New Hungarian Constitution Shirks Responsibility for the Holocaust

Its novel approach to Hungarian history will necessarily affect the decisions of the courts in this country perhaps for decades to come on issues of restitution for Holocaust atrocities. Enshrined by the Hungarian constitution, the new historical interpretation dictated by the populist, ultra-Conservative Fidesz government here will define the attitude of state-controlled cultural institutions on sensitive issues of human rights and personal responsibility at times of national crises.

It will rewrite the national Holocaust curricula from primary to higher education (including teacher training), whose persistent failure to promote tolerance towards the racial, religious and other minorities in Hungarian society is widely blamed for the current resurgence of neo-Nazi power. Museum administrators as well as teachers departing from the official line will risk dismissal. Some have been fired already.

The constitution is the fundamental legislation of any country, the basic reference by which all laws and regulations upheld by the state are interpreted by the courts, government departments and other authorities.

And it negates the unique place occupied by the Holocaust in all history by appearing to equate the Nazi deeds here during the war with those of the Communists in the subsequent grim decades of Soviet oppression.

Significantly, the constitution has been passed without cross-party accord. Indeed, two of the three opposition parties abstained from the vote in protest, and the third voted against it.

The law substantially weakens the power of the constitutional court, entitles the president to dissolve the national assembly if it fails to approve a budget and expands the administrative powers of the state at the expense of the individual. It emphasizes the supremacy of Christianity in Hungarian culture, narrows the grounds for protecting the individual against unfair treatment and specifically fails to outlaw hostile discrimination meted out on the grounds of sexual orientation, an explosive issue here in homophobe Eastern Europe.

All this has provoked mass protest meetings in Hungary and attracted severe criticism from such guardians of human rights as the European Parliament and the Council of Europe. Amnesty International has declared its deep concern at the violation by the constitution of some cherished international standards of legality.

basic tenets. It has outraged the Hungarian Jewish community and stunned historians here and abroad.

The Hungarian constitution seems also to fall in line with an insidious trend sweeping post-Soviet Eastern Europe to trivialize the Holocaust. Its assertions glossing over the differences in the nature and magnitude of the Nazi and the Communist crimes obfuscate the responsibility of these countries for the Holocaust that had begun in this region long before the territorial expansion of Nazi Germany that eventually led to Soviet control.

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The immediate ramifications of the legislative change are also significant. Several substantial restitution disputes arising from the Holocaust are currently making their way through the American courts. They could land up before the European Court of Human Rights (of the Council of Europe) or the European Court of Justice (of the European Union), both of which exercise jurisdiction in Hungary.

has outlined the government's legal strategy. As he put it, the administration intends to pursue its interests in the courts by “setting a new framework for the discussions.”

So far, the US has made a token restitution payment of some $21m.

* Damages claimed from the Hungarian State Railways by the survivors and descendents of Jews transported for financial profit in inhuman conditions under armed guard on board its cattle trucks to Auschwitz and other extermination and slave labour camps.

* The ownership of the legendary Herzog collection of some 40 Old Masters worth an estimated $100m, including several coveted paintings by El Greco, looted during the war and still on display in state-controlled Hungarian galleries. Both this and the case involving the railways are in their early stages of litigation.

* And the so-called “Masterless” class of Jewish assets comprising a variety of valuable property including real estate misappropriated by the Hungarian state during the war, in some cases eventually nationalized by the Communists and still awaiting their restoration to their legitimate owners.

ut in Hungary, such appointments are dependent on the officials’ loyalty to the government of the day.

My personal circle of acquaintances includes two provincial museum directors, one of them a much published Holocaust scholar, who have been similarly relieved of their posts without official explanation.

Feldmájer, who was present, gained the impression that the meeting had been intended to split the Jewish community and to persuade it to accept what he described as the government’s endeavour “to rewrite history”.

The Battle for Budapest (2003), published in several editions in Britain (by I. B. Tauris), the US (Yale University Press) and Germany (F. A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung) as well as Hungary (Corvina) – was immediately welcomed as a formidable success by both The Times Literary Supplement in London and The New York Review of Books.

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