Fall of Iron Curtain Brings Back Glory Days to Austro-Hungarian Region

FERTORAKOS, Hungary — Before democracy tore away the Iron Curtain, locals like Ervin and Eva Szentesi reveled in their distance from the dictators a thousand miles away in Moscow. The trouble was, they felt just as far from the Austrians just across the border, with whom they had shared an empire for most of the millennium.

The relative liberty of being the western outpost of the “Evil Empire” earned Hungary the facetious label of “the happy barracks of communism.” But its inhabitants were isolated and resentful.

“Ten years ago, this village was totally abandoned because it was on the border and there was nowhere to go from here,” says Ervin Szentesi, who operates a hotel and flower shop in this Hapsburg hamlet. “Now, being on the border is a big advantage. Most of our guests are from Vienna because they can now make the trip in less than an hour.”

Residents of one of the most vibrant of post-Communist economies--with more than 5% GDP growth last year and an enviable 9% jobless rate--Hungary’s notoriously gloomy citizens are learning to be upbeat. The Austrian border is a mere political nicety no more daunting than in the bygone imperial era.

Gone are the barbed-wire fences and lookout towers manned by gun-toting guards. Today’s Austro-Hungarian frontier is a portrait of peace and prosperity. Cyclists and horseback riders cross at will, patronizing restaurants, shops, country inns and campsites.

The frontier also may be a prototype for a European continent without empires or ideological divides, in which the lines will define where nationalities live rather than physically separating them.

Continuing disparity between Hungarian and Austrian prices for everything from real estate to dentures has given rise to thriving cross-border trade, travel and investment. Across the landscape of grapevines and giant sunflowers, bilingual signs advertise services that have put Hungarians to work in the private sector and enhanced many eastern Austrians’ quality of life.

“Austrians are the big winners in the opening of Eastern Europe. We have half the rate of unemployment of any other European Union economy, and our industries have been revitalized by these restored links,” says Erhard Busek, a former Austrian foreign minister who heads the Vienna-based Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe.

Far-right Austrian leader Joerg Haider sends a contrary message with his anti-foreigner rhetoric. Haider’s party drew more than a quarter of the votes in this month’s parliamentary elections. But Busek and other analysts dismiss Haider’s brand of xenophobic rabble-rousing as fleeting opportunism unlikely to turn back the tide of integration.

Austrian vintner Franz Weninger has teamed up with a grape-growing enterprise and a winery in the nearby Hungarian town of Balf to produce quality wines with Hungarian labor.

In Sopron, seat of the westernmost county in Hungary, 130 dentists hang out their shingles seeking patients from Austria, where state-funded dental insurance seldom covers cosmetic services.

“Hungarian dentists charge a quarter of the rates in Austria, and the quality is just as high,” says Andor Lang, head of the regional dental association.

“We can also be more flexible, offering late appointments and weekend hours, and every dentist here carries a cellular phone to be available to patients,” Lang says.

Local authorities still have the power to block land sales to Austrians and other foreigners if the property is considered to have national or historic significance. But even in some of those cases, lifelong leasing allows Austrians to acquire vacation properties.

“I could never have afforded to build such a beautiful home in the Austrian countryside,” effuses Gelinda Karner, a retired waitress from Vienna who built her two-story retreat here. “I feel very welcome here. This was all one society when [Austrian Emperor] Franz Josef ruled, and there are still many connections between the peoples.”

Judith Marx of the Sestertius realty agency in Sopron says at least 40% of sales in the county over the past few years have been to Austrian citizens, many buying dilapidated houses that older Hungarians have neither the means nor the incentive to fix up.

Hungary’s overall experience since 1989 shows the importance of being close to prosperous Austria. Poverty and disillusionment are still rife in eastern Hungary, which borders Ukraine and Romania. More than three-quarters of Hungary’s 10 million people live between the capital, Budapest, in central Hungary, and the western border. More leave the east with each hint of jobs elsewhere.

Zoltan Szerdahely was a teacher in a rural southern county before the upheavals a decade ago. He would have liked to continue his life and work there if he could have afforded to take care of his family.

“My wife and I had a dream to build our own home, but as teachers it would have taken 150 years at the rate of our savings,” says the 40-year-old, who instead opened a shop selling wicker baskets and wooden planters. Positioned at a strategic crossroads, Szerdahely’s shop has earned him enough to bankroll a sprawling new house that he has proudly depicted on a postcard.

“Both systems had their good and bad aspects, but people have more opportunity now,” Szerdahely says of the post-Communist era. “We didn’t have it so bad in Hungary because our reforms began earlier, but I feel proud that we played such a decisive role in the changes that brought an end to those times of hostility and division.”

Hungarian leaders snipped through the Iron Curtain here in 1989, making this bountiful agricultural region the conduit for an East German exodus that eventually toppled the Berlin Wall.

For who live along this border, that summer was not their first experience with such flight.

It was also here that Hungarians fleeing after the failed 1956 uprising against Soviet domination plied the marshy bogs in search of a way to freedom. A small footbridge made famous by James A. Michener in his book “The Bridge at Andau” was rebuilt in 1997 by Austrian authorities. Carved wooden figures depicting bedraggled refugees line a 6-mile-long “Street of Flight” memorial from the border to the Austrian village.

“There were 20,000 Hungarians who came through here in 1956. I remember that Christmas, every house in town had a Hungarian family in it,” recalls Johann Peck, a 66-year-old farmer still living in Andau. “We didn’t have so much ourselves at the time, as the [Allied] occupation had just ended. Now people can afford to be generous, but then we had to worry about every mouthful.”

Busek says Austria learned from that first exodus that immigrants are a boost for the economy, not a drain on resources as Haider claims. And the flourishing cooperation between two small neighbors who long ruled the heart of Europe is a promising sign of a continent now intent on bonding into an economic union.

“Disintegration was a prerequisite for integration, the type of integration envisioned by European Union expansion,” Busek says. “We don’t want to change borders in the new Europe, we want to lower them so they are no longer obstructions to the free movement of goods and peoples.”