Last October Deutsche Welle reported:
Thousands of Hungarians protested this weekend against the appointment of theater leaders linked to far-right groups. More demonstrations are expected.
Budapest Mayor Istvan Tarlos overruled a professional panel’s advice and appointed outspoken nationalist Gyorgy Dorner as director of the Hungarian capital’s prestigious New Theater, despite concerns by Jewish groups and international condemnation.
Dorner plans to share the job with Istvan Csurka, who leads the Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIEP), which is known for its anti-Semitic rhetoric. They have said they want to rename the theater Hinterland, because “new is not necessarily good,” especially “in the degenerate sick liberal hegemony.”
The mayor, however, has claimed there will be no name change.
The theater leadership, which is set to take office in February, demands that only Hungarian national drama is performed and not what they refer to as “foreign garbage,” which is viewed as a code word for Jewish and other non-Hungarian productions.
Now the fears of the protesters have been borne out.
István Csurka died on February 2. But his unperformed last drama, entitled “The Sixth Coffin,” has been included in the New Theater repertoire. Eva S. Balogh writes at Hungarian Spectrum:
“The Sixth Coffin” is an allusion to Imre Nagy’s reburial. Beside the remains of five people executed in 1958 a sixth coffin was placed to symbolize the hundreds of people who died in or were killed after the 1956 revolution. As it turns out, this last drama is not about 1956. Csurka’s aim was to reinterpret twentieth-century Hungarian history with the Treaty of Trianon in the center of it all.
…..
If we can believe Ádám Fischer, conductor and brother of Iván Fischer, the attempt to remove certain small offending parts will be a difficult task because “the whole play is about a secret Jewish conspiracy that plans, provokes, and directs from the background all the tragedies of the past one hundred years, including the holocaust. Moreover, just as Csurka blamed 9/11 on the Americans and indicated that they actually deserved what they got, in ‘The Sixth Coffin’ he claims that the Jews are responsible for the fate that befell them.”Népszava also inquired from some well known intellectuals who read the play what they thought of it. The opinion of Sándor Radnóti, a philosopher and literary critic, is not very different from that of Fischer. According to him, Csurka’s play is about “an international conspiracy led by American Jewish bankers that was behind the Treaty of Trianon.” Why? Because their goal was the dismemberment of Hungary which under the able guidance of the Hungarian historical class, meaning the nobility, would have become within twenty years a large country of forty million inhabitants. Such a Hungary would have been one of the strongest countries in Europe.
(Hat tip: Karl Pfeifer)
