In 2023, I undertook a series of interviews in Budapest with writers and academics on both sides of the Orban divide in Hungary. I was researching my novella, Budapest Requiem. The interviews became a piece of long-form reportage asking the question - what does Europe mean? Through the eyes of both Orban’s supporters and opposition? To those on the right and left of the European political divide?
On the eve of Orban’s likely defeat and the end of 16 years of authoritarian power, here’s the beginning of that piece, introducing Krisztina Toth, celebrated Hungarian author of Eye of The Monkey (Seven Stories Press), Pixel (Seagull Press) and many other novels, plays and children’s stories published to great acclaim internationally. We then meet a young man highly placed in Orban’s circles, and recently appointed director of a University. (Illustrations my own). DM me if you’d like a full copy or have an interest in reading the novella, Budapest Requiem - the first chapter of which I’ve turned into an audiobook with original music and location sound recordings here. You can also read an essay about the creative process behind the novella, here.
Fourteen-year-old Krisztina sits in the back of her father’s ‘Zhiguli’ with dollars stuffed in her socks. The sun is hot, and the old, soviet car, reeks of the giant salami on the rear parcel shelf. It is three hours from Budapest to Vienna by road, but travellers could be held up with bureaucracy at the Austrian border for many more. It is 1988, and to journey from the ‘inside’ to the ‘outside’ isn’t so much to move between countries as to time-travel between worlds.
“I felt betrayed,” Krisztina remembers her first family holiday beyond the borders of the Socialist Eastern Bloc: “I discovered all those things existed so close to us and no-one ever told us about it. People in the west were so nice and wore good clothes and their faces were so different and good looking.”
She thought everyone in the world travelled with huge quantities of salami and hidden dollars. In the eighties, the socialist government limited Hungarians to carrying $100 over the border, too little for food and accommodation in the capitalist west. The message was clear, those going west were supposed to come back. Only a year after Krisztina’s first trip to Austria, everything changed. Rebellious Hungarians dismantled fences on the Austro-Hungarian border. Hungary’s last Eastern Bloc leader, Janos Kadar, appeared to tolerate it, and a flood of East Germans crossed Hungary, into Austria. The first hole in the Berlin wall was a snip in Hungary’s barbed wire fence.
The west always expected Hungary to be the first ‘post-Soviet’ nation to re-embrace capitalist, liberal, Europe. In the 1980’s, Kadar introduced de-regulatory, free market practices that economists called ‘goulash communism’. Hungary was culturally and ideologically aligned to Western European values too. Before Hungary became subject to the Soviet Union, Austro-Hungarian Budapest was Vienna’s partying sister. Revolutionary leader and national hero Lajos Kossuth had been the bellwether of European democracy.
Today, Hungary’s government is proud of a very different kind of fence, built in 2015 to keep out migrants, and the Prime Minister of Hungary is considered by most European nations to be a very different kind of bellwether, backsliding on democracy and leading the march of right-wing authoritarianism.
Part of the transition generation, Krisztina has travelled widely and crossed many of the world’s borders. When we meet in her Budapest home, she has just returned from the plains of southern Hungary on a book tour of schools. As one of the nation’s most feted poets, novelists and short story writers, Krisztina at middle-age has an international life. She has travelled to China where, she admits, “you realise for the first time you are Hungarian, and that Europe has a meaning. You realise the common roots of other European countries and the common understanding of how we communicate with each other in Europe. No-one gets up in the morning and says, ‘I’m European’. It’s only when you travel outside of Europe that you realise.” She has a gentle, melodious laugh, “you know, the Chinese say Europeans all look the same!”
What does it mean to be both Hungarian and European in a country described by its Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, as ‘a laboratory’ of the conservative approach to national identity, nationalism, anti-liberalism, and populism?
Orban’s nationalist politics proposes the vision of a Hungary fundamentally ‘Christian’ in its value system and against the progressive grain of gender and LGBTQ+ rights. He frames his natalist policies in terms of replacement theory, and links them to anti-immigration: “If, in the future,” Orban has said, “Europe is to be populated by people other than Europeans…then we will effectively be consenting to population replacement”.
Europe has a positive place in Krisztina’s Hungarian life, both as an imagined community and a practical reality. Her publishers are often supported through the funding streams of the EU. She is married to a Scotsman whose own parents escaped Hungary in 1956. She regularly visits Britain, Germany, France and Spain. She has fulfilled the dream of so many Hungarians who came of age in the years of Hungary’s post-soviet transition; a western facing dream of integration with the Europe they imagined existing on the other side of the iron curtain. It is the Hungarian part of her identity that is in trouble. Krisztina is leaving Budapest to start a new life in London. In 2023, she will be joining an estimated 20’000 Hungarians who leave the country every year, most of whom are highly educated young professionals heading for countries like Germany, Austria and France. Is it just the ailing economy, or has a deeper-rooted sense of belonging and freedom been disturbed? One that sets Hungarian identity at odds with being European?
Krisztina lives in a modestly sized, beautifully kept apartment near the city’s main park where for years she has tended to an imposing palm that hangs over visitors in her dining room. She does not have economic problems at home, she does not need to work in the west. Quite the opposite. In Hungary, Krisztina has publishers, regular gigs in schools, universities, commissions from arts organisations…all a writer requires to survive. Krisztina is crossing the borders of Europe today because she feels she can no longer be herself in her own nation. She can no longer be a Hungarian living in Budapest.
Krisztina sighs. There is a lot of sighing in Budapest today.
“There is something in the national attitude,” her husband tells me, “that produces the phrase, ‘there is nothing to be done’.”
“It’s like the Reservoir Dogs meme,” a handsome man, wearing middle age well reaches over the olives and hummus of a chic, Middle Eastern restaurant on Szell Kalman square and shows me his phone. The meme is a puzzled John Travolta, looking left and then looking right. “This is how many Hungarians feel when they go to the West now: where has it gone?”
Tall, bright-eyed, wearing a forest green hoodie that helps him look much younger than his years, Attila (not his real name), has the glowing skin of someone who likes to spend his time outdoors.
His sharp eyes survey me, “you know, I could be suspicious about this, there are a lot of countries with intelligence interests in Hungary.”
A former government appointee and member of Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party, Attila is also a director of a major, national institution. All of which makes him the kind of character Budapest’s liberals love to hate. Chatting in a fashionable, Middle Eastern restaurant about Attila’s well-travelled life, it might be hard to understand how this conservative son of Budapest differs in choices and values from liberals like Krisztina Toth. Like Krisztina, Attila had a liberal education. As a former student of the Central European University in Budapest he benefitted from the Open Society scholarship of Hungarian born, billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Attila’s success at the CEU, (‘the most leftist environment I have ever encountered’), opened doors to LSE and Stanford, where he studied urbanism and social entrepreneurship; an educational trajectory that is almost a right-of-passage for the elite liberals of Budapest, (even Viktor Orban himself).
Unlike Krisztina, Attila feels at home in Hungary and has no plans to leave the country. Fidesz has always been Attila’s political home and community. In the early 2000’s, Fidesz people were young, they were under-dogs, and to attend Fidesz meetings and rallies was to mix with the smartest people he had ever met. Critics of Viktor Orban today often forget Fidesz battled a corrupt, stagnant, liberal coalition who did too little for the majority of Hungarians struggling on low wages and low-quality jobs. An investment in Fidesz was an investment in change for the majority of Hungary’s population, and a rallying cry against the corruption of the ruling elite. By attaching himself to the under-dog of his political youth, Attila could distance himself morally from a corrupt establishment.
Of course, the fate of successful insurgents is to become the establishment, a role I suspect Attila finds more onerous.
How did he gain his position as a director of one of the country’s most prestigious institutions? A little wearily, Attila raises his hand to his ear, extending thumb and little finger before saying: “a telephone call from the ministry“.
He knows this is the kind of answer that infuriates Hungarians who believe Orban is running the country through a nepotistic elite but warns me not to throw stones in a glass house. Isn’t this how countries have always been run? The House of Lords. The Directorship of the BBC. Elites are nepotistic everywhere, all that matters to Attila is whether your elite is running the country for the good of the nation or not.
When I tell Attila I tend to write stories about ex-patriot life, he pinches his lips together and shakes his head, “the ex-patriot way of life is a horrible way of living.” He doesn’t mean the students and long-haul travellers like himself, he means people who decide to live outside of their own country, alienated and atomised, disconnected from their national identity ˗ the person Krisztina may soon become. If the socialist directive restricting Hungarians to carrying $100 over the border kept them coming back, Fidesz politicians argue the same: there is nothing wrong with young people leaving the country to expand their professional experience, as long as they return home.
But where is home? Krisztina’s feelings about the state of her nation, her sense of belonging and home, couldn’t be more different to Attila’s. And yet, the people I meet in Hungary this summer swim in a small pond of the country’s highly educated elite. Hungary’s powerbrokers, cultural tastemakers and academic experts went to the same eight schools in Budapest, all dominated by the upper middle-classes. They studied at the same four universities in the city. They lived in the same few neighbourhoods of relative privilege and wealth in the hills of Buda, or tree-lined streets of Pest. How do people living so close together come to form different ideas of their nation and its future? Why is the divide between a man like Attila and his former professors at the CEU, now wider, and less fathomable than the Danube?
These questions are answered in the full piece. DM me if you’d like a copy or have an interest in reading the novella, Budapest Requiem - the first chapter of which I’ve turned into an audiobook with original music and location sound recordings here. You can also read an essay about the creative process behind the novella, here.
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