A Smashing Success? The Paradox of Hungarian Cultural Imperialism in Nazi New Order Europe,1939–42

Between December 1939 and March 1941, nearly every Hungarian sound feature film ever made appeared on Yugoslav screens. After exporting only four features in 1939, Hungary sent 143 films to Yugoslavia in 1940 and another 23 in the first months of 1941. Everything from bourgeois musicals to Budapest comedies to historical romances played throughout Yugoslavia. Although estimates of earnings are scant, Hungary probably reaped between 2.4 and 5.2 million Yugoslav dinar in profit from 1940 sales alone, slightly less than Hungary’s total profits for all its film exports for the entire decade of the 1930s. ¹ Setting box-office records, Hungarian films averaged higher per film earnings than their German and US competition in Yugoslavia, results which astounded Hungarian authorities, described as ‘absolutely striking’. ²

This huge increase in exports to Yugoslavia and the simultaneous expansion of Hungary’s domestic market ³ had a substantial impact, not only on the Hungarian film industry, but on the cultural politics of southeastern Europe during the early imposition of the Nazi New Order. ⁴ Suddenly, an enlarged Hungary found itself the third most prolific film producer in continental Europe. Hungarian film elites acknowledged that their works were filling the void resulting from the decline in French, British, and US products on the Yugoslav film market. Yet they read into the Yugoslav boom evidence of a deep-seated desire for Hungarian cultural products. Film consumption, they believed, indicated that Europe was returning to the natural equilibrium it had abandoned between 1918 and 1920, when Hungary, for its part in the First World War, lost over two-thirds of its lands and population and its Great Power status. Hungary’s film success, bragged some of its leading cultural and political figures, re-established the Hungarian people as the leading intellectual lights of the Danubian basin, one of the superior cultural ‘races’ or Führungsvolk of Europe. Its position behind Germany and Italy was representative of its equivalent importance as a culture-producing nation and its new-found European heft. Third place meant top echelon. ‘In the framework of the Second World War’, chortled János Bingert, the chief of Hunnia, Hungary’s state run studio, ‘Budapest [now] occupies Paris’ place …'. ⁵

Omer Bartov, Eric Weitz, Uta Poiger, Mark Mazower, and other scholars have recently resuscitated the concepts of imperialism, empire and borderlands to place Germany and its environs into larger ‘international webs’ to shed new light on the Reich’s evolution. ⁶ Rather than take Germany as my sole starting point, I will also argue the postulate of empire should be applied to Hungary. If the space between small states is the crucible in which notions of Europe are forged, we cannot ignore Hungary’s southern and western frontiers. ⁷ Here, through its involvement in the Yugoslav film world between 1939 and 1942, Hungary exercised imperialist muscle few thought it had. Unexpectedly although fleetingly, Hungarian culture grew in power as it crossed borders. At this peculiar moment, a time when ideas of Europe and the European order were confused and in flux as a result of the onset of war, a minor power seized the space and opportunity to behave, perceive of itself, and be perceived by others, as a culturally imperialist state. Hungary’s cultural advance into Yugoslavia provides evidence of an understudied contest, a non-military skirmish which compelled Nazi bureaucrats to clarify how they conceived of and how they would implement their New Order. This episode also altered the dynamic which determined the evolution of the Hungarian film industry. Delusions of grandeur resulting from its success in Yugoslavia forced Hungary’s film elites to reconsider how they envisaged ‘national’ film. And in a surprise twist worthy of a film script, these delusions had the unintended consequence of extending the careers of Hungary’s top Jewish film professionals at a time when both Nazi and Hungarian pressure to eliminate those Jews was rising. Always a vehicle for fantasy, film took on characteristics of irony and paradox in this time of European uncertainty.

Imperialism is a malleable and evasive concept, one that traditionally involves extension or domination through ‘conquest or coercion’, and some form of political control over lands beyond the borders of the existing state. ⁸ At first glance, then, it would appear a stretch to apply the term to interwar Hungary, a small, poor, linguistically isolated state of fewer than 10 million inhabitants. Hungary certainly lacked the status, power, and other traditional ‘imperialist’ credentials. Hungary’s Regent, Admiral Horthy, possessed no navy to project his power and his army was severely limited by Hungary’s First World War peace accord. Hungary’s relations with its neighbors were bad enough that merely gaining access to foreign markets, not domination of them, was the goal of Hungary’s commercial and political elites. The state unquestionably had an expansionist agenda, but it was largely a territorial and nationalist one designed to reverse the First World War settlements. ⁹

Yet the rhetoric of imperialism, particularly cultural imperialism, had a history in Hungary. Since 1867, when Hungary became one of two paramount powers within the restructured Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Hungarian leaders had volubly argued Hungarian language, education, and culture were the means of civilizing the masses. ¹⁰ Somewhat frustrated by the Second Reich’s reach into the Ottoman Empire, particularly regarding construction of the Berlin to Baghdad railway line, Hungarian scholars engaged in enthusiastic Balkans-region research in the 1880s and 90s. In part, their efforts were meant to aid Hungarian businessmen who were developing expansionist economic endeavors in the region. Their efforts coalesced after 1891 in the founding of the ‘Keleti Kereskedelmi Akadémia’ (Eastern Trade Academy), and a separate Center for Eastern Economics within the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. ¹¹ By the turn of the century, founding editor of the Budapesti Hírlap Jenő Rákosi, the editor of the official government newspaper Budapesti Közlöny Gusztáv Beksics, along with a growing chorus of intellectuals and politicians, began promoting a brand of Magyar imperialism. Heartened by Hungary’s thriving economy and increasing political autonomy, they argued that Budapest should replace ‘effete Vienna as the focal point of the Monarchy and [proceed] to extend its hegemony over the small people of the Balkans’, primarily through assimilation of minorities into the Hungarian culture. ¹² Some, such as Rezső Havass, went as far as to argue, quite assertively, that Hungary possessed the legal and imperial rights to rule the northern Balkans as it had prior to the Ottoman conquests. ¹³

Since the conclusion and after-effects of the First World War had stripped Hungary of much of its geopolitical significance, its military might, and its economic integrity, Hungary’s interwar ruling elites reluctantly accepted that this imperial destiny would not be achieved through force or fiat. Yet they did not give up the dream of southeast European hegemony. Led by Count Kunó Klebelsberg, the Minister of Religion and Education for much of the 1920s, Hungary’s oligarchy realized that culture was the most powerful tool remaining in its foreign policy arsenal. In fact, a consensus developed in interwar Hungary ‘that the demonstration of “cultural superiority” was the only path’ towards renewed international clout and ultimately to ‘revision of the despised Treaty of Trianon’. ¹⁴ Recasting the sentiments of his turn of the century predecessors, Klebelsberg recommended that Hungary advertise culture and education as the hallmarks of its society, preaching that achievements in these realms would not only bolster the main remaining vector of Hungarian imperialism, its language, but also convince the Great Powers that Hungary belonged among them. ¹⁵ Hungary’s elites not only grasped, but amplified the West’s clichéd rhetoric of the civilizing imperative and dominance as a form of birthright. Hungary’s language and the ‘civilization’ it spawned were not only of special value, but when combined with Hungary’s interpretation of its unique position in Europe as the natural authority in the Carpathian and Danubian basins and the bulwark against the spillover of Asia, the imperial discourse resulted in the following logic: the extension of Hungary was the extension of Europe. ¹⁶ OPEN IN VIEWER

When Klebelsberg endorsed this policy of cultural advancement in the mid-1920s, the prospects for a cultural flowering, especially in film, were becoming bleak. Hungarian silent filmmaking was catatonic, and the impending Great Depression meant that Hungary would soon have precious few resources to augment cultural and educational spending. Between 1933 and 1938, however, the phoenix of Hungarian sound feature film production rose from the ashes of the silent era, growing by leaps and bounds. The impetus for this revival was transnational. In the early 1930s, German nationalist and early Nazi legislation paradoxically acted as a catalyst for the rejuvenation of Hungarian film production. Between 1930 and 1933, Germany adopted a series of laws designed to foster a national film industry and protect the jobs of ethnic Germans. This legislation forced several hundred Hungarian film professionals out of Berlin and Munich, many of whom fled to Budapest. ¹⁷ Suddenly, the stagnant Hungarian industry possessed the critical supply of human capital necessary to both create quality film and attract crucial domestic and international support. Géza von Bolváry, a well-known Hungarian director who continued to work in Germany, quickly recognized the impact of these changes, writing in early 1932 that ‘Hungarian film [had become] sensational business'. In fact, he wrote, given all the talent now in Budapest, all European producers should work there. ¹⁸ By the time the Nazis passed the fourth film order in June 1933 it became almost impossible for Hungarians, particularly Hungarian Jews, to choose German citizenship and thus remain in Germany. Internationally known Hungarian film directors, writers, actors and producers such as István Székely, Béla Gaál, Károly Nóti, Ferenc Molnár, and Joe Pasternak, all of whom had flitted among European film cities and occasionally Hollywood, and all of whom were born into the Jewish faith, now found themselves unwelcome in Berlin. ¹⁹ This series of film ‘pogroms’ which chased them to Budapest not only jump-started Hungarian film production, but qualitatively affected it as well. These were the men and women who dominated the decade, and their products, Hungary’s products, eventually crossed the southern border and threatened German, and even Italian, imperialist projects in Yugoslavia. Their arrival in Budapest was also representative of the continued incorporation of Jews into the project of Hungarian modernization during the interwar era. ²⁰ At least through 1938, Jews could lead in the creation of Hungarian culture and industry, and aid Hungary in its attempts to restore its geopolitical standing, so long as they expected no political reward. Jewish participation in Hungarian cultural and industrial production was acceptable so long as it did not threaten the hegemony of the ruling Christian upper class.

As the Hungarian motion picture industry boomed, it became increasingly intertwined with the problems of modernization, the roles of Jews, and expressions of cultural imperialism. By the late 1930s, Hungarian film production had progressed to the point where export was no longer merely desirable, but necessary to insure the financial well-being of the film industry. During this same period, Hungarian antisemites ramped up their demands for restrictions on Jewish participation in Hungarian society, including the film industry. Simultaneously, Hungarian officials also embarked on a vigorous diplomatic offensive with culture its centerpiece, designed to revise Hungarian borders and reconstruct Hungarian power in the Danubian Basin. Ironically, it was the Second World War and the international instability preceding the war that set the stage for Hungary’s imperialist escapade in Yugoslavia and propelled the Hungarian film industry into Europe’s top tier. First, as a result of Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria, its division and occupation of Czechoslovakia, its virtual destruction of Poland and its dismemberment of the Little Entente, Central European relations and film markets were radically altered. Prior to the Second World War, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Poland were the only Central European states other than Germany and Hungary to possess the capacity to create sound feature film, but their industries were either wiped out or radically reorganized as a result of Nazi conquest. ²¹ Changes stemming from the war also significantly altered the filmmaking calculus on the continent. French and British movies, not to mention the products of Hollywood, found it more difficult to penetrate Europe. In 1940, the German victory over France temporarily halted all French movie production. Several hundred motion pictures, pictures which had been counted on in previous years to fill exhibition calendars throughout Europe, were gone, wiped from the ledger sheets. War forced many European countries to look elsewhere to satisfy their publics’ film needs, and in this tumult, Yugoslav authorities and audiences turned to Hungary.

Historians of Hungarian foreign policy either ignore or pay scant attention to Hungary’s interwar and wartime relations with Yugoslavia. ²² When Yugoslavia is considered it is most often within a larger geopolitical context: as a member of an alliance of enemies encircling Hungary (the Little Entente), as a pawn of the Great Powers or as an object of Great Power imperialist designs. Yugoslavia is portrayed as an entity capable of independent action infrequently, and when it is, cultural relations are rarely considered. ²³ Likewise, historians frequently gloss over the period from the destruction of the Little Entente in 1938 to the demise of Yugoslavia in 1941. This period, characterized by a noticeable improvement in Hungarian–Yugoslav relations, does not mesh well with the broader interpretation espoused by most historians, that of contention and consistent ill will. Even when the political thaw is acknowledged, it is seen as artificial, something imposed on Budapest and Belgrade resulting from a combination of Italian and German pressure and increasing French and British powerlessness. ²⁴ By incorporating cultural politics into the analysis of Hungarian foreign affairs, I suggest we might adjust our conceptualizations of Hungarian–Yugoslav, Hungarian–German, and in a broader sense, southeastern European relations. Hungarian cinema’s triumph in Yugoslavia was indicative of more than a superficial thaw in Hungarian–Yugoslav relations. It helped reanimate and complicate Hungary’s traditional imperialist aspirations and forced the Nazis to revise and defend conceptions of the European New Order.

Prior to 1937, when Yugoslav authorities began to allow a trickle of Hungarian cultural imports, Hungary had exported only limited translations of newsreels and culture films and a handful of German-language versions of Hungarian-made feature film to Yugoslavia. Officially, Yugoslav censors banned all films containing any Hungarian language for fear of Hungarian imperialism, namely the inciting of nationalist sentiment among Yugoslavia’s Hungarian-speaking minority. ²⁵ Changes in the political climate and the structure of the Yugoslav censorship apparatus in early 1937, however, seemed to indicate a shift in attitudes toward Hungary. ²⁶ This attracted the attention of Hungary’s film industry. Yugoslav censors permitted the showing of the Hungarian-made German language film Pacsirta, starring Marta Eggerth, despite the fact that Eggerth spoke some Hungarian in the picture. ²⁷ By August 1937 a group of Hungarian filmmakers sensed greater opportunity. Motivated by the desire to establish Hungary as a cultural bridgehead to southeastern Europe by making films for export to Yugoslavia and other Balkan states, they announced plans for construction of a new sound film studio in Szeged. ²⁸ Later that autumn, Hungarian film luminaries, led by the prolific director István Székely, proposed the founding of a Hungarian–Yugoslav Film Society, headquartered in Budapest. ²⁹ Simultaneously, representatives of the Yugoslav Film Center approached Hungary’s state-owned film company, Hunnia, and asked that it help Yugoslavia create a national film industry. Rumors circulated in Budapest film circles that Hunnia would make four Serbian-language films in 1938 and that Hungarian film companies would embark on projects in Yugoslavia. Hungary’s official film trade journal, Filmkultura, ran two major articles on film life in Yugoslavia in October and November 1937 which touted the potential of the Yugoslav market and the ‘great cultural and moral significance’ of the showing of Hungarian culture films in Belgrade. ³⁰ OPEN IN VIEWER

These events and proposals, however, proved premature, and none were ever realized. In March 1938, Prime Minister Kálmán Darányi announced his Győr plan, an agenda for rearmament, industrialization and a solution to Hungary’s ‘Jewish question’. Hungary’s neighbors reacted with understandable fright, worried about the specter of Hungarian expansion. Consequently, plans for Hungarian–Yugoslav cultural cooperation stalled and Yugoslavia indefinitely suspended the import of Hungarian film. ‘It appears we must again wait for a definite change in the political atmosphere’ before we might expect cultural relations with Yugoslavia to bloom, remarked a frustrated yet prescient János Bingert, head of Hunnia, Hungary’s dominant film studio. ³¹

This political change did occur in August 1938, when Hungary signed the Bled Agreement with the Little Entente states of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, renouncing the offensive use of force against these allied states. The Little Entente, theoretically formed as a French-supported ring on the eastern flank of Germany, had in fact served primarily as a bloc against Hungarian revisionism. Since the Little Entente’s inception in 1920–1, Hungary’s diplomats considered Yugoslavia the weak link, the state most easily pried away from the coalition. ³² Certain Hungarian elites even toyed with the idea of a Warsaw–Budapest–Belgrade–Rome alliance, as a Central European conservative, but non-Nazi counter to Germany. Miklós Kozma, the president and director of the Hungarian Telegraphic Agency (MTI) and a former Interior Minister, was one of the key proponents of this view. ³³ Kozma’s position is important because he oversaw the Hungarian Film Office (MFI) and played a leading role in both the Hungarian film community and the government. Friendly relations with Yugoslavia, he believed, represented vast political, cultural, and economic opportunity.

By 1939 a palpable improvement in Hungarian–Yugoslav relations became evident, particularly after the replacement of Milan Stojadinović with Dragiša Cvetković as Yugoslav premier, the obliteration of Czechoslovakia, and the subsequent collapse of the Little Entente. ³⁴ Trade agreements, the opening of a direct air link between Belgrade and Budapest, and Yugoslavia’s new willingness to allow the distribution of Hungarian cultural products were the clearest manifestations of this warming. Hungarian theater troupes performed in Belgrade and Zagreb, and in December the first entirely Hungarian-language film played in Yugoslav theaters. What began as a scout mission in 1939 turned into a veritable invasion in 1940, a cinematic flood that radically altered, at least temporarily, the landscape of popular culture in Yugoslavia and offered the tantalizing prospect of Hungarian cultural dominance in southeastern Europe. As previously mentioned, between December 1939 and March 1941, close to 170 Hungarian movies, constituting nearly every Hungarian sound feature film ever made, played in Yugoslav theaters. Not only did these sometimes dubbed, sometimes subtitled films succeed, they outstripped all competitor films, yielded record foreign receipts for Hungarian film-makers, and triggered a broad-based euphoria among the political and cultural elite. ³⁵ This cultural-economic achievement produced remarkable results. First, it led directly to a Hungarian cultural imperialism which consisted of a discourse of cultural superiority and an activist role in shaping the institutions of cultural production first in Yugoslavia and later in the Nazi puppet-state of Croatia. ³⁶ Second, it engendered a sense of confidence and value amongst the Hungarian film elite, and resulted in the enlargement of the domestic Hungarian film industry. Third, Hungary’s success in Yugoslav theaters had cultural-political ramifications, signaling an actual improvement in relations with the Yugoslav peoples. Finally, it convinced the Hungarian government that film was a powerful political tool, a legitimate cultural commodity, and a sign of Hungary’s ascendance, albeit one that presented ideological dilemmas. Looking beyond Hungary, events in Yugoslavia produced even greater ripples. Hungary’s cinematic triumph had the ironic effect of consolidating German grievances against Hungary and uniting German and US film distributors in opposition to Hungarian exports to Yugoslavia. In due course, it compelled German officials to refine their thinking about Hungarian influence and how these officials hoped to define New Order Europe.

What bolsters the case that Hungary acted with imperialist intent was the expanded role Hungarians assumed in the construction of Yugoslav and later Croatian film production and distribution. Beyond the basic provision of feature films, Hungarians started to shape the Yugoslav motion picture industry itself. At the invitation of the Yugoslav government, a Hungarian crew had recorded the Cvetković-Maček Compromise in August 1939. Pleased with the product, which included the singing of Croatian folk songs, the head of Jugoslavija Film, Mika Đorđević, determined to ‘bring Hungarian experts and sound equipment to Yugoslavia, to lay the foundations of Yugoslav national film’. ³⁷ In early 1940, Yugoslav film professionals began to arrive in Budapest to take special courses created for them at the Hungarian Film Office, and Croatian professionals continued to do so after the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in April 1941. Before this, the burgeoning trade of Hungarian movies in Yugoslavia spawned the birth of numerous Yugoslav distribution companies that competed to win contracts to import Hungarian film. These companies were not confined to the regions of Yugoslavia heavily populated by ethnic Hungarians, shocking Hungarian diplomats, who regaled in the wide appeal of Hungarian products. ³⁸ Eventually, Hungary altered both the production and distribution of motion pictures in Yugoslavia, creating a situation where the popular culture of the Balkan state became increasingly dependent on Hungary, a condition which Michael Doyle describes as a manifestation of an imperial relationship. ³⁹ Hungary actively manipulated how Yugoslavs imagined their cultural space at a time when Hungarian leaders clearly understood the link between assertions of cultural superiority and eventual territorial hegemony. ⁴⁰ Nazi authorities duly noted this fact and found it increasingly disquieting, meaning that these inroads, initially advantageous to Hungary, would eventually result in a panoply of new problems and opportunities for Hungarian film professionals, a paradox to which I will return.

By and large, however, within Hungarian domestic film circles, achievement in Yugoslavia bred self-assurance, which led to thinking in imperial terms. For the first time, Hungary had captured a large share of a market that was not Hungarian speaking. Feature film success led to greater cultural exchange, with exports of newsreels and radio broadcasts experiencing considerable growth in mid-1940, a period that also witnessed a minor explosion in the number of Yugoslav Hungarian-language journals. ⁴¹ Full houses in Belgrade also convinced distributors in other states that they too should import Hungarian feature films, catapulting Hungarian film to continental prominence. ⁴² Exports to Bulgaria shot up from three in 1939 to over 50 in 1940. ⁴³ Greece’s imports from Hungary went from zero in 1939 to over 20 in 1940. Interest spread well beyond the Balkans, as Sweden, Finland, Norway, the Baltic States, Switzerland, Italy, Turkey, Spain, Persia, Syria, and Egypt also imported substantially higher numbers of Hungarian film or contracted for future imports. ⁴⁴ Even exports to the United States of America rose during the second half of 1940. ⁴⁵ Hungary’s Foreign Ministry likewise was swept up in the film craze. In the summer of 1940, it began a campaign to contract for film export throughout Central and South America ‘… so that the distribution and progress of not only Hungarian film, but of Hungarian culture, be served …’ ⁴⁶ OPEN IN VIEWER

Flush with Yugoslav success, Hungary now fancied itself a world film power, and its film elites imagined themselves as the prime disseminators of Hungarian enlightenment. On the occasion of the release of Pista Dankó, Hungary’s 200th sound feature, the editors of Magyar Film, Hungary’s leading film journal, boasted:

The cultural and economic importance of Hungarian film has today already spilled beyond our borders and together with our culture’s many other rays proclaim the words of St. Stephen’s thought and the leading vocation of the Hungarian mentality in the Danubian basin. ⁴⁷

A few months later the same trade journal declared that the prosperity enjoyed by Hungarian motion pictures in neighboring countries, since the constricting borders of Trianon had been cast aside, attested to the special responsibility Hungarian film shouldered as a provider of culture in Central Europe. ⁴⁸ Intoxicated, the editors lauded the dissemination of Hungarian film as a continuation of ‘Hungary’s one-thousand year cultural mission in Central Europe and the Danubian basin’. They noted the relative infancy of the film industries of the other states in the area, insinuating that this too was proof of Hungary’s cultural superiority. ⁴⁹ The journal Országépítés proclaimed in 1941 that in New Order Europe, ‘… our film production … fills, with serious authority, an irreplaceable place in the cupboard of international cultural necessities’. ⁵⁰ Pester Lloyd declared that the appeal of Hungarian film ‘was of the highest national, cultural, and economic significance’, illustrating that ‘perhaps the day of the aesthetic revolution is not far ahead, in which the little nations find a way of making film which, as has their theater culture, finds a way into the hearts of the larger nations …’ ⁵¹ Pál Szvatkó, in a Christmas 1940 article in the newspaper Magyarország, echoed these sentiments. Hungary’s civilizing mission, accomplished through film with Yugoslavia as the stepping off point, would soon yield political and economic influence throughout the Balkans and Central Europe. As a result of our movies, boasted Szvatkó,

We have wondrous authority in the Balkans. We have prestige. Not primarily political, rather social [and] cultural and in the wake of these political authority is just now beginning to be created – and this is important. You wouldn’t believe how many excellent examples of Hungarian film there are in Belgrade, Sofia and Istanbul. Our stars are of Hollywood rank: [Zita] Szeleczky, [Pál] Jávor are recognized the same way Greta Garbo and Clark Gable are. ⁵²

It was not only the Hungarians who saw themselves as acting in an imperial fashion. At first, Hungarian accomplishments evoked grudging admiration from the German film and party establishments. A 25 April 1940 feature in the official Nazi film journal Filmkurier publicly complimented Hungarian film performance, but behind the scenes, German authorities protested that Hungarian prosperity endangered Germany’s share of the Yugoslav film market. In March 1940, German analysts were already voicing discomfort with the sustained good fortune of Hungarian film. The Nachrichten für Aussenhandel blamed Hungarian films for the decline in German income from film exhibition in Yugoslavia, implying that the rapid rise in Hungarian exports was allowing some theater owners to boycott German film. ⁵³ In an account forwarded to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, the Deutsche Akademie reported that Hungarian films had recently been showing non-stop, and that showings had been, on average, sold-out. The Hungarian minority in Yugoslavia, particularly the older generation, the report claimed, felt an obligation to see Hungarian-made films. The problem, hyperbolically identified by the authors of the report, was that income from one day for a Hungarian film was equal to one month of German film receipts. Naturally, theater owners were likely to import more Hungarian film in place of German film, which would seriously hamper the dissemination of German film, and thus Nazi ideology, in Yugoslavia. ⁵⁴

Nazi conceptions of empire evolved from economic exploitation to occupation-based domination as the Wehrmacht’s victories in the West brought much of the European continent under German control. How Nazi authorities interpreted Hungarian film accomplishments reflected this change. They wrote of film, and culture more generally, in an increasingly ideological sense. In early June 1940, an agent working for Germany’s Tesla-Film A.G. in Belgrade confirmed that since the Yugoslav film market had been opened to Hungary, Hungarian films had been far more successful than German films. Hungarian films achieved higher earnings than German films not only in the Vojvodina, ⁵⁵ where the Hungarian population was high, but also in Belgrade, Zagreb, and other areas with little ethnic Hungarian presence. In certain regions, the report remarked worriedly, even ethnic Germans were willing to pay higher ticket prices to see Hungarian films instead of German films. The writer attributed this, in part, to Hungary’s having convinced the ‘better circles’ in Yugoslavia of the superiority of Hungarian language and culture before the First World War. Among the older inhabitants of Yugoslavia, especially among the Jews, noted the Tesla representative, preference for Hungarian film was clear. This was particularly troublesome because by June, Hungary was no longer exporting its highest quality films. Even its weaker films were outperforming German ones. On average, according to the Tesla representative, Hungarian feature films earned 70–100,000 Yugoslav dinar (approximately 10–14,000 Hungarian pengő), while German films earned only 40–80,000 dinar. ⁵⁶ Hungarian products represented a choice for Yugoslav audiences and the markets were proving the validity of Hungarian culture. By inference, this demonstrated the inferiority of German products. ⁵⁷

The kid gloves were off by late June 1940, as German authorities now condemned Hungarian film and its flourishing trade in Yugoslavia. The head of the Cultural Section of the German Foreign Ministry informed the German Embassy in Budapest that the spread of Hungarian film in Yugoslavia caused definite damage to German film, German film companies and more broadly, German Kulturpolitik. The entire Yugoslav public, particularly ethnic Germans, was under threat from ‘Jewish distributed Hungarian film’ because Hungarian ‘film-Jews’ were the ‘chief carriers’ of anti-German propaganda in southeastern Europe. ⁵⁸ The letter urged the German ambassador to try to convince authorities in Hungary that competition in the Yugoslav film market should be ‘carried out in a loyal way in accordance with German-Hungarian political relations’. ⁵⁹ In parallel, the Foreign Ministry pressured Yugoslavia to take action to eliminate Jewish elements in its film enterprises, which, by German estimates, were thriving with Hungarian assistance. ⁶⁰

In other words, by mid-1940, German officials were behaving, to borrow a term from Maurus Reinkowski and Gregor Thum, as ‘helpless imperialists’. ⁶¹ Motivated by fear of loss of power and status, they viewed Hungarian film as a palpable threat, one causing a crack in the Nazi fundament of Festung Europa. While Nazi authorities mused about southeastern Europe as the testing ground for the Nazi New Order, defined by the destruction of multi-national states and race-based population transfers, ⁶² as of the middle of 1940 Yugoslavia remained on the periphery, an independent state whose location in Nazi thinking and the spatial geography of Kultur and Volk was unclear. ⁶³ Certainly, Yugoslavia was to be subject to German influence, yet Italy also assumed it to be part of its orbit, and the Nazis acknowledged that Hungary and Bulgaria coveted chunks of Yugoslavia’s territory. Indeed, by early 1941, Hungary’s inroads had expanded well beyond film. A February 1941 visit to Belgrade by Hungary’s Minister of Religion and Education, Bálint Hóman, and a high-level trade delegation promised not only further cultural exchange, but far more extensive trade relations. The mission received a universally positive response in the Yugoslav media, resulted in Hóman receiving the Yugoslav Crown Order First Class, and clearly annoyed German authorities. ⁶⁴

While the Nazi vision of the new Europe may not yet have been fully conceived, it certainly did not incorporate a Hungary punching above its weight in the Balkans. According to most scholars, Nazi concepts of the New Order were just beginning to develop into something more than economic exploitation and a reformulation of old commercial ideas of Mitteleuropa. ⁶⁵ The case of Hungarian culture in Yugoslavia, seen in this light, hints at how rigid and racialized Nazi conceptions of empire had already become, even before the war expanded. Those elites of the remaining independent states of Central and southeastern Europe who operated under the impression that the Nazis truly intended to create a New Order ‘born of the combined values of the truly European nations’ and that to take part, all each participant had to do was to ‘emphasize [its] national uniqueness’ were quite naïve. ⁶⁶ As Mark Mazower points out, the Nazi New Order evolved into an empire that was ‘a German venture’ not just for Germans, but by Germans, and based on a narrow definition of nation that precluded nearly all conquered and absorbed peoples from becoming part of the leading elite. ⁶⁷ Nazi rejection of Hungarian cultural prosperity in Yugoslavia provides evidence of how the Nazis laid the groundwork of empire and indicates that beliefs about the New Order were becoming inflexible well before Operation Barbarossa. The Hungarian conviction that there might be a place within the New Order for a flourishing cross-border trade in culture or that the ‘Magyar nation’ might serve as a ‘balancing force’ in Southeastern Europe was a chimera. ⁶⁸ Nazi authorities would not permit this even if that culture prospered in a land only indirectly under their influence.

Why was this the case? Most obviously, the triumph of the Hungarian film industry threatened the very premises of German economic hegemony and racial hierarchy. The Hungarian box office windfall occurred during a time of confused economic relations between Germany and southeastern Europe. 1940 witnessed a massive reversal in terms of trade balances, with both Hungary and Yugoslavia switching from countries with clearing account debts to Germany to countries with trade surpluses. ⁶⁹ Within this context, it is understandable why German diplomats and film professionals interpreted Hungary’s motion picture bonanza as stealing foreign currency income and influence they presumed to be theirs. To make matters worse, Hungarian film, according to German commentators, was cosmopolitan, frequently blurring the lines separating groups rather than more clearly demarcating them. More insulting still, in the eyes of the Germans, the Hungarian motion picture industry remained numerically dominated by Jews. Hungary’s own film commentators estimated that prior to 1938, 100 per cent of Hungary’s producers and 80 per cent of the stars of Hungary’s first 100 films were Jewish. ⁷⁰ János Smolka, an agent and producer of Jewish birth, largely corroborated these numbers, writing:

Of the first 100 sound films made in Hungary, 93 were produced by Jewish companies and 65 directed by Jewish directors … In general one may state that among the profession’s important companies, in total, there were two Christian film corporations. The owner of one, however, emigrated to Germany and the other committed suicide. ⁷¹

Despite passage of Hungary’s First and Second Jewish Laws in 1938 and 1939, which had substantially reduced Jewish numbers in the film industry and film journalism, Hungarian film production remained an enterprise in which Jewish professionals and Jewish financiers maintained influence. It goes without saying that Nazi ideology could not countenance this, particularly since the most successful filmmakers were those very same individuals the Brüning regime and the Nazis had expelled from Germany in 1932–3. ⁷² Nor could Nazi officials grant credence to Hungarian denials that culture grew directly out of one’s genetic makeup. Regarding an earlier dust-up over Jewish involvement in Hungarian film-making, the film journalist Andor Garami asked ‘Is it fair to protest against those people [Jews] who have produced such great national and patriotic results, for which they have been recognized by the most appropriate and highest official circles?' ⁷³ Not only was it fair, but essential if the Nazi New Order were to succeed. The case of Hungarian film in Yugoslavia presented an unacceptable challenge. In a head-to-head competition, an apparently neutral audience preferred the products of an inferior race, the products of Hungary’s Jews. Nazi ideology saw all comers not as partners, but as ‘rivals or competitors’. In the Nazi New Order, this competition had to be more than sidelined; it had to be crushed. ⁷⁴

Crushed it was because the Nazis interpreted the Jewish cultural threat as an imperial one, part of a worldwide struggle for supremacy. It is for this reason that correspondence between German film and political officials frequently portrayed Hungarian film as Jewish, not Hungarian, imperialism. To counter this, Germany flexed its own imperial muscle, utilizing the tools of traditional imperialism that Hungary lacked. In addition to actively interfering in the Hungarian film industry, it appears that German and US film agents and diplomats, perhaps acting in concert, maneuvered to restrict sales of Hungarian films in Yugoslavia. ⁷⁵ Both powers were able to negotiate fixed import fees two to three times lower than the fees Yugoslav authorities charged Hungarian films. The Belgrade branch of the Hungarian Foreign Trade Office and the Hungarian Foreign Ministry concluded that the new fee structure evolved because US interests had convinced Yugoslav authorities that ‘there were too many Hungarian language films playing in Yugoslavia’. ⁷⁶ This was, in part, Hungarian self-deception or, at the very least, careful diplomacy. Other film officials were far less circumspect. Nándor Jenes, a vice-president in the Hungarian Film Office and a state secretary in the Manufacturing Ministry, remarked that, ‘Every [exported] Hungarian film takes the place of a German film’, and that this was the reason that Nazi film apparatchiks felt the need to suppress Hungarian film in the Balkans. ⁷⁷ Germany, not the USA, was most likely the impetus behind the new fees. In 1940 and 1941, nearly 50 per cent of Germany’s foreign film income came from southeastern Europe, and Nazi authorities were not about to surrender the honey pot to Hungary. ⁷⁸ The Nazis absolutely had to have foreign audiences in order to successfully amortize their films, and the stakes went well beyond the mere economics of motion pictures. ⁷⁹ Germans, insisted Joseph Goebbels, ‘could not rule Europe economically if we do not also make ourselves supreme in the cultural domain’. ⁸⁰ Hitler often repeated his belief that culture was not only a direct product of race, but formative part of politics. ⁸¹ From the Führer on down, Nazi leaders understood consumer-driven free trade in culture was simply not compatible with Nazi hegemony.

The explosion of Hungarian film in Yugoslavia demonstrated the illogical impact the imposition of the Nazi New Order had in southeastern Europe, another example of how this supposed pan-European concept more often than not heightened, rather than reduced, elite emphasis on national sovereignty. The conquest of Yugoslavia by Hungarian film, made possible by German geopolitical changes, brought about what Hungarian film elites labeled ‘the Golden Age’ of their business, an unparalleled era of feature film productivity. In response to this success, in the early 1940s, Germany redoubled its efforts to control the Hungarian film industry, to pressure it to reduce Jewish participation in cinema, and to restrict Hungarian motion picture exports. As a result, an emboldened Hungary had to walk a fine line between appeasement of and resistance to German demands, while at the same time engaging in a domestic debate about what the Hungarian ‘mentality’ or ‘spirit’ or ‘identity’ proffered through film should be. This resulted in a complex dynamic whereby domestic and foreign events created a feedback loop. Flourishing foreign sales created pressure to maintain the status quo in terms of domestic production, yet also increased the frustration of Nazi officials and their Hungarian sympathizers. These groups more stridently pushed to limit or transform the creation and circulation of Hungarian film. These pressures therefore threatened the very existence of Hungarian film, whose disappearance Hungary’s conservative oligarchs would not permit in light of the cultural-political power their pictures were demonstrating in 1940 and early 1941.

That German authorities continued to believe Hungarian film imperiled the project of crafting the New Order is substantiated by Nazi actions in 1941. Germany invaded, subdued, and partitioned Yugoslavia in April 1941, with the assistance of Hungarian, Italian, and Bulgarian forces. By its participation, Hungary’s army abruptly terminated the Pact of Eternal Friendship its government had signed with Yugoslavia only a year earlier. In gratitude, Nazi authorities immediately cut off the import of Hungarian film to all but the Hungarian-annexed Banat and Bácska regions, rubbing salt into the wound by also impeding Hungarian exports to the supposedly independent state of Croatia. ⁸² This occurred despite, or perhaps because of, great evidence of a continued desire for Hungarian film. ⁸³ Demand certainly existed in Croatia, to which Hungary exported at least 19 films in the second half of 1941, ⁸⁴ and circumventing German interference through underground bilateral arrangements, 55 films in 1942. ⁸⁵ Hungarian film was so popular in Croatia after independence that Marijan Mikac, head of the State Directorate for Film in the Ministry of Culture and Propaganda for Culture, had to intervene to artificially cap the price paid for Hungarian film distribution rights because he believed them to be exceptionally high. ⁸⁶ Hungary remained the second most important supplier of feature film to Croatia through 1944. According to the renowned Croatian actor Boris Buzančić, Hungarian film saturated the Croatian market. ⁸⁷ German authorities recognized this as a direct threat, squashing Hungarian plans to establish a distribution office in Zagreb in 1942. ⁸⁸ Proponents of Hungarian culture perceived their films as part of an imperial civilizing vanguard which would establish Hungarian influence in southeastern Europe, within the framework of the German New Order. ⁸⁹ In practice, the triumph of Hungarian film, the presumptuousness of a supposed ally to reach beyond the minor market niche German authorities eventually allotted to it, and Hungary’s implicit aim to resuscitate a non-German regional identity that some saw as a vestige of outmoded Habsburg imperialism presented an existential challenge for the German authorities. ⁹⁰ Despite Nazi rhetoric to the contrary, in the ‘family of nations’ [Völkerfamilie] there could be only one Führungsvolk, and it was not the Hungarians, nor could it ever be a Hungarian culture tainted by its Jewish makers.

Hungary’s elites had difficulty assimilating this message. They received it, but did not fully comprehend it, deceived both by contradictory pronouncements from Germany and the Hungarian elites’ own lack of clarity regarding the nature of Hungarian culture. Just as Nazi authorities were placing heavy restrictions on Hungarian exports to the former Yugoslav states, Reichsminister Goebbels was convening a meeting of representatives from 17 European states in order to impose structures on cultural production and distribution within New Order Europe. In July 1941, these states reconstituted the International Film Chamber (IFK), ‘establishing German dominance’ but also awarding Hungary a high place in the racial hierarchy and promising Hungary a meaningful role in the creation of an autarkic ‘Film Europe’. ⁹¹

While Nazi inconsistencies helped befuddle Hungary’s cultural producers, the Hungarians’ own mystification over what constituted ‘Hungarian culture’ further contributed to their inability to comprehend the preponderance of Nazi signals. Even before the First World War, the position of Jews in Hungarian society had been debated and problematized, frequently serving as a surrogate for larger questions about the nature of nation, secularization, and modernization. ⁹² In the mid-1930s, a new variant of antisemitic right radicalism arose. With it came more vociferous student protest of ‘Jewish’ films and the growth of an increasingly powerful group of antisemitic film professionals. Together, these factions demanded the Christianization of the industry. In mid-1938, the Hungarian government acknowledged their calls. It took far-reaching steps to create a new ‘equilibrium’ in social, economic, and cultural life (Law XV/1938). Further legislation in 1939 (Law IV/1939) significantly restricted the influence of Jews by reducing the types and numbers of jobs they could hold to no more than 6 per cent of any profession or university program. For the film industry this meant three major changes. First, this spate of racist legislation destroyed independent film journalism. Second, through the creation of a Film Chamber, it effected a significant decline in the numbers of featured Jewish actors as well as Jews doing jobs of secondary importance in film production. And third, it encouraged a strawman system whereby Christians took figurehead positions in production, distribution, and exhibition companies while the previous Jewish owners continued to run the businesses. In response to these changes, in the year between the promulgation of the First Jewish Law in May 1938 and the Second Jewish Law in May 1939, Hungarian film production collapsed, entering what film historian István Nemeskürty derisively labeled Hungary’s ‘new and worthless phase'. ⁹³ Jewish financiers refused to risk their capital on films that might never see the light of day, and very few Christian capitalists stepped into the void. This caused a domino effect, nearly bankrupting exhibitors, who counted on a supply of Hungarian films to fill their theaters, and distributors, who made their livings provisioning theaters with film. ‘Hungarian audiences’, wrote the journalist János Magyar, were being ‘weaned from the habit of movie-going’. ⁹⁴ In light of this near catastrophe, Hungary’s political and cultural leaders retreated, and those who argued that if you simply remove the Jews, Hungarian Christian culture would spontaneously flourish, were dealt a blow. ⁹⁵

As soon as it became clear that authorities would tolerate the continued participation of Jews, and Jewish finance in particular, in the industry, Hungarian filmmaking rebounded. These developments occurred just months before the opening of Yugoslavia to Hungarian film. Thus, while German authorities continued to pressure Hungary to expunge Jews from the film profession, Hungary had already experienced what might occur should it take that radical racist path. Except for the most ardent antisemites, much of Hungary’s political elite and film community leaders viewed a commitment to rapid Christianization of the industry as a death wish.

When confronted with German demands that it eliminate Jewish elements of the movie business, Hungary’s elites therefore prevaricated or resisted, even as a broad public consensus for a more drastic anti-Jewish policy congealed. ⁹⁶ It was not until 1941, once Germany had put an end to any hopes that the light of Saint Stephen would brightly illuminate the Danubian basin, once Hungary had fully committed to the Axis cause through its involvement in the destruction of Yugoslavia, once Prime Minister Pál Teleki’s suicide had made it clear that Hungary lacked the leverage to resist German power, that domestic and German pressure combined to result in the passage of a draconian Third Jewish Law (Law XV/1941). It was only then that Hungary transformed into what Paul Hanebrink has labeled a Christian racial state. ⁹⁷

For at least the next year, Hungary’s political elites tacked right, operating from the presumption that appeasement of Nazi desires would be the best way to protect the territorial gains Hungary had made, and that securing a place in what appeared to be an inevitable New Order would best be accomplished by mimicking Nazi anti-Jewish initiatives. The film industry, however, was slower to turn, if only out of a desperation to survive. Even the state-controlled Hunnia Film Studio resisted imperatives to force out its top officials of Jewish origin until pressure from the National Film Committee and István Kultsár, Hungary’s euphemistically named Commissioner for Unemployed Intellectuals, compelled it to do so in the fall of 1941. ⁹⁸ It was not until this point, which coincided with a German carrot and stick policy whereby German officials promised to make films in Budapest while simultaneously threatening to cut off supplies of the raw film necessary for domestic Hungarian production that Hungarian officials seriously endeavored to purge their own. Between October and December of 1941, Kultsár launched a series of raids, strong-arming companies like Warner Brothers into dismissing its Jewish accountant, arresting 15 other leading Jewish film professionals, and driving countless others into hiding.

This back story to Hungary’s imperial enterprise in Yugoslavia helps to illustrate why Hungary’s fortuitous cinematic performance presented its elites with all sorts of dilemmas. Film is a complex medium. Part commodity, part art, its production and distribution drew together risk-taking speculators and risk-averse government regulators. The motion picture could attract audiences of the politically disenfranchised, particularly women, youth, and workers, in public places and give them choices, an inherently democratizing process that was problematic for oligarchies and dictatorships, yet political elites salivated over film’s unparalleled capacity to convey messages. Film transcended national borders and challenged traditional mores while officials urgently tried to ascribe to it fixed, ethno-national characteristics. ⁹⁹ All of these contradictions became manifest in relation to Hungarian film exports to Yugoslavia. Interwar Hungary was a country with a complicated relationship to capitalism. In the late-1930s and early 1940s, Hungarian authorities imitated their German neighbor and attempted to moderate the extremes of the free market by enhancing state control over the financing and distribution of film. Yet when German and US authorities endorsed similar heavy-handed methods in Yugoslavia, Hungarian film elites suddenly championed less regulated commerce, arguing that Yugoslav audiences should be permitted to express their preferences. These same film leaders supported the widest distribution of Hungarian film products in Yugoslavia, just as they were censoring their own domestic film stores, banning the re-screening of Hungarian-made features deemed too Jewish or in some ways offensive to the nation. As officials sharpened the sense of what it meant for a picture and an industry to be ‘Hungarian’ by legislating limits on the roles Hungarian Jews could play (in all facets of production, distribution, and exhibition), they dissembled when it came to enforcement of those rules and even continued to exploit Jewish film distributors and exhibitors in Yugoslavia in support of other economic and cultural-political goals to which they gave higher priority.

My point is not merely that historical actors are often opportunists. It is to demonstrate that context and perspective matter, particularly in relation to the world of the magic screen. By expanding the frame and ‘Europeanizing’ ¹⁰⁰ Hungary’s venture in Yugoslavia between 1939 and 1942, we find a region of Europe in a period and state of volatility. Its achievements in Yugoslavia reinvigorated a faltering industry, allowing Hungary’s film establishment the fantasy of imperial prestige and power. This fantasy, in turn, buoyed Hungary’s willingness to defend itself against German interference and adopt seemingly contradictory stances. In practice, we find that the objective of exerting authority abroad through provision of every type of film in the Yugoslav market could coexist with domestic political trends demanding much stricter limits on concepts of Hungarian identity, but it could not mesh with the increasingly concrete ideas of Hitler’s empire. Furthermore, what was Hungarian in Yugoslavia did not necessarily have to be the same as what was Hungarian in Hungary. This statement’s corollary, what was good for Hungarian film in Yugoslavia was not necessarily appropriate for Hungary domestically, was also true. And finally, what was good for Hungary in Hungarian eyes rarely coincided with what Nazi officials presumed to be in Hungary’s best interests.

In addition to helping us better comprehend why these paradoxes make sense and why the practice of culture can withstand internal inconsistency, consideration of culture, particularly film, through the lens of imperial rhetoric and desire suggests that perhaps there were closer bonds between Yugoslavia and Hungary than political analyses of this relationship imagine. This study of Hungarian film export and Nazi responses to it as cultural imperialism allows scholars to better apprehend the reasons contemporary commentators afforded such importance to Hungary’s cinematic success, why Nazi officials viewed it as so threatening, and how force and coercion were central to all concepts of the Nazi New Order from an early stage.