Socialism lives

It was with mixed feelings and a mixed message that I bought three Communist posters for my siblings after visiting Statue Park on Friday. Each had some combination of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Marx, and others, caricatured in the form of a movie poster, a band, and South Park. Never mind the capitalist profit made from their commodification. The more significant contrast is that my siblings will hang them up without entirely supporting the men (the way Che supporters wear his face), nor will they entirely laugh at the decoration (the way Michael Moore holds hands with Bush).

Whoever designed the posters probably intended them for the latter, ironic purpose, and so I say it is even more ironic that my family, with its socialist leanings, is more in between the Bush and Che alternatives. Safe to say we don’t support any of the reeducation, political purging, or subjugation that would make Orwell turn in his grave. But we remember too that these resulted from totalitarianism, not the ideology of socialism in its economic, sexual, and humanitarian equality.

Then again, I think we are removed enough from the Cold War to see that communism itself isn’t completely the evil we believed it to be. About all this I am unsure. Who knows, maybe not everyone is laughing. What impels people to, for instance, visit places like Statue Park? In between the ironic (though silent) laughter and the homage to the victims of terror, there is probably also a part of us that pays respect to the likes of Lenin and Mao, if only to recognize their impact as world-historical figures. Something like the legacy of Napoleon still upheld in France.

Not that I had much company on Friday. At times I was alone, at times half a dozen tourists wandered Statue Park, also known as Memento Park. And no wonder: I spent over an hour, two buses, and a tram to get outside Budapest, where the statues have been placed. Most were moved there from their sites in the heart of the city, after being toppled in 1989, though their original locations are still denoted on the not-very-informational plaques. What’s worse, I thought, some are “authentic replicas” of original monuments. I complained of this to a Hungarian friend, of city planners fabricating culture and recreating history just to please tourists. But my friend shut me up: is the city really making money on the half dozen tourists that come out there? The truth is, he said, they want to preserve culture and honor history.

He’s probably right, so I’ll just be happy with the huge replica of Stalin’s boots that stand outside the entrance, which is itself a large red brick wall that doesn’t really keep anything out. The park is an outdoor museum, a string of three round fields with a bright red star made of flowers in the center field, and larger-than-life statues, reliefs, murals and any number of monuments along the circumferences. People and writings are a mix of Hungarian and Russian, ranging from the solidarity of the Soviet Union and its satellite, the rights of women, the education of children, and the loyalty, strength, and peace realized through socialism.

The one called “Liberation Monument” shows a wall of white stone, interrupted where a man’s profile takes shape behind the man himself, who stands before the wall from which he has just broken free. The symbolism is clear, but I can’t look at it without thinking, don’t you know it’s you, Communism, from which we are breaking free?

At some point I realized how comic it all was: here I was, standing in a Cold War era park, holding The Joke by Milan Kundera. Like many of the Czech writer’s works, this sets the trials of life and love against the backdrop of Soviet-occupied Central Europe. Ordinarily I would call it a coincidence, but more likely, I am proving Kundera’s own thesis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It is not coincidence that my family comes from a still (nominally) Communist country, that I came to study in Hungary, that I read this book and this author, that I visited Statue Park. Kundera uses the example of Anna Karenina to argue that what we call dramatic, like Anna’s preoccupation with and death under trains, is not coincidence but life. The motif of trains (or just as easily of communism) is not dramatic accident created for novels, but drama that we, consciously or not, tend to create for ourselves.

Living at the speed of two languages

I finally got around to Hungarian literature in the form of Ferenc Molnar's The Paul Street Boys (A Pal Utcai Fiuk), a century-old novella about two rival gangs in Budapest. It had its merits, from the comical (I still laugh when I think about little Nemecsek falling into the Danube, and Csonakos asking, "Did you have a drink, laddie?") to the political (Molnar draws overt links between the gangs' pivotal battle and the real turf wars between states).

Not that I expected much from a book for young people, but still, to call this a "true world classic" (preface by Molnar's grandson) is a little silly. Some of it is the author's fault, e.g., martyring a schoolboy (sorry to ruin the ending if you were planning to read it). But to Molnar's credit, much of the problem is the translation. I once thought if you could speak two languages that was enough to translate, so it amazes me still how vital is a translator with a handle on the mechanics as well as literary form. This creates I think a divide that questions where credit is due: is the author great if the translator isn't? Conversely, can a talented translator fill in where an author is lacking?

The topic also resonates as I finish up Crime and Punishment. Not only do Raskolnikov and Razumikhin translate works between Russian and German, there's a circular scene in which Sonia reads in Russian the passage about Lazarus from a bible that has been translated (from I don't know what, German? Latin? English?) but of course I am reading this all in English. The translator, then, must have been very self-aware as he worked on Dostoevsky.

As in many introductions to Russian lit, this one clarifies the peculiarities of Russian names. But it goes a step further, explaining that the translator chose to keep some possible sources of confusion (such as referring to Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov as Rodia) because he is in Russia, the reader must remember.

I thought of it again last week at a Hungarian rendition of Hello, Dolly! Because I wasn't familiar with the plot, my subconscious succumbed to the Hungarian dialogue and repeatedly believed that the characters were traveling from Budapest (rather than Yonkers) to Manhattan. Again I relied on some translation and again felt the guilt of missing out on works as they are in the original (not that the Hungarian Hello, Dolly! is original...). I've read an untranslated work once in my life, Marquez's Cronica de una Muerte Anunciada, and it was immensely more beautiful and there is so much that just can't be translated. Hence my insistence that we preserve as much as possible, sans translation.

The only argument I've heard against bilingualism, and I heard it recently, was that one language would detract from the other so you'd never really have a command of either. But I reject it, else how could Milan Kundera write in French and Czech? So, Hungarians, that is one thing you must work on. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised at the scarcity of English speakers here, as so many politicians around the world don't speak English, but even Hungarians themselves admit that not enough of them, especially compared to neighboring countries, know the language.

Of the merits of bilingualism, though, I again share this argument a la Eddie Izzard:


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Watching: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Listening to: Springsteen, Greatest Hits

Civizational clash: nationalism and stereotypes

The trip to Eger on Sunday was an educational one even before we arrived, in that I learned how the main roads work. Turning into an exit, we encountered highway patrol parked there to check whether drivers had paid the fee to use the highway. Luckily my friends had, because I think it's similar to the hit-or-miss enforcement of the metro. Speaking of which, the subway is slightly less enigmatic now, and I bet Hungarians have figured out how to cheat the system because it's not difficult over time to get a sense of where guards will be checking tickets - the exception being the one time I came across a guard who actually hopped onto a train to see our tickets.

Anyway, the highway procedure should not be so surprising, I'm just used to U.S. tax policy. What my friends did on the other hand was buy a day pass at a gas station. You can buy passes for any range of times, and by SMS as well, which is funny because you could theoretically have to keep your confirmation SMS for a year to show as proof.

The remaining enlightenment that I derived from Eger was similarly not direct nor immediate, creeping up on me days later.

I was glad to have known about Egri Csillagok, the nationally required reading about Eger's uniquely successful defense against the expanding Ottomans in 1552. It means Stars of Eger, but is for some reason translated as Eclipse of the Crescent Moon, and the writer Geza Gardonyi's grave can be found at the castle in Eger. I didn't learn much from the Hungarian tour guide, depending instead on what my friends could translate. While deciding on the obligatory wine (the city is known for it), one friend insisted I buy Egri Bikaver, i.e., Bull's Blood of Eger. The legend goes that in the days preparing for the Ottoman attack, Hungarians drank this red wine, which dripped down their lips and convinced the Ottomans that they had drank bull's blood, and that was why they were strong enough to defeat them.

The story, along with the history as a larger context, joins other sources of national pride (the unsuccessful 1848 rebellion against the Habsburgs, the disastrous 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, the smooth 1989 shedding of communism, etc.). These, in turn, have their part in the even larger context of the overall idea of any country's national legacies, which I have started to wonder about lately. Brainwashing is just the extreme form of a universal practice in national education systems of conditioning citizens to understand and support their countries. At least at a basic level this means emphasizing achievements over mistakes as proof of greatness. Doesn't a country founded on liberty sound better than one founded on tax evasion?

It's true that the events of 1989 and 1956 and 1848 durably shape the Hungary we see today. And if anyone is to inherit these legacies, mustn't it be the Hungarians? But my problem, or at least what I question, is whether and how much anyone has a right to claim these legacies. Yesterday I read this in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure."

The Spain of today is not the Spain of the conquistadors. That is to say Prime Minister Zapatero's government had no say in the country's colonization decisions in the 16th century. What fidelity, then, do Latin Americans owe Spain? What accountability, then, does Spain owe them? I thought of this in more recent history when hearing that a French court blamed the country for deporting Jews during the Holocaust, and (in an Eastern/Central European class) that Polish people in the town of Jedwabne killed the Jewish half of their neighbors. In class my professor distinguished between guilt (as Sarkozy should not feel guilty for the choices of de Gaulle) and responsibility (as the Polish should admit historical accuracies).

If we take it for granted that, indeed, Belgium is liable for its colonial past or that Italians rightly take pride in the roots of the Renaissance, I think this implies some credence to Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. It divides the world and much of its history into seven main civilizations, which define conflict along cultural lines. It's not the best way to examine the aforementioned legacies, but in my mind there's a relevantly deterministic outlook. His theory has generally met resistance (including from me), probably because we dislike the idea of simplifying cultures so much that we say Germans behave that way because they're German. In this way it's 'wrong' to stereotype peoples, and yet right to identify them according to histories dating back decades, centuries, or millenniums. I'm still trying to reconcile this.

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Listening to: Dru Hill, "We're Not Making Love No More"
Reading: Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Day trip: Bratislava

[Click on headline for the Facebook album]

With Anna Karenina's suicide fresh in my mind, I got on a train to Bratislava, though I was only spending Friday there en route to Vienna for the weekend. It seems few visit the Slovakian capital except while passing through, and the winter cold made it even less appealing to visitors than other seasons, so I almost felt that we had the quiet city to ourselves.

As if as testament, my friends and I had trouble thinking of famous Slovaks, unless you count those who made Czechoslovakian history, and most of those associated themselves with the Czech Republic after the split. Jeff, our tour guide in Vienna and Budapest, said it was a shame but due in large part to the ambiguity of the Slovakian identity, a tool mainly of the rural nationalists who struggled for an independent state. It's true that Slovakia probably had/has relatively less bearing on international history, but I think it also seems less significiant because of a superficial, self-perpetuating cycle in which we're taught little about the country, so we teach little about the country.

Understand our irritation, then, that such an unvisited city should newly be on the Euro and relatively expensive, while the more popular Budapest is still on the Forint and more affordable. We should probably shed Hungarian attachments when crossing the border, but the difficulty is apparent when we keep trying to speak Hungarian (what little we know) to Slovaks. Then again, that probably has more to do with foreign languages in general, as people often confuse them when learning more than one, no matter how different.

An effect of my limited knowledge of Bratislava was to wander the day away, surprised by the Gingerbread-house-like designs of some buildings and amused by statues that didn't take themselves too seriously. At some point I always end up roaming the streets alone, or actually, allowing myself to get lost, like taking apart a car to see if you can put it back together. I took that time to see the requisite castle, New Bridge (main photo), and Danube River, where I would have snuck on to a deserted boat if a gate hadn't cut if off. But most of the time I didn't know where I was, walking east when I thought I was walking north.

As much as I love navigating and as much as my navigational skills improve with each trip, maps can be less simple than you expect. There can be a Vorosmarty Ter as well as a Vorosmarty Utca, or an Antelope Road as well as a North Antelope Road. My most recent epiphany is that I expect to look at a map and follow simple directions, only to immediately lose the correspondence between the paper and the street, i.e., reading the one and walking down the other. I expect something more like a GPS, as if I had a broader perspective and were to go outside myself to watch and guide from above.

I rely instead on instinct (successful much of the time) and strangers, and never worry because things always work out. While lost in Bratislava, I was lucky enough, as the dark descended and compounded the cold, that the next bus I saw would take me to the train station. I was one of the first to arrive, but the last to board because, succumbing to the negative temperatures, I bought a glass of wine just so I could sit next to a radiator at a restaurant and lose track of time in Sartre.

A possible high point of the day, I'm almost sorry to report, might have had little to do with Bratislava itself: from inside the evening bus, I watched a light snow fall unlike any I'd seen. Not sleet, not flakes, not powder; I can only liken it to sand that reflected the city lights the way clouds do, sand that the wind effortlessly twirled into a Flamenco dancer or dragged along the road as if by magnets.

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Reading: Sartre, "Nausea"
Listening to: John Legend, "PDA"

For the love of Buda

Two days passed before I realized how laughable my Friday afternoon was: I walked to Buda castle after exploring the gray and quiet streets of that western half of the city, and stopped at a ledge overlooking the Danube to read Kafka's The Castle. Granted, the book's castle is more metaphorical than physical, but it exists nevertheless. My intention was only to navigate through Buda because people (myself included) tend to spend more time on the Pest side of the river, but the day was such a welcome break from the rain and snow, I wanted to take a Czechoslovakian break.

The next day I returned with friends to meander through the castle's underground labyrinth, which is not as cool as it sounds, my friends decided. And they were just obtuse, I decided. It was, after all, a simple chain of subterranean, naturally sculpted tunnels, which can make for an excursion with the right expectations. I read the description at the entrance, so I was excited by the prehistoric age of the labyrinth and its history of sheltering the war-trodden. It also prepared me for the "cave drawings" and stone carvings that were not prehistoric so much as entertainment. Probably my dismay over the manufactured attractions in Rome also softened the blow, so the "artifacts" were not as odious as the clammy musk of the low-hanging passageways.

But what I couldn't have expected amid the dripping ceilings and ominous music was the exhibit of the "Other World." First we came upon a cordoned fossil of a footprint, and I waited as my friend read the description. "They're just laughing at us," he concluded, walking away in disgust. The footprint turned out to be a shoeprint from the specimen "homo consumerus," and other relics followed, stone impressions of a laptop, cell phone, and Coke bottle (see photo), among others. I found it hilarious that those who ran the labyrinth would ever have thought to produce something like that. At the same time, as with the music, the drawings, and the dining area, the "remnants" really said something about the desperation to please tourists and the dearth of better alternatives.

But as I said, I enjoyed my first maze, as you can find enjoyment in nearly anything, and after crossing out my friend's overblown sarcasm, I wrote something to that effect in the guestbook: "Thank you for the labyrinth. I appreciated it for its history. People who come here expecting fireworks and can-can dancers prove the joke of homo consumerus."

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Listening to: Janet Jackson, "Together Again"

Redemption

That is, if I needed to be redeemed, today gave me enough fodder to justify (culturally, educationally, historically) coming to Hungary. I generally grimace at all things touristy but went on a tour this afternoon thinking it can/should be done once. Then, our guide (Jeff, I thought, but he didn’t respond when called it) made a case for his existence, though I’m pretty sure it was unintentional: past halftime, we were asking which nearby cities he recommends visiting, which led to a spiel on remembering to read the guidebooks and go to the tourist hot spots because one can, believe it or not, learn a lot from them. Now that I think of it, he was referring to the Disneyworld in the Czech Republic. Previously I had been attracted to Hungary’s communist past, revolutionary pride, and developing status, but now on to more specific points of interest:

• Jeff put on a German accent and tells us what he says other tour guides would tell other tourists: two lions greet you at the entrance of the famous bridge over the Danube, and when it was first erected, people admired and praised the bridge as the first (after Vienna's) to connect East and West, but one little boy remarked that the lions had no tongues, which put the creator of the bridge to such shame that he jumped off said bridge. Bull shit, as it turned out. Moral of the story: don’t believe everything guides tell you. After all, they’re in the business of “edu-tainment,” in his words. I thought that was a good way for Jeff to begin our tour. (Disclaimer: the above photo was taken by a friend, not me.)
  


• I think the East-West part was true.


• At first I was cynical that he should show us hotels, but those, too, had their redeeming qualities. Namely, they broke ground in ushering in Western capitalism, therefore symbolizing goulash communism, Hungary’s soft approach to that craze of the second half of the 20th century.


• An even better symbol is the nearby McDonald’s, the first to open doors in a communist country. For its debut, journalists hailed the event as groundbreaking and Hungarians turned out in droves, dressed to impress.


• Hungary’s is the second largest synagogue in the world, after the one on Fifth Avenue. A fellow student pointed out: one would think Israel could hold its own in that race.


• It’s built in the Moorish style in homage to the days when Jews and Muslims got along. Later synagogues included organs, flouting the Christian patent, because Hungarian Jews couldn’t get enough of that Beethoven.


• After World War II, the best preserved (not entirely sure what that means) group of Jewish people were those in Hungary.


• The country’s name derives from the initial impression that the first settlers here were related to the Huns, which despite a physical resemblance at the time, has been disproved. In fact, they were genetically much closer to the Mongols. (Two words: lion’s tongues).