This is a primo weekend for us quasi-Hungarians. As your local classical radio station has probably informed you, or you deduced from today's Google doodle, October 22 is the 200th birthday of
I've been to a few of these concerts over the last year, but not so many, since usually it takes more than a guy banging on a piano to get me to put on clothes, brave the streets, and sit still for a few hours. And Liszt didn't write any operas, at least after adolescence. I'm very fond of his music though, when heard properly over the radio while loafing in a comfortable chair, particularly Les Années de pélerinage, which shows a depth of spiritual longing and complexity remarkable for the world's first pop star, unless he was just faking. Which he doesn't seem to be. His tumultuous life included periods of intense searching for cosmic grace interspersed among periods focused on much more earthly concerns. Was there something essentially Hungarian about this? Maybe.
There's been a lot written lately about Liszt's Hungarian-ness. Like this. It's true he always claimed to be Hungarian – and let's not forget that in the 19th century you could get a lot further with the totty as an exotic putative member of the minor Hungarian nobility with magic fingers than as just another boring Austrian tunesmith, which is sadly probably no longer true: for the fellows at least – and was a great benefactor to the development of musical education in Pest during his sojourns here. But on the key linguistic benchmark for ascertaining Hungarian-ness, which ranges along a personal scale of stringency, among the jury, from being able to make yourself understood in Magyar, to being able to do so without a silly accent, to being able to quote verbatim from 1980s television programs, he failed miserably.
So, Frank: Today isn't all about you. It's also about the rest of us who sometimes forget to place a "t" at the end of the direct object, a reminder that if we bring honor and acclaim upon the nation through our cleverness or charm, or less likely, through our hard work, this will be overlooked and we too will be embraced among our brethren and have an airport renamed after us.
October 23 is the anniversary of the start of the bloody uprising in 1956 and a national holiday. Chiefly, of course, it commemorates the brave men and women, in many cases boys and girls, who stood up to tyranny against impossible odds. In a broader sense, it also commemorates the victims and victimization of the communist period in general, and can even be taken to commemorate the entirety of the nation's suffering across the 20th century and its possible – this is still up in the air – redemption.
But in my own small way, I also observe it as a reflection of my own relationship to the nation, for insofar as anyone’s existence and the courses of life followed thereafter can be traced back to a concrete date marking a major historical event, October 23 is it for me.
And I’m not alone. I’ve met loads of children of ’56-ers who have decamped for “home” from all the countries that took their parents in in any kind of numbers: USA, Canada, UK, Australia, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Norway… Generally the parents remain in the host country, the country of their children’s birth, where they are now comfortably settled down, but come to visit occasionally. I haven’t heard of a good analogue for this phenomenon from another country, on this scale and as it has played out here.
I have one hypothesis for this grip that Hungary has on us that I find compelling: today, with cheap intercontinental jet travel, dual passports, relaxed border controls, and, thankfully, the increasingly smaller number of political regimes that systematically attempt to suck the spirits out of their citizens, relatively few cross-border migrants actually “emigrate”. Instead, in most cases, we “relocate” somewhere, usually for money, but sometimes just for kicks or other personal considerations, and then see how things pan out. With certain exception, you can always go back.
But in 1956, the situation was completely different. Emigration entailed a much deeper split with your home country, and in the cases of some countries it would foreseeably be near-total and permanent. In these cases, even if at the critical moment you had to dash across a minefield to emigrate, you still would have gotten enough time beforehand to weigh up the pros and cons, prepare yourself and come to terms, make your own decision, just like any other emigrant. In Hungary in 1956, political events moved so quickly none of this was possible. The revolution came out of the blue. First the Soviets withdrew. The lights came on, for the first time since 1939, or even earlier. Then they came back, with lots of big tanks and the promised support from the west was not forthcoming. The borders were open and it was only a matter of days before the lights went out again. What do you do? Especially if you were known to have had a hand in the events of the past few days?
So the 200,000 who left became good Australians or Swedes or what have you. But somehow the split wasn’t complete, and a kind of duality remained that was passed on to the children. Not always, but often. Fast forward to 1989 and the lights switch on again, almost as suddenly. (I know this is a gross oversimplification, but sufficient for the present argument.) The world is changing. The children of the émigrés have reached a suitable age for venturing forth into it, and have vestigial, atrophied Hungarian identities to develop.
So here we are contributing our toil, tears and marketable skills to the nation’s well-milked tax base. We might butcher our suppositions sometimes, or in some egregious cases really should sign up for Hungarian 101 after all these years here, but we speak tip-top English: especially the Swedes. Sometimes we say other things worth listening to.
Here's to us. Down with tyranny!
