THE QUEER CASE OF HUNGARY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 250, 6 April 1944, Page 4

THE QUEER CASE OF HUNGARY

i] Written for "The Listener" i}

by

A.M.

R.

UNGARY seems a queer country to Britons. The first time they hear of it as children they are incredulous; then they laugh. Next, having concluded that it must be the land of Huns, they learn that the inhabitants are not Huns, but Magyars. Later, they discover that Magyars are not Magyars in pronunciation, but Modyors. These "Modyors" (the lesson_ continues) though they occupy the dead centre of Europe are not Europeans but something nearer Chinese. Though they farm a rich plain, they are desperately poor. Though their country has no king, it is called a kingdom, and is ruled by a regent. Further, this man is an admiral, though obviously, since Hungary has no coastline, there is no navy for him to command. And now, though Hungary is the first German Ally after Italy, it is the Germans and not the Allies who have occupied it! Of course all these apparent absurdities have simple enough explanations if you know them. For example, Hungary did have a coastline when Horthy commanded a fleet. Similarly the Germans a taken over Hungarian government ause Hungary has never been a heart-and-soul Axis partner but merely struck a mercenary bargain with the Axis, trading blood and grain for people end soil. But though the peasants for the first time for centuries went short of home-grown bread so that the Danube plain might pour oil crops instead into German war industry, and though their country (which has historically been an oasis fot Jewish freedom) officially adopted the Nuremburg Laws, both rationing and race laws have been almost universally resented and wherever possible evaded. When the Nazis pressed for a million soqldiersthree per square mile-the pro-Nazi Premier Bardossy resigned and the archconservative Teleki took his own life rather than consent. "Never, Never, Never" Nevertheless, no one knowing Hungary is surprised that its politicians swallowed the Nazi bait even if they struggled against the hook inside it. As. school,

children the whole nation has paraded every week to cry "Never, Never, Never" to the Trianon Treaty-which pared down pre-1918 Hungary to almost a quarter its area and one-third its population. Then as adults they stood before each cinema programme began, while two maps flashed on the screen-"true" (i.e., Pre-Trianon) Hungary versus "dismembered" (i.e., post-Trianon, presentday) Hungary For an instalment of :the larger map they traded in 1941 what power they had over what they already possessed. You may think such fanaticism tragic, but if you consider the power of propagandised education, you will hardly think it strange. What is incomprehensible, however, on any surface view of Hungary, is how

such a perfervid "soil mystique" could ever have arisen. The mountain-ringed Danubian plain, which in‘its entirety is what the Magyars claim, is settled by a dozen races. And these peoples are so mingled that a map in my possession which colours the villages occupied by each — Magyars 54%, Rumans 16%, Slovaks 11%, Saxons 10%, etc.-looks like nothing so much as a diseased liver or a paint-shop in explosion. Most towns, indeed, need at least three names, Magyar, Slav, and Saxon-e.g., Kolosvar, Cluj, Klausenburg. Moreover, even Magyar-settled land is only rarely owned by Magyars. Hungary is feudal, almost the last state in Europe to become so and the last to remain so. But the cultured aristocracy who rack-rent its peasants-over 20 per cent illiterate and in places so poor that they buy matches singly-is cosmopolitan by origin, marriage, and interests; not Magyar. Only "the gentry," the one-time squirearchy who now are mostly public servants, has anything material to gain or lose by expansion or contraction of frontiers. A Tale of Two Continents The force that keeps Hungary an indigestible stone inside the Slav stomach; that makes enthusiastic Magyars down to their Tartar boots out of the various peoples who through a thousand years have been poured in to repopulate her often desolated plain; and that time and again has turned the officials sent to subdue the nation into its most ardent imperialists -this force is something stronger than any political construction or economic self-interest. It is-a legend. I give it for what it is worth. Two thousand years ago-begins this Tale of -Two Continents-the Heart Plain of Europe lay still open and empty of man although the forests around it were filling with people. Came the Romans, and occupied it to the Danube. But the heavily-wooded swamp around the river (even to-day much of the Danube resembles the Lower Waikato of 50 years ago) hid from them the steppe beyond. Came Attila, "Lord of the Volga," and his Hun horsemen on their afl-conquering sweep from China to the Channel. And, after him, other conquerors came. (Continued on next page)

(Continued trom previous page) Back home around the Caspian the Jewish Empire. of the Khazars was flourishing. Five hundred years it lasted, while Rome fell and Europe passed into a confusion of migrating conquerors. Under Khazar rule, certain families of Turanian Megyeri (Magyars) and Onogurs (Hungarians) grew slowly into a nation. Ancestors of theirs-their skinclad Shamans chanted-had camped with Attila’s men on a great empty plain among the peopled forests of the West, and to them in departing the demi-god had willed that territory for ever. Therefore, on being pressed for gtazing space by their neighbours, the Petchenegs, the tribe set out in search of its home. Into the Promised Land Passing by Kiev (where their statement that they were on a religious pilgtimage and would interfere with no man by the way was recorded), they swam the Dnieper on bladders and camped for some generations in Bessarabia. From here the Emperor of the East summoned their great chief Arpad to drive off the newly-arrived Turkish Bulgars who were investing Byzantium itself. But when Arpad’s horde returned to Bessarabia it was to find that their hereditary enemies, the Petchenegs, had followed them and were installed in their place. Obviously destiny was driving the Magyars on. Adventurous groups of them had already spied out the midDanubian plain, and had taken service under the German (Holy Roman) Emperor at its farther edge. Now the whole encampment swore a great "Blood Compact" settling in advance the distribution and government of the territory, and sacrificed the aged father of Arpad that his ghost might guide them through the intervening forests and mountains. Thus did the Chosen People enter upon their Promised Land.

In later centuries Hungary was baptised into Christendom and its horsemen learned, through Benedictine settlements from Cassino, the arts of agriculture and peace. It became the bulwark of Europe, ravaged in turn by Tartars and Turks, with the successors of St. Stephen often cut off as on an island in the Seven Castles of Transylvania. But the Magyar claim to the whole sweep within the mountains has never relaxed. However conquerors may dispose of it, whatever foreign colonists may occupy its wardevastated areas, it is the Land Sworn Unto Their Fathers, and must, they say, remain so for ever. Is this legend or is it fact? I believe it is considered by historians to be perhaps 90 per cent fact. But proving it 90 per cent pure fiction would not help us to settle Central Europe. A people bound together by a myth can neither be liquidated nor neutralised. Only a larger myth can incorporate them into a wider community. Perhaps the Century of the Comman Man may do this for many of to-day’s irreconcilable nationalisms . . . Unfortunately no Magyar believes he is a common man. Look at his dress.