Oliver Kamm - 'Ostalgie'

Oliver Kamm is an infuriating but must-read writer. An unrepentant Blairite, ex investment banker and very pro EU. There's lots I disagree with, but he's smart and argues his case very rigorously.

Here he is taking a swipe at the Daily Mail. Extraordinarily and counterintuitively the Daily Mail carries an article looking back with nostalgia at life in Communist Hungary.

"If the Mail titles ever ceased publication, I should be sorry on more grounds than merely the loss of press diversity. I find it useful that a single stable should encompass so many things I deride or despise: economically illiterate anti-Europeanism; social authoritarianism; mean-spirited, sneering hostility to homosexuals; crank conspiracy theories; support for Intelligent Design; utterly bogus, unfounded scaremongering about evidence-based medical science; and so many others.

But this is a new one on me. The Mail on Sunday carries an extraordinary article entitled "Oppressive and grey? No, growing up under Nazism was the happiest time of my life" by Susanne Clark. According to Mrs Clark, a state that is typically portrayed in western media as an unrelenting tyranny was more of a rural idyll - all in all, "rather a fun place to live". She says:

"Some of my earliest memories of living at home are of the animals my parents kept on their smallholding. Rearing animals was something most people did, as well as growing vegetables. Outside Berlin and the big towns, we were a nation of Tom and Barbara Goods.

"My parents had about 50 chickens, pigs, rabbits, ducks, pigeons and geese. We kept the animals not just to feed our family but also to sell meat to our friends. We used the goose feathers to make pillows and duvets."


Mrs Clark is especially interesting in her account of membership of the Hitler Youth:

"Many in the West believed it was a crude attempt to indoctrinate the young with Nazi ideology, but being a German Maiden taught us valuable life skills such as building friendships and the importance of working for the benefit of the community. 'Together for each other' was our slogan, and that was how we were encouraged to think.

"As a German Maiden, if you performed well in your studies, communal work and school competitions, you were rewarded with a trip to a summer camp. I went every year because I took part in almost all the school activities: competitions, gymnastics, athletics, choir, shooting, literature and library work.

"On our last night at the Bund Deutscher Mädel camp we sang songs around the bonfire, such as the Hitler Youth anthem, the Fahnenlied, and other traditional songs. Our feelings were always mixed: sad at the prospect of leaving, but happy at the thought of seeing our families again. Today, even those who do not consider themselves Nazis look back at their days in the Hitler Youth with great affection."

You think I'm making this up? Well, I've changed one or two words. The author's name is Zsuzsanna, not Susanne, Clark. And instead of Nazi Germany she is writing of Communist Hungary. She was a member not of the Hitler Youth but of the Young Pioneers, where she sang about squirrels rather than banners. Excepting the reference to Berlin, everything else is as she has written it.

But my analogy is fair. The totalitarian oppression of Eastern Europe after WWII was a difference of tempo, not of type, from Nazi Germany. Mrs Clark has what I suppose we should gratefully take as the fearless free spirit to acknowledge that "Communism in Hungary had its downside", but "despite this, I believe that, taken as a whole, the positives outweighed the negatives". So let's look at some of the negatives.

The regime of János Kádár in Hungary came to be seen in the West as more liberal than the other Soviet satellite states. This was true (and even then only partially so) only in economics, not in politics. The regime was founded in terror. After the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, Kádár was installed as party chief not by the people but by the Soviet Union. He immediately became known as Hungary's Quisling.

Kádár pledged not to arrest the deposed leader Imre Nagy, who had taken refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. Tragically, Nagy believed him. Nagy decided not to seek asylum but emerged, and of course was promptly arrested. Nagy and his comrades were imprisoned in Romania for 18 months, before being sent back to Hungary in June 1958. They were given a secret trial. The inevitable verdict was guilty; the inevitable sentence was death. Nagy was buried in an unmarked grave. Many of his compatriots shared a similar fate. The regime's own figures put the number of political executions at 2,000. The true figure was many times this. Thousands were incarcerated or exiled, or simply removed from public life. Scores of thousands were deported to the Soviet Union and disappeared. Kádár broke Hungary's political life. Hungary became a state without politics.

I heard about some of this at the same time as, I guess, Mrs Clark was undergoing her healthy outdoor pursuits with the Pioneers. The Kádár terror provoked an exodus to the West. For no reason I ever understood, many Hungarians settled in Leicester, where I grew up. I got to know one of these freedom fighters, Péter Mandoki. After settling in Leicester, he had met and married a local girl. Their daughter, Anna, became and has remained ever since one of my dearest friends. After the collapse of Communism, Anna learned Hungarian, travelled to the country to meet her lost family, and eventually settled in Budapest in 1991 where she worked as an accountant. I used to go to stay with her there or we'd meet in Prague. Even with my partial knowledge and limited experience of the culture, the sense of nations emerging from a stunted, tyrannised past was palpable.

A few years ago, Anna, now having emigrated to Melbourne, sought out the equivalents of her father: Hungarian émigrés who had fled to Australia after the 1956 uprising. She interviewed them for a book that she later published. There is a passage in which one of her interviewees describes the games of a young boy of that time, playing with his toy soldiers. The soldiers in best condition are (if you can imagine it) UN forces, and those in the ugliest condition are Soviet troops. "Itt vannak ENSZek!" cries the boy: "The UN troops are here!"

But of course the UN troops were not there. They never came. Those who hoped in vain for the UN's arrival, however, can now find in the Mail on Sunday the gratuitous insult from Mrs Clark that theirs are "the perspectives of wealthy emigrés or anti-communist dissidents with an axe to grind". It seems redundant, so I hope it will not appear ungracious, to add that Mrs Clark, who has been hawking her experiences in the Young Pioneers for some years, is an awesomely silly woman to whom history has never happened."