Sándor Komáromi:

With a long delay: the new Hungarian German literature in the last third of the 20th century

 "During the 18^th and 19^th century, a both quantitatively and qualitatively significant German literature was born in the territory of the historical Hungary, only a part of which was closely linked to the ethnic minority speaking the language as their mother tongue."[1] The reference to the wide-range German-speaking culture - which was part of the culture of the elite then - of the Hungarian society, mainly that of the urban citizens and noblemen - from Pozsony, through Pest-Buda, to Brassó and Temesvár -, living under Habsburgian rule, is hidden in the laconic statement of the literary historian. We also know that by the end of the 19^th century this culture, having been gradually driven back during the language-national integration of the Hungarians, became a minority-regional, folk-rooted culture of the lower social groups. In all this, the Hungarian conditions got into a substantially narrower framework after Trianon, and in fact the cultural and political heritage of the Germans of Hungary can be counted from that time. Approaching to World War II and during the War, the ethnic group partly became a strategic means of the Hitlerite politics, and that served as a pretext for the post-1945 pharisaic politics to call to account and punish the minority collectively. that results in the, later almost irredeemable, tragic breaking of German-Hungarian co-existence.

The Kádárian consolidation

 The German literary awakening of the 1970s accompanied the late, slow revival of the inland minority leaving behind decades of discrimination and isolation. The shift is far from being comprehensive, the circumstances are not ideal, the inner readiness of the ethnic group is unmatched; the systemic power of literature is questionable at the moment of beginning. The crisis-era embraces the years of collective punishment and penitence inflicted on the German minority for the Volksbund, the SS-recruitment, and for the war in total; and it also embraces the broader era of "hard" dictatorship causing the catastrophe of the majority society as well. By the end of the all-national "consolidation", at the beginning of the economic prosperity[2] - at the end of the ‘60s when, after the integration of the Hungarian workers, peasants and intellectuals, the integration and "elevation" of minorities completed the amalgamation of society -, the re-integration of the Hungarian minority of about 200,000, reduced to half of its former number by the deportation and relocation of 1945-1947, who were humiliated spiritually and were forced to resettle and deprived of their language, is placed on the agenda  in a more determined form within the frame of the Kádárian, so-called federal politics. In case of the minority Germans the completeness of consolidation would have naturally been the moral settlement of individual injuries and losses, but that could not be achieved even between the liberalized framework of the Soviet-style system. The political change of the end of the 80s also finds the minority in a position weakened by old injuries. Its whole identity cannot be restored. The most explicit opinion of the historian is: "The German identity in Hungary can only be treated in terms of a possible double identity, since the assimilation, the dissolution of the German ethnic group in the Hungarian nation has progressed a lot."[3] The struggle is on for the double identity - for the minority German identity that can be rendered on a real value to the national Hungarian identity, and, not in the last, for the mother-tongue forming its basis, an important weapon of which could be literature itself. Especially in case of the literary characters of the minority, the duality may take a broader, and more complex form on the examples of family history (common and plural heritage in blood) or of cultural education: in the intellectual formations of "by the Danube" consciousness, "Europeanness", "Central Europeanness". Actually, literature also starts with a disadvantage: its greatest loss that it cannot overcome yet is its 25 years break of tradition - together with the generation amputation of the preparedness of creators and authors.

          If there was a literary initiation from "beneath" (in Pécs, at the Department of the Teachers' Training College, in the circle of Professor Károly Vargha, with the collecting and treating of the treasures of peasant-, and miners' folklore; or around Béla Szende (a late successor of Vargha), in the editorial workshop of German-speaking broadcasts started also here, by the end of 1956[4]; and in the capital, at the press of the nationality association controlled by the Party since 1955, producing only one newspaper), that was a slender production, and could not have lead to success in a short time without the help of the "above". An inserted forum: the "literary section" developed inside the Association (1972) by some authors who had already published in the journal and by colleagues in the paper.[5] Initiated by the Section and as an outcome of the literary scholarship published in the paper (Neue Zeitung, 1973), the moderate, uneven volume, titled Mély gyökerek ("Deep Roots" - a bit sounding title)[6] came out, which is regarded as the starting point of the new literature. Its content and presentation precisely reflects the actual political situation: the official boasting with, and compulsory enthusiasm for the "elevation" of the minority. The Rittinger-poem on the first pages of the volume, with the ending strophe with a kind of late, minority voice of "bright breezes" - distorting the reality of the sensation - pays tribute to the "party-spirited" actuality of renewing the era, that floats along the volume. (In a contemporary reading it was not so evident as it is today.) A more problematic element of this volume: the historical image reduced to the conflict-types of the events of the Hitlerite War and the Soviet "liberation" or the local Swabs faithful to the Wehrmacht and those becoming deserters or becoming adjusted to the Soviet ideology. All the events that happened to the Germans afterwards are in fact missed out from this volume and from any early publications. We do not know why, the only recurring topic is the "longing to be back" homelessness of the rural Swab drifting towards the city (L. Fischer: Emberek a toronyházból, Ácsorgunk a városokban, etc.).[7] The great problematic should be regarded as non-existent for a while.

          A beginning like that of Mély gyökerek, with all that capacities, has mobilized something, and fortunately the further process soon overcomes the uneven policies: the authors and organizers will be able to turn the occasion and possibility of great politics to their advantage, and the format and thematic will gradually approach to the questions and dilemmas (survival, vernacular consciousness, questions of tradition, dual affinity, etc.) determined by the actual reality of minority existence. Literature gets emphasized on the pages of Neue Zeitung, and volumes are regularly published (Tankönyvkiadó). The circle of authors is broadening. Participation in workshops becomes more and more intense in Pécs and Budapest. Series of writer-reader meetings with the domestic and foreign German-speaking readers serve the acquaintance and popularisation of authors and writers. About the wideness of the process: until 1991, the first scientific documentation reviews 22 independent publications (collective collections and individual volumes) and enumerates about 45 recurringly or even regularly published authors in representation of the formerly mentioned works, or the newspaper, or the annual Kalendárium (Almanac).[8] As an aid in higher education, the Institution of German Studies of ELTE also publishes an anthology.[9]

The writers' middle-ward or the prose

 A fundamental merit of the Hungarian German anthology prepared for the competition is - despite its distorted political aspect - the lining up of the delayed older and the oldest generations of authors with intact roots, still familiar with their vernacular: Georg Fath (1910, Pécs), Franz Zeltner (1911, Brennbergbánya), Johann Herold (1921, Izmény), Josef Mikonya (1928, Tarján), Ludwig Fischer (1929, Szekszárd), Engelbert Rittinger (1929, Pécs), Georg Wittmann (1930, Budafok), Josef Kanter (1932, Szakadát). These people could have been writing for 15-20 years (or could have tried writing for themselves, or in Hungarian; of course Fath had been writing and publishing before the war, and he started to write again well before the publication of the anthology), and now they step afore partly as naïve, self-educated writers committed to practical professions (masonry, mining, teaching, etc,). Some of them "takes a pen" for the first time (that was the slogan of the competition). Besides the gyökerek-anthology, others join them: Nikolaus Márnai-Mann (1914, Bácsalmás), M.A. Thomann (1926, Kunbaja, Budapest), Franz Sziebert (1929, Rácgörcsöny). Only a few young people join them, and the space is completely empty in regard to the ages of the war and before. They were not joined by Wilhelm Knabel /Knabel Vilmos (1884 - 1972) who died in the year of the formation of the Section (although he did publish in the press before); neither his contemporary Matthes Nitsch / N. Mátyás (1884-1972) who withdrew after 1945. They represented the continuity with the past by their silent presence.[10] Other contemporaries, as being deportees and refugees (Hans Christ, Adam Englert and others) were less related to the Hungarian renewal.

          Despite its initial immaturedness, its didactical "crutches" and genre-limits, the prose of the middle-ward should be regarded the backbone of the new German literature, the plastic images of the still present or recallable environment (or even the damage) or scenes of vital processes can be mapped. The volume following the Gyökerek-anthology selects from the short stories of four authors.[11] The piece giving the title of the volume, the chronicler tale A fabábu (The wooden puppet) of Wittmann, who died in 1996, is the first outstanding work re-naturalizing the topic of folk-origin (it is also significant because of its size) - about the way of the settling ancestors from the area of the Black Forest, to the 1944 bombing of Promontor /Budafok, until the most recent pulling down of the core of the city, accompanied by many intimate elements of folklore. Many other stories and sketches by Wittmann broaden and deepen into a personally experienced chronicle of the past and present local way of life and fate. He, in other respects, provides brilliant examples on how much the denial of the events following the war did not depend on the authors. The work that lent the title of his author's volume is the Solymár-story (A várdombon - On the castle-hill) written in 1968, that remained unpublished for two decades, giving a more realistic picture about the coming of the Russians, but becoming a complete story of deportation.[12]

          The emphasis on the description of the milieu indicates in Wittmann's and others' works: how important is the original-regional (sometimes dialectic) background of the authors, especially the still well-populated Tolna and Baranya, but also the south of Bácska, or the Buda and Dorog regions. The new-born prose can partly be regarded as a presenting-documenting treatment of such Swabian worlds, that - right inside the Trianon borders - did not enter into the literary world more markedly, when they existed in their more intact forms. Now, right before their complete disappearance, literature attempts to make up for it, to the extent it touches upon the topic. (Wittmann has a reason to ask about the hinting of the theoretical critic on the "literary historian" tradition; the question of continuity is still completely unrevealed.)[13] This milieu-prose occurs in many writings of Mikonya (Lányok a Széna téren - Girls on the Széna Square).[14] At him, these are short, sketch-like, subjective proses, seeing together past and present. This returns as a greater form of prose in the autobiographical story and memory-prose commented from the present.[15] The memory-episodes inspired by local history-ethnography written by for example Fischer or Sziebert have a thinner literary texture compared to those described above. However, fortunately the anecdotic, humorous rural story is becoming a powerful tradition as the primordial, timeless genre of the local, regionally inspired prose - such as the stories of Rittinger, Márnai, Mikonya, Sziebert himself, and others, even in the form of its original, dialectic variety.[16] These "re-found" pieces written in dialects (in epic and in prose) record the linguistic-ethnic tradition at the last flare-ups. (They faced with difficulties with the public leaving behind its dialects or representing various dialect-traditions. However, that can be a productive problem as well.)

          Nevertheless, even the minority-described stories of the era and its people are not always related to the ancient environment. The fiction-story presenting a complete story or the short story presenting a situation are both taken by our prose-writers, most clearly (that is: without the chronicle-like stretching or reflection, instead with a punch-line) by L. Fischer. Examples for the first: his two vineyard-stories. One is from the Mély Gyökerek, a deserter-story with a political sounding[17] (that was referred to above), and the story written later about the family hiding from deportation, and the couple hiding in their vine-yard.[18] The other form is represented by Fischer's characteristic and productive dialogue-stories. In the rich genre-spectre of the short -prose, from the sketch to the story with the size almost of a small novel, there is not any variety that does not appear with our authors. But the novel giving a broader, more complex description of life, and the essay revealing background connections (not to mention the drama) are lacking, and several interrelated and independent causes of the phenomenon can be found - from the lack of the free perspective of the period opening from the still-print, to the unsettled writing tradition spanning periods. If the older authors - in a broader sense - undertook their autobiography, that would be a great treasure knowing the various sources and tendencies of the independent ways of life.

The new team of authors and the lyric poetry

 Glimpsing at lyric poetry we see: the poet-role is not dominant among the elder authors. Only the old-style idyllic songs and poetic sagas of G. Fath (related to the collections by Károly Vargha) represent lyric poetry with full emphasis. Primarily younger authors represent the genre, and they mainly represent lyric poetry itself. According to age-groups, there is the volume- and newspaper editor, Erika Áts (1934), a main contributor in the Gyökerek-anthology - near to the generation of the 1930s. She aimed to include the summary of the local Germans in the oratorical poem, A hársfa (The linden-tree)[19] originally written to meet "literary" demands - with an actual political inspiration and goal. In the poem, the linden-tree, the ultimate symbol of the all-German homeliness is a historical witness of the events happening around (in this, the end-point is also the "liberation" brought by the Soviets), and finally, when getting old, it is put under the protection of the community to sprout once again. Áts has already attempted to write poems in Hungarian, she represents the educated, professional author-type in the volume. She was often blamed for the didactic tendency and political actualisation of the poem educated in classic and modern - German and Hungarian - literary patterns, rich in poetic detail-beauties, although it is not only her who wrote such pieces in the volume. Later Áts, after quickly overcoming her political poetic moment, introduces herself with poems and (two-way) poem-translations resplendent in real lyrical colours, written in powerful languages and varied form-types; and she presents herself on the best level of contemporary German and Hungarian poetry (mixing a lot of elements from the two), unfortunately her energy does not last long. With her unique volume (after that of Fath: Stockbrünnlein - 1977, the second Hungarian German book of poetry is hers: Gefesselt ans Pfauenrad, 1981) she well deserves to be the domestic and foreign promoter of the new minority literature for a time.

          In the Gyökerek, beside Áts - from the other side of the censorship hiding the historical shift, the "lost" generation, there is Valeria (Vali) Koch (1949-1998) who left Pécs for Budapest and died tragically early. She "wins over" the role from Áts through the form of a more complex lyrical personality, and many others came afterwards. All of them are carriers of the self-expressive, personal poetic dynamics beginning with Áts, as opposed to the traditionalist, regional type of lyrical poetry. In the Gyökerek, Koch concealed herself as a stranger behind the others with her elegiac turning inwards underlined by Rilke- and Hölderlin-evocations. For her, that was the minority experience of life at the beginning: a resigned longing back to the world of lost childhood. Her most authentic writing, also lending the title of the anthology, is not a poem, but a lyrical prose: Egy nyírfa vallomásai (Confessions of a birch-tree)[20] - with the "talking" contemplation of the otherness planted by the wine-press house, and growing-spreading by the love of the masters. (Is it the variant, or the opposition of Áts's (linden-tree)?) On the other hand, the demand, the instinct of Koch: the personal redefinition of the great questions of life, existence and the age, and also the total experience of human existence (in love poems as well). Her means for that: her sensitivity and culture. (She became famous for choosing Heidegger as a topic unusual at that time for her dissertation.) Her deep irony and self-irony developed later, and resulted in a great variety of poem-types - from the pure tune-form, through the verse-libre to the epigrammatic condensation.

          Valéria Koch's poetry conceived in German is the pride of the new German literature, however, there is something more in her works: building together a German and a Hungarian poetic oeuvre, she wrote as a bilingual poet - with conscious, determinate, bilingual attachment.[21] Her bilinguality perfectly corresponds to the questions of double identity mentioned above. She is the initiator of the phenomenon and she has followers too. Whether it is the Hungarian and German groups of poems that provide a whole (with the different elements of poetic tradition and prosody, of mentality, dividing, at least partially, the thematic, emotional and sound-pack), or it is from sensitivity the need for experimenting in Hungarian originates, that is a question hardly answerable without thorough examination. (Only an impression: Koch's German poems may generally be better, having a more homogeneous language than the Hungarian ones.) The essence for us: it is the duality of instinct (?) or constrain (?), that is more and different than the recurring self-definition, that sounds (in the German vernacular) like: "the foster-child of language".

          The generation following Áts and Koch, or even: poet-personalities of generations: -Claus Kotz (1947-1990), Béla Bayer (1951), Nelu Bradean-Ebinger (1952) transmigrating from Romania, Josef Michaelis / Michelisz (1955), Robert Becker (1970) and others - such as Koch, are mostly instructed by the re-started language education: through the language classes in the secondary schools of Pécs and Budapest, the language institutes in the teacher training courses of universities and colleges. Orientating and experimenting in the various trends of style and approach, they speak of age, man, and identity in the episodes of emotional-mental generalization. Regarding the consideration of their poetic achievements, reception criticism is mostly hesitant. The opinion is more univocal in accepting that the rooting of a more critical, self-critical aspect distancing from the Kádárist boasting of minority political officiality is owing to them.

Attachment and identity

 Forbearance from the prose, which is obviously related to the wearing off of identity of their original environment, the decay of the milieu, was and has remained a big question mark for the youth from the very beginning. However, it is to be feared that from the moment when all the generational creative reserve of the prose-literature runs out, this minority literature will not be able to live on anymore only on its poetic intellectual reflections, and the limited vivification of "the Hungarian German literature" around 1970, and the comparably barely imagined autonomous evolvement of it will also remain a short culture-historical episode. Nevertheless, the characters of the new generation may still find their own prose-topics. While investigating the future of prose, we could welcome, towards the political change and more after the change, a more and more complete liberation of the Swabian fate thematic - beyond deportation (expulsion): "malenky robot", confiscation of wealth, dislodgement, internment, Tiszalök, etc. And in fact, besides the publication of documents, treatments of topics, literary treatment of subjects has also started (principally in the works of Fischer and Sziebert).[22] The colportage-like rough forming of the pseudo-documentary episode-telling, by which the thematic was published until recently, is not so promising for the time being.

          With the democratic progress following the political change, the chances of an airier, more natural minority existence and activity have increased, and in regard to that those of minority literature have done so, none the worse. Civilian and institutional, autonomic frameworks have widened. The Hungarian (in the capital) workshop found its own legs (writers' association), with its own publishing house and well-established connections with the mother-country (deported-fugitive Swabian and other German forums and institutions beyond the border).[23] Newer and newer authors appear, even if en passant, with their poems and short proses. Publicism becomes a literary genre. The forgotten-denied literary tradition or the works of the old deported-refugee authors sometimes appear in press publications. However, it would be difficult to define how far the new minority German literature has gotten after the decay of its first, great impulse, the publication of the ten anthologies and the individual volumes of the main characters.

          Back to the broadening of genre: the progress has almost reached the novel: Koch, the sensitive lyricist starts an auto-biographical novel, but the published parts do not provide enough information about its direction and proportions.[24] On the other hand, the introduction as an author of Stefan Raile (1937) returning from a Saxonian emigration is a radically new, significant sequel. He left Vaskút together with her parents deported to the Russian-occupied territories to find, as a delayed author, the words, the grammar of telling the story of the re-dreamt childhood and distance under the relieving influence of the double political change, in an extended prose published in Budapest. If we accept him as a Hungarian German author (and what can be said against that?), then Raile's age-group also gives the missing link in the generational process of the authors.[25] Theresia Móra (1971) emigrated from the environment of Sopron and her work becoming famous after its success in Berlin, are related phenomena, but already from a new generation and differently linked to the home-country. Her writing describes her birth-place environment through a strange alienating technique[26], and by that it is linked to the literatures of "political change" of the Eastern German provinces.

          Both the examples of Raile and Móra focus the attention to the question of the varieties of fields of language vitality. The conclusion can be drawn: the literary readiness of a given language in a colloquial standard-situation is incomparably more complete and effective than in the position of a stratum- or group-language. That is how we are provided with dynamic, regionally unbound, comprehensive works from beyond the borders of the region - growing also in our domestic basis with their examples and literary experiences. And let's remain at the topic of standard field of vitality for a moment more! For the minority literary culture the same readiness is offered by the Hungarian linguistic dimension inside the region - springing from the bilingual condition of the double attachment of the Hungarian Germans. And then, the requested generation- and family-saga of Hungarian Germans - already taken in the 80s by Kalász (Christmann) Márton (1934)[27] an author with Swabian roots from Baranya, who worked as a Hungarian lyricist -, or the Swabian "saga" - with the novel of the more younger István Elmer written in 1987, but published later[28] - are created in Hungarian. Of course, the question comes up immediately: with the shift of language, are we still on the ground of the Hungarian literature or not? Well, in this question the theoretical-critical strategy of the vernacular trend understandably binds itself to the language, a "German" prose, a "German" poem is impossible without its language. Nevertheless, the requirement fulfils its real role in the bilingual relationship, in other words, if - while maintaining the vernacular requirement - it does not exclude linguistic reciprocity. By its recognition there is nothing astonishing in that the monograph of the illustrious Swabian historian, on the basis of the novel Téli bárány, ranks Kalász among the three outstanding representatives of the late "Danubian-Swabian" literature, regardless to the fact that the novel was originally written in Hungarian[29]. The mechanical demarcation that the critic of the Neue Zeitung (or the eye-catcher of the careless press-style) exercises on the author and his novel ("a joyful border-case")[30] is more stunning though. The differentiating theory should find the proper formula, definition of the phenomenon - the contradiction of which Vilmos Ircsik, who also wrote in Hungarian about the Swabian changes in the Bakony, tells the following in his chronicler account: "This book was written in Hungarian, because this language is the same experience for him as it was for Kosztolányi, although his first words were formed in the mother-tongue of Goethe, probably with much fervour, suffering for them, then losing and later retrieving them in Hungarian".[31]

          The bilingual side of minority literature is the in-between province, the territory of which it shares with majority culture, which is a common property. Beyond that, only translations provide relationship. The workshops of Hungarian German literature, with a little abiding, have already thought about that, publishing the first (and the last so far) selection of Hungarian translations in the end of the 80s. The exiguous, poorly designed volume is less than the case would have deserved, its title is also ambiguous: Útban a csönd felé (~  "Towards silence")[32] and its reception was insignificant. As much unresounding as the whole work of the German writers was on the Hungarian side. Quite understandably, reserves may occur: how can the literature of a minority language be competitive in standards and diversity with the Hungarian staying in a standard position? The same applies to the standard German literature in regard to the vernacular public. Sometimes the problem very much annoys the minority authors themselves. The related individual measuring ("where is a German minority author matching the level of the Transylvanian Hungarian author András Sütő?" and other, similar approaches) and rows occasionally mistake the concreteness of different historical situations and components, and also mistake the peculiar function of minority literature, in which it differs from the standard (even if that function prevails there in the second line): that the linguistic identity should function as an important communicative body to tell the important messages to the community in its own authentic language. This requirement does not exclude the prevalence of the aesthetic optimum; it just does not require that as a basis. The appropriate relationship of the two is the responsibility of the author from work to work, and that is such a great responsibility like the human scale and aesthetic measure of the "great" literature.

Vissza