Border Situations and the Form 6 Card, or What Everyone Did with Their Freedom

The release of the agent files has put Hungary at a border situation: will we finally face up to who signed and who did not, or will we let everyone off the hook again? A personal and philosophical reckoning from a Transylvanian perspective, from Péter Kornis to Szilárd Demeter. The personal opinion of Anna Karczag.

Enormous emotional outbursts on social and traditional media: Hungary took the first step toward facing itself, then promptly stumbled. This is what this society is like, well then, we'll just have to live here — let's recall together the classic line, from a film in which, who knows, how many holders of a Form 6 card appeared, and how many network persons registered under code 04 contributed as a director, a lighting technician, or whatever else. And no, we will not live here, because this is exactly what we've had enough of. Many of us.

Like thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Hungarians — it's a miracle the servers didn't melt down — I too have been poring over the opened files, and have been for a day and a half now. My first task was to clear up matters within my own family: we knew that one of our uncles, back there in the distant motherland, was probably a "Hungarian secret police agent," because his job required it from the outset. So I searched for him and found him: an excluded network person, recruited in '57, then either dropped or not. I can hardly, in fact I cannot at all, believe that he wasn't one, because every circumstance argues against believing it. He is a relative, though not a close one. He never liked the branch of our family in which I, too, grew up; he disgustingly threw us out — his Transylvanian, or more precisely "Romanian," relatives — when, in the early 1990s, we begged him for a residence registration. This did not mean we were actually going to live there; it was simply needed for the formalities and for the residence permit that meant survival — but they wouldn't even do that much. That was the last time my mother ever met him, or them; since then I don't even know whether my so-called cousins are still alive, but from the outer edge of our not-too-extensive family I do know that they voted against us in the 2004 referendum on dual citizenship.

Then, like thousands, tens of thousands of Hungarians — a miracle the servers didn't melt down — I too began searching for well-known public figures. I was mainly interested in those of Transylvanian origin. May God forgive me, but since He already threw away the life of His only son to this bloodthirsty mob which, to reassure and flatter ourselves, we usually call humanity — so, forgive me, but it was still my own blood that interested me most of all: those who, in the darkest years of the Ceaușescu era, managed to flee to "Hungary," and whose further fate we could only learn about if a letter occasionally arrived. But "occasionally" here is an adverb of time characteristic of dark communism, it doesn't mean what the word normally means. In reality, "never" is closer to the truth.

I got over Vilmos Ágoston easily — a hangover is a tougher problem for me than whether he was an informant or not — but Péter Kornis hit me right in the heart. Hard. I am a devotee of folk culture, and I'm sure I would have become one even without his photographs, but without his photographs I would not be as devoted a fan as I am today — and "as devoted" here can mean something more valuable, more value-preserving. From his interview with Válasz Online I can read regret, but I can hardly believe that he never informed on anyone — recruited, with a Form 6 card, in that kind of position… hardly. I don't believe it, I don't believe it, and secretly I hope that Kornis, who gained access to the brighter Transylvanian parts of dark Romania, supplied the Hungarian communist authorities, through foreign-affairs channels, with information that actually served our interests. See how naive I am?

And here I must stop, because I caught myself. I don't believe my uncle's exonerating file, nor do I believe Kornis's incriminating one. Against one speaks my sense of grievance, for the other speaks my affection, and both are louder than the paper. According to Kant, only that standard is moral which I could also will as a universal law — one that remains valid even when I must apply it to my relative, to my favorite, or indeed to myself. A standard that depends on whom I love is not a standard at all, but sympathy — and sympathy has never yet turned into justice. The Gospel says the same thing about the speck and the beam, only more simply.

And while idols are toppling one after another, I keep reading that here, even though many had a Form 6 card and a recruitment file, nobody actually reported on anybody, and whoever did, did so in a way that nobody got into trouble. Yet this communist system managed to hold up rather well from '56 to '89, even though, apparently, it was carrying hundreds of thousands of saboteurs on its back — the way Orbán carries his "libtards." Then why did hundreds of thousands of Hungarians flee and emigrate from here? And how will we look in the eyes of those who, despite being blackmailed, never signed, who lost their careers, their families, often their lives, because of their backbone? How will we face the cream of our nation if we now let everyone off the hook because we got scared of reality?

Because those who signed don't need to be absolved. It is possible, even necessary, to understand: the fear, the blackmail, the sick child, the travel permit, the passport that never came. But understanding is not absolution, and whoever conflates the two is not merciful but unjust. Unjust toward those who, facing the same fear, the same blackmail, said no. They were afraid too. They, too, had families, children, careers — except that they were the ones who paid the price that others spared themselves.

There are those who had to leave: who, with a single suitcase, or not even that, set off across the green border, who were branded traitors at public meetings, who could not even come home for their parents' funerals, and who started over in a foreign-language country, at thirty, at forty, from nothing — while back home their informers took their places at the lectern, in the editorial office, on the stage. And there are those who stayed but did not sign: who were denied passports, whose books could not be published, whose children could not get into university, who spent their whole lives earning their bread as unskilled laborers, librarians, boiler stokers, even though their talent had destined them for far more. They did not die, they were not imprisoned, there is no plaque for them. They simply could not become who they might have been. Nobody factors their unfinished life's work into the balance, because what was never even allowed to be born is missed by no one — except by them, and by all of us, without our even knowing it.

If we now say that those who signed were also victims, and that they didn't really harm anyone anyway, then we are taking away from them, for a second time, the one thing they had left: the fact that they were right. That it was worth saying no. And with that we send the message, to today's and tomorrow's generations alike, that having a backbone is a luxury only suckers allow themselves.

That is why I think there is a minimum on which this torn-apart society — right and left, signatories and their descendants alike — ought to be able to agree: an apology to those who said no. Not compensation, not a plaque, not a medal, since many of them are no longer around to receive one. Just this much: that we say it out loud — you were right, and we, the silent ones, the signatories, those who looked away, and their children, owe you. Kant distinguishes between that which has a price and that which has dignity: what has a price can be replaced by something else; what has dignity cannot be replaced by anything. Those who said no chose dignity over price, and the very least we can do is give back to them what the community took away: recognition. This would be the smallest common denominator below which we cannot sink.

Because I increasingly feel that Hungarian society has become frightened. Frightened, because it has to face the fact that no one here is innocent; whoever used to be, we drove away, killed, or plundered — often all three at once, just in varying order. And it has become frightened also because Viktor Orbán's regime bears frightening similarities to the Hungarian People's Republic run by the Kádár–Apró–Dögei trio: if that era is ever held to account, the past sixteen years of ours cannot escape it either.

Everyone is guilty, and so the social contract is ready-made: no one is guilty. Hannah Arendt saw this trap exactly: where everyone is guilty, no one is. The Greeks used to slaughter the bearer of bad news — this is a legend, true, but a deeply human one, because this damned trait of ours has been burned into us forever, and it keeps pushing humanity back into the same eternal cycle whose end is marked by burned villages, bombed-out cities, raped women, and societies turned into lackeys.

According to Jaspers, a person's true morality is revealed by their behavior in border situations: during war, empathy toward the victim; during shock, the direction of one's action. Projected onto our own situation: in the shock following the release of the state security files, will we feel the need to cleanse ourselves, or will the national tradition of sweeping things under the rug win out? Because we are in a border situation right now, whether we admit it or not. For days, perhaps weeks, everything will still be right in front of us: the names, the cover names, the cards, the reports, the handwriting of the handling officers. Then the next scandal comes, the next piece of news, and the whole thing gets put on a shelf, to be dusted off by the next generation — if they even feel like it. Jaspers, incidentally, did not think about this only in the abstract: in 1946, in a Germany lying in ruins, he wrote The Question of German Guilt, in which he separated the different kinds of guilt — criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical. He did this precisely so that "everyone is guilty" could not conveniently turn into "no one is." As if he had written it for us.

This separation also protects us from another convenient loophole. I increasingly hear that the small-time informant wasn't really guilty after all, since it was the handling officer who was guilty, and the system, and the party. Arendt called this the "cog theory," and showed exactly where it collapses: before the tribunal there are no cogs, only people. Whoever says they were just a screw in the machine must also be asked: and why were you willing to be a screw? The handling officer's guilt does not dissolve the informant's, because the two guilts do not cancel each other out — they add up.

Except nobody ever called the handling officers to account either. Gábor Péter, the head of the ÁVH, who was responsible for the torture and death of masses of people, did go to prison, but not so much for his crimes as for his comrades' power games, and he was released on a pardon in 1959. Afterward he worked as a librarian until his retirement, and in 1993, at the age of eighty-six, he died of natural causes in a hospital in Budapest, in a free Hungary, without the public sphere of the regime change ever even raising the question of his responsibility. And lest we think all this is only the past: after the regime change, two former ÁVH officers, Miklós Bauer and Károly Bárd, worked at the law office of Mátyás Eörsi, of the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ). And when Tibor Vajda, a former ÁVH major, filed a defamation suit in Australia against his former victim, Magda Bárdy, a certificate from the Hungarian Ministry of Interior was submitted to the case, stating that between 1950 and 1952 the mistreatment of suspects was not permitted in the ÁVH's investigative department. So the free Hungarian state's own document testified on behalf of an interrogator, against the person he had tortured. Magda Bárdy won the case after nine years. In Australia. Not at home.

Because if we demand this reckoning only from the dead and from eighty-year-olds, and not from those alive today and in power today, then what results is not a cleansing but another rug. The same rug, except this time we're the ones weaving it, and here comes the question I cannot avoid: how should we relate to the Form 6 cardholders compared to those who today drive out and ruin talented and moral Hungarians? Since we're talking about Transylvanians and our own blood, let me ask — while acknowledging that in certain cases "greater" simply doesn't exist, because it only serves relativization — which of these two Transylvanians of our own blood committed the greater crime against this nation and against himself? Péter Kornis or Szilárd Demeter?

One of them, in a dictatorship, recruited, out of fear or calculation (I cannot know which), wrote reports, while with his photographs he preserved what that dictatorship wanted to erase. The other, in a free country, without coercion, of his own free will, took it upon himself to erase whatever stood in the way of the dictatorship being built. One of them has something to regret today, and apparently does regret it. The other has hidden behind walls of silence…

But we are still carrying bricks to the walls of silence even now — this time, bricks made of Form 6 cards.

Anna Karczag