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Hungarian Chauvinism

 Dr. Gheorghe Olteanu interviews Franz Wesner of Dortmund, Germany on March 30, 1993

  Gheorghe Olteanu - GO: You were born in Hungary. Please tell us about your life in that country.

Franz Wesner - FW: Yes, I was born in Hungary in 1927, in what is called in German history- writing "Swabian Turkey". That was a large and compact German colony that has been considered a "Pan-Germanistic nation" and that has been later intentionally destroyed through deportation and exile, so that nowadays there can be no mention any more of a "Swabian Turkey" proper, for it has become a region where very few Swabians live. I was born in the village of Hodyez. It had also been a German village. Apart from the Germans, there lived only Jews in that village; they no longer live there either.

GO: Why were the Jews also deported?

FW: The Jews were deported a short while before we were, to be precise in 1944, and six months later it was our turn. As for my education, as early as kindergarten teaching was done in Hungarian, while at home we spoke only German, since my grandmother knew not a single Hungarian word. We, the children, also understood no Hungarian at all.

GO: But was there no German school?

FW: No, as I said there was not even a German kindergarten, what created a very great hardship for us German children. We had to learn to sing Hungarian songs also. Today I understand the lyrics of those songs, but as a child it was very difficult to learn them because I did not understand the meaning of the words. The same thing happened with the prayer "Our Father" as at home we prayed only in German. Then I went to school, where I was taught German as a foreign language only; and that only two hours a week. You can imagine that I could not learn German in school. Then came the so-called village school, a Hungarian school where we were forbidden...

GO: Forbidden? FW: ...to speak German, and if we indulged during recess even (and not in class) to speak any German we were punished and beaten. I went to that school for four years, after which I went to Flinf Kirchen, the largest Bishop's residence and the largest town in "Swabian Turkey", where we were taught in the same nationalist Hungarian spirit. That happened between 1942 and 1944. Then I left Flinf Kirchen for Hodyez, my birthplace, and after the Russians came marching into our village we were deported to Russia together with the other Germans in the village.

GO: How old were you then?

FW: I was 17, and my sister was two years older. She too was deported. The order was to deport "the Swabians only" The lists were published, and there were only Swabians. Not one sisngle Hungarian was among them. From the neighboring village, that was 5 kilometers away from ours, Szakai, a Hungarian village, nobody was deported. Only the Swabians were deported, although all the Russians wanted were people for slave labor, consequently they did not care to have precisely only Swabians.

GO: How long were you in Russia?

FW: We were two years in Russia. The Hungarian government acted according to the directive "spare the Hungarian blood", and so we got taken to Russia where consulting with other Germans in the concentration camps we reached the conclusion that practically from Romania, the whole of Hungary and Yugoslavia only the Germans were deported, following the same principles that condemned us. In the concentration camp I had an outstanding experience. I met there Swabians from the Banat, Saxons from Transylvania, very few Swabians from Satu-Mare and Swabians from the Yugoslavian regions. As far as the language we spoke was concerned, those Germans were by far superior to us. Following the Treaty of Trianon, they had had the possibility of a true national rebirth, both in Romania and in Yugoslavia. They had thus the possibility to study in German, having their own schools. That accounts for the fact that they were far superior to us as far as the German language was concerned. We thought we had to deal with Germans from the German Reich. That is a very interesting finding and demonstrates the fact that those Germans had the chance to develop their national life whereas in Hungary we had been oppressed from that point of view. Thus, that was Russia. After two years I came home. My sister was very ill and could not even get on her feet; she died immediately after she was released from Russia. After my deportation I returned to Funf Kirchen, where I continued my education, and then obtained a teacher's certificate. That was a Catholic high school. Between 1949 and 1956 I was a school teacher only in Hungarian villages. In the last year, 1956, I obtained a transfer to a German village near Budapest. There lived some Germans there still, who, interestingly enough, were not deported, for they had been needed there, since they were miners. I would like to mention also the fact that when we returned home from Russia our family told us how they had been turned out of their home to be sent to Germany. Later they were allowed to stay because those Germans whose children had been deported to Russia were not to be exiled. In 1947 the entire play was staged once again, and my family was to be deported to the German zone that was under Soviet occupation. My father was saved only by his profession. He was a Martin furnace builder, a skilled laborer whose work was useful in the reconstruction. Thus he was saved by his trade, and did not get on the list. All those who had indicated on the 1941 census that they were Germans (judging from their mother tongue) were to be banished.

GO: Tell me more about the expulsion. How did it come about and why were the Germans to be banished?

FW: They were banished because Hungary did not wish to miss this favorable historical circumstance that arose after a long wait. It is not at all the way the Hungarian propaganda wishes to demonstrate. That propaganda asserts that the expulsion took place because the victorious powers ordered it. That assertion is not true for there was in reality no such order.

GO: You are referring to the Potsdam Convention?

FW: Yes, that is what they are citing. In Article 13 of the Potsdam Convention were mentioned Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. In that article were mentioned only the countries that requested the expulsion. At Potsdam no decision was made, all they did was approve the expulsion requests made. At Potsdam the initiative to banish populations was made legal. We had often asked ourselves why was Romania not listed in Article 13 and why was there listed a vanquished state among the two victorious states, since Poland and Czechoslovakia had the status of victorious states but Hungary had not. Romania had also been an ally of the Third Reich and still she was not listed in Article 13 alongside of Hungary. Of course, there is but one explanation - since the Romanian government did not request that the Germans be banished from Romania, Romania was not listed in Article 13 - which is a very simple explanation. Hungary had for a long time wished to get rid of us; that is proven also by the numerous historical texts.

GO: How did the expulsion take place, in practice?

FW: First I wish to relate what awaited us when we returned from Russia. Our family had been turned out of their home, and allowed to take along from their possessions only objects weighing a total of 50-60 kilograms. Then they were loaded in railway cars and transported to the American zone. The Americans either could not or would not receive other human beings, and one transport was sent back to Hungary. Seeing all that, the Hungarian government was seized - I may say - with mortal terror and approached the Soviet military administration and asked them to take over the Germans from Hungary. Thus, many of us got to be taken to the Soviet jurisdiction zone.

GO: What did the Church have to say to all that happened?

FW: Yes, the Church - I am referring to the Catholic Church - sided with the Hungarian nationalists and was used by them as a tool in the magyarization. Thus, the Church made a distinction between guilty Swabians and innocent Swabians. The guilty ones were the ones who belonged to the Popular Alliance, which was tantamount to harboring a desire to remain Germans; and the other ones, the so-called innocent Swabians, were those who belonged to the "Movement of the Dedicated". That movement was created to fight against the Alliance, to divide us.

GO: Whose idea was it?

FW: The idea originated with to Count Teleki, who was President of the Council of Ministers; it was still he who gave birth to the thesis of the three minorities.

GO: Could you enlarge a little upon that subject?

FW: That is a subject that I will attempt to treat summarily here in a few words. It is well known the Hungarian government demands for the Hungarian minority rights that it does not grant to the minorities that live in Hungary. To account for that. Count Teleki came up with the thesis on three kinds of minorities. According to that thesis, there are: traditional minorities, voluntary minorities and constrained minorities. Us, the Swabians, he listed among the voluntary minorities. He said: "You came to Hungary of your own free will, so that you cannot benefit from the rights of the minorities, whereas the constrained minorities, our Hungarians who live now in Transylvania, Voivodina or Slovakia, who are constrained to live there, unlike the Swabians who came to..Hungary of their own free will, have been degraded to the rank of minorities by force. That is why they must have full minority rights, but the Swabians must not." That is in short Teleki's thesis on the three kinds of minorities ... But where were we?

GO: I should have liked you to say a few words about the Catholic Church and about guilty Swabians and innocent ones.

FW: We all were Catholics, but our church did not support us, quite the contrary, it handed us over to the Hungarian nationalists. I do not wish now to go into details explaining why that was, neither do I believe it would be useftil.

GO: What can you tell us about Mindzenti?

FW: Mindzenti was the worst of them all. Cardinal Mindzenti worked together with Teleki to set up the organization of the "Movement of the Dedicated". Formerly his name had been Phem, but he later magyarized his name to Mindzenti. Mindzenti was one of the most important pillars of the "Movement of the Dedicated". The aim of that movement was assimilation.

GO: What happened to the Swabians who were part of that movement?

FW: You asked a very interesting question. Not even those Swabians were spared. That is exactly the proof that in Hungary it was not the Nazis that were banished but the Germans, for the Hungarians claimed that those who were in the Alliance were Nazis and those who were in the Movement of the Dedicated should have been anti-Nazis, since they were at the opposite pole. But these latter ones were banished together with those who were in the Popular Alliance. That proves that Hungary did not wish to abolish Nazism among the Hungarians but to abolish Germans among the Hungarians. Thus they achieved ethnic cleansing. That is what Hungary basically desired: that here should be no more compact blocks of nationalities in the land. The other nationalities were scattered throughout the entire country so that they could no longer claim minority rights.

GO: What was Hungary's stand to National Socialism [Nazism]?

FW: What hurt us was that it was exactly the Hungarians who branded us as Nazis, when it is known that Nazism was well received in Hungary and that in the Hungarian Parliament there were very. many Hungarian National Socialists. The Popular Alliance I mentioned before was in fact not a political party but a cultural association. It is interesting to note that the Germans of Romania, who even had a National Socialist Party, were not banished, and as far as Nazism was concerned, they knew it better. In Hungary the greatest part of the Germans were peasants, who had no idea about what National Socialism stood for; their desire was to stay Germans.

GO: What can you tell us about compensation paid to the Germans?

FW: Yes, that is a long story. At first nobody wanted to compensate the Swabians, and the law was drawn up so that only the citizens of the Hungarian state who were injured during the communist regime should receive compensations, and the communist regime was set up in Hungary in 1949 through Rakosi. We lost our rights and were expatriated between 1945 and 1948; in 1949 all that was past history. Rakosi set up his communist dictatorship in Hungary in 1949, and in 1950 the Germans of Hungary received, of course in form only, equal rights with those of the other citizens of Hungary. We became in 1950 Hungarian citizens with equal rights.

GO: Tell us please something about the compensation given to the Germans of Hungary.

FW: I cannot say more than this, but as far as I had heard all Swabians were to receive compensations, however all those I talked to told me it was not worth petitioning for that compensation since it was insignificant, as the Hungarian government stated that full compensation was impossible.

GO: Tell us please something about the law of the minorities.

FW: It may be of interest to you that in the Hungarian Parliament there were no members coming from the minorities. There are five deputies in the Hungarian Parliament who bear the title of Deputies for the Nationalities but they do not represent the minorities, they represent their own political parties; some of them represent the party in office, others represent the opposition. Those five deputies represent their political parties in Parliament, not the minorities. Those five attacked Geza Hambuch, the president of the Union of the Germans of Hungary, on account of an interview he gave to the Swabian newspaper of Germany where Hambuch was staling that the Germans have more rights in Romania than they have in Hungary. Thus Hambuch became the target of a deluge of attacks, and those five deputies addressed an open letter to Hambuch asking him "Geza how could you, how could you deface this country's image for the rest of the world". Geza Hambuch asserted in his interview that in Hungary the Germans do not have a single true school where teaching is done in the mother tongue. So, in Hungary, where the policy as regards the minorities is so exemplary, there is no real school for the minorities. As far as the law for the minorities is concerned, many people have high hopes of it; I do not, for I know that in Hungary there have always been written wonderful texts of laws - the best example is the law for the minorities of 1868: there cannot be a more beautiful, more wonderful law - all on paper only, it goes without saying. A British historian named McCartney has said that in Hungary there are wonderfully written laws that are never implemented. And what use is that wonderfully written text of a law to anyone, if it is never implemented? The then head of the Council of Ministers, Count Tissa Istvan, was asked once why that law [of 1868] was never implemented, and he answered: "if we were to implement all those laws that would be tantamount to the suicide of the Magyar state".

GO: What are your views about the respective positions of Romania and Hungary as regards the united Europe?

FW: I can only speak from my own experience; I believe that here, in the west, Hungary is being favored to the detriment of Romania. It is obvious that Hungary has better press than the news referring to Romania, although as regards the policy against the minorities it should be exactly the other way around, for in Romania, according to my sources, the minorities are flourishing, whereas in Hungary they are on the verge of extinction. That is the reason why nobody emigrates from Hungary any more, not because of the exemplary policy against the minorities that is being pursued there, but because the Germans from Hungary have ceased to think of themselves as Germans, for being German there has always been associated with drawbacks. In Hungary it does not make sense to think of yourself as not being Hungarian. Many Germans of Hungary have lost the awareness of their German ethnic character. That accounts in my view for the relatively low number of emigrants from Hungary and the great number of emigrants from Romania, for there that awareness still prevails. That is why I say that one must not belieye what the newspapers write but look for real facts rather.

GO: But do the newsmen not know the real facts?

FW: I have an idea why Romania is presented in such a bad light, unlike Hungary. I believe it is because the Hungarians have managed to infiltrate the editorial offices and the scientific organizations. Those are places successfully infiltrated by the Hungarians who knew how to enlist the newspapermen on their side. The people in the western countries, especially in West Germany, do not know what actually takes place in Hungary and in Romania. They swallow whole, hook, line and sinker, everything the Hungarian propaganda spoon-feeds them. That accounts in my opinion for the fact that Romania is seen in such a bad light. Maybe. Romania does not spend enough on propaganda.

GO: Do politicians play a part in this defamation of Romania?

FW: I cannot say, for I do not know. I know only that in the editorial offices and in the places of learning we encounter Hungarian names all the time. We, the Germans of Hungary, can tell immediately which side the wind is blowing from.

GO: But is there no traditional policy?

FW: When we were banished there was talk in Parliament not about the thousand-year-long German-Hungarian friendship but about the thousand-year-long German-Hungarian enmity. Then that was exacerbated. Today there is a commemorative plaque on the building of the German Parliament - I saw it with my own eyes in Berlin - inscribed with a bilingual Hungarian-German text. That text writes about the thousand-year-old Hungarian-German friendship. Everything took a different turn. But I never saw a plaque with a Romanian inscription. Romania did not banish the Germans who lived on her land, whereas the Hungarian government did. Still, on that plaque Hungary is listed as a friend and not Romania, although the Germans of Hungary were the only ones to be banished from all countries that had been former allies of Germany.

GO: But is that policy not based on a tradition inherited from Bismarck?

FW: Yes it is. The imperial policy of those times valued a Greater Hungary highly. They did not consider Trianon. They considered Greater Hungary as a power in that space. It was a fatal calculation for them, for Trianon happened and that Treaty did not rain down from heaven out of the blue sky, it was bound to be born, following the national policy that was implemented in Hungary.

GO: How do you see the future of the German-Hungarian relationship? Is there a common ground on which the two peoples could build?

FW: It is not easy to answer that question, I am not psychic, I do not know how those two peoples will get along. I can only tell you my own opinion. I believe that there will not be any German life in Hungary any more. The relations at state level between Hungary and Germany are a story in which I do not wish to get mixed up. We have always been the victims of those relations. For Bismarck, and later for Hitler, it was more important to be friends with Hungary than to find out whether the Saxons have a German school to educate their children or do not have it, so that as far as the Germans are concerned we were but pawns in the game. I only fear that the Germans of Hungary will disappear completely".

GO: Professor Wesner, thank you for your cooperation.