Category Archives: nationalism

by | 9 January 2024 · 5:14 pm

Kádár’s Early Years

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 359-360:

János Czermanik was born, illegitimate, in the port of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia), the son of a Slovak servant girl. His soldier father abandoned them both when he was born and he was brought up in abject poverty. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a toolmaker and was trained in repairing typewriters. He became a Communist at nineteen, when under the Horthy regime it was a banned organization. He was arrested in 1937 and spent three years in jail. During the war, under the codename Kádár (meaning ‘cooper’ or ‘barrel maker’), he ran the underground Communist Party and the pseudonym stuck. He narrowly avoided death when he was arrested again in 1944 and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, but managed to escape and return to Budapest. A tall, handsome, brown-haired man, he affected a cheerful disposition and an easy manner but was famously reserved. ‘Nobody ever knew what he was thinking,’ a long-time comrade said many years later. He was formally uneducated – he admitted once that he had ‘never read Marx’s Das Kapital and not much of Lenin’. But he had a naturally intuitive intelligence, was deeply perceptive about people and an extremely fast learner. He rose through the ranks as an apparatchik under Rákosi and succeeded Rajk, his great friend, as Interior Minister. It was his behaviour after Rajk was arrested that earned him a reputation for untrustworthiness and cynicism.

Godfather to Rajk’s baby son, Kádár betrayed his friend in a chilling manner, visiting him in a police cell to extract a false confession out of him. He knew Rajk was innocent yet made many speeches accusing him of a series of crimes. He was forced to watch Rajk’s execution, which left a deep impression on him. He told people that he felt sick at the sight and had to vomit – but he also noted, impressed, that the last words Rajk spoke were in praise of Stalin. Inevitably, it was soon his turn to be a victim of the purges. Arrested on bogus charges of treason, he was tortured until he ‘confessed’ and spent three years in jail; he was released during Nagy’s premiership when thousands of prisoners were freed. Soon afterwards he met Nagy and thanked him for his help in getting him released. ‘I hope that when my turn comes you would do the same for me,’ Nagy replied.

Kádár was no Stalinist and at the start of the Revolution he appeared enthusiastic about Nagy and his reforms. He voted within the leadership to press the Russians to withdraw their troops and for Hungary to leave the Warsaw Pact. But when the time came he could withstand neither the temptations nor the threats from Moscow. When he returned at the head of the new government he was loathed as a Judas. He could not leave the Parliament building in safety, so he would not have seen the placards which immediately went up around Budapest abusing him. A famous one that the Soviets destroyed several times but was immediately replaced somewhere else in the city declared: ‘Lost: the confidence of the People. Honest finder is asked to return to János Kádár, at 10,000 tanks Street’. He was so hated that when Khrushchev visited Budapest five months after the Uprising was crushed, even the Soviet leader seemed less unpopular than ‘the collaborator in chief’, as he was called for many years in Budapest. The Soviets did not entirely trust him either. Kádár was under probation by them for some time. Two KGB officers followed him wherever he went, ostensibly for his security, but also to keep an eye on him.

During my postdoc year in Romania in 1983-84, I attended an advanced Romanian language curs de perfecționare with classmates from the U.S., China, and East Germany. My favorite professor assigned us to do oral presentations for our final exams, on topics of our own choosing. My Chinese classmates, who were Romanian language broadcasters for Radio Beijing, had taken a tour of neighboring countries during our winter break, and they were impressed by Hungary’s relative prosperity during the 1980s. One of them talked about Kádár’s personal modesty and lack of a personality cult. She had experienced Mao’s personality cult, and gave her talk under the portrait of Ceaușescu that adorned every Romanian classroom at that time. I had no idea then about Kádár’s earlier perfidious rise to power. (My own talk was on the Hawaiian Great Mahele [Rom. Marea împărțire] in that revolutionary year 1848, which didn’t turn out so well for commoners.)

Leave a comment

Filed under democracy, economics, education, Hungary, military, nationalism, philosophy, USSR

by | 4 January 2024 · 4:07 am

Fall of Budapest, 1945

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 309, 315-316:

We have had three great tragedies in our country: the Tatar invasion in the thirteenth century, the Turkish occupation lasting 150 years – and the Soviet liberation. György Faludy (1910–2006)

…

If women were scared of rape, the fear among men was to be picked up off the streets and used as slave labour by the Soviets for public works like clearing rubble, shoring up buildings and repairing the city’s bridges. General Malinovsky reported back to Moscow that 110,000 men had been taken as ‘prisoners’ in this way. According to one well-informed journalist, ‘Count Géza Teleki [who would later himself become briefly Minister for Public Works] and a former Mayor of Budapest were seized without any warning and found two days later when an officer to whom they could talk finally released them. Prince Pál Esterházy was discovered in a cemetery burying dead horses.’ Around half of these detainees were returned home within weeks of the end of the siege. But the rest, including men from all walks of life and 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. Some returned to Hungary decades later, but most never did – one of the Soviet war crimes rarely mentioned amid all the other horrors of the Second World War. Forty thousand of these men – abducted from their homes and from the streets – were corralled into a concentration camp near Gödöllő, 30 kilometres north-east of Budapest, in appalling conditions before being taken to the USSR.

…

Budapest in the spring of 1945 ‘was nothing short of hell on earth’, said the high-ranking prelate Bishop József Grősz at the end of the year. ‘Thousands of women from girls of twelve to women in the ninth month of pregnancy raped; men deported for slave labour. Almost every home looted; the city and its churches in ruins; the restaurants and stores empty, dead horses in the streets along with unburied bodies; in the cellars people half-demented with hunger, cutting pieces of flesh from animals dead for days.

Leave a comment

Filed under Germany, Hungary, labor, migration, military, nationalism, slavery, USSR, war

by | 3 January 2024 · 7:18 am

Hungary’s First Anti-Jewish Laws

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 272-273:

Horthy introduced anti-Jewish laws in Hungary while Hitler was still speaking to tiny groups of disaffected Germans in Munich beer halls. The first legislation specifically to target Hungarian Jews for discrimination was passed on 22 September 1920, barely six months after the admiral was elected regent. It was the Numerus Clausus Act, which restricted the number of Jews admitted to universities to 7 per cent of the total population, effectively ending the legal equality for Hungarian Jews that had been established under the Ausgleich in 1867. This had a profound effect in Budapest, where more than a quarter of the inhabitants at the end of the First World War were Jews – and on the universities. Many young people who could afford to leave went to study abroad, never to return. So did some of the ablest professors – a drain of talent that was never replaced. Horthy was not interested when a few academics, even among his own supporters, objected. ‘Concerning the Jewish question, for all my life, I have been an anti-Semite,’ he wrote to a friend, the future Prime Minister Pál Teleki. ‘I have never made any contact with Jews. I have found it intolerable that here, in Hungary, every single factory, bank, asset, shop, theatre, newspaper, trade, etc., is in Jewish hands.’

The passage of the law was accompanied by a wave of pogroms throughout Hungary. In Budapest a dozen Jews were killed and more than 150 injured during a vicious riot by the far-Right Turul organization, led by the highly ambitious ultra-nationalist politician Gyula Gömbös, who a decade later would become Prime Minister.

In 1925 the League of Nations threatened to impose sanctions and other retaliatory measures against Hungary unless it removed anti-Semitic legislation. Budapest’s Jews begged them not to. The National Jewish Congress of Hungary asked the League not to interfere, for fear of a further backlash against Jews.

Leave a comment

Filed under economics, education, Germany, Hungary, nationalism, religion

by | 2 January 2024 · 3:15 am

A City of Partition Refugees

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 41-44:

I had been living in Delhi for some months before I began to realize quite how many of the people I met every day were Partition refugees. Even the most well-established Delhi figures – newspaper editors, successful businessmen, powerful politicians – had tales to tell of childhoods broken in two, of long journeys on foot over the Punjab plains, of houses left behind, of sisters kidnapped or raped: the ghastly but familiar litany of Partition horrors.

The Puris’ story was fairly typical. Before Partition they had a large town house in Lahore. When the riots came they packed a couple of suitcases, bought their bullock cart and headed off towards Delhi. Their possessions they left locked up in the haveli, guarded by Muslim servants. Like the Palestinians a year later, they expected to come back within a few months when peace had been restored. Like the Palestinians, they never returned.

On arrival in Delhi they found a gutted house in Subzi Mandi, the vegetable bazaar of the Old City. It had belonged to a Muslim family that had fled weeks before. The Puris simply installed a new door and moved in. There were still killings, and occasionally stray bullets ricocheted around the bazaar, but gradually the Puris began to find their feet.

‘We acquired slowly by slowly,’ Mrs Puri remembers. ‘My husband started a business making and selling small houses. I knitted woollens. At first it was very hard.’

After a year of carrying water in leaky buckets, the house was connected to the water mains; later the Puris got electricity installed. By 1949 they had a fan; by 1956 a fridge. In the late 1960s the Puris moved to a smart new house in South Extension. They had arrived.

We heard the same story repeated over and over again. Even the most innocuous of our neighbours, we discovered, had extraordinary tales of 1947: chartered accountants could tell tales of single-handedly fighting off baying mobs; men from grey government ministries would emerge as the heroes of bloody street battles. Everything these people now possessed was built up by their own hard labour over the last few years.

…

The violence totally gutted many of the poorer parts of Delhi, but even the very richest districts were affected. While shoppers looked on, Hindu mobs looted the smart Muslim tailors and boutiques in Connaught Place; passers-by then stepped over the murdered shopkeepers and helped themselves to the unguarded stocks of lipstick, handbags and bottles of face cream. In Lodhi Colony, Sikh bands burst into the white Lutyens bungalows belonging to senior Muslim civil servants and slaughtered anyone they found at home.

In some areas of the Old City, particularly around Turkman Gate and the Jama Masjid, the Muslims armed themselves with mortars and heavy machine guns. From their strongpoints in the narrow alleyways they defied not only the rioters but also the Indian Army. Many of the Muslim families who remain in Delhi today survived by barricading themselves into these heavily defended warrens.

…

The more I read, the more it became clear that the events of 1947 were the key to understanding modern Delhi. The reports highlighted the city’s central paradox: that Delhi, one of the oldest towns in the world, was inhabited by a population most of whose roots in the ancient city soil stretched back only forty years. This explained why Delhi, the grandest of grand old aristocratic dowagers, tended to behave today like a nouveau-riche heiress: all show and vulgarity and conspicuous consumption. It was a style most unbecoming for a lady of her age and lineage; moreover it jarred with everything one knew about her sophistication and culture.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, economics, education, India, migration, nationalism, Pakistan, religion, war

by | 1 January 2024 · 8:12 am

Delhi’s Extreme Mood-Swings

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 35-38:

Delhi had many failings, but I had never felt it was a violent city. In all the time I had spent in the dark mohallas (quarters) of the old walled city I had never once felt threatened. There were no areas that I felt uneasy to visit after sunset. Instead I had always found Delhi-wallahs, particularly the poor, remarkable for their gentleness and elaborate courtesy. Wherever we went, complete strangers would invite Olivia and me to sit and talk and share a glass of tea with them. To one brought up on a diet of starchy English reserve this habitual kindness of the Delhi-wallah was as touching as it was strange.

Yet as Balvinder and Sandhu could witness, when provoked the inhabitants of this mild town could rise up and commit acts of extreme brutality. Men would avert their eyes as next door neighbours were burned alive or disembowelled. The same people who would invite you to share their last plate of food could, with equal spontaneity, lose control and run amok. Then, with equal ease they could return to their bazaars and shops, factories and offices and carry on as if nothing had happened. It was difficult to understand.

Moreover, despite Delhi’s historic reputation as the most cultured town in India, the city’s history was punctuated with many such flashes of terrible, orgiastic violence. It was not just invaders who put the people of Delhi to the sword. During the Middle Ages and throughout the long Mughal twilight the town was continually rent with bloody riots, even small civil wars. Out of the first twelve Sultans, only two died peacefully in their beds; the rest were killed, usually in a horrible manner and almost always by their courtiers or subjects. Invaders like Timur the Lame were able to storm the high walls of the city only because the inhabitants were already busy cutting each others’ throats. The death toll from bazaar disputes such as the eighteenth-century Shoe Sellers’ Riot could run into tens of thousands.

The last great conflagration was Partition. In the dying days of the British Raj, when the subcontinent was split into Muslim-only Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, twelve million people were made refugees. Hordes of non-Muslims – Sikhs and Hindus – fled their ancestral villages in Pakistan; India’s displaced Muslims struck out in the opposite direction. It was the greatest migration the modern world had ever seen. Yet again Delhi was consigned to the flames. Following some of the worst rioting in its history, nearly half of its ancient Muslim population – the descendants of the people who had erected the Qutab Minar and lined the streets to cheer the Great Mogul – packed their bags and headed off to a new country. Their place was taken by refugees from the Western Punjab, among them Mr and Mrs Puri and Punjab Singh. Delhi was transformed from a small administrative capital of 900,000 people to a Punjabi-speaking metropolis half the size of London.

Of the two peoples who had ruled Delhi during the previous thousand years, the British disappeared completely while the Indian Muslims were reduced to an impoverished minority. In the space of a few months, the face of the city was probably changed more radically than at any other time since the Muslims first came to India, a millennium before.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, economics, food, India, migration, nationalism, religion, war

by | 29 December 2023 · 5:21 am

Tolls of the Treaty of Trianon

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 268-270:

All day throughout Hungary on Friday, 4 June 1920 church bells tolled a dirge, black flags flew over public buildings, traffic came to a standstill in the centre of Budapest for long periods, newspapers appeared with black borders and funeral services were held in churches. It was the day the Treaty of Trianon was signed – still regarded 100 years later ‘as the most devastating tragedy in the nation’s history…a live issue now from which Hungary has not recovered’, according to the philosopher Miklós Haraszti, who under the post-Second World War Communist regime was a dissident leader and in the 1970s the last political prisoner in the country. 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. Large slices of Hungary were given over by the Great Powers to existing states: the whole of Transylvania, part of historic Hungary for hundreds of years, was given to Romania. Half of the population was lost and millions of Hungarians became ‘foreigners’ in new countries overnight. Towns and cities with deep Hungarian roots were renamed: Kassa became Košice in Slovakia, Kolozsvár in Transylvania became Cluj: Temesvár in Romania was now Timişoara; Pozsony became the Slovak capital, Bratislava. As Horthy remarked on the day the treaty was signed: ‘They dismembered the Germans, the Bulgarians and the Turks too. But from them they only took only one or two fingers. From the Hungarians they took his hands and feet.’

The peacemakers of the new world order – particularly the French, who pushed hardest in the Trianon talks – believed they were acting in the interests of self-determination for peoples who had been long held subject. The Hungarians thought they were victims of an ahistorical act of vindictive punishment. The Hungarian army was limited to no more than 35,000 troops and was allowed no heavy artillery, tanks or an air force. Hungary – like Germany – was forced to pay enormous reparations. The French President, Georges Clemenceau, declared that Hungary would be ‘permanently deprived of the means of making war’.

For long afterwards in kindergartens and schools, during church services and in the press, the notion that the lost territories could be restored was kept alive. The slogan taught to children – and often used as a greeting when people met socially – was: ‘No, No Never’ – meaning ‘No, it can never happen’. The saying modulated daily life in Hungary between the wars. The legacy of Trianon defined life in Horthy’s Hungary….

Rump Hungary became a homogeneous state in a way it had never been in 1,000 years. Only 10 per cent of the population were not ethnic Magyars or did not use Hungarian as their native tongue. Trianon, as Paul Lendvai, the best historian of 1920s and 1930s Hungary, noted, ‘was the breeding ground for the transformation of nationalism from an ideology of liberation to one of distraction’. A hundred years later, in the 2020s, the best-selling items of tat in cheap market stalls are pre-Trianon fridge magnets and plastic flags with Greater Hungary maps.

The post-Trianon shock determined the Horthy regime’s revisionist policies. It drove public opinion to an ever more extreme nationalism and further isolated the country from its neighbours. After the peace treaty, ‘Hungary became the quintessential have-not state, ready to ally itself with the Devil himself to undo the injustices perpetrated at Trianon.’ All politics was seen through the prism of the infamous treaty.

Leave a comment

Filed under France, Germany, Hungary, military, nationalism, Romania, Slovakia, U.S., war, Yugoslavia

by | 28 December 2023 · 5:24 pm

Budapest in 1919

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 253-256:

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, [Bela] 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. A torrent of decrees poured out from the Revolutionary Council, but they were patchily implemented, especially outside Budapest. Not all of them were stupid and Kun’s regime, mainly of passionate young revolutionaries – Kun was one of the oldest in the leadership at the age of thirty-three – were convinced they could out-Lenin Lenin.

The Kun regime’s first decree on 21 March 1919, day one of the Revolution, proclaimed martial law and imposed the death penalty for any acts of ‘subversion’, which meant any opposition to his committee of Soviets. The second day he replaced the existing judicial system with ‘Revolutionary tribunals’ along the lines of those that had operated in the French Revolution.

…

Red Terror began from the Commune’s first day, presided over by Tibor Szamuely, a sinister figure who modelled himself on Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Russian Soviets’ secret service, the Cheka. He introduced Red death squads – the most feared, active in many parts of Budapest, were the red-scarved and leather-jacketed Lenin Boys led by a sadistic twenty-three-year-old thug, József Czerny. It is estimated that at least 1,000 people were murdered in Budapest and the surrounding area in 133 days.

…

The Russian Bolsheviks gave the Hungarian Soviet plenty of vocal support and a modest sum of financial backing, but when it faced the prospect of losing power did nothing to intervene on behalf of world revolution or the cause of Communism close-ish to home – Hungary has a border with Ukraine, then still part of the Russian Empire. 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…it was one of the darkest periods,’ one survivor of the invasion recalled. ‘The Romanians embarked on a systematic programme of looting, expropriation, deportations and terror.’

Children were taken from homes and sent into servitude in Romanian villages and towns. More than 500 Hungarians were murdered by Romanian troops and estimates suggest that 1,000 women were raped. Valuable art treasures, large amounts of agricultural produce and industrial plant were loaded on trains and sent east to Romania. They stole, among other things, 4,000 telephones from private homes they had ransacked. Bands of soldier-looters took railway locomotives and carriages, industrial machinery, and thousands of horses and cattle worth nearly 3 million gold crowns, more than twelve times in value than all the loans Hungary received four years later to get the country back on its feet. The Romanians took treasures from the National Museum, but were prevented from taking more by Brigadier General Harry Hill Bandholtz, the American member of the Allied Control Commission, which was supposed to supervise the Romanian army’s disengagement from Hungary.

Kun escaped in November 1919 and found refuge in Russia. As he left, without a hint of irony, he told a comrade: ‘the Hungarian proletariat betrayed us’ – by ‘us’ he meant the Communists. For a while he was treated as a hero in Soviet Russia, as one of the leading martyrs of the cause of world revolution. He was relatively successful in a series of roles in the Comintern in the 1920s and early 1930s. But Stalin loathed him. He disappeared into the great maw of the Gulag and was shot during the Great Purge in 1938.

Leave a comment

Filed under Czechia, democracy, economics, Germany, Hungary, industry, labor, migration, military, nationalism, Romania, Russia

by | 22 December 2023 · 6:22 am

Language Change in Budapest

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 198-199:

Demographics as well as politics were changing on both sides of the Danube, principally the rapid decline in the use of the German language – a victory for the cause of Hungarian nationalism. The German populations almost everywhere else in Central and Eastern Europe maintained their German heritage and their separation from the other, mainly Slavic, populations surrounding them – in the Czech lands, Galicia and parts of Romania. In Buda and Pest, if not the rest of Hungary, things progressed differently. The German-Austrian populations in Pest and Buda merged with, and then were absorbed by, the Magyars into a linguistic, political and cultural ‘Hungarianness’.

Another big demographic factor was the rapid influx of immigrants, mostly Jews, into Pest, who adopted the Hungarian language to assimilate into Magyar life. The main political manager of the unification was a prominent son of immigrants whose family had moved to Pest in the 1820s, the vastly experienced (and wealthy) Moritz Wahrmann. In 1869 he was the first Jew elected to the Hungarian Parliament, for the Leopoldváros (Leopoldtown) district of Pest, an area of large town houses and a few commercial businesses in the finance sector, populated by many better-off Jews. A close associate of Andrássy and a moderate Liberal, he steered the legislation uniting the city through Parliament. By then, though, the population of Buda was in decline compared with that of Pest. In 1848 the population was nearly even, with 46 per cent in Buda. Twenty years later this proportion fell to 25 per cent. By 1900 only one in six of the city’s inhabitants lived in Buda.

There was snobbery and parochialism on both sides of the river for decades after the unification. The writer Sándor Márai could be happy only in Buda, close to the Castle district where he lived, until he emigrated to the US after the Second World War. A Pest loyalist profoundly disagreed: ‘The Danube flows along the edge of Budapest, because Buda is not really one half of the capital city but merely a place for excursions,’ wrote Adolf Ágai, founder and long-time editor of the humour magazine Borsszem Jankó and author of the classic Travels from Pest to Budapest. ‘It is naturally right to rejoice in the dawn of tomorrow even while looking back wistfully to yesterday,’ he wrote. ‘Pest represents dynamism of the present and future…the other side is sleepy and secretive…I think highly of Buda but I am not familiar with it. My imagination remains baffled by its monotonous hills and valleys…I have travelled through all the great capitals of Europe but Buda remains a foreign place to me.’

Leave a comment

Filed under Austria, economics, Germany, Hungary, language, migration, nationalism, religion

by | 20 December 2023 · 5:18 am

Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich Quirks

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 191-194:

By the day of the coronation only the most dissenting voices in the court were complaining about the Compromise. Most had come round to accepting it as a consummate act of outstanding diplomacy by the emperor. In Hungary Andrássy and Deák were declared the presiding political geniuses and it was generally agreed that the Hungarians had received from the arrangement more than they had thought possible a few years earlier. ‘Hungary won victory from defeat,’ as Jókai once said. He meant it with a degree of irony, but the phrase has stuck and entire histories of Hungary have been written with the famous phrase as their titles.

…

The old Hungarian constitution was re-established, giving the Hungarian nobles essentially the same rights they had before 1848, though technically serfdom was abolished. The Empire of Austria became the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary with two capitals, two parliaments (both with limited powers) and two Cabinets. Only the Foreign Minister, the War Minister and the Finance Minister acted for both (and even then only for financial issues that affected the Empire as a whole). It was a highly complex structure that gave the Hungarians far more power as a proportion of their population. But Austria was far richer and paid 70 per cent of Imperial costs.

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 – and despite sporadic hostile reactions in Hungary, people were more satisfied with it than frustrated. It had plenty of absurdities: Hungary was under the king-emperor’s rule but was not subject to the Austrian Imperial government, a fact that wasn’t even mentioned in the Compromise Laws that brought the new empire into being and would cause severe problems later.

…

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. The purely Austrian offices were called Imperial-royal k.u.k., but the purely Hungarian ones just royal (königlich, or simply k). But in Budapest the term magyar királyi (Hungarian royal) was in general use, abbreviated as often as not on official signs in Budapest as magy.k.

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). This was followed in various ways in a whole range of other managerial jobs and professions, and navigating proper usage was a minefield until after the Second World War.

Leave a comment

Filed under Austria, economics, Hungary, language, nationalism, Romania, Slovakia, Yugoslavia

by | 18 December 2023 · 10:58 am

Habsburg Revenge on Hungary, 1849

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 159-160:

Tsar Nicholas I – at least in public – urged the teenage Austrian emperor to show magnanimity to the defeated ‘rebels’. But Franz Jozsef, or his chief adviser, Prince Schwarzenberg, was in no mood for leniency. The savagery of Habsburg retribution against Hungary shocked Europe.

At dawn on 6 October 1849 Lajos Batthyány, the first Prime Minister of revolutionary Hungary, was dragged to the courtyard of the main military barracks in Pest. He had been held prisoner since the end of July and was sentenced to hang for treason by a court martial – even though it was established at his trial that he had argued against Hungary declaring independence precisely on the grounds that it could be seen as treasonous. He was too weak to stand or walk so he had to be carried from his cell to the place of execution; three days earlier he had tried to cut his throat with a knife smuggled into the jail by his wife. It was seen as a dishonour for a nobleman to die by hanging, therefore he had done what he could to avoid the shame. The prison infirmary had saved his life so that he was fit enough to be killed. In what was described as an act of leniency, the court changed its sentence to death by firing squad. He was shot sitting on a chair. He refused to have his eyes covered by a blindfold – and he himself gave the order for the execution squad to fire. Like a true Hungarian aristocrat, he spoke in words from three languages ‘Allez Jäger, eljén a Haza’ (Long Live the Fatherland). His body lay in public at the scene of the execution for a day and a half – in what is now Szabadság tér (Liberty Square) in the heart of Budapest opposite the US Embassy, almost exactly on the spot where a more than life-size, awkward-looking statue of President Ronald Reagan has stood since the 1990s. On the same morning in Arad, Transylvania, now part of Romania, twelve Honvédség generals and a colonel were hanged. The date is one of the most important public holidays in Hungary.

General Baron Ludwig von Haynau was despatched to Budapest by the emperor and Schwarzenberg to teach ‘the Hungarians a lesson they will never forget’. He took up the challenge with alacrity. ‘I am the man who will restore order. I shall have hundreds shot, with a clear conscience,’ he told the General Staff in Vienna. The illegitimate son of Elector Wilhelm I of Hesse-Kassel, he was more widely known as the ‘Butcher of Brescia’ for the atrocities he had carried out in Lombardy, including the public flogging of women and girls he had accused of sedition, and the execution of a priest who was dragged from the altar of his church by soldiers directly to the gallows.

Leave a comment

Filed under Austria, Hungary, language, military, nationalism, Russia, war