Péter Apor’s deeply researched and thought-provoking new book analyzes the violent riots that broke out in Hungary in the autumn of 1945 and between February and August 1946. During these riots, hundreds, or thousands of individuals assaulted small numbers of people—many of whom were Jewish—and murdered four of them.
Backyard Revolution explores how people who were marginalized or thought to be excluded from political processes and power actually participated in politics. Apor thus consciously reframes Polish debates on similar, though far from identical, events in the months and years immediately following World War II. As he summarizes, those debates start by attempting to identify the causes of antisemitism and proceed to then examine how hatred escalated into violence. Apor focuses instead on the conditions that allowed crowd violence to emerge as a distinctive and typical form of social action and explores how groups and individuals of Jewish origin became the victims of such violence. Accordingly, a central question of his book is why the rioters felt it was appropriate or justified to unleash their violent anger.
While this is a complex question to address, Apor succeeds in offering a theoretically informed and original answer by considering “collective violence as a political action that purports to shape the sociocultural order while being engendered by the habitual order of everyday life, based on the body and ritual” (2). As he explains, a thorough analysis of the political and social significance of collective violent action requires examining broader social experiences, the symbolic and ritual components of crowd violence, and the political ideas and emotions expressed through it.
The chapters of this book deconstruct, layer by layer, the sociocultural systems that shaped these instances of collective violence. Using material frustrations as an entry point, Apor demonstrates how food scarcity and the black market fueled the demonization of commercial activities and actors. He illuminates the rioters’ apparent concern with economic justice, explores how the riots were underpinned by their notions of politics and community organization, and reveals how these were driven by desires for a revolutionary reshaping of society and founded on “antisemitic codes.” The book thus views antisemitic violence within the context of popular culture, presenting its ritual order as something more than merely defending “traditional values” or protecting local communities from “external interventions.” In fact, Apor argues that the “order of everyday life,” to which the “order of violence” was attached, served as a means of exerting power over others and played a role in shaping the political institutions of the postwar period.
As he explains, violent demonstrators in early postwar Hungary divided society into two distinct and sharply opposed groups—those who did manual labor and those who did not—and saw their actions as contributing to the establishment of a state based on manual labor. As Backyard Revolution shows in impressive detail, workers actively shaped the form and content of these violent demonstrations. They used the symbols of revolution while redeploying tropes of antisemitic propaganda and patterns of murderous violence. Having defined nonwork as a political threat, numerous Jews were conceived of as political enemies. To Apor, this reveals continuities in the antisemitic imagination and a new way of defining “the Jew”: to the rioting workers, Jews became the tangible expression of their deepest anxieties about losing control over their own survival.
Through its nuanced and often abstract reflections, Backyard Revolution tackles novel questions about the nature of social and political change, as well as what politics meant in this brief period. Apor demonstrates that the state was never isolated from social processes. He argues that the outlook of political institutions mirrored the ideas of a just society shaped by the habitual community culture of workers, in which the primary task of the state was meant to be to create, protect, and care for the privileged position of the working body. He adds in an intriguing manner that corporeal qualities prescribed rather than reflected one’s position and role—for example, the overweight were identified as the protectors of the unjust privileges of the old world. In this way, bodies themselves created and shaped the very materiality of the social order.
Apor further argues that the “order of the everyday” was also used to draw the internal and external boundaries of the collective, to discipline, punish, exclude, and repress norm-breakers. This perspective prompts us to rethink some of the theoretical premises concerning the politics of the subaltern and the often-romanticized focus on resistance. Moreover, the author clarifies that despite new paths for political participation opening after the war, the mechanisms and institutions that sought to achieve direct control of the state were unable to defend democratic participation in the long run.
Remarkably, the antisemitic dimension of the violence was marginalized in the trials and debates that followed. Apor emphasizes in this context that, instead of focusing primarily on heroic communist resistance, which was a powerful pattern in countries such as the Soviet Union or Italy, the Hungarian “antifascist myth” was rather built around the idea that the fascists were anticommunists. The riots of 1945 and 1946 could thus be interpreted to highlight the threat of fascist resurgence and conceptualize democracy in a particular manner, while erasing Jewish victims from narratives of antisemitic violence, he concludes this thoughtful and slightly unconventional book.
