Memoir of Hungary 1944-1948 [Paperback]

Reviewed by Johanna Granville, Clemson University, Clemson, SC USA. Sandor Marai's Memoir of Hungary (1944-1948) provides an interesting glimpse of post World War II Hungary under Soviet occupation. Like other memoirs by Hungarian writers and statesmen, it was first published in the West, because it could not be published in the Hungary of the post-1956 Kadar era.[1]Marai authored forty-six books, mostly novels, and was considered one of Hungary's most influential representatives of middle class literature between the two world wars by literary critics. He sought his true identity both in his profession and through a geographic attachment: first to Hungary, then to Europe, and finally to the West. He decided to leave his homeland in September 1948. The English version of the memoir was published posthumously; Marai took his own life in 1989, the same year that he was awarded the prestigious Kossuth Prize, Hungary's highest award for literature.[2] Whether or not Marai intended it, this memoir makes the reader wonder what influenced Marai to commit suicide, despite his literary success. Was it due to the bleak environment of Soviet-occupied Hungary, emigration from his homeland, or the inner dreams of a sensitive and expressive man? Written in the first person, this book has certain strengths that are absent from secondary works. Marai gives the reader a keen sense of the humiliation Hungarians felt in living under Nazi and then Soviet domination. Marai also entertains as a diarist, and later generalizes about his experiences in a way that endears him to his readers. Like a good playwright, he engages the audience on several levels, but none better than the homesick artist who, ironically, had grown sick of home. These strengths make the volume an excellent choice for undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of the central European region. On the other hand, Marai's memoir does not provide a dispassionate, critical defense of a central argument with supporting evidence and dissenting opinions. Precisely because it is a diary, the book lacks a single thesis, containing several competing themes instead. One gets the impression that Marai is writing more out of an inner need to articulate his thoughts for himself, rather than to persuade or impress an audience. Thus it would be inappropriate to evaluate this work as one would a scholarly argument. Development of thesis and selection of sources are irrelevant here. Marai's ideas are original and spring from his own experiences. While he cleverly incorporates quotations from great writers and poets, both Hungarians and foreigners, these are simply tools for expressing his own thoughts. In addition, the title of this memoir is a bit of a misnomer, since the book does not discuss in much detail Hungarian politics in the 1944-1948 period. Marai never mentions such public figures as Horthy, Rakosi, or Revai. Only in a couple of places does he refer to the "returned Hungarian communists," the Muscovites. As a subjective diary, it often digresses. One whole section provides details about the daily habits of his wife Lola's grandmother; no larger interpretation accompanies the section. As traumatic as wartime Hungary must have been, Marai found it in some ways preferable to living there after 1945. According to Marai, World War II fostered a sense of human collectivity. People felt closer to each other during the siege because their lives were threatened. After the war, however, people focused on the retrieval of their material possessions, and the spirit of cooperation and unity disappeared. Marai and his wife had been forced to flee their home in Budapest for a small house in a village. There he lacked everything a writer needed: good lighting, quiet, and privacy. There was no electricity, and candles were scarce. Marai lived there with escapees and refugees from the war. After the Soviet occupation in September 1944, random groups of Russian soldiers stopped by Marai's village house, often in the middle of the night, without knocking. They stole scarce food and supplies. Others stayed for longer periods of time. Once a group of Russian soldiers set up a repair shop in his house. Noise was continuous; tools banged and a record of Ukrainian children's choir played around the clock. Marai had to sleep in one room with the others in the household. He also had to witness atrocities. Once a group of Russian soldiers shot the husband of a woman they were abusing. Marai's opinion of the Russians did not improve with this close contact, to say the least. He writes: "We lived for weeks with the thirty men like animals in a cage, slept on the same straw, did their laundry, cooked their meals and helped them with their work" (p. 85). At the same time, it would be incorrect to say that Marai despised the Russians. Instead he was curious about them, and he often pitied them. Despite these intimate living arrangements, Marai continued to find the Russians very strange. The Russians, he writes, "brought Cyrillic letters and all that 'difference,' that mysterious strangeness which Western man never understands and which even this compulsory and very intimate living together could not dispel" (p. 85). While he admired the Soviet military for defeating the Nazis at Stalingrad ("turning around the wagon shaft of world history"), he also knew that the source of Soviet military power was its inexhaustible reserves, not its organizational and technical skills (p. 36). "This Eastern army," he writes in almost Churchillian fashion, "gave the impression of some instinctive biological power--human variants of ants or termites--that had assumed a military shape" (p. 80). Unlike many Hungarians at the time, Marai knew these Russian were not liberators; they could not bring freedom because they lacked it themselves. They merely continued the thieving and murdering that the Nazis had begun. Indeed, this memoir bears similarities to the memoirs of Jewish writers persecuted by the Nazis, in particular to the recently published diary of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of Romance languages in Dresden during World War II.[3] Both writers use their journals partly to substitute for their emotions, partly to maintain their sanity. Both know that if their journals are found by the wrong people, it could mean imprisonment or death. But both also sense in their Nazi or Soviet oppressors a concealed awe of writers. The dangers of journal-keeping are brought home to the reader when Marai tells the story of his friend Poldi Krausz, who in 1944 suddenly showed up outside Marai's door (in Budapest), asking Marai to safeguard his personal album. Krausz knew the Nazis would soon arrest him. Marai advised his friend to ask someone else, because his house would not be any safer than Krausz's. Indeed, literally the next day, Marai and his wife were forced to abandon their house. When they returned years later, after the siege, the house lay in ruins. Marai realizes that the Soviet military was no less ruthless than the Nazi military. Like the Soviet political system as a whole, it was not a meritocracy. Outstanding performance was not rewarded. Instead, Marai writes, "what always counted in the Soviet system was whether it could use a human being, the raw material, today, Thursday, at 4:30 p.m." (p. 83). The system subsisted primarily on forced labor. Moreover, Marai is struck by the Russians' frenzied looting, which he views as the manifestation of "some blind, biological instinct." He noted that the Soviet soldiers "pounced" on a village, a house, a family, and destroyed everything they needed or did not need. Thus "for years and years on barges, trucks, and trains, they hauled away from these rich lands the wheat, iron, coal, oil, and lard, and also human resources, German technicians and Baltic workers" (p. 69). In response, the Hungarian peasants--"just as in the time of the Turks"--took the cows into the woods, buried the potatoes in pits, and hid the women. This looting also explained Soviet military power, Marai claims, since "without the domestic and kidnaped scientists, spies, forced labor of an entire Russian generation," and American aid, "Soviet industry could not have built ballistic missiles, new airplanes, the atom bomb, and a navy" (p. 81). Indeed, Marai concludes that Soviet soldiers plundered so zealously, including property they did not need, because of the abject poverty they had endured for decades. Poverty--not ideology--motivated them, since they robbed both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie indiscriminately. Poverty also engendered corruption. Marai saw how Russians would sell a healthy horse for just one liter of brandy. For Marai the factors he notes in individual Russians' behavior--the lack of freedom, submission to compulsory labor, indiscriminate looting--help to explain Soviet behavior in world politics. For example, the Soviet leaders relied on compulsory solutions

This is a wonderful memoir set in Hungary covering the last days of World War II and the gradual take over of power by the communists.The memoir ends in 1948 when Marai left his homeland for good.

As anyone who has read Embers will know Marai is a very gifted writer and this memoir is an absolute delight to read.It is full of brilliant insights and perhaps gives the reader a better idea of what life was like in an East European city in the post war era compared to historical studies.I particulary enjoyed the sections in the book where he recounts his dealings with the Russian soldiers who "liberated" Hungary.

There is only one sadness attached to this book and that is that Marai has only the 3 books available in English.He was a prolific author and if Embers,Converstaions in Bolzano and this memoir are anything to go by he is a writer of great quality and I would gladly read anything he has written.So come on publishers show a bit of initiative and get more of this great twentieth century Hungarian writer into translation.

The "Memoir" covers a four year period out of some forty years during which Marai, the prominent and praiseworthy Hungarian novelist, kept a journal. At present it is the only portion of this long-running commentary which has been published in English. The translation by Albert Tezla is an excellent one which captures the author's spirit and style. The four years in question are those which proved to be a major historical turning point for Hungary and a bitter and deeply personal turning point for the author.

What happened during those four years? In brief: the final tergiversations and collapse of Horthy's Regency government; its replacement by a desperate Nazi-backed Arrow Cross regime which was determined to go down in flames and take as many victims as it could with it in a final Wagnerian gesture of hatred; an uneasy period of "liberation" by the Soviet army (where liberation equaled successful military operations against the Germans plus looting and other depredations); the machinations of political parties and leaders who were making their moves in a shrinking circle of authority and responsibility, since all knew or suspected that their fate would be decided in Moscow; the return of exiled Communist factotums who had been winnowed and educated by Stalin's system in its period of purges, men who lived in fear and ruled by fear; the springing up of fellow-travelers and shape-shifters of every description, each fleeing guilt while feathering his own nest; the period of land-redistribution followed by nationalizations of industry and commerce, then the creation of collective farms; the debasements of the period of currency hyperinflation; and, what breaks the author's heart the most, the "treason of the clerks" (that portion of the middle class and its literary and artistic spokesmen who abandoned their humanistic ideals and threw themselves into collaboration with the new, all-powerful Party apparatus).

For Marai personally this was a period when he began to take serious stock of his career hitherto as a successful bourgeois author and came to the sad conclusion that both he and his work might have been nothing but caricatures of a dying way of life. And, in 1947-48, it is a time when he turns this reckoning, along with his truly depressing picture of Hungary's total spiritual compromise and abasement under both its previous and its new systems of rule, into a decision to leave his homeland forever.

In his judgments of failure of intellect and behavior, he is as hard on the Hungarian and the broader European middle class as he is on the Communists. After a year or so when he feels he must commit himself to a "neutral" evaluation of the Red Army and its political masters, he comes to truly detest Communism. He hates it for the anti-humanism of its official philosophy (which he characterizes as an outdated and culturally dead and deadening theory which might have been appropriate in Marx's day but was irrelevant to the problems Europe faced in 1945). He hates it for the phoniness of its leaders' attempts to convince his countrymen that they are "building socialism" while in fact they are knowingly establishing a Russian colonial satrapy which will prove to be as indifferent to the needs of workers and farmers as it is to the death of the middle class and the old Hungarian aristocracy - both the real one and the faux-aristocracy of the Regency. And he hates it because he sees its leadership and middle-men as untrained, incompetent bunglers and looters whose real purpose is mere political survival at any cost. Marai does not regret the fate of the old land-owning class, whom he feels was as indifferent to the hardships of life of the vast majority of his countrymen as the new masters will prove to be. But the decay and destruction of the middle class truly disturbs him, since he believes that the educated, politically liberal bourgeoisie was the only group which had a chance of representing cultural humanism and political democracy in a way that might have withstood fascism and communism. More painfully, he acknowledges that this decay and destruction was brought on by a lack of vigilance and vigor by the middle class itself, which was losing confidence in the older accepted rationales for its existence and way of life. He indicts this middle class for sacrificing its principles on the altars of political expediency and self-interest.

All of this leads him to a period in which his own mind moves slowly and inexorably toward the decision to break with his past and his country. Most disturbing to him is the notion that if he stays - whether as a practitioner of "internal emigration" or as an occasional "fellow traveler" and regime booster who will be allowed to publish his work in return for such compromises - he will lose his "Self", because it is the capture of the core of his identity that is the objective of the new system. He is more afraid of that system's intolerance of the silence of a member of the intelligentsia than he is of its crass desire to manipulate writers and other artists into the practices of "socialist realism". He has to leave in order to save his relationship with his own language and to protect that Self. (His reflections on this give rise to the title of my review.)

But this memoir is more than a series of gloomy meditations on social and political affairs and trends. It is also a sort of love-letter to the beauties of the Hungarian language (which is Marai's declared "homeland") as they were developed over several generations by belletristic writers. There are recollections of the careers of his fellow writers and a portrait of the atmosphere of literary ferment and creativity that permeated the cafes, bars, and news-rooms of periodicals and daily papers for whom many of these writers worked in order to keep themselves alive while they also produced poetry, short-stories and novels for a loyal cohort of sophisticated readers. There are generous comments made about the many talented writers of his own generation and the two generations that preceded it. There is a paean to the minor Hungarian writers (the "second set") whom he feels were every bit as talented and worthy as the major and more successful ones (he spends his final year in locating and reading increasingly rare copies of the works of these minor writers, since he thinks they will become inaccessible to him after he goes into exile; this knowledge and experience is the only thing he wishes to take with him as he leaves his land and culture behind). And there is the recurring lament of the Hungarian writer who looks to world literature for both influence and approval: "We are alone with our unique language that is surrounded by a sea of powerful and mutually supporting Indo-European tongues that constitute this world-literature in Europe. Who will appreciate our efforts and take the time and trouble to learn the great beauties of own painfully created literary tradition and to see where it belongs in this broader sea of humanistic achievement?" (The foregoing is the reviewer's weak paraphrase of a longing expressed powerfully by Marai.)

The book opens with highly particular observations of the situation in Hungary in March of 1944, and it closes with more general ruminations about the psychological, ethical and cultural state of Europe in 1948. The author is pessimistic, but he will not yield an inch on the overarching importance of a humanistic culture which he feels may be moribund, but without which he sees Europe and the modern world as bereft of rational ideals and purpose. It might be better to read two or three of Marai's novels which are now available in good English translations before turning to this memoir - in this way the reader will be exposed to sophisticated and moving literary portrayals of the world whose loss he laments here. The Corvina Books Ltd. edition of the Memoirs has a brief, cogent Introduction by the translator, who has also compiled very informative end-notes on Hungarian personalities and events alluded to by Marais. This book is highly recommended to anyone who wishes to learn what this historical period looked and felt like "from the inside".

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