If you are born into a Hungarian family, you tend to take many things for granted – a tendency only reinforced by the purity and innocence of a child’s understanding. However, the opposite is true: everything in Hungary is peculiar, and so are all the Hungarians!
For a Hungarian, a family coat of arms on the wall, inherited from ancestors and indicating German origins, at first seems obvious. He feels that his grandparents’ reminiscences about his great-grandfather, who lived the messy life of the Hungarian gentry and finally died a heroic death during the retreat after the Battle of the Don Bend, fit into the natural order of life. As do serious stories about his grandfather’s Russian captivity and the persecution of other family members during the Rákosi era. On the other side of the family, the nostalgic tales of great-grandparents’ traditional, village life as peasants, and about the bygone world of their childhood seem self-evident, yet somehow the urban bourgeois environment into which he was born appears equally so. He does not ask why his rarely seen relatives are separated from him by borders that never used to exist. These things belong to the modus vivendi. Indeed, they form its basis!
Then, when he starts his schooling, he realizes that behind all the things he took for granted stand some very strange lives and events – things that make us Hungarian. How did Germans end up in Hungary? What were our soldiers doing thousands of kilometres away from home, far to the east? Why was a young girl persecuted and imprisoned by an all-powerful dictatorship under the pretext that she was courting the wrong person? How did the modernization that the nation voluntarily chose for itself during the Reform Era change the lives of all Hungarians? How did the bourgeois ideal become a feeling of class alienation, and how did the bourgeois ideal regain or fail to regain its rightful status after 1989? What domestic and foreign decisions created the circumstances by which Hungarians who never left their land live in a ‘foreign country’? Answering these questions involves confronting strange phenomena not typical in other parts of the world. After all, even though certain elements unquestionably occurred elsewhere, one thing can be said with absolute certainty about the stories behind the Hungarian everyday reality: no part of it is remotely self-evident. Neither is the fact that the Carpathian Basin has been the home of the Hungarians for a thousand years. Once, at Balatonszárszó, László Németh said that Hungarians ‘came together even in the most wretched circumstances, and from almost nothing created huge movements to make for themselves an intact nation.’ And such efforts are never ordinary, but special.
This specialness – or, if you like, the sense of specialness that develops as a synthesis of experience and study – may also have contributed to the fact that almost everything in Hungary is a question of fate. It is easy to see, in the shadow of so many historical setbacks and the enduring struggle for survival, how impossible it is to perceive even the most everyday matters otherwise. Every question is encased within so many other layers, which is why what food ends up on the kitchen table is as much a question of fate as what is written in school textbooks. Behind the questions of fate is the knowledge that one bad decision here, on the frontiers of Western civilization, could be a country’s last. If we make the wrong decision, there may be no chance to correct it. This is something that may be difficult for a foreigner to understand. And that is why, if someone in Hungary takes their work seriously, no matter how mundane it would be in any other part of the world, they are inevitably embarking on a matter of fate. From there, it is only one step to turn to politics.
It also happens elsewhere that those who originally chose the legal profession end up becoming politicians. But in Hungary there is much more to it than that. In another corner of the world, Pál Teleki, the outstanding geographer, would probably have ended his career at the pinnacle of his academic field, basking in the glory of his scientific achievements. In Hungary, he also became a politician, and as a consequence, ultimately took his own life in 1941 – Hungary’s participation in the invasion of Yugoslavia struck him as a betrayal. The author of the National Anthem, Ferenc Kölcsey, was not only a literary man with both a classical and a modern education, but also the representative of Szatmár County in the Hungarian House of Lords. Or we might consider the poet Dániel Berzsenyi, whose entire oeuvre is permeated by concern for the fate of the nation, yet who was often criticized by Kölcsey – from which we can see that there is not always consensus, even among the greatest. The list of examples could be continued virtually endlessly.
This peculiarity of Hungarian life, and within it public life, can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. The challenges before us can appear liberating or depressing to the point of helplessness. We have seen and continue to see many examples of both.
I personally believe that this characteristically Hungarian attitude, the inspiring burden of uniqueness, is a gift that equips Hungarians to successfully face the 21st century. If I can play my role in this fight, it will already have been worth it. As my grandmother said a million times – and since then I have never heard a more expressive credo – ‘I do my bit.’