Hungarian Borderlands: From the Habsburg Empire to the Axis Alliance, the Warsaw Pact, and the European Union

Hungarian Borderlands

Hungarian Borderlands From the Habsburg Empire to the Axis Alliance, the Warsaw Pact and the European Union

Frank N. Schubert

Published by the Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London, SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © Frank N. Schubert, 2011. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publishers. First published 2011 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-14411-2894-2 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

A könyvtárosoknak To the Librarians

Contents

Preface ix Part I╇ State of Flux: Hungarian Borders, 1914–1945

1

1. The Incredible Lightness of Borders

3

2. The Aftermath of Defeat The Slav Corridor and the Treaty of Paris The New Austrian Border Marking Turf The Loss of Transylvania A Hungarian Border Force Hegyeshalom, Gateway to the West Change in the Air

8 8 11 14 16 18 19 22

26 3. Expansion and Contraction Felvidék (Southern Hungary) 26 Kárpátalja (Trans-Carpathian Ukraine) 31 Erdély (Transylvania) 32 Délvidék (Southern Hungary) 34 Occupation, Defeat And Contraction 37 Part II╇ Bordering on Insanity: Hungarian Borders 1945–1989

43

4. Before the Iron Curtain

45

5. The Stalin Era The Czech Approach Emergence of a Hungarian System The First Barrier System 1956: Mine Removal and Revolution Developments in Germany and Austria

50 51 52 58 70 73

6. From Minefields to Electric Fences Resealing the Border Electric Signal Wire Paper Wall Border Anxieties

76 76 78 79 82

viii

Contents

7. Hungary and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Reconsidering The Signal Wire Many Small Steps A Picnic 9/11 and its Aftermath

84 84 85 92 100

Part III╇ Reversal: Hungarian Borders from 1989

105

8. The Emergence of a New Europe

107

9. From One Edge to Another A Dramatic Turnabout Joining Schengenland Austrian Unease The Hungarian-Slovakian Border

119 119 124 128 131

10. Inside Schengenland ‘Hello, Neighbour!’ Monuments and Museums Remembering the Picnic Borderland Enterprise A Detention Camp for the Borderland? Border Crossings Transformed Revising Border-Guard History Credit for the Change

136 137 138 141 146 152 154 156 159

11. Beyond Schengenland Migrants via Ukraine Local Cross-Border Traffic The Southern Route Croatia and Romania The Complexity of Barriers Frontex and the European Neighbourhood Policy

161 162 167 168 175 177 184

12. Hungary and Arizona Context and Comparison Conclusion

188 188 192

Notes 194 Glossary 231 Terms and Phrases 231 Place Names 232 Bibliography 234 Index 252

Preface

The tumultuous twentieth century, marked for Hungary by catastrophic defeat in two world wars and forty years under Communism, brought frequent and sometimes traumatic changes to the country’s borders. Its independent neighbours increased from two to four, then to five, and finally reached seven. Outside forces often determined changes in the state’s size, shape and relation to its neighbours. In fact, for most of the century, the ‘power centres controlling the borders,’ to use William Zartman’s phrase, were not in Hungary.1 They were in Vienna through World War I, then in Paris, where the Allied makers of the Trianon peace treaty shaped the borders, later in Nazi Berlin, and for forty years in Moscow. Soviet dominance turned on its head Hungary’s traditional self-image as an eastern bastion of Western civilization and made the country the western edge of the Communist empire. Then the sudden, dramatic end of the Cold War was followed by a period from 1990 to 2004 in which Hungary managed its borders without control by a larger dominant entity. When Hungary joined the European Union, border control again became a function of a larger body, this time centred in Brussels. Now European Union policies set the framework for Hungarian border management, which ultimately reflects worldwide phenomena and concerns about the nature and limits of globalization, fears and insecurities regarding migration, and disparities between rich and poor. Because of its location peripheral to centres of power and policies that bound it to the fate of other countries, Hungary’s twentieth century borders were almost always shaped by the interests and decisions of others. Whether it was the eastern edge of the west or the western rim of the east, Hungary was a frontier zone through most of the century. Its boundaries contracted, expanded and contracted again. People fled into and were driven out of the country by the thousands, and its borders have been closed and open, hard and soft, deadly and free. Since accession to the Schengen group of EU states with open internal borders and hard external boundaries, some segments of Hungary’s borders have been open, some have been protected but porous, and others have been rigorously guarded and practically shut against the uninvited. It is impossible to predict the ultimate Hungarian situation as the EU expands eastward, but at the start of the second decade of the twentyfirst century, the country guards the outer border of the EU in a position that resembles Arizona’s on the United States border with Mexico. While on the edge of something much bigger to which it answered, Hungary sometimes played key independent roles. After the 1956 revolution,

x

Preface

it created the biggest temporary breach ever to occur in the Iron Curtain, and in 1989 the Hungarian decision to lower its western barriers played a decisive part in the collapse of the Soviet empire’s hard outer shell. Hungary experienced the whole range of twentieth-century Europe’s borders, their uses, their management, their problems, and most recently their commercial possibilities. This border experience illuminates not only Hungary’s history, but Europe’s and more recently the West’s ongoing search for border solutions in an age without significant military threat that is still widely seen as fraught with external perils. I have written elsewhere about frontier matters, especially articles and books about black soldiers in the American frontier army, but what attracted me to Hungarian frontiers was personal. My parents’ flight from Hungary to the United States early in 1939, just before the start of the war that consumed much of Europe and several members of both their families, was very much shaped by the shifting of Hungary’s borders. My own birth in safe and comfortable circumstances during that terrible war was determined by the same developments. Inevitably, my approach to the Hungarian experience has mixed some personal ingredients with a more traditional historical account. So this mainly chronological narrative of the evolution of these borders is seasoned with family history and my own encounters with the borders, accumulated over a decade of travelling and living in Romania and Hungary, as a Fulbright lecturer in Romania during 2003–4, and since 2004 as a part-time resident of Hungary. My wife Irene and I have crossed back and forth to all seven neighbouring countries, by train, plane, bus, automobile and on foot, and I have talked often with former border guards and other borderland residents. I have always considered myself an American, without a hyphen. Yet my first visit to Hungary at the end of the Cold War triggered an intense response. I heard the language of my parents and my childhood all around me and knew the country had a grip on me. A couple of years later, on a subsequent visit, Irene and I took stock and decided ‘we could live here.’ Now we do. In 2002, we bought a flat in the northwestern city of Győr, just over thirty miles from Austria and twenty miles from the birthplace of my father in Slovakia, and spend four to five months of the year there. Despite the exhilarating experience of my first encounter with Hungary, my view of the country has from the beginning been ambivalent. My parents were born there and called it home, but the country had no place for them. I still marvel at my father’s intelligent grasp of the situation at a time when many Hungarian Jews convinced themselves that things would get no worse, and his even more stunning good fortune in finding a way out. I have relished living there, connecting with my Hungarian relatives, relearning the language with which I began, and wondering what my parents would think of this turn of events. I have also been aware of Hungary’s history of anti-Semitism and distressed by the growing political strength of xenophobic bigots. Partly because of this ambivalence, I have put aside my application for Hungarian



Preface xi

citizenship, for which I know I am eligible. I am lucky to be an American, with the chance to live in Hungary and study the evolution of Hungarian frontiers. Completion of this book would not have been possible without the help of friends, colleagues and relatives in the United States and Europe. My cousin, fellow historian and friend Péter Hahner located sources, helped with translation, shared his experiences, sent books, and read my manuscript, saving me from many errors. David A. Armstrong, Melody Herr and Gordon L. Olson also read drafts and made helpful suggestions for which I am deeply grateful. Győr historian and photographer István Nagy collected documents and newspaper clippings for me during the momentous days of December 2007, shared his research and photographs, guided my work, and took me to border sites. Others who shared their work or assisted with research, translation, photographs and ideas included Peter Adams, Allan Akman, Alfred M. Beck, Péter Bencsik, István Bors, Robert T. Cossaboom, Wolfgang Etschmann, Péter Gáli, Botond Gereoffy, Tibor Glánt, Sándor Goják, Sebastian Huluban, Miklós Kohuth, Marcel LaFollette, Éva Mathey, Alexandra Minçu, Zdeněk Munzar, Mária Nagy, Imre Okváth, Sarolta Pordány, Martyn Rady, Steven L. Rearden, Tony Salgo, Pavol Salomon, Erwin A. Schmidl, Jeffrey K. Stine, Emöke Szalay, Jolán Szijj, István Tűttő, Márk Várga, István Vida, and Patsy West. Irene, my wife for more than forty years and a superb reference librarian, took part in this journey in every way, sharing my interest in Central Europe, finding books, tracking news reports, accompanying me on trips to strange and remote places, reading the manuscript, and cooking gulyás and lecsó that rank with the best of them. This book is dedicated to ‘the librarians,’ my friends in Győr with whom I have enjoyed a beer almost every weekday afternoon since Irene and I moved into our flat in 2004. They have answered questions, helped me make contacts, translated terms, shared experiences, shown me border sites, and been my friends. To the librarians, past and present – Tamás Budai, Sándor Dobos, Dezső Istántsuly, Dezső Jakabovits, Károli Kopócs, István Nagy, András Rajcsányi, György Vámos, Rabán Vántus and Lajos Szakács – I say ‘a szivemböl köszönöm,’ I thank you from my heart. Frank N. Schubert Mt Vernon, Virginia

Part I

State of Flux: Hungarian Borders, 1914–1945

‘Freedom of movement … is no novelty. During the Monarchy it was not for a second a problem that a Bosniak or a Croat worked in Prague, or if Czechs lived anywhere in the realm.’ – Ambassador István Horváth, Vienna, December 2007.1

Hungary in 1914

C Z E C H O S L O V A K I A

Frontier established by the Treaty of Trianon (1920) Kassa

Danube Pozsony Miskolc Tls

Gyor Komarom ‘

“

AUSTRIA

za

Hegyeshalom Budapest

Debrecen ‘

Brück an der Leitha — Kiralyhida Sopron

Nagyvarad

H U N G A R Y

A

Kolozsvar ‘

‘

Dr

N

Szeged

Pecs

av

A

Maro

s

a

Zagreb

M

Temesvar “

O

Sa

va

R

‘

Ujvidek

U

G O S L

Map 1. Hungary before and after Trianon

‘

Y

Territories acquired 1938-41 Da

A V I A

I

nub

e

Frontier after the Treaty of Paris (1947)

Chapter 1

The Incredible Lightness of Borders

As the twentieth century opened, Hungary bathed in the glow of its millennial celebration. In 1896 the Magyars marked one thusand years in the Carpathian basin, from their first arrival through mountain passes in the north and east, through centuries as a self-styled bastion on the eastern edge of Western culture and religion, to attainment of nearly equal status with Austria in the huge multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire. With an expanding economy, a vibrant culture and a size to match its long rich past, the huge state sprawled over the heart of Europe. From just east of Vienna almost to Belgrade, the Danube was a Hungarian River, and the country extended from Fiume on the Adriatic Sea clear into modern Ukraine. Hungary at the turn of the twentieth century had more than twenty million people, and encompassed a territory of 300,000 square kilometres, more than three times its current size. To the north and the east, its borders were in the Carpathian Mountains; to the south the country very nearly extended to the mountains as well. Magyars considered Hungary and the Carpathian basin to be identical, and Hungarians looked back on one thousand years as lords of the basin. From as far back as the mid-thirteenthcentury reign of King Béla IV, they saw themselves as the bulwark defending the eastern limits of both Western Christianity and European civilization.2 The country was living in its Golden Age. This vibrancy and prosperity coincided with a time of remarkably free travel all over Europe. Throughout the nineteenth century the trend had been towards easier border crossings.3 Openness and ease of movement extended to experiments with regional passport unions, starting in 1850 with the Netherlands, Denmark, Hesse-Hamburg and Lichtenstein, and culminated in the North German Confederation in 1867.4 Those who paid attention might have noticed that while the borders were open, nations within the Habsburg realms were starting to distance themselves from each other, developing individual national identities that highlighted their own histories, creation myths that emphasized their unique characters and virtues, and educational curricula that stressed these attributes and the use of their own languages rather than imperial German. Lobbying for autonomy but not yet complete separation, nations of the empire, including the Czechs and Slovaks and the Romanians in Transylvania, were developing ideologies that rationalized autonomy and ultimately independence and even dominion over others.5 They watched as the Hungarians achieved their own wide-ranging

4

Hungarian Borderlands

autonomy in the form of the dual monarchy, independent in all but foreign and military policy and in their allegiance to Franz Joseph, the ruler who was emperor in Austria and king in Hungary. The borders between Hungary and Austria wers only delineated after establishment of the dual monarchy in 1867. The single-sheet passport became a booklet in 1877, and remained in use with modest variations until the twentieth century. Travel within Europe was virtually unrestricted, in a way that would not again be replicated until 2007, and the passport resembled a letter of recommendation rather than an essential travel document. Switzerland began to tighten its borders in the 1880s and established an independent Border Guard Corps in 1894, but only four countries, all of them on the eastern edges of Europe and two of them bordering on Hungary, required passports for entry. One, Romania, was Hungary’s neighbour to the east, and Serbia was directly to the south. The Hungarian passport form referenced the requirement for a passport to these two neighbours and to Turkey and Russia.6 Finally in 1903 Hungary announced a comprehensive passport system. The preamble of the decree was almost apologetic and emphasized the needs of a travelling Hungarian citizen rather than the need of the state to protect itself from unauthorized entry. The decree’s first paragraph added that the passport was not generally required for foreign travel, as at that point only the four countries required it.7 With passports came border guards. An independent Hungarian Royal Border Police service, formed within the Ministry of the Interior in 1903, went into operation three years later. The separate border police followed a succession of border minders, beginning in 1867 with the Hungarian Royal Customs and Tax Guards and after 1881 a special element of the Gendarmerie, which focused on the economic aspects of borders – customs duties and excise taxes – and which retained a role in border protection until the end of World War I. The gendarmes enforced a provision requiring foreigners to register within 24 hours of arrival in Hungary.8 Before World War I, international travel was something of a novelty. Mobility was not significant in traditional peasant societies, with the exception of local cross-border traffic – kishatárforgalom, local border-area movement. Economic motives underlay this most frequent category of crossings. Border people worked land across the line, as owner, renter or labourer, or went to market on the other side. Back then such travel only represented an issue on the Serbian and Romanian borders, where from 1898 it was regularized and controlled through permits that were available for residents within 40 kilometres of the border and generally good for five days. This local border zone arrangement with Serbia continued until the start of the war, and with Romania until 1916.9 Along the internal borders of the empire, such travel took place unencumbered by documents, harkening back to ‘classical or pre-modern civilizations,’ when communities frequently were separated by neutral spaces in which negotiations and markets took place. These neutral areas represented ‘the “original” inter-national, interstitial space of world politics.’ Modern Â�precedents



The Incredible Lightness of Borders 5

for local-border tourism, as well as accommodations for the rural economy that amounted to duty-free zones, went back at least to the first half of the nineteenth century. Tourists could travel between Dover-Folkestone in Britain and CalaisBoulogne in France – but no further – without papers, an arrangement France cancelled in 1858 after Italian conspirators carrying British travel documents tried to kill Napoleon III. Second in volume was emigration, the departure of those who did not intend to return. Tourism, travel for pleasure or recreation, was rare, and the Hungarian word for tourists was luxusutazok, luxury travellers, indicating that only the extremely rich could indulge such travel.10 Not that they often did. Novelist Margit Kaffka wrote of two wealthy provincial ladies, Ágnes and Melanie, who shocked nearby townspeople because ‘they had slept in a sleeping-car and eaten in the restaurant-car. Here in the home of plenty, with its tradition of abundance and well-being in which the family circle was nourished, this form of luxury was unheard of …’11 None of this traffic seriously threatened state security and stability. Nevertheless governmental emphasis slowly shifted towards guarding the political border and maintaining public order through intelligence gathering and surveillance of public meetings and individual foreigners, who were required to register within a day of arrival. The police also enforced deportation orders and pursued smugglers of women. All this was done without regular systematic examination of documents at border crossing points. Border protection reflected a mix of traditional suspicions of radicalism and subversion with more recent fears of smugglers and illegal migrants. The whole idea of the ‘illegal migrant’ was new at the time. The concept first appeared in the United States, with passage of an 1882 law that specifically prohibited entry by a non-white group, Chinese labourers. This new-world restrictive approach had yet to reach Europe, where travel increased in the pre-war decade, and the number of annual inspections of arriving foreigners and goods grew apace. Notably, the number of seizures of ammunition and weapons also rose with international tension.12 Given the ease of European movement outside Austria-Hungary as well as within, Hungary’s borders were uncomplicated. Except for Romania and Serbia, it was surrounded by other elements of the empire. The key crossing point over the Leitha River, between Brück an der Leitha, Austria, and Királyhida (King’s Bridge), Hungary, represented a nominal dividing point between the two main parts of the empire. A striped post, resembling a barber’s pole but painted in red, white and green, marked the border on the Hungarian end of the narrow single-arched bridge. Less than thirty kilometres from Vienna, Brück was a garrison town and a railway stop on the main line between Vienna and Budapest. The border there was not particularly consequential. As the liberal politician Ferenc Deák described the two sides of the river, even before the 1867 compromise that created the dual monarchy, the Lajta merely separated the Austrian part of the empire on one side of the stream from Hungarian portions on the other side. Lands on both sides belonged to the realm, regardless of cultural differences, the tendency of Austrians to look down on

6

Hungarian Borderlands

Hungarians, and the vagaries of the sometimes uneasy relationship between Hungary and Austria. In polite conversation, Hungarians acknowledged differences with ‘states across the Lajta’ and ‘peoples across the Lajta,’ 13 and some Austrians drew distinctions between Cisleithania and Transleithania.14 But the border, in any case, was open. These distinctions did not resonate with all peoples of the empire. During World War I, Jaroslav Hašek, the Czech author of The Good Soldier Svejk, served with the 91st Infantry Regiment at Királyhida, and so Švejk did as well. Švejk contributed a distinctive third-party view of the communities split by the river, cheerfully writing off the whole place as a giant brothel.15 At that time, both Hungarians and Austrians and both sides of the river, along with the Czech lands from which Hašek-Svejk came, were still part of the same vast, open monarchy. Back then, the town of Dévény, forty kilometres east of Vienna on the north side of the Danube where the Morava flowed in from the north, was the westernmost Hungarian settlement on the big river. Celts, Romans and Slavs had lived there before Napoleon’s artillery reduced to rubble in 1809 the castle that sat high up on the bluff. In the verses of Endre Ady, himself a child of the borderlands who had been born in the Partium between the great Hungarian plain and Transylvania, Dévény was a major gateway. Modernity did not ride the rails to Budapest via Királyhida; it flowed eastward on the Danube by way of Dévény, to challenge and threaten the stodgy traditionalists of Pest with ‘new songs from the West.’ Gates and walls, Ady promised, would not halt the flow. The songs would keep coming.16 Moravia, Silesia, Galicia and Bucovina formed a long arc around the northern Hungarian border along the Carpathians, and in the southwest and south, Hungary shared borders with Croatia, which was an autonomous part of Hungary, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, occupied by imperial forces since 1878. Local crossings to till land or attend markets were facilitated with five-day passes, issued free to those who could not afford the fees. Serbia actually gave up its passport requirement briefly in 1910 but reinstated it in 1912. Then, early in 1914, with tensions mounting throughout Europe, the constituent parts of the empire started to clamp down on border crossings, especially for men liable for military service. These restrictions, which aimed more at keeping people in than prohibiting entry, were preliminary changes. On 27 July 1914, the day before the empire declared war on Serbia, Hungary closed its borders and stopped issuing passports altogether, except to men already committed to military service.17 For Hungarians the first signs of serious change to the border regime came during that summer of 1914. Only a few days after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the successor to the Habsburg throne, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, Hungarian writer Endre Nagy, a founder of Budapest cabaret, got a glimpse of the future of border management. Up to that time, Europeans still did not regularly carry papers, coming and going without concern, except to a few places on the margins – Russia, Turkey, Romania and Serbia. At the French



The Incredible Lightness of Borders 7

border, Nagy got a big surprise: he was asked for his papers.18 That was only the beginning, of course, for Nagy, Hungary and the world, as the requirement for travel documents – passports and visas – spread through Europe, as a temporary wartime measure, and as soldiers started to unroll and string the barbed wire. The era of free travel was at an end.

Chapter 2

The Aftermath of Defeat

The Slav Corridor and the Treaty of Paris Early in the war, Czech nationalists lobbying for an independent state approached the Western Entente with proposals to realign the borders of Central Europe. Envisioning the end of Austria-Hungary years before the Great Powers got around to thinking about dissolution, and anticipating an independent Hungary separated from an independent Austria, they sought to convert a belt running north-south through what was then Western Hungary into a ‘Slav Corridor’ or ‘Slav Wall,’ to connect the territories of northern and southern Slavs, while separating Austria and Hungary. Tomáš Masaryk, dreaming of a vast Slav federation in the centre of Europe, broached the idea to British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey in April 1915. Masaryk argued that such a strip would block German’s eastward expansion and prevent a renewed alliance of Hungary and Germany. He envisioned the corridor extending north to south two hundred kilometres, a seventy-kilometre wide swath through the borderlands of western Hungary that would link Bratislava and Zagreb. Karel Kramář, who was a Czech representative in the imperial parliament when the war broke out and later became the first prime minister of independent Czechoslovakia, shared Masaryk’s enthusiasm for the corridor and his appetite for Hungarian territory. As he wrote in 1922, ‘The way I formulated the matter, only Budapest and its environs would remain of Hungary.’ They had to wait for the end of the war for the Allies to take up their project.1 Edvard Beneš persisted with the Czech proposal at the Paris peace talks in February 1919. He claimed that central European stability required a new North Slav State (later Czechoslovakia) to have direct ties with the anticipated South Slav State (later Yugoslavia) and with Romania. Masaryk, who became the first president of Czechoslovakia, annotated his copy of a map of Europe to show the crosshatched corridor practically brushing the city limits of Győr more than fifty kilometres inside the current Hungarian border. His notes indicated a willingness to divide ownership of the corridor with a future South Slav state. Overall, British Foreign Minister David Lloyd George thought Beneš presented the Czech case with ‘great skill and craft, … [and] put forth one very audacious and indefensible proposal.’ Beneš also showed a disregard for demographic reality, inflating the number of Slavic residents among the



The Aftermath of Defeat 9

700,000 who lived in the area and ignoring the fact that more than 70 per cent of the residents were either German or Magyar. The idea of a ‘Slavic Wall’ appealed to the French, with their focus on a cordon sanitaire to block German expansionism, but they alone among the victorious Entente countries supported the idea. Neither the United States nor Britain showed any enthusiasm; the British in particular saw the corridor as a building block for a Slav empire that might ultimately replace the Germans as a military threat. The British foreign office characterized the plan as ‘unjustified and impracticable.’ The United States, which had initially joined Britain in an effort to establish boundaries that more closely reflected the ethnic distribution of population, only stood firmly against the most extreme demands of the successor states, such as the corridor. Ultimately, the American delegation grew frustrated by the entire treaty process because of blatant and repeated disregard for the declared principles of the Allies. But the strong opposition of the Italian delegation killed the idea. Italy had almost bled itself to death with three years of brutal and frequently incompetent campaigning against Habsburg forces in its mountainous north. The string of military failures revealed a high command lacking both strategic imagination and interest in the welfare of its soldiers. The battles fought in the name of Italia irredenta, placed Italy on the victorious side and earned it a seat among the Allies. The campaigns across northern Italy also gave the world a new word – irredentism – to describe the desire to recapture lands that were seen to have been stolen, a word that would encapsulate Hungarian foreign policy for a generation. Italy’s traditionally uneasy relations with its Slavic neighbours and hopes of increased influence in the Carpathian basin informed its opposition to a strong Slavic state on its flank. The prospect of the Slavic corridor horrified Hungary, which envisioned itself surrounded by hostile successor states carved substantially out of Hungarian territory, but as a defeated country Hungary had no voice. Austria also opposed the corridor and was not consulted. Even the Croats and the smaller Slavic minorities, such as the Wends who lived in the borderland, felt no attachment to the Slav states being created to the north and south and never showed interest in pan-Slavic agitation. They were indifferent to the proposal. The Czechs pursued the proposal at least until 1921. The Allies ultimately sent the issue to a Commission on Czechoslovak Affairs, which in turn consigned the matter of economic communication between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia to a Commission on Internationalization of Railways and Waterways, effectively killing the whole idea.2 Although accurately described by historian Mary Heimann as among Masaryk’s ‘wilder fantasies,’ even in failure the scheme had an important impact. The proposal came at a time of continued skirmishing between Czech and Hungarian forces in the Felvidék, the upper part of Hungary now claimed by the Czechs. It contributed to the uncertainty over Hungary’s borders and the Hungarian fear of further occupation by both the Czechs and the Romanians, who invaded Hungary from the north and east, respectively, in the

10

Hungarian Borderlands

spring of 1919. The overall instability, including fear of the concept, played a role in the collapse of Prime Minister Mihály Károlyi’s government, the violent establishment of the short-lived Communist regime of Béla Kun, and the even more violent counter-revolution under Admiral Miklós Horthy.3 After the war ended and the treaties were signed, European states surrounded themselves with barbed wire and walls of paper. Under League of Nations sponsorship, at a series of meetings that started in Paris in 1920 and finished in Graz, Austria, in 1922, countries adopted a standard passport format that for the first time included photographs and signatures. The passport, once a cousin of the polite letter of introduction, became a requirement for European travel. Obsession with national security, particularly with spies, ended dreams of a passport-free world.4 Not for the last time, as Mark Salter noted, states chose a ‘securitized regime of population movement over an ethic of freedom of movement.’5 The postwar settlement did more than lead to formalized and permanent travel procedures. Still widely regarded in Hungary as a catastrophe on the scale of the Tatár invasion in 1241 and the 150-year Turkish occupation following the Ottoman victory at Mohács in 1526, the Treaty of Trianon dissolved the Habsburg Empire. The treaty redrew the map of Central Europe, assigning large portions of formerly Hungarian territory to newly formed Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and to Romania. For Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the treaty became a foundation document. For Romania, it fulfilled a century-long dream of nationalists who longed for a Greater Romania that incorporated Transylvania. For those three, Trianon fulfilled dreams of nationhood and greatness, providing places in the sun for peoples who saw themselves as longsuffering oppressed victims of the Habsburg imperial system in general and Hungarian cultural imperialism in particular. While relations with the Romanians and the Yugoslav successor states have mellowed, the Slovakians, whose state spun off from Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s, still define themselves to a large extent in opposition to Hungary. This opposition once extended to an exchange of propaganda blasts in which the Slovaks claimed their patron saints (Cyril and Methodius) could beat up the Hungarian patron saint (Stephen).6 To this day, Slovaks revere the treaty. In June 2010, while Hungary mourned the treaty’s ninetieth anniversary, Slovakia’s right-wing National Party erected a monument in celebration, where the river Danube forms the line between Slovakian Komarno and Hungarian Komárom. ‘We will,’ party president Jan Slota declared, ‘show the Hungarians where the border lies.’7 Even Austria, Hungary’s former partner in the dual monarchy, got a piece of Hungary in 1920. On all the borders, turmoil and armed hostility marked the changes, along with in most cases significant population movements, sometimes voluntary, or at least without overt pressure, and at other times under duress.



The Aftermath of Defeat 11

The New Austrian Border The losses to Austria were tiny, only 4,000 square kilometres and 297,000 people, but nevertheless hard to accept. Admiral Miklós Horthy, who became head of state after the overthrow of the short-lived People’s Republic in 1919, saw the western boundary change as a ploy by the victorious allies to drive a wedge between Hungary and Austria. He also suspected that it was part of an effort to pave the way for the Slav corridor idea, which did not survive the peace conference. Wealthy Hungarian aristocrats and gentry, staunchly Catholic, committed to the empire, and accustomed to life on both sides of the border, left for Austria by the thousands. Fleeing the newly established Hungarian Soviet Republic, whose Russian-backed partisans had overthrown the Károlyi government, they included at least ten thousand military officers. Some migrated merely to escape a tumultuous future; others fled to foment the counter-revolution that ultimately found expression in the Lajtabánság or Leitha Principality. This ephemeral project reached fruition in the summer of 1921 when Hungarian irregular forces under Pál Pronay drove off the Austrian gendarmes who tried to occupy the area – the future Austrian state of Burgenland – and forced the Austrians to send the regular army. In early October the insurgents declared the formation of their own independent republic, the Leitha Principality, an ‘operetta state’ which the founders ultimately hoped to turn over to Hungary. It lasted long enough to create its own flag and postage stamps. The armed resistance slowed the pace of Austrian occupation slightly, but little more than a month after the principality’s founding it disappeared.8 While a large number of rich, conservative Hungarians went west, a few less prosperous but staunch Magyars went the other way. Of the 350,000 Hungarians who are known to have left the successor states for Hungary at the time of Trianon, only 1,221 came from Austria. Romania had the most, with nearly 200,000. Just over half as many left Czechoslovakia, and more than 40,000 departed from Yugoslavia. Péter Grünauer, who lived in Féltorony (Halftower) east of the lake known as Fertő-tö in Hungarian, and who had served in the gendarmerie in the war and afterwards, found himself after Trianon living in Halbturm (Halftower) east of a lake now called Neusiedler See in German. He recalled that he could have had work in his new homeland, but he wanted to be a gendarme outpost commander and he considered himself Hungarian. So he took his new wife, who spoke only German, across the line, ultimately changed his name to Péter Zöldligeti, and stayed.9 Strange episodes marked the transition on the hitherto open border. In the spring of 1919, one wealthy young couple among the many who decided their future lay in conservative, Catholic Austria hatched a plan to make it to the other side without attracting suspicion. Hiding in a country house near Győr, the husband laid out the scheme to his wife. So as not to attract suspicion they would take separate trains to Királyhida and meet at the Leitha bridge, she with the family jewels hidden in the folds of her peasant costume.

12

Hungarian Borderlands

Wise and sophisticated but concerned about his wife’s grasp of the plan, he drilled her incessantly on the details. Then the day came. She endured a final lecture on the importance of following his detailed instructions – ‘Now don’t miss the train! What on earth will I do if you don’t turn up? I’ll die of worry. For Heaven’s sake, use your head for once!’ Then she obediently went west to nearby Mosonmagyaróvár, and boarded a train for Királyhida, where she arrived without incident. Fetching in her bright traditional dress and kerchief, bundle on her back, and jewels in her skirts, she waited. Meanwhile, her brilliant husband stayed in Győr as planned and also took a train. It turned out to be the wrong one, and he wound up in Sopron. So there she was, on the border without documents or money, since the husband knew that it was folly to trust such important things to the care of his wife. Evening came. She was still there, he was not, and something had to be done. Finally, she approached the Hungarian border guards, smiled and joined them on their bench, and chatted them up. She told them of her terrible predicament. Her aunt had gone back to town and had not returned. She was desperate. She could not get back across the frontier without her relative, but if she did not report to her job on time, her boss would beat her. She just had to get to Vienna. Predictably – in light opera the plight of a pretty young woman could always melt the heart of a mustachioed official – the guards agreed to help her. Not only did they let her cross; they escorted her across the bridge to the Austrian guard post to make sure she came to no harm. The husband arrived in Vienna a week later, perhaps to be reminded by his wife from time to time of how intelligent he had proved himself to be.10 This first restrictive border between Austria and Hungary in no way anticipated the ferocious rigidity of the Communist-era border. But it did occasionally provide the backdrop for exchanges of live fire between Hungarian revanchists and the authorities. During the first week of May 1919, a group of exiled officers robbed a bank next door to the embassy of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. The money, more than 140 million crowns and an indeterminate amount of Western cash, had just been delivered to the embassy and secured at the bank. Various counter-revolutionary groups along the western border with Austria and Slovenia shared the loot, with a small amount set aside for the operation of a coordinating group, the ABC, the Antibolsevista Comité or Antibolshevik Committee. The heist, considered by the conspirators to be a ‘great victory’ over Communism, would fund a pre-emptive strike into Hungary to secure territory that might be taken away by the peace treaty that had not yet been concluded.11 The centrepiece of the extemporized opposition was the brucki puccs or Brück putsch. Despite the presence in Austria of thousands of former officers and soldiers of the Royal Hungarian Army, only 44 men signed up for a surprise attack. These exiles, flush with cash from the bank job, planned to converge on Brück by taxi, link up with backers on the Hungarian side of the Leitha bridge, disarm the Bolshevik guards, take the offensive, and declare a new national government on Hungarian soil. The plot never had a chance. The conspirators



The Aftermath of Defeat 13

paid their taxi fares and advanced towards the bridge. Waiting Hungarian troops and Austrian militia surprised them in a crossfire, and they broke and ran. The Austrians swept them up and arrested them before they set foot on the Hungarian side. While success has many parents, in this case nobody ever acknowledged responsibility for the putsch.12 The last and perhaps most significant act of the territorial conflict on the Austrian border concerned the fate of Sopron (Ödenburg). Sopron was the largest town in the area designated for Austrian possession, and resistance to the change was widespread. The Italians took the lead in settlement of the issue, inviting the contesting parties to Venice, where they signed an agreement allowing a local referendum. In mid-December 1921, voters in Sopron and eight neighbouring settlements cast more than sixty per cent of their ballots in favour of remaining in Hungary. The Sopron settlement came to be the only significant adjustment allowed to the Hungarian borders delineated in the Trianon treaty.13 The Austrian frontier stabilized relatively easily by the mid-1920s. The loss of territory to Austria seemed particularly galling at first, considering that Austria and Hungary had been losers in the war, but Austria was not an implacable foe, and the loss on the Western border was small. Transylvania-born nobleman Miklós Bánffy, who served as foreign minister for a short time in the early 1920s, called the cession of 4,020 square kilometres of mainly forest that the Austrians named Burgenland ‘quite meaningless’ and ‘perhaps one of the silliest decisions to be incorporated in the various Versailles treaties.’14 In a few years Hungarians got over it, but there were exceptions. In the mid-1930s, Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös’s confused irredentist vision went beyond getting back Burgenland to digging a deep ditch along the Leitha, a kind of inverted wall that would isolate Hungary while protecting recovered territory, ‘not merely to separate us, … but to show all concerned that east of the Leitha we Hungarians mean to be the sole masters …’ Austria, for its part, forgot Hungarian efforts to resist the transfer, and rules for local-border traffic were mutually accepted and implemented. Magyar irredentism, which became such a powerful force in the interwar period, was minimized in Burgenland, where minorities, both Croats and Magyars, were allowed their own primary schools in their own languages, and the freedom to pursue their cultures. Had there been such a basis of mutual tolerance and acceptance elsewhere, the Austrian situation, which went through stages of resentment and hostility but ended with the Sopron referendum, might have served as a model on the other borders.15 Hungary, which before the war had shared boundaries with other components of the empire and the independent states of Romania and Serbia, now bordered on four nation states: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. All of them had been enlarged or created at Hungarian expense, all had substantial ethnic Hungarian minorities, and all but Austria had scores to settle over more than two generations of more or less forced Magyarization, that centred on the requirement to learn the Hungarian language.

14

Hungarian Borderlands

Marking Turf The successor states sought to secure their own borders as a means of asserting their new sovereignty. Consequently, they tried to reduce interest in travel in general and especially to curb connections between ethnic Hungarians inside their borders and their former homeland. Just after declaring their independence and well before the treaty was finalized, the Czechs passed laws requiring formal travel documents for cross-border visits to relatives and former neighbours. They also blocked Hungarian noblemen from reaching their estates in Czechoslovakia. For example, at Christmas, 1919, they stopped Count Albert Apponyi, chair of the Hungarian delegation to the Paris peace conference, from visiting his estate while they kept his wife from leaving to join her husband in Hungary. General Harry Hay Bandholtz, the American representative on the Allied Control Commission in Budapest, had to intervene on Apponyi’s behalf.16 Between 1921 and 1925, surveyors defined, mapped and marked the new borders. For Hungary it was a prodigious and complicated – not to mention depressing – undertaking, with separate boundary commissions on each of the four borders, a Border Delineation Office in Budapest under Count Imre Csaky to manage the work routine, and a new department in the Foreign Ministry overseeing the work, providing information to the four commissions, and collecting the maps, diaries and other materials generated during the process. Each commission worked with its opposite number in the neighbouring country and commissioners from the victorious allied powers who enforced the process. They split their sectors into sections, drew maps, emplaced markers, and resolved contentious local issues, usually in favour of the successor states. With the entire process operating under the premise that Hungary would remain a viable state, capable of survival in its truncated condition, primary consideration went to accommodating the claims of the successors regarding their economic and strategic needs. Each segment was different. The Czechs proved adept at obtaining a large number of small concessions that expanded their territory, arguing that the concessions were essential to the new state’s survival; the Romanians adamantly stood by the treaty and refused to discuss local adjustments. The new Romanian border ran right through 50 settlements, while the Yugoslav border divided at least 70, and the Austrian line split 22. The British commissioner on the southern Yugoslav line, Lieutenant Colonel D. Cree of the Royal Engineers, remembered the delineation as proceeding in a spirit of mutual respect and professionalism. Hungarians recall the whole process as underpinned by a corpse-robbing mentality accompanied by a petty and primitive vengefulness. Relations with neighbours had long been tinged with ethnic hostility, but Trianon exacerbated and magnified antagonisms for decades to come.17 Colonel Cree had probably never heard the folk rhyme, ‘Magyars and Ratz [Serbs, in Hungarian] – dogs and cats.’18



The Aftermath of Defeat 15

The new South Slav kingdom of Yugoslavia sought to persuade Hungarian landowners to sell or otherwise abandon property in the new kingdom. Lieutenant Colonel Cree was optimistic about the future of relations between the two countries, and wrote in 1925 that ‘the tendency to regard the boundary as a Chinese wall is already past.’ Cree’s optimistic expectation that ‘mutual respect that exists for each other’s fighting qualities may lead to the establishment of a friendship between them …’ proved unwarranted. The interests of the successor states, except Austria, ran counter to Hungarian efforts to facilitate local-border economic and social contacts with Magyar communities now outside Hungary.19 These states displayed a hypersensitivity and siege mentality that characterized insecure majorities. As Lucean Leustean noted about Romania, ‘… the Romanians were still feeling, despite the satisfaction caused by the Great Unification and by the achievement of the international confirmation thereof at the Peace Conference in Paris, a deep anxiety due mainly to the danger sometimes real and other times imaginary of a conspiracy of the hostile neighbours – Hungary, Bulgaria and Soviet Russia …’20 Yugoslavia limited northward travel by ethnic Hungarians who lived south of the border. Restrictions were meant to convince Hungarians with lands on or near the border to sell or otherwise relinquish their property. To make the ethnic character of the region irrevocably Serbian, the government wanted to force out as many Hungarians as possible, even to the point of giving priority to passport applicants with Hungarian surnames. To achieve this end, they started mass deportations of former public officials, dumping over the border fifty-eight officials from Zombor in Bács-Bodrog County who refused to take an oath of allegiance to the new regime. Hungarian authorities responded to these deportations by refusing to open the crossing gates. In one singular case, Kázmér Hoosz, a retired forestry chief counsellor from a town called Martonos on the Tisza River also in Bács-Bodrog County, was deported by Yugoslavia twenty-six times. Seeking to preserve their claim to the area, the Hungarians turned him back every time.21 The 1919 treaty with the victorious Allies obligated the South Slav state to protect minorities and to offer them the option of staying or moving. Essentially Magyar optánsok – optants – could choose individually to take up Yugoslav nationality or retain their original citizenship. Yugoslavia banned political and cultural organizations among the Magyars and suspending their voting rights until July 1922. Magyars who chose to stay and retain their Hungarian citizenship thus found themselves victims of serious discrimination; many were deported. Ultimately, about 40,000 Magyars from the south chose to go to Hungary.22 While pressuring Magyars to leave, the Yugoslav government encouraged South Slav settlers to take up lands near the border. Most notably, this involved the dobrovóljac, meaning volunteers or ‘men of good will’, Serbian army volunteers who had served in the war. More than 6,000 families of these veterans received land, mostly along the border, part of an effort to install a layer of ‘utterly reliable Slavs’ along the Hungarian border.23

16

Hungarian Borderlands

Hungarian authorities complicated the situation for Magyar travellers seeking to visit relatives across the new border. In passports issued for travel from Hungary to the south and east, instead of ‘Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’ and ‘Romania’ they wrote the phrase ‘valid in the occupied territories,’ which did not enhance the chances of civil treatment for Hungarian travellers. Nor did it help convince Yugoslav authorities to moderate their efforts to eliminate a Magyar presence from their territory. The bearers of these passports endured many insults, so the Hungarian government ended the practice in 1921. But for two years afterwards, Yugoslav diplomats in Hungary continued to issue Yugoslav passports to ethnic Serbs who were Hungarian citizens. When these came to light, Hungarian authorities did not allow the bearers of such documents across the border.24 Given this start to Hungarian-Yugoslav relations along the border, localborder traffic proved to be a difficult issue to resolve. None of Hungary’s new neighbours shared its interest in this matter. It was largely Hungarians whose lives had been disrupted by the changing borders, Hungarian farmers who had been severed from their lands, Hungarian tradesmen who had lost their markets and Hungarian families that were divided. Yugoslavia much preferred to shut down this sort of traffic to reduce the demand for revision of borders in the future. Finally a scheme evolved in the 1920s that designated a ten-kilometre wide border strip in which crossings were allowed with border identification, but only for those who actually worked the land, and only between daylight and dusk. Even the signing of agreements did not close the matter, as Yugoslav authorities and border guards dragged their feet, closed crossings without advance notice, and rerouted people attempting to cross to more remote border stations. Only after Hungary took the matter to the League of Nations in 1934 did the Yugoslavs consistently adhere to their agreements.25

The Loss of Transylvania The total Hungarian post-war loss to its neighbours of 190,000 square kilometres represented just over two-thirds of its land area, not even counting formerly autonomous Croatia, which became part of Yugoslavia, and sixty per cent of its 18.2 million inhabitants. The new Czechoslovak state, which David Lloyd George called ‘the polyglot and incoherent State of Czechoslovakia’ was born with hundreds of thousands of Hungarian speakers in its midst as well as millions of angry Germans.26 It got 63,000 square kilometres of Hungarian territory and Yugoslavia received 21,000. Romania obtained by far the largest chunk, Transylvania and some smaller adjacent territories, a total of 102,000 square kilometres, with 3.5 million residents. What remained of Hungary after the treaty, 93,000 square kilometres, was smaller even than the portion surrendered to Romania. The huge losses included Pozsony, which after a brief existence under the name of Wilsonovo was renamed Bratislava, as capital of



The Aftermath of Defeat 17

the Slovak region of Czechoslovakia. In addition to this important city, which had been the Hungarian capital during the Turkish occupation of Budapest, Hungary lost its access to the Adriatic through the port town of Fiume, most of its forests and minerals, and the northern headwaters of major tributaries of the Danube. Along the Danube, the border receded from Devény to Oroszvár.27 All these losses were painful, but the most difficult to endure was that of Transylvania. Home over the millennia to Romans from many corners of the empire, Dacians, Gepids, Avars, Bulgars, Germans, Turks, Armenians, Romanians and Magyars, Transylvania witnessed all manner of encounters – accommodation, intermarriage, assimilation, confrontation, collision and war. Romanians and Hungarians alike considered the region the cradle of their national cultures. Whatever the objective validity of the competing claims, clearly one of the reasons for them was to legitimize physical possession. Central and eastern Europe had other cases of nations that claimed locations near their edges as cultural centres. Thus Serbians considered the northern town of Sremski Karlovci, eleven kilometres southeast of Novi Sad and near the pre-Trianon Hungarian border, as their cultural heart, and Ukrainians saw Galicia on their western edge in the same way.28 What made Tansylvania unusual is that two states claimed the same frontier area as central to their national lives and traditions. Transylvania, a polyglot frontier country and an ethnic melting pot, was considered both ‘a cradle of Hungarian culture’ and ‘the cradle of Romanian national consciousness.’ Both countries sought exclusive possession.29

A 1919 postcard shows Hungary walled in by its neighbours. The English-language text indicates that the message of encirclement was directed to an international audience. Postcard in author’s collection.

18

Hungarian Borderlands

The legend of the boulders known as the two old hags encapsulated this competition over the centuries. Originally they were women, one Hungarian and the other Wallachian (Romanian). By the mountainside grave of St Peter, it is said, the women argued, incessantly and loudly, over which of their countries had the right to claim the tomb as its own. Such was the din that finally the apostle could no longer sleep in peace. In anger, he rose from his slumber and turned both of them to stone. Only then did peace prevail. The traumatic loss of Transylvania and other territories after World War I gave birth in Hungary to a ‘cult of revisionism,’ a national obsession with borders and Hungarian minorities beyond them. This fixation permeated daily life, and dominated Hungarian foreign policy. It made its way into the national vocabulary, as the old Hungary became Szent Királyi Magyarország (Holy Royal Hungary) and the post-Trianon state became Csonka Magyarország (Mutilated Hungary) in daily speech. Two slogans summed up everything. One, ‘Justice for Hungary,’ exemplified the national consensus that the peace settlement was grossly unfair; the other, ‘No, No, Never,’ expressed the nation’s resolve never to accept the result.30 Given the scale of the losses, by far the worst endured by any of the defeated countries after the war, ‘It is understandable why,’ American geographer Andrew Burghardt wrote, ‘at least until the end of World War II, the desire for a revision of the Treaty of Trianon dominated the foreign and domestic policies of Hungary.’31 The obsession burned fiercely for a generation. Daily, students recited a creed that affirmed their belief in the resurrection of Greater Hungary, the kind of hypernationalism that British journalist Jan Morris called ‘patriotism gone feral.’32 The irredentism resonated with portions of the population long after recovery was clearly impossible, even in the twenty-first century, when groups of Hungarians traveling to Romanian Transylvania or Kárpátalja, Ukrainian Sub-Carpathia, refused to set their watches an hour ahead to conform to Romanian and Ukrainian time.33

A Hungarian Border Force In addition to leaving the country much smaller in size, the treaty cut Hungary loose from its imperial moorings. Beyond the humiliation and truncation caused by defeat, the country that remained had far greater linguistic and cultural homogeneity, reinforcing what Count László Széchényi, the Hungarian ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1935, called ‘the walls of our linguistic isolation.’ Residents with non-Magyar mother tongues, forty-five per cent of the population in 1910, were only ten per cent in 1920. German speakers, numbering about half a million, were the only significant national minority that remained.34 Hungary had to create its own infrastructure and bureaucracy. Like its neighbours, Hungary established all the attributes of a sovereign state, including delineating and marking its borders and creating a bureaucracy to police them.



The Aftermath of Defeat 19

Because of the restrictions imposed in the peace settlement, policing the borders was no simple matter. The treaty prohibited deployment of Hungarian troops near the border, and so the Customs Guards, created in 1921, had responsibility for guarding the border as well as inspecting border traffic. Consisting mostly of veteran soldiers, organized into battalions that were expandable into combat formations, and functioning in border guard districts that matched the seven military districts, the customs guards became the strongest and best-trained military organization in the country during the 1920s. Unit members were limited to 4,500, and with administrative staff numbered fewer than 7,000. Separate from the customs service, they also helped with border protection, inspected border-belt traffic and protected border crossings. Inside the country, the Hungarian Royal State Police established branch offices near the border for inspection of long-distance border traffic and oversaw the presence and movement of foreigners from a national central office. In the 1930s, the country slowly rebuilt its military force. In 1932 the newly established Hungarian Royal Border Guards took over the military functions of the Customs Guards, and by the end of 1938 the border guards were absorbed into the army.35

Hegyeshalom, Gateway to the West At some post-World War I crossing points, the official presence amounted to a sawhorse in front of a foot bridge, along with a lone soldier in a booth.36 But Hegyeshalom, on the main railway line between Budapest and Vienna that extended all the way to Paris in the west and Istanbul to the East, required a greater force. Substantial changes took place in 1921–2. On 28 August 1921 the so-called Border Edge Branch Office of the customs service pulled back from Királyhida to the new border. In December 1922, after formal marking of the border, an agreement with the Austrians regularized rail traffic between the two new states. The situation stabilized sufficiently for a border station, designated to inspect the papers of train travellers between Vienna and Budapest, to open at Hegyeshalom. In keeping with the fiction that Admiral Miklós Horthy served as regent for the last Habsburg monarch, the station was called the ‘Hungarian Royal Police Borderline Branch Office Hegyeshalom’. In August 1923 the office moved into the community council house, and the Hungarian border force was born. Two years later, the town became the only station through which Romanians transiting Hungary were allowed to leave for the West. Then in August 1937, arrangements with the Austrians for reciprocal crossings and regulation of station traffic were completed, with establishment of a three-kilometre strip, half on each side, in which officials from both countries could work and trains could be shunted and assembled. The Hungarian state railway, MÁV, took over the Hungarian side of the strip.37 Hegyeshalom in those days was a village with about 2,400 residents. Before the movement of the border, the settlement had been in the centre of flat

20

Hungarian Borderlands

Moson County. Now it was on the edge of a new consolidated county called Győr-Moson-Sopron, and of the country itself, the crossing point on the main railway line to Vienna. It never grew beyond a peak size of 3,800 in 1990, but it developed into a key border crossing because of its location on the railway and later on the primary highway linking Budapest and Vienna. Trianon may have torn apart the Austro-Hungarian Empire and have been an unmitigated national catastrophe for Hungary, but Hegyeshalom’s new prominence had complex economic effects. In some ways an economic boomlet came to Hegyeshalom. The train station was expanded twice, and a café opened under the trackside awning. Customs officials arrived and doubled as border guards, and 125 new housing units were built with state support. Hegyeshalom was on its way to becoming the most heavily travelled border station of the new Hungary. Nine fast trains and two expresses daily connected Budapest and Vienna, and all of them stopped there. There were daily reminders of the debacle wrought by the war, and poverty was visible everywhere. Along with the jobs, the money and the bustle came the refugees – Hungarians who declined to live in Austria and left their homes. With no homes awaiting them and apartments at a premium because of the arrival of railway and construction workers, refugee families found shelter in goods vans at the station. There they remained, some for many months, a tiny portion of the more than 350,000 Hungarians who fled or were driven from their homes in the reshuffle of borders, unable to find work or proper places to live. In Hegyeshalom, the net effect of the changes was not an increase in development and prosperity, and the community struggled to adapt to the new situation.38 From the 1920s onwards, the town remained the last Hungarian settlement on the main line to Vienna and points west. During the Cold War, the settlement became the meeting point of east and west, a vital point on the edge of the Soviet empire. It became strongly identified in the Hungarian mind as the pre-eminent crossing point, the gate to the West. In the wake of the 1956 revolution, a young man from southern Hungary by the name of László Kasza, later a journalist and manager for Radio Free Europe, took his mother’s advice, his toothbrush and two pork chops between slabs of fat-smeared bread, and set out for the West. At Nagykanizsa near the Croatian border he asked a railway official for directions to Hegyeshalom. It was many miles to the north, far out of the way, but the only crossing he knew by name.39 After 1989, Hegyeshalom became the stage for huge international celebrations at the formal opening of the border, culminating in the December 2007 accession of Hungary into the group of European Union states that shared open borders. Along the way, it was the scene of a century of bureaucratic shuffling, military posturing, and encounters between terrified citizens and swinish border guards. The scene of nightmares for Hungarians considering a trip or even flight to the west, Hegyeshalom was the ground-level stage on which the twentieth century’s increasingly complex and problematic border concerns – imperial, royal, totalitarian, and most recently those of the



The Aftermath of Defeat 21

European Union and Schengenland – evolved and were acted out. During the whole period, much of the local economy came to depend on the presence of four border-related agencies: the border guards, the customs service, the animal inspectors and, after the Colorado or North American potato beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata) ravaged the potato crop in 1947, plant inspectors.40 The town’s location gave it a singular character. Many towns in the Carpathian basin have paid for the publication of small books that extol local virtues to entice tourists and that in one way or another embellish or twist their histories. These slim volumes either downplay, whitewash or just ignore grim and disgraceful periods in town history, while the suffering and hardships of the majority during war and under totalitarian regimes are illuminated in detail. Hegyeshalom is no exception. Atrocities against Jews are only vaguely recalled, while the names of minor functionaries of past city administrations are clearly remembered and dutifully recited, and the wonders of local fishing holes are enumerated in detail. Local monuments reflect the regional balancing of forgetfulness and memory. In front of the Roman Catholic church, on a granite slab, rests a huge severed head carved out of white stone-face up, eyes closed, and mouth open. A multi-purpose monument, it commemorates several categories of twentieth-century victims, those who died in the course of two world wars, the Holocaust and the 1956 revolution, and the German residents uprooted and forced to leave Strass-Sommerein, as they called Hegyeshalom, for Germany in 1946. The Germans also have their own monument by the train station, erected on the sixtieth anniversary of their expulsion, a local manifestation of the post-World War II European spasm of ethnic cleansing. There they are singled out for sympathy by a broken candle, carved in marble, bent to the ground and facing westward to Germany, the flame still intact, as ‘our German compatriots.’ A tiny museum in the middle of town underscores their primary place on the list of local victims. Less than fifty yards away a memorial column recalls the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary’s ultimate catastrophe. Almost twenty feet tall, the marble column has a long sword, point up, hilt down, bolted to the column, and a symbolic flame at the top. The inscription, Hazádnak Rendületlenül or ‘Firmly for the Homeland,’ taken from ‘Szózat’ or ‘Appeal’ by the nineteenth-century poet Mihály Vörösmarty, had a few letters missing in the spring of 2008 but was still intelligible. More recently two new memorials appeared alongside. In April 2009, the town dedicated a commemorative tablet of polished pink marble to the memory of 124 Jewish slave labourers who died or were killed at Hegyeshalom during the last year of the war. Remarkably, the memorial describes the victims not as Jews or ‘Israelites’ but as Hungarian citizens of Jewish faith. They had been housed in freight cars like the post-World War refugees and employed in repairing railway facilities repeatedly bombed by the Allies. Troops under German SS Lieutenant Karl Zimmermann and Hungarian Gendarme Lieutenant Zoltán Demeter shot them on Munkácsy Street, at the end of March 1945, a couple days before Soviet forces arrived in the town.

22

Hungarian Borderlands

Their remains, according to some, rest in an unmarked mass grave in the Christian town cemetrey; the memorial, about the size of a large grave marker, sits near the train station. Less than a year later, a newer small marker was installed alongside in remembrance of the victims of Communism, fewer in number but dearer to the hearts of right-wing Hungarians.41 Like the severed head in front of the town church, this pairing represents ‘victim lumping’ or ‘catastrophe lumping’, blurring any distinctions between kinds of atrocities and either diminishing the role of a particular group of perpetrators or diverting attention from them by positing a wider context of bloody violence.42 Cross-border rail traffic far surpassed highway movement. Two rapid trains passed through daily along with a handful of locals. The few who came in by car mainly fell in the category of local cross-border area (kishatárszéli) movement. With new boundaries that were indifferent to the ethnic make-up of border areas and that sliced through communities, sometimes creating two towns where there had been one, local or small border traffic took on a great importance that it still retains, not just on the Austrian border but all around Hungary’s perimetre. Early in the post-World War I period, some attempt was made to accommodate this situation. A 1926 agreement created a fifteenkilometre wide zone along the border with Austria in which local residents could transport goods for their own use without paying customs duties. The exemptions included up to three kilograms of meat or grain, two litres of milk, and work tools. Doctors and veterinarians received permission to practise on both sides of the border, and special provisions allowed for tilling fields that had been cut by the boundary.43 Even European Union border regulations take this situation into account, and the hard outer border of Schengenland makes accommodations for such local conditions. As far as the railway was concerned, the Vienna-bound fast train picked up an escort of border guards at Győr, an industrial city about sixty kilometres east towards Budapest. They rode with it to Hegyeshalom and inspected passports en route. Inspection on the incoming fast train took place during a stop at the border. Those entering without visas were taken off the train. If they received permission to continue their journeys, they were allowed back on and into the country; if not, they were sent back. Civilian traffic volume, road as well as rail, remained low in the inter-war years, got even smaller during the depression, and then almost ended entirely with Hungary’s entry on the German side in the war in 1941.44

Change in the Air Around the end of the Cold War, as alliances and client relationships disintegrated, William Safire observed in the New York Times that, increasingly, national groups were making regular visits to their irredentist.45 But there was never such a long and eager line at the irredentist’s office as there was in Hungary starting in 1938 and going through 1941. From a border standpoint,



The Aftermath of Defeat 23

alliance with the Germans and entry into the war promised a great opportunity to get back Hungarian lands awarded by the victors to others in 1920. With the support of its masters in Berlin, the Horthy government grabbed for lost Hungarian territory in almost every direction. It took four bites in 1938–41, gobbling up territory that had once been Hungarian, tearing up treaties, both imposed and freely signed, and solidifying both a pact with the devil and the enmity of its neighbours. Only Austria, which had organized the state of Burgenland out of formerly Hungarian lands, was left alone. But Austria had voted itself out of existence in a March 1938 plebiscite and had become part of the Third Reich. As Günter Bischof put it, ‘Rarely in the annals of mankind has a country so eagerly collaborated in its own demise.’46 This Anschluss put Austrian territory beyond the acquisitive reach of a lesser power. It also put Germany in complete charge of the Austrian economy, and in a few months, after occupying the Czech lands and recognizing the puppet fascist government in Slovakia, to a large measure in control of Hungarian trade as well. Hungary could no longer play off Germany and Austria against each other, as seller or buyer, and Germany dominated production and distribution of arms and ammunition. Although the German absorption of Austria did not materially affect local-border traffic, it cut off Hungary’s trade access to the west via Austria and Switzerland. The growing German encroachment on the Hungarian economy may not have been noticeable to ordinary people, but other signs of German influence were becoming increasingly visible. Even before the Anschluss, Hungarian children near the new Hungarian-German border could be seen greeting travellers with ‘Heil Hitler’ and the Hitler salute. The number of German travellers, sales agents and lecturers also increased, many promoting the greatness, strength and power of the Reich and hinting that after Austria would come Hungary’s turn.47 In the late 1930s, a new assertive Magyar nationalism showed its public face at Hegyeshalom. Visits by ceremonial trains became frequent, starting with the national tour of Hungary’s most revered religious relic, the shrivelled right hand – ‘holy Dexter’ – of St. Istvan, the king who had aligned Hungary with western Christianity at the turn of the first millennium. The whole country was swept by the craze over the commemoration of the nine hundredth anniversary of the king’s death, a potent reminder of grandeur that fuelled irredentist passions. The Aranyvonat or gold train featured a special car with the relic. At the Hegyeshalom station, in June 1938, people stood in awe or kneeled in reverence, bells rang, and the railway band played the national anthem. Participants in the Leventemozgalom, the militarized nationalist youth organization, welcomed the train, along with firemen, police officers and gendarmes, all in dress uniforms, and students in traditional costumes. Numerous people from ethnic Hungarian settlements on the Austrian side of the border joined the throng.48 Before the year ended, more important trains visited the border and marked the changing political situation. In August Admiral Miklós Horthy,

24

Hungarian Borderlands

once commander of the Austro-Hungarian Navy and now the head of state and so-called ‘regent’, made his triumphal way through the border station en route to visit his ally and patron Adolf Hitler. Well-wishers and curiosity seekers packed stations on both sides of the border. Two months later, just across from Hegyeshalom at Nickelsdorf (Miklóshalom), residents decorated a gate with the Habsburg imperial eagle and crowds anticipating the return of territory ceded a generation earlier screamed ‘Mindent vissza!,’ everything returned, as Hungary’s delegation to the Vienna conference that formalized the return of a chunk of former northern Hungary rolled through town.49 The same delegation returned before noon on November 5, bringing news of the reincorporation of lands north of the Danube into Hungary. Thousands welcomed the diplomats and celebrated the long-awaited event. The uncharacteristically bright blue November sky added sparkle to the great day. The train was twenty minutes late, and only stayed long enough for the steam engine from Vienna to be replaced by a modern Hungarian electric locomotive. But that provided enough time for the delegates in their salon carriage to return the waves of the cheering crowd, as people shouted ‘Köszönjuk a Felvidéket’ (‘Thank you for upper Hungary’). A priest blessed the train and patriotic songs filled the air, including the national anthem, the Hymnusz, with its plea to the Almighty to bless the Hungarians. On this day, the people in the crowd thought they were indeed blessed, and might not have given much thought to the source of their good fortune, the alliance with Adolf Hitler. That would come a few years later.50 The last special train of the year, four days later, brought British press magnate Harold Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere, to Hegyeshalom. Rothermere, owner of the London Daily Mail, had been a lone Western voice in support of Hungarian territorial aspirations. This was his moment of triumph too. Now he basked in the love and gratitude of the people whose cause he had championed on his way to lay a commemorative wreath in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square. Again, school children came out with their flowers, and parents cheered their hero. With Lord Rothermere’s departure, this spasm of celebratory border nationalism was over.51 The events that followed the disappearance of an independent Austria and the first territorial restitution brought significant change to Hungary’s western border. There was some expectation or at least hope that the Germans would return Burgenland to Hungarian control, but the border location did not change. The Nazis aimed to emphasize the German nature of the state, partly by turning on the 3,000 or so Jews who lived there, forcing them out of their homes, expelling them or killing them outright. They certainly showed no interest in Burgenland’s connection to Hungary. The border remained where it was, but it was no longer the border with Austria. Instead it became the border with Germany, and Hungary lost whatever breathing room it might have had. As the Hungarian economy increasingly aligned to support the German military buildup, the Germans became a major presence at Hegyeshalom, triggering a boom in station construction. With increasing



The Aftermath of Defeat 25

quanitities of Hungarian livestock, fruits and vegetables exported to Germany, the station acquired new sidings, warehouses and receiving facilities. In the spring of 1941, when German customs officers who inspected these goods moved their operation east from Vienna, contracts were drawn up for a new office building to accommodate them. A traffic and customs office was also added to the main station building.52 Change was indeed in the air.

Chapter 3

Expansion and Contraction

Felvidék (Northern Hungary) Hungary’s reacquisition of territories took place in four steps, between November 1938 and April 1941, all before the country entered World War II. Czechoslovakia, powerless in the face of German bullying, had already relinquished the Sudetenland, and now acceded to German and Italian arbitration of the dispute over upper Hungary.1 And so the foreign ministers of Italy and Germany, Galeazzo Ciano di Cortellazzo and Joachim von Ribbentrop, respectively, drew a green line across a map of Czechoslovakia, marking the new border.2 The Vienna Award of November 2, named for the meeting at which the decision was ratified at the city’s Belvedere palace, triggered the train-side celebration at Hegyeshalom when the Hungarian delegates went home. The Vienna Award returned to Hungary 11,927 square kilometres of land, with just over one million residents. Hungarians called the region that had been surrendered after World War I Felvidék, or the upper country. The returned sliver amounted to barely one-fifth of what had been lost, but it was something. It included major towns, most notably Kassa (Kosice), but not Pozsony (Bratislava), and it held promise for the future. Two themes dominated Hungarian press coverage of the takeover. Nationally, joy bordered on ecstasy over the first recovery of a part of the long-desired territory, representing what Hungarians saw as the beginning of the restoration of the massive losses suffered after World War I. Locally, the northwestern towns of Győr and Mosonmagyaróvár competed for construction of a bridge over the Danube that would link their towns to the new territory. For Slovaks, who had declared their region of Czechoslovakia autonomous on October 6, this was a catastrophe. Jozef Tiso, newly selected leader of the region, declared his outrage in terms reminiscent of Hungarian rhetoric since Trianon. ‘We lost everything,’ he said. ‘Our people, through no fault of their own, have become victims. … There is nothing to do but bow our heads and get to work. But nobody can keep us from declaring before the whole world that the Slovak people have suffered a tragic injury.’3 On the long stretch of the Danube between Bratislava and Esztergom, only one bridge connected both parts of the divided town of Komárom. Győr and Mosonmagyaróvár both saw the opportunity to become commercial gateways to the north. Ferries went into operation connecting both towns to the north



Expansion and Contraction 27

A commemorative postcard, celebrating the return of territory, shows Admiral Horthy’s triumphant entry into Komarno on 6 November 1938. Postcard in author’s collection.

bank, and military engineers immediately built a pontoon bridge connecting Győr to the other side, both to facilitate the movement of occupying troops and to open commercial and personal access. Győr, the larger of the two towns, eventually won the competition for a permanent bridge: the 361-metre steel bridge, built between Vámosszabadi in post-Trianon Hungary and Medve on the northern side, was formally opened in March 1943. In the hyperbolic mode of expansionist Hungarian rhetoric, the bridge became ‘splendid proof of the Hungarian will to live and its high degree of technical knowledge.’ A ferry continued to connect Mosonmagyaróvár to the new acquisitions.4 Triumphant celebrations of the movement of the border northward swept through the border area. They started in Hegyeshalom on November 5 when

28

Hungarian Borderlands

the Hungarian delegation came back from signing the award, hit dramatic heights in Komárom on the next day, and spread through Hungarian towns on both sides of the Danube as the occupation took place. Sunday, November 6, the big day, began with the movement of troops from Győr, crossing the river by rowboat and motor launch and on the pontoon bridge at Vámosszabadi, with delirious flag-waving Hungarians on both sides of the river cheering, singing the national anthem, throwing flowers at the troops, and embracing each other and the soldiers. Hungarian radio transmitted the entire proceeding live, including the issue at 10:07 a.m. of the order to cross the river to the first army units over the bridge, and military aircraft flew over the festive throngs. For those who did not have radios, the cameras of the state film office rolled, producing newsreels that later thrilled crowds in cinemas throughout the country. In Komárom, eight minutes after the crossing started to the west at Vámosszabadi, a Hungarian soldier with a hammer removed the sign for the Czech customs office, and then took down the post on which it had been nailed. In Komarno, as the Czechs called their portion of the city on the north side of the river, people stayed quietly at home until Czech authorities withdrew and the actual crossing started. Finally a Hungarian police car arrived across the bridge. Once sure that the Czechs were gone, the Hungarian residents brought out their flags and erupted into song. Then at eleven the main occupying force marched over, with flowers in their caps, on their rifles and in their button holes, taking with them, according to an elated newspaper reporter, a thousand years of love and pride. Never in the history of the world, this extravagant account asserted, had there been such a celebration. Admiral Horthy himself, on a white horse, joined the celebration, riding into town on a carpet of flowers. Horthy’s remarks were about Hungarian suffering become Hungarian joy. He made no effort to moderate or balance the euphoria. There was no magnanimous gesture, no Lincolnesque appeal for ‘malice toward none and charity toward all.’ By the middle of November, Hungarian soldiers and gendarmes spread throughout the towns of Northern Hungary and the occupation was complete. The triumphalism that marked this success would remain the hallmark of the numerous changes in borders as Hungary expanded at the turn of the 1940s. On November 11, Admiral Horthy made his grand entrance into Kassa (Kosice), the crown jewel among the retaken towns. In front of an audience that included Lord Rothermere and all the members of the Hungarian parliament, Horthy passed through a huge bunting-covered gate bearing the traditional Hungarian welcome Isten Hozott – God brought you. During his speech, he made a rare conciliatory gesture, reading aloud in halting Slovak his assurance that the Slovak minority would be permitted free use of their language, but Hungarians in general were in no mood to be gracious. Most of Horthy’s countrymen, like those waving ‘On to Transylvania’ signs and German flags in the cheering throngs at Kassa, thought mainly about more acquisitions and expansion. The day after the



Expansion and Contraction 29

Kassa parade, the Hungarian parliament voted to incorporate the Felvidék into Hungary.5 Germany was the key to grabbing more territory. On December 20, Foreign Minister István Csáky acknowledged as much, giving effusive thanks to Germany and Italy for the Vienna Award and outlined its consequences for the near future: ‘Hungarian foreign policy … adheres with unshakable fidelity to the Axis powers … The experience of the recent past has shown that the co-operation of the Axis Powers is a firm foundation for world peace based on justice.’ The reacquisition went a long way towards guaranteeing Hungarian loyalty to the Axis.6 Overt Hungarian anti-Semitism also made its way north across the Komárom bridge. In December ‘Christian Store’ signs began to appear on non-Jewish establishments in Komarno, while Jewish merchants swept up the glass from their broken windows. But it was not just Hungarian bigotry, although by then Hungary had already passed a law limiting the number of Jews in virtually all white-collar employment anywhere in Hungary. The Kristallnacht rampage against Jews and their property had swept through Germany barely a month earlier, coincident with the reoccupation. Irredentism was in the air, as ethnic Germans – the Volksdeutsch – also started to flex their muscles and imagine a future in which they too could ride Nazi coat tails to glory. Now the Slovaks and the Czechs, smarting over the losses of the Sudetenland to Germany and the Felvidék to Hungary, also became irredentists and revisionists. All of their hatreds intersected at loathing of Jews. As Alfred Engle, historian of one of the towns that reverted to Hungarian control, wrote, ‘Hell started to stir at autumn’s end.’7 Hell stirred as well on the Slovak side of the new border. With the Hungarian occupation forces scheduled to arrive on Sunday, November 6, Czech officials departed quietly on November 5. On that day, members of the Hlinka Guard, the military arm of the dominant Slovak political organization, rounded up between 3,000 and 4,000 Jews from Pozsony, Nagyszombat, and other towns on the Slovak side of the new border, crammed them on buses and trains, and shipped them to Dunaszerdahely just north of the Danube on the Hungarian side, and to other towns just over the new border, where they dumped them. In Dunaszerdahely, this caused a local humanitarian crisis as the Jewish community scrambled to find shelter and food for the displaced people. At least there was a Jewish community to come to their aid. Elsewhere the Hungarians put the refugees back across the border, into a country where their property had already been confiscated and they had nothing. This episode served as a reminder that for some things the border meant nothing, and that Slovaks and Hungarians agreed on their hatred of the Jews in their midst. Certainly any hope that things might be different on the Hungarian side were dispelled in Dunaszerdahely on Monday, when a wave of vandalism that preceded the German Kristallnacht by two days swept through the town, resulting in the pillage of Jewish stores. After the fury spent itself, the Gendarmerie showed up and restored order.8

30

Hungarian Borderlands Table 3.1╇ ’Hell started to stir at autumn’s end’

November 2–12 Nov. 2 First Vienna Award signed, Belvedere Palace Nov. 5 Slovak Hlinka Guard dumps Jews across new Hungarian border Nov. 6 Military occupation of Felvidék starts Nov. 7 Anti-Jewish vandalism in Dunaszerdahely Nov. 9–10 Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany Nov. 11 Admiral Horthy’s grand entrance to Kassa Jewish actor Oszkár Beregi forbidden to perform Shylock soliloquy, Goldmark Hall, near Dohány Street synogogue, Budapest Nov. 12 Hungarian parliament incorporates Felvidék into Hungary

In the villages that were incorporated into Hungary, not everyone was thrilled. The change of regime brought severe economic consequences, because Hungary was visibly less developed and prosperous than Czechoslovakia, ‘a more feudalistic and reactionary country,’ one historian called it, ‘with a lower standard of living, primitive social services, and negligible land reform.’ Not long after the euphoria came the reality reflected by the rhyme heard around the region – ‘Minden drága; vissza Prága’ – ‘Everything’s expensive; bring back Prague.’ For villages such as Nagypaka, Kispaka, and Csukarpaka, all tiny settlements near the town of Somorja, problems were acute. Now they were in Hungary and the main market for their crafts and produce remained in Czechoslovakia and would soon to be in the new Slovak Republic, an ‘authoritarian and xenophobic’ state that remained an extremely loyal ally of the Third Reich until the end of the war.9 Hard times were ahead, especially without bridges to Győr and the other towns across the river. When the 4th Honvéd Infantry Regiment’s 1st battalion marched into the three villages, they passed through the triumphal bowers that typically greeted the occupiers, and the overwhelmingly Hungarian residents were sincere in their welcome. In fact, some got a little carried away and attacked the Czechs, Slovaks and Moravians among them, convincing them in this blunt way to pack up and depart.10 The local history says nothing about attacks on Jews, but they may also have occurred, and those who would have borne the brunt of such attacks in Kispaka – if they took place – would have been members of the only Jewish family among them, the Schuberts. The last Hungarian census of Kispaka, taken in 1910, listed three of the 161 residents as ‘Izraelita’, rather than Magyar. They were Zsigmund and Julia Schubert and their three-year-old son Miksa, who became my father. They only stayed about a decade, before moving to Vác, a little up the Danube from Budapest, but some Schuberts remained there at the time of the reoccupation. My father was almost thirteen years old when the treaty was signed at Trianon. He was still a Hungarian citizen, but after 1920 his birthplace was in Czechoslovakia. Then came the reoccupation and absorption of Kispaka and its vicinity in November 1938. My father, clerking in a store in Budapest and



Expansion and Contraction 31

married two years, decided that it was time to leave and went to the American consulate. He was not denied a visa. He was told that he was eligible to enter the US, the annual quota of 869 was full, and that his number would come up in perhaps four years. So he might have reached the top of the list at the end of 1943, in the middle of the war, when the US no longer had representatives in Budapest, Hungarian Jews were wearing yellow stars, and thousands of Jewish men my father’s age had already toiled and died in Hungarian slave labour battalions in Russia and Ukraine. (The time of deportations to death camps did not arrive in Hungary until the following summer.) The American vice-consul in Budapest, H. F. Cunningham, Jr, looking at my father’s papers, told him there was another way. He was born in Kispaka, in the area just absorbed by Hungary, an occupation that the United States did not recognize as valid. During the late 1930s, the United States did pay attention to Central Europe, mainly the problem of aggressive German expansionism, the future of Czechoslovakia and the situation in Poland. It also took some notice of Romania and its vulnerabilities to the Soviet Union. The US seemed less interested in Hungarian affairs, but took a position on the annexation of the Felvidék. It never recognized the validity of this acquisition or the subsequent ones.11 As far as the US was concerned, my father was born in Czechoslovakia, and thanks to H. F. Cunningham, he received number 1390 on the Czech quota of 2,874. My mother carried number 1391. As far as the US was concerned, the Vienna Award, which had been signed on my father’s thirty-first birthday, was irrelevant. My parents left Hungary on 18 January 1939. This is the fateful level on which these border changes could matter. The shifts in borders and the international response to them, whether they were recognized or not, could determine a family’s chances of survival. For Christians as well as Jews, the borders shaped everyday life, the language used in schools, access to a doctor or a veterinarian, or a place to sell your pottery or produce, whether a farmer whose house was on one side of the border could till his field on the other side, how much tax a resident paid and to whom. Some more routine local-border issues were resolved in an agreement with the Slovak Republic in November 1939, and amplified in the following spring.12 The life and death issues remained: Jews on the Slovakian side of the border were deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Those on the Hungarian side were spared a little longer, under ever-more restrictive circumstances until 1944.

Kárpátalja (Trans-Carpathian Ukraine) Three more territorial grabs followed the triumphant return to Northern Hungary. The first resulted from military action in March 1939. Hungary occupied sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, the easternmost portion of Czechoslovakia which had just declared its independence a day earlier as Carpatho-Ukraine, at the same time that Germany occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and Slovakia declared its independence. This slightly larger acquisition (12,000 square

32

Hungarian Borderlands

kilometres) reestablished a direct Hungarian–Polish border, breaking the jealous and hostile circle of successor states that surrounded Hungary.13 The German invasion in September of that year took Poland off the map, but about 100,000 Poles managed to flee through historically friendly Hungary to Yugoslavia and ultimately the West.

Erdély (Transylvania) The next acquisition, the result of the Second Vienna Award of 30 August 1940, was the largest and most avidly sought: the return of a large portion of Transylvania, with its vast resources and special place in Hungarian history. Although diplomats from Romania and Hungary signed off on the transfer at the Belvedere, the deal represented a German effort to placate the Hungarians while not completely alienating the Romanians, both of whom were important to stabilizing the Third Reich’s eastern flank, and neither of whom was in a compromising mood. The Hungarians still declared their adamant opposition to the 1920 losses with ‘No! No! Never!’, and the Romanians responded to the possibility of returning territory to Hungary with a slogan of their own, ‘Not a furrow!’ The transfer of territory came as a result of Adolf Hitler’s direct intervention. Hitler knew that any division of territory would leave one side howling in outrage, but that division of Transylvania would probably leave both sides aggrieved. Discussions took place in Vienna, but he saw to the division himself, and the foregone conclusion satisfied neither side. The Romanians bitterly resented Hitler’s decision and called it a diktat, a dictated surrender, echoing the Hungarian characterization of the treaty that had awarded Transylvania to Romania in the first place. The reacquired northern portion, 43,000 square kilometres, amounted to almost half of what had been lost, and had more than 2.2 million residents. The dividing line between northern (Hungarian) and southern (Romanian) Transylvania was more or less straight, except for a gerrymander that came to be known as ‘Goering’s belly.’ A friend of the field marshal owned a sodium carbonate factory at Marosújvár, north of the proposed line, but his main source of natural gas was at Kissármás south of the line. He rushed to Vienna in time to arrange for the line to go around his properties and leave them intact south of the border. Another celebratory train ride capped the signing of the Second Vienna Award for the Hungarian delegation. The crowds cheered and waved at Hegyeshalom, just as they had done in 1938, but there was a big difference this time. Prime Minister Pál Teleki did not wave back. An internationally respected geographer, Teleki shared the values of his generation, its anti-Semitism and irredentism. He had ridden Hitler’s coat tails to another return of traditional Hungarian lands, a diplomatic success that thrilled his countrymen. Yet he sensed that the war to which Hungary was committing itself as Germany’s ally was unwinnable and would spell disaster for Hungary. Depressed about



Expansion and Contraction 33

the alignment with Germany, what it might cost Hungary, and prospects for the future, he did not show his face at the train window. When he got home, he offered his resignation but stayed on at Horthy’s insistance.14 Horthy meanwhile sent a thank-you note to Hitler, a letter both ‘exuberant’ and ‘obsequious,’ in which he promised Hitler to remember always ‘his proof of friendship.’15 Admiral Horthy believed the movement of Hungary’s frontiers to the Carpathians served justice and European civilization, allowing Hungary to fill its traditional role as defender of the West against eastern barbarian hordes, now personified by Soviet Communists. Horthy, besotted with this idea for twenty years, enjoyed his greatest moment of triumph, leading the first troops across the border and into Szatmárnémeti (Satu Mare) before a delirious crowd on September 5, then going on to review the troops in the region’s largest city, Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca), on September 15.16 The returned territory was not everything, but it was a lot, and Hungarian joy far surpassed any disappointment at not getting it all back. Almost the entire army participated in the occupation, which was stage-managed for maximum visual effect. In all the bigger towns, from Nagyvárad (Oradea) on the edge of the Hungarian plain all the way to Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mures) at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, the flower-bedecked arches and the ‘Isten hozott’ signs went up, the troops marched in, and the cameras rolled. For ten days, from September 5 to September 15, the celebrations continued as the occupying battalions fanned out over the region. In addition to the speeches, folk costumes and Hungarian colours, the festivities regularly included the display of Nazi flags and salutes, sometimes with huge protraits of Hitler and Mussolini hanging from buildings along parade routes, public acknowledgement of the central role of Germany in making possible the great day.17 The reoccupation of Transylvania had few hints of the conciliatory gestures Horthy had made in Kassa. The Hungarian government in the Felvidék made significant concessions to Slovak sentiment and, with German encouragement, the occupiers and the government of the new Slovak republic that had also been carved out of Czechoslovakia seemed to get along. The Hungarians accommodated the nationalism of younger Slovaks, who were energized by the creation of the new Slovak state, by permitting a Slovak newspaper and Slovak schools.18 Things could still get a little goofy on the Slovak side of the line, such as when Christmas brought ‘a grand outburst of rage in the Slovak press against the Magyar minority, which, it was said, had been indulging in irredentist gestures by burning green Christmas candles’, but this was not the norm.19 In Transylvania, on the other hand, intolerance was everywhere, complete with enough mutual atrocity, viciousness and stupidity to satisfy connoisseurs of such things. With an eye to future peace negotiations and international opinion, the Hungarians published a 143-page inventory of Romanian atrocities since 1918, in English, French, German and Italian, while the Romanians

34

Hungarian Borderlands

counted 919 people dead at the hands of Hungarians in the course of the occupation. There were mutual rumours of atrocities. In Kolozsvár, Hungarians heard that the Romanians had brutally killed all the Magyars in Torda; in Torda, the word was that the Hungarians had killed and decapitated an Orthodox priest in Kolozsvár, as well as cut off the noses and ears of Romanians. Neither was true. One Hungarian historian, still keeping score in 2010, wrote that Romanians were responsible for 50 atrocities, Hungarians for 22, and at least two cases numbered more than 150 victims. Public schools taught only in Hungarian, just as they had conducted classes only in Romanian since Trianon, and exclusively in Hungarian during the days of the empire. Now, like Hungarians under Romanian rule, Romanian students could choose to learn the language of the dominant group or stay at home. As a Hungarian teacher in Marosvásárhely recalled, ‘They [the Romanians] were not regarded as human beings. Although they did not know our language, they had to attend Hungarian schools – or none at all – which usually meant none at all.’ The mutual hatred was indeed visceral.20 Although both Hungary and Romania were allied with the Third Reich and both followed the Germans into the war with the Soviet Union, in Transylvania there was no trace of friendship in their relationship. Each desired to keep substantial numbers of their national groups in the other’s territory as the basis for future claims, in Hungary’s case to expand into the portion retained by Romania and in Romania’s case to get back what had just been lost. But that restraining factor was not enough to keep them from pursuing policies that Holly Case called ‘reciprocating slights.’ More like reciprocal viciousness than ‘slights,’ the vengeful approaches of both states tolerated discrimination against members of the other community, codified it, restricted employment options, and conscripted minority men for forced labour. Both sides also criminalized insults to their respective nations, something that tended to happen late at night, in taverns or on the way home from taverns. They assured that whatever the outcome of the war, bitterness between the two countries would continue.21

Délvidék (Southern Hungary) The fourth and final territorial expansion did not require a diplomatic charade in Vienna. It came at the expense of Yugoslavia after the GermanHungarian invasion of 11 April 1941 destroyed the country and split it into two main elements, German-occupied Serbia and a friendly fascist state in Croatia. Portions of each were occupied and reabsorbed by Hungary. As a result another 11,500 square kilometres and 1.25 million people found themselves on the Hungarian side of the border. Leaflets issued by joyful revisionists who signed themselves as the ‘Budapest-Rome-Berlin Funeral Company,’ identical to those broadsides printed for the earlier occupations of the Felvidék and Transylvania, announced the demise of Yugoslavia, a country that ‘passed away



Expansion and Contraction 35

after 23 feeble years.’22 A real funeral had taken place before the invasion began. Prime Minister Teleki, already brooding over the implications of the alliance with Germany, was appalled that Hungary had run roughshod over a treaty of friendship with Yugoslavia that was barely three months old. On April 2, he went to his office, locked the door and killed himself.23 This occupation differed significantly from the earlier three. First of all, it was the result of force. The army’s marching orders as it entered Serbia made it clear that this phase would be marked by deportations, internments and summary vengeance. The initial administration was military, and there was sporadic armed resistance, but not enough to justify the severity of the Hungarian occupation. The Yugoslav army vanished southward during the first week, blowing up bridges as it left, and surrendered on April 17. The Hungarian generals knew they faced no concerted opposition. However, every Serb, Communist and Jew was considered a potential enemy partisan. The Hungarians, driven by fear of guerilla resistance that would never amount to much, killed more than 3,000 Serbs in a ‘pacification’ campaign on 17–18 April, ‘compared to 126 Hungarian officers and enlisted men lost during the invasion’, and the occupation ultimately resulted in the largest and best known atrocity committed by Hungarian armed forces – the round-up and massacre of about 3,000 Serbs and Jews in Újvidék (Novi Sad) during January 1942.24 The Hungarian population of the newly occupied area, mindful of what had happened to them when they found themselves living in post-World War I Yugoslavia and wary of something similar taking place in the near future, was not universally ecstatic about the return of Hungarian governance.25 The flag-waving jubilation that marked earlier occupations did not always materialize. As in the other newly acquired lands, the Hungarians arrived with scores to settle. When they returned in 1941 they saw an opportunity to restore the old situation, or at least tilt the demographic balance back in that direction, by emptying the Délvidek, the southern country, of all who had entered and taken up residence after 31 October 1918. The underlying rationale was prevention of a second Trianon settlement, with its stated emphasis on ethnic selfdetermination. Packing the area with Hungarians and removing Slavs would anchor the Délvidék irrevocably in Hungary. Embarking on a round of dispossession, internment, and deportation of Slav settlers, the Hungarians gave the assurance that if the Slavs again got the upper hand, they would again reply in kind. It is no wonder that not all Magyars in the occupied region were in a celebratory mood. One of the first projects involved dispossession of the dobrovóljac settlers – ‘the men of good will’ – and their forcible removal back to the south. This was not an easy task. At first the Hungarian occupiers repeated the Yugoslav approach in the early 1920s. They rounded up the dobrovóljac and started to dump them across the border, but protests from commanders of forces in Serbia and Croatia ended the practice. In 1942 there were already 300,000 refugees and displaced people in Serbia. The Germans who had occupied

36

Hungarian Borderlands

Serbia were not interested in accepting additional Serbian settlers, particularly a group of army veterans.26 Another effort to alter the ethnic balance was the importation of Magyars to the Délvidék. Thousands of Csángó people from northern Moldova and Szeklers from Bukovina were recruited to take up residence hundreds of miles from their traditional villages. Some Szeklers declined, saying they did not want to live among Romanians. But substantial numbers came, for the discounted land, tax incentives, military assistance and free tools. The Magyar peasants and farm workers who were already there grumbled about a new privileged class, which they sometimes referred to as Magyar Â�dobrovoljácok, the Hungarian equivalent of the ‘men of good will’ brought in by the Yugoslavs.27 The occupation of the slice of Croatia between the Dráva and Mura rivers represented a delicate situation. Croatia was an ally, also committed to the German cause, so expansion to the south was done quietly, without large public celebration. Hungary claimed it accepted the Dráva as the state border and that it only assumed administrative control over lands to the south. Moreover, there were no attempts at large-scale internments or population movements, the Croatian language was allowed in official transactions, and some Croatian newspapers were allowed to continue publishing.28 Had the Hungarian military command had its way, the shuffling of populations that took place would have been merely the beginning. The army chief of staff, General Henrik Werth, who was born in southern Hungary near the confluence of the Tisza and the Danube, had commanded ground forces since September 1938, and remained in the job through all four reoccupations, until dismissed in September 1941 for excessively pro-German views. He saw the German victory in Yugoslavia as presenting the opportunity for ethnic rearrangement on a grand scale. In the Délvidék he had in mind as a first step the removal of 150,000 Serbs, and ultimately all Serbs, Romanians and Jews, some eight million people. The prime minister at the time, László Bárdossy, considered Werth’s vision fantastical, and told Horthy the project would create chaos in the Carpathian basin. Moreover, it was inconceivable that the Germans, had they been victorious, would have allowed Hungary so free a hand in the entire Carpathian basin.29 The changes that actually took place between 1938 and 1941 were much more modest, but amounted to a significant acquisition of territory and large numbers of people. It included almost half the territory lost after World War I, along with nearly half the population. The entire expansion of 1938–1941 involved 79,000 square kilometres and 4.6 million people, causing Hungary’s population to grow from nine million to 13.6 million, and its territory from about 93,000 square kilometres to nearly 171,000. Germany, the primary force behind the changes, got a lot from Hungary in exchange, in agricultural and industrial production, as well as political good will and military support.



Expansion and Contraction 37

Occupation, Defeat and Contraction As substantial as the acquisitions were, they took place without Hungary having to fight even a major skirmish. But the butcher’s bill finally became due. Just after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the Hungarians joined them. On June 26, a surprise air attack on the city of Kassa, apparently by Soviet aircraft but possibly orchestrated by the Germans as a way to pull Hungary into the war, killed 26 civilians. Hungary declared war on June 27, and the first Hungarian units crossed into the USSR on the next day, apparently en route to an easy victory. At the end of 1941, Admiral Horthy could take great satisfaction in the progress of the war. He had long seen Hungary as a bastion against Communism and firmly believed in the need to destroy it. Now his army was involved in exactly that. Things did not turn out well, however, and by the end of September 1944, a Hungarian delegation was in Moscow trying to negotiate a way out of a devastating war. They got the bad news: any peace settlement would require a withdrawal to pre-1938 frontiers.30 By then the Germans, weary of Hungary’s increasing ambivalence about a war that was going badly, had occupied the country. Just two weeks after Hungary’s negotiators got the bad news from the Russians, the Germans packed Horthy on a train and sent him into captivity. He had been through Hegyeshalom earlier that year, in March, bound for a conference with Hitler at Schloss Klessheim near Salzburg, after which he had returned to an occupied country. That trip had marked the beginning of the end for Hungary and for Horthy’s regency. By that time Hungary no longer controlled the border; Germany did. Horthy’s train sat on platform four, waiting for a trainload of German troops on leave to pass through the station. On the next day, after Horthy continued his journey, German troop trains with parts of an invading army went through in the opposite direction, heading for Budapest.31 In October, he saw Hegyeshalom for the last time. The train still stopped for the locomotives to be changed, but instead of cheering crowds, air-raid sirens greeted the deposed regent, travelling with his wife and daughter. It was, he said, ‘the saddest journey of my life.’32 The loss of sovereignty brought by the German occupation rippled through the borderlands. No sooner was the country occupied than armed German civilians in the Délvidék disarmed Hungarian gendarmes, with the help of German army units. In Újvidék, they took over public buildings. The German occupying authorities returned the firearms to the gendarmes. Hungarian authorities in Budapest could only tell their police in the south to be tactful and civil with the rambunctious Volksdeutsch. Although it was mid-1944 and the end was drawing near for the Third Reich and its various client states, the Croatian government saw the German occupation of Hungary as an opportunity rather than a harbinger of defeat and sought German help in wresting the occupied portion south of the Dráva from Hungary. By this time Germany had more pressing concerns than a detailed redrawing of the map of southern Europe.33

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Hungarian Borderlands

On all fronts Hungarian withdrawals were as painful as the expansion had been joyous. Generally they started in 1944, as the Russian army bore down on Hungary. The end came in the early spring of 1945. With nearly one million of its citizens – soldiers, Jews and other civilians – dead, Budapest practically levelled by a long and bloody siege, and many thousands of refugees pouring in from Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, Hungary in defeat was almost as battered as Germany itself. Demographically, economically and politically it faced its own ‘Stunde Null’ or zero hour. At that moment, Hungary resembled a historical-geographical concept rather than an extant social-political entity.34 At the end, Hungary was back within its old borders, minus the additional losses of three small villages along the Danube – Dunacsún, Horvátjárfalu, and Oroszvár – to the Czechs. Nearly 400,000 people – 134,000 from Romania, 119,000 from Czechoslovakia and 66,000 from Yugoslavia – either chose to return to Hungary to avoid being stranded as minorities in revenge-minded neighbouring countries or were compelled to go back. The population exchange with the Czechs, carried out in accordance with a treaty in February 1946, also sent 60,000 to 70,000 or so Slovaks north from Hungary. Most of those who left did so as homeless refugees, travelling in less comfort than Admiral Horthy. Their expulsion echoed that of a similar number who had left lands ceded to successor states after Hungary’s defeat in 1918. At least some of those who returned after World War II found homes in the residences vacated by about 200,000 ethnic Germans, driven out of Hungary to make their own sad way to a forced resettlement in Germany. Those who had given their sons to the SS as volunteers, and had had laurel wreaths painted on the walls of their houses as signs of their contributions to the war effort, were lucky to get out alive. Others were again forced to find shelter in railway cars.35 These movements were part of a sweeping process of realignment of populations and borders that made General Werth’s wildest dreams seem halting and tentative. ‘Mass mobility projects’ historian Adam McKeown called them. They may, as a Romanian scholar has suggested, have been ‘a common practice since the Balkan wars,’ but they were certainly significant after World War I and ubiquitous after World War II. The twentieth century abounded in examples – one million Armenians expelled from Turkey, even larger population exchanges between the collapsed Ottoman empire and some of its former constituents, and in 1944–1948 a staggering total of more than 30,000,000 people, among them liberated slave labourers and demobilized soldiers, fleeing, relocating, resettling and being deported and repatriated. Between 1944 and 1946, the Soviet Union shuffled about one million Poles and Ukrainians between Poland and Ukraine. In Yugoslavia, the government labelled more than half a million Germans collectively as fascists, and drove them out. A total of twelve million Germans lost their homes and were forced to move, including 3.5 million in Czechoslovakia and 7.8 million in Poland, as Polish borders shifted westward. Around half of the 450,000 ethnic Germans in Hungary, estimated variously at from 175,000 to 260,000, were actually forced to leave their homes, although the Potsdam Treaty required all of them to



Expansion and Contraction 39

be returned to Germany. Swept up in the result of a terrible war supposedly fought on their behalf, and then the decision of the victors to impose border changes and approve deportations, Timothy Snyder wrote, ‘these Germans were not victims of a calculated Stalinist killing policy comparable to the Terror or the famine.’ Indeed, it could be added that they were not victims of a genocide comparable to the Nazi murder of millions of Jewish Europeans.36 Their fate was harsh, but far from singular. The most extraordinary deportation of Germans from Hungary took place in Sopron. Only a quarter of a century had passed since the town had voted to stay in Hungary rather than accept a redrawn border that would put it in German-speaking Austria. In twenty-four days from April 23 to May 16, 1946, more than 12,000 of its 42,000 residents boarded twelve freight trains destined for Wurttemburg, Bavaria and Hesse in Germany. Among them must have been residents who had voted to stay in Hungary along with their progeny, people who had made a commitment to Hungary and helped keep the city in the country.37 Now the country turned its back on them. Europe was engaged in a massive sorting out along ethnic and national lines that peaked in the years immediately after the war.38 A great deal of this ongoing adjustment involved rearrangement of borders and restrictive immigration laws, as well as pogroms, forced and voluntary population transfers and mass murder. The whole thing, as István Deák shrewdly noted, raises significant questions about Europe’s ability to absorb large-scale inward migrations, such as the many thousands of Muslim guest workers from Turkey and elsewhere later in the century.39 In fact the huge scope of these relocations raises questions beyond German Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s 2010 declaration that multiculturalism had failed, to whether it in fact ever had a chance to succeed.40 The major post-war European border adjustments that accompanied these large-scale migrations did not involve Hungary except for the return to pre-war borders. Otherwise changes were trivial. The victorious Allies allowed the Czechs to take another small bite from the northwestern corner of the country. It did not amount to much, just forty-three square miles of territory and three villages across the Danube from Bratislava that the Czechs claimed were strategically necessary. The border, once at Dévény and then at Oroszvár, receded another four kilometres to Rajka, which added insult to the injury of losing another devastating war.41 Table 3.2╇╇ Expansion and Contraction in the twentieth Century



Historical Hungary 283,000 square kilometres Post-Trianon Hungary ╇ 93,000 square kilometres Hungary in 1941 172,000 square kilometres Post-war Hungary ╇ 93,000 square kilometres

This severe defeat at the hands of a horde from the East left Hungary without the slightest possibility of taking up its self-appointed mission as the

40

Hungarian Borderlands

eastern bastion of European civilization. Yet the identification of Hungarians with the Carpathian basin persisted for generations, even into the twenty-first century. On an overnight train from Romania in the pre-dawn hours of April 2000, a Hungarian big game guide fresh from a bear hunt in the Carpathians explained the situation between gulps of pear pálinka. Hungarians, he said, should not trouble with learning foreign languages merely to be understood by outsiders. Others should learn Hungarian. His reason? The Carpathian basin was the soul of world culture. And he left no doubt that the basin was Hungarian. Four years later, also in April and in the western foothills of the Carpathians, an ethnic Hungarian Protestant minister made the same point to a tour group from Budapest. Stabbing his finger at the peaks that were just over his shoulder to the East, he declared that the edge of Europe was twentyeight kilometres away. That put the edge of Europe right in the middle of Romania, but more importantly it put that edge at the limits of pre-Trianon Hungary. Overall, the sad period of 1938–1945 saw the borders change again and again, with scores settled and new grudges provoked, only for new resentments to emerge and for subsequent rounds of revenge. Minorities were abused, became majorities, and turned on their abusers. Not just the borders shifted back and forth; people by the tens of thousands were convinced or forced to move, resettled voluntarily or against their will, because of their ethnicity. Collective punishment put people by the thousands into railway cars for unwanted trips across borders. None of this outrage rose to the level of the brutality visited on the Jews and the Roma for whom the railway trucks went to death camps, but it left its victims displaced and pauperized all over central Europe. The period also demonstrated that boundary changes meant much more than the movement of lines. The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ had not been coined. Nevertheless, national and ethnic cleansing by internment, confiscation and removal accompanied the border shifts. Even when people were allowed to stay, other forms of ‘cleansing’ took place. Political cleansing involved removal of public officials and closing options to citizenship; the cultural variety was manifest in language requirements for official transactions, education and newspapers. Hungarian reacquisitions were not merely about adjusting borders or a return to historical boundaries, although irredentism was usually expressed in these terms. They were about marking out and making permanent their ownership, undoing land distribution, remaking schools, dominating public institutions, putting names back on the land, and of course moving populations. There were differences between the reacquisitions, but they were all about dominance, and they all failed. The period started and ended the same way, with Hungary defeated, forced behind confining reduced boundaries, emphasizing memories of its victimhood, and obscuring its history as perpetrator. Most importantly, perhaps, 1944–1945, like 1920 for the successor states and 1938–1941 for Hungary, represented opportunities to take transfers of territory in one of two directions, to impose a hegemonic vengeful regime



Expansion and Contraction 41

or to establish a tolerant civic culture in which all groups could participate on an equal basis. In each case the victors chose the former course and a layer was added to the list of mutual historic grievances. Regionally, the exhaustion of war and the establishment and entrenchment of Communist regimes, with their hard and lethal borders, precluded any effort to address this longstanding hostility and anger among neighbours. They did end the wartime madness, if only to establish a new form of insanity.

Part II

Bordering on Insanity: Hungarian Borders 1945–1989

‘If I am ever required to be a refugee, I hope I make it to Austria.’ – James Michener, The Bridge at Andau. ‘Those son-of-bitches border guards … THEY WERE NOT SANTA CLAUS!’ – Peter Hahner, historian, 2008.

Chapter 4

Before the Iron Curtain

A wave of wall building reminiscent of the great imperial projects of antiquity accompanied the emergence of a global confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. There were a handful of precedents for the Soviet undertaking in twentieth century Europe, most notably the pre-World War II French Maginot Line, which one author, in a direct reference to Chinese antiquity, called ‘the Great Wall of France.’ Fearing a repetition of the German invasion of 1914, the French tried to fortify their eastern border against another onslaught. The massive result, named for Andre Maginot, who served during 1928–1931 first as Minister of Veteran Affairs and then as Minister of War, was a line of concrete fortifications, tank traps, machine gun emplacements and other defences, ultimately 700 kilometres (almost 440 miles) long, with a price tag of about three billion francs. The largest forts had networks of munitions storage, medical facilities, showers, barracks and kitchens, as well as electricity-generating equipment, repair workshops, rooms to neutralize gas-contaminated air, command posts, and roads for trucks carrying ammunition, all 30 to 40 metres below ground. The network was finished by 1935 in plenty of time for the invading Germans in 1940 to bypass the whole thing with attacks via Holland and Belgium and through the supposedly impassable Ardennes forest. The line remained intact, not to mention irrelevant. Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Greece, Romania, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia built similar but less spectacular and more obscure systems. As the author of a detailed study of the Hungarian variant observed, ‘Permanent fortification systems built deep in the frontier zones were the basic lines of the state fortifications in Europe between the two World Wars.’1 French engineers still poured concrete and ran electrical wires through their network of forts, bunkers and tunnels when the film ‘King Kong’ hit the silver screen. With Fay Wray screaming in the clutches of the beast and airplanes buzzing around the Empire State Building to distract audiences, it was easy to forget that King Kong’s rampage began when he burst through the wall that the villagers had erected across Skull Island, separating themselves from this biggest, hairiest and scariest ‘other.’ The horror film, set in Depression-era America and released in March 1933, concerned film producer Bruce Denham’s successful effort to bring the giant gorilla to New York City and the consequences. The director used a ‘wall’ left over from

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Hungarian Borderlands

Cecil B. De Mille’s 1927 film King of Kings, but the barrier could just as well have been modeled on the seventeenth-century palisades built to protect Williamsburg, Virginia, or Manhattan Island.2 Even before the Maginot Line faced its wartime test, the one on Skull Island failed, unleashing the (invited) barbarian in our terrified midst. But whatever the Maginot Line failed to do, it presaged a post-war period in which massive and complex barrier systems marked state borders. The concentration and death camps of Nazi Germany provided an immediate precedent for Cold War barriers. This vast network of incarceration, exploitation and industrialized murder isolated and destroyed ‘the other’ who lived on the inside. Its connection to the cold-war period that followed lay in the technology of the construction and maintenance of impermeable perimetres. The widespread use of barbed wire strung on precast concrete poles, augmented by lethal electric fences, dogs trained to viciousness, searchlights and mined death strips, all backed by soldiers with instructions to shoot to kill, meant there was no shortage of people in post-war Europe versed in the techniques of wall building. Hungarians prefer not to link the death camps and Cold War border barriers, because they tended to support the Nazis and loathe the Communists, but Sculptor Attila F. Kovács, who avoided the use of barbed wire in designing a Budapest Iron Curtain memorial in 2009, recognized this connection when he said, ‘I did not want to use barbed wire: its symbolism these days is linked more to the concentration camps, yet the original border fence was made of it. Maybe it is not by chance that it separated [us] similarly to a camp (lager), and its physical appearance as well as its symbolic meaning represent the mental and physical closure of the country.’3 In the second half of the 1930s, the Germans built the Siegfried Line or West Wall facing France. Then during the war they constructed the Atlantic Wall to enclose and protect their conquests in western Europe from seaborne assault, as well as the East Wall in eastern Austria facing the Russians advancing through Hungary towards the end of the war, what the Hungarians called the Margit Line. This was preceded by an unsuccessful Hungarian effort to halt the Soviets at the Carpathian Mountains with the long massive barrier known as the Árpád Line. The Árpád Line, consisting mainly of strong concrete fortifications straddling mountain passes, mobile troops covering the territory between the strongpoints, and reserve forces poised to react at points of attack, stretched out over 600 kilometres of what are now Ukraine and Romania. The barriers were designed by Hungarian military engineers and built partly with slave labour, Jewish, Roma, and Romanian. This work force was not ideal, and one former lieutenant, writing from Cleveland, Ohio, more than half a century after the war, remembered that the Romanian forced labourers were ‘an unreliable gang’ whose use was ‘a serious mistake.’ Good slave labour was hard to find.4 This long barrier line was designed as a co-ordinated defence network against invasion and so, in the age of the airplane and highly mobile ground forces, was doomed to failure. The Soviets never breached the Árpad Line defences,



Before the Iron Curtain 47

which were so formidable that they earned praise from even the hypercritical Germans, but went around them and forced Hungarian and German forces to withdraw. Barriers confront attackers with questions regarding whether to go over, under, around or through them. In this case, the defenders forced the Soviets to choose ‘around’, and they did.5 The Carpathian defences, meant to withstand assault by modern ground forces, were much more durably constructed than the Iron Curtain that followed. Their physical traces have lasted much longer. Soviet forces destroyed some of the emplacements after the defenders fled. In Romania, the Ceausescu government ultimately demolished the majority of them, mainly in 1968, although they left the ruins. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, used them to lure tourists, and in the twenty-first century even started plans to convert some into lodgings.6 For Hungary, the line has sustained the myth of its role as defender of Europe against eastern hordes. The prevalence of barriers such as this, along with the enclosed concentration camps, ensured that Europe came out of World War II familiar with wall-building. Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians, Soviet nationals, and many others had ample familiarity and experience that could be used in designing, building and manning the barriers of the Soviet empire. The border barriers that became significant features on the European landscape during the Cold War differed significantly from those of ancient Rome and China. First of all, the modern walls were nearly all built along mutually accepted borders, unlike the walls of antiquity, which represented unilaterally delineated borders and self-imposed imperial limits. In addition, as British scholar Derek Williams noted, ‘The principal difference between twentieth- and first-century examples is that while modern Iron Curtain countries have something to hide from those inside, Rome had something to lose to those outside.’7 The walls built around Soviet-controlled Europe were designed primarily (but not exclusively) to imprison entire populations, rather than keep others out. This is not to say that regulation of migration had never focused on keeping people in. It is customary, almost a cliché, to look at the Cold War borders of the Soviet empire as aberrant, as if trying to keep people inside was extremely unusual. But it is far from strange. During long periods restrictive policies emphasized emigration over immigration, with more stringent exit controls than barriers against entry. In the period of mercantilist ascendancy, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, states considered population part of the national wealth that might be drained by emigration, which therefore had to be controlled. Slavery, serfdom and other arrangements that bound workers to their employers also curbed emigration, and states restricted the exit of people in trades thought necessary for national wellbeing. Even revolutionary France obstructed the departure of those considered essential to the state’s prosperity. As legal theorist Georg Friedrich von Martens wrote at the end of the eighteenth century, ‘One of the principal objects of police is to hinder the subjects from emigrating in too great numbers.’ Generally, whenever physical barriers

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Hungarian Borderlands

had been erected, even when primarily exclusionary and directed against barbarians beyond the gates, they had the effect of keeping people in as well as keeping people out. The Soviets made their imperial borders as impervious and deadly as a vicious regime with access to modern technology could, but conceptually barriers against departure were not new. What might be said to be new is the association of exit controls with particular repressive regimes, the Soviet Union in its time and more recently North Korea and Iran.8 The Cold War variant of the border wall imposed by the Soviet Union forced a crucial shift in the position of central Europe. The region’s states traditionally saw themselves as extensions and borderlands of the West, and the national myths of Poland, Hungary and Romania emphasized historical roles as defenders of western faiths and values against eastern barbarians. After World War II, the region’s geopolitical position was reversed, and it became the western extension of the Soviet East. Hungary, where the sense of belonging to the West remains strong, has seen itself as the West’s bastion against Tatars, Turks, and most recently Russians, particularly Russian Communists. After the failed revolution of 1956, James Michener’s Bridge at Andau introduced many Americans to this view of Hungary as having sacrificed much to fend off waves of Asian hordes and protect the West. In extolling the virtues of the Magyars, Michener almost lapsed into a view of them as noble savages, who ‘proved over a thousand years that if its loyalty could be enlisted in a reasonable cause, one could find no better men in Europe to have on one’s side than these unique, rugged descendants of the tribesmen from the Ural Mountains.’ However, at the end of the 1940s, Hungary faced about from its traditional role as a bulwark against the east. Its western border became the edge of an eastern Europe forcibly allied with and dominated by the Soviet Union.9 Communist political officers, assigned to border guard units beginning in the autumn of 1948, hammered home this point. In the 1960s, they still insisted their troops did not just defend the Hungarian border. They secured the perimetre of socialism.10 Maybe a few among the soldiers who heard these lectures recalled a line from Gyula Illyés’s poem ‘A Sentence about Tyranny’ of 1950: ‘worse than a barbed wire fence, the slogans devoid of sense’. The reversal from eastern edge of the West to western limit of the East had a special irony in Hungary. The government of Admiral Miklós Horthy had looked towards a rapidly fading past, with its titled land-owning aristocracy and knighted military heroes. Irredentist propaganda between the world wars, which had strongly anti-Semitic and anti-liberal as well as anti-Communist overtones, used wall imagery to characterize the constriction and confinement of the country by the Treaty of Trianon, portraying Hungary as surrounded by barriers built by hostile neighbours. Hungary’s mission to protect Western Christian Europe from eastern collectivist barbarism remained strong in those years and persisted into the Second World War. Horthy’s Honvédség (army) fought alongside Hitler’s Wehrmacht on the Russian front, battling for this vision of Europe, not questioning whether Germany was a worthy protector of the values of the Christian West, and imagining itself as fighting to fulfil



Before the Iron Curtain 49

Hungary’s role as its guardian, a role in which it failed.11 When it was over, Hungary, a land of paprika-laced stews and silky Tokaj wines, became, in William Vollmann’s words, ‘one of the new grey countries of Europe Central.’12

Chapter 5

The Stalin Era

The Cold War return to wall-building on an imperial scale resulted in the hardening and militarizing of a land border that stretched about 6,800 kilometres (more than 4,200 miles) from the Russian-Finnish border near the Arctic Ocean to the Balkans. All the satellites except Poland, which bordered on East Germany, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, had sections of the bloc’s external limits. East Germany faced the western part of the divided country; the Czechs shared borders with West Germany and Austria; and Hungary abutted Austria. Hungary, along with Romania and Bulgaria, also faced Yugoslavia, a socialist country under Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who refused to accept the leadership of Moscow, and broke free of the Soviet orbit. Tito preserved his country’s independence as the first ‘non-aligned’ country of the post-war period, and borders between Yugoslavia and its three Communist neighbours, all of whom had been enemies during the recent war, became hard, militarized, and in the early years of the Cold War sometimes violent and deadly as a result of tension with Moscow. In the months before alienation from Moscow caused the hardening of the borders, bad feelings and the terrible economic situation in the region meant that the border was anyway rarely crossed. In March 1947, for example, Hungarian authorities at Szeged reported a mere 570 road crossings, fewer than twenty per day. The trains that month carried only 76 passengers across the border, along with almost four times as many employees of the Hungarian state railway.1 Construction and maintenance of the Hungarian border section, later named by some after Communist party chairman Mátyás Rákosi as ‘Rákosi’s Maginot Line’,2 was an urgent priority imposed from the beginning by the Soviet Union. Unlike the imperial fortifications of the Romans, which had faced north and east, Soviet walls faced west and south. With missions assigned by the imperial power, soldiers and labourers of the satellite nations built their own prisons and paid the construction bills. The Romans had used legionaries of the imperial army for construction but deployed auxiliary soldiers recruited from faraway client states and provinces for duty manning the walls on European edges of the empire. Along the Soviet bloc barriers, soldiers and interior ministry troops of the satellites provided the patrols, serving in their own homelands, under their own flags, communicating in their own vernacular, and paid in local currency, but armed and clothed with obsolete Soviet equipment, trained to operate in accordance with Soviet practice, and



The Stalin Era 51

overseen by Soviet ‘advisers’ imbedded among them. Administratively they resembled the forces of sovereign nations, but operationally they had significant characteristics of native auxiliaries. They extended the Soviet military perimetre to the western limits of eastern Europe and isolated the empire from the outside world.3 Communist rhetoric claimed the sealed borders protected their citizens against vile external enemies. For example, leaders of the German Democratic Republic, as East Germany named itself with unintentional irony, called the Berlin Wall the ‘Anti-Fascist Protective Barrier’. This fiction derived directly from the country’s Communist creation myth of liberation by the Soviet Union from the Nazi yoke, rather than defeat as the Nazi enemy.4 Nevertheless, it was clear that the border structures were directed inward against residents, that they were exoskeletons without which the drain of people would never stop and the regimes could not survive. As Tony Judt observed, ‘The Communist state was in a permanent condition of undeclared war against its own citizens, … constantly mobilizing against its foes – external, but above all domestic.’ From that perspective, the creation of the external barriers, although represented as a defensive act, constituted the launching of a major offensive focused inward.5 The view outward from these borders was informed by feelings of insecurity and inferiority, as well as ideological hostility.6 The border system developed by the Communists was not cheap, simple, subtle or pretty. It was reproduced, with local variations, everywhere that the Soviet bloc bordered the outside. Stalin’s distrust of borderland nationalism, dating from the period of the consolidation of Soviet power before World War II, merged potently with his willingness to use all means at his disposal to enforce his will. The resulting border system sought to keep residents inside and bind the satellite countries tightly to the imperial centre. It was too weak to keep a serious invader out, but still created a pervasive frontier of seclusion, the likes of which the world had rarely seen.7

The Czech Approach The segment of the border between Czechoslovakia and West Germany tightened in phases over the forty-year existence of the Soviet empire. Before the Communist coup at the beginning of 1948, there had been a gradual stream of Sudeten Germans and Czechs, about 5,000 each week, out of Czechoslovakia. The German refugees, some driven out and others fleeing, ultimately numbered 3.5 million.8 A reduction in outward migration in 1947, as the country was ‘cleansed’ of Germans and the Czechs started to control the border more closely, was followed by an upsurge after the formal takeover in 1948. Then came the first round of Communist border restrictions. In 1949 and 1950 Czechoslovak soldiers and civilian workers cleared the border strip of buildings, built log and earth barricades across paths and trails, and dug ditches across roads approaching the border to halt motorized traffic. By the end of

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Hungarian Borderlands

1950, cross-border traffic was down to a trickle. Then, in 1951, barbed wire entanglements were added, along with entrenchments and ploughed strips, several metres wide and regularly raked to make it easy to spot footprints. Soon the entire border consisted of three rows of barbed wire, with a six-to-eightfoot-tall fence sandwiched between two four-foot fences. Hundreds of mutually supporting watchtowers, some manned around the clock, were also added, and porcelain insulators were added to the fences, indicating that they could be electrified. Following precedents set by the Germans, the Czech fences carried a lethal current of between 2,000 and 6,000 volts, killing the escaper while sending a message of the attempt back to the nearest guard post. Minefields ran parallel to the hot wires, on both sides.9 Soldiers and attack dogs garrisoned the barrier, with 24-foot-wide cleared, ploughed and raked zones in front of the fences, electric alarms, searchlights and floodlights. The fences stood hundreds of feet back from the border, giving soldiers time to run down those who succeeded in breaching the barriers before they reached the actual boundary. The barriers also had gates at road crossings and tunnels under them to facilitate troop movements. This Czech version was completed with the help of Soviet advisors by 1956. Thereafter, insulated gloves and wire cutters became standard equipment for anyone considering escape.10 Over the years people tried everything to get across the border. They tried to go over, under, around, and through the barriers. They rigged balloons and parachutes, hoping to soar over the walls; they devised waterproof suits and breathing apparatus to use waterways, or just swam for their lives. Nearly one hundred people died trying to cut the electric wires, and 143 others were shot and killed by Czech border guards. Two others died as a result of mine explosions, and many others were injured and maimed.11 Overall, according to the monument installed early in the twenty-first century at Devin (which the Hungarians had called Dévény), where freedom lay across the narrow channel of the Morava as well as the broad Danube, 400 died trying to break free. With Devin firmly under Communist control, the songs from the West could no longer come down the river. So people had tried to swim to the songs.

Emergence of a Hungarian System The Hungarian section of the long border between East and West started to harden earlier than the Czech segment. Typically, Cold War literature focuses on Germany: an American scholar even refers to ‘the German Iron Curtain’.12 The evolution of the Hungarian barriers gets scant attention, except for the brief period when they were open in the wake of the 1956 revolution. Even Hungarians, locked behind their own Communist wall, viewed the Berlin Wall with awe. Political Scientist László Kéri, standing in East Berlin and gazing at the Berlin Wall from a respectful distance in 1973, called it ‘the Border of Borders’.13 Still, Hungary deserves more attention. The 1956 revolution



The Stalin Era 53

brought the greatest breach in the forty-year history of the Iron Curtain. Even more importantly, Hungary played a critical role in eventually bringing down the entire Cold War wall system. That role, as well as the earlier breach, evolved out of the particular design of the Hungarian obstacles to movement. Just as in neighbouring Czechoslovakia, the definitive Communist takeover of the Hungarian government took place in 1948. By then, border control had already been in Communist hands for nearly three years. In the post-war coalition the Communists controlled the Interior Ministry portfolio, along with the police and the border guards. From February 1945, with the war still going on and the Russians overrunning the country from the east and north, the process was well under way. On 22 February 1945 the first Defence Ministry of the provisional government formed in the eastern city of Debrecen established the mission of the border-hunter attack companies. They were organized following the pattern of the pre-war border force, one per county, to operate aggressively against border threats. The need in 1945 to provide forces for pursuit of the withdrawing Germans limited actual deployments. The first five of the reconstituted border companies served on the southern and eastern borders, as the war continued to the west. By the end of 1945, twenty-seven had been activated.14 On the border with Austria, the situation almost resembled post-World War I conditions. Everything had to be started anew. The railway station at Hegyeshalom had been bombed repeatedly and required major repair before traffic could be restored. The Soviets reached Hegyeshalom on 2 April 1945, two days after the last 120 Jewish labour servicemen were shot to death. With Soviet units approaching Hegyeshalom, some of the rank and file among the town’s border bureaucrats had headed west with the retreating Germans. Others discarded their uniforms, dressed as civilians, managed to hide their former allegiances, and got jobs in the border service of the new regime. This was a common practice in those times. An exhibit at the House of Terror museum, installed during 2002 in the old Budapest headquarters of the state security service, showed without comment the varieties of adaptation that took place simply by shedding one outfit and stepping into another. Former thugs of the Hungarian Nazi party, known as the Nyilás Kereszt or Arrow Cross, burned their uniforms and became democrats in business suits. When the Russians came and the Communists took over, the suits were swapped for worker’s overalls, and green Arrow Cross membership cards were discarded for Communist red cards. It took several years, into the early 1950s, for the Communists to root out the politically dubious among them.15 Hegyeshalom became a meeting point of east and west during the Cold War, not on the symbolic scale of Berlin, but still a vital station on the edge of the Soviet empire. Along with nearby Sopron, Záhony on the Soviet (now Ukrainian) border in the northeastern corner, and Kelebia on the Croatian section of the Yugoslav border, it was one of the first four stations opened by Hungary for official crossings in the summer of 1945.16 At Hegyeshalom the border service office under a lieutenant and a dozen rank-and-file opened in

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August, and the first international trains started to roll through in September. Large numbers of refugees from Germany were making their way back home, possibly including Arrow Cross supporters and former Waffen SS volunteers, who had gone westward during the retreats earlier in the year. Although there was significant smuggling and organized crime in the borderland, the police concentrated on weeding out people they thought might be returning fascists and potential war criminals and packing them off to camps for further interrogation. Local residents on both sides of the border, at least those who were not themselves involved in smuggling, may have been too busy with the struggle for survival to care much, but these government efforts probably confirmed local antipathy for Communism, based on the residents’ Catholic conservatism and pre-war support for Germany. Certainly the new regime did not garner much local support with its emphasis on ferreting out old enemies, exacting revenge, and protecting itself in Budapest from potential foes. Russian troops stationed in Austrian Burgenland on the other side of the line cooperated with the occupying forces on the Hungarian side. They also apprehended people trying to return to Hungary and turned them over to their counterparts across the border.17 The number of border crossing stations expanded to nineteen in October 1945, but over the years, Hegyeshalom became strongly identified in the Hungarian mind as the gate to Austria and the West. An article in the February 1947 issue of the monthly Magyar Rendőr (Hungarian Police Officer) already identified the crossing as Hungary’s western gate.18 The first official meeting between Hungarian and Austrian border officials took place at Hegyeshalom, on 12 March 1946. Austria was newly separated from Germany. Now it was occupied by the victorious allies, including the Russians. The Paris peace agreement of 10 February 1947 assigned the Russians an occupation zone that included Burgenland, making Hungary the last leg of a line of communications for Soviet forces in Austria. Meanwhile, Hungary’s government was being taken over by communists directed from Moscow. The meeting at Hegyeshalom fixed the border crossing place for inspection of long-distance road traffic and settled on travel documents accepted for crossing the border: passports, permits good for one specific visit, a border-area identification document and a landowner’s travel document.19 Hegyeshalom got its own company of border-hunters, the 18th, which was part of the 6th battalion, headquartered in Magyaróvár. These military units patrolled the so-called green border, that is, all portions of the line except the official crossing points. They were separate in the early post-war days from the border police who managed the actual crossings under border district commands of the ministry of the interior.20 Pre-war borders were restored around Hungary, with one major modification. In addition to facing Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia, all of which had been neighbours before the war, Hungary had a fifth neighbour on its northeastern edge, the Soviet Union, which in 1939 had seized a chunk of formerly Polish Ruthenia where most of the inhabitants



The Stalin Era 55

were ethnic Ukrainians, and after the war expanded southwestward into Carpatho-Ukraine, annexing in June 1945 the uranium-rich area that Hungary had occupied in March 1939. The number of border-hunter companies, now twenty-seven, was on its way to a full strength of sixty-four, organized into sixteen battalions.21 General György Pálffy, a dedicated Communist even as a wartime staff officer in the Hungarian army, commanded the Border Guards from 1946 to 1948. His first post-war job, from April 1945, had been in the military-political police arm of the Interior Ministry. He went from there to take charge of the border police, a small but critical military organization with a total strength of about 4,000 people. When he took over, the regular armed forces were in ruins, and the border police, the river police and the air defence police, all of which were brought under the Interior Ministry, formed the kernels of the future military establishment, making the interior portfolio more important than defence and central to consolidation of Communist power. Working under instructions from Soviet Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, the president of the all-powerful Allied Control Commission, Pálffy brought the border police, ‘the only combat-ready force in the country,’ under Communist control by the end of his tenure.22 He thus removed the Border Guards, who controlled the crossings, from district directorate commands and placed them directly under the political section of the Ministry of the Interior, where they could be centrally controlled. Writing in the first issue (May 1946) of a magazine called Határőr (Border Guard), Pállfy defined the enemy as Hungarian reactionary elements living outside the country – Arrow Cross members, fascists and Horthyists among them – and their internal allies, spreading propaganda and money to poison the Hungarian people’s democracy.23 In fact, the border-guard literature came to contain a familiar refrain: SS soldiers and Arrow Cross men hiding on the western border and terrorizing residents. Not much later, after Pálffy moved on to become deputy defence minister under Minister of Defence Mihály Farkas, it turned out that he was the enemy. Pálffy was forty years old when he was swallowed up and executed during the great show trial of 1949. By 1956, he was rehabilitated, and in 1970 his portrait adorned the frontispiece of an official commemorative volume on the border guards. When the Communists took formal control of the Hungarian government in 1948, they made border control a top priority. Right away, the State Security Committee of the Hungarian Workers Party, as the Communists called themselves, set about tightening the border regime. Throughout this early period the party’s central leadership took a hands-on approach to border management. On 2 December 1948, the committee directed the transfer of border protection, including interrogation of illegal crossers, to the new office of state security, the Állami Védelmi Hatoság or ÁVH. From that point until 1956, the ÁVH contained both the border guards and the Secret Police, the Államvédelmi Osztaly (ÁVO). The ÁVH programme included tearing down buildings near the border, confiscating taverns that had untrustworthy owners, removing residents who

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might disagree with the regime and raiding border area hotels and inns. It also stressed the reliability of potential border guards. The whole thing came down to a drive for complete control and willingness to take any measures to enforce its will. János Kádár, later head of what became called the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, but then the minister of the interior, said as much at the December 2 meeting. Kádár took a particularly bloodthirsty approach to implementation, noting according to an officer who took part in the discussions of border enforcement, that ‘Having a few people shot and the reports verifying the news published in the papers and circulated among the residents will prompt the more careful consideration of deliberate crossing of the border.’24 This punitive approach of border control, part of what historians György Gyarmati and Tibor Valuch call ‘the criminalization of public life’, set the tone for the Mátyás Rákosi government during the Stalinist years. It underpinned what Communist intellectual István Bibó called ‘the bestial state’, in which ‘institutional persecution’ could strike anyone designated a class traitor, a lackey of Horthy-fascism, a kulak, or just a cleric, an intellectual or a Communist with unconventional ideas. Leaving the country became a criminal offence. Meanwhile, in a state with fewer than six million adults, the political police compiled more than 1.2 million dossiers.25 Defence Minister Farkas made the border the focus of his ‘Confidential Daily Order Number 1,’ issued on New Year’s Day 1949 and addressed to ‘all the headquarters of the Military Border Guard and every individual border guard.’ According to Farkas, multiple enemies lurked, waiting to strike the Hungarian people, among them ‘political criminals, the imperialist agents, and the domestic reactionary accomplices, as well as the economic criminals, the smugglers and their allies who illegally cross our borders.’ Protection from these sinister forces, inside the country and beyond its borders, was ‘every honourable border guard’s patriotic duty.’ Decrying a ‘loosening of discipline and orderliness among the border guards,’ not to mention ‘the decrease in political consciousness, discipline, and the sense of duty, and everything needed to make the service successful’, Farkas’s version of a New Year’s resolution emphasized ‘discipline inside individual border-guard companies and outposts, tidiness and compulsory secrecy’, better ‘military and political instruction’, as well as ‘increased vigilance’, on the southern (Yugoslav) and western (Austrian) borders.26 By the time of General Pállfy’s hanging later in the year, the period of secret rules and sealed borders, which lasted until 1961, was well underway. On 1 January 1950, following the Soviet pattern, the Ministerial Council took direct control of the ÁVH. Both the Interior Ministry’s Border Police, which patrolled the border, and the Defence Ministry’s Border Guards, which inspected travel documents at official crossings, came under the ÁVH. Both of these services moved to the Interior Ministry in 1953. The issue of passports also came under the ÁVH, although rules for their governance were not publicly available, and the border was tightly sealed.27



The Stalin Era 57

A whole network of regulations controlled movement near the border. The passport remained the basic travel document, but the number of different travel documents for foreign travel during the Communist period ranged from ten to sixteen. There were passports for domestic travel, which sharply limited access to a wide swath of border area. These included identification cards for those living close to the border and for those visiting the border area on a one-time basis. A special landowner’s travel document granted permission to work fields near the border. Beginning on 1 July 1950, borderarea residents received special identity cards, which had to be renewed every 90 days. There was no longer any provision for cross-border visits for families that were divided by the boundaries or for visits to family cemetreies on the other side. Employers whose work places were within two kilometres of the border were responsible for making sure workers had proper documents. Hunting was prohibited within a kilometre of the border, and work within 500 metres of the boundary lines was allowed only between dawn and dusk. Those with land inside the zone had permanent permissions stamped in their identity cards with a hexagonal seal: ‘Authorized in the 500-metre zone for farm work.’ Within a fifty-metre zone all construction and residence was forbidden, and only the border force commander could grant permission to work a field there.28 Much of this effort focused on Yugoslavia, which went from fraternal comrade to evil incarnate in just over a year. In December 1947 the Yugoslav military attaché toasted military cooperation between his country, Hungary and Czechoslovakia as the long front line of the people’s democracies. But Stalin’s increasing annoyance at Yugoslav unwillingness to follow Moscow’s directives changed everything. In March 1949, Hungarian leader Mátyás Rákosi, following the new line, accused Yugoslavia of selling out peace and the international proletarian front and moving into the imperialist camp. By the end of the year, the Soviet Union accused Tito of aligning with the aggressive imperialist powers and preparing for a new war.29 In December, Romania, another of Yugoslavia’s socialist neighbours, joined the denunciation. The whole propaganda machine of the Soviet bloc began to portray Tito as ‘an agent of the Anglo-American imperialists, an executioner of the peoples of Yugoslavia, and as a traitor to the great cause of socialism.’30 Severe tightening of Hungary’s southern border followed, and added incentive to the expansion of the border force, which grew from 4,000 in 1945 to almost 11,500 in 1948, to more than 17,500 in 1950, and ultimately to 18,902 in 1954. While the southern Yugoslav border represented just over a quarter of the 2,200-kilometre perimetre of Hungary, more than thirty-five per cent of the entire border force, including headquarters staff, watched and patrolled it.

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The First Barrier System Minefields were the backbone of the border system from the start. The Magyars started to install the first generation of anti-personnel mines in the spring of 1949, along portions of the 630-kilometre border with Yugoslavia. Nervous young men, fresh off farms or city streets, called ‘greens’ because of the tabs on their border-guard uniforms, planted the mines – krumpli, potatoes, they called them – six to a three-metre by two-metre wide section, three boxed in wood and three encased in cast iron, and connected them to trip wires. Also connected to trip wires and planted vertically above ground were cylindrical fragmentation mines with serrated casings that made them look like corn cobs (kukorica aknák). Wrapped with barbed wire and planted mainly in 1951-1952 in areas that were difficult to patrol, these mines disappeared from view after the minefields were overgrown with grass. When triggered, they sprayed rectangular chunks of metal and bits of wire in all directions. The Hungarian euphemism for the entire installation was ‘technical barrier’ or műszaki zár. This name was well chosen. It had and still has civilian applications, such as mechanical crossing gates, so it sounded innocuous. In the military context it included mines, obstacles, incendiary devices and later electrified signalling wire strung along both sides of the long thin minefield, along with barbed wire affixed to poles made of Carpathian wood.31 The choice of mines over lethal electricity may have reflected both an ample stock left over from the war and the primitive and penurious state of the post-war Hungarian economy. Electrical transmission systems were expensive to set up and operate; minefields were labour intensive rather than costly to build. Mines did need maintenance and were potentially deadly to troops who worked with them, but wages were negligible and soldiers were replaceable. In the twenty-five years during which minefields were at the centre of the border system, fifty-three guards died in what was loosely defined as the line of duty. Eight died of wounds received while attending to the minefields, planting them, maintaining them or picking them up. They included one who was shot by a comrade in a fight over a woman, and another killed in a personal dispute.32 Novelist and former border guard István Gáll wrote that his fictitious mine-laying squad, standing at attention in 1954, expected fifty per cent casualties. The more sophisticated Czech choice of lethal electricity may have cost more to install but was not as deadly to the troops and perhaps needed less maintenance than the crude wood-encased Hungarian mines. It seems clear that the Soviets imposed no central template, just the overall requirement to seal the borders. To the south and west, wide border strips were established within which movement was severely restricted. From 20 June 1950, a fifteen-kilometre border belt zone was declared in the south. An identical strip on the Austrian border followed on 1 September 1952. The two strips ran 700 kilometres, along the entire 630-kilometre southern border, and up the Austrian border



The Stalin Era 59

A corn cob mine from 1951–52 wrapped with barbed wire, at the Iron Curtain Museum, Felsöcsatár. Photograph by the author.

for the southernmost 70 kilometres, to Szentgotthárd Pass. It included roughly 9,000 square kilometres and 310 settlements along with 290,000 people.33 Mining of the Yugoslav border was not done on a uniform basis. The engineer plan divided the line into three categories and placed the minefields between barbed wire fences. Thus 323 kilometres, deemed to be the most frequently used for crossing attempts, received twelve mines for every eight metres of border length. Along 166 somewhat less active kilometres, four mines were installed every eight metres. The other 115 kilometres remained free of mines. By the end of August 1950, six of the army’s nine engineer battalions, more than 2,000 men, buried a total of 567,500 mines along the southern frontier. The mines and the fences cost – in wages, material, and transport – 14 million Hungarian forints, about $10.55 million in 2009 dollars. In addition there were 120 guard towers, with searchlights, gun emplacements and telephones. Border patrols, made up of 22 men, some with guard dogs, regularly walked 14-kilometre segments. The whole system, complete with border guards who were ready to shoot to kill, had the look of the forward edge of a military theatre of operations, except that it faced towards the country’s interior rather than to the outside.34 Hungary was a prison in everything but name.

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Soldiers working on the border belt followed rigid orders concerning their presence in the strip along the boundary. They could only approach it in daylight and crossing was strictly forbidden. Only armed units could carry out missions, and only with their weapons within reach. The emphasis on security and vigilance at all times included a prohibition against contact with women.35 Officially published pulp fiction in the ‘Border Guard Pocket Library’, such as Zoltán Papp’s A Szoknya (The Skirt), reinforced the warning about the evil that could befall a loyal soldier at the hands of attractive but treacherous women. Speedboats, at first no more than skiffs with outboard motors, patrolled the rivers leading to Yugoslavia and running along the border, the Tisza, Danube, Dráva and Mura. The boats leaked, some border guards couldn’t swim, and life preservers were not issued. Nevertheless, the river patrols represented a deterrent to potential crossers. In August 1952, one officially designated border-guard hero drowned in the Dráva along the border with Croatia, then a part of Yugoslavia. There had been five men in the boat when it started to take water, and only two could swim. Those two saved two others, and the fifth, Private György Magyar, drowned, still clutching his machine gun according to the official account, near the Drávasztára guardpost.36 The system vaguely resembled an earlier security belt that had faced south. The Croatian Military border had protected the Habsburg monarchy from incursion and carriers of disease from the pestilential Turkish East since the time of Maria Theresa.37 The big difference was that the real enemies of the early 1950s were inside and included the poor and confused peasants of the Yugoslav border. Peasants who owned land on both sides of the border, who had once been the focus of official Yugoslav hostility, were singled out as untrustworthy by the Hungarian government. The state also declared border residents of South Slav ethnicity to be unreliable, along with former soldiers of the Horthy regime, people with relatives in the West, and those of eastern Orthodox faith. In 1949, 450 families were packed off to the interior of the country. The process continued into the 1950s, and in 1952 the government took 9,323 farms and built border installations on many of them. This stream of internal deportees blended with an urban group of former senior officials of the Horthy government, whose removal cleared the way for party favourites to find apartments in Budapest and other cities. In the settlement of Hercegszántó in Bács-Kiskun county in late 1951, deportations started between one and two o’clock in the morning when police and ÁVO agents woke the families listed for removal. They took the family heads to the council house and forced them to sign contracts accepting work in the rice and cotton fields of a state farm in the Kormospuszta region. A freight train started in Hercegszántó and picked up the last deportees in Kelebia, taking 250 people altogether. All told only a few thousand people were affected, but the deportations took place in a hysterical atmosphere, along with show trials and rumours swirling about the removal of all South Slavs. With memories of the 1946 deportations still fresh, the removals terrified everyone in the borderlands. The Hungarian deportations may have served as a model for the East



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Germans who used similar techniques when clearing the inner German border in 1952: waking people in the middle of the night, forcing them to sign papers accepting the move, and bundling them into trains or trucks.38 Some residents managed to get out ahead of the soldiers sent to take them away, heading south from Romania as well as Hungary across the border to Yugoslavia. A Hungarian peasant woman said, ‘We discussed whether we should go up to Comrade Rákosi, and ask, if we are not being reliable, and if not then to put us across the border, or perhaps create calm for us.’ After Stalin’s death, those who had been removed were slowly allowed to return to the borderlands, only rarely with compensation and never with an apology; even discussion of the deportations was forbidden. Despite the efforts and the expense involved in terrorizing borderlanders and sealing the border, the line

The cover of the border guard pocket library edition of Gábor Devecseri’s Volunteer Border Guard shows Erzsi Gajdács pointing out a Titoist spy to a border guard. Photograph by István Nagy.

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remained porous, not least of all for the border guards, forty-three of whom fled to the other side in 1950 alone, the first full year of the effort to close the country.39 The deportation of Yugoslavs from border areas in neighbouring Romania was more severe. Romania declared its adherence to the Soviet line at the end of 1949. Operations in 1951, involving more than 10,000 soldiers, basically evacuated a 25-kilometre-wide zone along the Yugoslav border, packed the residents into freight cars, and dumped an estimated 40,000 South Slavs from the borderlands at Bărăganul and Galati-Brăila, northeast of Bucharest. One report of the feverish activities that summer claimed to know about construction of ‘fortifications of colossal proportions in both Romanian and Hungarian southern border areas, with the work on both sides of their mutual border connecting at Szeged in Hungary.’ The evaluator of this intelligence, without even acknowledging that Hungarian-Romanian cooperation was highly unlikely, considered the speculation on the construction programme – but not the evacuation, nor some military reinforcement and prohibition of civilian vehicles on border-zone roads – as ‘highly improbable’.40 Official interest and emphasis on the southern border was underscored by the 1951 publication of Gábor Devecseri’s long narrative poem Önkéntes Határőr, or ‘The Volunteer Border Guard.’ A renowned classical scholar, noted for translations of Homer’s epics into Hungarian, Devecseri deployed his talents on behalf of the Stalinist regime. Poets could get away with responses to Communist rule that were significantly less enthusiastic than Devecseri’s. Some left the party; others turned to neutral subjects. Devecseri threw himself wholeheartedly into support of the regime. From the establishment of the Communist system, almost until the revolution of 1956, he held the rank of major in the army and taught literature in the national military college. In ‘The Volunteer Border Guard’, he presented an idealized picture of border village life under socialism, seen through the eyes of a pig-tailed teenage girl, an ardent Communist named Erzsi (Liz) Gajdács, who alerted the authorities to the presence of a threatening alien, a Titoist snake spying on the happy Hungarian peasants and threatening their tranquillity.41 The poem appeared in an ordinary edition for general readers and another under the imprint of the border guard force and the political department of the armed forces as number 18 in the Border Guard Pocket Library. In the foreword, Lieutenant Colonel György Kőrösi admonished all border guards to read this important work as a lesson in the passion of Hungarian youth for protection of the homeland. There were other passions at work, among them bureaucratic empirebuilding and self-aggrandizement, perhaps even personal enrichment, on a scale that modern American secretaries of defence and homeland security, along with their biggest contractors, might respect and admire. In November 1950, less than three months after installation of the border system, the staff of Lieutenant General István Bata, the air defence chief, proposed an expansion of the southern defence system that envisioned a tightly connected permanent



The Stalin Era 63

belt of defensive structures between one hundred and 150 kilometres wide along the whole 600-kilometre strip, complete with an entire army corps to serve as garrison. Post-Trianon Hungary is a small country, about the size of Maine, and scarcely 200 kilometres wide from south to north at any spot. The Bata system would have turned a huge chunk of the nation into the southern border strip, which he proposed to organize into forty-six battalion defensive districts and at least 222 company bases, honeycombed with observation posts command posts and intelligence centres. At the end of May 1951, Party Secretary Rákosi gave the go-ahead, and 31 million forints went to development of a draft plan by the Engineering Directorate. Hungary undertook a massive construction programme reminiscent of the Árpád line. About 1,500 concrete machine gun emplacements, firing positions, observation posts and tank traps, all linked with communications trenches, dotted the landscape behind the barbed wire fences and minefields. Construction was typically shoddy, with doors that did not close properly, command posts without periscope tubes, and wood that was not properly treated. The project lurched along until 1955, no doubt kept alive in part because Bata himself became Minister of Defence in 1953.42 Only the improvement in Hungarian-Yugoslav relations after Stalin’s death stopped Bata’s plan from consuming more public money. By then the damage was considerable. With no independent auditing agency so the National Planning Office and the Investment Bank could track the outlays, the programme consumed 6.273 billion forints, about 22.5 per cent of the 28 billion in the national five-year plan and more than $4.7 billion in 2009 dollars. Bata went on to play a key role in putting down the revolution in Budapest, and after his retirement lent his management expertise to the Budapest public transit system. His lunatic border-defence enterprise left behind 25 million bricks and more than 200,000 reinforced concrete beams for civilian projects, but nothing built with these shoddily produced materials lasted more than a few years.43 After Stalin died in 1953, relations with Yugoslavia improved. Troops from the south were sent to the western border, where new posts were established and the two border districts divided into four. By the 1960s normalization of relations with Tito’s regime was well along, benefitting businesses on both sides. Cross-border commerce developed on the industrial level and among shoppers, with Hungary providing a market for industrial production and consumer goods. The number of border crossing points slowly expanded from a single road crossing and three train crossings to numerous rail and road avenues. A ferry across the Dráva at Barcs, which dated from before World War I, reopened and eventually was replaced by a highway bridge. Yugoslav companies dominated sugar-beet and soybean processing, while cross-border shopping expanded in the 1970s, mainly with Hungarians looking for scarce consumer goods – transistor radios and blue jeans, ‘farmer pants’ as the Hungarians call them. The expansion of trade went far toward re-establishing cross-border family and community ties severed in the early fifties.44

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As the southern border quieted, crossing into Austria remained essentially impossible. Local cross-border traffic which allowed farmers to till fields and market produce, residents to visit relatives and graveyards, and doctors and veterinarians to tend patients, had stopped. The Hungarian government never introduced a massive fortification construction programme, but the border system still throttled economic life, cut off communities from each other, and made residents seem like prisoners in their homes and villages. People on both sides knew they were at the edge. As their connections with each other faded and the separation process begun with the marking of the Trianon border accelerated, divergent trends took hold on both sides of the border. Hungarian towns and villages, cut off from their Austrian neighbours to the west and stranded in the border zone, became increasingly isolated and impoverished. Burgenland settlements, whether populated by ethnic Germans, Magyars or Croats, turned more towards the Austrian centre, culturally as well as commercially, as the hard border forced their estrangement from their neighbours. As one Burgenland peasant said, echoing Metternich but above all reflecting the impact of the Iron Curtain on borderland life, ‘Here is Europe, there is Asia.’ Indeed, the Cold War border represented the easternmost frontier of German-speakers, and the furthest extension of western society in Central Europe. Beyond was the Soviet empire.45 On the Hungarian side this feeling was driven home after Russian T-34 tanks rolled into Hegyeshalom at the beginning of April 1945 and pushed the Germans out. There the occupation marked the beginning of two months of plunder. While some such activity might be seen as normal revenge on a vanquished population and the pursuit by Soviet soldiers of wristwatches, the overall effect was more profound and longer-lasting than ordinary pillage. In Hegyeshalom that April, Soviet troops confiscated the only cow owned by an agricultural labourer. This was not the act of a liberator and directly contradicted and rendered meaningless the rhetoric of rescue from the fascist yoke. Everyone could see that the new occupation represented a grim future in which there could be no trust in state institutions and their agents.46 In the spring of 1946, 569 or about 35 per cent of the town’s 1,630 German residents were put on freight trains and packed off to Germany, as part of the mass expulsion of nearly 200,000 residents of German descent. The lucky ones (about 135,000) wound up in the American zone of Germany rather than the German Democratic Republic or – even worse – the Soviet Union. It coincided with the return of thousands of Hungarians from captivity or collaboration. ‘Leading fascists’, ordinary soldiers who had stayed with their units as they retreated into Austria, civilian war workers from the Third Reich, and concentration camp survivors made their way home, passing through Hegyeshalom on their way east, while German-speaking residents were packed off to the West, also through Hegyeshalom.47 In the border towns, the new regime’s emphasis on retribution assured alienation between residents and the state as well as between people on one side of the line and those on the other. Because northwestern Hungary’s dominant



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culture was Roman Catholic and conservative, the area started with a staunch anti-Communism which almost guaranteed a profound political animosity pitting the state against the population. The 1946 deportation of the Germans from border communities solidified the impression that a despotic state had emerged, showing as it did arbitrary state power against a group considered an enemy. The resultant fear crossed ethnic divides and awakened memories of the 1944 deportations, although there was considerable difference between being taken to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and being sent to the American zone of post-war Germany. In any case the process of deportation, anchored in the waves of forced migrations of various groups that started after the first world war, showed the inclination of the state to act against residents. ‘This apparent despotism,’ historian Peter Kenez noted, ‘weakened the state’s legitimacy, and its institutions found that the willingness of the population to co-operate with them was weakened as a consequence.’48 The 1946 deportations created suspicion on both sides of the Austrian border which drove the process of separation. Austrian sympathy with the Hungarian refugees led to suspicion of the Hungarian government’s intentions. This feeling grew and hardened in the years before the Hungarian revolution. The construction of the first rigid border regime of barbed wire fences, with watchtowers, and the clearing of vegetation within 500 metres of the border, validated Austrian suspicion. When Hungary insisted that Austria do likewise on its side of the border, the occupation government of Austria, which included the Soviets, declined. The Soviet Union’s primary interest in Austria during the occupation that lasted until 1955 centred on economic gain, mainly from factories and oilfields, and Soviet representatives in Austria refused to be distracted by fortifying their side of a border being shut down by the Hungarians. Hungary responded to the rebuff by closing the border, putting an end to the local cross-border traffic that had been negotiated after the Trianon settlement and which had haltingly revived when the shooting stopped.49 Between the sealing of the border in 1949 and 1956, Austrian authorities recorded a string of incidents that seemed calculated to cement mutual alienation. Hungarian border guards tried to kidnap Austrian citizens, shot an Austrian gendarme, and caused occasional injuries due to exploding mines when people ventured near the border. In one case, Hungarian farm workers protected by border guards trespassed into Austria to steal crops belonging to local farmers. Austria protested every incident; Hungary rejected every protest. The official line was that Hungary had a duty to defend its borders.50 The Hungarian national government practised a deliberate and pervasive discrimination against the borderlands. It denied investment to the main towns, such as Sopron, and withdrew cultural institutions and industry to the interior. Border residents found their freedom severely curtailed by a complex network of physical and bureaucratic restrictions that isolated them from people across the border and impeded travel towards the centre of the country. Farmers near the border were not allowed to grow corn because the

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tall crop could hide a potential defector. Residents who were deemed members of unreliable groups were moved somewhere else. The net effect was to assure that border settlements remained poor and small. Flints for fire-starting were in high demand after the war, so even matches were scarce, a shortage that was ironic because a Hungarian chemist named János Irinyi had invented the phosphorus match in the mid-nineteenth century. Former border guard István Gáll, in his novel Vas Kor (Iron Age) about the border service after the war, called one of the destitute places in which he served Patkánylyuk, or Rat Hole, a place that was behind God’s back and had slid off the map. Patkánylyuk did not exist, but Apátistvánfalva, Felsöszolnok and Ják did, and the barracks, connected tenuously to the world by dirt roads and horse-drawn wagons, were as remote as any imagined by Gáll. Hegyeshalom was throttled like other towns. Almost all border guards assigned there were from across the country, making sure there were no significant ties between these state agents and residents. Even the National Council of Trade Unions could not get approval from the Ministry of the Interior for a holiday camp it wanted to develop around a lake just outside town. All that the town had to show for forty years under the Communist regime was the guard station itself, a main building with a barracks and office, in front of a stable, and off to the side outbuildings that included storerooms, garage, a kitchen and dining hall. The compound also contained the residence of the commander, who along with the mayor and the president of the local party council was frequently one of the three most prominent people in a border community. The whole complex was surrounded by an iron-railing fence, with a sentry booth of corrugated sheet metal by the entrance. Otherwise, there were just the new street names, such as Vörös Hadsereg (Red Army) utca and Néphadsereg (People’s Army) utca, designations that did not outlast the regime by much.51 Western border villages that were not on main international routes found themselves at the ends of cul-de-sacs. The border strips and barriers wound around them in a way that would not be seen until Israel started to gerrymander the West Bank with its separation wall about fifty years later, blocking roads, isolating settlements, and making commerce extremely difficult. Communities in both Hungary and Austria had once lived off trade with each other, but that stopped when the border closed and decay immediately set in. People could not reach their vineyards or pastures, and the complex and lethal barriers assured complete separation. Residents went about their lives, acknowledging the occasional explosions from the border strip and the subsequent ambulance sirens with knowing glances. Otherwise, only the ringing of Sunday church bells in Austrian villages provided regular reminders of life on the other side. One woman, who left Szentpéterfa, a cul-de-sac village in Vas County, during the 1956 revolution, made her way to the United States, and returned to the village many years later, recalled that in the fifties she didn’t even dare to go into her garden in the evening to pick some leafy greens to put on her bread



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spread with fat. A soldier always waited to chase her back inside, seeming to pop out of the ground the minute she showed her face. With the state border along the edge of town in every direction except east, towers were everywhere, and the evening quiet often carried the sounds of soldiers, running or on horseback, as they chased down those who tried to flee. She was one of five hundred who left the village of 1,500 during the revolution, practically everyone between the ages of eighteen and forty. They took the village’s future with them, and for a few years afterwards, there were no births.52 In Pinkamindszent, a cul-de-sac village a couple of kilometres to the south, two villagers who made their peace with the situation and stayed recalled those times differently. To them, a woman, born in 1948, and her son-in-law, born seventeen years later, the border was a natural phenomenon, a fact of life of no special interest. It was there, and that was that. Maybe it was singular and remarkable to older people or to those who lived in the interior and not next to it, but to them it was, as the younger of the two put it, no more than the ocean to someone who lived on the shore. But they could not escape the feeling of confinement, not so much because of the border but because their location within the five-kilometre border strip isolated them from the rest of their countrymen. Only those with the special permits known informally as zőldsávos papirak or green-border papers could enter the border strip. The pass carried the bearer’s name, national identification card number, the purpose of the visit and the period of validity. It also specified the border portion for which it was valid and whether it was issued for single or multiple use. A fishing trip into the border strip required a detailed, two-page permit, specifying the stream or lake and containing personal details ranging from address, occupation, and boat name and licence number to the name of the bearer’s mother. Permission came neither automatically nor quickly, and an application represented a major inconvenience. Residents of the border strip were stuck there, and considered themselves lucky if other family members lived inside the strip as well, so they could visit each other. Even people who adapted to the hard national border at the edge of their villages found separation from the interior of Hungary hard to take.53 The border guard establishment meanwhile maintained the fantasy of dilligent efforts to improve local ties. One officer emphasized that the locals should understand that the border guards defended the construction of a democratic homeland. In the immediate post-war period he served at Csepreg, where his outpost hosted a supper and dance, and tried to cement ties, with an active cultural team and through assistance with farm work.54 An article in one of the first issues of Magyar Rendőr gave an early glimpse of the image the border forces wanted to project. A senior physician from Budapest, on the express train to Paris and bound for a two-year appointment in the United States, apparently arrived at the Hegyeshalom crossing without the keys to his suitcase. The border guard lieutenant allowed him to remain on his train as it crossed into Austria and offered to call Budapest and arrange

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for the keys to be brought to Hegyeshalom by the conductor on the next train. The keys would reach Paris by train in time for the doctor to get them during his layover in France. Of course, the matter of inspecting his bags never even came up. All that mattered to this dedicated public servant was providing assistance to a traveller in distress.55 This fantasy contrasted sharply with almost all accounts of crossings over the next forty years. Television reporter Tamás Vitray recounted his first journey across the border in 1960. The border guards got on at Győr, ordered everyone to stay seated, collected the passports and disappeared. Half an hour later they came back, and grilled all of them about their destinations. Only at Hegyeshalom did the guards allow the passengers to leave their seats. Coming home it was the same. ‘The crossing’ he recalled, ‘was so unpleasant that a person trembled even if he only brought home three pairs of nylon socks.’ Vitray had a pipe, a gift from a friend, that a customs officer wanted to take away, because such pipes were not available in Hungary. Moreover, to the customs officer’s sharp and class-conscious eye, the pipe did not befit the traveller’s social status. Perhaps, it bespoke a bourgeois origin or social level. Only with difficulty did Vitray convince the inspector that it was indeed his and legally and legitimately in his possession.56 Because Hegyeshalom was the most prominent crossing point, it received the most attention from the authorities and from those who published their recollections of departures, real and imagined. Sopron, the most unusual of the border towns because of its decision to remain in Hungary in the plebiscite of 1921 and the magnitude of the German deportations after the war, also played a special role in the control of the border. Sopron’s location was singular. It lay at the base of a small triangular salient or protrusion pointing into Austria. In every direction except eastward, Austrian lands were no more than ten kilometres away, in many places even closer. East of town, also about ten kilometres away, beyond the marsh grass of the current Fertő national park, the border ran through the waters of Fertő lake, the Austrian Neusiedler See. Except for a small portion at the southern end, the lake belonged to Austria, so in this one small area Austria was actually east of Hungary. In border towns facing the lake, such as Fertőrákos, border guard barracks had towers from which sentries could look out over the marsh grass towards the water, and the free-standing guard towers in the wetlands rested on metal struts in the water rather than on conventional wooden legs. When children in these communities came out to play, guards in the towers screamed at them if they as much as looked toward the lake, lest they get any ideas. Meanwhile small fast motor boats cruised the stretches of Hungarian open water. Only a narrow corridor towards the east of Sopron along the main highway and railway line connected the city to Győr and the rest of Hungary. Trains from Vienna crossed the border near Mattersburg northwest of Sopron and went out south of the city just before Deutschkreuz. In the 1950s and 1960s, they did not stop in Sopron or anywhere else in Hungary. They picked up a small contingent of border guards as they crossed into



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Hungary, the coach doors were locked, and they just passed through, from Austria to Austria. Yet they sometimes carried people whose sole purpose was to go slowly through Sopron and get a glimpse of relatives and friends who lived there. Some of those who had been forced out in 1946 returned over the next twenty years on these trains that passed through the city. By prior arrangement, family members and acquaintances would come to the Batsányi Street crossing, a couple blocks before the station. As the trains rounded the bend and straightened out before the crossing and the station a few hundred metres beyond, travellers and residents could glimpse each other and perhaps display a new child or grandchild through the slowly moving train’s locked window.57 At the Sopron station, guards on alert awaited the arrival of the train, with special guards assigned specifically to watch the doors and make sure they remained locked. The madness started to abate somewhat in the 1970s, but trains coming into Sopron from Austria still received special scrutiny.58 Despite the harsh reality, so remote from the officially promoted self-image, people who lived inside the border strip did actively assist the border guards in their work. Whether to curry favour with the authorities, out of commitment to the Communist cause, or for the monetary rewards that went with capturing border violators, this remarkable service took the form of volunteer groups, which the border guards claimed contributed in 1950–1955 to ten per cent of the 8,705 captures of border violators.59 On a table in the small state-run border guard museum at Apátistvánfalva near the Szentgotthárd crossing, among the documents available for visitors to handle, peruse and ultimately ruin, are albums that show the centrality of the border guards to the life of borderland communities. They also show their role in spreading the values and practices of the People’s Republic among border-area residents. One book shows pictures of awards ceremonies in border towns, with certificates designating ‘Border Guard Communities’ and honouring those who wore the green and white armbands of civilian ‘volunteer border guards’, a kind of Neighbourhood Watch that helped patrol their communities and reported suspicious behaviour – strangers in town, new boarders in neighbourhood houses, conversations with Austrian railway workers at border train stations. For example, according to a notebook kept by a border guard detachment commander at Hegyeshalom in November 1973, the volunteer border guards reported on the activities of two Austrian railway workers, who they said had conversed with Hungarian flag men and expressed interest in the locations of the border guards and patrols.60 Another Apátistvánfalva album, ‘the book of squealers’ as one visitor called it, told the stories of border residents who helped the guards catch border violators, such as the two teen-aged girls, Ilona Gáspár and Juliánna Deutsch, who split 500 forint in 1958, close to $50, for alerting the border guard to the presence of a stranger who it turned out had crossed over from Austria. Erzsi Gajdács, the young heroine of Devecseri’s ‘The Volunteer Border Guard’, was not just a figment of the poet’s imagination. Such people actually existed.

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1956: Mine Removal and Revolution Despite the efforts of border troops and cooperative residents, within seven years the minefields at the core of the barriers were a wreck. The wooden fence posts and mine boxes rotted in the ground, while the cast-iron mine casings rusted away. Mines sometimes detonated themselves or failed to go off when triggered. Meanwhile, in December 1955, Hungary was admitted to the United Nations. The deteriorated state of the minefields, perhaps combined with official efforts to improve the country’s international image, prompted the Rákosi government in March 1956 to dismantle the minefields, and engineer soldiers went into the border zone to pull them out. By mid-September the soldiers removed all the explosives, provided that they could find the rotted casings and provided that the mines did not go off during removal. The soldiers were good at what they did. They knew every tiny component of the mines they took up. And their knowledge paid off.61 Only one border guard, Lajos Nagy of the Nagykanizsa Technical Battalion, died during the lengthy nerve-wracking operation.62 Removal of the explosives did not signal a decline in attempts to escape or the opening of the border. The other elements of the barrier remained in place, and the border guards still had authority to shoot to kill. The Political Committee of the party, in deciding on the mine clearance, noted ongoing efforts to flee – 629 in the second half of 1955 and 327 more in the first four months of 1956 – and took steps to tighten the border. These included a switch to intensive patrolling in depth beyond the immediate border area, more German-language training for officers, better equipment, living conditions, and equipment for border units, stronger involvement of local citizens in securing the border, and more intensive indoctrination of young people, who formed the majority of those who fled.63 The senior leadership did not seem to realize that the problem was systemic and irremediable without changing the entire political and social system and that only the deadliest tools made it possible to keep the population in the country. The timing of mine removal had profound consequences. When revolution swept across Hungary in October, the path to the West was clear. The first two weeks after the revolutionary outbreak in the second half of October were marked by a bloodbath, with massacres by the authorities in Budapest, Mosonmayaróvár and other towns, and a handful of profusely documented lynchings by revolutionaries. The revolutionary government of Prime Minister Imre Nagy, who had briefly been minister of interior during the formative post-war period, tried to stake out an independent neutral position free of Soviet dominance. The Soviet invasion at the beginning of November quashed the revolt and ended Nagy’s tenure, replacing him with János Kádár, who had also once been Minister of the Interior. A mass exodus got underway and continued unimpeded until March 1957 by the undefended and unmined border barriers. Anywhere from 200,000 to as many as 300,000 of the country’s nearly ten million people left during the harsh winter months. This voluntary



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migration was of the same magnitude as the forced removal of the ethnic Germans ten years earlier. Its consequences were more profound, because the great majority were male university students, educated professionals and skilled workers under 25 years of age. The exodus, which altered the age distribution of the national population while draining its talent, was also extemporaneous rather than centrally controlled. One couple from Budapest, my 19-year-old cousin Judit and her husband, hitched a ride to Győr on a produce truck, took a train to Mosonmagyaróvár, and walked the rest of the way.64 During what had passed for normal times in the first half of the fifties, almost no human movement had been discerned near the Austrian border. Now, as railway worker Jenő Horváth later recalled, ‘the whole border region looked like turnip harvest time, with every field full of people.’ When Horváth approached, wearing his railway uniform, they seemed to vanish. Only when they thought it was safe again, did they get up and start walking – westward.65 In March 1957 the process of reclosing the border and restoring order started. The flood of emigration provided the regime with clear evidence of the need to restore and improve the lethal border system. The mass departures also led to a change in the Hungarian vocabulary, first officially and then generally. The word for emigrate, kivándorol, fell out of favour and was replaced by disszidál, to defect, which the older generations still use widely. The border guards responded to the revolutionary outbreak in three ways. Some tried gamely to carry out their orders; others abandoned their posts and their missions to head across a border, either to flee to the West or gain protection from their angry countrymen in Communist Czechoslovakia; and a third group tried to make a little money on the side, shaking down would-be emigrants. The bloodiest episode of the revolution took place at Mosonmagyaróvar, about twelve kilometres from the border at Hegyeshalom. A large group of demonstrators marched to the border guard barracks. The soldiers responded to the crowd’s invitation to join them with automatic weapons fire, killing at least fifty people, leading to the lynching of three border guards.66 The demonstrators were memorialized in 1991 in a park in front of the now vacant barracks building; the border guards’ names have been on the memorial at Border guard headquarters in Budapest for considerably longer. They died, according to the familiar Communist litany, preventing Horthyist police, SS youths and other subversives from entering the country. Officially nothing had changed over the ten years since World War II ended.67 Jenő Horváth, the railway worker who watched the ebb and flow of movement in the turnip fields, approached the border on his motorcycle with an automatic weapon slung from his neck. He had picked up the firearm after the disarming of the secret police in Hegyeshalom. At the border, a guard warned him not to continue because there was an ÁVO lieutenant ahead. He ignored the advice and confronted the officer, who told him to put down his weapon. With Austrian police standing on the other side of the line, he managed to convince the ÁVO man to get out of the way. ‘I told him’, Horváth

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recalled, ‘to get into his car and go home by the shortest route. This way he would be sure to avoid injury.’ The lieutenant apparently took the advice and left. Horváth and the Austrians then opened the gate.68 László Kasza, who set out to leave Hungary in 1956 knowing only the name of one border station, Hegyeshalom, crossed far to the south near Körmend. He had a map, given to him by a railway guard, so in spite of his ignorance of border geography, he became the leader of a group of defectors. Map in hand, he and his new acquaintances walked through the night until they reached a cemetrey full of Hungarian names. Seeing this and thinking they were still in Hungary, they turned around, and ran into the arms of some border guards. Their captors told them they had actually reached the other side and had been in the graveyard of an ethnic Magyar community that was now in Austria but had been in Hungary before the Treaty of Trianon. They could go back, but first the security officers demanded their jewelry and money. Kasza’s small hoard of valuables included a Soviet medal, which he had obtained in a trade with a soldier. When the border guard members saw the medal, they stopped, returned everything, and let them turn back around towards Austria. They went across and they stayed.69 While the door to Austria lay wide open and people poured through to freedom, the Czech border shut down. Bowing to Soviet demands, the Czechs called 14,000 reservists to duty and sent them to the Hungarian border on a four-week military exercise. No soldiers of Hungarian or Polish ethnicity, the two most troublesome national groups, were included among them. The reservists stayed on the border until the middle of December. Despite the increased military presence, rumours and reports of unauthorized crossings flew about, and even a few small-calibre artillery rounds from Esztergom arced over the Danube to the other side. Those who crossed into the Slovak region, far fewer than those who went west, fell into three categories: party officers, particularly those from the ÁVH, feared revolutionary justice; civilian refugees with relatives in Czechoslovakia sought safety with their families; and in late phases of the fighting, insurgents tried to avoid capture and prosecution. Some members of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia expressed sympathy with the revolution, but the majority remained sceptical of the outcome. There was some effort to send medical supplies to Hungary and a little hope that an uprising might spread to Czechoslovakia. Magyar irredentism flared as well, as the revolution raised hope on the fringes that Hungary might take back the Felvidék. However, the Czech regime retained the loyalty of the majority of Slovaks. The standard of living remained better than in Hungary, and no substantial reformist wing of the Communist party promoted change. There never was much likelihood of the revolution spreading northward, and by the 1960s the border was sufficiently quiet and stable that the Hungarians permitted border guards along that line to walk their posts alone. On the western border, border guards were never allowed out alone. They always went out at least in pairs, each soldier responsible for preventing the disappearance of his comrades.70



The Stalin Era 73

Developments in Germany and Austria Back in 1952, the same year that the fifteen-kilometre-wide border strip was designated along the Hungarian-Austrian border, significant changes had come elsewhere on the long cold-war border. The Inner German Border, as the German section of the land boundary between the Soviet bloc and its neighbours was called, became no less a wall than the barriers already separating Hungary from Austria and Yugoslavia, or the wall that ultimately split Berlin.71 It started as a line of demarcation but began to harden into a fortified and patrolled wall on 5 May 1952, two years after the Hungarian-Yugoslav border had solidified. From that time it became a genuine border between two Germanys. The border was created in accordance with Soviet instructions and specifications, to include a five-kilometre barrier zone in which only members of the border authorities were permitted. There was a ten-metre-wide strip in which trees were removed, and the ground was ploughed and harrowed twice a year. The 500 metres next to the fence were under the administration of the border authorities. Instructions issued on May 5 authorized border guards to use their weapons to enforce the prohibitions against crossings, just as the Hungarians had done on the Yugoslav border starting in 1949, at which time the border between the British and Russian zones of Berlin was marked by only a white stripe painted across the pavement at Potsdamer Platz.72 Overall, the inner border was almost twice as long as the Hungarian borders with Austria and Yugoslavia. It stretched over more than 1,500 kilometres, nearly 900 miles, and consisted of concrete panels, electrified metal-wire fence, searchlights, guard dog runs, watch towers, bunkers and anti-vehicular barrier ditches, made even more lethal with minefields and automatically detonating small arms. The authorities furnished the land immediately adjoining the 10-metre strip with ramparts, ditches and trip wires connected to alarms. When the whole thing was finished, six rail connections and five motorway crossings to the West remained. At the same time that the government closed the inner border, it developed the first contingency plans for the Berlin Wall.73 The East Germans tried to brand West Germany as the unholy child of Nazism, but when it came to fortifying a border, there was no question about where the similarities were. Most of the elements of ‘the anti-fascist protective barrier’ resembled both the barrier components emplaced at Auschwitz and other such camps and the Hungarian barriers that also drew on the Nazi model. In Germany, the traps and ditches designed to stop cars and trucks were more elaborate than anything built in Hungary, where there were far fewer motor vehicles, and lethal electricity had been used in the concentration camps and then in Czechoslovakia. Automatically firing small arms were an innovation, and over the later years of the Cold War the East Germans continued to introduce new and deadlier land-mines while the Hungarians renounced their use. The SM-70 anti-personnel mine, deployed along the Berlin Wall in the 1970s, was more effective than anything used by the Hungarians. When pressed, it shot up out of the ground and detonated a 110-gram charge of

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TNT that sprayed 80 four-by-four millimetre steel splinters as far as 120 metres in every direction. A later version used 98 grams of propellant to fire 20 steel ball bearings in a circle with a 280-metre radius. Installed almost a decade after Hungary started to take up its second generation of minefields, these mines stayed in the ground until 1984, causing great international ire. But the precast concrete posts, the death strips, the guard dogs, the towers and the soldiers all recalled the Nazi regime just recently destroyed and the installations by East Germany’s Hungarian comrades on the Yugoslav and Austrian borders. The border split families, divided towns and caused mental depression. Over the years of its existence, restrictions of the freedom to travel gradually became the single most widely held East German grievance.74 As the author of the official study of US military operations along the cold-war German border noted, the barriers of the inner German border were militarily ineffective. The system focused inward rather than outward against possible attackers, and NATO planners viewed measures to strengthen it as advantageous to their own operations. Warsaw Pact forces attacking from East Germany would have to breach their own barriers to invade the West, so their own system would slow or channel their attack into a relatively small number of approach routes.75 Moreover, some law enforcement officers on the western side, in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) viewed the GDR’s wall as a bulwark for the internal security of the FRG, by preventing the entry of people from the East in unwanted numbers, as did the entire Communist barrier system.76 On the western side border networks were not nearly as formidable as those they faced and perhaps even more useless against an attack. In eastern Austria, on the border with Hungary, there were trenches, gun emplacements and buried systems of bunkers and troops billets. These Austrian positions facing Hungary, reinforced by light infantry recruited locally, were installed after the establishment of the neutral Austrian state and withdrawal of Soviet troops from Austria in 1955 and the failure of the Hungarian revolution of 1956. The artillery along this ‘Schleinzer line,’ named for Karl Schleinzer, Austrian minister of defence during 1961–1964, included an assortment of 26 kinds of guns, some of them located along anti-tank ditches to fire directly on invading tanks, but also preregistered on targets across the Hungarian border. Some of the guns were old tank turrets, taken off of their carriages and immobilized in bunkers. Instead of hardened emplacements for protection against enemy fire, other weapons had wooden roofs for concealment. These could be lifted off and set aside by hand before the guns were used. Overall, it is hard to determine whether an invasion from Hungary or the defensive response from Austria would have been the less formidable.77 Until the beginning of the 1960s there was one gaping hole in the Soviet border system: West Berlin. The GDR haemorrhaged across the border between East and West Berlin. In one of the fastest and most harmful ‘brain drains’ in history, hundreds of thousands of citizens, frequently the best and the brightest, poured into West Berlin, about 2.7 million all told, from the



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end of the Berlin airlift in 1948 to the start of construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. East Germany became the only country in Europe whose population declined, from 19 million to 17 million during 1949–1961.78 As Soviet ambassador Mikhail Pervukhin drolly observed in 1959, ‘The presence in Berlin of an open and essentially uncontrolled border between the socialist and capitalist worlds unwittingly prompts the population to make a comparison between both parts of the city, which, unfortunately, does not always turn out in favour of Democratic Berlin.’79 The sheer magnitude of the exodus was ‘… beginning to threaten the future of the state itself.’80 With the reluctant agreement of the Soviet Union, in the pre-dawn hours of 13 August 1961, East German soldiers and workers began to build the Berlin Wall.81 The trams and subways were closed, but no moves were made to interfere with military rights of access to West Berlin in accordance with the occupation agreement. Initially thirteen official crossing points remained open, later twelve, then seven. A ‘first draft’ of the wall was completed in just three days. Ultimately, the wall included 290 watchtowers, 136 bunkers, 105 kilometres of trenches, 257 kilometres of dog runs, 122 kilometres of fences with warning devices, and a garrison of 14,000 ‘Grenzers’ or border troops, with technical adjustments and improvements constantly added through the wall’s twenty-eight-year life. These ranged from traditional measures such as a three-metre deep ditch designed to stop vehicular escape attempts, reminiscent of the Roman vallum, to sophisticated automatically detonating munitions and electronic sensors, added at various stages.82 The pre-eminent symbol of the Cold War was in place.83

Chapter 6

From Minefields to Electric Fences

Resealing the Border Meanwhile, in Hungary, a second generation ‘technical barrier’ or minefield became operational. Starting in the spring of 1957 and extending into 1959, the post-revolution regime resealed the border with a new improved system. The border soldiers emplaced concrete fence posts, bringing the Hungarian practice in this regard in line with East German and Czech usage. They also laid new minefields, widening them from two metres to five. They placed somewhere between one million and 1.3 million of the new brick-shaped Bakelite-encased mines along 350 kilometres of land border. In some places the mines were 25 centimetres apart and in four rows, in others more densely at 12.5 centimetres apart and in eight rows, depending on anticipated traffic. They were set to go off under 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of pressure. Tripwires crisscrossed the minefields, some attached to flares, some to mines, and others connecting the fence posts to mines so the posts could not be used to climb over the barbed wire. Soon the whole strip became overgrown with weeds, making the wires invisible and the strips truly impassable. People still tried to flee, encountered the impassible system, and headed south to the Yugoslavian border. The regime responded by re-establishing the Stalinist border zone along that side, but without mines.1 In keeping with general practice of the time, the five battalions of soldiers who did the work on the Austrian border all came from remote duty stations. When additional troops were needed for construction or other missions, they were brought from eastern Hungary and not told that they were going to the western border. After they had been near the border long enough to figure out their location, they were returned to their former bases. Sándor Goják, a silverhaired former border guard, compared this to the secret movement of Soviet troops to Budapest in the wake of the revolution in 1956. As they prepared to move out, the authorities told them they were going to Suez; some of them saw the Danube and asked whether it was the Egyptian canal.2 Only ten men were seriously injured while installing the mines; one was killed.3 This system served until the mid-1960s, and from a technical standpoint probably could have lasted longer. The odds against defeating this obstacle system were prohibitive. Despite the low likelihood of success, efforts to get out persisted and showed a wide



From Minefields to Electric Fences 77

range of creativity. People used numerous variations of footwear mounted on horse shoes or deer paws to fool patrols looking for human foot prints. A young pole-vaulting champion from Poland tried to soar over the border strip, but did not allow enough distance for his approach and landed among the mines. ‘They picked up the pieces of his body,’ recalled Sándor Goják, who served in the 1960s when this system was operational, ‘and put them in a basket.’ In another case, a man working in the dead of night, cut his way through the barbed wire, crossed the patrol road, and picked his way through the minefield. When he got to the first town, he had just enough time to find a pub and buy a round of drinks before he was arrested and hauled off. It turned out he had crossed a mock minefield set up for training purposes and never made it across the border. Another time, a border guard officer and his family crashed a recreational vehicle into the border strip, climbed on the roof, and jumped to the other side. They got out, but he was killed in what appeared to be an automobile accident in Vienna a couple weeks later. Overall Goják estimated the odds of successfully crossing at about four or five in one thousand, and statistics on attempts to cross the green border do not seem to exist.4 Obsolescence did not bring about removal of the minefields, as it had done with the first. ‘Extensive negative publicity’ did, and the decision came from Moscow. The horrific spring floods of 1965, washing over the border-barrier strip where the vegetation had been cleared to make way for the mines and smooth strip, caused so much erosion that many mines were exposed and washed into streams. Some of them got into the Pinka River, which in parts of Vas County forms the Austrian boundary and generally winds its way through the border area. Some of the mines floating down the river got into Austria, where two girls died when one went off. The Austrians complained to the United Nations, and the Soviets decided in December 1965 to remove the mines. The next spring, Hungarian border troops once again set about the dangerous work of pulling them out.5 This round of mine clearance was different from the earlier one but not easier. Bakelite is a plastic, which was at one time widely used for telephone casings. Metal detectors could not locate the bakelite devices and strings of tractor-rollers pulled through the minefields by tanks did not find and detonate all of them. So once again it was left to the border troops, on their knees with bayonets, probing gently by hand for the mines. Altogether they removed more than half a million mines, twenty per cent of which they exploded on the spot. For those they extracted, the standard procedure required 2,500 probes for every square metre, at best an extremely tedious and dangerous process. Remarkably, no fatalities were recorded, but ambulances frequently carried maimed soldiers to nearby hospitals.6

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Electric Signal Wire Meanwhile, after 1965 Hungary made the transition to a third border control system, whose most important new feature was SZ-100 signal wire imported from the Soviet Union. This single stainless steel strand carried 24 volts of current, and was strung from Rajka in the north 249 kilometres to Alsoszolnok in the south, on the innermost of two barbed wire fences, on the same poles with the regular barbed wire. The two fences framed the smooth strip which revealed tracks, and the entire barrier paralleled the border at distances from 50 metres to a kilometre. Patrol roads, guard towers and roving detachments remained integral to the system. The wire itself sent alarms to the nearest border stations, showing the sector of the break and triggering an armed response in three to four minutes. One unit would rush to the scene of the attempted breach, while another sped to the border in front of the opening to block the escape of anyone who might have managed to get beyond the wire. All along the strip locked gates at five- to eight-kilometre intervals (three to five miles) allowed border troops to get between those who managed to breach the barriers and the border itself. The electric charge in the fence was far from lethal, but when the wire first went into use, and until 1970, it worked in conjunction with the diminishing number of minefields that were not yet cleared.7 Placement of the barriers at some distance from the actual border increased the effectiveness of the system in two ways. An obvious advantage was gained by allowing the responding forces time to get between those who were fleeing and the border. Another more subtle advantage resulted from the mistaken impression, created by the barriers themselves, that they were in fact on the actual border. So some of those who got through the fence and eluded the patrols headed for the nearest town or border guard post, thinking they were in Austria, only to find themselves in a Hungarian town or, even worse, a Hungarian border guard post. At least one crosser made it through the wire and walked for kilometres before finding a town, only to enter, order a celebratory round of drinks, and then discover he was in a Hungarian kocsma, not an Austrian Gasthaus.8 In contrast to the Berlin Wall, Hungarian border installations split no large cities, did not appear massive and impermeable to the naked eye, and did not lure foreign politicians to posture and gesture within view of them. Stretching over the wooded hills along the Austrian boundary or the plains and rivers on the southern side, the barbed wire and watch towers were practically invisible to ordinary people in their daily lives. Curiosity seekers, assuming that there were any, could not get within sight of the barriers without the special credentials needed to approach the border. Except for 1956, the Hungarian obstacles got little press and public attention, and there was no museum like the one at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie dedicated to efforts to breach the infamous wall. Yet the Hungarian barriers were no less difficult to cross than the Berlin Wall and no less deadly to those who tried.



From Minefields to Electric Fences 79

The soldiers who patrolled the border knew that their primary adversaries were Hungarians like themselves. Still they worked diligently and with dedication. They came to be excellent trackers, not just in the winter when the snow made it easy but in summer as well. They could read signs and distinguish between human and animal trails. They knew that crows liked to be near humans, and that large numbers of the birds indicated the presence of people in the canal ditches leading to Austria. They took pride in these skills and referred to themselves as Leatherstockings.9 Later, when East Germans using fake West German documents tried to get out, many of the border guards also learned how to distinguish between speech patterns used on the two sides of the inner German border.10 They were, in the eyes of many, swinish bullies and thugs, but they were also shrewd trackers and intelligent observers of human behaviour. At first, people near the border stayed clear of the new electric wire of the 1970s, assuming that the current was deadly, like the Czech wire. By the end of the decade, it became well known that the Hungarian current was strong enough to send a message to a guard post but too weak to cause serious injury. Those who approached the border equipped with wire cutters, alligator clips and reinforced cables with which to reroute the current could cross the holes cut in the fence. Then all that stood between them and the border were two kilometres of open space and the soldiers responding to the alarm, who in almost all cases stopped the escape.11

Paper Wall The administrative aspect of border restrictions, which in the future some would call the ‘wall of paper’, started to ease during the period of the second generation of minefields and continued weakening through the time of the signal wire. There remained a bewildering array of exit documents, but in 1961 the Soviets started to ease the controls and supervision imposed after the 1956 revolution. Prime Minister János Kádár’s government allowed the regulations governing the issue of passports to become public knowledge. Then from 1964, as it appeared that people were coming to terms with the regime and the minor liberties that it was beginning to permit, it became possible to apply for a passport to visit Socialist countries once every two years. By the end of the decade the requirement for a visa to travel in the Eastern bloc, even to former arch-enemy Yugoslavia, was abolished. A slowly expanding trickle of Hungarian visitors to the West appeared, starting from just over 3,000 in 1954, and increasing to more than 120,000 in 1963. Hungarians who had fled the country for cities in Germany, Switzerland and Austria saw increasing numbers of their friends and relatives from back home turn up at their doors, an influx they called ‘Kádár’s revenge.’12 On 1 January 1972 came the biggest change since the border was closed, the introduction of the two-passport system. The red passport was valid for travel

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to the east, to Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria and East Germany, then also after 1 January 1977 to Russia and Yugoslavia. Possession of this little red book did not guarantee a cordial welcome or an easy crossing even to a fraternal Socialist neighbour. A Magyar political leader from the north later reminded a Hungarian audience that at one time the authorities on the Czech border performed such rigorous examinations of incoming visitors that they ‘did not even recoil from the proctoscope …’13 Romania too did not welcome visitors from Hungary. Customs officers of the Ceauşescu regime intensified censorship at the border crossings, regularly confiscating Hungarian-language papers, books and magazines as part of the relentless oppression of the Hungarian minority which continued through the 1980s. Relations between Hungary and Romania did not improve until after the December 1989 revolution, when Hungarians sent hundreds of spontaneously organized truckloads of relief supplies to alleviate widespread and severe poverty.14 Romanian efforts to choke off cultural materials reached astonishing levels. In July 1984, three artists involving in planning the coming season’s programme for the theater in Győr, then named for the poet Károly Kisfaludy, set out for a meeting with Transylvanian director György Harag regarding a playbill with a Kisfaludy theme. It was easier for them to go to him in Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureș), although he was scheduled to be artistic director in Győr for the coming year, than it would have been for him to go to them, so they piled into the Skoda and took off. At the border, on a bright summer morning, with 270 kilometres of bad Transylvanian road still ahead, they underwent inspection. None of them carried more than an overnight bag, at a time when Magyars going to visit relatives always had household necessities, smuggling them east to help their relatives – sugar, flour, laundry soap, toilet paper, you name it. They went through the meticulous vehicle inspection and handed over the obligatory two cartons of Kent cigarettes. Still the intuitive and sharp-eyed battle-axe of a border guard who oversaw the whole process glared at them. She found nothing, which made her more suspicious, not less. Finally she barked, in abrupt and unconventional but unmistakable Hungarian, ‘Vers van?’ (‘Got poetry?’) There they were, three guys in jeans and tee-shirts. She didn’t know they were involved in the arts, and she was looking for Hungarian poetry. And they said ‘no,’ but they all probably had one or another volume of Kisfaludy in their bags. András Pályi, who wrote down this story more than twenty years afterward, became concerned. What if she found the book in his bag? How was he going to explain that he was a poetic theatre specialist? Fortunately she didn’t look in any of them and let the artists go.15 The blue passport was for travel to the west, although this was allowed once every three years. Moreover, travellers were permitted only trivial amounts of foreign currency, making it impossible to leave without an outside source of support. Performers and athletes travelling as teams got preferential treatment, with their status noted with the annotation ‘sport’ on the corner of the main passport page. But they too had to dream up ways to get what little



From Minefields to Electric Fences 81

‘The barrier operator’s job only looks easy in the picture,’ according to the caption to this picture of the Hegyeshalom crossing in the 1980s as seen from the control tower. Photograph by the author.

money they had beyond their meal allowance out of the country, hiding it, for example, under false bottoms in their lunch boxes. Hungarian writer and one-time Eastern European correspondent for The Nation magazine Miklós Vámos recalled that a chasm separated the red and blue documents: There were two ‘overseas’, the ‘little overseas’, consisting of Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia or the GDR, that is the ‘peace camp’ countries, and the ‘big overseas’, which was the rest of the world. This ‘big overseas’ was a place where the Hungarian forint was worth as much as toilet paper, although it was insufficiently absorbent for such use. The coins, he wisecracked, you could throw into a fountain.16 During the transitional decade of 1966–1976, that started with the shift from mines to signal wire, included the start of the two-passport system, and ended with extending use of the red passport to travel towards the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, Hegyeshalom remained the primary crossing point to the West. It had anywhere from three to five times as much traffic as Sopron, the next busiest on the western border, but it was not the most heavily used route out of the country. Five of the ten most active crossings during the decade led to Czechoslovakia, and for every individual year of the decade except 1967 more than half the traffic flowed in that direction. Volume to Yugoslavia was also higher than that towards Austria, and only Romania had less traffic. The northeast corner abutting the Soviet Union had neglible activity.17 No agreement on small border traffic was concluded with Austria, but it became easier for those living within fifteen kilometres of the border to cross into the other four (Socialist) neighbours – Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia,

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Romania, and Russia – using specially designated crossing points. This accounts for much of the disparity in the volume of traffic. Such trips were limited at various times from four to twelve per year and were mainly designed to allow family visits. In those years, small-border traffic became less about village life and farming and more about family tourism and shopping. Thus Yugoslavia became a popular destination, because at least there it was possible to find some western consumer goods.18

Border Anxieties The grueling interrogations and inspections that travellers experienced on the way west and the limitations on the number of trips and on currency also influenced the volume of traffic. In the 1980s, improvements in travel were substantial but crossing the border remained a physically exhausting experience. Lines at the Hegyeshalom crossing were sometimes kilometres long, as vehicles heading in both directions inched forward until they got to the crossings, where drivers and passengers faced the inspections and the grilling. Motorists took their cars out of gear, turned off the ignition, and pushed them forward every time the lines moved a bit. Still it was not unusual for cars to run out of gas during the wait, and Hungarian border guards, not typically the most helpful or gracious of public servants, were even known to help push cars across the border if they ran out of gas at the crossing itself. Crossing could also be emotionally exhausting and infuriating. The experience of my historian-cousin on his first trip to the West in 1980 contained all the elements of the typical crossing, the arbitrariness of the border guards, the fear and powerlessness of the traveller, the pure nastiness of a simple train trip to and from neighbouring countries. As a young man in 1980, he ventured to Paris, London and Liège. Restrictions were not as harsh as they once were. The border was still hard to the point of being deadly, but the minefields had been removed and replaced by signal wire, and one trip outside the so-called ‘peace camp’ of the Soviet Union and its satellites was allowed every three years if you were lucky enough to be granted a blue passport. My cousin and his wife boarded the train at Budapest’s Keleti Station, and soon the border guards swarmed the train, barking orders that sent people scurrying back to their compartments. When they got to my cousins’ belongings, they opened every bag, almost cut up his jacket, searching inside the lining for hard currency above the meagre allowance of $50 per person, opening and searching even their private journals. My relative was not the only one who had such an experience. Lőrinc Szendres was right when he observed that ‘there is a generation for which the stomach always clenches on approach to the border.’ They will never forget the hours of waiting in front of the border barrier, the emptying of their suitcases, the examination of their shoes, even the strip searches, not just at Hegyeshalom but at every crossing.19



From Minefields to Electric Fences 83

My cousin arrived in London, where he experienced something almost as breathtaking that underscored the difference between where he had come from and where he had arrived: free books! There was, he recalled, a little book shop near St Paul’s Cathedral, where cheap editions of classic works were available without charge to visitors from Communist countries. He couldn’t believe his ears and asked again and again if this was true. And the answer remained the same: as many as he wanted. So he walked out loaded down with about twenty volumes, dropped off those books that he considered too risky to take home with his aunt and uncle in Belgium, who had left Hungary in the wake of the 1956 revolution, and went home. He thought the books he was packing for the return trip were harmless. Coming back, the border guards got on the train at Hegyeshalom and started their shouting and their inspections. Again they frightened everyone, and opened everything. The guards were not finished by the time the train reached its first Hungarian station at Győr, so they let no one off the train. My cousin remembered crying teenager girls shouting from the train to their parents that they were not being allowed to disembark and had to continue to Budapest. At Győr the guards entered my cousin’s compartment and discovered the books. As he recalled, ‘Of course they didn’t understand the titles, but they behaved as if I had carried heroin or something …’ They bundled up all the books, the free ones and those he had bought, and when the train arrived at Budapest, they made him carry them to the customs office and leave them there, ‘even,’ he said, ‘the New Cambridge Modern History of the French Revolution.’ Weeks went by before he got a message saying that he could retrieve them. When he did get his purchases, four items were missing, Doctor Zhivago, a Fontana History of Europe between the world wars, a free magazine published by the British Socialist Party that he had picked up in Hyde Park, and an advertising section of the Sunday Times, which they took because there was a photo of women Vietnamese soldiers in a tank. My cousin summed up his opinion of the border guards in a few angry works: ‘THEY WERE CRAP! SHIT! AGGRESSIVE THUGS!’20

Chapter 7

Hungary and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain

Reconsidering the Signal Wire The immediate events that led to the collapse of the whole Communist exoskeleton, including the Berlin Wall, started in the northwestern corner of Hungary, in the summer of 1989. Hungary had been slowly modifying its border regime for nearly a decade. The process can reasonably be traced back to the decision to abandon the use of deadly anti-personnel mines in 1965 and the subsequent installation of electric signal wires to alert border forces of attempted crossings. In contrast mines remained part of the German barrier system until 1984. The Hungarian border wall that remained in place through the 1980s caused occasional public-relations problems and a constant financial drain for the regime. It also created tactical headaches and a handful of casualties for the border guards. For residents of the border strip it guaranteed lives of isolation and poverty. It may have served the security interests of the Soviet Union, which remained unchanged from the Stalinist period, to maintain a hermetically sealed buffer zone between it and the West, just like a similar belt of surrounding allies and clients had served the Third Reich as a buffer between it and the Soviet Union, but Soviets did not pay for this security belt.1 Hungarians, Czechs, Germans and citizens of the other satellites paid for it. Border guards did not concern themselves, at least publicly, with geopolitical issues. But they did grapple with technical and financial aspects of maintaining the system. Word had started to spread through the Soviet empire that the Hungarian segment of the Iron Curtain was vulnerable. András Oplatka, driving through his native Hungary in 1984 on his way from the Soviet Union to his home in Switzerland, picked up a hitchhiker near Sopron. The young man from the German Democratic Republic declared his intention to cross to Austria under the cover of darkness. He had been a border guard in his native land, and this border, he opined, would be easy. There were no footstep detectors, fewer searchlights, and only a weak current in the wires. It was also widely known that the border was rarely enforced with firearms. He said he could deal with the obstacles.2 By the early 1980s the decaying system started to drive the border guards crazy. Small animals, birds and even tree branches blown into the fence by high winds set off some 4,000 alarms a year, far more than those



Hungary and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain 85

triggered by humans. Patrols frequently went dashing to the scene only to find nothing. So early in the decade, most notably at an organizational conference in 1984, border guards started to ponder alternatives to this burdensome arrangement. It was clear to the leadership that the barriers required extensive and costly repair or revision, and that state leaders would have to commit themselves to hefty outlays if they wanted to continue to secure the border. In 1986, complaints of the border guard, now under the leadership of Major General János Székely, made their way into decisionmaking circles, while birds and rabbits triggered ‘border incidents’ up and down the Austrian line.3

Many Small Steps While the border guard leadership pondered the future of the signal wire, Hungary took its first quiet steps toward an independent foreign policy. Hungary had established diplomatic relations with West Germany in 1973, steadily expanded bilateral connections with France and Britain, and signed the Helsinki Declaration of Human Rights in 1975. Connections improved but the economy did not, and with insolvency a strong possibility, Hungary turned to the Soviet Union for help at the end of the decade, seeking increased oil supplies or financial help to stabilize its situation. The Soviets could not help, and despite strong objections from them, Hungary started discussions with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. In 1981, with the Soviets less strenuously opposed, the Magyars requested admission to both and started secret negotiations with the European Economic Community, a precursor to the European Union that Moscow did not officially recognize. In the following year, Hungary joined the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, without notifying Moscow. As historian Bernard Wasserstein noted, this was ‘a significant assertion of sovereign decision-making.’4 While Hungary expanded its official contacts beyond the Soviet bloc, developments outside Hungary that would greatly influence the border situation started to unfold. In the autumn of 1984, two West German diplomatic posts, the embassy in Prague and the office of the permanent representative in Berlin, had to close because of overcrowding with East Germans seeking asylum. At the same time the Bundesrepublik’s embassy in Budapest came to the attention of those looking for a way out. In addition to allowing asylum-seekers to gain refuge on the grounds of its diplomatic posts, the West Germans, also in 1984, exerted a mitigating influence on the East German border barriers, granting badly needed financial credits to the Honecker government in exchange for removal of the infamous SM-70 minefields. The East German border remained much harder than its Hungarian counterpart, and people like the former border guard encountered by András Oplatka were starting to take a circuitous route from East Germany, through Czechoslovakia, to Hungary, hoping to reach the West via Austria.5

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Then in 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev started to respond to the internal weaknesses of the Soviet system with ‘perestroika’ or restructuring and ‘glasnost’ or openness, both soon to become catchwords of Gorbachev’s tenure. According to the Hungarian and Soviet foreign ministers at the end of the decade, Gorbachev also became convinced that Soviet troops would ultimately have to be pulled out of the satellite countries.6 In 1987 came signs that Hungary might be considering additional steps towards an independent foreign policy. Despite protests from Moscow and the East Germans, the Magyars signed an agreement with West Germany calling for the establishment of cultural institutes and maintenance of the linguistic traditions of ethnic Germans in Hungary. The agreement also called for significant and badly needed West German monetary support for political and economic reforms in Hungary. Before the year ended, the Hungarian government approved the World Passport Act, ending the dual passport system, making the freedom to travel abroad generally accessible, and downgrading the act of illegally crossing the border to something like a misdemeanor offence. From January 1 1988, Hungarians could go abroad anywhere, with the new so-called ‘World Passport’, although they still were permitted to take only paltry amounts of money. The slumping western economies at the time did not generate much demand for workers, so very few were likely to go job hunting.7 Immediately there were discernible changes in travel patterns. For years much foreign travel had been determined by the constant foraging for consumer goods and groceries in neighbouring socialist countries and westward travel was severely restricted. The most heavily used crossing points had led north to Czechoslovakia, where rice, which was an essential ingredient of blood sausage, was cheap and so were bananas; inexpensive shoes were also available. In the decade from 1976 to 1987, annual traffic to Czechoslovakia was consistently three to six times as heavy as to Austria. Usually Komárom and occasionally Rajka were the most active crossing stations. This changed in 1988 and Hegyeshalom became the most frequently used border crossing. In 1987 it had been the site of only 400,000 or almost six per cent of 7.2 million outward border crossings. One year later two million (18.5 per cent) of 10.8 million travellers crossed there. From that point, the volume of foreign travel expanded, and Hegyeshalom remained the busiest of the forty official crossing points.8 Hungarian political patterns also started to change. Opposition groups began to form, and independent organizations started to emerge. This development had a number of strands, including solidarity with persecuted Czech activists, pressure to rehabilitate victims of post-1956 reprisals, the appearance of underground samizdat publications, establishment of the first private charity, and even environmental opposition to a huge Hungarian-Czechoslovak hydroelectric project on the Danube. In 1987, the Hungarian Democratic Forum became the first opposition political group in Hungary, and at the end of 1988, the Alliance of Free Democrats emerged as a coalition of opposition groups. The Communist party continued to govern, at least in a formal way



Hungary and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain 87

but, undercut by Gorbachev’s policies, it lost the capacity to intervene to stop these developments. In May 1988 János Kádár stepped down after over thirty years as general secretary and prime minister, and reform Communists began to take over.9 For the border guards, these developments raised questions about their mission of rigidly sealing the border. After adoption of the World Passport Act, what was the point? Everyone could get a passport and leave if they desired. In the autumn of 1987, right around the time that the decision was made to make passports generally available, headquarters queried border guard officers about their views. The consensus was that the electric signalling system had outlived its usefulness. The original special wire had been purchased from the Soviet Union, but suitable replacement wire was now only available from expensive western sources, adding irony and the expenditure of precious foreign exchange to the equation. The other possibility, an entirely new system modelled on the Soviet and East German barriers, would cost as much as 1.5 million forints, or nearly $20,000, per kilometre. Moreover, the cost in negative publicity would be steep. There seemed no choice apart from dismantling it.10 While the border guards pondered this situation, Hungary took another step towards an independent policy. In 1988 it signed the comprehensive trade agreement with the European Economic Community that had been under discussion for seven years. Hungary became the first Warsaw Pact country to reach such an arrangement.11 In October 1988, the political and technical questions regarding the border started to come together in public. Minister of State Imre Pozsgay and Interior Minister István Horváth received an invitation from Generel Székely, commander of the border guards and head of the border guard party organization, to visit the guard force at Hegyeshalom. The two friends went to the border together. At their meeting on October 26, officers explained the dilapidated condition of the signal system with its frequent false alarms. The possible end to the closed border was raised. In response to reporters’ questions, Pozsgay opined that the signal system and Iron Curtain should be taken down, citing the well-known technical problems and the expense of replacing it but adding political and historical reasons as well. He said the same things the next day at a forum in Győr, and his words were reported on television, then in Népszabadság, the party-sponsored daily, under the headline, ‘Time has come for elimination of technical closure’, and even in the official monthly of the border guards, Határőr, still publishing after more than forty years. He was blunt and direct claiming ‘… the electronic alarm system has morally, technologically and politically outlived itself.’ As a result, Pozsgay lost his job, but it looked like the end was drawing near for the hard cold-war border. Besides, Interior Minister Horvâth, under whom the border guards served, was now on record as not opposing removal of the alarm system.12 While these events took place in the western part of Hungary, a wave of refugees headed towards Hungary from Romania. The mad regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu, lurching towards its bloody and chaotic end, was emptying

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thousands of villages to consolidate the population and reduce the number of settlements with ethnic Hungarian majorities. As a result, refugees, mainly Magyar but with ethnic Germans and Romanians among them, were fleeing, with the Magyars among them likely to stay in Hungary rather than pass through. They crowded into camps in Hungary, the burden of their care stressing the fragile Hungarian economy. At that time migration remained restricted, and the notion that a person could leave a socialist country for political reasons was not generally accepted in other bloc countries. Hungary had never signed the Geneva Convention on refugees, and treated those fleeing Romania as migrants seeking economic opportunity rather than as refugees fleeing persecution.13 The situation changed quickly during 1989. When the year opened, it would have been hard to anticipate a leading role for Hungary in the dismantling of the Iron Curtain. Prime Minister Miklós Németh, an economist who had taken office in July 1988, took another small step towards an independent foreign policy. He went on his first foreign trip as government head, but it was not the once obligatory pilgrimage to the Kremlin. In mid-February Németh met with Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitsky, first at Nagycenk near the border in northwestern Hungary and then at Rust on the other side. Németh then alerted Austria to the Hungarian intention to remove the obstacles on the border. At that point the recollections of the two men concerning the meeting diverged. Németh recalled that Vranitsky was not overjoyed at the news. Vranitsky claimed Németh got it wrong, that he was surprised, but satisfied, albeit concerned about new missions that might devolve on Austria’s border guards. But inside the Austrian government there was unease over the news. Foreign Minister Alois Mock, reflecting a view of Hungary and the East common since the time of Metternich, worried that the removal of the barrier would bring more eastern European refugees to Austria. Vranitsky and Németh agreed that they would have to work together concerning cross-border crime. Up to that point, most illegal crossers had been Magyars fleeing to the west. Now border-jumping smugglers might be moving in both directions.14 Events accelerated in the spring. Facing a crisis caused by Transylvanian Magyars and others fleeing Romania, on March 14 Hungary signed the United Nations’ Geneva Refugee Convention, asserting the right of people to emigrate and requiring the admission of people seeking refuge from persecution. Hungary acceded to the convention with a reservation, a willingness to accept only refugees from other European countries, which remained in effect for almost nine years, until 1 March 1998. The Geneva accord has been imbued with a timelessness by its advocates, as codifying a customary right, but it reflects a very modern sensibility tied to free markets and freedom of movement that is far from traditional. It is also not tied to a corresponding right to enter a country, making it a somewhat hollow concept. In this case, even when Hungary signed the Geneva Convention, it still had treaties with the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Romania, requiring prompt return of those who had illegally entered



Hungary and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain 89

Hungary. The commitment to the Geneva Convention meant that the 12,500 Transylvanian Magyars in the country would not be sent back. It also meant that more would come, even though the Romanians tried to stem the tide in the summer of 1989 by stringing barbed wire on the Hungarian border and shooting an increasing number of the people who entered the frontier zone heading west to Hungary. Other countries that tried to halt the flight of their citizens, predominantly East Germany, would also redouble their efforts to seal their borders against flight, but Hungary had just announced to the world that it would not honour its treaty obligations to return those who had escaped other Communist countries, making an increased flow ever more likely.15 Meanwhile, when Németh learned that an item in the 1990 budget was for refurbishing the electric signalling fence, he crossed it out. On the last day of February he received approval from the Party to proceed towards an open border and thereafter, according to András Oplatka, the Németh government’s actions reflected his efforts to replace the party with a democratic system. In mid-March, right around the time that Hungary signed the Geneva accord, the Németh government made it official. It informed the ambassadors of other socialist countries that it intended to end its strict border regime, but not how far exactly it meant to go in creating an open ‘green border’. At the end of March, this translated into a decision to start dismantling the electric signal fence.16 Németh met Gorbachev for the first time on 23-24 March 1989. The encounter had its tense moments, but ended with the Soviet leader acknowledging that Hungary could decide its own fate. Nevertheless, the Hungarian government remained fearful of Soviet intervention to the end. Later in the spring, news that the Soviets were strengthening their short border with Hungary reached Budapest, and that reduced the concern: they had poured troops into Hungary from that direction in 1956 but now they were barricading themselves in and were not likely to invade, at least from that direction. Everyone knew that they didn’t have to invade at all. There were as many as 100,000 Soviet soldiers stationed inside Hungary, not to mention nuclear warheads, and through this force Gorbachev had ample power to halt and reverse the process that Németh had set in motion.17 Gorbachev’s government remained aloof from developments in Hungary, and events in April clearly indicated what was to come. Near the north-south border crossing at Rajka, on the Hungarian-Czech border but very near to Austria to the west as well, the border guards conducted an exercise in preparation for taking down the electric fence. They tested machinery designed to pull out the concrete posts and roll up the wire. With Interior Minister Horváth’s encouragement, they publicized these first steps. By that time it was an open secret in the press that the barriers were coming down, and that 1 January 1991 had been set as the date for their complete elimination. Border guard deputy commander Balázs Nováky told his Soviet colleagues as much at a border-guard meeting in Odessa, adding that he did not know what would

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replace the old system. Before the month was over, the East Germans knew that Hungary was lost to socialism.18 On May 2, the electric fence system was switched off. Border guards and soldiers started to roll up the wire, 600 yards of it a day. Nováky announced the move during a press conference staged at Hegyeshalom and informally publicized beforehand to the media. He cited economic reasons. It was all done for maximum effect, with two hundred representatives of the international press watching as an officer stood before the cameras and pulled a lever in a circuit box to shut off the current, and the guards set to work on the fence with outsize wire cutters. Coverage by West German television spread the news into East Germany and beyond. When asked whether his government had cleared its plans with the Soviets, Nováky answered that the decision had been taken independently, adding a bit disingenuously that the decision to close the border forty years earlier had also been taken without informing the Austrians beforehand. 19 At that point it became clear to many, in East and West Germany, that the Iron Curtain, which stretched from the North Sea to the Black Sea, had been breached. West German diplomat Axel Hartman, watching the news on television, was caught by surprise but appreciated the significance of the event. ‘Jesus,’ he exclaimed, ‘now we are going to have both our hands full of work!’ To his boss he explained the obvious: ‘if people got to see these pictures in the GDR,’ which Hartman knew they would, ‘they would right away embark for Hungary, because the only thing they really cared about was where they could find a hole in the Iron Curtain; in fact, this was just what would happen …’20 Even while Hartman spoke, East German citizens were planning summer vacations on Lake Balaton in Hungary. Sixteen days after the electricity to the fence was turned off, on May 18, a new law confirmed what was visibly taking place, and set the completion date for dismantling the system at 31 December 1990. The law ended restrictions on free movement along the border strip and on border waters, particularly Fertő Lake, which was partly in Austria and partly in Hungary, as of 31 July 1989. Hungary tried to reassure the East Germans that strict enforcement of the border would continue, but even the most wishful of socialist thinkers couldn’t possibly have found the promises convincing.21 The widely publicized photograph of Austrian and Hungarian foreign ministers Alois Mock and Gyula Horn, wire cutters in hand, severing the fence near the Klingenbach-Sopron border crossing on 27 June 1989, guaranteed that everyone was aware of what was happening. The idea for the meeting near Sopron had been Mock’s. His concern over possible increases in unwanted guests in Austria did not diminish his awareness that dismantling of the wire barrier represented a truly significant development that merited recognition by the nations’ top diplomats, and he wanted to show that both countries were serious about cooperation in building a new common European home. Now he was immortalized studiously wielding a large pair of wire cutters along with the grinning Horn.



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It turned out that taking the actual picture was harder than either anticipated, because first they had to find a suitably long stretch of intact wire to serve as their backdrop. Ultimately they did, and the resultant picture would remain an iconic image of the extraordinary events then under way.22 It would also leave the erroneous impression that June 27 was a key date in the actual opening of the border, rather than a stunt for the cameras and a nod toward posterity. Here again the Austrian narrative, placing Mock at the centre of this event, diverges from at least one version of the Hungarian view. The American reporter Michael Meyer, then with Newsweek, came to see the fence-cutting as part of a deliberate effort of Németh and his supporters to call international attention to the border opening, lure East Germans into Hungary, and precipitate the collapse of the whole Iron Curtain. Twenty years later, Meyer wrote that Németh had been behind the event: ‘Németh later told me he wanted to make sure the world got the message. “Something important is happening,” he sought to say. ‘Pay attention.’23 But twenty years later, Németh also told dinner guests at the 11 September 2009 meeting of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation nearly the opposite, that he found the attention lavished on the June 27 event puzzling. He claimed he ‘never placed great value on public relations appearances’, which is all this was, although he conceded that the encounter did have the value of testing the Soviet response.24 Whether they needed (or got) Prime Minister Németh’s overt encouragement or not, German refugees began to swarm into Hungary via Czechoslovakia. By July 1, 25,000 of them were there on vacation, and thousands more were leaving East Germany, some seeking refuge in the West German embassies in Prague and Budapest. A few actually crossed the Austrian border, where the danger had significantly gone down since March, but most just remained in Hungary, anticipating further steps toward openness. In Vienna, the Hungarian embassy noted that Austrian politicians had started to grouse about Hungarians again causing headaches in Europe, as they had done in 1956.25 By July as well, the police in Austrian Burgenland could see what was happening. They knew where the holes were and that they would not be patched. They also knew that Hungarian border guards would no longer use lethal force against crossers. Burgenland police chief Nikolaus Koch, recalled that, ‘When in July 1989 we on the Burgenland side of the border realized that there was a significant increase in the number of GDR citizens crossing our borders, and that they were arriving without the so-called Convention Passport, a travel document issued along the lines of the Geneva Refugee Convention of 1951, and that in addition to all this, almost all new arrivals had been from Hungary, we already suspected that some changes were to happen that would also affect Burgenland.’26 Koch could see that Hungarian border policy was in transition, extending beyond border matters to the criminal code, the rights of citizens and the overall view of the world. Illegal crossing of the border had been reduced from a felony to a trivial transgression, passports were generally available, and the Iron Curtain was coming down with no plans in the offing

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to replace it. Then on August 1, the law of March 18 ending the prohibitions against entry into the border strip was implemented, and the border guards could no longer arrest someone for being inside the zone. Their job, carried out for years with diligence and even relish, was becoming impossible, as citizens gained flexibility in their daily options.27 August 13 brought the twenty-eighth anniversary of the start of the Berlin Wall. In Budapest, a public demonstration featured a cardboard replica of the despised wall on Vaci Street near Vorosmarty Square, in the heart of the shopping district. The replica was built for the occasion and then knocked down, like the one that had been erected and then dismantled by Jack Abramoff and the Young Republicans in Washington DC’s Lafayette Park five years earlier.28

A Picnic Six days later came the ‘pan-European picnic’, during which East Germans refugees fled through Hungary to Austria, the most momentous and dramatic public event of that tumultuous summer of 1989. This was a project first proposed over a June 1989 dinner in Debrecen by Ferenc Mészáros, a member of the opposition group Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) but adopted and sponsored by the Pan-European Union, an organization that had promoted European unification since its founding in 1923, and its president, Otto von Habsburg, heir of the last emperor and king, Charles IV. MDF also took a leading role, as did Imre Pozsgay, a professor of history at Debrecen since his dismissal from the government, who lent his name to the project.29 Mária Filep, director of a summer camp for young people from Communist bloc countries, joined the list of supporters, intending to make the picnic the closing event of her camp’s Sopron session.30 This may have helped give the picnic an air of something other than a demonstration by the opposition. With its mix of opposition leaders and Communists, it also started to set the groundwork for later arguments over who owned the picnic, Communist reformers or opposition leaders. At first, only Mária Filep staunchly supported Mészáros. Almost all the opposition leaders considered the idea too hard, too complicated and too hastily conceived. Ultimately, however, their resistance dissolved into a concerted effort to make it work. There was indeed a lot to do, ranging from permission to publicity, and covering logistical matters ranging from food and drink to toilets, as well as entertainment, parking, drinking water, electricity, site clearance, signs, a sound system and tents for the campers. The event really was conceived as a picnic, a casual meeting over grilled meat between neighbours. As Zoltán Kócsán, one of the organizers, said, ‘… we simply wished to do something we had not been allowed before, namely build a fire on the spot where the Iron Curtain had been standing, roast some bacon on the former minefield, and create an opportunity for the citizens of nearby



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towns and villages from either side of the border to just sit down and talk …’ Maybe a little disingenuously, he called it a simple matter, something like Carl Sandburg’s long ago evocation of Hungarians picnicking on the Chicago River, whole families with an accordion and a keg of beer, a gathering that Sandburg said illuminated the meaning of life. To Kócsán, a Sopron engineer born in the historic year of 1956 at Hegykő, the spot immortalized by poet George Faludy as a crossing place during the revolution, it was ‘simply the people of Sopron who wanted to enjoy themselves on a spot where it had previously been impossible, in the no-man’s-land where the Iron Curtain had just stood.’31 Of course, a barbed wire fence and a locked gate separated the neighbours, so involvement of the border guards in fulfilling this simple desire was essential. And border guard cooperation meant at the very least the tolerance of the government to the highest levels. So when the border guards displayed a generally cooperative spirit and agreed to allow the picnic, then accompanied the organizers on a site visit to assure that everything would go smoothly, and even accepted a three-hour opening of the border at one specific point to allow this casual mingling of neighbours, there could be no question that the government of Prime Minister Miklós Németh had decided to allow the event to be staged. In addition to what amounted to tacit approval from the Hungarian government, the organizers needed Austrian permission for the border opening. László Magás had originally suggested opening the border near Sopron, on the road towards St Margarethen (Margitbánya), a little beyond Morbisch, the town nearest the border. The Morbisch crossing had once been part of the national road leading from Sopron to Pozsony, now Bratislava. In April 1938, after the Anschluss, twenty to thirty Jews from the Burgenland village of Parndorf, who had Hungarian papers, had been taken there by the Austrians and dumped at the border. The Hungarians had refused to let them across and they were stranded there for four days before Austrian authorities relented and allowed them to travel to Vienna.32 A decade later, when the Communists took power in Hungary, the road was closed – it seemed for good – and blocked by a wooden gate secured with a lock and chain. In 1989, neither Magás nor any other picnic organizers had the slightest idea of who on the Austrian side they should contact regarding the opening. Then on August 11, Magás met Andreas Waha, the mayor of St Margarethen. Like most of the Hungarians who were involved, at first Waha ‘found the idea absurd and impossible to be realized within eight days.’ But when he saw how far planning had progressed, including placards and notification printed in German, he changed his mind and decided to support the project. From that point he worked tirelessly in the background to push authorization through the Austrian bureaucracy, succeeding in getting verbal permission in time for the picnic. He also spread word of the event on the Austrian side of Fertő Lake. The gathering took place on an open field called Sopronpuszta about midway between the Hungarian community of Fertőrákos to the south and

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Austrian Morbisch to the north.33 Ultimately it turned into a substantial breach in the already crumbling Iron Curtain. With thousands of East Germans in the country looking for a way to the West, the event drew more than local residents to the border. Why and how the the Germans got there culminates a series of imperfectly known events and decisions leading up to the picnic. These events took place separately from and parallel to those involving the organizing committee. In addition to the details of the directions given to the border guards when they were authorized to allow the gathering, two main questions remain. One concerns the overall nature of the involvement of the Hungarian government and particularly the role of its partnership with the West German government, which had been steadily strengthening since the 1984 agreements, in publicizing the picnic to the refugees, so that they would be present near the border when the opening took place. The other relates to the provision of travel documents to facilitate their departure once the opportunity presented itself. Opinions of the nature of government involvement vary. Prime Minister Németh and Interior Minister Horváth, according to Andreas Oplatka,

An invitation to a picnic. The flyer, with a map of the venue that shows the border, declares ‘Bontsd és vidd!’ Take it down and take it away. A German version of the flyer was also distributed. Photograph by István Nagy.



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expected only a trickle of East Germans to find their way out, and were extremely nervous about the Soviet reaction to the symbolic but provocative event. Horváth also denied authorizing the border guards to ignore crossers, and the guard force national commander, General János Székely, confirmed that a mass exodus was unexpected. Yet Oplatka mentioned that government officials distributed maps of the Sopron border area to East German refugees at the Zugliget camp on the western edge of Budapest, probably the picnic flyer that was part invitation and part map and printed in German, ostensibly for Austrian visitors, as well as in Hungarian. But the slogan on the programme with the map, the one that made its way to the refugee camps and showed those camped there the way to the picnic site, was not merely an invitation to a cookout. ‘Bontsd és vidd!’ it proclaimed in Hungarian, ‘Baue ab und nimm mit’ in German. In English this was ‘take it down, and take it away,’ not exactly a mere invitation to a barbecue with the neighbours. Oplatka claimed Németh, Horváth and Pozsgay all considered the picnic a test of the Soviet reaction to a brief opening of the border and the departure of some residents of Socialist countries.34 While Oplatka’s narrative suggested that the government’s role was complex and a little ambivalent, perhaps even without a clear idea of where the outcome might lead, Michael Meyer saw Németh and his inner circle as bent on revolutionary change. Németh ‘and his small crew of communist subversives’, as Meyer labelled the inner circle, ‘consciously set out to bring down the Iron Curtain that separated Hungary from the West.’ According to Meyer’s view, the events leading to the picnic and the dismantling of the border – the Hegyeshalom press conference on May 2 and the fence-cutting photo opportunity on June 27 among them – were crafted for maximum attention and impact in the hope of directing the attention of refugees in the country and others who were on their way from East Germany to the easy escape route. To make sure that the picnic would yield the desired results, Hungarian and West German consular officials, partners in this enterprise, themselves escorted East Germans to the picnic site, basically pointing the way across the border. The picnic, which Mayer claims Németh hoped would result in the departure of ten thousand East Germans, provided a splendid opportunity to pursue this goal: ‘For the Hungarian conspirators, this translated, essentially, into a plan to lure a bunch of East Germans out of the country, over the border to freedom, in hopes that thousands of others would follow.’ According to Meyer, ‘Németh called it “priming the pump.”â•›’35 Németh himself complicated the matter, apparently telling the BBC in the summer of 2009 that it was mid-August 1989 when the decision to open the border was born, in his head and in his heart. In other words, he had no long-term vision before the picnic.36 Both Oplatka and Meyer drew on conversations with people who took leading roles in the summer’s events, including Németh and his supporters. Yet they reached different conclusions. While Meyer saw a carefully conceived and centrally managed plan to break free, Oplatka saw a government probing and testing in pursuit of a better situation.

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But consider for a moment what Meyer claims that Németh sought and encouraged, the possible illegal crossing of thousands of East Germans at one time. The picnic organizers had made an arrangement with the border guards, sanctioned by the government and ultimately approved by the Austrian government as well, to allow small numbers of local residents to cross the border and enjoy each other’s company. On that basis the picnic received approval, and a lieutenant-colonel with a five-man team went to the border to oversee this symbolic event and stamp passports. Then, nearly a generation later, here is the same prime minister whose government gave the nod to a symbolic opening, allegedly claiming that he wanted thousands of people to cross and that he and his Hungarian and West German co-conspirators went out of their way to round up as many potential crossers as they could recruit, possibly overwhelming the tiny border guard detachment they had set up for a friendly cross-border gathering, a picnic. This is so improbable that it boggles the mind. If Meyer is right, what could Németh have been thinking? What if thousands actually did try to cross? What if they had trampled an armed border guard in their haste? What if one of the guards had fired a warning shot and started a panic-driven swarming of the border and the border guards? Would Lieutenant-Colonel Árpád Bella, level-headed and responsible though he was, have been able to prevent a massacre if his men had been threatened? Did Németh consider the possibility that he might provoke such bloodshed? Assuming that Meyer accurately reports Németh’s recollections, and there is no reason to doubt his integrity or accuracy, could there be some other reason for Németh to make such claims. Could he have been showing the same facetious side that he showed to his own defence minister, Ferenc Kárpáti, at the beginning of May 1989, regarding the border? After Kárpáti reported to Németh the results of a meeting with a furious Erich Honecker, Németh told him to inform the East Germans that the opening of the border, just under way, was merely symbolic. ‘Tell them,’ Meyer says Németh told Kárpáti, ‘it’s a question of money, as I told Gorbi. And, by the way, tell them I consider that fence to be a barbarism. Tell them we intend to tear it down!’ Kárpáti was suitably shocked by this outburst, ‘until’, Meyer reports ‘he realized Németh was joking.’37 Or could Németh have been trying to create for himself and his ‘co-conspirators’, as Meyer called them, a central place in the history of the affair, when in fact they played an important but more modest role, mainly granting approvals for the event to take place? Could in fact Ferenc Mészáros, originator of the idea for the picnic, have addressed this very point, when he wrote to the Győr newspaper Kisalföld twenty years later that he was sick of hearing politicians trying to invent for themselves central roles in this event when they had none. Only Imre Pozsgay, who had been fired for getting out in front of his government on the issue of opening the border, made anything like a visible commitment to change, according to Mészáros. The rest of the political leaders, including Foreign Minister Horn, whose claim to fame was participation in a photo-op which had no significance beyond drawing publicity, had



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nothing to do with the event. Now, twenty years later, they were positioning themselves as visionary agents of change, and Mészáros found it repugnant.38 And Miklós Németh, presumably the ‘MN’ to whom Michael Meyer dedicated his book, The Year that Changed the World, and who did in fact play an important role in the whole complex decade-long process of opening Hungary’s border, has moved himself to dead centre of the entire story, including the picnic with which he had little involvement beyond letting it take place. The actual risks and dangers on that August day in 1989 were great, and Németh remembered being nervous all day long. Pozsgay too recalled his great anxiety. Gorbachev had promised not to intervene, but everyone concerned had ample experience with Soviet promises. They also had ample experience with Soviet military might, remembering 1956 in Hungary and the Prague spring of 1968. There was also the chance that the border guards might open fire in self-defence if too many people rushed the fence, and if Michael Meyer is correct, Németh had gone to some lengths to make that likely by trying to arrange for thousands to try to cross a border blocked by five men.39 If the picnic created such anxieties and tensions, what was the hurry and what was the point? As Oplatka and others have noted, the Central Committee of the Communist party had already decided to take down the border obstacles and settled on a deadline of 1 January 1991. The process of dismantling the barriers had started, and the Russians had not tried to block it. Why create confrontations, risk lives and challenge Gorbachev and the USSR at this point, when as Lieutenant Colonel Bella said, the real significance of the picnic was to speed up a process already scheduled to end within sixteen months? Why not continue to move deliberately towards the deadline date already selected? Was the crush of refugees from Romania and East Germany so stressing that such risks were worthwhile? The actual ‘break-through’ at the border on August 19 came while the organizers of the picnic held a press conference, which ran over time and beyond the scheduled opening of the fence for local visitors at three o’clock. There were, according to László Nagy, ‘a few thousand’ people mingling on the grounds. Lieutenant Colonel Bella had his detachment of five border guards on duty at the crossing, with their exit and entry stamps ready and no idea of the size of the crowd that they might face. Each man also had ten rounds of live ammunition and a holstered pistol, not enough firepower to stop a mass exodus, but enough to turn the picnic into a bloody catastrophe, a Sopronpuszta equivalent of the Boston Massacre.40 As previously arranged, they were going to allow members of the official delegations with valid passports to cross for visits between three and four o’clock. However, a little before the appointed hour arrived, about 100 to 150 German refugees started to run towards the border and freedom. Colonel Bella, who in later years spoke of the spreading feeling of sympathy among the border guards with those who wanted to flee, said ‘I had about 20 seconds to think about it until they got here.’ He wisely decided not to try to stop them, and groups from the vicinity

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of the picnic, between 600 and 700 people altogether, seized the opportunity and crossed into Austria, continuing into the evening hours.41 Another officer, Lieutenant-Colonel István Róka, sent from border guard headquarters in Budapest as an observer, recalled that the picnic organizers had shared their plans with the border guards, and that these plans called for an official delegation to be allowed across the border, with passports, in both directions. As far as he knew, there had been no mention of the possibility that East Germans might be allowed across. He also recalled that a headquarters meeting two days before the picnic had considered the possibility that some people might try to break out, but that no provisions were made for such a development. Roka said this meeting emphasized the importance of keeping the temporary crossing from turning into a conflict, which of course the routine movement of an official delegation was not likely to cause. Like Árpád Bella, he was surprised at what actually happened just a few minutes before 3 p.m., when a large crowd started to form in front of the small group of border guards at about five minutes before the hour. At first, he said, the border guards thought this might be the official party, but they soon saw that they faced an East German group. There was not a Magyar among them. To Roka, these Germans, initially about fifty in number, seemed to be organized, with robust, muscular young men in the front ranks, and older people, women and children behind them. They stopped about four or five metres in front of the border, then after a champagne cork was heard to pop, they advanced in a cluster, pushed aside the passport inspectors, and broke through the gate to the sound of applause from the Austrian side. The border guard detachment, despite the fact that it represented a feared and reviled organization, turned out to be made up of some really swell guys. According to Roka, they behaved like Boy Scouts in pursuit of merit badges for community service. One helped an elderly East German woman who had fallen to rise and continue her flight. Another picked up a baby, apparently dropped in the confusion, and returned the child to its mother. However, the guards did try to detain some of the escapees. Those who tried to escape did not respond with an assault, and the guards gave up the effort, seeing that there was no point. It became apparent that they faced an organized operation, not to mention the cameras of the news show ‘168 Hours’, and they confined themselves to humanitarian gestures, such as escorting people who seemed in need of help back to their base, giving them tea and a snack of bread smeared with fat, and first aid if they needed it. They asked politely about what was going on and let their guests go on their way, across the border to freedom. The way Colonel Róka saw it, looking back on these events in 2009, it was clear the entire world stood with the East Germans and their world-shaking breakthrough. And the border guards had already brought about major change by ending the electric fence system and then by the prohibition against shooting escapers. These directives had set the stage for avoiding mass casualties, and the events of August 19 brought to the minds of some of the



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border guards on the scene that day a basic question: ‘What are we doing here?’42 According to Oplatka, the Austrians, expecting something of the sort, had already planned for special trains to pick up the refugees.43 László Nagy credited Mayor Waha, a hero of the event because of his diligence in obtaining Austrian permission for the border crossing, with reacting quickly to the breakout and setting in motion support and transportation for the East German refugees. He went home and picked up the phone, contacted local inns and restaurants for accommodations and food, arranged for long-distance telephone service for those who came across, and called the West German embassy. Only then were buses ordered, to take the defectors to Vienna, and thence to Giessen in West Germany.44 Clearly the West German diplomats in Austria were not surprised; all the crossers already had properly stamped West German passports issued by the West German embassy in Hungary.45 A few hundred ‘gate-crashers at the picnic’ made it into Austria – 661 is the number most frequently given – leaving behind enough East German Trabant and Wartburg cars to stock a dealership, or perhaps a museum, and creating a mirror image of 1938, when Jews fleeing Austria created ‘car parks’ of abandoned vehicles on the Hungarian or Czech border and walked across the borders to what they thought was safety. ‘Not since the Berlin Wall had been built’, Paul Nemes observed, ‘had such a large number of people escaped across the Iron Curtain.’46 In fact, not since 1956 had such an exodus taken place, and that too had come from Hungary. The picnic did not relieve the pressure or end the exodus. Afterwards, the growing stream of refugees from East Germany, added to those from Romania, appeared to be pushing Hungary towards the edge of a humanitarian catastrophe as well as endangering public health and safety. At the end of August, the refugee camps filled beyond capacity, and the weather started to turn cold. The Hungarian Knights of Malta charity, the country’s largest, took on a significant portion of this burden, caring for nearly 50,000 people in three camps for three months.47 An incident on the border between Austrian Lutzmannsburg and Hungarian Zsira two days after the picnic underscored just what could have happened at Sopronpuszta had something gone wrong. A young architect from Weimar in the German Democratic Republic named Kurt-Werner Schulz and his wife Gundula Schafitel, with their six-year-old son, were crossing the border between Zsira and Lutzmannsburg about fifteen miles south of Sopron. They ignored the warning shots fired by border troops, who by then were under orders not to shoot crossers but still had instructions to prevent crossings. One border guard tried to restrain Schulz, who knocked him down. The two grappled for control of the border guard’s rifle, their struggle taking them across the border into Austria. The weapon discharged, wounding Schulz in the head. Another border guard pulled him back into Hungary and tried to administer first aid, but to no avail. He died en route to a Hungarian hospital. Hungary apologized to Austria for violating its territory and expressed regret for Schulz’s death. Both police chief Nickolaus Koch and Schulz’s wife, who

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was later released with her son and allowed to resume her westward journey, considered the shooting accidental. The soldier, who was nineteen at the time, was not prosecuted, but underwent year-long psychotherapy to help him deal with the event. When he spoke anonymously to an Austrian news outlet twenty years later, he said he deeply regretted what happened and that he still could not get the incident out of his mind. Schulz became the last person killed trying to cross the Hungarian Iron Curtain.48 In two other incidents during the initial days after the picnic, one at Sopronpuszta and another at Kópháza, border guards severely beat Germans trying to leave. West German television reporters witnessed one of these incidents. Possibly the soldiers’ reaction reflected their confusion and uncertainty about their mission. They were no longer allowed to shoot, the media made heroes of the crossers, and they were left wondering what they were supposed to do. Elsewhere guards ignored crossers or assisted them. Some even pointed out the way to the borders. Efforts to reinvent the border guards as compassionate and considerate servants of the Hungarian people who had rolled up the electric fence and prohibited the shooting of border violators were not yet in full swing, but there would have been confusion enough for many of the troops. They were soldiers with conflicting orders.49

9/11 and its Aftermath Clarity was missing as well for the thousands of East Germans who remained in Hungary, waiting for the opportunity to break out. Estimates of their number varied widely. Michael Meyer’s guess of 150,000 or more was by far at the high end. Tony Judt thought there were 60,000.50 The wait for some definitive action to settle the fate of these thousands of foreigners in Hungary ended in mid-September. Foreign Minister Horn, when asked on September 10 about his government’s policy towards the growing number of disaffected easterners who were coming into Hungary via Czechoslovakia, replied that ‘we will allow them through without any further ado and I assume that the Austrians will let them in.’ This was no off-the-cuff remark. Two days earlier, the Hungarian government had told the Honecker regime that it intended to allow the East Germans to leave for Austria. Now things started to move fast. Colonel Tibor Vidus, who commanded the border guards in the Győr region, said that when word of Horn’s statement got out, Austria-bound traffic at Hegyeshalom started to back up. Most of the cars had East German plates, but others scraped together the 4,000 forints for a taxi ride from Budapest, about three hours away. Some of those in the queue had been in Hungary since June, others for a week or two. At Nickelsdorf on the other side, the Red Cross braced for the rush with tea, snacks, and the promise of a quick bus trip for those who got out on foot. The media started to show up as well. NBC brought in a crew by helicopter. And, at one minute past midnight, on 11 September 1989, ‘the gates lifted and the mad rush to the West was on.’51



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Fifty to sixty thousand crossed the border in the next few days, at Hegyeshalom, Sopron and more obscure points. The majority headed for West Germany. In 1988 Hegyeshalom had become the busiest crossing point with two million departures out of 10.8 million. This year 3.1 million of 14.5 people leaving the country crossed at the tiny town.52 While this westward exodus gained momentum, seventy International Red Cross buses came in the opposite direction to pick up those at Balaton camps. The first of these arrived at 3:30 in the afternoon; they were back at the border, full of escaping Germans, by 6 o’clock. MÁV, the Hungarian state railway, added cars to its scheduled international trains as well. Some border guards took to holding or even wearing signs pointing to the border. The signs may have been whimsical or ironic, but they were helpful as well. The border is not a straight line, and, as Burgenland Police Chief Koch noted, the East Germans ‘would soon realize that orienteering was the primary challenge refugees were facing.’ Villages near the border illuminated their church towers and buildings on higher ground so that refugees, often arriving with small children, would not get lost in the woods and could find shelter once across.53 A few Hungarian border guards took advantage of the opportunity to enrich themselves. Colonel István Frankó, who commanded the Sopron district, said that even before 1989 some in the rank and file saw that there was no point to their work and accepted bribes from Germans trying to get out. Not all of them got away with it. Nine guards from the Magyarfalva station in the Sopron district accepted money, watches and rings for helping Germans to leave, and later faced sentences of two to eight years. Four others who worked on the main highway to Vienna were punished for dismantling abandoned Trabants, presumably to sell parts, and one who faced charges for accepting two wristwatches killed himself. One way or another, just over five thousand people left the very first day, and the Hungarian government was committed to keeping the border open until all who wanted to leave had departed.54 Lloyd Dakin, who represented the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Hungary, witnessed the summer’s events, from the slow gathering of people who sensed possibility in the air, through the anxiety-laden weeks before the climax on September 11, and then the westward rush. He thought he had seen something remarkable, a ‘… unique moment when a group of refugees and their flight became a driving force in the history of Europe and indeed in the world … At the heart of the event were the courageous men and women, young people, children, whose desire for freedom really changed the face of Europe in a way that political negotiations and other efforts had not been able to do.’ In emphasizing the freedom-seekers, Dakin underplayed the planning and coordination by government and private bodies involved in the events leading up to the opening of the border. Nevertheless, this was a 9/11 to celebrate.55 When the border opened on September 11, people from the German Democratic Republic were still migrating towards Hungary via Czechoslovakia.

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There were no longer problems getting from Hungary to Austria, but it was not so easy to make it to Hungary from Czechoslovakia. The authorities there allowed only those with valid papers to cross into Hungary. Crowds built up at the Komárom, Vámosszabadi and Rajka border stations, but no violence took place. Some swam the Danube to break free; others waited until the government yielded to the inevitable.56 By the end of the summer, many developments merged. The Soviet Union had reached a point of exhaustion. Hungarian relations with West Germany had come to a stage where the two could collaborate on the refugee issue, and Hungarian politics had evolved in a decidedly reformist direction, with an opposition that could act on a significant scale. Moreover, the border guards had seen that they could no longer enforce the closed border. All of these trends came together in the picnic and the opening of the border. As a result, Hungary represented an open escape route from East Germany. This path was more circuitous than the one Berlin had provided to citizens of the GDR. The growing numbers who had used the Berlin route to flee to the west had provoked construction of the wall in the first place. In any case, people who wanted to leave were accustomed to taking the long way around. One Hungarian who escaped to Vienna and ultimately the United States in the late 1960s, a construction engineer named Sándor Nagy, got out via an organized excursion to Yugoslavia, then to Italy on a forged passport with a little help from his friends, and by train to Austria.57 Now, in 1989, a roundabout hole had opened for Germans willing to detour, and in this case there was no likelihood that it would be closed. The East German government watched in horror, as Hungary became the catalyst for the collapse of the entire structure of the GDR, and many of its citizens once again started to vote with their feet. Whether accidentally or inadvertently, ‘The Hungarian government had, by its decision, started an avalanche that would in the end force the government of the GDR to implement changes, and would then in the end also lead to the fall of the Berlin wall and later on to the collapse of communist systems in Central and Eastern Europe.’ As West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said in Budapest at the end of the year, Hungary had indeed pulled the first brick from the Berlin wall, and indeed from the Iron Curtain, putting Germany on the road to unification. Given the anxiety and peril that was in the air during that summer, there is no need to question the West German foreign minister’s observation that ‘it is always the first brick that is hardest to remove.’ On November 9, the GDR recognized the new reality by announcing that its citizens would be allowed to travel freely. These events, as Timothy Garton Ash wrote, represented ‘the beginning of the end of the Berlin Wall.’58 When the end came in November, the Wall disappeared almost overnight. The rapidity and ease with which it was dismantled made clear how deeply loathed it was. The quick collapse also showed the extent to which modern walls depend on technological and human augmentation to make them viable. The wall itself, despite its physicality, lacked the impermeability that it projected. Without the political will of the regime to sustain it, citizens seeking



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to bring it down easily destroyed it. The whole thing happened so fast that by the time of the Pink Floyd concert in West Berlin on 21 July 1990, when the city partied to the sound of their rocking lament that it wasn’t ‘… easy banging your head against some mad bugger’s wall’, there was no wall to be found, and Styrofoam panels had to be assembled to simulate the real thing. The plastic model reflected the newly discovered fragility of the original.59 When the exoskeleton collapsed, the GDR went with it. Yuly Kvitsinsky, the Soviet ambassador to West Germany during 1986–1990, wrote in a speech that he drafted for his foreign minister, ‘The death sentence of the GDR was signed in the moment when it was decided to open the border. The treaties mirrored the changes, inevitable after that point and foreseeable. When the Berlin Wall fell no single voice in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR had been raised to preserve it … There was no way back.’60 While it stood, the Berlin Wall symbolized the entire Cold War; when it came down, it became emblematic of the conflict’s end. Never before had Robert Frost’s insistence that ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down …’ been more clearly validated. But more than any wall of the past, the Berlin Wall is with us still. Once reviled as ‘the most inhumane border in the world’,61 the wall lives through the slabs that dot parks and other public spaces from Potsdamer Platz to Washington, DC and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Although the wall was breached in November 1989, souvenir bits were in Filene’s Basement, in Boston, by Christmas. A two-ounce chip in a maroon velvet jewelry bag, plopped in a special commemorative box, came with ‘an inspirational pamphlet’ that oozed sentimentality and breathless triumphalism: ‘‘The Wall is Gone!’ And from this rubble rose a new symbol for tomorrow, an icon for future generations; the Berlin Wall … dismantled.’ According to the text, the concrete fragment carried the essence of ‘struggles and … triumphs, … grief and … joy, … hope and … fulfilment.’ There in the inanimate object lay ‘the distant tremor of tomorrow’s history,’ all of which was ‘gently unfolding in the palm of your hand.’62 Chunks of the Berlin Wall, as small as thimbles and as large as baseballs, embedded in lucite and inscribed with sentiments extolling freedom, were still hot items in 2005, bringing as much as €36 at the Checkpoint Charlie museum in Berlin. This small-size kitsch includes key chains, post cards, and refrigerator magnets, as well as strands of barbed wire from the Hungarian-Austrian border, the opening of which in the summer of 1989 started the whole wobbly Communist edifice on its way to collapse. At the other end of the scale, Veryl Goodnight’s massive sculpture commemorating the fall of the wall reflected the same triumphalism as the Filene’s pamphlet. The five-animal group, larger than life, was initially installed outside the George H. W. Bush presidential library, at College Station, Texas, when it opened in 1997. The library complex has space for the mortal remains, papers, and possessions of the former president, something like an Egyptian pharaoh’s pyramid. In such a monumentalist environment, this massive work,

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which Newsweek’s Michael Meyer called ‘Ceauşescu-scale statuary’, looks right at home.63 A copy of the statue stands in Berlin, where it was installed during the following year, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Berlin Airlift.64 The memory of the Wall is not just embodied in kitsch. In Baghdad, during the run-up to the election on 30 January 2005, an American-Iraqi checkpoint at a bridge was protected by ‘Berliners: twelve- or fifteen-foot-high blast barriers of rough concrete, named for the Berlin Wall, that now marched by the hundreds and thousands along Baghdad’s main streets and avenues, masking vast parts of the city from public view.’65 In North America, Mexican authorities call American plans to strengthen the border akin to building another Berlin Wall.66 In Israel and abroad, opponents of the wall being built between Israel and the Palestinian West Bank, call the structure a Berlin Wall.67 And, in Berlin itself, in the neighbourhoods of Kreuzberg, Neukölln and Wedding, Turkish enclaves which replicate rural Anatolian culture, augmented by refrigerators, are said to exist behind a new Berlin wall.68 In 2006, a novel by Australian Max Barry, called Company, situated the Training Sales Division in Zephyr Holdings, Inc. in ‘open-plan seating’, with the sales representatives on one side, with their ‘six-figure salaries, seven-figure quotas and single-digit golf handicaps (West Berlin), and the sales assistants are on other low-status side (East Berlin).’ Separating them was ‘an eight-foot-high divider’ known as ‘the Berlin Partition.’69 The Berlin Wall remains the symbol of separation and of the Iron Curtain, ‘the most telling architectural symbol of the regime.’70 But fittingly it was in Hungary, where the hard barriers of the Cold War got their start, that the process that brought it down got its impetus. Whether in Berlin or along the Austrian-Hungarian divide, the entire border wall was about control of civil populations and movements: dissidents, economic refugees, asylum seekers and family reunification, not military formations that would attack but individuals and families who would vote with their feet. Only the rhetoric of the Communist regimes connected these barriers to a military threat. Because of this focus on civil populations, the iron curtain anticipated the future, the barriers developed in the post-Cold War era by the liberal democratic West as protection against the entry of non-military civilian migrants who in the main were not white Christian Europeans.

Part III

Reversal: Hungarian Borders from 1989

‘… a new European space of free movement protected by a hardened outer wall.’ – Peter Andreas, Border Games. ‘Want to come many people. This is the problem.’ – Ivan Zheliaskov, Bulgarian border guard.1

Chapter 8

The Emergence of a New Europe

It is clearly impossible to consider Hungary’s borders, the contractions and expansions and shifts in population, without reference to the broader European context. The dissolution of the Habsburg empire, the Treaty of Trianon, Magyar irredentism, successor state nationalism and World War II formed the essential backdrop to Hungarian developments. In the same way, without reference to Communism, the Soviet Union and the Cold War, the situation between 1945 and 1989 would be inexplicable. For the twenty years since the opening of the Hungarian border in 1989 and the foreseeable future, it is just as important to understand the development of the European Union, particularly its institutions, policies and attitudes toward migration. The dramatic changes of 1989 represented only the beginning of a long period of shifting border regimes throughout Europe. The next two decades saw the end of the Soviet Union and its empire, unification of Germany and introduction of a substantial international zone without internal border controls. Sometimes called ‘Schengenland’ after its birthplace, this free travel area is not coterminous with the European Union but since 2008 contains twenty-two of the twenty-seven EU member countries.2 It grew from five original constituents – France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg – who signed am agreement on a ship in the Moselle River near the Luxembourg town of Schengen in 1985. The original five have expanded to include almost all European Union states as well as Iceland, Norway and most recently Switzerland, a total of twenty-five countries. Nine new members among the ten who joined the EU in May 2004 were allowed inside the Schengen system on 21 December 2007. Eight of these had been in the Soviet empire, and all had to demonstrate their readiness to enter by showing compliance with requirements for external border control.3 By 2008 discussion began on yet another expansion, to encompass Romania and Bulgaria. As a result of this remarkable accord, border posts between signatory countries have been removed and a common visa policy has been put in place. Historian Tony Judt considered Schengen the ‘greatest trans-national achievement of the time.’ But as Judt observed, the lowering of internal barriers came with the strengthening of the external ones: ‘Civilized Europeans could indeed transcend boundaries – but the ‘barbarians’ would be kept resolutely beyond them.’ 4

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Like a baguette, Schengenland has a crusty exterior and soft core, allowing free movement internally while enforcing an array of regulations and controls governing entry. Beyond the remarkable achievement of creating controlfree borders among constituent nations that have not always been the best of friends, it has two unusual features. Its outer border moves as its territory and that of the EU expand. In addition, it has shifted a large part of the burden of maintaining its outer wall-like shell to the ring of recently admitted countries, and to Bulgaria and Romania, which while awaiting admission form a buffer between Schengenland and the outer limits of the larger EU.5

The Evils That Lurk Much like at the US border with Mexico, east and south of the outer limits of the EU lurk the barbarians: jobseekers, refugees, criminals and terrorists, many of them poor dark-skinned peoples of strange faiths and peculiar habits and tongues. Such people, poised to enter Europe in search of licit or shady opportunity, while not leading invading armies, are multi-purpose enemies, with something for everyone to fear. Confronting these strange people, nationalists worry about social cohesion and the threat to ethnic purity, supporters of urban values see threats to the civility of town life, those concerned with the status of workers perceive threats to the hard-won gains of the labouring classes, and defenders and foes alike of the welfare state agonize over swindlers, welfare cheats and overloaded support systems. Those concerned with public health rouse the traditional fear of the disease-ridden East, evoking memories of the eighteenth-century Pestkordon and quarantine stations between Habsburg Europe and the illness-plagued Ottoman domains; not just for political reasons was Turkey dubbed ‘the sick man of Europe’. The Danube was often seen as a dead line, between the healthy and the sick, the civilized and the barbarian. Hungarian novelist Mór Jókai in the 1870s described riverine quarantine stations of old as the ‘purgatory … through which every creature coming from the pestilential east to the frontier of the healthy west, must pass …’6 German poet Anastassius Grün went further: the river marked the boundary between the living and the dead, the earth and the realm of ghosts.7 More than a century later the East still incubated illnesses that threatened the West. As a Hungarian newspaper reminded its readers in 2005, ‘We have to recognize the fact that Europe’s three sickest states [measured in terms of tuberculosis C] are Russia, Ukraine and Romania.’8 The so-called ‘swine influenza’ pandemic which broke out in the press during the spring of 2009 gave one of the countries branded as among the ‘three sickest’ the opportunity to challenge this view that sickness moved from east to west. On May 6, at the tiny border crossing of Vállaj between Hungary and Romania just west of Satu Mare, the sight of two American passports stirred the Romanian border guards from their torpor. Only after satisfactory answers



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to questions regarding when we had last been in North America (information clearly visible on entry stamps in our passports) were my wife and I allowed to pass. Then, little more than one hundred metres beyond the border, another border guard waved us to the side for questioning by a team of a doctor and a veterinarian, regarding our destination, length of stay, and address while in Romania. Although the interrogation focused on North Americans as persons of interest, neither one of these health professionals spoke English or Spanish. Ultimately, we received slips of paper listing symptoms of influenza (including ‘bad disposition’), urging medical visits, and referencing public health websites – in English as well as Romanian and Hungarian. This little piece of homelandsecurity theatre took place in a country where leaded gasoline fouls the air and heavy metals poison the drinking water. The overall message was plain and maybe even historic: although for centuries westerners had viewed disease as travelling from east to west, the East was getting a small measure of revenge. ‘Swine flu’ made it into Romania despite the vigilance of Romania’s homeland security team. It also managed to enter Slovakia, despite the November 2009 closure of the Ugar (Ubla) border crossing to automobiles and pedestrians and the Felsőnémet (Velky Slemenec) crossing to pedestrians, all in the name of protecting public health. The disease turned out to have rhetorical uses along the Hungarian-Romanian divide as well. During the same month, László Tőkés, a Magyar Protestant minister and European Parliament representative from western Romania, reacted to news of Romanian dismissals of Magyar office holders by claiming that hostility to Hungarians was spreading like swine flu in ‘the former Little Entente countries.’9 For the European Union, the numerous dire prospects represented by the barbarians, sick and otherwise, who pressed westward, are at least balanced by some good news. For upholders of the identity of European nation states in their current form and demographic composition, migrants served a positive function as scapegoats for perceived dilution of the national identity. But, at the same time, advocates of extremely stringent measures to stop immigration, such as the American Patrick Buchanan, warned that their very numbers constituted a threat not merely to Europe or the United States but to western civilization. According to Buchanan, third-world population growth, which he estimated at 100 million every eighteen months, amounted to ‘the greatest invasion in the history of the world. If we do not shake off our paralysis, the West comes to an end.’10 Such people are indeed something to fear, especially now, with the possible combination of evils represented by bioterrorists, eastern barbarians deliberately releasing toxins that threaten widespread illness and death.11 Schengenland is rooted in the Cold War period, the emergence of European regionalism, and the growing concerns with migration from the outside. During the Cold War, while western rhetoric focused on the immoral rigidity of the Soviet border regime and the Soviets’ refusal to allow residents to leave if they chose, European concern rose over the dangers represented by immigrants from the satellites. Even though the great-power competition

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exerted a stabilizing influence on population movement by keeping a lid on local conflicts, immigration started to seem like a worldwide threat to western public order and national identity in the 1970s. Terrorism showed its modern face at the Munich Olympics of 1972, with the murder by Palestinians, of eleven Israeli athletes and a German policeman and later in the decade the kidnapping and killing of a former prime minister of Italy by home-grown murderers of the Italian Red Brigade. The growth of unemployment in the wake of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) boycott added concerns about foreign jobseekers to those about terrorists. While these concerns spread, Western condemnation of Communist infringement of human rights persisted, and the 1975 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, held in Helsinki, enshrined the right to emigrate in its Final Act.12 The insistence on the right to emigrate, meaningless without the corresponding right to enter somewhere else, persisted alongside the rise of anti-immigration sentiment. By the signing of the Schengen agreement in 1985, the issue had expanded to include difficulties involved in integrating migrants from the Third World into European society and the fear that they would bring their families and stay. Generally, as Warsaw Pact restrictions loosened, migration to the West picked up. In Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania, those seeking to leave became marketable, for sale to the governments of West Germany and Israel, if they wanted to take them in. Meanwhile, the pact signed near Schengen did not even mention the refugee or migrant issue, focusing entirely on liberalizing travel within the bounds of its constituent states, and the public focus remained on the ideologically significant wall that split Europe into two blocs. US President Ronald Reagan’s dramatic 1987 demand that the Berlin Wall come down reflected Cold War values, but the Immigration Reform and Control Act which he had signed a year earlier, with its promises of sealing the border with Mexico, spoke more to the future.13 At the end of the decade, with the Berlin Wall down and the once fervently desired goal of freedom of emigration from formerly Communist Eastern Europe attained, revision of the Schengen Agreement reflected the new attitude. While the original treaty only mentioned the abolition of internal border controls, the new one dealt in thirty-six of 142 articles with migration into the Schengen area and only once mentioned internal free movement. ‘For western Europe,’ as a British scholar observed, ‘the fear of tanks and missiles arriving from across the Iron Curtain has been supplanted by anxiety about uncontrolled immigration and cross-border crime.’ This shift and movement away from celebration of the right to freedom of movement took place at the same time. The European reaction to this anxiety did not just mirror the situation that the United States faced along its southern border. The United States experienced a troubling increase in immigrants, many of whom came without permission. Most of them were from the south, Mexico and beyond. Largely poor and unschooled, to critics like Patrick Buchanan they represented a



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menace to the survival of the dominant culture. Christopher Caldwell, on the other hand, noted the similarities of the new immigrants from the south to earlier generations of working-class Americans. They mainly spoke Spanish, although the tendency in the United States remained the adoption of English over a generation or two. In addition, they were poor, they tended to participate in the workforce in large numbers, their family structure tended to be patriarchical, they attended church more frequently than most Americans, they had higher birth rates and relatively poor diets, and they showed higher rates of military enlistment than mainstream whites. Yet Caldwell considered all these apparent differences ‘… perfectly intelligible to any patient American who has ever had a conversation about the past with his parents.’ They could be comprehended and their future could be envisioned within the American paradigm.14 The demographic processes at work in western Europe and the United States were not parallel. While the United States had absorbed multiple waves of immigration, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, over the course of the twentieth century, Europe had over the same period gone through a two-step process. First it had sorted itself out into ever more homogeneous groupings, through rearrangement of borders, restrictive immigration laws, pogroms, forced and voluntary population transfers and mass murder.15 This process went on from the end of World War I, when treaties redrew many of the borders of central Europe and triggered large-scale cross-border movements. It continued with even more massive population changes during and after World War II that was the climax to a long, sometimes bloody, and largely successful effort to sort out populations and make assimilation unnecessary. By mid-century, when the continent was splitting into two camps clustered around the Cold War superpowers, the countries of western Europe and even some on the eastern periphery were more homogeneous than they had been for generations.

Assimilation of Outsiders Almost simultaneously with the winding down of the massive postwar movements, a counter-trend emerged. In countries like Hungary, World War II represented a demographic catastrophe, with nearly half a million Jews murdered, and about 300,000 soldiers killed. Lower populations and birthrates in a rebuilding western Europe had the same effect, and led to new efforts to recruit workers. Roughly during the second part of the century there was a gradual introduction of a population the likes of which Europe has never before tried to absorb and which appears resistant if not impervious to assimilation; brown-skinned largely Muslim people from Asia and Africa. With the nearby labour force of eastern Europe immobilized and unavailable behind the bloc’s hard borders, industrial recruiters in western countries turned to Muslim workers, mainly from Turkey (Germany), North Africa (France) and

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the Indian subcontinent (Britain). When this practice began, slowly in the 1950s, there were virtually no Muslims in Europe. Muslims had certainly been there in previous centuries, variously as invaders, competitors, underlings or overlords, but not assimilated and not on a footing of equality. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were between 15 and 17 million Muslims in western Europe with 1.7 million more arriving each year. These totals included abut five million in France, four million in Germany and two million in Britain, and they were on the increase.16 On one side stood an immigrant group, whose identity valued transnational religious cohesion and was easily roused to apparently united militance by perceived affront. On the other side was a group of staunchly secular ethnically homogenous nation states, seared by their own intolerant and murderous recent past and willing in some cases to bend over backwards to avoid giving offence. The net result was a Europe that had at mid-century rejected assimilation and was perhaps even unsuited for such an project, facing a growing group that wasn’t sure about assimilation either. In this ongoing encounter it would be difficult to determine which side came to represent the greater obstacle to integration. In time that may become evident, but it is clear that the population of Europe underwent a dramatic change in the second half of the twentieth century, and that, as Christopher Caldwell claimed, ‘Western Europe became a multiethnic society in a fit of absence of mind.’17 In any case, the evolution of a perception of a new and diffuse non-military threat was underway. Sometimes it focused on the growing Muslim population, driven by apparently vast cultural differences between the newcomers and the white Christian majority, most notably concerning the status of women, and the shockingly militant responses to negative depictions of Islam and the prophet. Manifestations of opposition ranged from graffiti along the Danube canal in Vienna – ‘Turken ‘raus’ in the 1990s instead of the more familiar ‘Juden ‘raus’ – to the growing popularity of political parties with anti-immigration platforms in Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland, to cite three, and to individual acts of vandalism and murderous violence. In the most recent such incident, at the end of August 2010, a gunman in Bratislava murdered seven people, six Roma and a woman who wandered into the line of fire.18 The threat also seemed to come from the formerly Communist East, only recently the direction from which armed invasion had been feared. Now the Polish plumber became a popular shorthand for skilled tradesmen who accepted low wages and threatened the livelihood of western Europeans. A 2008 book on the EU even reconceptualized the end of the Warsaw Pact as marking not the end of an era of great and mortal danger to European security, but the start of an era of an ominous ‘security vacuum’. In this view, the ‘change’, as the collapse of Communist regimes has become known, required that Western European states ‘prepare themselves for such possible security threats as drugs and human trafficking, organized crime, or widespread migratory movements, and seek institutional mechanisms to address these problems.’ In Hungary the press and the border guards adopted this vocabulary of anxiety, using



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the phrases ‘security vacuum’ and ‘security deficit’ interchangeably. A short article in one Hungarian newspaper – the English translation amounted to 270 words – used the word ‘security’ eleven times. One could infer the view that the Warsaw Pact and the hard border maintained from the Communist eastern side had been beneficial, that it had kept the lid on and protected Europe from baleful influences.19 Certainly the French, who in 2010 found hundreds of Romanian Roma from inside the EU no easier to assimilate than millions of Muslim North Africans, would have agreed.20 In the 1990s the lid was indeed off, not just in Europe. Along with the end of the Cold War came a rise in small wars, ethnic conflicts and migration. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees dealt with increasing numbers of displaced people in the first half of the 1990s, fleeing for their lives or seeking opportunities for themselves and their families. In 1992, there were 83 million people worldwide who had emigrated from one country and resettled in another, with 15 million economic migrants in Western Europe and about the same number in North America, where the United States was the most popular destination and absorbed about two million legal and illegal immigrants per year. While there had been 22 million refugees and displaced people in 1985, ten years later the number was 37 million.21 The Red Cross was right: ‘One country’s refugee is another’s illegal alien.’22

Border Enforcement Regarding Europe, Brown University political scientist Peter Andreas in his book Border Games characterized the emergent situation as ‘a new European space of free movement protected by a hardened outer wall,’ one that focused less on liberal values and freedom of movement and more on European identity and border security.23 And, we might add, with borders that were enforced from the Western side. The days of a divided Europe were not over. What had changed was that the division was being enforced from the other side.24 And the terms and conditions for belonging to the new Europe were changing. The 1990s, framed by the Maastricht Treaty of December 1991 and another agreement in Amsterdam in May 1999, brought codification of the new Schengenland border regime. Maastricht established the EU, culminating developments that started shortly after World War II, and confirmed the outer border’s role as the basis for exclusion and control.25 Amsterdam eight years later laid down the framework for expansion after the turn of the twentyfirst century. In between, by 1996, all the first states that would become part of Schengenland agreed to uniform visa requirements, internal freedoms and outer enforcement. The Treaty of Amsterdam made acceptance of that regime, known as the Schengen acquis, a requirement for states that wished to join the EU. The Schengen Agreement of 1985 and the Convention of 1990, along with the rules that were based on them and related agreements, formed

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the acquis. In 1999, it became part of the institutional and legal framework of the European Union by virtue of a protocol to the Treaty of Amsterdam. Acceptance of the acquis became a non-negotiable requirement for admission to the EU.26 By 2004, when the former Communist states were admitted, it amounted to a whopping 90,000 plus pages of treaties, laws, rules and regulations. A convenient 2009 compendium listing the decisions, regulations, agreements and protocols that make up the acquis, stretched over 58 pages.27 The EU emplaced a border regime that substantially resembled the border between the United States and Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), permeable for commerce but highly exclusionary regarding people. The phrase ‘Fortress Europe’, that once described the wall systems built by the Third Reich as protection against invasion, became popular in describing the newly regionalized post-Cold War Europe, along with the variant ‘Fortress EU’.28 Operationally the new border system had two focal points corresponding to two streams of migration, across the Mediterranean Sea from the south and over the eastern land borders. Some authors recognized that other fortresses were appearing as well. ‘Fortress Europe, fortress America, fortress Australia and the surveillance surge in the aftermath of September 11 …’ all represented similar responses to the barbarians beyond the walls.29 Winston Churchill had once labelled the southern coast of Nazi Germany’s Fortress Europe the ‘soft underbelly’ of Europe. Now for the EU’s fortress Europe, the southern coast became the focus of concerted attention, along with the land borders on which the treaties focused and for which new members of the EU became responsible as a condition of their entry into the community. The southern shore remained one of the most vulnerable avenues of entry, until the establishment of cooperative coordinated patrols. Still it remained hard to apprehend crossers, and the perilous voyage itself represented the most significant obstacle to success. On the southern side, 1991 was an important year in development of the Schengen border. Spain joined the EU, and the Schengen group four years later, putting the EU in easier reach for North Africans. Spain ruled two small cities in northwest Africa, Melilla and Ceuta, that now also became part of the EU. They were both convenient springboards into mainland Europe. For good reason, the Spaniards of Melilla saw themselves as living between worlds, Spain and Morocco, Europe and Africa, Christianity and Islam, and sometimes on the cutting edge of ethnic and national conflict, as well as at the starting point for ‘the march of the Tortoise’, the inexorable northward movement of undocumented Muslim Africans – the barbarians. In the 1990s, this border between Europe and Africa in Africa began to resemble the US-Mexico border, with undocumented jobseekers trying to cross a frontier that divided the West from the Third World, a ‘highly asymmetric border region’ to say the least.30 By 1997 it became clear that the peoples of Eastern Europe, finally free to leave, were not the only ones likely to storm Schengenland.31 So walls went up around Melilla and Ceuta in 1998, with the



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EU picking up most of the $35 million cost of construction for two parallel chain-link fences, each ten feet high, topped with coiled razor wire, and augmented by security cameras and fibre-optic sensors. This system featured watch towers and spotlights along its whole length. A road between the fences allowed for patrols of the entire perimetre.32 Late in 2005, the height of the basic fences was doubled. After the enclaves were ringed, North Africans continued to try to get inside. On one bloody day in September 2005, hundreds rushed the fence at Ceuta. The mass attempt to scale the barrier ended in at least fourteen deaths and more than one hundred injuries. It also recalled the early 1990s at the western end of the US-Mexico border near San Diego, California, when hundreds would charge the border at once and just wash over the force positioned to stop them.33 The walls did not deter efforts to get over; they just diverted the flow. Vast expanses of water had traditionally provided obstacles as formidable as the most daunting land barrier, protecting Britain and Japan from invasion for centuries. But the advent of outboard motors, mobile telephones and global positioning systems, combined with the evolution of the threat from huge invading navies under sail to small groups of desperate migrants looking for freedom, jobs or criminal opportunities – ‘molecular mass migrations,’ as German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger called them34 – changed the equation and seemed to put the impossible within reach. So as the walls went up and were strengthened, and Moroccan-Spanish cooperation intensified, the flow that had rattled against the chain link and razor wire took to the water, from small port towns along the coast of western Africa in Senegal and Mauritania, hundreds of miles south of Gibraltar, setting out for another Spanish EU outpost outside the European mainland, the Canary Islands. Thousands of people pushed slender open fishing boats into Atlantic waters, heading for beaches that were favoured haunts for well-heeled European tourists. About one thousand Africans died at sea in the four months from December 2005 through March 2006.35 Spain closed off the Canaries, with increased enforcement and agreements with Mauritania and Senegal for cooperative efforts to halt the migration, and the Senegalese navy stepped up patrols of its own waters, seizing ten boats with 1,500 potential immigrants over a single weekend at the end of May. All were headed for the Canary Islands, 870 miles or eight to ten days from the northern coast of Senegal.36 Heightened enforcement had predictable effects. Migrants fanned out across the Mediterranean and came in ever larger numbers aboard bigger vessels. They showed a new willingness to resort to violence to fend off capture, and often succumbed to bigger catastrophes. At the same time, the increased difficulty of evading patrols created a market for people smugglers and scam artists.37 By mid-2006, migrants from all along the northern coast of Africa, and even from Ethiopia and Eritrea, were being apprehended in small boats, rubber dinghies, almost anything that could float. Italy was a primary destination, especially the island of Lampedusa, which was closer to Libya than to

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the Italian mainland and drew thousands during 2006-2007. In one 24-hour period of August 2007, it might have seemed as if the invasion of the soft underbelly that Churchill had envisioned was underway. The Italians captured four boats off Lampedusa, with more than 400 passengers; they found another 56 people near Syracuse in Sicily; picked up 26 on another Sicilian beach, along with twelve Algerians on a leaking boat off Sardinia and ten at the port of Califarion Island. Ibrahim, a 28-year-old from Darfur, the Sudanese province wracked by death and starvation, reached Italy with 45 others in a fibreglass boat launched from Libya. ‘We were already dead when we were in Sudan and Libya,’ he said. ‘If we died on the boat, it’s all the same.’38 In April 2009, more than 200 people drowned about thirty miles north of Libya. About twenty were rescued by workers from an oil-drilling platform.39 The need for a concerted European response brought FRONTEX, the newly created EU office responsible for enforcing external border controls, into the picture. FRONTEX, as the ‘European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union’ is known, managed the border control programme of the EU. FRONTEX (the acronym abbreviates the French phrase Frontières extérieures) was created in October 2004, just after accession of the first formerly Communist states in May, and began operation seven months later with offices in Warsaw, the former headquarters of the Soviet-led military alliance. The location reflected the importance of the long Polish border with Ukraine and Belarus and concern with migration from the formerly Communist east, even while movement from Africa received the headlines. The agency’s mission to insure ‘a uniform and high level of control and surveillance, which is a necessary corollary to the free movement of persons within the European Union’ explicitly linked internal freedom to external barriers. Its charter also affirmed the responsibility of individual member states for control and surveillance. Recognizing that entry into one EU state gave access to all member states, it emphasized that maintenance of such control was ‘a matter of the utmost importance to Member States regardless of their geographical position.’40 The road to full cooperation in the face of migration from the south remained problematic despite Frontex deployment. In April 2009, Italy and Malta squabbled for days over responsibility for 140 migrants rescued from two rubber dinghies, one of which had run out of fuel, by a Turkish merchant ship between Lampedusa and Malta. Not the first group to be caught up in such an argument, the people from Niger, Ghana, Somalia and Liberia spent four days on the deck of the freighter, along with the corpse of a pregnant woman who had set out with them, with the two EU states deadlocked over who should let them to land. Finally, after European Commission President José Manuel Barroso intervened, the Italians relented.41 Like the United States, the European Union conceived of the problem mainly in terms of border protection enforcement. There was some understanding that a humanitarian issue was at the core of the problem. Miguel



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Becerra, a senior policy advisor to the regional Spanish government of the Canaries, hoped Europe would get the message that it needed to help Africa. ‘There is a chance’, he exclaimed, ‘that for the first time Europe will come up with a serious policy for Africa. It is about time, because this is a big problem that requires military resources, intelligence resources, economic assistance [and] medical aid.’ This was an important acknowledgement of reality: no matter the intensity of the enforcement and regardless of the severity of the risk, they would keep coming as long as the difference in economic conditions remained enormous. The prevailing view remained that the influx had to be stopped, and at least eight EU states provided planes, boats, and other resources to help Spain patrol its borders. Joint patrols also involved African states from which immigrants fled. FRONTEX oversaw the effort through emergency coordination teams in the Canary Islands. The unified effort, so intense that one scholar called it ‘a sort of Berlin Wall across the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic’, seemed to have had some effect, as the Spanish Civil Guard and FRONTEX’s European immigration force apprehended many of the migrants shortly after they set sail and reached international waters. The European Commission acknowledged in 2009 that the Mediterranean member states – mainly the poorer ones that in the debt crisis of 2010 came to be known as PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) – continued to shoulder an increasing share of the burden, and that although overall illegal migration remained stable, the number of people arriving after dangerous water crossings remained ‘particularly worrying.’42 The Libyan uprising in early 2011 showed just how worrying the whole thing continued to be, as Lampedusa again became a prime destination for North Africans seeking to escape chaos.

Hungary in 1914

S L O V A K I A

Kassa

Pozsony

Hegyeshalom

Gyor “

Bicske

za Tls

AUSTRIA

Miskolc

Komárom Budapest

Debrecen

H U N G A R Y

Nagyvarad

Bekescsaba ‘

‘

a

Nagylak

Maro

s

Temesvar ‘

Sa

va

R

Ujvidek ‘

CROATIA

‘

av

Zagreb

Pecs

Szeged .. Roszke

Kolozsvar ‘

A

Dr

SLO

I VEN

BOSNIA Map 2. Hungary in Schengenland

UKRAINE

Záhony

‘

Danube

Frontier established by the Treaty of Trianon (1920)

Da

SERBIA

nub

e

O

M

A

N

I

A

Territories acquired 1938-41 Frontier after the Treaty of Paris (1947)

Chapter 9

From One Edge to Another

A Dramatic Turnabout While an EU-wide approach to the southern situation evolved, the eastern land borders received their share of attention. Eight of the countries admitted to the EU in May 2004 were to the east of the core EU nations. They included the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and Poland, as well as three former constituent elements of the Soviet Union, the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Only two in the group, the island states of Malta and Cyprus, had not been Communist or part of the Soviet domain.1 The accession of these countries moved the outer border of the EU eastward, and created a whole new eastern belt of states inside the EU. And a long variegated border it was. The entire EU, new countries included, had 1,636 designated points of entry in 2006 – land crossings, seaports and airports. Nine hundred million people – mainly legitimate tourists, business people, truckers and residents – entered every year.2 The new members, all poorer than their Western neighbours, were not immediately admitted to Schengenland or the EU. Hungary at the start of the 1990s stood removed from both by two borders. The eastern limit of the Schengen grouping was the German-Austrian border. Austria joined the EU and Schengen in 1995, after much hand-wringing on the German side over the danger this represented for public security. The edge then moved eastward to the border with Hungary. By then, in 1994, Hungary had joined Poland and Czechoslovakia – the so-called Visegrad group – as candidate members of the EU, a status all three retained until 2004. Meanwhile, at the beginning of the 1990s, civil war broke out on the other side of Hungary’s border in what was once Yugoslavia. Slovenia broke off first, in June 1991, with EU encouragement. Then came Croatia in July; later Bosnia and Macedonia did the same. What remained came temporarily to be called FRY, ‘the former republic of Yugoslavia.’ For a while it included Montenegro as well as Serbia. Then Montenegro went its own way, leaving Serbia. The chaos to the south initially caused a slump in border traffic but then brought unprecedented numbers of shoppers to Hungarian border towns on the Slovenian and Croatian segments of the border. Towns like Barcs, population 13,000, drew anywhere from 50 per cent to 90 per cent of their retail customers from Croatia. Outside of town and outside of the law, smuggling picked up, as

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guns and ammunition flowed southward through Hungary into the war zone. The northward flow of refugees increased as well. Hungary had reeled under the influx of refugees from Transylvania in 1989 and now became, along with Switzerland, Austria and Germany, one of the states that took in the bulk of two million refugees. At one time the town of Nagyharsány, population 3,500, sheltered more than 8,000 outsiders from Croatia. A few kilometres away, the even smaller towns of Kásád and Beremend also had more refugees than residents. Initially locals helped willingly, but inevitably the strain on resources and the disruption of routines led to compassion fatigue, resentment and ill treatment. The same thing had happened in Szeged when waves of Magyars from Transylvania poured into the city during 1919.3 The United Nations imposed sanctions against Serbia in 1992 for actions in the civil war that had started in July 1991, cutting off access to arms and oil and turning the Hungarian border into a major smuggling route. By then the Hungarian government itself had started to smuggle arms to the Croatian separatists, and the Serbs had laid mines along about 25 kilometres of the green border between Hungary and Croatia, turning the border into the most militarized and closed boundary in Europe, almost a throwback to 1950. The border section remained blocked for five years. The Serbs only withdrew after the 1992 UN sanctions were lifted towards the end of 1996.4 Both the Serbs and the Hungarians reinforced their border forces. The Hungarians sent 500 additional troops and 19 armoured combat vehicles. Still illegal traffic grew, and stricter control brought professional smugglers to the border: 221 were arrested in 1991 alone. Bootleg petrol went south, where the embargo created scarcity and drove up the price, and untaxed Serbian slivovitz went north, with Hungarian borderguards sometimes takng ten Deutschmarks to look the other way. Heavily armed automobile smugglers also went south, sometimes exchanging shots with border forces as they sped through the crossings.5 Meanwhile, starting in 1995, Hungary allowed NATO to use an airbase at Taszár, just west of the city of Kaposvár. Thus only six years after the regime change, Hungarian citizens had uniformed American service members in their midst and parking their trucks in front of the McDonald’s on the main square in Pécs, a startling turnabout for the former Soviet satellite. NATO used Taszár for logistical and operational flights into Serbia well into the following decade. As a member of NATO from 1999, Hungary thus became an official participant in air attacks on its southern neighbour. The situation did not return to a semblance of normality until 2001, when a second round of sanctions, imposed in March 1998 in response to Serb brutality in Kosovo, was lifted after the removal of Slobodan Milosovic from the presidency in 2000.6 Already a member of NATO, Hungary was admitted to the EU in 2004. Along with the other new members, it had to meet essentially non-negotiable standards in border security, visa management, police cooperation and protection of personal data. The Hungarians became responsible for defending the European Community’s outer land borders from the usual suspects in



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even poorer countries, jobseekers, refugees, criminals and terrorists from countries further to the south and east: Serbia, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus and the Soviet Union, as well as the Turks, Palestinians, Pakistanis and others who approached from the east. In exchange for their accession to the EU and the economic aid that went with it, they became the external guardians of Schengenland, first as part of an outside buffer, and later, when they were admitted to Schengenland, as the ongoing protectors of Schengen’s outer limits. Essentially these new members’ eastern and southern boundaries marked the outer limits of regionalization and the point where a more customary twentieth-century territoriality began. Even before the 2004 group joined the EU, the Oder and Neisse Rivers that formed the border between Germany and Poland were becoming known as the ‘Rio Grande’ of Europe. Like the North American border river, it was a police barrier and an economic bridge, as well as the outer limit of western prosperity. So while legitimate traffic flowed steadily across the border, so did smuggled people and goods: drugs, untaxed cigarettes, prostitutes and stolen cars. Germany increased its border guards by a factor of eight, from around 400 in 1990 to 3,200 in 1996, but the German equivalent of the US Border Patrol, the Bundesgrenzschutz or BGS, acknowledged that it captured perhaps one in five covert crossers, and that increased enforcement had predictable results, driving illegal immigrants into the hands of professional smugglers and causing their business to expand dramatically, and in turn encouraging the involvement of international smuggling organizations. As on the southern flank of the US, the ever more difficult problem of preventing illegal entry evolved in a context of increasing legal entry. In 1998, one million commercial trucks entered at Frankfurt an der Oder alone. At another, weekend traffic jams stretched out for 7.5 kilometres or almost five miles for German shoppers going east.7 Conditioned by Germany’s twentieth-century past, the German approach to the Polish border differed somewhat from the American. Memories of the Nazi past as well as of the Berlin Wall shaped the appearance of the response. The Germans of Schengenland tried to reduce the visibility of the police presence and keep the Army out of border enforcement. Techniques favoured by the Americans, such as bright lighting, steel fences, sensors and cameras, were avoided to preclude the appearance of an ‘electronic iron curtain’. While the US based its efforts to protect its borders on the defence of national sovereignty, the Germans based theirs within the broader EU framework.8 German enforcement may have been constrained by memories of walls past, but it was enhanced by the ability to incorporate Polish border forces into the project. Now, with financial aid from former NATO foes – especially former arch-enemy Germany, which waived visa requirements, provided jobs for many Poles, and supported Polish EU membership – and equipped with British Land Rovers and Austrian rifles instead of Russian gear, Polish border guards stood vigil against border violators from their own former Warsaw Pact comrades in Ukraine and Belarus and points east. Those trying to enter

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Germany illegally had to contend with two – Polish and German – layers of enforcement. In some respects this represented a reversal of roles, with the Poles now working hand in hand with westerners to enforce a border regimen imposed from the West. But in other ways it was familiar territory. Poles still blocked the paths of easterners heading west. And they still focused on the movement of civilian populations, a continuation of the Communist emphasis. Invasion had never been the issue. The enemy had always been a population yearning for mobility, freedom and prosperity. No longer were Poles among them, especially after May 2004, but they still kept people seeking to get out – Russians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians – inside Poland, just like in the past. In concept this suggests what might occur if the United States was creative enough to co-opt Mexican authorities to keep out Guatemalans and others who came up from Central America, those called OTMs or Other Than Mexicans by the US border bureaucracy. Polish guards, who once oversaw the hard border of the Warsaw Pact, now defended, along with their German colleagues, the hard border of Schengenland. And with almost one billion preponderantly legitimate crossings into Europe each year, there was plenty of work to do. Traffic backups occurred on a scale seen at only a few of the exterior crossings of the EU, such as the Mediterranean ferry crossings in southern Spain used by North African workers taking their families home for summer vacation, and the entry point between Záhony, Hungary, and Chop, Ukraine, where the line of trucks seeking entry to Hungary on 22 December 2007 extended over twelve kilometres, more than seven miles. To this day guide books for tourists warn travellers about the notorious Záhony crossing.9 On the Polish-German border, the opening of the border that accompanied Poland’s entry into the Schengen group in December 2007 was marked by the usual celebrations as well as protests launched by the national police union of Germany. The police argued that crime gravitated to open borders, and that the gap between incomes drew criminals westward. A vocal minority in Germany began installing metal shutters, ringing their property with barbed wire, and buying guns. Joachim Hermann, interior minister of Bavaria, used a military metaphor to express his concerns, pointing out that ‘The EU’s front line [is] in the fight against illegal immigration.’10 Hermann’s comment reflected an undercurrent of anxiety that gripped the older EU countries, but he had not been schooled in the niceties of approved terminolgy. The European Commission frowned on the term ‘illegal immigrant’, and preferred ‘Migrant (illegally resident/staying)’ because the former usage ‘for some has a more negative connotation’. It also preferred ‘Third-Country National found to be illegally present’ or ‘illegally resident/ staying Third Country National’ to the blunter usages ‘illegal immigrant’ or ‘illegal migrant’.11 In any case, Schengenland absorbed Poland, and the periphery moved eastward, with Poland still retaining responsibility for the hard EU barriers, on its eastern borders with Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. As Gerard Delanty noted,



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‘With the gradual incorporation of the periphery into the core, the periphery does not disappear. Rather, new peripheries emerge.’12 The Hungarian situation was similar. Here too, during the three years when Hungary was in the EU but not yet in Schengenland, desperate people from Ukraine, Serbia, Turkey, Palestine and other non-member states, sometimes crammed in vehicles in the airless spaces under false floors and over phony ceilings or even dressed as Hungarian border guards, passed through the country trying to get across the last border to the West. The crossing at Hegyeshalom saw many such efforts, and press reports gave the impression of waves of ‘Third-Country National[s] found to be illegally present’.13 Hegyeshalom became popular with ambitious ‘tourists’, mostly from Ukraine and Moldova, who rented rooms in town and in nearby Levél and Mosonmagyaróvár while they gauged the rhythm and routine of border operations and waited for their opportunities. Their presence represented a new source of income for the historically poor settlement, not just in the hospitality industry but in a new enterprise, the provision of fake visas and false passports. Italian travel documents, the easiest to counterfeit, were popular until 2006, when the preferred approach changed to alteration of passports by insertion of new pictures. Cars with Ukrainian and Moldovan license plates drew immediate attention, and the police recorded 1,103 instances of attempts to cross with false documents in 2004 alone. This short-lived boom, ended by increased police attention by 2006, represented a continuation of Hegyeshalom’s 1990s role as a smuggling entrepot. Back then, shortly after the hard border regime ended, the town had seen brisk trade in incoming electronics and outgoing sweaters, forints and other currency. Drugs turned up then as they still do, but the biggest daily volume was in untaxed cigarettes – lightweight, low in unit cost and popular, as they still are among smuggled goods.14 About 30,000 people illegally residing in Hungary were apprehended during the four-year period of 2004-2007, with Romanians representing the largest group every year until Romania joined the EU in 2007. Ukrainians and Serbs were second and third during 2004–2006, and then the largest groups in 2007. During the same period almost 2,000 people were forced to leave the country, ‘removed’, in EU-speak, rather than ‘deported’, which was ‘not the preferred term to use.’15 From the east and the south, the European Union was beset by people trying to get inside, mainly to find work, albeit not always innocent work. The post-accession roles of the new Schengenland states as guardians of the borders were more complex than appears at first glance. Poland had seven adjacent neighbours, four of which were in both the EU and the Schengen group (Germany, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and three that were outside both (Russia, Belarus and Ukraine). Hungary also had borders with seven states. Three of them – Austria, Slovakia, and Slovenia – were Schengenland states. A fourth, Romania, was in the EU but not in the Schengen group. The other three – Croatia, Ukraine and Serbia – remained outside the EU.

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Hungarian Borderlands Table 9.1╇ Length of Post-Cold War Hungarian borders

Schengen ╅╇ Austria ╅╇Slovakia ╅╇Slovenia EU but not Schengen (Romania) Outside Schengen and EU ╅╇Croatia ╅╇Serbia ╅╇ Ukraine Total

km miles 1,138.9 703 356 219.8 680.9 420.3 102 63 447.8 276.4 655.7 404.8 344.6 212.7 174.4 107.7 136.7 84.4 2,242.5 1,384.3

Moreover, all seven of Hungary’s neighbours had substantial ethnic Hungarian minorities, a result of the redrawing of European boundaries after World War I. So while abolition of border controls towards the West in December 2007 ended an eighteen-year transition from the fall of the Iron Curtain to integration into the European Community, and represented a major step towards reconnection of ethnic Hungarians beyond the borders with their homeland, it created a complicated set of boundaries.

Joining Schengenland December 21, 2007, was a day of great celebration for Hungary. It marked the culmination of a process that started in 1989 and turned Hungary back into the eastern edge of western Europe, after almost half a century as the westernmost edge of the East. It was a NATO member and part of the EU, ‘an undisputed part of the system of Euro-Atlantic integration and processes …’, with open access to its western neighbours. Feelings were similar in other former Communist states.16 At border crossings from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Basin, blue balloons sporting the European Union’s circle of yellow stars soared skyward, while fireworks banged and zoomed, and orchestras played. Prime ministers expressed their amazement and pleasure and spoke of Europe’s bright future. VIPs and bystanders got commemorative stamps in their passports, marking the end of inspections and markings, while delighted onlookers bore witness to the remarkable spectacle. Cheers resounded at midnight, as the crossing gates were ceremoniously removed and the passport inspectors shut down their booths at the Austrian, Slovakian and Slovenian borders. The biggest crowds gathered at Hegyeshalom. Vienna, which Metternich had famously placed at the gateway to Asia, was now just a few unimpeded minutes away. Hegyeshalom had been the concrete manifestation of the chasm, the closely guarded exit barring the way out for those longing for freedom or riches or just the chance to buy a refrigerator. For others, who saw Hungary’s



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links to the West as dating back one thousand years to the reign of King Stephen, Hungary was reunited with a western Europe to which it had always, in ‘our culture and our roots’, belonged.17 A hint of Metternichian anxiety wafted from the Austrian side because of fears of crime coming from the east, and on the Hungarian side concern appeared because of Austrian reluctance to throw open all the roads, depicted facetiously in a Hungarian newspaper two days before the opening with a Trojan horse perched at the border.18 But these concerns were forgotten for the moment; Hungary’s ‘return to Europe’ was complete. Amid the pomp and promises, real work took place. Borders that twenty years before had been rock hard and had gradually gone soft were thrown wide open. Countries that twenty years earlier had served the Soviet Union as armed buffer states with borders sealed against the West – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (the two successor states of former Czechoslovakia), Slovenia (once part of Yugoslavia) and the three Baltic republics which had recently been part of the Soviet Union itself – were now in the western orbit. All belonged to NATO and the European Union, and now all were part of Schengenland. All had shown they could meet EU standards in personal data protection, police cooperation, visa preparation and external border protection. For Hungary certification came after 58 site visits in 2006, 15 re-visits to check weaknesses in 2007, and nine inspections of the capability to operate the Schengen Information System, the database used to track aliens, people wanted for extradition, terrorist suspects and others whose cross-border travels were of interest.19 All had passed and gained admittance. The hard borders that were a residue of the Cold War division of Europe into blocs were gone, replaced by hard external borders facing in the opposite direction and defended by the new members of Schengenland. Europe was whole, and it was secure. If there was a discordant note to Hungary’s border celebrations, it was not the result of Austrian unease or Hungarian feelings of insecurity. Rather it concerned the very thing Paul Lendvai warned about earlier in the year, the failure of Hungarian politics to transcend partisanship and unite on national matters. In the case of the border opening, this would not have meant abandonment of principles or conceding victory by one party to the other. It would have required celebration of a remarkable national milestone as Hungarians, rather than as the governing party or the opposition. But that was clearly in the ‘too hard’ pile; and so Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány marked the event at Hegyeshalom, while opposition leader Viktor Orbán celebrated at Esztergom. Socialists did attend the event at Sopron, but celebrated separately. Katalin Szili, the Socialist president of the parliament, lamented that ‘It’s awful that in the moment when we celebrate a mutual accomplishment, we can’t be together.’ She and the mayor of Sopron never spoke. The end of a bipolar Europe was greeted with a bipolar commemoration.20 Basically the change was about the internal freedom to travel. Externally,

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off the southern shores of the EU, the situation was entirely different. In 2007 almost 1,300 migrants died while trying to get into Europe. In December, at the time of the big celebrations, 243 deaths were reported, 120 in the Aegean, 96 on the way to the Canaries, 17 along the coast of Algeria and ten near the French island of Mayotte.21 Still, inside it was a time to remember and celebrate. Marietta Bódy had experienced the whole cold-war period in northwestern Hungary. Her husband had died in July 1991 of a heart attack while inching forward in a kilometres-long queue towards the Hegyeshalom border checkpoint, caused by the crush of Turkish guest workers heading east for their summer vacation. Later she told her grandson, ‘The whole world truly is open before your generation and you will be able to form your own impressions based on experience.’ This was more than an observable fact; for her generation, the open border was no less than a miracle.22 In some quarters, the celebration goes on. My friends in Győr commemorate this marvel about twice a year, boarding a train without their passports, crossing into Austria at Hegyeshalom uninspected and going to Vienna for lunch. Lunch is always a huge pig’s knuckle and too much beer at the Schweizerhaus beer garden in the Prater, practically in the shadow of the gigantic Ferris wheel – the Riesenrad – on which Joseph Cotton confronted Orson Welles in the 1950 film ‘The Third Man’. They never deviate from their programme: no museums and no shopping, just a boisterous lunch and a train ride home. The best thing about it is that they can do it. Hegyeshalom’s pivotal place in the transformation that my friends toasted at the Prater is clear in the recollections of novelist András Petőcs, as he looked forward in 2007 to an unimpeded crossing into Austria: ‘… Crossing the border at the end of the 80s was still a traumatic experience, as far as I was concerned, whether going out or coming back … On December 22 I’m going to get into the car and go to Vienna. And I don’t want to stop at Hegyeshalom. In fact, gradually I would just like to forget that word Hegyeshalom.’23 So it was fitting that the most prominent politicians gathered there to mark the border opening, Prime Minister Gyurcsány posed symbolically under the EU flag with the barrier about to be raised for the last time and moved to a museum, sharing the spotlight with Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico and Austrian Interior Minister Gunther Platter, as well as Portuguese Prime Minister and President of the Council of the European Union José Socrates and former Portuguese Prime Minister and President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso.24 They spoke of dreams and destinies fulfilled, of broken barriers and European unity, while they unveiled and dedicated a marker, showing the distance to all the capitals of Europe, now within unobstructed reach of all in Schengenland. Gyurcsány recalled Hungary’s traditional mission as the defender of Europe, declaring that ‘We have prepared to defend and strengthen Europe as proud Hungarians …’ As the balloons of EU blue and gold floated upward, accompanied by the notes of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, Austrian novelist Robert Musil’s vision of this soaring piece of music’s power to dissolve frontiers and unite those once separated seemed to be coming true.



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Now it was the unofficial anthem of this moment of liberation, here as well as on the newly open German-Polish border.25 During the week surrounding the December 2007 ceremonies, newspaper reminiscences of crossings past recalled the fear, anxiety and above all the powerlessness of Cold War era travellers setting out for Vienna and the West. Time and again they spoke of what can truly be called ‘the border crossing sickness’ or ‘border fright’, the dry constricted throat, clenched stomach and pounding heart that Hungarians felt as they approached the all-powerful border guards. The reverse of this illness also once existed, and could be called Nickelsdorf euphoria, for in those days freedom started there, in the Austrian village across from Hegyeshalom. As an East German man who fled via Hungary said, ‘Nickelsdorf, how often have I caressed this name on the map!’26 Now that whole era was buried and westward travel was free to all. It was a glorious day, one that few who saw their lives permanently mired in the bad old ways dreamed could take place. In the weeks that followed, the national government explained to the citizenry the meaning of the change. It published a full-page announcement in Metro, a free newspaper distributed at shopping centres and supermarkets throughout the country, which declared that ‘After 18 years we have opened the road in the direction of freedom .â•›.╛╛.’, and highlighted the establishment of an official government internet site called ‘Borderless Europe’, www. magyarorszag.hu/schengen/, which it still maintained two years later.27 It also released a tri-fold brochure sometime between the 21 December 2007 opening of land borders and parallel changes at airports on 31 March 2008. This publication detailed the Schengen system and provided internet addresses for the justice and foreign ministry websites, along with street locations in Budapest and an ’EU line’ telephone number. A magazine called Újmagyarország, or ’New Hungary’, published by the government in January 2008, had high production values – glossy paper and good illustrations, and came out of the office of the prime minister. The introduction by the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, welcomed Hungary ‘into the borderless Europe!’ and the lead article contained a link to another website, www.hatartalaneuropa.hu, another homepage of a borderless Europe. Sidebars explained the difference between the EU and Schengenland and explained key terms: internal borders, external borders, air travel, travel documents. The websites, the advertising newspaper and the magazine, all interlinked with government agency homepages and addresses, represented a thorough and systematic effort to inform citizens about border regulations and requirements for travel documents, not to mention a sea change from the secretive ways of the Communist regime, in which even the rules for passport applications had been kept hidden.28 The lead article, ‘Borderless Europe’, reflected on the great change that had swept over Europe. Freedom to travel had caught up with the movement of goods, currency and information, while EU security forces kept at bay ‘criminals and refugees’, lumped into a single category, as they were generally

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by EU officialdom. Hungary, which had ‘succeeded in proving that it will be able to perform as a bastion of Schengenland’, played a major role in this effort. The author reminded readers that ‘before our entry into the EU, border crossing raised the blood pressure of many Hungarians or just evoked unpleasant memories.’ But that was in the past now. ‘Who remembers anymore the Dacias and Ladas with freezers tied to them and the video tapes smuggled under the rear seats?’ This was written during the tenure of a Socialist prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, who had been a leader of the Communist Youth League while finishing his studies at the University of Pécs. He and the members of his government probably all hoped that the memory of the old days and their party’s role in sustaining the Communist regime were indeed fading into the mists.

Austrian Unease Not everyone was overjoyed at the elimination of barriers to western travel. In Burgenland, expressions of fear and anxiety were easy to find. The articulated concerns, like those of Germans contemplating the open border with Austria in 1995 and with Poland in 2007, centred on crime, but those expressions in some measure were little more than a politically correct code for a fear of outsiders. These anxieties often masqueraded as opposition to increased car traffic, mainly to prevent congestion (as if long streams of cars were about to descend on the tiny villages along the border rather than take the motorway), reduce exposure to pollution, and preserve the tranquillity of border area resorts. So when the border opened, some places posted ‘No Entry’ signs on country roads at the border, allowing pedestrians and cyclists but not cars. At least one border town hired a private security company to patrol its periphery. Hans Niessl, the governor of Burgenland, claimed that the state’s unguarded border with Hungary left his region vulnerable, and he boycotted public programmes and meetings regarding the border opening. Niessl, a Social Democrat who had won his office in 2004 under the motto ‘A modern and humane policy for Burgenland’, had applauded the movement of Burgenland to centre stage with EU enlargement in 2004, but later changed his mind. His posturing so annoyed the national government that the embarrassed governor showed up for the December 21 celebration at Hegyeshalom.29 Austrians also raised issues about Hungarian competence in protecting the Schengen border. In 2004 they focused on their mutual border, and in 2007 they shifted their attention to the new outer border. Of course, Hungarians found these concerns offensive. The worries ignored the fact that Hungarians knew how to maintain a hard border. In fact, their border guards had done such a good job of protecting the border back when they were keeping people inside Hungary that they were still reviled by their countrymen who remembered their brutal efficiency.



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The Hungarian border guards themselves now started to try to put their former competence behind them and reinvent their past to show a more civil and humane side. They bragged about their role in lifting mines and rolling up barbed wire, conveniently ignoring the fact that they had been the ones who had installed the system and enforced it. The key difference between the old regime and the one unfolding since the end of the 1980s was that border guards were no longer authorized to kill people merely for the act of crossing. Given that limitation, it was indeed likely that people would get across, but not because those they faced were Hungarian. The fact was that in Europe the rules of the game had profoundly changed.30 To accommodate Austrian concern about crime and Hungarian competence, the governments agreed to joint patrols of the border and the Austrians deployed army units to the eastern border as reinforcements. The patrols operated on both sides of the border, and both countries’ police forces were permitted to cross their mutual borders in pursuit of criminals.31 Early on a Saturday morning in May 2009, Hungarian police officers chased a people smuggler who had refused their order to stop all the way to Vienna, at speeds of over 110 miles per hour, radioing the Austrians who joined the chase as they sped west. The Austrians made the arrest, when the Turks and Kosovars tried to abandon both the car and their Hungarian smuggler and disappear into roadside brush.32 Cooperation extended to random checks in border towns and at service areas and laybys, and keeping rural and wooded segments of the border, the so-called ‘green border’, under observation. The attitude of ‘the in-laws’, as Hungarians sometimes called the Austrians, miffed the jubilant Hungarians. At the conference celebrating the eighteenth anniversary of the Pan-European picnic in Budapest during the summer of 2007, less than half a year before the end of border inspections between the two countries, Chancellor Franz Vranitsky spoke of years of good relations between the two countries, and Burgenland police chief Koch said Burgenlanders were ‘bound to Hungarians by many decades of shared work, creation and suffering.’33 So when the actual opening came, Hungarians were taken aback and offended by the hostility of the neighbours’ who half a century earlier had welcomed thousands of refugees who fled via Austria after the Hungarian Revolution, and who had welcomed the East Germans who had come via Hungary in the summer of 1989. The local Hungarian press played up every case of an Austrian village obstructing access for motor vehicles, always on the pretext of controlling traffic, and sometimes causing complicated detours for border residents who lived on one side and worked on the other. Sometimes the Hungarians responded with humour, and occasionally sympathetic Austrians joined them in highlighting the absurdity of the situation. Within ten days of the appearance of one border sign prohibiting motor vehicles, two Hungarians tested the limitation of crossings to cyclists, horse carts and pedestrians imposed by the town of Morbisch when one pushed the other across the border in a wheelbarrow. Perhaps it was a business-class wheelbarrow, because the passenger brandished a bottle of champagne.34 Later, at

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nearby Sopronpuszta, Hungarian and Austrian supporters of an open border posed by the do-not-enter sign which they had draped with an EU flag. Nevertheless, the fear was real and it endured. As taxi-driver István Tűttő and I found out, even some GPS systems were programmed to ignore certain rural border crossings. On a June 2009 excursion south by taxi from Győr to the border town of Szentpéterfa, across from Eberau, Austria, he and I returned northward on the Austrian side with directions to cross back at the Hungarian village of Pornoapati, a village near Deutsch Schützen in Austria that was not nearly as interesting as its name. A map showed the hard-packed country road we sought, but our GPS kept telling us to turn around, adamant that we were going the wrong way. We knew the road was supposed to be there, and the street repair crew in Deutsch Schützen confirmed our understanding, so we found our way across the border. But the insistent message from the machine suggested that the technology had been adapted to accommodate Austrian fears about unwanted border crossings. Of course, it could be adjusted anew if views of the border changed, say, in an effort to lure tourists. Austrian politicians still claimed occasionally that increases in crime were attributable to the border openings and urged re-establishment of border controls. The booths at Hegyeshalom were reopened and controls were put back in place briefly in June 2008 for the European football championships. However, it is doubtful that any barbarians from the East could have represented more of a threat to public order than the beer-swilling soccer hooligans of the United Kingdom and Italy. It was no secret that the greatest menace to public order was internal, and in 2006 during World Cup matches in Germany, all cars from Britain and Italy were inspected before being allowed near the Munich site of the matches. Maybe it reassured the Austrians to know that it was possible to reimpose controls when they thought them necessary. The controls did not impose much of a burden for Irene and me in Tüttő’s taxi, at least not at five a.m. on June 8, heading for the Vienna airport. The booths were manned by Austrians only; the Magyars stayed at home. We joined half a dozen cars in line, and stopped at the booth. A border guard peered inside. Without asking for documents, he waved us through with a flick of a finger.35 By mid-2009 the trend was definitely towards openness even along the smaller border routes through villages near Sopron. Two Austrian towns connected by road to Fertőrákos – Morbisch and St Margarethen – both began to allow cars across in May; other towns went in the same direction, including Andau, which James Michener had made famous. By mid-autumn 2009, the Hungarian ambassador in Vienna could report to borderland mayors a growing willingness on the Austrian side to abolish traffic barriers.36 Some efforts were made to express the concerns about criminal behavior in a way that distinguished between this anxiety and opinions about Hungarians. An Austrian news magazine’s survey of public opinion regarding the new Schengenland neighbours showed a favourable view of Hungarians. It turned out that 71 per cent of those polled considered them more simpatico than the other eastern neighbours, with the Slovenes (63 per cent), Czechs (50 per



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cent), and Slovaks (33 per cent) behind them.37 But as with some close family relationships, there was a layer of unease on both sides. Hungarians recalling their first visits to Vienna when travel restrictions were eased in the 1980s remembered Hungarian-language signs in shop windows that said ‘Ne lopj Magyar!’ (No stealing, Hungarian!) And it appears that there was good reason for the signs, insulting though they appeared. A historian (not my cousin) reminiscing about his first visit to the Austrian capital, a secondary school outing by bus, said his classmates stole so much chocolate that they were all in a state of sugar shock on the way back.38 But there was scandalous behaviour aplenty among the Austrians as well, perhaps of a more pernicious kind than petty theft by juveniles in grocery shops. Under the headline ‘The consuls lined their own pockets’, the Hungarian news weekly HVG broke a story concerning Austrian diplomats in Budapest and Belgrade who sold visas based on false papers to prospective immigrants. Convictions ensued, and one former vice-consul in Belgrade, who sold nearly 1,000 visas over five years for as much as €3,000 each for a total approaching €3 million, received a three-and-a-half year jail sentence. It turned out that neither the Austrians nor the Hungarians monopolized virtue.39 In fact, compared to the serious corruption represented by kickbacks and bribes throughout the European Union, involving politcians, political parties, and the biggest companies, described in Carolyn Warner’s book, The Best System Money Can Buy, even €3 million does not seem like much.40

The Hungarian-Slovakian Border While the Austrian segment of the newly opened border drew the most attention and generated the most angst, something very different took place on the Slovakian border. Relations with Slovakia up to 2007 had been chilly, as reflected in the failure of both countries to agree on terms for rebuilding the bridge between Esztergom and Štúrovo (Párkány), which had been destroyed just before Christmas in 1944 by the retreating Germans. Only in 2001, more than half a century after the fighting ended, was the small passenger ferry that plied the Danube between the towns put out of business and the Mária Valéria Bridge restored, with EU financial support. The Slovakians seemed less enthusiastic about the improved connection. Both countries commemorated the event with new postage stamps, but only the Hungarian one was bilingual. Rigorous inspection of traffic at the bridge kept the number of passenger-car crossings down to between 60 and 80 per hour. Even pedestrians ordinarily faced ten- to twenty-minute lines. Some Slovak politicians predicted that Hungarian tanks would make the first crossings.41 Ethnic Hungarians on the Slovakian side felt singled out by the slow traffic flow. But links gradually improved to the point that some commentators saw the December 2007 border opening as realization of the irredentist dream, a virtual revision of the Trianon treaty that reconnected ethnic Hungarians

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on the Slovak side with the mother country by way of the open border. Some saw the border opening as marking the end of the horrible twentieth century, which had started with World War I and the reviled treaty that followed. Within days of the December celebration, which was marked by thousands of candles floating down the river in the night, Štúrovo and Esztergom opened discussions on joint infrastructure projects, the first since before Trianon, notably a new sports arena in Štúrovo designed to serve both cities. They also established regular joint meetings of their city councils and special committees.42 On a national level, Hungarian politicians cast their generally positive views in ways that reflected their different outlooks. In 2002, Viktor Orban, then leader of the opposition but later prime minister, envisioned ‘the dissolution of borders’, a goal that was later reflected in the 2010 law offering Hungarian citizenship and passports to ethnic Hungarians living in neighbouring states. László Solyom, president during the period of Socialist governance, put it differently, when celebrating Romanian accession to the EU in January 2007. He recognized that loyalties could be broader than those tying Magyars to Hungary, that ‘every Hungarian can love the Carpathian Basin in its entirety, each land to which he or she is tied by history and culture. And all the other peoples living here can do the same.’43 The newly popular focus on cooperation troubled Prime Minister Robert Fico enough for him to remind radio listeners that the borders were open, not abolished, and that Schengen was about the end of border inspections, not the end of the border. His coalition partner Jan Slota, head of the right-wing National Party and, according to a Slovakian television news report quoted in the Győr newspaper, a convicted car thief, chimed in with a declaration that there were no Hungarians in Slovakia, only Slovaks who happened to speak Hungarian.44 Slovakian emphasis on respecting the border and Hungarian focus on free crossings were rooted in divergent views of the Treaty of Trianon, one side seeing it as a founding document and the other as dividing historic Magyar communities. Right-wing politicians in both countries continued to stage provocations, at the borders and elsewhere. Early in 2009 hundreds of cheerful Hungarian soccer fans posed with two large banners, one announcing ‘Jan Slota must die’, and the other ‘Fuck Slovakia’.45 Members of Jobbik, the right-wing party affiliated with the black-shirted ‘Magyar Garda’, blocked traffic for the better part of a day at the Rajka and Vámossabadi crossings in September 2009 to protest a Slovak law requiring all public business and education to be conducted in the Slovak language.46 The Slovakians meanwhile barred Hungarian President László Sólyom from entering the country to participate in the dedication of a statue honouring Hungary’s patron saint and king, St Stephen, on Hungary’s national day, which coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the Pan-European picnic and the forty-first anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, in which Hungarian troops had participated. Of course, the border between Hungary and Slovakia was supposed to be open; crossing stations had been closed and dismantled. Ultimately, Sólyom declined



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to force the issue, and Hungary took the matter to the European Commission, which finessed the matter and said national courts should resolve the problem. Hungary’s ambassador attended the ceremony, where speeches urging cooperation mixed with banners announcing ‘Hungary Ended in 1918’, ‘Sólyom, go home’, ‘Enough of the Occupation and Meddling’ and ‘Ratislav was our first great king’.47 Meanwhile a migration was underway, not often commented upon and apparently not causing the same concern in Hungary as that which troubled the Slovak politicians. Slovak nationals started to buy property in border towns of northwestern Hungary, notably the former border crossing settlement of Rajka. By the autumn of 2009, twenty families had bought houses in Rajka, and others were moving into nearby towns. A year later, 600 of the 3,000 residents were Slovak citizens, and regular bus service connected the village to Bratislava. Mosonmagyaróvár, a considerably larger town, had between fifty and sixty such families, with more anticipated. The local ReMax real estate office’s home page ended with ‘.sk’, rather than ‘.hu’. As the economic downturn spread, Slovakians with euros found bargains in Levél, Hegyeshalom, Dunakiliti and other towns, with prices in towns closer to the border higher than those a little further away. Their children went to local schools, and they used Hungarian medical facilities, but they paid their income taxes in Slovakia. The northwest corner of Hungary appeared on the way to becoming a bedroom suburb of Bratislava.48 Komárom remained a focal point for contention between the neighbours into the middle of 2010. At the beginning of June, on the ninetieth anniversary of the Trianon Treaty, Jan Slota and the Slovak People’s Party erected a monument to the treaty just on the Slovakian side of the Danube bridge between Hungarian Komárom and Slovakian Komarno. ‘We will show the Hungarians where the state border is,’ Slota said, adding that ‘he wanted to demonstrate that Komarno was a Slovak city.’ He claimed the city government refused to defend the interests of the state and would not dictate what monuments he would erect in the city.49 The memorial was dedicated on 4 June, the ninetieth anniversary of the signing of the treaty, so it had been in place for just over one week when Irene and I saw it. It was a slab of black granite about as tall as an adult man, on the central reservation in the middle of the road, rough on the back, with three unlit candles in glass jars in front of it, at the base on the polished side. These candles are usually associated with mourning, so it is possible that Magyars left them. The text, almost entirely in Slovak but with a little English, included the name of the Czech diplomat who signed the treaty for the new Czechoslovak state. The monument had already been vandalized with a hammer. Scratches, cracks and pockmarks were visible after only a week in public view, and chunks had been broken off around the edges. We watched from the shade under the canopy of the old border station, while visitors stopped to inspect the memorial. In about 40 minutes 12 individuals or couples came to take a look. One young man, with his girlfriend or wife in tow,

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got out of his car, walked up to the marker, and let out a long spray of spit in its direction. A return visit four months later found the memorial slightly more battered, and stained with a permanent red pigment. On the bridge itself a Slovakian flag and an EU flag on tablets hang from a girder, just over midway across the river, a few metres on the Slovakian side, facing toward Hungary. There is no equivalent Hungarian ornament. In fact, there isn’t even a ‘Welcome to Hungary sign’ on the south side, just a tablet announcing ‘Komárom’. All the signs seemed to point to Slovakia’s selfconscious insecurity. Slota sought to cast the vandalism as evidence of Hungarian irredentism, but the contretemps did nothing to enhance his success in the parliamentary elections on the day after our first visit. Tottering on the threshhold of parliamentary representation with barely five per cent of the vote in the previous election, he may even have orchestrated the whole thing, including the vandalism, to generate votes. However, he failed to expand his base significantly, just reaching 5.09 per cent, as the voters turned Fico out and chose a new government that seemed inclined towards reconciliation. So the episode had no electoral significance.50 In contrast to the complexities and ambiguities of the opening of the borders with Austria and Slovakia, the Slovenian portion remained quiet and uneventful. At a ceremony at the Nemesnép-Kobilje (Kebele) crossing, Katalin Szili, president of the Hungarian parliament, spoke about feeling like citizens of Europe and experiencing true freedom. Otherwise the two former Communist countries quietly made the transition into Schengenland.51 It had not always been easy between them. In the early 1950s, Yugoslavian Titoists and Hungarian Stalinists had glared at each other across a border that was closed and hot, but Tito, Stalin and the hostility were long gone.

Nickelsdorf

.. Morbisch

Neusi eaie t Se a

Hegyeshalom

Sopronpuszta ‘

Sopron .. Hegyko ‘

Lutzmannsburg

Geschriebenstein park

Felsocsatar ‘

“

Eberau Szentpeterfa ‘

Moschendorf

Pinkamindszent

Apatistvanfalva ‘

‘

Map 3. The open Hungarian-Austrian border

Zsira

Andau

Chapter 10

Inside Schengenland

The transition of the borders from Cold War dead zone to open corridors that culminated on 21 December 2007 took place on many levels. For many, the change was all about the freedom to travel, without special permission and above all without fear. But for the border zone itself, with its small villages and long-ago severed ties, the change was not that simple. Along the Austrian border, the end of the superpower confrontation in 1989 had brought only occasional opportunities for crossing. Austrian troops took over protection of the border in 1991, and stepped up their operations in 1995, when Austria joined Schengenland and became the guardian of the zone’s outer border. For the next twelve years, until Hungary itself became a member of the Schengen group in 2007, the line hardened once again. Between the world wars, smuggling of produce, livestock and consumer goods had been widespread in the area, from richer Hungary to poorer Austria. Now smuggling from east to west was again a concern, but this time the focus was on people smuggling and the coming of the barbarians: the unemployed, the refugees and the dreaded criminals and terrorists from beyond the EU. On both sides of the border, the sound of rotor blades as helicopters skimmed over the treetops came to signify a search for such migrants.1 Among border communities in the south, the rehardened border of the 1990s did not prove particularly difficult to enforce. Two generations of habitual separation, reinforced by a linguistic barrier that had grown over time, doomed occasional efforts to establish cross-border links. Villages that had been virtual twins, such as Austrian Moschendorf (Nagysároslak) and Hungarian Pinkamindszent (Allerheiligen), stood on the edges of different countries, spoke different languages and faced in different directions. Both had lost population, but Pinkamindszent had fared worse, confined as it had been inside the highly restricted five-kilometre border zone during the Cold War, while Moschendorf had lured Austrian city dwellers seeking weekend homes. In the 1990s, visitors to Pinkamindszent cut pieces from the barbed wire fence of old, leaving locals who had adapted to the situation scratching their heads in bewilderment. Efforts to develop links between the villages never went far beyond occasional religious processions. Moschendorf residents rejected a permanent border crossing between the villages, claiming traffic would become too heavy. They also bought a fire engine for Pinkamindszent, possibly so they would not feel obligated to come to the assistance of the



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Hungarians. In any case, the latter could not afford to buy fuel to operate it. On the Hungarian side, a Pinkamindszent resident built a bowling alley, but no Austrians came over to bowl. This is how it went in the south, unlike near Sopron where commerce was brisk. For people outside the southern border area, crossings permitted and denied became symbols of repression or freedom; for people inside the zone, crossings became matters of indifference. They had been separated from the other side for generations.2 The changes along the Schengen border had far-reaching impacts beyond practical and symbolic questions related to crossings. Hungary, Austria and Slovakia linked themselves to a multilingual internet site concerning border environmental issues; this started as an initiative of the city of Győr and shares information among public bodies as well as with the public in four languages, English as well as the native tongues of the three countries. The ‘AustriaHungary-Slovakia Forum for Cross-Border Cooperation’ still operated in 2010. It offered links to ministries and non-governmental agencies and general environmental information while ignoring contentious specific matters such as the dumping of a foamy brown pollutant into the upper Rába River by a leather factory in Jellersdorf, Austria. The noxious waste went the length of the river, through Győr and into the Danube for four years. The factory finally agreed to halt the practice in the summer of 2006.3 On a broader scale, the European Green Belt initiative also focused on the environmental health of the borderlands. The organizers sought to maintain and expand this single positive legacy of the Iron Curtain, the preservation of a wealth of habitats and species on lands free of farming, industry and human habitation along the line of the old barriers. The first Green Belt conference, organized by the World Conservation Union and the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation, took place near Sopron in 2004, in the Fertő-Hanság National Park, the site of one of the three projects focusing on Hungarian borderlands. The other two focused on the trinational Goričko-Raab-Őrség National Park (Slovenia-Austria-Hungary) and the wetlands of the Drava along the border with Croatia. Annual conferences continued through the decade, and a 1,000-kilometre bicycle race along the Green Belt from Sopron in August 2009 publicized the programme.4

‘Hello, Neighbour!’ Along with the ecological bridges came symbolic connections. All three Hungarian segments of the Schengenland border – Slovene, Austrian, and Slovak – had commemorative benches on the line in celebration of the opening. A firm owned by Czech Peter Kukorelli and Hungarian Balázs Orlai conceived a project they called ‘Hello, neighbour!’ that involved installing sleek stainless steel benches, engraved across the centre with the national abbreviations, SL-HU, for example, and bearing in the middle a recessed red heart. Conceptually half in one country and half in the other, they were

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actually only close to the border because the treaties setting the boundaries required a four-metre clear strip on each side of the actual line. The benches were installed next to the border with Slovakia at Aggtelek-Kecovo (Kecső), on the Slovenian line at Kercaszomor-Domanjsevci (Domonkosfa), and along the Austrian border at Szentpéterfa-Eberau (Monyorókerék). One writer referred to the latter as ‘the daydream bench of Szentpéterfa’, and the seats almost literally bridged the boundary line and offered a place to reflect on the ability to live in peace in the borderlands. They symbolized borders as connectors rather than separators and were fitting monuments to a truly memorable achievement.5 The benches symbolized new cross-border relations but simultaneously reflected the harsh reality of economies gone sour and a flourishing scrap metal trade based on theft. Along that border strip reality included the likelihood that such a fine flawless slab of stainless steel might be stolen in the middle of the night and sold for scrap. Hungarian thieves regularly made off with street signs and business shingles, even brass flower- and candle-holders in cemetreies, as well as the state railway’s signal equipment and communication wire strung along the railway bed. Perhaps the greatest of these thefts involved about 11,500 pounds of aluminium cable belonging to an electric utlity that the police found in Győr during 2010.6 So a June 2009 visit to Szentpéterfa to photograph the border-straddling bench succeeded, but only after Mayor Miklós Kohuth unlocked the door to the storage building in which he had been protecting it. He planned to reinstall it, permanently bolted to a concrete slab, later in the year, if funds were available. For the time being, however, he considered it more important for the bench to be invisibly safe than visibly symbolic. By autumn the bench was back where it belonged, bolted to its concrete mooring next to border marker C 52, with its role as a reminder of the border opening more secure. Of course the symbolic resonance of the border opening was especially profound on the Austrian border. Even though Austria remained officially neutral, for decades that border had been a hard and deadly line between East and West, capitalism and socialism, the Soviet empire and the Western alliance. And the bench at Szentpéterfa-Eberau was not the only concrete manifestation of the extraordinary change that had taken place. The border strip on the Hungarian side was slowly being reinvented as a multi-faceted recreational and memorial zone that evoked the history of the Communist past and exploited the opportunities available in the capitalist present.

Monuments and Museums Recent history along the border with Austria, once among the most lethal of borders, was encapsulated at a handful of new sites, which illuminated both the period of the Iron Curtain and current approaches to its history. The state



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sponsored a new border guard museum at Apátistvánfalva, a few kilometres south of the mountain pass at Szentgotthárd. The museum started out tucked away in a secondary school in the border town of Körmend and was moved to its own building at Apatistvanfalva, at a former border guard station that was already the home of a monument to the border guards. The border guard establishment, now part of the police, seemed of two minds about the place, establishing it but not supporting it properly, paying for neither a telephone nor an internet connection. In 2008, arranging a visit to the museum required calling the mobile phone of the caretaker’s daughter. In a way, the souvenir coffee mug that was for sale there, with the Cold-War era border-guard badge prominently displayed but disappearing after two or three turns in the dishwasher, was appropriate to the place as well as to the time. The museum itself is deadpan, neither boastful nor apologetic about what it shows: uniforms, vehicles, weapons, signal equipment, barracks furnishings, and the long-chimneyed wheeled field kitchen known to border troops as a gulyáságyú or ‘goulash cannon’. There is neither introspection nor selfjustification, unlike the organization’s internally distributed commemorative history, which boasted of its role in removing the barbed wire along the border but neglected to mention that it had installed and maintained the wire and its lethal predecessors and appurtenances for almost two generations.7 On a table in the museum, among the documents available for visitors to handle, peruse and ultimately to ruin, albums show the centrality of the border guard to the life of borderland communities and its role in spreading the values and practices of the People’s Republic among border-area residents, including the ‘book of squealers’. About an hour north by car, past the border-bridging steel bench at Eberau-Szentpéterfa, Sándor Goják, a former border guard who became a borderland innkeeper and vintner, opened a private border guard museum at Felsőcsatár, west of Szombathely. Goják also sold a sturdy red table wine in two-litre jugs for about $8, and explained the Cold War border regime to tour groups and individual visitors alike. He presents more directly than the Apátistvánfalva museum a narrative focused on the border-guard mission of keeping Hungarians from leaving the country. His outdoor museum shows the three distinct phases of border installations, with the evolution of mine technology and the electric signal fence. Maybe some of the school-group members who visit his museum and hear his stories of failed crossings, lost arms and legs and death will someday visit Apatisvanfalva as well and ask questions about the bland official presentation of the same era. The sites at Apátistvánfalva, Szentpéterfa, and Felsőcsatár are all in Vas County. Győr-Moson-Sopron County to the north contains the most important exit points at Sopron and Hegyeshalom. It also has significant memorial places and museums. At Zsira, just north of the Vas county line, a memorial and sculpture park dedicated in 2006 celebrates ‘Flight and Freedom’. The monument on the Hungarian side commemorates the 1956 revolution, and a sculpture group at Lutzmannsburg on the Austrian side celebrates the end

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of the Iron Curtain. The park marks the spot where the young East German architect Kurt-Werner Schulz was killed in August 1989. György Kovács’s sculpture commemorates the 1956 migration, during which 31,000 Hungarians crossed into Austria at Lutzmannsburg, where the townspeople provided shelter and support. The inscription on the back, ‘Szerte nézett, s nem lelé honját a hazában’, comes from one of the seldom-sung latter verses of the Himnusz, the national anthem. It refers to the failed search for a home within the homeland, appropriate enough for those who chose to flee after the revolution. The other main element, on the Austrian side, is the steel Freiheits-Trichter or Freedom Funnel, by Karl Hiess. The sheet-metal cone, with the small end facing into Hungary and the larger opening turned weswtward, leads from the narrowness of imprisonment to the expanse of peace and freedom. Students of the secondary school in nearby Oberpullendorf supplemented the freedomfunnel with six two-dimensional figures depicting the movement to freedom. One, a man wrapped in wire and named Der Entfesselte, The Enraged, by its young creator, Linda Schwarts, shows a figure trying to free himself from the wire that bound him. Presumably he and the other figures around the funnel did not arrive by car, because the sign facing east at the border prohibits car traffic from Hungary. The Hungarian and Austrian portions of the park are both right on the border so they are in fact parts of a single jointly built park. Farther to the north, near Sopron at Hegykő, a historical site that was the personal initiative of the town mayor replicated a swath of border barrier, with fences, minefield and patrol road. Hegykő is about three miles south of the actual border, along the south side of the lake known as Fertő. The village is the last outpost before the border, a long slog through the marsh grass northward to the lake’s eastern shore and Austria through what is now a Hungarian national park. The poet György Faludy, who fled in 1956 with 400 forint (nowadays around $2) and a toothbrush, first to London and then to Toronto, memorialized the spot in his poem ‘Exodus’: ‘We were fifty, maybe more, and we crossed at Hegykő …’8 To this day, with the wind, isolation and quiet, the reconstructed forty-metre border strip, opened to visitors in July 2008, has the feel of a real edge, of being az isten háta mögött, behind God’s back. Mayor István Szigethi played it safe conceptually, declaring his intention to honour those who both succeeded and failed in their efforts to cross, and those border guards who were true to their oaths, first defending the border and then removing the mines their predeccessors had installed.9 The celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Pan-European picnic in the summer of 2009 provided the occasion for the appearance of another Iron Curtain museum near Sopron. Former border guard Imre Csapó, like Sándor Goják at Felsőcsatár, made and sold his own Kékfrankos wine, and his museum in a flat-roofed prefabricated building behind his house in Fertőrákos seemed designed at least in part to sell wine. Csapó claims to have collected materials for more than thirty years. He also managed somehow to acquire the collections of the Győr and Sopron border guard unit museums, when they closed



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at the time of the absorption of the guards into the police. Next to his little box of a museum was the obligatory Trabant, which once epitomized a failed consumer economy and had recently come to symbolize the East German desire for freedom, and a truncated version of a guard tower, the kind with steel legs that had been used to peer out over the tall grasses onto Lake Fertő.10

Remembering the Picnic Csapó picked an excellent time to open his museum. With the twentieth anniversary of the Pan-European Picnic that summer, tourists and dignitaries poured into Sopron for the festivities, exhibits and ceremonies. The Pan-European Picnic ‘89 Foundation, established by the former organizers of the event, had held annual commemorative events at the picnic site since the tenth anniversary in 1999, when they established the Memorial Park on the site and improved the formerly impassable access road. The foundation wanted the site to symbolize the desire for freedom of people of former socialist countries and the reunification of Europe, according to chairman László Magas in 2009. This focus drove their goal, ‘to present the events truthfully and maintain the memories respectfully.’ Over the decade after its establishment, the site developed into a combination historical and commemorative park. A picnic area, a parking lot and a series of outdoor displays outlining the history of the Iron Curtain along the dirt road that marked the line of the border all resembled aspects of historical sites such as Civil War battlefield parks in the United States. But there was also a border guard watchtower beyond the tree line and an assortment of monuments and markers. The earliest two (with the exception of the 1922 border stone, No. B 5) were the flat rectangular stone placed by the government of the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, and the traditional Hungarian carved wooden column inscribed by the organizers of the picnic, both installed in 1991. By 2009 there were four more, one contributed by the World Jurist Association in 1999; a bell from the city of Debrecen, the home of picnic organizer Ferenc Mészáros, also in 1999; another from the European Commission, installed in 2004, the year of Hungary’s accession into the European Union; and a contribution by the government of Japan during the same year. This last one, a door ajar in its frame, effectively caught the significance of the picnic itself, while the others by and large seemed more to mark the presence of their donors than to harken back to the event. Then in 2009 another far larger sculpture joined this array of commemoration: Miklós Melocco’s Áttörés (Umbruch in German) or ‘Breakthrough’, a massive rendering in white marble of a group of people escaping from a subterranean prison into the bright light of freedom. Critics noticed the faces of the Transylvanian poet Sándor Kányadi, two of Melocco’s siblings and the sculptor himself among those coming up the stairs.11 The sculpture immedi-

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The Melocco sculpture at the Sopronpuszta picnic site with a border tower in the background. Photograph by Irene Schubert.

ately became the dominant presence in the memorial park. On its side, in Hungarian and German, was the inscription, ‘An enslaved people opened the prison gates so another enslaved people could step out into freedom.’ And right behind it, on the other side of the trees, the cold-war era guard tower reminded visitors of the everyday reality of life in the Communist bloc. The Sopron city government, a sponsor of the twentieth anniversary celebration, predicted that ‘The dedication of the monument will be a huge step towards making the site of the former Pan-European Picnic a shrine for pilgrims.’12 The future would test that forecast, but in any case the Melocco sculpture would surely remain the dominant presence. Numerous viewers, Ferenc Mészáros among them, were not pleased. They questioned whether it really belonged on the picnic site, and some even claimed it would have been at home in the statuary park outside Budapest, where specimens of three generations of socialist-realist public art had been preserved and displayed as



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reminders of the Communist past.13 It was certainly a far cry from Melocco’s simple memorial to the murdered poet Miklós Radnóti, standing outside the city of Győr, his head bowed and trying to shield himself from the cold with his cloak, or from the evocative Japanese door. The dedication of the Melocco sculpture came after a four-month build-up to the twentieth anniversary festivities. The regional newspaper started to promote the summer programme in April, promising an outdoor exhibition in the centre of Sopron, a conference of historians, and a grand celebration on the picnic site on August 19, along with dedication of the statue. The European Union provided financial support for a travelling exhibition about Sopron and the picnic, scheduled for display in Austria and Berlin. On May 16 Mayor Tamás Fodor placed a 40-kilogram chunk of the Berlin Wall, taken from near the Brandenburg Gate, in the ground at the picnic site, where it would serve as part of the foundation for the Melocco sculpture.14 In June, the Burgenland tourist bureau promoted a Trabant rally, starting at the picnic site and featuring dinner in Morbisch. Just days later in Budapest, Prime Minister Imre Nagy was reburied at Heroes Square, in a ceremony attended by the German, Austrian and Hungarian heads of state. Back at Sopron on 27 June, Presidents Sólyom of Hungary and Heinz Fischer of Austria went together to the site of the fencecutting by Foreign Ministers Horn and Mock to commemorate the photo-op. President Sólyom credited all who were involved in the dismantling of the border. The socialist newspaper Népszabadság called the day the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the Iron Curtain, exaggerating the meaning of the Horn-Mock gesture. Sixty Trabants at Sopronpuszta provided the backdrop to the event.15 The pace picked up in August with the historians’ conference, the town centre exhibition, and the commemoration itself. Anniversaries present opportunities to teach history, solidify or challenge myths, assert or deny responsibility for what happened, and maybe settle some political scores. Starting in the spring, groups of schoolchildren visited the picnic site and the city display, in a section of the trench in front of the medieval city wall. There they could sit in a Trabant, stand under a guard tower, and see a fakabát or wooden coat as the border guard booths were called, as well as border guard equipment including the goulash-cannon field kitchen. At least two vintners, including museum-owner Imre Csapó, set up shop and sold local red wine with labels that showed cold-war era guard towers and barbed wire. The exhibition would stay open until October, and the wine was still available in November, but the climax came on August 19. The round of celebrations, commemorations and exhibits underscored Sopron’s position in the events of 1989, and the Sopron city government published a trilingual book, Határáttörés-Border Breakthrough-Grenzdurchbruch that emphasized events and festivities. While Hegyeshalom remained emblematic of the Cold War, Sopron’s association with the end of all that and the opening of the border was becoming well established. The picnic anniversary brought President Sólyom and senior officials from Austria and Germany to Sopron. German chancellor Angela Merkel, herself

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an East German, received the most attention. Appearing before nearly two thousand, she expressed Germany’s gratitude for Hungary’s role in paving the way for German unification, both in her remarks and with a wreath whose ribbon had the single word Danke. She also thanked Austria for assisting Germans who escaped by way of Hungary. She called the original gathering the world’s most successful picnic, more in fact than a picnic, and more than a civil initative reaching out across the Iron Curtain It was, she concluded, a small revolution, and Hungary had given it wings. Although she singled out for praise the political opposition of the time and the organizers of the picnic, she also credited the Németh government, recalling that when then Chancellor Helmut Kohl asked Hungarian Prime Minister Németh whether he expected compensation for allowing the East Germans to leave, Németh replied that Hungary did not sell human beings.16 Other dignitaries added their perspective to the event. László Tőkés, now a representative of Romania in the European Parliament but in 1989 at the centre of the events that brought down Ceauşescu, claimed the picnic was the true day of the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister then serving as EU president, likened the picnic to the first trickle of water piercing a dam, ultimately causing the edifice to collapse. But he reminded his listeners that the road on which Europe had embarked when the barriers fell remained in front of them and that much remained to be done in the development of Europe. Bildt had been the first EU representative in Bosnia during the wars of the early 1990s, so he had first-hand knowledge of the complex road to European unity. He noted that more than one hundred million Europeans remained outside the EU and wanted to enter, emphasizing in particular the difficulties in relations with Turkey and Russia. The end was not in sight, but the dramatic change of 1989 had been achieved largely without guns and armies by the citizens themselves. László Magas, head of the Picnic Foundation, added praise for the border guards who kept the picnic site from becoming a place of carnage. He also noted without being specific that false claims of credit for the revolutionary events remained in the air.17 Questions remained: whose holiday was being celebrated and whose shrine was being established? With the reflection and the commemoration came the contested claims regarding ownership of the border opening in general and the picnic in particular, whether the opposition or Németh’s reformist regime turned revolutionary played the key role. The argument never became explicit or direct but was conducted through oblique references, warnings, and sniping. It was always in the air, with the various participants, whether of the opposition, the government, or the border guards, pointing to their own role and ignoring the others, and irritating others who were involved along the way. Overall, the commemoration was a day of joy and pride but there were discordant notes. ‘Jobbik’ was there to introduce foreign visitors to Hungarian fringe politics. Fresh from a suprising electoral victory in June 2009, where they took three of the thirteen Hungarian seats in the European Parliament, they waved the red- and white-striped flag which they claimed symbolized the



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early kings of the House of Árpád but that had much more recently been the banner of wartime Hungarian Nazis, the Arrow Cross. There at Sopronpuszta, with almost everyone celebrating the opening of Hungary and Europe to each other and the smashing of barriers, they chanted their xenophobic slogan, ‘Hungary for the Hungarians’.18 Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai, who had replaced Gyurcsány as head of the Socialist coalition and government, did not attend, because he was not invited. Chancellor Merkel had asked for a meeting with Bajnai. They had economic issues to discuss, but the organizers claimed they wanted to keep politics at a distance. So the two prime ministers met for dinner near Sopron, outside the framework of the celebration.19 The organizers’ desire to keep politics at arm’s length was either foolish or disingenuous. After all, the opening of the border was a profoundly political act, altering the way Europe was governed and ultimately resulting in the spread of Western-style governance and regional arrangements in the form of the European Union into former Soviet satellites and beyond. The original picnic was an important element in the political change in Europe. When the organizers denied an invitation to Prime Minister Bajnai, on the pretext of keeping politics at arm’s length, they in fact kept the governing coalition, allegedly the inheritors of the Communist tradition and policies, at a distance to focus the political limelight on the old opposition, allegedly the progenitors of the post-Cold War Fidesz party, which in 2009 stood in opposition to the Socialists. They also ignored the plea of Paul Lendvai, the Hungarian-born Austrian journalist and historian, who at the 2007 ‘First Brick’ conference had implored the Hungarian political class to grow up, transcend the divisive partisanship that defined modern Hungarian politics, and act in the interests of the entire country. Lendvai had hoped that the commemoratuon would bring together the governing party and the opposition, but Hungary was not ready for that.20 There was nothing new in the politicization of history and public memory in post-Communist Hungary. Much of this came from the right wing of the Hungarian political spectrum. Notable episodes included movement of the crown of St Stephen from the National Museum, where it had been a historical relic from the time of its return by the United States in 1978, to the parliament building, where it became a political symbol that signalled the assertion of Hungarian interest in the lands that had once made up pre-Trianon Hungary. The founding of the House of Terror museum in 2002, in the building that had been first the Arrow Cross and later the ÁVO headquarters, was part of a Fidesz effort during an election campaign to connect the Socialists with the Communist regime and emphasized Communist atrocity over the more murderous record of Hungary as an ally and junior partner of the Germans during World War II. In 2007, shortly after Lendvai’s appeal, the main political parties separately marked the opening of the Schengen border on what should have been a great day for the entire country. Then, in 2009, the picnic became just another battle in this ongoing war. Paul Lendvai would

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have to wait for fulfilment of his vision of a system in which politicians put the country’s interests ahead of their own, where the achievement of 1989 would be celebrated as a national rather than a party triumph.21

Borderland Enterprise So much for the historical and commemorative part of development along the border strip, with its strong political overtones. Now for the capitalist part. ProLogis, a company based in Denver, Colorado, that claimed to be ‘‘the world’s largest owner, manager and developer of distribution facilities, with operations in 118 markets across North America, Europe and Asia’, opened a complex of warehouse and office space totalling 150,000 square feet at Hegyeshalom. Its first lessee, the trucking and logsitics firm ETL Hungary Kft, signed a contract in late 2007. Then in February, 2008, Unilever leased nearly twenty per cent of the available space as a distribution centre for its food and personal care products. Hegyeshalom’s mayor expressed cautious optimism about the impact of the development on his town. He did not budget for increases in tax revenue, preferring a ‘nice surprise’ if additional money materialized to disappointment based on unrealistic expectations. The company asked for no concessions but saw the town government as a valuable ally, which had control over authorization of the development master plan and represented a public relations conduit to the broader community.22 Another newer development, on a far bigger scale than ProLogis or anything else imagined for the border area, got under way near the main crossing at Hegyeshalom. Ground was broken in 2008 for a huge gambling resort complex, first called Crystal City and later less modestly styled as EuroVegas. The huge project created a partnership between international capital on a grand scale and borderland communities that were desperate for employment opportunities and tax revenue, but uneasy about the changes that such a huge and unfamiliar enterprise might bring. By the beginning of 2010, a team of thirty engineers from Hungary, Austria and the United States, working in prefabricated buildings, started adapting construction plans to the site. With backers who at one time or another included Austrian entrepreneurs, Arabian shieks, Michael Jackson’s family, Credit Suisse and the Guggenheim partners, EuroVegas was situated in the middle of an area known as either the ‘magic triangle’ or the ‘golden triangle’, formed by the three capital cities of Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest. All three had international airports, so the location provided convenient access not just to a large regional audience but to high-rollers worldwide. This ambitious project, expected ultimately to cost more than one billion euros, was envisioned as potentially the largest tourist attraction in Europe, with the casino, a 3,000-bed hotel, a golf course, a concert venue and a shopping mall, a glittering complex with its own exit from the Vienna-Budapest expressway and even its own railway station. Overall the complex was planned to accommodate 10,000 daily visitors and 35,000 vehicles



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while providing 3,500 jobs. Located at Bezenye, a largely Croatian village seven kilometres northeast of and half the size of Hegyeshalom, which was home to just over 3,000 residents, this project would truly change everything for those who lived nearby, as well as strongly affect industries such as construction and hospitality. It took at least eight years to form a stable investor and management group, and just as long for issuance of Hungarian construction permits. Plans were made public in 2001, land was acquired, and construction permits appeared nearly ready seven years later, in 2008. Up to that point, local opinion of the prospects for this huge development varied. Some expected great economic benefit. Others considered this a disaster in the making, for its environmental impact and because of the prostitutes, criminals and lowlifes who would gravitate to the area. A sceptical third group said ‘Drop me a note when it’s done; I’ll believe it when I see it.’23 For seven years, the project had been little more than drawing board dreams, lines and sketches depicting imagined pleasure palaces, surrounded by shopping malls and golf courses, linked to the world by exit ramps, access roads and parking garages. Real estate owner Hans Asamer of the huge construction and development firm of Asamer & Hufnagl and project director Alfred Supersberger stood behind the project from the beginning. Otherwise investors came and left, and various government officials speculated hungrily about tax windfalls and the job-creating capacity of such resorts. Environmental groups tried to stop the project. When their predictions of catastrophic traffic jams and air pollution failed to resonate, they made their last stand in defence of a pair of bustards that they claimed nested in the middle of the proposed construction site. A Hungarian judge dismissed the Hungarian Ornithological Association’s complaint. He accepted instead reports of local hunters who said bustards had never nested in that area and suggested that local tree huggers had transplanted the birds in the hope of stopping the project.24 The key development in moving EuroVegas off dead centre was involvement of the Seminole tribe of Florida. Once among the fierce natives who struggled to defend their homeland from the white onslaught, the Seminoles were now among the wealthiest. For much of the twentieth century they had scraped a living from tourism, mainly through village sites where they depicted traditional life, sold crafts and wrestled alligators. In the 1970s they branched out into cigarette shops on tax-free Indian reservations, then moved into high stakes bingo on their Hollywood, Florida, reservation. This generated enough income to make donations to political campaigns and pay tribal lobbyists. They fought off at least three legal challenges to their operation by the State of Florida, while hedging their bets with more traditional fall-back enterprises, cattle-ranching and citrus farming, becoming in the process, according to ethnohistorian Patsy West, the ‘world’s number one producer of lemons.’ Gaming produced lavish dividends and became of central importance to the life of the tribe, ‘the new buffalo’, as West called it.25

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Thirty years later, in addition to hugely prosperous Florida casinos, the Seminoles owned the internationally famous Hard Rock International chain of restaurants, which they purchased in December 2006 from the British Rank investment group for $965 million. Thus they became the first tribe to own a multinational company. The chain had 152 outlets in 52 countries, including ten hotel-casinos and two Hard Rock concert venues, and the Hard Rock logo could be seen on tee shirts and baseball caps worldwide. The tribe’s most recent ventures included a hotel and casino in Macao known as the ‘City of Dreams’.26 Now they were significant investors in EuroVegas Hungary Ltd., and real Indians had come to the territory of German novelist Karl May and his fictional Apache chief Winnetou. Instead of warriors and shamans, they brought accountants, publicists, lawyers and chequebooks. Max B. Osceola, Jr, whose family’s interests ranged from roadside Osceola Gaming and Pizza on the Big Cypress reservation to the casino projected for Central Europe, was not kidding when he declared, ‘The sun will always shine on Seminoles’ Hard Rock Cafes.’27 An American television network specializing in business news, CNBC, took note of this remarkable development on 6 July 2009 with a six-minute report. The CNBC reporter’s first question to James Allen, the tribe’s gaming CEO and managing director of Hard Rock International, was ‘Where is Bezenye?’ But after he got his laugh, his report emphasized Bezenye’s location between three capitals and predicted the farming village that had once been home to Warsaw Pact radar dishes could one day become the casino capital of Europe.28 By that time, the Seminoles had arrived in Budapest. Jim Allen and Max Osceola, who represented the tribal council, which oversees gaming operations, along with his wife Megan, were definitely the star attractions. Like white people had done for centuries with Indian spokesmen and representatives, the Hungarian press designated Osceola a ‘chief’. In his brightly-coloured sports shirt splashed with geometric designs, he basked in the attention, grinning for the cameras and flashing the internationally recognized sign for ‘Rock On’ at the elegantly refurbished New York café, the very antithesis of a Hard Rock café. Long before the Communists took control in Hungary, the New York had been a dignified meeting place where intellectuals read newspapers, discussed current issues, and maybe ate a slice of dobos or a kremes with their coffee. This press conference announced the arrival of the antithesis of the genteel coffee house, a raucous splashy home for high-rollers and throbbing music. Beyond this dissonance, there were the usual questions about the project’s size, management team and the ardently sought tax revenue. To those who were aware of the long gestation period for the project, Osceola provided assurances. In his tribe, he said, there was no alphabet or written contracts; there was only the spoken word, and it could be trusted. And he, Max Osceola, was saying that they would build the casino city in Hungary. One reporter also asked whether investors were concerned that most people in the vicinity might not know how to enjoy a casino. Jim Allen replied that they would learn, that Hard Rock’s cultural ambassadors would introduce



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the foods, the flavours and the lifestyle, so people could try it, acquire it, and enjoy it. He said his colleagues would strive to make their guests feel at home, even if they were unfamiliar with casinos, and that they would learn. Indeed, some Hungarians may have sensed the alien nature of the enterprise, for which the word for gambling – szerencsejáték – would be inadequate. A new usage, kaszinózni, ‘to casino’, appeared in the papers. Construction manager Alfred Supersberger was thrilled to be associated with Hard Rock, which he called ‘the ideal partner …’, with ‘a perfect combination of entertainment and success …in operating world-class hotels and entertainment venues.’ Maybe when all was completed, Supersberger would have a Hard Rock Café sandwich named after him.29 If the casino culture took hold, it would mean more than expansion of the Hard Rock brand. Within a few weeks of the issue of permits for EuroVegas, announcement of a similar venture just across the border in Slovakia and only five miles from Bezenye hit the papers. This one, called ‘Europa Las Vegas’ in the newspapers, was planned in Bratislava by the huge Hungarian construction firm Trigranit and had its own heavy-hitting American gaming partner, Harrah’s Entertainment. Sceptics tended to see the proliferation of gaudy reports on the Golden Triangle as portending a potential ‘Bermuda Triangle’. They argued that short of the arrival of a new Golden Age that resembled the glory days of the Habsburg Empire, the eight million residents of the three capitals, especially in a time of economic decline, would not sustain these enterprises. They did not seem to consider the lure of luxury gambling complexes to people from outside the immediate area. Investors in the Slovak enterprise did not share such doubts and claimed not to view EuroVegas as a competitor, but rather as a complementary enterprise in development of a new entertainment region in East-Central Europe. Their first phase contained a water park, three hotels and a casino, with an opening scheduled to coincide with that of the neighbouring project. As a European trade journal reported, the new resort would sit ‘on the border of the richer half of Europe and the newer, faster growing east.’ The borderland envisioned by the investors in Europa Las Vegas and EuroVegas, one of gaudy pleasures, wads of cash and easy access for all, was a far cry from the world of the Iron Curtain, a mere twenty years in the past.30 At the end of 2009, Bratislava city leaders withdrew support for the Europa Las Vegas project, fearing that increasing crime would spill over from the complex into the capital city. This did not stop the national government from continuing to back it. The minster of the economy had visions of a five per cent increase in gross domestic product, driven by a huge spurt in what he called conference tourism, the hosting of huge meetings à la Las Vegas. The mayor of Jarovce, the site that had been selected for the project, had his own visions of new tax revenues and issued a construction permit. The Slovak view reversed the Hungarian perception: in Hungary opposition tended to form in the villages, while Budapest, further from the site than Bratislava, voiced no objection to the project. The outcome for the Slovakian version remained even

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Eurovegas in May 2010, with the pre-engineered buildings across the road from the sign. Photograph by Irene Schubert.

less clear than the Hungarian counterpart. In the summer of 2010 the Bezenye site still consisted of a row of blue prefabricated buildings inside a chain link fence, an unconnected motorway interchange, and a signpost that said ‘Eurovegas’. Construction, announced in 2009 to begin in the spring of 2010, was rescheduled to begin in August 2010. The new start date also came and went; the blue buildings and the sign remained the only visible evidence of the



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project, along with some paved access roads. The county newspaper was left wondering when the cash for a real start-up would arrive from the US.31 At the end of 2010, it referred to the project as a fantomkaszinó, a phantom casino.32 Some investors still bet on construction. In 2010, the Nagyrét residential park laid out just north of town promised cable TV and internet in 136 spacious homes, only two kilometres from the EuroVegas site.33 But Trigranit seemed to be shifting its focus. Trigranit was involved in building a Bratislava shopping and entertainment centre that its spokesman said would be the largest such complex in Europe. The firm also opened its first shopping centre in Zagreb. Like Eurovegas, Trigranit’s borderland gambling enterprise seemed less likely to materialize in the near future.34 Like the Seminoles and their Hard Rock chain, which still talked about adding a presence in Budapest to its restaurants in other former outposts of the Communist bloc – Prague, Cracow, Warsaw, and Bucharest – Trigranit seemed at least for the moment to be giving up on the borderland.35 Perched even more remotely on the frontiers of capitalism than EuroVegas and its rival was another reported borderland venture, the ‘Happy Times Hotel’. Auctions had started in 2008 for former Cold War border guard towers, and an unnamed businessman was said to be quietly buying them up, paying €280 for two structures that had stood on the Hungarian-Austrian border. A Budapest daily claimed he planned to collect them and buy or lease a patch of borderland forest, where he could open a pay-by-the-hour no-tell motel.36 The borderland that had been a faultline between world views and social systems, once one of the deadliest boundary strips in the world, was on its way to becoming a long slender playground for tourism of a cultural as well as a more mundane sort. By this time, Hungary had seen all manner of borders, from the open borders of the Habsburg empire to the hard borders of the Soviet empire, even borders that expanded and contracted during World War II and occasional exceptions to border regimes to accommodate local needs between the wars and during the Cold War. But now, the very fact that a project like the ‘Happy Times Hotel’ could be seriously reported in a leading daily of a former Socialist country indicates the extent to which the varied world of the western borderlands had turned upside down. The Austrian side also had reminders of the profound change that had come over the borderland, albeit not as many. West of Köszeg, in the Austrian nature park called Geschriebenstein (Irottkő), a century-old stone tower that actually straddles the Trianon border, but remained in Austria throughout the Cold War, provides an eastward view out over the vineyard-covered hills of the borderland. Here at this tourist viewpoint, inside which an exhibit summarizing the history of the region lined the walls, Austrian solders and Hungarian border guards met for a friendly chat on 19 December 1990, the first time that had happened since the end of the Cold War. A little more than fifty miles to the northeast, the wooden footbridge over an irrigation canal at Andau, made famous by James Mitchener’s book about

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the 1956 revolution, is actually in Austria, a few metres beyond the boundary rather than exactly on it. Because thousands escaped across the border and then the canal via the bridge before the Soviets destroyed it, it became central to the story of the flight to freedom. Austrian army engineer troops restored the bridge in the summer of 1992, and nearby stands a viewing tower and a monument to the Austrian Red Cross, dedicated in 2004, that claims 70,000 fleeing Hungarians came out at that point. Along the actual border, Hungarian guard towers provide reminders of the Cold War apearance of the area. A third Cold War historical site, at the Bruck an der Leitha training facility of the Austrian army thirty kilometres west of Hegyeshalom, preserves Austrian border fortifications, tunnels and bunkers from the post-1956 period.

A Detention Camp for the Borderland? Potentially the most significant marker of the changing situation on the Austrian side of the border first received public attention at the end of 2009. Right across the line from the ‘Hello, neighbour!’ bench at Szentpéterfa, the Austrian government planned to bring in new neighbours, three hundred Chechens who had entered Austria illegally. An estimated 224 detention and transit camps for migrants are scattered inside the EU, in every country from Finland to Greece and Portugal to Poland. Even outside the EU, including, for example, North Africa and Ukraine, governments eager to accommodate the Europeans and receive EU financial aid run camps. These amount to a new archipelago of confinement, not a ‘Gulag’ in which people were worked and starved to death as a matter of routine, but sufficiently similar in appearance on the map to recall the Soviet network.37 Austria has two such camps, Thalham in Upper Austria, which in February 2010 contained 147 people, and Traiskirchen in Lower Austria, where 771 were confined. The latter had housed Hungarian refugees after the 1956 revolution. Now Chechens form the larger part of the population, 500 in the summer of 2007 and 800 six months later. With Chechens continuing to arrive via Ukraine and Slovakia as well as from Poland and the Czech Republic, Interior Minister Maria Fekter decided that a third camp – an Asylzentrum the Austrians called it – was necessary and, after the town of Gűssing turned down the camp, she chose Eberau. Mayor Walter Strobl, tempted by the 130 new jobs the facility would bring to his backwater town of one thousand, along with an expected augmentation of thirty new police officers, agreed to the project before Christmas 2009. He consulted neither the citizenry nor the town council. When the story broke in the Viennese paper Die Presse, all of Burgenland seemed to rise up in arms. Hans Niessl, the state president who had been troubled before the December 2007 opening of the border by even the possibility of neighbouring Hungarians coming unimpeded into Burgenland, was furious. ‘You must not deal with people like that,’ he admonished Fekter on



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The Rajka border crossing after it was abandoned and vandalized. Photograph by the author.

television, characterizing the proposal as the worst possible outrage against the citizens of southern Burgenland. Other regional politicians lined up with him, and Strobl, who had been attracted to the prospect of bringing much needed jobs to Eberau, faced townspeople clamouring for his resignation. The furore subsided in response to Fekter’s promises to abide by a local referendum, which took place in February 2010 and overwhelmingly rejected the camp. Southern Burgenlanders, widely regarded as hicks by the sophisticates of Vienna, had made their feelings clear: not in their backyard. Meanwhile, a springtime referendum in Burgenland was scheduled, to consider whether such a camp would be tolerated anywhere in the state.38 But for the time being Eberau and Burgenland, faced with a choice resembling that created for Bezenye, Hegyeshalom and Győr-Moson-Sopron County by EuroVegas, would opt for their traditional tranquillity over a potentially disruptive source of employment. On the Hungarian side of the border, emotions did not run as high. The Szombathely mayor, György Ipkovich, said there was no need for concern. Escapees from detention camps, he said, always went west, not east; they would not be a problem in Hungary.39

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Border Crossings Transformed With the borders with Austria, Slovakia and Slovenia now open, the old border crossing places underwent transformations. The usual welcome signs still announced the presence of a border, but no more so than the lines separating states in the US. Crossing stations had once bustled with border guards, customs offices, travel agents, money changers, restaurants and hotels as well as small souvenir and grocery shops. Barriers had been removed, booths were locked, and the ladders used to inspect trucks for stowaways had been rolled away. The buildings at small crossings, such as Rajka and Vámosszabadi along the Slovakian border, were still there, abandoned, stripped for souvenirs and sometimes vandalized. Not all the border crossings were so thoroughly trashed as Rajka and Vámosszabadi. The station between Sopron and Austrian Klingenbach remained in impeccable condition. The reason, as explained by a Hungarian observer, was obvious. It came down to fifty metres. Rajka was on the Hungarian side; the Klingenbach crossing was in Austria, where such things did not happen. But at all of them, it was almost as if a miracle had taken place with ‘the checkpoint gone that looked built on rock and everlasting.’40 Nobody cared whether you photographed the facilities, because nobody was there to notice. The town of Hegyeshalom remained sleepy, its complex and sometimes terrible history of Anglo-American bombings, Nazi-Arrow Cross mass murder, Soviet rape and plunder and Hungarian deportation remained undetectable, while the volume of traffic that zipped past on the motorway was high. Despite the widespread publicity throughout Europe given to the cessation of inpections and the celebrations with their fireworks, music and VIPs, not everyone got the message. Numerous motorists stopped at the booths during the last week of December 2007. When traffic was heavy, this caused backups as long as fifteen kilometres. In the months that followed, some drivers continued to slow down and even stop. They could not believe that these brick and glass manifestations of state power did not require some sign of respect, and their caution caused brief backups and flashes of anger among more savvy motorists. These were exceptions, and generally people blasted right through.41 If they were from Hungary or other states that had once been in the Soviet empire and were old enough to remember the gut-wrenching experience of leaving for the West, they might have felt an involuntary tightening of certain muscles as they approached the vacant booths. This feeling was a variant of what the Germans called the ‘wall in the head’, the internalization of the conditions of life behind a barrier, but the feeling passed quickly for most drivers as they cruised past. Some got over the trauma faster than others. One musician recalled crossing on a bus in the 90s. At that time formal procedures still required stops at both the Hungarian and Austrian borders for separate document checks, a practice that continued until Hungarian entry into the EU, when joint inspections started. The bus pulled up to the crossing, the driver rolled down his window,



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and when the border guard peered out of the booth, the driver ordered two cheeseburgers and a diet cola. The entire bus rocked with laughter, and the guards performed their inspection quickly to get the unruly artists on their way before they ordered desert.42 The new generation, with no memory of Cold War borders, was astonished by the visceral reaction of their parents. ‘My mother’ said one young writer, ‘gazed in astonishment at my generation’s nonchalant grabbing hold of passports and starting off into the wide world.’43 They were not burdened by memories of the barriers. No internalization, no physical reaction, maybe even none of the sense of adventure associated with foreign travel, just the blessed normality of freedom of movement. Some did not break free of the feeling of entrapment for a long time. Actress Ilona Béres said that for years crossing the border knotted her stomach and ‘fifteen years had to pass before I could cross calmly at Hegyeshalom.’44 The story told by writer András Jolsvai summed up his experience as well as that of his post-Schengen children. With his memories of unpleasant interrogations at land crossings, he watched in amazement as his daughter returned from a trip to Brussels, walking through the Budapest airport as if she owned the place. No furtive looks or signs of stress; no nasty officials waiting to pounce.45 His revulsion remained an active memory, but his offspring did not share it. In fact she and her contemporaries may even be indifferent to a history they did not themselves personally experience.46 The reinvented perception of the border that emerged was not accompanied by any national vision of the area’s future. All the historical and entrepreneurial activities promised some creative use of newly available resources as well as ample reminders of the old regime. Yet, perhaps in some unconscious revolt against the centrally directed economy and society of the old regime, there was no national concept or plan for this valuable asset. Some local governments tried to take the initiative and acquire the crossing places and the surrounding real estate from the national property custodian to lure investors to the border area and generate jobs. Győr-Moson-Sopron County applied for title to the Hegyeshalom crossing and the smaller ones at Rajka and Vámosszabadi. These places, the first glimpses of Hungary by visitors coming by train, bus and car, might have been prime locations for museums, historical parks, light industry and retail shops, located as they were on main roads accessible from two countries, three in the case of Rajka, perhaps not on the demented level of the ‘Excalibur City’ duty-free complex on the Czech-Austrian border north of Vienna on route E59, with its faux medieval castle and huge fire-breathing dragon, but still tempting enough to induce motorists to stop. Yet on the national level the applications were ignored, and the crossings were allowed to slide into ruin. Eighteen months after border controls ended, bureaucrats still puzzled over ownership of weigh stations, transmission towers, and real estate. Nearly two years passed before calls went out for bids to take out the barriers that distracted motorists and to provide basic services, such as weigh stations and prepayment booths for motorway tolls, as well as space for spot inspections

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of traffic. At that time, near the end of 2009, more complex issues regarding historical or commercial ventures were not even on the agenda, except for the Greenbelt bicycle route, subsidized with EU money, along the line of the Iron Curtain.47 During the Cold War, development of border settlements had been inhibited as a matter of policy. The fewer people there were near the border, the easier it was to maintain control. Now the possibilities were ignored for lack of vision. Moving the state-sponsored border guard museum from remote Apatistvanfalva to the main crossing at Hegyeshalom appears never to have been considered. Unlike Berlin, where Checkpoint Charlie was turned into money even before the Berlin Wall came down, the potential of Hegyeshalom remained completely untapped. The lingering effects of the culture of the old regime and the rise of managers who were schooled within it may explain this inertia, but EuroVegas’s published plans also showed no interest in highlighting the history and culture of the borderlands, despite its proximity to the Hegyeshalom crossing. One exception to official hostility to growth involved the maintenance of at least some structures in the network of border guard posts, with their barracks, officers’ apartments and outbuildings – kitchens, arms rooms, garages, and supply rooms. Almost all towns near crossings had such stations, and almost all of them have gone the way of the border crossings themselves, left to deteriorate to the point of ruin. A rare exception was the four-storey building north of Győr at the Vámosszabadi crossing on the Slovak border, which was built as housing for guest workers from Yugoslavia and later occupied by the army. The military vacated the building, then renovated it between 2003 and 2006. It stood vacant in 2009, and under consideration as a possible retirement home or tourist hotel. Meanwhile, on the Austrian side, a Hungarian businessman who had been frustrated in attempts to buy and convert a Hungarian border guard building into a motel, bought and refitted a Nickelsdorf barracks and opened for business in 2010.48

Revising Border-Guard History Changing perception of the border was accompanied by the promotion of a new public image of the Border Guards. Back in 1986 their leadership had seen that the electric signalling system that alerted guard stations to attempts to breach the barrier was dysfunctional. When old border guards looked back on this situation from the perspective of the first decade of the twenty-first century, they managed to do two things: equate the electric signalling system with the Iron Curtain and turn their technical critique of its operation into principled opposition. Thus they became, as they liked to say, the catalysts for dismantling the Iron Curtain.49 At the same time, the border guards were at work reducing the cold-war experience as a whole into the briefest of moments, an instant in the course of



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centuries of dedicated service to Hungary, so trivial in fact that it was no longer worth mentioning. Simply put, they had served the country with dedication for centuries, then provided the leadership that brought down the Iron Curtain, before vanishing into the national police at the beginning of 2008. Magyar Posta, the Hungarian post office, helped fuel this fantasy by issuing a commemorative postage stamp to mark the demise of the independent border guard. Both of these themes, that the border guards were instrumental in opening the Iron Curtain and that the period of the cold war was not particularly significant in the context of centuries of dedicated border protection, were contained in the Border Guard’s own history, written just at the time of the Schengenland accession. Of course, that history showed no awareness of any dissonance in subsuming a forty-year struggle to prevent Hungarians from leaving in a millennium of protection against barbarians outside the gates. Although many Hungarians recalled the anxiety, frustration and humiliation of encounters with the border guards and customs officers of the Cold-War period, the veterans themselves took little interest in this part of their heritage. At the beginning of February 2008, the Győr newspaper announced the impending publication of an official border guard history, not just prematurely as it turned out, but erroneously. The report noted that the history featured an introduction by Lieutenant-General József Béndek, the commander of the Border Guard, who explained that it was ‘time to give an account of the whole thing, without pretension, of our commitment, our accomplishments, who we were and how we were able to serve the homeland …’ ‘We’ he boasted, ‘took down the electric fence system, were eye-witnesses to the expiration of neighbouring states, the terrible southern Slav wars, were there for the floods, catastrophes, restored calm when needed, meanwhile effectively guarded the frontiers and inspected the growing border traffic …’ He promised a glimpse of the world of these dedicated servants of the people, ‘where honour, courage and pride were the guiding principles,’ not to mention a short history of the border guard orchestra into the bargain.50 The book did appear, but it was never distributed beyond officers of the border guard, a kind of self-congratulatory souvenir to mark the end of the era of the independent border force. The helpful staff of the Anima bookshop in Győr tried to locate this book and finally found a single example at the national library in Budapest. The additional cooperation of my historiancousin and a librarian resulted in access to a digital copy, which repeated the claims made in the newspaper article about the benign character of the border guard. Old soldiers of the border guard propagated the myth of an institution focused on service to the Hungarian people. György Nagy, a retired border guard colonel and historian, dated efforts to improve courtesy and civility among the border guards back to the 1960s, an effort that seems to have been lost on the next generation of travellers.51 President Imre Fehér of the St László Association for the Preservation of Border Guard Traditions first told the Győr newspaper that the border guards catalyzed the regime change,

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without mentioning their earlier role in sustaining that very system, then followed that up at a conference where he conflated the electric fence with the Iron Curtain, and credited the border guards with deciding to bring it down, thus ultimately bringing down the Iron Curtain itself and setting in motion the profound change that followed. The next speaker, Dr. Imre Szakács, president of the county council, subtlly reflected on the change to a situation where young people no longer felt the tightening of their stomach muscles when approaching the border and crossed without fear. Perhaps his listeners, largely old border guards and their family members, did not see his remarks as a reminder of the broader and more pernicious role of the Communist-era border guards. Certainly a later speaker, retired border guard Major General Tibor Vidus, did not. General Vidus, formerly head of the Győr border guard directorate and later director of security for the Hungarian post office, claimed that in the middle 1980s a generational shift in the border guard management brought a changed way of thinking. By 1986, according to Vidus, support for taking down the Iron Curtain matured within the organization. He left unclear whether he thought the electric fence and the Iron Curtain were identical.52 Overall, the publicly stated views of border veterans and those who had experienced the border seemed not to connect, with one side boasting of its role in changing a brutal and inhumane regime, and the other recalling the brutal and inhumane regime itself, and the role of the border guards in sustaining it. The huge gap between these perceptions represents a continuation of the chasm between the Cold-War era outlook of travellers who approached the border in fear and those who tried to build an image of the border guard as a protector of the nation and its citizens. Throughout the life of the People’s Republic of Hungary, official literature promoted the Border Guard as a caring organization, close to the people, considerate of individual rights, dedicated to serving with border communities. From practically the start of the post-war Communist takeover, while Russian soldiers were stealing watches in Budapest and cows along the Austrian border, literature promoting the border force as the friend of the ordinary citzen started to appear. Only a few years later, Gábor Devecseri, the distinguished classical scholar turned Communist apologist, published his contribution, emphasizing the dedication of civilians to the border protection cause. Hungarians in considerable numbers went along with this charade. Civilians in border towns wore green and white ‘volunteer border guard’ arm bands, and ceremonies recognized communities with certificates praising their loyalty to the border guards. Books like the squealer albums at the Apátistvánfalva museum celebrated the bravery of residents who blew the whistle on strangers or turned in their neighbours. This official construct of a world in which the border guard represented a positive force was matched by the feeling of terror experienced by those who approached the border. The whole situation seemed to evolve in parallel universes, and a similar phenomenon continues, with travellers remembering the angst of crossing and border guards recalling their role in dismantling the system they had built.



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Credit for the Change While the border guards reinvented their history and Hungarians argued over who owned 1989, the Pan-European picnic and the opening of the border, an equivalent dispute took place on an international level regarding the respective roles of Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Lech Wałęsa, Václav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev in the world-shaking events of that year. The Time magazine twentieth-anniversary report, a twelve-page centre spread in a double issue, played it safe, crediting all of them with roles in the collapse of the Iron Curtain, along with the thousands of ordinary people who hit the road in quest of freedom and whose presence in Hungary helped create pressure to do something. In the United States, at least in some circles, it is almost an article of faith that Ronald Reagan was at the centre of this process, challenging the Soviet Union publicly to remove the Berlin Wall in his famous Brandenburg Gate speech and forcing the Soviets into a costly phase of the arms race that bankrupted the regime and weakened its imperial grip. Harvard Cold War scholar Mark Kramer, a noteworthy exception, stressed Gorbachev’s reforms and refusal to resort to violence, the willingness of ordinary people to take to the streets to demand their freedom, and the demoralization of hardline Eastern European leaders when they realized that the Soviets would not prop them up against internal rebellions.53 In the outpouring of Europeam narrative and opinion that accompanied the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Iron Curtain, Reagan merited little mention. Certainly the books, articles and speeches commemorating the anniversary in Hungary recognized only Gorbachev among these international figures. Peter Gumbel’s Time article observed that Gorbachev ‘… didn’t bring down the Berlin Wall, but having undermined its foundation, he didn’t stop it from being toppled, either.’54 However desperate the state of the Soviet economy, he could have done that, using the troops still in Hungary in 1989. The failure to include Reagan among the heroes of 1989 may seem odd to Americans, but odder still may be the fact that almost no one appeared to appreciate at the time that events in Hungary represented the first steps towards the breaching of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Iron Curtain, and the reunification of Germany.55 Miklós Németh and his interior minister István Horváth had surely understood the broad meaning of an open border for the Socialist bloc, and so did the East German government.56 At any rate, sometimes it seemed that no one wanted to take credit for what ultimately happened. Where were all the people who usually line up to take credit for a successful plan? But the consensus among those who participated in these events suggested that at the time no one had such a long term vision. Axel Hartman, speaking at an eighteenth anniversary commemoration of the opening of the border, claimed that no one saw this coming. András Oplatka, in a presentation at Sopron on the twentieth anniversary of the picnic, cited areas in which knowledge of the picnic’s background is imperfect. Generally they involved the extent of foreknowledge of the East German breakthrough

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among the secret services of Austria, the German Federal Republic and Hungary. As he said, documentation with which this question might be answered remains largely unavailable. Austrian government documents will remain locked for another thirty years, as will the records of the German Red Cross. László Nagy, a member of the opposition Hungarian Democratic Forum and an organizer of the pivotal picnic, contends we still do not have answers to the key question: ‘Were the Hungarian authorities aware of the German intention of making the breakthrough?’ ‘In retrospect,’ he observes, ‘everyone seems to be very clever and very well informed,’ but only the future opening of all the archives will clarify this key matter. Certainly, he contends, the map of Europe was bound to change, with or without the picnic, with or without the September 11 opening of the border, with or without bloodshed. Still, getting back to the key question, he concludes, ‘It would be good to know, though, what powers were pulling the strings, what was going on in the back state.’57 But so far, we do not have this clear view.

Chapter 11

Beyond Schengenland

The world of the westward-facing Schengenland border, with its developing tourist attractions and emergent border guard mythology, vastly differed from that of the southern and eastern borders. As one Hungarian newspaper contrasted the two, the Schengen system was ‘For some gold, for others an iron curtain.’1 While Hungary on the western side integrated into the open regime of Schengenland, on the eastern side, Hungarians defended the hard external boundary of the same regional cluster. On this side, facing Ukraine, Serbia and Croatia, the border regime that settled into place reminded some observers of the one that had provoked muscle spasms on the border with Austria. From the eastern perspective, across Hungary from Marietta Bódy’s miracle, the European Union’s circle of stars resembled the circled wagons of an earlier North American frontier. Inside this border, police officers scanned monitors at surveillance centres; outside, soldiers operated refugee camps for those who had been turned away. Hungary was situated between the two faces of Schengenland, part of a new borderland zone that separated the EU from Belarus, Ukraine and the Balkans. Hungarian border forces, which once had enforced a hard border designed to keep people inside the so-called ‘peace camp’ of the Soviet empire, now defended the hard outer border of Schengenland.2 And the border forces of their immediate neighbours, in Serbia and Ukraine, outside of Schengenland, were engaged in the same mission once carried out by Warsaw Pact forces, keeping people in. Not only did this new Schengen border wall face east, but the Polish border with Belarus and the Polish, Slovakian and Hungarian borders with Ukraine stood at the actual edges of what had once been the Soviet Union. Everyone had anxieties and jealousies, not to mention scores to settle. The Hungarians, envious of Austrian prosperity, worried about the lack of respect shown by the ‘in-laws’. The Slovaks still seemed fearful of Hungarian irredentism, and politicians used the idea to whip up political support. Austrians fretted over the security of their possessions, and Slovenians disliked Croatians enough to want to keep them out of the EU and NATO and roll up the crossings. It would take more than a handful of benches loaded with symbolism to bring harmony to the immediate region. In the weeks leading up to Hungary’s admission to Schengenland, EU bureaucrats and the Western European press carefully scrutinized preparations. EU officials conducted about sixty unannounced inspections of

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implementation of procedures and systems, with follow-up visits in more than one-fifth of the cases, before approving admission of the countries in 2004.3 And starting in the autumn of 2007 and continuing into January 2008, two London papers, the Telegraph and the Sunday Times, ran articles asserting serious shortcomings in border protection measures implemented by Slovakia and Hungary along the Ukrainian border. The Times’s claims incensed the border guards at Hungary’s Nyirbátor regional office, who replied with a letter claiming the first article was unethical, inaccurate and defamatory. The border guards cited favourable press reports from Bloomberg, Reuters, Agence Français Presse and others, and asked, in Hungarian, for a retraction that was not forthcoming. Brigadier General István Szepesi at the border guard headquarters also wrote in response, calling Hungary ‘a strong bastion of the Schengen zone’. and denying the accusations. His assertion that nearly 70 foreigners, including Somalis, Afghans and Pakistanis, had been arrested by Hungarian forces was not likely to comfort anyone, since the number of arrests almost inevitably tended to be far fewer than the uncountable number of successful crossers, and in that vicinity were considered to represent about one-third of those who tried. But Szepesi did hold out the possibility that newly established cooperative links with the Ukrainians might succeed against organized smugglers on the other side.4 There were definitely holes in the system. Two years later, a Debrecen police officer stopped a Romanian motorist during a highway inspection, found that he had no papers, and accepted 5,000 forint to let him continue on his way.5 Doubtlessly the number of police caught accepting such petty bribes – this amounted to $24, about $21 more than it cost to escape a Romanian traffic ticket enroute from Bucharest to Cluj during 2003 – no more indicates the total number of law enforcement officers engaging in such practices than the apprehended smugglers show about the total smuggling activity.

Migrants via Ukraine The spotlight was clearly on smuggling from Ukraine. The Hungarian border with Ukraine ran through an area in which many people still spoke Hungarian on both sides, an area that had been the Soviet border and earlier the Czech boundary as well as part of Hungary. Like the French-Spanish border through the Pyrenees or the US-Mexican border, it was a border locals often saw as ‘a line drawn through their identity for the convenience of others’, just as they considered national authorities as suspicious outsiders.6 Smuggling was bound to be a major issue on this border, given the disparities in the economies of the European Union and Ukraine, but it took on tremendous importance and received international attention after the sensational arrest in late 2007 of a Hungarian and two Ukrainians with half a kilogramme of enriched uranium. That got everybody’s attention. The radioactive material apparently came across the border from Ukraine, and the three men were apprehended at



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the end of November before meeting an unknown buyer in Slovakia. There was some disagreement about how much of a problem this small quantity represented, but it got widespread notice. With Ukraine becoming the most significant funnel for all manner of smugglers from Belarus, Russia and points as far east as China and the central Asian republics known in the West as the ‘Stans’, the security system on both sides of the Ukraine-EU border came under more intense scrutiny.7 Ukraine was poor enough and price differentials were big enough that even small legal quantities of alcohol and tobacco, especially when combined with a tank of gas, could yield enough profit to make a quick round-trip crossing of the border worthwhile. At about $4 a litre, two litres of high-quality Ukrainian vodka could easily bring three to four times as much, $24 to $32, in a Hungarian border town. Low taxes created similar differentials and profit margins on the two packs of cigarettes that were permitted. With gas siphoned out on the roadside, the chance to make a quick buck was even greater. The practice of crossing to sell small legal quantities of goods to take advantage of the tax and price differential became so commonplace that a new word emerged among Hungarian-speakers in Ukraine – határolni, to work the border. Unlike the new usage that emerged on the western border, kaszinozni, which referred to high living in gambling palaces, this one described entrepreneurship at the low end, reflecting the difference between the two border zones.8 Border defences facing Ukraine were well organized. Even British journalists were impressed by the gear deployed to stop unwanted migrants. The regional Slovak control centre at Sobrance, between Kosice (Kassa) and Uzhhorod (Ungvár), monitored 250 surveillance cameras and dispatched patrols equipped with global positioning systems and infra-red cameras on their fourwheel drive vehicles. The force that patrolled the 60-mile Slovakia-Ukraine border more than tripled from 240 in 2004 to 886 at the end of 2007, and had its wages doubled and internal inspections increased to reduce corruption. With the new technology, including electromagnetic scanning systems at border posts to detect humans hiding under trucks and trains, this was ‘the new final frontier for the European Union’, with its EU-wide connectivity through the Schengen Information System. It was a modern high-tech answer to a traditional quest, ‘like something from outer space … intended to prevent the age-old human habit of the poor seeking a new home.’ Miroslav Uchnar, head of the Slovakian border police on the section facing Ukraine, called his equipment ‘the best there is’. The ‘EU Business’ online news service called it a ‘virtual wall’.9 And when the wall failed, as it inevitably would, especially along stretches of unfenced rolling hills and birch forests between crossing points, there were random ‘deep inspections’, similar to those along the Hungarian border with Austria.10 Washington Post writer Jonathan Yardley once observed that a sophisticated electronic system required the smooth functioning of hardware, software and fleshware, the last being the most susceptible to failure. Slovakian security systems may have had the most modern equipment but the fleshware – the

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human operators of the system – sometimes fell short. So it was early in January 2010, nine days after a young man from Nigeria tried unsuccessfully to blow up a plane bound from Amsterdam to Detroit. Slovakian officials decided to test security at the Poprad-Tatry airport in the middle of the country. They placed bomb parts in the baggage of nine unwitting Dublin-bound passengers as part of a training exercise for police dogs and their handlers. Eight of the insertions were indeed detected, but one bag, with about three ounces of a plastic explosive known as RDX, made it to Dublin and then out of the airport. Three days later, the Slovakian police informed their Dublin counterparts that a man had brought explosive materials to Ireland from Slovakia. Only after the Irish police blocked off the man’s neighbourhood and raided his house did the Slovaks mention that they had placed the bomb material in his suitcase. The incident ended with an apology from the Slovakian minister of the interior and the resignation of border police commander Tibor Mako.11 Even with the most dedicated professional supervision, hard borders have never completely blocked the movement of people, goods or ideas in either direction. Somehow they have always managed to reach the other side – over, under, around or through walls of every kind, real and virtual. At great risk, people have scaled and pole-vaulted fences, trekked across deserts, launched balloons or watercraft, swum rivers, jury-rigged submarines, dug tunnels, hitchhiked on top of freight trains, hidden in trucks and passenger cars, crashed through gates, forged documents, bribed border guards or circumvented computer firewalls. There have always been smugglers willing to assist, as matters of principle or as a way to turn a profit. And smuggling was a labourintensive enterprise. It was expensive to the client, partly because of the risk, but partly because it employed so many, as facilitators, recruiters, money brokers, guides, transporters, document forgers, travel agents and harbourers at every step, from countries of origin, through transit zones and into destination countries.12 In places like the villages of western Ukraine, smuggling represented a vital source of employment. People served as guides into the region, provided safe houses and supplies, and then led migrants to the EU border. Sometimes children too young to be prosecuted served as guides on the final leg of the trip. And there have always been corrupt border guards, customs officials, and immigration officers, be it on the Ukrainian border, the Austrian border, or the Mexican border. One Ukrainian people smuggler, who lived near the Slovak border, earned £100 of the £5,000 to £10,000 that Asians paid for the entire trip to the West, for a monthly income of about £1,500. He flashed his gold teeth as he munched on slices of pork fat and told a British reporter early in 2008 that his network routinely paid off the Ukrainian border guards. In exchange they told him the patrol schedules, so smugglers could time their moves across the border. The Cold War had bred two classes of human smugglers, private entrepreneurs and diplomats, the latter immune from border searches. Both groups contained idealists and profit-seekers. Those in it for the money were known



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to charge as much as $15,000 to facilitate an escape from the Communist bloc. One of the biggest, Hans Ulrich Lenzlinger, ran the million-Deutschmark ‘Aramco Corporation’ from Zurich and employed sixteen ‘escape experts’. He claimed to have smuggled four hundred people out of East Germany for DM20,000 – 25,000, with group discounts for families, before he was found shot dead in his villa.13 After the end of the Cold War, Zurich apparently still provided a home to traffickers in human cargo, but the idealistic smuggler faded into the past. On the other hand, the entrepreneurial smuggler flourished. Again, this category divided into two groups, the traditional smuggler and the trafficker. The difference lay in the relationship between smuggler and migrant. The smuggler worked on the basis of a more or less equitable contracting arrangement, with a fee paid in advance or on rendering of the service, while the trafficker’s operations involved manipulation and coercion, sometimes going over into indentured servitude where payment was made with labour in sweatshops and restaurants over time, often as well as by prostitution. Fear of deportation and of the trafficker enforces such arrangements and keeps migrants in the illegal economy, with no recourse in exploitative situations. And, generally speaking, as border enforcement improves, the demand for smugglers’ services goes up, raising their fees, making it in turn more difficult for migrants to pay up front, and ultimately making more of their transactions into indentures rather than fee for service contracts. One estimate puts the volume of this traffic at 15,000 victims a year, spread over 71 countries.14 Because of Hungary’s position on the eastern edge of Schengenland, it became a major transportation route towards western Europe, the destination of most migrants from the East. There is no indication that any of them had Hungary in mind as a destination, or that many even knew anything about the country. But this was not unusual. As Imre Pozsgay observed, reflecting back on the events of 1989, ‘We have always been like a ferryboat, plying the river between East and West. For too long we have been moored to the Eastern bank. Perhaps soon we will have a berth on the Western shore.’15 Hungary had earned its berth on the western shore, and was no longer the outer shell of the Iron Curtain. But it was still a transitional country, on the edge of one group or the other, perhaps even both. Many Austrians still saw Hungary as belonging to the East, while those to the East considered it the gateway to the West. A Hungarian joke had it that a motorist bound from Paris to Moscow who arrived in Budapest might think he had reached his destination. Going the other way, heading from Moscow to Paris, he might make the same mistake.16 Inevitably, while the debate swirled over the effectiveness of Hungary’s efforts to protect the border of the West against westward-flowing hordes, some Hungarians became involved in smuggling migrants across the country, creating entrepreneurial and illegal variants of the ferryboat. Both the risks and the rewards were high. One Ukrainian smuggler said in 2008 that two-thirds of his clients made it to the West. Even with a one-third failure rate, he could charge up to £10,000.17 Press reports of ten cases between 2003 and

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2008 in which the migrants were detected and stopped from going further to the west showed they paid fees ranging from $100 each for a minibus ride across the border at Hegyeshalom to between €2,000 and €2,800 per person for the longer trip from Kosovo across Hungary to the West. And, with the trend at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century towards group migration, with Kosovars coming twenty at a time, one such trip could bring €40,000–€50,000 Euros and even more for the smugglers. Because smuggling is inherently clandestine, illegal and unregulated, a complete picture of those who succeeded will never be available. So, as Patrick Keefe observed in his book on the trade in Chinese migrants bound for the US, ‘… illegal immigration statistics are always a game of extrapolation.’ Nevertheless, people smuggling is plainly big business, possibly worth as much as $20 billion annually, second only to illegal drug traffic.18 Migrants who were caught, under floors or over false ceilings in vehicles, with fake documents or none at all, paid what for them had to be huge sums, frequently scraped together from relatives and friends back home, to make the hazardous and expensive journey in their quest for better lives. Table 11.1.╇ ‘Now how much would you pay?’ (Weird Al Yankovic, ‘Mr. Popeil,’ 1984)

Fees reported for failed smuggling attempts, 2003–200819 2003 Moldova-Austria 2005 Hungary-Austria 2005 Romania-Italy 2006 Ukraine-Italy 2006 Ukraine-Austria 2006 Slovakia-Hungary 2007 Kosovo-Germany 2007 Kosovo-Paris 2008 Kosovo-Western Europe 2008 Russia-Hungary

€2,000 $100 €300–700 €2,000 €500 $645 €2,800 €2,500 €2,000 £1,000–2000

Those Hungarians who engaged in this enterprise probably thought little about the historical context of their choice. But they were in fact turning their backs on the traditional Hungarian self-image as defender of the West from eastern barbarians, and opting instead to take part in a variation of the role that poet Endre Ady had envisioned for Hungary as a kompország or ‘ferry country’, a bridge between East and West. Smuggling was well organized on the Ukrainian side. Villages were dotted with safe houses and local men worked as guides. Usually, they took migrants towards the border, but not across, and pointed them the rest of the way. Migrants paid anywhere from €5,000–10,000, with a chain of smugglers, drivers, minders, guides and sometimes border guards getting their cuts. Still this guaranteed nothing. In September 2007 a Chechen woman and her four children got as far as a village near the Ukrainian border with Poland. Walking



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alone towards the border, the family got lost in the rain and cold. The mother panicked, and went for help, taking only her two-year-old son. Polish border guards finally picked them up and went back for her three daughters, aged between six and thirteen. By the time the border guards found them, all three were dead of hypothermia.20 In addition to reflecting migrant desperation and western fears, the new border alignment also came about as a result of the situation left by the dissolution of two empires, Habsburg and Soviet. Redrawing of borders after World War I and then again after World War II had split ethnic communities, putting some outside their home countries. Stories of long-lived Eastern European villagers who never left their home towns yet lived in four or five countries are commonplace in that part of the world. Sections of Carpatho-Ukraine had been in the Habsburg empire at the dawn of the twentieth century, then in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary during World War II, back in Czechoslovakia, then in the Soviet Union and are now in Ukraine. Villagers lived in one country while their ancestors’ graves in the next village were in another, fuelling lingering irredentist passions. This area, where ‘every war … brought a change in street names and rulers … and villages changed their names like floating islands … ’, remained a frontier zone on the edge of Ukraine, a country that had adopted European democracy but still manifested the corruption common to Russia.21

Local Cross-Border Traffic Accession to the EU and Schengenland offered a new range of solutions for countries in the border belt or just outside, an alternative beyond the choice between the hard borders of the immediate past and irredentist nostalgia. The borders remained in place but travel was free among Schengenland countries and less difficult on the hard outer borders due to accommodations written into the regulations for local border traffic. About 1.9 million ethnic Magyars lived in neighbouring countries that remained outside Schengenland, many clustered near the border in areas that had been part of pre-Trianon Hungary. For those in Serbia or Ukraine, these accommodations included special discounted visas for those who lived within 35 kilometres of the border. They were valid only for travel into Hungarian locales that were also within 35 kilometres of the border, and good for less than a year. The dispensations also included waiver of visa fees for family visits, students, cultural exchanges and similar purposes. Without a waiver, these visas cost 20 euros, no small amount in Ukraine. These were available to residents of 244 Hungarian towns and 382 Ukrainian settlements. The same sort of arrangement went into effect on the Serbian border.22 In May 2010 the new Hungarian government enacted a potentially far-reaching expansion of the local border accommodation. The new law offered Hungarian citizenship and passports to ethnic Magyars living in neighbouring states. Magyars outside the EU in Ukraine, Croatia and Serbia

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would be able to travel unimpeded in the EU and, according to critics, add their numbers to already stressed job markets, while those in Slovakia and Romania, who already lived in EU states, would be able to choose the state to which they gave allegiance. Spain had led the way with such legislation in 2008, granting Spanish nationality to those whose parents and grandparents had fled the civil war and the Franco dictatorship. Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania followed in the first half of 2010. Ten EU countries already restricted the rights of Bulgarians and Romanians to apply for jobs, and Austria and Germany required work permits for residents from eight other former communist countries. Thus the right to travel did not amount to the right to compete for work. Nevertheless, like the accession of the former Communist countries to the Schengen club in 2007, the new laws created concern over waves of the unemployed legally entering core countries of the EU.23 Hungary’s invitation to citizens of other states to apply for citizenship had special implications because of touchy relations with Slovakia. The Fico government expressed outrage at the law and the lack of prior consultation. In response they passed a law that took Slovakian citizenship from anyone who applied for a Hungarian passport. Efforts to bring about reconciliation by the new government of Iveta Radičová in 2010 included pledges to rescind that law and an earlier one that penalized local officials in southern Slovakia, where many residents speak Hungarian, for conducting business in Hungarian.24 Short of granting Hungarian citizenship and passports, the changes were similar to the United States ‘Border Crossing Card’, sometimes called a local passport or laser visa, which allowed Mexicans residing in border cities with jobs or residences in the US to cross the border for up to 72 hours but required them to stay within a twenty-five mile zone while visiting or shopping.25 For other Mexicans, as for ethnic Hungarians outside the local border-crossing zone as well as for all others outside the EU in Ukraine or Serbia, the border remained hard, augmented by electronic surveillance and patrols.

The Southern Route The Serbian border resembled the Ukrainian. Local crossing arrangements were made for ethnic Hungarians, but otherwise the border was hard. Serbia did not create the obstacles to these arrangements that it once had in the period after World War I. However, it still provided its share of difficulties in enforcement of the Schengenland border. Serbia, and to a lesser extent Croatia, provided the land routes for Kosovars and Albanians seeking a better life in EU countries, and human smuggling was a major issue all along Hungary’s border with those two countries. In the autumn of 2008, a pattern started to appear in the smuggling process. On two occassions, groups of about twenty Kosovars were caught heading west in Hungary on the M-1 motorway, near the Austrian border. Both groups were packed in small buses that were discovered during surprise



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inspections, one at a service area, the other at a pre-dawn checkpoint. Both groups had come the same way. They had paid about two thousand euros per person for a trip from Pristina, Albania’s capital, to Subotica (Szabadka) in northern Serbia. They spent the night there, and an escort walked them to the border, with young mothers carrying their babies. The practice of bringing the whole family, kids included, was new. It increased the risks and expenses incurred by the migrants and raised the profit potential of the people-smuggling trade. In both these cases, a driver from Mosonmagyaróvar near the Austrian border met them on the Hungarian side with his van, loaded them up and took off. The failed migrants wound up in the detention camp at Békéscsaba, except for the younger children who were placed with the child protection service.26 Almost as quickly as the trend towards toward entry on foot and travel by van became apparent, it became obsolete. By January 2009, more migrants were trying to cross at Hegyeshalom in groups of four and five, using taxis with Hungarian licence plates or other passenger cars. The crossers mainly headed for Italy or France, but for those who were caught the trip was over. In the first three weeks of January, there were forty arrests, with the first coming fifteen minutes into what turned out to be an unhappy new year for a car full of Serbs. The police warned taxi companies that their drivers risked arrest in Austria if their fares turned out to be border-jumpers, and then waited for the next shift in the pattern of movement. As it turned out, within a few months, migrants using cabs started to avoid the motorway and use smaller crossings. That too was bound to change, as the police shifted their vigilance to these routes, and in fact it did, almost immediately. After nearly five years with no reported attempts to cross in small freight trucks, police at Hegyeshalom pulled two Palestinians and three Sri Lankans from under the crates of vegetables in an Opel van with Romanian plates.27 The movement of family groups through Hungary towards the West continued into 2009. The police stopped ten members of two families, four adults and six children in a single passenger car near Hegyeshalom in mid-June 2009. None had papers, and officers detained the driver, who was a member of one of the families, on smuggling charges. Neither did any of the fourteen Kosovar adults and children, picked up together while resting by the roadside a few kilometres from Hegyeshalom, a few days later, or the two Bangladeshis in a private car. Then in the last few days of July, three families with children – one Serb (two children) one Albanian (two children) and one Afghani (three chidren) – all in taxis, had their trips cut short at Hegyeshalom, while a man without papers from Chad was taken off a bus.28 They just kept coming, more of them from more distant places as the world economic situation deteriorated. They came as individuals and in family groups, from faraway locations that in the first two months of 2010 included Afghanistan, Georgia, Palestine, Iran, Morocco, Tunisia,and Somalia, as well as neighbouring states, and the number caught only hints at the numbers who may have made it across. Like the man from Chad, a migrant from the Ivory Coast tried to take a bus to Austria just after

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New Year’s Day in 2010. Had he made it across the border, we would have no knowledge of his journey. But he did not. He was taken off the bus at Hegyeshalom.29 In December 2010, a month of ferocious storms and bitter cold, inspections still turned up carloads of westbound migrants, still mainly Serbs and Albanians, guided by smugglers legally in the EU. An inspection of a train also yielded five Afghanis, travelling as a group but each sitting alone in a separate compartment. There was no end in sight.30 Most of the people who got as close as the Hungarian side of the Austrian border came from places only one or two borders away – Serbia, Kosovo and Albania. They were Europeans, spoke at least one European language, reached Hungary fairly easily, and then needed only to cross one more border, an open one at that, to reach what they though would be the promised land. Only rarely did they even consider staying in Hungary, which, like Slovakia, was usually just somewhere en route to more promising places. Those who were caught and sent home were likely to try again, maybe learning from their failed attempt to try an alternative form of transportation or not to speak their native tongues at train stations or perhaps to try another crossing point or a better time of day. They were joined by others, from at least sixteen countries, in the year from April 2009 through March 2010, making Hegyeshalom and its immediate vicinity a sort of transient melting pot.31 What of these others, the Afghanis and Bangladeshis, or the Chadian man pulled from the bus? They had travelled many hundreds of miles, in lorries, on freight trains, on foot, spent fortunes that had been saved, borrowed and otherwise collected by their families, endured hardships, and now were being turned around. How did a man from Chad get into Hungary? The customary route to Europe would have taken him north through the Libyan desert to the Mediterranean coast for a trip on a rickety boat, or west across Africa to Senegal and a longer trip on a rickety boat, but both these routes would have put him into southern Europe, in Spain, Italy or Greece. Could he have gone via Egypt, Israel and Syria, up into Turkey and from there joined the migrants bound for the north from Kosovo or Serbia? And after he had pushed the boulder up the hill, almost to the top, right before the border at Hegyeshalom, it rolled back over him and left him crushed at the base of the hill. What was his life like after that? A fairytale ending to such a gruelling trip was improbable but possible. One young man from Ethiopia, a seventeen-year-old named Argaw, spent three months in Ukraine, waiting for the chance to reach the West. Then one night, after a long trip by car with men who promised to take him to Britain, he was let out on the main highway, pointed towards the Hungarian border, and told that if he encountered police, he should say he was a refugee, in any language. Once across, with no money and no clue – he had never heard of Hungary – he stayed, learned Hungarian in a detention camp from a volunteer teacher, and after two years won a scholarship to a bible college. At that point he thought Hungary might become his permanent home. His story ended atypically but well. He met an American woman, married, finished school and moved to the



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US.32 Others who leave the camps and are allowed to stay do not fare nearly as well; many wind up on the streets of Budapest.33 For many of those caught near the border with Austria, the journey across Hungary started on the Serbian border, at or near the Röszke crossing. Barely ten miles southeast of Szeged, Röszke was the busiest southern crossing point, handling about half the legal traffic between Hungary and Serbia. The crossing was part of the 62-kilometre stretch of border managed from the Szeged regional office, along with 68 kilometres of the Romanian line and a total of five crossing points. There are cornfields along the border, but the border guards cannot cut them down, like they once did along the western boundary.34 Like Záhony on the Ukrainian border, Röszke was an entry point into the EU on one of the four main routes, this one up through the western Balkan countries. The border-security buildings had been renovated and the newest document-scanning technology, digital cameras and SIS software had been installed before Hungary joined the EU in 2004. During 2007, the last year of Hungary’s probationary period before admittance to the Schengen group, more than 1.5 million cars and lorries crossed there, and border guards captured 2,000 illegal crossers along the Serb border. On the first day after the border opening, with traffic especially heavy due to the Christmas holiday, the guards arrested four crossers based on information turned up by the SIS computers and refused entry to several others. SIS hits resulted in daily arrests into the new year and thwarted at least two car thefts before the end of January 2008.35 People who don’t look European tend to avoid Röszke and the other official crossings and choose to come on foot through the countryside. Patrols sent from the border post at Kelebia, equipped with mobile units that detect body heat, watched the green border. Such sophisticated gear is not always necessary. The black Ghanaian man who tried to walk across the green border from Romania near the Nagylak crossing surely attracted the attention of everyone who saw him. He was caught and charged with illegal crossing, without the aid of the SIS.36 The town of Röszke was just inside a closely watched crossing point on the hard Serbian border. A couple kilometres to the east, the Tisza River, which started in the Carpathian mountains of Ukraine, flowed south between flood walls from Szeged into Serbia, where it emptied into the Danube. Life around the little settlement had always been defined by the border. István Vásárhelyi, age 63, who lived outside town at Kisszéksos right at the border, in the last house in Hungary, had witnessed tumultuous times. In 1991, when Yugoslavia started to break apart, he saw the NATO planes, mainly American, and heard the explosions in Serbia. Once, he remembered, he came out of his house to stare down the muzzle of a tank, whose crew had become lost in the fog. István and his neighbours still called the land across the border ‘Jugo’. He had seen a lot of people come across from there, including a family in which a man pushed a wheelbarrow that held his mother-in-law, while a pregnant

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woman carried a baby in her arms. Once seven Romanians came to his house for water; they looked very hungry, so he and his family fed them. By the time they were finished, the border guards arrived and took them into custody. Despite the supposed hardness of the border, he had seen Albanians, Afghans and Iranians come through, and recalled that some migrants had been captured in the church courtyard, with the help of local residents. Locals, with their special crossing documents, often went south to Horgos, six minutes away, where cigarettes and coffee were cheap. People with relatives there went to visit and shop, and the kids came over from Serbia to go to school.37 True to form, Röszke was busy in October 2009. The Szeged-based newspaper délmagyar, or ‘southern Hungarian’, said the backup on Sunday October 10 for traffic from Serbia was so bad that the wait at the border averaged about an hour, all due to the large number of guest workers from outside the EU heading to Austria and beyond. The paper recommended that travellers use the Tompa crossing to the west.38 In mid-October, life near the southern border settlements got a little exciting. Shortly after midnight on 15 October 2009, a police patrol stopped a suspicious looking passenger car between Szoreg and Újszentiván, two small settlements east of the Tisza. The driver, a Croatian citizen, claimed to be looking for the Romanian border, not too far to the east. The nearest crossing at Nagylak was the same one Italian hunter-entrepreneurs had used when they tried twice to bring hundreds of plucked, cleaned, vacuum-packed and frozen quail that had been killed in Romania, worth $300 each, through Hungary in the boot of their car in the summer of 2008.39 The Croat had valid papers, so the police let him go, but watched as he changed direction and headed for the Serbian border at Tiszasziget, where he picked up four people. Leaving the border, he saw the police behind him, hit the gas, and tried to evade his pursuers. The chase went all the way to Szeged, where he was caught, with four Kosovars. All of them had left Kosovo on October 13; none had documents allowing them to be in Hungary. The driver was charged with people smuggling, and his passengers were charged with entering the country without authorization.40 A terrible story began to unfold the same night, when the police received a telephone call on their 1-1-2 emergency line from a public telephone in Röszke. A desperate man, who claimed that he had crossed the border that evening during a slashing rainstorm, said he had left his two drenched and freezing children, a one-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl, on the Tisza flood wall to call for help. Border authorities found the children. Unlike the earlier case of the Chechen mother in Ukraine, they were still alive. Both were rushed to a Szeged hospital in critical condition. By the time they got there, the boy’s body temperature had dropped to 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and he was comatose. The girl had not lost consciousness and was warmed with infusions and hot water bottles. Both children were stabilized within a day and remained under observation in intensive care. Their father, who claimed that he had



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swum into Hungary from Serbia in the 57-degree Tisza with his children, was charged with life-threatening neglect.41 On October 20, while this episode played out and headed for an apparently semi-happy ending, Irene and I were in István Tüttő’s taxi, diagonally across the country near its northwestern corner, going from Győr to the Vienna airport and a long-anticipated week in Greece. Near Mosonmagyaróvar, on the motorway to Hegyeshalom and beyond to Vienna, going about 140 kilometres per hour in a 130-kilometre zone, we passed the police car, a green ‘Határőrség’ SUV lurking at an access road. The police quickly passed us, pulled in front of us, and turned on their blue lights, as well as a digital panel across the top of the vehicle, which said alternately in Hungarian, German and English ‘follow me’. We complied and pulled off the road behind the vehicle. Two police officers, one male and one female, got out, came to our cab, and said they were doing an ID check. We gave them our passports, they looked at them, at us, and the rear baggage compartment. Two minutes later they let us go. They explained that there had been a rise in illegal migrants from Kosovo, arriving in the vicinity of Szeged and crossing the country by taxi, and that inspections were increased for that reason. This was one of the ‘deep inspections’, instituted in 2006, eighteen months before Hungary joined the Schengen group, and which, after accession, were sometimes conducted jointly with the Austrians, to allay Austrians fears regarding illegal migrants from the East. I had often read in the local paper of illegal migrants heading for the Austrian border in taxis and being thwarted near the Austrian border. These taxis usually came either from Szeged, Debrecen near the main migrant reception centre, or Budapest, where migrants who reached the capital from Szeged or Debrecen switched to taxis.42 This was the first time in our numerous crossings that we were checked. On the day we went to Greece, the two children rescued from the Tisza embankment were released from the Szeged hospital. Reunited with their father, who asked for political asylum, they were taken to the Békéscsaba migrant reception centre and given shelter. The father faced charges for neglect and illegal entry.43 At that point, authorities in Hungary and Serbia began to connect the plight of the father and his children to a disaster that had taken place on October 14. When rescued, the man had mentioned an overturned boat, his missisng wife and more people, but the police had thought it more likely that he and his two children had crossed alone. Searches started on October 15, and bodies began to turn up on October 17, the first one a woman found in the river in Serbia. Then Hungarian army divers found a male corpse in Hungary, and a third surfaced downstream in Serbia. The Albanian press carried reports of an overturned boat that had dumped fifteen people into the Tisza, fast and wild from heavy rains. The reported number of people on the boat went as high as nineteen, with eighteen the consensus figure, pending the recovery of bodies. In Hungary the army and the police cooperated in the search. The little pink boot they found a few metres from the river bank might have belonged to the three-year-old girl who had been rescued, but it could also have belonged to

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one of the seven children who the survivor claimed were among the migrants and had yet to be found. Some locals, chatting with reporters in stores and at bus stops, observed a few days later that the Serbian commitment to the search might not have been full-hearted, since the victims were Kosovar Albanians.44 The second woman found turned out to be the missing wife of the father at the Békéscsaba reception centre. She was 23 years old and her body had been found in the river almost a mile south of the border. She and the man who had been found in Hungary were identified on the basis of information provided by their families. Relatives from Kosovo took her body home. With no additional bodies found by the end of October 23, the search was called off.45 The two women’s bodies that turned up in Serbia were found by Krsztin and Bosko Száva, brothers who lived in Martonos on the Serb side, who had fished the river all their lives. They told reporters that in their thirty years on the river, they had found eleven corpses. The frequency with which bodies turned up on the river may have accounted for the police reluctance to connect them to the original survivor and his missing wife. Morover, their experience and those of their neighbours indicated that while smuggling Albanians to the north on land was routine, use of the river as a smugglers’ route was rare. The Száva brothers, along with the president of their fishing club and Hungarian fisherman in the neighbourhood, discounted the possibility that the smuggler had rented the boat used for the trip from a fisherman in Martonos.46 In Kosovo, meanwhile, authorities identified four suspects in the case. They detained a man from the north near Mitrovica, whose house contained forged identity papers. The European Union’s Police and Justice Mission in Kosovo (EULEX) joined the investigation. The suspect they arrested had been a bag man for the smugglers, assigned to collect the fees after the group made it over the border. He told authorities that the boat contained members of five families, each of whom had paid between six thousand and eight thousand euros for the trip, a total of at least €30,000. By the end of the month, police seemed to have at least a general picture of a gang of six to ten people involved in the case, possibly including a police officer from Subotica in Serbia.47 At the end of October the investigations continued. Three more bodies were found, a ten-year-old girl, a man in his twenties and finally a woman, all in separate locations in Serbia. The man who had placed the phone call from Röszke and his two children at Békéscsaba were deported from Hungary, where news sources never mentioned any of the victims’ names.48 In mid-December Kosovar and EU police working together made seven arrests in five Kosovar towns. No more corpses were found; the total remained at eleven. At least four bodies remained unaccounted for, probably flushed far downstream. If they were ever found, perhaps by an experienced fisherman who had found occasional bodies over the years, they may not have been connected to the boatload of Kosovars spilled into the river near Röszke. With Kosovar unemployment estimated at forty per cent and 30,000 young people entering the job market every year, more such disasters were likely to take place.49



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Up north, on the M-1 motorway and other roads to Austria, nothing changed. On October 29, 165 Hungarian police officers from five counties, along with customs, immigration and traffic authorities, conducted a massive operation designed to thwart people smugglers on the main westward roads. Austrian and Slovakian authorities from border stations also participated in the sweep. They inspected the papers of 4,564 foreigners and 925 Hungarians, hauling in speeders, drivers using mobile telephones and scofflaws who did not buckle their seatbelts. This batch of miscreants included a wanted criminal, a truckload of counterfeit brand-name clothing and one Guinean man in the country illegally. Fifty-four were fined on the spot, and the twenty-five speeders included one who zipped along at an attention-getting 190 kilometres (just under 120 miles) per hour.50 On into November it went. At the Sopron train station, ten migrants from Kosovo and Macedonia were caught on November 10, standing on the platform, asking about international trains, and calling attention to themselves by speaking to each other in a language no one understood. All had come from the refugee reception centre at Debrecen by taxi and had humanitarian permission to stay in Hungary but not to travel westward. The seven adults and three children were arrested and charged with violating the terms of their stay. The police in Sopron said the number of people like them, Serbs, Kosovars, and occasional Afghanis among them, was growing. There was no end in sight.51

Croatia and Romania In a situation marked by anomalies, Croatia stood out. With its Habsburg past and Catholic orientation, Croatia considered itself part of the West, much as Slovenia, also Catholic and a former part of Yugoslavia and now a member of Schengenland, saw itself. But Croatia remained outside. So at midnight on 20–21 December 2007, no celebrations took place at the Letenye crossing between Croatia and Hungary. Because of the complex ethnic mix in the borderlands, with Italians, Croatians, Slovenes and Magyars, a special arrangement was worked out allowing Croats to enter the EU with only their national ID cards and an insert with a police stamp showing when and where they entered Schengenland. Nevertheless, they still had to stand in border queues for inspections and interrogations before getting their passes and entering. They were still outsiders.52 In addition to the open western borders and the complex varieties of the hard borders facing Ukraine and Serbia, there was the Romanian border. Romania belonged to the European Union in the same way that Hungary had from May 2004 to December 2007. Because it was an EU member, its citizens were not subject to customs duties or restrictions. Nor were they required to have visas to cross into Hungary. Only valid passports were required, and the border inspections were conducted jointly at one crossing by Hungarian and

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Romanian officials, using the so-called one-stop system that had been used on the Hungarian-Austrian border between Hungary’s admission to the EU in 2004 and its entry into Schengenland three years later. The days when a Romanian border guard could take a traveller’s passport and ask if the traveller had a gift for him were over. The border with Hungary remained the outer frontier of Schengenland. Romania, which had a long northern border with Ukraine and Moldova, another long section of Serbian border to the southwest and the Black Sea on its eastern flank, now protected a long segment of the EU border. It had to prove its ability to police this outer edge before admission to Schengenland would be approved. There was no need for ‘kis határ’ provisions for ethnic Hungarians, because Romania’s entry into the EU in 2006 ended the visa requirement for travel between the two countries. On the other hand, such arrangements were necessary on the border between EU-member Romania and Moldova, which had a substantial Romanian-speaking population. These countries did not always get along, and the Romanians seemed to use EU security requirements to annoy the Moldovans, adjusting border procedures as political tensions rose and fell, resorting to discriminatory customs duties, and justifying stricter requirements on the basis of EU standards even before Romania’s admission to the EU.53 The end of customs duties for legitimate travellers between Romania and Hungary did not put the customs services out of business. There was plenty of illegitimate movement of goods – antiquities, cigarettes, perfume, drugs, humans and forged documents – just as there had been between Hungary and Austria between 2004 and 2007. Less than two years after the great quail smuggling busts of 2008, in June 2010, another border inspection at Nagylak led to the discovery of 73 kilogrammes of high-quality heroin, brought into Hungary by two Bulgarians headed for the Czech Republic. The border guards estimated the value of the drug at one billion forints, about $4 million at the time.54 This was a far cry from the post-World War II days, when along that stretch of border smugglers from Romania dealt mainly in salt, pepper, lamp glass and oil, while those from Hungary sold chickens, eggs and pigs.55 At the end of 2010, another bust, almost as large, took place at the Röszke crossing from Serbia. X-ray inspection of a truck with Serbian plates carrying metal scaffolding revealed 312 kilogrammes of marijuana. The border authorities called the cargo ‘the largest catch in a long while’, apparently forgetting the heroin seized less than six months previously.56 Romanian entry into Schengenland was scheduled to take place at the end of March 2011. But early in 2011, the EU pushed the date back six months. Details were not announced, but neither Romania nor Bulgaria had met all the criteria for admission.57



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The Complexity of Barriers Schengenland’s external barriers were physically much less visible than the walls of antiquity or even US barriers in the southwestern desert but they were thicker than they appeared. First of all, they started in the countries of potential immigrants. When a Moldovan, who made an average monthly wage of about €32, discovered that a passport would cost that much, he encountered the first layer of the EU protective barrier. Similarly a Ukrainian who already had a passport could get a visa to enter neighbouring Poland to visit relatives but needed a Schengen visa to get into Germany. That cost ten to €50, for him or the Moldovan. Along with the fees were requirements for health and travel insurance, money amounting to $100 per day of the stay, the address of a hotel, a letter of invitation, proof of employment and a birth certificate. Russians, who faced similar requirements even if trying to visit relatives in one of the Baltic states that had been part of the Soviet Union and were now in the EU, found these obstacles particularly galling.58 The financial requirement almost mirrored the old Communist restriction on those leaving. The Cold-War limit on money taken out assured that those who left were beholden to their hosts for support and confined those without Western connections to their home countries. The EU requirement assured that only the wealthiest of visitors from poor neighbouring countries secured visas and that the rest stayed behind. The US also had paper walls. At the point of seeking entry, the principal difference between the European system and the American was that until 2008 the latter required payment up front to apply for a visa, whether it was granted or not, while the Europeans charged for the visa itself. In both cases this wall of paper represented the first layer of defence, and it provoked former President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine to remark in September 1999 that the EU was replacing the Iron Curtain with a new paper curtain facing eastward. Similarly, a Pakistani scholar at the Brookings Institution likened American procedures to ‘an attempt to draw a Maginot Line around America.’59 The greatest expressions of bitterness about the exterior border regime of Schengenland come from neighbouring countries such as Ukraine. Zhidas Daskalovski, a Macedonian scholar, complained about ‘the Schengen wall’, catalogued the draconian visa restrictions, and observed that ‘the Western world is not that generous and humane as many Eastern Europeans thought in 1989.’ Croatian Vlatko Mileta noted ‘the Schengen wall’, ‘treaty wall’, and ‘electronic curtains’ that replaced the old Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. Those inside the borders generally refrain from using the word ‘wall’ – the US Department of Homeland Security doesn’t use the word ‘wall’ either; its barriers are ‘tactical infrastructure’ – but those outside do not shy away from the usage. As far as they are concerned, they still face a wall. Only the ownership has changed.60 After successfully negotiating the paper wall, prospective immigrants encountered the outer, eastern borders of the new EU states, on the Polish-Ukrainian border, for example, long before getting to the Polish–German border. On this

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outer hard edge of the EU, the Poles defended the EU border while honouring their agreements for free travel with their neighbours to the east. Then until 2007 there came the interior barrier at the Polish–German border, the second hard edge, with its two rings of border police, Polish and German. Just inside the German border, mobile patrols consisting of 6,000 police officers prowled an 18-kilometre-wide strip, randomly checking one in every 2,000 vehicles during the month after the celebrations. In the German interior, enforcement continued, based on mandatory registration of residents and national identification, required for employment, access to public services and bank accounts. Enforcement thus extended from beyond the outer limits of the EU to the workplace, making the border, for practical purposes, hundreds of kilometres wide and dauntingly complex.61 Under this regime, asylum seekers, once seen as anti-Communist resisters and heroes, were viewed with suspicion. To Schengenlanders they were criminals, terrorists, jobseekers and opportunists masquerading as victims of oppression, all trying to take advantage of protection under the Geneva Convention to which they were not entitled. This problem was managed through ‘readmission agreements’, designed to keep refugees from even getting into the core countries or, if they did, getting them out to the periphery in a hurry. The earliest of these, between Germany and Poland in 1993, required Poland to accept and settle applicants who were granted asylum, rather than allow them to transit to Germany, and to accept the return of those who made their way to Germany anyway and were discovered. Based on the Dublin Convention of 2003, which required asylum seekers to lodge their applications in the EU country of their arrival, the arrangement became general. The accession of the 2004 group put the social and financial burden of dealing with this problem on the poorer eastern EU countries of the buffer zone, just as defence of Europe’s Mediterranean shores put the burden of community defence on the less prosperous southern members – Spain, Italy, and Greece. The Hungarian Asylum Act of 2004 incorporated the Dublin procedure and allowed asylum seekers to remain in the country through the appeal process. Former Communist countries could not afford to accept large numbers of asylum seekers, nor did they have a tradition of accepting political refugees. During the Communist regimes, they lost asylum seekers to the West. Given this situation, it was hardly surprising that the number of successful asylum seekers from the East hovered near zero. Slovakia had no experience as an asylum for the politically oppressed. It received 6,400 applications for asylum in January-June 2004 and approved two. Four years later, Slovakia granted asylum to 22 out of 909 applicants. The reduced number of applicants suggests that the message was getting out, and those seeking refuge entered the EU elsewhere.62 In other countries on the edge of the EU, granting of refugee status was not noticeably more generous. Greece received more than 13,000 applications, about a quarter of them from Iraqis, in the first seven months of 2007,



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recognized sixteen as refugees, and offered humanitarian protection to eleven others. All others were deported to Turkey. As far as the core states of Schengenland were concerned, this programme, as carried out in former Communist countries like Slovakia and elsewhere, such as Greece, was an excellent success.63 Hungary, which perhaps empathized more with refugees based on its 1956 and 1989 experiences, had fewer claimants and more approvals, roughly 9,000 of the former and almost 1,000 of the latter during 2004–2007. In 2005 and 2006 the largest number of applicants were from Vietnam; in 2004 they were from Georgia and in 2007 from Serbia–Montenegro. Most of those who requested asylum did not stay: 60 per cent left during the appeals process; most of them went sureptitiously westward, some to be caught at Hegyeshalom and sent back to one of the refugee centres, at Debrecen, Bicske or Békéscsaba. In the whole period the number of foreigners in the country remained stable at between 1.1 and 1.7 percent of the population of just over ten million.64 Along with the elaborate defence in depth represented by the walls of paper, the border obstacles, barriers and the patrols, the Schengen barrier had a complex digital component. This consisted of several databases, central to which was the Schengen Information System (SIS), a database that had been introduced in 1995 to facilitate cooperation between the police forces of EU countries. At its core was a constantly updated register of names – a watch list of terrorists, convicted criminals, suspects, fugitives, disappeared persons and stolen property. Hungary started using the SIS, which allowed sharing of data on these types of ‘persons of interest’ with all EU police organizations, on 1 September 2007, almost three months before the barriers were opened. When Hungary entered Schengenland it contributed its own list of people expelled from Hungary to the database, linked to the system’s centre in Strassbourg, France. The system does allow EU citizens to ascertain whether their names are in the database and to petition for corrections.65 In addition to SIS, EURODAC (European Dactyloscopy) stored fingerprint records of asylum seekers along with the reasons for denial of their applications. It was designed to prevent the filing of asylum claims by a refugee in more than one country and to enforce the Dublin Convention requirement that refugees file their asylum requests in the countries of their arrival in the EU. By October 2006, EURODAC contained about 250,000 sets of prints of asylum seekers, as well as those of 7,585 illegal entrants and 16,814 who were in the EU on an ‘irregular basis’. FADO (false and authentic documents) provided a secure network for exchanging information on false documents, and EUROPOL allowed sharing of files on criminals. A programme called ARGO in the EU financially supports cooperative projects in the areas of training, staff and data exchange, meetings and cooperative activities in third countries. Taken together, this system represents a remarkable coordinated enterprise in the collection, sharing and dissemination of data. The European Commission’s Directorate General for Justice and Home Affairs backed up this system with €4 billion for 2007–2013 for projects concerning ‘Solidarity and

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Management of Migration Flows’, perhaps leading ultimately to EUROSUR, the European Border Surveillance System, connecting border surveillance technology that will include satellites, drones and radar, while providing a very substantial ongoing source of income for those who make their living by defending community borders.66 These databases represent a ‘hypertechnologization’ analogous to the one taking place on the US-Mexico border in the realm of motion detection devices and transmission of alerts to border forces via computer centres. The US prefers to deploy its technical wizardry on the border; the Europeans resort to rapid and complicated data-sharing systems. Both approaches generate work, income and status for the enforcement agencies and professionals who operate them, and for the contractors who cater to their wants. In the United States this means sustaining an enormous homeland security bureaucracy, hard at work, according to former President George H. W. Bush’s science advisor Norman Neureiter, in keeping us ‘safe from anything – disease, nuclear, radioactive or humans – that might cross our borders. And every day,’ Neureiter noted, ‘they need to go to work and do something.’ Like the Romanian medical workers who interrogated potential carriers of influenza from North America, they also satisfy a public need for the appearance of action to allay their fears. Neither may be very likely to succeed in thwarting unwanted crossings, even as they challenge the ingenuity of those pressing against the walls.67 It is easy to see why the newer states of the EU might chaff under the burdens of the Schengenland border regime. An undercurrent of opinion holds that Schengen has created a new Iron Curtain, and that nations of the buffer zone remain on the wrong side of the border, just as they did under the Communist regimes. They understand that they bear the costs associated with control of borders and migrations and that they are once again client states, this time of the core nations of Schengenland, rather than of the Soviet Union, guarding borders that keep people inside the buffer zone or beyond it.68 Besides, like the auxiliary units of the Roman Army on the frontier and the client states from which they came, they have cousins among the barbarians beyond the wall. This is particularly true of Hungary, with ethnic Magyars still a significant minority in Ukraine and Serbia, as well as in Romania. The fact that the new Schengen states continue to perform their border control functions and do not publicize their complaints measures the intensity of their attachment to the Schengenland club. At the end of 2009 things started to change for the Hungarian protectors of the outer border. Serbia and the European Commission had started negotiations concerning ending visa requirements for Serbian citizens early in 2008. By that time Serbia had become so isolated that Franco Frattini, vice-president of the European Commission, estimated that seventy per cent of Serbian young people had not been out of the country. In the spring sixteen Schengenland countries and Norway waived the visa fee, although the requirement for formal permission remained. The main obstacle to continued progress appeared to be the failure of Serbia to apprehend and deliver to the International Court



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of Justice Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military commander who had been indicted for war crimes committed in 1995. Still, in September 2009, European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso held out the promise of closer ties and EU membership for Serbia. On December 19, the visa requirement was lifted, and Serbs along with Macedonians and Montenegrans were allowed to enter the EU, provided they carried the new style biometric passports. The change did not affect Kosovo, once part of Serbia and now independent. The festivities at the Hungarian crossing points recalled the celebrations of 2007, when Hungary entered the Schengen group. Serbia submitted its application for membership in the EU on the following day, promising to carry out the required reforms. Now Hungarian border guards would have to learn to deal with faked and stolen Serbian passports, altered with new pictures. Patrols were alerted to the possibility of Kosovars still trying to get to the West, but with Serbian documents.69 Serbs could now enter without visas, but overall the outer edge just became a little more complicated, because citizens of the three non-EU neighbours confronted different border regimes. Moroever, Serbia was on the way to possible EU membership, and Croatia moved closer, after the agreement with Slovenia on a path to resolution of their border dispute. In the summer of 2010, the German foreign minister even suggested that a final agreement on Croatian accession was possible for the following year.70 In any case, being a Schengenland ‘gatekeeper’ was clearly a complicated and changeable responsibility. For openers, there was the sheer complexity of Hungarian borders, open borders, hard borders, the soft border with Romania and the case of Croatia, somewhere between the soft Romanian border and the open Schengen borders. Austrian complaints and concerns about slack border enforcement required attention at the same time that leaders of the former border guard were trying to downplay their well-documented earlier competence at strict border control during the Cold War. Technologization of the border required a new sophistication while political and traditional imperatives imposed a requirement to consider the needs of Magyar communities outside the country. In the group of states that entered the EU in 2004, Hungary had slightly more experience with political refugees than the others, having signed the Geneva Convention in the run-up to the border opening, but that too was a new area that required adaptation. With these many aspects to the current borders, it is difficult to fit Hungary’s approach to its borders into any typology, such as the one formulated by Eva Green in her assessment of European attitudes toward immigration. Her analysis put the former Communist countries among the strictest and staunchest supporters of restriction, with Hungary the third strictest and Austria fifteenth. This certainly did not fit the Hungary that opened its borders to East Germans in 1989 and did not appear to reflect the views of Burgenlanders in Austria. Overall, she concludes that Western European countries tended to be ‘individualist gatekeepers’, leaning towards generosity and showing a marked preference for those with good education and income,

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while Eastern European countries inclined towards being ‘strict gatekeepers’ with ‘sweepingly negative attitudes toward foreigners settling in their countries …’ This view ignores the fact that the strict gatekeepers of the East do the bidding of core countries of the EU when they carry out that role. It also does not seem borne out by the tense and sometimes overtly hostile relations between Western European societies and the millions of Muslim immigrants within them. Nor does the Hungarian experience support this conclusion. Certainly hypernationalist nativism exists in Hungary, but the right-wing Jobbik party’s screeds against Jews and Gypsies appear to have their sources in a more traditional nativism than that generated by current migrations. And Hungary’s relatively weak economy and position as a gatekeeper along the route of westward migration rather than as a destination have not resulted in widespread public pressure for stern restrictions that has emerged to the west.71 The substantial variance between the number of asylum applications and approvals in two former Communist neighbours, Hungary and Slovakia, also suggest that it may not be useful to generalize about the countries in that group regarding their attitude towards those seeking entry. Gatekeeping responsiblities have meant detention camps, similar to those all over Europe. Like Austria, Hungary had three, all in operation since 2004, one at Bicske west of Budapest, another on the plain to the east at Békéscsaba and one at Debrecen. Migrants caught without papers were usually turned over to the Immigration and Citizenship Office and from there sent to one of these three. Sometmes they foundered there for months. Sometimes they arrived not knowing where they were, or anything about Hungary, and certainly knowing not a word of Hungarian. Almost completely ignorant of central Europe in general and Hungary in particular, they put their faith in smugglers, paid them, and expected ultimately to arrive in a place where they could find employment and stability, hopes that did not always materialize.72 Hungary had had a crash course in the establishment and maintenance of reception camps and detention centres during the crisis of 1989, and Lloyd Dakin, representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in central Europe, credited the country with greatly improving its management of the camps by 2007.73 Countries beyond the border and outside the group somewhat alleviated the complex burdens associated with enforcing the Schengen border. The practice of exporting detention of migrants appears to have started in 2003, with a British suggestion for the creation of ‘transit centres’ beyond the fringes of the EU, in Morocco, Ukraine, Somalia, Albania and Turkey. Since then, Italy, which has a camp of its own on Lampedusa that was built for 850 but holds about 2,000, has established three camps in Libya. These countries are anxious to curry favour with the EU but are poor in resources and human rights records. In 2004, Austria, alert to the opportunity to export its refugee problem, suggested refugee camps for Chechens in Ukraine, which subsequently opened a detention camp at Pavshino for migrants caught trying to enter Hungary and Slovakia. Located in the trans-Carpathian forest outside the



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city of Mukacevo (Munkács), Pavshino is one of four camps in the vicinity and as of January 2008 housed 383 people. Somalis, Indians, Bengalis, Chinese, Uzbeks and Iraqis all vegetate there, in a country swamped by the requirement to house them, and that itself is so poor that seven million of its 48 million citizens work outside its borders. Detainees duly file requests for political asylum and they are just as routinely denied. In 2006-2007, over 2,000 such applications were submitted, and all but 90 were rejected locally. The rest were forwarded to Kiev, the capital, where they too were turned down. Maintaining these camps and policing the border in cooperation with Schengenland members Hungary and Slovakia has made Ukraine part of the buffer against unwanted migrants from the east.74 This approach, combined with aid and trade agreements with ‘European Neighbourhood’ countries that included repatriation agreements, moved some of the burden of caring for asylum seekers out of the poorer EU states to countries that had even less in the way of resources and poorer human rights records.75 Despite the carefully contrived rigidity of the Schengenland border it has one remarkable characteristic: it does not stay still. It moved in increments during the 1990s as more countries with western orientations, such as Spain and Austria, joined the agreement. Then it moved again in 2004, in a big way, when the eastern buffer zone of new EU members was established. At that point, Poland became the defender of the German border, both at the actual border and far to the east where Poland bumped against Ukraine and Belarus. Similarly Hungary kept third-country nationals out of Austria, both at its border with Austria and in the distance at Hungarian borders with Ukraine, Romania, Serbia and Croatia. Then, in 2007, the EU border moved again. Hungary and Poland still stood guard beyond the Austrian and German borders, respectively, but now Romania and Bulgaria, newly admitted to the EU, formed the outer perimetre of Europe against the onslaught from the east and south. With this movement of the border, the buffer zone provided by the 2004 group shifted eastward. With new EU peripheries come new EU walls. As James Sherr, a senior analyst with the Conflict Studies Research Centre at Britain’s Royal Military College Sandhurst, observed five years before the 2004 expansion, the movement of its barriers further east, leaves countries outside the community even more isolated than they had been and creates new European divisions. ‘As the EU moves east,’ he observed, accurately anticipating what would happen, ‘so in effect will a tariff wall, a customs wall and an immigration wall.’76 By the end of 2010, when Hungary was about to take over the rotating presidency of the EU, it had developed an interest in making sure that EU and Schengenland borders did in fact continue to move. Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s publicly declared short-term priorities included integration of the countries to the immediate south into the EU and those to the east into Schengenland. He emphasized regional stability and a shared future, but there could have been more practical reasons. Admission of these countries would push the outer border of the EU to the edges of Croatia and Serbia, and

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expand Schengenland to the Black Sea, transferring gatekeeper responsiblities to the newer member states. Poland, which stood to occupy the presidency after Hungary, also urged closer ties between the EU and Ukraine, and similarly stood to benefit from Ukrainian membership.

Frontex and the European Neighbourhood Policy Institutional arrangements within the EU indirectly reflect the ambiguity of this hard frontier that moves. First, there is FRONTEX, dedicated to enforcement of Schengenland borders. By 2007 it had its own small military force, on loan from member nations. These assets included 21 planes, 27 helicopters and 116 vessels, as well as 82 permanently assigned people and a budget of €35 million. They were grouped together as Rapid Border Intervention Teams, or RABITS, perhaps the best acronym to come out of a supranational organization since UNGASS, for the UN General Assembly. RABITS represented the EU consensus on the need to enforce external borders. ‘The raison d’être of Frontex’, according to executive director Ilkka Laitinen, ‘is not emergency operations but the consistent introduction of well-planned regular patrols by Member States, in order to limit urgent missions and to integrate the management of borders in all its dimensions defined by the Member States.’77 In plain English, this appears to mean a commitment to regular border patrols to deter illegal migrants. FRONTEX was not an analogue to the US Department of Homeland Security. It was not nearly as big and did not have a leading role in border protection. DHS had a variety of missions, from emergency response to policing the border, and was funded to the tune of $50 billion per year.78 By contrast, FRONTEX, as Christopher Caldwell noted, was ‘something of a Potemkin agency …’, with a miniscule budget.79 Primary responsibility for border protection remained with member states on the edges of Schengenland. But successful bureaucracies grow, in funding, personnel and importance, so it remains to be seen what will become of this fledgling organization. Meanwhile, plans were under way to implement a permanent European Patrols Network to coordinate surveillance efforts on the maritime borders, avoid overlap, and share operational information. The stated goal, ‘Integrated Border Management’ under FRONTEX, promised more efficient border protection and emergency assistance for those stranded at sea. Along with RABITS, it was a big step towards militarization of border control under a regional European headquarters.80 On a regional European level, it also resembled the effort to coordinate border enforcement applied by the United States in the 1990s through Joint Task Forces, ad hoc military organizations intended to facilitate coordination between the many national, state and local enforcement organizations that worked on the border; only in the EU context, the coordination was applied to national enforcement agencies. While FRONTEX focused on enforcement, the European Neighbourhood



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Policy, announced in March 2003, tried to present a benign face to nations beyond the EU’s limits. Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner’s introduction to the policy, with its assertion that ‘Just at a time when we have ended the division of our continent, it is important that the outer perimetre of the EU should not become a new dividing line’, put a smiling countenance on the system, under which nations bordering the EU or directly across the Mediterranean in North Africa – the Southern Mediterranean, as the EU puts it, to reduce rhetorical emphasis on difference – and the Middle East are offered financial aid and access to the EU market in exchange for implementing reforms. For those who comply with conditions, the aid is substantial, €8.4 billion before 2007 and 12 billion more budgeted for 2007-2013. The programme operates through bilateral action plans between the EU and the outsiders, including autocratic regimes in Libya, Syria and Belarus that did not share European political values. The EU offers such neighbours ‘a privileged relationship, building upon a mutual commitment to common values (democracy and human rights, rule of law, good governance, market economy principles and sustainable development).’ ‘Border management’, as the strategic paper predictably notes, ‘is likely to be a priority in most Action Plans’, explaining that ‘it is only by working together that the EU and its neighbours can manage common borders more efficiently in order to facilitate legitimate movements.’ Ultimately the ENP proclaimed its goal was ‘to facilitate movement of persons, while maintaining or improving a high level of security.’81 The EU would decide the proper balance, and like the client kingdoms of the Roman Empire, the neighbours outside would serve as buffers in exchange for subsidies from the imperial centre. Nevertheless the amount of money involved made the European approach to neighbours from which barbarians sought entry vastly different from the American, which focused on enforcement and the optimistic assumption that free trade would bring prosperity to neighbouring countries. For the moment, at least, it was clear where the emphasis was. Israel, the only country in the neighbourhood with a white, mostly European population and a functioning political democracy, was also the only country among the immediate neighbours whose citizens were permitted to travel in Schengenland without a formal visa.82 Israel was also the only Western democracy that shared with the EU and the United States an ongoing wall construction project, one that was more physical and far more deadly than the others. In conclusion, after clearing away the cheerful and hospitable prose of the ENP, we are left with the reality of the hard Schengen exterior and its essential paradoxes. First, the hard exterior exists in a tandem arrangement with the extremely high degree of fluidity, free movement, within its protective shell, one displaying new forms of cross-border freedom of movement, while the outer shell shows new forms of immigration control.83 Schengen farms out this mission to the new member states of Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary and Poland, all of which have responsibility for significant segments of the exterior land border. In fact, of the formerly Communist states that entered Schengenland

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in 2007, only the Czech Republic does not have responsibility for parts of the long outer border of the EU. Even the tiny Baltic states have borders with Russia that they are required to defend. Thus the Czechs, taking their turn in the six-month ceremonial presidency of the EU at the beginning of 2009, could cheerfully declare the motto for their term to be ‘A Europe Without Borders’. The Czech Republic, sheltered comfortably inside by the protection of Poland and Slovakia, had no hard borders.84 The Czechs did not take direct part in the EU paradox, ‘a system both for abolishing internal border controls and for regulating controls at external frontiers …’85 Second, for all its hardness, the border is not fixed in a single place. It and its buffer zone can move, in an outward direction that vaguely recalls the Turnerian frontier of North America, with its stages of migration, economic activity and political development. It also recalls the expansion of the borders of empires, justified by British prime minister Lord Salisbury in 1898 as the living nations gradually encroaching on the territory of those that were dying ‘from the necessities of politics or under the pretence of philanthropy.’86 In Schengenland the steps involved in expansion are not phases of a vague process, inevitable or otherwise. They are steps in a highly bureaucratized procedure, and are consensual, programmed, calculated and scheduled. For the core countries, ‘the old EU-15’, expansion concerns markets, increased stability and security on the continent, and for some member states, such as the United Kingdom and Denmark, a way to dilute the ambitions of others for even greater integration. Expansion also involves acceptance and compliance with regulatory systems and economic subsidies of the newest members by the core community, rather than what Frederick Jackson Turner considered to be steps in a natural process, from untamed wilderness to civilization. The European movement of the buffer zone also pushes its hard outer shell ahead of it rather than sweeping away bewildered and doomed natives. Finally, the expanding frontier also allows ‘the old EU-15’ to export border protection and the messy problems of asylum and detention to the new members on the periphery and even beyond. As of now, the moving frontier has not found its ultimate limit, with Croatia, Turkey, and most recently Serbia and Montenegro having attained ‘candidate’ status and preparing for entry while others are also eager to join. Rigidity of enforcement and fluidity of borders coexist on the Schengenland frontier, making its borders and borderlands the most intriguing and complex of frontiers and walls. Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Empire and the establishment of Schengen Europe, Europe was usually seen as divided between western free Europe and eastern Communist Europe. Debates about the nature of pre-Communist Europe had ascribed various limits to western, central and eastern Europe.87 The new divisions, at least for the time being, are between Schengenland, the buffer zones making the transition into Schengenland, and regions outside of Schengenland. In important respects, the whole arrangement represents a major turnabout



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in underlying values from the Cold War years. In those days, western nations viewed freedom of movement as an essential attribute of democratic societies and elevated those who sought to escape from tyranny to heroic status. Asylum seekers since then have become a burden, and those in pursuit of opportunity in free societies were no longer encouraged, as a ‘securitarian spirit’ replaced emphasis on free movement. This transition was legitimized and facilitated by heightened fears in both the United States and Europe in the wake of the attacks on the former in 2001 and the bloody attacks that later occurred in Madrid and London. Distinct issues of border control and terrorism became merged into a single concern, especially in the United States but to a degree in Europe as well.88 Differing ideological and historical perspectives aside, and always remembering that the Schengenland and EU borders represent consensus and a developing regional identity on the inside, Cold War borders were similar in that they also had been managed by regionalized forces, members of the EU and NATO on the western side, and Warsaw Pact satellites doing the Soviet bidding in the east. Warsaw Pact borders then represented concerted military efforts to prevent civilian (non-military) movement outward, while EU borders today represent a concerted military effort to prevent civilian (non-military) migration inward. In both systems, the key players ultimately became the border forces of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, formerly Communist nations, whose borders remain set against the crossings of civilians from beyond the EU and whose border guards still keep people from the East from migrating to the West. These nations are in a voluntary colonial relationships with the EU, doing the bidding of FRONTEX and the European Parliament, as opposed to their former involuntary colonial relationships with the Soviet Union. Many things changed but some remained the same, and firm regionalized wall-like borders dividing Europe remain in place. For Hungary, the 180-degree turn from western edge of the Soviet Empire to eastern edge of Schengen Europe, and the mix of open, hard and soft borders, with local accommodations thrown in for good measure, mirrors this complex and still evolving process.

Chapter 12

Hungary and Arizona

Context and Comparison Hungary’s situation on the perimetre of the EU makes it a guardian of EU borders and creates a geospatial and political situation resembling the southwestern border states of the US. Arizona has become the focus of illegal migration across the southwestern land border of the United States, and of a roaring national controversy over its recent efforts to deal with that migration, while Hungary straddles the main route northward of Serbs, Kosovars and Albanians. Both are on the cutting edge of larger polities that view those on the outside as threats to the general culture, economy and social peace. Both face outward across long sparsely populated borderlands, astride major migration routes, towards poor populations that want to enter. Arizona’s bleak border with the Mexican state of Sonora stretches across 380 miles of desert; Hungary guards almost 405 miles of the EU’s outer borders. Although Hungary and Arizona are mainly conduits for migrants seeking to reach places beyond their borders, there are major differences in how their situations emerged. Arizona’s position as the major route into the US resulted from a process that started when enforcement efforts drove seaborne drug smuggling ashore into Mexico. Subsequently California and Texas succeeded in getting federal attention and funds for hardening their own southern borders, against both drugs and migrants.1 Neither state troubled itself with questions about where the migrants would go when the flow was diverted, and true to form, migrants sought the path of least resistance. The diversion of the stream had dire consequences for Arizona, because of the increased number of crossers and because of the tight links between human smuggling and the far more violent drug trade in the southwest. These conjoined enterprises and the harsh borderland climate produce far more fatalities than occur on Hungarian borders. EU enforcement efforts against illegal migrations also respond to shifts in the routes used by migrants, but the overall approach, based on the Schengen acquis, remains more uniform. The same policy applies everywhere, usually without frantic efforts to fill holes based on political pressure from specific locales and politicians, or reacting to the consequences of the actions of other states. French efforts to drive out the Roma in their midst in 2009–2010 represent a glaring exception to this peaceful acquiescence to EU policy. None



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of the new EU states have shown any indication of emulating France thus far. American federalism, which gives states the opportunity to act on their own and influence the range of options available to other states, is not the same as European regionalism, in which uniform application of standards and programmes is the rule rather than the exception. In any case, Mexicans and Central Americans enter Arizona with Wichita or Chicago on their minds; Kosovars and Turks coming in through Hungary try to reach Vienna or wealthier cities further west. They tend not to stay in poorer border areas. In the US, this migration has made undocumented workers an issue in Postville, Iowa, and led to sightings of the image of Jesus Malverde, the patron saint of Sinaloan drug dealers, in Portland, Oregon. In Europe it has led to the development of Berlin neighbourhoods resembling rural Anatolia with refrigerators,2 and ‘Turken ‘raus’ graffiti in Vienna. Like most perimetre states, Arizona’s per capita income is lower than the nation’s, 84 per cent of the US average, according to the Department of Commerce. Hungary’s is far lower at 57 per cent of the EU average. But both are also considerably better off than the outside states they abut. Per capita income in Serbia is 72 per cent of Hungary’s, and Ukraine’s is 34 per cent. The Mexican per capita figure is barely one-third of Arizona’s. Migrants arriving in Arizona might stay because of the comfort and security they find in Spanish-speaking communities. This is far less likely in Hungary, because the Hungarian language is rarely spoken by anyone very far beyond the borderlands.3 Defenders of both outer edges of civilization deploy high-tech, high-cost protection systems. The big differences are cultural and attitudinal. Europeans, who have had enough of concrete walls, barbed wire and guard towers, have avoided use of stark physical barriers, of cement, corrugated metal or chain link, choosing to emphasize patrols and inspections, augmented by remote sensing devices and cameras and linked by computer systems. Vehicles, sensing equipment and computers are also employed by American uniformed border forces, along with unmanned aircraft, but the inclination towards tangible barriers is far stronger in the United States. In both cases the actual border forces represent the operational face of a phalanx of large firms and bureaucracies with interests and investments in this array of equipment: developers, manufacturers, sellers, maintainers and managers that might be considered a border-industrial complex. In the US the budget for the Department of Homeland Security, established in 2003, has hovered between $47.3 billion in 2008 and $55.1 projected for 2011, and the largest contractors – Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed and Ericksson among them – vie for contracts.4 In both the US and Europe vocal right-wing constituencies that oppose both legal and illegal immigration fuel this spending and clamour for additional vigilance and sterner enforcement. Only in the US does this support lead to border vigilantism, as personified in the American Southwest by the ‘Minutemen’, self-styled patriots roaming the desert in pick-up trucks

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and squinting southward through telescopes and binoculars. It is also only in the US that complaints about inadequate enforcement rise to the level of suggestions that the East German model, which involved shooting crossers, should be considered, in one case by nationally syndicated writer George Will and in another by Joe Miller, a Republican candidate for the US Senate from Alaska.5 Moreover, only in the US are states able to override any coherent national vision of border policy in pursuit of their own interests. Texas and California managed to do exactly that through their congressional delegations, gaining appropriations to build barriers and increase enforcement on their segments of the border, and Arizona seeks to do the same through creation of a hostile climate for those illegally in the state.6 Any apparent advantages over the EU that the US might have as a single nation state in establishing a coherent policy are thus reduced.7 On the other hand, it is inconceivable that Hungarians (but not the French) might get out in front of the EU and conduct their own anti-migrant efforts, either officially or privately. Private efforts to police the southwestern border of the US tap a wellspring of American individualism and suspicion, even contempt, of government. The European approach implemented in Hungary shows a more positive view of government activity and no apparent inclination towards unsanctioned private efforts to enforce the law. Americans argue over whether Arizona law enforcement agencies may stop possible illegal migrants for ‘probable cause’, about what constitutes probable cause, and whether such traffic stops constitute ‘racial profiling’ when probable cause includes a Hispanic appearance. Hungarian police regularly stop motorists en route to Austria, either during widespread sweeps or individually and for no apparent reason. While Americans clash over whether legal immigrants might be required to carry proof of their status, residents of the EU carry national identity cards. EU citizens may cross internal Schengenland borders with these national ID cards, which they carry without even thinking about it, while in the US the prospect of a requirement to carry such a document is anathema to many, including some who insist aliens in the country should always carry their documents and produce them on demand. And on the Austrian border, Hungarian and Austrian border forces conduct ‘deep inspections’ and pursue suspects across national borders, making the Schengen border area as wide as the entire territory of Hungary. Both approaches include occasional bursts of creative stupidity, such as the Slovak police test of airport security by planting bomb parts in the luggage of international travellers and the insistence of former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff that barriers across the sensitive borderland environment are eco-friendly because illegal migrants leave litter. Corruption among border guards, immigration officials and diplomats looking for extra cash also undermines both approaches from time to time. But overall, differing views of police powers and privacy underpin policies and enforcement. Hungarian police do not need to show probable cause for stopping a



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motorist who has crossed into Hungary or who seeks to go westward towards the heart of the EU. Moreover, they do not need search warrants to inspect luggage compartments. Irene and I have been stopped twice on the way to Austria by taxi, most recently in late June 2010, right at the Hegyeshalom crossing, largely, it seemed, because our taxi followed a sedan registered in Bulgaria that caught the attention of the police. A quick glance at our passports satisfied the police officer, who did not even look in the trunk for stowaways. The driver of our taxi, bemused but not distressed, noted that in his many crossings, he had only been stopped twice, both times with us in the car. Since we are both beyond retirement age and both white, we did not fit the usual profile, racial or otherwise, of refugees or jobseekers heading for the promised land. In Europe, racial profiling would probably not be an issue in any case. Partly because many who try to get in – Kosovars, Albanians, Serbs, Belarusians, Ukrainians – are white, it does not often become apparent. Still, racial profiling takes place, without significant public dispute. Single black men on buses, even if they speak French or another EU language, as did the young Chadian caught near Hungary’s western border in 2009, have a hard time escaping attention in this practically all-white country. At least as likely is something we might call linguistic profiling. Rare indeed is the migrant who speaks Hungarian, and groups of young people speaking Albanian or Ukrainian at a railway station inevitably provoke interest. The discussion of border issues in Hungary will probably go on without the intensity and anger that marks the conversation in the United States. This is partly due to the relative prominence of the issue on the political agenda, and because migrants to Hungary seek other countries, while those who reach Arizona often go on but remain in the United States. In the interior of the EU, where guest workers, their families and their countrymen number in the millions, the dispute is more passionate. Some of the difference from the United States stems from the European conceptualization of the problem as a police matter, while Americans show a decided preference for the rhetoric of war – against poverty, inflation, drugs and terrorism – and deploy military forces, in the form of active-duty joint task forces (in the 1990s) and more recently National Guard troops, to augment and support the Border Patrol.8 So far not even the most rabid office-holder, on either side of the Atlantic, has advocated a shoot-to-kill policy, the only sure way to stop migrants from getting over, under, around or through the network of obstacles. By the same token, neither the US nor Europe has seriously considered a massive effort to lift the standard of living in the countries that generate migrants. The European Neighbourhood Policy has made gestures in that direction, but seems more designed to co-opt nearby countries into participating in EU border enforcement efforts. Some of the difference in approach will continue to be caused by the fact that Europe has resolved issues that generate such heat in the United States, regarding documentation, searches and profiling. It is also likely that the edge of Schengenland will someday move beyond Hungary to Romania and Bulgaria. As far as Hungary is concerned,

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this development would be highly desirable, as it would move the frontier eastward and shift the burden of protecting it elsewhere.9 Schengenland may well also take in Balkan states, such as Croatia and Serbia, both eager to join the EU, and both supported by Hungary. Arizona will always remain the edge of the US facing south.

Conclusion The hardening of Hungary’s borders has been part of the overall project of closing the external borders of the EU that started after the Cold War. This process has in turn been part of a broad trend in dealing with migration in which the US, Canada and Australia have also participated, a trend counter to the globalizing of commerce and finance. Israel has also gone in that direction, blocking movement of people from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel, and China and other authoritarian countries have developed electronic barriers against the entry of ideas and information deemed threatening to political stability and social peace by those in power. Clearly the problems of Hungary in confronting migration and smuggling are the problems of Europe, and the problems of Europe reflect those of other countries and groupings that see migrations of strange people, ideas and crime as threats. The future of Hungary’s borders will be influenced by local developments. These will include the rate at which Slovakia matures to a self-confidence that does not require it to define itself in opposition to Hungary. They will also depend on how Austria deals with its fears of foreigners, on whether Hungary’s far-right xenophobes gain strength, and whether relations with Serbia and Romania continue on a positive trajectory. But this future is tied to broader trends. These include the disparities between rich and poor societies that generate the movement of populations seeking freedom and opportunity. They also include the evolution of the terrorist threat, the success or failure of fearmongers in turning anxieties into public policy, and whether the tendency of prosperous western polities to respond to those fears with more restrictions and greater obstacles to entry continues.10 Ultimately, underlying these questions and issues lies the sure knowledge that those who really want to gain access will persist and find ways to circumvent the walls, negotiate the paper obstacles and evade the patrols deployed against them. Hungary’s borders at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century show the possibilities and a broad range of options – open borders with free movement, soft borders with minimum inspections, and hard borders with local accommodations. As the EU evolves and its borders move, and as the world continues to deal with migration and the limits of globalization, the borders of Hungary will continue to reflect all these factors and evolve and adapt in ways that differ from the paths taken in the United States. If countries to the east and south are admitted to the open-border Schengen zone, Hungary might even find itself closer to the centre, no longer on the outer



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borders of Schengenland, and no longer the guardian of the EU’s borders. Maybe then it can close the door on its role as a gatekeeper. But, as with so many decisions about Hungary’s borders over the past one hundred years, the ‘power centres controlling the borders’ will be elsewhere.

Notes

Preface ╇1 I. William Zartman, Introduction,’ Understanding Life in the Borderlands, in I. William Zartman, ed. (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2010), p. 11.

Chapter 1 ╇1 (Budapest) Népszava, 24 December 2007. ╇2 Ágnes Széchenyi, ‘General and Dictator! My Friend! A Portfolio of Hungarian Letters,’ Hungarian Quarterly, 43 (Spring 2002), 36–37; ‘The Hungarian Book of Letters (Extracts),’ Hungarian Quarterly, 43 (Spring 2002), 42; Tudor Sălăgean, ‘Honorius III, Transylvania and the Papacy’s Eastern Policy,’ Transylvania Review, 7 (Winter 1998), 84. ╇3 Martin Lloyd, The Passport: the History of Man’s Most Travelled Document (Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton, 2003), pp. 102, 115; Mark B. Salter, Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003), p. 4; John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 3, 56. ╇4 Salter, Rights of Passage, p. 102; Torpey, Invention of the Passport, pp. 76–88. ╇ 5 On Romania see Lucian Boia, History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness, James Christian Brown trans. (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001); Sorin Mitu, National Identity of Romanians in Transylvania (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001). On the Czechs and Slovaks see Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia: the State that Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Nadya Nedelsky, Defining the Sovereign Community: the Czech and Slovak Republics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). ╇6 Pál Nagy, Képes Krónika: a Magyar Útilevelek, Útlevelek Három Évszázados Múltjából (1661–2000) (Debrecen: a Hajdú-Bihar Megyei Levéltár Igazgatója, 2006), pp. 71, 78, 82. ╇7 Lloyd, The Passport, p. 117; Péter Bencsik, ‘Útiokmányok, utazási lehetõségek és határforgalom a 20. századi Magyarországon,’ Regio, 13, No. 2 (2002), 33.



Notes 195

╇ 8 [Headquarters, Border Guard Service,] Határőrség 1906-1946–2007 (Np: np, 2008), pp. 11–12. ╇9 Bencsik, ‘Útiokmányok,’ 31; Bencsik, ‘A kisebb határszéli forgalom Magyarország és a szomszédos államok közt 1898-1941,’ Kissebség, 4 (1999), downloaded from www.hhrf.org/magyarKisebbség/ (downloaded 25 November 2008.) 10 Bencsik, ‘Útiokmányok,’ 31; Bencsik, ‘A kisebb határszéli forgalom;’ Salter, ‘At the threshold of security: a theory of international borders,’ in Elia Zureik and Mark B. Salter, ed, Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders, security, identity (Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2005), p. 37; Lloyd, The Passport, p. 18. 11 Margit Kaffka, Colours and Years, George F. Cushing, trans. (Budapest: Corvina, 2008), p. 230. 12 Bencsik, ‘A kisebb határszéli forgalom;’ Határőrség 1906–1946–2007, pp. 11–12; Adam M. McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 122–3; James Bradley, The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), p. 282. 13 Ferencz Déák, Easter letter, (Budapest) Pesti Naplo, Sunday, 16 April 1865, is the classic example of this usage. 14 R.J.W. Evans, ‘Frontiers and National Identities in Central-European History,’ in R.J.W. Evans, ed., Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Central Europe c. 1683–1867, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 129. 15 Andrew Riemer, A Family History of Smoking (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), pp. 51–2; Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk and his Fortunes in the World War, Cecil Parrott trans. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 375. 16 Endre Ady, ‘Góg és Magóg Fia Vagyok En …,’ Új Versek (1906), available at Magyar Elektronikus Könyvtár, www.mek.osyk/hu (accessed 31 October 2010.) 17 Bencsik, ‘A kisebb határszéli forgalom;’ Bencsik, ‘Határforgalom Magyarország és a Balkán között (1903-1941), 2. Rész (1914-1941),’ Limes, 12 (2000/2-3), 303. 18 (Budapest) Népszabadság, 21 December 2007.

Chapter 2 ╇1 Ignác Romsics, ‘Az Osztrák-Magyar Monarchia felbomlása és a trianoni békeszerződés’/‘Disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Trianon Treaty’, Rubicon, 2010/4–5, 16; Gyla Popély, Felvidék, 1914–1920 (Budapest: Magyar Napló, 2010), p. 17; Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 235. The Romsics article includes maps of three variants of the corridor proposal.

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╇2 Andrew F. Burghardt, Borderland: A Historical and Geographical Study of Burgenland, Austria (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), pp. 169, 173–4, 309; David Lloyd George, The Truth About the Peace Treaties, II (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1938), pp. 928, 940–1; Dagmar Perman, The Shaping of the Czechoslovak State: Diplomatic History of the Boundaries of Czechoslovakia, 1914–1920 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1962), p. 154; Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, Tim Wilkinson, trans. (Budapest: Corvina Osiris, 1999), pp. 117–18; György Haas, ‘A Szláv Folyosó Tervei’, Magyar Szemle, 9 (2004, no. 4); Mark Thompson, The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915–1919 (New York: Basic Books, 2008), passim; Heimann, Czechoslovakia, p. 58; Popély, Felvidék, pp. 20–1, 28, 261–7; map on display in Czech Military History Institute, Autumn 2008, translation of text by Zdenek Munzar, librarian, Czech Military History Institute, in e-mail to author, 6 December 2008, ╇3 Perman, Shaping of the Czechoslovak State, pp. 225–226; László Kontler, Millenium in Central Europe: A History of Hungary (Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing House, 1999), pp. 325–41; Burghardt, Borderland, pp. 172–3, 258; Heimann, Czechoslovakia, p. 63; D. Cree, ‘Yugoslav-Hungarian Boundary Commission,’ Geographical Journal, 55 (February 1925), 91. ╇4 Lloyd, The Passport, pp. 119, 121–2, 129. ╇5 Salter, Rights of Passage, p. 79. ╇ 6 István Janek, ‘Az első bécsi döntés’, Rubicon, 2010 Különszám, 22. ╇7 (Győr) Kisalföld, 2 June 2010. ╇8 Kálmán Benda, general editor, Magyarország Történeti Kronológiája, III 1848–1944 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982), pp. 873, 882; Miklós Horthy, Memoir, annotated by Andrew L. Simon (Safety Harbor, FL: Simon Publications, 2000), p. 153; John C. Swanson, ‘The Sopron Plebiscite of 1921: A Success Story’, East European Quarterly, 34 (March 2000), 89; István. I. Mócsy, The Effects of World War I The Uprooted: Hungarian Refugees and Their Impact on Hungary’s Domestic Politics, 1918–1921 (New York: Brooklyn College Press, Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1983), Chapter 7, Corvinus Library: Hungarian History, www.hungarian-history. hu/ilb/m-w.htm (accessed March 2010). ╇ 9 Csaba Csóti, ‘Vagonlakók, Barakklakók, Menekültek,’ Rubicon, 2010/4–5, 55; Kisalföld, 4 June 2010. 10 Miklós Bánffy, The Phoenix Land, Patrick Thusfield and Katalin BánffyJelen trans. (London: Arcadia Books, 2003), pp. 164–6. 11 Mócsy, Effects of World War I, chapter 7; Bánffy, Phoenix Land, pp. 166, 358, note 50. 12 Mócsy, Effects of World War I, chapter 7. Bánffy, Phoenix Land, pp. 166, 174–5, 177, 180. 13 Benda, Hungarian Historical Chronology, p. 883; Haas, ‘A Szláv Folyosó Tervei’; Swanson, ‘The Sopron Plebiscite,’ 89; Endre Radnai and Géza Vaska, editors, Magyarság Évkönyve 1920–1930 (N.p.: Magyarság Lapkiadó, [c. 1930].), p. 9.



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14 Bánffy, Phoenix Land, p. 207. 15 C.A. Macartney, A History of Hungary 1929–1945, I (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1956–1957), pp. 77, 82–3; Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, pp. 124–5; Thomas L. Sakmyster, Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback: Miklós Horthy, 1918–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 110; Burghardt, Borderland, p. 252; Bánffy, Phoenix Land, pp. 207–8. 16 Harry Hill Bandholtz, An Undiplomatic Diary: By the American Member of the Inter-Allied Military Mission to Hungary – 1818–1920, Fritz-Konrad Krüger, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), pp. 289–90, 310; Heimann, Czechoslovakia, p. 57. In the summer of 2009, less than two years after the internal borders of the European Union’s Schengen states opened to unobstructed movement, there were echoes of this incident. The Slovak government blocked Hungarian President László Solyóm from crossing the Danube bridge to Komarno for the dedication of a statue of the Hungarian King Stephen, generating much fuss and posturing on both sides. See (Budapest) Magyar Nemzet, 10 November 2009; Népszava, 10 November 2009. 17 Cree, ‘Yugoslav-Hungarian Boundary Commission,’ 89–109; János Suba, ‘Magyarország trianoni határainak kitűzése’, Rubicon, 2010, special issue, online supplement, www.rubicon.hu/magyar/oldalak/magyarorszag_ trianoni_hatarainak_kituzese/, (accessed and printed June 2010). 18 Quoted in Evans, Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 162. 19 Bencsik, ‘Útiokmányok,’ 36; Burghardt, Borderland, pp. 146–8; Cree, ‘Yugoslav-Hungarian Boundary Commission’, 109. 20 Lucean Leustean, ‘Romania’s Relations with its Neighbors between the two World Wars: the episodes of January 1923 at the Romanian-Hungarian Border’, Revista istorica, XI (2000), no. 3–4, 243–260; Ivanka Nedeva Atanasova, ‘Transborder Ethnic Minorities and Their Impact on the Security of Southeastern Europe’, Nationalities Papers, 32/2 (June 2004), 366–7. 21 Enikő A. Sajti, Hungarians in the Voivoidina 1918–1947, Brian McLean trans. (Highland Lakes, NJ: Atlantic Research and Publications, Inc., 2003), pp. 14, 17, 24 (note 31); Bencsik, ‘Határforgalom Magyarország és a Balkán között’, 208. 22 Sajti, Hungarians in the Voivoidina, pp. 18–20; Bencsik, ‘Határforgalom Magyarország és a Balkán között’, 208. 23 Sajti, Hungarians in the Voivoidina, pp. 164–69. 24 Bencsik, ‘Határforgalom Magyarország és a Balkán között’, 308. 25 Bencsik, ‘Határforgalom Magyarország és a Balkán között’, 309–311. 26 Heimann, Czechoslovakia, pp. 45–7. 27 Benda, Magyarország Történeti Kronológiája, p. 873. 28 Jovan Janicijevic, ed., The Cultural Treasury of Serbia (Belgrade: IDEA Publishing House, 2002), p. 53; Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), p. 209.

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29 Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford: Berg, 2001), p. 209; Claudio Magris, Danube, Patrick Creagh trans. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1986), pp. 314–15; Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvania Question and the European idea during World War II (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 1. 30 Nándor Bárdi, ‘Magyarország és a határon túli magyar kisebbségek’, Historia, 2008 (no. 6–7), 37; Benda, Magyarország Történeti Kronológiája, p. 873; Burghardt, Borderland, pp. 146–8, 165, 167–8; ‘Az Utolsó Tíz Ev Nagy Fordulatai Magyarországon’, Magyarság Évkönyve 1920–1930, p. 9. 31 Burghardt, Borderland, p. 168. 32 Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002), p. 130; L. P. Morris, ‘Dependent Independence? Eastern Euorpe, 1918–1956’, History Today, August 1980, 41. 33 In 2009, a new quarterly called Trianoni Szemle (Trianon Review), part nostalgia, part nationalist version of history, made its appearance. 34 Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, pp. 155–6; Count Széchényi quoted in Tibor Frank, ‘Patronage and Networking: The Society of the Hungarian Quarterly 1835–1944’, Hungarian Quarterly, 50 (Winter 2009), 5. 35 Határőrség 1906–1946–2007, pp. 12–13; Leo W. G. Niehorster, The Royal Hungarian Army 1920–1945, I, Organization and History (New York: Axis Europa Books, 1998), pp. 14, 38. 36 For a picture of such a border post, see Tyekvicska Árpád, ‘Civitas Fortissima’, Rubicon, 19 (April 2008), 39. 37 István Thullner, Hegyeshalom nagyközség története II (Hegyeshalom (Hungary): Palatia, 2004), pp. 70, 78; Bencsik, ‘Határforgalom Magyarország és a Balkán között’, 314. 38 Thullner, Hegyeshalom, pp. 7–8, 20; Burghardt, Borderland, p. 191; Csaba Csóti, ‘Vagonlakók, Barakklakók, Menekültek,’ 55. 39 (Budapest Népszava) Szép Szó, A Nápszava kulturális és társadalomkritikai melléklete, szombat, 22 December 2007, 8. 40 On the migrations of the Colorado Beetle from its original home in Mexico, north into the United States, and eastward across the Great Plains, ultimately to Europe, see ‘The March of the Colorado Beetle,’ Softpedia, www.news.softpedia.com/news (accessed and printed 31 October 2008). 41 Thullner, Hegyeshalom, p. 31; Randolph L. Braham, ed., A Magyarországi Holokaust Földrajzi Enciklopédiája, I kötet (Budapest: Park Könyvkiadó, 2006), p 485; Kisalföld, 22 April 2009. 42 Case, Between States, p. 217, used the phrase ‘perpetrator lumping’ to describe the efforts of a Romanian mayor, Gheorghe Funar of Cluj-Napoca, to link Hungarian treatment of Romanians with the murder of Romanian Jews during World War II. My usage of ‘victim lumping’ and ‘catastrophe lumping’ are based on my reading of her book.



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43 Burghardt, Borderland, p. 204. 44 Thullner, Hegyeshalom, pp. 69, 78–82, 107. 45 See Safire’s ‘On Language’ column in the New York Times Magazine, 16 May 1982, 22 January 1984, 6 November 1989, and 30 January 1994. 46 Günter Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War, 1945–55: the Leverage of the Weak (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1999), p. 7. 47 Macartney, History of Hungary 1929–1945, I, pp. 142, 178, 207, 345; Cecil D. Eby, Hungary at War: Civilians and Soldiers in World War II (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p. 12; Bencsik, ‘A kisebb határszéli forgalom’. 48 Thullner, Hegyeshalom, p. 27; Sakmyster, Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback, p. 213. 49 Thullner, Hegyeshalom, p. 70. 50 Győri Nemzeti Hirlap, 5 November 1938. 51 Thullner, Hegyeshalom, p. 27; Győri Nemzeti Hirlap, 10 November 1938. 52 Thullner, Hegyeshalom, p. 71; Kontler, Millennium in Central Europe, p. 371; Giles MacDonogh, 1938: Hitler’s Gamble (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 58.

Chapter 3 Macartney, History of Hungary 1929–1945, I, pp. 300–1. Janek, ‘Az Első Bécsi Döntés’, 19. Janek, ‘Az Első Bécsi Döntés’, 19. Győri Nemzeti Hirlap, 11 March 1941. Győri Nemzeti Hirlap, 8 November 1941; Sakmyster, Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback, pp. 215, 220; Macartney, History of Hungary 1929–1945, I, p. 305. This section on the occupation of northern Hungary, the Felvidék, is otherwise based on articles from Győri Nemzeti Hirlap, 1938–1943. ╇6 Macartney, History of Hungary 1929–1945, I, p. 318. ╇ 7 Stephen Borsody, The New Central Europe (New York: Columbia Univesity Press, 1993), p. 75; Alfréd Engel, A dunaszerdahelyi zsidó hitközség emlékkönyve, Jószef Berg trans., (Poszony, Kalligram Publisher, 1995), p. 123. ╇8 Engel, A dunaszerdahelyi zsidó hitközség emlékkönyve, p. 125; MacDonogh, 1938, p. 215; Nedelsky, Defining the Sovereign Community, pp. 93–4. The Slovaks treated employees of the Czech government similarly, evicting, robbing and dumping them across the Moravian border into Czechoslovakia. Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia, p. 93. ╇9 Eby, Hungary at War, p. 13; Frederik Federmeyer and Lajos Presinsyky, Nagypaka Kispaka Csukárpaka és lakosságának múltja (Somorja: FOTOSSzitás Zoltan, 2001), p. 214; Heimann, Czechoslvoakia, p. 111. 10 Federmeyer and Presinsyky, Nagypaka Kispaka Csukárpaka és lakosságának múltja, p. 214. 11 Document 122, ‘Czechoslovakia: Hungary Territorial Problems …’, ╇1 ╇ 2 ╇ 3 ╇4 ╇5

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Chapter III, Summaries and Rcommendations, in Wartime American Plans for a New Hungary: Documents from the U.S. Department of State, 1942–1944, Ignác Romscis, ed., War and Society in East Central Europe, XXX (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), Corvinus Library: Hungarian History. www.hungarian-history.hu/lib/romsics/w34.htm (accessed January 2010); C. A. MacDonald, The United States, Britain and Appeasement, 1936–1939 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), passim. 12 Bencsik, ‘A kisebb határszéli forgalom’. 13 Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in our Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 280; Macartney, History of Hungary, I, pp. 320, 330; Eby, Hungary at War, p. 14. 14 János Józzef Szabó, The Árpád Line: The defence system of the Hungarian Royal Army in the Eastern Carpathians 1940–1944, Mihály Benkő, trans. (Budapest: Timp Kiadó, 2006), p. 79; Béni, ‘A Második Bécsi Döntés’, 26, 32; Thomas A. Sakmyster, Hungary, the Great Powers, and the Danubian Crisis 1936–1939 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1980), pp. 248–49. 15 Sakmyster, Hungary, the Great Powers, and the Danubian Crisis, p. 230. 16 Sakmyster, Hungary, the Great Powers, and the Danubian Crisis, pp. 241, 248; Paul Lendvai, The Hungarians: a thousand years of victory in defeat, Ann Major, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 384–85; Béni, ‘A Második Bécsi Döntés’, 23–33; Péter Illésfalvi, ‘Atrocitások az 1940-us Erdelyi Bevonulás Során’, Rubicon, 2010, Külőnszám, 41. 17 Péter Ilyésfalvi and Péter Szabó, Erdélyi Bevonulás, 1940 (Csikszerda, RO: Tortoma könyvkiadó, 2010), passim. 18 Macartney, History of Hungary, II, p. 40. 19 Macartney, History of Hungary, II, p. 57. 20 Eby, Hungary at War, pp. 53, 224. On mutual atrocities, great and small, see Case, Between States pp. 50, 102; Illésfalvi, ‘Atrocitások az 1940-us Erdelyi Bevonulás Során’, 35–41; Mária Gál, ‘A Halál Önkéntesei: A Maniu-Gárdisták Rémtettei: Magyarellenes Atrocitások Őszen Erdélyben’, Rubicon, 2010, Külőnszám, 42–7. 21 Case, Between States, pp. 116, 121–2, 138–9, 161–2. 22 Sajti, Hungarians in the Voivoidina, p. 211. 23 Sajti, Hungarians in the Voivoidina, pp. 115, 192–3; Sakmyster, Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback, p. 260. 24 Sajti, Délvidék 1941–1944: a magyar kormányok délszláv politikája (Budapest: Kossuth KönyvKiadó, 1987), pp. 29–32. When the Slovak Republic was established in 1939, it immediately identified all Jews, Communists and Czechs as the enemy in its midst, marking members of each group for deportation or worse. Thus there seems to have been a template for the establishment of new governments by the allies of Hitler. Jews, Communists and members of the national group that had previously been in power were automatically marked for removal. On the Slovak case, see Mary Heimann, Czechoslvoakia, pp. 112–113.



Notes 201

25 Sajti, Délvidék, p. 20; Sajti, Hungarians in the Voivoidina, p. 211. 26 Sajti, Hungarians in the Voivoidina 1918–1947, pp. 234–5, 247; Sajti, Délvidék, p. 40. 27 Sajti, Délvidék, pp. 63, 67, 69. 28 Sajti, Délvidék, pp. 36–9. 29 Sajti, Délvidék, pp. 61–3. 30 Sakmyster, Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback, pp. 266–7. 272, 368. Actual Soviet responsibility for the raid was never proved, and the possibility that the attack had been staged by the Germans, perhaps with the involvement of pro-German Hungarian officers, has long been debated. 31 Thullner, Hegyeshalom, p. 71; Macartney, History of Hungary, II, p. 242. 32 Horthy, Memoir, p. 296. 33 Sajti, Délvidék, pp. 105–106, 217–18. 34 Peter Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: the establishment of the Communist Regime in Hungary, 1944–1948 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 18; György Gyarmati and Tibor Valuch, Hungary under Soviet Domination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), Lendvai, The Hungarians, p. 6. 35 Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, p. 244; Flavius Solomon, ‘The situation of the ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe during the first two decades of “popular democracy”,’ in Akexandru Zub and Flavius Solomon, eds Sovietization in Romania and Czechoslovakia: History, Analogies, Consequences (Iasi, Romania: Polirom, 2003), p. 190. Some estimates go up to 300,000. Eby, Hungary at War, p. 294; Sajti, Hungarians in the Voivoidina, p. 18. 36 Solomon, ‘The situation of the ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe’, 190–1; Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (New York: Basic Books, 2008), p. 236; Snyder, ‘The Expulsion of Germans From the East’, sidebar to ‘Holocaust: the Ignored Reality,’ New York Review of Books, 56 (16 July 2009), 16; Sajti, Hungarians in the Voivoidina, p. 443; McKeown, Melancholy Order, p. 31; Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), p. 193; György Gyarmati, Demokráciából a ditkatúrába 1945–1956 (Budapest: Kossuth Kiadó, 2010), pp. 31–3; Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Repressive population transfers in central, eastern and South-Eastern Europe: A historical overview’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 16 (2000), 21; Klara Apor, Vándormadarak: Visszaemlékezés (Budapest: Argumentum, 2004), p. 133. 37 ‘Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ungarn 1946–1948 nach Gemeinden,’ 2 August 2008, Das Portal der Ungarndeutschen, www. ungarndeutschen. de (accessed 8 May 2010). Also see András Krisch, A Soproni Németek Kitelepitése (Sopron: Escort Kiadó, 2006), passim. 38 For a broad analytical summary of this process and its antecedents, see Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Repressive population transfers’, 1–27. 39 István Deák, ‘Mindless Efficacy’, Hungarian Quarterly, 49, no. 192 (Winter 2008), 71–81.

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40 Christian Science Monitor, 17 October 2010. Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk raises the same question. See ‘The Fading Dream of Europe’, New York Review of Books, 58 (10 February 2011), 58. 41 Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, p. 243.

Chapter 4 ╇ 1 For a description of the Maginot Line structures and facilities, see Vivian Rowe, The Great Wall of France: the Life and Death of the Maginot Line (Ney York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961); other systems are mentioned in Szabó, Árpád Line, p. 8. www.history.acusd.edu/gen/filmnotes/kingkong.html ╇ 2 ’King Kong’, (accessed and printed 30 April 2006). ╇3 Nepsava, 21 August 2009. ╇4 Szabó, Árpád Line, pp. 115, 137, 140, 173, 242, 253, 271. The quotation from Lieutenant Ferenc Kovács, former deputy commander 24/1 Fort Company, Cleveland OH, November 2000, is on p. 242. ╇5 Szabó, Árpád Line, pp. 17–28, 303. ╇6 Szabó, Árpád Line, pp. 294–5; notes on visit to trans-Carpathian Ukraine, September 2010, in author’s files. ╇ 7 Derek Williams, The Reach of Rome: A History of the Roman Imperial Frontier 1st–5th Centuries AD (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 299. ╇ 8 On the history of inclusionary barriers, see McKeown, Melancholy Order. Georg Friedrich von Martens is quoted on p. 28. ╇9 James A. Michener, The Bridge at Andau (New York: Random House, 1957), pp. 160–1; Julian Rubinstein, Ballad of the Whiskey Robber (New York: Back Bay Books, 2004), p. 13; Lonnie R. Johnson, Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 234, 236; László Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War 1945–1956: between the United States and the Soviet Union (Budapest: Central University Press, 2004), pp. 21–2; Adam Michnik, ‘A Europe for Poland,’ East European Constitutional Review, 12 (Spring/Summer 2003), 62–8; Sakmyster, Hungary, the Great Powers, and the Danubian Crisis, p. 77. 10 Interview, author with Károly Kopocs and Dezső Jakabovits, Győr, Hungary, 25 May 2010; István Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956–ban’, in Imre Okváth ed. ÁVH – Politika – 1956: Politikai helyzet és állambiztonsági szervek Magyarországon, 1956 (Budapest: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, 2007), p. 99; Gyarmati and Valuch, Hungary under Soviet Domination, p. 89. 11 See for example ‘Az Utolso Tiz Ev Nagy Fordulatai Magyarországon’, Magyarság Évkönyve 1920–1930, 9; Lendvai, The Hungarians, pp. 384–5; Macartney, History of Hungary, II, pp. 125, 146. 12 William T. Vollmann, Europe Central (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 738.



Notes 203

Chapter 5 ╇ 1 Bencsik and Nagy, A magyar úti okmányok története, pp. 141–2. ╇ 2 ’Rákosi Maginot-vonala’, hirtv, 10 November 2009, www.hirtv.hu/belfold/ ?article_hid=295791 (accessed 11 June 2010). ╇3 This summary of the Soviet approach to border staffing is based on: Zoltan D. Baranyi, Soldiers and Politics in Eastern Europe, 1945–90: the Case of Hungary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); László Bencze, ‘The Hungarian People’s Army, 1947–1954’, Army History, No. 18 (Spring 1991), 8–12; Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War; Dennis Deletant, Romania Under Communist Rule (Bucharest: Civil Academy Foundation, 1998); Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995); Imre Okvath, ‘The Strategic Plans of the Hungarian People’s Army Between 1948–1962’, unpublished paper, 2003; Orgoványi, ‘A vasfüggöny őrei’, Rubicon, 2002/6–7, passim; William E. Stacy, U.S. Army Border Operations in Germany 1945–1983 (GSM 5–1–84) (Frankfurt: U.S. Army Europe and 7th Army, 1984). ╇ 4 Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 29. ╇ 5 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), p. 192. After it was all over, Hans Modrow, who had been chief of the Socialist Unity Party in Dresden, said that ‘In our hearts, we knew that the fortified border was what kept the country together. We were stuck in a circular logic: no wall equals no GDR. So the fortified border had to stay, or what was the point of us?’ Anne McElvoy, ‘It Happened One Night’, Time, 173 (29 June–6 July 2009), 42. ╇6 Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War, p. 52. ╇7 Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Stalin, Man of the Borderlands’, American Historical Review, 106 (December 2001), 69–79. www. Historycooperative.org/ cgi-bin/cite.cgi?f=ahr/106.5/ ah0501001651.html (accessed 4 October 2010). ╇ 8 Snyder, ‘Expulsion of Germans From the East’, 16. ╇9 Anthony Langley (Antwerp, BE), ‘The Great War in a Different Light,’ www.greatwardifferent.com (accessed and printed 23 January 2009); Stacy, U.S. Army Border Operations in Germany, pp. 41, 51, 83, 195, 198–9; Prokop Tomek, On the Cold War Front, Czechoslovakia 1948–1956, Exhibition on the Occasion of the 60th Anniversary of Anti-Communist Resistance Abroad (Prague: The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, 2009), pp. 41, 43. See Martin Dubánek, Jan Lakosil, and Pavel Minařik, Utajená Obrana Železne Opony: Československé opevněni 1945–1964 (Praha: Mlada fronta, 2008), for detailed drawings and photographs of Czech border installations. 10 Tomek, On the Cold War Front, pp. 41, 43. 11 Tomek, On the Cold War Front, pp. 45, 49. 12 Zartman, ‘Introduction’, Understanding Life in the Borderlands, p. 13.

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13 Szép Szó, 22 December 2007, 4–5. 14 Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban’, 98; The Border guards 1906–1945–2007, p. 13. 15 Orgoványi, ‘A vasfüggöny őrei’, 20–1; Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, pp. 224–45; Kontler, Millenium in Central Europe, p. 393; Braham, ed., Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary, I, p. 485. 16 A Határőrség Megalakulása és Harca a Népi Hatalomért 1945–1948 (Budapest: Zrinyi Nyomda, 1970), pp. 226, 317–18. For examples of individuals who made the change from Arrow Cross goons to Communist hacks, see Eby, Hungary at War, pp. 139, 146, 268, 298–9. 17 Thullner, Hegyeshalom, pp. 75, 78; Mark Pittaway, ‘Making Peace in the Shadow of War: The Austrian-Hungarian Borderlands, 1945–1956’, Contemporary European History, 17/part 3 (August 2008), 352–3; Dénes Kovács, ‘Politikai Nevelőmunka a Csepregi Zászloaljnál 1946-ban’. in A Határőrség Megalakulása, p. 184; Bencsik and Nagy, A magyar úti okmányok története, p. 127. 18 ‘Hegyeshalom: Magyarország Nyugati Kapuja,’ Magyar Rendőr, 1 February 1947, reprinted in A Határőrség Megalakulása, pp. 329–31. 19 Thullner, Hegyeshalom, p. 78; Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban’, 98. 20 A Határőrség Megalakulása, p. 26; Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban’, 102. 21 Loránd Tilkovszky, ‘The Late Interwar Years and World War II’, in Peter F. Sugar, general editor, A History of Hungary ((Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), p. 340; Gyarmati, Demokráciából a ditkatúrába, p. 30; A Határőrség Megalakulása, p. 14; Határőrség 1906–1946–2007, pp. 13–14. 22 Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War, p. 82; Bencsik and Nagy, A magyar úti okmányok története, pp. 16, 127, 130. 23 Lieutenant Colonel Dr Sándor Mucs, ‘Adotok a Magyar Határőrség 1945 utáni Tortémetéhez (1945 február–1946 december)’, A Határőrség Megalakulása, p. 26; Pál Kornis, ‘A Határőrség Újjászervezése’, A Határőrség Megalakulása, p. 115; Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets, pp. 53, 58; Határőrség 1906–1946–2007, p. 14; Gyarmati and Valuch, Hungary under Soviet Domination, pp. 318–19, 321; Lendvai, The Hungarians, p. 89; Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban,’ 98. 24 Orgoványi, ‘A vasfüggöny őrei,’ 20; Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban,’ 102–3. 25 Gyarmati and Valuch, Hungary under Soviet Domination, pp. 89, 152–3. 26 Minister of Defence, Order No. 1, 1 January 1949, file 1949/T-1 131–127f, Military Archives, Budapest. 27 Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban’, 102; Bencsik, ‘Útiokmányok,’ 31–50. 28 Thullner, Hegyeshalom, pp. 78–9; Orgoványi, ‘A vasfüggöny őrei’, 20–2; Határőrség 1906–1946–2007, p. 15; Bencsik and Nagy, A magyar úti okmányok története, pp. 228–33.



Notes 205

29 Okváth, Bástya: a Béke Frontján Magyar Haderő és Katonapolitika 1945–1956 (Budapest: Aquila, 1998), pp. 82, 87–90. 30 Constantin Hlihor and Ioan Scurtu, The Red Army in Romania (Iasi: The Centre for Romanian Studies, 2000), p. 103. 31 Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban’, 104; Antal Kender and Lajos Mikó, Műszaki Zárak Telepitése és Leküzdése (Budapest: Zeinyi Katonai Koado, 1983), p. 12; Memorandum of conversation with Károlyi Kopocs and Sándor Goják, 22 June 2010, author’s files. 32 Ferenc Szilvasi, Határőr Hősök Nyomában (Budapest: Bélugyministerium Határőrség Politikai Csoportfőnökség, 1979), passim; Kisalfőld, 25 June 2010. 33 Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban’, 106–7; Orgoványi, ‘A vasfüggöny őrei’, 21. 34 Okváth, Bástya, pp. 114–115; Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban’, 108. Currency conversions are based on data from the home pages of the Hungarian National Bank (www.english.mnb.hu), and the US Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (www.minneapolisfed. org). 35 Okváth, Bástya, p. 117. 36 Szilvasi, Határőr Hősök Nyomában, pp. 111–13. 37 On the Croatian military border, see Gunther Erich Rothenberg, The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522–1747 (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1960), and Rothenberg, The Military Border in Croatia, 1740–1881: a Study of an Imperial Institution (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966). 38 Orgoványi, ‘A vasfüggöny őrei’, 20–5; Gyarmati and Valuch, Hungary under Soviet Domination, p. 160; Jürgen Ritter and Peter Joachim Lapp, Die Grenze: Ein deutsches Bauwerk (3rd edition. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 1999), pp. 22–3. 39 Bencsik, ‘Útiományok’, 40; Deletant, Romania Under Communist Rule, p. 108; Orgoványi, ‘A vasfüggöny őrei,’ 20–2. 40 Deletant, Romania Under Communist Rule, pp. 107–8; Hlihor and Scurtu, The Red Army in Romania, pp. 103–4; Item No 1735, Romania – Armed Force border defences, 3 July 1951, Item No. 2856, Romania – Soviet Army, 19 July 1951, Item 4663, Romania – Armed Forces border zone, 15 August 1951, all in Radio Free Europe Information Items, Romania, Open Society Archives, Budapest. 41 For biographical information, see any of the following: Magyar Nagylexicon, VI (Csen-Ec) (Budapest: Magyar Nagylexicon Kiadó, 1998) pp. 527–8; Kortárs Magyar Írók Kislexikona 1959–1988 (Budapest: Magvető Könyvkiadó, 1989), pp. 93–4; Köpeczi Béla and Lajos Pók, eds, Világirodalmi Kisenciklopédia (Budapest: Gondolat, 1984), p. 295; L. Rónay, Devecseri Gábor alkotásai és vallomásai tükrében (1979); Péter László, senior editor, Uj Magyar Irodalmi Lexikon, I, A-GY, (Budapest: Académia Kiadó, 1994), p. 437; Béládi Miklós, ed., A Költészet, I (Budapest: Akadémia Kiadó, 1986),

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pp. 406–9. See also Miklós Vajda, ‘â•›“If Any Harm Comes of This, I’ll Kill You!” The True Story of Six Hungarian Poets’ Grand Tour of Britain in 1980’, Hungarian Quarterly, 44 (Autumn 2003), 85–96. 42 ’Titkos katonai bunkerek magyarorszagon’/’Secret military bunkers in Hungary’, Stop, www.stop.hu/articles/article. php?id=584043 (accessed and printed 1 July 2010); ‘Kiássák a láncos kutya csontját’, Index.hu, 8 November 2007, www.index.hu/belfold/magyi071108 (accessed and printed 1 July 2010). 43 Okváth, Bástya, pp. 117–119; Magyar Életrajzi Lexikon, Hungarian Electronic Library, www.mek.iif.hu (accessed October 2009); ‘Kiássák a láncos kutya csontját’. See note 21 above for the source used in converting 1950 forints to 2009 dollars. 44 Zoltan Hajdu, ‘Renewal of Cross-Border Cooperation along the HungarianCroatian Border,’ in Vera Pavlakovich-Kochi, Barbara J. Morehouse, and Doris Wastl-Walter, eds, Challenged Borderlands: Transcending Political and Cultural Boundaries (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 111, 115, 120; Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban’, 110–111, 113. 45 Burghardt, Borderland, pp. 189–190. 46 Thullner, Hegyeshalom, p. 35; Pittaway, ‘Making Peace in the Shadow of War’, 360. 47 Pittaway, ‘Making Peace in the Shadow of War’, 352–3; ‘Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ungarn 1946-1948 nach Gemeinden,’ 2 August 2008. Such tragedies have a way of growing as the years pass. Dr. Zsuzsana Varga, who was five in 1946, remembered in 2010 that 90 per cent of the German residents were deported. See Kisalföld, 20 May 2010. 48 Thullner, Hegyeshalom, p. 35; Pittaway, ‘Making Peace in the Shadow of War’, 363; interview with Sándor Goják, Felsőcsatár, 26 May 2008, notes in author’s files; Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets, p. 215. 49 Pittaway, ‘Making Peace in the Shadow of War’, 361; Siegfried Beer, ‘The Soviet Occupation of Austria, 1945–1955,’ Eurozine, www.eurozine.com, 9 pp, from Akadeemia (Estonia), 2006 (accessed May 2010). 50 Pittaway, ‘Making Peace in the Shadow of War’, 361. 51 A Határőrség Megalakulása, pp. 329–331; István Gáll, Vaskor (Budapest: Zrinyi, n.d); Pittaway, ‘Making Peace in the Shadow of War’, 363; Thullner, Hegyeshalom, pp. 14, 17; Interview with Károly Kopocs and Dezső Jakabovits. 52 Határőrség 1906–1946–2007 (Np: np, 2008), p. 15; Ildikó Horváth, ‘Szentpéterfa merengőpadja,’ Szép Szó, 22 December 2007, 12; Monika Mária Váradi, Doris Wastl-Walter, and Friedrich Veider, ‘A végek csöndje. Határ-narrativák az osztrák-magyar határvidékről’, Regio, 13, No. 2 (2002), 88–96. 53 Ildikó Horváth, ‘Szentpéterfa merengőpadja’. 54 A Határőrség Megalakulása, pp. 129–30. 55 ’Hegyeshalom: Magyarország Nyugati Kapuja,’ A Határőrség Megalakulása, pp. 329–31.



Notes 207

56 Szép Szó, 22 December 2007, 6. 57 Kisalföld, 6 May 2009. 58 Gáll, Vaskor, p. 251; Bencsik, ‘Az útlevelek ellenőrzése az országhatáron, 1945–1989’, condensed chapter from Bencsik and Nagy György, A magyar úti okmányok torténete 1945–1989 (Budapest, 2005), pp. 9–10, www.publikon.hu/htmls/tanulmanyok. html?ID=36&essayID=130, (downloaded November 2008); Szép Szó, 22 December 2007, 9. 59 Határőrség 1906–1946–2007, p. 15. 60 Kisalföld, 20 December 2008. 61 Former border guard Sandor Goják’s interpretation at his Iron Curtain Museum emphasizes the deterioration of the system to the point of uselessness; historian István Orgoványi puts the emphasis on Hungary’s admission to the United Nations in December 1955 and the negative image projected by mining a border with a neutral neighbour. ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban’, 111–12. Also see András Schweitzer, ‘Félned, halnod kell’, HVG, 22 November 2007, 71. 74–5. 62 Szilvasi, Határőr Hősök Nyomában, pp. 171–2.. 63 Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban’, 114–15, 118. 64 Michener, Bridge at Andau, p. 207; Gyarmati and Valuch, Hungary under Soviet Domination, p. 333. András Oplatka, Egy döntés története (Wien: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2008. Budapest: Helikon, 2008), p. 20, estimated the number at 180,000. Endre Marossy, 1956 fiadnak hagyd örökül (Debrecen: Tóth, 2006), p. 198, put the number at 194,000. The US Census Bureau’s count for Hungary’s population in 1955 was 9,825,000. Country Rankings www.census.gov/cgi-bin/broker (accessed and printed October 2009). 65 Kisalföld, 4 November 2006. 66 Csaba Békes, Malcolm Byrne, and János M. Rainer, eds, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents (Budapest: CEU Press, 2002), p. 199; ‘Revolution Trial Opens in Hungary,’ BBC News, 14 September 1999, www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/446714.stm (accessed February 2010); New York Times, 19 September 1999 and 21 June 2001. 67 Szilvasi, Határőr Hősök Nyomában, pp. 219–25. 68 Kisalföld, 4 November 2006. 69 Szép Szó, 22 December 2007. 70 Juraj Marušiak, ‘Slovakia and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956,’ in Zub and Solomon, eds Sovietization in Romania and Czechoslovakia, pp. 100–2, 105–6, 109; Interview with Károly Kopocs and Dezső Jakabovits. 71 For pictures of solidly constructed walls along sections of the Inner German Border, see Ritter and Lapp, Die Grenze, pp. 35, 56, 59, 84, 90, 92, 107, 112, 135. 72 Ritter and Lapp, Die Grenze, pp. 16–19; Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–1989 (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 79; Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban,’ 108;

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Deyan Sudjic, The Edifice Complex: How the rich and powerful shape the world (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), p. 146. 73 Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization, p. 515. 74 Ritter and Lapp, Die Grenze, pp. 7, 19, 22, 71, 104–7; Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: the Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 22, 50; Stacy, US Army Border Operations in Germany, p. 50. 75 Stacy, U.S. Army Border Operations in Germany, pp. 180–1. 76 Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the US Mexico Divide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 118–19. 77 Notes on visit to Brück an der Leitha, April 2005, in author’s files. 78 Norman Davies, Europe, A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 1100. 79 Quoted in John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), p. 113. 80 David Miller, The Cold War, a Military History (London: Pimlico, 2001), pp. 341–2; Gaddis, The Cold War (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), p. 114. The actual documented number of successful escapes from September 1949 to 8 August 1961 was 2,691,270. Thomas Flemming and Hagen Koch, Die Berliner Mauer: Geschichte eines politischen Bauerwerks (Berlin: be.bra verlag, 1999,) p. 30. 81 For the official Warsaw Pact explanation of the Wall, see Joint Declaration of the Warsaw Treaty States on the Berlin Wall, August 13, 1961, in Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne, eds, A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005), pp. 126–8. 82 David Miller, The Cold War, p. 342; Maier, Dissolution, p. 22; Judt, Postwar, p. 252. Details of modifications and improvements are in Jürgen Ritter and Peter Joachim Lapp, Die Grenze, passim. 83 Maier, Dissolutuion, p. 22.

Chapter 6 ╇ 1 Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban’, 119–20. ╇2 Conversation with Sándor Goják, Felsőcsatár, 26 May 2008, notes in author’s files; Erwin A. Schmidl and László Ritter, The Hungarian Revolution 1956 (New York: Osprey, 2006), p. 27; Schweitzer, ‘Félned, halnod kell,’ 71, 74–5; Technical Directorate, Report on execution of technical closing of HU-AH border, 12 July 1957, in Robert Ehrenberger, ed., ‘A dolgozó népet szolgálom!’ Forráskiadvany a magyar néphadsereg hadtőrténelmi leveltárban őrizott irataiból, 1957–1972 (Budapest: Petit Real, 2006), pp. 30–1; Orgoványi, ‘A nyugati határzár és annak felszámolása 1956-ban,’ 99. ╇ 3 Schweitzer, ‘Félned, halnod kell’, 71, 74–5; Technical Directorate, Report on execution of technical closing of HU-AH border, 12 July 1957, pp.



Notes 209

30–1; Conversation with Sándor Goják, Felsőcsatár, 26 May 2008; Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 21, 268. ╇4 Schweitzer, ‘Félned, halnod kell’, 71, 74–5. Peter Bencsik, the leading historian of Hungary’s border policies and traffic, compiled a number of tables concerning traffic into and out of Hungary. Some of them are appended to Bencsik and Nagy, A Magyar úti okmánzok története 1945–1989. Others he shared with me by email. None of them contain data on attempts to cross, successful or unsuccessful. As he notes in A Magyar úti okmánzok története, p. 240, data on those who tried to cross the green border without documents did not turn up. ╇ 5 Schweitzer, ‘Félned, halnod kell’, 71. 74–5. ╇6 Schweitzer, ‘Félned, halnod kell’, 71, 74–5; Technical Directorate, Summary Report on the SZ-100 work, 13 Dec 1969, 242–4. ╇ 7 Technical Directorate, Summary Report on the SZ-100 work, 13 Dec 1969, 242–4. ╇ 8 Schweitzer, ‘Félned, halnod kell,’ 71, 74–5; Kisalföld, 12 October 2005. ╇9 Szép Szó, 22 December 2007, p. 4. 10 Schweitzer, ‘Félned, halnod kell’, 75. 11 Schweitzer, ‘Félned, halnod kell’, 71. 74–5; Kisalföld, 12 October 2005. 12 Gyarmati and Valuch, Hungary under Soviet Domination, pp. 318–19, 321; Lendvai, The Hungarians, p. 459. 13 (Budapest) Magyar Hirlap, 21 December 2007. 14 Gyarmati and Valuch, Hungary under Soviet Domination, pp. 368, 411–12, 444. 15 András Pályi, ‘Vers Van?’, Szép Szó, 22 December 2007, 4–5. 16 Miklós Vámos, ‘Megy, Ember, Magyar, Külföldre, Ha-,’ Szép Szó, 22 December 2007, 1; (Szeged) delmagyar, 27 December 2007. 17 I am indebted to Peter Bencsik for sharing the data on which this analysis is based. 18 Bencsik, ‘Útiokmányok’, 41–5. 19 Lorinc Szendres, ‘Történetek a zónából’, Szép Szó, 22 December 2007, p. 4. 20 Email to author, subject: ‘Those son-of-bitches border guards … THEY WERE NOT SANTA CLAUS!’ 3 and 5 July 2008.

Chapter 7 ╇1 ╇2 ╇3 ╇ 4

Sakmyster, Hungary, the Great Powers, and the Danubian Crisis, p. 63. Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 8–9. Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 16–17, 20–3. Gyarmati and Valuch, Hungary under Soviet Domination, pp. 363–65, 400, 405; Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization, p. 624; Ambassador István Horváth, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall: The role of Hungary in pulling down the Iron Curtain’, proceedings of a conference, Budapest, September 2007, p. 52, www. magyarorszag.hu/ 1989/1989/

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leto/theto/the_first-brick_from_the berlin wall.pdf, (downloaded and printed April 2009). ╇ 5 Ritter and Lapp, Die Grenze, p. 44; Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp 8–10. ╇ 6 Hartmann, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’, p. 52; Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 18, 88. ╇7 Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization, p. 624; Gyarmati and Valuch, Hungary under Soviet Domination p. 402; István Németh, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’, p. 48; Horváth, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall,’p. 85; Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 22–3. The minister of the interior at that time was also named Istvan Horváth. ╇8 Tables appended to email, Peter Bencsik to author, 5 October 2010, author’s files. ╇ 9 Gyarmati and Valuch, Hungary under Soviet Domination, pp. 368, 411–12, 444. 10 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 23–5; László Nagy, ‘The Pan-European Picnic, and the opening of the border, September 11, 1989’, www.berlinermauer.de/László-nagy/Lászlónagy-eu.html (accessed and downloaded October 2009). 11 Horváth, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’, p. 85. 12 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 31–3, 45; László Nagy, ‘The Pan-European Picnic, and the opening of the border, September 11, 1989.’ 13 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 44–5, 51–3. 14 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, p. 47; Borhi, ‘A Reluctant and Fearful West: 1989 and Its International Context,’ Hungarian Quarterly, 50 (Spring 2009), 63, 66. 15 László Kovács, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’, p. 20; László Nagy, ‘The Pan-European Picnic, and the opening of the border, September 11, 1989; ‘Annual Report on Asylum and Migration Statistics for Hungary,’ 2007, p. 2, European Migration Network Reports and Studies, www.emn.Sarenet.es/Downloads/ (accessed February 2010); Oplatka, Egy döntés története, p. 54. 16 Népszabadság, 28 June 2009; Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 75–6. 17 Imre Poszgay, presentation, conference ‘Húsz Éve Hullott Le a ‘Vasfüggöny’’ [‘Twenty Years Ago the Iron Curtain Dropped’], Győr, 9 May 2009, author’s notes; Michael Meyer, The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall (New York: Scribner, 2009), pp. 55–7; Gyarmati and Valuch, Hungary under Soviet Domination, p. 282. Oplatka, Egy döntés története, p. 93, estimates the number of Soviet troops at 80,000. 18 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 77–82. 19 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 15–16; István Németh, presentation, p. 48, Hartman, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall,’ p. 54; Meyer, The Year that Changed the World, pp. 67–70; Gábor Halász, ‘The Bolt Cutters Who Wrote History,’ SpiegelOnline, 4 May 2009, www.spiegel.de/



Notes 211

international/europe (accessed March 2010). On December 17, Mock repeated the performance at Hevlin on the Czech side of the Danube with Czech Foreign Minister Jiri Dienstbier. 20 Hartmann, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’, p. 52. 21 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 93–4. 22 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 112–5. 23 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp 112–5; Meyer, The Year that Changed the World, p. 100. 24 Quoted in Jan Mainka, ‘Looking back 20 years at the opening of the border’, Budapest Times, 25 September 2009, www.budapesttimes.hu/ content/ view/13035/27/ (accessed 12 October 2009). 25 Judt, Postwar, p. 612; Oplatka, Egy döntés története, p. 123; Borhi, ‘A Reluctant and Fearful West’, 66. 26 Nikolaus Koch, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall,’ p. 56. 27 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp 108–9, 127–8. 28 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, p. 156. 29 For more information, see the Pan-European Union website, www. epaneurope.eu. 30 László Nagy, ‘The Pan-European Picnic, and the opening of the border, September 11, 1989’; Marianna Kiscsatári, ‘Annus Mirabilis: the Year 1989 in Photos, Part 3, The Opening of the Border’, Hungarian Quarterly, 50 (Autumn 2009), 110, credits Walburga von Habsburg, the daughter of Otto von Habsburg, with the idea. 31 Zoltán Kócsán, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’, pp. 80–1; Nemes, ‘It All Started with a Picnic …’ 32 Giles MacDonogh, 1938, p 59. 33 László Nagy, ‘The Pan-European Picnic, and the opening of the border, September 11, 1989’; Nemes, ‘It All Started with a Picnic …’ 34 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 169–74. 35 Meyer, The Year that Changed the World, pp. 28, 100–1, 104. 36 Magyar Hirlap, 21 August 2009. 37 Meyer, The Year that Changed the World, p. 69. 38 Kisalfőld, 30 June 2009. 39 Oplatka, Egy döntés története,, p. 169; Meyer, The Year that Changed the World, p. 101; Hartman presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’, p. 54. 40 Kisalföld, 19 August 2009. 41 Kisalföld, 19 August 2009; Pablo Gorindi, ‘Germans, Hungarians commemorate border picnic that opened first breach in Iron Curtain’, Associated Press, 19 August 2009, Daily Press, www.dailypress.com/news/ national/ sns-ap-eu-hungary-picnic-to-freedom,0,7916599,full.story (accessed October 2009). 42 Kisalföld, 18 July 2009. 43 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 174–6, 181; Kisalföld, 12 July 2008.

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44 László Nagy, ‘The Pan-European Picnic, and the opening of the border, September 11, 1989’. 45 Meyer, The Year that Changed the World, p. 101. 46 Paul Nemes, ‘It All Started with a Picnic …’; Hans-Dietrich Genschler, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall,’, pp. 12–13; Giles MacDonogh, 1938, p. 46. 47 László Kovács, presentation, p. 20, István Németh, presentation, pp. 49–50, Father Imre Kozma, presentation, p. 64, all in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’. 48 Eugene (OR) Register-Guide, 23 August 1989, www.news.google.com/ newspapers/ (accessed November 2009); ‘Shot to Death in 1989: the soldier speaks, 16 August 1989’, www.burgenland. orf.at/stories/383295/, accessed November 2009. Nikolaus Koch, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’, p. 79; Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp 181–2, 297. A documentary film on the incident, called ‘Borderline Case’ or ‘Határeset’, and directed by Péter Szalay, was released in 2006. ‘Border Incident’ might be a better translation. 49 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 218–19. 50 Meyer, The Year that Changed the World, pp. 8, 68, 104, 113; Judt, Postwar, p. 612. 51 László Kovács, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’, p. 21; Kisalföld, 10 September 2009. 52 Table appended to email, Bencsik to author, 5 October 2010. 53 Nikolaus Koch, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’, pp. 77–8. 54 Kisalföld, 10 September 2009; Meyer, The Year that Changed the World, pp. 115–16; László Kovács, presentation, p. 20, István Németh, presentation, p 50, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’. 55 Lloyd Dakin, presentation, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’, p. 60. 56 Kisalföld, 10 September 2009. 57 Szép Szó, 22 December 2007, p. 4. 58 Hans-Dietrich Genschler, presentation, pp. 12–13; István Németh, presentation, p 50, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’. Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Introductory Essay’, in Csaba Békés, Malcolm Byrne and János M. Rainer, eds, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution. (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2002), p. xxiv; Judt, Postwar, pp. 612–3; Maier, Dissolution, p. 125; Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, p. 433. The Horn quotation is from Judt, pp. 612–13. 59 Maier, Dissolution, p. 166. Sometimes the ‘mad bugger’ may be the one banging his head against the wall. On Long Island, New York, during the winter of 2007, teenage boys took to putting their heads down and charging into suburban fences, sometimes pushing them over and winding up on the ground, other times hitting concrete and winding up on the ground, rather like Russian roulette with fences. New York Times, 18 February 2007, Week in Review, p. 11.



Notes 213

60 Maier, Dissolution, p. 282. 61 Malcolm Anderson, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (London: Polity Press, 1996), p. 130. 62 Quoted in Maier, Dissolution, pp. 285–6. 63 Meyer, The Year that Changed the World, p. 212. 64 For biographical data and the artist’s views on her work, see her website, www.verylgoodnight.com (accessed and printed on 1 May 2006). 65 Mark Danner, ‘Iraq: The Real Election’, New York Review of Books, 52 (29 April 2005), 41. 66 New York Times, 4 January 2006. 67 Isabel Kershner, Barrier: the Seam of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 13. 68 Peter Schneider, ‘The New Berlin Wall’, New York Times Magazine, 4 December 2005, 66–71. 69 Max Barry, Company, a novel (New York: Doubleday, 2006), p. 14. 70 Sudjic, Edifice Complex, p. 150.

Chapter 8 ╇ 1 Ivan Watson, ‘Bulgaria to Auction WWII Nazi Tanks’, ‘The World’, National Public Radio, 21 March 2008, www.npr.org (accessed and printed 21 March 2008). ╇ 2 European Union members not part of the Schengen group include the United Kingdom and Ireland, which prefer to manage their borders according to their own standards; Cyprus, which was deemed unready for accession in 2007; and Romania and Bulgaria, which were admitted to the EU in 2008. The latter two have yet to prove their readiness for accession but are likely to be admitted at some point. ╇3 Even in mid-October 2007, there was concern that the EU might find some excuse to renege on its promise – say, a software deficiency within programs designed to track people entering Schengen territory. See Népszabadság, 11 October 2007. The article title, ‘Schengen nincs még lejátszva’, translates as ‘Schengen is not yet played out’, but it really means ‘it ain’t over till it’s over.’ ╇4 Judt, Postwar, p. 534. ╇ 5 The ‘Schengenland’ coinage spread quickly among scholars, as the most convenient one-word description of the new grouping. See William Walters, ‘Mapping Schengenland: denaturalizing the border’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20 (2002), 561–80; Didier Bigo, ‘Frontier Controls in the European Union: Who is in Control?’ in Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild, eds, Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement Into and Within Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), p. 60; Helene Pellerin, ‘Borders, migration and economic integration: towards a new political economy of borders’, in Ella Zureik and Mark B. Salter, eds Global

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Surveillance and Policing: Borders, security, identity (Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2005), p. 52. ╇ 6 Mór Jókai, Az Aranyember, Mrs. H. Kennard, trans., 4th edition (Budapest: Corvina, 2001), pp. 37–38. ╇ 7 Anastassius Grün, ‘The Border Soldier’, Gesammelte Werke, vol. I (Berlin, 1907), pp. 322–6. ╇8 Kisalföld, 19 October 2005. ╇9 Kisalföld, 27 May, 29 May and 9 November 2009. 10 Anastasia Tsoukala, ‘Looking at Migrants as Enemies’, in Bigo and Guild, eds., Controlling Frontiers, p. 167. For an anti-immigrant tract, focusing on black Africans, see John Arhur [sic] Emerson Vermaat, ‘Out of Africa: Illegal Immigrants, crime, terrorism, polygamy and Aids’, 29 August 2006, 20 pp., Militant Islam Monitor, www.militantislammonitor. org/pf.php?id=2314 (accessed and printed 26 June 2007); Kisalföld, 19 October 2005; Patrick J. Buchanan, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), p. 245. 11 The 15 January 2005 exercise ‘AtlanticStorm’, organized by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre, the Johns Hopkins University Centre for Transatlantic Relations, and the Transatlantic Biosecurity Network, was based on a bioterrorist smallpox attack. According to the scenario a group of Islamic terrorists who had managed to enter Austria – the West – set up a secret laboratory in Austria, where they bred the pathogen and released it further west, in New York and Los Angeles as well as other places. The exercise can be accessed (and played) at www.AtlanticStorm.org (accessed August 2009). See also Philip Alcabes, Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu (New York: Doubleday, 2009), p. 205. 12 Anderson, Frontiers, pp. 144–5; Bigo, ‘Frontier Controls in the European Union’, p. 62; Margit Bessenyey Williams, ‘On Europe’s Edge: New and Old Borders in Central and Eastern Europe’, paper prepared for Workshop ‘The New Face of Europe’, University of Florida Centre for European Studies, Paris, France, 18–19 February 2005, p. 2, www.ces.ufl. edu/Williams.pdf (accessed and printed 29 August 2007). 13 New York Times, 12 June 2007; Joseph Lelyveld, ‘The Border Dividing Arizona’, New York Times Magazine, October 15, 2006; Robert Lee Maril, Patrolling Chaos: The U.S. Border Patrol in Deep South Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2004), p. 158. 14 Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (New York: Doubleday, 2009), pp. 12–13. 15 Deák, ‘Mindless Efficacy’. 16 Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, pp. 12, 17. 17 Schneider, ‘The New Berlin Wall’; Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, p. 3. 18 Kisalföld, 30 August 2010; New York Times, Monday, 30 August 2010.



Notes 215

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations, Andrew Brown trans. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 83–5, is an excellent discussion of this aspect of the cultural conflict. 19 Andreas Staab, The European Union Explained (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 19, 122–3; Határőrség 1906–1946–2007, p. 53; Ildikó Horváth, ‘Szentpéterfa merengőpadja’, Szép Szó, 22 December 2007, p. 12; Kisalföld, 12 October 2007. 20 See the New York Times, July-September 2010, for coverage of this issue. 21 Yahya Sadowski, The Myth of Global Chaos (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), pp. 43, 46. 22 International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, World Disasters Report 1996 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 78, 122; Karin Von Hippel, Democracy by Force: U.S. Military Intervention in the Post-Cold War World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.), p. 170. 23 Anderson, Frontiers, p. 34; Maril, Patrolling Chaos, p. 158; Bigo, ‘Frontier Controls in the European Union’, pp. 62, 73; Madeleine Byrne, ‘Fortifying Europe: Poland and Slovakia Under the Dublin System’, in Matt Killingsworth, ed., Europe: New Voices, New Perspectives (Proceedings from the Contemporary Europe Research Centre Postgraduate Conference, 2005/2006), (Melbourne: Contemporary Europe Research Centre, 2007), pp. 8–9 www.cerc.unimelb.edu.au (downloaded 13 August 2007); Andreas, Border Games, pp. 116–17; Heather Grabbe, ‘The Sharp Edge of Europe: Extending Schengen Eastwards’, International Affairs, 76 (July 2000), 498. 24 Vlatko Mileta, ‘Is a new “Iron Curtain” remerging in Europe?’ Politička misao, 34 (1997), 89. 25 On the events leading up to formation of the European Union, see Tony Judt, Postwar, passim. 26 For details of the acquis, see the European Union website, www.europa. eu/scadplus/glossary/schengen_agreement_en.htm (accessed and downloaded 19 September 2007). 27 Staab, The European Union Explained, p. 33; European Commission, Directorate General of Justice, Freedom and Security, ‘Consolidated Acquis’, October 2009, www.ec.europe.eu/justice_home/doc_centre (accessed February 2010). 28 For use of the phrase ‘Fortress Europe’, see James Anderson, ed., Transnational Democracy: Political spaces and border crossings (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 3; Andreas, Border Games, p. 127; Bessenyey Williams, ‘On Europe’s Edge’, 6; Bigo, ‘Frontier Controls in the European Union’, p. 76; New York Times, 8 October 2006 and 26 August 2007, p. 10. Even the common currency, the euro, has been characterized as a building block for a financial fortress. New York Times, 5 February 2010. 29 Katja Franko Aas, ‘â•›”Getting ahead of the game”: border technologies and the changing space of governance’, in Zuriek and Salter, eds, Global Surveillance and Policing, pp. 194–214. 30 Liam O’Dowd, ‘Transnational integration and cross-border regions in

216

31

32 33

34 35 36

37 38 39 40

41 42

Notes the European Union’, in James Anderson, ed., Transnational Democracy: Political spaces and border crossings, London: Routledge, 2002), p. 121. Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 68, 99; Andreas, Border Games, pp. 130–3; (London) Telegraph, 26 July 1998; Sinikka Tarvainen and Hildegard Huelsenbeck, ‘Immigrants risk their lives to cross ‘Europe’s Rio Grande’, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, 18 July 1998; Jason DeParle, ‘A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves’, New York Times Magazine, 22 April 2007. Telegraph, 26 July 1998; Tarvainen and Huelsenbeck, ‘Immigrants risk their lives to cross ‘Europe’s Rio Grande’. New York Times Magazine, 13 November 2005, p. 15; New York Times, 30 September 2005; USA Today, 19 April 2004; Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, pp. 65–6. Quoted in Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, p. 8. Washington Post, 1 April 2006. Washington Post, 1 April 2006; New York Times, 23 and 24 May 2006; International Herald Tribune, 1 June 2006; (Minneapolis) Star Tribune, 4 August 2006. New York Times, 11 April 2007. Washington Post, 20 August 2006; New York Times, 24 February, 19 June, 15, 17, 26, 30 and 31 August 2007. New York Times, 1 and 2 April 2009. Council Regulation (EC) No. 2007/2004, 26 October 2004, Official Journal of the European Union, 25 November 2004, www.eur-lex.europa.eu (accessed and printed 4 October 2006). New York Times, Monday, 20 and 21 April 2009. International Herald Tribune, 15 May 2007; New York Times, 24 and 25 May 2006; ‘EU Grapples with Flood of Illegal Immigrants’, ‘Weekend All Things Considered’, NPR, 30 September 2006; Saskia Sassen, ‘Migration policy: from control to governance’, openDemocracy, 13 July 2006, p. 1, www. openDemocracy.net (downloaded 14 July 2006); European Commission. ‘Justice, Freedom and Security in Europe Since 2005: An Evaluation of the Hague Program and Action Plan’, 10 June 2009, Europa, www.ec/europa. eu/justice_home/ doc_centrescoreboard_en.htm (accessed February 2010); Kisalföld, 15 Sep 09, MTI.

Chapter 9 ╇1 Neither the European Union nor any of its members recognized the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus, so de facto only the Greek portion was admitted. ╇ 2 European Commission. ‘Justice, Freedom and Security in Europe Since 2005: An Evaluation of the Hague Program and Action Plan’. p. 10. ╇3 Mócsy, Effects of World War I, chapter 7; Zoltan Hajdu, ‘Renewal



Notes 217

of Cross-Border Cooperation along the Hungarian-Croatian Border’, in Pavlakovich-Kochi, Morehouse and Wastl-Walter, eds, Challenged Borderlands: Transcending Political and Cultural Boundaries, pp. 113, 116–18; Milada Anna Vachudová, ‘Eastern Europe as Gatekeeper: the Immigration and Asylum Policies of an Enlarging European Union’, in Peter Andreas and Timothy Snyder, eds, The Wall Around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in North America and Europe (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), pp. 155, 170, note 41. ╇4 New York Times, 2 October 1996; Hajdu, ‘Renewal of Cross-Border Cooperation’, p. 117. ╇5 Határőrség 1906–1946–2007, p. 21; Hajdu, ‘Renewal of Cross-Border Cooperation’, p. 117; email message, Martyn Rady to author, 23 February 2011, author’s files. ╇ 6 Hajdu, ‘Renewal of Cross-Border Cooperation’, p. 117. ╇7 Andreas, Border Games, pp. 118–21. ╇8 Andreas, Border Games, pp. 122–3. ╇9 Andreas, Border Games, pp. 123–4; Bigo, ‘Frontier Controls in the European Union’, 77–8; Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, pp. 19–20; Magyar Nemzet, 23 December 2007. 10 Washington Post, 21 December 2007; New York Times, 20 December 2007. 11 ‘Asylum and Migration Glossary, A Tool for Better Comparability’, January 2010, 172 pp, European Migration Network. www.emn.Sarenet. es/Downloads/ prepareShowFiles.do?directoryID=2 (accessed February 2010). Regarding the development of a vocabulary of political correctness in the European discussion of migration, see also Henk van Houtum and Roos Pijpers, ‘The European Community as a Gated Community: Between Security and Selective Access’, in James Wesley Scott, ed., EU Enlargement, Region Building and Shifting Borders of Inclusion and Exclusion (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), p. 56. 12 Gerard Delanty, ‘Peripheries and borders in a post-western Europe’, 6 eurozine, www.eurozine.com (printed 4 September 2007). 13 Here are some samples from Kisalföld in 2005: ‘Seventeen in a trailer’, 18 April; ‘Two Turks in a car trunk’, 11 October; ‘They dressed like border guards’, 15 October; ‘Palestinians in a small bus’, 25 October; ‘Tragedy at the border crossing’, 2 November. 14 Kisalföld, 10 and 24 February 2005, 22 May 2006; Thullner, Hegyeshalom, p. 78. 15 Hungary Asylum and Migration Data, pp. 7–8; ‘Asylum and Migration Glossary, A Tool for Better Comparability’, January 2010, p. 143, both at European Migration Network www.emn.Sarenet.es/Downloads/ PrepareShowFiles. do?directoryID=2 (accessed February 2010). 16 Zoltán Hajdu and Imre Nagy, ‘Changing Border Situations within the Context of Hungarian Geopolitics,’ in Scott, ed., EU Enlargement, p. 78. 17 Népszava, 24 December 2007. 18 Kisalföld, 19 December 2007.

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19 Népszava, 19 december 2007, MTI. 20 Kisalföld, 22 December 2007; Magyar Hirlap 21 December 2007. 21 Gabriele del Grande, ‘Frontex and Fortress Europe’, www.frontex.info.pl/ content/frontex_and_fortress_europe (accessed and printed 22 August 2010). This website is not an official European Union homepage, despite the similarity in appearance. The Frontex logo appears in the upper left hand corner, but underneath it the usual motto of ‘Libertas Securitas Justitia’ has been replaced by ‘Slavery Intolerance Injustice’ in Polish. Instead of official reports and documents, it contains essays written by opponents of European migration policy. 22 Marietta Bódy, ‘Memoir’ (Unpublished manuscript in author’s files, 2007), p. 97. 23 András Petőcs, ‘A Schengen főbejárat’, Szép Szó, 22 December 2007, 9. 24 The Council of the European Union, also known as the Council of Ministers, had representatives from each member country. Its powers included approval of the budget. The European commission consists of ministers representing each member country, and a full-time permanent staff of civil servants. Each country’s representative minister has responsibility for a particular subject area. For example, during the period 2004–2009, the Finnish representative handled EU enlargement, the Italian matters relating to justice, and the Hungarian taxation and customs. See Staab, The European Union Explained, pp. 22–5, 41–7, 54. 25 Kisalföld, 23 December 2007; Meyer, The Year that Changed the World, p. 204. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Vol. I (New York: Picador, 1979), p. 50. 26 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12 September 1989, quoted in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall,’ p. 91; Magyar Hirlap, 21 December 2007. 27 ‘18 éve nyitottunk utat a szabadság felé …’ (National edition) Metro, 2 December 2007. 28 Neither of these websites was still on line by the end of 2011. 29 Wir Burgenlander, www.unserburgenland.at/spoe/menschen/klub/1 (accessed 25 January 2008); Népszabadság, 19 December 2007; Kisalföld, 8 and 13 December 2007. 30 ‘Ukrainian Shot Dead by Russian Border Guards’, RFE/RL Newsline, 28 November 2009, www.rferl.org (accessed 26 December 2009). 31 Kisalföld, 25 April 2009. 32 Kisalföld, 18 May 2009. 33 Franz Vranitzky, presentation, p. 17, and Nikolaus Koch, presentation, p. 76, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’. 34 Kisalföld, 7 January 2008. 35 Népszabadság, Monday, 10 December 2007; ‘Austria reimposes border checks from June 2’, DL Vienna, 29 May, Reuters, www.football.uk.reuters. com/ euro2008/news (accessed and printed 30 May 2008); Kisalföld, 6 June 2008. 36 Kisalföld, 30 September and 27 October 2009.



Notes 219

37 Népszabadság, 24 December 2007. 38 (Szeged) delmagyar, 27 December 2007. The story about the chocolate is from a private conversation. Not knowing the statute of limitations in Austria regarding juvenile chocolate theft, I deem it inadvisable to reveal my informant’s name. 39 HVG, 9 January 2008; email, Erwin Schmidl to author, 22 January and 15 and 26 April 2009, copies in author’s files. 40 Carolyn M. Warner, The Best System Money Can Buy: Corruption in the European Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), passim. 41 New York Times, 6 November 1999; Washington Post, 20 January 2000; András Vári, ‘Határkerülés: a vállaékozók szomszéd orzághoz fűződő gazdasági kapcsolatai az esztergom-párkányi kistérségben’, Régio, 13, No. 2 (2002), 67–8; Magyar Hirlap, 21 December 2007; Radoslaw Zenderowski, ‘Borders of Europe – Borders in Europe’, Polish Foreign Affairs Digest, 3, no. 2 (2003), 46–7. 42 Magyar Nemzet, 20 December 2007; Népszabadság, 15 December 2007 and 5 January 2008; Kisalföld, 5 January 2008; Magyar Hirlap, 21 December 2007. 43 Case, Between States, pp. 209, 220. 44 Magyar Nemzet, 20 December 2007; Népszabadság, 15 December 2007 and 5 January 2008; Kisalföld, 5 January and 15 April 2008; Magyar Hirlap, Friday, 21 December 2007; László Szárká, ‘A Protecting Power without Teeth’, 16–17. 45 The pictures are online at www.felvidek.ma/foto/ftc-meccs2.jpg (accessed 3 February 2010). 46 Kisalföld, 1 September 2009. 47 Magyar Nemzet, 10 November 2009; Népszava, 10 November 2009; Kisalföld, 21 August 2009; Matei Hruska, ‘Hungary takes Slovakia to court over presidential snub’, euobserver.com, 7 July 2010, www.euobserver.com/9/30436/ (accessed and printed 30 August 2010). 48 Kisalföld, 30 September 2009; ‘Napról napra több ingatlant kinálnak a szlovákiábol érkezőknek’, www.ingatlanmagazin.com/7855/ (accessed August 2010); ‘Bratislava Buses Cross Hungarian Border’, InsideWorld, 5 October 2010, www.insideworld.com/r/ mid,4196110.html (accessed 10 October 2010). 49 Kisalföld, 2 June 2010. 50 Kisalföld, 14 June 2010; memorandum of visit to Komarno, 12 June 2010, author’s files; ‘Slovakia is seeking reconciliation with Hungary’, Trend, 24 August 2010, www.trend.az/en/page 1/17401233/ (accessed and printed 25 August 2010); Michaela Stanková, ‘Region: Cross-border cooperation’, 21 July 2010, www.pragueppost.com (accessed and printed 30 August 2010); ‘Bratislava is seeking reconciliation with Budapest’, Neweurope, 29 August 2010, www.neurope.eu (accessed and printed 31 August 2010). 51 Magyar Nemzet, 22 December 2007.

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Chapter 10 ╇1 Doris Wastl-Walter and Monika M. Varadi, ‘Ruptures in the AustroHungarian Border Region’, in Pavlakovich-Kochi, Morehouse,and Wastl-Walter, eds, Challenged Borderlands, pp. 176–184. ╇2 Wastl-Walter and Varadi, ‘Ruptures in the Austro-Hungarian Border Region’, in Pavlakovich-Kochi, Morehouse and Wastl-Walter, eds, Challenged Borderlands, pp. 176–84; Váradi, Wastl-Walter and Veider, ‘A végek csöndje. Határ-narrativák az osztrák-magyar határvidékről’, pp. 85–106. ╇3 Kisalföld, 18 April and 22 May 2008. The web site is www.infolink.hu. ╇ 4 International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), European Greenbelt, www.europeangreenbelt.org/ (accessed 9 March 2011); the Independent, 17 May 2009, www.independent.co.uk/ (accessed 10 March 2011); ‘Further enhancement for the European Greenbelt?’ European Nature Heritage Fund, EuroNatur, 18 February 2011, www.euronatur.org/ (accessed 10 March 2011). There can be little doubt that the Iron Curtain had positive environmental effects. Western Europeans also appreciated the role of the barriers in excluding unwanted migrants from the east. In addition, it may also be argued that the Iron Curtain isolated East German art from the influence of abstraction, thereby preserving traditional approaches: drawing from nude models, learning rules of perspective and analysing formal composition. Thus East German students could continue in the German tradition of Luther Cranach and Max Beckmann. See Arthur Lubow, ‘The New Leipzig School’, New York Times Magazine, 8 January 2006, 39–40. ╇5 Népszabadság, 24 November and 22 December 2007; Ildikó Horváth, ‘Szentpéterfa merengőpadja’, Szép Szó, 22 December 2007, 12. ╇6 Kisalföld, 30 April 2010, 19 October 2010. ╇7 Határőrség 1906–1946–2007 (Np: np, 2008), passim. ╇ 8 The poem can be found in György Faludy, Összegyűjttöt Versei (New York: Püski, 1980), pp. 353–4. ╇9 Kisalföld, 16 July 2008. 10 Kisalföld, 3 August 2009. 11 Ádám Kiss, ‘A nap, amiért a németek örökké hálásak lesznek Magyarországnak’, hirszerző, www.hirszerzo.hu/cikkprint.120292, (accessed and printed 30 August 2010). 12 Sopron City Government, Határáttörés-Border Breakthrough-Grenzdurchbruch (Sopron: 2009), p. 10. 13 Kisalföld, 27 August 2009. 14 Kisalföld, 6 and 18 May 2009. 15 ‘If you are the proud owner of a Trabant, now you can write history’, advertisement, Kisalföld, 13 and 27 June 2009; Népszabadság, 13, 26, and 27 June 2009. 16 Magyar Hirlap, 21 August 2009; Nepszabadsag, 21 August 2009; Népszava, 21 August 2009.



Notes 221

17 Kisalföld, 21 August 2009; Nepszabadsag, 21 August 2009; Népszava, 21 August 2009. 18 Magyar Hirlap, 21 August 2009; Ádám Kiss, ‘A nap, amiért a németek örökké hálásak lesznek Magyarországnak’. 19 Magyar Hirlap, 21 August 2009; Magyar Nemzet, 21 August 2009; Népszava, 21 August 2009. 20 Paul Lendvai, presentation, p. 26, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’. 21 Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets, pp. 289-90. 22 ‘ProLogis Leases 295,000 Square Feet of Warehouse Space to Unilever in Hungary’, DL Budapest, 19 February 2008, Prologis, www.ir.prologis.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid =294893 (accessed and printed March 2010); Peter Olah, ‘The luck of the draw’, n.d., Central & Eastern European CIJ On-line, www.cijjournal.com/Main/ Story.aspx?id=1998 (accessed March 2010); ‘Prologis első hegyeshalmi ügyfele’, 5 November 2007, IngatlanHírek, www.ingatlanhirek. hu/nymotatas/Prologis-elso-hegeshalmi-ugyfele/2294/ (accessed March 2010). 23 Kisalföld, 1 May 2002, 24 October 2003, 18 June 2005, 22 September 2006 25 September 2007, 17 January, 3 April, 13 September 2008 and 14 January 2010; ‘Las Vegas a magyar pusztán: az első biztató fejlemény’, www. ingatlanmagazin.com/1787/ (accessed February 2010); ‘Konténerváros épül Euro Vegas helyen’, www.ingatlanmagazin.com/2847/ (accessed February 2010). 24 Kisalföld, 15 April and 24 July 2009. 25 West, ‘From Hard Times to Hard Rock,’ 11, 13–14; West, The Enduring Seminoles, pp. 112–14, 121, 125. 26 Kisalföld, 18 June and 14 July 2009; West, ‘From Hard Times to Hard Rock’. 11, 13–14; ‘Hard Rock International Announces Plans for Hard Rock Hotel and ‘Casino Hungary’, Press Release, Hard Rock Hotels, Orlando, Florida, 26 June 2009, www.hardrockhotels.com /GenericPages. aspx?process=news/ hard_rock_international_announces_plans_for_ hard_rock_ hotel_and_casino_hungary.html (accessed and printed November 2009). The project’s homepage, www.euro-vegas.eu (accessed November 2009), is in English and Hungarian. 27 West, The Enduring Seminoles, p. 127. 28 Kisalföld, 14 July 2009. There is a link to the CNBC report on www.eurovegas.eu. 29 Népszabadság, 27 June 2009; Kisalföld, 25 and 27 June 2009; ‘Casino Hungary’, Press Release. 30 Kisalfőld, 24 October 2009; ‘Trigranit, Harrah’s Announce €1.5Bn Bratislava Resort’, n.d., Central & Eastern European CCIJ Online, www.cijjournal.com (accessed and printed November 2009); ‘Hard Rock plans hotel-casino in Hungary’, 30 June 2009, TravelDailyNews, www.traveldailynews.com/ (accessed and printed November 2009). 31 Kisalföld, 24 December 2009, 24 June and 24 August 2010; ‘Kasinóinvázio

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a magyar határon’, 14 October 2009, www.ingatlanmagazin.com/10973 (accessed March 2010). 32 Kisalföld, 15 December 2010. 33 Nagyrét Lakopark Hegyeshalom, www.magyret.lakopark.hu/ (accessed 31 November 2010). 34 Kisalföld, 13 October 2009; ‘Trigranit opens new centre in Zagreb’, PropertyEU, 5 November 2010, www.propertyeu.info/index-nesletter/ (accessed and printed 8 December 2010). 35 BBJ, Budapest Business Journal, 17 December 2010, www.bbj.hu/ (accessed 21 February 2011); ‘On Location’, Hard Rock Café, www.hardrock.com/ locations (accessed 21 February 2011). 36 Népszabadság, 12 September 2008. 37 HVG, 19 January 2008; New York Times, 3 January 2008, Bigo, ‘Frontier Controls in the European Union’, 60: Caroline Brothers, ‘Migrants in Calais, France’, International Herald Tribune, www.iht.com/multimedia/ ss/calais/index. html (accessed 12 May 2008). For the distribution of camps see the map at www. migrationeducation.de/fileadmin/uloads/ NM_Europe_detentionCamps_09.gif (accessed February 2009); Gabriele del Grande, ‘Frontex and Fortress Europe’. 38 HVG, 19 January 2008, pp. 28–9; Kisalföld, 19 February 2008; Magyar Nemzet, 20 December 2009; (Szombathely) Vas Népe, 22 Deccember 2009, 11 January and 2 February 2010; Váradi, Wastl-Walter and Veider, ‘A végek csöndje’, 101. 39 Vas Népe, 11 January 2010. 40 Robin Fulton, ‘Border-Crossing’, in David and Helen Constantine, eds, Frontiers: Modern Poetry in Translation, third series, number eleven (2009), p. 113. 41 Kisalföld, 28 December 2007, 23 January and 22 December 2008. 42 Népszabadság, 24 December 2007. 43 Gábor Miklósi, ‘Schengen Blues’, Hungarian Quarterly, 49 (Spring 2008), 88. 44 Szép Szó, 22 December 2007, 6. 45 Vasárnapi Hirek, 23 December 2007. 46 Anna Porter, The Ghosts of Europe: Central Europe’s Past and Uncertain Future (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), pp. 12, 268. 47 Kisalföld, 12 October 2005, 21 and 27 May and 1 October 2009. 48 Kisalföld, 17 September and 8 October 2009, 20 October 2010. 49 Kisalföld, 25 April 2009. 50 Kisalföld, 2 February 2008. 51 Bencsik and Nagy, Magyar úti okmányok története, p. 156. 52 Kisalföld, 25 April and 1 May 2009. 53 András Schweitzer in Convesation with Mark Kramer, ‘Gorbachev’s Go-Ahead’, Hungarian Quarterly, 50 (Winter 2009), 80. 54 Peter Gumbel, ‘Moscow’s Revolution’, Time, 173 (29 June–6 July 2009), 48. For examples of the emphasis on Gorbachev, see Maria Ormos, presen-



Notes 223

tation, pp. 32–3, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’; Meyer, The Year that Changed the World, passim. 55 Vranitsky, László Kovács, Rita Süssmuth, Zoltán Kócsán, Ambassador István Horváth, and Paul Lendvai, presentations, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’. 56 László Kovács, presentation, p. 20, István Németh, presentation, p. 48, and Hartman, presentation, pp. 52, 54, Ambassador István Horváth, presentation, pp. 85–6, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’; András Oplatka, Egy döntés története, pp. 37, 44–5, 55, 76 57 László Nagy, ‘The Pan-European Picnic, and the opening of the border, September 11, 1989;’ Hartman, presentation, pp. 52, 54, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’; Kisalföld, 18 and 19 August 2009.

Chapter 11 ╇1 ╇ 2 ╇3 ╇4 ╇5 ╇ 6 ╇7

╇ 8 ╇9 10 11

12

13

Magyar Hirlap, 21 December 2007. Gabriele del Grande, ‘Frontex and Fortress Europe’. Népszabadság, 5 December 2007. Magyar Nemzet, 17 December 2007; (Nyiregháza) Szabolcs, 21 and 23 January 2008; Telegraph, 17 December 2007. Kisalföld, 23 November 2009. Colm Tóibín, ‘In the Fires of Catalonia’, New York Review of Books, 57 (13 May 2010), 52. New York Times, 30 November 2007; Népszabadság, 30 November and 4 December 2007; Kisalföld, 30 November 2007; Olga Mrinska, ‘The Impact of EU Enlargement on the External and Internal Borders of New Neighbours: The Case of Ukraine’, in Scott, ed., EU Enlargement, pp. 87–8; Tatiana Zhurzhenko, ‘Regional Cooperation in the Ukrainian-Russian Borderlands: Wider Europe or Post-Soviet Integration?’ in Scott, ed., EU Enlargement, p. 100. Notes on visit to trans-Carpathian Ukraine, September 2010, in author’s files. ‘Europe’s infra-red final frontier’, 11 December 2007, www.eubusiness. com/news-eu (accessed and printed 19 January 2008). Magyar Nemzet, 17 December 2007; Telegraph, 17 December 2007. ‘Slovak border police chief quits over Irish explosives scandal’, Earth Times, 7 January 2010, www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/302585 (accessed February 2010); New York Times, 6 and 8 January 2010. See the chart in Susan Ginsburg, Securing Human Mobility in the Age of Risk: Challenges for Travel, Migration, and Borders (Washington: Migration Policy Institute, 2010), pp. 78–9. Werner Sikorski and Rainer Laabs, Checkpoint Charlie and the Wall: a Divided People Rebel (Berlin: Ullstein, 2004), pp. 40–1.

224

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14 Guido Friebel and Sergei Guriev, ‘Smuggling Humans: a Theory of Debt-Financed Migration’, Journal of the European Economic Association, 4 (6), 1086, 1106–7; Ginsburg, Securing Human Mobility, pp. 8–9. Five Hungarians went on trial, charged with running a Zurich-based ring engaged in human trafficking and forced prostitution, in late August 2010. ‘Human trafficking trial begins in Zurich’, World Radio Switzerland, 25 August 2010. www.insideworld.com/r/mid.4027201.html (accessed 25 August 2010). 15 Meyer, The Year that Changed the World, p. 145. 16 Oplatka, Egy döntés története, p. 8. 17 Miklósi, ‘Schengen Blues’, p. 91. 18 Keefe, The Snakehead, pp. 83, 106. 19 Kisalföld, 25 October 2005, 8 and 21 July and 30 September 2006, 23 May 2007, 30 September and 11 October 2008; Magyar Nemzet, 11 April 2007; Szabolcs, 23 January 2008. 20 Telegraph, 20 January 2008. 21 Sarah Dugdale, ‘At the Edge’, Frontiers: Modern Poetry in Translation, p. 41; Timothy Snyder, ‘Gogol Haunts the New Ukraine’, New York Review of Books, 57 (25 March 2010), 36. 22 Ilona Erdelyi, ‘Határtalan Schengen’, National Geographic Magyarország, January 2008; Magyar Hirlap 21 December 2007. 23 Bruce Crowley, ‘Four E.U. Nations Stoke Fears of an Immigrant Flood’, Time, 14 August 2010; London Daily Mail, 6 August 2010. 24 ‘Bratislava is seeking reconciliation with Budapest’, Neweurope, 29 August 2010, www.neurope.eu (accessed and printed 31 August 2010). 25 Heyman, ‘Constructing a Virtual Wall’, p. 328. 26 Kisalföld, 18 April 2005, 6 and 11 October 2008. 27 Kisalföld, 24 January 2009, 22 and 25 October 2010. 28 Kisalföld, 12 and 22 June and 29 July 2009. 29 Kisaulföld, 10 January and 23 Feburuary 2010. 30 Kisalföld, 8 December 2010. 31 For this twelve-month period Kisalföld mentioned migrants from Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Bangladesh, Chad, Georgia, Iran, Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Morocco, Palestine, Serbia, Somalia, Tunisia, Turkey and Ukraine. Not long afterwards, at the beginning of May 2010, a man from Burkino Faso was also arrested near the Austrian border. For Europe as a whole, according to FRONTEX data, the top ten places of origin for illegal entries were Albania, Afghanistan, Morocco, Somalia, Iraq, Tunisia, Nigeria, Eritrea, Palestine and Algeria. EUROPOL, ‘Facilitated Illegal Immigration into the European Union’, September 2009, www.europol. europa.eu/publications (accessed and printed August 2010). 32 Erdelyi, ‘Határtalan Schengen’. 33 ‘Down and Out in Budapest: Somali Refugees Face Winter struggle’, Xpatloop.com, 5 October 2010, www.xpatloop.com/news/65281 (accessed 10 October 2010).



Notes 225

34 Határőrség 1906–1946–2007, p. 36; Alexandra Fouché, ‘The EU’s new southern frontier’, BBC News online, 30 April 2004, www.bbc.co.uk/ go/ pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/3669291.stm (accessed and printed 20 February 2010); ‘Europe’s new outer frontier Hungary battles illegal migrants’, Deutche Presse-Agentur, Monsters and Critics.com, 4 November 2009, www. monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/features/ (accessed and printed 18 February 2011). 35 EUROPOL, ‘Facilitated Illegal Immigration into the European Union’, March 2008, www.europol.europa.eu/publications (accessed and printed August 2010); Magyar Nemzet, 10 and 22 December 2007; delmagyar, 9 January 2008; Alexandra Fouché, ‘The EU’s new southern frontier:’ ‘Europe’s new outer frontier Hungary battles illegal migrants’, Deutche Presse-Agentur, Monsters and Critics.com, 4 November 2009. 36 delmagyar, 24 January and 1 February 2008; Alexandra Fouché, ‘The EU’s new southern frontier’. 37 delmagyar, 15 February 2008 and 13 October 2009. 38 delmagyar, 11 October 2009. 39 delmagyar, 31 August and 8 September 2008. 40 delmagyar, 15 October 2009. 41 delmagyar, 15 and 16 October 2009. 42 Kisalföld, 23 June 2006, 26 October 2007 and 16 September 2009. 43 delmagyar, 21 October 2009. 44 delmagyar, 22, 26, and 29 October 2009. 45 delmagyar, 23, 24, and 28 October 2009. 46 delmagyar, Friday, 29 October 2009; Hírszerző, 23 October 2009, www. hirszerzo,hu/cikkprint. 127799 (accessed and printed 3 November 2009). 47 Hírszerző, Monday, 25 October 2009, www.hirszerzo,hu/cikkprint. 127961 (accessed and printed 3 November 2009); delmagyar, 25 and 26 October 2009; Kisalföld, 12 November 2009. At around the same time, the head of the border guard office in Szeged estimated that the going rate from Kosovo was €3,000 per person. ‘Europe’s new outer frontier Hungary battles illegal migrants’, Deutche Presse-Agentur, Monsters and Critics. com, 4 November 2009. 48 delmagyar, 28 and 29 October 2009; Kisalföld, 2 November 2009. 49 ‘Kosovo police arrest 7 over death of migrants’, Reuters World Bulletin, 16 December 2009, www.worldbulletin.net/news_print.php?id=51391, (accessed February 2010). In Kosovo no one knew for certain the actual level of unemployment because the population there was not known. Tim Judah, ‘At Last, Good News from the Balkans’, New York Review of Books, 57 (11 March 2010), 47. 50 Kisalföld, 30 October 2009. 51 Kisalföld, 12 November 2009. 52 Népszabadság, 15 December 2007. 53 Alla Skvortova, ‘The Impact of EU Enlargement on Moldovan-Romanian Relations’, in Scott, ed., EU Enlargement, pp. 138-41.

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54 Kisalföld, 10 June 2010. 55 Zoltán Kiss, ‘From the history of the border guards’, A Határőrség Megalakulása, p. 48. 56 ‘Massive Drug Shipment Seized in Hungary’, Xpatloop.com (8 December 2010), www.xpatloop.com/news/65844 (accessed and printed 8 Decmber 2010); ‘Hungarian customs authorities seize 312 kg cannabis in truck at border’, balita (7 December 2010), www.balita.ph/2010/12/06, (accessed and printed 7 December 2010). 57 ‘Bulgarian and Romanian Schengen Area entry pushed back’, SETimes.com, 10 January 2011, www.insideworld.com/r/,,mid.4700982.html (accessed 10 January 2011). 58 Zhidas Daskalovski, ‘Schengen’s Iron Curtain’, Central Europe Review, 1 (13 December 1999), www.ce-review.org (accessed 28 August 2007); Mileta, ‘Is a new ‘Iron Curtain’ reemerging in Europe?’ 88–93; Ahto Lobjakas, ‘The EU’s Invisible ‘Schengen Wall’’, RFE/RL Newsline, 13 April 2009, www.rferl. org/ articleprintview/1607507.html (accessed and printed 3 May 2009); Christopher Solioz, ‘Has Europe dropped the Balkans?’ openDemocracy News Analysis, 7 May 2009, www. opendemocracy.net/node/ 47870/print (accessed and printed 9 May 2009); New York Times, 11 February 2010, 59 Quoted by Edward Alden, The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11 (New York: Harper, 2008), p. 112; Washington Post, 3 February 2003. 60 Daskalovski, ‘Schengen’s Iron Curtain’; Mileta, ‘Is a new ‘Iron Curtain’ remerging in Europe?’ 88–93. 61 Andreas, Border Games, pp. 125–6; Bessenyey Williams, ‘‘On Europe’s Edge: New and Old Borders in Central and Eastern Europe’, pp. 8, 18; Bigo and Guild, ‘Policing at a Distance: Schengen Visa Policies’, in Bigo and Guild, eds., Controlling Frontiers, p. 249; Daskalovski, ‘Schengen’s Iron Curtain’; Grabbe, ‘The Sharp Edge of Europe’, 498; Laure Akai, ‘Not So Quiet on the Eastern Front: Frontex assures xenophobic Europe that it’s doing its job’, www.frontex.info.pl/content/not_so_quiet, (accessed and printed 25 August 2010). The concept of paper walls is far from new. See, for example, David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968). 62 Byrne, ‘Fortifying Europe’, pp. 13–15, 17, 24; Grabbe, ‘The Sharp Edge of Europe’, 507; Bessenyey Williams, ‘‘On Europe’s Edge:’ New and Old Borders in Central and Eastern Europe’, pp. 11–12; Helen O’Nions, ‘The Erosion of the Right to Seek Asylum’, passim., Web Journal of Current Legal Issues (2006), www.webjcli.ncl.ac.uk/2006/issue2/onions2.html (accessed and downloaded 27 August 2007). 63 Gabriele del Grande, ‘Frontex and Fortress Europe’. 64 ‘Annual Report on Asylum and Migration Statistics for Hungary’, 2007, pp. 2–3, 9, 17; Mgr. Zuzana Bargerová and Dr. Zuzana Števulová, ‘Annual Report on Migration Policies 2008, Slovak Republic’ (Bratislava, June 2009), pp. 47–8, both at European Migration Network, www.emn.Saranet.



65 66

67

68 69

70

71

72 73 74

Notes 227 es/Downloads/ prepareShowfiles.do?directoryID=2 (accessed February 2010). Népszava, 17 and 24 December 2007; Határőrség 1906–1946–2007, p. 51. Byrne, ‘Fortifying Europe’, p. 14, Bigo, ‘Frontier Controls in the European Union’, in Bigo and Guild, eds Controlling Frontiers, pp. 88–9; John Crowley, ‘Where Does the State Actually Start? The Contemporary Governance of Work and Migration’, in Bigo and Guild, eds, Controlling Frontiers, p. 144; Bessenyey Williams, ‘‘On Europe’s Edge: New and Old Borders in Central and Eastern Europe’, p. 3; Katja Franko Aas, ‘â•›”Getting ahead of the game”: border technologies and the changing space of governance’, in Zuriek and Salter, eds, Global Surveillance and Policing, pp. 206–7; Hélène Pellerin, ‘Borders, migration and economic integration: towards a new political economy of borders’, in Zureik and Salter, eds., Global Surveillance and Policing, p. 56; European Commission, ‘Justice, Freedom and Security in Europe Since 2005: An Evaluation of the Hague Program and Action Plan’, 10 June 2009, Europa, www.ec/europa.eu/justice_home/ doc_centrescoreboard_en.htm, (accessed February 2010); ‘Perfection of the Border Regime’, www.frontex.info.pl/content/ perfection_border_ regime, accessed and printed 22 August 2010. See also David Lyon, ‘The border is everywhere: ID cards, surveillance and the other’, in Zuriek and Salter, eds, Global Surveillance and Policing, pp. 55–82. Bigo, ‘Frontier Controls in the European Union: Who is in Control?’ in Bigo and Salter, eds, Controlling Frontiers, pp. 78–9; Alden, The Closing of the American Border, p. 23. Bessenyey Williams, ‘‘On Europe’s Edge: New and Old Borders in Central and Eastern Europe’, pp. 7–8; Byrne, ‘Fortifying Europe’, p. 24. ‘EU Starts Visa Talks with Serbia’, RFE/RL Newsline, Vol. 12, No. 21, Part II, 31 January 2008, downloaded February 2008; ‘Serbs to Receive Schengen Visas Free of Charge’, RFE/RL Newsline Vol. 12, No. 86, Part II, 7 May 2008, www.rferl.org/info/Newsline+Archive (downloaded May 2008); New York Times, 4 September 2008; Népszava, 20 December 2009; Kisalföld, 23 December 2009 and 6 January 2010 ‘Westerwelle encourages Croatia’s EU hopes on Balkan tour’, Trend, 25 August 2010, www.wap.trend.az/en/page1/1740851 (accessed and printed 25 August 2010). Eva G. T. Green, ‘Guarding the gates of Europe: A typological analysis of immigration attitudes across 21 countries’, International Journal of Psychology, 42 (December 2007), 365–79. Also see the commentary on this article in ‘Continental Divide,’ Atlantic Monthly, 301 (April 2008), 22. Kisalföld, .11 October 2008 and 25 April 2009 Lloyd Dakin, presentation, pp. 61–4, in ‘The First Brick from the Berlin Wall’. Aas, ‘â•›”Getting ahead of the game”â•›’, in Zuriek and Salter, eds, Global Surveillance and Policing, p. 204; Tomma Schröder, ‘1700 Kilometre für Arbeit’, Die Furche, No. 5/31 (January 2008), 24; Wolfgang Machreich, ‘Imprisoned like Animals’, Die Furche, No. 5/31 (January 2008), 21–2.

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75 Aas, ‘â•›”Getting ahead of the game”â•›’, pp. 194–214, in Zuriek and Salter, eds, Global Surveillance and Policing, p. 210; Tatiana Zhurzhenko, ‘Regional Cooperation in the Ukrainian-Russian Borderlands: Wider Europe or Post-Soviet Integration?’ in Scott, ed., EU Enlargement, p. 102. 76 Sherr quoted in Breffni O’Rourke, ‘Yugoslavia: Kosovo Crisis Creates EU Dilemma’, FRE/RL Newsline, 9 July 1999, www.rferl.org (downloaded February 2006). 77 Ilkka Laitinen, ‘Frontex – Facts and Myths’, News Release, 11 June 2007, www.frontex,europa.eu/newsroom/ news_releases/art26.html (accessed and printed 29 June 2007). 78 Meyer, The Year that Changed the World, pp. 1, 77. 79 Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, p. 69. 80 ‘European Patrols Network’, News Release, 24 May 2007, www. frontex,europa.eu/newsroom/news_releases/art25.html (accessed and printed 29 June 2007). 81 Benita Ferrero-Waldner, commissioner, ‘The Policy: Welcome!’ European Neighbourhood Policy, www.ec.europa.eu/world/enp/welcome_en.htm (accessed and printed 28 June 2007); Commission of the European Communities, ‘Communication from the Commission: European Neighbourhood Policy, Strategy Paper’, Brussels 12 May 2004, European Commission, European Neighbourhood Policy, www.ec.europa.eu/world/enp/ (accessed and printed 28 June 2007); ‘The Policy: What is the European Neighbourhood Policy?’ European Neighborhood Policy, www.ec.europa.eu/ world/enp/policy_en.htm (accessed and printed 28 June 2007); Staab, The European Union Explained, pp. 133, 160, note 9; Bessenyey-Williams, ‘On Europe’s Edge: New and Old Borders in Central and Eastern Europe’. 82 Ruben Zaiotti, ‘Of Friends and Fences: Europe’s Neighbourhood Policy and the “Gated Community Syndrome”â•›’. European Integration, 29 (May 2007), 160. 83 Crowley, ‘Where Does the State Actually Start? The Contemporary Governance of Work and Migration’, Bigo and Guild, eds, Controlling Frontiers, p. 144. 84 The only other Schengen countries that had neither land nor maritime external borders of the EU were Luxembourg, Austria and non-EU Schengen member Switzerland. 85 Grabbe, ‘The Sharp Edge of Europe’, p. 503. 86 The speech was published in the New York Times, 18 May 1898. In 1938 a report by the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems advocated continuous adjustment of territorial borders in response to the changing needs of nations as a reliable way to reduce international tension and avert warfare. ‘Fixed National Boundaries Likely to Bring About War’, Science News Letter, 16 April 1938, p. 241. 87 See Lonnie R. Johnson, Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends. 88 Ginsburg, Securing Human Mobility in the Age of Risk, pp. 18–20.



Notes 229

Chapter 12 ╇1 On the success of Texas and California in getting funds and attention, leading ultimately to diversion of the flow of migrants, see Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: the Rise of the ‘Illegal Alien’ and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); Belinda I. Reyes, Hans P. Johnson, and Richard Van Swearingen, Holding the Line? The Effect of the Recent Border Build-up on Unauthorized Immigration (San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 2002) ╇ 2 Peter Schneider, ‘The New Berlin Wall’. ╇ 3 US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, ‘Per Capita Personal Income by State’, Infoplease, www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104652. htm; Central Intelligence Agency, ‘Country Comparison: GDP per capita (PPP),’ The World Fact Book, (accessed 29 July 2010); www.cia.gov/library/ publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html (accessed 29 July 2010). ╇ 4 US Department of Homeland Security, ‘Budget and Finance Documents’, www.dhs.gov/xabout/budget/ ( accessed 15 August 2010); Paul C. Light, ‘The Homeland Security Hash’, Wilson Quarterly, 31 (Spring 2007), 41; New York Times, 22 September 2006 and 11 December 2007. ╇5 Washington Post, 30 March 2006 (writer George Will,) 25 October 2010 (Senate Candidate Joe Miller.) ╇ 6 See the editorial, ‘The Anti-Arizonans’, in New York Times, 5 March 2011. ╇7 Todorov, Fear of Barbarians, p. 188, contends that the US has an advantage in foreign policy over the EU, because it is a single nation state. This advantage does not appear to extend to development of border management policies. ╇8 See New York Times, 10 September 1995; Andreas, Border Games; Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978-1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home (Austin: The Centre for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas, 1996); U.S. General Accounting Office, Assets DOD Contributes to Reducing the Illegal Drug Supply Have Declined (Report No. GAO/NSIAD 00-9, December 1999); Maril, Patrolling Chaos. National Guard involvement can be followed in daily newspapers, right up to the present day. ╇9 ‘Hungary wants to see Bulgaria and Romania in Schengen area in March 2011’, Radio Bulgaria News, 17 October 2010; www.insideworld. com/r/,,mid,4259131,html (accessed 19 October 2010); ‘Hungary Backs Serbia’s Further Progress To EU’, Xpatloop, 18 October 2010, www. xpatloop.com/news/ 65424.html (accessed 20 October 2010); ‘Hungary supports Romania’s accession into Schengen Area’, China Economic Net, 19 October 2010, www.insideworld.com/r/,,mid,4269219/html, accessed 20 October 2010; ‘Hungary promises support for Romanian entry in Schengen accord’, The Earth Times, 19 October 2010, www.insideworld. com/ r/4267328.html (accessed 20 October 2010).

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10 A substantial literature has emerged describing and analyzing the fears of residents of post-industrial democracies, especially in the US since 9/11. See Philip Alcabes, Dread; David Altheide, Terrorism and the Politics of Fear (AltaMira, 2006); John Hope Bryant, Love Leadership: The New Way to Lead in a Fear-Based World (NY: Jossey-Bass, 2009); Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007); Frank Furedi, Politics of Fear (London: Continuum International, 2005); Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999); John Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorist Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (New York: Free Press, 2006); Corey Robin, Fear: the History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Marc Siegel, False Alarm: the Truth about the Epidemic of Fear (New York: Wiley, 2006); Peter N. Stearns, American Fear: the Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety (London: Routledge, 2006); Tzvetan Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations, Andrew Brown trans. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010). There was even an editorial complaint in the New York Times during the 2008 campaign about the insufficiency of fear, by a former inspector general of the Department of of Homeland Security and author of Open Target: Where America is Vulnerable to Attack (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Glossary

Terms and Phrases Anschluss: absorbtion of Austria into Germany in 1838. Aranyvonat: golden train, the 1938 train carrying the relic of King Stephen during the commemoration of 900 years of western Christianity in Hungary. Csángó: Hungarian-speaking people from Moldavia. Csonka Magyarország: Broken Hungary, the post-Trianon state. Dobrovóljac: Serbo-Croatian, meaning ‘men of good will’, Serbian army volunteers who had served in World War I. Fakabát: wooden coat, the booth in which a border guard stood watch. Gulyáságyú: goulash cannon, a military field kitchen. Határolni: verb meaning ‘to work the border’, used on the Ukrainian border to mean bringing legal quantities of cheap goods, especially alcohol, tobacco and gasoline from Ukraine into Hungary for immediate sale. Isten hozott: a traditional Hungarian welcome, ‘God brought you.’ Kaszinózni: verb meaning ‘to casino’. Kékfrankos: blue frankish, a red wine of the Sopron area and Burgenland. Kishatárforgalom: small border traffic, describes local cross-border communication between residents on two sides, also kishatárszéli or border-edge traffic. Krumpli: potato, slang for land mine. Luxusutazok: luxury travellers, tourists. Mindent vissza: everything back, irredentist slogan. Műszaki zár: technical barrier, a range of devices and techniques used to seal the border, a category that included mines, obstacles, incendiary devices and later electrified signalling wire. Önkéntes Határőr: volunteer border guard, civilian auxiliaries of border guards, also the title of Gábor Devecseri’s narrative poem.

232

Glossary

Szekely: Szekler people of eastern Transzlvania, Magyar speakers with a tradition as border soldiers. Szent Kiraly Magyarorsyág: Holy Royal Hungary, Hungary before it was dismembered by the Treaty of Trianon. Szerencsejáték: games of chance, gambling. Volksdeutsch: Ethnic Germans residing outside Germany.

Place Names Apátistvánfalva: town in Vas County, on Austrian border near Szentgotthárd Pass, location of public border-guard museum. Békéscsaba: seat of Békés County, east of Budapest, site of refugee reception centre. Bezenye: village in Győr-Moson-Sopron County, near Hegyeshalom on Austrian border; site of EuroVegas. Bratislava: capital of Slovakia, Pozsony in Hungarian. Brück an der Leitha: Austrian border town, across the Leitha River from Királyhida, Hungary, on the pre-Trianon border. Debrecen: second largest city in Hungary, seat of Hájdú County. Délvidék: south country, now in Serbia. Esztergom: Danube-river city, seat of Esztergom County and of archbishop of Hungary; across from Štúrovo (Párkány), Slovakia. Felsőcsatár: town in Vas County, on the Austrian border, location of Iron Curtain museum. Felvidék: upper Hungary, now Slovakia. Fertő-tó: Neusiedler See in German; border lake, partly in Hungary and partly in Austria, near Sopron. Fertőrákos: town outside Sopron near Fertő Lake, location of private border guard museum. Győr: seat of Győr-Moson-Sopron County. Hegyeshalom: main border-crossing to Austria, in Győr-Moson-Sopron County. Királyhida: King’s Bridge, now Brück Neudorf, Austria, pre-World War I Hungarian border station at the border between Austria and Hungary. Kolozsvár: largest city in Transylvania, now Cluj-Napoca, Romania, also known as Klausenburg and Claudiopolis.



Glossary 233

Komárom: town on Hungarian side of Danube across from Komarno, Slovakia. Morbisch: nearest Austrian town to site of Paneuropean picnic, Fertőmeggyes in Hungarian. Mosonmagyarovár: largest town between Győr and the border at Hegyeshalom. Nickelsdorf: first town in Austria after Hegyeshalom, called Miklóshalom in Hungarian. Rajka: town in Győr-Moson-Sopron County, near Slovakian border. Röszke: town in Csongrád County, near border with Serbia. Sopron: city in Győr-Moson-Sopron County, on border with Austria. Sopronpuszta: near Sopron; site of Pan-European picnic, August 1989. Szeged: seat of Csongrád County, on Tisza River in southern Hungary. Szentpéterfa: village on Austrian border in Vas County, across from Eberau, Austria; site of ‘Hello Neighbour!’ commemorative bench. Szombathely: seat of Vas County. Újvidék: also Novi Sad (Serbo-Croatian) and Neusatz (German), all three names meaning New Country; largest city in Délvidék, site of massacre of Serbs and Jews by the Hungarian Army, January 1942. Vámosszabadi: border crossing to Slovakia on Danube north of Győr. Zsira: village on Austrian border in Győr-Moson-Sopron County; site of the death of Kurt-Werner Schulz in August 1989.

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Williams, Margit Bessenyey. ‘‘On Europe’s Edge:’ New and Old Borders in Central and Eastern Europe’, paper prepared for Workshop ‘The New Face of Europe’, University of Florida Centre for European Studies, Paris, France, 18–19 February 2005. www.ces.ufl.edu/Williams.pdf (accessed and printed 29 August 2007). Wir Burgenlander. www.unserburgenland.at/spoe/ menschen/klub/1 (accessed 25 January 2008). Wright, Patrick. Iron Curtain: from Stage to Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Wyman, David S. Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968. Zaiotti, Ruben. ‘Of Friends and Fences: Europe’s Neighbourhood Policy and the “Gated Community Syndrome’â•›”. Journal of European Integration, 29 (May 2007). www. allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_ citation/0/9/9/0/1/pages99011/p99011-1.php (accessed March 2011). Zartman, I. William, ed. Understanding Life in the Borderlands. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2010. Zenderowski, Radoslaw. ‘Borders of Europe – Borders in Europe’, Polish Foreign Affairs Digest, 3, no. 2 (2003). Zub, Akexandru and Flavius Solomon. Sovietization in Romania and Czechoslovakia: History, Analogies, Consequences. Iasi, Romania: Polirom, 2003. Zureik, Elia, and Mark B. Salter, eds. Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders, security, identity. Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2005.

Newspapers Austria Vienna AustrianTimes. Hungary Budapest Magyar Hirlap. Budapest Magyar Nemzet. Budapest Népszabadság. Budapest Népszava. Győr Kisalföld. Győr Nemzeti Hirlap. Metro. Nyiregháza Szabolcs. Szeged délmagyar. Szombathely Vas Népe. United Kingdom London Daily Mail. London Independent. London Telegraph. United States Christian Science Monitor. International Herald Tribune. Minneapolis Star-Tribune. New York Times. USA Today. Washington Post.

Interviews Goják, Sándor, interview with author. Felsőcsatár, Hungary, 26 May 2008 and 23 June 2010. Jakabovits, Dezső, interview with author. Győr, Hungary, 25 May 2010. Kopocs, Károly, interview with author. Győr, Hungary, 25 May 2010.

Index

Abramoff, Jack╇ 92 Ady, Endre╇ 6, 166 Állami Védelmi Hatoság (ÁVH)╇ 55–7, 72 Államvédelmi Osztaly (ÁVO)╇ 55, 60, 71, 145 Allen, James╇ 148 Alliance of Free Democrats╇ 86 Allied Control Commission post-World War I, Hungary╇ 14 post-World War II╇ 55 Alsoszolnok╇78 Amsterdam, Treaty of╇ 113–14 Andau╇ 130, 151–2 Andreas, Peter╇ 105, 113 Antibolshevik Committee (ABC)╇ 12 Apátistvánfalva╇ 66, 69, 139, 156, 158 Apponyi, Albert╇ 14 Arrow Cross╇ 53–5, 145, 154 Asamer, Hans╇ 147 Ash, Timothy Garton╇ 102 Auschwitz╇ 31, 65, 73 Austria╇ 3–6, 8–10, 15, 19–20, 23–4, 39, 46, 50, 54, 67, 69, 86, 88, 92–6, 119–21, 123–5, 131, 155, 160–1, 165–6, 168–9, 181–3 attitudes toward Hungarians╇ 5 anxieties╇ 125, 128–30, 136, 161, 173, 192 border with Hungary╇ 4, 11–13, 53–4, 56, 58, 64–6, 68, 71–4, 77–9, 84–5, 88–9, 98–100, 102–4, 126–7, 134, 136–40, 143–4, 146, 151, 156, 163–4, 168, 170–3, 175–6, 190–1 Burgenland╇ 11, 13, 23–4, 54, 64, 91, 93, 101, 128–9, 143, 152–3, 181 Hungarian jealousy╇ 161 “the in-laws”╇ 130 Austro-Hungarian Empire╇ 3–6, 10–11, 13, 17, 20, 34, 107, 149, 151, 167 Bajnai, Gordon╇ 145 Bandholtz, Harry Hay╇ 14 Bánffy, Miklós╇ 13 barbarians╇ 48, 107–9, 114, 130, 136, 157, 166, 185, 188 barbed wire,╇ 47, 49, 59, 64, 66, 77–9, 130, 140, 190 Germany╇123

post-World War I╇ 7, 11 Romania╇90 Sopronpuszta╇94 souvenirs╇ 104, 137 Barcs╇ 63, 119 Bárdossy, László╇ 36 barriers and walls╇ 48, 165, 181, 193 Árpád Line╇ 46–7, 64 Atlantic Wall╇ 47 bureaucratic╇ 11, 80, 178, 180 China╇ 16, 48, 193 East Wall╇ 47 financial╇178 Hungarian and German compared╇ 79, 85 Israeli separation barrier╇ 67, 186, 193 linguistic╇ 19, 137 Maginot Line╇ 46–7 Manhattan Island palisade╇ 47 Margit Line╇ 47 mental╇155 Roman Empire╇ 48 Soviet Empire╇ 48–9, 51–2, 59, 105 Siegfried Line (West Wall)╇ 47 United States and Europe compared╇ 181 water╇116 Williamsburg, Virginia, palisade╇ 47 see also barbed wire, electric fence, Iron Curtain, mines and minefields, and individual countries Barroso, José Manuel╇ 116, 126–7, 181 Barry, Max╇ 104 bastion of Western civilization Hungary╇ 3, 33, 40, 47–8, 126 Poland╇48 Romania╇48 Bata, István╇ 62–3 Becerra, Miguel╇ 117 Békéscsaba╇ 169, 173–4, 179, 182 Béla IV╇ 3 Belarus╇ 116, 121–3, 161, 163, 183, 185 Belgium╇ 45, 83, 107 Bella, Árpád╇ 96–8 Béndek, József╇ 157 Beneš, Edvard╇ 8 Beremend╇120



Index 253

Béres, Ilona╇ 155 Berlin╇ 23, 34, 74–5, 143, 189 airlift╇ 75, 104 Checkpoint Charlie museum╇ 75, 78, 102–3, 156 Turkish residents╇ 189 Berlin Wall╇ 51, 73, 75, 99, 102–4, 121, 143, 156, 158–9, 177 across Mediterranean╇ 117 Cold War symbol╇ 75, 103 collapse╇ 84, 102–3, 159–60 compared to Hungarian border╇ 53, 78 dismantling Washington replica╇ 92 Hungarian views╇ 52 Bezenye╇ 147–50, 153 Bibó, István╇ 56 Bicske╇ 179, 182 Bildt, Carl╇ 144 Bódy, Marietta╇ 126, 161 Border Guard Pocket Library╇ 60–2 border traffic, local see local cross-border traffic Bosnia╇ 5, 119, 144, 181 Bratislava (Pozsony)╇ 8, 16, 26, 29, 39, 93, 112, 133, 146, 149, 151 Brück an der Leitha╇ 5 border fortifications╇ 152 Brück putsch╇ 12 Buchanan, Patrick╇ 109–10 Budapest╇ 5–8, 14, 17, 19–20, 22, 30–31, 34, 37, 38, 40, 54, 60, 63, 67, 70, 72, 76, 83, 85, 89, 91, 95, 100, 102, 127, 129, 131, 146, 149, 157, 165, 171, 173, 182 airport╇155 border guard memorial╇ 71 Hard Rock café╇ 151 Heroes’ Square╇ 24 House of Terror museum╇ 53, 145 Iron Curtain Memorial╇ 46 Keleti Station╇ 82 National Library╇ 157 New York café╇ 148 replica of Berlin Wall╇ 92 statuary park╇ 143 Bulgaria╇ 15, 50, 80–1, 107–8, 168, 176, 183, 191 Bush, George H. W.╇ 103, 180 Caldwell, Christopher╇ 111–12, 184 Canary Islands,╇ 115, 117 Case, Holly╇ 34 Ceauşescu, Nicolae╇ 47, 80, 87, 104, 110, 145 Ceuta╇115 Chertoff, Michael╇ 190

Chop╇122 Ciano di Cortellazzo, Galeazzo╇ 26 Cisleithania╇6 Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár)╇ 33–4 Cree, D.╇ 14–15 Croatia╇ 6, 16, 20, 34, 36–7, 53, 119–20, 123, 137, 161, 168, 175, 181, 183, 186, 192 Croatian Military border╇ 61 Csáky, István╇ 29 Csángó╇36 Csapó, Imre╇ 143 Csepreg,╇67 Csonka Magyarország╇18 Csukarpaka╇30 Cunningham, H. F., Jr.╇ 31 Czech Republic╇ 186 Czechoslovakia╇ 8–12, 14, 16–17, 27, 30–1, 33, 38, 45, 49, 51, 53, 54, 57, 71–3, 80–1, 85–6, 91, 100–2, 119, 125, 132–3, 167 see also Felvidék Dakin, Lloyd╇ 101, 182 Danube╇ 3, 6, 10, 17, 24, 26, 28–30, 36, 38–39, 52, 60, 72, 76, 86, 102, 108, 133, 171 Komárom bridge╇ 26, 133 Mária Valéria Bridge╇ 131 Stúrovo-Esztergom ferry╇ 131 Vámosszabadi bridge╇ 27–8 Deák, Ferenc╇ 5 Deák, István╇ 39 Debrecen╇ 53, 93, 141, 162, 173, 175, 179, 182 Delanty, Gerard╇ 122 Demeter, Zoltán╇ 21 detention camps╇ 152, 182 Austria╇ 152–3, 182 Hungary╇ 95, 169–70, 175–7, 181, 183 Italy╇182 Libya╇182 North Africa╇ 152 Ukraine╇ 152, 182 Deutsch, Juliánna╇ 69 Deutsch Schutzen╇ 132 Deutschkreuz╇68 Devecseri, Gábor╇ 62, 69, 158 Dévény (Devin)╇ 6, 17, 39, 52 disease╇ 60, 108–9, 180 Dráva River╇ 36–7, 60, 63, 137 Drávasztára╇60 dual citizsnship╇ 132, 167–8 Dublin Convention╇ 178–9 Dunacsún╇38

254

Index

Dunakiliti╇133 Dunaszerdahely╇29–30 Eberau╇ 130, 138–9, 152–3 electric fence╇ 46, 52, 58, 73, 78–9, 84, 87, 89–90, 98, 100, 139, 156–8 Engle, Alfred╇ 29 Enzensberger, Magnus╇ 115 Esztergom╇ 26, 72, 125. 131–2 Europa Las Vegas╇ 149 European Commission╇ 116–7, 122, 126–7, 133, 179–91 European Economic Community╇ 85, 87 European Green Belt initiative╇ 137 European Neighbourhood Policy╇ 184–5, 191 European Union╇ 20–2, 85, 107, 109, 114, 116, 121–6, 131, 161, 164, 168, 183, 187 border protection╇ 116–17, 161, 163, 177 compared to United States╇ 189–92 Frontex╇ 176–7, 184 Hungary admitted╇ 120 Police and Justice Misson in Kosovo (EULEX)╇174 Schengen acquis╇ 113–14, 188 eurospeak╇123–4 EuroVegas╇ 147–50, 157 Excalibur City╇ 156

Faludy, György╇ 93, 140 Farkas, Mihály╇ 55–6 Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany)╇ 51, 85–6, 90–1, 99, 101–3, 110 Fehér, Imre╇ 157 Fekter, Maria╇ 152 Felsőcsatár╇139–40 Felsőnémet╇109 Felsőszolnok╇65 Féltorony╇11 Felvidék╇ 9, 24, 26, 29–31, 33–4, 72 Ferrero-Waldner, Benita╇ 185 Fertő Lake╇ (Neusiedlersee)╇ 11, 68, 90, 93, 137, 140–1 Fertőrákos╇ 68, 93, 130, 140 Fico, Robert╇ 126, 132, 134, 168 Fidesz╇145 Filep, Mária╇ 92 Fiume╇17 Fodor, Tamás╇ 143 Fortress Europe╇ 114 France╇ 4–5, 45–7, 68, 85, 107, 111–14, 169, 179, 189 Franz Ferdinand╇ 6

Franz Joseph╇ 4 Frattini, Franco╇ 180 Frost, Robert╇ 103 Gajdács, Erzsi╇ 61–2, 70 Galati-Brăila╇62 Galicia╇17 Gáll, István╇ 58, 66 Gáspár, Ilona╇ 60 gendarmerie╇ 4, 11, 21, 23, 28–9, 31, 37, 65 Geneva Convention on Refugees╇ 88–9, 91, 178, 181 Georgia╇179 German Democratic Republic (East Germany)╇ 11, 50–1, 64, 74–5, 80, 87, 89–91, 165, 190 escape via Hungary╇ 84, 90–5, 97. 99, 101 Hungarian role in collapse╇ 90, 102–3 Germany╇ 8, 23–6, 30, 32–3, 38–40, 48, 54, 79, 111–12, 114, 120–3, 130, 143–4, 168, 177 border anxieties╇ 122, 128 border control compared to United States╇121 concentration and death camps╇ 46 focus of Cold War literature╇ 52 Inner German Border╇ 73–4, 85 unification╇ 102, 107, 159 World War II relations with Hungary╇ 29, 32–3, 36–7 Geshriebenstein (Irottkő)╇ 151 Goják, Sándor╇ 76–7, 139–40 golden triangle╇ 146, 149 Gömbös, Gyula╇ 13 Goodnight, Veryl╇ 103 Gorbachev, Mikhai╇ 86–7, 89, 97, 159 Göring, Hermann╇ 32 Great Britain (United Kingdom)╇ 5, 9, 18, 85, 112, 115, 130, 170, 183, 186 Greece╇ 45, 117, 152, 170, 173, 178–9 Green, Eva╇ 180 Greenbelt bicycle route╇ 156 Grey, Edward╇ 9 Grün, Anastassius╇ 108 Grünauer (Zöldligeti), Péter╇ 11 Gumbel, Peter╇ 159 Gyarmati, György╇ 56 Győr╇ 8, 11–12, 22, 26–8, 30, 55, 68, 71, 83, 96, 100, 126, 130, 132, 137–40, 143, 156–8, 173 Gyurcsány, Ferenc╇ 125–6, 128, 145

Habsburg, Otto von╇ 92 Happy Times Hotel╇ 151



Index 255

Harag, György╇ 80 Hard Rock International╇ 149 Harrah’s Entertainment╇ 149 Hartman, Axel╇ 90, 159 Hašek, Jaroslav╇ 6 Határőr╇ 56, 87 Havel, Václav╇ 159 Hegyeshalom (Strass-Sommerein)╇ 19–24, 26–8, 32, 37, 53, 64, 66, 71–2, 81–3, 86–7, 90, 127–8, 130, 133, 139, 146–7, 152–6, 166, 169–70, 173, 179, 191 border guards╇ 19, 53–4, 66–9, 82–3 border opening (1989)╇ 95, 100–1 border opening (2007)╇ 123–8 Cold War╇ 20, 53, 68, 143 gateway for migration to West╇ 54, 64, 81, 123–4, 126, 169 Jewish slave labor╇ 21, 53 Nagyrét residential park╇ 151 Prologis warehouse complex╇ 146 smuggling╇ 123, 166 transient melting pot╇ 170 volunteer border guards╇ 69 Hegykő╇ 93, 140 “hello neighbour!” benches╇ 138 Helsinki declaration of human rights╇ 85 Hercegszántó╇60 Hermann, Joachim╇ 122 Hiess, Karl╇ 140 Hitler, Adolf╇ 23–4, 32–3, 37, 48 Hlinka Guard╇ 29 Holland╇ (Netherlands)╇ 3, 45, 107, 112 Honecker, Erich╇ 85, 96, 100 Hoosz, Kázmér╇ 15 Horn, Gyula╇ 90, 96, 100, 143 Horthy, Miklós╇ 10–11, 19, 23, 27–8, 33, 36–8, 48, 60 Horváth, István╇ 87, 159 Horváth, Jenő╇ 71 Horvátjárfalu╇38 Hungarian army╇ 19, 28, 30, 33, 37, 48, 173 Hungarian Democratic Forum╇ 86, 92, 160 Hungarian Ornithological Association╇ 147 Hungarian People’s Republic (1919)╇ 10–12 Hungarian Revolution╇ 53, 63, 70–2, 89, 91, 97, 99 Hungarian Socialist Workers Party╇ 56 State Security Committee╇ 57 Hungarian Soviet Republic see Hungarian People’s Republic (1919) Hungarian State Railroad (MÁV)╇ 19, 101 Illyés, Gyula╇ 48 International Monetary Fund╇ 85

Iran╇48 Iron Curtain╇ 47, 52–3, 64, 84, 87, 92–3, 104, 110, 121, 124, 137–8, 140–1, 143–4, 149, 156–9, 161, 165, 177, 180 Hungary in dismantling╇ 88, 90, 99–101, 102 irredentism╇ 9, 22, 134, 167 Czech and Slovak╇ 29 Hungarian╇ 13, 18, 22–3, 29, 32–3, 40, 48, 72, 107, 131, 134, 161 Italia irredenta╇9 Italy╇ 9, 26, 29, 102, 110, 112, 115–16, 117, 130, 166, 169, 178 Jarovce╇149 Jews╇40 deported from Parndorf╇ 93 expelled from Slovakia to upper Hungary╇ 29, 31 fleeing Austria (1938)╇ 99 Hungary╇ 29, 31 upper Hungary╇ 30 vandalism against in Dunaszerdahely╇ 29 Jobbik╇ 132, 144, 182 Jókai, Mór╇ 108 Jolsvai, András╇ 155 Judt, Tony╇ 51, 100, 107 Kádár, Jánós╇ 56, 70, 79, 87 Kaffka, Margit╇ 5 Kányadi, Sándor╇ 141 Kaposvár╇120 Károlyi, Mihaly╇ 10–12 Kárpáti, Ferenc╇ 96 Kásád╇120 Kassa╇ (Kosice)╇ 26, 28–30, 33, 37, 163 Kasza, László╇ 20, 72 Kelebia╇ 53, 171 Kenez, Peter╇ 65 Kéri, László╇ 52 Kiev╇183 King Kong╇45 Királyhida╇ 5–6, 11–12, 19 Kisalföld╇96 Kisfaludy, Károly╇ 80 Kispaka╇30–1 Kissármás╇32 Kisszéksos╇171 Klingenbach╇ 90–1, 95, 154 Knights of Malta╇ 99 Koch, Nicholaus╇ 91, 99, 101, 129 Kócsán, Zoltán╇ 92–3 Kohl, Helmut╇ 102, 144 Kohuth, Miklós╇ 138

256 Komárom (Komarno)╇ 10, 26, 28–39, 86, 102,133–4 Kópháza╇100 Körmend╇ 72, 139 Kormospuszta╇60 Kőrösi, György╇ 62 Kosovo╇ 120, 174–5, 181 Köszeg╇151 Kovács, Attila F.╇ 46 Kovács, György╇ 140 Kramář, Karel╇ 8 Kramer, Mark╇ 159 Kristallnacht╇29 Kukorelli, Peter╇ 137 Kun, Béla╇ 10 Kvitsinsky, Yuly╇ 103 Laitinen, Ilkka╇ 184 Lajtabánság╇11 Lake Balaton╇ 90 Lampedusa╇ 115–17, 182 League of Nations╇ 10, 16 Leitha (Lajta) River╇ 5, 13–14 Lendvai, Paul╇ 125, 145 Lenzlinger, Heinz Ulrich╇ 165 Letenye╇175 Levél╇ 123, 133 Leventemozgalom╇23 Libya╇ 117, 185 Lloyd George, David╇ 8, 16 local cross-border traffic╇ 4, 15–16, 22, 57, 181 Austria╇ 13, 22–3, 65–6, 81 Bosnia╇6 Britain-France╇5 Croatia╇175 Czechoslovakia╇14 European Union╇ 22 Romania╇ 4, 176 Schengenland╇167 Serbia╇ 4, 168 Socialist countries╇ 81 Ukraine╇167 Yugoslavia╇15–16 London Daily Mail╇24 London Times╇83 Lutzmannsburg╇ 99, 139–40 Maastricht, Treaty of╇ 113 Magás, László╇ 93, 141, 144 Maginot, Andre╇ 45 Magyar Gárda╇ 132 Magyar, György╇ 60 Magyar Rendőr╇ 54, 67

Index Mako, Tibor╇ 164 Maria Theresa╇ 60 Marosújvár╇32 Marosvásárhely╇ 33–4, 80 Martens, Georg Friedrich von╇ 47 Masaryk, Tomášâ•‡ 8–9 Mattersburg╇68 May, Karl╇ 148 McKeown, Adam╇ 38 Melilla and Ceuta╇ 114–15 Melocco, Miklós╇ 141–3 Merkel, Angela╇ 39, 143, 145 Mészáros, Ferenc╇ 92, 96–7, 141–2 Metro╇127 Metternich, Klemens von╇ 64, 88, 124 Meyer, Michael╇ 91, 95–7, 100, 104 Michener, James╇ 43, 48, 130 migration╇ 15, 35, 47, 109–4, 120, 133, 170–1 asylum seekers╇ 85, 104, 173, 178–9, 182–3, 186–7 see also specific countries Hungarian╇ 36, 38, 54, 60–1 Kosovo╇ 120, 166, 170, 172–5, 181 Macedonia╇175 North African╇ 114–6 post-World War I╇ 10–11 post-World War II German╇ 21, 38–39, 51, 64–5, 68 see also smuggling, people Miller, Joe╇ 190 Milosovic, Slobodan╇ 120 mines and mine fields╇ 46, 52, 58–59, 70, 73, 76–7, 84–5, 120 Mladic, Ratko╇ 181 Mock, Alois╇ 88, 90–1, 143 Morava River╇ 52 Morbisch╇ 93–4, 129–30, 143 Moschendorf (Nagysároslak)╇ 136 Mosonmagyaróvár╇ 12, 26–7, 71, 123, 133, 169, 176 massacre (1956)╇ 71 Mura River╇ 36 Musil, Robert╇ 126 Mussolini, Benito╇ 33 Nagy, Endre╇ 6 Nagy, György╇ 157 Nagy, Imre╇ 71, 143 Nagy, Lajos╇ 70 Nagy, László╇ 99, 160 Nagy, Sándor╇ 102 Nagycenk╇88 Nagyharsány╇120 Nagykanizsa╇ 20, 70



Index 257

Nagylak╇ 171–2, 176 Nagypaka╇30 Nagyszombat╇29 Nagyvárad╇33 Napoleon╇5–6 Napoleon III╇ 5 NATO╇ 74, 120–1, 124–5, 161, 171 Taszár airbase╇ 120 Nemes, Paul╇ 99 Nemesnép-Kobilje (Kebele)╇ 134 Németh, Miklós╇ 88–9, 91, 93–7, 144, 159 Népszabadság╇87 Neureiter, Norman╇ 180 New York Times╇22 Newsweek╇ 91, 104 Nickelsdorf╇ 24, 100, 127, 156 Niessl, Hans╇ 128, 152 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)╇114 North Korea╇ 48 Nováky, Balázs╇ 89–90

Hungary╇ 4, 6, 17, 56–7, 79–82, 86–7, 91, 96–7, 128, 133, 156, 168–9 other travel documents╇ 54, 57, 67, 79, 168 Romania╇4 Russia╇4 Serbia╇ 4, 6 Turkey╇4 United States╇ 108 Yugoslavia╇15–16 see also visas Pécs╇120 Pervukhin, Mikhail╇ 75 Petőcs, András╇ 126 Pinkamindszent (Allerheiligen)╇ 67, 136–7 Platter, Gunther╇ 126 Poland╇ 31–2, 38, 48, 50, 77, 80, 119, 121–3, 125, 128, 152, 166, 177–8, 183–6 Polish plumber╇ 112 Pornoapati╇132 Pozsgay, Imre╇ 87, 92, 95–7, 165 Pronay, Pál╇ 11

Önkéntes Határőr (“The Volunteer Border Guard”)╇62 Oplatka, András╇ 84, 89, 94, 99, 159 Orbán, Viktor╇ 125, 183 Orlai, Balázs╇ 137 Oroszvár╇ 17, 38–9 Osceola Gaming and Pizza╇ 148 Osceola, Max B.╇ 148 Osceola, Megan╇ 148 Ottoman empire╇ 10, 38, 108

Rába River╇ 137 Rajka╇ 39, 78, 86, 89, 102, 132–3, 153–5 Rákosi, Mátyás╇ 50, 56–7, 61, 63, 70 Reagan, Ronald╇ 110, 159 Red Cross Austrian╇ 100, 152 German╇160 International╇ 101, 113 refugee crisis (1989)╇ 99–100 reinventing border guard history╇ 129, 156–8, 181 Ribbentrop, Joachim von╇ 26 Róka, István╇ 98 Roma╇ 40, 112–3, 188 Roman Empire╇ 47, 50, 75, 180, 187 Romania╇ 4–6, 8, 10–11, 13–8, 31–4, 36, 38, 40, 45–8, 50, 54, 57, 61–2, 80–2, 108–10, 121, 144, 162, 166, 168, 176, 192 admission to Schengenland╇ 107–8, 176, 191 admitted to European Union╇ 123, 132 border guards╇ 80, 108–9, 176 border with Hungary╇ 171–2, 175–6, 181–2 Kent cigarettes╇ 80 refugees in Hungary╇ 87–9, 97, 99 Röszke╇ 171–2, 174, 176 Rothermere, Harold Harmsworth╇ 24, 28 Russia╇ 15, 31, 186 Rust╇88 Ruthenia╇ 31, 54

Pálffy, György╇ 55 Pályi, András╇ 80 Pan-European picnic╇ 93–8 20th anniversary╇ 140, 143 arguments over ownership╇ 144 Austrian government approval╇ 93, 96 border guard role╇ 93–8, 144 break-through╇97–8 documentation╇160 Hungarian government role╇ 94 Soviet reaction╇ 95 unification of Germany╇ 144 West German government role╇ 94 Pan-European Picnic ’89 Foundation╇ 141 Pan-European Picnic Memorial Park╇ 141 Pan-European Union╇ 92 passports╇ 3–4, 7, 10, 96–9, 177, 181 fake╇ 102, 123, 183 Federal Republic of Germany Pan-European picnic passports╇ 99 Geneva Convention passport╇ 91

258

Index

Sandburg, Carl╇ 93 Schafitel, Gundula╇ 99 Schengen (Luxembourg)╇ 107 Schengen Agreement╇ 110 Schengen Information System╇ 125, 163, 171, 179 Schengenland╇ 22, 107–10, 112–14, 121–8, 130, 132, 134, 136–7, 161, 167–8, 175, 177–93 admission of former Communist countries╇ 107, 119 asylum seekers╇ 178–9 see specific countries barriers compared to Berlin Wall╇ 177 Cold War roots╇ 109 compared to European Union╇ 107 Hungary╇ 122–3, 125–6, 161–2, 165, 171, 173, 176, 179, 181 Schleinzer, Karl,╇ 74 Schubert, Julia╇ 30 Schubert, Miksa╇ 30 Schubert, Zsigmund╇ 30 Schulz, Kurt-Werner╇ 99–101, 140 Schwarts, Linda╇ 140 Seminole Indians╇ 147 Serbia╇ 4–6, 13, 15, 17, 34–6, 119–21, 123–4, 161, 167–76, 179–81, 183, 186, 189, 192 Slav corridor╇ 8–9, 11 Slota, Jan╇ 10, 132–4 Slovakia╇ 10, 23, 31, 109, 119, 123–6, 131–4, 137–9, 149, 152, 154, 161–4. 166, 168, 170, 175, 178–9, 182–3, 185–6, 192 asylum seekers╇ 178–9 Trianon monument, Komarno╇ 133–4 Slovenia╇ 12, 119, 123–5, 134, 137–8, 154, 161, 175, 181, 185 smuggling╇ 54, 56, 80, 88, 119–21, 123, 128, 136, 162–3, 172, 175–7, 192 drugs╇ 123, 176, 188 people╇ 5, 115, 129, 164, 166, 175, 182 by river╇ 174 by taxi╇ 169, 173, 191 changing patterns╇ 164–6, 168–9 Croatia╇168 Kosovo╇ 166, 174 profiling, racial and linguistic╇ 190–1 Serbia╇ 168–9, 172 Ukraine╇ 164–6, 170 Romania╇176 Ukraine╇ 162, 164 uranium╇162 Snyder, Timothy╇ 39 Socrates, José╇ 126 Sólyom, László╇ 132, 143 Somorja╇30

Sopron╇ (Ödenburg)╇ 12–13, 39, 53, 65, 68–9, 82, 84, 90, 92–3, 95, 99, 101, 125, 130, 137, 139–43, 145, 154, 159, 175 Sopronpuszta╇ 93, 97, 99, 130, 143, 145 historical park╇ 141 post-picnic incident╇ 100 Soviet empire╇ 20, 47–8, 51, 53, 64, 84, 107, 138, 151, 154, 161, 186–7 Soviet Union╇ 31, 34, 37–8, 45–8, 50–1, 54, 57, 64–5, 75, 78, 81–2, 84–8, 102, 107, 119, 121, 125, 159, 161, 167, 177, 180, 187 Spain╇ 114–5, 117, 122, 168, 170, 178, 183 Spanish Civil Guard╇ 117 Sremski Karlovci╇ 17 St. László Association for the Preservation of Border Guard Traditions╇ 157 St. Margarethen╇ 93, 130 Stalin, Josef╇ 51, 57, 61, 63, 134 Strobl, Walter╇ 152–3 Štúrovo (Párkány)╇ 131–2 Sudetenland╇ 26, 29 Supersberger, Alfred╇ 147, 149 Switzerland╇ 4, 23, 79, 84, 107, 112, 120 border guard╇ 4 Szakács, Imre╇ 158 Szatmárnémeti (Satu Mare)╇ 33, 108 Száva, Krsztin and Bosko╇ 174 Széchényi, László╇ 18 Szeged╇ 50, 62, 120, 171–3 Székely, Jánós╇ 85, 87, 95 Szeklers╇36 Szendres, Lőrinc╇ 82 Szent Királyi Magyarország╇18 Szentgotthárd Pass╇ 59, 69, 139 Szentpéterfa╇ 65, 130, 138–9, 152 Szepesi, István╇ 162 Szili, Katalin╇ 125, 134 Szombathely╇ 139, 153 Szoreg╇172 Teleki, Pál╇ 32, 35 terrorism╇ 108–10, 121, 125, 136, 178–9, 187, 191–2 The Nation╇81 Tiso, Josef╇ 26 Tiszasziget╇172 Tito, Josip Broz╇ 50, 57, 61–2, 134 Tőkés, László╇ 109, 144 Tompa╇172 Torda (Turda)╇ 34 Trabant╇ 99, 141, 143 Transleithania╇6 Transylvania╇ 3, 6, 10, 13, 16–8, 28, 32–4, 80, 88–9, 120, 141



Index 259

Trianon, Treaty of╇ 10–11, 13–14, 17–18, 20–1, 26–7, 30, 34–5, 40, 48, 63–5, 72, 107, 131–3, 145, 151, 167 Commission on Czechoslovak Affairs╇ 10 Trigranit╇ 149, 151 Turkey╇ 4, 6, 38, 108, 111, 123, 144, 170, 179, 182, 186 Turner, Frederick Jackson╇ 186 Uchnar, Miroslav╇ 163 Ugar╇109 Újmagyarország╇127 Újszentiván╇172 Újvidék (Novi Sad)╇ 17, 37 massacre (1942)╇ 35 Ukraine╇ 3, 31, 38, 46, 55, 108, 116, 121–4, 152, 161–4, 166–8, 170–2, 175–7, 180, 182–4, 189 United Nations╇ 70, 77, 88, 120 High Commissioner for Refugees╇ 101, 113, 182 United States╇ 9, 31, 45, 66–7, 102, 109–11, 113–14, 116, 122, 141, 146, 151, 159, 162, 168, 177, 180, 184–5, 187–9, 191–2 Arizona╇188–92 Chinese immigration╇ 5, 166 crown of St. Stephen╇ 145 Uzhhorod (Ungvár)╇ 163 Vác╇30 Vállaj╇108 Valuch, Tibor╇ 56 Vámos, Miklós╇ 81 Vámosszabadi╇ 27–8, 102, 154–6 Vas Kor╇66 Vásárhelyi, István╇ 171 Vidus, Tibor╇ 100, 158 Vienna╇ 3, 5–6, 12, 19–20, 22, 25, 68, 77, 91, 93, 99, 101–2, 124, 126–7, 129–31, 146, 153, 155, 173, 189 Danube canal graffiti╇ 113, 190 Hungarian shoplifters╇ 132 Prater╇127

Vienna Award first╇ 24, 26, 29–31 second╇ 32, 34 visas╇ 7, 22, 107, 113, 120–1, 123, 125, 167, 175–6, 180–1, 185 Hungarian╇ 79, 167 sold by Austrian diplomats╇ 131 United States╇ 31, 168, 177 Visegrad group╇ 119 Vitray Tamás╇ 68 Volksdeutsch╇ 29, 37 Vollmann, William╇ 49 Voroshilov, Klimint╇ 55 Vörösmarty, Mihály╇ 21 Vranitsky, Franz╇ 88, 129 Waha, Andreas╇ 93, 99 Wałęsa, Lech╇ 159 walls see barriers and walls Warner, Carolyn╇ 131 Warsaw Pact╇ 74, 87, 112–13, 121–2, 132, 148, 161, 187 Wasserstein, Bernard╇ 85 Werth, General Henrik╇ 36, 38 West, Patsy╇ 147 Will, George╇ 190 Williams, Derek╇ 47 World Bank╇ 85 World Cup (2006)╇ 130 Wray, Fay╇ 45 Yardley, Jonathan╇ 163 Yugoslavia╇ 9–11, 33, 35–7, 39, 51, 64, 83, 120, 176 dobrovóljac╇16 optants╇16 post-Trianon border policies╇ 16 post-Trianon boundary survey╇ 15 protection of minorities,╇ 16 Záhony╇ 53, 122, 171 Zimmermann, Karl╇ 21 Zombor╇15 Zsira╇ 99, 139–40