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East European Jewish AffairsPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/feej20

Hungarians and Jews:Narrowed Perspectives andThreatened SensibilitiesGeorge Schöpflin a ba Jean Monnet Professor of Politics , UniversityCollege Londonb School of Slavonic and East European Studies ,University of LondonPublished online: 19 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: George Schöpflin (2000) Hungarians and Jews: NarrowedPerspectives and Threatened Sensibilities, East European Jewish Affairs, 30:2,123-131, DOI: 10.1080/13501670008577926

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REVIEW ARTICLE

GEORGE SCHÖPFLIN

Hungarians and Jews:Narrowed Perspectives and ThreatenedSensibilities

Sunshine (179 minutes) Directed by Istvén Szabó. Starring RalphFiennes, Rosemary Harris, Rachel Weisz, Jennifer Ehle, William Hurt

I have never liked dubbed films. I have always found it highly irritating whensomebody's lips moved in French, say, and words came out in English. Iremember seeing Sophia Loren absurdly speaking German in, I think,Boccaccio 70, shouting 'du Schweinhund' (or words to that effect). But thenI saw Sunshine - or to be precise A napfény ize, which actually means 'TheTaste of Sunshine' - in the place in which it was set - Budapest - and dubbedinto the language in which the characters were meant to be speaking -Hungarian - and I changed my mind.

For the first few minutes it was rather odd to hear Ralph Fiennes andJennifer Ehle speaking fluent Hungarian - not the easiest of languages - butwithin a very short space of time it no longer mattered. The Hungarian voicestook over and the Hungarian version of the original took over completely. Itfelt authentic and genuine because it captured the genius loci in a way thatEnglish never would.

Crucially, the city and the language came together to give the film aconcentrated Hungarian perspective that it would never have gained in anyother way. It was not a Hollywood reading: it articulated a reality that broughtout both the good and the bad aspects of the film with great clarity. Theunsatisfactory side of the film was its unavoidable superficiality. It simplifiedHungarian history to a ridiculous extent in order to make it digestible for anAmerican and global audience and, in consequence, to ensure that themessage would get through, it put extreme emphasis on style.

It is common knowledge that when style becomes more important thancontent and when style has to do the job of narration, the danger of spillingover into kitsch is real and present. So it was with Sunshine. It lingered overthe Hungarian detail that might just have passed for exoticism elsewhere, but

EAST EUROPEAN JEWISH AFFAIRS, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2000/1350-1674/123-131PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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came out as sentimentalism in Budapest - not a city that is a stranger tosentimentalism, by the way. The oppressive, overformalized interiors, thepolished wood and porcelain, the long drawn-out removal of the familyfurniture towards the end, and maybe the lingering over the fencing scenes -all this felt like an over-pedantic teacher repeating the lesson to dim-wittedpupils. The banging away at the obvious was a message in itself.

The central theme of the film is marked by a kind of naive simplicity.Once upon a time, Hungary was ruled by the Habsburgs (a kindly Franz Josefmakes a cameo appearance in a call for tolerance) and during this period notonly does the sun always shine - which in the film as a matter of fact it does- but Hungary is a good place for Jews to be in. Then Austro-Hungary fallsapart, in come some bad Hungarians - or maybe the bad Hungarians who firsthumiliated and then murdered the Jews - to be followed by the communists,who exploit the Jews in the hunt for Nazis, until finally the sun shines again(ah!) because Hungary is democratic and it is proper for the last Sonnenscheinto revert to his old name.

Names and fatesThe business of names is a bit odd, really. When the assimilation of theSonnenschein family begins, they choose the name 'Sors', which means 'fate'or 'destiny' in Hungarian. This is most implausible, but it does allow the filmto make a few thumping symbolic points. Nomen est omen - or is it? Thesimilarity to 'Soros' is hardly a coincidence, incidentally.

More obscure - though Hungarian critics spotted it relatively easily - isthe reference to the psychologist Lipöt Szondy, who Magyarized his namefrom Sonnenschein. Szondy was the creator of the 'fate-analysis'{sorselemzes) technique of psychoanalysis and here too the echo is mostunlikely to be a coincidence. In particular, Szondy stressed the role of thefamily in character formation and to some extent implied that individual fatesare more strictly determined by their family antecedents than liberalindividualism is comfortable with.

In fact, the film uses a number of fairly well-known Hungarian Jewishfates in building the story. The liqueur - 'the taste of sunshine' - on which theSonnenschein family fortune is based, is reminiscent of the Zwack family'sUnicum, a dark, bitter, herby drink that has become a quintessential part of theHungarian experience. The Olympic sabre champion is obviously AttilaPetschauer, who was murdered during the Second World War by the fascistsin the way depicted in the film.

The youngest Sors/Sonnenschein, who becomes a secret policeinterrogator in 1945 after his terrible wartime sufferings, could be any one ofdozens of young Jewish men and women who joined the communist party inthe (vain) hope of creating a new world of universal freedom and equality.

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G. SCHÖPFLIN 125

The communists cynically encouraged this. Jews were by definition anti-fascist and thus reliable from the party perspective. In the longer term, thiswas to leave a baneful legacy for Jewish-non-Jewish relations, a legacy thatis still not resolved. Indeed, while that relationship was always a complex andproblematic one, the suspicion of some non-Jews that Jews were toocomfortable with communism and gave the communist system more supportthan it deserved poisons attitudes to this day (and not only in Hungary, ofcourse).

A particular irony here - and there are more to come - is that theexpropriation of the Hungarian middle class by the communists hit the Jewsevery bit as hard as non-Jews. In 1956 there were Jews on both sides. In thissense, the suspicion entertained by non-Jews that Jews were too close tocommunism is not justified; but insofar as many Jews did come to regardcommunism as a source of security against anti-Semitism (a dubiousproposition if ever there was one), the anti-Semites have a pretext for theirprejudices.

Narrowed perspectives and threatened sensibilitiesThis question of the attitudes of the two communities - the word 'attitudes'implies something altogether too cohesive - gives rise to a host of othertroubled moral, cultural and sociological difficulties, which the film blithely(and, who knows, maybe pardonably) overlooks - like the role of the non-Jewish population in the Holocaust, what was the causal nexus (if any)between pre-Auschwitz anti-Semitism and Auschwitz itself, and why theHungarian Holocaust is a taboo subject in Hungary. Indeed, there is not eventhe language for it. Any attempt to launch a serious public debate onJewish-non-Jewish relations instantly runs into Jewish suspicions of covert orovert anti-Semitism. Sensitivities are hyperacute and the fundamentalists onboth sides unwittingly ensure a persistent polarization. The complexity of thisrelationship demonstrates, by the way, the futility of the victim-victimizerdiscourse. There is a reciprocally potentiating relationship, in which each sideacquires and regenerates some of its identity by engaging in polarization. Allare victims because it has become next to impossible to find a way out of thethicket of narrowed perspectives and threatened sensibilities.

The film, by sliding over these ethical dilemmas, may gain in box-officeappeal, but it definitely loses in depth and resonance. It is not that these issuescannot be approached through the medium at all - Kieslowski's Dekalog isirrefutable evidence to the contrary - but Sunshine sidesteps them andtherefore deserves to be regarded as kitsch.

So the key aspect of the Jewish experience in Central Europe that ismissing from the film is irony. Here again, Hollywood is likely to have beenthe reason. Central European irony is just too 'difficult' for the audiences that

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Hollywood targets. The particular brand of irony that is so characteristic ofthe region has its origins in the problem of Jewish adjustment to the needs ofthe non-Jewish majority society and of the continuous redefinition of theterms of adjustment by the majority. When you are in the weaker position andcrave acceptance, it is most unnerving to have the goal posts shifted aroundyou.

The particular quality of irony that Jews as insiders-outsiders brought -and it was their insider-outsider status that was the source, not theirJewishness - was their capacity to relativize the intense emotions generatedby nationalism. Countless numbers of Jews were every bit as patriotic andcommitted to the solidarities of Hungarianness as non-Jews, but in the firstinstance it was very largely Jews who were able to counteract the kitsch andsentimentalism into which such intense emotions sometimes spill over.

One of the central weaknesses of the film (one that was picked up by manycommentators in Hungary) is that the non-Jewish context in which theSonnenschein/Sors family saga unfolds is absent or marginal. In the film, theJews mostly meet only negatively stereotyped non-Jewish Hungarians - whoeither humiliate or murder them. This is far too simplistic and merelycontributes to creating negative ethnic stereotypes. The relationship wasalways more nuanced. Indeed, at times it was genuinely poignant and touchedby understanding and misunderstanding. For many (though far from all)Hungarians, assimilated Jews were, indeed, members of the Hungariannational community and the realization that this proposition was contested,especially by upwardly mobile non-Jews, was a shock and a source of shamefor those who did accept Jews as equals.

There is a revealing, near-tragic moment in the film when theSonnenschein/Sors fencing champion, who has accepted baptism as a RomanCatholic in order to gain entry to the officers' club, is told by a general thatthis is what he has to do to assimilate. Assimilation is thus a kind of civic,social and possibly ethnic, virtue. But it fails because the majority will notaccept a Jew as a fully-fledged Hungarian. The general apologizes, but thejunior officers pursue a vindictive campaign of humiliation against the 'alien'Jew.

This coûtd have been an excellent moment for the use of irony, especiallyas the junior officers were most likely to have been assimilated members ofthe German (Svâb) minority themselves. The opportunity is missed. In reallife, it was not and the Hungarian Jewish experience relied on irony to makesense of the unequal treatment that it received. Jews were not given fullmembership of the Hungarian affective community, but they were expected tobear the same burdens and obligations as everyone else. This was one momentof the tragic and absurd quality that characterizes so much of twentieth-century Central Europe.

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G. SCHŌPFLIN 127

Flawed Jewish-Hungarian relationshipThere is another, somewhat puzzling aspect of the film that requireselucidation: none of the male members of the Sonnenschein/Sors familyseems to have much success with women. All their relationships are flawedin one way or another. Now this is odd and it raises the question of what couldlie behind it. My explanation is a reading that is very probably remote fromthat of Szabö. I suspect that these flawed male-female relationships areemblematic of the flawed Jewish-Hungarian relationship - that Jews did wantto be accepted as equals by Hungary but that desire was never reciprocated.The relationship was difficult and uneven and each was perceived asunfaithful by the other.

A brief historical and sociological background to the film and to thetroubled Jewish-non-Jewish relationship in Hungary would be helpful here.Jews entered Hungary in significant numbers in the mid-nineteenth centuryfrom the east, mostly as poor immigrants. By the end of the century, therewere, of course, poor Jews, but there was also a successful and influentialmiddle class. This is where the Sonnenschein story begins. What it shouldhave said, and does not, is how and why the relationship has been so troubled.From the non-Jewish perspective, Jews are seen as a powerful, close-knitgroup that has access to resources out of all proportion to its size. From theJewish perspective, their role and status in Hungary are always potentiallyprecarious and open to being changed by the majority. This sense of being aminority marginal group has resulted in what the majority sees as a separateand different solidarity on the part of Jews and there are those who resent it.

Ambiguities of integrationThe origins of the problem lie in the ambiguities of the integration of Jews inthe last century - an integration which seemed unequivocal at the time, butwas not. The problem with Jewish assimilation in Hungary is that theassimilands and the assimilators had different agendas and approachedmodernity with different cultural baggage. These differences were never fullyor adequately reconciled. For the non-Jewish majority, Jews were welcome asHungarians in order to tip the statistical balance in the pre-1914 Kingdom ofHungary in favour of Magyars (defined by mother tongue), who came toconstitute just over 50 per cent of the population with the inclusion of theJews. Further, Jews could engage in the money-using economy which theHungarian elite - the gentry - scorned as being unfit for gentlemen.

For Jews, Hungary appeared to be the land of promise, where they werewelcome on equal terms as long as they learned the language and acquired theculture. Was equality purely a civic equality and would Jews be accepted asequal members of the ethnic community? The answer, as we have seen, wasnot quite - Jews had the same obligations but not quite the same rights of

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solidarity and affect. This disparity was to produce a flawed and divergentunderstanding of citizenship. For Jews, cultural assimilation was the price ofentry to civic rights; for some non-Jews, civic rights were partly or whollydependent on ethnicity. This contradiction has never been satisfactorilyresolved, whether in Hungary or elsewhere in Europe, for all the currentinsistence on the universality of citizenship, human rights and tolerance. Andas European history demonstrates, no amount of cajoling, shaming, exposure,unmasking or even coercion can impose the norms of civic tolerance on anysociety that resists it.

There is an explanation for this that goes beyond 'the inherent racism ofthe Hungarians' type of explanation. The Jews who arrived in Hungary, asImmanuel Sonnenschein did in the film, came with a certain cultural capitalof their own. They had their own thought-worlds and thought-styles,aspiration structures and cultural endowments which were different fromthose of the majority and particularly from those of the upwardly mobileChristian peasantry, whose mobility in many ways paralleled that of the Jews.Crucially, the Jewish attitude towards the land had never been affected byland hunger and by seeing the land as patrimony (rather than as a commodity)as well as an object of symbolic veneration, not least because they had notbeen permitted to own land until after the emancipation, unlike their non-Jewish competitors. The cultural and symbolic role of land thus differentiatedJews and non-Jews in modernity to some extent to the advantage of theformer, because under modernity land as a resource is gradually replaced byinterchangeable — 'modular' is the term used by Ernest Gellner - cognitiveabilities.

The problem from the perspective of the Hungarian elite was that whilethey tacitly expected the Jews to fill the economic niches in unmodernizedHungary, they also assumed that the Jews would stay there and not seek toconvert their economic power into social and cultural status. The shift fromsuccessful economic entrepreneur in Immanuel Sonnenschein's generation tojudge and doctor in the next is clearly marked in the film. What the dominantHungarian elites found wholly disconcerting, and do so to this day, was thatJews, in becoming members of the Hungarian cultural community, broughttheir somewhat different model of modernity with them, like their skills in themoney-using economy and subsequently the professions, and simultaneouslyexpect to be accorded fully equal status as members of a modern civic society.Furthermore, by the twentieth century Jews were full members of Hungariancultural life, in literature and the arts, and were every bit as sophisticated intheir semantic skills as the majority, of which they believed they were a part.Just as non-Jews wrongly assessed the consequences of assimilation as beingpurely economic, so Jews underestimated the resonance of ethnic solidarity inthe non-Jewish majority.

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A problem of mixed agendasA note on culture seems appropriate here. No society enters modernity naked:there is always a legacy from the pre-modern past that mingles with themodern modes that the society in question has adopted. These residues areboth religious and secular in origin. Very simply, the dominant residue inHungary was that of the north European Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Baroque, which stresses visual and aural communication,emphasizes elaboration over precision and accepts the legitimacy of hierarchyand obedience. The Jewish residue, on the other hand, was structured byliteracy, argument, precision and doubt. When the dynamic was positive, as itvery largely was until 1914, these two residues could be seen ascomplementary; when it was negative, conflict was inevitable.

The outcome of these mixed agendas was a classic case ofmisunderstandings that derived from the unintended consequences of action.The assimilation of the Jews was only partial, though that part was real. Theywere accepted as members of the Hungarian cultural community, but at thesame time they were also identified as distinct, in a way that Hungarians ofRoman Catholic German or Lutheran Slovak origin, say, were not. Matterswere further complicated because the cultural capital that assimilating Jewsbrought with them was closer to the demands of the mainstream of Europeanmodernity, to which the Hungarians aspired to belong, than to those of themajority, who, therefore, had in some respects a longer and more arduousjourney to make than the Sonnenscheins and their coevals. This gap can beseen as one of the sources of the pre-Auschwitz anti-Semitism thatcharacterized Hungarian society and to some extent still characterizes it.

Two major events transformed the equation, however, in a deeply negativedirection for Jews in Hungary. The first was the 'loss of empire', thedismemberment of Hungary in 1918-20, which radically reduced theopportunity structures for the rising non-Jewish social groups. At the sametime, the cataclysm was a failure of the Hungarian project of modernizationand placed an immediate question mark over the status of Jews as bearers ofmodernity in Hungary. The non-Jewish middle classes now found themselveswith much less space economically and culturally, and the occupationalniches that they expected to enter were already filled by Jews, whom they didnot regard as fully equal members of the community of solidarity. This wasthe situation in inter-war Hungary, one that was made worse by stagnation;economic growth would have provided more opportunity for upward socialmobility.

The second event was Nazism, which necessarily impacted on Hungaryand created an altogether different cognitive model for assessing the role andstatus of Jews in Hungary. It should not be forgotten that Nazism, and itsHungarian variant the Arrow Cross, were radical movements and attracted

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support by their radicalism. However uncomfortable it may be today for someto admit this, right-radicalism did have the power to mobilize sizeablesections of the population and not just in Hungary - and it had this capacityprecisely because it was radical.

The two events taken together made the position of Jews in inter-war andwartime Hungary quite intolerable. They lost their civic rights and had towatch helplessly as the political community in which they placed their trusttore up the promises made to their grandparents. The deal made in thenineteenth century — civic equality in exchange for cultural assimilation - wasunilaterally abrogated. The Jews felt themselves to be helpless, without anypolitical support from the community to which they thought they belonged.Assimilated Jews, who felt themselves completely Hungarian, were told thatthis was not so and the Hungarian state, of which they were citizens, subjectedthem to forced labour and then assisted Eichmann in deporting them to bemurdered in Auschwitz. Those who survived could never fully trust theHungarian state and the non-Jewish majority again, even while those who didnot emigrate remained completely Hungarian in culture.

Under communism, the issue was ignored. The symbolic quest forforgiveness never took place. There has been no attempt by the majority tobegin to understand how and why Jews in Hungary cannot escape from theirpast and that past is by definition different from theirs. The majority may alsosee itself as victimized by history - the loss of three million ethnic Hungariansto the successor states in 1920 was a devastating blow and Stalinism bore veryhard on Hungary - but that is a different trajectory of victimization from theone suffered by the Jews. Neither side can see fully the different andinterlocking history of the other. The outcome is fertile ground formisunderstanding, for friction and tension.

This historical and sociological background is vital in understanding whyWestern, and particularly United States, models of Jewish-non-Jewishrelations - not to mention accusations of anti-Semitism - are received withincomprehension or anger by the majority. In effect, they are saying:recognize the wrongs done to us, not merely the wrongs done to the Jews.These undigested elements of the past continue to affect - some would saydisfigure - Hungarian political life. Hungarian Jews are Hungarian and makea tacit claim to be both Hungarian and in the forefront of European modernity.Non-Jews question whether Jews as Jews can be the bearers of a modernitydifferent from that of the majority; and when they do this they are accused ofanti-Semitism. The lines of the dispute over modernity and anti-Semitism areboth overt and hidden; and they are continuously confused. At this time, thereis no clarity on the horizon.

As argued, the question of assimilation - what it means, what its terms are- is open, unresolved and painful. Are there Jewish Hungarians, just as there

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are Catholic or Protestant Hungarians? Fairly clearly not. And this distinctionis reciprocal. But the question is a real one, because, while Hungarian societytoday is in some respects genuinely civic, in many ways it is not so and theimpersonal norms that are essential for civic equality are at best imperfect.The consequence is that personal networks continue to play a role in thedistribution of power, the construction of identity and the formation of valuesand attitudes. And insofar as some Jews are members of such networks ofpower, they will be suspect - fairly and unfairly - as Jews and not as membersof an informal network of the type in which every Hungarian participates.

The film ends with a long take of the youngest Sonnenschein, who hasreclaimed his old name (symbol alert!, symbol alert!) and is walking into theBudapest crowd on a sunny day with a panoramic view of the city.Hungarians will not have missed the clue that this is meant to be now - thatSonnenschein is among us, as it were, an invisible and normal member of thecrowd. The film shows the lower end of the Vaci utca, in central Budapest,after it had been pedestrianized, in the late 1990s.

That part of the message is unmistakable. The rest is not. Szabö seems toimply that Jews can live as Jews or as Hungarians or as both in Hungarytoday. If only it were so simple and straightforward. But do not expect the filmto explain why this artificial happy ending is so fraudulent, misleading andsuperficial.

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