Kádár's Long Shadow

"For many, the heritage of the Kádár era stands for individual selfishness and indifference to public affairs. It also means corrupted political morals and the breakdown of national and community values. Some observers add to these maladies a number of unbroken and damaging historical traditions: a parasitical political elite and its clientele plundering public wealth, state paternalism, authoritarian tendencies and the related powerlessness of ordinary citizens. All of this was characteristic of the one-party state before 1989. These ills, however, were not created by the Kádár regime. At worst it prolonged and strengthened them."

A paradox: János Kádár, head of the Communist regime for thirty years, is in poll after poll regarded as the greatest Hungarian figure of the twentieth century. Is there nostalgia for the Communist past, and for the man who engineered the reprisals against the revolutionaries of 1956? There was another paradox at work in the Kádár era: initial, brutal oppression of the 1956 Revolution was followed by a series of reforms that resulted in the softer, so-called "goulash communism". Yes, the paternalism and authoritarian tendencies of the regime were unmistakable. But many were left feeling well-off; they were at least getting by in a time that lacked today's economic and political volatility. The "Faustian legend of Kádár" became current from the 1970s.

In our Autumn issue, András Mink and his fellow historians, Ignác Romsics and Krisztián Ungváry, examine the era and the man who lent his name to it, dealing with Kádár's political career, the stop-and-go attempts at economic reform and one part of the repression upon which the regime was based, the control and manipulation of the Catholic Church.

Other articles and memoirs in our Autumn issue allude to and reflect on the Kádár years and their aftermath in Hungarian politics and arts.

Kádár's Shadow
by András Mink

Roger Gough: A Good Comrade: János Kádár, Communism and Hungary, London, I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2006.

"The Faustian legend of Kádár became popular from the early 1970s and remained influential even after 1989. It goes roughly like this: the goals of the 1956 Revolution, independence and democracy, were outside what constituted a possible reality, which was set by the conditions of the Cold War. The Revolution had to be betrayed and defeated. Kádár dirtied his hands and sacrificed his moral integrity in order to secure what would have remained unattainable within the given circumstances: material progress and relative freedom. Thus, Kádár and the Kádárist elite carried out a secret, underground mission as they worked to accomplish the goals of 1956: no less than the gradual self-liquidation of the regime behind the Soviet leaders' backs."

Kádár is something of a historical enigma for the simplest of reasons: he put almost nothing in writing. Nor was he forthcoming in his public speeches or in private conversation. Historian András Mink finds that Roger Gough (A Good Comrade: János Kádár, Communism and Hungary, 2006) has worked around this gap to write a successful biography of the man. Mink defines "success": "A Kádár biography is successful if it does not try to defend the indefensible and can accurately reveal the difference between what was possible and what actually happened. A description of Kádár's life cannot forego a utilitarian calculus, an examination of his hunger for power and a consideration of the realities of the Cold War. However, it would be a mistake to place these factors in the context of a neutral political pragmatism, ignoring the ideological nature of his regime and the way Kádár and his political elite related to the ideology of the system: Communism."

András Mink finds the core of the Faustian legend absurd. Here he describes Kádár's accession to power, his use of that power (savage in the aftermath of 1956, seemingly benign from the early 1960s), the apparent arrival of prosperity and security and the limits set on all this by the ideology the regime was in thrall to.

 

Economic Reforms in the Kádár Era
by Ignác Romsics

"The 1989-90 change in regime demarcated itself from the entire Kádár era, ranking it to be, along with the early Fifties, no more than a historical detour. Nevertheless, research into the economic structure of the period is bound to ask what success Hungary's reforms enjoyed, unique as they were within the socialist bloc. According to data provided by the most recent international comparison-not too impressive."

Ignác Romsics identifies three waves of reform, the first in 1956-7, the second from the mid-1960s culminating in the New Economic Mechanism introduced in 1968 and the third post-1978 reforms. The first saw more radical proposals shelved, probably due to "Soviet reluctance and the strength Hungarian hardliners drew from that". The chaos caused by a new round of collectivization led to a significant freeing up of private capacity in agriculture during the 1960s, which the reformers tried to extend to the economy as a whole leading to the introduction of the New Economic Mechanism. But with the failure to round this off with political measures (again under Soviet pressure), this reform stagnated. The third wave again began in agriculture and small businesses were encouraged. ("It has been estimated that by the mid-1980s something like two-thirds of Hungarian families were operating in the 'second economy'.")

By the end of the 1980s, Hungary might have appeared ready for the transition to a market economy. Thousands of small commercial and manufacturing businesses ("Economic Work Partnerships") were in operation. But, if measured in terms of raw economic data, the reforms accomplished little: a 2.8-fold per capita growth in GDP between 1950 and 1988, compared to 2.5-fold in Czechoslovakia and 2.4-fold in Poland-two countries which witnessed little to no reform.

 

The Kádár Regime and Its Control of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy
by Krisztián Ungváry

"State security emphasised drives against the Churches, in particular against the Catholic Church. It was here that the Interior Ministry mobilized the greatest number of agents in relative terms. By 1977, they were employing just four agents to keep tabs on members of the former 'ruling classes' (i.e. aristocrats and financial tycoons); a total of 489 agents to keep an eye on the tens of thousands kept under observation under the heading of Youth Protection; 485 for the entire cultural domain; but as many as 421 individuals were engaged in the relatively easily monitored sphere of Church affairs."

 

In the period 1945 to 1956, the Church in Hungary was the hardest hit of all the Roman Catholic Churches in the Eastern Bloc; this led to an agreement between the Vatican and the state in 1964, which one authority described as the Hungarian Church "sinking to its lowest point in its thousand-year history". Under its terms, only bishops approved by the state were appointed; by the 1970s, almost all the archbishops and a minimum of two-thirds of the bishops were "at least formally members of the security service's informer network". By controlling the hierarchy, the state obstructed (and persecuted, if all else failed) clergy and lay people engaged in grassroots initiatives. The archives seem to indicate the Vatican's acquiescence in all this.

All this explains why, unlike in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the Church in Hungary played little part in the lead-up to the changes of 1989.

 

Hungary Forced to Reform
by András Gerő

"Over the past seventeen years we have failed to formulate any vision in response to basic questions such as: What sort of society does the new Hungarian democracy want? What is demanded of a society whose welfare hinges on the market economy? During the Communist period, there was a clear social vision. It failed when hard economic facts smashed the illusion of its own self-professed utopia."

Hungary's predicament today takes many forms. Environmental: "Two out of every five Hungarians live in polluted and noisy areas. (...) Hungary's use of renewable energy sources is a sixth of the average of the 25 EU member states." In communications: "In 23 EU countries half the population can speak English at a conversational level; in Hungary only 16 per cent can. The proportion of those who never use the Internet is 34 per cent in the 25 EU member states; in Hungary it is 57 per cent." Care for the elderly: while the government and the opposition promise higher pensions and benefits, "the country spends 50 per cent less on care for the elderly than the EU average." And the health sector: death rates for cancer and cardiovascular diseases are distressingly higher than the EU average, yet "in Hungary the number of hospital beds per 100,000 inhabitants and spending on pharmaceuticals far exceeds the EU average."

Faced with such challenges, both the government parties and the opposition must create a new intellectual framework to counter the equally empty "technocratic rationalism" and "intellectual vacuity" now dominating a politically polarized post-Kádár Hungary.

 

On the Border
by István Tanács

Something entirely unexpected has transpired on the border between south-eastern Hungary and central-western Romania. Rather than countless Romanians streaming across the border to take up low-wage jobs in Hungary, Hungarians from economically depressed areas next to Romania are commuting daily across the border to work in Romania's Arad and Timiş counties, where the unemployment level has dropped to a remarkably low 2 per cent.

István Tanács reports on Battonya, a small town in south-eastern Hungary, where the accession of Romania to the European Union has opened up employment opportunities across the border. He examines the reasons for the movement of foreign investment into Romania and through the person of Péter Czirka, provides a not untypical story of what has happened over the last thirty years to eastern Hungary. After the change to a full market economy beginning in 1989, Czirka, a qualified agricultural mechanic who worked 24 years in various co-operative farms, drifted from occupation to occupation, sometimes selling insurance, sometimes working in a plant which extracted industrial fat from bones, sometimes self-employed, sometimes out of work. He now looks expectantly to the east: "We have never looked for handouts. My wife works and the two of us together take home about Ft70,000 (280 euros) [per month]. That's bare subsistence, never mind a living! I've heard that in Pecica (Romania) it's possible to make around 400 euros..."

 

SCIENCE & THE ARTS

The newest product of Hungarian scientific creativity is a plump yet elegant three-dimensional solid called a "Gömböc". It is the world's first mono-monostatic body, a three-dimensional form able to right itself on a single point, born from the minds of mathematicians, but easily mistaken as the work of a sculptor. Our Autumn Issue presents the story of its invention, as well as accounts of the lives and work of emigré Hungarian scientists, mathematicians, photographers and filmmakers, and of István Orosz, a polymath artist.

 

At the Peak and On the Edge
by András Schweitzer

Graph theory is a branch of mathematics whose development would have been inconceivable without the contributions of Hungarian mathematicians. Concerned with networks, it has considerable implications for physicists (who were among the first to recognize its implications), biologists and neuro-scientists, and is central to many everyday applications such as the Internet or air-traffic routing.

András Schweitzer looks at some of those Hungarians involved, "people of ideas and solvers of riddles", including the legendary Pál Erdős, acknowledged as one of the great mathematicians of the twentieth century ("the new Euler") and unsurpassed in the number of his (usually joint) publications.

The examination of random graph theory is truly a Hungarian achievement: Erdős and Rényi published a series of eight papers describing what happens when one positions the points of a graph onto a plane and draws random lines in between them: "The result is similar to when one haphazardly lays down the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle individually, immediately connecting those that fit together. At first the pieces are connected to one another as islands consisting of a few parts. Then, however, these small islands suddenly, with only a few steps, come together as a large connected network." What is this good for? Erdős and Rényi's contemporary Béla Bollobás says, ask the physicists: "In the beginning it was the physicists who saw the value of this mathematical model, called phase transformation, because it describes quite precisely the process whereby, for instance, water freezes."

Turtles, Eggs and the "Gömböc"
by Zoltán Barotányi

The Mathematical Intelligencer, one of the most prestigious journals in the mathematics world, recently published (and devoted its cover to) an article by Péter Várkonyi and Gábor Domokos. The article caused something of a sensation since it proved the existence of a three-dimensional shape with one stable and one unstable point of equilibrium. They have also succeeded in constructing such an object, which they have playfully named the "Gömböc" (translated approximately as "plumpy").

Zoltán Barotányi, a science writer, describes the background to the paper and considers some of its implications.

Gábor Domokos describes a "lunch" with the great Russian mathematician V. I. Arnold, whose speculation on the existence of such a shape set them on their way.

The strangely beautiful "Gömböc" itself, something like a cross between a Spanish conquistador's helmet and a turtle, is illustrated here.

 

The Uncommon Denominator
by Iván Sanders

Kati Marton: The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2006, 271 pp., illustrated.

Ivan Sanders does not even need to open Kati Marton's book The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World (2006) before he arrives at its most troubling feature: "Publishers and editors are probably right in claiming that a title can sometimes make or break a book. The full title of Kati Marton's new book is eye-catching, all right, and also incomplete and inaccurate." How so?  It is true that anti-Semitism played a part in some of them leaving the country to study abroad, Jews being largely excluded from Hungarian universities in the early twenties. It is also the case that their movements in the world were later dominated by the need to dodge the Nazis. However, as Sanders argues, for all of them being Hungarian meant more than being Jewish.

The extraordinary men in question are three physicists (Leó Szilárd, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller), two filmmakers (Alexander Korda, Michael Curtiz), two photographers (André Kertész, Robert Capa), one mathematician (John von Neumann) and one writer (Arthur Koestler). Their stories have now been told numerous times, individually and collectively. Ivan Sanders discusses the environment that sent them off into the world to seek fame and fortune: in The Third Man, perhaps Korda's best film as a producer, "a character declares 'In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy, and they produced the cuckoo clock.' According to Alexander Korda's nephew, Michael, this is 'pure Korda'. It might have struck a responsive chord in the other eight Hungarians, too."

 

How to Pull "The Raven" Out of a Hat
by István Orosz

István Orosz, Artist of a Silver Age
by András Török

István Orosz is a graphic artist, printmaker, poster designer, animator, film director, illustrator and reviver of the technique of anamorphosis. In a lecture delivered last Spring in Melbourne, he describes his craft: "[A] cylinder is a prop I have been experimenting with for quite some time to produce an optical illusion. The technique I employ is called anamorphosis." Orosz prefers to call it retransformation: "Anamorphosis is the Greek term for retransformation. In art history it refers to works that were made distorted and unrecognizable through ingenious geometrical constructions but when viewed from a certain point, or through a reflecting object (usually a cylindrical mirror), a hidden image appears in its true shape, that is, it undergoes retransformation." Anamorphosis becomes an extraordinary tool in Orosz's hands. It allows him to interact with writers and he explains in great detail how he created a dark visual representation of Poe's "The Raven".

In his essay on Orosz's art, András Török, critic and urban historian, writes,
"In the Orwellian year of 1984, Orosz decided he needed a pseudonym and came up with OUTIS, the name Odysseus used (...) after [he] had blinded the Cyclops (...). Utisz, as he calls himself in the Hungarian form, is someone who attacks the eye. Indeed, his target is human vision and Orosz attacks it with various devices."

These two articles are accompanied by illustrations of István Orosz's work including posters and etchings.

 

MUSIC & MUSICIANS

A palette of articles and reviews covering the history of the Budapest Opera, sources for a Bartók motif, a comprehensive CD-ROM on Bartók's collection of Arab folk music, new DVDs on György Kurtág and Péter Eötvös and a memoir by a celebrated conductor of opera.

 

Bartók, Kodály and Salome
by László Vikárius

In a 1905 letter, young Béla Bartók wrote that Richard Strauss's Salome was having an "absolutely overwhelming effect" on him. Renowned musicologist László Vikárius makes the case that Salome had an important influence on Bartók, in particular by inspiring a Bartók motif employing recurring minor thirds, what Zoltán Kodály called "the hallmark of his musical style". There are three intriguingly different possible sources for this: Arab folk song (which Bartók collected in 1913), the "Dance of the Seven Veils" from Richard Strauss's Salome and an obscure Hungarian popular song which he included in the 1906 Hungarian Folk Songs that he published together with Kodály. Still, when discussing Bartók's predilection for the minor third, Kodály failed-or refused-to notice the influence of Salome.

Detailed musical examples are provided.

 

The Lure of Africa: Béla Bartók's Journey to Biskra
by Vera Lampert
Bartók and Arab Folk Music. Budapest Hungarian National Commission for Unesco, 2006, PC CD-ROM.

Lampert, the music librarian of Brandeis University, allows that "it may come as a surprise to learn that Bartók, a European composer and an expert in the folk music of Eastern Europe, had an interest in Arab music." But, indeed, in the summer of 1913, with a phonograph, music notebook and boxes of wax cylinders in tow, and an Arab phrasebook at hand, Bartók set off for Biskra, in Algeria, to collect Arab folk music. Today all the recorded Biskra material with all the printed, manuscript and pictorial material and correspondence relevant to it, has been compiled into a CD-ROM.

 

Passion and Aftershocks
by Paul Griffiths
György Kurtág-The Matchstick Man/Péter Eötvös-The Seventh Door. DVD. Directed by Judit Kele, Idéale Audience, JuxtapositionsT
György Kurtág: Complete Choral Works, Hänssler Classics, CD 93 74

"A score is only one element in the transmission of music. There are also traditions of performing, and of listening. And then there are things that can only come from the composer but cannot be written down-things that the composer may urgently want to communicate but has no written language for, or things that will emerge perhaps unknowingly in two words, in the wave of an arm, in a phrase of hoarse song." But how to get at these ephemeral aspects of composition? Paul Griffiths reflects on two documentary films on György Kurtág and Péter Eötvös, both directed by Judit Kele. Interwoven scenes of the subjects in action, of archival material and of interviews with distinguished colleagues bring out the passion which is "the essence (...) of Kurtág's business", while passion's aftershocks are what "Eötvös is here to collect". Griffiths observes that Kurtág "looks by far the happiest during three or four minutes when he is guiding-with words, gestures and vocalizations-two young players", that is, drawing music out, rather than writing it down. As for Eötvös, he confides that "the essence of passion escapes me", but there it is, as he conducts orchestras in Budapest and London, as a scene from his Chekhov opera Three Sisters unfolds.

Griffiths also reviews a newly released compilation of Kurtág's choral works.

 

Music and Drama: Crisis at the Opera
by Tamás Koltai

The Budapest Opera House, completed in 1884, is much admired by residents and visitors alike. Our drama critic Tamás Koltai points out that drama has been off-stage as much as on in this brief history of opera performances and personalities.

For years now, Hungary's vicious political rivalry has had a bearing on the life of its Opera. House. "The last five or six years at the Hungarian State Opera House have been stormy. As at opera houses the world over, money has been tight. To make things worse, the tenures of intendants and music directors have been short and affected by the tide of electoral fortune and political shifts. (...) On several occasions in the Hungarian State Opera's recent history, management shuffles have conformed with the results of parliamentary elections, one case being that of a chief intendant set aside by one government only to be reinstated four years later when the opposition came to power." Difficulties at the opera are nothing new. Hungarian opera has witnessed its share of blunders alongside its share of triumphs. There has been no shortage of major conductors; but modern, unorthodox works have been avoided. The Budapest company has included many outstanding singers; but during the Fifties they could not travel to the West and failed to get the international recognition they deserved. The situation is all the more dire today because, among other things, the premises are hardly new: "The State Opera House has (...) become (...) a cumbersome, monolithic, immovable primordial being. Even the fact that its antediluvian hydraulic stage eventually became dysfunctional, forcing the Opera House to close its doors for renovations back in 1980, has done nothing to change this. It speaks volumes that more was spent on the re-gilding of the auditorium than on the modern electro-mechanical scene-moving machinery, which was ordered from an East German firm at a price below 'Western' quotations (it soon broke down)."

Koltai sees hope in that that the Hungarian State Opera house is under new management, that the Intendant is renowned conductor Ádám Fischer, and the artistic director is Balázs Kovalik, who has staged several excellent productions.

 

Tamás Blum and His Journeys
by Zoltán Peskó

Itinerary
by Tamás Blum
Barely eighteen years of age, Tamás Blum (1927-1992) began as a répétiteur at the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest where his staggering musical gifts were quickly recognized. He went on to have a full and distinguished career as a conductor (and, incidentally, translator of libretti) in Hungary before, in 1972, deciding to settle himself and his family in Switzerland.
Shortly before his death, Tamás Blum wrote an account of his life, centering it around the journeys he had made. In this, the first part of his memoir, he records with a laconic eye the stages of his itinerary: some were involuntary (to Bergen-Belsen in 1944), most were under sufferance from the regime (to fulfill musical engagements, until 1957 behind the Iron Curtain only).

(The memoir will be concluded in our next issue.)

Zoltán Peskó, Music Director of the Lisbon Opera, who had known Tamás Blum since his early childhood, introduces this memoir, highlighting Blum's early links with Klemperer (a family friend to the end of his life) and his own last aborted attempt to see him on the day he died.  

FILMS & FICTION

Two Films, One Case
by Erzsébet Bori

Norbert Komenczi: Daráló (Grinder)
Elemér Ragályi: Nincs kegyelem (No Mercy)

Erzsébet Bori praises two films about a notorious miscarriage of justice involving a young and very poor Roma, who spent years in prison for a murder he did not commit and killed himself while waiting for the pathetically small amount of compensation which a dysfunctional system fought tooth and claw against awarding him. The two, one a documentary (Grinder), the other a feature film (No Mercy), created enough of a stir to bring about a redress: "The court that was proceeding on the Pusoma case finally ordered an inquiry into what lessons could be learnt from the affair. And it was decided that lay assessors from the minority (i.e. Roma) groups were to be brought into the work of local magistrate's courts."

 

Artiste
by Kriszta Bódis

Kriszta Bódis, a novelist, poet and filmmaker who has documented the lives of the marginalised in today's Hungary, published her second novel, Artista, last year. Here we present the opening chapters of a novel dealing with street-wise and vulnerable teenagers in the hands of the state care system.  In Paul Olchváry's translation.

The novel is also reviewed by Miklós Györffy, who also reviews two other works of innocence and experience, Zsuzsa Takács's The Guest of Misleading Appearance and János Lackfi's Calling on the Dead.

Poems by Szilárd Borbély, translated by Daniel Hoffman, are also featured in this issue.