Research on Anti-Semitism in Dezső Kosztolányi’s Pardon era

The Pardon column was published on a weekly basis as part of Új Nemzedék with the contribution of Dezső Kosztolányi between 1919 and 1921. One third of these texts have been found to have anti-Semitic content and through stylistic analysis have been tied to the work of Dezső Kosztolányi (Arany 2019). Literary critics and historians have long been exploring Dezső Kosztolányi’s anti-Semitic connections, however their implications for the social sciences are yet to be considered. Due to the writer’s fame and scope of his work we are in possession of documents, which help us understand the ways Kosztolányi and his peers understood their role in the anti-Semitic discourse—as writers and editors of the Pardon column. Our goal is to get a deeper insight into the era in which the columns were written, and to try and understand how historic social processes impacted the work of individual writers, thereby providing a social-historical context to the anti-Semitic writings of the Pardon column. In our study, we will consider Judeism’s social, economic and political role, through which we will examine the content of the anti-Semitic columns and the social-historical processes that led to their formation. Furthermore, through the biography of Dezső Kosztolányi we will showcase how participation in the anti-Semitic discourse affected the life of the individual.