Band on the Run/Budapest Dreams

 

 

Jan 20

Band on the Run/Budapest Dreams 

“Protest like there is a tomorrow,” that was the sign we saw in Berlin, between cracked windows,  wondering about the future, the fog about on our way to the train station for a ride to Budapest.

Says John Harrison:

“Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city… a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.” 

The dreams were many, making it from city to city, from Brooklyn to Berlin to Budapest. 

Thinking about our last trip here with the kids, learning about history, thinking about what went wrong after the war, about the madness of our times, the band on the run, talking with the bus driver about their favorite baths. 

With a nasal voice, he suggested we try Lukacs baths, an art nouveau spa adjacent to a hospital that a lot of the tourists miss. 

We take a bus to a tram through the streets of Vienna like streets, past cozy restaurants, selling goulash, finding our way.

We swam outside in the pool, steam rising, and back inside, switching between hot and cold pools,

taking in a feeling, from the beginnings of the baths:

“In the 12th century, knights of the order of Saint John engaging in curing the sick settled in the area of today's Lukács Bath, followed by the orders of Rhodos and Malta, who built their monasteries baths as well. The bath operated through the time of the Turks but the energy of the springs were used primarily to produce gunpowder and for grinding wheat. After the reoccupation of Buda, the bath became the property of the Treasury. In 1884, Fülöp Palotay purchased the bath from the Treasury, thus a series of transformations began. The spa hotel was built, an up-to-date hydrotherapy department was established and the swimming pool was transformed. People wishing to be healed came from all over the world. Following their successful healing cure, they placed marble tablets o­n the wall of the Bath's courtyard to express their gratitude.”

The thermal baths feel like an old world hammam, bodies around us, taking in the Magic Mountain feeling in the air. 

By the time I’m done, I don't even feel the cold bath. 

It all blurs into each other. 

Back to the tram, we look at the city, walking down windy streets, fog in the air, an old world feeling, city, full old empire charm, somewhere between Vienna and Sarajevo, with lots and lots of history to shape it.

The staircase to our room circles and winds, inviting a lovely uncertainty.

Back in the room, we see reports about a new administration being sworn in power. Some in Berlin are horrified. Others shrug. Some worry about democracy, others think it will be fine. Many things I care about are precarious or at risk, freedom of bodies and autonomy, immigration, movement across borders, ideas, free thought, civil liberties. The last round inspired us to see more and more of the world, to try to understand how others live, how they survive, and find meaning and beauty, even in hard times, thank you Anne Frank, to flee persecution, to endure it,  to find common cause with others. I pray for democracy and those who suffer when it collapses. I know many feel like they will be fine. But looks around you, at the kids, hoping for a healthy future, the person in a restaurant cleaning, the person whose family doesn't have all their paperwork, the outsiders, drug users, they have, we all have something to be concerned about, fear of fires spreading in la, persecution we saw in Germany, autocratic

tendencies here in Hungary, the ever expanding tendencies rulers with, 

 "absolute power, taking no account of other people's wishes or opinions; domineering...." The collateral damage will be  sweeping. Already immigrants are being detained, identities criminalized. Will democracy remain? I hope so. Will doors close, as new ones open? Certainly. Think dialectically, I wrote eight years ago.

As Thomas Mann wrote about the madness of his day, the wars and collective suicide, the utopian dreams that followed in The Magic Mountain:

"For at the moment of the final division, the final miniaturization of matter, suddenly the whole cosmos opened up."

Jan 21

There is a tik tok video that says when you are depressed about what could possibly go wrong, don’t talk with an eastern European. On the screen a young woman says, we know it could always get worse. The bottom could go lower. The last time we were here we explored the Museum of Terror, a Communist era detention center, turned museum about the horrors. 

I had to leave. The youngster and mom made it all the way through. That went on for four and a half decades. 

Rather than repeat that, we spent the day at the National Museum trying to understand the history of the Magyar people caught between empires, Ottoman, Byzantine, Holy Roman, invasions of the Mongolians, on and on, through wars, the Hungarian Jacobin movement,  Communism, 1990 into Europe, Viktor Orban and his autocratic visions for and today. Visited the

old synagogue and Gellert Baths, took trams all day, visited Brandon and Noemi and explored the ruins bars, chatting with our friends about Budapest and the people  we saw, the messages on the street, the feeling here. Walking by the old synagogue, Baby C wondered how neighbors who had lived with each other for centuries, could have decided it was ok to murder their neighbors. 

 It's still a question that hasn't an answer. I hope we are not drifting back there.  The horrors of history are always there, around the corner, always here.