The Incidental Tourist Page 17
Much earlier, Essen figured prominently in the story of bitterness and despair that, subsequent to the collapse of the liberal Weimar Republic, led to the rise of militarism and the emergence of Hitler. Echoing what happened to them at the end of the Franco–Prussian war (1870–71), the French (egged on by Australia’s own Prime Minister William ‘Billy’ Hughes) demanded massive reparations. Unable to collect from the bankrupted nation, France and Belgium invaded the Ruhr in 1923 with the intent of seizing German coal to support their steel industry. The other former allies (particularly Britain) tried to dissuade them, but French cavalry and armoured cars drove through Essen, with contemporary, local accounts relating the deep hatreds stirred up by their presence. By 1925, forced to acknowledge that a psychologically grievous mistake had been made, the occupying troops were withdrawn, but the damage was done.
The precise numbers are hard to calculate, but it’s thought that some 3 per cent of the 1940 world population (then 2.3 billion) died as a consequence of the Second World War. Unlike the situation in the First World War, many were civilians. That reflects both the advent of big planes that could strike deep into enemy territory, and the development of more sophisticated killing devices, culminating with the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Apart from being blown or burned to bits, large numbers of non-combatants were gassed (in trucks with carbon monoxide, or at death camps with IG Farben’s Zyklon B), machine gunned (particularly in Eastern Europe) or otherwise disposed of in strategies driven by an absurd mythology of racial superiority leading to ‘justifiable’ genocide. In the Ruhr, and at other industrial sites throughout Germany, many forced labourers (including prisoners of war) succumbed to the effects of systematic abuse, overwork and starvation.
When peace finally came, though any further experiment with financial retribution was ruled out, there was a deep conviction that those with primary responsibility for 80 million or so deaths should pay a heavy price. The result was the 1945–52 Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials that led to the execution or imprisonment of the worst offenders. In the main, the industrialists (including the Krupps) got off rather lightly. Most were soon back at work and redirecting the national capacity for quality, innovative manufacturing in much more positive directions.
Those who prosecuted the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity would, while understanding the link between coal, steel and the murderous war waged by Hitler and his minions, have had no further reason to think negatively about coal. Since then, the emerging, science-based understanding that anthropogenic climate change may ultimately be an even greater threat to human survival than the bombs and guns of the twentieth century has led to the consciousness that we have to stop using the atmosphere as a dump for the excess CO2 generated by the continued, mindless exploitation of the world’s non-renewable fossil fuel reserves.
Surely there are much better, long-term uses for these complex chemical products that, when burned, cause progressive, and irreversible (for millennia) climate change? Some are already describing the failure of those with power to act decisively in ways that limit greenhouse gas emissions as a crime against humanity. Where will that lead? One way or other, there will be a price to pay!
CHAPTER 24
The synagogue
ON THE FINAL LEG of our May/June 2012 meeting/conference circuit we found ourselves seated beneath the 48-metre-high domed ceiling of the ornate Moorish revival/Art Nouveau synagogue in Szeged, Hungary. Still used occasionally for religious services (it seats 1300), the partially restored building now serves all of Szeged’s citizens as a community centre and concert hall. There was time to look around as the hall filled in anticipation of an organ recital by Hungarian Xaver Varnus.
Historically, the Szeged Synagogue has seen less felicitous times. Photographs prominently displayed in the foyer illustrate a not-so-distant time when, stacked high with the furniture and personal belongings of the dispossessed, the degraded building once anchored the Nazi-era ghetto, with the ‘surplus to requirements’ Jewish population being crammed into houses nearby. We were there for a musical entertainment as part of a celebration of discovery and science but, while beautifully restored, the synagogue also reminds us how the dark forces of authoritarianism can manipulate mindless populism to destroy good people and poison even the most technologically advanced societies.
Finding a seat close to the stage, the general ambience recalled weddings, funerals and the churchgoing years of my Protestant upbringing. Unfamiliar, though, were the little hinged doors that seemed to mark small storage areas boxed-in to the back of the pew in front. Curious in the quiet moments before the massive organ (more than two thousand pipes) dominated our senses, I opened the mini compartment in front of me, found it was empty and realised that this was likely to have held a prayer book (Siddur) or even a prayer shawl (Tallit) belonging to a regular worshipper. Having just seen something of the synagogue’s darker history, my mind focused on the possible fate of that nameless (and likely prosperous) man who would have paid a substantial tithe to sit, week after week, year after year, where I now sat. The women would, of course, have been upstairs.
Did he have the good fortune to emigrate before the Second World War, an option embraced by many during the Regency (1920–44) of Hungarian Admiral Miklós Horthy? Though anti-Semitism was rife in Hungary, Horthy defied Adolf Hitler and delayed any Jewish ‘resettlements’ until (in 1944) the Nazis forced his resignation. A much worse possibility is that our congregant stayed too long and was deported during the 1945 liquidation of the Hungarian ghettos. Many were sent by rail to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau near Krakow in Poland.
In 1998, we experienced at first-hand the deep horror of Auschwitz–Birkenau. Constructed as a Polish army barracks, the twenty or so original Auschwitz buildings present as inoffensive, 1920s to 1950s brick apartment blocks. Any such illusion is, though, dispelled by the too familiar, and deeply cynical Arbeit Macht Frei (‘Work Makes You Free’) sign over the main gate. The less substantial huts and gas chambers of the adjacent Birkenau site were largely demolished by the fleeing Nazis, but enough remains to connect us with the photographs of emaciated and recently murdered prisoners taken at the time of liberation by Ukranian soldiers of the Red Army.
Seeing the Auschwitz collections of human hair, discarded shoes and luggage recalls political theorist Hannah Arendt’s summary of ‘the banality of evil’. Such generalisations help us to deal intellectually with genocide, but it can be the small things, perhaps an absence, that connect us emotionally. Reflecting on the enormous loss of human potential resulting from the holocaust, three of the nine Nobel Laureates (Ada Yonath and Aaron Ciechanover from Israel, and Andrew Schally from the United States) who came to this scientific meeting in Szeged were from Polish/Jewish families.
Completed in 1907, the Szeged Synagogue is the second biggest in Hungary and the fourth largest in Europe. In 1907, the Jewish population was evidently close to seven thousand, with four thousand or so remaining at the time of the Nazi occupation. Though about half returned after the cessation of hostilities in 1945, the congregation had fallen to around a thousand by 1958, as Hungarians of all religious affiliations fled their country following the failed 1956 revolution against the Soviet occupiers. Some fifteen thousand came to Australia, with the 2006 census showing that there were 67,616 citizens identifying as Hungarian/Australians, including 7.4 per cent who declared Judaism as their religion. Many others went to Canada, the United States and, of course, Israel.
In the early years of the twentieth century, Szeged was the administrative centre for a region that included substantial lands in what is now Serbia and Romania. The Austrian takeover of Serbia triggered the First World War, but Romania joined the Allied forces opposing Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany and Emperor Franz Josef I’s Austro-Hungarian Empire. The territorial carve-up resulting from the 1921 Treaty of Trianon saw Szeged lose much of its relevance, with the resultant economic downturn contributing to th
e continued diminution of the Jewish population.
A further consequence of this Imperial dismemberment was that the University of Kolozsvár, founded by Emperor Franz Joseph 1 in 1872 in what is now Romania, moved to Hungary and restarted as the University of Szeged. Prominent among the early Professors was Budapest-born Albert Szent-Györgyi. Raised as part of the landed minor (Calvinist) nobility, Szent-Györgyi graduated in medicine from Semmelweis University and then trained as a research physiologist and chemist in the University of Groningen, Netherlands, and Cambridge in the United Kingdom. A dynamic and colourful character who loved tennis, motorbikes, music, fast cars, women (with four marriages) and biochemistry, he exited the First World War as a consequence of a self-inflicted wound, helped Jewish friends escape and, having tried to negotiate a treaty with the Allies, spent 1944–45 as a fugitive from the German Gestapo. After contributing to the post-Second World War establishment of the Hungarian Academy of Science, Szent-Györgyi left permanently for the United States in 1947 to establish an Institute for Muscle Research at Wood’s Hole on Cape Cod. There he did substantial research in the broad areas of actin (muscle) biophysics and cancer well into his eighth decade, protested against the Vietnam War, and died in 1986 aged ninety-three. We belonged to different scientific ‘clubs’, and I did not meet him.
What took us to Szeged was the seventy-fifth anniversary celebration of Szent-Györgyi’s 1937 Nobel Prize in Medicine, the only such award for work done in Hungary, though thirteen Nobelists have a strong Hungarian connection. My immediate acceptance of this 2012 invitation reflected a vague awareness of (and respect for) Szent-Györgyi as a courageous and thoughtful guy (he wrote about the human condition in The Crazy Ape) and a recent fascination with the history of that part of Europe. Some of the senior scientists who were invited were asked because their contributions reflected broad themes followed by Szent-Györgyi, while others were involved in areas of interest to current Hungarian researchers. I was clearly in the latter category, with our particular host being the immunologist Peter Hegyi.
Having free time after the end of the Essen meeting (see chapter 23, ‘The coalmine’) we arrived a few days early. After landing in Budapest, we were driven the two hours or so to Szeged. This was our second time in Hungary – we’d spent an interesting week in Budapest twenty years earlier while participating in the 8th International Congress of Immunology, the first in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communist Russia. Not too many countries have endured three, very different imperial administrations – Hapsburg, Nazi and Soviet – through the course of one century! In 1992, Hungary was just opening up to Western influence and, having escaped the Second World War destruction inflicted by the Russians on Warsaw, the late nineteenth/early twentieth century streetscapes, particularly across the Danube in Pest, were being used as movie sets for places like Paris. Our hotel was in Buda and, among the many good memories was that much of the food – goulash, soups, sausages and stews – was both sourced from the countryside nearby and loaded with paprika. Red peppers seem to be pretty much the national symbol! Air-dried and ground to give the familiar powdered paprika, the pepper varieties range from hotter to sweeter.
As we were soon to learn, Szeged is the home of a much-appreciated sweet paprika that features prominently in the famous fish (carp) stew of the region. We didn’t get to the Paprika Museum but, accommodated in the Hotel Soliel near the centre, we walked a lot through the streets and parks and along the banks of the Tisza River. Flowing from the Ukraine through Hungary to finally enter the Danube in Serbia, the Tisza determined the character of modern Szeged by flooding massively in 1879 and destroying all but 265 of the 5723 houses (165 people died). Visiting the disaster zone, the Hapsburg Emperor Franz Josef I promised that this ancient city would rise again. And it did, in the style of a mini Vienna, with the imposing plazas, stately buildings and, of course, the substantial flood walls that can be seen today. The architectural ambience is of an important city from the late Austro-Hungarian period.
Paprika also features in the story that led to the 1937 Nobel Prize for Szent-Györgyi. Recruited to the recently formed University of Szeged in 1930 to head a new Department of Medicinal Chemistry. He continued with the work on the antioxidant hexuronic acid (vitamin C) that he had isolated during his earlier tenure at Cambridge University. In a priority dispute with biochemist Charles Glen King at the University of Pittsburgh, and cut off from his previous source of primary material (citrus fruit and adrenal glands), he was desperate to confirm and extend his findings. The story goes that, having tested the local vegetables without success, the breakthrough came when his wife Nelly served red peppers for dinner. Wanting neither to eat them nor offend her, he took the peppers to his laboratory that evening and discovered that they were loaded with vitamin C. Vitamin C is, of course anti-scorbutic (prevents scurvy), and it was Szent-Györgyi who changed the ‘chemical’ name from hexuronic acid to ascorbic acid. His Nobel citation reads, ‘For his discoveries in connection with the biological combustion process with special reference to vitamin C and the catalysis of fumaric acid’.
Most of the international participants flew in and out for the anniversary celebration, but the few extra days we spent in Szeged before the meeting allowed us to engage more closely with the country and with the local scientific community. The University of Szeged prides itself as being a research university in the Western tradition. Welcomed at a dinner with university leaders, we later visited the nationally prominent, university-run Sagvari High School. I met with the local immunology group, listened to short scientific presentations from a number of junior and senior faculty members and gave a talk at a round-table discussion organised by the regional committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It’s important to be an Academy member, or to be seen as being on that trajectory, as the Hungarian Academy of Sciences administers much of the research budget.
The quality of the science was high though it was obvious they had to work smart and make optimal use of the available clinical material. Hungary is not a rich country and the level of research support is relatively low. In order to bring in extra dollars (or euros), the innovative and highly professional medical school teaches both Hungarian and English language streams, with the latter group being particularly well qualified to work anywhere in the European Economic Community. I hope that hasn’t been compromised by Brexit!
Peter and Szilvia Hegyi walked us around the town, and hosted an evening at their house, where we met both male and female university colleagues and their partners in a more casual setting and had our first experience of the indeed excellent Szeged fish stew. We also enjoyed a performance of Madame Butterfly at the Szeged Opera. Constructed after the flood, the house is based both architecturally and organisationally (there’s a full-time professional orchestra and opera company) on the magnificent Vienna Opera. The better themes of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire persist in both countries, though we’d not expected to confront this in Szeged.
Driven out to the Pusztaszer Protected Landscape, which serves as both a wildlife refuge and a folk history museum, we walked in the model village that showed something of Hungarian rural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Particularly intriguing was the massive 1894 cyclorama Arrival of the Hungarians by Arpad Feszty, depicting the early settlement (invasion) of Hungary from the east. Displayed in the museum rotunda, this enormous expanse of painted canvas highlights the historic origins and ethnic diversity of the Hungarian population. The vast painting also reminds us that, being flat and relatively featureless, this part of Europe has long been a highway for cavalry, whether mounted on horses or in tanks and armoured cars that roll across the landscape, from east to west, west to east. As a spectacle, the cyclorama has been rendered historic by modern audio-visual technology, which is why, I guess, it languishes in this somewhat remote place.
Another insight into Hungarian culture came with a day spent back in Budapest visiting an old friend, Anna Erdei, who is widely known
for her good sense and energetic participation in the International Union of Immunological Societies and works at the science campus of the historic Eötvös Loránd University. After a few hours talking science with staff and students, Anna drove us to see some of the sights that we had missed on our earlier visit. Particularly impressive was the peaceful Garden of Philosophy that, high over the city, features the work of Hungarian Wagner Landor (1922–77). His eight ‘statues for better mutual understanding’ emphasise the need to focus on commonality rather than differences, the perception that dominated my thoughts about the Szeged Synagogue. Science has always been outgoing and international, a worldview that still describes too few human institutions and practices.
Not long before the Szent-Györgyi invitation arrived, my interest in Hungarian history had been piqued by the chance discovery (from his obituary in the New York Times) of English soldier/hero and travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. Paddy’s derring-do exploits in occupied Crete during the Second World War are portrayed in the movie Ill-met by Moonlight (starring Dirk Bogarde), based on the book by his fellow warrior Stanley Moss. But what does Fermor have to do with Hungary? Two fascinating, complex books written by him long after the end of the Second World War, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, describe how, as an adventurous eighteen year old in 1934, he set out to walk from London to Constantinople. The aim had been to live off the land but, being upper class, personable, good looking and with a gift for languages, he was soon taken up by members of the old European landed gentry and passed from household to household as he headed south and east. One family even lent him a horse for his ongoing journey!