History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  Bratislava

  Before the wars—Second World and cold—you went by tram from Vienna for an evening at the theater in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava, or vice versa. Now you could do so again, if the authorities would only relay a few miles of track. Meanwhile, it is just over an hour by train, and you slide across the border as if the Iron Curtain had never been. Amid the seemingly endless, dusty allotments—small plots of land on which people grow vegetables—I spy garages flying the flags of Volkswagen and Audi, like crusader castles. Giggly Slovak schoolgirls scream pop songs out of the train windows, startling the people digging in their gardens below. But the nice girl sitting next to me demurely studies a German textbook on management economics. She hopes to work in the hotel trade.

  As I arrive, the government falls. The populist prime minister, Vladimír Mečiar, has been ousted by a parliamentary vote, following outspoken criticism of him by the president, Michal Kováč.

  On the evening television news, the chubby, avuncular president is shown sitting beside a carefully polished tile oven, with a large bunch of flowers in a vase on the table before him. At one side of the screen you see a large microphone, held motionless by a female hand with brightly painted fingernails. The president talks about democracy, constitutionalism, civic engagement, on and on, but the more he talks, the less he convinces me—because of that painted hand. After about five minutes, we briefly catch sight of the woman interviewer. Her feeble “question” gives the cue for another five-minute sermon, delivered to the long-suffering painted hand. President Clinton, President Mitterrand, or, for that matter, President Klestil can only dream of such a complaisant medium; but then they work in fully fledged democracies.

  My acquaintances are divided over whether Mečiar’s fall is a good thing. All sigh with relief that the vulgar, nationalist rabble-rouser has got the boot. But some fear this ouster gives him the perfect chance to bounce back—as self-styled victim—in the elections that are due to be held in September. After all, he did it once before, in 1992, after being ousted by the parliament in 1991. Well, we shall see.

  Meanwhile, I am in search of old Bratislava—that is, the German-Hungarian-Jewish-Slovak city of Pressburg, and before that the Hungarian royal capital of Pozsony. As I walk the dilapidated streets of the old town in the company of a local journalist, we meet an elderly gentleman in a black felt hat and formal gray coat, with a semiprecious stone on a ribbon around the collar of his slightly grubby white shirt. “Ah, here is the oldest Pressburger!” says my acquaintance and makes the introduction. This is Jan, Hans, or “Hansi” Albrecht, a retired musicologist and son of a celebrated local composer.

  Later, over coffee and cognac in the inspissated gloom of his cluttered apartment, Albrecht tells tales of old Pressburg, while kids smash out the window glass from a derelict house across the road. (“Yes, that house belonged to the Esterházys,” he says; crash goes another window.) He shows me a program for one of his father’s concerts: printed in German, Hungarian, and Slovak. The Pressburg of his youth really was trilingual, he says. Someone would address you in Hungarian, you might reply in German, another would interrupt in Slovak.

  Even after the first wave of Slovakization, which began with the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918, the statistics still show a population of some 15,000 Jewish, 20,000 Hungarian, and 30,000 German citizens of Pressburg, as well as 60,000 Slovaks. It was only the next two waves of Slovakization that effectively purged the city of all but a very few survivors of the other nationalities. First came the proclamation of Slovak independence under Hitler’s protection in March 1939. (Outside the Slovak Philharmonic’s concert hall, apathetic gaggle of old men in shabby suits and cheap ties can be seen gathering to celebrate the anniversary.) The fascist puppet state of Father Jozef Tiso got rid of the Jews, and made the Hungarians unwelcome too.

  After 1945, the new Czechoslovak government got rid of the Germans. Finally, to celebrate the enhanced status that Slovak Bratislava received after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the communist authorities drove a huge suspension bridge, the “Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising,” across the Danube and through the heart of the old town, destroying the synagogue and much of the old Jewish quarter. On a high wall they inscribed in large letters, “Bratislava, City of Peace.”

  Alas, poor Pressburg! Hansi Albrecht, the musicologist, argues that there has also been some cultural gain—the effete, decadent bourgeois culture of the late Habsburg empire has been reinvigorated by an injection of raw Slavonic folk spirit—but one feels an overwhelming sense of loss. Alma Münzová, another charming survivor of old Pressburg, well-read, multilingual, soignée, gives me the text of a talk she recently delivered (in German) on the history of the city. In it, she quotes a wry old joke: “When will things finally get better?” “What do you mean? They already were!” In many ways, to propose multiculturalism in Central Europe really is to suggest going forward to the past.

  However, one must beware the siren song of nostalgia. The balance was never even. Before the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich, or compromise, of 1867, the Austro-German element dominated Pressburg life. After the Ausgleich, the Hungarians there launched a program of systematic Magyarization. At the end of the century, this would arouse the sympathy of visitors such as the historian R. W Seton-Watson, who described it under the pseudonym “Scotus Viator” in The Spectator. So at the end of the First World War he was among those who advocated that Slovakia—“Northern Hungary” as it then was—should be taken away from Hungary and joined with the Czech lands, in the newly independent state of Czechoslovakia.

  All this is not just history. It has immediate political relevance. For, as a result of the post-1918 territorial settlement, reaffirmed after 1945, and again in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, some half million Hungarians now live just inside the Slovak frontier, on the north bank of the Danube. In Czechoslovakia, they were a small minority: about one in thirty of the population. In Slovakia, they are a much larger minority: about one in ten.

  The Slovak government, under Mečiar, has been a model of nationalist stubbornness in resisting even the most reasonable demands for bilingual road signs, the restoration of the Hungarian forms of personal names, and so on, despite pressure from, among others, the Council of Europe. On the other hand, it was the now deceased Hungarian prime minister József Antall who famously declared that he wished to be the prime minister of 15 million Hungarians—that is, roughly 10 million inside Hungary’s frontiers and 5 million beyond them. When Czecho- and Slovakia were splitting up, radical Hungarian nationalists even argued that what was laid down by the Allies in 1920, in the Treaty of Trianon, was the new frontier of Czechoslovakia, not of Slovakia—which would therefore have to be negotiated anew. Incredibly, though Slovakia and Hungary are both members of the Visegrád group, together with the Czech Republic and Poland, Slovakia currently has no ambassador in Budapest.

  Slovakia’s Hungarians are represented in the Slovak parliament by their own Hungarian parties. Except on a few tactical votes (and to some extent, interestingly, in the ex-communist party), they do not mix with the Slovak parties. Regrettably, the Hungarian and Slovak sides seem to be getting not closer together but farther apart. I am told that, in a recent poll, 35 percent of those asked thought the Hungarian parties should not be in the Slovak parliament.

  It is a worrying state of affairs.

  Budapest

  I cross the Slovak-Hungarian border on the so-called Balkan—Orient Express. Its Romanian carriages provide a very credible setting for a murder. The old peasant woman sitting opposite me puts the Hungarian-Slovak conflict in its proper place. To the Slovak passport officer she says, in Slovak, “I’m Slovak.” To the Hungarian passport officer she says, in Hungarian, “I’m Hungarian.” To neither does she show a passport. Maybe there’s hope for Central Europe yet.

  I tell a Hungarian friend that I’m staying at the Hotel Gellért, that splendid art-nouveau blancmange on the right bank of the Danube
, with its majolica-walled thermal baths and granite-faced masseurs. “Oh,” she says, looking disapproving, “it’s a Forum hotel.” Thinking of the rather good Forum Hotel on the Pest side of the river, I’m about to exclaim, “So has the Forum taken over the Gellért?” Then I realize that she means the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the conservative nationalist party which has been in power since 1990 and now faces an election in which the former communists are favored to win. How out of touch can you get?

  She’s right, too. I had forgotten how the tone, the decor, the very smell of the Gellért exude that particular aesthetic of populist Hungarianness. Even the “Do Not Disturb” signs to hang out on your doorknob are done in the national colors of red, white, and green. Meanwhile, the modern Forum Hotel is bursting with Western consultants, most of them wasting large sums of our (that is, Western taxpayers’) money which is meant to be going to the struggling new democracies of postcommunist Europe. In German, one talks of Spesenritter: expense-account knights. O brave new world, that has such people in’t.

  This evening, however, something of the old world—almost a flashback—can be witnessed just along the embankment. A large crowd gathers at the invitation of the Democratic Charter, a liberal civic initiative, or anti-Forum forum, to protest against the recent sacking of 129 state radio employees. This was the latest act in the so-called media war, and a quite blatant attempt by the government to skew the radio still further to its side during the election. As dusk falls, the crowd, in which I meet several old friends, moves picturesquely down the left bank of the Danube, flaming torches held aloft, to reassemble at the statue of the poet Sándor Petöfi.

  It was 146 years ago tomorrow, on 15 March 1848, that Petöfi led a Budapest crowd in what is generally taken to be the beginning of the country’s “lawful revolution”—Hungary’s 14 July. And tomorrow it will be celebrated as a national holiday, with all the fetid pathos of which the Forum is capable. But this evening, the liberals have stolen a march on them. At the feet of the poet, fine speeches are delivered by flaming torchlight: for democracy! for civil rights! for freedom! O brave old world, that had such demos in’t.

  As we watch the march, a publisher friend explains to me his worry that Hungary is once again being polarized into two nations, locked in a Kulturkampf. If someone talks of “structural problems,” of “this country” or “this agricultural country,” you know at once that they come from the camp known before the war as “urbanist.” If someone talks of “fate issues,” of “my land,” or “our homeland,” they belong to the camp known before the war as “populist.” He fears history is repeating itself.

  Another friend puts his personal dissatisfaction, frustration, and melancholy in a different way. “I grew up,” he says, “in what I knew was an ‘abnormal’ state. I thought that, if the communists and the Soviet Union went, Hungary would be a ‘normal’—that is, a Western—country. Now they’ve gone, and it isn’t. We’re governed by the Forum, and I have to accept that Hungary is in some ways an Eastern country.”

  He gropes for an image and finds it. “There was a statue, covered by a heavy sheet. We believed it was beautiful. One day, miraculously, after forty long years, it was uncovered. Our hearts rose, great were our hopes. But then we found that the statue was chipped and dirty and not so handsome after all.”

  Prague

  The sleeping beauty of Central Europe has not merely been awakened by a prince’s velvet kiss. She has put on black tights and gone off to the disco. (That is, after all, what contemporary princesses do, whether in Monaco or Mayfair.) While Budapest developed gradually into a modern consumer city, starting in the 1970s, Prague has emerged from its time warp suddenly and explosively. Instead of the magical museum, lovely but decaying, there is color, noise, action: street performers, traffic jams, building works, thousands of young Americans—would-be Hemingways or Scott Fitzgeralds— millions of German tourists, betting shops, reserved parking places for France Telecom and Mitsubishi Corporation, beggars, junkies, Spesenritter of all countries, car alarms, trendy bars, gangsters, whores galore, Bierstüben, litter, graffiti, video shops, and Franz Kafka T-shirts.

  I have mixed feelings about this transformation scene. But I am quite won over by walking the streets with my friend Jáchym Topol, a young poet, novelist, and editor of the formerly samizdat journal Revolver Revue. Jáchym—longhaired, chain-smoking, deeply Bohemian in both senses of the word—stalks along simply fizzing with enthusiasm for the way Prague has come alive. “Look at it—it’s great!” he exclaims, as we are nearly run down by a speeding car. The rock groups now write their lyrics in English, he says. Street kids use the Albanian word for prison, because there is now a strong Albanian “mafia,” beside the Russian and local ones. And there’s a new kind of savory bread roll. It’s called a crazy chleba, a grammatically eccentric name translatable roughly as a “bread crazy.”

  Jáchym’s new novel, out of Döblin and Joyce by way of Hrabal, is to be published next month, and he’s dashing around trying to arrange publicity for it. But he has to do almost everything himself. The publicity department, so important a part of most Western publishers, is still almost unknown here.

  The cliché is that the Czechs are the Prussians of the Slavs. Certainly the orderly, Western qualities of Bohemia, its prewar industrial record, the economic credibility of premier Václav Klaus, and, above all, its cheap skilled labor have combined to attract foreign, and especially German, investment. (An hour’s skilled labor costs the employer about DM 35 in Germany compared to just DM 4 in Bohemia.) Yet even here there is the characteristic postcommunist mixture of enterprise and corruption: large kickbacks paid in the course of privatization, mysterious enhancement of party funds, the dubious involvement of ex-nomenklatura, criminal, semicriminal, and corrupt official elements, all combining to give many ordinary people a slightly jaundiced view of both capitalism and the politicians who preach it.

  The frequently encountered and loosely used term mafia points to the ubiquitous element of organized crime. The Russian word prikhvatizatsiya—that is, roughly, pritheftization (khvatat = seize, grab)—catches another aspect of the postcommunist scene; as does the phrase “the privatization of the nomenklatura.” Alfred Stepan, the American political scientist and new rector of George Soros’s Central European University, reminds me of the term kleptocracy, already used in Latin America and Africa. The former foreign minister Jiří Dienstbier talks of an “Italian-type political system.” And, finally, there is the special part played by the consultants and the Spesenritter. German businessmen, I am told, are particularly free with the bribes. What we need, however, is a term that encompasses the whole distinctive postcommunist combination of all of these.

  A friend who works for the Helsinki Committee for Refugees adds another colorful tessera to the postcommunist mosaic. She tells me the story of a former Afghan police chief who had fled with his family to Moscow. There, he was told that he could get to Germany, at a cost of $12,000 per head. He paid up for himself, his wife, and their two youngest children, leaving two older children behind. (How an Afghan police chief had collected $48,000 one can perhaps imagine.) They were given false passports, traveled for many hours by train, by bus, by train again, until they finally arrived. “Well,” said the Russian who escorted them, “here you are, in Germany.” Setting them down in the station buffet, he asked for their false papers back and then went, as he said, to get some cash. Of course he never returned. So there they were, without papers, money, or a single acquaintance, in what they thought was Germany. That is, in Prague.

  Walking along Národní Street, I suddenly notice a black metal plaque inscribed simply with the date 17 November 1989. It marks the student demonstration that began the “velvet revolution.” But you feel that event is already almost as remote as the resistance to Nazi occupation commemorated by other plaques around the city. Here more than anywhere else the last forty years seem just to have evaporated, almost as if they had never been. Certainly no one, excep
t a very few historians, is interested in the communist past. Inasmuch as anyone is interested in the past at all, it is that of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk’s first republic, before 1939.

  NEXT DAY, I am driven out to Masaryk’s country house at Lány, to see President Havel. Recovering from the flu, he sits with a small group of friends and counselors in a rather formal salon, while the rain buckets down on the park outside. Watched by the ghost of Masaryk, we talk about the idea and the reality of Central Europe. Masaryk’s definition of Central Europe, or Střední Evropa, elaborated in London during the First World War in R. W Seton-Watson’s journal The New Europe, included “Laplanders, Swedes, Norwegians and Danes, Finns, Estonians, Letts, Lithuanians, Poles, Lusatians, Czechs and Slovaks, Magyars, Serbo-Croats and Slovenes, Romanians, Bulgars, Albanians, Turks and Greeks”—but no Germans or Austrians. The German liberal politician Friedrich Naumann articulated a very different vision of Central Europe at the same time. His Mitteleuropa was all about the Germans and Austrians, with the others included only insofar as they were subjects of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires.

  One of the great questions of the new “New Europe” is whether this old tension between Mitteleuropa and Střední Evropa can finally be laid to rest. Very much with this in mind, Havel has invited seven presidents to an “informal” meeting in Litomyšl, the birthplace of the composer Smetana. Besides the presidents of the “Visegrád four” (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia) and the president of Slovenia, a country with which the Czech Republic has developed its own miniature special relationship (some make jokes about “Czecho-Slovenia”), the “L7”—as Havel’s foreign-affairs adviser Pavel Seifter wryly christens it—will include Austria’s President Klestil and Havel’s good friend, the outgoing German president, Richard von Weizsäcker, whose birthday will also be marked by the occasion.