Géza Buzinkay
Antal Szerb, the Inquisitive Martian and Budapest in the 1930s
We, the present readers of Szerb's Budapest Guide, are the Martian, the creature
from far away. The city today is different, its landmarks are found elsewhere,
associations (if any) different than those of Antal Szerb seventy years ago
will come to mind when roaming the streets. It is best to read the Guide as if it were
the gentle recollections of a distant, sunken world by a Romantic author of the
early nineteenth century. Yet Szerb actually intended it as a "persiflage of a
tourist guide", as one critic put it at the time of its publication in 1935.
Antal Szerb (1901-1945) is best known in his native country as a literary historian
and critic, the author of a History of Hungarian Literature (1934) and a threevolume
History of World Literature (1941), two ground-breaking and immensely
popular works which challenge the sweep of any novel. Szerb was an essayist of
the first rank, who produced translations from four languages and whose knowledge
and erudition were legendary. His two novels, The Pendragon Legend, an
ingenious and enthralling ghost story (1934), and Journey by Moonlight ( 1937)
have been everybody's secret favourites. The novels, as well as his brilliant evocation
of the notorious affair of Marie Antoinette's necklace in the The Queen's
Necklace (1943), were regarded as side products, as it were, of his many talents
and interests. Still, Szerb regarded himself first and foremost as a writer. It is a
belated compensation for his early and tragic death that the two novels have
recently been published to resounding success in Germany and Italy. Their recent
success in England can also be attributed to the congenial translation of Len Rix,
translator of A Martian's Guide to Budapest for this journal.
Antal Szerb's short life, a life spent very much among his beloved books, can
be summed up in a line or two. He studied Hungarian, German and English
literature at universities in Graz and Budapest, lived for five years in France, Italy
and London, took a teaching position at a secondary school on his return to
Budapest and was killed in the Holocaust for being Jewish.
A Martian's Guide to Budapest, his "whimsical and gently ironical loveletter
to the city", as Nicholas T. Parsons puts it in an essay in this issue, first
appeared in Nyugat, Hungary's leading literary review of the first half of the
twentieth century, and was subsequently published in a limited edition with a
handful of illustrations and ornamental capitals in 1935. The publishing house
Officina, known for its serious and handsomely produced small books, was the
undertaking of a Budapest printer and stationer, Dávid Löbl. The translation
published here is accompanied by drawings and initials, some by Sándor
Kolozsváry for the 1935 edition and others by József Pintér.
A Martian's Guide to Budapest is a wealth of observations infused with fine
irony. The reader will find a special delight and a challenge in the pyrotechnics of
literary and other references provided by this exceptionally widely read and
original writer. How forceful, and yet enigmatic, the image is of the "Habsburg
radish" topping the belfries of St Anne's Church in the Watertown District - it
takes some looking to discover the similarity in shape between the spire and the
root. Sometimes it is an adjective, sometimes a paragraph, devoted to a building,
area or city district that makes readers forget whatever image of it they might
have had before seeing it through Szerb's eyes.
The Martian was a favourite symbol of Szerb's. In his History of World
Literature, Szerb epitomised Goethe's singular significance by saying that "if we
die out, the Martians will have to study the greatness and weaknesses of our
species through his legacy." The naive Martian, without previous knowledge or
preconceptions, was the appropriate figure Szerb could show his beloved city to -
and in the substance and manner he perceived to be his own. Familiar tourist
sights do not appear in his Guide because he did not relate to them; but he had no
difficulty presenting radish-belfries--why not, when onion domes are famous
elsewhere? A Martian can be told something other than the clichés proffered in the
usual travel guide and can have quoted to him rhymesters of old with the same
gravity as our finest bards. Szerb must surely have known that "the otherwise unknown
Emil Vidor" (there could hardly have been an aspect of Hungarian literature
he would not have known) was none other than Frigyes Kerényi, the classically
trained poet popular in the eighteen-forties who had staged a "poetic contest" with
the great Sándor Petőfi. But why should a Martian have been interested in that?
Szerb cites the poets of the eighteenth century with their charmingly artless
descriptive passages: Pál Ányos, the poet monk and doctor of philosophy, who
died at the age of 28; Major General Count József Gvadányi, who created one of
the enduring figures in Hungarian poetry in the person of the village notary
from Peleske, a country squire who came up to the capital; and the priest and
poet Benedek Virág, who lived in the Tabán and scraped along as a one-man
literary centre there. Having struggled through their clumsy stanzas, Szerb finally
arrives at the lines from that genius who meant most to him, Mihály Vörösmarty
(1800-1855), "that wonderful liberator of the Hungarian language".
Even a hundred years after his time, Vörösmarty was important enough for
Szerb to practically sacrifice his life for him. With the anti-Jewish laws coming
into force and under the shadow of spreading Nazism and its modus operandi,
Szerb was invited to lecture at Columbia University in New York. He agonised
over the offer. In the end, he declined, arguing that it would be bizarre to be
teaching students who were not able to read Vörösmarty.
What is it a Martian could have seen in the Budapest of 1935? Primarily Pest,
or more precisely, more of Pest than of Buda, since Szerb was a Pester -
there he felt at home, there he lived. He crossed over to Buda only for a specific
purpose, as had been natural already for the "urban" writers and journalists of
the eighteen-sixties. Pest bustled with trade and the lively exchange of ideas this
brought; Buda was a sleepy place, permeating tradition and nostalgia. A real
intellectual could only be a man of Pest. The Pest intellectuals had always agreed
on that - even when they were strolling over to Buda to end up in one of the small
inns or cafés in the fairytale world of the soon-to-be demolished Tabán to chat
about old love affairs and old poets.
Still, Szerb's Budapest tour is mainly on
Buda. It begins with the Chain Bridge, and
rightly so, since across this beautiful piece
of engineering, the first permanent bridge,
"old Hungary marched into new Hungary",
as Gyula Krúdy recalled. Facing the bridge
on the Pest side, next to the Gresham
building, still stood a famous relic from
Biedermeier times, the Hotel Európa,
though at that time it housed the police
headquarters and not travellers. After the
Second World War, the building (with its
splendid ballroom undamaged) fell prey to
the wrecker's ball to make room for a
much-disputed monstrosity.
The book devotes a paragraph to the
core of the old Inner City of Pest--without
whose gracious Baroque mansions "the
city is now a bit gap-toothed" - in which a
group of edifices long since gone was
described. They were callously pulled
down when the Elizabeth Bridge was built and the dream of Budapest as a
metropolis was conceived. The disappearance of this part of the city took with it
the vestiges of two famous people Szerb considered worthy of mention. One was
József Ürményi, the author of the sweeping education reform during Maria
Theresa's reign (Ratio educationis, 1777). The other was Ferenc Kazinczy, poet,
writer and literary organiser, who launched the Hungarian language reform.
What had been left standing has also lost its original function. The Greek Church
in Petőfi Square lost one of its steeples during the Second World War and Greek,
Hungarian and Russian are now used in worship.
Across the river, Gellért Hill roused not just Szerb's imagination but that of the
old residents also. Its steep, romantic cliffs have always evoked the presence of
witches and gave it the name "Blocksberg", in reference to its German counterpart.
Below stretched the Tabán, the quarter favoured by writers, artists and
all bohemians, razed, allegedly in line with urban development plans and against
stiff resistance, during the time Szerb wrote his Guide. Nothing remained of the
centuries-old tavern on whose wall Imre Vahot had once written his initials
(Vahot was a playwright and "literary factotum", a fellow editor to the great poet
and freedom-fighter Sándor Petőfi. Nor was anything left of all the places
frequented by Gyula Krúdy, the celebrated novelist of the first third of the
twentieth century, lover of evanescence and of the Tabán.
On Castle Hill, over the Tabán, rose the Royal Palace, in its gardens the enormous
Turul bird, the totemic animal of the medieval House of Árpád and regal symbol of Hungarian rulers. In
Szerb's eyes, the Turul was
a harmless beast sporting
the ceremonial dress public
figures donned, leaning forward
slightly, like the fiery
orators in Parliament. As he
recalled the apocalyptic days
of the Hungarian Soviet Republic
of 1919, he saw a vision
of the coming of the
Prophet - images like the
grande finale to a Fellini film.
On the Bastion Promenade
he imagined spying the professor of philosophy at the university of Pest, Ákos
Pauler, among the strolling crowd, then jumped unexpectedly to the image of
budding lovers sketched against the background of the sauntering philosophers
and generals. The Fishermen's Bastion brought to his mind its southern steps,
the eerie Jesuit-stairway named for the Jesuit house that once stood there, and,
in recounting his vanished Jewish jeweller ancestor's fate, he evoked the mystery
that cannot fail to accompany a site of this sort. Not far from the top of the stairs,
in Tárnok Street, stood a Palace of the Esterházys. In view of Szerb's account, one
can only be sorry to see the school which stands in its stead today. Further on, at
the northwestern corner of the Castle quarter, the Garrison Church fared no better
than that stately mansion; nowadays only the Mary Magdalene Tower remains.
Down in Krisztina Town, next to Vérmező Park, Buda's jewel, the Romanticstyle
Karátsonyi Palace was razed at this time. When the counts died out, the
palace had been sold and pulled down: the new owner, the German Reich,
planned to build a school on the site. As a fitting illustration of the twists of
history in this part of Europe, instead of a Nazi German building a Socialist-
Realist-style ministry in the Soviet mould was erected here in 1951.
Now Szerb directed his steps into the Buda hills, to the new villas and apartment
blocks in outer Pasarét, to the look-alike boxes designed by the Hungarian
followers of the Bauhaus. Here stands also what was then a new church, one of
the prides of modernist Hungarian architecture.
In a jump over the hills one reaches Óbuda, parts of which still retain their rural
atmosphere. Its traditional residents - Jewish money-changers, merchants and
artisans - after banishment from the free royal boroughs of Pest and Buda, had
long since left to settle near the town-wall of Pest, in the massive Orczy House
with its many courtyards on the Király Street corner. Of Óbuda, Szerb noted only
a single name, that of Gábor Halász, a wonderful essayist and his great friend. It
proved to be a premonition, since less than a decade after the G u i d e 's publication,
both would fall victim to Nazism in Balf, a notoriously cruel labour camp.
Between Buda and Pest lies Margaret Island (Margitsziget), which for a manof-
letters cannot but recall János Arany and the cycle of poems he composed
there as an old man. With fine irony Szerb notes that the man regarded as the
greatest of all Budapest poets in actual fact didn't like Pest very much. Arany is
present on the island also in the form of a statue by Alajos Stróbl. On either side
of it stood two vases (destroyed in the war) derived from originally smaller drinking
vessels with rams heads and alluding to Arany's proclivity for Hungarian prehistory.
The actual originals belonged to the Nagyszentmiklós gold treasure
hoard which had made its way into the Imperial and Royal collection and is on
permanent display in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Szerb concluded his walk on the Pest shore facing Margaret Island, in Újpest, a
factory district whose workshops and working men and women he found utterly
romantic. Here he could formulate a Pest citizen's real worldview: "Buda may be on
the far side of the water, but the real far shore is Újpest" - as if he sensed the end
of his own comfortable city and the coming of the proletarian city of the masses.
"If ever I had to turn my back on the city forever, on that day I would become
as old as the Monk of Heisterbach," he wrote tongue-in-cheek, as he cannot have
been certain that his readers would understand his reference to the Cistercian of
a medieval legend of the Rhine. But he had to turn his back on Budapest: he
became an inmate of a forced labour camp. "We learned about the turn of events
on 19 March 1944 from Antal Szerb, who telephoned in the afternoon whether he
could come and sleep over," recalled his friend Pál Granasztói, the architect and
writer on Budapest, of the day the Germans occupied Hungary.
He came, and from him we learned for the first time... about the upheaval in our entire
social circle, their trying to seek sanctuary back and forth. He finally went home and stayed
there. Shortly they sent him into retirement from the Vas Street school. We heard he was
at home all day and reading all the time. We visited him - it must have been the end of
spring - my wife got there first. She stepped in quietly and found him in his study, lying on
the couch among heaps of books. He looked up at the ceiling and did nothing. My wife,
hiding her concern, greeted him with feigned cheerfulness and asked him how he was.
"I am just thinking," he replied with a sweeping motion at his books, "I have read
everything that is worth reading and may just as well die."
Not much later he was called up for forced labour service, and he complied obediently.
Just like he had once gone to camp as a scout, to play, now he went into the
looming horror. But first he asked to let him bring over his books. We cleared out the
small room, and the two of us carried perhaps two thousand selected and properly
packaged books up into the flat in the attic. It was warm, we both sweated and
panted. ... He seemed tired, but not broken or dejected. Maybe determined. I knew he
did not want to hide and made no attempt to talk him into it. ... His concern was his
books, not himself. We said goodbye, I escorted him to the stairs, hugged him. I had a
strong sense of his vulnerability, that I would not see him again, and so it was. The
room at our place where we had put the books was shelled during the siege, the only
damage to the house. Nothing more happened than a hole in the wall and a few books
got scorched. Even here Fate aimed a swipe at him.
Translated by
Géza Buzinkay
is Professor of History at Esterházy College, Eger. He has written eleven books
on the history of journalism, cultural history and museology.
