The statue is by Imre Varga who, in my view, is Europe’s master of the unfashionable art of ‘public sculpture.’ Next to the Parliament building, looking out over the Danube, stands Varga’s statue of Count Károlyi. He is a slight figure, framed in a broken Gothic arch. He is the loneliest man in the world, upright Károlyi who tried and failed to save his country from defeat, mutilation, economic ruin, revolution and Fascist terror, who died in exile. But you don’t need to know any of that, not even his name, to understand from the statue that this was a good person abandoned by history and his friends.
So Wallenberg is lucky, at least, in his sculptor. It isn’t the first monument. The guests assembled in Budapest to unveil the original one in 1948, but soon observed that – under the tarpaulin – there was nothing left to unveil. The statue had been removed in the night and, like its subject, vanished into the mists of time and rumour.
Wallenberg remains in those mists, but the original statue does not. A few years ago it was found, shorn of identifying inscriptions and standing outside a factory on an industrial estate at Debrecen. As it is a highly symbolic work rather than a portrait, showing a male figure wrestling with a snake, the workers had supposed that it was Peace Triumphing over Warmongers or something equally banal.
A visitor to Budapest today will soon notice, if he has Hungarian friends, that this is the last Central European capital with a large, lively Jewish population. Two men made this possible. One was the Regent Miklos Horthy, who saw that the war was lost and managed to halt the deportations to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, when Eichmann had taken the Jews from the provinces but had not completed the ‘clearing’ of Budapest. The other was Raoul Wallenberg. As an emissary of the Swedish Government, he distributed Swedish passports, set up refuges and saved the lives of perhaps 100,000 human beings.
In January 1945, Wallenberg and his driver set off to make contact with the headquarters of the approaching Soviet Army. They never returned. Wallenberg apparently reached the command post of Marshal Malinovsky at Debrecen. Then … nothing. For years, the Swedes demanded news about him, and were told that he was not in the Soviet Union. In 1957, however, Andrei Gromyko, Deputy Foreign Minister, informed Sweden that Wallenberg had died in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow on 17 July 1947.
Even glasnost has not induced the Soviet authorities to change this version – or add to it. But the Swedish Government, unconvinced, has never ceased to demand his release, or to suggest that he may still be alive (he would now be 74). Meanwhile, the Wallenberg family continues to take seriously an apparently endless trickle of ‘sightings,’ some from Gulag survivors claiming to have met Wallenberg, others from somebody who met somebody in the camps who knew him or his driver, others again just Gulag folk-lore about ‘a Swedish diplomat’ in a camp in Norilsk or Mordvinia.
A couple of years ago, I met two Swedes with a very different story. Hans Ehrenstrale and Lilian Broman – they were not married then – were Swedish aid workers in Poland just after the war. Civil war was still raging, as remnants of the old Home Army partisans loyal to the exile government in London and Ukrainian guerrillas in the south-east fought the Communist authorities. Lilian – a startling historical detail – was secretly passing money from the American Embassy to partisan units in the southern hills who used it to buy weapons across the border in Slovakia.
In October 1947, Lilian’s American contact ‘Jimmy’ told her that a Soviet military train had been ambushed, and that several badly-injured foreign prisoners had fallen into Polish partisan hands. The Poles reported that one was a Swedish diplomat from Hungary. ‘Jimmy’ asked Lilian to go and find this man, whom he believed to be Wallenberg, and to ask him if he had certain documents still with him.
Hans and Lilian set out, and after various adventures she was taken to a forest camp near Tarnow. Here she found an unconscious and dying man. Lilian had met Wallenberg twice before the war, on a sailing party and at a ball when they danced together. She says now that she is almost totally certain that the dying man was Wallenberg, but ‘I could not prove it beyond doubt.’ The partisans were nervous, anxious to move on: Lilian took the man’s empty knapsack and pressed his fingers against it to leave fingerprints. Back in Warsaw, she gave the bag to ‘Jimmy’; it was returned to her later, but if the prints survived, she was not told.
And that is almost all. Later she helped the local village priest to emigrate to the United States. He told her that he had buried the man up against the wall of a church near Pilzno, south of Debnica, under an old tomb-slab.
It would be worth a visit to Pilzno. The train was heading West, towards Prague, and the prisoners may have been due for release there. At all events, I found the Ehrenstrales highly respectable and sober witnesses; Hans later had a distinguished career as a UN civil servant. But in Sweden, this story has provoked every sort of ridicule and irritation. Believing Wallenberg is still alive has become, it seems, something of a loyalty test.
I think that he is long dead. But what, exactly, is the queer appeal of this idea that somewhere far, far away, behind the dim perimeter lights of some forgotten labour camp in a forest, Raoul Wallenberg lies toothless on a wooden bunk and dreams of the fresh breeze, the diamond spray of the islands around Stockholm? It is, I suspect, that we require Russia (or the Soviet Union) to be an infinity.
Once it was ‘the Amazon jungles’ or ‘darkest Central Africa’; before that, it was endless and undiscovered America. Now Amazonia is a rapacious lumber camp, Africa is bright with flashbulbs and World Bank inventories. But in great Russia, you can still get lost, be forgotten, stumble on a mammoth’s ginger head poking from the ice, or enjoy the masochistic thrill of countlessness. Only in this land, slothful and secretive, can a world hero like Wallenberg sink away as Colonel Fawcett sank away into the Amazon forest, in the 1920s, leaving only ambiguous bubbles to reach the surface.
Such is the Western fantasy. In a way, Russians share it. The sense of infinite resources is ingrained in Russian attitudes -and is one of the worst problems that Mr Gorbachov has to face, ‘we have so many diamonds, so much gold, oil for a thousand years, a continent of trees, a world of soil.’ Scarcity, mother of invention in the West, is there understood as a mere distributive problem, a bungle which obliges the people of the richest nation on earth to queue before empty shops.
The late Nikita Khrushchev was vexed and puzzled by the Swedes’ obsession with Wallenberg’s fate. ‘We have hundreds of millions of people,’ he might have said. ‘Take your pick, but why this one?’ Perhaps because Wallenberg was, after all, a little like Count Károlyi, a lonely and just man who waded by himself against history’s tide of blood until it swept him away.
[1987
Dream of Escape
Not long ago – last autumn, in fact – a small, uncanny thing happened to me in Prague. I was in a museum of ancient musical instruments, housed in a baroque palace down by the river, and paused to lean on the window-sill and stare out of the window.
It was a brilliant, blue afternoon. The trees outside were losing their leaves, which fell as I watched and formed a glittering, golden scatter on the cobbled square below.
Something came into my mind, a story I had been told of the terrible days in the autumn of 1938 when Britain and France – through the Munich Agreement – betrayed Czechoslovakia to Hitler. Thousands of Czech veterans who had fought in France during the First World War had gone to the French embassy and had flung down their medals until the stones of the square outside were covered with gleaming silver and gold. It must have looked just like this, I thought. And, later that day, I discovered that it was the very same square.
In those weeks, almost 50 years ago, there began the tearing apart of Europe’s living body. The Yalta Conference completed it, cauterising the wounds with pious words. The last, finishing slashes of connecting nerves and sinews were done when Communism took power in Prague in 1948, and when the Berlin Wall appeared in 1961.
The fashion remains to blame Western cowa
rdice and cynicism for the division of Europe. This is blind. The future outlines of Europe’s partition were decided in June 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union and brought about the conjunction which statesmen had managed to avoid for over a century: the flooding of Russian power into the European heartlands. We live in the Europe which Hitler created.
But wounds can heal and lesions may at least skin over again. The partition of Europe is no longer absolute, and in many places there is a tentative rejoining: a physical one of travel and trade, a mental one of nations either side of the line reviving a sense of common culture. In this atmosphere, people have begun to write and speak again about ‘Central Europe.’
Richard Bassett has just published a ‘Guide to Central Europe’ (Viking), a clever, useful, comic invitation to treat as a single region the lands from Lower Austria to Transylvania, from north Bohemia through Hungary and Slovenia to Trieste and its ‘Austrian Riviera.’ This takes in two Warsaw Pact states, one NATO member, one capitalist neutral and a non-aligned socialist republic. But Bassett writes of ‘a unique culture,’ a shared mental background which is still flourishing.
If Bassett’s ‘Central Europe’ is really the southern part of the old Habsburg Empire, others draw the term more widely. The German writer Karl Schlogel writes of ‘roughly the geographical area between Germany and Russia, between the Baltic and the Adriatic’ – which takes in Poland and perhaps the Ukraine and the Baltic states as well. Tim Garton Ash, in a long and imaginative piece in the New York Review of Books last year, dissects the way that opposition writers in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary use the term and suggests, disarmingly, that while they all live in ‘Eastern Europe’ – the predicament of the Soviet empire – they would all wish to live in a ‘Central Europe’, a place of free, truthful societies outside all imperial systems.
Eastern Europe is what exists, according to Garton Ash, while Central Europe remains only an idea. But it is a powerful idea, just because it is generated by the reality of Eastern Europe and finds its values in all that Eastern Europe is not. It is a political and moral programme as much as a place: ‘its territory is the space between the State and the individual, between the power and the powerless.’
This approach has the advantage of not presenting Central Europe as something past which could be revived. That is good because revival is impossible. The supranational Habsburg Empire is fit only for nostalgia, as long as its stupid, oppressive aspects are ignored. The Jews, whose sceptical, liberal, rationalist genius was the real catalyst of a common culture in those lands between Germany and Russia, can never be brought back.
Professor Seton-Watson wrote recently of the paradox that ‘it is among the weakest nations of Europe … that the strongest European consciousness exists.’ And yet two wars which wrecked the continent began in those ‘lands in-between.’ The conflicts which principally caused the outbreak of 1914 resulted, as Professor Seton-Watson puts it, from ‘the penetration of economic forces and social ideas from the West into societies unprepared for them.’ Garton Ash remarks that although this intellectual generation stakes out Central Europe as a zone for tolerance and humanism, its fathers made it the breeding-ground for the most fanatical and ruthless ideologies.
And yet Central Europe is more than just a dream Canaan for opposition intellectuals in the smaller nations of the Warsaw Pact. Others are sharply interested. And among those others are many Germans.
They, after all, invented the term Mitteleuropa. And it began as an imperial term. Squeezed between Russia to the east and the great colonial powers of France and Britain to the west, Germany was to establish a ‘third bloc’, a Central Europe including the Balkans dominated by German military and industrial power. For some Germans, like the great Friedrich Naumann writing during the First World War, it was to be a fatherly, paternal dominion over lesser races. In Hider’s demonic version, it was a Great-German empire founded on genocide and slavery.
To leave modern Germany out of talk about Central Europe is a dangerous mistake. The new West German generation is not interested in domination. But it has adopted the idea that the strip of Europe between Baltic and Adriatic is a place where German policies can be made with more sovereign freedom than within the constraints of the Western Alliance and the Common Market. As the writer François Bondy puts it, ‘when Central Europe is discussed in West Germany, a certain separation from the West is usually meant…’
The vision here is of a great band of neutral or semi-neutral states in the middle of Europe, without foreign armies of occupation and their nuclear weapons. Britain and France would cease to count much. They might well stay tied to the United States, but Germany – reunited or a federation of two states -would find its destiny in a new Mitteleuropa balanced between the West and a pacified Soviet Union that had withdrawn behind its own frontiers.
We may already be in the very first stages of this process. If so, it will end with a Central Europe rather unlike the vision of Czechs like Vaclav Havel or Hungarians like Gyorgy Konrad, for it will be a region completely overshadowed by the wealth, industrial energy and sheer numbers of the Germans.
It is, of course, a far better thing to be swamped by Quelle mail-order catalogues, German porno movies and BMW salesmen than by censorship, Trabant cars, which fall to bits even if you live long enough to afford them, and the secret police. But it will be swamping, all the same. Beyond the Elbe, the idea of Central Europe is about decency, truth, sceptical lucidity. I hope those values survive when, and if, the idea becomes reality.
[1987
Bad Dreams
How do we see ‘The Threat’ – the possibility of attack by the other side on the Cold War? Last weekend, I was in Budapest at a conference organised by the Alerdinck Foundation to discuss ‘mutual perceptions of threat.’ A powerful Soviet delegation attended. When asked to muse on The Threat, Mr Vladimir Lomeiko, now an ‘ambassador at large,’ told a story.
A woman in New York has a dream. She is walking home at night (do New Yorkers still do that?) when she hears heavy footsteps close behind her. She walks faster, then runs. The footsteps come pounding after her, until she reaches her flat, slams and locks the door and falls on her bed in breathless relief. And then she hears the footsteps advancing through the hall and entering the bedroom. ‘What do you want of me?’ she screams. A voice replies: ‘What do you want of me? After all, this is your dream!’
I liked that story. The night before, I had been reading an article entitled ‘The Soviet Rubber Fleet Sails the Pacific,’ from the bulletin of a New York organisation called the Centre for War, Peace and the News Media. The centre specialises in reviewing and mordantly criticising the performance of those who write or broadcast about military matters.
The article, by Betsy D. Treitler, examined what the Washington Times called ‘the extraordinary growth of the Soviet Navy in the Pacific’ That is an understatement. The New York Times gave data revealing the mightiest Stakhanovite feat of instant shipbuilding in history. On 10 August 1986, the paper referred to 410 ships and submarines, but a week later it had grown to 530, and by September ‘across the Western Pacific, the Russians have amassed 830 ships.’ The Washington Times spoke that summer of 840 vessels.
But then, all unreported, there arose a sea-serpent or typhoon which smote that fleet and devoured it. In November 1986 Time magazine wrote of a mere 166 warships. In March this year the New York Times managed to raise part of the fleet from the ocean-floor, referring to the 500 warships of the Soviet Pacific Navy. Where all this news of the expansive-contractile fleet came from, Ms Treider was unable to say, for no sources were quoted. But ‘Soviet Military Power,’ published by the Pentagon, wrote in its 1986 edition that the Soviet Union had only 175 ‘principal combatants’ and submarines in the Pacific theatre.
Our conference in Budapest was not about the Pacific, but about the military confrontation in Europe. At the centre of argument was the security of Western Europe, in the case that intermediate and sh
ort-range nuclear weapons were removed from the Continent and the forces facing one another were conventional. Given the superiority of the Warsaw Pact in conventional armaments, would the threat increase?
All agree that the Warsaw Pact has more men and tanks than NATO. But how many more? Back in London, I took out the Fleet Street newspaper cuttings on the subject. They made a curious read.
In June 1986, The Times reported that NATO had 5 million men and the Warsaw Pact 6.4 million. Two days later, the Daily Telegraph wrote of 2.29 million NATO soldiers and 2.8 million Warsaw Pact soldiers. In March this year, the Independent gave figures of respectively 5 million and 6.2 million. As for tanks, the Independent gave the figures as 20,300 in the West and about 46,000 in the East. On the same day, however, the Daily Telegraph stated that NATO had 9,000 tanks and the Pact 22,000, although almost a month later it gave the figures as 20,314 and 46,610.
In all that, too, there are elements of Lomeiko’s dream. A horrible hairy bear, constantly changing size but always irresistible, is tramping into the bedroom of Daily Telegraph readers. In numbers of men, tanks and tactical aircraft, the Warsaw Pact is stronger. But it seemed to me, listening to the debate in Budapest, that this was not a very threatening superiority, all the same. We are living in a military period rather like that of 1914-18, when defensive conventional weaponry has the edge over attacking equipment, and unlike that of 1940 when the opposite was true. NATO is obviously in no condition to attack the Warsaw Pact, but the Pact’s superiority in tanks, for example, is nothing like enough to assure victory.
The Eastern side at Budapest would not define a threat to itself, beyond the proposition that any arms race could end in accidental catastrophe. But for the Westerners, there seemed to be three varieties of menace. The first, to me almost negligible, was the risk of direct attack. The second was the use of military force against a single nation by its own allies, which we have seen in Hungary in 1956, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The third was that, in a Europe stripped of nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union would be able to dominate the West by political leverage deriving from its own military strength -’nuclear blackmail,’ or just ‘tank blackmail’.
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