Hungarian dance

This article describes the novel. For the works of Johannes Brahms see Hungarian Dances .

Hungarian Dance is a political novel by the Austro-Hungarian novelist and journalist Hans Habe (1911–1977). The novel was published in Germany under the title Die Rote Sichel (1959) and under the title Hungarian Dance in 1983 as part of the works edition of Hans Habe: Collected Works in Individual Editions . This is the new version of the book published in America in 1952 under the title Black Earth , edited by Habe's wife Licci Habe .

The novel is set in Hungary between the end of the First World War and the collectivization of agriculture in the 1950s. The hero is an agricultural servant who becomes a rebellious communist, spies for the Soviet Union during the Second World War , returns to Hungary with the Red Army , succeeds as Minister of Agriculture, resigns out of opposition to the collectivization of agriculture and finally at the head of those who fight for their country Peasants lost their lives in the hail of bullets from the Red Army.

The character of the hero seems to be based on the life of the Hungarian Prime Minister at the time of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, Imre Nagy .

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The novel tells the story of the agricultural servant Béla Sulyok, who was born in 1914 in Veszprém County in Hungary in the simplest of circumstances. From the beginning the contrast between the poor and lawless life of the servants, to which Sulyok belongs, and that of an all-determining and presumptuous aristocracy is shown. Like his family for generations, Sulyok has been working on the estate of Count Terézváry. His life is determined by the hard work and the lack of rights of his class, where he is torn between hatred and love for the count's daughter, Margit. After Margit calls him over one night, he has to leave the count's property.

Sulyok went to Budapest , where as early as 1938 he came into contact with communists. He is determined by them to be enlisted in the army. Sulyok receives books from them to help him learn Russian. When the Germans attack the Soviet Union , Hungary also enters the war on the side of the German Reich . Sulyok keeps sending messages to the Russians. One day he kills a Hungarian soldier who is raping a Russian woman. Sulyok does not do this because he is committed to the Soviets, but out of genuine compassion.

At the battle of the Worensch River, Sulyok withdrew, with parts of his regiment overflowing to the Russians under his leadership. During the death march of the Hungarian prisoners of war, he encounters the Soviet reality, which shows itself in its brutality and human contempt. In the prisoner-of-war camp he is now supposed to raise Hungarian soldiers who are ready to fight the Germans on the Soviet side and who want to return to Hungary as liberators.

Sulyok is serving up in the ranks of the Red Army. In Sulyok's eyes, the liberating Red Army is losing its luster as it marches on Budapest. This time he kills a Russian soldier who raped a Hungarian woman. Here, as before, he does this out of a sense of justice and out of disgust for the animality of the perpetrator. He witnessed the Battle of Budapest , in which the SS and the Red Army were equal in brutality and ruthlessness.

With the constitution of a Hungarian government, Sulyok is promoted to Minister of Agriculture. He is reminded that he has failed to join the Communist Party so far , which he corrects immediately.

Sulyok wants to finally eliminate the centuries-old injustice of the landless servants. He introduces a fair land reform in which everyone who can work land has a right to a clod. However, this is a thorn in the side of the foreign Communist Party cadres coming from Moscow ; they favor the formation of collective farms . Sulyok finds himself exposed to more and more hostility, until he finally has to resign after personally campaigning for the release of a pastor. After initial resistance from the communists, he was given a plaice in his home country, which he worked with his sister. There he developed a real love for the former landowner Margit, who, like all farmers in the region, now cultivates her own plaice.

When the local pastors were arrested in the struggle for collectivization and the farmers' cattle were confiscated by the communists, the farmers marched in front of Sulyok's house and asked him to lead their fight. Sulyok goes out at the head of the peasants to obtain the priest's release and the cattle. More and more farmers join them along the way. When the Hungarian police and units of the Soviet occupying power block the peasants' way, but the latter cannot be persuaded to turn back, the police and the occupying power open fire on the peasants. Sulyok dies in the hail of bullets.

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Sulyok is not an ideologist from start to finish. He doesn't subscribe to any ideas. He demands justice. For him, justice is not an abstract system of ideas and laws, for him it is the banal necessity that everyone feed themselves free from their handwork. In the beginning the Hungarian aristocracy prevented this justice, in the end the hunts of a workers and peasants ideology, which were only concerned with their own power instead of humanity.

Habe shows here how fragile the universal values ​​of humanity, freedom and justice, are, but how they are devoid of meaning and distorted by ideologies for their benefit. The motif of freedom and justice appears constantly in Habes' works. His personal life has always been in the struggle for this simple unideological freedom and justice.

literature

• Habe, Hans: Hungarian dance . FA Herbig Verlagbuchhandlung, Munich, Berlin and Hans Habe, Ascona. 1983. ISBN 3-7766-1284-3 .