Violence against remembrance

  While numerous new statues of Governor Miklós Horthy have been recently inaugurated, the statue of Miklós Radnóti – a Hungarian Roman Catholic poet of Jewish origin who was a victim of the Holocaust –was destroyed and his books burnt.  The man who drove his car into Radnóti’s statue in Győr states that it was an accident due to his drunkenness. It is somewhat difficult to believe that his driving while being drunk exactly in the vicinity of Radnóti’s martyrdom particularly during these days was a mere coincidence. However, the presumption of innocence is due unto him. Regarding the burning of Radnóti’s books, a Nazi group explicitly takes the responsibility. 

Heinrich Heine postulated in the 19^th century that "where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings" ("Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen"). Indeed, historical experience shows that the act of book-burning (biblioclasm or libricide) is rather often a prelude to persecution and massacre of human beings. It was the case with the burning of the Qur’an by the Spanish Inquisition, with burnings of the Talmud in medieval France and also with the burning of books written by Jewish authors in Germany in the 1930s. Libricide is such a grave act, that books are often saved from burning when the very authors request so, as happened to some 80 poems of Emily Dickinson, the manuscript of Aeneid of Virgil, and the manuscripts of Franz Kafka. There is even precedent of military officers saving books from other soldiers: in the beginning of the Battle of Monte Cassino Colonel Julius Schlegel and Captain Maximilian Becker, German officers, transferred the Monte Cassino Archives to the Vatican.

On November 9 near to Miskolc, a Nazi organization, “Hungarian National Front Line” (its original name was “Hungarian National Socialist Action Group”) organized a meeting titled “Night of Self-purification”, where several volumes of Radnóti’s poems were burned. November 9 is the assumed date of the poet’s martyrdom. Although it is not known on which day in early November 1944, it is widely known in Hungary, that Radnóti, one of the best Hungarian poets of 20^th century literature, was murdered by Hungarian guards as a Jewish forced laborer.

László L. Simon, cotemporary poet and head of the parliament’s commission for culture and media, appointed by the governing Fidesz party, condemned this action declaring that Hungarians have learned from their history that whoever is annihilating books is likely to continue with the annihilation of people. Not only politicians protested, but also civilians of Budapest expressed their outrage over such symbolic violence by gathering around a (still standing) statue of Radnóti and reading aloud his poems.

Ágnes Kelemen, Nationalism Studies, Hungary

Images: www.hirado.hu, www.litera.hu

 This article was originally published in the 40th issue of The CEU Weekly.