A Case Study on Trianon

"Trianon to us bears the meaning of a human slaughterhouse: it is there that every third Hungarian was crushed into subsistence under foreign rule; it is there that the territories of our native language were torn to pieces."¹ The writer who uttered these words on the eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the concluding of the Trianon peace treaty has been called the Grand Old Man of Hungarian letters. He is also referred to sometimes as perhaps the last of the national poets-"national" in the sense that he has taken it upon himself to voice his people's, his nation's, vital concerns. The role of advocate, prophet, crusader, intellectual leader-while it usually took considerable courage to assume-became an honorable burden in a country which often faced domestic and foreign tyranny, enslavement, even virtual extinction during its thousand-year history.

Gyula Illyes was born in 1902 and became one of the most significant writers of his time in Hungary and, as translations of his works reach an ever-growing number of readers everywhere, he will be known in other parts of the world as well. As Alain Bosquet, the French writer said: "Only three or four living poets have been able to identify themselves totally with the soul of the century. ... Their genius burns in the Hungarian poet Gyula Illyes. ... In his poems we find the charm, the fire, the grave thoughts and feelings underlying the need to embrace the world and transform it through the Word."²

Gyula Illyes has voiced his concern about the human rights of Hungarians everywhere, has stood up for their freedom to preserve their cultural heritage, to maintain as ethnic minorities their schools, churches, and literary forums. This has often resulted in his being called a "nationalist" by various official and other critics. Illyes has repeatedly rejected this label and showed it to be a malicious and deliberately misleading reversal of truth.

It is a fateful deception to call 'nationalists' those who try to repel or reduce nationalistic oppression, instead of identifying as nationalists

those who actually practice and intensify nationalistic discrimination.³ To call 'nationalism' the cries of those who suffer from oppression, and not the oppressor, provides ammunition for the real nationalists whose intentions border on genocide The almost alarmingly accelerating efforts of many ethnic groups to become independent is an unexpected symptom of our century. So is the startling orgy of nationalism. To call the essence of these two processes the same, however, is to mistake cause for effect. The two are: water and fire, mutually exclusive, in the deepest war with each other.⁴ I am not a nationalist. ... Nationalists violate rights, patriots protect rights. I want equal rights for all people, including the Hungarian people.⁵

The changed demographic situation and the oppression of the Hungarian minorities in the territories annexed to Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Rumania, and Yugoslavia in 1921 were taboo subjects, forbidden to be publicly discussed after World War II in East-Central Europe. The political leaders of Hungary, as well as of her neighbors to the North, East, and South, ruled in the name of socialism, internationalism, and communism-ideologies which deemphasize national consciousness and national identification. During those years, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania came under Soviet domination and the Soviet Union condoned not only the Trianon borders but also the disenfranchisement of the minorities. Oppression of minorities, after all, was a traditional policy in Stalin's totalitarian state. Only in the late 60's after a period of political relaxation had set in, in Hungary did it become again possible to raise questions publicly about some of these previously forbidden issues. One of the issues was the survival of the Hungarian minorities beyond Hungary's borders. The official and unofficial censors yielded very grudgingly, and very slowly. By the end of the seventies there seemed to be only three taboo subjects left: the revolution of 1956, the single (communist) party's autocratic rule, and the presence of the Soviet military occupying forces (referred to officially as "friendly troops stationed temporarily on our country's territory"). In today's Hungary, beside these forbidden topics, there are writings which are "tolerated" and, of course, works which are supported by the authorities. These three official reaction patterns are said to have created three categories of literary works-the three "T" 's (in Hungarian "tiltott [forbidden], "turt" [tolerated], and "tamogatott" [supported]).

Thus, it took courage to refer in the 1960's and 1970's to the

problem of the Hungarian minorities who live in Hungary's neighboring countries. At the time Illyes started talking in public about the fact that there were 15 or 16 million Hungarians in the world and one full third of them live outside of Hungary, even these demographic data were unmentionable. It was perhaps partly Illyes' enormous prestige and brave persistence, and also the continued flexibility of the ruling regime, that enabled this topic to move into the "tolerated" sphere. But not always, and not quite.

A few years ago Illyes-at the insistence and with the support of his friends-put together a collection of twenty pieces of his writings on this subject matter, including an introduction, a poem, some essays, letters, lectures and interviews, a majority of them previously published. The book came to 280 pages and was published by Magveto publishing company in Budapest in 1978, bearing the title of one of the newly written essays: Szellem es eroszak (Spirit and Violence).

The book never left the publishing company's warehouse. It cannot be obtained in any bookstore, it cannot be read in any library, it is not mentioned anywhere. it was ordered from the "tolerated," back to the "forbidden" category. One optimistic note: the book was not destroyed, it is still waiting to be released. Another hopeful sign:

Illyes was not intimidated by the banning of his book. Indeed, the opposite occurred: in the three years since then, his efforts to bring this issue to the public's attention increased. A good example is a TV interview he gave in February 1980, the text of which was published in the May 1980 issue of Alfold, one of the best regional literary journals of Hungary. In the interview Illyes states:

Hungarians are in a tragic situation: there are fifteen million Hungarians in the world, but only ten million live within the present borders of their country. The rest live beyond these borders, and many of them are deprived of the opportunity to maintain their language, and are being discriminated against in other ways as well. If we are not concerned with them, we commit not national treason, but ethical treason-treason against our brothers and sisters, against a people.⁶

One of the earliest pieces in Szellem es eroszak is a 1963 interview Illyes gave to a French newspaper: L'Express.⁷ In it Illyes called chauvinistic intolerance what took place in the annexed territories after Trianon.

L'Express: You have traveled in Eastern countries and have recently visited some Western countries as well. What really caught your attention in these countries?

Gyula Illyes: Perhaps the disturbing remnants of chauvinism. When I was young, we thought that as a result of the French revolution and the works of the very logical 19th century thinkers, internationalism would become the new world order. But eventually we had to give up this hope!

First, there were the nationalistic explosions of the 20's, then came Hitlerism. Hitler is dead, Nazism is annihilated, but intolerance, chauvinism, racism, separatism, language disputes keep stirring up the world. Not even the most thoroughgoing social changes could solve these problems. There is a province in Romania: Transylvania, which for centuries was the real birthplace of Hungarian civilization and literature. In this province they have recently closed the only university which served the more than two million Hungarians living there. The position of Hungarian writers and intellectuals there is very precarious.⁸

Elsewhere he characterizes the patterns of oppression practiced by Hungary's neighbors against the Hungarian minorities as cultural intolerance, deprivation, subjugation into a sort of proletarian existence, a system of apartheid.

Nationalistic intolerance cloaks itself in forms of intolerance against native languages. This has happened even in countries which took some steps toward socialism in their economic structure.⁹

Our language seems to be under some kind of a death sentence beyond our borders. Let me state this clearly: consciously or unconsciously efforts are made to bring about the disappearance of our language, which would cause untold suffering to millions of innocent people.¹⁰

Of the fifteen million Hungarians, only ten million live in the State of Hungary. Every third Hungarian inherits, on account of his native language, a socially disadvantaged life, a kind of proletarian fate.¹¹

The native language of Hungarians is not Germanic or Slavic, or Latin; it is related, in Europe, only to the languages of the distant Finns and Estonians. Therefore, every third Hungarian, who may not know or find it hard to learn the completely different majority language, has to contend with a multitude of difficulties. This fact has not been sufficiently recognized up to now. The basic cause of these difficulties is that humanism, even that which is advocated by socialism, has remained ineffective in many parts of the world against unexpectedly

widespread nationalistic hostilities, especially the intolerances that torment the life of minorities in our century.¹²

I was humiliated in Czechoslovakia. They told me not to talk in my native language. They rebuked the lady in my company, my wife, with the same words, and I had no way to protect her. Thus, they let me know, and more than once, that I was not welcome there. Since this happened in a city and in a province where virtually everybody spoke the same language as we did, that is: Hungarian, I had to conclude that they would like everybody in that region to leave his home, This puzzled me because there were signs and posters everywhere on the streets proclaiming the sacred slogans of the highest stage of humanism: socialism. But then: these proclamations were not written in the population's native language.¹³

The largest national minority of Europe is Hungarian. According to factual, verifiable data this minority does not have universities or other higher educational institutions, and soon will not have high schools either where the language of instruction would be Hungarian. Their few remaining high schools are being turned into vocational-technical schools, where the language of instruction is the "official language," which is other than Hungarian. The result is that a minority youth can't learn a trade in his own language; therefore, he can't become a skilled worker or a machine operator. He can only aspire to unskilled day-laborers' jobs.

In the Hungarian minorities' elementary schools the children have to learn lies in their own language about their ancestors who, their textbooks tell them, were barbarian invaders, inferior savages. Twenty percent of the Hungarian children do not learn the alphabet in their own language. This is partly because some parents do not want to send their children to Hungarian schools-who would not want to save his children from an almost apartheid way of life?

If, after having received their diplomas, young Hungarian professionals still insist on using their mother tongue, they are often assigned to jobs far away from any Hungarian community. Many of the professionals who are assigned to work in Hungarian towns, on the other hand, are people who do not speak or understand the local population's language.

Hungarian intellectuals are disappearing from entire regions. Every function of Hungarian culture, art, and education is discontinued in an increasing number of traditionally Hungarian towns and cities.¹⁴

In Czechoslovakia and in Romania there are officially encouraged and recognized scientists, linguists, historians and others who keep turning out hundreds of publications whose theme is that

Hungarians were wandering barbarians before they invaded those regions where the native ancestors of Czechoslovakians and Romanians had already established their superior cultures. 'This historical falsification serves as the basis for discrimination against Hungarians, forcing them to assimilate or to leave their homeland. Illyes calls this pattern "pathology," "a nightmare," and the issue of "who was here first" completely irrelevant.

Historians wrote volumes about the question: which of the contemporary populations of the Danubian basin arrived here first? They would have had to write less if that which is clear today would have been clearer earlier.- it does not matter who was here first because it does not change the deep psychological reasons for intolerance. No-body should be able to drive out anybody from this region, from his native village, on the basis of having settled there first. if this were a valid reason, then Americans might have to leave the States, I imagine, as long as one American Indian would insist on expelling them!¹⁵

Some people attempt to justify the deprivation of the Hungarian minorities of their human rights and of their opportunities to maintain their language and culture in Czechoslovakia, in the Soviet Union, and in Romania by pointing out that Hungarians have also oppressed their minorities when they had ruled the multi-national regions of Central Europe.

Illyes notes this reasoning, but finds it to be an insufficient explanation and calls for a responsible and substantial exposition and discussion of this issue, including a comparison of the historical and the present practices of minority oppression in Central Europe.

The reason our native Hungarian language upsets some people who live around us-the reason that a ring of hostility surrounding us has been glowing with increasing heat for the past half century-is that there was a time when it was the Hungarians who insulted these people. At the end of the past century Hungarians closed the national schools and cultural organizations of their minorities, continuing the oppression which these people had suffered for centuries.

I find this reasoning inadequate. It is not the root cause. If it were, then we could overcome the hurt with apologies, compensations and reparations. But in my opinion, the causes of the present problems go much deeper.¹⁶

Some people blame Hungarians for past practices of forced assimilation and language intolerance against other nationalities. If these people want to be objective, they have to admit that such practices could be cited only for about a fifty-year period from the Compromise of 1867 to the years of 1917-1918. Prior to that it was we, Hungarians, who were forced to assimilate by the Austrians. Let us compare those fifty years with the laws and practices suppressing the Hungarian minorities during the last sixty years! Yes, let us mutually discuss these questions. I hope that this might happen because in no other way can we reach understanding that is in the national and international interest of every nation in the Danubian Basin. The question of minorities is a pressing world problem, which we have to try to understand and, eventually, solve.¹⁷

Illyes also calls attention to the fact that it is a time-honored Hungarian historical tradition to foster brotherhood and cooperation with the nations of the Danubian Basin, bearing in mind their shared fate, and interdependence. He cites Laszlo Teleki and Wesselenyi, leaders who fought for the equal rights of national minorities, living on Hungarian territory. He also mentions many of the most significant modern Hungarian writers, poets, and musicians-Jokai, Tomorkenyi, Mikszath, Ady, Laszlo Nemeth,¹⁸ Moricz, Babits, Bartok and Kodaly-who all turned with understanding toward the nations around them and were all truly interested in making the idea of brotherhood in the Danubian Basin a well defined program.

We might call to mind the utterances of some of the men mentioned by Illyes, which express their views on equality and interdependence.

* Miklos Wesselenyi, the politician, wrote in his Szozat a magyar es szlav nemzet ugyeben (An appeal in the Matter of Hungarians and Slavic Nationals) published in Hungarian in Leipzig in 1843, and in German in 1844: "It is not necessary for the non-Hungarian nationals to forget their native languages. This should not be seen as a goal. Legislation must be immediately promulgated which would prohibit any office or person to curtail the personal or public use of the nationals' native language, or which would force them to use the Hungarian language." (p. 318.)

* Endre Ady, one of the greatest Hungarian poets at the beginning of the twentieth century, wrote in his poem: The Song of the Hungarian Jacobins.

Hungarian, Rumanian, Slavic trouble

will always be the same trouble.

Our disgrace and our grief

has been the same for a millenium ...

When will we finally unite,

We, oppressed, crushed

Hungarians and non-Hungarians?

Why can't a thousand numb desires

finally become one strong will?

Tomorrow we can have everything if we want,

if we dare.

* Bela Bartok wrote in a letter to Octavian Beu, a Romanian musicologist in 1931: "I am a Hungarian musician. My works use Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak folk musical sources, thus my music can be seen as representing the idea of integration. My guiding thought, of which I have been conscious ever since I have found my own voice as a composer, is that different people should become brothers in spite of wars and feuds."

"This is what we tried to transmit to the generations following ours, Illyes asserts. "We made them believe that if they will reach out, their hands will be grasped by brotherly hands. That if they look not just towards Paris, but also toward Pozsony, Bucharest and Belgrade, they would receive encouraging signals. I am. ashamed to say that we were turned down."¹⁹ "It is not the first time that I had to describe this painful experience. We did not receive similar brotherly attention. We were waiting for an Ady or a Bartok to appear on the other side. We hoped that if such a person existed he would have kind words for us."²⁰

I do not recommend that we compare how much of their literature we translated into Hungarian, and how much of our literature they translated into their languages. We, in Hungary, are not the only ones who are aware of them and who translate their works. The periodicals of the millions of Hungarians living beyond our borders also provide us with ample interpretations and commentaries on their literature. This is simply not the case on the other sides-we know much more about our neighbors than they know about us.²¹

What does Gyula Illyes think of the future implications of the minorities problem sixty years after the Trianon peace treaty? What

can they mean to millions of Hungarians? As a writer and as a moral man, he feels that he and his peers must act courageously on behalf of human rights.

How do we, humanists, have to behave so that our actions may be useful in countering barbaric forces of mass oppression, policies aimed at depriving people of their human rights because of their national origin and native language?

We have to start pounding on the closed prison doors and pound unceasingly!

We have to create a well-disciplined movement that will not only deliver resounding blows on their doors but will finally break them down.

If I expect it to be natural that my community be a kind of protective sanctuary for me, do I not also have to defend my community's rights? When at the same time they are universal human rights? There can be no disagreement about this. But should we intellectuals take it upon ourselves to pound on those doors with our own tools: words, thoughts and reason? Is it our responsibility to do battle for these rights? It certainly is. ... And what happens when people don't speak up against rules which forbid their neighbors to speak in their own language in their own town? Eventually, even they will be forced to leave that town. And later they will be forced to abandon other areas of human existence. Finally they will be forced to give up life itself.²²

Illyes has offered bold examples in the past few years on how to use words, thoughts, and reason to "pound on those doors" of intolerance, of un-reason, of inhumanity. One such courageous act was to submit his Spirit and Violence for publication. He knew that its words and thoughts would be considered dangerous by the dogmatic elements in the ruling structure. He also attempted to enlist the support of the international news media to help expose the discriminatory, nationalistic policies aimed against Hungarian minorities. In an interview he gave to the Stockholm newspaper Svenska Dagbladet Illyes pointed out that continued oppression could even lead to another world war.

Imagine that all the road signs where you live were written in a foreign language. Imagine that your public officials and policemen could not utter a single sentence in your language. In Romania, this problem becomes doubly severe, because many Romanian peasants learn to believe the official propaganda and view the Hungarians as

inferior creatures, second-class citizens. This is happening in territories where Hungarians had lived for centuries. It is happening in Transylvania, which had traditionally been a country of tolerance and intellectual freedom.

Nationalism is a horrible poison. Was it not precisely the problem of national minorities in Europe which provoked the two world wars? And, as long as national hostilities exist, as long as national minorities are being discriminated against in Europe, I am not so certain that these circumstances could not once more become an important factor leading to the outbreak of a new world war.²³

Immediately after his book was banned, Illyes took art even riskier step: he wrote an introduction to a book which was published in West Germany. The manuscript, along with the introduction, was smuggled out of Hungary, after the original manuscript had been smuggled in to Budapest from Czechoslovakia. The book is a 320-page historical study by Kalman Janics about Czechoslovakia's persecution, disenfranchisement and partial deportation of its Hungarian minority population between 1945 and 1948.²⁴ In the introduction Illyes writes:

Even the newest historical developments seem to work against the national minorities. Industrialization centralizes; it creates and expands cities. And the cities are assimilation centers where the majority language, the official state language, prevails. It s relatively easy for the oppressive forces to break up the homogenous ethnic regions of the minorities by building factories and purposively directing the relocation patterns of their new worker populations.²⁵

Illyes' observations of this modern method of forced assimilation are borne out by current demographic data. In Romania, for example, by 1977 only one of the eight largest, traditionally Hungarian cities had a Hungarian majority. The fastest population shifts occurred in the past decade.²⁶ The multitude of laws and regulations, which restrict or prohibit the maintenance of minority institutions and practices, results in a shift from majority to minority status in these cities, which in turn forces the Hungarian population to give up its language and culture. It is estimated by a demographer that about 20-25 percent of Hungarian children do not currently have the opportunity to learn to read and write in their own language.

In the introduction to the book about Czechoslovakia's Hungarian

minority, Illyes comes to hard conclusions about the future of minority rights:

Prospects for the future are dim, but the lessons of the past bring some truths into sharp focus. If a 'majority' society is incapable of providing equal opportunities to its 'minorities,' then it is unworthy to govern them. Mankind itself has to protect these minorities, to protect itself from the recurrence of barbarism on the troublesome road toward civilization. The symptoms of barbarism reveal themselves most alarmingly in our behavior toward the weak, the defenseless.²⁷

Illyes turned 79 years old on the sixtieth anniversary of the Trianon treaty. He is ailing. His admonition to young writers, at a two-day meeting on May 18 and 19, 1980 at Lakitelek in Hungary, to take up the issue of human rights and the cause of the Hungarian minorities could be taken almost as his spiritual last will.

The issue of nationhood, and that of national minorities, became the foremost issue of the twentieth century. The plight of Hungarians beyond our borders has become a world problem because it is a question of universal human concern. Here is your challenge: either you, too, take responsibility for doing something about this problem, or you will pass on without having made your mark as a generation of writers on the literature and history of our nation.²⁸

Notes

1. Illyes, Gyula: "Iroi gondok" [The Writer's Concerns], Tiszataj (September 1980), p. 5.

2. Kabdebo, Thomas and Paul Tabori, ed.: A tribute to Gyula Illes (Washington: Occidental Press, 1968).

3. Illes, Gyula: 'Iroi gondok" [The Writers Concerns], Uj Tukor (February 17, 1980), p. 9.

4. Illyes, Gyula: "Bevezeto" [Introduction], in Kalman Janics, A hontalansag evei, a szlovakiai magyar kisebbseg a masodik vilaghaboru utan 1945-1948, [The Years of Homelessness; The Hungarian Minority in Slovakia After the Second World War, 1945-1948] (Munich: Europai Protestans Magyar Szabadegyetem, 1979), p. 19.

5. Illyes. Gyula: "Utodaink nemcsak testunkbol szarmaznak-szellemunkbol is" [Our Offsprings Generate Not Only From Our Bodies, But Also From Our Spirit], Alfold (May 1980), p. 75.

6. Ibid., p. 73.

7. Illyes, Gyula: Szellem es eroszak [Spirit and Violence], Magveto (Budapest, 1978), p. 12-20.

8. Ibid., p. 18-19.

9. Szellem es eroszak, p. 91-92.

10. Szellem es eroszak, p. 71.

11. Szellem es eroszak, p. 214,

12. Szellem es eroszak, p. 254-255.

13. Szellem es eroszak, p. 36.

14. Szellem es eroszak, p. 256, 257, 258.

15. Szellem es eroszak, p 56.

16. Szellem es eroszak, p. 44.

17. Szellem es eroszak, p. 272-273.

18. Szellem es eroszak, p. 271-272.

19. Szellem es eroszak, p. 72-73.

20. Szellem es eroszak, p. 91.

21. Szellem es eroszak, p. 93.

22. Szellem es eroszak, p. 175, 176, 180, 190-191.

23. "Diktarprotest med politikst eko" [Protest of a Poet With a Political Echo], Svenska Dagbladet (Stockholm), May 12, 1978.

24. Janics, Kalman.

25. Janics, Kalman, p. 17.

26. Semlyen, Istvan: Hetmilliard lelek, [Seven Billion Souls] Kriterion (Bucharest, 1980).

27. Janics, Kalman, p. 19.

28. Illyes, Gyula: "Lehet meg nemzedek?" [Can There Yet Be a Generation?], Forras, Kecskemet, XI, 9 (September, 1979), pp. 117-118.

A Case Study on Trianon