The fate of the Radnóti statue in Abda

The name of Miklós Radnóti has been all over the news in the last week or so. Radnóti, who lost his life in the Holocaust, is considered to be one of the great poets of Hungary. He died on November 10, 1944, during a forced march of a Jewish labor battalion from Bor, Serbia, through Hungary toward the German-Austrian border. Most of the battalion died en route in one way or the other. Radnóti was most likely shot and buried in a mass grave in a small village, Abda, adjacent to the city of Győr. In 1980 a statue was erected in his honor at the site where he was killed.

Why all this sudden interest in Radnóti? First, because on November 15 in Miskolc a neo-Nazi group called the Hungarian National Front decided to make a bonfire of books that were not to their members’ liking. Among the books journalists on the scene discovered was a volume of the complete works of Miklós Radnóti.

The statue of Miklós Radnóti before its destruction

Some people found that shocking enough, but two days later the country learned the sad news that an unknown perpetrator had destroyed the statue of Radnóti in Abda. A local paper, Kisalföld, first reported the news. When MTI picked up the story, the agency decided to be extremely cautious in its wording: “The Radnóti statue broke.”  Yes, just broke. I guess by itself. The decision makers at MTI liked this description so much that they repeated it every time the fate of the statue came up. Exactly three times.

Soon enough, however, it became known that the statue didn’t just break by itself but that a car hit it with such force that the statue actually broke in half. In fact, the damage is so great that it will have to be replaced by a replica of the original.

The Hungarian left immediately assumed that the destruction of the statue was deliberate and that the motive behind it was anti-Semitism. The politician who is the district’s socialist candidate for next year’s election expressed his opinion that the “guilty ones” will soon be found and that they will get what they deserve.

Meanwhile, the police began to investigate and came to the conclusion that it was a simple car accident. However, if it was an accident, why did the driver flee the scene without reporting it? 444.hu, an investigative Internet paper, immediately raised doubts about the police’s description of the likely events. The journalist pointed out that the statue is at least 10 meters from the main road. In order to run into it one would have to break through a guard rail and drive across a ditch. Here is a picture of the spot and a Google map of the same.

The highway and the evergreens that surrounded the statue

Cink.hu, on the other hand, accused the left-liberal media of manipulation, which they said began already with the local paper that first reported the incident. After all, the reporter of Kisalföld called attention to the fact that this is not the first time that Radnóti’s statue was defaced. A couple of years back someone poured red paint all over it. So, their assumption was that it was a deliberate political act. Cink.hu also found fault with ATV’s reporting of the case and complained in general that the left-liberal media had already decided the case without having any concrete information of the circumstances. The reporter also mentioned that at the time of the accident, around 2 a.m., there was dense fog in the area and it was therefore quite possible that the driver accidentally drove into the statue.

Gépnarancs, a left-wing blog, is also certain that the destruction of statue couldn’t have been accidental. It must, the blogger surmises, have something to do with the Miskolc book burning.

This is what the statue looked like after the accident

Within a day the police found an abandoned and badly damaged black Mercedes in Öttevény, a village west of Abda. The next day, on November 19, Szabolcs P., a twenty-five-year-old from Pápa, went to the police and told the following story of accidentally driving into Radnóti’s statue. The car was not his, it was borrowed. He and a friend of his were on their way to Győr to a bar when in the fog he lost his way and accidentally drove across the evergreen shrubs behind the statute and crashed into it. He got scared and drove away, but then he ran out of gas, which is why he abandoned the car in Öttevény. He and his companion hitched a ride to Győr from where they took a bus to Pápa.

The abandoned black Mercedes with damaged left front

The Győr police  seems to be satisfied with this story. However, another local online paper,  inforabakoz.hu, has serious doubts about the veracity of Szabolcs P.’s story. According to the driver of the Mercedes they were traveling to Győr, but what remains of the evergreen shrubs indicates that the car hit the statue traveling from the other direction–that is, it was hit by a car traveling away from Győr. From the direction Szabolcs P. claims he hit the statue there are no tire marks. Moreover, the car was found in Öttevény, which is not on the way to Győr where the two men were allegedly heading.

I would also like to add my own observation concerning the damaged car. As one can see, it is the left side of the Mercedes that had to come into in contact with the statue. But if Szabolcs P. was driving toward Győr, it should have been the right-hand side that got damaged.

Interestingly, the website of the Győr police which, by the way, has very little useful information on the accident itself, has a small news item asking people whether the future replacement statue should be surrounded by some kind of barrier, like an iron railing. The article also says that members of the Győr police driving at 50 km/h reached the place where the statue once stood in 7 seconds. And, yes, they were driving from Győr toward Abda and not vice versa as Szabolcs P. claimed he was driving. So, perhaps the police after all know something that they haven’t bothered to share with the public.

These delaying tactics of the Hungarian police are regrettable. It would be much better to inform the public of police findings as soon as possible. Otherwise doubts remain, just as they remain in the case of the Baja video.

Was Ferenc Kölcsey, author of the Hungarian national anthem, gay?

Although I realize there is great interest in Viktor Obán’s trip to London, I’m going to turn my attention elsewhere today. But before moving on, I would like to call your attention to an interview with Orbán that appeared in The Daily Telegraph today. Some readers of Hungarian Spectrum have already discussed this interview in the comments section, but, if you haven’t read it yet, it is definitely worth taking a look at. I might add here that the prime minister’s office was quick to charge that the Telegraph‘s reporter falsified certain parts of the interview. The specific passage the spokesman referred to concerns the reporter’s question whether “he could become an authoritarian strongman, the Vladimir Putin of his country,” to which he answered: “The risk is there. . . though it is much smaller if Hungary is economically successful.” “He thinks,” the reporter continued, “that circumstances have changed.”

Today I’m turning to a nineteenth-century poet, the author of the lyrics of Hungary’s national anthem, Ferenc Kölcsey (1790-1838), who became a minor online sensation in the wake of a literary historian’s revelation that most likely the greatly revered Kölcsey was gay.

Now you have to understand that the literature on Kölcsey is enormous and there is nothing he ever wrote, as far as we know, that remains unpublished. His early love poems may not have identified the object of his love, but his letters did. Since 1960 his surviving letters, all 420 of them, have been available. Among these letters are several addressed to Pál Szemere, a fellow poet, which indicate that Kölcsey’s love poems were most likely were written to him.

Ferenc Kölcsey, portrait by Anton Einsle, 1835 / Wikipedia.org

There were other reasons to suspect possible homosexuality. We know a great deal about Kölcsey’s life but nothing about any female companions. Here and there in some of his poems he talks about a mysterious “girl,” but that girl is nameless and faceless. We also know about his melancholic nature and his references to his unfulfilled desires. But literary historians simply didn’t want to dwell on the secret life of one of Hungary’s great poets. The author of the national anthem’s lyrics was untouchable. At least until now.

Krisztián Nyáry, a literary historian, is in the middle of publishing a series of books devoted to the great love affairs of Hungarian poets and writers. He promotes his books by publishing short “teasers” on Facebook. It was here that the other day he had a post on Kölcsey. Nyáry identified at least two men Kölcsey most likely was in love with. The first was Ferenc Kállay, a schoolmate of Kölcsey in the famous Calvinist Debrecen Kollégium, where the orphaned boy was sent at the age of six. We know relatively little about their relationship because no early correspondence between the two survived. About the second, however, Pál Szemere, a fellow poet and writer, we know a lot. I was able to read Kölcsey’s letters to Szemere and have no doubt that Nyáry correctly analyzed his feelings. The letters are available on the Internet. Szemere’s letters to Kölcsey are not so easy to access. As far as I could ascertain, in this country they are available only in Columbia University’s Butler Library.

According to Nyáry, Kölcsey’s passionate love was not returned by Szemere, who looked upon Kölcsey as a good friend and not more. Szemere was known to be a ladies’ man, and about three years after he met Kölcsey he got married. When Kölcsey learned about the impending marriage, he wrote and sent to Szemere a poem entitled “Jegyváltó” (Engagement): “„Mért e reszkető könyű szememben? / Mért ez édes órán új remény? / Bájos arcod, százszor boldog álom, / A múltban s jövőben nem találom.” (Why the fluttering tears in my eyes? / Why is there new hope in this sweet hour? / Your charming face is a hundred times a happy dream, / I cannot find in the past and the future.) And he finished his letter with these words:  „Ölellek véghetetlen szerelemmel, mint mátkád ölelni soha sem foghat – ez a szív nem a lyánykájé.” (I embrace you with infinite love as your betrothed never will–this heart does not belong to that girl.) I don’t think that he could have been more explicit.

The fact that Kölcsey had homosexual desires is not the important issue. Many poets and writers did, and this is not why I decided to talk about this case. What is important here is Hungarian society’s total inability to handle the issue of homosexuality. Surely, no scholar who ever dealt with Kölcsey’s oeuvre could have missed the obvious signs in his letters to Szemere. Yet they decided to ignore them or even to hide them from the public. The result is a misinterpretation of Kölcsey’s literary work, which centered on his contemplation of issues of love, friendship, and love of country. As Nyáry says, once he recovered from his unrequited love of Szemere, he devoted his life to the betterment of his country. As if he transferred his love from a person to the homeland and its people.

So far only the Internet crowd and the few papers that picked up the story have been buzzing about Kölcsey. I can hardly wait to see when Hungary’s literary establishment will discuss the matter. I’m curious what kind of explanations will be offered.