Women’s affective transactions and the memory of Hungarian (historical) affairs: Istvan Szabo’s The Door (2012)

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• cruel optimism
• affective transactions
• Hungary
• Holocaust

In Hungarian director Istvan Szabo’s 2012 The Door, Helen Mirren played the role of Emerenc Szeredas, the extraordinary housekeeper in the eponymous novel, Az ajto (The Door) by contemporary Hungarian writer, Magda Szabo. While viewing the film in tandem with reading the novel, as it were, I want to conjure up a sense of creative tension between the two Szabos and evoke a synchronicity between the literary text and its cinematic adaptation. (The most vivid manifestations of such a synchronicity are, of course, the reactions of viewers ranging from recognition and delight to frustration to disappointment with the film adaptation of any literary work.) The original Hungarian word ‘az ajto’ in the title of both the movie and the novel means, literally, ‘the door’ in English. Magda Szabo’s international bestseller has been translated into several languages¹ with the image of the door being the one stable signifier in all the foreign titles of the book. Except that it turns out not to be stable at all. There are in fact two doors Emerenc is guarding fiercely in the novel: the entrance door to her shabby service apartment in Budapest and another door hidden inside her apartment behind a massive chest of drawers. The most dramatic difference between film and novel is precisely the fact that, while the novel builds a narrative crescendo climaxing in the opening of the second door, the film refuses to lead towards that door at all, let alone open it. It is as if the two Szabos had misunderstood each other: while Magda Szabo wrote a novel about the inside, hidden door, Istvan Szabo made a film about the entrance door to Emerenc’s apartment, effectively, thus, two Szabos, two doors. In both film and novel, through radicalized love and compassion, Emerenc saves the life of little Eva Grossmann in Nazi-occupied Budapest, and her affective transaction crucially pits the exchange value of gendered capital against devalued Jewish life. In this article, I employ Laurent Berlant’s terms of ‘cruel optimism’ and ‘affective bargains’ along with Sara Ahmed’s related concept of ‘happy objects’ to highlight Emerenc’s ultimate affective bargain and the devastating costs she pays for love. I argue that what makes Istvan Szabo’s film transformative, and very successful as adaptation, is that it captures Emerenc’s sacrifice as a gendered act situated within the lived materiality of her life. The film effectively conveys thus the precarity of Emerenc’s positionality as a young woman in a patriarchal economy and a war-torn country.

Both Laurent Berlant and Sara Ahmed’s formulations within Affect Theory offer productive critiques of normative myths of subjecthood and of gender. Berlant defines ‘cruel optimism’ as ‘the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object’ because such ‘objects or scenes of desire,’ in turn, ‘provide something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world’ (2011, 24). In other words, the coherence of the self is contingent upon its always already tarnished attachments. Yet, exactly because they are essentially compromised, such attachments, ranging from ‘something as banal as a scouring love … obsessive appetites, working for a living, patriotism, all kinds of things,’ can only be maintained at an often disproportionately steep price and through ‘affective bargains’ one makes, ‘usually unconscious ones, most of which keep one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition’ (2011, 25). The ‘proximity of objects’ is what Ahmed theorizes as well along with ‘the realization of the possibility of a good or virtuous life’ (2010, 34). According to Ahmed, ‘happy objects,’ are ‘necessary for a good life,’ and they are part of ‘an essentially moral economy in which moral distinctions of worth are also social distinctions of value’ (2010, 35). Therefore, to lead a good, and implicitly moral, life, validated as such by social standards, one is supposed to attain happy objects considered social goods like a happy family, or financial stability or patriotic fervor, etc. In The Door, Emerenc’s transaction turns into an ‘affective bargain’ (Berlant 2011, 25) not only to keep the beloved (Jewish) other within proximity, but, in fact, to keep her alive. Within the historical conditions of the Holocaust in Hungary, the Jewish other turns into a site of ‘cruel optimism’ because maintaining attachment to her, as an ‘object of desire,’ jeopardizes not only one’s ‘thriving,’ but it can also lead to one’s ultimate ‘attrition’ and loss of life (Berlant 2011, 25). Though Emerenc’s act is absolute good, the costs she must pay are commensurately high: she loses all her gendered capital which is precisely that ‘good object’ that would allow her to lead ‘a good life’ (Ahmed 2010, 35).

Istvan Szabo’s filmography forms a representative part of the ‘posttraumatic discourse in film’ (Hirsch 2002, 11) on the Holocaust in Hungary which signals Szabo’s lifelong preoccupation, from Father (Apa),1966, to Love Film (Szerelmesfilm),1970, to Firemen’s Street 25 (Tuzolto utca 25), 1973 and culminating in the epic cinematic vistas of Sunshine (A napfeny ize),1999. In fact, it is a nearly uninterrupted interest resurfacing in almost all his films: for instance, in Meeting Venus (Talalkozas Venusszal), 1990, one of the founding members of the Opera Europa, a thinly veiled reference to an improvised, barely functional Europe , is a Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In another movie, Taking Sides (Szamadas), 2001, United States army officer Steve Arnold, played by Harvey Keitel, is haunted by the memory of genocide, and the film includes archival WWII footage of truckloads of Jewish corpses. It seems that in Szabo’s cinematic ouvre, the Holocaust as ‘inexhaustible text’ (Diamond 2019, 28) is always there, behind the door: an epistemology of the closet of sorts. Szabo was born into a family of assimilated Hungarian Jews, and he lived as a child through the terrible siege of Budapest at the end of WWII. Thus, his films offer some of the most ‘resonant cinematic mediations on the dynamics of intergenerational trauma and Jewish identity’ (Portuges 2005,137) in Hungary.² The affective plenitude of the The Door is also generated by the post-Holocaust story: the film’s temporal setting is the 1960s in Hungary, a tumultuous decade of socialist government rule defined by the imbrication of communist ideology with the characters’ lives, while the memory of the Holocaust is hauntingly fresh still.

A youngish couple of writers, Magda and her husband, hire Emerenc at the beginning of the film to take care of their household while they can both dedicate themselves to their intellectual pursuits.³ The film captures the growth of a complex, exquisitely calibrated, and resplendent love between Magda and Emerenc. It is far from an easy relationship: the harsh words the two women hurl at each other at times seem too relentless. Marked by major differences in age, social class, life experiences and world view, and, as affect escaping the gridwork of both maternal love and erotic desire, it establishes itself as a separate entry along an emotional landscape rarely explored in film.⁴ The first signs of a hidden but palpably present old saga in Emerenc’s life crop up early in the film through Emerenc’s well-meaning gestures of rough-hewn kindness and nurturing support extended towards the couple. Gradually, Magda’s attention is drawn to the striking objects Emerenc starts bringing to their apartment. They register almost like what Bill Brown defines as ‘things,’ more than just sheer objects. According to Brown, ‘things’ have an ‘excess’ through ‘what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects,’ they have a ‘latency’ that is ‘the not yet formed or the not yet formable’ (2001, 5). It is this dormant affective surplus Magda tries to locate in Emerenc’s objects while tracing them somewhere else in Emerenc’s past. When Magda’s husband falls dangerously ill and is taken for a high-risk lung surgery, Magda collapses on the sofa worried and exhausted. Emerenc, whom Magda had not informed about the emergency due to a squabble they had just had, brings her a cup of homemade medicinal concoction. It turns out to be some healing elixir, hot wine most likely mixed with sugar and maybe some cardamom, a recipe familiar to Hungarian palates, and Magda is struck by the beautiful glass in which Emerenc serves it.

Even more remarkable is the porcelain container with which Emerenc turns up when the recuperating husband is finally released back home. The camera lingers on the soup bowl, and purposefully so: it looks like an antique imperial piece, decorated with the portrait of a venerable old male face resembling that of Franz Joseph, the emblematic figurehead of the twilight days of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. The other side of the dish has the Monarchy’s coat of arms depicted in rich colors, a shifting signifier of national prosperity and territorial integrity, tragic reminder of the traumatic loss incurred by Hungary at the peace treaties at Trianon in 1920, at the end of WWI, then replicated and solidified at the end of WWII. The ‘excess’ (Brown2001, 5) the dish evokes is Hungarian history, its good old days, a world lost in two continental wars. In the age of communist mass-produced, aesthetically impoverished, largely unappealing utilitarian objects, this ‘thing’ (Brown 2001, 5) from the past stands out and is meant to catch the eye. What lies latent within it is the vanquished world of Hungarian elites and of the century-old Hungarian aristocracy gone with the wind after the communist coup d’etat in 1945.⁵

Magda first articulates her misgivings about Emerenc’s past over that bowl of steaming soup her husband digs into with obvious relish, after all, Emerenc is an excellent cook. This becomes the seminal scene of the movie in reference to the Holocaust in Hungary. The scene starts with the husband, played by the well-known Hungarian actor Karoly Eperjes, unbuttoning his sweater to make himself comfortable while sinking into the armchair and receiving from Magda a very neatly prepared tray with the flavorful bowl of soup. ‘What stuff this Emerenc brings to the house,’ he muses evidently grateful for the pampering care. The word ‘holmik’ he uses, meaning ‘stuff’ in Hungarian, echoes just for a split second with overtones which might ring ominous for some viewers, that is, for those aware of the fact that one of the euphemistic code terms the Nazis used in Auschwitz-Birkenau to denote Jewish corpses was ‘holmik’ or random objects, inanimate, useless material.⁶ At the extreme end of ‘the phenomenological infrastructure on which the apprehension of alterity as such is built’ (Brown 2010, 186), holmik were things defined in the negative with their latent excess being precisely their antecedent humanity. To her husband’s comment Magda replies that the items must have come from the Grossmanns’ ‘hagyatek’ or ‘heritage,’ meaning goods bequeathed with goodwill at the end of life. ‘Hagyatek’ has, nevertheless, different connotative references from its synonymous ‘orokseg’ in Hungarian, the latter meaning essentially the same thing, nonetheless, placing emphasis on the receiving end, on the person who inherits rather than the people passing down material goods. The word ‘hagyatek’ stems from the root verb ‘hagy,’ which means to allow, to permit things to happen, or to let live, implying a sense of willingness and of agency. Yet, within the context of the anti-Jewish laws in WWII Hungary, passing on one’s belongings would have been forced, a matter of extortion and expropriation rather than of willing letting go.⁷

It is this very unease of the past suddenly entering the conversation and potentially spoiling the moment of savoring food and restoring health that the husband attempts to prevent when he replies, benevolently, that well, maybe Emerenc did not know what was going to happen to the Grossmann family. Magda cracks a little ironic smile, then says that she herself was ‘lucky’ to have been amongst ‘decent people’ during the war, people who knew, and had told her as well, ‘whom the trains were carrying and with what purpose.’ To this, the husband interrupts his eating and looks at Magda: ‘Is this what you call luck?’ he asks, ‘Is this the right word for it?’ Magda, the wordsmith, seems genuinely disconcerted: ‘This might not be the right word,’ she says defensively. ‘No,’ affirms her husband, ‘And we do not have anything else but words.’ Briefly, the conversation slips dangerously close to academic pedantry, and it is a somewhat delicate balance the film maintains through the two actors’ subtle performance. Then, instead of hollow didacticism, the conversation deepens into pause and silent eye contact between the two of them before the tension of the scene eases.

The word ‘luck’ points towards a core issue of the Holocaust in Hungary: the troubling synchronicity of knowledge and survival amongst the country’s Jewish population. Within a makeshift dichotomy: knowledge remained episteme for Hungarian society at large while for Hungary’s Jewish population it became an ‘ontology of fear,’ awareness directly determining existence and embedded within an ‘affective economy of fear’ (Ahmed 2004, 132–136) encompassing all aspects of their lives. One of the trademark features of the Holocaust in Hungary was its belatedness: it occurred in early 1944 when it was already abundantly clear that the Wehrmacht was losing the war and the Soviets were closing in upon them. Following the German invasion of the country, the speed with which deportations were carried out in Hungary between May 15 and 9 July 1944, with a ‘furious pace’ (Friedlander 2007, 614) and with Adolf Eichmann’s seasoned killing apparatus swinging into full motion, remained unparalleled in other European countries. It was an organized terror the efficacy of which would turn Auschwitz-Birkenau into ‘a Hungarian cemetery’ (Braham and Miller, 2002, 250). With the Nazis aiming to keep Hungary on the side of Germany and threatening Hungarian sovereignty, it seemed that the sacrifice of Hungary’s Jewish population was ‘the price to be paid for the preservation of a Hungarian state’ (Snyder 2015, 236). Another poignant and largely unsolved question concerns the Jewish stewardship of knowledge and, ultimately, the role of the Jewish Council in Budapest in disseminating or withholding information, thus, arguably, contributing to the survival of select Hungarian Jews at the expense of the destruction of the overwhelming majority. By choosing not to inform the Jewish population in the provinces about the fate awaiting them at the hands of the Nazis, the Budapest leaders deprived them from any means of resistance, however improbable.

The deportations were officially stopped by Admiral Miklos Horthy, head of the Hungarian government, on 7 July 1944 (Braham and Miller 2002, 38–40). By then two-thirds of Hungary’s Jewish population had been taken primarily to Auschwitz-Birkenau with about 320,000 (Snyder 2015, 237; Wachsmann 2016, 460) to 394,000 (Friedlander 2007, 619) people eliminated there in the matter of weeks. The Budapest Jewry, by and large, managed to escape and survive the war decimated, nevertheless, during the fall and winter of 1944 and the rampages through the besieged city of Hungarian Fascists, members of the Arrow Cross Party whose infamous execution method was shooting then throwing people into the Danube (Stone 2020,147). Out of a grand total of approximately 825,000 Jews in all pre-Trianon Hungary before the war, about 255,500 survived the Final Solution, with an estimated 119,000 in Budapest, roughly half of the city’s Jewish population (Patai 1996, 584–590). Following the war and its disastrous consequences for Hungary, the desire to ‘denationalize’ the Holocaust and to shift responsibility exclusively upon Nazi Germany (Braham 2015, 252) has been a profoundly problematic ideological stand and a powerful tendency in Hungarian memory culture, especially within the official post-communist memory discourse.

Thus, in The Door, Magda’s interpretation of her own knowledge as ‘luck’ is singularly misplaced because it denotes a quintessentially Jewish position: in fact, it was those Hungarian Jews who had found out what the Final Solution meant that got ‘lucky’ in Budapest in stark contrast to, or maybe at the expense of, those in the countryside who were herded up in the matter of days, bewildered, cooperative, and reassured by messages and directives reaching them from their religious elders in the capital city.⁸ Magda considers herself ‘lucky’ for having been informed by ‘decent’ Hungarians about what was happening around her, but her husband is right: her word-choice is wrong because her knowledge remained episteme, her beloved intellectual capital, it did not turn into ontology and it carried no existential risk. Magda’s linguistic negligence, her slippage in terms makes her uncomfortable since she is a writer so gifted with language that she is awarded (an episode recorded both in the novel and in the film) the Kossuth Prize, Hungary’s most prestigious literary award.⁹ She does not reach, nevertheless, the realization of her ultimate ‘luck’ of being the right kind of Hungarian: non-Jewish, bona fide stock. Intensely aware of her ancestry, her solid Calvinist background, Hungarian par excellence, she is simply unable to venture into the historic contingency of Hungarian identity and to think through the millennial good ‘luck’ her own people enjoyed and the cost of that privilege. Thus, for her, when the trains do pull through the Hungarian countryside loaded with their human cargo, wanting to know about what they carry becomes the humane thing to do, and it suffices to diffuse the horror, after all, the real Hungarians, those of the pure stock, are safe and sound, they can sit and watch the trains pass by.

In the same scene, Magda continues the conversation sotto voce, in conspiratory whisper about how Emerenc must have been like ‘so many others’ who thought they should not leave the abandoned Jewish goods lying around because if they had not picked them up, others would have. Maybe Emerenc is storing fantastic treasures in that hermetically closed apartment of hers, and that is why she never opens ‘the door.’ In their previous discussion Emerenc had told Magda she wanted to build a marvelous crypt for herself and all her family members, it would be almost as stunning as the Taj Mahal. The exoticism of the reference underscores the idea of outlandish luxury and orientalized Jewish wealth Emerenc might have had access to. It seems that, via Jewish money, Emerenc grew rich enough to dream of her own replica of the Taj Mahal. About midway through the novel, as opposed to the film, Emerenc does indeed draw up an official will in which she leaves her substantial savings to her nephew and bequeaths the contents of her inner room to Magda. The nephew is given detailed instructions about the crypt resembling the Taj Mahal, and Emerenc promises a wonder-like inheritance to Magda, one that would not disappoint. On Emerenc’s death, Magda finally enters the secret chamber, an episode the film, as mentioned earlier, leaves out entirely. Behind the door, she finds a set of 18^th century furniture of the most delicate beauty. As the police officer, Emerenc’s old friend, tells her, the antique was ‘the price of Evike Grossmann’s rescue,’ and it must have been worth a fortune. After twenty-some years of airtight containment, however, the wood is devoured by time and wood-beetles, and upon the opening of the door, the rococo ensemble collapses into, almost literally, a heap of dust. It is not that Magda, ravished by the loss of Emerenc and the guilt she feels at her death, cares too much. By then, Magda knows the truth: Emerenc was ‘good,’ she keeps repeating, ‘perhaps the best of us,’ and that plural ‘us’ resonates very much like the voice of collective Hungarian consciousness (Szabo 2015, 154).

When the film, in turn, shows a luminously blond young Emerenc and an approximately two-year old child with glossy dark curls, with whatever identity papers they might have on them, on the train leaving Budapest for the countryside, the episode is shot in black and white, Istvan Szabo’s trademark formal device for signaling temporal distance and projecting memory and the past. It is a typical modernist indexicality, influence of the French New Wave, although in Szabo’s case, ‘[p]aradoxically (…), this guarantee of historical reality interrupts the color narration and subverts its realism’ while also serving as ‘intertextual allusion’ to Szabo’s earlier films and as ‘self-reflexive marker’ of the constructed nature of the reality portrayed (Suleiman2001, 243–244). There are three such black-and-white flashbacks in The Door. The one cast the furthest back in time projects, literally, an eruptive convulsion of natural elements whose destructive forces wipe out Emerenc’s closest family in front of her eyes: her mother and her twin sister and brother. She is barely three when she witnesses the most traumatic event of her life. The incident takes place within the mythical landscape of her native region, the Hungarian Plains, or the ‘puszta.’ Emerenc is a tiny, willowy girl when she decides to escape her mother’s beatings and takes the younger twins with her. An enormous storm catches up with the three kids and the twins shelter under a huge tree while Emerenc runs for water to the well nearby. The tree draws the sudden powerful lightning which then strikes the two children and turns them instantly into ashy stumps on the ground. The returning Emerenc is unable to register the catastrophe, she watches disoriented and helpless as her mother literally flies over there with her long hair blowing in the wind, then seeing the two burned stumps, she turns shrieking towards the well and jumps in. The next temporal sequel in black and white relates the story behind the name of the dog Emerenc and Magda raise together: Viola. The little stray puppy Magda and her husband rescue one Christmas night grows into a superbly intelligent dog whose seemingly boundless adoration for Emerenc frustrates Magda endlessly. Her nominal ownership notwithstanding, Magda has limited control over Viola, it is Emerenc who comes up with the impromptu name as well, another baffling manifestation of her unusual logic since Viola is a female name, hence inappropriate for a male dog. The explanation is provided later in the film by the second black-and-white childhood episode about the baby calf Emerenc grew up with called Viola. She had loved the animal so much that when Viola was sold she inadvertently caused its death because the calf jumped off the cattle train for her and broke its legs. It was slaughtered and quartered in front of the screaming child to teach her yet another rudimentary lesson about life, about not loving anyone or anything too much because both people and animals could be lost and one would be left to survive the horror of it all.

The third and last black-and-white scene places Emerenc once again in the eye of the storm, though this time around, within a Hungarian countryside turned inimical, Emerenc is safe: the target is the child she embraces. Except that the gesture of affection she makes is precisely what pulls her into the epicenter of the murderous vortex of history. Emerenc’s embrace implements ‘a set of embodied practices that produce visible conduct as an outer lining’ (Thrift 2008 175), the embodied gesture of care producing the easily identifiable signs of familial attachment, as if the Jewish child was her own. She keeps Evike as close to herself as possible, within her ‘bodily horizon’ (Ahmed 2010, 32), and she sustains thus the ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant 2011, 34) of love for the child she is not supposed to recognize anymore as object of desire. By not detaching herself from Evike, Emerenc risks her own physical ‘attrition’ (Berlant 2011, 35) as a subject: her stigmatization as a Hungarian citizen and her own death as a traitor of the purported national cause. If caught on the train, both Emerenc and the little girl could be dispatched directly to the extermination camps. The film does not insist on showing just how much Emerenc is aware of the danger; the carriage interior glides over the screen silent as an apparition, yet it creates an atmosphere laden with premonitions, like the quiet before the deadly storm on the plains in the first black-and-white scene. Sitting next to each other, the child’s dark hair stands out too sharp against Emerenc’s blondness, and the camera’s sweep over the tableau of the two of them is enough to make palpable the risk they are running. Smuggling Evike out of Budapest, Emerenc takes her to her native village in the Hajdusag, into a peasant microcosm of folkloric forces. She re-enters a ‘social space’ she knows intimately as her native habitat, defined by connections, familial and social, and takes up again ‘the specific weight of [her] place of birth’ (Bourdieu 2018, 111–112). Yet she returns as an unmarried woman with a child in her arms, and both the villagers and her family assume the child to be her own, conceived out of wedlock. This is precisely Emerenc’s plan; this is the only way she can prevent any gossip and can save Evike.

What ensues is a paradigm-changing moment in the life of a young, unmarried woman who goes against ‘conventions – familial as well as gender-based obdurate beliefs’ (Hirsch and Spitzer 2011, 55, 58) in WWII Hungary. She loses all her social capital at this point; it is the most catastrophic transaction of her life, and she is fully aware of it. The only answer she gives to her furious grandfather is ‘Evike,’ the name of the child whose warm little body she is holding tight. It is a sufficient answer because the – ka/ke suffix in Hungarian denotes diminutive status and endearment and it condenses all the affection and protective care one can express linguistically: ‘little Evike’ this child is, and that should suffice, she is small and fragile, and I love her. This is the utmost Emerenc can do for the little girl and even the raging grandfather understands it: he assumes a blood connection where there is none, but it is only the strength of such a connection between Emerenc and himself that prevents him from throwing out both the young woman and her bastard child. It is the old peasant code of honor Emerenc relies on and which, apparently, she herself had broken, but the belligerent old man shouting at the top of his lungs will not. He will eventually get really attached to Evike and cry when she is taken back to ‘Pest.’ On the eve of Emerenc’s arrival with the child, however, he beats Emerenc brutally. In the film, years later, Emerenc relates to Magda how she could barely walk for days after the beating. Her recollection of the corporeal punishment inflicted by hegemonic violence is received with silence by Magda, and the close framing of the two women sitting together in front of Emerenc’s entrance door works as a subtle yet powerful marker of ‘the reality of women’s bodies and their lived experiences in a patriarchal world’ (Hekman 2008, 107).

Emerenc’s status in life as a young Hungarian woman is determined by a constellation of material conditions refracted through gendered identity. Her female agency is motivated by ‘emotion that “affects” a change’ (Struth 2015 , 126), and that change is radical because it is the saving of another human life, yet it can only occur within ‘structures of feeling,’ of ‘social content in its full sense, that of generative immediacy … lived, actively, in real relationships’ (Williams 1977, 130). Her decision to hide Evike in her own home in the country changes her family relations irremediably: she becomes a social pariah, a fallen woman, a heavy blow on someone as fiercely proud as she is. Fully aware of the implications, she behaves by the same punitive familial social code: she never returns to her native village and to a, potentially, more prosperous peasant life. The only time she would be willing to go for a visit is decades later, when she is invited to accompany Magda for a book-signing in Csabadul. She is visibly perturbed, and Helen Mirren is wonderful in the film as she projects a stiff appearance which nevertheless hides a great deal of inner turmoil. She considers the offer reluctantly, then decides to go, and it is evident that she does so because she would have Magda to go with, as, perhaps, a surrogate Evike. She dresses up in her Sunday best, but at the last moment things fall through because the woman who was supposed to sub for her in her various cleaning and administrative duties is suddenly called in by a central city committee to renew her work license. Of course, Emerenc would not jeopardize her good name and let things unattended, so instead, she stays home. She runs after the departing car and asks Magda to do her a favor and walk along the train tracks in Csabadul and, also, to go out into the local cemetery.

Both the film and the novel stress Emerenc’s extraordinary sense of honor and pride, an ethical stance which often appears quite outdated or downright frustrating for the people around her. Yet it is precisely Emerenc’s self-awareness that implies how much the stigma on her reputation must have hurt her. The film shows repeatedly, and the novel goes into describing at great lengths, her continuous hard manual labor: she is seen sweeping the streets, even in heavy winter, and cleaning people’s apartments. She could have returned home after the war to a better life, her family had the largest house in Csabadul before the communist collectivization of the lands. That would have meant, however, explaining to her family that they had kept a Jewish child for a year assuming she was Emerenc’s daughter. Besides the fact that the family were put in danger unawares, the notion that they were all taken advantage of might have seemed just as reckless and hard to accept as any other breach of trust. Conversely, maybe Emerenc could never get over the ostracization her family exposed her to when she expected them to accept her unconditionally. Either way, for the rest of her life, Emerenc stays in Budapest and her decision to do so reduces substantially her chances of getting married and of leading a ‘good life’ (Ahmed 2010, 35), a life that would have garnered the kind of social status and acknowledgment that are obviously very important to her. It would have been infinitely better to labor for one’s own people than to clean the houses of strangers for a lifetime. Thus, she works hard with determination and frugality to realize her dream of a family crypt more stunning than the Taj Mahal, The substantial money she accumulates by the end of her life is not Jewish money but the fruit of her own endurance.

Evike Grossmann, in turn, grows up in the United States as member of the ‘1.5 generation,’ or ‘child survivors of the Holocaust, too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of the Jews’ (Suleiman 2002, 277). From the United States, she sends packages to Emerenc living behind the Iron Curtain. Later in the film, Emerenc calls her home, ‘summons her,’ as a matter of fact. The film’s climactic scene is probably the day of Evike’s anticipated return and of the extraordinary lengths Emerenc goes to deliver a reception fit for the little girl whose life she had saved. She asks Magda to let her use the couple’s salon for the dinner, cooks a fantastic array of dishes and lays the table with her best china and silverware. Magda takes off to let the two have the apartment to themselves: she is not informed about the identity of the mysterious guest so she half-suspects a love tryst of sorts. She returns home to a scene of utter carnage ruled over by the irrepressible Viola. The scene registers along various dimensions in the movie: as comic, grotesque, tragic, tragicomic, or the impromptu amalgam of all these. The point is that Viola sits at the head of the table, gobbling up the delicacies almost as if he had table manners as well. Magda is on the verge of a nervous breakdown when she spots the dog’s paw reclining on her late mother’s delicate porcelain dinner set, the treasured pieces she herself had only used once or twice in her entire life. She shouts at Emerenc to get the dog off the table immediately, and Emerenc pulls Viola off, then starts beating the whining dog with a large spoon. She stops shortly afterwards and apologizes to Viola kissing his head repeatedly. Magda has had enough: it is a scandal. She tells Emerenc to clean up the incredible mess and she disappears into her room. Emerenc tidies up everything, the drama is over. The cause of the mayhem, it turns out, was the phone call she had received last minute informing her that Ms. Eva Grossmann, the young American businesswoman, had not arrived at Budapest because the meeting she was supposed to attend got canceled. Emerenc is profoundly upset; in her value system, things do not add up, transactions do not compare and the cancelation of Evike’s business deal cannot justify her failure to show up upon the request of the old woman who sacrificed all she had to save her life.

This scene occurs during Emerenc’s quiet preparations for the ‘szamadas,’ literally, the final ‘account-giving’ at the end of life, effectively, one’s final grand transaction before death, when she wanted to see one more time the little girl she had carried to safety all those years ago. Evike’s only possible response would have been to come, except that Evike has grown up in the far-away United States and seemingly forgot the real depths of the danger Emerenc had saved her from. ‘If I am not around, they smash her skull against the wall,’ Emerenc tells Magda that night in the silence following the humiliating raucous. It is at that moment that Emerenc lets go of Evike Grossmann’s hand and she transfers her love wholesale upon Magda. The two of them are sitting together in front of Emerenc’s door, it is a balmy summer night and Magda had just consumed some of the food prepared for Evike. It is the gesture that turns the tide in the two women’s relationship, when Magda wakes up in the night, leaves the bed with her sleeping husband in it and walks over to knock on Emerenc’s door (her gate, really, leading to the common yard in front of the apartment building). In line with the value system of her own provincial background, she understands Emerenc’s humiliation and the righteousness of her own reaction to the mess, but she also finds her way within the intricate powerlines of culture and social class and, for once, does the right thing: she simply asks Emerenc for food. The smile on Emerenc’s face is likened to sunshine breaking through the clouds in the novel: the neat table is laid, and Magda conscientiously plies through the dishes. Indeed, when Emerenc closes the gate behind Magda that night, her gratitude is real: ‘I will never forget what you did tonight.’

Evike does arrive at the end of the film, but she does not catch Emerenc alive. The final shots of the movie follow Evike and Magda walking together to the cemetery, visiting Emerenc’s grave with flower bouquets, but suddenly a huge storm breaks out and almost sweeps them off their feet. Then, just as suddenly, sunshine breaks through the clouds and, with the camera’s last glimpse of the name inscribed on the headstone, credits start rolling. This closure is an easier denouement for cinema than the way the novel ends. In the novel, the relationship between Magda and Emerenc is further complicated, and the second door does get opened to reveal stunning ephemeral beauty which then turns almost immediately into a pile of wreckage. Magda is left with guilt and loss and periodic nightmares and writes the novel as atonement dedicated to Emerenc. What transpires in The Door at the juxtaposition of cinematic discourse and literary text is female agency constrained within the severely limited terrain of patriarchal economy. Incorporating yet another instantiation of ‘the matrix of gender, power, and loss’ (Austin 2021, 2), Istvan Szabo’s film choreographs a subtle and sensitive representation of Emerenc’s exceptional morality during the Holocaust in Hungary. His film disrupts entrenched tradition, and not only Hungarian, of conceiving of women as ‘“insignificant” in configuring the master narrative’ (Mushaben 2004, 148) of the Holocaust and the marked tendency in cinema of portraying women as minor protagonists employed mostly to advance the male saga of agency and signification.¹⁰ By keeping the camera focused consistently on the story of a woman, Szabo legitimates female participation in history. Rather than framing Emerenc’s actions as heroic, and thus amorphous and mythologizing, the film shows the lived realities and repercussions of her ethical act contextualized within the everyday life of an (extra)ordinary woman.

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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.

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 2020, 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 1999, 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 2010, 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 2016, 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’ (2007, 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, (1997), and see, about (mis)representations of gender in Laszlo Nemes's Son of Saul, Haragos (2021).