"The book, a volume of essays edited by Randolph L. Braham and András Kovács, gives an excellent introduction into the state of the art in Hungarian Holocaust research seventy years after the events. Two main questions stand out: how to understand and come to terms with the complicity of non-Jewish Hungarians and the Hungarian state on the level of nationwide history politics, and how to grasp the relationship between the Holocaust and earlier periods in Hungarian Jewish history. In other words, was the catastrophic fate of Hungarian Jewry presaged by a lingering and deep-rooted antisemitism in Hungarian society, or was it, as some Hungarian Jewish spokespeople would still argue in the wake of the war, an unprecedented and entirely unexpected occurrence that was out of step not just with Jewish life in Hungary, but with Hungarian society as a whole? This debate—also known as the intentionalist versus the functionalist dimensions of the Holocaust—informs the different approaches taken by scholars of the Hungarian Holocaust."
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