Revolution and repression
MARTYN RADY admires the smartly written story of a nation that has veered from freedom-fighting to corrupt dictatorships
Hungary: A Short History by Norman Stone Profile Books, 288 pages, £16.99
Back in the 15th century, one king of Hungary offended his foreign guests by serving them overseasoned food. And over the years, Hungary itself has presented something of an acquired taste. There have been long periods when it was thought highly palatable. In the aftermath of Hungary’s failed 1848–49 War of Independence against the Habsburgs, the exiled revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth was feted by British and US audiences, while his Austrian adversary, General Haynau, was chased by draymen down Southwark’s Borough High Street. In the late 19th century, Hungary did a plausible impression of constitutional government with a parliament building that even looked like the Palace of Westminster (with the dome of St Paul’s on top). Then, in October 1956, its freedom fighters set a new standard of courage and exposed the harshness of communist rule. In the months afterwards, the British Communist party lost a third of its members.
But between these times, the flavour has been more pungent. At the start of the last century, western visitors discovered that, beneath its liberal facade, the Hungarian government was behaving in a savage fashion towards its national minorities. In 1914 and 1940, the country lined up with Germany, and during the Holocaust participated in the murder of Jews. Then, in defeat, Hungary’s politicians kowtowed to Moscow, with their leader becoming ‘Stalin’s most loyal pupil’. Now, Hungary is fast becoming a byword for dictatorship, covert antisemitism and industrial-scale corruption.
Norman Stone’s history of Hungary fizzes with narrative elan and startling anecdotes: that the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Joseph brought his own bottled water when visiting Budapest; that during the great inflation of 1946, 3 trillion pengő bought only a chicken, a bottle of olive oil and a few vegetables. The emphasis is firmly on the modern period; even so, the 20 pages that take the reader from the Middle Ages to 1848 are full of insights.
But historians of Hungary all too often lose their taste buds. Picking up the title of Bryan Cartledge’s history of Hungary,
The Willto Survive, Stone ventures that “Hungary’s survival is indeed strange”. Nobody has ever sought to kill off the Hungarians or their language, though, and Hungary is still halfway up the EU list of countries ranked by population size. He dismisses the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which reduced Hungary’s land mass by more than two-thirds, as “immoral”. In fact, the peacemakers did a fairly good job of squaring territory with nationality and state viability. Finally, Stone resurrects the old idea that Hungarian is a Turkish language and unrelated to Finnish. This is a linguistic canard now being promoted by the Hungarian government. Its inclusion in this otherwise masterly survey leaves
a strange taste in the mouth.