother fatally shot András Achim in 1911 because they thought that the peasant leader had disrespected them. More than once after 1918, Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky challenged rivals to ludicrous duels. He was also obsessed with his own political relevance, sharing his ideas about history and foreign relations with anyone who would listen in whatever forum presented itself. So convinced was he of the significance of his strategic vision that he continued to devise new and ever more fanciful plans for reordering the Danubian region, even when he was in prison in 1944. Yet this same belligerent obsession with honor, both his own and his country’s, led him to speak out against the atrocities committed by the Hungarian Army in Novi Sad (Újvidék) in 1942 and to join and ultimately die for Hungary’s tiny anti-Nazi resistance movement during World War II. The life and afterlife of Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinsky raises important questions about the entanglement of nationalism and masculinity and about the affective power of honor concepts. A very different kind of study, conceived along the lines of Victoria De Grazia’s of the Italian Fascist Attilio Teruzzi, might have put these issues at the center of analysis.2Throughout his life, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky embraced and reflected a particular version of Hungarian national historical consciousness. As Bartha shows so clearly, he found inspiration for everything he wrote and did in a narrative tradition about past struggles for independence and self-determination in which the Hungarian ethnic nation was the protagonist in its own story. His identification with this style of collective memory was total, which made him an ideal symbol in death for a regime eager to associate those traditions with its own ideology of anti-fascism. After 1989, however, the anti-fascist paradigm that had sustained and given meaning to the Bajcsy-Zsilinszky cult crumbled. It is impossible now to reconcile his determination to rid Hungary of Germans or to defend “true-born” (törzsökös) Hungarians from Jewish influence with our own present-day democratic ideals. How then should we remember Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky today? For guidance with this question, we are fortunate to have this comprehensive and judiciously argued biography, which shows clearly why and how he mattered to so many for so long.

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