Page 133 [133]
OCR
(Multi-)Mediatized Indians in Socialist Hungary: Winnetou, Tokei-ihto, and Other Popular Heroes the way of wandering—redrawn, reused, reconceived—images from novels to movies/filmstrips and back, from movies and filmstrips to book illustrations,® and from books and movies to doings, sayings, even objects. This dense intermediality makes the practice of indidnosdi a paradise indeed for cultural research, and not only for Hungarian scholars. A significant complement to this richness is provided by the international character of the sources. Novels and movies, children’s toys and filmstrips constitute a remarkable ensemble, a textual and visual/figural repertoire of the most varied linguistic and cultural origin, reuse, and re-adaptation. Without being exhaustive, let me put together some of the most notable examples. A number of those sources originated in West Germany (like the Indian films featuring Barker and Brice); some were East German (like those of WelskopfHenrich, the publishing houses Altberliner Verlag Lucie Groszer and Kinderbuchverlag in Berlin, and the DEFA Filmstudio for which Mitié worked for years); some were Serb/Croatian (Mitié originally was a Serb born in southern Serbia, near to Leskovac but moved to East Germany); many of the Indian movies were made in West German and Yugoslavian co-production and filmed on locations now to be found in Croatia (e.g. the national parks of Plitvice, Paklenica, or the mountains above Rijeka), and the publishing house called Miadost (‘Youth’) in Novi Sad (today in Serbia) published children’s books for Hungary as well as for Yugoslavia. Other ingredients of this cultural mélange were Czechoslovak (like this Indian outfit sold for children during the 1970s, which consisted of a colourful plastic headdress, a bow and arrows, and some other pieces of clothing),’ while still others were Polish (such as the publishing house Czytelnik in Warsaw, which provided, as we will see, certain Indian books to translate abroad), and many were Hungarian or even Bulgarian. Among the latter two we find individual translations of the classical Indian novels of Cooper (1789-1851) and May and also several “original” works written in the wake of these authors.'° By original I mean here Indian stories authored by European/east-central European local, domestic writers. Some of these books have even been cross-translated in our socialist countries, as I will return to it later. What can we do with such a huge and complex amount of cultural material? How can we approach it; in what ways can we handle it? And, is it interesting at all? Are there any important—social, political, and so forth—lessons that its study would yield for us, eastern Europeans, and also, perhaps, for a wider audience? I attempt to answer these questions by presenting here the basic research questions § There was a certain overlap between the graphic artists of filmstrips and children’s books during the 1960s. Erné Zérad (1911-2004), for example, was active at both filmstrip drawing and illustrating children’s books. He made, among others, the black and white illustrations for the Hungarian translation of Thomas Mayne Reid’s novel The White Chief published in 1975 by Méra Ferenc Kényvkiadé (Reid 1975). ° A friend from my generation remembers having had a complete set as a little girl. 0 I would like to express my gratitude to Dobrinka Parusheva (University of Plovdiv) for her invaluable help and constant interest in this research. 131
