Hungary's tame intellectuals
Tim Garton Ash
Budapest The uniformed doorman at the 'Hungaria', the grandest restaurant in Hungary, was apologetic, He was sorry not to be able to offer me a table, but the whole restaurant was reserved for a private reception — in honour of Franz Josef Strauss. The for Bavarian leader and candidate tor the West German chancellorship in next year's elections was here on an official visit to discuss, among other things, expanding economic co-operation between the two states. Franz Josef was given a regal welcome in what was once the second capital of the Habsburg Dual Monarchy. I did not see Strauss's right-hand man, Otto von Habsburg, among his suite. But the last heir to the Hungarian throne would not have been °ut of place in the 'Hungaria', which is a temple of late Habsburg decadence, a glorious riot of gilded classical mouldings, gilded baroque columns and gilded rococo mirrors. (My guide-book despairingly calls it the 'Eclectic Style'.) The food at the 'Hungaria', which I was permitted to sample the next evening, is as fine as the architectural Confectionery. But one can eat and drink as royally in half-a-dozen restaurants in Budapest. The Hungarian capital is in many ways more Viennese than Vienna. In Vienna the confectioners still have ornate plaques ,announcing a 'Ku. K. Hotionditorei' — a Kaiserliche und Koenigliche' establishment (roughly, 'By Appointment to the King and Emperor). In Budapest the plaques have been removed. Yet the cafés are far closer to the state of aristocratic decay nd self-indulgent disorder which prevailed Ti the last years of the `K.u.K.' monarchy, t':urthermore the café-living, cosmopolitan !ntelligentsia are still here in Pest on the left ank of the Danube. They are a little older, id trifle fatter, perhaps more world-weary ,han the brilliant company of writers, ,,t.rtists, and journalists who frequented the ungaria' (or the 'New York' as it was then (Ailed) at the turn of the century. These intellectuals live very well in conlentporary Hungary. They have an agreeable flat in Pest or a villa in Buda, and g, euerally own a small week-end house In. Tille surrounding hills or on the shores of IL.ake Balaton. They are the regular ellenLie of the best restaurants. Their mornings iu ay be spent in the 'Lukacz Baths',rp eparg . for luncheon. These thermal baths 'Jilting from the period of Turkish occuNtion are, as Sir Nathaniel Wraxell wrote vv.ben he visited them in 1778, an 'amusing ?,b)lect of inspection'. 'Men, women, and quicken,' Wraxell observed, 'were bathing _12"romiscuously, or lying around the basin, Ntretched in a variety of attitudes. The females, though not altogether naked, were nearly so, and the greater part excited no sentiment except disgust. I saw, nevertheless, among them one or two tolerably pretty figures, occupied in combing each other's hair.' There is, I discovercl, a whole art and etiquette of moving at the crouch through the three-foot deep waters, bowing from the neck to the left and right before taking your place in one of the stone seats carved from the walls. Here the men of letters sit for hours discussing Lukacs and playing chess on floating chess-boards. The baths are actually named after St Luke, not after George Lukacs, the great Marxist. But it is his spirit which moves over the waters. George Lukacs was a brilliant talker. Friends describe how he would stroll down Vaci utca, Budapest's Bond Street, delivering a series of impromptu speeches on the political, social and psychological significance of the shirts, shoes, antiques, trinkets and bangles displayed in the shop-windows. His modest flat on the Left Bank is preserved as an archive. By the entrance there is a memorial tablet, only recently erected. For a long time the critic was without public honour in his own country. Indeed the memorial tablets of Budapest are an illustration of the old adage: Christians believe in life after death. Communists in posthumous rehabilitation. A street is named, for example, after Laszld Raj k, the Foreign Minister executed in 1949 after a notorious Stalinist show trial. From the windows of Lukacs's flat you have a view across the Danube to Liberty Bridge and the Liberation Monument. The glass-fronted bookcases lining the walls are filled with countless volumes of his own works. A young scholar who visited Lukas in the Fifties wondered at the great man's immense output. 'How do you do it, Meister'', he asked, pointing to the shelves. 'Quite simple, my dear Lultacs replied, '— house arrest.'
Lukacs's successors in the intellectual society of Budapest are also brilliant talkers. But far from being under house arrest they are remarkably free to travel where they like, and very often to the West. Their doyen is Ivan Boldizsar, editor of the New Hungarian Quarterly. Boldizsar is a large, expansive man. half Dr Johnson and half Dr Kissinger. His present office is, suitably, above the 'Hungaria' café. He is a jovial raconteur; an interview in the latest, jubilee number of the NHQ gives an idea of his style. In trying to explain the feebleness of the Hungarian Resistance to Nazism he suggests that Hungarians are constitutionally incapable of conspiring or keeping secrets: 'Excuse me for quoting myself again, but that's the source I know best. In my play The Survivors the protagonist says that he went into the Espresso on what was then the Appony ter, now the Felszabadulas ter, it is still there, and when he looked around, the waitress asked: "You're looking for the Resistance Movement, sir? They've just left." If I remember right that happened to me.' If he remembers right. There is also what seems to be astonishing plain speaking for an official publication in a communist country: `By the time Rajk was arrested, it had become possible to trample on the law precisely because what we so euphemistically call the personality cult, straight talk calls it tyranny and despotism, had already come into existence.' (my italics).
One turns to the rest of the jubilee number with high hopes. These are somewhat dampened by a stunningly one-eyed 'Letter' from the American novelist, Hortense Calisher. 'The recognition of literature as a cultural power, and even an incendiary one, doesn't pervade our national rubric as it does yours,' Ms Calisher avers in her deathless prose. 'Each time I come to Central Europe, I'm whelmed [sic] by the formality, decorum — and above all, inten sity of literary life . Writers' Unions, which we do not have, whelm me in two ways . . . ' (I submit this new usage to the OED: to whelm = to pull the wool over the eyes.) The NHQ is scarcely to be blamed for printing such stuff. But 'it springs in the eye,' as Boldizsar writes, making one of very few slips in the generally excellent English of the Hungarian contributions, that Janos Kadar wrote the article which leads this jubilee issue.' The party leader writes powerfully and at length about 'peace' and 'civilisation' and 'democracy,' 'History bears witness,' he begins, and one page later we learn of the 'progressive forces in Hungary' which 'took the upper hand following the suppression of the 1956 counter-revoh.tionary mutiny. . '(my italics). Coming from the man who, on 1 November 1956, claimed the 'revolution' for the Communists (on Radio Free Kossuth), and threatened to fight Soviet tanks 'with his own hands', this is rich. The excellence of the English translation permits clearly to see the muddy glibness of Kadar's presentation of socialist democracy: 'Since the socialist state serves the interests of all working men and women, institutions as well are accordingly more democratic than in any other type of social system . The socialist social order is truly the democracy of the people, it is therefore objectively the most democratic system in human history so far.' QED.
You may object that this routine cant is unimportant compared to Kadar's practical achievements since 1956. Rhetorical conformity and unswerving orthodoxy in foreign policy are the price he has had to pay for a free hand and heterodoxy at home, Similarly, it was suggested to me, describing the events of 1956 as a 'counter-revolutionary mutiny' in its political half is the price which the NHQ has to pay for comparative freedom in its literary half. These arguments remind me Slightly of the remark of Paul Teleki, Prime Minister in 1940, apropos of' Nazi Germany: 'We may have to sell half our soul to the devil'. (Teleki later committed suicide). The NHQ however, like a British weekly, is something of a pantomime horse. Its literary back half has a certain , independence. In the opinion of C.P. Snow, who contributes a short tribute, it is the communication of Hungarian literature to an English audience which is the great achievement of the journal. 'Its economic and sociological articles are,' he remarks in an aside, 'instructive, but to some of us not so novel'.
What use do the editors make of this literary independence? The salient fact about Hungarian literature is that it has been, as Hortense Calisher correctly observes, an 'incendiary' power. The writer Tibor Dery's speech in June 1956, and the free elections to the Writer's Union in September of that year, fired the furnaces which blew up that October. Kadar's gov ernment retrospectively acknowledged the importance of the writers by arresting and imprisoning Wry the next year. The salient fact about the literature published by the New Hungarian Quarterly is that it is 4whelmingly' unexplosive. It has been defused. It will send no-one to the bar ricades. Perhaps I have failed to detect the message 'between the lines'. Yet I challenge anyone to read between the lines of, for instance, Ferenc Juhasz's Homage to Marx: 'So much! So much! So much! So much! But when Karl Marx, !Marx Karoly tenderly placed his universe-complex, universe-simple Feuerbach's smile-like and Hegel's heartbeating-like enormous fingertip on my to action-devoted magic steed-wild manyouth mourn-white dead-alive bier-heart — coming to my senses in this world I sat up on my bleeding white bier, and rejoicingly I cried out . . . '• Enough said. Perhaps it works in Hungarian. The truth is that the intellectual establishment represented by Boldizsar and his ilk have accepted the terms which the Party. has offered them. These are spelt out by a Deputy Prinfe Minister in an instructive article about 'Intellectuals in Socialist Society'. 'As against mythmongers who allotted leading intellectuals the role of prophets, moving ahead of the people as pillars of fire, intellectuals today are conscious of their proper place.' (Note the trick of disguising prescription as description). 'A proof of the political mentality of Hungarian intellectuals and of their historical maturity, is that they increasingly ridicule those who shout from the touchlines at a time when every constructive person acting in the spirit of progress can have and does have a chance to play the ball'.
Ivan Boldizsar has played the game for all he's worth. Self-censorship is one name for it. But it goes deeper than that. One's admiration for his brave words about Stalinism is tempered when one learns that he himself was an Under Secretary in the Foreign Ministry in the late Forties and did not resign (as did, for example, Michael Karoly) even when he realised that the case against Rajk was a frame-up. He now says he is 'ashamed' of this, but goes on with his next breath to imply that he could not have resigned without risking his neck. Well, one can't disprove that assertion. His mottor is survived'. He is Hungary's Sieyes. Nor . has he simply retreated into a deliberately • apolitical world of 'laughter and the love of friends', into 'inner emigration' — the response of so many central Europeans to the successive traumas of Nazism and Stalinism . Not for him the tranquil cultivation of his garden. No, Ivan the survivor is up there in the front row of the scrum, getting his hands dirty. Are the recent price increases inHungaryto be 'explained' to an English-speaking audience? Here is Boldiz. sat. in the Daily News of 28/29: July 1979: . . the last thing I intend to do is to try to tell you that the changes were received with unanimous enthusiasm. I only say this because I've listened to a radio commentary broadcast abroad, which alleged that Hungarian papers reported that Hungarians had received the news with pleasure and contentment. I will say, however, that the news were [sic] received calmly.' No doubt they • were received calmly by the editor of the New Hungarian Quarterly. He is living quite well. The ordinary Hungarians I talked to were not so content. Their feelings about the author of that fragment of soft propaganda might be sumnied up in two lines: Just for a glassful of Tokay he left us, Just for a ticket to fly to New York Boldizsarism is very widespread in contemporary Hungary. The cynicism it presupposes is profound. I talked to a younger Boldizsarist about the country's suicide rate. According to the World Health Organisation it is one of the highest in the world, more than double our own. All this man could say was, with a snigger, 'yes, that is the one thing in which Hungary leads the world.' He went on to tell me that one of the speeches made on the occasion of Constitution Day had announced the 'reintroduction of unemployment -500,000 over two years.' He found this terribly amusing. I have not yet been able to establ ish the truth behind his report (a vagueness about the boundary between fact and fan tasy belongs to the character of a Boldizsarist). It is certainly a logical next step in the economic policy of the Kadar regime. The , possibility was discussed at the inception of the New Economic Mechanism in the Six ties. A rather unsuccessful experiment in laying-off labour was made in 1973. But what .impressed me was the urbane insouciance with which my informant threw such an essential piece of ideological baggage. — the .claim that there can be no unemployment under communism — out of the window, between one sip of wine and the next. Here was a figure, I felt, who believed in nothing — except his own comfort — and would justify anything. If Franz Josef Strauss came back as King of Hungary he would be there, composing elegant apologetics.
Why is there no intellectual opposition in Budapest, in the sense in which I encountered it in Warsaw and Cracow? The trauma of the brutal reign of Matthew Rakosi (1945-56) is advanced as an apology. It is true that the scars of the Rakosi period (and the cauterisation after 1956) are still deeper than the comparable wounds in Poland. On the other hand the brief Nazi occupation of Hungary and the atrocities of the Arrow Cross fascists took nothing like the toll which was exacted on the Polish intelligentsia in the years 1939-45. In any case, the generation of my last informant were still children in the fifties. More important is the skill with which Kadar has handled his intellectuals since 1956, compared with the ineptness of both Gomulka and Gierek. Kadar has bought off his intellectuals. Their readiness to sell themselves has still to be explained. There is certainly a large measure of opportunism and cynicism. But there are oportunists and cynics in Poland (although admittedly the Hungarian Government has more to offer such persons than the Polish) The explanation must he deeper. One reason might be that the epigones of Lukacs have no solid rock of traditional values, such as Polish intellectuals find in liberalism and the Catholic Church. Lukacs himself was deeply compromised in the course of his career. And his later writing reveals increasingly murky, poisonous swamps. He is quoted in the jubilee number endorsing the idea of Boris Savinkov that, 'only he who acknowledges unflinchingly and without any reservations that murder is under no circumstances to be sanctioned can commit the murderous deed that is truly — and tragically — moral.'•Furnished with that kind of morality it is no wonder his successors have les mains sales. It was not always so. The same article quotes something Lukacs wrote only a few weeks earlier: 'Bolshevism relies on the metaphysical assumption that good can come of evil, that it is possible — as Razumi k hin says in Crime and Punishment 7 to lie our way through to the truth. The writer, of these lines is not able to share this belief: This, amidst the columns of Boldizsarism, is like a blast of clean air.
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