Le Grand Tour
“The areas of Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg that are home to the European institutions are slick, functional, sinister. You don’t see anybody walking around on Sundays. On the rue de la Loi, in Brussels, a statue entitled ‘The Walking Man’ has been put up. A sleepwalker steps off a pedestal into mid-air: the symbolism is striking. And our banknotes… rather than the faces of Dante, Goethe, Mozart or Victor Hugo, instead of landscape of Tuscany, Bavaria or a Grecian temple, we have fictitious bridges and arches designed on a computer. Are we afraid of ourselves, of our history, of our identity? Or are we too lazy to define and take ownership of them?”, the French journalist and novelist Olivier Guez asks in the preface to this work, for which he invited 27 writers (one for every member state of the European Union) to write a text connecting their country to European culture and history, with total latitude to decide for themselves on the form and the content of their contribution (our translation throughout).
“In the 18th century, the Grand Tour took young aristocrats from northern Europe to the Mediterranean shorelines. Here, they would complete their education and their knowledge of the Humanities”, Guez points out by way of background, before going on to add that “more modestly, our Grand Tour will wander through the European imagination and invite its readers to come along on this utopian Trans Europe Express (…). It relates its destinations, urban and rural, it examines the Europe of today. It often goes back in time; we are an old continent. During the European Presidency, it presents an unprecedented panorama of contemporary European literature, a self-portrait of Europe by its writers, including some of the best of the continent”. In its own way, it also gives our disembodied Europe the bit of extra soul it is so sadly lacking.
You cannot summarise a book of this kind, you have to read it; but here are a few extracts chosen to give our readers a small taste of it.
In “Hohenschönhausen: the prison that did not exist”, German writer Daniel Kehlmann submerges us in the memories of a woman who was once held in this Stasi prison in the former GDR. He describes the former East German state as above all a “powerful system of surveillance, a labyrinth of reciprocal observation in which half the population was constantly writing reports on the other half”. This happened in Europe, just over 30 years ago.
Having continued our journey to Treriksröset, where the borders of Norway, Sweden and Finland meet, the Swedish writer Björn Larsson reflects that “for the Europeans of the continent, the Nordic countries seem to be on the periphery, as if they were less European than the rest”. He goes on to state, not without humour, that “strangely enough, many Swedes, even those who are in favour of the European Union, would probably agree with them. To the Swedes, Sweden is somewhere you leave to go to Europe… which, even today, the Swedish are apt to refer to as ‘the continent’, just like the British do. In Sweden at least, Europe is a ‘non-place’, both literally and figuratively, and definitely ‘elsewhere’”. “By the age of 19, I had only visited two European countries”, writes the author, even though he would define himself as a European; “at the same age, my daughter had been to around a dozen, without ever worrying about how long she stayed there. For her, Europe is not a place, real or symbolic, but a space of potential. It is no surprise that the majority of young people are pro-European, not for political or economic reasons, but because the European Union gives them more opportunities to live, to work, to study, to make friendships and to love”. His conclusion: “I would therefore say that a European, a ‘real’ European, is somebody who can seriously imagine themselves living, working, making friends, having children and loving in more than one European country; somebody who is willing to learn one or more European languages; in other words, somebody who is disposed to leaving his or her original identity behind and adopting another one, or suspending the very question of a national adherence that is imposed upon one rather than chosen”.
While Slovenia’s Brina Svit takes us on a tour of the town of Nova Gorica, which was built after the Second World War 100 metres from the Italian town of Gorizia, Agata Tuszinska of Poland takes us into the ghetto of Warsaw in search of her own roots. The ghetto wall, of which only a few sections remain today, is “always in me”, she comments. “It is what detaches me from Poland and it is what attaches me to it. It is the mark of the stigmatisation, the trace of the link with the melancholy landscape of the past. This wall of the Warsaw ghetto, which has not existed for 80 years, separated the living people on the Aryan side from the condemned, the people of the ghetto, where almost all my mother’s family was”, the author, whose parents hid her own origins from her, tells us. “For years, I had no idea that I was part of it. That I was one of those who had to live on the wrong side of the wall. For years, I did not know what they went through during the war. Not only had I never heard of Jews, I got the impression that I did not know any. I thought that in Poland, in Warsaw where I was born, there weren’t any Jews. I was 19 when I found out the truth”. She concludes this poignant account by saying that “the Warsaw before the extermination does not exist. It exists even less in other cities affected by the war. Removed from the surface of the earth and stuffed inside it, rebuilt on its own rubble, it carries this debris and these ruins inside itself”.
The Romanian Norman Manea invites us to Bucovine, which is shared between Ukraine to the north, with the city of Chernivtsi, and Romania to the south with the city of Suceava, where he was born. He sets out to illustrate the “ruptures caused by the disasters of two world wars”. “Borders and populations then displaced, contemporary European life and culture still bear the scars”, he writes, lamenting the fact that “the effects of xenophobic extremism are still making themselves felt today in Europe, not excluding in my old homeland, in Romania”. He adds that the “painful dismemberment of Bucovine can also be seen as a warning to the Europe of the moment and in favour of the balance of forces assured by the existence of the European Community and the North Atlantic Treaty, which helps to vouchsafe a Europe that is at least partially coherent and democratic”.
The Italian writer Rosella Postorino takes us to Ventotene, on the trail of Ernesto Rossi and Altiero Spinelli, in a story of love and activism, a long way away from the content of the manifesto drawn up on the island in 1941, entitled “For a Free and United Europe”. Flemish Belgian Lize Spit provides a humorous account of the introduction of the euro in the small village of Viersel (commune of Zandhoven in the province of Antwerp), where she was born in 1988. And to finish this overview, there are some very enjoyable pages about the history of the textile industry in the city of Brno, courtesy of Katerina Tuckova of the Czech Republic. It is brilliant escapism, but also a visit back to a European mosaic for which culture alone can supply the cement. (Olivier Jehin)
Olivier Guez (edited by). Le Grand Tour (available in French only). Grasset. ISBN: 978-2-2468-3047-4. 454 pages. €24,00
La Hongrie sous Orbán
This work, the fruit of the work of six French freelance journalists who have lived for many years in this country, under the editorship of Corentin Léotard, editor-in-chief of Courrier d’Europe centrale, immediately immerses the reader in Hungarian society.
“Eleven years have passed since the Fidesz party of Viktor Orbán came to power. Invoking the national interest, he set the State machinery to work at the service of his party, systematically colonising its institutions, remodelling the electoral system to his advantage, imposing a form of social conservatism to undo all the evolution of a highly secularised society, slandered his political opponents one by one, describing them as ‘traitors to the nation’, creating scapegoats (former prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, the billionaire George Soros, NGO activists) and stigmatising social groups (the homeless, migrants, LGBTQ). He has also dismantled employment law and social protection nets at the expense of employees, virtually abolished the right to asylum, suffocated democracy and kept the population in a state of moral panic, fed by relentless propaganda via the public media set in place by a private media empire with levels of power and influence never seen before in the European Union. Furthermore, universities have been placed into the hands of foundations under his control. Finally, he has given rise to a crony capitalism fed into by public funds – both Hungarian and European – and has helped himself to many State assets, aligning Hungary on the strategic interests of its new allies, Moscow, Beijing and Ankara”, the authors explain, stressing that “at the same time, the middle and upper classes have been able to benefit from the consequences of vigorous economic growth and a redistribution of wealth to their advantage (indicating at the same time that inequalities have grown to the same proportion: Ed). All of this has come about against the backdrop of reassuring statist and authoritative discourse for a Hungarian population still reeling from the ‘every man for himself’ regime of the 1990s and 2000s” (our translation throughout).
In addition to this summary, the book describes Fidesz having been born out of the democratic and liberal aspirations of Hungarian students, including Jozsef Kardos, who set out the history of the creation of the party in March 1988 and the illiberal turn it took under the influence of Viktor Orbán. He also dwells at length on the closure of the borders and the refugees and migrants crowded into Keleti railway station. He observes that “having peaked at 10.7 million in 1980, the population of Hungary fell below the symbolic threshold of 10 million in 2010 and may fall to a level as low as between 8 and 9 million by halfway through the century”.
Although he refers to xenophobia, particularly the murders of Roma and the Shoah, the book also introduces us to the pastor Gabor Sztehlo, who saved many hundreds of Jewish children and would spend the whole of the rest of the war welcoming orphans into a kind of self-managing community known as Gaudiopolis. We also meet an enterprising woman, the mayor of a poor village on the Romanian border, who started a cooperative making cheese, and the energetic Marton Gulyas, whose YouTube channel Partizan has shaken up the media landscape and breathed new life into the debate in Hungary.
In the ten years since Fidesz came to power, “bureaucracy has doubled in value in ministries crowded with young civil servants, loyal – as far as anybody knows – to the party in power”, writes Corentin Léotard in a portrait of Katalin Novak, whom Orbán made into his emissary in charge of connecting with conservative circles internationally, and who was elected President of the Republic on 10 March 2022.
In a country where the average gross salary is 740 euros and the minimum salary barely 300 euros, Viktor Orbán, who actively promotes a “state based on work as opposed to the provident state”, cut the period for which jobseekers may claim unemployment benefit to just three months in 2011. After this point, jobseekers are asked to accept underpaid (just over 150 euros) “subsidised” menial work, according to Hélène Bienvenu.
“In the European elections, everywhere in the country, the party in power was voted in wherever poverty thrives. 94% of the electorate in the ten poorest villages in Hungary voted for Fidesz. In some cases, volunteers collected voters from their homes in a van to give them a lift to the polling station; in other cases, the promise of a sack of potatoes or a basket of vegetables was enough. The luckiest voters got a 5000 forint note, the equivalent of 15 euros”, reports Léotard, who is quick to point out that “cronyism and vote-buying are nothing new, as the Socialist party practised these when it dominated the election scene”. “But since then, the student Fidesz has surpassed the master”, he adds.
“After three general elections in a row in which they were annihilated by the Nationalists, the leaders of six political parties overcame their disagreements to unite around the same objectives: ousting Viktor Orbán from power, re-establishing the democratic institutions and reconciling a profoundly divided society”, the authors write, also stressing that “after a primary election of all the opposition parties, which impassioned the country and in which 850,000 people took part, the anti-Orbánists got behind Peter Marki-Zay”. “The mayor of a small provincial town, this 49-year-old devout Christian, the father of seven children, looks every inch the ideal favoured by the opposite camp”, they go on to note, but on the eve of the election of 3 April, the opinion polls were not in his favour. Even though, with war being waged on the neighbouring Ukraine because the Russian ally of Viktor Orbán would not tolerate its burgeoning democracy and a civil society capable of expressing choices, “Hungarian democracy is still breathing”. And that’s the main thing. (OJ)
Corentin Léotard (edited by). La Hongrie sous Orban (available in French only). Plein Jour. ISBN: 978-2-3706-7070-0. 219 pages. €19,00