As part of a January 1942 raid nominally conducted against Serbian partisans and their supporters in Novi Sad, between a tenth and a third of the city's population of about 64,000 was brought before an ad hoc Verification Committee. The attempt to assert total control and transform the socioeconomic order of the city quickly degenerated into mass murder: between January 21 and 23, members of the Hungarian army and gendarmerie executed more than one thousand innocent citizens, most of them Jews, at varied locations such as the Danube Strand, the local soccer stadium, or the houses of the victims.

Árpád von Klimó’s new monograph investigates what happened before and during this massacre, how the atrocity was understood at the time, and how it has been interpreted and remembered in the three-quarters of a century since (with the nearly three post-communist decades serving as the subject of an epilogue). Introduction and first chapter offer a more conventional reconstruction of the crime and aim to embed it in multiple contexts. The author's main interest, however, lies in the “cold days” as a site of memory: his subsequent chapters analyze how different political regimes in Hungary attempted to manage, restrict, and sometimes use representations of these mass crimes, explore how the societal remembrance of them have evolved, and sketch what broader transformations such changes may reflect.

Klimó appropriately highlights that the Novi Sad massacre—while it might be viewed as one example among a staggeringly large number in the east European borderlands—had several highly specific features. Members of the Hungarian army and gendarmerie committed it in a territory that had been incorporated into Hungary the year before and was nominally under civilian administration. Unusually for the time, a wartime military trial was initiated against the commanding officers for their supposed disloyalty, with fifteen death sentences pronounced (though only partially carried out) at the Budapest court in January 1944. Sensible to the multiple ironies of judgement, Klimó subsequently offers illuminating comparisons between the narratives and conclusions of the wartime and postwar trials.

The overall interpretation of the chapter devoted to “the long Stalinist decade” may sound less original but this part formulates several insights into Hungarian and Yugoslav processes of remembrance and adds valuable detail on the tribulations of former gendarmes in postwar Hungary. Chapter 5 on the novel and movie Cold Days is particularly fascinating since it not only demonstrates how most disturbing questions regarding ordinary men participating in mass crimes were raised already in the Hungary of the mid-sixties but also shows how expert and popular reactions to such profound (self-)questioning were far from rejectionist at the time.

The book's two key arguments concerning the transformation of Hungarian remembrance are that the 1960s shifted the memory of the massacre from a mostly judicial and political topic to a catalyst for broader debates about responsibility, and that the late 1970s and early 1980s saw another shift from a perpetrator- and nation-centered reckoning to a victim-centered discourse. The closing chapter shows effectively how the rise of victim-centered perspectives helped prepare the ground for the peaceful transition of 1989 while noting that the recognition of various victim groups would result in an increasingly polarized status competition afterwards. While not uncritically disposed towards more recent developments, the book paints a rather encouraging overall picture of the transformation of Hungary's culture of remembrance.

While Remembering Cold Days amounts to a wide-ranging and well-researched book, there are several thematic limitations worth mentioning. It studies the processes of remembrance in Hungary and Yugoslavia in a somewhat one-sided manner and without elaborating on their specifically Jewish aspects. Focusing on the case of Novi Sad, the book only marginally addresses the broader regional history of violence in wartime Bačka and its remembrance. Lastly, even as the author is clearly cognizant of Yugoslav retaliations at the end of the war, the contest over their historical place and meaning are not organically integrated into his analysis.

While its various chapters are devoted to rather diverse levels and objects of analysis—the story of the massacre, trials in wartime, and early postwar Hungary, a novel and its film adaptation during the 1960s, the transformation of historical culture before 1989—Remembering Cold Days develops an engaging and largely coherent narrative. Many of its specific observations are nuanced and convincing whereas the connections it suggests between case study and broader trends deserve to be more widely discussed.