Even the beastliest Communist dictatorship failed to demolish civic tradition in Hungary, Deputy Minister of State for International and EU Affairs Gergely Prőhle said at a roundtable discussion held in the Budapest Opera House to celebrate the 25th anniversary of opening the border between Hungary and Austria.
Hungarian musical life and companionship played a key role in safeguarding those traditions, he added and asserting that unlike in the former GDR the components of civic society survived in Hungary, albeit in embryonic form.
1956 played a pivotal role in Hungary, Gergely Prőhle said, as communists in Hungary were driven by a superior instinct to survive since “they recognised they had better privatize government assets and offer certain freedoms to the people rather than be hanged or imprisoned”.
He mentioned as an example the former GDR, which owes the current status of its economy to Western provinces, rather than to its own economic performance. He said it was very difficult to fathom current Hungarian events from a German perspective and to understand “how what used to be the merriest barracks ended up as the saddest supermarket”.
He said Hungary accepted some compromises during the fall of communism which others countries did not have to “because the bad ones left and the good ones entered”. He claimed the recent Hungarian reforms, which triggered “unfriendly” responses from the German media, were necessary in order to rectify the compromises of 1989-1990.
Hans Kaiser, head of the Budapest office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation said for him 1956 was synonymous to freedom. The notion of freedom and Hungary are inseparable. He said the changes of the past 25 years were far from being complete and added saying that communism caused both material damage and cognitive harm in people’s heads.