20 January 2017
László Lőrinc
Exactly six years ago, on January 20, 2011, an untrue statement appeared on the Hungarian-language web that has become a widespread historical legend. This time, the birth and spread of a real, classic historical fallacy can be followed step by step.
“I wonder if besides the fact that such a former communist, who most of his life also jousted for the communist dictatorship, and is now deputy group leader in the European Parliament, would be so accepted, would they also accept a former Nazi?” – asked documentary filmmaker László Pesty on HírTv’s Civil Casino programme on 28 January 2011. He was referring to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who nine days earlier had harshly criticised the Hungarian media law and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in the EP.
The question was a summary of a conversation which the presenter Katalin Nagy had opened by asking “on what moral basis can hold the Hungarian prime minister accountable for democracy” someone who once considered right “the joint invasion of Prague by the Warsaw Pact countries? Is this man speaking?” And Jesuit Father Ulrich Kiss added that “Red Dany” positioned himself as a Maoist and a friend of Fidel Castro.
This may have come as a surprise, since the opposite was previously known about Cohn-Bendit. To be precise, until 20 January 2011, the day after the Orbán debate in the EP. It was then that the allegation that the co-chair of the European Greens had ‘supported Soviet intervention during the repression of the Prague Spring of 1968’ spread on the internet. Two months later, you could read it in hundreds of places, almost verbatim, mostly in blog posts and comments, but also in the Hungarian daily Magyar Nemzet, for example, or on the RTL Klub TV channel’s website, in the news section. When they did reference it at all, they all referred to a single source: Wikipedia. And indeed: the Hungarian Cohn-Bendit glossary article was supplemented with a new subheading entitled “the 1968s” (sic!) at 16:37 on the day in question, as it is documented in the editing history of the page. The four lines, written with the linguistic bravura befitting the title, were the first to include the incriminated Prague statement, citing the Amazon.de commercial website as the source, where a few lines of a German-language review promoting Markus Herbert Schmid’s book titled The Prague Spring and the ’68ers[1]. A comment to it, also only a few lines long, says that the ’68ers in the West were embarrassed by the Soviet invasion of Prague, but many of them – including Cohn-Bendit – outright approved it. All this comes without naming any specific source.
Reading the Wikipedia article, it was suspicious, not only because of the unusual way of referencing and the rustic wording, but also because this instance so contradicting public perception had not been widely publicised before, not even during the 2008 anniversary of 1968, when comparative exhibitions and books were flooding all available cultural space. And there is also the fact that it appeared on that very day, and only in the Hungarian-language section of the internet – even the most sensitive Czech version of the Wikipedia was unaware of it. On Wikipedia, it can be traced that the paragraph in question originated from Tamás Szabó, who, as he himself reveals, has long been living in Germany as an IT specialist. “I was just curious, I searched the Internet to find out who this guy shouting in the EU Parliament actually was. … I couldn’t find anything better, but I don’t think the book review is false,” he wrote in response to an emailed question about his sources.
The historian László N. Göbölyös, known as an expert on the student movements of ’68 in Hungary, says he would be “extremely surprised” if the Prague statement attributed to Cohn-Bendit “were true”, and Pierre Grémion, author of Paris/Prague, The Left’s Relationship to the Renewal and Repression in Czechoslovakia 1968-1978 , shares a similar view.[2] As he explains in his letter, the students in Paris – narrow-mindedly – at the time of the unfolding of the reforms in Prague regarded Dubček and Brezhnev as representatives of the same oppressive communist power, between whom there wasn’t a pint to choose. But – or rather, for this very reason – Grémion finds it unlikely that, in August, the “deeply anti-Stalinist” Cohn-Bendit would have endorsed the repression of the Prague Spring. To make the ideas of ‘Red Dany’ clear, the student leader refers to a book he wrote with his brother in 1968 (which was published by the Hungarian authorities, too, but only to a select few, because of its anti-Sovietism[3]). The Soviet specialist on France, Nikolai Molchanov, also considered that “the most important characteristic of Cohn-Bendit’s views is their pathological anti-Communism.”[4] The Cohn-Bendit brothers’ book was already in print in August, so it could not have reflected on the Soviet intervention, but it is not difficult to glean from it what the authors thought of “tank diplomacy”. Right in the second sentence of the first chapter they included Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin among the “old world powers”, the Pope, Johnson and de Gaulle. Two pages later, they list four historically interesting examples of “the autonomous activity of the masses and its organisational forms” as a precursor to Paris ’68, including the Hungarian 1956 attempt suppressed by Soviet tanks. According to them, the Soviets “showed their true colours” in Hungary in 1956 (p. 227) and, together with the French Communists, who “repugnantly” welcomed Soviet intervention, it was precisely in 1956 that they succeeded in disillusioning the Western left with “the myth of a socialist paradise”.
An important contribution to Cohn-Bendit’s basic position in ’68 and afterwards are his conversations with the Polish anti-communist resistance fighter Adam Michnik in the first half of the 1980s. In it, for example, Michnik recalls with gratitude the pleasure he took in 1968, when he was in prison and his lawyer told him that Cohn-Bendit had introduced himself during his interrogation in a Paris court as “Kuron-Modzelewski”, i.e. by the names two Poles who were also under arrest. [5]
All this said, it could not be ruled out that Mr Schmid had found a confused Cohn-Bendit statement on which the misleading statement in the commentary to the book review could then be built. But that is not the case. In the forty-page (including appendix, seventy-page) booklet[6] of amateur make, Cohn-Bendit’s name appears only on page 29, where a sentence from the 2 September 1968 issue of Der Spiegel is quoted: “Kiesinger would do better not to talk about what happened in Czechoslovakia.” That is all. The original Spiegel article, by the way, was in fact a list of (condemning) statements made by various members and groups of the German New Left APO[7] on the Prague invasion. The picture attached to the article showed, in a typical manner, young people protesting in front of the Soviet embassy. Cohn-Bendit, who had already been expelled from France at the time, was also a member of APO, and this is the only sentence quoted in Der Spiegel, without giving any indication that he had a dissenting policy on the substance of the issue. The gentleman to whom he refers, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, then Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, has long been a thorn in the side of the left, mainly because of his past: he was a member of the National Socialist Party from 1933 to 1945, including when German tanks happened to arrive in Prague in 1939. From 1940, as deputy head of the Broadcasting Department of the Nazi Foreign Ministry, he oversaw the control and jamming of foreign broadcasts, so it might have been thought that it didn’t sit pretty with him to fret over the crushing of the Prague Spring, which brought freedom of the press. Cohn-Bendit was not, therefore, defending imperialism, dictatorship and censorship, but on the contrary, was attacking the hypocrisy of Kiesinger, who embodied those for him.
This also gave László Pesty an answer to his question. While they were still alive, former Nazis were so accepted in the West that someone with such a background could have been the first man of Germany[8]. Cohn-Bendit, on the other hand, never jousted for any communist dictatorships (not even Mao and Castro)[9], on the contrary, as a “pathological” anti-communist, he was an anarchist advocate of expanding freedom and the freedom of the press.
László Lőrinc
The first version of this article appeared in the Hungarian weekly Élet és Irodalom (Life and Literature) on 6 May 2011.
[1] The Prague Spring and the 68ers. Isisverlag, Eichstätt, 2008.
[2] Paris / Prague, La gauche face au renouveau et à la régression tchécoslovaques 1968-1978. Julliard, Paris, 1985.
[3] Gabriel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit: Left-wing radicalism, a remedy for the age-old disease of communism. Bp. n.d. [1970]
[4] The meaning, causes and aims of student revolts in the West. In Student movements in the West. Bev. József Gombár. Kossuth, Bp., 1969. p. 150.
[5] Totalitarianism. Dany Cohn-Bendit interview with Adam Michnik. Translated by Miklós Sulyok. 1988. Unpublished stencil print. Page 23. Original: by Dany Cohn-Bendit: Nous l’avons tant aimée, la revolution. Paris, 1987. In the course of the interview, Cohn-Bendit also noted that, although they had protested a lot against the Vietnam War, they had stated in a leaflet that “the Vietnamese revolution under the Stalinist Ho Chi Minh has no future” and that “I have protested as much against the Soviet Union as against the Americans”. “In my whole generation”, including the Western rebels, “I admire you (Michnik) the most … I don’t know if I would have had the courage to behave in Poland as you did, [i.e.] to face prison consciously”. But neither could Michnik have said of a confounded tank-lover during the martial law year: ‘We are lucky to have people like Dany to talk to the Poles about. And Dany has the opportunity to make people like Kuron better understood by the Western world”.
[6] The book was researched and reviewed by my colleague Gábor Széles, for which I thank him.
[7] Außerparlamentarische Opposition, meaning Parliamentary Opposition.
[8] Kiesinger’s Minister of Economics, the then Social Democrat Karl Schiller, was also a former Nazi.
[9] On the relationship of Cohn-Bendit and the 22 March movement defined by him to the Maoists, see La revolte étudiante. Les animateurs parlent. Paris, 1968. pp. 69-70.
Photo of Chancellor Kiesinger with swastika in the background and an anti-Nazi activist, Beate Klarsfeld, who slapped him in public at a Social Democratic Party meeting in November 1968, in front of it. Cohn-Bendit berated the Chancellor, not the Soviet Union
Contributions from Wikipedia editors on the day the first version of this article appeared in the Élet és Irodalom. The incriminated part of the Wikipedia article has been removed.
Visiting figures for the Wikipedia page on Cohn-Bendit in January 2011. You can see the surge on the 20th: six thousand views that day alone, some of them already including the fake entry.
