If you want to understand what's going on in Hungary...

If you are curious why a country, which is part of the EU, has a strong conservative-nationalistic and clerical leaning, how it can have a far-far-right party standing at around 17% percent in polls monitoring possible election outcomes, why it accepts the rule of a party led by a single man portraying himself as the savior of the nation, and claiming that no one is part of the Nation who is not a True Hungarian, then I'm glad to offer you a short list of suggested readings.

If you want to understand what’s going on in Hungary you don’t need to understand a lot of very complex theory. And you should definitely not, not even for a second, listen to the politicians.

Just go and read a few – as it happens to be, quite entertaining – books. One of them is Istvan Orkeny’s One minute short stories (Egyperces novellák). Orkeny makes fun of the oppression and nonsensical, often ad-hoc and cruel rules the communist regime enforced on Hungarians with the support of the Russian army. Also (a bit similarly to Joseph Heller, but in a much-much more condensed version) he points out forcefully the meaningless violence of the Second World War, and the perverse distortion of any rationality.

If you then go on and read Peter Nadas’s book, Parallel Stories (Párhuzamos történetek), you can get a much broader and detailed picture – a bit the opposite of Orkeny – about the many ties of the dictatorial oppression that run through and corrupted the lives of generations in Central- and Eastern-Europe. It has less humor than the brilliant, absurd short stories of Orkeny, but offers a much more detailed picture of all the political ties between the histories of neighboring countries in the region, and gives awe-aspiring depictions of individual fates.

A nice third novel to round out the collection is Gyorgy Spiro’s Spring Exhibition (Tavaszi tárlat). The novel focuses on the story of a man who was in hospital during the events of the 1956 revolution against the Russians. Accordingly, he couldn't take part in the fights, he couldn't go to work, he was left out of everything and seen nowhere. But in the eyes of the secret police, who want to hold a few big lawsuits (pre-organized), this makes him an ideal victim to involve in one of their schemes. He gets accused of having been a member of a secret organization plotting against the communist system. As he reflects in the following days, in his terror before being taken away, he sees through the injustice and artificiality of the systems workings, and it's perverse logic: they can make a victim out of someone, because he is entirely innocent.

Oh, and just in case you would wonder: but why did Hungary fight on the side of Nazi Germany in WW II in the first place? Well, it is enough to read a bit of Laszlo Nemeth’s excellent book, Sin (Bűn). Nemeth guides you through the reality of late 1920’s, early 1930’s Hungary. The country hasn't been called ‘the land of the two million beggars’ for no reason. Society’s structure was still very much the same as before WW I, when all the privileges of the aristocracy still existed and were enforced by law. If you weren't lucky enough to be born into at least an upper middle class family, you didn't stand much chance for a decent life.

All these novels portray the reality the majority of Hungarians had to endure and struggle with during the last hundred years. You might get an idea from this, why they aren't surprised by, why they aren't revolting against the changes the current Fidesz-KDNP government carried out.

And I’m not talking about their economical policy. That is a matter which according to some has a certain chance of success. We will see later whether it works or not. The problematic points are the eroding of honesty, the acceptance of archaic and extreme clerical and nationalist views, the message that it is perfectly alright to govern a country by force. Meanwhile, there is not even a glimmer of self-criticism, or a chance of being open to input from any other sources than the ones loyal to them. And that’s just what we had to get used to for a long time in our history due to a conservative, slowly adapting and status quo preserving aristocracy, and then later due to the ultra-nationalist revisionist Horthy era, and after that the WW II governments, including a short Nazi and German rule, and then a Communist rule, supported by the Soviet Union and its wast army, far outnumbering the Hungarian one.

But one thing they couldn't ruin is an excellent art life. As one of my friends wrote recently in a review on the work of Laszlo Krasznahorkai (author of Satan’s Tango, and collaborator of Bela Tarr, the famous director of among other movies The Horse of Turin): Hungarian literature is world literature, in as far as it is concerned with all its issues, exemplifying all its trends, advancing new solutions and style, and creating great works in all its genres.