This octagonal room in the Kunstmuseum is full of small paintings by German masters of the 16th century: Hans Wertinger, the Oberrheinischer Meister, two little allegories (death and the woman, death and the maiden) by Hans Baldung Grien and four marvellous Lucas Cranachs.
The greeny-blues of Cranach’s Judgement of Paris sit easily on one pea-coloured wall. A sly-eyed horse looks out from an oak thicket with a river valley in the background, a walled city done in tints of blue. So far, so Rhinish. A castle crowns a hill, a road winds up. Cranach came from the small town of Kronach in southern Germany: town and painter are synonymous; he knows this topography like the back of his hand.

Paris is in armour, anticipating the battle of Troy that will ensue from his choice. Zeus himself holds the Apple of Discord. Three gossamer-draped goddesses occupy the foreground. Paris holds an enormous white-feathered red hat, like a cardinal’s but without the tassels. He appears to look towards the middle of the three goddesses, Athene: she is wearing a similar cardinal red hat, but without the feathers.

The goddesses Hera and Aphrodite flanking her have lovely buns, small as a boy’s, seen sideways on and full view, and willowy figures, narrow under the breasts, hairless: a contortionist’s dream of women.

Then you notice that Aphrodite on the right wears her hair in a gold brocade cap and that all three women wear jewelled dog collars, chokers, I suppose. Two of them also sport large neck chains. Athene is a minx, her hair done in 1930s flapper style. Aphrodite has a perfectly formed breast, white as alabaster.

Paris sits on a kind of stone-coped spring that issues from a spout. Its little splashes are almost sexual. The strange red hat is picked up in the red lining of his inside thigh, which looks like an enormous penis issuing from his codpiece. He has a square, bearded, simian face, like the faces in many of these Upper Rhine paintings: rough-hewn woodsmen coming down out of the forest to the riverbank to become burghers. He appears to be looking at the nude women but really he’s gazing up into the trees at a coat of arms hung in the top branches like those signs you used to see in trees in Northern Ireland – Repent, the End is Nigh!

Who is the old man brokering the deal? He clutches the Apple of Discord in the transparent gauze that gives the women a semblance of decency. Perhaps he’s Zeus under grey muttonchop whiskers.

The line of four faces leads the eye back to the eye of the horse, elaborately saddled, with a gold-clasped bridle that echoes the chains of the goddesses. That horse is an effete creature, unready for the ten years of the Trojan War. The scene is arcadian, conjured from the trees. Cupid, enveloped in a grey storm cloud, is about to let fly a golden arrow. Which woman will it pierce? We know from the myth that Paris will choose Aphrodite who promises him the gift of love in exchange for the golden apple. Paris gets the girl, Helen of Troy. War starts between the Trojans and the Greeks, the thousand boats. The hollow horse ends it. Odysseus wanders the seas and founds Rome.

Once again the apple is the start of history as we know it.

Another Cranach, Portrait of a Woman (1508), is simple and spare after the rich treatment of the judgement. It’s on a small oak panel in a plain black frame. The woman looks like a servant or a nun but a ring is on her right index finger. She wears a white veil that doesn’t appear to be kept in place by anything. The white of the veil is carried into the border of her black dress. Its sailor collar has an almost unnoticed pattern of leaves, black on grey. The effect is subtly modulated; black, white and grey playing off each other as in a Whistler or a Sargent.

The woman’s round, large-eyed face conveys restraint and purity, like her dress. The brown eyes are slanted inwards, finely lashed and far apart, like a Lucian Freud. The mouth is small and prim. In a praying posture, she looks fixedly at us as though we are intruding. What is she thinking? The matt green, dung-coloured background does a lot of contrast work. It is an arresting study in piety.

This tiny portrait of Johann Friedrich Grossmütigen (the Magnificent) offers a moral contrast to its neighbouring portrait of piety. It was painted in the last year of Cranach’s life, 1533, on limewood. How magnificent he is, in his sable-collared coat, neck hung with beadwork, gold chains and jewels, his fat finger sporting a sapphire ring. One almost expects earrings, so oriental does he look under muttonchops and thin trimmed moustache. The hair is receding, the brow squashed and misaligned. The fur collar seems an extension of his beard. He is every inch the pasha, the decadent potentate: sloped forehead, small almond-shaped eyes, unsmiling, preoccupied by the trivia of power. The background is sky blue, just washed in, with only Cranach’s insignia and the date for relief. The Elector of Saxony has all the pomp and arrogance of his position: not a pretty man.

 

The Monument to Hungarian Jewish Martyrs is behind the Moorish-style synagogue fronting Pest’s wartime ghetto. This striking memorial in the form of a weeping willow, each metal leaf inscribed with a name, was erected over the twenty-four mass graves of the Jewish victims of Hungarian Fascism. In all 2,281 corpses are buried there, a fraction of the total who suffered the same fate during the last months of the war.

The synagogue, the second largest in the world, has been renovated partly from funds donated by the actor Tony Curtis’s Emmanuel Foundation. Curtis – born Bernard Schwartz, in the Bronx – is the son of Hungarian immigrants. In 1952 he played the part of Pest’s most famous escape artist, Harry (“Shake me, I’m magic”) Houdini.

Houdini was born Ehrich Weiss, son of Rabbi Weiss, in Pest in 1874. The family fled from Budapest to Appleton, Wisconsin, when Houdini was two. It was the first of his many escapes.

Like its illustrious sons, the streets of the Jewish quarter have hidden connections. In the warren of courtyards between Dob, Király, and Wesselényi streets developers are moving in and tarting up the stucco.

Returnees from America stop in at Fröhlich Cukraszda for kosher strudel, and these days the damp courtyards are used for movie sets with a gangsterish, Blade Runner street-cred. But at night an eerie atmosphere descends and history comes out of the woodwork.

Behind the synagogue a golden angel leans out at right angles from a gable and rescues a man on his back on the cobbles with a length of metal bedsheet. This sculpture is dedicated to the memory of Carl Lutz, the Swiss consul who issued foreign identity passes, the famous Schutzpass, to the ghetto’s inhabitants. Lutz and his colleague Raoul Wallenberg saved tens of thousands of Budapest Jews from the Final Solution in which an estimated 500,000 Hungarian Jews perished.

Wallenberg travelled around Budapest in a Studebaker, never slept in the same house two nights in a row, and wore a broad-brim Eden hat. He supplied food, medicine and warm clothing to those on Eichmann’s forced marches, bribed officials when necessary and retrieved people from the deportation trains – sometimes after they had left.

In April 1948 the Mayor of Budapest was poised to unveil a statue of Raoul Wallenberg, showing him battling with a snake, but Soviet soldiers spirited it away at the last minute. It reappeared two years later outside a pharmaceutical factory in eastern Hungary, its plaque removed, the snake taking on a completely different meaning. Now it’s back on the Pest quay looking towards Margit Island.

Hungarian history sometimes seems like a vaudeville act of appearing and disappearing statues. During the two years when the statue went awol the flesh and blood Wallenberg was moved from Lefortovo Prison in Moscow into the Gulag network of Soviet labour camps, where he disappeared. There have been rumours of sightings ever since.

Survivors of the Gulag system use the expression “our knocking connections” to describe the coded communication from cell to cell. Wallenberg, they report, “was a great knocker”. Those who survived the ghetto still knock on doors using the same code: three times means friend. Knocking habits, like statues, die hard.

A Raoul Wallenberg Street, formerly Phönix Street, leads down to the Danube, in an area, the former “little ghetto”, where the Swedish diplomat established many safe houses. A second statue of Wallenberg, by Imre Varga (who also designed the Holocaust Memorial), was unveiled in 1987. Communist authorities grudgingly wanted the statue erected far from the centre of town. The inscription on it is taken from Ovid’s Tristia – another exile at the hands of empire: Tempora si fverint nubila solus eris: “In stormy times you’re on your own.”

Thousands of Jews were shot and thrown into the Danube by the Arrow Cross, the Right-wing fascist group which seized power on 15 October 1944. They would handcuff their victims together, shoot one, and watch laughing as the other struggled in the freezing current. They attacked the diplomatically protected houses, children’s homes and the Jewish Orphanage. The diary of a child, Tamás Kilényi, captures the fear of the last days of the war. “Three o’ clock at night, we have to get up immediately, we are leaving. We all get a sugar cube. Two Hungarian soldiers come in. They are going to accompany us. We go outside. In the moonshine we slip through the fence, and reach Bogár utca. Bombed out buildings everywhere.” “Then the Danube was not blue but brown, red. Red from the blood of Jews,” another survivor, Eva Bentley, recalls. On the Danube bank there is a pyramid of stones in memory of the dead.

Horror, death and entertainment are uncomfortably close, as Houdini, the manacled diver, knew. Death was a constant companion for the Budapest Jews. Outside the city there is a new resting ground, a Statue Park, for all the big boys currently out of favour. In it Lenin still declaims to the masses, Stalin massively reigns, the Unknown Worker and Ukrainian tractor drivers toil away in stone. This is the heaven of statues. This is where bad history goes when it dies.

Watson’s slim book on jargon is in the form of a discursive essay tracing the history of “sludge and management-speak” back to the rise of business schools and the large corporations which employ their graduates. He follows this sludge into public speech, media jargon and the workplace. An irreverent look at management and the language it uses is welcome. Why and whither are we all going forward? Why are we enhancing? Why are we content to call parents and students consumers? Once one begins to deconstruct the language, the deconstruction of ideas follows.

Watson is good on the parrot aspect of jargon: it catches on unquestioned. There is nothing sadder than the previous decade’s buzz words:

In institutions where we might expect the most resistance the capitulation is most complete. Managerialism came to the universities as the German army came to Poland. Now they talk about achieved learning outcomes, quality assurance mechanisms and international benchmarking.

Watson argues that such jargon is inadequate and unnecessary, a language of public-relations rather than truth telling. Here, he echoes Orwell’s view of the function of jargon – the little lie masking the bigger lie.

A glossary of jargon provides much fun. Here they all are, the linguistic sludge, the tired baseball terms, the strutting verbs, the midget words on elevator shoes: issue, implement, input, core, key, strategic, deliver, workshop, scenario, point in time.

Now that documents are being generated about documents, Watson’s little book is as astringent as a good mouthwash.