Tapestry of Memory

Evidence and Testimony in Life-Story Narratives

Nanci Adler

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412851657
• eBook ISBN: 9781351486996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

In this volume, contributors present narratives and explore the way they influence the perception of the past. While acknowledging the debate about the validity of qualitative research based on narratives, this volume aims to illuminate how truth and evidence form part of a much wider debate on the representation of history.The volume includes the work of historians but the interdisciplinary nature of the contributions shows that the validity debate also applies to the broader fields of cultural studies, sociology, and other social sciences. The distinction between memory and testimony is a crucial theme. Memory, though selective, is the basis of testimony. Testimony provides an audience with information that becomes evidence of what was seen or experienced. Such evidence can form the basis of legal truth.Nanci Adler and Selma Leydesdorff divide the volume into three core sections: Official Testimony and Other Facts and Evidence; The Creation of New History and the Integration of Collective Memory in the Story of One's Self; and Claims Based on Narratives vs. Official History. After a comprehensive introduction by the editors, the volume offers twelve essays by leading scholars. This work is a new offering in Transaction's acclaimed Memory and Narrative series.

Part I Official Testimony and Other “Facts and Evidence”

1 Historicizing Hate: Testimonies and Photos about the Holocaust Trauma during the Hungarian Post-WWII Trials

Andrea Pető

Introduction

The trial of László Endre (1895–1946), the former State Secretary of Home Affairs, was followed by the Hungarian media with keen interest. Endre had overseen—with the assistance of an efficient state apparatus of 200,000 civil servants—the deportation of 400,000 Hungarian Jews over the course of three months in the summer of 1944. On one of the days of the trial, which lasted from 17 December 1945 until 7 January 1946, he was escorted on foot by two policemen to the “People’s Courtroom” in Budapest. A photograph, preserved in the archives of the Hungarian National Museum, captured the moment when a middle-aged woman on the street shouted at Endre, while shaking her fist. The accused seems to be smiling smugly at the woman. She could not reach him, as he was protected by the two policemen. The photo was part of a photographic genre; photojournalists documented the post-war lustration process, accompanying the defendants on their journeys from the courtroom to the prison—and sometimes even to the gallows. To my knowledge, this particular photo was never published, unlike others possibly taken on the same day in the courtroom. They show that very same woman, wearing sunglasses and sitting silently in a prominent spot on the public benches.

The photographs are exceptional; they capture the manifestation of the victim’s emotions and, at the same time, a moment of communication between her and the perpetrator. There are better-known images of the trial, which were either published in the daily papers or by historians seeking to illustrate their narratives about the history of the “People’s Tribunals” and the juridical processes after World War II in Hungary. These photos documented what happened in the courtrooms, with their “talking heads” and silent audiences. The other “public” (that is, published) photograph of Endre and the woman wearing sunglasses was taken in the courtroom; it captured an orchestrated and hierarchical relationship shaped by the legal framework.¹

These two photos compel us to consider the trials and the entire post-WWII transitional justice period as a space where the full emotional burden of the crimes committed during World War II was manifested. These crimes included the deportation of 600,000 Hungarian Jews, who had been denied their rights by the anti-Jewish legislation that was enacted between 1938 and 1942.² Most of the rich international literature focuses on the post-war trials in Germany, especially in the American, British, and French occupational zones, and on the Eichmann trial in Israel. These venues approached witness testimony quite differently, as Shoshana Felman describes: the “Nuremberg prosecution made a decision to shun witnesses and base the case against the Nazi leaders exclusively on documents, whereas the prosecution in the Eichmann trial chose to rely extensively on witnesses as well as documents to substantiate its case,” because immediately after the war the prosecution believed in the authentic power of written documents.³ Since the Hungarian People’s Court relied mostly on testimonies and not documents, its proceedings can reveal new, thus far neglected characteristics of the post-war trials. Of all the countries under Soviet occupation only Hungary was allowed to institutionalize people’s tribunals of the Soviet type as a legal site for “dealing with the past.” Hungary was the only country where the five members were delegated by political parties without any public participation, representing continuity with pre-war times. These trials were held shortly after the end of the war, from 4 February 1945, well before Nuremberg.⁴ Thus, there was no considerable, detectable “memory gap”⁵ between the lived experience and what later became the impermissibility of speaking about the events. Nor was there a ritualized or standardized narrative frame that could be used to speak about the Holocaust in Hungary. Therefore, in legal procedures, testimonies were initially the primary means of articulating the meaning of the Holocaust. Moreover, Hungary represents a unique case in terms of the institutionalization of war crimes tribunals.

During the trials the actors of transitional justice were able to speak about emotions, in relation to the events that caused their reactions.⁶ By exploring this aspect of their testimonies, this chapter aims to contribute to the extensive literature on emotions, while also investigating the legal documents in two ways.⁷ First, the People’s Tribunal process was a way to construct “emotional communities.”⁸ Investigating transcripts of the trials thus helps us to trace how the language of emotions was learned and performed in court.⁹ Second, the trials served as a civilized form for the expression of hate and reflected the emotional standards of the period. Whereas “fear is felt,” hate can be manifested.¹⁰ After the cataclysm of war, the expression of hate became a form of resistance and agency. As Sara Ahmed pointed out, “hate is involved in the very negotiation of boundaries between selves and others,”¹¹ and trials were the spaces where this negotiation “between the subject and the imagined other”¹² happened through the ritualized language of the law.

The People’s Tribunals were expected to start the process of normalization and to reconstruct social cohesion by determining the meanings of social interactions during World War II. As a part of the post-war normalization they were supposed to transmit moral judgments about emotions and about the acts stemming from them. Their function was also to punish and to serve as a warning to the perpetrators. The legal language of the court served to mediate and express emotions. The court was a highly structured space for communication between criminals, victims, and witnesses.

The Function of People’s Tribunals

The People’s Tribunal provided a space in which different social conflicts were staged while various parties struggled to define the meaning of the Holocaust and its consequences. Their agency was based on class (the victorious Communist Party of Hungary used these trials to label the previous ruling elite as responsible for class bias) and gender (ten percent of the perpetrators were women, a comparatively high percentage). They all became part of this particular legal discourse when approximately 60,000 cases were heard.¹³

The manifestations of these conflicts in the courtroom determined interpretations of post-WWII social life. Trials were crucial institutions in the post-war normalization because they redefined citizenship as one “set of institutionally embedded political, social, and cultural practices”; their legal practice also served as a site for the “display of certain ‘civic emotions’ as a marker of a person’s inclusion in the political word.”¹⁴ For example, the Eichmann trial was instrumental in formulating not only the narrative frame of the Holocaust as seen through the lens of the victim, but it also laid a foundation for an Israeli identity.¹⁵ Historians have tended to neglect those emotions. They often did not see them because emotions do not leave any traces in legal historical sources. To make emotions visible, we need testimonies, such as those in the early People’s Court Tribunals, which were dynamic and volatile.

Methodology and Sources

This article is part of a larger research project, based out of Budapest, entitled “The Memory of WWII and Transitional Justice.” In the Budapest City Archives, researchers have at their disposal a register containing the names of defendants during the People’s Tribunals. Based on this register, I conducted my research, selecting 6,000 female defendants from a list of 70,000 people convicted in Budapest. I examined approximately 200 files of female perpetrators in detail. I also read the contemporary press, interviewed judges, lawyers, children of the convicted, survivors, and witnesses to the People’s Tribunals, and I tried to find all possible photographs and newsreels about the People’s Tribunals for a larger research project on legal memory of WWII. In this chapter, based on an analysis of these sources, I seek to connect the emotions, cultural meanings, and social organization—the post-WWII People’s Tribunals in Hungary—that were expected to “deal with” the emotion of hate from both sides. Their aim was to prevent social explosions, such as lynching, and to “normalize” the post-war situation. In this chapter I would also like to explain the construction of a divided memory and competing narratives about World War II, by showing how the testimonies given at the People’s Tribunals served as a space for the articulation of emotions, while shaping the discourses on emotions and on emotional normalization.

The Importance of People’s Tribunals: Corrective Justice and Negotiating Emotions

After 1945, the purpose of the court cases conducted throughout Europe was to demonstrate, by educating and enlightening the populus, the norms and values of the post-Holocaust world. Ernst Cassirer stated that only those constitutions that were “written into the citizens’ mind”¹⁶ could function. The institution itself, the People’s Tribunal, was completely unprepared in both institutional and emotional terms for its historical mission. István Bibó (1911–1979), in his seminal 1948 article on the “Jewish question,” noted the absence in post-liberation Hungary of lynching and revenge murders, which he referred to as “explosive and disorderly ways of seeking satisfaction.”¹⁷ In the immediate aftermath of the war in France, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Italy (where, incidentally, significant resistance and partisan movements had existed), collaborators faced various forms of street justice—none of which had any kind of institutional approval.

In Hungary survivors and victims’ relatives awaited liberation, because for them it meant moving on with their life, but also the possibility of corrective justice. The fabric of Hungarian society had been torn apart by World War II; there was no social cohesion. Moreover, there had been neither domestic armed resistance nor a partisan movement in Hungary. Individual cases (the “rescuers” who have received wide publicity in recent years) do not obscure the fact that the Hungarian administrative state system and bureaucracy collapsed. The contradictory operations of the Jewish Council and its (lack of) choices have been examined, analyzed, and illuminated.¹⁸ In Hungary as in many other places in Europe, there was no institution or organization that was ethically beyond reproach—and which could therefore have operated as a cohesive force in the aftermath of the war. This was the political and institutional vacuum that the People’s Tribunals were expected to fill.

The verdicts of the People’s Tribunal depended on timing and the identity of the accused. When the first cases came up, the west of the country was still a conflict zone. Meticulous legal work was almost impossible. After the liberation of Budapest, the city’s Jewish survivors immediately filed their complaints. When the survivors of the death camps began to return to Hungary in mid-1945, a whole series of accusations and complaints were filed. The People’s Tribunals were not prepared to examine all these cases because the institution was overwhelmed by their sheer number. In Germany the feeling was that the “lesser murderers” were punished and the “big ones” got off,¹⁹ but in Hungary just the opposite was true. Due to the ideological zeal and political ambitions of the Communist Party, those prosecuted tended to be prominent politicians, government ministers, and military leaders. This zeal was absent when it came to ordinary collaborators, who were so numerous that for practical reasons many of them were never punished.²⁰

Snyder and Vinjamuri outlined a typology of international justice: the first type is legalism, where courts are the main institutions of justice; the second is pragmatism, where deals are made with the participants in the process; and the third is emotionalism, where one may observe “an emotional catharsis in the community of victims and an acceptance of blame by the perpetrators.”²¹ In the case of Hungary only the legalist approach was present; pragmatism was not politically viable after the Holocaust, and emotionalism was not possible given the lack of consensus on the interpretation of the Holocaust. The legalist approach was not without consequences. Various historians have criticized the political and legal framework in Hungary.²² As far as criticism of the political framework is concerned, the general point of departure of such analysis is that the People’s Tribunals became a tool of the Communist authorities who controlled the Ministry of Justice. They contributed to the development of a new political system through the use of retroactive justice and exceptional courts for punishment. I shall argue that the importance of this legal procedure as a site of communicative memory is related more to the construction of emotions through memory than to direct “conspiratory” political aims of the Communist Party to orchestrate a political takeover; moreover, I will argue that the structure of the People’s Tribunals also served as a site of resistance to establishing guilt and responsibility for the Holocaust in Hungary. Instead of denoting the guilty, this forum facilitated the labeling of its participants as victims of Communist oppression.

During the legal process both the victims (and witnesses) and the perpetrators were asked to retell their stories in front of those present. For the victims, the testimonies were acts of re-experiencing and an attempt to normalize past feelings in the present, in front of the perpetrators and other victims. The first testimonies were given in the investigative phase o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: On the Evidence Value of Personal Testimony
• Part I Official Testimony and Other “Facts and Evidence”
• Part II The Creation of a New History and the Integration of Collective Memory in the Story of One’s Self
• Part III Claims Based on Narratives versus Official History
• List of Contributors
• Index