The Habsburg Cafe (22 page)

Much of Szeged is like its railway station. Once you leave the decaying square in front of the station, busy with the clanging of trams, fouled by the exhaust fumes of decrepit Lada taxis, the buildings become more and more impressive, displaying a certain grandeur and a flamboyance curiously out of keeping with a town tucked into a corner of a small and
impoverished country. It is, moreover, vaguely reminiscent of another place—not only of Budapest, two-and-a-half hours away by train, but, you realise as you catch sight of a broad, curving avenue from which equally impressive thoroughfares radiate in an orderly manner, of Vienna, the city that provided the model and the ideal for the towns and cities of Kakania. The buildings of Szeged also display many Habsburg conceits—elaborately moulded decorations, caryatids, muscular titans, their arms folded above their heads to support balconies with heavily-carved balustrades, eyeless classical busts in niches, and, everywhere, the proud double-headed Habsburg eagle.

Elsewhere, though, especially in the cobbled sidestreets, the atmosphere is entirely different. Low single-storey houses with seemingly oversized gateways display a different type of emblem: the rays of the rising sun carved in wood or stone, an ancient image from Hungary's pagan past that was introduced by the Magyar people, descendants of Central Asian nomads. These streets, the mostly elderly people that shuffle along them, the women with kerchiefs tied around their heads, the men in peaked caps, something in the air and in the quality of the light, even the dust that rises with every gust of wind, all tell you that this is the east, even perhaps the Balkans, that world to which no self-respecting Central European, trapped in that dream of Kakania visible in other parts of the city, wishes to belong.

In certain clearly defined sections of Szeged, among the statues and fountains (strutting heroes and demure nymphs) of the large municipal park, or in the open-air café that fills, in good weather, most of a spacious and beautifully proportioned principal square, this seems, by contrast, a city of young people, of jeans-clad students—some of whom have to endure, in the course of the weeks I am to spend here as a guest of two academic institutions, a ramble around some aspects of Australian literature, to the incessant grumbling accompaniment of defective plumbing.

Not far from the square and the gardens there are other
symbols and icons of urban ambitions. An enormous, hideously impressive neo-romanesque cathedral in liver-coloured brick (Patrick White's suburbia blown up to gigantic scale) dominates a vast open space, filled with rising tiers of seats, a grandstand for spectators at a summer arts festival modelled on Salzburg. Opposite, an archway, also in liver-brick, is flanked by two monstrous statues of armed men carved in the simplified and brutal style that symbolises the moral and political decline of Europe through its flirtation with Fascism. A few steps in the other direction takes you to a shopping complex, constructed this time in terracotta-textured brick, that conjures immediately other images of an Australian suburb—a shopping mall with its characteristic mixture of the tawdry and the utilitarian. Outside the broken telephone booths near these shops (including the one displaying cellophane-wrapped salami in satin-lined boxes), dark-skinned youths lounge, argue, eye and whistle at the attractive girls hurrying about their business. They are Romanian refugees, gypsies, according to the locals, (watch out for your wallet!) though they look harmless enough, only poor, bored and dispossessed.

A mixture such as this should be heady and exhilarating. Yet during these weeks of a wonderfully mellow autumn the town comes to strike me as curiously sleepy, boring and very provincial. It is, somehow, all show, none of it quite right or hanging together, a dead place, despite the bustle, despite the crowd of young people enjoying the soft sunshine. It would not surprise me if the handsome buildings were nothing but façades, empty behind their imposing exteriors. The grandeur and scope seem not merely inappropriate but, in some indefinable way, alien and imported. And there is, besides, a vaguely familiar sense which, in the course of these weeks, leads to two realisations. The first and more obvious, confirmed by guide-books and histories of the city, is that this is in many ways a little Vienna. The other is much more personal, even perhaps idiosyncratic: Szeged, planted in that world where Europe begins to become the despised ‘east', is an invented city, as most Australian cities were invented from a mixture of
nostalgia and hard-headed politics, therefore providing a contrast with, or even perhaps an affront to, the physical and spiritual environment in which they were constructed.

In the days before the Treaty of Versailles, which robbed Hungary of what are the western parts of Romania and a considerable portion of Serbia, Szeged, now a border town, was the commercial and administrative centre of a large and prosperous agricultural district. It was also an important bishopric, though it could not at that time boast of the many fine seats of higher learning which distinguish it today. They settled here when Hungary lost more than half of its territory in the aftermath of the Great War, and several Hungarian-language institutions, such as the university of what is now the Romanian city of Cluj, were obliged to seek shelter in the remaining parts of the nation. In the nineteenth century Szeged was also the hotbed of Hungarian—that is to say Magyar—nationalism. The abortive revolution of 1848 against the Habsburgs was directed from this city, just as almost a century-and-a-half later the movement to free Hungary from Soviet domination began here. Szeged was always, if its proud citizens are to be believed, a thorn in the side of those foreign bullies who have oppressed the gallant Hungarian people throughout the many centuries of their turbulent history.

The city is situated on the river Tisza (after the Danube the country's most important waterway) a capricious and dangerous stream given to sudden and difficult-to-control flooding. One of these inundations, in 1879, destroyed most of the city, with disastrous effect on the morale and the economy of the town. In what must have been an act of extreme political cunning and cynicism, Franz Josef, the Emperor and also King of Hungary, directed from Vienna—the stronghold of the hated Habsburgs—the reconstruction of the devastated city along the most modern lines. This instance of the care and love shown by the benevolent monarch for his Hungarian subjects turned out to contain an unmistakable political message. Whereas the old Szeged had been a Hungarian town that had
grown with its people and their way of life over the centuries, the new city was to replicate the grandeur of Vienna here, in a different world on the banks of the Tisza.

The focus of the city is a curved boulevard, running from river bank to river bank, a diminutive and provincial replica of the Ring, that arterial emblem of Viennese imperial pride. Lined by substantial buildings, all flaunting the insignia of Habsburg power, the atmosphere of these boulevards is studiedly Viennese. The layout of the city contains an echo of the physical and cultural polarity of the imperial capital. At one end of the inner town, as in Vienna, stands a splendid theatre, surprisingly large, solid and ornate for a city of two hundred thousand souls. At the other, in the vast space filled with tiers of seats, the Votive Church, the cathedral of Szeged (not finished until 1930), dominates everything within sight, glaringly self-important in its liver-brick bombast. Religion and art, Catholicism and the cult of the opera embrace a Szeged rebuilt at the dictates of the King-Emperor, in the same way as identical shrines of Central European political and cultural life mark out the polarities of imperial Vienna. Everything seems to have been replicated here—under a different sky, it is true, and perhaps on a smaller scale, but Szeged, away from those cobbled sidestreets and their kerchiefed women, is nevertheless a dream or fantasy of Vienna set in the middle of the great Hungarian plain, where the unruly east encroaches on the confidence of Europe.

The city is imposing in a pleasantly sleepy way. Perhaps it even represents a model of town planning, providing a near-ideal urban environment, large enough to offer the civilised amenities of life yet sufficiently small to avoid the evils of big cities. Yet the sense that Szeged is, in some hard-to-define way, not quite right, that there is something inappropriate about it, far from diminishing, grows stronger the more familiar the city becomes. At first, during these weeks of a faintly absurd endeavour to teach Australian literature to a group of young people who know very little about that distant land and lack almost all curiosity about it, I suspect that the atmosphere of
the place is the result of its (and indeed of the whole country's) having languished under communism for many decades, a vague feeling that these sleepers had only just woken. There is, however, more to it than that; the inappropriateness, the sense that things do not quite fit together appear to be much more deeply ingrained than the effects of nearly half a century of totalitarian rule could explain. There must be, it comes to me from time to time as the curiously unsettling atmosphere of the city descends on me, some other explanation, something more particular to account for the inescapable sense that here is another theme park—not as self-conscious or efficient as that of Vienna, yet a sentimental construct, for all that.

The municipal museum and art gallery is housed in a self-important neo-classical building bristling with columns and heroic statues. The paintings it displays are commonplace enough, theatrical nineteenth-century genre pieces of the kind that Hungarian artists seemed able to turn out in their thousands. In another wing of the building there is an historical and ethnographic museum filled with metal and stone tools, peasant costumes and examples of folk art. One of the rooms displays an engraved panorama of eighteenth-century, antediluvian Szeged. The orientation of the city, as far as you can tell from the engraver's rather feeble attempt at composition and perspective, was different from that of the modern city. It seemed to run parallel to the bank of the river, rather than radiating from the semicircular Ring that now marks the limits of the inner town. Old Szeged obviously lived with its river, its lifeblood and
raison d'être
. The engraver showed wharves and jetties, the busy commerce of a town on an important waterway. The new city turned its back on the river, perhaps to forget the terrible devastation that necessitated its birth. It is now protected by sturdy dykes and massive embankments, arranging its own shapes and contours as though it were an inland city, ignoring that terrible stream which now flows placidly through the autumn drought.

Looking at that old engraving, the implication of the new
city's being a replica of Vienna, the distant place from which its rebuilding was planned and directed, becomes clear and poignant. Szeged was deliberately conceived as a dream of Vienna transplanted into an alien and possibly hostile soil. It is no accident that one encounters a succession of neo-baroque public buildings with their emblems and insignia of Habsburg power, parks and tree-lined boulevards, and that most revealing antiphony of theatre and cathedral—culture and religion—that lies at the heart of Vienna's urban symbolism, where the Stephansdom and the Opera House frame the cityscape of the inner town. The new Szeged is a colonial city. It did not, in its present form, grow naturally out of a place, a people and a way of life. It shows, rather, the essentially parodic nature of those cities where the architecture, the planning of the streets, the images, symbols and emblems displayed on buildings and monuments enforce a lesson of dependence and nostalgic memories of a distant place. Reality, such places seem to say, is elsewhere: the local and indigenous are, almost by definition, beyond contempt. They must be tamed and transformed precisely in the way that the old riverside town of Szeged, that haphazard collection of streets, wharves and warehouses, was transformed into a little Vienna after the great flood.

That is why there is something essentially unsettling about such a transformation, such mirroring of a different, and in the context of the 1880s, distant society—just as Australian cities mirror and emulate, in the wrong hemisphere as it were, the cities and towns of England. Colonial cities always retain some sense of artificiality—inevitably so, since they did not grow as a matter of necessity or as a consequence of people's attempting to create a space in which to pursue their way of life. They are in essence always nostalgic, and their nostalgia is fundamental to the colonial mentality, which invariably looks elsewhere for models to emulate.

Szeged, like other colonial cities—Sydney or Melbourne or Adelaide or Brisbane—was built and moulded in accordance with standards and aspirations appropriate to a very different
place. It replicates the townscape of Vienna in a dream-like fashion, it represents a mixture of diverse elements all derived from the city that provided its inspiration, yet it fails to achieve whatever unity or appropriateness such elements had achieved in their natural habitat. On the Hungarian plains, under a sun that tells you that you are far away from Vienna, the proud eagles, shields and heroic pediments embellishing the principal buildings, the way these buildings themselves are laid out along admittedly well-planned thoroughfares produce a clashing that is very like the oddity of most Australian cities which strikes so forcefully many European visitors.

Sydney also displays several buildings where such inappropriateness is particularly evident: the proud campanile of Central Railway towering over a space without any civic or ceremonial function, or the old Department of Lands building, designed with a memory of broad tree-lined avenues and rows of imposing monumental buildings. In such places the jarring sense of displacement produces odd, occasionally weird effects. Szeged provides therefore an appropriate location for me to attempt to bring together, briefly and provisionally, two cultures, Australian and Hungarian, both victims of the curious effects of nostalgia and make-believe. Szeged, this improbable dream of Kakania, is in many ways an ideal place to attempt to define a culture and a society which had also looked, at least until very recently, towards a distant land for its inspiration, its life-blood and its justification. Such places always betray an often incompatible mixture of elements of a kind that compose both this city and the dish named after it.