Hungarian Review November 2015 [antikvár]

F CROSSING THE FRONTIER Editorial Note John O'Sullivan 1 or almost a century "crossing the frontier" has been an almost omnipresent metaphor in poetic and intellectual life. That should not perhaps astonish us in the aftermath of a war that first destroyed the frontiers dividing Europe and then drew new ones in the devastated continent. Frontiers and the states they enclosed could hardly seem so "natural" in this world of new maps. Given that the frontiers of Hungary were altered more than any other single European non-imperial state, Hungarian writers might have been among the most radical advocates of frontier crossing. Hungarian socialists were indeed so to the extreme extent of favouring the abolition of national frontiers. But they had little influence in the Hungary of their day, largely because they were living in Moscow at the time. Otherwise Hungarian opinion on frontiers was beyond conservative. It was passionately restorationist. The Treaty of Trianon (1920) symbolised amputation, loss, shame, and the duty of recovery. Frontiers had to be crossed, certainly, but only for the purpose of firmly entrenching authentic ones. It was the English, above all W H. Auden, who pioneered the metaphor of frontier crossing as early as 1929. In Auden's poetry, admittedly, the frontiers to be crossed were only rarely national ones. Mostly they were frontiers of law, custom, morality, class and sexuality. Sometimes a frontier, once crossed, offered refuge from the oppression of the domestic Enemy. Sometimes that Enemy was seeking the frontier as refuge from revolution at home (he wouldn't get it). Sometimes necessity compelled the revolutionaries to invade across frontiers that represented dying values or outmoded class loyalties. But since patriotism was supposedly one of those dying values, sometimes the frontiers to be crossed or simply ignored were national ones too. Both communists and fascists routinely ignored frontiers when it was in their interest to do so, most famously in the Spanish civil war. But communists were more consistent in doing so. Fascists supposedly believed in the frontiers they violated; for communists frontiers were bourgeois illusions that obscured the only true reality of class conflict. They had an armoury of mechanical arguments that served, like tanks, to flatten frontier posts and to coerce nations into becoming provinces of an ideology. In the old joke, they spoke Esperanto like natives. CROSSING THE FRONTIER 3