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ABSTRACT
The article highlights the cinematic portrayal of a woman’s exceptional affective agency against the backdrop of historical trauma, more specifically, of the Holocaust in Hungary, in Hungarian director Istvan Szabo’s The Door (Az ajto 2012) based on Hungarian writer Magda Szabo’s eponymous novel The Door (Az ajto 1987). Through a juxtaposition of the cinematic and the literary text, the article discusses central protagonist Emerenc Szeredas’s affective transaction to save the life of a little Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied Budapest. Emerenc’s ‘affective bargain’ through which she sustains the ‘cruel optimism’ (Lauren Berlant) of love and compassion pits her gendered capital against devalued Jewish life. The film conveys the costs of such an affective transaction and Emerenc’s ultimate failure to achieve ‘the good life’ (Sara Ahmed) of societal expectations. What transpires in The Door at the convergence of cinematic discourse and literary text is female agency constrained within the severely limited terrain of patriarchal economy. In terms of Istvan Szabo’s cinematography, The Door instantiates yet another engagement with the Holocaust as Szabo’s lifelong preoccupation, and it stands for a significant intervention into the current post-Holocaust memory discourse in Hungary.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The French translation of The Door garnered the Prix Femina Etranger in 2003.
2. A January 2006 political scandal implicated Szabo Istvan as secret police informer in the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, ‘the affair’ did not compromise him to the extent of endangering his later work and career (Petrie Citation2020, 71).
3. In that sense, with the central protagonist Magda’s occupation as a post-war female intellectual, The Door takes up again Istvan Szabo’s interest in the dialectics implicit in the relationship between intellectuals and hegemony brilliantly explored in his Oscar-winning Mephisto (1981). In this film, the protagonist, Mephisto, is the prototypical figure of the parvenu artist/intellectual whose creativity is transmogrified by his ‘underlying political project’ and who becomes a ‘particularly refined example of the Eastern European artist’s wish-fulfilling assimilation into the West of Europe’ (Imre Citation1999, 499). The theme of wish-fulfillment preoccupies Istvan Szabo in Meeting Venus (1991) as well. Similarly, in Taking Sides a central concern is the intellectual’s/artist’s power to ‘offer spiritual nourishment’ to people in times of crisis (Gardiner Citation2010, 102).
4. Istvan Szabo’s 1991 production, Sweet Emma, Dear Bobe (Edes Emma, Draga Bobe) offers an earlier portrayal of two women’s close relationship which, nevertheless, is much less idiosyncratic because the two young women are very close both in terms of age and of social class.
5. Incidentally, the twilight zone of the Monarchy is another one of Istvan Szabo’s thematic preoccupations: both Colonel Redl (Redl ezredes),1985 and Sunshine (A napfeny ize), 1999, two of Szabo’s best-known films inhabit this period, revealing its inner tensions, in particular its identity politics and the challenges faced by assimilated Hungarian Jews being accepted by the status quo.
6. I refer here to a particular scene in Laszlo Nemes’s Son of Saul (Saul fia), 2015 and the portrayal of the Sonderkommando, or the Special Squads of Jewish men tasked with the destruction of corpses through incineration in the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Hungarian Sonderkommando men reiterate the terminology they are taught to use referring to the corpses as ‘holmik.’
7. The distinct transactional nature of the Final Solution, the ideological pursuit of racial eradication along with redistribution of wealth, profited primarily Nazi Germany and its ruling elites, but substantial material gains were also distributed across wide sections of European societies. According to Polish scholars Thomasz Gross and Irena Grudzinska Gross , for instance, the economic dimension of the genocide was of primary significance to ordinary Polish villagers. The objectification of Jews reached a liminality during WWII in Europe which meant that they became identifiable immediately with ‘possessions’ to such an extent that ‘the attention and efforts of those surrounding them were concentrated on collecting, segregating, and profiting from the objects gained from the Jews,’ and in some cases, like the Great Action in Warsaw in 1942 when 250,000 people were deported to Treblinka, ‘the accumulation, selection, and distribution of objects left by the expelled and murdered Jews took several months’ (Gross and Gross Citation2016, 87–88). The expropriation of Jewish wealth had thus presupposed a fundamental shift in social relationships, with Jews being pushed out of the social contract entirely, deprived of civil rights and ultimately of citizenship. See also the remarkable 2017 Hungarian film entitled 1945 directed by Ferenc Torok on this topic.
8. Indeed, one of the most controversial facts about the Holocaust in Hungary was that the Jewish Council in Budapest, aware of the realities of the Final Solution, kept the information to itself, deciding not to warn Jews in the Hungarian provinces against boarding the trains to Auschwitz-Birkenau. According to Saul Friedlander, the Council ‘may have assumed that any warning to Jews of the provinces would be useless. Possibly for that reason and because the council members were utterly assimilated, law-abiding Magyar citizens, the council made no attempt to inform the heads of communities in the provinces covertly; its announcements were soothing all along, as if the Budapest leaders mainly wanted to avoid panic among the hapless Jewish masses’ (Citation2007, 615).
9. The Kossuth Prize (Kossuth Dij) is the highest official state acknowledgment of a Hungarian writer, artist or intellectual,
10. See Geoffrey H. Hartman’s analysis of the objectification of women in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in Hartman, (Citation1997), and see, about (mis)representations of gender in Laszlo Nemes's Son of Saul, Haragos (Citation2021).
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Szidonia Haragos
Szidonia Haragos is Associate Professor of English at Zayed University, Dubai, UAE. Her work has appeared in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies; Life Writing; Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies.