Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading James Michener’s The Bridge at Andau which chronicles the five days of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. While familiar with his award-winning fiction such as Hawaii and Chesapeake, I was not aware of his non-fiction reporting during this era.  It originally was published in 1957 and republished in 2015.  There is an excellent introduction in the new edition by the writer Steve Berry.

The title refers to a small footbridge at Andau, Austria, that Hungarians used to escape the oppressive regime of the Communists in the 1950s.  Michener was a reporter on the Austrian side of the bridge who ended up assisting escapees and who also took notes on their stories.  This book is historical fiction mainly because while the stories told are basically true, the names of individuals were changed to protect families and friends still in Hungary.  Each chapter relates a story of one or more of the escapees during the revolution.

I found the book intriguing mainly because I was not aware of the details of what took place in Budapest.

I found it a good read!

Below is a so-so review that appeared in Commentary in 1957.

Tony

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Commentary

The Bridge at Andau, by James Michener

by Paul Kecskemeti

The Bridge at Andau is an account of the Hungarian revolution based entirely on talks the author had with Hungarian refugees whom he met last November as they were crossing the Austrian border. Mr. Michener devotes most of the book to descriptions of some outstanding episodes of the Budapest uprising, but he also provides flashbacks showing what life was like in Hungary before the revolution. The details of these flashbacks, taken in isolation, seem plausible enough, but their cumulative effect is misleading. One would not know from these stories, for example, that the “thaw” in Soviet policy after Stalin’s death extended to Hungary too, nor do we learn anything about the coalition regime—composed of small landholders, Socialists, and Communists—which preceded the Communist one-party dictatorship.

It is impossible to achieve complete accuracy in reconstructing the events of the actual uprising, since eyewitness accounts of large-scale incidents (such as the siege of the radio station during the night of October 23-24 or the massacre in Parliament Square on October 25) diverge considerably. The main outlines, however, are drawn on Mr. Michener’s pages, and some aspects of the revolution are brought out clearly: the unbelievable courage with which children and adolescents defied death time and again until many were slain; the despair which drove a people to choose death and destruction rather than continue with a life under Communism.

But there are fatal limitations in Mr. Michener’s approach. To begin with, a revolution cannot be portrayed from eyewitness accounts alone, no matter how thoroughly these are checked by “highly trained research experts.” Many crucial political facts must be established from other sources. Whenever Mr. Michener tries to fill the political background in, he relies on fantasy and speculation, often giving the impression of writing about a political never-never land. A glaring example of this is his description of the very first act of the revolution, the presentation of the students’ demands at the radio station:

At nine o’clock that night, while the crowd still hovered near the station a group of university students arrived at the great wooden doors and demanded the right to broadcast to the people of Hungary their demand for certain changes in government policy. These young men sought a more liberal pattern of life. The AVO men laughed at them, then condescendingly proposed, ‘We can’t let you broadcast, but we’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll let you put your complaints on tape, and maybe later on we’ll run the tapes over the air.’ The students refused to fall for this trick and tried to force their way into the building, but the AVO men swung the big doors shut.

This is a purely imaginary scene. The young men were not merely seeking “a more liberal pattern of life”; the text they wanted to broadcast included such points as the formation of a new government under the premiership of Imre Nagy, the withdrawal of Russian troops, the revision of trade treaties with the Soviet Union. The conversation with the laughing policemen at the door of the building never took place. The AVO men guarding the radio station did not negotiate with the students, and there was no offer such as Mr. Michener describes. Actually, the students’ delegation was admitted to the building and there followed a long and fruitless negotiation with the radio authorities as to what could and could not be broadcast.

Mr. Michener has his own notion of what the revolution meant politically:

. . . in Budapest the Soviets perpetrated their horrors upon a people who had originally been their peaceful associates, who had been good communists, and who had co-operated to the point of sacrificing their own national interests. In Budapest, the Russians destroyed with cold fury the very people who had in many ways been their best friends in Eastern Europe. They were not fighting reactionaries. They were not fighting antique elements trying to turn back the clock of history. They were annihilating fellow communists.

Mr. Michener must have heard from many refugees that the workers of Csepel, the miners of Pecs, the students of Budapest were not fighting to restore capitalism, and this apparently could mean only one thing to him: the Hungarians were Communists, willing to sacrifice their own national interests to further the Soviet cause. One is either a reactionary capitalist bent on turning back the clock of history, or a devoted follower of the Soviet Union. Since the Hungarians were not the former, they must have been the latter.

The fallacy involved in such reasoning is obvious. What the Hungarian uprising shows is that the Hungarians could, and did, loathe both the Soviet Union and their own Communist regime, without desiring to return confiscated industrial and landed property to its former owners. But the fact that restoration of capitalism and landlordism was generally rejected by the revolutionaries does not justify the conclusion that at some earlier time the Hungarians as a nation had turned Communist or become the “best friends” the Soviet Union had in Eastern Europe. As long as they could express themselves freely, the Hungarian people voted overwhemingly against the Communist party, in spite of intense pressures and blandishments. One can blame the Russians for many things, but not for annihilating “friends” and “fellow Communists.”

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