Nicholas Parsons
Your City, My City, Their City
Reflections on Budapest Guidebooks
...
Outsiders and insiders
In the century previous to ours, most of the mainstream modern guides covered
Hungary in general and Budapest in particular until the advent of Communism.
At that point, demand fell away to such an extent that producing a guide was no
longer considered a paying proposition for most western publishers of guidebooks.
The exception was West Germany, though even then their books mostly
appeared in the late Kádár era (e.g. Prestel's Hungary of 1985). DuMont deserves
a special mention for standing against the general trend and publishing Erika
Bollweg's lively Budapest in its mainline Richtig reisen series as early as 1983, presumably
a reflection of the fact that Hungary, with its more relaxed atmosphere,
was a holiday destination favoured by both East and West Germans, often indeed
the place where separated families could meet up. Almost the only other books for
western travellers were American compendia taking in the whole of "Eastern [sic]
Europe" (e.g. Fodor), an approach which inevitably tended to have a somewhat
homogenising effect on very different countries and cultures. Bollweg herself
presents a chatty and essentially nostalgic view of the city, in which some venerable
clichés are taken from the propstore and dusted down ("the Paris of the
East", "the Pearl of the Danube", "the Queen of the Bridges"). On the other hand,
the book is also remarkable for being one of the very few accounts of Budapest
by a foreigner who had learned Hungarian, which enables her to penetrate where
others do not (e.g. in the vivid and sad cameo of an elderly Rezső Seress playing
Szomorú vasárnap (Gloomy Sunday) in a dingy Pest nightspot).
Since the fall of Communism, there has predictably been an explosion of guidebooks
dealing with Hungary and Budapest, both "stand-alone" publications and
volumes in all the main series (Frommer, Fodor, Blue Guide, Baedeker, DuMont,
Rough Guide, Lonely Planet, Eyewitness and Insight, besides Italian, Spanish and
French offerings). It would be wearisome to describe the approaches of the
various mostly well-known series, some of which (e.g. Eyewitness) also exist in
various translations. Their markets are usually quite well-defined (backpackers
are equipped with Lonely Planets or Rough Guides, sabbatical professors with Blue
Guides.) Nowadays, publishers' marketing techniques (or lack of them), as well
as the expectations of readers, have sealed the fate of most "stand-alone" guides,
only a few of which make it to a second edition - something that makes the success
of András Török's Budapest: A Critical Guide all the more laudable. Perhaps
nothing so idiosyncratic has appeared on the market since the writer Antal Szerb
wrote his delightful Budapesti kalauz Marslakók számára (A Martian's Guide to
Budapest, 1935; new facsimile edition published by Officina Nova in 1991). Based
on an essay Szerb originally wrote for Nyugat, the booklet was a whimsical and
gently ironic love-letter to Budapest, qualities it shares with Török's work half
a century later. [It appears in its entirety in this issue.] Both take advantage
of the local patriot's privilege of mockery, whereby the kalauz describes the
Fisherman's Bastion as "giccs, de gyönyörű..." ("kitsch, but wonderful"), and
Török remarks that its replica, which can be seen in the confectionery exhibition
of the Museum of Catering is "only slightly more sugary than the original".
Most guides are written by outsiders for other outsiders, whatever the publishers'
blurbs may claim. Török's book is that rare volume, a guide by an insider
from which both insiders and outsiders can profit. On the other hand, as someone
once said of Margaret Thatcher, it has the weaknesses of its strengths.
Török's milieu is the coffee-house, the baths, the lecture hall, the cosy little
eatery with genuine Hungarian cuisine, and all the other haunts of the intellectual
urban sophisticate. Óbuda, one of the three municipalities united in 1973 to
form Budapest, might just as well not exist; likewise the Roman remains of
Aquincum and its surroundings, of which happily there is a long description in a
rather good, but poorly distributed little guide that was published in the nineties.
Certain areas are of course always unfashionable for guidebooks, while those
that are may be precisely what the the "insider" chooses to avoid.
Nevertheless, the sights that Török does choose to cover, always in his gossipy
engaging manner, amply make up for what is omitted. My own favourite is his
account of the "world-famous lavatory" in the subway of the Batthyány Square
metro station, which begins with a quote from Vespasian ("a little money takes
away every smell") and ends with a well-aimed dig at "privatisation" since the
change. "This book," he writes in the Introduction to the First Edition, "tries to
combine three types of guides with the advantages of all three: the Baedeker type,
the critical guidebook and the alternative guidebook. Obviously it will not be
exhaustive in all three modes."2 Obviously. But what is actually meant by "critical"
and "alternative"? Such qualities are necessarily dependent on a "point of view",
which in turn means that the dominance of the authorial personality is crucial,
by contrast to the studied impersonality cultivated by the formula guides. The
impersonality itself is a rhetorical mode designed to create the impression of an
authoritative, objective consensus of unassailable accuracy. Török's book, on the
other hand, scarcely mentions a fact without also offering a subjective opinion or
a comment. It is certainly no Baedeker and benefits from not being one.
Locally written specialist guides
Into this category fall a number of usually shorter books focusing on minority
aspects of Budapest culture or specific topics (architecture, eating out, shopping
etc.). The Jewish Face of Budapest by Anna Sellyei [n.d.] reflects the revival
of interest in Jewish culture per se following the rendszerváltás (literally "systemchange")
in 1989. Such a topic was largely taboo under Communism, a doctrine
that claimed to have superseded ethnic particularism. More comprehensive (and
not actually intended as a guidebook, though it has elements of such) is Jewish
Budapest: Monuments, Rites, History, edited by Géza Komoróczy (1999). As the
editor notes in his preliminary remarks, the publication of this work, or at least
its title, was not uncontroversial, critics claiming that the very idea of a "Jewish
Budapest" in such an assimilated society was "ahistorical". By way of reply,
Komoróczy points to the numerous books appearing at this time with titles like
Jewish Rome (he might have added there was a particularly good guidebook to
Jewish Prague published almost contemporaneously), as well as the German
series entitled Jüdisches Städtebild put out by Suhrkamp. "Speaking of Jewish
Budapest," he adds, "refers, on the one hand, to a distinct component in the
society of Hungary, and on the other, to a Hungarian variant of the universal
Jewish culture in the Diaspora."
The treatment of a culture within a culture, though often controversial, is a
generally welcome departure from the monolithic approach of the total guidebook.
Readers of the latter inevitably tend to experience the city as a succession
of items (a Baroque church here, an Art Nouveau bank there) that have been
wrenched from their period-determined and cultural context in order to become
"sights." This is usually avoided in the excellent series Our Budapest, put out with
the support of the City Hall, whereby individual architectural, environmental,
cultural, social and confessional aspects of Budapest are treated in short
guides written by experts, but not by bores. The knowledgeable enthusiast's
perspective is quite different from that of the diligent generalist covering the
"must see" items of a total guidebook, and of course it is more rewarding. Who
would not warm to the late Anna Zádor's account of her beloved Classicism
or to János Gerle, one of the most quixotic and selfless promoters of the city's
turn of the century architectural heritage, expatiating on his favourite Art Nouveau
architects? As far as I know, this is a unique experiment in officially supported,
but intellectually independent, guidebook-making.
Our Budapest, modestly priced at not much more than the cost of a foreign
newspaper, and published in Hungarian, German and English, has recently been
revamped: the latest offerings come with highly attractive illustrations (including
archival ones) and a more attractive format and layout. Apart from the fact that
their editors share the Hungarian publishers' irritating and pathological aversion
to indexes, it is hard to fault them. Although some titles may appear a shade
whimsical ("Night Lights," "Shopfronts"), closer inspection reveals that, taken
together, the series presents a mosaic of the city that is both specific and documentary,
the very reverse of the homogenising clichés beloved of package tour
guides. A city that is "real" and "exists in time" (to adopt Barthes' criteria) is
necessarily a palimpsest, a blend of order and disorder, a mass of contradictions
and parallels. This is what the series reflects by breaking down the image of
Budapest into its component parts: there are books on the "Roman Catholic
Churches", the "Protestant Churches" and on "Serbs in Pest-Buda"; the title on
"Equestrian Statues" is complemented by that on the (Communist) "Statue Park";
essays on "The Danube Promenade" or "Parks and Forests" are counterpointed
by those on "Industrial Monuments" or "Urban Transportation". What emerges
indirectly from the texts is the periodisation and visual context of Gyula Krúdy's
nostalgia, Antal Szerb's whimsy and Frigyes Karinthy's coffee-house culture - but
also of Dezső Kosztolányi's bleak realities, where the "Palaces of Money" (as one
of the volumes dealing with banks is titled) can be imagined as icons of bourgeois
economic triumphalism and as affronts to the slum-dweller. The texts of Our
Budapest imply the infrastructural and chronological reality within which the
city's autobiographical or fictive visions were created.
...
Creating and selling an "authentic" experience
Time is money and the tourist needs the "facts", or at any rate serviceable
clichés. Instead of an accumulation of knowledge and understanding (so the
accusation runs), modern tourism offers a pre-packaged ersatz experience
fabricated out of marketable icons and dubious notions of "heritage". Indeed
the somewhat nebulous concept of "tourism" today covers everything from a
thoughtful individual's enlightened attempt at self-education to the worst excesses
of sexploitation, together with the ecological devastation of desperately
poor environments by visitors from phenomenally rich ones.
The guidebook writer is caught somewhere in the middle of these two
extremes - at his best, a liberal spirit who opens the eyes of his readers to new
cultural perspectives; at his worst, a lowly and spiritless processor of an exploitative
industry. Contemporary guidebooks also exhibit tensions between a normative
approach to sights that was previously symbolised by the "stars" placed
against the most important ones (according to a John Murray or a Karl Baedeker)
and a Post-Modern non-prescriptive approach where "anything goes." The
extreme version of the latter position is adumbrated in MacCannell's remark that
"anything is potentially an attraction. It simply awaits one person to take the
trouble to point it out to another as something noteworthy, or worth seeing."6 In
reality, however, guidebook writers (or at least those catering to mass tourism)
cannot afford to lose control of the sightseeing agenda, nor to depart significantly
from a tacitly agreed list of major sights, not least because that is what their
readers expect of them. The result is a compromise, whereby the Blue Guides
have dropped their star system over the last decade, evidently feeling that such
spoon-feeding patronises their readers. On the other hand, a host of mass market
guides actually sell themselves on their handy lists of "must see" items, "the
Top Ten Sights" of the city, or similar formulas.
One has to accept that the "cult of authenticity and place" is capable of an
entire range of interpretation from the dry and scholarly to the wholly subjective
and whimsical. For example, András Török, writing in The Budapest of the
Imagination about the city's "spirit of place", cites an architect and writer who
"has said that the spirit of the city of Budapest had, by 1960, retreated into the historic
Castle District of Buda." He was right at the time, opines Török, "but the spirit
of a city reacts to tourists like the devil to holy water: it flees for dear life. So later
in the 1960's it fled ... to Gozsdu udvar (Király utca, 7th District), where one hundred
years ago seven out of ten inhabitants were Jewish. However, it soon became
apparent that the plans of Hong Kong businessmen to erect a trade centre on this
site would force the spirit to flee from here too." (It should be said that the businessmen's
claimed intention was to create a new promenade and a new community
with its own stylish identity - and thus a new spirit of place.) On this reading,
the "spirit of Budapest" is conservative, requiring a combination of gnosis, nostalgia,
continuity and stasis to survive. Török depicts it as something whose identity
is defined by what it must escape from. "Will it have anywhere left to go?" he asks
with the frustrated air of a man in pursuit of the délibáb.
The answer is: probably not. Our age is no longer appropriate for the sort of
spirit of place celebrated by late Romantic writers like Lawrence Durrell or Henry
Miller, if only because the "authentic" tends to become inauthentic as soon as the
best-selling guidebook draws attention to it. As far as Hungary is concerned, its
individual elements of supposed "authenticity" - from Gypsy music to the cowpokes
of the Great Plain - are in danger of suffering the fate of native Americans
on reservations; the picturesque and v ö l k i s c h aspects of Central European national
cultures are bundled into marketable packages of stereotypes for tourist groups.
In the great cities, however, a somewhat different process is at work. Here, a vicarious
sophistication takes the place of the naive "folk" experience in the countryside:
"insider's guides" have become so ubiquitous that we are all "insiders" now,
once we have absorbed the funky prose of our knowing guidebook.
A complicating factor in regard to the issue of authenticity is the increasing onus
on the guidebook writer to avoid gratuitous offence to ethnic or religious sensibilities.
In a secular age (at least if we are talking of Western Europe) it is something of
an irony that texts for public consumption must increasingly handle articles of
faith with respect, not because they are necessarily worthy of respect, but because
their adherents believe in them so strongly. It is interesting to see how guidebooks
now handle a cherished relic like the Szent jobb, bearing in mind that for several
centuries in the Middle Ages relics and their associated indulgences were actually
the staple ingredients of guidebooks for pilgrims. As tourist attractions, relics are the
most enduring sights from the 4th century to the present, even if today's scholarly
Cicerone with a secular cast of mind finds them something of an embarrassment.
A contemporary guidebook author has some difficulty in hitting exactly the
right tone when dealing with the celebrated Szent jobb. The safest policy, one that
gives offence neither to believers nor patriots, is to report without comment the
claims made for it, whereby formulas like "believed to be" (Blue Guide), "said to
be" (Insight Guide) or "angeblich" (allegedly, Prestel) come in handy. On the other
hand, the TimeOut guide, presumably with its laid-back young readership in mind,
goes further than most in open irreverence: "The mummified fist of Szent István
lies in a Matthias Church-shaped trinket box [sic] - a bit like Thing from the
Addams Family. Ft20 in the slot lights up this gruesome relic." Likewise the
Eyewitness Guide refers to the Szent Jobb as "the most bizarre relic in all
Hungary". Perhaps as a distraction from the perils of commenting on the
genuineness of the relic, the lighting arrangements seem especially to interest
the guidebook authors. Frank Strzyz˙ewski (op. cit. p. 254) tells his readers to put
20 forints into the box, for which they will get 118 seconds of illumination. Török
(op. cit. p. 82) says "you drop a coin in the slot and the relic lights up. If not right
away, the guard gives the case a knock, and behold, it does." The text of the
Insight Guide stands out for being almost the only one to challenge the credentials
of the Szent Jobb directly, remarking drily that it is "said to be [the right
hand] of St Stephen... but probably dates from the 14th or even the 15th century."
Tacitly the guidebooks seem to have adopted the pragmatic line that the
genuineness of the relic is not an issue; what counts is that many people have
believed in the relic, or do still believe in it. This makes it a tourist "sight" that may
be sacral for those who wish and simply a curiosity for the rest. In a broader sense,
as MacCannell and others have pointed out, all "sights" - monuments, buildings,
panoramas and relics - become part of the tourist ritual and in that sense are
sacral. It is this that makes them emblematic of an individual culture, possessing
what Walter Benjamin described as an "aura", but which also (according to critics
of tourism) divorces them from the "real life" of that culture. It is the way in which
they are used, not what they happen to be, that determines their authenticity.
...
Suppressio veri
The guidebooks to Budapest and Hungary published under Communism were
often quite good in a formulaic sort of way, but unsurprisingly they left out
anything regarded as "sensitive." Nevertheless, they were certainly a great deal
better than the Intourist type of production, hilariously satirised by the British
novelist, Malcolm Bradbury, in his burlesque Why Come to Slaka? (1986). Written
in a perfectly attuned parody of the mangled English of the tourist brochure, this
guidebook to the "People's Republic of Slaka" caricatures the tone of such works,
complete with their linguistic slips that accidentally reveal the truth. For example,
the section on Slaka's "Achievements and Political System", graciously written
by the Minister of Culture himself, lauds the "National Assemblage of the
Fatherland", which is composed of "representatives of all groups: the committee
for State Security, the Counsel of Ministers, our military leaders and even elected
representatives. These give their advises to the Supreme Counsel ('Politburo'),
which decides on executions." The page where this helpful text occurs is illustrated
with a characteristically shabby black and white photograph featuring what
appears to be a Hungarian csikós driving a herd of wild horses towards an electricity
pylon. The caption reads: "Slakan shepherd urges into the future his flock."
While this would be grossly overstated as a parody of the Hungarian guides
produced for foreigners under the Kádár regime, the shadow of the dictatorship
does of course fall across the history section, e.g. of Corvina's 1967 German
guide to Budapest. Its final three paragraphs present the period from 1947 up to
the date of publication as a triumph of five-year plans, prosperity and progress,
all as a result of "the people" taking command in every sphere of life. In the comparatively
restrained boasting of this Corvina guide ("Die strahlenden Kaufläden
beleben nicht mehr allein die zentralen Stadtteile, sondern auch die Außenbezirke." - "
Glittering shops enliven not only the town centre, but also the suburbs.")
one hears a muted echo of Bradbury's Why Come to Slaka?, where we read
"The advanced watercress industry is a miracle of aggro-organization. Our
nuclear technology is proud of its piles, and our RMBK Kiev-type reactor, with its
spectacular emissions, offers the means of electrifying our entire people."
There is a notable exception to the general dearth of British guides to Hungary
in the sixties and seventies, namely Alan Ryalls' Your Guide to Hungary, published
by the small firm of Alvin Redman in 1967. A decade after the Revolution, and
boasting a Foreword by the President of the National Office of Tourism, this guidebook
generally reflects the image that the Kádár regime sought to project of a land
wisely ruled by five-year plans, helpful officials and smiling traffic policemen (the
author seems particularly enamoured of the last named). "The Hungarian People's
Republic," we are told at the end of the History section, "is carrying on a consistent,
firm policy for peace to protect its own achievements and to promote peaceful
co-existence and co-operation amongst all people." If this sounds like His
Master's Voice speaking, the author volunteers his own assessment as follows:
"I have been asked quite seriously by Britons and Americans whether the 'hordes
of Soviet troops' stationed in Hungary interfered with my holiday in any way. I can
honestly say that throughout my travels in Hungary, I have never come across
these 'hordes of Soviet troops', though I have occasionally seen a couple strolling
in the streets, apparently in harmony with the Hungarians around them."
Ryalls' book, which is full of useful and practical information but offers minimal
coverage of architecture and cultural artefacts, faithfully transmits the Kádár
regime's decision to eschew the earlier threatening attitudes of Stalinism ("those
who are not with us are against us") in favour of the disarming and reasonablesounding
tone of "those who are not against us are with us." One's impression
of the author, derived from the somewhat breathless and occasionally naive tone
of the book, is that of an idealistic English leftie of the caravanning and camp fire
variety. There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of his enthusiasm for
Hungary and Hungarians. While he seems a little over-eager to toe the official line
in places, it would be wrong to dismiss such a thoroughly useful book as mere
propaganda. Rather, it conjures exactly the air of "normality" that Kádárism liked
to project, and for which, after all, evidence could be adduced if you were ideologically
so inclined. By ironically putting the phrase "hordes of Soviet troops" in
inverted commas (twice!), the text also manages to imply that their numbers were
greatly exaggerated by ill-informed and possibly ill-intentioned persons, without
risking any confrontation with the actual figures.
However, most of the mainstream guide publishers steered clear of the Communist
countries before 1989, not so much out of ethical concern as out of a correct
perception that not many westerners wanted to go to them. This of course
generally left the field clear for the bland local guidebooks, produced also in
some foreign languages. All credit, therefore, to Eugene Fodor (himself of Hungarian
extraction), whose Fodor's Hungary (1987 - abridged from an earlier
edition of Fodor's Eastern Europe) contains an excellent and candid Overview
of Contemporary Eastern Europe by Fodor's compatriot George Schöpflin.
The latter's paragraph on mid-eighties Hungary is not only a model of fairness,
but dryly punctures the clichés about the "happiest barracks in the Soviet camp",
for example, "Hungarians ... do believe they are better off than their neighbours
- the regime encourages this belief tacitly as a way of promoting complacency -
but they also have to work extremely hard for the privilege. A majority of
Hungarians will do two jobs: they have to, to make ends meet."
Translated by
Nicholas Parsons
has written a number of guidebooks himself, including one on Budapest.
His forthcoming book is a cultural history of the guidebook as a literary genre
from Pausanias to the Rough Guide.
