It was a rock song that took me to the Banat. In February 1982 the Goth group Bauhaus made what I think was their debut on Top of the Pops with a dark, haunting song called Bela Lugosi’s Dead. I had never heard of him at that time but looked up his films, and did get to see his 1931 film Dracula in a nearby art cinema.
Lugosi, or Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó as he was born in 1882, had a long career in Hungary, in Weimar Germany, and then in Hollywood, not only in Dracula, and nit only in horror films, although these are the films for which he is best remembered. Less well remembered is that he was a political activist, a socialist and a supporter of Bela Kun’s shortlived Communist regime and organiser of an actors’ trade union. It was for this reason that he had to flee Hungary to escape the reactionary crackdown after the fall of Kun. Lugosi was one of those people who got, for good or ill, to live in person some of the dramas of early 20th century Europe. He was by no means the only one to end up in Hollywood. Following the life story of Lugosi took me, unexpectedly, to Rumania.
Lugosi took his stage name from the town of Lugoj/Lugos/Lugosch where he was born. This town is now in Rumania, not far from the Hungarian border. When Lugosi grew up there, it was part of the Kingdom of Hungary within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Specifically it was in the Banat, an area in Western Rumania (although parts of the historical Banat are in modern day Serbia). The Banat was ceded to Austria by the Ottoman Empire on the 1718 Treaty of Passarowitz, (the modern day Serbian town of Požarevac). Depopulated after years of war it was settled by incomers from various parts of the Austrian Empire, Germans and Hungarians mainly, but other nationalities too, including Czechs. The resettlement of the Banat was a significant contributor factor in the ethnic and linguistic diversity of mid 20th century Rumania.
I had discovered the diversity of Rumania in my reading a couple of years earlier.
When I was a teenager I had a keen interest in linguistics. The owner of the local bookshop thought it was at best unusual to have a sixteen year old girl reading Chomsky, reading Susan Greenfield on Psycholinguistics and a number of other books he might otherwise have struggled to shift from the shelves. This was an independent bookshop of a kind of which there are now far too few, a bookshop staffed by people who loved books as much as I did, people who always had advice and tips on other books I might enjoy. One day the owner pressed a Pelican paperback into my hand and said, “I really think you will enjoy this.”
The book was a fairly thin one and was called, simply, Sociolinguistics. I noticed the Open University logo on the spine indicating that this was a set book on one or other of their courses. The author was Peter Trudgill, then a lecturer at the University of Reading, and still, at the age of eighty one, active in research after a long and distinguished academic career. I bought the book and rushed home to start reading. It was a fascinating book that opened a number of doors to me in my exploration of language It also introduced me to the linguistic cornucopia that is, or rather was Rumania. Trudgill cites figures from 1956, that is to say before the era of the national Communist cultural levelling that reached its nadir under Nicolae Ceausescu that permanently erased a number of centuries old linguistic communities, most notably the Germans who had settled in Transylvania in the Middle Ages. The largest, and for Rumanian nationalists, most troublesome group were the Hungarians, many of them still not reconciled to their towns and villages being detached from Hungary by the Treaty of Trianon. There were simply too many of them to either assimilate by force or send to the country they thought of as home. The Germans were sold to the Federal Republic earning precious hard currency. The Hungarian issue was to return
As I began to get interested in Rumania it became a subject of considerable political interest as Ceausescu paid a state visit to the UK. This has become something of legend and the late Queen let it be known that the evening she and the Duke of Edinburgh spent with Nicolae Ceausescu was one of the most awful experiences of her life. She found them utterly dreadful it is said. She hadn’t. of course, wanted a state visit. And state visits are n the gift of the sovereign. Against her better judgement she was persuaded by the Labour government to agree to a state visit as this was a way of oiling the wheels of a trade deal and arms deal.
For Ceausescu, which in hindsight, seems incredible, was seen in the West as a good guy, the man who had stood up to the Soviet Union in 1968 when he refused to commit Rumanian troops to the invasion of Czechoslovakia and de facto withdrew Rumania from the Warsaw Pact’s military structures. The Observer even ran a frankly gushing piece about him on the occasion of the visit in which he claimed to have been “a Communist since sixteen, a Rumanian since birth” In other words, Ceausescu was, like several other Communist leaders, a man who blended Communist totalitarianism with nationalism in a way that was to be pregnant with consequences. .
Within a year I met my first Rumanian. This was Kurt our new German language assistant. He was a Transylvanian German, from Sibiu, or Hermannstadt as he called or, or Nagyszeben as its Hungarian inhabitants call it. Kurt had let Rumania a couple of years earlier, moving to West Germany where he was a postgraduate student at the University of Wurzburg and he had stories to tell that showed Ceausescu and his regime in a less flattering light. He brought us a copy of the Rumanian party paper after a visit to his parents. It was the conventional six pages and, unusually, had photographs on every page, specifically photographs of the Conducador on every page, and reports of his thoughts and speeches on every page. This was like a monomaniacal cult, a regime that was weird even by Eastern Bloc standards. This regime made life pretty much intolerable for all its inhabitants, but linguistic and cultural minorities felt the brunt. I will return to Transylvania in a future post but I now had the bug to find out more about Rumanian even if travelling there would not be possible for many years.
Many years later I invited a friend for Sunday lunch. She asked if she could bring her German friend Monika, By all means, I said, looking forward to another opportunity to practise my German. Meeting Monika was more interesting than I had expected, as she told me that she was born in Rumania, to be precise in the Banat, in a small town near Timisoara. Like Kurt, she had left Rumania in exchange for the hard currency of the Federal Republic, in her case as a teenager with her family although she still had stories to tell. As she spoke, I felt I heard a note of regret that German communities that had existed for centuries practically no longer existed. In one sense, Ceausescu was successful in his grey, dismal levelling. Too successful and the loss of diversity is a loss of national richness. He could never be completely successful though. Hungarians were always going to be a problem, there were simply too many of them, the conviction that the frontier changes of the Treaty of Trianon, and the cession of Banat and Transylvania, represent a great historical injustice is one that unites Hungarians of all political persuasions, it was an incident in the Hungarian Banat, the failed attempt by the police to remove the Lutheran pastor László Tőkés from his home in Timisoara, that started the cascade of events that led Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu from absolute power to the firing squad in just nine dramatic days in December 1989. Bela Lugosi might have enjoyed the spectacle.
This all came too late to save the German minority. The destruction of their villages may have stopped but many Germans had always made up their minds to leave, and the fall of Ceausescu wasn’t going to change them. The Hungarians remain, they have been enfranchised by Viktor Orban and gratefully give him their votes in Hungarian elections. And I think it is good that elements of diversity remain, that nation states can have large linguistic minorities and majority communities live in peace with them even if the presence of Hungarian communities never entirely reconciled to living outside Hungary has given rise to tensions, and not only in Rumania.
Bela Lugosi is, indeed, dead. But it his spirit that lives on, and not that of Nicolae Ceausescu.
It has been an important lesson of the last thirty years that nation states that rose up from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with the inevitable legacy of ethno-linguistic diversity, can live with it. In time they may come to treasure it.