Ortega y Gasset wrote of those who had stepped onto the stage of history and did not belong there. Vertical invaders he called them. Those who had come up from below. Cowboy capitalists and tinhorn dictators who elbowed the nobility, church and founding fathers aside. The nastiest rat in the shithouse 1. Pistanek blasts away images of Slovaks plowing fields, eating goulash, playing accordions, going to church as First World images, tour bus vistas. Racz has come to Bratislava to make money so that he can be a suitable suitor for the woman from his village he loves.
He gets work as the stoker in the Hotel Ambassador, one of the most prestigious hotels in Bratislava, and in his single-mindedness soon discovers that he can take advantage of his position. People will pay to have the heat on and, in short, Racz learns that he who puts the heat on can control things.
He rises quickly from stoker in the Ambassador to its owner and much else. Those who oppose him small-time money changers, former secret police, professional classes knuckle under while those whose dreams have foundered in the new world order have to make do or become, like academics, increasingly irrelevant.
The stooped porter with spidery bony fingers who takes your bags turns out to have been at one time a lecturer at the evening university, now closed, of Marxism-Leninism. He was a philosopher, or so he says. Whatever they do now is only temporary, done out of necessity. The cafe waitress is miserable; no doubt, she originally planned to be an actress. She finds it degrading to serve Hurensson coffeeβ¦. If you are not from the First World, however, your everything can never be more than parody the Eastern Europe syndrome.
Racz learns how to use a knife and fork, how to dress, read and go to the opera. He marries a college girl interested in art she takes him to museums and lives in a villa with the folks on the hill. He has put his village behind him. It is, if you will, how civilization assimilates those who have risen in its ranks, but to those already there, Racz is still a vertical invader who does not belong.
