Nicholas T. Parsons
The Joke that Dances over Catastrophe
Paul Lendvai: Die Ungarn: Ein Jahrtausend. Sieger in Niederlagen.
(The Hungarians. A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat)
C. Bertelsmann, Munich, 1999. 634 Pages, with 24 pages of black and white
illustrations.
If you write the history of a people (especially one as mixed as the "Hungarians"), are you engaged primarily in historical analysis or psychological portraiture? The question is a real one, even if its resolution hardly seems to matter in the context of a text so rewarding, entertaining and well written as the one under review. "The contradiction between individual genius and repeated national failure," says the blurb of Paul Lendvai's impressively bulky tome, "is one of the most fascinating features of the turbulent history of the Magyars, [as they pursued their nationhood] between Germans and Russians, between Austrians and Southern Slavs, between independence and subjection to foreign rulers. [Hungary's] continued existence, or rather its survival as a nation-state, may be considered a miracle; by the same token, the Hungarians, right up to the present day, have time and again turned out to be victors in defeat.... "What is Hungarian?" [asked Tibor Déry after the Revolution of 1956], and answered: "A joke that dances over catastrophes".
So are we embarked upon a work that seeks causes of historical events in reactions and behaviour determined by a perceived ethnic character, a sort of psychohistory of the Hungarian nation? Despite the eye-catching bons mots of the blurb, Lendvai's book goes much deeper than that, especially in the early and middle part of the book. While the author is an immensely gifted journalist (currently Editor-in-Chief of the Eastern and South-Eastern European Section of the ORF), he is also a scholar and honorary professor, whose record in Central European and South-Eastern European studies is distinguished. This book is far more substantial than the witty musings to be found, for example, in Luigi Barzini's The Italians, an international bestseller in its day; nor does it adopt the tiresome de haut en bas tone that disfigures Gordon Brooke-Shepherd's recently published The Austrians. On the other hand, although the author's passionate enthusiasm for his homeland is readily apparent, his book eschews the sort of Hooray Henry patriotism ("Our Island Story") on which British children used to be reared, and which found a more sophisticated after-life in popular history written for middle-brow adults by writers like Sir Arthur Bryant.
This is hardly surprising. Lendvai's Jewish parentage on his mother's side stems from Alsósófalva (now Romania), and on his father's side from Kassa (now Košice, in Slovakia). As assimilated Hungarians living in a periphery where Magyarization policies from the late 19th century caused fury and nationalistic resentment, one can well imagine the sort of growing hostility such families may have endured; as Jews, against whom official Hungary turned in the hateful swirl of 20th century racial ideology, assimilation turned out to have marginalized them again, by moving the goalposts of Hungarian identity. One of the most fascinating chapters in the book is the twenty-eighth, entitled "Hungarian Jew or Jewish Hungarian?", which deals with what Heine called der Taufzettel as Entréebillet zur europäischen Kultur, the conversion and assimilation of Jewry into European (in this case Hungarian) culture.
This chapter, and the two preceding ones, are as good a place as any to begin an overview of the whole book. Chapter XXVI, somewhat over half way through the whole text, marks a caesura, whereby the author abandons the flowing narrative of the first part and begins to treat his theme essayistically: "Blindness beyond all Bounds: the Hungarian Sense of Mission and the Nationalities" (Chapter XXVI); "The ´Golden Age' of the Millennium: Modernisation and its Darker Sides" (Chapter XXVII); "Hungarian Jew or Jewish Hungarian?" The Unique Symbiosis between the Nobility and the Jews" (Chapter XXVIII); "Will Hungary be German or Magyar? The Special Role of the Germans" (Chapter XXIX). The titles of these four chapters circle round the book's leitmotif, which is that of the recurring tension between the idea of the Hungarian nation (based on history, constitutionalism and cultural continuity, but also, until 1848 on an increasingly anachronistic feudalism); and the reality of foreign domination, partition and exploitation, finally the thwarted aspirations of other nationalities within the lands of St Stephen's Crown. The modern expression of the idea, enunciated by Kossuth in 1848 and reaffirmed by Ferenc Deák in 1867, is summed up (p. 342) as follows: "In Hungary there are nationalities, but there is only one nation." By the turn of the century, only one Hungarian MP, writes Lendvai, was consistently protesting against the systematic perversion of this idea (ruthlessly pursued as the non-negotiable premise of the Hungarian state), and vainly demanding respect for the theoretically liberal Nationality Law of 1868.
The author's handling of this particular topic (Law XLIV) is deft: we see (p. 331) how it guaranteed the equal status of every citizen, regardless of nationality, insofar as he was a constituent of the "one and indivisible Hungarian nation". However its preamble added the proviso that equal status applied only to the use of customary languages, and even then only so long as the efficiency of administration and justice required it, stipulations that from 1875 onwards were used to turn a concessionary law into an instrument of oppression. Yet, given the assumptions on which the Compromise itself rested, it is hard to see how things could have turned out otherwise; the Hungarian half of the Empire was only 40 per cent ethnically Magyar. To have begun sharing out legislative and executive power (except at the very lowest level) to the collectively more numerous other nationalities, would not only have been an act of political suicide comparable to that of Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980's, it would have removed at a stroke the Magyars' raison d'etre as joint guarantor, with Austria, of the integrity of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. That at least seemed self-evident to most Hungarians. As Jörg K. Hoensch puts it, the ruling Hungarian elite "believed that recognition of individual equality for non-Magyar citizens, modest concessions in the use of their native languages and the guarantee of autonomy for the minority churches had already reached the limit of what the Hungarian nation-state could reasonably concede."1
The story of how the Hungarian nation came to find itself in such a historical cul-de-sac is really the sub-text of Lendvai's book. Not that this is a deterministic narrative where the unseen hand of fate guides the nation to its inevitable doom (even if it is quite easy to find Hungarians who tend to think like this). The narrative illustrates with vivid anecdotal asides and well-chosen commentary from other historians, eyewitnesses or commentators at home and abroad, that choices were made by leading figures in Hungarian history: in Transylvania during the Turkish period, in the Revolution of 1848 or in the inter-war period with Regent Miklós Horthy as head-of-state. And that these choices, at least in part, influenced the more or less lamentable outcomes of individual struggles. And yet, for all that Lendvai is no respecter of taboos, his narrative also demonstrates with clarity and empathy the difficulty of those choices, given the repeatedly desperate geopolitical position of the country. He quotes sources to show how time and again Hungarians have been the victims of manipulation and betrayal by Western powers pursuing their own interests, a phenomenon that begins at least with the wars against the Habsburgs of the Transylvanian Princes and continues through Trianon up to 1956 and the grossly irresponsible and hypocritical "brinkmanship" of John Foster Dulles. At Trianon the French, in an unholy alliance with a particularly Hungarophobe British delegation, cynically distorted their own supposed principles in accommodating maximalist demands made by Hungary's neighbours. Lendvai's summing up of this fateful parody of peace-making is no more than the truth: "Since the partition of Poland, the great powers have not dealt with any European state so mercilessly and with such injustice as they dealt with historic Hungary." (p. 418).
That it was not always thus is demonstrated in the first 100 pages of the book (Chapters I to VIII), in which the author describes Hungary's ascent from a band of marauding tribes to a settled Christian kingdom under St Stephen, and then to great power status under foreign kings. The end of this glittering (albeit sporadically interrupted) ascent, that had culminated in the great Renaissance court of Matthias Corvinus, is marked by the catastrophe of the Battle of Mohács in 1526. This defeat looked like the end of the road for an independent Hungary: "Hungary as an individual political force disappeared from the map of Europe," writes Lendvai; "Even the temperament of the Magyars, their 'peculiar mixture of the sanguine [sic], the phlegmatic, and the melancholy' (Jókai), may be explained by this deeply rooted and historically determined feeling of being an endangered species, given added emphasis by the doom-laden prophecy of Johann Gottfried von Herder. The preoccupation with the 'death of the Magyar people', the fundamental note of pessimism, the national feeling of isolation, the hope against hope, the threat to the individual, all these became the great themes of literature. Numerous poems deal with the fate of the nation." (p. 111). And he goes on to quote from a character in Géza Ottlik's celebrated novel Iskola a határon (School on the Frontier, Budapest, 1950): "We have got used to a solitary celebration of our great, lost battles, which we have survived."
It has been said of the Czechs and Poles that they cultivate a martyr syndrome in their historiography, and perhaps the same might be said, to a greater or lesser extent, of all Central European nations. Outside Hungary, the historically determined Hungarian image was nevertheless sui generis, alternating between perceptions of brutality or of sacrifice, between denigration of the mindless chauvinist or encomia for the gallant victim: such have been the contradictory receptions of the nation's history from the Song of Roland to the Voice of America. For their part, the Hungarian image of themselves and their leaders seemed to veer between messianic optimism and bitter disillusion, between hero-worship and demonization, between nobility of ideals and perceived betrayal of the same. One of the reasons that this book is particularly worth reading is the ability of the author to evoke the charisma of great Hungarians while remaining clear-eyed about their failings. Of Ferenc II Rákóczi he writes (p. 175): "... (he) was the only noble commander who, throughout the whole rebellion, concerned himself with the suffering and misery of the serfs and offered them concrete assistance. His charm and natural modesty and selflessness lent his personality a special aura." On the other hand, concludes Lendvai sadly, "he was no general and his memoirs are basically a tale of battles lost."
Nowhere is the author's even-handedness more evident than in his treatment of Kossuth, who has been subjected posthumously, as in his lifetime, both to unjustified adulation and to prejudiced criticism. (Of course it doesn't help that, of the two great heroes of Hungary's Reform Period, the Communists chose to canonize Kossuth and airbrush out the aristocrat Széchenyi). In a chapter (XXII) entitled "Hero Kossuth against 'Judas' Görgey: "Good" and "Evil" in the Mythology of Sacrifice" Lendvai treads carefully through the minefield of the "traitor Görgey" debate. In a sober analysis (p. 277), he examines Kossuth's motives for accusing Görgey of treachery ("... the claim that the nation had only been defeated by trickery was designed to inspire hope in the future and win support for preparation of a new struggle for liberty" – p. 278). It was a tactical move, designed to re-establish his authority in the eyes of his countrymen, and especially among potentially sympathetic foreign powers.
Yet the instrumentalization, both of Kossuth's heroic image and General Görgey's supposed treachery in 1849 by surrendering to the Russians at Világos, has clouded the perceptions of generations of Hungarians and indeed of non-Hungarians. It cannot be laid at Kossuth's door that an unholy alliance of nationalists and Communists have used and misused his name for their own ends. Lendvai describes how, in 1952, the Rákosi regime brought out a study on Kossuth's 150th birthday, in which a contributor extravagantly envisioned a trinity of heroes who had made Hungary what it was: step forward Rákóczi, Kossuth, Rákosi!2 But even if we accept that Kossuth is the victim of hagiographical treatment from such dubious quarters, his branding of Görgey (in his letter to the western powers of 12th September, 1849) as the "Judas of Hungary" remains one of the most despicable acts of any statesman worthy of the name, demeaning both Kossuth and the Hungarian cause.
One of the saddest passages in the book relates how Görgey subsequently lived for seventeen years under house-arrest in Klagenfurt. Returning to Budapest, he was hounded from his lowly job as book-keeper for the tolls of the Chain Bridge, and received the same treatment when he attempted to take up employment in a brick factory or work on a Transylvanian railway project. His memoirs were not published in Hungary until 1911: we can be sure they contain something of truth and honour in them, if only because Engels described them as hundsgemein, an endorsement if ever there was one, coming from such a source. In a sensitive summing up (p. 280), Lendvai makes the observation that should surely be hung on the wall of every Hungarian school: "Kossuth's historical significance would not be any the less, if Görgey were to be regarded as a superb soldier and a good patriot", a fact which has been acknowledged by every responsible historian and teacher of history for many a decade. As for Görgey, his "instrumentalization" (mostly demonization) was hardly less bizarre than the canonization (albeit with some bitter dissenting voices) of Kossuth. Some rehabilitation was eventually undertaken by the Horthy regime, which had an equestrian statue put up to him in Buda in 1935. Damaged in the war, its bronze contributed to the making of the mega-statue of Stalin pulled down by the freedom fighters of 1956. After the change of 1989, the post-Communist government had a new statue erected on the original site on Buda's Castle Hill.
Such pathos-ridden detail is Lendvai's stock in trade: he is rhetorical, ironic and empathetic in turn. His delight in rogues and impostors is given free rein, the Hungarian genius that he rightly acclaims having also its counterpart in a talent for intrigue, deception and not always genial chutzpah. Perhaps the most hilarious chapter in the book is entitled "Who was Captain Gusev? A Russian 'Freedom Fighter' between Minsk and Budapest", which deals with the celebration by the Rákosi regime of a Russian officer of that name, who was said to have agitated on behalf of the Hungarians when serving in the Tsarist army sent to suppress the freedom fighters. The Communists hoped thereby to improve the image of the Russians, who had after all dealt the fatal blow to the Hungarian cause in 1849 and were now again enslaving the Magyars. "Alexej Gusev" was actually a product of the fertile imagination of the "Muscovite" emigrant writer Béla Illés, but this did not prevent a street being named after him and a plaque being erected to him (Gusev) in Budapest (later even with a relief portrait of the great man) at which the Communist military annually laid wreaths. "When the Soviet President Mikoyan visited Hungary," adds Lendvai, "he did not forget to recall, in his speech before the Parliament, the legacy of Gusev and his heroic comrades" (in the meantime a number of Gusev´s brother soldiers had deftly been added to the story of the Magyar-friendly hero).
The mixture of cynicism, sadness and farce in this tale makes it a particularly poignant addition to the library of Hungarian irony. "Geniuses, Losers, Lebenskünstler" shouts the slogan on the book's back cover, a marketing man's description of Hungarians, if you like: yet tales like that of Gusev, or more especially like that of his creator, Illés, partly validate that image, even if it leaves out the pathos and tragedy with which Lendvai invests the story of the Hungarians elsewhere in his book. It can in fact be disconcerting for non-Hungarians to discover how naive heroism and extreme cynicism co-exist in Hungarian life, sometimes indeed in the same person. Perhaps they are different sides of the same coin: the heroism has generally precipitated catastrophes, the cynicism has sweetened the process of survival. At bottom is an irresistible sardonic humour (much in evidence in the book under review), which does indeed constitute a sort of philosophy (or anti-philosophy) of life.The tragi-comedy of the Gusev story helps to appease the ghosts of horrors past, and make bearable the diseased normality of the present, by means of its surreal humour. Lendvai relates how eager young historians set off for Minsk from Budapest to research the life and deeds of Captain Gusev. This did not worry Illés, as he had already taken the precaution of announcing that the relevant archive had unhappily been burned to the ground. Despairing of finding material, the researchers were momentarily enthused by an article on Gusev that appeared in a Soviet monthly: avidly scanning the pages for sources, they swooped on the first footnote ... which however was sourced to "Béla Illés/Delo Guszeva". Illés lived until 1974, the Gusev plaque, however, much longer, although (or perhaps because) the truth had by then leaked out. A satirist offered an inscription for Illés's gravestone: Here lies Béla Illés, If it's true...
Lendvai's labour of (sometimes frustrated) love does not present a new picture of Hungary (he relies heavily on mainstream historians like Kann, Hanák and Deák for the framework of his judgements); but this was not his intention. He makes vivid use of quotation from secondary sources, particularly literary ones, which are of great assistance and interest to those with no Hungarian. If I have any criticism as a non-specialist reader, it is that the book is rather cursory in its treatment of the Kádár era, which the author might be expected to know in detail, and the narrative effectively ends in 1989. Perhaps the author was unwilling to immerse himself in the complexities, passions, disillusion and frustrations of politics since 1989, which all the same have steered Hungary into NATO and to the brink of the EU. But a decade is a long time in politics and more changes have been seen in this one than in the previous four. This is something later editions could remedy. The final chapter of the book ("Everyone is a Hungarian...: Geniuses and Artists") is a long résumé of (mostly emigrant) Hungarian achievement in the twentieth century, which repeats what are by now virtually clichčs on the subject, without really examining afresh the puzzle of how such a small nation has given so much to the world. It is followed by a useful chronological table of events in Hungarian history, which is detailed and especially useful for the more confused and confusing periods, such as the Transylvanian independence struggle.
Overall the book is written with passion and wit and amply fulfills the aims modestly proclaimed by the author at the end of his Introduction: "As a Hungarian of Jewish extraction who, after forty years in Vienna has become an Austrian, I hope that I do not need to be cowed by any taboos, and that I can describe the Magyars with friendly, but also critical detachment". That is a fair characterization of his text. No one who is interested in Hungary should miss reading this book, which is why it should also be considered for translations into other European languages.
NOTES
1, Jörg K. Hoensch: A History of Modern Hungary: 1867–1986. London and New York, 1988. p. 31. Back
2, It is worth noting that the instrumentalization of the trinity was probably an intentional allusion to Hungarian symbolic tradition. The most famous national "trinity" was that of Árpád – Rákóczi – Kossuth, while Kecskemét town hall has a mosaic featuring Széchenyi – Kossuth – Deák. Back
Nicholas T. Parsons
is a freelance writer and journalist based in Vienna. His latest book is Blue Guide Austria (A&C Black, UK; Norton, USA, 2000).
