A storyboard: Švejk in the Third World War

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  A storyboard: Švejk in the Third World War | 2015

Repeated forms of patriotism lead always to a tragedy, even if for the sight the repetition looks like a farce. Forced bitter laugh could be the appropriate response as looking at the new public monuments in Hungary. But the uninhibited proliferation of patriotic, ethnicist and irredentist sculptures foreshadows an irreversible depletion of critical forces, a complete desertification. The Hungarian (extreme-)right could finish more quickly with the spectre of ’68 then its Western allies from the European People’s Party as it was always just a vague hologram, transmitted from a remote and unknown universe. Nevertheless, ethnicist partiotism was always the best opiate for the masses around these counties, under the camouflage of international workers’ solidarity or today, under the boots of oligarchic capitalism. The anachronical faith in a strong, centralized state with its heroes and its enemies could transform Hungary to its own puppet state only in a few years. Ferenc Gróf’s ongoing graphic series examines the dynamics and the iconography of this new-old kind of patrimonialism. Using patterns and stereotypes of pater/patria/patriarchy, the main and only character of the graphics is Švejk, whose gorged face decorates hundreds of pubs and restaurants all around Central and Eastern Europe. As an echo to the general kitchification tendencies and as a probably unconscious critique of nationalism, one can find bronze statues dedicated to this literary figure on public squares from Saint-Petersbourg to Prague. “The Good Soldier” of Jaroslav Hašek is a folkloric and commercial icon, his anecdotes and brave idiocy made him almost a timeless anti/super/hero. The popularity of his figure was helped by the prolific illustrator, Josef Lada, who created several hundred caricatures for the book. Following the sudden death of Hašek, his friend and colleague Karel Vaněk continued the First World War adventures of Švejk, guiding him through Russian capivity and the revolution. Several sequels were created already from the 1920s, including the 1943 drama of Bertolt Brecht, written in exile in California, “Schweik in the Second World War”. The textual part of the series evokes the spectres of ’68, using pastiches and citations mainly from two films of the epoch: the longtime censored “Agitators“ by Dezső Magyar, which reenacts the events and debates of the 1919 Hungarian council republic, and “La chinoise” by Jean-Luc Godard.