I left Budapest the next morning after sharing red-, green-, and yellow paprika with the Hungarian Bakunin in his kitchen. (As we ate the simple vegetable for breakfast, I recalled all the jokes about paprika and goulash communism I had heard over the past year.)
Next, like a guardian angel, Gyorgy took me back to the Buda train station.
Inside the station, we observed more passengers from all over Eastern Europe napping out near the platforms—and in various corners of the station. It was clear to me that this Hungarian named Gyorgy was seeing to it that poor wayfarers from the West--like my Jewish friends and I--did not have to live and sleep like gypsies in the station. Click here.
As I boarded the train towards Sopron, I had to ask myself whether, in fact, in the man Gyorgy Bakunin, I had witnessed a glimpse of the “new man” which communism and socialism were supposed to be striving for.
I had seen such glimpses of “the new man” of socialism in Sandinista, Nicaragua in 1983 on my visit there to various state and private projects. I recall that I my tour with international development (ID) students from the U.S. were taken to an open-air prison farm.
There, we met a man--a former Somoza army officer—who had been sentenced two nearly 19 years of prison, but on this particular government project, the prison had no walls and the prisoners were free to come and go as they pleased—i.e. as long as they demonstrated the ideals of living as a new man in the Sandinista world.
That particular prisoner ex-Somocista hoped to be released early (after only four to five years) based on his own remorse, his apparent reform, and his show of improvement as to how he had come to look at and treat his fellow man.
No???!!!
Hungarian Gyorgy wasn’t necessarily an example of communism’s “new man”, but he was certainly an example of something different. He was an Eastern European who saw each international contact as a means of reaching out and saying, especially to Westerners, that we are not enemy’s and you should feel safe with me.
Gryorgy’s spirit (or demeanor) was saying, “Let me share my home or homeland with you. Here are the keys to my abode! Enjoy Budapest and my country Hungary. Trust. Don’t be afraid.”
It would be such demeanor of naïve trust in humanity and hope for a better future--which I would often miss after the Revolutions of 1989 when I visited Eastern Europe.
On the other hand, there is still something in the air of this trusting humaneness which most of us from the West will hardly ever experience again on our travels elsewhere—or even in our homelands. Perhaps it is like a small but closed community in which one feels a sense of safety or “Geborgenheit” as one is taken care of in a somewhat patriarchal manner.
That is, I am certain that this trusting-way and hopefulness-for-the-best-in-man demeanor is something that continues to spawn a reversal-towards-parochialism and nostalgia for the pre-1989 world. This nostalgia is something which many East Europeans are still directly or indirectly passing onto their progeny.
NOTE: In its most negative manifestation, this parochialism leads to an us-versus-the-other xenophobia and misdirected anger.
Incidentally, the location where I crossed the border into Austria from Sopron, Hungary later that September (1987) day was exactly where the barbed wire would be taken down by May 1989.
It was this wide-open border between Austria and Hungary, which would offer and opening for thousands of East Germans to leave their homeland for the West that same summer.
