Zsuzsanna Gahse is an Austrian-German-Swiss author; she fled to the West with her Hungarian family in 1956 and has since lived in Vienna, Stuttgart and Lucerne - today she lives in Müllheim (Canton Thurgau, Switzerland). Her literary work is situated between prose and poetry, between narrative and dramatic texts. She has received numerous prizes and awards for her 30 or so book publications and translations.

On the way to the hotel, I asked a Hungarian author I know, let's call him Eduard or Peter Paul, how a mutual acquaintance was doing. When we'd last met, I'd talked about an old book that we must have read at the same time in primary school and that still interested us. I remember the chapter that talked about special foreign languages, strange expressions such as it is spoken through me instead of I speak or it is sung through me instead of I sing. When I told Peter Paul about this, he immediately replied with a smile that the book had been a socialist claim. Shortly afterwards, I mentioned the common origin of the Finnish-Hungarian languages. He couldn't say anything about that, he said. Hungarian is more likely to be German, Turkish or Serbian.

Years ago, György Konrád, who was also well-known in this country at the time, spoke almost word for word about his mother tongue and clearly rejected any similarities with Finnish. Konrád was regarded as a politically aware author, so I was all the more surprised by his view.

It is irritating when a writer cannot or will not distinguish between borrowed words that have immigrated from a nearby or respected country and the basic structure of a language. When he ignores elementary, recognisably common, obviously ancient words and even wants to portray this ignorance, this obtuseness, as an enlightened attitude, as distancing himself from a former dictatorship or something, I find it hard to listen any longer - at the very least, my ears are ringing. It has nothing whatsoever to do with political distancing. I don't believe that Peter Paul or anyone else wanted to claim that languages fall from the sky independently, with no connection to any other language, and are later populated with individual words adopted from neighbouring countries. Peter Paul smiled stubbornly. He had a scarf around his neck and mumbled into his scarf.

Certainly the Soviet Union had for years overemphasised the unity of the allied countries, and I repeat this so as not to place Peter Paul and the once famous György Konrád too abruptly in the same corner: Certainly, the Soviet Union had once overemphasised the close affiliation of the allied countries, but etymologists in particular were given a lot of leeway. I enjoyed a detailed reading of a formerly highly respected Finno-Ugric linguist (Géza Bárczy) and gained a lot from it. He was and still is known to university-educated authors, perhaps even non-students, but they look down on him and smile into their scarves. They consider themselves enlightened opponents of a past regime, or any regime; they are proud of their stance, and they continue to throw languages overboard - they throw entire languages overboard so as not to associate with any former allies. Some still do it today. They know exactly with whom they don't want any connection (also considering advantages for themselves.) They pupate in their own heads, certain regions of the brain are stuck in cocoons, and who knows where and when the larvae will develop. The tissue could dry up completely. And in the end, this deliberate larval state is a parallel to the unfortunate Alzheimer's disease.

I should add that it is advantageous (a privilege, they say today) to know a Finno-Ugric language and thus to see completely different European idioms in context. The similarities between Slavic, Germanic, Romance and Greek are impressive, but the structure of Hungarian, for example, clearly shows that not all imaginable languages have to be constructed accordingly. This is just one example, because connoisseurs of Turkish, Basque or an Arabic language (a long list could follow here) also have the privilege of seeing the language families in Europe.

A continuation will of course follow under the keyword Scarf.