"Budapest"

[fiefoe]

Victor Sebestyen's account of this beautiful city doesn't sidestep much misery and suffering experienced by its residents.

• Yet its most distinctive marks were left by involuntary forces – wars, revolutions, floods. Altogether Buda, over many periods the administrative centre of the Kingdom and then the Republic of Hungary, suffered thirteen sieges and was left in total ruins five times... a few footprints behind: the remains of a Roman bath house complete with wonderfully preserved mosaics stand next to a Soviet-style ‘five-year-plan’ apartment block that is already falling apart. As I hope to show, Budapest has grandeur, if faded around the edges, beauty in a gritty, lived-in sort of way. It is a city ‘humbled by time and the ferocious moods of history’, as the great poet George Szirtes put it.
• newly laid out City Park (Városliget) stood the most elegant building in town, the perfectly proportioned, Secessionist-style Gallery of Applied Art. So too, within sight, was the most vulgar: a reconstruction of an entire medieval Transylvanian castle (Vajdahunyad) by the shore of an artificial lake.
• The biggest event by far was the Millennium Exhibition: Over the previous decade she had spent far more time in Budapest than in the royal court in Vienna. Even in the twenty-first century almost every town in Hungary has an ‘Erzsébet’ street, avenue or square named after the empress; Budapest has several.
• * the absence of Prime Minister Count Dezső Bánffy’s wife. It was said that she did not attend because she had been enjoying a long trip to the Italian Lakes, but in fact the real reason was that, although she was of noble birth, she was a trained schoolteacher and had held a job before she married. The leading aristocrats thought it was ‘unacceptable’ that such a person should play a part in such an occasion as Hungary’s ‘first lady’, so she stayed at home.
• an embarrassing hitch. The Crown of St Stephen, Hungary’s first Christian king, considered a holy relic some 900 years old, was brought in an iron chest to be symbolically placed on Franz Jozsef’s head. Time had rusted the lock and hasp of the chest and none of the noble ‘guardians of the crown’ could open it. Members of the royal household rushed to find a locksmith,
• by 1913: Budapest around the millennium year ‘was the world of the day before yesterday’, as the Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler used to say, deliberately misquoting Stefan Zweig on the subject of Habsburg nostalgia... In the millennium year Hungary was nearly three times the size it would be just twenty-five years later and its population around 50 per cent higher. Most of present-day Croatia and Slovakia, a third of Romania and a large slice of Serbia were all part of Greater Hungary. It possessed a busy seaport on the Adriatic with a busy merchant navy.
• In 106 the Emperor Trajan made Aquincum the new capital of the province, which he renamed Pannonia Inferior – Pannonia Superior was further west, where its principal town was Vindobona (now Vienna). An enormous 120-metre square palace for the governor was built on the Danube island opposite, now Óbuda island.
• Wiborada: When the marauding band of Magyars arrived at the undefended abbey she was axed to pieces. But her holy books survived – hence she was canonized in 1047 by Pope Clement II and is the patron saint of libraries.
• Both sides – vicious at times, jolly at others – were probably true. As the French historian Fernand Braudel said: ‘Until the late Middle Ages all states claimed to be the ancestors of rapacious beasts … Europe’s map has never shown so many white patches as before the year 1000.
• The Magyars far outnumbered the indigenous Slavic population... These numbers allowed the Magyars to become different from the other horsemen of the steppes, who came and conquered and whose ways were absorbed into those of the indigenous population. The Avars, Bulgars, Franks and so on, who had settled there before, were expected, or forced, to speak Magyar – that is how ‘a linguistic island was created in the German and Slavic sea’,
• Latin would be the language of official and legal Hungary, as it would remain until the nineteenth century.
• It is no stretch to call King Stephen the first and arguably the most successful Hungarian revolutionary of them all. He centralized royal power in a unified state, as the Saxon and Danish kings in England, or Capetians in France, attempted but failed to do. He rooted out the ancient tribal customs of the Magyars and limited the powers of clan chieftains. He introduced a form of feudalism common for the period.. Using various methods, he Christianized the Magyars.
• ‘This belief over the centuries has proved indestructible … historians must have no choice but to admit that in this case it doesn’t matter whether, as an object, it is Stephen’s crown or not, but what is essential is the unshakeable belief in it.’ An explanation for so many legends... Somehow it fell into the hands of the US army in Vienna in 1945. The Americans kept it in Fort Knox, to ensure its safety,
• * Stephan's the Exhortations:  ‘Immigrants are of great benefit,’ he wrote in one section. ‘They bring with them different tongues and customs, different skills and weapons. And all that is an ornament to the country and alarms our enemies. So my son I advise you to face new settlers, and treat them decently. Then they will prefer to stay with you rather than elsewhere. A nation with but one tongue and one custom is feeble and fragile …
• even years after the barons and the King of England reached a compromise about the separation of powers in the Magna Carta, enshrining baronial rights in law, the high nobility in Hungary forced King Andrew (András) II to sign a similar charter. But the Golden Bull (named because its seal was in gold leaf) of 1222 gave the nobility far more extensive rights than its English predecessor. They retained most of these rights until the middle of the nineteenth century, with enormous consequences for Hungary’s future. Nobles were excused from paying any kind of taxes, but unlike in feudal England or France they did not have to raise armies in ‘foreign wars’ if they didn’t want to.
• there were none so unlucky as the Hungarians … Nature brought forth their strong, handsome, clever men in vain. -- Voltaire (1694–1778)
• Heaven grant us its peace, but not the King of Hungary’s. -- William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act 1, Scene 2
• Half of Batu’s force followed Béla – in the Mongols’ eyes a territory was not entirely beaten while its rightful ruler was still alive.
• * We have received no support in our great affliction from any Christian ruler or nation in Europe.’ These thoughts have been a constant theme throughout Hungarian history, echoed repeatedly – when the Turks occupied the country in the sixteenth century, the Austrians suppressed an independence movement in the nineteenth century, when the Soviet Union savagely put down a revolution in the twentieth.
• until the mid eighteenth century, when constitutions had to be amended to allow the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa to be Queen of Hungary, a process known as the Pragmatic Sanction.
• * Eventually the Angevin Charles Robert, grandson of Ladislaus IV’s sister, Mary of Naples, won a decisive victory: he was crowned King of Hungary towards the end of 1308 as Charles I. Foreign monarchs, some from far away and others who seldom lived within the borders of Greater Hungary, would rule for the following 225 years, among them four Neapolitans from the House of Anjou, a Luxembourger, two Habsburgs and three Jagiełłos from Poland and Bohemia. There was just one locally born Hungarian king among them, Mátyás Hunyadi, who reigned as Matthias Corvinus and became, even ahead of St Stephen, the most revered Hungarian monarch of all.
• János Arany, a contemporary of Tennyson’s ballad about Klára Zach:
  What your deserved claim? / For my index finger / His beautiful young daughter,
  For my lost thumb his /Oldest son’s slaughter.
  For my other two fingers / Whose blood ran and ran / The lives of his whole clan.
• Hungary was saved from occupation for seventy years – and the Ottoman advance into Europe halted – largely through the efforts of one enigmatic man, a brilliant military commander. János Hunyadi
• Matthias and his uncle were released. Szilágy and Matthias’s mother, Elisabeth, schemed, bribed and intimidated a path to the throne, but it was the allure of the Hunyadi name that presented Matthias with the opportunity... He would prove that he was cast from the same mould as his father... He became a true Renaissance prince who could be merciless and forgiving, vengeful or chivalrous and had the intelligence to surround himself with talented people who knew how to present their master to the outside world as the very model of a philosopher king... He named himself Matthias I Corvinus – a spurious, made-up title but a brand that has stuck... supposedly a Roman knight from the time of the Republic, who is said to have fought a Gallic giant – the descendant of Jupiter – with the help of a raven.
• Dózsa’s army refused to disband and the crusade against the infidels turned into the biggest peasants’ revolt in Hungarian history... There had occasionally been eruptions of unrest among peasants, but Hungary’s feudalism was among the most entrenched anywhere. In the sixteenth century, when in most of Western Europe serfdom had all but disappeared, it remained strong in Hungary.
• The Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi recorded later that ‘Suleiman has the treasures of King Louis packed into seven leather chests, and the many military supplies, objects of rare beauty, thrones laid out with precious stones, hundreds of window shutters and doors containing precious stones, bronze and gilded shining angel figures... The palace candelabra went back to decorate the mosque that had once been the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia.
• the flowers and their scent, along with bath houses, paprika – and of course coffee – are the few remaining physical reminders of the 150-year-long occupation of Buda by the Turks. Not a bad legacy
• Maintaining the baths was one of the few municipal services the Turks took seriously;.. The Ottomans built fifteen of them, most of which were in constant use ever since the 1540s and five of which were still in operation in the 2000s.
• When Lutherans and Catholics disputed in the 1580s about who had a right to use St Mary Magdalene, the ruling pasha – the begler bey – gave the right-hand nave to the Catholics and the left to the Protestants. <> Christians and Muslims (for much of the time the majority of the Hungarian population left in the town) rubbed along reasonably well.
• * On the whole, the higher the rank of the official, the shorter time he spent in Hungary; the main reason was to prevent the growth of personal relationships between conquerors and the conquered. During the century and a half of occupation there were ninety-nine pashas in the highest positions.
• Habsburgs taking over: Less than half of Buda’s Jews were left alive immediately after the siege. They were taken prisoner in chains and treated so appallingly in jail that a few weeks later only 200 or so remained. Eventually they were redeemed with enormous ransom money raised by Jewish congregations throughout Europe and a large sum from Samuel Oppenheimer, a banker whose family had been thrown out of Vienna.
• * Like most imperialists, the Austrians knew how to divide and rule. Some groups were offered glittering rewards and opportunities as long as they accepted colonial status. Others lost everything under an increasingly absolutist Habsburg Empire, determined to establish their notion of order and to reimpose Catholic orthodoxy.
• Every revolt was ruthlessly and easily crushed, except one, the war of independence led by Ferenc Rákóczi II, Prince of Transylvania (1676–1735), a reluctant and unusual rebel whose extraordinary life is a quintessential Hungarian story of heroic defeat.
• The Habsburgs essentially appointed a new nobility: Perhaps most harmful was the ancient system of land tenure under which estates were never owned by an individual lord but were entailed to the family and could only be inherited, not sold. This had a profound effect on the future, as it meant that only a very few of the biggest and richest owners could borrow money on their property, hindering investment needed to modernize farming.
• * The one Habsburg monarch for whom Hungarians of all classes seemed to hold a grudging respect was the Empress Maria Theresa, who reigned from 1740 to 1780. At the start of her reign, she owed her crown to the loyal support of the Hungarian nobles,... She was a modernizer, but deeply attached to some profoundly conservative values. As Voltaire described her she was devout, maternal and marked by the contrasting traits of the Baroque, ‘the spirit of the age … a mixture of mysticism, pathos and glitter’
• Maria Theresa’s reign: comparatively few people engaged in any kind of trade or industry – according to contemporary economists who studied census figures, just one in eighty-nine people in Hungary at the end of the eighteenth century, compared to one in fourteen in Austria and one in nine in the Lombardy region.
• 1795: Ignác Martinovics, a Franciscan monk. His blindfold had been removed and he was forced to witness the incompetent executioner perform his handiwork. As guards tried to carry him to the block he suffered an epileptic fit and a physician had to be called to ensure he was well enough to be executed.
• Martinovics produced dossiers full of dramatic reports – preserved in the royal archives in Vienna – detailing a wide range of anti-Habsburg plots by Jesuits, Freemasons and Jacobins, each more vivid and disturbing than the last – until the new emperor who had succeeded Leopold, his young son Francis I, grew suspicious. He discovered that Martinovics had invented them all from a vivid imagination. The monk was fired.*2 <> He returned to Buda and transferred his loyalties almost overnight to radical causes. He translated Rousseau’s Social Contract into Latin and passed it to groups of mainly young intellectuals, in a late-eighteenth-century version of Soviet-era samizdat, underground literature.
• Kazinczy was the leader of the ‘neologists’ who invented modern Hungarian. They transformed the grammar, standardized the syntax, enriched the vocabulary, produced dictionaries and lexicons, and gave new life to a moribund tongue. A twenty-first-century Hungarian would be hard-pressed to understand the archaic, formal and inflexible Magyar used in the eighteenth century – they would feel it was almost entirely foreign, rather as though Chaucer’s English
• the useful and atmospheric word characteristic of a Hungarian view of the world – délibáb, a kind of Fata Morgana, or illusion; something that Freud’s great friend, the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, called magical thinking, a talent for daydreaming and pretending, but which en masse turned into herd instinct that took hold of the general populace in times of crisis quite often in Hungarian history.
• ‘forr’, so revolution – a rather useful word in Hungarian as the country lived through so many of them – became forradolom, which translates as ‘on the boil’. The Hungarian word for isolation is taken from the ancient Magyar word for island. A beautiful Hungarian word for wife or female partner was invented: feleség, which literally means ‘my halfness’ –
• * Joseph II:  decreed that German would be the official language throughout the Empire... (The nobles) thought the use of Latin was part of their identity, separating them from the commoners. The linguistic revivalists were furious This was the first appearance of the aristocratic class uniting with the reformers and middle class in a nationalist cause – the politics that would define Hungary from now until the First World War.
• * István Széchenyi's bridge:  The foundation stone was laid on 24 August 1842. The discovery soon after construction began that much of the building material was brought over from England caused a rumpus. Then it became known that some specialist foreign workers were employed on the project. There was a big demonstration in Pest in protest, amid demands for their removal, which halted any work on the bridge before a compromise was reached. Then there was a revolution, a war and a bloody siege of Buda before it was finally completed in 1849.
• Széchenyi was the most gifted and romantic figure among Hungary’s Enlightenment reformers, a grand seigneur who developed the common touch, and arguably the man who did more than any other to create the city that became Budapest.
• ‘In Hungary, even a revolution has to be started by an aristocrat,’ as the early Communist thinker, Friedrich Engels, noted drily some years later.
• Flood relief: For many people in Buda and Pest the biggest and most important fundraising event by far was the return to Hungary for the first time in years of the megastar music performer of the day, Ferenc Liszt.
• They demanded he publish the Twelve Points and Petőfi’s poem immediately. His sympathies were with the demonstrators, but the law forbade it as neither had been approved by the censor. Then he suggested that the young radicals ‘confiscate’ the press ‘in the name of the Revolution’. Irinyi put his hand on the press and solemnly declared: ‘In the name of the people we herewith appropriate the press and demand the printing of the manuscript.’
• Lajos Kossuth's Országgyűlési Tudósítások (Parliamentary Reports): The Master of the Horse, who was responsible for keeping order in the Diet, confiscated the press and threatened him with arrest – though in a typically Austrian touch the authorities compensated Kossuth generously for the financial loss of the equipment... Kossuth introduced the idea of placing the tub-thumping editorials (most of them written by him) on the front page – a practice often adopted later in France, Britain and the US.
• * Following the meeting, Metternich told Széchenyi that the Austrians had made four mistakes in dealing with Kossuth: they arrested him – and then let him go; then they gave him a newspaper to run, and took it away from him... The Austrians allowed Kossuth to run for the Diet in November 1847, which turned out to be the fifth mistake in dealing with him.
• * 1848: The opponents of Kossuth and his idea of Hungarian freedom were not Jews but the Slavs who lived in Greater Hungary... Some saw the Revolution in Buda and Pest as an opportunity to put pressure on Hungary to grant more autonomy for the other ethnic groups in Hungary, or at least recognition of their nationhood. But the first Cabinet of the revolutionary Hungarians showed that they had little sympathy with the aspirations for independence of any others; nationalism was good for them, not for the Slavs.
• * This was a strange war in the often complex history of the Austrian Empire: Habsburg generals were fighting against Habsburg generals. As the Hungarian Count Majláth noted when it began: ‘The King of Hungary had declared war on the King of Croatia while the Emperor of Austria remained neutral, and these three monarchs were one and the same person.’ <> The Croat invasion prompted a political crisis in Buda.
• Petőfi: is the national poet not just because of his skill as a writer, but for the high romance of his life and his early death on the battlefield... It is largely due to him that Hungarians thereafter could hardly conceive of a social Reform Movement, let alone a revolution or war for independence, not inspired by a poet.’
• Nowhere in Middle Europe did Jews play such a prominent part in modernization as in Hungary – in industry, commerce, banking, the professions. Partly this was because Hungary was more feudal: the landowning magnates and petty nobility ran the country, but scorned being ‘in trade’. This left a space greater than anywhere else for Jews to become the middle class, the professionals and the engineers of economic growth.
• The alliance seemed to work well for all sides: the Hungarian nationalists found an increasingly powerful counterweight against the majority of Slavs and Germans in Greater Hungary. Jews spoke Magyar and on national holidays the new synagogues were richly decorated with Hungarian national flags. The Habsburgs found a loyal group dependent on their patronage who would bring forward an economic boom. On their side, the Jews – at least the more educated and more ambitious among them – had every reason to subscribe to this unwritten contract with the political elite, and did so with enthusiasm. The outcome was an economic revolution in the latter part of the century and a rapid process of integration.
• The Mayers, who owned one of the largest cotton mills in the country in Pest, found a novel, if comical, loophole. They ‘sold’ their factory on Friday afternoons to one of their Christian employees and bought it back again at dusk on Saturdays, to get round the rules.
• The Cult of Sisi was genuine – up to a point. But the affection for her in her lifetime, as the historian of Habsburg Hungary, András Gerő, put it, ‘was enhanced by the fact that it provided public opinion with a reliable way that they could demonstrate their dislike for Emperor Franz Jozsef while maintaining the appearance of loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty
• Maximilian, Emperor Franz Jozsef’s brother (who was soon to come to a sticky end, executed by revolutionaries just three years after being imposed on Mexicans as their king)
• in the modern world, it was hard to hold the line on the idea of the divine right of monarchs. Left to his own devices Franz Jozsef might perhaps, over time, have come to terms with the Hungarian opposition. Equally, if it were not for the mediation of the queen-empress, all attempts at reconciliation could easily have broken down. It was her relationship with Andrássy that made the difference.
• ‘Few men in public life deserve the epithet of “political sensualist” as much as Andrássy,’ said one of his smarter followers. He was as vain as a prima donna, and assiduously cultivated the image of being irresistible: ... In spite of the immense curiosity and almost criminal inquisitiveness of a great many Viennese court appointees in an effort to find an ‘indiscretion’ on the part of the Empress … such attempts have never succeeded. Both the Empress and Andrássy were under constant surveillance by innumerable court members … aside from the fact that Elisabeth was not a woman who found anything in physical love that seemed worth the effort
• * The system worked, for the moment, by balancing and safeguarding the Magyars’ sense of identity and the dynastic sovereignty of the Habsburgs. It was an intricate and fragile system, which worked for a limited period and gave rise, in Hungary at least, to an extraordinary spurt of prosperity and creativity. Essentially, modern Budapest is the product of the Dual Monarchy
• * The nomenclature of ‘dualism’ had to be navigated with extreme tact for there were endless snares and traps. The joint institutions were called ‘Imperial and royal’ (kaiserlich und königlich), or k.u.k. The Hungarians had insisted on ‘and’ to signify that they were equal. .. Hungary was even more caste-conscious and hierarchical than Austria. Titles were important and there were highly complex rules about how to address different grades in the civil service. The first two grades were addressed as Gracious Sir (kegyelmes), grades three to five as Dignified Sir (méltóságos), grades six to nine as Great Sir (nagyságos) and grades ten and eleven as Respectable Sir (tekintetes or cimzetes).
• There had always been a feeling by many people who lived on both sides that they lived in separate towns, divided not just by a river but by custom and attitude: Buda represented the feudal past, while Pest exemplified everything that was new, a future built on entrepreneurship, capitalism and commerce. The difference was obvious to any visitor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• * It is fitting that Budapest’s spine, its ‘avenue of dreams’, is named after Gyula Andrássy. His crowning achievement, which lives on, was one of his early acts as Hungary’s first Prime Minister under the Dual Monarchy... his Act 1870:10 – on the face of it a dull piece of municipal legislation, but the spark that by the turn of the century created Europe’s sixth-largest city. It set up a Metropolitan Board of Public Works that was charged with planning the future of the city, rather like George-Eugène Haussmann did in Paris, but with greater powers.
• As Gyula Krúdy described it: Every burgher without any hope of entering the Hungarian nobility or a baronage was eager to obtain the rank that can be reached on one’s own strength – a landlordship on Andrássy Avenue … Real Andrássy is where the asphalt is always immaculate, the parquet that is the carriageway is sprinkled with dust-repellent oil, the constable’s frock coat is always pressed and his gloves white, the carriage wheels are red and have noiseless tyres,
• Mahler arrived in Budapest with much fanfare and on 1 October, his first day in his job, to the delight of his new hosts, he declared that he would learn Hungarian – ‘I am sure I can be fluent within a year, or perhaps two,’ he said. He assured his new employers that he would guarantee to mount more Hungarian works. But Mahler’s two and a half years in Hungary were turbulent, themselves the stuff of grand opera, culminating in two tenors in the chorus challenging him to a duel.
• * At the turn of the twentieth century, the comic writer and journalist Frigyes Karinthy performed a crucial – and typically Hungarian – social experiment. He once tried to measure how quickly it would take a joke to cross Budapest. His method: one afternoon he told a joke he had made up on the spur of the moment to some friends in a coffee house in Buda. An hour or so later, strolling into a café in Pest, he heard the same (by his own admission very unfunny) story relayed back to him.* This was why the future dictatorships in Hungary, fascist and Communist by turn, frowned on the subversive element in cafés – communication, the exchange of information and especially jokes, were seen as potentially dangerous.
• When he was a brash young film director on the make Sándor Kellner, who would become the movie producer Sir Alexander Korda, was at the New York ‘almost every day’, as he said later. He made his first big hire of a star there.. Michael Curtiz (born Mihály Kertész Kaminer in Budapest) spent a large part of his formative years as a film director in the coffee house, though it is wrong, as some have suggested, that he based Rick’s Café in the movie Casablanca on his beloved New York,
• It was not beneath many of the best-born magnates to sit on the boards and lend their names to various banks and industrial conglomerates owned and run by Jews. In 1893 a researcher established that thirty-four Zichys, twenty-nine Széchenyis and twenty-seven Pallavicinis did so, plus a handful of Andrássys and Esterházys.
• The Parliament: Patrick Leigh Fermor was impressed: ‘Aswarm with statues, this frantic and marvellous pile was a tall, steep-roofed gothic nave escorted for a prodigious length by medieval pinnacles touched with gilding and adorned by crockets; and it was crowned, at the point where its transepts intersected, by the kind of ribbed and egg-shaped dome that might more predictably have dom inated the roofs of a Renaissance town in Tuscany, except that the dome itself was topped by a sharp and bristling gothic spire. Architectural dash could scarcely go further.’
• * The main weakness of the Dual Monarchy – a large realm supposedly with two equally powerful political centres – had always been that it was predicated on the suppression of a voice for the Slavs. The Hungarians in their part of the Empire were allowed to dominate all their nationalities,
• Gyula Andrassy... Of the peoples who have established states in Europe up to the ninth century, only we have succeeded … in maintaining the unity of the state from the first moment in an unbroken continuity by preserving … the hegemony of the nation until this day.’ These were people unlikely to make compromises with Serbian dissidents.
• 'One word lingers among the gathered crowds on the street: War. This strange, brief, thunder-like word now rises on the crowd, which rushes back inside the café with the news. Everyone is standing at a table. This one word amplifies into a howl until it reaches a terrifying crescendo, joining the thuds of many chairs put back at once – a sudden, frantic jumping to the feet, and then one great prolonged cry: War.'
• "I tore myself away from her grip, and … joined the crowd as it shouted “Death to the Serbian dogs”. How thrilling it was to be part of something “bigger than myself” and melting into a giant crowd … "...The irony of the Hungarians going to war – and fervently so – after Franz Ferdinand’s murder was lost on practically everybody. It was well known that the heir presumptive, nephew of the emperor, was no friend of the Magyars
• Károlyi was hugely popular for a short while immediately after the fighting ended. There was genuine joy on the streets of Budapest, until the reality of defeat sank in. His was the first revolution named after a flower – the aster... to hold free elections with universal suffrage under new electoral lists. On the first day, soldiers with asters fixed on their lapels and in their rifle barrels – in an attempt to hide the Imperial and royal emblems – were seen dancing through the streets with civilians. Hence it was called the Aster Revolution. They had also, in a classic coup, taken over the telephone exchanges, Post Office and railway stations,
• it was a short-lived carnival. The Great Powers – with US President Woodrow Wilson one of the key players – had already decided that Hungary would be carved up, new independent states would be created from the ethnic Slav nationalities, and that the Habsburg Empire would be assigned to the dustbin of history.
• according to Koestler: They had been designed by the elite of modern Hungarian painters, who later on swarmed out over Europe and America and became prominent as artists, cartoonists and magazine-cover designers … It is a historical curiosity, known only to experts, that the posters of the Hungarian Commune of 1919 represented one of the peaks of commercial art.
• The country was renamed the Hungarian Socialist Republic of Soviets – an imitation of Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik regime in Russia, with all its expropriations, nationalizations, regimentation and terror. Short and unprepossessing, Kun had a squat face, almost no neck and a flaccid mouth. But he was a surprisingly gifted speaker and showed some remarkably practical common sense amid the ideological jargon.
• * Romanian and Czech troops invaded Hungary in the summer of 1919 in their battle for independence and nationhood. Between them they controlled nearly half the country by the time the Kun regime collapsed and its leadership fled – most of them to Russia. The Romanians occupied Budapest from 4 August. Three nightmare months ‘of horror and misery as bad as the Soviet Commune followed
• After the Ausgleich, which established the Dual Monarchy, there was a move to get more Hungarian officers into the armed services, and the young Horthy benefited from a Habsburg-style policy of affirmative action... he had fluent French, Italian, Czech and Croatian – with a smattering of Spanish too. His English was excellent; he had once had James Joyce as his English teacher in Trieste. Some critics have wondered whether Horthy may have been the source for the Hungarian obscenities and scatological references in Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake.
• The white terror that followed the coup by Horthy far exceeded the crimes of Béla Kun – mainly because it continued for so much longer... ‘In place of an intellect Horthy had acquired a small collection of idées fixes, which predetermined his approach to any given issue,’... He was blinded by a nationalism highly blinkered even by Hungarian standards.
• * the Treaty of Trianon: Trianon ‘was the vivisection of the nation … the death certificate of the 1,000-year realm of King Stephen’. <> Hungary was the biggest loser from the First World War – around a third of its territory was handed over to successor states to form new nations, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
• * A Second Jewish Law in 1939 tightened the quotas: Large sections of Hungarian society got to like the idea that one could make a living not only by work and enterprise, but also by seeking out someone else’s position, researching his ancestry, denouncing him, having him dismissed and claiming his business … by the total usurpation of that person’s existence. There was alarming greed, unscrupulous mendacity, and at best, calculated pushiness by a considerable section of this society.
• Nowhere else in Central and Eastern Europe had so many Jews – more than 820,000 – been able to live so long in relative safety as in Hungary. But nowhere else were they sent to their death so quickly. All the Hungarian Jews outside Budapest were herded into ghettoes in the first part of the ‘final solution’ in Hungary... Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz, begged the Hungarian authorities not to send more than one transport every second day, as the camp crematoria did not have the capacity to cope with the sheer number of bodies arriving from the gas chambers.
• After armistice: Hungary’s troops laid down their arms, led by the officer corps, who were overwhelmingly pro-Nazi. Budapest was recaptured and the Germans appointed as Prime Minister of Hungary Ferenc Szálasi, head of the Arrow Cross, the fascist group Horthy had once banned for being too extreme
• Horthy: He had a large ceremonial reburial in September 1993 – the Hungarians do burials well, reburials even better.
• The battle for Budapest was the longest and bloodiest siege of any capital city in the Second World War... The Soviet siege of Budapest was a titanic struggle for three months, 102 days altogether, and ended only after a failed attempt by the Germans and Hungarian defenders to break out of what Hitler had called ‘Fortress Budapest’... I learned that a city with a million inhabitants is a vast place. While towards the end those in Buda, the western half of the city, were still under siege, in Pest, east of the Danube, a movie house was already showing films.
• The favoured place for the murders – though not the only place – was the Danube embankment, and they continued throughout the day and night. A senior police officer told the Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz that there were no more than 4,000 armed Arrow Cross militiamen in Budapest in the autumn of 1944 – yet they terrorized a million people while the gendarmerie, the general civilian population and Hungarian soldiers stood by and watched... The favoured number was three at a time, with their wrists wired together, facing the river. A rifleman would then fire into the back of the person standing in the middle. He would slump forward, dragging the other two into the Danube. This saved bullets and was just as effective as shooting all three.
• György Konrád: They were like a cross-section revealing the building’s naked innards after a bomb had torn its façade off; a bathtub dangling, but the sink still in place; a heavy mahogany cupboard on the wall, but the dining table three flights down. It was the shameless, twisted humour of destruction
• The best known outside Hungary is Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who was the first to establish safe houses for Jews in Budapest, organized food supplies and issued thousands of passports and exit visas after the Germans occupied the country.* Wallenberg disappeared at the end of the war, arrested by the Russian secret police and taken to the USSR, where he was murdered in a prison camp.
• The most famous of all war photographers, Robert Capa, born Endre Friedmann in Budapest, left home aged nineteen in 1931 after having been beaten up by an anti-Semitic gang amid the White Terror following Horthy’s takeover.
• The ‘trophy brigades’ – officially sanctioned by Moscow – began work in late January even before the siege was over, when the Red Army had control of part of Pest but fighting was still raging in Buda. ‘A small but very meticulous group of officers plundered the strongboxes.. For more than forty years, until Soviet troops left Hungary in 1990, almost nobody mentioned the taboo subject of the rapes committed by Russian troops in 1945... The misery is made worse by the fact that many Russian soldiers are diseased and there are absolutely no medicines in Hungary.’
• * the fear among men was to be picked up off the streets and used as slave labour by the Soviets for public works.. essential workers like firefighters, ambulance drivers, train and bus drivers – people who would be needed to rebuild Hungary – were transported east to the Soviet Union for forced labour on building projects in the Urals and Siberia.
• Worse attacks against Jews were occurring at the same time in Poland and Czechoslovakia immediately after details of the Holocaust were known, which from a distance of years may seem inconceivable. But as the wise philosopher Stanisław Ossowski pointed out after one of the most murderous of the post-war pogroms, ‘compassion is not the only imaginable response to a misfortune suffered by others’. Many people in Eastern Europe who had been living in houses previously owned by Jews were boiling with new resentment when after the war the few surviving Jews returned to reclaim their property seized under the Nazis’ anti-Jewish laws.
• Without any legal process more than 13,000 class enemies (aristocrats, high gentry, officials from the old regime, judges) were evicted from their Budapest homes and sent to work.. the real reason was to satisfy the demand for decent housing among the new boss class of Party apparatchiks.
• the thoroughness and breadth that went into looking for informers: ‘Insurance agents, rent collectors, gas meter readers are excellent … chimney sweeps are very useful. They can move about freely in people’s homes … and often they can engage in friendly conversation and no one suspects them.’ Anyone could be an AVO snoop – and everyone knew it.
• * The Terror following the Rajk case lasted more than three years. The numbers, in a small country of fewer than 10 million people, were staggering. Between 1950 and 1953, more than 1.3 million people were prosecuted (and half of them jailed)... Of 850,000 members of the Communist Party in 1950, almost half were either dead, in prison or in labour camps three years later. Often the roles changed between victim and executioner with dramatic speed.
• László Rajk: While he lived, Rajk had been loathed by most Hungarians as the diehard Stalinist who had helped to install the rotten system. Then he became the most prominent victim of the Terror and he had been transformed into a true patriot deserving of a state funeral at Kerepesi Cemetery, where a long list of Hungarian heroes have been buried. ‘Having had a show trial, he now had a show burial.’
• Russian soldiers and their tanks and guns began marching out of the country. But the Soviet withdrawal was an elaborate feint. Fresh new troops arrived in massive force from 3 November with orders this time to crush the Uprising with ruthless savagery.
• When they were behind the quota – which was often – workers simply reduced the width and size of the glass to make up the numbers to save time. Hence, when the windows were installed they didn’t fit properly. Windows became a huge issue in Budapest living spaces throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Broken windows were frequently a metaphor in Budapest literature at the time for much of what was wrong with life in Communist Hungary.
• Kádár tried to show some independence, that he was no mere Soviet puppet. He was a clever political tactician. His most significant step in November 1962, six years after the Uprising, was his widely publicized statement, carefully crafted by his intelligent propagandists, that ‘those who are not against us are with us’. It was a smart move, performed with deft timing – and, above everything, not at all Hungarian: as this story has shown, and history has proved since, Hungary is a nation of political extremes where differences are not always settled with calm moderation and common sense... On the whole, the contract between the regime and the people worked – for a while.
• As much as any other factor, it was debt that brought down the Communist system in Eastern Europe. .. The killing of the socialist bloc, of the Communist system, began the moment the Western banks and financial institutions gave loans to countries like Hungary. At that point we were on a hook.’
• Towards the end he dried up and froze. He was heard in total silence by an embarrassed audience. At the end Kádár – an ebullient, chatty man in his prime – remained in the hall, alone, talking to nobody, waiting for his wife to collect him and drive him home. It was a pathetic finale to an extraordinary career.
• On 10 Septenber 1989 the Hungarians brought down the Iron Curtian: the (still Communist) government decided to allow any East German who wanted to do so to leave for Austria – a decision that led directly, two months later, to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
• Hungarians are the only people in Europe without racial and linguistic relatives. The peculiar intensity of their existence can perhaps be explained by their exceptional loneliness … To be a Hungarian is a collective neurosis. -- Arthur Koestler, Arrrow in the Blue (1952)
• Another familiar theme in Hungarian history is mass emigration, and this has returned as a significant issue, though it is rarely talked about within the country. Since Hungary joined the EU the population has fallen by at least 9 per cent, mostly because people have left