Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1986. július-december (40. évfolyam, 27-49. szám)
1986-07-24 / 30. szám
14. AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZÓ Thursday, July 24. 1986. A VISIT TO BUDAPEST Coming here from Vienna, suspending history in willful disbelief, you find it easy to think that Budapest, not that other city, was the capital of a vast empire. Vienna was ringed-in by its middle class at the turn of the century and rendered definitive: mecca of the pompous, the mad, and the cozy. Budapest, on the other hand, is a series of vistas along the broad Danube, a sixteen-mile stretch dreaming itself infinite. On the right bank rise the wooded hills of Buda, with a big royal castle stuck on the brow like a diadem. Opposite, Pest bustles behind the riverbank Parliament Building, which is modeled on the neo-Gothic grandeur of the London structure. After the Hungarians were finally given charge of their internal affairs in 1867, they built a parliament like that of the greatest empire the world had known; and as the flamboyant style of the Viennese Secessionists ceded to cost-efficient housing, Budapest was still building public baths fit for Caesars. The Hungarians have a way of belittling their masters. To the visitor, the "Iron Curtain" seems less substantial here than fog between the bridges. Open to contact, bustling with enterprise and new prosperity, paced by a powerful current of Old World nostalgia, Budapest is a fascinating and pleasurable place. Peter Esterhazy, bearer of one of the great noble names in Hungarian history and, by the grace of the People's Republic presses, a best-selling author of fantasy novels, calls the current situation "undefin- able". For Western professors, Hungary is the proving ground of "revisionist" Marxism. Yet as you talk to other artists in this city as well as to the leaders of industry who are making the "new wave" economy happen, Esterhazy's nondefinition seems appropriate. What is apparent is not a consistent scheme, but a patchwork kind of setup: on the one hand to make Hungary still plausibly Marxist. In any case, you find Hungarians here by the score who speak your language, literally and in terms of values. In its own mind, Budapest definitely faces West. Many of its intellectuals have lived in West Berlin, London, or New York, and they returned to their native soil having established a second home that they periodically visit. The city's businessmen travel all over the West and the Third World cutting deals. And no country is quite so proud of its diaspora as Hungary. There are eleven million Hungarians in Hungary, but Buda- pesters remind you that there are ten million people in the West who, when asked, say they are Hungarian. Budapest is a walker's city, an eater's city par excellence, a city with a museum whose works by Tintoretto, Rembrandt, El Greco, Goya, and Velazquez, though not always as well restored as you find elsewhere, can match anyone's for quality. At one of Europe's grandest opera houses, there are first-class performances of music as well as excellent ballet. And late into morning, at the small, muffled piano bars, people slip into dreamy song, accompanying the pianist with the casual, natural theatricality that is so distinctively Hungarian. In the morning the Danube is the barometer of the day ahead. In winter there is often fog. In summer, with cafe tables out along the Duna Corso and sequins of light on the river, the heartland of Europe seems Mediterranean. One of the best first-morning walks in this city is on Castle Hill. Farther north stretches what Sándor Benko, Hungary's globe-trotting Dixieland bandleader, calls "Budapest's Beverly Hills" - Rózsadomb, or Rose Hill - where new money is restoring Baroque revival and Bauhaus villas. Directly west, on Freedom Hill, beyond where little housing developments are going up for Hungarian-American retirees, the scene is more suburban, i.e., three cars and a dog. Freedom Hill is where Hungary's first private country club was recently built, financed by a rock group called Fonograf. Membership sold out in ten months. Yet the most truly desirable neighborhood in Budapest is Castle Hill, a grand, principally Baroque quarter inhabited by nobles and by the servants of nobles who took over when their masters fled Hungary. If you're staying at the Hilton, perhaps the most advantageously located Hilton in the world, your walk begins at your doorstep. If you're not staying there, stop by all the same and pick up the walking guide to the neighborhood. The Hilton itself is partly a national monument: its facade is what was left of the sixteenth-century exterior of a Jesuit college. Inside there are remnants of a thirteenth-century Dominican monastery, and grafted onto all of this is a Hilton like all Hiltons, which is exceptionally well run by Hungarian .management. This intersticing of modern and hallowed architecture may irritate at first, until you realize it is a part of the neighborhood's signature - and its tradition. After the bomb damage of the Second World War, there was obviously not enough money available to meticulously restore Castle Hill. Instead, the contemporary was patched onto the old. At no time in its history, however, was Castle Hill a museum village. House after house is an amalgam of periods. Baroque facades are pierced by entrance halls with Gothic arches. Stucco walls are stripped at certain places to reveal the details of stone that date to an earlier time. On Castle Hill, Budapesters do not showcase a pedigree past, they salvage and use what they can of their history. It is a vital tradition more deeply embedded in the fiber of the Hungarian personality than any imposed ideology could be. And the hand kissing, the bowing, and the courtliness you encounter in this People's Republic are its outward signs. On the other side of the river, in Pest, you come upon the flamboyant vitality of Hungary's turn-of-the-century buildings. Little lay little, the monumentally plastic architecture designed from the late 1800s through the First World War is being redeemed from grime. Budapest's bestknown architect, József Finta, who designed nearly all of Pest's postwar luxury hotels, from the functionalist 1963 Duna Intercontinental to the new postmodern Taverna, affirms his turn-of-the-century predecessors did some of the most powerful work of their generation. "The economic center of the empire shifted from Vienna to Budapest in the 1880s", he says. "New industries sprang up here: machinery, electrotechnical (cont. p. 15.)
