Árpád von Klimó, a historian of modern Europe who teaches at the Catholic University of America, raises important questions in Remembering Cold Days on the history and memory of mass violence during World War II. It focuses on the mass murder by Hungarian army and gendarmerie forces of more than one thousand people, mostly Jews and Serbs, in the city of Novi Sad on 21–23 January 1942, and the way that the Hungarian state and society understood it in the changing military, political, ideological, and cultural contexts of the following half century. The massacre was a culmination of state violence in the Bačka following the region's occupation by Hungary in April 1941, as Hungary joined Nazi Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria in destroying Yugoslavia. Chapter 1 provides a thorough historical account of the violence, describing how state authorities—and many of the Hungarian army and gendarmerie officers who carried it out—perceived it as a security measure against partisans and communists (23–27).

Most of the book explores the construction, meanings, and uses of the memory of the massacre in Hungarian politics and society. Chapter 2 traces how wartime state leaders viewed the massacre as an act of disloyalty that damaged Hungary's international reputation, thus moving to prosecute and convict fifteen officers from among the perpetrators in December 1943 and January 1944. The book then shows in chapters 3 and 4 how in postwar trials and during the Stalinist years the Hungarian state portrayed the massacre as representing forces that oppressed Hungarians: Germans and “Horthy-Fascists,” often depicted as sadistic beasts rather than normal people. Chapter 5 deals with the post-Stalinist shift that now saw state leaders attempting to tie the perpetrators of the massacre to the revolutionaries of 1956 to discredit the latter through association with the former; then, in the 1960s, space began to open for questions about the perpetrators as normal Hungarians. Chapter 6 tells the story of yet another shift in the following two decades from a focus on the perpetrators to a focus on victims. The epilogue provides some thoughts on the memory of the massacre in Hungary after 1989, focusing on the 2011 trial and acquittal of Sándor Képiró, a gendarmerie officer who took part in the massacre.

Remembering Cold Days presents meticulous research, utilizing primary sources gathered from six archives and libraries in Hungary, Serbia, and the United States, including reports and correspondence of state authorities, trial material, and periodicals. Its use, furthermore, of literature and film as key sources in the analysis of memory culture and politics is particularly illuminating. This is demonstrated primarily in the analysis in chapter 5 of Tibor Cseres's 1964 novel about the massacre, Cold Days (Hideg napok); Cseres's adaptation of the novel, two years later, into a theater play and a film script; and the reception of the book and film in Hungary and abroad. Cold Days was, von Klimó shows, a turning point in the depiction of the perpetrators as “ordinary human beings, average Hungarians” rather than the Stalinist-era caricature of them as fascist deviants (137).

I address here two key points of analysis in the book. First, von Klimó argues that the massacre should mostly not be understood as part of the Holocaust in Hungary. He defines the latter as beginning with the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944 and the swift ghettoization and deportation, primarily to Auschwitz, of more than 430,000 Jews from across the country, except the capital, from April to June 1944 (5–6). This common German-centered periodization, however, fails to account for genocide as a process that often unfolds in unexpected ways, escalating in moments of opportunity and deescalating in response to changing circumstances at other times. The attack of the Hungarian state against Jews, before and after March 1944, figured as part of the drive to realize an ethnonational “Greater Hungary”—a broader destructive vision, also against other groups. Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish Polish jurist who coined the term genocide, described Hungarian state violence, specifically in the Bačka, exactly in this way when he wrote in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) that the “Hungarian authorities have introduced a genocide policy by endeavoring to impose a Hungarian pattern upon these territories” (262–63; emphasis added). While von Klimó places the massacre in various contexts, including Hungarian state violence (6–8 and 34–41), the German-centered periodization of the Holocaust in Hungary precludes consideration of the genocide framework as Lemkin understood the concept during the war. It is true, as von Klimó explains, that the wartime trials against fifteen of the massacre's perpetrators “made apparent not only the ambivalent relationship between the Hungarian elites and Nazi Germany but also the complex nature of the Horthy regime itself, disclosing political tensions within it and within Hungarian society” (46). There was, however, a consensus across the Hungarian political spectrum about the vision of “Greater Hungary,” even as the conservative right and the extreme right clashed on how “to impose a Hungarian pattern,” including anti-Jewish policies, in view of changing diplomatic, economic, and military circumstances and constraints. Rather than a pre-Holocaust/Holocaust break, then, March 1944 figures within a broader process of destructive state violence in Hungary, including the Novi Sad massacre.

Moving from the massacre to its memory, von Klimó offers a narrative of progress: The memory discourse evolved through Stalinist and post-1956 communist distortions, eventually facilitating in the 1980s a recognition not just of the Jewish victims of the massacre and the Holocaust but also of other victims whom the communist state had heretofore sought to silence. These included ethnic Hungarians in the Bačka whom Tito's partisans murdered in 1944–45, Hungarian soldiers during World War II now depicted as war victims, ethnic Hungarian minorities in wartime Hungarian territories lost to Romania and Czechoslovakia, and the various victims of communist governments in Hungary. This, then, gave rise to a “post-heroic society” in Hungary that helps explain the nonviolent fall of the communist regime in 1989. Considering that this is a key argument in the book (16–17), the idea of a “post-heroic society,” which appears only once more (153), requires more elaboration. Instead, the book concludes with an analysis of the acquittal of Képiró in 2011 that, von Klimó asserts, proves the success of the 1989 transition, as it “demonstrated that Hungary had become a democratic, constitutional state with an independent judiciary” (187). It was clear already in 2011, however, that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán was aiming to transform Hungary into a nondemocratic state, with the judiciary as a key target of attack. Holocaust memory also came under attack in the decade since then, with Orbán essentially reviving the communist memory politics of the 1950s that portrays the Holocaust in Hungary as a German history with Hungary as the victim. Thus, Képiró's acquittal could be seen differently: as the failure of Hungarian society to follow Cseres and accept the responsibility of normal Hungarians as Holocaust perpetrators. Rather than progress, we find ourselves, tragically, almost where the story of the massacre's memory began.

My critique, however, speaks to the importance of the book and the discussion it prompts. Remembering Cold Days traces a story that should interest all Hungarians and, more broadly, students of genocidal violence across the world and the politics of memory around it, past and present.