An excerpt from the Mephisto booklet essay by John Cunningham

Mephisto, along with Colonel Redl (Redl ezredes, 1985) and Hanussen (1988) brings together a number of István Szabó’s concerns and interest in Central Europe, where he was born (Budapest, 18 February, 1938) and still lives. They do not constitute a trilogy and Szabó has always resisted this suggestion when it has been put to him. They are more like a set of paintings, still photography or a compilation video, picking out particular moments in the history of the region as in the works of George Grosz, Otto Dix and Käthe Kollwitz or Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin novels – snapshots and fragments of a time now lost, think of the Bayeux Tapestry with holes cut out. The films focus on three different protagonists, all of whom are Central Europeans and products, in varying degrees, of Mitteleuropa, that geographical, cultural and historical entity once controlled and/or influenced by Germany and Austro-Hungary. Basically, the empires of the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs, with their respective centres in Berlin, Vienna and Budapest.

The two empires covered a huge area of Europe, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, and its dominant culture was Germanic. Intellectually most writers, thinkers and a number of artists embraced or were influenced by some form of German idealism (Fichte, Schelling and Hegel). They tended to be liberal, democratic and tolerant, as an example look at the writers grouped around the Hungarian journal Nyugat (‘West’). There was also a large Jewish influence on the culture of Mitteleuropa, part German idealism, part Marxism and what Michael Löwy calls ‘Jewish Messianism’. Their thinking could be characterised as Judeo-Germanic and includes such diverse figures as Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Max Brod, Gustav Landauer and György Lukács. However, it would be misleading to portray Mitteleuropa as some form of idyll, Trotsky who lived in Vienna on two occasions thought the Habsburg Empire was the “prison house of nations”, while in Germany life was distorted by an all-pervading sense of militarism. After the Versailles Treaty in 1919, the Weimar Republic was a stew of conflicting ideas, repeated failures and resentment over the war – a state that promised much but never delivered. Austria was a truncated muddle eventually becoming part of the Reich while Hungary careered into a form of Christian nationalism and briefly embraced fascism during the Second World War. Although Mephisto and the other two films do not treat these themes consistently and only occasionally in any depth, taken together they can be seen as the death-rattle or requiem for the last vestiges of Mitteleuropa ravaged by the First World War, the rise of Hitler, the Anschluss, the Holocaust and the killing fields of the Second World War. What little was left survived only abroad in pockets, such as those cultural forms (in Britain – the magazine Picture Post, the Glyndebourne and Edinburgh Festivals) inspired by émigrés from fascism. Or in the USA, where the last representatives: László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm lived in exile and have long since died. Mephisto is not, in any sense, a history of Mitteleuropa and its demise, but nor is that history merely background noise. It may be the case that, as L. P. Hartley once wrote: “The past is a foreign country”, but we can (and should) still visit it, for the events in this region have done so much to shape the world we have inherited. István Szabó has opened a door for us to enter.

 

John Cunningham's complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the Mephisto booklet which accompanies this release.