Dem Deutschen Bécs, dem Ungarn Pécs, says the proverb: “The Germans have Vienna and the Hungarians have Pécs.” Tranquil and withdrawn, the city – which in German is called Fünfkirchen, the Five Churches – is not unworthy of the hyperbolical comparison with Vienna, nor with the long catalogue of encomiums which have celebrated it ever since the Middle Ages. Its climate is applauded, with its mild winters, breeze-cooled summers, long and balmy autumns; its cultural traditions abound in Roman antiquities and are similar to those of Chartres; it boasts chroniclers, scholars, a university founded in 1367, the most ancient in Hungary and the fourth oldest in Central Europe, and the library of Bishop Georg Klimó. Panegyrics are also directed at its wines: those of Mecsek once favoured by the Germans, the Siklós preferred by the Slavonians, the Alsó Baranyér in which the Serbs of the Bačka indulged to a man.
In terms of the wine the eulogy of the Baranya, the region of Pécs, has indeed for a long time set two factions at odds – the one which awards the palm to the local wine of Pécs, the capital, and the more pugnacious one which extols the wine of Villány. The judgment of Paris is left to Gigi, or at least he is elected foreman of the jury which has met, motu proprio, in the Rózsakert restaurant. “Judge not,” it has been said, but being a juryman can be a pleasant occupation when one is not weighing up human actions and years in prison, but the books or the wines of the season. The juries of literary prizes meet, discuss, sift, proclaim, assign, banquet; dull old life meanwhile passes by, thank goodness, dim and unobserved; as for the vague feeling of importance that inhabits the one who presents the prize, bending slightly towards the prizewinner who is climbing the steps to the stage, it helps him to forget his own vacuity and the approach of the final epilogue. This evening, at the Rózsakert, there are no authors but only works, bottles from the cellar, and there is not much to discuss. The white wine of Pécs is excellent, fine and slightly sweet, while the red wine of Villány is sour. Thus, on an evening like any other, the tenacious reputation of the latter comes crashing to the ground.
The Baranya, which Alexander Baksay compared to a tapestry inlaid by two rivers, is a border area, composite and stratified. As well as Hungarians and the German minority there were the Serbs and the Schokatzi, the latter being Slav Catholics from the Balkans who made the sign of the cross with the open palm of the hand and amongst whom it was usually only the women who could read and write – perhaps to save the men even this chore, and render the exploitation of women even more complete. They say that at Ormánság, in Baranya, when the examining commission once asked a candidate for the office of magistrate whether he could read and write, the answer they got was, “No, but I can sing.”
The German presence was particularly strong; the committee of Baranya was known as “Swabian Turkey”. Eighty years ago Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn, the defender of German solidarity against “Magyarization”, represented the Swabians of the Banat and the Transylvanian Saxons who were staunchly loyal to Austria and opposed to the Hungarian Revolution in 1848; today, however, the literature of the Germans in Hungary, cultivated chiefly in Pécs and Bonyhád, extols the bond between Swabians and Hungarians in that territory as being anti-Hapsburg and anti-Austrian – still with reference to 1848. In an open letter of November 17th 1967, Wilhelm Knabel, who died in 1972, explicitly theorized the present function of the German writer in Hungary. His own verses, written in German and in Swabian dialect, are worthy and imitative, like the prose pieces of the authors represented by Erika Áts in her anthology Deep Roots, who are voices of an ingenuous local clique. The more encouraging critics, such as Béla Szende, speak of their “simplicity that touches the hearts of all”. The German community in Hungary – threatened by Magyarization in Hapsburg times, in even worse decline after 1918, and compromised by Germanic chauvinism during Nazi times was oppressed and ignored after 1945. Efforts are now being made, even artificially, after the community’s total silence, to restore some vigour and meaning to it. Stress is being laid on its function as a mediator between differing cultures (the key slogan of the whole of Mitteleuropa), similar to the role it played in the last century, when, for example, the German-Hungarian Jew Dóczi Lajos – or Ludwig von Dóczi – translated Goethe’s Faust into Hungarian and Madách’s Tragedy of Man into German.
The persistent Hungarian patriotism of these German writers is an attempt to erase the memory of the fierce Magyar-Germanic clashes during the period of Dualism, and even more the tensions built up during the Third Reich. The situation throughout this last period was extremely complicated. The German-National movement of the German-speaking group in Hungary, led by Jakob Bleyer, did not identify itself with Nazism, in spite of Bleyer’s ideology of the Volkstum; while Hitler, on his side, watched after the interests of the German minority, but made no attempt to annex the areas in which it lived. At the same time Hitler’s ally Horthy, leader of the Fascist (or para-Fascist) regime in Hungary, pursued a nationalistic policy which came down hard on all the minorities in Hungary, including, of course, the German one.
In the years immediately following the Second World War the Hungarian government repressed and expelled the German minority, identifying it with Nazism. But today German-speaking writers in Hungary, encouraged and patronized by Budapest, profess loyalty to the Hungarian nation and to Socialism. It is true that the Bund, the Nazi organization, did in its day find most of its adherents in the Baranya, and at Bonyhád in particular. Unless this too is Jewish slander, responsible, as we all know, for every conceivable evil including Nazism itself: Hitler also – according to the anti-Semitic viewpoint – must have been a Jew, because only a Jew would have been capable of his crimes … According to Bleyer, the German-Nationalist leader, in Hitler’s day the Hungarian correspondent of the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter was of Jewish origin and wrote anti-German articles under a pseudonym for the Hungarian papers, to arouse people’s spirits …