THE DRINK OF IMPERIALISTS / Maria Heller
In the fifties, the Hungarian public heard a lot about the licentiousness and moral debauch rampant in Western countries. Coca-Cola was an emblematic symbol of all this. It could not be obtained in Hungary, where the “favourite” of the masses was a soft drink called Bambi, which was allegedly made of tar. There was nothing else that could be bought in the shops.
My father was the director of a large industrial company. Originally, before the war, the company used to be his father’s workshop, where my father, as a young man, who could not dream of a university education because of the anti-Jewish laws, worked as a mechanic. After the war, he and his father developed the company until it was nationalized in 1950, together with my father’s car and the shop my mother had inherited from her father, who had been killed in the Holocaust. My paternal grandfather could not survive this, and died a few months later.
My father’s company had connections in Austria, and in October 1956 my father was on a business trip in Vienna, conducting negotiations with his partners. He returned on 22 October, and brought back a bottle of Vita Cola, the Austrian version of Coca-Cola.
On 23 October, our family of five sat around the dinner table with considerable excitement. Events of a different nature were unfolding in the city, but we did not know about them at the time. My father opened the magic bottle, and all of us, including the children, were given a teaspoonful of the “imperialist poison”, i.e. the Cola, and we waited for its effect, the ecstasy we had heard so much about.
