"No one could be in Hungary very long," recalled the American minister to Budapest in the 1930's, John F. Montgomery, "without knowing that nem, nem, soha meant no, no, never, and that it referred to the boundaries fixed by the Treaty of Trianon." As the diplomat's comment suggests, visitors to Hungary in the 1920s and 1930s encountered a nearly universal rejection of the peace settlement and an incessant clamouring for its reversal at almost every turn. Trianon inflicted a national trauma upon the Hungarians equal in magnitude to any in the nation's history and gave rise to an irredentist cult that occasionally assumed astonishing proportions. As one historian has remarked, "the shock of Trianon was so pervasive and so keenly felt that the syndrome it produced can only be compared to a malignant national disease." Revisionism was "in the air." Yet while the peace treaty in all its aspects has spawned a massive and ever-burgeoning literature, the ensuing revisionist movement and attendant irredentism has generated less analysis.
The author of the work under review, Miklós Zeidler, is abundantly qualified to tackle this subject. The bulk of this work, a revised version of his doctoral dissertation, has already appeared in print in Hungarian in the form of a brief monograph on revisionist thinking in Hungary and an extended essay on the cult of irredentism between the wars. In addition, he has authored numerous shorter studies dealing with various aspects of Hungarian revisionism and has edited and annotated a mammoth

compendium of source materials as part of the series Nemzet és emlékezet (Nation and Memory).
The book's opening chapters provide the prolegomena to the main narrative. A survey of the events that led to the disintegration of historical Hungary is followed by an account of the Paris Peace Conference and analysis of the factors that influenced the drafting of the Treaty of Trianon itself. Along the way Zeidler addresses and debunks a number of commonly-held notions connected to the treaty. First, the severe terms were dictated much rather by the security interests of the Entente than any antipathy towards Hungary, even if, as the author points out, such anti-Hungarian feeling could be detected among at least certain delegates of the Great Powers (p. 17). He also refutes the notion that more favourable terms might have been obtained had the Hungarian delegation been headed by someone other than Albert Apponyi. In fact, the Count's performance in Paris apparently made an overall positive impression on the peacemakers (pp. 22–24). Nor does the assertion that the treaty was a "ramshackle structure [and] a legal patchwork based on inaccurate information and ill will" hold up to scrutiny. On the contrary, the treaty was a thoroughly circumspect document, "a carefully constructed, detailed legal product," even if its terms reflected only the interests of the victors (p. 30). Its 364 total articles, distributed over 14 parts, regulated almost every aspect of Hungary's place in the post-war order and left virtually nothing to chance.