Ignác Romsics

Letters to a Fellow Historian from Dalmatia

A Subjective Afterword to a Twentieth-Century History of Hungary

 

1

I was unable to reply before now to your letter, in which you comment at length on many of the conclusions reached in my Hungary in the Twentieth Century (Corvina - Osiris, 1999). I have long been planning, however, to respond to the substance of the lines with which you honoured me. I suppose that this year's summer holiday by the Adriatic is going to offer that opportunity, alongside reading Péter Esterházy's new novel, Celestial Harmonies, and turning the pages of the diaries of Sándor Márai. Though we had lovely weather yesterday, and have the same today, at Crkvenica - right on the border between the Kvarner and Dalmatia - the sea rarely warms up enough to allow it to be wallowed around in for any length of time. I think that sitting here, on the terrace, between two dips, will be a good opportunity to enter into a 'discussion' with you.
In your letter you choose to break off again and again from your substantive comments and advert to the 'detached', 'fact-packed', 'self-effacing' character of my book. There are times when you give utterance to a distinct sense of disappointment. Simply replying that my publisher commissioned me to produce a 'multifunctional textbook' would be to evade giving a proper reply. How an author sees his task is only ever settled in the heat of writing, and the pen from which the sentences flow is, to a large extent, actuated by the author's personality and way of doing things. That is the way it has always been for me. Though I naturally do not hold with the Rankean wie es eigentlich gewesen ist school of historio-graphy, I am even less attracted to the wie es eigentlich wäre or wie es hätte sein sollen narrative type of writing history - that Michael Oakeshott called practical - which sets up an overly tight and ideological bond between past and present.
When it came to investigating social phenomena, the texts that I have always admired were those that did not provide ready-made answers but presented me with the facts, the data needed to construct an answer. It is very well for the author to have a point of view, but he should not seek to ram it down my throat - rather allow me to decide for myself whether I agree with him or not. Moreover, I believed in the far from original recognition (though it counted as heretical in relation to the 'monotheism' of the Marxist conception of history) that no such thing as objective historiography is possible, due to the very nature of historical knowledge: every historical interpretation is subjective, to a greater or lesser extent. I put that in writing for the first time in 1989, in the preface to my biography of Count István Bethlen, though I had formulated it in my own mind a good while before then, in the late 1970s. As best I recall, I came to that conclusion after having read Max Weber and Wilhelm Dilthey; Benedetto Croce, Heinrich Rickert and R.G. Collingwood were known to me only by name, not through their writings. On the other hand, I never concurred - and still do not concur - with the extreme view, as exemplified most typically by Hayden White, that historians are as free as poets or novelists are in constructing their texts. Among the fundamental differences that set historiography and literature apart, one of the most important, to my mind, is the divergent positions they take as regard the past. A writer may, without further ado, rely on his own free imagination to elaborate on a historical event, inventing ad absurdum. It is a historian's duty to survey the accessible source material on any event that is to be reconstructed, and to select, weigh up and evaluate that as best he can, in accordance with his convictions. Moreover, any pronouncement he makes is part of a professional discourse that, depending on the topic, may stretch back for centuries but which it is his duty to be aware of. The historian's hands are more tied, and even if his assertions are not unappealable, they rest on a much sounder and, above all, more verifiable basis than those of the novelist. (Alun Munslow, the author of Deconstructing History (1997), would categorise this approach as a variety of 'practical realism' that one could interpret as intermediate between the traditional reconstructionist and the postmodern deconstructionist approaches.)
These, then, are the experiences, considerations and motives that lie behind the 'detached', 'fact-packed', 'self-effacing' character of my book. I was never able - and never sought - to put on the airs of either a prosecutor or a defence counsel; indeed, I shrank even from a juridical posture. It is so easy, with the wisdom of hindsight, to allocate brickbats and praises among the figures of the past; I would rather try and understand them. Accordingly, I see my role - to stay with the judicial simile - as more along the lines of a court reporter. In other words, I seek to recount both what the prosecutor and counsel for the defence submitted in evidence, and finally strive to give a fair summary of the judge's verdict and the reasoning behind it. Still, if you read my book attentively, you will of course notice - as indeed you did notice - that there are many cases where the reporter 'slipped out' of his role and gave free rein to conclusions that reflect his personal opinion. Nevertheless, those are either absolutely clear-cut cases - agreeing with death sentences for mass murderers, let us say, or expressing sympathy for those who were slaughtered - or else I signal: Watch out here! this is the author's personal opinion, which the reader is entirely free to accept or reject. On the whole, though, I did strive to induce the potential reader to make up his or her own mind through a detached, yet far from ad hoc presentation of the facts.

2

I have been enjoying the Adriatic summer for three days now on the shady terrace of our rented house. In the garden before me are bushes of laurel, oleander and myrtle, well-trimmed pines, and behind them, the blue sea. To the left and right are holiday homes, several of them villas, large and small, that were built between 1890 and 1914. Crumbling as they are and awaiting renovation, they are still imposing and command respect. Mementoes of a vanished world. The same is true of Opatija, once known as Abbazia, and a dozen other places on what is now the Croatian coast. Altogether there are several hundred, maybe even thousands, of these places, including Ótátrafüred (Vysoké Tatry), a mountain resort in what used to be Upper Hungary and is today Slovakia, or Szováta (Sovata) and Tusnádfürdő (Ba×ile Tus¸nad) in what is today Romania - in all such spa resorts, from Ischl in the Salzkammergut to Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) in Bohemia and Herkulesfürdő (Ba×ile Herculane), there was this same elegance, hundreds of villas and hotels in the same style. How many of them were built altogether, one wonders? Fifty thousand? One hundred thousand? A huge number, to be sure, yet still negligible in relation to the 50 million inhabitants of the Habsburg Empire - at best 1 - 2 per cent would have been able to enjoy the aristocratic or upper-middle-class comforts that these buildings once offered their residents. So what about the other 48 - 49 million? Just a few minutes by motorway from the elegant sea coast, tucked in among the mountains, are tiny Dalmatian villages of ramshackle dry-stone huts with dilapidated roofs - hard to tell which are for people and which for their animals. The same contrast will strike the eyes of the traveller who drives out of Sfintu Gheorghe toward Ba×ile Tus¸nad and turns off to Ba×s¸anii Mici, or who takes the highway from Poprad through Vysoké Tatry on the Slovakian side of the High Tatras toward Dunajec on the Polish side, to say nothing of the villages of the Transylvanian Heath between Reghin and Cluj.
That's how it was; that was the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Vienna, Budapest, Prague and somewhere between one and two dozen other big cities rose like islands above the traditional rural world. In the cities, lighting came courtesy of gas and even electricity; in the latter, candles or possibly oil lamps. In the former, dwellings were provided with bathrooms and water closets; in the latter, people still slept with their animals. In the former, people travelled by bus and tram, the richest even in their own cars; in the latter, at best on horseback or by cart but more often than not on foot. In the former, people could be entertained in theatres, music-halls and, increasingly, cinemas; in the latter, if people gathered at all for pleasure, it was in the spinnery or the village tavern. A growing number of city dwellers enjoyed the blessings of modern social insurance; the rural masses could only dream of accident and health insurance or a pension. The city dweller had money to spare; the villager could barely afford food and clothes. The city dweller was a gentleman, to be addressed as 'Sir,' 'Your Honour,' 'Your Worthiness' or 'Your Worship'; a villager might at best qualify for 'Mister.' The gendarmes would salute the one and beat the other.
I do not share the view of those who, confusing the 'land of dreams' of coffee with whipped-cream and everlasting waltz tunes with the Monarchy's reality, nostalgically think back to the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century as some sort of idyllic era - adding gloomily that things have been going downhill ever since. Though you don't suggest anything as silly as that, you gently chide me for undervaluing the achievements of the age and overemphasising its problems. I don't know if you are aware of it, but as far as this debate goes Sándor Márai, that burgher or middle-class citizen par excellence, were he still living, would take my side. In a 1942 essay, "Pamphlet Concerning National Education", he wrote: "the masses lived discontentedly with the economic disparities of this great period, with huge forces straining and competing in the depths of society, seeking a balance, striving to attain an equitable disposition of the incongruities of ownership, production and distribution in the established course of things... That equitable disposition was tardy."
I picked out five of the focal points of social and political tension that were lurking below the idyllic surface. These were the following: 1) the constitutional dispute between the Liberal Party supporters of the 1867 Compromise with Austria (the '67-ers) and the Independence and '48 Party (the '48-ers) over the future of the dual Monarchy; 2) the conflict of interests and values between the Christian and Jewish middle classes, or in other words the Jewish question and anti-Semitism; 3) the aspirations of the various middle-class, peasant and working-class strata to democratise the conservative-authoritarian political system in the face of the opposition of the historical élite; 4) the friction between large and small landowners or, in other words, the issue of land reform; and lastly 5) the antagonism between Magyars and non-Magyars, i.e. the nationalities question. I don't doubt your contention that the relation to Austria, the Jewish question, the contest of democratic forces and the establishment, as well as the concerns of the peasant class were severe, but in all probability they were problems that could have been handled within the framework of the historical Hungarian state. After all, states everywhere else have always had to cope with similar issues. The political aspirations of the non-Magyar inhabitants, however, threatened the very existence of this historical Hungarian state, and - power politics aside - there was no real antidote to those centrifugal forces. That is why approaches that describe any period in the Monarchy's existence as an idyll or 'golden era' or 'having gone to the dogs since' strike me as fundamentally flawed and misleading.

You are well aware, since you mention it in your letter, that Hungarians first came up against the threat of the nationalities question during the 1848 - 49 War of Independence. Politicians of the Reform Era, István Széchenyi and Miklós Wesselényi among them, still entertained the fond belief that in return of an extension of legal rights that was to be implemented within the framework of a wider civic transformation, without reference to linguistic or ethnic differences, Hungary's ethnic minorities would be willing to assimilate, to 'Magyarise', or at least to accept Hungarian as a lingua franca. As it is well known, aspirations to establish a Hungarian nation-state not only met with opposition from Vienna but prompted Hungary's non-Magyar peoples to formulate their own national goals as well. Serb, Romanian and, to some degree, Slovak leaders demanded that Hungary be remodelled on a federal basis, while the Croats set their sights even higher - on their own statehood. The outcome is all too familiar. It was impracticable to suppose that millions of Romanian, Serb, Slovak and Ruthene peasants, concentrated for the greater part in homogeneous blocs and in part also distinct in religious faith, would behave like the more thinly dispersed and urbanised Germans and Jews and voluntarily exchange their own language and culture within the foreseeable future, while their leaders gave up demands for territorial autonomy and self-rule. A policy of forced assimilation held out equally little hope of success, on top of which it was incompatible with the liberalism that was still typical, to its credit, of Hungary's own ruling class. Instead, they implemented a principle of organisation of the state and public administration that, comparable to a Western European or North American concept of the nation-state, guaranteed many cultural and even low-level administrative rights to the non-Magyar minorities while refusing to recognise them as political entities, as peoples capable of forming states.
The empire's Austrian half was being torn apart by similar contradictions. That is why many suppose that some form of federalism would have been the only way of saving the Monarchy, if it could have been saved at all. One is still waiting to this day, however, for a single instance of federalism being implemented successfully. The Swiss case is better regarded as an exception rather than the rule, to say nothing of the fact that whereas in Switzerland it was necessary to find forms of coexistence for only three (in any case closely related) linguistic-cultural communities, in the Habsburg empire it was a question of integrating literally dozens of ethnic groups that were, moreover, historically and culturally very diverse. That chance arose in 1848 - 49, indeed even subsequently, but it never came to fruition - not least due to opposition on the part of Hungary's leaders. Even if it had come to that, it is questionable how long that solution would have been accepted by the Poles and Ukrainians of Galicia, the Romanians of Transylvania, the Serbs of the south, and - please note! - the ethnic Germans of Austria and Bohemia, who supported a 'Greater Germany', and how long before they decided they wanted to unify with fellow-nationals across the border, who at least in part had already formed states.
In the case of Hungary, it is customary to point to the views propounded by László Teleki, by Lajos Kossuth in exile and, later, by Lajos Mocsáry and Oszkár Jászi as conceptions that offered solutions. You too invoke them. There can be no doubt about it: an offer to the nationalities that - along the lines of the Swiss model, mutatis mutandis - not only guaranteed cultural rights but also bestowed on them co-national status would have had considerably more appeal to non-Magyar minorities than what was adumbrated in the Nationalities Act of 1868, to which their élites responded with decades of passive resistance. But would that have had more appeal than the lures dangled by Belgrade in front of Hungary's Serbs, by Bucharest in front of her Romanians, and later on by Prague in front of her Slovaks? We cannot be at all sure about that. Still, adoption of the Swiss model - and I agree with you on this - might have been useful even if history gave a negative response, in part because secession then would probably have been troubled by fewer memories of past strife, in part because there would have been a realistic chance of parcelling out the property (namely the land) on a consensual basis that was laid out along linguistic boundaries and, at the decisive moment, this would have taken place along frontiers that would have felt natural both to the seceding parties and to the outside world.
The nationalities issue was indeed a threat and not only to the territorial integrity of the Hungarian state but to the evolution of ideas and thinking about the Hungarian state as well. This offered a justification (and a realistic one at that) to which any conservative authoritarian stance opposed to democratising the political system, or in other words to keeping up with the ruling ideas of the day, could appeal. The legislators of Hungary's 1848 Declaration of Independence vested the right to vote on just 7.2 per cent of the population, and they did not reach a clear-cut decision - given the high level of illiteracy in Hungary - over whether voting should be by secret or open ballot. By 1875, that electorate had been successfully whittled back to 6.2 per cent, and it did not get any higher
subsequently. Meanwhile the manner of voting was also clarified: though illiteracy had been reduced by leaps and bounds, from 1874 only voting by open acclamation was allowed. As to why, the answer given by the former prime minister Dezső Bánffy in 1902 was that Hungary, "being a state in the development phase cannot be a Rechtstaat, a constitutional state," because the accomplishment of a Hungarian constitutional state as an "ultimate aim" had to be preceded by the establishment of "a unified Magyar nation-state." That given by Mihály Réz, a confidant and adviser to István Tisza, on the other hand, was: "Let's not speak about freedom and equality; what needs to be created is rule by the Magyar race. The nation-state, national society, has to adapt to this goal."
Who, then, among Hungary's Magyars and non-Magyars was 'happy' or satisfied at the beginning of the twentieth century, and to what degree? For how many more years would it have been forbidden to speak about "freedom and equality", in other words for the overwhelming majority of society to demand political rights? Twenty? Forty? A hundred maybe? Or should we simply acknowledge that a "Renaissance way of life" is just a privilege of the prevailing élites, and the "proletarian Renaissance", as the social historian Elemér Hankiss calls the consumer civilisation of our days, is actually not desirable or advantageous to anyone, not even the proletarians, it is just that they are too dim to realise it? Perhaps we should restore conditions to what they were before the emancipation of serfs, as some of my conservative friends sometimes - in private, when they can relax - maintain half jokingly, half seriously? Yes, one can reply either positively or negatively to such questions and, depending on the answers, but based on the same historical facts - in this case about Hungary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - one would be able to reach interpretations that ended on quite different notes. That is how we can become nationalist and humanist, conservative and democratic, or even socialist historians. In my case, as I claimed in the preface to my 1991 book on Bethlen, the set of values that can be called patriotic-democratic - as represented by István Bibó, that most consistent and intellectually fastidious of twentieth-century Hungarian thinkers - lies closest to my heart. Given that you profess to be a democrat, that cannot be far removed from your position either.

3

The day before yesterday, a violent storm - a bora as the locals call it - beset the area. The sea had cooled down and the sun was still overcast the next morning, so we decided to make a trip into Rijeka, the Fiume of old. We found a fair number of Hungarian - or to be more precise, Austro-Hungarian - mementoes here too. On strolling around the harbour, all of a sudden, the stooped figure of a monocled Count Mihály Károlyi, walking-stick in hand, presented itself to my mind's eye. The next moment, I knew why. It was here that Károlyi's emissary, Lajos Fülep, the noted art historian, looked for and succeeded in making contact with the Italians in November 1918. A link with Italy and, with that as a fulcrum, a drive to contain Belgrade's expansionist aims, was one of the abortive foreign-policy efforts of the Károlyi government. And how many other, likewise unavailing attempts were made during the five months of that first revolution! Could it all have happened some other way, or was Gábor Ugron right when he wrote about Hungary's future in a private letter, just a few days after the revolution had triumphed, "We are living in terrible times, everything is crumbling away... There is no longer any way of climbing out of this; all poor Károlyi's efforts are in vain."
I cannot believe that the Hungarian troops who were then returning home from the various battle fronts could have been employed in defending the country's borders. No doubt you too recollect that scene in the film of Doctor Zhivago in which a disciplined Russian infantry unit on its way to the line, a monocled and moustachioed elderly officer on horseback at its head, comes up against a group of presumably defeated but certainly battle-weary soldiers who are heading home. The tired, embittered men routed the column of raw recruits in no time at all, and shot the officer. I am not aware that officials of the Károlyi government made any attempt to halt the homeward-bound stream of Hungarian troops, to reorganise them and lead them back into battle; yet if any did attempt so, they would hardly have escaped the same fate as their Tsarist colleague. All that most of the soldiers wanted was to get back home and to be left in peace; on top of which a substantial portion of the regiments in the Austro-Hungarian army were troops of mixed nationality, whom it would have been a highly risky proposition, without any prior selection, to lead into battle against Serbs, Romanians and, later on, Czechs in areas where these were the predominant nationality or where the nationalities were mixed.
Of course, you might throw in, they might have organised a new national army, possibly one linked to distribution of land: every recruit would get 7 acres on signing up and a further 7 acres when the fighting was over. It is quite certain that the rural poor would have volunteered in their thousands, just as they did in 1848. Undoubtedly the government was guilty of serious negligence in this respect - and not just the government, but the right- and left-wing Opposition as well, one should immediately add. It was Károlyi's fault that in five months his government went through four war ministers, each of whom brought a different concept to organising the army. It was the Social Democrats' fault that they opposed any distribution of land for as long and as hard as they could, because they sought - out of doctrinaire purism - not to increase but reduce the number of owners of private land. It was the Communists' fault that they managed to demoralise what Hungarian regiments were still under arms and had remained in the barracks, turning them against the government with their popular but rabble-rousing demands. It was the fault of the old pre-war big landowners, including the Roman Catholic Church, that they placed their own vested interests - that is to say, preservation of their private or communal property - above that of defence of the realm linked to land reform. They also played a part in ensuring that the Act was published so late - only on February 16th, 1919.
Let us suppose that through a miracle, despite all this, some sort of relative national unity had temporarily come into being and had resulted in a combat-ready Hungarian army. I would contend that even that would have been unable to maintain the integrity of historical Hungary. That is not just because it is very hard to fight if - as with Transylvania and the southern region in 1848 - the direct hinterland involved also supports the enemy, but also because that Hungarian army would have had to have been successful against a well-equipped and courageous Serb army, a less well-equipped and courageous but much bigger Romanian army, a French expeditionary force to the Balkans that was still stationed in the region, and in time also against the Czech legions that were then being formed. One cannot, of course, rule out the possibility that by retiring to the vicinity of the borders of the country's Hungarian-speaking area and taking up relatively well-prepared defensive positions, or in other words remaining in at least partial control of the land, it may have been possible to force the peace conference to propose another set of terms. Fair application of the principle of national self-determination was not at all contrary to the views of either the British or the American delegation at Versailles, while Italy too, with a view to keeping the newly emergent southern Slav state in check, was also ready enough to support Hungary.
Károlyi therefore failed to feel out what, under the circumstances, were the best frontiers that were achievable from a Hungarian foreign-policy standpoint, and on that account he was seriously at fault. At the very least, one has to say that he was not on top of things. His domestic policy was equally ill-advised. Instead of pushing through a land reform and organising elections, which would have allowed him to start off a set of irreversible processes in the domain of social and political democratisation of the country (and for which, incidentally, both he and his supporters had been striving as sincerely as possible), under the influence of the political pressures that were being placed on him from abroad and domestically, he invited the Social Democrats to form a government. Then, when they snuggled up to the Communists behind his back and forced him to resign from the presidency, he put a brave face on the backroom dealing and within a few weeks had left the country. However, he cannot be considered the traitor he was painted as during the inter-war years (and as political commentary in the public arena has again caricatured him from time to time during the decade or so since 1989) nor can he even truly be considered a 'cack-handed mug' or 'dilettante'; if he is, then a great many Hungarian politicians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - from Lajos Kossuth through Miklós Horthy and Ferenc Nagy to Imre Nagy - must equally be considered that. For they also failed, and after their fall - with the notable exception of Imre Nagy, who chose martyrdom - they too fled abroad, just like Károlyi.
The bourgeois democratic revolution of 1918 elevated the democratic reform aspirations of the early years of the century to a government programme. Although it implemented a radical change in the élite at the top of society, and through land reform an extremely comprehensive transformation of property relations among its goals was included, it was not seeking to eliminate a civil
polity that rested on private property and embraced political pluralism, but to develop that further and bring it to fullness. In that sense, it represented both continuity and discontinuity. The socialist programme of the Communists and the Social Democrats, who united with them, likewise had its precursors in Hungary's recent history: the messianic egalitarianism of the rural socialist movements and the Social Democrats' vision - previously treated as merely a distant goal - of a society freed from private property and exploitation. The two utopias, deriving as they did from shared roots and in a good part overlapping in content, were only turned into a detailed and specific political programme at the end of 1918, and consequently any influence the latter had was restricted to very narrow circles. For that reason, the installation of a Soviet Republic stood for a much sharper break in the continuity of Hungary's history than what is called the "Chrysanthemum Revolution" of late October 1918.

4

I closed my last letter by evoking some personal memories. As I listen to the rumble of the sea, those are what occur to me right now. At the very beginning of 1977, the monthly periodical Valóság published my two-part essay on the peasant uprising in the Kalocsa district. A few weeks later, György Ránki, then deputy director of the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, offered me a job there, at the very institution in whose corridors one could in those days still run across the likes of Kálmán Benda, György Györffy, Péter Hanák, Domokos Kosáry, György Litván, Emil Niederhauser, László Makkai, Mária Ormos, Jenő Szűcs and Zsigmond Pál Pach; where Ferenc Glatz was just starting his work as editor of História; where during coffee breaks on Monday and Friday mornings, the oppositionist Miklós Szabó held ideological and political briefing sessions in the 'children's playroom' that was reserved for younger staff; and where even Elemér Mályusz put in an appearance every now and again, indeed even István Bibó once gave a lecture.
A great schooling it was, granting me experiences that will last a lifetime. The most memorable of all were those I gained in September 1979, by then in my third year at the Institute. The occasion was a book (Counter-revolution and Consolidation: the First Ten Years of the Horthy Régime) that I had produced for the Magyar História series published by Gondolat. It was quite a surprise to me that the same milieu which had been perceptibly so sympathetic to what I wrote about the revolutions of 1918 - 19, should then be so patently antipathetic to, and sharply critical about, what I had to say about the 1920s. I was accused of being an apologist for Bethlen and the consolidation that he spearheaded, as well as 'over-dramatising' the Treaty of Trianon and its consequences. As compared with the position of an Erzsébet Andics or Dezső Nemes, of course, who considered the Horthy régime to be fascist from start to finish and tried to play down the significance of Trianon, there was a fair degree of deviation, insofar as I described the construct that Bethlen brought into being as a limited bourgeois parliamentarism, praised the success he had in adapting the country's economy, and drew a positive picture of Bethlen's minister of education, Kunó Klebelsberg and his cultural policy, while I called Trianon - paraphrasing something Gyula Illyés had written - Hungary's second worst disaster after the 1526 Battle of Mohács. Still, set against things that Ránki and others of what was the middle-aged generation of the day had been writing since the late 1960s, I did not feel my own views were so very different. They evidently did not agree and perhaps they were right. All the same, the affair did no harm to my livelihood; indeed, with a few alterations, and after not much of a pause, the manuscript duly appeared in print in 1982.
If you compare what I wrote then about the Horthy régime with what I wrote in my Bethlen biography ten years later, in the late 1980s, and again in the present book, after the passage of almost another decade, you will not find much of a difference. At most, my writing has become a bit more mature, more '"scholarly". Perhaps I also see both Bethlen's faults and limitations more clearly today than I did twenty years ago. Nevertheless, I consider it a huge achievement that, after a series of catastrophes like the one that befell this nation between 1918 and 1920, what remained of the country should have been on the ascendant by the latter half of the 1920s, and by 1929 the per capita national income had not just regained but surpassed that of 1913.
The achievements of the Horthy era in respect of the economy and infrastructure were more modest than those Hungary had produced before the First World War - there is no argument between us on that point. All the same, one cannot call it a period of decline or stagnation either. A large portion of the national income that was devoted to investment went to education. Thanks to these substantial amounts, the training of the brightest students remained at a remarkably high level, while elementary education also developed. As a result of that and also the introduction of the eight - hour working day in 1937, there was a growth in reading. On this and on virtually every other cultural indicator Hungary continued to outstrip its neighbours to the East and South, and was no more behind Western Europe than it had been before the war. The rapidly progressive change in lifestyle among the urban populace, which in addition to reading included the cinema, the radio, and the delights of tourism and various sports activities, had not yet - sadly - reached the inhabitants of the villages and homesteads, who still made up two thirds of the total population. Peasants essentially retained their traditional mode of life, becoming acquainted with the more civilised accomplishments of the modern world only after the Second World War.
That the leaders of the day should have responded to the Treaty of Trianon with a policy of revisionism rather than passive acquiescence I consider only natural. Though I find fault with it, I also understand that, living as they were under the spell of the drive to 'get it all back,' they were unable to position themselves on a platform of ethnic revision that was more compatible with the spirit of the age. However, I do vigorously dispute that every step taken by Hungarian foreign policy before and during the Second World War was either necessary or inevitable. Unlike you, I do not try to justify, for instance, Hungary's entry into the war in 1941. In 1914, Francis Joseph and István Tisza pondered for a whole month before they spoke the decisive words. In 1941, Miklós Horthy hesitated, if at all, for at most a few minutes; nor did his prime minister, László Bárdossy, make any effort to restrain him.
The most uncomfortable moment in the aforementioned controversy at my workplace, by the way, came when one of my older colleagues did not just accuse me of nationalism in the abstract but made little secret of strongly suspecting me of anti-Semitism as well. You did not live in Hungary between 1947 and 1990, so you can have no personal experience of the pathological degree of repression that surrounded the Jewish question right up to the end of the 1980s. This was precisely the opposite of what happened during the same period in West Germany, your own second home, in connection with Hitler and the whole phenomenon of Nazism. Germans tried to talk the trauma out; here in Hungary we kept quiet. After the Holocaust, the crisis in confidence that had arisen between Jews and non-Jews - and our mutual acquaintance, the historian and sociologist Viktor Karády, has written several revelatory studies about this - evolved a mutually respected norm of behaviour and ritual form of communication that not only rendered impossible any dialogue between Jews and non-Jews on subjects touching on Jewishness that were considered ticklish but even deformed communications between Jews themselves, within their own group, that is to say, rendered them dishonest and often hard to decode. I had transgressed this radical taboo. In order to make certain processes and phenomena comprehensible, I had written, without resorting to the customary codification and euphemisms, about the social structure of the Jewish community, its conspicuously high representation in many intellectual occupations, and the decisive role it had taken in the leadership of the two revolutions of 1918 - 19, and particularly the Soviet Republic. Unless I did so, I considered (and I still consider today), it would be hard to give a satisfactory understanding or explanation of the White Terror of 1919 - 20, the numerus clausus quota system on university entrance of Jews, or the anti-Semitism of the inter-war period in general. My critic clearly thought that even the subject of Jewishness was not permitted to a non-Jew, or if it was, then the kind of conceptual distinction thatI employed was discriminatory in principle, or in other words anti-Semitic.
It is interesting that the same suspicion should have been raised in connection with my present book, despite the fact that over the past decade, the Jewish question and the problems connected with it have moved from being taboo subjects to being the most widely researched aspect of modern Hungarian history. The sensitivities, however, have remained, and that is completely understandable, partly in the light of the events of 1944, partly on account of many unseemly and shameful developments in Hungarian public life since 1990. To this day I, like Gyula Szekfű, Ferenc Erdei and István Bibó before me, consider that capitalist development in Hungary has not created a united, internally integrated, modern civil society. Jewish and non-Jewish groups, from the topmost élite strata down to the petty bourgeoisie, despite the linguistic and cultural assimilation of a part of the immigrant Jewish populace and the occurrence of mixed marriages, mutually discriminated against one another and became significantly segregated. The world of the small towns of the Danube - Tisza interfluve prior to the First World War, the conditions in the area around Marosvásárhely (Tîrgu Mures¸, Romania) whence Bethlen set off, the events of 1918 - 19, and everything that I came into close contact with in my researches, are, for me just as much proof of that as the literature from the turn of the century, which is also extraordinarily informative in this respect. Indeed, I think it highly likely that, even had the First World War not been lost and Trianon not taken place, then rivalry and competitive struggle between the intellectual élites - already readily evident at the turn of the century - would have resulted in conflicts that would have forced both parties to rethink, in whole or part, the 'informal agreement' that they had reached in the mid-nineteenth century. If, as you write, you really are genuinely interested in this complex and delicate issue, then I would draw your attention first and foremost to neither a novel nor a historical analysis but to István Szabó's latest film, Sunshine, a brilliant film and spectacle in its own metaphorical manner, and also a historically authentic narrative.

6

Hot fritters - one forint a bit! János Kádár is a lousy shit!" Though I didn't hear it myself, I believe you when you say that you heard it on the streets of Budapest in early November 1956. That's how his career started; that's how people on the streets of Budapest ridiculed the new satrap! Yet just look where he got to and what became of him! In that same poll of the Hungarian population, János Kádár came out as the most popular Hungarian politician of the twentieth century, and the third most highly respected in the whole thousand years of the country's existence.
Like István Kemény, Péter Kende and László Lengyel, I too see the main reason for Kádár's success in his adaptability. After the seismic shock of 1956, this repeatedly frustrated and, in the early days, unswerving Communist revolutionary accommodated to everyone that he needed to: to the Russians, to the Hungarian people, to his party troops, and finally to the world at large. By doing so, he became a statesman, the second major Hungarian consolidator of the twentieth century after István Bethlen. Why, one has to ask? What motivated and guided his actions when he made his deals and thereby abandoned his doctrinaire principles? He had no interest in riches, wealth or ceremony - quite unlike Tito who, on the island of Brioni, not so far away from Hungary, lived a life of luxury much in the manner of the dictator of a South American republic. He certainly was no power-drunk megalomaniac like his colleague in Romania. So what was it? Was it a guilty conscience over his part in the executions of László Rajk and Imre Nagy, and for the post-1956 reprisals in general? Or maybe a sense of responsibility, of 'loyalty to the common man', a compulsion to meet expectations or prove himself? Tibor Huszár's biography of Kádár may eventually offer answers to those questions. I, for my part, am very reluctant to accept the now widespread view which you allude to that depicts him simply as a 'technician' who held power without having any long-range goal, vision or human feeling.
"The happiest barrack in the Soviet bloc" - yes, that's what Hungary became in the 1960s and '70s, just as it had been for the 'German bloc' during the Second World War. Those who were left alive and stayed in the country after 1956 became resigned to that reputation, even occasionally, in moderation, rejoiced in it. Yes, it was Kádár, not Rákosi, who dragooned the peasants into co-operative farms, but then they did not compare themselves merely with Austrian or West German farmers but also with their fellows in Romania, Poland and Slovakia, to say nothing of the Soviet Union. And they were right to do so, you have to admit, because until the Soviet Union set off on the path of decay there was no possibility of making any alterations to the the fundamental givens. Anyone who might have tried would simply have lost his head. And then again, no walker who loads his pack with stones is going to proceed as rapidly as one who just takes what is strictly necessary with him.
Then again, anyone who was just slightly better educated and more astute was well aware that even in older times Hungary had not exactly been a land flowing with milk and honey - not during the time of Sándor Petőfi, nor at the beginning of the century or the Horthy era, and particularly not during the 1950s. Most people had no enthusiasm at all - for the perfectly understandable reason that they had been the losers - for the vanished gentry world prior to 1945, with its huge discrepancies in wealth and income, its social segregation, whilst they damned to hell the egalitarian poverty and virtually all-encompassing reign of terror that had been experienced during the 1950s. Kádárism called a halt to the reign of terror, and from the mid-1960s onward it guaranteed a modest but steady and reliable advance in living standards for Hungarian society. The co-operative farms turned out to be not as bad as people had feared, while the fact that the elderly received a regular pension or assistance seemed a veritable blessing for many rural in-habitants. Hungary grew and it got prettier - not for the first time.
In the early and mid-1970s, Hungary's per capita national income stood closer to the European average than it had done either in the pre-World War I era or in the inter-war years of 1929 and 1938, when it had reached its previous pinnacles. Between 1960 and 1980, great swathes of Hungarian society for the first time attained a standard of living in which going hungry was unheard of. To that extent the phrase "goulash Communism" which is nowadays adverted to so contemptuously is fully justified as one of the synonyms that encapsulate Kádárism. Besides the satisfaction of life's primary needs, housing conditions were modernised, and most households were equipped with a range of gadgets: radios and bicycles were already among these in the 1950s, while in the 1960s and '70s most families were able to purchase a washing machine, refrigerator, vacuum cleaner and television. By the early 1980s, these goods could be found in essentially every household; tourism spread and holiday homes sprang up like mushrooms. Those holiday homes, of course, related to the elegant villas of the early years of the century in much the way that a brook does to the Danube or a boating pond to the Adriatic, but then it was not a mere 1 - 2 per cent of families but 10 - 20 per cent or even more who got to enjoy the luxury. And it was the same for Danuvia and Pannónia motorbikes and later for Trabant and Lada motor cars. That precisely captures the difference between a "Renaissance", as the joke goes, and a "proletarian Renaissance", and I accept that such an appraisal is again a matter of one's choice of values. What I wrote about those years was not an apology for the régime but an acknowledgement of this uneven modernisation process.
Fair enough, I can see you snatching up your head on reading these lines, but what was the cost for the Hungarian people? High, tragically high. An organic modernisation process would have been much better. Still, the various forms of deviant behaviour were not products of either socialism or the Kádár era. The rate of suicide ran at high levels in Hungary from the end of the nineteenth century, and some data suggest that even back in the golden years of peace Hungarians also consumed above-average amounts of alcohol. But there is no denying that from the mid-1950s onward the deterioration was on such a massive scale that one would be hard put to explain it by anything other than an extremely rapid and radical transformation of society, the existence of greater than normal tensions in day-to-day life, the failures in the nation's history and in individual lives, and the demoralising effect of a wholesale crisis in values as a result of all this. As we know from what Rudolf Andorka and Ferenc Pataki have written, the same applies to the various symptoms of stress and psychological illness that are the attendants of modern life everywhere, though only rarely at the same high levels as in Hungary. During the 1970s and '80s, those living in Hungarian society had higher standards of living than the populations of most socialist countries, but the price paid for this was such that its socio-psychological consequences - along with the irrationalities in industrial structure that have been inherited from the 1950s and the debt burden that was incurred during the 1980s - cast a long shadow not just on our present but also on our future.
The absence of crude political repression on a mass scale, growing material well-being, and the system of small freedoms (travel, cultural latitude, scope to practice one's religion) that was equally characteristic of Kádárism meant that the confidence of society as a whole in the régime was only palpably and demonstrably shaken in the mid-1980s, when the growth in national income, having risen steadily at an annual rate of 4-6% for several decades on end, sputtered to a halt, as a result of which the value of wages (and later incomes) began to fall in real terms, while the system of free social benefits began to totter. Even then, how-ever - indeed not at all prior to the change in régime - there were no instances of mass strikes or protests. Up till 1988, the number of people actively opposed to the régime could be put at a few hundred, growing to a few thousand in 1988, and a few tens of thousand in 1989. Homo kadaricus may have followed events via TV and radio, if he bothered to pay attention at all rather than staying wrapped up in his garden (or allotment, or house, or car, or the private small business he was by then allowed to own). It is hard to believe the collapse of the Hungarian régime would have taken place at the end of 1989 had it not been for the disastrous weakening and signs of incipient disintegration of the Soviet Union, along with the cautious but consistent policy of thaw being pursued by the USA. Unlike you, I consider this, the foreign-political factor, to be the mainspring of Hungary's change in régime.
That notwithstanding, Hungarians were not opposed to what happened; indeed they were very happy about it, because they believed life would get better without the Soviet Union and the Communists. Sure, a free press is necessary, and multi-party democracy would be nice as well, they would reckon - but most particularly if one lives like the Austrians do. Even under the new disposition, homo kadaricus wanted, above all else, to consume. And when it became clear that he was not able to do that - or at least not to the extent that he had hoped and that he had been promised, out of ignorance or irresponsible recklessness, by the new political parties competing with one another in 1990 - then he calmly brought the former Communists back to power as democratically as you could wish, in 1994.

Ignác Romsics
is Professor of Modern History at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His most recent book in English is Hungary in the Twentieth Century, Budapest, Corvina, 1999.