(sorry, couldn’t resist…)
June 11, 2009
June 8, 2009
WHEN ETHNIC TENSIONS, FOOTBALL, AND YOUTUBE MIX: AN INTERNET AUTOPSY OF THE COUNTDOWN TO THE CLASH BETWEEN HUNGARIAN FANS AND SLOVAK POLICE AT THE 1 NOVEMBER 2008 DAC DUNASZERDAHELY – SLOVAN BRATISLAVA MATCH
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WHEN ETHNIC TENSIONS, FOOTBALL, AND YOUTUBE MIX:
AN INTERNET AUTOPSY OF THE COUNTDOWN TO THE CLASH
BETWEEN HUNGARIAN FANS AND SLOVAK POLICE AT THE 1 NOVEMBER 2008
DAC DUNASZERDAHELY – SLOVAN BRATISLAVA MATCH
by Richard Andrew Hall, Ph.D.
Standard Disclaimer: All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or any other U.S. Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or CIA endorsement of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.
I am an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency. I have been a CIA analyst since 2000. Prior to that time, I had no association with CIA outside of the application process. I do not work and have not worked on Hungary or Slovakia at the Agency.
It sounds like a testament to the wonders and integrative potential of globalization…and yet it also sounds like the opening to a bad riddle:
The DAC (Dunajská Streda/ Dunaszerdahely Athletic Club) soccer team in Slovakia is owned by a Dubai billionaire who is an Austrian citizen of Iranian origin (Dr. Khashayar Mohseni). The team’s roster includes six Cameroonians, three Croatians, several Arabs playing on either German or French passports, some Czechs, Slovaks, three Slovak Hungarians and two Hungarians from Hungary proper (Csaba Regedei and Zoltán Vasas). The coach is a German, Werner Lorant. In the locker room a Turkish born masseur serves as translator and speaks several world languages. Ján Novota, the goalkeeper, says he directs his team’s defense in four languages: Slovak, Hungarian, German, and English.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[1]<!–[endif]–>
Yet on 1 November 2008 in Dunajská Streda (Dunaszerdahely), Slovakia, there was a football riot…of a sort. Based on the above description and particularly the tensions that have played out in recent years in stadiums in Spain and France, one might think that the spark for the conflict could have been racism toward the Cameroonians or anti-Muslim or anti-Arab suspicion directed against the Persian owner or the Arab players. But, no, despite the broader globalized context of the DAC team, this football politics was eminently local, or at the very least regional: a flashpoint and manifestation of deteriorating ethnic Slovak – ethnic Hungarian relations.
According to various reports, 50 people were wounded and seen by medical personnel, six (five of them Hungarians) were taken to the local hospital, and one person was transported by helicopter for treatment in the capital, Bratislava (contrary to initial and sometimes hysterical posts on the Internet, this individual did not die). The overwhelming majority of those who were injured appear to have been ethnic Hungarian, either from Slovakia or from neighboring Hungary proper.
After the 17 minute mark of the match, helmeted black-clad Slovak riot police intervened in the “Hungarian sector” of the stadium which was supporting the local team, DAC—Dunajská Streda (Dunaszerdahely), located in southwestern Slovakia near the Slovak-Hungarian border, is 80 % ethnic Hungarian. The Slovak police herded the DAC supporters to one side of the bleachers—the crush of humanity, with people jumping from the stands to escape the stampede, was vaguely reminiscent of scenes from the May 1985 Heysel tragedy in Brussels, as noted by some Internet posters.
The catalyst for the police intervention remains in dispute. According to one of the few English language reports relating the incident, AFP, “local fans started to throw stones and the match had to be interrupted due to violence after 17 minutes.” DAC supporters on the Internet have maintained that the intervention was essentially unprovoked, while the Slovak authorities and media have in some cases sought to suggest that some of the “rowdies” (aka hooligans) among the Hungarians who traveled to Slovakia for the match physically assaulted the riot police. As most video footage of the police-fan confrontation posted on the youtube site begin after this event, and those that claim to have captured it are not conclusive, it remains a subject of speculation and recrimination.
One thing is for sure from reading the Internet: this clash was both foreseeable—if not necessarily inevitable—and has had broad ramifications inside both Slovakia and Hungary. Whether or not “1 November” proves to be a “watershed”—as some Hungarian posters claim or attempt to brand the event on the Internet—is a matter of time, and can probably really only be accurately assessed after much more of it has passed. Nevertheless, make no mistake: ethnic Hungarians are attaching significance to this event. Already on the evening of 1 November—significantly, if serendipitously “All Saints Day,” a day of mourning—the Hungarian (nationalist) hip-hop artist FankaDeli (Ferenc Kőházy) had posted a song entitled “1 November” on youtube and other Internet sites, spawning many supportive comments among ethnic Hungarian posters, even among those who stated that they don’t like the genre of music, or even the music of this video, but were deeply affected by the nationalist lyrics.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[2]<!–[endif]–>
This article is mostly about the run-up to the 1 November 2008 match, in other words the making of the conflict. It reflects three possible limitations that I wish to recognize at the outset: 1) I can read Hungarian and can recognize some basic slavic constructions but do not know Slovak and thus for the most part have been unable to access Slovak sites and bulletin boards; 2) this study was performed post facto (the first I learned of the match and its events was, like many, Monday 3 November 2008) and thus my search of what happened on sites on 1 November 2008 and in the weeks and months prior was conducted after the events of 1 November 2008; and 3) in order to conform with contemporary Agency regulations, their interpretation and application, I am unable to discuss much of the political context and fallout that has surrounded these events. This short article then is designed to be purely informational, rather than political or editorial. It will thus have some discussion of immediate, direct fallout from the match, but not of broader Slovak-Hungarian political and governmental relations.
25 July 2008: DAC – Spartak Trnava I
Already back in the summer, with the beginning of the new Slovak football season, there were expressions of concern over fears of violence at Dunaszerdahely matches. DAC, which had a storied history from the mid-1980s to late 1990s, was returning to the top Slovak football division for the first time since 2000.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[3]<!–[endif]–> The 25 July 2008 match between DAC and Spartak Trnava (referred to as Nagyszombati Szpartak by Hungarians, although Trnava is 97% Slovak) led to debate over whether there should be an alcohol ban in parts of Dunaszerdahely on the day of the match. Despite the fact that the “wildest fanatical Spartak fan club had been disbanded in May [an apparent reference to the ultras spartak group],” even some of those who had a commercial interest in selling alcohol—restaurant and bar owners—advocated for a ban on alcohol sales because of memories of a previous visit by Spartak Trnava supporters back in the 1990s (according to one owner, he and his son had been attacked and he claimed a young girl had been thrown by the “Nagyszombati hooligans” from a train). <!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[4]<!–[endif]–>
The first DAC-Spartak Trnava match ended going off without major incident—DAC won 3-0—but one can see the helmeted, black-clad Slovakian riot police posted at the base of the stands of both DAC and Spartak supporters and intervening against rowdy fans on several occasions.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[5]<!–[endif]–> The match, however, was interrupted for about ten minutes when a Spartak fan ripped a Hungarian flag out of the hands a DAC supporter, and proceeded to parade around the field with it, followed in pursuit by the DAC supporter, until the Spartak fan ripped the Hungarian flag apart.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[6]<!–[endif]–> Although the Slovak football authorities said they were looking into the event because “football hooliganism knows no nationality,” the leader of the Slovak Nationalist Party, Ján Slota, called the Dunaszerdahely stadium “the citadel of Hungarian nationalism and chauvinism,” while the party’s deputy Anna Belousova called for the Dunaszerdahely club to be kept out of the champions’s league. <!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[7]<!–[endif]–>
Countdown to Kick-off: The Weeks Leading up to the 1 November DAC-Slovan Match
‘GETTING READY’: A Hungarian Poster Stirs the Pot with Youtube Videos…
On 29 September 2008, Zsozsi1980, who lists himself as 28 years old and from Hungary, posted a video on Youtube announcing three upcoming sporting events of apparent interest.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[8]<!–[endif]–> One was a women’s handball match in Slovakia involving Budapest’s Ferencváros team<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[9]<!–[endif]–>, one was a men’s ice hockey match in Romania involving Budapest’s Ferencváros team, and one did not involve a Ferencváros club directly: the 1 November DAC – Slovan match in Dunajská Streda (Dunaszerdahely). Extended clips of the aforementioned incident at the 25 July match when a Spartak fan absconded across the field with a Hungarian flag accompanied the announcement of the 1 November football match. The video bore in Hungarian the nationalist introduction “Homeland Above All Else” and ended with the times and places of the three events along with the headings “In Hungary’s Honor” and “Attack.”
Although Zsozsi1980 had only posted a handful of videos to the Youtube site since registering earlier in the summer, he has apparently been posting prolifically under his other handle Zsozsi80. Zsozsi80 who also lists himself as 28 years old is an unabashed fanatic of the Ferencváros (Fradi) football and sports clubs. He posts mostly soccer videos of the Ferencváros team, but he also posts videos of rallies of various radical right groups in Hungary and musical performances from the far right youth scene.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[10]<!–[endif]–> He is without a doubt, a proud ultra(s)-nationalist and he appears to be particularly focused on Slovakia.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[11]<!–[endif]–>
In early October, under the Zsozsi80 handle, he posted several videos of an infamous 1992 match involving Ferencváros and played in Bratislava, where Slovak riot police appeared to go on a rampage against the Hungarian fans—as one of the commentators says from the live Hungarian Television broadcast of the time “it’s not good to be a Hungarian over in that area right now.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[12]<!–[endif]–>
Then on 19 October 2008, Zsozsi1980 posted a video with a driving techno beat entitled “Are You Ready??????” The subject of that question becomes clear in the video: the DAC Dunaszerdahely – Slovan Bratislava match of 1 November 2008. Zsozsi1980, is, not unexpectedly, supporting DAC in that match-up, as becomes clear from the video. The match was to be, as we find from news reports, the first meeting of the two teams since 1999, so there was much expectation.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[13]<!–[endif]–>
You could tell where this was all going with comments on the aesthetics of the video. To the comment “this video is like economy in hungary terrible,” a poster retorted, “ your comment is like cultur [sic.] and history in slotakia [a pun on Slovakia and the Slovak nationalist leader Slota]: empty.” [After the match, which Slovan Bratislava won 4-0, presumably Slovaks gleefully posted: “slovan- duc mongolska streda [instead of dac dunajska streda, puns on the Asian origins of Hungarians] 4:0 hahahaha parasztok [peasants in Hungarian] dac fans,” and playing directly on the title of the video, “WE WAS READY! HAHAHA.”] The video’s comment section would contain many other interesting and revealing exchanges—by turns profane, moronic, ugly, surprising, and even on occasion, humorous despite the subject matter—in the days and weeks to come. For example<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[14]<!–[endif]–>…
Calls to Attend the Match and Attendant Threats
greetings slovak slaves, your masters from budapest will visit you on 1 November
have_ you monkie passport?mongols back to asia!!!!!
respect your hungarian masters you [expletive deleted] slave or we will [expletive deleted you up like_ in 1848, 1919, 1938 or 1939 you [expletive deleted] historyless prideless [expletive deleted] slave. slovakia = 15 years old history, they were always slaves of Hungarians
I wish it were Saturday already…Let’s Go Already!!!
[Expletive deleted] Szlovákia! [translated from Hungarian]
Ferencváros to rule the Slovan.
Hungarians to show them who is the boss.
We are already united, now to triumph!!!
Everybody to [Duna]Szerdahely!!!!
Homeland Above All Else!!! [translated from Hungarian]
Listen, I have had it up to here with all this crap that we should be friends with the “toths” [derogatory term for Slovaks]. I am ashamed because I am proud to be Hungarian, and I don’t want to have to be anybody’s conational, because I am pure [Hungarian], and that is why they are afraid, those who kiss Slovak [expletives deleted]! [translated from the Hungarian]
I am going on Saturday and I won’t be afraid to deal out a few “mongol” slaps! [from the Hungarian…he is sarcastically employing the “mongol” epithet used earlier by an apparent Slovak poster]
Összetartás! Kitartás! [Unity! Perseverance! Old Hungarian radical right rallying cries]
The “mongol” epithet is the favorite cutting slogan of the toths, vlachs, and the rac [“tót, oláh, rác”…in order, Hungarian derogatory terms for Slovaks, Romanians, and Serbs]. Only problem is we have no connection to the Mongols. We have been accustomed to dealing out Hungarian slaps, since we came to Europe in the 600s. ; [from the Hungarian]
Natrually, I was being sarcastic [from the Hungarian]
On 22 October 2008, another video asking “Are You Ready?” was posted under the heading “DAC Slovan” by a DACHooligans0.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[15]<!–[endif]–> While some of the postings were similar, the discussion on this page moved on to the issues of organizing, transport, logistics and intentions, as follows:
greetings slovak slaves, your masters from budapest will visit you on 1 November [the handle “socialdarwinist” again]
RIA RIA MONGOLIA…. [A defamatory Slovak retort to the chant of Hungarian fans “RIA RIA HUNGARIA”]
you should show respect to your hungarian masters
We are coming from Győr, and we want to know how many are going and from where. 11 am we will parade on the Saint Stephen square. [from Hungarian]
Guys! Don’t write specifics here, and schedules will be on the open forums! Rather let’s discuss such things in private. Let’s not help the vermin [from Hungarian]
But before the matter of DAC-Slovan, there was an intervening football match.
25 October 2008: Spartak Trnava – DAC II
The Spartak Trnava –DAC rematch took place in Trnava three months to the day after the first meeting in Dunaszerdahely. The rematch ended in a 1-1 draw, but it was what transpired in the stands that made the most news. The correspondent for Felvidék Ma referred to the DAC team and its 300 supporters in the stands as having found themselves in “hell.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[16]<!–[endif]–> The Spartak Trnava supporters had a huge banner that said “Destroy (Exterminate) them.” There were chants of “Death to the Hungarians,” “Hungarians to the Gas Chambers,” and “Hungarians into the Danube!” Another banner proclaimed “You are not Hungarians, just homeless upcountry people! („Nem magyarok vagytok, csak felvidéki hontalanok!”)”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[17]<!–[endif]–> But the event that might have been the tipping point for those who were to pour across the border from Hungary a week later for the DAC-Slovan match, was the burning of a Fradi jersey.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[18]<!–[endif]–>
One Hungarian poster declared on his blog:
Enough already!
The time has come now when I have lost all patience with the Slovaks. I can’t be patient any longer and I ask that the liberals understand that! I was going to write about something else, but I just saw the news that these lowlife thieves set a Fradi jersey on fire during the Dunaszerdahely-Spartak Trnava championship soccer match. And it wasn’t the first time something like this has happened. Last year a nagyszombat [Spartak Trnava] supporter set a Hungarian flag on fire! And now here is the essence of it all (result): will they be penalized, will they be told off? NO! Will the Slovak leadership try to denounce similar actions? NO! Are Slovak leaders egging on the Slovaks to do such things? YES! Will the European Union criticize them for these actions? NO! Is the Hungarian government capable of taking steps against this? NO!<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[19]<!–[endif]–> [from the Hungarian]
Additionally, after the events of 1 November 2008, posters harked back to the 25 October match as justifying the road-trip of fans from Hungary proper to Dunaszerdahely for the following match. For example,
“When they had a Spartak Trnava – DAC match, the Spartak fans were shouting things like that: “Kill the Hungarians and drop them to the Danube.” And they were burning a Ferencváros T-shirt. THIS is the reason why Hungarian fans went there to support DAC. And the police attacked them. That’s what happened.”
“THE FIRST STEP WAS THE SPARTAK TRNAVA – DAC MATCH. Spartak fans were burning a FERENCVAROS t-shirt and yelling things like this: “Let’s kill the Hungarians and drop them to the Danube!” Thats why FERENCVAROS fans went to Dunaszerdahely last Saturday!”
Zsolt Bede, who describes himself as “a Hungarian, a Christian, and a Fradi supporter” also recounted after the 1 November events that he had been among the approximately 100 Hungarians (mostly Ferencváros with some (Székes)fehérvár and Újpest fans) who had traveled to Slovakia for the match, claiming that “neither then did we go to fight but because some Csallóköz (region around Dunaszerdahely) Fradi supporters asked us to come to support the Hungarian DAC team.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[20]<!–[endif]–> According to Bede, the week after the match, “we prepared in Hungary…For their part, the Slovaks put the clip of the burning of the Fradi jersey on Youtube and claimed Czech and Polish football fan clubs were going to come to the DAC-Slovan [1 November] match to strengthen the Slovak side.”
It is possible that a video egging on Slovan fans and Slovaks and showing the burning of the Fradi jersey had at one time been on Youtube, but interestingly my post DAC-Slovan [1 November 2008] searches–using the search terms “DAC Slovan” and “Spartak Trnava Dunajska Streda”–do not turn up any such video. The Hungarian news agency MTI reported on 31 October the same rumor–that Czech and Polish hooligans were planning to swell the ranks of the Bratislava Slovan supporters–so I assume there must have been something to it. An article in the Hungarian sports media was even more specific, claiming that the “hooligans” in question were fans of the Polish club, Ruch Chorzów, and the Czech club, Brno.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[21]<!–[endif]–> And, indeed, after much searching, I did find on the http://www.ultrasgang.eu site two articles, “1.11.2008″ (29 October 2008) and “Fanúšikovia Ferencvárosu organizujú výjazd na Slovan” (18 October 2008) that would appear to fit this bill. The first appears to claim/warn that Fradi and other supporters of “Greater Hungary” were making their travel to the 1 November match a focal point and challenge, while the second earlier posting shows the aforementioned Zsozsi1980 video from 29 September 2008 and an article entitled “On Tour Dunaszerdahely” which ends with the motto “This is Why We are the National Team!” In the comment section of the second ultrasgang posting, it appears forum participants are discussing precisely the travel of Ruch Chorzów and Brno supporters to bolster Slovan representation at the match. All of this tends to suggest, however, that they were responding to the (already-underway) Fradi effort to organize an expedition from Hungary to the DAC – Slovan 1 November showdown.
It is worth raising the question, however, whether the Fradi videos promoting attendance at the coming DAC-Slovan match, and the Ultras site response (18 October 2008), gave the Spartak Trnava fans a target on which to fix their emotions: not just a Hungarian flag this time, but a Fradi jersey! On Hungarian-posted Youtube videos, the burning of the Fradi jersey clearly became a rallying cry, a focal point of outrage that called for a response. The jersey burning was thus of only passing fancy it would appear to Slovak nationalists and other Slavic football thugs, whereas it became a cause celebre for Hungarians, especially Fradi supporters and nationalists.
Organizing for A Road-Trip
On the same day as photos of the Fradi jersey burning at the Spartak Trnava-DAC match were showing up on nationalist Hungarian sites [27 October 2008], efforts to organize Hungarians to travel to Slovakia for the coming weekend’s DAC-Slovan Bratislava were underway. Rock musicians and concert promoters Gábor Gőbl and Balázs Sziva announced a “patriotic program”—featuring the bands Hungarica and Romantikus Erőszak—for the Saturday 1 November 2008 match in Dunaszerdahely with the following flourish:
In the fall of 1938, the NATION was unified and in a feverish state. After the victories of the Rongyos Gárda (1921 Western Hungarian uprising) for a second time our homeland succeeded to be compensated for the Trianon injustice. The first Vienna decision [8 November 1938] for the most part restored the just northern border [of the country]. The 85% Hungarian majority of the region after a 20 year occupation had finally returned to Hungary.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[22]<!–[endif]–>[from the Hungarian]
The appeal ended with logistical information, especially concerning the two buses that were to leave Sopron (on the border with Austria) and Budapest and the stops they might make upon the way to collect fans. The Hungarica and Romantikus Erőszak was scheduled to follow the game and bore the motto: “Home(land) Before Everything!” [the poster was in both Hungarian and Slovak, although the motto was in Hungarian only]. The concert organizers called upon “fan clubs, friendship societies, and defenders of tradition association members [perhaps a euphemism for members of Hungarian far-right groups] to come to stand together for the nation!” and requested that they spread the word to other “patriots.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[23]
Dialogue of the Deaf, Monologues of the Mute
We can get a sense for the climate that awaited fans in the Dunaszerdahely stadium that coming Saturday by looking back at the aforementioned Youtube sites. The commentary there was and is timeless in a sense. We look at them now.
Back to “Comparative Histories -101”
…Ensuring the Reader Will Be Stupider for Having Read These [from “Are You Ready????”]
slovak history = 15 years old
slovaks were always slaves of hungarians, you don’t have history,_ you never won a battle, slovakia = god’s joke
we are not aggressive nation, Huns only desire is Aggression…
“we are not aggressive nation, Huns only desire is Aggression…”
therefore the police beat hungarians till they almost died without any reason? and the same happened in 92 [a reference to Slovak police beating Fradi fans in Bratislava at a 1992 match]. you idiot
Slovak history = longer than hungarian history. yes, we were your slaves and now we are free and you have economical problems, because you are stupid…
slovak history longer than hungarian??:D:D:D why don’t you have own culture, popular customs, flag, language?? cause you’re a thief “nation” like gypsies, or other low races! you have mythology not history! you will be slaves for the end of time cause it’s in your gene, in your blood!;)
Hungarians DID have an alphabet before they came to Central Europe in 896. It is called “rovásírás”.
Cyril and Metód never been to slovakia, it is a LIE claimed only by your manipulating idiotic historians.
Hungarians have got nothing to do with Mongols, it’s another LIE created by your filthy drunkard politician ján slota.
Even if our ancestors were Mongolians, I would be proud of it, because they ruled half of Asia.
Slovak people were analphabets [i.e. illiterates] until the 19th century.
You didn’t have a clearly developed language, it was just an eastern branch of Czech.
Slovak intelligence [i.e. intelligentsia] appeared only in the 18th-19th century which was represented by some nationalist priests. Their numbers weren’t serious.
Don’t you understand that your history is an ugly fiction made up by your historians in order to strenghten nationalism in your historyless nation???? HUH???!
you poor [expletive deleted]. Wake from your feudal-socialist-colonial let[h]argy. It is 21st century. All former “big” countries woke up, like Portugal, Holland, UK……Only you are still living in a 16th century dream, that surrounded states will work for you as they did for at least 700 years. You got financial help …days ago. use it wisely…or just bankcrupt. Finally.
Mocskosok magyarok nincsen hazzátok!!!! [You dirty Hungarians have no home!!!!]
Spartak Trnava 4ever, long live Ján Slota!!!
If we don’t have any home where you live it is because you stole it from us…but I am not in the mood to hold history class here. [from the Hungarian]
Where do you get off [poster’s name] uttering a Hungarian word out of your mouth? Did you exhume your mother? Did you cut her tongue out? You stinking outhouse [expletive deleted]…like so many of your wild animal “friends”…you punks…scram…SLOVAKS have no home!!! [from the Hungarian]
My Hungarian Brothers!
Don’t bother the “toths” [derogatory Hungarian term for Slovaks “totok”], aren’t they unfortunate enough already to have no minds and to be stupid?
Don’t provoke them, extend your hand to them, unfortunately we can’t give it to them but at least we can drink a beer together!
I believe in God,
I believe in the the Homeland,
I believe in a divine Eternal truth,
I believe in the Resurrection of Hungary
Amen [translated from Hungarian]
Magyars, you are the most isolated nation in the world. You don’t have any choice, only to be aggresive. You are on a good way to selfdestruction. Magyarization time is over !!!
The original genes of Huns are already dead!
yes you are right I would never go because of football to Hungary for several reasons:
1. your football has no quality (your origin is asian so you playing very similarly like majority of asians)
2. you are very aggressive nation (I have seen some videos from budapest demonstrations with molotov coc[k]tails, fire…even tank)…for slovakia is something like this unbelievable (mentally we are completly different).
3. you still need some time to adapt yourself mentally in Europe region
A Bit of Comic Relief???: “I had a pony…we all had ponies…Who leaves a pony country for a non-pony country?”
1001 Hungary
1991 Slovakia
no comment…
Hungary 1001???? before 1001 gypsy homeless mongols on little ponnies [sic.] from asia with no culture which has stolen our land!!!!
That´s the history of hungaria-mongolia!!!!
historyless barefoot slave!!!!
there was insignificant tribe (Moravia is Czech history thief) and your ancestors were kneeling in front of what u call “gipsy homeless asians with ponni”
Appeals to Reason…Drowned Out
On these sites, it was not surprising that well-meaning level-headed efforts to intervene, fell mainly upon deaf ears.
Voices of Reason and Calls for Cooler Heads to Prevail…Don’t Last Long [from “DAC-Slovan” and then “Are You Ready?”]
Now everybody! We want to watch football, and whoever is not preparing for that in DS [Dunaszerdahely], rather stay home! And you HU [Hungarian] Hungarians, don’t come here to brawl, we don’t need it. You go home, and then we have to bear the consequences…Thanks! [from the Hungarian]
We hope that you will see that we HU [Hungarian] Hungarians won’t make trouble, but it was your Slovak police who in 1992 stormed Hungarian fans for no reason! Therefore, you should rejoice that several thousand supporters from the motherland will be there to support you, since nobody else can or will? [from the Hungarian]
that must really hurt… first the Trianon, then decades of frustration, now the economy collapsing so you have to take a loan from IMF that was originally designed for third world countries, forint falling just like pengo few decades ago… And you even lost this match to Slovan… Poor you… At least you can scream your pathetic “Slovakia is hungary, Bratislava is Pozsony”… I really feel sorry for you our hungarian friends…
and
Enough already boys, don’t come here to “party”! I hope that you won’t go to the match and won’t fight and act foolish, because that will hurt DAC’s play! Be smart, leave the provocations at home, let us watch a good match!!! Here the game is the most important thing, not who is what nationality! AM I BEING CLEAR ENOUGH FOR YOU???? My thanks to the intelligent readers for their understanding. [translated from Hungarian]
Slovakians, you don’t have history, and you want to speak about origin… :D it’s funny… and who started provocation?? who burned a Fradi shirt??? i give you the answer, slovan’s (vagy mi a faszom neve van a csapatnak [“or whatever the hell is the name of the team”…he means Spartak Trnava]) burned the Fradi shirt, and it’s prvocating [sic.]!!
The Day of the Match Arrives: All Saints Day 2008
It was clear by the morning of 1 November 2008 that Slovak authorities and the Dunaszerdahely football club had prepared for the possibility of problems at the DAC-Slovan match that afternoon. News reports before the match spoke of 800 police, including officers on horseback and commandos, having been dispatched to Dunajska Streda, and first responders were available in the event of need for medical attention. One officer from Bratislava was quoted as saying that “this is going to be a lot more difficult than it had been to protect Britain’s Elizabeth the Second and Prince Philip” during their recent visit to Slovakia.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[24]<!–[endif]–> The aforementioned Gábor Gőbl had reportedly advised the Hungarian Consulate in Bratislava the day before that at least 1000 fans from Hungary should be expected to come to Dunaszerdahely for the match.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[25]<!–[endif]–> Interestingly, while Gábor Gőbl expressed concerns that the Slovak police might mistreat the Hungarian expeditioners, Dusan Caplovic, the Slovak Deputy Prime Minister charged with Human Rights and Minority Affairs, worried on Slovak television about the potential for provocations by the Hungarian visitors.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[26]<!–[endif]–>
Based on the recounting of some of those who crossed the border from Hungary to see the game, it seems clear the Slovak authorities were most concerned about and interested in Ferencváros (Fradi) fans. According to the aforementioned Fradista, Zsolt Bede:
We arrived around 8 am, but at that time the police in the Komarom area were not really ready and only a couple of people were controlled at the border. The late-arriving fans had to deal with a much stricter inspection—the police checked the people crossing into Slovakia against a list which had the names of fans and their pictures. It thus became clear, that they were prepared for the arrival of the large group of supporters, in particular the FRADISTAK. The police would ask, which team we supported, and if FRADI wasn’t the answer then the policeman would react, good because ‘We are waiting for the Fradistak!”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[27]<!–[endif]–> [translated from the Hungarian]
The Hungarian correspondent Richard Sztanscik reported much the same thing. At the Komarom bridge border crossing and then in Dunaszerdahely, he heard guards state: “Budapest Honvéd? What’s with the big friendship among all of you, huh? Újpest, Ferencváros, Honvéd, what you all root together?” and “The Fradistak…always looking for a ‘party’.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[28]<!–[endif]–> Gábor Gőbl, Balázs Sziva, and other musicians from the far-right rock scene were apparently prevented entry at the border.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[29]<!–[endif]–> Furthermore, the aforementioned Hungarica and Romantikus Erőszak concert, scheduled to follow the game was cancelled.
As during the aforementioned July match, there were restrictions on alcohol sales, but not throughout the whole town or, of course, on the way….According to English-language Slovak media, confrontations began even before the match started, leading police to escort 1,000 Slovan fans to the stadium.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[30]<!–[endif]–> Authorities also confiscated dozens of banned items as fans entered, including signal rockets, wooden bats, brass knuckles and boot spikes.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[31]<!–[endif]–> According to the Fradi supporter, Zsolt Bede, under heavy police presence, his group paraded through the closed off streets of Dunaszerdahely. Approximately 500 Hungarian locals and Hungarians—as he listed their roll call, újpestiek, kispestiek, debreceniek, váciak, gyöngyösiek, körmendiek, fehérváriak, soproniak, szombathelyiek, békéscsabaiak, nyíregyháziak—were present as a “Trianon keepsake” from the Várpalotai Trianon múzeum was presented and sang the Hungarian national anthem (Himnusz, the Hymn) together.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[32]<!–[endif]–> Szombathelyi Haladás supporters claimed after the match that two hours before it even started there were problems when they attempted to unfurl their own banner and two Slovan supporters stormed their section of the stands lunging for the team scarves around their necks.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[33]<!–[endif]–>
The English language Budapest Times described the scene in the Hungarian section of the stands as follows:
Some 500 fans from Hungary were present at the Dunajská Streda Stadium, many of whom were wearing red white and green scarves with the word “Perseverance” printed on them, which was the motto of the Arrow Cross fascist movement during the final months of the Second World War. Árpád flags, which are favoured by the extreme right in Hungary, were also being waved and the home crowd sang the Hungarian national anthem before kickoff.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[34]<!–[endif]–>
By contrast, Zsolt Bede (who claims to have been there) estimates that out of a total of about 8000-9000 people in the overflowing stadium (capacity is listed at about 6,100), there were 1000-1500 Hungarians from Hungary and 800-1000 Slovan fans.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[35]<!–[endif]–> From Youtube videos, one of the most prominent banners is one in the colors of the Hungarian flag with the words “Voltunk, Vagyunk, Leszünk” written on it: “We Were [here], We Are [here], We Will Be [here].”
As is traditional/typical, the ethnic Hungarian fans sang the Hungarian national anthem, a song which is at one and the same time, a prayer imploring God, the national anthem of the state of Hungarian, and the anthem of ethnic Hungarians everywhere. As happens, and especially given the character of the music itself, Hungarian spectators recount some were crying in the Hungarian section. As the Slovak English-language press reported, “press reports from the scene said that the police failed to act against [Slovan] Bratislava supporter who were throwing smoke bomgs, noise grenades and other missiles on the pitch.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[36]<!–[endif]–> This was shortly after the game started. What happened next is a subject of contention. Police commander Stanislav Jankovic would tell the press, “Hungarian supporters threw stones at my men and made crude gestures at them.”<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[37]<!–[endif]–> Bede and other Hungarians claim that this was impossible because before the match, as they waited to enter the stadium, they saw the police remove any stone or chair that could be used as a weapon from that section.
Hungarian fans claim they were upset both by the lack of intervention by the police against the Slovan supporters who were launching the rockets toward the Hungarian section and who were engaging in the typical anti-Hungarian chants (along the lines of “HÚNI DO PLYNU, MAĎARI DO DUNAJA” “Hungarians to the gas chambers, Magyars [in]to the Danube”). (In one of the Youtube videos, it sounds as if the Hungarian section is shouting “Itthon vagyunk, Itthon vagyunk”—“We are at home, We are at home!” as a response to the chants from the other side.) One of the apparently more balanced accounts by a poster to a web forum observed nonetheless:
A guy in grey sweatshirt attacked one member with his fist (btw it’s pretty clear in the DAC – slovan police brutality against hungarian fans video on youtube) of a little hopsital convoy that was moving under his row of seats. One policeman saw that and actually that’s pretty [expletive deleted] up if you attack anyone especialy escorting a guy on stretchers. But yeah the police attack was unnecessary in the scale they did it. But so does politics and nacionalism [sic.] nothing to do with any of this.
Based on what is available on the Internet, especially Youtube, however, it is next to impossible to see who or what, if anything specific, prompted the police intervention—most tapes began rolling only after the police intervened. The only thing that seems clear is that when the police intervened they did so forcefully and some of the Hungarian fans (skinheads among them) fought back. Fifty fans ended up seeking medical attention, with six being in serious enough condition to be taken to the hospital.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[38]<!–[endif]–>
Hungarian fans were livid, however. The Hungarian, Krisztian Lengyel, who was airlifted to a hospital in Bratislava, according to the Slovak authorities, suffered an epileptic seizure due to excessive alcohol consumption, not due to his beating. Moreover, to add insult to injury, it was rumored that because he did not have his proper EU medical insurance card, he was charged the rate of 90,000 Slovak Crowns (around $4000) for his hospital visit. The Hungarian far right became even more incensed when later that evening the Hungarian police released a statement admitting that five Hungarian police “spotters” had been present at the match:
On 22 October 2008, Slovak police informed their Hungarian colleagues that a large number of Hungarian fans were going to come to the scheduled 1 November Dunaszerdahely-Slovan Bratislava football match. To this end, the BRFK [Budapest Chief of Police] and the Győr-Moson-Sopron Chief of Police sent officers to observe the match. At the match a police investigation was undertaken. According to the information of the Slovak authorities 16 Hungarian citizens (1 for a major offense [apparently drug possession], 15 for disturbing the peace) were taken into custody but released later that day. The Slovak police at our request announced that there were injured Hungarian citizens among those interrogated, but none of them was in jeopardy of losing their life.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[39]<!–[endif]–> [translated from the Hungarian]
The next day—after far right demonstrations the night before, at the Slovak Embassy in Budapest and Consulate in Békéscsabá, at which the Slovak flags were set on fire—the Hungarian police sought to further clarify the situation of the five Hungarian “spotters” sent to the match, and to declare that those officials had not been apprised of the decision of the Slovak police to intervene as they did.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[40]<!–[endif]–> Rather than calm matters, Hungarian tempers seemed to be further inflamed when the Slovak authorities admitted that they had arrested 16 Slovak citizens in addition to the 16 Hungarians, 13 of the 16 Slovak fans being Slovan supporters, and that two of the 16 Slovak citizens had major charges filed against them: a 28 year old who had the flag in his possession of the Slovak fascist movement, the Hlinka Guard, and a 23 year old who apparently wore a “fascist” pin on his clothes.<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[41]<!–[endif]–> There were no reports of Polish or Czech citizens being arrested, and it is unclear how many, if any, actually travelled to and watched the match, despite the Internet coverage this issue had received earlier. Ironically then, one of the issues that may have contributed to the ratcheting up of tensions may never have actually materialized.
After the match, however, it was back to mutual insults and recriminations on Youtube sites, now all the more pointed in the wake of the events of the day in Dunaszerdahely…
After the Match…Back to Insults and Mutual Recriminations on the Web Forums [Youtube: “Are You Ready???”]
hmm, hmm hmmm, small hungarian turul [bird that is a Hungarian symbol, especially prized by nationalists] lost all plumage. So damage. Wrong way took up this bird. Hungary is in collapse and so had got only stupid flunkeyiana. Somebody has to be guilty. Clowns
Hungarian are the best of all the world. But nobody can see it.;-). Turuls know sc[r]eech only, no work, no normal ideas only [expletive deleted] dreams about mad primacy. Wake up stupid turuls
Slowakia: No History, no land, no roots, no flag, no past, no future!
Slovaks was our slaves they are our slaves and they will be our slaves
Hungary – Slovan 0:4 that is right! So you call “mongolska streda” as a part of Hungary. I agree! In your soul, Dunaszerdahely never been part of Slovakia, You hate it, but we love that city. Lets make a vote tomorrow, and we able to belong again to Hungary! After that we will organize a central-european soccer championship and maybe, we will friends again!!!!!!! I love you too!
Maďari za Dunaj !!! [I can understand this much Slovak, “Hungarians into the Danube!!!”]
You reap as you sow! Blow wind and you get storm!!!!!
Hungarians beyond the Borders’ Frustration with Hungarians from Hungary Proper
But the number of stupid Hungarian Hungarians is also pitiable. What can we do about it? The vast majority of Hungarians didn’t stand up with the patriots on 5 December 2004 [date of the so-called “status law” referendum in Hungary that would have extended citizenship benefits and rights to Hungarians outside of Hungary proper]. They practically turned their back on their own country. Thus what can we expect from the other nationalities???
Slovaks on the International Dimension of the Match
can some1 explain why did hungryan “fans” travel to a different country to attend a league match of 2 foreign(slovak) football clubs, with vulgar antislovak writings on their flags, throw rocks and chairs at police and then complain that they get their ass kicked??? new level of moronism if u ask me
they traveled to foreign country? they traveled to Felvidék:)
Dunaszerdahely 80% Hungarian!
95%
What the heck is the cross of Saint Stephen doing on the damn Slovak flag? They stole the Hungarian symbol! They have no mind of their own, no history of their own, no brain of their own! Come down here to Hungary Slovak children and you can make a big deal about being Slovak here, and then you will get the slaps you deserve. [translated from Hungarian]
What do you expect [a poster’s handle] from an uneducated primitive people such as the Slovaks who couldn’t come up with their own flag but had to copy the Slovenian flag’s layout…in truth you can’t expect anything from them so let them make fools of themselves until suddenly it dawns upon them that their houses are on fire…[translated from Hungarian]
An Outsider Inquires What’s the Problem…and Gets an Earful
what is the problem between the two countries? can anyone explain please? want to understand this.
main problem is that activities of hungarian government cross their borders and interfere with internal affa[i]rs of neighbouring counties.Contrastive and incompetent stance of hungarian government enables extremistic and military forces to gain support.even to undertake expeditions abroad in order to provoke conflict.when they’re rightfully punished they wonder what happened as they realize that in Slovakia an anarchy isn’t that kind of arrangement that prevails (like they are used from their own)
no the problem (SLota) can be found on youtube:
watch?v=eLP4mPiu0vs
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your comment: though sophisticated but still bullshit, and lying!!!!
And so it goes, in the Internet universe and on Youtube.
Conclusions
Would all of this have happened without the Internet, and specifically Youtube and football fan sites? Perhaps not, or certainly not in the way it unfolded. One can imagine, for example, the climate of September 1992 when Ferencváros fans were beaten in the stands in Bratislava by Slovak police. To be sure, the pictures and story were covered by the handful of television stations in Hungarian and then still Czechoslovakia, and by newspapers and weeklies. But in the case of the weeks leading up to the 1 November 2008 DAC Dunaszerdahely – Slovan Bratislava match and its aftermath, content and viewing on demand and subject to repeated playing and extensive second and third hand dissemination has created a much different world. Both in 1992 and in 2008, word of mouth undoubtedly played an important role in spreading news and interpretations of events, but the intensity of the events in question is likely much greater when it can be linked to and reinforced by downloaded images and the opportunity to contribute personal experience and thoughts to web forums. This is particularly the case when we are talking about individuals who are passionate on a given topic, for example football fan(atic)s.
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<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[1]<!–[endif]–> Compiled from a combination of József Szilvássy, “Balhéveszély, 800 rendőr Dunaszerdahelyen,” Népszabadság, 1 November 2008 at http://nol.hu/sport/balheveszely__800_rendor_dunaszerdahelyen , the official DAC website http://www.fcdac1904.com , and Tibor Somogyi (MTI), “A mi csapatunk fizetett rá – mondja a DAC iráni tulajdonosa,” Magyar Nemzet, 4 November 2008, found at http://www.zoom.hu/cikk.php?cikk=30561. For group and individual photos of the team (including owner) see the video “FK DAC 1904 Dunaszerdahely” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZO5k2GVIDA.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[2]<!–[endif]–>For the video/song and commentary by viewers, see FankaDeli – November 1. at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I937MSjDQG4 . The 25 year old FankaDeli (Ferenc Kőházy) is a native of Kecskemét, Hungary, according to an entry in the Hungarian wikipedia, and has been putting out recordings since he was 15 (http://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/FankaDeli). In his song, “November 1,” he makes an aside—”Kedves uraim! Hatmillióval kevesebb személyi igazolványt volt szerencséjük kiosztani!” “Dear sirs, it was your luck to have to issue six million less identity cards” so what is one less for you? What does mine matter?—which appears an allusion to the perception of the political abandonment of Hungarians beyond the borders of Hungary proper. (Some of the posters note “six million is a magical number” because of the Holocaust.) Other posters, however, seek to suggest that FankaDeli’s song is significant because it shows “it is not just skinheads” and hooligans who are interested in the fate of Hungarians beyond the borders in the wake of the November 1 incident and song. FankaDeli’s comments on the song and broader context suggest his nationalist inclinations: “…csak bőrszín alapján különböztetnek meg “rasszokat” hanem akár nemzetiségi alapon is. A tegnapi eseményekkel úgy gondolom minden olvasónk tisztában van…”( http://ww2.salatamagazin.com/) and “trianonról most csak röviden annyit, hogy a jugoszláv események bebizonyították, hogy a 21. században is gumiból vannak a határok és ha nem is feltétlenül a régi nagymagyarországot szeretném visszaállítani de az a minimum, hogy legyen kettős állampolgárságotok és egészséges valamint betartott autonomiátok .. ezért küzdök a magam módján.. kérlek gondold át újra ha megtisztelsz ezzel, hogy akkor egy oldalon állunk e vagy tényleg nem.. az, hogy te egy tisztelt boxoló vagy aki a szlovák zászló alatt megbecsülést vívott ki magának és az akcentusod miatt néhány buta fasz itthoni furán nézett rád még közel sem a teljes valóság hiszen más magyarokkal te is nagyon jól tudod hogyan bánnak és bizony én magam pofoznám fel azokat a magyarokat akik nem tisztelik a ti “magyarságotok” az akcentussal együtt…” (“türelem rózsát terem”) at http://www.fankadeli.hu/. On FankaDeli’s MySpace Page,
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=144534305 , he takes a somewhat more idiosyncratic stance, showing himself a fervent nationalist by getting into arguments with a Dunaszerdahely Hungarian who is disturbed by the intervention of Hungarians from Hungary and sees it as counterproductive, and yet rejecting as “a stupidity” the calls of one poster to boycott Slovak beer (the brands listed) and products, saying that his grievance is “not with the Slovak people but with one or two stupid politicians.”
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[3]<!–[endif]–> http://www.fcdac1904.com/uvod.str.hu.htm and http://www.fcdac1904.com/uvod.str.hu.htm
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[4]<!–[endif]–> Éva Lakatos, “Balhéra készül Dunaszerdahely a DAC–Spartak meccs miatt,” Paraméter, 17 July 2008, at http://www.parameter.sk/rovat/regio/2008/07/17/balhera-keszul-dunaszerdahely-dac-spartak-meccs-miatt .
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[5]<!–[endif]–> “DAC – nagyszombati szpartak 3-0 _3” posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYhQJar3YPI&feature=related by www.1899.hu a fanatical supporter of the Ferencváros (Fradi), Hungarian football club.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[6]<!–[endif]–> Sandor Neszmeri, “Slota a focihoz is ert,” Magyar Nemzet, 4 August 2008, at http://www.mno.hu .
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[7]<!–[endif]–> Sandor Neszmeri, “Slota a focihoz is ert,” Magyar Nemzet, 4 August 2008, at http://www.mno.hu .
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[8]<!–[endif]–> “ŐSZI ELŐZETES,” 29 September 2008, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDd5kZumhig
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[9]<!–[endif]–> Vágsellye – FTC EHF kupa http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxvBFbnvV6Q&watch_response 12 October 2008, a vulgar anti-Slota banner is lifted at one point by the small group of Fradi supporters.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[10]<!–[endif]–> Under “books” he lists “Dr. David Duke,” an apparent reference to the ex-Louisiana Klansman and Congressional representative.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[11]<!–[endif]–> It therefore remains an open question if the selection of these three events for road-trips (two in Slovakia and one in Romania) was mainly for sport and to “party,” or whether, even if almost serendipitously, Hungary’s radical right has discovered a mechanism to “move the ball forward,” so-to-speak, where they can try to elude the Hungarian authorities and yet become a driver of foreign policy and relations with neighboring states by taking “the show on the road”…Such antics abroad, of course, inevitably have an impact on the situation and balance of forces back home.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[12]<!–[endif]–>“1992 sLOVAN – FERENCVÁROS,” ‘magyarverés pozsonyban’ 2 October 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNFBFIktUlI for the Hungarian TV footage of the time see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYxArJ5pok0 a tüntetésen elmaradt videó /ELŐZMÉNYEK/. One Hungarian fan apparently later died from the match confrontation on 16 September 1992, see in English http://www.iht.com/articles/1992/09/30/rob__3.php .
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[13]<!–[endif]–> http://sportgeza.hu/futball/hirek/2008/10/31/ezer_magyar_utazik_a_dac-slovan_meccsre/ “Ezer magyar utazik a DAC-Slovan meccsre, 2008. október 31.,
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[14]<!–[endif]–> It is interesting to note that many of the exchanges are in English, some good, some poor, but nonetheless English as the lingua franca between Hungarians and Slovaks on the web.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[15]<!–[endif]–>http://www.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments&v=0pm1LcVzVMk&fromurl=/watch%3Fv%3D0pm1LcVzVMk
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[16]<!–[endif]–>From http://www.felvidek.ma “Helytállt a DAC a nagyszombati pokolban,” 25 October 2008, found at http://www.felvidek.ma/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8398&Itemid=51 and http://www.fcdac1904.com/uvod.str.hu.htm .
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[17]<!–[endif]–> See the discussion in Richárd Sztancsik, “Viperák között Dunaszerdahelyen,” 168 ora, 2 November 2008 http://www.168ora.hu/cikk.php?cikk=26196. It can be seen at the 45 second mark of the far right Youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkaFxLVoTY4 (HUNGARICA – A HÁRMASHALOM ÉS A KETTÖSKERESZT): „Nem magyarok vagytok, csak felvidéki hontalanok!”
It is a common nationalist insult the world over that “we got here first” and “you interlopers came later.” However, from the perspective of Hungarians living in the states neighboring Hungary and once under Hungarian rule, the taunt of being “homeless” “nomads” etc. is particularly sharply felt. In Romania, for example, the taunt is bozgor (nomad).
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[18]<!–[endif]–> As an American friend living in Budapest who is a keen observer of Hungary told me this past summer: “if you think the fans were bad before, now Fradi has been relegated to the second division…so you can imagine how it is.”
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[19]<!–[endif]–> “Most már aztán elég!” 26 October 2008, http://64.233.169.132/search?q=cache:aTJP7xFN_pgJ:hilts.blog.hu/2008/10/26/most_mar_aztan_eleg+%22Most+mar+aztan+eleg%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&client=firefox-a , translation from Hungarian is mine.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[20]<!–[endif]–> “Ahogy én láttam – Dunaszerdahely egy fradista szemszögéből,” 2008-11-08. 09:37 at http://kuruc.info/r/1/30523/ , also posted on http://www.bombagyar.hu/index.php?post=1547 and http://barikad.hu/node/20229.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[21]<!–[endif]–>See http://www.focitipp.hu/?content=hirek&id=4291. The calls for supporters from elsewhere to join Slovan backers may refer to postings like the following, http://www.ultrasgang.eu/?p=208#more-208 ,which appears to claim that Fradi and other supporters of “Greater Hungary” were making their travel to the 1 November match a focal point and challenge. http://www.ultrasgang.eu/?p=170 18 October 2008, appears to have discussion in the forum section of Polish and Czech friends… http://7side.hu/?action=ontour&mz_art_cat=2&mz_art_id=144 On Tour Dunaszerdahely Ezért vagyunk mi a Nemzet Csapata!
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[22]<!–[endif]–> “Felvidékre hív a Romantikus Erőszak és a Hungarica,” 2008-10-27 22:43 barikád.hu, http://www.barikad.hu/node/19320 .
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[23]<!–[endif]–> “Felvidékre hív a Romantikus Erőszak és a Hungarica,” 2008-10-27 22:43 barikád.hu, http://www.barikad.hu/node/19320 .
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[24]<!–[endif]–> Quoted in József Szilvássy, “Balhéveszély, 800 rendőr Dunaszerdahelyen,” Népszabadság, 1 November 2008 at http://nol.hu/sport/balheveszely__800_rendor_dunaszerdahelyen
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[25]<!–[endif]–> József Szilvássy, “Balhéveszély, 800 rendőr Dunaszerdahelyen,” Népszabadság, 1 November 2008 at http://nol.hu/sport/balheveszely__800_rendor_dunaszerdahelyen
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[26]<!–[endif]–> József Szilvássy, “Balhéveszély, 800 rendőr Dunaszerdahelyen,” Népszabadság, 1 November 2008 at http://nol.hu/sport/balheveszely__800_rendor_dunaszerdahelyen
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[27]<!–[endif]–> “Ahogy én láttam – Dunaszerdahely egy fradista szemszögéből,” 2008-11-08. 09:37 at http://kuruc.info/r/1/30523/ , also posted on http://www.bombagyar.hu/index.php?post=1547 and http://barikad.hu/node/20229.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[28]<!–[endif]–> Richárd Sztancsik, “Viperák között Dunaszerdahelyen,” 168 ora, 2 November 2008 http://www.168ora.hu/cikk.php?cikk=26196.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[29]<!–[endif]–> http://szentkoronaradio.com/elszakitva/2008_11_01_a-magyar-szurkolok-ma-visszafoglaljak-a-felvideket-percrol-percre-a-dac-slovan
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[30]<!–[endif]–> Luba Lesna, “Football Riot Stokes Tension,” 10 November 2008 at http://www.spectator.sk/articles/view/33498/2/football_riot_stokes_tension.html .
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[31]<!–[endif]–> Luba Lesna, “Football Riot Stokes Tension,” 10 November 2008 at http://www.spectator.sk/articles/view/33498/2/football_riot_stokes_tension.html .
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[32]<!–[endif]–> “Ahogy én láttam – Dunaszerdahely egy fradista szemszögéből,” 2008-11-08. 09:37 at http://kuruc.info/r/1/30523/ , also posted on http://www.bombagyar.hu/index.php?post=1547 and http://barikad.hu/node/20229.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[33]<!–[endif]–> From Vas Népe, “Haladás-drukkert is ütöttek a szlovák rendőrök,” 4 November 2008, at http://nol.hu/belfold/haladas-drukkert_is_utottek_a_szlovak_rendorok .
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[34]<!–[endif]–> Attila Leitner, “Hungarians Attacked,” 10 November 2008 at http://www.budapesttimes.hu/content/view/9883/230/ . [I must admit that based on what is on Youtube, I was struck by the comparative absence of the Árpád flags of the far right, of which I would have expected to see more.]
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[35]<!–[endif]–> “Ahogy én láttam – Dunaszerdahely egy fradista szemszögéből,” 2008-11-08. 09:37 at http://kuruc.info/r/1/30523/ , also posted on http://www.bombagyar.hu/index.php?post=1547 and http://barikad.hu/node/20229.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[36]<!–[endif]–> Luba Lesna, “Football Riot Stokes Tension,” 10 November 2008 at http://www.spectator.sk/articles/view/33498/2/football_riot_stokes_tension.html.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[37]<!–[endif]–> Luba Lesna, “Football Riot Stokes Tension,” 10 November 2008 at http://www.spectator.sk/articles/view/33498/2/football_riot_stokes_tension.html.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[38]<!–[endif]–> For one of many videos, see for example http://www.felvidek.ma/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8605&Itemid=33, which has the advantage of showing clips before, during, and after the match, inside and outside the stadium.
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[39]<!–[endif]–> See http://szentkoronaradio.com/elszakitva/2008_11_01_a-magyar-szurkolok-ma-visszafoglaljak-a-felvideket-percrol-percre-a-dac-slovan . For the statement itself, and related ones, see http://www.police.hu/sajto/sajtoszoba/orf_081101_01.html?query=dunaszerdahely , http://www.police.hu/sajto/sajtoszoba/orf_081103_03.html?query=dunaszerdahely [from Slovak authorities], and http://www.police.hu/sajto/sajtoszoba/orf_081102_01.html?query=dunaszerdahely [discussing the “spotters”].
<!–[if !supportFootnotes]–>[40]<!–[endif]–> http://www.police.hu/sajto/sajtoszoba/orf_081102_01.html?query=dunaszerdahely. Moreover, in the days that followed, two Hungarian police officers told reporters that from what they had seen “on the ground in Dunaszerdahely,” the intervention of the Slovak commandos was unwarranted, see “A magyar rendőrök sem láttak okot a brutális szlovák beavatkozásra, 3 November 2008 at http://www.felvidek.ma/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8665&Itemid=51 .
June 1, 2009
May 26, 2009
Images of Hungarians and Romanians in Modern American Media and Popular Culture, by Richard Andrew Hall
by Richard Andrew Hall, Ph.D.
ROMANIANS…
JERRY SEINFELD: (trying desperately to make conversation) So, Ceausescu. He must’ve been some dictator.
KATYA [A guest character, she is supposed to be a Romanian gymnast who won a Silver medal in the 1984 Olympics] : Oh yes. He was not shy about dictating.
JERRY: He, uh, he must’ve been dictating first thing in the morning. “I want a cup of coffee and a muffin!”
KATYA: And you could not refuse.
JERRY: No, you’d have to be crazy.
KATYA: He was a very bad dictator.
JERRY: Yes. Very bad. Very, very bad.
(from the American television comedy series, Seinfeld, episode entitled “The Gymnast,” aired 3 November 1994, multiple sites, see for example, http://www.seinology.com/scripts/script-92.shtml)
HUNGARIANS…
TONY KORNHEISER: “Thank you, Julian…folks, Julian Rubinstein, author of ‘The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber’ [a Hungarian bankrobber of the 1990s whose cover was playing ice hockey], will be at the ‘Hungarian-American Foundation’ tonight…What’ll they have there? [Laughing] Gulash, yes, they’ll have popperkash [sic]…”
ANDY POLLIN: [Laughing] Maybe Zsa Zsa [Gabor] will be there…
(author’s gist of a conversation heard on the sports talk/comedy radio program “The Tony Kornheiser Show,” 2 December 2004, 9 AM Hour, WTEM 980 AM, Washington, D.C.)
Part I: Introduction
Larry Wolff, Maria Todorova, Vesna Goldsworthy and other scholars interested in the development and spread of Western images and stereotypes of the peoples of eastern Europe understandably have focused their research on travelogues, plays, novels, oper(ett)as, paintings, etc. This makes sense and is methodologically appropriate since these are the artifacts of the age in which these ethnonational images and stereotypes came to be specified, recorded, and communicated to audiences larger than the one in direct earshot. But the content and context of these images and stereotypes are not static, and neither are the means by which they are communicated. Over the last century, and particularly half century, technological and media innovations—primarily in the form of mass communications (films, animated cartoons, radio, television, the Internet)—have changed how ethnonational images come into being and are conveyed to others. This change has arguably decreased the role of traditional (especially intellectual) elites in shaping the content of ethnonational images, while simultaneously enhancing the role of the audience in determining which images “take” and which ones creative intellectuals, journalists, and others will use in their work.
Ironically, the very point that is at the center of the research of Wolff, Todorova, et. al.—that these ethnonational images were not always what they became later, or are today—has somehow gotten lost, including in their application of their own theories to the latter part of the twentieth century. This departure from their intellectual assumptions has happened despite the fact that conditions such as the technology revolution, marketization, globalization, and democratization clearly challenge and reshape—and have challenged and reshaped—individual and collective identities. It is one thing to say that ethnonational images evolved, but hardened over time, and continue to shape how peoples view themselves and others, despite such changes. It is quite another to say, as many in this constructionist literature seem to, at least implicitly, that somehow this evolution became frozen in time, that these images, after a long period of evolution, “consolidated” and now are essentially impervious to meaningful change—that is, that everything is merely déjà vu all over and over and over again and again.
The two excerpts I have invoked above suggest the arbitrary, idiosyncratic, and often personality-contingent and event-driven character of modern ethnonational images of Hungarians and Romanians in the United States. These images are set against a backdrop of, influenced by, and feed upon the broader preexisting images outlined by scholars of the “first generation” of image and stereotype creation (the constructionist literature described above), but they are neither a subset of, nor beholden to, those first order images. Moreover, the interplay between televised images and the audience who watches them (i.e. as consumers who can vote-with-the-remote so-to-speak)—as well as the Internet’s empowering capacity to encourage and facilitate individual expression and participation—means that power over the content and meaning of these ethnonational images has devolved more to non-traditional elites (journalists, producers, media executives, business people) and the mass audience in comparison with the situation that prevailed in the past.
Despite the “Eastern (European)” classification of Hungarians and Romanians, the negative Hun/Mongol/Asian/Oriental connotations of the Hungarians and the “Balkan” characteristics of Romanians, and the general “neo-orientalist” treatment of this “second/third world” or “semi-periphery/periphery,” the actual content of popular and media images of Hungarians and Romanians is far less foreseeable, and more internally and externally diverse, than such overarching, generalizable theories of externally-created and imposed cultural construction predict. (I shall employ Csaba Dupcsik’s term “Euro-Orientalism” here to capture collectively the ideas of Wolff, Todorova, Goldsworthy, Bakic-Hayden and others.)
Moreover, the constructs of this literature have a difficult time accounting for something that derives from the excerpts above and recurs throughout this paper: the difference between Romanian images, which I will argue tend to be more recent and political (from the Seinfeld episode, Nicolae Ceausescu and a Nadia Comaneci-like gymnast)—and, as a consequence, vulnerable to change in content and connotation—and Hungarian images, which tend to be older and more “cultural” (from the sports radio talk show: goulash and Zsa Zsa Gabor) and static. Although the cultural constructionist model of Western image-creation and imposition does not fully spell out its assumptions and expectations, based on its treatment of the concept of “Central Europe” its underlying logic would seem to suggest that the more “Eastern” a people, the more simplistic and perjorative the ethnonational images and stereotypes attributed to that people, the more indistinguishable that people is from the rest of the “unwashed” peoples of the non-West, and the more inflexible the images and stereotypes. At least in the comparison of Hungarian and Romanian images in the West, this does not appear to be the case, and that begs the question: why?
Overall, I conclude from an examination of representations of Hungarians and Romanians in modern American media and pop culture, that in comparison to one another, to other peoples from central and eastern Europe and to peoples from western Europe, the neo-orientalist (Todorova’s distinctions and caveats of her own model notwithstanding) bent of much of the work that studies images of “Eastern Europeans” oversimplifies and overstates the picture. As I have already hinted, part of this derives from the sources, medium, and time period selected by these scholars for study. Another part, however, I would argue derives from the reification and schlerosis of this academic vantage point—one that at times seems unable to overcome its elitist roots. All of this said, I do not completely conclude that the neo-orientalist perspective has nothing useful to contribute. For one of my conclusions is that images of Hungarians in the American imagination are older, more consolidated, less subject to modification, and more diverse than contrasting images of Romanians. The stockpile or archive of images of Romanians tends to be smaller, less differentiated, more political, and newer. Part of this I hypothesize is arbitrary, but deals with the timing of the incorporation of ethnic images—itself a consequence of travel to the country, emigration from that country, and the timing of modern national consciousness and identity movements in that country—into western European/English-speaking/American consciousness. Like Gerschenkron’s late developing states, late developing nations face a different set of rules, or at least more limited options—a choice between irrelevance and ignorance, less-than-desirable stereotypes, or the possibility of exploiting comparative advantage of that stereotype no matter how unsatisfying and patronizing it may be.
Here is a preview summary of my findings then:
<!–[if !supportLists]–>1) <!–[endif]–>The range or universe of ethnonational images of either Hungarians or Romanians in North American film and television is more diverse, more internally contradictory, and less predictable than neo-orientalist assumptions seem to allow for.
<!–[if !supportLists]–>2) <!–[endif]–>Neo-orientalist assumptions prove somewhat ahistorical. Accident and absence of intention are filtered out in retrospect, and intention and malice are assumed in their place in order to create a coherent narrative.
<!–[if !supportLists]–>3) <!–[endif]–>Concrete, individual, idiosyncratic images prove much more enduring and influential than the pale abstract assumptions associated with the neo-orientalist model. It is these that frequently differentiate peoples in the popular mind and that are more impervious/inflexible to change.
<!–[if !supportLists]–>4) <!–[endif]–>Partly because of the role of individual images, televised images/pictures prove more compelling and lasting.
<!–[if !supportLists]–>5) <!–[endif]–>This points us toward the influence of television, film, and the Internet—media largely ignored in the earlier constructionist, neo-orientalist research, research which, surprisingly, while emphasizing the role of new mass media such as novels and travelogues that brought new peoples and places into the Western consciousness, and while stressing that images have changed over time (i.e. were not what they were later to become), underestimates or ignores both the capacity for change and the role of new media in identity and image formation.
<!–[if !supportLists]–>6) <!–[endif]–>The issue of modern media, popular inclusion/consumption culture, etc. brings us to the question of audience and highlights the link between technology and broader market access in determining image selection, formation, and endurance. The neo-orientalist perspective focuses excessively on elite control and dissemination, suggesting audiences are labile and easily manipulable, and placing almost no importance on the role of audience in determining image formation and content. The greater role of masses in determining which images “stick” buffers the elitist focus of the neo-orientalist perspective and accounts in part for the more mixed, syncretic character of contemporary ethnonational images.
<!–[if !supportLists]–>7) <!–[endif]–>As with state formation, the late developing nation and its late incorporation into the Western consciousness has a lingering role in the content of ethnonational images. Being unknown and having no image, although beneficial in presenting a tabula rasa template upon which good images can be projected, often leaves a people vulnerable to being pigeonholed in the foreign imagination by a small number of late developing images—images which inevitably seem to be more political than cultural, and as a whole, more negative. However, it is important to note that this is as much a product of mass audiences and visual media…as it is of elites and any imputed constructionist imperative.
As I believe befits this topic, the layout and content of this paper is eclectic. As a result, it is unlikely that the reader will find every section of this paper of interest. However, I do believe that a wide variety of different audiences should find something germane to their particular interest—including those interested in media and communications studies, Central and East Europeanists, pop culture trivia buffs, movie aficionados, and sports fans. This article has something for most people, but it is definitely not “for everyone.”
An Autobiographical Note as an Introduction to Hungarian and Romanian Images in American Culture
Encounters with ethnonational images, of course, often predate one’s intellectual capacity to recognize ethnic and national distinctions and to link people and fictional characters with ethnic and national groups. It is only in retrospect that we can recognize the connection. Because of the subject of this section and the role of personal memories, the approach is somewhat stream-of-consciousness.
“Knowing” Romanians (or at least, Tran-syl-va-ni-ahahaha-ns)
As a child, when it came to Romanians, I knew of course of Dracula, or at least his pop-cultural/film (re-, and seemingly never ending)incarnation. After all, to the extent I knew where he was from it was some place called “Transylvania,” which was either its own country—in which case it must have some pretty cool-looking postage stamps, spooky castles on forbidding mountain tops and the like—or a made-up place. I suppose this should not have been surprising for a kid, since, of the myriad Dracula films, there were ones such as “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966).” (Where does that take place, Dodge City?)
Dracula’s birthday, as we all know, is 31 October, which just happens to coincide with Halloween, thereby causing some confusion. Anyway, so when I went trick-or-treating as Cornelius from the “Planet of the Apes”—it was the ‘70s okay, and I was a kid, how was I to know?…I actually thought soylent green was people—in a costume that they probably use today to demonstrate the danger of fireworks—to say nothing of the mask, a cheap plastic mold with an elastic string that invariably broke, causing you to have to carry it with you and thereby destroying any capacity you might have had to surprise the people who came to their doors…unless of course they tried the “please, take just one” candy-in-the-bowl-out-front-with-the-lights-off-really-we’re-not-home-socialism-in-action method—more often than not, I would run into countless Draculas. They had the the cape, the fake fangs, and that cool fake blood…and perhaps even some of those cool postage stamps. (Context is everything at Halloween. My youngest brother went sometime in the late ‘80s as “Jason” from the “Halloween” horror series. A little old lady opened up the door at one house and said “Ooooooh, look at the cute little hockey player”! By the way, what happens when you go up to somebody’s house in a costume, ring the doorbell, and say trick-or-treat, on a day other than Halloween? I figure one of two things can happen: 1) they call the cops, or 2) they seek to regift the still-remaining popcorn balls and circus peanuts left over from last Halloween.)
If Dracula was only present in person on Halloween, he could be found the rest of the year on television—especially, perhaps ironically, for kids. There was Count von Count from Sesame Street. The count’s theme song included a line, “When I’m alone. I count myself. One, one count! Ahahahaha [to thunder in the background]!” Interestingly, according to the Internet’s Wikipedia (“Count von Count”) entry, there is some vampire folklore which suggests that vampires can become obsessed with counting things and that should you ever confront one, throwing sand or seeds may help to distract them (a helpful travel tip…).
The Count von Count skit is emblematic of the confused mix of Romanian, Hungarian, and sometimes inexplicably inserted slavic elements that make up the Dracula composite. For example, as in the Seinfeld scene excerpted in the introduction (whose characters actually speak a few words of Romanian in the scene!, but who are nevertheless named Katya (the gymnast) and Misha (the circus performing acrobat), names (diminutives) which are neither Hungarian, nor Romanian), the Count’s bats for some unknown reason have slavic names—Grisha, Misha, Sasha, etc. The Count’s characteristics are clearly inspired by Bela Lugosi’s (indeed, a real Transylvanian (from Lugoj), of Hungarian origin) 1931 portrayal of Dracula (down to Count von Count’s accent), and, it would appear, the Count’s cameo girlfriend “Countess Dahling von Dahling” is inspired by the Hungarian actress, Zsa Zsa Gabor, who is famous for being famous, as is said, and for calling people “dahling” (convenient, she has said, because then you never have to remember anyone’s name).
Finally, there was Count Chocula, a staple of Saturday morning television serials and the commercials in between which they were sandwiched (nothing in comparison to today, however, as commercial breaks took up much less time then). All I knew of him was that he presided over what looked like a really-tasty chocolate cereal that looked more like dessert than breakfast. That, of course, explains why our mother refused to buy it for us. Back in the in-retrospect-not-a-bad-time-to-be-a-kid, now much-maligned, hedonistic “have a nice day smiley-face,” “Me” decade of the 1970s, gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins was given temporary special dispenstation. Gluttony was in…even if chocolate covered cereals with marshmallows were not in some households. (In those days, “nutrition correctness” had not yet taken over, as names such as Sugar Smacks (renamed Honey Smacks) or Sugar Pops would suggest.)
“Knowing” Hungarians
My introduction to Hungarians was similarly obscure. To the extent I identified Dracula with any place at all, it was, as I noted, Transylvania; to the extent that it was a country, Romania—not yet having gotten the spiel countless times by the proprietors of private rooms I was to stay in in Hungary in later years, “ah, so you are going to Transylvania, you know that used to be part of Hungary—one, one dismembered kingdom, ahahahahahaha—until they took it away (to the accompaniment of thunder in the background) .” What did I know and when did I know it (well, it was the Watergate era, you know)? It was not, for example, until years later that I realized that I had once lived in the Hungarian-American mecca known as Cleveland, or that the Austrian family from whom we bought our house in a suburb of Toronto in the early ‘70s was named Feleky. (It was quite a street we lived on then (1970-1974); my parents, Irish immigrants just naturalized American citizens, the mother of a friend a Prague Spring Czech refugee, and many new Greek families, doubtless some having fled the right-wing military junta of 1967-1973.)
My mother used to make that staple of many an American household (at least at a time), “Hungarian goulash”…it sounds ghoulish, but it tastes delicious. (As is frequently noted, the American version is more similar to porkolt (stew-like) than to gulyas (a soup).) I loved it, even though I didn’t know what it was or where it came from. (It can only be said to be ironic too, although I did not realize it was ironic at a time: my father is a ’56er, only he came from Dublin, a relative (a policeman!) stiffed him at the port, and so he wandered the streets of New York with his suitcase in heavy Irish tweed during Indian summer, only to duck into a bar to see a few pitches of Don Larsen’s Perfect Game in the World Series, an event whose importance was inscrutible to him; like many a Hungarian ‘56er, however, he felt like a Martian (see below for more on the theme of Hungarians as “aliens”). No, my father did not bump into Frank McCourt!)
“Goulash,” of course, already had a long history on television by that point, what with mad scientists in Warner Brothers cartoons, living in “Transylvania” among lightning storms and talking about making “spider goulash” and similar mad scientist specialties. (The other Hungarian touch used in a whole series of cartoons—including a classic Warner Brothers’ cartoon by Fritz Freleng with Bugs Bunny as a concert pianist (“Rhapsody Rabbit”) and a classic MGM cartoon by Hanna and Barbera of “Tom and Jerry” dueling it out at a piano (“The Cat Concerto”), both of which came out within weeks of each other in 1946 leading to mutual accusations that the competitor was guilty of plagiarism (see Wikipedia entry)—is the manic-depressive, mostly manic, frantic music Franz (Ferenc) Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2”.) “Goulash” was also the plot-line of what from today’s optic was a clearly racist episode (“A Majority of Two,” 4/11/68) of the 1960s sitcom “Bewitched” in which, as usual, “Darrin” (alias “Darwood”) was to entertain an out-of-town business guest—would you like a high-ball, sir, make that a double; sorry they’ve slashed the expense account, dinner at Darrin’s again…—who on this occasion was Japanese. The whole episode, Darrin’s wife, a witch named Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery), is trying to track down how to prepare the meal request the businessman’s secretary had relayed: Hun-gai-ran-gou-rash. She is worried, of course, about causing the Japanese businessman to lose face if she asks, which is indeed a concern since throughout the episode when this happens to someone his or her face will literally disappear, apparently leaving a blotch of white-out. Everyone, of course, has a good laugh at the end, however, after the businessman has romanced only a mildly Asian-looking (didn’t want to have her looking tooooo Asian) stewardess, and it turns out all the businessman really wanted was “Hungarian Goulash,” but owing to his secretary’s accent…Everyone except that nosy next-door neighbor Mrs. Gladys Kravitz, who, we can deduce, must be spying on the Stevens’ household for “Dragnet” or “The FBI,” since “freak out” parties have been reported at that address…
Then, there was the show, “Green Acres,”…something was definitely up with that, but exactly what I didn’t know. Although I knew the character Lisa Douglas was eccentric, I didn’t know she was Hungarian, and I certainly did not know that she was Eva Gabor and not Zsa Zsa Gabor as is very frequently mistaken. As a kid, I thought I didn’t understand the show, precisely because I was a kid. Nope. Now, years later, I know: that wasn’t the problem.
How exactly does one describe “Green Acres?” The plot ostensibly was that Eddie Albert’s character wished to experience the “real livin’” of the countryside (today, this is known as a “r-e-a-l-i-t-y show,” starring a similarly famous-for-being-famous celebrity, Paris Hilton…who is actually related to the Gabors (see below), however, thereby causing us serious existential issues at this point in this sentence). Eddie Albert drags his reluctant Hungarian wife with him, and she is not very happy with the situation because, as we learn from the theme song, she would rather be shopping on Park Avenue. (The countryside theme was so common in CBS sitcoms during the 1960s, that some critics derisively referred to it as the “Country Broadcasting System”.) Anyway, they lived in some rural area, several hundred miles from Chicago, probably Illinois. Despite the small size of the town in which they lived, Hooterville was capable of hosting not one, but two sitcoms: Green Acres (1966-1971) and Petticoat Junction (1963-1970). (The town was apparently known best for the ample breasts of the young female stars of Petticoat Junction, since, as it turns out, the choice of name was not accidental). The two shows were united by the presence of Sam Drucker, apparently town grocer, postmaster, and banker, and the unforgettable character of George Jefferson (oh, sorry, no, too early, this was still the 1960s, strike that then). As the Wikipedia entry notes, Hooterville had Drucker’s grocery store and the hotel from Petticoat Junction…not exactly, Pixley material (to say nothing of Mount Pilot), and likely that giant sucking sound on the state’s budget. At least the town did not have Goober or Howard Sprague, clearly not local personalities the chamber of commerce wishes to advertise when trying to attract investment).
Moreover, I would venture to guess, this was one town where the locals did not “exceed the plan” or “break the harvest record,” despite Eva’s naturally collectivist tendencies. Instead, a lot of time was spent with fending off the vexing locals, including the featherheadded state bureaucrat, county farm agent Hank Kimball, a gender-ambiguous brother and sister painting team, and Arnold Ziffel, the “hilarious” TV-watching pig, apparently “Green Acres”s’answer to Mr. Ed (an insidious, but false, urban legend has it that the cast ate Arnold after the show was cancelled; the truth is just being on the set made him nostalgic for the sanity of the sty). The running joke of the series was that Mr. Douglas (Eddie Albert) wanted to be there, but nothing went right and the locals drove him crazy; while Mrs. Douglas, despite her love of fluffy negligees and diamonds, fit right in and understood the locals. Her Hungarianness in the show was alternatively exotic, haughty, sexy/ditzy (as connoted by her accent) and seemingly oblivious to reason—yes, a veritable goulash of “otherness.”
One would like to assume that “Green Acres” could be explained by recourse to more complicated analysis: that it was somehow a) a reflection of the drug culture’s first penetration of the creative intelligentsia (according to Alice, the wind was whispering, not yet crying Mary…“Green Acres” an accidental choice of title?!), or that b) there was some deep allegory at work here, suggesting pursuit of a utopian rural life is a chimera, and that instead you get electrification and a TV-watching pig. (Appropriately enough, when it and other such country broadcasting system shows were cancelled in 1971, it was referred to as the “Rural Puge.”) It is more likely that the show was merely escapist, almost unintentionally absurd—although it did leave a score that lent itself well to translation into Hungarian for a skit at a summer language camp years later. (One of the best indictments of “America’s Cold War realism” of the era can be found in the movie “Forrest Gump,” in a recovery room for injured soldiers during the Vietnam War…in the background “Gomer Pyle, USMC” plays on a TV…In 5 years, Gomer somehow never made it out of basic training to Vietnam…)
Through the Eyes of an American Child of the Television Age: Identifying Hungarians and Romanians as Hungarians and Romanians…through the Wide World of Sports
Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky
Speaking of Eva…I mean Zsa Zsa, no, I mean, for once this is right, Zsa Zsa Gabor…a guest spot on another rural-themed 1960s television show introduces us to our next theme: the Hungarians as “mad” or crazy (a la Lisa Douglas). In one episode (28 January 1962), Wilbur congratulates his talking horse, Mr. Ed, for having cured Zsa Zsa of her fear of horses, to which Mr. Ed responds: “She cured my fear of Hungarians” (“The Best of Mr. Ed,” multiple sites; Mister Ed aired from 1961-1966 on, you guessed it, CBS). In J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” (published as a whole in 1961), Mrs. Glass tells Zooey: “You could use a haircut, young man…You’re getting to look like one of these crazy Hungarians or something getting out of a swimming pool” (the section also contains a reference to Zsa Zsa Gabor and use of the descriptor “Balkan”; I remember now reading this book beneath leafy trees below the Pannonhalma abbey in Hungary in June 1990) http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/salinger/frannyandzooey.doc. (I would be curious to know here: this section first appeared in The New Yorker in May 1957, and the reference to a Hungarian “getting out of a swimming pool”—a rather strange comparison—inevitably brings to mind the famous bloody waterpolo match between the Soviets and the Hungarians on 6 December 1956 at the 1956 Summer Olympics (yes, that’s right, because the Summer Olympics were held in Melbourne, Australia that year). The Hungarians defeated the Soviets in a match with huge political overtones—angry Hungarian fans were reportedly ready to lynch a Soviet player for a punch to the eye of a Hungarian star—the match coming just a month after the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising.)
My first personal realization of Hungarianness as Hungarianness, however, came around 1976, with the ascribed “mad” quality of Hungarians, specifically and appropriately enough, Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky. Hrabosky was a relief pitcher for several different teams in the 1970s and early 1980s, but his best years were with St. Louis and Kansas City, with 1975 being his cardinal year in the record books. The mid-1970s were the days of colorful characters in baseball, especially among pitchers: the cigar-chomping Cuban of the Boston Red Sox, Luis Tiant, who looked like we was throwing toward the outfield rather than the catcher because of his pitching motion; Sparky Lyle for the New York Yankees, his cheeks like a blow-fish filled with chewing tobacco; and Mark “The Bird” Fidrych of the Detroit Tigers, who talked to the ball as if it were alive and whose boyish enthusiasm unfortunately couldn’t overcome injuries that strangled his career in its infancy.
Then there was Hrabosky who despite the Slovak-sounding last name claims Hungarian descent. Contrasting the absence of colorful characters among pitchers in today’s baseball, Gordon Edes wrote in a wonderful—if he were Hungarian, we might even say “sweet”—article in 2003 about Hrabosky as follows:
But for sheer theatrics, one reliever remains in a league of his own: Al Hrabosky, known as the “Mad Hungarian” when he pitched for the Cardinals, Royals, and Braves from 1970-1982. With his Fu Manchu mustache, long hair, and a silver ring, the Gypsy Rose of Death (“I don’t even remember the stupid story I made up for that, it was so far-fetched—probably a family heirloom of Dracula”), Hrabosky would turn every outing into performance art. He’d stomp off the mound toward second base, eyes blazing, the fury practically seeping through his uniform as he turned back to the hitter who was left waiting at the plate until he was done working himself into an altered state he called his “controlled hate routine,” then whirled around, pounding his ball into the glove while the home crowd generally went nuts. (Gordon Edes, “Hrabosky had a flair about him,” “The Boston Globe,” 28 March 2003, F9, reprinted on the Internet)
How did Hrabosky get his nickname? Again, Edes recounts:
The nickname, he said, came from a team publicist. No one was sure of his nationality—[the American film star] “Burt Reynolds once called me ‘The Mad Russian’”—and only the spelling-bee champions got his name right. But then one day, a Cardinals publicist, Jerry Lovelace, said “Hey, M.H.,” to the young pitcher from Oakland, Calif., and a nickname was born….I said, “What does that mean?” He said, “Mad Hungarian.” I said, “I like it.” (Edes, 2003)
Hungarians, I concluded from watching his television appearances and from his nickname, must be associated with craziness. That is how, of course, many images are passed on, not with malice, but as descriptors for individuals, a way of awarding identity and for marketing purposes. Hrabosky’s “mad” behavior was established before his nationality (as Burt Reynolds’ calling him “The Mad Russian” indicates, in itself a negative and positive reflection of “East European” ethnicity in the United States at the time—interchangeable, part of a melting pot, even if a separate one from those of West European ethnicity—although cultural constructionists would view such “everycountry” ascription more darkly (see below)), rather than his Hungarianness being identified first, and his behavior seen as reflecting his Hungarianness. Once the two become intertwined, however, and given the propensity for collective associations to outweigh individual associations, it was difficult and almost irrelevant to know which came first—the two were married and interchangeable in the popular imagination, or at least sports fan’s imagination.
Nadia…
It was also the Bicentennial Summer of 1976 when I was introduced to Romanians, also through sports. It was, of course, through Nadia Comaneci (“N.C. I”), an endearing young Romanian gymnast who scored seven perfect 10s, the perfection being driven home even more by the fact that the scoreboards only went up to 9.9, the perfect score of 10 being considered unattainable! (The scoreboard would show 1.0 because it could not go past 9.9….Spinal Tap’s invention of the 11 not having been invented yet.) Nadia spawned “Nadia-(Ro)mania” of a sort. ABC which carried the Montreal Olympics in the United States attached a musical theme to the gymnast’s performances; “Nadia’s theme” then climbed the pop charts! (It was actually the theme to an American soap opera, “The Young and the Restless,” but it was through its attachment to Nadia who used it for one of her floor performances that it became famous.)
Of course, I have asked myself since then: would the reaction, the outpouring of genuine warmth and admiration from Americans (Canadians, and Westerners in general) have been the same had Nadia been representing Bulgaria and not Romania—to say nothing of the Soviet Union? True, the USSR’s Olga Korbut generated enthusiasm four years earlier in Munich but nothing like Nadia. Was it Nadia’s comparative youth and “cuteness/sweetness/prepubescence?” Was it her coach, the charismatic, bear-like Hungarian, Bela Karolyi (their relationship presented as indicative of the “warm ethnic relations” fostered by “Ceausescu’s Romania”)? Perhaps, but I also think it was against the backdrop of Romania’s highly-crafted and the U.S. and West’s highly-courted image of Ceausescu’s Romania as the great thorn in the Soviets’ side, bravely standing up to Moscow and more Western in their culture and people (“a Latin people in a sea of Slavs”)—i.e. thus not Balkan or truly “Eastern,” somehow caught by accident “behind enemy lines.” It is simply difficult to believe that something approaching Nadia-mania could occur in the post-Cold War world; it was a reflection of the time in which it took place.
Certainly, the standing ovation for the Romanian delegation as it entered the Los Angeles Coliseum at the 1984 Summer Olympics—which unfortunately lent itself easily to continuous exploitation by Ceausescu thereafter, during the most-difficult years of his reign—and Nadia’s escape from Romania in November 1989, became metaphors for and barometers of Romania’s political situation and U.S.-Romanian relations. The appropriately surreal “1984” moment reflected the Chernenko, pre-Gorbachev nadir of Soviet-American relations in the 1980s—arms reductions talks’ were essentially put on ice between late 1983 and 1985—and the continued greater importance attached to Romania’s foreign policy over Ceausescu’s “Golden Era” domestic policy (the 1984-1986 period being perhaps the worst and most hopeless according to some, in part owing to brutal weather, and the weakness of reform currents at that moment elsewhere in the bloc). By 1989, with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in full swing—and with “Gorbymania” having changed the image of the Soviet Union extensively in the United States—the image of a transmorgified Nadia—as if 1976 had never happened—involved in a “tawdry affair” with a married man (Constantin Panait), escaping from Romania, seemed to symbolize the ills of Ceausescu’s Romania and how it now stood in stark contrast to the rest of the Eastern bloc. As the Seinfeld episode demonstrates, and as I will discuss in more detail below, the gymnast frame stuck in the popular imagination, however. It was Nadia who set that mold.
(A Romanian-American scholar once told me how surprised he was to look up on the television screen one day in November-December 1989, only to see the married father of four, the Romanian émigré for whom a now aging and plumper Nadia had allegedly left Ceausescu’s Romania: the scholar had tended bar with the guy…and the guy still owed him money! My first encounter with “real, live” Romanians from Romania also had a sad sports theme in a sense. It was in Keleti pu., the eastern train station in Budapest in May 1985. Amid the clapping of rusting toilet flanges and intermittent torrents of urine falling to the tracks below, Romanian boys in dingy blue track suits with trim that had once been white chased each other around the unmistakable “CFR” railcars of the time…)
Part II:
Back to Theory: The Inventions of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Ruritania
Over the years, there has developed a growing subfield across many academic disciplines that examines the construction of identities in the “region formerly known (primarily during the Cold War) as ‘Eastern Europe.’” This reflects the intersection of two trends, one political/historical, one intellectual/ideological. Part of the timing of the birth of this subfield owes to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the break-up of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia as well as of regional groupings such as the Warsaw Pact and COMECON, and the question of where the future of the countries of the region lies in the face of extensive political and economic restructuring and the prospect (and now for many, reality) of NATO and, in particular, European Union membership. Part of it lies in broader academic and cultural trends that look at the role of white Christian male Americans and (Western) Europeans in creating and imposing identities upon “others” in their home countries, but especially abroad—i.e. the so-called “Orientalism,” identified by Edward Said. The bottom line of such analysis is that the American and West European views of East Europeans and others says more about the owner of the view than the object of the view, about elaborately rationalized, but unjustifiable and often immoral superiority complexes, and about how those making the characterizations do so wittingly and unwittingly to establish and maintain control over those they characterize and categorize.
As a result, we have learned important conclusions such as the shift from a north-south mental geography of Europe to a west-east one (i.e. “Eastern Europe”) weighted with far more political, cultural, and moral baggage (Wolff), the similarly, historically-recent evolution and accepted use of the perjorative regional classification of “the Balkans” (Todorova), and more broadly of non-western Europe as a mythical and allegedly genetically-backward “Ruritania” (Goldsworthy). The Hungarian scholar Csaba Dupcsik has dubbed this set of studies collectively as a critique of “Euro-Orientalism” (Dupcsik, 2001). Much, perhaps most, of the literature in this burgeoning subfield—it is part of the contemporary bread-and-butter of universities and colleges, both outside and inside the classrooms, that is “identity politics,” the behemoth of research agendas—bases its conclusions on the reading of travel narratives, novels, poems, plays, operas, paintings, etc. In other words, the historic province of narrow, if traditionally influential, elite populations, that mirror to some extent the intellectuals who now are examining their works.
In a review of Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination and Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans, the journalist and historian Misha Glenny summarizes this body of literature for the lay-person as follows:
Both Goldsworthy and Maria Todorova, a Bulgarian historian who now teaches at the University of Florida, seek to explain the peculiar form of literary and ideological imperialism visited on the Balkans. While consciously drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism for inspiration, Todorova makes clear distinctions between Said’s consideration of the Middle East and her own of what used to be called the Near East. Both authors draw on a third academic, Milica Bakic-Hayden, to describe the process of imagining the Balkans as one of ‘nesting orientalisms’. On the one hand, the region is seen as ‘irreparably oriental’ because it spent nearly five centuries as part of the Ottoman Empire. On the other, it is indisputably part of Europe. The dichotomy is summed up by two further, now defunct names for the Balkans: Turkey-in-Europe and Ottoman Europe. Its inhabitants were in the main white and Christian, but in important contrast to the Middle East, the region was never colonised by Western powers, which allowed it to become the repository of any manner of fantastic imaginings. (Glenny, “Only in the Balkans,” London Review of Books, 1999)
In other words, the utility and great advantage of the Balkans and Eastern Europe for those in Western Europe and North America is that they are foreign enough as settings to host an allegory or morality play unobtrusively and yet familiar enough to make that allegory or morality play credible and understandable to a Western audience.
It should be noted here that within this literature there is a, never thoroughly resolved, tension between foreigners and locals lumping the whole region together (“Eastern Europe”) or making and placing emphasis upon distinctions between groupings of countries or parts of countries in the region. The larger, regional approach—the “everycountry” tendency discussed by Fleming below—is, not surprisingly, favored in the discourse of Westerners. Thus, the countries of “Eastern Europe” as a whole, or the “Balkans” as a whole, are viewed as virtually indistinguishable and interchangeable. Locals, understandably, or perhaps those who spend longer periods of time in the region, are likely to invoke the language of “nesting orientalisms” described by Milica Bakic-Hayden. That is, rank-ordering ethnonational groups within eastern Europe or the Balkans, or within the former Yugoslavia, or even among constituent ethnonational groups there (Serbs vs. Albanians as she suggests)—for Bakic-Hayden this is a reflection of the hegemony and internalization of the orientalist discourse among the region’s peoples and its replication in their dealings with each other and even more “oriental” peoples (the Turks, etc.) (see Bakic-Hayden, 1994, or online at http://www.zmag.org/balkanwatch/hayden_orientalisms.htm). The Romanian academic Sorin Antohi demonstrates how even within a country such as Romania, and among Romanians themselves, the roughly northwest to southeast “nesting orientalist” discourse exists and shapes views of those who live in these areas (Antohi, Transit 21, 2002).
Goldsworthy, Todorova, and Bakic-Hayden clearly believe that the role of Westerners in defining and characterizing those from the eastern part of the continent, the “lesser Europe,” or perhaps most appropriately “the Other Europe,” has led to the creation of cultural hierarchies, often then internalized to their own detriment by those who are being categorized, of negative and perjorative images and stereotypes of the peoples of “Eastern Europe” and “The Balkans.” In an interesting article entitled “Dracula and the Cultural Construction of Europe,” Jason Dittmer elaborates specifically on the role of “travel literature and the Enlightenment” in fostering negative images of Eastern Europe:
Larry Wolff attributes the construction of an Eastern Europe that is separate from the “civilized” portions of Western Europe to Enlightenment philosophers (in particular, Voltaire and Rousseau) who perpetuated and mythologized each other’s accounts of a backward and barbaric homogenous region (some of them despite never actually going there). For example, Voltaire’s History of Charles XII (1731) was critical in mapping Eastern Europe in the popular imagination by describing Charles’ march through Eastern Europe. This book was written in the first person and instilled a fantasy-filled image of Eastern Europe that later travelers would bring with them to Eastern Europe, inserting a lens of preconceptions in their imagination. We know that the book was extremely influential because it had several printings and translations, and its effect was far-reaching and long lasting. Later Voltaire would write a history of the Russian Empire under the rule of Peter the Great (1759) and he used the now popular image of Peter as a “modernizer” to paint Russia as innately backwards and in need of Europeanization (a representation of the Russian executive that was still dominant in the Western media during the more recent reign of Boris Yeltsin). Later correspondence between Voltaire and Catherine the Great (which was all published at the time) further established Russia as a “backward” land in the minds of readers. Rousseau played a similar role in the cultural construction of Poland, constructing Poland and its neighbors as chaotic, despotic, or both:
Poland is a large state surrounded by even more considerable states which, by reason of their despotism and military discipline, have great offensive power. Herself weakened by anarchy, she is, in spite of Polish valor, exposed to all their insults […]. No economic organization; few or no troops; no military discipline, no order, no subordination; ever divided within, ever menaced from without, she has no intrinsic stability, and depends on the caprice of her neighbors. (2: 431)
In addition to this representation from philosophers who may or may not actually have been to Eastern Europe there were similar depictions available to the public from completely fictional travelers, such as those of Baron Munchausen (Wolff 100-06). While there was a real Baron Munchausen who did travel through Eastern Europe, the stories published about his namesake were tall tales written by Rudolf Raspe that portrayed Eastern Europe as a ridiculous and fantastic place. This representation became fashionable just as travel to the region increased, which is interesting as evidence supporting the cliché “familiarity breeds contempt” because Southwest Asia and East Asia received a much more romantic image, perhaps because of their inaccessibility for most Europeans at the time. Similarly, Goldsworthy notes: “the Gothic plot [as of Dracula] requires a setting which is sufficiently close to the reader to appear threatening, while nevertheless being alien enough to house all the exotic paraphernalia—the castles, the convents, the caverns, the dark forests at midnight, the mysterious villains and the howling specters” (75). Todorova outlines a similar process of “discovery” for the Balkans, where diplomats and other travelers to the region came back with stories and descriptions that were rich in detail and description, especially of the beauty of the women and the “crudeness” of the men. Thus, Jonathan Harker’s journal entries must be viewed as they would have been viewed at the time they were written—as a throwback to a not-so-distant literary era, when Eastern Europe came to be known as a magical, timeless place, and Dracula serves as a part of that same politico-geographic project whereby Eastern Europe was constructed as something entirely different than the West. (Jason Dittmer, “Dracula and the Cultural Construction of Europe,”© Connotations 12.2-3 (2002/2003): 233-48 found at http://www.unituebingen.de/connotations/dittmer1223.html)
The Enlightenment brought with it the belief that we can rationally explain and understand the environment in which we live. Unfortunately, it also brought with it the ability and desire to justify in intellectual terms our visceral reactions and prejudices and preconceived notions. “Just because” is not an acceptable answer in Enlightenment thinking. The overlapping or reinforcing of visceral reactions, prejudices, and preconceived notions with rational argument instantly made such beliefs all the more difficult to challenge and falsify. In other words, the capacity for protecting one’s beliefs from attack and for deceiving oneself became infinitely greater and more complicated. Post-Enlightenment “prisms/prisons of the mind” have become every bit as sophisticated and difficult to escape as its prisons.
One of the features alluded to by Dittmer as characteristic of Western images of Eastern Europe is the alleged homogeneity and interchangeability of the countries in the region. In the following passage, K.E. Fleming examines the cultural baggage of the fictional settings of Syldavia (Hergé [George Remi], “King Ottokar’s Sceptre”) and Herzoslovakia (Agatha Christie, “The Secret of Chimneys”), where politics is inscrutable, and violence, brigandry, mystery, assassination, and revolutions are said to be the fabric of everyday life:
Syldavia and Herzoslovakia, then, are sort of Balkan “everycountries,” composites (both in name and character) based on several assumptions: that Balkan countries are more or less interchangeable with and indistinguishable from one another, that there is a readily identifiable typology of politics and history common throughout the Balkans, that there is such a thing as a Balkan ethnic or racial “type.” Yet even as Hergé and Christie assume that they know something fundamental about the Balkans—indeed, that they know the Balkans so well that they can effortlessly construct fictional Balkan worlds—both Herzoslovakia and Syldavia point to an even more pervasive, and apparently contradictory, assumption about southeastern Europe. This is the belief that the Balkans are so hopelessly and intrinsically confused and impenetrable that there is scarcely any point in trying to distinguish between them; a novelistic or cartoon substitute is, in fact, eminently more manageable and presents less of an authorial problem than does the real thing. Anything vaguely East or South-East Europeanish will do. Syldavia, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, Herzoslovakia, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Borduria, Bohemia—what’s the difference, after all? Hermann Keyserling’s wry observation, “If the Balkans did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them,” was perhaps understated. Even though the Balkans do exist, they must be invented anyway. Simultaneously and tautologically, then, the Balkans are both fully known and wholly unknowable. (K.E. Fleming, “Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography,” The American Historical Review vol. 105, no. 4 (October 2000) found at http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.4/ah001218.html )
There are many more recent examples through which to clarify Fleming’s point. There was the memorable 1984 Wendy’s fast-food commerical with generic East European frenetic fiddling and a communist bloc fashion show where the only thing that differentiates “dayvehr” from “eefningvehr” is the flashlight (spotlight) that accompanies a plump peasant woman in her drab, mass-consumption frock. In Mike Myers’ “Austin Powers” film series (spoofs of the Cold War era James Bond/In Like Flint spy thrillers), the fictional “everycountry,” the synonym for instability from the Balkans to Central Asia is the “breakaway Republic of” Kreplachistan (according to multiple websites, kreplach is in fact a Yiddish word for a type of fritter; similarly, Farbissina as in the series’character Frau Farbissina, apparently means “embittered” in Yiddish). Their difference from the West is their alleged monotony and monochrome nature and yet it is their monotony and monochrome nature that makes them indistinguishable from one another.
“Molvania”: How a Guide Book to a Fictional Country Can Illustrate the Euro-Orientalist Debate in the Post-Modern Age of Virtual Reality
It is telling and ironic in so many ways that a travel guide parody about a fictional East European country that has its own website and inspires not only imaginary travelers to swap stories about their trips there, but East Europeans themselves (!) to discuss what the country represents, can demonstrate for us what is at issue in the Euro-Orientalist debate. Moreover, it is a particularly good contemporary example of the “everycountry” phenomenon and shows us that the debate retains its relevance.
The Jet Lag Travel Guide to Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry (Overlook Press, 2003) is as much, if not more, a send-up and satire of the sometimes pretentious, trendy travel guide industry for young backpackers (e.g. Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Let’s Go), than it is a companion to traveling this fictional East European country (in interviews, the authors have described it as “a practical joke gone awry”). In fact, the parody has far outsold many a travel guide to a real country: as of March 2005, it had sold 500,000 copies, including 50,000 in the US, while Lonely Planet’s most popular guide, its Guide to Australia, sells about 140,000 copies a year (Wall Street Journal, 3 March 2005). (I was introduced to it by two non-east Europeanists; my thanks to my work colleagues Matt and Chris for doing so). Nevertheless, the parody’s authors had to place their country somewhere, and although sequels to this initial offering now include tourist resorts in the Far East (“Phaic Tan”), the fact is they chose “Eastern Europe” as the setting for their first venture. Indeed, “Molvania”’s “East Europeanness” is on display in that post-modern locus for gaining “reality” status, an entry in the online encyclopedia, “Wikipedia”:
The Republic of Molvania is a composite of many stereotypes and cliches about Eastern Europe. Historically, the nation was a desolate wasteland, torn by civil war and ethnic unrest. Eventually Molvania’s various warring factions were united as a single kingdom, ruled by a series of cruel despotic kings. In the late 19th Century the monarchy was overthrown, but the royal family remained popular in exile. During World War 2 the country was invaded by Nazi Germany, and then afterwards was occupied by the Soviet Union who set up a Communist puppet government. After the fall of European Communism in the 1990’s the country became a run of the mill dictatorship run by a corrupt government with heavy ties to the Mafia. Molvania is a very poor and rural country, heavily polluted and geographically barren. The infastructure is terrible, with necessities such as electricity, clean water, and indoor plumbing being rare finds, largely due to bureaucratic incompetence. Though the tour guide tries to explain otherwise, there is little to do in the country, as all hotels are tiny, filthy, and dilapidated, the ethnic cusine is disgusting, and the “tourist attractions” are all boring and overpriced. The Molvanian people, in turn are generally rude, dirty, and at times a bit psychotic, with numerous bizarre and illogical beliefs and traditions. The Molvanîan language is so complicated it is said to take an average of 15 years to learn. The Molvanian national flag, the “Molvanian Trikolor” is unique, in that it has only two colours. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Molvania was the only ex-Soviet state to retain the hammer and sickle. So enamoured were they with the symbols of workers’ unity, they added a third tool – the trowel. (Wikipedia)
Ironically, perhaps, because Molvania: A Land Untouched is in the first place a satire of the youth-oriented travel guide industry, the location of the guidebook’s subject in Eastern Europe is almost incidental. One of the authors, Tom Gleisner, told the BBC that he and his co-writers (Santo Cilauro and Rob Sitch) chose Eastern Europe because they felt “no-one, even those who live there, is even sure of the geography of the area” (“Molvania Spoof Mocks Travel Books,” BBC World Service Online, 2 April 2004). (Of course, we could argue, as Fleming’s passage above suggests, this latter statement—not even the locals know where they live, who they are, or where they came from…all is mystery, miscegenation, and confusion—indeed is itself reflective of the Euro-Orientalist mindset.)
The exact location of Molvania is, as can be imagined, never specified—that is, of course, a source of the power and allure of this traditional literary trope/stage device. We do know, according to its authors, Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch, that it lies “somewhere north of Romania and a little downwind of Chernobyl.” We learn from the country’s website (http://jetlagtravel.com/molvania), that its most famous citizen, Szlonko “BuBu” Busjbusj (1891-1948), was responsible for tying the country’s currency (the strubl) to the “Latvian lit,” and attempted to bring the “Balkan 7” land-locked republics together in a loose regional confederation. We also learn that the official religion is Baltic Orthodox and that the country is the only ex-Soviet state to maintain the hammer and sickle in its flag—to which was added, in what I would call an East German-inspired touch (the old DDR flag with its engineering compass), a trowel. The language looks to be mainly slavic, heavily peppered by “j” s and “z” s, with a smattering of German (the country’s capital is Lutenblag; the national stadium, the Lutenstaad), although the spelling of the country could even have been influenced by the 1952-1964 slavicized orthography of Romînia (see the diacritical over the “i” in Molvanîa). The descriptions of the country’s environmental degradation can’t help but bring to mind exposes from the early 1990s, such as the memorable “Where Night Falls All Day Long” in the June 1991 issue of National Geographic, about Copsa Mica, Romania, a town where even the sheep and geese eggs were covered by the carbon black used by a tire manufacturing factory.
Given the name and vague location of the country, one might expect that Moldova is the template for the country. In fact, according to the authors, who are not American or Canadian or British, but rather Australian—in itself indicative of the more genuinely “cross-Western” character of some contemporary stereotypes—Eastern Europe did not inspire the project; they first came up with the idea of the guide book in Portugal in the mid 1990s (Susan Spano, “Taking the Backpacker Guide Books for a Ride,” Los Angeles Times, 2 May 2004). Moreover, certain factoids seem inspired by details from other parts of the world, such as in the case of Molvania’s electrical current of 37 volts, a figure we are told was chosen with the help of numerology—which sounds more like the use of the numbers 15, 35, 45, 90, etc. in the Burmese monetary system, allegedly based on the numerological preferences of the leader Ne Win (1962-1988).
Whatever the intentions of the authors to spoof the guide book industry, the controversial part of Molvania: A Land Untouched is, of course, the features ascribed to Molvanians and the characteristics of the land they inhabit. After reading the guide, a Financial Times reviewer summed up the country as follows: a land of criminals, bigots, and hairy women where garlic is sometimes accepted as legal tender and map keys include “chemical waste dump” and “unexplored due to landmines” (Naomi Mapstone, review, Financial Times, 19 April 2004). According to the guide, “Molvania prides itself on the fact [that]…most of its gypsies have been successfully driven abroad or incarcerated”—something which is hardly surprising when one reads the politically-incorrect, we are informed, now-infrequently-sung-because-it-clashes-with-EU standards, last line of the Molvanian national anthem, “We shall drive the gypsy curse from our land” (one wonders how much if at all the authors directly or indirectly were influenced by the British comedian Sasha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” character on Da Ali G. Show). Pig, cabbage, and beets are fundamental components of the native cuisine, many desserts include parsnips, and elderly women spit in strangers’ faces to ward off evil spirits. Molvania is in essence a decaying post-Soviet land, with lots of hulking cement monstrosities and over-officious bureaucrats, and a crude and rude populace benighted by ignorance and poor hygeine.
Some of the commentary on this mock travel guide to a fictional country might as well have been about a real country, given the implicit accusations of “Euro-Orientalism” against its Australian (!) authors. For example, Richard Trillo, a spokesman and author for the London-based Rough Guides series, said of the book,
“I found the Molvania book offensive, with no redeeming features. It’s not funny; it’s boring and repetitive, with the same predictable jokes stereotyping Eastern Europe. And what stinks is the way local people have been derided through the unacknowledged use of their photos.” (The cover shot of the Australian edition, and the website, shows a gap-toothed old man in a furry hat, unidentified and grinning broadly.) (Susan Spano, review, LA Times, 2 May 2004).
As Jerry V. Haines wrote in the Washington Post, “the line between what’s funny and what’s just mean is often breached. The country may be imaginary, but the condescension and xenophobia are real” (Washington Post, 10 October 2004). Former UK “Minister for Europe” Keith Vaz said the book was a little “cheeky” because “it does reflect some of the prejudices which are taking root [in Europe]” (“Molvania Spoof Mocks Travel Books,” BBC World Service Online, 2 April 2004). Indeed, here we find the insinuation that art, literature, and apparently even mock guide books, cannot be separated from politics. In the context of the post-“Haider shock” (2000 elections in Austria), EU enlargement (the addition of the 10 in 2004 and Romania and Bulgaria in 2007), and post-9/11 scrutinization and suspicion of immigrants in the collective West, this Australian parody becomes a tool of xenophobic, anti-immigrant forces aiming to maintain and construct new walls for Eastern Europe.
Finally, the fictional Molvania has encouraged central and eastern Europeans themselves to weigh in on the country, what it represents, and what they believe it says about the real “Eastern Europe.” An apparently Polish poster wrote the following trenchant critique, that from the optic of the outsider highlights what for lack of a better term could be termed the nested political correctness that prevails in the West (I would add, especially on elite college and university campuses):
Why is it that the only people ‘liberals’ think it’s OK to laugh at these days are the white working class and Central and Eastern Europeans?
The best-selling spoof travel guide, Molvania: a land untouched by modern dentistry, has been described by the doyen of comedic travel writing, Bill Bryson, as, “brilliantly original and very, very funny.” But is the book a witty satire on the travel guide genre, or just a re-hash of some outdated stereotypes about Central and Eastern Europe?
Europe’s ‘white trash’
The authors – three Australians – have not only invented a history and culture for Molvania, but they also include some very confusing maps and some grainy old photos; one of which looks suspiciously like Krakow. The humor of the book – which, as you can see, is sometimes funny in a kind of sniggering, schoolboy type way – is mostly pretty harmless stuff. But they do, on occasion, go a little too far. In the section ‘Advice for Women Travellers’ they advise that woman who are traveling on their own can expect few problems, “aside from the usual assault, armed robbery and stalking that one usually sees in most eastern European countries.” Now wait a minute! That is not the experience of women travelers in this part of the world, at all. In fact, many feel much safer here than they do in most western-European or American cities.
Molvania: a land untouched by modern dentistry was brought to my attention by a Polish female friend of mine who had read the book and found it unfunny and ‘offensive’. She said the real butt of the joke was “Slavs in general.’ And she is right. The book is both a satire on Slavs and a satire on the sometimes toe-curlingly earnest travel writing so common to the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet. But mostly it just uses central and eastern Europeans as the butt end of some pretty nasty little jokes. Basically, on the receiving end of these jokes are the poor. For instance, the only people who I have seen around here with only one tooth in their heads are poor people from rural areas, who are untouched by modern dentistry because they simply can’t afford it.
There is something a bit strange happening in the West. If this sort of book had been written about, say, African people, then, quite rightly, there would have been uproar and outrage. Words like ‘racism’ would have been used by lefty-liberal reviewers. But it seems that Political Correctness extends to all groups these days except poor whites from urban, rural or semi-rural areas in America and Europe. Central Europeans are being presented as the Chavs of the continent. And that is just not funny at all. (see the post at “the beatroot: Politics and current affairs of Poland and Central Europe,” for Saturday, 21 January 2006 http://beatroot.blogspot.com/2006/01/molvania-land-untouched-by-modern.html)
On the Molvanian website’s forum (where you can also address questions to the Molvanian Ministry of Tourism!), a presumably ethnic Hungarian poster (“MocskosFurtoshajukisbogar,” which translates roughly into DirtyCulyHairedLittleBug(ger)) responded to the usual queries by some posters confused as to the reality of Molvania, as follows:
Molvania is the best place to leave…. Ezek a kretenek [author’s note: these cretins] :D
I know Molvania, I know it very well, actually we all know it here in Eastern Europe. Molvania is the concentrated Eastern world. We luckily have the chance to experience the human miserability every week, 24 hours a day. But thats not all. Westerners, you have to feel the historical pointlessness of our lives. You should understand this before you laugh at us. We know, we feel it in our veins that our future has nothing to do with great ideas, ideology or religious fate about our destiny. And no, poverty is not romantic, poverty is far from being cool. No it is a plague, that spreads in the body of society. Poor people are not just hardworking, they are burning their lives in these tunnels of ruthless work. they have to sacrafise their lives for their children or for tomorrow’s meal. Hopeless people overcharged by work sooner or later became arrogant, impatient, cruel or worse. Soon we all become insane in some way, and this is not something that can be saved by some idealistic aides or charity. This mentality kills us or eats us. We all turn against morality or be burned by the desperate attempts to break out or at least push out our children from this pit. Belive me, cruel we are, we need more than just Jhonny CASH , we need Steve WONDER. (“MocskosFurtoshajukisbogar,” 27 August 2005.)
The rumors of the Molvanians’ nonexistence appear to have been greatly exaggerated….
The Gift that Can Keep Giving an Entire Scholarly Career or…
How Imagining How Others “Invented” “the Other” “Jumped the Shark”
The colorful and bitter intervention of our slightly pessimistic (!) Hungarian poster, “MockosFurtoshajukisbogar,” brings us to one of the important misgivings about the constructionist school: is there no reality to these stereotypes of Eastern Europe? At what point do they themselves cross over into becoming merely rhetorical constructions and lose any basis in reality? In a review of Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania, Tony Judt highlights incisively some of the problems inherent in the constructionist literature of Eastern Europe as follows:
We used to study states, nations, classes. But for some time now, following a shift in fashion within the disciplines of anthropology and history especially, we study not the thing itself but the way it is represented—by the protagonists and by those who study them. Owing in large measure to the influence of the anthropologist Benedict Anderson, we investigate not nationalism but “imagined communities.” And since the publication in 1983 of a seminal collection of essays by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, it is not tradition but “the invention of tradition” that preoccupies historians of modern popular culture and political spectacle.
Eastern (or “Central”) Europe is a ready-made, heaven-sent playground for such notions. After all, the states of Eastern Europe either did not exist until recently, or else had to be reconstructed in the modern era following their obliteration by greater powers in earlier times. From a Western perspective (though not necessarily in the eyes of the locals), Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, and Bosnians—to cite only the best known—are all invented nations. Poland, Serbia, Ukraine, the Baltic states, even Greece, whatever the real or imagined glories of their distant past, have all been constituted and reconstituted out of lands and peoples whose history was once submerged in someone else’s story. Eastern Europe, in short, has been both present and absent, real and unreal, depending on your perspective and location.
Neither Anderson nor Hobsbawm and Ranger paid much attention to the region, but their approaches (or at least the titles of their books) have inspired a growing literature charting the ways in which the West has “imagined,” “invented,” or (borrowing from postmodern styles in literary criticism) “(mis)represented” its Eastern Other. At its best—say in Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe, which appeared in 1994—the result has been an illuminating contribution to Western intellectual history, a fine excursion into uncharted waters that helps to map the ways in which Western European writers have frozen into place a certain topography of civilization, and thereby condemned Eastern Europe to a moral as well as a spatial marginality in the Western story.
But the constructionist approach has its hazards. Between “invention,” “imagination,” “representation,” and the invocation of “Otherness,” the story of the West’s failure to see Eastern Europe as it was and as it is runs the risk of sinking under the weight of overtheorized scholarly suspicion. Add “Orientalism” to the mix—the charge that Western writers have deployed patronizing, distancing devices to romanticize Eastern or Southeastern Europe, to better control it—and the region gets lost all over again, this time in a marshland of well-intentioned compensatory subtlety….
To pretend that the history of Eastern or Southeastern Europe would look like that of Western Europe if only Western observers didn’t “orientalize” the region is a grievous error. There are reasons for the sheer awfulness of Balkan conflicts, of course; but awful they are. There is nothing imagined, invented, represented, constructed, appropriated, or orientalized about such a claim. It is a fact.
(Tony Judt, Book Reviews, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. 21 September 1998, New York Review of Books; emphasis added)
A corollary to Judt’s critique of the constructionist literature as positing a rift between reality and Western representation, or better yet that Western representation has shunt aside Eastern reality or displaced it, is the argument that constructionist accounts often essentialize the West, assuming the “everycountry” timeless appraisal by the West of the East, that they so condemn in the (Euro-) Orientalist discourse. True, as a reaction by the weaker of the parties to this competition, essentializing the West is not quite the same as essentializing the East in its implications. Still, and here even in spite of the bow someone like Todorova takes to James D. Carrier on the issue of “Occidentalism” (Todorova, 1997, p. 10), scholars such as Todorova and Goldsworthy fall into the trap of essentializing the West, failing to make sufficient distinctions between governments and peoples, between policy debates among the political class in these countries, between the policies of different countries, and between one era and another.
Such views are no the less insulting, and more importantly, no less wrong than those leveled by the West against “Eastern Europe.” Moreover, and here is a major point made by Buruma and Margalit (Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, Penguin, 2004), the defense of “local” autochtonous values in the face of the Western expansion is a misnomer, for the critique of “Westtoxification”—no matter what the contemporary period—is itself often directly or indirectly an import from the West, specifically the Romantic rejection of the real and imagined excesses of the Englightenment. If for areas such as Japan, where lack of contact with the West makes it harder to argue that occidentalism is in fact a Western import, this is not the case, because of the proximity and interaction during this period, of Eastern Europe. (Indeed, in general, the new New Left, the anti-globalization movement, with its glorification of and wistfulness for a lost mythic community living at peace with pristine nature, owes a—appropriately enough, spritiual—debt to the European right of the 19th and early 20th centuries that it undoubtedly does not wish to acknowledge.)
Deconstructing “Euro-Orientalism,” Source Selection, and Intellectual Biases
It is perhaps a reflection of the condition and zeitgeist of research in the contemporary social sciences and humanities that authors desire and/or feel that purely historical accounts are not enough: history must “speak” to the modern condition and must tell us something important about the world in which we currently live. As a result, an account about the birth and the evolution of ethnonational images cannot stop sometime in the past: it has to be fast-forwarded to the present, where it must continue to have influence. (It is unclear exactly whom scholars are doing this for: for themselves, to demonstrate to their colleagues that what they are doing is relevant to today, to parents of undergraduates, to state legislators who hold the purse strings of higher education, to politicians and policymakers, to the broader non-academic market society (i.e. to include publishers)? At a certain level, much of this seems to “speak” to the perceived marginality, weak influence, and low social status of academics and intellectuals in American society, and their efforts to overcome this situation. The irony is that in seeking to be or become more “relevant,” they merely highlight and reinforce their isolation. It also perhaps leads to a “historicization” of the present, drawing far too much of the past into the present, something so many of the scholars themselves decry.)
In the literature on “Euro-Orientalism,” this situation has meant that scholars do not just examine works of the past, but they search for evidence to show that those older works continue to shape ethnonational images directly or indirectly today. The problem is that this leads them to take an almost exclusively “political” view of the phenomenon of contemporary ethnonational images. Thus, for example, in Imagining the Balkans Maria Todorova essentially abandons the comparative diversity of her source selection in examining the creation of Balkan images—say, plays by George Bernard Shaw—when she moves to examining contemporary portrayals of the region and invokes sources such as Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, articles in Foreign Affairs, and op-ed pieces in the New York Times. I find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is very much an “intellectual complaint,” that because the topic is currently so serious, one turns to political (often academic/intellectual) writings to see the echo of these derogatory and dangerous ethnonational cliches. This is ironic, since the point of these same scholars about the past is that ethnonational images were conveyed through a diverse body of media and that if one seeks to look solely to the overtly political tract, one will miss the key conclusion that these ethnonational images entered the Western imagination by many routes, most of them not overtly political, and that in fact this is why they were so influential and have been so lasting. Such a realization and approach leads one to look beyond both the overtly political in today’s writings, but, even more so given the mass communications revolution over the period we are discussing, to look to other forms of media, particularly film and television, as avenues for ethnonational image creation and dissemination.
Less explicitly, both Judt and Glenny in the aforementioned reviews have highlighted this methodological oversight in the selection of sources in the constructionist literature. Judt thus observes on Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania, that “…the other [non-Karl] Marxes receive no mention in this book, but their film [“Duck Soup,” i.e. the mythical country of Freedonia] is by far the best-known ‘exploitation’ of Balkan images in Western popular culture…” Glenny uses a more recent media example to underscore the same point, the 1980s American prime time soap opera hit, “Dynasty.” Although I never watched the show when it ran, in an appropriately post-modern touch, I did see a made-for-TV—predictably execrable—movie about it in recent years. (That such movies are marketed as “unauthorized” and “behind-the-scenes” accounts is ironic, not to mention hypocritical, since a unifying theme of such movies—conveniently they always peer behind the curtains of a show carried by a competing network—is moralizing about how the “tyranny” of commericalism and ratings ultimately destroyed the show and ruined the lives of its stars. Sensationalism and appealing to prurient interest are, of course, effective ways to decry sensationalism and prurient interest.) According to this made-for-TV movie, one phrase became a mantra for Dynasty’s embarrassing and sudden plummet from popularity: “Blame it on Moldavia!” Let us pick up Glenny’s description from here:
In the mid-Eighties, when we still lived in that stable bipolar world, two American friends of mine were hiking in a remote part of Montenegro [in the former Yugoslavia]. As they surveyed the beauty of the mountains around them, a smiling shepherd boy, ten years old at most, approached in an evident state of excitement and keen to talk. Taking out an imaginary machine-gun, he sprayed make-believe bullets in a semi-circle and delivered a message that echoed around the Dinaric peaks: ‘Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh – Blake! Krystle! All dead!’
The boy bore news from distant Hollywood: the elders of the Carrington clan, the central characters in Dynasty, had met a sticky end. The crime that induced shock in audiences across the United States had not been perpetrated by a crazed Vietnam vet. If it had, perhaps Americans could have made some sense of the tragedy. But members and friends of Denver’s richest family had been gunned down by terrorists in the distant Balkans. The heinous act was carried out (in a house of God!) as Blake and Alexis’s long-lost daughter was marrying the Crown Prince of Moldavia. Most of the cast were brought back from the dead in the subsequent episode by the insatiable desire for network ratings. All this happened just a hundred miles from Dracula’s castle. Only in the Balkans.
Although Vesna Goldsworthy does not investigate the Dynasty affair in Inventing Ruritania, it is a rich example of what she calls the ‘imperialism of the imagination’. The television producer who had wanted to massacre the cream of Colorado society was Camille Marchette. ‘I’m responsible for Moldavia,’ she told America’s TV Guide in 1986. ‘I sat down one day and said: “I’m only going to be on the show a year and I’m going to end it with a shoot-out in Moldavia.”‘ Did she know that Moldavia was a real place which would gain its independence just five years after the wedding was filmed? Did she dream up the name King Galen? Were the terrorists who imprisoned Krystle and Alexis Communists? Nationalists? Romanian-speaking Serbs, perhaps? (Glenny, “Only in the Balkans, London Review of Books, 1999)
The Power of Images and Images of Power
Allow me to expand upon the themes that flow from the passages by Judt and Glenny cited above—1) that the constructionist literature imputes too much intent and not enough ambiguity to the formation of Western images of “Eastern Europe,” 2) that modern media such as a primetime soap opera can have as much if not greater influence in creating and shaping Western images than many a book by a journalist, intellectual, or academic, and 3) that, to use James Scott’s formulation in hyperbolic form, these images can be exploited as “weapons of the weak” to the commerical and intellectual advantage of those portrayed as “the weak.” This is important, because when scholars of this constructionist school write about current events, they often assume—or wish to argue—that these “constructed” images are a) influential and b) that the impact they have is almost automatically negative.
It is one thing to decry the negative content of images and stereotypes, and to highlight in the context of unequal power relationships; it is quite another to argue that the negative characterization is unidirectional—an outcome of power and control by one group of an object group, “the other.” Are these merely responsive?
Media-Created Stereotypes: Necessarily Intentional? Necessarily Negative?
Let us turn to an example that suggests both the influence of modern media in reshaping previous, long-established associations, and the fact that this impact is not entirely or even primarily negative or intended. The 1959 Walt Disney film Darby O’Gill and the Little People has been credited with—and predictably assailed for—introducing a very different image of the leprechaun than exists in Celtic folklore. Leprechauns were only minor figures in Celtic folklore, who mended the shoes of other fairies, and were known for their trickery—used to protect their treasure—and were notorious for their crankiness (see the entry at http://www.historychannel.com/exhibits/stpatricksday/index.jsp?page=history8 ). Darby O’Gill and the Little People converted them into joyous, well-meaning souls. The image of the joyous leprechaun in American popular culture was reinforced in 1964 with the birth of the “Lucky Charms” cereal, which introduced marshmallows to the breakfast table, and is a widely-known enough pop culture icon that it could serve as a punchline for a character in the first Austin Powers comedy film. (Apparently, out of either marketing “wisdom” or concern over charges of ethnic stereotyping, a wizard briefly replaced the leprechaun as the character representing it in commericals, but audience reaction was such that they quickly conjured the leprechaun back (see wikipedia entry on “Lucky Charms”).)
(I can’t help but be reminded here in this context of the advertising campaign of the 1970s and 1980s for “Irish Spring”, that wonderful green soap. Now in elementary school I can remember for some kids this was the first thing that came to mind when they thought of Ireland. At the time it suggested to me the Irish must be an awfully clean race…complete with the Irish lass straight out of the pages of National Geographic or an ad by the Irish National Tourist board, and a rugged, jolly potato farmer or something. Little did I think of the subtext that the Irish were so dirty—all that lack of bathing thanks to the drinking and the roughhousing and the squalor—that they needed such a strong soap to kill or drown out the stench…)
Of course, if one is hyper-sensitive to any depiction of the Irish, it is not difficult to construct an argument that this revisionist image of the leprechaun as merry soul is scarcely better than the original in Irish folklore: i.e. 1) it is no longer authentic, 2) it was invented by outsiders for commercial purposes (hence, the inattention or disdain for authenticity), 3) the “happy-go-lucky” nature of the leprechaun masks and erases the memory of a history of oppression and misery at the hands of the English, 4) the leprechaun, like the Irish who see him, remains dominated by passion more than intellect, 5) the leprechaun remains obsessed with and hypnotized by gold and his good- naturedness may be the product of liquid assistance.
Indeed, one can even argue that the difference between the Disney portrayal and the anti-Irish newspaper cartoons of the 1800s is superficial—what remains unchanged are the qualities of susperstition and delusion ascribed to the Irish for believing in and “seeing” leprechauns in the first place, qualities to which can easily be read in a subtext about a fondness for “The Drink” and the influence of an insinuated irrationality and superstition of Catholicism. Certainly an ill-fated, lamentable, and quickly-cancelled NBC sitcom of the early 2000s “The Fighting Fitzgeralds,” complete with brawling, drinking, unemployment, etc. unleashed a torrent of Internet frustration at the perpetuation and resentment of Irish stereotypes of this kind. Pat Friend opined: “…The other day I tripped over my shillelagh as I was watching a leprechaun swing at a fairy because he was drunk and fighting having had too much Guinness on his way to find his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” (Pat Friend, “Irish Stereotypes Just Won’t Die” at http://allaboutirish.com/library/identity/stereotypes.shtm )
Nevertheless, I think many would be inclined to see the Disney portrayal as a propitious improvement, one from which the Irish tourism industry in more economically-difficult years (1960s-early 1990s) no doubt profited handsomely. For all their resentment at being the object of a stereotype they did not produce and control—and understandably since it reduces them to a caricature that makes for a cereal box cover (painfully ironic perhaps in the context of the history of the potato famine)—it is difficult to argue that the Irish themselves have not been a financial beneficiary of this inauthentic innovation. (Moreover, the “fighting Irish” stereotype has been manipulated to good effect—drained of its inebriated reputation somewhat—to mean steadfast, committed, and hardworking, whether that be in the context of University of Notre Dame sports, or as I recently saw on the road, the van of a plumbing company that promised a “fighting Irish” attitude to dealing with leaks.)
Idiosyncratic: The Unfolding of a Modern Tale/Meme
Scottish (Presbyterians) were “on earlier boats” so-to-speak and thus probably have never faced the same experience of discrimination as Irish Catholic immigrants to the United States (all of which, of course, pales in comparison to later immigrants, to say nothing of involuntary immigrants (Africans) and “native Americans”). Nevertheless, despite their earlier arrival and pride of place in the elite, is the stereotype of the Scot in American culture any qualitatively better than that of the Irish—to say nothing of the Hungarian, Romanian, or others?
The content and contours of ethnonational images are less predictable than the constructionists would have us believe. Take the image of the Scottish in contemporary North America. The character “Scotty” in the science fiction television series “Star Trek” has become a template for the portrayal of Scots in film and television ever since the show’s original airing in the late 1960s—just as William Shatner’s Captain Kirk has become a paradigm for overacting in countless spoofs. The story goes that James Doohan, whose parents were Irish Catholics who emigrated from Belfast to Canada, auditioned several different accents—a talent of his—for the role of the Starship Enterprise’s first engineer. When asked by the series’ inventor and producer Gene Rodenberry which accent he preferred, Doohan reportedly replied “If you’re going to have an engineer, you’d better make him Scottish” (or “All the world’s best engineers have been Scottish”) (wikipedia entry for “Montgomery Scott”). Thus was born Montgomery Scott, his Scottishness incidental to the character and the series. Scotty was by turns merry, crotchety, and hard-working/industrious. His signature phrase was usually in reference to the Starship Enterprise’s engines, something along the lines of “I cunnugh doo it cap’n…I’m givin it all I’ve got, but she cannugh take it anymore.” This line has been spoofed often, including in seemingly unusual places such as Jim Carey’s “Ace Venture, Pet Detective (1994).” The roots of “Groundskeeper Willy” on the long-running cartoon series, “The Simpsons,”—a fearsome character whose unpredictability and sharp temper scare the other characters—in James Doohan’s “Scotty” seem unambiguous.
Mike Myers, the Canadian comic—he brilliantly inserts an ice hockey pie-in-the-sky reference, “[Toronto] Maple Leafs win Stanley Cup” in a news ticker at the bottom of a fictional TV interview in one of the Austin Powers’ films (the Leafs last won the Cup in ’67)—who is of Scottish descent, has taken the modern Scottish template to a new level, with his “If’ iss no’t scu’ttish iss crrraapppp” shop skit on Saturday Night Live (SNL) and the bagpipe-playing, noxious character of “Fat Bastard” in the Austin Powers series.
The voice of the cartoon-character Shrek is also “accidentally” Scottish. The voice for Shrek was originally recorded by fellow Saturday Night Live cast member, Chris Farley, but after Farley’s death, Myers was brought on to replace him (see wikipedia entry for “Shrek”). After Myers had completed providing the voice for the character and the movie was well into production, he asked to be allowed to re-record all of his lines in a Scottish accent similar to the one his mother used when she told him bedtime stories (wikipedia entry for “Shrek”).
Even after Myers left SNL, the stereotype of the ornery Scot lived on in Darrell Hammond’s portrayal of Sean Connery in the recurring sketch, “Celebrity Jeopardy!”—Hammond’s Connery never missing the opportunity to insult the show’s host with some cheap sexual innuendo about the latter’s mother. Yes, this stereotype was dictated by Connery’s notorious personality, but it was presented as inseparable from his Scottishness. The crotchety stereotype throughout all of these television and film examples clearly has roots in older stereotypes, but as we can see the content and context of this stereotype has evolved in unforeseen and idiosyncratic ways that probably defy any linear analysis of the type found in much of the constructionist literature.
The Core West: Axiomatic Positive Images by Comparison?
“Where you stand is…where you sit,” so the saying goes. So even if the Irish and Scots are part of the core West from a “Euro-orientalist” perspective when they write and talk about eastern Europeans, within the “British Isles” they are “nested” and on the lower rungs vis-à-vis the English/Anglo-Saxons. But are celluloid depictions of the English any better, any less demeaning than those of the Irish and Scots? In other words, in terms of content, are the stereotypes of the powerful any “nicer,” any more pleasant and defensible than those of others? In updating images of Eastern Europeans, we also have to update stereotypes of the West.
The English are continuously associated with or portrayed as stodgy, selfish, hypocritical (as a result of their politeness and their respect for rules, while turning a blind-eye to injustice), killjoys, and sexually-repressed (read anything the French have to say about them). In what appears to me as an excellent piece of film analysis, Martin McLoone highlights, for example, how a memorable sequence in the 1997 film Titanic has the live-life-to-the-fullest character of Leonardo DiCaprio whisking Kate Winslett’s Rose beneath the decks to a party filled with Irish, who drink, dance, and exude a raw sexuality that contrasts with the stultifying, and very English life, above. As McLoone points out, this is not merely a story about class, it is a story about ethnicity, a contrast of the Irish and the English. The politically-correct constructionist—complete with an explicit, but more likely implicit, internal hierarchy of collective historical victims and victimizers—is, of course, tempted to fixate on the portrayal of the Irish, as the typical stereotype of “the poor” or of “the Irish,” more animalistic and primitive, but is the portrayal of the English any less insulting, any less painful than the stereotypes we see of others? For such stereotypes arguably neuter and desexualize a people, while suggesting that they do not and are incapable of enjoying life, and despiritualizing them, suggesting they somehow lack a soul (and even God) because they place the material before all else.
Moreover, ethnonational stereotypes are often far more internally diverse, and even contradictory, than the constuctionists suggest. Alongside the portrayal of the “emotionally-challenged” English, we have the image of “football hooliganism.” Whereas within England this may be treated as a problem of class—lower, working class, “yobbo” behavior—outside of England the class specification usually drops out, and they are referred to as “English football hooligans.” I remember back in May 1985—only a few weeks before the so-called Heysel disaster in Belgium which led to English soccer fans being banned from the Continent for a period—buying tickets to a soccer game in Innsbruck, Austria, and asking in English if I could take my small (day) backpack into the stadium. The woman looked at me as if I were from outer space asking such a naïve, stupid question and said: “Yes, why of course, we have no rowdies here!” It was very clear who she had in mind: the English. (Hard to believe in the old NASL, terrible acronym for the North American Soccer League, the team name of one of the most successful franchises, Tampa Bay, was “Rowdies.”)
Ironically, Goldsworthy herself, who negates the role of modern media in image creation and the accidental character of it, points to how as a young woman leaving Belgrade in 1986, her view of the English was decidedly negative!:
Goldsworthy reminisces at one point about how the British were seen in the run-up to her departure for Britain in 1986. The broadly held view was that they were “perfidious and treacherous” and “on the whole, ugly”. She writes: “For every British-born Cary Grant and every Vivien Leigh there were literally hundreds who looked downright weird. Belgrade television, with its endless repeats of programmes such as The Benny Hill Show, Are You Being Served? and Hi-de-hi!, did not help. Neither did the fact that members of the Royal Family were somehow thought of as typically English.” (Eve-Anne Prentice, “Life after meltdown,” The Times, 14 May 2005, http://www.arlindo-rreia.com/140805.html)
There is a great irony here, I believe. Benny Hill, Are You Being Served?—particularly the latter, a show whose surplus 1970s labor union mandatory employment at “Grace Brothers” is reminiscent of the Central in Cluj, Romania early 1990s or Unirea in Bucuresti—these were created at a time when, like footballers, crossing borders was rare, i.e. before today’s globalization, before as in 1990 when the overwhelming majority of the Irish national soccer team at the World Cup appeared to have emigrated from Africa. Yet, despite their “inside baseball” or I suppose “inside cricket (?)” production for the home market, their slapstick humor and especially in the case of Benny Hill, lack of verbal dialogue, made them great for export. (Benny Hill’s “do-do-do-do-doot do-do-do-do-doot…muhnuhmunuhp muhnuhnuhmup” (“Yakety Sax” by Boots Randolph) might as well me a foundational element of any international language. The show’s absence of dialogue and ability to “travel,” probably explain the later international mobility of “Mr. Bean” and “Baldy Man.” Benny Hill once said that no matter where he went in the world, people were most interested in the fate of the bald little guy with glasses whose head he would always pat—an Irishman as it turns out, I believe) Exported, without regard to ethnostereotyping, they nevertheless became the means by which foreigners formed their opinions of the English (as if to say: see, you thought no one was watching…now we know how you really are!)
Finally, just a brief foray into the amusement park of stereotypes that surround Americans and the United States—and emphasizing the role of visual media in shaping and disseminating those images. Marius Ursache writes in a Romanian daily of “Brand America”:
People are perceived as being wealthy and generous, outgoing and often loud, wasteful, boastful and impolite. They are often accused to be ignorant to other cultures and countries, and lacking skills out of their main area of interest. Hollywood has a huge role in portraying the stereotypical personalities, from government VIPs to mass-murderers, to red-necks, teenagers, promiscuous women and ordinary Americans involved in the daily rat race. (Marius Ursache, “Brandingul de naţiune Brand America,” 6 July 2005, online edition.)
Not exactly the most flattering picture is it? And yet the source of these images are also ascribed to Hollywood—who apparently didn’t get the memo about the supposedly positive, romanticized vision of the West the orientalist monitors allege of them.
Dracula: Tourism and the Accidental East European?
Even the much-maligned “Dracula” image of Transylvania, Romania, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe seems to owe more to serendipity and idiosyncracy than many believe. The author of Dracula (1897), the Irishman Bram Stoker, had planned on writing a vampire novel before he ever came across the name “Dracula” (Miller, “Filing for Divorce: Count Dracula vs. Vlad Tepes,” http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/Divorce.rtf. ). The villain of Stoker’s novel originally titled The Undead was to be “Count Wampyr.” Stoker’s use of the title “count” was in keeping with the Gothic convention of drawing villains from among the ranks of the aristocracy (Miller, “Filing for Divorce”). In fact, according to Miller, vampire counts in pre-Dracula fiction include Count Azzo von Klatka in The Mysterious Stranger and Countess Karnstein in Le Fanu’s Carmilla (Miller, “Filing for Divorce”). In The Mysterious Stranger, the vampire count terrorizes a family in the Carpathians! (Miller, “Vampire Hunting in Transylvania,” http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/Trans.htm )
According to his notes for the novel, Stoker always had eastern Europe in mind as the setting for his story; but initially he placed the action in Styria, Austria and only later changed it to Transylvania (from Frayling as cited in Coundouritis http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/connotations/coundour92.htm). An article entitled “Transylvanian Superstitions” in the July 1885 edition of The Nineteenth Century by Emily de Laszowska Gerard, the Scottish wife of a Hungarian cavalryman (!), appears to have piqued his interest. As Miller recounts,
Gerard’s article also provided Stoker with some of the folklore surrounding Dracula and his castle: St. George’s Day, “the eve of which is still frequently kept by occult meetings taking place at night in lonely caverns or within ruined walls”; hidden treasures and “the light they give forth, described as a bluish flame”; and the wolf that “continues to haunt the Transylvanian forests.” Also from Gerard came the term “nosferatu,” as well as the use of garlic and the wooden stake. (Miller, “Vampire Hunting in Transylvania,” http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/Trans.htm )
Stoker appears to have taken only the name of “Dracula” from his famous namesake in Romanian history—and then only because the source from which he took the name (William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820)) suggested, as Stoker recorded in his notes, that “DRACULA in the Wallachian language means DEVIL” (Miller, “Filing for Divorce: Count Dracula vs. Vlad Tepes,” http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/Divorce.rtf.). Based on Stoker’s notes, Wilkinson was the source from which he got the name “Dracula,” and in Wilkinson’s brief three mentions of the name and one footnote, he only refers to “Dracula” or “Voivode” and never “Vlad,” “Vlad Tepes,” or “the Impaler” (Miller, “Filing for Divorce: Count Dracula vs. Vlad Tepes,” http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/Divorce.rtf.).
Miller skillfully resolves the false contradictions created by believing that Stoker based his Count Dracula on the personage from Romanian history:
Another consequence of the insistence on connecting the two Draculas is the temptation to criticize Stoker for inaccurate “history.” Why, some ask, did he make Dracula a Transylvanian Count rather than a Wallachian Voivode? Why was his castle situated in the Borgo Pass instead of at Poenari? Why is Count Dracula a “boyar,” a member of the nobility which Vlad continuously struggled with? Why does Stoker make Dracula a “Szekely,” descended from Attila the Hun, when the real Dracula was a Wallachian of the Basarab family? There is a very simple answer to these questions: Vlad Tepes is Vlad Tepes, while Count Dracula is Count Dracula [emphasis added]…. We know that he read and took notes from a number of books and articles (for a complete list, see Leatherdale, Origins 237-9) and that some of this material found its way into his novel almost verbatim. But his research seems to have been haphazard (though at times fortuitous) rather than scholarly. What he used, he used “as is,” errors and confusions included. That his rendering of historical and geographical data is fragmented and at times erroneous can be explained by the fact that Stoker seemed content to combine bits and pieces of information from his sources without any concern for accuracy. After all, Stoker was writing a Gothic novel, not a historical treatise. And he was writing Dracula in his spare time, of which I doubt he had much. (Miller, “Filing for Divorce: Count Dracula vs. Vlad Tepes,” http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/Divorce.rtf.)
Again Hollywood and happenstance combined in creating perhaps the most enduring popular image of Dracula: Bela Lugosi’s 1931 reprisal of the role. As Eric Harrison has written: “Ever since Lugosi donned a cape and rhapsodized about the howling of wolves outside his crumbling castle (‘What music they make!’), the classic prototype of a movie vampire has been an Eastern European aristocrat with a heavy accent and hypnotic eyes” (Eric Harrison, L.A. Times, “A New Reason to Get out of Dodge,” 30 October 1998, p. F-2). Lugosi succeeded in “making the count more debonair, less beastly” (Harrison) and Dracula scholar David Skal terms his portrayal of the part as “smooth, elegant, and seductive” (“In Search of Dracula” at http://www.abcnews.go.com/2020/Entertainment). Ironically, as Skal notes, Dracula’s memorable intonation was the consequence of a Hungarian actor with little command of English, who learned his lines phonetically (“In Search of Dracula”)! Lugosi’s Dracula was faithful to neither Stoker’s creation, nor to the historical personage of Dracula, nor to much of the vampire folklore. Nevertheless, it is the image that has endured most.
Would the Real Dracula Please Kindly Now Remove His Plastic Vampire Teeth!
Dracula is one of those rarities—an elite construct that has long since “gone public” and become a product of mass popular consumption—to the degree that its putative Transylvanian and even Romanian links have become routinized to the point of being mere background noise. The epitome of this phenomenon can be argued to have taken place in the film version of Anne Rice’s novel, “Interview with a Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles”—not to be confused, although understandably to be confused, with another film from 1994, “Reality Bites”—the angst-ridden tale of brooding, self-indulgent Generation X(Files) youth—harumph, was that whiff of teen spirit I just got….Bob Bankard’s review of “Interview with a Vampire” draws the appropriate pint of blood from this painful film:
The roots of modern Goth are all here; the narcissism, the romantization of death and times thereafter, all the the boo-hoo loneliness. The fact of the matter is, these characters are better off dead, because if they were alive they’d be taking Zanax, listening to ‘Alien Sex Fiend’ and working at McDonalds during the swing shift.
Brad Pitt is the poor widdle vampire boy who just hates being all undead and stuff, so he only eats people he doesn’t like. Horribly guilt-ridden, he tells his whole sob story to some imbecile with a tape recorder, creating the most obvious framing device in the history of cinema. (Bob Bankhard, “Intrerview with a Vampire,” PhillyBurbs Special Sections at http://www.phillyburbs.com/vamp/interview.shtml)
More recently, an American novelist married to a Bulgarian, Elizabeth (Johnson) Kostova, decided to dispense altogether with the traditional confusion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the historical figure Vlad Tepes, by spending ten years putting together a novel The Historian, that discusses the fictional and nonfictional personnae separately and uses Cold War Eastern Europe (Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) as a backdrop for a historical search for the “real” Dracula. Julie Wheelwright describes Kostova’s Dracula thus as follows:
Her Dracula emerges as a figure so obsessed with the past that he lures historians into his master plan to colonise his undead followers throughout the globe.—author’s note: My reaction: oh, just great, as if there weren’t enough half-living, half-dead, living dead Ph.D.s floating around already, Dracula is out there trying to flood the market—Paul and Helen, a Romanian exchange student, become embroiled in an attempt to rescue Paul’s supervisor, an eminent historian, from Dracula’s clutches. Their story, set in the late 1950s, takes them into the farthest-flung corners of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. (Julie Wheelwright with Elizabeth Kostova, “Elizabeth Kostova. The Vampire Chronicler,” The Independent, 5 August 2005, online).
Kostova strenuously denies that her novel is opportunistic: “Some of it is about Dracula, not me; Dracula has eternal cachet. I wasn’t trying to cash in on that; I’m really fascinated by the Dracula legend—but it is kind of startling, you’re right, to see my name linked up with Dracula now”(http://www.powells.com/authors/kostova.html with Dave Weich).
Kostova, who studied in Bulgaria in the late 1980s, seems to argue that Cold War Eastern Europe was the new fictional Transylvania in a sense because “the iron curtain preserved the mystery of eastern europe for the rest of us” (Julie Wheelwright with Elizabeth Kostova, “Elizabeth Kostova. The Vampire Chronicler,” The Independent, 5 August 2005, online). Nevertheless, it is clear that Dracula is by now such a pop culture, recycled and reappropriated product that it is almost impossible to separate the post and post-post modern from this discussion as we see in the following exchange:
Interviewer: Growing up, did you ever wear those plastic vampire teeth?
Elizabeth Kostova: I did. I remember having a pair and loving them. The problem is they fall apart really fast. And I was delighted, on my book tour—at the Harry Schwartz store in Milwaukee, they handed out those plastic vampire teeth at the door to everybody. They gave me all the extras.
The bottom line here is that as the evolution of the Dracula character, metaphor, and meme suggest: the monopolistic, hegemonic “western” ownership, intentionality, and negative connotations ascribed by the orientalism monitors to “western” cultural producers is simply overwrought.
Recapitulation
Before moving on to the Hungarian and Romanian cases, let me pause here to reiterate some of my preliminary conclusions:
- The “Euro-Orientalist” critique is helpful at explaining the origins of Western ethnonational stereotypes and images of the peoples of eastern Europe and the Balkans. But the closer we get to the present, the less useful and the more dogmatic the “Euro-Orientalist” critique appears. Ironically, a key insight of the literature of the critique of “Euro-Orientalism”—that ethnonational stereotypes and images were not always as they were to become, and that they can be subject to change—is forgotten in the analysis of contemporary ethnonational stereotypes and images. In many ways, the “Euro-Orientalist” critique is thus locked in the past.
- Precisely because the focus of the “Euro-Orientalist” critique is upon the origins of modern ethnonational stereotypes and images of the peoples of eastern Europe and the Balkans, it places itself primarily in the 19th century and first part of the 20th century. As a result, the media this literature studies tends to be that of travelogues, plays, novels, oper(ett)as, paintings, etc. The authors of these images tend to be “elites”—those with the money, education, time, and opportunity to travel—and their audience tends to be “elites.” The “Euro-Orientalist” critique is thus elite-focused, and heavily supply-side, stressing the role of producers of images, and essentially assuming that consumers of those images are passive.
- Because the “Euro-Orientalist” critique focuses on “origins,” this literature has tended to ignore newer media—film, television, and the Internet. This has a significant consequence because the mass market has given consumers a greater “voice” in determining which images “stick” and thus shape the universe and choice of image-makers to at least some extent. As could be expected, the expansion and diversification of both producers and consumers plants the seeds of change and mitigates predictability. Thus to ignore the newer media and to ignore the role of audience in image creation and survival is to ignore the prospects for and reality of change and idiosyncracy in contemporary ethnonational images and stereotypes of peoples.
- The “Euro-Orientalist” critique implicitly posits an overly-simplistic and one-dimensional portrayal of ethnonational stereotypes—essentially, the further east and south one goes on the Continent, the more negative, the more backward the stereotype. The issue is not the existence of negative stereotypes, however. It is instead to what degree there exist positive stereotypes that counter or balance the negative ones. It is in fact those without stereotypes, those whose inclusion into Western media and popular consciousness is comparatively “late” who seem to be at disadvantage—since they are more vulnerable to being reduced to contemporary political and politicized images.
- Just as the role of the mass market is a double-edged sword for the peoples of eastern Europe and the Balkans, so too is politics. The portrayal of ethnonational stereotypes as suffering directly at the hands of “Great Power” politics is far too simplistic. Some of the enduring, positive images of east European and Balkan peoples are precisely a result of earlier geopolitical convenience. To condemn these ethnonational images because they were not autochtonously-created—in itself often not the case—is to ignore benefits of unintended consequences, to essentially look a gift-horse in the mouth.
Part III: Images of Romanians
From “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” to “Dictators, Gymnasts, and Orphans”: Modern Pop Culture Images of Romanians in the United States
One can easily sympathize with the exasperation of Alexandra Toma, described in 2005 by the Romanian daily Jurnalul National as “the single Romanian political advisor for foreign policy in the American Congress” (according to the article, as of early 2005 she was serving on the staff of House of Representatives member Stephen Lynch (Democrat, Massachusetts)):
In America, Romanian “orphans” are famous. Everyone asks me about them. That’s all they know. Just orphans, Ceausescu, and Dracula. Those are the three questions I always get asked. “The Romanian Orphans” are always on the TV. (Ana-Maria Luca, “O romanca la Capitol Hill [A Romanian Girl on Capitol Hill],” Jurnalul National, 25 February 2005, online edition).
Of course the problem here—and knowledge of it does not make the Romanian or any other foreigner feel any better or any less exasperated—is that most of those mentioning these topics and asking these questions mean no harm. This may indeed be all they know of the country; they don’t want to admit their ignorance and look foolish; they don’t want the foreigner to feel badly that they don’t know anything about the foreigner’s country (which would make them a rude host of sorts); they wish to start conversation, show interest, and learn something about the foreigner’s country, etc.
Alexandra Toma’s frustration is not unique. Alexandra Diaconu wrote an excellent article wittily entitled “Cum ne vindem tara (How we sell our country)”—the title possibly a play on the famous chant of the rampaging miners of June 1990, with whom the country became identified in the international consciousness, thanks to televised images of savage “Balkan” brutality and chaos. (The miners roamed the streets of Bucharest shouting “Nu ne vindem tara,” that is, “We aren’t selling [out] our country.”) Diaconu observed:
When you say France, a few words automatically come to mind: wines, perfumes, refinement, Paris, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and the list goes on. When you say Italy: “la dolce vita [the good life],” Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Pavarotti, Milano, and fashion, the Colosseum, Venice or the [Leaning] Tower of Pisa. When others speak of Romania, however, assuming they have heard anything about us, they think in the first place of Dracula, Ceausescu, Nadia, street children, corruption, immigrants or, and even worse, the imaginary Romanian terrorists that still appear in post-1990 American films [I’d love to know exactly which films she is referring to here, because I am very familiar with the topic and don’t know what she is talking about: Call me Ahab! See my most recent publication on the topic, “Orwellian…Positively Orwellian” Prosecutor Voinea’s Campaign to Sanitize the Romanian Revolution of December 1989” at http://homepage.mac.com/khallbobo/RichardHall/pubs/Voineaswar091706.html].
…Without question, Romania has an image problem. In the past 15 years, it has become something of a national refrain repeated periodically by politicians in electoral campaigns, by cultural elites, when the foreign press judges us critically, when any foreigner confuses Bucharest with Budapest and when our sportspeople return from international competitions laden with medals. [Diaconu, Evenimentul Zilei, 5 June 2005, online edition]
A comment on Diaconu’s characterization seems in order here before moving on. The Bucharest-Budapest confusion, one which frankly is at least understandable because of the similarity of the two capital names in English and many languages, is ceaselessly annoying to both Hungarians and Romanians—and regional specialists—who feel insulted and powerless to overcome foreign ignorance about what is for them a simple, but huge distinction. And it does matter…to the point of having the potential to contribute to wounded national pride and inter-state tensions. When US Team Captain Dennis Ralston was presented with the Davis Cup in 1972 in Bucharest, after what an English commentator termed “the noisiest, angriest, the most absorbing and most passionate contest in the history of Davis Cup competition,” Ralston thanked “‘the good people of Budapest’ for their kindness and spoke of the memories the US team would take back with them ‘of Budapest’s sportsmanship’…[that this] ‘famous victory means Budapest will forever be remembered by American tennis’” (Keating, The Guardian, 11/28/97). Of course, perhaps this mistake should not have been surprising, given that the English commentator recounted of one match that “the linesmen were as partisan as the crowd and with armed guards around the court the efforts of the referee to restore a semblance of fair play were negated by the intimidatory martial atmosphere,” while the American player Stan Smith opined, “I have never been more pleased to be off court. Every arena steward seems to be toting a sub-machinegun and by the look in their eyes the safety-catch is undoubtedly cocked and ready.”
Finally, there are the characterizations of Romanian emigres who have settled in the U.S. and Americans who have spent extended time in Romania. “What do Americans see when they look at a Romanian?” asks Andrei Codrescu in The Disappearance of the Outside. “Three things: Dracula, Eugene Ionesco, and Nadia Comaneci. In other words, sex, the absurd, and gymnastic ability” (p. 42) (Ileana Florentina Popa, “Cultural Stereotypes: From Dracula’s Myth to Contemporary Diasporic Productions,” VCU thesis, p. 77, May 2006 at http://etd.vcu.edu/theses/available/etd-07212006-171925/unrestricted/popaif_thesis.pdf.). In other words, essentially the plotline for the Seinfeld episode which introduced this paper! And Karen Schmidt, an environmental journalist, responded as follows when asked what she knew of Romania before visiting:
I knew very little. Like most Americans, I associated Romania with Ceausescu and totalitarian Communism, with Nadia Comaneci and wonderful gymnasts, with Dracula and Transylvania, and with gypsies, street dogs and abandoned children. Of course, these stereotypes came mostly from the American mass media. (Ad Astra, Volume 1, Issue 2, 2002, at http://www.ad-astra.ro/journal/2/interview_schmidt.php?lang=en)
The Politics of “Romania’s Image”
In another example, which addresses the more directly political dimension of this issue: in April 1993 Romanian parliamentarians representing six political parties recounted their impressions after returning from a month long visit to the United States. Victor Bostinaru of the principal governing party, the Democratic National Salvation Front (FDSN), opined about “the perception of Romanian realities in the United States—often distorted and unilateral, or truncated, appearing to the Americans as a ‘half-exotic’ country especially known for the ‘coal miners, handicapped children, Funar [the then recently elected nationalist mayor of the main city of northern Transylvania, Cluj] and Dracula’” (FBIS, 14 April 1993, “Parliamentarians Assess Country’s Image in U.S.”).
The discussion of the parliamentarians quickly devolved into one of improving Romania’s (unjustifiably degrading in their view) “image” in Western eyes. True, as Romania’s liberal intelligentsia at home and abroad ceaselessly pointed out at the time and ever since, this was a convenient mechanism of denial for Romanian politicians, who wished to avoid the role post-communist leaders had played in creating or feeding such a negative image (see, for example, Tismaneanu (1998) for an excellent, if partisan deconstruction of this). But that such discussion was aimed at “scapegoating” and denial does not negate the fact that government-linked politicians had a case, and that their frustration reflected their seeming inability to exercise any influence over the content of Western images. Indeed, Romania’s intellectuals at home and abroad realize that they are handicapped from the same Western images of Romania and that despite political change over the past 17 years and political alternation in power these images have proved fairly inflexible (without the televised images of rampaging miners in downtown Bucharest, the miners of 1990-1991 may have faded from American popular consciousness, and Funar may always have been too obscure to appear on the popular radar screen, but the rest have remained).
This is more than the question of just who was in power at a particular moment and how their intentional actions contributed to these images. And the dynamic is far more complex and less partisan than Tismaneanu or other leading Romanian intellectuals like to argue. If it is true that illiberal forces in Romania focus on negative Western images of the country because it confirms their preconceived notions and gives them a rationale for resenting the West and defending Romania in the face of any criticism—thereby demonstrating a preference for the conditions that they very well may be responsible for having put into place and maintaining—it is also true that this “image” debate has its uses for Romania’s liberal intelligentsia at home and abroad. Because the latter are doing most of the writing about the country—particularly that which appears in English—this dimension is, of course, rarely discussed—it is inconvenient.
A good example of this debate over image-making, and of its complexities and subtexts, was the flap over an article written by the aforementioned Tony Judt, entitled “Romania: Bottom of the Heap,” published in the 1 November 2001 edition of The New York Review of Books. In Romania, the publication and translation of the article into Romanian unleashed a wave of articles supportive and critical of Judt’s piece in the Romanian cultural and political media. The magnitude of the incident and its fallout—at least among Romania’s intellectual class at home and abroad—was sufficient that Mircea Mihaies edited a book chronicling and analyzing the reactions (Tony Judt. Romania la fundul gramezii. Polemici, controverse, pamflete. Iasi: Polirom, 2002.) As the title suggests [although it is important to note, NYRB not Judt chose the title, see pp. 193-194], the article is a devastating portrayal of the country before, during, and after communism. Those who criticized the article tended to see it as a somewhat superficial stereotype or thumbnail sketch of Romania without necessary nuances; those who acclaimed it accused its critics of not wanting to face the truth and of having defensive, phobic reactions when confronted with the truth.
Even though in the introduction of this volume, Mihaies writes (page 7) that Judt travelled to Romania for the first time in 1998 and that Judt admitted to him that “Romania was the one country in Central Europe that he didn’t know,” Judt’s comments on the country were accorded great weight. Judt can be insightful, as demonstrated in the long quote invoked above, but the content of of “Romania: Bottom of the Heap” is frankly, unremarkable. Clearly, it was Judt’s acclaim and renown, more than the content of the article, that prompted the interest and reaction of Romania’s intelligentsia. Indeed, therein lies the problem: the views are Judt’s, but they are derivative by virtue of his not being familiar with the country. In fact, that is why they are unremarkable: they have been repeated over and over again by Romania’s liberal intelligentsia at home and abroad since the fall of the Ceausescu regime. Thus, it is not surprising to read in this Mihaies volume the names of those who write articles supportive of Judt: their works and arguments are cited throughout the article (indeed, Judt’s article opens with a tidbit he admits Mihaies gave him.) The point here is about the circularity of such arguments. The Romanian intellectuals who inform Judt’s article promote it, in part because it is echoing their own sentiments and gives them further weight in debates outside and inside Romania. Those who criticize Judt’s and similar articles by foreigners do so in part because they see the content, or at least some of it, and sometimes accurately, as derivative of his named or unnamed Romanian intellectual sources.
[I personally got to encounter yet another face of the perils and subtext of criticizing such an article. I, of course, knew of Tony Judt, but I had did not know how to pronounce his last name: was the j silent, as in “yoot” or hard as in j “dgoot”? (Similar cases abound, JAT, the old Yugoslav airline, yaht or djaht?) In other words, had the name been “Americanized” for “easier” pronounciation? A senior East Europeanist (non-Romanianist) asked me shortly after the article’s publication, what I thought of the article, and I admitted that I was not very impressed. In discussing the article, I referred to it as being written “by Yudt or should I say Judt”? I could not understand at the time why he immediately declared that he thought it was a superb article and began giving me the third degree “What did I think about the [anti-Semitic wartime dictator] Antonescu?” Only later did I get it: he thought my question about pronouncing Judt was an anti-Semitic slur! But it was telling in a certain sense—and disturbing—that he couldn’t imagine criticism of such a seemingly enlightened Western perspective on Romania without the author of that criticism also being anti-Semitic.]
Brand-ing Romania: Beyond “The Bottom of the Heap”
That Romania’s image or “brand,” is not merely a partisan political, and thus bounded, issue, has increasingly been realized by those for whom it is a matter of business, a reality of life, rather than a matter of an intellectual’s blame game. The “image of Romania” has even spawned a BRANDING website—http://www.brandingromania.com—to discuss the issues of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing stereotypes. On 24 June 2005 Corin Chiriac got the ball rolling by asking posters their perceptions of “stereotypes of Romanians and Romania.” The following example was given to spark debate:
People and Personalities: Ceausescu, Dracula, Nadia Comaneci, Hagi [famous soccer player], and folklorists.
Character and Behavior: sa moara capra vecinului [screw your neighbor], proasta organizare [poor organization] (lines and especially poorly formed lines, ignoring scheduled hours), lack of respect for rules (cut to the front of the line mentality)
Events: The Revolution of 1989, Cerbul de aur [annual Brasov-based talent show], mineriadele [referencing the five brutal journeys of the miners towards Bucharest in 1990, 1991, and 1999]
Places: Bucharest, the Danube Delta, Prahova Valley (Predeal, Sinaia), Sfinxul
Monuments or buildings: Casa Poporului [Ceausescu’s “House of the People” monstrosity], Hotel Intercontinental, the monasteries of Bucovina, Bran castle.
The website appears partly responsible for new reflection on the issue of “branding the Romanian image” in the Romanian press that goes less in search of scapegoats for the situation and more in search of solutions. On 25 October 2005, Mihai Ghyka wrote an article entitled “Branding Romania—a ship sunk at the dock” in the daily Gandul in which he opined:
Romania—the country of gypsies. Romania—the country of handicapped orphans. Romania—a corrupt and dirty country. Romania—a country lacking in civilization. Whether or not we like them, these are the most frequent associations that pop into the mind of foreigners when they are asked what they know about Romania. For better than 15 years, the image of Romania in the world has been left to accidental whimsy.
In recent years, Romania has spent an annual budget of approximatively 20 million Euros, promoting at random tourism, Brancusi [famous sculptor], Romanian products, the Enescu Festival and diverse commercial fairs…Each minister promoted his activities as best he knew how, by himself. (Mihai Ghyka, “Branding Romania – vaporul scufundat in port,” Gandul, 25 October 2005.)
A truly fascinating and insightful reflection on all this was posted on the branding website on 3 February 2006 under the title “Permission to Brand”:
Starting from zero “Romania has so many problems in terms of perception that it becomes difficult to make an inventory,” says Valeriu Turcan, president of the Agency of Governmental Strategies, which is spearheading the branding Romania campaign. “The difference between Romania and other countries is that its Communist past and its experiences right after 1989 have been much more negative and visible in Western media compared to the others.” Turcan cites the ‘Mineriade’, where miners traveled to Bucharest to violently break-up an anti-Neocommunist demonstration, the orphanages and Romanians who break laws abroad as image wreckers. “This picture is incomplete, out of date and extremely difficult to change,” he adds.
Country branding expert Simon Anholt says that this problem exists in many transition economies. “Their brand is still strongly tainted with negative imagery acquired under Soviet influence,” he says, “and the majority of foreign publics have not yet updated their perceptions. The only reason why Bulgaria and Poland are doing better [than Romania] is because they are better organised and are doing something about it.” “Romania was a blank page after the Revolution and this was what was first communicated,” says Ioana Manea, managing partner at brand and communication firm Loco. “These things do not have the depth they used to have.”
Communism and its fall-out also exercise a powerful hold over the western imagination. Visitors to Romania still bring packet soups and Mars bars, to use as currency. They are also scared to venture out after nine o’clock at night. Anthropologist Vintila Mihailescu, director of the award-winning Romanian Peasant’s Museum, says that compared to other ex-Communist countries in the region Romania still has, for the outside eye, a still strongly visible label of Communist country. Something the authorities and people have failed to change. “When a person, a group, a nation does not build itself an image, it is attributed one, the first one at hand,” he adds.
Another problem is the vacuum of knowledge the west has of Romania.“Many free citizens of Europe are confused between Budapest and Bucharest and Romania and Bulgaria,” says Manea. “We deceive ourselves that Nadia Comaneci meant something to the world and that everyone knows Hagi,” says Naumovici. “Romanians are too optimistic and see Romania as the most beautiful place in the world. Education is partly to blame for this. “We [Romanians] were taught during primary school that we beat the Turks,” he adds, “that we can repair a car with a piece of wire, while the Germans had to wait for a spare part to come from the factory.” (Anca Pol, Ana-Maria Smadeanu and Michael Bird, “Permission to brand,” 3 February 2006, reprinted from the ‘The Diplomat – Bucharest’ at http://www.brandingromania.com, emphases added)
Wally Olins, one of the apparent gurus of country image-making, suggested recently that Romania may already be developing positive elements to counter the negative ones associated with its international “brand.” Part of Olins’ philosophy seems to be something of jiu-jitsu, making lemonade out of lemons, as he suggests with Nicolae Ceausescu’s “House of the People.” Like it or not, this interests foreigners about Romania. According to Olins: “If I tell people I am going to Bucharest, 20 % believe I am going to Hungary [the Bucharest-Budapest confusion], another 20% asks me what I am going there for, and 15 % ask me if I am going to see Ceausescu’s palace.” (Wally Olins, interview by Cosmin Popan, “Romania devine brand fara stirea ei,” Cotidianul, 15 February 2007, online edition). In other words, use what you have, allow the audience or market to determine comparative advantage/value…and go with the flow.
Nicolae Ceausescu = Dracula ?
Some stereotypes are more insidious and difficult to combat than others though. The repopularization, or perhaps reinvigoration of the pop-culture Dracula myth, as a result of the modern political reincarnation of Dracula myth since the 1980s, neglects the fact that Nicolae Ceausescu was not associated with Dracula (or the subset of the wider syncretic Dracula myth, Vlad Tepes) abroad, much less at home, during the 1960s and 1970s. The political element, the cruel Vlad Tepes-like leader, and the cultural element, Ceausescu pictured with fangs as if out of a Bela Lugosi movie, were a phenomenon of the 1980s and particularly 1989 and the immediate post-Ceausescu years. This suggests that the association of Nicolae Ceausescu with Dracula derived from the increasingly difficult living conditions (this includes the ability to practice freedoms) of Romanians as his rule progressed—and increasing Western knowledge of those conditions—and of the gradual, if delayed, American and European (geopolitical) disassociation from the regime they had once lauded and presented to the world as heroic. Thus, the “Ceausescu as Dracula” myth in the West was contingent on the reality and knowledge of living circumstances in Romania and the broader geopolitical climate. Significantly, this means not that Ceausescu was plugged into the preexisting Dracula paradigm/frame/representation, but that the latter was superimposed over a changed perception of Ceausescu and Romania. This is a subtle, but important difference.
A separate, but no less important issue regarding this question is the degree to which the Dracula, whether as the historical figure of Vlad Tepes or the Bram Stoker and then Hollywood amalgam of Tepes, vampire, and werewolf, etc., was justified objectively from the start, even in light of the deteriorating living conditions of Romania. The smug and somewhat snide reference by Jerry Seinfeld of Ceausescu—very bad dictator, very very bad dictator…he used to start dictating in the morning, etc.—likely reflects unintentionally and even unknowingly the lack of seriousness and caricature nature of the dead communist “threat” that characterizes liberal creative intellectuals in the United States, to say nothing of left wing academics and students on America’s university campuses. It is as if Ceausescu had merely been a generic character in a bad made-for-TV movie of the 1980s and had never actually existed.
On the other hand, and it is important to point out as I do below in the discussion of an amazingly Ceausescu-like literary chacter in the best-selling evangelical Christian book series, the portrayal by the political right, especially religious right in the United States, and perhaps more general mass culture view of Ceausescu among Americans, is wholly disproportionate to the facts of the man’s regime. This was a dictator, as I like to say, of “no statues” despite his extensive personality cult, and a slogan and generally adhered to policy of “no martyrs”—as means of provoking societal and stoking societal discontent among a population in which many came to bitterly resent and dislike him. On the one hand, it was partly Ceausescu’s personality and character, and lack of true charisma, unique political ideas, and revolutionary vision, that prevented him from instituting a truly bloodthirsty reign—more along the lines of the historical Vlad Tepes’ gruesome treatment of his enemies. On the other, it was structural and spoke to when he came to power on the timeline of a communist/still at that time totalitarian regime—that is, after the communist attempt at revolutionary policies and a broad assault on society. (In reality, of course, the regime strayed from strict adherence to a “no martyrs” principle—see, for example, the case of Gheorghe Ursu—and in making up for lost time, Ceausescu left many bodies in his wake in December 1989.)
Violence was neither the defining factor—surveillance and intimidation and fear as a weapon in and of itself were—of these “post-revolutionary” regimes from the 1960s onward in Eastern Europe, nor considered necessary or conducive to the goals and interests at hand, which were primarily about the maintenance of political power. (Despite his tendency toward over-generalization and thus a failure to be able to account for the wide differences in policy-choice, nationalism, economic reform, political liberalization, etc. among these “post-revolutionary phase” regimes—and these differences had real and meaningful political and social consequences—Jowitt’s model of the “stages” and evolutionary elite delegitimation of communist regimes remains probably the best and most helpful analytical framework for understanding what changed and why over the history of these regimes, see the compendium of his essays over the years in Jowitt 1992). Peter Siani-Davies’ caveat in a new book is probably in order, however, for, although Romanians clearly suffered in Ceausescu’s Romania, people were “disappeared” and did die for political reasons and were murdered (witness December 1989): “Under Ceausescu, the loss of life and suffering cannot be equated with the horrors of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, China during the Cultural Revolution, or even Romania under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.” (Siani-Davies, 2005, p. 11)
Nevertheless, if for those on the left, Ceausescu is a joke, a caricature of a communism that was made out to be a bogeyman (by the right, of course) but was really not so bad (especially with the passage of time, they add “after all”), for those on the right, Nicolae Ceausescu has become the template for evil, and combination of the worst form of tyranny mankind has ever witnessed—communism—and Balkan big man, a tin-pot dictator from a little known country that is haunted by the “ghosts” of a distant, long, but enduring past and that shows “the West” glimpses of a bygone, pre-modern era, stuck-in-time. As is frequently the case, as a (dead) historical figure, during the 1990s Ceausescu served as an appropriate model for fiction, rather than someone like Slobodan Milosevic, who was still too present, hence too non-fictional, to serve the purposes of fiction.
Nicolae Carpathia
What? You say you’ve never heard of Nicolae Carpathia? Look him up on the Internet. The last time I did [late summer 2005], Nicolae Ceausescu had 67,000 webpages, Nicolae Carpathia 14,500! (Of course, neither can hold a lit torch to Dracula, who weighs in at 2,270,000 google hits!)
Well, if you haven’t, don’t feel so bad, neither did I until recently. Nicolae Carpathia is the Anti-Christ of the “Left Behind” evangelical Christian book-series that sketches out visions of the future based on a very specific reading of the Book of Revelation in the Bible’s New Testament. Over the past decade, more than 60 million copies of the “Left Behind” series have been sold (Michael Standaert, L.A. Times, 25 May 2005)! A low-budget film based on the series came out several years back starring Kirk Cameron, a “teen-age heart throb” of the 1980s television sitcom “Growing Pains,”—Cameron is himself a fervent born-again Christian.
Dr. Stu Johnson described “Nicolae Carpathia in the Apocalyse Series” in an article on http://www.Leftbehind.com posted 20 May 2004:
Fairly early in Apocalypse Dawn, we meet the charismatic Carpathia:
Not every politician was pushing for more and bigger weapons and more and bigger armies. Goose had heard of a United Nations representative from Romania named Nicolae Carpathia. Surprisingly, Carpathia was pushing for disarmament in his own country. At the time he’d heard that, Goose had never thought it would happen. Romania was part of Eastern Europe, left orphaned by the failed Soviet Communist government, and host to a series of bloodthirsty dictators who had only been driven from office by equally bloodthirsty military uprisings. Most military analysts had figured that the country would be awash in political unrest and military action for decades to come. Instead, Carpathia had begun to quiet Romania down, almost as if by magic. [emphasis mine] (Dawn, pp. 47-48)
Johnson continues:
Later, we learn more of Carpathia as Romanian satellites are leased to U.S. forces to fill in gaps in their system, sent into chaos by “the disappearances” [author’s note: i.e. the Rapture whereby the “saved” are suddenly and inexplicably plucked from earth to heaven].
“I can give you access to another satellite system,” [said Cody].
Remington curbed his frustration with the situation. “What satellites?”
“Satellites leased by the Romanian government,” Cody said. “Other satellites that Nicolae Carpathia owns and has offered for your use.”
Remington knew the name. Carpathia was an international figure, and part of the reason the U.N. peacekeeping forces and the United States Army Rangers were presently in-country. Carpathia had taken his own country by storm, becoming the darling of the population over the last few years after getting off to a less-than-sterling beginning. Yesterday, the president of Romania had stepped down and suggested that the legislature appoint Carpathia as their new president [author’s note: i.e. a clear Hindenburg-Hitler analogy here]. In a surprising turn of events, both houses had unanimously done just that. Before becoming a member of the House of Deputies in Romania, Carpathia had been a shrewd businessman who had his fingers in many international business ventures. He’d gotten rich. Remington wasn’t surprised to learn that Carpathia had invested heavily in communications, and satellites would have been one of the most natural investments. (Dawn, pp. 213-14)
According to Michael Standaert in his review of the most recent book of the series, “In the Beginning; The Rising: Before They Were Left Behind” by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, “this prequel sets up Carpathia as embodying everything stereotypically liberal” (Standaert, 2005). Indeed, Carpathia is the creation of a conspiratorial group of “international bankers”—could there be a clearer code for “Jews”?—and, as if that were not enough, almost unsurprisingly given the radical right-wing leanings of the authors and many of the readers of the series, Carpathia is “a genetically engineered test-tube baby with the DNA of two homosexual fathers”[!, the trifecta…how prosaic]. And Satan’s forces predictably use the cherished institutions and policies the radical-right attributes to “liberals” (i.e. the left in the political parlance of the American right)—the U.N., disarmament, peacekeeping forces, and satellite television (somewhat ironic I would add given the use of this by evangelical fundraisers themselves!; clearly they have in mind here Ted Turner and not Ruppert Murdoch)—to establish tyrannical “one world government.”
The hazy popular and media images of Romania shine through in the character of Nicolae Carpathia. It is a simplistic and, frankly, tacky amalgam. Nicolae Ceausescu, “Genius of the Carpathians”…and so we get “Nicolae Carpathia.” A brutal dictator who was initially perceived in positive terms: he presents himself as a man of peace, a proponent of “disarmament,” a supporter of Israel (when he really is not), a neutral arbiter of international relations in a difficult time. When the Ceausescus were executed on Christmas Day 1989, the Romanian media hyperbolically proclaimed “The Antichrist is Dead” (the deconstructivists among Romanian intellectuals at home and abroad ascribed intent of the former communists to cynically use religious language to cleanse their sins before the population and buy credibility—to me this is over-interpretation.) Romania is depicted as a place of chaos, military intervention, and mystical leaders and politics. And if that is not enough, Carpathia’s political assistant is named Stolojan—the last name, it just so happens, of the Romanian Prime Minister from September 1991 to November 1992. One interesting difference, however, that would be difficult for evangelicals to explain is that whereas Ceausescu banned abortions, Carpathia imposes them!
Predictably, and it would be interesting to see what Romanian evangelicals actually think of the series, Romanians have not been amused by the selection of a Romanian as the anti-Christ in the end of time! (Indeed, as Theodor Stolojan’s political profile rose once again in Romanian politics in early 2007, the daily Cotidianul noted the influence of the “Left Behind” series was such that “when you look up the word ‘Stolojan’ on the Internet, the first five results refer to the character in the book,” leading the author to opine “it is impossible to estimate for just how many people the Romania described in the book [is for them Romania]” (Barbu Mateescu, “Stolojan si presedintele sint eroi negativi in SUA,” Cotidianul, 17 February 2007, online edition). Of course, the very fact that this paradigm [Nicolae Ceausescu] is used is because it exists—it says everything that Nicolae Carpathia is a Romanian, not say a Bulgarian, Albanian, or Hungarian.
Orphans, Abortions, and Adoptions
With the execution of “the Anti-Christ” on Christmas Day 1989 began to come the stories of the Ceausescu family’s excesses and of the harsh living conditions the run-of-the-mill Romanian citizen had experienced. I distinctly remember at the place where I was working at the time between undergraduate and graduate school—there was a book critical of President Bush the elder during his administration entitled Sleepwalking through History, an appropriate description for my ability not to be in the right place at the right time during the momentous events of 1989—my direct supervisor picking up the Washington Post and looking at a picture of Elena Ceausescu’s shoe collection and saying, “What is it about dictators’ wives and shoes?”
My supervisor was, of course, invoking the parallel which the media was tacitly making at the time: Elena Ceausescu = Imelda Marcos of the Philippines (untrue, based on Elena’s collection she wasn’t fit to tie Imelda’s shoes, and as became well-known in the demonization phase immediately after the Revolution, Elena had “large peasant feet”…). We all know about how media frames emerge, often far more arbitrarily than observers recognize. But what is important is when they stick, and they often do, they are very difficult to dislodge, from the collective popular psyche or even from the journalist collective psyche. In the case of Elena’s shoes, it was a good visual image that can sum up extravangance and hypocrisy against the backdrop of images and news about how normal citizens were living. Moreover, the stock of shoes was not invented. They were there, and even if not as extensive as Imelda’s, it was likely a case of the reporters saying to themselves when they found them: “What is it about dictators’ wives and shoes?”
The same is probably true about how the stories of the “orphans” got started. One can imagine Romanians who knew of the appalling and heartrending conditions of these orphanages, telling their Western interlocutors about them, the journalists asking to go there, and the journalists having the same gutwrenching reaction as the Romanians who had told them. The images were awful: clearly poorly-heated, decaying buildings, with impatient and apparently not-terribly-concerned “caregivers,” children (not just infants) in rusting white metal cribs, rocking back and forth, starved for and unused to human attention and interaction. Here again, the pictures said so much more than any number of news commentaries ever could have—heck, a cheapskate who does not often send money to charity, and probably in part because of my interest in Romania, I couldn’t help but write a check to the Red Cross after seeing all these images. I doubt I was alone in such reactions.
Of course, the orphanages and the partly-related issue of HIV-transmission to infants through unscreened blood transfusions transmitted a political message that this was the inheritance of dictatorship, and at least for some, of a communist dictatorship. I do wonder, however, how these orphanages really compared to others, even within the region, at the time, or since the collapse of communism—there was no comparative context in these reports. Additionally, I wish to suggest here, something that many of my liberal colleagues are unlikely to agree with or appreciate: these stories were also related directly to the abortion issue and the overwhelming (well-documented) pro-choice orientation of those who report the news in the United States and Western Europe. Behind this reportage, knowingly or unknowingly, was a cautionary tale, in their view, of what happens when abortion is outlawed, as it was in Ceausescu’s Romania after 1966. You get unwanted and hence, especially given the very difficult living conditions of the time, abandoned children, who wind up in understaffed orphanages that hide the political and public shame behind their doors. (One has to remember too that it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s that there was much media coverage, including leading national news broadcasts, about the protests of the anti-abortion “Operation Rescue” group, in Wichita and elsewhere.)
When it came to HIV/AIDS the tale was a broader and somewhat more abstruse one: see, this is what you get, “this is your society, this is your society in denial.” The underlying message was that governmental shame and political denial about HIV/AIDS and its risk beyond high-risk groups leads to horrible outcomes, that actually make the problem worse. The analogue/allegory was clear in the Reagan-Bush years, since the suggestion was that shame and political denial—in the United States, on the basis of religious grounds—could threaten similar tragedies. Undoubtedly, there are truly cautionary tales here about what happens when abortion is banned and of political denial over stigmatizing national health crises, but it is important to recognize the factors, usually unacknowledgedly and unwittingly, that encouraged these reports to become a centerpiece of coverage of post-Ceausescu Romania.
An even more cynical view can be cast upon the issue of Western adoptions of Romanian children, including the orphans. As in the case of the physical and psychological trauma, particularly on women’s lives, because of the abortion laws, and of the HIV children and their parents, so I do not mean to deny or denigrate here the tremendous pain and vexing choices that couples unable to conceive go through before, when, and after they adopt. But as has been pointed out, Romanian orphans are special, even important, to couples who wish to adopt a Caucasian child—they are part of a short international supply of Caucasian children up for adoption. Sixteen years after the Revolution, it is telling that in May 2006, the New York Times would have a (yet another) story on its front-page (!) about the situation of orphans and adoptees in Romania. Of course, it is nice to know about the situation of these people, especially those who were orphans and then adopted many years ago, but is it wrong to ask what, consciously or unconsciously, lies at the foreground of these reports in the first place? It is hard not to be cynical about this, but is it too much to suggest that journalists write about such things because they live in a social milieu in which they know people who are, and their (advertising) targeted “front-page” readership includes, white upper-middle class professional couples, who despite their values and ideals, want to adopt a Caucasian child and Romania offers one of the last options (in addition, to the feeling and reality that they would probably be making a difference in the life of someone who might otherwise never get the chance in Romania)? (This said, it is their right to choose whom they wish to adopt, and whatever the gap between their ideals and their actions on this question, I do not think it is fair or right to accuse them of racism just because they would prefer to adopt a white child. Besides, in the final analysis, for the child, it scarcely matters…the situation puts parents in their lives where they did not exist before….)
Gymnasts, Acrobats, and Circus Performers…Oh My!
Clearly, Nadia has been the template for all “gymnast”-based images of Romanians in American pop culture since the 1970s. In a 1989 romantic comedy, “Her Alibi,” the Czech model Paulina Porazskova plays a Romanian circus performer (acrobats are the afterlife, professional extension of gymnasts apparently) who defects and falls in love with a character played by Tom Selleck. The Securitate make a cameo in the film trying to prevent her defection, although if I remember correctly, as always there appears to be some political/cultural confusion/script simplification, with references to them as the “kgb” or the like.
Although it is no great insight, it is interesting to note in the context of “Her Alibi” how Hollywood was (is) a barometer, if a lagging one, in terms of geopolitical relations. The James Bond film series is, of course, the most famous of these, with the comparative role of the renegade Chinese revolutionary communists rising in the 1960s, with Barbara Bach as not just Russian love interest, but as professional partner in the détente-era “The Spy Who Loved Me (1977),” (the Soviets all-but-disappear from the 1979 “Moonraker”) and with a return to outright identification of the Soviets and associated East Europeans (East Germans, Czechs, etc.) as the enemy in the 1980s (at its apogee in film as in life with the 1983 “Octopussy”—fanatical Soviet general using faberge eggs to undermine the West, a showdown in East Berlin, etc.). With movies such as “Red Heat (1988),” the typical buddy-cop, fish-out-of-water, opposites-become-friends movie (see, for example, Beverly Hills Cop (1984)) showing Soviet (Arnold Schwarzenneger, Austrian descent) and American (Jim Belushi, Albanian descent) cops working against the politically-correct scourge of the 1980s—drug kingpins, a threat to both American and Soviet societies that they could agree on…after all, what about the children?, I believe the children are our future…), Hollywood chose to find more geopolitically-correct villains.
By 1989, Gorbachev’s Soviet Union was not a geoplitically-correct villain; Ceausescu’s Romania, on the other hand, was—it would be interesting to see how a similar script would have been written a decade before, when Romania was on the top of the West’s geopolitical world. Of course, if the creation of fictional enemy countries—satirized well in the Austin Power film series, Kreplakistan—can be annoying and is itself still an amalgam stereotype of the former Soviet Union, from Ukraine to Central Asia, Hollywood’s search for the most consensual-least box-office controversial enemy can have backlash, especially years later. See, for example, the substitution of generic Middle Eastern enemies for the Soviets and others as the 1980s progressed; the choice, for example, of “Libyan terrorists” in the 1985 “Back to the Future” may have seemed like a “safe” one—an official enemy of the US, that had targeted Americans in terrorist acts (such as the Berlin discotheque bombing), and that had a very small Libyan (as opposed to Arab) émigré community in the United States—but it is clear that in retrospect it was far from “safe.” Clearly, as the Soviet Union waned, drug cartels became prosaic and boring, and the East bloc “mafiya” prototype ran its course, the xenophobic “Middle Eastern terrorists” became “useful.” The United States, in part, probably reaps some of the anger directed against it from the happenstance, box office driven selection of real-world enemies for action-thrillers in a post-Cold War world.
The Seinfeld episode that introduced this paper—with its Romanian gymnast-cum-acrobat—“Her Alibi,” etc. made me question whether there was any empirical reality that may have contributed to the birth and growth of this stereotype. I have not compared things systematically to the situation of defectors from other East bloc countries, but I did a brief search in the Washington Post and New York Times on the subject. Clearly, the most well-known, “gymnastics defections” from Romania were those of Nadia herself in November 1989 and in 1981 her controversial ethnic Hungarian coach Bela Karolyi, his wife Marta, and the Romanian team choreographer Geza Pozar (based on the name, apparently also likely Hungarian). In November 1985, an acrobat, Andi Georgescu, who performed for Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey, defected (WP 11/22/85 A 30a; NYT 11/22/85 II 3:1). In April 1987, two 16 year olds, Carmen Georgescu and Julia Catrinoiu, both gymnasts and acrobats were granted political asylum (NYT 4/9/87 II 7:6; WP 2/24/87 A 14a). In August 1987, four acrobats in California with Ringling and Barnum and Bailey sought asylum (NYT 8/8/87). It is possible that coverage of such incidents, particularly in the media of major metropolitan areas could have, by osmosis, created this connection and image, particularly among America’s creative intellectuals? Of course, once again, as occurs throughout many examples raised in this paper, there is the chicken-or-the-egg problem, since coverage and attention given to these particular types of defections—of gymnast/acrobats, from Romania—had already been conditioned by Nadia and Romanian gymnastics (in fact, in a sense perhaps, to the extent that was possible, made “easier,” likely to garner more media coverage, and a greater blow to a country whose prestige had become tied to this issue).
The Magical and the Mystical
As a repository for the occult, for evil, for the mysterious spiritual world, Romania became a good bet for American television shows during the early and mid-1990s. Thus, the 5 May 1993 episode of the drama “Law and Order” entitled bluntly “Securitate,” has a lawyer pleading that his Romanian immigrant client charged with murder is “not guilty due to cultural insanity” claiming he had been “conditioned to violence in his homeland” [!]. There is, of course, the great irony here, that what in the American context may appear to be “understanding”—sensitive to cultural differences, recognizing the societal influences on individual action—would no doubt beckon Todorova-like indignance over a classic “Balkan” stereotype. Moreover, given the timing of the episode (May 1993), a year into the Bosnian conflict, the argument of “cultural insanity” played well into the Kaplanesque “ancient hatreds” mentality so prevalent at the time. And to top it all off, three of the main characters in the episode have the last name Iliescu!
The magical-mystery tourism aspect of Romania is better explored in the 14 April 1995 episode of the “X-Files” where the traditional Romanian fertility folk dancers, the “Calusari,” become a trope for warding off evil. In this episode, Romanian language shows up again. A character in the episode comments on the Calusari: “In Romania, they are responsible for the correct observance of sacred rites.” An episode capsule expands on their role in the plot:
When Steve Holvey is later killed in a bizarre accident, ash from the scene is identified as a substance called Vibuti, holy ash produced during the presence of spiritual beings. The Grandmother later dies while performing a protective ritual on Charlie and when a social worker questions Charlie about the incident, he claims his still born twin brother Michael killed her. Which comes as a shock to Maggie Holvey, who claims she never told Charlie about his dead twin brother. It appears that the families only hope is a strange group of Romanian elderly chanters called The Calusari. (X-files episode guide on the Internet)
The exotic and superstitious are in full effect: Bram Stoker’s Romania meets FBI chasers of UFOs and the supernatural.
The “Romanian Quintuplets” South Park Episode:
A Cornucopia of Modern Romanian Pop Culture Images in North America
Comedy shows, often distastefully, have also used Romanian images to good effect. For example, the British comedy series of the 1990s, “Absolutely Fabulous” in which a layabout, alcoholic, high-maintenance fashion-designer threatens her straightlaced daughter that she will adopt Romanian orphans if her daughter won’t invite her to a school presentation. The threat backfires when her addle-minded assistant actually follows through on the idea and Romanian orphan babies begin arriving (“Iso Tank” episode broadcast 12/3/92 on BBC 1 http://entertainment.msn.com/movies/movie.aspx?m=484619.) However, the trifecta, the grand slam, of American (although the creator of the show is Canadian) images of Romanians—and one that is actually intended, it appears, to be just that—is the so-called “Romanian Quint(uplet)s” episode of the cartoon series “South Park.”
The “South Park” episode from 2000 (Original Air Date: 26 April 2000) is a satire of the Elian (aka Alien) Gonzalez saga from the spring of that year—an arguably absurd made-for-cable/satellite “twenty-four/seven” round-the-clock television news channel prodcution, with Cuban emigres in Florida attempting to prevent the return of a seven-year old boy to his father in Cuba. In retrospect, given the whole Florida fiasco in the 2000 elections—and I am not aware of any studies that have specifically looked into the issue although they may exist—one has to wonder if the television coverage of the saga and interest in the Cuban and other communities in Florida may have contributed in some (though doubtfully decisive) measure to the election results. The South Park episode has orphan Romanian gymnasts/acrobats from the circus defecting from communist-like bureaucrats and a country described in the most negative terms.
The episode contains a number of the characteristics and stereotypes of (North) American images of Romanians. A Romanian woman is named “Mrs. Vladchick,” one can assume a sort of slang combination of Vlad (Tepes, aka Dracula) and “chick” (also, conveniently an ending for some (especially South) Slavic last names in English). Names and language are pseudo-slavic: although one girl is named Nadia (a clear descendent of the ’76 Olympics), another is named Baltania, while Mrs. Vladchick carries on a conversation in “Romanian” that centers around the following gibberish: “Nid kelmin da bushka.” It should also be noted that the idea of “quintuplets”-as-circus-show-for-viewing may be influenced by the story of five French Canadian sisters—the Dionne quintuplets—who were treated in this manner in the 1930s in Canada without much regard to their fate (the story was given wide play in the late 1990s and the creator of the show is Canadian, so this may be the link).
A television reporter summarizes the background and scene as the Mrs. Vladchick’s Quintuplets from the traveling “Cirque de Cheville” attempt to defect:
Tom, I’m standing at the home in South Park where five precious little girls have been rescued from Romania. Their mother passes away some months ago, and then their grandmother died trying to bring them here. But all is well now, and people are coming from all over the country to view the little tykes. [someone takes a picture] If you’d like to come down and visit the quintuplets, admission is only $5, and for a few dollars more ["FEED THE QUINTS! One Dollar" A man buys some fishsticks], you can feed them fishsticks.
A Quint: [hops up and down, then opens her mouth for a fishstick the man drops down to her] Mmm.
Reporter: Tom, it looks like these cute little girls have made it out of that armpit of a country they call Romania.
[Romania, day. Government officials watch the report in a run-down office]
Reporter: Yes, luckily for them, these quintuplets no longer have to live in
Romania, the asshole of the world. [a last shot of the quints is seen] Back to you, Tom.
President: This is not good. It makes our country look poor and stupid.
Romanian Official: This could kill our tourism.
President: You know what to do. [they salute him and leave.]
(author’s note: from Episode 403 “The Quintuplets,” script can be found online at many sites, for example, http://www.southpark.dsl.pipex.com/scripts/scr403.shtml, captions as found in script).
In a later scene, one of the South Park children, Cartman, tries to convince the quints that they don’t want to go back to Romania, by saying, “In Romania they just oppress you and try to bring you down.” All is for naught, however, for, as with Elian Gonzalez, the Quints’ father comes forward, and (then Attorney General) Janet Reno descends on Easter Sunday in an Easter Bunny suit, seizing the girls at gunpoint with well-armed soldiers in the background.
“Vlad,” orphans, gymnasts/acrobats, Romania as a poverty-stricken country dependent on tourist revenues and run by a mindless, oppressive bureaucracy and an aggressive president—the images/stereotypes are all here. Ironically, South Park and this episode are perhaps more bent on satirizing (North) American society and the hypocrisy, absurdity, and sanctimony of politicians, special interest groups, and the media. Yet, with Romania as prop, they succeed in creating a “perfect storm” of kitsch Romanian pop-culture iconography (although in truth, political correctness is always a target, never a shackle for the cartoon’s creators).
Part IV: Images of Hungarians
“They’re heeeeerrrrreeeeee…”: Alien-(n)ation
One of the most enduring and entertaining images of Hungarians during the second half of the 20th century is the idea of Hungarians as aliens or Martians. Much of this is tongue-in-cheek, is not intended to be perjorative, and has been exploited to good effect and with great enjoyment by Hungarians themselves—to the point of their likely having been behind its origination. There are multiple overlapping/competing descriptions of how all this started. Consensus suggests that it came out of the circles of émigré nuclear scientists, physicists, and mathematicians who came to the US during 1930s and 1940s, many of whom were colocated at Los Alamos, New Mexico for the Manhattan Project.
As George Marx, a Hungarian professor of atomic physics in Budapest, asks in his extremely engaging chapter entitiled “The Martians’ Vision of the Future” (http://www.mek.iif.hu/kiallit/tudtor/tudos1/martians.html), how is it that there were groups of Austrians, Germans, and Italians involved in these scientific breakthroughs and yet it was Hungarians alone who seemed to gain the moniker and association of “alien?” Marx appears to prefer the account according to which one day the Italian Enrico Fermi was speculating about the universe and the possibility of life on other planets, and Leo Szilard, a Hungarian, ventured an answer to Fermi’s question:
“And so,” Fermi came to his overwhelming question, “if all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now, so where are they?” It was Leo Szilard, a man with an impish sense of humor, who supplied the perfect reply to Fermi’s rhetoric: “They are among us,” he said, “but they call themselves Hungarians.” (according to Marx, this is Francis Crick’s version of the myth)
Marx elaborates on the “birth to a legend”:
The myth of the Martian origin of the Hungarian scientists who entered world history on American soil during World War II probably originated in Los Alamos. Leon Lederman, director of the Fermilab, reported possible hidden intentions. The production of scientists and mathematicians in the early 20th century was so prolific that many otherwise calm observers believe Budapest was settled by Martians in a plan to infiltrate and take over the planet Earth…According to myth, at a top secret meeting of the Manhattan Project, General Groves left for the gents’ room. Szilard then said: “Perhaps we may now continue in Hungarian!” Hungarian emigres enjoyed speaking their mother tongue whenever a chance offered itself. This has made them look suspicious. Los Alamos was a place of top security. General Groves was annoyed that Neumann and Wigner had frequent telephone conversations in Hungarian. [Teller, talk in Budapest 1991.] The “thick Hungarian accent” was often heard even in the corridors of the Pentagon. (The Lugosi accent made the alien power of Dracula, the count from the faraway Transylvania even more realistic.) (http://www.mek.iif.hu/kiallit/tudtor/tudos1/martians.html)
Marx recounts the details of the arrival of the Martians-cum-Hungarians on planet Earth:
–Gabor, von Kármán, Kemeny, von Neumann, Szilard, Teller, and Wigner were born in the same quarter of Budapest [author’s note—most were Jewish…it is interesting to note that some anti-Semitic Hungarian nationalists at the same time assiduously include these names in lists of famous Hungarians]. No wonder the scientists in Los Alamos accepted the idea that well over one thousand years ago a Martian spaceship crashlanded somewhere in the center of Europe. There are three firm proofs of the extraterrestrial origins of the Hungarians: they like to wander about (like gypsies radiating out from the same region). They speak an exceptionally simple and logical language which has not the slightest connection with the language of their neighbors. And they are so much smarter than the terrestrials. (In a slight Martian accent John G. Kemeny added an explanation, namely, that it is so much easier to learn reading and writing in Hungarian than in English or French, that Hungarian kids have much more time left to study mathematics.) [quoted by Marx from “Yankee” Magazine (?) 1980] (http://www.mek.iif.hu/kiallit/tudtor/tudos1/martians.html)
Finally, in a somewhat more serious vein, the alien connotation has been explained in analytical terms as follows:
If we understand SteeDee’s theory correctly, the first Hungarians-
are-aliens story arose from some minor human incident. The
Hungarians may have stood out from the rest of the staff at Los
Alamos, perhaps by maintaining their own cliques and speaking
their own indecipherable tongue, and this made the English
speakers uncomfortable. The Hungarians were like aliens to the
rest, and since there were many reports of “flying saucers” in the
popular press in the 50s and late 40s, the “Martian” label was a
convenient way to sublimate the social tensions. To be called
extraterrestrials, in a jocular, rib-poking way, might have helped
reduce this social friction both inside and outside the Hungarian
group. If there was a problem with communication, the recurring
alien joke would provide a means to make light of it, thereby
expressing frustrations that could not otherwise be spoken. (http://www.ufomind.com/area51/desertrat/1995/dr29/ )
According to Marx, “as a matter of fact, these suspicious Hungarians—Theodore von Kármán, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard—enjoyed the myth. Edward Teller became especially happy of his E.T. initials, but he complained about indiscretion, ‘Von Kármán must have been talking’.” (http://www.mek.iif.hu/kiallit/tudtor/tudos1/martians.html)
From Teller to Talleah…Zsa Zsa and Her Sisters
This brings us from Teller to Talleah, the difference being that Teller was a real Hungarian scientist who pretended to play the part of an alien…whereas Talleah is the name of an alien from the 1958 King of the B Sci-fi Movies, “Queen of Outer Space”…starring none other than perhaps the most well-known Hungarian among Americans, Zsa Zsa Gabor, who plays the role of an alien scientist! [More about this hysterical film and its hysterical reviews below.]
Of course, June 1989 put Hungarians on the map for many Americans. The reburial of Imre Nagy, the huge crowds, the solemn ceremony before hundreds of thousands and a live television audience, a landmark event in the history of Hungary…No, that was 16 June 1989…I am referring here to 14 June 1989, the day Zsa Zsa slapped a Beverly Hills police officer, an incident that immediately became fodder for every late night comedian and even two years later was the subject of a spoof starring the actress in the satirical film series, the Naked Gun. Such is the fate of Hungary and Hungarians in the United States.
There were actually three Gabor sisters: Zsa Zsa, Eva, and Magda. I am not sure whether to say marriage or divorce ran in the family. The three sisters had more marriages than they did important movie roles. To borrow a page from Dave Barry in another context (Dave Barry Slept Here, Random House 1989, p. 101), here are the final tallies of the three sisters in Marriages:
Final (?) Gabor Sister Marriage Standings
Zsa Zsa 9* *** ****
Magda 6**
Eva 5
*It is difficult to know how exactly to calculate Zsa Zsa’s total number of husbands…since as she once responded: “How many husbands have I had? You mean apart from my own?”
**These numbers may be affected by the fact that both Zsa Zsa and Magda were married to the English actor George Sanders, if sixteen years apart. Not to make too much light of things, but Sanders eventually committed suicide. He played the part of Mr. Freeze in the Batman television series, that Zsa Zsa made guest appearances on (see below).
***It seemed only fitting in early 2007 surrounding the macabre and absurd Anna Nicole Smith custody fight that Zsa Zsa’s most recent husband—Prinz von Anhalt—claimed that he had a ten year affair with Anna Nicole and was the father of her orphaned child. (Supposedly, Zsa Zsa was angered and hurt by this admission, but can one completely discount the possibility that it was yet another attempt for Zsa Zsa to get back in the limelight, and after all, hadn’t Anna Nicole Smith been famous for being famous.)
****It may surprise almost no one in a certain sense, but Zsa Zsa’s daughter by Conrad Hilton (the only child of all three Gabor sisters) is grand-aunt to Paris and Nicole Hilton (http://www.webenetics.com/hungary/filmsartsandmedia1.html)!
Zsa Zsa claims that she won the 1936 Hungarian beauty pageant (according to one Hungarian source, Sandor Incze who discovered Zsa Zsa, invented the idea of the beauty pageant…don’t think so), although her mother Jolie (“pretty” in French), married only twice, and fond of “new math” long before we knew it was new—like her daughters she seemed genetically incapable of telling her true age; if she was telling the truth her first daughter, Magda, would have been born when Jolie was thirteen!—claimed it was she (the mother) and not Zsa Zsa who had won the beauty pageant. (To use the famous Casey Stengel line “You can look it up!”…these things should be verifiable, although I will leave that to others to investigate since it is beyond the intended scope of this paper.)
The “Queen of Outer Space” or “Damn it, Jim, I’m a Former Hungarian Beauty Queen, Not a(n Alien) Scientist”
Zsa Zsa’s film career is summarized by the online film critic “Jabootu” as follows:
Unfortunately, Ms. Gabor’s Hollywood career proved much less epic [than her married life or run-ins with the law]. In John Huston’s 1952 Moulin Rouge, Zsa Zsa played, in a bold move, a Euro-sexpot opposite Jose Ferrer’s Toulouse-Lautrec. The following year she appeared in a supporting role in the musical Lili, which co-starred the unrelated but similarly monikered Mel Ferrer. From there, though, it was all downhill. Her few starring roles included playing twins (!!) in the hilarious-sounding espionage meller Girl in the Kremlin. In case you’re wondering, one of the twins [is] Stalin’s mistress (!!), the other a spy working against the Soviets. Zsa Zsa also had a bit part in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. (http://www.jabootu.com/queen.htm)
But perhaps “Jabootu” is being too hasty and superficial in judging Ms. Gabor’s career. Maybe we have underestimated Zsa Zsa’s roles in movie and television. For example, Zsa Zsa has recounted how she liked playing the role of “spy” when she guest-starred on the Batman serial as Minerva, a beauty parlor owner, whose hairdryers could read the minds of (male) clients (Batman classics, website, http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/7537/minerva.htm). Was the episode perhaps a skillful allegory about how the totalitarian state uses the most banal and subversive means to pry into the lives of its citizens? (Was the “mullet” a communist plot to make Americans look stupid? Tune in next time, same Battime, same Batchannel…)
Evidence for such a, more enlightened, revisionist view comes from the 1958 movie “Queen of Outer Space,” in which Zsa Zsa plays Talleah, an alien scientist, who leads the women of Venus against the sadistic, disfigured Queen Yllana, thereby saving a flight crew of men from Earth whom Yllana has cruelly imprisoned. I argue here that this film only appears to be a sexist, cheesy, and moronic vehicle for profit, when in fact that is part of its subterfuge and inner-brilliance. The movie is, in fact, a subtle and sophisticated allegory of communist Hungary and the outbreak and crushing of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Let us take another look at this film—although, unfortunately, we are forced to rely on the flippant and sometimes juvenile comments of “Jabootu” for a discussion of the plot (http://www.jabootu.com/queen.htm).
In this first extended excerpt, we find Zsa Zsa’s Talleah (symbolizing the Hungarian resistance) being informed that recently arrived Earthmen (“bourgeois” intellectuals, “men” had been banished from the planet, although “scientists and mathematicians” were retained because they were needed) have been imprisoned by the evil Yllana (the communists/Soviets). Talleah recounts for the men, the sad history of the planet, the destructive war, how Yllana went from well-meaning rebel to tyrant, etc. The astute reader will notice here that Zsa Zsa is in fact recounting the destruction of World War II in Hungary—she says “Ten Earth years ago”!—the coming to power of the communists, the initial “popular” image of the Soviets as liberators, and their construction of a people’s dictatorship.
Talleah: Rebel Leader with a flare for fashion.
…Kaeel, the Cute Blonde that Turner was earlier checking out (and who’s attired in one of Anne Francis’ sparkly mini-dresses from Forbidden Planet), rushes off. She soon appears in what I at first assumed was a laboratory, as it was furnished with a Bunsen burner and the obligatory tabletop metal scaffolding arrayed with Conical Beakers Filled With Mysterious Colored Fluids™. Then I noticed that the room was staffed exclusively by a couple of women, so I decided it was instead a space kitchen of some sort. I know that’s not ‘P.C.’, but c’mon, one of the women there is a rather young and shapely Zsa Zsa Gabor, and if you’re going to try to tell me she’s a scientist…
Kaeel reports to Talleah (Zsa Zsa), who’s attired in a form-fitting chef’s coat – or, OK, maybe it’s a scientist’s smock – that the men have been imprisoned. Talleah asks what the men were like, exhibiting the only Hungarian accent to be found on the one city on the planet Venus. “They seem strong and brave,” Kaeel coos, already falling under the evil Patriarchal spell of the virile Earthmen. She, unlike Yllana, believed Patterson’s statement that the men came in peace. “His eyes told me he spoke the truth,” she avers. Well, that’s good enough for me.
Talleah soon appears outside the men’s quarters, wearing a very slinky red dress with a high leg slit. Men or no men, these chicks sure like dressing up. Intercepting a woman baring a food tray, she takes possession of it and enters the room. The guards don’t say ‘boo’ about this, so Talleah must be some sort of bigwig. The men all rouse themselves as she enters – not like that, you perverts – recognizing that as the film’s star she must be the most desirable woman on the planet. Patterson requests another audience with Yllana, hoping to make her understand their honorable intentions. (You might want to leave Turner back in the brig, then.) “But the Queen doesn’t vish to understand,” Talleah thickly explains. “She has nothing but hatred in her heart!”
Patterson notes her seeming hostility to Yllana. Talleah explains that she’s a member of the Queen’s court. She then tells them that their lives are in danger – yeah, thanks for the newsflash – and offers her help. Turner smarmily thanks her, calling her “Baby.” Somebody beat the living crap out of this guy, would ya? Patterson tries to refuse her aid, though, knowing that it would it expose her to danger. Not to mention Turner. She replies that there’s a resistance movement that would like to end Yllana’s cruel reign. If the Earthmen will help them, they will help the Earthmen. Oh, and anyone expecting that Talleah and the stolid Captain Patterson would show an immediate attraction to each other, give yourself a cookie.
Talleah furthers explains that Yllana plans to destroy the Earth. (Well, she would, wouldn’t she? I mean, you don’t get to be an Evil Space Despot with a Giant Laser Cannon if you don’t sit around thinking up things like that.) Then it’s time for some exposition. “Ten Earth years ago,” she begins, “our vorld became involved in var with the planet Mordo. It vas a terrible var. We fought vith veapons of great power, and ve still vere nearly defeated.” I might be exaggerating the accent here a little bit, but not by much.
“Finally,” she continues, “Mordo vas destroyed. However the var vas von at great cost. Most of our cities vas [sic] destroyed, and now they were lost to the jungle.” After the var, er, war, the women took over the planet. (Well, city.) The leader of the insurrection was a masked woman, Yllana. No one yet knows why she wears the mask, although she’s said to be quite beautiful. “She said that men caused the ruin of this vorld, and it vas time for vomen to take it over.” When Konrad asks how the revolution managed to succeed, Talleah replies that the men didn’t take it seriously. “She vas only a voman,” she archly points out.
All the men were killed, except for ones Yllana still needed. No, not for that. “Scientists, mathematicians…” Talleah explains. You know, guy stuff. She doesn’t explicitly mention opening pickle jars, but I think that can be safely assumed. These men, we learn, are up on a prison satellite circling, as Talleah calls it, “Wenus.” Now that Earth’s technology is advancing, Yllana wants to knock the planet out before it becomes a problem….
In a subsequent scene, we learn of Yllana’s plans to destroy the Earth because she sees it as a threat to her control over her own planet.
A couple of guards appear. They’re friends, however, and take the men to Talleah’s lab. There Our Heroine, naturally attired in an elaborate white silk gown (I mean, she is working), and Patterson immediately go into a clinch. Which, considering that they’ve spent less than ten minutes which each other, seems a bit odd. Still, they’re the lead actress and actor, so why not just cut to the chases, eh?
Talleah has big news. “I’ve learned the Queen plans to destroy Earth in two days,” she reports. “Maybe she wasn’t bluffing,” Patterson decides. (What a moron!) The men decide to travel to the Beta Disintegrator set, er, complex, and destroy it. [Earlier “Jabootu” has described the “Beta Disintergrator” as a “comically bad set whose sophistication fails to rival that of King Friday’s realm from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. Basically it contains a big white box with gold polka dots and being serviced by randomly strolling chicks in miniskirts and high-heeled boots.”] Patterson tells the women they should stay behind for safety’s sake. They vant, I mean, want to come with, however. “Ve haf no life here vithout Love, or children,” Talleah explains. Persuaded, Patterson gives his permission for them to come along. And so Talleah and Kaeel and their other hot associate Motiya join the party.
The women provide the men with Forbidden Planet sidearms. Then guards are heard outside the lab. Nice of them to announce themselves, anyway. Everyone but Talleah hides away in a small chamber that I’d assume was a priest’s hole, except that the door to it is perfectly visible and opened with a big protruding knob-like device attached to the wall. As Talleah tries to bluff things out, Turner, who might be termed incorrigible (or an a**hole), is seen taking advantage of the tight quarters to smooze up to the entirely receptive Kaeel.
The guys spend the night around a little fire, snuggling up with their respective chicks. Except for Konrad, but he doesn’t really need one. He’s a scientist. (Or maybe it’s just that women-love-a-man-in-uniform thing.) Patterson and Talleah are spotlighted here, as we listen in on their mushy conversation. Unsurprisingly, this offers up a bounty of bad dialog, as well as some choice mispronunciations by Ms. Gabor. For instance, she asks her newfound beau if he was happy on his “plant.” She also tells him she was thinking the “same sing.” Meanwhile, the film’s insights into the female psyche continue apace. For instance, at one point Patterson reveals that there’s no girl waiting for him back home.
Talleah: “I’m glad you said that. I vould be terribly jealous!”
Patterson: “Talleah, you’re amazing! Why, you know on Earth a woman would rather die than show her real feelings?”
They starting making out, at which we cut over to Motiya and Cruze mooning at one another. Glancing aside, Motiya notes “I think the fire is going out.” ( What do you think Cruze’s comeback is? Think hard.) “No it isn’t,” he replies. Then he realizes she actually means the fire is going out, probably from the shrill burst of ‘comedy music’ that blurts across the soundtrack….
Here we see Talleah confronting Yllana; the uprising begins. As usual Yllana (the communists/the Soviets) doesn’t seem to get it, pointing out that the people love her and she has “kept the peace” (who liberated you guys from the Nazis anyway?…). She refuses all compromise (such as a revolutionary government of national inclusion and reconciliation).
Talleah speaks of the thousands who wish to be free of Yllana’s rule. For her part, the Queen doesn’t believe it. “My subjects are grateful to me,” she exclaims, “I’ve kept peace.” “Peace isn’t enough,” Konrad interjects. “They must also be content.” Talleah agrees, adding “We can’t be happy without men!” Upon which Turner gets the last word. “You’re so right, baby!”
Patterson offers Yllana a chance to save her life. (Shouldn’t that decision be up to the locals? You’d think.) First, she’s to order the crew readying the Disintegrator to stand down. Second, to order the release of the Venusian men being held up on the satellite. Whereupon they can come back down and get back to running things, I assume.
An apparently chastened Yllana goes over and lies down on her divan. Once there, however, she surreptitiously reaches for a ray gun kept under her pillow. (Yeah, that’s safe.) I’m not sure what she intends to do, since she’s rather outnumbered and out armed. Presumably she just wants to reap her revenge on Patterson. Or maybe I’m thinking about this more than the filmmakers did. In any case, she proves a rather poor shot. With seven targets huddled together in a fairly small room, she manages to disintegrate a lamp.
They disarm her, but she promises to have the last laugh. The order to halt the preparation of the Beta Disintegrator can only come from her, she says. (Of course, if they just killed her…never mind.) The clever Talleah isn’t easily thwarted, however. “And the orders are going to come from Yllana,” she promises in a sly voice. I think you can see where this is going….
In the midst of this heavy allegory, let us pause for a moment to appreciate Zsa Zsa’s acting prowess, as “Jabootu” highlights in the next passage:
Talleah reenters the room, clad in Yllana’s mask and a tight and sparkly black dress. (The latter will no doubt aid in her deception, because nothing says ‘authority’ like a high leg slit and a hint of décolletage.) The disguise amazes Patterson. “You look like her twin sister!” he exclaims. Yes, it’s amazing how one stacked blonde wearing a mask will eerily resemble another stacked blonde wearing a mask. The resemblance is so pristine, in fact, that Patterson believes they should try to bluff their way into the Beta Installation itself. That way the weapon can be permanently destroyed.
Kaeel and Motiya are sent ahead to announce the ersatz Queen’s imminent arrival. This gives Patterson the chance to tell Talleah that he loves her. Zsa Zsa’s acting here is worth noting. She leans back her head (Fleming is quite taller than she is), assumes a look of blank adoration and then pauses, as if playing freeze tag. “Love!” she replies. “I’d almost forgotten. But if it is that varm feeling that makes my heart sing…then I do love you!” OK, got it, Love is a warm feeling that makes the heart sing. But what’s this nauseous feeling that’s making my stomach lurch? Anyhoo, after fervid declarations of mutual devotion they embrace passionately and do that ‘50s thing where they turn their heads away from each other and press the sides of their faces together.
As they leave we get certain hints where this is going. Patterson arms the masked Talleah — she’s the Queen; they’re her prisoners – and tells the other men to leave their weapons behind. That’s one problem with skintight space uniforms, I guess. Then the camera cuts significantly to Yllana, somewhat haphazardly bound and gagged behind a dressing screen.
Here the other members of the Council — they all wear masks, so we know who they are — enter the room. Why? Talleah orders them to leave. It’s amazing. The film features mini-skirted space amazons and cheesy giant spiders and a planet Venus that sports a breathable atmosphere. And yet the silliest moment might be here, as we watch Talleah, thick Hungarian accent and all, attempt to vocally impersonate Yllana. You’d think the moment she opened her mouth the jig would be up, but no. While the women look vaguely confused, as if pondering whether there was something different about their Queen, Yllana kicks over the dressing screen she’s none-too-cleverly been ‘hidden’ behind. At this point Talleah still has the drop on the mostly unarmed group, but apparently it would be too violent to just start blasting them down. (Besides, Talleah’s a girl, and it’s not in her nature.) So Our Protagonists find themselves captives again.
One of Hollywood’s legendary feuds: Betty Page and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Needless to say, Yllana has the group executed on the spot, before they can again escape or gain the upper hand. Oh, wait, no she doesn’t. She’s still on that “You’ll watch me destroy the Earth, then I’ll kill you” kick. When are these Evil Despots going to learn? And speaking of making the same mistake more than once, Yllana cozies up to Patterson yet again. (Perhaps she got hot and bothered from being tied up. People in positions of authority often enjoy the kinkiness of being dominated.)…
Of course, this is the 1950s fantasy world, and the evil Yllana is overthrown, Talleah’s resistance triumphant…all of which leads to a predictable James Bond-like conclusion (or Star Trek’s captain James T. Kirk, as the author suggests) in which the Earthmen are stranded with scantily clad women for the indefinite future.
Cut to the Council Chamber. All the women who aren’t hideously scarred freaks, including the bodyguards who just moments earlier appeared quite ferociously loyal to their Queen, are happily chatting away with the Earthmen and each other. This established, a curtain parts and Talleah, clad in a golden gown, enters the room. She is, big surprise, the new Queen, with Kaeel, Motiya and a few extras joining as council members.
Talleah sadly notes that the Earthmen’s rocket has been repaired, and that they’re soon to depart. Assuming that this took some time, I have to wonder why there are no Venusian men present. Shouldn’t they have been released from the satellite by now? Anyhoo. Talleah runs over for a final almost-sorta embrace with Patterson. “I don’t want to go,” he explains. “I want to stay here with you.” Meanwhile, Turner’s feeding an equivalent line to Kaeel. Eventually Patterson looks around for his junior officer and sees them smooching in a fashion that suggests he dropped his keys down Kaeel’s throat and is now trying to extricate them with his tongue.
As the sad-faced crew prepares to depart, Talleah is told that a message has arrived from Earth. Activating the Televiewer, we cut first to a shot of Earth and then right to the desk of the guys’ Base Commander. (That’s some zoom mechanism.) He orders the crew to hang around Venus until a relief expedition arrives. The women all seem happy enough with the news, so I guess no one’s going to point out that perhaps they should be consulted before the nations of Earth start sending ships over willy-nilly. Turner and Kaeel, meanwhile, have taken the opportunity to resume their public make-out session. Isn’t this guy supposed to be on duty or something? Damn, Patterson, you sure are one poor-ass excuse for a commanding officer. On the other hand, the Base Commander can presumably see all this through his end of the Televiewer set-up, and he doesn’t say anything, so apparently he doesn’t care either. It’s like an entire space fleet of especially nitwitted Jim Kirks. (http://www.jabootu.com/queen.htm)
Commericalism and the need to sell theater seats, of course, required a happy-ending that did not occur in real life, but this should not detract from either Zsa Zsa’s Oscar-worthy performance of Talleah or the caustic allegory beneath the movie’s deceptive exterior. And you say you thought this was just a bad sci-fi movie with a Hungarian actress playing an alien scientist. And I take it you also think “I am the Walrus” is a bunch of intentional gibberish dreamt up by John Lennon to confound the press and the Beatles’ critics!
“To Be Hungarian Is Not Enough…”: Hollywood and Hungarians
As is to be expected of spacetravelers, Hungarians claim to have founded certain places…one of them being Hollywood. Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures, one of the early Hungarians in Hollywood is said to have had on the wall of his office an inscription: “TO BE A HUNGARIAN IS NOT ENOUGH.” To this George Marx adds, “in a low voice Adolph would add, ‘but it may help’” (http://www.mek.iif.hu/kiallit/tudtor/tudos1/martians.html). He continues, “Non-Hungarians in Hollywood used to say, “If you have a Hungarian friend, you don’t need an enemy.” The MGM commissary was said to have a sign which read, “Just because you’re Hungarian, doesn’t mean you’re a genius!” (http://www.webenetics.com/hungary/filmsartsandmedia.html).
The influence of Hungarians on Hollywood is astounding. In 1996, the Associated Press reported that of the 136 Oscar nominations since 1929, Hungarians had won 30 of them (http://www.webenetics.com/hungary/filmsartsandmedia.html). Some of the names are more familiar than others. George Cukor—not to be confused with the aforementioned Adolph Zukor, “Mr. Motion Pictures,” founder of Paramount Pictures, and producer of perhaps the first film “Prisoner of Zenda”—captured five best director nominations, including for My Fair Lady (’Enry ’Iggins says of Zoltan Karpathy: “Every time we looked around there he was that hairy hound from Budapest. Never leaving us alone, never have I ever known a ruder pest.”). William Fox of “20th Century Fox” was born near Tokaj, Hungary, famous for its sweet wines. Among the better-known actors other than Bela Lugosi (born Bela Blasko) and the Gabor clan, we can name Leslie Howard, born Laszlo Steiner, and Tony Curtis, born Bernard Schwartz (born in Budapest, fluent in Hungarian), and Peter Lorre.
(http://www.mek.iif.hu/kiallit/tudtor/tudos1/martians.html).
Speaking of Bela Lugosi…there is the following unforgettable exchange between Johnny Depp playing legendary B-moviemaker Ed Wood and Martin Landau (himself of interplanetary space travel frequently) in his Oscar-winning protrayal of aging, foul-mouthed, bitter, and morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” (1994):
[Ed and Bela are watching Vampira's TV show.]
Ed Wood: Oh, I hate it when she interrupts the picture. She doesn’t show ‘em the proper respect.
Bela Lugosi: I think she’s a honey. Look at those jugs!
[Bela Lugosi casts a love spell on Vampira who is on TV while moving his fingers like Dracula]
Edward D. Wood, Jr.: My Gosh, Bela, how do you do that?
Bela Lugosi: You must be double-jointed. And you must be Hungarian. [!]
Some “Hungarians” famous in film and television will come as a surprise. Drew Barrymore’s mother was Ildiko Jaid Mako. Jerry Seinfeld might talk about Ceausescu above, but his father was named Kalman Seinfeld. Paul Newman’s mother was Hungarian. And half of the famed animator set behind “The Simpsons” and a series of other cartoons, Klasky Csupo—Gabor Csupo—is a Hungarian (he fled Hungary in 1975 hiking through a 2 ½ hours through a darkened railway tunnel to Austria).
The trivia of all these cases is to say the least entertaining. Other great finds on the http://www.webenetics.com/hungary/famous.html site are the following. Ilona Staller, aka Ciccolina, of blue movies and green politics, had a red father—a member of the early communist Interior Ministry. And Juan Epstein’s mother—whose signature concluded every excuse note Juan Epstein brought to class in the 1970s ABC sitcom “Welcome back, Kotter!”—is in fact Hungarian, Juan Epstein having been played by Robert Hegyes.
“What’s that? Hungarian roots?”: Budapest and Wanting the Other MTV
Then there are the Hungarian roots of rock and pop stars. Appropriately enough, while Art Garfunkel is of Romanian Jewish ancestry, Paul Simon is of Hungarian Jewish ancestry. Tommy Ramone, drummer for “The Ramones,” was born with the more sedate name of Thomas Erdelyi. We can salute Gene Simmons of KISS (or should it have been KISz?) as half-Hungarian, and you might find it ironic, but you ought to know that Alanis Morissette is supposedly half Hungarian. It also turns out that the father of the Knopfler brothers of the “Dire Straits” band was a Hungarian Jew who fled the Nazis to Glasgow in 1939.
The Hungarian tie of “Dire Straits” is interesting—even if probably entirely incidental—in light of the “video within a video” of the band’s most famous commercial/video success, “Money for Nothing (1985).” “Money for Nothing” is better known for its line “I want my MTV”—brilliant and somewhat satirical marketing, mention the video channel coming of age in an iconic way in your song/video and you will guarantee play there. (It was also the first video played when MTV Europe debuted on 1 August 1987—for those too young to remember, MTV, no not Magyar Televizio, was a brief experiment in playing something called “music videos” until reality shows killed the music video star). The premise, the inspiration of “Money for Nothing,” was a bunch of workers moving appliances and commenting while, as it turns outs, watching Sting’s “The Russians” video on a wall of TV screens (http://www.dsrc.com.br/page/stpent.htm). (Ooohhhh, Sting mentioned the Russians, do they really love their children too? Ooooohhhhh, how daring…because I’m sure the Russians do love their children too…1985, the eighties, ugh). I had always wondered about “the video within the video” since the bikini-clad “mama she got it stickin’ in the camera lens” model appears to be posing in the Halaszbastya (Fisherman’s Bastion on the Buda side of Budapest) which I had then just recently visited (May 1985, the video came out in September 1985). Turns out I wasn’t hallucinating for as Dennis O’Connell writes:
The video was produced by Steve Barron, who envisioned that the entire video be computer animated. The band wanted a live video. The final product was a mix: footage from Budapest enhanced by computers along with a computer generated character, Sal, which was inspired by Joe Pesci’s character in Raging Bull. (Dennis O’Connell, “Top ten music videos of the 1980s.” at http://askmen.com/toys/top_10/34b_top_10_list.html)
Sting, the object of the workers’ derision that gave rise to the song, performs back up vocals on “Money for Nothing.” Briging everything full circle, my Russian History professor in college decided to open his semester with “Money for Nothing” blaring as students entered the classroom.
Camp. La(s)zlo
In keeping with the alien riff, Hungarians love their inside jokes. The crowd-favorite, sentimentalist Hollywood film, “Casablanca,” with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman (nope, neither of them Hungarian), was directed by Michael Curtiz (Kertesz). S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall, a Hungarian stage actor, played the role of Karl, the kindly Austrian waiter in Rick’s Café (http://www.webenetics.com/hungary.filmsartsandmedia.html). The famous historian John Lukacs (author of Budapest 1900) among others has argued that there is a typical Hungarian inside joke in this film—or at least the film bears the marks of its Hungarian director. Ingrid Bergman’s underground, Czech resistance leader husband in the film is named Victor Laszlo. Now, of course, as Lukacs notes—personally, he describes the movie as “imbecile”—“Laszlo” is neither a first nor last name in Czech. It is, however a sometimes last name, but frequent first-name in Hungarian—and Curtiz was surrounded “by a slew of Hungarian scriptwriters in Hollywood, many of whose first names were Laszlo” (Lukacs, 1989, pp. 178-179). Hence, the name in the film. (There is also a popular contemporary cartoon named “Camp Lazlo,” but Lazlo is a Brazilian spider monkey, and as far as I can tell there is in no conscious Hungarian connection behind the name choice.)
But I would argue there are even better inside Hungarian jokes than that of “Victor Laszlo” woven into movies, as I will now demonstrate.
The Boy Named Wolf in Hungarian Who Made Ralphie Cry…
It took over 30,000 feet, several time zone changes, and countless years to figure it out. A few years ago (2001) I was flying out west and scanning the music channels for the headphones. On the classical music channel I suddenly came upon a familiar tune. Yes, there it was: the tune that would repeat everytime the school bully would appear in the lovable, sentimental, nostalgia-fest for a life that few of us ever lived, that is “A Christmas Story (1983).” I thought I recognized the music: it was Sergei Prokofiev’s famous “Peter and the Wolf,” and the theme—that which Prokofiev used for the wolf—became the school bully’s signature in the film. Upon the first hearing of this tune, when the school bully makes his first frightening appearance, the reminiscing “Ralphie,” the little boy who is the main protagonist of the movie, exclaims, “it was Farkas, Scott Farkas, the school bully…he had yellow eyes, yellow eyes I tell you.” (Ralphie’s younger brother, Randy “lay there like a slug…it was his only defense”!)
(Spoiler Warning!: When I came to this personal epiphany in 2001, and even while I was writing this article in 2005, there was no indication on the Internet that anybody else had recorded this observation, which led me to question whether an overactive imagination had gotten the best of me yet again. What a great difference two years can be in the Internet age: now a google search for “farkas wolf ‘christmas story’ prokofiev” yields 123 hits, beginning with the wikipedia entry for the film!)
Why is this important you ask? Well, if you know Hungarian, you will know that “farkas” is the Hungarian word for “wolf.” Therefore, to play the theme of the “wolf” from Prokofiev’s work—a piece drafted, it would appear, for children to learn the various instruments of an orchestra—is to play an obscure “inside joke” on the viewers of the film. (Making it even better is the fact that the actor who plays the part of Ralphie is Peter! Billingsley.) Jean Shepherd, upon whose book the movie is based—and who also narrates the film from the perspective of an adult Ralphie looking back on his childhood—appears to have chosen the name of the bully, “Scott (Scut) Farkas,” himself. The story is set in 1940s northwestern Indiana—significantly, Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” debuted in 1936 and became the subject of a Disney cartoon—so the presence of people of Hungarian ancestry and last names is plausible.
It is always possible that the Prokofiev-wolf-farkas nexus is just an unintentional, if very witty happenstance. But the idea of it having been one of the ultimate Hungarian “inside jokes”—although Jean Shepherd does not appear to have been Hungarian himself—is enhanced by the comparatively unknown and definitely less memorable sequel to “A Christmas Story,” “It Runs in the Family (1994),” in which Ralphie’s father recounts the story of “the Hungarian barber’s cross-eyed daughter.” Shepherd died in 1999, but as with many common last names from other cultures—and farkas can perhaps be deemed one of those—growing up with Hungarian acquaintances it is conceivable that Shepherd would have known the meaning of the name in Hungarian.
“Honky”: The Hungarian Roots of a Racial Epithet
Speaking of the Hungarian(-American) “working class” in the Chicago environs. According to the entry on the wikipedia: Honky, Honkey or Honkie is an American racial slur for a Caucasian, usually applied to males. The word “honky” as a pejorative for Caucasians comes from “bohunk” and “hunky”. In the early 1900’s, these were derogatory terms for Bohemian, Hungarian, and Polish immigrants. According to Robert Hendrickson, author of the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, Black workers in Chicago meat-packing plants picked up the term from white workers and began applying it indiscriminately to all Caucasians.
Honky, was later adopted as a pejorative meaning white, in 1967 by black militants within SNCC seeking a rebuttal for the term nigger. They settled on a familiar word they felt was disparaging to certain Americans of European descent; hunkie meaning an American of Slavic or Hungarian descent. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honky )
In the Simpsons cartoon series, Homer Simpson is fond of saying when something goes wrong, particularly at the nuclear power plant where he works, “blame it on Tibor, the guy who doesn’t speak English.” One can imagine that this is something of an inside joke among the creators of the Simpsons, since the chief cartoonist Gabor Csupo is Hungarian (supposedly Hank Azaria’s character Dr. Nick Riviera, a quack physician, is supposed to be a parody of Ricky Ricardo on “I Love Lucy”—“Hi e-ver-y-bo-dy!”—but coworkers just assumed he was making fun of Gabor. Personally, I have always thought he sounds oddly like Andrei Codrescu on NPR…) According to the online urban dictionary of slang (http://www.urbandictionary.com), “blame it on…Tibor” has entered at least some marginal popular discourse as shorthand for blaming the foreigner—thus in keeping perhaps, unintentionally, with the roots of “Honky”:
A tibor is someone in your office whom you blame when you have done something stupid, illegal, or immoral. Typically the person is someone who cannot defend themself. Especially effective when the Tibor cannot speak English. “You’ll have to jiggle the handle. That idiot, Tibor, lost the key.” (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tibor)
Part V: Weapons of the “Weak” and When Images Don’t Travel Well through Space or Time
The Uses of Images by Hungarians and Romanians: Who’s Exploiting Whom?
“Goulash cruises” on the not-so-blue Danube, “gypsies” fiddling Liszt and Brahms’ rhapsodies, wine and palinka flowing quicker than the river and the fingers of the fiddlers—“tipsy tourists,” that tune that is music to the ears of the restauranteur the world over—Zsa Zsa Gabor walking tours, communist theme pizza parlors and statue parks—who exactly is exploiting whom here? Yes, locals are boxed; yes, they prostrate and prostitute themselves for cash; yes, it is demeaning. But as we know, “the weapons of the weak,” knowing how to “flip the script,” blue collar justice…they are all here too. The locals sneer beneath their smiles and look down at the drunken, dumpy tourists emptying their wallets of bills and coins whose values they have quickly forgotten, if they ever knew them at all—although the Euro has put some end to the dimensions of this hijinks. Should the much ballyhooed (see Elizabeth B. Miller’s chronology of this saga) “Dracula-land” ever become a reality in Romania, and even if it never turns a profit, it is still a certainty that it will have drained a good sum of money out of backpackers there to say they experienced the tackiness in person, journalists in search of the pun to end all puns on the subject, and perhaps a goth here and there.
Individuals—especially emigres who can play to an American audience reared on such images—can use these ethnonational images to good effect for their own benefit. We have already encountered Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky. As we saw, it didn’t matter that his Hungarianness was only an afterthought to his “mad” personality: the image was useful. Thus, did he wear the “Gyspy Rose of Death” ring of which he says: “I don’t even remember the stupid story I made up for that, it was so far-fetched—probably a family heirloom of Dracula.” Anything to get an edge, to distract and intimidate a competitor—but in this case that meant conjuring up an ethnonational image: the rationality and clever calculation of simulated madness.
Similarly, Romanians have used their “tempermental,” “emotional” “Latinness” to their advantage. The renowned “British” actor Sir Peter Ustinov, an avid tennis fan, shortly before his death, reminiscing about Wimbledon, contrasted “the volcanic Irish temper” of John “You can’t be serious…” McEnroe and even Jimmy Connors with the Romanian tennis star of the 1970s Ilie “Nasty” Nastase: “Ilie Nastase, however, became ‘nasty’ and premeditated. He became his own commercial, a caricature of himself. Gamesmanship became his game” (Brendan Gallagher, The Daily Telegraph, 24 June 2002). Another source termed Nastase and Connors as “calculated…If their opponent got on a roll and they felt the match slipping away, they would find something to scream about” (http://www.geocities.com/vegasarchivist.players.html). Simon Turnbull said of Nastase: “Nastase abused officials, mocked opponents and turned on any member of the paying public who dared to bait him” (The Independent, 22 June 1997). According to Robert Philip,
the Romanian was the first player to transcend the sport as entertainer, sex symbol, serial carouser and trouble-maker. At the height of his bad-boy image, “Nasty” could have started an argument on an empty court and even Muhammad Ali acknowledged him as the main rival in the art of making headlines [--Ali supposedly approached him at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas with the line “Hey, you the big mouth in tennis?…] (The Daily Telegraph, 19 June 2004).
Nastase effectively used the image of his “Romanianness” to his advantage in much the way Hrabosky did his “Hungarianness.”
When it comes to using the images of the “old country” to one’s own benefit, however, it is difficult to surpass another Romanian “bad-boy,” the brilliant and highly entertaining poet and commentator, Andrei Codrescu. His deep, gravelly voice seems to emerge from the mists “beyond the forest”—which is, of course, exactly the atmosphere he wishes to create for his listeners. Many, especially white, upper-middle class Americans, probably know him from his periodic commentaries on National Public Radio, and he may be one of the better known Romanian-Americans or Romanians in general.
It is amazing the authority and credibility—or lack thereof—that can come from voice and use of language alone. For a long time after I first heard Codrescu, I was convinced that this was someone “just off the boat.” His voice, use of language, and his clear power of observation instantly seemed to signal deep understanding and insight into Romanian politics. I was shocked then to find out—as many people are after hearing him talk about the Ceausescu era as though he lived through it—that Codrescu was 19 when he left the country in 1966 and did not return, understandably, until after the Revolution broke out in December 1989. True, Codrescu does not attempt to hide that he has not lived in Romania for almost four decades; but he also clearly believes, and wants his audience to believe, that his being Romanian infuses his claims about Romanian politics and history with super-size authority. Codrescu’s uberconfidence about all things Romanian political and historical comes through nowhere more clearly than when he talks about the Romanian Revolution of December 1989—with, I would argue, tragically misguided consequences for his, and thus his readers’, understanding of those seminal events.
(The joke is ultimately on Codrescu, who combines that most dangerous mix of glibness, arrogance, belief in what was told to him personally by word of mouth, and history by intuition and impression…although sadly it is doubtful he will ever get the joke. He has, however, provided us with some of the best, most involuntary humor in the historiography of the events: “tourists are terrorists and terrorists are tourists with guns” (for a discussion see Hall 2002 and Hall 2005).)
Beyond Codrescu’s voice in his NPR commentaries, he fully exploits the gammut of Romanian images in the U.S. For example, he has written a novel about the Blood Countess, Elizabeth de Bathory, which, thankfully, is considered fiction and not history. Before he returned to Romania for public broadcasting’s FRONTLINE in 2002, he told an interviewer: “For an American audience, Romania is quickly becoming some kind of dark cloud whence descend, in order, Dracula, orphans, crazed gymnasts and absurdist writers [I am unclear of the “crazed” descriptor of gymnasts, although it could be a reference to Nadia Comaneci’s ill-fated daliance with the Romanian-American father of four back in 1989]” (http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/romania/interview.html). Yet it is interesting to note one of the reviews of his “Romania: My Old Haunts” on the PBS homepage:
The problem with Codrescu’s story is the fact that he has followed too closely the typical Western press approach to Romania: Dracula, gypsies, women working abroad as exotic dancers, etc. Only the orphans were missing. Romania has so many other things to offer, besides those mentioned above [a reference to other postings] and good pretzels. Why not show those also? How about a story on the country’s brilliant students or rich cultural heritage? Codrescu’s approach only reinforces Western images of Romania. (posted by Sebastian Burca – Chicago, Illinois; emphasis added) [Mr. Burca is indeed correct in reference to the observation on the country’s brilliant students; it is amazing the presence and impact they have made in the social sciences (what I am familiar with) in the U.S., and from what I can tell, in computer science and mathematics, among other disciplines. Not surprisingly, behind Indians, Romanians are said to be the second largest foreign ethnic group represented on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington (300 according to at least one source).]
On the one hand, it seems somewhat unfair to criticize Codrescu for his focus on images that he did not create and in which American audiences continue to exhibit interest. He is merely using what is available to him, and satirizing America’s obsession with them, as well as the kitschy, absurd character of some of the images themselves. But it is also, perhaps, a window to the fact that Codrescu is as much, if not more, an American than a Romanian, and that Romania has become merely a stage for his literary skills, almost incidental to the plot [just as it was for Bram Stoker and the others constructionists focus upon]. In the final analysis, Codrescu exploits to good measure many of the images he deplores, and smugly seems to attribute to the unwashed, ignorant American massess—in this he would probably be joined by a good number of his NPR listeners. “Romania,” the idea, has been “very, very good” (business) to Codrescu.
Of, For, and By the Elite—and thus of Limited Impact
The cultural cognescenti of Hungarians and Romanians are likely to have been disappointed and perhaps surprised by my discussion so far. Where is the discussion of famous Hungarians and Romanians in literature, classical music and opera, and the arts in general? Like it or not, these high culture forms rarely penetrate the broader popular consciousness outside of their home countries and thus although the names below may be famous they are not necessarily associated with their ethnicity.
Focusing on music and art alone, many Hungarians and Romanians will be known by the reader. Bartok, Kodaly, and Ligeti are likely familiar to those interested in classical music—and even if they are not, they are likely familiar with their music, for example, the brilliant use of the second movement of Bartok’s Orchestra for Strings, Percussion, and Celestra in the eeriest scenes of “The Shining (1980).” George S(z)ell, Sir George Solti, Eugene Ormandy, Christian von Dohnanyi are just a few to have made their mark as conductors. In more modern terms, many people may know Carol Sebestyen and Muzsikas (the music of which appears in The English Patient, complete with its Hungarian character, Count Almassy). But to the extent that the broader popular culture is aware of “Hungarian music,” I venture to guess the older, aforementioned dueling Liszt Rhapsody-laden Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry cartoons of the late 1940s has played a greater direct role.
Among Romanians, in music, one can mention the composer George Enescu, the conductor Sergiu Celibidache, or the pianist Radu Lupu. In letters and the arts, there are Eugen(e) Ionesco, Mircea Eliade, and Brancusi. Even the title of the “dada” movement is sometimes ascribed to its foundational Romanian members, Tristan Tzara and Marcel Iancu—“da da” being Romanian for “yes yes.” It is true, however, and bears further study, that noted Romanian personalities such as Ionesco or Brancusi, are known often not as Romanians, because of their time spent abroad and in the case of authors such as Ionescu, because they chose to write in French. This may owe something to the insularity and difference of the Hungarian language and pentatonic music scale and its impact on Hungarian identity, and to the extreme obsession of Romania’s intelligentsia—more muted, particularly among the younger generation, but still pronounced—with all things French.
Different Strokes…for Different Folks
Related to the issue of elite vs. popular images and the fact that the twain may never meet between the two, is the temporal nature of these associations and that they are often generationally-bound. For example, on tourist websites, do people mention Dvorak or Smetana or Kafka or Kundera or Forman or Havel, or even Svejk, when they think of the Czechs they are going to visit. Apparently not: “My perceptions were distorted because I could not shake the comedy influence of a 70’s American TV show (Saturday Night Live) featuring ‘Two Wild and Crazy Czech Guys!’” (posted by “Richmond” at http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/Europe/Czech_Republic/Nightlife-Czech_Republic-BR-1.html)
Dan Akroyd describes here how this comedy skit about two “Czech brothers”—despite their omnipresent references to life back home in Bratislava—was in fact like Stoker’s Dracula a somewhat accidental hodgepodge invention. Akroyd played Georg Festrunk and Steve Martin, Yortuk Festrunk (not exactly Czech-sounding names!):
“I had no idea the ‘Czech Brothers’ would be as popular as they are,” says Aykroyd. “Steve had a character called the ‘Continental Suave Guy’; I saw him do in his act one night and I really enjoyed it. I went backstage afterward and I said “Listen, I do this Czech architect”…I’d noticed a tremendous similarity in the rhythms of Steve’s character and I said, “Let’s put them together as Czechs who wear polyester shirts and everything!” It didn’t work that well with the studio audience the first time we did it on the show, but then we got so much feedback from people who wathced it on TV. Phew! Really blew me away! http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/2976/RS.html
Clearly, though, the Festrunk brothers’ erroneous association as “Czechs” is generational. Younger people with little memory of early Saturday Night Live or Czechoslovakia probably have never heard of them.
Generation…Next!
If foreigners are to know “Romanian music,” one would hope perhaps that it would be the scalp- and spine-tingling melodies of Maria Tanase. But that is unlikely and only for a certain generation. For those over 30 or so, the Romanian musician they are perhaps most likely to know is that of (Gheorghe) Zamfir, the pan flute artist. Back in the days of K-tel records, Ron Popeil (aka Bob Woodward), and the amazing Bassomatic ’76—perhaps even before Andean bands at metro stops playing Simon and Garfunkel’s “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail”…or commuter trapped to hear this song yet again—there was Zamfir, Master of the Pan Flute. As Steve Huey recalls, “In the United States, ubiquitous TV commercials for his albums made Zamfir a household name (http://shopping.yahoo.com/p:Zamfir:1927117326:page=biography).” Back in 1986, Michael Small of People Magazine wrote:
Fans who hear it on their record players claim it soothes the soul like a sweet birdcall. Critics, who often hear it in elevators or the dentist’s office, say it sounds like somebody blowing into a Coke bottle. Either way, the man who creates the odd musical noises in question has become a most unlikely celebrity to millions of Americans who have been subjected to a three-year barrage of TV ads for his album, “The Magic of Zamfir.” He is the undisputed king of the pan flute. (http://panflute.net/zamfir/zamfir.html)
Timothy Borden details more specifically the centrality—but also the campy, disingenuous quality—of the commercials:
Entering into a contract with Heartland Records, he agreed to record some popular and traditional standards for release by the label, which was owned by Lawrence Welk, Jr., son of the famous bandleader. The connection to the easylistening Welks did not do much for Zamfir’s musical credibility; nor did the manner in which the records were marketed. On commercials that typically aired in late-night slots on cable television, the ads showed Zamfir playing his pan pipes while an announcer intoned, “Relax, as Zamfir sweeps you away to a world of haunting, tranquil beauty.” The ads also claimed that Zamfir had sold tens of millions of records around the world, a statement that the record company was unable to substantiate. Estimates of the number of records that Zamfir sold in the American market ranged from 750,000 to one million albums in the 1980s. (http://arts.enotes.com/contemporary-musicians/zamfir-gheorghe-biography)
If many know Zamfir for his music, far fewer probably know of his more recent, unwanted publicity. Despite apparently having a Jewish wife, Zamfir, “occasionally publishes ultranationalist articles in the Greater Romania Party’s weekly Romania Mare” and was reportedly denied entry to Israel in November 2002, because Romanian Jews in Israel had protested his alleged anti-Semitic views and denial of the Holocaust in Romania (Michael Shafir, “Israel Refuses Entry to Pan-Flute Virtuoso Zamfir,” 25 November 2002, http://www.hri.org/news/balkans/rferl/2002/02-11-25.rferl.html).
But even Zamfir and Nadia are unkowns to a younger generation. A better point of reference of something Romanian, at least in the UK, might be the teenage twin sister pop duet, “Cheeky Girls” (the fact that their mother is an ethnic Hungarian, that they studied Hungarian dance, and that they performed for the Hungarian national opera (conveniently) being muted in discussions of them; they do appear to consider themselves Romanian, however, and in the final analysis, this is what matters). How far we have come then: from Neville Chamberlain stating “a quarrel in a far off country between people of whom we know nothing”—a reference to Czechoslovakia—to a Romanian teenage girl duet exhorting Britons to “Touch me bum” in their 2004 hit. But in globalization we are all, in a sense, the butt of the joke.
25.11.53 or…6 to 3
We have already touched upon here the tendency toward “occidentalism”—toward essentializing and homogenizing “the West”—in the constructionist literature on image formation of eastern Europeans, despite their attempts and protestations that they avoid this. Frame of reference, of course, can make a hell of a difference, however.
Let us take sports once again. Present an American sports fan with the names of Hungarian sports stars and coaches and even if they did not know these people were Hungarian, they are likely to know something about the people in question: from American football alone, famous Chicago Bears coach George “Papa Bear” Halas, Miami Dolphins player and coach respectively Larry Csonka and Don Shula, and New York Jets quarterback (dating him, his nickname in early post-WW II America, in high school, “the Hungarian howitzer”) Joe Namath. But these are meaningless in western Europe and elsewhere.
Years ago when I was first becoming infatuated with Eastern Europe—and before the age of the Internet, where “the search engine” referred to yourself tracking down book, articles, films, and people in person—I had the pleasure of finding a Hungarian film “Meg all az Ido (Time Stands Still) (1981, directed by Peter Gothar).” It is a “coming of age” movie that recounts the events of November 1963 among a circle of teenagers. If I remember correctly (I apologize here, I have not seen the film in years and my memory may be a bit hazy on certain elements) there is no direct mention of the year, but at one point, as one of the boys is getting treated by his mother after having burned himself on the bathroom water heater (an incident that I am sure all too many people in a Hungarian audience could relate too), in the background of their apartment the radio announces the assassination of President Kennedy. Even without that reference, we know from the beginning of the movie with its flashbacks to 1956 and the return of people who had been imprisoned that we are in the amnesty period, the first fruits of Kadar’s so-called “Alliance Policy” inaugurated in 1962 (first announced in his famous “he who is not against us, is with us” Party speech in December 1961…perhaps the best succint characterization of the apoliticism an authoritarian regime is willing to live with and even embrace, but that a totalitarian regime cannot abide) (The 25th anniversary of the film in October 2006 was marked by the weekly HVG “Huszonöt éves a Megáll az idő
Emlékszel Szukics Magdára?” 2006. október 17. http://hvg.hu/awan2megmondja/20061017megallwan2.aspx).
There was also a memorable school scene in which a teacher-mentor confronts one of the teenagers, expressing his disappointment in the boy’s behavior, while both are in line holding candles. At the time, I could not figure out what the event was. I thought to myself, it had to be some kind of event, anomalous or even Party-sponsored that, given its timing in November, must have offered a great opportunity as a subversive, allegorical platform for November 1956, when the Soviets crushed the shortlived uprising. Only later did I realize that, of course, it was All Saints Day, 1 November, a religious (Catholic) holiday on which, at least in Europe, people bring lighted candles to the cemeteries in memory of the dead. I still wonder to this day, but have never read anything specifically on it, if the timing—which as we know well is everything—in between the dates of the Revolution, and when the Soviets were crossing into Hungary, to
enter Budapest on 4 November (1956), was used in later years to turn the event into just what I had thought it was—a well-timed proxy for honoring the 1956 rebellion and those who had fallen in it. (Other events, such as 16 June or 23 October, in the Hungarian historical lexicon of significant anniversaries during the communist era, did not offer the same type of opportunity for dissidence because of where they fell on the calendar).
But the event that should have clarified the setting of the film, even in the absence of the aforementioned details, was one that baffled me at the time. In the high school, one of the teenagers essentially hijacks the reading of the school’s morning announcements over the public address system, shouting into the microphone, every pop-cultural, dissident reference he could utter before he is dragged out—an event that has of course universal appeal in terms of the teenager-authority/school relationship. One of the things he shouted with great glee, as if the crescendo of his heroic act, was “Hungary 6 England 3…Hungary 6 England 3.” What did it mean? Why would someone use such an incident—even in a fictional account—to give a sports score update?!
“Long live the morons! Let there be nothing! C’mon Let’s Twist Again! Blueberry Hill! Down with the babies! Long live chicks! Hungary 6 England 3!”
(See, for example, Imre Barna, “Csalamade,” Mozgo Vilag, at http://www.mozgovilag.hu/2001/11/nov13.htm. There seems to be some debate over the exact line; a closer remembrance seems to be found at http://www.radiocafe.hu/forum.)
A European or even international reader—particularly of a certain age—needs no explanation here. The boy was marking the 10th anniversary of perhaps the greatest victory in Hungarian soccer history, and a match of international fame—the first loss ever by the English national team on English soil in regular (non-Olympic) international play. It happened at Wembley Stadium in London on 25 November 1953. For the Hungarians, the victory could have been eclipsed a year later in the 1954 World Cup held in Switzerland, but the heavily-favored Hungarians blew a lead, losing to the West Germans, and for any Hungarian soccer fan, apparently ushering in a steady downward spiral to today’s national soccer oblivion (“hat, Richard, olyan gyenge a magyar foci…”) (for Hungarian soccer, 1954 is the equivalent of the defeat at Mohacs in 1526). (For a wonderful recounting of how Hungary stood still for the game, see the childhood reminiscences of Laszlo Hovanyecz, “Ketszer is adtunk nekik,” Nepszabadsag, 22 November 2003).
The numbers, the event, have no meaning to most Americans, but they are not nearly so obscure to other English-speaking peoples. When Hungary entered the European Union on 1 May 2004, Ireland held the EU Presidency. A journalist for the Hungarian daily, Nepszabadsag, went to Sligo (my mother’s home town as it turns out) in the west of Ireland to find out what people knew of and thought about Hungary (Laszlo Szocs, “Ahern: Majus 1., a remeny napja,” Nepszabadsag, 3 May 2004). “Puskas, Bozsik, Hidegkuti”—not Zsa Zsa or goulash or even the 1956 Revolution—is what they responded. (When Ferenc Puskas died in November 2006, Hungarian PM Ferenc Gyurcsany described him as “the best-known Hungarian of the 20th century”!). A civil servant from the town told another Hungarian reporter: “We have been feeling as one for 51 years now: when the legendary “Golden Team” beat the English side 6:3” (Laszlo Szocs, “Az ir Sligon at lepunk az unioba. Az unnepi keszulodes mar tart, hangol a Cedrus es az Ifju Muzsikasok egyuttes,” Nepszabadsag, 17 April 2004). As the journalist wrote, “this town of 20,000 inhabitants already sympathized with us once before at the time of the 1953 England-Hungary 6:3 [match].” Of course, unexamined in the article is why the memory was so particularly well-ingrained—one cannot help but speculate that it was less the Hungarians winning than the English losing that make the event so memorable for the Irish. [“For centuries on end all we have had to see was the back of the English…” declares one resident, and thereby explaining the synergy felt in de Valera’s Ireland for Hungary in the famous match against England.]
Still, the point here, is the cultural frame of reference: that although Ireland may indeed just be “across the pond” from the US, it may be an ocean away in terms of the images of these continental Europeans.
Bloomsday…Bloody Bloomsday!
Let me attempt to bring things full-circle here. 16 June, of course, became a seminal day on the Hungarian calendar, following the execution of Imre Nagy on 16 June 1958. Thereafter, particularly at plot 301 in Rakoskeresztur cemetery where Nagy had been anonymously buried, the date became a focal point for anti-regime demonstrators in the communist era, and if there were one day that marked the turning point of the communist regime and the transition it was clearly 16 June 1989, when Nagy’s body was reinterred (for the spirit of that day, see Timothy Garton Ash’s recounting in The Magic Lantern).
Ireland was already somehow linked to Hungary via 16 June, for it was 16 June 1904 during which James Joyce’s tome Ulysses transpires:
Leopold Bloom, a fictional thirty-eight year old advertising canvasser, is the protagonist of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, assuming the role of the ‘Odysseus’ character. Born in 1866, Bloom is the only son of Rudolf Virág (a Hungarian from Szombathely who emigrated to Ireland, converted from Judaism to Protestantism, changed his name to Rudolph Bloom and, later, committed suicide) and of Ellen Higgins, an Irish Protestant. He married Marion (Molly) Tweedy on 8 October 1888. The couple have one daughter, Millicent (Milly), born in 1889; their son Rudolph (Rudy), born in December 1893, died after eleven days. The family live at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin. Ulysses focuses primarily on Bloom and on the contemporary odyssey he embarks upon through Dublin over the course of the single day of June 16, 1904, and the various types of people and themes he encounters. Joyce aficionados celebrate June 16 as ‘Bloomsday’ [from wikipedia entry on Leopold Bloom]. [author’s note: virag means flower in Hungarian]
I actually have a personal connection—albeit a most tenuous and remote one—to Joyce’s Ulysses. The passage in question appears in Chapter 7 Aeolus:
A STREET CORTEGE
Both smiled over the crossblind at the file of capering newsboys in Mr Bloom’s wake, the last zigzagging white on the breeze a mocking kite, a tail of white bowknots.
–Look at the young guttersnipe behind him hue and cry, Lenehan said, and you’ll kick. O, my rib risible! Taking off his flat spaugs and the walk. Small nines. Steal upon larks.
He began to mazurka in swift caricature across the floor on sliding feet past the fireplace to J. J. O’Molloy who placed the tissues in his receiving hands.
–What’s that? Myles Crawford said with a start. Where are the other two gone?
–Who? the professor said, turning. They’re gone round to the Oval for a drink. Paddy Hooper is there with Jack Hall. Came over last night.
–Come on then, Myles Crawford said. Where’s my hat?
He walked jerkily into the office behind, parting the vent of his jacket, jingling his keys in his back pocket. They jingled then in the air and against the wood as he locked his desk drawer.
–He’s pretty well on, professor MacHugh said in a low voice.
As Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman note in their Ulysses Annotated Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses 7.456 (130:7) “J.B. Hall. A Dublin journalist with a considerable local reputation as a raconteur.” Indeed, he appears again in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake with a quote from his Random Records of A Reporter “Yielding to no man in my absolute ignorance of the subject” (198, Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake) [For an online excerpt from Random Records, see for example “The Phoenix Park Murders”
http://indigo.ie/~kfinlay/General/phoenixmurders.htm].
Arra, by now then, he—and we—are indeed “pretty well on.” And thus it is time to turn to our conclusions…
Part VI:
Conclusions
I have argued here that the ethnonational images North Americans and western Europeans have formed of eastern (and central) Europeans over much of the past century, but particularly the past 50 years, are far more idiosyncratic than the existing constructionist literature on image formation about the region suggests. About the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s, one can argue that those who came into contact with eastern Europeans or wrote about them were an elite stratum: western emissaries or travelers to the region, intellectuals or political advocates looking for an allegorical setting in which to place their stories or argue the need for reform. From this came the view of the region as benighted, hopelessly backward and primitive, lacking in the cultural influence and behaviors of west European Christianity, “civilization,” and/or the world view and values of the Enlightenment. Alternatively, one could assert the superiority of western Europe and of the elite of which those crafting these images were members or a send-up of the stodginess and emptiness of aristocratic west European elites—and later, capitalist commercialism and materialism. Simple, (R)romantic, backward, exotic, mysterious, mystical, eastern Europe was a movable feast, a field of dreams for those in western Europe who inserted them into the west European imagination.
But the entry of a broader public—as much a product of economic as of political inclusion—into the forum of identity and image formation has changed the process and the content of those images. Before the early twentieth century, publics learned their information in an almost entirely derivative fashion: most of them couldn’t or didn’t travel to the region. They had little basis for comparison or alternative information by which to verify or challenge the images created by elites, and thus were dependent on those elites to a greater extent than today for the images of “others.” (The control of elites in image formation was reinforced for Eastern Europe from the 1950s to the 1970s in particular, when travel, contact, and information were highly rationed). What was fictional, what was allegorical, about eastern Europe and their peoples in those days was easily lost in this chain of communication down from creative intellectuals and politicians—what they wrote and said shaped the ethnonational images of the broader public precisely because the latter had little against which they could compare or test such images. (It seems plausible to argue, however, that in countries premised on immigration, such as the US, Canada, and Australia, there may have been greater opportunity for publics to form their own independent images based on personal encounters with east European immigrants. Still, de facto socio-economic and ethnic “ghettoization” inevitably limited such contacts and the diversity of images that could result from them.)
Even if the shift to film, cartoons, and television shifted control of those images to a different sort of creative intellectual and to corporate elites attempting to market to a broader audience of people willing and able to pay for a product, a public that was able to vote with its feet economically had a comparatively greater say in image formation than in the past. The crafting of ethnonational images could, of course, still be achieved by politicians, as for example arguably occurred with Romania during the 1970s and early 1980s, when Romania’s Latinness and westernness in comparison to its neighbors were heavily marketed. But ethnonational images increasingly became the epiphenomenon of celebrity and individual personality and characteristics—in essence a post-modern condition—rather than the other way around, as it can be argued was more apt to happen before the communications revolution and when the written word and artistic performance, rather than something like sports or sitcoms, ruled the day. Thus, the association of “Hungarianness” with Zsa Zsa or “Romanianness” with Nadia.
Perhaps because the study of image formation—the unwieldly “imagology”—of eastern Europe in “the West” has been the province primarily of historians and literary scholars analyzing older sources, and not of social scientists and/or those analyzing more recent sources, almost inevitably there has been a tendency to project the past onto the present—an academic version of “Groundhog Day,” where every new day is just a thinly-disguised version of yesterday—or to assume that the collective weight of whatever has been formed prevents meaningful change. This is, to say the least, problematic, and runs into some real road blocks when it tries to argue that these images have a profound effect on western foreign policy toward the region. Hence, as many have noted, the Wilsonian-inspired Czechoslovakia, the closest thing to a western democracy in the region at the time, was sacrificed, while the west European allies went to war over Poland. Romania, that resevoir of the mysterious, mist-ical emotional, cruel, and pristine, has gone over the past century from a valued member of the Little Entente, to an almost forgotten “slavicized” state in the Eastern bloc, to a Latin island in a sea of Slavs and home of famous adorable gymnasts who under the “enlightened” and courageous leadership of Nicolae Ceausescu defied the Soviet Union, to a benighted corner of Europe, home to orhpans, miners, corrupt and repressive leaders and bureaucrats, and even the Anti-Christ. (What happened?) Or Hungary, from the hordes of the Puszta to that irredentist, troublemaking ally of the Germans intent on reinstituting cultural oppresion of their neighbors, to home of a communist leadership much favored by Stalin, to site of a heroic, tragic uprising against Soviet tyranny, to the happiest-barracks-in-the-Soviet-camp and tourist haven with a reformist leadership, to, once-again depending upon who you ask, stable member of the European Union or constant irredentist troublemaker in a community of democratic states. (For an excellent discussion of the whipsaw-like toing and froing of ethnonational stereotype usage in foreign policy, and ultimately its ambiguous impact, see in particular, Piotr Wandycz “Western Images and Stereotypes of Central and Eastern Europe,” and Laszlo Maracz, “Western Images and Stereotypes of Hungarians,” in Gerrits and Adler, 1994, Vampires Unstaked: National Images, Stereotypes, and Myths in East Central Europe).
This is what happens, all-too-often, in constructionist circles: their identification of the images and analysis of how they came into being are likely accurate, but their assumption that these negative images are somehow inflexible, and strongly influence foreign policies and their justifications assumes far too much. Thus, perhaps in its supposedly most prominent recent manifestation, Robert Kaplan’s neo/nested-orientalist redux “Balkan Ghosts” becomes responsible for shaping (or at least justifying) the image of the Balkans as a place of “ancient [and thus unsolvable] ethnic hatreds” and for fostering a preference in the West and particularly in the US for the west of Yugoslavia and for fueling anti-Serb (hence, “Balkan”) animus (see for example, Todorova, 1997, p. 158; she also scores former Secretaries of State Lawrence Eagleburger and Henry Kissinger for such alleged bias). Of course, such a view ignores the cries of Bosnia-Hercegovina as the new “Abyssinia” from which the western allies turned their eyes in the face of an expansionist dictatorship or the well-chronicled differences among and within west European (principally French, German, and English) foreign policy circles. Moreover, it is difficult to explain the shifts in American foreign policy over the course of a decade, from the “Chicken Kiev” doctrine of the Bush administration applied to Yugoslavia (appropriate enough since Yugoslavia was seemingly viewed through the prism of what precedent it would set for the nuclear Soviet Union) and discouraging separatism, to the arms embargo against all former Yugoslav republics (widely interpreted as penalizing Bosnia-Hercegovina), to a belated Bosnia intervention and at the very least tacit acceptance of Croatia war gains versus Serbia, to a belated intervention over Kosovo that ended up with bombing Belgrade, to a return to a doctrine of maintaining territorial integrity in the region, particularly in the post 11 September 2001 world. Nested orientalisms and perjorative, demeaning views of the Balkans don’t go far in explaining how such changes occurred. Changes and perceptions in domestic politics and in geopolitics—situational politics and leadership—would seem far more helpful. (It should be noted here, too, that the broader anti-“orientalist” view outside of the Balkans and eastern Europe, that is among some Muslims and certainly among global jihadists, is that the failure of the US and western Europe to respond at all or early on when it mattered, in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya, was precisely because their were Muslim populations invovled.)
What Have We Learned Then?
<!–[if !supportLists]–>1) <!–[endif]–>Technological innovations in media and their impact on the content of images and the popular role in determining which images endure. The role of visual images (now frequently live and color) and the internal and external sources of market competition in television and film have shifted the power in stereotype creation to editors, directors, and business executives in these domains, while indirectly increasing the influence of their viewers and, hence, consumers over which images survive and flourish. In other words, the locus of opinion making has shifted somewhat from self-selecting, frequently unrepresentative, well-educated intellectuals, concerned to a lesser extent with profit and mass popularity, to mass culture. As with everything else, the Internet, which allows and empowers individual participation (vis-à-vis the traditional passive reader or viewership), further recrafts and reenforces images and the manner in which they are disseminated. Whereas it can be argued that in the past, mass images of other peoples were largely derivative, since the bulk of populations were unable to travel to these countries and were dependent upon a narrow elite that wrote about other peoples for their understandings, and, immigration was far more infrequent and segmented in comparison to today, today masses and individuals play a greater role in stereotype creation and maintenance.
<!–[if !supportLists]–>2) <!–[endif]–>The larger, regional entities that have been the subject of much of the recent literature—“Eastern Europe,” “the Balkans,” “Central Europe,” “the Black Sea,” “the Near East,” etc.—ignores the often fuzzy, idiosyncratic, arbitrary, and often sharply distinctive images of peoples and states within and across these regions, suggesting the frequent elite, political, and academic overemphasis inherent in many of these studies. This literature fails to examine, particularly at the mass culture level, what the relationship is between national images and these regional images. My sense is that national images play at least an equal and perhaps greater role in determining mass attitudes in North America. And even among politicians and academics themselves, I suspect these national images, although frequently subsumed and not formerly addressed when discussing such regional classifications and “(regional) collective identities” for policy, administrative, and intellectual purposes, influence their views to a greater extent than is often acknowledged.
<!–[if !supportLists]–>3) <!–[endif]–>To abuse a well-worn construct yet again: “All peoples have images attached to them, some have more, better-developed, and more widely-known images attached to them than others.” The question of course is why? Some of this as I will demonstrate is linked to the roles of media and prominent events covered by those media, some of it happenstance. For example, one of the difficult topics to explain is why some peoples have well-developed and well-known images, and are well-known or have prominent personalities associated with them, while others simply do not. The reader cannot help be struck when comparing on the Internet the lists of famous Hungarians and Romanians with the lists of famous Bulgarians or Albanians. Although the first might be explained partly in terms of immigrant population numbers (the ‘56ers having a great impact in this regard), it is difficult to contrast the last three “Balkan” populations. Look up the many names on the Lists of Famous Albanians on the Wikipedia, and I would venture to guess most Americans probably would recognize the Belushi brothers (John and Jim) as the most famous Albanians they know. Regarding Bulgarians, the situation is perhaps even worse: perhaps because the World Cup was played in the U.S. in 1994 and the Bulgarians did particularly well, upsetting the heavily-favored Germans at the Meadowlands, some might recognize the name of Stoichkov, but that is about it. Sad to say many Americans may think of the film “Casablanca” (ironically, as will be discussed below, allegedly with its own typical inside Hollywood, Hungarian joke), and Rick’s decision not to take advantage of a pretty young Bulgarian woman seeking to escape the clutch of the Nazis. In the American comedy film, “National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985),” one of the main characters says to another on a TV Game Show to choose the category of ‘The History of Early Hungarian Cabinet-making’ “…because nobody knows anything about the Hungarians.” The joke upon what is a comic device used to good effect is that the observation, comparatively-speaking to other peoples of “Eastern Europe” is not true: people do know about Hungarians…and so the question then becomes one of what and why?
Images of Hungarians and Romanians in the “Western” Consciousness:
Tentative Explanations of the Difference
The past, and the accretion of events and their interpretations through the years, matters. Compared to the image of the Hungarian, the image of the Romanian seems far more variable, to the distinct disadvantage of the latter. How to explain the differences in images of Hungarians and Romanians in the North American imagination? The Hungarian image somehow so much more social and cultural, the Romanian so much more political.
In an earlier research project, I focused on the comparative role of diaspora politics in Hungary and Serbia during the late communist era (Hall, 2003). Both peoples faced the issues of how to protect and defend ethnic kin in neighboring regions/states over which they had little or no direct control (Transylvania during the Ceausescu era; Kosovo after the 1974 Constitution). Yet the outcome during the communist era was much different in the two cases, as we well know. Ethnic politics became a mere part of the political landscape in the Hungarian transition, whereas it came to dominate the transition in Serbia—despite the fact that Transylvania and Kosovo are comparable analogues in terms of their cultural, literary, and historical importance for both peoples. The similar structural circumstances of the diaspora problematique have easily been forgotten in the wake of the very different outcomes of the two cases (at least in the short to medium term, i.e. first 10-15 years since 1987), yet they pose an interesting and significant challenge for the social scientist to explain.
Back in 2003, I tentatively located the answer in the level of underlying societal/cultural diversification, particularly among intellectuals. The conclusion: that earlier patterns of political culture, which were as much happenstance and the product of unique political and economic conditions in the past, had enduring, lingering impact when new cleavages or issues came up. The more differentiated and internally diverse those patterns, the more able they were to weather the storm unleashed by the transition from communism upon national politics. Otherwise, the potential of “capture,” of reinforcing vs. crosscutting cleavages, of counteproductive, if self-reassuring majorities and intellectual hegemonies.
In the comparison between images of Romanians and Hungarians in the North American imagination, I see a similar distinction in terms of preexisting structural conditions, timing (as anyone knows in their personal lives: critical and crucial beyond measure!), and the integration of new socio-economic and cultural cleavages into the existing political dynamic (Lipset and Rokkan 1967, Dahl 1971). I am tempted here to suggest that timing of statehood formation, modern popular national consciousness and identity, and “discovery” by the West has played a long-term role in setting the frame of reference/discussion/perception. It is not that those closer and more well-known peoples have uniformly or even predominantly positive ethnonational images abroad, but the quantity of them, and the fact that social and cultural images are well-developed and thereby able to withstand the whimsical character of images deriving from geopolitics and political events. What is striking about Romania by comparison to Hungary is the comparative recentness and political character of the associations. Bulgaria and Albania, even less known and central to the geopolitics of the communist era—because Bulgaria was seen as solidly in the Soviet camp and Albania strove to be completely out of it—still have relatively underdeveloped ethnonational images in the West (US/UK).
Many of the enduring stereotypes of Hungarians seem to have their roots in the period of national awakening from the 1820s-1920s (Trianon 1920 to be more exact). For what is this stereotype based in but a view of Hungarians as arrogant, rude, haughty, insular, and inscrutable (“I never met a ruder pest…”). On the one hand, one can almost see this an outgrowth of the embrace and use of Hungarian language and music, the very things that gave the Hungarians the appearance of being the “odd man out” in this part of Europe, a people who had come from Asia, whose language was different and almost inscrutable, whose core musical scale was even different. Such things of course suggest isolation, distance, insularity, inscrutability, beyond understanding. Inevitably, rightly or wrongly, and more likely, rightly and wrongly, this linguistic distance fed behaviors and perceptions of arrogance and rudeness. Connected to this, and yet discrete, is that the aristocratic, “stuck-up” behavior, and “madness” is associated with the gentry and petty nobility that swelled Hungary’s ranks in a parasitic style, particularly as the 19th century progressed. National awakening, socioeconomic status, and linguistic difference thus may have been reinforcing to some extent in creating and perpetuating these stereotypes.
The point, however, is that these stereotypes, the stereotype of a Hungarian, appeared to be planted in and exist in the west European and north American collective conscience earlier than the comparatively-late nationhood and statehood of neighboring Romania—in part of course, because of Hungarian domination and subjugation of the Romanians. Joseph Rothschild’s classic discussion of nationalizing elites in East Central Europe between the World Wars indirectly would appear to offer confirmation for such a hypothesis. Of the Hungarians, the caustic Rothschild wrote:
The subsequent internal political and social history of this Hungarian state consisted of a tenacious and—until well into the twentieth century—a successful struggle by the mettlesome Magyar nobility to assert and maintain its dominant position against royal authority, against the non-Magyar nationalities residing in the kingdom, and against other social classes, including the dispossessed Magyar peasantry that had virtually no rights….The nobility, in short, was “the political nation”of the Kingdom of Hungary…The rhetoric of “national survival” was thus used as a figleaf for social and political privilege (pp. 137-138).
…while of the Romanians:
The oligarchic, bureaucratic ruling elite behaved simultaneously as nationalistic modernizers and as prospective emigrants, salting away in foreign banks the wealth squeezed out of the peasantry under the device of jingoistic banners….In no other European country of the interwar era was the moral and psychological chasm between the oligarchic, bureaucratic elite and the lower classes as wide and deep; even its cultural infatuation with France and its fetishistic fascination with foreign affairs and foreign politco-legal models was a kind of flight from its own people on the part of that elite. (Rothschild, 1974, p. 321)
I cannot help but believe that the fact that so many of Romania’s leading intellectuals—Ionescu, Cioran, etc.—wrote in French or produced their works abroad—Brancusi—such that people are unsure of their ethnicity or surprised to learn that they were Romanians, reinforced the absence of a Romanian image associated with its elite. Instead, Romania as a movable feast, entering the popular western imagination at a later date.
It will be interesting to see if the cultural image of the Hungarian can endure more recent political developments. The geopolitical peripherality of Hungary today and the extreme market segmentation that characterizes contemporary media of all stripes probably ensures the Arpad stripes and the unprecedented post-communist violence of last fall (2006) and this spring (2007) are seen and remembered by a very small audience. In this sense, the more recent public, mediated violence is Hungary’s and not Romania’s and yet I would be surprised if the latter is not the one in the western imagination that is associated with violence. The geopolitical imprint and influence of ethnic image association probably is not and will never be again what it was during the Cold War. Romania’s best hope then is that with new images—some of which some Romanians won’t be terribly proud, the Cheeky Girls or the Dacia Logan—it will see an increase in the overall number of images and the internal diversity of those images.
Selected Sources:
Films, Television, and Radio shows referenced
A Christmas Story (1983)
Absolutely Fabulous
Austin Powers (1997)
Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
Bewitched (1964-1972)
Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966)
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Casablanca (1942)
Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959)
Ed Wood (1994)
Forrest Gump (1994)
Franny and Zoey
Gomer Pyle USMC (1964-1969)
Green Acres (1966-1971)
Halloween (1978)
Her Alibi (1989)
Hostel (2005)
It Runs in the Family (1994)
Law and Order
Meg all az ido (Time stands still) (1982)
Money for Nothing (1985)
Moonraker (1979)
Mr. Ed
My Fair Lady (1964)
National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985)
Octopussy (1983)
Petticoat Junction (1963-1970)
Planet of the Apes
Queen of Outer Space (1958)
Red Heat (1988)
Rhapsody Rabbit (1946)
Seinfeld
Sesame Street
Southpark
Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
The Cat Concerto (1946)
The Naked Gun (1989)
The Shining (1980)
The Simpsons
The Tony Kornheiser Show
The X-Files
Titanic (1997)
Select Books, Articles, Websites:
Antohi, Sorin, 2002. “Romania and the Balkans. From Geocultural Bovarism to Ethnic Ontology,” Transit no. 21.
Bakic-Hayden, Milica, 1995, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review, vol. 54, no. 4 (Winter). Also at http://www.zmag.org/balkanwatch/hayden_orientalisms.htm
Bankhard, Bob. “Intrerview with a Vampire,” PhillyBurbs Special Sections at http://www.phillyburbs.com/vamp/interview.shtml
Barna, Imre, 2001. “Csalamade [Pickled Cabbage],” Mozgo Vilag, at http://www.mozgovilag.hu/2001/11/nov13.htm.
Barry, Dave, 1989. Dave Barry Slept Here, New York: Random House.
“the beatroot: Politics and current affairs of Poland and Central Europe,” for Saturday, 21 January 2006 http://beatroot.blogspot.com/2006/01/molvania-land-untouched-by-modern.html
“Branding Romania” at http://www.brandingromania.com
Buruma, Ian and Avishai Margalit, 2004. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, Penguin.
Codrescu, Andrei, 1991 The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company.
Codrescu, Andrei, 2002. Interview by Stephen Talbot for Frontline. “My Old Haunts,” October at http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/romania/interview.html
Coundouritis, 1992. http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/connotations/coundour92.htm
Diaconu, Alexandru, 2005, “Nu ne vindem tara,” Evenimentul Zilei, 5 June.
Dittmer, Jason. “Dracula and the Cultural Construction of Europe,”© Connotations 12.2-3 (2002/2003): 233-48 found at http://www.unituebingen.de/connotations/dittmer1223.html.
Dupcsik, Csaba, 2001. “The West, the East, and the Border Lining,” Newsletter Social Science in Eastern Europe, Special Edition 2001, pp. 31-39 at http://www.gesis.org/en/publications/magazines/newsletter_eastern_europe/archive/nl01s/nl_sh_2001.pdf
Edes, Gordon, 2003. “Hrabosky had a flair about him,” The Boston Globe, 28 March 2003, F9, reprinted on the Internet.
Fleming, K.E., 2000. “Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography,” The American Historical Review vol. 105, no. 4 (October 2000) found at http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.4/ah001218.html )
Friend, Pat. “Irish Stereotypes Just Won’t Die” at http://allaboutirish.com/library/identity/stereotypes.shtm
Gerrits, Andre and Nanci Adler, 1995. Vampires Unstaked: National Images, Stereotypes and Myths in East Central Europe. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (May 2004 conference proceedings).
Ghyka, Mihai, 2005. “Branding Romania – vaporul scufundat in port [Branding Romania—a boat sunk in port],” Gandul, October 2005, online edition.
Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidman Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Glenny, Misha, 1999. “Only in the Balkans,” London Review of Books, Vol. 21 No. 9 (dated 29 April 1999) http://lrb.veriovps.co.uk/v21/n09/glen01_.html.
Goldsworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Haines, Jerry V. Review of Molvania: A Land Untouched. Washington Post, 10 October 2004
Hall, J.B. “The Phoenix Park Murders” excerpt from Random Records of a Reporter (Drogheda, 1929) at
http://indigo.ie/~kfinlay/General/phoenixmurders.htm.
Hall, Richard Andrew, 2006, “ ‘Orwellian, Positively Orwellian’: Prosecutor Voinea’s Campaign to Sanitize the Romanian Revolution of December 1989,” http://homepage.mac.com/khallbobo/RichardHall/pubs/Voineaswar091706.html.
Hall, Richard Andrew, 2005, “The 1989 Romanian Revolution as Geopolitical Parlor Game: Brandstatter’s ‘Checkmate’ Documentary and the Latest Wave in a Sea of Revisionism,” http://homepage.mac.com/khallbobo/RichardHall/pubs/checkmate040405.html.
Hall, Richard Andrew, 2003. “Nationalism in Late Communist Eastern Europe: Comparing the Role of Diaspora Politics in Hungary and Serbia,” Radio Free Europe “East European Perspectives,” http://www.homepage.mac.com/khallbobo/RichardHall/pubs.
Hall, Richard Andrew, 2002, “The Securitate Roots of a Modern Romanian Fairy Tale: The Press, the Former Securitate, and the Historiography of December 1989,” Radio Free Europe “East European Perspectives,” Vol. 4, nos. 7-9, reposted at http://homepage.mac.com/khallbobo/RichardHall/pubs/romania%20securitate%205-2002.html.
Harrison, Eric. “A New Reason to Get out of Dodge,” The Los Angeles Times, 30 October 1998, p. F-2
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October 7, 2008
Nationalism in Late Communist Eastern Europe: Comparing the Role of Diaspora Politics in Hungary and Serbia, by Richard Andrew Hall
RFE/RL Reports Print Version E-mail this page to a friend
5 March 2003, Volume 5, Number 5
NATIONALISM IN LATE COMMUNIST EASTERN EUROPE: COMPARING THE ROLE OF DIASPORA POLITICS IN HUNGARY AND SERBIA
By Richard Andrew Hall
Part 1: ETHNIC PRIMACY (1944-68) AND THE INVISIBILITY OF DIASPORA POLITICS
All communities are imagined; some are clearly more imagined than others. No one perhaps learned this lesson better — or more bitterly –than communist rulers and ideologues in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Ethnic and national identities may indeed be artificial, constructed, and malleable, but not infinitely so. Moreover, in comparison to other identities they are remarkably enduring and particularly resistant to orchestrated efforts to eradicate them or diminish their relevance once they have become established — even where a regime may have played a critical role in their formation and early formulation, as occurred with certain national identities in the former Soviet Union.
For all the works in the tidal wave of recent research educating us that ethnic and national identities are not, after all, organic — a battle, one might argue, that has often been joined and won largely by taking on a journalistic and pop-culture straw man — the reality remains that certain myths have historically proved more resilient and durable than others. In Eastern Europe, the most “fit” from a Darwinian standpoint has been the national myth — even if the reason for its resilience has been a derivative of broader political, economic, social, and cultural conditions. (One can, for example, argue that religion in the Middle East, and class in Latin America, have been the most recurrent and galvanizing myths in those regions — thereby suggesting the contingent and historically determined character of which myth emerges preeminent.)
Such generalizations, however valid in the comparison of different geo-historical regions, do not help much in the way of explaining variations within those regions, however. After all, there has rarely been an era in which there was such strong institutional and ideological similarity — even if far from identicalness — across a single region as during the communist era in Eastern Europe. And yet, as we well know, the role and impact of ethnicity and nationalism on politics varied sometimes greatly from place to place in communist Eastern Europe.
One puzzle that continues to intrigue is why Serbian politics became seized with and was eventually captured by nationalism in the late 1980s? One is tempted to ascribe this almost singularly to the personality and ruthlessness of Slobodan Milosevic — and certainly many single-case studies analyzing Serbia, especially journalistic and popular accounts, do just that. Without Milosevic’s advocacy and incitement of the nationalist cause — especially after his famous “moment of truth” in Kosova* on 24 April 1987 — clearly this outcome might not have happened. Yet such an argument presupposes — as many longtime scholars of Yugoslavia have rejoined — the existence of a nationalist sentiment that could be exploited. Hence, their focus in the analysis of causes tends to turn the clock further back, to the fall of 1986, and the publication of the famous SANU (Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts) Memorandum outlining Serb grievances and demands against the Federal Yugoslav state. Without Milosevic’s willing scribes among the Serb intelligentsia, these scholars suggest, the opportunistic and ideologically colorless Milosevic might never have undergone his nationalist conversion, with its tragic repercussions for the future of Serbia and Yugoslavia as a whole.
Still, such explanations suffer somewhat from having been argued largely in a vacuum. Serbia was not the only place in Eastern Europe where the diaspora issue played an influential role during the late-communist era. The role of nationalism — and “diaspora politics” specifically — in the Hungarian transition is easily forgotten in the wake of the brutal wars of Yugoslav succession, Hungary’s comparatively smooth postcommunist evolution, and the eventual postcommunist warming of relations between Hungary and Romania. Yet at the time — as literature from the period indicates — it was a significant issue.
In comparison to a country such as Romania, the communist regime’s embrace of nationalism in Hungary and Serbia was belated, but it did emerge, particularly during the late-communist era. In both the Hungarian and Serb cases, the issue of ethnic diaspora — for Hungarians in Transylvania (Romania), southern Slovakia (Czechoslovakia), Vojvodina (Yugoslavia), and Subcarpathian Ukraine (the Soviet Union), but particularly in Transylvania; for Serbs, in Kosova, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, but particularly in Kosova — was a key catalyst in the resurgence of nationalism into the political arena. In both cases, a progressive loss of ethnic representation, power, and influence in these regions, and emigration to the homeland from a region considered to be THE primary cultural source of the nation — but where that nation now constituted a “besieged” minority in the face of the policies of the political authorities who controlled the region — forced this issue onto the agenda of dissidents and communist politicians alike. As in Serbia, diaspora politics in Hungary galvanized regime opposition and helped draw populist and liberal regime critics together as never before. And, as in Serbia, declining regime legitimacy and a process of leadership succession allowed for, and encouraged the mobilization of, nationalism in the political arena.
Yet, as is well known, the outcome of the nationalist resurgence was very different in Serbia from in Hungary. In Serbia, the question came to transfix the Serbian state and society, unleashing a politics of nationalism that played a central role in the destruction of the Yugoslav state and the horrendous loss of life in the wars of succession of the 1990s. In Hungary, by contrast, the fate of Transylvanian Hungarians that was such a fundamental feature of politics in the late 1980s receded from center-stage and became merely A characteristic — rather than THE characteristic — of the broader transition. What happened? I try to answer that question in this five-part article by comparing the differing role and impact of diaspora politics in late-communist Serbia and late-communist Hungary. I do so in the hopes of better highlighting, from a comparative standpoint, what it was specifically that contributed to and enabled the tragic outcome in Serbia.
A word on the comparability of the two cases before I embark on this comparison. Clearly, Serbia was not an internationally recognized “nation-state” during the period under investigation. Nevertheless, I treat it as comparable to one — and thus comparable to Hungary — for analytical purposes. As early as 1984, Ramet compared post-Tito Yugoslavia to something approximating a “balance of power” state system, with ethnic groups and their titular republics/provinces essentially assuming the role that states would in the international system (Ramet, 1992, pp. 3-18). Moreover, it is debatable, for example, whether the Serbian republican leadership under Tito had significantly more autonomy than the Hungarian leadership did vis-a-vis Moscow. Certainly, during the 1980s, it can be argued that Moscow’s influence on the leadership and policies of the Hungarian party was at least equal to and perhaps greater than the Yugoslav Federation’s on the leadership and policies of the Serbian party. Finally, it is clear that, particularly during the 1980s, knowing the relationship between the party-state and society for Yugoslavia as a whole, or in any (one) particular republic, was a weak predictor for understanding that relationship in any (other) particular republic.
A Theoretical Overview Of The Evolution Of Ethnic And National Identity In Communist Eastern Europe
Ethnic and national identities became politicized in communist Eastern Europe precisely because communist rulers tried to negate their influence and raise the profile and salience of competing class, institutional (the Party), and inter- or supra-national identities (especially loyalty to the Soviet Union). Because much of ethnic identity and nationalism is informally institutionalized — and thus is not the exclusive province of any particular political party or societal organization — these identities were able to survive the communist onslaught — focused as it was primarily on destroying formal institutions that lay outside the control of the Party — and became a natural rallying point and metaphor of opposition to the communist authorities who sought to diminish their influence.
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution against a leadership that even by comparison with other communist leaderships in the region was particularly determined to make a definitive break with national tradition; the success of the East European communist regimes in destroying independent societal organizations and initiatives and in creating new institutions based on competing concepts of identity (the agricultural collective, for example); and the simultaneous, if somewhat paradoxical scaling back of expectations regarding the potential for remaking identity (“socialist man”) — all contributed as factors to the tacit and carefully measured recall or “return of the nation” in communist rhetoric and ideology, and, to some extent, policy in Eastern Europe in the 1960s (the era described by Ken Jowitt as the era of “Inclusion,” see Jowitt, 1992, pp. 88-120). The move from being a “party of the working class” to being a “party of the whole people or nation” — ostensibly in part because the goals of the “socialist revolution” had allegedly been fulfilled — was intended to reflect the communist regime’s changing view of, and relationship, to ethnic identity and nationalism.
But if the growing acceptance of and accommodation with nationalism in party ideology and policy represented a stage in — a reflection of — the delegitimation of communist rule in general, such insights remain generally unhelpful in explaining for us the wide variations in the degree to which communist regimes embraced nationalism in the middle (1964-76) and late (1977-89) stages of communist rule in Eastern Europe. Mobilizing ethnic and national identity was only one of several alternative “elite survival strategies” that East European leaderships pursued in order to indirectly address their widespread illegitimacy with their populations and to insulate themselves, however imperfectly — the instability of the interregnum of 1953 to 1956 had been enough to convince them — from the power struggles and policy shifts of the Kremlin. The other primary models included a generally un-reformist “consumerism” — financed by loans from Western governments and institutions — or a continued pursuit of Stalinist repression and breakneck development policies — political reform outside (post-1956) or inside (post-1968) the party having been eliminated as a practical option because of the Soviet response. In fact, most regimes tended to combine elements from each of these “survival strategies” but in different measures.
Nor was the nationalist option equally attractive or feasible for every communist leadership in the region. The approach to nationalism during the middle and late stages of communist rule in Eastern Europe varied widely, with Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania and “normalized” Czechoslovakia perhaps forming the two opposing poles of this approach. Nationalism in Romania allowed the continuation of “Stalinism in one state” — as it did in Albania — even when the Soviet Union itself opted, as under Nikita Khrushchev, and later Mikhail Gorbachev, to engage in de-Stalinization. One can argue, however, that the nationalist option was chosen by the Romanian leadership — first by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and then by Ceausescu — not solely out of the need to protect the party’s development prerogatives, but because the “colonial” history of the Romanian nation and state (particularly as regards Transylvania) meant that the nationalist discourse could be woven into the official ideology without triggering major contradiction and ideological delegitimation. (By contrast, arguing that nation and oppressed class had overlapped in Hungarian history was more ideologically challenging.) Opting for the nationalist palliative to popular illegitimacy was thus conditioned by both the manner in which elites perceived prerogatives and by structural circumstances deriving from a people and state’s history.
Nevertheless, in the cases of Hungary and Serbia — the two cases in which history (pre-Trianon Hungary and Serbia’s primacy in interwar Yugoslavia) was in theory arguably the most problematic for and seemingly incompatible with communist ideology — communist elites did end up embracing the nationalist cause. The sources for this lay in the communist era itself. The early- and middle-communist eras in Kosova and Transylvania saw a period of ethnic supremacy for Serbs and Hungarians — though it lasted longer for the former than it did for the latter — followed by a steady decline in influence. During the initial period of ethnic supremacy, the comparatively favorable conditions for Serbs in Kosova and Hungarians in Transylvania combined with the strongly “anti-national” content of communist ideology dominant in Belgrade and Budapest at the time to largely remove the issue of Kosova and Transylvania from the political agenda.
The shift in ethnic balance and power within Kosova and Transylvania changed things, however, both within these ethnic peripheries and within the kin state. The change in ethnic power spurred emigration where possible to the kin state — although it was still relatively small at this point. The deteriorating ethnic balance and the nascent emigration it triggered inevitably began to bring “the problem” of Kosova and Transylvania home to the kin state — “the problem” of which intellectuals there increasingly became aware and concerned.
Kosova, 1944-1968: Ethnic Domination Under The Auspices Of ‘Yugoslavism’
In Kosova, the period from the origins of communist rule in 1944 until the removal from senior party and state posts in 1966 of Aleksandar Rankovic, the leading representative of Serbian hegemonism within the League of Yugoslav Communists, can be regarded as a period of Serb domination in the region. Significantly, as World War II drew to a close, and the Partisans extended their control over the territories of interwar Yugoslavia, Tito abandoned earlier pledges by the Yugoslav Communist Party to Kosova joining an independent Albania (1928, Fourth Congress) or gaining republican status (1940, Fifth Congress) when the communists came to power in Yugoslavia (Vickers, 1998, pp. 121-143). In late 1944 and early 1945, Tito and the Partisan leadership largely looked the other way as Serbs and Montenegrins settled scores with Kosovar Albanians and crushed an ethnic Albanian uprising in the region. Miranda Vickers characterizes this state of affairs as follows:
Because of their co-operation with Axis forces, the Kosovars were perceived as politically unreliable and thus a possible threat to the stability and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia. Tito realized that only by retaining Kosovo within Serbia’s borders could he hope to win over the Serbs to communism (Vickers, 1998, pp. 141-142).
Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform in 1948 put an end to the essentially open border policy between Kosova and Albania that had existed in the interregnum following the end of the war, when visions of an eventual Danubian confederation predicated upon the erasure of historic state boundaries in the region were still entertained. Enver Hoxha’s decision to throw in his lot with Stalin and the Soviets in the Tito-Stalin dispute rather abruptly reinforced the perception that Yugoslavia’s Albanian population was a security threat (Vickers, 1998, p. 149). The new 1953 Yugoslav constitutional law further codified this situation by amending the 1946 Federal Constitution’s reference to autonomy as a federal matter — the amendment therefore essentially made Vojvodina and Kosova ordinary districts of Serbia — while simultaneously the Yugoslav government’s Chamber of Nationalities was abolished (Vickers, 1998, p. 155).
During these first two decades of communist rule in Yugoslavia, Serbs and Montenegrins held a disproportionate amount of power and influence in Kosova in comparison to their numbers. According to Vickers, in 1958, Serbs and Montenegrins comprised 27.4 percent of the population of Kosova but constituted 49.7 percent of local Party membership (Vickers, 1998, p. 156). Party documents released after the purge of Aleksandar Rankovic revealed that within the security services in Vojvodina and Kosova, there had been a systemic policy of discrimination against Hungarians and Albanians respectively: Not a single Hungarian or Albanian was employed by the republican secretariat of Serbia for security affairs and only one Albanian could be found in the secretariat for Kosova (Burg, 1983, pp. 34-35). Ramet cites Branko Horvat’s figures as showing that in 1956 Albanians were 64.9 percent of the population but accounted for only 13.3 percent of security police and 31.3 percent of the regular police, while by contrast the Serbs accounted for 23.5 percent but held 58.3 percent of positions in the security forces and 60.8 percent of all positions in the regular police (Ramet, 1992, p. 188).
Marina Blagojevic has noted that census data from 1948, 1953, and 1961 indicate that during this period the proportion of Serbs in Kosova was relatively constant, at 23.6 percent, 23.6 percent, and 23.5 percent, respectively, and that fertility rates for Serb and Albanian women in the region were not sharply different at the time (Blagojevic, 2000, pp. 215-216). Nevertheless, there were concerted efforts by Serb authorities to dilute the Albanian presence in Kosova. A policy of “Turkification” that had been advocated by some Serbs (for example, the infamous Cubrilovic) during the interwar period was revived in the post-1948 Cominform climate when Albanians increasingly came to be seen as a potential fifth column. The policy saw not only the introduction of Turkish language schools in Kosova and pressure for Albanians to declare themselves as ethnic “Turks” — of which there was still a very small population in, for example, Prizren — but a campaign to encourage Albanian emigration to Turkey (Vickers, 1998, p. 149; 171). Vickers maintains that between 1954 and 1957 as many as 195,000 Albanians emigrated to Turkey (Vickers, 1998, p. 157).
The fate of Serbs in Kosova was not a galvanizing issue in Belgrade as long as Serbs dominated the region. That all changed with the removal of Aleksandar Rankovic — he was head of the federal security services and vice president at the time — in July 1966 at the famous Brioni Plenum. Rankovic’s fall was welcomed enthusiastically in Zagreb, Novi Sad, and Prishtina and was interpreted by Serbs and non-Serbs alike as a defeat for Serbs (Burg, 1983, p. 35; Vickers, 1998, p. 163; Ramet, 1992, p. 91). Rankovic’s dismissal rather rapidly unleashed a process of indigenization of the communist party “nomenklatura” and security structures in Kosova — to the extent that an immigrant from Albania was appointed chief of police (Vickers, 1998, p. 163). 1968 was the 500th anniversary of the death of the Albanian national hero, George Kastrioti Skanderbeg, and saw a series of ethnic Albanian demonstrations in Kosova and in neighboring Macedonia. Constitutional amendments in December 1968 gave the renamed Socialist Autonomous Province — the additional term “Metohija,” considered offensive and a symbol of Serb hegemony by Albanians, was dropped from official usage thereafter — representation in the federal parliament, and legislative and judicial authority was passed to the provinces (Vickers, 1998, pp. 169-170).
In January and February 1969, Kosova was able to pass its own constitutional law, and its autonomy was further strengthened. 1969 also saw the creation of an independent University of Prishtina — it had previously been merely a branch of the University of Belgrade — and the rapid Albanianization of both faculty and student body (Ramet 1992, p. 191). The new Yugoslav constitution promulgated in February 1974 gave Kosova and Vojvodina substantial powers as autonomous provinces of Serbia: They were now full constitutive members of the federation; they were represented in the Federal Presidency (where they essentially could exercise veto power if they so chose), the Federal Assembly, and in the federal and constitutional courts; and the Republic of Serbia was forbidden from officially intervening in provincial affairs against the will of the provincial assemblies in Prishtina and Novi Sad (Vickers, 1998, pp. 178-179). The 1970s would see an intensification of this indigenization process and pressure — both indirect and direct — on Serbs that would lead many to abandon the province.
The Slow Marginalization Of Ethnic Hungarian Influence In Transylvania: 1944-68
Serb influence in Kosova during the first two decades of communist rule owed something to Tito’s effort to mollify Serbs concerned that the concept of federal Yugoslavia was a conspiracy to dilute Serb power, and to fears of irredentist and hostile neighbors Albania and Bulgaria. By contrast, Hungarian political influence in Transylvania was widely regarded as the price Bucharest had to pay for having all of Transylvania returned at the end of the war and as a sop to communist leaders in Budapest who had to defend a deeply unpopular concession.
The Romanian Workers’ Party did not deliver on its interwar promises of awarding parts of Transylvania to Hungary, but it also did not completely abrogate such commitments. Between 1952 and 1960 a Hungarian Autonomous Region (RAM) brought together three of the majority ethnic Hungarian counties — according to one Hungarian populist scholar, thereby granting at least “some measure of symbolic self-government to the solidly Hungarian Szekely population” (Joo, 1994, p. 115). In 1960, the RAM was gerrymandered into the new Mures-Maghiar Autonomous Region, which diluted the proportion of ethnic Hungarians from 77 percent to 62 percent of the total population in the jurisdiction. Nevertheless, the majority Hungarian region existed until 1968 — when, perhaps ironically, Nicolae Ceausescu’s brief embrace of reformist policies and of overtures to the ethnic Hungarian community allowed him to argue that ethnic issues in socialist Romania had been superseded and the region’s autonomous status was eradicated.
Unlike Serbs in Kosova, ethnic Hungarians did not rule in the Autonomous Region as a clear minority that disproportionately occupied the seats of political, security, and administrative power. The 1956 census showed that the region had a population of 731,387, of whom 77 percent were Hungarian, while statistics from 1958 claimed that 80 percent of the deputies to the people’s councils and 78 percent of civil servants were non-Romanians, mostly Hungarians (King, 1973, pp. 150-152). Hungarians in the RAM constituted only one-third of the Hungarian population in Romania as a whole, and outside the region they had substantially less representation and influence in the structures of power than they had inside it. Moreover, it can be argued that because of the relationship of religion and land to a dwindling ethnic minority, the state’s moves against religious institutions — especially the Catholic Church — and collectivization were felt acutely by the Hungarian minority (Deletant, 1995, p. 109).
Nevertheless, as Robert King concludes: “the fact that most of the officials [in the RAM] were Hungarians was an important concession to the minority” (King, 1973, p. 150). Even Smaranda Enache, one of the leading proponents of interethnic harmony in Transylvania during the postcommunist era and hardly one who can be accused of being a Romanian nationalist, admits that in the RAM “it was a job to be a Romanian during that time” (Enache, 1991). As so often happens, ethnicity became intertwined with far-reaching social change — in this case collectivization — and in the minds of the Romanian peasant in the RAM, they were left with the bitter memory that “it was a Hungarian who came and took my land” (Enache, 1991).
However unsatisfying and fictional aspects of the RAM, totalitarian rule and elite commitment to notions of “socialist internationalism” largely removed the diaspora issue from the political agenda in Hungary. According to Kurti: “During the 1950s and 1960s, themes of Magyarness and Transylvania were rarely found in artistic or literary works” (Kurti, 2001, p. 103). Schopflin writes: “In effect, during the period up to the revolution the issue of ethnic Hungarians all but disappeared from Hungarian public life, although it evidently remained beneath the surface” (Schopflin, 1988, pp. 2-3). Joo highlighted in 1988 the absurd lengths to which Budapest’s denial of its coethnics extended during the early communist era:
The basically unaltered official position was that Hungary had nothing to do with the Hungarians of neighboring countries. Accordingly, press and educational establishments also remained silent about the issue. Even the sports celebrities and artists who were ethnic Hungarians had their names printed in the Hungarian press according to the rule of Romanian spelling (e.g. Iolanda Balas, Stefan Ruha), and Budapest newspapers employed the Romanian designation for centuries-old Hungarian settlements and towns of Transylvania (Joo, 1994, p. 98).
Ludanyi maintains that the situation of ethnic Hungarians in Romania began to deteriorate with the crackdowns that followed the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (Ludanyi, 1995, p. 315). Even if ethnic Hungarians in Romania had not protested in solidarity with the aims of the revolutionaries in Budapest as they did, they were bound to be viewed with suspicion by the Dej regime in Romania that so obediently backed the Soviet crushing of the uprising. The withdrawal of Soviet troops from Romania in 1958 — in part, interpreted as an acknowledgement of and reward for Romania’s fealty to the Soviet Union — gave the Romanian leadership wider latitude in dealing with the minority question as it saw fit (Ludanyi, 1995, p. 315).
Nevertheless, indicative of just how much removed from the political agenda in Budapest was the issue of the Hungarian minority in Romania was the response to the events of 22 February 1959, when — with then CC Secretary Nicolae Ceausescu presiding — the Hungarian Bolyai University of Cluj was merged with the Romanian Babes University and renamed Babes-Bolyai — an event that initiated a process of Romanian schools absorbing Hungarian schools at all levels of education (Shafir, 1985, p. 160). Despite the subsequent suicide of the pro-rector of the Bolyai University, Laszlo Szabedi, Budapest was essentially silent over the event. Moreover, according to Joo, “when in 1962 a few Hungarian intellectuals protested at international forums against the merger of the Hungarian and Romanian universities of Cluj, the protesters were found guilty of violating state interests by a court of law in Budapest” (Joo, 1994, p. 98). As Joo describes, not even the comparatively more relaxed ideological atmosphere in 1960s Hungary had much impact:
The increased tourist traffic between countries of Eastern Europe in the early 1960s made it easier to strengthen family relations and friendship ties between Hungarians living in Romania and Hungary. Still, the existence of the more than two million strong Hungarian minority in Romania remained a taboo topic in Hungarian public discussions. Representatives of official (mainly cultural) policy manifest not only indifference but vehement opposition to any consideration of the problem (Joo, 1994, p. 98).
Those intellectuals who spoke up at this point on the diaspora question were few and far between — essentially nationalist voices in what was then the political wilderness — as we shall see.
*Author’s Note: Spelling per editorial request.
(The author wishes to thank Indiana University’s Russian East European Institute for a Mellon Grant-in-Aid that made possible the interview with Smaranda Enache cited above.)
(Richard Andrew Hall holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University and a B.A. from the University of Virginia. He currently works and lives in northern Virginia. Comments or questions can be sent to him at hallria@msn.com.)
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Burg, S., 1983, Conflict and Cohesion in Socialist Yugoslavia: Political Decision Making Since 1966, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press).
Deletant, D., 1995, Ceausescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965-1989, (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe).
Enache, S., 1991, Interview with author, (Targu-Mures, Romania, 27 May).
Joo, R. (ed.), Ludanyi, A. (rev. ed.), Tennant, C. (trans.), 1994, The Hungarian Minority’s Situation in Ceausescu’s Romania, (New York: Columbia University Press).
Jowitt, K., 1992, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
King, R R., 1973, Minorities under Communism: Nationalities as a Source of Tension among Balkan Communist States, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press).
Kurti, L., 2001, The Remote Borderland: Transylvania in the Hungarian Imagination, (New York: State University Press).
Ludanyi, A., 1995, “Programmed Amnesia and Rude Awakening: Hungarian Minorities in International Politics, 1949-1989,” in Romsics, I. (ed.), 20th Century Hungary and the Great Powers, (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 307-335.
Ramet, S. P., 1992. Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991, (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press).
Schopflin, G., 1988, “The Role of Transylvania in Hungarian Politics,” in “Radio Free Europe Research,” RAD Background Report no. 236 (Hungary), pp. 1-6.
Shafir, M., 1985, Romania: Politics, Economics, and Society. Political Stagnation and Simulated Change, (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers).
Vickers, M., 1998, Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo, (New York: Columbia University Press).
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2 April 2003, Volume 5, Number 7
NATIONALISM IN LATE COMMUNIST EASTERN EUROPE: COMPARING THE ROLE OF DIASPORA POLITICS IN HUNGARY AND SERBIA
By Richard Andrew Hall
Part 2: DIASPORA POLITICS EMERGES FROM THE PERIPHERY
From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, nationalism was a bad word in the official idiom of communist Eastern Europe. It was rarely voiced openly by regime opponents — when it was, it was in the context of a brief window of political liberalization, as occurred in Poland and Hungary in 1956 — and was even rarer within the regimes. The reasons for this were multiple in the cases of Hungary and Serbia: Ethnic power and influence in Transylvania and Kosova* muted diaspora politics in the homeland, the regimes remained highly repressive against any type of dissent, and nationalism was effectively denigrated by its association with the interwar and World War II disasters of the region; for young people and students, and particularly regime members themselves, the concept was too foreign and taboo in the existing ideological hegemony.
Nationalist Voices In The Political Wilderness
During the 1960s and 1970s, the place of nationalism in communist Eastern Europe gradually changed. For one thing, the positions of Serbs in Kosova and Hungarians in Transylvania began to change and change for the worse, if slowly at first. The fact that intellectuals attempted to push the envelope with such criticism, and the sometimes muted criticism of the authorities, was indicative of the delegitimation of the ruling ideology and of the transition to a less repressive “post-totalitarian” regime (to use the categories outlined by Linz and Stepan, 1996). It is important to note, however, that such criticism appealed to the statist and centralizing instincts of communist elites, calling for more, not less, party and state involvement in the protection of coethnics who were minorities caught outside the homeland. Still, for those who came to attach great importance to the diaspora issue, these muted efforts by communist elites to incorporate a diluted nationalism came across as half-hearted, cynical, opportunist, and ultimately unconvincing.
In Hungary, the standard-bearer of the diaspora cause was Gyula Illyes (born 1902), a by-then-already-famous populist poet and writer who had been a representative of the National Peasant Party in the first postwar National Assembly until withdrawing from politics in 1947 (Reisch, 1983). Despite the populists’ rapprochement with the Kadar regime after 1957 — especially after Kadar’s declaration of his “alliance policy” in 1962 — Illyes broke the taboo on the diaspora issue in a 9 January 1964 interview with the French magazine “L’Express” in which he criticized the closure of the Hungarian faculty at Babes-Bolyai University. Illyes was severely reprimanded for this criticism (Schopflin, 1988, p. 3). He continued, however, to raise the issue of the Hungarian minorities in his novels “Hajszalgyokerek” (Root Branches, 1971) and “Itt elned kell” (Here you must live, 1976) (Schopflin, 1979, p. 177).
According to an obituary by a Radio Free Europe analyst, although Illyes did address the plight of Hungarians in Czechoslovakia, he did it less frequently and never with the same force that he did in analyzing the situation of Hungarians in Romania (Reisch, 1983). Illyes’s most direct comments on the diaspora issue, and particularly the issue of Transylvanian Hungarians, came in a two-part article that appeared in the state-run daily “Magyar Nemzet” on 22 December 1977 and 1 January 1978, even though, as Schopflin points out, he neither mentioned Romania nor Transylvania by name (Schopflin 1979, p. 178). Indicative, however, of the regime’s confused and contradictory embrace of nationalism at this juncture, in January 1978 Illyes’s “Szellem es eroszak” (Spirit and Violence) was banned because of its focus on the national question and ended up being published abroad (in Munich) in 1980 (“Kronologia,” 1978; Reisch, 1983). Thirty-thousand copies of the work had been printed and bound in Hungary in 1978 but were not distributed, and the Kadar regime did not permit Illyes to respond personally to Romanian criticism of his “Magyar Nemzet” articles (Lendvai, 1988, p. 31).
Kurti summarizes the catalytic role played by Illyes in the expression of nationalist dissent as follows:
“[Among those who did not opt to emigrate] some, such as Illyes or [Laszlo] Nemeth, helped pave the way for the establishment of their youthful alter ego, the neopopulists. The neopopulists, most notably Ferenc Juhasz, Laszlo Nagy, Istvan Agh, and especially Sandor Csoori, demanded attention by opening up a more relaxed political climate that encouraged mild criticism, experimentation, and diversion from the officially favored ‘urbanist’ (bourgeois humanist) and ’socialist’ literary forms. But with the emergence of this group, there was another equally if not more significant literary direction led by those writers whose family and regional backgrounds were located in the geopolitically sensitive region of Transylvania — Istvan Csurka, Ferenc Santa, Zoltan Jekely, and Zoltan Zelk” (Kurti, 2001, p. 101).
Nick Miller identifies the speech of Serb intellectual Dobrica Cosic at the May 1968 plenum of the Serbian League of Communists (SKS) as “the birth of Serbian dissent” on the national question in communist Yugoslavia (Miller, 1997a, p. 298). Miller has termed Cosic “the herald of the original antibureaucratic revolution” and affirmed that Cosic’s speech “established the foundation for Serbian complaints about the devolutionary tendencies of Yugoslav communism for the following two decades” (Miller 1997a, p. 304; 298). Cosic asserted that history, not demography, should determine the character of Kosova, and he displayed obvious disdain for Albanians and fear of Albanian nationalism in his speech:
“We can no longer fail to recognize how much the conviction spreads in Serbia regarding the intensification of relations between Siptars and Serbs, regarding the feeling of endangerment of the Serbs and Montenegrins, regarding the pressures for emigration, regarding the systematic removal of Serbs and Montenegrins from leading positions, regarding the desires of specialists to abandon Kosovo and Metohija, regarding inequalities before the courts and lack of respect for legality, regarding blackmail in the name of national identity” (cited in Miller 1997a, p. 298).
Cosic lost his position as a member of the Serbian League of Communists and resigned from the party three weeks later (Miller 2000, pp. 269-270 n. 7). A like-minded intellectual colleague, Jovan Marjanovic, also was excluded (Miller 1997a, p. 301). Significantly, however, Cosic’s criticism lay outside the intellectual mainstream and was not taken up by reform Marxists or humanist intellectuals — such as Mihailo Markovic and the scholars of the so-called Praxis group — nor by the reformist wing of the SKS centered around Marko Nikezic and Latinka Perovic.
According to Miller, Cosic’s speech in 1977 marking his admission to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts “heralded the opening of the second front, the non-party, intellectual uprising against Titoism” (Miller 1997a, p. 304). Cosic characterized Serbian history as filled with division and betrayal — both internally and at the mercy of foreign powers — and claimed that “in Europe there is not a small nation which in the past two centuries, and especially in the twentieth, that has expended so much in the name of history…as the Serbian nation” (Miller 2000, pp. 274-275; Miller 1997a, p. 304). But as Miller admits, the time was not yet ripe for Cosic’s form of dissidence, and “Cosic had little influence in Serbia until Tito died and Kosovo’s Albanian population revolted in 1981″ (Miller 1997b, p. 152).
A Slow, Timid, And Unconvincing Effort By Regime Elites To Appropriate Nationalism
The party in both Hungary and Serbia was slow to integrate and/or voice populist concern for the diaspora raised by the likes of Illyes and Cosic. In the Hungarian case, one can speculate that the Kadar leadership’s desire to pursue internal reform — whether by pursuing a more tolerant political line with dissidents or in implementing the changes of the New Economic Mechanism — led it to tread carefully on a foreign-policy issue where expression of a nationalist claim might attract greater Soviet interest in Hungary’s internal developments. In Serbia, the Rankovic purge, the constitutional amendments of 1968, 1972, and 1974, and finally the post-1972 purge of liberals from among the leadership of the SKS, muted the defense of the Kosova issue by party leaders.
According to a Hungarian populist source, June 1971 was the first time when a leader of the Hungarian Socialist Worers’ Party (MSZMP) — Zoltan Komocsin — publicly declared that Hungary was interested in the fate of the Hungarian national minority (Joo, 1994, p. 116). As George Schopflin writes:
“the existence of strong popular sentiments on [the Transylvanian question] could not be wholly ignored, and by the mid-1970s a gradual shift took place in official attitudes. [Thus, i]n a speech to the Helsinki summit in 1975 Kadar explictly endorsed a kind of political and cultural nationhood that had positive features” (Schopflin, 1988, p. 3).
In a 1977 agreement with Romania — the year when Kadar and Ceausescu engaged in bilateral meetings in Debrecen and then Oradea — reflecting growing sentiment on the diaspora question, Hungary incorporated the concept of national minorities as forming a bridge that unites different peoples (Joo, 1994, p. 99; Schopflin, 1988, p. 4). Nevertheless, as Joo writes, “during the 1970s and even into the 1980s, official Hungarian policy still reflected a great deal of hesitancy and uncertainty,” while those “who demanded a more assertive policy were often regarded with suspicion” and “young people who regularly traveled to Transylvania faced the prospects of harassment by the [Hungarian, as well as Romanian] authorities” (Joo, 1994, p. 99). And, as Schopflin explains, “a communist leadership, especially one as professionally neutral on the subject as Kadar’s, was hard put to portray itself convincingly as a credible spokesman for the nation” (Schopflin, 1988, p. 3).
If in Hungary the need to avoid alienating the Soviet patrons who had restored the Hungarian communists to power after November 1956 delayed and muted discourse on the Transylvanian issue, in Serbia the “normalization” of politics that followed the purge of the Serbian party leadership after 1972 delayed and muted discourse on the Kosova issue. Nick Miller claims, “Until the late 1970s, the Serbian party doctrinally ignored or persecuted those like Cosic who claimed anti-Serbianism was integral to post-1966 Titoism” (Miller 1997a, p. 303). Partly in an effort to balance his purge of nationalists from the Croatian leadership beginning in late 1971 (Miko Tripalo, Savka Dapcevic-Kucar, etc.), Tito struck against the reformist, although not necessarily nationalist, Serbian leadership in 1972, removing most notably the president and the secretary of the Serbian League of Communists, Marko Nikezic and Latinka Perovic, respectively (Benson, 2001, pp. 122-123). According to Benson, in the end the total number purged from the party in Serbia “very nearly matched that of Croatia” (Benson, 2001, p. 123). Pavkovic has estimated that approximately 6,000 of those deemed “supporters” of Nikezic and Perovic were purged from the Serbian party (Pavkovic, 2000, p. 68). The “normalized” Serbian party dutifully abided by Tito’s constitutional changes giving Kosova the status of an autonomous province in 1974 — a situation that would discredit the “normalized” party leadership in the eyes of many Serbs.
The trinity of events that many Serbs increasingly came to believe marked their collective humiliation — especially as regards Kosova — during these years (Rankovic’s purge in 1966, the purge of the Serbian party in 1972, and the 1974 constitution formalizing Kosova’s autonomy) demoralized party members and had important structural consequences. Cosic castigated the “survivors” as characterized by “mediocrity and political cowardice” (Miller, 2000, p. 280). Miller writes of the purges:
“The LCS had been purged of its most capable leaders in 1972. The LCS had continued to resist changes to the constitutional status of Serbia after the purges, but they had robbed the party of much of its intellectual capital…. Today, there is significant support for the thesis that Serbia lost its best and brightest in 1972, leaving the field open to talents like Milosevic in the 1980s” (Miller, 1997b, p. 152; Miller, 1997a, p. 302).
Indeed, as Miller demonstrates, after rising from 69 percent to 86 percent from the 1950s to the late 1960s, the number of Central Committee members with higher education fell back to 62 percent following the purges (Miller 1997b, p. 185n.10). The purge extended outside the party and eventually touched “Praxis” in 1975, when the journal was closed down and eight “Praxis” theorists — including Mihajlo Markovic, Dragoljub Micunovic, and Ljubomir Tadic — began being suspended from teaching at the University of Belgrade (Benson, 2001, p. 128; Grunewald, 1992, p. 178). According to Leonard Cohen, the “crudely managed repression of neo-Marxist dissidents and other political nonconformist Serbs in the mid and late 1970s” further weakened the republican leadership’s political position (Cohen, 1997, pp. 319-320).
Slowly but fitfully, however, the Kosova issue worked its way into official discourse. In 1977, a party working commission under the guidance of Serbian President Dragoslav Markovic gathered arguments against the enhanced autonomy of Kosova since the 1974 constitutional changes, but the so-called Blue Book was too politically sensitive and thus was never publicly discussed. (Vickers suggests that the “Blue Book” was craftily modeled on the “Blue Book” printed for the 1899 Peace Conference in The Hague that detailed Albanian violence in Kosova [Vickers, 1998, p. 183 n. 29].) That such views remained officially proscribed was clear at the 15th Session of the SKS Central Committee in April 1978, when Mirko Popovic and other speakers inveighed against the Serbian chauvinism that Popovic maintained had become more serious “in the last year or two” and was tendentiously attempting to exploit every friction (Ramet, 1992, p. 199).
Grounds for Consensus and Activism: The Slide toward Second-Class Citizenry (1968-81)
The greater concern of the Hungarian intelligentsia for Hungarians in Transylvania reflected a response to the deteriorating situation of the Hungarian minority in Romania as the 1970s wore on — an issue that became all the more galling and beckoned for attention as a result of the favored role of Romania in Western capitals because of Nicolae Ceausescu’s sometimes anti-Soviet foreign policy decisions at a time when, at least in the foreign-policy arena, Hungary continued to toe a reliable Soviet line.
The Deteriorating Situation Of Transylvanian Hungarians
The decision in 1968 to gerrymander out of existence the Mures-Maghiar Autonomous Region merely formalized the process of the jurisdiction’s dwindling significance as a distinct entity over the preceding years. However, even in the early 1970s, the Ceausescu regime was still careful to offer ethnic Hungarians piecemeal concessions — in part because, in the immediate wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the Romanian regime seemed to interpret this as a way to deny the Soviets a vulnerability that they could potentially exploit to divide and weaken the regime. In 1969, the University of Bucharest reopened a department of Hungarian literature and philology and the Kriterion publishing house for minority languages, while in October 1970 the Hungarian weekly “A Het” (The Week) was allowed to begin publication in Bucharest (Joo, 1994, p. 116).
Matters began to change, however, as the 1970s progressed. An educational decree law in 1973 established a minimum number of students requirement for the teaching of minority languages, with no such minimum established for Romanians (Joo, 1994, p. 117). Also around this time, a decree reduced the size of newspapers and number of pages per publication — ostensibly because of an emergency paper shortage. Although both Romanian and Hungarian-language papers were initially equally affected, while Romanian-language papers were eventually returned to their original sizes, Hungarian ones were not (Deletant, 1995, p. 125). On 9 December 1974, a law came into effect that prohibited Romanian citizens from hosting foreign visitors in their homes — inevitably this was to have a disproportionate impact upon ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania hosting relatives from neighboring Hungary (“Kronologia,” 1974).
As Dennis Deletant suggests, Helsinki changed the equation somewhat:
“By committing Romania to the Helsinki Agreement of 1975, Ceausescu opened the door to international scrutiny of the regime’s treatment of the Hungarian and German minorities in Transylvania and the Banat and at the same time offered encouragement to those governments who wished to press the matter to do so…. A second development was the opportunity afforded by the Helsinki Agreement to the Hungarian minority to release its pent-up anger at what they regarded as discriminatory policies…. A string of protests began to be heard from Transylvanian Hungarians in the spring of 1977″ (Deletant, 1995, p. 121).
For example, there was the 1975 case of Janos Torok, a textile worker from Cluj who complained at a factory meeting on behalf of worker and Hungarian minority rights and was detained while speaking, severely beaten by “Securitate” officers, and then interned at a psychiatric hospital, where he was injected with large doses of drugs (until his conditional release in 1978) (Deletant, 1995, pp. 121-122). Or the cases of Lajos Kuthy, a Hungarian teacher from Brasov who had been collecting signatures for a petition to set up Hungarian classes and was found shot dead in a forest near the city in 1976, and Jeno Szikszai, another Brasov teacher who was arrested by the “Securitate” in spring 1977 — for allegedly encouraging parents to send their children to schools with Hungarian sections — beaten, and then committed suicide upon his release (Deletant, 1995, p. 122).
1977 also saw a series of memorandums and letters from senior ethnic Hungarian officials of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) criticizing the deterioration of the cultural and educational situation of the Hungarian minority. A memorandum from Lajos Takacs — a former rector of Babes-Bolyai at the time of the 1959 merger — detailed how decreasing opportunities in Hungarian-language instruction had led to a sharp decline in the number of ethnic Hungarians attending universities or with the possibility to do so (Deletant, 1995, pp. 122-126). Karoly Kiraly, who had resigned as a candidate member of the PCR Executive Committee and first secretary of Covasna county in 1972 — officially for “personal” reasons but in actuality to protest discriminatory policies against ethnic Hungarians — outlined in three letters to senior party officials how in leadership positions at major industrial plants and cultural institutions — even in areas with significant Hungarian populations, such as Targu-Mures — ethnic Hungarians were systematically being replaced with Romanians (Deletant, 1995, pp. 126-128). As Kiraly noted, the Hungarian State Theater in Targu-Mures had a Romanian director who did not speak Hungarian, the mayors of the largely Hungarian towns of Sovata and Targu-Mures had Romanian mayors, and bilingual signs and the designation of place names in Hungarian on maps were rapidly disappearing at this time. Kiraly was briefly arrested in early 1978, and the “Securitate,” according to Deletant, turned “hundreds of homes belonging to members of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania” upside down in search of copies of Kiraly’s letters (Deletant, 1995, p. 129).
Finally, between 1981 and 1983, Hungarian intellectuals in Transylvania attempted to produce their own “samizdat,” exposing the Romanian regime’s treatment of the Hungarian minority. Nine issues of the publication “Ellenpontok” (Counterpoints) appeared between December 1981 and January 1983, when the editors were detained, beaten, and expelled to Hungary (Deletant, 1995, p. 131; Kurti, 2001, p. 109). A second samizdat publication “Erdelyi Magyar Hirugynokseg” (Transylvanian News Service) appeared first in May 1983 and then on an irregular basis thereafter.
The Deteriorating Situation Of Kosova Serbs
The deterioration of Serb influence in Kosova was arguably more dramatic and deeper than the corresponding situation of Hungarians in Transylvania. Ethnic Albanians in Kosova and many outsiders saw the Albanians as the victims — and they undoubtedly were — of the 1981 violence that seized the province and over time spilled into neighboring Macedonia and Montenegro (as in 1968). Serbs, on the other hand, saw these events as the last straw, as the clearest evidence that their cession of power and influence in the province was leading to the very demands — Albanian autonomy — that they feared most.
The impact upon Kosova of the founding of the Albanian-language university in Prishtina in 1969 was extraordinary. By the 1981/82 academic year, the university had over 20,000 students, or nearly one out of every 10 adults in the city (Mertus, 1999, p. 29). Kosova, thus as Mertus notes, “had the dubious honor of having the highest ration of both students and illiterates in Yugoslavia” (Mertus, 1999, p. 29). At university, many students would focus on the liberal arts — especially Albanian language and literature — rather than technical subjects, reinforcing their chances of unemployment upon graduation, particularly if they were to leave the republic (Mertus, 1999, p. 28). This intellectual proletariat — now with heightened expectations and hopes, and with a more developed sense of self and national identity — looked to the republican bureaucracy as essentially its sole outlet for employment. According to Fred Singleton, there were few jobs outside of “the inflated administrative machine and in the cultural institutions which had also been the recipients of [federal] funds which ought to have been spent on projects of greater economic relevance” (cited in Mertus, 1999, p. 28). Seventy percent of those unemployed were under the age of 25 (Poulton, 1991, p. 60). At the same time, the situation for non-Albanians at the university had become inhospitable: “at Pristina University and in high schools students boycotted non-Albanian classes, ostracized ‘hostile’ teachers, and refused to study Serbo-Croat” (Vickers, 1998, p. 188).
According to Vickers, the 1974 constitution “began the virtual Albanianization of public life in Kosovo.” The constituion “caused ‘positive discrimination’ in favor of the Albanians in Kosovo: bilingualism became a condition for employment in public services; four-fifths of the available posts were reserved for Albanians on a parity basis; and national quotas were strictly applied when nominations were made for public functons” (Vickers, 1998, p. 180). Between the end of 1974 and 1980 alone, the proportion of Albanians employed in the so-called “social sector” increased from 58 percent to 92 percent, while that of Serbs declined from 31 percent to 5 percent — far below the proportion of Serbs in Kosova’s population as a whole (Ramet, 1992, pp. 192-193). By 1981, over two-thirds of party members in Kosova, and three-quarters of provincial police and security-service personnel, were ethnic Albanian (Malcolm, 1998, p. 326). Vickers concludes that “during the years 1971-1981, Kosovo’s administration operated with minimal restraint from either the Federal or the Serbian Republic government” (Vickers, 1998, p. 183).
The apex for Kosova Albanians — and in many ways, from the perspective of the Serbs, the corresponding nadir — must have been the joint celebrations launched in 1978 between Yugoslavia and Albania to mark the centenary of the founding of the League of Prizren, the historic watershed of Albanian national revival in the 19th century (Magas, 1993, pp. 38, 11; Vickers, 1998, pp. 187-188).
On 24 September 1984, the Belgrade weekly “NIN” reported that between 1961 and 1981, 112,600 Serbs and Montenegrins left Kosova (Benson, 2001, p. 143). According to Malcolm, such numbers are generally confirmed by 1981 census statistics on the number of people in Serbia proper who declared themselves as having come from Kosova (110,675, of whom 85,636 had come between 1961 and 1981) (Malcolm, 1998, p. 330). The proportion of Serbs in Kosova, which had stayed relatively constant at about 23 percent between the late 1940s and early 1960s, fell to 18.3 percent in the 1971 census and 13.2 percent in the 1981 census. More alarming still from the Serb perspective was that, in absolute terms, the number of Serbs had dropped between 1971 and 1981 by over 18,000 (Ramet, 1992, p. 198). Indicative of the contingent and historical character of why particular diaspora issues become politically predominant instead of others is the fact that, according to Malcolm, Bosnia saw an outflow of 111,828 Serbs over this same period, one that was proportionately greater than the outflow of Serbs from Kosova (Malcolm, 1998, p. 330). Whereas in 1961, Serbs had made up 43 percent of Bosnia’s population and Muslims 26 percent, by 1981 the figures were 32 percent and 40 percent, respectively (Benson, 2001, p. 144). Yet, as we know, the diaspora issue of greatest concern for Serbs during the 1980s was Kosova, not Bosnia.
Writing in the summer of 1983, RFE’s Zdenko Antic identified the growing spread of Serbian nationalism and concluded, “If anything provoked this new wave of Serbian nationalism it was the Kosovo events [of 1981]” (Antic, 1983). What began as student demonstrations by ethnic Albanians in Prishtina in March 1981, turned into protests for republican status for Kosova, and then rapidly spread throughout the province in the weeks that followed, eventually spilling over to the ethnic Albanian populations of Macedonia and Montenegro (Ramet, 1992, pp. 195-197). The response of federal officials, spearheaded by Stane Dolanc (a Slovene), was a brutal crackdown — administered by the federal arm of the state-security services and military counterintelligence — and even by Dolanc’s own account resulting in 1,500 arrests for serious crimes against public order and 4,500 for “lesser offenses” (Benson, 2001, p. 136). The climate between the remaining Serbs and Albanians inevitably worsened, and Serbs continued to stream out of the province primarily for economic reasons, but also because they felt increasingly the subject of indirect, and in some cases, direct, pressure (Malcolm, 1998, p. 331).
*Author’s Note: Spelling per editorial request.
(Richard Andrew Hall holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University and a B.A. from the University of Virginia. He currently works and lives in northern Virginia. Comments or questions can be sent to him at hallria@msn.com.)
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Cohen, L. J., 1997, “‘Serpent in the Bosom’: Slobodan Milosevic and Serbian Nationalism,” in Bokovoy, M., Irvine, J., and Lilly, C. (eds.), State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia, 1945-1992, (New York: St. Martin’s Press), pp. 315-343.
Deletant, D., 1995, Ceausescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965-1989, (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe).
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Joo, R. (ed.), Ludanyi, A. (rev. ed.), Tennant, C. (trans.), 1994, The Hungarian Minority’s Situation in Ceausescu’s Romania, (New York: Columbia University Press).
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Kurti, L., 2001, The Remote Borderland: Transylvania in the Hungarian Imagination, (New York: State University Press).
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30 April 2003, Volume 5, Number 9
NATIONALISM IN LATE COMMUNIST EASTERN EUROPE: COMPARING THE ROLE OF DIASPORA POLITICS IN HUNGARY AND SERBIA (Part 3)
By Richard Andrew Hall
A CRITICAL STAGE: REGIME OPPOSITION COALESCES
Just as the regime policy of differentiating and segregating opposition to the regime was critical to the success of the Hungarian and Serb communist parties in undermining opposition during the 1970s, so events or changes in regime behavior that brought together or enabled different parts of the opposition to coalesce proved significant in altering the regime-opposition dynamic in the 1980s. As is often the case, interaction and collaboration on one set of issues “spilled over” and set the stage for future interaction and collaboration — even where there was little direct relation between the earlier and later issues and even where the earlier projects had been viewed as comparatively apolitical. In both Hungary and Serbia, the convergence of populist and liberal dissidents on the nationalist issue was an evolutionary and initially independent process, but it was given impetus and encouraged by unprecedented cooperation between the two camps on other issues.
The Hungarian Opposition Comes Together
Rudolf Tokes identifies the funeral of the legendary writer and historian Istvan Bibo — and the 1,001-page tribute including the contributions of 76 different authors, “Bibo Emlekkonyv” (Bibo Memorial Book, 1980), that followed — as a critical juncture for opposition to the communist regime: “The death of Istvan Bibo in April 1979 became the defining event that helped reshape the dissident movement from a loose intelligentsia network into a new coalition of democratic opposition in Hungary” (Tokes, 1996, p. 184). Indeed, a report prepared by the Central Committee’s Department for Science, Education, and Culture recognized the volume’s potential, stating, “[I]t is suitable for the building of a kind of consensus among various strata of the intelligentsia” (Tokes, 1996, p. 186). The “samizdat” publication brought together what the report identified as eight different types of regime opponents, ranging from populists such as Gyula Illyes to members of the “democratic opposition.”
The Bibo “samizdat” project undoubtedly set the stage for the collaboration of the populist and democratic opposition camps that occurred with the publication of Hungary’s first regular “samizdat” journal, “Beszelo” (Speaker), beginning in December 1981. According to Tokes: “From 1983 on, every issue of the journal gave prominent coverage to matters of Populist interest and paid substantial attention to regional concerns… [C]overage of the Transylvanian scene w[as] [a] major confidence-building step toward the forging of a political alliance between the Hungarian urban and rural critical intelligentsia” (Tokes, 1996, p. 189). Of course, although both sides were defined by a change in their willingness to work more closely with one another, the change in interest in the diaspora issue was primarily one of the liberal intelligentsia.
Prior to the signature by 34 Hungarian intellectuals of the Charter 77 manifesto in January 1977, Janos Kenedi, one of the most active organizers of “samizdat” projects at the time, maintains that “the dissidents had struck outsiders as a clannish lot intent on recruiting people to support noble causes abroad but oddly disinterested in social problems at home and in Hungarian ethnic minority rights in Romania and Slovakia” (cited in Tokes, 1996, p. 184). The Helsinki accords, with their stated commitment to the defense of minority rights, and the increasing recognition by members of the liberal opposition that commitment to the preservation of individual rights necessitates that they take an increasing interest in the fate of the Hungarian minority — particularly in Romania, where those rights appeared to be diminishing — clearly contributed to this turnabout in the focus and interest of the liberal opposition in the diaspora issue. According to George Schopflin, populists and liberals came to the diaspora cause from different philosophical perspectives, but they were nevertheless drawn together: The liberal approach focused on “human rights and the democratization of communist political systems as the means of ending national oppression”; the more emotive populist worldview on “the Hungarian nation’s right to define its identity and objectives” (Schopflin, 1988, p. 4).
One might add here, however, that the appearance and rising prominence of representatives in the liberal opposition who had come from or had deep roots in Transylvania also played a role — most notably, perhaps, the case of Gaspar Miklos Tamas, who had come to Hungary from Romania in 1978. In the 1980s, Tamas would be joined by other Transylvanian intellectuals, who were expelled by the Romanian authorities and consequently sought to publicize the situation of the Hungarian minority in Romania upon arriving in Hungary — including Attila Ara-Kovacs (1983) and Geza Szocs (1985) (Kurti, 2001, p. 109; Joo, 1994, p. 118).
In the wake of the disappointing 13th Congress of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP) in March 1985 — at which the aging and increasingly intransigent Janos Kadar retained the top party post — and the first parliamentary elections with two or more (party-nominated) candidates per district on 8 June 1985 — which saw 154 “spontaneously nominated” candidates and 35 of them end up in parliament — the “democratic opposition” gathered together 45 intellectuals from across the political spectrum, including populists and reform socialists, at a three-day conference at a campsite in the Budapest suburb of Monor from 14-16 June 1985 (Tokes, 1996, pp. 273; 238; 189-190; Ash, 1985, pp. 149-150). The conference convener, Ferenc Donath, suggested that fear of a political crisis because of declining living standards and intractable economic problems — read, in part, Kadar’s continued stewardship of the party and intransigence — had instigated the conference (Tokes, 1996, p. 190). One of the organizers told Timothy Garton Ash in 1985 that “the idea [behind the conference] was [to bring together] a kind of popular front” (Ash, 1985, p. 150). Among the populists, Sandor Csoori and Istvan Csurka spoke and focused on the need for moral renewal, the preservation of the national cultural identity, and heightened awareness of the sufferings of ethnic Hungarians beyond the national boundaries. Csoori argued that the latter question had not yet surfaced because “the vocabulary of socialism seems to lack the words” for doing so (Koppany, 1986). Janos Kis, the de facto editor of “Beszelo” and a chief representative of the liberals criticized the populists for their seeming tunnel vision on these issues and lack of attention to broader issues of social welfare and human rights, but admitted the political crisis necessitated cooperation and bridge-building (Tokes, 1996, p. 190).
Writing in late 1985, Timothy Garton Ash concluded: “What emerged from Monor is not — or not yet — something one could call a united, let alone a popular, front…. But there was at least common debate” (Ash, 1985, p. 150). Ash recognized, however, how central the diaspora question — and specifically Transylvania — was to the coalescing — even if fitful and imperfect — of the Hungarian opposition:
“Perhaps more than anything else it is the direct persecution of Hungarians in Romania that has catalyzed this convergence: the kind of persecution that, as it were, “evades” the Hungarians in Hungary. Nicolae Ceausescu as the godfather of Hungarian intellectual life — what an irony! Deeply unreliable rumor in Budapest has it that when Kadar went to see Gorbachev in September, the Soviet leader asked him: ‘What’s this I hear about your intellectuals gathering together at Monor?’” (Ash, 1985, p. 150)
The European Cultural Forum held in Budapest in the fall of 1985 — the first Helsinki follow-up meeting held in a Soviet-bloc country — gave a boost to further opposition cooperation but also served as something of a watershed in the degree to which representatives of the Hungarian regime voiced the issue of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania. Opposition cooperation gained a boost in large part because the regime ensured that they were barred from the official forum (Tokes, 1996, p. 188). Once again, populists and liberals came together, and much of their attention at their parallel unofficial symposium focused on the situation in Transylvania (Ash, 1985, pp. 152-156).
A secret 1 July 1986 MSZMP Politburo report on regime opposition that was leaked abroad gives evidence that the regime itself recognized and believed that the opposition was coalescing and broadening (J.R., 1987). The document observed that although the core of people in opposition had not grown since 1982, the opposition’s “influence has broadened and the volume of illegal publications increased.” As of 1986, political dissidence in Hungary had ceased to be merely “oppositional” but now was considered a “hostile” antiregime movement (Tokes, 1996, p. 195). The report differentiated what it called the “nationalist radical tendency” (i.e. populist) from the “bourgeois radical group” (i.e. “democratic opposition”), with the former focusing “on problems of the Hungarian minorities and accusing Hungarian authorities of ‘criminal neglect.’” The report acknowledged how during the early and mid 1980s the various strands of opposition opinion in Hungary had coalesced, how the question of the Hungarian diaspora was THE issue fueling populist dissent, and how regime opposition as a whole was allegedly taking advantage of the “worsening situation of the Hungarian minority in neighboring states.”
The 30th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution in October 1986 led to a joint statement signed by 54 Hungarian dissidents, including members of the populist and liberal oppositions, some of whom had participated at Monor. Alfred Reisch concluded at the time that the joint statement was evidence that “the Monor initiative does, indeed, now seem to have been followed up” and that “the recent and remarkable coalition of the various Hungarian oppositionist groups and individuals that began at Monor has held together, despite the variety of concerns and interests involved” (Reisch, 1986). The appeal significantly included “a statement to respect the rights of all minorities,” a clear bow to the importance and unifying character of the diaspora issue within the Hungarian opposition.
Serbia’s Path to Opposition Symbiosis
If in Hungary the coalescing of populist and liberal oppositions to the regime derived largely from events such as the Bibo memorial or an increasing convergence of concern (on the issue of Hungarian diaspora), in Yugoslavia regime actions played a much greater role. Specifically, an ill-fated crackdown in 1984 brought populist and liberal branches of the Serb opposition together. In January 1986, they would collaborate on a groundbreaking Kosova* petition. In March 1986 — therefore before Milosevic’s ascendency to the helm of the Serbian party and prior to the release of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) memorandum — Ramet noted how “the mood in Yugoslavia today is increasingly reminiscent of that of 1970-1971,” only that the Serbs were now playing the role of the Croats then and the impediments to nationalist excess were weaker than in 1971 (Ramet, 1986). By early 1986, the Kosova issue had been percolating in Serbia for at least half a decade. Nick Miller writes:
“In the course of the period from 1981 to 1986, an opposition to the way the Serbian party dealt with Albanian nationalism would coalesce around several specific points: the fact of Serbo-Montenegrin outmigration; the immense economic drain that Kosovo represented; and the alleged revisitation of ancient crimes (rape, murder, and even impalement) against Serbs perpetrated earlier by Turks, now by Albanians” (Miller, 1997, p. 305).
The growing popular appeal and potential of Serb nationalism — and of the centrality of Kosova in its renaissance — was on display at the funeral of Aleksandar Rankovic in 1983. As many as 100,000 people may have witnessed Rankovic’s burial — clearly the largest societal action in communist Serbia to that point in time. Leslie Benson, who was there to witness the event, memorably describes it as follows:
“Rankovic became the posthumous champion of the Serbs, who had kept the Kosovar Albanians in their place. Although Rankovic’s death was given little coverage in the media at the time, the bush telegraph brought out thousands of mourners to follow him to his grave (20 August 1983), many sporting the traditional Serbian peasant cap and singing patriotic songs, interspersed with shouts of ‘Kardelj stitched him up’ (Kardelj ga namestio)…. Rankovic’s obituary notice in ‘Politika’ was relegated to second place on a page which also reported, more prominently, the death of Milos Minic, the organizer of the Seventh Congress. It was still too soon for a Serbian nationalist rehabilitation of Rankovic in public” (Benson, 2001, p. 143; p. 188 n.10).
Indeed, the soon-to-be head of the League of Communists of Serbia (SKS) and Belgrade city chief at the time of the event, Ivan Stambolic, was defensive on the subject: “All across Yugoslavia they criticized me for not controlling it — should I have put tanks round the cemetery?” (quoted in Silber and Little, 1996, p. 36n8). Dobrica Cosic himself identified Rankovic’s funeral as “above all a nationalist demonstration. It was a true, widely effective gesture, a real nationalist uprising [of] solidarity with a noted Serbian communist who was the victim of a great injustice” (quoted in Miller, 2000, p. 281). At this point, however, one can say, many intellectuals continued to lag the crowd, and it would only be in later years that Serb popular sentiment, particularly over Kosova, became more strongly articulated by the broader Serb intelligentsia.
Robert Thomas writes that “the 1980s saw increasing moves towards collective organization among Serbian intellectuals” (Thomas, 1999, p. 40). In what Leslie Benson colorfully describes as “the dying roar of senescent Titoism, which for all its quasi-democratic trappings abhorred all talk of ‘bourgeois rights,’” the League of Communists of Yugoslavia led by the Croatian Titoist ideologue Stipe Suvar launched one last-gasp effort to slow the progression of the federation’s burgeoning centrifugalism and save what was left of the now-threadbare doctrine of “Yugoslavism” (Benson, 2001, p. 145). The Sarajevo Winter Olympics (February 1984) now firmly behind them — and thus the international spotlight turned away, too — in May 1984 the Commission for Ideological Questions and Information met in Zagreb with Suvar leading the ideological charge against the growing trend in the country toward “abuse of freedom of creativity” (Grunewald, 1987, p. 524).
The regime actions that followed were heavy-handed, vindictive, and seemingly arbitrary, however. Twenty-eight participants at a meeting of the so-called “Free” or “Flying” university in a private apartment — ironically, to discuss the national question in Yugoslavia — were arrested in Belgrade on 20 April 1984 (Magas, 1993, pp. 89-91). Four of them were physically assaulted while in police custody, and one of them — a 33-year-old worker, Radomir Radovic — disappeared after a second arrest and release and was found dead on 30 April. In May, the authorities swooped down and arrested a series of intellectuals, including Vojislav Seselj (who had participated in the 20 April meeting) in Sarajevo and three former leaders of the 1968 student movement in Belgrade (Magas, 1993, pp. 102-103). The show trial of the “Belgrade Six” from August to November 1984 backfired and succeeded in bringing together the divergent strands of the Yugoslav — but primarily, the Serb — opposition. Led by Dobrica Cosic, a Committee for the Defense of Freedom of Thought and Expression (CDFTE) was founded on 10 November 1984. The CDFTE, which was founded explicitly to defend the rights of those who had been unjustly imprisoned and offer support to their families, echoed similar-type organizations that had preceded it in Poland (Workers’ Defense Committee, KOR, founded in 1976) and in Czechoslovakia (Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted, VONS, founded in 1978). Helsinki, in a manner of speaking, had finally come to Yugoslavia.
The CDFTE became a template for future opposition collaboration in that it brought together nationalists like Cosic but also the critical marxist “liberals” of “Praxis,” such as Mihailo Markovic. According to Thomas, “despite dealing with such ‘heroic’ national material and his split with the League of Communists, Cosic continued to consider himself to be a man of the ‘left’ maintaining close links with members of the ‘Praxis’ group” (Thomas, 1999, p. 40). Markovic termed the founding of the CDFTE “the first successful breakthrough of civil society in Yugoslavia since the war” (cited in Grunewald, 1992, p. 182). Oskar Grunewald recognized the significance of the founding of the CDFTE for the Praxis group and regime opposition as whole as follows:
“But it is only following the death of Radomir Radovic that Mihailo Markovic ignored his own advice concerning permissible ‘limits’ for a critically minded intellectual and signed the first ever petition in postwar Yugoslavia calling on the interior minister to account for an unexplained death or accept responsibility for it and resign from office” (Grunewald 1992, p. 182).
Next, in May 1985, an event occurred that was to inflame Serb passions on the Kosova question and contribute to the further convergence of opposition in Serbia. Ivo Banac summarizes the incident and issues it raised as follows:
“And then in 1985 came the bizarre case of Djordje Martinovic [a 56-year-old Serb peasant], who was (or was not) impaled (or abused himself) with a broken bottle (or a bottle that broke in his anus) by two Albanians (or by Albanians of his own invention). At stake was the veracity of Kosovar authorities (who argued that Martinovic was in effect a pervert) and the Serbian authorities and public opinion (who were convinced that Martinovic was a victim of violence and a crude cover-up). At stake, too, was the autonomy of Kosova, since it appeared that even the purged ranks of Albanian communists were [following the riots and crackdown of 1981] were unreliable, while the Serbian investigatory agencies were constitutionally prevented from acting in the province” (Banac, 1992, p. 176).
The impact of the Martinovic affair on Serb consciousness as a symbol of Serb suffering in Kosova could be seen in Mica Popovic’s 1986 painting “1 maj 1985,” which depicts the fictional crucifixion of Martinovic. According to Nick Miller:
“Popovic chose, not only to render the scene, but to render it as the martyrdom of the Serbian peasant, standing in for the nation as a whole. All of the elements of Serbian subjugation in Yugoslavia are present — white-capped Albanians hoist Martinovic onto the cross; the bottle waits; the blue-uniformed policeman, the ubiquitous watchman of the Titoist regime, stand guard over the ceremony” (Miller, 1999, p. 530 — see photo of painting on p. 532).
Julie Mertus writes that “[t]aking advantage of the public uproar caused by the Martinovic case, Kosovo Serbs created a petition to the assemblies of Serbia and Yugoslavia in October 1985″ (Mertus, 1999, p. 108). This was the second petition of Kosovar Serbs and contained the signatures of 2,011 Serbs and Montenegrins. The first petition had been circulated in early 1982 and carried the names of 79 Serbs. In the wake of the 1981 events in Kosova, Kosovar Serbs who had left the province began to tell their stories to the Belgrade press — encouraged to do so by Dobrica Cosic and like-minded intellectuals and prompted by their perception of the unreceptivity of Kosova’s predominantly Albanian authorities to their plight (Silber and Little, 1996, pp. 34-35; Mertus, 1999 pp. 97-98; Thomas, 1999, p. 35). Kosovar Serb activists Miroslav Solevic, Kosta Bulatovic, and Bosko Budimirovic proclaimed in the first petition what was to become the slogan of their movement: “This is our land. If Kosovo and Metohija are not Serbian then we don’t have any land of our own” (Silber and Little, 1996, pp. 34-35). According to Silber and Little, Cosic has admitted a role in encouraging the movement — “they complained about their position and I advised them to write a petition and to put forward their demands,” they quote him as saying (Silber and Little, 1996, p. 35).
Just as in Hungary it was more a case of the “democratic opposition” coming to the nationalist cause, so it was with Serbia’s “liberals” — the critical marxists of the “Praxis” group — though perhaps even more belatedly. In January 1986, 212 Belgrade intellectuals — many of them prominent and including 52 professors and 34 members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts — sent a petition to the Yugoslav and Serbian national assemblies decrying the treatment of Serbs in Kosova (Stankovic, 1986a). According to Mertus, the petition echoed the October 1985 petition in blasting Serbian and Yugoslav leaders for failing to take action in defense of Kosovar Serbs faced with a looming Albanian-administered “genocide” (Mertus, 1999, pp. 135-136). Its language was emotive and highly charged, speaking of “old women and nuns being raped, youngsters beaten up, cattle blinded, stables built from gravestones, churches and old shrines desecrated” and warning that “no nation will give up its right to exist, and the Serb people are not and do not want to be an exception…. [If Kosova were to become] ethnically pure, this would inevitably lead to fresh national and international conflicts” (Mertus, 1999, pp. 135-136).
Branka Magas, writing in late 1986 in the “New Left Review” under the pseudonym of “Michelle Lee,” recognized the groundbreaking nature of the January 1986 Kosova petition — and its implications for the character of opposition to the communist regime in Serbia — as follows:
“Particularly surprising was the fact that the January petition was signed by three former editors of ‘Praxis’: Zaga Golubovic, Mihailo Markovic and Ljuba Tadic — joined subsequently by Milan Kangrga, another well-known former ‘Praxis’ editor, who gave an interview to the Belgrade literary and oppositional journal ‘Knjizevne novine,’ once again overtly anti-Albanian in message. This unexpected, indeed astonishing, alignment of ‘Praxis’ editors with nationalism has aroused considerable dismay among their friends and sympathizers, for it delineates a complete break with the political and philosophical tradition represented by the journal…. The appearance of ‘Praxis’ signatures on the Kosova petition, signaling a de facto absorption into the nationalist bloc, thus represents not only the final denouement of the ‘Praxis’ venture but also a generational rupture with Yugoslav Marxism” (Magas, 1993, pp. 52-53).
Nick Miller characterizes it this way:
“The other half of the non-party opposition consisted of members of the Praxis group. Their position outside of the party had been long-established. Yet their opposition to the party had always been essentially Marxist. The fact that they now joined a nationalist consensus is thus intriguing and somewhat shocking. Four members of the group, Ljubomir Tadic, Zagorka Golubovic, Mihailo Markovic, and Milan Kangrga had signed the January 1986 petition that first labeled Albanian behavior in Kosovo as genocidal. Their gravitation from Marxism to nationalism was abrupt. Their anti-Titoism was of long pedigree, and their democratic inclinations were well-publicized. Their transition can be explained in two ways: their democracy, like that of other Serbs (and Croats, as well as others) was not rooted in a belief in individual liberties, rather it was founded on a collective conception of society and rights; and they found it easy to move from one homogenizing, collective ideology (class-based Marxism) to another (cultural-based nationalism). By the early 1990s, Markovic was Milosevic’s intellectual alter-ego” (Miller, 1997, p. 308).
In the months that followed the groundbreaking January 1986 Kosova petition, here again opposition convergence on the Kosova question was accompanied by continued collaboration in defending intellectual victims of the regime’s wrath. From February to early April 1986, the Serbian Writers’ Union held weekly literary protests with lectures on repression and creativity in support of Dragolub Petrovic, who had been sentenced on 3 December 1985 to 60 days’ imprisonment for questioning official historiography (Grunewald, 1987, p. 518). Attendance began at 200 people on 10 February and had grown to over 1,000 by 3 March. Cosic called openly at these meetings for civil disobedience, strikes, and petitions as legitimate means to protest the authorities (Grunewald, 1987, p. 518). Similarly, the firing of Dusan Bogovac as chief editor of “Komunist” for having invited Seselj to publish in the pages of his journal, and for his own writings on Serb migration from Kosova, led 91 journalists to start a so-called Solidarity Fund on May Day 1986 (Grunewald, 1987, pp. 525-526). Journalists themselves had held a protest on 13 March 1986 against a ban on coverage of Yugoslav National Assembly President Ilijaz Kurteshi — an ethnic Albanian (Stankovic, 1986b).
Meanwhile, the protests by Kosovar Serbs were gathering steam. In February 1986, 95 Kosovar Serbs representing 42 towns and villages in the province braved bitter cold and marched to the Federal Assembly in Belgrade (Vladisavljevic, 2002, p. 772). The arrest of one of the organizers in early April led to a vigil of several thousand outside his home, a futile effort of then Serbian party leader Ivan Stambolic to quell the crowd’s spirits at Kosova Polje, and another march — this time by 550 Kosovar Serbs, led by an 80-year-old farmer — to Belgrade (Vladisavljevic, 2002, pp. 772-773). In what Silber and Little maintain was a “key moment” after which “no longer would the movement be confined underground,” the leaders of this group were met by the dissident nationalist writer, Vuk Draskovic, who in turn brought them to an emotional Cosic (Silber and Little, 1996, p. 35). Cosic reportedly phoned Dusan Ckrebic, the then Serbian president, who supposedly advised the protesters the next morning: “This is where you should be. Not where you were last night.” With help from a self-proclaimed “Committee of Serbs and Montenegrins” from Kosova, a petition in the latter’s defense would garner over 50,000 signatures during 1986.
*Author’s Note: Spelling per editorial request.
(Richard Andrew Hall holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University and a B.A. from the University of Virginia. He currently works and lives in northern Virginia. Comments or questions can be sent to him at hallria@msn.com.)
SOURCES
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Banac, I., 1992, “Post-Communism as Post-Yugoslavism: The Yugoslav Non-Revolutions of 1989-1990,” in Banac, I. (ed.), Eastern Europe in Revolution, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), pp. 168-187.
Benson, L., 2001, Yugoslavia: A Concise History, (New York: Palgrave).
Grunewald, O., 1987, “Yugoslav Camp Literature: Rediscovering the Ghost of a Nation’s Past-Present-Future,” in “Slavic Review,” Vol. 46, Nos. 3-4, pp. 513-528.
Grunewald, O., 1992, “Praxis and Democratization in Yugoslavia: From Critical Marxism to Democratic Socialism?” in Taras, R. (ed.), The Road to Disillusion: From Critical Marxism to Postcommunism in Eastern Europe, (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe), pp. 175-195.
Joo, R. (ed.), Ludanyi, A. (rev. ed.), Tennant, C. (trans.), 1994, The Hungarian Minority’s Situation in Ceausescu’s Romania, (New York: Columbia University Press).
J. R., 1987, “Secret Politburo Report on Opposition Published,” in “Radio Free Europe Research,” Hungarian Situation Report No. 7, pp. 25-28.
Koppany, S., 1986, “Hungarian Opposition Groups Hold Meeting to Discuss Nation’s Future,” in “Radio Free Europe Research,” RAD Background Report No. 24, pp. 1-12.
Kurti, L., 2001, The Remote Borderland: Transylvania in the Hungarian Imagination, (New York: State University Press).
Magas, B., 1993, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracing the Break-up 1980-92, (New York: Verso).
Mertus, J., 1999, Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
Miller, N. J., 1997, “Reconstituting Serbia: 1945-1991,” in Bokovoy, M., Irvine, J., and Lilly, C. (eds.), State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia, 1945-1992, (New York: St. Martin’s Press), pp. 291-314.
Miller, N. J., 1999, “The Nonconformists: Dobrica Cosic and Mica Popovic Envision Serbia,” in “Slavic Review,” Vol. 58, No. 3, pp. 515-536.
Miller, N. J., 2000, “The Children of Cain: Dobrica Cosic’s Serbia,” in “East European Politics and Societies,” Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 268-287.
Ramet, P., 1986, “Concern about Serbian Nationalism,” in “Radio Free Europe Research,” Yugoslavia Situation Report No. 4, pp. 11-15.
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Silber, L. and Little, A., 1996, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, (New York: Penguin USA).
Stankovic, S., 1986a, “Serbian Intellectuals Deplore Genocide in Kosovo,” in “Radio Free Europe Research,” Yugoslavia Situation Report No. 3, pp. 13-14.
Stankovic, S., 1986b, “Journalists Protest Censorship,” in “Radio Free Europe Research,” Yugoslavia Situation Report No. 4, pp. 3-4.
Thomas, R., 1999, The Politics of Serbia in the 1990s, (New York: Columbia University Press).
Tokes, R., 1996, Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution: Economic reform, social change, and political succession, 1957-1990, (New York: Cambridge University Press).
Vladisavljevic, N., 2002, “Nationalism, Social Movement Theory and the Grass Roots Movement of Kosovo Serbs, 1985-1988,” in “Europe-Asia Studies,” Vol. 54, No. 5, pp. 771-790.
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14 May 2003, Volume 5, Number 10
NATIONALISM IN LATE COMMUNIST EASTERN EUROPE: COMPARING THE ROLE OF DIASPORA POLITICS IN HUNGARY AND SERBIA (Part 4)
By Richard Andrew Hall
The Symbiosis Of Serbian Opposition (Continued)
Benson, for one, expresses skepticism regarding the timing of the publication of the now infamous Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (SANU) Memorandum in late September 1986 — “since it had been in circulation for well over a year” (Benson, 2001, p. 146). SANU had appointed a committee in June 1985 to formulate a memorandum to “raise the most important social, political, economic, educational, and cultural problems.” What they came up with instead was a nationalist screed that claimed Serbs were the targets of “neofascist aggression” and of “physical, political, legal, and cultural genocide in Kosovo.” (It is worth noting that such hyperbolic and ultimately abusive treatment of the term “genocide” also characterized Hungarian discussion of the plight of Transylvanian Hungarians.) Serbs were portrayed as the victims of a monstrous “anti-Serbian coalition” consisting of the leaderships of Croatia, Slovenia, and Vojvodina (Thomas, 1999, p. 41; Mertus, 1999, pp. 137-141). A media campaign after the leaking of the divisive document lasted from autumn 1986 through spring 1987 and called for the SANU leadership and, in particular, its vice president, the writer Antonije Isakovic, to resign (Thomas, 1999, p. 41).
Bennett maintains that whereas Ivan Stambolic, then president of Serbia, and Dragisa Pavlovic, head of the Belgrade League of Communists, denounced the memorandum publicly, condemnation of the document by the Central Committee of the Serbian League of Communists was “suppressed at the insistence of its President, Slobodan Milosevic” (Bennett, 1995, p. 82). Milosevic had acceded to that position in May 1986 according to the rules of rotation of office that prevailed at the time and with the help of his longtime political benefactor Ivan Stambolic. However, Cohen claims that as late as 4 June 1987 — and thus three months after Milosevic’s public nationalist epiphany at Kosovo Polje (Fusha Kosova) in April 1987 (discussed below) — Milosevic used a closed meeting with Communists from the Federal Secretariat of Internal Affairs to launch an “uncharacteristically impassioned attack on the infamous Memorandum” (Cohen, 1997, p. 326). As Cohen observes, “Only a short time after making this speech, Milosevic would begin appropriating and encouraging viewpoints that he had earlier condemned as examples of the darkest nationalism” (Cohen, 1997, p. 326). Within a year he would also co-opt many of the memorandum’s authors and supporters as an intellectual brain trust.
As is well known, the defining moment of Slobodan Milosevic’s political career — his personal “epiphany” or “moment of truth” — occurred in Kosovo Polje on 24 April 1987 when he addressed a crowd of 15,000 Serbs beaten back by a mainly ethnic Albanian civilian police force. “No one should dare beat you, no one has the right to beat you,” he told them. The crowd began chanting in response, “Slobo, Slobodo” — a play on Milosevic’s nickname and the word for freedom in Serbian — and Milosevic responded: “You should stay here. This is your land. These are your houses. Your meadows and gardens. Your memories.” Eric Gordy has perhaps captured best why Milosevic’s behavior and style of interacting with the crowd at this event — no matter how rehearsed or staged-managed as has been alleged — was so groundbreaking:
“This was one of the first instances in which a leading politician had spoken in public and offered an idea that everybody could understand and who went so far as to encapsulate the message in a single comprehensible sentence. After years of progressively more incomprehensible and dense babble purporting to explain Yugoslavia’s unnervingly opaque system of ‘workers’ self-management,’ such an event was beyond memory for people who opposed Milosevic as well as those who supported him” (Gordy, 1999, p. 26 No. 6).
The so-called Night of Hard Words — Milosevic would listen to the grievances of a delegation of Kosova Serbs in a meeting that lasted 12 hours! — would end with Slobodan Milosevic a changed man. With the Belgrade media on hand to capture and later replay the moment over and over, Milosevic’s “promise” to protect the Serbs rapidly became the stuff of popular legend in Serbia (Silber and Little, pp. 37-39).
Hungary: Leadership Succession, Struggle, And Opposition Fragmentation
The process of opposition coalescence that had developed in Hungary over the course of the early and especially mid-1980s began to fray in 1987. On the one hand, the banning of the provincial (Szeged) periodical “Tiszataj” in July 1986 for “nationalist material” and the measures taken against Istvan Csurka and Gaspar Nagy, who had written that material in its pages, had become mainly the focus of populist angst — as exhibited at the Hungarian Writers’ Union congress in late November 1986, the first such meeting since December 1981 (Pataki, 1986). Jenkins notes too that although Csoori, Csurka, and Sandor Lezsak had signed the October 1986 joint appeal with members of the “democratic opposition,” they pointedly stayed away from a ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of the 1956 Uprising, in part because they did not wish to jeopardize the gains they had wrested from the regime as a result of their ability to establish influence in the Writers Union (Jenkins, 1992).
After all, despite their struggles with the authorities — a struggle made clear at the 1986 Writers’ Union congress when party ideologue Janos Berecz launched a stinging indictment of intellectuals who did not toe the party’s line in their work — the populists did have something to lose. In response to a letter in late 1984 by Zoltan Biro and 18 of his populist colleagues, they had been allowed to establish the Gabor Bethlen Foundation to cover the plight of Transylvanian Hungarians (Jenkins, 1992; Tokes, 1996, pp. 196-197). Then, in April 1987, relations with the “democratic opposition” were further soured when the cultural monthly “Mozgo Vilag” published a poem by the urbanist Gyorgy Spiro in which he referred to the populists as “scum.” As Judith Pataki describes, “many populist authors felt insulted and [thus] asked the Hungarian Writers’ Union to refer the poem to its Committee on Ethics” (Pataki, 1987).
Against this backdrop came the so-called “Beszelo” affair surrounding the publication of the “Tarsadalmi Szerzodes,” in which Janos Kis and two co-authors argued that it was time for Kadar to exit the political scene and for “radical political change” to renegotiate the “social contract” of the Kadar years (Tokes, 1996, p. 201). The populists were furious. It did not matter that the document, in Tokes’s words, reflected the views of the “Beszelo” editors and not the broader “democratic opposition,” and thus, “devoted considerable attention to the issue of Hungarian ethnic minorities” (Tokes, 1996, pp. 201-202). What mattered was that in “early 1987 the Populists [had] made another attempt to resume cooperation with the ‘Beszelo’ group by way of holding a ‘Monor II’ conference later in the year,” and now instead the “democratic opposition” was attempting to impose their more radical agenda on the populists without consulting them (Tokes, 1996, p. 197).
Tokes argues that at the time the document was exceptionally courageous, but that it was the product as much of new pressures as new opportunities (Tokes, 1996, p. 200). In June 1987, Karoly Grosz had succeeded to the post of prime minister in what Tokes identifies as “the beginning of the endgame for the Kadar regime in Hungary.” “The still loosely organized dissident movement was in danger of losing momentum or worse — succumbing to offers of co-optation by the regime or by its ‘human face,’ Imre Pozsgay,” head of the People’s Patriotic Front-organization (HNF) since 1982 and already well known as the most prominent advocate of reform among the post-Kadar generation in the party’s higher ranks (Tokes, 1996, p. 200; 239).
Clearly jockeying for power in advance of the succession struggle that would inevitably follow Kadar’s eventual resignation, Pozsgay appears to have played an important role as godfather of the conference of 181, mostly populist intellectuals at Lakitelek on 27 September 1987, that saw the founding of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). The site of the conference was the home of the intellectual Sandor Lezsak in the village of Lakitelek, some 90 kilometers southeast of Budapest. The contrast with a previous meeting of young authors at the same location in May 1979 — when authorities shut down proceedings after only two days — could not have been greater. This time, not only did the authorities stay away, but a senior official (Pozsgay) spoke at the gathering (Pataki, 1987).
As Tokes points out, Zoltan Biro, still a party member at the time, was a friend and associate of Pozgay’s while at the Culture Ministry in the 1970s and had since at least the late 1970s constituted a link for Pozsgay to the provincial cultural and educational elites who formed the backbone of the populists (Tokes, 1996, pp. 204-205). Tokes maintains that as one of the conveners of Lakitelek, Biro was clearly serving as “Pozsgay’s political emissary.” Pozsgay himself attended the meeting — ostensibly to convey Prime Minister Grosz’s greetings — and delivered a sharp indictment of the contemporary political situation in Hungary, calling for a “new national coalition” for a “democratic and socialist” Hungary. In case there was any doubt that the MDF was a “stalking horse” for Pozsgay, on 14 November 1987 the founding statement of the MDF was published in the HNF newspaper “Magyar Nemzet” as part of an interview with Pozsgay, the HNF head. The article came six weeks after the conference, but significantly only two days after a stinging address by Grosz in Gyor about the “extremist elements of the opposition trying to compromise and discredit the leadership” (Reisch, 1987).
Conspicuous by their absence at the Lakitelek conference were representatives of the “democratic opposition.” Judith Pataki noted at the time, “Gyorgy Konrad was the only ‘urban’ author invited to the meeting, indicating the split that exists between populists and ‘urban’ writers, which the regime has sought to capitalize on in order to divide the opposition” (Pataki, 1987). In fact, Konrad objected to the nascent communist-populist condominium being advocated by Pozsgay and most of the populist speakers, claiming that it was antithetical to the multiparty system that had prevailed in 1947-48, before the communists extinguished official political differentiation (Tokes, 1996, p. 198). Laszlo Lengyel, a reform economist, did not abstain from highlighting that the conference was not representative of the Hungarian opposition: “Where are those who for years had spoken up for the cause of Hungarian democracy and the rights of Hungarian citizens? Where are the Janos Kis’? I miss them!” (cited in Tokes, 1996, pp. 198-199).
The absence of representatives of the “democratic opposition” from Lakitelek was not accidental. Asked several years later why, at the famous founding meeting of the MDF at Lakitelek in September 1987, representatives of the “democratic opposition” had been conspicuously absent, Zoltan Biro recalled what he claims was the poisonous fallout of the “Beszelo” affair:
“The whole thing went to pieces with the appearance of the special ‘Tarsadalmi Szerzodes’ edition of ‘Beszelo.’ With this they went ahead of the events, since the goal of the organizing council should have been exactly the acceptance of such a document. I cannot help but conclude that such a gesture was a breach of trust. They didn’t say a word about any of it. Csoori, Gyula Fekete, and I were sitting on the terrace of the ‘Europa presszo’ [cafe], when Fur and Csurka returned from a preparatory session with the news: ‘Social Contract’ had been published. It was then that we decided that we can’t go on like this [with the "democratic opposition"], we have to arrange our own meeting (Biro, 1993, p. 96).
Tokes discusses the groundbreaking significance of the Lakitelek conference for regime-opposition relations in Hungary as follows:
“The Lakitelek conference was a landmark event: the public renegotiation of the terms of the Kadar-Aczel-Populist compromise of 1958-1962. The old regime had defaulted on its commitment to Nemeth, Illyes, and their ideological heirs. This, in turn, presented the reform communists, particularly Pozsgay, with the opportunity to revise the terms of the relationship to their political benefit. The recruitment of Populists for participation in a ‘democratic socialist’ partnership with political incumbents was an example of communist ‘rearguard Realpolitik’ at its best. The Populists’ enthusiastic endorsement of the terms of Grosz’s proposal helped drive a wedge between the democratic opposition and the nationalist intelligentsia. As the populists saw it, Pozsgay’s involvement as a trusted middleman between the regime and the intellectuals committed to values of ‘people and nation’ held the promise of a Popular Front-type ‘democratic socialist’ party pluralism. Prospects of peaceful power sharing by emerging constituencies, such as new clubs and associations, with the regime’s PPF seemed irresistible to the ‘founding fathers’ of the HDF in the fall of 1987. The pact, such as it was, helped upgrade the Populist politicians’ status from that of powerless petitioners to politically sheltered auxiliaries of the ruling party’s nascent reform wing” (Tokes, 1996, p. 199).
As Kurti has suggested, as emigration from Transylvania increased, the issue of the fate of the Hungarian diaspora became more concrete for Hungarians: “The very presence of ‘Transylvanian Hungarians’ gave an impetus to the public discourse on the problems of Hungarian minorities living in the neighboring successor states, especially in the fight for human rights in Czechoslovakia and Romania” (Kurti, 2001, p. 111). In this way, Hungary mirrored Serbia, where the exodus of Kosovar Serbs and their presence in Belgrade had placed the issue in the popular conscience and forced its way onto the political agenda.
Although the role of changes in Hungarian regime policy toward East German “tourists” and refugees is well known in the history of the collapse of communism in 1989, the impact of Hungarian regime policy on the Transylvanian question in Hungarian politics and upon Hungarian-Romanian relations is generally not. Between August and October 1986, for example, the number of Romanian passport holders exiting Hungary for Austria without the requisite valid Austrian entry stamp doubled (Pataki, 1988a). Whereas in 1986 3,284 Romanian citizens had requested Hungarian residency, in 1987 that number doubled to 6,499 — with fully 95 percent of the total being Romanian citizens of Hungarian ethnicity (Kurti, 2001, p. 110). By early 1988, there were an estimated 10,000 new refugees from Romania living in Hungary — even though one-quarter of those trying to enter Hungary were still purportedly being turned back at the border and there were isolated instances of Romanian border guards gunning down would-be refugees (Pataki, 1988b). The resettlement issue in general, and the return of ethnic Hungarians to Romania by the Hungarian government specifically, were issues that, according to Kurti, “so galvanized the Hungarian opposition elite that by the beginning of 1988 it dared to speed up its open confrontational manner against both countries’ regimes” (Kurti, 2001, p. 124).
As Kurti observes, “Mostly formed by populist writers, filmmakers, poets, university teachers, and artists, the Democratic Forum was organized with the central goal of helping the Transylvanian cause” (Kurti, 2001, p. 129). Although in late January and early February 1988, there was a coordinated multi-country effort by dissidents across Eastern Europe — including representatives of Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia — to protest Nicolae Ceausescu’s oppressive rule in Romania, the Democratic Forum was undeniably the engine of sustained efforts to highlight the transgressions of the Romanian regime — but primarily with regard to the treatment of the Hungarian minority. A 30 January 1988 gathering of some 500 people sponsored by the Democratic Forum — but also including the attendance of Gyorgy Konrad and Janos Kis — in the Jurta Theater — Budapest’s only large privately owned theater at the time — had drawn up an appeal for political reform that was promptly ignored by official Hungarian media (Reisch, 1988a). However, the MDF’s third meeting, on 6 March 1988 in the Jurta Theater, was devoted to formulating a statement on the Hungarian diaspora, and attracted 730 people to the 330-seat theater — attendees were asked to donate 100 forints for rent, because the regime was applying financial pressure to shut down the Jurta Theater (Reisch, 1988b). In attendance this time were not only populist mainstays such as Csoori and Csurka and many others, but nonpopulist Transylvanian emigres such as Gaspar Miklos Tamas and Geza Szocs, as well as a series of increasingly prominent Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP) members who were shortly to be expelled from the party (Reisch, 1988b). In his remarks, Szocs assailed not only the Romanian regime but the “lameness” of the Hungarian authorities. Undoubtedly responding to the increasing flow of refugees from Romania and the pressure now publicly assumed and exerted by the MDF, and attempting to carve out a more autonomous role in the rapidly evolving political climate preceding Kadar’s succession, on 17 March the National Assembly — with only 12 votes against and 10 abstentions — voted for a resettlement fund for the refugees in the amount of 300 million forints (Reisch, 1988b).
The MDF’s existence as the first and essentially sole organized representative of civil society at this juncture, the prominence it gave the Transylvanian question, the growing tide of ethnic Hungarian refugees from Romania, and the politics of Kadar’s potential successors staking out their ground in the run-up to the special party conference scheduled for May, conspired during this period to give the national question, and specifically Transylvania, a primacy in Hungarian domestic politics. Indicative of the fact that some within the party leadership were fearful of the growing influence of the MDF, and of how it was potentially serving as a stalking horse for Imre Pozsgay within the context of the succession struggle, four reformers within the party were expelled in early April 1988 for violating party discipline by articulating “views at variance with the party’s policies…for some time at nonparty forums” (Tokes, 1996, p. 202). Not surprisingly, one of the four expelled was Zoltan Biro, who had played a key role at Lakitelek and in the founding of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, and was widely seen as Pozsgay’s bridge to the organization.
But the decisions taken by the Romanian regime at this juncture also played a key role in forcing Transylvania to the front of the Hungarian political scene. In April 1988, the Hungarian media reported that even minority language newspapers in Romania were now required to use only Romanian-language place names for cities and villages, regardless of the location or ethnic makeup of the place in question. More damaging still was Ceausescu’s announcement to reenergize his so-called “systematization” dream, that called for the elimination of up to 10,000 villages by the year 2000, and that Hungarians believed would disproportionately affect them given the increasingly precarious long-term prospects for Hungarian culture and identity in Transylvania.
The Romanian regime’s decisions loosed a veritable avalanche of articles, statements, and protests from individuals and organizations inside and outside the Hungarian party-state. Demonstrations in Western capitals against the Romanian regime’s policies, and in particular the systematization project, were covered by the Hungarian media. The Hungarian Architects Association, the Hungarian Musicians Association, the Hungarian Musical Council, the Hungarian Lawyers Association, the Hungarian Writers Association, the Institute for Literary Theory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Association of Hungarian Film and Television Artists, the Hungarian Association of Societies for the Technical and Natural Sciences, and many other official organizations launched appeals and protests against the systematization project — frequently appealing for international intervention to prevent it — in the weeks following Kadar’s resignation from the post of general secretary on 22 May 1988 (for an excellent chronology of the protests, see Ionescu, 1988). The Hungarian media gave prominence to such developments. The Foreign Ministry took the occasion to openly criticize the Romanian authorities while putting translations of articles from the official Hungarian press critical of Romania’s resettlement plans at the disposal of foreign journalists (Ionescu, 1988). Clearly, those in the party-state were taking advantage of the succession and Kadar’s exit to promote and exploit the authorities’ tacit approval of protests on the Transylvania question.
The founding of the MDF, the regime’s apparent grudging toleration of its existence (so long as it was a distinct entity outside the party and was not attempting to “steal” party members), and Pozsgay’s call for a law on associations had unleashed a process in early 1988 whereby the formalization of what had been distinct, if informal, interest groups began to take place. Thus, on 30 March 1988, students founded the youth organization, the League of Young Democrats (FIDESZ), and a series of emergent interest groups joined together to form the Network of Free Initiatives (SZKH) on 1 May 1988. As Tokes suggests, the SZKH “was an unstructured discussion forum and, in a way, the ‘Beszelo’ circle’s answer to the by then semilegitimate MDF” (Tokes, 1996, pp. 311-312). As Jenkins suggests, the members of the “democratic opposition” who founded the SZKH still, somewhat unrealistically perhaps at this juncture, seemed to harbor the expectation and hope that the MDF would join under the umbrella SZKH to form a united opposition (Jenkins, 1992). This did not happen. From March, the MDF had been setting up provincial branches, and throughout the spring and summer of 1988 this proto-party gathered momentum as an increasing force in Hungarian politics.
The response of Hungarian authorities to protests that occurred in the immediate wake of the special party conference in late May demonstrated even more clearly the lines between tolerated and unacceptable dissent and the regime’s efforts to differentiate and drive a wedge between the two. On 27 May, for example, an unofficial gathering of 2,000 protesters demonstrating against the Czechoslovak Gabcikovo-Nagymaros dam project was allowed to proceed peacefully and was covered by Radio Budapest, including a 20-minute press account the following day (Pataki, 1988c). A month later, on 27 June 1988, in the largest demonstration since the 1956 Revolution — larger than any previous effort to mark the dates of 15 March, 16 June, and 23 October — at least 40,000, and perhaps many as 80,000 people, marched through the streets of Budapest to denounce the planned Romanian project of “village systematization” and protest in general the lot of ethnic Hungarians in Romania. There was little police presence and both Hungarian television and radio covered the demonstrations (Pataki, 1988d). Moreover, it appears that although the party’s politburo urged party and youth organizations to stay away from the 27 June demonstration, nothing was said about party penalties for those who chose to join the protest march (Tokes, 1996, p. 486 n. 88).
By contrast, preventive detentions occurred in the days leading up to the 16 June 1988 demonstrations to commemorate the execution of Imre Nagy, and 19 were arrested and over 100 beaten as police brutally broke up the demonstration (Pataki, 1998c; Tokes, 1996, p. 287). What differentiated the repressed 16 June 1988 demonstration and the tolerated 27 June 1988 demonstration 11 days later was that the “democratic opposition” had a heavy presence at the former, while the latter was dominated by the populist Hungarian Democratic Forum (Schopflin, Tokes, and Volgyes, 1988, pp. 44-45). And what differentiated the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros and Transylvania protests from the Nagy protest was also that the former called upon (greater) regime action and intervention — a call that could be potentially embraced by party cadres who did not support the cause of the demonstrations themselves — whereas the latter was explicitly critical of the government.
The division and separation of the Hungarian opposition into distinct groups was cemented in the fall of 1988. A year after the famous Lakitelek conference, the Hungarian Democratic Forum officially declared itself a political movement on 3 September 1988. Among its founders were the core of populist dissent and thus it should come as no surprise that its founding statement stipulated that the diaspora was an “inalienable” part of the Hungarian nation (Reisch, 1988b). Significantly, the MDF announced that it was and intended to be a “movement that neither supports, nor opposes the government” (Reisch, 1988b). As Alfred Reisch noted, the MDF appeared to have been set up with “official acquiesence,” as media coverage of the event was incomparably greater than that of the Lakitelek conference the previous year, and as government officials seemed to be “outright rejoicing” in their commentary on the party’s creation (Reisch, 1988c). Indicative of the sea change in official regime attitudes that appeared to have followed Kadar’s ouster was that the regime organ “Tarsadalmi Szemle,” which had previously published criticism of the MDF, ran a six-page statement by MDF official Zoltan Biro, who had been expelled from the party in April for his participation in the MDF (Reisch, 1988c). In November 1988, some members of the SZKH (led by Janos Kis, Ferenc Koszeg, and Balint Magyar) chose to form their own rival political movement to counter the MDF, the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ); by March 1989, their first party congress — including Gabor Demszky, Gyorgy Konrad, Miklos Haraszti, and many other long-time members of the “democratic opposition” — was launching a political program (Jenkins, 1992; Markos-Oltay, 1989). Hungary’s future political party system was coming into existence.
(Richard Andrew Hall holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University and a B.A. from the University of Virginia. He currently works and lives in northern Virginia. Comments or questions can be sent to him at hallria@msn.com.)
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28 May 2003, Volume 5, Number 11
NATIONALISM IN LATE COMMUNIST EASTERN EUROPE: COMPARING THE ROLE OF DIASPORA POLITICS IN HUNGARY AND SERBIA (Part 5)
By Richard Andrew Hall
Serbia: Leadership Succession, Struggle, and Regime-Opposition Symbiosis
Arguably as important during the course of 1987 as Milosevic’s public conversion to the nationalist cause was his centralization and consolidation of power within the media and the structures of the party-state. On 18 February 1987, at a session of the Belgrade Party Committee, Milosevic announced what Aleksandar Nenadovic terms a “radical political and personal ‘differentiation’ in Serbian journalism” by declaring:
“The editor-in-chief of ‘Duga’ has been replaced, but the situation in ‘Duga’ will not change before we execute broader changes in the editorial staff of ‘Duga.’ We are talking about a new editor-in-chief of the weekly ‘NIN.’ Regardless of the solution we reach, we shall not solve the problem ‘NIN’ unless a serious reconstruction is carried out” (Nenadovic, 2000, p. 553).
Ultimately, “Duga,” “NIN,” and the rest of the Belgrade media would fall into line. Milosevic would capitalize upon the growing nationalist media hysteria over the Kosova* issue to seize control of the Serbian party by driving his two main political competitors, Dragisa Pavlovic, head of the Belgrade party, and Ivan Stambolic, the president of Serbia, out of their positions in the fall of 1987.
On 3 September 1987, in what came to be known as the “Paracin massacre,” Aziz Kelmendi, a 19-year-old Albanian recruit, went on a shooting rampage in a barracks in central Serbia, killing four soldiers (two Bosnian Muslims, a Croat, and a Serb) and wounding five others before allegedly taking his own life. The funeral of the Serb recruit who was killed — 10,000 attended — became a political demonstration against the Kosovar Albanian leadership, even as his parents reportedly pleaded with the demonstrators not to abuse the death of their son (Silber and Little, 1996, p. 41). The reaction of the Belgrade media was also swift and hysterical, with “Politika” and “Borba” seeking to suggest that Kelmendi’s shots had a broader target, Yugoslavia, and that his actions were part of a broader conspiracy (Mertus, 1999, pp. 145-146).
Interestingly, at this point — as with Milosevic’s pitch at the special federal party session on Kosova earlier in the summer, and perhaps reflecting the still not-fully legitimated character of the nationalist discourse — the Serbian media expended greater effort in trying to demonstrate how the Paracin massacre had been directed at other nationalities, not just the Serbs, and thus at how Kosova was not just a Serb problem, but a Yugoslav one. There thus appeared to be an attempt here to insinuate that anti-Albanianism could be a unifying factor for all south Slavs. It was clear though from the calls in the Belgrade press for the expulsion of the Kelmendi family from their home and for retribution against Kelmendi’s home town, and the breaking of the windows of Albanian shops in Serbia by groups of youth singing Serbian nationalist songs, that this was, nevertheless, really a Serbian issue (Mertus, 1999, pp. 146-154).
Two weeks after the Paracin massacre, “in an atmosphere of hysteria and anti-Albanian propaganda,” Dragisa Pavlovic gave a televised press conference in which he called on the media to tone down their nationalist excesses and in which he indirectly warned against Milosevic’s role in fanning the flames (Silber and Little, 1996, p. 41). A blistering attack against Pavlovic, attributed to the editor but in fact written by Milosevic’s wife (Mirjana Markovic) and accusing Pavlovic of destroying Serbian and Yugoslav unity, followed in “Politika Ekspres” (Silber and Little, 1996, p. 42). According to Silber and Little, Stambolic appealed in vain to the editor of “Politika,” Zivorad Minovic, to allow him to publish a statement in defense of Pavlovic, but Minovic rebuffed him and ended up reprinting Mirjana Markovic’s attack.
At the eighth session of the Central Committee of the Serbian Party that opened a week later and was skillfully and manipulatively televised by Milosevic’s ally, Dusan Mitevic, Milosevic pilloried Pavlovic for being “soft” on Kosova and humiliated his former mentor, Stambolic, by insinuating that Stambolic had attempted to rally support for Pavlovic. Pavlovic was expelled from the party leadership on 23 September, and three months later, on 14 December, Stambolic was forced out of his post as president of Serbia. As Silber and Little argue, this unleashed a “purge of everything from the Belgrade media to the head waiter at the Serbian government villa” (Silber and Little, 1996, p. 47). Unfortunately, the comments of Stipe Suvar, Croatia’s representative on the Federal Party Presidency by this time, demonstrate how tone-deaf to the nationalist threat much of the rest of the Yugoslav leadership was at this time — so much so that they were actually relieved by Milosevic’s victory:
“Stambolic was the most feared politician on the Yugoslav scene, so the grey bureaucrat Milosevic made us feel that we could control him. You must remember he was clearly not a nationalist — everything he did was in the name of Yugoslavia — and his argument that the Albanians were secessionists was basically right” (Silber and Little, 1996, p. 47).
Between 9 July and 19 November 1988 — the crowning demonstration that would take place in Belgrade and consummate Milosevic’s unchallenged authority — there were an estimated 80 Serbian popular protests with as many as 3 million people taking part in all (Andrejevic 1988; Mertus, 1999, p. 177). They took place under the banner of “[Serb] Brotherhood and Unity,” “popular forums,” “happenings of the people,” and “meetings of truth.” They led to the fall of both the Vojvodina provincial leadership (the so-called Yogurt Revolution) and the leadership of the neighboring republic of Montenegro. Milosevic’s so-called antibureaucratic revolution was eminently bureaucratic in its orchestration. “Parallel” societal organizations — such as the Committee for the Defense of Kosovar Serbs, the Committee for Organizing the Transportation of Kosovar Serbs and Montenegrins to the Protest Rallies Outside the Province, and the Association for the Return of Serbs and Montenegrins Exiled from Kosova (“Peony”) (which operated directly within the framework of the SKS’s front organization) — played a prominent role at these rallies. They were now more powerful than official institutions, something Milosevic realized well. Whatever the level of spontaneity of their origins, by now they had also been effectively subordinated to Belgrade’s will (Mertus, 1999, p. 177; Thomas, 1999, pp. 44-45). Belgrade’s mass media — including television and radio — gave these events wide and sometimes hyperbolic coverage, and those in positions of control in the mass media used the size and intensity of the crowds to justify the homogenization of public opinion. As “Politika” Editor Zivorad Minovic announced: the media “has no right to think differently from the people” (Nenadovic, 2000, p. 550).
At this crucial juncture — when Slobodan Milosevic was busily and effectively eliminating any and all potential checks on his power within republican party and state structures, and forcing leadership and policy change through the “pressure from the streets” — Serbia’s leading intellectuals were essentially missing in action. They were conspicuously silent, if not downright complicit in Milosevic’s seizure and consolidation of ever-greater power. Just as Milosevic was not looking to institutionalize the political voice of those he was mobilizing, so Serbia’s leading intellectuals were not looking to exploit this period of leadership succession and political change to pressure the party-state toward institutionalizing and legalizing civil society and political pluralism. During the period from 1987 to 1989, for all intents and purposes opposition in Serbia melted away — in Branka Magas’ characterization discussed earlier, “absorbed into the nationalist bloc.” Because they so enthusiastically supported Milosevic’s effort to eliminate Kosova’s constitutional autonomy, they allowed themselves to be drowned out and become one with Milosevic’s street theater. Many of them might have sincerely believed that they were only temporarily suspending the struggle for democratization, until the “security of the nation had been ensured,” but by the time they reactivated that struggle — after the constitutional changes of March 1989 that eliminated Kosova’s autonomy — it was too late to be able to mount a serious challenge to Milosevic’s personal power (Pawlowitch, 2002, p. 204).
Returning from a visit to Yugoslavia in May-June 1988, Branka Magas reflected on how Mihailo Markovic had been quoted as having lauded Milosevic as “the best leader we Serbs have had since Rankovic” (Magas, 1993, p. 123). Markovic’s fellow “Praxis” alumnus, Ljubomir Tadic, would come to oppose efforts to establish a dialogue with Kosovar Albanians criticizing “Serbian liberals who underwent surgery for the removal of every and all national feeling. They side with other nationalities when they claim that Serbia is threatening them. They are completely blind to the problems of Serbia” (Grunewald, 1992, p. 187). As Gallagher observes, “Victimization at the hands of Tito perhaps made it easier for Markovic and colleagues to reconfigure their dissent along nationalist lines” (Gallagher, 2001, p. 245). When multiparty politics finally did come to Serbia in 1990, Mihailo Markovic would become vice president of Milosevic’s reprofiled SKS, the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS); a fellow neo-marxist dissident, Ratko Markovic, would also be elected to the SPS’s Main Committee; and Antonie Isakovic, who had played an important role in the drafting of the SANU Memorandum, would join the party (Miller 1997, p. 155; Andrejevic, 1990). According to Pavkovic, in 1990, all of the once-suspended “Praxis” philosophers were “ceremoniously returned to their original university posts” (Pavkovic, 1995, p. 124). Perhaps not for nothing, Milosevic extolled the role of Belgrade’s intellectuals at the founding congress of the SPS, praising them for their “most progressive and most critical spirit” (Andrejevic, 1990).
Leonard J. Cohen credits Milosevic’s “political pragmatism and nonideological style,” as well as the links established by his wife, Mirjana Markovic, at the university, for his success in gaining the support of the Serbian intelligentsia:
“Milosevic’s appeal to the communist and neo-Marxist intelligentsia was clearly enhanced by the political role of his wife. Mirjana Markovic’s well-known communist family background, and her orthodox Yugoslav communist views, provided a natural bridge to sections of the intelligentsia who had remained suspicious of Slobodan Milosevic’s break with Titoist policy on the national question, and uncomfortable with his unconventional populist tactics…. Thus, well-known and vocal Belgrade University professors such as Mihajlo Markovic and Svetozar Stojanovic — whose espousal of participatory forms of socialist democracy and ideological distance from the Tito regime had made them the darlings of the neo-Marxist community around the world — decided (like the SANU intellectuals who had broken completely with the League of Communists in the 1960s and 1970s) that Milosevic’s creatively mixed cocktail of skin-deep socialism and Serbian patriotism justified their return to the mainstream of what was still a one-party regime” (Cohen, 1997, p. 336).
Intellectuals whose credentials were traditionally more nationalist than they had been socialist were also seduced. Poet Matija Beckovic, who had been the subject of harassment because he was the son of a Chetnik, became president of the Serbian Writers Association in 1988 and the following year would praise Milosevic for having reversed 600 years of Serbian history in Kosova (Thomas, 1999, pp. 38, 43, 49). Writers such as Cosic did eventually call for greater democratization, but their focus was so narrowly national that by the time they did so it was far too late — they had missed the window of opportunity. For example, Cosic waited until after Milosevic’s constitutional coup in March 1989 eliminating the autonomy of Kosova and Vojvodina before declaring in April 1989 that “Serbia’s intellectuals support Milosevic and his efforts to reunite Serbia, but he must now address the question of democracy, which is essential to the Serbian people” (Andrejevic, 1989). In 1992, with Milosevic’s backing, Cosic, by then a member of the SPS’s Central Committee along with Markovic, would assume the new presidency of Yugoslavia — with a “Praxis” member, Svetozar Stojanovic, as his personal adviser (Pavkovic, 1995, p. 124; Magas, 1993, p. 263).
Conclusion
This article has attempted to analyze nationalism in late-communist Hungary and Serbia — and specifically the issue of their respective ethnic diaspora in Transylvania and Kosova — in the broader context of a political system in transition. The primary lesson that this comparison leaves us with is that the broader context of regime-opposition dynamics proved crucial to how the issues of ethnic diaspora and nationalism played out in each case. The prevailing models used to understand the transitions from communist rule in Eastern Europe are simply too reductionist to explain the difference in outcome between Hungary and Serbia. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan substantially improved upon earlier models of transitions from authoritarian rule by suggesting that differences in pre-existing regime type are critical. Linz and Stepan argue that these differences determine if there exist the political actors — moderates in both the regime and opposition camps — necessary for a negotiated or so-called “pacted” transition (Linz and Stepan, 1996, pp. 55-65). But for Linz and Stepan, the issue that determines what makes regime and opposition moderates prospective partners is their willingness to talk to and work with the opposing side in order to bring about regime transition.
On the basis of Linz and Stepan’s criteria, the character of the transition and the outcomes it produced should have been roughly the same in Serbia and Hungary. In Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic clearly looked to mobilize those who up until that time had been viewed as regime opponents in order to win a succession struggle for control of the SKS and later to consolidate and enhance his personal power. That willingness to appeal to dissidents differentiated him from others in the SKS leadership — perhaps in particular Stambolic himself — who for the most part continued to view the party as the only legitimate forum and player in politics. Among regime dissidents, Milosevic found a host of intellectuals who were more than willing to work with the regime. In Hungary, in the mid-to-late 1980s one found Imre Pozsgay seeking to mobilize regime opponents, in large part also to enable him and those around him to eventually succeed the aged Janos Kadar and consolidate power. Just as Milosevic appealed to nationalism and won over members of the opposition, so Pozsgay wooed Hungary’s populists with nationalist appeals and a willingness to give them some say and influence in the country’s future evolution.
As is well known, however, in Serbia the outcome of the rapprochement between elements of the regime and opposition was very different from Hungary. Neither Linz and Stepan’s revised version of transitions, nor other, far more reductionist models, render an explanation for this difference. The reason for the failure, I believe, is to be sought in the inadequate attention that has been paid to the particular context in which regime and opposition actors operated. The existence of liberalizers in the regime and moderates in the opposition is not enough to determine the type of transition that will follow and its outcomes. One needs to understand the motivations that drove the sides toward cooperation; in other words, one has to inquire into how regime liberalizers and opposition moderates perceived themselves, perceived the other side, and how they valued key principles, such as commitment to interest group and organizational autonomy and, more generally, to the values of political pluralism.
As this study has demonstrated, in Hungary regime liberalizers and opposition moderates were ready to cooperate and to exploit each other’s strengths and weaknesses; but neither side lost sight of its own, separate identity and ultimately different end-purpose. Furthermore, neither the regime liberalizers nor the opposition moderates envisaged merging forces into a joint, single organization. This was the legacy of the evolution of regime-society relations over the years during which the Kadarist compromise came into being. The compromise, as Jenkins suggests, made it possible for informal organization to take shape before the transition began, and “meant that informal political groupings and emergent organizations were defined around ideological and interpersonal questions rather than in terms of a unifying struggle between ruling elite and its opposition” (Jenkins, 1992). As this study has shown, the very policy of “divide and conquer” pursued by the regime, and the regime’s own “differentiation” among opposition types, contributed to the diversification and internal differentiation of the opposition. The populists of the MDF had for many years demonstrated their willingness to cooperate with the regime, but they placed a value on their autonomy (both vis-a-vis the regime and vis-a-vis the rest of the opposition). Ultimately, this ensured that they would not allow themselves to be merely subsumed by the Pozsgay faction into the MSZMP, but would work to set up their own organization and, later, political party. As for Pozsgay, he recognized that the populists were probably far more useful and controllable outside the MSZMP than would be the case if they were absorbed into the party.
By contrast, in Serbia Milosevic would not merely content himself with using the opposition for his own personal ambitions, as Pozsgay did in Hungary, but would aim at fully enveloping it. Just as Pozsgay’s decision to move toward formalizing ties with the opposition outside the party was a comparatively radical step geared at strengthening his position in the party itself, so in the Serbian context Milosevic’s willingness to mobilize the population for use in an internal party power struggle was a break with precedent. Milosevic, however, was intent on delaying the institutionalization of this popular participation, and he saw in the regime’s intellectual opponents potential followers and agents rather than partners. Had Milosevic confronted an opposition bent on preserving its own identity and autonomy, a rapprochement between regime and opposition might have played out differently. Instead of meeting resistance to his efforts geared at enveloping the opposition, Milosevic’s attempts were in fact warmly welcomed by Partisan intellectuals, who appeared to have longed for the day of reconciliation and reacceptance by the party.
Part of this outcome might simply have been due to a generational “divide” and to the individual and collective life experience of Serbia’s dissidents. Like Cosic, Mihailo Markovic and Ljubomir Tadic had participated directly in the wartime Partisan struggle — for them “Praxis” was less an abstract intellectual concept than the essence of their lives (Thomas, 1999, pp. 33, 40). To paraphrase Jowitt, one could wonder whether their “Yenan-like protective/interactive experience,” had rendered the members of this “cohort group” ready to eagerly dream of recreating the mythical consensus and unity of their earlier lives — even after ideological differences had drawn them apart (Jowitt, 1992, p. 295). The response of the “Praxis” scholars also might owe something to the informal web of friendships and ties forged within the intellectual community from Belgrade’s universities and research institutes. According to Pavkovic, by 1984, as a result of sustained left-wing pressure in the West, all of the “Praxis” scholars who had been suspended from their university posts in 1975 had been rehired at such institutes (Pavkovic, 1995, p. 123). Moreover, Leonard J. Cohen argues that when Milosevic was still an ideologically colorless protege on Stambolic’s team, his wife, Mirjana Markovic, “was ambitiously laying the groundwork in Belgrade’s political circles for her husband’s political involvement” (Cohen, 1997, p. 342, No. 39). Mirjana Markovic herself claims that as of November 1984, her “Belgrade circle of left-wing intellectuals” began their “just and fine struggle for the national affirmation of all the interests of the Serbian people in Yugoslavia” (cited in Cohen, 1997, p. 342 n. 39).
The findings of this study thus also question the progressive and teleological assumptions concerning the role played by Marxist revisionism in communist Eastern Europe. It might indeed be true that where Marxism was rejected outright and therefore genuine, neo-Marxist, revisionist debates never really developed — most notably in Romania, where, in the memorable words of Tismaneanu and Pavel, “it was as if the warm winds of 1956 and 1968 had never affected the Romanian intelligentsia, whose celebration of historical materialism was nothing but a perfunctory ritual” — the process of regime evolution from totalitarianism was delayed and consequently distorted (Tismaneanu and Pavel, 1994, p. 412). It might also be accurate to emphasize that (particularly in Poland’s and Hungary’s cases), the existence and evolution of Marxist revisionism played an important role in the delegitimation of the communist regime and the transition away from totalitarianism, and, eventually, out of post-totalitarianism/authoritarianism.
Nevertheless, Serbia/Yugoslavia is proof of the limits of such assumptions about Marxist revisionism. After all, Yugoslavia was the communist state in which Marxist revisionism — “socialist humanism” — gained its first institutional expression, with the establishment of the journal “Praxis,” founded in 1964. Yet over the long haul, intellectuals in Yugoslavia, but particularly in Serbia, progressed far more slowly down the revisionist road than comparable intellectuals in Poland and Hungary — many of whom ended up abandoning Marxism and socialism altogether. In Serbia, however, commitment to the values of individual and group differentiation and autonomy never became deeply entrenched and was never internalized by the regime’s neo-Marxist dissidents. As Pavkovic notes, even during the university sit-ins of 1968 or later on, there was no demand by Belgrade’s neo-Marxists for a multiparty system (Pavkovic, 1995, p. 124). It also meant that in Serbia — as in Romania, but unlike in Poland or Hungary — nationalism became part of the “left” and of “socialism,” and not of a populist “right.” Serbia’s Marxist revisionism in essence became “frozen” at an early stage.
The seemingly perplexing behavior on the part of “Praxis” scholars can thus partly be explained by the peculiar — remarkably myopic and self-serving — conception of “nationalism” held by many Serbian — especially leftist Serbian — intellectuals. Writing about the liberal intellectuals that signed the January 1986 petition, Mertus concludes that “[s]o deeply ingrained was the sense of injustice that most Serbs felt regarding Kosovo that they failed to make a connection between Serbian claims to Kosovo and Greater-Serbian nationalism,” and that they viewed the petition as being primarily “just a freedom of speech issue” (Mertus, 1999, p. 136). Advocacy of the cause of the Serbian diaspora in Yugoslavia was regarded by leftist Serb intellectuals as “patriotic,” and thus as inherently compatible with socialist principles and antithetical to “nationalism” or “chauvinism” that were allegedly only Albanian or Croatian “sins.”
Just like Markovic and Tadic, Cosic significantly continued to consider himself as belonging to the “left” and never rejected “socialism” (Thomas, 1999, pp. 33-40). Whereas in Hungary it was a populist intellectual (Illyes) whose nationalist roots lay in the interwar period who became the standard-bearer of the diaspora cause when the topic was still taboo, in Serbia it was a former Partisan commissar (Cosic) who became disenchanted with the system he helped put in place. Miller explains Cosic’s unexpected qualities as follows:
“Surprisingly, one searches in vain for any meaningful reference to the battle of Kosovo in Cosic’s written record. Also absent is religion, any substantive mention of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Cosic’s fratricidal system is rooted entirely in the modern history of the interplay of nationalism and communism” (Miller, 2000, pp. 283-284).
To a certain extent, then, it turns out that in order to adequately account for the differences in the core-values of dissent in communist Serbia and Hungary, we must reach farther back in time. I shall close therefore with a cursory and necessarily preliminary attempt to do so.
In his seminal application to Eastern Europe of Barrington Moore’s model of the social origins of modern political systems, Gale Stokes portrays 19th- and early 20th-century Serbia as being a remarkably homogenized, essentially “undifferentiated peasant society,” even in comparison with its Balkan neighbors (Stokes, 1989, p. 235). Despite, or perhaps because of, Serbia’s comparatively early achievement of statehood, from its inception the Serb left was distinctively nationalist in its orientation, as Viktor Meier has argued (Meier, 1999, pp. 44-45). And according to Rothschild, Serbia’s interwar university graduates, whether of the right or of the left, were united by their radicalism, their etatism, and their assumption of, and desire for, “unity” (Rothschild, 1974, p. 277). Finally, it should be borne in mind that Yugoslavia’s, and in particular Serbia’s intelligentsia had paid a heavy toll in World War II and its aftermath. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that these intellectuals had been displaced and the intelligentsia had to a large extent melted away. A combination of factors, beginning with the war itself, postwar emigration and demographic developments, reprisals meted out by the Partisans against the Chetniks and against the intelligentsia of other nationalities in Yugoslavia, had each contributed to forge this situation. In a nutshell — Serbia simply did not posses an intellectual noncommunist elite capable of significantly opposing the regime, and thus intellectual dissent could only emerge from within the party-state itself.
By contrast, one can argue that Hungary’s more diversified, if deeply inequitable class structure, eventually translated into the evolution of a more diverse and well-defined ideological and political spectrum among its intelligentsia during the interwar period. The comparatively far-weaker popularity of the Hungarian communists — seen as a clear extension of Moscow’s will — the relatively early explosion of social discontent in 1956 — less than a decade into communist rule — and Kadar’s “divide and conquer” rather than simply “conquer and obliterate” policy in its wake, are all factors that contributed to the survival of the interwar populist current that would eventually reclaim first intellectual, and ultimately also political influence. Nationalism in Hungary, unlike Serbia, was thus an “old” nationalism, not a direct product of the communist era.
Ultimately, however, a satisfactory answer to this question must await further research.
* Spelling per editorial request.
(Richard Andrew Hall holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University and a B.A. from the University of Virginia. He currently works and lives in northern Virginia. Comments or questions can be sent to him at hallria@msn.com.)
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About, Bio, and Contact Information for Richard Andrew Hall
You can reach me at hallria@comcast.net
Richard Andrew Hall
(aka Rich Hall, Richard A. Hall, Rich Andrew Hall )
Born 1966
Education:
Ph.D. Political Science Indiana University August 1990-February 1997
Dissertation: “Rewriting the Revolution: Authoritarian Regime-State Relations and the Triumph of Securitate Revisionism in Post-Ceausescu Romania”
B.A. with Highest Distinction University of Virginia August 1984-May 1988
Thesis: “The Economic, Social, and Political Effects of the Hungarian New Economic Mechanism (NEM), 1968-1988″
I am an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). I have a been a CIA analyst since 2000. Prior to that time I had no association with CIA outside of the application process.
