Glimpse of Hungary to whet the appetite

Tibor Fischer enjoys Norman Stone’s spirited canter through the history of a remarkable country

IHUNGARY: A SHORT HISTORY

242pp, Profile, £16.99, ebook £10.79

t’s always a good idea to call your history short. It’s attractive to readers and it provides you with a readymade defence in case any critics detect gaps in your arguments or coverage: would have loved to put it in, but, sorry, just no room.

Norman Stone, as he explains in the preface, is well placed to write a history of Hungary (although, at 242 pages, it’s not really that short). He has studied the language, spent many years in the country, knows many of the leading Hungarian politicians and intellectuals, and now lives there. It also helps that, as an historian, he is drawn to the big themes and big ideas: Catholicism, Protestantism, liberalism, fascism, communism. At the same time, as one of the handful of historians who can write well, he loves to throw in a colourful anecdote or detail to illustrate his contentions. (Khrushchev trading a sack of potatoes for a maths lesson being my favourite in this book.)

Stone does a good job of shining European light on to Hungarian history. I can’t imagine another British historian including in his bibliography Céline’s almost-forgotten biography of Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian physician who pioneered antiseptic.

Germany, Austria, Russia and Turkey have all been the targets of Stone’s previous research, so he’s very familiar with most of the countries that have intruded into Hungary’s past. And that includes us, too. There’s always been a strong Anglophilia in Hungary, even if Britons never thought much about Hungary until the low-cost airlines started flying to Budapest.

In Stone’s telling, the early years of Hungarian history – the horseback rampaging, the medieval glory, the crushing Turkish occupation, and the first skirmishes with the Hapsburgs – are quickly dispatched in half a chapter. This book is, in essence, a history of modern Hungary, from the revolution of 1848 onwards, the glorious period of the AustroHungarian compromise, and the largely wretched 20th century.

It was all the more wretched for having started off so marvellously. In 1900, Budapest was one of the most charming and affluent cities in the world. Mahler had just left as the director of the Budapest opera. Bartók and Kodály were getting started. The city had the first underground system in continental Europe. The schools were teaching what would turn out to be a horde of Nobel laureates and influential scientists: Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb”; János von Neumann, founder of game theory. Much of the wealth and sparkle of the capital was down to its Jewish citizens who made up a quarter of the population, and who were largely and enthusiastically Magyarised, although political Zionism was also born in Budapest.

It was the Austrians who were keenest on having a go at the Serbs in 1914, but while the Austrians lost an empire because of that disastrous war, the Hungarians were the ones who, in addition to their war dead, paid a heavier price at Trianon, losing some two thirds of their territory and a third of their population, setting off a grievance that can still be found in Hungary today, in fridge magnets and CDs of irredentist songs.

The collapse of order brought about a short-lived Soviet Republic under Béla Kun, who instigated a terror. In 1920, Admiral Horthy took over and there was another wave of killings, this time of those suspected of communist sympathies. (Sometimes being Jewish was enough.) The “semiJapanese complexity” of Horthy’s Hungary, where feudal forms of address survived, along with duelling, provides Stone with an amusing chapter.

The Second World War brought the Holocaust and wholesale destruction. Stone points out that the battle for Budapest was “almost comparable to Stalingrad”. It was followed by totalitarianism. Stone cleverly underlines how, in taking over the country, the Comintern applied the lessons they had learnt in the Spanish Civil War. There was also economic devastation in the form of hyperinflation. Only Poland can claim to have had it worse.

If the Hungarians had a bad deal in the 20th century, they also had two moments of prominence remarkable for a small country: the revolution of 1956 when they surprised everyone by briefly shaking off the Soviet yoke, and the summer of 1989, when Hungarian border guards left the gates into Austria open for East Germans to flood into the West, an act that ultimately led to the collapse not just of the Warsaw Pact, but of the Soviet Union itself. There’s a wonderful irony that it was the Hungarian Communists (who had years before given up on Marxism) who finished off the system, in exchange, as Stone states, for

Marks and Sparks undies.

The last chapter “The 1980s and Beyond”, which goes up to the elections of 2010, is where the shortness really kicks in. That’s odd, since this is the period Stone witnessed in person and he is acquainted with many of the key players, but I suppose historians like a little time to elapse before awarding the marks.

Stone portrays the relaxed Hungary ruled by János Kádár in the Eighties as a vast Potemkin village, financed by Western money. (There is a rumour that Kádár’s bag man, the disillusioned János Fekete, racked up the vast

In 1900, Budapest was one of the most affluent and charming cities in the world