Echoes From A Past Not Really My Own

I'm beginning to wonder if even the Hungarians themselves know Hungarian. This morning at 6:30 I arrived at the Eger Palyaudvar (pieawudvawrr/ Train Station) to purchase a round trip ticket to Budapest, 6:50 departure. On the walk over from my apartment, about twenty minutes, I practiced, out loud, "Kérjuk, Budapest, hat ut ven, körutazás" (kayrrook, budapesht, hot ut ven, koorrutawzosh." Over and over, I repeated "Kérjuk, Budapest, körutazás" like a mantra, fingering the scrap of paper I had scribbled it on like a rosary.

So when I say to the ticket agent -- in what I can only describe as impeccable, and, more importantly, unambiguous Hungarian -- "Kérjuk, Budapest, hat ut ven, körutazás," he looks at me, adrift within my syllables.

I concede: maybe the körutazás should have come after the Budapest, or the hat ut ven before, but, given the context, what possibly could I have been saying to so confound him? Even if I had shown up speaking Mandarin (and not perfect Hungarian), wouldn't the fact that we both were in a train station, that Budapest is a train stop, and that the next departure was scheduled for 6:50, minutes away, wouldn't that combination of clues, even under the most unintelligible of exchanges have prompted the ticket agent to hazard the Hungarian equivalent of "Budapest? One way or two way?" There appear to be few leaps of logic when it comes to Hungarian rail service. 

Baffling as Hungarian is, it doesn't scare me. German scares me. Irrational as I may be, German remains, to my ears, fixed in the larynx of Nazism. As a Jew I cringe at the sound of it. Everything I hear sounds like six degrees of separation from Adolph Hitler. Again, I fully admit the irrationality of it.


Still, it is with some apprehension and a bit of anxiety that I find myself now in seat 25A of Lufthansa flight #1337 en route to Berlin for five sprechen sie Deutsch-filled days.

My trip into the acme of the axis powers is not entirely involuntary. Berlin, nor anything within Germany's borders, was on my to-do list. But, each year the German Fulbright Commission hosts a pan-European conference, to which as a European Fulbrighter, I was invited.

I could have said no, turned down the invitation with no excuses, purely for fear of being immersed in German/y, but I decided that to do so would be childish, that what happened happened long ago, in a much different time, in a much different country.

I know this. And yet I am not convinced that, once there, I won't break out in hives or have some other kind of hysterical reaction.

To prepare myself for a soft landing, I had dinner last night in Eger's sole "German" restaurant, the HDH, or something-something Hofbräuhaus. It's a German restaurant, but everyone who works there is Hungarian and speaks Hungarian. Worst case scenario I figured is that I'd end up eating some kind of wurst when I thought I'd ordered wienerschnitzel. I read the laminated menu, each page of which featured a picture of the stereotypical blonde, buxom biergarten fräulein hugging a brood of brews close to her ample bosom, laughing heartily at something no doubt saucy shouted off camera.

Unfortunately, my server looked nothing like the fräuleins; he looked like James Carville. 

Through a series of pointings and "igens" I managed to get some kind of pork thing with roasted potatoes wrapped in bacon (as I've said before, Hungary is no place for pigs), which would have been good had the pork "loin" not been sauteed into a wafer. With it I had a nice mug of a special sour-cherry beer, which, fortunately, James Carville did not attempt to deliver nestled in his cleavage.

Had it been just this amount of Germanness in the restaurant, I would have been fine. But, in order to cultivate maximum Aryan authenticity the music was all oom-pah-pah and Bavarian drinking songs. All very cheery, and upbeat, the kinds of songs you and a fräulein can swing huge steins to in unison, and maybe even klink some.Trinken, trinken, trinken!

The problem was that I didn't picture myself swinging steins with either of the HDH fräuleins, nor did I see myself merrily drinking to these songs with anyone else. Instead, innocent as the music sounded, I pictured a couple of SS guys, caps tilted back, drinking and singing those songs, pinching the fräuleins and generally yukking it up after a long day of deporting Jews. 


I am certain that because they were authentic, the songs filling the room had also filled rooms during and through the second world war, and had, for at least a while, given comfort and pleasure to Nazis as they went about the day-to-day business of persecuting, and ultimately exterminating, Jews (and yes, others).

So, you can see how, if I can manifest that kind of darkness out of simple German drinking songs over a Hungarian restaurant's sound system, who knows what kind of paranoia I'll come up with once I have both feet on the ground in Germany.  


One thing I can assure you of: for better or worse, I will be all ears.