Hungarian Heritage Review, 1986 (15. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1986-01-01 / 1. szám

8 HUNGARIAN HERITAGE REVIEW JANUARY 1986

BACK TO BUDAPEST- BY - GEORGE LANG

EDITOR’S NOTE: Connoisseur magazine, in its outstanding report on Hungary by Anthony Astrachan (The Hungarian Experience), also included this piece by George Lang, the world famous Hungarian author and restaurateur, which we believe embodies a “message” of special significance to our readers. For this reason, we decided to reprint it.)

Recently, I took my wife, Jenifer, to Budapest to show her the city I so often visited as a child with my father and where I later was to study music. It is this Budapest of nearly forty years ago that I have carried with me since the day in 1946 when I was forced to flee. I would have liked to walk back from New York, to have had time to adjust to my reawakened past life, time to tell my wife about sitting in 1939 under the horse-chestnut trees with a carafe of wine glittering in the moon’s generous light. The wind held back its breath that evening; a chambermaid—a displaced peasant girl—sang in the kitchen, and the daughter of my host played Bach. At this magical moment, I thought the entire world was well-tempered, and Budapest the found paradise.

The first night of our visit, I was not sure I should tell my wife what else my brain and nerves had preserved throughout the years. While looking at the Széchényi Chain Bridge—the symbol of Budapest—I remembered running across the same bridge one day in 1945, showered with machine-gun bullets from low-flying Russian planes. The city, wounded and partly ruined, was shivering that cold Christmas as the German and Russian armies clashed. I have always been perplexed that God did not end all the inhumanity.

Instead, the Communists took over, and we survived. Hungarians have always been master of survival, helped by our sense of humor, which, especially in Budapest, is as inventive as any other art form. It allows us to distance ourselves from reality. There is the story, for example, about a Russian and a Hungarian miner who discover a sizeable 'gold mine. The Russian hastily assures the Hungarian that they will share it in brotherly fashion. “No way,” snaps the Hungarian. “This time it’s going to be fifty-fifty!”

Even though Hungary is today dominated by Brother Russia—you can choose your friends but not your family, according to another Hungarian joke—it is unlike any other iron curtain country. Since the 1956 uprising, Hungarians have achieved just about everything they wanted, and all

the things the rest of the Soviet-bloc countries still crave: prosperity, relative freedom of choice, and the right to be wrong. Budapest presents other contradictions. Although the average citizen of Budapest earns only $100 per month, the people are well dressed, and many families own one or two cars, partly because of a form of capitalism that is expanding throughout the country. As evidence of a rich cultural life, nightclubs and theaters abound—but so do the scars of bullets from World War II and the 1956 “counterrevolution.”

This is the Budapest I returned to with Jennifer. I wanted to show her what the city has become—the most charming, the most Western of all Eastern European capitals. It is like the phoenix of legend: always destroyed, always reborn.

The Castle District

Our first walking trip was to the Castle district of Buda, on the right bank of the Danube. Here, during the eighteenth century, well-to-do vineyard owners and burghers built their exuberant miniature palaces. Perhaps inevitably, it has turned into the city’s tourist center. Because it also remains a fashionable area to live in, the ten-block district has retained the atmosphere of a small medieval township surrounded by a more or less modern city. In spite of the melange of baroque stucco ornaments on the two-story houses, Renaissance graffiti, and Gothic archways, these townhouses blend into a genuine, intimate neighborhood of urban decency, vividly expressing an age that despised straight lines.

The center of this fairy-tale town is the often-destroyed and rebuilt Royal Castle, in Szent György Ter, which now houses four museums. In the southern wing is the permanent exhibit “A Thousand Years of Our Capital.” It includes countless objects used in Budapest’s daily life throughout its history; and altogether, the museum offers the best way to get a feel for the city.

Please remember to look at a pair of pictures toward the end of the exhibit. One is a huge photograph of the boastful excitement and festivities of the allied German-Austro- Hungarian forces in 1914, at the beginning of World War

I. Directly next to it, the other picture, taken in 1918 on the same boulevard in Budapest, shows a child beggar sitting in the rubble. These photographs should hang opposite the bed of every general and politician for them to see when they get up in the morning. What a lesson in the utter vanity of violence and the horrors of hubris! The question is, will we ever heed it?