Which Path to Christian Nationalism? Wartime Hungarian Cinema in New Order Europe

This article examines the transformation of the Hungarian film industry, focusing on the wartime years, when Hungary became the third most prolific feature film producer in continental Europe, when rhetoric about the nation-producing role of film and its corrolary, antisemitism, reached a crescendo across the continent. Despite what appeared to be ideal conditions for the right-wing advocates of Hungarian Christian nationalism, David Frey's article demonstrates how difficult it was for Hungary to conceive of and sustain a viable film industry meant to define the nation in the midst of war, poverty, cultural crisis, and political instability while under the umbrella of Nazi Germany, Hungary's a sometimes ally, sometimes competitor. To understand how Hungarian filmmaking elites attempted to articulate and shape 'Christian national' culture during the World War II era, Frey proposes that a multivalent analysis is necessary. At the micro-level, forces within the film industry played a major role in establishing the parameters of what was Christian national. However, those forces were unleashed and constrained by developments within the Hungarian state, countrywide discourses about antisemitism and the nature of the Hungarian nation, and perhaps most importantly, by Nazi Germany's ideology, its continent-wide aggression, and attempt to create a cultural and economic 'New Order'. The author also argues that to fully grasp wartime understandings of Hungarian Christian nationalism, we must examine not only what state-led industries created, but what they rejected. Attempts that failed, as well as those that seemed to succeed, likewise expose resistance to and divisions within national narratives we might otherwise miss. Frey considers three archetypes of the so-called Christian national film style. He probes the categories of great man films, populist social problem films, and overtly antisemitic propaganda films. He explains why each was unable to produce the nation-building synthesis their producers dreamt they would. In the process, Frey elucidates why Hungarian antisemitism transformed as it did prior to the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, and why Jews, ironically, remained so central to the production of 'Christian' Hungarian culture.

Keywords: Hungarian Film, Christian nationalism, antisemitism, populism, Nazism