1984, the ominous year prophesied by George Orwell, was – fortunately – not as horrific in the countries behind the ’iron curtain’ as the writer had envisioned it, but it was nevertheless bad enough. By that time the hope of the last spectacular attempt in Central Europe to change the system, i.e. the potential success of the 1980-81 movement of the Polish trade union Solidarnosć, had evaporated for good. In the summer of 1983 the socialist leadership, which had broken down the resistance, finally ended the state of emergency introduced in December 1981 and resulting in several years of protest, clashes as well as the death of 30 people and the internment of tens of thousands, as they managed to restore their power. Similarly to the events of 1956 in Budapest and the Prague spring of 1968, the perspective of increasing oppression and sustained depression cast a shadow over people’s lives in all of Central Eastern Europe.
Given this general climate of depression, Hungary was among the relatively more tolerable places. When the period of retributions and imprisonments after the revolution of 1956 ended, the country earned itself the convivial labels of the ‘happiest barracks’ and ‘goulash communism’ from the end of the sixties, under János Kádár’s leadership. Although with several halts, a ‘new economic mechanism’ developed in Hungary, creating legal loopholes for small- and medium-size private enterprises and thus allowing the spread of some of the elements of the consumer society and the lifestyle associated with it. Travelling to the west became freer from Hungary than from Czechoslovakia, which became completely isolated in this regard after 1968, and from Poland, which sustained new blows, such as the murder in 1984 of Jerzy Popiełuszko, a priest advocating opposition views. Nevertheless, the situation in Hungary was obviously far from being indicative of an actual process of liberalisation. The authorities of the police state, the bans and the secret services operated here in the same way as elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Their grip might have been somewhat weaker and their acts of enforcement somewhat more ’civilised’ but they watched over the stability of the system just as alertly as their neighbours.
So how did the cultural milieu – the youth subculture or the underground, which by then had been the hotbed of opposition to the establishment for two decades – operate during this time? What manifestations did it have and what situation did it find itself in?
Background
In order to understand the overall picture of these times, it must be established that the international counterculture of the sixties and seventies as well as its Avant-garde strivings, the Beat Generation, the hippy movement, the student riots and attempts at alternative lifestyles found a relatively broad and enthusiastic following and had numerous original figures in Hungary (like in the other Eastern bloc countries). More or less rebellious beat and rock groups – Illés, Omega, Metró, Kex, Sakk-Matt, Tűzkerék, Syrius – fired up masses of people, and even rock music festivals modelled on Woodstock were organised in the seventies. Avant-garde artists were experimenting with Neo-dadaism, Pop Art, Fluxus, happening and performance art. The adherents to the ’new left’– the circle of students gathered around philosopher György Lukács, students sympathising with Maoism and Che Guevara, as well as ’poverty sociologists’ – voiced their views in critical theory writings and public political actions inspired by the west. The second half of the seventies saw the emergence of literary and political samizdat publications, first typed and then stencil duplicated or reproduced by screen-printing. There were communes, huge house parties and Avant-garde apartment theatres, and experimental filmmaking enjoyed institutional support thanks to the Béla Balázs Studio for ’young’ filmmakers.
Starting from the late sixties, the actors of the cultural and political underground scene in Hungary were continuously trying to push the limits of tolerated critical and taboo-breaking manifestations – “BE FORBIDDEN!” was the slogan of Tamás Szentjóby, one of the popular creators of happenings. This of course provoked the watchdogs of the regime to repeatedly impose bans and political retaliation: György Poór and his fellow artists were sentenced to prison for a Maoist conspiracy” in 1968; the most populat Beat music band Illés was sentenced for one year of ‘silence’ in 1971 for their political messages; the philosophers of the Lukács school of thought – Ágnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, György Márkus, János Kis and György Bence – were sacked from their jobs in 1973 and several of them were forced to emigrate and a year later the same fate befell György Konrád, the writer of a volume critical of the system, and sociologist Iván Szelényi. In 1973 the authorities closed down the chapel in Balatonboglár rented by György Galántai and having functioned for three years as the popular summer venue for Avant-garde exhibitions and theatre events. In 1974 Miklós Haraszti, a representative of the new left, was imprisoned for his novel he smuggled to the west, titled “Darabbér” [Piece Wage], in which he revealed the truth about the exploitation of workers in socialist factories. Péter Halász and his apartment theatre emigrated to the west in 1975 after repeated bans and harassment and later earned worldwide fame in New York as the Squat Theater. Numerous other emblematic figures of the Avant-garde milieu left Hungary in these years, including János Baksa Soós, a rock musician and the singer of Kex, as well as Tamás Szentjóby, a happening artist, and Árpád Ajtony, a writer and filmmaker.
By the turn of the seventies and eighties this rather oppressive climate had slightly improved when the thus far separate groups of youth, art and political opposition began to gradually associate with one another and organised themselves into a kind of counterculture or ‘second publicity’. Of course in this case we cannot speak of a real counterculture but there existed a quite diverse and ever-more active intellectual-artistic subculture: a Hungarian – and mostly Budapest-based – underground. In 1977, risking losing their jobs, dozens of young intellectuals and in 1979 hundreds of them signed petitions protesting against the oppressive mechanisms of state socialism and expressing solidarity with the imprisoned activists of the Czechoslovakian Charta 77. Based on the Polish model, opposition historians, sociologists and philosophers held talks at home seminars, known as ‘flying universities’. Two samizdat periodicals were launched in 1981 (Beszélő, AB Hírmondó). Gábor Demszky, and following him, others also founded samizdat book publishers. A ’samizdat boutique’ with regular weekly opening hours operated in László Rajk’s flat until the police intervened.
In these years, new amateur trends appeared on the rock music scene: these hard rock, new wave and punk bands were far more radical compared to the Beat bands, which had by then been commercialised and incorporated into the state record industry. These music groups included the hardcore hard rock bands whipping up mass hysteria among the youth living on the outskirts of the city, the ragged Hungarian punks: Piramis, Edda, P. Mobil, Hobo Blues Band and the band that called itself a punk group: Beatrice. At the same time with this Gergely Molnár, inspired by David Bowie, formed his group Spions in 1978. The band of fine artists evoking Frank Zappa’s Neo-dadaism called A.E. (=Albert Einstein)Bizottság debuted at the Black Sheep concerts in 1980 organised for hard rock bands gathered around Beatrice.
Bands like URH, Kontroll Csoport, Balaton and Európa Kiadó as well as Vágtázó Halottkémek, the latter making ecstatic Shamanic music, gained popularity with their combination of punk and new wave from the late 1980s. Besides performing in clubs on the outskirts of the city and in university clubs, they often had concerts in the Club of Young Artists, which was under the control of the Hungarian Young Communist League and functioned as a kind of ‘safety valve’, a means of monitoring the activities of Avant-garde artists and at the same time one of the central meeting places in Budapest for the artists of Avant-garde subculture in the early eighties. In these years György Galántai, the organiser of the chapel exhibitions banned a decade earlier, re-emerged on the scene: he launched his Avant-garde fanzine-like samizdat periodical titled AL (Topical Letter) and together with his wife, Júlia Klaniczay, he organised Artpool, an arts archive in his home to document performance art events, happenings, exhibitions and concerts.
A banned exhibition and a punk trial
Although I earlier wrote that 1984 was not such a terrible year in Hungary, this statement needs to be slightly corrected: it started alarmingly, with a banned exhibition and the conviction of a punk band in a court.
On 27 January 1984 Galántai organised a large-scale exhibition in the Club of Young Artists titled “Hungary Can Be Yours!” displaying works by 110 Hungarian and foreign Avant-garde artists. This passed the tolerance limit of the authorities: the exhibition was banned straight on the day of the opening. But what was so blood-boiling in these artworks to deserve such a response from the authorities? This question would be hard to answer today. Obviously, the products of the alternative-Avant-garde art subculture proclaimed different ideas and were built on a different aesthetic canon when compared with those of the officially accepted art. The existence, main motifs and representatives of this trend, however, had been known for decades and had been vegetating in the ‘tolerated’ category. Perhaps the large number of exhibits and the ‘international’ community that joined the Hungarians as well as the diversity of genres – including fine arts, poetry, rock music and performance art – and the massive audience of 200-300 people at the opening (among them quite a few prominent ‘opposition’ figures) angered the officials, at least this is suggested by the tone of a rather detailed secret service report:
“For Galántai's competition several “works of art” (in reality plain botch-works) had been provided that are politically problematic, destructively criticize and, moreover… mock and attack our state and social order as well as the state security organs… and as a great number of visitors were present, the exhibition fulfilled a politically harmful, destructive and disorientating role.”
The works of art submitted to the exhibition responded to the organisers’ call by trying to provide a visual and metaphorical representation about “what Hungary was” and “what Hungary was like” in 1984. Of course everybody knew about George Orwell: the samizdat publication of the Hungarian translation of Animal Farm was already out and many people read Orwell’s 1984 in English. The lyrics of one of the first songs by the new wave band URH [Ultra Short Wavelength] (Péter Müller) went like this: “So great that when your health goes to hell, you’ve got Big Brother here to help...” Although the exhibited artworks made no direct reference to Orwell, the overall tone was ironic-sarcastic.
The harshest works were perhaps the pictures of the INCONNU group, whose artists had previously been active in the genre of performance art. One of them showed a map of Hungary with the following caption: “made to assist the work of the state security organisations, so that they can complete their surveillance tasks in connection with the INCONNU more efficiently”; a line next to it said: “Où est l’Inconnu?” [Where is the unknown?] and the map was full of completely chaotic, hide-and-seek-like misleading markings. Another picture by them was a paper cutout showing a map of Hungary pinned with nails, shards of glass in front of it and old bloodstains on it: a rather daring allusion to the events of 1956. The work titled Traffic Light (literal translation: ‘electric policemen’) by Miklós Erdély, the Hungarian guru of conceptual art, is a black-and-white drawing of the Hungarian tricolour flag, with each of the three colour fields containing a light and the words “stop”, “wait” and “go” corresponding to the red, white (amber in this case) and green strips in the Hungarian flag and sending the message that the country was a police state. Several of the displayed works featured the map of Greater Hungary, prior to the Trianon Treaty, which was a popular emblem of the nationalist opposition.
A special mention must also be made of the exhibited – or rather audible – rock music and performance art recordings, which were the most dynamic and most critical contribution from the Avant-garde milieu at the time. The audience could listen to an excerpt from the soundtrack of the film titled Centaur, made by Tamás Szentjóby, who had lived in emigration for a decade by then (and called himself Emmy Grant); they could also listen to the sound performance of Tibor Hajas, the leading figure of Hungarian body art; the exhibition included free verses and sound poems by several Avant-garde poets. And there was also some new wave music, such as the song ‘Howl’ by Vágtázó Halottkémek; ‘Brutal and Harsh’ by Bizottság; ‘Blue Light’ (mocking the title of the Hungarian TV series on criminal cases) by URH; and ‘Deliver Me from Evil’ by Európa Kiadó (“A bald censor sits in my brain / A thousand ears for each word of mine/ someone thinks instead of me/ Someone leaves instead of me/ I cannot win/ I cannot lose/ If I die/ Well, then I die/ Deliver me from evil...”, sang Jenő Menyhárt in his coarse and pain-filled voice).
The punk tone was represented by the CPg (Coitus Punk Group or Come on Punk Group), with their song that had caused the biggest scandal in the years before, in which they addressed Péter Erdős, who was the all-powerful party functionary and director of the Hungarian State Record Factory, with the following lines: “I’d so much love to/ So much want to/ (2x) I’d so much love to put your eyes out/ I’d so much love to tear your ears off/ I’d so much love to cut off your dick/ I’d so much love to tear your guts out / Péter Erdős, fuck you! (6x) / Fuck you! (5x)” (I live performances they usually accompanied these lines by turning their bottoms towards the audience, pushed their trousers down and showed their bare butts...)
The CPg was charged with ‘incitement’ (the term used at the time for voicing banned political content) and a court trial was already in progress against them. No wonder that was the case since in one of their concerts their intro went like this: “fucking bloody communist gang, why aren’t hanging?”; at other times they sang about “Soviet atom”, “harassing police” and “young model workers”. Another punk band, called Mosoi had been given several years of (suspended) jail sentence before the Hungary Can Be Yours exhibition, in September 1983, because of their lyrics. The decision in the court case launched against CPg was announced in Szeged on 7 February 1984, one week after the exhibition was banned: three of the four musicians received a two-year prison sentence and one of them was given a suspended sentence of one and a half years.
Films about the underground scene
After the ‘tough start’, during which a few blows were dealt, the year 1984 continued with a gradual opening up and new achievements for the cultural opposition, and this could mainly be felt in the area of feature films. The greater degree of freedom compared to previous years was reflected by the fact that one of the films made by Gyula Gazdag – a leading figure of the Béla Balázs Studio in the ’70s, credited with several excellent documentaries (one banned) – was finally screened, with a ten-year delay: his feature film titled “Bástyasétány 1974” [Bastion Promenade 1974], which he directed in 1974 and at the time was ordered to be shelved as it presented socialist culture with subtle irony. It was also permitted to run Péter Bacsó’s “Te rongyos élet” [Oh, Bloody Life], a film speaking straightforwardly about the resettlements in the ’50s. However, the greatest novelty, culturally speaking, was that some of the films, mainly screened for smaller studio audiences but at times for the general public, contained elements of the ’new wave’ subculture.
András Wahorn, the key man of the music band Bizottság, directed the film titled “Jégkrémbalett” [Ice-cream Ballet] in the Béla Balázs Studio. It is an intentionally absurd underground screen adaptation of a gluttony-fun-orgy series conceived in the spirit combining Frank Zappa and Dušan Makavejev, together with footage from several concerts and video clips, including the unforgettable duo of the extravagant female singer, Kokó, and Laca (FeLugossy), known as the “Milarepa version”, which evokes the saint of Tibetan tantric Buddhism on the shore of Lake Balaton in a sweet and silly setting. Another film with a new wave feeling, also made in the Béla Balázs Studio, was “Ex-kódex” by Péter Müller, who was the singer of URH, Kontroll Csoport and then Sziámi. A role is played in this production among others by the legendary Dixi (János Gémes), a philosopher and a master in the art of living, who could step out of a Kerouac novel, and the director allows him to speak at length.
It was also in the Béla Balázs Studio where János Xantus was able to make his first film. In 1984 he came out with a long feature shown to the general public, titled “Eszkimó asszony fázik” [Eskimo Woman Feel Cold], the story of an amateur singer (Marietta Méhes) struggling and being thrown about by life. Its primary objective is to present the milieu inspired by Andy Warhol, Lou Reed and Nico, which filled her life not with the roughness of punk but rather with an enervated spleen and the irony known from Pop Art. The soundtrack was played by two bands – Balaton, led by Mihály Víg, and Trabant, organised by Gábor Lukin – which did not have many concerts but distributed their music on cassettes reproduced in home studios and were listened to in many flats over the years.
Another film that must be included in the list of underground films is Gábor Bódy’s “A kutya éji dala” [The Dog’s Night Song], which debuted in 1983 but was also shown in 1984. The film director himself acts the role of the peculiar pseudo-priest ending up in the countryside. Among other people, he meets an astronomer, who takes part in ecstatic rock music sessions with his friends every night – this role was played by Attila Grandpierre, the singer of Vágtázó Halottkémek, for whom this was an excellent opportunity to do some shaman music. Bódy was an outstandingly talented figure of the Hungarian Avant-garde film scene. His career also started in the late sixties from the Béla Balázs Studio, where he made experimental films. By the early ’80s he enjoyed international acclaim. His two-part film “Nárcisz és Psyché” [Narcissus and Psyche] (1980) starred Udo Kier. From 1980, partly living in West Berlin, he and his wife, Vera Baksa Soós, co-organised an international video art magazine, titled INFERMENTAL. It came as a shock when he committed suicide in 1985 and caused a major scandal when it turned out after 1989 that while being the most creative and leading figure of Avant-garde film for two decades, he was an informer for the secret service regularly writing reports from 1973. Like the Stazi, which enlisted Sascha Anderson in Berlin, the Hungarian secret service tried to monitor the activities of the underground scene with the help of its ‘main protagonists’.
Yet another a film should be mentioned from 1984, which was not really a product of the underground but was nevertheless linked to it. Levente Szörényi and János Bródy, the two leading musicians of the Illés band, by then dissolved, tried their hands at composing a historical rock opera titled “István a király” [Stephen, the King]. The stage production was running in 1983, and Gábor Koltay’s film adaptation premiered in 1984. The central idea resembled that of “Jesus Christ Superstar” but Szörényi and Bródy chose an original concept: they presented the historical parable through different rock music styles. The first Christian king of Hungary sang in the voice of ’classical’ Beat music, while his pagan adversaries (Koppány and his people) performed their roles in the styles of the more hardcore representatives of hard rock and punk (their women and daughters represented folk styles). The powerful and expressive performances by Gyula Vikidál from P. Mobil and Feró Nagy from Beatrice lay the grounds for a new ‘national rock music’, a nationalist youth subculture open to pagan, ’ancient Hungarian’ tradition. (A surprising detail emerged from these quarters too after 1989: the handsome and robust ‘tough guy’ Vikidál, also reported to the secret police in those years.)
Underground as a lifestyle
It is hard to remember today what it was like to live in those years when we could not yet know how long the much-hatred state socialism would be around. There were a lot of us who decided not to choose the path of a career, craftiness and petty bourgeois aspirations within the prevailing system; instead, we lived our lives on the peripheries, in the subcultures and the underground, looking for and finding ways of entertainment, culture and a community. With more or less success. Resistance, conspirative activities, political actions on varying scales, cultural scandals and regular attempts at breaking taboos often brought meaning and excitement to our lives, while disillusionment caught up with a lot of us, as we saw many talented people losing their way, being deprived of opportunities and thus becoming spiritually empty and trapped by drugs and alcohol.
Around 1984 these people were the ideal recruits for the Krishnas and then the powerful movement of charismatic Christians, called the Faith Church. (Some years later, in 1987, we witnessed the most spectacular conversion: one of the most talented musicians of the new wave milieu, the first Hungarian rap singer, Tamás Pajor, who was the leader of the band Neurotic, also known for scandalous concerts, joined the Faith Church along with a dozen other fellow musicians during the time when János Xantus was shooting a film about him. Xantus’ film “Rocktérítő” [A Rock Convert] documents this shocking development.) Back in 1984, however, only the first winds of this series of conversions could be felt.
The atmosphere was rather one of partying – sometimes rebellious and angry, and some other times apathetic and melancholy, but overall it was somewhat hesitant. There was a joke going around at the time: “The situation is hopeless but not serious...” But it could also be described with some excerpts from lyrics:
“The city is a distant planet / living here is not bad and not good / it is a high-class mental ward /that is the wage of fear / you want the most of the best / but even this is better than nothing...”
(Európa Kiadó – lyrics by Jenő Menyhárt)“I know that you know it will be over/ it’s a bit bad now but it will be over/ and the always-something-else will also be over/ and what’s very bad will also be over/ and what’s very good will also be over/ sometimes terribly, sometimes easily/ and that’s how it should be, that’s how it should be/ this suffering is so good/ the whole thing so uplifting/ I feel so terribly / so terribly, terribly good…”
(Balaton – lyrics by György Kozma)“This house can alsocollapse/ it’s stolen my time/ tremor in the corner of my eye / it’s all the same /…from a distance it’s far away/ and even more when I go close/ your dark curtain should be drawn / you have nothing to do with anyone anymore”
(Trabant – lyrics by János Vető)“Pixie dust, pixie dust / Deliver me from this rut...”
(Balaton – lyrics by Mihály Víg)