Nicholas T. Parsons
How to Be a Magyar
[...]On the one hand, a Magyar patriot suffers from feelings of injured merit; on the other, he is tortured by what the Germans call a Nachholkomplex - a determination to "catch up" with societies, cultures and economies that he frankly and generously regards as more advanced than his own. Being misunderstood is thus a sort of occupational hazard of being a Hungarian, not least because the obscurity of the Hungarian language casts its speakers into spiritual isolation. The concomitant feeling of being culturally trapped is poignantly evoked by a celebrated Hungarian writer, who described the mother tongue of the Magyars as simultaneously their softest cradle and most solid coffin.
[...]
Optimist:"I think we live in the best of all possible worlds!"
Pessimist (an Hungarian): "I'm afraid so".
[...]
896 AD: To avoid being wiped out entirely by Pechenegs etc., the Magyars make a hasty advance (retreat) into the Carpathian Basin.
1240=1: Tatar invasion. Population decimated.
1240's: Béla IV decides it would be prudent to build a fortress on Buda, in order to give people something worthwhile to attack. Archeologists have painstakingly recorded thirty-one sieges thereafter.
1514: Revolt of György Dózsa: 70,000 casualties.
1526: Catastrophic Battle of Mohács at which the Turks slaughter 80 per cent of a combined Hungarian / Polish army of 25,000 men. The historian Stephan Vajda betrays his pessimistic Hungarian origins when he writes that the Hungarian plan of attack was typical of the national temperament "combining folly with theatrical over-confidence".
1541=1686: Hungary partitioned between Turks and Habsburgs. Population decimated.
1670: After the Emperor Leopold I hands over territories to the Turks which the Hungarians have just spent much blood defending, the Wesselényi conspiracy against Vienna fails. Savage reprisals include execution of leaders who had just saved Leopold`s bacon and an opportunistic drive against Protestants.
1686 and subsequently: "Liberation" by imperial armies decimates the population and lays waste the country.
17th to 18th century: Habsburg policy helpfully summarized by Cardinal Kollonitsch: "First I will make the Hungarians beggars, then Catholic, then German."
1703=1711: The Rákóczi War of Independence against the "illegal and intolerable yoke" of the Habsburgs. Illegal and intolerable yoke prevails.
1794=95: Martinovics conspiracy unmasked, not least because the instigator had naively informed Leopold II (as a fellow protagonst of the Enlightenment) of his activities, while subsequently keeping the members of his two Hungarian associations in ignorance of each other`s existence. Reprisals, executions, a generation of Hungarian literati silenced for many years.
1849: War of Independence fails. Russian army slaughters Hungarians. Baron Haynau ("the hyena of Brescia") "pacifies" Hungary with judicial murders.
1867 and subsequently: The Compromise with Austria. Things go well for a while, which in itself is a sign of impending disaster. Mass emigration to the New World.
1914=18: World War I. Disaster that would be on unprecedented scale if this was not Hungary.
1919: "Red terror" of Béla Kun regime, for symmetry's sake followed by "White Terror" of Admiral Horthy. Mayhem and butchery.
1920: Meltdown: the Treaty of Trianon awards two-thirds of the historic territories of Hungary to her neighbours. She waves gooodbye to nearly a third of her population.
1920's and 30's: Hungary becomes the country of "three million beggars," which is gratifying to the shade of Cardinal Kollonitsch. Mass emigration.
1941=45: Second World War just as big a disaster for Hungary as the first one.
Over half a million Jews deported to death camps. Budapest decimated in nine-week siege.
1948=56: Stalinist terror: mass torture and executions. Emigration of intellectuals and the politically vulnerable.
1956: Revolution fails. Over 4,000 estimated dead through fighting and subsequent executions. Mass imprisonment. 200,000 flee to the west.
1989: Communists melt away. Country teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. Virgin Mary admonishes Hungarians over their violent past and they promise to do better in future.
[...]
"Temetni, azt tudunk"
Billy Connolly, the Glaswegian sage and and gadfly, once remarked of his home town that it "doesn't care much for the living, but certainly looks after the dead", (a reference to the civic monumentalism of Glasgow's cemeteries). The Hungarians have encapsulated a similar idea in the resonant phrase "temetni, azt tudunk", "we are good at burying". The truth of this proud boast is most poignantly demonstrated in the periodic reburials, at which the Hungarians are past masters. The point of such ceremonies is, of course, to administer justice post mortem, but also to embarrass or enrage those whom that particular burial might be expected to embarrass or enrage. Thus the burial of Lajos Kossuth, who died in exile, was an ostentatious way of reminding the imperial authorities and their hangers-on that, (notwithstanding the Compromise of 1867), there was still an authentic and independent Hungarian nation which the Austrians had failed to subdue and never would subdue. Unpopular governments are usually the targets of a really good burial, as was the case with the re-interments of László Rajk before the 1956 Revolution and of Imre Nagy to seal the change of 1989. On the other hand, the recent reburial of Admiral Horthy's remains was a way of annoying the opposition during the Christian Conservative regime in power between 1990 and 1994.
[...]
Oscillating between east and west, rebellion and subjection, euphoria and gloom, naiveté and suspicion (the list could go on), the Hungarian psyche has a built-in mechanism for over-reaction alternating with fatalism. It is a recipe for achievement and breakdown, a paradigm for the struggle of irreconcilables. The last word, however, should lie not with an outsider, who can always be told he is thinking with his outsider's head and knows not of what he speaks, but with a Hungarian. It was Arthur Koestler who observed that "to be a Hungarian is a collective neurosis." Well, that is just what a successful Magyar would say. Interrogating Hungarians about themselves often produces this slightly surreal result, a feeling that their plight is both impossibly tragic and mildly absurd. A Budapest suicide joke admirably captures this ethos and might be offered as a sort of epitaph for a much-abused and ever-suffering nation: a man jumps from a third floor window and hits the pavement with a shattering crunch. A crowd gathers round the crumpled body. From the back of the throng, a busybody pushes his way importantly to the front and demands to know "What is going on here?" An eye located somewhere in the heap of twisted bones below him opens slowly, and after regarding the busybody reflectively for a few seconds is assisted by a voice located somewhere else in the heap, which observes plaintively: "How should I know? I only just got here myself."
Nicholas T. Parsons's
most recent books are The Xenophope's Guide to the Austrians (Ravette Books, 1994) and The Blue Guide to Vienna (1996).
