Peter Esterhazy
GOD'S HAT
Schadenfreude
I get the malicious thrill known as
Schadenfreude
whenever I see
a Western reporter on a visit to Hungary the Beautiful squirming and shift–
ing from foot to foot and gnawing at his pen.
Things weren't always like this. Time was when a native like me in–
terested in knowing what was going on here and how it tallied with the latest
in world trends had only to open a decent Western newspaper to feel like
Snow White: Hungary was invariably the fairest of them all.
Yet much as he read, he knew he was one of the dwarfs - ugly, puny,
poor, and trudging through the mines knee-deep
in
lies.
It all started long before Gorbachev - back in the midsixties, actually -
when Hungary was the most bearable (the liveliest barrack) ofthe so-called
socialist countries and reporters spent all their time at the Hotel Forum or in
the fashionable Vaci Street district sipping dry sherry with the downtrodden
Hungarian folk.
Now had the Hungarian folk been allowed to feast their eyes on those
papers, they'd immediately have stopped cursing the system or questioning it
or even grumbling, so had I been what was then known as a Communist
leader, I'd have ordered them distributed throughout the land instead of out–
lawed . In fact, had anyone of the papers been available in Budapest,
Bucharest, Berlin, or Prague, the old regimes might be alive and well today.
And ifmy concrete
Schadenfreude
drizzles mist-like over the Western
press, it is because this will appear after the Great Hungarian Elections and
has nothing - but nothing - to say about the current political situation. At last!
The moment I've been waiting for: not only I know nothing, the Western
press knows nothing. On the one hand, we Central Europeans have main–
tained quite superciliously that Central Europe can be truly understood only
from within; on the other, that to be Central Europeans means not to know
ourselves.
Editor's Note: This essay first appeared in the German weekly
Stern,
on March
29,1990.
