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Finding a New Homeland

The photo (above) by Bruno Bourel is something of a love letter to the French artist’s adopted city of Budapest.  It seems both a reflection of and a tribute to the photography of the Hungarian artist Brassaï (born Halász Gyula in what is now Brasov, Romania).  Brassaï sent Paris many similar romantic valentines after he took up residence in the French capital in 1918.  The difference is that Brassaï’s photographs of Paris of that day and age have become romanticised, while Bourel’s “Before the Photo” is an immediate act of romanticizing Budapest by returning the city to a moment in the uncertain past, or to a time outside of history that never was.  Bourel, a professional photographer from France who moved to Hungary in the mid-1990’s, like many ex-patriots—or citizens of the world—seems to be searching for the “next Paris,” or their new ideal home.  

            Time is not the only aspect of nostalgia.  Whether the search lies in the past or in the future, the location in space of that preferable homeland is equally important to consider.  Dubravka Ugresic writes of the East and the West as frustrated lovers, or of the East as the mistress to the married man who is the West. [1]   While the resident of Prague or Budapest may have longed for Paris or San Francisco, the changes awoke a desire for the American and the Frenchman to be reunited with his ideal “mate” in the newly opened worlds to the east.  For many (of us) the fact that the affair had been possible all along was of little or no importance.  The changes brought strong longings to act on the desire for that beautiful and exotic other place: the potential lover of a new homeland.

            While not exclusively so, this desire for the ideal home may be especially strong for artist.  The removal of extraneous outside influences—all of the baggage of everyday living in the known place—can liberate the senses.  As one of the exiled/ex-patriot characters in Nádas Péter’s Book of Memories explains,  

In a foreign city the essential and the trivial merge in an impenetrable blur, a stone façade and a human face, a staircase and the people climbing it become one; colors, smells, lights, kissing, eating, lovemaking—all flash before us, though we cannot know their origins and histories, and their impact is all the stronger, lack of awareness and knowledge transporting you back to the paradisiacal state of a child’s urge to observe and discover, the sensual state of unaccountability! perhaps this is the reason why twentieth-century  people like so much to be on the move, the comforting, familiar state may be the one they are searching for as they roam about, singly, in pairs, or as part of a herd, in foreign cities all over the world; weighed down by duties and responsibilities, they want out, and this may be the only universally accepted state in which, with no particular danger, they can breach the thick wall erected to isolate the events of one’s unconscious childhood from the experiences of what one believes to be conscious adulthood: what infinite joy, what bliss, to be able, once again, to trust oneself to one’s nose, taste buds, ears, and eyes, to one’s elemental and undeceivable sense organs! [2]

A Personal Interlude

            I am also complicit in harboring desire for “mysterious Eastern Europe.”  I can document the start of my obsession with Central-Eastern Europe and they all deal with not the dawning of a new age, but a focus on romantic images of the past.  Soon after the fall of the wall, a General Electric television advertisement with the tag line, “We’re Lighting Up Budapest,” delivered me my first view of one of the trademark sights of Hungary, the capital’s Chain Bridge.  This was followed quickly by an obscure reference to another important Hungarian locale in the 1699 English Restoration Comedy “The Constant Couple.”

 

If you’re my friend, meet me this evening at the Rummer; I’ll pay my way, drink a health to my king, prosperity to my country; and away to Hungary tomorrow morning…. Let but a single drum beat up for volunteers between Ludgate  and Charing Cross, and I shall undoubtedly  hear it at the walls of Buda. [3]

Upon making a decision to search out this place that seemed to seductively be whispering into my ear, the purchase of a guidebook brought me yet another trademark image of “old” Hungary.  The 1991 cover of the Rough Guide showed the interior of the Rudás “Turkish” Bath’s central stain-glassed dome and the nude male bathers whose bodies the publisher had modestly blurred.  This odd exotic world had become indelibly imprinted upon my longings as a place where the relics of the past can be found immediately next to the present day.  It was the land that I thought time had forgotten or a land that had preserved the past just for me.

            This is not so much a self-accusation as a confession of nostalgia.  This simple nostalgia, devoid of awareness of the place, is a form of naïvete.  While I would not suggest that the condition is harmful, the attempt to find the homeland in this way will inevitably be thwarted.  For once the place is known to a certain degree, either the nostalgia must be discarded, or another homeland of the mind must be sought.

Whose Nostalgia?

            Brassaï’s visions of Paris have had an effect on the way that Paris is seen today, and I would argue that Bourel’s photographs—and the nostalgia they represent—influence how Budapest is seen, imagined, and experienced.  If there is no absolute collective memory within a culture, then the existence of the outsider further complicates the act of remembering.  The movement of people in a global community creates a constantly changing mutual process of cultural development.  In a utopia, the ex-patriot would find his alternate homeland in the new locale and the native would have already created the ideal place without crossing a border.  In reality, the intersection and confrontation of the native and foreigner’s different desires for aspects of the traditional and modern create a new third place/time, but the absolute goal of the ideal homeland remains unrealized.