The Arrow Cross. The Ideology of Hungarian Fascism.

332 Pages·2016·6.94 MB·English

DOI: 10.14754/CEU.2015.06

The Arrow Cross.
The Ideology of Hungarian Fascism.
-A conceptual approach-

By Áron Szele
Central European University, Budapest
2015
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Table of Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 7
Fascism in Hungarian historical writing ................................................................................................ 9
What is fascism? Delimiting the concept ............................................................................................ 26
Populism and the populist style ......................................................................................................... 30
Circumscribing the field: the far right and fascism. The theory of the political family ......................... 33
The history of transfers ...................................................................................................................... 35
Conspiracies and fears ....................................................................................................................... 39
The study of ideology through political concepts ............................................................................... 43
Interwar Hungary- ossification and revolt .......................................................................................... 46
The intellectual and political roots of Hungarian Fascism ................................................................... 56
Fascist Charisma in interwar Hungary ................................................................................................... 63
Horthy and the others ....................................................................................................................... 70
Popular geniuses ............................................................................................................................... 73
Bringers of the new age ..................................................................................................................... 78
Martyrdom and leadership without leader ........................................................................................ 81
Conclusions ....................................................................................................................................... 90
The concept of the nation ..................................................................................................................... 92
Symbolic geography and nationalism: spatial understanding of the nation ........................................ 92
Matolcsy’s New Europe ................................................................................................................... 112
Nation, community and race within Hungarian fascist ideology ....................................................... 118
The harmonious nation: the Hungarian “national community” ........................................................ 120
Demography and paranoia .............................................................................................................. 133
The nationalities in the “Hungarian empire” .................................................................................... 136
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People and society in Hungarian fascist discourses ............................................................................ 175
Populism and the social question: the early years ............................................................................ 175
The Scythe Cross and the urban-rural divide .................................................................................... 190
The development of a populist discourse ......................................................................................... 194
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Land reform ..................................................................................................................................... 199
Szálasi, between fascist corporatism and “the Work-State” ............................................................. 202
Women ........................................................................................................................................... 217
The historical teleology and worldview of Hungarian fascism in the 1930’s-1940’s............................ 227
The beginnings of historical theory .................................................................................................. 229
Radical right histories ...................................................................................................................... 239
Sacred histories, dark presents, bright futures ................................................................................. 243
Decay and rebirth ............................................................................................................................ 246
Baráth Tibor: the culmination of the fascist thesis of history ............................................................ 255
Conclusions ..................................................................................................................................... 261
Conclusions ......................................................................................................................................... 263
Annexes .............................................................................................................................................. 279
A short biographical dictionary of fascist politicians in Hungary ....................................................... 279
Chronology of events ...................................................................................................................... 310
Photographic evidence .................................................................................................................... 315

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Acknowledgments

The development and completion of this dissertation is the product of my long-standing
interest in the history of political ideas, and particularly, the history of nationalism in modern and
contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. This interest was fostered and nurtured by a great
many historians and social scientist I had the privilege to work with and interact during my time
as a student of the Central European University in Budapest.
I would first of all like to express my gratitude and appreciation for the supervisor of my
thesis, Balázs Trencsényi. Professor Trencsényi, who has also helped supervise my Master‘s
dissertation, has served as an intellectual beacon, helping to guide my work, clarify my ideas and
my academic demarche. He has also provided me with motivation and through his vast
knowledge of the intellectual sources and the history of ideas in Eastern, Central and Southern
Europe has also helped me embed my work into larger theoretical debates. I would also like to
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his classes on totalitarianism and fascism that I have developed the basic idea which constitutes
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this thesis, and he was the one who introduced and familiarized me with the most important
theoretical tenets within the field. Professor Iordachi has also involved me in a project in
comparative fascism studies, which has greatly helped me in gathering data and comparing my
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findings to others; he has also closely followed and guided my work through numerous
discussions we had over the years. I am also very grateful to László Kontler, who has helped me
over the years, providing me with the opportunity of serving as a teaching assistant in his class
on modern historiography and historical theory, and who has been gracious enough to provide
me with encouragement and assistance over the years. Parts of this thesis would not have been
possible without the positive and critical input of Gábor Egry, an expert on interwar Hungarian
history, whose positive advice and input enabled me to better understand the context in which
Hungarian fascist ideology and discourse developed and existed.
I would like to express my gratitude to professor Péter Balázs, the director of the Center
for European Enlargement Studies. Professor Balázs‘ support was invaluable, as he helped to
further develop my interest in the study of the ideology and discourse of the far right by enabling
me to coordinate a project on the contemporary Central European far right. His academic input,
advice and encouragement of my projects during my stint as a Research Assistant at CENS
facilitated my intellectual development beyond history, toward a multi-disciplinary approach,
including political science and international relations. Without professor Balázs‘ help, this thesis
would probably not exist in its current form. I would also like to thank my former colleagues at
CENS, especially Zselyke Tófalvi, Antónia Molnárová and Hana Semanič, for their gracious
on help and assistance over the years.
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I would like to give special thanks to all of my current and former colleagues at the
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History Department of the Central European University, for contributing to a climate of a fertile
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and free exchange of ideas and mutual support which made this work possible. I would
especially like to thank my colleagues Octavian Silvestru and Anton Kotenko for the many
stimulating talks we had during our years at CEU, and for their unwavering support.
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The thesis would not have been possible without the help and support of my family: I
would therefore like to give special thanks to my mother, Emese Szele and my girlfriend,
Cristina Cucu, for having trust in my abilities and supporting my studies these past six years. I
would like to dedicate this thesis to the memory of my father, Péter Szele, who was the first to
encourage me on embarking on a career as a historian, and supported and pushed me toward
academic life. In his quality as a writer, he often criticized and discussed my works and ideas
from a literary perspective, inspiring me to create and think independently.

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Introduction

I arrived in Budapest in the beginning of 2007, as an MA student at the CEU, to an
atmosphere of tension and discontent. Hungary, by that time, was gripped by a recession and a
general dissatisfaction with the powers that be coming from a significant section of the
population. The loss of credibility of the political left, and the subsequent rise of the right-wing,
in its conservative and far right manifestations, was palpable. As a Hungarian coming from the
diaspora, I had the quality of a semi-outsider, and had a unique perspective, being accustomed to
Hungarian culture, but not its contemporary politics. I could not help notice the situation, and
contrast it to that of my native country, Romania, where the far right had all but died out as a
political phenomenon. As a historian, I attempted to interpret the situation in a diachronic
manner, comparing past situations to the present. As asymmetrical as these comparisons were,
they opened up my interest in investigating a hitherto under-researched area, that of the far right
and fascist ideologies in interwar Hungary. These past political projects were conspicuously
n present in the symbolism and legitimacy of the contemporary far right, which glorified the
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oll interwar period. Reading further into the material that became available to me, I came across
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e certain trends of interpretations that seemed implausible and anachronic (see the literature
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review). Beyond simple intellectual curiosity toward the topic, I attempted to explain the
apparent populist and mimetic leftist rhetoric of both the interwar fascism and contemporary far
right.
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The dissertation is structured into three major chapters, which constitute the body of the
thesis. The first chapter is dedicated to explaining the current state of the research on the topic,
and attempts to place my work within the major international historiographic debates on the
subject of fascism. It also provides the reader with the needed socio-political context, in order to
show the political, intellectual and social background which gave birth to fascist ideology in
Hungary. This also includes external influences, for I have partly explained the phenomenon as a
product of domestic tendencies and adaption of foreign ideologies. The second chapter contains
the actual results of my research, structured into four major sub-chapters, each dedicated to a
certain group of ideas or concepts. In the first sub-chapter, I attempted to discuss the attempt of
interwar fascism to create a certain type of national community through discourse and practice,
and to define the nation on ethno-racial terms, all the while attempting to place Hungary as high
up as possible in a European new world order. Closely following this, the second part of the
chapter discusses the role of the narrative of leadership and charisma in creating hierarchies of
power within state and society. These hierarchies were formed a binomial between leadership
and the people, who were also given an important role, as fascism attempted to level social
difference in favor of an organic community of the people, with a singular leader. This kind of
definition of the people constitutes the topic of my third subchapter. The final sub-chapter of the
second part of the thesis analyzes the narrative in which these concepts of people, nation, and
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a-historic and anti-historic theory. The Hungarian nation would enter into a new phase of
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C existence that would constitute the end of history, a sort of perpetual golden age. In the final
chapter, I provided the conclusions to my work.

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Fascism in Hungarian historical writing

Compared to the vast literature on German National Socialism or Italian and even French
fascism, a literature review of the scientific works on the topic of Hungarian fascism is a
somewhat brief task, but at the same time it speaks volumes about the politics of memory in the
country in the last 5-6 decades. The topic of fascism in Hungary was a problematic one to deal
with and process both during communism and democracy, a dark chapter of history which was in
turn condemned, forgotten, deemed an aberration or utilized for political legitimation. Due to the
prevalence of these attitudes, there was little serious or independent (unmarred by politics)
analysis of the phenomenon up to the present, with a few notable exceptions. This is evident if
we undertake a short history of the histories of Hungarian fascism.
The first works that started to deal with and tried to make sense of the brutality and
apparent insanity of the Szálasi state appeared in the immediate wake of the fall of the fascist
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e regime in Hungary. The most significant of these was the work of Márton Himler, a Hungarian-
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D American journalist of Jewish origin, who had direct access to Szálasi in 1945, as he was part of
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E the American OSS team which captured and repatriated the former fascist dictator. He
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questioned and took the statements of Szálasi during his investigation, and gathered invaluable
data on his personal attitude toward politics, nationalism and especially the anti-Semitic crimes
perpetrated during his time in power. The results of his work appeared much later, in 1958, under
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the title ―The face of the gravediggers of the Hungarian nation1‖. He was also examined by the
psychologist Pál Gartner2. A little later, during his detainment proceeding arraignment for his
trial, the authorities also attempted to confront Szálasi with his crimes, taking him on a tour of
the ruins of Budapest, from which the statement, the notes of the trip from his prison diary and a
number of photos survive3. The opinions in all reflect him rebuffing any responsibility and
maintaining his radical nationalist stance until the end; the authors of the materials therefore
considered him a pathological case, and gave his actions a clinical psychiatric interpretation.
This gave rise to the first scheme of understanding the fascist regime, which on the one hand,
divested a lot of what happened onto the actions of the leader, and on the other, underlined the
deeply irrational, pathological nature of the regime. The idea was that it had been a regime that
had come into power during extraordinary circumstances (the war, Soviet invasion), via the
action of a foreign power (Nazi Germany) and was essentially made up of a political riff-raff of
insane persons. This is a seductively simple explanation, which is still championed today by
some professional historians (I have also run into this interpretation during academic forums).
This explanation also bears the error of minimizing the domestic responsibility for the crimes
that occurred, and gives them an external tinge, as if the 1938 anti-Semitic laws and the
ghettoization of Jews did not exist prior to 1944. It also does not explain anything, and does not
show the deep roots of Hungarian fascism and far right anti-Semitism which in actuality began in
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soon after this, as professional scholarship began to turn its attention toward the phenomenon.

1 Marton Himler, Így Néztek Ki a Magyar Nemzet Sírásói : A Magyar Háborús Bűnösök Amerikaiak Előtt Tett
Vallomásának Hiteles Szövege (New York: St. Marks Print. Co., 1958).
2 Rudolf Paksa, Szálasi Ferenc És a Hungarizmus (Jaffa Kiado, 2013)., p. 192
3 Ibid., p. 188; L Karsai, ―Tetemrehívás,‖ Rubicon, October 1992.
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