In the Darkroom (41 page)

“And Jobbik?” I parried.

On the first day of the new parliamentary session, Jobbik leader Gábor Vona had stepped up to take the oath of office—and flipped into Superman mode, whipping off his suit jacket and puffing out his chest to the cameras. He was wearing the black vest and symbols of the old and banned Magyar Gárda. A few Socialist ministers objected to the stunt. The governing Fidesz leadership ignored them.

“Fidesz will keep Jobbik in line,” my father said. “It's like with the Regent Horthy. He kept the extremists in check.”

Until, of course, he didn't.

Anyway, my father said, Fidesz had promised to stop the corrupt handouts of real estate. “Maybe we will finally get our property back.”

I doubted it.

Under the Fidesz administration, the economy continued its free fall, poverty soared, social support services were slashed, and professionals fled the country in droves. By the end of Fidesz's first term in 2014, a third of the population was living at or below the subsistence level, child poverty was growing faster than in any other country in the European Union, and more than a fourth of citizens were “seriously deprived” (that is, unable to pay for such basics as rent, home heat, or groceries). Nearly a half million citizens had left the country, a sixfold increase in emigration since Fidesz had taken power. A third of the expatriates were college-educated. The brain drain hit all professional sectors: medicine, science, finance, academe, culture. By 2015, there was an alarming shortage of physicians, health care workers, engineers, and computer scientists. “We have become a country of emigrants,” a headline lamented. Emblematic was psychiatric care. A mental-health crisis, aggravated in no small measure by socio-economic distress, afflicted the nation at the very time when thousands of psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric nurses—grossly underpaid, despite “pseudo-solution” gratuities—were decamping. Severe austerity measures had driven the national hospital system to the brink of bankruptcy. Earlier and without explanation, the state had shut down the nation's premier institute for psychiatric training, treatment, and research (established by Franz Josef in 1868) and eliminated 25 percent of the nation's acute psychiatric hospital beds. The cutbacks were hardly due to lack of demand: Hungary has one of the highest rates in the EU of depression, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, and suicide. As these rates rose even higher in the new millennium, the psychiatrists available to treat them would shrink by 40 percent.

Faced with such real problems, the Fidesz regime peddled the pseudo-solution elixir of identity. Within weeks of Fidesz's victory at the polls, the new government had moved to grant “ethnic Hungarians” outside its borders (that is, Hungarians supposedly “stranded” in the Trianon successor states) the right to Hungarian citizenship, and declared June 4 (the day the Treaty of Trianon was signed) the Day of National Cohesion, mounting countrywide demonstrations of Magyar folk dances, handicrafts, and cuisine to “strengthen national identity.” Fidesz legislators championed municipal initiatives on “what it means to be Hungarian,” and took pains to define who was not Hungarian. The Hungarian Parliament renamed streets and erected monuments to “Hungarian patriots,” more than a few with a fascist past. Reviving the authoritarian state seemed to be an integral part of reviving Hungarian selfhood.

In 2015, the Fidesz government sponsored a billboard campaign accusing foreign invaders of “taking” Hungarian jobs and conducted a survey on “immigration and terrorism” that fanned the flames with such leading questions as “Do you agree with the Hungarian government that instead of migrants, we should support families and their future babies?” Prime Minister Orbán ordered the construction of a thirteen-foot razor-wire fence along the 110-mile border with Serbia to keep out refugees (and soon after, another one on the border with Croatia). That summer the feared wave arrived, and the fence famously didn't hold. Orbán greeted the scandal of thousands of migrants stranded at the Serbian border and in the Keleti train station in Budapest with a military response and declarations like “We want to preserve the Hungarian Hungary” and “Those arriving have been raised in another religion and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians.” Hungarian police herded the migrants into holding pens and locked them in train cars without drinking water. “They tell them that the train is going to Austria and then take them to a camp instead,” Robert Frölich, chief rabbi of the Dohány Street Synagogue, told the
New York Times
that September. “I don't think the police got instructions from the government to do it this way, but it is very similar to what happened to Jews in the 1940s.”

There were other echoes: The Orbán administration, which my father had counted on to curb Jobbik's worst instincts, moved quickly after the 2010 election to pass a battery of laws that undermined the independence of the courts, the central bank, the national elections commission, the media, and a host of government oversight bodies. The Hungarian Constitution was rewritten, expanding the powers of the state, curtailing civil liberties, defining life as beginning at conception and abortion as homicide, and forbidding same-sex marriage. Its preamble (“the National Credo”) enshrined the “Holy Crown” of Saint Stephen as the embodiment of national “unity” and recognized “the role of Christianity in preserving our nationhood.”

The government began aggressively firing the heads of cultural and academic institutions (a notable number of them Jews or liberal intellectuals suspected of a “foreign” mind-set) and installing in their stead true believers in the Magyar way. The new Fidesz mayor of Budapest replaced the director of the New Theater with an unapologetic anti-Semite and Jobbik adherent, who vowed to liberate the stage from a “degenerate, sickly, liberal hegemony” and “instill patriotic values” with programming that would feature only “pure” Hungarian plays. (His first, though abandoned, choice: a notorious anti-Semite's play, “The Sixth Coffin,” which blamed the Jews for Trianon.) When a Fidesz minister handed out government awards in 2013 to “those who represent the best of the nation” in the arts and sciences, the prizes went to several anti-Semitic reactionaries, including the guitarist for the neo-Nazi band Kárpátia, who had composed the official anthem of the Magyar Gárda militia. Most Fidesz officials were careful to speak in euphemisms, but not always: Zsolt Bayer, a founding member of the party and a personal friend of the prime minister, published a scabrous attack on three prominent Jews who had been critical of Fidesz policies (including Hungarian-born concert pianist András Schiff). Bayer equated one of the critics with “stinking excrement” and expressed his regret that they “were not all buried up to their necks in the forest of Orgovány,” the site of a 1919 pogrom.

Jobbik officeholders rarely bothered to conceal their anti-Semitism. “Hitler was right in everything,” one Jobbik MP pronounced, “except he made a mistake with this holocaust thing which is a weapon in the hands of the Jewry.” The Jews, he added, “are people of Satan.” Krisztina Morvai, Jobbik's declared future nominee for president and one of its best-known figures (though she claimed to be independent of the party), announced that “we will not allow Hungary to become a second Palestine.” She advised Hungarian Jews, “Your kind's time is over.” While serving as an elected representative to the European Parliament, Morvai wrote an open letter to the Israeli ambassador to Hungary in which she said she “rejoiced” over Israeli deaths in the country's war in Gaza: “I wish all of you lice-infested, dirty murderers will receive Hamas's ‘kisses.' ” After a conservative Jewish expatriate (who styled himself a “proud Hungarian Jew”) expressed dismay over Morvai's remarks, he received the following response from her: “Your kind expect that if you fart our kind stands at attention and caters to all your wishes. It's time to learn: we no longer oblige! We hold our heads high and no longer tolerate the terror your kind imposes on us.” In conclusion, Morvai advised all of “the so-called proud Hungarian Jews” to “go back to playing with their tiny little circumcised tails rather than vilifying me.”

By the time of that exchange, Morvai had pulled off her own identity reinvention. She had begun her public life as a progressive lawyer. She was the author of Hungary's first and groundbreaking book on domestic violence (
Terror in the Family
), organized the nation's first association to fight violence against women, and, in the early '90s, represented four women who had killed their battering husbands with a self-defense argument. From 2003 to 2006, she served as the Hungarian representative to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Before she was the poster girl for Jobbik intolerance, Krisztina Morvai was a ranking feminist.

And claimed she still was one. Jobbik and the Magyar Gárda, she maintained when I interviewed her at her home several months after the 2010 elections, were packed with “strong and revolutionary” women. “In the Gárda, which is pictured as the most extremist fascist Nazi organization in the history of the world,” she told me, “there are lots of women, and most of them I would say are very conscious of women's equality.” In fact, they were joining the Gárda for liberationist reasons, “to say, ‘I'm going to defend myself and other vulnerable people.' ” She rattled off the names of Jobbik leaders whose marriages she regarded as “model” equal partnerships. (“You call Gábor”—Jobbik founder Gábor Vona—“and often, he's like, ‘I just picked up my child from the pediatrician.' ”) As I left, Morvai handed me a gift: a huge coffee-table book titled
The Beauties of Historic Hungary
, containing glossy photographs of the “former Counties of the Hungarian Holy Crown” lost to the Treaty of Trianon. On the ride home, I opened to the title page and read her inscription: “To
Susan Faludi
, in sisterhood and with love, Morvai Krisztina.”

“I'm getting all these e-mail attacks about how I'm not a ‘true Hungarian,' ” Katalin Lévai told me. It was two years before the fateful 2010 elections. I was having coffee in the Pest theater district with the Socialist Party representative to the European Parliament. The day was warm and we had grabbed one of the remaining outdoor tables at Mai Manó café, named for the royal court photographer of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a seminal figure in Hungarian photography (and a Jew), who had worked and lived in the building. In 2003, the then governing Socialist Party had appointed Lévai its equality minister. She was the first to hold that post. “First and last,” she noted.

“I'm very worried about what is happening in this country,” she said. “The nation is being divided into two kinds of people, the ‘good Hungarians' and the ‘bad Hungarians.'And the ‘bad Hungarians' are all of those who are not crying over Trianon every day, or who are Jewish or Roma or feminist.” Under that ideology, the “good Hungarians” are the ones who have actually been discriminated against and deserve “special care.” That belief had deep roots. “The Habsburg Monarchy cultivated this idea of Hungarians being taken care of by the nobility,” Lévai said. “And then the Communist regime continued that under the state. Being ‘taken care of' ” by those in power—“this is the key to the Hungarian mentality.”

A few weeks earlier, Lévai had agreed to give the keynote speech for the upcoming Gay Pride Festival in Budapest. When the news hit the press, she was deluged with threats and hate messages. For championing LGBT rights, she told me, “they are calling me a ‘dirty Jew.' ”

As we were finishing our espressos, Lévai asked, “Do you know the words to the ‘Himnusz'?” She was speaking of the Hungarian national anthem. When I said I didn't, she broke into song, and the verse she sang was a reminder that the need to be “taken care of” could have its flip side, a desire for victimization:

“It is asking God to protect the Hungarian, to protect us from”—she struggled to find the right words—“it's very hard to translate. It means, when we Hungarians fight against the enemy, we have this terrible fate which has tortured us for a long time. We've suffered enough for our future and our past, so please God, protect us.” She continued to the concluding verse:

“When I've gone to football matches in Europe,” Lévai said, “I'm always struck by the difference. Other countries have anthems that express the determination of their people, the power of their people—they're optimistic and proud. And ours is quite the contrary. It's very sad and defensive. Self-pitying.” She recommended I study it. “If you understand the Hungarian anthem, you understand the Hungarian soul.”

“Are you going to be in the parade?” I asked. We were washing dishes in my father's kitchen. It was a week after my conversation with Lévai.

“Waaall”—my father took her time drying her hands on her frilled yellow apron—“no.”

“Why not?” I asked. We were talking about the one annual public showing of Hungary's LGBT population, the Budapest Gay Pride Parade—or rather, as of this year, the Budapest Gay Dignity Procession. The organizers had changed the name to counter charges that they were taking pride in
not
being Hungarian. The march was scheduled for July 5, a few weeks hence.