Many Peoples, More or Less

Dénes kicked a pine cone just far enough for the two dachshunds to reach it in a few bounds and fight over it. I tried the same, but the dogs didn’t budge. Instead, they stared at Dénes enquiringly.

We had been walking for half an hour along a well-kept Swiss forest road through a well-kept Swiss forest, replenishing the oxygen in the tent beneath which our red-wine hangover lay dying. After all those hours in Dénes’s company, I knew so much about my ancestors that I would never know enough again. Which meant that a journey to Transylvania was now all but decided.

‘Are you sure?’ Dénes asked after I had announced my decision.

‘Pretty sure. I mean, yes.’

‘Hmm. I don’t think you know what you’re letting yourself in for.’

‘Then tell me!’

‘All right,’ said Dénes. And he did.

The most important thing, he said, was to understand that Transylvania had always been a melting pot. All manner of peoples had passed through it over the centuries, some staying, others eventually moving on. Almost all of them had derived a claim to ownership from their presence, leading to centuries of conflict. On the surface, matters were settled nowadays, but underneath, things were still simmering.

‘Who was the first to discover Transylvania?’ I asked, rather like a schoolboy. ‘Surely it ought to belong to him.’

‘That’s precisely one of the main points of contention,’ Dénes replied. ‘All we know for certain is that some two thousand years ago, a people called the Dacians lived there, as recorded by the Roman Emperor Trajan. They apparently made regular raids into the territory of the Empire. So the Romans decided to annex Dacia in order to restore peace and order. They seem to have succeeded, which suggests that there can’t have been any Gypsies in the country at the time. But that’s beside the point.

‘Today’s Romanians, at any rate, claim to be descended from those Dacians and therefore to have been the first inhabitants of Transylvania. Given the raids, I’m quite prepared to believe them!’

I laughed only briefly, for Dénes was getting into his stride.

In reality, he continued, the Romanians were an elusive people. Not just historically. Europe’s police forces could tell you a thing or two about that. Since their country’s accession to the EU, they had either been living off the welfare systems of the West, organising themselves into family-run income-generating schemes, or they had stayed at home and devoted their time to wearing leather jackets several sizes too small, distilling spirits, falsifying history books and sewing Romanian flags the size of swimming pools, with which they attempted to cover entire Hungarian settlements in order to demonstrate their claim to ownership.

‘Claim to ownership?’

‘Yes. Transylvania belongs to Romania today.’ Dénes sighed.

‘How can that be? Why were there so many Hungarian stamps on the envelopes we went through? And where do all those German street names come from?’

‘Slowly, Richard. We’ve only just begun.’

‘What about the Hungarians?’ I persisted.

‘If there’s one thing we Hungarians are really good at, as I told you yesterday, it’s losing wars. And in the First World War we excelled at it in more ways than one. Our finest achievement was losing Erdély, as we call Transylvania. They took it away from us, just like that, and handed it to the Romanians, who happened to be standing in the right place and, for once, had a hand free.’

This arrangement, Dénes went on, had been set in stone by a treaty named after the place where it was signed: ‘Trianon’. The building was still standing, an annex of the Palace of Versailles which Louis XIV had commissioned for entirely different purposes. If ever I felt the urge to ruin a Hungarian’s day, all I had to do was utter that one word. It had been working for almost a hundred years.

‘And by the way, that wasn’t all they took from us.’ Dénes’s voice now sounded slightly strained, as though he were running short of air here in the forest.

‘What else was there?’

‘Hungary lost more than seventy per cent of its territory. Seventy! Just imagine that! If you applied that to present-day Germany, all you’d have left would be Bavaria and most of Baden-Württemberg. Everything else would be gone.’

I was speechless. Then a few timid little sounds returned, but I kept them to myself.

‘The Hungarians who, on paper, were no longer Hungarians stayed where they were, even after the countries had been divided up. As a result, they are now the second-largest population group in Transylvania, and therefore the largest minority.

‘But be careful!’ Dénes raised a warning finger. ‘Most of them are actually Székelys.’

‘What are Székelys?’

‘I don’t know. Even though I’m one myself. Nobody knows for certain. We speak a Hungarian dialect, but sometimes write in runes. That gave a few ethnologists the amusing idea that the Székelys might actually be Germanic. Judging by their drinking habits, it’s not such a far-fetched theory. Tacitus, whom I’m sure you know, famously wrote that the Germanic tribes were blind drunk from morning till night. I’m afraid that applies to some Székelys too. But do you know what speaks against the theory?’

‘What?’

‘The language. What else would speak? A Teuton will never learn Hungarian. They can’t even manage Italian and fall at the first hurdle trying to pronounce “Chianti”. Hungarian is in a different league altogether. Even the Székelys only managed to learn it because they spent centuries roaming the steppes alongside the Hungarians before settling in Pannonia. And they still can’t speak it properly!’

Dénes now laughed heartily at his own joke and at himself.

‘I speak Italian quite well,’ I interjected once he had calmed down.

‘No wonder, you half-blood Teuton. But Hungarian was still beyond you!’ Dénes winked at me.

He then explained how to tell a Székely from a Hungarian if you didn’t speak the language. All you had to do was find out where the person in question lived! If the entrance consisted of an ordinary door, the occupant was a Hungarian.

If, however, there stood in front of the house a wooden gateway with rounded arches, twice the height of a man or even concealing the house itself, decorated with the most painstakingly carved patterns, a date and a blessing, and crowned by a birdhouse with portholes, whose roof extended over much of the gateway so that the birds could go bowling inside whenever it rained, you could safely bet a glass of schnapps that it had been built by a Székely!

‘I’ve always wanted to see birds bowling!’

‘There’s nothing to see. Aren’t you listening? The bowling takes place inside!’

Dénes was visibly struggling to keep a straight face. And he seemed tired, too.

‘Shall we take a little break? History is exhausting,’ I suggested.

‘With pleasure,’ Dénes accepted.

We sat down on a stack of debarked, resin-free and beetle-free logs and fell silent. I thought about Dénes’s last words, while he was probably already thinking about his next ones. The dachshunds immediately settled down beside him, and he gave them something to nibble from his trouser pocket.

When we resumed our walk, I realised we weren’t far from the house any more. I hadn’t the faintest idea where we’d been going.

‘We’re almost home!’ I remarked.

‘Yes, nearly. And we’ve only one group left. The Saxons. That’s going to be doubly interesting for you, because your grandfather was one of them. We know fairly precisely where they came from. What we don’t really know is what will become of them. Unfortunately.’

Their name, Dénes explained, was the result of a careless translation of the Latin Saxones, a term used in the Middle Ages to describe settlers of German origin in general. Consequently, they had absolutely nothing in common with the present-day Saxons of eastern Germany. Instead, they had emigrated to Transylvania from the twelfth century onwards, coming from regions west of the Rhine between Lorraine and the Eifel. One proof of this was that their dialect, Såxesch, which had remained unchanged for eight hundred years, could still be understood by a modern Luxembourger, but certainly not by someone from Leipzig.

They had been lured there by the Hungarian king of the time, Géza II, who promised them extensive autonomy in return for putting the country into some sort of order. What he had probably neglected to mention was why the place needed tidying up in the first place: the incessant raids by neighbouring peoples from the east and south.

‘Their names are recorded in the annals – and there isn’t a single Romanian among them. Because they weren’t even there yet. That’s why!’

He paused briefly, looked at me, saw my confusion – and went on.

‘Anyway, after the Transylvanian Saxons, together with the Székelys, had beaten back the Pechenegs, Cumans, Kabars, Bashkirs and God knows who else, and thought they might finally have a bit of peace and quiet, along came the Ottomans. But that’s another drama altogether.’

For the sake of completeness (although their activities tended rather towards the opposite), Dénes felt that the Sinti and Roma ought also to be mentioned, a people whose appearance and behaviour bore a striking resemblance to the dreadful prejudices once held against Gypsies. They were the only ethnic group in Transylvania whose numbers were not declining, but increasing in inverse proportion to the possessions of the other three ethnic groups.

While some of the Székelys were bravely holding their ground and others were entering into mixed marriages with Romanians, the Saxons had meanwhile made themselves comfortable in the West. Having been bought out in the 1980s through lavish payments by Germany to the Ceaușescu regime, they now preferred sentimentality to reality.

Every year on Whit Sunday, they would gather on the operetta stage that was Dinkelsbühl, grill suspicious-looking sausages and, by their third Timişoreana, Romania’s second-best beer, begin lamenting the loss of their German homeland. Embroidered cushions and painted wooden plates would be offered for sale, depicting rural scenes or the Black Church of Kronstadt. Then a folk-dancing group from a small town in Missouri, all descendants of emigrant Saxons, would perform a few dances; a deservedly unknown painter would be permitted to exhibit her life’s work; a non-profit association would present its latest genealogy project, in which, after twenty years of research, they had already reached the letter B in village C; the chairman of the expellees‘ association would offer some unnecessary words on the need for peaceful coexistence between Saxons and Romanians; and everyone would reserve their deepest affection for the town in which they no longer wished to live: Schäßburg.

‘I have to go there!’ I said.

‘You have to go there,’ said Dénes.