Miklós Vajda
Scenes from Adolescence
in a Minefield
A Memoir
[...]
The middle class into which we had been born and which
was able to get back on its feet once again after the war, was doomed—and
that we somehow did not perceive. The vast political, economic and
intellectual might of the Catholic Church was crumbling before our own eyes;
our monastic teachers lost their certainty; our textbooks, indeed much of our
upbringing, became useless—something we experienced as liberation,
intoxicating freedom. After many spiritual vicissitudes and much torment,
hundreds upon hundreds of masses, prayers, sermons, pious exhortations and
reading material, reciting the rosary, contrite confessions, penitences and
absolutions, maybe even as a direct consequence of that overdose, the
conviction grew in me that God must have abandoned Providence if there ever
was such a thing, because how otherwise could one explain the dreadful war
which had just passed and human history in general? And what if everyone
who trusted in Providence were able to realize their cherished desires?
A disaster, I reckoned. We argued on points like that; Tomasz did not share my
view. Interest governs the world, not merit, I drew the surprising, original
conclusion. Béla shared that opinion. God had disappeared—from me for sure,
I declared. That in itself was an exciting and liberating feeling: it was me now
who would decide what was right and what was wrong. In that respect Béla
was more cautious, keeping for himself a little let-out: "Rational belief in the
irrational—that's my motto," as he summed it up. "Though it's more
interesting vice versa, of course."
By the start of our last school year, the autumn of 1949, our grammar
school had been taken over by the state, our Cistercian teachers had vanished,
being replaced by lay teachers, several of them quite outstanding, given that
the school had a high reputation. One day at the beginning of 1949, following
the arrest of Cardinal Mindszenty, the Primate of Hungary, a "circular letter",
as it was called, went the rounds of the school. That was the name given to
administrative announcements which were taken round from classroom to
classroom while teaching was in progress, in all cases to be read aloud, signed
by the teacher before the monitor for that week took it on to the next
classroom. On this occasion the crude Communist text, which approved of the
arrest of the Primate and demanded harsh measures against the machinations
of "clerical reaction", urged his stringent punishment. It quite clearly stemmed
from some source outside the school, but everyone had to sign. Our deathly
pale lay teacher, a new man, looked over the deathly pale class before slowly
nodding twice and then, after a brief hesitation, he added his signature. We all
followed suit. We sensed that this was a serious, epoch-making historical
moment. In that resigned nodding was concentrated, down at the local level,
the impotent submission of an entire nation, but we were not yet in a position
to register this. Afterwards a bleak silence descended on the class until finally
the teacher regathered his faculties and, without a word of comment, carried
on with the lesson.
Maybe already the next day yet another circular letter turned up, this time a
protest against the baseless political charges that had been levelled at the
Church and the Primate. One will never know who had had the courage to pick
a fight with the Communist powers which were then settling into place and to
accept the consequences, though in the end these did not materialize as the
dictatorship had not yet developed fully and had more important things to do.
The teacher this time—another teacher—thought briefly before signing,
followed by the whole class without any hesitation at all. No, none of that, we
telegraphed to one another with mute facial expressions in the back row of
desks—we don't want any of that.
We didn't want that, but a Western democracy, along with all that entails. We
felt that accomplishing this would be a gigantic task which awaited the coming
generation of intellectuals—ourselves, in other words. We decided that we
would work out the possible modes of transition to Western democracy, the
path by which Hungarian society would be transformed, lest we were caught
unprepared when the moment came for action. With that in mind, on Tomasz's
proposal, and on the model of the meetings held during the war by
sociographer-writers who, concerned about the fate awaiting the country,
sought to reveal the conditions in which the peasantry existed in Hungary, we
would give lectures about the various possibilities, debate these, and then pool
labours to hammer out a set of 'Leányfalu Theses'. Five or six of us met in the
Abody family's summer cottage in order to get to know and discuss each
other's ideas. Béla himself came forward with a voluminous text which took in
Athenian democracy, "the criminal stupidity of the philistines", Robespierre, the
individual and the community, social equality, the categorical imperative and
quotations from Hungarian poets, the Communist Manifesto and the Bible. It
was witty and aphoristic and, in all, a fairly unserious flight of thinking, in
spirited and serious rendition. Tomasz drew on thinkers who discussed the fate
of the nation and the recent past, whereas I waded through an at the time
frequently cited 1942 work by the German economist Wilhelm Röpke, Die
Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart (The Social Crisis of the Present) with
particular regard to the part on Der dritte Weg (The Third Way), out of a
conviction that it was not advisable to adopt ready-made solutions.
I no longer recall which of us started laughing, but at some point the entire
pompous, infantile undertaking, lock, stock and barrel, suddenly became so
absurd and comical that we broke out into uncontrollable chortling and howls
of laughter. In our relief, we laughed inordinately at ourselves.
[...]
Miklós Vajda,
an essayist, critic and literary translator, was the literary editor of this journal
(1965–1990) and its editor (1990–2005). In addition to translating a great number of
works by British, American and German authors including about five dozen plays
for the theatre he selected and edited anthologies of Hungarian writing in English
and British/American writing in Hungarian.
