Literature/Film Association Annual Conference
University of Montana - Missoula, MO
Presented September, 2023
The Postsocialist era has afforded Eastern European states of the former Soviet bloc an openness to re-examine the past and uncover historical injustices repressed for decades by state authorities. One of the most consequential examples comes from Jan Gross’ 2000 study Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland in which he exposed the complicity and collaboration of some Catholic Poles in the planned murder of their Jewish neighbors in the summer of 1941.[1] Gross demonstrates that the attack, which ended with the surviving Jews locked into a barn and burned to death, was planned not by the occupying German army but by local Polish officials. The study challenged the myth of Polish martyrdom Communist leaders promulgated for decades by revealing to many that not only were Poles not World War II’s main victims, but that they were even the perpetrators of some of its horrors. These revelations caused for Poles what sociologist Geneviève Zubrzycki terms a “narrative shock” in which “the key story of a nation is seriously challenged, shaking its identity to its core.”[2]
Narrative shocks produced by revelations such as Jedwabne have provoked a swift reaction on the religious Right to double down on the myth of Polish innocence, heroism, and martyrdom. The Law and Justice Party (abbreviated and referred to as “PiS”) which won the Presidency and Parliamentary super majority in 2014 attempts to define the symbolic boundaries of the Polish nation under ethnic religious terms, that of the Polak-Katolik.[3] The Fidesz Party in Hungary, led by populist Viktor Orbán, similarly employs Catholicism as a political ideology to determine who is and who is not Hungarian.[4] The portrayal of Catholic Nationalism as the antidote to the growing discontent with multicultural and secular values imposed by the West has reinforced the stigma toward Jews as the “internal other.” In her study The Crosses of Auschwitz Zubrzycki notes that Jewishness is often employed to exclude unwanted ideological elements that do not fit with the Right’s ideally defined model of Polishness.[5] Jews, either imaginary or real, are coded as Western, liberal, cosmopolitan, and are a threatening reminder of a more diverse past in which the country was defined not by religious but by civic, legal terms.[6]
This paper outlines several Polish and Hungarian films that challenge the homogonous ethno-Catholic vision of both countries through de-Othering Jews. In Poland, the films Aftermath and Ida portray the collaboration of opportunistic Poles who dispossessed their Jewish neighbors during World War II. The Hungarian films Son of Saul and 1945, meanwhile, attempt to indigenize the figure of the Jew by firmly rooting Jewish identity on Hungarian soil. In each of these films Jewish figures transgress nationalist Self/Other and Native/Foreign dichotomies, and their presence serves as a threatening foil to the dominant model of Polishness or Hungarianness that ties itself to Catholicism. With varying degrees of success, they accentuate anxieties associated with the unresolved question of Jewish property, and controversially use the nostalgia for Jewish inclusion as a drive for West-modelled liberal, multicultural openness in the present.
The first, Władyslaw Pasikowski’s 2012 film Aftermath, is perhaps the most controversial film in the last two decades of Polish cinema because it takes as its inspiration the previously mentioned 1941 pogrom in Jedwabne.[7] The story revolves around brothers Józef and Franek who have been shunned by the community for acquiring and displaying on their farmland dozens of Jewish tombstones which had been used by German occupying forces as paving stones in a now abandoned road. They literally unearth and make public the village’s Jewish past, which stokes the ire of villagers who want to keep it silent. It is eventually uncovered that these Jews were burned to death by the villagers in their family’s former house, and that their own father was directly involved in the murder. In the climax of the film Franek finds his brother Józef beaten, stabbed, and nailed on the inside of the barn door with his arms outstretched.
The film, initially titled Kaddish, failed to receive sufficient funding when it was first written in 2005. The coproducers and Director took the hesitation from the government as a rebuke to historical truth-telling. The groundswell of support from the centrist press, and an A-list production team of Polish nationals who had expressed interest over the years put the pressure on financing.[8] It took five years to raise enough money, but the Polish Film Institute eventually contributed nearly 40 percent of the film’s budget.[9] After its release virtually all discussions about the film were inscribed into historical discussions. Nationalists labeled the film as a tool in the “pedagogy of shame,” that is, of intentionally un-teaching Poles of national pride, and was censored from several local cinemas amidst some public backlash.
Within days of the film’s release, Wrpost, a weekly magazine, ran a photo of lead actor Maciej Stuhr on its cover with a Star of David and reads, “Maciej Stuhr was lynched at his own request.” The publication accuses Maciej of becoming “a symbol of simplicity and manipulating history for commercial gain.” Although Stuhr doesn’t identify as Jewish, the right-wing press continued to insist he is of Jewish origin and that he is “mendacious and harmful for Poles.”[10]
The historical arguments and political division stirred by Aftermath would arise again the following year with the release of Paweł Pawlikowski’s film Ida. Set in 1962 Ida follows a young woman, Anna, who is on the verge of taking vows as a nun. Orphaned as an infant during the German occupation, she is ordered by her Mother Superior that she must meet her aunt before taking her final vows.[11] Immediately upon meeting her aunt Wanda, a minor state judge and Communist Party member, she tells her niece that her real name is Ida Lebenstein, and that she’s Jewish.
Wanda proposes they go on a road trip together to discover what became of Ida’s parents during the war. The father of the Christian family who now owns their old home, Feliks, agrees to tell them where Ida’s parents are buried if she promises to give up any claim to the house and land. Feliks then takes the women to the burial place in the woods.
While digging up their bones he admits to Ida that he, and not the German authorities, killed her parents, and Wanda’s son. Ida, however, was given to the convent. The revelation leads Wanda to suicide, and, after a brief experiment with profane pleasures, including smoking, drinking, and a one-night stand with a jazz musician, Ida dons her novitiate habit again and presumably returns to the convent to take her vows.
The film’s intimate drama places pressure on the aspects of life where the Catholic, Jewish and Communist strains of Poland’s endlessly and bitterly contested national identity intersect. Will Ida be faithful to the traumatized family that she was born into or take an oath of allegiance to the one that raised her? Or, is there a third option, in which she may be both a Jew and a Catholic? Can one flee from the past once it has been re-discovered? Unlike in Aftermath, very little is stated directly; instead, we glean things from casual remarks and subtle suggestions. Despite being a far more poetic and ambiguous film, it still spurred much controversy for bringing such tense topics to the foreground. PiS Prime Minister Beata Maria Szydło even chided the film as a bad promotion of Poland.[12] Its distribution in Poland was the smallest among the top twenty films released in 2013, and it was only the 10th most watched film released in for Poland that year.[13] Protests and petitions against Ida were launched by Poland’s nationalist groups after the film was nominated for Academy Awards.[14] Shortly before the Academy Awards ceremony, the Polish League Against Defamation circulated a petition against the Polish Film Institute charging that the film failed to acknowledge the German occupation.
The historical argument presented in the film was also contested by Polish Television (TVP), which is the only public national broadcaster in Poland and the largest Polish television network. When Ida was shown on TVP it was preceded by a 12-minute editorial program that claimed the film to be historically inaccurate. Title cards stating many Poles helped to save Polish Jews were also added.[15] During its editorial program TVP alleged that the film won an Oscar only because of its pro-Jewish point of view. Moreover, the inclusion of the theme of dispossession in the film renewed attention to the sensitive fact that Poland is the only country from the former Soviet bloc that has not taken steps to provide restitution and compensation to their pre-war Jewish citizens.
Hungary shares with Poland a recent rightwing political turn to conservative populism that increasingly defines itself at odds with the post-national, secular culture modelled by the West. Despite having a much larger Jewish population – between 75,000 to 100,000 compared to 13,000 in Poland[16] – Hungary, lead by Orbán’s anti-immigrant nostalgia, has claimed eleven hundred years ago before Hungary was “diverse” and “mixed” as the authentic past of the nation which must be rescued from contamination by Western modernity.[17] Many artists and filmmakers have taken to task participating in cultural work that acknowledges Hungarian complicity as an ally of Nazi Germany, and memorializes Jewish absence to disrupt Catholic universality. Two Hungarian films of note are László Nemes’ Son of Saul and Ferenc Török’s 1945. Unlike the rest of the films discussed Son of Saul does not puncture the image of Hungarian innocence by portraying Christian Hungarians collaborating with Germans; instead, by virtue of its massive critical success, the film sparked debates about the legitimacy of the Hungarian Film Fund and its role in funding stories centered on Jewish suffering.[18]
Son of Saul is about a Sonderkommando prisoner in Auschwitz who seeks to provide a boy, who he believes to be his son, a proper Jewish burial.[19] Throughout the film Saul endangers not only his unit but also obstructs their plans of escape, compelling us to question both his motives and his sanity.
In the final scene of the film another boy appears in front of Saul, but we do not know if he is envisioning a phantom or a real, live child. Saul’s cryptic smile suggest that the boy clearly offers him a moment of grace before his final execution. The positive reception by most Hungarian critics[20] and audiences had been tempered by dissenting voices, including those from the far-right Jobbik party who claimed that Son of Saul is part of “a booming Holocaust industry,” and that Hungarian filmmaking should focus on other parts of Hungary's history.[21] In an episode of the Hungarian TV show Civil Kaszino several Fidesz officials made the specious argument that there must be no antisemitism in Hungary if its state film fund is willing to give money to a Holocaust-themed film. They then give a backhanded compliment imbued with antisemitism to the young Director by claiming that he chose a “Holocaust theme” for his first film only because it “is very popular at international film festivals.”[22] Nemes also made himself a target by making critical remarks directed toward the Fidesz government. In an interview with Geoffrey Macnab of Independent he proclaimed that his film will have succeeded if it “make(s) it less trendy for Hungarian schoolboys and schoolgirls at the age of 16, 17 and 18 to be neo-Nazis.”[23] Viktor Orbán has also directly praised the film on social media but only to prop it up as proof of no antisemitism even though polls from the Eurobarometer, Holocaust Revisionist Report, and Anti-Defamation League Report indicate a rise of antisemitism in Hungary.[24] Not to mention the use of antisemitic language in his government’s anti-immigrant “Stop Soros” laws.
Török Ferenc’s 1945 is an original addition to Hungary’s long history of Westerns going back to Miklos Jansco’s 1966 The Round Up that transfers the American West to Hungary’s puszta, the veritable frontier edge of Europe, and considers such sensitive topics as restitution, Wartime sins, and the insufficient wartime resistance of the Catholic church.[25] In it, the arrival of two men who appear to be Orthodox Jews arrive at a rural Hungarian train station. No one recognizes them yet their arrival spurs the station master to send word to the town clerk, Istvan. As it turns out, Istvan, the prosperous kingpin-like Mayor, is preparing for his son’s wedding that afternoon. But preparing for this festive occasion nearly comes to a halt when he gets word about the arrival of the two men.
Fearful that the Jewish arrivals are an expeditionary force for Jews who used to own property there, Istvan frantically mounts cover-ups of his own crimes. Without confronting or accusing anyone, these Jewish visitors inflict a terrible revenge on the townspeople by their mere presence. Stewing in their own bad consciences, the villagers who harbor guilty secrets about ill-gotten gains tear their families and community apart.
In the climactic showdown of the film at a Jewish cemetery it is uncovered that the outsiders are merely there to bury what’s left of their dead. They then leave as they arrived: shrouded in mystery. The film provocatively locates contemporary Hungarian National Identity, and its lack of multicultural openness, in the deplorable existence of the double collaborator, personified in Istvan, who helps the Germans remove the town’s Jewish population, and then labors to earn the respect of newly arrived Soviet soldiers.
Each of these films share a thematic concern with performing a proper burial or commemorating absent Jews, such as in the tombstones of Aftermath or Saul’s search for a rabbi in Son of Saul. In Aftermath, Ida, and 1945 the past itself refuses to remain buried. Portraying the willing cooperation of gentiles to rid Jewish neighbors undermines the revisionist historical policy of Hungary’s Fidesz and Poland’s Law and Justice Party. Through their national film funds both governments have transfigured the screen as a battleground of historic memory by propagating a mythologized heroic, Christian past. Among them are some of the most expensive national films made in recent years. Jerzy Hoffman’s historical epic Battle of Warsaw, 1920 (2011)[26] about the decisive Polish victory during the Polish-Soviet War received the most amount of funding in the Polish Film Institute’s history, while Hungary’s Rise of Raven, about the warrior Janos Hunyadi who led the defeat of the Ottoman army in 1456, received $29.5 million from the Hungarian Film Fund.[27] These clichéd, almost patriotic textbook-like stories about events of national importance have not received critical recognition nor met audiences’ expectations. Established filmmakers from Agnieszka Holland in Poland to Bela Tarr and Ildikó Enyedi in Hungary have decried the use of national film funds for such big budget jingoistic films.[28] The degrees of separation, however small, between the Hungarian National Film Fund or the Polish Film Institute and their governing political bodies has allowed films like 1945 and Ida to source funding, and advocate for the possibility of a broader range of significations of national identity. In their attempts to demythologize a glorious, uncontaminated past we must recognize their production as acts of disobedience that, for now, exist without the threat of lawful punishment.[29]
While challenging statist historical revisionism is appropriately considered a transgressive artistic intervention, the project of envisioning a modern multicultural society through Jewishness must nevertheless take to task the following questions: If Jewishness is used to enable Poles and Hungarians to imagine a truer, better, and more diverse version of themselves then does that risk fetishization, and a further “Othering” of Jews? And, more broadly, what are the limits of using ethnicity as the means through which to attempt to transcend ethnonationalism? These questions will be critical for imagining a civic nationalism that does not treat its “internal Other” as its “threatening Other.”
WORKS CITED
[1] Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton University Press, 2000).
[2]. The other major “narrative shock” that spurred much debate is the changing of Auschwitz from a symbol of Polish to Jewish victimhood.
[3]. In 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election Fidesz won 54.13% of the popular vote, and 135 seats in the 199-seat National Assembly. PiS is still the most popular party in Poland with 37 percent according to Politico.
[4]. A succinct series of recent events in Hungary, for example, would include: the transference of the crown of St. Stephen from the National Museum to Parliament; the decrease of funding to the Budapest Holocaust Museum; the founding of the Orbán-sponsored House of Terror museum; the declaration of June 4th as the “Day of National Solidarity” to commemorate the Treaty of Trianon; the use of coded antisemitic language in the “Stop Soros” law; the erection of the Memorial for the Victims of the German’s Occupation, and the attempted rehabilitation of the reputation of Admiral Miklos Horthy. In Poland, the first of two controversial events include the Institute of National Remembrance Law in 2018 which threatened up to three years’ imprisonment for “anyone claiming publicly and against the facts” that “the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich.” The second event being the 2018 amendment to Poland’s restitution law which prevents the descendants of Jews whose property was seized during the Second World War and retained during the communist era from receiving restitution.
[5]. Geneviève Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland, (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 12.
[6]. Jews are also paradoxically coded as exotic, “Oriental,” and communist. For more see Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present by Joanna Beata Michlic. (University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
[7]. Władyslaw Pasikowski, Aftermath, (Apple Film Productions, 2012).
[8]. Some notable crew members include Production Designer Allan Starski, an Oscar winner for Schindler’s List, and cinematographer Pawel Edelman, who shot The Ghostwriter and The Pianist for Roman Polanski.
[9]. The film’s coproducer, Dariusz Jabłoński, explains that Russian, Slovak, and Dutch production companies later supported the project (each funding 10%). The film’s purported message was to distribute knowledge about a “difficult past” to Poles dressed up in the aesthetics of popular cinema. In an interview for the film Pasikowski states that “the film is about restoring our memory, the film is about us. Our examination of conscience, which we should make after leaving the cinema.”
[10]. Gazeta Polska called Aftermath
[11]. Paweł Pawlikowski, Ida (Polish Film Institute, 2013).
[12]. Stanley Bell, “Review of ‘Ida’: Identity and Freedom,” Notes from Poland, January 9, 2015, https://notesfrompoland.com/2015/01/09/review-of-ida-identity-and-freedom/. PiS Prime Minister Beata Maria Szydło has remarked “this particular film was definitely not a promotion of Poland,” and that “it rather painted a negative image of it.”
[13]. Marek Haltoff, Polish Cinema: A History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 312. 243,466 viewers (number 10 on the list of Polish films released in 2013), compared to 500,00 in France or 100,000 in Italy.
[14]. Andrew Pulver, “Polish Nationalists Launch Petition Against Oscar-Nominated film Ida” The Guardian, January 22, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/22/ida-oscars-2015-film-polish-nationalists-petition.
[15] Katarzyna Grynienko, “Polish Filmmakers Protest TVP Interference in Ida Broadcast,” Film New Europe, February 3, 2016, https://www.filmneweurope.com/news/poland-news/item/112262-polish-filmmakers-protest-tvp-interference-in-ida-broadcast
[16]. “Hungary,” World Jewish Congress, accessed September 7, 2023, https://worldjewishcongress.org/en/about/communities/HU
[17]. “We do not want to be diverse and we do not want to be mixed… we want to be how we became eleven hundred years ago here in the Carpathian Basin.” Shaun Walker and Flora Garamvolgyi, “Viktor Orbán Sparks Outrage with Attack on ‘Race Mixing’ in Europe,” The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/24/viktor-orban-against-race-mixing-europe-hungary
[18]. At the time Sipos and Nemes first met to discuss the project, the new Hungarian Film Fund was coming into existence. Its debt-ridden predecessor, Motion Picture Public Foundation of Hungary (MMKA), had collapsed amid much acrimony. Andy Vajna, the Hungarian-born Hollywood producer of hits including Rambo, Die Hard and Terminator, was about to be appointed the new film commissioner.
[19]. László Nemes, Son of Saul (Hungarian Film Institute, 2015). The film is based on a collection of testimonies entitled “Voices from Beneath the Ashes” which became The Scrolls of Auschwitz by Bernard Mark (Tel Aviv: Am `Oved Pub. House, 1985).
[20]. The film renewed conversations about the ethics of Holocaust representation with critics like Stefan Grissemann and Rich Brownstein disavowing it. In his article “Atrocity Exhibitionism” (Film Comment, 2015, Vol. 51, No. 6, pp. 26-29) Grissemann states “They make the inconceivable palpable, and by doing so they trivialize it. Son of Saul claims to make us feel, hear, and see what really happened in Auschwitz; by this intention alone, it is a work of breathtaking pretension.” For Brownstein, a Holocaust film should not portray a Jewish character as even partially insane, and that the film unoriginally copies the plot of Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone (2002). Richard Brownstein Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide, (North Carolina: McFarland, 2021), 215.
[21]. Kasnyikm, “The Son of Saul won, so we can say it: there is no anti-Semitism in Hungary,” 444, May 25, 2015, https://444.hu/2015/05/25/nyert-a-saul-fia-igy-kimondhatjuk-nincs-antiszemitizmus-magyarorszagon/
[22]. Christopher Adam, “Fidesz intellectuals believe Son of Saul proves there is no antisemitism in Hungary,” Hungarian Free Press, May 26, 2015. https://hungarianfreepress.com/2015/05/26/fidesz-intellectuals-the-film-son-of-saul-proves-there-is-no-antisemitism-in-hungary/
[23]. Geoffrey Macnab, “Son of Saul: Taboo-busting Holocaust tale to put Hungary on Hollywood’s map,” February 25, 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/son-of-saul-taboobusting-holocaust-tale-to-put-hungary-on-hollywood-s-map-a6898726.html
[24]. Ben Sales, “Over a third of people in Hungary, Poland have ‘extensive’ antisemitic beliefs – poll,” The Times of Israel, May 31, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/over-a-third-of-people-in-hungary-poland-have-extensive-antisemitic-beliefs-poll/
[25]. Török Ferenc, 1945 (Katapult Film, 2017). The puszta, a large stretch of flatland spreading across eastern Hungary, fulfills an important role in the national imaginary, celebrated as the site where nomadic Hungarians are thought to have settled in the ninth century, a physical space designated as the birthplace of the Hungarian nation.
[26].Dorota Hartwich, “Box Office Poland,” Cineuropa, October 12, 2011, https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/210383/. €2.25 m Euros was the most ever given in history by the Polish Film Institute. This expensive production by Polish standards (its budget was $9 million, including $3 million provided by the PISF) was the first Polish 3-D feature film (photographed by Sławomir Idziak) Another highly anticipated yet failed film was Siberian Exile (2013, Janusz Zaorski), about the fate of Poles sent to Siberia after the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939. Perhaps the most spectacular was the failure of Łukasz Barczyk’s epic costume drama Influence (2015) with a budget of $7 million, which was advertised as a spiritual thriller.
[27]. Christopher Vourlias, “‘Crimes of the Future’ Producer Robert Lantos on How Epic Drama Series ‘Rise of the Raven’ Will Raise the Bar for Hungary, Variety, August 9, 2022, https://variety.com/2022/tv/global/crimes-of-the-future-robert-lantos-hungary-rise-of-the-raven-1235336725/.
Now or Never! directed by Balázs Lóth is set to release in cinemas March 2024, and it will have received $12.5 million production grant from Hungarian Film Fund, which is the most in HFF history. Budapest Reporter, January 1, 2023, https://www.budapestreporter.com/now-or-never-most-expensive-hungarian-movie-ever-drops-teaser/.
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. Christopher Vourlias, “Amid Rightward Turn Under Viktor Orbán, Hungarian Filmmakers Look to a ‘Heroic Past’,” May 21, 2022, https://variety.com/2022/film/global/hungary-orban-historic-dramas-1235257772/. “I think [the NFI] have other priorities,” says Ildikó Enyedi. “They are supporting big-budget, historical films about the very heroic past of Hungary.”
[29]. In this way these filmmakers are continuing a rich tradition of combatting the governing party’s injustices, from Andrjez Wajda’s subtle allusions to Władysław Gomułka’s bigoted campaign against Polish Jews in his 1970 Landscape After Battle to András Kovács 1996 film Cold Days about the Novi Sad massacre in which 4000 Yugoslavian Serbs and Jews were executed by Hungarian army units.
