Budapest Quotes

(Jace) "Is there anything special you want to see? Paris? Budapest? The Leaning Tower of Pisa?" Only if it falls on Sebastian's head, she thought.

Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life? See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Morrocan midnight. Love a beautiful woman.

I am with you. I'm not going anywhere." "Is there anything special you want to see? Paris? Budapest? The Leaning Tower of Pisa?" Only if it falls on Sebastian's head, she thought. "Can we travel to Idris? I mean, I guess, can the apartment travel there?" "It can't get past the wards." His hand traced a path down her cheek. "You know,I really missed you." "You mean you haven't been going on romantic dates with Sebastian while you've been away from me?" "I tried", Jace said, "but no matter how liquored up you get him , he just won't put out.

You see? There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant - (sighs deeply). Oh, fuck it. -M. Gustave, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.

Don’t fret none, darlin’. I got your back.” “You said that in Budapest. I still have the scars, too.

(Hungarian...) the only tongue the devil respects.

the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.

Communism existed once, during two 45 minute half-times, when Honved, from Budapest, won over England by 6-3. The English played individually, and the Hungarians, collectively.

To be alone—the eternal refrain of life. It wasn’t better or worse than anything else. One talked too much about it. One was always and never alone. A violin, suddenly—somewhere out of a twilight—in a garden on the hills around Budapest. The heavy scent of chestnuts. The wind. And dreams crouched on one’s shoulders like young owls, their eyes becoming lighter in the dusk. A night that never became night. The hour when all women were beautiful.

MR. MOUSTAFA There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once know as humanity... He was one of them. What more is there to say?

The hotel is just Budapest, America. Imported phones, lamps, cupboards etc. God forbid Americans should feel they are somewhere ELSE.

So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.

You and I remember Budapest very differently

I’d like to introduce Officer Hank Budapest with the Bayview Police Department. He has some questions about what you witnessed on Monday.

She had wandered the streets of Vienna and Budapest. No wonder she felt different. Perhaps travel did that to you. Mary had come home, but she was not the same Mary who had left—not quite.

the wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone, and the High Sierras may be required to function as bases for guerrilla warfare against tyranny...The value of wilderness, on the other hand, as a base for resistance to centralized domination is demonstrated by recent history. In Budapest and Santo Domingo, for example, popular revolts were easily and quickly crushed because an urbanized environment gives the advantage to the power with technological equipment. But in Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam the revolutionaries, operating in mountain, desert, and jungle hinterlands with the active or tacit support of a thinly dispersed population, have been able to overcome or at least fight to a draw official establishment forces equipped with all of the terrible weapons of twentieth century militarism.

But every Sunday morning, in the clear blue sky before the church of St Stephen, the good Lord hovers above the town, invisible and merciful, righteous and terrible, ever present and everywhere the same, be it in Sárszeg or in Budapest, in Paris or New York.

What’s the capital of Hungary?” she demanded. I knew the answer was Budapest before she even gave me the four choices. “A. Accra B. Berlin C. New Delhi D. Budapest.

Nincsen olyan része Budapestnek, ami a számomra ne volna az ifjúság. Ha egyszer örökre el kellene hagynom a Várost, aznap megöregednék, mint a hesiterbachi szerzetes.

...Faludy György (...) meséli el, hogy mikor 1945 után hazatért, hogy megnézze, hogyan épül a demokrácia demokraták nélkül, találkozott régi barátjával, Goda Gáborral, aki a kocka fordultával Budapest kultúrtanácsnoka lett, és azzal kapacitálta a költőt a kommunista párthoz csatlakozásra: "Miénk a guba. Az egész guba." Ennyi a nagy "kultúrharc" alapja, a "guba".

O Danúbio, pensei, era o Danúbio mas não era azul, era amarelo, a cidade toda era amarela, os telhados, o asfalto, os parques, engraçado isso, uma cidade amarela, eu pensava que Budapeste fosse cinzenta, mas Budapeste era amarela.

The ferry back to Budapest was full of reveling women in their fifties. Elbows linked, they danced, stomped, sang, and coughed. In the bar, they banged bottles against the counter. The few men in their party were slumped at the tables, heads buried in their arms. Only two were sitting upright, addressing a salami of durable appearance with a pocketknife.

(The greatest city in Gallacia is fine, I suppose, but I didn’t feel the need to linger. Imagine if an architect wanted to re-create Budapest, but on a shoestring budget and without any of the convenient flat bits. While fighting wolves.)

Ali por uns segundos tive a sensação de haver desembarcado em país de língua desconhecida, o que para mim era sempre uma sensação boa, era como se a vida fosse partir do zero.

I admit I have a Hungarian temper. Why not? I am from Hungary. We are descendants of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun. —ZSA ZSA GABOR

I never used an outline until I started "The Bourne Legacy" project for which I was required to write an outline. To be honest, I thought I'd hate the idea, assuming that if I'd thought of all the ideas at the outset I'd have to incentive to actually write the book, because for me part of the joy of writing are the surprises you come upon as the book takes shape. But something curious and exciting happened. As I wrote the outline, some sections would be very detailed, others quite sketchy, so that whole portions of the book would be covered by one line, such as "Bourne is chased by Khan through Budapest," which when I wrote the novel turned out to be 40-50 pages! Now I'll never write a novel without first doing an outline. Looking back on it, I used to get bogged down in extraneous characters and situations, especially during the first 100 pages (which I find the most difficult to write) that I would later have to scrap, wasting time and energy, and frustrating me. Now that never happens.

No one is Sighet suspected that our fate was already sealed. In Berlin we had been condemned, but we didn't know it. We didn't know that a man called Adolf Eichmann was already in Budapest weaving his black web, at the head of an elite, efficient detachment of thirty-five SS men, planning the operation that wold crown his career; or that all the necessary means for "dealing with" us were already at hand in a place called Birkenau.

...those lives whose truths had disappeared into a vault of eternity beyond her reach—were not gone or silenced. She could hear them calling.

(Mr. Moustafa) I think his world ended long before he even entered it. Although I must say, he certainly maintained the illusion with a marvelous grace.

Cities tend to reflect the character of their residents. Budapest is a dramatic, theatrical kind of place. More than anything else it resembles a stage set.

Within a week I walked the streets of Tel-Aviv, I wandered around Budapest and found myself admiring the Architecture of Paris. That's the power of great literature.

At least if she died doing this she would be dying for a reason. There were a lot of ways to die in Budapest.

Our true city is the new Jerusalem, even while we still belong to Paris or Budapest or New York.

You and I remember Budapest very differently" to black widow

This is like that time in Budapest." "You and I remember Budapest very differently.

My name is Carmilla,” said the woman. “I’ve come from Mina, in Budapest. I think it’s time you were rescued from this place. Don’t you think?

Kingbitter, as he did frequently nowadays, was standing at his window and looking out onto the street below. This street offered the most mundane and ordinary sights of Budapest's mundane and ordinary streets. The muck-, oil-, and dog-dirt-spattered sidewalk was lined with parked cars, and in the one-yard gaps between the cars and the leprotically peeling house walls the most mundane and ordinary passersby were attempting to go about their business, their hostile features an outward clue to their dark thoughts. Every now and then, perhaps in a hurry to overtake the single file inching along the front, one of them would step off the sidewalk, only for an entire chorus of rancorous car horns to give the lie to any groundless hope of breaking free from the line.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.” —Winston Churchill, speaking in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946

When I was in Auschwitz, I kept asking, why am I here, what did I do wrong? What did my grandfather do wrong? And a young American man, he put me in the right knowledge. You didn’t do anything wrong, he said, the world did something wrong, terribly wrong. This young man, he went to Budapest in the beginning of it all, and he saved Jews, he gave out passports of Sweden, and because the Hungarians didn’t know how to read Swedish, this was how my father was saved. And thousands of others too, with these pieces of paper. I am here to tell you that one man can make a difference, and that man can be you, any of you…

Before 9/11, I thought that tragedy had the potential to connect us with humanity in ways that prosperity does not. I thought that if prosperity tends to isolate, tragedy must connect. Now I realize that this is not always the case. One unfortunate response to tragedy is a self-righteousness about one’s own condition, a seeking proof of one’s special place in the world, even in victimhood. One afternoon, I shared these thoughts with a new colleague, the Israeli vice chancellor of the Budapest-based Central European University. When he told me that he was a survivor of Auschwitz, I asked him what lesson he had drawn from this great crime. He explained that, like all victims of Auschwitz, he, too, had said, “Never again.” In time, though, he had come to realize that this phrase lent itself to two markedly different conclusions: one was that never again should this happen to my people; the other that it should never again happen to any people. Between these two interpretations, I suggest nothing less than our common survival is at stake.

She’d been in Budapest for over four weeks and her sister Vivian had been silent since her arrival. All Sarah had was the final note her dead sister made her write telling her that Armond Stuart had fled to Hungary.

If Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, Cracow, Warsaw, and Berlin belong to Europe, then why not Leningrad, why not Moscow--indeed, why stop before Vladivostok? It is all part of Eurasia, there is no state frontier between...I would like to think of myself as some utopian son of Europe, able to touch the Pacific at San Francisco with one outstretched arm and at Vladivostok with the other, and keeping the peace everywhere within my embrace.

It is said that you are a New Yorker the moment you remember the way New York used to be. This miraculous place lives to obliterate its history. It is history as fashion. Trend. Moments. Moments lost and... overwritten. You have to hunt the past in NY. Not like Prague. Budapest. Krakow. Paris. Istanbul. These places wear their pasts with honor over their hearts. A woman. Not a girl. New York... is youth. Always trying on new masks, new faces.

We glided into Budapest at twilight, the city poured over with a viscous glowing blue, lights already blazing on the splendid Western bridges. Upside-down electronic billboards were reflected in the river, advertising Tuborg beer and Minolta cameras.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

But in the end, Mogilevich eluded their grasp and settled in Moscow. The FBI closed down the Budapest outpost from which it had tracked Mogilevich. Meanwhile, the foreboding assortment of murderous gangsters and tattooed thugs known as the Russian Mafia had climbed the ladder of white-collar respectability, insinuated itself in multibillion-dollar global corporations, and taken on the protective coloring provided by K Street lobbyists and white-shoe law firms. They were now hard-wired into some of the most powerful Republican politicians in the country.

To be successful, Soviet secret policemen thought that show trials needed a complex story line, a conspiracy involving many actors, and so Soviet advisers pushed their Eastern European colleagues to link the traitors of Prague, Budapest, Berlin, and Warsaw into one story. In order to do so, they needed a central figure, someone who had known some of the protagonists and who could plausibly, or semi-plausibly, be accused of recruiting all of them. Eventually they hit on a man who fit these requirements: a mildly eccentric Harvard graduate and American State Department official named Noel Field.

The boy who convinced you to go to Hungary, he must be very handsome,” Svetlana’s aunt Bojana told me. “You can find an excellent coffee in Budapest. I see that you are looking at my tea tray. Do you like it? It’s quite a good tray. I will make it a gift to you. But not now—only when you get married.

Do you think it’s going to rain?” I asked. “Yes. Why?” My heart quickened. “I don’t know,” I said. Then I realized I wanted it to rain because maybe Ivan and his family would come back to Budapest a day early and Ivan might call me. I knew there were a lot of flaws in this reasoning. But my body didn’t know.

But it was not in Mr. Gruber's nature to look for reasons. That was why he was an ideal secretary. He had been given much fancier assignments in the past. Find out by six in the evening whether Hubermann played any Tschaikovsky after the first intermission of his concert in Brussels last year. Produce a narwhal tusk at least five feet long by eight o'clock Thursday morning. Buy, in your own name, the Domino Motion Picture Theater in Zurich. On Wednesday afternoon between five and six in the Café Meteor in Budapest, slap the face of a character known as Ervin Kugyec. A good secretary does not look for reasons but gets results.

The news spread through Sighet like wildfire. Soon that was all people talked about. But not for long. Optimism soon revived: The Germans will not come this far. They will stay in Budapest. For strategic reasons, for political reasons … In less than three days, German Army vehicles made their appearance on our streets.

To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. It had been known about before, but it has now been exposed for the first time in all its pathetic and sordid detail by Raul Hilberg, whose standard work The Destruction of the European Jews I mentioned before. In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation.

If the Viennese had a food pyramid, desserts would be the main category.

An Austro-Hungarian Torte is the edible equivalent of a Mozart symphony combined with the frivolity of a Strauss waltz.

Since Antiquity, rage had been seen as a feature of the powerful. Only those at the top could afford and enact it. They alone had the power to let others feel their rage.

According to a recent condom-company survey, the average Hungarian has sex 131 times a year (behind only France and Greece), making them Europe’s third-greatest liars.

„Idegenek idegenek között” – ez a nagyvárosi ember alapélménye a saját világáról.

Everything in life is trouble, haven't you learned that yet?

Moi j'ai pensé que, dans sa vie,on ne peut même pas plier une feuille soixante-quatre fois. Même pas trente-deux. C'est bien vrai qu'on est que dalle.

Now we wanted to sample all that life had to offer, and we were off to a pretty good start. I’d danced under the moonlight in Tuscany, dined on escargot in a French village, and risked my life climbing into the back of a motorbike taxi in Budapest. I’d seen world-famous landmarks and met local people. The one thing I hadn’t done was achieve a non-self-assisted orgasm. Awkward, I know.

Pici passi. Un viagio in bici xe fato de pici passeti. I pici passi te permeti, co te entri int'un paeseto, de entrarghe veramente, de sentirlo tuo, de respirar a pieni polmoni la sua atmosfera, de imerger totalmente i tui zinque sensi int'un novo contesto. I pici passi fa questo. Fa assaporar i loghi, fa assaporar le persone, fa assaporar la tua crescita assieme a queste. Pici passi come filosofia de vita.

1945. II. 10. Negyed 10. Az egyik katona a szalonablakból leselkedett ki (a kis kíváncsi), lelőtték. Fejlövést kapott. Amikor a szalonban jártam és az ablak alatt, ahol őt kilőtték, átbújtam (mivel mutatkozni nekem sincs kedvem) belenyúltam véletlenül a földön szétfolyt agyvelős vérbe. Ebéd közben jutott az eszembe, hogy még azóta nem mostam kezet. Azért ettem tovább nyugodtan. Kezet mosni luxus. (...) Már az óvóhely feljáró felől is lőnek. Ilyennek képzeltem a háborút. Most már nagyon unom.

Budapeste parece um lugar esplêndido, pelo que pude ver de relance pela janela do trem e o pouco que caminhei pelas ruas. Tive receio de me afastar muito da estação, já que chegáramos atrasados e o trem haveria de partir o mais próximo possível do horário marcado. Tive a impressão de que estávamos deixando o Ocidente e adentrando o Oriente; cruzamos o rio Danúbio, que aqui tem nobre extensão e profundidade, por majestosas pontes ao leste que nos conduziram entre as tradições do reinado turco.

Later he would tell her that their story began at the Royal Hungarian Opera House, the night before he left for Paris on the Western Europe Express. The year was 1937; the month was September, the evening unseasonably cold. His brother had insisted on taking him to the opera as a parting gift. The show was Tosca and their seats were at the top of the house. Not for them the three marble-arched doorways, the façade with its Corinthian columns and heroic entablature. Theirs was a humble side entrance with a red-faced ticket taker, a floor of scuffed wood, walls plastered with crumbling opera posters. Girls in knee-length dresses climbed the stairs arm in arm with young men in threadbare suits; pensioners argued with their white-haired wives as they shuffled up the five narrow flights. At the top, a joyful din: a refreshment salon lined with mirrors and wooden benches, the air hazy with cigarette smoke. A doorway at its far end opened onto the concert hall itself, the great electric-lit cavern of it, with its ceiling fresco of Greek immortals and its gold-scrolled tiers. Andras had never expected to see an opera here, nor would he have if Tibor hadn’t bought the tickets. But it was Tibor’s opinion that residence in Budapest must include at least one evening of Puccini at the Operaház. Now Tibor leaned over the rail to point out Admiral Horthy’s box, empty that night except for an ancient general in a hussar’s jacket. Far below, tuxedoed ushers led men and women to their seats, the men in evening dress, the women’s hair glittering with jewels.

often tell me how lucky I am, to live in a country where cheap flights to dozens of exciting destinations are so readily available. They never understand why England doesn’t completely empty into Prague or Budapest every weekend. What they don’t appreciate is that to take advantage of these cheap flights, one must generally get to London; and that getting to London, from almost anywhere else in the country, is either dramatically more expensive, or considerably less pleasant, than the flights in question. Usually both.

Krisztina played the song. It was a lament made of eight notes, repeated. It was an empty melody. It sounded elemental too; it made Krisztina think of the snow falling beyond the window and across Budapest. She wondered if it was snowing in England. Alice’s mother would be here again later, all the way from London. There was so much grief. They were mourning her little girl before she had gone. Without realising she heard these words making themselves part of the song. She played what she could, her head down, her face solemn and determined. She went back to the start, and felt the world falling away, the tears drying on her face. She heard the words coming, falling like the luminous snow. After a few minutes she looked across what seemed like a huge divide to Alice on the bed and faltered. In the house of the body, the lights were being extinguished, one by one. The floors were now bare, the walls unadorned, all sound hollow and lost; all that remained was the ghost of what was, the glimmer of the melody, the tune, the song of a life lived and lost in three minutes.

I have to tell you about these things from the past, because they are so important. The really important things usually lie in the distant past. And until you know about them, if you'll forgive my saying so, you will always to some extent a mere newcomer in my life. When I was at High School my favourite pastime was walking. Or rather, loitering. If we are talking about my adolescence, it's the more accurate word. Systematically, one by one, I explored all the districts of Pest. I relished the special atmosphere of every quarter and every street. Even now I can still find the same delight in houses that I did then. In this respect I've never grown up. Houses have so much to say to me. For me, they are what Nature used to be to the poets - or rather, what the poets thought of as Nature. But best of all I loved the Castle Hill District of Buda. I never tired of its ancient streets. Even in those days old things attracted me more than new ones. For me the deepest truth was found only in things suffused with the lives of many generations, which hold the past as permanently as mason Kelemen's wife buried in the high tower of Deva.

Klara tells another story with a happy ending. With the knowledge that we’d been evacuated to the brick factory, that we expected any day to get shipped away, to Kenyérmező or who knows where, she went to the German consulate in Budapest to demand to be sent to wherever we were. At the consulate, the doorman told her, “Little girl, go away. Don’t come in here.” She wasn’t going to be told no. She tried to sneak back in the building. The doorman saw her and beat her up, punching her shoulders, her arms, her stomach, her face. “Get out of here,” he said again. “He beat me up and saved my life,” she tells us.

He ate a ghastly blutwurst in the dining car, finished Bartha, managed to buy a copy of Est, the evening edition brought in from Budapest, at the station buffet in Brno. Clearly, political life was heating up. Two members of parliament had come to blows. At a workers’ march in the Tenth District, bricks thrown, people arrested. To the Editor. Sir: How can we let these liberal pansies run our lives? An editorial called for “strength, firmness, singleness of purpose. The world is changing, Hungary must change with it.” A coffeehouse by the university had burned down. TENS OF THOUSANDS CHEER HITLER SPEECH IN REGENSBURG. With photograph, on page one. Here they come, Morath thought.

But—and this was not so good—Viola, M and D had apparently gone with Ivor Novello to look at the silly film test I had done a year ago, and were much impressed. Viola even rang up from London about it, and told me there were plans for the two of us, with Ivor, to go to Budapest in the summer and do some film. A letter from M followed, full of this idea. Flattering, perhaps, but what about ties? I did not want to have a film career. ‘It would mean contracts, not being able to go away when I wanted to, no Fowey, no boats, and all for what? A little money and a lot of gush, and tiring, tedious work. I’m not at all keen. Besides, it takes four days to get to Budapest, and four days back, all in a beastly train.

I turned to the exercises. “The dog kicked by the boy is red. Circle the picture that applies.” The pictures showed a red dog kicking a boy, a dog kicking a red boy, a red boy kicking a dog, and a boy kicking a red dog. It was the kind of test used to diagnose Wernicke’s aphasia. “I think I’m going to buy it,” Owen decided. “Do you want to split the cost? One of us can read it here in Budapest, and the other can take it to the village and leave it there as a gift.” I didn’t want to read the book, not in Budapest and not in a village, but I didn’t want to seem snotty so I said okay and paid for half of it. It wasn’t expensive. It was, however, big, and Owen didn’t have a bag, so I ended up carrying it all day.

The purpose of ritual is to wake up the old mind in us, to put it to work. The old ones inside us, the collective unconscious, the many lives, the different eternal parts, the senses and parts of the brain that have been ignored. Those parts do not speak English. They do not care about television. But they do understand candlelight and colours. They do understand nature.

Brahms' friends in Budapest finally managed to talk him into attending the performance of Don Giovanni - he had initially turned down their invitation, arguing that he preferred to read the score and had never seen or heard a decent performance of the work. He would even prefer a cold beer, he insisted. But in the end he allowed his friends to drag him along to their box, where he demonstratively settled down on a sofa at the back in the hope of enjoying a rest. But it was not long before he was making increasingly inarticulate noises indicative of his enthusiasm, and at the end of the first act he was heard to shout out: 'Most excellent, admirable, what a deuce of a fellow!' He then ran on to the stage and embraced Mahler with typically grumpy cordiality.

When I first started hearing about the places that give people joy, I realized that many of them evoke this giddy feeling of abundance: carnivals and circuses, dollar stores and flea markets, and giant old hotels like the Grand Budapest of director Wes Anderson’s imagining. The same feeling also exists on a smaller scale. An ice-cream cone covered in rainbow sprinkles is like a candy store held in your hand. A shower of confetti, a multicolored quilt, a simple game of pick-up sticks, have this irresistible allure. Even the language of joy is rife with excess. We say we’re overjoyed or that we’re brimming with happiness. We say, “My cup runneth over.” And this is very much how it feels to be in a moment of joy, when our delight is so abundant it feels like it can’t be contained by the boundaries of our bodies.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,’ he declared, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow . . . The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.

As Boris Yeltsin was to acknowledge many years later, in a speech to the Hungarian Parliament on November 11th 1992, ‘The tragedy of 1956 . . . will forever remain an indelible spot on the Soviet regime.’ But that was nothing when compared with the cost the Soviets had imposed on their victims. Thirty-three years later, on June 16th 1989, in a Budapest celebrating its transition to freedom, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians took part in another ceremonial reburial: this time of Imre Nagy and his colleagues. One of the speakers over Nagy’s grave was the young Viktor Orbán, future Prime Minister of his country. ‘It is a direct consequence of the bloody repression of the Revolution,’ he told the assembled crowds, ‘that we have had to assume the burden of insolvency and reach for a way out of the Asiatic dead end into which we were pushed. Truly, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party robbed today’s youth of its future in 1956.

In the great world outside Hungary events were taking place that would change all their lives: the uprising in Russia, the dispute over Crete, the Kaiser Wilhelm’s ill-timed visit to Tangier, the revelation of Germany’s plans to expand its navy – but such matters were of no importance to the members of the Hungarian Parliament. Even events closer to home, such as the rabble-rousing speech of an Austrian politician in Salzburg urging revolt among the German-speaking minorities in northern Hungary, or the anonymous pamphlet, which appeared in Vienna and revealed the total unpreparedness of the Austro-Hungarian forces compared with those of the other European powers, went unnoticed in Budapest. Naturally when Apponyi made a speech in favour of Deszo Baffy’s proposal to limit the demand for Hungarian commands in the army to using Hungarian only in regimental matters, everyone listened and discussed it as if their very lives depended on it.

The church was locked. In the back, by the graveyard, stood a cottage with a sign that read CARETAKER, SZEKERES JÁNOS. Béla banged on the door and windows, until Szekeres János came out, rubbing his eyes. Unlocking the church, he proceeded to talk for an hour about pillars and naves and Cain and Abel. Part of a great king’s body might have been buried in the crypt at some point. The king had originally been buried in Budapest, then canonized, then exhumed and dispatched, in pieces, to reliquaries across the country. The remains of the remains were reinterred. During the Ottoman invasion, they were dug up again and sent away for safekeeping—maybe to this very crypt, although then again maybe not; the caretaker meticulously weighed the evidence pro and con. In any case, nothing was here now, it had all been sent back to Budapest after the Ottomans left. I expected the crypt to be dark and gloomy, but it was pale and light, with yellow vaulted ceilings and archways, so maybe death would be that way, too. • • • We visited a folklore museum.

In May 1981, Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, gathered his senior officers in a secret conclave to issue a startling announcement: America was planning to launch a nuclear first strike, and obliterate the Soviet Union. For more than twenty years, a nuclear war between East and West had been held at bay by the threat of mutually assured destruction, the promise that both sides would be annihilated in any such conflict, regardless of who started it. But by the end of the 1970s the West had begun to pull ahead in the nuclear arms race, and tense détente was giving way to a different sort of psychological confrontation, in which the Kremlin feared it could be destroyed and defeated by a preemptive nuclear attack. Early in 1981, the KGB carried out an analysis of the geopolitical situation, using a newly developed computer program, and concluded that “the correlation of world forces” was moving in favor of the West. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was proving costly, Cuba was draining Soviet funds, the CIA was launching aggressive covert action against the USSR, and the US was undergoing a major military buildup: the Soviet Union seemed to be losing the Cold War, and, like a boxer exhausted by long years of sparring, the Kremlin feared that a single, brutal sucker punch could end the contest. The KGB chief’s conviction that the USSR was vulnerable to a surprise nuclear attack probably had more to do with Andropov’s personal experience than rational geopolitical analysis. As Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, he had witnessed how quickly an apparently powerful regime might be toppled. He had played a key role in suppressing the Hungarian Uprising. A dozen years later, Andropov again urged “extreme measures” to put down the Prague Spring. The “Butcher of Budapest” was a firm believer in armed force and KGB repression. The head of the Romanian secret police described him as “the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist Party in governing the USSR.” The confident and bullish stance of the newly installed Reagan administration seemed to underscore the impending threat. And so, like every genuine paranoiac, Andropov set out to find the evidence to confirm his fears. Operation RYAN (an acronym for raketno-yadernoye napadeniye, Russian for “nuclear missile attack”) was the biggest peacetime Soviet intelligence operation ever launched.

Nessun limite a Parigi. Nessuna città ha avuto questa dominazione che dileggiava talvolta coloro ch'essa soggioga: Piacervi o ateniesi! esclamava Alessandro. Parigi fa più che la legge, fa la moda; e più che la moda, l'abitudine. Se le piace, può esser stupida, e talvolta si concede questo lusso, allora l'universo è stupido con lei. Poi Parigi si sveglia, si frega gli occhi e dice: «Come sono sciocca!» e sbotta a ridere in faccia al genere umano. Quale meraviglia, una simile città! Quanto è strano che questo grandioso e questo burlesco si faccian buona compagnia, che tutta questa maestà non sia turbata da tutta questa parodia e che la stessa bocca possa oggi soffiare nella tromba del giudizio finale e domani nello zufolo campestre! Parigi ha una giocondità suprema: la sua allegrezza folgora e la sua farsa regge uno scettro. Il suo uragano esce talvolta da una smorfia; le sue esplosioni, le sue giornate, i suoi capolavori, i suoi prodigi e le sue epopee giungono fino in capo al mondo, e i suoi spropositi anche. La sua risata è una bocca di vulcano che inzacchera tutta la terra, i suoi lazzi sono faville; essa impone ai popoli le sue caricature, così come il suo ideale, ed i più alti monumenti della civiltà umana ne accettano le ironie e prestano la loro eternità alle sue monellerie. È superba: ha un 14 luglio prodigioso, che libera l'universo; fa fare il giuramento della palla corda a tutte le nazioni; la sua notte del 4 agosto dissolve in tre ore mille anni di feudalismo; fa della sua logica il muscolo della volontà unanime; si moltiplica sotto tutte le forme del sublime; riempie del suo bagliore Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar, Botzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown, Garibaldi; è dappertutto dove s'accende l'avvenire, a Boston nel 1779, all'isola di Leon nel 1820, a Budapest nel 1848, a Palermo nel 1860; sussurra la possente parola d'ordine: Libertà, all'orecchio degli abolizionisti americani radunati al traghetto di Harper's Ferry ed all'orecchio dei patrioti d'Ancona, riuniti nell'ombra degli Archi, davanti all'albergo Gozzi, in riva al mare; crea Canaris, Quiroga, Pisacane; irraggia la grandezza sulla terra; e Byron muore a Missolungi e Mazet muore a Barcellona, andando là dove il suo alito li spinge; è tribuna sotto i piedi di Mirabeau, cratere sotto i piedi di Robespierre; i suoi libri, il suo teatro, la sua arte, la sua scienza, la sua letteratura, la sua filosofia sono i manuali del genere umano; vi sono Pascal, Régnier, Corneille, Descartes, Gian Giacomo; Voltaire per tutti i minuti, Molière per tutti i secoli; fa parlar la sua lingua alla bocca universale e questa lingua diventa il Verbo; costruisce in tutte le menti l'idea del progresso; i dogmi liberatori da lei formulati sono per le generazioni altrettanti cavalli di battaglia, e appunto coll'anima dei suoi pensatori e dei suoi poeti si sono fatti dal 1789 in poi gli eroi di tutti i popoli. Il che non le impedisce d'esser birichina; e quel genio enorme che si chiama Parigi, mentre trasfigura il mondo colla sua luce, disegna col carboncino il naso di Bourginier sul muro del tempio di Teseo e scrive Crédeville, ladro, sulle piramidi. Parigi mostra sempre i denti; quando non brontola, ride. Siffatta è questa Parigi. I fumacchi dei suoi tetti sono le idee dell'universo. Mucchio di fango e di pietre, se si vuole; ma, soprattutto, essere morale: è più che grande, è immensa. Perché? Perché osa. Osare: il più progresso si ottiene a questo prezzo. Tutte le conquiste sublimi sono, più o meno, premî al coraggio, perché la rivoluzione sia, non basta che Montesquieu la presagisca, che Diderot la predichi, che Beaumarchais l'annunci, che Condorcet la calcoli, che Arouet la prepari e che Rousseau la premediti: bisogna che Danton l'osi.

I remember standing against the bar in Budapest’s airport with a couple of workmates, some chaps from McLaren too, waiting for our homeward flight to be called after the ’92 race weekend. The chap behind the counter was doing the exact same thing: halving and squeezing oranges. Funny how these things spark memories. It was an exceedingly hot afternoon that day, and I remember seeing James Hunt walk through the door with Murray Walker. We were waiting for the same flight, a charter to London; I think pretty much the whole of the paddock’s British contingent was on it. Murray looked perfectly normal . . . like Murray really . . . open-necked shirt, briefcase, what have you; but James was wearing nothing but a pair of red shorts. He carried a ticket, a passport and a packet of cigarettes. That was it. There wasn’t even a pair of flip-flops to spoil the perfect minimalist look. The thing that really made the event stick in my mind, though, was that James was absolutely at ease with himself, perfectly comfortable. This was real for him, no stunt or affectation designed to impress or shock, this was genuine: James Hunt, former world champion driver, current commentator for the BBC; work done for the day . . . going home. Take me, leave me; do what you bloody well want, just don’t give me a hard time about your own petty hang-ups. He became a hero of mine that day. Sadly, his heart gave out the following summer and that was that. He was only forty-five. Mind you, he’d certainly packed a lot of living into those years.

I’d met Madison, as I’ve already mentioned, two months earlier, in Budapest. I’d been at a conference. She’d been there with some girlfriends. We’d got talking in the hotel bar. An anthropologist, she’d said; that’s … exotic. Not at all, I’d replied; I work for an incorporated business, in a basement. Yes, she said, but … But what? I asked. Dances, and masks, and feathers, she eventually responded: that’s the essence of your work, isn’t it? I mean, even if you’re writing a report on workplace etiquette, or how to motivate employees or whatever, you’re seeing it all through a lens of rituals, and rites, and stuff. It must make the everyday all primitive and strange—no? I saw what she was getting at; but she was wrong. For anthropologists, even the exotic’s not exotic, let alone the everyday. In his key volume Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the twentieth century’s most brilliant ethnographer, describes pacing the streets, all draped with new electric cable, of Lahore’s Old Town sometime in the nineteen-fifties, trying to piece together, long after the event, a vanished purity—of local colour, texture, custom, life in general—from nothing but leftovers and debris. He goes on to describe being struck by the same impression when he lived among the Amazonian Nambikwara tribe: the sense of having come “too late”—although he knows, from having read a previous account of life among the Nambikwara, that the anthropologist (that account’s author) who came here fifty years earlier, before the rubber-traders and the telegraph, was struck by that impression also; and knows as well that the anthropologist who, inspired by the account that Lévi-Strauss will himself write of this trip, shall come back in fifty more will be struck by it too, and wish—if only!—that he could have been here fifty years ago (that is, now, or, rather, then) to see what he, Lévi-Strauss, saw, or failed to see. This leads him to identify a “double-bind” to which all anthropologists, and anthropology itself, are, by their very nature, prey: the “purity” they crave is no more than a state in which all frames of comprehension, of interpretation and analysis, are lacking; once these are brought to bear, the mystery that drew the anthropologist towards his subject in the first place vanishes. I explained this to her; and she seemed, despite the fact that she was drunk, to understand what I was saying. Wow, she murmured; that’s kind of fucked. 2.8 When I arrived at Madison’s, we had sex. Afterwards,

agora, para entrar no desespero médio da cidade nem precisas de mexer os pés.

Horthy entró en Budapest a los dos días de haberla abandonado los rumanos, y se dedicó a liquidar la izquierda, en una campaña de «terror blanco» en la que colaboró activamente la aristocracia, y que tuvo como participantes más activos a bandas paramilitares racistas incontroladas, inspiradas por grupos como el Pacto de sangre de la doble cruz, la Sociedad científica húngara para la protección de la raza o un grupo dirigido por aristócratas, el batallón Prónay, en cuyo cuerpo de oficiales había un duque, ocho condes y siete barones. El «terror blanco» superó de largo las atrocidades que se atribuían al «terror rojo»: hubo de cinco a seis mil muertos, en su mayoría judíos, además de palizas, violaciones y abusos de todo tipo a individuos de cualquier naturaleza étnica; unas setenta mil personas fueron internadas en cárceles y campos de concentración y otras cien mil, «entre ellas algunas de las mejores mentes de Hungría», abandonaron el país para siempre.

Einstein and Szilard were friends, and together invented a refrigerator without mechanical parts to help the poor. They first met in 1920 when Szilard moved to Germany after being thrown down a set of steps leading to the Budapest University by anti-Semites and realising that it was time to leave Hungary. An outstanding student, Szilard had trained as an engineer, but in Berlin, the epicentre of modern physics, he pursued the new science.

Less than ten years earlier, the Russian President had successfully rolled his battalion tactical groups into eastern Ukraine and sliced off a nice chunk of the country. The rest of the world had done nothing. Worse still, the United States—a key signatory to the Budapest Memorandum, an agreement promising to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in the aftermath of the implosion of the USSR in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapon stockpiles—did little more than shrug.

In the second court hearing, the Bavarian Administrative Court argued that Floris had not made a Bekenntnis to German Volkstum back in Hungary. Although his parents might have been part of the “German linguistic and cultural sphere” (deutscher Sprach- und Kulturkeis)—as he claimed—and his ancestors might have come from German-speaking lands, this did not mean that they were Germans. Liberal Jews in interwar Hungary had cherished German language and culture, but, the court argued, this attitude resulted from a “cosmopolitan stance” (weltbürgerliche Haltung) and was not indicative of a person’s “conscience and will to be German and to belong to no other people.”65 In this court’s view, the plaintiff had not publicly identified himself as German. Rather, he had tried twice—once without success, then successfully—to change his German-sounding surname, Steiner, into the neutral-sounding Floris. The reasons for these actions were arguably economic (only by assuming this name could he continue using the brand name after the war, when the real Floris moved to England), yet the name change made clear that he did not value his German appearance in name. In the Bavarian court’s view, Floris’s emigration from Hungary had also been for economic reasons. Moreover, his wife, Elisabeth, was not clearly German either, even though she credibly stated that her maternal language was German and that she had been a member of the Mozart cultural association in Budapest, where she used to sing German songs and where she met her husband, with whom she always spoke German. She supposedly also lacked the Bekenntnis.66

London’s first coffeehouse was opened by Jacob, a Jew, in 1652.

Babka has roots in the cooking of Russia and Poland and, along with some ugly architecture, is one of the few remnants of the Russian years in Prague.

Számtalan hasonló ügynek a tükre, csak a többi nem fajul ilyen végzetessé. Mindenki lefekszik mindenkivel, lassankint egész Budapest egy nagy punalua család lesz! Ha valaki az általános promiszkuitás ilyen légkörében komolyan veszi a saját és a másik érzelmeit, az ráfizet.

Everybody sleeps with everybody else, soon all of Budapest will turn into one big family. Whoever takes their own or anyone else’s feelings seriously will pay a high price in this atmosphere of general promiscuity.

– A többi már jó – szívott a cigarettájából Gordon. – Csak a sorrendre figyeljen az alcímben, az nagyon fontos. Maga ezt írta: „Ma délután pasaréti házában revolverével vetett véget életének az Arabs kávékereskedés tulajdonosa.” Nem az a fontos, hogy mikor, és az sem, hogy hol. Hanem az, hogy ki. Tehát: „Az Arabs kávékereskedés tulajdonosa ma délután revolverével vetett véget életének pasaréti házában.” És annak sem alcímben van a helye, hogy kire hagyta a vagyonát. Elég, ha az anyaotthont a cikkbe írja bele. Na, most menjen szépen, és gépelje le újra.

The rest is fine,” said Gordon, taking a drag on his cigarette. “Just be careful with what comes first in the lead. That’s very important. You wrote, ‘This afternoon in his home on Pasaréti Street, using a revolver, the owner of the Arabia Coffee Company took his own life.’ The important thing is neither when nor where. But who. Thus: ‘The owner of the Arabia Coffee Company took his own life with a revolver this afternoon in his home on Pasaréti Street.’ And who he left his estate to, that doesn’t belong in the lead, either. It’s enough if you mention the maternity home only farther down. So then, go on back now and retype the article.

Chomsky’s appendix was taken out in the most expensive clinic in Budapest," said Marek, looking mildly offended, as though she had taken the name of Central Europe in vain.

In this new entity, known as Austria-Hungary or the Dual Monarchy, Jews were fully emancipated. In 1873, Buda and Pest merged to form the metropolis of Budapest, home to almost two hundred thousand people, of whom 16 percent were Jews.

What did you do before you bought the shop?’ The man gave Mac a sheepish smile. ‘I was a professor at a university in Budapest.’ It was an answer that Mac hadn’t been expecting.   ‘A professor? What did you teach?’ ‘Philosophy.’ ‘And you’re happy to work as a shop keeper?’ ‘Believe me it pays much better and it’s far less troubling, all that deep thinking can make you a little mad, plus I like living in the UK.

There was constant propaganda about how communism was changing the village for the better,” recalls Tamás Sályi, a Budapest teacher of English, of his Hungarian youth. “There were always films of the farmer learning to improve his life with new technology. Those who rejected it were [depicted as] endangering their families. There are so many examples about how everything old and traditional prevented life from being good and happy.” Thus does the Myth of Progress become a justification for exercising dictatorial power to eliminate all opposition. Today, totalitarianism amounts to strict, forced regimentation of the Grand March toward Progress. It is the method by which true believers in Progress aim to keep all of society moving forward toward utopia in lockstep, both in their outward actions and in their innermost thoughts.

his return to Budapest shows his incongruity with the post-war (“adult”) world and his difficulties with grasping its logic. Also, his body is described as, at the same time, an adolescent physicality and an old man’s body. As a story of coming of age (in a camp), Fateless is thus also a story of the “passing of age,” that is, of Gyuri’s never reaching adulthood, but remaining instead displaced from its order.

and eastern Europe, to settle in town, especially in the capital cities of the Habsburg and Wilhelmine empires. It was in the context of this multiform upheaval – the demographic growth and the urbanization process generated by the industrial revolution, modernization and assimilation – that German Jewry acquired a new profile. Vienna, where no more than 2,000 Jews had lived in 1850, counted more than 200,000 on the eve of the First World War, or 10 per cent of the total population; in the same timeframe, the Jewish population of Berlin grew from less than 10,000 to nearly 200,000, here making up 7 per cent of the total population.12 The Jewish populations of Budapest, Prague, Lvov, Krakow and Czernowitz underwent similar growth.