发信人: oceann (dany), 信区: English
标 题: East on the Danube: Hungary’s Tragic Century (N
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Sun Aug 10 12:32:18 2003)
DOWN THE DANUBE: ACROSS THE DIVIDE
East on the Danube: Hungary’s Tragic Century
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
NAGYMAROS, Hungary — You know immediately when you arrive in Hungary from
Austria that you have crossed more than a national frontier. You have also cr
ossed from one historical zone, one domain of experience, into another.
First there is the ritual, now absent when you travel between European Uni
on countries, that makes entering Hungary seem a bit like an old World War II
movie — the posse of uniformed police officers with guns who solemnly check p
assports.
This entry from Austria to Hungary was by train, and a group of customs of
ficials in T-shirts spent a good deal of time with flashlights inspecting the
spaces above the lavatories for contraband.
All of that will disappear on this particular border next May when Hungary
and nine other countries, most of them former members of the East bloc, join
the European Union.
What will disappear less slowly is the scene outside the window on the Hun
garian side of the border. A few yards from Austria concrete, Stalin-era housi
ng complexes remain, stained and battered but still in use.
On this side it is shabbier, rustier, weedier, even now 14 years since Com
munism disappeared from this country and the Iron Curtain from Europe. But if
Hungary seems unkempt compared with its opulent upriver neighbors, it also hum
s with a kind of ardor, an avidity for new prospects that one seldom feels in
the take-everything-for-granted countries farther west.
“The difference is less than when I was in kindergarten,“ said Laszlo Cs
aba, a professor of economics and European studies at the Central European Uni
versity in Budapest. “But it is greater than when my grandparents were in kin
dergarten.“ He was referring to the difference between Hungary and Austria, a
nd between the former East Europe and the former West.
“In 1938, it took two hours to go by train from Budapest to Vienna,“ Mr.
Csaba said. “Now it takes two and a half to two and three-quarter hours, dep
ending on the train. That’s it, history in a nutshell.“
In fact, other people in Hungary question the accuracy of Mr. Csaba’s par
ticular example about the train, but few would dispute the overall point. Hist
ory for Hungary means the country’s slippage from full European status into m
ass murder, dictatorship, enforced poverty and isolation from the rest of the
world, a slippage that has left most people less well off than people in their
grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ time.
Hungary, after all, is the place where a little more than a century ago, G
ustav Mahler directed the state opera. Later, it was where Bela Bartok lived a
nd worked, and the home of such others as the photographer Robert Capa, the wr
iter Arthur Koestler and several great figures in 20th-century nuclear physics
, including Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and John von Neumann.
It is also the country where 60 years ago, Hitler was welcomed by a collab
orationist government, which then looked the other way as some 550,000 of Hung
ary’s 700,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
Having had the worst of World War II, in which it was on the wrong side, H
ungary then got 45 years of Soviet domination, including the events of 1956, w
hen the Soviet Union crushed a popular nationalist uprising in Hungary and exe
cuted Imre Nagy, the Communist leader who dared to speak out against Moscow.
Hungary is the kind of place where every little village lost on the shores
of the Danube has its part in the 20th-century tragedy and, in some instances
, in the late-century recovery.
This modest place on the north bank of the river just opposite the imposin
g ruins of the castle at Visegrad, built by the first Hungarian kings in the 1
3th century, is where a dam, planned in the 1980’s by the Communist governmen
t, was never built — and in not being built changed not the course of the riv
er, but the course of recent history.
“The harmony of nature would have been harmed by the dam,“ Mihaly Zoltay
, a former mayor of Nagymaros, said, showing visitors the broad, verdant spot
on the river where the dam would have been.
“When I was a kid, I used to swim in the Danube here,“ he said, “but af
ter the dam was built nobody would have come here. This is one of the sacred s
pots in Hungary, and the dam would have harmed the view.“
The question of the dam is not entirely over, even though after huge popul
ar protests throughout Hungary the government abandoned its plans to build it
here.
More recently, neighboring Slovakia, which as part of Czechoslovakia in th
ose days was a partner in the original project, diverted the river near Bratis
lava, the Slovakian capital, and built two dams upriver from Hungary, a move t
hat has been sharply criticized by environmentalists in Hungary and elsewhere.
But more important, the dam came for many Hungarians to symbolize what Kri
sztian Szabados, a director of a new and successful policy research and consul
ting firm in Budapest, called “the real meaning of Communism.“
“There were two ways to protest in Hungary in the 1980’s,“ he said in h
is tastefully sleek office. “One was protesting the dam; the other was to def
ace one of those big statues of Communist heroes that used to be all over the
place.“
The statues have been collected in a huge park in Budapest, a sort of monu
ment to the discredited custom of Communist leaders to make larger-than-life m
onuments to themselves. The leaders have gone, but the Danube remains, and it
may be more central to the identity of Hungary than to any of the other countr
ies it touches.
Here in Nagymaros, the impression is one of the river’s majesty. It comes
around a great bend just below the castle at Visegrad. A bit upriver from her
e it flows past Esztergom, whose immense church signifies its importance as th
e main seat of Hungarian Catholicism.
Then there is Budapest itself, perhaps the most beautiful of the Danubian
cities, certainly a place that until the period of Soviet domination was intel
lectually and culturally drawn by the river toward Vienna and the West.
It is the city’s robust grandeur, with the Danube dividing it into its tw
o component parts, Buda and Pest, that imparts the melancholy that it always c
onveys to a visitor, the sense that the terrible events that took place here w
ere particularly out of place in the surrounding beauty.
The river is the city’s heart. It passes in front of the neo-Gothic Parli
ament building and the great castle of the Hungarian kings, which sits on its
hill with a kind of arrogant and yet lovely hugeness.
It flows beneath the famous bridges linking the two halves of Budapest tha
t were blown up by the Nazis as they fled in front of the advancing Soviet Arm
y in 1945.
On the river in late 1944, just where the tourists now stroll on the Pest
side to the famous Chain Bridge that leads to Buda, the fascist Arrow Cross, w
hich took over the Hungarian government, sought out Jews from the Budapest ghe
tto. It murdered hundreds by the day, sometimes tying them together, shooting
one and pushing the rest into the ice floes, where they perished.
It is a terrible history. Things are getting better.
In some ways Hungary’s joining the European Union next year will mark a k
ind of restoration of this country’s historic ties. Hungary was stripped of t
wo-thirds of its territory by the Treaty of Trianon after World War I. That le
ft about two million ethnic Hungarians outside Hungary.
Trianon is still a word that evokes a powerful reaction among Hungarians,
intensifying their sense that Hungary was stripped by an ignorant historic han
d of its rightful possessions. To many people here, accession to the European
Union will be equivalent of restoring some of what they lost.
“Hungarians are the people most in favor of European integration,“ Mr. S
zabados said, “because they feel that the borders will disappear and will lea
d to the lessening of ethnic tensions. They also think that accession will imp
rove the condition of the Hungarians outside Hungary.“
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was essentially a network of the many differen
t ethnicities and nationalities that always lived along the Danube, and as lon
g as it was strong, it effectively had no borders and held ethnic rivalries in
check.
The expectation is that the empire of Europe, obviously more democratic th
an the Austro-Hungarian Empire and voluntary rather than coerced, will do some
of the same things.
Nearly 20 years ago the Italian scholar of the Danube region Claudio Magri
s presciently spoke of Budapest-on-the-Danube this way:
“It is also a robust and full-blooded city, which suggests the strength w
hich Europe could and should possess, if it found a way of making use of all i
ts multiple energies, instead of wearing them away in a perpetual annulment, a
state of permanent stalemate.“
ps;
The New York Times
As the Danube reaches Nagymaros, Europe‘s East is visible.
<img src="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/08/09/international/0809DAN
UBEmap.gif">
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好想振作一点点，真的好想
<img src=http://album3.chinaren.com/album/13/93/17409313/555736.gif border=0>
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