Miklós Györffy
Doses of Reality
Balázs Györe: Ha már õ sem él, kérem olvasatlanul elégetni (If He Is Already Dead Too, Please Burn This Without Reading It). Budapest, Liget, 1996, 156 pp. * A valóságban is létezik (This Also Exists in Reality). Budapest, Liget, 1997, 152 pp. * Attila Hazai: Szilvia szüzessége (Silvia's Virginity). Budapest, Balassi, 1995, 205 pp. * Jenõ Thassy: Veszélyes vidék (Dangerous Territory). Budapest, Pesti Szalon, 1996, 468 pp.
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For Jenõ Thassy the question of whether he has a story, or whether his life has been real, simply does not arise. If anything, Thassy has had more than his fair share of real life, even if his story is about how someone can lose everything which belongs to him and into which he was born. Jenõ Thassy was born in 1920 into an old Hungarian landowning family. He became an officer in the army just at the time when even army officers, or perhaps especially army officers, had to ask themselves to what extent they could remain true to their oath and yet maintain a clear conscience. Was it indeed possible for an army officer, whose duty in theory is to obey the orders of his superiors, to have a conscience, or even a personality at all? From Géza Ottlik's novel, School on the Frontier, we know how military cadets in the inter-war era were brought up in the doctrine of unquestioning obedience. Jenõ Thassy, progeny of the erstwhile ruling caste, nevertheless decides to attempt resistance, using the opportunities and the abilities at his disposal. He chooses the path of resistance when the Hungarian army becomes fatally embroiled in the Second World War, moreover, on the side of the Germans yet again. Just as in the First World War.
He set himself an impossible task: to avert the historical tragedy. All he succeeded in doing was to survive the disaster. In 1946, at the age of 26, he emigrated and, after living in France for a few years, he settled in the United States. A number of his novels and short stories have been published in French and English, but his autobiography, which is written in Hungarian and has just been published in Budapest under the title Dangerous Territory, was intended to be his major work.
Dangerous Territory, which recounts the story of the fateful first quarter-century of Thassy's life, is both an enthralling portrait of an era and a gripping adventure story. Take even the opening scene; the atrocities he depicts cannot be merely the product of a writer's skill or inventiveness. It is 1919. Hungary has lost the war as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ally of Germany, while its neighbours, their members swelled by the Empire's rebellious ethnic groups - or in some cases newly-formed, such as Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia - are thirsting for vengeance on their erstwhile oppressors. Under the Paris peace treaties, then being drafted, Hungary would later be carved up to such an extent that even large contiguous Hungarian-speaking areas were ripped apart. Meanwhile, however, there were also some who were trying to grab a share of the booty using their own resources. The Thassy estate, which bordered on Yugoslavia, is ravaged by Serbian soldiers who, like common criminals, murder the master of the house for his money and shoot his first-born son. His wife, who is pregnant with their second child, is brutally beaten and it is only thanks to the timely arrival of help in the form of the Jewish family doctor that she and her unborn child survive. When Jenõ Thassy is born, they try for a long time to hide from him what dangerous territory he has been born into.
His mother supervises his upbringing. On the one hand she tries to shield him from the dangers lying in wait for him on all sides, while on the other, by chance as much as by intention, she gives him a good grounding in the kind of moral courage he will need in the face of such dangers. The Thassy estate on the banks of the Drava river was by then only a fraction of the domain formerly owned by the family; a large part of it was lost when Hungary's borders were redrawn. Thassy's mother, however, proves to be a modern woman and a lady of some mettle; she learns how to farm, even introducing new methods, and does her best to make a living from the remaining three hundred acres to enable her to maintain the lifestyle of the landed gentry and educate her son. Gradually, however, despite their bonds of kinship or friendship with the oldest and wealthiest families in the country, decline finally reaches them. Jenõ Thassy is educated for four years at expensive Jesuit boarding-schools in Pécs and Kalocsa, but then has little choice but to enrol in a military academy where all expenses are met by the state, in view of the patriotic merits and heroic death of his father.
Jenõ Thassy's memoirs were written after all these vicissitudes; they are the product of much bitter experience and disappointment. Of course, he occasionally projects something of the knowledge he has since acquired onto the story of how he thought and the choices he made as a young man, but one thing was patently clear to him from the beginning: Horthy and alignment with Germany would take the country down the path towards dictatorship. He did not veer to the political left as a result, he "merely" became a modern European. He joined the resistance, because he stood for learning and modernity as well as for the time-honoured, historical traditions of his class. Neither does he forget how much he owes to his Jesuit education - strange though it may seem in Hungary today to see priests portrayed against the "neo-Baroque" backdrop of the Horthy-era but not in the role of conservative reactionaries and collaborators. It is also strange to see aristocrats and landowners emerging as a better alternative to the leadership aspirations of Horthy and the pre-fascist government of Gömbös. Count István Bethlen, conservative prime minister of the 1920s responsible for the post-Trianon consolidation, comes across in a light in which he has long deserved to be regarded by the common consciousness. And Imre Biedermann, a wealthy Jewish baron and owner of a vast estate in Baranya county, becomes the young Thassy's real teacher; he is the person who sets him on that "slippery" path whose ultimate goal is no less than "to save our country, our institutions, the world, for that was what Baron Imre Biedermann, member of parliament, landowner and hussar captain of the reserve, so ardently desired. The first half-hour's lesson with him was later to put me in uniform and lead me into dangerous adventures. I had found my apostle and committed myself to being his student, but I had no idea at the beginning where this path would eventually lead."
Jenõ Thassy thus completed his education at the Ludovika Military Academy and became an officer. In 1942, on his first posting - in the recently re-annexed Kassa (now Kos˙ice, in Slovakia) - the commander of the young lieutenant's battalion was Jenõ Nagy, one of those Hungarian officers who mounted the armed resistance, thereby sacrificing their military careers and, indeed, their lives. After Biedermann, the highly cultured and imaginative Jenõ Nagy had a profound formative influence on the character of Jenõ Thassy, who soon also committed himself irrevocably to the principle and practice of "rescuing whatever could be rescued". Whereas Jenõ Nagy and many of his companions were exe-cuted by the Hungarian military leadership which unhesitatingly served the interests of the Germans, many others, including Thassy and some of his fellow-officers, landowners, aristocrats, Jesuits, nurses and city wide-boys, operated with a modicum of success on the dangerous territory of a Budapest careening towards the siege and the end. They saved lives and they saved their honour; they survived the disaster by remaining human. However, there was hardly time to draw breath before the next act in this historical tragi-comedy commenced; this time Thassy fled to the West. Not all his companions realized in time what was happening; some paid for this with their lives, among them Imre Biedermann, who had survived the Holocaust only to be killed by ÁVÓ thugs in 1947.
Dangerous Territory deserves a special place in the enormous pile of literary memoirs dealing with the last days of old Hungary, all of which, with self-flagellating scrutiny, seek to answer one question: where did we go wrong?
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Miklós Györffy
is our regular reviewer of new fiction.
