Gábor Gyáni
Budapest Beyond Good and Evil
...
Budapest, the Magyarised city
Two books on Budapest's non-Magyar aspect have recently appeared. Discussing the ethnic Germans and Jews of the capital, they demonstrate the
once acute reality of just how divided and variegated Budapest was in its ethnic
and denominational make-up. Karl Lueger, the rabidly anti-Semitic pre-Great
War mayor of Vienna, used to refer to the Hungarian capital as "Judapest", but
one might just as easily speak about German, Slovak, Serb and Polish, or
Calvinist and Lutheran Budapests. With the exception of the Germans, they have
not been properly studied yet.
At the time the city was being unified in the 1870s, the tone was set by a longstanding
German ethno-cultural tradition.
Yet, within a very short period of time,
a massive tide of overwhelmingly Hungarian-speaking newcomers arrived. As
a result, by the end of the First World War, Budapest boasted a population of
nearly one million - more than three times what it had been at the time of unification.
As István Weis, a sociologist of the inter-war period noted:
Budapest does not have citizens in the same sense as Vienna or Paris; for, almost two
thirds of the inhabitants were born outside the capital, which is to say that they have
brought with them other childhood memories and customs.
There is no doubt that this linguistic shift was the key to the Magyarisation of
Budapest. Moreover, it is readily traceable. Until 1840, the country's official language
had been Latin, though in many towns (including Pest and Buda) German was the
language of local administration, in line with the fact that the residents of Hungary's
urban centres (with few exceptions) were German-speakers. This started to
change around the middle of the century as the ability to speak Hungarian had
been a central demand of Hungarian nationalism from the 1830s onwards.
However, it was only after 1867 that Hungarian became the official language.
There is a general recognition of the fact of this extraordinary linguistic,
ethnic and denominational heterogeneity, and of the ensuing brisk homogenisation
at the end of the nineteenth century. However, opinions differ on the nature
of this process. Furthermore, after 1920, instead of looking on the Magyarisation
of Budapest as a good thing, some found it partly or wholly objectionable. The
slogan of the 'sinful city', which gained currency at the time, expressed this unambiguously.
In March 1920, very much in line with the thinking of the zealously
Christian-Nationalist regime that had installed itself after the overthrow of the
revolutions of 1918-19, a Christian-Social politician declared:
the old Masonic funny business still prevails in the capital. Freemasonry must dismantle
and destroy its old stronghold... What is needed here is a new broom.
...
The profound change in how Budapest was viewed was the consequence of
the counter-revolutionary hysteria (and an associated virulent anti-Semitism)
that swept the country after the collapse of the four-month-old Soviet Republic
in the summer of 1919. This in turn determined the attitudes that the newly
installed rightist and conservative political élite took to anything associated with
Budapest. Horthy had given this new discourse its keynote when he was still the
commander-in-chief of the national army on its entry into Budapest in November
1919. In response to being welcomed by Mayor Tivadar Bódy in front of the
Gellért Hotel, he called on the city to confront its guilt:
When we were still a long way away from here and only a scintilla of hope flickered in
our soul, then - let me make no bones about it - we loathed and execrated [Budapest],
because we did not see the people who were suffering there, those who became
martyrs, we saw only the filth of the country that had accumulated there.
This was a radical re-assessment of what in fact had been an urban development
of staggering proportions since the Compromise, which embraced every
conceivable manifestation of being a Budapester, whether in politics, behaviour
or merely language. As to the vernacular of Budapest, let me quote here a request
submitted by Károly Darvassy, an engineer, to the city authorities in June 1921.
In support of his claims, the petitioner even went so far as to draw up a brief compilation
of linguistic anomalies:
Permit me, Your Honour, to draw your worthy attention to the particular colourlessness
of the Budapest language and to some of the intolerable signs of its badness.
The Budapest dialect is beginning to be completely ruined by the un-Hungarian, musichall,
hoodlum speech that is propagated by the Városliget [City Park] fairground mob
and of the influence of which even untouched, well-spoken, intelligent people cannot
entirely rid themselves.
Darvassy's initiative swiftly and readily reached understanding ears. The
council promptly forwarded his letter to the National Association of Primary and
Secondary School Teachers, which subsequently reached the view that "The elimination
of non-Hungarian expressions and words is an educational requirement
of the first order." It accordingly set about getting rid of the linguistic shortcomings
in question; in preparation for that, it called on the capital city's teaching
bodies to collect examples of un-Hungarian locutions that permeated the speech
of their pupils. The Association was itself planning to work up and publish the
considerable material that accumulated, but in the end this did not happen.
Under the impetus of this and similar experiences in schools and of the
general educational ethos of the times, a public debate developed about what
being a Budapester meant. We even find László Németh, an outstanding novelist
and essayist passionately concerned with all matters relating to the fate of the
Hungarian nation, being confronted with the reality of the 'flotsam and jetsam' of
the Budapest lower classes. As a school doctor of a junior secondary school in
the Water Town district of Buda, he recorded:
Even our "colossal hall" cannot count on a more native character; for all that, the hundredyear-
old Water Town has surrounded it intact until the most recent years... [For], apart from
a few dozen true Water Town children, our school, too... is attended by the children of those
who have been tossed this way and that in the course of the modern-day Great Migration.
Separating out this 'flotsam and jetsam stratum', Németh finally concludes:
It does not take too much intelligence to find an explanation for the Magyarisation [of
schools] in the post-war (and in part, also pre-war) engulfment. The catchment area of
our school in the seventies and eighties was still German-speaking, the Magyar nation
supplying fifty per cent before the war and now eighty or ninety per cent (for certain).
Németh arrived at this finding after an analysis of the pupils' surnames.
The continuous monitoring of the homogenisation that attended Magyarisation
between the two world wars was something of a national pastime,
particularly among those who were connected in some way with a school and its
pupils. Sándor Karácsony, a legendary educationalist and psychologist - whose
person and work divides the profession to the present day - likewise considered
it important to set forth his views on the hotly disputed question of a 'Hungarian
Budapest' (the title he gave to his article):
At the start of the last century, Budapest was still a German-speaking city; indeed, even
in mid-nineteenth century much German speech was heard in the streets, and any
Budapester who attempted to speak Hungarian did so with miserable result... These
days, [however] Budapest is Hungarian. It speaks Hungarian and feels Hungarian.
It may speak differently from, and not feel quite the same as, Debrecen or Dévaványa
or the Bugac plain; nevertheless, it is Hungarian.
"Yet," he finally poses a thorny question, "how could this modern miracle have
happened, one wonders?"First and foremost, because the provincial Hungarian
population found homes for itself in Budapest. "The Hungarian peasantry made
Budapest Hungarian." Furthermore, he adds the somewhat curious explanation
that as Budapesters these Hungarian newcomers
are all the more Hungarian [because] their souls... by a strange but understandable and
natural contrariety, to their dying day feel an aching homesickness and pull towards
home, to the countryside, the open air, the village, the puszta.
It was precisely in this sense that, as Karácsony saw it, Budapest's Hungarianness
had been "tragically Hungarian" during the years that elapsed between the
Compromise and Hungary's Millennial celebrations of 1896. Only subsequent to
this did the by then Hungarian Budapest step onto a path leading to its loss of
Hungarian character. The reason for that was obvious. Being an arena of intense
cultural exchange, Budapest had assumed - and could assume - merely a veneer
of Hungarianness, which, however, it had soon begun to propagate as a kind of
yardstick across the rest of the country:
Budapest, from the Compromise up to the Millennial Exhibition, became Hungarian;
then it again turned foreign, only now this was in a Hungarian garb. It was foreign even
while seeming to be Hungarian; in point of fact, it was not even aware of this.
Thus, by the outbreak of the First World War, matters had degenerated to the
point where Budapest's Hungarianness was nothing more than a veneer; but
when the war was over, and during the revolutionary turmoil of 1919, even that
thin veneer soon peeled off. Not that everything was lost, Karácsony claims, for
the long-standing process of de-Magyarisation was by then over:
At the very moment that Austria-Hungary ceased to exist, Budapest's old role also
ceased to exist, and the course of its new life began. Up till then it had been the
European quarter in a colony; since then it has been a self-reliant efflorescence of the
life of a self-reliant people and country, nation and state.
That, then, was the tone of the inter-war discourse about Budapest, with its participants
seeking to suggest that the 'natural' non-Hungarianness of this cosmopolitan
metropolis within Austria-Hungary was soon effaced by the Magyarising
influence of a country that had now (post-Trianon) become a nation; with twothirds
of its territory taken away from the truncated country, the capital would at
last be able to cast off its previously accreted sins of lacking national spirit.
...
The political map
Each time a general election comes round, it is noticeable just how uneven the
political map of Budapest is. The distribution of votes cast in elections since
1989 shows Budapest, that most liberal of Hungarian cities, serving as one of
the prime sources of support for the extreme right, particularly in the more prosperous
districts on the Buda side of the Danube. The historical reasons are
manifold.
Because of the votes of a substantial liberal middle class and petty bourgeoisie,
Budapest was a stronghold of liberalism and social democracy between
1920 and 1939. Indeed, after 1906, during what might be called the Bárczy Era
(1906-18, the tenure of Mayor István Bárczy), democratic, or what we would
nowadays call socially liberal, ideals had also gained ground in municipal politics.
During the Twenties these political forces would have had control of the city
if fair play had prevailed in the politics of the time.
The overall picture is a bit more complex than that, however. In the mid-
1970s, György Ránki studied the Budapest archive material covering the 1939
parliamentary election and established that the Arrow Cross movement, Hungary's
home-grown fascists, largely owed their rapid rise to the support they
enjoyed in working-class districts in Budapest. This finally forced people to abandon
the previously unshakeable myth of the city being exclusively liberal. In
1950, after half a century of lobbying from some quarters, a 'Red Belt', mainly inhabited
by industrial workers, was incorporated to create a Greater Budapest at
the behest of Communist party leader Mátyás Rákosi. The Left acquired an
unequivocal ascendancy in the capital that could even legitimise the Communists'
hold on power, should there be any necessity for such legitimation by
the people's will. During the successive elections of the coalition years from 1945
to 1949, Budapest's substantial leftism really did carry weight, all the more so as
extreme-right, conservative and finally liberal political factions had all been successively
removed from the arena, with the social groups backing them duly
intimidated and politically eliminated.
From the moment that Budapest set off on the path of modern development,
a process that has been a motor for Hungary over the last century and a half,
two distinct social groupings, an entrepreneurial (and managerial) segment of
the middle and upper classes and an industrial working class determined its
character. The civil service as the capital's working machinery also had an
influence, their ethos likewise being a palpable presence in Budapest. Finally,
Pest, Buda and Óbuda, separate municipalities before their unification in 1873
- and later the growing belt of the suburbs - each retained something of their
traditional social and intellectual ambience: Pest as primarily a commercial
centre from the eighteenth century on, Buda as a municipality of government
officials, and Óbuda as a settlement with strong peasant roots. Budapest the
metropolis was a conglomerate of all these traditions and influences.
Gábor Gyáni
is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences and Professor at the Sociology Institute of Eötvös Loránd University.
He is the author of 14 books, including Women as Domestic Servants: The Case of
Budapest, 1890-1940 (1989); Parlor and Kitchen: Housing and Domestic Culture in
Budapest, 1870-1940 (2002); A Social History of Hungary from the Reform Era to the
End of the Twentieth Century (with co-authors, 2004) and Identity and the Urban
Experience: Fin-de-Siecle Budapest (2004).
