The snow is falling outside, my kitchen is lit by candles, I had a fabulous writing group last night, I am happy. I have been going through my materials on Hungary, trying to figure out what I want to focus on for today. I ended up getting sucked into the first chapter of Robert Kaplan’s Eastward to Tartary. In the first chapter of the book, he hangs out in Budapest with a Hungarian named Rudolf Fischer. They drink plum brandy in Fischer’s study full of books, and Fischer basically prepares Kaplan mentally for his upcoming journey through the Balkans. Fischer goes completely beneath the surface and is able to let Kaplan know what is REALLY going on.
These are the sorts of encounters which make Kaplan’s books so special. It’s the people you meet.
Anyway, so I got sucked into the chapter, and read the whole thing, trying to figure out how to boil it all down into my own language, blah blah. Then I figured that Kaplan and Fischer describe it much better than me, so I will excerpt snippets from their conversation. These are snapshots.
— Fischer unfurled his set of late-nineteenth-century Austrian army staff maps and a somewhat earlier German one. “These are the maps you must use at the start of your journey,” he told me. “They are better than Cold War era maps. The maps before 1989 are, of course, useless. The Iron Curtain is still a social and cultural border. Do you know the real service provided by McDonald’s in Hungary and the other formerly socialist countries? They are the only place where people — women, especially — can find a clean public lavatory.”
— Kaplan on the still reverberating echo of the Roman empire: Very simply put, the split running through the Balkans between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires to which Fischer referred reflects a much earlier division. In the fourth century A.D., the Roman empire divided into western and eastern halves. Rome remained the capital of the western empire, while Constantinople became the capital of the eastern one. Rome’s western empire eventually gave way to Charlemagne’s kingdom and to the Vatican: Western Europe, in other words. The eastern empire — Byzantium — was populated mainly by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, and later by Moslems, when the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453. The border between the eastern and western empires ran through the middle of what after World War I became the multiethnic state of Yugoslavia. When that state broke apart violently in 1991, at least initially it echoed the division of Rome sixteen centuries earlier: The Slovenes and Croats were Roman Catholics, heirs to a tradition that went back from Austria-Hungary to Rome in the West; the Serbs, however, were Eastern Orthodox and heirs to the Ottoman-Byzantine legacy of Rome in the East.
–Kaplan on the Carpathian Mountains: The Carpathians, which run northeast of the former Yugoslavia and divide Romania into two parts, reinforced this boundary between Rome and Byzantium and, later, between the Habsburg emperors in Vienna and the Turkish sultans in Constantinople. Rudolf Fischer told me that the Carpathians, which were not easily traversed, halted the eastward spread of European culture, marked by Romanesque and Gothic architecture and by the Renaissance and Reformation.
–Fischer on the Carpathian Mountains and the divide between West and East: “Romania — because of the influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation in the northwest of the country — had been more developed than Greece before World War II! It was only the Truman Doctrine — $10 billion in American aid, in 1940s dollars no less — that created today’s westernized Greece. Let me go on in the same vein. The differences between the Hungarian Stalinist leader Matyas Rakosi and the Romanian Stalinist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and even more so between their successors, Janos Kadar and Nicolae Ceausescu, were the differences — don’t you see! — between Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. Rakosi and Kadar may have been perverse Central Europeans, but as Hungarians, they were Central Europeans nonetheless. But Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu were Oriental despots, from a part of Europe influenced more by Ottoman Turkey than by Habsburg Austria. That’s why communism did less damage to Hungary than to Romania.”
— Fischer on how Hungary cannot escape its communist past: “Our whores in Budapest are Russian and Ukrainian; our money — though it floats freely — is still worthless in the West; our oil and gas are from Russia; and we have mafia murders and corruption just like in the countries to the south and east. Mafia shootings and the drug trade put pressure on the Hungarian government to make [entrance] visas compulsory for Romanians, Serbs, and Ukrainians, who are thought to be the culprits, but that will never happen, because it will separate us from the ethnic Hungarians just over the [Romanian] border. We are tied to the ex-Communist East, whether we like it or not.”
— Kaplan on the lingering effects of Communism in the Hungarian urban landscape: …the hallway in his building was dark and untidy, like many that I had seen throughout the former Communist world, where decades of state ownership had given people no incentive to maintain property, an attitude that was changing slowly. There was, too, the building itself, and all the others in Fischer’s neighborhood, whose unfinished look and poor construction — plate glass and mustard-colored cinder blocks — were more typical of buildings in formerly Communist Central Asia than those in Austria, just a two-hour ride away by train. The Berlin Wall may have fallen in November 1989, but for a traveler almost a decade later, its ghost was still present.
— A conversation between Kaplan and Fischer about Hungary, NATO, and the EU:
Kaplan: “What about NATO? Will its new eastern frontier — following the admission of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary– mark the border of the Near East?”
Fischer: “NATO doesn’t matter. Only the EU is real. The EU is about currency, border controls, passports, trade, interest rates, environmental and dietary regulations — the details of daily life — which will change Hungary. For decades Austria was not part of NATO, but did you ever think of Austria as part of Eastern Europe or the Near East? Of course not.”
— Kaplan expanding on the new Near East: Therefore, it appeared likely — at least if the EU expanded into Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Poland but took a decade to grant full membership to Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey, and Russia — that the Western alliance would be an eerie variation of the Holy Roman Empire at its zenith in the 11th century, and the split between Western and Eastern Christianity would be institutionalized once more, as it had been during the divisions between Rome and Byzantium and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The Near East would then begin on the border of Hungary and Romania. Completing the reemergence of this older map, Russia was now returning to the dimensions of 16th century Muscovy: a vibrant city-state within a chaotic hinterland.
— A conversation between Fischer and Kaplan about the borders of Hungary:
Fischer: “Hungarians want to spiritualize the frontiers — that is the word that they use here.”
Kaplan: “You mean they want the borders to be filters: to protect, but not to divide.”
Fischer: “Perhaps. What the Hungarians really want is to let ethnic Hungarians from the east into Hungary, but nobody else.”
Editorial comment from Sheila about the above: Uh-oh.
— Fischer on modern-day Europe: Fischer then railed against the “modern age” in Europe, in which democratic stirrings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries strengthened ethnic nationalism, while industrialization strengthened the power of states. The result was the collapse of multiethnic empires like Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey and the rise of uniethnic powers like Germany and of nasty tribal principalities in the post-World War I Balkans, though they were in some cases called parliamentary democracies. Even the 1848 democratic revolutions in Central Europe, it seemed, were not so pure; they were based on ethnicity as much as on liberal ideals, and in Hungarian (Magyar) areas, at least, were opposed by the minority Croats, Serbs, and Romanians. For Fischer, with his background, the modern age had meant “Magyarization campaigns” and other forms of “ethnic cleansing”, crucial to the establishment of petty states tyrannized by ethnic majorities.
— A personal story from Fischer’s past which illuminates the problems with Hungarian nationalism. It is the story of what happened to him on his 21st birthday, September 17, 1944: “Because my father and I had fled Romania when World War II broke out and managed to get visas to Australia, I was in the Australian army on my 21st birthday. My commanding officer had given me a short leave. Thus, I spent my birthday alone, walking in the Australian countryside and thinking about who among my family and friends back in Transylvania were alive or dead. What had happened to them? Soon after the war, I learned that on that very day, Hungarian soldiers shot the entire Jewish population of Sarmas, a village east of Kolozsvar, in Transylvania. Those poor people. They had thought of themselves as Hungarian. They spoke Hungarian. They had managed to survive five years of fascism without being deported to concentration camps. It was as if they had been miraculously forgotten while every kind of horror reigned around them. Then their own Hungarian soldiers appears in Sarmas, and what did they do? They herded all the Jews into pigsties for several days and then took them to a hill and massacred them. Within the Holocaust, there were many little pogroms. This is why I remember so vividly walking alone in Australia on my 21st birthday. Because the memory of it was preserved by what I later found out had occurred on that same day in Sarmasu. You see, Robert, Hungarian nationalism, Romanian nationalism — they’re all bad. The boundary formed by the Carpathians was benign compared to these modern nationalistic boundaries, because the Carpathians divided empires within which peoples and religions mixed. I am a cosmopolitan. That is what every civilized person must now try to be!”
— Fischer says to Kaplan: “We are going for a walk. I have something to show you which you must see before you start on your journey.”:
Near Orczy Square, in the far-off southeast corner of Budapest, we came to an immense hodgepodge of metal-framed stalls and greasy canteens set up in abandoned Russian railway cars. I saw Chinese-manufactured high-top running shoes on sale for the equivalent of ten dollars, sweaters for four dollars, socks, clocks, jackets, cell phones, shampoo, toys, and just about any other necessity — all cheap and made in either Asia or formerly Communist Europe. Many of the goods were Russian. The food at the canteens was Turkish. The merchants were Chinese, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and other Central Asian nationalities, but mostly Chinese. i noticed bus stops for destinations in Romania and other points east, but never west. Hungarian policemen were ubiquitous, for there had been several murders here recently. Nobody was well dressed.
“People in Budapest call this place the Chinese market,” Fischer told me. “It grew in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and China loosened travel restrictions on its own citizens. It is a real caravansary.” Chinese families dominated a vast underground trading network that provided cheap goods for the overwhelming majority of people in Eastern Europe, who could not afford the new Western-style shops. Here, any language worked. Commerce was the great equalizer. “Yes, it is a bit violent, with gangland killings,” Fischer said. “But is it any different from the backstreets of Odessa one or two hundred years ago, where my Jewish ancestors and yours were carrying on much as these people do now?”
“This is all I have to show you, Robert,” Fischer concluded. “Remember that the Iron Curtain still forms a community. Just look at this market. Over four decades of the most comprehensive repression cannot be wished away in a few years.” Fischer guided me onto a tram and rode with me for a few stops. “It is good that you will be passing through Transylvania. Ah, so much to see there,” he said, his voice full of longing. Then he stepped off the tram and waved good-bye by lifting his walking stick.
